No, what actually happened was that the power companies asked for the rate cap, in order to preserve their profits. After all, through the magic of competition, rates were sure to go down... Like most legislation today, it was basically drafted by the industry the bill was supposed to regulate.
In addition, there was the matter of a 10% rate cut, paid for by a bond measure, in order to make the deal more palatable for consumers ("Look! A rate cut! Pay no attention to the bond debt..."). We also included kickbacks to PG&E for coverage of their "stranded costs" (Translation: the expenses from investment in nuke plants which nobody wanted to buy; the companies allegedly needed cash to stay competitive; something the Libertarian pro-nuke Cato crowd often glosses over when discussing this issue...)
Er, not like real life at all. If I lead a team of commandos to kill Saddam, then he is dead and gone, and will never respawn. One could argue the pointlessness of such an endevour, but in the real world, it is possible for single invidivuals to make lasting changes in the world.
To take one example, in Lisp you can pass nameless functions quite easily. So you might have a library that has a function to create a new button. One of the arguments to the function is a function that the library will execute when the button is pressed. In Lisp this is a trivial thing, you just create a function and pass it as the argument. But if nameless functions are not supported by the virtual machine, then this operation becomes very problematic.
This is supported in Java via anonomous classes, therefore the JVM supports it. I assume C# has similar mechanisms.
You might want to give Objective C another chance in the future. Unlike C++, Objective C is a 100% backwards compatible OO extension to C. The OpenStep/Cocoa APIs are specifically designed to use the features of Objective C and are outstanding for most types of application development, although possibly not for action-oriented games.
Let's standardize on a C varient known by a very small percentage of developers, as opposed to the perfectly usable alternative (C++). Better yet, let's target our game to a platform that only represents 5% of the PC market. We'll be rich, yeah!!!
I've had my eye on the MOTU myself, but I've been wary about their support for the PC. Mac oriented audio companies often "support" the PC as an afterthought...
It seems to have what I need, and it will even hook up to my ADAT. Of course, there is no point in using an ADAT if I have this...
What I've heard is that Ximian has some of the strictest guidelines for code style and quality, which is more than I can say about what I've heard of M$.
Obviously from someone who knows nothing about MS development. A manager at my former employer was an ex-Power Point developer. He brought over the coding standards and instituted them more or less verbatim; they were quite useful (we dropped most of the hungarian nonsense thankfully).
You might also want to check out some of the books from Microsoft Press. If you can get over you anti-MS bias, that is...
I have a 20GB 10K RPM Deskstar that has been working like a champ; IBM had a great rep for reliable drives. So I recently purchased a 60GB Deskstar. Fortunately for me, I was unable to get it to work at all, so I exchanged it for a WD. Only later did I start reading about all the reported problems.
I noticed that the drive was manufactured in Romania, rather than the usual asian locations...
My experience from about 12 years ago. The Air Force mandated that Oracle would be the "standard" DB, because it was "portable". There was an on-base Oracle representative. Our project was working just fine using VAX/DBMS, but we figured we would call up the Oracle guy and get a quote. It was something like 40K, or about quadruple what we were paying for VAX/DBMS. We choose not to switch.
Another time, myself and a friend were experimenting with Oracle on an AT&T 3B2 (also mandated by the Air Force as the "standard minicomputer"). It was slow as hell, but that may have been AT&T's fault. whilst creating a simple form, and trying to do something basic, like hit the function key to add a trigger to a field, the forms app would blow up. So we call the Oracle guy, who helpfully advises "Don't press that key". We were unimpressed with Oracle's tech support.
I hear you. I just uninstalled Real on my home machine, because when trying to copy a CD it would:
launch its own CD burning program (in addition to my Adaptec burner, which also auto launches), launch RealPlayer for the audio CD I just inserted in the other drive, then launch some kind of nag-ware to get me to upgrade something.
After the second time this happened, I uninstalled in a fit of rage. Of course, some tendrils are undoubtably still on my machine.
At work, I am trying to listen to some audio samples on web pages, and I keep getting "out of memory" warnings. The machine has 128MB, and RealPlayer still won't work, even after closing everything else. Just for laughs, I clicked on the "more help" button, and it took me to a worthless marketting hype page (with no trouble shooting tips whatsoever), AND it launched two popups!
I think the reason their return rate is so low is that most stores won't accept cds for returns.
Try to return an openned cd to best buy and see how far you get. They'll happily exchange it for another copy of the same disc, but exchanging defective for defective is still defective.
All stores where I live will exchange CDs for store credit, no questions asked. Most only give you about 75% back, unless you tell them the disc is defective (in which case you get 100%; in theory they might want you to exchange for the same title, but in practice the store clerk won't care)
OK, step one: avoid anything dubbed by Streamline. In fact, avoid most dubs (Mononoke is one of the few decent one's I've seen).
You've already dissed two favorites of mine (Akira and Ninja Scrolls), so I'm not sure what I can suggest. I'm several years out of date as well.
Some old favorites: Macross Movie, Demon City Shinjuku, Vampire Hunter D, Tenchi Muyo, Ranma 1/2, Urusei Yatsura, Cobra, Votoms, Gundam, Gundam Z, Giant Robo, Etranger... That's all I'm coming up with at the moment.
You know, it is OK to turn those PCs off at night. They are going to be thrown out in 5 years (or less), who cares about the alleged damage caused by turning them off occasionally...
Yep, Advil and Motrin are just Ibuprofin. 3 to 4 pills (200mg ea) is equal to a perscription dose. This is helpful to know, as many of my trips to the doctor about back and shoulder pain resulted in the standard advice: "rest, ice and lots of Ibuprofin" Now I know to just treat myself unless it is something serious.
I agree with most of what you say, but two areas worry me: lack of code ownership and pair programming.
For both of these to work, you need to have programmers of a consistently high caliber. Unfortunatly, most of the people I have worked with are not people I would trust to refactor my code, nor would I want to pair with them. I also suspect you need to keep your teams small.
There have been collaborative experiences in my career that were fantastic, but were exceptions, not the rule...
I've skimmed through a book by one of the XP guru's (forget the names, sorry); he made it abundantly clear that many projects and many organizations should not use XP. It is not a one-size-fits all methodology.
Code ownership has downsides, but also positives. If code is "mine", then I may have to live with my mistakes for years to come. If I have some spare time to refactor, I will clean up my own mess, because it is in my best interests to do so. Unowned code however is less likely to be refactored, because it "isn't my problem". Unowned code tends to deteriorate over time, as various people slap quick hacks on top of it.
The article gives the answer, basically the same as yours. I don't understand why the answer stops at 3 people.
4 people - A, B, C and D see each other on the first, second and third days. They all leave that evening.
5 people - A, B, C, D and E see each other...
Isn't the answer N, where N is greater than 0, and less than or equal to the total number of villagers?
Slashdot Mirror
No, what actually happened was that the power companies asked for the rate cap, in order to preserve their profits. After all, through the magic of competition, rates were sure to go down... Like most legislation today, it was basically drafted by the industry the bill was supposed to regulate.
In addition, there was the matter of a 10% rate cut, paid for by a bond measure, in order to make the deal more palatable for consumers ("Look! A rate cut! Pay no attention to the bond debt..."). We also included kickbacks to PG&E for coverage of their "stranded costs" (Translation: the expenses from investment in nuke plants which nobody wanted to buy; the companies allegedly needed cash to stay competitive; something the Libertarian pro-nuke Cato crowd often glosses over when discussing this issue...)
Er, not like real life at all. If I lead a team of commandos to kill Saddam, then he is dead and gone, and will never respawn. One could argue the pointlessness of such an endevour, but in the real world, it is possible for single invidivuals to make lasting changes in the world.
To take one example, in Lisp you can pass nameless functions quite easily. So you might have a library that has a function to create a new button. One of the arguments to the function is a function that the library will execute when the button is pressed. In Lisp this is a trivial thing, you just create a function and pass it as the argument. But if nameless functions are not supported by the virtual machine, then this operation becomes very problematic.
This is supported in Java via anonomous classes, therefore the JVM supports it. I assume C# has similar mechanisms.
You might want to give Objective C another chance in the future. Unlike C++, Objective C is a 100% backwards compatible OO extension to C. The OpenStep/Cocoa APIs are specifically designed to use the features of Objective C and are outstanding for most types of application development, although possibly not for action-oriented games.
Let's standardize on a C varient known by a very small percentage of developers, as opposed to the perfectly usable alternative (C++). Better yet, let's target our game to a platform that only represents 5% of the PC market. We'll be rich, yeah!!!
I've had my eye on the MOTU myself, but I've been wary about their support for the PC. Mac oriented audio companies often "support" the PC as an afterthought...
It seems to have what I need, and it will even hook up to my ADAT. Of course, there is no point in using an ADAT if I have this...
And let the neighbors see all my pr0n? No way!
What I've heard is that Ximian has some of the strictest guidelines for code style and quality, which is more than I can say about what I've heard of M$.
Obviously from someone who knows nothing about MS development. A manager at my former employer was an ex-Power Point developer. He brought over the coding standards and instituted them more or less verbatim; they were quite useful (we dropped most of the hungarian nonsense thankfully).
You might also want to check out some of the books from Microsoft Press. If you can get over you anti-MS bias, that is...
I have a 20GB 10K RPM Deskstar that has been working like a champ; IBM had a great rep for reliable drives. So I recently purchased a 60GB Deskstar. Fortunately for me, I was unable to get it to work at all, so I exchanged it for a WD. Only later did I start reading about all the reported problems.
I noticed that the drive was manufactured in Romania, rather than the usual asian locations...
My experience from about 12 years ago. The Air Force mandated that Oracle would be the "standard" DB, because it was "portable". There was an on-base Oracle representative. Our project was working just fine using VAX/DBMS, but we figured we would call up the Oracle guy and get a quote. It was something like 40K, or about quadruple what we were paying for VAX/DBMS. We choose not to switch.
Another time, myself and a friend were experimenting with Oracle on an AT&T 3B2 (also mandated by the Air Force as the "standard minicomputer"). It was slow as hell, but that may have been AT&T's fault. whilst creating a simple form, and trying to do something basic, like hit the function key to add a trigger to a field, the forms app would blow up. So we call the Oracle guy, who helpfully advises "Don't press that key". We were unimpressed with Oracle's tech support.
I hear you. I just uninstalled Real on my home machine, because when trying to copy a CD it would: launch its own CD burning program (in addition to my Adaptec burner, which also auto launches), launch RealPlayer for the audio CD I just inserted in the other drive, then launch some kind of nag-ware to get me to upgrade something.
After the second time this happened, I uninstalled in a fit of rage. Of course, some tendrils are undoubtably still on my machine.
At work, I am trying to listen to some audio samples on web pages, and I keep getting "out of memory" warnings. The machine has 128MB, and RealPlayer still won't work, even after closing everything else. Just for laughs, I clicked on the "more help" button, and it took me to a worthless marketting hype page (with no trouble shooting tips whatsoever), AND it launched two popups!
I think the reason their return rate is so low is that most stores won't accept cds for returns. Try to return an openned cd to best buy and see how far you get. They'll happily exchange it for another copy of the same disc, but exchanging defective for defective is still defective.
All stores where I live will exchange CDs for store credit, no questions asked. Most only give you about 75% back, unless you tell them the disc is defective (in which case you get 100%; in theory they might want you to exchange for the same title, but in practice the store clerk won't care)
Agreed, and for graphics, add:
Foley & van Dam, "Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice"
Before they retcon the entire TOS.
Anyway, what really bugged me is the snide claim that a Palm is merely a status symbol. I use it every day as:
Calendar and time piece
Scientific calculator
Address book
Portable game device
Seems like a pretty cost-effective and useful device. Maybe that is why I bought one.
OK, step one: avoid anything dubbed by Streamline. In fact, avoid most dubs (Mononoke is one of the few decent one's I've seen).
You've already dissed two favorites of mine (Akira and Ninja Scrolls), so I'm not sure what I can suggest. I'm several years out of date as well.
Some old favorites: Macross Movie, Demon City Shinjuku, Vampire Hunter D, Tenchi Muyo, Ranma 1/2, Urusei Yatsura, Cobra, Votoms, Gundam, Gundam Z, Giant Robo, Etranger... That's all I'm coming up with at the moment.
Battleship, not sub. In the original Japanese, they refurbished the Yamato, which was sunk during WW2.
But they did have subs in one episode; "space submarines" that could hide below the surface of... space I guess.
Still, as far as children's television programming goes...
Macross was produced for Japanese teenagers, gundam it! It ain't "kids stuff".
I'll stop now before I go into an anti Carl Macek / Robotech rant...
5 extra hours of Jar Jar...
You know, it is OK to turn those PCs off at night. They are going to be thrown out in 5 years (or less), who cares about the alleged damage caused by turning them off occasionally...
Yeah, right on!
And we shouldn't be teaching people how to add or multiply, until they have a firm grasp of number theory and abstract algebra either!
Yep, Advil and Motrin are just Ibuprofin. 3 to 4 pills (200mg ea) is equal to a perscription dose. This is helpful to know, as many of my trips to the doctor about back and shoulder pain resulted in the standard advice: "rest, ice and lots of Ibuprofin" Now I know to just treat myself unless it is something serious.
I have a modest proposal for a "bad-spelling" death penalty. Offenders would have their slashdot charter revoked.
hight safty precausions ultimatly responcible diffrent streat jounal accedentaly punnishing compaaining tring crusifing accedents accedentally pssition moderat
Honorable mention: "it's" instead of "its". Did I miss anything?
Curiously, he managed to spell "excoriate" correctly...
Yeah, kind of like the brilliant idea of NeXT computers shipping with an optical drive and no hard disk. Oops...
I agree with most of what you say, but two areas worry me: lack of code ownership and pair programming.
:-)
For both of these to work, you need to have programmers of a consistently high caliber. Unfortunatly, most of the people I have worked with are not people I would trust to refactor my code, nor would I want to pair with them. I also suspect you need to keep your teams small.
There have been collaborative experiences in my career that were fantastic, but were exceptions, not the rule...
I've skimmed through a book by one of the XP guru's (forget the names, sorry); he made it abundantly clear that many projects and many organizations should not use XP. It is not a one-size-fits all methodology.
Code ownership has downsides, but also positives. If code is "mine", then I may have to live with my mistakes for years to come. If I have some spare time to refactor, I will clean up my own mess, because it is in my best interests to do so. Unowned code however is less likely to be refactored, because it "isn't my problem". Unowned code tends to deteriorate over time, as various people slap quick hacks on top of it.
I do like the "no overtime" rule though
The article gives the answer, basically the same as yours. I don't understand why the answer stops at 3 people.
4 people - A, B, C and D see each other on the first, second and third days. They all leave that evening.
5 people - A, B, C, D and E see each other...
Isn't the answer N, where N is greater than 0, and less than or equal to the total number of villagers?