I speed and accelerate reasonably quickly from intersection (quicker than the guy behind/next to me anyway). I bought a fun car to enjoy driving it, and if the left lane is open I'm going 85 the entire way home. But it never hurt me to keep a safe distance between me and the next guy.
But tailgating, wasting your brakes on an intersection, etc, isn't getting you there faster it's just begging for a wreck. I go through intersections faster by coasting gently to a stop because if the light turns I'm accelerating again from 15 mph instead of 0. And leaving space in front of you for half of a car... you still have to wait for the guy in front of you to go. And if some asshole tries to take that space... it closes, quickly.
I'm sorry, every time I see someone riding someone ass on the freeway I don't think "Go behind this guy, he'll get me there faster" I'm thinking "stay the fuck away so I don't rear end him when he plows into the car in front of him."
My sports coupe has a stopping distance 60-0 in 116 feet. Don't tell me that if you're ten feet behind me at freeway speed you're going to be able to react AND brake faster than that if I have to avoid something in the road.
Yes, it'd be lovely if there were a train system that made that even possible.
A bus trip from my house to my work will take several hours. A car ride takes fifteen minutes. And as much as I hate it and bitch about it, it isn't going to change.
Americans still think of themselves as the underdog, because our required history classes pretty much stop in 1865, and don't cover any world history save for how it relates to America (except for that one unit on Hitler, who was apparently evil).
As for the French... considering that De Gaul pretty much spent his whole political career badmouthing the US after we came in and saved their asses, I'm not sure that you can claim we started it.:)
The same happened with the transition to Mac OS X. Although they have improved power management with the various upgrades, on my old tibook G4 I could get a half hour or more extra battery life running mac os Classic than I could in OS X.
The rules have changed, because we changed them. Any environment is shaped partially by climate and partially by the available species and the habitat they create. Humans just manage to change the climate more.
In our current world our main source of competition is ourselves. And currently what gets you ahead in life (in terms of number of progeny - ie, how likely your genes are to survive) is being athletic, good at selling something, and good looking. Eventually the McDonald's generations will sink to the bottom as fat people are less likely to get laid. Or they'll just breed a piglike subrace underclass, one or the other.
The amusing thing is that a low metabolism and ability to store energy easily as fat was most likely once a survival mechanism in certain parts of the world.
All of our math and science teachers were female, although I bet they did a good enough job discouraging people by example. Some of the nerdiest people I've met.
There are few girls in computer science because there are few girls who mess around with their computer in junior high and high school. Figure out that one (I have guesses, but no one knows for sure) and you'll fix the problem. It starts long before college.
Have they improved the trash incinerators in recent years? There was a plant south of the city here for a while, but they shut it down because:
1) It was polluting horribly 2) It kept blowing its own roof of, because they missed something that wasn't really supposed to go into the incinerator.
I mean, I'm all for burning all of our crap instead of tossing into landfills (see especially those cow-manure powered generators). But burning anything is releasing some kind of gasses. I'm curious what progress has been made to make trash burning do anything but shift where the pollution is going.
I think wikipedia, and to some extent the web in general, have gone a long way to forcing us to learn that you can't trust a single source.
So much time is spent viewing education as this omniscient provider of Truth - you trust encyclopedia Brittanica, the NY Times, your textbook - most people rarely challenge this idea, yet anyone here knows that any popular press article on their subject of study is always oversimplified and usually wrong. Most teachers will require that you have a backup source and strong verification for any web source - but will accept a single source from a nonfiction book by joe nobody any day. I remember several assignments where I was required to have 5 sources if I used web sources and only 2 or 3 if they were print.
Wikipedia is, even with errors, still an amazing starting point in your research - it tells you what the subject matter is, and what terms you should be looking for. Knowing that any of the facts in it may or may not be true just encourages better outside research.
It's so you get smooth performance when you're running a video game, a music player, a web browser, and that coding assignment you left up to fool your boss when you have to alt tab, all at once.
And games should become more multithreaded with the way consoles are shaping up. Just because they don't take advantage of it now (mostly because 90% of people still have single core systems, and programming in multiple threads is hard) doesn't mean that newer games won't.
But I spent a grand total of 20 minutes on the phone when my Tibook broke, and they shipped me an overnight box the next day. The turnaround from call to getting a fixed laptop was under 5 days.
Maybe it depends on how tough your problem was to diagnose?
My mother works as a teacher, and the numbers any school reports on how long their days are are complete BS. You work 8 hours at school, then either stay an extra 2-4 hours a day grading/prepping lesson plans or do the same at home, because they aren't given time to do any of those essential tasks during the normal school day. I realize that this isn't that unusual in some salaried positions, but it needs to be taken into account.
Her yearly wage with a master's degree and ten years experience is less than mine as a starting programmer in the same state.
I don't know how much that works out to hourly... although if I worked as much extra each day I'd probably have enough comp time to take a month off in summer.
Although I will admit that I'm not sure why most teachers don't seem to pick up some sort of summer employment. I guess it must be tough finding something better than McDonald's for only three months?
1) Violence is not the way you fix a bully. Good parenting (involvement in the child's life, a good example of how to interact with people, and instilling a stern sense of embarassment at being a loser who has to bully people) is.
2) A bully's victim is not usually given a chance to be the bully's parent. A school administrator might have a small chance, but in general we aren't encouraging the administrator to beat up the bully, just to not punish the victim for defending himself.
What the wiimote means is that we finally have an intuitive method of input for any game that involves aiming on a console.
Sure, Halo standardized the dual joystick mode, but even as a hardcore shooter fan I found that took a lot of getting used to. The shooting puzzles were often trivialized right off by how easy it is to aim a bow in zelda. I'd say that adds quite a bit.
I was trying to think of the difference between a fps or rts progression (go to the next area, get a new weapon/unit) vs an rpg (level up). And I realized that the major difference is that in most FPS's, while you start out with a pistol, there is no such thing as a "pistol +2". Every progression makes your character more powerful by adding new abilities and options, not by just giving you the same thing but doing more damage because you killed 10 beasts. While RPG's give you new abilities occasionally, the majority of the difference in character power is just that a level 20 wizard-thief does 2x the damage or more of a level 10 wizard-thief.
Zelda is kind of a good example of this progression in the realm of action/rpgs.
Personally I think you get enough of the "total loser" sense at the start of a game just from being a noob at the game. You have limited abilities, you only have a vague grasp of combat strategies... I think in most games you grow enough as a player as you progress that having a character with 20x the base hp seems unnecessary.
But the real problem with rpg's isn't that you have to level up... it's that you level up by killing billions of the same fodder over and over, without any AI, without any needed strategy. In DND you normally see only a couple combats a session, and get a lot of your XP from either bosses or quest experience. I would love to see an RPG that made more of the combat meaningful and challenging, and levelled me up for saving the princess, not for turning in 100 wolves hides.
$4.50/gal in rural ohio? BS. I live in ohio, have driven back and forth through half of it recently, and have never seen gas over 2.50 for regular.
And if you've got 160,000 in debt from college, hop off your high horse and attend a public school. The MOST I could be in debt from my education was $60,000, and I got a job right away.
Things are much worse than the Bush administration and the flag-wavers claim, but let's replace their antics with facts, not hyperbole.
BS. They had enough money to publish Halo and were set to be a blockbuster with it - they just saw a much larger opportunity in being the premiere xbox publisher. Nothing I've read has indicated that they were backed into that big of a corner, even with the loss of nearly all profits from Myth 2 due to the installer bug recall.
Regardless, how many directX only independent developer/publishers are left these days? Everyone's working for a big studio - if they were in financial trouble, I doubt it was the switch to directx that saved them.
I read some interesting articles from Alex Seropian, former president of Bungie studios (before MS bought them).
He made several arguments against the common wisdom of the time regarding Mac ports - mostly saying that any significant cost of porting was due to a lack of planning for porting. Having written OpenGL code with and without thinking about how hard it would be to port the code to DirectX, I can definitely understand what he is talking about. He claimed that by planning for a cross platform release from the beginning, the cost added to their development was minimal relative to the profits from the additional market - and the goodwill from the mac community. While mac sales accounted for only a small portion of their total profits, some profit is always better than no profit, at a relatively small additional risk.
But most dev houses are stuck in somebody's proprietary API's, or don't have the expertise or forethought to write portable code - because it does add a different dimension to your development process. So a mac version requires a complete rewrite of all shaders and graphics libraries for opengl, all sound libraries to openAL, and probably new loading classes to handle the endianness (although this, at least, has changed a bit). Not to mention the fun issues you can have with differences in floating point precision:/
Basically the overall point is that porting is expensive and only worth the cost for best-selling games, but planning for cross platform development will likely give you similar returns on a small scale to your windows release.
It all depends so much on what you're listening to music on.
Through the average set of headphones/earbuds most people stick into their ipod? Very little difference. On most computer speakers? Almost no difference (I tried and failed several times to pass a blind listening test on my computer speakers).
Through a decent set of headphones or nicer home audio system? Oh yes, it's almost painful sometimes when I hit a badly encoded mp3 I downloaded somewhere. I got a new pair of headphones and had to toss a large portion of my ripped music collection.
I'll agree with you on their "experts," but there is a large subset of the population that probably isn't listening on something good enough to notice or care.
This is exactly the sort of argument that has been going on in the church since it began. If christians can't even agree on what "Christian" is, please excuse the rest of us for going with what most of them have written down as defining it.
However... regardless of whether it *would* be as secure in a theoretical world where it was a lucrative spyware target - today a mac user can plug in his machine and visit a website with the default browser without getting owned. A windows user really can't.
I haven't visited a non-technical user's windows system yet that wasn't completely owned by spyware and/or viruses. I've seen some people really mess up their macs, but they've never had those problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they could just be, I dunno, a safe driver.
I speed and accelerate reasonably quickly from intersection (quicker than the guy behind/next to me anyway). I bought a fun car to enjoy driving it, and if the left lane is open I'm going 85 the entire way home. But it never hurt me to keep a safe distance between me and the next guy.
But tailgating, wasting your brakes on an intersection, etc, isn't getting you there faster it's just begging for a wreck. I go through intersections faster by coasting gently to a stop because if the light turns I'm accelerating again from 15 mph instead of 0. And leaving space in front of you for half of a car... you still have to wait for the guy in front of you to go. And if some asshole tries to take that space... it closes, quickly.
I'm sorry, every time I see someone riding someone ass on the freeway I don't think "Go behind this guy, he'll get me there faster" I'm thinking "stay the fuck away so I don't rear end him when he plows into the car in front of him."
My sports coupe has a stopping distance 60-0 in 116 feet. Don't tell me that if you're ten feet behind me at freeway speed you're going to be able to react AND brake faster than that if I have to avoid something in the road.
Yes, it'd be lovely if there were a train system that made that even possible.
A bus trip from my house to my work will take several hours. A car ride takes fifteen minutes. And as much as I hate it and bitch about it, it isn't going to change.
Americans still think of themselves as the underdog, because our required history classes pretty much stop in 1865, and don't cover any world history save for how it relates to America (except for that one unit on Hitler, who was apparently evil).
:)
As for the French... considering that De Gaul pretty much spent his whole political career badmouthing the US after we came in and saved their asses, I'm not sure that you can claim we started it.
The same happened with the transition to Mac OS X. Although they have improved power management with the various upgrades, on my old tibook G4 I could get a half hour or more extra battery life running mac os Classic than I could in OS X.
I've never lived somewhere where recyclable pickup was offered as part of normal waste disposal.
The rules have changed, because we changed them. Any environment is shaped partially by climate and partially by the available species and the habitat they create. Humans just manage to change the climate more.
In our current world our main source of competition is ourselves. And currently what gets you ahead in life (in terms of number of progeny - ie, how likely your genes are to survive) is being athletic, good at selling something, and good looking. Eventually the McDonald's generations will sink to the bottom as fat people are less likely to get laid. Or they'll just breed a piglike subrace underclass, one or the other.
The amusing thing is that a low metabolism and ability to store energy easily as fat was most likely once a survival mechanism in certain parts of the world.
All of our math and science teachers were female, although I bet they did a good enough job discouraging people by example. Some of the nerdiest people I've met.
There are few girls in computer science because there are few girls who mess around with their computer in junior high and high school. Figure out that one (I have guesses, but no one knows for sure) and you'll fix the problem. It starts long before college.
Have they improved the trash incinerators in recent years? There was a plant south of the city here for a while, but they shut it down because:
1) It was polluting horribly
2) It kept blowing its own roof of, because they missed something that wasn't really supposed to go into the incinerator.
I mean, I'm all for burning all of our crap instead of tossing into landfills (see especially those cow-manure powered generators). But burning anything is releasing some kind of gasses. I'm curious what progress has been made to make trash burning do anything but shift where the pollution is going.
I think wikipedia, and to some extent the web in general, have gone a long way to forcing us to learn that you can't trust a single source.
So much time is spent viewing education as this omniscient provider of Truth - you trust encyclopedia Brittanica, the NY Times, your textbook - most people rarely challenge this idea, yet anyone here knows that any popular press article on their subject of study is always oversimplified and usually wrong. Most teachers will require that you have a backup source and strong verification for any web source - but will accept a single source from a nonfiction book by joe nobody any day. I remember several assignments where I was required to have 5 sources if I used web sources and only 2 or 3 if they were print.
Wikipedia is, even with errors, still an amazing starting point in your research - it tells you what the subject matter is, and what terms you should be looking for. Knowing that any of the facts in it may or may not be true just encourages better outside research.
It's so you get smooth performance when you're running a video game, a music player, a web browser, and that coding assignment you left up to fool your boss when you have to alt tab, all at once.
And games should become more multithreaded with the way consoles are shaping up. Just because they don't take advantage of it now (mostly because 90% of people still have single core systems, and programming in multiple threads is hard) doesn't mean that newer games won't.
Ever hear of the Shakers? They already tried.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaker
There are four of them left.
Great example of natural selection in action.
But I spent a grand total of 20 minutes on the phone when my Tibook broke, and they shipped me an overnight box the next day. The turnaround from call to getting a fixed laptop was under 5 days.
Maybe it depends on how tough your problem was to diagnose?
My mother works as a teacher, and the numbers any school reports on how long their days are are complete BS. You work 8 hours at school, then either stay an extra 2-4 hours a day grading/prepping lesson plans or do the same at home, because they aren't given time to do any of those essential tasks during the normal school day. I realize that this isn't that unusual in some salaried positions, but it needs to be taken into account.
Her yearly wage with a master's degree and ten years experience is less than mine as a starting programmer in the same state.
I don't know how much that works out to hourly... although if I worked as much extra each day I'd probably have enough comp time to take a month off in summer.
Although I will admit that I'm not sure why most teachers don't seem to pick up some sort of summer employment. I guess it must be tough finding something better than McDonald's for only three months?
It's an interesting question - what portion of the voting population has to become criminals before the law is repealed?
At least in this case they don't take away your voting privileges for infringement.
And moreover... how is a 2-year-old going to reach the pedals?
On my car I doubt he could even get the parking brake off.
1) Violence is not the way you fix a bully. Good parenting (involvement in the child's life, a good example of how to interact with people, and instilling a stern sense of embarassment at being a loser who has to bully people) is.
2) A bully's victim is not usually given a chance to be the bully's parent. A school administrator might have a small chance, but in general we aren't encouraging the administrator to beat up the bully, just to not punish the victim for defending himself.
What the wiimote means is that we finally have an intuitive method of input for any game that involves aiming on a console.
Sure, Halo standardized the dual joystick mode, but even as a hardcore shooter fan I found that took a lot of getting used to. The shooting puzzles were often trivialized right off by how easy it is to aim a bow in zelda. I'd say that adds quite a bit.
I was trying to think of the difference between a fps or rts progression (go to the next area, get a new weapon/unit) vs an rpg (level up). And I realized that the major difference is that in most FPS's, while you start out with a pistol, there is no such thing as a "pistol +2". Every progression makes your character more powerful by adding new abilities and options, not by just giving you the same thing but doing more damage because you killed 10 beasts. While RPG's give you new abilities occasionally, the majority of the difference in character power is just that a level 20 wizard-thief does 2x the damage or more of a level 10 wizard-thief.
Zelda is kind of a good example of this progression in the realm of action/rpgs.
Personally I think you get enough of the "total loser" sense at the start of a game just from being a noob at the game. You have limited abilities, you only have a vague grasp of combat strategies... I think in most games you grow enough as a player as you progress that having a character with 20x the base hp seems unnecessary.
But the real problem with rpg's isn't that you have to level up... it's that you level up by killing billions of the same fodder over and over, without any AI, without any needed strategy. In DND you normally see only a couple combats a session, and get a lot of your XP from either bosses or quest experience. I would love to see an RPG that made more of the combat meaningful and challenging, and levelled me up for saving the princess, not for turning in 100 wolves hides.
$4.50/gal in rural ohio? BS. I live in ohio, have driven back and forth through half of it recently, and have never seen gas over 2.50 for regular.
And if you've got 160,000 in debt from college, hop off your high horse and attend a public school. The MOST I could be in debt from my education was $60,000, and I got a job right away.
Things are much worse than the Bush administration and the flag-wavers claim, but let's replace their antics with facts, not hyperbole.
BS. They had enough money to publish Halo and were set to be a blockbuster with it - they just saw a much larger opportunity in being the premiere xbox publisher. Nothing I've read has indicated that they were backed into that big of a corner, even with the loss of nearly all profits from Myth 2 due to the installer bug recall.
Regardless, how many directX only independent developer/publishers are left these days? Everyone's working for a big studio - if they were in financial trouble, I doubt it was the switch to directx that saved them.
I read some interesting articles from Alex Seropian, former president of Bungie studios (before MS bought them).
:/
He made several arguments against the common wisdom of the time regarding Mac ports - mostly saying that any significant cost of porting was due to a lack of planning for porting. Having written OpenGL code with and without thinking about how hard it would be to port the code to DirectX, I can definitely understand what he is talking about. He claimed that by planning for a cross platform release from the beginning, the cost added to their development was minimal relative to the profits from the additional market - and the goodwill from the mac community. While mac sales accounted for only a small portion of their total profits, some profit is always better than no profit, at a relatively small additional risk.
But most dev houses are stuck in somebody's proprietary API's, or don't have the expertise or forethought to write portable code - because it does add a different dimension to your development process. So a mac version requires a complete rewrite of all shaders and graphics libraries for opengl, all sound libraries to openAL, and probably new loading classes to handle the endianness (although this, at least, has changed a bit). Not to mention the fun issues you can have with differences in floating point precision
Basically the overall point is that porting is expensive and only worth the cost for best-selling games, but planning for cross platform development will likely give you similar returns on a small scale to your windows release.
It all depends so much on what you're listening to music on.
Through the average set of headphones/earbuds most people stick into their ipod? Very little difference. On most computer speakers? Almost no difference (I tried and failed several times to pass a blind listening test on my computer speakers).
Through a decent set of headphones or nicer home audio system? Oh yes, it's almost painful sometimes when I hit a badly encoded mp3 I downloaded somewhere. I got a new pair of headphones and had to toss a large portion of my ripped music collection.
I'll agree with you on their "experts," but there is a large subset of the population that probably isn't listening on something good enough to notice or care.
This is exactly the sort of argument that has been going on in the church since it began. If christians can't even agree on what "Christian" is, please excuse the rest of us for going with what most of them have written down as defining it.
The only way you will spend more building your own system is if you are comparing to it to the lowest end POS that the name brands churn out.
Or if you only want to look at the CPU spec and ignore all other aspects of the system, like most low-end premades do.
However... regardless of whether it *would* be as secure in a theoretical world where it was a lucrative spyware target - today a mac user can plug in his machine and visit a website with the default browser without getting owned. A windows user really can't.
I haven't visited a non-technical user's windows system yet that wasn't completely owned by spyware and/or viruses. I've seen some people really mess up their macs, but they've never had those problems.