80 columns has been too little for years now. Hell, back in my DOS days I had the editor set to the hi-res textmode (132 columns? Heh, to this day I still use the Turbo-C colour scheme, and I see quite a few coders at work do too.) These days with widescreens and GUI's everywhere I code to 150 lines, even though my editor window is wider. It seems stupid to limit yourself to some arbitrary number. (That being said, I don't think 150 is arbitrary because it's about the point on the screen where the debugger windows pop up, thus allowing me to see a whole line of code without horizontal scrolling when running in the debugger.)
I find that it makes code a lot more readable as you can get away with using meaningful variable, function and method names, 4-space tab indents and spacing between operators and stuff. The liberal use of whitespace to in combination with syntax colouring makes it much easier to read and navigate through code. You can clearly delinate sections and stuff.
Maybe in years gone by when a 14" monitor was huge, 80 lines was a lot. In fact, I remember that it was massive when we went from a 40-column C64 to a PC. But how horrible is it today to look at a 80x25 textmode screen on a 23" widescreen? Talk about headache inducing!
Give me 12pt monospaced fonts on a high-res screen with arbitrary-sized windows any day!
It's not addiction or a disorder, it's just a lack of self-discipline. Nothing that a good boot up the arse can't fix. Anyone who argues otherwise is just looking for an excuse for their lack of self control.
Addiction is chemical dependency. Deprive a tech or gambling "addict" of their stuff for a week and compare their behaviour to that of a heroin junkie that's been deprived of heroin for a week. The former will have bitched for a day or two then gotten on with life. The latter... well, let's just say it wouldn't be a pretty sight.
Yeah, but a good watch or good piece of furniture is something that will last a lifetime (if cared for), and most probably become an heirloom. E.g. my youngest brother's bed was my first bed and was bought over 20 years ago. It will probably be around as a guest bed in our family home for another 20 years after he moves out.
Tech gadgets break or are replaced after a few years.
I was amazed to read about the pneumatic tube network that was developed in Manhattan in the 1890's and how it was speculated that eventually people would be able to travel via them. (Which is the whole point of the article - everyone hypes up new developments with bullshit that almost never turns out to be true and it's always something that nobody saw coming that "revolutionises" things.)
Anyway, what I'm really wondering is if that is where the Futurama guys got their idea for the pneumatic tubes in New New York from? =]
40 years now is it? All the greenies and environuts down here in Australia have been saying that there's only 80 years of supply left as their other arguments about meltdowns and such have been blown out of the water in our national debate on nuclear energy.
It's probably worth noting that there has been barely any exploration for Uranium in the last 20 or so years. This has been because of large finds like Olympic Dam being brought online, the lack of new reactors and shutdown of existing reactors and the decomissioning of thousands of US and USSR nuclear warheads. Apparently the warhead decomissioning has constituted about 50% of the supply, but now the programmes are winding up and the price of Uranium has dramatically increased in the last couple of years. This is also being fuelled by China and Russia's plans to build dozens of new reactors in the next couple of decades, and also the resurgence in interest in nuclear energy occuring elsewhere in the world.
Because of all of that, there has been a 400-500% increase in Uranium exploration expenditure in Australia in the last couple of years and it is predicted that expenditure will grow by that amount again in the next couple of years. The opposition party's recent lifting of their ban on new Uranium mines is also already helping to fuel the exploration boom, especially seeing as it seems they are going to win government in the looming election.
So does yours. Ketosis fucks up your liver, just as the whole Atkins diet fucks up your body.
Dieting is no substitute for eating a healthy balanced diet and exercising. Just because you're skinny doesn't mean you're healthy, and healthy is what we should be aiming for!
I think that Sony are either breaking even or losing say $50 per unit. (Can't be losing too much if they're expecting it to make it back on game sales when you consider how many games the average owner would buy and the license fees on those).
Probably breaking even now that they've dropped the PS2 hardware from the latest revision. Have a look at the gizzards of a PS3 and there isn't really that much to look at - it appears to be an elegantly designed system.
I think these "analysts" that try to estimate the costs are just pulling numbers out of their arses and we can expect a price drop as soon as Microsoft drops the price of the 360 or Christmas rolls around - whichever happens first.
I'm sure somebody has already covered it and it hasn't been modded up to the level I read at, but I'm glad I live in Australia where you can at least have a beer before you get sent off to die fighting for your country.
Yeehaw, you're 18! Drive a car, get married, stick a bun in the oven and then go to Iraq and blow away some dirty sand nigger terrorists, but don't you dare have even a drop of refreshing icy cold beer after a hard day's shooting in the desert heat until you're 21!
I shudder to think about the reaction these people would have upon being told that the high school I went to has a functioning vineyard and winery and teaches kids how to make wine. (A surprisingly scientific endeavour!) =]
Looking in at the USA from an Australian/British perspective it seems that a lot of the crazy stuff that goes on stems from the fact that you have not made your public institutions apolitical - the administration of your public service is politicised.
You elect judges, prosecutors and people to run schools and whenever you elect a new president you clean out all the people running all the departments and replace them the new president's appointees. As such, these people do crazy things to win votes and curry favour or repay debts to the people that elected/appointed them. (Just look at the guy your president appointed to run the emergency management department when New Orleans was flooded.)
Contrast that to the British/Australian (and most probably a lot of other countries) way where people in those roles are independent from the politicians. It swings the other way, where the public criticises the judiciary, etc. for being too lenient and pissweak, but if the alternative is to live in a place where I can get arrested and jailed for trivial things like we always seem to be reading about here I'll take our system anyday.
Demand is growing because China and India are booming and rapidly industrialising. The resultant demand for raw materials has seen a boon in mineral exploration and mining.
You can earn incredible money in the Australian mining industry right now because there's a huge shortage of skilled labour. It's not just geologists, surveyors and engineers - it's also everyday trades like electricians, welders, metalworkers, carpenters, concreters, etc. as well as unskilled labour like drill rig operators, dump truck and excavator drivers and even cleaners and caterers!
The boom in commodities prices means that mines can pay big bucks to get people in, and it's draining people away from all other industries. It's particularly hurting farming districts because the country is in the grip of a drought that has been going on for five years or so and all the farmers and tradesmen that depend on farmers spending money are leaving to work in the mines.
In the city I used to live in (Adelaide, Australia), the main sewage treatment plant installed a methane turbine to help power the plant - it produces about 1MW if I remember correctly.
We also used to live near a dump for the southern half of the city and years ago they started tapping the methane and running it through a couple of converted big Cat diesel gensets to kick out a couple of megawatts into the local grid.
Cool stuff and a lot of facilities do it these days - why let stuff like that go to waste when you can use it to reduce running costs or even generate revenue? That it helps the environment is only a side-effect.
Get yourself a Logitech set... I don't know what the models are anymore, but I bought the z680 a few years ago and it works pretty well... just have to keep the sub turned down because it's typical dickhead kiddy "who cares about mid and high-end sound?" Has optical and copper SPDIF inputs as well as 6-chan analogue and can decode DTS and AC3.
If you want I/O bandwidth, you're going to have to call up IBM and plonk down the cash for a Blade Center and a Cell Blade or two.
Also, your 1.6Tb/s figure is wishful thinking as the actual throughput to the EIB is choked by the XDR and RSX bandwidth which is 50GB/s(?) combined at best. Although if you're just shuffling data between the SPU's then I guess it can get that fast. I think I'll leave it at that though since I'll probably step into NDA territory if I say anything more.
Like every rule, there's always an exception - and S&M is that exception. (But maybe that's because before then I'd always thought it would awesome to hear Metallica as played by an orchestra.)
More of them listed the Britney Spears genre than the Angus Young genre.
What are you talking about? 39% vs 14% - AC/DC ain't metal, it's rock (It's a long way to the top, if you wanna rock'n roll!) It's just like that article - Queen is metal? News to me!
No, it won't. It won't because OpenAL is a horrible bastard of an API and lacks crucial features and functionality for modern game audio that can be found in better audio API's like XAudio, MultiStream and FMOD. Effects processing will be done in software like it is on next-gen consoles. There is no need for hardware accelleration of audio these days, especially with multi-core processors. The only reason you should buy an overpriced Creative piece of shit is because it probably has better analogue output than your onboard DAC. Even then, just use the SPDIF out on the mobo - because if you're buying a sound card for sound quality you obviously don't have a shitty amp and speakers to be able to tell the difference between a sound card and onboard analogue output.
Creative are really just an anomaly and their time has well passed. Once PC's became like pretty much every other architecture out there and started shipping with onboard audio and Windows became the OS everyone used there was no need for the average joe to buy a sound card.
That's it... when we (Australia) stopped tarrifs and subsidies it caused a lot of pain to farmers and rural communities (in fact, it's still painful today) as a lot of farms went bust and people moved away to the cities. The farms that were left though, snapped up the bust ones to expand and achieve greater economies of scale and are forced to be as efficient as possible to be able to compete with overseas producers that are subsidised on the order of 60-70% Now you have large farms where the fields are worked by GPS-guided autonomous tractors and crops are monitored with satellite imaging while sheep and cattle stations ("ranches" the size of small european countries) muster/round up stock with helicopters and dirt bikes and use solar powered bore pumps and remote telemetry to monitor watering points.
Classic example of US farm inefficiency - US slaps a tarrif on Australian lamb. Average US lamb producer turns out about 65 head/year. Average Aussie lamb producer turns out about 100x that.
Sounds like history is repeating itself in Zimbabwe, which has gone completely to shit in the last five or so years since Mugabe started seizing farms from whites and divvying them up to "independence veterans". Many farmers who didn't flee the country when it all started were murdered by mobs.
Exactly, there'll be a period of pain for a decade whilst the inefficient and unprofitable are shaken out and the efficient and profitable buy them out. You'll probably see the rural population halve, but farming will by no means stop. You've just got to look down here at Australia to see what happened when we stopped subsidies and tarrifs. We now have very large and efficient farms. Farming is just as hard as ever though because you're gambling on the weather and are at the bottom of the value chain.
It would be a boon for our farmers and farmers around the world if the USA and EU would just halve their subsidies and tarrifs.
All the richest nations, that have the best fed populations, have farm subsidies. Now, I think they would continue just fine without them, but "free markets have always done the best job" is untrue: in the richest countries it hasn't even been tried!
Australia doesn't subsidise farmers. Well, we do a bit in natural disasters and stuff like now with the worst drought in recorded history but overall our subsidies equate to 5% or something. The USA and EU have disgustingly high subsidy rates of 70% - 80% IIRC and Australia has been pressing for the USA and EU to slash subsidies and tarrifs for years. It's what the "Doha Round" of the WTO is all about.
When we started removing subsidies and tarrifs it caused a lot of pain and a lot of farmers went bust. Rural Australia has suffered a large population decline, but as a result there was consolidation as some were able to do well and buy up other farms and now we have the most efficient farmers in the world and our farmers continue to increase their efficiency as they have to compete the hardest. You'd probably be surprised to hear that a lot of farmers use GPS-guided autonomous tractors for tilling, sowing and harvesting - just plot the co-ordinates of the paddock, fill it up with fuel and supplies and come back in a few hours. Quite a few also use satellite imaging to monitor crops.
In recent years, the USA imposed horrendous tarrifs on Australian lamb. To illustrate the differences in efficiency, the average US lamb producer turns out something like 65 lambs a year while the average Australian lamb producer turns out 100x that. But then maybe that's because lamb is a very popular meat here.
And all you need to do to defeat this is break into someone's house and steal their thing or buy a 2nd hand one.
Unless the watermark encodes the GPS location of where the copy was made, there's really no way to keep the records of who has what watermark up to date - provided it's even legal to keep that data in the first place.
Actually the RoundUp resistance doesn't lead to increased spraying if the farmer has his wits about him. By being able to spray early after germination, weeds that would compete with the crop for moisture and nutrients and stunt growth of seedlings can be eliminated. This gives the crop a good head start so that it can out-compete and supress weeds that germinate later. Think of it like the rainforest where when a tree falls over there's a race amongst all the newly germinated ones to get to the top and get all the sun.
That aside, I don't agree with GM crops - especially the ones where they add genes from other species (xenomorphic?) By adopting the correct cultivation practices, the need for spraying can be essentially eliminated. Natural breeding has brought us to where we are today and it is still continuing to bring dramatic improvements in crops and livestock.
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80 columns has been too little for years now. Hell, back in my DOS days I had the editor set to the hi-res textmode (132 columns? Heh, to this day I still use the Turbo-C colour scheme, and I see quite a few coders at work do too.) These days with widescreens and GUI's everywhere I code to 150 lines, even though my editor window is wider. It seems stupid to limit yourself to some arbitrary number. (That being said, I don't think 150 is arbitrary because it's about the point on the screen where the debugger windows pop up, thus allowing me to see a whole line of code without horizontal scrolling when running in the debugger.)
I find that it makes code a lot more readable as you can get away with using meaningful variable, function and method names, 4-space tab indents and spacing between operators and stuff. The liberal use of whitespace to in combination with syntax colouring makes it much easier to read and navigate through code. You can clearly delinate sections and stuff.
Maybe in years gone by when a 14" monitor was huge, 80 lines was a lot. In fact, I remember that it was massive when we went from a 40-column C64 to a PC. But how horrible is it today to look at a 80x25 textmode screen on a 23" widescreen? Talk about headache inducing!
Give me 12pt monospaced fonts on a high-res screen with arbitrary-sized windows any day!
It's not addiction or a disorder, it's just a lack of self-discipline. Nothing that a good boot up the arse can't fix. Anyone who argues otherwise is just looking for an excuse for their lack of self control.
Addiction is chemical dependency. Deprive a tech or gambling "addict" of their stuff for a week and compare their behaviour to that of a heroin junkie that's been deprived of heroin for a week. The former will have bitched for a day or two then gotten on with life. The latter... well, let's just say it wouldn't be a pretty sight.
Yeah, but a good watch or good piece of furniture is something that will last a lifetime (if cared for), and most probably become an heirloom. E.g. my youngest brother's bed was my first bed and was bought over 20 years ago. It will probably be around as a guest bed in our family home for another 20 years after he moves out.
Tech gadgets break or are replaced after a few years.
I was amazed to read about the pneumatic tube network that was developed in Manhattan in the 1890's and how it was speculated that eventually people would be able to travel via them. (Which is the whole point of the article - everyone hypes up new developments with bullshit that almost never turns out to be true and it's always something that nobody saw coming that "revolutionises" things.)
Anyway, what I'm really wondering is if that is where the Futurama guys got their idea for the pneumatic tubes in New New York from? =]
40 years now is it? All the greenies and environuts down here in Australia have been saying that there's only 80 years of supply left as their other arguments about meltdowns and such have been blown out of the water in our national debate on nuclear energy.
It's probably worth noting that there has been barely any exploration for Uranium in the last 20 or so years. This has been because of large finds like Olympic Dam being brought online, the lack of new reactors and shutdown of existing reactors and the decomissioning of thousands of US and USSR nuclear warheads. Apparently the warhead decomissioning has constituted about 50% of the supply, but now the programmes are winding up and the price of Uranium has dramatically increased in the last couple of years. This is also being fuelled by China and Russia's plans to build dozens of new reactors in the next couple of decades, and also the resurgence in interest in nuclear energy occuring elsewhere in the world.
Because of all of that, there has been a 400-500% increase in Uranium exploration expenditure in Australia in the last couple of years and it is predicted that expenditure will grow by that amount again in the next couple of years. The opposition party's recent lifting of their ban on new Uranium mines is also already helping to fuel the exploration boom, especially seeing as it seems they are going to win government in the looming election.
If you can't get that information and the source from the vendor then what the hell are you doing using that library?
License Perforce.
So does yours. Ketosis fucks up your liver, just as the whole Atkins diet fucks up your body.
Dieting is no substitute for eating a healthy balanced diet and exercising. Just because you're skinny doesn't mean you're healthy, and healthy is what we should be aiming for!
I think that Sony are either breaking even or losing say $50 per unit. (Can't be losing too much if they're expecting it to make it back on game sales when you consider how many games the average owner would buy and the license fees on those).
Probably breaking even now that they've dropped the PS2 hardware from the latest revision. Have a look at the gizzards of a PS3 and there isn't really that much to look at - it appears to be an elegantly designed system.
I think these "analysts" that try to estimate the costs are just pulling numbers out of their arses and we can expect a price drop as soon as Microsoft drops the price of the 360 or Christmas rolls around - whichever happens first.
I'm sure somebody has already covered it and it hasn't been modded up to the level I read at, but I'm glad I live in Australia where you can at least have a beer before you get sent off to die fighting for your country.
Yeehaw, you're 18! Drive a car, get married, stick a bun in the oven and then go to Iraq and blow away some dirty sand nigger terrorists, but don't you dare have even a drop of refreshing icy cold beer after a hard day's shooting in the desert heat until you're 21!
I shudder to think about the reaction these people would have upon being told that the high school I went to has a functioning vineyard and winery and teaches kids how to make wine. (A surprisingly scientific endeavour!) =]
Real Men(tm) play Aussie Rules.
Looking in at the USA from an Australian/British perspective it seems that a lot of the crazy stuff that goes on stems from the fact that you have not made your public institutions apolitical - the administration of your public service is politicised.
You elect judges, prosecutors and people to run schools and whenever you elect a new president you clean out all the people running all the departments and replace them the new president's appointees. As such, these people do crazy things to win votes and curry favour or repay debts to the people that elected/appointed them. (Just look at the guy your president appointed to run the emergency management department when New Orleans was flooded.)
Contrast that to the British/Australian (and most probably a lot of other countries) way where people in those roles are independent from the politicians. It swings the other way, where the public criticises the judiciary, etc. for being too lenient and pissweak, but if the alternative is to live in a place where I can get arrested and jailed for trivial things like we always seem to be reading about here I'll take our system anyday.
Demand is growing because China and India are booming and rapidly industrialising. The resultant demand for raw materials has seen a boon in mineral exploration and mining.
You can earn incredible money in the Australian mining industry right now because there's a huge shortage of skilled labour. It's not just geologists, surveyors and engineers - it's also everyday trades like electricians, welders, metalworkers, carpenters, concreters, etc. as well as unskilled labour like drill rig operators, dump truck and excavator drivers and even cleaners and caterers!
The boom in commodities prices means that mines can pay big bucks to get people in, and it's draining people away from all other industries. It's particularly hurting farming districts because the country is in the grip of a drought that has been going on for five years or so and all the farmers and tradesmen that depend on farmers spending money are leaving to work in the mines.
In the city I used to live in (Adelaide, Australia), the main sewage treatment plant installed a methane turbine to help power the plant - it produces about 1MW if I remember correctly.
We also used to live near a dump for the southern half of the city and years ago they started tapping the methane and running it through a couple of converted big Cat diesel gensets to kick out a couple of megawatts into the local grid.
Cool stuff and a lot of facilities do it these days - why let stuff like that go to waste when you can use it to reduce running costs or even generate revenue? That it helps the environment is only a side-effect.
Get yourself a Logitech set... I don't know what the models are anymore, but I bought the z680 a few years ago and it works pretty well... just have to keep the sub turned down because it's typical dickhead kiddy "who cares about mid and high-end sound?" Has optical and copper SPDIF inputs as well as 6-chan analogue and can decode DTS and AC3.
If you want I/O bandwidth, you're going to have to call up IBM and plonk down the cash for a Blade Center and a Cell Blade or two.
Also, your 1.6Tb/s figure is wishful thinking as the actual throughput to the EIB is choked by the XDR and RSX bandwidth which is 50GB/s(?) combined at best. Although if you're just shuffling data between the SPU's then I guess it can get that fast. I think I'll leave it at that though since I'll probably step into NDA territory if I say anything more.
Like every rule, there's always an exception - and S&M is that exception. (But maybe that's because before then I'd always thought it would awesome to hear Metallica as played by an orchestra.)
More of them listed the Britney Spears genre than the Angus Young genre.
What are you talking about? 39% vs 14% - AC/DC ain't metal, it's rock (It's a long way to the top, if you wanna rock'n roll!) It's just like that article - Queen is metal? News to me!
No, it won't. It won't because OpenAL is a horrible bastard of an API and lacks crucial features and functionality for modern game audio that can be found in better audio API's like XAudio, MultiStream and FMOD. Effects processing will be done in software like it is on next-gen consoles. There is no need for hardware accelleration of audio these days, especially with multi-core processors. The only reason you should buy an overpriced Creative piece of shit is because it probably has better analogue output than your onboard DAC. Even then, just use the SPDIF out on the mobo - because if you're buying a sound card for sound quality you obviously don't have a shitty amp and speakers to be able to tell the difference between a sound card and onboard analogue output.
Creative are really just an anomaly and their time has well passed. Once PC's became like pretty much every other architecture out there and started shipping with onboard audio and Windows became the OS everyone used there was no need for the average joe to buy a sound card.
That's it... when we (Australia) stopped tarrifs and subsidies it caused a lot of pain to farmers and rural communities (in fact, it's still painful today) as a lot of farms went bust and people moved away to the cities. The farms that were left though, snapped up the bust ones to expand and achieve greater economies of scale and are forced to be as efficient as possible to be able to compete with overseas producers that are subsidised on the order of 60-70% Now you have large farms where the fields are worked by GPS-guided autonomous tractors and crops are monitored with satellite imaging while sheep and cattle stations ("ranches" the size of small european countries) muster/round up stock with helicopters and dirt bikes and use solar powered bore pumps and remote telemetry to monitor watering points.
Classic example of US farm inefficiency - US slaps a tarrif on Australian lamb. Average US lamb producer turns out about 65 head/year. Average Aussie lamb producer turns out about 100x that.
Sounds like history is repeating itself in Zimbabwe, which has gone completely to shit in the last five or so years since Mugabe started seizing farms from whites and divvying them up to "independence veterans". Many farmers who didn't flee the country when it all started were murdered by mobs.
Exactly, there'll be a period of pain for a decade whilst the inefficient and unprofitable are shaken out and the efficient and profitable buy them out. You'll probably see the rural population halve, but farming will by no means stop. You've just got to look down here at Australia to see what happened when we stopped subsidies and tarrifs. We now have very large and efficient farms. Farming is just as hard as ever though because you're gambling on the weather and are at the bottom of the value chain.
It would be a boon for our farmers and farmers around the world if the USA and EU would just halve their subsidies and tarrifs.
All the richest nations, that have the best fed populations, have farm subsidies. Now, I think they would continue just fine without them, but "free markets have always done the best job" is untrue: in the richest countries it hasn't even been tried!
Australia doesn't subsidise farmers. Well, we do a bit in natural disasters and stuff like now with the worst drought in recorded history but overall our subsidies equate to 5% or something. The USA and EU have disgustingly high subsidy rates of 70% - 80% IIRC and Australia has been pressing for the USA and EU to slash subsidies and tarrifs for years. It's what the "Doha Round" of the WTO is all about.
When we started removing subsidies and tarrifs it caused a lot of pain and a lot of farmers went bust. Rural Australia has suffered a large population decline, but as a result there was consolidation as some were able to do well and buy up other farms and now we have the most efficient farmers in the world and our farmers continue to increase their efficiency as they have to compete the hardest. You'd probably be surprised to hear that a lot of farmers use GPS-guided autonomous tractors for tilling, sowing and harvesting - just plot the co-ordinates of the paddock, fill it up with fuel and supplies and come back in a few hours. Quite a few also use satellite imaging to monitor crops.
In recent years, the USA imposed horrendous tarrifs on Australian lamb. To illustrate the differences in efficiency, the average US lamb producer turns out something like 65 lambs a year while the average Australian lamb producer turns out 100x that. But then maybe that's because lamb is a very popular meat here.
And all you need to do to defeat this is break into someone's house and steal their thing or buy a 2nd hand one.
Unless the watermark encodes the GPS location of where the copy was made, there's really no way to keep the records of who has what watermark up to date - provided it's even legal to keep that data in the first place.
Actually the RoundUp resistance doesn't lead to increased spraying if the farmer has his wits about him. By being able to spray early after germination, weeds that would compete with the crop for moisture and nutrients and stunt growth of seedlings can be eliminated. This gives the crop a good head start so that it can out-compete and supress weeds that germinate later. Think of it like the rainforest where when a tree falls over there's a race amongst all the newly germinated ones to get to the top and get all the sun.
That aside, I don't agree with GM crops - especially the ones where they add genes from other species (xenomorphic?) By adopting the correct cultivation practices, the need for spraying can be essentially eliminated. Natural breeding has brought us to where we are today and it is still continuing to bring dramatic improvements in crops and livestock.