...is to crack games. Nowadays all the games I have bought are on duplicatable CDs. But in the old days we learned a lot by trying to crack games. And unlike actually playing games, when you crack a game you feel like you really are pitting your wits against someone who was being devious because their job depended on it, not because it's some artificial contrived scenario concocted by a 'game designer'. Because it's more fun than actually playing you can feel highly motivated to actually learn about what you are doing and try to understand someone else's code from the ground up. I'd put money on the people who learn to code from cracking games ending up much better than people who learn from playing games.
Retroreflective tape is retroreflective. Retroreflective armbands and running vests are retroreflective. Traffic signs are retroreflective. Retroreflective markers used for motion capture are retroreflective. But camera lenses are not retroreflective.
The guy is a little mad but his points are basically sound.
If you implement a geometrical function whose input is a bunch of lengths and their ratios and whose output is a bunch of lengths and their ratios then you frequently shouldn't need any trig in your function, instead you should be using algebraic functions (+, -, *,/, nth root etc.). But many people find it easy to solve their problem by converting a bunch of stuff to angles using trig and then converting back. In fact, I optimised someone's rendering code recently by literally looking for every line of code where he'd used trig and replacing it, where possible, with the algebraic version. It worked well and speeded up the code massively. In addition I uncovered what you might call bugs. For example at one point this guy did a 180 degree rotation by converting to polar coordinates, adding M_PI to the angle and converting back. Rotating (x,y) by 180 degrees gives (-x,-y). The guy who'd written it was 'trig happy' and should have stopped to thing about the geometrical significance of what he was doing rather than just doing the obvious thing. If this book encourages people to use trig less it might be a good thing. But you don't need to talk about 'quadrance' and 'spread' to use the principles I'm talking about.
But of course there are times when you need trig. I'd hate to see the guy differentiate rotations without trig.
The one where the solution involves sqrt(7). The fact is, you don't need trig to solve that problem and people shouldn't be using trig to do so. His approach isn't new, it's what a mathematician should do anyway. If there's one thing that is taught wrong it's a tendency to use trig when pythagoras's theorem and similar triangles will do the job anyway. But this guy isn't doing anything new.
We're talking about a company who took until version TEN to have a decent OS
True. But so what. It's now the best OS out there. Do you tell people you meet "it took 3.5 billion yours for you to evolve so clearly you are a crap person?" Before OSX Apple was in a rut producing second rate products. The company reinvented itself. It seems wrong to hold its past against it, just as I no longer joke about the BSOD now that MS have had a stable OS since 2000.
If they had their way, everything would be text mode or Apple
Or maybe competitors would have innovated and designed a new type of interface rather than the mac clones that everyone runs today. That is, after all, the whole point of patents. And I find it hard to believe that the one solution that MacOSX, Gnome, KDE and Windows all provide is the one and only way of doing things.
Is this the best they could come up with?
on
Review: Nintendogs
·
· Score: 1
No. I've heard you can get other games for the DS too.
You mean like if I keep picking white victims rather than mixing between victims who are black and white? Are we sure we really want to see games like this?
How do you know that? Given how I get parents and parents-in-law asking when we're having kids the whole time it seems pretty obvious that it's all about pressure from other people. The only actual 'urge' to have kids was cured long ago with contraceptives. If humans actually had an 'urge' to have kids, as opposed to have sex, humans wouldn't have evolved to find sex so enjoyable. In societies where the population is well educated, ie. those societies where people are able (or even encouraged) to question societal norms the birth rate is far lower than in traditional societies, even when taking into account availability of contraception.
Out of all the APIs, I found Palm (along with Java) as one of the best thought out 'languages'.
Eh? I wrote a game for the old 160x160 Palms. I wanted to port ot to PalmOS 5 so it could make use of the 480x320 screen if present. Running on a different resolution screen should require few lines of code being modified, especially when my code used mostly 'vector' graphics. Not so. I had to write code to handle DIA events (I spent hours trying to find the docs) and separate code to handle similar events on Sony devices that had their own flavor of the OS. I spent ages poring over headers trying to make it work. I couldn't actually find the docs I wanted. The example code I needed seemed to link to a lib file I didn't have in the SDK. I can't remember the problems. Eventually I gave up. PalmOS is hopelessly broken with layer after layer of patches for each new feature that appeared in each new device - as if each time the OS was extended nobody had a clue that it might actually be extended again in the future. I find it easier to do raw X11 or Win32 than use PalmOS.
'Problem'? That's a value judgement. We're talking about nature here and value judgements are irrelevant. If dumber people reproduce more then at least in the short term it appears that 'dumb' contributes to 'fitness' as defined by Darwinians.
I have difficulty finding any source of death or reproduction that is meaningfully affected, today, in our human world, by genes.
There are plenty of congenital disorders that can prevent reproduction. And there are subtle effects that nobody has even studied. I have no kids and my desire to have them isn't too strong. Is that an inherited trait? Obviously not straightforwardly or I wouldn't be here. But even if it's 1% inherited it makes a difference but I doubt there are many experiments that could uncover it reliably. Similarly for people who desire to have large families.
In many parts of the world resistance to disease is a major deciding factor in whether or not you live. This may even be true in Western societies though the mortality rate from disease is much less here than elsewhere. Even before birth there are evolutionary forces at work.
Many babies aremiscarried. About 50% of the women I know have miscarried at some point in their lives, and that's just the ones I know about. So there's still selection pressure for getting babies to term.
There's also the simple fact that there is a differential rate of reproduction for different genes for effects that aren't directly causally linked to the genes. For example Westerners typically reproduce at a much lower rate than many other groups. This is obviously correlated with, though not necessarily caused by, many different gene groups. (There's no doubt that many of the genes carried by organisms today are a result of semi-accidental effects such as this.)
Additonally I'm sure that there's plenty of sexual selection going on in various groups as people choose mates that they find sexually attractive. They say, for example, that the population of California is better looking than the population of the rest of the US for various historical reasons. Even if this is apocryphal, it's not implausible that such effects are at work in many places vover the world.
Civilization has removed the engine through which drives the evolution of the species.
What engine has been removed? There is still a differential rate of reproduction between different groups and so natural selection is carrying on exactly like it has always done. You say the engine has been removed because you have a preconceived notion that certain traits should be selected for (eg. not being stupid) and when you see that those are not the traits associated with a higher differential rate of reproduction you dismiss it as not being evolution. Sometimes I wonder if anyone out there has actually bothered to try understanding evolution.
Maybe you could tell me about the carnal pleasures in other religions. If you're accusing someone else of dishonesty for not discussing them I expect that an honest person like you must have a list of them.
Um...have you programmed in anything other than C++? A large chunk of STL and Boost are poor imitations of features found in other programming languages. Much of Boost is quite consciously modeled on functional programming languages. Maybe you should try some of these languages. For example, if you like lambda, why not use a language where concepts from lambda calculus are natural?
Younger readers may need an explanation of this phrase. The idea is that when a male sees someone to whom they are sexually attracted they may become aroused and one aspect of arousal is penile erection. This can result in a (sometimes embarassing) bulge in the pants. The author of this story is implying that Oregon, or at least part of it, is sexually aroused by them, and that this bulge is analogous to that caused by an erection. It may come as a shock to you that a story posted on/. that is ostensibly about volcanos contains references to penile erections. You may have thought that only immature individuals would make penis jokes as part of a scientific story. But actually adults do this all the time and now that you have read this you too can join other adults in making penis jokes at seemingly inappropriate times.
In my old company I was on $235,000 but I was a manager there (though I mostly wrote code). I'm not self-employed, I'm a regular salaried employee. I'm 38 and I work in a fairly specialized field. But basically I write 3D graphics code. I like to think I'm well paid but I own one of the lower cost houses in the blocks around me (Oakland, CA). In a few years, when the interest rate on the mortgage goes free floating, I probably won't be able to afford to keep the house. I.e. I'm not paid well enough to buy a house here.
Slashdot Mirror
...is to crack games. Nowadays all the games I have bought are on duplicatable CDs. But in the old days we learned a lot by trying to crack games. And unlike actually playing games, when you crack a game you feel like you really are pitting your wits against someone who was being devious because their job depended on it, not because it's some artificial contrived scenario concocted by a 'game designer'. Because it's more fun than actually playing you can feel highly motivated to actually learn about what you are doing and try to understand someone else's code from the ground up. I'd put money on the people who learn to code from cracking games ending up much better than people who learn from playing games.
You need more digits. Or a google search as opposed to a calculation.
Retroreflective tape is retroreflective. Retroreflective armbands and running vests are retroreflective. Traffic signs are retroreflective. Retroreflective markers used for motion capture are retroreflective. But camera lenses are not retroreflective.
...that if he gave out bad advice it would make him look better than the competition.
Does anyone care what a 14 year old thinks?
It was called Cobalt. We're still waiting to see a product with it. I really can't understand why.
If you implement a geometrical function whose input is a bunch of lengths and their ratios and whose output is a bunch of lengths and their ratios then you frequently shouldn't need any trig in your function, instead you should be using algebraic functions (+, -, *, /, nth root etc.). But many people find it easy to solve their problem by converting a bunch of stuff to angles using trig and then converting back. In fact, I optimised someone's rendering code recently by literally looking for every line of code where he'd used trig and replacing it, where possible, with the algebraic version. It worked well and speeded up the code massively. In addition I uncovered what you might call bugs. For example at one point this guy did a 180 degree rotation by converting to polar coordinates, adding M_PI to the angle and converting back. Rotating (x,y) by 180 degrees gives (-x,-y). The guy who'd written it was 'trig happy' and should have stopped to thing about the geometrical significance of what he was doing rather than just doing the obvious thing. If this book encourages people to use trig less it might be a good thing. But you don't need to talk about 'quadrance' and 'spread' to use the principles I'm talking about.
But of course there are times when you need trig. I'd hate to see the guy differentiate rotations without trig.
The one where the solution involves sqrt(7). The fact is, you don't need trig to solve that problem and people shouldn't be using trig to do so. His approach isn't new, it's what a mathematician should do anyway. If there's one thing that is taught wrong it's a tendency to use trig when pythagoras's theorem and similar triangles will do the job anyway. But this guy isn't doing anything new.
No. I've heard you can get other games for the DS too.
You mean like if I keep picking white victims rather than mixing between victims who are black and white? Are we sure we really want to see games like this?
The comment is vacuous drivel. I don't think it contains any information worth reading though I did try.
How do you know that? Given how I get parents and parents-in-law asking when we're having kids the whole time it seems pretty obvious that it's all about pressure from other people. The only actual 'urge' to have kids was cured long ago with contraceptives. If humans actually had an 'urge' to have kids, as opposed to have sex, humans wouldn't have evolved to find sex so enjoyable. In societies where the population is well educated, ie. those societies where people are able (or even encouraged) to question societal norms the birth rate is far lower than in traditional societies, even when taking into account availability of contraception.
How old? I'm 38 with no kids and little desire. I hope it doesn't set in when I'm 80, I might not be able to perform.
I won't even mention armlets.
'Problem'? That's a value judgement. We're talking about nature here and value judgements are irrelevant. If dumber people reproduce more then at least in the short term it appears that 'dumb' contributes to 'fitness' as defined by Darwinians.
In many parts of the world resistance to disease is a major deciding factor in whether or not you live. This may even be true in Western societies though the mortality rate from disease is much less here than elsewhere. Even before birth there are evolutionary forces at work.
Many babies aremiscarried. About 50% of the women I know have miscarried at some point in their lives, and that's just the ones I know about. So there's still selection pressure for getting babies to term.
There's also the simple fact that there is a differential rate of reproduction for different genes for effects that aren't directly causally linked to the genes. For example Westerners typically reproduce at a much lower rate than many other groups. This is obviously correlated with, though not necessarily caused by, many different gene groups. (There's no doubt that many of the genes carried by organisms today are a result of semi-accidental effects such as this.)
Additonally I'm sure that there's plenty of sexual selection going on in various groups as people choose mates that they find sexually attractive. They say, for example, that the population of California is better looking than the population of the rest of the US for various historical reasons. Even if this is apocryphal, it's not implausible that such effects are at work in many places vover the world.
Maybe you could tell me about the carnal pleasures in other religions. If you're accusing someone else of dishonesty for not discussing them I expect that an honest person like you must have a list of them.
Um...have you programmed in anything other than C++? A large chunk of STL and Boost are poor imitations of features found in other programming languages. Much of Boost is quite consciously modeled on functional programming languages. Maybe you should try some of these languages. For example, if you like lambda, why not use a language where concepts from lambda calculus are natural?
It's not just any orange dirt. It's Martian orange dirt. It could be bottled and sold for extortionate prices.
Younger readers may need an explanation of this phrase. The idea is that when a male sees someone to whom they are sexually attracted they may become aroused and one aspect of arousal is penile erection. This can result in a (sometimes embarassing) bulge in the pants. The author of this story is implying that Oregon, or at least part of it, is sexually aroused by them, and that this bulge is analogous to that caused by an erection. It may come as a shock to you that a story posted on /. that is ostensibly about volcanos contains references to penile erections. You may have thought that only immature individuals would make penis jokes as part of a scientific story. But actually adults do this all the time and now that you have read this you too can join other adults in making penis jokes at seemingly inappropriate times.
Interesting and specialized works too. It also makes you feel better (assuming you derive any kind of pleasure or self-esteem from your work).
In my old company I was on $235,000 but I was a manager there (though I mostly wrote code). I'm not self-employed, I'm a regular salaried employee. I'm 38 and I work in a fairly specialized field. But basically I write 3D graphics code. I like to think I'm well paid but I own one of the lower cost houses in the blocks around me (Oakland, CA). In a few years, when the interest rate on the mortgage goes free floating, I probably won't be able to afford to keep the house. I.e. I'm not paid well enough to buy a house here.