So if they sold you a custom, easily swappable battery for $59, you'd be happier?
Custom-fitted batteries are always expensive, and AA alkalides don't have anywhere near the rechargable convenience (nor form factor for that matter) or the batteries used in the ipods.
This was a problem, like, two years ago when they didn't offer a repair program. That window lasted all of a couple months, and only affected those rare people who listened to their first gen ipods to empty daily and had the batteries fail soon after the warranty ended. Stop bringing it up, it's almost a non-issue now.
Since every fricking developer seems to think that the web is the end all be all future solution for everything, then yes, it does matter.
When I click on an element in a web page to manage my email or use a word processor, the response time is going to be around my ping (30-90 ms depending on where in the country it is) plus the time to load. That is long enough that I am clicking, and waiting. If I were working on a local native app, the response time would be under 30 ms and I would probably not even notice it.
For a quick email check or reading webpages, it doesn't really matter too much. But if you're trying to use that for constant daily productivity sorts of things (or even have a lot of email to go through) it is wasting a ton of your time. There are some real advantages to moving applications online and into a web browser (I've even heard people suggesting we should move to a web-browser for the full interface of our windowing system) but speed is currently NOT one of them. Since it seems like it's going to be more or less forced on me, anything that can make it faster and more tolerable is quite appreciated.
I'm going to bet that, in a random crowd in a foreign country, you'll only notice the annoying ones:(
And the conservatives aren't the ones who would emigrate right now. They're the ones in power, true, but their current mentality is much more "stand up and make a difference for God and your country" rather than "whinge about it and talk about leaving" like the majority of the current crop of liberals:(
Everyone's a nerd. Math nerd, car nerd, sports nerds, entertainment nerds, clothes nerds, bible nerds.
Sit any random person down at a Trivial pursuit game and there will be at least ONE subset of a category that they have covered, whether it's naming five people who slept with Marylin Monroe or how many hydrogen bonds there are in ethanol.
Society at large just values certain nerds higher than others, although this changes significantly depending which part of society you're in at the moment (I can't imagine that knowing the Psalms is going to get you a lot of perks on IRC, for example).
But most people base their impressions of "society values" from high school and television, where sports, cars, and clothing are in.
How about the question - what will there be in end game that doesn't require commitment to a raiding guild?
I think most of the people who complain about a lack of casual content aren't actually that "casual." I realized that most of the people I meet who would label themselves casual still play probably 8 hours a week, at least, maybe even more like 16-20. What they mean is that they can't or won't commit to the specific times or effort required to be in a raiding guild. Even without the time issue, I know quite a few people who don't want to leave their small, homey guilds to go raid with people who are taking the game much more seriously.
It does not take long in wow to reach a point where you cannot advance your character without the help of 39 other people all meeting on a specific night, whether you call them hardcore or not. Wow has (finally) addressed this somewhat with the Dungeon Set 2 quests, but it took them a while, and they're still just a creative rehash of existing content, not a new dungeon. There is no reason they can't implement a 5-man dungeon with epic loot that has bosses undefeatable by five new level sixties, that could take several days for a small group of friends to complete. In fact, they seem to be doing just that in the expansion.
So what is going to be offered in terms of advancement for someone who would rather get a group of five friends together to go do something challenging than have to find 39 people he can put up with?
Dunno that it's as useful for the print industry (I've heard pretty nasty things about its actual quality when used for print work), but for everyone else it's actually a pretty nice feature. Being able to export from any program into a full quality format that can be read anywhere without much hassle at all has saved me grades and headaches many times.
I recently graduated, and my school's job placement program required resumes in a very particular format - which looked like crap. However, I guess it does standardize things a bit when they send off fifty of them to a company that asks for "everyone in CS with a 3.4 or higher gpa".
I think the best way to get better resumes is to in your job posting either give a format or give specific items you'd like to see. I knew when I wrote mine that it had to get past a million filters - so even if I only spent a couple days and one project writing Java, I had to get it on there somehow - if only to get past the HR department into a real interview, where I knew I could convince people that I knew how to code.
If you only care about job experience, say that. Or if you want sample code.
My current employer glanced at my resume to get me an interview, but then didn't even want to see my references. They just gave me a coding assignment and two days to do it. I've honestly started thinking that might be the best way, for just a straight introductory to middle-of-the-road coding job. If they aren't don't want the job enough to do the assignment, why hire them? And how else can you tell what their code is like?
"Maryrose, of The YouTube Team, said if any video viewer flags a video as inappropriate, it is forwarded to a queue for the company's customer support team to review."
Man, that's got to be a good job. Sitting around all day looking at movies that people have marked as porn.
If to tell them that if I find them acting like lamers, or team killing, or trolling, I will beat then within an inch of their lives. Other than that, they can look at all the weird porn they want - I doubt there's much I can do to stop it. As long as they leave the family cat alone, things will turn out ok.
Worst thing that'll ever happen to a kid from looking at weird porn is that he'll develop a strange fetish, and have to find a girl/boy who shares it to marry. Big fricking deal.
As long as you coach them to be anonymous when possible and supervise any first meetings with internet friends, I don't see that stalkers are that big of a problem. That 40-year-old meeting my kid for the first time won't be able to do much if his daddy's standing behind him with a shotgun:)
Although the line between "successful military coup" and "heroic defense of democracy" seems to have been determined by the winners of that engagement.
Well, actually, I generally vote independent. Because I haven't seen any proof that the democrats would do things better than the republican administration, seeing how they have been trying to play almost exactly the same angles as them. Democrats are pushing against video games to get the conservative vote. They voted for Iraq, the Patriot act, and now seem to be perfectly fine with these new bills to violate the geneva convention and ignore any oversight of our privacy rights.
I just don't feel like they're offering a valid second party any more, and I don't get why not.
I'm just amazed that apparently none of their focus groups, studies, surveys, anything, seem to indicate that they can get a good percentage of the vote by actually protecting our rights.
Instead of worrying about being "strong on terror", which is how the republicans have been framing these events, why can't they be "strong on our rights" or something. Why are they blasting the republicans for getting us into war and committing all these rights violations when THE DEMOCRATS ARE VOTING FOR THEM, TOO, because they're scared to death of appearing soft on terror.
It's complete BS. Show me the party who actually cares about my rights as a citizen, about upholding our constitution, and they'll have my vote in every election from here to when this mess is finally sorted out.
I'm disappointed in the republicans for ignoring their past values (small government, conservative interpretations of constitutional rights) but at this point I'm even more disappointed in the democrats for letting them do it. If they'd come up with a candidate who actually seemed to stand for something instead of just shouting "I'm not Bush, and we all hate Bush" we not be in this whole mess.
I still swear that Company of Heroes wouldn't let me enable some of the shaders on my 6600GT at home that it would on the 6800 at work... but that might just be the developer trying to look after me a little too much.
I'm actually very surprised to hear back directly from you. Thank you for the response, and I'm glad to hear that you did take these things into consideration.
However, there is a general problem (and it's not yours, it's the hardware manufacturer's) about what "support" actually means.
For example, ATI cards claim to support the OpenGL 2.0 spec. And they do... but some of it is in software.
There were several shader methods relied upon by our software that are part of the spec, supported on Geforce 6800 hardware.. but an equivalent ATI card which claims support for the same spec supported it in software, and performance dropped over 100-fold.
There are several similar issues between a Geforce 6600 and a 6800, or a 6800 and 7900, despite the fact that both "support" the same shader models.
I don't expect a review like these to take all of this into account (it's hard enough finding a developer site that actually does). But it can be an annoyance, and in cases where programming around it isn't feasible (we found another way to implement things on the ATI card), can influence how your game is going to look.
According to their press releases at the time, the idea was a team-oriented combat game. Most people compared it to Tribes (and Bungie admitted to being heavily influenced by tribes during the development process).
The switch to xbox made single player a higher priority. Although they obviously kept quite a bit of multiplayer, the scale and teamwork aspect of the levels was scaled down quite a bit from what they were originally talking about.
Of course, in some of the first interviews they were still considering a procedure terrain generation algorithm so you could play on almost infinitely large maps. Which I think worked somewhat in theory in their labs, but I can't imagine trying to get that working in multiplayer.
They all support the shader model, but will the cost be the same?
It doesn't really matter so much that they "support" a feature if it still kills your performance to use it.
I'm just saying that it isn't a linear scaling of speed because of the degree of support for specific features. There's more of a difference sometimes than just the clock speed or fill rate.
Or at least, there will be a practical one based on some games turning off features if they know you can't run them at full speed. Company of heroes looks signficantly better on the 6800GT's at work than my 6600GT at home, at the same detail settings. If it were just speed to be worried about my card would look the same, just have half the frame rate.
And those elders were quite willing to go to war with the nearest neighbor over buffalo hunting rights.
While there were a few isolated peaceful American Indian tribes, the general history of the continent is one of war and slaughter as much as Europe of old. No place in the world has been immune from the basic realities of military power - that might does make right, when there is no higher authority's might saying otherwise.
I don't attempt to defend any of this morally - I think Iraq was a big mistake strategically, morally, and politically. But from the "realist" view of international relations, it is a natural consequence of our current imbalance of power. Without anyone to challenge the US, there is little disincentive to the leaders to avoid war in Iraq, for whatever reason (ideological, resources, political) they originally chose to do so.
Realism doesn't justify takeovers, it describes the existing data from human history as far back as the assyrian invasion of egypt, the rise and fall of the aztec empire, and the kingdom of mali. Mankind's history is a bloody one, and the few lucky societies to have escaped it for some time (due to a combination of isolation, lack of anything worth taking, traditions of non-violence, and good leadership) do not change the basic results of human existence.
The moment someone learns how to grow corn, someone else going to realize that it's a lot easier to pillage it than it is to grow it.
It was never conquered, but it was Russian and socialist ideas that shaped many of the new governments formed when the European empires in Africa collapsed (please remember that pretty much everyone who could had a stake in Africa - there is a reason that so many people along the coast have French as an official language). Most of the new governments that formed initially out of the chaos were socialistic dictatorships of a style very similar to the USSR's. As was seen earlier in southeast asia, the forced nationalism in many places of farming and industry destroyed their local economies:(
It never conquered, but it sent arms and supplies to quite a few socialist nations there.
There are some very great success stories in Africa. There are, unfortunately, even more tales of starvation and horror.
As far as I've studied, the general problem was that there was a great push for government and nation-building in africa, once the empires left, with little regard for actual practical economics and existing tribal structure. Some of these were democratic to begin with, but more and more they became dictatorial and communist/socialist, with influence from the Soviet Union especially (as the soviets were very keen on advancing their form of government across the world, just as the US was). The forced collectivization of farmland combined with the innefficient socialization of business, with the corruption so often present in dictatorial structures, completely wrecked many of the economies, leading to famine, unrest, and eventually warlordism.
I'm not an expert on african studies, but that seems to have been the case in far too many places:( It is unfortunate that we place so much value on the forms of a government, when what really matters for the people is that there is some law and order so they can feel safe, and that the economy is good enough that they can feed themselves. I meaning to point an example, not bash all communist governments in africa:)
For example, some fancier shading tricks are only supported in the Geforce 6800 and later (try running, say, the new Company of Heroes game on a 6600. You can get a great frame rate, but you're missing out on a lot of cool looking stuff).
A lot of times going from one generation to the next (or from the consumer card to the once-flagship-card) will net you a lot more than just pure speed. I work for a gaming type company, and I know a lot of the features we use in some of our shaders just plain aren't supported on lower end cards, or are "supported" by the driver but are actually implemented in software, which means if we can't code around it the feature get disabled for that card, and your game won't look as pretty. It's becoming more and more of a concern with new games.
It's still a nice quick snapshot intro to the graphics cards available, though. The sort of run down I try to do for people when they're asking what they should buy.
Anti-aliasing is basically sampling parts of the image at 2x or 4x the resolution. 4x anti-aliasing is similar to just rendering at 2x the resolution (samples go up by square of resolution), except for the video card manufacturers can pull some fancy tricks to make it actually faster than that.
When you are playing at a high enough resolution, you are already sampling at a high enough frequency that most artifacts will disappear.
I think at 1024x768 you can still notice a difference, and on bad artwork, even at higher resolutions the AA can help (buildings with sharp 90 degree edges can be very noticeable at times). But for most games, I run at 1600x1200 and don't really notice the AA difference either.
The whole concept of not just outright conquering other nations whom you disagree with, and are more powerful than, is a relatively recent invention. Only since World War II has it really taken hold as a global opinion. Prior to that, it was just assumed that any great power had the right to colonize/dominate any minor country it could, and fight over territory from other great powers using whatever means it had.
Even within the last fifty years, while the US has been nowhere close to the shining pillar it attempts to pass itself off as, the former soviet union did much worse. Ask the people behind the iron curtain, or living under the chaos that has been the dictatorial aftermath of communism in africa, about forcing governmental systems on a people.
While the American approach is quite honestly hypocritical (we are going to force you to be "free" by our definition of free), it is no less so than the communist line of a state run by the workers.
I understand that bashing America is the "in" thing to do right now, and I am in no way condoning our current foreign policy. But please have some sense of history before you go spouting off nonsense.
Here are two easy ways to significantly improve your working knowledge base.
1) Read anything you can find, always something new. Go to the library and just pick a random book from the classics section and read it. Then when you're done go to the "literary criticism" section and read a couple articles on what other people thought you should get out of that book. Even though you'll probably think they're full of crap, you'll learn a lot just seeing what made a book a "classic" to begin with, because it quite often wasn't that it was really that fun to read:)
2) Any time a subject that sounds vaguely interesting comes up in history or science class comes up, wikipedia it and follow where the cross links lead you. I have learned more from doing this than I would believe. No, it's not the best source in the world - but it is the best way I have ever seen to get a quick, broad understanding of a topic and the things it relates to. If something interests you even more, read a few book reviews to find something more in depth to read that won't put you asleep.
3) In math, nothing says you can't work ahead or out of a more interesting book. And even the crappiest math teacher will have a hard time staying mad at you if you're attempting to solve multi-dimensional calculus instead of listening to her lecture.;-)
The biggest thing I learned in high school was to squeeze as much as I could out of the good classes (pay attention, discuss with the teacher, participate and bring up interesting slightly-off-topic conversations in class), and do the bare minimum for the grades while teaching myself in the crappy ones. Because, to be honest, in high school (and often even in college) it takes very little effort for a smart kid to get decent enough grades. But that doesn't mean you should be wasting all the rest of your time not learning.
There was a BA version of my major... but it was really kind of gimp compared to the engineering one.
It's not really the number of credit hours that amazes me, but the percentage that could be got through AP credit. There's no way I could pull >half of my education from AP credit. That's spending more than half of your education on basic calc and general introduction classes. But I guess it might be different in an major where fewer of your more "general knowledge" requirement were actually engineering specific, instead of just "take another history course."
Slashdot Mirror
So if they sold you a custom, easily swappable battery for $59, you'd be happier?
Custom-fitted batteries are always expensive, and AA alkalides don't have anywhere near the rechargable convenience (nor form factor for that matter) or the batteries used in the ipods.
This was a problem, like, two years ago when they didn't offer a repair program. That window lasted all of a couple months, and only affected those rare people who listened to their first gen ipods to empty daily and had the batteries fail soon after the warranty ended. Stop bringing it up, it's almost a non-issue now.
Since every fricking developer seems to think that the web is the end all be all future solution for everything, then yes, it does matter.
When I click on an element in a web page to manage my email or use a word processor, the response time is going to be around my ping (30-90 ms depending on where in the country it is) plus the time to load. That is long enough that I am clicking, and waiting. If I were working on a local native app, the response time would be under 30 ms and I would probably not even notice it.
For a quick email check or reading webpages, it doesn't really matter too much. But if you're trying to use that for constant daily productivity sorts of things (or even have a lot of email to go through) it is wasting a ton of your time. There are some real advantages to moving applications online and into a web browser (I've even heard people suggesting we should move to a web-browser for the full interface of our windowing system) but speed is currently NOT one of them. Since it seems like it's going to be more or less forced on me, anything that can make it faster and more tolerable is quite appreciated.
I'm going to bet that, in a random crowd in a foreign country, you'll only notice the annoying ones :(
:(
And the conservatives aren't the ones who would emigrate right now. They're the ones in power, true, but their current mentality is much more "stand up and make a difference for God and your country" rather than "whinge about it and talk about leaving" like the majority of the current crop of liberals
(not much room for moderates around here)
Everyone's a nerd. Math nerd, car nerd, sports nerds, entertainment nerds, clothes nerds, bible nerds.
Sit any random person down at a Trivial pursuit game and there will be at least ONE subset of a category that they have covered, whether it's naming five people who slept with Marylin Monroe or how many hydrogen bonds there are in ethanol.
Society at large just values certain nerds higher than others, although this changes significantly depending which part of society you're in at the moment (I can't imagine that knowing the Psalms is going to get you a lot of perks on IRC, for example).
But most people base their impressions of "society values" from high school and television, where sports, cars, and clothing are in.
Sometimes I wonder who made those decisions..
Little bit of hostility there, eh?
How about the question - what will there be in end game that doesn't require commitment to a raiding guild?
I think most of the people who complain about a lack of casual content aren't actually that "casual." I realized that most of the people I meet who would label themselves casual still play probably 8 hours a week, at least, maybe even more like 16-20. What they mean is that they can't or won't commit to the specific times or effort required to be in a raiding guild. Even without the time issue, I know quite a few people who don't want to leave their small, homey guilds to go raid with people who are taking the game much more seriously.
It does not take long in wow to reach a point where you cannot advance your character without the help of 39 other people all meeting on a specific night, whether you call them hardcore or not. Wow has (finally) addressed this somewhat with the Dungeon Set 2 quests, but it took them a while, and they're still just a creative rehash of existing content, not a new dungeon. There is no reason they can't implement a 5-man dungeon with epic loot that has bosses undefeatable by five new level sixties, that could take several days for a small group of friends to complete. In fact, they seem to be doing just that in the expansion.
So what is going to be offered in terms of advancement for someone who would rather get a group of five friends together to go do something challenging than have to find 39 people he can put up with?
Dunno that it's as useful for the print industry (I've heard pretty nasty things about its actual quality when used for print work), but for everyone else it's actually a pretty nice feature. Being able to export from any program into a full quality format that can be read anywhere without much hassle at all has saved me grades and headaches many times.
I recently graduated, and my school's job placement program required resumes in a very particular format - which looked like crap. However, I guess it does standardize things a bit when they send off fifty of them to a company that asks for "everyone in CS with a 3.4 or higher gpa".
I think the best way to get better resumes is to in your job posting either give a format or give specific items you'd like to see. I knew when I wrote mine that it had to get past a million filters - so even if I only spent a couple days and one project writing Java, I had to get it on there somehow - if only to get past the HR department into a real interview, where I knew I could convince people that I knew how to code.
If you only care about job experience, say that. Or if you want sample code.
My current employer glanced at my resume to get me an interview, but then didn't even want to see my references. They just gave me a coding assignment and two days to do it. I've honestly started thinking that might be the best way, for just a straight introductory to middle-of-the-road coding job. If they aren't don't want the job enough to do the assignment, why hire them? And how else can you tell what their code is like?
Man, that's got to be a good job. Sitting around all day looking at movies that people have marked as porn.
If to tell them that if I find them acting like lamers, or team killing, or trolling, I will beat then within an inch of their lives. Other than that, they can look at all the weird porn they want - I doubt there's much I can do to stop it. As long as they leave the family cat alone, things will turn out ok.
:)
Worst thing that'll ever happen to a kid from looking at weird porn is that he'll develop a strange fetish, and have to find a girl/boy who shares it to marry. Big fricking deal.
As long as you coach them to be anonymous when possible and supervise any first meetings with internet friends, I don't see that stalkers are that big of a problem. That 40-year-old meeting my kid for the first time won't be able to do much if his daddy's standing behind him with a shotgun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens
Although the line between "successful military coup" and "heroic defense of democracy" seems to have been determined by the winners of that engagement.
Well, actually, I generally vote independent. Because I haven't seen any proof that the democrats would do things better than the republican administration, seeing how they have been trying to play almost exactly the same angles as them. Democrats are pushing against video games to get the conservative vote. They voted for Iraq, the Patriot act, and now seem to be perfectly fine with these new bills to violate the geneva convention and ignore any oversight of our privacy rights.
I just don't feel like they're offering a valid second party any more, and I don't get why not.
I'm just amazed that apparently none of their focus groups, studies, surveys, anything, seem to indicate that they can get a good percentage of the vote by actually protecting our rights.
Instead of worrying about being "strong on terror", which is how the republicans have been framing these events, why can't they be "strong on our rights" or something. Why are they blasting the republicans for getting us into war and committing all these rights violations when THE DEMOCRATS ARE VOTING FOR THEM, TOO, because they're scared to death of appearing soft on terror.
It's complete BS. Show me the party who actually cares about my rights as a citizen, about upholding our constitution, and they'll have my vote in every election from here to when this mess is finally sorted out.
I'm disappointed in the republicans for ignoring their past values (small government, conservative interpretations of constitutional rights) but at this point I'm even more disappointed in the democrats for letting them do it. If they'd come up with a candidate who actually seemed to stand for something instead of just shouting "I'm not Bush, and we all hate Bush" we not be in this whole mess.
I still swear that Company of Heroes wouldn't let me enable some of the shaders on my 6600GT at home that it would on the 6800 at work... but that might just be the developer trying to look after me a little too much.
:)
Good article, and good responses
I'm actually very surprised to hear back directly from you. Thank you for the response, and I'm glad to hear that you did take these things into consideration.
However, there is a general problem (and it's not yours, it's the hardware manufacturer's) about what "support" actually means.
For example, ATI cards claim to support the OpenGL 2.0 spec. And they do... but some of it is in software.
There were several shader methods relied upon by our software that are part of the spec, supported on Geforce 6800 hardware.. but an equivalent ATI card which claims support for the same spec supported it in software, and performance dropped over 100-fold.
There are several similar issues between a Geforce 6600 and a 6800, or a 6800 and 7900, despite the fact that both "support" the same shader models.
I don't expect a review like these to take all of this into account (it's hard enough finding a developer site that actually does). But it can be an annoyance, and in cases where programming around it isn't feasible (we found another way to implement things on the ATI card), can influence how your game is going to look.
According to their press releases at the time, the idea was a team-oriented combat game. Most people compared it to Tribes (and Bungie admitted to being heavily influenced by tribes during the development process).
The switch to xbox made single player a higher priority. Although they obviously kept quite a bit of multiplayer, the scale and teamwork aspect of the levels was scaled down quite a bit from what they were originally talking about.
Of course, in some of the first interviews they were still considering a procedure terrain generation algorithm so you could play on almost infinitely large maps. Which I think worked somewhat in theory in their labs, but I can't imagine trying to get that working in multiplayer.
They all support the shader model, but will the cost be the same?
It doesn't really matter so much that they "support" a feature if it still kills your performance to use it.
I'm just saying that it isn't a linear scaling of speed because of the degree of support for specific features. There's more of a difference sometimes than just the clock speed or fill rate.
Or at least, there will be a practical one based on some games turning off features if they know you can't run them at full speed. Company of heroes looks signficantly better on the 6800GT's at work than my 6600GT at home, at the same detail settings. If it were just speed to be worried about my card would look the same, just have half the frame rate.
And those elders were quite willing to go to war with the nearest neighbor over buffalo hunting rights.
While there were a few isolated peaceful American Indian tribes, the general history of the continent is one of war and slaughter as much as Europe of old. No place in the world has been immune from the basic realities of military power - that might does make right, when there is no higher authority's might saying otherwise.
I don't attempt to defend any of this morally - I think Iraq was a big mistake strategically, morally, and politically. But from the "realist" view of international relations, it is a natural consequence of our current imbalance of power. Without anyone to challenge the US, there is little disincentive to the leaders to avoid war in Iraq, for whatever reason (ideological, resources, political) they originally chose to do so.
Realism doesn't justify takeovers, it describes the existing data from human history as far back as the assyrian invasion of egypt, the rise and fall of the aztec empire, and the kingdom of mali. Mankind's history is a bloody one, and the few lucky societies to have escaped it for some time (due to a combination of isolation, lack of anything worth taking, traditions of non-violence, and good leadership) do not change the basic results of human existence.
The moment someone learns how to grow corn, someone else going to realize that it's a lot easier to pillage it than it is to grow it.
It was never conquered, but it was Russian and socialist ideas that shaped many of the new governments formed when the European empires in Africa collapsed (please remember that pretty much everyone who could had a stake in Africa - there is a reason that so many people along the coast have French as an official language). Most of the new governments that formed initially out of the chaos were socialistic dictatorships of a style very similar to the USSR's. As was seen earlier in southeast asia, the forced nationalism in many places of farming and industry destroyed their local economies :(
It never conquered, but it sent arms and supplies to quite a few socialist nations there.
There are some very great success stories in Africa. There are, unfortunately, even more tales of starvation and horror.
:( It is unfortunate that we place so much value on the forms of a government, when what really matters for the people is that there is some law and order so they can feel safe, and that the economy is good enough that they can feed themselves. I meaning to point an example, not bash all communist governments in africa :)
As far as I've studied, the general problem was that there was a great push for government and nation-building in africa, once the empires left, with little regard for actual practical economics and existing tribal structure. Some of these were democratic to begin with, but more and more they became dictatorial and communist/socialist, with influence from the Soviet Union especially (as the soviets were very keen on advancing their form of government across the world, just as the US was). The forced collectivization of farmland combined with the innefficient socialization of business, with the corruption so often present in dictatorial structures, completely wrecked many of the economies, leading to famine, unrest, and eventually warlordism.
I'm not an expert on african studies, but that seems to have been the case in far too many places
Is that it ignores feature support.
For example, some fancier shading tricks are only supported in the Geforce 6800 and later (try running, say, the new Company of Heroes game on a 6600. You can get a great frame rate, but you're missing out on a lot of cool looking stuff).
A lot of times going from one generation to the next (or from the consumer card to the once-flagship-card) will net you a lot more than just pure speed. I work for a gaming type company, and I know a lot of the features we use in some of our shaders just plain aren't supported on lower end cards, or are "supported" by the driver but are actually implemented in software, which means if we can't code around it the feature get disabled for that card, and your game won't look as pretty. It's becoming more and more of a concern with new games.
It's still a nice quick snapshot intro to the graphics cards available, though. The sort of run down I try to do for people when they're asking what they should buy.
Yes, almost exactly.
Anti-aliasing is basically sampling parts of the image at 2x or 4x the resolution. 4x anti-aliasing is similar to just rendering at 2x the resolution (samples go up by square of resolution), except for the video card manufacturers can pull some fancy tricks to make it actually faster than that.
When you are playing at a high enough resolution, you are already sampling at a high enough frequency that most artifacts will disappear.
I think at 1024x768 you can still notice a difference, and on bad artwork, even at higher resolutions the AA can help (buildings with sharp 90 degree edges can be very noticeable at times). But for most games, I run at 1600x1200 and don't really notice the AA difference either.
The whole concept of not just outright conquering other nations whom you disagree with, and are more powerful than, is a relatively recent invention. Only since World War II has it really taken hold as a global opinion. Prior to that, it was just assumed that any great power had the right to colonize/dominate any minor country it could, and fight over territory from other great powers using whatever means it had.
Even within the last fifty years, while the US has been nowhere close to the shining pillar it attempts to pass itself off as, the former soviet union did much worse. Ask the people behind the iron curtain, or living under the chaos that has been the dictatorial aftermath of communism in africa, about forcing governmental systems on a people.
While the American approach is quite honestly hypocritical (we are going to force you to be "free" by our definition of free), it is no less so than the communist line of a state run by the workers.
I understand that bashing America is the "in" thing to do right now, and I am in no way condoning our current foreign policy. But please have some sense of history before you go spouting off nonsense.
Whoops, nice ironic mistake there.
:(
3 ways, 3 ways! It was two when I started writing
Everyone listen to this guy.
:)
;-)
Here are two easy ways to significantly improve your working knowledge base.
1) Read anything you can find, always something new. Go to the library and just pick a random book from the classics section and read it. Then when you're done go to the "literary criticism" section and read a couple articles on what other people thought you should get out of that book. Even though you'll probably think they're full of crap, you'll learn a lot just seeing what made a book a "classic" to begin with, because it quite often wasn't that it was really that fun to read
2) Any time a subject that sounds vaguely interesting comes up in history or science class comes up, wikipedia it and follow where the cross links lead you. I have learned more from doing this than I would believe. No, it's not the best source in the world - but it is the best way I have ever seen to get a quick, broad understanding of a topic and the things it relates to. If something interests you even more, read a few book reviews to find something more in depth to read that won't put you asleep.
3) In math, nothing says you can't work ahead or out of a more interesting book. And even the crappiest math teacher will have a hard time staying mad at you if you're attempting to solve multi-dimensional calculus instead of listening to her lecture.
The biggest thing I learned in high school was to squeeze as much as I could out of the good classes (pay attention, discuss with the teacher, participate and bring up interesting slightly-off-topic conversations in class), and do the bare minimum for the grades while teaching myself in the crappy ones. Because, to be honest, in high school (and often even in college) it takes very little effort for a smart kid to get decent enough grades. But that doesn't mean you should be wasting all the rest of your time not learning.
Yeah, must just be different between schools.
There was a BA version of my major... but it was really kind of gimp compared to the engineering one.
It's not really the number of credit hours that amazes me, but the percentage that could be got through AP credit. There's no way I could pull >half of my education from AP credit. That's spending more than half of your education on basic calc and general introduction classes. But I guess it might be different in an major where fewer of your more "general knowledge" requirement were actually engineering specific, instead of just "take another history course."