Like Hustler Magazine making a fake advertisement about a drunken Jerry Falwell making it sweet in an outhouse with his mother? The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Hustler. I don't think that Rockstar is worried in the least.
There are some things that can be done to reduce the impact of hurricanes like this. The biggest one is to restore the delta and the wet lands. The messing with the Mississippi caused a lot of this damage.
Yes, removing the levees from the Mississippi and restoring the flood plains would reduce the threat of New Orleans flooding during a hurricane but displace everyone who lives along the river to the north. It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul. The whole point of the levees was to save the entire Mississippi River basin, even far north of New Orleans. Here's just one example of what happened before the levees existed: 700,000 people displaced in 6 states.
The US Corps of Engineers actually has a very good track record of preventing flood damage, preventing approximately $208 billion in damages between 1990 and 2000. Sometimes, these things just happen. The area north of Vicksburg flooded in 1997 due to heavy rains, even with the levees. Iowa had what seemed like 40 days and 40 nights of rain in 1993 and flooded everything. The levees are a necessity to keep these things from happening more often.
Think about the damage that waters 12 feet above flood stages would have caused without the levees. The Mississippi (state) delta had water creeping into people's houses in 1997, but they would have been completely underwater otherwise.
It's like Amdahl's Law. We build the levees to remove the common case (annual displacement of tens of thousands and the persistent destruction of property) and resign ourselves to the rare worst-case scenario (category 5 hurricane impacting New Orleans once in recorded history, displacing 1.3 million) because that is how we achieve maximum benefit. Like you said, we can't just abandon these cities.
By living in a disaster-prone area, be it New Orleans, Los Angeles, or Tokyo, you are making the decision that the risk is acceptable to you. However, here's guessing that they rebuild the levees to withstand a category 5....and for the sake of all those whose homes are teetering on the brink of destruction, here's hoping that the 3,000 lb. giant sandbags work.
Most departments care more about your recommendation letters than your GRE scores anyway. Actually, I've been told that my ECE department doesn't even look at the verbal and only considers the math and analytical if you are massively deficient... and this is a top 10 program.
I can't imagine that the CS scores would be that different.
I agree completely. Quality makes the MITs, CalTechs, and Stanfords go-round. I think the most ridiculous statement in the entire article is:
Experts such as Malcom and Babco think some colleges should "take a page" off the for-profit, client-based institutions such as Strayer and DeVry, and make computer science more accessible, practical and less intimidating, to get more 18 year-olds to major in computer science.
Now I'm for accessability and all that, but there is a serious problem when you start telling universities to water down the sciences in the name of accessability. I can only imagine what prospects had been open to me if my EE undergrad consisted of routing wires and the National Electric Code instead of communication theory, analog IC design, etc. I'm sure that would have improved my chances of succeeding in grad school and getting an engineering design job after graduation.
I just think that people need to stop thinking about the sciences as being easy. The sciences are hard because we don't know all the answers. For that matter, we don't even know if we're asking the right questions. If you don't get into details, it is impossible to realize that.
Unfortunately, these kinds of applications are really hard to come by for Win32 (the above is the only one that I know). You may find that some laptops have vendor-supplied programs like Maximiser, but I believe the problem you have is that such an application simply doesn't exist. Your best bet really is to use a 2.6 Linux kernel and the/proc/acpi facilities. I'm not entirely sure about the cycle count, but I'm pretty sure it will give you the rest of the info you need. Just fire up a Knoppix CD and go to work... that is, unless you want to write a program that interfaces with Windows ACPI.:)
P.S. If you're going to do any kind of power management after you get this data, I'd highly suggest a distro with kpowersave (like SuSE 9.1 or better), which has a libpowersave library for managing devices. But as a warning, the source code was somewhat difficult to locate online (don't ask me why).
There are plenty of places where all the cleverness in the world is worthless, but the skills required to earn that PhD are essential
Isn't that an oxymoron? To get a Ph.D. from any reputable university, you have to develop a novel concept that advances the state of the art and rigorously verify its correctness through experiment and peer-reviewed publication. If you aren't clever, you can't get the novelty aspect and don't get past the preliminary oral exam because you don't have any publications. Reviewers love to reject papers because ideas are "obvious."
If you mean slave away long hours on a single project, I fail to see how that skill is unique to Ph.Ds. Actually, the majority of the ones I know are lazy bums until the deadline comes.:)
I will say this, though. I'd be a little offended if I was subjected to nine consecutive technical quizzes (as from TFA) while carrying a Ph.D. I understand a few open-ended questions to see if a person can think creatively and prove they aren't an anti-social prick. Maybe a few technical questions with distinct solutions to check their background. However, I would get really tired, really quickly if they spent more time toying around than asking me about my research.
They did this is NCAA Football 2001, too. Unfortunately, it was fatally flawed. Any time you made a turnover, the meter completely flipped, even if you were up by 50. I also really liked how any time the other team punted, your momentum went down, even if they decided to do it on 4th and inches (indicating that they didn't think they could get a foot of yardage on your defense). They tried to make the concept of mental state in NCAA 2005, but I never noticed a difference between my clutch quarterback and rattled quarterback. They were both equally worthless because EA gimped everybody for playing on the road.
I'm all for attempts to capture the emotional state of players, but they need to (a) make it subtle and (b) provide an option to turn it off.
IMHO, the best video game music out there is Metroid Metal. Of course, it's all a matter of taste.
I downloaded all of OCRemix's archives through their BitTorrent link and sampled about 20 seconds of every one. I wound up keeping only about 200 total (and I'm still filtering down to about 150 of those). It's just worth noting to anyone who is getting interested in gaming remixes that there is a lot of crap out there. However, some of them are *really* good (see above link, "Kraid's Theme" rocks!).
Another good one is Project Majestic, although they sell their CDs rather than provide them for free.
Everyone on Slashdot seems to be giving this kid a hard time for trying to get a better job. Many of us had crappy jobs when we were younger and think that it is some rite of passage. None of us liked them but did them because our parents said it was a character-building experience. However, I think that getting one of these jobs is essential for every smart kid to have because they teach you how to deal with people less intelligent than you.
Most smart people I know have a special knack for insulting the people around them when someone asks a dumb question. Similarly, they frequently have a superiority complex over the vast population of "normals" or whatever the heck they're calling them today. The fact is that most intelligent people don't understand how to act or speak around less intelligent people. This is a subtle skill that will get you far in life. I learned it working at a hardware store in Vicksburg, MS. Not exactly the peak of human civilization.
You will never live in a world of hyper-intelligent people. You will always need that guy in purchasing who watches sports obsessively. You will need techs with associate degrees to build samples. You will even need managers who never seem to get it. Learn this skill early, so you don't piss off any of these important people in your attempts to learn it later.
One interesting thing about the Hitachi is that it has dynamic RPM (DRPM) scaling, so it will slow down to prevent overheating. This is useful because it prevents the drive from exceeding its thermal envelope. Other drives must stop processing when they reach their maximum rated temperature to prevent data corruption and mechanical failure. Granted, "stop processing" means several milliseconds of pause, but would you rather run really fast in bursts or just run continuously? Another neat feature is that DRPM will allow power management without completely shutting down the drive, providing good quality-of-service without wasting power. Considering that data centers spend a great deal of money on powering disk arrays and cooling them sufficiently, this could really take off in the server market. See Gurumurthi et al. for details.
In a teaching training seminar, I was asked what was most important as a teacher. The response: "To crush your students, to see their grades driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their parents." Absolutely no one got it. Talk about awkward...:)
Finally... someone who agrees with me. Call me crazy, but I don't like sharing my gaming experience. I can take it as seriously or as retarded as I want. I can pause at my leisure (becoming more important as real-life responsibility kicks in) or take my time lining up that beautiful headshot on a guard (as opposed to everyone rushing in the room shooting everything). It's just a more relaxing experience.:)
It encourages raiding and confrontations and risk, and pretty much adds to the enjoyment of the game knowing that attempting something difficult or even stupid won't set you back.
Playing devil's advocate here. What you are saying is that the sense of danger causes players to think twice before doing something stupid. How do we think this could apply to malicious behavior, such as griefing? The time barrier for reaching a level to annoy players effectively would make it prohibitive. I can see the 13 year old now. "Yeah, I got killed for being a tool. It's going to take me three days to do it again. I'm going to go play something else." Yes, it sucks for those who get whacked, but after the tools understand that they can get their kicks elsewhere, all that will be left will be the people who take it seriously, which should make the game an overall more satisfying experience (until death, of course). I seriously doubt that anyone would ever make it to a level where they became a serious threat if they acted like an asshole, so griefers become mobs with a really good AI.:)
Yes, this sucks as a business model because there aren't enough hardcore gamers to pay developers, but it should remove a lot of the hassle of playing MMORPGs. I also totally agree with you that respawning should be relatively painless. However, I eventually stopped playing Anarchy Online simply because I lost the patience to deal with a bunch of morons on a team. (Tank sees room full of high level mobs. Tank runs into room before party is ready. Tank gets raped. Party blames doc for tank's stupidity. Repeat as often as possible.)
You don't need the players' or teams' names to make a football game. I remember some of the old ones calling their teams just "Denver" and "Chicago," with modified logos and player names spelled differently than the real ones.
...unless you're a sports fan. Around/., many people need to be reminded that being a nerdy gamer and a sports fan are not mutually exclusive. I'm probably not going to pick up NCAA 2006 because 2005 was a step backwards, but I've got 1998, 2000, 2002 - 2005. Why? I'm an insane Arkansas Razorback fan. I don't want quarterback John Smith with some made-up statistics. I want Matt Jones as my quarterback and a 40 of 4.41s. I want everyone else from the starters to the walk-on kid that won't ever get a chance. Similarly, rabid USC fans everywhere are going to want Tom Malone as their punter and Texas fans want a Bob Stoops look-alike roaming the sidelines on the off chance that the Longhorns don't get gang-raped by Oklahoma (again).
I understand that this is less important or completely unimportant to some people. Personally, I could care less what any of EA's other games do. However, when I play my college football games, I expect it to be just like my experience at Arkansas from the fight song to calling the hogs to the huge SmartVision scoreboard that you can see from 5 miles away. I don't want to have to enter statistics for a 70 player roster (names I can tolerate) so I can have a team that plays like the Razorbacks. If it doesn't feel like a college football game or if I'm not playing with my team, they can take it elsewhere because I'm not paying for it.
I don't remember them being good before 92 either.
They weren't. NCAA Football has been the only EA game that I have ever liked, but even it is starting to spiral down the toilet by "fixing" things that weren't broken to begin with. My personal favorite is how they fixed pass defense by making it impossible to catch a pass. (Great work, fellas!)
Similar experience. We were playing GTA3 in a dorm room when one of the girls we knew came by. This girl was in Chi Alpha (Christian "Fraternity") and very active in youth ministry. She was appalled that we were driving on the sidewalks (and over people), running from the cops with a 4 star wanted level. Then we told her to play it for five minutes. Twenty minutes later, we had to pry the controller from her fingers because she was enjoying it so much. We couldn't get her off the sidewalks.:) She didn't play it after that because she felt guilty, but she could understand why people would play it. It's just fun.
What those who scapegoat video games (and movies, music, etc.) fail to understand is that the game is a safe and healthy way to release your aggressive urges without having to hurt real people.
I agree 100%. Nothing better to get over being picked on all day in high school and going home to play multiplayer Quake.:)...but then again, I could always tell fantasy from reality as a kid. As an adult gamer, sometimes you've just have to take your workday frustration out on a computer game by beating a digitized hooker with a double-ended dildo.
I guess you could say I was crazy, but maybe I'm missing something here. What does this offer that other WMs don't offer?
I was working on some power management tweaks the other day for my laptop and discovered that KDE was producing dirty pages like crazy. These would get written back by the pdflush threads in the kernel every 15 seconds or so. The short version of this story is that the disk was never idle long enough to timeout. I switched to Blackbox and it stopped. While I prefer KDE, I use Blackbox while I'm travelling.
Now, this is the kind of thinking and research development that I would expect from HP!
The idea of turning off unused sections of the screen was proposed by Flinn et al. in 1999. They recommended that adaptivity be implemented at the window manager level with hardware support to actually change the screen intensity. Among other ideas, they suggested changing the window managers to "snap to borders," to prevent applications from being in multiple different lightable blocks. A similar idea was implemented by Chang et al. over the course of the past few years. They implemented a system that adaptively changes the backlighting of LCDs based upon the statistical properties of displayed videos. I saw their product at a conference in August (supposedly their third version), and it was pretty sweet. They had made a little ASIC that would perform all sorts of computations on the frames and display the videos at the full frame rate. You couldn't really tell that the intensity was changing, either. The first two versions were purely software, so I've heard. Not too bad from an academic group.
Yes, HP's *development* is great. If the article is accurate, they seem to have fine-grained control over the whole screen. Chang et al. have the adaptivity right but lack the LCD development to get more than full-screen control. There's absolutely no way that an academic group can compete with the development power of a private company. I'm really glad to see that HP has gotten on the bandwagon because I spend most of my time working in a terminal and/or text editor.:) However, I'd just like to clarify that people have been proposing and implementing ideas like this for at least 6 years before we raise our hopes too much for HP's return.
Even though both caffeine and carbs provide a short-term energy boost, I find that avoiding them completely makes me much more alert and energetic overall.
I've given up caffeine completely for the past month. While I really feel it first thing in the morning (first 30 minutes), I would agree that it makes me feel much better throughout the day. I'm less jittery at my desk, and my grades have been my highest in two years. Whoever would have thought the key to grad school would be giving up caffeine?:)
If a student actually needs one of those freshmen courses then they have no business being in college.
I call bullshit. I'm from Mississippi and went to a public high school. Due to attending high school in the state with the worst educational system in the country, I had not dealt with many of the topics in calculus, physics, or chemistry, despite taking every AP course I could take in HS. By the time I got out of my undergrad, I had graduated as the #1 student in the College of Engineering and moved on to a direct Ph.D. program at a top 10 university. I'm doing very well here, too.
Freshman year is meant to provide everyone with a common base from which to work. Deficiencies at this level say nothing about a person's intellectual potential. Although, one might argue that your post provides some insight into your own.
I'd like to see a decline in the high priced rental stores like Blockbuster, and a move to lower priced store with good selection.
Blockbuster actually ran a test marketing campaign in my area (Lafayette, IN) where they allowed one night rentals for $2.00 on new releases and $1.00 on older movies. My wife and I were renting movies all the time because we always watch the movie the first night. Basically, it was like they dropped the price by half. When I went in after Christmas (after the no late fees campaign), they had upped the rental price to $3.50/$2.00. I spoke with the manager, who said that people in our area would rather avoid late fees than have cheap movies. Ironically, I haven't rented a movie from Blockbuster since then.
In 1999, I had a summer job at Blockbuster (and have been missing small chunks of my soul since). About one in three people have late fees on their account at any given time. We would call about 50 people a day who had multiple movies 3 days or more overdue. While I agree with you that Blockbuster's prices are outrageous, a large portion of their rental base are too busy (or lazy) to bring their movies back on time. The responsible people can go to the grocery store next door to rent videos.:)
We got DDR for Christmas, as well. I got two high density mats and DDR Extreme for $120 from the following link. They have both PS2 and XBox models. My wife and I absolutely love playing DDR. I turned on the workout mode and got a feel for how much I was really doing... about 500 calories a workout at Standard level.
Note: I have no affiliation with the above company. I was just very happy to find both the mats for less than one from the store. Take note that their shipping is somewhat excessive... about $15 for two mats and a game that fit in one box.
Well, we'll never get there if no one funds it. This is unfortunately the way our research environment works. Ideas like these seem wildly out of reach, so funding them seems like a waste of money. However, without funding, we will never get any closer to these goals. It's a chicken and egg type of problem.
Part of research on this grand of a scale is to discover the subproblems necessary to tackle the big problem. Each of these problems may involve a dozen subproblems. After a few years, you have fleshed out the high-level problem enough to solve it. Once again, this is the way research works.
Do I think they're going to create an AI with the ability to learn from text? Not really, but I'm glad that DARPA is willing to give them a push in the right direction.
What happens if the daemons and possessed marines kill the administrator? My computer would become possessed by the minions of hell, spewing spam and adware to all! MWHA HA HA HA!
Seriously, I'm going to have to check this out when I get home tonight.:) That's awesome!
Slashdot Mirror
I used Google Maps to locate the trench lines for the Siege of Vicksburg. You can see the streets that run along the trenches. Namely, Confederate Avenue and Union Avenue.
The US Corps of Engineers actually has a very good track record of preventing flood damage, preventing approximately $208 billion in damages between 1990 and 2000. Sometimes, these things just happen. The area north of Vicksburg flooded in 1997 due to heavy rains, even with the levees. Iowa had what seemed like 40 days and 40 nights of rain in 1993 and flooded everything. The levees are a necessity to keep these things from happening more often.
Here's an example of the levees in action in 1997: http://www.hq.usace.army.mil/cepa/pubs/oldpubs/apr 97/story2.htm
Think about the damage that waters 12 feet above flood stages would have caused without the levees. The Mississippi (state) delta had water creeping into people's houses in 1997, but they would have been completely underwater otherwise.
It's like Amdahl's Law. We build the levees to remove the common case (annual displacement of tens of thousands and the persistent destruction of property) and resign ourselves to the rare worst-case scenario (category 5 hurricane impacting New Orleans once in recorded history, displacing 1.3 million) because that is how we achieve maximum benefit. Like you said, we can't just abandon these cities.
By living in a disaster-prone area, be it New Orleans, Los Angeles, or Tokyo, you are making the decision that the risk is acceptable to you. However, here's guessing that they rebuild the levees to withstand a category 5. ...and for the sake of all those whose homes are teetering on the brink of destruction, here's hoping that the 3,000 lb. giant sandbags work.
I can't imagine that the CS scores would be that different.
I just think that people need to stop thinking about the sciences as being easy. The sciences are hard because we don't know all the answers. For that matter, we don't even know if we're asking the right questions. If you don't get into details, it is impossible to realize that.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/documen t.do?lndocid=MIGR-44226/
Unfortunately, these kinds of applications are really hard to come by for Win32 (the above is the only one that I know). You may find that some laptops have vendor-supplied programs like Maximiser, but I believe the problem you have is that such an application simply doesn't exist. Your best bet really is to use a 2.6 Linux kernel and the /proc/acpi facilities. I'm not entirely sure about the cycle count, but I'm pretty sure it will give you the rest of the info you need. Just fire up a Knoppix CD and go to work... that is, unless you want to write a program that interfaces with Windows ACPI. :)
P.S. If you're going to do any kind of power management after you get this data, I'd highly suggest a distro with kpowersave (like SuSE 9.1 or better), which has a libpowersave library for managing devices. But as a warning, the source code was somewhat difficult to locate online (don't ask me why).
If you mean slave away long hours on a single project, I fail to see how that skill is unique to Ph.Ds. Actually, the majority of the ones I know are lazy bums until the deadline comes. :)
I will say this, though. I'd be a little offended if I was subjected to nine consecutive technical quizzes (as from TFA) while carrying a Ph.D. I understand a few open-ended questions to see if a person can think creatively and prove they aren't an anti-social prick. Maybe a few technical questions with distinct solutions to check their background. However, I would get really tired, really quickly if they spent more time toying around than asking me about my research.
I'm all for attempts to capture the emotional state of players, but they need to (a) make it subtle and (b) provide an option to turn it off.
TWAIN = Thing Without An Interesting Name
I downloaded all of OCRemix's archives through their BitTorrent link and sampled about 20 seconds of every one. I wound up keeping only about 200 total (and I'm still filtering down to about 150 of those). It's just worth noting to anyone who is getting interested in gaming remixes that there is a lot of crap out there. However, some of them are *really* good (see above link, "Kraid's Theme" rocks!).
Another good one is Project Majestic, although they sell their CDs rather than provide them for free.
Most smart people I know have a special knack for insulting the people around them when someone asks a dumb question. Similarly, they frequently have a superiority complex over the vast population of "normals" or whatever the heck they're calling them today. The fact is that most intelligent people don't understand how to act or speak around less intelligent people. This is a subtle skill that will get you far in life. I learned it working at a hardware store in Vicksburg, MS. Not exactly the peak of human civilization.
You will never live in a world of hyper-intelligent people. You will always need that guy in purchasing who watches sports obsessively. You will need techs with associate degrees to build samples. You will even need managers who never seem to get it. Learn this skill early, so you don't piss off any of these important people in your attempts to learn it later.
One interesting thing about the Hitachi is that it has dynamic RPM (DRPM) scaling, so it will slow down to prevent overheating. This is useful because it prevents the drive from exceeding its thermal envelope. Other drives must stop processing when they reach their maximum rated temperature to prevent data corruption and mechanical failure. Granted, "stop processing" means several milliseconds of pause, but would you rather run really fast in bursts or just run continuously? Another neat feature is that DRPM will allow power management without completely shutting down the drive, providing good quality-of-service without wasting power. Considering that data centers spend a great deal of money on powering disk arrays and cooling them sufficiently, this could really take off in the server market. See Gurumurthi et al. for details.
In a teaching training seminar, I was asked what was most important as a teacher. The response: "To crush your students, to see their grades driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their parents." Absolutely no one got it. Talk about awkward... :)
Yes, this sucks as a business model because there aren't enough hardcore gamers to pay developers, but it should remove a lot of the hassle of playing MMORPGs. I also totally agree with you that respawning should be relatively painless. However, I eventually stopped playing Anarchy Online simply because I lost the patience to deal with a bunch of morons on a team. (Tank sees room full of high level mobs. Tank runs into room before party is ready. Tank gets raped. Party blames doc for tank's stupidity. Repeat as often as possible.)
I understand that this is less important or completely unimportant to some people. Personally, I could care less what any of EA's other games do. However, when I play my college football games, I expect it to be just like my experience at Arkansas from the fight song to calling the hogs to the huge SmartVision scoreboard that you can see from 5 miles away. I don't want to have to enter statistics for a 70 player roster (names I can tolerate) so I can have a team that plays like the Razorbacks. If it doesn't feel like a college football game or if I'm not playing with my team, they can take it elsewhere because I'm not paying for it.
They weren't. NCAA Football has been the only EA game that I have ever liked, but even it is starting to spiral down the toilet by "fixing" things that weren't broken to begin with. My personal favorite is how they fixed pass defense by making it impossible to catch a pass. (Great work, fellas!)Yes, HP's *development* is great. If the article is accurate, they seem to have fine-grained control over the whole screen. Chang et al. have the adaptivity right but lack the LCD development to get more than full-screen control. There's absolutely no way that an academic group can compete with the development power of a private company. I'm really glad to see that HP has gotten on the bandwagon because I spend most of my time working in a terminal and/or text editor. :) However, I'd just like to clarify that people have been proposing and implementing ideas like this for at least 6 years before we raise our hopes too much for HP's return.
Freshman year is meant to provide everyone with a common base from which to work. Deficiencies at this level say nothing about a person's intellectual potential. Although, one might argue that your post provides some insight into your own.
In 1999, I had a summer job at Blockbuster (and have been missing small chunks of my soul since). About one in three people have late fees on their account at any given time. We would call about 50 people a day who had multiple movies 3 days or more overdue. While I agree with you that Blockbuster's prices are outrageous, a large portion of their rental base are too busy (or lazy) to bring their movies back on time. The responsible people can go to the grocery store next door to rent videos. :)
http://www.hartsunlimited.com/dancepads.html
Note: I have no affiliation with the above company. I was just very happy to find both the mats for less than one from the store. Take note that their shipping is somewhat excessive... about $15 for two mats and a game that fit in one box.
Part of research on this grand of a scale is to discover the subproblems necessary to tackle the big problem. Each of these problems may involve a dozen subproblems. After a few years, you have fleshed out the high-level problem enough to solve it. Once again, this is the way research works.
Do I think they're going to create an AI with the ability to learn from text? Not really, but I'm glad that DARPA is willing to give them a push in the right direction.
Seriously, I'm going to have to check this out when I get home tonight. :) That's awesome!