actually an enormous game has been written in "stackless" python: EVE online. the reviews of EVE have been mediocre, but most have complimented the game's graphics. it's also an enormous world with all kinds of complex rules. according to the developers, it wouldn't have been possible without python.
i think EVE proves that python is ready for big projects, even when performance is critical.
what are the main offenders when it comes to corrupting audio signals inside the PC? i was under the impression that in a purely digital PC setup, only discreet bits of binary code were getting shuffled around with phenomenally low error rates, thus making the signals vastly more resistant to corruption and distortion. apparently, this is not the case.
so why does this happen and is there anything i can do to minimize distortion in my setup? also, will we see a technological solution to this problem in the near future?
i am probably the only person in the world to catch your classic Smirnovian reversal, but for what it's worth i laughed so hard i almost spontaneously combusted.
are you all so in love with ICANN that you just can't conceive of giving it's authority to the UN? how much worse could it be to take power from a small trade body and give it to the global community?
let me state for the record that my educational background in no way qualifies me to register opinions on the foundations of physics, but niether did Lynd's and look at all the hoopla he's raising.
this line caught my attention:
Lynds' solution to all of the paradoxes lay in the realisation of the absence of an instant in time underlying a bodies motion and that its position was constantly changing over time and never determined. He comments, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
well, duh! that's because to determine if something is in motion you need at least two "samples" of information, namely, the positions at times t and t1. an instant in time would be represented by a number with an infinite amount of digits after the decimal place, such as pi seconds. one instant in time is not enough to take two "samples" and thus, not enough to determine whether something is moving relative to the observer. at an instant in time, there is no motion relative to the observer. it's like putting the pause button on the universe.
furthermore, just because it is impossible to determine the position of a moving body at a given instant in time between t and t1, does not mean that at that instant it didn't have a determined position. this is a problem of epistemology disguised as a revolution in physics.
wil wheaton on something awful
on
Dancing Barefoot
·
· Score: 0, Troll
i would rather have my eyes gouged-out with a rusty fork than have to submit to have wil wheaton as the representative of all of geekdom. all the ubergeeks i know consider wil wheaton to be something of a wiener monkey, and if you don't agree with us you should read something awful's article:
http://somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=1123
or
http://somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=972
wil wheaton should not be writing books, or blogging, or existing, or in any other way influencing my culture. and he should especially not be joining my green party and tainting it with his unholy presence.
the fastest serial-ata hard drive is the western digital 10k rpm raptor. it turns out 63MB/s peak and 45MB/s min throughput.
also, you left out a few key details such as how old the drive is, how fast it was for its time, and how fast cpu's were at the time.
from a recent x-bit labs review of the maxtor diamondmax plus 8 hard disk:
"In our recent reviews we often had to state that data density growth and as a result the higher data exchange rate with the platter, lead to no perceptible performance growth."
higher data density doesn't necessarily increase performance.
also, my statement about hard drives not getting any faster wasn't meant to be taken literally. of course hard drives have gotten faster, but compared to the performance gains we've seen in microprocessors in the last few years those gains look pretty weak.
i'm talking about the turing who made the amazing, dead-on prediction in 1950 that in 2000 there would be computers with at least 128MB of memory (see "computing machinery and intelligence").
also, AI can fit on a tape.
i really hope the next matrix doesn't go pseudoscience, pop-philosophy, cheeseball on us. the first movie definitely flirted with disaster a couple of times, but always managed to pull out a witty or well-phrased tidbit of legitimate philsophy or science. with the success of the first film, the wachowski's now have carte blanche to spew out whatever they want. let's hope they're smart about what they include in the film.
i fear the influence of eastern philosophy (read: bullshit) and classical western philosophy (read: bullshit) will taint the next two films. what bothers me is that there's so much modern, totally groundbreaking work being done in neuroscience and philosophy of mind that are probably just going to be ignored. i'm talking about guys like dennett, fodor, searle, turing, dawkins, and damassio. why does the matrix have to dig up what some ancient dead guy said from a time when they thought the soul lived inside our pineal glands and that our brains were just radiators (descartes and aristotle, respectively). those guys might have been really smart for their time, but that was a long time ago. today's simpleton's are capable of understanding the natural world in much greater depth than any of the great philosophers or scientists of the distant past.
first, he co-authors the mccain-feingold campaign finance reform bill, which was a very un-politician thing to do. then he makes the politically risky move of speaking at one of the shadow conferences they had a while back, whose purpose was to voice opinions outside of the normal two-party fair. he railed against his own party for being awash in special interest money. that took some balls. then ralph nader endorsed feingold as one of the good guys in a bad congress. and now he's proposed this beautiful piece of legislation that just might make radio suck less. go feingold and go wisconsin!
am i the only one who thinks that anime is wierd and dumb?
i'll grant you ghost in the shell and maybe a few others, but pokemon, inuyasha, and cowboy (fucking) beebop. good christ! don't tell me that i'm a xenophobic, cultureless american. don't tell me that coherence gets lost in the translation. there are standards for character and plot development that are universal, which is why i feel confident in dismissing a good 95% anime. you don't include 2.4 million characters in an episode and give them all one (count it) psychological motivation. it's just not done. who gives a shit about increasing your stupid power levels. furthermore, when somebody jumps in the air, they fall back to earth in accordance with the laws of gravity. they do not hang suspended for hours at a time while seizure-inducing blue and red colors zoom by them at high speed.
and don't even get me started on anime "humor". there is an adjective that describes what it's like to experience the punchline of an anime joke, and that adjective is "scrotum-exploding".
can anybody suggest some good internet radio stations for a guy who likes:
rage against the machine
incubus
deftones
pearl jam
jamiroquai
soundgarden
red hot chili peppers
smashing pumpkins...and all of the rest of the 1991 bands?
the traditional model of theft is something like stealing a candybar from a convenience store. you take something that belongs to someone else and in doing so deprive them of value and the incentive to continue producing/selling candybars.
what if, however, instead of walking into the store and outright grabbing the candybar off the shelf, you made a perfect atom-by-atom copy of the candbar, leaving the original unharmed? what if you could make a trillion copies for next to nothing? under such a manufacture/distribution scheme, shouldn't anybody who wants a candybar get a candybar? wouldn't this new system make the old system obsolete? who but the original recipe-holder could be said to "own" the candybar?
sure, that sounds like a lot of storage, but how many full-length german sheizer films can it hold? when will we start setting standards that are actually meaninful?
what's so hard about it?
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 1
why is it so damn hard for them to make a easy to use version of linux? the problem of ease-of-use has been solved since the invention of the wizard. you take complex tasks and break them down into steps so simple a child could perform them. why don't they just wizard the hell out of everything? but don't wizards sacrifice functionality and penalize power users, you ask. not if they're implemented correctly they don't. you want to make the task power-user friendly, just insert a step at the beginning that asks the user about his/her skill level (like "advanced mode" or "custom"). problem solved.
the real problem is that linux programmers are too technically skilled for their own good. they've lost the ability to relate to joe computer user. kudos to ark for trying to break the mold.
ask somebody from nicaragua, chile, el salvador, east timor, guatemala, sudan, or vietnam about american democracy.
you might learn a thing or two about america's idea of self-defense.
newsflash:
the media (cable news networks and everything) are OWNED, bloody OWNED, by half a dozen gigantic corporations. and they don't tend towards the left side of the fence, billy.
as for bernard goldberg's book:
from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
http://www.fair.org/articles/bias-op-ed.html
i am smart. i did vote. and i would like to point out that while bush ambles around talking about "strategery" and "the evildoers", the man i voted for is touring the country giving impromptu speeches about "the unrealized possibilities of human existence." his name is ralph nader, and in every possible measure of quality as a human being he is LIGHT YEARS beyond the man who now sits in the white house. while bush was still using alcohol and cocaine, waiting to find jesus, nader had already reformed dozens of industries and government agencies. and i don't think it takes a great intellect to figure out that years of alcohol and drug abuse might affect the speech pathways of the brain.
my favorite part was about halfway through when they show henry kissinger (nobel peace prize winner and butcher of chile, e. timor, and vietnam) talking about the importance of strong leadership. queue "dueling banjos" and cut to president bush making an ass of himself ("...the american people...uh...").
i can't be the only person in america who cringes every time the president tries to say something off the top of his head. how in holy hell did a man that profoundly stupid become president of the united states?
Slashdot Mirror
actually an enormous game has been written in "stackless" python: EVE online. the reviews of EVE have been mediocre, but most have complimented the game's graphics. it's also an enormous world with all kinds of complex rules. according to the developers, it wouldn't have been possible without python.
i think EVE proves that python is ready for big projects, even when performance is critical.
the problem is: you can't HEAR the audio quality difference.
what are the main offenders when it comes to corrupting audio signals inside the PC? i was under the impression that in a purely digital PC setup, only discreet bits of binary code were getting shuffled around with phenomenally low error rates, thus making the signals vastly more resistant to corruption and distortion. apparently, this is not the case.
so why does this happen and is there anything i can do to minimize distortion in my setup? also, will we see a technological solution to this problem in the near future?
i am probably the only person in the world to catch your classic Smirnovian reversal, but for what it's worth i laughed so hard i almost spontaneously combusted.
are you all so in love with ICANN that you just can't conceive of giving it's authority to the UN? how much worse could it be to take power from a small trade body and give it to the global community?
ICANNwatch.org
let me state for the record that my educational background in no way qualifies me to register opinions on the foundations of physics, but niether did Lynd's and look at all the hoopla he's raising.
this line caught my attention:
Lynds' solution to all of the paradoxes lay in the realisation of the absence of an instant in time underlying a bodies motion and that its position was constantly changing over time and never determined. He comments, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
well, duh! that's because to determine if something is in motion you need at least two "samples" of information, namely, the positions at times t and t1. an instant in time would be represented by a number with an infinite amount of digits after the decimal place, such as pi seconds. one instant in time is not enough to take two "samples" and thus, not enough to determine whether something is moving relative to the observer. at an instant in time, there is no motion relative to the observer. it's like putting the pause button on the universe.
furthermore, just because it is impossible to determine the position of a moving body at a given instant in time between t and t1, does not mean that at that instant it didn't have a determined position. this is a problem of epistemology disguised as a revolution in physics.
i would rather have my eyes gouged-out with a rusty fork than have to submit to have wil wheaton as the representative of all of geekdom. all the ubergeeks i know consider wil wheaton to be something of a wiener monkey, and if you don't agree with us you should read something awful's article:
http://somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=1123
or
http://somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=972
wil wheaton should not be writing books, or blogging, or existing, or in any other way influencing my culture. and he should especially not be joining my green party and tainting it with his unholy presence.
the fastest serial-ata hard drive is the western digital 10k rpm raptor. it turns out 63MB/s peak and 45MB/s min throughput. also, you left out a few key details such as how old the drive is, how fast it was for its time, and how fast cpu's were at the time.
from a recent x-bit labs review of the maxtor diamondmax plus 8 hard disk: "In our recent reviews we often had to state that data density growth and as a result the higher data exchange rate with the platter, lead to no perceptible performance growth." higher data density doesn't necessarily increase performance. also, my statement about hard drives not getting any faster wasn't meant to be taken literally. of course hard drives have gotten faster, but compared to the performance gains we've seen in microprocessors in the last few years those gains look pretty weak.
microprocessors have gotten faster and faster. hard disks have not.
i'm talking about the turing who made the amazing, dead-on prediction in 1950 that in 2000 there would be computers with at least 128MB of memory (see "computing machinery and intelligence"). also, AI can fit on a tape.
i really hope the next matrix doesn't go pseudoscience, pop-philosophy, cheeseball on us. the first movie definitely flirted with disaster a couple of times, but always managed to pull out a witty or well-phrased tidbit of legitimate philsophy or science. with the success of the first film, the wachowski's now have carte blanche to spew out whatever they want. let's hope they're smart about what they include in the film. i fear the influence of eastern philosophy (read: bullshit) and classical western philosophy (read: bullshit) will taint the next two films. what bothers me is that there's so much modern, totally groundbreaking work being done in neuroscience and philosophy of mind that are probably just going to be ignored. i'm talking about guys like dennett, fodor, searle, turing, dawkins, and damassio. why does the matrix have to dig up what some ancient dead guy said from a time when they thought the soul lived inside our pineal glands and that our brains were just radiators (descartes and aristotle, respectively). those guys might have been really smart for their time, but that was a long time ago. today's simpleton's are capable of understanding the natural world in much greater depth than any of the great philosophers or scientists of the distant past.
first, he co-authors the mccain-feingold campaign finance reform bill, which was a very un-politician thing to do. then he makes the politically risky move of speaking at one of the shadow conferences they had a while back, whose purpose was to voice opinions outside of the normal two-party fair. he railed against his own party for being awash in special interest money. that took some balls. then ralph nader endorsed feingold as one of the good guys in a bad congress. and now he's proposed this beautiful piece of legislation that just might make radio suck less. go feingold and go wisconsin!
am i the only one who thinks that anime is wierd and dumb? i'll grant you ghost in the shell and maybe a few others, but pokemon, inuyasha, and cowboy (fucking) beebop. good christ! don't tell me that i'm a xenophobic, cultureless american. don't tell me that coherence gets lost in the translation. there are standards for character and plot development that are universal, which is why i feel confident in dismissing a good 95% anime. you don't include 2.4 million characters in an episode and give them all one (count it) psychological motivation. it's just not done. who gives a shit about increasing your stupid power levels. furthermore, when somebody jumps in the air, they fall back to earth in accordance with the laws of gravity. they do not hang suspended for hours at a time while seizure-inducing blue and red colors zoom by them at high speed. and don't even get me started on anime "humor". there is an adjective that describes what it's like to experience the punchline of an anime joke, and that adjective is "scrotum-exploding".
can anybody suggest some good internet radio stations for a guy who likes: rage against the machine incubus deftones pearl jam jamiroquai soundgarden red hot chili peppers smashing pumpkins ...and all of the rest of the 1991 bands?
the traditional model of theft is something like stealing a candybar from a convenience store. you take something that belongs to someone else and in doing so deprive them of value and the incentive to continue producing/selling candybars. what if, however, instead of walking into the store and outright grabbing the candybar off the shelf, you made a perfect atom-by-atom copy of the candbar, leaving the original unharmed? what if you could make a trillion copies for next to nothing? under such a manufacture/distribution scheme, shouldn't anybody who wants a candybar get a candybar? wouldn't this new system make the old system obsolete? who but the original recipe-holder could be said to "own" the candybar?
sure, that sounds like a lot of storage, but how many full-length german sheizer films can it hold? when will we start setting standards that are actually meaninful?
why is it so damn hard for them to make a easy to use version of linux? the problem of ease-of-use has been solved since the invention of the wizard. you take complex tasks and break them down into steps so simple a child could perform them. why don't they just wizard the hell out of everything? but don't wizards sacrifice functionality and penalize power users, you ask. not if they're implemented correctly they don't. you want to make the task power-user friendly, just insert a step at the beginning that asks the user about his/her skill level (like "advanced mode" or "custom"). problem solved. the real problem is that linux programmers are too technically skilled for their own good. they've lost the ability to relate to joe computer user. kudos to ark for trying to break the mold.
there's nothing inherent about ease-of-use that makes in unstable.
ask somebody from nicaragua, chile, el salvador, east timor, guatemala, sudan, or vietnam about american democracy. you might learn a thing or two about america's idea of self-defense.
you say it, brother.
newsflash: the media (cable news networks and everything) are OWNED, bloody OWNED, by half a dozen gigantic corporations. and they don't tend towards the left side of the fence, billy. as for bernard goldberg's book: from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) http://www.fair.org/articles/bias-op-ed.html
i am smart. i did vote. and i would like to point out that while bush ambles around talking about "strategery" and "the evildoers", the man i voted for is touring the country giving impromptu speeches about "the unrealized possibilities of human existence." his name is ralph nader, and in every possible measure of quality as a human being he is LIGHT YEARS beyond the man who now sits in the white house. while bush was still using alcohol and cocaine, waiting to find jesus, nader had already reformed dozens of industries and government agencies. and i don't think it takes a great intellect to figure out that years of alcohol and drug abuse might affect the speech pathways of the brain.
sigh...
my favorite part was about halfway through when they show henry kissinger (nobel peace prize winner and butcher of chile, e. timor, and vietnam) talking about the importance of strong leadership. queue "dueling banjos" and cut to president bush making an ass of himself ("...the american people...uh..."). i can't be the only person in america who cringes every time the president tries to say something off the top of his head. how in holy hell did a man that profoundly stupid become president of the united states?