I find it simply amazing that most of you haven't even touched on this. One guy did who stated that just because the user doesn't know computing doesn't mean he's stupid. However, the majority of you do tend to throw crap at the IT people for not being understanding of the users' lack of skills.
I have been working in IT for over 7.5 years now and I can tell you this: It's not the users' lack of computer knowledge/skills that pisses us off. It's their laziness for not even TRYING to figure these things out. The vast majority of our problems are that users do not know how to user their computers. I currently support over 350 computers and 700 users. In this pool of users, there are very few (around 10 - 15) users who actually make a good solid effort to learn how to use their computers. When something goes "wrong" they instantly freak out and call IT to come to their offices to fix the problem. I don't have this documented so I will pull this number out of my ass. I am willing to bet that around 85% - 90% of my time is wasted on showing users how to user their computers.
Now I know some of you are going to bitch about the use of the word 'wasted' there, but it really is appropriate. Would I apply for a job as a chef of a 5 star hotel if I didn't know how to use an oven? If I couldn't make the thing cook food, would I bitch and moan that the oven doesn't work and call the repair guy in to fix it? Hell no! I would be fired. One of the major problems here is that more and more jobs today require people to use computers. When people apply for jobs in my department, they are asked if they know how to use a computer. Specifically, clerical staff are asked about MS Office and they even have it on their resumes that they are proficient with Office. I'm not kidding, the people who put these skills on their resumes ask me simple things like, "how do I save a file?" I literally had to draw a picture of a computer with a blow up box for the power button, just so one of our PhDs would know how to turn the computer on. I wasn't being sarcastic. He TOLD me to do this for him! These types of problems are NOT rare! Most of my users freak out when an error message pops up. When I ask them what it says, they said they didn't read it, they just clicked 'OK' and bad things started to happen. People need to have the common sense and lack of laziness to at least read error messages that pop up. The ones who do try to read it still end up geting freaked out before they finish and call us. Basic understanding of the language on your screen and a basic basic basic knowledge of computers is enough to understand most of the error and other messages that pop up. (Please, don't give me shit about cryptic messages. I am fully aware of them and hate them, but most messages are very easy to understand if you just read them.)
Getting past the issue of user laziness and onto the issue of user knowledge, there is a difference between computer users not knowing how to map an SMB share and people who don't know how to login or save a file. Face it, 30 years ago pen, paper, and type writers may have been the tops in office tools, but today, it's the computer. We should have some reasonable expectations for what you can and cannot do with a computer before you are hired into a job that requires its use. Consider the billions of dollars wasted each year in the mere time it takes IT personnel to teach users how to use the tools of their jobs. Until the k-12 system catches up and the graduating high-school seniors are expected to know how to use a computer as well as a pencil, we need to have some better policies surrounding the minimum level of computer proficiency for a job. If you apply for the job and claim to have that proficiency and it becomes found out later that you don't, instead of giving your IT guy more grief, give the employee who isn't qualified the axe.
I want it to be known that I am all about user education. I have been doing it for over 7 years. But their needs to be a limit. I'm n
You may want to contact the Air Force Academy. They were requiring that all students purchase a computer since at least the days of the 486. Back in the early 90s when I was still dreaming of going there, they were talking only about desktops. I'm sure they have evolved their computer requirements since then. You may want to check with the other military academies as well.
I really want to believe this. Neither the article nor the patent mention anything about being more than 100% efficient except . . . the article's summary. If the word 'barrier' wasn't in the summary I would agree with you completely. But what other 100% barrier is there? Increasing power output by 100% is no barrier at all. We've been doing it for millennia in all kinds of power sources. If you can convince me that the word "barrier" means something other than the 100% efficiency barrier we all love to hate, then I agree with you 100%
Part of the problem here is that when comparing a Linux OS to Windows, you have to recognize the fact that Windows comes bundled with a browser. It is part of the OS and you know that few users want a computer that cannot browse the web. So, to be fair, you have to compare competing OSes on like terms and this means including a web browser with linux-based operating systems.
Most distributions include Firefox in their installation. Yes, it's true, Firefox is not linux. But then if you start going down that path, we'll start to see people going to the extreme of saying, KDE is not Linux, glibc is not linux, linux is a kernel, etc... We have to draw the line somewhere. So, we include browsers in the comparisons. But, we can't include browsers like Konqueror because not everyone uses KDE. We have to use a browser that the majority of users actually use. On Windows, this is IE. On linux-based OSes, this is mozilla/firefox. It just needs to be stated as a caveat that Firefox security holes exist on both platforms as with any application that runs on both.
The net charge of the lunar surface is zero, relative to the moon. Relative to the Earth, it may be and probably is something different. The problem is that the net charge of the Earth being zero is only relative to the Earth. What if we compare the net charge of the Earth's surface to another planet's surface net charge? Will it be zero? Why or why not? Basically, a charge of 0V means there is no potential for eletrical charge to migrate from one location to another. If we put the Earth and the moon close enough to each other we would probably see a lightning bolt as the electrical difference settled the score so the voltage difference between the two bodies was zero. This would probably happen over and over again because there is a lot of activity under the Earth's surface and probably not so much under the moon's surface. That might cause the Earth's surface to keep recharging and shooting lightning at the moon.
Basically, I think it's safe to assume that building a colony on the moon would mean that on the moon, the moon's surface would have a net charge of zero relative to the electrical devices running on it. It would be an interesting question to ask if a space craft from Earth would have to go through a discharge zone before approaching a lunar colony or risk damaging the electronics of either one because it's net charge of zero relative to the Earth's surface would no be 0V on the moon's surface. I assume lightning rods on the moon would perform as well as they do here on Earth, though.
Interesting question and one that could spawn a nice little short story if one was so inclined.
I am an IT manager at a university where I don't even get a budget. I have to beg for money to replace the hard drive of my server when it fails! There will be no money for training for me.
However, I will say that I believe the training should be a good division between your time and your company's time. While you can say that the training will benefit your company, it will also benefit you. Should you receive all this training and then leave the company, you will have on your resume some extra qualifications, especially if you received certification. Since it will benefit your employer AND you, I think it should be cost shared.
However, how that cost is to be shared is up for debate. I go through periods of time where I work like a horse and other periods where I am a couch potato. When I am working hard, I find that I usually have time on the clock that isn't being used for anything. Maybe 30 to 60 minutes a day. During that time, I usually do training. In that case, the training IS being paid for by the employer. However you share the cost, I do personally believe that if you pursue certification, your employer should never pay for it because it is your certification, not your employer's.
All that said, I also agree (in accord with the above example of cost sharing) that any good employer expects to hire an employee that can learn and adapt to the changing IT environment. So, if you can come to an agreement with your employer for a certain amount of time on the clock for training, I think it should be a given that your employer EXPECTS you to be able to train yourself. Most IT professionals should find this reasonably easy. Either through the use of books or online resources. Most tasks you need to learn how to do have some sort of posted information that can be googled. If you choose hard copy, then you will be faced with a dilemma of who should pay for that as well. This to me is simple. If you will be keeping the books when you leave the job, you pay for them. If the employer will be keeping them, the employer should pay for them. Books are cheap enough that even though I have to beg for system hard drives funds, I can usually convince my employer that a few books here and there are absolutely necessary to performing my job.
I find it really odd that people have been bitching about some of Sid's responses about clones of his games. The big argument I have seen here is the same old OSS stuff we hear trying to rationalize moral stances. I wonder how many people here read the interview with an open mind. Sid just gave all OSS gamers and would-be developers the idea of a lifetime and I haven't seen anyone actually mention it yet because they're all too busy complaining about the clone comment.
Sid mentioned in the interview:
It's very difficult to convince publishers to invest millions of dollars in a new game idea...it's too risky.
This is the golden apple here! To all OSS game developers, if you want to contribute to the open source communities AND to the game industry in a meaningful way, develop games based on new game ideas. Be radical. Be innovative. Be crazy. You are in a position to beta test ideas that the game industry can never possibly afford to put themselves in. If you are an OSS game developer, instead of trying to make clones of games and risk legal action, why not take the road less traveled and develop new games based on ideas we have never seen before. Try contacting people like Sid and volunteering to develop these new game ideas. The gaming companies can certainly use an infusion of new genres and ideas and OSS could be the best test-bed for these ideas. For all who take the stance that the whole world should be OSS, this is also the way to do that. Develop your new game ideas as OSS games and be the first, the original. One of the reasons clones like FreeCiv are seen as half-assed (as I saw someone mention earlier) is because it isn't the first. If it were the first, it might be looked at as a better game or at least not half-assed. The original is almost always more likeable than the clones.
I'm normally not the type of guy that tries to find the good in everything, but it seems a lot of the OSS people are always trying to find the bad in everything. Instead of trying to find ways of accusing people of being "the man" and trying to stomp you for participating in OSS, take a look at the whole picture and you just might find some good stuff in there like this.
And, on a subject slightly differnt than the subject of this post indicates: Sid, thank you very much for your responses. I enjoyed reading the interview and am extremely envious of you. Back on my C64, I always dreamed of putting out the next big game but never had the balls to see it through. And you're right. It is very difficult to get into the gaming business today. I wish it weren't so because I would love to join the ranks of game developers from my garage/basement.
I don't believe the universities with poor professors or TAs are the problem. The problem is the K-12 school system. The problem is that the K-12 school systems in this nation are not preparing our students for college. College, at least in my little world, should be a place where a student goes to school on his own initiative. It is expensive, it is demanding, it is most importantly, self-taught. The universities in this nation should not get into the hand-holding business. They should basically say to the students, "You need a degree. We can give it to you. Make us give it to you."
If I attend a university expecting teachers to actually teach the material, I should be flogged. It needs to be the responsibility of the student to take the initiative to teach himself. Really, the university just needs to be there to set the pace and tell him what he needs to teach himself. Given a good solid book and a few faculty on stand-by for extraordinary questions, there is no reason that a student on the college level shouldn't be able to teach himself all the information needed to earn that degree.
But this is where the failure lies in the K-12 school systems. How many of our high-school graduates enter college with the expectation or even the ability to teach themselves? I have met less than I can count on one hand. And this is because our K-12 system is being geared towards getting as many kids through the system as possible as opposed to teaching these kids how to survive in the world that is Earth. Of course, some of this blame falls on the parents of these kids too. I guess I should rephrase this to be that the kids are not prepared for college because the parents and/or schools are not preparing them.
And, on a note slightly off to the side, some universities are doing this (making kids effectively teach themselves either by accident or design.) These universities need to keep it up. Because the students that come out of these programs will not only have learned the material, but have also shown that they can handle the task of teaching themselves, learning without instruction (or with minimal instruction) and are self-sufficient. These are traits that can be seen from graduating college seniors by employers. I have never actually heard of employers preferring graduates of a given college because they know the material well. They almost always like them for their ability to adapt to situations and get the job done well. This is the ability that should be taught in K-12 and perfected in college.
This is absolutely terrible!! I am myself going through college at a Big Ten university working on a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology and I see this as a major problem. In my degree program, I was required to take a C programming course for use in a microcontrollers class. Nothing wrong with that, but due to the politics involved, the CS department (NOT in the School of Technology) would not teach the students. However, the Computer Technology department (IN the School of Technology) was obligated to handle it since they teach "programming" to their own students. However, the C programming course was far below par. I had taken a CS course in C programming at a different school before transferring (but the credit didn't transfer) so I compared the two. There simply is no comparison. How far into the semester should an introductory C course introduce the concept of functions and how to use them? A week? Maybe two at the most? It was less than two weeks in the CS course. In the CPT course, it was 9 weeks. Ridiculous.
But it gets worse. Because of even more politics and an attempt to streamline the program, the C programming was shifted into the first 5 weeks of the EET microcontrollers class. Now, instead of a semester of poor instruction by Computer Technology professors, we have EET professors teaching C programming in just 5 weeks. It's no wonder nobody in the EET micro courses is comfortable just sitting down and coding! To most of them, it's a struggle for dear life to write the simplest of functions. I have witnessed this first hand and helped many of these kids. I feel terrible for them because it really isn't their fault they aren't capable of the level of programming required of them. These kids need at LEAST a full semester of CS level introductory C programming. A second semester dealing with data structures wouldn't hurt either!
Unless we can get an accrediting organization like ABET http://www.abet.org/ to require these non-CS degree programs to provide CS level introductory programming classes, we will continue to see this type of change. I really think these students need to see that programming as taught in other programs is not necessarily programming, but just an introduction to the concepts of what can be done with programming skills.
Now, the examples above are indicative of a single program at a single university and not of all non-CS programs in all universities. But my intuition says this is probably not a lone case. I think it is imperative that we make sure these kids understand that they need to evaluate the differences between the programming taught in various programs before dumping CS. You can always double major or go for the BS in CS and an AS in another field. The BS degree in CS will go very far actually. Don't let the hype lead you astray. The AS degree will allow you to break out later or even get into other fields from the start. You can even get a BS in CS and a masters or doctorate in another field. Don't disregard any option!
You know, I live in Lafayette, IN. I am friends with people who attend anime conventions like ACEN. I do use bittorrent to download anime. I look all over for anime shops to buy good japanese DVDs with subtitles OF THE EPISODES I HAVE ALREADY DOWNLOADED! I travel to Indianapolis regularly. In fact, for about a year, I went there at least once a week. I even recently went there to buy a vehicle. Yet, I have never heard of your store.
Surely being in the business you have to know that college and high-school kids are going to be your biggest market. Here I am at Purdue University, a very large Big Ten university, only 45 minutes away from Indy, and I have never seen an advertisement on any of our bulletin boards for your store. I don't make it to Bloomington very often, but it's not that far away from Indy either and I am willing to bet you advertised there as much as you did at Purdue.
Im not trying to insult you by what I said above, but I am actually a little upset. The day I find out about an anime store near me that may have a potentially good line-up of DVDs, I find that it's closing. For god's sake, advertise! Most kids I know around Purdue go to Chicago frequently for things like movies and concerts and shopping. Indy is a lot closer than Chicago and I know way too many people into anime around here. You missed your target audience.
I know one of the major arguments is that college kids have no money. Don't let that white lie discourage you from taking their money. They haave more than they know what to do with (most of them, anyway) and they WANT to spend it. I work full time, yet I am amazed at how often these kids can afford to go out drinking. I can't afford to drink that much and I don't have any major expenses (minus a car payment and rent.) Your audience consists of the two Big Ten universities flanking your city as well as the other universities nearby: Ball State, ISU. You need to reach out to them as if you are local to them because in the eyes of college kids, you are.
And hey, any chance you may stay open two more days? I get paid once a month and that happened today. I see your website hours are Mon - Sat 11-7. It's too late to make it there now and actually do any shopping in your store. But, I can leave straight from work tomorrow or even go down Saturday. I'll tell my anime friends (er, read "friends who like anime") and we'll get down their and buy shit.
I can't believe what I'm seeing here. The majority think this is a bad thing, it seems. I disagree.
I have a few Sun E450s in my shop and I am going to be moving them to gigabit ethernet soon. A gigabit ethernet card from Sun costs considerably more than this so it is an option as long as it will run on Sparc hardware with Solaris drivers. Sorry, but the Intel e1000 just isn't going to cut it here.
I'd like to see that article about 20 instructions (I assume these are ML instructions) handling an entire packet. This may be the case on CISC CPUs, but I just don't see it happening on RISC CPUs. I am not saying it's impossible, but I would definitely have to see that to believe it and I am genuinely interested in reading this article. Please let me know where I can find it.
I don't think some of you understand the difference between intelligent network chips and networkchips with a CPU core inside them. Take a look at Cisco's solutions. Their line is moving hastily towards ASICs. The idea here is that specialized hardware designed to perform a task will ALWAYS be faster at handling that task than a CPU running on the same clock. Cisco is proving this with Layer 3 switching vs routing. It's not clear what their solution is, but I'm willing to bet this NIC is an ASIC optimized for the purpose of handling TCP/IP traffic from an ethernet network. I have a hard time seeing how any CPU will be able to beat out an ASIC in this field today.
Also of note is memory and bus bandwidth. I have seen some comments about CPU usage and how it's negligible and what not. While I don't believe that either (I pay a lot for those cycles, I want to use as many for data processing as possible), I do believe that the CPU handling the TCP/IP stack takes a little more BUS bandwidth as well as memory bandwidth. If this is all handled on the card, both bandwidth usages will be reduced. Bus and memory bandwidth is already lagging way behind CPU speed as it is. It is my number one system performance limiter right now. The more I can eliminate it, the more productive I can be. Someone already mentioned large numbers of packets. This is a good argument as well. When dealing with large numbers of small packets, CPU usage on a CPU-based TCP/IP stack increases as opposed to a smaller number of larger packets. So in some cases, it depends on your network and it's configuration.
Also, consdier that maybe I do only get 10 more cycles per second from using this card. Is the card worth it? With CPU cycles at a premium and everyone here trying to purchase as many as possible and never a single idle CPU in any of my servers, I have to give a resounding YES! 10 cycles per second per CPU times the numebr of CPUs and seconds the NIC is in place is a LOT of cycles and most certainly worth $500 over the lifetime of a $30,000 machine. If they can prove it does what they claim on my hardware, count me in.
I think a lot of people are missing some info here. I have been watching posters giving the negative view of the world on slashdot for years. I'm seeing people say the opposite now. Even in this thread, an example of a guy who had a hard time getting a job with a long search took place a few years ago.
Keep an eye on the economy. Remember, it wasn't that long ago we had 9-11. Our economy took a plunge but is most definitely on the way back up. While those who have been talking about the difficulty of getting a job weren't wrong a couple years ago, their year(s) old experience isn't necessarily relevant to the market today.
Finding a good job is always a difficult thing to do, even in a good economy. But, you should always do your own research and come to your own conclusion about what you should and should not do. While slasdot is a good place to get some opinions, I would be looking in other areas for hard facts. Check out the stock market. Who's stocks are showing a long-term rising trend? Who's arent? Check out job postings, ask around about benefits. As long as there are computers, there will be work for programmers.
Also, I do agree with the majority here in that you should not be looking for a position too high on the food chain. Even with a masters, you are still going to be "entry-level" unless you have at least a year of full-time experience. By full time, I do not mean 40 hour weeks. Even two years of 20 hour weeks will be sufficient.
In short, use every resource available to you to find wether or not you should continue in school or find a job. Once that decision is made, again use every resource to find the job that you want. Just be realistic about your goals. If you aim too high, you will almost certainly be shot down. Aim too low and you will be seen as over-qualified and wont be hired either (oh he wants to use us as a stepping stone for a few months but we want someone to stay for a few years.)
My DVD player has problems from time to time with reading discs, almost always with dual-layer discs. I open the player and clean the read head with a cotton swab soaked in isopropyl rubbing alcohol. Works every time, but make sure you don't soak the swab too much or try playing a DVD before the alcohol has had time to evaporate or it might appear that it didn't work. This has worked every time for me except one time that required a second cleaning. I suspect I have these problems because I am a smoker.
Sorry if this is a redundant post. There are too many posts to read through so I just posted.
Actually, not trying to be an ass here, but if there really is a law, could you please point me to it? My university is using SSNs for a number of things and I have been (unsuccessfuly) trying to get this to stop. If I had law to point to, I might be able to start the wheels turning.
Not a problem on my 5-disk RAID. More than enough I/O throughput to burn a DVD and handle all the gaming I want while compiling gcc, glibc, and the kernel all at the same time. MMMM mmmmm. RAID!
So, when are we going to start seeing dual-core drives? You know, one 3.5" 120GB drive that is actually three 40BG drives RAIDed inside? Hell, include the RAID controller in the drive so you can just plug the drive into any old IDE/SCSI/SATA port. I hereby claim this as prior art to any patents files on this idea. Sue me.
- The 6510 had one less power pin than the 6502 - The 6510 required TWO clock signals at the same frequency offset from each other as input while the 6502 required only one and generated the offset clock signal on-chip. The 6510 did not. This means there is one less clock pin on the 6510. - The 6502 had a set overflow pin while the 6510 did not - The 6502 had 3 pins that were not connected, the 6510 used all 40 pins and was not pin compatible with the 6502 - The 6510 did not support the 'sync' pin which was worthless in the design of the Commodore 8-bit computers
In total this freed up 7 pins for the 6510. One was used as an Address Enable Control for implementation in multiprocessor systems to control memory sharing. While this was never done to my knowledge with multiple 6510s, this was used in conjunction with the VIC-II chip which accessed the same memory as the 6510 in the C64. The other 6 were used to implement peripheral I/O pins. These were essentailly just hardwired in-chip to addresse 0001 with directional control register for these pins mapped to 0001. Support circuitry connected to those pins could be controlled to do things. This circuitry was what handled the bank switching and datasette I/O you are all talking about. The 6510 chip didn't support these things on board. Basically, they had 6 pins doing nothing so they were made available to be used for whatever the support circuitry could do with 6 pins. This was nice because without doing this on chip, we would have had more complex circuitry on the PCB to map these hardware components to specific memory addresses. Excellent engineering as far as I'm concerned.
Point of Interest: The 6510 was capable of running at 2MHz. Had Commodore been able to make this 2MHz setup work, the C64 would have had twice the CPU power and may have been able to do some quite amazing things beyond the amazing things we all know it did at 1MHz. I presonally think it could have been possible to make the C64 work at 2MHz with it's other support circuitry. I would have liked to have seen that computer. (And that computer was NOT the C128 even though it ran the CPU at 2MHz.)
That's all nice and dandy, but maybe we should be comparing an entire Linux-based OS to Windows XP. Remember that Windows XP comes with a media player, wordpad, notepad, and many many other tools. So let's take the full Redhat Enterprise WS distro (since it's a pretty popular commercial distro) and track down all it's bugs and see if that average doesn't change. I don't think we should be comparing OS vs Kernel. It takes a lot more than a kernel to make my Linux machine go. Having said that, I would be very interested in a comparison of the Windows XP kernel to the Linux kernel.
That's because it's cheaper! Layer 3 swtiching uses ASICs that are much much cheaper to build and much more efficient than CPU-based routing. It's only when you get to extremely bandwidth intensive on very high-speed (read: gigabit or higher) networks that a modern generic x86 box running a 533FSB or so cannot handle the load. What this guy is going for is a cheaper solution that is robust and easy to maintain and that does meet his network's requirements. If that is a Commodore 64 running uIP, then so be it.
Yes, it does crash more. I have only installed Firefox 1.0 on a Fedora Core 3 machine. I thought it was just Fedora Core 3. I guess not. I haven't put it on another machine yet so I have no other info to go on.
You know, I have heard so many conspiracy theories about anti-virus companys. You know, the old capitalist world domination arguments like, "They write half the viruses out there and have the antidote waiting so you have to buy their product."
While I never really jump into those and at the same time never really discount them, the first thing I thought when I read this was, "What an efficient way to write better viruses." I'm not pointing fingers or trying to start rumors. Just sharing a thought . . . to keep you awake at night.
PC motherboards typically have 4 - 6 layers. That's pretty complicated. Think about routing all of the signal lines of the PCI (64-bit) bus and memory bus. If you have AGP nad PCI-X, add those in ther too. Think of all the signals going from your IDE ports and SCSI ports (if you have them) to your chipset. If you have an opteron, you have in the neighborhood of 940 pins. They all get connected. That's a lot of nets and a lot of routing!
And, it's a good thing to reduce board layers to a certain point because adding layers gets expensive! While it does complicate the process, the process of routing the board is a one time process and thus a one time cost. Once the board is routed and tested, it's off to manufacturing where the cost of extra layers is recurring. It does complicate the manufacturing process in that now you have to glue together more layers after routing them. This is why more layers get so expensive. Those layers have to line up. With nets getting as small as they do, there is almost no room for error in lining these layers up. Very difficult. The more layers you add, the more likely you are to have layers aligned improperly. Someone has to eat the cost of those boards that cannot be sold and it wont be the manufacturer.
This is interesting because I migrated my network from NT4 to 2K to XP and I have seen the reverse trend. NT4 seemed to BSOD quite regularly and I have seen reduced BSODs as we migrated o XP. I understand that they are not talking about BSODs only, but most of my machines seem to fail on BSODs more than anything else and that is pretty rare.
Hahahah!!! Well, I wasn't talking about UT or Quake or anything like that. I wasn't even talking about America's Army. Just the idea that a game could train a soldier. Hell, you could even put a feature in a game (this should be in every game) to not respawn until the mission is over. So, if you die, your team has to go on without you.
And, the military may want a soldier that will sharge straight in. D-Day is a good example of this. Not necessarily charging straight in, but the people that were the most desired and fit for the invasion were rookies. They hadn't experienced what the vetrans had experienced. A lot of vetrans at Normandy were too cautious because they had seen what bullets and shrapnel could do to a body. The rookies thought they were invincible and that was definitely a quality we wanted for that particular fight. So, maybe our troops should be trained on respawn FPS sometimes.
I'm not a chick. I am a dude. I am not a homosexual. I am straight. But I still think scars are sexy, and yes, I mean on a chick! I like my chicks sweet but mean!
. . . because all those games about teaching typing made me an effective killing machine. My fast fingers make pulling the trigger second nature. All those math games made it easier for me to keep track of ammo (if I shoot on full auto for 3 seconds, how many bullets will I use?) and those damn pattern matching games make my enemy's camouflage obvious to my eyes. I'm ready. Send me in to kill bad guys. I'm a fat, lazy, mouse wielding killing machine!
If only the Alpha-Betas had known about this, they would have just left those nerds alone.
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I find it simply amazing that most of you haven't even touched on this. One guy did who stated that just because the user doesn't know computing doesn't mean he's stupid. However, the majority of you do tend to throw crap at the IT people for not being understanding of the users' lack of skills.
I have been working in IT for over 7.5 years now and I can tell you this: It's not the users' lack of computer knowledge/skills that pisses us off. It's their laziness for not even TRYING to figure these things out. The vast majority of our problems are that users do not know how to user their computers. I currently support over 350 computers and 700 users. In this pool of users, there are very few (around 10 - 15) users who actually make a good solid effort to learn how to use their computers. When something goes "wrong" they instantly freak out and call IT to come to their offices to fix the problem. I don't have this documented so I will pull this number out of my ass. I am willing to bet that around 85% - 90% of my time is wasted on showing users how to user their computers.
Now I know some of you are going to bitch about the use of the word 'wasted' there, but it really is appropriate. Would I apply for a job as a chef of a 5 star hotel if I didn't know how to use an oven? If I couldn't make the thing cook food, would I bitch and moan that the oven doesn't work and call the repair guy in to fix it? Hell no! I would be fired. One of the major problems here is that more and more jobs today require people to use computers. When people apply for jobs in my department, they are asked if they know how to use a computer. Specifically, clerical staff are asked about MS Office and they even have it on their resumes that they are proficient with Office. I'm not kidding, the people who put these skills on their resumes ask me simple things like, "how do I save a file?" I literally had to draw a picture of a computer with a blow up box for the power button, just so one of our PhDs would know how to turn the computer on. I wasn't being sarcastic. He TOLD me to do this for him! These types of problems are NOT rare! Most of my users freak out when an error message pops up. When I ask them what it says, they said they didn't read it, they just clicked 'OK' and bad things started to happen. People need to have the common sense and lack of laziness to at least read error messages that pop up. The ones who do try to read it still end up geting freaked out before they finish and call us. Basic understanding of the language on your screen and a basic basic basic knowledge of computers is enough to understand most of the error and other messages that pop up. (Please, don't give me shit about cryptic messages. I am fully aware of them and hate them, but most messages are very easy to understand if you just read them.)
Getting past the issue of user laziness and onto the issue of user knowledge, there is a difference between computer users not knowing how to map an SMB share and people who don't know how to login or save a file. Face it, 30 years ago pen, paper, and type writers may have been the tops in office tools, but today, it's the computer. We should have some reasonable expectations for what you can and cannot do with a computer before you are hired into a job that requires its use. Consider the billions of dollars wasted each year in the mere time it takes IT personnel to teach users how to use the tools of their jobs. Until the k-12 system catches up and the graduating high-school seniors are expected to know how to use a computer as well as a pencil, we need to have some better policies surrounding the minimum level of computer proficiency for a job. If you apply for the job and claim to have that proficiency and it becomes found out later that you don't, instead of giving your IT guy more grief, give the employee who isn't qualified the axe.
I want it to be known that I am all about user education. I have been doing it for over 7 years. But their needs to be a limit. I'm n
You may want to contact the Air Force Academy. They were requiring that all students purchase a computer since at least the days of the 486. Back in the early 90s when I was still dreaming of going there, they were talking only about desktops. I'm sure they have evolved their computer requirements since then. You may want to check with the other military academies as well.
I really want to believe this. Neither the article nor the patent mention anything about being more than 100% efficient except . . . the article's summary. If the word 'barrier' wasn't in the summary I would agree with you completely. But what other 100% barrier is there? Increasing power output by 100% is no barrier at all. We've been doing it for millennia in all kinds of power sources. If you can convince me that the word "barrier" means something other than the 100% efficiency barrier we all love to hate, then I agree with you 100%
Make that: 101%
Part of the problem here is that when comparing a Linux OS to Windows, you have to recognize the fact that Windows comes bundled with a browser. It is part of the OS and you know that few users want a computer that cannot browse the web. So, to be fair, you have to compare competing OSes on like terms and this means including a web browser with linux-based operating systems.
Most distributions include Firefox in their installation. Yes, it's true, Firefox is not linux. But then if you start going down that path, we'll start to see people going to the extreme of saying, KDE is not Linux, glibc is not linux, linux is a kernel, etc... We have to draw the line somewhere. So, we include browsers in the comparisons. But, we can't include browsers like Konqueror because not everyone uses KDE. We have to use a browser that the majority of users actually use. On Windows, this is IE. On linux-based OSes, this is mozilla/firefox. It just needs to be stated as a caveat that Firefox security holes exist on both platforms as with any application that runs on both.
The net charge of the lunar surface is zero, relative to the moon. Relative to the Earth, it may be and probably is something different. The problem is that the net charge of the Earth being zero is only relative to the Earth. What if we compare the net charge of the Earth's surface to another planet's surface net charge? Will it be zero? Why or why not? Basically, a charge of 0V means there is no potential for eletrical charge to migrate from one location to another. If we put the Earth and the moon close enough to each other we would probably see a lightning bolt as the electrical difference settled the score so the voltage difference between the two bodies was zero. This would probably happen over and over again because there is a lot of activity under the Earth's surface and probably not so much under the moon's surface. That might cause the Earth's surface to keep recharging and shooting lightning at the moon.
Basically, I think it's safe to assume that building a colony on the moon would mean that on the moon, the moon's surface would have a net charge of zero relative to the electrical devices running on it. It would be an interesting question to ask if a space craft from Earth would have to go through a discharge zone before approaching a lunar colony or risk damaging the electronics of either one because it's net charge of zero relative to the Earth's surface would no be 0V on the moon's surface. I assume lightning rods on the moon would perform as well as they do here on Earth, though.
Interesting question and one that could spawn a nice little short story if one was so inclined.
I am an IT manager at a university where I don't even get a budget. I have to beg for money to replace the hard drive of my server when it fails! There will be no money for training for me.
However, I will say that I believe the training should be a good division between your time and your company's time. While you can say that the training will benefit your company, it will also benefit you. Should you receive all this training and then leave the company, you will have on your resume some extra qualifications, especially if you received certification. Since it will benefit your employer AND you, I think it should be cost shared.
However, how that cost is to be shared is up for debate. I go through periods of time where I work like a horse and other periods where I am a couch potato. When I am working hard, I find that I usually have time on the clock that isn't being used for anything. Maybe 30 to 60 minutes a day. During that time, I usually do training. In that case, the training IS being paid for by the employer. However you share the cost, I do personally believe that if you pursue certification, your employer should never pay for it because it is your certification, not your employer's.
All that said, I also agree (in accord with the above example of cost sharing) that any good employer expects to hire an employee that can learn and adapt to the changing IT environment. So, if you can come to an agreement with your employer for a certain amount of time on the clock for training, I think it should be a given that your employer EXPECTS you to be able to train yourself. Most IT professionals should find this reasonably easy. Either through the use of books or online resources. Most tasks you need to learn how to do have some sort of posted information that can be googled. If you choose hard copy, then you will be faced with a dilemma of who should pay for that as well. This to me is simple. If you will be keeping the books when you leave the job, you pay for them. If the employer will be keeping them, the employer should pay for them. Books are cheap enough that even though I have to beg for system hard drives funds, I can usually convince my employer that a few books here and there are absolutely necessary to performing my job.
I find it really odd that people have been bitching about some of Sid's responses about clones of his games. The big argument I have seen here is the same old OSS stuff we hear trying to rationalize moral stances. I wonder how many people here read the interview with an open mind. Sid just gave all OSS gamers and would-be developers the idea of a lifetime and I haven't seen anyone actually mention it yet because they're all too busy complaining about the clone comment.
Sid mentioned in the interview:
It's very difficult to convince publishers to invest millions of dollars in a new game idea...it's too risky.
This is the golden apple here! To all OSS game developers, if you want to contribute to the open source communities AND to the game industry in a meaningful way, develop games based on new game ideas. Be radical. Be innovative. Be crazy. You are in a position to beta test ideas that the game industry can never possibly afford to put themselves in. If you are an OSS game developer, instead of trying to make clones of games and risk legal action, why not take the road less traveled and develop new games based on ideas we have never seen before. Try contacting people like Sid and volunteering to develop these new game ideas. The gaming companies can certainly use an infusion of new genres and ideas and OSS could be the best test-bed for these ideas. For all who take the stance that the whole world should be OSS, this is also the way to do that. Develop your new game ideas as OSS games and be the first, the original. One of the reasons clones like FreeCiv are seen as half-assed (as I saw someone mention earlier) is because it isn't the first. If it were the first, it might be looked at as a better game or at least not half-assed. The original is almost always more likeable than the clones.
I'm normally not the type of guy that tries to find the good in everything, but it seems a lot of the OSS people are always trying to find the bad in everything. Instead of trying to find ways of accusing people of being "the man" and trying to stomp you for participating in OSS, take a look at the whole picture and you just might find some good stuff in there like this.
And, on a subject slightly differnt than the subject of this post indicates: Sid, thank you very much for your responses. I enjoyed reading the interview and am extremely envious of you. Back on my C64, I always dreamed of putting out the next big game but never had the balls to see it through. And you're right. It is very difficult to get into the gaming business today. I wish it weren't so because I would love to join the ranks of game developers from my garage/basement.
I don't believe the universities with poor professors or TAs are the problem. The problem is the K-12 school system. The problem is that the K-12 school systems in this nation are not preparing our students for college. College, at least in my little world, should be a place where a student goes to school on his own initiative. It is expensive, it is demanding, it is most importantly, self-taught. The universities in this nation should not get into the hand-holding business. They should basically say to the students, "You need a degree. We can give it to you. Make us give it to you."
If I attend a university expecting teachers to actually teach the material, I should be flogged. It needs to be the responsibility of the student to take the initiative to teach himself. Really, the university just needs to be there to set the pace and tell him what he needs to teach himself. Given a good solid book and a few faculty on stand-by for extraordinary questions, there is no reason that a student on the college level shouldn't be able to teach himself all the information needed to earn that degree.
But this is where the failure lies in the K-12 school systems. How many of our high-school graduates enter college with the expectation or even the ability to teach themselves? I have met less than I can count on one hand. And this is because our K-12 system is being geared towards getting as many kids through the system as possible as opposed to teaching these kids how to survive in the world that is Earth. Of course, some of this blame falls on the parents of these kids too. I guess I should rephrase this to be that the kids are not prepared for college because the parents and/or schools are not preparing them.
And, on a note slightly off to the side, some universities are doing this (making kids effectively teach themselves either by accident or design.) These universities need to keep it up. Because the students that come out of these programs will not only have learned the material, but have also shown that they can handle the task of teaching themselves, learning without instruction (or with minimal instruction) and are self-sufficient. These are traits that can be seen from graduating college seniors by employers. I have never actually heard of employers preferring graduates of a given college because they know the material well. They almost always like them for their ability to adapt to situations and get the job done well. This is the ability that should be taught in K-12 and perfected in college.
This is absolutely terrible!! I am myself going through college at a Big Ten university working on a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology and I see this as a major problem. In my degree program, I was required to take a C programming course for use in a microcontrollers class. Nothing wrong with that, but due to the politics involved, the CS department (NOT in the School of Technology) would not teach the students. However, the Computer Technology department (IN the School of Technology) was obligated to handle it since they teach "programming" to their own students. However, the C programming course was far below par. I had taken a CS course in C programming at a different school before transferring (but the credit didn't transfer) so I compared the two. There simply is no comparison. How far into the semester should an introductory C course introduce the concept of functions and how to use them? A week? Maybe two at the most? It was less than two weeks in the CS course. In the CPT course, it was 9 weeks. Ridiculous.
But it gets worse. Because of even more politics and an attempt to streamline the program, the C programming was shifted into the first 5 weeks of the EET microcontrollers class. Now, instead of a semester of poor instruction by Computer Technology professors, we have EET professors teaching C programming in just 5 weeks. It's no wonder nobody in the EET micro courses is comfortable just sitting down and coding! To most of them, it's a struggle for dear life to write the simplest of functions. I have witnessed this first hand and helped many of these kids. I feel terrible for them because it really isn't their fault they aren't capable of the level of programming required of them. These kids need at LEAST a full semester of CS level introductory C programming. A second semester dealing with data structures wouldn't hurt either!
Unless we can get an accrediting organization like ABET http://www.abet.org/ to require these non-CS degree programs to provide CS level introductory programming classes, we will continue to see this type of change. I really think these students need to see that programming as taught in other programs is not necessarily programming, but just an introduction to the concepts of what can be done with programming skills.
Now, the examples above are indicative of a single program at a single university and not of all non-CS programs in all universities. But my intuition says this is probably not a lone case. I think it is imperative that we make sure these kids understand that they need to evaluate the differences between the programming taught in various programs before dumping CS. You can always double major or go for the BS in CS and an AS in another field. The BS degree in CS will go very far actually. Don't let the hype lead you astray. The AS degree will allow you to break out later or even get into other fields from the start. You can even get a BS in CS and a masters or doctorate in another field. Don't disregard any option!
You know, I live in Lafayette, IN. I am friends with people who attend anime conventions like ACEN. I do use bittorrent to download anime. I look all over for anime shops to buy good japanese DVDs with subtitles OF THE EPISODES I HAVE ALREADY DOWNLOADED! I travel to Indianapolis regularly. In fact, for about a year, I went there at least once a week. I even recently went there to buy a vehicle. Yet, I have never heard of your store.
Surely being in the business you have to know that college and high-school kids are going to be your biggest market. Here I am at Purdue University, a very large Big Ten university, only 45 minutes away from Indy, and I have never seen an advertisement on any of our bulletin boards for your store. I don't make it to Bloomington very often, but it's not that far away from Indy either and I am willing to bet you advertised there as much as you did at Purdue.
Im not trying to insult you by what I said above, but I am actually a little upset. The day I find out about an anime store near me that may have a potentially good line-up of DVDs, I find that it's closing. For god's sake, advertise! Most kids I know around Purdue go to Chicago frequently for things like movies and concerts and shopping. Indy is a lot closer than Chicago and I know way too many people into anime around here. You missed your target audience.
I know one of the major arguments is that college kids have no money. Don't let that white lie discourage you from taking their money. They haave more than they know what to do with (most of them, anyway) and they WANT to spend it. I work full time, yet I am amazed at how often these kids can afford to go out drinking. I can't afford to drink that much and I don't have any major expenses (minus a car payment and rent.) Your audience consists of the two Big Ten universities flanking your city as well as the other universities nearby: Ball State, ISU. You need to reach out to them as if you are local to them because in the eyes of college kids, you are.
And hey, any chance you may stay open two more days? I get paid once a month and that happened today. I see your website hours are Mon - Sat 11-7. It's too late to make it there now and actually do any shopping in your store. But, I can leave straight from work tomorrow or even go down Saturday. I'll tell my anime friends (er, read "friends who like anime") and we'll get down their and buy shit.
I can't believe what I'm seeing here. The majority think this is a bad thing, it seems. I disagree.
I have a few Sun E450s in my shop and I am going to be moving them to gigabit ethernet soon. A gigabit ethernet card from Sun costs considerably more than this so it is an option as long as it will run on Sparc hardware with Solaris drivers. Sorry, but the Intel e1000 just isn't going to cut it here.
I'd like to see that article about 20 instructions (I assume these are ML instructions) handling an entire packet. This may be the case on CISC CPUs, but I just don't see it happening on RISC CPUs. I am not saying it's impossible, but I would definitely have to see that to believe it and I am genuinely interested in reading this article. Please let me know where I can find it.
I don't think some of you understand the difference between intelligent network chips and networkchips with a CPU core inside them. Take a look at Cisco's solutions. Their line is moving hastily towards ASICs. The idea here is that specialized hardware designed to perform a task will ALWAYS be faster at handling that task than a CPU running on the same clock. Cisco is proving this with Layer 3 switching vs routing. It's not clear what their solution is, but I'm willing to bet this NIC is an ASIC optimized for the purpose of handling TCP/IP traffic from an ethernet network. I have a hard time seeing how any CPU will be able to beat out an ASIC in this field today.
Also of note is memory and bus bandwidth. I have seen some comments about CPU usage and how it's negligible and what not. While I don't believe that either (I pay a lot for those cycles, I want to use as many for data processing as possible), I do believe that the CPU handling the TCP/IP stack takes a little more BUS bandwidth as well as memory bandwidth. If this is all handled on the card, both bandwidth usages will be reduced. Bus and memory bandwidth is already lagging way behind CPU speed as it is. It is my number one system performance limiter right now. The more I can eliminate it, the more productive I can be. Someone already mentioned large numbers of packets. This is a good argument as well. When dealing with large numbers of small packets, CPU usage on a CPU-based TCP/IP stack increases as opposed to a smaller number of larger packets. So in some cases, it depends on your network and it's configuration.
Also, consdier that maybe I do only get 10 more cycles per second from using this card. Is the card worth it? With CPU cycles at a premium and everyone here trying to purchase as many as possible and never a single idle CPU in any of my servers, I have to give a resounding YES! 10 cycles per second per CPU times the numebr of CPUs and seconds the NIC is in place is a LOT of cycles and most certainly worth $500 over the lifetime of a $30,000 machine. If they can prove it does what they claim on my hardware, count me in.
I think a lot of people are missing some info here. I have been watching posters giving the negative view of the world on slashdot for years. I'm seeing people say the opposite now. Even in this thread, an example of a guy who had a hard time getting a job with a long search took place a few years ago.
Keep an eye on the economy. Remember, it wasn't that long ago we had 9-11. Our economy took a plunge but is most definitely on the way back up. While those who have been talking about the difficulty of getting a job weren't wrong a couple years ago, their year(s) old experience isn't necessarily relevant to the market today.
Finding a good job is always a difficult thing to do, even in a good economy. But, you should always do your own research and come to your own conclusion about what you should and should not do. While slasdot is a good place to get some opinions, I would be looking in other areas for hard facts. Check out the stock market. Who's stocks are showing a long-term rising trend? Who's arent? Check out job postings, ask around about benefits. As long as there are computers, there will be work for programmers.
Also, I do agree with the majority here in that you should not be looking for a position too high on the food chain. Even with a masters, you are still going to be "entry-level" unless you have at least a year of full-time experience. By full time, I do not mean 40 hour weeks. Even two years of 20 hour weeks will be sufficient.
In short, use every resource available to you to find wether or not you should continue in school or find a job. Once that decision is made, again use every resource to find the job that you want. Just be realistic about your goals. If you aim too high, you will almost certainly be shot down. Aim too low and you will be seen as over-qualified and wont be hired either (oh he wants to use us as a stepping stone for a few months but we want someone to stay for a few years.)
Good luck!
My DVD player has problems from time to time with reading discs, almost always with dual-layer discs. I open the player and clean the read head with a cotton swab soaked in isopropyl rubbing alcohol. Works every time, but make sure you don't soak the swab too much or try playing a DVD before the alcohol has had time to evaporate or it might appear that it didn't work. This has worked every time for me except one time that required a second cleaning. I suspect I have these problems because I am a smoker.
Sorry if this is a redundant post. There are too many posts to read through so I just posted.
Actually, not trying to be an ass here, but if there really is a law, could you please point me to it? My university is using SSNs for a number of things and I have been (unsuccessfuly) trying to get this to stop. If I had law to point to, I might be able to start the wheels turning.
Not a problem on my 5-disk RAID. More than enough I/O throughput to burn a DVD and handle all the gaming I want while compiling gcc, glibc, and the kernel all at the same time. MMMM mmmmm. RAID!
So, when are we going to start seeing dual-core drives? You know, one 3.5" 120GB drive that is actually three 40BG drives RAIDed inside? Hell, include the RAID controller in the drive so you can just plug the drive into any old IDE/SCSI/SATA port. I hereby claim this as prior art to any patents files on this idea. Sue me.
- The 6510 had one less power pin than the 6502
- The 6510 required TWO clock signals at the same frequency offset from each other as input while the 6502 required only one and generated the offset clock signal on-chip. The 6510 did not. This means there is one less clock pin on the 6510.
- The 6502 had a set overflow pin while the 6510 did not
- The 6502 had 3 pins that were not connected, the 6510 used all 40 pins and was not pin compatible with the 6502
- The 6510 did not support the 'sync' pin which was worthless in the design of the Commodore 8-bit computers
In total this freed up 7 pins for the 6510. One was used as an Address Enable Control for implementation in multiprocessor systems to control memory sharing. While this was never done to my knowledge with multiple 6510s, this was used in conjunction with the VIC-II chip which accessed the same memory as the 6510 in the C64. The other 6 were used to implement peripheral I/O pins. These were essentailly just hardwired in-chip to addresse 0001 with directional control register for these pins mapped to 0001. Support circuitry connected to those pins could be controlled to do things. This circuitry was what handled the bank switching and datasette I/O you are all talking about. The 6510 chip didn't support these things on board. Basically, they had 6 pins doing nothing so they were made available to be used for whatever the support circuitry could do with 6 pins. This was nice because without doing this on chip, we would have had more complex circuitry on the PCB to map these hardware components to specific memory addresses. Excellent engineering as far as I'm concerned.
Point of Interest: The 6510 was capable of running at 2MHz. Had Commodore been able to make this 2MHz setup work, the C64 would have had twice the CPU power and may have been able to do some quite amazing things beyond the amazing things we all know it did at 1MHz. I presonally think it could have been possible to make the C64 work at 2MHz with it's other support circuitry. I would have liked to have seen that computer. (And that computer was NOT the C128 even though it ran the CPU at 2MHz.)
That's all nice and dandy, but maybe we should be comparing an entire Linux-based OS to Windows XP. Remember that Windows XP comes with a media player, wordpad, notepad, and many many other tools. So let's take the full Redhat Enterprise WS distro (since it's a pretty popular commercial distro) and track down all it's bugs and see if that average doesn't change. I don't think we should be comparing OS vs Kernel. It takes a lot more than a kernel to make my Linux machine go. Having said that, I would be very interested in a comparison of the Windows XP kernel to the Linux kernel.
That's because it's cheaper! Layer 3 swtiching uses ASICs that are much much cheaper to build and much more efficient than CPU-based routing. It's only when you get to extremely bandwidth intensive on very high-speed (read: gigabit or higher) networks that a modern generic x86 box running a 533FSB or so cannot handle the load. What this guy is going for is a cheaper solution that is robust and easy to maintain and that does meet his network's requirements. If that is a Commodore 64 running uIP, then so be it.
Yes, it does crash more. I have only installed Firefox 1.0 on a Fedora Core 3 machine. I thought it was just Fedora Core 3. I guess not. I haven't put it on another machine yet so I have no other info to go on.
You know, I have heard so many conspiracy theories about anti-virus companys. You know, the old capitalist world domination arguments like, "They write half the viruses out there and have the antidote waiting so you have to buy their product."
While I never really jump into those and at the same time never really discount them, the first thing I thought when I read this was, "What an efficient way to write better viruses." I'm not pointing fingers or trying to start rumors. Just sharing a thought . . . to keep you awake at night.
PC motherboards typically have 4 - 6 layers. That's pretty complicated. Think about routing all of the signal lines of the PCI (64-bit) bus and memory bus. If you have AGP nad PCI-X, add those in ther too. Think of all the signals going from your IDE ports and SCSI ports (if you have them) to your chipset. If you have an opteron, you have in the neighborhood of 940 pins. They all get connected. That's a lot of nets and a lot of routing!
And, it's a good thing to reduce board layers to a certain point because adding layers gets expensive! While it does complicate the process, the process of routing the board is a one time process and thus a one time cost. Once the board is routed and tested, it's off to manufacturing where the cost of extra layers is recurring. It does complicate the manufacturing process in that now you have to glue together more layers after routing them. This is why more layers get so expensive. Those layers have to line up. With nets getting as small as they do, there is almost no room for error in lining these layers up. Very difficult. The more layers you add, the more likely you are to have layers aligned improperly. Someone has to eat the cost of those boards that cannot be sold and it wont be the manufacturer.
This is interesting because I migrated my network from NT4 to 2K to XP and I have seen the reverse trend. NT4 seemed to BSOD quite regularly and I have seen reduced BSODs as we migrated o XP. I understand that they are not talking about BSODs only, but most of my machines seem to fail on BSODs more than anything else and that is pretty rare.
Hahahah!!! Well, I wasn't talking about UT or Quake or anything like that. I wasn't even talking about America's Army. Just the idea that a game could train a soldier. Hell, you could even put a feature in a game (this should be in every game) to not respawn until the mission is over. So, if you die, your team has to go on without you.
And, the military may want a soldier that will sharge straight in. D-Day is a good example of this. Not necessarily charging straight in, but the people that were the most desired and fit for the invasion were rookies. They hadn't experienced what the vetrans had experienced. A lot of vetrans at Normandy were too cautious because they had seen what bullets and shrapnel could do to a body. The rookies thought they were invincible and that was definitely a quality we wanted for that particular fight. So, maybe our troops should be trained on respawn FPS sometimes.
I'm not a chick. I am a dude. I am not a homosexual. I am straight. But I still think scars are sexy, and yes, I mean on a chick! I like my chicks sweet but mean!
. . . because all those games about teaching typing made me an effective killing machine. My fast fingers make pulling the trigger second nature. All those math games made it easier for me to keep track of ammo (if I shoot on full auto for 3 seconds, how many bullets will I use?) and those damn pattern matching games make my enemy's camouflage obvious to my eyes. I'm ready. Send me in to kill bad guys. I'm a fat, lazy, mouse wielding killing machine!
If only the Alpha-Betas had known about this, they would have just left those nerds alone.