I'm trying to basically chronicle the average model that the players have made in their heads. It's like cultural anthropology. Already it's having a huge impact on what we do with our expansion packs and the next version of The Sims. We're getting a sense of when people like to play the house building game vs. the relationship game, and what types of families they like to create, what objects they like the most. Eventually, in the not too distant future, we're working towards having this be dynamic on a daily basis so the game in some sense can be self-tuning to each individual player based on what they've done in the game.
So Will is playing a game where he has to make sure that a million Sims players are happy playing their Sims game. I guess you could call him the only Sims player who is getting paid for playing.:)
If you think the next year is going to bring some really cheap, big storage, ogg compatible players (I do) then you may want to just get the cheapest thing now and plan to upgrade.
Something like the Audiophase player costs $50 at BestBuy, plays mp3 CDs (and CD-RWs) comes with a car kit, runs for hours on two AAs (I use rechargables), and has decent skip protection. 650MB CDs aren't as nice as a big hard drive but it's still holds a lot of music and swapping them is easy.
backwards compatible with normal IDE drives (inexpensive)
long thin cables
no jumpers
MOBOs with room for eight or more interfaces
The one thing I don't understand is that if each drive has its own channel does that mean that each drive requires an IRQ? How will you be able to plug 8+ drives into a MOBO if it eats 8+ IRQs? Are they all shared?
Franklin also invented a more efficient fireplace, which he also built and sold. He was offered a patent on this by the Governor of Pennsylvania but refused.
That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.
-BF
He thought the idea of intellectual property to be a bit kooky.
If you're curious, read more about Franklin in the excellent biography The First American
I was so disgusted by Episode I that I made a vow to never see Episode II. I know, a single ticket probably won't make any difference but I just can't bring myself to give more money to Lucas' crap factory.
The funny thing is that my friends think that since I am such an uber-geek that I will eventually have to see the movie--either purposly or accidentally. They've actually started a betting pool to see how long it will be before I see it.
Re:Its why people buy lottery tickets.
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 1
Events like this keep reminding me how humans in general have no natural inclination for either big numbers or probability.
Support the Math Illiteracy Tax: Buy Lottery Tickets!
I've got oh-too-much experience with professionals who pass and return structs to and from C functions, not pointers to structs. They cause an infinite amount of memory leaks, buffer overflows, memory corruption, and other unimaginable problems.
Not understanding C and misusing malloc, free, pointers and return types is bad. Not understanding Python and misusing its feature set is also bad. Knowing C well, not knowing python very well, and attempting to compare C and Python is also bad.
Languages are just tools and if you don't understand them you may choose the wrong tool for the job.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Every variable in python is a reference to an object (i.e. a pointer) so you can implement any complex data structure / algorithm you want.
$ python >>> class A: ... pass ... >>> a = A() >>> b = a >>> a.foo = "assigned to a" >>> a.foo 'assigned to a' >>> b.foo 'assigned to a' >>>
I saw this article, looked over my shoulder at the bookcase that has way too many Oreilly books and thought "Understanding the Linux Kernel. has probably saved me more time than any other book."
Eventually you are going to run into a bug/performance problem that is not in your code, not in the language, and not in the runtime, and you'll need to step into that big scary blob called the kernel. Then you'll read this book and realize that the kernel no different than any other piece of code, find the problem fix it, and go on with your life.
Of course if you're programming on top of a closed source OS then you're out of luck.
This firing only applies if one is male, white, under 40, has no disabilities that fall under the scope of the ADA, and (in some states) straight. If you are not one of these, you fall into a "protected class" and, although one can still be fired, the employer needs to document it REALLY well.
It's kind of ironic that due to discrimination laws, for the first time in history, young white males actually are superior to all other groups in one way: they can be easily fired.
Strange timing. The latest issue of Scientific American has an article that discusses the Drake equation, specifically the L quantity which is the lifetime of communicating civilizations.
I was four years old when my older siblings played Ziggy Stardust, Alladin Sane, and Space Oddity all day every day. They must have worn out a ton of albums not to mention turntable needles. They also wore out my Dad's patience as I can still hear him yelling at them to "Turn that shit down!"
Now whenever I hear these songs I get that strange deja-vu feeling you get when you hear some childhood lullaby. They're burned into my brain like bits on a ROM.
I'm sure a lot of the slashdot crowd knows about security updates, firewalls, and TCP SYN flags, but remember that there are a lot of folks out there that don't have a clue what any of this means. These clueless folks are the same newbies that are installing an arbitrary distribution onto an old box and promptly plugging that box into their cable modem.
The next time you introduce a friend to linux, be sure to give them a rudimentary security lesson and make sure they are installing security updates.
Extreme Programming consists of a lot of distinct ideas including: small teams, two people per keyboard, unit testing, and refactoring.
The most useful of these ideas to me is refactoring. (probably followed closely by unit testing) Refactoring starts with the humble admission that at the start of most software projects, you really don't know exactly what the final product will look like. This implies that the design of the project will change during development. Refactoring is a set of techniques that allows the design of a program to change without making a mess of the code.
If you are interested in Java and Refactoring, you really owe it to yourself to check out Refactoring by Martin Fowler. He has come up with a very well written book in the format of Design Patterns that does a good job of enumerating and explaining many refactoring techniques.
Re:Perhaps when bandwidth is cheap...
on
P2P Television?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The thing that "let the genie out of the bottle" for digital music was:
Rippers that made it easy to suck wave files from a CD
Encoders that turned an NNN size wave file into MM.
Bandwidth that made downloading MM size files feasable.
Cheap CD burners and blank CD media
Now with VCDs we definitely have (4) we may have (1) (2) depending on your definition of easy but we certainly don't have (3) for a 650MB VCD image....and the latest news makes the future of broadband certainly look more expensive.
The video P2P genie looks like it's still in the bottle to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Games like the Sims, Sim City, and collectable card games (deck construction) allow the player to become the game designer.
Isn't it both more fun and rewarding to actually design your own game? I know it is for me and I doubt that I'm alone in this opinion.
So Will is playing a game where he has to make sure that a million Sims players are happy playing their Sims game. I guess you could call him the only Sims player who is getting paid for playing. :)
I agree it's a long article but even more exhausting is the range of topics:
*gasp*, what do I comment on first?
If you think the next year is going to bring some really cheap, big storage, ogg compatible players (I do) then you may want to just get the cheapest thing now and plan to upgrade.
Something like the Audiophase player costs $50 at BestBuy, plays mp3 CDs (and CD-RWs) comes with a car kit, runs for hours on two AAs (I use rechargables), and has decent skip protection. 650MB CDs aren't as nice as a big hard drive but it's still holds a lot of music and swapping them is easy.
Serial ATA looks great:
The one thing I don't understand is that if each drive has its own channel does that mean that each drive requires an IRQ? How will you be able to plug 8+ drives into a MOBO if it eats 8+ IRQs? Are they all shared?
Franklin also invented a more efficient fireplace, which he also built and sold. He was offered a patent on this by the Governor of Pennsylvania but refused.
That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.
-BF
He thought the idea of intellectual property to be a bit kooky.
If you're curious, read more about Franklin in the excellent biography The First American
I was so disgusted by Episode I that I made a vow to never see Episode II. I know, a single ticket probably won't make any difference but I just can't bring myself to give more money to Lucas' crap factory.
The funny thing is that my friends think that since I am such an uber-geek that I will eventually have to see the movie--either purposly or accidentally. They've actually started a betting pool to see how long it will be before I see it.
Events like this keep reminding me how humans in general have no natural inclination for either big numbers or probability.
Support the Math Illiteracy Tax: Buy Lottery Tickets!
There are also no pointers to pointers in Python, which are a highly useful technique in C.
Wrong. Python can do pointers to pointers
$ python
... pass
...
>>> class P:
>>> p=P()
>>> p.s="foo"
>>> pp=P()
>>> pp.p=p
>>> pp.p.s
'foo'
I've got oh-too-much experience with professionals who pass and return structs to and from C functions, not pointers to structs. They cause an infinite amount of memory leaks, buffer overflows, memory corruption, and other unimaginable problems.
Not understanding C and misusing malloc, free, pointers and return types is bad. Not understanding Python and misusing its feature set is also bad. Knowing C well, not knowing python very well, and attempting to compare C and Python is also bad.
Languages are just tools and if you don't understand them you may choose the wrong tool for the job.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Every variable in python is a reference to an object (i.e. a pointer) so you can implement any complex data structure / algorithm you want.
$ python
... pass
...
>>> class A:
>>> a = A()
>>> b = a
>>> a.foo = "assigned to a"
>>> a.foo
'assigned to a'
>>> b.foo
'assigned to a'
>>>
FYI. java, perl and ruby are the same way.
I saw this article, looked over my shoulder at the bookcase that has way too many Oreilly books and thought "Understanding the Linux Kernel. has probably saved me more time than any other book."
Eventually you are going to run into a bug/performance problem that is not in your code, not in the language, and not in the runtime, and you'll need to step into that big scary blob called the kernel. Then you'll read this book and realize that the kernel no different than any other piece of code, find the problem fix it, and go on with your life.
Of course if you're programming on top of a closed source OS then you're out of luck.
This firing only applies if one is male, white, under 40, has no disabilities that fall under the scope of the ADA, and (in some states) straight. If you are not one of these, you fall into a "protected class" and, although one can still be fired, the employer needs to document it REALLY well.
It's kind of ironic that due to discrimination laws, for the first time in history, young white males actually are superior to all other groups in one way: they can be easily fired.
When an author who works for a company describes the features of a product from that company it's called an advertisement not a review.
Yes, still think the product is damn cool.
Strange timing. The latest issue of Scientific American has an article that discusses the Drake equation, specifically the L quantity which is the lifetime of communicating civilizations.
I was four years old when my older siblings played Ziggy Stardust, Alladin Sane, and Space Oddity all day every day. They must have worn out a ton of albums not to mention turntable needles. They also wore out my Dad's patience as I can still hear him yelling at them to "Turn that shit down!"
Now whenever I hear these songs I get that strange deja-vu feeling you get when you hear some childhood lullaby. They're burned into my brain like bits on a ROM.
I'm sure a lot of the slashdot crowd knows about security updates, firewalls, and TCP SYN flags, but remember that there are a lot of folks out there that don't have a clue what any of this means. These clueless folks are the same newbies that are installing an arbitrary distribution onto an old box and promptly plugging that box into their cable modem.
The next time you introduce a friend to linux, be sure to give them a rudimentary security lesson and make sure they are installing security updates.
Extreme Programming consists of a lot of distinct ideas including: small teams, two people per keyboard, unit testing, and refactoring.
The most useful of these ideas to me is refactoring. (probably followed closely by unit testing) Refactoring starts with the humble admission that at the start of most software projects, you really don't know exactly what the final product will look like. This implies that the design of the project will change during development. Refactoring is a set of techniques that allows the design of a program to change without making a mess of the code.
If you are interested in Java and Refactoring, you really owe it to yourself to check out Refactoring by Martin Fowler. He has come up with a very well written book in the format of Design Patterns that does a good job of enumerating and explaining many refactoring techniques.
The thing that "let the genie out of the bottle" for digital music was:
Now with VCDs we definitely have (4) we may have (1) (2) depending on your definition of easy but we certainly don't have (3) for a 650MB VCD image. ...and the latest news makes the future of broadband certainly look more expensive.
The video P2P genie looks like it's still in the bottle to me.
Here's a link to Cosmic Voyage. It is an excellent film. See it if you can.
Salon reviewed this book a while back.
Here is a full diff between 7.2 and last night's rawhide which should be pretty close to 7.3.
diff-72-73.txt.bz2