I have a 100g jar of coffee and a 500g box of sugar cubes on my desk, plus a 500ml bottle of water (which I fill from the tap), and in the fridge upstairs there are several 2 litre cartons of milk. Bottles of beer and cider tend to come in 500ml (although I'll accept that's by no means exclusive). Mince and the like comes in 250g or 500g packages.
It wasn't that long ago that it became a legal requirement to label goods in metric; round numbers are becoming increasingly common, although they've yet to completely replace the imperial versions. I suspect that people previously bought 1 lb of mince, and since the move to 500g of mince increased the amount of slightly, the shops were not willing to round it immediately since people would notice the increase in price. That's my theory anyway.
Depends what you mean by "Year of the Linux Desktop". For me, that was around 2003, when I first started using it exclusively (as do a large proportion of the people I know, although hanging round with geeks all the time, and working in a mathematical modelling research department certainly might skew that somewhat).
If you meant "Linux is installed on at least a certain percentage of new computers", or something similar, then you might have to wait a very long time, as we've witnessed by the netbooks -- the software companies just won't allow it. But you can at least go into stores and buy computers running Linux, so that's something at least.
Actually that animation was how I first found out about VY Canis Majoris. It's quite difficult to picture something "2100 X" the size of something else at that scale, because it's far bigger than anything we can really comprehend. However, I've seen it put quite elegantly somewhere:
Imagine that Earth is a ball with a 1cm diameter, then the sun is a ball with a 1.09m diameter, and VY Canis Majoris is a ball with a 2.3km diameter. By rescaling to these sizes, I can just about handle the size differences. Sometimes a little perspective is good.
The article states that R136a1 is 265 solar masses, however it doesn't say how big it is.
VY Canis Majoris is 2,100 times the size of the sun, and 230,000 times the size of Earth. It is so huge, that if it occupied the centre of our solar system, its boundaries would be Saturn's orbit.
If R136a1 is the heaviest star, then it must be considerably more dense than VY Canis Majoris, but I find the latter to be far more impressive.
Even though I'm not a fan of football, I never call it soccer (which is slang for "association football").
Meanwhile, I'm always puzzled why American football is called "football" at all, since the whole point of football is that you kick a ball with your feet, you don't carry it. Having said that, rugby is also short for "rugby football", and American football is a derivation of rugby.
I don't really understand American football; it seems far more complicated and much slower than rugby.
I can't speak for other people, but I recently bought a netbook and have been using F11 to view Firefox full screen, and not having the menus feels feels very restricting for some reason.
I also dislike tabs above menus and bookmarks - it just doesn't feel right with the tab UI that I'm used to, particularly considering how heavily I use them. I'm not normally that resistant to change, but this just grated immediately, and I hope there will be an option to choose between the two styles.
I built my own machine, it's a Core2 Duo E8400, with a Geforce 8800 GTS 512 video card and 2GB memory.
Actually I had no problem with stuttering until I upgraded from a 17" monitor to 24" widescreen monitor. I suspect that the plugin is trying to do something really stupid, as resizing the picture should be reasonably cheap for the processor (it's only stretching pixels, not drawing the original video at a higher resolution). If the video was passed to the graphics card to resize, there'd be no difference at all between fullscreen and windowed.
LOL, and yet lin-sux cannot play a flash video at full screen without stuttering. Perhaps you imbeciles should spend less time adding NUMA support to your crappy kernel and more time writing actual working video drivers. In the meantime, those of us who use our computers to get real work done will continue to use Windows 7 and OS X.
I can't say I've ever needed to play flash video at full screen at work (where I and most of the other researchers run Linux), as there's not much use in it. It does handle my simulations wonderfully though, particularly when I can run them in a console with screen on the server, then switch my PC off for the night. Not sure if it would be quite so seamless under Windows, as even the Windows users tend to run Linux in a VM to do the actual work.
At home though, my DVDs and avis run just fine at full screen, and at full frame rate; so do my games, and there are quite a few old ones that don't actually run under Windows any more. I'll admit that flash stutters quite badly if I try to run it at full screen; it's not a big deal though, as resizing the desktop resolution does the job just as well.
Not true at all. During my first degree (before I switched to maths) I had to frantically copy down notes off PowerPoint slides that I didn't have a hope of getting it all (this is where I learnt my dislike of PowerPoint). We regularly had four hours of lectures in a row, and my wrist cramped up so badly it hurt for ages afterwards. In the end, picking up a pen made my wrist tense up and hurt after only five minutes.
When I started doing maths, PowerPoint wasn't very popular, and most lecturers used a blackboard and chalk. Also the lecture scheduling tended to be two hours, then an hour break, then one hour, with occasional fourth lecture in the afternoon. I still had difficulties with my wrist, but it wasn't quite as bad (although during revision period it got really bad again). However, I also spent a lot of time on the computer, and using the mouse was very painful, so I try to use it as rarely as possible (and I'm obviously not an emacs user for much the same reason).
As for writing implement, I used a fountain pen until I started maths when it became too smudgy, then I switched to biro and pencil (I've noticed that paper quality has decreased in recent years, and it can be difficult to find paper that fountain pens write cleanly on). Since I started my PhD I've had relatively little writing to do, and my hand has mostly recovered.
I'm actually quite a fan of yyyy/mm/dd, since it is brilliant for archiving and sorting things, especially journals, webcomics, stuff that varies from day to day and needs to be stored. As you say, it sorts by order of occurrence. If you start trying to sort things by mm/dd/yyyy, then suddenly things get hopelessly out of order, it's like some middle ground that fails to satisfy anything.
However, for humans concerned with what today is (conversation, newspapers, forums etc.), generally the most important piece of information is the one that changes most rapidly, i.e. the day, which means that dd/mm/yyyy is most useful. Fortunately, the day only needs to be displayed for reading purposes, not for storage purposes.
I find this quite irritating in certain situations, particularly forums. Many US based forums won't allow you to change the date style to dd/mm/yyyy, which is more common in the rest of the world, and I often get confused trying to sort through entries. I got married on 1 May (01/05/09), not 5 January (05/01/09).
I could make arguments based on most immediately important number, and most significant/least significant ordering, but the Americans say "May the 1st", not "the 1st of May", and I think that's the reason they do it that way.
Luckily my date of birth is 19/12/81, so no one is likely to ask me what the 19th month of the year is.
While I would heartily agree that 4E does suck, I don't think it's for the reasons that you mention.
The simplified maths is good for everyone. Having 1d20 + half level works so much better than some of the 1/3rd of level that saves were using in 3E, or the "whatever we thought looked good" tables that 2E and earlier used. It also goes along way to fix some of the balance problems that plagued earlier editions, and made some characters unplayable or broken at high levels. Oh, it's very handy for eye-balling difficulties too, which speeds up play, and helps the story instead of the system.
As for the non-Euclidean geometry, they just substituted the d-2 norm for the d-infinity norm. This makes it much easier to figure out how far you can reach/go, and doesn't suffer from any weird 1-2-1-2 movement. You have a upper bound of 73% error in distance in 3-dim combat, and 41% in 2-dim combat, which is acceptible. In fact we've been using this form of movement for centuries, it's how kings move on a chessboard, and it allows for easy 3-dimensional combat without resorting to a calculator. And since they've made position in the game so damned important...
The healing system does take a bit of getting used to, but it makes sense in a weird kind of way, and it in no way prevents you from dying.
My criticisms are: * it plays like a board game; a horrible, complex board game with too many rules. I really don't want to care if my character is in that square or the one next to it, it shouldn't matter. * it has lost all of its character, all of those wonderful spells and systems that gave D&D its intrigue are gone. * they changed stuff. Like halflings aren't small anymore. They're three-quarterlings. * it feels like 90% of it is devoted to combat, and anything else is an afterthought. * the classes are all based around their roles in combat, and how the mechanics work, whereas earlier editions actually cared about their roles in the world. * it's meant to be mediaeval fantasy, but it really isn't. * it's a min-maxer's paradise. * if I create a character, I have to mangle it against the system to make it work, and spend hours figuring out how good they are in combat before I can even focus on their other abilities. Other RPGs let me create characters. * I really don't know how to create new content (powers etc.) for the game, when this was so much easier in earlier editions. * the awful artwork. I'd take Larry Elmore's 2E mediaeval fantasy style offerings over the hideous 4E posing three-quarterlings any day.
Heterogenity and stochasticity are very important in modelling. Diseases are far less likely to die out in a deterministic model, and you end up modelling infinitesimally small individuals which can still affect the disease, such as "atto-foxes" allowing the persistence of rabies (Mollison, 1991).
Space is important too, as predator prey cycles seen in deterministic simulations (which are fairly similar to an SI model) don't occur in a stochastic model, unless you include space, and then you only get localised cycles.
Finally the most common model I've seen is actually an SEIR model, where the E is an exposed group, who are infected and infectious, but who are not yet symptomatic. They're the tricky group who can make stopping a disease very difficult. In zombie terms, it's the ill looking guy in your group who has been following you for the last 2 hours holding a bloody rag around his arm.
-- Mollison, D. (1991) Dependence of epidemic and population velocities on basic parameters. Mathematical Biosciences 107, 255-287.
That's entirely similar to the work I've been doing for the last year, modelling the spread of a disease among an animal population. I've been trying to work out under what situations culling will lead to an increase in the number of infecteds.
So, if I name the particular species I've been working on "zombies", and adjust some of the parameters, I've got an SI model that is not only very similar to this, but also includes spatial structure and stochasticity, which is crucial for describing the stability of the disease, and modelling the spread when the population size is low.
As a maths graduate, I'm confident that the methodology is correct, and the major point was to show the ballpark that the golden boulder would be vastly bigger than the known universe. I could improve the accuracy though.
Price of gold = £9.80/g, density of gold = 19.3g/cm^3, atomic weight of gold = 196.97g/mol. So 50p of gold has a mass of 0.5/9.8 = 0.051g, a size of 0.051/19.3 = 2.64x10^-3cm^3 or 2.64x10^-9m^3, this lump of gold has 0.051/196.96xL = 1.56x10^20 atoms (L is Avogadro's constant).
We previously established that 300 million years of (pretty rubbish) inflation at 0.0001% is an increase by a factor of 1.000001^(3x10^8) = 1.942x10^130. So the 50p piece of gold is now 5.134x10^121 m^3, and contains 3.030x10^150 atoms.
The universe is estimated to have a diameter of 7.8x10^10 light years, and about 10^80 atoms. So the lump of gold has 3.030x10^70 times as many atoms as the universe. Of course space is pretty sparse, so let's work out how big this boulder is going to be.
Let's assume the gold hasn't collapsed in on itself, but has instead formed a gold ball. It will have a diameter of 2*(.75/pi*5.134x10^121)^(1/3) = 4.611x10^40m, or 4.874x10^24 light years. This is 6.249x10^13 times or 62.5 trillion (that's 62.5 billion in traditional maths) times the size of the universe.
At this point a physicist can take over and tell me exactly what happens when you have a boulder of gold 6.25x10^13 times the size of the universe floating around in space.
Due to the exponential nature of inflation, say a meagre 5% per year, for 3x10^8 years, that's 1.05^(3x10^8)... and GNU Octave overflows.
Okay, let's try something a bit smaller, say 0.0001% per year inflation. That's an increase of 1.942x10^130. That's around 10^50 times as many atoms as there are in the known universe. So your golden boulders are about 10^50 times as big as the universe. Yep, that's pretty huge.
Let's go really small, say 0.000001% per year inflation. That's better, they've only increased to 20 times the size.
Still, the amount of economic growth that was going on in the first 200 million years probably wasn't that big. But let's say it remained constant until the year 1 CE. That's 2000 years of interest at 5%, and we're up to 10^40 times the size again.
At this point I start freaking out that the whole conversation was about spiders!
My wife was taught to use LaTeX in the library where she worked. It was however for some totally inappropriate use, like generating business reports or something, with numerous tables (which are not LaTeX's strong point). She's normally pretty technically inept, but she managed to learn LaTeX, although she hated using it. Of course she has no love for MS Word either.
Yes, it does default to digital, but it is a trivial change to switch to analogue, and it's a sensible default for people who are new to GNU/Linux and have a digital out on their card. Having said that, it's the change I always forget when I install a new distribution.
Much worse than that is the new reliance on PulseAudio that distributions like Ubuntu seem to have. PA always seems to set the number of speakers to 2, and requires editing a config file to set it to 4.1 (my own setup), which I would certainly not expect a new user to know about (not to mention the latency it produces and the CPU time it hogs). PA is always the first thing I remove if it's installed with the distro. However, for some people, PA offers more options and features than they'd get under Windows, so there are a few upsides.
My thoughts exactly. Turn the sound off in games and see just how much you lose your sense of immersion.
I would rank good sound above good graphics in a game (note: I still recognise a need for functional graphics, I'm just very flexible as to what I think they are).
Not sure if you'd consider it 8-bit arcade graphics or not, but in Doom 2, the sound of an Archvile howling always scared me. The sprite itself wasn't realistic or scary, but I knew what it was capable of, but I hadn't even *seen* it at this point. It was far more horrifying than any shiny ray-traced monster saliva.
I played Doom 2 after I played Half-Life, and in HL the scariest moments were probably stepping round the blind tentacle monsters, or running towards the kill switch while the behemoth charging after me down a corridor, and all I could see was its one red eye.
Graphics are of some importance to atmosphere, but they are not everything.
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I have a 100g jar of coffee and a 500g box of sugar cubes on my desk, plus a 500ml bottle of water (which I fill from the tap), and in the fridge upstairs there are several 2 litre cartons of milk. Bottles of beer and cider tend to come in 500ml (although I'll accept that's by no means exclusive). Mince and the like comes in 250g or 500g packages.
It wasn't that long ago that it became a legal requirement to label goods in metric; round numbers are becoming increasingly common, although they've yet to completely replace the imperial versions. I suspect that people previously bought 1 lb of mince, and since the move to 500g of mince increased the amount of slightly, the shops were not willing to round it immediately since people would notice the increase in price. That's my theory anyway.
Depends what you mean by "Year of the Linux Desktop". For me, that was around 2003, when I first started using it exclusively (as do a large proportion of the people I know, although hanging round with geeks all the time, and working in a mathematical modelling research department certainly might skew that somewhat).
If you meant "Linux is installed on at least a certain percentage of new computers", or something similar, then you might have to wait a very long time, as we've witnessed by the netbooks -- the software companies just won't allow it. But you can at least go into stores and buy computers running Linux, so that's something at least.
Actually that animation was how I first found out about VY Canis Majoris. It's quite difficult to picture something "2100 X" the size of something else at that scale, because it's far bigger than anything we can really comprehend. However, I've seen it put quite elegantly somewhere:
Imagine that Earth is a ball with a 1cm diameter, then the sun is a ball with a 1.09m diameter, and VY Canis Majoris is a ball with a 2.3km diameter. By rescaling to these sizes, I can just about handle the size differences. Sometimes a little perspective is good.
When it comes to stars, MASS is what matters. Mass governs the size, lifetime, luminosity, and temperature of the star.
Ah! Fair enough, I didn't realise how important the mass was to a star. When you put it in those terms, R136a1 suddenly becomes much more impressive.
The article states that R136a1 is 265 solar masses, however it doesn't say how big it is.
VY Canis Majoris is 2,100 times the size of the sun, and 230,000 times the size of Earth. It is so huge, that if it occupied the centre of our solar system, its boundaries would be Saturn's orbit.
If R136a1 is the heaviest star, then it must be considerably more dense than VY Canis Majoris, but I find the latter to be far more impressive.
It would be great if I could play my favourite game on my phone!
Even though I'm not a fan of football, I never call it soccer (which is slang for "association football").
Meanwhile, I'm always puzzled why American football is called "football" at all, since the whole point of football is that you kick a ball with your feet, you don't carry it. Having said that, rugby is also short for "rugby football", and American football is a derivation of rugby.
I don't really understand American football; it seems far more complicated and much slower than rugby.
As far as I know Linus isn't part of GCC, but he has clearly stated that he does not want C++ in the Linux kernel.
I can't speak for other people, but I recently bought a netbook and have been using F11 to view Firefox full screen, and not having the menus feels feels very restricting for some reason.
I also dislike tabs above menus and bookmarks - it just doesn't feel right with the tab UI that I'm used to, particularly considering how heavily I use them. I'm not normally that resistant to change, but this just grated immediately, and I hope there will be an option to choose between the two styles.
I built my own machine, it's a Core2 Duo E8400, with a Geforce 8800 GTS 512 video card and 2GB memory.
Actually I had no problem with stuttering until I upgraded from a 17" monitor to 24" widescreen monitor. I suspect that the plugin is trying to do something really stupid, as resizing the picture should be reasonably cheap for the processor (it's only stretching pixels, not drawing the original video at a higher resolution). If the video was passed to the graphics card to resize, there'd be no difference at all between fullscreen and windowed.
There are two girls in our current D&D group. And they aren't hideous trolls either.
In fact there are quite a few women in our university roleplaying society, albeit most of them don't tend to play D&D.
LOL, and yet lin-sux cannot play a flash video at full screen without stuttering. Perhaps you imbeciles should spend less time adding NUMA support to your crappy kernel and more time writing actual working video drivers. In the meantime, those of us who use our computers to get real work done will continue to use Windows 7 and OS X.
I can't say I've ever needed to play flash video at full screen at work (where I and most of the other researchers run Linux), as there's not much use in it. It does handle my simulations wonderfully though, particularly when I can run them in a console with screen on the server, then switch my PC off for the night. Not sure if it would be quite so seamless under Windows, as even the Windows users tend to run Linux in a VM to do the actual work.
At home though, my DVDs and avis run just fine at full screen, and at full frame rate; so do my games, and there are quite a few old ones that don't actually run under Windows any more. I'll admit that flash stutters quite badly if I try to run it at full screen; it's not a big deal though, as resizing the desktop resolution does the job just as well.
Not true at all. During my first degree (before I switched to maths) I had to frantically copy down notes off PowerPoint slides that I didn't have a hope of getting it all (this is where I learnt my dislike of PowerPoint). We regularly had four hours of lectures in a row, and my wrist cramped up so badly it hurt for ages afterwards. In the end, picking up a pen made my wrist tense up and hurt after only five minutes.
When I started doing maths, PowerPoint wasn't very popular, and most lecturers used a blackboard and chalk. Also the lecture scheduling tended to be two hours, then an hour break, then one hour, with occasional fourth lecture in the afternoon. I still had difficulties with my wrist, but it wasn't quite as bad (although during revision period it got really bad again). However, I also spent a lot of time on the computer, and using the mouse was very painful, so I try to use it as rarely as possible (and I'm obviously not an emacs user for much the same reason).
As for writing implement, I used a fountain pen until I started maths when it became too smudgy, then I switched to biro and pencil (I've noticed that paper quality has decreased in recent years, and it can be difficult to find paper that fountain pens write cleanly on). Since I started my PhD I've had relatively little writing to do, and my hand has mostly recovered.
I'm actually quite a fan of yyyy/mm/dd, since it is brilliant for archiving and sorting things, especially journals, webcomics, stuff that varies from day to day and needs to be stored. As you say, it sorts by order of occurrence. If you start trying to sort things by mm/dd/yyyy, then suddenly things get hopelessly out of order, it's like some middle ground that fails to satisfy anything.
However, for humans concerned with what today is (conversation, newspapers, forums etc.), generally the most important piece of information is the one that changes most rapidly, i.e. the day, which means that dd/mm/yyyy is most useful. Fortunately, the day only needs to be displayed for reading purposes, not for storage purposes.
I find this quite irritating in certain situations, particularly forums. Many US based forums won't allow you to change the date style to dd/mm/yyyy, which is more common in the rest of the world, and I often get confused trying to sort through entries. I got married on 1 May (01/05/09), not 5 January (05/01/09).
I could make arguments based on most immediately important number, and most significant/least significant ordering, but the Americans say "May the 1st", not "the 1st of May", and I think that's the reason they do it that way.
Luckily my date of birth is 19/12/81, so no one is likely to ask me what the 19th month of the year is.
While I would heartily agree that 4E does suck, I don't think it's for the reasons that you mention.
The simplified maths is good for everyone. Having 1d20 + half level works so much better than some of the 1/3rd of level that saves were using in 3E, or the "whatever we thought looked good" tables that 2E and earlier used. It also goes along way to fix some of the balance problems that plagued earlier editions, and made some characters unplayable or broken at high levels. Oh, it's very handy for eye-balling difficulties too, which speeds up play, and helps the story instead of the system.
As for the non-Euclidean geometry, they just substituted the d-2 norm for the d-infinity norm. This makes it much easier to figure out how far you can reach/go, and doesn't suffer from any weird 1-2-1-2 movement. You have a upper bound of 73% error in distance in 3-dim combat, and 41% in 2-dim combat, which is acceptible. In fact we've been using this form of movement for centuries, it's how kings move on a chessboard, and it allows for easy 3-dimensional combat without resorting to a calculator. And since they've made position in the game so damned important...
The healing system does take a bit of getting used to, but it makes sense in a weird kind of way, and it in no way prevents you from dying.
My criticisms are:
* it plays like a board game; a horrible, complex board game with too many rules. I really don't want to care if my character is in that square or the one next to it, it shouldn't matter.
* it has lost all of its character, all of those wonderful spells and systems that gave D&D its intrigue are gone.
* they changed stuff. Like halflings aren't small anymore. They're three-quarterlings.
* it feels like 90% of it is devoted to combat, and anything else is an afterthought.
* the classes are all based around their roles in combat, and how the mechanics work, whereas earlier editions actually cared about their roles in the world.
* it's meant to be mediaeval fantasy, but it really isn't.
* it's a min-maxer's paradise.
* if I create a character, I have to mangle it against the system to make it work, and spend hours figuring out how good they are in combat before I can even focus on their other abilities. Other RPGs let me create characters.
* I really don't know how to create new content (powers etc.) for the game, when this was so much easier in earlier editions.
* the awful artwork. I'd take Larry Elmore's 2E mediaeval fantasy style offerings over the hideous 4E posing three-quarterlings any day.
Not necessarily, I've seen a lot more weed in Scotland than I've seen hash.
Erm, so I hear.
*shuffles away*
Heterogenity and stochasticity are very important in modelling. Diseases are far less likely to die out in a deterministic model, and you end up modelling infinitesimally small individuals which can still affect the disease, such as "atto-foxes" allowing the persistence of rabies (Mollison, 1991).
Space is important too, as predator prey cycles seen in deterministic simulations (which are fairly similar to an SI model) don't occur in a stochastic model, unless you include space, and then you only get localised cycles.
Finally the most common model I've seen is actually an SEIR model, where the E is an exposed group, who are infected and infectious, but who are not yet symptomatic. They're the tricky group who can make stopping a disease very difficult. In zombie terms, it's the ill looking guy in your group who has been following you for the last 2 hours holding a bloody rag around his arm.
--
Mollison, D. (1991) Dependence of epidemic and population velocities on basic parameters. Mathematical Biosciences 107, 255-287.
Modelling a zombie outbreak?
That's entirely similar to the work I've been doing for the last year, modelling the spread of a disease among an animal population. I've been trying to work out under what situations culling will lead to an increase in the number of infecteds.
So, if I name the particular species I've been working on "zombies", and adjust some of the parameters, I've got an SI model that is not only very similar to this, but also includes spatial structure and stochasticity, which is crucial for describing the stability of the disease, and modelling the spread when the population size is low.
As a maths graduate, I'm confident that the methodology is correct, and the major point was to show the ballpark that the golden boulder would be vastly bigger than the known universe. I could improve the accuracy though.
Price of gold = £9.80/g, density of gold = 19.3g/cm^3, atomic weight of gold = 196.97g/mol. So 50p of gold has a mass of 0.5/9.8 = 0.051g, a size of 0.051/19.3 = 2.64x10^-3cm^3 or 2.64x10^-9m^3, this lump of gold has 0.051/196.96xL = 1.56x10^20 atoms (L is Avogadro's constant).
We previously established that 300 million years of (pretty rubbish) inflation at 0.0001% is an increase by a factor of 1.000001^(3x10^8) = 1.942x10^130. So the 50p piece of gold is now 5.134x10^121 m^3, and contains 3.030x10^150 atoms.
The universe is estimated to have a diameter of 7.8x10^10 light years, and about 10^80 atoms. So the lump of gold has 3.030x10^70 times as many atoms as the universe. Of course space is pretty sparse, so let's work out how big this boulder is going to be.
Let's assume the gold hasn't collapsed in on itself, but has instead formed a gold ball. It will have a diameter of 2*(.75/pi*5.134x10^121)^(1/3) = 4.611x10^40m, or 4.874x10^24 light years. This is 6.249x10^13 times or 62.5 trillion (that's 62.5 billion in traditional maths) times the size of the universe.
At this point a physicist can take over and tell me exactly what happens when you have a boulder of gold 6.25x10^13 times the size of the universe floating around in space.
Due to the exponential nature of inflation, say a meagre 5% per year, for 3x10^8 years, that's 1.05^(3x10^8)... and GNU Octave overflows.
Okay, let's try something a bit smaller, say 0.0001% per year inflation. That's an increase of 1.942x10^130. That's around 10^50 times as many atoms as there are in the known universe. So your golden boulders are about 10^50 times as big as the universe. Yep, that's pretty huge.
Let's go really small, say 0.000001% per year inflation. That's better, they've only increased to 20 times the size.
Still, the amount of economic growth that was going on in the first 200 million years probably wasn't that big. But let's say it remained constant until the year 1 CE. That's 2000 years of interest at 5%, and we're up to 10^40 times the size again.
At this point I start freaking out that the whole conversation was about spiders!
My wife was taught to use LaTeX in the library where she worked. It was however for some totally inappropriate use, like generating business reports or something, with numerous tables (which are not LaTeX's strong point). She's normally pretty technically inept, but she managed to learn LaTeX, although she hated using it. Of course she has no love for MS Word either.
Yes, it does default to digital, but it is a trivial change to switch to analogue, and it's a sensible default for people who are new to GNU/Linux and have a digital out on their card. Having said that, it's the change I always forget when I install a new distribution.
Much worse than that is the new reliance on PulseAudio that distributions like Ubuntu seem to have. PA always seems to set the number of speakers to 2, and requires editing a config file to set it to 4.1 (my own setup), which I would certainly not expect a new user to know about (not to mention the latency it produces and the CPU time it hogs). PA is always the first thing I remove if it's installed with the distro. However, for some people, PA offers more options and features than they'd get under Windows, so there are a few upsides.
My thoughts exactly. Turn the sound off in games and see just how much you lose your sense of immersion.
I would rank good sound above good graphics in a game (note: I still recognise a need for functional graphics, I'm just very flexible as to what I think they are).
Not sure if you'd consider it 8-bit arcade graphics or not, but in Doom 2, the sound of an Archvile howling always scared me. The sprite itself wasn't realistic or scary, but I knew what it was capable of, but I hadn't even *seen* it at this point. It was far more horrifying than any shiny ray-traced monster saliva.
I played Doom 2 after I played Half-Life, and in HL the scariest moments were probably stepping round the blind tentacle monsters, or running towards the kill switch while the behemoth charging after me down a corridor, and all I could see was its one red eye.
Graphics are of some importance to atmosphere, but they are not everything.