A gibibyte? Jesus. I'm aware that these are standard SI terms, but at some point you've got to let common sense step in.
My production server at work has 24 gigabytes of RAM, by which I mean it has 24 x 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 bytes of RAM. I assume that you would claim this machine has 24 gibibytes of RAM, or that your desktop has 512 mebibytes of RAM, or that this particular object module is 72 kibibytes in size, then? If I started throwing around terms like that, people would look at me like I had gone completely batshit.
"megabyte" and "gigabyte", as they pertain to computer storage, have always been based off of multiples of 1024. This is different than the traditional meanings of these prefixes, but that's a separate issue (and it's hardly new; they've been around for more than fifty years.) What is new is how HDD manufacturers have silently discarded the existing meanings in order to artificially inflate the size of their media. This is a phenomenon that has come about only in recent years (i.e., in the past 5 years or so.) The fact that these manufacturers protest "But look! Technically, we're right!" is not particularly meaningful to me. 40 MB hard drives used to be 40 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. 512 MB of RAM is still 512 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, the same as it's always been. And you claim that "HD makers redefined squat?"
Another obvious example of this is CD-R versus DVD-R. A Yellow Book CD has a capacity of 650 MB, by which I mean 650 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, which is well above 650,000,000 bytes. DVD-R, on the other hand, which is advertised as a 4.7 GB medium, can only hold ~4.35 GB as gigabytes have traditionally been interpreted. So you've got one interpretation for CD-R, and another for DVD-R.
Now, you can crow about SI units all you want, and you can go around talking about how many mebibytes of RAM your laptop has and how many kibibytes this e-mail attachment consumes, but if you don't see that there has been a recent redefinition of standard computer terminology by media manufacturers to hype their products, then you are being either naive or deliberately obtuse.
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. It's true that FF7+ is heavy on FMV and animated cut-scenes, and some of them are tedious to sit through during repeated trips through the game (i.e., "Cloud's Past" in FF7.) However, there's a lot of shit to do in these games. I am currently replaying FF7 just for the hell of it, and I'm still finding things that I didn't know were there (case in point: this was the first run through the game that I discovered the Group Room in the Honey Bee Inn, and I rather wish that I hadn't.) You have two optional characters that you would probably miss on the first run through the game if you didn't know about them, lots of optional side-quests, and then other activities such as Chocobo raising (which gives you access to tons of hidden items and magic, such as the Knights of the Round materia.)
Gameplay doesn't necessarily have to suffer when cinematics are introduced. For example, the materia system in FF7 is probably the most interesting, customizable, and powerful features found in the series (and if you know what you're doing with it, you can make yourself obscenely powerful.) Some of the cinematics are distractions, but others actually add to the gameplay. I remember watching some of the FMV in FF7 for the first time in 1997, and my jaw literally dropped. It takes the player out of a pixellated 2-D world and puts them into a world that really feels alive. And there's something to be said for that.
Having said that, the cinematics can be overdone, as you note. FFX is probably the worst offender in this category. While the graphics, sound, and music were great, the sheer linearity of FFX shocked me. I had hoped that Square would harness the power of the PS2 to create a world that was at least as open as the world of FF7 was. Instead, they created a world where you really weren't free to travel at will until the end of the game, and even then you could only travel to certain spots on the world map.. no open overworld to explore! What's up with that?
Have you considered the idea that perhaps most Americans like the idea of making the world more like us?
And the 19 hijackers that flew planes into the WTC and Pentagon two years ago liked the idea of making the world more like them. If you believe that the totality of your culture is superior to each and every other culture on the face of the Earth, then you will obviously want to make the rest of the world more like you. This does not mean, however, that the rest of the world is obligated to become more like you.
It's an interesting choice of words, by the way; "making" the rest of the world like us, as opposed to "helping" the rest of the world become more like us. The former implies force and compulsion, whereas the latter implies aid and assistance.
Also, can you understand why the "Project" guys might/want/ to make the rest of the world more like the US?
I certainly would want to make sure that other peoples and nations who sincerely want help to reform their societies and governments gets whatever assistance they need, but I cannot support the (thoroughly bizarre) notion of "imposing freedom." America should lead by example, not by force. America should be respected and looked up to, not hated and feared. Nations and groups who actively decide to make an enemy of America should fear our capabilities, but the recent oderint dum metuant policy of this administration has gone far beyond that.
The PNAC's agenda is pretty transparent: a "New American Century", regardless of whether the recipients of said Century actually want it or not. And that's horribly, horribly wrong. If the underdeveloped world is to become more like America, it should be because it wants to become more like America, not because it's been forced to. If we have to resort to military force to spread our way of life, then we've taken a very long stroll down a very wrong road.
The reason that there's not much interest in Venus is that the atmospheric pressure is 100 times greater than it is here on Earth, the temperature is hot enough to melt lead, and it rains sulfuric acid. Not the most hospitable environment for exploration, at least on the surface, although the surface has been mapped using radar (which is really the only way you can do it, given the planet's perpetual thick cloud cover.)
That aside, the Soviets actually were able to put several landers on the surface of Venus in the 1970s and early 1980s (check out HarveyBirdman's link.) None of them were able to operate for very long in such extreme conditions, of course, but most of them returned valuable scientific data and some of them even returned surface photographs.
There's far more interest in Mars because that planet would be explorable and perhaps habitable by humans, given the proper facilities. A day on Mars is roughly the same as a day on Earth (24.5 hours or so) so there would not be major adjustments needed to things like the human sleep cycle. Compare that to Venus, where the length of the day (243 Earth days) is longer than the length of an entire year (225 Earth days!)
Resident Evil is a great game, but the acting truly deserves the label that it gets. I think the worst example is right out of the chute, where Chris Redfield is missing and Barry and Jill find some blood on the floor of the mansion, and Barry asks "Is this.. Chris' blood?" in the same tone of voice that you might ask "Are you going to eat that sandwich?"
Of course, I think right before that, there's an exchange like this:
BARRY: What? What is this? JILL: What is it? BARRY: Blood!
Apparently, Jill and Barry have never seen blood before?
Re:One of the things I find annoying...
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In terms of the game engine, there's not a lot of comparison between Doom and Wolf3D. The Wolf3D engine was primitive compared to Doom; most of the rooms were essentially large squares or rectangles, the lighting was pretty static, the list of enemies was pretty limited, and all of the levels were flat. Compare that to Doom, with its sectors of (basically) arbitrary shape and size, its introduction of sector height so that you could create staircases, trenches, walls, etc., its vastly-improved lighting capabilities, its vast array of special line types, its long list of monster types, etc.
Wolf3D was a ground-breaking game, but not nearly as ground-breaking as Doom was. Hell, I think I have more fun playing the original Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein from the early 1980s.:-)
.. what are some of the "extremist ideas that reek of communism" that are "frequently explored" on Slashdot? From my experience on Slashdot, there are just as many right-wing zealots here as there are left-wing zealots. For every person espousing (for example) a completely public government health care system, there's another person arguing (for example) that we ought to end income taxes and all entitlement programs. It all goes back to the original point: the "tech community" has no coherent political agenda.
Pretty much the same thing happened in both True Romance and Reservoir Dogs, though I think there were more than three people involved in the standoff in True Romance.
In Reservoir Dogs, Joe shoots Mr. Orange, Mr. White shoots Joe, Nice Guy Eddie shoots Mr. White, Nice Guy Eddie shoots Mr. White again, and Mr. White shoots Nice Guy Eddie.
Did anybody ever see that old Quentin Tarantino movie "True Romance", where it ends with like five guys in a room, all pointing guns at each other and engaging in a violent shootout where they pretty much all die? (Hell, I suppose that could describe pretty much any Tarantino movie.) Let's hope that Red Hat doesn't end up being Mr. Orange.
So I guess we should cover up all of those mass graves, put all those children back in prison, get Chemical Ali back into the lab, get those torture racks greased, throw all of those 'Big Brother Saddam' pictures back up in Baghdad, and leave a fruit basket with a letter of apology. You're right...we are indeed in the Twilight Zone.
You would have a point if the Iraq war had been justified in terms of "We need to remove Saddam because he's mean to his people." It wasn't. The entire war was predicated on the supposed threat that Iraq posed to the United States, and its status as a "terrorist state" with massive stockpiles of "ultimate weapons" (President Bush's words.) Tony Blair even told the British parliament that Iraq had the capability to launch an attack on the UK in as little as 45 minutes. It's been months now since the fall of Baghdad, and the only thing we have to show for this war is a piece of a nuclear centrifuge that some guy buried in his backyard before the first Gulf War. That may justify the war in your eyes, but the families of the hundreds of American servicemen (and women) killed in this conflict might have some different thoughts.
I'm glad that Hussein is gone. Dead or alive, let's hope he rots in peace. But all of this "Well, Iraq wasn't much of a threat to us, but look at the mass graves! Look at the torture devices!" is Monday morning quarterbacking. It's great that the Pentagon has media-savvy people that are able to invent scary-sounding nicknames (i.e., "Mrs. Anthrax") for the people that it kills or captures, but at the end of the day I would have had a lot more respect for the administration if they had just been honest about things. Hussein was a brutal dictator, but the world is full of brutal dictators, and the last time I checked, the United States wasn't drawing up plans to invade Burma or Zimbabwe.
You sound partisan, bitter, and illogical.
Whereas you are obviously objective, clear-headed, and perfectly logical.:-)
Everybody is sensible, so long as they say things that you agree with.
You have built your platform on the hopes that the United States will fail in its endeavours. That is disgusting.
I can't speak for the original poster, but do you want to know what's really disgusting? I have six friends who are in harm's way in Iraq right now. What's disgusting is people like you who implicitly suggest that I want to see harm come to them to prove a political point. I have no desire to see the United States will "fail" in any of its endeavours. That doesn't change the fact that there are endeavours that I would have preferred us to avoid in the first place. See, if it were up to me, these guys would be sitting in my living room and drinking beer with me instead of being stationed in a country populated by people that hate them even more than they hated the dictator that they just got rid of.
The world is a safer place for both Americans and Iraqis today than it was a few months ago, and it cost fewer lives than anyone estimated.
You've got to be kidding me. At my workplace, some co-workers and I were scheduled to attend a May conference in South America, and the trip was cancelled out of war-related concerns for our safety. It has never been more dangerous to be an American traveling abroad, and the Iraq war only made this worse. The primary contributing factor in the 9/11 attacks was fundamentalist Muslim hatred of the United States, and if you have evidence that the Iraq war helped to mitigate this, then I confess that I would be curious to see it. I want to be clear about this: I do not subscribe to the theory that the United States deserved the 9/11 attacks because of our foreign policy; it was a heinous and cowardly attack that no nation on this planet deserves. But our foreign policy in the past year or so has done much to fan the flames of the same hatred. And for who? For what? Saddam Hussein? This is a third-rate dictat
I think what C and C++ really lack is the option to turn on array range checking.
How do C and C++, as languages, lack this? You're talking about specific implementations of the languages, not the languages themselves. When you read or write outside of array bounds, the language standards say in no uncertain terms that the behavior is undefined. That means that anything (and everything) can happen. Permissible undefined behavior includes printing an error message such as "Attempt to write outside of array bounds at line 427 of foo.c."
There is nothing in the language standards that prevent runtime array bounds checking. The reason why you don't see many implementations doing it is the performance hit, which works against one of the biggest selling points of C and C++ (speed.) And, as you say, there already exist tools with which you can diagnose runtime memory problems.
It might sound morbid but they should have waited until he was dead.
That may be true, but all of the good dead Presidents have already been used. I mean, the "USS Grover Cleveland" or "USS Millard Fillmore" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
I do realize how complicated the shuttle is. I also know that they are required to take the entire thing apart after it returns from space, requalify each piece, and rebuild the entire thing from the ground up.
This is simply untrue. I have no idea where you think you heard this from, but the type of maintenance that you describe only happens when the engineers deem it necessary (usually every 8 to 10 flights.) They do not "rebuild the entire thing" every time a shuttle returns from space, and it is extraordinarily dishonest of you to propagate this.
NASA did do good work, 30 years ago, but they haven't done much of anything since.
Correct. Other than the Shuttle program itself (which is aging but still a marvel of human engineering) and all of the science that has resulted from it, the Voyager missions to explore the outer solar system, the Viking and Pathfinder missions to Mars (the latter of which involved JPL actually driving a rover around on the surface of the planet) and the resulting hundredfold increase in mankind's knowledge of Mars, the Galileo mission that spent years studying and providing unprecedented amounts of information on the Jovian (that's Jupiter) system, the Cassini mission that will do the same in the Saturnian system, the Deep Space 1 mission that involved an actual rendezvous with comet Borrelly, numerous Earth science projects that enable us to map this planet, monitor resources, respond to disasters, and deal with everything from famine to forest fires, the International Space Station, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Oh, and then there's that Hubble thing, which has expanded mankind's knowledge of the universe more than any other instrument in history. And I'm sure I'm forgetting several prominent projects (sorry, fellas.)
Other than that, yeah, NASA's been pretty much inert.
My tax dollars are higher because NASA has refused to scrap the shuttle.
Oh, for God's sake. NASA's budget is approximately one quarter of one percent of the entire federal outlay. If you pay (for example) $400 in federal taxes for each paycheck, less than a dollar goes to NASA. (And if you get paid every two weeks, this means that you pay about $25/year to NASA.) Even at the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s, NASA's budget was only slightly over 4 percent of the national budget as a whole. If you want to complain about "your tax dollars", start pointing your fingers at certain Senators who order aircraft carriers that the military doesn't even want just so that a company in their Congressional district can land a lucrative contract.
If we could cut all of the self-serving pork out of the federal budget, we'd have enough money to fund ten NASAs.
You link to a single post from a Slashdot user making unsubstantiated claims about NPR as evidence of its bias? I listened to NPR during the impeachment, and I certainly don't recall hearing them play "We Shall Overcome" during any breaks. A Google search for 'NPR "We Shall Overcome" impeachment' yields less than a page of results, none of which (after a cursory glance) has anything to do with the claim in the post that you linked. A Usenet archive search yields zero results. If there were any truth to this claim, the FreeRepublics and WorldNetDailys and Fox Newses and conservative newsgroups would have been all over it.
It's ironic that you complain about not being able to trust NPR and then use examples like this as your evidence.
(And yes, you are right, it started with SLS. And backups on a floppy streamer... And a VLB graphics card... And alt.os.linux... And kernel patches via Usenet...) *sigh*
Why *sigh*? Them were the good ole days of Linux.;-)
I hope it's fair use because the material I quoted was written in 1991 by Stephen King, not the Grimm brothers.:-)
Re:You read one Lovecraft story you've read 'em al
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
The Call of Cthulhu is a fantastic story, but I agree that the ending is anticlimactic. The whole story is relayed second-hand by a narrator, and reading through it the first time, I expected the narrator himself to end up involved in the events of the story (that is, with Cthulhu, not with simply paying visits to some of the other characters.) At the time, I remember thinking "Well, this is like two-thirds of a story," but after reading it again, it grew on me. It's creepy stuff; the collective visions and bad dreams of the artists, the monstrous identical Cthulhu Cult rituals practiced by groups scatted all over the globe who know nothing of the others, etc.
However, I disagree that all of Lovecraft's stories are the same. I can't really draw any direct parallels between Cthulhu and, say, The Outsider or Cool Air or The Music of Erich Zann. It's true that many of his stories deal with the much-vaunted "Cthulu Mythos" (The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow over Innsmouth come to mind) but these are hardly the same stories. Many borrow from the same basic ideas (the Cthulhu pantheon, ancient civilizations that pre-date Man, etc.) but you'd be hard-pressed to find an author (alive or dead) that didn't do the same in his or her body of work.
Oh, and The Rats in the Walls makes me shiver every time I read it.:-)
I completely agree on Poe's prose. This is not stuff that you're going to speed-read, but it's great to just sit down and take a bite out of. The opening pages of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, where Poe discusses the difference between true analysis and mere calculation, are great, and make an appropriate introduction to the engrossing mystery to come.
It's (Lord of the Rings) not that it's a hard read, it's that it moves way too slowly. IIRC, there's a good page about Treebeard when we first meet him. A simple, "he looks like an aging cypress tree with a face" would work pretty well.
In the preface to the unabridged version of "The Stand", Stephen King (truly an American icon) writes:
As it happens, I think that in really good stories, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. If that were not so, the following would be a perfectly acceptable version of "Handsel and Gretel":
Hansel and Gretel were two children with a nice father and a nice mother. The nice mother died, and the father married a bitch. The bitch wanted the kids out of the way so she'd have more money to spend on herself. She bullied her spineless, soft-headed hubby into taking Handsel and Gretel into the woods and killing them. The kids' father relented at the last moment, allowing them to live so they could starve to death in the woods instead of dying quickly and mercifully at the blade of his knife. While they were wandering around, they found a house made out of candy. It was owned by a witch who was into cannibalism. She locked them up and told them when they were good and fat, she was going to eat them. But the kids got the best of her. Hansel shoved her into her own oven. They found the witch's treasure, and they must have found a map, too, because they eventually arrived home again. When they got there, Dad gave the bitch the boot and they lived happily ever after. The End.
I don't know what you think, but for me, that version's a loser. The story is there, but it's not elegant. It's like a Cadillac with the chrome stripped off and the paint sanded down to dull metal. It goes somewhere, but it ain't, you know, boss.
LOTR is certainly not short on words, but taking all of the pages that describe the world of Middle-Earth and boiling them down to single Cliffs Notes-style sentences would kill the narrative. There are portions where Tolkien goes overboard (i.e., some of the details of Middle-Earth's history and the lineages of his characters) but on the whole, I thought that LOTR was pretty well-paced.
I mean, the trilogy isn't a Michael Crichton airport reader or a Thomas Harris psycho thriller. It's an epic journey through a world of splendor and grandeur. The guy invented his own languages for Middle-Earth, dude.:-) Rushing through Tolkien's world would not have done it justice.
A lot of times in the summer, I'm too busy with other things to spend a lot of time reading major novels, but in the time that I do get to read, I like to tear into collections of short stories, things that you can get through in an abbreviated sitting. Some of the stuff I read last summer:
The complete works of H.P. Lovecraft (Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!)
The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Stories and Novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Tales and Poems (the tales, mostly; I'm not big on poetry)
Not exactly sci-fi geek hacker stuff, of course, but I've read through most of Stephenson and Gibson's stuff and found that I like classic mystery/suspense as well. If it's hard sci-fi you're looking for, check out a book called The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, if you haven't already. It's old (circa 1950s or 1960s IIRC) but a great read. And then there's the classics like Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama or 2001 series.
Using chat rooms to connect soldiers to experts?
on
The Internet and The War
·
· Score: 5, Funny
*** soldier (jimbo@army.iq) has joined channel #help *** techie (whizkid@pentagon.mil) has joined channel #help <soldier> hey, anybody know how to get sand out of a gatling gun? <techie> Sure thing. let me look it up for you. brb <soldier> thanks *** katie (luvkitties@ipt.aol.com) has joined channel #help <katie> hay all!!!!!!!!!!!!! <soldier>... <katie> hi solder ASL?? <techie> Approximately when did you get the sand in the gatling gun? <katie> huh?? <soldier> about 15 minutes ago. <techie> okay, brb <katie> techie what r u talking about!! *** jenny (nsync_rulz@msn.com) has joined channel #help <katie> hi jenny how r u ltns!!!!!!! lol <jenny> K8E!!!! kisskiss <soldier>... <techie> How much sand would you say is inside the gatling gun? <jenny> wtf lol <soldier> well, there's quite a bit. it's draining out like an hourglass. <jenny> hour glass?? <katie> jenny geuss what, taylor told lisa today that he want's me 2 invite him 2 the dance on saturday <jenny> omfg LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL <jenny> wat did u say? did u say anything 2 him? <techie> The sand is draining out of the Gatling gun like an hourglass? <soldier> pretty much, yes. <katie> heehehe!! well i went up 2 him and said hi and then he bought me a bottle of mt dew code red!! LOL <techie> I see. have you tried shaking it vigorously? <katie> techie wtf would i shake it vigorusly, it would fizz over and explode *** techie rolls eyes <techie> soldier: Have you tried shaking the gatling gun vigorously? <soldier> no. brb *** taylor (linkinparkfan@earthlink.net) has joined channel #help <jenny> OMFG <katie> OMFG <soldier> OMFG <soldier> the damn thing just went off and took out the cook and the chaplain <katie> hi taylor, how r u???? <techie> I see. Recommend you replace gatling gun immediately. <taylor> hi katie <soldier> roger *** soldier has left channel #help <taylor> jenny, how r u? r u busy saturday night? <katie> f u jenny *** katie has left channel #help
Re:SAIC is Employee-Owned - Employee-Ownership Roc
on
Inside SAIC
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's a good question.:-) SAIC has got a broker/dealer subsidiary called Bull, Inc. that essentially operates an internal market that allows employees to buy or sell shares. The price is determined by a process too complicated for me to explain (based on performance of similar companies, other external market factors, etc.) It sounds a bit unusual (like the fox guarding the henhouse, since Bull is an SAIC subsidiary) but something must be working.
Re:SAIC is Employee-Owned - Employee-Ownership Roc
on
Inside SAIC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The interesting point about SAIC is the "private market" for company shares that the company itself maintains. How well does that really work for employees who don't want to have a disproportionate share of their savings tied to their company's stock?
Well, for one thing, the 401(K) plan gives you a list of mutual funds/bonds/etc. of varying degree of risk to invest in, pretty much the same as any typical 401(K). You don't need to invest in SAIC if you don't want to (although you certainly can.) SAIC's company match is given in the form of SAIC stock, but that is hardly unusual.
SAIC gives its employees lots of chances to buy company stock (and stock options), and it gives out things like stock options and fully-vested shares as performance bonuses, but nobody is required to invest their retirement savings in it. If somebody's got 100% of their retirement funds in SAIC stock, that's because that's the way they wanted it.
1. If you want gross-out factor, you go to see some gross-out movie. Raiders wasn't a gross-out film, it was a fun movie with a decent plot with some special effects to help where necessary. But nothing was done just to be gross and disgusting as was the case in Doom.
Largely agree.
2. Raiders and Last Crusade are based on things which many people consider historic. I.e., the Ark of the Covenant existed and really is "lost", and the chalice of the last supper obviously existed (he had to drink out of something!). Wheter they had the powers attributed to them in the movies is certainly open to discussion, but the movies were based on historical artifacts and placed in the Nazi era. Take some historical objects and have fun with them. In Doom we're talking mass child abductions and glowing Shakras that make the fields green. Please...
Well, this is a bit of a stretch. I think the most you can say is that the second film was based on a different mythology than the other two were. The Thuggee cult and their battle with British colonial forces in India are as much a part of historical fact as Nazi Germany is. Their vast underground caverns and armies of slave children used to search for the Shankara stones are as much of a plot device as Hitler's "obsession with religious artifacts" was in the first and third films. Shiva and Kali are as much a part of Indian culture as Yahweh is of Western culture.
I think the bottom line is that the Indiana Jones films are not intended to be documentaries. They're action movies. I like to see things I've never seen before in a movie, and I've never seen people jump out of an airplane in an inflatable raft, or go on a wild, careening mine car chase through twisty, lava-filled tunnels, or somebody severing a rope bridge over a deep chasm while standing in the middle of it. On that level, Temple of Doom is great. Gross-out scenes aside, of course.:-)
All of the Indiana Jones movies are billed as action/adventures. If Temple of Doom didn't have enough action or adventure for you, you need to check your pulse. Really, I think the reason that most people are so down on the second film is that it's so "different" from the first one. This is probably to be expected, since the story was not written by the same Spielberg/Lucas team that (with others) wrote the first and the third films. However, it's also refreshing to see a director willing take a fresh angle on a story rather than simply rehashing what's already been done in order to make more money as quickly as possible.
Having said that, if I were Spielberg, I would have made a couple of changes to the film. (In particular, I thought that the whole "gross-out" dinner scene was silly and unnecessary.) However, Temple was still a pretty wild ride, a perfect example of what Roger Ebert calls the "Bruised Forearm Movie."
Slashdot Mirror
A gibibyte? Jesus. I'm aware that these are standard SI terms, but at some point you've got to let common sense step in.
My production server at work has 24 gigabytes of RAM, by which I mean it has 24 x 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 bytes of RAM. I assume that you would claim this machine has 24 gibibytes of RAM, or that your desktop has 512 mebibytes of RAM, or that this particular object module is 72 kibibytes in size, then? If I started throwing around terms like that, people would look at me like I had gone completely batshit.
"megabyte" and "gigabyte", as they pertain to computer storage, have always been based off of multiples of 1024. This is different than the traditional meanings of these prefixes, but that's a separate issue (and it's hardly new; they've been around for more than fifty years.) What is new is how HDD manufacturers have silently discarded the existing meanings in order to artificially inflate the size of their media. This is a phenomenon that has come about only in recent years (i.e., in the past 5 years or so.) The fact that these manufacturers protest "But look! Technically, we're right!" is not particularly meaningful to me. 40 MB hard drives used to be 40 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. 512 MB of RAM is still 512 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, the same as it's always been. And you claim that "HD makers redefined squat?"
Another obvious example of this is CD-R versus DVD-R. A Yellow Book CD has a capacity of 650 MB, by which I mean 650 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, which is well above 650,000,000 bytes. DVD-R, on the other hand, which is advertised as a 4.7 GB medium, can only hold ~4.35 GB as gigabytes have traditionally been interpreted. So you've got one interpretation for CD-R, and another for DVD-R.
Now, you can crow about SI units all you want, and you can go around talking about how many mebibytes of RAM your laptop has and how many kibibytes this e-mail attachment consumes, but if you don't see that there has been a recent redefinition of standard computer terminology by media manufacturers to hype their products, then you are being either naive or deliberately obtuse.
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. It's true that FF7+ is heavy on FMV and animated cut-scenes, and some of them are tedious to sit through during repeated trips through the game (i.e., "Cloud's Past" in FF7.) However, there's a lot of shit to do in these games. I am currently replaying FF7 just for the hell of it, and I'm still finding things that I didn't know were there (case in point: this was the first run through the game that I discovered the Group Room in the Honey Bee Inn, and I rather wish that I hadn't.) You have two optional characters that you would probably miss on the first run through the game if you didn't know about them, lots of optional side-quests, and then other activities such as Chocobo raising (which gives you access to tons of hidden items and magic, such as the Knights of the Round materia.)
.. no open overworld to explore! What's up with that?
Gameplay doesn't necessarily have to suffer when cinematics are introduced. For example, the materia system in FF7 is probably the most interesting, customizable, and powerful features found in the series (and if you know what you're doing with it, you can make yourself obscenely powerful.) Some of the cinematics are distractions, but others actually add to the gameplay. I remember watching some of the FMV in FF7 for the first time in 1997, and my jaw literally dropped. It takes the player out of a pixellated 2-D world and puts them into a world that really feels alive. And there's something to be said for that.
Having said that, the cinematics can be overdone, as you note. FFX is probably the worst offender in this category. While the graphics, sound, and music were great, the sheer linearity of FFX shocked me. I had hoped that Square would harness the power of the PS2 to create a world that was at least as open as the world of FF7 was. Instead, they created a world where you really weren't free to travel at will until the end of the game, and even then you could only travel to certain spots on the world map
Have you considered the idea that perhaps most Americans like the idea of making the world more like us?
/want/ to make the rest of the world more like the US?
And the 19 hijackers that flew planes into the WTC and Pentagon two years ago liked the idea of making the world more like them. If you believe that the totality of your culture is superior to each and every other culture on the face of the Earth, then you will obviously want to make the rest of the world more like you. This does not mean, however, that the rest of the world is obligated to become more like you.
It's an interesting choice of words, by the way; "making" the rest of the world like us, as opposed to "helping" the rest of the world become more like us. The former implies force and compulsion, whereas the latter implies aid and assistance.
Also, can you understand why the "Project" guys might
I certainly would want to make sure that other peoples and nations who sincerely want help to reform their societies and governments gets whatever assistance they need, but I cannot support the (thoroughly bizarre) notion of "imposing freedom." America should lead by example, not by force. America should be respected and looked up to, not hated and feared. Nations and groups who actively decide to make an enemy of America should fear our capabilities, but the recent oderint dum metuant policy of this administration has gone far beyond that.
The PNAC's agenda is pretty transparent: a "New American Century", regardless of whether the recipients of said Century actually want it or not. And that's horribly, horribly wrong. If the underdeveloped world is to become more like America, it should be because it wants to become more like America, not because it's been forced to. If we have to resort to military force to spread our way of life, then we've taken a very long stroll down a very wrong road.
The reason that there's not much interest in Venus is that the atmospheric pressure is 100 times greater than it is here on Earth, the temperature is hot enough to melt lead, and it rains sulfuric acid. Not the most hospitable environment for exploration, at least on the surface, although the surface has been mapped using radar (which is really the only way you can do it, given the planet's perpetual thick cloud cover.)
That aside, the Soviets actually were able to put several landers on the surface of Venus in the 1970s and early 1980s (check out HarveyBirdman's link.) None of them were able to operate for very long in such extreme conditions, of course, but most of them returned valuable scientific data and some of them even returned surface photographs.
There's far more interest in Mars because that planet would be explorable and perhaps habitable by humans, given the proper facilities. A day on Mars is roughly the same as a day on Earth (24.5 hours or so) so there would not be major adjustments needed to things like the human sleep cycle. Compare that to Venus, where the length of the day (243 Earth days) is longer than the length of an entire year (225 Earth days!)
Resident Evil is a great game, but the acting truly deserves the label that it gets. I think the worst example is right out of the chute, where Chris Redfield is missing and Barry and Jill find some blood on the floor of the mansion, and Barry asks "Is this .. Chris' blood?" in the same tone of voice that you might ask "Are you going to eat that sandwich?"
Of course, I think right before that, there's an exchange like this:
BARRY: What? What is this?
JILL: What is it?
BARRY: Blood!
Apparently, Jill and Barry have never seen blood before?
In terms of the game engine, there's not a lot of comparison between Doom and Wolf3D. The Wolf3D engine was primitive compared to Doom; most of the rooms were essentially large squares or rectangles, the lighting was pretty static, the list of enemies was pretty limited, and all of the levels were flat. Compare that to Doom, with its sectors of (basically) arbitrary shape and size, its introduction of sector height so that you could create staircases, trenches, walls, etc., its vastly-improved lighting capabilities, its vast array of special line types, its long list of monster types, etc.
:-)
Wolf3D was a ground-breaking game, but not nearly as ground-breaking as Doom was. Hell, I think I have more fun playing the original Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein from the early 1980s.
.. what are some of the "extremist ideas that reek of communism" that are "frequently explored" on Slashdot? From my experience on Slashdot, there are just as many right-wing zealots here as there are left-wing zealots. For every person espousing (for example) a completely public government health care system, there's another person arguing (for example) that we ought to end income taxes and all entitlement programs. It all goes back to the original point: the "tech community" has no coherent political agenda.
Pretty much the same thing happened in both True Romance and Reservoir Dogs, though I think there were more than three people involved in the standoff in True Romance.
In Reservoir Dogs, Joe shoots Mr. Orange, Mr. White shoots Joe, Nice Guy Eddie shoots Mr. White, Nice Guy Eddie shoots Mr. White again, and Mr. White shoots Nice Guy Eddie.
Now we just have to figure out which one is SCO.
Did anybody ever see that old Quentin Tarantino movie "True Romance", where it ends with like five guys in a room, all pointing guns at each other and engaging in a violent shootout where they pretty much all die? (Hell, I suppose that could describe pretty much any Tarantino movie.) Let's hope that Red Hat doesn't end up being Mr. Orange.
So I guess we should cover up all of those mass graves, put all those children back in prison, get Chemical Ali back into the lab, get those torture racks greased, throw all of those 'Big Brother Saddam' pictures back up in Baghdad, and leave a fruit basket with a letter of apology. You're right...we are indeed in the Twilight Zone.
:-)
You would have a point if the Iraq war had been justified in terms of "We need to remove Saddam because he's mean to his people." It wasn't. The entire war was predicated on the supposed threat that Iraq posed to the United States, and its status as a "terrorist state" with massive stockpiles of "ultimate weapons" (President Bush's words.) Tony Blair even told the British parliament that Iraq had the capability to launch an attack on the UK in as little as 45 minutes. It's been months now since the fall of Baghdad, and the only thing we have to show for this war is a piece of a nuclear centrifuge that some guy buried in his backyard before the first Gulf War. That may justify the war in your eyes, but the families of the hundreds of American servicemen (and women) killed in this conflict might have some different thoughts.
I'm glad that Hussein is gone. Dead or alive, let's hope he rots in peace. But all of this "Well, Iraq wasn't much of a threat to us, but look at the mass graves! Look at the torture devices!" is Monday morning quarterbacking. It's great that the Pentagon has media-savvy people that are able to invent scary-sounding nicknames (i.e., "Mrs. Anthrax") for the people that it kills or captures, but at the end of the day I would have had a lot more respect for the administration if they had just been honest about things. Hussein was a brutal dictator, but the world is full of brutal dictators, and the last time I checked, the United States wasn't drawing up plans to invade Burma or Zimbabwe.
You sound partisan, bitter, and illogical.
Whereas you are obviously objective, clear-headed, and perfectly logical.
Everybody is sensible, so long as they say things that you agree with.
You have built your platform on the hopes that the United States will fail in its endeavours. That is disgusting.
I can't speak for the original poster, but do you want to know what's really disgusting? I have six friends who are in harm's way in Iraq right now. What's disgusting is people like you who implicitly suggest that I want to see harm come to them to prove a political point. I have no desire to see the United States will "fail" in any of its endeavours. That doesn't change the fact that there are endeavours that I would have preferred us to avoid in the first place. See, if it were up to me, these guys would be sitting in my living room and drinking beer with me instead of being stationed in a country populated by people that hate them even more than they hated the dictator that they just got rid of.
The world is a safer place for both Americans and Iraqis today than it was a few months ago, and it cost fewer lives than anyone estimated.
You've got to be kidding me. At my workplace, some co-workers and I were scheduled to attend a May conference in South America, and the trip was cancelled out of war-related concerns for our safety. It has never been more dangerous to be an American traveling abroad, and the Iraq war only made this worse. The primary contributing factor in the 9/11 attacks was fundamentalist Muslim hatred of the United States, and if you have evidence that the Iraq war helped to mitigate this, then I confess that I would be curious to see it. I want to be clear about this: I do not subscribe to the theory that the United States deserved the 9/11 attacks because of our foreign policy; it was a heinous and cowardly attack that no nation on this planet deserves. But our foreign policy in the past year or so has done much to fan the flames of the same hatred. And for who? For what? Saddam Hussein? This is a third-rate dictat
I think what C and C++ really lack is the option to turn on array range checking.
How do C and C++, as languages, lack this? You're talking about specific implementations of the languages, not the languages themselves. When you read or write outside of array bounds, the language standards say in no uncertain terms that the behavior is undefined. That means that anything (and everything) can happen. Permissible undefined behavior includes printing an error message such as "Attempt to write outside of array bounds at line 427 of foo.c."
There is nothing in the language standards that prevent runtime array bounds checking. The reason why you don't see many implementations doing it is the performance hit, which works against one of the biggest selling points of C and C++ (speed.) And, as you say, there already exist tools with which you can diagnose runtime memory problems.
It might sound morbid but they should have waited until he was dead.
That may be true, but all of the good dead Presidents have already been used. I mean, the "USS Grover Cleveland" or "USS Millard Fillmore" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
I do realize how complicated the shuttle is. I also know that they are required to take the entire thing apart after it returns from space, requalify each piece, and rebuild the entire thing from the ground up.
This is simply untrue. I have no idea where you think you heard this from, but the type of maintenance that you describe only happens when the engineers deem it necessary (usually every 8 to 10 flights.) They do not "rebuild the entire thing" every time a shuttle returns from space, and it is extraordinarily dishonest of you to propagate this.
NASA did do good work, 30 years ago, but they haven't done much of anything since.
Correct. Other than the Shuttle program itself (which is aging but still a marvel of human engineering) and all of the science that has resulted from it, the Voyager missions to explore the outer solar system, the Viking and Pathfinder missions to Mars (the latter of which involved JPL actually driving a rover around on the surface of the planet) and the resulting hundredfold increase in mankind's knowledge of Mars, the Galileo mission that spent years studying and providing unprecedented amounts of information on the Jovian (that's Jupiter) system, the Cassini mission that will do the same in the Saturnian system, the Deep Space 1 mission that involved an actual rendezvous with comet Borrelly, numerous Earth science projects that enable us to map this planet, monitor resources, respond to disasters, and deal with everything from famine to forest fires, the International Space Station, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Oh, and then there's that Hubble thing, which has expanded mankind's knowledge of the universe more than any other instrument in history. And I'm sure I'm forgetting several prominent projects (sorry, fellas.)
Other than that, yeah, NASA's been pretty much inert.
My tax dollars are higher because NASA has refused to scrap the shuttle.
Oh, for God's sake. NASA's budget is approximately one quarter of one percent of the entire federal outlay. If you pay (for example) $400 in federal taxes for each paycheck, less than a dollar goes to NASA. (And if you get paid every two weeks, this means that you pay about $25/year to NASA.) Even at the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s, NASA's budget was only slightly over 4 percent of the national budget as a whole. If you want to complain about "your tax dollars", start pointing your fingers at certain Senators who order aircraft carriers that the military doesn't even want just so that a company in their Congressional district can land a lucrative contract.
If we could cut all of the self-serving pork out of the federal budget, we'd have enough money to fund ten NASAs.
Yeah, I dunno. "Beverly Hills, 6USG7 Y7B3E" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
I'd still watch anything with Tiffany-Amber Thiessen in it, though.
You link to a single post from a Slashdot user making unsubstantiated claims about NPR as evidence of its bias? I listened to NPR during the impeachment, and I certainly don't recall hearing them play "We Shall Overcome" during any breaks. A Google search for 'NPR "We Shall Overcome" impeachment' yields less than a page of results, none of which (after a cursory glance) has anything to do with the claim in the post that you linked. A Usenet archive search yields zero results. If there were any truth to this claim, the FreeRepublics and WorldNetDailys and Fox Newses and conservative newsgroups would have been all over it.
It's ironic that you complain about not being able to trust NPR and then use examples like this as your evidence.
(And yes, you are right, it started with SLS. And backups on a floppy streamer... And a VLB graphics card... And alt.os.linux... And kernel patches via Usenet...) *sigh*
;-)
Why *sigh*? Them were the good ole days of Linux.
I hope it's fair use because the material I quoted was written in 1991 by Stephen King, not the Grimm brothers. :-)
The Call of Cthulhu is a fantastic story, but I agree that the ending is anticlimactic. The whole story is relayed second-hand by a narrator, and reading through it the first time, I expected the narrator himself to end up involved in the events of the story (that is, with Cthulhu, not with simply paying visits to some of the other characters.) At the time, I remember thinking "Well, this is like two-thirds of a story," but after reading it again, it grew on me. It's creepy stuff; the collective visions and bad dreams of the artists, the monstrous identical Cthulhu Cult rituals practiced by groups scatted all over the globe who know nothing of the others, etc.
:-)
However, I disagree that all of Lovecraft's stories are the same. I can't really draw any direct parallels between Cthulhu and, say, The Outsider or Cool Air or The Music of Erich Zann. It's true that many of his stories deal with the much-vaunted "Cthulu Mythos" (The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow over Innsmouth come to mind) but these are hardly the same stories. Many borrow from the same basic ideas (the Cthulhu pantheon, ancient civilizations that pre-date Man, etc.) but you'd be hard-pressed to find an author (alive or dead) that didn't do the same in his or her body of work.
Oh, and The Rats in the Walls makes me shiver every time I read it.
I completely agree on Poe's prose. This is not stuff that you're going to speed-read, but it's great to just sit down and take a bite out of. The opening pages of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, where Poe discusses the difference between true analysis and mere calculation, are great, and make an appropriate introduction to the engrossing mystery to come.
In the preface to the unabridged version of "The Stand", Stephen King (truly an American icon) writes:LOTR is certainly not short on words, but taking all of the pages that describe the world of Middle-Earth and boiling them down to single Cliffs Notes-style sentences would kill the narrative. There are portions where Tolkien goes overboard (i.e., some of the details of Middle-Earth's history and the lineages of his characters) but on the whole, I thought that LOTR was pretty well-paced.
I mean, the trilogy isn't a Michael Crichton airport reader or a Thomas Harris psycho thriller. It's an epic journey through a world of splendor and grandeur. The guy invented his own languages for Middle-Earth, dude.
- The complete works of H.P. Lovecraft (Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!)
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Stories and Novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Tales and Poems (the tales, mostly; I'm not big on poetry)
Not exactly sci-fi geek hacker stuff, of course, but I've read through most of Stephenson and Gibson's stuff and found that I like classic mystery/suspense as well. If it's hard sci-fi you're looking for, check out a book called The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, if you haven't already. It's old (circa 1950s or 1960s IIRC) but a great read. And then there's the classics like Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama or 2001 series.*** soldier (jimbo@army.iq) has joined channel #help ... ...
*** techie (whizkid@pentagon.mil) has joined channel #help
<soldier> hey, anybody know how to get sand out of a gatling gun?
<techie> Sure thing. let me look it up for you. brb
<soldier> thanks
*** katie (luvkitties@ipt.aol.com) has joined channel #help
<katie> hay all!!!!!!!!!!!!!
<soldier>
<katie> hi solder ASL??
<techie> Approximately when did you get the sand in the gatling gun?
<katie> huh??
<soldier> about 15 minutes ago.
<techie> okay, brb
<katie> techie what r u talking about!!
*** jenny (nsync_rulz@msn.com) has joined channel #help
<katie> hi jenny how r u ltns!!!!!!! lol
<jenny> K8E!!!! kisskiss
<soldier>
<techie> How much sand would you say is inside the gatling gun?
<jenny> wtf lol
<soldier> well, there's quite a bit. it's draining out like an hourglass.
<jenny> hour glass??
<katie> jenny geuss what, taylor told lisa today that he want's me 2 invite him 2 the dance on saturday
<jenny> omfg LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
<jenny> wat did u say? did u say anything 2 him?
<techie> The sand is draining out of the Gatling gun like an hourglass?
<soldier> pretty much, yes.
<katie> heehehe!! well i went up 2 him and said hi and then he bought me a bottle of mt dew code red!! LOL
<techie> I see. have you tried shaking it vigorously?
<katie> techie wtf would i shake it vigorusly, it would fizz over and explode
*** techie rolls eyes
<techie> soldier: Have you tried shaking the gatling gun vigorously?
<soldier> no. brb
*** taylor (linkinparkfan@earthlink.net) has joined channel #help
<jenny> OMFG
<katie> OMFG
<soldier> OMFG
<soldier> the damn thing just went off and took out the cook and the chaplain
<katie> hi taylor, how r u????
<techie> I see. Recommend you replace gatling gun immediately.
<taylor> hi katie
<soldier> roger
*** soldier has left channel #help
<taylor> jenny, how r u? r u busy saturday night?
<katie> f u jenny
*** katie has left channel #help
That's a good question. :-) SAIC has got a broker/dealer subsidiary called Bull, Inc. that essentially operates an internal market that allows employees to buy or sell shares. The price is determined by a process too complicated for me to explain (based on performance of similar companies, other external market factors, etc.) It sounds a bit unusual (like the fox guarding the henhouse, since Bull is an SAIC subsidiary) but something must be working.
The interesting point about SAIC is the "private market" for company shares that the company itself maintains. How well does that really work for employees who don't want to have a disproportionate share of their savings tied to their company's stock?
Well, for one thing, the 401(K) plan gives you a list of mutual funds/bonds/etc. of varying degree of risk to invest in, pretty much the same as any typical 401(K). You don't need to invest in SAIC if you don't want to (although you certainly can.) SAIC's company match is given in the form of SAIC stock, but that is hardly unusual.
SAIC gives its employees lots of chances to buy company stock (and stock options), and it gives out things like stock options and fully-vested shares as performance bonuses, but nobody is required to invest their retirement savings in it. If somebody's got 100% of their retirement funds in SAIC stock, that's because that's the way they wanted it.
1. If you want gross-out factor, you go to see some gross-out movie. Raiders wasn't a gross-out film, it was a fun movie with a decent plot with some special effects to help where necessary. But nothing was done just to be gross and disgusting as was the case in Doom.
:-)
Largely agree.
2. Raiders and Last Crusade are based on things which many people consider historic. I.e., the Ark of the Covenant existed and really is "lost", and the chalice of the last supper obviously existed (he had to drink out of something!). Wheter they had the powers attributed to them in the movies is certainly open to discussion, but the movies were based on historical artifacts and placed in the Nazi era. Take some historical objects and have fun with them. In Doom we're talking mass child abductions and glowing Shakras that make the fields green. Please...
Well, this is a bit of a stretch. I think the most you can say is that the second film was based on a different mythology than the other two were. The Thuggee cult and their battle with British colonial forces in India are as much a part of historical fact as Nazi Germany is. Their vast underground caverns and armies of slave children used to search for the Shankara stones are as much of a plot device as Hitler's "obsession with religious artifacts" was in the first and third films. Shiva and Kali are as much a part of Indian culture as Yahweh is of Western culture.
I think the bottom line is that the Indiana Jones films are not intended to be documentaries. They're action movies. I like to see things I've never seen before in a movie, and I've never seen people jump out of an airplane in an inflatable raft, or go on a wild, careening mine car chase through twisty, lava-filled tunnels, or somebody severing a rope bridge over a deep chasm while standing in the middle of it. On that level, Temple of Doom is great. Gross-out scenes aside, of course.
All of the Indiana Jones movies are billed as action/adventures. If Temple of Doom didn't have enough action or adventure for you, you need to check your pulse. Really, I think the reason that most people are so down on the second film is that it's so "different" from the first one. This is probably to be expected, since the story was not written by the same Spielberg/Lucas team that (with others) wrote the first and the third films. However, it's also refreshing to see a director willing take a fresh angle on a story rather than simply rehashing what's already been done in order to make more money as quickly as possible.
Having said that, if I were Spielberg, I would have made a couple of changes to the film. (In particular, I thought that the whole "gross-out" dinner scene was silly and unnecessary.) However, Temple was still a pretty wild ride, a perfect example of what Roger Ebert calls the "Bruised Forearm Movie."