[...]who has a wonderfull girlfriend without the skills, the sense of humor and all the other stuff that makes being a geek a good thing [...](IMO at least).
The abilty to knock the shit out of people is only a side effect of Karate (a nice one though). Learning Karate in a decent Dojo is one of the few ways to really Change Your Life (TM) to the positive.
The first point you already mentiond: Coordination. With coordination there comes elegance into your behavior. A thing that most geeks lack. Most of them (as Terry Pratchet put it) seem to be only consisting out of knees. That makes them just look jerky when they move and that's the main reason they get picked on.
Second point: You get into a certain stage of mind where you stop taking stuff too seriously. Be it the bully approaching you or the hot chick asking you to help with her physics homework. In neither of these situations you will get nervous anymore.
Third point: You develope a sense of aesthetics that will help you to understand that you look dorky when you hair isn't combed or your trousers are to short.
These points in combination with alot of other ones that are to subtile to explain turned me from a relly geeky geek into a normal nice guy who has a wonderfull girlfriend without the skills, the sense of humor and all the other stuff that makes being a geek a good thing (IMO at least). Of course all this takes a few years and you will discover the merits only piece by piece but you will.
OTOH, other than disk controller caches (?), what kind of embedded systems need more than 4GB online simultaneously ?
Some CAD Programms used in Mechanical Engineering (CATIA V5 for example) could use that much.
Loading a whole car engine into one of these Programms will exceed 4 GB pretty quickly.
I think you are uninformed. Delphi 8 is NO LONGER wrapping the arcane win32 API, it will be wrapping.NET, which itself is very VCL like, so why bother?
And for non-.NET platforms they still got the CLX, which is a wrapper around QT (including a licence from Trolltech for every Kylix developer).
The windows version of UT2003 uses DirectX too. To port it to Linux they only had to rewrite the renderer to use OpenGL, which isn't that much of a hard task (according to the UT2003 Readme).
So, technically it there is no reason not to expect a linux version for HL2. The question is if it would pay out for them to port it.
Borland Delphi. Creating GUI Applications with it is as easy as with VB, the integration with that whole Windows stuff (ActiveX, OLE,...) is pretty good, you can write real Applications with to and everything (besides the Windows stuff of course) is easily portable to Linux.
On the other hand, the commercial distributions are pretty expensive. Something about 1500 Euro for the Professional edition.
The so called "Open" Edition is for free, but you may only write GPLed software with it.
Percolation is perhaps the worst method you can use to brew coffee. Surprisingly, the simplest and cheapest methods are best: spoon the grounds into a container, add boiling water, let brew for x minutes, then filter or just pour the coffee into a cup. Very similar to a french press.
Right. And you shouldn't be to cheap. Go and and get some good italian coffee. You'll notice the difference and never want to drink something else. Personally I prefer Segafredo. Okay, here in Germany it costs about 20 Euro per kg and it's pretty hard to find stores selling it, but it's well worth it. Tastes simply great!
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[...]who has a wonderfull girlfriend without the skills, the sense of humor and all the other stuff that makes being a geek a good thing [...](IMO at least).
Whithout loosing the skills, damnit!
The abilty to knock the shit out of people is only a side effect of Karate (a nice one though).
Learning Karate in a decent Dojo is one of the few ways to really Change Your Life (TM) to the positive.
The first point you already mentiond: Coordination. With coordination there comes elegance into your behavior. A thing that most geeks lack. Most of them (as Terry Pratchet put it) seem to be only consisting out of knees. That makes them just look jerky when they move and that's the main reason they get picked on.
Second point:
You get into a certain stage of mind where you stop taking stuff too seriously. Be it the bully approaching you or the hot chick asking you to help with her physics homework.
In neither of these situations you will get nervous anymore.
Third point:
You develope a sense of aesthetics that will help you to understand that you look dorky when you hair isn't combed or your trousers are to short.
These points in combination with alot of other ones that are to subtile to explain turned me from a relly geeky geek into a normal nice guy who has a wonderfull girlfriend without the skills, the sense of humor and all the other stuff that makes being a geek a good thing (IMO at least).
Of course all this takes a few years and you will discover the merits only piece by piece but you will.
OTOH, other than disk controller caches (?), what kind of embedded systems need more than 4GB online simultaneously ?
Some CAD Programms used in Mechanical Engineering (CATIA V5 for example) could use that much. Loading a whole car engine into one of these Programms will exceed 4 GB pretty quickly.
I think you are uninformed. Delphi 8 is NO LONGER wrapping the arcane win32 API, it will be wrapping .NET, which itself is very VCL like, so why bother?
And for non-.NET platforms they still got the CLX, which is a wrapper around QT (including a licence from Trolltech for every Kylix developer).
I'm debugging an MFC App at the moment (well, besides reading Slashdot), and that comment actually made me spit Coke over my keyboard.
Hilarious...
The windows version of UT2003 uses DirectX too. To port it to Linux they only had to rewrite the renderer to use OpenGL, which isn't that much of a hard task (according to the UT2003 Readme).
So, technically it there is no reason not to expect a linux version for HL2. The question is if it would pay out for them to port it.
Borland Delphi. Creating GUI Applications with it is as easy as with VB, the integration with that whole Windows stuff (ActiveX, OLE, ...) is pretty good, you can write real Applications with to and everything (besides the Windows stuff of course) is easily portable to Linux.
On the other hand, the commercial distributions are pretty expensive. Something about 1500 Euro for the Professional edition.
The so called "Open" Edition is for free, but you may only write GPLed software with it.
Percolation is perhaps the worst method you can use to brew coffee. Surprisingly, the simplest and cheapest methods are best: spoon the grounds into a container, add boiling water, let brew for x minutes, then filter or just pour the coffee into a cup. Very similar to a french press.
Right. And you shouldn't be to cheap. Go and and get some good italian coffee. You'll notice the difference and never want to drink something else.
Personally I prefer Segafredo. Okay, here in Germany it costs about 20 Euro per kg and it's pretty hard to find stores selling it, but it's well worth it.
Tastes simply great!