I don't understand. How do you avoid the "I hit you!" "No, you didn't, that spot was already there!" thing? Do you just shoot people and get the satisfaction when they say ow? Wouldn't they just shoot you back? How does respawning work? I always figured a bunch a people went out and the last person (or last team of people) with no paint on them was the winner.
Well, you assume that every shot means one splatter. My new gun is pretty accurate, and I could maybe hit a paper plate 5 times out of 10 at, say, 40 yards. With no wind. And the first shot I'd have to use to guide the rest in. And I'd stand a good chance of having maybe one in four paintballs being slightly out of round, having a seam stick up, etc. which would make them fly weird. That's accurate in paintball. Rental guns are wildly inaccurate. You probably couldn't hit that paper plate once in 100 shots. So you tend to use a lot of paint just shooting "at" someone.
Sometimes, you have to pin a couple guys down behind a bunker so a buddy can advance. Here's where speed comes into play: if I can spit out at least 10 balls per second, then figure I can be just as useful in providing covering fire as maybe 5 guys with rentals or slow guns. And you don't always use convering fire -- it's a really good way to get everyone on the other team to shoot at you (so a quiet gun is good). But if there's three or four guys keeping down a teammate who wants to move up, 10 balls/second hitting the board in front of you is enough to make you want to stay down, believe me.:-)
Paintballs have a very bright, albeit highly soluble, paint. Some paint is thicker than other paint. Some is like Crisco/butter/wax consistency. I use bright pink, waxy paint. It's hard to claim you weren't shot. But it happens. It's called "wiping", and wipers get kicked off (sometimes for the day) if the ref catches them. Wiping is to paintball as a stick in the spokes is to bicycling. It's the #1 no-no.
Again, here's where fast is good: If you jump up and run and I shoot you once (because I have a slow gun or something), you may or may not know you're hit. Balls bounce off all the time. It has to break on you to count. So you get shot once, maybe have a little splatter, maybe not. But you have to check, and you'd do it when you get to where you were going. If you jump up and I lay into you with a fast stream, you probably get hit 5-10 times (depending on when you said you were out, how far away you were, etc). See, I keep shooting until you yell "out!". After a couple hits, you just know you're hit. One hit, you don't just yell out automatically. Also, it's impossible to wipe off four or five hits. Everyone knows you're hit, so you leave.
As the day wears on, you get to know who the wipers are. You shoot them more. Everyone does. They know they are cheating, and they know they'll get hit more because people want to make sure. But there's nothing sadistic about "lighting someone up" like that. It's part of the game. Now, if you do it to a guy you know is out, or he's really close, that that's bad form and not nice. Might get you punched, too. I've seen it happen, and it's really unpleasant to watch. Beginners do it a lot. I ususally give them the canned "sportsmanlike conduct" speech, and they usually listen since I'm a pretty big guy (and it's usually a kid who does it).
People do shoot back when they are hit. I've seen people kinda keep shooting even though they know they're out. It's kind of a judgement call at that point. If you know you got the person out first, by a wide margin -- like they were walking off and shot you -- then you just keep playing. Like when your own team shoots you (again, this is usually from a kid, and usually at the start of the game), you have to decide if you want to get out or not. If it's late in the game and I'm in a weird place (like on th eother team's side; I tend to do flanking stuff a lot and sneak around) and I get shot by my own team, then I call myself out. I figure at that point, they'll have lost a good player and the team's match will suffer so they'll learn to check before shooting.
A corollary to this is blind-fire. It's where someone holds the the gun up in the air and shoots at stuff they can't see -- while they hide behind a bunker or something. It's a cowardly, dangerous (you never know if someone has their mask off) thing to do, and I usually call the ref if I see it. If I get shot by blind-fire I stay in (since you can't blind-fire legally, any paint launched that way is illegal and therefore doesn't count -- like if someone from another field shot at you) and hunt the person down and shoot them real close if I can. That sounds mean, but there's no other way for them to learn that they could blind someone because of how they break the rules. I nearly always talk to them about blind fire. Again, it's typically a kid with a rental.
The respawning thing is something you see every once in a while, usually on big fields with a lot of players. It keeps things moving (and it keeps people shooting, which is one reason why you see it more on fields that make you buy the more expensive paint from them instead of bring your own). It can also be a part of the game you're playing. For example, one game I play is called "Attack and Defend". It's very commmon. On the field I play at, the defenders have lots to hide behind and they are at the top of a hill. Their flag is out in the open, though, and easy to get. So you have to aggressively defend it. The attackers have to cover open ground, uphill. So when an attacker gets shot out, they go back to the bottom of the hill, out of site. Every couple minutes, the ref there will send the group who's been shot back into the game. This makes another wave of attackers. Trick here is that defenders are out for good once shot. Did you ever see Starship Troopers? It reminds me of that. Just waves and waves of attackers, relentlessly coming up the hill, through bushes, etc. It's scary. Think of it as The Alamo or something. You'd think being a defender would be nice since you have good cover and you don't have to run around a lot, but you shoot a lot and they just don't stop coming. And the attackers get better after they'v been out a couple times. If you have a neat trick or a hidey hole you're shooting them from, trust me, they'll come back and try to find you. Being an attacker is hard work, and you get shot a lot, but you have fun trying to outwit an entrenched defender.
But that's one type of game. There are probably hundreds of types of games. Heck, I know of groups of a thousand or more people that get together once a year to recreate battles like D-Day at Omaha Beach. Seriously. They turn old golf carts into "tanks" and such. There are companies that make paint mortars, claymore mines, grenades, etc. Check this out. Yeah... Heh heh. That's a little out there for me. But usually, it's standard "capture the flag" stuff. It's basically Quake in real life, which is why I play. It's hellaciously fun, and good exercise.
As an aside: I once was in a paintball store and a guy came in and asked the fella working there "What kind of paintballs hurt the most?" Everyone in the store wanted to beat him up. The owner told him to get out and never come back. Those are the sort of people I'd like to see never play again. I'm very much into playing fairly and having fun. It's all about fun, not putting some other guy down, or being sadistic. The guys that want hard paintballs are the kinds that tortured animals as kids or hit women. They have personal self-worth issues and need to hurt others to make themselves feel good. They are honorless and I have no respect for them.
The satisfaction in paintball is not hurting people by shooting them. Paintballs don't hurt all that much anyway. The real satisfaction is trying like mad to run/sneak/hide/shoot/whatever better than the other guy. I like the games where it takes a couple minutes to survey the landscape, get some real teamwork going, figure out a plan, and then execute that plan. It's being out of breath, trying to burrow cover behind a 10" tall log, fire coming in from all sides, adrenaline pumping and then finally figuring a way out. It's running over a hill and finding ten members of the other team in front of you. Run or shoot? Think fast. The fun is taking five minutes to slither through the bushes and sneak up behind the enemy team to get the drop on them. It's making that "I only have 10 paintballs left, so fsck it" mad dash for the flag. It's looking for and finding the sweet cover so you can play like you're a machine gun nest and ambush a couple flag runners or holding an entire half field at bay. It's having one "nemesis" who's been shooting you out all day and finally working your way into a place where you can get him. And it's also just plain fun laying down a suppressing fire by shooting a lot of paint "over that way" where the enemy is running around.:-) If you play with really good players, better than you are, and you can outwit them, then that's the real fun.
Anyway, sorry for the long-winded response. I haven't been able to play for well over a month, so I was vicariously re-living the moment. You ought to try it some day. Take a look at warpig.com, pbnation.com, or pbreview.com for more info.
I don't play paintball, but I imagine that it's mostly running around and you only shoot a couple of times.
How much paint you use depends greatly on a lot of things. For example, I sometimes play at a course frequented by church groups and father/son beginners. You'll get 20 minute games (with regeneration, so you're never "out" for long) on 2 acre fields with like 60 people. That means lots of targets, so that means lots of shooting. I once played on a real small hyperball field (about two basketball courts in size, with large tubes and such for cover) with 25 people per team. I went through a lot of paint then too. But then again, I've played on large foresty fields with 5-10 players per team, and haven't shot more than a hundred rounds or so in 15 minutes.
The type of gun you have means a lot too. I recently upgraded to an electronic gun (a Matrix, in case you wondered) to replace my older semi-auto mechanical Spyder (a decent entry-level gun). The electro shoots like 22 paintballs per second, although I can't shoot that fast (it's semiauto only unless you upgrade the chip). But I can shoot it a lot faster than the Spyder. Much faster. I used to go through about 1000 paintballs per day (that's all day: 9am to close, playing every match), now I can go through more than a case of 2000 easy. Meaning I have to stay mindful of my paint consumption. But I usually play as a "back player" (hang out in the back/middle and longball people running around), so that means more paint. Think one step up from spray-and-pray.:-) But I have a big, heavy, accurate and quiet gun, so that's my lot in life (although the Matrix makes a great hide-and-go-seek gun since it's about the quietest gun there is, so I play that way every fifth time or so).
Back in the old days of pump guns and single shot pistols with powerlet cartidges, going through more than 50 paintballs was really shooting it up. Now, that's nothing. The hoppers hold 200 rounds, and you see guys carrying 1200 rounds in their pod carriers (six 150 round pods) who are using electronic semiauto guns with 88cu. in. compressed air tanks filled to 4500psi. I always carry at least 800 rounds with me every match, even though I rarely use that much in one go. My wife sometimes runs out, my buddy drops some, etc. Where paintballs are concerned, it's always better to have extra than not enough.
But, yeah, most people shoot a lot when they play paintball. And the more expensive your gun, the more paint you tend to shoot. BTW, paintball isn't so much running around as it is sprinting a little and crouching a lot.
mysql> select * from human where (human.trekkie=1 and human.techie=0);
Empty set (0.00 sec)
You want all the people that are trekkies and techies, right? I'm maybe a little rusty, but wouldn't you want something like this:
mysql> select * from human where (human.trekkie=1 and human.techie=1);
That is, you want all rows where the records indicate that the subject is both a trekkie and a techie? Or maybe it'd be more clear if you had two columns like this:
CREATE TABLE human (
id INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
trekkie ENUM('YES','NO') DEFAULT 'NO',
techie ENUM('YES','NO') DEFAULT 'NO'
);
Then you could say:
mysql> select * from human where (human.trekkie='YES' and human.techie='YES');
Which is the same thing, I guess. Maybe. I'm not sure. Anyway, this got much too geeky...
-B
I think merit should be earned, like anything else
on
Hacking Web Services
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· Score: 2
I guess in the end it comes down to this: There are two camps- One that believes that hard work and "gumption" should be what separates the deserving and the undeserving, and another that believes that true knowledge and ability should be the qualification
Subject pretty much says it all. I don't think any wise person would disagree if you were to say that the most heinous intellectual crime is one of unfulfilled potential. Whether fulfilling that potential necessarily means a degree or just living a fruitful life is the sticky bit. I know a lot of people that have the societal measure of success yet haven't stretched themselves mentally in the slightest. I know a lot of people that have the piece (or pieces, in at least one case) of paper, but had to work very hard at it because they aren't that bright. I know some who excelled at rote learning, but failed awfully when asked to integrate two concepts into a novel whole. And I know a lot of very bright, certifiably genius-level people who have decided to do and make stuff instead of spend time learning about other stuff that was done and made. If one is lucky, one gets the choice which road to take.
Sad part is, hard economic times bring out the great equalizer: management knows that individuals who have graduated from a certain institution at a certain level have demonstrably performed to a level which guarantees they themselves cannot be faulted for "taking a chance" on a new hire. It's the way things are always going to be, unless you know people. You either have a degree and hotjobs/monster/dice, or no degree but people who you and know you've done excellent work in the past. Official references don't count, either. I'm talking about people that know you and will hire you because they know what you can do. If you don't fit into neither camp, you stand a hard chance of finding a decent job in today's economy.
And BTW, I was agreeing with your earlier post. I currently work at a university. Before that I worked at a high-dollar startup, before that a Fortune 100 company, and before that a university. I don't have a degree, and that is by choice. I've faced a lot of discrimination because of it. However, I've never had trouble finding a good job at any time in the past 13 years largely because I know people who know me and know what I can do. I know I'm smart, because I'm smart enough to recognize where I fit in what I can do. I'm also smart enough not to care about the ArsDigitia's of the world. I guess I have a self-worth that doesn't depend on other people. Which is probably not healthy....
I know that there are some brilliant non-Phd holders, however blanket claiming that one title indicates a superior being is ridiculous, and I'd love to see an intelligence and "cleverness" ranking between Phd holders and general comp. sci. grads.
So why not include non-degreed individuals in your rankings as well? If the primary difference between B.S. and Ph.D. computer science people is some combination of time, money and determination acting independently of intelligence and/or cleverness, then those same differences would apply to non-degreed and B.S people as well, right? It would then similarly apply between B.S. and B.A. folks, or those having an M.S and an B.F.A.
I don't mean to be obtuse (or a troll), but I have to ask: Is a Bachelor's the point at which you begin ranking intelligence? Why not start at a high school diploma? Why not eighth grade (US)? Kindergarten? At which level can one finally claim the title of a "superior being"? Should society be a meritocracy? Can I be a Webelo without all my badges? If not, am I as smart as a Boy Scout or doomed to be labeled simple for all time?
Not that it matters much to anyone, but I never made it out of Cub Scouts and it's far too late in the game to start caring what everyone else in the den thinks...
-B
Re:Slashdot, and their news...
on
XBox Live Network
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I thought this was "NEWS" that mattered, not "OPINIONS OF LINSUX ZEALOTS THAT HATE MICROSOFT"
It's stuff that matters to the guys that own/run the site. You're more than free to find another place which fits in with your views if you don't like the "bias" here. The news.com forums, any ZDNet site, or fuckedcompany.com would be my suggestions.
And it's news for nerds which is mattering. I'd wager that many people who fit the definition of the word "nerd" around the time when that tagline was coined do actually resent what MS has done, what they represent, etc. Lots of them tolerate MS, too. Lots don't care. It takes all kinds. You are one of them, Michael is another, both of you have a point. The difference is that Michael has a web site he's asked to post stories to in which to voice that opnion. You merely have one (of no doubt many) troll accounts from which to voice yours. He's at the top of the page, you're at the bottom, and life is unfair in the anti-MS Slashdot world. Sorry.
Bottom line: Posting on/. about the biases of the editors is like joining a nudist camp to protest the use of sunscreen: it's self-referentially ludicrous.
-B
He needs a Lanthanide & Actinide drop leaf
on
Periodic Table Table
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It would have been really cool to have the Lanthanides and Actinides come out as part of a "drop leaf" thing. Hell, I don't know what you call it... like the TV tray thing for lazy people attached by articulated arms to the underside on some tables. You could have these sets of elements on such an arm so that you could move them up and out.
You could also have them make a bi-level sort of table. Just take the two rows and attach them on little dowels to the top of the table at a 45 degree angle so they come up and out. You could set plants on that part maybe. Put some glowing Thinkgeek light strips (or flourescent lights) in the little cubbies, pretend there are rare earths in there, and scare the neighborhood kids. Be a real safe place to hide your stash I bet. Every neighborhood has the haunted house/spooky old man thing. This guy has the glowing radioactive table. "Trick or Treat? Reach in there for your candy Billy..."
'Course the table is incredibly cool without my Monday morning engineering. Well done.
I installed and have throughly updated Redhat 7.2. Now, 7.3 comes out.
Sounds like a great time to see if the upgrade install feature works. Since you only recently installed, there can't be much custom (non-RPM I suppose) stuff to break. If the upgrade goes well, nothing more to do except remember that when RH 8.x comes out, you can sdafely upgrade instead of re-install. If the upgrade fails, then you can submit a bug report and install freshly. Either way you have a 7.3 install.
VFD's are easy to get to talk to linux, they act just like a LCD and if it is serial I am betting that it takes standard Matrox Orbital commands so he just downloaded the code from one of the linux pages on how to talk to one of these things.
Before I could get the manual, I didn't know how to talk to it. I had no serial port info, so I was trying all sorts of stuff. I looked all over the web and couldn't find much. I wrote an email to the manufacturer and told myself that if I didn't hear back, I'd take it apart. When they sent me the manuals, it was fairly trivial to write a tiny perl script that sent information to it. I have no idea if the VFD commands are similar to the MO commands and I didn't "download any code".
The thing people don't realize is that before I got the screwdriver out, I didn't even know if it was a PC. And in kind of a leap of faith, my mom had bought 10 of them hoping she could use them. So I grabbed one, took it apart, and she's now got them working. But yeah, it is just a PC. And I'm having fun playing with it (Caller ID on the pole display will be cool, and I'm thinking xmms-based VU meters would be nice as well). The only reason there are web pages is because my thumbnailer script makes them. I just added some comments.
Hey, If I install linux on my PC can I get a story on slashdot?? That is exactly what this is.
No, this is me discovering how POSes are built, partly to help my mom out, partly to have fun with old hardware. If it isn't impressive, then that's ok by me. I never claimed it would cause world peace or cure the common cold or anything. I could have cared less it got on Slashdot. In fact, it would have been better if I had got everything working before people saw it...:-)
I didn't know until I opened it. My mom saw these at a sale from Service Merchandise and got them for liek $30 each. So I nabbed one because I wanted to see what was inside it. I took it apart and saw that it was a PC. I couldn't get it to boot, so I installed Linux. I never said it was like I wrote a special kernel or anything.
BTW, the reason I have web pages for this at all is that once I realized Linux would run on these then I realized that my mom could possibly move to Linux for her POS OS (which would solve some problems she's been having lately). And so I took pictures so she and my brother could see my progress. I have an automatic thumbnailing script that makes those pages, and I used that. After I repeated myself twice when I was doing things, I made little notes.
But I never claimed it was any great hack, just Linux on a second-hand cash register. I certainly wasn't trying to impress anyone, I'm just having fun...
I was looking for cheap info about my LED-on-a-stick cash register deal when I found the android head site. I have to admit: getting a working android head is cool. Way cool. But it can't stream stock quotes and weather data on a cash register pole display...:-)
from the site: Pat can be reached at (protected)@aol.com
I never thought I'd see a parallel-distributed computing, X11-hacking, web-developing sys admin that uses AOL. I suppose with all those complicated hobbies he just wants a nice, relaxing, online experience.
Hey man, the android head is cool. I was even making an "Android Head Has A Posse" sticker. I was just trying to find out the weight of the head (for the sticker) but the site was non-responsive. Then I checked Slashdot. I guess the site has gone out of my cache since I submitted it or something.
But AOL'er or not, the friggin' head rocks. You can't get down on the man for his ISP. Not when he makes a motorized head out of a planter and bike parts that greats little Johnny when he gets home from school. Not even then, man. There are much easier targets than him. Find one who hasn't made a fully-functional robot head out of rat shack parts...
How about a G4 then? It outperforms the iMac, and still costs less than the Sony. My colleague just got the new 17" LCD Panel and it is simply awesome.
What I'd really love is a Cinema Display on a G4. But I don't have the money. I could get the money, but I'd probably have to give up my wife to get it. So I'm going to be be home-building commodity PC hardware for a while I think...
I need to be able to upgrade video cards, monitors, sound cards, add SCSI cards, whatever. Otherwise, I'd think about buying an iMac. The fact that the monitor is attached would clinch the VAIO deal for me.
Of course, I'm probably not in Apple's target market for the iMac. And I'm not in Apple's target financial range for a desktop, either, so I don't think I'll be getting OS X anytime soon...:-)
I'm not much of a Redhat guy, so I don't know how they issue updates. Are those 500MB all security updates, or are they full updates to the system?
I never bothere to even count up the size of the pakages, but aparently that's the size of every rpm released as an update since version 6.2. That's the diff between 6.2 and 7.0, 7.0 and 7.1, 7.1 and 7.2, all 7.2 errata. I can believe that there are 500MB of updates. Whether it shows how insecure Linux is compared to any other OS is hooey.
I'm assuming that was a typo and you meant pabulum, insipid ideas, yes?
Actually, I meant it the way it was spelled. And now that I look at it, dictionary.com has different ideas about what pablum and pabulum mean. But I meant insipid, yes.
In reply to the content of your comment: I'm not too great on my NT security, but I understand (from my own experimentation) that IE (at least parts of it) runs in the "system" context under win2k. Is this true? Does anyone care to explain why this is necessary? Why does it require elevated privileges?
I dunno. The last MS OS I actually installed and used for any length of time was Windows98SE. I've used Win2k and XP very briefly, and I had an NT4 machine at work for a while. So I'll have to guess:
Since IE is "part" of the OS, it must be able to interact with various underlying system calls outside the confines of any normal security model? Some Win32 pigs are more equal than others? Surely MS gives other developers similar hooks through their DevNet program...
I'm sorry if I can't even be serious about this anymore, but I hope you realize I was making a rather dumb joke.
Yes,I saw the joke. I liked it too. I just used your post to vent something that's been bugging me for a long time. Your post was the minor imperfection on the beer glass of the world which allowed the seed of my thought to find purchase and rise to the surface as a big festering bubble of disgust. How very Zen. I think I'll go write Haiku...
Seriously, though, I once had to spend a week testing alternate browsers so that I could develop a test plan to replace IE on the machine in our NOC (after one of them got rooted when an operator was browsing warez and pr0n sites). I'm bitter about IE. And I had a nasty day at work (wrestling with CorporateTime's horrible attempt at an API, if you must know) so I had to vent. And for that I must thank you. I feel much better without all that painful gas pressure.
If they had waited til tomorrow, they'd have known about M$'s fix for this dangerous security hole.
If MS had responded back in November when he made the sploit known, or if they had even thought once about security when designing IE, or if they had any kind of decent security model in the OS, or, or, or... then this never would have happened in the first place and MS wouldn't have to patch the barn door after the horse had left. But don't blame the guy who discovered this by trotting out that "don't tell anyone about the security hole until the vendor can fix it" pablum. Security through obscurity isn't, especially when that obscurity is driven my the needs of the marketing group.
You find a hole, you do due dilligence, they don't respond (he gave them months to fix it fer cryin' out loud), you publish. Then, most likely, the vendor publishes a fix based on the real needs of users and not the perceived needs of some business unit looking at a bottom line.
It boggles my mind that one could have a machine rooted simply by browsing the web. A die-hard MS nut at work today was giving me grief over the fact that Red Hat has "published" 500MB of "updates" to "Linux" since version 6.2 and how could the OS be so insecure as to need that many updates... I didn't even have the energy to respond. And I'm all for people running with whatever works for them, but at least I know for a fact that Opera on my machine runs in userland and won't get me rooted. And hopefully, using your favorite browser won't mean data loss and/or a re-image of the OS as well.
But to blame the guy who discovered it? I mean, honestly, for fsck's sake: we're talking about a web browser, you know? Completely compromising a machine via a back button? And it's been known for five months?!? At least MS could tell users to run another browser until they can fix the issue. Or turn scripting off. Or whatever. The fact that it could happen in the first place is just obscene. Or criminal. MS leaves a bad taste in my mind sometimes...
That almost happened. When I worked there, I was bugging them to port Eudora to Linux. (I've been a Linux user for a long time, and essentially had to use Windows since I had to use Eudora.) Well, one day a PHB type (sorry, John...) comes into my office and says "We'd like to talk about what it would take to get Eudora working on Linux." w00t!
So I go searching for someone to do the port. Among my searches, I would up talking to Loki Software. The Linux game company that just went joysticks up. So I brought them in (they were in Tustin, QCOM was in San Diego, so it was a easy thing). We had them sign NDA's, the works. Scott Draeker came, as did two other geeks. I had fun talking to them. Way smart people. One of them was a GNOME user, the other KDE. I got them going on that. Kind of a troll, but I needed an ice-breaker.:-)
Anyway, I burnt a CD with Mac and Win Eudora source and gave it to them. They looked at both and said that the Windows source could be ported in like 3 months. I was a happy camper.
Then, doom. Money got weird. The ads were selling, but there were internal QCOM politics. I can't go into it, but if I had talked to Loki three, four months previous, there likely would have been a Linux Eudora Pro. And Loki might still be in business (since we were going to pay them a boatload of money). And I would have been happy. But now I make do with Pine and Kmail.
This is all an interesting story, actually. I should write it up one day. I still have friends at Qualcomm, though, so I'll have to wait.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you assume that every shot means one splatter. My new gun is pretty accurate, and I could maybe hit a paper plate 5 times out of 10 at, say, 40 yards. With no wind. And the first shot I'd have to use to guide the rest in. And I'd stand a good chance of having maybe one in four paintballs being slightly out of round, having a seam stick up, etc. which would make them fly weird. That's accurate in paintball. Rental guns are wildly inaccurate. You probably couldn't hit that paper plate once in 100 shots. So you tend to use a lot of paint just shooting "at" someone.
Sometimes, you have to pin a couple guys down behind a bunker so a buddy can advance. Here's where speed comes into play: if I can spit out at least 10 balls per second, then figure I can be just as useful in providing covering fire as maybe 5 guys with rentals or slow guns. And you don't always use convering fire -- it's a really good way to get everyone on the other team to shoot at you (so a quiet gun is good). But if there's three or four guys keeping down a teammate who wants to move up, 10 balls/second hitting the board in front of you is enough to make you want to stay down, believe me. :-)
Paintballs have a very bright, albeit highly soluble, paint. Some paint is thicker than other paint. Some is like Crisco/butter/wax consistency. I use bright pink, waxy paint. It's hard to claim you weren't shot. But it happens. It's called "wiping", and wipers get kicked off (sometimes for the day) if the ref catches them. Wiping is to paintball as a stick in the spokes is to bicycling. It's the #1 no-no.
Again, here's where fast is good: If you jump up and run and I shoot you once (because I have a slow gun or something), you may or may not know you're hit. Balls bounce off all the time. It has to break on you to count. So you get shot once, maybe have a little splatter, maybe not. But you have to check, and you'd do it when you get to where you were going. If you jump up and I lay into you with a fast stream, you probably get hit 5-10 times (depending on when you said you were out, how far away you were, etc). See, I keep shooting until you yell "out!". After a couple hits, you just know you're hit. One hit, you don't just yell out automatically. Also, it's impossible to wipe off four or five hits. Everyone knows you're hit, so you leave.
As the day wears on, you get to know who the wipers are. You shoot them more. Everyone does. They know they are cheating, and they know they'll get hit more because people want to make sure. But there's nothing sadistic about "lighting someone up" like that. It's part of the game. Now, if you do it to a guy you know is out, or he's really close, that that's bad form and not nice. Might get you punched, too. I've seen it happen, and it's really unpleasant to watch. Beginners do it a lot. I ususally give them the canned "sportsmanlike conduct" speech, and they usually listen since I'm a pretty big guy (and it's usually a kid who does it).
People do shoot back when they are hit. I've seen people kinda keep shooting even though they know they're out. It's kind of a judgement call at that point. If you know you got the person out first, by a wide margin -- like they were walking off and shot you -- then you just keep playing. Like when your own team shoots you (again, this is usually from a kid, and usually at the start of the game), you have to decide if you want to get out or not. If it's late in the game and I'm in a weird place (like on th eother team's side; I tend to do flanking stuff a lot and sneak around) and I get shot by my own team, then I call myself out. I figure at that point, they'll have lost a good player and the team's match will suffer so they'll learn to check before shooting.
A corollary to this is blind-fire. It's where someone holds the the gun up in the air and shoots at stuff they can't see -- while they hide behind a bunker or something. It's a cowardly, dangerous (you never know if someone has their mask off) thing to do, and I usually call the ref if I see it. If I get shot by blind-fire I stay in (since you can't blind-fire legally, any paint launched that way is illegal and therefore doesn't count -- like if someone from another field shot at you) and hunt the person down and shoot them real close if I can. That sounds mean, but there's no other way for them to learn that they could blind someone because of how they break the rules. I nearly always talk to them about blind fire. Again, it's typically a kid with a rental.
The respawning thing is something you see every once in a while, usually on big fields with a lot of players. It keeps things moving (and it keeps people shooting, which is one reason why you see it more on fields that make you buy the more expensive paint from them instead of bring your own). It can also be a part of the game you're playing. For example, one game I play is called "Attack and Defend". It's very commmon. On the field I play at, the defenders have lots to hide behind and they are at the top of a hill. Their flag is out in the open, though, and easy to get. So you have to aggressively defend it. The attackers have to cover open ground, uphill. So when an attacker gets shot out, they go back to the bottom of the hill, out of site. Every couple minutes, the ref there will send the group who's been shot back into the game. This makes another wave of attackers. Trick here is that defenders are out for good once shot. Did you ever see Starship Troopers? It reminds me of that. Just waves and waves of attackers, relentlessly coming up the hill, through bushes, etc. It's scary. Think of it as The Alamo or something. You'd think being a defender would be nice since you have good cover and you don't have to run around a lot, but you shoot a lot and they just don't stop coming. And the attackers get better after they'v been out a couple times. If you have a neat trick or a hidey hole you're shooting them from, trust me, they'll come back and try to find you. Being an attacker is hard work, and you get shot a lot, but you have fun trying to outwit an entrenched defender.
But that's one type of game. There are probably hundreds of types of games. Heck, I know of groups of a thousand or more people that get together once a year to recreate battles like D-Day at Omaha Beach. Seriously. They turn old golf carts into "tanks" and such. There are companies that make paint mortars, claymore mines, grenades, etc. Check this out. Yeah... Heh heh. That's a little out there for me. But usually, it's standard "capture the flag" stuff. It's basically Quake in real life, which is why I play. It's hellaciously fun, and good exercise.
As an aside: I once was in a paintball store and a guy came in and asked the fella working there "What kind of paintballs hurt the most?" Everyone in the store wanted to beat him up. The owner told him to get out and never come back. Those are the sort of people I'd like to see never play again. I'm very much into playing fairly and having fun. It's all about fun, not putting some other guy down, or being sadistic. The guys that want hard paintballs are the kinds that tortured animals as kids or hit women. They have personal self-worth issues and need to hurt others to make themselves feel good. They are honorless and I have no respect for them.
The satisfaction in paintball is not hurting people by shooting them. Paintballs don't hurt all that much anyway. The real satisfaction is trying like mad to run/sneak/hide/shoot/whatever better than the other guy. I like the games where it takes a couple minutes to survey the landscape, get some real teamwork going, figure out a plan, and then execute that plan. It's being out of breath, trying to burrow cover behind a 10" tall log, fire coming in from all sides, adrenaline pumping and then finally figuring a way out. It's running over a hill and finding ten members of the other team in front of you. Run or shoot? Think fast. The fun is taking five minutes to slither through the bushes and sneak up behind the enemy team to get the drop on them. It's making that "I only have 10 paintballs left, so fsck it" mad dash for the flag. It's looking for and finding the sweet cover so you can play like you're a machine gun nest and ambush a couple flag runners or holding an entire half field at bay. It's having one "nemesis" who's been shooting you out all day and finally working your way into a place where you can get him. And it's also just plain fun laying down a suppressing fire by shooting a lot of paint "over that way" where the enemy is running around. :-) If you play with really good players, better than you are, and you can outwit them, then that's the real fun.
Anyway, sorry for the long-winded response. I haven't been able to play for well over a month, so I was vicariously re-living the moment. You ought to try it some day. Take a look at warpig.com, pbnation.com, or pbreview.com for more info.
-B
How much paint you use depends greatly on a lot of things. For example, I sometimes play at a course frequented by church groups and father/son beginners. You'll get 20 minute games (with regeneration, so you're never "out" for long) on 2 acre fields with like 60 people. That means lots of targets, so that means lots of shooting. I once played on a real small hyperball field (about two basketball courts in size, with large tubes and such for cover) with 25 people per team. I went through a lot of paint then too. But then again, I've played on large foresty fields with 5-10 players per team, and haven't shot more than a hundred rounds or so in 15 minutes.
The type of gun you have means a lot too. I recently upgraded to an electronic gun (a Matrix, in case you wondered) to replace my older semi-auto mechanical Spyder (a decent entry-level gun). The electro shoots like 22 paintballs per second, although I can't shoot that fast (it's semiauto only unless you upgrade the chip). But I can shoot it a lot faster than the Spyder. Much faster. I used to go through about 1000 paintballs per day (that's all day: 9am to close, playing every match), now I can go through more than a case of 2000 easy. Meaning I have to stay mindful of my paint consumption. But I usually play as a "back player" (hang out in the back/middle and longball people running around), so that means more paint. Think one step up from spray-and-pray. :-) But I have a big, heavy, accurate and quiet gun, so that's my lot in life (although the Matrix makes a great hide-and-go-seek gun since it's about the quietest gun there is, so I play that way every fifth time or so).
Back in the old days of pump guns and single shot pistols with powerlet cartidges, going through more than 50 paintballs was really shooting it up. Now, that's nothing. The hoppers hold 200 rounds, and you see guys carrying 1200 rounds in their pod carriers (six 150 round pods) who are using electronic semiauto guns with 88cu. in. compressed air tanks filled to 4500psi. I always carry at least 800 rounds with me every match, even though I rarely use that much in one go. My wife sometimes runs out, my buddy drops some, etc. Where paintballs are concerned, it's always better to have extra than not enough.
But, yeah, most people shoot a lot when they play paintball. And the more expensive your gun, the more paint you tend to shoot. BTW, paintball isn't so much running around as it is sprinting a little and crouching a lot.
-B
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You want all the people that are trekkies and techies, right? I'm maybe a little rusty, but wouldn't you want something like this:
mysql> select * from human where (human.trekkie=1 and human.techie=1);
That is, you want all rows where the records indicate that the subject is both a trekkie and a techie? Or maybe it'd be more clear if you had two columns like this:
CREATE TABLE human (
id INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
trekkie ENUM('YES','NO') DEFAULT 'NO',
techie ENUM('YES','NO') DEFAULT 'NO'
);
Then you could say:
mysql> select * from human where (human.trekkie='YES' and human.techie='YES');
Which is the same thing, I guess. Maybe. I'm not sure. Anyway, this got much too geeky...
-B
Subject pretty much says it all. I don't think any wise person would disagree if you were to say that the most heinous intellectual crime is one of unfulfilled potential. Whether fulfilling that potential necessarily means a degree or just living a fruitful life is the sticky bit. I know a lot of people that have the societal measure of success yet haven't stretched themselves mentally in the slightest. I know a lot of people that have the piece (or pieces, in at least one case) of paper, but had to work very hard at it because they aren't that bright. I know some who excelled at rote learning, but failed awfully when asked to integrate two concepts into a novel whole. And I know a lot of very bright, certifiably genius-level people who have decided to do and make stuff instead of spend time learning about other stuff that was done and made. If one is lucky, one gets the choice which road to take.
Sad part is, hard economic times bring out the great equalizer: management knows that individuals who have graduated from a certain institution at a certain level have demonstrably performed to a level which guarantees they themselves cannot be faulted for "taking a chance" on a new hire. It's the way things are always going to be, unless you know people. You either have a degree and hotjobs/monster/dice, or no degree but people who you and know you've done excellent work in the past. Official references don't count, either. I'm talking about people that know you and will hire you because they know what you can do. If you don't fit into neither camp, you stand a hard chance of finding a decent job in today's economy.
And BTW, I was agreeing with your earlier post. I currently work at a university. Before that I worked at a high-dollar startup, before that a Fortune 100 company, and before that a university. I don't have a degree, and that is by choice. I've faced a lot of discrimination because of it. However, I've never had trouble finding a good job at any time in the past 13 years largely because I know people who know me and know what I can do. I know I'm smart, because I'm smart enough to recognize where I fit in what I can do. I'm also smart enough not to care about the ArsDigitia's of the world. I guess I have a self-worth that doesn't depend on other people. Which is probably not healthy....
-B
So why not include non-degreed individuals in your rankings as well? If the primary difference between B.S. and Ph.D. computer science people is some combination of time, money and determination acting independently of intelligence and/or cleverness, then those same differences would apply to non-degreed and B.S people as well, right? It would then similarly apply between B.S. and B.A. folks, or those having an M.S and an B.F.A.
I don't mean to be obtuse (or a troll), but I have to ask: Is a Bachelor's the point at which you begin ranking intelligence? Why not start at a high school diploma? Why not eighth grade (US)? Kindergarten? At which level can one finally claim the title of a "superior being"? Should society be a meritocracy? Can I be a Webelo without all my badges? If not, am I as smart as a Boy Scout or doomed to be labeled simple for all time?
Not that it matters much to anyone, but I never made it out of Cub Scouts and it's far too late in the game to start caring what everyone else in the den thinks...
-B
It's stuff that matters to the guys that own/run the site. You're more than free to find another place which fits in with your views if you don't like the "bias" here. The news.com forums, any ZDNet site, or fuckedcompany.com would be my suggestions.
And it's news for nerds which is mattering. I'd wager that many people who fit the definition of the word "nerd" around the time when that tagline was coined do actually resent what MS has done, what they represent, etc. Lots of them tolerate MS, too. Lots don't care. It takes all kinds. You are one of them, Michael is another, both of you have a point. The difference is that Michael has a web site he's asked to post stories to in which to voice that opnion. You merely have one (of no doubt many) troll accounts from which to voice yours. He's at the top of the page, you're at the bottom, and life is unfair in the anti-MS Slashdot world. Sorry.
Bottom line: Posting on /. about the biases of the editors is like joining a nudist camp to protest the use of sunscreen: it's self-referentially ludicrous.
-B
You could also have them make a bi-level sort of table. Just take the two rows and attach them on little dowels to the top of the table at a 45 degree angle so they come up and out. You could set plants on that part maybe. Put some glowing Thinkgeek light strips (or flourescent lights) in the little cubbies, pretend there are rare earths in there, and scare the neighborhood kids. Be a real safe place to hide your stash I bet. Every neighborhood has the haunted house/spooky old man thing. This guy has the glowing radioactive table. "Trick or Treat? Reach in there for your candy Billy..."
'Course the table is incredibly cool without my Monday morning engineering. Well done.
-B
Sounds like a great time to see if the upgrade install feature works. Since you only recently installed, there can't be much custom (non-RPM I suppose) stuff to break. If the upgrade goes well, nothing more to do except remember that when RH 8.x comes out, you can sdafely upgrade instead of re-install. If the upgrade fails, then you can submit a bug report and install freshly. Either way you have a 7.3 install.
-B
-B
I'm on a Road Runner cable modem in San Diego. I'm getting ~80Kb/sec pulling down all three simultaneously.
Not bad. Thanks for the mirror!
-B
Before I could get the manual, I didn't know how to talk to it. I had no serial port info, so I was trying all sorts of stuff. I looked all over the web and couldn't find much. I wrote an email to the manufacturer and told myself that if I didn't hear back, I'd take it apart. When they sent me the manuals, it was fairly trivial to write a tiny perl script that sent information to it. I have no idea if the VFD commands are similar to the MO commands and I didn't "download any code".
The thing people don't realize is that before I got the screwdriver out, I didn't even know if it was a PC. And in kind of a leap of faith, my mom had bought 10 of them hoping she could use them. So I grabbed one, took it apart, and she's now got them working. But yeah, it is just a PC. And I'm having fun playing with it (Caller ID on the pole display will be cool, and I'm thinking xmms-based VU meters would be nice as well). The only reason there are web pages is because my thumbnailer script makes them. I just added some comments.
Hey, If I install linux on my PC can I get a story on slashdot?? That is exactly what this is.
No, this is me discovering how POSes are built, partly to help my mom out, partly to have fun with old hardware. If it isn't impressive, then that's ok by me. I never claimed it would cause world peace or cure the common cold or anything. I could have cared less it got on Slashdot. In fact, it would have been better if I had got everything working before people saw it... :-)
-B
BTW, the reason I have web pages for this at all is that once I realized Linux would run on these then I realized that my mom could possibly move to Linux for her POS OS (which would solve some problems she's been having lately). And so I took pictures so she and my brother could see my progress. I have an automatic thumbnailing script that makes those pages, and I used that. After I repeated myself twice when I was doing things, I made little notes.
But I never claimed it was any great hack, just Linux on a second-hand cash register. I certainly wasn't trying to impress anyone, I'm just having fun...
-B
LOL...
My thick head. Pardon me.
-B
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I never thought I'd see a parallel-distributed computing, X11-hacking, web-developing sys admin that uses AOL. I suppose with all those complicated hobbies he just wants a nice, relaxing, online experience.
Hey man, the android head is cool. I was even making an "Android Head Has A Posse" sticker. I was just trying to find out the weight of the head (for the sticker) but the site was non-responsive. Then I checked Slashdot. I guess the site has gone out of my cache since I submitted it or something.
But AOL'er or not, the friggin' head rocks. You can't get down on the man for his ISP. Not when he makes a motorized head out of a planter and bike parts that greats little Johnny when he gets home from school. Not even then, man. There are much easier targets than him. Find one who hasn't made a fully-functional robot head out of rat shack parts...
-B
What I'd really love is a Cinema Display on a G4. But I don't have the money. I could get the money, but I'd probably have to give up my wife to get it. So I'm going to be be home-building commodity PC hardware for a while I think...
-B
Of course, I'm probably not in Apple's target market for the iMac. And I'm not in Apple's target financial range for a desktop, either, so I don't think I'll be getting OS X anytime soon... :-)
-B
There's a slight difference here. What an obvious troll... At least nobody seems to be complaining about Mexico City's software purchases.
-B
I never bothere to even count up the size of the pakages, but aparently that's the size of every rpm released as an update since version 6.2. That's the diff between 6.2 and 7.0, 7.0 and 7.1, 7.1 and 7.2, all 7.2 errata. I can believe that there are 500MB of updates. Whether it shows how insecure Linux is compared to any other OS is hooey.
-B
Actually, I meant it the way it was spelled. And now that I look at it, dictionary.com has different ideas about what pablum and pabulum mean. But I meant insipid, yes.
In reply to the content of your comment: I'm not too great on my NT security, but I understand (from my own experimentation) that IE (at least parts of it) runs in the "system" context under win2k. Is this true? Does anyone care to explain why this is necessary? Why does it require elevated privileges?
I dunno. The last MS OS I actually installed and used for any length of time was Windows98SE. I've used Win2k and XP very briefly, and I had an NT4 machine at work for a while. So I'll have to guess:
Since IE is "part" of the OS, it must be able to interact with various underlying system calls outside the confines of any normal security model? Some Win32 pigs are more equal than others? Surely MS gives other developers similar hooks through their DevNet program...
-B
Yes,I saw the joke. I liked it too. I just used your post to vent something that's been bugging me for a long time. Your post was the minor imperfection on the beer glass of the world which allowed the seed of my thought to find purchase and rise to the surface as a big festering bubble of disgust. How very Zen. I think I'll go write Haiku...
Seriously, though, I once had to spend a week testing alternate browsers so that I could develop a test plan to replace IE on the machine in our NOC (after one of them got rooted when an operator was browsing warez and pr0n sites). I'm bitter about IE. And I had a nasty day at work (wrestling with CorporateTime's horrible attempt at an API, if you must know) so I had to vent. And for that I must thank you. I feel much better without all that painful gas pressure.
-B
If MS had responded back in November when he made the sploit known, or if they had even thought once about security when designing IE, or if they had any kind of decent security model in the OS, or, or, or... then this never would have happened in the first place and MS wouldn't have to patch the barn door after the horse had left. But don't blame the guy who discovered this by trotting out that "don't tell anyone about the security hole until the vendor can fix it" pablum. Security through obscurity isn't, especially when that obscurity is driven my the needs of the marketing group.
You find a hole, you do due dilligence, they don't respond (he gave them months to fix it fer cryin' out loud), you publish. Then, most likely, the vendor publishes a fix based on the real needs of users and not the perceived needs of some business unit looking at a bottom line.
It boggles my mind that one could have a machine rooted simply by browsing the web. A die-hard MS nut at work today was giving me grief over the fact that Red Hat has "published" 500MB of "updates" to "Linux" since version 6.2 and how could the OS be so insecure as to need that many updates... I didn't even have the energy to respond. And I'm all for people running with whatever works for them, but at least I know for a fact that Opera on my machine runs in userland and won't get me rooted. And hopefully, using your favorite browser won't mean data loss and/or a re-image of the OS as well.
But to blame the guy who discovered it? I mean, honestly, for fsck's sake: we're talking about a web browser, you know? Completely compromising a machine via a back button? And it's been known for five months?!? At least MS could tell users to run another browser until they can fix the issue. Or turn scripting off. Or whatever. The fact that it could happen in the first place is just obscene. Or criminal. MS leaves a bad taste in my mind sometimes...
-B
Fnord, man... Fnord.
-B
Please, Dr. Cowan: it's viruses.
I don't mean to get overly semantic about it, but the pseudo-word "virii" needs to go away.
-B
That almost happened. When I worked there, I was bugging them to port Eudora to Linux. (I've been a Linux user for a long time, and essentially had to use Windows since I had to use Eudora.) Well, one day a PHB type (sorry, John...) comes into my office and says "We'd like to talk about what it would take to get Eudora working on Linux." w00t!
So I go searching for someone to do the port. Among my searches, I would up talking to Loki Software. The Linux game company that just went joysticks up. So I brought them in (they were in Tustin, QCOM was in San Diego, so it was a easy thing). We had them sign NDA's, the works. Scott Draeker came, as did two other geeks. I had fun talking to them. Way smart people. One of them was a GNOME user, the other KDE. I got them going on that. Kind of a troll, but I needed an ice-breaker. :-)
Anyway, I burnt a CD with Mac and Win Eudora source and gave it to them. They looked at both and said that the Windows source could be ported in like 3 months. I was a happy camper.
Then, doom. Money got weird. The ads were selling, but there were internal QCOM politics. I can't go into it, but if I had talked to Loki three, four months previous, there likely would have been a Linux Eudora Pro. And Loki might still be in business (since we were going to pay them a boatload of money). And I would have been happy. But now I make do with Pine and Kmail.
This is all an interesting story, actually. I should write it up one day. I still have friends at Qualcomm, though, so I'll have to wait.
-B