The original poster had basically said he wanted to speak japanese because "Part [anime] can't be understood completely due to the complexity and subtleties of the Japanese language."
To which I say: good luck. If the poster is trying to do this without taking classes or tutoring, he'll never get there. To understand the "complexities and subtleties of the language" you need to be extremely dedicated and naturally talented, and this guy doesn't seem to have that yet.
If you're happy listening to other people's conversations and understanding a few words here and there, that's great. But Romaji and passive conversation pickup aren't going to help you when you're trying to let someone in a Tokyo resturant know that you're allergic to wheat.
Arabic or Hindi are pretty insane too. Oh, and don't forget Thai, where letters and modifiers can be out of order and there still aren't any spaces around words.
As my Japanese professor once said in College: You can study Japanese every waking hour of every waking day, struggle through the hardest classes you have ever taken, and after 10 years emerge from the other side with a PHD in the language and a 1st grade speaking level.
Seriously. The question is not how do you learn Japanese without taking classes, the question is how many classes and lectures and tutors and other resources do you need to get to a basic Japanese comprehension level. How many years until you can chat with a kindergartener. And forget reading newspapers.
Let's start with Kanji. I believe 5 year-olds in Japan average about 500 of these, and the number just gets higher from there. You need to know A: the somewhat random symbol, B: the stroke order (Very important!), and C: about 6 different contexts within which each can be used, because the meaning and pronunciation changes constantly. And don't be foolish and think one kanji equals one thing... Kanji can be their own words, or they can be put next to eachother to create certain bigger words. It is like a second langauge, but one basically devoid of pronunciation clues. Each Kanji needs to be appended with a certain number of hiragana characters to complete the word and or change the ending. Except when they don't. And don't forget: no spaces between words!
Let's move on to how to count. No, no, don't start counting yet, because the numbers you use to count with change by the shape of the thing which you are counting. If you are counting people, you use different numbers than if you are counting big boxy things, or pencils, or days. In fact, there are hundreds of these variations. Are those place settings you're counting? Years? Stuffed Animals? Gallons of water? Are you counting all of these 'freaking counting systems? Don't worry, you'll NEVER get it quite right.
Ok, how about saying hello? Thankfully, there is only about a dozen ways of doing this, depending upon if the person you're talking to is high above you, above you, at your level, below you, or really below you. Of course, there are variants for if there is a big age gap, or you're related, or you're a girl. Or any of a million other variants.
The grammar is cool, but completely alien and quickly compounding. Early sentences are simple and fun. For example, (my) Car is old is. However, real sentences are quite ugly. Tomorrow's Party in prep for breakfast since (your) Roommate (my) Car is.... Yes, that ellipsis is in the sentence. It would be impolite to finish a thought, even though it would be helpful for figuring out what the sentence means.
Really, Japanese is just insanely difficult for not a lot of payoff. In order to learn enough to be at all useful, you have to be totally dedicated to the language. You also have to accept the fact that you will never speak well, you will never read a newspaper correctly, and you are pouring your heart and soul into this thing which you will never be good at simply because you weren't born into it.
Just get subtitled Anime, and find something better to do with your life. There are millions of people who speak spanish, or german, or french... learn all three of the languages in the time that it would take you to get a kindergarten proficiency at Japanese.
As I'm sure other posters will point out, reverse engineering Microsoft Word formats is a MAJOR pain in the tail, and nobody has done it quite right. Rumor has it that for backwards compatibility, Microsoft must include the engine that drives previous versions of the software because even they don't quite know how it worked.
Either way, with the best efforts of the Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect, and many, many other teams of people focused on figuring out the standard, it is still impossible to get a decently formatted doc file on anything other than Word.
I would guess that microsoft has more people working on obscuring that file format than they do working on improving the software.
However, the point was that Gandhi was being taken out of context, as he frequently is.
Gandhi's progression referred specifically to passive resistance, whereby the point is to appear oppressed so that the oppressors lose support at home. That is why they lose when they fight you: they lose their temper, they lose face, and they lose the battle. The GOAL is to make the other guy punch you in the face really hard, so that everyone around sees what a jerk he is and tells him to go home.
That's pretty contextually significant. This has nothing to do with how a government treats all of its people, or how one business interacts with another. It is all about how a people can make a conquering nation face up to the evil acts it is perpetrating, and abandon them.
There is a lot of passive resistance going on in the US which forgets this principle. I'll never forget the first time I saw a protest where the police and protesters arranged ahead of time who was going to be arrested. Non-disruptive passive resistance is by definition useless. It had the map, but not the destination. The people forgot why that tactic can work, and merely assume that it always does work.
I distinctly remember a car from the 50's which had a 5th wheel which would come out the back. This allowed you to drive head-first into a parking spot, then flip a switch to cause the hydrolic wheel to come down and swing the back end off the car until it was parallel.
Does anyone else remember this car? Any footage or info online?
A: Bring an Ace Bandage. Ok, so it doesn't really count as technology, but you can fix everything from broken bike racks to ripping bags to actual (gasp!) cuts and bruises with an Ace bandage. More useful than Duct Tape, and easier to work with.
B: A cheap candybar cellphone. It should be relatively new, so that it has good battery life, but it should be cheap because these days cheap=durable in a phone. Be sure to switch to a nationwide plan before leaving.
C: Spare LED blinkers. Never run out of night-riding LED blinkers. However, forgo headlights on the bike. They just destroy your night vision while adding a ton of weight. Use more LED blinkers if necessary. Bring a spare set of AA's, and expect to replenish on the road.
D: Platapus bag. Don't leave home without a silly, expensive hydration system that happens to work really well. Bring purifying tablets if you can't find a reasonable water source, but don't be that guy who assumes anything less than bottled water is toxic. I recommend two additional water bottles for backup.
E: An old PDA, like a Sony Clie N360. Even though the batteries are wearing out, they should still get about 20 days to a charge. Plus they're dirt cheap.
F: Anything that charges will be the bane of your existence. I tend to lean against a lot of GPS systems for that reason. However, if you do carry a few charging things, try having a rest at every starbucks you see. The food is overpriced, but they've got outlets that anyone can use. College Campus food courts also tend to have outlets. Otherwise, expect to spend a lot on motels.
G: A bar of soap, a second set of clothes, the heaviest-duty sunblock you can find, a toothbrush / paste, a sleeping bag... and that's about it. Don't bring anything you can live without, and expect to get really dirty. I recommend a tent as a luxury. I always feel the need to find an enclosed space when I travel without a tent. Oh, and lots of Vitamins, Powdered Gatoraid, Tiger's Milk bars, and Ramen (bulky but light!), for those times when you just can't find food. Eat raw... no cooking. No pots / pans.
H: For your bike, take two saddle-bags and NOTHING MORE. No stove, no fire, no pads, nothing. If it can't be strapped to the back of the bike, it ain't coming. Use puncture-resistant tires with Puncture-resistant tubes and puncture-resistant tire liners. Stuff will get through that too, but at least it will be less stuff. Go with 25mm tires. Your bike will be laden with junk anyway, so the handling difference will be minimal for a lot more comfort. Bring about one to two spare tubes for every day between bike shops. You shouldn't need that many, but every now and then you get into a bad patch that eats through four tubes. These should be the normal, lighter kind, and buy more as you go. "Tire Slime" is useless and should be avoided at all costs. Beyond that, bring two patch kits, a slimline pump, a chain wrench, a spoke wrench for your size spokes, pliers, a set of torque wrenches, a good phillips head, a pocket knife, a spare brake cable, a spare shift cable, tin shears, a solid cable lock that can weave between your frame, both wheels, and the seat. Also, a split saddle. A comfortable saddle on a long trip is worth more than all of the rest of your gear combined. Take aerobars of some sort so that you can change to a few different random seating positions as you go.
I: Quick on / off should be a priority for your bags and packing, because you will be doing this A LOT.
J: A hidden Money Belt. I recommend a few hundred in emergency money, plus all of the contact / account info you can write down and stuff in there.
Nearly everything you will need to survive will be learned outside of the classroom. Or at least, many great programmers that I know had to do their most productive learning outside of the classroom.
It is expected. That's how things work. Pay attention to the O of N stuff in the classroom, but really get down and dirty on your own.
That having been said, I'd start a few smaller projects that interest you and that have a very limited scale. An end-to-end e-mail system that solves all of the cryptography and accountability problems with the current mail system would be neat, but you'll never finish that for you first project. How about some simple scripts that let you control your home server by sending it e-mail? Your first stuff may get hammered out in a few days, and may not get terribly elegant code. But you'll learn and stay motivated. Be sure to finish your first project before you get bored.
If games are more of your thing (Go games!) start by creating mods of reasonable scope... Like jousting mods in Counterstrike that propel people forward when they fire their weapons, or simple gravity mods that alter attraction based upon the distance to the ground below. Or to really stay motivated, join a modding team. There is nothing more helpful than a good modding team.
Whatever it is that you want to do... start by doing it. Nothing in the classroom will really teach you to write scripts to be a sysadmin. Or to write graphics code. Or to control robotics systems in a production envrionment, find real information in databases full of junk, or how to resuscitate someone else's crappy code.
Find something you like, and figure out how to do it. Sometimes you get lucky and find mentors, but don't expect to find it in a college classroom.
Sadly, it still looks like a turd too. Most people would be more apt to spending ten or twenty thousand for the most expensive MP3 player ever if it didn't happen to look like it came from a corner jewelry store in Brooklin.
"Yo Yo Yo! Check out my MP3 Playaz! Ain't it the Shiznit?"
Someone should really let Guiness know that a lot of games break the 20 million mark these days.
Anyone care to make a guess as to how much Blizzard's 5 years of WoW development cost? Or for that matter the amount spent on the next Unreal Tournament, considering we've seen games using its engine yet the game itself has yet to be released? Duke Nukem Forever?
A: Doesn't store as much as HD-based MP3 players. B: Isn't as fast or durable as Flash-based MP3 players, for slightly less space. C: Isn't as cheap as CD-based MP3 players. D: Software is so bad it should be criminal. Used Sonic Stage to transfer MP3's to a Sony PDA. I now own a Treo. E: Zero compatibility with anything but other Sony MD players. F: Not all that small, really.
Basically, like the Memory Stick, the MiniDisk doesn't do anything better than any of the offerings out there. It tries to be middle-of-the-road, but manages to be nothing special.
I forgot the part about estimating the number of times per month you would listen to that MP3. 3 dollars for the first 10 times, 2 dollars each additional time.
Re:Meta-commentary: "Gorgeous" really relevant?
on
The Real Purpose of DRM
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· Score: 5, Interesting
To be fair, it wasn't the slashdot editor but the story submitter that referred to the author in that way.
Likewise that introduction would be obviously inappropriate if the author's story was about an OpenSSH vulnerability or a commentary on the sad state of Windows Vista. In that case writing about physical appearances would be an irrelevant distraction which would imply judgement of factual nature of the article in question based upon the physical appearance of the person. Whether or not that judgement is positive isn't important.
But on a farcical story about cockfighting roombas that line isn't very clear. Can a comedian be demeaned by references to her appearance? Are they making less relevant a story that is already, at core, irrelevant? It again implies a degree of judgement, and a reminder of the prevalant nature of physical judgements in this culture. (I might add, the most insidiously judgemental people about women's appearances are largely other women)
I personally would have edited out the reference to her "gorgeousness." But the question remains... In a non-serious, non-professional context, is it OK to slip in an irrelevant compliment about someone looks?
"Hey boss, wouldn't it be great if we sold 30GB phones that people could play MP3's on? Nokia's got one coming out." "Yeah, that would sell millions" "Exactly" "Of downloads." "What?" "We take the MP3 standard, we encrypt it with a wrapper so that nobody else can play it back, and sell it to the user at three dollars a track over our online phone-based music store" "That's not what I meant" "Then if the user wants to transfer that track to their PC, we charge them the download cost again. Or the ringtone version. Then we sell them concert tickets over their phone, and if they want a working signal in the concert venue we hit them with roaming fees." "No, No, that's all wrong." "That's a great idea. Now we just need a name. MP3Me? Not that it would play actual MP3's... that would eat into download sales." "An MP3 player that can't play MP3's?" "Stability doesn't matter, so we should be able to get it up and running quickly. Billy, make it happen in a month, or you're fired. Now if you'll excuse me, my masseuse is coming." "You're the devil, aren't you?"
Be careful! The nanites might only attack foes, but even inert they would still be enough to (for example) knock a friend off of a sail barge.
My personal theory about light sabers is that they're really just extendable swords, with lights added to let people know where the bad parts are. You know, like how smell gets added to gasoline, or the title "prequal" gets added to some of Lucas's movies.
I've worked on all three platforms. And while I haven't didn't do the coding myself, I have worked with the coders who did.
The rule of thumb was that if you could do it on the Xbox, you could do it on the GameCube and you would probably have to shave it down to get it to work on the PS2. The problem child you have to worry about in a cross-platform title is always PS2.
I don't know where Casamassina is getting his assertion that GC polygon peaks were less than the PS2. Does he mean untextured polys? Again the PS2 is generally the platform that you have to optimize for.
Using MHz numbers to compare the speed of different processors is like comparing the speed of cars by looking at how much gas they consume. There is a relationship there, but it isn't the primary one. And it isn't the one you care about.
There are all sorts of reasons for performance numbers, such as the PS2's surprisingly fast cache but low ram, etc. I hope someone will do a detailed technical breakdown, because I really should remember this stuff. And also financial pressures play a part: you add optimization time for the Xbox if you think you will sell in North America, and optimization time for the GameCube if you have the possibility of Japan sales. But in general, the Xbox and Game Cube are similar in power, and the PS2 runs to catch up.
I can't really talk about the Revolution, partially because I don't have one, but I've heard other developers use the "2x more powerful than the GC" figure. That puts it somewhere between the Xbox 1 and the Xbox 360.
It is a simple question of economics. The person can spend 8 hours grinding levels for alts at World of Warcraft to get 2% better stats. Or they can spend 8 hours with their primary character grinding date quests, with a 20% chance of success and a 5% chance of critical hit.
At the end of a week, player 1 has just 15% higher stats. But player 2 has a pretty good chance of getting (or becoming) an ultra rare pet, with only a base level 18 requirement. Depending on which server and region you are in, group quests are also a possibility.
There can be complications with item drops, but anything you don't want can be sold at the auction house.
I didn't include the 5200 because A: it was a qualitatively different stick for different reasons, B: the 5200 was a failure in the market, and the non-recentering joystick was a part of that, and C: it was convienient.
A few of the things on the list are on the edge, as you'll find a few early system that use re-writable mag-op media, for example. But none of them were successful, and none of them were using it in the same way or at the same time.
To be fair, Nintendo had the first online console, the the first handheld portable game system, the first re-writable optical drive in a console. They had the first (and only) all-red dual-eye parallax game console, the first battery backed-up cartridge, the first scrolling arcade game. They had the first shoulder buttons, the first analog stick (on a major system), the first rumble pack, the first diamond configuration buttons. They had the first analog buttons that click when you hold them all the way down. They had the second handheld to system link feature, the first utterly gratuitous plate-spinning robot, the first sewing machine attachment. They had some of the the first portable single-title LCD games. They had the first 3rd person / 1st person hybrid shooter, the first action floor mat, the first touch-screen portable gaming system. The first (by a few days) portable gaming system with built-in wifi.
All of the things that you list as Nintendo shying away from are actually things which everyone else in the industry considered the safe bet. When everyone was going to CD, Nintendo took a risk and stuck with the access times of cartridges. 10 years ago when everyone said that online console gaming was now, Nintendo correctly said that the time was not yet right.
With Pokemon, Virtua Boy, Nintendogs, Kirby, Brain Games, Bulky Drive, etc, it is hard to fault their originality. Nintendo routinely does really bafflingly odd things.
So they're so afraid of the nerds in the basement and their 19" LCD screens, that they'll stop taking the money from those fat cats in their Bucky Balls wanting to watch Brucky Bombs go off.
Ironically those nerds with their LCD screens can't give the MPAA their money if they wanted too: HD-DVD won't play back on any of the existing computer monitors at above DVD resolution.
I watch all videos on my computer monitor (don't have a TV), and was excited by the prospect of getting some real high-quality video for these high quality monitors. Yet I could blow a few hundred bucks for an HD-DVD / Blu-Ray player, but only get video output equivalent to that of a 20$ DVD drive. I might as well keep pirating, because there is no reason to fork over the money for a new standard that I can't support. What is the incentive for upgrading?
Don't forget the sampling problem of many HDTV sets... if you try to play a low-rez movie at high rez, you will incurr the wrath of the "upsampler," which has the nasty habit of getting video and audio out-of-sync on many displays. So now the problem may be that your 8,000 dollar plasma-screen TV shipped before the MPAA's chosen video interface standard, but all you will know is that people's voices are coming out a bit before they open their mouths and the picture seems blurrier than when using your Xbox.
Slashdot Mirror
The original poster had basically said he wanted to speak japanese because "Part [anime] can't be understood completely due to the complexity and subtleties of the Japanese language."
To which I say: good luck. If the poster is trying to do this without taking classes or tutoring, he'll never get there. To understand the "complexities and subtleties of the language" you need to be extremely dedicated and naturally talented, and this guy doesn't seem to have that yet.
If you're happy listening to other people's conversations and understanding a few words here and there, that's great. But Romaji and passive conversation pickup aren't going to help you when you're trying to let someone in a Tokyo resturant know that you're allergic to wheat.
Arabic or Hindi are pretty insane too. Oh, and don't forget Thai, where letters and modifiers can be out of order and there still aren't any spaces around words.
As my Japanese professor once said in College: You can study Japanese every waking hour of every waking day, struggle through the hardest classes you have ever taken, and after 10 years emerge from the other side with a PHD in the language and a 1st grade speaking level.
Seriously. The question is not how do you learn Japanese without taking classes, the question is how many classes and lectures and tutors and other resources do you need to get to a basic Japanese comprehension level. How many years until you can chat with a kindergartener. And forget reading newspapers.
Let's start with Kanji. I believe 5 year-olds in Japan average about 500 of these, and the number just gets higher from there. You need to know A: the somewhat random symbol, B: the stroke order (Very important!), and C: about 6 different contexts within which each can be used, because the meaning and pronunciation changes constantly. And don't be foolish and think one kanji equals one thing... Kanji can be their own words, or they can be put next to eachother to create certain bigger words. It is like a second langauge, but one basically devoid of pronunciation clues. Each Kanji needs to be appended with a certain number of hiragana characters to complete the word and or change the ending. Except when they don't. And don't forget: no spaces between words!
Let's move on to how to count. No, no, don't start counting yet, because the numbers you use to count with change by the shape of the thing which you are counting. If you are counting people, you use different numbers than if you are counting big boxy things, or pencils, or days. In fact, there are hundreds of these variations. Are those place settings you're counting? Years? Stuffed Animals? Gallons of water? Are you counting all of these 'freaking counting systems? Don't worry, you'll NEVER get it quite right.
Ok, how about saying hello? Thankfully, there is only about a dozen ways of doing this, depending upon if the person you're talking to is high above you, above you, at your level, below you, or really below you. Of course, there are variants for if there is a big age gap, or you're related, or you're a girl. Or any of a million other variants.
The grammar is cool, but completely alien and quickly compounding. Early sentences are simple and fun. For example, (my) Car is old is. However, real sentences are quite ugly. Tomorrow's Party in prep for breakfast since (your) Roommate (my) Car is.... Yes, that ellipsis is in the sentence. It would be impolite to finish a thought, even though it would be helpful for figuring out what the sentence means.
Really, Japanese is just insanely difficult for not a lot of payoff. In order to learn enough to be at all useful, you have to be totally dedicated to the language. You also have to accept the fact that you will never speak well, you will never read a newspaper correctly, and you are pouring your heart and soul into this thing which you will never be good at simply because you weren't born into it.
Just get subtitled Anime, and find something better to do with your life. There are millions of people who speak spanish, or german, or french... learn all three of the languages in the time that it would take you to get a kindergarten proficiency at Japanese.
As I'm sure other posters will point out, reverse engineering Microsoft Word formats is a MAJOR pain in the tail, and nobody has done it quite right. Rumor has it that for backwards compatibility, Microsoft must include the engine that drives previous versions of the software because even they don't quite know how it worked.
Either way, with the best efforts of the Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect, and many, many other teams of people focused on figuring out the standard, it is still impossible to get a decently formatted doc file on anything other than Word.
I would guess that microsoft has more people working on obscuring that file format than they do working on improving the software.
Agreed.
However, the point was that Gandhi was being taken out of context, as he frequently is.
Gandhi's progression referred specifically to passive resistance, whereby the point is to appear oppressed so that the oppressors lose support at home. That is why they lose when they fight you: they lose their temper, they lose face, and they lose the battle. The GOAL is to make the other guy punch you in the face really hard, so that everyone around sees what a jerk he is and tells him to go home.
That's pretty contextually significant. This has nothing to do with how a government treats all of its people, or how one business interacts with another. It is all about how a people can make a conquering nation face up to the evil acts it is perpetrating, and abandon them.
There is a lot of passive resistance going on in the US which forgets this principle. I'll never forget the first time I saw a protest where the police and protesters arranged ahead of time who was going to be arrested. Non-disruptive passive resistance is by definition useless. It had the map, but not the destination. The people forgot why that tactic can work, and merely assume that it always does work.
I distinctly remember a car from the 50's which had a 5th wheel which would come out the back. This allowed you to drive head-first into a parking spot, then flip a switch to cause the hydrolic wheel to come down and swing the back end off the car until it was parallel.
Does anyone else remember this car? Any footage or info online?
There are some students from Tienneman Square who would have issues with step 4.
Would.
A: Bring an Ace Bandage. Ok, so it doesn't really count as technology, but you can fix everything from broken bike racks to ripping bags to actual (gasp!) cuts and bruises with an Ace bandage. More useful than Duct Tape, and easier to work with.
B: A cheap candybar cellphone. It should be relatively new, so that it has good battery life, but it should be cheap because these days cheap=durable in a phone. Be sure to switch to a nationwide plan before leaving.
C: Spare LED blinkers. Never run out of night-riding LED blinkers. However, forgo headlights on the bike. They just destroy your night vision while adding a ton of weight. Use more LED blinkers if necessary. Bring a spare set of AA's, and expect to replenish on the road.
D: Platapus bag. Don't leave home without a silly, expensive hydration system that happens to work really well. Bring purifying tablets if you can't find a reasonable water source, but don't be that guy who assumes anything less than bottled water is toxic. I recommend two additional water bottles for backup.
E: An old PDA, like a Sony Clie N360. Even though the batteries are wearing out, they should still get about 20 days to a charge. Plus they're dirt cheap.
F: Anything that charges will be the bane of your existence. I tend to lean against a lot of GPS systems for that reason. However, if you do carry a few charging things, try having a rest at every starbucks you see. The food is overpriced, but they've got outlets that anyone can use. College Campus food courts also tend to have outlets. Otherwise, expect to spend a lot on motels.
G: A bar of soap, a second set of clothes, the heaviest-duty sunblock you can find, a toothbrush / paste, a sleeping bag... and that's about it. Don't bring anything you can live without, and expect to get really dirty. I recommend a tent as a luxury. I always feel the need to find an enclosed space when I travel without a tent. Oh, and lots of Vitamins, Powdered Gatoraid, Tiger's Milk bars, and Ramen (bulky but light!), for those times when you just can't find food. Eat raw... no cooking. No pots / pans.
H: For your bike, take two saddle-bags and NOTHING MORE. No stove, no fire, no pads, nothing. If it can't be strapped to the back of the bike, it ain't coming. Use puncture-resistant tires with Puncture-resistant tubes and puncture-resistant tire liners. Stuff will get through that too, but at least it will be less stuff. Go with 25mm tires. Your bike will be laden with junk anyway, so the handling difference will be minimal for a lot more comfort. Bring about one to two spare tubes for every day between bike shops. You shouldn't need that many, but every now and then you get into a bad patch that eats through four tubes. These should be the normal, lighter kind, and buy more as you go. "Tire Slime" is useless and should be avoided at all costs. Beyond that, bring two patch kits, a slimline pump, a chain wrench, a spoke wrench for your size spokes, pliers, a set of torque wrenches, a good phillips head, a pocket knife, a spare brake cable, a spare shift cable, tin shears, a solid cable lock that can weave between your frame, both wheels, and the seat. Also, a split saddle. A comfortable saddle on a long trip is worth more than all of the rest of your gear combined. Take aerobars of some sort so that you can change to a few different random seating positions as you go.
I: Quick on / off should be a priority for your bags and packing, because you will be doing this A LOT.
J: A hidden Money Belt. I recommend a few hundred in emergency money, plus all of the contact / account info you can write down and stuff in there.
K: Pen, paper, your thoughts.
Nearly everything you will need to survive will be learned outside of the classroom. Or at least, many great programmers that I know had to do their most productive learning outside of the classroom.
It is expected. That's how things work. Pay attention to the O of N stuff in the classroom, but really get down and dirty on your own.
That having been said, I'd start a few smaller projects that interest you and that have a very limited scale. An end-to-end e-mail system that solves all of the cryptography and accountability problems with the current mail system would be neat, but you'll never finish that for you first project. How about some simple scripts that let you control your home server by sending it e-mail? Your first stuff may get hammered out in a few days, and may not get terribly elegant code. But you'll learn and stay motivated. Be sure to finish your first project before you get bored.
If games are more of your thing (Go games!) start by creating mods of reasonable scope... Like jousting mods in Counterstrike that propel people forward when they fire their weapons, or simple gravity mods that alter attraction based upon the distance to the ground below. Or to really stay motivated, join a modding team. There is nothing more helpful than a good modding team.
Whatever it is that you want to do... start by doing it. Nothing in the classroom will really teach you to write scripts to be a sysadmin. Or to write graphics code. Or to control robotics systems in a production envrionment, find real information in databases full of junk, or how to resuscitate someone else's crappy code.
Find something you like, and figure out how to do it. Sometimes you get lucky and find mentors, but don't expect to find it in a college classroom.
Sadly, it still looks like a turd too. Most people would be more apt to spending ten or twenty thousand for the most expensive MP3 player ever if it didn't happen to look like it came from a corner jewelry store in Brooklin.
"Yo Yo Yo! Check out my MP3 Playaz! Ain't it the Shiznit?"
Someone should really let Guiness know that a lot of games break the 20 million mark these days.
Anyone care to make a guess as to how much Blizzard's 5 years of WoW development cost? Or for that matter the amount spent on the next Unreal Tournament, considering we've seen games using its engine yet the game itself has yet to be released? Duke Nukem Forever?
Yup. They're thinking of folding it into The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
A: Doesn't store as much as HD-based MP3 players.
B: Isn't as fast or durable as Flash-based MP3 players, for slightly less space.
C: Isn't as cheap as CD-based MP3 players.
D: Software is so bad it should be criminal. Used Sonic Stage to transfer MP3's to a Sony PDA. I now own a Treo.
E: Zero compatibility with anything but other Sony MD players.
F: Not all that small, really.
Basically, like the Memory Stick, the MiniDisk doesn't do anything better than any of the offerings out there. It tries to be middle-of-the-road, but manages to be nothing special.
I forgot the part about estimating the number of times per month you would listen to that MP3. 3 dollars for the first 10 times, 2 dollars each additional time.
To be fair, it wasn't the slashdot editor but the story submitter that referred to the author in that way.
Likewise that introduction would be obviously inappropriate if the author's story was about an OpenSSH vulnerability or a commentary on the sad state of Windows Vista. In that case writing about physical appearances would be an irrelevant distraction which would imply judgement of factual nature of the article in question based upon the physical appearance of the person. Whether or not that judgement is positive isn't important.
But on a farcical story about cockfighting roombas that line isn't very clear. Can a comedian be demeaned by references to her appearance? Are they making less relevant a story that is already, at core, irrelevant? It again implies a degree of judgement, and a reminder of the prevalant nature of physical judgements in this culture. (I might add, the most insidiously judgemental people about women's appearances are largely other women)
I personally would have edited out the reference to her "gorgeousness." But the question remains... In a non-serious, non-professional context, is it OK to slip in an irrelevant compliment about someone looks?
Please, lets try not to promote, sloppy, lazy journalism and opinion pieces.
You must be new here.
"Hey boss, wouldn't it be great if we sold 30GB phones that people could play MP3's on? Nokia's got one coming out."
"Yeah, that would sell millions"
"Exactly"
"Of downloads."
"What?"
"We take the MP3 standard, we encrypt it with a wrapper so that nobody else can play it back, and sell it to the user at three dollars a track over our online phone-based music store"
"That's not what I meant"
"Then if the user wants to transfer that track to their PC, we charge them the download cost again. Or the ringtone version. Then we sell them concert tickets over their phone, and if they want a working signal in the concert venue we hit them with roaming fees."
"No, No, that's all wrong."
"That's a great idea. Now we just need a name. MP3Me? Not that it would play actual MP3's... that would eat into download sales."
"An MP3 player that can't play MP3's?"
"Stability doesn't matter, so we should be able to get it up and running quickly. Billy, make it happen in a month, or you're fired. Now if you'll excuse me, my masseuse is coming."
"You're the devil, aren't you?"
You didn't claw your eyes out in vain: there is still the IT color scheme.
And, unfortunately, not like this.
This would be the perfect time to point out Pony Trouble, the movie for players of The Pony Game, and innocent children at heart.
Be careful! The nanites might only attack foes, but even inert they would still be enough to (for example) knock a friend off of a sail barge.
My personal theory about light sabers is that they're really just extendable swords, with lights added to let people know where the bad parts are. You know, like how smell gets added to gasoline, or the title "prequal" gets added to some of Lucas's movies.
I've worked on all three platforms. And while I haven't didn't do the coding myself, I have worked with the coders who did.
The rule of thumb was that if you could do it on the Xbox, you could do it on the GameCube and you would probably have to shave it down to get it to work on the PS2. The problem child you have to worry about in a cross-platform title is always PS2.
I don't know where Casamassina is getting his assertion that GC polygon peaks were less than the PS2. Does he mean untextured polys? Again the PS2 is generally the platform that you have to optimize for.
Using MHz numbers to compare the speed of different processors is like comparing the speed of cars by looking at how much gas they consume. There is a relationship there, but it isn't the primary one. And it isn't the one you care about.
There are all sorts of reasons for performance numbers, such as the PS2's surprisingly fast cache but low ram, etc. I hope someone will do a detailed technical breakdown, because I really should remember this stuff. And also financial pressures play a part: you add optimization time for the Xbox if you think you will sell in North America, and optimization time for the GameCube if you have the possibility of Japan sales. But in general, the Xbox and Game Cube are similar in power, and the PS2 runs to catch up.
I can't really talk about the Revolution, partially because I don't have one, but I've heard other developers use the "2x more powerful than the GC" figure. That puts it somewhere between the Xbox 1 and the Xbox 360.
YMMV
It is a simple question of economics. The person can spend 8 hours grinding levels for alts at World of Warcraft to get 2% better stats. Or they can spend 8 hours with their primary character grinding date quests, with a 20% chance of success and a 5% chance of critical hit.
At the end of a week, player 1 has just 15% higher stats. But player 2 has a pretty good chance of getting (or becoming) an ultra rare pet, with only a base level 18 requirement. Depending on which server and region you are in, group quests are also a possibility.
There can be complications with item drops, but anything you don't want can be sold at the auction house.
I didn't include the 5200 because A: it was a qualitatively different stick for different reasons, B: the 5200 was a failure in the market, and the non-recentering joystick was a part of that, and C: it was convienient.
A few of the things on the list are on the edge, as you'll find a few early system that use re-writable mag-op media, for example. But none of them were successful, and none of them were using it in the same way or at the same time.
To be fair, Nintendo had the first online console, the the first handheld portable game system, the first re-writable optical drive in a console. They had the first (and only) all-red dual-eye parallax game console, the first battery backed-up cartridge, the first scrolling arcade game. They had the first shoulder buttons, the first analog stick (on a major system), the first rumble pack, the first diamond configuration buttons. They had the first analog buttons that click when you hold them all the way down. They had the second handheld to system link feature, the first utterly gratuitous plate-spinning robot, the first sewing machine attachment. They had some of the the first portable single-title LCD games. They had the first 3rd person / 1st person hybrid shooter, the first action floor mat, the first touch-screen portable gaming system. The first (by a few days) portable gaming system with built-in wifi.
All of the things that you list as Nintendo shying away from are actually things which everyone else in the industry considered the safe bet. When everyone was going to CD, Nintendo took a risk and stuck with the access times of cartridges. 10 years ago when everyone said that online console gaming was now, Nintendo correctly said that the time was not yet right.
With Pokemon, Virtua Boy, Nintendogs, Kirby, Brain Games, Bulky Drive, etc, it is hard to fault their originality. Nintendo routinely does really bafflingly odd things.
So they're so afraid of the nerds in the basement and their 19" LCD screens, that they'll stop taking the money from those fat cats in their Bucky Balls wanting to watch Brucky Bombs go off.
Ironically those nerds with their LCD screens can't give the MPAA their money if they wanted too: HD-DVD won't play back on any of the existing computer monitors at above DVD resolution.
I watch all videos on my computer monitor (don't have a TV), and was excited by the prospect of getting some real high-quality video for these high quality monitors. Yet I could blow a few hundred bucks for an HD-DVD / Blu-Ray player, but only get video output equivalent to that of a 20$ DVD drive. I might as well keep pirating, because there is no reason to fork over the money for a new standard that I can't support. What is the incentive for upgrading?
Don't forget the sampling problem of many HDTV sets... if you try to play a low-rez movie at high rez, you will incurr the wrath of the "upsampler," which has the nasty habit of getting video and audio out-of-sync on many displays. So now the problem may be that your 8,000 dollar plasma-screen TV shipped before the MPAA's chosen video interface standard, but all you will know is that people's voices are coming out a bit before they open their mouths and the picture seems blurrier than when using your Xbox.
Bad MPAA. No doughnut.