What I love is how Siri has built in logic to detect swearing and tell you not to use such language, but it can't do basic things like keep the context of the question that it had literally just asked you a moment before. Brilliant way to spend your programming resources Apple... Make sure Siri has a witty comeback if I use profanity because of how crappy it is at not understanding context that it literally created by asking me a question.
"Siri, what is my relationship status?"... "I can't answer that"
"Siri, what is my marital status?"... "I can't answer that"
"Siri, phone my wife"... proceeds to phone my wife.
"Siri, where is my girlfriend?"... "Your wife is right beside you."
That last one has me confused. Did Siri know that I am married and thus girlfriend means spouse? Or did she try to warn me that my wife was right next to me.
Are you mad??? Asking people on slashdot to shower even less???
Pheremones don't have a noticable scent/odor... someone not showering AND failing to apply deodorant is gonna smell pretty awful, especially if it's for days.
Take the people who believe they're in a haunted house and send them through an MRI to see what part of their brain is damaged. Don't waste your time in the supposed haunted house, the feeling of a 'presence' and 'ghosts' and any other paranormal crap is all in the person's head. So start there.
Sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy if I've ever heard one... People don't play the final levels so we don't put much effort into them, so in turn people will not want to play the crappy final levels, rinse and repeat. STUPID logic. How about making every level more and more interesting, drawing the player further and further into the game. God of War did a great job of that. The story and the levels became more and more interesting as you went through the game. Give the users incentive to continue playing... spending less and less effort on the content as the game progresses leads to shit releases like DOOM 3, after the second level it looked like the level was script generated, by the 5th level I wasn't killing zombies, *I* the player, had become a zombie.
My guess is because they focused on 'safety'. Late 90's early 2000's, most of the cars were getting ABS, all sorts of airbags, traction control, stupid junk like 'on-star', navigation, power windows/locks/seats/steering columns/etc., Tire Pressue monitoring, climate control... The focus was on luxurious features and safety, which added lots of weight.
And then to add insult to injury the emissions standards got thrown in, and manufacturers were forced to scrap the old way of doing things to meet the new standards. It takes a long time for a new engine design to make it from concept to production, and the manufacturers were sitting on their laurels as it were.
First, check your purge control valve, if it sticks open it'll kill your fuel economy. I clean mine every 50,000km. The valve has a design flaw in the 04/05 model car. I never bothered to let them replace it at the dealership, so if yours wasn't replaced, this may be why you're not seeing good fuel economy.
Next, I neglected to mention I drive a manual transmission, I'm sure it makes a few MPG difference but based on your reaction, I'll assume your results are WAY off mine.
If I drive like I have a deathwish and pretend the gas and brake pedals are digital inputs, I can still get 600km out of a 52 Litre tank. If I simply accelerate normally from stoplights, and pay attention to keeping the throttle constant when cruising at highway speeds, I'll easily hit 800km a tank. I'm not talking about hypermiling, drafting trucks, and coasting downhill with the engine off... I've heard people pass 1000km on a tank doing crazy shit like that, but that isn't real world.
I'd highly recommend getting a scangage or similar device and hooking it up to your car to see your instantaneous fuel consumption. Very small changes in how you handle the accelerator pedal make a world of difference on your fuel consumption, and without it affecting your ability to keep up with normal traffic, hell I average 20km/h over the posted speed limit on highways, and I really do get over 40MPG.
I have a 2005 2.0L Mazda 3. It easily gets 40MPG, and if I pay attention to not mashing the gas pedal randomly while crusing (a big cause of wasted gas since the speed stays more or less the same but the fuel consumption increases), I can easily get 50MPG.
I agree that Diesel has done this for a while. But, while you cite no ignition system to go wrong, I cite cheap maintenance costs (oil change on a diesel is much more expensive, and a recurring cost), and I live in Canada and can't be bothered to worry about installing a block heater for those few days where my petrol engine sounds painful when started, but my diesel friends can't start. Low end torque is owned by diesel, but it's ALWAYS at the cost of incomplete combustion. Not even the latest and greatest modern diesels will accelerate off the line without a plume of black come out the tailpipe... which leads to further maintenance costs down the line.
Diesel has it's place, some people love it, some people hate it. But what I found great is that not only is it quite possible based on my own experience to get a non-direct fuel injected petrol car up to 50MPG, it looks like this mazda 2 and its new tech can reach 60+ MPG. The stupid hybrids out there with their insanely expensive markups, and huge toxic batteries can't acheive 50MPG in the real world. I can't speak for the Mazda 2, but with my 5 year old 3 I can get 50MPG in the real world. It's nice to see a company focus on actually improving fuel economy instead of this hybrid hack job.
If you can turn the feature off, then it is a gimmic.
When was the last time you could turn 'color' off in a game? 3D is a gimmic, and the fact they offer you the ability to turn it off WHILE playing means it's not required to immerse you in the gameplay.
I tried that approach a few years ago (pay everything in cash)... only problem was I needed a bank account to cash my paycheque... So that's all I had it for... to put the cheque in, and remove the cash right after. Worked great... until I tried to get car insurance for a car that I paid for in cash... apparently I had no credit history and therefor was a high risk to insure.
So I hacked the credit application database and gave myself great credit.... umm... where was I going with this... ???
So basically instead of just writing a windows app, people are going to write IE-9 specific HTML 5 extended (or enhanced) pages that load only on Windows systems and pretty much perform the same things a windows app would do (hardware accelerated).
Isn't this a really long roundabout way of just allowing apps to run off the web in a sandbox? Why the smoke and mirrors?
Nobody is infallible. This friend of yours may be smart, he may be extremely good at writing bug free code, but he is worthless as a developer for a company that needs to create anything useful if he is naive enough to believe he can write totally bug free code.
I rather have someone working with me that is an average developer who does their best to write bug free code, but deals with unexpected situations than one who thinks they're smart enough to forsee every possible outcome during code execution.
This guy sounds like the 'Greek Tragedy' of programming. An infallible developer... HA!
Some how, in North America, your mentality would be viewed as admission of guilt, and they'd find you guilty of pirating software that quite probably hasn't even been written yet.
We seem to have fallen into a guilty until proven innocent beyond any doubt (no matter how unreasonable) system up here... How's the weather down there? If you guys have cheap internet, I'm willing to emmigrate...
If anything, it would help the jury decide to sentence him to death... obviously they're helping him by not letting him live, thus his horribly diseased brain won't make him suffer any longer... Really it's the humanitarian thing to do...:P
-- I'm quite eager to start 'testing' satellite TV signals again... After all,
-- it's just some keys used for signing, right? I purchased my hardware
-- receiver for money, right? Quite the slippery slope, isn't it?
-No. It's fundamentally different
I take a TI calculator, using keys obtained from internet forums I sign my hacked version (or homebrew, or whatever) and load it onto my device and expose functionality that I am not entitled to access from the hardware.
I take a Nintendo DS, using keys I obtained from internet forums, I sign my homebrew game and load it onto the device. I am now playing games on my DS that are not sanctioned by Nintendo (replace Nintendo with Sony Playstation, Apple iPhone, Microsoft XBOX, etc.).
I now take a DirecTV receiver, using keys I obtained from the internet, I load a firmware version on the device that allows me to tune into channels that I don't have in my 'package'.
Please, humor me, as I'm not seeing how this isn't a quick and logical argument that if I can do the first thing, why can't I progress to the last thing using the same legal arguments along the way? I paid for the hardware in all cases.
All sorts of companies produce the exact same hardware and then have a registry bit/flag hidden somewhere to enable the more expensive features. nVidia and their Quadro cards comes to mind... Or Intel and their underclock/overclock crap... the chips are identical, one is stamped with a different number and frozen at a different multiplier.
TI probably has some features disabled or unavailable in their lower-end models, hack the software, and lo and behold, the actual hardware can probably do most of the same stuff the more expensive model can. I can see why they wouldn't want people *SHARING* this information with the general public.
Actually, come to think of it, if TI loses on this one, I'm quite eager to start 'testing' satellite TV signals again... After all, it's just some keys used for signing, right? I purchased my hardware receiver for money, right? Quite the slippery slope, isn't it?
What makes you think creative thinking can't be taught?
If it could be taught, it would be a multi-billion dollar industry. I know I certainly would love to attend courses that taught me to be more creative... I always wanted to write music, or create artwork... too bad all I've ever learned from the classes offered has been how to identify what sucks about what I created, but they never taught me how to actually create something good. That's always left to your 'creativity'... how convenient...
For example, almost everyone knows how to use photoshop if they play with it long enough, right? Can you show me a school that will teach any average person to be artistic? Probably not, but I'm sure you can show me lots of art schools that can teach artistic people how to use photoshop with amazing results.
You can take a creative person and teach them the correct ways to apply their ideas, but you can't take someone that knows the 'rules and regulations' inside and out, but sucks at independent thinking and teach them to be creative.
Hence why you'll get a bunch of people who have the same degrees from the same universities but they will have capabilities that are miles apart when it comes to software development. All the people were given the nuts and bolts knowledge, but only the creative ones excel in the real world think outside the box environments. That's not to say there aren't places for the 'by-the-book' developer, but it'll be maintenance coding, and not make the latest cutting edge app or game.
Hacker mentality or not, lack of creativity is why Indian developers tend to produce lackluster results. (And before I get flamed, I'm saying this in general, I'm sure there are many creative Indian developers out there, just as there are many uncreative American developers)
The original Nintendo GBA port of DOOM certainly proved that point. They ported it directly, except without sufficient processing power, and a complete lack of optimization effort on the part of the developers that did the port, the game SUCKED ASS.
Being a software developer myself, I can totally appreciate the comment about the port only take a few days (Afterall, the original engine is only a few hundred lines of code), but that a quality port will take much longer. If you need proof, again, look at the Nintendo GBA port of DOOM.
Honestly, if you want to compare American and Canadian laws, copyright laws are the bottom of the list in terms of impact and relevency. There are WAY more important laws that clearly shows Canada's are generally more enlightened and less restrictive compared to their American counterparts.
I've tried the exchange method before... the woman took my money, and gave me nothing in return... what the hell are the male chimps doing differently?
mplayer plays almost everything I've thrown at it. It even handles corrupt files pretty well. VLC dies a horrible death if the file is corrupt, even with just a few bytes being messed up in a header.
mplayer gets my vote for being the BEST player out there, not only because it supports most everything, and has an unintrusive UI as the parent post pointed out, but also because it doesn't hang and crash when it runs into data that isn't perfect.
You want to be notified of everything that may happen unexpectedly? Seriously? Because then we're going to be here a while...
No, not everything... I want to be notified of my windows' possible shattering due to a KNOWN explosion being conducted a mile away. It's unexpected from my frame of reference since I'm uninformed about it.
Hell, we get probability reports on where a piece of space junk may fall and possibly hit my house (I have a better chance of winning the lottery 10 times and nailing a super model twice), yet they think it's fine to not inform nearby residents that there's going to be a giant bang? Nobody needs to say it's due to a crew filming a TV show, just inform the town that there's a test going on at such and such a time, and there's a possibility of damage from the blast. I don't think that's at all unreasonable.
So now if some TV show is filming a dangerous experiment near my house, I shouldn't be notified that my windows may explode unexpectedly? This public official needs to be fired. I'm all for the TV show, but public safety comes first... or at least it used to back in the day... now get off my grass!
Slashdot Mirror
What I love is how Siri has built in logic to detect swearing and tell you not to use such language, but it can't do basic things like keep the context of the question that it had literally just asked you a moment before. Brilliant way to spend your programming resources Apple... Make sure Siri has a witty comeback if I use profanity because of how crappy it is at not understanding context that it literally created by asking me a question.
Actual conversation I had with Siri.
... "I can't answer that" ... "I can't answer that" ... proceeds to phone my wife. ... "Your wife is right beside you."
"Siri, what is my relationship status?"
"Siri, what is my marital status?"
"Siri, phone my wife"
"Siri, where is my girlfriend?"
That last one has me confused. Did Siri know that I am married and thus girlfriend means spouse? Or did she try to warn me that my wife was right next to me.
Are you mad??? Asking people on slashdot to shower even less???
Pheremones don't have a noticable scent/odor... someone not showering AND failing to apply deodorant is gonna smell pretty awful, especially if it's for days.
Take the people who believe they're in a haunted house and send them through an MRI to see what part of their brain is damaged. Don't waste your time in the supposed haunted house, the feeling of a 'presence' and 'ghosts' and any other paranormal crap is all in the person's head. So start there.
Sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy if I've ever heard one... People don't play the final levels so we don't put much effort into them, so in turn people will not want to play the crappy final levels, rinse and repeat. STUPID logic. How about making every level more and more interesting, drawing the player further and further into the game. God of War did a great job of that. The story and the levels became more and more interesting as you went through the game. Give the users incentive to continue playing... spending less and less effort on the content as the game progresses leads to shit releases like DOOM 3, after the second level it looked like the level was script generated, by the 5th level I wasn't killing zombies, *I* the player, had become a zombie.
My guess is because they focused on 'safety'. Late 90's early 2000's, most of the cars were getting ABS, all sorts of airbags, traction control, stupid junk like 'on-star', navigation, power windows/locks/seats/steering columns/etc., Tire Pressue monitoring, climate control... The focus was on luxurious features and safety, which added lots of weight.
And then to add insult to injury the emissions standards got thrown in, and manufacturers were forced to scrap the old way of doing things to meet the new standards. It takes a long time for a new engine design to make it from concept to production, and the manufacturers were sitting on their laurels as it were.
First, check your purge control valve, if it sticks open it'll kill your fuel economy. I clean mine every 50,000km. The valve has a design flaw in the 04/05 model car. I never bothered to let them replace it at the dealership, so if yours wasn't replaced, this may be why you're not seeing good fuel economy.
Next, I neglected to mention I drive a manual transmission, I'm sure it makes a few MPG difference but based on your reaction, I'll assume your results are WAY off mine.
If I drive like I have a deathwish and pretend the gas and brake pedals are digital inputs, I can still get 600km out of a 52 Litre tank. If I simply accelerate normally from stoplights, and pay attention to keeping the throttle constant when cruising at highway speeds, I'll easily hit 800km a tank. I'm not talking about hypermiling, drafting trucks, and coasting downhill with the engine off... I've heard people pass 1000km on a tank doing crazy shit like that, but that isn't real world.
I'd highly recommend getting a scangage or similar device and hooking it up to your car to see your instantaneous fuel consumption. Very small changes in how you handle the accelerator pedal make a world of difference on your fuel consumption, and without it affecting your ability to keep up with normal traffic, hell I average 20km/h over the posted speed limit on highways, and I really do get over 40MPG.
I have a 2005 2.0L Mazda 3. It easily gets 40MPG, and if I pay attention to not mashing the gas pedal randomly while crusing (a big cause of wasted gas since the speed stays more or less the same but the fuel consumption increases), I can easily get 50MPG.
I agree that Diesel has done this for a while. But, while you cite no ignition system to go wrong, I cite cheap maintenance costs (oil change on a diesel is much more expensive, and a recurring cost), and I live in Canada and can't be bothered to worry about installing a block heater for those few days where my petrol engine sounds painful when started, but my diesel friends can't start. Low end torque is owned by diesel, but it's ALWAYS at the cost of incomplete combustion. Not even the latest and greatest modern diesels will accelerate off the line without a plume of black come out the tailpipe... which leads to further maintenance costs down the line.
Diesel has it's place, some people love it, some people hate it. But what I found great is that not only is it quite possible based on my own experience to get a non-direct fuel injected petrol car up to 50MPG, it looks like this mazda 2 and its new tech can reach 60+ MPG. The stupid hybrids out there with their insanely expensive markups, and huge toxic batteries can't acheive 50MPG in the real world. I can't speak for the Mazda 2, but with my 5 year old 3 I can get 50MPG in the real world. It's nice to see a company focus on actually improving fuel economy instead of this hybrid hack job.
If you can turn the feature off, then it is a gimmic.
When was the last time you could turn 'color' off in a game? 3D is a gimmic, and the fact they offer you the ability to turn it off WHILE playing means it's not required to immerse you in the gameplay.
I tried that approach a few years ago (pay everything in cash)... only problem was I needed a bank account to cash my paycheque... So that's all I had it for... to put the cheque in, and remove the cash right after. Worked great... until I tried to get car insurance for a car that I paid for in cash... apparently I had no credit history and therefor was a high risk to insure.
So I hacked the credit application database and gave myself great credit.... umm... where was I going with this... ???
So basically instead of just writing a windows app, people are going to write IE-9 specific HTML 5 extended (or enhanced) pages that load only on Windows systems and pretty much perform the same things a windows app would do (hardware accelerated).
Isn't this a really long roundabout way of just allowing apps to run off the web in a sandbox? Why the smoke and mirrors?
Nobody is infallible. This friend of yours may be smart, he may be extremely good at writing bug free code, but he is worthless as a developer for a company that needs to create anything useful if he is naive enough to believe he can write totally bug free code.
I rather have someone working with me that is an average developer who does their best to write bug free code, but deals with unexpected situations than one who thinks they're smart enough to forsee every possible outcome during code execution.
This guy sounds like the 'Greek Tragedy' of programming. An infallible developer... HA!
Some how, in North America, your mentality would be viewed as admission of guilt, and they'd find you guilty of pirating software that quite probably hasn't even been written yet.
We seem to have fallen into a guilty until proven innocent beyond any doubt (no matter how unreasonable) system up here... How's the weather down there? If you guys have cheap internet, I'm willing to emmigrate...
If anything, it would help the jury decide to sentence him to death... obviously they're helping him by not letting him live, thus his horribly diseased brain won't make him suffer any longer... Really it's the humanitarian thing to do... :P
-- I'm quite eager to start 'testing' satellite TV signals again... After all,
-- it's just some keys used for signing, right? I purchased my hardware
-- receiver for money, right? Quite the slippery slope, isn't it?
-No. It's fundamentally different
I take a TI calculator, using keys obtained from internet forums I sign my hacked version (or homebrew, or whatever) and load it onto my device and expose functionality that I am not entitled to access from the hardware.
I take a Nintendo DS, using keys I obtained from internet forums, I sign my homebrew game and load it onto the device. I am now playing games on my DS that are not sanctioned by Nintendo (replace Nintendo with Sony Playstation, Apple iPhone, Microsoft XBOX, etc.).
I now take a DirecTV receiver, using keys I obtained from the internet, I load a firmware version on the device that allows me to tune into channels that I don't have in my 'package'.
Please, humor me, as I'm not seeing how this isn't a quick and logical argument that if I can do the first thing, why can't I progress to the last thing using the same legal arguments along the way? I paid for the hardware in all cases.
All sorts of companies produce the exact same hardware and then have a registry bit/flag hidden somewhere to enable the more expensive features. nVidia and their Quadro cards comes to mind... Or Intel and their underclock/overclock crap... the chips are identical, one is stamped with a different number and frozen at a different multiplier.
TI probably has some features disabled or unavailable in their lower-end models, hack the software, and lo and behold, the actual hardware can probably do most of the same stuff the more expensive model can. I can see why they wouldn't want people *SHARING* this information with the general public.
Actually, come to think of it, if TI loses on this one, I'm quite eager to start 'testing' satellite TV signals again... After all, it's just some keys used for signing, right? I purchased my hardware receiver for money, right? Quite the slippery slope, isn't it?
Is my 12" Powerbook with 5-hour battery life now retroactively a netbook?
:P
No, you still paid way too much for it... At best it can be a retro 'Apple fanboy' netbook!
What makes you think creative thinking can't be taught?
If it could be taught, it would be a multi-billion dollar industry. I know I certainly would love to attend courses that taught me to be more creative... I always wanted to write music, or create artwork... too bad all I've ever learned from the classes offered has been how to identify what sucks about what I created, but they never taught me how to actually create something good. That's always left to your 'creativity'... how convenient...
For example, almost everyone knows how to use photoshop if they play with it long enough, right? Can you show me a school that will teach any average person to be artistic? Probably not, but I'm sure you can show me lots of art schools that can teach artistic people how to use photoshop with amazing results.
You can take a creative person and teach them the correct ways to apply their ideas, but you can't take someone that knows the 'rules and regulations' inside and out, but sucks at independent thinking and teach them to be creative.
Hence why you'll get a bunch of people who have the same degrees from the same universities but they will have capabilities that are miles apart when it comes to software development. All the people were given the nuts and bolts knowledge, but only the creative ones excel in the real world think outside the box environments. That's not to say there aren't places for the 'by-the-book' developer, but it'll be maintenance coding, and not make the latest cutting edge app or game.
Hacker mentality or not, lack of creativity is why Indian developers tend to produce lackluster results. (And before I get flamed, I'm saying this in general, I'm sure there are many creative Indian developers out there, just as there are many uncreative American developers)
The original Nintendo GBA port of DOOM certainly proved that point. They ported it directly, except without sufficient processing power, and a complete lack of optimization effort on the part of the developers that did the port, the game SUCKED ASS.
Being a software developer myself, I can totally appreciate the comment about the port only take a few days (Afterall, the original engine is only a few hundred lines of code), but that a quality port will take much longer. If you need proof, again, look at the Nintendo GBA port of DOOM.
Honestly, if you want to compare American and Canadian laws, copyright laws are the bottom of the list in terms of impact and relevency. There are WAY more important laws that clearly shows Canada's are generally more enlightened and less restrictive compared to their American counterparts.
I've tried the exchange method before... the woman took my money, and gave me nothing in return... what the hell are the male chimps doing differently?
mplayer plays almost everything I've thrown at it. It even handles corrupt files pretty well. VLC dies a horrible death if the file is corrupt, even with just a few bytes being messed up in a header.
mplayer gets my vote for being the BEST player out there, not only because it supports most everything, and has an unintrusive UI as the parent post pointed out, but also because it doesn't hang and crash when it runs into data that isn't perfect.
You want to be notified of everything that may happen unexpectedly? Seriously? Because then we're going to be here a while...
No, not everything... I want to be notified of my windows' possible shattering due to a KNOWN explosion being conducted a mile away. It's unexpected from my frame of reference since I'm uninformed about it.
Hell, we get probability reports on where a piece of space junk may fall and possibly hit my house (I have a better chance of winning the lottery 10 times and nailing a super model twice), yet they think it's fine to not inform nearby residents that there's going to be a giant bang? Nobody needs to say it's due to a crew filming a TV show, just inform the town that there's a test going on at such and such a time, and there's a possibility of damage from the blast. I don't think that's at all unreasonable.
So now if some TV show is filming a dangerous experiment near my house, I shouldn't be notified that my windows may explode unexpectedly? This public official needs to be fired. I'm all for the TV show, but public safety comes first... or at least it used to back in the day... now get off my grass!