Volume shmolume. The real reason you need to get earphones is not to avoid hurting your friends' delicate ears with your Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, but to avoid having them hear all your game sounds and messages.
In several games I've played, there have been cases where I waste a perfectly planned ambush / attack / whatever, simply because the other player heard the background noise coming out of my PC speakers, and knowing exactly where my character was.
Earphones are a necessity, whenever you're surrounded by hard-core gamers.
Amen to that, Anonymous bro. Or else you'll have to suffer when the non-geek friend of a friend of a friend shows up with his PC running Windows 95, wanting to "join the fun", and then having to spend several hours trying to reconfigure his PC (obviously he didn't bring the installation CDs) only to find out that his Network card is useless.
Well i've had both good and bad team-work experiences in college. And what I've learned is that choosing the right team-mates has more influence on the outcome than the difficulty of the project.
In one case, I got assigned a team-mate (a friend of mine) who had a programming style just like mine. We both thought of the same things while programming, and we had a lot of fun during the semester. In the end, the project was a complete failure: we didn't complement each other, we were both lacking in the same areas, and therefore the project suffered a lot.
Next semester, while taking the same class (ouch!) I got assigned another teammate (even though my friend from the last semester wanted me to be his teammate again). This time, having learned from my previous experience, we started out dividing and assigning most of the work, depending on our areas of expertise. I was good at coding, he was good at planning, we were both good at database designing.
That was the best project I've done in my life. We were finishing it days in advance of the rest of the class, and although we did spend a lot of sleep-less nights coding (we drank so much coffee it looked like we had a Starbucks franchise in his kitchen), the result was really worth it. We got an A+.
So what did I learn in those cases?
- Don't confuse friendship with teamwork. You can have great friends who make lousy team-mates, and viceversa.
- Always work ahead of the schedule. It doesn't matter if you get zero sleep in the first weeks of the semester, you'll be thankful in the end, when everyone else has a ton of schoolwork to do and can't help you.
- Find team-mates who complement you. You suck at DB design? Get someone who's good at it. You haven't learned to code well? Join someone who can, and make yourself useful drawing diagrams and designing the project. Oh, and learn to code while you're at it.
- Drink lots of coffee and get used to the lack of sleep.
- If you're stuck with a team-mate who's dragging you down, talk to your teachers. You can't always save a big project by yourself, and if you try you could affect your other courses. Sometimes it's better to get a regular score in a project than to waste your time trying to save it. Besides, many of the teacher I had, when confronted with this situation, decided to split the score according to each student's contribution, so you had teams where the good student got an A or B by proving he had worked well in the project, and the other student failed the course.
- What's good for the team is good for both. If you can learn something, anything, from your teammate, try to do so. And viceversa, try to help him (him, her, whatever) in the areas in which he's lacking.
- CYOA. It's your future that's at stake here. If you find your teammate is cheating in the project, try to make him stop. If he doesn't stop, talk to your teacher. It may be true that nobody likes a snitch, but you're risking a LOT by helping him.
I hope all this drivel actually helps any CS students out there. Good luck!
Just as an example, estimates differ, but 400-2000 innocent civilians were killed when the US invaded Panama to arrest a suspected drug smuggler some years back.
I remember I was half-awake listening to the radio in my bed (you know, when you're kind of lying there trying to get the energy to wake up) when the newsman was arguing with someone about the lack of information about a plane crash or something. A few moments later, he said something about "two planes instead of one". That deffinitely got my attention. Then he added, "both World Trade Center towers are in flame right now". That woke me up FAST.
I ran to the TV and turned it on, trying to find out what had happened, several minutes after the second impact. I told my father, who was getting ready to go to work, and then the rest of my family woke up, too.
I remember trying to find out what the fsck had happened, and obviously all of the news websites were overloaded... thankfully Slashdot was up and running (although a bit slow at times). I was switching between the TV and the PC, and I recall watching in disbelief as one of the towers collapsed. It really looked as a Hollywood movie. Then we started listening to the rumours: 8 planes hijacked, the Pentagon hit, Camp David attacked, San Francisco and Colorado, a car bomb in the Dept of State. An hour later, the second tower collapsed.
Me and my friends on ICQ started trading URLs trying to find out what was happening, while my family was trying to contact an uncle whose daughter was in NY on her honeymoon. I spent most of the day glued to the TV and the PC, wondering what was going to happen next.
Not even the news thay my city (Monterrey) was getting flooded after torrential rains could compare to the disaster in NY and Washington. Even the local stations split the time informing about the floods and the attack.
Our deepest condolences go out to the american people, from the people of Mexico (at least from everyone I know). I hope we can send you (if we haven't already) the rescue teams that have been in constant training ever since the Mexico City quake in '85.
Hang in there.
Scary signature at the bottom of this/. article: Excellent time to become a missing person. *Shiver*
By a stroke of good fortune, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory satellite happened to be looking when the presumed black hole enjoyed a quick snack of gas and dust. Analysis of the resulting belch -- a sudden X-ray flare that changed in intensity over a span of just a few minutes -- provided strong new support for the existence of the black hole. So when did this gas and dust turn into a comet, exactly?
This hipothesis of a giant blach hole at the center of the galaxy is really interesting... too bad we won't have the galactic center exploding, as in Larry Niven's "Known Universe" books.
And after making sure 98% have food, shelter, and clean drinking water. He can then make sure those 98% have a good enough education to be able to properly read and write. THEN he can worry about getting them on the internet. Seriously, what the hell is he thinking?
Well speaking as someone living in the country in question, I think I can see what he's thinking.
We need to feed that 98%, sure. Shelter, potable water, education, services, etc, they all cost money which we need to find somewhere. Selling oil can only get us so much. And we're not gonna earn the billions we need, by selling silver crap and trinkets to tourists.
We need infrastructure to develop businesses, commerce and the like, and right now the 'Net is one of the biggest business opportunities worldwide. So you can either give the people their daily fish, or help them build fisheries. Therefore, investing in infrastructure is investing on the future well-being of the people.
Politics and national economy, as usual, are anything but simple.
Hmm, you're absolutely right on both nitpicks. And I agree, it's deffinitely a must read. Too bad it wont ever be published here in Mexico, EVER. I'll just hafta cross the river into the States to get the final book of the series.
I did like Mindstar Rising, seemed to me like it was very similar to Neuromancer, but in a British setting. I'll just have to get the other two books.
Of course, Majel was a nice lady and a good actress, so they let her play Nurse Chapel....
And with her continuing role as the voice of the computer, it's fair to say she's the oldest recurring character (if her voice can be described as such) in the ST series.
Well it looks like that episode was based on Greg Bear's Blood Music, a sci-fi story dealing with MAB's - Medically Applicable Biochips. in that story, they MABs are "microscopic logic circuits which can be injected into the human body to troubleshoot".
He also developed this story into a novel, which I haven't read yet, so i can't say much about it.
To your list of recent good SF authors I'd have to add Peter F. Hamilton. His Reality Disfunction series is some of the best hard sci-fi I've read in the past few years. Consisting of a trilogy (which had to be split into 6 books in order to be marketed in the USA) and a few short stories set in the same universe, they have a level of depth and size I personally find really fascinating.
Of course, that's only my opinion, you know, my 2 fuseodollars' worth.
I imagine it's simply that philosophers aren't "exciting" enough for all the ADD-afflicted American audiences. Heh, at first I read "the AD&D-afflicted audiences". I thought it was kind of funny... until I gave it a second thought and realized that it's not so far from the truth.
After all, most of the people (that I know of) who like fantasy gaming also like to read all those AD&D-esque novels, or their siblings. The mighty warrior, the old cranky wizard, the bumbling thief... those are almost requisite characters in most fantasy novels nowadays. Not that they're bad per se, but sometimes they get a little bit too alike for my taste.
Seems to me like "Harry Potter" brought something new to the Fantasy readers, or at least to the kids.
Re:Great books, but way out of the genre
on
Harry Potter Wins Hugo
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
. Is "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" a fantasy, or a sci-fi, book? Come on, everybody knows it's a mystery book. Sure, it may have ghosts, time travel, aliens, spaceships, electric monks from another planet, and the bit about the horse, but it's deffinitely a "whodunit" book.
Obviously! You can't just drop random cultural references (FNORD) in one of your comments, and hope that the Force will guide their minds (with all of their assorted engrams) towards Illumination. It just not logical.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go make me a Protoculture / Spice martini (shaken, not stirred) at Moe's. Maybe a whole Beowulf cluster of them. Hmm... better not, after all it could be made OUT OF PEOPLE!! Damn them to Hell! (Being dragged away by agents Daggett and Scully)
Actually, when you come to think about it, it may not be as evil and greedy as it sounds. The article says that they're in the higher-level range of the middle class. Considering how bureocratic they say Russia is, would they be happier earning more money? More taxes, bribery, corruption, etc. (My apologies to any fellow Russian/. readers... this is what I've read about in the news)
And I know it sounds like a trollish comment, but you can't say a salary is too low or too high unless you consider the circumstances and the environment around it.
For instance, programmers here in Mexico earn about... i dunno, maybe one third of the salary paid to same-level programmers in the US, but the cost-of-living is considerably lower here. So you may get paid less, but you spend less money, too.
Although I wouldn't mind receiving a higher salary so I could get me a better 'puter!
Now how long until someone sets up a Nike-style (or kathy-lee-style) sweatshop where hundreds of chinese kids sweat it out over Apple IIe's pumping out lines and lines of turbo pascal...
Hmm, I always thought Microsoft had developed Windows 98 using the Chinese-hordes approach.
One's a liiiitle bit farther away from Cincinnati and Orlando than the other. Of course, with the power of the Internet, I suppose it makes no difference if you're in India or in Indiana.
Slashdot Mirror
Volume shmolume. The real reason you need to get earphones is not to avoid hurting your friends' delicate ears with your Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, but to avoid having them hear all your game sounds and messages.
In several games I've played, there have been cases where I waste a perfectly planned ambush / attack / whatever, simply because the other player heard the background noise coming out of my PC speakers, and knowing exactly where my character was.
Earphones are a necessity, whenever you're surrounded by hard-core gamers.
Amen to that, Anonymous bro. Or else you'll have to suffer when the non-geek friend of a friend of a friend shows up with his PC running Windows 95, wanting to "join the fun", and then having to spend several hours trying to reconfigure his PC (obviously he didn't bring the installation CDs) only to find out that his Network card is useless.
On each and every CD they're gonna start puting a big sticker that reads:
"WARNING! This CD includes N*Sync's latest hit. Not recommended for Linux users, pregnant women, MP3 rippers or anyone with an IQ over 50".
Well i've had both good and bad team-work experiences in college. And what I've learned is that choosing the right team-mates has more influence on the outcome than the difficulty of the project.
In one case, I got assigned a team-mate (a friend of mine) who had a programming style just like mine. We both thought of the same things while programming, and we had a lot of fun during the semester. In the end, the project was a complete failure: we didn't complement each other, we were both lacking in the same areas, and therefore the project suffered a lot.
Next semester, while taking the same class (ouch!) I got assigned another teammate (even though my friend from the last semester wanted me to be his teammate again). This time, having learned from my previous experience, we started out dividing and assigning most of the work, depending on our areas of expertise. I was good at coding, he was good at planning, we were both good at database designing.
That was the best project I've done in my life. We were finishing it days in advance of the rest of the class, and although we did spend a lot of sleep-less nights coding (we drank so much coffee it looked like we had a Starbucks franchise in his kitchen), the result was really worth it. We got an A+.
So what did I learn in those cases?
- Don't confuse friendship with teamwork. You can have great friends who make lousy team-mates, and viceversa.
- Always work ahead of the schedule. It doesn't matter if you get zero sleep in the first weeks of the semester, you'll be thankful in the end, when everyone else has a ton of schoolwork to do and can't help you.
- Find team-mates who complement you. You suck at DB design? Get someone who's good at it. You haven't learned to code well? Join someone who can, and make yourself useful drawing diagrams and designing the project. Oh, and learn to code while you're at it.
- Drink lots of coffee and get used to the lack of sleep.
- If you're stuck with a team-mate who's dragging you down, talk to your teachers. You can't always save a big project by yourself, and if you try you could affect your other courses. Sometimes it's better to get a regular score in a project than to waste your time trying to save it. Besides, many of the teacher I had, when confronted with this situation, decided to split the score according to each student's contribution, so you had teams where the good student got an A or B by proving he had worked well in the project, and the other student failed the course.
- What's good for the team is good for both. If you can learn something, anything, from your teammate, try to do so. And viceversa, try to help him (him, her, whatever) in the areas in which he's lacking.
- CYOA. It's your future that's at stake here. If you find your teammate is cheating in the project, try to make him stop. If he doesn't stop, talk to your teacher. It may be true that nobody likes a snitch, but you're risking a LOT by helping him.
I hope all this drivel actually helps any CS students out there. Good luck!
The web must be filling some need for you, or you'd find something better to do with your time...
So where did we jump from "surfing the Web for pleasure and entertainment" to "surfing the Web in order to buy stuff"?
I like to watch TV, but that doesn't mean I look at the commercials or buy anything from the Home Shopping Network.
Just as an example, estimates differ, but 400-2000 innocent civilians were killed when the US invaded Panama to arrest a suspected drug smuggler some years back.
A U.S.-funded drug smuggler, some people might add.
I remember I was half-awake listening to the radio in my bed (you know, when you're kind of lying there trying to get the energy to wake up) when the newsman was arguing with someone about the lack of information about a plane crash or something. A few moments later, he said something about "two planes instead of one". That deffinitely got my attention. Then he added, "both World Trade Center towers are in flame right now". That woke me up FAST.
/. article: Excellent time to become a missing person. *Shiver*
I ran to the TV and turned it on, trying to find out what had happened, several minutes after the second impact. I told my father, who was getting ready to go to work, and then the rest of my family woke up, too.
I remember trying to find out what the fsck had happened, and obviously all of the news websites were overloaded... thankfully Slashdot was up and running (although a bit slow at times). I was switching between the TV and the PC, and I recall watching in disbelief as one of the towers collapsed. It really looked as a Hollywood movie. Then we started listening to the rumours: 8 planes hijacked, the Pentagon hit, Camp David attacked, San Francisco and Colorado, a car bomb in the Dept of State. An hour later, the second tower collapsed.
Me and my friends on ICQ started trading URLs trying to find out what was happening, while my family was trying to contact an uncle whose daughter was in NY on her honeymoon. I spent most of the day glued to the TV and the PC, wondering what was going to happen next.
Not even the news thay my city (Monterrey) was getting flooded after torrential rains could compare to the disaster in NY and Washington. Even the local stations split the time informing about the floods and the attack.
Our deepest condolences go out to the american people, from the people of Mexico (at least from everyone I know). I hope we can send you (if we haven't already) the rescue teams that have been in constant training ever since the Mexico City quake in '85.
Hang in there.
Scary signature at the bottom of this
By a stroke of good fortune, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory satellite happened to be looking when the presumed black hole enjoyed a quick snack of gas and dust. Analysis of the resulting belch -- a sudden X-ray flare that changed in intensity over a span of just a few minutes -- provided strong new support for the existence of the black hole. So when did this gas and dust turn into a comet, exactly?
This hipothesis of a giant blach hole at the center of the galaxy is really interesting... too bad we won't have the galactic center exploding, as in Larry Niven's "Known Universe" books.
Does this mean that companies will soon be smuggling cheap SysAdmins across the border?
No, we can't compete with the Russians in that area.
And after making sure 98% have food, shelter, and clean drinking water. He can then make sure those 98% have a good enough education to be able to properly read and write. THEN he can worry about getting them on the internet. Seriously, what the hell is he thinking?
Well speaking as someone living in the country in question, I think I can see what he's thinking.
We need to feed that 98%, sure. Shelter, potable water, education, services, etc, they all cost money which we need to find somewhere. Selling oil can only get us so much. And we're not gonna earn the billions we need, by selling silver crap and trinkets to tourists.
We need infrastructure to develop businesses, commerce and the like, and right now the 'Net is one of the biggest business opportunities worldwide. So you can either give the people their daily fish, or help them build fisheries. Therefore, investing in infrastructure is investing on the future well-being of the people.
Politics and national economy, as usual, are anything but simple.
Well considering that about 40% of the United States once belonged to Mexico, I'd say we're getting our payback...
And 100% of us Mexicans would be living in the US, too, if only you got rid of Taco Bell and that damned talking chihuahua dog.
Hmm, you're absolutely right on both nitpicks. And I agree, it's deffinitely a must read. Too bad it wont ever be published here in Mexico, EVER. I'll just hafta cross the river into the States to get the final book of the series.
I did like Mindstar Rising, seemed to me like it was very similar to Neuromancer, but in a British setting. I'll just have to get the other two books.
Of course, Majel was a nice lady and a good actress, so they let her play Nurse Chapel....
And with her continuing role as the voice of the computer, it's fair to say she's the oldest recurring character (if her voice can be described as such) in the ST series.
Come on. Everyone knows that Number One was and always will be William T. Riker.
Well it looks like that episode was based on Greg Bear's Blood Music, a sci-fi story dealing with MAB's - Medically Applicable Biochips. in that story, they MABs are "microscopic logic circuits which can be injected into the human body to troubleshoot".
He also developed this story into a novel, which I haven't read yet, so i can't say much about it.
To your list of recent good SF authors I'd have to add Peter F. Hamilton. His Reality Disfunction series is some of the best hard sci-fi I've read in the past few years. Consisting of a trilogy (which had to be split into 6 books in order to be marketed in the USA) and a few short stories set in the same universe, they have a level of depth and size I personally find really fascinating.
Of course, that's only my opinion, you know, my 2 fuseodollars' worth.
I imagine it's simply that philosophers aren't "exciting" enough for all the ADD-afflicted American audiences. Heh, at first I read "the AD&D-afflicted audiences". I thought it was kind of funny... until I gave it a second thought and realized that it's not so far from the truth.
After all, most of the people (that I know of) who like fantasy gaming also like to read all those AD&D-esque novels, or their siblings. The mighty warrior, the old cranky wizard, the bumbling thief... those are almost requisite characters in most fantasy novels nowadays. Not that they're bad per se, but sometimes they get a little bit too alike for my taste.
Seems to me like "Harry Potter" brought something new to the Fantasy readers, or at least to the kids.
. Is "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" a fantasy, or a sci-fi, book?
Come on, everybody knows it's a mystery book. Sure, it may have ghosts, time travel, aliens, spaceships, electric monks from another planet, and the bit about the horse, but it's deffinitely a "whodunit" book.
...which makes it worth while to waste a whole afternoon reading Slashdot.
Butter John Wayne: Party on, Garth!
Butter Garth Brooks: Party on, Wayne!
(Easy karma... Ka-shing!)
Obviously! You can't just drop random cultural references (FNORD) in one of your comments, and hope that the Force will guide their minds (with all of their assorted engrams) towards Illumination. It just not logical.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go make me a Protoculture / Spice martini (shaken, not stirred) at Moe's. Maybe a whole Beowulf cluster of them. Hmm... better not, after all it could be made OUT OF PEOPLE!! Damn them to Hell! (Being dragged away by agents Daggett and Scully)
(Did I miss anything?)
WTF is up with Australia?
Austria. Not Australia. And I always thought nothing was "up" with Australia, "the land down under".
Actually, when you come to think about it, it may not be as evil and greedy as it sounds. The article says that they're in the higher-level range of the middle class. Considering how bureocratic they say Russia is, would they be happier earning more money? More taxes, bribery, corruption, etc. (My apologies to any fellow Russian /. readers... this is what I've read about in the news)
And I know it sounds like a trollish comment, but you can't say a salary is too low or too high unless you consider the circumstances and the environment around it.
For instance, programmers here in Mexico earn about... i dunno, maybe one third of the salary paid to same-level programmers in the US, but the cost-of-living is considerably lower here. So you may get paid less, but you spend less money, too.
Although I wouldn't mind receiving a higher salary so I could get me a better 'puter!
Now how long until someone sets up a Nike-style (or kathy-lee-style) sweatshop where hundreds of chinese kids sweat it out over Apple IIe's pumping out lines and lines of turbo pascal...
Hmm, I always thought Microsoft had developed Windows 98 using the Chinese-hordes approach.
So which one is it?
One's a liiiitle bit farther away from Cincinnati and Orlando than the other. Of course, with the power of the Internet, I suppose it makes no difference if you're in India or in Indiana.