I don't think that's what he was saying at all. He didn't get close to saying "Doom/Quake is the most important program ever written". First off, he puts the clause "for me at least" in there to avoid making a general statement about programming for everyone, which is smart.
My take on it was he's saying that game programming gives a programmer the most experience with the most diverse fields within programming. Working on something like Oracle is a very tightly focused effort. I'm sure there are people at Oracle that spend months or years trying to speed up tiny little chunks of code. It's important, it is probably what those people love doing, and it certainly pays well. But it doesn't exactly show them the width and bredth of the world of programming. It's not the outcome or product that he's judging, it's what goes into making that product.
It's a good thing I'm not in charge of SoCalEd. If I heard that official from SD say that, I would have resorted to Bond villian tactics. Monday morning, 9am, I would make an announcement that at 9:15, all the power under my control would be turned off. As soon as $9 billion was in an account of my choice, the power would be turned back on. It's not like they would be making money. They're 9 B in the hole. People have no idea just how dependent we are on electricity. A few days in the stone age may be very good for them.
The one third figure reeks of special interest group. I've been reading quite a bit about this situation and I've never heard anything close to that. I do know that several plants are down for major maintenance, which is making a bad situation worse, but nothing like two thirds.
Yes, one of the two biggies (I forget which one) did not make some debt payments this week. It was a smart move. If they had made all the payments they were commited to, they would be totally broke inside of three weeks. I would rather my company have a billion dollars in cash with no credit over having no cash and terrible credit anyway. The thing that really opened my eyes was a story saying that Edison International would in all likelyhood go bankrupt over this thing. That's a damn big company.
I remember the original saga from about 16 months ago. I think the basic conclusion was that they took the entire RedHat distro source code and did a find/replace RedHat -> LinuxOne. I vaguely remember that if you chose an install language other than English, it said "Red Hat" in the foreign language of your choice. Oh well, I wanted to make a boatload of cash buying options after the IPO.
I thought I had seen everything on Slashdot, but congrats on showing me something unexpected. I read your post, saw your name was "buttfucker2000", and saw you had a link in your sig. I thought, "oh wow, I'll bet the link is really gross. Some joke about pussy or something." I have my own office, so I clicked to check it out. It's a real site about fricking cats. It has these queer little pastel images of kittens available for download. If you're going to name yourself "Buttfucker2000", do something cool with your sig. Come on.
Yeah, it's off-topic. My Karma is really really high.
-B
The guy is named Woo-ping Yuen (thanks IMDB). If you like his stuff, track down Fist of Legend. It's gotten a lot easier to find since Hollywood picked up on Jet Li. I believe that Yuen was hired for The Matrix specifically because of his work on Fist of Legend.
"And natural gas is drying up? How come I haven't seen headlines to that effect? It would be a news item a lot more significant than California's energy shortages."
I'll chime in on that. Remember 18 - 36 months ago when gas was dirt cheap? Outside of Indianapolis I could get gas for $0.89/gal. Both oil and natural gas prices at the wholesale level were at rediculous lows. So the brilliant oil company folks completely stopped looking for new reserves because it wasn't cost effective to hunt down such a cheap product. The natural gas they should have been looking for two years ago is the natural gas that's not in the pipelines today. Low supply, same high demand...high prices. It's standard boom and bust economics, and it's biting the CA utilities right in the ass.
It's not that the planet is out of natural gas, we just don't have much available right now.
A search engine should only glance over a site once, index it, and move on to the next site. Did it take up some resources? Yes, but just a little for a short time. But from the sounds of this (since we're lacking a non-Hooters related article), it looks like long term repeated use of system resources. There's a big difference IMO.
Who would go to Hooters in Amsterdam? "Well, I can go smoke the best weed on Earth, go see a live lesbian sex show, boink two prostitutes at once....or I can go see chicks in small shorts and eat chicken wings." And who is the dorky guy in the corner of the bottom picture? Hemos?
-B
Re:No more unsightly spots...
on
Nano-pants
·
· Score: 2
They do specifically mention that the first company to sign up for this stuff makes fabric for khakis. And as you all know, khakis have a much bigger problem showing pee spots then other pants. I think you're on to something.
I'm not even going to pretend to understand the chemistry involved in your post. But the article mentions that 1)it doesn't change the look or feel of the fabric 2)it doesn't wash off. Would a chemical treatment like octa(big chemistry words) do both of those things? I think you referred to the product Rain-X that makes water bead on glass. That stuff washes off after a while. Of course, the article is very short on tech so we'll see. It sounds cool to me, though.
You are dead on with your "Blockbuster factor". The problem in this particular case is that Blockbuster is already wasting expensive floor space to have DVD copies of movies they already have on VHS. Then you have more complicated buying and inventory to increase overhead. They do it because people want DVD quality movies and Viacom is a big part of The Man that wants everything to go the way of DVDs. There is no way they're going to waste even MORE shelf space with a third format.
I think there's a big chunk missing from the psych analysis of IRC script kiddies. The points you hit are pretty true for most of the individuals involved, but things get much worse when you get groups of people together. During the school day, these people are not in the "cool group", they don't get to sit at the good table at lunch and don't get to sit in the back seat of the school bus. They want to, but they can't. After school, they get on IRC and they'll do damn near anything to get the other 5/10/100 people on the channel to think they're cool. Then the second guy has to one up the first guy so everyone will think he's cooler. It's a nasty mob mentality and nobody even notices when things are going too far.
-B
BTW: I want to publicly apologize for all the mean things I did to efnet #startrek in 94 and 95.
I'd say governmentally we've been becoming more restrictive over the course of the last 50 to 75.
75 years ago we let women start voting. 50 years ago we let blacks start voting. I would say that those were pretty great non-restrictive moves on the government's part.
I sit across a very thin wall from the Pitney-Bowes machine you are referring too. It's a sweet machine but it has two problems that create human jobs stuffing envelopes: 1) It costs a half million bucks 2) It has major trouble doing fancy "non-standard" things that humans can do easily (like putting a card inside a folded letter).
Another thing keeping these machines out of normal office space is that it's about 25 feet long and runs at 90 decibles.
Hey all you dot-com millionaires (I'm sure there are a few left), buy this guy a new computer. Or better yet, send him a grand and let him build a new Athlon box.
The problem with 8 CPUs on one die is that if one CPU has one tiny flaw, you have to chuck the whole die. Then you have to charge customers for the one they buy and the one (or several) that you threw away making the one they bought. I'm blanking on the technical term for this, but it's a huge problem for LCD screen (which is why they're damn expensive). If you make 8 serpate cheap CPUs, it would be a lot more cost effective on the CPU end. Then, as the other reply points out, the mobo/bus gets a whole lot more complicated.
Kid Rock has one song. It's called "Kid Rock is a bad ass pimp mother fucker". Sometimes he changes the lyrics or the beat around a little bit, but it's still the same song.
Pretty much every geek I've asked remembers loving construction type toys as children. I know my fave was Capsella because of the motors and gears, but there was always a big box of Legos in my house, too.
Did you play with toys like that in your 5-12 years?
When I read this, I immediately thought about CD-ROMs. I remember way back when a CD-ROM drive was a real purchase that you thought about and maybe saved for. How long can it be before graphics cards completely overtake mainstream display capabilities and when designing a new system you say "...and throw in one of those $40 graphics cards, it's more than my $400 display can handle anyway"?
For those that didn't click the link, this was the first question that was skipped: "TMBG, do you know about the Street Performer Protocol, and if so, what do you think of it?..." I took them skipping a response to mean "I have no idea what the Street Performer Protocol is" and not "I know and I don't feel like talking about it". It would have been nice to get a "Never heard of it" response but they were told they could skip questions. The teeming/. masses are probably yelling, "Go to Google and look it up, John". Please remember that this was a Q&A, not a research paper. We got concise, non-BS responses to our questions. That's all I was looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that's what he was saying at all. He didn't get close to saying "Doom/Quake is the most important program ever written". First off, he puts the clause "for me at least" in there to avoid making a general statement about programming for everyone, which is smart.
My take on it was he's saying that game programming gives a programmer the most experience with the most diverse fields within programming. Working on something like Oracle is a very tightly focused effort. I'm sure there are people at Oracle that spend months or years trying to speed up tiny little chunks of code. It's important, it is probably what those people love doing, and it certainly pays well. But it doesn't exactly show them the width and bredth of the world of programming. It's not the outcome or product that he's judging, it's what goes into making that product.
-B
It's a good thing I'm not in charge of SoCalEd. If I heard that official from SD say that, I would have resorted to Bond villian tactics. Monday morning, 9am, I would make an announcement that at 9:15, all the power under my control would be turned off. As soon as $9 billion was in an account of my choice, the power would be turned back on. It's not like they would be making money. They're 9 B in the hole. People have no idea just how dependent we are on electricity. A few days in the stone age may be very good for them.
-B
The one third figure reeks of special interest group. I've been reading quite a bit about this situation and I've never heard anything close to that. I do know that several plants are down for major maintenance, which is making a bad situation worse, but nothing like two thirds.
-B
Yes, one of the two biggies (I forget which one) did not make some debt payments this week. It was a smart move. If they had made all the payments they were commited to, they would be totally broke inside of three weeks. I would rather my company have a billion dollars in cash with no credit over having no cash and terrible credit anyway. The thing that really opened my eyes was a story saying that Edison International would in all likelyhood go bankrupt over this thing. That's a damn big company.
-B
I remember the original saga from about 16 months ago. I think the basic conclusion was that they took the entire RedHat distro source code and did a find/replace RedHat -> LinuxOne. I vaguely remember that if you chose an install language other than English, it said "Red Hat" in the foreign language of your choice. Oh well, I wanted to make a boatload of cash buying options after the IPO.
-B
I thought I had seen everything on Slashdot, but congrats on showing me something unexpected. I read your post, saw your name was "buttfucker2000", and saw you had a link in your sig. I thought, "oh wow, I'll bet the link is really gross. Some joke about pussy or something." I have my own office, so I clicked to check it out. It's a real site about fricking cats. It has these queer little pastel images of kittens available for download. If you're going to name yourself "Buttfucker2000", do something cool with your sig. Come on.
Yeah, it's off-topic. My Karma is really really high.
-B
The guy is named Woo-ping Yuen (thanks IMDB). If you like his stuff, track down Fist of Legend. It's gotten a lot easier to find since Hollywood picked up on Jet Li. I believe that Yuen was hired for The Matrix specifically because of his work on Fist of Legend.
-B
That was the most intelligent, well written post that I've ever seen end with "eat a dick". Brilliant. I applaud you.
"And natural gas is drying up? How come I haven't seen headlines to that effect? It would be a news item a lot more significant than California's energy shortages."
I'll chime in on that. Remember 18 - 36 months ago when gas was dirt cheap? Outside of Indianapolis I could get gas for $0.89/gal. Both oil and natural gas prices at the wholesale level were at rediculous lows. So the brilliant oil company folks completely stopped looking for new reserves because it wasn't cost effective to hunt down such a cheap product. The natural gas they should have been looking for two years ago is the natural gas that's not in the pipelines today. Low supply, same high demand...high prices. It's standard boom and bust economics, and it's biting the CA utilities right in the ass.
It's not that the planet is out of natural gas, we just don't have much available right now.
-B
A search engine should only glance over a site once, index it, and move on to the next site. Did it take up some resources? Yes, but just a little for a short time. But from the sounds of this (since we're lacking a non-Hooters related article), it looks like long term repeated use of system resources. There's a big difference IMO.
-B
Who would go to Hooters in Amsterdam? "Well, I can go smoke the best weed on Earth, go see a live lesbian sex show, boink two prostitutes at once....or I can go see chicks in small shorts and eat chicken wings." And who is the dorky guy in the corner of the bottom picture? Hemos?
-B
They do specifically mention that the first company to sign up for this stuff makes fabric for khakis. And as you all know, khakis have a much bigger problem showing pee spots then other pants. I think you're on to something.
-B
I'm not even going to pretend to understand the chemistry involved in your post. But the article mentions that 1)it doesn't change the look or feel of the fabric 2)it doesn't wash off. Would a chemical treatment like octa(big chemistry words) do both of those things? I think you referred to the product Rain-X that makes water bead on glass. That stuff washes off after a while. Of course, the article is very short on tech so we'll see. It sounds cool to me, though.
-B
You are dead on with your "Blockbuster factor". The problem in this particular case is that Blockbuster is already wasting expensive floor space to have DVD copies of movies they already have on VHS. Then you have more complicated buying and inventory to increase overhead. They do it because people want DVD quality movies and Viacom is a big part of The Man that wants everything to go the way of DVDs. There is no way they're going to waste even MORE shelf space with a third format.
-B
Maybe if my CDs and DVDs weren't so scratched up, I would respect them more.
-B
I think there's a big chunk missing from the psych analysis of IRC script kiddies. The points you hit are pretty true for most of the individuals involved, but things get much worse when you get groups of people together. During the school day, these people are not in the "cool group", they don't get to sit at the good table at lunch and don't get to sit in the back seat of the school bus. They want to, but they can't. After school, they get on IRC and they'll do damn near anything to get the other 5/10/100 people on the channel to think they're cool. Then the second guy has to one up the first guy so everyone will think he's cooler. It's a nasty mob mentality and nobody even notices when things are going too far.
-B
BTW: I want to publicly apologize for all the mean things I did to efnet #startrek in 94 and 95.
I'd say governmentally we've been becoming more restrictive over the course of the last 50 to 75.
75 years ago we let women start voting. 50 years ago we let blacks start voting. I would say that those were pretty great non-restrictive moves on the government's part.
-B
I sit across a very thin wall from the Pitney-Bowes machine you are referring too. It's a sweet machine but it has two problems that create human jobs stuffing envelopes: 1) It costs a half million bucks 2) It has major trouble doing fancy "non-standard" things that humans can do easily (like putting a card inside a folded letter).
Another thing keeping these machines out of normal office space is that it's about 25 feet long and runs at 90 decibles.
-B
Hopefully, Slashdot has some automated check in place to prevent main page links to redirect pages. If not, that's a great idea.
-B
Hey all you dot-com millionaires (I'm sure there are a few left), buy this guy a new computer. Or better yet, send him a grand and let him build a new Athlon box.
-B
The problem with 8 CPUs on one die is that if one CPU has one tiny flaw, you have to chuck the whole die. Then you have to charge customers for the one they buy and the one (or several) that you threw away making the one they bought. I'm blanking on the technical term for this, but it's a huge problem for LCD screen (which is why they're damn expensive). If you make 8 serpate cheap CPUs, it would be a lot more cost effective on the CPU end. Then, as the other reply points out, the mobo/bus gets a whole lot more complicated.
-B
Kid Rock has one song. It's called "Kid Rock is a bad ass pimp mother fucker". Sometimes he changes the lyrics or the beat around a little bit, but it's still the same song.
-B
Pretty much every geek I've asked remembers loving construction type toys as children. I know my fave was Capsella because of the motors and gears, but there was always a big box of Legos in my house, too.
Did you play with toys like that in your 5-12 years?
What were your favorites?
-B
The only one I can think of is price.
When I read this, I immediately thought about CD-ROMs. I remember way back when a CD-ROM drive was a real purchase that you thought about and maybe saved for. How long can it be before graphics cards completely overtake mainstream display capabilities and when designing a new system you say "...and throw in one of those $40 graphics cards, it's more than my $400 display can handle anyway"?
-B
For those that didn't click the link, this was the first question that was skipped: "TMBG, do you know about the Street Performer Protocol, and if so, what do you think of it? ..." I took them skipping a response to mean "I have no idea what the Street Performer Protocol is" and not "I know and I don't feel like talking about it". It would have been nice to get a "Never heard of it" response but they were told they could skip questions. The teeming /. masses are probably yelling, "Go to Google and look it up, John". Please remember that this was a Q&A, not a research paper. We got concise, non-BS responses to our questions. That's all I was looking for.
-B