The XBox360 architecture was never designed to support anything other than DVDs. Even with the HD-DVD peripheral, XBox360 games could not have taken advantage of the extra space that seems to be in demand nowadays.
Kind of an odd statement. Which system do you believe is architectured better to take advanatage of large space?
Bring lots of alcohol. And pot. Heck, LSD even. Depends on the crowd though. Either way, bring stuff to loosen people up. Bring party games. These should include: * Fluxx (card game where the rules continuously change) * XBOX 360 or similar; preferably party games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, SceneIt, etc. * Wii if someone's got it (great for parties)
As for the whole mingling (getting commutative?:D) aspect...
Consider games like truth or dare. Drinking games. Etc. Consider making it a rule that every 30 minutes, someone has to go around and introduce themselves to everyone at the party.
Get everyone to bring something random to the party, that has a story behind it. Then get everyone to tell the story.
And here's a good other rule: Keep the party smallish. Stops cliques from forming, keeps the group dynamic manageable for people who might have issues with it otherwise.
Eh... it's just like any other party. But bring Fluxx. It's great;-)
I wouldn't redefine IF, but I'd certainly consider redefining bool/true/false.
Mainly because sizeof(bool) is compiler dependent, and bool values are coerced to be 1 or 0, which can be a performance hit. Not a strong reason, but certainly a reason. (And why I never use bool as a type in data which has to be serialized and read on other platforms).
Speaking of which... for gawd's sake someone add something to C++ to allow reflection on static data types. I don't care what mechanism it has to work by, but if I had a dollar for every time I've wanted to be able to take something like this:
struct s {
int a;
bool b;
SomeClass c;
MyPointer* p; }... and get: The offset of all the members. The size of all the members. A list of all the members. Information about the padding between members...... I mean, come on... I don't want to have to write code that cracks open the debug info in an elf or a pdb to get this information. Especially as that's likely to change from compiler version to compiler version.
(Yes, I know offset_of, alignof, sizeof, etc can get my that information... but it can't get it for any arbitrary class without me writing much more code).
It also doesn't help that most programmers are rewarded on their output on a by-the-pound basis, rather than how well their code does what it's supposed to do.
I've seen programmers regularly get beaten up on by their bosses because it takes them 3 times as long to write the same code that Bugsy in the other cube wrote. The difference being that Bugsy's version has 40 bugs in it, which all tend to hit right around ship time, and Joe's code has 1 bug in it, when someone tried to get it to do something it was never intended for.
Oh yeah, that and all of this tech has been predated by other work out of Xerox Parc by a least 17 years. (See "Digital Desktop" - 1991 - at that link)
Another connection is that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients are shown to have high levels of herpesviridae(typically HSV1,2) in their spinal fluid. That's what I'd put my money on.
I'll put my money on a combination of genetics, and either one of a number of herpesviridae or human papilloma viruses. Actually, it could even be simple influenza (which in rats has been shown to - once it crosses the blood-brain barrier - cause parkinson's).
Impossible to tell without a biopsy, but you might get somewhere by doing a virion assay on some spinal fluid.
And as someone who owns a 18-bits per pixel monitor, trust me, you can tell when working with static imagery. Maybe not when playing games or playing movies, but you can tell. The little gradients on Slashdot look terrible on that monitor. It helps that it doesn't do any form of dithering, but even on my cheap Acer laptop that also only does 18bpp, you can clearly see the dithering.
Yep... got a Toshiba Satellite A215 here with the same issue. Every time a fade happens, it looks tortously horrible. And gradients are banded.
Which is why I've never tried sending out a proof... it's not baked yet - it's just a hunch.
Although I still have yet to see anything that explains why the sum of the areas trick for pythagoras should work in a theoretical manner, that actually explains the underlying principles without resorting to a geometric argument. Which is kind of cheating - what I want to know is why the geometry works that way:)
I've got this odd hunch that the original solution for Fermat's last theorem is related to Pythagoras.
Why is x^2+y^2=z^2?
I mean, I know the geometric explanation - the area of a square of side Z for any right-angled triangle, where Z is the hypotenuse is the area of the sum of squares of the other sides.
What I want to know is, fundamentally, why? I've got this feeling the geometric approach is actually a side effect of the way that orthogonal axes relate to one another.
Same thing with expanding it to 3 dimensions; for some reason (and yes, I know the pythagorean derivation), the length of a line in 3D is still of the L^2 = x^2+y^2+z^2 form.
Why do I care about this?
I figure that a^n + b^n = c^n not holding for n > 2, where a b and c are integers is actually a direct result of whatever this link is. And part of the logic that Fermat was using is that hey, pythagoras holds.
Of course, the trick is proving that you can only get perfect triangles when that relationship holds. No idea how you begin proving that - but I get the feeling that there's something fundamental hiding here.
They have no use for it because it isn't bundled. People who write software have to assume there is no compiler on the target, and adapt to it.
I'm not saying a compiler would mean anything drastic at this late point. But if the commercial Unixes had shipped with one in the 1980s... no gcc, and no Linux or *BSD. Uh, maybe we should be grateful they didn't?
Yeah, but by the time you install all the libs, docs, headers, etc, we're talking about 2Gb. What's so hard about downloading Visual Studio express?
Bundle Visual Studio, in the package, the way Apple bundles XCode and all free UNIXes bundle their compilers. Windows is the last hold out of the horror of the '80s... the compiler-less OS.
Nah, don't bundle it. Most people don't need it. Seriously, 99% of people have no use for a compiler on their machine.
However, they do let you download Visual Studio Express editions for free. So if there was an - I dunno - "World of Windows" tutorial which explained where to get that, that might satisfy your requirements.
For those not familiar with the term, WEIRDNIX was the POSIX crew's term for a hypothetical implementation that was technically compliant with all the POSIX standard, but implemented everything in the worst possible way. The idea was to find bugs in the POSIX standard that would allow implementers to claim compliance while violating the intent of the standard.
So you're saying that the POSIX standard was badly written?
Reminds me of the original Java 1.0 days. They didn't specify what direction Z-order was in the UI, so Netscape had one way of doing it, and everyone else including Sun did the opposite. Lovely.
He assumes that the largest market for software is in selling packaged, off the shelf products.
No, I think he's actually talking about that market, not the other one. Believe it or not, that's a freakin' huge market. Just because the other one may or may not be bigger, doesn't mean that you get to ignore its existence.
Unfortunately, when it comes to health, genetics have dealt me a rather nasty hand, and I have a very active case of Crohn's Disease and a number of other physical ailments that make my life quite difficult. After being ill for the majority of last year and largely unresponsive to the drugs that were tried to put me back into remission, I was severely depressed (justifiably so) and had decided on euthanasia as my desired medical treatment, both to terminate the suffering of my medical condition and the emotional impact it was having on me.
Did they try ganciclovir? The studies I've seen seem to indicate that it's caused by Cytomegalovirus. Ganciclovir would help with that; if you add some Prozac into the mix, and increase the amount of Omega 3 fatty acids, Lysine and vitamin C in your diet (about 3000-4000mg of Lysine/VitC per day, about 2000mg of Omega 3 Fish Oil), you should see some improvement, I think. (Note: I am not a doctor).
Prozac has been shown to help with Crohn's/Irritable Bowel because believe it or not you have a second separate nervous system in your intestine to control all of the systems. Prozac can work on this and improve the symptoms.
Lysine, Omega 3, etc. helps to prevent CMV and other herpesviridae from replicating.
Ganicyclovir will attack the CMV directly.
It's worth a shot if you can get a doctor to listen and give it a go.
No they won't. For that crowd, bribery, collusion and cartelism are all part of the free-market experience, and they like it just fine! Just so long as the gummint doesn't butt in on all the fun.
Last July, the EU started investigating why Blu-Ray was winning, wondering "whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back [Sony's] format."
One can come up with all sorts of complicated theories on why linux hasn't gained significant ground on windows, but it's very simple. Applications, applications, applications. If linux was running word, photoshop, quickbooks, and a host of other business software (not to mention games), we wouldn't be reading these endless pontifications about why linux hasn't been overtaken windows on the desktop.
I'm not sure... I was asking a friend who runs Linux exclusively at home about developing for it the other day... the question was "Have the fonts been fixed yet"? His answer was "no. But on the plus side, you can remote apps anywhere".
I've not tried it myself in quite a while - last time was 2004 (Suse), so I can't verify his comments. But it wasn't encouraging.
Fonts are a big deal. They should just work. Same goes for everything in the GUI - it should all just work, cleanly, without much faffing around.
Linux has a great place on the server - until someone comes and pulls an Apple on it though, it's still going to be a tough sell.
I don't get your point. Custom software is all but useless to anyone except the customer. That's why there is and there will continue to be a very large amount of money spent on it. I wonder why thieves never steasl fitted bookshelves. Must be a reason for that...
My point is this: pointing at custom works and saying "hey, look, the industry will be fine - most of this stuff is custom! It's only the stuff that isn't custom which will suffer" is a pretty lousy idea. Most people rely more on the non-custom stuff.
Have you ever considered the possibility that mass-market sales is a good thing? It allows someone like me, or you, to get out of the rat-race and start producing stuff that we want to, instead of working on billing software for a business.
Slashdot Mirror
The XBox360 architecture was never designed to support anything other than DVDs. Even with the HD-DVD peripheral, XBox360 games could not have taken advantage of the extra space that seems to be in demand nowadays.
Kind of an odd statement. Which system do you believe is architectured better to take advanatage of large space?
Bring lots of alcohol. And pot. Heck, LSD even. Depends on the crowd though. Either way, bring stuff to loosen people up.
:D) aspect...
;-)
Bring party games. These should include:
* Fluxx (card game where the rules continuously change)
* XBOX 360 or similar; preferably party games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, SceneIt, etc.
* Wii if someone's got it (great for parties)
As for the whole mingling (getting commutative?
Consider games like truth or dare. Drinking games. Etc.
Consider making it a rule that every 30 minutes, someone has to go around and introduce themselves to everyone at the party.
Get everyone to bring something random to the party, that has a story behind it. Then get everyone to tell the story.
And here's a good other rule:
Keep the party smallish. Stops cliques from forming, keeps the group dynamic manageable for people who might have issues with it otherwise.
Eh... it's just like any other party. But bring Fluxx. It's great
I wouldn't redefine IF, but I'd certainly consider redefining bool/true/false.
... and get: ... I mean, come on... I don't want to have to write code that cracks open the debug info in an elf or a pdb to get this information. Especially as that's likely to change from compiler version to compiler version.
Mainly because sizeof(bool) is compiler dependent, and bool values are coerced to be 1 or 0, which can be a performance hit. Not a strong reason, but certainly a reason. (And why I never use bool as a type in data which has to be serialized and read on other platforms).
Speaking of which... for gawd's sake someone add something to C++ to allow reflection on static data types. I don't care what mechanism it has to work by, but if I had a dollar for every time I've wanted to be able to take something like this:
struct s
{
int a;
bool b;
SomeClass c;
MyPointer* p;
}
The offset of all the members.
The size of all the members.
A list of all the members.
Information about the padding between members...
(Yes, I know offset_of, alignof, sizeof, etc can get my that information... but it can't get it for any arbitrary class without me writing much more code).
Si
It also doesn't help that most programmers are rewarded on their output on a by-the-pound basis, rather than how well their code does what it's supposed to do.
I've seen programmers regularly get beaten up on by their bosses because it takes them 3 times as long to write the same code that Bugsy in the other cube wrote. The difference being that Bugsy's version has 40 bugs in it, which all tend to hit right around ship time, and Joe's code has 1 bug in it, when someone tried to get it to do something it was never intended for.
The TRUE_VAL/FALSE_VAL can be useful when you've got to write cross-platform code. Although why you wouldn't use TRUE and FALSE beats me.
The problems happen when someone cargo-cult copies the behavior of another program without understanding why it was done.
Oh yeah, that and all of this tech has been predated by other work out of Xerox Parc by a least 17 years. (See "Digital Desktop" - 1991 - at that link)
The Surface demo, complete with all that multitouch stuff, came out at the end of May of last year.
The iPhone wasn't released until the end of June of last year.
It's not difficult to claim to have invented something when you did it first.
Another connection is that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients are shown to have high levels of herpesviridae(typically HSV1,2) in their spinal fluid. That's what I'd put my money on.
I'll put my money on a combination of genetics, and either one of a number of herpesviridae or human papilloma viruses. Actually, it could even be simple influenza (which in rats has been shown to - once it crosses the blood-brain barrier - cause parkinson's).
Impossible to tell without a biopsy, but you might get somewhere by doing a virion assay on some spinal fluid.
And as someone who owns a 18-bits per pixel monitor, trust me, you can tell when working with static imagery. Maybe not when playing games or playing movies, but you can tell. The little gradients on Slashdot look terrible on that monitor. It helps that it doesn't do any form of dithering, but even on my cheap Acer laptop that also only does 18bpp, you can clearly see the dithering.
Yep... got a Toshiba Satellite A215 here with the same issue. Every time a fade happens, it looks tortously horrible. And gradients are banded.
*grrr*
Which is why I've never tried sending out a proof... it's not baked yet - it's just a hunch.
:)
Although I still have yet to see anything that explains why the sum of the areas trick for pythagoras should work in a theoretical manner, that actually explains the underlying principles without resorting to a geometric argument. Which is kind of cheating - what I want to know is why the geometry works that way
I've got this odd hunch that the original solution for Fermat's last theorem is related to Pythagoras.
Why is x^2+y^2=z^2?
I mean, I know the geometric explanation - the area of a square of side Z for any right-angled triangle, where Z is the hypotenuse is the area of the sum of squares of the other sides.
What I want to know is, fundamentally, why? I've got this feeling the geometric approach is actually a side effect of the way that orthogonal axes relate to one another.
Same thing with expanding it to 3 dimensions; for some reason (and yes, I know the pythagorean derivation), the length of a line in 3D is still of the L^2 = x^2+y^2+z^2 form.
Why do I care about this?
I figure that a^n + b^n = c^n not holding for n > 2, where a b and c are integers is actually a direct result of whatever this link is. And part of the logic that Fermat was using is that hey, pythagoras holds.
Of course, the trick is proving that you can only get perfect triangles when that relationship holds. No idea how you begin proving that - but I get the feeling that there's something fundamental hiding here.
Totally agree... not to mention that materials science has gone so far forward since then, you'd be insane to use that design.
They have no use for it because it isn't bundled. People who write software have to assume there is no compiler on the target, and adapt to it.
... no gcc, and no Linux or *BSD. Uh, maybe we should be grateful they didn't?
I'm not saying a compiler would mean anything drastic at this late point. But if the commercial Unixes had shipped with one in the 1980s
Yeah, but by the time you install all the libs, docs, headers, etc, we're talking about 2Gb. What's so hard about downloading Visual Studio express?
Bundle Visual Studio, in the package, the way Apple bundles XCode and all free UNIXes bundle their compilers. Windows is the last hold out of the horror of the '80s... the compiler-less OS.
Nah, don't bundle it. Most people don't need it. Seriously, 99% of people have no use for a compiler on their machine.
However, they do let you download Visual Studio Express editions for free. So if there was an - I dunno - "World of Windows" tutorial which explained where to get that, that might satisfy your requirements.
For those not familiar with the term, WEIRDNIX was the POSIX crew's term for a hypothetical implementation that was technically compliant with all the POSIX standard, but implemented everything in the worst possible way. The idea was to find bugs in the POSIX standard that would allow implementers to claim compliance while violating the intent of the standard.
So you're saying that the POSIX standard was badly written?
Reminds me of the original Java 1.0 days. They didn't specify what direction Z-order was in the UI, so Netscape had one way of doing it, and everyone else including Sun did the opposite. Lovely.
He assumes that the largest market for software is in selling packaged, off the shelf products.
No, I think he's actually talking about that market, not the other one. Believe it or not, that's a freakin' huge market. Just because the other one may or may not be bigger, doesn't mean that you get to ignore its existence.
Open Source? Communist? Never! http://www.cafepress.com/redpenguins :D
Hmmm... sounds like a bug in the political system. We should fix that.
Unfortunately, when it comes to health, genetics have dealt me a rather nasty hand, and I have a very active case of Crohn's Disease and a number of other physical ailments that make my life quite difficult. After being ill for the majority of last year and largely unresponsive to the drugs that were tried to put me back into remission, I was severely depressed (justifiably so) and had decided on euthanasia as my desired medical treatment, both to terminate the suffering of my medical condition and the emotional impact it was having on me.
Did they try ganciclovir? The studies I've seen seem to indicate that it's caused by Cytomegalovirus. Ganciclovir would help with that; if you add some Prozac into the mix, and increase the amount of Omega 3 fatty acids, Lysine and vitamin C in your diet (about 3000-4000mg of Lysine/VitC per day, about 2000mg of Omega 3 Fish Oil), you should see some improvement, I think. (Note: I am not a doctor).
Prozac has been shown to help with Crohn's/Irritable Bowel because believe it or not you have a second separate nervous system in your intestine to control all of the systems. Prozac can work on this and improve the symptoms.
Lysine, Omega 3, etc. helps to prevent CMV and other herpesviridae from replicating.
Ganicyclovir will attack the CMV directly.
It's worth a shot if you can get a doctor to listen and give it a go.
Si
No they won't. For that crowd, bribery, collusion and cartelism are all part of the free-market experience, and they like it just fine! Just so long as the gummint doesn't butt in on all the fun.
Speaking of the Gummint butting in... whatever happened to the DOJ's investigation of claims that Sony was deliberately sabotaging the HD-DVD consortium?? (In 2004, no less).
The EU also fined Sony, Fuji, and Maxwell for price fixing... a sign of things to come?
Last July, the EU started investigating why Blu-Ray was winning, wondering "whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back [Sony's] format."
*shrugs*
To the point where the masses can afford to buy two players, one for each BD region?
Exactly. The last Sony DVD player I bought - quite a nice, upscaling, progressive output one - wouldn't play region 0 disks.
That's region 0. As in region free.
I contacted support. They said "Yep."
Grrr.
Btw... for the record, the problem seems to be accurate grid-fitting and hinting and kerning.
One can come up with all sorts of complicated theories on why linux hasn't gained significant ground on windows, but it's very simple. Applications, applications, applications. If linux was running word, photoshop, quickbooks, and a host of other business software (not to mention games), we wouldn't be reading these endless pontifications about why linux hasn't been overtaken windows on the desktop.
I'm not sure... I was asking a friend who runs Linux exclusively at home about developing for it the other day... the question was "Have the fonts been fixed yet"? His answer was "no. But on the plus side, you can remote apps anywhere".
I've not tried it myself in quite a while - last time was 2004 (Suse), so I can't verify his comments. But it wasn't encouraging.
Fonts are a big deal. They should just work. Same goes for everything in the GUI - it should all just work, cleanly, without much faffing around.
Linux has a great place on the server - until someone comes and pulls an Apple on it though, it's still going to be a tough sell.
I don't get your point. Custom software is all but useless to anyone except the customer. That's why there is and there will continue to be a very large amount of money spent on it. I wonder why thieves never steasl fitted bookshelves. Must be a reason for that...
My point is this: pointing at custom works and saying "hey, look, the industry will be fine - most of this stuff is custom! It's only the stuff that isn't custom which will suffer" is a pretty lousy idea. Most people rely more on the non-custom stuff.
Have you ever considered the possibility that mass-market sales is a good thing? It allows someone like me, or you, to get out of the rat-race and start producing stuff that we want to, instead of working on billing software for a business.