/shrug I personally have never had an issue with disabling auto-updates when I've done it in the past. I will have to keep an eye on it in the future.
Usually the only issues I've had with Steam end up being due to IP address based region locking (and pricing!) when I travel (plus I was living in Japan for a few years).
Actually wireless 360 controller is easy, MS sells a specific adapter for it. Plug it in, wait a minute or so while windows does its new hardware thing, sync the controller and you're good to go.
Updating can be disabled for games, you can even specify which ones you want to auto-update and which ones to never auto-update. I'm not sure how that works with back-up as I've never reinstalled any of my Steam library from Back-up. Some games on Steam are playable without Steam running, granted this is only a small % of their catalog, but there are quite a few.
Steam is tolerable for me as it provides enough convenience for me to outweigh the negatives. I routinely travel for work, often for months at a time without Internet. I can easily download the games I want while at home, put Steam in off-line mode and I'm good to go, I've heard of people having issues before, but I haven't had any (yet).
This is a much better case than a console that requires a constant connection. I prefer gaming as my typical medium of entertainment as opposed to tv and movies, so I tend to buy a lot of them, I own or have owned all 3 consoles from the current and previous generations. For me, a console I can only play the few months out of the year I'm at home is a no go.
Steam is also easier to deal with if I do need to get on-line while traveling as I can usually find a hot-spot or hotel room connection every now and then if necessary. It's a lot easier to cart my laptop around and connect then to bring my xbox + display out to connect.
There is plenty of science in "Hitchiker's Guide", it's just mostly wrapped in humor.
Flying - throwing oneself at the ground and missing - might be a good place for discussion on free fall, principle of relativity, etc Somebody else's problem field - see psychology. The infinite improbability drive - could be a good starting point for a discussion on probability The earth (as a computer) and the bistro drive, good places for discussion as to what makes a computer, and maybe even a lead in to topics such as chaos an animal that wants to be eaten and can express that idea - selective breeding, GMO's
I had a really good math teacher in sixth grade, I don't remember how well she knew the topics and how well she presented it, but she did one awesome thing. I had been moved out of the advanced track due to my lack of desire to do homework (it wasn't challenging, bored the crap out of me and I still aced the tests). This teacher recognizing that some students had the ability but couldn't be in that track for whatever reason gave students opportunities to learn more advanced stuff. before each new topic, a pre-test was given, if you scored high enough on the pre-test you were exempted from that weeks work, and given a more advanced topic to study independently. These topics were not part of the course, so if you didn't pass a test you just joined right back in with the rest of the students for that topic.
The only downside to this was that when I moved on to the next years class, the work I had done didn't count for anything and I was right back to being bored and lazy;)
the fact that there can be so many unknowns is what statistics attempts to deal with. Sure, at a base definition level "a statistic estimates a parameter of a population" but the techniques go well beyond just that. It's not that you're necessarily ignoring a result but questioning how significant is that result. We can't account for every single variable, we can't measure anything exactly, and if we can perform a given measurement multiple times, we will probably get different results each time, without the tools of statistics it would be difficult to make sense of any of our data. Of course like any other tool it can easily be misused, both intentionally and mistakenly, though with knowledge of statistics it makes it easier to call those cases into question.
And going back to the single outlier, it may be the case of a single variable that is normally not a concern but in that one case just happened to be so, that variable might be an equipment error, meaning it can be safely ignored (aside from needing to inspect the equipment), it might be due to an unknown phenomena which may warrant further study, it may have been human error, it may even have been expected once in awhile. Does that completely invalidate the model? Not necessarily. I work with models where the statistics is taken into account - Under normal circumstances this is what you should expect, however there may be a non-zero chance that this other result occurs, it's understood and accounted for.
We never had an after school one. Just a period set aside during the normal school day for the G+T kids to sit in the same room together. Granted occasionally there was some substance outside of coloring, but it often felt it was a just a free period to relax with little direction (and very few resources to do any additional learning). After elementary school kids were divided up into grade level and advanced courses and high school had some interesting electives, but those were optional and anyone could take them (nothing wrong with that either).
I swear it has to be a ruse. Anonymous Coward posts one day, sounds like a blithering idiot, next day they are posting the most intelligent and insightful response in the thread. Maybe just a manipulative bastard.
Q: What did the Mathematician say when he saw his new office? A: It's affine space.
I got put in and taken out of a couple gifted and talented programs in elementary school (multiple programs due to switching schools). These programs were more or less a joke from what I remember, I didn't necessarily think so at the time because I was age 6-9, but we were never really challenged to do anything, it was really just like an additional free period to do whatever. I remember a lot of coloring. The program you describe above sounds much better.
Paperwork left on desk while agent uses bathroom, clumsy coworker walks by spills coffee on paperwork, starts cleaning it up, throws out paperwork without looking at it.
Hell, I can think of a million different reasons the guy's name didn't get put or left in a database.
Multi-generational households have too much baggage. Plus what level of respect do I need to give to my elders? Since they no longer have an income, would I need to provide for the homeopathic remedies they want? Do I have to put up with them buying political childrens books for my kids? What about when I come home from work to a child crying because they're going to hell since they've never been to church? Do I tolerate any level of bigotry and stereotyping that were "acceptable" when they were my age? Sure, I'm a mature, rational adult and could probably handle all those situations, but there would probably be resentment, maybe even arguments.
You know, I'm not even that old and yet when you said "phone users", I immediately imagined someone dialing in to/., listening to all the comments and then posting them by voice.
Related, though I wonder how many others out there are like myself and my wife when it comes to most CPG.
Regardless of any advertising we're exposed to, I don't think we've bought the same toothpaste twice in a row. Hell, I don't even think we've ever bought the same brand twice in a row. I just bought toothpaste today, I haven't checked to see if it's even the same brand as the almost empty tube in my bathroom, but I doubt very much that it is. I would be shocked if it was the exact same product.
They have far too many products on the shelves, the packaging seems to change often and given that one or two people can easily make a tube of toothpaste last 2-3 months easy (even brushing 3 times a day) it's hard to remember what I bought last time. You'd think I'd notice the brand and product name on the tube when I use it, but I don't. So how do I usually determine which one to buy? A combination of price and supposed flavor. The same can also be said for toothbrushes. I typically buy 2 packs, and by the time I've worked through both brushes, the ones at the store no longer resemble the ones I've been using. So a combination of price and general shape are how I determine which brush to buy.
The same tends to go for many other products I use. There are some exceptions, I tend to buy the same brand of shampoo even if the exact product changes slightly just because I like that brand compared to others I have used. I've been using the same brand and model of razor for the past decade just because the handle is reusable, the blades are disposable and the product and it's packaging really haven't changed much in the past decade. Why did I pick that particular brand out? Don't remember, it was 10 years ago.
I'd be curious to see just how much of an effect advertising has on the sales/brand recognition/product recognition of many of those goods. Certainly I recognize most of the major brands of toothpaste, but without looking in my shopping bag (and I just got home from the store 2 hours ago) I can't even tell you which brand I bought today.
Actually Japanese is way easier to read and grasp in Kanji than it is without. While it does take years to master them all (and the Japanese only use around 2000 characters, much less than the Chinese), it doesn't take very long to master the most common ones. You might not be able to read a newspaper in its entirety, but you can probably handle most signs and restaurant menus. Also, since the characters are symbolic, in most cases even if you can't remember how to read the character you may still remember the abstract meaning in English (or whatever your native language is), so while you may not be able to read the word or sentence in Japanese, you may still understand it (though occasionally characters are used strictly for their phonetic properties, so this does fail at times). Hiragana and Katakana are very easy to learn (it took me about 3 days to master both character sets, approximately 100 characters total, and all of them much more simple than the average Kanji character) but they can be more difficult to read than Kanji, especially given the limited phoneme inventory in Japanese that necessitates longer words. I used to feel the same way about Kanji (that it was intentional obfuscation) until I started learning it. When I had the time, I could easily pick up 5-10 new characters a day at the start and 3-5 per day after I hit 100 or so. Granted, living in Japan for 6 years and being completely immersed in it helped. The only real problems with it (aside from the number of years it takes to learn completely) is the difficulty in inputting Kanji into a computer, especially given that there are multiple different schemes and not all of them are available on each platform.
It's possible, I was posting that from a brand new laptop, assumed it was a change to/. probably pre-installed add-on.
Pure math is pretty much the only "language" I've never struggled with learning. I speak a little bit of Japanese and have forgotten quite a bit of German, but aside from Kanji, I struggle with learning them. I have an idea that what makes various programming languages difficult for me to pick up is related to what makes verbal languages difficult for me to pick up. Then again, I have no way to formally test that so.. meh!
I'll probably just end up falling back on C once I get to a point where I can devote some time to getting down and dirty with a language. For now it's mostly just do what I have to in order to support school work that requires some level of coding.
Oh, she's my wife not my GF, so sacrifices must be made! I've managed so far with her XP laptop, but I'm much more familiar with XP, so muscle memory of where to find various options helped. She tried to tell me I needed to get Win8 so I could better help her with her laptop. She lost that one.
Well, she's insane and actually wanted Win8, so we'll see how it goes. Also, she's Japanese so the default language is Japanese which will make things even more fun considering my Japanese reading ability is at an early elementary school level.
Can't find the video, have to dig around and see if I can find a copy. Maybe have my old disc in storage somewhere.
My wife bought a Win8 laptop recently so once she moves out here with me I'm sure I'll get plenty of time mucking with it as her personal technician.
MW3 was definitely my favorite of that series and would love to be able to play it again. That bug does sound hilarious though. At least to see it once. Almost makes me want to take coding more seriously and attempt to build a Win9X emulator akin to DOSBox.
Granted I will admit that I haven't done a side by side comparison for Bioshock Infinite PC vs. Bioshock Infinitie PS3/360, my comparison has only been: saw a console demo in the store and then later installed it on my PC. So faulty memory can easily be blamed there. Other games I have had the opportunity to do side by sides, and while the PC version was superior, it wasn't as drastic an example as the Quake 2 one I made. An example of that would be Skyrim, I run it on max settings with the high res texture pack on my PC and side by side it's not a huge difference from the 360 version. Are there noticeable differences? Yes. Are they readily apparent? Not really.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, we've been dicks from the start. I personally blame our English parents.
Pretty sure anybody can produce alcohol without interfacing with a middle man or paying taxes.
/shrug I personally have never had an issue with disabling auto-updates when I've done it in the past. I will have to keep an eye on it in the future.
Usually the only issues I've had with Steam end up being due to IP address based region locking (and pricing!) when I travel (plus I was living in Japan for a few years).
Actually wireless 360 controller is easy, MS sells a specific adapter for it. Plug it in, wait a minute or so while windows does its new hardware thing, sync the controller and you're good to go.
Updating can be disabled for games, you can even specify which ones you want to auto-update and which ones to never auto-update. I'm not sure how that works with back-up as I've never reinstalled any of my Steam library from Back-up. Some games on Steam are playable without Steam running, granted this is only a small % of their catalog, but there are quite a few.
Steam is tolerable for me as it provides enough convenience for me to outweigh the negatives. I routinely travel for work, often for months at a time without Internet. I can easily download the games I want while at home, put Steam in off-line mode and I'm good to go, I've heard of people having issues before, but I haven't had any (yet).
This is a much better case than a console that requires a constant connection. I prefer gaming as my typical medium of entertainment as opposed to tv and movies, so I tend to buy a lot of them, I own or have owned all 3 consoles from the current and previous generations. For me, a console I can only play the few months out of the year I'm at home is a no go.
Steam is also easier to deal with if I do need to get on-line while traveling as I can usually find a hot-spot or hotel room connection every now and then if necessary. It's a lot easier to cart my laptop around and connect then to bring my xbox + display out to connect.
There is plenty of science in "Hitchiker's Guide", it's just mostly wrapped in humor.
Flying - throwing oneself at the ground and missing - might be a good place for discussion on free fall, principle of relativity, etc
Somebody else's problem field - see psychology.
The infinite improbability drive - could be a good starting point for a discussion on probability
The earth (as a computer) and the bistro drive, good places for discussion as to what makes a computer, and maybe even a lead in to topics such as chaos
an animal that wants to be eaten and can express that idea - selective breeding, GMO's
Diamond Age definitely has an orgy.
I had a really good math teacher in sixth grade, I don't remember how well she knew the topics and how well she presented it, but she did one awesome thing. I had been moved out of the advanced track due to my lack of desire to do homework (it wasn't challenging, bored the crap out of me and I still aced the tests). This teacher recognizing that some students had the ability but couldn't be in that track for whatever reason gave students opportunities to learn more advanced stuff. before each new topic, a pre-test was given, if you scored high enough on the pre-test you were exempted from that weeks work, and given a more advanced topic to study independently. These topics were not part of the course, so if you didn't pass a test you just joined right back in with the rest of the students for that topic.
The only downside to this was that when I moved on to the next years class, the work I had done didn't count for anything and I was right back to being bored and lazy ;)
the fact that there can be so many unknowns is what statistics attempts to deal with. Sure, at a base definition level "a statistic estimates a parameter of a population" but the techniques go well beyond just that. It's not that you're necessarily ignoring a result but questioning how significant is that result. We can't account for every single variable, we can't measure anything exactly, and if we can perform a given measurement multiple times, we will probably get different results each time, without the tools of statistics it would be difficult to make sense of any of our data. Of course like any other tool it can easily be misused, both intentionally and mistakenly, though with knowledge of statistics it makes it easier to call those cases into question.
And going back to the single outlier, it may be the case of a single variable that is normally not a concern but in that one case just happened to be so, that variable might be an equipment error, meaning it can be safely ignored (aside from needing to inspect the equipment), it might be due to an unknown phenomena which may warrant further study, it may have been human error, it may even have been expected once in awhile. Does that completely invalidate the model? Not necessarily. I work with models where the statistics is taken into account - Under normal circumstances this is what you should expect, however there may be a non-zero chance that this other result occurs, it's understood and accounted for.
We never had an after school one. Just a period set aside during the normal school day for the G+T kids to sit in the same room together. Granted occasionally there was some substance outside of coloring, but it often felt it was a just a free period to relax with little direction (and very few resources to do any additional learning). After elementary school kids were divided up into grade level and advanced courses and high school had some interesting electives, but those were optional and anyone could take them (nothing wrong with that either).
Whomever taught you statistics in a school setting failed at their job.
I swear it has to be a ruse. Anonymous Coward posts one day, sounds like a blithering idiot, next day they are posting the most intelligent and insightful response in the thread. Maybe just a manipulative bastard.
I like that one.
My favorite lately has been:
Q: What did the Mathematician say when he saw his new office?
A: It's affine space.
I got put in and taken out of a couple gifted and talented programs in elementary school (multiple programs due to switching schools). These programs were more or less a joke from what I remember, I didn't necessarily think so at the time because I was age 6-9, but we were never really challenged to do anything, it was really just like an additional free period to do whatever. I remember a lot of coloring. The program you describe above sounds much better.
Paperwork left on desk while agent uses bathroom, clumsy coworker walks by spills coffee on paperwork, starts cleaning it up, throws out paperwork without looking at it.
Hell, I can think of a million different reasons the guy's name didn't get put or left in a database.
Multi-generational households have too much baggage. Plus what level of respect do I need to give to my elders? Since they no longer have an income, would I need to provide for the homeopathic remedies they want? Do I have to put up with them buying political childrens books for my kids? What about when I come home from work to a child crying because they're going to hell since they've never been to church? Do I tolerate any level of bigotry and stereotyping that were "acceptable" when they were my age? Sure, I'm a mature, rational adult and could probably handle all those situations, but there would probably be resentment, maybe even arguments.
Of course, we are now so far off topic that meh.
You know, I'm not even that old and yet when you said "phone users", I immediately imagined someone dialing in to /., listening to all the comments and then posting them by voice.
Then I realized what you actually meant.
(troll)
1. Drum up controversy
2. Get page views
3. Profit
There is no ???.
(/troll)
Related, though I wonder how many others out there are like myself and my wife when it comes to most CPG.
Regardless of any advertising we're exposed to, I don't think we've bought the same toothpaste twice in a row. Hell, I don't even think we've ever bought the same brand twice in a row. I just bought toothpaste today, I haven't checked to see if it's even the same brand as the almost empty tube in my bathroom, but I doubt very much that it is. I would be shocked if it was the exact same product.
They have far too many products on the shelves, the packaging seems to change often and given that one or two people can easily make a tube of toothpaste last 2-3 months easy (even brushing 3 times a day) it's hard to remember what I bought last time. You'd think I'd notice the brand and product name on the tube when I use it, but I don't. So how do I usually determine which one to buy? A combination of price and supposed flavor. The same can also be said for toothbrushes. I typically buy 2 packs, and by the time I've worked through both brushes, the ones at the store no longer resemble the ones I've been using. So a combination of price and general shape are how I determine which brush to buy.
The same tends to go for many other products I use. There are some exceptions, I tend to buy the same brand of shampoo even if the exact product changes slightly just because I like that brand compared to others I have used. I've been using the same brand and model of razor for the past decade just because the handle is reusable, the blades are disposable and the product and it's packaging really haven't changed much in the past decade. Why did I pick that particular brand out? Don't remember, it was 10 years ago.
I'd be curious to see just how much of an effect advertising has on the sales/brand recognition/product recognition of many of those goods. Certainly I recognize most of the major brands of toothpaste, but without looking in my shopping bag (and I just got home from the store 2 hours ago) I can't even tell you which brand I bought today.
Actually Japanese is way easier to read and grasp in Kanji than it is without. While it does take years to master them all (and the Japanese only use around 2000 characters, much less than the Chinese), it doesn't take very long to master the most common ones. You might not be able to read a newspaper in its entirety, but you can probably handle most signs and restaurant menus. Also, since the characters are symbolic, in most cases even if you can't remember how to read the character you may still remember the abstract meaning in English (or whatever your native language is), so while you may not be able to read the word or sentence in Japanese, you may still understand it (though occasionally characters are used strictly for their phonetic properties, so this does fail at times). Hiragana and Katakana are very easy to learn (it took me about 3 days to master both character sets, approximately 100 characters total, and all of them much more simple than the average Kanji character) but they can be more difficult to read than Kanji, especially given the limited phoneme inventory in Japanese that necessitates longer words. I used to feel the same way about Kanji (that it was intentional obfuscation) until I started learning it. When I had the time, I could easily pick up 5-10 new characters a day at the start and 3-5 per day after I hit 100 or so. Granted, living in Japan for 6 years and being completely immersed in it helped. The only real problems with it (aside from the number of years it takes to learn completely) is the difficulty in inputting Kanji into a computer, especially given that there are multiple different schemes and not all of them are available on each platform.
It's possible, I was posting that from a brand new laptop, assumed it was a change to /. probably pre-installed add-on.
Pure math is pretty much the only "language" I've never struggled with learning. I speak a little bit of Japanese and have forgotten quite a bit of German, but aside from Kanji, I struggle with learning them. I have an idea that what makes various programming languages difficult for me to pick up is related to what makes verbal languages difficult for me to pick up. Then again, I have no way to formally test that so.. meh!
I'll probably just end up falling back on C once I get to a point where I can devote some time to getting down and dirty with a language. For now it's mostly just do what I have to in order to support school work that requires some level of coding.
Oh, she's my wife not my GF, so sacrifices must be made! I've managed so far with her XP laptop, but I'm much more familiar with XP, so muscle memory of where to find various options helped. She tried to tell me I needed to get Win8 so I could better help her with her laptop. She lost that one.
Well, she's insane and actually wanted Win8, so we'll see how it goes. Also, she's Japanese so the default language is Japanese which will make things even more fun considering my Japanese reading ability is at an early elementary school level.
Can't find the video, have to dig around and see if I can find a copy. Maybe have my old disc in storage somewhere.
Admitting you're wrong and apologizing for it? This must be some fancy troll business.
My wife bought a Win8 laptop recently so once she moves out here with me I'm sure I'll get plenty of time mucking with it as her personal technician.
MW3 was definitely my favorite of that series and would love to be able to play it again. That bug does sound hilarious though. At least to see it once. Almost makes me want to take coding more seriously and attempt to build a Win9X emulator akin to DOSBox.
Granted I will admit that I haven't done a side by side comparison for Bioshock Infinite PC vs. Bioshock Infinitie PS3/360, my comparison has only been: saw a console demo in the store and then later installed it on my PC. So faulty memory can easily be blamed there. Other games I have had the opportunity to do side by sides, and while the PC version was superior, it wasn't as drastic an example as the Quake 2 one I made. An example of that would be Skyrim, I run it on max settings with the high res texture pack on my PC and side by side it's not a huge difference from the 360 version. Are there noticeable differences? Yes. Are they readily apparent? Not really.