As I understood the CNN pie charts, they were each showing the top 3 or top 4 (don't remember which) party candidates by percentage points. Biden fell into the top N even though he only had a single digit percentage point, while Paul fell off because there were N other candidates with larger percentages.
The raw percentage numbers got used as a conspiracy against Ron Paul argument, but no one looked at the fact they were listing the top N candidates on the pie charts. Probably someone just told the graphics guy to show the top 3 or whatever so it wouldn't be too crowded.
Wrong episode/movie. You want the one where they go into cancer man's background, since he's the one that killed JFK. None of the JFK stuff is mentioned in the movie.:p
Television is a mass broadcast medium which is often used for delivery of time-sensitive and important information. Much like the radio was (and still is). That is one reason it is important that it is made as simple and cheap as possible for the populace to continue receiving television broadcasts. People rely on both radio and television for information like storm/tornado/hurricane/flood/fire alerts, information about local and national politics, health threats like peanut butter recalls or SUV's that roll over or baby cribs that spontaneously combust. I think it's fairly important that citizens receive any state of the union addresses or declarations of "war", regardless of your political views or opinions on the value of television entertainment.
You need to backup your music files and also the "decryption" information. It's stored in the/Users/Shared directory, IIRC. You could, of course, always burn your purchased songs to a regular CD and never worry about any of this.
I don't know. I played video games, computer games, and AD&D almost every free minute I had, weekdays and weekends. We averaged at least one new game each month, since we got a new Nintendo game each month and we were also playing computer games and Nintendo games at friends houses at the same time. I was a top student throughout.
Of course, I also finished all my homework (doing it during school left more time after school for games) and didn't try to do a sloppy job. I also played a wide variety of games, from Wolfenstein 3D to Civilization to Betrayal at Krondor and the Castle of Dr. Brain. I don't think there are many good brain-exercising games these days. Nothing like the old Sierra classics. So I've saved all of those for my kids to play.
I suspect the lack of good thinking games, even for parents and kids who try to buy thinking games, is a real problem. Pretty much all educational games are crap. Modern and old. The only ones I've seen that really incorporated straight learning without being boring or repetitive or simple or annoying are the Castle and Island of Dr. Brain. The third Dr. Brain was also crap.
You want ACID...? Use J2EE transactions and Hibernate, and never worry about which database you use again.
By doing this you are restricting yourself and ignoring the problem. Putting J2EE transactions and Hibernate in front of a MySQL ISAM table isn't going to guarantee you data integrity. What if your Java app crashes? It also means you are not bothering to ensure data integrity at the database level, and someone who accesses it through a different tool can screw you over. Plus, you are abstracting things away when you might not be able to. If you need to process millions of statements a day, knowing the right way to build your schema and manage database resources in the first place, and also how to deal with your transactions and transaction interactions, which is unique to each database and application, is important.
It's not always better to offload onto the database. If you have a database that has heavy load, but because it's a database needs to remain a single "instance", moving heavy processing into the clients can be a better thing. That way, you can scale horizontally while not placing as much hit on the database resources.
While that's an "in" or "elitist" joke which others will find amusing who also think they are "in" or "elitist", the truth is MySpace's biggest problem right now is that it has too many fake people on it. MySpace, and community-based sites like LiveJournal, do provide a great deal of value to those who use it. Regardless of whether or not you value the same thing.
Just because you're too old to realize it doesn't mean it's not real. (That was my old person joke in response to your young person joke.);P
How is this an HD-DVD capable system? I don't think it comes with the software to support AACS. And without HDMI 1.3 and HDCP, you cannot pass the protected audio stream to your sound system.
Well, except gun control is something that was legislated to help ensure accidents don't happen, criminals can't buy firearms, and there isn't a significant number of high-power arms in the population.
IIRC, there are studies indicating guns at home significantly increase the risk of kids shooting themselves. Which seems obvious since you couldn't do that without a gun. But whereas kids cutting themselves with a knife usually doesn't involve death, kids shooting themselves with a gun usually die. Kids don't usually run around playing with chainsaws either. But since guns are "toys" and small, quiet, and easy to activate they're more of a problem than kids playing with chainsaws.
Background checks into criminals attempting to purchase guns is sort of like if there were background checks on people convicted of using their VCR to make and sell copies of movies they don't have rights to, to prevent them from doing it again. And this punishment is being used against people who misuse things, like computers.
And whereas I can understand the argument for having handguns for protection, I don't understand the argument of having assault rifles or rocket launchers. Sure, maybe going to the shooting range with an assault rifle or a few grenades if a legitimate hobby. But you could restrict the sale and use of ammo to designated areas to allow the hobby while disallowing people from running around with those weapons loaded. Just a thought, not something I'm advocating one way or the other or anything.
Anyway, I just thought lumping DRM with gun control is a simplification and inaccurate association.
Well, now I'm asking for you to provide sources for your statements. When I was in Shanghai, the price for many goods and services is equal to that of goods and services in the U.S. Some things are cheaper, most notably food depending on where you go, but I found lots of brand name clothing, items at the drug store, and any luxuries from chocolate to electronics to be the same price. Non-brand name clothing is cheaper mostly because it's not getting imported and marked up at the retailer. The barber shop was also about a third of the cost for similar services in the U.S. I also remember that some apartments were more expensive than New York City or San Francisco per square foot.
As for services being free, like what? Buses aren't free. Health insurance is provided by the company you work at. The only free things I remember are the park, roads, and things like the police and fire department. Same as in the U.S.
I guess my point is that a DVD player still costs US$80, a computer still costs US$1000, a brand name hat still costs US$60, and pizza at Papa Johns or Pizza Hut still costs US$10. This means those little things become luxury items, and you have to budget your money more carefully and really save up for that computer. I recall reading a Shanghai newspaper article that said the average wedding cost in Shanghai had reached US$15k-$20k. Not too far off from the average wedding cost in the U.S. No one would steal a mobile phone in the U.S. because stealing a US$50 phone isn't really worth it. But it's certainly worth it in China.
Re:one time at computer camp...
on
Computer Voodoo?
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· Score: 1
I heard a story about someone actually doing that. Maybe it was in the scrum design book, or an anecdote from my current manager. Don't remember from where. But then later no one could figure out how to maintain the code, because you'd have to maintain code that makes the other code. I suppose it would be a lot like maintaining a version of yacc that was customized to produce a specific program.
So basically you lost something and now you're grumbling about having to go through hoops to get a replacement for free. It's your fault you lost something, not Microsoft's, or the key scheme itself. If you lose the remote to a television that doesn't have all the functionality on the face of the TV, you need to buy another remote. If you lose the key to your house, you need to pay a locksmith to make you a new key.
Maybe the hoops were a little annoying, and so you can blame Microsoft for making it so difficult, but I don't think that has anything to do with this key scheme. Some companies handle things like this better. Some companies worse.
My kid sister (who is 29) and I still regularly fire up the old Commodore to play M.U.L.E. Ah, the 640K floppy disk, no entering mystic serial numbers and checking with the company server to grant you "permission" to play your game.. those were the good ol' days.
This is where 13-year-old's point at you an ask if you were alive when there were dinosaurs.
Maybe you have to increase your ability to suspend disbelief (or be more willing to accept alternate realities) to play games like this. I'm not saying there's something wrong with you. I'm just wondering if that's the case. Same thing goes for movies as well. I know there's a subset of people who aren't able to do this as readily, and maybe that directly translates to the success of games, movies, and books that require it.
Hm. I played MTG with a bunch of my existing friends, and hosted my own tournaments on a weekly basis. I wasn't interested in playing with strangers or people who only played MTG. We did this for a while, and I never got into the craze of buying the latest expansion packs. Truth is new expansions only gave you an advantage if you picked up their specific "tweak", while standards and specific cards in some expansions were worthwhile across the board. So I had a lot of fun, and didn't collect much more than to build the decks I wanted.
Fast forward several years and I still have my cards, and ended up playing again with my 12-year-old niece/cousin/something and we had fun. The Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh CCGs are crap in comparison to MTG.
Maybe you just need to find someone who you're friends with and can enjoy playing MTG with you on occassion. I don't think I spent $2500 on my cards though.:P
No day-lengthening secret. I just slept and woke two hours offset each day. Which one of the guys I was working on the project with found quite amusing.
I can't do this anymore because of the stupid 24-hour rotational behavior of the Earth and how that impacts the rest of civilization. Meaning my current job actually requires me to interact with others in a shared building on a daily basis.:P Otherwise I do still have the tendency to want 26-hour cycles and having to conform to 24-hour cycles means I almost never fall asleep or wake up at a time my body likes.
Berkeley's been doing this sort of thing for years and years now. I'm sure someone there can help you identify software that can do what you're looking for. Unfortunately, I never TA'ed while attending, so I don't know what they use.
Instead, accept that you can't single-mindedly focus on any one thing for more than about 45 minutes to an hour....
Or perhaps it takes a certain mindset. I have no trouble doing this when it comes to coding. But then I also have no trouble doing other things for hours on a time, including movies (all three LoTR:EE in a row), TV shows (10 episodes of 24 in one sitting), video games (earlier Zelda games in one sitting), books (read for hours straight). Earlier today I think I spent about 2-3 hours working on my postfix settings and I didn't even realize it'd been that long. There was one summer I coded for 16 hours, slept for 10 hours, and repeated that schedule for maybe two weeks.
I'm not trying to toot my own horn. I just think making that generalization based on what you've learned in CogSci might be an incorrect generalization to make. Sure, all of those things interest me, but I've found myself doing that even when I don't particularly like what I'm doing. I have a compulsion to finish things, which one of my coworkers finds idiotic. He'd just stop watching a bad movie whereas it wouldn't even cross my mind to stop watching (and only watching, not doing other things at the same time).
The first thing I thought of after reading the topic was Vernor Vinge's book, A Deepness in the Sky. In that book, the Emergents publish anonymously in order to direct the subject civilization toward their personal end. This included scientific papers, theories to prompt research and development, and current events and opinions designed to incite a global war and hide their presence.
Not that anyone in their right mind would purchase either since both formats are DRM - Defective Recorded Media.
I take it you also don't purchase DVD or VHS movies either then, as both of those have Macrovision, and DVD movies have both region coding and CSS. Or is it just that since there have been technological products that allow you to circumvent this issue, that it becomes a moot point in your mind?
Of course, I'm sure the same could be said about people: people aren't 100% reliable, even when triply redundant, and their decisions aren't always right. Everyone that's spent any significant amount of time watching other people has at least once scratched his head and asked, "why the hell did he do that?"
Something that a machine does guarantee, unless randomness is purposefully introduced, is deterministic behavior. That's something people are never going to have.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understood the CNN pie charts, they were each showing the top 3 or top 4 (don't remember which) party candidates by percentage points. Biden fell into the top N even though he only had a single digit percentage point, while Paul fell off because there were N other candidates with larger percentages.
The raw percentage numbers got used as a conspiracy against Ron Paul argument, but no one looked at the fact they were listing the top N candidates on the pie charts. Probably someone just told the graphics guy to show the top 3 or whatever so it wouldn't be too crowded.
It's the red balls that can't be detected far in advance. The brown balls can, but they rarely have anything to do with uncontrolled anger.
Wrong episode/movie. You want the one where they go into cancer man's background, since he's the one that killed JFK. None of the JFK stuff is mentioned in the movie. :p
Then you should probably buy an HD TiVo and use it with Amazon's Unbox (which I believe will expand into other areas than just movies).
Television is a mass broadcast medium which is often used for delivery of time-sensitive and important information. Much like the radio was (and still is). That is one reason it is important that it is made as simple and cheap as possible for the populace to continue receiving television broadcasts. People rely on both radio and television for information like storm/tornado/hurricane/flood/fire alerts, information about local and national politics, health threats like peanut butter recalls or SUV's that roll over or baby cribs that spontaneously combust. I think it's fairly important that citizens receive any state of the union addresses or declarations of "war", regardless of your political views or opinions on the value of television entertainment.
You need to backup your music files and also the "decryption" information. It's stored in the /Users/Shared directory, IIRC. You could, of course, always burn your purchased songs to a regular CD and never worry about any of this.
I don't know. I played video games, computer games, and AD&D almost every free minute I had, weekdays and weekends. We averaged at least one new game each month, since we got a new Nintendo game each month and we were also playing computer games and Nintendo games at friends houses at the same time. I was a top student throughout.
Of course, I also finished all my homework (doing it during school left more time after school for games) and didn't try to do a sloppy job. I also played a wide variety of games, from Wolfenstein 3D to Civilization to Betrayal at Krondor and the Castle of Dr. Brain. I don't think there are many good brain-exercising games these days. Nothing like the old Sierra classics. So I've saved all of those for my kids to play.
I suspect the lack of good thinking games, even for parents and kids who try to buy thinking games, is a real problem. Pretty much all educational games are crap. Modern and old. The only ones I've seen that really incorporated straight learning without being boring or repetitive or simple or annoying are the Castle and Island of Dr. Brain. The third Dr. Brain was also crap.
You want ACID...? Use J2EE transactions and Hibernate, and never worry about which database you use again.
By doing this you are restricting yourself and ignoring the problem. Putting J2EE transactions and Hibernate in front of a MySQL ISAM table isn't going to guarantee you data integrity. What if your Java app crashes? It also means you are not bothering to ensure data integrity at the database level, and someone who accesses it through a different tool can screw you over. Plus, you are abstracting things away when you might not be able to. If you need to process millions of statements a day, knowing the right way to build your schema and manage database resources in the first place, and also how to deal with your transactions and transaction interactions, which is unique to each database and application, is important.
It's not always better to offload onto the database. If you have a database that has heavy load, but because it's a database needs to remain a single "instance", moving heavy processing into the clients can be a better thing. That way, you can scale horizontally while not placing as much hit on the database resources.
Oh, for someone to invent a pointer-controller for a laptop that TRULY rivals a mouse for speed and control...
They're called touch screens. Man, touch screens are like having god mode in FPSers.
While that's an "in" or "elitist" joke which others will find amusing who also think they are "in" or "elitist", the truth is MySpace's biggest problem right now is that it has too many fake people on it. MySpace, and community-based sites like LiveJournal, do provide a great deal of value to those who use it. Regardless of whether or not you value the same thing.
;P
Just because you're too old to realize it doesn't mean it's not real. (That was my old person joke in response to your young person joke.)
How is this an HD-DVD capable system? I don't think it comes with the software to support AACS. And without HDMI 1.3 and HDCP, you cannot pass the protected audio stream to your sound system.
Well, except gun control is something that was legislated to help ensure accidents don't happen, criminals can't buy firearms, and there isn't a significant number of high-power arms in the population.
IIRC, there are studies indicating guns at home significantly increase the risk of kids shooting themselves. Which seems obvious since you couldn't do that without a gun. But whereas kids cutting themselves with a knife usually doesn't involve death, kids shooting themselves with a gun usually die. Kids don't usually run around playing with chainsaws either. But since guns are "toys" and small, quiet, and easy to activate they're more of a problem than kids playing with chainsaws.
Background checks into criminals attempting to purchase guns is sort of like if there were background checks on people convicted of using their VCR to make and sell copies of movies they don't have rights to, to prevent them from doing it again. And this punishment is being used against people who misuse things, like computers.
And whereas I can understand the argument for having handguns for protection, I don't understand the argument of having assault rifles or rocket launchers. Sure, maybe going to the shooting range with an assault rifle or a few grenades if a legitimate hobby. But you could restrict the sale and use of ammo to designated areas to allow the hobby while disallowing people from running around with those weapons loaded. Just a thought, not something I'm advocating one way or the other or anything.
Anyway, I just thought lumping DRM with gun control is a simplification and inaccurate association.
Well, now I'm asking for you to provide sources for your statements. When I was in Shanghai, the price for many goods and services is equal to that of goods and services in the U.S. Some things are cheaper, most notably food depending on where you go, but I found lots of brand name clothing, items at the drug store, and any luxuries from chocolate to electronics to be the same price. Non-brand name clothing is cheaper mostly because it's not getting imported and marked up at the retailer. The barber shop was also about a third of the cost for similar services in the U.S. I also remember that some apartments were more expensive than New York City or San Francisco per square foot.
As for services being free, like what? Buses aren't free. Health insurance is provided by the company you work at. The only free things I remember are the park, roads, and things like the police and fire department. Same as in the U.S.
I guess my point is that a DVD player still costs US$80, a computer still costs US$1000, a brand name hat still costs US$60, and pizza at Papa Johns or Pizza Hut still costs US$10. This means those little things become luxury items, and you have to budget your money more carefully and really save up for that computer. I recall reading a Shanghai newspaper article that said the average wedding cost in Shanghai had reached US$15k-$20k. Not too far off from the average wedding cost in the U.S. No one would steal a mobile phone in the U.S. because stealing a US$50 phone isn't really worth it. But it's certainly worth it in China.
I heard a story about someone actually doing that. Maybe it was in the scrum design book, or an anecdote from my current manager. Don't remember from where. But then later no one could figure out how to maintain the code, because you'd have to maintain code that makes the other code. I suppose it would be a lot like maintaining a version of yacc that was customized to produce a specific program.
So basically you lost something and now you're grumbling about having to go through hoops to get a replacement for free. It's your fault you lost something, not Microsoft's, or the key scheme itself. If you lose the remote to a television that doesn't have all the functionality on the face of the TV, you need to buy another remote. If you lose the key to your house, you need to pay a locksmith to make you a new key.
Maybe the hoops were a little annoying, and so you can blame Microsoft for making it so difficult, but I don't think that has anything to do with this key scheme. Some companies handle things like this better. Some companies worse.
My kid sister (who is 29) and I still regularly fire up the old Commodore to play M.U.L.E. Ah, the 640K floppy disk, no entering mystic serial numbers and checking with the company server to grant you "permission" to play your game .. those were the good ol' days.
This is where 13-year-old's point at you an ask if you were alive when there were dinosaurs.
Maybe you have to increase your ability to suspend disbelief (or be more willing to accept alternate realities) to play games like this. I'm not saying there's something wrong with you. I'm just wondering if that's the case. Same thing goes for movies as well. I know there's a subset of people who aren't able to do this as readily, and maybe that directly translates to the success of games, movies, and books that require it.
Hm. I played MTG with a bunch of my existing friends, and hosted my own tournaments on a weekly basis. I wasn't interested in playing with strangers or people who only played MTG. We did this for a while, and I never got into the craze of buying the latest expansion packs. Truth is new expansions only gave you an advantage if you picked up their specific "tweak", while standards and specific cards in some expansions were worthwhile across the board. So I had a lot of fun, and didn't collect much more than to build the decks I wanted.
:P
Fast forward several years and I still have my cards, and ended up playing again with my 12-year-old niece/cousin/something and we had fun. The Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh CCGs are crap in comparison to MTG.
Maybe you just need to find someone who you're friends with and can enjoy playing MTG with you on occassion. I don't think I spent $2500 on my cards though.
No day-lengthening secret. I just slept and woke two hours offset each day. Which one of the guys I was working on the project with found quite amusing.
:P Otherwise I do still have the tendency to want 26-hour cycles and having to conform to 24-hour cycles means I almost never fall asleep or wake up at a time my body likes.
I can't do this anymore because of the stupid 24-hour rotational behavior of the Earth and how that impacts the rest of civilization. Meaning my current job actually requires me to interact with others in a shared building on a daily basis.
Berkeley's been doing this sort of thing for years and years now. I'm sure someone there can help you identify software that can do what you're looking for. Unfortunately, I never TA'ed while attending, so I don't know what they use.
Instead, accept that you can't single-mindedly focus on any one thing for more than about 45 minutes to an hour....
Or perhaps it takes a certain mindset. I have no trouble doing this when it comes to coding. But then I also have no trouble doing other things for hours on a time, including movies (all three LoTR:EE in a row), TV shows (10 episodes of 24 in one sitting), video games (earlier Zelda games in one sitting), books (read for hours straight). Earlier today I think I spent about 2-3 hours working on my postfix settings and I didn't even realize it'd been that long. There was one summer I coded for 16 hours, slept for 10 hours, and repeated that schedule for maybe two weeks.
I'm not trying to toot my own horn. I just think making that generalization based on what you've learned in CogSci might be an incorrect generalization to make. Sure, all of those things interest me, but I've found myself doing that even when I don't particularly like what I'm doing. I have a compulsion to finish things, which one of my coworkers finds idiotic. He'd just stop watching a bad movie whereas it wouldn't even cross my mind to stop watching (and only watching, not doing other things at the same time).
The first thing I thought of after reading the topic was Vernor Vinge's book, A Deepness in the Sky. In that book, the Emergents publish anonymously in order to direct the subject civilization toward their personal end. This included scientific papers, theories to prompt research and development, and current events and opinions designed to incite a global war and hide their presence.
Not that anyone in their right mind would purchase either since both formats are DRM - Defective Recorded Media.
I take it you also don't purchase DVD or VHS movies either then, as both of those have Macrovision, and DVD movies have both region coding and CSS. Or is it just that since there have been technological products that allow you to circumvent this issue, that it becomes a moot point in your mind?
Of course, I'm sure the same could be said about people: people aren't 100% reliable, even when triply redundant, and their decisions aren't always right. Everyone that's spent any significant amount of time watching other people has at least once scratched his head and asked, "why the hell did he do that?"
Something that a machine does guarantee, unless randomness is purposefully introduced, is deterministic behavior. That's something people are never going to have.