Back in the day (and this i a really long time ago), I wrote a mail server that could be used as a file server. You could set up accounts so that when you attempted to receive the mails from the mail server, files from some given directory would download as email attachments. Some mail clients dealt with this admirably well, downloading large files with out trouble. However, others didn't... cope so well, and crashed or consumed insane amounts of memory when attempting to download emails of that size. It was really sorted the chaff from the wheat in terms of email clients.
Granted, at the time (some 10 years ago), emails of that size (several hundred megabytes) were pretty much unheard of, so I don't really blame them for not putting a lot of effort into making their software cope with those extreme cases. But it gladdened me that some did.
I agree that GeV is the appropriate unit. Though it wouldn't hurt to have a paragraph explaining to people not well versed in physics how 1 GeV is roughly the mass of a hydrogen atom.
Of course, "strings" takes files as an argument, so
"strings image_name.jpg | less"
Would do just as fine. You know. Less is more. Doubly so in this case.
Re:Guess I'm one of the critics to ignore
on
BioShock 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
I really couldn't get into BioShock. I had just played Dead Space and they both felt like essentially the same game and same story line. You arrive, transport is destroyed, find yourself thrown into environment overrun with monsters, get your prompts from a "friendly" on the radio, etc. I made it through the first chapter, then quit. Oh, and the sound was annoyingly "off" somehow, maybe not properly mapped to the sprite's distance in the background.
BioShock is the "spiritual successor" of the System Shock series. In this case "spiritual successor" means "same exact story in a different setting".
Dead Space is a more or less blatant ripoff of System Shock II, with some Alien sprinkled on top of it for good measure. In the end, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as the System Shock IP is forever tied up in legal tangles and a System Shock III seems unlikely, as well as the people who worked on System Shock II kinda dropping the ball with BioShock.
So yeah. The story and elements are similar because they're borrowing them from the same game.
Whereas math and physics, where people take copious notes, are all about rote memorization? I don't think so.
If you don't need to take notes, you aren't being challenged enough.
For physics and mathematics at a reasonably high level (late undergraduate to graduate level courses), assuming you have decent course literature, it makes no sense at all to take notes. The equations and derivations are generally so complicated that both copying them and really listening to what the lecturer is saying is not really an option.
At least for me, I feel I learn faster from devoting my attention towards trying to follow the arguments of the lecturer instead of taking down notes.
A mobile phone can emit about a 1 watt. So say you talk for t about of time, so 1 watt * t joules of energy.
The energy of each photon from a mobile phone would be, E = hf = h * 900 MHz.
So number of photons emitted is: t / (h*900Mhz).
The cross section area is about 10^50, so, roughly, you'd need to talk for.. about 10^18 years. Far far longer than the age of the universe.
At the microwave energies, EM-radiation is more wave-like than particle-like, validity of the photon description is somewhat questionable. Furthermore, time and energy are incompatible observables in QM, so the "same time" part of two photons being absorbed at the same time can get considerably fuzzy.
The problem is that the game industry is to an extent making the same mistake as the film industry: Catering to too wide a demographic with the same product. If you make a 3D romantic comedy in space surrounding a mysterious murder during a high speed car chase and cast everyone as a teenager, you will indeed have squeezed most genres into the film, and it'll probably be watchable for people who like those genres, but it will never surpass watchable. You'll maximize the revenue, but pay a hefty price in quality.
Same thing goes for making a game that attempts to cater to both the casual and normal gamer groups.
I know we can't make too many assumptions, but I think common sense would indicate there's trillions of these things floating out there. I would think there's more of these in the galaxy than stars, if you just continue the mass/frequency curve past the point that fusion ignites.
That's a pretty common astrophysical assumption though, that the universe is homogenous and isotropic. Or in simpler words, our corner of space is not significantly different from any other corner of space. So if we find these guys floating around in space, similar objects will likely float around elsewhere as well.
It doesn't necessarily need to have explicit randomization. An algorithm that exhibits chaotic behavior is just as efficient, and more elegant, as we have yet to identify a 'randomizer' in our own brains.
You have a crew of nerds here who are all about open source and you refer to your project as "an open source web software project of mine" and are asking for more users?!
You must be new here.
It's kinda sad that you didn't put it in the summary, as others pointed out before me, you really did miss out. Good luck getting it in in the comments, everybody who skims the summaries won't even see it...
If he -had- posted it in the article, 70% of the comments would berate him for slashvertisement. So it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Entropy is a statistical thing. When you consume energy, it looses order. A charged capacitor is very ordered: You have a positive charge on one side, and a negative charge on the other. When you hook it up to a lightbulb, the energy will transform into heat and light. But try as you might, warming and shining light on a lightbulb hooked up to a capacitor will not charge it up again, because out of all the ways this light and warmth can go, very few of them act towards charging the capacitor.
Ordered energy is more useful than "random" energy. What the second law of thermodynamics says is that on average, energy tends to become more "random". While you can turn random energy into ordered energy, it is never efficient: You always spend more energy turning it into ordered energy, than you gain spending it again.
So it's not that energy with high entropy is unable to do work, it's that the work it can do is less useful.
Which is for example why you should never use resistive heating to warm stuff, it's a waste of entropy. You should use that electricity to do meaningful work while creating heat as a by product, not as a goal in it self.
I openly admit to not reading ALL comments prior to posting this, but.... I think the top level posters so far are missing the real issue here. These people are in Jail for a reason. Let's not treat them to things they do not deserve.
Jail should be a place to serve a sentance and to hopefully let the the criminals reflect on their crime and hopefully learn a lesson. It SHOULDN'T be a place where criminals get to hang out and play board games. That's just ridiculous. Yes, D&D and any other aformentioned board games are harmless, but enabling someone to have fun in a place of punishment is just downright absurd. I know people who have been to jail, and while they say it was absolutely no fun at all, their behavior after their sentance really didn't change.
The system is broken. We can't let people forget the reason they're being punished...
If they are not treated to any entertainment at all, they will become depressed and kill themselves. Clearly, this is not the intention of jail either, is it? I understand that you have some sort of sadistic need to see these people suffer, but there are limits to how you can treat people (yes, inmates are people too), both stemming from psychology and international law.
Simplified != dumbed down. It is the essence of good design.
It depends on who you are designing for. An engineer type will think of the computer in terms of a sequence of granular low-level ideas, and be greatly discomforted by separation from these ideas. Because unlike someone who has learned computing in abstract high-level terms, the very idea he is trying to convey to the computer is different.
A mac user might think "I want to write a text document". And the mac caters very well to this sort of idea. The technical type might think "I want to start vi so I can create a TeX-file, then I want compile it and pass it through a ps->dvi converter", and when he is trying to tell a mac this, it will not cater well to the notion. It's very difficult to un-learn this sort of thinking, and it's very frustrating when you're forced to abandon this low-level view of computer interaction.
Slashdot Mirror
A programmer pirate. See
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
printf("Hello World Arg!");
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
For the same reason we don't "just push" things into orbit.
Wrong.
An inch-long hair is only 90 micrometers wide. So that is 0.00354330709 square inches, so you would need something 282 times as bright as the sun.
Ah, I interpreted the hair-width as the thickness of the film, and an inch to be the characteristic dimension of the area. But maybe you're right.
One watt from an inch-long and hair-thin area? How freaking intense would that light source have to be? Pretty hard to believe.
Twice as bright as the sun with 100% energy-conversion efficiency, as the solar constant is roughly half a watt per square inch.
How did you come to that value?
World population ~ 6.8 billion
EU population ~ 500 million
So the EU is roughly 7% of the world population. The US, on the other hand, is less than 5%.
Back in the day (and this i a really long time ago), I wrote a mail server that could be used as a file server. You could set up accounts so that when you attempted to receive the mails from the mail server, files from some given directory would download as email attachments. Some mail clients dealt with this admirably well, downloading large files with out trouble. However, others didn't ... cope so well, and crashed or consumed insane amounts of memory when attempting to download emails of that size. It was really sorted the chaff from the wheat in terms of email clients.
Granted, at the time (some 10 years ago), emails of that size (several hundred megabytes) were pretty much unheard of, so I don't really blame them for not putting a lot of effort into making their software cope with those extreme cases. But it gladdened me that some did.
I agree that GeV is the appropriate unit. Though it wouldn't hurt to have a paragraph explaining to people not well versed in physics how 1 GeV is roughly the mass of a hydrogen atom.
For most of my photos, this works:
cat image_name.jpg | strings | more
Of course, "strings" takes files as an argument, so
"strings image_name.jpg | less"
Would do just as fine. You know. Less is more. Doubly so in this case.
I really couldn't get into BioShock. I had just played Dead Space and they both felt like essentially the same game and same story line. You arrive, transport is destroyed, find yourself thrown into environment overrun with monsters, get your prompts from a "friendly" on the radio, etc. I made it through the first chapter, then quit. Oh, and the sound was annoyingly "off" somehow, maybe not properly mapped to the sprite's distance in the background.
BioShock is the "spiritual successor" of the System Shock series. In this case "spiritual successor" means "same exact story in a different setting".
Dead Space is a more or less blatant ripoff of System Shock II, with some Alien sprinkled on top of it for good measure. In the end, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as the System Shock IP is forever tied up in legal tangles and a System Shock III seems unlikely, as well as the people who worked on System Shock II kinda dropping the ball with BioShock.
So yeah. The story and elements are similar because they're borrowing them from the same game.
So by that measure we should censor all pictures of women's faces as it violates the decency standards of Iran.
We can do better than that. Let's form a community that considers rules on internet decency the height of indecency.
Whereas math and physics, where people take copious notes, are all about rote memorization? I don't think so.
If you don't need to take notes, you aren't being challenged enough.
For physics and mathematics at a reasonably high level (late undergraduate to graduate level courses), assuming you have decent course literature, it makes no sense at all to take notes. The equations and derivations are generally so complicated that both copying them and really listening to what the lecturer is saying is not really an option.
At least for me, I feel I learn faster from devoting my attention towards trying to follow the arguments of the lecturer instead of taking down notes.
Indeed. If all you are doing on your lectures is reciting bullet points off of slides, why should anyone attend your lectures?
Okay let's see.
A mobile phone can emit about a 1 watt. So say you talk for t about of time, so 1 watt * t joules of energy.
The energy of each photon from a mobile phone would be, E = hf = h * 900 MHz.
So number of photons emitted is: t / (h*900Mhz).
The cross section area is about 10^50, so, roughly, you'd need to talk for .. about 10^18 years. Far far longer than the age of the universe.
At the microwave energies, EM-radiation is more wave-like than particle-like, validity of the photon description is somewhat questionable. Furthermore, time and energy are incompatible observables in QM, so the "same time" part of two photons being absorbed at the same time can get considerably fuzzy.
The problem is that the game industry is to an extent making the same mistake as the film industry: Catering to too wide a demographic with the same product. If you make a 3D romantic comedy in space surrounding a mysterious murder during a high speed car chase and cast everyone as a teenager, you will indeed have squeezed most genres into the film, and it'll probably be watchable for people who like those genres, but it will never surpass watchable. You'll maximize the revenue, but pay a hefty price in quality.
Same thing goes for making a game that attempts to cater to both the casual and normal gamer groups.
Wear leather underwear. Backscatter doesn't penetrate skin? Try penetrating this cow skin!
If S&M isn't your thing, maybe lamé would do as a substitute?
I know we can't make too many assumptions, but I think common sense would indicate there's trillions of these things floating out there. I would think there's more of these in the galaxy than stars, if you just continue the mass/frequency curve past the point that fusion ignites.
That's a pretty common astrophysical assumption though, that the universe is homogenous and isotropic. Or in simpler words, our corner of space is not significantly different from any other corner of space. So if we find these guys floating around in space, similar objects will likely float around elsewhere as well.
It doesn't necessarily need to have explicit randomization. An algorithm that exhibits chaotic behavior is just as efficient, and more elegant, as we have yet to identify a 'randomizer' in our own brains.
You have a crew of nerds here who are all about open source and you refer to your project as "an open source web software project of mine" and are asking for more users?!
You must be new here.
It's kinda sad that you didn't put it in the summary, as others pointed out before me, you really did miss out. Good luck getting it in in the comments, everybody who skims the summaries won't even see it...
If he -had- posted it in the article, 70% of the comments would berate him for slashvertisement. So it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I guess someone thought it would be an effective way to prevent piracy
Once you've started a legitimate copy of a game, what process do they figure will turn the copy into an illegitimate one during gameplay?
DIY Biology sounds pretty dangerous.
As long as the instructions it comes with are better than Ikea's...
Not particularly so long as you're careful and use a condom.
I kept reading "Prisons" instead of Prions and was dumbfounded beyond belief.
News at 10: D&D harmful to Myelin.
Entropy is a statistical thing. When you consume energy, it looses order. A charged capacitor is very ordered: You have a positive charge on one side, and a negative charge on the other. When you hook it up to a lightbulb, the energy will transform into heat and light. But try as you might, warming and shining light on a lightbulb hooked up to a capacitor will not charge it up again, because out of all the ways this light and warmth can go, very few of them act towards charging the capacitor.
Ordered energy is more useful than "random" energy. What the second law of thermodynamics says is that on average, energy tends to become more "random". While you can turn random energy into ordered energy, it is never efficient: You always spend more energy turning it into ordered energy, than you gain spending it again.
So it's not that energy with high entropy is unable to do work, it's that the work it can do is less useful.
Which is for example why you should never use resistive heating to warm stuff, it's a waste of entropy. You should use that electricity to do meaningful work while creating heat as a by product, not as a goal in it self.
I openly admit to not reading ALL comments prior to posting this, but.... I think the top level posters so far are missing the real issue here. These people are in Jail for a reason. Let's not treat them to things they do not deserve.
Jail should be a place to serve a sentance and to hopefully let the the criminals reflect on their crime and hopefully learn a lesson. It SHOULDN'T be a place where criminals get to hang out and play board games. That's just ridiculous. Yes, D&D and any other aformentioned board games are harmless, but enabling someone to have fun in a place of punishment is just downright absurd. I know people who have been to jail, and while they say it was absolutely no fun at all, their behavior after their sentance really didn't change.
The system is broken. We can't let people forget the reason they're being punished...
If they are not treated to any entertainment at all, they will become depressed and kill themselves. Clearly, this is not the intention of jail either, is it? I understand that you have some sort of sadistic need to see these people suffer, but there are limits to how you can treat people (yes, inmates are people too), both stemming from psychology and international law.
Simplified != dumbed down. It is the essence of good design.
It depends on who you are designing for. An engineer type will think of the computer in terms of a sequence of granular low-level ideas, and be greatly discomforted by separation from these ideas. Because unlike someone who has learned computing in abstract high-level terms, the very idea he is trying to convey to the computer is different.
A mac user might think "I want to write a text document". And the mac caters very well to this sort of idea.
The technical type might think "I want to start vi so I can create a TeX-file, then I want compile it and pass it through a ps->dvi converter", and when he is trying to tell a mac this, it will not cater well to the notion. It's very difficult to un-learn this sort of thinking, and it's very frustrating when you're forced to abandon this low-level view of computer interaction.
Well, you know ladies these days, so skinny they're all bones. We have come full circle.