...But good luck getting anything but the demo that ships with your
prepackaged pair of identical cards to run on such a setup.
Don't worry, though - The sequel to your favorite game might
support such a configuration (assuming you have the right card model,
the right rev of that model, the right motherboard, the right BIOS,
and the right OS) somewhere around the time single-GPU cards have 8x
(i.e. twice what this would yield, if you can get it
to work) the power of anything available today.
Does this have serious geek-cred? Sure. Would anyone but a
total masochist try to run such a configuration, for anything
more than bragging rights? HELL no!
Though I have to grant that by the time I managed to post, I did count
as (unknowingly) redundant, I think it really says something that the
VERY FIRST POST to this thread got modded out of existence as "redundant".
Evidently the Gods-O'-Slashdot didn't consider "no" the right answer.
Just like establishing a police force has resulted in a police state!
Sure, we have the highest per-capita inmate population, and Amnesty International
has scolded us for how we treat them. But we don't have a police state, really!
And setting up a military has resulted in a military dictatorship!
So YOU define "A government composed of an undemocratically chosen
leader who maintains his position by a continuous series of aggressive
military campaigns, both against foreign nations and his own populace".
And don't forget how totally oppressed Californian dissenters are
Especially the San Fransiscan ones who dare to follow their own state's law
regarding medical marijuana. But don't worry, the DOJ cerrtainly wouldn't
resort to stacking the jury, concealing evidence, kidnapping, and murder to
make their point, right? They'd just peacefully take us back to your first
point.
Well, you beat me by about half a second, but I think we might both get
karma-spanked momentarily... All the ACs posting the same idea before us
got modded into oblivion.:(
Do I really need to say anything else? If you have to ask, we disagree so
fundamentally on the definition of "freedom" that I'd accomplish nothing more than
waste wear-and-tear on my keyboard to continue further.
Instead of playing games with the power company, you can buy small-scale wind turbines
for roughly $1/W. That also pays off after about three years, except unlike a battery
bank, it actually reduces the real load on the electric grid, and will
keep working for 20-30 years rather than 5-10.
Oh, sorry, lost my head for a minute, forgot I live in the USA. Can I "upgrade" my
>45MPG TDI (diesel) Beetle to a <10MPG Explorer? Uhhh... Go Yankees!
Where can you get a motherboard for $25 with onboard
video, sound, and the works?? You're looking at at least
$75-$100 just for that.
Alone - $25 - no. $35, yes.
Newegg has the
PC Chips M851G, with onboard video, 6ch sound, and 10/100 LAN for $35.50. They have 40-50 boards under $50 meeting similar
specs, for both AMD and Intel CPUs.
If you get them as combos with CPU and RAM, then subtracted out
the price of the CPU and RAM... I suspect that yes, you could
probably push $25 for "just" the motherboard.
"Minimal smoke for improved visibility in the surgical field"
Although I can see how reduced loss of blood can help recovery,
I have to question how well the cut parts stick back together
when they advertise "minimal smoke" as a selling-point.
"Hey Jonsey, can you clamp this over here... Yeah, thanks. Aww
yeah... Do you smell what the doc is cookin'? Anyone up for
a trip to Chick-n'-Pig after we finish here?"
That isn't the default in Win2K either - you have to enable it in just the same way.
I'll have to respectfully disagree...
I did not know of the existance of that setting, yet all the
Win2k boxen I've ever set up had that behavior by default.
Perhaps different versions of Win2k had different defaults for that setting?
Seems an odd thing for Microsoft to tweak, but I seriously have set up no
fewer than a dozen Win2k, and they all had cut-and-paste functional without
needing to do the annoying right-click-and-select-"Mark" to which XP defaults.
Turn on Quick Edit Mode for right-click paste actions.
Holy crap... Since I resigned myself to using XP at work, I have so wanted
a way to get the command prompt to use the Win2k style of cutting and pasting.
And you've just provided it.
Bless you! If I had mod points, and you hadn't already hit "5"... Well,
you get the idea.
The little light-bulb went on for a friend of mine when his sister with a Ph.D in
computational physics was hired by a high-end as "a fukin' booth-babe! A Demo Dame! What
kinda sh** is that?!" as he'd say with considerable outrage in his voice.
Rage that his highly-educated sisted TOOK a job as a booth-bunny?
You fail to see this from the "business" angle. People don't get hired because
of their skills - They get hired because their skills can make the company
money
In the case of a software dev environment, you have three or four major conventions.
If your friend had a "hot" sister, the company could best use her skills not
by stuffing her in a cubicle, but by parading her around in a skimpy outfit. Four
weeks out of 52 "lost", but sex sells.
Now, why not just hire an uneducated bimbo to do the trade shows, and keep the
Ph.Ds in cubicles? Simple - After attracting a drooling predominately male
crowd, the booth bunnies need to understand the product enough to convince
the droolers that they need it. I've attended a few trade shows - You have
FAR too many booths that suffer from one of two problems:
1) Bimbo attracts visitors, who leave amazed that she can even tie her
shoes. Not future customers.
2) Bimbo attracts visitors, male sales rep pulls a bait-and-switch.
Possible customers, but theey leave feeling dirty.
Replace both of those with "Bimbo attracts visitors, then shames them with
her superior knowledge of their own jobs", and you have a sure-fire recipe for
a sale.
When I read the article, I immediately thought that
the town was going back to a bartering system.
They will - The first time the power goes out for any
decent span and suddenly an entire town realizes with
horror that they have no tokens of their economy with
which to trade.
I'll stop using cash the day people lose that glint in
their eyes on seeing a Krugerrand. Until then, even if
"they" force me to make all my on-the-books purchases
electronically, they'll see nothing more detailed about
my buying patterns than that I like to stock up on precious
metals once a month.
What percentage of the features available in email
clients do you think 90% of the populace actually use?
Assuming (and that has a really big "if" on it) Live already
has decent spam filtering, including not forcing its own
ads on users (which we all know will last about a month)...
Rule-based forwarding, for one. Plugins to perform a handful of
common tasks. Spell-checking. Automatic never-return-receipt.
Remote image blocking.
And of course, the number one "feature" - Not using MSIE.
Most students will welcome this. Most dont know or
want to know what pop/smtp/imap are
True, most people don't care about the protocols used.
But today's college freshmen have grown up in a world with
ubiquitous email. They have a preferred email client,
know that they can't use it with Live, know that the Live
interface lacks 90% of the features they enjoy in any other
email client.
They will look to find ways around this. They might perform
the obligatory daily-or-so mail check many universities now
require, but won't use Live for anything else. It will turn
into just one more joke of a college email system, one that
"everyone uses" but no one uses.
Ah, yes, riding a gryphon to meet elven friends, making space cruisers appear out of thin air,
hunting dinosaurs with meteorite rain spells and flying a Pelican Dropship over high tech
physically-impossible buildings is just so mundane.
Do you do those things IRL? Because, if 2L has them, their entire advertising team needs
a good round of sulphuric acid enimas. Their web-site shows only an ego-graffiti-littered
map that makes SC2000 look like high-quality rendering, with a ton of "events" that the following
example seems to best summarize the low:
Yard Sale--A Fake One. That's right...come on
down to "Linda's Resale and Eternal Indoor Yard Sale" for a 100% fake yard sale. This isn't a yard
sale; it's a business--just like all those other fake yard sales that are really businesses.
Woo woo, where can I sign up to make the meter on the left side of the page spin faster (Y'know, the
"our suckers have spent this much real US cash here today" meter?)
C'mon... A "game" that seems to consist entirely of interior decorating, fake yard sales,
and real-estate(???) speculation?
"Coming soon - Sim Algebra 1! Relive all those exciting moments from your past, with an
imaginary twist! Solve for X! Factor polynomials! Take midterms!"
What's so wrong about wanting to live/play/pretend
that you're somebody else? Don't you daydream?
Nothing... I enjoy a little escapist fantasy myself, whether
watching Star Trek or role-playing a dwarf with a big axe and
a bigger beard. Nothing wrong there... Not productive, but
at least entertaining.
But 2L satisfies neither the "escape" nor "fantasy" part
of that. Just trading one mundane dog-eat-dog existance
for another, without even the perk of entertainment. And
you can't even call it an even trade, because while trudging
along in "real life" might get you fed, sheltered, and
offspring, no amount of success in Second Life will keep
you alive and viable.
So yeah, I'd certainly call it scarily unhealthy that
people will trade an unsatisfying life for an unsatisfying non-life...
its hard to keep track of all the backpages you came
from, unless u right them down or try to put a finger in
each slot in the tiny paperback.
Two words: Reverse indexing.
You can either do it as you go, or with five minutes' work
up-front... Basically, any time you follow a path (even a
one-choice jump), note the source page on the destination.
You can also collapse one-choice jumps back to the previous
actual multi-choice decision, but that can cause problems
if the story includes multiple entry points inside a linear
path (you'll still have the ability to rewind, but you
can't start at an arbitrary page and see how else you might
have gotten there).
Interestingly, most books didn't have a proper tree structure,
with one input and output per page... Some even included loops,
but for the most part almost all CYOA books tended to fan
out 4-7 choices deep then reconverge on either death or a
plot advanceing node.
Were my first interractive fiction, I used to love
those. Especially the ones where you could die really
easily.
I loved those as a kid, but my "must explore every possible
alternative" compulsion would always result in having about a
dozen post-it notes sticking out to mark my path backward for
when I eventually hit a dead-end (good or bad, didn't
matter, I'd still backtrack and take the next path).
Then I learned the concept of reverse indexing, and could burn
through one of those suckers in under an hour. Hard to decide
whether that made them more, or less, fun, but it certainly
did result in less frustration from falling post-its.;-)
it's not surprising to see the Republicans push for
more and more cheap labor, even when we can't employ
100% of our own people.
Corporate America (aka "Republicans" as you used it) doesn't
want 100% employment. 100% employment means that, rather
than the plebes fighting one another over who will accept the
lowest pay for a given demeaning job, the employers actually
need to make honest, fair offers to get good employees, then
treat them like humans to keep them.
That describes the Republican nightmare, a market where
employers rather than employees compete for resources. Of
course, don't think I'll let the Democrats off the hook so
easily - They only want us to make more so we don't complain
when they take a progressively bigger cut of our income to
give to those who consider "reproduction" a state job with
full benefits.
An FPGA doesn't equal dedicated hardware. It takes a
performance hit (in some domains, a huge hit) in
exchange for flexibility. It also requires code that
supports it.
The first set of DRC modules will consume about 10 - 20
watts versus close to 80 watts for an Opteron chip.
People buying USD$5000 coprocessors, plus the cost of
developing specialized code to use them, don't cut corners
on the basis of their electric bill.
As do I - Because it describes the reality of the situation,
like it or not.
even if that candidate is not elected, an increase in
other party's showing sends a message to the incumbrents.
True - It says, loud and clear, "Pander to your base, because
the fringe whackjobs will actually throw their vote away rather
than vote agauinst you".
Voter turnout is low because of stupidity & apathy.
Apathy, yes - I don't want Tweedledum or Tweedledee.
But stupidity? I'll stand at the front of the line to say
that Joe Sixpack doesn't have the mental capacity to set the
clock on his DVD player, but I would also say that makes him
more dangerously uninformend and opinionated, not less.
He actually believes things like "for the children" and
"drugs r bad, m'kay" and "WMD WMD WMD I mean Freedom". And
Joe votes. And the small minority who actually do take
the time to study the issues at hand (the real issues, not the
dog-and-pony "they" use to distract Joe from the hand dipping
into his pockets) simply don't have the numbers to outvote
Joe.
People need to understand that you do not have to get
your party voted in to make a difference
In a winner-take-all scenario, which the US uses, you most
certainly do need to get your party voted in to make a
difference. The winner doesn't change their strategy to
adapt to a minority showing - Quite the opposite, they
go even more toward their base, which proved the
viability of ignoring everyone but their core constituency.
2000 and 2004 as good examples of that... in 2000, the Greens
made a good minority showing, but Bush's pandering to the
southern religious whackjobs paid off. And how did the
Republican strategy change in 2004? Did they take a more
environmental approach to embrace the disenfranchized Greens?
Hell no! They all but said "rape and pillage Alaska, oh and
we'll toss you a very expensive bridge to nowhere", while
taking the religious pandering from subtext to an overt "fuck
you America, convert or starve".
Genetic mutations only propagate through to the descendants if they all have the same mutation.
Um, no.
Let's say a critter has a mutation that causes purple iris pigmentation. This has very little
impact, if any, on its survivability, so it manages to reproduce (obviously with a "normal"
member of its species).
Now... In the simple case, if this mutation occurs as one-off dominant gene, 50% of offspring
will have purple eyes.
If the mutation occurs as a pair of recessive genes, none of the offspring will have it, but
will all carry one copy of it (otherwise the gen-0 critter wouldn't express the mutation).
If two of the gen-1s then mate, their offspring have a 25% chance of expressing purple eyes.
Even if it occurs as a one-off recessive gene, in which case the gen-0 won't express the
trait, you can get the same result... The gen-0 mates, 50% of its offspring carry the gene.
The gen-1s mate, and 6.3% of the gen-2s will express the trait.
Of course, you can get into far more complicated scenarios than that (for example, perhaps you
have two dominant genes but one activates the other, so to express the mutation an individual
would need both genes), but you get the idea... A single mutation, even one that
conveys no evolutionary advantage, can eventually reach ubiquity in a previously non-mutation-bearing
population.
While I agree with the above post, IMHO, Google should have the courtesy
of asking permission from the controlling body.
Why? Why should they need to ask permission to use
the style of a dead artist in their logo?
Miro, like him or not, contributed something to our shared culture.
We ALL have the right (morally, not necessarily legally) to
make use of that contribution. In this case Google did a tribute
to him, which makes the complaints all the more offensive, but I would
say the same thing if they had created their "normal" logo, purely out
of commercial self-interest, from his style.
Miro family: Get out of the shadow of your one famous
ancestor and do something with your lives. The modern
world doesn't need de facto aristocracies. Make a name
for yourselves, or fade into oblivion. Don't expect
society to let you rest on the long-dead laurels of a relative
who did accomplish something.
Theodore Feder and the Artists Rights Society: You spout non-stop
self-aggrandizing BS about how much your members contribute to our
culture, then deny us access to that same culture. You disgust me
as the worst kind of hypocrits. Just cease to exist.
Re:legal abandonware
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The only situation where you can truly expect it to be legal
is when the company holding the copyrights went belly-up and even
then you would need to find out whether anyone bid for the copyrights.
But that describes the core problem, and the reason we have "abandon"ware
in the first place...
Consider a game produced by a privately-owned company, consisting of one
person with no offspring, no known relatives of any degree, and no outstanding
debts... If that person died, no one could "own" the copyright, but the
copyright would still exist. You still couldn't legally copy that
game.
Now, in the real world, you have much more complicated situations
that the one I just described, but leave about the same chance of someone
legally reissuing the game. For example, company X went under in the 1985
videogame crash and all its assets (including copyrights) went to dozens of
different companies and individuals, many of which might not even realize
what they got in the deal. One (or more) of those went under in the 1993
Comic crash, with a similar diasporic outcome. Who "owns" the copyright
to a given game produced by company X?
You could try to construct a moral or legal argument involving abandonded
property, but a bona fide effort to find out whether the holder of the copyrights
really gave up his rights might involve approaching the holder.
Yet we have a curious irony here - With a physical object (a sunken ship, for
example), yes, you could call it abandoned/salvage/whatever, and legally
take posession of it. With abandonware (or books, or music, or any form of
intangible "property"), even though everyone could in practice have
a copy of it, the law doesn't allow that, and you commit a crime by copying
it even though getting permission to copy it would require nothing short of
ubiquitous consent from everyone on the planet.
When dealing with older games with a well-defined still existant owner,
we get into an ethical (if not legal) grey area. But for games that would
take thousands of hours of research just to come up with a pool of
probable owners who never even heard of the game in question?
That needs to change. Nothing "sketchy" or "contrived" about
it!
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, wtf? The driver shipped with the card plugs it into opengl and directx, the game outputs to those and doesn't care, and everything is happy.
Kinda like the late great Voodoo 3? Yeah, a real breeze to use. Just pop it in and let the drivers do the rest. Riiiiiiight...
...But good luck getting anything but the demo that ships with your prepackaged pair of identical cards to run on such a setup.
Don't worry, though - The sequel to your favorite game might support such a configuration (assuming you have the right card model, the right rev of that model, the right motherboard, the right BIOS, and the right OS) somewhere around the time single-GPU cards have 8x (i.e. twice what this would yield, if you can get it to work) the power of anything available today.
Does this have serious geek-cred? Sure. Would anyone but a total masochist try to run such a configuration, for anything more than bragging rights? HELL no!
Do your jobs properly, mods.
Though I have to grant that by the time I managed to post, I did count as (unknowingly) redundant, I think it really says something that the VERY FIRST POST to this thread got modded out of existence as "redundant".
Evidently the Gods-O'-Slashdot didn't consider "no" the right answer.
Just like establishing a police force has resulted in a police state!
Sure, we have the highest per-capita inmate population, and Amnesty International has scolded us for how we treat them. But we don't have a police state, really!
And setting up a military has resulted in a military dictatorship!
So YOU define "A government composed of an undemocratically chosen leader who maintains his position by a continuous series of aggressive military campaigns, both against foreign nations and his own populace".
And don't forget how totally oppressed Californian dissenters are
Especially the San Fransiscan ones who dare to follow their own state's law regarding medical marijuana. But don't worry, the DOJ cerrtainly wouldn't resort to stacking the jury, concealing evidence, kidnapping, and murder to make their point, right? They'd just peacefully take us back to your first point.
Uhhh...
What point did you mean to make at first?
Well, you beat me by about half a second, but I think we might both get karma-spanked momentarily... All the ACs posting the same idea before us got modded into oblivion. :(
No.
Do I really need to say anything else? If you have to ask, we disagree so fundamentally on the definition of "freedom" that I'd accomplish nothing more than waste wear-and-tear on my keyboard to continue further.
Instead of playing games with the power company, you can buy small-scale wind turbines for roughly $1/W. That also pays off after about three years, except unlike a battery bank, it actually reduces the real load on the electric grid, and will keep working for 20-30 years rather than 5-10.
Oh, sorry, lost my head for a minute, forgot I live in the USA. Can I "upgrade" my >45MPG TDI (diesel) Beetle to a <10MPG Explorer? Uhhh... Go Yankees!
Where can you get a motherboard for $25 with onboard video, sound, and the works?? You're looking at at least $75-$100 just for that.
Alone - $25 - no. $35, yes.
Newegg has the PC Chips M851G, with onboard video, 6ch sound, and 10/100 LAN for $35.50. They have 40-50 boards under $50 meeting similar specs, for both AMD and Intel CPUs.
If you get them as combos with CPU and RAM, then subtracted out the price of the CPU and RAM... I suspect that yes, you could probably push $25 for "just" the motherboard.
"Minimal smoke for improved visibility in the surgical field"
Although I can see how reduced loss of blood can help recovery, I have to question how well the cut parts stick back together when they advertise "minimal smoke" as a selling-point.
"Hey Jonsey, can you clamp this over here... Yeah, thanks. Aww yeah... Do you smell what the doc is cookin'? Anyone up for a trip to Chick-n'-Pig after we finish here?"
That isn't the default in Win2K either - you have to enable it in just the same way.
I'll have to respectfully disagree...
I did not know of the existance of that setting, yet all the Win2k boxen I've ever set up had that behavior by default.
Perhaps different versions of Win2k had different defaults for that setting? Seems an odd thing for Microsoft to tweak, but I seriously have set up no fewer than a dozen Win2k, and they all had cut-and-paste functional without needing to do the annoying right-click-and-select-"Mark" to which XP defaults.
Turn on Quick Edit Mode for right-click paste actions.
Holy crap... Since I resigned myself to using XP at work, I have so wanted a way to get the command prompt to use the Win2k style of cutting and pasting.
And you've just provided it.
Bless you! If I had mod points, and you hadn't already hit "5"... Well, you get the idea.
The little light-bulb went on for a friend of mine when his sister with a Ph.D in computational physics was hired by a high-end as "a fukin' booth-babe! A Demo Dame! What kinda sh** is that?!" as he'd say with considerable outrage in his voice.
Rage that his highly-educated sisted TOOK a job as a booth-bunny?
You fail to see this from the "business" angle. People don't get hired because of their skills - They get hired because their skills can make the company money
In the case of a software dev environment, you have three or four major conventions. If your friend had a "hot" sister, the company could best use her skills not by stuffing her in a cubicle, but by parading her around in a skimpy outfit. Four weeks out of 52 "lost", but sex sells.
Now, why not just hire an uneducated bimbo to do the trade shows, and keep the Ph.Ds in cubicles? Simple - After attracting a drooling predominately male crowd, the booth bunnies need to understand the product enough to convince the droolers that they need it. I've attended a few trade shows - You have FAR too many booths that suffer from one of two problems:
1) Bimbo attracts visitors, who leave amazed that she can even tie her shoes. Not future customers.
2) Bimbo attracts visitors, male sales rep pulls a bait-and-switch. Possible customers, but theey leave feeling dirty.
Replace both of those with "Bimbo attracts visitors, then shames them with her superior knowledge of their own jobs", and you have a sure-fire recipe for a sale.
When I read the article, I immediately thought that the town was going back to a bartering system.
They will - The first time the power goes out for any decent span and suddenly an entire town realizes with horror that they have no tokens of their economy with which to trade.
I'll stop using cash the day people lose that glint in their eyes on seeing a Krugerrand. Until then, even if "they" force me to make all my on-the-books purchases electronically, they'll see nothing more detailed about my buying patterns than that I like to stock up on precious metals once a month.
What percentage of the features available in email clients do you think 90% of the populace actually use?
Assuming (and that has a really big "if" on it) Live already has decent spam filtering, including not forcing its own ads on users (which we all know will last about a month)...
Rule-based forwarding, for one. Plugins to perform a handful of common tasks. Spell-checking. Automatic never-return-receipt. Remote image blocking.
And of course, the number one "feature" - Not using MSIE.
Most students will welcome this. Most dont know or want to know what pop/smtp/imap are
True, most people don't care about the protocols used.
But today's college freshmen have grown up in a world with ubiquitous email. They have a preferred email client, know that they can't use it with Live, know that the Live interface lacks 90% of the features they enjoy in any other email client.
They will look to find ways around this. They might perform the obligatory daily-or-so mail check many universities now require, but won't use Live for anything else. It will turn into just one more joke of a college email system, one that "everyone uses" but no one uses.
Do you do those things IRL? Because, if 2L has them, their entire advertising team needs a good round of sulphuric acid enimas. Their web-site shows only an ego-graffiti-littered map that makes SC2000 look like high-quality rendering, with a ton of "events" that the following example seems to best summarize the low: Woo woo, where can I sign up to make the meter on the left side of the page spin faster (Y'know, the "our suckers have spent this much real US cash here today" meter?)
C'mon... A "game" that seems to consist entirely of interior decorating, fake yard sales, and real-estate(???) speculation?
"Coming soon - Sim Algebra 1! Relive all those exciting moments from your past, with an imaginary twist! Solve for X! Factor polynomials! Take midterms!"
What's so wrong about wanting to live/play/pretend that you're somebody else? Don't you daydream?
Nothing... I enjoy a little escapist fantasy myself, whether watching Star Trek or role-playing a dwarf with a big axe and a bigger beard. Nothing wrong there... Not productive, but at least entertaining.
But 2L satisfies neither the "escape" nor "fantasy" part of that. Just trading one mundane dog-eat-dog existance for another, without even the perk of entertainment. And you can't even call it an even trade, because while trudging along in "real life" might get you fed, sheltered, and offspring, no amount of success in Second Life will keep you alive and viable.
So yeah, I'd certainly call it scarily unhealthy that people will trade an unsatisfying life for an unsatisfying non-life...
its hard to keep track of all the backpages you came from, unless u right them down or try to put a finger in each slot in the tiny paperback.
Two words: Reverse indexing.
You can either do it as you go, or with five minutes' work up-front... Basically, any time you follow a path (even a one-choice jump), note the source page on the destination. You can also collapse one-choice jumps back to the previous actual multi-choice decision, but that can cause problems if the story includes multiple entry points inside a linear path (you'll still have the ability to rewind, but you can't start at an arbitrary page and see how else you might have gotten there).
Interestingly, most books didn't have a proper tree structure, with one input and output per page... Some even included loops, but for the most part almost all CYOA books tended to fan out 4-7 choices deep then reconverge on either death or a plot advanceing node.
Were my first interractive fiction, I used to love those. Especially the ones where you could die really easily.
;-)
I loved those as a kid, but my "must explore every possible alternative" compulsion would always result in having about a dozen post-it notes sticking out to mark my path backward for when I eventually hit a dead-end (good or bad, didn't matter, I'd still backtrack and take the next path).
Then I learned the concept of reverse indexing, and could burn through one of those suckers in under an hour. Hard to decide whether that made them more, or less, fun, but it certainly did result in less frustration from falling post-its.
it's not surprising to see the Republicans push for more and more cheap labor, even when we can't employ 100% of our own people.
Corporate America (aka "Republicans" as you used it) doesn't want 100% employment. 100% employment means that, rather than the plebes fighting one another over who will accept the lowest pay for a given demeaning job, the employers actually need to make honest, fair offers to get good employees, then treat them like humans to keep them.
That describes the Republican nightmare, a market where employers rather than employees compete for resources. Of course, don't think I'll let the Democrats off the hook so easily - They only want us to make more so we don't complain when they take a progressively bigger cut of our income to give to those who consider "reproduction" a state job with full benefits.
Dedicated Hardware goes one hell of a lot faster.
An FPGA doesn't equal dedicated hardware. It takes a performance hit (in some domains, a huge hit) in exchange for flexibility. It also requires code that supports it.
The first set of DRC modules will consume about 10 - 20 watts versus close to 80 watts for an Opteron chip.
People buying USD$5000 coprocessors, plus the cost of developing specialized code to use them, don't cut corners on the basis of their electric bill.
Sorry - I find that argument quite irritating.
As do I - Because it describes the reality of the situation, like it or not.
even if that candidate is not elected, an increase in other party's showing sends a message to the incumbrents.
True - It says, loud and clear, "Pander to your base, because the fringe whackjobs will actually throw their vote away rather than vote agauinst you".
Voter turnout is low because of stupidity & apathy.
Apathy, yes - I don't want Tweedledum or Tweedledee. But stupidity? I'll stand at the front of the line to say that Joe Sixpack doesn't have the mental capacity to set the clock on his DVD player, but I would also say that makes him more dangerously uninformend and opinionated, not less. He actually believes things like "for the children" and "drugs r bad, m'kay" and "WMD WMD WMD I mean Freedom". And Joe votes. And the small minority who actually do take the time to study the issues at hand (the real issues, not the dog-and-pony "they" use to distract Joe from the hand dipping into his pockets) simply don't have the numbers to outvote Joe.
People need to understand that you do not have to get your party voted in to make a difference
In a winner-take-all scenario, which the US uses, you most certainly do need to get your party voted in to make a difference. The winner doesn't change their strategy to adapt to a minority showing - Quite the opposite, they go even more toward their base, which proved the viability of ignoring everyone but their core constituency. 2000 and 2004 as good examples of that... in 2000, the Greens made a good minority showing, but Bush's pandering to the southern religious whackjobs paid off. And how did the Republican strategy change in 2004? Did they take a more environmental approach to embrace the disenfranchized Greens? Hell no! They all but said "rape and pillage Alaska, oh and we'll toss you a very expensive bridge to nowhere", while taking the religious pandering from subtext to an overt "fuck you America, convert or starve".
Genetic mutations only propagate through to the descendants if they all have the same mutation.
Um, no.
Let's say a critter has a mutation that causes purple iris pigmentation. This has very little impact, if any, on its survivability, so it manages to reproduce (obviously with a "normal" member of its species).
Now... In the simple case, if this mutation occurs as one-off dominant gene, 50% of offspring will have purple eyes.
If the mutation occurs as a pair of recessive genes, none of the offspring will have it, but will all carry one copy of it (otherwise the gen-0 critter wouldn't express the mutation). If two of the gen-1s then mate, their offspring have a 25% chance of expressing purple eyes.
Even if it occurs as a one-off recessive gene, in which case the gen-0 won't express the trait, you can get the same result... The gen-0 mates, 50% of its offspring carry the gene. The gen-1s mate, and 6.3% of the gen-2s will express the trait.
Of course, you can get into far more complicated scenarios than that (for example, perhaps you have two dominant genes but one activates the other, so to express the mutation an individual would need both genes), but you get the idea... A single mutation, even one that conveys no evolutionary advantage, can eventually reach ubiquity in a previously non-mutation-bearing population.
While I agree with the above post, IMHO, Google should have the courtesy of asking permission from the controlling body.
Why? Why should they need to ask permission to use the style of a dead artist in their logo?
Miro, like him or not, contributed something to our shared culture. We ALL have the right (morally, not necessarily legally) to make use of that contribution. In this case Google did a tribute to him, which makes the complaints all the more offensive, but I would say the same thing if they had created their "normal" logo, purely out of commercial self-interest, from his style.
Miro family: Get out of the shadow of your one famous ancestor and do something with your lives. The modern world doesn't need de facto aristocracies. Make a name for yourselves, or fade into oblivion. Don't expect society to let you rest on the long-dead laurels of a relative who did accomplish something.
Theodore Feder and the Artists Rights Society: You spout non-stop self-aggrandizing BS about how much your members contribute to our culture, then deny us access to that same culture. You disgust me as the worst kind of hypocrits. Just cease to exist.
The only situation where you can truly expect it to be legal is when the company holding the copyrights went belly-up and even then you would need to find out whether anyone bid for the copyrights.
But that describes the core problem, and the reason we have "abandon"ware in the first place...
Consider a game produced by a privately-owned company, consisting of one person with no offspring, no known relatives of any degree, and no outstanding debts... If that person died, no one could "own" the copyright, but the copyright would still exist. You still couldn't legally copy that game.
Now, in the real world, you have much more complicated situations that the one I just described, but leave about the same chance of someone legally reissuing the game. For example, company X went under in the 1985 videogame crash and all its assets (including copyrights) went to dozens of different companies and individuals, many of which might not even realize what they got in the deal. One (or more) of those went under in the 1993 Comic crash, with a similar diasporic outcome. Who "owns" the copyright to a given game produced by company X?
You could try to construct a moral or legal argument involving abandonded property, but a bona fide effort to find out whether the holder of the copyrights really gave up his rights might involve approaching the holder.
Yet we have a curious irony here - With a physical object (a sunken ship, for example), yes, you could call it abandoned/salvage/whatever, and legally take posession of it. With abandonware (or books, or music, or any form of intangible "property"), even though everyone could in practice have a copy of it, the law doesn't allow that, and you commit a crime by copying it even though getting permission to copy it would require nothing short of ubiquitous consent from everyone on the planet.
When dealing with older games with a well-defined still existant owner, we get into an ethical (if not legal) grey area. But for games that would take thousands of hours of research just to come up with a pool of probable owners who never even heard of the game in question? That needs to change. Nothing "sketchy" or "contrived" about it!