Penumbra isn't all that taxing. The game was made in 2007, but the engine is more similar to something like the UT2k4 engine, with more physics and less speed.
I'd be surprised if a 6 year old machine couldn't run Penumbra. It's not overly taxing.
However, it's a fantastic game, despite that. It's a "First Person Horror Puzzler". While there is some limited combat, most of the game involves avoiding it. It's a pretty creepy game, for sure. And it is a puzzle solving game. I enjoyed the hell out of the series.
I need more stability than whiz-bang features that aren't-so-mature-yet.
Then why would you be an "ex-Ubuntu fanboi"? It's been clear for years now that Ubuntu's focus is on the desktop. There are plenty of good server distros. Why make a stink here about getting modded down when you're just picking the best tool for the job?
Do you just like getting whipped on slashdot like in real life?
You got pretty well flamed here for your post. Like the rest, I tolerated ads for quite some time. However, when I was quietly surfing the web one night, long ago, and one of my tabs started blasting out noise from a flash ad, I installed flash-click-to-play. A few years later, when I moused over an underlined word, and an ad popped up that obscured what I was trying to read, I installed noscript. When nearly every ad started moving, making noise, popping out of the page, and doing other fucking irritating shit, I blocked all the ads together.
I realize that you need to pay the bills. But if you fucking douchebag developers hadn't totally ruined the online experience with ads, completely fucked up and obscured the pages I was trying to read, and created the most distracting, worthless ads ever, I wouldn't have blocked ads. Nor would have a lot of other people here.
It's like wanting to be a lawyer, and getting pissed off that people hate you just because you're a lawyer. You should know that the hatred is well deserved due to the massive amount of douchebags in your field. Either suck it up, or change careers to one not filled with douchebags. Calling us "your smug smarmy sel(ves)" just makes you look like the rest of the douchebags we hate.
I've had one on my keychain for 15 years now. The *same* one. It's been used as a can opener, a knife, a screwdriver, pry-bar, splinter remover, paint scraper, etc. Now, in all fairness, it's not good at ANY of those jobs. But it's a damn rugged piece of hardware.
What's in my drawer now is a "safety" can opener, which cuts the side of the lid, rather than the top. It's supposed to reduce the chance of being sliced by sharp edges. It's 4 years old, rusty, with no discernible brand name nor country of origin. All I can see is a little seal of a house with some wavy crossed bars in it. No idea what it is or stands for. I'd recommend one of those!
Thank you. I've wondered the same for some time. Do people have a "set shit time" or something? I know I don't. I go though life doing what I need to do, then wander to the can to take a shit when I feel that I've got one ready.
I count myself lucky - I just moved from a market desperate to fill positions (HS science teacher) into a PhD program. Just before I left, I got certified to teach HS science for 7 more years - I can find jobs aplenty should I need one between now and 2016.
While I took a pay cut, I'm grant funded for another 2 years, and can either TA (a breeze, since I'm a teacher) or work with my advisor to find new grant funding after that, so I can continue on doing pure research.
Should the PhD program go south, I can head back to HS teaching with a pretty good shot at getting a job, with a pay-raise on top of it due to the extra college credits I now have. Otherwise, I'm headed towards a tenure position at some university down the line.
There were times in my life when it looked a little gloomy - like after I got laid off from my first job, a programmer/DBA position during the dot-com bust. At the moment, I'm looking at all these kids I see, and shaking my head. That's scary shit they're hedging their bets on. Slavery on one side, unemployment and homelessness on the other.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation is that a 747 covers about 1/4 mile every 2 seconds at cruising speed.
Even if there were birds up there, there's no possible way to spot them and then move a huge plane out of the way to avoid them. Hell, at those speeds, I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't even have time to figure out if they were in the flight path or not before it was too late. With no fixed reference points, those specs 1/4 of a mile away aren't anything you can do anything about.
I'm all for wiring an x-box into the cockpit, which auto-pauses whenever the plane is under 20k feet, there is a radio transmission, any sort of warning or change in airspeed or direction, and the autopilot is not engaged. When none of those things are happening, I'd rather my pilot be resting his brain, and be ready for the important shit.
That's the hallmark of the US. We have a very long history of applying our laws inconsistently. In general, if your skin isn't white, the law gets applied much more stringently, much more haphazardly, and much more often than if it is.
We only really got civil rights in the last 40 or so years. There are plenty of people who grew up before that happened, and they retain the mentality of that period. Even if you grew up after that time, if your parents grew up during a time when black folk had to sit at the back of the bus and couldn't use the same stores and bathrooms as white folk, it's probable you still have some of that mindset.
A high unemployment rate, combined with a recent killing of an Arizona farmer by a suspected border crosser, and this has the potential to be widely abused.
Am I safe? I have a six-character, alphanumeric password on facebook. But it's also my weakest password. I chose that one specifically because I don't trust FB, and didn't want to compromise my other passwords. Did they dictionary/brute force it, or did they get the passwds some other way?
(Not that I have any personal info stored on FB anyway...)
Pardon me for being a bit of an ass. However, you're requirements are something like 1 in a million users. I'm actually surprised that ANY OS can do all that.
Dude, you're about 5-10 years behind on your linux hatred. That or you're about 80 IQ points dumber than you think you are.
The linux command line is god damn useful if you only know three commands. The more you know, the more useful it is.
To bitch about how hard it is to install stuff on linux shows real ignorance. 5-10 years ago, yes, it was a bitch. I will fully give you that. In 2001-2003 or so when I was playing around with linux, it was terrible. Currently, it blows windows out of the water. My mom's a retired librarian, and she can use the package manager in Ubuntu just fine. As a "sysadmin", I'd hope you could do better than her.
and where do you find which command? how do you know the package name? where is that information. how do you know what's in each package? what happens when your distro doesn't have the package you want?
Aaaah, you "sysadmin" from mom's basement. Got it. For the record, on Ubuntu, it's apt, apt-get to install and remove stuff, apt-cache to search for programs and get more information on them. Google can help you a lot with these things. As can the myriad of user guides and forums dedicated to new users.
I'm glad to hear that. Those folks deserve all the cash that they can get rolling into them.
2D Boyis a shining example of how to produce a solid game, and then distribute it like reasonable human beings. The demo was extensive, not time limited, and fully 1/4 of the game. The purchase price was reasonable, and was available for all platforms, with no DRM.
I've rarely been as impressed as I was when I found the World of Goo. I bought 4 copies for myself, my family, and friends.
I was just thinking about that the other day. I was wondering how much money we waste on this crunch-day, when we could spread it out over 3/4 of the rest of the year.
I considered splitting the US into 4 regions, and doing each tax region at a different time. That's an issue if you move. What if you earn income in multiple regions?
The next idea was to split the population into 4 groups, and file in quarters. Still, how do you do this? Based on SSN? Based on birthday?
Then it hit me....Happy Birthday! Your taxes are due!
Make taxes due within 2 weeks of each person's birthday. That would spread them over the entire year, and would spread the workload out accordingly. Not a great birthday present, but I wonder how much money that would save....
They're not even a role model for how to rake in the dough - your chance of having the skills and grooming to play a pro sport is approximately on par with your chance of getting struck by lightning. Seriously - how many pro golfers can you name? 600 people get hit by lightning in the US every year. We're not adding 600 world-famous golfers each year, that's for sure.
It blows my mind how many kids are fed the lies that they can make it in pro sports. I your skills aren't better than 1 in 100,000, you're not going to make it into pro sports.
Since I blew my mod points this morning, and you're at +5, I'll just add a "me too".
Putting my mom and my sister's kids on such a system was the best thing I ever did. It was a couple of hours to install and update, then mostly hands off since. I show up to do some tweaking once a year. Compare that to their windows systems, and I was being asked to fix shit multiple times a year, and each time it was taking hours to days to do so.
I'm at the point where I recommend Ubuntu for work, and consoles for games. While I hate consoles personally, that combination has made it so that I don't ever do more than a half-hour of tech support for any of my friends or family.
Oh, I know how bad it is to eat Orange Roughy - when I found out about them, I felt pretty damn bad about how many I had eaten. But that's one damn tasty fish.
As for tilapia - a coworker of mine once said, "The way you're describing seasoning tofu, it sounds like you could make cardboard taste good. Why would you go through all that effort when you could just eat something that tastes good to start with?"
Yes, I know how to make talapia taste palatable, by smothering it with stuff. But it still has a shitty texture, and it's damn hard to get the flesh to have a decent taste. I'd rather start with a tasty fish, and work from there.
Point me to a sustainable fish with firm flesh and good flavor, at a reasonable price, and I'll be all over that. It's the holy grail I've been looking for for years.
And then we fire all the teachers this year, because nobody can get a job. Must be bad education!
Yeah, that was a bit snide, but that's the big issue with a single metric. What if some of them decide that they want to be organic farmers? What if several friends from the class before all went into finance?
What all this comes down to is the fact that there isn't a good way to measure the effect of education. Yet we insist on trying to make one up.
The other problem is that they're also reactive metrics. You can only react to the outcome years later. With standardized test numbers, you can react to them a month after you get them back!! That allows you to DO SOMETHING!!!
Yes, the numbers don't mean shit, but if your job requires you to look like you're doing something, standardized tests serve you well. Besides, 10 years after graduation, if the students got a bad education, the teachers who taught them might well be gone. It's hard to fix that.
As you point out, the real issue is that education is a long-term investment. We don't have a mechanism for long-term tracking of student progress. We also can't fix problems with education from a decade ago, when we figure it out now.
If I could figure out how to do this, I'd be a rich man.
It's not possible to keep standardized tests. Believe me, I've looked into it. It was my Master's thesis.
The issue with standardized tests is that they are a tiny snapshot of student performance. They don't do any sort of a good job of measuring learning. They measure two things:
1) Can students answer questions in this format. 2) Do students have the motivation to answer questions in this format.
IFF the answer to both of those is "yes", then, and only then can you use standardized tests questions to assess learning. But again, it's just a one or two hour snapshot, and not really representative of a year of school.
The big problem is that in the real world, only a small subset of the student body applies here. By and large, students aren't used to answering questions in the rigid format of a standardized test, and most don't give a shit about answering the questions. In this "no high-stakes testing" climate, the public refuses to put any penalty on failure to take tests seriously. Because of this, looking at standardized test scores as any sort of useful metric is asinine.
Slashdot Mirror
Penumbra isn't all that taxing. The game was made in 2007, but the engine is more similar to something like the UT2k4 engine, with more physics and less speed.
I'd be surprised if a 6 year old machine couldn't run Penumbra. It's not overly taxing.
However, it's a fantastic game, despite that. It's a "First Person Horror Puzzler". While there is some limited combat, most of the game involves avoiding it. It's a pretty creepy game, for sure. And it is a puzzle solving game. I enjoyed the hell out of the series.
Even if you call her "Pamela Handerson", it's still not screwing...
I need more stability than whiz-bang features that aren't-so-mature-yet.
Then why would you be an "ex-Ubuntu fanboi"? It's been clear for years now that Ubuntu's focus is on the desktop. There are plenty of good server distros. Why make a stink here about getting modded down when you're just picking the best tool for the job?
Do you just like getting whipped on slashdot like in real life?
I figured that with only a paper left to write in my school semester, I'd risk it and upgrade.
It went flawlessly. Everything works fantastically well, just like it's been working for the last 2 years.
I know it doesn't help you, but I'm happy to provide a counter-point to your doom-and-gloom scenario.
You've got a whole thread now asking you what the hell you're talking about. Since I don't see one on first, +3 scanning, I'll give you one:
[[citation needed]]
Especially given the farmers in Vermont being paid to turn cow shit into electricity. If you don't consider a steaming pile of cow shit "waste", I'm not sure what qualifies...
You got pretty well flamed here for your post. Like the rest, I tolerated ads for quite some time. However, when I was quietly surfing the web one night, long ago, and one of my tabs started blasting out noise from a flash ad, I installed flash-click-to-play. A few years later, when I moused over an underlined word, and an ad popped up that obscured what I was trying to read, I installed noscript. When nearly every ad started moving, making noise, popping out of the page, and doing other fucking irritating shit, I blocked all the ads together.
I realize that you need to pay the bills. But if you fucking douchebag developers hadn't totally ruined the online experience with ads, completely fucked up and obscured the pages I was trying to read, and created the most distracting, worthless ads ever, I wouldn't have blocked ads. Nor would have a lot of other people here.
It's like wanting to be a lawyer, and getting pissed off that people hate you just because you're a lawyer. You should know that the hatred is well deserved due to the massive amount of douchebags in your field. Either suck it up, or change careers to one not filled with douchebags. Calling us "your smug smarmy sel(ves)" just makes you look like the rest of the douchebags we hate.
I've had one on my keychain for 15 years now. The *same* one. It's been used as a can opener, a knife, a screwdriver, pry-bar, splinter remover, paint scraper, etc. Now, in all fairness, it's not good at ANY of those jobs. But it's a damn rugged piece of hardware.
What's in my drawer now is a "safety" can opener, which cuts the side of the lid, rather than the top. It's supposed to reduce the chance of being sliced by sharp edges. It's 4 years old, rusty, with no discernible brand name nor country of origin. All I can see is a little seal of a house with some wavy crossed bars in it. No idea what it is or stands for. I'd recommend one of those!
I think it's kdawson's subtle dig..
I think it's incompetence.
Thank you. I've wondered the same for some time. Do people have a "set shit time" or something? I know I don't. I go though life doing what I need to do, then wander to the can to take a shit when I feel that I've got one ready.
I don't require mine to appear on command....
I count myself lucky - I just moved from a market desperate to fill positions (HS science teacher) into a PhD program. Just before I left, I got certified to teach HS science for 7 more years - I can find jobs aplenty should I need one between now and 2016.
While I took a pay cut, I'm grant funded for another 2 years, and can either TA (a breeze, since I'm a teacher) or work with my advisor to find new grant funding after that, so I can continue on doing pure research.
Should the PhD program go south, I can head back to HS teaching with a pretty good shot at getting a job, with a pay-raise on top of it due to the extra college credits I now have. Otherwise, I'm headed towards a tenure position at some university down the line.
There were times in my life when it looked a little gloomy - like after I got laid off from my first job, a programmer/DBA position during the dot-com bust. At the moment, I'm looking at all these kids I see, and shaking my head. That's scary shit they're hedging their bets on. Slavery on one side, unemployment and homelessness on the other.
I'm damn glad I'm not in that pool of people...
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation is that a 747 covers about 1/4 mile every 2 seconds at cruising speed.
Even if there were birds up there, there's no possible way to spot them and then move a huge plane out of the way to avoid them. Hell, at those speeds, I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't even have time to figure out if they were in the flight path or not before it was too late. With no fixed reference points, those specs 1/4 of a mile away aren't anything you can do anything about.
I'm all for wiring an x-box into the cockpit, which auto-pauses whenever the plane is under 20k feet, there is a radio transmission, any sort of warning or change in airspeed or direction, and the autopilot is not engaged. When none of those things are happening, I'd rather my pilot be resting his brain, and be ready for the important shit.
a tragedy if it's done inconsistently.
That's the hallmark of the US. We have a very long history of applying our laws inconsistently. In general, if your skin isn't white, the law gets applied much more stringently, much more haphazardly, and much more often than if it is.
We only really got civil rights in the last 40 or so years. There are plenty of people who grew up before that happened, and they retain the mentality of that period. Even if you grew up after that time, if your parents grew up during a time when black folk had to sit at the back of the bus and couldn't use the same stores and bathrooms as white folk, it's probable you still have some of that mindset.
A high unemployment rate, combined with a recent killing of an Arizona farmer by a suspected border crosser, and this has the potential to be widely abused.
So, I wonder....
Am I safe? I have a six-character, alphanumeric password on facebook. But it's also my weakest password. I chose that one specifically because I don't trust FB, and didn't want to compromise my other passwords. Did they dictionary/brute force it, or did they get the passwds some other way?
(Not that I have any personal info stored on FB anyway...)
The bears would get him then.
Aaah. I see.
Pardon me for being a bit of an ass. However, you're requirements are something like 1 in a million users. I'm actually surprised that ANY OS can do all that.
The linux command line is god damn useful if you only know three commands. The more you know, the more useful it is.
To bitch about how hard it is to install stuff on linux shows real ignorance. 5-10 years ago, yes, it was a bitch. I will fully give you that. In 2001-2003 or so when I was playing around with linux, it was terrible. Currently, it blows windows out of the water. My mom's a retired librarian, and she can use the package manager in Ubuntu just fine. As a "sysadmin", I'd hope you could do better than her.
and where do you find which command? how do you know the package name? where is that information. how do you know what's in each package? what happens when your distro doesn't have the package you want?
Aaaah, you "sysadmin" from mom's basement. Got it. For the record, on Ubuntu, it's apt, apt-get to install and remove stuff, apt-cache to search for programs and get more information on them. Google can help you a lot with these things. As can the myriad of user guides and forums dedicated to new users.
But you really didn't want answers, did you?
I'm glad to hear that. Those folks deserve all the cash that they can get rolling into them.
2D Boyis a shining example of how to produce a solid game, and then distribute it like reasonable human beings. The demo was extensive, not time limited, and fully 1/4 of the game. The purchase price was reasonable, and was available for all platforms, with no DRM.
I've rarely been as impressed as I was when I found the World of Goo. I bought 4 copies for myself, my family, and friends.
I was just thinking about that the other day. I was wondering how much money we waste on this crunch-day, when we could spread it out over 3/4 of the rest of the year.
I considered splitting the US into 4 regions, and doing each tax region at a different time. That's an issue if you move. What if you earn income in multiple regions?
The next idea was to split the population into 4 groups, and file in quarters. Still, how do you do this? Based on SSN? Based on birthday?
Then it hit me....Happy Birthday! Your taxes are due!
Make taxes due within 2 weeks of each person's birthday. That would spread them over the entire year, and would spread the workload out accordingly. Not a great birthday present, but I wonder how much money that would save....
Core Wars? You went with that over Progress Quest?
They're not even a role model for how to rake in the dough - your chance of having the skills and grooming to play a pro sport is approximately on par with your chance of getting struck by lightning. Seriously - how many pro golfers can you name? 600 people get hit by lightning in the US every year. We're not adding 600 world-famous golfers each year, that's for sure.
It blows my mind how many kids are fed the lies that they can make it in pro sports. I your skills aren't better than 1 in 100,000, you're not going to make it into pro sports.
Since I blew my mod points this morning, and you're at +5, I'll just add a "me too".
Putting my mom and my sister's kids on such a system was the best thing I ever did. It was a couple of hours to install and update, then mostly hands off since. I show up to do some tweaking once a year. Compare that to their windows systems, and I was being asked to fix shit multiple times a year, and each time it was taking hours to days to do so.
I'm at the point where I recommend Ubuntu for work, and consoles for games. While I hate consoles personally, that combination has made it so that I don't ever do more than a half-hour of tech support for any of my friends or family.
Oh, I know how bad it is to eat Orange Roughy - when I found out about them, I felt pretty damn bad about how many I had eaten. But that's one damn tasty fish.
As for tilapia - a coworker of mine once said, "The way you're describing seasoning tofu, it sounds like you could make cardboard taste good. Why would you go through all that effort when you could just eat something that tastes good to start with?"
Yes, I know how to make talapia taste palatable, by smothering it with stuff. But it still has a shitty texture, and it's damn hard to get the flesh to have a decent taste. I'd rather start with a tasty fish, and work from there.
Point me to a sustainable fish with firm flesh and good flavor, at a reasonable price, and I'll be all over that. It's the holy grail I've been looking for for years.
And then we fire all the teachers this year, because nobody can get a job. Must be bad education!
Yeah, that was a bit snide, but that's the big issue with a single metric. What if some of them decide that they want to be organic farmers? What if several friends from the class before all went into finance?
What all this comes down to is the fact that there isn't a good way to measure the effect of education. Yet we insist on trying to make one up.
The other problem is that they're also reactive metrics. You can only react to the outcome years later. With standardized test numbers, you can react to them a month after you get them back!! That allows you to DO SOMETHING!!!
Yes, the numbers don't mean shit, but if your job requires you to look like you're doing something, standardized tests serve you well. Besides, 10 years after graduation, if the students got a bad education, the teachers who taught them might well be gone. It's hard to fix that.
As you point out, the real issue is that education is a long-term investment. We don't have a mechanism for long-term tracking of student progress. We also can't fix problems with education from a decade ago, when we figure it out now.
If I could figure out how to do this, I'd be a rich man.
It's not possible to keep standardized tests. Believe me, I've looked into it. It was my Master's thesis.
The issue with standardized tests is that they are a tiny snapshot of student performance. They don't do any sort of a good job of measuring learning. They measure two things:
1) Can students answer questions in this format.
2) Do students have the motivation to answer questions in this format.
IFF the answer to both of those is "yes", then, and only then can you use standardized tests questions to assess learning. But again, it's just a one or two hour snapshot, and not really representative of a year of school.
The big problem is that in the real world, only a small subset of the student body applies here. By and large, students aren't used to answering questions in the rigid format of a standardized test, and most don't give a shit about answering the questions. In this "no high-stakes testing" climate, the public refuses to put any penalty on failure to take tests seriously. Because of this, looking at standardized test scores as any sort of useful metric is asinine.