To make even more sense of it, run it through everyone's favorite AOLer translation script:
KATRINA NUG3NT YESTERDAY I PUT MAH LUNCH IN TEH FRIDGA ON LAVEL 19 WHICH INCLUD3D A PAKAT OF HM SOME CHESE SLIECS AND TWO SLIECS OF BR3AD WHICH WAS GONG 2 B FOR MAH LUNCH 2DAY OVER1!111 OMG NIGHT IT HAS GONA MISNG AND AS I HAEV NO R MONEY 2 BUY ANOTHER LUNCH 2DAY I WUD APRECIAET BNG REIMBURSED FOR IT
M3LINDA1!!1 OMG WTF LOL BIRD KATRINA THEYRE R IETMS FITNG UR 3XACT DESCRIPTION IN TEH L3VEL 20 FRIDG3!!11 OMG WTF LOL R U SUR3 U DIDNT PLAEC UR LUNCH IN TEH WRONG FRIDG3 YEST3RDAY
KATRINA?!?!!??? OMG WTF LOL NUG3NT MELINDA PROBABLY BST U DONT REPLY 2 AL NEXT TIEM WUD B ANOYED 2 TEH DA!1!!! WTF KITCHEN WAS NOT DONG DIN3R LAST NIGHT SO OBVIOUSLY SOMAONE HAS HELP3D THEMSELVES 2 MAH LUNCH1!!1 OMG LOL RILLY SWET OF U 2 INV3STIGAET FOR MA
M3LINDA!!1!1 LOL BIRD KATRINA SINCA I US3D 2 B A FLOAT AND M STIL ON DA LEVEL 19 3MALE LIST I CUDNT HELP BUT RAC3IEV UR R3DICULOUS EMALE - LUKY U!!!111! WTF LOL USA OUR KITCHAN AL DA TIEM FOR SOM3 UNKNOWN RAASON AND I SAW TEH IETMS U MENTION3D IN TEH FRIDG3 SO NATURALY THOUGHT U MAY HAEV PLAECD THEM IN TEH WRONG THX111111 LOL I KNOW IMM SWET BUT I ONLY HAD UR BST INTAR3STS AT HEART1111! OMG NOW AS U WUD SAY BYE
KATRINA1!11! WTF LOL NUGANT IMM NOT BLONDE!
MELINDA!1!11!!!!1!!!1!!!!! OMG WTF LOL BIRD BNG A BRUNETA DOASNT MEAN UR SMART THOUGH
KATRINA1!!1! OMG NUGENT I D3FINIETLY WUDNT TRAED PLAECS WIT U FOR DA WORLD
MELINDA!!11!1 OMG WTF BIRD I WUDNT TRAED PLAECS WIT U FOR DA WORLD.I1!!111!111!!! LOL DONT WANT UR FIGUR3
KATRINA111!!1!! WTF NUGENT LETS NOT GAT PERSON (SIC) MIS CANT KEP A BOYFREIND IM IN A HAPY RELATIONSHIP HAEV A BAUTIFUL APARTMANT BRAND NU CAR HIGH PAY JOB.SAY11!!!11!1!!11111111 LOL NO MORA!
MELINDA!1!111!!!1 WTF OMG IMM LAUGHNG!1!11 LOL HAPY RALATIONSHIP U HAEV BEN WIT SO MANY GUYS) BAUTIFUL APARTMENT (SO WUT BRAND NU R (M3 2) HIGH PAY JOB (I EARN MOR3)..SAY!!111!!!!11!1!!1!!1!!1!! WTF PL3NTY MORE.. I11111!!111!!1!11!111!!1!!1!111 LOL HAEV 5 GUYS AT TEH MOMANT HAHA!11!!! WTF
I fail to see why one can't have a zero button mouse that simply executes the appropriate action after a predefined delay. After all, many of us have happily lived with X windows auto focus to foreground for years with no obvious detriment.
Haven't ever used Photoshop before, have we?
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ...
on
News at a Glance
·
· Score: 1
"I do believe that we will some day move to a more pictorial language where the alphabets will be replaced by pics"
Unless, of course, you're blind or near blind, at which point 50 slow-to-load, blurry or invisible pictures becomes hundreds of even slower-loading, blurry or invisible pictures.
Or are you volunteering to start www.text-descriptions-of-news-pictures.com?
You can be a Paladin, a holy warrior of God. How is this bad?
Anyone who's actually played through all of Diablo will be able to answer that. You don't actually succeed in killing Diablo. Your failure is the basic lead-in to the sequel, Diablo II.:)
Except for the fact that the people slapping stacks of cards and leaflets in their palms on every street corner of The Strip are, in fact, giving you phone numbers that, when dialed, will bring a call girl up to your hotel room (they all seem to promise this within 30 minutes to an hour).
Do I see cops stopping these people?
Of course, 'illegal' and 'enforced' are two different things, but let's not try to paint Reno and Las Vegas as the only places in Vegas where you can't get a hooker.
Simple. These mind-bogglingly cool graphics technologies are still being used to make cartoons. Iconified characters are easier for kids to identify with (and make easier to identify merchandise, for the cynical). The desired effect isn't photorealism at all. Why bother recreating the perfect human digitally when you've got actual humans who can just dance in front of an analog camera? The expense seems wasteful. All you need is something that looks like it could be real, like watching snow clump on Sully's fur (which adds atmosphere and emotion, not realism).
Hyper-realism just doesn't click with audiences (witness Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). Besides, when it comes to fantasy-based cartoons, it's easier to relay impossible animation on a character (that is, the 'squash and stretch' regularly associated with Cartoon Physics) if the animator isn't constrained by trying to make it look terribly 'realistic' at the same time. This is precisely why action-animation combo movies can look awkward when the action sequences happen (Cool World, Roger Rabbit).
Executive pay has been soaring for two decades, but over the last couple of years, as many big companies have seen their stock pummeled, the pay-for-performance rationale that was supposedly driving these packages has been exposed as a fraud. Moreover, as executive pay has grown ever more dependent on share prices, the incentive to manipulate earning reports and thereby boost shares has also increased.
Good CEOs may be worth every penny paid, but the feeling one gets is that even terrible CEOs are getting paid just as much, if not more, than our Benevolent Captains of Industry.
Not to nitpick, but the plot description sounds exactly like half life's plot. An isolate research facility is experimenting with teleportation qhen things go bad and people start turning into zombies.
Golly, that half-life plot sounds really, really familiar.
From the orginal Quake manual:
You get the phone call at 4 a.m. By 5:30 you're in the secret installation. The commander explains tersely, "It's about the Slipgate device. Once we perfect these, we'll be able to use them to transport people and cargo from one place to another instantly.
"An enemy codenamed Quake, is using his own slipgates to insert death squads inside our bases to kill, steal, and kidnap... "The hell of it is we have no idea where he's from. Our top scientists think Quake's not from Earth, but another dimension. They say Quake's preparing to unleash his real army, whatever that is.
"You're our best man. This is Operation Counterstrike and you're in charge. Find Quake, and stop him... or it... You have full authority to requisition anything you need. If the eggheads are right, all our lives are expendable.."
Quake and Doom have always been about blowing things up, with a plot kinda papered-on afterwards. Adrenaline + action = id-style fun. People who drop fifty bucks on id's games then bitch about a lack of plot are idiots. They want plot and suspense? Buy another game. No One Lives Forever 2 is coming out soon. Wait for that. Or for the next well-plotted game to be based on an id engine (cough...Half-Life...cough).
I believe what you mean is never use vector<bitset>,
Actually, what he meant was:
Never use vector<bool>. It's an Item (18, glancing at my copy) covered in the Meyers book he plugged (in summary: it's not an STL container, and it doesn't contain bools).
Hey guys, seriously, if the schools want to use Windows, they should pay for it.
Good god, did you even read the article?
Microsoft has put a new spin on the agreement, requiring an "institution-wide commitment." That means the district must include in its count not only the PCs, but all the iMacs and Power Macs that might conceivably use Windows software.
MS isn't just trying to get them to pay for windows licenses. The Microsoft School Agreement makes them pay for any computer the school ever comes into, be it through a purchase or donation.
And if a computer is donated, and the school can't produce proof of license because the donor didn't give it to them, they're in violation of the license. So the school will either have to pay up or dispose of every computer they can't prove has legally installed MS software. Unless someone goes in and removes all the OS components from the computers MS would run afoul of.
This is kind of the problem with 'high-concept' animation. Lain is very disorienting and has anything but a happy dynamic between the characters. Really, you just don't get to know the characters in Lain (not even Lain herself). This is a different kind of disorientation you receive from watching Evangelion. Evangelion is, on several levels, going out of its way to depress its viewership. You get to the end of the 26 episodes and all you can feel is loss and alienation. Hideaki Anno wrote this after years of depression, reportedly, and it shows. But a failure to make us feel good about ourselves is what makes this kind of unsatisfying. And many viewers are discontent with the somewhat arrogant 'high-concept' response of that as a successfully delivered message. It's not that they refuse to 'get it,' they just don't all believe getting slapped in the face by the artist is a good way to spend your money.
That Evangelion's conclusion fails to thrill and entertain is probably not its biggest detractor. By far what turns people off about this is the absolutely abhorrent characters put in charge of saving the world in Evangelion. While most of them on the surface have decent 'hero' facades, they are all deeply broken on the inside. Shinji mortally despises his father. Misato is permanently emotionally scarred from the trauma of surviving the Second Impact. Shinji's father is cruel and unfeeling towards his only son. The other two pilots do not reach out emotionally to anyone. Everyone else is part of some paranoid agenda to destroy the world.
The plot progression is one where the awesomely scripted robot action decays to the low-level corrosion of the character types in the series. The transition happens about halfway through the series, and it is jarring. "Hey! Where'd the cool robot fights go?" And all this in a series where the ultimate message is one of futility and failure? The ending is just plain gratuitous to these points, especially after the release of the final films (I felt worse after watching them than after watching the 'normal' endings). I hate to spoil the ending for anybody, but you won't feel any better watching it than watching all of Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil,' for comparison.
I don't argue that anime needs to have a happy ending to be engrossing and acceptable to the mainstream. It's just that calling Evangelion the 'greatest anime ever made' both oversells Evangelion and undersells the remainder of the Anime industry.
Try these, if you think I'm lying. Cowboy Bebop delivers a gritty and dark message, but it's plenty fun for all involved. Metropolis, the 'Brazil' of the anime world (although the source greatly predates Gilliam's work) also wanders into the brittle realm of the cheerless mechanization of life. But it's better than Evangelion at doing it. People who declare Anno's work the pinnacle of Anime really do need to watch more Anime. Odds are, all they've watched is Evangelion. It would be particularly enlightening to them, if they get the opportunity, to check out what Anno's beendoingsince Evangelion.
102. Digital Research refuses to sign an IBM NDA to enter talks to license their operating system for IBM's venture into the PC market. IBM then turns back to Microsoft for their OS needs.
There was 'Yo! Noid!' the competing pizza-based video game from Domino's Pizza. Came out around the same time (1990) as TMNT 2. Such a game (which features a hook-nosed dwarf in red rabbit tights) was likely far less popular than the ninja turtles.
Re:errr what's today? Did people stop reading it?
on
XBox Defects Draw Ire
·
· Score: 1
I didn't get past that paragraph before I had to stop reading and go "what?" I think there is just a little melodrama here. At least on my Calendar the date is only January 5th. Which puts us almost at a mere two weeks after Christmas.
"The Holidays" != simply Christmas Day. It's a journalistic abbreviation for "The Holiday Shopping Season," in this context, which for most retailers begins immediately after Thanksgiving.
Not to mention that a mere few words down from the paragraph you've highlighted there is an example of "waiting weeks"
John Kreis, 31, of Chicago bought an Xbox the day it came out. [November 15].
Granted, the story is a little blown out of proportion, but not for the reasons you pretend. And since when did a comment that admits to have not read the article past the lead-in paragraph get modded up as "Insightful?"
If you want your game to have good physics, then slap a good physics engine (based on real formulae) into it!
Trolls are the quickest to get scores of 3, aren't they?
Mind you, the other consideration besides accuracy is performance. Modern computers can only do complex math by either look-up tables or doing the calculations 'by hand' with a Riemann Sum/Taylor series, which can hog memory and CPU time. Neither is a problem with programs that don't need to finish with any hurry (Matlab, Mathematica), but is a severe problem with a videogame meant to provide quick responses to user input.
Graphics programmers achieve realism using researched shortcuts like the ones mentioned in the book. Hell, they don't even use the textbook formulae for rasterizing basic geometric shapes (not even lines and circles. Google for "Bresenham" and "Circle" and you'll see what I mean). So let's not get snippy and clamp down on game programmers for not using "Pure" physics. I mean, c'mon. Video games.
This article (CNN.com) gives a rather haunting echo to what was meant as a funny story by The Onion's editors. Choice quote:
"CNN's policy is to avoid airing any material that we believe would directly facilitate any terrorist acts," [CNN] said. "In deciding what to air, CNN will consider guidance from appropriate authorities."
And computers are just a bloated rehash of television, which is just a bloated rehash of radio, which is just a bloated rehash of the written word, which is just a bloated rehash of people using their imaginations for everything.
Perhaps Serious Sam isn't the best example of this technology's application (at a retail price of $20, Serious Sam is already super-cheap), but it's an excellent example of the kinds of games this sort of rental would be ideal for. Some action games out there are still forty bucks and up (MDK and Oni immediately spring to mind), despite the fact that the games are over in a matter of hours. At best, you take your 72-hour rental and finish the game. If there is no replay value, then you got your five bucks worth. Just like going to the arcade.
If there turns out to be considerable replay value, then you can go out and buy the game...shame EB isn't (or doesn't appear to be) giving a discount option to buy after your rental is up.
Don't forget last year's classic...
on
TCP/IP Over HTTP
·
· Score: 4
RFC 2795 (Infinite Monkey Control Protocol) is by far the best RFC I've ever read.
Slashdot Mirror
That's so planned out it's almost as if it's....ORGANIZED...crime.
But surely not in New York! Surely not New Jersey!
I fail to see why one can't have a zero button mouse that simply executes the appropriate action after a predefined delay. After all, many of us have happily lived with X windows auto focus to foreground for years with no obvious detriment.
Haven't ever used Photoshop before, have we?
"I do believe that we will some day move to a more pictorial language where the alphabets will be replaced by pics"
Unless, of course, you're blind or near blind, at which point 50 slow-to-load, blurry or invisible pictures becomes hundreds of even slower-loading, blurry or invisible pictures.
Or are you volunteering to start www.text-descriptions-of-news-pictures.com?
Most CS/Engineering types I knew in college were practically -scared- of women, not beer-guzzling chauvenist pigs.
As a male chauvenist pig, I find your statement patently offensive. I prefer wine.
You can be a Paladin, a holy warrior of God. How is this bad?
:)
Anyone who's actually played through all of Diablo will be able to answer that. You don't actually succeed in killing Diablo. Your failure is the basic lead-in to the sequel, Diablo II.
Except for the fact that the people slapping stacks of cards and leaflets in their palms on every street corner of The Strip are, in fact, giving you phone numbers that, when dialed, will bring a call girl up to your hotel room (they all seem to promise this within 30 minutes to an hour).
Do I see cops stopping these people?
Of course, 'illegal' and 'enforced' are two different things, but let's not try to paint Reno and Las Vegas as the only places in Vegas where you can't get a hooker.
Simple. These mind-bogglingly cool graphics technologies are still being used to make cartoons. Iconified characters are easier for kids to identify with (and make easier to identify merchandise, for the cynical). The desired effect isn't photorealism at all. Why bother recreating the perfect human digitally when you've got actual humans who can just dance in front of an analog camera? The expense seems wasteful. All you need is something that looks like it could be real, like watching snow clump on Sully's fur (which adds atmosphere and emotion, not realism).
Hyper-realism just doesn't click with audiences (witness Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). Besides, when it comes to fantasy-based cartoons, it's easier to relay impossible animation on a character (that is, the 'squash and stretch' regularly associated with Cartoon Physics) if the animator isn't constrained by trying to make it look terribly 'realistic' at the same time. This is precisely why action-animation combo movies can look awkward when the action sequences happen (Cool World, Roger Rabbit).
From the article:
Good CEOs may be worth every penny paid, but the feeling one gets is that even terrible CEOs are getting paid just as much, if not more, than our Benevolent Captains of Industry.
Wouldn't the phrase be more meaningfully called 'pull a chrisd,' if what you're trying to say is 'foolishly spoil a surprise for millions of people?'
Golly, that half-life plot sounds really, really familiar.
Quake and Doom have always been about blowing things up, with a plot kinda papered-on afterwards. Adrenaline + action = id-style fun. People who drop fifty bucks on id's games then bitch about a lack of plot are idiots. They want plot and suspense? Buy another game. No One Lives Forever 2 is coming out soon. Wait for that. Or for the next well-plotted game to be based on an id engine (cough...Half-Life...cough).
I believe what you mean is never use vector<bitset>,
Actually, what he meant was:
Never use vector<bool>. It's an Item (18, glancing at my copy) covered in the Meyers book he plugged (in summary: it's not an STL container, and it doesn't contain bools).
Good god, did you even read the article?
MS isn't just trying to get them to pay for windows licenses. The Microsoft School Agreement makes them pay for any computer the school ever comes into, be it through a purchase or donation.
And if a computer is donated, and the school can't produce proof of license because the donor didn't give it to them, they're in violation of the license. So the school will either have to pay up or dispose of every computer they can't prove has legally installed MS software. Unless someone goes in and removes all the OS components from the computers MS would run afoul of.
Its not all supposed to make sense.
This is kind of the problem with 'high-concept' animation. Lain is very disorienting and has anything but a happy dynamic between the characters. Really, you just don't get to know the characters in Lain (not even Lain herself). This is a different kind of disorientation you receive from watching Evangelion. Evangelion is, on several levels, going out of its way to depress its viewership. You get to the end of the 26 episodes and all you can feel is loss and alienation. Hideaki Anno wrote this after years of depression, reportedly, and it shows. But a failure to make us feel good about ourselves is what makes this kind of unsatisfying. And many viewers are discontent with the somewhat arrogant 'high-concept' response of that as a successfully delivered message. It's not that they refuse to 'get it,' they just don't all believe getting slapped in the face by the artist is a good way to spend your money.
That Evangelion's conclusion fails to thrill and entertain is probably not its biggest detractor. By far what turns people off about this is the absolutely abhorrent characters put in charge of saving the world in Evangelion. While most of them on the surface have decent 'hero' facades, they are all deeply broken on the inside. Shinji mortally despises his father. Misato is permanently emotionally scarred from the trauma of surviving the Second Impact. Shinji's father is cruel and unfeeling towards his only son. The other two pilots do not reach out emotionally to anyone. Everyone else is part of some paranoid agenda to destroy the world.
The plot progression is one where the awesomely scripted robot action decays to the low-level corrosion of the character types in the series. The transition happens about halfway through the series, and it is jarring. "Hey! Where'd the cool robot fights go?" And all this in a series where the ultimate message is one of futility and failure? The ending is just plain gratuitous to these points, especially after the release of the final films (I felt worse after watching them than after watching the 'normal' endings). I hate to spoil the ending for anybody, but you won't feel any better watching it than watching all of Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil,' for comparison.
I don't argue that anime needs to have a happy ending to be engrossing and acceptable to the mainstream. It's just that calling Evangelion the 'greatest anime ever made' both oversells Evangelion and undersells the remainder of the Anime industry.
Try these, if you think I'm lying. Cowboy Bebop delivers a gritty and dark message, but it's plenty fun for all involved. Metropolis, the 'Brazil' of the anime world (although the source greatly predates Gilliam's work) also wanders into the brittle realm of the cheerless mechanization of life. But it's better than Evangelion at doing it. People who declare Anno's work the pinnacle of Anime really do need to watch more Anime. Odds are, all they've watched is Evangelion. It would be particularly enlightening to them, if they get the opportunity, to check out what Anno's been doing since Evangelion.
My favorite, legend or not:
102. Digital Research refuses to sign an IBM NDA to enter talks to license their operating system for IBM's venture into the PC market. IBM then turns back to Microsoft for their OS needs.
There was 'Yo! Noid!' the competing pizza-based video game from Domino's Pizza. Came out around the same time (1990) as TMNT 2. Such a game (which features a hook-nosed dwarf in red rabbit tights) was likely far less popular than the ninja turtles.
I didn't get past that paragraph before I had to stop reading and go "what?" I think there is just a little melodrama here. At least on my Calendar the date is only January 5th. Which puts us almost at a mere two weeks after Christmas.
"The Holidays" != simply Christmas Day. It's a journalistic abbreviation for "The Holiday Shopping Season," in this context, which for most retailers begins immediately after Thanksgiving.
Not to mention that a mere few words down from the paragraph you've highlighted there is an example of "waiting weeks"
John Kreis, 31, of Chicago bought an Xbox the day it came out. [November 15].
Granted, the story is a little blown out of proportion, but not for the reasons you pretend. And since when did a comment that admits to have not read the article past the lead-in paragraph get modded up as "Insightful?"
If you want your game to have good physics, then slap a good physics engine (based on real formulae) into it!
Trolls are the quickest to get scores of 3, aren't they?
Mind you, the other consideration besides accuracy is performance. Modern computers can only do complex math by either look-up tables or doing the calculations 'by hand' with a Riemann Sum/Taylor series, which can hog memory and CPU time. Neither is a problem with programs that don't need to finish with any hurry (Matlab, Mathematica), but is a severe problem with a videogame meant to provide quick responses to user input.
Graphics programmers achieve realism using researched shortcuts like the ones mentioned in the book. Hell, they don't even use the textbook formulae for rasterizing basic geometric shapes (not even lines and circles. Google for "Bresenham" and "Circle" and you'll see what I mean). So let's not get snippy and clamp down on game programmers for not using "Pure" physics. I mean, c'mon. Video games.
and yet you find time every week or so to rant via slashdot's html/http interface.
It's close to the real thing.
If this were a genuine Slashdot Effect, the biggest bar on each graph would instead be 'CowboyNeal'
And computers are just a bloated rehash of television, which is just a bloated rehash of radio, which is just a bloated rehash of the written word, which is just a bloated rehash of people using their imaginations for everything.
Who the hell modded this 'insightful?'
ACLU has nativity scene labeled unconstitutional
http://www.aclu.org/library/pbp10.html
ACLU defends Neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan parades
http://www.aclu.org/news/n113098c.html
Naturally, if you think they're right in both these cases, then go right ahead and become a card-carrying member (they do have nifty little cards).
If there turns out to be considerable replay value, then you can go out and buy the game...shame EB isn't (or doesn't appear to be) giving a discount option to buy after your rental is up.
RFC 2795 (Infinite Monkey Control Protocol) is by far the best RFC I've ever read.