When I'm woking as a coder, I find that it's easy to constantly turn the problem over in my mind so that I have no problem getting up in the middle of the night and finishing something. Most of my most productive sessions have happened outside the office.
Whereas when I had a sys admin job early on in university, there was so much running around and fighting with other people's bugs that I didn't want to look at a computer by the time I got home.
It also completely drained me by the end of the day. For things with very few moving parts, computers fail a lot. It goes in cycles but at times, there's so much to do that your constantly running around and actively prioritizing several tasks as they come up. My admin job was probably more difficult than most however. I was supporting a mishmash of unix/linux systems and the users were very technical. I usually only had to deal with weird problems that they had given up on.
The few Windows systems we did have for the office people required constant babying but it wasn't really high impact. I could see how it would be more relaxing. Due to the occasional virus scramble and the inability to easily ssh into a Windows machine or whip up few scripts, you get a lot of time to reflect on just badly NT5.x handles its dumb self while watching progress bars crawl across the screen.
Easy, you can solve bigger problems (as in process/create more data) for the same amount of money. It may take forever because of the latency, but eventually you reach a point where the scale of the calculation far outweighs that factor.
Here's an example, I have one Pentium 3 with 256 megabytes of ram, it's pretty impressive and can solve 256 megabyte problem sets extremely fast. For the same amount of money, let's say $2500, I can buy 20 Pentium 1's with 48MB of ram at $125 a pop. Now I can solve a 960MB problem for the same price at a much slower speed.
A lot of posters in this article decry commodity hardware for sucking but they're not considering the long term. The tasks commonly performed by commodity hardware are starting to be more and more suited to scientific applications. We can already see how vector optimizations like Altivec and SIMD have worked their way into every desktop chip around.
As 3D rendering and sophisticated media codecs are becoming the primary reasons for upgrading a home PC, the front side bus and CPU (especially the CPU) have gained a disproportianate speed advantage compared to the rest of the PC. And when you start throwing in high speed network compenents like blade interconnects and 10Gig E, you can create an extremely powerful, scalable computer. Vendors like IBM love this because it means they can sell one design to everyone, just changing the number and specs of the nodes to fit their customer.
Speaking as someone who worked support on a large academic cluster where thriftiness is king, not only is the hardware cheaper, but it's mundane specs mean it's less likely to fail, when it does, the nodes are replaceable like lightbulbs, and you can run down to the local computer store in the event of a faulty IDE drive or memory stick. The support costs and reliablility are far superior to typical high performance solutions because support can mostly be done in house by existing staff.
And that ComputerWorld article is mostly bunk, OpenMP supports Fortran. The people who are writing large scale simulations in the first place are not only technical but also extremely bright. While it is a hassle, adding networking to the already heavy code optimization that they do is not that big of a deal.
Though there are problems that require a shared memory system, $2 million can buy so many more networked Xeons than shared memory SGI processors that the scientists in question should really consider their needs. While it may take much longer, their problem set can be much, much larger since they'll have more collective RAM and HD space. The system can also easily be partitioned, rebuilt, and shared in such a way that it's always in use by one or several people. In many cases, the tradeoff is worth it. And even then, shared memory systems will probably still have a lower price/performance ratio compared to clustering a smaller number of high memory database servers. Say for example, a group of Itaniums with 64Gig of ram each vs their SGI Origin equivalent in terms of memory footprint.
I think as time goes on, interconnect speed will increase to the point where clusters are very similar to traditional supercomputers. We can already see baby steps in this direction with blade equipment and various motherboards with gigabit NICs built into their own bus to avoid choking in PCI land. Infiniband and 10G over copper are the first major steps but switching and motherboards still have to catch up it seems. Instead of whining, the typical supercomputing vendors should be looking into merging standardizing their designs with those of clustered systems. Of course, I could see how the entrenched traditional vendors would want to legislate as much as possible to avoid having to compete with dozens of smaller engineering companies with less overhead and better ideas.
Now that I think of it, a lot of the posts I've read here are probably skeptical of massively parallel machines because they don't realize that the performance is all in the network. I've seen two clusters first hand with an identical number of identical nodes. One was being used as a compute farm where several hundred dual Xeons were attached to a rediculously large and overly expensive IBM foundry switch. The other was being used as a massively parrallel simulation machine, with dual gigabit nics attached to a bunch of 'cheap' 24 port switches in a 2D mesh. The second design cost much less because it wasn't built by IBM while still being about twice as fast.
If I wanted to travel around at normal speed I wouldn't have bought a car. Why would a game world be any different?
It seems like a step backwards to have to find some magic item or complete some quest to solve an incredibly annoying problem that I already deal with in real life. I thought these games were supposed to be about escapism.
Ya but as soon as everyone moves to a browser with pop-up blocking, advertisers will move to something even more annoying and pop-up blocking will no longer be feature, just an unofficial standard.
I'm currently an undergrad in CS. Our curriculum uses Windows for the first year and is then entirely unix based for the rest using xhosted Solaris labs.
The problem is that most students don't want to leave Windows. The unix accounts default to 2 xterms and twm on login, providing a work environment that's simply unnacceptable. This setup, which was probably pretty anachronistic even when it was first installed, gives unix-like operating systems a terrible reputation among students. Even simple things like the keybindings in vim for the PC keyboards they use are completely broken by default.
I understand that their funding is limited (at least as far as undergrads are concerned) and I can see how the support costs for this setup are easily a fraction of what a fullblown lab of PCs would cost, but for fuck's sake, at least install icewm or blackbox on these things to provide something close to what students are used to. Fighting with your focus-follows-mouse window manager with completely alien window controls while trying to get something submitted before a deadline is quite an unpleasant experience.
The saddest part is that the X clients are such great solutions. I don't have to remember which machines have broken system installs, noisy fans, or broken harddrives, I just sit down somewhere and it works. Loads are automatically balanced between 18 or so machines through window forwarding and ssh so the system is almost always responsive. The potential exists for an amazing user experience but for some reason, nobody in charge seems to care.
If they use isometric view and allow turn based combat it will be fallout 3, otherwise it will be just another franchise butchered beyond recognition.
Whether or not they use isometric views or turn based combat is irrelevant, people will still buy it because it's Fallout 3. The mechanics of a game are only a small part of what makes it good. As long as the game has a similar atmosphere and script to 1 & 2, it will be Fallout and it will be succesful.
The game will have to be in 3D because most people wouldn't buy it otherwise. And like most franchises, the transition to 3D will probably mean change. The weird thing is that most of the posts in this article focus on how it will be like an FPS or real time RPG. I've always thought that the 3D game most similar in spirit to Fallout was Grand Theft Auto 3.
Before losing your tophat and monocle out of sheer chagrin, hear me out, it has an expansive world and a wide open quest system that requires you to make tradeoffs and ally yourself with different groups. Because of this, you could play the game pretty much any way you wanted after the first few quests and it wouldn't be the same for everyone. For example, there are many ways to solve an individual quest for the Yakuza, but at the end of the day, the Italians will still shoot at you after its completion because you chose to complete the Yakuza mission in the first place. And regardless of what you're supposed to be doing, you can still spend your time hitting pedestrians with a baseball bat because it's just plain Fun. There were very few time limits or restrictions and you could drop storylines if they became boring or difficult without consequence. And all this without having to wonder where to go next to further advance the plot when you felt like doing so.
But the main difference between GTA3 and most large, immersive RPGs is that it isn't totally fucking boring. You're never stuck scrounging up treasure or dealing 50 annoying but trivial monsters whenever you try to do something or get somewhere, you just do it. Fallout was the same for the most part, if you wanted to pick pocket every police officer in town or shoot some kid in the head, you could. Like GTA3, the end result came about quickly, usually wasn't tedious, and wouldn't necessarily cause certain death. And like GTA3, you didn't have to work the usual RPG treadmill before you could actually do anything decent. Yeah, the mechanics of an RPG were there, but Fallout seemed a lot more concerned with having fun rather than being realistic or Monty Haul. I wish more American games were like that.
So while a turn based game would be cool, I think the issue is mostly irrelevant as long as its something like GTA3 in structure. Whatever gameplay technicalities are most conductive to freedom will be the best, because really, I don't want to spend my time walking from location to location, or dealing with another dungeon full of generi-monsters ("oh look, a giant ant!"), or being forced into doing a bunch of lame and repetitive levelling up tasks, I want to change the wasteland and be a post-apocalyptic badass.
Now that everyone knows, it doesn't really make sense for companies to allow Alan Smithee to be associated with their productions. So what's the new alias? I'm guessing that if there is one, it's David E. Kelly.
Alan Smithee is one of those little pieces of knowledge that people know because it helps make them feel elite, which is weird because everyone knows about it by now. It's like the way mullets were a big joke a while back.
But really, odds are, if you know about it, then it's not hip and you're cool, stop pretending and go listen to some more Weezer.
Re:Expose kicks your brain's ass.
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 1
I'd also like to add that Apple shouldn't have any trouble implementing virtual desktops in a friendly manner when they manufacture the input hardware. People like tactile controls if they do useful things well. The iPod touch wheel, the degauss button on a CRT, and the mousewheel come to mind.
Apple keyboards could have keys dedicated to desktop management. Something like a scroll wheel and some buttons near the top or a modifier key near the arrows would make the feature a lot more obvious and would also avoid hijacking keys from applications.
It sounds like something Apple would never do but looking down at the bottom of my iBook's keyboard, I have keys labelled fn, ctrl, option, command, and enter, three of which are completely useless unless I have to use the F1 to F6 keys or pretend like I'm a cartoon swearing in greek (ø®ç). All one of them needs is a new sticker and a relocation.
On the GUI side, the different desktops can distort and act like pieces of paper, the metaphor being that switching to a new desktop is like flipping through the pages on a sketchpad. You could even extend the metaphor to include features like destroying a desktop and all the programs in it by crumpling up the page and throwing it into Trash, or saving and loading a workspace with a bunch of programs already loaded by pushing and pulling a desktop out of a binder or photo album.
Expose kicks your brain's ass.
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 1
I find that compared to virtual desktops, Expose is much more destructive on a cognitive level.
When I'm programming in XCode and I want to get at a window that's covered by the browser or something similar, I first have to hit a key or mouse to a hot corner and watch everything change to new and unknown positions, examine the windows, and visually identify the one I want.
Or I have to click the icon on the Dock. This makes all the windows for that application come up, covering other stuff that I needed to look at. So then I have to play window janitor to see that header file that I quickly more'd or whatever.
In either case, I'm dealing with a lot of things that are not related to that function call I was looking for and subtle errors can result.
With Expose, the fact that you're visually tracking windows that are flying all over the place, changing size, and appearing in different positions most of the time doesn't help when you consider the context switching your brain has to do to process all this information. It's like randomly tossing your sheet music papers along the piano everytime you need to turn the page.
Whereas with virtual desktops, I hit Alt-3 and it takes me to my IDE and a few terms. Because I'm consistent in where I put things, this action is trained and, like mouse gestures, the physical motion is done without any thought. The nifty little transition animation is a lot less dramatic and helps to subconsciously cue your brain that your going to another set of applications.
While I'm talking about programming, I'm sure people doing "average Mac user" tasks like writing in Word, making something in Photoshop, or even just looking at more than 2 pdfs concurrently, also need to concentrate at the same level some of the time.
Usually Snopes articles are really good but that one's pretty weak.
Up until the end where a folklorist is quoted, it's extremely speculative, basing almost all its evidence on the fact that the rhyme didn't appear in print until the 1880s. Arguing over the year claimed by an urban legend (or at least the version that they chose to knock down) is pretty pedantic and poorly thought out in this case.
For example, it's much easier to make light of a plague that happened 2 centuries earlier, just as many of the posters here have done. It's also quite possible that nobody had written the rhyme down before 1881 despite its existance, contrary to snopes' arbitrary claims.
The Grimm brothers didn't publish their collection until the early 1800s even though many of the tales had existed long before that. The Hunt translation (the most popular english translation around that era) didn't come until the mid to late 19th century. It seems folk tales and nursery rhymes were in vogue at the time.
The red herring is that snopes exagerates the time span by referring to the 14th century plague rather than the more recent 17th century one. It would take a lot of drama out of their argument if they couldn't write about "five centuries" and "six centuries".
They also dismiss the issue based on a lot of superficial differences. For example:
The word "ashes" cannot be "a corruption of the sneezing sounds made by the infected person" and a word used for its literal meaning. Either "ashes" was a corruption of an earlier form or a deliberate use; it can't be both.
Fuck off. Why not? The verse "Catch a tiger by the toe" has a disturbingly more racist variation. The use of the word "tiger" is both a linguistic corruption of an earlier form and a deliberate use.
Moreover, the "ashes" ending of "Ring Around the Rosie" appears to be a fairly modern addition to the rhyme; earlier versions repeat other words or syllables instead (e.g., "Hush!", "A-tischa!", "Hasher", "Husher", "Hatch-u", "A-tishoo") or, as noted above, have completely different endings.
Wow, a few of those sound a lot like sneezing to me. Snopes is also ignoring the regional differences that this probably comes from. I drink pop and use kleenex while others drink soda and use tissues. Before TV and radio, these differences were more prevalent and evolved over time. And for the love of Pete, it's not like we ever obscure morbid concepts in language. That practice passed away a while back.
As for the folklorist, he explains the ring game and how the rhyme fits. That's not enough to claim the rhyme has no other meaning, he just describes its purpose.
The article doesn't present any concrete evidence to show why the plague interpretation is not a valid one, just that the verses are more recent than the 1300s. Considering the line "The nursery rhyme 'Ring Around the Rosie' is a coded reference to the Black Plague." is marked with a big red "False", they sure do a shitty job of addressing the issue.
IMO, treating this snopes article as a solid fact is worse than doing so with the original presumption. It's annoying that they can get away with making such loose arguments just because they wear the magic skeptic hat.
Well ya. You only need the first few letters to identify a website unless you're looking at things with all the same title and then a subtitle truncated to that.
Also, most titles would be irrelevant if IE actually showed those icons that a lot of sites have.
If copyrights aren't an issue, go for some modern lesser-known instrumental music. A lot of it is good while still being non-invasive. Because it will be something that most people probably haven't heard before, it could help reduce boredom by sparking intrest. Classical is alright but it's pretty generic.
Whatever you decide, don't play the local fucking pop station. No product is worth having to sit through 30 minutes of ChristinaBritney/NickleCreed.
Off the top of my head, some quiet instrumental music I listen to while coding: Godspeed You Black Emporer!, Tortoise, Boards of Canada, mouse on mars
Of course, you could always just do what everyone is thinking and play Uncle Fucka from South Park on an endless loop.
Promise sucks but we use some of their stuff at work, inlcuding an 8 drive linux based RAID 5 array. We found that having smartmon enabled with the pdc268 cards made the machine die every time we tried doing a bonnie++ over nfs. Disabling the daemon made the system stable again.
Also, we had to replace the power supply to resolve some other stability problems that were happening at the same time. The one I took out seems fine, just not fine enough to drive that much stuff I guess.
I never gave much thought to Palm before they bought BeOS and let it languish. Now I hope they disintegrate soon.
I would donate without a second thought to purchase the BeOS for the sake of GPL'ing it. At least then we might see a kernel that's newer than 2001 and a much needed injection of some new features like OpenGL. Once Palm closes its doors, the property will hopefully be cheap enough to do so.
For now, I'd rather use Linux 2.6, Fluxbox, and some accelerated X drivers and think of what might have been.
Exactly, there are too many variables to have it be done reliably by a cron job on another machine unless you dedicate that system to running OpenBSD. When something is no longer automatic, it tends to get put off for long periods of time in smaller or understaffed departments.
The cvs excuse seems pretty lame, I bet most people do run the base setup unless they want linux compatibility. Even then, as I said, it's not hard to buy a $200 machine to compile a handful of the most popular config permutations. Just a tarball containing all the binary patches up to that point would be leaps and bounds over what exists. And really, the reason people rely on OpenBSD in the first place for their servers is so they can forget about it, this is the only fly in the ointment.
True, except the patches that do exist for OpenBSD are a pain in the ass to install. They're source only last time I checked and while some people linked from google did have pre-compiled ones, I couldn't find anything that was mature or that even had a working server. If there's somewhere where sparc64 tar files exist, I'd really like to know.
I understand their resources are limited, but come on, the University of Alberta can't even afford ONE $200 machine on which to compile these things?
They made some good selections (yay Vandal Hearts), I'll have to check out the PS2 ones. But what about some strategy games on the PC? There must be tons but the only one I can think of at the moment is Fallout Tactics. Any suggestions?
Aside from that, the main reason Fallout is the only PC RPG that I really liked is because the battles were well-done strategy instead of mindless mouse clicking. Most PC RPGs nowadays, if they're not yet another Diablo clone, try and incorporate some real time/multiplayer aspect and usually fail. Even Arcanum managed to ruin itself. LAME.
What are some good traditional RPGs with strategic combat? If they even exist that is.
The only reason to go into gconf is to completely disable the spatial nautilus features. Only people likely to want that, are the non-newbies longing for the "good old days" of "exploring" the filesystem.
Who do you think is most likely to be running a Linux system in the first place? All this "Desktop for Grandma" shit is getting annoying. Everyone who matters to the adoption of Linux has used a computer before, most likely Windows.
While the GNOME people may be excellent programmers, they suck at demographics. Even users who end up using Linux without installing it are likely to be corporate users and they'll have been using computers everyday if they're employed.
Go ahead and make a spatial browser, smash all preconcieved notions of a user interface and come up with someething cool like mouse gestures for all I care, just don't make it the default. In short, make the default whatever appeals to the people who matter, not your mom.
Why is executable size even an issue? A jump or branch instruction can cover a fairly wide chunk of memory so that it doesn't really make much of a difference if you jump over 10 or 10 000 lines of code and dynamic linking doesn't have much overhead. If anything, the 100K app will probably run slower because of shortcuts the programmer took (not unrolling loops, storing more arguments on the stack than necessary, etc.).
For most architectures, less instructions != faster code. The only time I can think of where this isn't true is when you have a large cache, want to fit your whole program into it, the OS and hardware will actually let you do so, and the larger executable wouldn't be able to fit.
The bloat isn't in the language, it's in the libraries people are using. Fltk and KDE/Qt are both C++ libraries but have a huge difference in performance/features/appearance/usability. Using either is a matter of tradeoffs that the programmer is willing to make but both are miles ahead of raw assembly in most matters.
Libraries also allow for far more functionality and reliability. It's the little things like having functional and bug free scroll bars in your interface that people take for granted. Try, for example, loading a JPEG image in assembly. You can do it, somebody probably has already, but I'd rather just call to something that can be compiled for all the platforms I'll ever use.
On the other hand, programs streaming megabytes of things like useless images off the disk is responsible for a lot of the shittyness in modern computing, so maybe some libraries are making things a little too easy.
I was in school around that time. The problem wasn't so much that Office was good but rather that Word Perfect sucked. It was unstable, would present artifacts on the screen at times, was ugly, and was generally slow to load. Office was fast and relatively nice even though dealing with its autoformatting was a huge pain in the ass.
The NT4 systems just tended to rot away after a while and need reghosting. Maybe the rotting took a heavier toll on WP.
That being said, both word processors had little quirks that made them weird to use for students. To find the word count in Word Perfect, you have to go to File->Properties and click a tab, none which is immediately obvious. In Office, to doublespace a document, you had to go to Format->Paragraph and set line spacing to 2.0. You'd figure both companies would have gotten their acts together enough to make their products appeal to those who would ultimately choose one for a good part of their life.
And as an aside, another argument used against WP was that Office was what was used in business and for some students, high school would be the only access to any kind of computer training in their lifetime, especially if they didn't have a computer at home. Not everyone goes on to post-secondary education.
Not only is art a "peaceful purpose" but if his bacteria is not harmful then isn't he also protected under free speech rights? I'm not American but this doesn't seem to fall under that 'yelling fire in a crowded theatre' example.
Is the government allowed to confiscate tools used to create and distribute messages? Especially in a case like this where the communication is clearly both physically safe (I assume) and political.
Any two consecutive prime numbers can be represented as e + 1 and e + 3 where e is an even number. Their sum is: (e + 1) + (e + 3) = 2e + 4. Because e is even, it's divisible by 2, so let o be e|2.
So 2e + 4 = 2(2o) + 4 = 4o + 4 = 4(o + 1) which is divisible by 4..`. the sum of any two consecutive odd numbers is divisible by 4.
The sum of any two consecutive odd numbers is divisible by 4. I misread a question in first year and proved it.
I thought that was fairly neat, it makes me the life of the party when I tell it to people. (Well, not really. Depressing.) Does anyone know any other little tricks like that?
Slashdot Mirror
I had the opposite experience.
When I'm woking as a coder, I find that it's easy to constantly turn the problem over in my mind so that I have no problem getting up in the middle of the night and finishing something. Most of my most productive sessions have happened outside the office.
Whereas when I had a sys admin job early on in university, there was so much running around and fighting with other people's bugs that I didn't want to look at a computer by the time I got home.
It also completely drained me by the end of the day. For things with very few moving parts, computers fail a lot. It goes in cycles but at times, there's so much to do that your constantly running around and actively prioritizing several tasks as they come up. My admin job was probably more difficult than most however. I was supporting a mishmash of unix/linux systems and the users were very technical. I usually only had to deal with weird problems that they had given up on.
The few Windows systems we did have for the office people required constant babying but it wasn't really high impact. I could see how it would be more relaxing. Due to the occasional virus scramble and the inability to easily ssh into a Windows machine or whip up few scripts, you get a lot of time to reflect on just badly NT5.x handles its dumb self while watching progress bars crawl across the screen.
Easy, you can solve bigger problems (as in process/create more data) for the same amount of money. It may take forever because of the latency, but eventually you reach a point where the scale of the calculation far outweighs that factor.
Here's an example, I have one Pentium 3 with 256 megabytes of ram, it's pretty impressive and can solve 256 megabyte problem sets extremely fast. For the same amount of money, let's say $2500, I can buy 20 Pentium 1's with 48MB of ram at $125 a pop. Now I can solve a 960MB problem for the same price at a much slower speed.
A lot of posters in this article decry commodity hardware for sucking but they're not considering the long term. The tasks commonly performed by commodity hardware are starting to be more and more suited to scientific applications. We can already see how vector optimizations like Altivec and SIMD have worked their way into every desktop chip around.
As 3D rendering and sophisticated media codecs are becoming the primary reasons for upgrading a home PC, the front side bus and CPU (especially the CPU) have gained a disproportianate speed advantage compared to the rest of the PC. And when you start throwing in high speed network compenents like blade interconnects and 10Gig E, you can create an extremely powerful, scalable computer. Vendors like IBM love this because it means they can sell one design to everyone, just changing the number and specs of the nodes to fit their customer.
Speaking as someone who worked support on a large academic cluster where thriftiness is king, not only is the hardware cheaper, but it's mundane specs mean it's less likely to fail, when it does, the nodes are replaceable like lightbulbs, and you can run down to the local computer store in the event of a faulty IDE drive or memory stick. The support costs and reliablility are far superior to typical high performance solutions because support can mostly be done in house by existing staff.
And that ComputerWorld article is mostly bunk, OpenMP supports Fortran. The people who are writing large scale simulations in the first place are not only technical but also extremely bright. While it is a hassle, adding networking to the already heavy code optimization that they do is not that big of a deal.
Though there are problems that require a shared memory system, $2 million can buy so many more networked Xeons than shared memory SGI processors that the scientists in question should really consider their needs. While it may take much longer, their problem set can be much, much larger since they'll have more collective RAM and HD space. The system can also easily be partitioned, rebuilt, and shared in such a way that it's always in use by one or several people. In many cases, the tradeoff is worth it. And even then, shared memory systems will probably still have a lower price/performance ratio compared to clustering a smaller number of high memory database servers. Say for example, a group of Itaniums with 64Gig of ram each vs their SGI Origin equivalent in terms of memory footprint.
I think as time goes on, interconnect speed will increase to the point where clusters are very similar to traditional supercomputers. We can already see baby steps in this direction with blade equipment and various motherboards with gigabit NICs built into their own bus to avoid choking in PCI land. Infiniband and 10G over copper are the first major steps but switching and motherboards still have to catch up it seems. Instead of whining, the typical supercomputing vendors should be looking into merging standardizing their designs with those of clustered systems. Of course, I could see how the entrenched traditional vendors would want to legislate as much as possible to avoid having to compete with dozens of smaller engineering companies with less overhead and better ideas.
Now that I think of it, a lot of the posts I've read here are probably skeptical of massively parallel machines because they don't realize that the performance is all in the network. I've seen two clusters first hand with an identical number of identical nodes. One was being used as a compute farm where several hundred dual Xeons were attached to a rediculously large and overly expensive IBM foundry switch. The other was being used as a massively parrallel simulation machine, with dual gigabit nics attached to a bunch of 'cheap' 24 port switches in a 2D mesh. The second design cost much less because it wasn't built by IBM while still being about twice as fast.
If I wanted to travel around at normal speed I wouldn't have bought a car. Why would a game world be any different?
It seems like a step backwards to have to find some magic item or complete some quest to solve an incredibly annoying problem that I already deal with in real life. I thought these games were supposed to be about escapism.
Ya but as soon as everyone moves to a browser with pop-up blocking, advertisers will move to something even more annoying and pop-up blocking will no longer be feature, just an unofficial standard.
o ck
Hopefully Flash will take over since this extension already exists and works quite well:
http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#flashbl
I'm currently an undergrad in CS. Our curriculum uses Windows for the first year and is then entirely unix based for the rest using xhosted Solaris labs.
The problem is that most students don't want to leave Windows. The unix accounts default to 2 xterms and twm on login, providing a work environment that's simply unnacceptable. This setup, which was probably pretty anachronistic even when it was first installed, gives unix-like operating systems a terrible reputation among students. Even simple things like the keybindings in vim for the PC keyboards they use are completely broken by default.
I understand that their funding is limited (at least as far as undergrads are concerned) and I can see how the support costs for this setup are easily a fraction of what a fullblown lab of PCs would cost, but for fuck's sake, at least install icewm or blackbox on these things to provide something close to what students are used to. Fighting with your focus-follows-mouse window manager with completely alien window controls while trying to get something submitted before a deadline is quite an unpleasant experience.
The saddest part is that the X clients are such great solutions. I don't have to remember which machines have broken system installs, noisy fans, or broken harddrives, I just sit down somewhere and it works. Loads are automatically balanced between 18 or so machines through window forwarding and ssh so the system is almost always responsive. The potential exists for an amazing user experience but for some reason, nobody in charge seems to care.
Whether or not they use isometric views or turn based combat is irrelevant, people will still buy it because it's Fallout 3. The mechanics of a game are only a small part of what makes it good. As long as the game has a similar atmosphere and script to 1 & 2, it will be Fallout and it will be succesful.
The game will have to be in 3D because most people wouldn't buy it otherwise. And like most franchises, the transition to 3D will probably mean change. The weird thing is that most of the posts in this article focus on how it will be like an FPS or real time RPG. I've always thought that the 3D game most similar in spirit to Fallout was Grand Theft Auto 3.
Before losing your tophat and monocle out of sheer chagrin, hear me out, it has an expansive world and a wide open quest system that requires you to make tradeoffs and ally yourself with different groups. Because of this, you could play the game pretty much any way you wanted after the first few quests and it wouldn't be the same for everyone. For example, there are many ways to solve an individual quest for the Yakuza, but at the end of the day, the Italians will still shoot at you after its completion because you chose to complete the Yakuza mission in the first place. And regardless of what you're supposed to be doing, you can still spend your time hitting pedestrians with a baseball bat because it's just plain Fun. There were very few time limits or restrictions and you could drop storylines if they became boring or difficult without consequence. And all this without having to wonder where to go next to further advance the plot when you felt like doing so.
But the main difference between GTA3 and most large, immersive RPGs is that it isn't totally fucking boring. You're never stuck scrounging up treasure or dealing 50 annoying but trivial monsters whenever you try to do something or get somewhere, you just do it. Fallout was the same for the most part, if you wanted to pick pocket every police officer in town or shoot some kid in the head, you could. Like GTA3, the end result came about quickly, usually wasn't tedious, and wouldn't necessarily cause certain death. And like GTA3, you didn't have to work the usual RPG treadmill before you could actually do anything decent. Yeah, the mechanics of an RPG were there, but Fallout seemed a lot more concerned with having fun rather than being realistic or Monty Haul. I wish more American games were like that.
So while a turn based game would be cool, I think the issue is mostly irrelevant as long as its something like GTA3 in structure. Whatever gameplay technicalities are most conductive to freedom will be the best, because really, I don't want to spend my time walking from location to location, or dealing with another dungeon full of generi-monsters ("oh look, a giant ant!"), or being forced into doing a bunch of lame and repetitive levelling up tasks, I want to change the wasteland and be a post-apocalyptic badass.
Now that everyone knows, it doesn't really make sense for companies to allow Alan Smithee to be associated with their productions. So what's the new alias? I'm guessing that if there is one, it's David E. Kelly.
Alan Smithee is one of those little pieces of knowledge that people know because it helps make them feel elite, which is weird because everyone knows about it by now. It's like the way mullets were a big joke a while back.
But really, odds are, if you know about it, then it's not hip and you're cool, stop pretending and go listen to some more Weezer.
I'd also like to add that Apple shouldn't have any trouble implementing virtual desktops in a friendly manner when they manufacture the input hardware. People like tactile controls if they do useful things well. The iPod touch wheel, the degauss button on a CRT, and the mousewheel come to mind.
Apple keyboards could have keys dedicated to desktop management. Something like a scroll wheel and some buttons near the top or a modifier key near the arrows would make the feature a lot more obvious and would also avoid hijacking keys from applications.
It sounds like something Apple would never do but looking down at the bottom of my iBook's keyboard, I have keys labelled fn, ctrl, option, command, and enter, three of which are completely useless unless I have to use the F1 to F6 keys or pretend like I'm a cartoon swearing in greek (ø®ç). All one of them needs is a new sticker and a relocation.
On the GUI side, the different desktops can distort and act like pieces of paper, the metaphor being that switching to a new desktop is like flipping through the pages on a sketchpad. You could even extend the metaphor to include features like destroying a desktop and all the programs in it by crumpling up the page and throwing it into Trash, or saving and loading a workspace with a bunch of programs already loaded by pushing and pulling a desktop out of a binder or photo album.
I find that compared to virtual desktops, Expose is much more destructive on a cognitive level.
When I'm programming in XCode and I want to get at a window that's covered by the browser or something similar, I first have to hit a key or mouse to a hot corner and watch everything change to new and unknown positions, examine the windows, and visually identify the one I want.
Or I have to click the icon on the Dock. This makes all the windows for that application come up, covering other stuff that I needed to look at. So then I have to play window janitor to see that header file that I quickly more'd or whatever.
In either case, I'm dealing with a lot of things that are not related to that function call I was looking for and subtle errors can result.
With Expose, the fact that you're visually tracking windows that are flying all over the place, changing size, and appearing in different positions most of the time doesn't help when you consider the context switching your brain has to do to process all this information. It's like randomly tossing your sheet music papers along the piano everytime you need to turn the page.
Whereas with virtual desktops, I hit Alt-3 and it takes me to my IDE and a few terms. Because I'm consistent in where I put things, this action is trained and, like mouse gestures, the physical motion is done without any thought. The nifty little transition animation is a lot less dramatic and helps to subconsciously cue your brain that your going to another set of applications.
While I'm talking about programming, I'm sure people doing "average Mac user" tasks like writing in Word, making something in Photoshop, or even just looking at more than 2 pdfs concurrently, also need to concentrate at the same level some of the time.
Up until the end where a folklorist is quoted, it's extremely speculative, basing almost all its evidence on the fact that the rhyme didn't appear in print until the 1880s. Arguing over the year claimed by an urban legend (or at least the version that they chose to knock down) is pretty pedantic and poorly thought out in this case.
For example, it's much easier to make light of a plague that happened 2 centuries earlier, just as many of the posters here have done. It's also quite possible that nobody had written the rhyme down before 1881 despite its existance, contrary to snopes' arbitrary claims.
The Grimm brothers didn't publish their collection until the early 1800s even though many of the tales had existed long before that. The Hunt translation (the most popular english translation around that era) didn't come until the mid to late 19th century. It seems folk tales and nursery rhymes were in vogue at the time.
The red herring is that snopes exagerates the time span by referring to the 14th century plague rather than the more recent 17th century one. It would take a lot of drama out of their argument if they couldn't write about "five centuries" and "six centuries".
They also dismiss the issue based on a lot of superficial differences. For example:
Fuck off. Why not? The verse "Catch a tiger by the toe" has a disturbingly more racist variation. The use of the word "tiger" is both a linguistic corruption of an earlier form and a deliberate use.
Wow, a few of those sound a lot like sneezing to me. Snopes is also ignoring the regional differences that this probably comes from. I drink pop and use kleenex while others drink soda and use tissues. Before TV and radio, these differences were more prevalent and evolved over time. And for the love of Pete, it's not like we ever obscure morbid concepts in language. That practice passed away a while back.
As for the folklorist, he explains the ring game and how the rhyme fits. That's not enough to claim the rhyme has no other meaning, he just describes its purpose.
The article doesn't present any concrete evidence to show why the plague interpretation is not a valid one, just that the verses are more recent than the 1300s. Considering the line "The nursery rhyme 'Ring Around the Rosie' is a coded reference to the Black Plague." is marked with a big red "False", they sure do a shitty job of addressing the issue.
IMO, treating this snopes article as a solid fact is worse than doing so with the original presumption. It's annoying that they can get away with making such loose arguments just because they wear the magic skeptic hat.
Well ya. You only need the first few letters to identify a website unless you're looking at things with all the same title and then a subtitle truncated to that.
Also, most titles would be irrelevant if IE actually showed those icons that a lot of sites have.
If copyrights aren't an issue, go for some modern lesser-known instrumental music. A lot of it is good while still being non-invasive. Because it will be something that most people probably haven't heard before, it could help reduce boredom by sparking intrest. Classical is alright but it's pretty generic.
Whatever you decide, don't play the local fucking pop station. No product is worth having to sit through 30 minutes of ChristinaBritney/NickleCreed.
Off the top of my head, some quiet instrumental music I listen to while coding:
Godspeed You Black Emporer!, Tortoise, Boards of Canada, mouse on mars
Of course, you could always just do what everyone is thinking and play Uncle Fucka from South Park on an endless loop.
If you have money to burn, you can look into SGI's CXFS.
http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/cxfs.html
Promise sucks but we use some of their stuff at work, inlcuding an 8 drive linux based RAID 5 array. We found that having smartmon enabled with the pdc268 cards made the machine die every time we tried doing a bonnie++ over nfs. Disabling the daemon made the system stable again.
Also, we had to replace the power supply to resolve some other stability problems that were happening at the same time. The one I took out seems fine, just not fine enough to drive that much stuff I guess.
I never gave much thought to Palm before they bought BeOS and let it languish. Now I hope they disintegrate soon.
I would donate without a second thought to purchase the BeOS for the sake of GPL'ing it. At least then we might see a kernel that's newer than 2001 and a much needed injection of some new features like OpenGL. Once Palm closes its doors, the property will hopefully be cheap enough to do so.
For now, I'd rather use Linux 2.6, Fluxbox, and some accelerated X drivers and think of what might have been.
Exactly, there are too many variables to have it be done reliably by a cron job on another machine unless you dedicate that system to running OpenBSD. When something is no longer automatic, it tends to get put off for long periods of time in smaller or understaffed departments.
The cvs excuse seems pretty lame, I bet most people do run the base setup unless they want linux compatibility. Even then, as I said, it's not hard to buy a $200 machine to compile a handful of the most popular config permutations. Just a tarball containing all the binary patches up to that point would be leaps and bounds over what exists. And really, the reason people rely on OpenBSD in the first place for their servers is so they can forget about it, this is the only fly in the ointment.
True, except the patches that do exist for OpenBSD are a pain in the ass to install. They're source only last time I checked and while some people linked from google did have pre-compiled ones, I couldn't find anything that was mature or that even had a working server. If there's somewhere where sparc64 tar files exist, I'd really like to know.
I understand their resources are limited, but come on, the University of Alberta can't even afford ONE $200 machine on which to compile these things?
They made some good selections (yay Vandal Hearts), I'll have to check out the PS2 ones. But what about some strategy games on the PC? There must be tons but the only one I can think of at the moment is Fallout Tactics. Any suggestions?
Aside from that, the main reason Fallout is the only PC RPG that I really liked is because the battles were well-done strategy instead of mindless mouse clicking. Most PC RPGs nowadays, if they're not yet another Diablo clone, try and incorporate some real time/multiplayer aspect and usually fail. Even Arcanum managed to ruin itself. LAME.
What are some good traditional RPGs with strategic combat? If they even exist that is.
Who do you think is most likely to be running a Linux system in the first place? All this "Desktop for Grandma" shit is getting annoying. Everyone who matters to the adoption of Linux has used a computer before, most likely Windows.
While the GNOME people may be excellent programmers, they suck at demographics. Even users who end up using Linux without installing it are likely to be corporate users and they'll have been using computers everyday if they're employed.
Go ahead and make a spatial browser, smash all preconcieved notions of a user interface and come up with someething cool like mouse gestures for all I care, just don't make it the default. In short, make the default whatever appeals to the people who matter, not your mom.
Why is executable size even an issue? A jump or branch instruction can cover a fairly wide chunk of memory so that it doesn't really make much of a difference if you jump over 10 or 10 000 lines of code and dynamic linking doesn't have much overhead. If anything, the 100K app will probably run slower because of shortcuts the programmer took (not unrolling loops, storing more arguments on the stack than necessary, etc.).
For most architectures, less instructions != faster code. The only time I can think of where this isn't true is when you have a large cache, want to fit your whole program into it, the OS and hardware will actually let you do so, and the larger executable wouldn't be able to fit.
The bloat isn't in the language, it's in the libraries people are using. Fltk and KDE/Qt are both C++ libraries but have a huge difference in performance/features/appearance/usability. Using either is a matter of tradeoffs that the programmer is willing to make but both are miles ahead of raw assembly in most matters.
Libraries also allow for far more functionality and reliability. It's the little things like having functional and bug free scroll bars in your interface that people take for granted. Try, for example, loading a JPEG image in assembly. You can do it, somebody probably has already, but I'd rather just call to something that can be compiled for all the platforms I'll ever use.
On the other hand, programs streaming megabytes of things like useless images off the disk is responsible for a lot of the shittyness in modern computing, so maybe some libraries are making things a little too easy.
I was in school around that time. The problem wasn't so much that Office was good but rather that Word Perfect sucked. It was unstable, would present artifacts on the screen at times, was ugly, and was generally slow to load. Office was fast and relatively nice even though dealing with its autoformatting was a huge pain in the ass.
The NT4 systems just tended to rot away after a while and need reghosting. Maybe the rotting took a heavier toll on WP.
That being said, both word processors had little quirks that made them weird to use for students. To find the word count in Word Perfect, you have to go to File->Properties and click a tab, none which is immediately obvious. In Office, to doublespace a document, you had to go to Format->Paragraph and set line spacing to 2.0. You'd figure both companies would have gotten their acts together enough to make their products appeal to those who would ultimately choose one for a good part of their life.
And as an aside, another argument used against WP was that Office was what was used in business and for some students, high school would be the only access to any kind of computer training in their lifetime, especially if they didn't have a computer at home. Not everyone goes on to post-secondary education.
Not only is art a "peaceful purpose" but if his bacteria is not harmful then isn't he also protected under free speech rights? I'm not American but this doesn't seem to fall under that 'yelling fire in a crowded theatre' example.
Is the government allowed to confiscate tools used to create and distribute messages? Especially in a case like this where the communication is clearly both physically safe (I assume) and political.
Here's the proof because I'm bored.
.`. the sum of any two consecutive odd numbers is divisible by 4.
Any two consecutive prime numbers can be represented as e + 1 and e + 3 where e is an even number. Their sum is: (e + 1) + (e + 3) = 2e + 4. Because e is even, it's divisible by 2, so let o be e|2.
So 2e + 4 = 2(2o) + 4 = 4o + 4 = 4(o + 1) which is divisible by 4.
The sum of any two consecutive odd numbers is divisible by 4. I misread a question in first year and proved it.
I thought that was fairly neat, it makes me the life of the party when I tell it to people. (Well, not really. Depressing.) Does anyone know any other little tricks like that?