Yeah, but a young gamer that doesn't quickly learn that "Attack!" isn't always the best answer to a problem has a DM that isn't handing out severe enough consequences.
Game studios, hardware manufacturers, and especially game reviewers hate puzzles.
How do you compete with low-budget studios if the gameplay is king instead of the graphics and high-budget art and voice assets?
How do you sell a fancy new video card if the latest game doesn't require ripping through a fast changing scene at 100 FPS using the most realistic techniques currently available?
How do you review a steady stream of games if you can't experience 90% of it in two or three encounters with an enemy?
We've had game series after game series be wildly successful based on interactive puzzle style game play only to be ruined in sequels as more focus is put on the combat. Yet reviewer pan games based on the combat system without giving the puzzles any thought; even if the puzzles are the vast majority of the game!
If Portal weren't bundled as part of Orange Box, it probably would have received little critical attention.
Anybody who says "more funding" without saying what it would be spent on is part of the problem.
Want to fix education? Budget administration and recreation separately from the educational costs. Have the Education budget pay for teachers, facilities and supplies. Have the administration budget pay for principals, school boards, and secretaries. Have the recreation budget pay for athletics. Then people will know where the money is going.
Hopefully that leads to more centralization. Localities don't need control. Curriculum doesn't need to be micromanaged. Just because busybody parents want to have a huge say doesn't mean they should have it. Making those decisions thousands of times instead of 50 times, or even once is massively, massively wasteful.
Lastly, stop building new schools to replace perfectly functional old buildings. Yes, procuring federal funding for a new school building will win you votes in a US House election, but it's still stupid. The building doesn't teach your child anything. Unless it's a health hazard, suck it up and live with your 25 year old building. Do a little remodeling during the summer months.
He's not doing it your way, but he's not doing it wrong.
Saving e-mail is like saving any correspondence, but easier. You saved off that phone number in an address book. That's great if what you need from your past correspondence is that phone number. You can't anticipate what data you're going to need out of your past correspondence, and you can't enumerate all of the data contained in your correspondence. The only logical solution is archival.
Quick. Tell me who sent you that person's phone number. When? Why did they deem it appropriate to reveal somebody's personal information. When's the last time you heard from that old friend? How many people have contacted you about that piece of code you posted on the internet in 1998? Who is this guy who just contacted you, and have you really ever done business with him in the past? How much did you pay for that thing when you bought it 10 years ago?
You can't even think of all the possible nuggets of information contained in an e-mail archive until you suddenly care about the data. So you're never going to be able to file it away in another form in advance.
Also, yes. Most clients are still terrible. But the good clients have been around for *much* longer than most of the bad ones. And that's not even counting "grep".
I've remembered things I'd certainly have forgotten, learned new things about people from old correspondence, answered questions I didn't know I had the answer to, won lawsuits, and saved myself incalculable amounts of time, simply because I have an archive of past e-mails.
Of course, with the anti-Vista hatefest still going on, there's little Microsoft can do but try new marketing approaches to get that message across.
You must have gone to business school.
They do have another option. They could increase the quality of their product.
An anti-microsoft "hatefest" certainly slows adoption amongst the haters that frequent certain online forums, but it doesn't influence, for example, business adoption. They developed a product that differentiates itself from its predecessor in ways that people and businesses are either completely apathetic to (new interface), or really turned off by (requires higher end hardware for no good reason, DRM). At the same time, they really didn't add any new features which make it a "must-have" operating system. They could try to polish the turd and sell it anyway, or they could go back to the lab and create something that their customers actually want to buy.
The problem with many discount PCs is that they come with very small amounts of cache. A crappy low-end processor with 1MB of L2 cache runs Vista like crap.
The problem is that you can't put a $200 CPU in a $350 machine.
It doesn't matter how well Vista runs on high-end equipment. It needs to perform well on low-end machines too.
Your wise man was wise. Violence is sometimes appropriate, and a smart person would know when to use it. An idiot would say "it's the last resort", and try to reason with an aggressor rather than defend himself.
You live in a peaceful society because we have chosen to apply violence when necessary to stop those that deviate from our generally agreed upon rules of conduct. If we instead chose not to use violence until the last resort, we would find ourselves constantly fighting for our lives against those who chose to exploit us; or more likely, we'd be dead.
Search for 'custom debian distribution' in the debian wiki. Tools like this have existed to build custom Debians for years.
I've got exactly the setup you describe for the custom debian the company I currently work for ships with their product.
If you install the 'cdd-common' package, you get the base tools for building and maintaining your own custom debian distribution. Additionally, you'll find the 'debianEdu' and 'emdebian' wrappers that give you partial custom distributions if you don't want to start completely from scratch.
The license is stored in the package, but it is not stored in the cached list of packages. You can do something like:
for i in *.deb; do dpkg -c $i | grep/usr/share/doc/.*/MPL 2>&1 1>/dev/null && echo $1; done;
To get a list of all packages licensed under the MPL..... But you'd need to have all the packages you wanted to check on hand, and usually all you have is the 'packages' file.
On the other hand, the packages are conveniently separated into 'main' (complies with the debian free software guidelines), and non-free (doesn't). It's easy to make that determination with just apt.
The build process for debs has been the same for ages. Stand in the directory that contains debian/control, run dpkg-buildpackage (-b if you just want binary packages), done. There are many ways to build a package, but it's not because it has been an ever changing process... Just because some people prefer to roll their own. One of the projects I work on uses a maven plugin to build packages. There is no reason you couldn't build the package by hand too.
The tools you describe have all existed for Debian for ages. Fedora has only recently caught up. The only reason that developers have preferred Fedora/RedHat over Debian and its derivatives has been marketing, business development, and the size of the installed base.
They've fixed the majority of the packaging and dependency issues (after almost a decade of lagging behind), but I still find their configuration tools, their liberal interpretation of the LSB filesystem hierarchy, and things like Kudzu to be far more cumbersome to what you find in Debian, and Ubuntu.
One of the things I most hate about female sexists: They can't come to terms with the fact that one of the definitions of 'man' is a synonym for our species. It isn't just a reference to a male human.
There are extensions implemented by Cisco to deny routing based on any number of things. Validation by the TPM can just be added to the long list. It still doesn't stop you from using your computer as a general purpose (runs whatever instructions you want) system.
So you're going to preempt the people who were going to correct the parent by spreading mis-information in advance?
The TPM doesn't stop you from using your computer as a general purpose system. It simply allows third party software to choose not to work if certain conditions aren't met. You can still do "whatever you want" with your computer, as long as "whatever you want" doesn't include running such software.
I've written drivers for a company that built a linux appliance using Foxconn motherboards. It seems Foxconn supports Linux for customers as long as they're buying in large enough quantity.
The real lesson here is not to buy Foxconn unless you're a big important customer that they care to suck up to.
Converting complex serial algorithms to effectively utilize multiple cores is generally not simple.
Fortunately, most algorithms that end-users care about don't fall into that category.
Video encoding certainly doesn't fall into that category. It is almost trivial to split a video up into sections of length (total length/number of cores), and then concatenate the encoded sections after you're done. Transcoding is even easier. Core 0 decodes, Core 1 encodes.... Etc.
Synchronization, scheduling, and data transport issues are largely the same as multi-threaded programming on a single core. The problems are well understood.
Multi-threaded programming is hard because most programmers don't understand the theory. They only learned about the tools.
No, it's not renewable. But it will certainly last for sufficiently long for us to develop renewable options, and can last much, much longer. Thus it is typically classified as a sustainable energy source. (We're talking about nuclear fission, not fusion)
Coal and natural gas aren't sustainable, plus they're highly polluting in comparison.
Estimates I've read indicate that we have 100 years of nuclear fuel already mined, should we become willing to reprocess already spent fuel rods. Supplies increase as the price goes up, as well, since uranium that is more difficult to extract becomes profitable to extract. The supply of uranium on the planet is essentially inexhaustible (see graph on the right side of the page...), it's just a matter of how much we're willing to spend to get it. Unlike natural gas price increases, a doubling of the cost of unprocessed uranium only results in a 7% increase in the cost of nuclear generated electricity.
The best part about nuclear power, though, is that unlike wind and solar, it's a viable replacement for all of our fossil fuel generation now.
Because the cost of producing the equipment (gas or electric) in terms of emissions doesn't even come close to the emissions from operating a 80-100k BTU natural gas furnace. On an average New England winter night, the average 95% efficiency natural gas furnace consumes enough fuel to take itself from room temperature to a pool of molten metal. You could make the thing 100% efficient, and it still would produce several orders of magnitude more in emissions over its lifetime than your share of emissions in expanding electrical infrastructure, and emissions from the transport of nuclear fuel.
I was only assuming it was a good idea based on a presumption that people wouldn't be able to have a fission reaction occurring in the basements. Instead we'd want that sort of thing centralized.
However if we could bury a mini-nuke in our back yards to cut down on conversion losses, I'd be all for it.
Conversion of our power generation to nuclear was also assumed, as it was the premise of the whole comment.
It's only as good as it sounds if it doesn't lose its charge in a couple days parked in your driveway.
Devices with a low enough internal resistance to be able to be charged quickly, also typically lose their charge quickly even when you're not drawing current from the device externally.
What good is a super efficient electric car if you're wasting energy while you're parked?
In many areas, 50% or more of the electricity is lost in transmission, 'cause people don't want power plants or high tension wires near their house, so we build plants far, far away, and convert to lower voltage, lower to the ground wiring much sooner in the chain than we would otherwise.
The theory states that if the top income earners invest more into the business infrastructure and equity markets, it will in turn lead to more goods at lower prices, and create more jobs for middle and lower class individuals.
You don't do Big things without Big industry. Luckily for us, this generates Big economic impact, and creates a Big percentage of our jobs. The net effect on our quality of life, and our overall wealth as a society is Big (in a good way).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but a young gamer that doesn't quickly learn that "Attack!" isn't always the best answer to a problem has a DM that isn't handing out severe enough consequences.
Exactly.
Gamers still love puzzles.
Game studios, hardware manufacturers, and especially game reviewers hate puzzles.
How do you compete with low-budget studios if the gameplay is king instead of the graphics and high-budget art and voice assets?
How do you sell a fancy new video card if the latest game doesn't require ripping through a fast changing scene at 100 FPS using the most realistic techniques currently available?
How do you review a steady stream of games if you can't experience 90% of it in two or three encounters with an enemy?
We've had game series after game series be wildly successful based on interactive puzzle style game play only to be ruined in sequels as more focus is put on the combat. Yet reviewer pan games based on the combat system without giving the puzzles any thought; even if the puzzles are the vast majority of the game!
If Portal weren't bundled as part of Orange Box, it probably would have received little critical attention.
Anybody who says "more funding" without saying what it would be spent on is part of the problem.
Want to fix education? Budget administration and recreation separately from the educational costs. Have the Education budget pay for teachers, facilities and supplies. Have the administration budget pay for principals, school boards, and secretaries. Have the recreation budget pay for athletics. Then people will know where the money is going.
Hopefully that leads to more centralization. Localities don't need control. Curriculum doesn't need to be micromanaged. Just because busybody parents want to have a huge say doesn't mean they should have it. Making those decisions thousands of times instead of 50 times, or even once is massively, massively wasteful.
Lastly, stop building new schools to replace perfectly functional old buildings. Yes, procuring federal funding for a new school building will win you votes in a US House election, but it's still stupid. The building doesn't teach your child anything. Unless it's a health hazard, suck it up and live with your 25 year old building. Do a little remodeling during the summer months.
He's not doing it your way, but he's not doing it wrong.
Saving e-mail is like saving any correspondence, but easier. You saved off that phone number in an address book. That's great if what you need from your past correspondence is that phone number. You can't anticipate what data you're going to need out of your past correspondence, and you can't enumerate all of the data contained in your correspondence. The only logical solution is archival.
Quick. Tell me who sent you that person's phone number. When? Why did they deem it appropriate to reveal somebody's personal information. When's the last time you heard from that old friend? How many people have contacted you about that piece of code you posted on the internet in 1998? Who is this guy who just contacted you, and have you really ever done business with him in the past? How much did you pay for that thing when you bought it 10 years ago?
You can't even think of all the possible nuggets of information contained in an e-mail archive until you suddenly care about the data. So you're never going to be able to file it away in another form in advance.
Also, yes. Most clients are still terrible. But the good clients have been around for *much* longer than most of the bad ones. And that's not even counting "grep".
I've remembered things I'd certainly have forgotten, learned new things about people from old correspondence, answered questions I didn't know I had the answer to, won lawsuits, and saved myself incalculable amounts of time, simply because I have an archive of past e-mails.
Of course, with the anti-Vista hatefest still going on, there's little Microsoft can do but try new marketing approaches to get that message across.
You must have gone to business school.
They do have another option. They could increase the quality of their product.
An anti-microsoft "hatefest" certainly slows adoption amongst the haters that frequent certain online forums, but it doesn't influence, for example, business adoption. They developed a product that differentiates itself from its predecessor in ways that people and businesses are either completely apathetic to (new interface), or really turned off by (requires higher end hardware for no good reason, DRM). At the same time, they really didn't add any new features which make it a "must-have" operating system. They could try to polish the turd and sell it anyway, or they could go back to the lab and create something that their customers actually want to buy.
The problem with many discount PCs is that they come with very small amounts of cache. A crappy low-end processor with 1MB of L2 cache runs Vista like crap.
The problem is that you can't put a $200 CPU in a $350 machine.
It doesn't matter how well Vista runs on high-end equipment. It needs to perform well on low-end machines too.
Your wise man was wise. Violence is sometimes appropriate, and a smart person would know when to use it. An idiot would say "it's the last resort", and try to reason with an aggressor rather than defend himself.
You live in a peaceful society because we have chosen to apply violence when necessary to stop those that deviate from our generally agreed upon rules of conduct. If we instead chose not to use violence until the last resort, we would find ourselves constantly fighting for our lives against those who chose to exploit us; or more likely, we'd be dead.
The real problem is that peace, love, and understanding don't defend you from guns, knives, and rocks.
The parent is saying, essentially, that Africans, like the rest of us, live in the real world, and not fantasy hippy fairy land.
Search for 'custom debian distribution' in the debian wiki. Tools like this have existed to build custom Debians for years.
I've got exactly the setup you describe for the custom debian the company I currently work for ships with their product.
If you install the 'cdd-common' package, you get the base tools for building and maintaining your own custom debian distribution. Additionally, you'll find the 'debianEdu' and 'emdebian' wrappers that give you partial custom distributions if you don't want to start completely from scratch.
Deb supports that. Apt doesn't.
The license is stored in the package, but it is not stored in the cached list of packages. You can do something like:
for i in *.deb; do dpkg -c $i | grep
To get a list of all packages licensed under the MPL..... But you'd need to have all the packages you wanted to check on hand, and usually all you have is the 'packages' file.
On the other hand, the packages are conveniently separated into 'main' (complies with the debian free software guidelines), and non-free (doesn't). It's easy to make that determination with just apt.
The build process for debs has been the same for ages. Stand in the directory that contains debian/control, run dpkg-buildpackage (-b if you just want binary packages), done. There are many ways to build a package, but it's not because it has been an ever changing process... Just because some people prefer to roll their own. One of the projects I work on uses a maven plugin to build packages. There is no reason you couldn't build the package by hand too.
The tools you describe have all existed for Debian for ages. Fedora has only recently caught up. The only reason that developers have preferred Fedora/RedHat over Debian and its derivatives has been marketing, business development, and the size of the installed base.
They've fixed the majority of the packaging and dependency issues (after almost a decade of lagging behind), but I still find their configuration tools, their liberal interpretation of the LSB filesystem hierarchy, and things like Kudzu to be far more cumbersome to what you find in Debian, and Ubuntu.
One of the things I most hate about female sexists: They can't come to terms with the fact that one of the definitions of 'man' is a synonym for our species. It isn't just a reference to a male human.
There are extensions implemented by Cisco to deny routing based on any number of things. Validation by the TPM can just be added to the long list. It still doesn't stop you from using your computer as a general purpose (runs whatever instructions you want) system.
So you're going to preempt the people who were going to correct the parent by spreading mis-information in advance?
The TPM doesn't stop you from using your computer as a general purpose system. It simply allows third party software to choose not to work if certain conditions aren't met. You can still do "whatever you want" with your computer, as long as "whatever you want" doesn't include running such software.
I've written drivers for a company that built a linux appliance using Foxconn motherboards. It seems Foxconn supports Linux for customers as long as they're buying in large enough quantity.
The real lesson here is not to buy Foxconn unless you're a big important customer that they care to suck up to.
Converting complex serial algorithms to effectively utilize multiple cores is generally not simple.
Fortunately, most algorithms that end-users care about don't fall into that category.
Video encoding certainly doesn't fall into that category. It is almost trivial to split a video up into sections of length (total length/number of cores), and then concatenate the encoded sections after you're done. Transcoding is even easier. Core 0 decodes, Core 1 encodes.... Etc.
Synchronization, scheduling, and data transport issues are largely the same as multi-threaded programming on a single core. The problems are well understood.
Multi-threaded programming is hard because most programmers don't understand the theory. They only learned about the tools.
No, it's not renewable. But it will certainly last for sufficiently long for us to develop renewable options, and can last much, much longer. Thus it is typically classified as a sustainable energy source. (We're talking about nuclear fission, not fusion)
Coal and natural gas aren't sustainable, plus they're highly polluting in comparison.
Estimates I've read indicate that we have 100 years of nuclear fuel already mined, should we become willing to reprocess already spent fuel rods. Supplies increase as the price goes up, as well, since uranium that is more difficult to extract becomes profitable to extract. The supply of uranium on the planet is essentially inexhaustible (see graph on the right side of the page...), it's just a matter of how much we're willing to spend to get it. Unlike natural gas price increases, a doubling of the cost of unprocessed uranium only results in a 7% increase in the cost of nuclear generated electricity.
The best part about nuclear power, though, is that unlike wind and solar, it's a viable replacement for all of our fossil fuel generation now.
Because the cost of producing the equipment (gas or electric) in terms of emissions doesn't even come close to the emissions from operating a 80-100k BTU natural gas furnace. On an average New England winter night, the average 95% efficiency natural gas furnace consumes enough fuel to take itself from room temperature to a pool of molten metal. You could make the thing 100% efficient, and it still would produce several orders of magnitude more in emissions over its lifetime than your share of emissions in expanding electrical infrastructure, and emissions from the transport of nuclear fuel.
It doesn't matter how efficient natural gas equipment is. That is only a measurement of how much of the emissions are unnecessary.
I was only assuming it was a good idea based on a presumption that people wouldn't be able to have a fission reaction occurring in the basements. Instead we'd want that sort of thing centralized.
However if we could bury a mini-nuke in our back yards to cut down on conversion losses, I'd be all for it.
Conversion of our power generation to nuclear was also assumed, as it was the premise of the whole comment.
...because clearly the only things we should consider are those at the extremes.
Either paint them with the Evil brush or let them run amok...
Certainly, if you're trotting out the Big stereotype you're not interested in rationality though.
It's only as good as it sounds if it doesn't lose its charge in a couple days parked in your driveway.
Devices with a low enough internal resistance to be able to be charged quickly, also typically lose their charge quickly even when you're not drawing current from the device externally.
What good is a super efficient electric car if you're wasting energy while you're parked?
In many areas, 50% or more of the electricity is lost in transmission, 'cause people don't want power plants or high tension wires near their house, so we build plants far, far away, and convert to lower voltage, lower to the ground wiring much sooner in the chain than we would otherwise.
No, that's something else entirely.
You don't do Big things without Big industry. Luckily for us, this generates Big economic impact, and creates a Big percentage of our jobs. The net effect on our quality of life, and our overall wealth as a society is Big (in a good way).
Don't bite the hand that feeds you.