Engineers have absolutely nothing to do with IT workers and programmers. We're talking professionals vs. people straight out of high school, and it's not even close to the same field, except for maybe computer engineers.
It's not like us mechanical engineers had a sudden influx of phonies and money-grubbers in the dot com bubble.
You'd have to have one sweet, outrageously expensive camera setup to even approach the I/O limits of a single hard drive when editing your video. MiniDV and DVCAM are only around 3MB/sec.
"Doom started that plot years before Half-Life"? Half-Life doesn't share a plot with Doom, but Doom III does. Do you know what a plot is? It's also a member of an unorignal genre - that is to say, there are many, many other games in the same shoot-the-aliens-to-pieces-from-first-person-persp ective group. It hardly matters that Doom did it before Quake (what does Quake have to do with this?). It's like Doom II, but with prettier graphics and sound. No plot innovation. No interesting take on FPSes. It's a formulaic as you could get - it's as if they're using it as a vehicle to sell engine licenses.
Just because you don't like my opinion doesn't make me a troll, that's just a nasty word to pull out when you've got nothing good to argue with in rebuttal.
I'd like to know how a game that requires a whole new (expensive) generation of hardware to live up to its graphical promise is going to somehow draw in a large group of new people into gaming. Let's go over Doom 3's deficiencies:
An unoriginal plot
An unoriginal genre
Did id even bother hiring writers?
High hardware requirements
Sure, you can play on lower-end hardware at 640x480, but then what's the point? There's a whole generation of games coming out right now (I can't possibly imagine Half-Life 2 being less substantive) that offer the same kind of visuals with a much more substantive game to go along with them. Why bother? I guess you could add it to your benchmark suite to show people how paying $600 for a graphics card really was worth it, but then again, you can get 3DMark as a free download. Why?
Most of the features you just listed are available in Final Cut Pro, at least the last version I used (3). I don't know how many choices you have in a seperate audio editor, but the version of FCP I worked with came bundled with its own third-party editor (whose name I now forget) which integrated just fine with the FCP environment (i.e. you ctrl-click the audio clip you want to edit and select "Edit in external editor" or something and it automatically moves it into the third-party editor, then reloads the file automatically when you're done editing it).
I ride a Trek mountain bike with touring tires and straight bars and find my hands going numb during and after long rides - it just isn't easy to use that many different positions with your hands on straight bars.
You need much more than GPS to guide a missle - GPS doesn't update nearly fast enough to serve as a guidance system. You'd need much custom-designed instrumentation in order to feed the guidance system accurate information at a fast enough rate to make course corrections and otherwise keep the thing from plummeting into the ground far from its target.
But this is all academic, because this guy is clearly a screwball. He won't be doing anything significant anytime soon.
Let's incorporate Bayesian filtering into MySQL. The first person to give me the best 5 ideas for using Bayesian filtering in MySQL will get 2 Gmail accounts.
This guy is a computer hardware engineer. Anyone who thinks he could design and construct anything resembling a militarily-viable cruise missle by himself is either way out of their depth or just plain dumb.
Seeing as he hasn't actually constructed anything, but rather just released vague plans on the internet, I think that rather bolsters my case that this guy is just another net.kook.
While you ignore the very important distinction that what the Wrights did had never been done before. Burt Rutan poorly re-inventing the wheel so a couple of libertarians could prove some kind of point about the "free market" when everybody else has been going into orbit and coming back for years is not even close to the significance of what the Wrights did.
You know what really irritates me these days is the sheer pomposity of the name "SpaceShip One". Hello? It's not a spaceship. It's an airplane. They did not even get close to entering orbit. They have done nothing to solve the re-entry problem. It's an (ugly-looking) airplane with a rocket strapped to the back that can't even take off on its own power.
So why is Burt Rutan suddenly the go-to guy for all things space-related - what's he going to do, drop payloads off in the high atmosphere and just "pretend" he's sent them to orbit as they plummet into the ground?
The way I see it, these solutions that encrypt the user's email in the client will never work, because they are at too high a layer on the network layering model. For email encryption to be successful, it will take an implementation of a secure protocol on a lower level. SMTP as it stands now is a horribly outdated protocol which was designed in a time when the internet was a safer, closer-knit community than the sort of digital Wild West it's turned into today.
The solution is to replace SMTP. This will be neither easy nor quick, but it is the best way to solve all the problems in a manner that people won't mind using.
The technologies for encrypting email that have been offered up, most notably PGP, require too much learning and intervention on the part of the user while offering far too few tangible benefits ("Why encrypt my email? I have nothing to hide!") to make it worth the effort.
I'm speaking here about an average user, rather than the tech-saavy crowd that populates Slashdot.
Hopefully, if the Supreme Court doesn't overturn this decision, then at least people will get outraged enough that they will write to their lawmakers to quickly remedy this problem. It's not just Slashbots that worry about privacy in email, this is a clear enough danger that I'm sure the non-IT public would be shocked if they heard about what was going on.
And to those who think encrypting your email is the answer - it's not. The email sent to you can still be read, and many sites like Amazon, which is mentioned in the article, send automated emails to whatever address you provide them, making your communications easy pickings for unscrupulous ISPs.
Of course, on the other hand, I'm sure some people here won't be surprised, and will in fact welcome such intrusion into their email, as evidenced by the enthusiasm here and elsewhere in geek circles for Google's Gmail service, which at least as intrusive and does the exact same thing with a user's emails (i.e. reads them for the purposes of marketing other products they think the user would be interested in). I'm still not sure what causes this cognitive disconnect in the technical community, but it is both puzzling and worrisome.
Oh, I agree, I have a 19" monitor and it is just about perfect for me, size-wise. However, there's a hell of a difference between a 23"(!!) LCD and a 17" one. Frankly, I'm jealous:-)
What do you mean, "Isn't twice as good in pixels"? I've never seen a "good in pixels" rating on a monitor before (except maybe one that a CompUSA salesman told me about, but that's another story). However, I do know that the Viewsonic is a much higher resolution screen than the Apple 30" display. That kind of resolution on a 22" display is effectively photo-equivalent until you have your nose pressed up against the screen.
That raises another interesting question, then - isn't this display at or past the limit of resolution high enough for the human eye? The percieved aliasing on any screen is proportionate to how far away you are viewing it from. I've already seen displays with a lower resolution than this, and they look flawless from a little less than 2 feet away. Do the people who use these displays prefer to get their face really close to the screen and squint instead of just enlarging the image?
Slashdot Mirror
How could another season of the same guy winning over and over again possibly be interesting?
Absolute fucking bottom of the gene pool.
I've never met a Physics major who's been in a threesome either.
It's not like us mechanical engineers had a sudden influx of phonies and money-grubbers in the dot com bubble.
You'd have to have one sweet, outrageously expensive camera setup to even approach the I/O limits of a single hard drive when editing your video. MiniDV and DVCAM are only around 3MB/sec.
It's only a matter of time before someone steals their confidential list of security bugs and cashes in big time.
Just because you don't like my opinion doesn't make me a troll, that's just a nasty word to pull out when you've got nothing good to argue with in rebuttal.
- An unoriginal plot
- An unoriginal genre
- Did id even bother hiring writers?
- High hardware requirements
Sure, you can play on lower-end hardware at 640x480, but then what's the point? There's a whole generation of games coming out right now (I can't possibly imagine Half-Life 2 being less substantive) that offer the same kind of visuals with a much more substantive game to go along with them. Why bother? I guess you could add it to your benchmark suite to show people how paying $600 for a graphics card really was worth it, but then again, you can get 3DMark as a free download. Why?Most of the features you just listed are available in Final Cut Pro, at least the last version I used (3). I don't know how many choices you have in a seperate audio editor, but the version of FCP I worked with came bundled with its own third-party editor (whose name I now forget) which integrated just fine with the FCP environment (i.e. you ctrl-click the audio clip you want to edit and select "Edit in external editor" or something and it automatically moves it into the third-party editor, then reloads the file automatically when you're done editing it).
That's what the BOINC project is all about.
Sure you can. Didn't you watch Lance in the Tour last year? At 50 mph, no less.
I ride a Trek mountain bike with touring tires and straight bars and find my hands going numb during and after long rides - it just isn't easy to use that many different positions with your hands on straight bars.
But this is all academic, because this guy is clearly a screwball. He won't be doing anything significant anytime soon.
Let's incorporate Bayesian filtering into MySQL. The first person to give me the best 5 ideas for using Bayesian filtering in MySQL will get 2 Gmail accounts.
Seeing as he hasn't actually constructed anything, but rather just released vague plans on the internet, I think that rather bolsters my case that this guy is just another net.kook.
I'm not deriding it for what it wasn't designed to do, per se, but rather the people who seem to think it does things that it wasn't designed to do.
While you ignore the very important distinction that what the Wrights did had never been done before. Burt Rutan poorly re-inventing the wheel so a couple of libertarians could prove some kind of point about the "free market" when everybody else has been going into orbit and coming back for years is not even close to the significance of what the Wrights did.
The thing did not enter orbit. HTH. HAND.
So why is Burt Rutan suddenly the go-to guy for all things space-related - what's he going to do, drop payloads off in the high atmosphere and just "pretend" he's sent them to orbit as they plummet into the ground?
The solution is to replace SMTP. This will be neither easy nor quick, but it is the best way to solve all the problems in a manner that people won't mind using.
I'm speaking here about an average user, rather than the tech-saavy crowd that populates Slashdot.
And to those who think encrypting your email is the answer - it's not. The email sent to you can still be read, and many sites like Amazon, which is mentioned in the article, send automated emails to whatever address you provide them, making your communications easy pickings for unscrupulous ISPs.
Of course, on the other hand, I'm sure some people here won't be surprised, and will in fact welcome such intrusion into their email, as evidenced by the enthusiasm here and elsewhere in geek circles for Google's Gmail service, which at least as intrusive and does the exact same thing with a user's emails (i.e. reads them for the purposes of marketing other products they think the user would be interested in). I'm still not sure what causes this cognitive disconnect in the technical community, but it is both puzzling and worrisome.
Oh, I agree, I have a 19" monitor and it is just about perfect for me, size-wise. However, there's a hell of a difference between a 23"(!!) LCD and a 17" one. Frankly, I'm jealous :-)
What do you mean, "Isn't twice as good in pixels"? I've never seen a "good in pixels" rating on a monitor before (except maybe one that a CompUSA salesman told me about, but that's another story). However, I do know that the Viewsonic is a much higher resolution screen than the Apple 30" display. That kind of resolution on a 22" display is effectively photo-equivalent until you have your nose pressed up against the screen.
That raises another interesting question, then - isn't this display at or past the limit of resolution high enough for the human eye? The percieved aliasing on any screen is proportionate to how far away you are viewing it from. I've already seen displays with a lower resolution than this, and they look flawless from a little less than 2 feet away. Do the people who use these displays prefer to get their face really close to the screen and squint instead of just enlarging the image?