Actually, you only need 30 minutes of elevated heart-rate per day to start making a difference. You like games right? Play a DDR game for 30 minutes... you're on your way! Note also that totally skinny isn't healthy for a man - ideal fat content is between 10 and 15% The insanely cut bodybuilders you see only look that massive because a couple of weeks before the competition they started starving themselves of carbohydrates and working out heaps to burn their fat down to a stupid 2-3%
As for where you put your kid on the bike - I take it you've never visited a bike shop and seen the kids seats that bolt onto the saddle rack? (But yeah, I wouldn't go riding in traffic with a kid strapped in like that - that's really only for the veloways)
Yeah, ask any trainer who knows their shit and they say BMI is bullshit. A given volume of muscle weighs 3x as much as the same volume of fat. I'm about 16% fat and lift weights a few times a week and run on the other days and weigh the same now as when I started 7 or 8 months ago. Back then I was 27% fat (or about that) with high blood pressure and resting heart rate and piss-weak muscles. I was in poor health, despite my healthy diet and propensity for walking everywhere.
Now I can lift more than 2x as much as then (Yay!) and my BMI hasn't changed one bit (says i'm just overweight) yet I'm now healthy according to all other indicators - body composition, blood pressure, cholestrol levels, resting heart rate, etc. Hell, I'm even starting to buy tight-fitting clothes for the first time ever now that I'm starting to get a bit of buffness to show off! If this muscle growth keeps up I'll be able to join the ranks of the Terry Tuff Cunts at the end of the year =]
You're on the right track about the protein. I can't remember the exact figures (and people seem to disagree on them) but it's something like 1.2g/kg body mass/day to maintain muscles and 1.7-2g/kg body mass/day to maintain hypertrophy in conjunction with lifting. The ideal diet is 50% protein, 50% carbohydrates - pasta with a lean mince and vegetable sauce is ideal. If you're going to get into a competition or want to look really cut for something then you cut back the carbs a couple of weeks beforehand and step up the reps to burn off the fat and tone up.
It really pays to keep track of the content of what you're eating (and to try and eat 6 to 8 times day to speed up metabolism). After a couple of weeks of monitoring the protein content of my diet I found that I needed to up my intake. I tried to eat more but it was hard so I got onto a protein supplement that I take after working out.
Yeah I know diesels have much higher compression ratios and how they're different from petrol engines. I do think that the insanely high pressures in injector systems these days is more about atomising the fuel than getting it into the cylinder - apparently the latest systems are pushing 4,000psi!
I'd love to drive a diesel car built today, as the last one I drove was my parents 4wd that's about 4 years old. (That is a huge improvement over the last diesel I drove - their 4 tonne truck with no power steering!)
This sounds an awful lot like a modern diesel engine. Modern diesels are turbocharged and use common-rail injection to achieve insane pressures at the injector heads (for really fine atomisation of the fuel), which directly inject into the cylinder. I believe the newer engines even stagger the injection during the compression and combustion cycles too to achieve more power and cleaner burning.
(NB: I'm not a revhead so I might be talking shit)
Note that some traditionally strong coal mining countries are giving up all coal mining over the next decade.
Not that it'll make much of an impact, since Australia is by far the worlds largest exporter of coal - our output dwarfs the next largest exporter. What's more is that we're currently at capacity - ships are lining up for weeks to be filled with their load of coal - and work is being done to expand export capacity.
Most of our exported coal heads to Japan. China doesn't account for much (yet) because they have enormous reserves like we do. What scares me the most is that China is bringing almost two new coal-fired power stations online every week - in six months their emissions grow by as much Australia's entire annual emissions!
All the greenies going around down here bleating about us having the world's highest per-capita emissions is just a load of horseshit when you stand back and look at the big picture - 20 million industrialised Aussies versus over a billion rapidly industrialising Chinese! But now I'm starting to ramble so best leave it at that.
Exactly. Hardware accelerated audio pretty much died back with the GUS. Ever since then, CPU's have had the beef to mix a substantial number of channels. The current generation of consoles does all the audio processing in software and now Vista is the same. There's just no need for HW accell of sound anymore, especially with multi-processor/core systems being about the only sort of system you can buy these days.
The only two reasons for getting a sound card that I can think of is if you want realtime AC-3/DTS encoding or you want high-quality analogue I/O's.
If you go to university/college and you submit an assignment that uses someone elses work without attributing it to them you are guilty of plagiarism and will immediately fail the subject and possibly even be expelled if the institution holds any sort of regard for their academic integrity. Plagiarism is high treason in the academic world. However, if you indicate something in your assignment as being by someone else, that is allowable because you're not passing it off as your own work.
In the demoscene, the same principle applies - except plagiarism is called "ripping" and it's considered to be "lame". In the demoscene it is traditional to send "greets" in your productions, to acknowledge other sceners and groups that you know or admire and respect. However, "lamers" receive "fuckings". So whilst it's lame to rip in the scene, which is done for the art and not for profit (I know that for Assembly, you are disqualified if you enter anything that contains copyrighted work and you don't have permission for it) - ripping for profit is really fucking obscene and that's why demosceners are so pissed at this.
Profit is the key here - as far as I understand, The Grey Album was never released for money and DJ Danger Mouse never tried to hide who the sources were. Whilst it's lame that he used other artists work without their permission, because there was no commercial gain from the production it isn't even in the same ballpark.
Rabbits are one of the most efficient farmed animals at converting plant protein to meat - they're right up there with chickens. Apparently they thrive on grasses, which don't pack much punch for poultry and ruminants, who instead make the most gains from eating grains. This is important, because humans eat grains and not grasses.
Their high conversion efficiency and preference for foods that humans don't eat combined with prolific reproduction rate makes them an ideal, although not primary, meat source. (Apparently rabbit lacks some nutrients found in other meats that the human body can't synthesise)
Farmed rabbits are typically slaughtered at 12 weeks and will at that point have consumed around 10kg of feed, yielding around 1.5kg of meat. The pelts aren't worth much though because the animal is so young and the skin isn't as developed as in a more mature adult. Heads and guts are apparently good food for composting worms, and the liver can be used for pate.
Rabbit manure is also a very good fertiliser as it is rich in Nitrogen.
(Funnily I've been researching rabbit farming for the last few weeks.)
They can, but then anyone making a game with maps large enough to cause such issues commonly split up the map into chunks with their own co-ordinate space and re-centre the global co-ordinate space's origin to the origin of each chunk as the camera moves into it.
Animating objects like characters and such have all of their calculations performed in their local co-ordinate space before the result is transformed into world space.
Most also use the scale of 1.0f = 1M, so you'll be going on for a few KM's before precision becomes much of an issue.
The next thing you know, some programmer on your team got the wise-ass idea to use Boost lambda functions (for no good reason) and you find yourself with 14 different string classes and... you have a mess that no one single developer can fully deal with.
Which is why the Lead Programmer lays down the rules then fires anyone who decides to pull brain-dead shit like that. If you don't have a Lead Programmer then you really shouldn't have more than two people working on the project.
At the places I've worked, Alpha is considered to be "feature complete", in that all of the code features have been laid down and work then progresses on filling out the content side whilst the code is fixed up and made more stable.
When content is all done, it's Beta and work progresses on ironing out all the bugs and tuning the play and content to get it ready for submission.
Submissions are called release candidates and when one passes submission it becomes gold master and is released to manufacturing.
It boils down to this: If you have enough time, you can work on eye candy AND on playability. Save the $500,000 on licensed technology for whatever and do it in-house. Not only is it easier to suit it to your needs, but it's more unique.
Spoken like someone who's never worked in games, or probably even software development!
$500,000 is going to buy you mature tools, pipeline and engine technology.
To develop something equivalent to that would require months of work from a bunch of coders... and that's not even counting the QA. I can assure you that it would cost significantly more than half a million to develop something to the standard of $LICENSED_ENGINE I should know, my current employer has an in-house engine just like my previous employer. Both invested decades of man-hours into their current/last-gen engines, and even then still use middleware!
Sure, doing it all yourself gives you ultimate control over everything... but then it also means that if you lose an employee it will be hard and expensive to find another to work in that area of expertise. Besides, nobody in their right mind would license an engine or middleware that didn't come with source anyway, so you still do have total control with the added benefit of it being easier/cheaper to find a developer who is familiar with the tech.
An interesting point! Many plants have been "cloned" via non-seed propogation such as grafting, cuttings and tissue culture for thousands of years. (Well, not thousands in the case of tissue culture!)
None of these plant species have suffered from any catasrophic diseases. Of course, there are diseases and pests that affect plants, but they haven't wiped out everything.
I should know, my family has run a production nursery for decades and at any one time has thousands of citrus trees "cloned" by grafting sitting around. Take a short drive over the hill and there's thousands of hectares of grapevines, all "cloned" by cuttings.
It is a good point... we've done well with cloned plants, so what makes cloned animals any different? It can't be that there'll be a monoculture, because there will most probably be many different varieties of animals (just as there currently are) like there are with oranges - different regions will prefer different types. Steak with strong marbling is what people in the USA want, whereas in Australia we prefer ours lean.
And unless you find a way to do it locally (that is, capture the HDCP stream before it exits the graphics card) this will be a really fringe thing for release groups
And there you have it... all it takes is for one person to be able to do it, and next thing you know there's tens of thousands of people out there downloading it via bittorrent.
I'll agree, unless someone can give me an example of what C++ is best suited for. I've tried every language that I can find at least twice, and I can't find anything that C++ is the best at, or even a reasonable middle-ground.
So you're a jack of all trades, but master of none?
C++ is like chess, something you can pickup relatively quickly, yet takes years to master. It's a language with extraordinary power because it's so full of features. Just because it has support for all sorts of things doesn't mean you have to use them. (Eg friggin' exceptions) It doesn't wrap you in cotton wool and shield you from the harsh reality of how computers actually work, so you get the power to do whatever you want with fast execution speed.
Heh, you sound like me. I learned C/C++ with TurboC++ and to this day, the first thing I do when using a fresh install of an editor is change all the colours to be as much like TurboC as possible. Quite a few other coders around here do it too.
I don't know how people can stare at a bright, white background all day.
To a certain extent. Console games almost always pad out the disc with large files to force the actual game datafiles to the outer edge of the disc, where read speeds are a lot faster. You could fill a pad file with random data so the disc image won't compress, but what's the point when people have multi-megabit links and P2P?
Really though, games are huge because gamers want them to be bigger and more detailed and it's a lot faster to precompute offline and store the data on disc in the hardware's native format so you can just stream it straight into memory where it can be used straight away with perhaps only a bit of work to fixup pointers or something. That way you don't have to burn precious cycles on generating data on the fly.
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Actually, you only need 30 minutes of elevated heart-rate per day to start making a difference. You like games right? Play a DDR game for 30 minutes... you're on your way! Note also that totally skinny isn't healthy for a man - ideal fat content is between 10 and 15% The insanely cut bodybuilders you see only look that massive because a couple of weeks before the competition they started starving themselves of carbohydrates and working out heaps to burn their fat down to a stupid 2-3%
As for where you put your kid on the bike - I take it you've never visited a bike shop and seen the kids seats that bolt onto the saddle rack? (But yeah, I wouldn't go riding in traffic with a kid strapped in like that - that's really only for the veloways)
Yeah, ask any trainer who knows their shit and they say BMI is bullshit. A given volume of muscle weighs 3x as much as the same volume of fat. I'm about 16% fat and lift weights a few times a week and run on the other days and weigh the same now as when I started 7 or 8 months ago. Back then I was 27% fat (or about that) with high blood pressure and resting heart rate and piss-weak muscles. I was in poor health, despite my healthy diet and propensity for walking everywhere.
Now I can lift more than 2x as much as then (Yay!) and my BMI hasn't changed one bit (says i'm just overweight) yet I'm now healthy according to all other indicators - body composition, blood pressure, cholestrol levels, resting heart rate, etc. Hell, I'm even starting to buy tight-fitting clothes for the first time ever now that I'm starting to get a bit of buffness to show off! If this muscle growth keeps up I'll be able to join the ranks of the Terry Tuff Cunts at the end of the year =]
You're on the right track about the protein. I can't remember the exact figures (and people seem to disagree on them) but it's something like 1.2g/kg body mass/day to maintain muscles and 1.7-2g/kg body mass/day to maintain hypertrophy in conjunction with lifting. The ideal diet is 50% protein, 50% carbohydrates - pasta with a lean mince and vegetable sauce is ideal. If you're going to get into a competition or want to look really cut for something then you cut back the carbs a couple of weeks beforehand and step up the reps to burn off the fat and tone up.
It really pays to keep track of the content of what you're eating (and to try and eat 6 to 8 times day to speed up metabolism). After a couple of weeks of monitoring the protein content of my diet I found that I needed to up my intake. I tried to eat more but it was hard so I got onto a protein supplement that I take after working out.
Yeah I know diesels have much higher compression ratios and how they're different from petrol engines. I do think that the insanely high pressures in injector systems these days is more about atomising the fuel than getting it into the cylinder - apparently the latest systems are pushing 4,000psi!
I'd love to drive a diesel car built today, as the last one I drove was my parents 4wd that's about 4 years old. (That is a huge improvement over the last diesel I drove - their 4 tonne truck with no power steering!)
This sounds an awful lot like a modern diesel engine. Modern diesels are turbocharged and use common-rail injection to achieve insane pressures at the injector heads (for really fine atomisation of the fuel), which directly inject into the cylinder. I believe the newer engines even stagger the injection during the compression and combustion cycles too to achieve more power and cleaner burning.
(NB: I'm not a revhead so I might be talking shit)
I think showers are a good idea as some of us like to cycle to work and/or play sport at lunch.
A half-decent kitchen is also good too - nice to be able to warm up left-overs and stuff.
Note that some traditionally strong coal mining countries are giving up all coal mining over the next decade.
Not that it'll make much of an impact, since Australia is by far the worlds largest exporter of coal - our output dwarfs the next largest exporter. What's more is that we're currently at capacity - ships are lining up for weeks to be filled with their load of coal - and work is being done to expand export capacity.
Most of our exported coal heads to Japan. China doesn't account for much (yet) because they have enormous reserves like we do. What scares me the most is that China is bringing almost two new coal-fired power stations online every week - in six months their emissions grow by as much Australia's entire annual emissions!
All the greenies going around down here bleating about us having the world's highest per-capita emissions is just a load of horseshit when you stand back and look at the big picture - 20 million industrialised Aussies versus over a billion rapidly industrialising Chinese! But now I'm starting to ramble so best leave it at that.
Lack of natural gas? We have more gas than we know what to do with!
Exactly. Hardware accelerated audio pretty much died back with the GUS. Ever since then, CPU's have had the beef to mix a substantial number of channels. The current generation of consoles does all the audio processing in software and now Vista is the same. There's just no need for HW accell of sound anymore, especially with multi-processor/core systems being about the only sort of system you can buy these days.
The only two reasons for getting a sound card that I can think of is if you want realtime AC-3/DTS encoding or you want high-quality analogue I/O's.
Did you know that ipods only support 2 video formats (both of them MAC formats)
Last time I checked, the formats were MPEG4 and MPEG4-AVC/H.264 - hardly "MAC-only" formats!
If you go to university/college and you submit an assignment that uses someone elses work without attributing it to them you are guilty of plagiarism and will immediately fail the subject and possibly even be expelled if the institution holds any sort of regard for their academic integrity. Plagiarism is high treason in the academic world. However, if you indicate something in your assignment as being by someone else, that is allowable because you're not passing it off as your own work.
In the demoscene, the same principle applies - except plagiarism is called "ripping" and it's considered to be "lame". In the demoscene it is traditional to send "greets" in your productions, to acknowledge other sceners and groups that you know or admire and respect. However, "lamers" receive "fuckings". So whilst it's lame to rip in the scene, which is done for the art and not for profit (I know that for Assembly, you are disqualified if you enter anything that contains copyrighted work and you don't have permission for it) - ripping for profit is really fucking obscene and that's why demosceners are so pissed at this.
Profit is the key here - as far as I understand, The Grey Album was never released for money and DJ Danger Mouse never tried to hide who the sources were. Whilst it's lame that he used other artists work without their permission, because there was no commercial gain from the production it isn't even in the same ballpark.
Rabbits are one of the most efficient farmed animals at converting plant protein to meat - they're right up there with chickens. Apparently they thrive on grasses, which don't pack much punch for poultry and ruminants, who instead make the most gains from eating grains. This is important, because humans eat grains and not grasses.
Their high conversion efficiency and preference for foods that humans don't eat combined with prolific reproduction rate makes them an ideal, although not primary, meat source. (Apparently rabbit lacks some nutrients found in other meats that the human body can't synthesise)
Farmed rabbits are typically slaughtered at 12 weeks and will at that point have consumed around 10kg of feed, yielding around 1.5kg of meat. The pelts aren't worth much though because the animal is so young and the skin isn't as developed as in a more mature adult. Heads and guts are apparently good food for composting worms, and the liver can be used for pate.
Rabbit manure is also a very good fertiliser as it is rich in Nitrogen.
(Funnily I've been researching rabbit farming for the last few weeks.)
They can, but then anyone making a game with maps large enough to cause such issues commonly split up the map into chunks with their own co-ordinate space and re-centre the global co-ordinate space's origin to the origin of each chunk as the camera moves into it.
Animating objects like characters and such have all of their calculations performed in their local co-ordinate space before the result is transformed into world space.
Most also use the scale of 1.0f = 1M, so you'll be going on for a few KM's before precision becomes much of an issue.
So overall, it's hardly an issue.
The next thing you know, some programmer on your team got the wise-ass idea to use Boost lambda functions (for no good reason) and you find yourself with 14 different string classes and... you have a mess that no one single developer can fully deal with.
Which is why the Lead Programmer lays down the rules then fires anyone who decides to pull brain-dead shit like that. If you don't have a Lead Programmer then you really shouldn't have more than two people working on the project.
At the places I've worked, Alpha is considered to be "feature complete", in that all of the code features have been laid down and work then progresses on filling out the content side whilst the code is fixed up and made more stable.
When content is all done, it's Beta and work progresses on ironing out all the bugs and tuning the play and content to get it ready for submission.
Submissions are called release candidates and when one passes submission it becomes gold master and is released to manufacturing.
It boils down to this: If you have enough time, you can work on eye candy AND on playability. Save the $500,000 on licensed technology for whatever and do it in-house. Not only is it easier to suit it to your needs, but it's more unique.
Spoken like someone who's never worked in games, or probably even software development!
$500,000 is going to buy you mature tools, pipeline and engine technology.
To develop something equivalent to that would require months of work from a bunch of coders... and that's not even counting the QA. I can assure you that it would cost significantly more than half a million to develop something to the standard of $LICENSED_ENGINE I should know, my current employer has an in-house engine just like my previous employer. Both invested decades of man-hours into their current/last-gen engines, and even then still use middleware!
Sure, doing it all yourself gives you ultimate control over everything... but then it also means that if you lose an employee it will be hard and expensive to find another to work in that area of expertise. Besides, nobody in their right mind would license an engine or middleware that didn't come with source anyway, so you still do have total control with the added benefit of it being easier/cheaper to find a developer who is familiar with the tech.
Who cares about movies?
The real reason for Blu-Ray on the PS3 is that there are already games in development that will need more space than a dual-layer DVD can offer.
An interesting point! Many plants have been "cloned" via non-seed propogation such as grafting, cuttings and tissue culture for thousands of years. (Well, not thousands in the case of tissue culture!)
None of these plant species have suffered from any catasrophic diseases. Of course, there are diseases and pests that affect plants, but they haven't wiped out everything.
I should know, my family has run a production nursery for decades and at any one time has thousands of citrus trees "cloned" by grafting sitting around. Take a short drive over the hill and there's thousands of hectares of grapevines, all "cloned" by cuttings.
It is a good point... we've done well with cloned plants, so what makes cloned animals any different? It can't be that there'll be a monoculture, because there will most probably be many different varieties of animals (just as there currently are) like there are with oranges - different regions will prefer different types. Steak with strong marbling is what people in the USA want, whereas in Australia we prefer ours lean.
Don't forget the PlayStation and PlayStation2! I think my ADSL2+ all-in-one routerthingy has a MIPS processor too.
But yeah, MIPS will be around forever in embedded systems, just like ARM and PPC.
And unless you find a way to do it locally (that is, capture the HDCP stream before it exits the graphics card) this will be a really fringe thing for release groups
And there you have it... all it takes is for one person to be able to do it, and next thing you know there's tens of thousands of people out there downloading it via bittorrent.
I'll agree, unless someone can give me an example of what C++ is best suited for. I've tried every language that I can find at least twice, and I can't find anything that C++ is the best at, or even a reasonable middle-ground.
So you're a jack of all trades, but master of none?
C++ is like chess, something you can pickup relatively quickly, yet takes years to master. It's a language with extraordinary power because it's so full of features. Just because it has support for all sorts of things doesn't mean you have to use them. (Eg friggin' exceptions) It doesn't wrap you in cotton wool and shield you from the harsh reality of how computers actually work, so you get the power to do whatever you want with fast execution speed.
Heh, you sound like me. I learned C/C++ with TurboC++ and to this day, the first thing I do when using a fresh install of an editor is change all the colours to be as much like TurboC as possible. Quite a few other coders around here do it too.
I don't know how people can stare at a bright, white background all day.
Obviously you never saw a 3DO system. =]
You've also just described how diesel locomotives and large earthmoving equipment work.
To a certain extent. Console games almost always pad out the disc with large files to force the actual game datafiles to the outer edge of the disc, where read speeds are a lot faster. You could fill a pad file with random data so the disc image won't compress, but what's the point when people have multi-megabit links and P2P?
Really though, games are huge because gamers want them to be bigger and more detailed and it's a lot faster to precompute offline and store the data on disc in the hardware's native format so you can just stream it straight into memory where it can be used straight away with perhaps only a bit of work to fixup pointers or something. That way you don't have to burn precious cycles on generating data on the fly.