Ultima V was an excellent excellent game that was SOOOO ahead of it's time (same can be said about every Ultima). You did some extraordinary work on that title! I think half of the credit goes to RG for coming up with great game concepts, but surely the programming on that title was amazing (esp. considering the limitations of the computers it was designed to run on). I had never before experienced a game so big, so full of so many different areas (towns, keeps, castles, dungeons, all larger than ever and very very detailed), and so much fun. All that and it still ran on hardware inferior to a Palm Pilot!!
To this day I occasionally take Ultima V off the shelf and play it and still enjoy it! BRAVO!
DUDE!! AUTODUEL ROCKED! After the Ultimas, it was my FAVORITE GAME. Man.. how I loved it. Ahh.. amateur night.. the courier runs.. doing jobs for the FBI. It was so ahead of its time concept-wise. The programming that went into that game was also pretty impressive considering the limitations of those old 8-bit machines it used to run on.
Also, that game I think had some of the largest maps I had ever seen at the time. Driving from New York to Albany FELT like you were covering huge distances...
Ahhh.. thanks for bringing up Autoduel man. I am truly content to be thinking of such pleasant memories..
I would disagree. If you stop and think about it, what majorly radical improvements have come to UO in recent months? The stupid faction system? The slow/buggy 3rd dawn client? I would say OSI's problems are now much larger than poor execution. They are a lack of ideas and a fear to stick their necks out. There is so much potential still in UO but OSI is too reluctanct to expand on the game in any MEANINGFUL way. They are like amateurs trying to not break anything in terms of the way the game works. They are too AFRAID to add REAL new features (like new spells) and to generally be creative with UO and take some risks.
The problem isn't with the coders themselves. It's with management and the fact that they lack BALLS.
Game design is about risks. It's about letting your imagination run wild and it's about pushing the envelope not just technologically, but concept-wise. Look at how much fun Moleneaux (or however you spell his name) has with Black & white.
Richard Garriot had his hands tied for far too long. I think we're going to see some really interesting things coming out by him in the next few years. At least I hope we will.
Umm.. well C and Perl are two totally different animals. It would be unfair to compare the two, since each has it's engineering porpoises. The porpoises that engineer in Perl are usually fond of pot-smoking and listening to various incarnations of devil-music. The engineering porpoises that do C usually are bald.
Just kidding. Seriously though, Perl and C are totally different philosophically, so it would not be fair to compare them. Sure, their syntax can be similar. A for loop is a for loop I suppose.. whether it be Java, perl, or C.
However here are some key points that make C and Perl different:
1) Perl is not (normally) pre-compiled. A perl program is normally compiled into bytecode just before being run by the interpreter. This bytecode is then interpreted. Needless to say, the need for an interpreter, and also the sheer fact that all perl is just a bunch of symantics and abstractions, is expensive computationally. So to answer your performance question: perl can be from 5 to 30 times slower than C. Depending on the program. Also, poorly written C can be slow too--but then again chances are poorly written C programs will crash before you'll notice the slowness.
2) Perl is extremely SAFE. If a perl script/program runs at all (which is not hard since by default perl is not very strict) chances are, you will NEVER get a segfault. You might get some erratic behavior if you made some logical error in your code, but you will never have the opportunity to dereference random addresses as you do in C.
3) Perl is quirky. There are about from 3 to 25+ ways to do anything, and they all appeal to different parts of the brain. Thus, perl is more poetic than C. If you are in a very colorful mood, you can write perl code that is actually funny. I am not kidding.
4) Perl is handy. In 3 lines of code you can perform really complicated tasks like sorting through log files and splitting them up by eye-color and then multiplying them by the speed of light (c) in order to travel to Proxima Centauri. It has really really really handy built in functions, and it's three basic data-types (ok 4, if you include filehandles) are just about all you need to solve 99% of the problems out there.
5) Perl is difficult to read. Although C has been accused of the same sin, Perl's versatility combined with it's (optional) terseness can lead to beastly code. However, if you are careful you can design neat, pretty, poetic, and also readable perl programs.
6) Perl is optionally object-orientable. Yes, it is. C is not. (Well, actually, if you are careful you can get similar amounts of object orientisness out of C, but that fact is enforced by the programmer more than the language).
7) Perl is even more easily portable than C. This is because of all that layer-of-abstraction stuff.
I can go on and on.. but in short C has it's uses. You have more control of the instructions executed by the machine (esp. if you really know your compiler and the desination architecture). C is lightning fast. If you want to do anything with hardware directly, you should use something low-level like C... etc, etc. However perl is good if you just want to get the job done and don't feel like worrying about fixed-sized buffers or malloc'ing your way into carpal tunnel syndrome.
GNU/Linux is mostly CLI based? That's not really true. Nowadays, if you grab a copy of KDE 2.1 and/or get a really well packaged/user-friendly distribution such as Mandrake, you won't EVER have to see a command line! (Unless you want to, which is the cool thing, you can still fine-tune stuff by the CLI).
Have you seend rpmdrake, mandrake updater, and DrakConf? I think they do a serious job of kicking the ass of or at least holding their own against comparable features in windows.
I'm with you, brother. It's hard to justify wanton piracy. I have yet to hear of anyone out there using napster to trade public domain music... as cool as napster was, we call gotta admit that it was kind of ludicrous how much abusive piracy went on.
Now, the greater question to me is: should it be illegal to swap copyrighted music ? I think it shouldn't be, but then again, who the hell am I?
Nicholson as a rich and enigmatic character
on
The Pledge
·
· Score: 1
Well for me it isn't exactly so cut and dry. I am not sure what Nicholson should or shouldn't have done. On the one hand he was seriously obsessed with this killer, and on the other he became attached to this woman and her daughter for reasons that may or may not be 100% premeditated.
I think one could argue that Nicholson was not really trying to betray anybody, but was in his own strange way trying to defend that community, and Robin Penn Wright, against a deranged killer. He was trying to protect this little girl in the best way he knew how: through catching the killer. (The best defense being a good offense and all).
Perhaps Nicholson justified his actions to himself in the following way: The killer's next victim is unknown. That means the killer has a very distinct advantage as long as he has surprise on his side. In order to minimize the damage the killer can do, I am going to undo that axiom. I am going to make the next killer's victim KNOWN. Thereby preventing the deaths of countless little girls by catching the killer before he strikes. His plan makes a lot of sense. I think we need to explore if he had other alternatives.. but this one seems very good (if you accept that defending life at all costs is the most important thing). I don't know if Nicholson could have accepted other plans that were less likely to succeed--he didn't want this to happen again to anybody.
And we also have to be careful in considering exactly WHAT Nicholson did wrong. After all he was convinced that he could defend this girl and prevent her from being harmed. (Although to be honest with you we didn't really see much evidence that Nicholson really tried to grapple with whether or not his actions were truly right or wrong.. he I think let himself be deluded into thinking that he could defend the girl no matter what.)
While this strategy may seem to be at first a bit inhumane, I think it rationally is the BEST thing Nicholson could have done, given the extremely limiting constraints of his personality and of the situation. If one chooses to honor one's commitments in full, you can't be a NIMBY-ist about it. Nicholson's character showed such devotion to being the protector, such piety in keeping to his almost holy promise, that I think on closer inspection one can forgive him for his seemingly reckless endanderment of the little girl.
(I firmly believe that Nicholson's strategy was the most logical. He perhaps attempted to take some small-to-medium level risks in order to protect the lives of those around him).
However I do understand your argument that Nicholson's character may have crossed the line, but I seriously ask you to question it--do you honestly think it's a universally good policy to but the needs of the few in front of those of the many?
I at least can't help but love him for his Greek-tragedy-style character flaws. I think his character was at the same time beautiful and frail in its flaws--a very rich combination that you don't see often in mainstream cinema!
Re:It helps if you sound out the words...
on
The Pledge
·
· Score: 1
Don't listen to him... he's clearly a deranged troll script-kiddie.
How many times do I have to say this. The length of the day is in no way, shape or form related to the size of Earth's orbit!! It is related to the amount of time it takes the earth to complete one rotation. Rotation and revolution are two completely unrelated vectors!! Get it through your heads people!!!
Well if we were real careful we could change the length of the year but not that of the day. Remember the length of our days is NOT related to out distance from the Sun in any way. So seconds would still have the same meaning, so would hours and days, but we might need to tack on some extra days to february or something in order to reflect the new size of the year.
Re:A Metacomment, not Off Topic...
on
The Pledge
·
· Score: 3
Very well said!
One other interesting thing about this film it that it makes one wonder about the nature of destiny, genius, talent, madness, the self. This film reminds me of the notion that the variety of beliefs and personalities out there may just be simply the result of an inherently chaotic universe. We are very much affected by the circumstances of our lives.
You don't believe me?
What if the killer HADN'T died in that car crash? What if he had actually made it to the little girl, drawn a knife, and attempted to molest/kill her? Maybe all of Nicholson's ex-colleagues would have stopped considering him a madman and would have blessed him for the genius in his passion. His live-in girlfriend may have still resented him for putting her daughter at risk.. but I think she would not have considered Nicholoson a crazy nut.
Do you think that maybe then Nicholson would not have gone mad? Instead he would have perhaps made peace with himself in his old age. Toni Morrison once observed that it is very American to not give credence to the notion that people are often the sums of what the world makes of them. It's the external directly shaping the internal. It happens more than we like to think in our highly individualistic culture. (The reason why it's unamerican to admit this is that it's the scariest thing for you to tell the quintessential American--someone who's had the beautiful American dream of liberty and individuality stuffed down his throat all his life that maybe he isn't as original as he thought he was--that maybe some or a good part of who he is comes from the external world.)
I think that if the killer could have somehow managed to make it to the little girl, everything could have turned out differently. It's funny how fate works.. and how sometimes destiny throws us a bone and sometimes it doesn't. We as a society praise obsession when it yields visible immediate and usually monitary results. Everything else is crazy or nonsense. But ask yourselves -- what is the difference between madness and genius? I tell you that the two are very closely related!
That being said, this movie is not only visually very captivating, but it explores some human themes--some questions about the self--that are not often explored in the mainstream. I am glad to have seen it!
Unfortunately, time and time again I run across people that lack the passion and pride I think a tech person should have.
A lot of the people I meet in my professional life are just in it for the money. To me, it's sad and sickening to see the 'art of ware' -- programming -- being corrupted and twisted in such an ugly way. I say this because usually the developers I know that are simply doing it for the money are the lousiest developers. Often I have to clean up after them -- not only is their style ugly, but a lot of the time they don't bother to actually solve the problem correctly. They miss the point or don't care to cover all the extreme contingencies.
It's like they write this glossy code which obviously took little tought, minimal effort, and seems to do the job at least for a little while.
If you are one of the developers out there who really hates programming, and really couldn't give a rat's ass about the art -- I ask you to consider either changing your attitude or getting out of the profession. People like you are the reason why the rest of us have to suffer out there!
I suffer BEFORE I get a job.. because half the time the people hiring me have been so BURNED by boastful, greedy, lying developers that they have to be very skeptical. After I manage to convince the person that's hiring me that I am actually competent, I then have to usually pick up after the greedy jerk of a developer that came before me. I have to take his ugly, beastly, hulking, diseased code and hopefully turn it into something halfway decent. Usually these people write the most spaghetti-like, poorly documentated, obfuscated, uncommented, ugly code.. It sickens me!
The fact of the matter is that you have some scientists saying that the Earth is warming. Their evidence for this is based upon basically two things: some local statistical anomalies, as well as some atmospheric and geological simulations.
Both these sources of 'evidence' are flawed.
First, we shall look at why statistics is flawed: Over the past 100,000 years, during any 200-year period, the Earth's average annual temperature has varied within a 10 degree Farenheit range. This means that the Earth's climate varies greatly even during relatively local time periods. Thus, any statistical obvervations of the past 40 years (which is as far back as most scientists go when they issue their 'doomsday decrees') are statistically insignificant observations.
Certain simulations used to model the atmosphere given X ppm CO2 and Z ppm CO, etc, etc are the second source of evidence doom-sayers use to prove a global warming trend. Most of these simulations are oversimplified. They fail to take into account some major forces and phenomena in the environment. All of them neglect the dynamic nature of biological influences on the environment. They simply treat the amount of CO2 conversion (basically as a result of photosynthesis) as a constant, rather than as a function whose parameters would be something like average yearly temperature, CO2 content of the atmosphere, etc. This is one of the more glaring examples of oversimplification in certain atmospheric simulations.
Other scientists have modeled the earth differently (using more optimistic rules to model certain phenomena) and have obtained different results. But the fact of the matter is that crucial pieces of our knowledge about the Earth are missing. We just don't know how dynamic a system the Earth is and how easy or difficult it is to disrupt its equilibrium. We don't know what the true function is that biology plays and to what degree its slope varies. Most well-respected researchers are the first to admit this, and they refute the findings of the sensationalists on just these grounds.
Basically, doomsayers are bending the rules just slightly, with minor assumptions and simplifications, in order to get their agena across. Most of them simply want funding and are looking to do research that sounds groundbreaking in order to distinguish themselves. The fact that you get seemingly contradictory reports almost weekly on this topic, and many others, is an indication of junk science, human nature, and the sensationalist nature of much of the press.
Yes, technically, you are absolutely right... however if linux had proper scalable fonts, anti-aliasing would not be as big an issue. Look at how acceptable windows screen fonts are, even though they are not anti-aliased... The reason being that they scale intelligently.
While anti-aliasing produces a more correct image, it still is guilty of the crime of blurring. It's nice to scale a virtually infinite dpi vector to a nice-looking bitmap at any resolution... but it's really not worth the blurring.
If you have intelligently designed vector-based graphics, scaling is pretty acceptable, and you don't NEED to anti-alias! Personally I agree with some people that say that blurring looks bad and doesn't belong on a computer screen. I like the crispness of a good vga display! We don't need no steenkin' blurred fonts! Just good scalable fonts!!
According to the original poster, Windows 98/ME are nothing more than some "extra features" packed into 95. Just like kernel 2.0.35 has "extra
features" compared to kernel 2.0.1. They are still compatible with the software on the system. ie: If 98 doesn't work with 95 drivers, then 98 is
NOT just a minor revision. It is a complete new OS line, the same as kernel 2.2 is a whole new line of kernels compared to 2.0.
That is not true. LKM's (loadable kernel modules, which are basically a superset of linux drivers) are NEVER binary-compatible across even minor kernel revisions -- 2.2.14 vs. 2.2.16 for instance. You always have to recompile them across kernel revisions.
The fact that microsoft drivers SOMETIMES work (without recompilation) from windows 95 to 98 is really a minor miracle, and is probably Not A Good Thing. Ideally you want your OS to reject drivers that weren't compiled for that very specific kernel version. Anything else becomes a hack on top of a hack and is prone to failure, erratic behaviour, and/or just plain unmaintainability.
And your argument that drivers are software is correct technically, but drivers are really an extension of the operating system. They are not mere user application programs. They have access to kernel internals, which are liable to change across even minor OS version numbers. Hence, if the operating system's internals change in the least, it is unfair to expect old drivers to work in a new operating system version. This should not be a criticism of microsoft's os.
Hey, I work for BigStar entertainment. Don't believe everything you read... Life isn't that miserable! We have learned a lot in the recent months, both about the technology and about the nature of our business.
While it is really sad to see a large small-company downsize and "buckle down" for tough days ahead (it's harder to get investor money now for e-commerce).. it really isn't so bad. We only kept the most talented of people, cut the fat, and sort of prepared for a few tough months without funding. The BigStar website is now actually not LOSING money (granted I'm not sure if it's making money YET.. but read on and see why I think it will--and most importantly.. it isn't BURNING CASH LIKE IT USED TO). There's some great software that we built, state of the art and all--the site pretty much runs itself. We have perl scripts that auto-generate content from muze and from our vendors, we auto-submit orders to the fulfillment houses, and it basically takes a skeleton crew to run this multi-million-dollar website!
At this rate, I really think it will prove to be a profitable enterprise.. and all with ZERO marketing expense.
If anything, maybe all of this will teach people that the internet is unlike any other industry. You don't need to throw hundreds of bodies or millions of dollars at a problem in order to get it solved. All you need is to get the computers to do it for you. Hire some talented and ingenious programmers, and set things up so the computers run the show. That's what the internet is about. Automation. The most popular things on this great Internet don't need much manual intervention. Like usenet.. or slashdot.. or irc.. etc..
You wouldn't believe how many web sites, despite the relatively techincal industry that they are in, are run in a very old-fashioned and inefficient way! Dozens of bodies are thrown at tasks that really only require someone to write a few programs and think things through. I can think of DOZENS of things that we thought we needed people to do at BigStar, and finally when we had to downsize, we got really ingenious and managed to figure out a way to automate 99 percent of them!!
And another thing.. people leaving a company often offer more junior people a great opportunity. After a bunch of the programmers quit (most of them wanted to go on to bigger and better things where they could get better pre-ipo stock options)... I got to do a lot more of the core programming--I learned quite a bit--and am earning a very decent salary at this "dead" company. (the company is far from dead!)
The moral: Don't believe what the press is saying. Sometimes a disadvantage can be an advantage! We at BigStar are running essentially the same business much more efficiently at maybe 1/10th the cost of what it used to take us to run this business. That's a great thing!
>I _dare_ you to install the Windows '95 original compatible OPTi 924 soundcard drivers in a ME
Dude, your point that DRIVERS still don't work across operating system versions is irrelevant and shows a blatant lack of understanding.
Drivers are pieces of software that typically have a great deal more to do with the specific data structures and lower-level API of an operating system that does user application code. As a result, drivers are VERY hardware and operating systems version specific. DUH!
So, if you want to criticize windows, you sure picked a damn stupid way to do it. In fact, some would even argue that nt's microkernel architecture lends itself more readily to quelling driver incompatibilities across kernel versions than does linux's monolithic kernel.
Hey meathead. Gandhi, or GHANDI, are both valid spellings as his name probably is a HINDU name, which is spelled with A HINDU SCRIPT THAT BEARS NO RESEMBLENCE to your precious ROMAN ALPHABET!!
Slashdot Mirror
Ultima V was an excellent excellent game that was SOOOO ahead of it's time (same can be said about every Ultima). You did some extraordinary work on that title! I think half of the credit goes to RG for coming up with great game concepts, but surely the programming on that title was amazing (esp. considering the limitations of the computers it was designed to run on). I had never before experienced a game so big, so full of so many different areas (towns, keeps, castles, dungeons, all larger than ever and very very detailed), and so much fun. All that and it still ran on hardware inferior to a Palm Pilot!!
To this day I occasionally take Ultima V off the shelf and play it and still enjoy it! BRAVO!
DUDE!! AUTODUEL ROCKED! After the Ultimas, it was my FAVORITE GAME. Man.. how I loved it. Ahh.. amateur night.. the courier runs.. doing jobs for the FBI. It was so ahead of its time concept-wise. The programming that went into that game was also pretty impressive considering the limitations of those old 8-bit machines it used to run on.
Also, that game I think had some of the largest maps I had ever seen at the time. Driving from New York to Albany FELT like you were covering huge distances...
Ahhh.. thanks for bringing up Autoduel man. I am truly content to be thinking of such pleasant memories..
I would disagree. If you stop and think about it, what majorly radical improvements have come to UO in recent months? The stupid faction system? The slow/buggy 3rd dawn client? I would say OSI's problems are now much larger than poor execution. They are a lack of ideas and a fear to stick their necks out. There is so much potential still in UO but OSI is too reluctanct to expand on the game in any MEANINGFUL way. They are like amateurs trying to not break anything in terms of the way the game works. They are too AFRAID to add REAL new features (like new spells) and to generally be creative with UO and take some risks.
The problem isn't with the coders themselves. It's with management and the fact that they lack BALLS.
Game design is about risks. It's about letting your imagination run wild and it's about pushing the envelope not just technologically, but concept-wise. Look at how much fun Moleneaux (or however you spell his name) has with Black & white.
Richard Garriot had his hands tied for far too long. I think we're going to see some really interesting things coming out by him in the next few years. At least I hope we will.
err.. i meant to type SEMANTICS and not SYMANTICS. Hmm. I have been spending too much time using peter norton products.. -Calin
Umm.. well C and Perl are two totally different animals. It would be unfair to compare the two, since each has it's engineering porpoises. The porpoises that engineer in Perl are usually fond of pot-smoking and listening to various incarnations of devil-music. The engineering porpoises that do C usually are bald.
Just kidding. Seriously though, Perl and C are totally different philosophically, so it would not be fair to compare them. Sure, their syntax can be similar. A for loop is a for loop I suppose.. whether it be Java, perl, or C.
However here are some key points that make C and Perl different:
1) Perl is not (normally) pre-compiled. A perl program is normally compiled into bytecode just before being run by the interpreter. This bytecode is then interpreted. Needless to say, the need for an interpreter, and also the sheer fact that all perl is just a bunch of symantics and abstractions, is expensive computationally. So to answer your performance question: perl can be from 5 to 30 times slower than C. Depending on the program. Also, poorly written C can be slow too--but then again chances are poorly written C programs will crash before you'll notice the slowness.
2) Perl is extremely SAFE. If a perl script/program runs at all (which is not hard since by default perl is not very strict) chances are, you will NEVER get a segfault. You might get some erratic behavior if you made some logical error in your code, but you will never have the opportunity to dereference random addresses as you do in C.
3) Perl is quirky. There are about from 3 to 25+ ways to do anything, and they all appeal to different parts of the brain. Thus, perl is more poetic than C. If you are in a very colorful mood, you can write perl code that is actually funny. I am not kidding.
4) Perl is handy. In 3 lines of code you can perform really complicated tasks like sorting through log files and splitting them up by eye-color and then multiplying them by the speed of light (c) in order to travel to Proxima Centauri. It has really really really handy built in functions, and it's three basic data-types (ok 4, if you include filehandles) are just about all you need to solve 99% of the problems out there.
5) Perl is difficult to read. Although C has been accused of the same sin, Perl's versatility combined with it's (optional) terseness can lead to beastly code. However, if you are careful you can design neat, pretty, poetic, and also readable perl programs.
6) Perl is optionally object-orientable. Yes, it is. C is not. (Well, actually, if you are careful you can get similar amounts of object orientisness out of C, but that fact is enforced by the programmer more than the language).
7) Perl is even more easily portable than C. This is because of all that layer-of-abstraction stuff.
I can go on and on.. but in short C has it's uses. You have more control of the instructions executed by the machine (esp. if you really know your compiler and the desination architecture). C is lightning fast. If you want to do anything with hardware directly, you should use something low-level like C... etc, etc. However perl is good if you just want to get the job done and don't feel like worrying about fixed-sized buffers or malloc'ing your way into carpal tunnel syndrome.
Hey are you British or something? What's with the funny spellin of algorithm?
GNU/Linux is mostly CLI based? That's not really true. Nowadays, if you grab a copy of KDE 2.1 and/or get a really well packaged/user-friendly distribution such as Mandrake, you won't EVER have to see a command line! (Unless you want to, which is the cool thing, you can still fine-tune stuff by the CLI).
Have you seend rpmdrake, mandrake updater, and DrakConf? I think they do a serious job of kicking the ass of or at least holding their own against comparable features in windows.
I'm with you, brother. It's hard to justify wanton piracy. I have yet to hear of anyone out there using napster to trade public domain music... as cool as napster was, we call gotta admit that it was kind of ludicrous how much abusive piracy went on. Now, the greater question to me is: should it be illegal to swap copyrighted music ? I think it shouldn't be, but then again, who the hell am I?
I think one could argue that Nicholson was not really trying to betray anybody, but was in his own strange way trying to defend that community, and Robin Penn Wright, against a deranged killer. He was trying to protect this little girl in the best way he knew how: through catching the killer. (The best defense being a good offense and all).
Perhaps Nicholson justified his actions to himself in the following way: The killer's next victim is unknown. That means the killer has a very distinct advantage as long as he has surprise on his side. In order to minimize the damage the killer can do, I am going to undo that axiom. I am going to make the next killer's victim KNOWN. Thereby preventing the deaths of countless little girls by catching the killer before he strikes. His plan makes a lot of sense. I think we need to explore if he had other alternatives.. but this one seems very good (if you accept that defending life at all costs is the most important thing). I don't know if Nicholson could have accepted other plans that were less likely to succeed--he didn't want this to happen again to anybody.
And we also have to be careful in considering exactly WHAT Nicholson did wrong. After all he was convinced that he could defend this girl and prevent her from being harmed. (Although to be honest with you we didn't really see much evidence that Nicholson really tried to grapple with whether or not his actions were truly right or wrong.. he I think let himself be deluded into thinking that he could defend the girl no matter what.)
While this strategy may seem to be at first a bit inhumane, I think it rationally is the BEST thing Nicholson could have done, given the extremely limiting constraints of his personality and of the situation. If one chooses to honor one's commitments in full, you can't be a NIMBY-ist about it. Nicholson's character showed such devotion to being the protector, such piety in keeping to his almost holy promise, that I think on closer inspection one can forgive him for his seemingly reckless endanderment of the little girl.
(I firmly believe that Nicholson's strategy was the most logical. He perhaps attempted to take some small-to-medium level risks in order to protect the lives of those around him). However I do understand your argument that Nicholson's character may have crossed the line, but I seriously ask you to question it--do you honestly think it's a universally good policy to but the needs of the few in front of those of the many?
I at least can't help but love him for his Greek-tragedy-style character flaws. I think his character was at the same time beautiful and frail in its flaws--a very rich combination that you don't see often in mainstream cinema!
Don't listen to him... he's clearly a deranged troll script-kiddie.
How many times do I have to say this. The length of the day is in no way, shape or form related to the size of Earth's orbit !! It is related to the amount of time it takes the earth to complete one rotation. Rotation and revolution are two completely unrelated vectors!! Get it through your heads people!!!
Well if we were real careful we could change the length of the year but not that of the day. Remember the length of our days is NOT related to out distance from the Sun in any way. So seconds would still have the same meaning, so would hours and days, but we might need to tack on some extra days to february or something in order to reflect the new size of the year.
One other interesting thing about this film it that it makes one wonder about the nature of destiny, genius, talent, madness, the self. This film reminds me of the notion that the variety of beliefs and personalities out there may just be simply the result of an inherently chaotic universe. We are very much affected by the circumstances of our lives.
You don't believe me?
What if the killer HADN'T died in that car crash? What if he had actually made it to the little girl, drawn a knife, and attempted to molest/kill her? Maybe all of Nicholson's ex-colleagues would have stopped considering him a madman and would have blessed him for the genius in his passion. His live-in girlfriend may have still resented him for putting her daughter at risk.. but I think she would not have considered Nicholoson a crazy nut.
Do you think that maybe then Nicholson would not have gone mad? Instead he would have perhaps made peace with himself in his old age. Toni Morrison once observed that it is very American to not give credence to the notion that people are often the sums of what the world makes of them. It's the external directly shaping the internal. It happens more than we like to think in our highly individualistic culture. (The reason why it's unamerican to admit this is that it's the scariest thing for you to tell the quintessential American--someone who's had the beautiful American dream of liberty and individuality stuffed down his throat all his life that maybe he isn't as original as he thought he was--that maybe some or a good part of who he is comes from the external world.)
I think that if the killer could have somehow managed to make it to the little girl, everything could have turned out differently. It's funny how fate works.. and how sometimes destiny throws us a bone and sometimes it doesn't. We as a society praise obsession when it yields visible immediate and usually monitary results. Everything else is crazy or nonsense. But ask yourselves -- what is the difference between madness and genius? I tell you that the two are very closely related!
That being said, this movie is not only visually very captivating, but it explores some human themes--some questions about the self--that are not often explored in the mainstream. I am glad to have seen it!
Beautiful. I am really glad to see this in such an official format. It maked me proud to be an engineer!
hahahahaha That's pretty funny...
A lot of the people I meet in my professional life are just in it for the money. To me, it's sad and sickening to see the 'art of ware' -- programming -- being corrupted and twisted in such an ugly way. I say this because usually the developers I know that are simply doing it for the money are the lousiest developers. Often I have to clean up after them -- not only is their style ugly, but a lot of the time they don't bother to actually solve the problem correctly. They miss the point or don't care to cover all the extreme contingencies.
It's like they write this glossy code which obviously took little tought, minimal effort, and seems to do the job at least for a little while.
If you are one of the developers out there who really hates programming, and really couldn't give a rat's ass about the art -- I ask you to consider either changing your attitude or getting out of the profession. People like you are the reason why the rest of us have to suffer out there!
I suffer BEFORE I get a job.. because half the time the people hiring me have been so BURNED by boastful, greedy, lying developers that they have to be very skeptical. After I manage to convince the person that's hiring me that I am actually competent, I then have to usually pick up after the greedy jerk of a developer that came before me. I have to take his ugly, beastly, hulking, diseased code and hopefully turn it into something halfway decent. Usually these people write the most spaghetti-like, poorly documentated, obfuscated, uncommented, ugly code.. It sickens me!
Both these sources of 'evidence' are flawed.
First, we shall look at why statistics is flawed: Over the past 100,000 years, during any 200-year period, the Earth's average annual temperature has varied within a 10 degree Farenheit range. This means that the Earth's climate varies greatly even during relatively local time periods. Thus, any statistical obvervations of the past 40 years (which is as far back as most scientists go when they issue their 'doomsday decrees') are statistically insignificant observations.
Certain simulations used to model the atmosphere given X ppm CO2 and Z ppm CO, etc, etc are the second source of evidence doom-sayers use to prove a global warming trend. Most of these simulations are oversimplified. They fail to take into account some major forces and phenomena in the environment. All of them neglect the dynamic nature of biological influences on the environment. They simply treat the amount of CO2 conversion (basically as a result of photosynthesis) as a constant, rather than as a function whose parameters would be something like average yearly temperature, CO2 content of the atmosphere, etc. This is one of the more glaring examples of oversimplification in certain atmospheric simulations.
Other scientists have modeled the earth differently (using more optimistic rules to model certain phenomena) and have obtained different results. But the fact of the matter is that crucial pieces of our knowledge about the Earth are missing. We just don't know how dynamic a system the Earth is and how easy or difficult it is to disrupt its equilibrium. We don't know what the true function is that biology plays and to what degree its slope varies. Most well-respected researchers are the first to admit this, and they refute the findings of the sensationalists on just these grounds.
Basically, doomsayers are bending the rules just slightly, with minor assumptions and simplifications, in order to get their agena across. Most of them simply want funding and are looking to do research that sounds groundbreaking in order to distinguish themselves. The fact that you get seemingly contradictory reports almost weekly on this topic, and many others, is an indication of junk science, human nature, and the sensationalist nature of much of the press.
They should take their disgruntlement out on the source... and steal it and release it to the Open Source community so that we can all laugh at it!
Yeah, that's called opengl!
While anti-aliasing produces a more correct image, it still is guilty of the crime of blurring. It's nice to scale a virtually infinite dpi vector to a nice-looking bitmap at any resolution... but it's really not worth the blurring.
If you have intelligently designed vector-based graphics, scaling is pretty acceptable, and you don't NEED to anti-alias! Personally I agree with some people that say that blurring looks bad and doesn't belong on a computer screen. I like the crispness of a good vga display! We don't need no steenkin' blurred fonts! Just good scalable fonts!!
There's a product for the mac called virtual PC that does this already. So the x86 architecture HAS been emulated on a non-x86 machine.
That is not true. LKM's (loadable kernel modules, which are basically a superset of linux drivers) are NEVER binary-compatible across even minor kernel revisions -- 2.2.14 vs. 2.2.16 for instance. You always have to recompile them across kernel revisions.
The fact that microsoft drivers SOMETIMES work (without recompilation) from windows 95 to 98 is really a minor miracle, and is probably Not A Good Thing. Ideally you want your OS to reject drivers that weren't compiled for that very specific kernel version. Anything else becomes a hack on top of a hack and is prone to failure, erratic behaviour, and/or just plain unmaintainability.
And your argument that drivers are software is correct technically, but drivers are really an extension of the operating system. They are not mere user application programs. They have access to kernel internals, which are liable to change across even minor OS version numbers. Hence, if the operating system's internals change in the least, it is unfair to expect old drivers to work in a new operating system version. This should not be a criticism of microsoft's os.
While it is really sad to see a large small-company downsize and "buckle down" for tough days ahead (it's harder to get investor money now for e-commerce).. it really isn't so bad. We only kept the most talented of people, cut the fat, and sort of prepared for a few tough months without funding. The BigStar website is now actually not LOSING money (granted I'm not sure if it's making money YET.. but read on and see why I think it will--and most importantly.. it isn't BURNING CASH LIKE IT USED TO). There's some great software that we built, state of the art and all--the site pretty much runs itself. We have perl scripts that auto-generate content from muze and from our vendors, we auto-submit orders to the fulfillment houses, and it basically takes a skeleton crew to run this multi-million-dollar website!
At this rate, I really think it will prove to be a profitable enterprise.. and all with ZERO marketing expense.
If anything, maybe all of this will teach people that the internet is unlike any other industry. You don't need to throw hundreds of bodies or millions of dollars at a problem in order to get it solved. All you need is to get the computers to do it for you. Hire some talented and ingenious programmers, and set things up so the computers run the show. That's what the internet is about. Automation. The most popular things on this great Internet don't need much manual intervention. Like usenet.. or slashdot.. or irc.. etc..
You wouldn't believe how many web sites, despite the relatively techincal industry that they are in, are run in a very old-fashioned and inefficient way! Dozens of bodies are thrown at tasks that really only require someone to write a few programs and think things through. I can think of DOZENS of things that we thought we needed people to do at BigStar, and finally when we had to downsize, we got really ingenious and managed to figure out a way to automate 99 percent of them!!
And another thing.. people leaving a company often offer more junior people a great opportunity. After a bunch of the programmers quit (most of them wanted to go on to bigger and better things where they could get better pre-ipo stock options)... I got to do a lot more of the core programming--I learned quite a bit--and am earning a very decent salary at this "dead" company. (the company is far from dead!)
The moral: Don't believe what the press is saying. Sometimes a disadvantage can be an advantage! We at BigStar are running essentially the same business much more efficiently at maybe 1/10th the cost of what it used to take us to run this business. That's a great thing!
Dude, your point that DRIVERS still don't work across operating system versions is irrelevant and shows a blatant lack of understanding.
Drivers are pieces of software that typically have a great deal more to do with the specific data structures and lower-level API of an operating system that does user application code. As a result, drivers are VERY hardware and operating systems version specific. DUH!
So, if you want to criticize windows, you sure picked a damn stupid way to do it. In fact, some would even argue that nt's microkernel architecture lends itself more readily to quelling driver incompatibilities across kernel versions than does linux's monolithic kernel.
-Calin
-Calin