You also happily ignore the countless western games where UNLIKE the japanese games, you can choose your own race. MMO's like WoW and Lotro.
WoW? You mean where my choices for human characters are "white guy," "white guy with a slight tan," and "white guy with a dark tan?" They don't have any choice of facial features that make my toon look anything other than European.
Sage has similar capabilities to Mathematica including the separation of client and server for example.
I'm sure somebody will point out that there's areas in which Sage and other open projects lag behind the capabilities of Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc. Maybe some people absolutely need the capabilities in these proprietary products to do their work, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let myself get shoehorned into a research niche that "requires" dependence on proprietary products, because I don't want to find myself held hostage to somebody's generosity.
At least I know that if I use Sage, SciPy, NumPy, matplotlib, octave, Maxima, etc., to generate some result for a paper, and properly cite my use of said software packages, I'll probably get a, "Gee, thanks for telling people you used our stuff!" response, instead of a cease and desist letter from some money-grubbing fucktard that thinks he owns my research results.
I would think that repeating an experiment falls into the category of "Scientific Rigor" -- if academics are unwilling to their experiments (albeit this seems for the wrong reasons), they are in the wrong job...
Most people doing experiments don't have unlimited resources to redo something they did right the first time. As far as the "rigor" part goes, the idea is to get *other people* to do the experiment...having the same people do it over again doesn't really do much to show reproducibility.
So using something like Java or C# or C++ or Ruby or Python, where 1 line of code equals dozens of assembler instructions, is insanely more productive.
That's generally been my experience, and several similar arguments came to mind, but I just didn't think it would be worth the effort to write them all down this time.:P
It is cheaper and faster to design a custom arrangement of 1000 $1.50 microprocessors to match the needs of complex problem than it is to write and debug the software that will 'solve' the problem on a $5000 standard Von Neumann computer. Microcontroller programmers are cheap and easy to recruit: OOP software development teams are expensive.
Am I living in a different universe or something? I should build a custom machine with 1000 processors every time I have a new complex problem, instead of just writing a program in a high-level language that will run on my single $5000 general-purpose machine? Do these microcontroller programmers work for free or something?
I mean, yeah, it sounds like it might be cool to implement a 3D finite volume PDE solver that uses adaptive mesh refinement in...assembly language...from scratch...running on 1000 processors...that I'll have to wire together myself. To be honest, it really does sound like it would be cool to do *once*, for a toy-sized problem, just for the experience, but I must have missed something if doing things this way is always the best solution. That seems awfully reminiscient of saying "programming language X is *always* the best solution for *every* problem."
...so over a total of 25 years, the richest man ever to live managed to capture about 2.6 days of the current annual production of the United States (and he is back down to having about 25 hours).
Assuming there's 153.1 million people "producing" in the US, and that the average person works for 60 years, that 2.6 days of GDP comes out to about 18,000 working lifetimes of average production. That still seems like a lot to me.
The Microsoft EULA most likely states that usage in a nuclear facility is not allowed. Quite a lot of commercial licenses have such a clause to limit liability. I doubt Microsoft would be willing to sell a license to such a facility for any reasonable price.
The DoD probably just buys a site license for Windows, and uses it wherever they damn well please. Just because Microsoft says they don't want you to use their software to monitor/control nuclear weapons or power plants doesn't mean organizations avoid doing so.
Why? Because you believe that nobody in the US Department of Defense would be stupid enough to have a Windows machine as part of a nuclear weapons control system, or because you believe that including Windows in anything built by DoD and its contractors couldn't really make the system significantly more vulnerable?
on the show? The crew gets into a horrible accident that requires them to get voice box transplants, and Bender's voice gets erased and he is programmed with a different one.
What a nice idea. If this recasting turns out to be a bluff, I'd love to see them poke fun at it for the opening of the first new episode...get random people the mail room, HR, etc., to voice everybody for the first 5 minutes (or something similar).
Of course if they actually recast, I expect it will go down in flames...I just can't see it being the same.
Oh noes! Just think of all the government and corporate workers that will no longer be able to watch YouTube after the phase-out. I bet those organizations will see a drop-off in their network traffic when the switch is thrown.
Modifying and DISTRIBUTING GPL software causes license violations.... How hard is that to understand? Christ, I understood it as a high-school junior...
How hard is it to understand that other developers may come along later in the life of a project and change things such that the project now distributes binaries built from a modified GPL'd codebase? Yeah, I may know all the rules for abiding by the GPL, but if I haven't taken some effort to let management and other developers know that we're using GPL'd code, then I'm setting them up to make a mistake that might cost them reputation and/or money down the road.
If nothing else, I think it's just professional courtesy to my coworkers to let them know when I'm bringing in somebody else's code to get our job done.
You don't. None of you. You take the software, and use it like Excalibur to slay your dragon and then take the credit for it.
No, asshole, some of us think it's important for our employer to know which third party libraries and tools we're using (whether they are open source or not), so they aren't blindsided with a lawsuit. I conjecture that you're projecting your own need to be the hero onto the rest of us.
Yeah, but that's only believe there is another one, and that your $DIETY is in charge of it. Who knows, Odin might have a lot of respect for somebody that can produce a good blue streak laden with lots of naughty Anglo-Saxon* words.;)
*Disclaimer for the inevitable linguist Nazis: I don't know jack shit about the Angles, Saxons, or their words, but for some reason I think a Norse god would give you a thumbs up if your curse could make Beowulf blush.
I'm sorry, but I think you misunderstood me: I'm not making the standard complaint. I'm saying that, whether you're a man or woman, if you're somebody that genuinely wants your partner to actually give a shit about you in the same way you care about them, then you're probably going to invest a lot of time to find somebody that meets that standard. Why? Because most people--men and women--want somebody that will do a laundry list of things for them, but they can't be bothered to reciprocate in full. I'm only 40-ish years old, but so far I haven't seen anything to make me think that one sex is any better in that respect than the other.
And, although I'll get beat up for it, I have to say a couple of other things:
1) Tell the people that expect you to agonize over that swimsuit and that "young, supple, well-rounded" bullshit to go take a flying leap. Any guy that's going to be a good partner isn't going to worry about that, and (honestly) any guy that's really worried about it in any significant way probably isn't worth your time.
2) If you go around assuming that guys just can't understand how much it sucks to be a woman, you're going to run off a good percentage of the guys that would actually like to give a shit about their partner.
But really people, is it so freaking hard to just take us out to dinner, kiss our neck afterwords in an intimate and quiet environment, and actually DO the foreplay (and for those in longer-term relationships, not have it become formulaic?)
Apparently it's really freaking hard for most guys, based on the difficulty many women seem to have in finding guys that meet those criteria. That said, it's apparently also really freaking hard for many women to show the same level of respect for men's similarly simple expectations.
On the condition that the loop includes a trip above the Mayor's house and that all video feeds are released to the public.
Even if it doesn't, I'm sure some concerned citizen(s) could implement some round-the-clock monitoring of him and his family. That way, he will "never know when he is being watched or followed. It would be stupid for him to have a mistress, for his kids to buy drugs, or for any member of his family to do anything that might offend [voting group X]'s sensibilities." It's for the protection of the public--which justifies anything nowadays, or so I hear--and people in power are in a unique position to defraud or embarrass the public.
...who cares when what's running on all the servers is open source software, and the services written atop THAT are also using open technologies?
Is it open, though? I expect that Amazon, Google, et. als. have tweaked and customized the bejeezus out of the underlying OS and other software, and aren't about to share it. So yeah, they're (maybe) using open source, and maybe even contributing some improvements back into those projects, but I'm not sure that's enough to say the cloud infrastructure is open source.
A game ought to be designed with limits from its inception - thus you would get a true diminishing returns curve, and a limited number that ever reach "max_level"
So if I don't have 100 hours a week to devote to play time, I should automatically get crushed by the guy that does, because he's 5 levels higher than me?
It just doesn't have a point, you know the level cap will be raised again and again (and again). It has little effect beyond giving more grind for your buck (lengthening the game) and diminishing what "value" the previous level had.
If you ask me, it's really good to wipe the slate clean every once in a while by raising the level cap. Yeah, the guy that plays all the time will get to the new level cap faster than me, and get nice gear faster than me, but he still has to start over at the same level as me, replace all their gear again, and (even if only for a few months) the bulk of the population isn't supremely overpowered when compared to the casual gamer.
In my opinion, there *is* a nonlinear curve after you reach the level cap: you have to spend a lot of time playing to get minimal incremental benefits. A character in full top-notch epics isn't that much more powerful than an equivalently specced one wearing "welfare" epics (or whatever the 1337 hardcore people are calling epics you don't have to live in the game to get nowadays).
I think Blizzard has done a pretty good job of giving me entertainment at a fairly low cost per hour. But then I'm just somebody that plays casually for fun; I don't treat it like an important endeavor.
Slashdot Mirror
You also happily ignore the countless western games where UNLIKE the japanese games, you can choose your own race. MMO's like WoW and Lotro.
WoW? You mean where my choices for human characters are "white guy," "white guy with a slight tan," and "white guy with a dark tan?" They don't have any choice of facial features that make my toon look anything other than European.
Mathematica could be rebuilt in 5 years with a good focus.
Some projects such as Sage already have made large strides:
http://www.sagemath.org/tour-quickstart.html
Sage has similar capabilities to Mathematica including the separation of client and server for example.
I'm sure somebody will point out that there's areas in which Sage and other open projects lag behind the capabilities of Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc. Maybe some people absolutely need the capabilities in these proprietary products to do their work, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let myself get shoehorned into a research niche that "requires" dependence on proprietary products, because I don't want to find myself held hostage to somebody's generosity.
At least I know that if I use Sage, SciPy, NumPy, matplotlib, octave, Maxima, etc., to generate some result for a paper, and properly cite my use of said software packages, I'll probably get a, "Gee, thanks for telling people you used our stuff!" response, instead of a cease and desist letter from some money-grubbing fucktard that thinks he owns my research results.
I would think that repeating an experiment falls into the category of "Scientific Rigor" -- if academics are unwilling to their experiments (albeit this seems for the wrong reasons), they are in the wrong job...
Most people doing experiments don't have unlimited resources to redo something they did right the first time. As far as the "rigor" part goes, the idea is to get *other people* to do the experiment...having the same people do it over again doesn't really do much to show reproducibility.
So using something like Java or C# or C++ or Ruby or Python, where 1 line of code equals dozens of assembler instructions, is insanely more productive.
That's generally been my experience, and several similar arguments came to mind, but I just didn't think it would be worth the effort to write them all down this time. :P
It is cheaper and faster to design a custom arrangement of 1000 $1.50 microprocessors to match the needs of complex problem than it is to write and debug the software that will 'solve' the problem on a $5000 standard Von Neumann computer. Microcontroller programmers are cheap and easy to recruit: OOP software development teams are expensive.
Am I living in a different universe or something? I should build a custom machine with 1000 processors every time I have a new complex problem, instead of just writing a program in a high-level language that will run on my single $5000 general-purpose machine? Do these microcontroller programmers work for free or something?
I mean, yeah, it sounds like it might be cool to implement a 3D finite volume PDE solver that uses adaptive mesh refinement in...assembly language...from scratch...running on 1000 processors...that I'll have to wire together myself. To be honest, it really does sound like it would be cool to do *once*, for a toy-sized problem, just for the experience, but I must have missed something if doing things this way is always the best solution. That seems awfully reminiscient of saying "programming language X is *always* the best solution for *every* problem."
...until we go extinct maybe the trees will continue to poke when pecked, even if the poke is intended for extinct peckers.
In Soviet evolution, peckers poke you!
...so over a total of 25 years, the richest man ever to live managed to capture about 2.6 days of the current annual production of the United States (and he is back down to having about 25 hours).
Assuming there's 153.1 million people "producing" in the US, and that the average person works for 60 years, that 2.6 days of GDP comes out to about 18,000 working lifetimes of average production. That still seems like a lot to me.
I wish I had mod points for you. I also wish I had a dollar for every blatantly stupid quack diet idea that's sold a book.
No. Halos are a feature of some people's imagination, not a emission of visible light.
Fixed that for you.
The Microsoft EULA most likely states that usage in a nuclear facility is not allowed. Quite a lot of commercial licenses have such a clause to limit liability. I doubt Microsoft would be willing to sell a license to such a facility for any reasonable price.
The DoD probably just buys a site license for Windows, and uses it wherever they damn well please. Just because Microsoft says they don't want you to use their software to monitor/control nuclear weapons or power plants doesn't mean organizations avoid doing so.
Why? Because you believe that nobody in the US Department of Defense would be stupid enough to have a Windows machine as part of a nuclear weapons control system, or because you believe that including Windows in anything built by DoD and its contractors couldn't really make the system significantly more vulnerable?
The armed services ... promote solely on the basis of merit.
As a former member of the armed services, I find that hilarious.
on the show? The crew gets into a horrible accident that requires them to get voice box transplants, and Bender's voice gets erased and he is programmed with a different one.
What a nice idea. If this recasting turns out to be a bluff, I'd love to see them poke fun at it for the opening of the first new episode...get random people the mail room, HR, etc., to voice everybody for the first 5 minutes (or something similar).
Of course if they actually recast, I expect it will go down in flames...I just can't see it being the same.
Oh noes! Just think of all the government and corporate workers that will no longer be able to watch YouTube after the phase-out. I bet those organizations will see a drop-off in their network traffic when the switch is thrown.
Modifying and DISTRIBUTING GPL software causes license violations. ... How hard is that to understand? Christ, I understood it as a high-school junior ...
How hard is it to understand that other developers may come along later in the life of a project and change things such that the project now distributes binaries built from a modified GPL'd codebase? Yeah, I may know all the rules for abiding by the GPL, but if I haven't taken some effort to let management and other developers know that we're using GPL'd code, then I'm setting them up to make a mistake that might cost them reputation and/or money down the road.
If nothing else, I think it's just professional courtesy to my coworkers to let them know when I'm bringing in somebody else's code to get our job done.
You don't. None of you. You take the software, and use it like Excalibur to slay your dragon and then take the credit for it.
No, asshole, some of us think it's important for our employer to know which third party libraries and tools we're using (whether they are open source or not), so they aren't blindsided with a lawsuit. I conjecture that you're projecting your own need to be the hero onto the rest of us.
Dammit...read thoroughly before posting--it should be, "Yeah, but that's only if you believe..."
Yeah, but only in this life!
Yeah, but that's only believe there is another one, and that your $DIETY is in charge of it. Who knows, Odin might have a lot of respect for somebody that can produce a good blue streak laden with lots of naughty Anglo-Saxon* words. ;)
*Disclaimer for the inevitable linguist Nazis: I don't know jack shit about the Angles, Saxons, or their words, but for some reason I think a Norse god would give you a thumbs up if your curse could make Beowulf blush.
I'm sorry, but I think you misunderstood me: I'm not making the standard complaint. I'm saying that, whether you're a man or woman, if you're somebody that genuinely wants your partner to actually give a shit about you in the same way you care about them, then you're probably going to invest a lot of time to find somebody that meets that standard. Why? Because most people--men and women--want somebody that will do a laundry list of things for them, but they can't be bothered to reciprocate in full. I'm only 40-ish years old, but so far I haven't seen anything to make me think that one sex is any better in that respect than the other.
And, although I'll get beat up for it, I have to say a couple of other things:
1) Tell the people that expect you to agonize over that swimsuit and that "young, supple, well-rounded" bullshit to go take a flying leap. Any guy that's going to be a good partner isn't going to worry about that, and (honestly) any guy that's really worried about it in any significant way probably isn't worth your time.
2) If you go around assuming that guys just can't understand how much it sucks to be a woman, you're going to run off a good percentage of the guys that would actually like to give a shit about their partner.
But really people, is it so freaking hard to just take us out to dinner, kiss our neck afterwords in an intimate and quiet environment, and actually DO the foreplay (and for those in longer-term relationships, not have it become formulaic?)
Apparently it's really freaking hard for most guys, based on the difficulty many women seem to have in finding guys that meet those criteria. That said, it's apparently also really freaking hard for many women to show the same level of respect for men's similarly simple expectations.
On the condition that the loop includes a trip above the Mayor's house and that all video feeds are released to the public.
Even if it doesn't, I'm sure some concerned citizen(s) could implement some round-the-clock monitoring of him and his family. That way, he will "never know when he is being watched or followed. It would be stupid for him to have a mistress, for his kids to buy drugs, or for any member of his family to do anything that might offend [voting group X]'s sensibilities." It's for the protection of the public--which justifies anything nowadays, or so I hear--and people in power are in a unique position to defraud or embarrass the public.
Others may, but I wouldn't. Mac OS was bad enough on a Mac...no way in hell I'd want to experience it again on a PC (even if it was free).
...who cares when what's running on all the servers is open source software, and the services written atop THAT are also using open technologies?
Is it open, though? I expect that Amazon, Google, et. als. have tweaked and customized the bejeezus out of the underlying OS and other software, and aren't about to share it. So yeah, they're (maybe) using open source, and maybe even contributing some improvements back into those projects, but I'm not sure that's enough to say the cloud infrastructure is open source.
For some reason my brain automatically did this:
<Zap_Branigan>
But if open-source can hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
</Zap_Branigan>
A game ought to be designed with limits from its inception - thus you would get a true diminishing returns curve, and a limited number that ever reach "max_level"
So if I don't have 100 hours a week to devote to play time, I should automatically get crushed by the guy that does, because he's 5 levels higher than me?
It just doesn't have a point, you know the level cap will be raised again and again (and again). It has little effect beyond giving more grind for your buck (lengthening the game) and diminishing what "value" the previous level had.
If you ask me, it's really good to wipe the slate clean every once in a while by raising the level cap. Yeah, the guy that plays all the time will get to the new level cap faster than me, and get nice gear faster than me, but he still has to start over at the same level as me, replace all their gear again, and (even if only for a few months) the bulk of the population isn't supremely overpowered when compared to the casual gamer.
In my opinion, there *is* a nonlinear curve after you reach the level cap: you have to spend a lot of time playing to get minimal incremental benefits. A character in full top-notch epics isn't that much more powerful than an equivalently specced one wearing "welfare" epics (or whatever the 1337 hardcore people are calling epics you don't have to live in the game to get nowadays).
I think Blizzard has done a pretty good job of giving me entertainment at a fairly low cost per hour. But then I'm just somebody that plays casually for fun; I don't treat it like an important endeavor.