First of all, I don't play online games. I don't even have a working computer. It's remarkably freeing.
Second, the key here is that somebody created a lot of trouble in a public venue. It's not like somebody cheating at a D&D game; it's more like going into a gaming store and knocking all the shit to the ground and harassing the patrons. It's freaking illegal.
Just because it was on a computer screen doesn't make it less real. This is the Mitnick mentality that people have to dump.
If I see somebody drop $100, is it a crime to pick it up and walk off with it?
If I see a door open to a warehouse I *KNOW* I'm not supposed to be in, is it a crime to walk in and take a couple High-Def TVs?
If I see a gun just lying around, is it a crime for me to shoot people with it? I mean, it's not my gun.
YES!
So why is it so unusual that manipulating private software, even if the entry point is public and easily accessible, should be a crime? Why should we expect the virtual "world" to be any different, especially considering that it's much more anonymous and therefore much more enticing to break the law?
If I expose a bug in an online ordering system to get a stereo for $.01, I'm breaking the law. If I append &debug=1 to the end of a URL and suddenly get into their CMS, I'm breaking the law.
And if I use a bug I've discovered, and KNOW I shouldn't be manipulating, to ruin a game for thousands of other people...well, it's the same as causing a public disturbace at any large function. Might as well have streaked at the superbowl; at least that would have impressed the chicks.
Of course I listed games prior to 2001...I haven't bought any games since 2001. I just don't have time to play anything.
Well, that's not completely true. I bought Warcraft 3, which wasn't original but was highly polished. I bought Neverwinter Nights which actually WAS pretty original, at least in the online play. And I bought Terminus, because a friend of mine had his likeness in the game and it was only $4. It was absolute shit but very original...now we can stop complaining about realistic physics in space simulations, because it sucks.
Oh, and I just bought Uplink. Uplink is a VERY original game, also very addictive and fun, but it's destined for obscurity because it is not really "mainstream" enough in scope. It's in some ways a standard "hacker" video game like the old BBS door games, only it adds a factor of graphical wizardry while managing to make the whole "fake hacker" thing more realistic and more fun.
I had this game back when it was called "Bomb Squad" for the Intellivision Intellivoice. You had to disarm a bomb within a time limit using a variety of tools corresponding to a certain type of wire. It was like Simon meets Mastermind with a time limit, creepy music and a kick ass animation when the city blew up.
The INTV was the most original system ever made. Because with so little to work with in terms of hardware and development kits, the Blue Sky team created dozens of fun, distinct games with infinite replayability.
The Sims, Wolfenstein 3D, Unreal Tournament, Mario Kart, Pokemon, Myst, Parappa the Rapper, Super Mario 3d, Ninja Gaiden, The Legend of Zelda...
Each of these sold better than "Legends of Wrestling" _BECAUSE_ of their originality, because they appealed to a new crowd. The Sims is the best example of this.
Of course, some ideas just don't cut it. Sewer Shark. The Sims Online. Anything for the Jaguar. It's not always because the game sucked -- sleepers like Jet Grind Radio, Star Control 2, Shadow of the Beast, Radiant Silvergun and Panzer Dragoon Saga happen all the time and either miss their audience or are otherwise stutter started into obscurity.
The Dreamcast was killed by speculation and nothing else. Everybody who played Crazy Taxi with me when it first came out loved it. Most of them waited for the PS2 anyway -- because the PS1 had a huge library and Sony was making promises to shake the very earth. It's not ORIGINALITY that killed the DC. That's just stupid. ORIGINALITY was the only think that prevented it from doing a complete "Saturn fail."
The web hosting market space leaves little room for profitability in default configurations. The problem is, you HAVE to get a low price or people will ignore you. I've seen absurd offerings like 50 gig of bandwidth and 300 meg of space for $5 per month. There's no way this is cost effective...50 gigabytes of bandwidth is the equivalent of 154 kbit per second. Get 7 people actually pushing at that level and you'd have the equivalent of a T1's bandwidth for $35 in revue, which at least around here is a $565 loss.
So you oversell. Of course you oversell...chances are 95% of your users will never hit that level. If they do, you make sure your service agreement has a "drop you at any time we like" clause. No problem. It's sleazy, but people never pay their bandwidth bills...shit, i owe my old co loc something like $500 and they never even bothered to send a bill, they knew I wouldn't pay it.
Disk space is another issue entirely. People will definitely hit their disk space limit, so you can't oversell it. And the people doing it will be content creators -- just the people likely to pay for additional play. Charge them up the ass, offer then your "second tier" service, and you've got a single client stuck on your service AND paying you more money for roughly the same support costs.
Of course, you *COULD* just buck the whole thing and charge what you like, or a percentage above what things actually cost you and your company. You can do sophisticated math on how much your time is worth vs. how much time you spend doing tasks and assign a value based on that. You're not going to have much success, but if you have quality service you'll get a few people anyway.
Then they need a dictionary. "Skunky" beer is beer that has attracted a number of non-standard types of yeast to the party, yeasts which grow faster when exposed to sunlight. This is the reason most beers is bottled in brown or green bottles -- to prevent ambient sunlight from damaging the in bottle fermentation process, which is where most of your flavor comes in. Right out of the initial fermentation, beer tastes like a thin, grassy malted milkshake.
Budweiser is absolute shit beer, but it is NEVER "skunky." The hops and wort are so heavily treated that no ambient yeast can survive. All that's left is the special blend of Bud yeast and a specific amount of sugars, which will be quickly eaten by the yeast after bottling and promptly stop any future fermentation. The end result of this is you can drink a hundred bottles of Bud and it will always taste exactly the same. Not that this is a good thing.
You might be referring to Bud's sourness, which is a result of the young hop blend and to "afficianados" is the reason to drink it. Of course, they'll give you shit for the "bitterness" of European beers. There's no pleasing some people.
Me? I like a nice, burnt taste in a thick, sweet beer. An oatmeal stout or a brown ale.
In my defense, blush tastes like ass and I will not drink anything my mom likes, eg your desert wines and gross champagnes.
However, I have been known to order a lambrusco with pasta. Because I'm such a puss.
Re:What's the range of effect?
on
Mastering Light
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· Score: 1
Sounds to me like it ENFORCES the 2nd rule of thermodynamics.
"Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; it can only change form."
It's not creating anything. It's not destroying anything. It's changine form...and since we're using plenty of energy to create the phasic wave which is doing the changing, entropy's increasing too.
Newton's emasculation of crazy science fiction magic continues unabated.
Wine growers somehow have the money and the desire to use the latest technology...hmmm...could it be because they are often rich ex-technologists who have retired and gone into a field where the right attitude and social networking can lead other rich people to pay $100+ for grape juice that's gone bad?
Sorry, it's my birthday, and I'm cynical. Fact is, the best wine I've ever had was 2001's St. Ives from Bully Hill. It's $6/bottle but tastes EXACTLY like what I want wine to taste like. Last year's batch tastes completely different and has lost all the really good, excuse the bullshit term, undertones, of the old wine of which I still have a dusty bottle in my basement. Sure, I'd like to have this years' batch taste the same as it did in 2001, and an expensive digital setup would help that. But Bully Hill is a very laid back organic winery. The reason St Ives was so perfect two years ago was that the weather was perfect, and nobody fucked with it. If they had, it would have lost its wild flavor, and I would have never gotten a taste of it.
Too much control is going to turn wine into Buddweiser. It's never skunky, it's never watery or too strong, but it's also never _GOOD_. Goodness is randomness in my book, but I'm a Wolfram-ite.
You know, I'm freaking sick of "cool web interfaces." They're inefficient and by nature inhibitive when it comes to performing advanced operations. Like creating many-to-many relationships or giving instanteous, absolute feedback to changes. HTML just doesn't have the controls necessary to do so without creating tons of overhead -- or necessitating the use of javascript. Which even at this late date is a real bear.
Sure, they're nice for some things, and multiplatform, but they're not for everything. I like the way Freenet does things...there's a very basic web interface for accessing the gateway, but all the real setup and control is done with a Java client. Best of both worlds, and no need for ugly OSS GUI toolkits (flame on!).
Of course, there's no need to mention Microsoft's inability to create a stable system.
You know, my win2k machine -- the one that has been up since our last power outtage, and had been up since the power outtage before that -- has never crashed. It might be because I don't overclock it, used a retail processor, Intel networking, four fans, whatever. But it has not crashed or needed a reboot since I installed Jetico BestCrypt last year, March or something. I use it every day, have played pretty hardware intensive games on it, and even used it as a server.
I think the problem here isn't with Microsoft and their inability to write a stable OS. If it is stable anywhere, that means the kernel isn't leaking ram or occasionally polling hardware that doesn't exist. The problem therefore lies with Microsoft's inherent trust that driver manufacturers and software engineers will handle their own damn errors. Linux doesn't do that. The kernel is so "low" that it recovers from just about everything. The software on top of it, that's another story. Many of the applications I've used in Linux crash after a single parsing error, bringing down anything reliant on them. Tell me you've never had an X server crash on you, taking down your entire GUI. To the average user, who isn't running a bunch of services or daemons, losing the GUI is the same thing as crashing. So what if bringing it back up is faster than rebooting the machine -- it's also more complex to support.
Besides, hardly anybody buys a Windows installation because they wanted a more stable system. They bought it because they wanted cooler toys and a snappy GUI. People "buy" Linux, BSD, et al. for stability.
Actually, there's a lot of creativity that goes into pricing things.
Ever see this: $39.95 ? The.95 cuts.05 cents off the price but greatly increases the chances you'll buy it.
How about 2/6.00? Unless they say otherwise, that means 1's only $3, but again, you're more likely to buy the two. A supermarket by me commonly sells things like limes and small bags of snacks at 4/$1.00, rather than just $.25, which i guess seems cheap.
A lot of the delis around me have sandwiches for 4.63, which with tax is exactly a finski. No numeric change means they can ring you out faster.
Besides this, figuring out what things are worth is a very exact science when you live, as we do, in a vastly service based economy. Prices have nothing to do with the actual cost of physical production, and everything to do with the public's perceived value of the product in question. This is how GM can make two identical trucks, label one GMC, and get another $3000 for it because GMCs are "professional grade and therefore more reliable." This is how Victoria's Secret can get $30+ for maybe a quarter square foot cloth and a pair of wires, and in fact get more money when they use less material or "exotic" materials like satin (which often cost less than cotton). It's all perception and advertising, baby. The luxuries that seperate us from the communists.
Hell, where I used to work, I got paid $15/hr for my time, when the company would charge $125 for it. At one point, they had a massive sliding scale, decreasing the hourly charge based on the amount of work requested and how locked into our system they became, thus guaranteeing future fees. "Partnered" companies got my time for $75, and any company I did work for within our organization estimated me at $50. It was the same freakin' work (though I did really try to wow the full price folks).
Now, if you spidered our rate system, you'd take the $50 and assume we always charged that much. And we'd probably have gone under without the extra $75 to pay for the 85% of the company who weren't directly related to producing software.
Finally: you know, not all vacations are the same. If you pay a cutrate price for travel, you generally get screwed. Cramped flight, rooms filled with cockroaches, free drinks watered down, free meal vouchers for peanut butter sandwiches and generic chips, and a geo metro rental. It is very difficult to compare travel packages objectively because every travel agent has different alliances and partnerships. If you, as a travel agent, offered me a service that would spider all of the other sites and offer me a lower price, it wouldnt' save me any time because I wouldn't trust it. In the hands of the enemy, and all.
1.8 in drives connected via ATA. I was wrong about the SCSI. I misread info from this page which mentions that the iPod connects to the mac as a SCSI block device, which makes sense...that means more of the functions of copying and reading data are controlled by the iPod's processor and not by the mac's processor. And that may be one of the big keys to the iPod's download speed, which really is fast as hell. Faster than copying across my own HD, at least.
Yes. SCSI is one of things that "didn't pan out." But desktop Macs had SCSI LONG after it died on the PC market, for the extended MTBF and reduced CPU utilization. As I understand it, the HD inside my iPod is SCSI.
When I say "USB over PCI," I mean that Apple chose to eliminate PCI and PCMCIA slots from its most popular machines (iMac, iBook) because USB served the same purpose of extendability, was easier to install and manage and was cheaper to produce and support. USB was faltering until Mac made that hard decision. Now it's everywhere. Apple did the same for IEEE 1334, though it could be argued Firewire's time had come anyway.
Thanks for reminding me about VLB...I should have said "PCI over VLB/ISA/Microchannel," and pointed out that Mac tried to popularize 66 MHz PCI as the successor for graphics, not AGP. Another thing that didn't pan out, but it wasn't a bad idea...to have the same slot and bus for EVERYTHING is a pretty good idea from a simplification and unification point of view, even if it's slow as shit.
Sorry, that's bullshit. Apple has whatever choice apple wants to make, and they've had talks with other chipmakers including AMD. If the 970 fell through, they'd go with something else. If they had to, they could switch to an x86 architecture without batting an eye. It worked pretty well for SGI.
Not that it would necessarily be in their best interest. Apple, as a company, represents an ALTERNATIVE, and therefore they try to maintain alternative hardware choices: SCSI over IDE, ATI over NVIDIA, USB over PCI, the one button & metakey paradigm, Flat Panel over CRT -- and the big one, RISC over CISC. Some of these choices have panned out great. Some have flopped miserably...yet despite the doomsayers, Apple is still afloat after 30 years of "forcing" people to buy "crazy" proprietary gear. With "only" 3% of the market, but it's a huge freakin' market, and their margins are gigantic. Part of the reason for this huge margin is that they are the only hardware player, and are therefore able to name their own prices.
As for Apple users having no choices, that's also crap. We always have choices: buy Apple, or buy something else. Keep the current machine and upgrade it, or buy a new one. And Apple will still make the old chips for a long time after the 970 has started smokin' competitors...at least, that's what they did every other time they made a generation jump in processors.
Apple users vote with their dollars and so it's in Apple's interest to do whatever people are most receptive to, which is what they as a company seem to be best at anyway. After all, they got me to spend $538.72 on an mp3 player. This whole "no choice" thing is BS -- you choose the platform, not the hardware. That's the Apple way.
Notice nowhere in this formula is any room for great performances, originality, and bucking of tradition and cliche?
Maybe it's formulas like this that cause me to lock in a $9 frown before watching any Hollywood film. Of course, on the good side, there's no percentage for "automatic star draw" either, which might be something to tell the directors who still think that we want to see Arnold blow stuff up without a good explanation.
My personal percentage: Plot cohesion 20pc, originality & performance 20 pc, dialog 15 pc, action 15pc, comedy 15pc, special effects / cinematography 10pc and senusality (ok, hot chicks) 5pc.
Let's say you have a really complex, but SMALL, algorithm that you do all the time. Going into a new function takes resources even when compiled (basically, the CPU pops your current work onto the stack, flushes the current command queue and any fancy branch prediction going on, and moves to the memory location of the function EACH TIME it's called)...so C programmers invented this method called inlining.
(this next bit is a very simple and very halfassed explanation in pseudo C. flames from C programmers about the bad syntax will be ignored. i got a D in C so F it)
Inlining works like this. You write a function and assign it a variable name. Then, any place you want that function, you use the variable name. The "precompiler" converts any instance of the variable name into the original function. EX:
#DEFINE PISETUP int pi; pi = 22/7; #ENDDEF
Later, if you use the term PISETUP it will be replaced with that code by the precompiler.
This was a good way to facilitate rewriting the same thing over and over, while maintaining speed, and a single location to change/fix the function. Unfortunately, it was also a good way for lazy programmers to obfuscate code by creating precompiler directives and variables for common language patterns. EX:
#DEFINE STARTIF if ( #ENDDEF #DEFINE CLOSEIF ) { #ENDDEF
Used to make:
if ( true ) {
beep; }
into:
STARTIF true CLOSEIF beep; }
Shorter, yes. But harder to read, much harder to understand, and absolutely confusing for the poor newbies. Kind of like learning how to read from logs of an AOL chatroom.
One of the big "innovations" of Java was the elimination of the precompiler, which made sense. Java runs object code, not directly runnable byte code, so it is in essence already performing the tasks of the precompiler. The virtual machine "compiles" the code while it is running, to optimize for the individial physical machine, no matter what it may be.
The idea worked IMO because, now that you can cut, paste, and find and replace (with regular and replace expressions), you don't really need these replacements. Might as well just be verbose as you want to be. Might as well use tiny little functions since inlining doesn't work anyway.
Besides, since Java is interpretted and recompiled while it's running, you don't gain anything from inlining. Any "contextual" function (the function as written in the code) might become "inlined" when run by a good virtual machine program that performs "Just In Time" (JIT) compilation. Call void incrememtI(){ i++; ) a lot? The compiler will notice this, and replace calls in the stack to incrememtI() with the actual code this function contains..NET does this with simple Properties...which results in a sincere benefit to using Properties for ALL inter-class data assignment and for some intra-class assignments as well.
This is why Metadata is a bad idea, or could be. No real benefit to the code, not much of a benefit for the "thorough" developer, and yet there's a real chance for lazy folks to create disgusting, hard to maintain code. This is never a good idea...a lot of coders think that obfuscated code makes them more valuable to employers. Not half...they'll axe you first if they think you're playing the obscurity game and will not give great references if you leave first.
Of course, if all Metadata does is replace:
// @Property:int ID
with:
private int id; void setID(int value){ id = value; } int getID(){ return id; }
Then it may be worthwhile. Time, and the Java Community, will tell.
(PS: Used to work for/with a Pat Doyle, but he's not you)
"Shortcuts" are not the problem. Stupidity is the problem. A good programmer, or at least a kind programmer, uses "shortcuts" so that somebody else can figure out what's going on without having to everything about an object.
Enumerated types will save your ass the first time you change databases or some project manager adds a new "status level" in between DONE and FINISHED. They are much faster than using internalized strings, which is how I had been testing for this crap. Remember, once they hit the object code they're just constants anyway...
Foreach was easily the coolest thing about C# when I started using it, indexers were the second, and the code they create is FAR more maintainable than for(Object o = someList.FirstItem(); o != someList.LastItem(); o = someList.NextItem()){...}.
Automagic "boxing" is a beautiful thing for newbie coders...I have had to teach so many the difference between a Byte and a byte that it isn't funny. I intend to use it, too...we pass in and out of the classes for char, int, byte, bool etc so often it makes sense to have the compiler/VM do our dirty work for us.
And generics...well, they look real queer in Java, where we've never used the syntax before. But they will save our behinds on reuse! Besides no doubt being faster, it will make more sense when typing collections of inherited objects. We have a BaseRecord class. We have an optimized BaseRecordColl class, usually full of different types of ChildRecord classes. If we can write the one collection class, and not have to explicitly cast each child op, it will save time, space, and hassle...and avoid calling the superclass methods of uncast subclasses!
Metadata is the only ingredient here that seems like it could cause trouble, and if it does it will be because people are using it wrong. Java is not a language that inlines...that's the whole idea of the JIT...and with today's cut and paste GUI IDEs, there's no need for programmers to use the lazy C declarations of the past. If people start doing so because it's neat, just nip it in the bud. Find/Replace when the code hits your desk. Eventually they'll get the hint.
Netbeans is a FABULOUS IDE...until I used.NET, the best I'd ever seen..NET's only major wins are in the realms of usable screen space and speed. Netbeans is slow on the fastest java systems I've seen. It's got so many abstraction layers between it and the hardware (not the least of which being the VM, jrocket doubles the speed easily but its still too slow), i don't think it'll ever speed up. The hiding in.NET is the awesome. I have a single bar on the way left of my screen with every possible window I could want docked to it, from the help browser to the preferences window. There's even a full screen mode and key combos for freakin' everything. So you have productivity combined with ease of use...MS finally fucking got something right. I guess $1800 or whatever is a lot for an IDE and a VM when Java is free. But it wasn't my money not my decision.
Netbeans has the.NET ide beat HANDS DOWN for functionality, though. New modules come out just about every second and get organized as updates, new feature, beta features and alpha features. It is the only IDE I have seen that helps you do everything Java can do, from emulating embedded systems running J2ME, to running j2EE server apps.
Plus, Netbeans is also an application PLATFORM. Meaning you can write your apps to fit snugly inside netbeans, and a lot of the tough work of designing new controls and common dialogs is done for you.
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First of all, I don't play online games. I don't even have a working computer. It's remarkably freeing.
Second, the key here is that somebody created a lot of trouble in a public venue. It's not like somebody cheating at a D&D game; it's more like going into a gaming store and knocking all the shit to the ground and harassing the patrons. It's freaking illegal.
Just because it was on a computer screen doesn't make it less real. This is the Mitnick mentality that people have to dump.
If I see somebody drop $100, is it a crime to pick it up and walk off with it?
If I see a door open to a warehouse I *KNOW* I'm not supposed to be in, is it a crime to walk in and take a couple High-Def TVs?
If I see a gun just lying around, is it a crime for me to shoot people with it? I mean, it's not my gun.
YES!
So why is it so unusual that manipulating private software, even if the entry point is public and easily accessible, should be a crime? Why should we expect the virtual "world" to be any different, especially considering that it's much more anonymous and therefore much more enticing to break the law?
If I expose a bug in an online ordering system to get a stereo for $.01, I'm breaking the law. If I append &debug=1 to the end of a URL and suddenly get into their CMS, I'm breaking the law.
And if I use a bug I've discovered, and KNOW I shouldn't be manipulating, to ruin a game for thousands of other people...well, it's the same as causing a public disturbace at any large function. Might as well have streaked at the superbowl; at least that would have impressed the chicks.
Of course I listed games prior to 2001...I haven't bought any games since 2001. I just don't have time to play anything.
Well, that's not completely true. I bought Warcraft 3, which wasn't original but was highly polished. I bought Neverwinter Nights which actually WAS pretty original, at least in the online play. And I bought Terminus, because a friend of mine had his likeness in the game and it was only $4. It was absolute shit but very original...now we can stop complaining about realistic physics in space simulations, because it sucks.
Oh, and I just bought Uplink. Uplink is a VERY original game, also very addictive and fun, but it's destined for obscurity because it is not really "mainstream" enough in scope. It's in some ways a standard "hacker" video game like the old BBS door games, only it adds a factor of graphical wizardry while managing to make the whole "fake hacker" thing more realistic and more fun.
Except it was, you know, 20 years earlier. And was awesome.
I had this game back when it was called "Bomb Squad" for the Intellivision Intellivoice. You had to disarm a bomb within a time limit using a variety of tools corresponding to a certain type of wire. It was like Simon meets Mastermind with a time limit, creepy music and a kick ass animation when the city blew up.
The INTV was the most original system ever made. Because with so little to work with in terms of hardware and development kits, the Blue Sky team created dozens of fun, distinct games with infinite replayability.
The Sims, Wolfenstein 3D, Unreal Tournament, Mario Kart, Pokemon, Myst, Parappa the Rapper, Super Mario 3d, Ninja Gaiden, The Legend of Zelda...
Each of these sold better than "Legends of Wrestling" _BECAUSE_ of their originality, because they appealed to a new crowd. The Sims is the best example of this.
Of course, some ideas just don't cut it. Sewer Shark. The Sims Online. Anything for the Jaguar. It's not always because the game sucked -- sleepers like Jet Grind Radio, Star Control 2, Shadow of the Beast, Radiant Silvergun and Panzer Dragoon Saga happen all the time and either miss their audience or are otherwise stutter started into obscurity.
The Dreamcast was killed by speculation and nothing else. Everybody who played Crazy Taxi with me when it first came out loved it. Most of them waited for the PS2 anyway -- because the PS1 had a huge library and Sony was making promises to shake the very earth. It's not ORIGINALITY that killed the DC. That's just stupid. ORIGINALITY was the only think that prevented it from doing a complete "Saturn fail."
The web hosting market space leaves little room for profitability in default configurations. The problem is, you HAVE to get a low price or people will ignore you. I've seen absurd offerings like 50 gig of bandwidth and 300 meg of space for $5 per month. There's no way this is cost effective...50 gigabytes of bandwidth is the equivalent of 154 kbit per second. Get 7 people actually pushing at that level and you'd have the equivalent of a T1's bandwidth for $35 in revue, which at least around here is a $565 loss.
So you oversell. Of course you oversell...chances are 95% of your users will never hit that level. If they do, you make sure your service agreement has a "drop you at any time we like" clause. No problem. It's sleazy, but people never pay their bandwidth bills...shit, i owe my old co loc something like $500 and they never even bothered to send a bill, they knew I wouldn't pay it.
Disk space is another issue entirely. People will definitely hit their disk space limit, so you can't oversell it. And the people doing it will be content creators -- just the people likely to pay for additional play. Charge them up the ass, offer then your "second tier" service, and you've got a single client stuck on your service AND paying you more money for roughly the same support costs.
Of course, you *COULD* just buck the whole thing and charge what you like, or a percentage above what things actually cost you and your company. You can do sophisticated math on how much your time is worth vs. how much time you spend doing tasks and assign a value based on that. You're not going to have much success, but if you have quality service you'll get a few people anyway.
Then they need a dictionary. "Skunky" beer is beer that has attracted a number of non-standard types of yeast to the party, yeasts which grow faster when exposed to sunlight. This is the reason most beers is bottled in brown or green bottles -- to prevent ambient sunlight from damaging the in bottle fermentation process, which is where most of your flavor comes in. Right out of the initial fermentation, beer tastes like a thin, grassy malted milkshake.
Budweiser is absolute shit beer, but it is NEVER "skunky." The hops and wort are so heavily treated that no ambient yeast can survive. All that's left is the special blend of Bud yeast and a specific amount of sugars, which will be quickly eaten by the yeast after bottling and promptly stop any future fermentation. The end result of this is you can drink a hundred bottles of Bud and it will always taste exactly the same. Not that this is a good thing.
You might be referring to Bud's sourness, which is a result of the young hop blend and to "afficianados" is the reason to drink it. Of course, they'll give you shit for the "bitterness" of European beers. There's no pleasing some people.
Me? I like a nice, burnt taste in a thick, sweet beer. An oatmeal stout or a brown ale.
MODERATORS: Please mark this as "+1, Has Read 'The Monkey Wrench Gang'"
In my defense, blush tastes like ass and I will not drink anything my mom likes, eg your desert wines and gross champagnes.
However, I have been known to order a lambrusco with pasta. Because I'm such a puss.
Sounds to me like it ENFORCES the 2nd rule of thermodynamics.
"Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; it can only change form."
It's not creating anything. It's not destroying anything. It's changine form...and since we're using plenty of energy to create the phasic wave which is doing the changing, entropy's increasing too.
Newton's emasculation of crazy science fiction magic continues unabated.
if science can't help drunk/horny/single people get laid, what good is it?
I use roofies...that's chemistry, right?
Wine growers somehow have the money and the desire to use the latest technology...hmmm...could it be because they are often rich ex-technologists who have retired and gone into a field where the right attitude and social networking can lead other rich people to pay $100+ for grape juice that's gone bad?
Sorry, it's my birthday, and I'm cynical. Fact is, the best wine I've ever had was 2001's St. Ives from Bully Hill. It's $6/bottle but tastes EXACTLY like what I want wine to taste like. Last year's batch tastes completely different and has lost all the really good, excuse the bullshit term, undertones, of the old wine of which I still have a dusty bottle in my basement. Sure, I'd like to have this years' batch taste the same as it did in 2001, and an expensive digital setup would help that. But Bully Hill is a very laid back organic winery. The reason St Ives was so perfect two years ago was that the weather was perfect, and nobody fucked with it. If they had, it would have lost its wild flavor, and I would have never gotten a taste of it.
Too much control is going to turn wine into Buddweiser. It's never skunky, it's never watery or too strong, but it's also never _GOOD_. Goodness is randomness in my book, but I'm a Wolfram-ite.
You know, I'm freaking sick of "cool web interfaces." They're inefficient and by nature inhibitive when it comes to performing advanced operations. Like creating many-to-many relationships or giving instanteous, absolute feedback to changes. HTML just doesn't have the controls necessary to do so without creating tons of overhead -- or necessitating the use of javascript. Which even at this late date is a real bear.
Sure, they're nice for some things, and multiplatform, but they're not for everything. I like the way Freenet does things...there's a very basic web interface for accessing the gateway, but all the real setup and control is done with a Java client. Best of both worlds, and no need for ugly OSS GUI toolkits (flame on!).
Of course, there's no need to mention Microsoft's inability to create a stable system.
You know, my win2k machine -- the one that has been up since our last power outtage, and had been up since the power outtage before that -- has never crashed. It might be because I don't overclock it, used a retail processor, Intel networking, four fans, whatever. But it has not crashed or needed a reboot since I installed Jetico BestCrypt last year, March or something. I use it every day, have played pretty hardware intensive games on it, and even used it as a server.
I think the problem here isn't with Microsoft and their inability to write a stable OS. If it is stable anywhere, that means the kernel isn't leaking ram or occasionally polling hardware that doesn't exist. The problem therefore lies with Microsoft's inherent trust that driver manufacturers and software engineers will handle their own damn errors. Linux doesn't do that. The kernel is so "low" that it recovers from just about everything. The software on top of it, that's another story. Many of the applications I've used in Linux crash after a single parsing error, bringing down anything reliant on them. Tell me you've never had an X server crash on you, taking down your entire GUI. To the average user, who isn't running a bunch of services or daemons, losing the GUI is the same thing as crashing. So what if bringing it back up is faster than rebooting the machine -- it's also more complex to support.
Besides, hardly anybody buys a Windows installation because they wanted a more stable system. They bought it because they wanted cooler toys and a snappy GUI. People "buy" Linux, BSD, et al. for stability.
I already have tethered power. But riddle me this, batman: when am I gonna get power over WIRELESS ethernet?
I'm willing accept a little sparking.
May I suggest Quicken?
Unless you fear The Quickening.
Actually, there's a lot of creativity that goes into pricing things.
.95 cuts .05 cents off the price but greatly increases the chances you'll buy it.
Ever see this: $39.95 ? The
How about 2/6.00? Unless they say otherwise, that means 1's only $3, but again, you're more likely to buy the two. A supermarket by me commonly sells things like limes and small bags of snacks at 4/$1.00, rather than just $.25, which i guess seems cheap.
A lot of the delis around me have sandwiches for 4.63, which with tax is exactly a finski. No numeric change means they can ring you out faster.
Besides this, figuring out what things are worth is a very exact science when you live, as we do, in a vastly service based economy. Prices have nothing to do with the actual cost of physical production, and everything to do with the public's perceived value of the product in question. This is how GM can make two identical trucks, label one GMC, and get another $3000 for it because GMCs are "professional grade and therefore more reliable." This is how Victoria's Secret can get $30+ for maybe a quarter square foot cloth and a pair of wires, and in fact get more money when they use less material or "exotic" materials like satin (which often cost less than cotton). It's all perception and advertising, baby. The luxuries that seperate us from the communists.
Hell, where I used to work, I got paid $15/hr for my time, when the company would charge $125 for it. At one point, they had a massive sliding scale, decreasing the hourly charge based on the amount of work requested and how locked into our system they became, thus guaranteeing future fees. "Partnered" companies got my time for $75, and any company I did work for within our organization estimated me at $50. It was the same freakin' work (though I did really try to wow the full price folks).
Now, if you spidered our rate system, you'd take the $50 and assume we always charged that much. And we'd probably have gone under without the extra $75 to pay for the 85% of the company who weren't directly related to producing software.
Finally: you know, not all vacations are the same. If you pay a cutrate price for travel, you generally get screwed. Cramped flight, rooms filled with cockroaches, free drinks watered down, free meal vouchers for peanut butter sandwiches and generic chips, and a geo metro rental. It is very difficult to compare travel packages objectively because every travel agent has different alliances and partnerships. If you, as a travel agent, offered me a service that would spider all of the other sites and offer me a lower price, it wouldnt' save me any time because I wouldn't trust it. In the hands of the enemy, and all.
1.8 in drives connected via ATA. I was wrong about the SCSI. I misread info from this page which mentions that the iPod connects to the mac as a SCSI block device, which makes sense...that means more of the functions of copying and reading data are controlled by the iPod's processor and not by the mac's processor. And that may be one of the big keys to the iPod's download speed, which really is fast as hell. Faster than copying across my own HD, at least.
Yes. SCSI is one of things that "didn't pan out." But desktop Macs had SCSI LONG after it died on the PC market, for the extended MTBF and reduced CPU utilization. As I understand it, the HD inside my iPod is SCSI.
When I say "USB over PCI," I mean that Apple chose to eliminate PCI and PCMCIA slots from its most popular machines (iMac, iBook) because USB served the same purpose of extendability, was easier to install and manage and was cheaper to produce and support. USB was faltering until Mac made that hard decision. Now it's everywhere. Apple did the same for IEEE 1334, though it could be argued Firewire's time had come anyway.
Thanks for reminding me about VLB...I should have said "PCI over VLB/ISA/Microchannel," and pointed out that Mac tried to popularize 66 MHz PCI as the successor for graphics, not AGP. Another thing that didn't pan out, but it wasn't a bad idea...to have the same slot and bus for EVERYTHING is a pretty good idea from a simplification and unification point of view, even if it's slow as shit.
Sorry, that's bullshit. Apple has whatever choice apple wants to make, and they've had talks with other chipmakers including AMD. If the 970 fell through, they'd go with something else. If they had to, they could switch to an x86 architecture without batting an eye. It worked pretty well for SGI.
Not that it would necessarily be in their best interest. Apple, as a company, represents an ALTERNATIVE, and therefore they try to maintain alternative hardware choices: SCSI over IDE, ATI over NVIDIA, USB over PCI, the one button & metakey paradigm, Flat Panel over CRT -- and the big one, RISC over CISC. Some of these choices have panned out great. Some have flopped miserably...yet despite the doomsayers, Apple is still afloat after 30 years of "forcing" people to buy "crazy" proprietary gear. With "only" 3% of the market, but it's a huge freakin' market, and their margins are gigantic. Part of the reason for this huge margin is that they are the only hardware player, and are therefore able to name their own prices.
As for Apple users having no choices, that's also crap. We always have choices: buy Apple, or buy something else. Keep the current machine and upgrade it, or buy a new one. And Apple will still make the old chips for a long time after the 970 has started smokin' competitors...at least, that's what they did every other time they made a generation jump in processors.
Apple users vote with their dollars and so it's in Apple's interest to do whatever people are most receptive to, which is what they as a company seem to be best at anyway. After all, they got me to spend $538.72 on an mp3 player. This whole "no choice" thing is BS -- you choose the platform, not the hardware. That's the Apple way.
Notice nowhere in this formula is any room for great performances, originality, and bucking of tradition and cliche?
Maybe it's formulas like this that cause me to lock in a $9 frown before watching any Hollywood film. Of course, on the good side, there's no percentage for "automatic star draw" either, which might be something to tell the directors who still think that we want to see Arnold blow stuff up without a good explanation.
My personal percentage:
Plot cohesion 20pc, originality & performance 20 pc, dialog 15 pc, action 15pc, comedy 15pc, special effects / cinematography 10pc and senusality (ok, hot chicks) 5pc.
(this next bit is a very simple and very halfassed explanation in pseudo C. flames from C programmers about the bad syntax will be ignored. i got a D in C so F it)
Inlining works like this. You write a function and assign it a variable name. Then, any place you want that function, you use the variable name. The "precompiler" converts any instance of the variable name into the original function. EX:Later, if you use the term PISETUP it will be replaced with that code by the precompiler.
This was a good way to facilitate rewriting the same thing over and over, while maintaining speed, and a single location to change/fix the function. Unfortunately, it was also a good way for lazy programmers to obfuscate code by creating precompiler directives and variables for common language patterns. EX:Used to make:into:Shorter, yes. But harder to read, much harder to understand, and absolutely confusing for the poor newbies. Kind of like learning how to read from logs of an AOL chatroom.
One of the big "innovations" of Java was the elimination of the precompiler, which made sense. Java runs object code, not directly runnable byte code, so it is in essence already performing the tasks of the precompiler. The virtual machine "compiles" the code while it is running, to optimize for the individial physical machine, no matter what it may be.
The idea worked IMO because, now that you can cut, paste, and find and replace (with regular and replace expressions), you don't really need these replacements. Might as well just be verbose as you want to be. Might as well use tiny little functions since inlining doesn't work anyway.
Besides, since Java is interpretted and recompiled while it's running, you don't gain anything from inlining. Any "contextual" function (the function as written in the code) might become "inlined" when run by a good virtual machine program that performs "Just In Time" (JIT) compilation. Call void incrememtI(){ i++; ) a lot? The compiler will notice this, and replace calls in the stack to incrememtI() with the actual code this function contains.
This is why Metadata is a bad idea, or could be. No real benefit to the code, not much of a benefit for the "thorough" developer, and yet there's a real chance for lazy folks to create disgusting, hard to maintain code. This is never a good idea...a lot of coders think that obfuscated code makes them more valuable to employers. Not half...they'll axe you first if they think you're playing the obscurity game and will not give great references if you leave first.
Of course, if all Metadata does is replace:with:Then it may be worthwhile. Time, and the Java Community, will tell.
(PS: Used to work for/with a Pat Doyle, but he's not you)
"Shortcuts" are not the problem. Stupidity is the problem. A good programmer, or at least a kind programmer, uses "shortcuts" so that somebody else can figure out what's going on without having to everything about an object.
...}.
Enumerated types will save your ass the first time you change databases or some project manager adds a new "status level" in between DONE and FINISHED. They are much faster than using internalized strings, which is how I had been testing for this crap. Remember, once they hit the object code they're just constants anyway...
Foreach was easily the coolest thing about C# when I started using it, indexers were the second, and the code they create is FAR more maintainable than for(Object o = someList.FirstItem(); o != someList.LastItem(); o = someList.NextItem()){
Automagic "boxing" is a beautiful thing for newbie coders...I have had to teach so many the difference between a Byte and a byte that it isn't funny. I intend to use it, too...we pass in and out of the classes for char, int, byte, bool etc so often it makes sense to have the compiler/VM do our dirty work for us.
And generics...well, they look real queer in Java, where we've never used the syntax before. But they will save our behinds on reuse! Besides no doubt being faster, it will make more sense when typing collections of inherited objects. We have a BaseRecord class. We have an optimized BaseRecordColl class, usually full of different types of ChildRecord classes. If we can write the one collection class, and not have to explicitly cast each child op, it will save time, space, and hassle...and avoid calling the superclass methods of uncast subclasses!
Metadata is the only ingredient here that seems like it could cause trouble, and if it does it will be because people are using it wrong. Java is not a language that inlines...that's the whole idea of the JIT...and with today's cut and paste GUI IDEs, there's no need for programmers to use the lazy C declarations of the past. If people start doing so because it's neat, just nip it in the bud. Find/Replace when the code hits your desk. Eventually they'll get the hint.
Netbeans is a FABULOUS IDE...until I used .NET, the best I'd ever seen. .NET's only major wins are in the realms of usable screen space and speed. Netbeans is slow on the fastest java systems I've seen. It's got so many abstraction layers between it and the hardware (not the least of which being the VM, jrocket doubles the speed easily but its still too slow), i don't think it'll ever speed up. The hiding in .NET is the awesome. I have a single bar on the way left of my screen with every possible window I could want docked to it, from the help browser to the preferences window. There's even a full screen mode and key combos for freakin' everything. So you have productivity combined with ease of use...MS finally fucking got something right. I guess $1800 or whatever is a lot for an IDE and a VM when Java is free. But it wasn't my money not my decision.
.NET ide beat HANDS DOWN for functionality, though. New modules come out just about every second and get organized as updates, new feature, beta features and alpha features. It is the only IDE I have seen that helps you do everything Java can do, from emulating embedded systems running J2ME, to running j2EE server apps.
Netbeans has the
Plus, Netbeans is also an application PLATFORM. Meaning you can write your apps to fit snugly inside netbeans, and a lot of the tough work of designing new controls and common dialogs is done for you.