I wrote a web based game in RoR http://www.forumwarz.com/. It's running of a single dedicated server and it seems to be handling a lot of requests just fine. During peak periods, we've got multiple requests per second and I've never had any complaints about the performance.
Ruby gets a lot of flack for being slow. The truth it, it is slower than other languages. However, it's rarely a bottleneck for web applications. I'm fairly active in the local Rails community and I've yet to meet someone who had to backpeddle on rails for performance reasons.
In most web applications the database is your big bottleneck. Since Rails is process-based you can always buy another server or two and increase your performance that way. Let's face it, servers are cheap and developers are expensive. Rails allows you to get done stuff faster.
Just because you're ignorant doesn't mean you're smart.
Carl Sagan said it best himself: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I'm one of millions of residents of Toronto, and I've lived here for almost a decade. Never have I experienced, nor heard of anyone experiencing energy fields that made sleeping unbearable. I also know many other residents who don't have physical and stress problems.
You're asking a lot of people if you expect them to assume that you have some extra-sensory abilities to feel energy waves (and make energy bubbles). As far as I know there isn't a single scientific study that supports those findings. If there is, I'm sure you could make some money off of James Randi.
Instead of throwing around terms like ignorant, how about throwing out some evidence? And when I say evidence, I mean studies involving many people in controlled conditions, not just some odd feeling you got.
EMI has been releasing high profile discs from artists like Radiohead, Jane's Addiction and Blur in Canada for a while now. The problem is that these high profile discs do not play in many conventional players, such as my 1-year old Sony Discman.
I wrote a nasty email to EMI about it, and they replaced my Radiohead disc free of charge with a non-crippled version, including delivery. I suggest that everyone who's against this technology actually buy the CD, write a letter to them and have them send a second disc at their expense.
My biggest objection with this technology is that they call them CDs, when they don't conform to the CD standard. If you look for the official Compact Disc Constortium logo, it's missing. Putting these crippled discs alongside regular CDs in a store is misleading. They should be in a seperate section of the store, in very clear packaging (a small sticker or bullet on the back of the CD isn't obvious enough)
I also don't think the artists know what's happening to their work. People who play these CDs in computers receive a far lower quality version of the song than they'd even get by downloading them online. They can't say that they're "all about the art" and release crap like this which sounds hissy and loses the bass-line. The WMA files are ripped at very low bitrates, something like 96kpbs, presumably to prevent people from just extracting them off the data layer and using file sharing. I personally never rip anything less than 192kpbs.
I was dissapointed to discover that my copies of Radiohead's "Hail to the Theif" and Blur's "Think Tank" were copy controlled. Fortunately, I discovered that you can circumvent it easily enough with the proper software.
That link has the entire story, and my response to Copy Control mechanisms. I too have an objection with them calling them CDs, seeing as they are not "Compact Discs" within the RedBook IEC 908 Specification.
First, before I say this, it's worth noting that I am a hardcore video game fan. I own all major systems, and have been finding myself caught in front of a TV for hours playing games since I was about 10 (I'm 24 now)
Having said that, there is definitely a correlation between violent behaviour and violent video games. I know this, because I have felt them.
Last year, a close friend and I spent an entire afternoon/early evening inside playing Grand Theft Auto 3, stealing cars, passing missions, running around and shooting people. We blasted the jungle radio station through my surround sound system, laughed, smoked, and had a great time.
Later that night, we went out with some other friends clubbing. After last call, we were stuck about a 20 minute walk from home, so we decided to hike it on foot. About half way home, a cop car suddenly pulled up in front of us, and two officers got out and walked into a chinese restaurant. The window on the passenger's door was wide open.
I looked at my buddy Drach just as he looked at me and then I said "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" And he's like "My dear god... My urge to steal the cop car is ridiculous."
Of course, we're rational human beings, and we did nothing of the sort. But the fact is that after joy riding in cop cars all after noon, it sort of romanticized the idea. Now you could argue that because we didn't go through with it, video games are safe. And I'd agree with that, as I continue to play and just beat Return to Castle Wolfenstein : The Tides of War. But the idea here is that they can be just as suggestive (or moreso, as interactivity increases) as other media.
A game like GTA3, with it's violence and glamorization of criminal acts has no place in the hands of a toddler, or a young child. After that, it's the parent's responsibility to determine whether or not their child can handle it.
While 2-D platform games do have that retro appeal, I can't help but think that this set of tools would be inifinitely more useful if it were geared towards GameBoy Advance development.
Unlike the PC, the GBA is a popular platform for this kind of game. I'm not necessarily suggesting that they should drop all work and target the GBA exclusively, but it would be nice if it supported the native resolution and limitations of that platform, and, better yet, could export tile data as assembly files that could be compiled into your GBA projects.
Now THAT would be useful. Otherwise, I feel this project is doomed to obscurity.
Actually, the text is misleading. You can only play the new Mario Kart with 4 players at once. The broadband adapter lets you link your GC to another one, and then play with 8.
As another poster mentioned, the real appeal here is the idea that someone will create an Internet bridge to be able to play on the net, like they did with Halo on the Xbox.
Actually, there are more assumptions made than that. They are assuming that the lifeforms have developed radio technology as a form of communication, which could also be seen as an evolution of the ears/mouth that we have.
Really, though, what it comes down to is this - the universe is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY big. And the amount of time they have to scan it is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY small. So what they're doing is deciding which planets to scan first. Since we have no idea what other platforms that life could have evolved on, the safest bet is to use that short amount of time is to scan those which are similar to our own. The idea being that we DO know what kind of variables were able to sustain life here.
In the future, I think you'll see they'll expand their searching, as technology improves and our understanding increases.
I refuse to watch the war... because it's not HDTV
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Seriously, guys, if you search Slashdot for the word "Rama", it's the first result that comes up (besides this newly posted story.)
Here is the original thread. Interestingly enough, the web site has not changed since 2001, the original time it was posted. If anything, today's story should be about how long some movies stay in development hell before ever being made.
I think before any story is published, they should have the slashcode automatically search the site to see if there's a similar story. Because this kind of thing could have been caught really easily.
I bought a HDTV set a couple of months ago. Here in Toronto, through Rogers Cable, we get 8 HDTV stations. Now, having said that, there are usually only a few hours worth of HDTV on any given day on each channel. But still, most popular shows come through and look amazing. The Sopranos in particular, is breathtaking.
Still, I am quite impressed with the quality of the 1080i broadcasts. Everything looks crisp and clear. Fox is the only network that doesn't transmit in a HDTV resolution (they do 480p, widescreen - about the same quality of watching a progressive scan DVD in 16:9 mode), but even that is leaps and bounds ahead of their regular quality.
I've personally seen the amount of HDTV content increase about 30% since I got my set, so I have no reason to believe that this is just a passing fad that will not catch on. The price was prohibitive until recently, and now that it's entering the realm of affordability, you'll be amazed with how quickly things go.
The Phantom Menace is Palpatine. At first, the movie seems like the bad guys are the Trade Federation, who are power hungry. It turns out, though, that Palpatine orchestrated the whole thing in order to get Senator Valorum voted out in a vote of no confidence, so that he could rise to the head of the senate.
In other words, he could care less about the Trade Federation - he only used them to get into a position of power.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a web based game in RoR http://www.forumwarz.com/. It's running of a single dedicated server and it seems to be handling a lot of requests just fine. During peak periods, we've got multiple requests per second and I've never had any complaints about the performance.
Ruby gets a lot of flack for being slow. The truth it, it is slower than other languages. However, it's rarely a bottleneck for web applications. I'm fairly active in the local Rails community and I've yet to meet someone who had to backpeddle on rails for performance reasons.
In most web applications the database is your big bottleneck. Since Rails is process-based you can always buy another server or two and increase your performance that way. Let's face it, servers are cheap and developers are expensive. Rails allows you to get done stuff faster.
Just because you're ignorant doesn't mean you're smart.
Carl Sagan said it best himself: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I'm one of millions of residents of Toronto, and I've lived here for almost a decade. Never have I experienced, nor heard of anyone experiencing energy fields that made sleeping unbearable. I also know many other residents who don't have physical and stress problems.
You're asking a lot of people if you expect them to assume that you have some extra-sensory abilities to feel energy waves (and make energy bubbles). As far as I know there isn't a single scientific study that supports those findings. If there is, I'm sure you could make some money off of James Randi.
Instead of throwing around terms like ignorant, how about throwing out some evidence? And when I say evidence, I mean studies involving many people in controlled conditions, not just some odd feeling you got.
EMI has been releasing high profile discs from artists like Radiohead, Jane's Addiction and Blur in Canada for a while now. The problem is that these high profile discs do not play in many conventional players, such as my 1-year old Sony Discman.
I wrote a nasty email to EMI about it, and they replaced my Radiohead disc free of charge with a non-crippled version, including delivery. I suggest that everyone who's against this technology actually buy the CD, write a letter to them and have them send a second disc at their expense.
Here's an open letter I wrote to EMI and the RIAA
and here's an entry about a technology I found to circumvent it. It can be done with software:
How to Rip these tracks
My biggest objection with this technology is that they call them CDs, when they don't conform to the CD standard. If you look for the official Compact Disc Constortium logo, it's missing. Putting these crippled discs alongside regular CDs in a store is misleading. They should be in a seperate section of the store, in very clear packaging (a small sticker or bullet on the back of the CD isn't obvious enough)
I also don't think the artists know what's happening to their work. People who play these CDs in computers receive a far lower quality version of the song than they'd even get by downloading them online. They can't say that they're "all about the art" and release crap like this which sounds hissy and loses the bass-line.
The WMA files are ripped at very low bitrates, something like 96kpbs, presumably to prevent people from just extracting them off the data layer and using file sharing. I personally never rip anything less than 192kpbs.
-RW
I was dissapointed to discover that my copies of Radiohead's "Hail to the Theif" and Blur's "Think Tank" were copy controlled. Fortunately, I discovered that you can circumvent it easily enough with the proper software.
That link has the entire story, and my response to Copy Control mechanisms. I too have an objection with them calling them CDs, seeing as they are not "Compact Discs" within the RedBook IEC 908 Specification.
-RW
First, before I say this, it's worth noting that I am a hardcore video game fan. I own all major systems, and have been finding myself caught in front of a TV for hours playing games since I was about 10 (I'm 24 now)
Having said that, there is definitely a correlation between violent behaviour and violent video games. I know this, because I have felt them.
Last year, a close friend and I spent an entire afternoon/early evening inside playing Grand Theft Auto 3, stealing cars, passing missions, running around and shooting people. We blasted the jungle radio station through my surround sound system, laughed, smoked, and had a great time.
Later that night, we went out with some other friends clubbing. After last call, we were stuck about a 20 minute walk from home, so we decided to hike it on foot. About half way home, a cop car suddenly pulled up in front of us, and two officers got out and walked into a chinese restaurant. The window on the passenger's door was wide open.
I looked at my buddy Drach just as he looked at me and then I said "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" And he's like "My dear god... My urge to steal the cop car is ridiculous."
Of course, we're rational human beings, and we did nothing of the sort. But the fact is that after joy riding in cop cars all after noon, it sort of romanticized the idea. Now you could argue that because we didn't go through with it, video games are safe. And I'd agree with that, as I continue to play and just beat Return to Castle Wolfenstein : The Tides of War. But the idea here is that they can be just as suggestive (or moreso, as interactivity increases) as other media.
A game like GTA3, with it's violence and glamorization of criminal acts has no place in the hands of a toddler, or a young child. After that, it's the parent's responsibility to determine whether or not their child can handle it.
-RW
While 2-D platform games do have that retro appeal, I can't help but think that this set of tools would be inifinitely more useful if it were geared towards GameBoy Advance development.
Unlike the PC, the GBA is a popular platform for this kind of game. I'm not necessarily suggesting that they should drop all work and target the GBA exclusively, but it would be nice if it supported the native resolution and limitations of that platform, and, better yet, could export tile data as assembly files that could be compiled into your GBA projects.
Now THAT would be useful. Otherwise, I feel this project is doomed to obscurity.
-RW
Actually, the text is misleading. You can only play the new Mario Kart with 4 players at once. The broadband adapter lets you link your GC to another one, and then play with 8.
As another poster mentioned, the real appeal here is the idea that someone will create an Internet bridge to be able to play on the net, like they did with Halo on the Xbox.
-RW
Actually, there are more assumptions made than that. They are assuming that the lifeforms have developed radio technology as a form of communication, which could also be seen as an evolution of the ears/mouth that we have.
Really, though, what it comes down to is this - the universe is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY big. And the amount of time they have to scan it is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY small. So what they're doing is deciding which planets to scan first. Since we have no idea what other platforms that life could have evolved on, the safest bet is to use that short amount of time is to scan those which are similar to our own. The idea being that we DO know what kind of variables were able to sustain life here.
In the future, I think you'll see they'll expand their searching, as technology improves and our understanding increases.
Who's with me?
Read the truth
-RW out.
Seriously, guys, if you search Slashdot for the word "Rama", it's the first result that comes up (besides this newly posted story.)
Here is the original thread. Interestingly enough, the web site has not changed since 2001, the original time it was posted. If anything, today's story should be about how long some movies stay in development hell before ever being made.
I think before any story is published, they should have the slashcode automatically search the site to see if there's a similar story. Because this kind of thing could have been caught really easily.
-RW
I bought a HDTV set a couple of months ago. Here in Toronto, through Rogers Cable, we get 8 HDTV stations. Now, having said that, there are usually only a few hours worth of HDTV on any given day on each channel. But still, most popular shows come through and look amazing. The Sopranos in particular, is breathtaking.
Still, I am quite impressed with the quality of the 1080i broadcasts. Everything looks crisp and clear. Fox is the only network that doesn't transmit in a HDTV resolution (they do 480p, widescreen - about the same quality of watching a progressive scan DVD in 16:9 mode), but even that is leaps and bounds ahead of their regular quality.
I've personally seen the amount of HDTV content increase about 30% since I got my set, so I have no reason to believe that this is just a passing fad that will not catch on. The price was prohibitive until recently, and now that it's entering the realm of affordability, you'll be amazed with how quickly things go.
-RW
The Phantom Menace is Palpatine. At first, the movie seems like the bad guys are the Trade Federation, who are power hungry. It turns out, though, that Palpatine orchestrated the whole thing in order to get Senator Valorum voted out in a vote of no confidence, so that he could rise to the head of the senate.
In other words, he could care less about the Trade Federation - he only used them to get into a position of power.
-RW