Hmm.. I worked at WorldCom back before they acquired MCI (actually, I quit just as the deal was being finished).. I actually liked my job there.. I quit to further my career, but the department I was in was excellent...
I don't know if my opinion really counts tho.. the department I was in was a seperate company that was purchased and integrated into WCOM. At the time it was a small company, so it was basically just made a department inside of WCOM with almost no changes. The group was an excellent group with great managment (hence why WCOM wanted to purchase them rather than just contract to them).. the job I did required that I worked the midnights shift (I was sorta a program's analyst on a mission critical project that required attention around the clock).. So I worked all night and didn't have to spend much time with the WCOM politics..
Actually, I miss that job most of all.. we were in a HUGE building, full of cubes that was completely empty.. the particular project I was on was only busy about 4 days out of the month, the rest of the time was spent pretty much idle.. we had a total blast.. we'd go through peoples cubes and rearange them.. we'd have cart races down the barren hallways.. we'd take off for hours and go to denny's in the middle of the night.. there was almost no one else in the building, so we were pretty unsupervised and all college age students.. so we had fun fun fun!:)
IMHO WCOM was a blast to work for.. but I bet your results will vary!:)
Its not an argument. Its the reason behind the QWERTY design. Its not like they just put the keys were just thrown on a table and some guy said "this is how it will be laid out." Call that fact an argument is like saying "well, we made the tires on a car round because rubber comes in circles."
The QWERTY keyboard was not in any way designed to slow down your typing, but it was designed to make it less likely that any 2 letters typed would be adjacent to each other on the keyboard. The problems with keyboard jamming happened to be when the typist typed 2 key's adjacent on the keyboard in rapid succession. Instead of designing a slower keyboard, it was decided to design a keyboard that would have commonly used successive keys spread apart on the keyboard.
The sick sad reality is there is no better keyboard design in the world than QWERTY. There may be keyboard designs that are equal in convience as the QWERTY keyboard (like the Dvorak), but no keyboard offers such grand improvments that it's worth changing the current huge install base of keyboards (not to mention the logistics and lost time of retraining everyone).
Now, inevitably a vehement Dvorak enthusiast will reply and tell me how poor the QWERTY design is at keeping adjacent keys from being typed. I will respond in advance by saying: I never said the QWERTY keyboard was perfect at what it was designed to do, however, there is no longer a need to worry about keyboard jamming, so the question still remains.. Why go through a massive change?
The terrorists are going to have a very hard time winning if they won't even tell us what their goal is. Your post is the first I have seen stating this goal, and I have seen no discussions about the US even thinking about pulling out of the middle east. If that really is the terrorists' goal, they'd better step up and announce it. Otherwise, nobody is even thinking about it.
Osama bin Laden has mentioned several times that he is at all out War with the US because of our troops in Saudi Arabia, and our 'meddling' in Muslim affairs.. I think it's fairly well known that if the terrorist attacks were directed by Mr. bin Laden (which it seems they were) that the attacks have the exact goal that the original poster stated.. Perhaps you aren't aware of the goals of bin Laden, but I would have to say you are probably in the minority on this point..
I believe the reason that you haven't heard any discussions of the US pulling out of the Middle East is because this is clearly not an option. In other words, it's not that we don't understand bin Laden's goals.. it is that his goals are completely unrealistic to the point that no one can even imagine complying with them..
In this case bin Laden is acting out like a child throwing a fit.. If a child were to throw a temper tantrum because his parents won't give him 10 million dollars, his parents won't even remotely discuss giving in to the childs demands as they are impossible to meet... if the child had less unrealistic goals, his parents would at least discuss giving in (like if the child wanted 2 dollars for a new toy).. Perhaps if bin Laden had less unrealistic goals people would be discussing meeting those goals rather than stopping bin Laden.. but the reality is bin Laden has his sights set way to high..
So I suppose KFMDM's Power [kmfdm.net] and Son of a Gun [kmfdm.net] are right out;-)
Being a very long time KMFDM fan.. I'm going to assume that if any of KMFDM's songs were sloted for air time on the radio (very unlikely to happen in my experience) the radio station would decide not to play the soung... I forgot the name of the song (it's on Nihil, but since I listen to primarly cd's I never can remember the song names) there is a song that has a sample of someone with an arabic accent (at least it sounds arabic to me) stating "Some people call them terrorists, these boys are just misguided"..
Most of KMFDM's songs probably would seem inappropriate to most of the mindless radio industry at this point in time.. Just on the albumn Nihil (which is one of my least favorite KMFDM albumns but since my previous example was from this albumn I thought I would draw more from it) you could check out the lyrics to Terror (which is about stripping away our civil liberties after a terrorist attack, hmmm, sound familiar? ) or Search and Destroy, either song is probably slated as unsuitable for play at the moment..;)
As another poster stated above, I'm amazed that The Cure's Killing An Arab isn't on the list of songs not to play.. but since that song's based on Albert Camus's The Stranger I guess we'd have to burn the book too!:)
What we are saying is they may have had legitimate greivances against the US, and maybe, just maybe we should sit up and take notice.
Lets see.. legitimate greivances like: it's impossible for bin Ladin and Afganistan or Iraq to move an army into Saudi Arabia and take over one of the richest oil producing countries in the world while there are US troops stationed there..
What?!?!?!!?.. Did I just say that bin Ladin is willing to kill thousands of innocent people and use his own people as suicide bombers against the US, not because of some religious belief, but instead because he wants Oil, which translates to money and power!!.. This can't be.. surely bin Ladin isn't just some money hungry greedy person that uses senseless rhetoric when he kills his very own people and performs great attrocities on the rest of mankind.. surely Mr. bin Ladin is really a great religious hero fighting a cause that us Americans just can't understand...
The Point: This is a war over oil and land.. they can complain all they want about the Holy land and fighting for Allah, but the truth is, the people leading this battle are in it for greed and power, and you shouldn't ever let their propaganda make you believe otherwise... The same people talking about the great attrocities that America performs are the people peforming these attrocities.. that's right.. they guy who did this isn't some kind of wonderfull religious hero, but he's performing these same attrocities to his very own people and blaming the US...
Ohh.. and if you don't believe me.. go read about bin Ladin's demands and why he's performed past bombings (and may or may not have done this current horrible act).. you'll find quite a bit about how he wants US troops to leave Saudi Arabia and very little about Isreal..
Re:US foreign policy, not global trade, the issue
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The US supported the corrupt regime of the Shah in Iran (so did the Brits).
The US supported the Afghan militias during the Soviet invasion. Osama bin Laden was trained under this support. The same people the US equipped, now rule Afghanistan.
The US has alternately supported and destabilized Iran and Iraq at various times.
The US has propped up the corrupt monarchies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
...and more
None of these examples show how the United States prevented stood in the way of the Freedom of the Arabic people.. I'm sorry that the Arabic leaders are keeping the Arabic people from their deserved freedom, but this isn't the US.. these people that are fighting a 'War of Terrorism' against the US are the very people restricting the freedom of the Arabic peoples... It's incredibly hypocritical for them to be constantly shouting how they are fighting the US in the name of freedom, when these people (Hussien, bin Laden, et al) are the very people that are performing atrocities and restricting the freedom of their people..
When a country is at war with one of our enemies, we may help to fund those wars... It's in our own self interst to do this.. This is in no way a restriction of the freedom of the people of those countries.. and we are more than allowed to change our opinions at a later date if these countries suddenly become a threat to our nation..
Re:US foreign policy, not global trade, the issue
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
see your children starving to death....
And this is the US's fault how?..
see your children dieing on contamination caused by A-10 amunition used in Kuweit/Iraq...
I've got a bright idea.. don't try to take over another country and we won't come in a shoot at you.. Iraq clearly started that fight..
see your children die on simple deseases because the embargo let not enough medicals through....
Again.. don't start wars with us you aren't prepared to fight.. I'm sorry that there is a trade embargo against these countries.. but again and again they prove they need to be punished (see the events of yesterday).. Get a clue, act like adults and we treat you like adults..
see your children be killed by armed civilians thinking your child had a stone in his hand where it was dried bread...
Again.. this is the US's fault how?.. The Arabic people are shooting each other because of us?.. doubt it..
USA denies everybodies freedom except their own citicens' (at least their own citicens believe they are free, nice trick)
How are we making anyone in the Middle East 'not free'?.. They have their own rulers.. we only ask that they don't invade neighboring countries that happen to be our allies.. that isn't restricting the freedom of the people in the Arabic countries.. How are the US citizen's not free?.. please give a few examples...
In the first article, it is obvious that this was faked, because the company admitted it and released a press statement. It comes straight from the company. On the other hand, the thing with the missle defense article is written by someone at salon who said that someone at MIT got some papers from someone and on and on. If this is true that it actually is faked, i want to see a press release by MIT saying that there was GPS in the system and they're dismissing the guy that was working on it. Slashdot always seems so quit to criticize the republican government. An article written about the past government that was a "He said that he said that he said" article would not have been published on slashdot.
Okay, I'm going to go a little off topic here but I just HAVE to ask what your thought proccess this morning was.. "Okay, I'm going to read one of the most liberal publications ever published in history.. *types in http://www.slashdot.org*.. OMFG!!!!!, they are bashing republicans.. how can this be!?!?!?"..:)
Of course I don't mean to offend, but I think you're fighting a loosing battle by calling slashdot.org anti-republican.. I'm fairly certain they MUST know.. if they don't there is something wrong!!:)..
Alas, I can't find the original, but the dialog went approximately:
"We can't sell it, we only have the prototype."
"Can't we sell the prototype?"
"The prototype is our competitor's model with duct tape over the label."
Actually, as I remember it it was a little worse,
Salesman: That mockup of the new product you did was perfect, the customer purchased 1000 of them to be shipped next quarter.
Dilbert: That was a mockup, the product wont be ready for another 2 years.
Salesman: Well the mockup worked perfect, we just need to make 1000 of those.
Dilbert: The mockup was our competitors product with Duct Tape over their label!
Obviously this is coming from my memory, but I thought it was made funnier by the fact that the salesman (bastards) had already sold a bunch of them based on the mockup!:)
If your e-mail quota are filling up, they should simply refuse to accept more mail, not delete old stuff. This scheme too is prone to denial of service, but at least your correspondents will know that their message to you was lost and that they should try again later.
I don't think this guy is speaking the truth.. my wife uses hotmail and this is exactly what happens when she runs out of space, hotmail stops accepting new mails. She has NEVER had a mail automatically deleted by hotmail (in over 2 years of hotmail usage)...
It sounds to me like you had somthing else going on, or you had a bad TNT2, I've played quite a lot of EQ over the past year on a TNT2 without a single crash, before that I was using a PCI TNT without a crash as well.
I would guess you either had a heating problem, old drivers lying around in the windows directory, or some motherboard/card interaction. nVidia has probably the best driver support out of all the consumer card companies, compared to say 3dfx who couldn't even be bothered supporting my Voodoo2 properly a little over a year after it was out and never did get a real OpenGL implementation going.
Well.. I'm 99% sure that it was a driver problem because if you follow my link lots of people are having the problem, and I have seen the problem happen on several different cards on different machines. All of the cards were from one vendor tho, IOMAGIC. Now, that aside, you guys have definately made me MUCH less worried about my decision to purchase a GeForce3 card for the new machine I am building. I have honestly been very worried about purchasing any Nvidia chipsets since I saw the problem. I know that lots of peope HAVEN'T had the problem, but the problem definately does exist...
really? I have a tnt2 (Diamond tnt2...I forget the revision number...) in my machine...I know its old, I'm waiting for creative to release a geforce3. But, I've had my Diamond Viper 770 forever (and so have all of my friends) and I (them too:-) have never had _any_ repeat _ANY_ problems with them. Be it using the drivers that came with the card, or the latest detenator drives I downloaded from Nvidia (for Linux or win32). Either your board was defective (did you try to exchange it?) or you shoved it into a pci slot some how. Was that voodoo5 you bought pci? If it was, have you ever tried another card in your AGP slot? That could be fried. Also, check your BIOS, do you only have 64 megs of ram, and have your AGP apeture size set to 64 megs? The TNT2 chipset was one of the best chipsets in my mind. I'm still running a Viper 770 on my windows boxen at home, and my linux box here at work.
Heheheh.. Yeah the voodoo 5 is AGP. I don't think it's the TNT2 chipset but the way the specific card vendor (IOMAGIC) integrated the chipset into the card didn't work with the drivers, i.e. the TNT2 chipset works fine.. but the IOMAGIC card has problems with the drivers. I agree that it is probably a problem with the IOMAGIC card, and not Nvidia, but the people who purchased IOMAGIC cards need support too!
If you see my name up there, I develop device drivers for PCI cards, so uhh.. I think I can tell the difference between a AGP slot and a PCI slot.. heheheheh.. funny to think about trying to fit a keyed agp card into a PCI slot.. I'm certain the pin locations are different, so if you did manage to get it in I don't think you would see ANY graphics..:)
The machine had 256 megs of ram, and I tried all the various AGP apeture size settings with no success.. the only way I could get the card to work reliably is to turn off hardware acceleration in windows all together, which wasn't an acceptable fix for me.
As for the card, I've seen several iomagic cards have the same problems (3 or 4 different cards that people have had) in some 3d games (it seems EQ and Half-life is the worst). Again, I think the chipset is probably okay, but the drivers didn't seem to work with iomagic's specific implimentation of the card.
As to the person who mentioned that it was funny that I got a Voodoo5.. Well I had only built the machine for 1 purpose, and that was to play Everquest. I purchased the Voodoo card AFTER Nvidia had purchased 3dfx, but I got it because I knew that card had very few issues with EQ, compared to the number of issues I saw people were having with the GeForce2 cards at the time.
uh, since when has nvidia had unstable drivers? They're usin' unified driver architecture, meaning that the same drivers that they made for the original Geforce 2 years ago now can be used with the geforce3 (although the drivers might need to be tweaked a little for the differentiating architecture). This gives Nvidia over 2 years to tweak their drivers for maximum stability and performance. the only reason why you're complaining, im assuming, is because you are using the leaked beta drivers that Nvidia never authorized. well guess what? they arent supposed to be out! So if you care about stability that much, just get yourself the official drivers and stop bashing the company for something it has done right:P
Well, I had to throw my TNT2 card into the trash because it had unstable drivers. I recently built a low end machine for my wife to play everquest, and since eq doesn't need a high end graphics card I purchased a TNT2. About 50% of the time that she zoned or started the game her comp would get a fatal exception 0E. In fact it would get this fatal exception:
A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C0006EB2 in VXD VMM (01)+ 00005EB2
After days of playing with it.. buying new memory, trying everything I could I finally find out this is a problem that the TNT2 card has been having for years. I would say the drivers are realitivly unstable. I bought a Voodoo5 card for the machine and it hasn't crashed since. If you goto this link you'll see that the only workaround I could find (the AGP apeture size and disable video caching did not work) was to TURN OF HARDWARE ACCELERATION. ROFL! Why by a 3d card at all if you have to turn off the hardware acceleration to get it to work properly? Can't even run EQ with the acceleration turned off. And just to prove that the problem is not eq's.. I had the same problem when running Half-life on the card.
It saddens me that Nvidia is quickly gaining a monopoly on the graphics industry, because I truely do not want to purchase another card from this company after they knowingly allow the old TNT2 cards to have driver problems without fixing it.
Doom did have a "Z dimension". In 3D graphics, Z is depth. You're saying "you couldn't jump". Yes, you had no controllability in vertical unless there was an element there for you to stand on. You couldn't jump, but you sure could fall real good.
Semantics.. Whichever you want to label up down deminision, Doom had none.. i.e. you could move side to side or front to back (2d) but not up or down.. now there was a cheesy hack that Carmack added that simulated an up/down-dimension, and if you read paper's he's written he specifically states that doom is 2d.. Granted to the average 3d developer X is up Y is right left and Z is depth into the screen, for the average slashdot reader this is confusing and there is no need to go into such silly details other than to argue semantics (i.e. YOU are wrong because you called it "blah" when it's really "foo".. big deal.. names are labels and nothing more)..
They get flattened to a 2-d array of pixels by your Geforce card, anyway.
Now you are again using semantics.. 'True 3d' as is defined by the gaming industry means the game contains a 3d model of the objects in the game and can render the objects based on the positional data. Granted the only interface we have to those objects is a 2d monitor, so in the long run it is displayed 2d, to be truely 3d it must as some point be represented by a true 3d model.
Bottom line: Doom was a true 3-d game with a few shortcuts and a missing control axis. It was much better distributed than Wolfenstein, and created the richness of atmosphere that pervades first-person shooters to this day. Wolfie was a testbed by comparison. Doom was the real deal. Quake was Doom in makeup.
Again that's just a stupid argument, Doom was in no way a 3d game if you look at what the industry defines as a True 3d game.. Doom was 2d.. everything was sprites.. there was no 3d rendering engine (in software or in hardware)..
Another you have missed that proves that Doom was 2d is that Doom lacked the ability to shoot at angles.. you could only shoot in front of you (not like Quake where you can shoot anywhere from directly in front of you to a 90 degree angle upwards)... if you look at a map of doom from above, you'll see a bunch of objects that exist on a x y grid, if I shoot in a straight line that intersects another x y point that contains a different object I hit it.. there is no z (in the standard use of Z in a geometrical system, for game developers this will actually be referred to as X).. i.e. if I shoot foward I don't have to worry if the object is jumping or ducking, it will still intersect.. The cheesy hack that Carmack added was that if you 'fall' to a different up/down dimension you actually enter a NEW 2d playing field.. if I stand on a playing field above yours (I'm on a box) you can't hit me.. we are on different fields..
I did it on purpose.:-) I just wanted the game to be something a little more dignified than "Ultimate Clash of the neferious Space slugs of hate".
The funny part is that I rejected about a dozen much worse names in my head before I finally decided on the much less offensive sounding space slugs title.. In other news, I've begun developing UCotNSSoH in another window here on my desktop, because it's just too good of a title not to have a booth at E3 next year.. I'm envisioning Space Slug Booth Babes!! WOOT!:)
now I'm sure that 50 people are going to reply and explain how the Ultimate Clash of the neferious Space slugs of hate or some other such game was the first 3d shooter
Actually, the first multiplayer 3d shooter was probably a tank fighting game that was a GL demo for SGI systems. Kind of a neat game actually. It got better as GL got better. Preceeded even Wolfenstein 3D, but it required awesomely expensive hardware.:-)
Thank you for proving my point! Did you do that on purpose? Like I said, I'm sure there were a million truely 3d (not 2d as in wolfenstien and doom) games that came out before Quake; however, not one of them had the success that quake did...
Does anybody remembers when exactly it all has started? The first game I remember is Wofenstein 3d, and is worse than Doom, but not that much. IMHO Doom is a better milestone than Quake.
If my memory isn't core-dumping, I remember that Doom had an improved 3d engine and better camera move as you walk. Oh, and had also 3d scenarios (although it has only 2d maps).
Can anybody help us to find where all this started?
Uhmm.. If you mean Doom had an improved 3d engine over quake then your memory has definately core dumped.. Doom was still 2d (only it was produced to look 3d.. but it had no Z dimension (i.e. you couldn't jump)).. quake was the first commercially successfull 3d first person shooter.. now I'm sure that 50 people are going to reply and explain how the Ultimate Clash of the neferious Space slugs of hate or some other such game was the first 3d shooter and that I'm a non-1337 14m3r and I should kill myself.. but Quake was the first COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFULL 3d shooter, there may have been other games that entered the field first, but non of them had the success of quake...
Both Wolfenstein and Doom were 2d shooters that attempted to make you think you were playing something in 3d.. look at the bad guys in those 2 games, they weren't 3 dimentional bad guys (i.e. there wasn't a model with 3 dimensions) but 2d drawings that were moved like sprites in a simulated 3d world.. if you looked at the sprite from the side or the back you just saw the front, or a 2d image of the side or a 2d image of the back of the critter.. i.e. there were no angles, not true 3d..
Yeah, I saw a boxed Macross DVD set for sale in this Sunday's Best Buy add in the local newspaper. I don't know all the specific episodes as I'm not a total anime freak, but I've thought about picking it up just for the Saturday morning nostalgia effect.:)
I think the price as advertised at Best Buy was only $34.95 for the 3 DVD box set.
Okay.. just to be a little helpfull.. it's very important that you realize that Macross and Robotech are COMPLETELY different series.. Robotech is what you saw as a child on TV, the first 12 episodes are in the box set that came out yesterday for 40 bucks (2 dvd's of episodes and 1 dvd of extra features). Macross is the Japanese version of Robotech (the original version) but has a widly different plot after the first season.. it eventually dwindles down to singing at the bad guys until they die..;) The entire macros box set is like 360 bucks when it comes out.. but it's every season.. the whole shebang..
Now, the Robotech that is 40 bucks is only 12 episodes of 85 total produced episodes.. so expect another 6 or 12 to be released at a time for the next year or two until the entire 85 episode series is out.. and of course sitting in my house!:).. I had the first box set of 12 episodes preordered since the day they started accepting preorders and I'm happy to say I got a notice of shipment yesterday, so I should be getting them soon!!:) WOOT!:)
Of course, I could be all wrong, they might be a fearsome fighting force, when they use their black helicopters, operating out of secret bases in the Pacific Northwest to take over the United States and establish a true world government.
Those of us in the Pacific Northwest have never seen any black helicopters and have no idea what you are talking about..
(*fnord*It's okay guys, I think he believed me!*fnord*)
And let's not even get into the heart disease issues brought to you by the meat, dairy, television, TV show, computer, computer game, console game box, and console game industries.
Heheheh.. good idea.. I'll jump on the class action lawsuit against EverQuest.. but only after my char's reach level 60!:).. I wouldn't want to put them out of buisness before then..
"You've agreed to give Bobo the Space Chimp an annual stipend of $20,000.00 by reading to the end of this sentence."
Wow.. I am glad I didn't read to the end of that sentence.. sheesh.. I'm a lucky guy!:)
IMHO (and I'm sure there's a really good technical reason for this), they missed the boat using a RGB color filter over a b/w pixel. Wouldn't it be much better to have three different-colored pixels -- cyan, magenta and yellow, perhaps?
They would still have the 1/3 of the resolution problem, though that seems pretty unavoidable with this kind of approach. But at least they'd have a truly CMYK reflective electronic display.
I suppose the really good techincal reason not to use CMY pixels has to do with the problem of assembly. Would keeping track of which pixels were which color be much harder than producing the filter they use in the current setup?
This was my first thought too, but in reading the article it sounds like a time to market thing. They decided the filtered approach would put them in the market very soon (the technology is already there) and other approaches were off in the distance. Even the company was complaining about the filtered approach in the article, so I would imagine we will see a better implimentation later, after they make a bit of money off the filtered idea.
Advertising everywhere? Sure. Along those lines, be afraid, and consider this;
genitics + advertising + fishing = Pepsi Fish
I'll give it 15 years before corporate sponsored 'wildlife' starts showing up -- and they'll be tasty too!:)
This is hilarious! The images it brings to my head are great.. things like "We've engineered our fish to desire the taste of plastic, so they will be much easier to catch with artificial lures", and we'll finally be able to go out to the woods and kill animals to eat that have NO nutritional value, just like the food we buy from these companies everyday! I just can't wait until Boca comes out with a genetically engineered vegitarian cow! Finally I can get REAL MEAT and still be vegan!:)
I wish to God people would stop idolizing Kevin Smith. His movies are interesting, but not remarkable. He should stick to writing essays and op-ed pieces instead of masquerading his mental debates as dramatic or comedic dialogue. I guess everyone has a need to feel that what they are watching is deep and important and while his movies are deep, they are certainly not important. Give us some classic character development and plot solidity.
Or, a better idea.. how about you quit watching them and let us have our fun.. jeez.. what did he kill your dog or something? Lighten up..;)
This guy reminds me of a lot of the girls i've gone out with. Trying to rationalize things and prove they are right about every single thing, no matter how outrageous and insane it might be.
Unfortunately it doesn't get any better.. in fact.. just wait until your married.. ohh the horrors..:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. I worked at WorldCom back before they acquired MCI (actually, I quit just as the deal was being finished).. I actually liked my job there.. I quit to further my career, but the department I was in was excellent...
:)
:)
I don't know if my opinion really counts tho.. the department I was in was a seperate company that was purchased and integrated into WCOM. At the time it was a small company, so it was basically just made a department inside of WCOM with almost no changes. The group was an excellent group with great managment (hence why WCOM wanted to purchase them rather than just contract to them).. the job I did required that I worked the midnights shift (I was sorta a program's analyst on a mission critical project that required attention around the clock).. So I worked all night and didn't have to spend much time with the WCOM politics..
Actually, I miss that job most of all.. we were in a HUGE building, full of cubes that was completely empty.. the particular project I was on was only busy about 4 days out of the month, the rest of the time was spent pretty much idle.. we had a total blast.. we'd go through peoples cubes and rearange them.. we'd have cart races down the barren hallways.. we'd take off for hours and go to denny's in the middle of the night.. there was almost no one else in the building, so we were pretty unsupervised and all college age students.. so we had fun fun fun!
IMHO WCOM was a blast to work for.. but I bet your results will vary!
At least they're not putting these things in cars, I'd sure hate to have a 10-20 gallon tank of highly flammable material anywhere NEAR my car.
:)
;)
After reading all of the responses to this, I have to bet that you wished you used the <sarcastic> tag!
It's times like thist that I wish I could spend my mod points on a +1 Sarcastic..
If it helps any.. I got it..
Its not an argument. Its the reason behind the QWERTY design. Its not like they just put the keys were just thrown on a table and some guy said "this is how it will be laid out." Call that fact an argument is like saying "well, we made the tires on a car round because rubber comes in circles."
It's not an argument. It's an urban legend .
The QWERTY keyboard was not in any way designed to slow down your typing, but it was designed to make it less likely that any 2 letters typed would be adjacent to each other on the keyboard. The problems with keyboard jamming happened to be when the typist typed 2 key's adjacent on the keyboard in rapid succession. Instead of designing a slower keyboard, it was decided to design a keyboard that would have commonly used successive keys spread apart on the keyboard.
The sick sad reality is there is no better keyboard design in the world than QWERTY. There may be keyboard designs that are equal in convience as the QWERTY keyboard (like the Dvorak), but no keyboard offers such grand improvments that it's worth changing the current huge install base of keyboards (not to mention the logistics and lost time of retraining everyone).
Now, inevitably a vehement Dvorak enthusiast will reply and tell me how poor the QWERTY design is at keeping adjacent keys from being typed. I will respond in advance by saying: I never said the QWERTY keyboard was perfect at what it was designed to do, however, there is no longer a need to worry about keyboard jamming, so the question still remains.. Why go through a massive change?
The terrorists are going to have a very hard time winning if they won't even tell us what their goal is. Your post is the first I have seen stating this goal, and I have seen no discussions about the US even thinking about pulling out of the middle east. If that really is the terrorists' goal, they'd better step up and announce it. Otherwise, nobody is even thinking about it.
Osama bin Laden has mentioned several times that he is at all out War with the US because of our troops in Saudi Arabia, and our 'meddling' in Muslim affairs.. I think it's fairly well known that if the terrorist attacks were directed by Mr. bin Laden (which it seems they were) that the attacks have the exact goal that the original poster stated.. Perhaps you aren't aware of the goals of bin Laden, but I would have to say you are probably in the minority on this point..
I believe the reason that you haven't heard any discussions of the US pulling out of the Middle East is because this is clearly not an option. In other words, it's not that we don't understand bin Laden's goals.. it is that his goals are completely unrealistic to the point that no one can even imagine complying with them..
In this case bin Laden is acting out like a child throwing a fit.. If a child were to throw a temper tantrum because his parents won't give him 10 million dollars, his parents won't even remotely discuss giving in to the childs demands as they are impossible to meet... if the child had less unrealistic goals, his parents would at least discuss giving in (like if the child wanted 2 dollars for a new toy).. Perhaps if bin Laden had less unrealistic goals people would be discussing meeting those goals rather than stopping bin Laden.. but the reality is bin Laden has his sights set way to high..
So I suppose KFMDM's Power [kmfdm.net] and Son of a Gun [kmfdm.net] are right out ;-)
;)
:)
Being a very long time KMFDM fan.. I'm going to assume that if any of KMFDM's songs were sloted for air time on the radio (very unlikely to happen in my experience) the radio station would decide not to play the soung... I forgot the name of the song (it's on Nihil, but since I listen to primarly cd's I never can remember the song names) there is a song that has a sample of someone with an arabic accent (at least it sounds arabic to me) stating "Some people call them terrorists, these boys are just misguided"..
Most of KMFDM's songs probably would seem inappropriate to most of the mindless radio industry at this point in time.. Just on the albumn Nihil (which is one of my least favorite KMFDM albumns but since my previous example was from this albumn I thought I would draw more from it) you could check out the lyrics to Terror (which is about stripping away our civil liberties after a terrorist attack, hmmm, sound familiar? ) or Search and Destroy, either song is probably slated as unsuitable for play at the moment..
As another poster stated above, I'm amazed that The Cure's Killing An Arab isn't on the list of songs not to play.. but since that song's based on Albert Camus's The Stranger I guess we'd have to burn the book too!
What we are saying is they may have had legitimate greivances against the US, and maybe, just maybe we should sit up and take notice.
.. that's right.. they guy who did this isn't some kind of wonderfull religious hero, but he's performing these same attrocities to his very own people and blaming the US...
Lets see.. legitimate greivances like: it's impossible for bin Ladin and Afganistan or Iraq to move an army into Saudi Arabia and take over one of the richest oil producing countries in the world while there are US troops stationed there..
What?!?!?!!?.. Did I just say that bin Ladin is willing to kill thousands of innocent people and use his own people as suicide bombers against the US, not because of some religious belief, but instead because he wants Oil, which translates to money and power!!.. This can't be.. surely bin Ladin isn't just some money hungry greedy person that uses senseless rhetoric when he kills his very own people and performs great attrocities on the rest of mankind.. surely Mr. bin Ladin is really a great religious hero fighting a cause that us Americans just can't understand...
The Point: This is a war over oil and land.. they can complain all they want about the Holy land and fighting for Allah, but the truth is, the people leading this battle are in it for greed and power, and you shouldn't ever let their propaganda make you believe otherwise... The same people talking about the great attrocities that America performs are the people peforming these attrocities
Ohh.. and if you don't believe me.. go read about bin Ladin's demands and why he's performed past bombings (and may or may not have done this current horrible act).. you'll find quite a bit about how he wants US troops to leave Saudi Arabia and very little about Isreal..
The US supported the corrupt regime of the Shah in Iran (so did the Brits).
The US supported the Afghan militias during the Soviet invasion. Osama bin Laden was trained under this support. The same people the US equipped, now rule Afghanistan.
The US has alternately supported and destabilized Iran and Iraq at various times.
The US has propped up the corrupt monarchies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
...and more
None of these examples show how the United States prevented stood in the way of the Freedom of the Arabic people.. I'm sorry that the Arabic leaders are keeping the Arabic people from their deserved freedom, but this isn't the US.. these people that are fighting a 'War of Terrorism' against the US are the very people restricting the freedom of the Arabic peoples... It's incredibly hypocritical for them to be constantly shouting how they are fighting the US in the name of freedom, when these people (Hussien, bin Laden, et al) are the very people that are performing atrocities and restricting the freedom of their people..
When a country is at war with one of our enemies, we may help to fund those wars... It's in our own self interst to do this.. This is in no way a restriction of the freedom of the people of those countries.. and we are more than allowed to change our opinions at a later date if these countries suddenly become a threat to our nation..
see your children starving to death ....
...
....
...
And this is the US's fault how?..
see your children dieing on contamination caused by A-10 amunition used in Kuweit/Iraq
I've got a bright idea.. don't try to take over another country and we won't come in a shoot at you.. Iraq clearly started that fight..
see your children die on simple deseases because the embargo let not enough medicals through
Again.. don't start wars with us you aren't prepared to fight.. I'm sorry that there is a trade embargo against these countries.. but again and again they prove they need to be punished (see the events of yesterday).. Get a clue, act like adults and we treat you like adults..
see your children be killed by armed civilians thinking your child had a stone in his hand where it was dried bread
Again.. this is the US's fault how?.. The Arabic people are shooting each other because of us?.. doubt it..
USA denies everybodies freedom except their own citicens' (at least their own citicens believe they are free, nice trick)
How are we making anyone in the Middle East 'not free'?.. They have their own rulers.. we only ask that they don't invade neighboring countries that happen to be our allies.. that isn't restricting the freedom of the people in the Arabic countries.. How are the US citizen's not free?.. please give a few examples...
In the first article, it is obvious that this was faked, because the company admitted it and released a press statement. It comes straight from the company. On the other hand, the thing with the missle defense article is written by someone at salon who said that someone at MIT got some papers from someone and on and on. If this is true that it actually is faked, i want to see a press release by MIT saying that there was GPS in the system and they're dismissing the guy that was working on it. Slashdot always seems so quit to criticize the republican government. An article written about the past government that was a "He said that he said that he said" article would not have been published on slashdot.
:)
:)..
Okay, I'm going to go a little off topic here but I just HAVE to ask what your thought proccess this morning was.. "Okay, I'm going to read one of the most liberal publications ever published in history.. *types in http://www.slashdot.org*.. OMFG!!!!!, they are bashing republicans.. how can this be!?!?!?"..
Of course I don't mean to offend, but I think you're fighting a loosing battle by calling slashdot.org anti-republican.. I'm fairly certain they MUST know.. if they don't there is something wrong!!
Alas, I can't find the original, but the dialog went approximately:
:)
"We can't sell it, we only have the prototype."
"Can't we sell the prototype?"
"The prototype is our competitor's model with duct tape over the label."
Actually, as I remember it it was a little worse,
Salesman: That mockup of the new product you did was perfect, the customer purchased 1000 of them to be shipped next quarter.
Dilbert: That was a mockup, the product wont be ready for another 2 years.
Salesman: Well the mockup worked perfect, we just need to make 1000 of those.
Dilbert: The mockup was our competitors product with Duct Tape over their label!
Obviously this is coming from my memory, but I thought it was made funnier by the fact that the salesman (bastards) had already sold a bunch of them based on the mockup!
If your e-mail quota are filling up, they should simply refuse to accept more mail, not delete old stuff. This scheme too is prone to denial of service, but at least your correspondents will know that their message to you was lost and that they should try again later.
I don't think this guy is speaking the truth.. my wife uses hotmail and this is exactly what happens when she runs out of space, hotmail stops accepting new mails. She has NEVER had a mail automatically deleted by hotmail (in over 2 years of hotmail usage)...
It sounds to me like you had somthing else going on, or you had a bad TNT2, I've played quite a lot of EQ over the past year on a TNT2 without a single crash, before that I was using a PCI TNT without a crash as well.
I would guess you either had a heating problem, old drivers lying around in the windows directory, or some motherboard/card interaction. nVidia has probably the best driver support out of all the consumer card companies, compared to say 3dfx who couldn't even be bothered supporting my Voodoo2 properly a little over a year after it was out and never did get a real OpenGL implementation going.
Well.. I'm 99% sure that it was a driver problem because if you follow my link lots of people are having the problem, and I have seen the problem happen on several different cards on different machines. All of the cards were from one vendor tho, IOMAGIC. Now, that aside, you guys have definately made me MUCH less worried about my decision to purchase a GeForce3 card for the new machine I am building. I have honestly been very worried about purchasing any Nvidia chipsets since I saw the problem. I know that lots of peope HAVEN'T had the problem, but the problem definately does exist...
really? I have a tnt2 (Diamond tnt2...I forget the revision number...) in my machine...I know its old, I'm waiting for creative to release a geforce3. But, I've had my Diamond Viper 770 forever (and so have all of my friends) and I (them too :-) have never had _any_ repeat _ANY_ problems with them. Be it using the drivers that came with the card, or the latest detenator drives I downloaded from Nvidia (for Linux or win32). Either your board was defective (did you try to exchange it?) or you shoved it into a pci slot some how. Was that voodoo5 you bought pci? If it was, have you ever tried another card in your AGP slot? That could be fried. Also, check your BIOS, do you only have 64 megs of ram, and have your AGP apeture size set to 64 megs? The TNT2 chipset was one of the best chipsets in my mind. I'm still running a Viper 770 on my windows boxen at home, and my linux box here at work.
:)
Heheheh.. Yeah the voodoo 5 is AGP. I don't think it's the TNT2 chipset but the way the specific card vendor (IOMAGIC) integrated the chipset into the card didn't work with the drivers, i.e. the TNT2 chipset works fine.. but the IOMAGIC card has problems with the drivers. I agree that it is probably a problem with the IOMAGIC card, and not Nvidia, but the people who purchased IOMAGIC cards need support too!
If you see my name up there, I develop device drivers for PCI cards, so uhh.. I think I can tell the difference between a AGP slot and a PCI slot.. heheheheh.. funny to think about trying to fit a keyed agp card into a PCI slot.. I'm certain the pin locations are different, so if you did manage to get it in I don't think you would see ANY graphics..
The machine had 256 megs of ram, and I tried all the various AGP apeture size settings with no success.. the only way I could get the card to work reliably is to turn off hardware acceleration in windows all together, which wasn't an acceptable fix for me.
As for the card, I've seen several iomagic cards have the same problems (3 or 4 different cards that people have had) in some 3d games (it seems EQ and Half-life is the worst). Again, I think the chipset is probably okay, but the drivers didn't seem to work with iomagic's specific implimentation of the card.
As to the person who mentioned that it was funny that I got a Voodoo5.. Well I had only built the machine for 1 purpose, and that was to play Everquest. I purchased the Voodoo card AFTER Nvidia had purchased 3dfx, but I got it because I knew that card had very few issues with EQ, compared to the number of issues I saw people were having with the GeForce2 cards at the time.
uh, since when has nvidia had unstable drivers? They're usin' unified driver architecture, meaning that the same drivers that they made for the original Geforce 2 years ago now can be used with the geforce3 (although the drivers might need to be tweaked a little for the differentiating architecture). This gives Nvidia over 2 years to tweak their drivers for maximum stability and performance. the only reason why you're complaining, im assuming, is because you are using the leaked beta drivers that Nvidia never authorized. well guess what? they arent supposed to be out! So if you care about stability that much, just get yourself the official drivers and stop bashing the company for something it has done right :P
Well, I had to throw my TNT2 card into the trash because it had unstable drivers. I recently built a low end machine for my wife to play everquest, and since eq doesn't need a high end graphics card I purchased a TNT2. About 50% of the time that she zoned or started the game her comp would get a fatal exception 0E. In fact it would get this fatal exception:
A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C0006EB2 in VXD VMM (01)+ 00005EB2
After days of playing with it.. buying new memory, trying everything I could I finally find out this is a problem that the TNT2 card has been having for years. I would say the drivers are realitivly unstable. I bought a Voodoo5 card for the machine and it hasn't crashed since. If you goto this link you'll see that the only workaround I could find (the AGP apeture size and disable video caching did not work) was to TURN OF HARDWARE ACCELERATION. ROFL! Why by a 3d card at all if you have to turn off the hardware acceleration to get it to work properly? Can't even run EQ with the acceleration turned off. And just to prove that the problem is not eq's.. I had the same problem when running Half-life on the card.
It saddens me that Nvidia is quickly gaining a monopoly on the graphics industry, because I truely do not want to purchase another card from this company after they knowingly allow the old TNT2 cards to have driver problems without fixing it.
Doom did have a "Z dimension". In 3D graphics, Z is depth. You're saying "you couldn't jump". Yes, you had no controllability in vertical unless there was an element there for you to stand on. You couldn't jump, but you sure could fall real good.
Semantics.. Whichever you want to label up down deminision, Doom had none.. i.e. you could move side to side or front to back (2d) but not up or down.. now there was a cheesy hack that Carmack added that simulated an up/down-dimension, and if you read paper's he's written he specifically states that doom is 2d.. Granted to the average 3d developer X is up Y is right left and Z is depth into the screen, for the average slashdot reader this is confusing and there is no need to go into such silly details other than to argue semantics (i.e. YOU are wrong because you called it "blah" when it's really "foo".. big deal.. names are labels and nothing more)..
They get flattened to a 2-d array of pixels by your Geforce card, anyway.
Now you are again using semantics.. 'True 3d' as is defined by the gaming industry means the game contains a 3d model of the objects in the game and can render the objects based on the positional data. Granted the only interface we have to those objects is a 2d monitor, so in the long run it is displayed 2d, to be truely 3d it must as some point be represented by a true 3d model.
Bottom line: Doom was a true 3-d game with a few shortcuts and a missing control axis. It was much better distributed than Wolfenstein, and created the richness of atmosphere that pervades first-person shooters to this day. Wolfie was a testbed by comparison. Doom was the real deal. Quake was Doom in makeup.
Again that's just a stupid argument, Doom was in no way a 3d game if you look at what the industry defines as a True 3d game.. Doom was 2d.. everything was sprites.. there was no 3d rendering engine (in software or in hardware)..
Another you have missed that proves that Doom was 2d is that Doom lacked the ability to shoot at angles.. you could only shoot in front of you (not like Quake where you can shoot anywhere from directly in front of you to a 90 degree angle upwards)... if you look at a map of doom from above, you'll see a bunch of objects that exist on a x y grid, if I shoot in a straight line that intersects another x y point that contains a different object I hit it.. there is no z (in the standard use of Z in a geometrical system, for game developers this will actually be referred to as X).. i.e. if I shoot foward I don't have to worry if the object is jumping or ducking, it will still intersect.. The cheesy hack that Carmack added was that if you 'fall' to a different up/down dimension you actually enter a NEW 2d playing field.. if I stand on a playing field above yours (I'm on a box) you can't hit me.. we are on different fields..
I did it on purpose. :-) I just wanted the game to be something a little more dignified than "Ultimate Clash of the neferious Space slugs of hate".
:)
The funny part is that I rejected about a dozen much worse names in my head before I finally decided on the much less offensive sounding space slugs title.. In other news, I've begun developing UCotNSSoH in another window here on my desktop, because it's just too good of a title not to have a booth at E3 next year.. I'm envisioning Space Slug Booth Babes!! WOOT!
now I'm sure that 50 people are going to reply and explain how the Ultimate Clash of the neferious Space slugs of hate or some other such game was the first 3d shooter
:-)
Actually, the first multiplayer 3d shooter was probably a tank fighting game that was a GL demo for SGI systems. Kind of a neat game actually. It got better as GL got better. Preceeded even Wolfenstein 3D, but it required awesomely expensive hardware.
Thank you for proving my point! Did you do that on purpose? Like I said, I'm sure there were a million truely 3d (not 2d as in wolfenstien and doom) games that came out before Quake; however, not one of them had the success that quake did...
Does anybody remembers when exactly it all has started? The first game I remember is Wofenstein 3d, and is worse than Doom, but not that much. IMHO Doom is a better milestone than Quake.
If my memory isn't core-dumping, I remember that Doom had an improved 3d engine and better camera move as you walk. Oh, and had also 3d scenarios (although it has only 2d maps).
Can anybody help us to find where all this started?
Uhmm.. If you mean Doom had an improved 3d engine over quake then your memory has definately core dumped.. Doom was still 2d (only it was produced to look 3d.. but it had no Z dimension (i.e. you couldn't jump)).. quake was the first commercially successfull 3d first person shooter.. now I'm sure that 50 people are going to reply and explain how the Ultimate Clash of the neferious Space slugs of hate or some other such game was the first 3d shooter and that I'm a non-1337 14m3r and I should kill myself.. but Quake was the first COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFULL 3d shooter, there may have been other games that entered the field first, but non of them had the success of quake...
Both Wolfenstein and Doom were 2d shooters that attempted to make you think you were playing something in 3d.. look at the bad guys in those 2 games, they weren't 3 dimentional bad guys (i.e. there wasn't a model with 3 dimensions) but 2d drawings that were moved like sprites in a simulated 3d world.. if you looked at the sprite from the side or the back you just saw the front, or a 2d image of the side or a 2d image of the back of the critter.. i.e. there were no angles, not true 3d..
Yeah, I saw a boxed Macross DVD set for sale in this Sunday's Best Buy add in the local newspaper. I don't know all the specific episodes as I'm not a total anime freak, but I've thought about picking it up just for the Saturday morning nostalgia effect. :)
;) The entire macros box set is like 360 bucks when it comes out.. but it's every season.. the whole shebang..
:).. I had the first box set of 12 episodes preordered since the day they started accepting preorders and I'm happy to say I got a notice of shipment yesterday, so I should be getting them soon!! :) WOOT! :)
I think the price as advertised at Best Buy was only $34.95 for the 3 DVD box set.
Okay.. just to be a little helpfull.. it's very important that you realize that Macross and Robotech are COMPLETELY different series.. Robotech is what you saw as a child on TV, the first 12 episodes are in the box set that came out yesterday for 40 bucks (2 dvd's of episodes and 1 dvd of extra features). Macross is the Japanese version of Robotech (the original version) but has a widly different plot after the first season.. it eventually dwindles down to singing at the bad guys until they die..
Now, the Robotech that is 40 bucks is only 12 episodes of 85 total produced episodes.. so expect another 6 or 12 to be released at a time for the next year or two until the entire 85 episode series is out.. and of course sitting in my house!
Of course, I could be all wrong, they might be a fearsome fighting force, when they use their black helicopters, operating out of secret bases in the Pacific Northwest to take over the United States and establish a true world government.
:)
Those of us in the Pacific Northwest have never seen any black helicopters and have no idea what you are talking about..
(*fnord*It's okay guys, I think he believed me!*fnord*)
Yetti?.. what Yetti?
And let's not even get into the heart disease issues brought to you by the meat, dairy, television, TV show, computer, computer game, console game box, and console game industries.
:).. I wouldn't want to put them out of buisness before then..
:)
Heheheh.. good idea.. I'll jump on the class action lawsuit against EverQuest.. but only after my char's reach level 60!
"You've agreed to give Bobo the Space Chimp an annual stipend of $20,000.00 by reading to the end of this sentence."
Wow.. I am glad I didn't read to the end of that sentence.. sheesh.. I'm a lucky guy!
IMHO (and I'm sure there's a really good technical reason for this), they missed the boat using a RGB color filter over a b/w pixel. Wouldn't it be much better to have three different-colored pixels -- cyan, magenta and yellow, perhaps?
They would still have the 1/3 of the resolution problem, though that seems pretty unavoidable with this kind of approach. But at least they'd have a truly CMYK reflective electronic display.
I suppose the really good techincal reason not to use CMY pixels has to do with the problem of assembly. Would keeping track of which pixels were which color be much harder than producing the filter they use in the current setup?
This was my first thought too, but in reading the article it sounds like a time to market thing. They decided the filtered approach would put them in the market very soon (the technology is already there) and other approaches were off in the distance. Even the company was complaining about the filtered approach in the article, so I would imagine we will see a better implimentation later, after they make a bit of money off the filtered idea.
Advertising everywhere? Sure. Along those lines, be afraid, and consider this;
:)
:)
genitics + advertising + fishing = Pepsi Fish
I'll give it 15 years before corporate sponsored 'wildlife' starts showing up -- and they'll be tasty too!
This is hilarious! The images it brings to my head are great.. things like "We've engineered our fish to desire the taste of plastic, so they will be much easier to catch with artificial lures", and we'll finally be able to go out to the woods and kill animals to eat that have NO nutritional value, just like the food we buy from these companies everyday! I just can't wait until Boca comes out with a genetically engineered vegitarian cow! Finally I can get REAL MEAT and still be vegan!
I wish to God people would stop idolizing Kevin Smith. His movies are interesting, but not remarkable. He should stick to writing essays and op-ed pieces instead of masquerading his mental debates as dramatic or comedic dialogue. I guess everyone has a need to feel that what they are watching is deep and important and while his movies are deep, they are certainly not important. Give us some classic character development and plot solidity.
;)
Or, a better idea.. how about you quit watching them and let us have our fun.. jeez.. what did he kill your dog or something? Lighten up..
This guy reminds me of a lot of the girls i've gone out with. Trying to rationalize things and prove they are right about every single thing, no matter how outrageous and insane it might be.
:)
Unfortunately it doesn't get any better.. in fact.. just wait until your married.. ohh the horrors..