Get a Mac? According to the FAQ, the disc appears as a normal CD on a Mac. Anyone know if the content is the same, or are there extras that you get for enabling viruses on your PC?
Apple has never been anti-MS. They've been seriously anti-Windows. And with good reason. The Mac BU of Microsoft actually produces nicer applications than the Windows division (except recently, when they've gone a bit overboard with the whole semi-transparent whooshiness enabled by Quartz)... But Windows Still Sux (tm).
That's a statement. You might argue that it is true or false, and in fact, several people do. I know where I fall in the argument. BUT, the statement is a statement of opinion, and its truth or falsity is open to debate. One might even say that its veracity is somewhere between true and false in the sense that he might be harming the country in some ways and helping it in others.
Statements of opinion are referred to as "bias" in Wikipedia and other encyclopedias, but they're not terribly escapable if you want to be complete. The trick as a reader is to recognize opinion, and the trick as an editor is not necessarily stamp it out, but to prevent it from becoming FUD and call it out specifically as an opinion.
The Wikipedia article on Intelligent Design appears to be a good example of how to write about a sensitive topic. Good on them... or us!
Apple is including USB2 instead of firewire because most windows boxes have USB2 instead of IEEE1394, and when they do have IEEE1394, it tends to be the 4-pin mini version without the power supply. Most of the iPods are bought by windows users (there are a whole lot more of them), so Apple exchanged firewire for USB2. Mac folk aren't hurt because most Macs (and all recent ones) have USB2 on them as well.
It doesn't mean that Apple is "backing away" from Firewire, just that they've done some market research, and are responding to their customers. Don't expect the firewire port to go away any time soon...
Can anyone tell me how the "pusher" satellite in the picture is supposed to work? I see one beam of energy with enough force to accelerate a spacecraft with a lot of force. Either there's an invisible other beam balancing this out, scorching the Earth underneath, or the satellite is doing a much better job of propelling itself out of the solar system than it is pushing the distant spacecraft where it's supposed to go. Or has someone figured out how to suspend Newton's second law?
LowOnCash, meet Apple Store. Apple Store, meet LowOnCash. Go explore! Take your time! Have fun! Try an iMac. A G5. Download some programs. Run them. Whatever.
Here's an anti-spam system. Let's say it costs the sender one dime ($0.10) to send an e-mail to a single person. The receiver, on deciding that the mail was valid non-spam e-mail, can push a button that effectively returns the dime to the sender. This can be automated so that trashing an e-mail, as opposed to filing it, prevents the dime from being returned automatically.
If a spammer wants to drop a dime every time they send me something, I'm all for it. It's their money, and it goes to upkeep the bandwidth they waste. For me, it only costs me something like $7.00 for the maximum amount of outstanding e-mail I'll ever have. (Big parties on evite cost money, but you're inviting your friends, so you'll get your dimes back.)
Naturally, this only works if everyone's on the same system, but all it takes is one of the major e-mail address vendors to implement it and everyone will have to jump on to be able to send e-mail to their clients...
I wrote a similar challenge for the 1999 MIT AI Olympics: RoboSockey
It's a non-violent physically realistic (mostly) soccer game played in a 2D hockey rink, and
should run fine in your Java 1.1 browser. Beware Linux folks! Most Linux Java implementations translate Thread.sleep() into a no-op, which slows this program down tremendously -- there are 14 threads running here!
Most of the teams were written in less than a day, so the ones that work tend to chase the ball like a bunch of 6th graders.
</plug>
Anyway, all the games listed here really help students get into programming. It's important to learn algorithms, and all that... but nothing beats watching your code interact with a real or simulated world. Anything you can use to get folks interested and keep them long enough to get them involved helps!
Re:First impressions of A.I.
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
It's amazing how much Kubrick shows up in this movie. One of the first complaints I heard after this movie was, "Hey, there's no character development!" This struck me as particularly Kubrickian -- he tends to prefer ideas to story, and force the viewer to ponder the meanings he's trying to get across (at least in the few true Kubrick movies I've seen).
I happen to prefer storytelling to tableaus, which is why the third act pissed me off so much. I thought the movie missed a perfect opportunity to end at the end of the second act. I must have missed the point of act 3, because it seemed to me that it was tacked on simply to provide a Hollywood Ending (everything wrapped up). Exposition belongs in the front of a story; if you find yourself explaining things too much towards the end, it's an indication that you're making the storytelling equivalent of a run-on sentence.
I do have to admit that I liked the movie a lot until that point, and any movie that makes you think and talk as you leave the theater is a good movie in my book, but I can't help but feel a little disappointed in Spielberg's handling of the story.
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Get a Mac? According to the FAQ, the disc appears as a normal CD on a Mac. Anyone know if the content is the same, or are there extras that you get for enabling viruses on your PC?
Apple has never been anti-MS. They've been seriously anti-Windows. And with good reason. The Mac BU of Microsoft actually produces nicer applications than the Windows division (except recently, when they've gone a bit overboard with the whole semi-transparent whooshiness enabled by Quartz)... But Windows Still Sux (tm).
"G.W. Bush is harming the USA".
That's a statement. You might argue that it is true or false, and in fact, several people do. I know where I fall in the argument. BUT, the statement is a statement of opinion, and its truth or falsity is open to debate. One might even say that its veracity is somewhere between true and false in the sense that he might be harming the country in some ways and helping it in others.
Statements of opinion are referred to as "bias" in Wikipedia and other encyclopedias, but they're not terribly escapable if you want to be complete. The trick as a reader is to recognize opinion, and the trick as an editor is not necessarily stamp it out, but to prevent it from becoming FUD and call it out specifically as an opinion.
The Wikipedia article on Intelligent Design appears to be a good example of how to write about a sensitive topic. Good on them... or us!
Apple is including USB2 instead of firewire because most windows boxes have USB2 instead of IEEE1394, and when they do have IEEE1394, it tends to be the 4-pin mini version without the power supply. Most of the iPods are bought by windows users (there are a whole lot more of them), so Apple exchanged firewire for USB2. Mac folk aren't hurt because most Macs (and all recent ones) have USB2 on them as well.
It doesn't mean that Apple is "backing away" from Firewire, just that they've done some market research, and are responding to their customers. Don't expect the firewire port to go away any time soon...
Can anyone tell me how the "pusher" satellite in the picture is supposed to work? I see one beam of energy with enough force to accelerate a spacecraft with a lot of force. Either there's an invisible other beam balancing this out, scorching the Earth underneath, or the satellite is doing a much better job of propelling itself out of the solar system than it is pushing the distant spacecraft where it's supposed to go. Or has someone figured out how to suspend Newton's second law?
LowOnCash, meet Apple Store. Apple Store, meet LowOnCash. Go explore! Take your time! Have fun! Try an iMac. A G5. Download some programs. Run them. Whatever.
Here's an anti-spam system. Let's say it costs the sender one dime ($0.10) to send an e-mail to a single person. The receiver, on deciding that the mail was valid non-spam e-mail, can push a button that effectively returns the dime to the sender. This can be automated so that trashing an e-mail, as opposed to filing it, prevents the dime from being returned automatically.
If a spammer wants to drop a dime every time they send me something, I'm all for it. It's their money, and it goes to upkeep the bandwidth they waste. For me, it only costs me something like $7.00 for the maximum amount of outstanding e-mail I'll ever have. (Big parties on evite cost money, but you're inviting your friends, so you'll get your dimes back.)
Naturally, this only works if everyone's on the same system, but all it takes is one of the major e-mail address vendors to implement it and everyone will have to jump on to be able to send e-mail to their clients...
Here's to wishful thinking...
Six year old soccer players is what you get when you give the MIT AI Lab folk one day to write a soccer-playing team in Java:
AI Olympics Sockey
(note: this applet was written independently of the Robocup tournament and doesn't share the same rules or physics.)
I wrote a similar challenge for the 1999 MIT AI Olympics: RoboSockey
It's a non-violent physically realistic (mostly) soccer game played in a 2D hockey rink, and
should run fine in your Java 1.1 browser. Beware Linux folks! Most Linux Java implementations translate Thread.sleep() into a no-op, which slows this program down tremendously -- there are 14 threads running here!
Most of the teams were written in less than a day, so the ones that work tend to chase the ball like a bunch of 6th graders.
</plug>
Anyway, all the games listed here really help students get into programming. It's important to learn algorithms, and all that... but nothing beats watching your code interact with a real or simulated world. Anything you can use to get folks interested and keep them long enough to get them involved helps!
It's amazing how much Kubrick shows up in this movie. One of the first complaints I heard after this movie was, "Hey, there's no character development!" This struck me as particularly Kubrickian -- he tends to prefer ideas to story, and force the viewer to ponder the meanings he's trying to get across (at least in the few true Kubrick movies I've seen).
I happen to prefer storytelling to tableaus, which is why the third act pissed me off so much. I thought the movie missed a perfect opportunity to end at the end of the second act. I must have missed the point of act 3, because it seemed to me that it was tacked on simply to provide a Hollywood Ending (everything wrapped up). Exposition belongs in the front of a story; if you find yourself explaining things too much towards the end, it's an indication that you're making the storytelling equivalent of a run-on sentence.
I do have to admit that I liked the movie a lot until that point, and any movie that makes you think and talk as you leave the theater is a good movie in my book, but I can't help but feel a little disappointed in Spielberg's handling of the story.