I am not talking about 'mass produced copies', I'm talking about people buying a CD with all the Nintendo roms for 10 bucks and playing them to their heart's content (or downloading said roms for free off the net).
Please remember that (unless I'm really, really, really mistaken) these flash cards can of course be reprogrammed many times, they're more like a CDRW than a CDR in your example.
Industrial wholesale pirating is a completely different ball game of course...
Hmmm, considering that an 'original' game is *cheaper* than a 'flashed' game (i.e. the flash cartridge costs much more than an original cartridge, unbelievably more if you count the reader) I fail to see your point.
It's much cheaper when my hypothetical kid loses an original cart than when they lose or break one of these flash carts + the reader...
Methinks the mirrors you're trying to climb on are a wee bit too slippery, I really fail to see how 99.9% of the people will use this device for anything else than playing 'backups' (as pirated games seem to always be called nowadays).
I really don't think that more than 0.1% of the buyers of this device will do any software development with it (yes, I'm jaded).
Try finding books here in Canada and you'll see how great Amazon is.
Walking into any of the various Chapters/Indigo brick & mortar stores is totally pointless unless you're looking for the latest bestseller or Oprah recommendation (and note how many acres of space are devoted to selling candles, picture frames and other crap like that). Interestingly while they do have quite some selection, the 'best books' in every department seem to always be out of stock, and never replenished, while all the other non-selling crap obviously remains on the shelves.
Ordering online from Chapters/Indigo is even worse, most things I am interested in seem to be always on 3-6 weeks shipping, while Amazon has ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS had EVERYTHING I wanted on '24 hours' shipping (and it *did* ship in 24 hours).
I also remember once ordering a book in a brick & mortar Chapters store, being quoted '2 months' and after about 1 *year* being told that the book went out of print in the meantime (and yes, I kept going there every other week to ask what was going on). Same thing happened trying to order an import CD from the Virgin megastore: they got all my data, told me 3 weeks, it's been 2 years and they still haven't gotten back to me...
While ordering from Amazon is expensive for us Canadians (shipping ain't cheap, and 3 times out of 4 I get to pay duty/GST and PST on the things) it is really the only option if you really want something in a reasonable time frame.
Now if only Amazon shipped *everything* to Canada (most/all toys/electronics/power tools/etc. are US-only) it would be even better, not to mention if they slashed the really expensive shipping charges on paperbacks...
Things are probably VERY different now-adays because temps are especially having problems finding jobs now!
yeah, exactly: things today are probably much worse for the type of employee described in the article, because if conditions were so bad with a 2% unemployment rate, can you imagine how much worse they are now with many more people available to take your job if you don't like how you're treated?
IMHO sub-sub-sub-contracting should be made illegal, because, like it's very well explained in this article, it exposes workers to all sorts of abuse. If you work at an HP plant, you should be hired by HP. There should be a maximum of 15 days of temping allowed, perma-temping is an abomination.
It's also time that companies stop caring only about Wall Street and start caring a bit more about their workers, and not lay them off or pay them crap or keep them in this type of working conditions just so they can show the stock analysts how good they are in creating ever increasing profits (and make a killing in stock options).
It seems that in the current economic climate there is no incentive for execs at a company to make it successful in the very long run by treating their workforce well, after all for some reason the more the execs decide to axe employees and/or pay them less (so they leave) the more the stock goes up and the more money they make...
Even without opening the source code there are AIs around that can shred you to pieces. They do cheat, but they do provide quite a really good challenge.
I was going to post this as well, AFAIK it was a short story in which the main character went to somebody who manifactured these.
These 'slow glasses' were put close to beautiful spots and left there to soak up the imagery, then you could buy them and put them in your living room and see what they saw for a few years (wouldn't it be way cool to have a huge 'picture window' of a waterfall that freezes in winter etc.)
IIRC the story ended with the character noticing that the artisan had some glasses of his family when his wife was still alive.
Does anybody remember the title/author of this story?
Do you have any links/info that corroborate your assertion?
A *lot* of people I know would have died much earlier than they did (or they aren't dead yet, me included) due to illnesses they contracted after age 5...
Considering all of the people older than 5 going in hospitals for heart surgery, appendicectomies, assorted cancer removals etc. that go on living for decades afterwards (rather than dying), I find it counter intuitive that a lower infant mortality is the only reason why the average lifespan has increased so much during the past decades.
Note that I don't necessarily think it's wrong, mind you, just very counter intuitive, that's why I'd like to know if you have some sort of proof to back your statement with.
hmmm, I compiled 0.50 some weeks ago with gcc 2.96 (I think the warning is a bit overblown, having to do a --ignore-gcc-whatever *and* having to type 'yeah, gcc 2.96 sucks' or something seems a bit redundant) and it's been working just fine...
While I do not doubt that gcc 2.96 has bugs, in my experience it's not worse than most gcc versions I used during the years, and much better than quite some of them, especially in C++.
I also did a bit of google-ing about this warning in mplayer, and AFAIK some people were a bit angry that 2.96 has been singled out (probably just because it's a RH release) I wonder if the reasons for so prominently warning people about 2.96 are at least in part political...
Re:At least *someone* is immune to all the hype...
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The Hype of the Rings
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· Score: 2
not really, I saw 'Apocalypse Now: Redux' at my local IMAX theatre, while obviously the movie didn't use ALL of the screen, it was still better than in the normal movie theatre, as the sound system is better, and the screen is bigger...
This was NOT an 'optimization', it was plainly CHEATING on ATI's part to get better benchmark scores.
If I select in q3 that I want a certain level of detail, the card better give it to me, otherwise what's the point!
It's as if whenever you ran q3 the card defaulted to non textured polygons in 320x200 'because in this way you get 600fps', come on, please be objective, ATI blew it big time.
I am not saying that NVidia are saints, but AFAIK people haven't found this kind of cheating in their drivers yet...
(I actually don't own either of those brands, I own a Matrox G400Max so I consider myself fairly unbiased).
this looks pretty cool: instead of having a mess of cables going everywhere and having to figure out where to plug what in the dark, you could just have a couple of hubs and *one* cable going back to the mixer.
Regardless of the hub you plug your instrument in, the mixer will 'know' it, and map you to the appropriate slider/controls, which really helps if, say, you have set an input with gain/eq/etc. for your bass drums and some dolt swaps it with the singer's mike just before the set starts...
This will make set-up and tear-down a total snap for the average working band (the 2-3 pub gigs a week kind).
For the 'tubes sound better' audiophiles, let me let you in on a big secret: the average pub-person couldn't care less about how your amp sounds, or the brand of your guitar or what kind of mixer you're using, especially as the evening goes on (and the beer goes in) not to mention the fact that you can't control the acoustics of the pub or the sometimes not-that-great FOH that you have to use...
Oh, come on, and since when so called 'esoteric' audio component makers make meaningful decisions? It's just a matter of perceptions, if it's priced at $20,000, a lot of 'audiophiles' will think it's worth it.
It's the same rationale as people who think that a CD player that has a gold plated/rare woods case sounds better than a standard plasticky CD player regardless of what actually is inside.
Same goes for people who spend hundreds of dollars for gold-everything interconnects (cables) and other various snake oil products.
Music appreciation is by definition subjective, so if one spends several hundred bucks for a component which *might* produce a difference measurable in a lab with ultra-sensitive equipment, one mysteriously becomes able to hear this difference even while listening to the newly enhanced hi-fi kit from three rooms away and under the shower...
While it's obvious that there *is* quite a difference between a $300 hi-fi, and a $3000, most of the things above a, say, $5,000 threshold for a complete system (CD+pre+amp+speakers+interconnects) tend to cater more to your aesthetic senses than actually sound incrementally better. If the room you put this system in has not been modified in any way (i.e. if you stick the speakers in a wall mounted library 3" apart from each other etc.) cut the $5,000 by half at least. Same goes if you live in an apartment and you can't turn the knob on your 400W RMS amp higher than 1 without your neighbours threatening to evict you.
not to mention somebody that does not drink and is vegetarian, considering that when my coworkers go out for lunch it's always in joints where I can't get anything decent to eat, so I stay behind in the office and pack my lunch.
Besides, cops, firemen, and even sysadmins, are jobs where people *talk* to each other all day, and where they depend on each other a lot: in programming jobs, you just get to work, go in your cubicle and that's it.
Yes, there might be status meetings every now and then, and infrequently you might chat about something with your coworker, but if you're in your cubicle for hours programming, it's kind of hard to socialize.
It also depends from the people you're working with: I've worked with all sorts of people from great guys to hang around with, to backstabbing ones, to people I wouldn't definitely want to associate myself with, it's really hard to generalize.
Re:I don't understand
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GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 2
well, you start emacs when you boot your computer, to be more precise... here at work I had an emacs session open for about two months, I had to close it just because I had to reboot the machine due to a planned power outage.
Without emacs life as a coder would be so much harder...
Re:All major ISPs being served warrants now!
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
I wonder if this is the Nostradamus newsgroup person that has been talked about several times recently...
any of the games could be used to simulate violence (even the ones you suggested)
in TIM you can do nasty things to cats, mice and fishes
in lemmings you can nuke them all
in SimCity you can build a city and destroy it
in RCT you can build rollercoasters that crash
I assume that in RRT you can get trains to crash as well
Please take this into consideration when picking your title. Note, I am NOT saying that people would use the games to do these things, but the possibility is there, and if it happens you (or whomever approved the games) might have some explaining to do, so I suggest that in your proposal you explain that creative games could *theoretically* be used to simulate violence, even if that's obviously not the aim of the game itself.
I grew up with legos, from the first sets I eyed jealusly in my friends' houses, to the first set I actually got for Christmas (1976, it was a launch pad with a rocket).
I kept collecting and playing with legos (space series first, tech series later) I think up until I was 14-15 years old, the last years were spent mostly trying to build funky stuff with the tech set.
IMHO the problem with legos nowadays is that they are trying to cater way too much to the average kid of this decade, the kid that is force fed advertising from the time they are two years old, the kid for whom 'imagination' is such an unfamiliar word it's not even funny, the kid that thinks books are 'boring' (yes, I grew up reading lots of books, I remember I never really liked books with pictures, because they limited my imagination).
Take a lego set produced in the seventies (or sixties) note how 'generic' the bricks are, even if you bought (like my parents did for me) the space series, the bricks for that series were just the same as the bricks for most other series: the colors were a bit different (the space bricks were mostly blue/black/grey, while, for example, the town bricks were more garishly coloured) but that was about it, you could build a castle with the space set if you felt like it.
Look at legos now, hyper-specialized, so full of parts that cannot be used for anything else: you just build the model shown on the cover, and that's it: if you buy a 'tie fighter' lego set, could you conceivably build anything resembling a rebel starship with the included pieces? No way, you have to buy the other set for that.
I see it as very unfortunate that today's kids don't seem to appreciate the freedom that the old sets gave you: yes, the finished product didn't look *exactly* like, say, the space shuttle (even if you could get very close) but they had a mindboggling flexibility.
If I wanted a 'realistic' model, why would I bother buying a lego, I would just buy a die-cast, that looks even better, costs less and has the same function, given that today's legos can be customized so little.
I would welcome a return of Lego to its roots, its roots without stupid commercial tie-ins (do we need a SW:TPM series of kits? I don't think so), its roots of giving you a box which contents could give you *months* of enjoyment (my parents were not very well to do, I got two sets of legos per year, one at Christmas and one for my birthday, but I've never ran out of stuff to do with them), letting kids have some original ideas, instead of, once again, force feeding them the finished product so that by the time they're adults any shred of creativity they might have will have long been destroyed.
Besides the already mentioned (Kernighan&Ritchie, Stroustrup etc. etc.) I would vote for the following:
Lamport: Latex, a document preparation system
Goosens et al: The Latex Compation
Nemeth et al: Unix system administration
Gamma et al: Design patterns
Butenhof: Programming with Posix threads
Meyers: Effective C++
A good data structures book in C/C++ (unsure, I haven't yet found one I'm completely comfortable with)
The X windows series from O'Reilly, since even if GTK and Qt are the flavor of the moment, if one learns how to program in Xlib/Xt/Motif, one can pick up pretty much anything.
To support the PX-61XM1's monitor, NEC teamed up with nVIDIA Corporation
to develop a new chip, which makes full display of the wide XGA (1,360
by 768 pixels) and VGA (848 by 480 pixels) possible and enables CAD/CAM
detailed material to be displayed accurately without image stretch
oh puh-leeze, what about just using X and creating a custom mode line? Since when one needs a new chip to drive a non-standard resolution...
you would probably be wrong, as IIRC correctly (I used to be in bikes several years ago, and owned a nice Honda) there was a 1000cc honda that was very close to 200Mph.
Considering that this thing has double the horsepower of that bike, 50mph more seems fairly feasible...
spirit of fair play? where have you been playing? I'd like to join you!
Compared to aimbots, client side hacks, spiked models, proxy cheating, rules bending (i.e. using game features in ways they were not supposed to be used to gain an unfair advantage), ping flooding other players etc. etc. these 'cheating' drivers are a drop in the sea...
Well, look at it from the other side, how would you feel if next time there is an Apache conference, or a Kernel developers conference, or a perl conference or whatever, people from MS showed up waving banners outside, harassing you by asking the speaker endless questions about open source ethics while, say, Linus is talking?
I'm sure you'd be very pissed, *really* pissed, and I don't even want to imagine the flames here on slashdot if that happened.
We live in a society where free speech is a guaranteed liberty, all this implied talk of 'MS is going to spew FUD at this convention, let's go and show them who's right' leads down a slippery slope to civil unrest.
If you honestly want to go to this talk to listen, to ask meaningful questions, to be civil, then so be it, if this is a public event (which I'm not sure), if you plan to go there to just be a nuisance, think how you would react if the same was done at a Free software conference where you were attending.
Just because you don't agree with MS's ethics, or with their position is no excuse to resort to intimidatory tactics. If you want respect, please be prepared to give some.
Mathematics: Can you imagine what would have happened to mathematics if all these laws were applied to theorems? I mean, a theorem is a honest-to-God work of art, it took a long time for the scientist to figure it out, it can be copied digitally (i.e. you can make a copy indistinguishable from the original) and because others can make derivative works from it and access it in the original form, new theorems are created, and humanity's knowledge advances. What if you couldn't access a theorem or its proof in its original form, but just to take a picture of it from a grainy TV screen or something? What if that 2.1234 becomes 2.1235? Some could argue that if you alter a movie a little bit by taping it, people would still get the idea, well, you would still get the idea from the photographed theorem, but you wouldn't be able to appreciate it as much, since you wouldn't be able to follow the proof, or maybe even read what the heck the theorem is all about
Well this is hard, one could try to say that if you are studying something, you need the whole thing, whether it's a musical score (you need all the notes) a painting (that's why scholars travel to museums, pictures are not enough) etc.
In general, to seriously criticize or analyze a work, you need to see/hear the work as the artist intended you to and any reproduction of this work is an approximation that prevents you from actually studying the work.
Now, the problem is that in the old days art objects were unique, there was no way that you could copy an autograph score, a picture, a statue and create an indistinguishable one.
Nowadays, instead, you can create as many copies of a digital work as you want: in a way this is bad, since copying is possible, but in another way this is good, since the number of people that can have access to the original, unadulterated work of art, is practically unlimited.
Imagine if you could do a 1:1 copy of the 'Mona Lisa', nobody would have to travel all the way to the Louvre to study it, you would just buy one of these master copies stick it in your living room and enjoy it to your heart's content. If you wanted to quote it in a study of yours, you could quote part of the original.
Fast forward to now, imagine that an artist comes up with a digital piece of art (this is not that far fetched, even a movie is art) if you have access to the original digital material, you can do all sorts of things that you can't do with an analog copy.
If I am studying a movie and I have the digital signal, I can run it through some programs to figure out, say, the histograms of the light distribution in a particular scene, I can calculate the color bias of a frame as a whole, all things I couldn't do if I taped it from a TV.
Now, people could argue that the DVD is not the original product of the artist, the movie reel is, but since it comes from the same studio, it is an approved product, and constitutes art in and of itself. In any case, a private citizen wouldn't be able to have access to the movie reel at all.
You see where I am going, nowadays, with the digital availability of content, we could usher a new era in which access to art in its original form is not anymore a privilege of the few, but something that anybody can enjoy. The DMCA seems to want to limit this newfound freedom by constraining people to use this art only in approved ways.
Personally I believe that everything is art, anything that is the product of human intelligence and creativity is art, whether it's a movie, a painting, an ad campaign, a piece of code, a house, a three year old's drawing, an interior decorator's colour plan, and I can't see why some people's art must be protected more than others' (besides, of course, to protect some pre-existing acquired interests).
I am not advocating a free-for-all world, unfortunately many people, if given the choice, will freeload instead of buying things, but there must be a better way to protect the artist's interests while at the same time preserving the art consumer's interests as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not talking about 'mass produced copies', I'm talking about people buying a CD with all the Nintendo roms for 10 bucks and playing them to their heart's content (or downloading said roms for free off the net).
Please remember that (unless I'm really, really, really mistaken) these flash cards can of course be reprogrammed many times, they're more like a CDRW than a CDR in your example.
Industrial wholesale pirating is a completely different ball game of course...
Hmmm, considering that an 'original' game is *cheaper* than a 'flashed' game (i.e. the flash cartridge costs much more than an original cartridge, unbelievably more if you count the reader) I fail to see your point.
It's much cheaper when my hypothetical kid loses an original cart than when they lose or break one of these flash carts + the reader...
Methinks the mirrors you're trying to climb on are a wee bit too slippery, I really fail to see how 99.9% of the people will use this device for anything else than playing 'backups' (as pirated games seem to always be called nowadays).
I really don't think that more than 0.1% of the buyers of this device will do any software development with it (yes, I'm jaded).
Try finding books here in Canada and you'll see how great Amazon is.
Walking into any of the various Chapters/Indigo brick & mortar stores is totally pointless unless you're looking for the latest bestseller or Oprah recommendation (and note how many acres of space are devoted to selling candles, picture frames and other crap like that). Interestingly while they do have quite some selection, the 'best books' in every department seem to always be out of stock, and never replenished, while all the other non-selling crap obviously remains on the shelves.
Ordering online from Chapters/Indigo is even worse, most things I am interested in seem to be always on 3-6 weeks shipping, while Amazon has ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS had EVERYTHING I wanted on '24 hours' shipping (and it *did* ship in 24 hours).
I also remember once ordering a book in a brick & mortar Chapters store, being quoted '2 months' and after about 1 *year* being told that the book went out of print in the meantime (and yes, I kept going there every other week to ask what was going on). Same thing happened trying to order an import CD from the Virgin megastore: they got all my data, told me 3 weeks, it's been 2 years and they still haven't gotten back to me...
While ordering from Amazon is expensive for us Canadians (shipping ain't cheap, and 3 times out of 4 I get to pay duty/GST and PST on the things) it is really the only option if you really want something in a reasonable time frame.
Now if only Amazon shipped *everything* to Canada (most/all toys/electronics/power tools/etc. are US-only) it would be even better, not to mention if they slashed the really expensive shipping charges on paperbacks...
Things are probably VERY different now-adays because temps are especially having problems finding jobs now!
yeah, exactly: things today are probably much worse for the type of employee described in the article, because if conditions were so bad with a 2% unemployment rate, can you imagine how much worse they are now with many more people available to take your job if you don't like how you're treated?
IMHO sub-sub-sub-contracting should be made illegal, because, like it's very well explained in this article, it exposes workers to all sorts of abuse. If you work at an HP plant, you should be hired by HP. There should be a maximum of 15 days of temping allowed, perma-temping is an abomination.
It's also time that companies stop caring only about Wall Street and start caring a bit more about their workers, and not lay them off or pay them crap or keep them in this type of working conditions just so they can show the stock analysts how good they are in creating ever increasing profits (and make a killing in stock options).
It seems that in the current economic climate there is no incentive for execs at a company to make it successful in the very long run by treating their workforce well, after all for some reason the more the execs decide to axe employees and/or pay them less (so they leave) the more the stock goes up and the more money they make...
Even without opening the source code there are AIs around that can shred you to pieces. They do cheat, but they do provide quite a really good challenge.
Check it out here:
http://www.laughingcrowgraphics.com/BSR/ai.html
(BAI2K1, IIRC it even uses nukes!)
I was going to post this as well, AFAIK it was a short story in which the main character went to somebody who manifactured these.
These 'slow glasses' were put close to beautiful spots and left there to soak up the imagery, then you could buy them and put them in your living room and see what they saw for a few years (wouldn't it be way cool to have a huge 'picture window' of a waterfall that freezes in winter etc.)
IIRC the story ended with the character noticing that the artisan had some glasses of his family when his wife was still alive.
Does anybody remember the title/author of this story?
Do you have any links/info that corroborate your assertion?
A *lot* of people I know would have died much earlier than they did (or they aren't dead yet, me included) due to illnesses they contracted after age 5...
Considering all of the people older than 5 going in hospitals for heart surgery, appendicectomies, assorted cancer removals etc. that go on living for decades afterwards (rather than dying), I find it counter intuitive that a lower infant mortality is the only reason why the average lifespan has increased so much during the past decades.
Note that I don't necessarily think it's wrong, mind you, just very counter intuitive, that's why I'd like to know if you have some sort of proof to back your statement with.
hmmm, I compiled 0.50 some weeks ago with gcc 2.96 (I think the warning is a bit overblown, having to do a --ignore-gcc-whatever *and* having to type 'yeah, gcc 2.96 sucks' or something seems a bit redundant) and it's been working just fine...
While I do not doubt that gcc 2.96 has bugs, in my experience it's not worse than most gcc versions I used during the years, and much better than quite some of them, especially in C++.
I also did a bit of google-ing about this warning in mplayer, and AFAIK some people were a bit angry that 2.96 has been singled out (probably just because it's a RH release) I wonder if the reasons for so prominently warning people about 2.96 are at least in part political...
not really, I saw 'Apocalypse Now: Redux' at my local IMAX theatre, while obviously the movie didn't use ALL of the screen, it was still better than in the normal movie theatre, as the sound system is better, and the screen is bigger...
This was NOT an 'optimization', it was plainly CHEATING on ATI's part to get better benchmark scores.
If I select in q3 that I want a certain level of detail, the card better give it to me, otherwise what's the point!
It's as if whenever you ran q3 the card defaulted to non textured polygons in 320x200 'because in this way you get 600fps', come on, please be objective, ATI blew it big time.
I am not saying that NVidia are saints, but AFAIK people haven't found this kind of cheating in their drivers yet...
(I actually don't own either of those brands, I own a Matrox G400Max so I consider myself fairly unbiased).
this looks pretty cool: instead of having a mess of cables going everywhere and having to figure out where to plug what in the dark, you could just have a couple of hubs and *one* cable going back to the mixer.
Regardless of the hub you plug your instrument in, the mixer will 'know' it, and map you to the appropriate slider/controls, which really helps if, say, you have set an input with gain/eq/etc. for your bass drums and some dolt swaps it with the singer's mike just before the set starts...
This will make set-up and tear-down a total snap for the average working band (the 2-3 pub gigs a week kind).
For the 'tubes sound better' audiophiles, let me let you in on a big secret: the average pub-person couldn't care less about how your amp sounds, or the brand of your guitar or what kind of mixer you're using, especially as the evening goes on (and the beer goes in) not to mention the fact that you can't control the acoustics of the pub or the sometimes not-that-great FOH that you have to use...
Oh, come on, and since when so called 'esoteric' audio component makers make meaningful decisions? It's just a matter of perceptions, if it's priced at $20,000, a lot of 'audiophiles' will think it's worth it.
It's the same rationale as people who think that a CD player that has a gold plated/rare woods case sounds better than a standard plasticky CD player regardless of what actually is inside.
Same goes for people who spend hundreds of dollars for gold-everything interconnects (cables) and other various snake oil products.
Music appreciation is by definition subjective, so if one spends several hundred bucks for a component which *might* produce a difference measurable in a lab with ultra-sensitive equipment, one mysteriously becomes able to hear this difference even while listening to the newly enhanced hi-fi kit from three rooms away and under the shower...
While it's obvious that there *is* quite a difference between a $300 hi-fi, and a $3000, most of the things above a, say, $5,000 threshold for a complete system (CD+pre+amp+speakers+interconnects) tend to cater more to your aesthetic senses than actually sound incrementally better. If the room you put this system in has not been modified in any way (i.e. if you stick the speakers in a wall mounted library 3" apart from each other etc.) cut the $5,000 by half at least. Same goes if you live in an apartment and you can't turn the knob on your 400W RMS amp higher than 1 without your neighbours threatening to evict you.
not to mention somebody that does not drink and is vegetarian, considering that when my coworkers go out for lunch it's always in joints where I can't get anything decent to eat, so I stay behind in the office and pack my lunch.
Besides, cops, firemen, and even sysadmins, are jobs where people *talk* to each other all day, and where they depend on each other a lot: in programming jobs, you just get to work, go in your cubicle and that's it.
Yes, there might be status meetings every now and then, and infrequently you might chat about something with your coworker, but if you're in your cubicle for hours programming, it's kind of hard to socialize.
It also depends from the people you're working with: I've worked with all sorts of people from great guys to hang around with, to backstabbing ones, to people I wouldn't definitely want to associate myself with, it's really hard to generalize.
well, you start emacs when you boot your computer, to be more precise... here at work I had an emacs session open for about two months, I had to close it just because I had to reboot the machine due to a planned power outage.
Without emacs life as a coder would be so much harder...
I wonder if this is the Nostradamus newsgroup person that has been talked about several times recently...
But....
any of the games could be used to simulate violence (even the ones you suggested)
in TIM you can do nasty things to cats, mice and fishes
in lemmings you can nuke them all
in SimCity you can build a city and destroy it
in RCT you can build rollercoasters that crash
I assume that in RRT you can get trains to crash as well
Please take this into consideration when picking your title. Note, I am NOT saying that people would use the games to do these things, but the possibility is there, and if it happens you (or whomever approved the games) might have some explaining to do, so I suggest that in your proposal you explain that creative games could *theoretically* be used to simulate violence, even if that's obviously not the aim of the game itself.
Sim City 3000 (or 2000 if your hardware is not powerful enough)
Rollercoaster Tycoon (my wife's favorite)
Railroad Tycoon II
I grew up with legos, from the first sets I eyed jealusly in my friends' houses, to the first set I actually got for Christmas (1976, it was a launch pad with a rocket).
I kept collecting and playing with legos (space series first, tech series later) I think up until I was 14-15 years old, the last years were spent mostly trying to build funky stuff with the tech set.
IMHO the problem with legos nowadays is that they are trying to cater way too much to the average kid of this decade, the kid that is force fed advertising from the time they are two years old, the kid for whom 'imagination' is such an unfamiliar word it's not even funny, the kid that thinks books are 'boring' (yes, I grew up reading lots of books, I remember I never really liked books with pictures, because they limited my imagination).
Take a lego set produced in the seventies (or sixties) note how 'generic' the bricks are, even if you bought (like my parents did for me) the space series, the bricks for that series were just the same as the bricks for most other series: the colors were a bit different (the space bricks were mostly blue/black/grey, while, for example, the town bricks were more garishly coloured) but that was about it, you could build a castle with the space set if you felt like it.
Look at legos now, hyper-specialized, so full of parts that cannot be used for anything else: you just build the model shown on the cover, and that's it: if you buy a 'tie fighter' lego set, could you conceivably build anything resembling a rebel starship with the included pieces? No way, you have to buy the other set for that.
I see it as very unfortunate that today's kids don't seem to appreciate the freedom that the old sets gave you: yes, the finished product didn't look *exactly* like, say, the space shuttle (even if you could get very close) but they had a mindboggling flexibility.
If I wanted a 'realistic' model, why would I bother buying a lego, I would just buy a die-cast, that looks even better, costs less and has the same function, given that today's legos can be customized so little.
I would welcome a return of Lego to its roots, its roots without stupid commercial tie-ins (do we need a SW:TPM series of kits? I don't think so), its roots of giving you a box which contents could give you *months* of enjoyment (my parents were not very well to do, I got two sets of legos per year, one at Christmas and one for my birthday, but I've never ran out of stuff to do with them), letting kids have some original ideas, instead of, once again, force feeding them the finished product so that by the time they're adults any shred of creativity they might have will have long been destroyed.
Besides the already mentioned (Kernighan&Ritchie, Stroustrup etc. etc.) I would vote for the following:
Lamport: Latex, a document preparation system
Goosens et al: The Latex Compation
Nemeth et al: Unix system administration
Gamma et al: Design patterns
Butenhof: Programming with Posix threads
Meyers: Effective C++
A good data structures book in C/C++ (unsure, I haven't yet found one I'm completely comfortable with)
The X windows series from O'Reilly, since even if GTK and Qt are the flavor of the moment, if one learns how to program in Xlib/Xt/Motif, one can pick up pretty much anything.
To support the PX-61XM1's monitor, NEC teamed up with nVIDIA Corporation
to develop a new chip, which makes full display of the wide XGA (1,360
by 768 pixels) and VGA (848 by 480 pixels) possible and enables CAD/CAM
detailed material to be displayed accurately without image stretch
oh puh-leeze, what about just using X and creating a custom mode line? Since when one needs a new chip to drive a non-standard resolution...
.... when he listened to an intricate 12 parts (IIRC) vocal composition performed in the Sistine Chapel and transcribed it down perfectly from memory.
You see, the Vatican wanted the exclusive on that piece, but Mozart had a really good memory (sore understatement) and threw a wrench in their plans.
Nowadays probably they would cite the DMCA and burn him at the stake...
you would probably be wrong, as IIRC correctly (I used to be in bikes several years ago, and owned a nice Honda) there was a 1000cc honda that was very close to 200Mph.
Considering that this thing has double the horsepower of that bike, 50mph more seems fairly feasible...
spirit of fair play? where have you been playing? I'd like to join you!
Compared to aimbots, client side hacks, spiked models, proxy cheating, rules bending (i.e. using game features in ways they were not supposed to be used to gain an unfair advantage), ping flooding other players etc. etc. these 'cheating' drivers are a drop in the sea...
Well, look at it from the other side, how would you feel if next time there is an Apache conference, or a Kernel developers conference, or a perl conference or whatever, people from MS showed up waving banners outside, harassing you by asking the speaker endless questions about open source ethics while, say, Linus is talking?
I'm sure you'd be very pissed, *really* pissed, and I don't even want to imagine the flames here on slashdot if that happened.
We live in a society where free speech is a guaranteed liberty, all this implied talk of 'MS is going to spew FUD at this convention, let's go and show them who's right' leads down a slippery slope to civil unrest.
If you honestly want to go to this talk to listen, to ask meaningful questions, to be civil, then so be it, if this is a public event (which I'm not sure), if you plan to go there to just be a nuisance, think how you would react if the same was done at a Free software conference where you were attending.
Just because you don't agree with MS's ethics, or with their position is no excuse to resort to intimidatory tactics. If you want respect, please be prepared to give some.
Example first, rambling later:
Mathematics: Can you imagine what would have happened to mathematics if all these laws were applied to theorems? I mean, a theorem is a honest-to-God work of art, it took a long time for the scientist to figure it out, it can be copied digitally (i.e. you can make a copy indistinguishable from the original) and because others can make derivative works from it and access it in the original form, new theorems are created, and humanity's knowledge advances. What if you couldn't access a theorem or its proof in its original form, but just to take a picture of it from a grainy TV screen or something? What if that 2.1234 becomes 2.1235? Some could argue that if you alter a movie a little bit by taping it, people would still get the idea, well, you would still get the idea from the photographed theorem, but you wouldn't be able to appreciate it as much, since you wouldn't be able to follow the proof, or maybe even read what the heck the theorem is all about
Well this is hard, one could try to say that if you are studying something, you need the whole thing, whether it's a musical score (you need all the notes) a painting (that's why scholars travel to museums, pictures are not enough) etc.
In general, to seriously criticize or analyze a work, you need to see/hear the work as the artist intended you to and any reproduction of this work is an approximation that prevents you from actually studying the work.
Now, the problem is that in the old days art objects were unique, there was no way that you could copy an autograph score, a picture, a statue and create an indistinguishable one.
Nowadays, instead, you can create as many copies of a digital work as you want: in a way this is bad, since copying is possible, but in another way this is good, since the number of people that can have access to the original, unadulterated work of art, is practically unlimited.
Imagine if you could do a 1:1 copy of the 'Mona Lisa', nobody would have to travel all the way to the Louvre to study it, you would just buy one of these master copies stick it in your living room and enjoy it to your heart's content. If you wanted to quote it in a study of yours, you could quote part of the original.
Fast forward to now, imagine that an artist comes up with a digital piece of art (this is not that far fetched, even a movie is art) if you have access to the original digital material, you can do all sorts of things that you can't do with an analog copy.
If I am studying a movie and I have the digital signal, I can run it through some programs to figure out, say, the histograms of the light distribution in a particular scene, I can calculate the color bias of a frame as a whole, all things I couldn't do if I taped it from a TV.
Now, people could argue that the DVD is not the original product of the artist, the movie reel is, but since it comes from the same studio, it is an approved product, and constitutes art in and of itself. In any case, a private citizen wouldn't be able to have access to the movie reel at all.
You see where I am going, nowadays, with the digital availability of content, we could usher a new era in which access to art in its original form is not anymore a privilege of the few, but something that anybody can enjoy. The DMCA seems to want to limit this newfound freedom by constraining people to use this art only in approved ways.
Personally I believe that everything is art, anything that is the product of human intelligence and creativity is art, whether it's a movie, a painting, an ad campaign, a piece of code, a house, a three year old's drawing, an interior decorator's colour plan, and I can't see why some people's art must be protected more than others' (besides, of course, to protect some pre-existing acquired interests).
I am not advocating a free-for-all world, unfortunately many people, if given the choice, will freeload instead of buying things, but there must be a better way to protect the artist's interests while at the same time preserving the art consumer's interests as well.