To have a "game" promote this as an achievement is disturbing. [...] Promoting such acts should be banned, and anyone who actually performs such an act should be castrated/killed.
Promote? You do realise that there is no evidence that sexual violence in games promotes sexually violent behaviour? I'm not aware of any scientific study into games, but studies into sexually violent pornography have generally found no correlation between exposure and instances of rape.
And as to castration or death being a reasonable punishment for rape, well I'm just kind of glad we don't live in that sort of society any more. Would you cut off peoples' hands for stealing, too?
Why doesn't the headline use EOCS? There is no Japanese ESRB.
Because 99% of slashdot readers wouldn't know what EOCS is, and ESRB is the closest US equivalent (i.e., a purely voluntary organization that most game manufacturers are members of and which attempts to control its members' output).
This is Japan. You can maybe sort-of convince them to give up their rape porn. But schoolgirl porn? No deal. It's a cultural tradition, don't you know?
Those who have those urges towards children may feel prodded seeing the depicted acts to try them in the real world.
Maybe. Although nobody has come up with any convincing evidence yet; most studies find noeffect. And some psychologists have suggested the effect could be the opposite (i.e., not being able to see the acts they already fantasize about may push them to do them themselves, rather than watching somebody else do them), although I have yet to see a study examining this hypothesis explicitly.
I.e., we don't know whether the effect of limiting access to such material is to reduce or increase the number of offences that are committed. Therefore, IMO, it is hideously irresponsible to act based on hunches and guesses of what might be the case.
the ineptitude of their management can be seen in the 108 hour week. anything over a 12 hour day is wasted, and you NEED 1 day off a week minimum to recharge the batteries, otherwise you just find ways to waste time on the job.
i've been there, i'm working 50 - 60 hour weeks and i achieve more now than i did in 90 hour weeks.
While I agree with what you're saying, it's only true long term. As long as they are _unusual_, long hours really can pull more work out of developers, without a necessarily huge drop in productivity. 108 hours is perhaps taking it too far (approaching 16hrs/day), but I can and have worked 90 hour weeks without significant issues. It's when you're doing them week after week that you lose productivity.
If someone came up to me and accused me of murder I wouldn't base my case on freedom of privacy. I would hope my lawyer could simply disprove the actual charges against me.
If your legal rights to privacy had been violated, I would expect your lawyer to use this to try to prevent evidence resulting from those violations being used against you. This is standard legal practice, and is the basic reason why such things as the necessity for search warrants actually work.
Fighting these sorts of things largely on free speech seems to imply that that video games are actually responsible for some sort of mayhem but should be protected anyway. They aren't dangerous. They don't pose a public threat and they shouldn't even be charged as such let alone 'allowed' to exist in spite of these accusations.
Which is an important point, because freedom of speech doesn't trump public safety. Basically, at least here in the EU, legislators are permitted to make exceptions to free speech as long as there are clear public interest grounds in doing so ("necessary in a democratic society [...] for the protection of public safety" being I think the phrasing involved here). So, yes, free speech isn't an automatic win in this case: we need to show, conclusively, that there isn't a (serious) public safety issue here.
"More-accurate and less-invasive" is misleading, since the thing that it is "more accurate" than is not the same thing it is "less invasive" than. It is more accurate than the minimally-invasive electrodes-on-the-scalp method, and less-invasive than the more accurate electrodes-implanted-into-the-brain method.
The question I have at this point is, seeing as the only useful claim made for it (that patients can learn to control a cursor with it) has also been made for the electrodes-on-the-scalp approach, is what use is this additional accuracy? More precise cursor control? Give us some numbers, e.g. a comparitive study with the previous best.
Don't discount iTunes because of the iTunes Store nonsense. It's a great music manager, especially because it exports an XML file with all songs that can be read by other applications.
M3U files have a trivially simple format, and were standard a long time before itunes came on the scene. What benefits does itunes XML file offer over and above this format?
And while we're at it, what's the deal with ipods needing a database of files (in a non-obvious format that's difficult to work with) in order to be able to play them? Isn't that just to convince people to use itunes, which exists to convince people to buy from itms?
What version of the JDK are you using? Java 6 has improved speed considerably.
I'm on 1.6 and have been since beta releases of it, as it added some features I desperately needed. It improves the situation for some floating point algorithms, as I believe it uses processor intrinsic implementations of sin and cos, but not exp.
Here is are interesting benchmarks comparing floating point performance:
None of these are floating point benchmarks. I agree entirely that there is little reason to avoid using Java for integer number crunching.
Note: If you are raising numbers to an integer power you will almost certainly get better performance doing y = x*x*x than y = pow(x, 3.0) in any language
Agreed. My problem is very specifically calculating 1 / (1 + e^{-x}), which is somewhat slower in Java than in (e.g.) C, and can't be helped with any such transformation.
Technically, virtualizaiton is insane for a number of reasons:
* Each guest needs its own kernel, so you need to allocate memory and disk space for all these kernels that are in fact identical
1. Who says the kernels are identical? I can run each application on an environment tailored specifically for it. I have a single server running applications that require W2K3, Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6 here. I also have WinXP, Solaris and OSX images for our developers' use in testing. I don't think this scenario is as rare as you think; there are a hell of a lot of legacy applications out there that are extremely picky about OS versions they run on. I've come across people still running netware because they need an app that depends on it; I'm pretty sure that could be put on a VM too.
2. AIUI, the hypervisor is able to detect identical memory pages and merge them. Disk space is cheap, so I don't care that I need more of it.
TLB flushes kill performance. Recent x86 CPUs address the problem to some degree, but it's still a problem.
Yes, but this is as much a problem with running multiple processes on the same OS, as you have a TLB flush on each user/kernel transition anyway. Kernel/kernel transitions are rare so the additional performance overhead of virtualisation here is minimal.
A guest's filesystem is on a virtual block device, so it's hard to get at it without running some kind of fileserver on the guest
Yes, this is a slight downside, but the administrative overhead involved here is small. If the guest isn't running, I can easily mount its partition in another VM; if it is running, the cost of configuring a fileserver with admin-only access is minimal.
Memory management is an absolute clusterfuck. From the point of view of the host, each guest's memory is an opaque blob, and from the point of view of the guest, it has the machine to itself. This mutual myopia renders the usual page-cache algorithms absolutely useless. Each guest blithely performs memory management and caching on its own resulting in severely suboptimal decisions being made.
Yes & no. The VM is quite easily able to detect pages that have been mapped from disk (i.e. cache pages) and handle them in a sensible fashion, including merging the caches between different systems. One problem with jails and similar techs is that an I/O intensive process running on one jail can effectively seize control of the entire cache, severely degrading performance of other jails. This doesn't happen with VMs, as their cache is effectively partitioned. But, on a system that's behaving properly this does result in needing more memory to achieve the same performance level, yes.
That keeps people writing crappy software on C++ or C when quite often Java would be a good fit for them and the performance is mostly a non-issue these days (unless you write very inefficient programs).
Or programs that need floating point. Several of the commonly used functions in java.lang.Math are implemented by processor specific instructions, e.g. Math.exp(), yet Java refuses to use them, instead preferring an integer-based approach that's 5-10 times slower, but maybe a bit or two more accurate. Despite repeated requests, no option is as yet available to use them anyway in applications where that accuracy is not required. This makes many high-performance computing systems (particularly neural nets) substantially slower on Java than other systems.
I don't think Nevada has a lot to worry about in the realm of online gaming. Brick-and-mortar casinos offer a lot that online gaming can never provide.
Not to mention that a lot of those casinos have extremely well-recognised brands that could help them to set up competing internet gambling sites. Nevada could well become the center of Internet gambling, as well as brick-and-mortar, and therefore stands to _gain_ from this proposal.
I've never heard of this book, or any other cures for alcoholism.
No comment as to the book, but there is a perfectly good cure for alcohoolism. It's called disulfiram, and causes extremely unpleasant reactions when taken with alcohol.
I didn't know that rats "spontaneously" consume alcohol when it is freely available to them.
You've obviously never kept rats. Rats will spontaneously consume _anything_ that's freely available to them. Water, food, bedding, cage ornaments, bits of their cage, keepers' fingers, other rats...
The entire HFCS thing makes me laugh. The short version:
A while ago, soft drink manufacturers noticed that HFCS (glucose+fructose mix, usually in approx 50/50 ratio) was cheaper than cane sugar (sucrose) and tastes almost identical, so they substituted it in their recipes. At about the same time, there was a growing problem with obesity, which was known to be tied to people consuming too much sugar. Some people who didn't know any better hypothesized that the chemical sounding HFCS was responsible.
What none of them stopped to consider is this: sucrose is composed of one molecule of glucose and one of fructose linked by a weak bond. The first step in digesting it (which we're extremely good at) breaks this bond. Therefore, as far as any interesting processes happening in the body are concerned HFCS and sucrose are pretty-much identical.
So now the manufacturers are switching back to sucrose. Meanwhile, over here in the UK they've been using sucrose all along, because HFCS is more expensive here, _and yet we still have exactly the same obesity problem that US people have been blaming on HFCS all along_.
Today is Memorial Day in the United States of America. We would appreciate you folks taking some time to reflect on our servicemen who gave their lives saving your asses in WW I and II.
We do that on Nov 11, thanks. I don't see why we need to adopt your dates for the purpose.
You appear to be wrong. As I write this, the last post on her feed is less than 5 days old. The articles about her twittering were published 11 days ago. She had been using the site for about 3 days at the time, and had posted about 15 or so times by the looks of it. She also attracted attention when she signed up for facebook, nearly a year ago now, although it doesn't look like she's been keeping up the updates.
Slashdot Mirror
To have a "game" promote this as an achievement is disturbing.
[...]
Promoting such acts should be banned, and anyone who actually performs such an act should be castrated/killed.
Promote? You do realise that there is no evidence that sexual violence in games promotes sexually violent behaviour? I'm not aware of any scientific study into games, but studies into sexually violent pornography have generally found no correlation between exposure and instances of rape.
And as to castration or death being a reasonable punishment for rape, well I'm just kind of glad we don't live in that sort of society any more. Would you cut off peoples' hands for stealing, too?
Why doesn't the headline use EOCS? There is no Japanese ESRB.
Because 99% of slashdot readers wouldn't know what EOCS is, and ESRB is the closest US equivalent (i.e., a purely voluntary organization that most game manufacturers are members of and which attempts to control its members' output).
This is Japan. You can maybe sort-of convince them to give up their rape porn. But schoolgirl porn? No deal. It's a cultural tradition, don't you know?
Those who have those urges towards children may feel prodded seeing the depicted acts to try them in the real world.
Maybe. Although nobody has come up with any convincing evidence yet; most studies find no effect. And some psychologists have suggested the effect could be the opposite (i.e., not being able to see the acts they already fantasize about may push them to do them themselves, rather than watching somebody else do them), although I have yet to see a study examining this hypothesis explicitly.
I.e., we don't know whether the effect of limiting access to such material is to reduce or increase the number of offences that are committed. Therefore, IMO, it is hideously irresponsible to act based on hunches and guesses of what might be the case.
I can't believe no one has said this yet
That would be because it isn't true. The first bah weep grana weep nini bong post was nearly half an hour before yours.
It means that if they actually wanted to fight us, they could out produce us in terms of Armor and Planes.
Yeah, but we'd be sitting there with the United Nations, so they'd have to offer to make peace with us.
Wait, you mean we aren't talking about a game of Civilization?
the ineptitude of their management can be seen in the 108 hour week. anything over a 12 hour day is wasted, and you NEED 1 day off a week minimum to recharge the batteries, otherwise you just find ways to waste time on the job.
i've been there, i'm working 50 - 60 hour weeks and i achieve more now than i did in 90 hour weeks.
While I agree with what you're saying, it's only true long term. As long as they are _unusual_, long hours really can pull more work out of developers, without a necessarily huge drop in productivity. 108 hours is perhaps taking it too far (approaching 16hrs/day), but I can and have worked 90 hour weeks without significant issues. It's when you're doing them week after week that you lose productivity.
If an engineer designs a car and it crashes due to easily-avoidable defects, he goes to jail.
[citation needed]
They should spend their time and energy solving REAL problems.
Yeah. Like banning paintball. Oh, wait.
If someone came up to me and accused me of murder I wouldn't base my case on freedom of privacy. I would hope my lawyer could simply disprove the actual charges against me.
If your legal rights to privacy had been violated, I would expect your lawyer to use this to try to prevent evidence resulting from those violations being used against you. This is standard legal practice, and is the basic reason why such things as the necessity for search warrants actually work.
Fighting these sorts of things largely on free speech seems to imply that that video games are actually responsible for some sort of mayhem but should be protected anyway. They aren't dangerous. They don't pose a public threat and they shouldn't even be charged as such let alone 'allowed' to exist in spite of these accusations.
Which is an important point, because freedom of speech doesn't trump public safety. Basically, at least here in the EU, legislators are permitted to make exceptions to free speech as long as there are clear public interest grounds in doing so ("necessary in a democratic society [...] for the protection of public safety" being I think the phrasing involved here). So, yes, free speech isn't an automatic win in this case: we need to show, conclusively, that there isn't a (serious) public safety issue here.
"More-accurate and less-invasive" is misleading, since the thing that it is "more accurate" than is not the same thing it is "less invasive" than. It is more accurate than the minimally-invasive electrodes-on-the-scalp method, and less-invasive than the more accurate electrodes-implanted-into-the-brain method.
The question I have at this point is, seeing as the only useful claim made for it (that patients can learn to control a cursor with it) has also been made for the electrodes-on-the-scalp approach, is what use is this additional accuracy? More precise cursor control? Give us some numbers, e.g. a comparitive study with the previous best.
Don't discount iTunes because of the iTunes Store nonsense. It's a great music manager, especially because it exports an XML file with all songs that can be read by other applications.
M3U files have a trivially simple format, and were standard a long time before itunes came on the scene. What benefits does itunes XML file offer over and above this format?
And while we're at it, what's the deal with ipods needing a database of files (in a non-obvious format that's difficult to work with) in order to be able to play them? Isn't that just to convince people to use itunes, which exists to convince people to buy from itms?
What version of the JDK are you using? Java 6 has improved speed considerably.
I'm on 1.6 and have been since beta releases of it, as it added some features I desperately needed. It improves the situation for some floating point algorithms, as I believe it uses processor intrinsic implementations of sin and cos, but not exp.
Here is are interesting benchmarks comparing floating point performance:
1) http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2005-08/000567.html
Java is 12% slower than C and Visual Basic.NET is 13% faster. This is based on the usage of an optical design ray tracing programme.
Again, this is using only raw floating point and trig. Sun's Java VM supports processor-based trig functions, but not other transcendental functions.
2) http://kano.net/javabench/
None of these are floating point benchmarks. I agree entirely that there is little reason to avoid using Java for integer number crunching.
Note: If you are raising numbers to an integer power you will almost certainly get better performance doing y = x*x*x than y = pow(x, 3.0) in any language
Agreed. My problem is very specifically calculating 1 / (1 + e^{-x}), which is somewhat slower in Java than in (e.g.) C, and can't be helped with any such transformation.
Technically, virtualizaiton is insane for a number of reasons:
* Each guest needs its own kernel, so you need to allocate memory and disk space for all these kernels that are in fact identical
1. Who says the kernels are identical? I can run each application on an environment tailored specifically for it. I have a single server running applications that require W2K3, Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6 here. I also have WinXP, Solaris and OSX images for our developers' use in testing. I don't think this scenario is as rare as you think; there are a hell of a lot of legacy applications out there that are extremely picky about OS versions they run on. I've come across people still running netware because they need an app that depends on it; I'm pretty sure that could be put on a VM too.
2. AIUI, the hypervisor is able to detect identical memory pages and merge them. Disk space is cheap, so I don't care that I need more of it.
TLB flushes kill performance. Recent x86 CPUs address the problem to some degree, but it's still a problem.
Yes, but this is as much a problem with running multiple processes on the same OS, as you have a TLB flush on each user/kernel transition anyway. Kernel/kernel transitions are rare so the additional performance overhead of virtualisation here is minimal.
A guest's filesystem is on a virtual block device, so it's hard to get at it without running some kind of fileserver on the guest
Yes, this is a slight downside, but the administrative overhead involved here is small. If the guest isn't running, I can easily mount its partition in another VM; if it is running, the cost of configuring a fileserver with admin-only access is minimal.
Memory management is an absolute clusterfuck. From the point of view of the host, each guest's memory is an opaque blob, and from the point of view of the guest, it has the machine to itself. This mutual myopia renders the usual page-cache algorithms absolutely useless. Each guest blithely performs memory management and caching on its own resulting in severely suboptimal decisions being made.
Yes & no. The VM is quite easily able to detect pages that have been mapped from disk (i.e. cache pages) and handle them in a sensible fashion, including merging the caches between different systems. One problem with jails and similar techs is that an I/O intensive process running on one jail can effectively seize control of the entire cache, severely degrading performance of other jails. This doesn't happen with VMs, as their cache is effectively partitioned. But, on a system that's behaving properly this does result in needing more memory to achieve the same performance level, yes.
Fuck deleting folders, can you create new documents anywhere other than the root folder?
Slashdot, you disappoint me. Again.
You should probably learn this: never have high hopes for slashdot.
I stopped being disappointed with slashdot some time around 1999.
Hah whoops please `sed s/EMACS/ECMA/`
Presumably you mean "M-x replace-string EMACS ECMA", right?
That keeps people writing crappy software on C++ or C when quite often Java would be a good fit for them and the performance is mostly a non-issue these days (unless you write very inefficient programs).
Or programs that need floating point. Several of the commonly used functions in java.lang.Math are implemented by processor specific instructions, e.g. Math.exp(), yet Java refuses to use them, instead preferring an integer-based approach that's 5-10 times slower, but maybe a bit or two more accurate. Despite repeated requests, no option is as yet available to use them anyway in applications where that accuracy is not required. This makes many high-performance computing systems (particularly neural nets) substantially slower on Java than other systems.
I don't think Nevada has a lot to worry about in the realm of online gaming. Brick-and-mortar casinos offer a lot that online gaming can never provide.
Not to mention that a lot of those casinos have extremely well-recognised brands that could help them to set up competing internet gambling sites. Nevada could well become the center of Internet gambling, as well as brick-and-mortar, and therefore stands to _gain_ from this proposal.
Uh, corn syrup is ~ a 50/50 mix of glucose / fructose
No, it isn't. Corn syrup is mostly glucose.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is just that, higher in fructose.
We're talking a 40/60 to 25/75 mix of glucose / fructose.
Actually, usually 45/55 which is similar enough to the ratio in sucrose that it makes no difference.
I've never heard of this book, or any other cures for alcoholism.
No comment as to the book, but there is a perfectly good cure for alcohoolism. It's called disulfiram, and causes extremely unpleasant reactions when taken with alcohol.
The problem is convincing alcoholics to use it.
I didn't know that rats "spontaneously" consume alcohol when it is freely available to them.
You've obviously never kept rats. Rats will spontaneously consume _anything_ that's freely available to them. Water, food, bedding, cage ornaments, bits of their cage, keepers' fingers, other rats...
The entire HFCS thing makes me laugh. The short version:
A while ago, soft drink manufacturers noticed that HFCS (glucose+fructose mix, usually in approx 50/50 ratio) was cheaper than cane sugar (sucrose) and tastes almost identical, so they substituted it in their recipes. At about the same time, there was a growing problem with obesity, which was known to be tied to people consuming too much sugar. Some people who didn't know any better hypothesized that the chemical sounding HFCS was responsible.
What none of them stopped to consider is this: sucrose is composed of one molecule of glucose and one of fructose linked by a weak bond. The first step in digesting it (which we're extremely good at) breaks this bond. Therefore, as far as any interesting processes happening in the body are concerned HFCS and sucrose are pretty-much identical.
So now the manufacturers are switching back to sucrose. Meanwhile, over here in the UK they've been using sucrose all along, because HFCS is more expensive here, _and yet we still have exactly the same obesity problem that US people have been blaming on HFCS all along_.
Today is Memorial Day in the United States of America. We would appreciate you folks taking some time to reflect on our servicemen who gave their lives saving your asses in WW I and II.
We do that on Nov 11, thanks. I don't see why we need to adopt your dates for the purpose.
You appear to be wrong. As I write this, the last post on her feed is less than 5 days old. The articles about her twittering were published 11 days ago. She had been using the site for about 3 days at the time, and had posted about 15 or so times by the looks of it. She also attracted attention when she signed up for facebook, nearly a year ago now, although it doesn't look like she's been keeping up the updates.