It's a way to defeat spam filters. Most of them look for specific key words, and ignore misspellings by default. The goal seems to be to make something readable to the fuzzy systems in the human brain, but utterly incomprehensible to computerized scanners. Looks like it's working at the moment.
Um, in commercial software, there's always money involved.
IANAL, but given my (admittedly limited) understanding of the law in this country, fraud has to be a deliberate act. Products have been hyped since the beginning of time, and it's impossible to declare that illegal. Of course, if criminal or fraudulent activity can be proven, that's another story.
Generally, the market decides what's fair and what's not among vaporware. (Remember Daikatana? Unless the managers of Enron's broadband division mysteriously bought homes in Tahiti after they received an infusion of investment capital, I don't see how one can accuse them of any real wrongdoing.
No matter how far technology advances, CD's will always be throwable; you can even break them into sharp fragments if you don't like the person you're throwing them at.
More than rumored, at this point. The GBA->GCN connectivity is the big thing that Nintendo's pushing right now; you'll be able to use a GBA in virtually all of Nintendo's forthcoming first- and second-party Gamecube titles.
Seriously, what the hell are you talking about? There's Eternal Darkness, Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, Zelda: The Wind Waker, Pikmin, Animal Crossing and Super Smash Brothers Melee. Each of those first- or second-party games is not only Gamecube exclusive, but a system seller as well. Name seven exclusive PS2 titles that justify a system purchase. I dare you. (The XBox has all of one.)
Furthermore, the Gamecube hardware is the cheapest on the market, at $150.
I'm not a Nintendo fanboy by any means. What Nintendo is doing in this case is inexcusable. But you clearly have no idea what you're talking about here. The market can and will endure anything as long as people want to play video games. And as long as Miyamoto is still making video games, I don't think Nintendo will ever be in any immediate danger.
Sending soldiers into NYC? Now there's a good idea. Not only would it cause unprecedented rioting around the country; but it's blatantly unconstitutional as well.
...is that nVidia did modify their drivers, and that this is an "optimization" and not a "cheat." They go on to state that optimizations of any kind (including nVidia's "optimizations") are not allowed.
So tell me again how doing something forbidden to increase one's score isn't cheating?
You mean, so the tests can act even more differently from real-world applications than they do now. That will make the benchmark utterly useless--video cards are (generally) used to render scenes, not random sets of points.
I think AOL bought Nullsoft almost exclusively for Winamp. Its members were probably guaranteed employment by AOL for a certain amount of time, and are most likely allowed a good deal of freedom in what they work on, as they've demonstrated that they can produce good things when working autonomously.
He said images on a website are too small to bother with. Well, how about a tarball of the entire site?
Sounds like a hideous waste of bandwidth. Very few users look at a significant portion of an entire site. Not to mention that virtually all sites of any size are in some way dynamic these days. Honestly, I don't think BT could be made useful for web content unless dramatic changes were made.
I don't know if I fully buy that. Mistakes happen, and I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that the one change in score on the Radeon 9800 was incidental. Eight "abberations," on the other hand...
Why would there be a market for this? The connected PDA's that dominate the market could surely handle this, as could any cellphone with web capability. I'm all for dedicated devices, but the last thing anyone needs is another lump of metal in one's pocket to go along with the cellphone, PDA, iPod and Game Boy.
Anyone who writes articles for WSJ is clearly doing too much work to be fully qualified to give advice on slacking. They also don't seem to mention anything about slacking off while in the office. Here's what I recommend:
Don't do too little. It's better to do too much than too little--the former might almost put you up to expectations and make you feel good about yourself. The latter will get you shit-canned before you can say "miserable job market."
Take lunch at a slightly different time every day. In the tech field, people don't tend to have set lunch hours. It's harder to keep track of when you're due back if no one knows when you left, exactly.
Make minor aesthetic adjustments to code. If you use a version control system, try cutting and pasting a few function definitions out of order or changing the indentation of comments. I don't know about real versions of diff, but SourceSafe thinks I'm a real plugger.
Schedule doctor's appointments two hours from either end of the work day. If it's not worth the time it would take to commute back to work before/after the appointment, you can come in later or leave earlier than is really necessary.
Act like you care, especially when the boss is around. If someone is watching you for signs of slacking, you're screwed. The key is in appearing to be a model employee.
Don't play games. That's just too damn obvious.
Ghost hours are your friend. Just don't overdo it--that's one sure way to get your ass fired.
Lastly, look for a different job. If you care this much about not doing work, you're obviously not enjoying your job very much.
Amen. In theory, C++ would be the worst of the three in a timed contest--too much housekeeping. Of course, Java's somewhat crippled by the time it takes to type in three explicit casts for every line of code you write... (:
Have you read anything about 3D rendering? It's all math, at least in the mainstream areas of the field--perhaps in the old days, when techniques hadn't been perfected, math might not have been such an issue. I don't know much about ray tracing, but I can tell you that the polygonal engines used in virtually all games today are nothing but linear algebra and multivariate calculus. Stereoscopic rendering, which seems to be making a bit of a comeback (there's support for it in D3D as of a release or two ago), is slightly more neurological in nature, but I think that's about it.
While engines themselves might not last long, that has more to do with the capabilities of computer hardware than anything else--vector transforms, quaternions and the like haven't changed since they were first discovered long before the era of modern computing.
It's even more specific than that--most likely most hits in context as well as spell checking. I don't remember specifics, but there have been a couple of times when I've been looking for a combination of words and had one suggested that would only make sense under very specific circumstances. Google rocks.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a way to defeat spam filters. Most of them look for specific key words, and ignore misspellings by default. The goal seems to be to make something readable to the fuzzy systems in the human brain, but utterly incomprehensible to computerized scanners. Looks like it's working at the moment.
Can you get alpha transparency in IE? Yes, you can. I didn't say it wasn't ugly.
Um, in commercial software, there's always money involved.
IANAL, but given my (admittedly limited) understanding of the law in this country, fraud has to be a deliberate act. Products have been hyped since the beginning of time, and it's impossible to declare that illegal. Of course, if criminal or fraudulent activity can be proven, that's another story.
Generally, the market decides what's fair and what's not among vaporware. (Remember Daikatana? Unless the managers of Enron's broadband division mysteriously bought homes in Tahiti after they received an infusion of investment capital, I don't see how one can accuse them of any real wrongdoing.
No matter how far technology advances, CD's will always be throwable; you can even break them into sharp fragments if you don't like the person you're throwing them at.
More than rumored, at this point. The GBA->GCN connectivity is the big thing that Nintendo's pushing right now; you'll be able to use a GBA in virtually all of Nintendo's forthcoming first- and second-party Gamecube titles.
IE can do alpha transparency in PNGs, but it requires jumping through an inordinate number of hoops.
Ummm, nice troll?
Seriously, what the hell are you talking about? There's Eternal Darkness, Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, Zelda: The Wind Waker, Pikmin, Animal Crossing and Super Smash Brothers Melee. Each of those first- or second-party games is not only Gamecube exclusive, but a system seller as well. Name seven exclusive PS2 titles that justify a system purchase. I dare you. (The XBox has all of one.)
Furthermore, the Gamecube hardware is the cheapest on the market, at $150.
I'm not a Nintendo fanboy by any means. What Nintendo is doing in this case is inexcusable. But you clearly have no idea what you're talking about here. The market can and will endure anything as long as people want to play video games. And as long as Miyamoto is still making video games, I don't think Nintendo will ever be in any immediate danger.
Even Clippy's sold out to marketing. Remember when he was called Clippit, before Microsoft hired Gilbert Gottfried to voice him?
Sending soldiers into NYC? Now there's a good idea. Not only would it cause unprecedented rioting around the country; but it's blatantly unconstitutional as well.
I'm trying to not be a cynic and assume a big fat envelope was passed under the table.
Au contrare. Letters containing legal threats are usually rather thin.
Um, read the original article. With that in mind, read the retraction. That is clearly not the case.
...is that nVidia did modify their drivers, and that this is an "optimization" and not a "cheat." They go on to state that optimizations of any kind (including nVidia's "optimizations") are not allowed.
So tell me again how doing something forbidden to increase one's score isn't cheating?
You mean, so the tests can act even more differently from real-world applications than they do now. That will make the benchmark utterly useless--video cards are (generally) used to render scenes, not random sets of points.
I think AOL bought Nullsoft almost exclusively for Winamp. Its members were probably guaranteed employment by AOL for a certain amount of time, and are most likely allowed a good deal of freedom in what they work on, as they've demonstrated that they can produce good things when working autonomously.
As long as the word "solution" stays the hell out of there, I'm happy.
He does. There's a whole story about her somewhere on his site--it even mentions her real name.
Sounds like a hideous waste of bandwidth. Very few users look at a significant portion of an entire site. Not to mention that virtually all sites of any size are in some way dynamic these days. Honestly, I don't think BT could be made useful for web content unless dramatic changes were made.
I don't know if I fully buy that. Mistakes happen, and I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that the one change in score on the Radeon 9800 was incidental. Eight "abberations," on the other hand...
And to think, in three short years, all you'll have is an FX 5800 paperweight.
Why would there be a market for this? The connected PDA's that dominate the market could surely handle this, as could any cellphone with web capability. I'm all for dedicated devices, but the last thing anyone needs is another lump of metal in one's pocket to go along with the cellphone, PDA, iPod and Game Boy.
Anyone who writes articles for WSJ is clearly doing too much work to be fully qualified to give advice on slacking. They also don't seem to mention anything about slacking off while in the office. Here's what I recommend:
Typing URLs on a GBA will be interesting, what with the two buttons. It might almost work if you live in Bosnia or Barbados.
Amen. In theory, C++ would be the worst of the three in a timed contest--too much housekeeping. Of course, Java's somewhat crippled by the time it takes to type in three explicit casts for every line of code you write... (:
Have you read anything about 3D rendering? It's all math, at least in the mainstream areas of the field--perhaps in the old days, when techniques hadn't been perfected, math might not have been such an issue. I don't know much about ray tracing, but I can tell you that the polygonal engines used in virtually all games today are nothing but linear algebra and multivariate calculus. Stereoscopic rendering, which seems to be making a bit of a comeback (there's support for it in D3D as of a release or two ago), is slightly more neurological in nature, but I think that's about it.
While engines themselves might not last long, that has more to do with the capabilities of computer hardware than anything else--vector transforms, quaternions and the like haven't changed since they were first discovered long before the era of modern computing.
It's even more specific than that--most likely most hits in context as well as spell checking. I don't remember specifics, but there have been a couple of times when I've been looking for a combination of words and had one suggested that would only make sense under very specific circumstances. Google rocks.