Uh, your report talks about installing skylights, not lightbulbs that produce the full spectrum. I'd be willing to wager that people perform better with a skylight for psychological reasons. Using it as a reason to scoff CFLs seems like a huge stretch to me. I will buy the argument that you need an incandescent (even full spectrum) bulb if you're doing something that requires you to match colors or design something for outdoor viewing (like a billboard), but 99% of the time people don't care about their color purity that much. The eye is very forgiving for color imbalance so as a tradeoff for using CFLs I don't think it has much pull.
That's the point of the $1 salary. He basically only gets paid if the company does well enough to make returns on dividends and hand out bonuses. I'm sure he also gets a fair number of stock options, but those too require that Apple do well to make him money. IMHO, it's a lot better than the CEOs that have gigantic salaries and golden parachutes that don't seem to mind if they run the company into the ground.
Re:You can't force people to keep salaries secret.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, but I've yet to see a company that didn't include the "don't discuss your salary with anyone" in the contract. It's really in the company's best interest to keep you in the dark as to your actual bargaining position. They really don't want some of there less savvy people to learn just how much more their co-workers make just because they know how to play the table at the salary negotiations.
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
This can also be fixed in Unix by writing your scripts better. It is a major problem though because people don't realize it's a problem until it's too late (their script is bombing), and the fixes are not always obvious.
Given that nobody has published benchmarks on the R600s yet, that's pure speculation/hearsay. ATI has typically had faster hardware (but crappier drivers), although nVidia really put out a monster with the 8800. It remains to be seen how well they compete. Frankly, I'd be highly disappointed in ATI if the R600s don't beat out the 8800 given that the 8800 has been out for 7 months now.
Interestingly enough, from the article apparently the 8800GTX Ultras pull less power than the 8800GTXes. It's from the improved manufacturing techniques though, and since those improvements should trickle down to the regular 8800GTXes fairly soon the advantage will go away. It may come as a bit of a surprise to the early adopters that they could save 20-30W by just rebuying their card now.
I don't know. TA had "3d" but it really looked like ass. I played it for awhile, but it never really measured up to Starcraft in terms of online play IMHO.
Supreme Commander unfortunately has some of the same problems that TA did. Online it seems like tank rushes are generally useless and everybody ends up just spending half an hour econning like mad so they can build one of the grossly expensive superweapons or try to build tons of arty to just shell each other to death. It's just kind of dull.
You shouldn't be surprised how many cycle hungry programs require Windows (or in some cases, require Windows if you want to make use of all of your hardware). We bought the above mentioned monster machine for Opnet, which will gladly eat every single cycle on any machine when you start running larger simulations.
I saw an episode of that. It might have been more interesting but the teams were both pretty dumb and the challenges were dull as dirt. Granted there was some thought involved, but overall it felt like a snoozer. I recall one of the challenges was determining which of 6 cans had fuel instead of water, but you couldn't open the lid. The winners did what most people would do and dropped them all in the water to see which one floated the highest. The losers pretty much just stared at the cans hoping to divine their contents.
Why do people think the Mythbusters only run experiments once? They have videos on their website of them running them pretty much until the day runs out or their rig breaks down. They even say this on the show. Obviously they don't make you watch them repeat the experiments 10 times on the show because it would be boring.
Did you watch the same one I did? The conclusion I got from it was "both the Hydrogen and the Paint had something to do with it." They were debunking the myth that the Hydrogen had little or nothing to do with the fire and it was the paint that did the Hindenburg in.
That's one thing I've seen a lot online. People watch maybe 80% of the show and then go online and say "they made a gross procedural error!" when in fact they're testing something subtly different or not doing what those people think. From what I've seen they usually set up something that tests their myth, although occasionally they do screw up. They also tend to word their problems such that they can be solved without overly elaborate test procedures.
An example of a badly botched experiment was the light blub experiment, in particular the part they tacked on at the end about how much wear and tear turning lightbulbs on and off is compared to leaving them on. Since they both failed to create a control group and failed to set up any way to document when each bulb burned out, the test was a complete loss. At least they pretty much admitted it afterward (when they came back 2 months later and only the LED based bulb was still working). The other half of the test, where they compared the energy use of the various forms of lightbulbs was pretty good though, if a little basic.
I wonder if they're just reading the signals that are being sent over the wire? With analog signals this is pretty easy to to, but with DVI it's a lot harder, and way harder still if the signal is encrypted. With the future of display technologies appearing to be heading as close as possible to encryption to the eyeballs, it makes me wonder how long this will remain viable.
There are always a handful of titles with good AIs, but over my years of playing many different games I can say with some certainty that the AI isn't getting any worse. In fact from what I've seen, the AI has been slowly but steadily improving over the years in general. It used to be in FPS games that the enemies always just walked straight at the player and shot. Nowadays they're likely to use cover, team tactics, and even a bit of misdirection. Sure it isn't as good as human players, but they're a lot better than the Doom or Wolfenstein AIs of old.
RTS AIs are a mixed bag, but in general they're doing more with less cheating than ever before. A lot of the old games cheated a LOT to make the AI competitive, but often now you'll find that they do a decent job with only minimal cheating.
Fighting games certainly aren't any easier than the ones of old, yet the AI seems to do fairly well. In some games it's almost punishingly good (Guilty Gear has some very hard AI opponents) and the player might even feel resentment over the computer's calculated reflexes.
Driving game AI hasn't improved much but frankly that's because there's not a lot to think about with driving games. Stuff like Mario Kart where there are powerups and whatnot can require a bit more smarts, but even then it's pretty simple. It's not hard to program a bot to drive around a circle. On the other hand, it's clear that in today's driving games the computer has to do a lot more work to make it around the corners. This isn't like F-Zero on the SNES where the computer completely cheated by setting its cars not to slide (in a game where controlling your sliding was 90% of the challenge).
Conspiracy isn't "thinking about committing a crime", it's doing the preparations (in the real world!) that are involved with committing the crime, especially gathering and organizing accomplices. In court, it is the prosecutions job to show that your perpetrations were for a crime and that you should be punished for planning to commit it. Sentences for conspiracy are shorter than those you would get if you committed the crime because there is always the lingering doubt that you might have changed your mind at some point.
The problem with viewing child porn online isn't so much with the viewer as it is with the producer. To produce real child porn you need real children, and that's exploitation pure and simple. If you pay for it, you're paying people to exploit children.
This distinction gets a lot blurrier with CG and drawn porn, but from what I understand the cops tend to focus on real porn instead of the fake stuff. Otherwise you'd have to imagine a gigantic crackdown on things like the Tokyo Doujinshi shows and whatnot. 4chan wouldn't still be around (although there are plenty of other reasons it shouldn't still be around). It's the stuff where real children are exploited that the cops rightfully focus on.
Oh, there are defiantly people who want to have sex with kids out there. They are rare however and the chances of having your kid abducted for sex are absolutely minuscule. Still, the chance is nonzero and because it's such a sensational and heinous crime you can be assured that there will be parents clamoring for the authorities to do something about those people.
The worst part is all of the people who are more than willing to give up liberties a-plenty to only slightly improve the safety of their children. The worst part is that they'll insist that you give up the same liberties and yet still their children aren't much (if at all) safer.
IMHO, this situation is likely to get out of hand if we keep going on the same path. For instance, poorly thought out legislation in Miami forces "sex offenders" (which can be a very broad term these days), to sleep under bridges because they literally cannot buy a home that is not in some form of restricted zone (too close to a daycare, school, playground, mall, etc...). As a result you have people who may have had some minor mental problems before being forced into vagrancy and the myriad of problems associated with that. Not to mention the difficulty in keeping track on someone who lives under a bridge. The very laws designed to make the children safer can in fact make them less safe because they've gone too far.
Not to mention the fact that in the jungle you tend to fight at close distances, negating the range and accuracy advantage of the M16. That's also a problem with the city fighting in Iraq, which is why the M16 isn't preferred in door to door city fighting.
I've often thought that Gangsta Rap singers have done the inner cities load of good by teaching urban punks that holding the gun sideways is "cool". That has to have gone a long way in reducing shooting fatalities in the hood by making it impossible to aim the gun properly. Plus, it should increase the number of incapacitating but non-fatal arm/shoulder wounds and save lives.
See, I disagree there. This means a lot of the valuable information is locked up in a forum that people may well not find because it doesn't show up very highly in Google. The public may be better served by abandoning the guy on a shoestring budget and posting in forums that get indexed by search engines.
Sure, since neither cookies nor IP addresses are good ways to count traffic you'll start seeing an increase in sites that don't let you do anything until you register. Frankly, this is already happening. I've searched for plenty of technical questions on google that land me on forums that require you to register to even read the posts. This means you have to give them a valid (well long enough for you to get the confirmation) email address and username/password. The worst part is that a lot of times those sites are really slow to send out the email and you're stuck waiting for it to solve your problem. It's obnoxious, but I guess they have to do it since they can't count traffic reliably otherwise...
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Uh, your report talks about installing skylights, not lightbulbs that produce the full spectrum. I'd be willing to wager that people perform better with a skylight for psychological reasons. Using it as a reason to scoff CFLs seems like a huge stretch to me. I will buy the argument that you need an incandescent (even full spectrum) bulb if you're doing something that requires you to match colors or design something for outdoor viewing (like a billboard), but 99% of the time people don't care about their color purity that much. The eye is very forgiving for color imbalance so as a tradeoff for using CFLs I don't think it has much pull.
That's the point of the $1 salary. He basically only gets paid if the company does well enough to make returns on dividends and hand out bonuses. I'm sure he also gets a fair number of stock options, but those too require that Apple do well to make him money. IMHO, it's a lot better than the CEOs that have gigantic salaries and golden parachutes that don't seem to mind if they run the company into the ground.
Yeah, but I've yet to see a company that didn't include the "don't discuss your salary with anyone" in the contract. It's really in the company's best interest to keep you in the dark as to your actual bargaining position. They really don't want some of there less savvy people to learn just how much more their co-workers make just because they know how to play the table at the salary negotiations.
Has that ever actually worked for anybody?
This can also be fixed in Unix by writing your scripts better. It is a major problem though because people don't realize it's a problem until it's too late (their script is bombing), and the fixes are not always obvious.
Given that nobody has published benchmarks on the R600s yet, that's pure speculation/hearsay. ATI has typically had faster hardware (but crappier drivers), although nVidia really put out a monster with the 8800. It remains to be seen how well they compete. Frankly, I'd be highly disappointed in ATI if the R600s don't beat out the 8800 given that the 8800 has been out for 7 months now.
Interestingly enough, from the article apparently the 8800GTX Ultras pull less power than the 8800GTXes. It's from the improved manufacturing techniques though, and since those improvements should trickle down to the regular 8800GTXes fairly soon the advantage will go away. It may come as a bit of a surprise to the early adopters that they could save 20-30W by just rebuying their card now.
I don't know. TA had "3d" but it really looked like ass. I played it for awhile, but it never really measured up to Starcraft in terms of online play IMHO.
Supreme Commander unfortunately has some of the same problems that TA did. Online it seems like tank rushes are generally useless and everybody ends up just spending half an hour econning like mad so they can build one of the grossly expensive superweapons or try to build tons of arty to just shell each other to death. It's just kind of dull.
You shouldn't be surprised how many cycle hungry programs require Windows (or in some cases, require Windows if you want to make use of all of your hardware). We bought the above mentioned monster machine for Opnet, which will gladly eat every single cycle on any machine when you start running larger simulations.
Well, Windows for one. The price for a Windows license shoots up dramatically as you add memory and processors.
I saw an episode of that. It might have been more interesting but the teams were both pretty dumb and the challenges were dull as dirt. Granted there was some thought involved, but overall it felt like a snoozer. I recall one of the challenges was determining which of 6 cans had fuel instead of water, but you couldn't open the lid. The winners did what most people would do and dropped them all in the water to see which one floated the highest. The losers pretty much just stared at the cans hoping to divine their contents.
Why do people think the Mythbusters only run experiments once? They have videos on their website of them running them pretty much until the day runs out or their rig breaks down. They even say this on the show. Obviously they don't make you watch them repeat the experiments 10 times on the show because it would be boring.
Did you watch the same one I did? The conclusion I got from it was "both the Hydrogen and the Paint had something to do with it." They were debunking the myth that the Hydrogen had little or nothing to do with the fire and it was the paint that did the Hindenburg in.
That's one thing I've seen a lot online. People watch maybe 80% of the show and then go online and say "they made a gross procedural error!" when in fact they're testing something subtly different or not doing what those people think. From what I've seen they usually set up something that tests their myth, although occasionally they do screw up. They also tend to word their problems such that they can be solved without overly elaborate test procedures.
An example of a badly botched experiment was the light blub experiment, in particular the part they tacked on at the end about how much wear and tear turning lightbulbs on and off is compared to leaving them on. Since they both failed to create a control group and failed to set up any way to document when each bulb burned out, the test was a complete loss. At least they pretty much admitted it afterward (when they came back 2 months later and only the LED based bulb was still working). The other half of the test, where they compared the energy use of the various forms of lightbulbs was pretty good though, if a little basic.
Getting a TCP/IP stack running on a Z80 is no mean feat, so I'm guessing no, your washing machine probably doesn't have network support.
I wonder if they're just reading the signals that are being sent over the wire? With analog signals this is pretty easy to to, but with DVI it's a lot harder, and way harder still if the signal is encrypted. With the future of display technologies appearing to be heading as close as possible to encryption to the eyeballs, it makes me wonder how long this will remain viable.
There are always a handful of titles with good AIs, but over my years of playing many different games I can say with some certainty that the AI isn't getting any worse. In fact from what I've seen, the AI has been slowly but steadily improving over the years in general. It used to be in FPS games that the enemies always just walked straight at the player and shot. Nowadays they're likely to use cover, team tactics, and even a bit of misdirection. Sure it isn't as good as human players, but they're a lot better than the Doom or Wolfenstein AIs of old.
RTS AIs are a mixed bag, but in general they're doing more with less cheating than ever before. A lot of the old games cheated a LOT to make the AI competitive, but often now you'll find that they do a decent job with only minimal cheating.
Fighting games certainly aren't any easier than the ones of old, yet the AI seems to do fairly well. In some games it's almost punishingly good (Guilty Gear has some very hard AI opponents) and the player might even feel resentment over the computer's calculated reflexes.
Driving game AI hasn't improved much but frankly that's because there's not a lot to think about with driving games. Stuff like Mario Kart where there are powerups and whatnot can require a bit more smarts, but even then it's pretty simple. It's not hard to program a bot to drive around a circle. On the other hand, it's clear that in today's driving games the computer has to do a lot more work to make it around the corners. This isn't like F-Zero on the SNES where the computer completely cheated by setting its cars not to slide (in a game where controlling your sliding was 90% of the challenge).
Yeah, I think it's weird too. But as was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that doesn't mean it won't be made illegal.
Conspiracy isn't "thinking about committing a crime", it's doing the preparations (in the real world!) that are involved with committing the crime, especially gathering and organizing accomplices. In court, it is the prosecutions job to show that your perpetrations were for a crime and that you should be punished for planning to commit it. Sentences for conspiracy are shorter than those you would get if you committed the crime because there is always the lingering doubt that you might have changed your mind at some point.
The problem with viewing child porn online isn't so much with the viewer as it is with the producer. To produce real child porn you need real children, and that's exploitation pure and simple. If you pay for it, you're paying people to exploit children.
This distinction gets a lot blurrier with CG and drawn porn, but from what I understand the cops tend to focus on real porn instead of the fake stuff. Otherwise you'd have to imagine a gigantic crackdown on things like the Tokyo Doujinshi shows and whatnot. 4chan wouldn't still be around (although there are plenty of other reasons it shouldn't still be around). It's the stuff where real children are exploited that the cops rightfully focus on.
Oh, there are defiantly people who want to have sex with kids out there. They are rare however and the chances of having your kid abducted for sex are absolutely minuscule. Still, the chance is nonzero and because it's such a sensational and heinous crime you can be assured that there will be parents clamoring for the authorities to do something about those people.
The worst part is all of the people who are more than willing to give up liberties a-plenty to only slightly improve the safety of their children. The worst part is that they'll insist that you give up the same liberties and yet still their children aren't much (if at all) safer.
IMHO, this situation is likely to get out of hand if we keep going on the same path. For instance, poorly thought out legislation in Miami forces "sex offenders" (which can be a very broad term these days), to sleep under bridges because they literally cannot buy a home that is not in some form of restricted zone (too close to a daycare, school, playground, mall, etc...). As a result you have people who may have had some minor mental problems before being forced into vagrancy and the myriad of problems associated with that. Not to mention the difficulty in keeping track on someone who lives under a bridge. The very laws designed to make the children safer can in fact make them less safe because they've gone too far.
Ouch, being arrested for mere desires? Citizen, report to the Bureau of Thoughtcrime immediately.
I'm reasonably sure you have to act on your desires in some way before being arrested ResidntGeek.
Not to mention the fact that in the jungle you tend to fight at close distances, negating the range and accuracy advantage of the M16. That's also a problem with the city fighting in Iraq, which is why the M16 isn't preferred in door to door city fighting.
I've often thought that Gangsta Rap singers have done the inner cities load of good by teaching urban punks that holding the gun sideways is "cool". That has to have gone a long way in reducing shooting fatalities in the hood by making it impossible to aim the gun properly. Plus, it should increase the number of incapacitating but non-fatal arm/shoulder wounds and save lives.
See, I disagree there. This means a lot of the valuable information is locked up in a forum that people may well not find because it doesn't show up very highly in Google. The public may be better served by abandoning the guy on a shoestring budget and posting in forums that get indexed by search engines.
Sure, since neither cookies nor IP addresses are good ways to count traffic you'll start seeing an increase in sites that don't let you do anything until you register. Frankly, this is already happening. I've searched for plenty of technical questions on google that land me on forums that require you to register to even read the posts. This means you have to give them a valid (well long enough for you to get the confirmation) email address and username/password. The worst part is that a lot of times those sites are really slow to send out the email and you're stuck waiting for it to solve your problem. It's obnoxious, but I guess they have to do it since they can't count traffic reliably otherwise...