Take a really close look at some Lego pieces someday. Then have a look at some other toys in your toy store. Lego's manufacturing tolerances are very narrow indeed, and they must be; if they didn't you'd not be able to put blocks together. Modern manufacturing has improved, to be sure, but they have been doing this for decades.
The article suggests to me that game companies will only need average programmers to make real good games, but they will need some absolute geniuses if they want to optimise them.
I would suggest that what game companies need to produce good games are good, creative game designers.
Unless, of course, you are hacking together Virtua Strip Poker, in which case you have my full blessing to spend 95% of the budget on pretty graphics;-)
I'm sure Heinlein wrote a bunch of stuff that would kill you if you tried it.
for example
- travelling back in time and going for a drive with your mother while the younger version of you watches from the back seat - your mother getting very randy - having sex with your own mother
http://www.prb.com.au/ - a superbly built Seven clone to be had for about 35k aussie. This is well within the "toy budget" of many people in the IT industry, mine included.
i have. check out the indycam driver. admittedly it's a baroque piece of hardware (though a fun toy!) on an 11-year-old platform but it is pretty half-arsed and barely working. i'd fix it (the specs are all freely available and it doesn't look like more than a weekend of effort) if my Indy had enough disk space to untar kernel source:/
last year I tried to build a linux-mips cross compiler toolchain to aid the process, but halfway through compiling gcc my PC's cpu died, and i haven't bothered replacing it since:-(
he actually has been quite useful. his contributions to The Great Game, for example, are IMHO quite spiffy and appropriate for the game. the tourist character class, for example
i feel the same way when people trot out this tired old line:
"*bsd is better because walnut creek cdrom / hotmail / yahoo / obscure tequila-producing community in mexico use it, linux users are obviously teh sux!!"
the company i work for has migrated (spanning around 9 years) the core-business application from ultrix/mips to digunix/alpha to solaris/sparc to linux/x86. i think we'll be staying on linux for a good while, as worthy contenders don't appear very often. the only real constant has been the gnu tools, and we are very grateful for them.
corporations, public ones at least, have the sole aim of filling their shareholders' pockets. they are required to do the best they legally can for their shareholders; this must always be the first consideration when they hand down orders to the little peons in the corporate machine rooms.
with the above in mind it makes perfect sense for them to talk themselves up and the competition down.
as for long range planning... have you ever chatted with a director or CEO of a decently sized corporation? you'd be surprised...
yes, Apache config sucks balls. You can, however, make it at least sortof tolerable by structuring your basic httpd.conf (deny/allow, systemwide aliases, etc) sensibly and then putting the vhosts in Includeed directories.
I haven't done thousands of sites, but I've done hundreds, and this worked very nicely.
It's also a matter of what oil you use. If you don't use performance oil then your engine is just being suffocated.
spoken like a true automotive engineer... not.
actually even the "performance" oils available today (ELF, Mobil 1, blah blah blah) are pretty crap. a friend has been doing some reasonably careful testing of many different oils and oil additives (old Datsun L-series cylinder head modified to mount in a lathe bed with the camshaft attached to the lathe chuck) and found that none of them were particularly good.
What he did find during this testing, however, is that there is an additive you can buy that apparently used to be present in performance oils (since removed for pollution reasons) that when added in a 4-parts-per-100 ratio, or even less, makes a massive difference to the length of time that the oil will protect surfaces that are moving against each other (camshaft lobes and valve buckets in this test)
in summary, he found that "performance" oils do make a difference, but not a terribly significant difference.
I'm not sure which way to lean WRT connection lifetimes vs. gzip cpu utilisation. However...
cpu time is NOT cheap in either case. sure, fast CPUs might be cheap, and the servers containing them also reasonably cheap, but there is a pretty big difference in operating cost between a mostly idle cluster of 1u boxes and a well loaded cluster of 1u boxes.
the well loaded cluster will want LOTS more power and generate LOTS more heat. not only that, but in the Dells we use here (eg. PE1850, PE2850, PE6850, etc) if just one fan dies, ALL of the other fans in that server will run at full speed in an attempt to compensate, sucking even more power. Then as things heat up, your AC requirements also go up. This costs many beans.
In short, you can't just look at one aspect in isolation. There are many flow-on effects!
I work on cars for a hobby rather than computers, so I use air tools; in place of a dremel I'd use a die grinder, angle grinder, drill, blah blah blah. All of them are fscking noisy. I use some aircraft-mechanic earmuffs:-)
Convenient, though; no recharging batteries, and the "power point" is at the near end of the air hose rather than a metre or two away at the end of a cable. Switching tools takes hardly any time at all. They're generally cheaper, too.
I'd often want nose/mouth protection, too. Inhaling tiny bits of very hot flying $METAL isn't fun:-(
There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots.
Slashdot Mirror
damn, i hadn't seen a /. id lower than mine in ages :-(
perhaps we could start an old boys club, drink lots of gin, and go hunting foxes. in that order
Take a really close look at some Lego pieces someday. Then have a look at
some other toys in your toy store. Lego's manufacturing tolerances are very
narrow indeed, and they must be; if they didn't you'd not be able to
put blocks together. Modern manufacturing has improved, to be sure, but they
have been doing this for decades.
The article suggests to me that game companies will only need average programmers to make real good games, but they will need some absolute geniuses if they want to optimise them.
;-)
I would suggest that what game companies need to produce good games are good, creative game designers.
Unless, of course, you are hacking together Virtua Strip Poker, in which case you have my full blessing to spend 95% of the budget on pretty graphics
eh, mine (australian delivered scph9002, i think, and with a stealth-mod) still works fine.
the earlier ones didn't last so long though, something to do with the CD transport and things being made of plastic instead of metal
I'm sure Heinlein wrote a bunch of stuff that would kill you if you tried it.
for example
- travelling back in time and going for a drive with your mother while the younger version of you watches from the back seat
- your mother getting very randy
- having sex with your own mother
not sure if it'd kill you, but it's fairly warped
But people who sit down at a Microsoft product can generally use it immediately.
:-(
On behalf of the ~50 other people in my workplace I must respectfully disagree.
http://www.prbaustralia.com.au/ - preview mode is handy :/
tripe, again.
http://www.prb.com.au/ - a superbly built Seven clone to be had for about 35k aussie. This is well within the "toy budget" of many people in the IT industry, mine included.
tripe. fast** cars are pretty useful on racetracks...
** not necessarily meaning "powerful" - the lovely Lotus Elise / Exige are superb examples, as is any Lotus Seven (or Seven clone)
i have. check out the indycam driver. admittedly it's a baroque piece of hardware (though a fun toy!) on an 11-year-old platform but it is pretty half-arsed and barely working. i'd fix it (the specs are all freely available and it doesn't look like more than a weekend of effort) if my Indy had enough disk space to untar kernel source :/
:-(
last year I tried to build a linux-mips cross compiler toolchain to aid the process, but halfway through compiling gcc my PC's cpu died, and i haven't bothered replacing it since
indeed. for the purpose of deciding who is running something, is autorun.inf "us" or "them" ?
i think you misspelled "arse"
unless, of course, you mean that the movie industry has its head in a donkey. now there's an idea for a web comic!
he actually has been quite useful. his contributions to The Great Game, for example, are IMHO quite spiffy and appropriate for the game. the tourist character class, for example
i feel the same way when people trot out this tired old line:
"*bsd is better because walnut creek cdrom / hotmail / yahoo / obscure tequila-producing community in mexico use it, linux users are obviously teh sux!!"
the company i work for has migrated (spanning around 9 years) the core-business application from ultrix/mips to digunix/alpha to solaris/sparc to linux/x86. i think we'll be staying on linux for a good while, as worthy contenders don't appear very often. the only real constant has been the gnu tools, and we are very grateful for them.
tripe.
corporations, public ones at least, have the sole aim of filling their shareholders' pockets. they are required to do the best they legally can for their shareholders; this must always be the first consideration when they hand down orders to the little peons in the corporate machine rooms.
with the above in mind it makes perfect sense for them to talk themselves up and the competition down.
as for long range planning... have you ever chatted with a director or CEO of a decently sized corporation? you'd be surprised...
yes, Apache config sucks balls. You can, however, make it at least sortof tolerable by structuring your basic httpd.conf (deny/allow, systemwide aliases, etc) sensibly and then putting the vhosts in Includeed directories.
I haven't done thousands of sites, but I've done hundreds, and this worked very nicely.
yep, bigips are lovely, lovely things. easily worth the small number of beans you hand over for them
if nobody has seen a license, can it still start a flamefest? :-)
they could at least let you choose from a list of responses, or something.
gasp. like ultima underworld? I think I was still in high school back then!
*wrinkles*
It's also a matter of what oil you use. If you don't use performance oil then your engine is just being suffocated.
spoken like a true automotive engineer... not.
actually even the "performance" oils available today (ELF, Mobil 1, blah blah blah) are pretty crap. a friend has been doing some reasonably careful testing of many different oils and oil additives (old Datsun L-series cylinder head modified to mount in a lathe bed with the camshaft attached to the lathe chuck) and found that none of them were particularly good.
What he did find during this testing, however, is that there is an additive you can buy that apparently used to be present in performance oils (since removed for pollution reasons) that when added in a 4-parts-per-100 ratio, or even less, makes a massive difference to the length of time that the oil will protect surfaces that are moving against each other (camshaft lobes and valve buckets in this test)
in summary, he found that "performance" oils do make a difference, but not a terribly significant difference.
At what point is nudity considered art and not pornography?
As a friend of mine says so sagely...
It's not porn if it's in black and white!
(He is an extremely talented amateur photographer who is looking to go professional)
I'm not sure which way to lean WRT connection lifetimes vs. gzip cpu utilisation. However...
cpu time is NOT cheap in either case. sure, fast CPUs might be cheap, and the servers containing them also reasonably cheap, but there is a pretty big difference in operating cost between a mostly idle cluster of 1u boxes and a well loaded cluster of 1u boxes.
the well loaded cluster will want LOTS more power and generate LOTS more heat. not only that, but in the Dells we use here (eg. PE1850, PE2850, PE6850, etc) if just one fan dies, ALL of the other fans in that server will run at full speed in an attempt to compensate, sucking even more power. Then as things heat up, your AC requirements also go up. This costs many beans.
In short, you can't just look at one aspect in isolation. There are many flow-on effects!
bollocks, it's a triangle with four sides!
big uptimes are easy :-) just don't turn your computer off or reboot it or have a power failure.
voila, big uptime!
sleeping on macs is nice, too
I work on cars for a hobby rather than computers, so I use air tools; in place of a dremel I'd use a die grinder, angle grinder, drill, blah blah blah. All of them are fscking noisy. I use some aircraft-mechanic earmuffs :-)
Convenient, though; no recharging batteries, and the "power point" is at the near end of the air hose rather than a metre or two away at the end of a cable. Switching tools takes hardly any time at all. They're generally cheaper, too.
I'd often want nose/mouth protection, too. Inhaling tiny bits of very hot flying $METAL isn't fun :-(
There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots.