For the most part, what I see is not a race between the heroes and the explosion, but a race between the following two things:
How long it takes the explosion to reach from the source to where the heroes are now (usually represented as a wall of flame down a series of corridors (a representation, not a realistic document).
How long it takes the heroes to get somewhere (some cover, out of the building) where they are protected from the blast--usually a much shorter distance.
Mostly, this is forgivable. When the heroes start running, the explosion hasn't usually happened yet, you can certainly see that they are not literally outrunning the blast front of the explosion. The shot is cut together to make it appear "close" (always), and the explosion is represented by something graphic (burning gasoline), because this is visual storytelling, not a filmic document. This just has to do with the way the thing is shown, for the most part no one in the movie's world is claiming implicitly or explicitly that the heroes can run faster than an explosion.
You need to look at these things through this lens of visual storytelling. Consider how fragile the human body is in horror movies. You would think we are all thin bags of blood and meat just barely hanging on to a skeleton of matchsticks and topped with a skull no tougher than a watermelon. People pop, break, are pulled apart, etc. In reality, people are mostly tough. Their structure is elastic and strong, the connective tissue hard to break. However, visually seeing human bodies as fragile in this way is shocking and horrifying, which is precisely the point. Saying that it's unrealistic is missing the point.
Yet this was basically handled just fine in Firefly. I guess the space opera part of Battlestar Galactica just demanded it.
I haven't watched much BSG but you could add a lot of "action sound" and not really violate anything, just by moving the perspective from inside one of the ships. What gets crazy is when Star Wars apologists posit that the reason you hear explosions from other ships is that the ship's computers detect the explosion and play a soundtrack for you...
Since we're talking about add-ons, by the same token a good Star Wars game with a "real" lightsaber controller is probably a winner for any platform. Sony or Microsoft could get their wiimote-alike out there pretty effectively by making an exclusive deal with LucasArts.
I also suspect, based on what I've seen of Red Steel, that the wiimote might actually... kinda suck to really control a sword. I've heard that you can activate a pre-rendered sword swipe, beat-'em-up style, with a sort of flick of the wiimote, but actually controlling a sword may be beyond the capabilities of the wiimote anyway. A fencing game, where it can point at the sensors... maybe. But not lightsabers.
If you're interested in role-playing online, might I suggest any of hundreds of fantasy-themed MUSHes? MUSHes are usually very heavy on the roleplay and light on the hack and slash. Check out TMC, perhaps. And, they're usally all free.
Parents who want to restrict what is seen in public forums don't want to take responsibility for raising their children: they want the government to raise them.
Since I do take responsibility for raising them, I would like to have some control over what they're exposed to, or at least when and in what context.
You shouldn't restrict what your kids see! You should raise your children in the manner I see fit.
The parent post is just step 3. Isn't it interesting how the people who first want parents "taking responsibility" for raising their children in fact do not want that, they want to impose a child-rearing method on parents.
One of the commandments? No. But Job 38 is all about the wisdom of questioning God's plan: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding." (Job 38:4)
I'm surprised (or maybe not) that most of the discussion so far has focused on complaining about how lousy the U.S. is without actually answering the original poster's question, and yours is the first post (as far as I've seen) that mentions COBRA.
The OP probably has three reasonable options: membership in a professional organization that offers insurance; Kaiser, if it's available, as they actually have affordable self-employment plans, though most hate their model and the quality of care is a crapshoot; and COBRA on the wife's current insurance, which is almost assuredly what should be done.
The COBRA plan will offer continuity of coverage, which is important for covering things related to the pregnancy, birth and the first weeks of the child's life. You'll be paying her former employer's group rate (even though you're covering the whole premium cost, it's better than you'll get in some random plan elsewhere), etc.
You might consider not telling her workplace that she's going to stay at home at all, and taking advantage of whatever leave is offered before severing ties. Your wife can take a four-month FMLA leave during which her employee will have to continue her coverage (and pay their previous share of the premiums). [note] But in any case it's very likely COBRA is the right thing to do after separation.
Hey, we still "drive" our cars when there's no team to whip. Steering, sure, but not driving.
Re:Standard geek viewpoint == standard geek proble
on
Why Vista Took So Long
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· Score: 1
Well, you can have it both ways. Present the interface as Splosky would have it (one option: "Bye" which locks the screen, allows user switching, then goes to sleep, then hibernates) but allow the optimizer to customize it through some setting somewhere. I would like to have more explicit choices, because I know what I want, but since I know what I want I don't have a problem finding the configuration for the things I care about.
Where "limited choice" systems get it wrong (I'm looking at you, recent versions of GNOME) is where the configurability is removed, not just hidden.
Wood is a great building material, or a poor one. As someone else pointed out, it satisfies many demands simultaneously. Market forces (cost and home type), environment (earthquakes, severe weather and other factors not existing in the UK, for example) and personal taste (ease of retrofit, etc.) all contribute to building material choice.
One of the factors that's interesting is that the quality of wood used in construction differs quite a lot from the long-lasting timbers in the old wood-frame houses. I owned an over-hundred-year-old house which had lasted through two of our age's most severe earthquakes, with aplomb. In a termite-endemic area the naturally pest-resistant, tight-grained old-growth redwood timbers and planking (it had solid heartwood plank sheathing, not OSB or plywood) had no damage (the "modern" addition, built with current farmed-fir 2x4s, was not so fortunate). I have no doubt that, properly maintained, the house will last another hundred years or more (possibly with more than one generation of modern-construction additions).
But that wood construction is not typical of current practice. By today's standards (it was built to no code but the good judgment of the original builder) it would be horribly material-hungry and overengineered. The pace of building in the U.S. demands cheaper materials and techniques--in fact, to do otherwise would be a criminal waste of limited natural resources; as to why low-quality timber is being used instead of more poured concrete--I bet it has much to do with consumer demand and tradition (that is, what contractors are used to working with and homeowners are used to buying) and little to do with actual economics.
Maybe better. There's three Fred Meyers around here and one Costco.
The thing I like about Costco is they've treated me extremely well with regard to returns. Given the potential horror stories regarding possible problems with early production models (of any console) that could be a big difference.
Luckily, I'm really old, so I don't care about buying things right away. Now, or in a year, not much difference.
Yeah, when they're selling the things as Today's Special Value on QVC, the notion that it's somehow a videophile-only market is mistaken.
The idea that the Wii is going after the "secondary TV" market is interesting. I expect, given the cost we're likely to see, it will be pretty common to own either an X-box 360 or PS3, plus a Wii.
Both films were completed with money far in excess of these "original" and oft-quoted budgets. This completion money was critical to producing an actual viewable, marketable film from each project. Clerks's budget was more in the hundred-thousand range and El Mariachi's I think ended similarly. I don't know what that is in 2006 dollars but I'll grant it's still a lot less than 1.7M, assuming the 1.7M refers only to production costs.
It's not off-topic, since given the tone of the item and comments the topic is "how much does Burger King suck?" Yours is a point I was going to bring up myself.
I haven't had Harvey's, but I've eaten enough veggie burgers to identify the patty being used most of the time. Burger King uses Morningstar Farm's Garden Veggie Patty, which I tend to favor. A&W (at least here, and like mose places offering a veggie burger) uses a Gardenburger, and doesn't taste weird to me, so you might be picking on something funny A&W is doing to it that I can't taste. McDonald's seemed to be using something like a Boca Burger, which is more of a meat imitation than a veggie burger, and I didn't think it was too bad but it wasn't great.
The best veggie burgers I've had from chains are from Red Robin (granted, a "real restaurant") where they allow you to substitute a Gardenburger on any of their specialty burgers, and from Burgerville, but that's only available in the Portland area (and if you ordered them vegan, they'd both lose their considerable charm). My favorite local place does a great veggie burger, one of the best I've had. All three of these places use Gardenburgers, yet I dislike Gardenburgers when making them myself. Another great veggie burger is to be had from Tony's Cable Car in San Francisco near Geary and Masonic--they use a Garden Veggie Patty, just as Burger King does.
A note about your list: Foster's Freeze in my area used to have veggie burgers but I just visited one on the road and they didn't have one. Does anyone know if they do or don't?
It depends how it's handled; I've been doing after-hours oncall in addition to a regular workday/week for years, and I've had experience with a number of systems.
If I can get a few minutes to wake up, go to the bathroom, splash some water on my face and have a long drink of water, I'm pretty much awake. I'm a little slower than optimum but I'm not going to do anything disastrous. However, sometimes problems are simple enough so that I don't have to wake up completely to handle them--that's why I want the page I get in the middle of the night to be informative and concise, so I know how much I have to wake up (if I wake up completely I won't go back to sleep).
It's why it's much better to page out and have the person respond a few minutes later, ready to help, than to call them on the phone. When you call them, they've literally just woken up and in that state I, at least, am useful for nothing.
A second factor is prioritization. If there's someone whose job it is to be the first line of defense, and to do everything except that which absolutely must be done by the specialist, that works better. People are much more willing to engage in the middle of the night if it's a) an actual emergency and b) they're not doing bookkeeping or makework (like updating trouble tickets or calling customers) besides.
The third thing is that people just react differently. I do okay on an after-hours oncall schedule, but some people don't. Then again, I've done support while drunk, too, with no ill effects except some anxiety that maybe I was screwing things up.
A fourth factor is compensation. People are much more likely to engage properly and carefully if they fell they're compensated for it. It could be money, overtime or compensation time off to take the next day but in my opinion it has to be there. Otherwise people feel they're getting screwed and are unlikely to do much, even if "required."
As the press release states, some Answers.com software will be receiving "chartered placement" on a Wikipedia tools listing in return for compensating the foundation. I suppose you might say that doesn't constitute advertising (as the "clarification" states) but it's a distinction without a difference.
I suspect it was the whiff of hoity-toity-ness--especially from someone who prefers to call themselves a "mere" programmer--in the phrase "professional software engineer." I don't think it was meant as "if you don't write in assembly language and C++ you suck" sarcasm.
I'll also point out that the OP just said he wanted an IDE that supported "languages," such as XML and SQL. He didn't say he wanted to "program in them." You many not write programs in them but SQL and XML certainly are "languages."
It's funny you bring it up, because here are my impressions of the book:
It's really quite a good book. There are probably only two or three things I actually disagree with Conway on, and for a book that takes stands, that's immense. He even convinced me on the "inside-out" class approach, which I scoffed at when I first heard about it.
The sad fact is, that if you follow all these practices, that's as good as Perl's going to get. And it's not very good. After using Ruby, or a good functional language, for a while, going back to Perl is like... well, it's not like visiting an old friend. It's like having to get back in your old jalopy because someone stole your "good" car.
By showing us how good Perl can be, Conway shows us the limit of its quality. Once upon a time, this would be an exciting lesson (I wrote programs in Perl almost exclusively for years, and loved it). But now, it just shows how much of a papering-over it needs to seem competent.
I like Ruby a lot. I like Erlang a lot. I wrote a lot of Python code on a huge project that used it exclusively; it has its charms, and is better than Perl, but its irritations as well ("char".join(array)? please). I'm not going to pick "the next big thing" except I will say that, for me at least, it's not Python.
Yeah, I'm not sure where we ran into the premise that the point of a video game is to tell a story. Esssentially, this article is "how to tell a story using a video game;" and while that's not bad as far as it goes, it still ignores the game nature of the game.
To me, a video game is primarly a new medium in which to play a game--something we have been doing as long as we have been telling stories--and not primarily a new medium to tell stories.
Games can certainly be enhanced by story, and you can certainly tell a story through a game, but it really isn't a necessary component.
...when you have the time for watching a move you probably have the space to use a portable DVD player.
I don't understand this argument. I guess it might be true while you're watching the movie, but whatever player you're using doesn't magically appear in your hand when you're ready to use it, along with its discs. You have to carry it around, which is when the space is taken up.
Slashdot Mirror
For the most part, what I see is not a race between the heroes and the explosion, but a race between the following two things:
Mostly, this is forgivable. When the heroes start running, the explosion hasn't usually happened yet, you can certainly see that they are not literally outrunning the blast front of the explosion. The shot is cut together to make it appear "close" (always), and the explosion is represented by something graphic (burning gasoline), because this is visual storytelling, not a filmic document. This just has to do with the way the thing is shown, for the most part no one in the movie's world is claiming implicitly or explicitly that the heroes can run faster than an explosion.
You need to look at these things through this lens of visual storytelling. Consider how fragile the human body is in horror movies. You would think we are all thin bags of blood and meat just barely hanging on to a skeleton of matchsticks and topped with a skull no tougher than a watermelon. People pop, break, are pulled apart, etc. In reality, people are mostly tough. Their structure is elastic and strong, the connective tissue hard to break. However, visually seeing human bodies as fragile in this way is shocking and horrifying, which is precisely the point. Saying that it's unrealistic is missing the point.
Yet this was basically handled just fine in Firefly. I guess the space opera part of Battlestar Galactica just demanded it.
I haven't watched much BSG but you could add a lot of "action sound" and not really violate anything, just by moving the perspective from inside one of the ships. What gets crazy is when Star Wars apologists posit that the reason you hear explosions from other ships is that the ship's computers detect the explosion and play a soundtrack for you...
Invisible gases, my friend, invisible gases.
Since we're talking about add-ons, by the same token a good Star Wars game with a "real" lightsaber controller is probably a winner for any platform. Sony or Microsoft could get their wiimote-alike out there pretty effectively by making an exclusive deal with LucasArts.
I also suspect, based on what I've seen of Red Steel, that the wiimote might actually... kinda suck to really control a sword. I've heard that you can activate a pre-rendered sword swipe, beat-'em-up style, with a sort of flick of the wiimote, but actually controlling a sword may be beyond the capabilities of the wiimote anyway. A fencing game, where it can point at the sensors... maybe. But not lightsabers.
I don't think any sci-fi fan worth his salt who likes moon railguns firing titanium at the earth wouldn't also imagine a space elevator.
If you're interested in role-playing online, might I suggest any of hundreds of fantasy-themed MUSHes? MUSHes are usually very heavy on the roleplay and light on the hack and slash. Check out TMC, perhaps. And, they're usally all free.
This dialog always goes:
The parent post is just step 3. Isn't it interesting how the people who first want parents "taking responsibility" for raising their children in fact do not want that, they want to impose a child-rearing method on parents.
One of the commandments? No. But Job 38 is all about the wisdom of questioning God's plan: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding." (Job 38:4)
I'm surprised (or maybe not) that most of the discussion so far has focused on complaining about how lousy the U.S. is without actually answering the original poster's question, and yours is the first post (as far as I've seen) that mentions COBRA.
The OP probably has three reasonable options: membership in a professional organization that offers insurance; Kaiser, if it's available, as they actually have affordable self-employment plans, though most hate their model and the quality of care is a crapshoot; and COBRA on the wife's current insurance, which is almost assuredly what should be done.
The COBRA plan will offer continuity of coverage, which is important for covering things related to the pregnancy, birth and the first weeks of the child's life. You'll be paying her former employer's group rate (even though you're covering the whole premium cost, it's better than you'll get in some random plan elsewhere), etc.
You might consider not telling her workplace that she's going to stay at home at all, and taking advantage of whatever leave is offered before severing ties. Your wife can take a four-month FMLA leave during which her employee will have to continue her coverage (and pay their previous share of the premiums). [note] But in any case it's very likely COBRA is the right thing to do after separation.
Hey, we still "drive" our cars when there's no team to whip. Steering, sure, but not driving.
Well, you can have it both ways. Present the interface as Splosky would have it (one option: "Bye" which locks the screen, allows user switching, then goes to sleep, then hibernates) but allow the optimizer to customize it through some setting somewhere. I would like to have more explicit choices, because I know what I want, but since I know what I want I don't have a problem finding the configuration for the things I care about.
Where "limited choice" systems get it wrong (I'm looking at you, recent versions of GNOME) is where the configurability is removed, not just hidden.
Wood is a great building material, or a poor one. As someone else pointed out, it satisfies many demands simultaneously. Market forces (cost and home type), environment (earthquakes, severe weather and other factors not existing in the UK, for example) and personal taste (ease of retrofit, etc.) all contribute to building material choice.
One of the factors that's interesting is that the quality of wood used in construction differs quite a lot from the long-lasting timbers in the old wood-frame houses. I owned an over-hundred-year-old house which had lasted through two of our age's most severe earthquakes, with aplomb. In a termite-endemic area the naturally pest-resistant, tight-grained old-growth redwood timbers and planking (it had solid heartwood plank sheathing, not OSB or plywood) had no damage (the "modern" addition, built with current farmed-fir 2x4s, was not so fortunate). I have no doubt that, properly maintained, the house will last another hundred years or more (possibly with more than one generation of modern-construction additions).
But that wood construction is not typical of current practice. By today's standards (it was built to no code but the good judgment of the original builder) it would be horribly material-hungry and overengineered. The pace of building in the U.S. demands cheaper materials and techniques--in fact, to do otherwise would be a criminal waste of limited natural resources; as to why low-quality timber is being used instead of more poured concrete--I bet it has much to do with consumer demand and tradition (that is, what contractors are used to working with and homeowners are used to buying) and little to do with actual economics.
As far as I can tell, this is the best evaluation of the various evaluations of human flesh, and it turns out it's like veal. Not pork.
Maybe better. There's three Fred Meyers around here and one Costco.
The thing I like about Costco is they've treated me extremely well with regard to returns. Given the potential horror stories regarding possible problems with early production models (of any console) that could be a big difference.
Luckily, I'm really old, so I don't care about buying things right away. Now, or in a year, not much difference.
Yeah, when they're selling the things as Today's Special Value on QVC, the notion that it's somehow a videophile-only market is mistaken.
The idea that the Wii is going after the "secondary TV" market is interesting. I expect, given the cost we're likely to see, it will be pretty common to own either an X-box 360 or PS3, plus a Wii.
Both films were completed with money far in excess of these "original" and oft-quoted budgets. This completion money was critical to producing an actual viewable, marketable film from each project. Clerks's budget was more in the hundred-thousand range and El Mariachi's I think ended similarly. I don't know what that is in 2006 dollars but I'll grant it's still a lot less than 1.7M, assuming the 1.7M refers only to production costs.
It's not off-topic, since given the tone of the item and comments the topic is "how much does Burger King suck?" Yours is a point I was going to bring up myself.
I haven't had Harvey's, but I've eaten enough veggie burgers to identify the patty being used most of the time. Burger King uses Morningstar Farm's Garden Veggie Patty, which I tend to favor. A&W (at least here, and like mose places offering a veggie burger) uses a Gardenburger, and doesn't taste weird to me, so you might be picking on something funny A&W is doing to it that I can't taste. McDonald's seemed to be using something like a Boca Burger, which is more of a meat imitation than a veggie burger, and I didn't think it was too bad but it wasn't great.
The best veggie burgers I've had from chains are from Red Robin (granted, a "real restaurant") where they allow you to substitute a Gardenburger on any of their specialty burgers, and from Burgerville, but that's only available in the Portland area (and if you ordered them vegan, they'd both lose their considerable charm). My favorite local place does a great veggie burger, one of the best I've had. All three of these places use Gardenburgers, yet I dislike Gardenburgers when making them myself. Another great veggie burger is to be had from Tony's Cable Car in San Francisco near Geary and Masonic--they use a Garden Veggie Patty, just as Burger King does.
A note about your list: Foster's Freeze in my area used to have veggie burgers but I just visited one on the road and they didn't have one. Does anyone know if they do or don't?
It depends how it's handled; I've been doing after-hours oncall in addition to a regular workday/week for years, and I've had experience with a number of systems.
If I can get a few minutes to wake up, go to the bathroom, splash some water on my face and have a long drink of water, I'm pretty much awake. I'm a little slower than optimum but I'm not going to do anything disastrous. However, sometimes problems are simple enough so that I don't have to wake up completely to handle them--that's why I want the page I get in the middle of the night to be informative and concise, so I know how much I have to wake up (if I wake up completely I won't go back to sleep).
It's why it's much better to page out and have the person respond a few minutes later, ready to help, than to call them on the phone. When you call them, they've literally just woken up and in that state I, at least, am useful for nothing.
A second factor is prioritization. If there's someone whose job it is to be the first line of defense, and to do everything except that which absolutely must be done by the specialist, that works better. People are much more willing to engage in the middle of the night if it's a) an actual emergency and b) they're not doing bookkeeping or makework (like updating trouble tickets or calling customers) besides.
The third thing is that people just react differently. I do okay on an after-hours oncall schedule, but some people don't. Then again, I've done support while drunk, too, with no ill effects except some anxiety that maybe I was screwing things up.
A fourth factor is compensation. People are much more likely to engage properly and carefully if they fell they're compensated for it. It could be money, overtime or compensation time off to take the next day but in my opinion it has to be there. Otherwise people feel they're getting screwed and are unlikely to do much, even if "required."
As the press release states, some Answers.com software will be receiving "chartered placement" on a Wikipedia tools listing in return for compensating the foundation. I suppose you might say that doesn't constitute advertising (as the "clarification" states) but it's a distinction without a difference.
I suspect it was the whiff of hoity-toity-ness--especially from someone who prefers to call themselves a "mere" programmer--in the phrase "professional software engineer." I don't think it was meant as "if you don't write in assembly language and C++ you suck" sarcasm.
I'll also point out that the OP just said he wanted an IDE that supported "languages," such as XML and SQL. He didn't say he wanted to "program in them." You many not write programs in them but SQL and XML certainly are "languages."
It's funny you bring it up, because here are my impressions of the book:
It's really quite a good book. There are probably only two or three things I actually disagree with Conway on, and for a book that takes stands, that's immense. He even convinced me on the "inside-out" class approach, which I scoffed at when I first heard about it.
The sad fact is, that if you follow all these practices, that's as good as Perl's going to get. And it's not very good. After using Ruby, or a good functional language, for a while, going back to Perl is like... well, it's not like visiting an old friend. It's like having to get back in your old jalopy because someone stole your "good" car.
By showing us how good Perl can be, Conway shows us the limit of its quality. Once upon a time, this would be an exciting lesson (I wrote programs in Perl almost exclusively for years, and loved it). But now, it just shows how much of a papering-over it needs to seem competent.
I like Ruby a lot. I like Erlang a lot. I wrote a lot of Python code on a huge project that used it exclusively; it has its charms, and is better than Perl, but its irritations as well ("char".join(array)? please). I'm not going to pick "the next big thing" except I will say that, for me at least, it's not Python.
Then how come it's news that ruby and php have been modified to be "dtrace" providers? This sounds more like an interface to tracing.
Me too. I don't like twitch games and it's not fun for me to feel "under pressure" in combat. Sometimes I like to pause and think.
The turn-based combat system was one of the things that I liked best about FFX.
Yeah, I'm not sure where we ran into the premise that the point of a video game is to tell a story. Esssentially, this article is "how to tell a story using a video game;" and while that's not bad as far as it goes, it still ignores the game nature of the game.
To me, a video game is primarly a new medium in which to play a game--something we have been doing as long as we have been telling stories--and not primarily a new medium to tell stories.
Games can certainly be enhanced by story, and you can certainly tell a story through a game, but it really isn't a necessary component.
I don't understand this argument. I guess it might be true while you're watching the movie, but whatever player you're using doesn't magically appear in your hand when you're ready to use it, along with its discs. You have to carry it around, which is when the space is taken up.