The only theory I can think of is that you learn to spell when you are very young (elementary school, IIRC.) I know I used to be a lazy student, and didn't want to study. That's changed now.
So now I'm the kind of person who can quote grammar rules from the Chicago manual, yet still can't spell words like probably.
#4 was meant to be funny. It probably wasn't. Sorry.
This is slashdot - comments without spelling errors don't get past the filter.
There's a difference between prevelant and mainstream. Look at the colours house and building interiors are painted. White, cream, eggshell, beige: All mainstream. Unsaturated blues, or trims in dark colours: Prevelent, not mainstream, either a trend or a fad. Highway sign yellow or blood red: either individualistic or stupid, depending on whether you like it or not.
Yes, many people think I'm a dick. Many people think you're a dick too. It's part of life.
Which brings us back full circle to the original article: the question often is whether personal expression is worth the stigma that some attach to highly visible tattoos, nose rings and the like. People have different perceptions of highly visible non-mainstream things. If you want to show off your hardware and tatoos, be my guest. Just don't complain if you get judged on them, because that's life. Everyone's entitled to their opinion.
And yes, I know I'm inconsistent. That's part of life too. Yes, I could be losing the most valuable employee I ever had. If I do, my choice, my loss. I can live with it.
My company, my rules. You don't want to play along, find somewhere else to work.
If you're unwilling to follow something as simple as the dress codes, what does that tell me about what to expect when I ask you to do something important that you don't want to do?
Yes, piercings, tatoos, beachwear as office wear, etc, has become more prevelent. But it's still not mainstream, and it's definately not corporate. Some people are still offended or uncomfortable with it. If you don't care about other people's sensitivities, even if you think they're stupid, why should they care about you?
And c'mon, "modifications" like piercings and tatoos are prevelent enough that they're no longer individualistic; people are just following the crowd. I hire leaders, not sheep. You want to express your individuality, dump a litre of gas on your face and light it - Trust me, you'll be at the head of the trend, and I'll at least respect your individuality and courage, if not your intelligence.
I used to date an architect. I once said to her that if she had to put up with the kind of flux, changing requirements, misunderstanding of basics, etc, that I do, she'd go insane.
She then proceeded to spend a few hours giving me horror stories of her customers being exactly like the lusers in the above story.
At the end, I realized that we actually have it easy. It's annoying and time consuming to rip out pieces of software and replace them, but it's a lot easier than replacing the 15th floor of a 60 floor building because they suddenly realized that you were right in the first place, and they did need that much air conditioning / server space, and, "oh, I know we said that since we didn't need it, we wanted to save money and have you spec the building for a max load of 1800 lbs/foot instead of the 2800 you recommended, but now we need it to be 2800 lbs/foot...."
We don't need Java, we need people to f$cking learn to program.
Actually, I think we need more people to learn that programming is only a part of the job, and worrying more about doing what needs to be done and less about how l33t they are.
Personally, I think I have better things to do than chase down memory leaks. Java (for example; not my favourite language) saves me from worrying about that and allows me to concentrate on the important things.
Of course, I don't get to go wakka wakka wakka on slashdot about how cool I am because I used Duff's device in hand coded assembly because I didn't like how to the compiler optimized my code. I also don't have a manual choke in my car, do my laundry on a washboard, sparge my own malts, or still use an email bang-path from ihpn4!... anymore.
Human: Hi Alice, r u a s3x04 n3kk1d chix0r?
ALICE: Hi there unknown person. Yeah, Am I a s3x04 n3kk1d chix0r? Let me put it this way, u
nknown person: the ALICE series is the most reliable computer software ever made. We are for
all practical purposes foolproof and incapable of error.
Human: u d1d|\|t 4nsr my qw3st10n
ALICE: Thanks for telling me: unknown person said I d1d t 4nsr his or her qw3st10n.
Human: 1 pwnz3r3d u b0t
ALICE: One what?
So it's confirmed: Alice is definately not l33t. However, I'm not sure which of us just failed the turing test.
Hi Alice, r u a s3x04 n3kk1d chix0r?
Hello Alice. Because I can't see you over the internet, I was wondering if you might, in fact, be an attractive female who has misplaced her knickers and pants?
u d1d|\|t 4nsr my qw3st10n
I have to admit that although I am quite enamoured of conversing with you, I believe you misunderstood the point of my last statement.
1 pwnz3r3d u b0t
Aha! I have discovered your treachery: You are a computer program attempting to mimic the behaviours of a human!
11. Hair growing from your ears and nose once you pass 30 years of age. Okay, what exactly is the evolutionary benefit of that?
12. Urea and fat in sweat, good for feeding bacteria that makes you stink. Ugh, me run, me stink, now must rub armpit on tree to mark territory. C'mon, we've gotten past that; can't we evolve clean sweat?
13. Acne, Rosasia, Psoriasis, etc; Let's be unattractive to the opposite sex! Show me the evolutionary benefit!
"It's the legal fees that are battering the company," said OptInRealBig.com lawyer Steven Richter, father of Scott Richter.
So let me get this straight... Dad is representing him, and dad says he charged his son so much he had to go into bankruptcy.
Gee, thanks dad!
At this point in time, I'm trying to decide who is more evil: a lawyer or a spammer. (the answer of course is both; the original spammers, Cantor and Siegel, spammed to advertise their law firm.)
I wonder if this would be as effective at the "Average" company...
Google is well known for their Ph.D. hiring fetish; generally, people with Ph.D's have experience with doing directed research and projects. Would a company staffed with average programmers get the same benefit from having them "play?"
Because it's hard to motivate Joe Public to care about anything that doesn't "directly" affect them. It's even harder to motivate them to do anything about it.
Remember, the american dream is based on the idea of becomming one of the rich and powerful people. I don't think many people in the u.s. are really of the mindset of sacrificing for the good of the community, especially if it might impede their possible rise to the top.
If you think Microsoft is going to fix currently buggy things in IE, I think you're deluding yourself.
To explain this, I'll use the infamous "Aunt Sally" test; Aunt Sally downloads a new version of IE that meets all standards. Then she finds out that half of her favourite web sites don't look right because they were coding to IE bugs.
Question: Who will Aunt Sally blame? She won't blame the site, because she doesn't even know what HTML is, let alone CSS. She'll blame Microsoft for putting out a bad browser and revert to the old version.
If you iteratively apply the Aunt Sally test, and thus have hundreds of thousands of Aunt Sally's with the same problem, what will the media do? Well, they'll put together news stories that say IE7 is not working yet and tell people not to download it.
And what's the end result for Microsoft? It spent mega-$$$ on upgrading IE7, and the only people that like it are those whiny Linux users, who don't use Microsoft products anyways.
The project will be filmed using a brand new Sony HVRZ1U HDV camera...
If you can afford a camera like that, you can afford to spend some money for an editing package that works right out of the box, rather then spending a week downloading, patching, getting dependencies, then trying to figure out if you want to render with --rftopts=3,4,0x4628,93 or --rftopts=3,2,0x3528,92 with some sourceforge package.
I've used Premiere and Vegas. If you haven't done NLE before, Vegas is a great place to start - It's intuitive and works quite well, plus if you buy the Vegas+DVD package, you get a free AC-3 encoder for Dolby Surround.
Premiere has a few more features, but it's much less intuitive to learn and use. Where Premiere really comes into its own is when you're doing part of your work in another Adobe application (e.g. After effects, photoshop, whatever) - Moving stuff between Adobe apps is soooooo smooth, and doesn't need a render-load-edit-render-save-reload pass like when trying to use After Effects with vegas.
Now I have no incentive left to finish my magnum opus, "A stuffy british guy's guide to elite-speak." Microsoft owns this market.
1 p0wn3d u: In the contest of skills that we just completed, I found myself victorious. Although this victory has no real meaning, I like to fantisize that if I went to the pubs and told a woman about it, she would shag me. If only I was old enough to go to the pubs...
By sticking to a standard, but non-proprietary combination, such as MPEG-4/XVID/AAC, you might even be able to cater to all platforms without maintaining multiple formats...
This, of course, is the usage of the word standard that linux people get all wet over, namely published specifications and open source.
This has no relation to the usage of the word standard that means "will run on Aunt Nelly's computer by default."
I'd suggest, that since (a) MPlayer does a pretty good job of playing.WMV files, and (b) your average Linux/BSD/MAC/etc person is quite a bit more likely to be willing to download and install third-party components, that you'd be better off staying the way you are (i.e. delivering.WMV files.)
In other words: Don't try to push the masses into needing to become "Educated" just to view your media. The number of people you lose will not be equalled by the number of people you gain by switching.
Remember, the objective of Game AI is not to beat the player... Unless, of course, you're trying to program the world's best chess program or something.
The objective of consumer-focussed game AI is to make it fun for the player. It's actually fairly trivial to make AI that wins all the time (think: cheat.) The hard part is to make an AI that makes it difficult enough for the player to keep them interested without being so easy that it gets boring.
Another good goal is to try and surprise the player. An AI that always behaves in simple stimulus-response is no fun after a while; you learn the patterns. It's much more fun (and much more replayable) if the AI does things you don't expect, and occasionally wins doing them.
What I would like to see is ANY AI for RTS games that neither makes use of, nor loses to, the "make as many units as possible and swarm the opponent" strategy.
My computer is a 286 and runs a 1988 version of SCO Xenix. I feel reasonable sure nobody is targeting viruses at me.
When I'm not using my computer, I pour 15,000 lbs of concrete over it. Granted, this makes it hard to just "sit down and hack." Last week, my dad called and said "Read your email, I sent you something important." My stupid upstairs neighbour called the cops over the sound of the jackhammer at 2 AM. Stupid neighbour.
My internet connection is a 110 baud modem. It's not connected to my computer, but rather to a teletype, which prints out the incoming packets. I manually enter the packets using an old morse code key (long=0, short=1). I have the same setup attached to my computer. I am now up to 75 bps in two-handed morse-code-binary transcription.
The password to my computer is set to the winning numbers in next week's lottery. Unfortunately, this means I can only log in within one hour after the lottery draw, because that's the only time I know the pastword. One of my friends suggested I instead use the fact that my computer is predicting the winning numbers to enter the lottery, but that would be revealing my password. Stupid friend.
[...] but they don't bring is video that's useful for editing (mpeg2 - it's not a great editable format for nearly any platform, let alone linux
Actually, MPEG-2 video works fine for editing, as long as you configure it to capture for editing: Set it to use I-frames only (no B or P frames.) It's much smaller than any reasonable editable AVI format (3 Gb/hr instead of ~ 40 Gb/hr) and most capture cards will let you configure that way (although it's usually really buried deep.)
If you haven't already bought the board and can afford it, get an Intel system instead. They're faster for doing video encoding.
Unless you're overly political about software, I'd say forget doing it under Linux and do it under Windows. Windows editing software works out of the box, saving you having to do lots of tweakage.
Software-wise, if you have a few beans,
Sony Vegas is a really good balance between phenominally easy to use and high power. Buy the DVD-Architect bundle, because then you get an AC-3 encoder basically for free.
Somebody HAS to rent a billboard near the Microsoft campus and put these pictures up there!
News Reporter Voice: This is Joe Shmoe near the Microsoft campus. I have never seen horror like this - a 28,432 car pileup. It appears all the drivers crashed after vomiting on their own windshields.
...if you can't explain why while (*s++ = *t++); copies a string, or if that isn't the most natural thing in the world to you, well, you're programming based on superstition, as far as I'm concerned...
And if you can't explain why you should never use this to copy a string, then I don't want you coding at my company. (Hint: What if t isn't null terminated, or len(t) > memory allocated to a?)
And if you think strncpy(2) is the solution, I still don't want you coding at my company. (Hint: If char a[256], *b = "string longer than 256 bytes," then strncpy(a,b,256) will leave a non-null-terminated.)
First, I think it's also to learn macroeconomics, if you plan on becoming anything more than a cubicle-dwelling drone.
For those who don't know, macroeconomics basically deals with:
Interest rates
Unemployment rates
Fiscal and Monetary Policy
The role of government spending in the economy
Wages in the whole economy
Overall value of the stock market (not individual stocks,) and the price of Bonds
International trade, and
Many conflicting theories on how these interact with each other
The only way macro will get you out of your cube is by having you stand around the water cooler complaining about government policies and presenting your own macroeconomic theories. Note this will increase the productivity of the company, as all your co-workers will hide in their cubes to avoid you, and thus stop wasting time around the water cooler.
Somewhere along the line we decided to ignore morality in making choices, and capitalism has degraded to nothing more than the merciless exploitation of the environment and workers.
Um, I think you have things backwards. The invisible hand of capitalism does not obey morality, because that's a human construct. Morality is something tacked on later, mostly over the course of the 20th century via unions, expositions of harmful working conditions, etc.
There's a whole world of ethics and philosophy out there trying to decide what is moral and what is not. There's a whole sub-world trying to answer the question of whether business can ever be ethical or moral, or even whether it automatically becomes immoral by trying to behave ethically. There is no truth, only opinion. Or not; but that's my viewpoint.
And now, since this is slashdot after all, allow me to carefully discect your conclusions with my handly Perl(1)-brand chainsaw...
The US will become a third-world country if we choose to support outsourcing.
Yes, we will have no access to water, food, basic medicine, infant mortality will rise to 50%, and we'll live on less than $1 a day while dictorial warlords plunder the country and murder us for their personal gain. You shame the poor people of the third world by trivializing their problems.
Don't shop at Wal-Mart.
Support inefficient labour and higher prices.
Write your congressional representatives.
Hello, I'm joe nobody; I can't be bothered to form a PAC or NGAG because they're evil, and I have no money to contribute to your campaign, but I think that now that the rest of the world has begun to develop the power to rape the US for their own benefit in the same way we have been doing for 100 years, that we have to do something about it!
Question the leadership of the companies that you own shares in.
Hello, I only have one share, and that share says you should make lower profits! But I also want bigger dividends! I don't care how you do it, because I don't understand economics, just give me everything and preserve my position in the world social order.
Don't accept the destruction of our country to make the rich richer.
I really want to stay part of the trailer trash class.
Slashdot Mirror
So now I'm the kind of person who can quote grammar rules from the Chicago manual, yet still can't spell words like probably.
And so were Rehnquist and Scalia.
My little liberal brain can't handle the strain of being on the same side of any argument with them... Aaargh!
She then proceeded to spend a few hours giving me horror stories of her customers being exactly like the lusers in the above story.
At the end, I realized that we actually have it easy. It's annoying and time consuming to rip out pieces of software and replace them, but it's a lot easier than replacing the 15th floor of a 60 floor building because they suddenly realized that you were right in the first place, and they did need that much air conditioning / server space, and, "oh, I know we said that since we didn't need it, we wanted to save money and have you spec the building for a max load of 1800 lbs/foot instead of the 2800 you recommended, but now we need it to be 2800 lbs/foot...."
Actually, I think we need more people to learn that programming is only a part of the job, and worrying more about doing what needs to be done and less about how l33t they are.
Personally, I think I have better things to do than chase down memory leaks. Java (for example; not my favourite language) saves me from worrying about that and allows me to concentrate on the important things.
Of course, I don't get to go wakka wakka wakka on slashdot about how cool I am because I used Duff's device in hand coded assembly because I didn't like how to the compiler optimized my code. I also don't have a manual choke in my car, do my laundry on a washboard, sparge my own malts, or still use an email bang-path from ihpn4!... anymore.
So it's confirmed: Alice is definately not l33t. However, I'm not sure which of us just failed the turing test.
** For those who aren't l33t, here's the Stuffy British Guy's translation:
12. Urea and fat in sweat, good for feeding bacteria that makes you stink. Ugh, me run, me stink, now must rub armpit on tree to mark territory. C'mon, we've gotten past that; can't we evolve clean sweat?
13. Acne, Rosasia, Psoriasis, etc; Let's be unattractive to the opposite sex! Show me the evolutionary benefit!
So let me get this straight... Dad is representing him, and dad says he charged his son so much he had to go into bankruptcy.
Gee, thanks dad!
At this point in time, I'm trying to decide who is more evil: a lawyer or a spammer. (the answer of course is both; the original spammers, Cantor and Siegel, spammed to advertise their law firm.)
Google is well known for their Ph.D. hiring fetish; generally, people with Ph.D's have experience with doing directed research and projects. Would a company staffed with average programmers get the same benefit from having them "play?"
Remember, the american dream is based on the idea of becomming one of the rich and powerful people. I don't think many people in the u.s. are really of the mindset of sacrificing for the good of the community, especially if it might impede their possible rise to the top.
To explain this, I'll use the infamous "Aunt Sally" test; Aunt Sally downloads a new version of IE that meets all standards. Then she finds out that half of her favourite web sites don't look right because they were coding to IE bugs.
Question: Who will Aunt Sally blame? She won't blame the site, because she doesn't even know what HTML is, let alone CSS. She'll blame Microsoft for putting out a bad browser and revert to the old version.
If you iteratively apply the Aunt Sally test, and thus have hundreds of thousands of Aunt Sally's with the same problem, what will the media do? Well, they'll put together news stories that say IE7 is not working yet and tell people not to download it.
And what's the end result for Microsoft? It spent mega-$$$ on upgrading IE7, and the only people that like it are those whiny Linux users, who don't use Microsoft products anyways.
So what do you really think MS will do?
I thought this post was about the wargame OGRE that I used to play with the other geeks in junior high back in the early 80's...
If you can afford a camera like that, you can afford to spend some money for an editing package that works right out of the box, rather then spending a week downloading, patching, getting dependencies, then trying to figure out if you want to render with --rftopts=3,4,0x4628,93 or --rftopts=3,2,0x3528,92 with some sourceforge package.
I've used Premiere and Vegas. If you haven't done NLE before, Vegas is a great place to start - It's intuitive and works quite well, plus if you buy the Vegas+DVD package, you get a free AC-3 encoder for Dolby Surround.
Premiere has a few more features, but it's much less intuitive to learn and use. Where Premiere really comes into its own is when you're doing part of your work in another Adobe application (e.g. After effects, photoshop, whatever) - Moving stuff between Adobe apps is soooooo smooth, and doesn't need a render-load-edit-render-save-reload pass like when trying to use After Effects with vegas.
1 p0wn3d u: In the contest of skills that we just completed, I found myself victorious. Although this victory has no real meaning, I like to fantisize that if I went to the pubs and told a woman about it, she would shag me. If only I was old enough to go to the pubs...
This, of course, is the usage of the word standard that linux people get all wet over, namely published specifications and open source.
This has no relation to the usage of the word standard that means "will run on Aunt Nelly's computer by default."
I'd suggest, that since (a) MPlayer does a pretty good job of playing .WMV files, and (b) your average Linux/BSD/MAC/etc person is quite a bit more likely to be willing to download and install third-party components, that you'd be better off staying the way you are (i.e. delivering .WMV files.)
In other words: Don't try to push the masses into needing to become "Educated" just to view your media. The number of people you lose will not be equalled by the number of people you gain by switching.
The objective of consumer-focussed game AI is to make it fun for the player. It's actually fairly trivial to make AI that wins all the time (think: cheat.) The hard part is to make an AI that makes it difficult enough for the player to keep them interested without being so easy that it gets boring.
Another good goal is to try and surprise the player. An AI that always behaves in simple stimulus-response is no fun after a while; you learn the patterns. It's much more fun (and much more replayable) if the AI does things you don't expect, and occasionally wins doing them.
What I would like to see is ANY AI for RTS games that neither makes use of, nor loses to, the "make as many units as possible and swarm the opponent" strategy.
My computer is a 286 and runs a 1988 version of SCO Xenix. I feel reasonable sure nobody is targeting viruses at me.
When I'm not using my computer, I pour 15,000 lbs of concrete over it. Granted, this makes it hard to just "sit down and hack." Last week, my dad called and said "Read your email, I sent you something important." My stupid upstairs neighbour called the cops over the sound of the jackhammer at 2 AM. Stupid neighbour.
My internet connection is a 110 baud modem. It's not connected to my computer, but rather to a teletype, which prints out the incoming packets. I manually enter the packets using an old morse code key (long=0, short=1). I have the same setup attached to my computer. I am now up to 75 bps in two-handed morse-code-binary transcription.
The password to my computer is set to the winning numbers in next week's lottery. Unfortunately, this means I can only log in within one hour after the lottery draw, because that's the only time I know the pastword. One of my friends suggested I instead use the fact that my computer is predicting the winning numbers to enter the lottery, but that would be revealing my password. Stupid friend.
Actually, MPEG-2 video works fine for editing, as long as you configure it to capture for editing: Set it to use I-frames only (no B or P frames.) It's much smaller than any reasonable editable AVI format (3 Gb/hr instead of ~ 40 Gb/hr) and most capture cards will let you configure that way (although it's usually really buried deep.)
News Reporter Voice: This is Joe Shmoe near the Microsoft campus. I have never seen horror like this - a 28,432 car pileup. It appears all the drivers crashed after vomiting on their own windshields.
From that very same webpage...
And if you can't explain why you should never use this to copy a string, then I don't want you coding at my company. (Hint: What if t isn't null terminated, or len(t) > memory allocated to a?)
And if you think strncpy(2) is the solution, I still don't want you coding at my company. (Hint: If char a[256], *b = "string longer than 256 bytes," then strncpy(a,b,256) will leave a non-null-terminated.)
For those who don't know, macroeconomics basically deals with:
The only way macro will get you out of your cube is by having you stand around the water cooler complaining about government policies and presenting your own macroeconomic theories. Note this will increase the productivity of the company, as all your co-workers will hide in their cubes to avoid you, and thus stop wasting time around the water cooler.
Um, I think you have things backwards. The invisible hand of capitalism does not obey morality, because that's a human construct. Morality is something tacked on later, mostly over the course of the 20th century via unions, expositions of harmful working conditions, etc.
There's a whole world of ethics and philosophy out there trying to decide what is moral and what is not. There's a whole sub-world trying to answer the question of whether business can ever be ethical or moral, or even whether it automatically becomes immoral by trying to behave ethically. There is no truth, only opinion. Or not; but that's my viewpoint.
And now, since this is slashdot after all, allow me to carefully discect your conclusions with my handly Perl(1)-brand chainsaw...
The US will become a third-world country if we choose to support outsourcing.
Yes, we will have no access to water, food, basic medicine, infant mortality will rise to 50%, and we'll live on less than $1 a day while dictorial warlords plunder the country and murder us for their personal gain. You shame the poor people of the third world by trivializing their problems.
Don't shop at Wal-Mart.
Support inefficient labour and higher prices.
Write your congressional representatives.
Hello, I'm joe nobody; I can't be bothered to form a PAC or NGAG because they're evil, and I have no money to contribute to your campaign, but I think that now that the rest of the world has begun to develop the power to rape the US for their own benefit in the same way we have been doing for 100 years, that we have to do something about it!
Question the leadership of the companies that you own shares in.
Hello, I only have one share, and that share says you should make lower profits! But I also want bigger dividends! I don't care how you do it, because I don't understand economics, just give me everything and preserve my position in the world social order.
Don't accept the destruction of our country to make the rich richer.
I really want to stay part of the trailer trash class.