your making the assumption that A, B, and C are all enemies, but what about the following scenario.
A is enemies with B. B is enemies with A and C. A and C are completely neutral towards eachother. As A and C have no emnity with eachother it is beneficial for them to be friends.
Another case would be where B is the primary enemy of A. B is also an enemy of C. A and C are enemies- but the problems between A and C are not as great as those between A and B. Therefore it makes more sense for A and C to team up against B, and then settle their differences after B is out of the way.
I have a similar situation, except without the ability to ride over to the office and drop of a disk full of images.
The last job I had involved uploading a lot of high resolution images. It was faily painful to wait 15 minutes to upload a single image, and then get back "X needs to be just a tad more blue", spend 1 minute tweaking the image, and then send it back. Repeat about 100 times a week and that's about 25 hours a week wasted waiting on files to be uploaded.
Agreed. Actually, what I find most annoying is that there seems to be some sort of lockout that actively prevents google earth running on Wine. I've tried installing it with plain ol' wine, crossover office and Cedega and each time the installer pops-up and complains that I'm not running on a Windows OS and promptly closes.
You'd think a company that sponsors things like the Summer of Code would at least let people TRY to get their product running under something like Wine. (Incidentally, how do they even tell the difference between Wine and the actual Windows API? Is there some sort of isWine() function in the Wine APIs that identify it?).
Just to point out, for those who don't seem to know, using Xmas as opposed to Christmas was never an attempt to desecularize the holiday- and has (likely) been in use for a very long time. It originates with the greek letter Chi (Which looks like an english X) and is the first letter of the word christ in greek. Later Constantine added Rho to create the Labarum (chi-rho) symbol which looks like an X and P superimposed.
In other words, X has always been a traditional symbol for Christ, and a such is NOT a means to desecularlize the holiday or "Remove Christ From Christmas".
\not christian
\\wishes christians would stfu about the xmas vs christmas debate
\\\Won't point out that christmas was originally a pagan holiday, because everyone knows that by now.
\\\\hope that clears things up.
They only picked a few games in each genre, which works out because the one article can work for people who only play a few genres. A lot of people (myself included) will probably have time and a bit of extra cash this time of year to play a few new games. It's pretty annoying when you look at list thinking of getting some pointers on games to pick up and 8 of the 10 games are from genres you don't care about (for example, most lists tend to be heavy on FPS, Racing and Sports games. Since I do not play any of these genres of games as a rule, finding out what the best games in these genres are doesn't really help me much).
A bit of a disclaimer, I've done much more development with Java than with C#. That said, I would recommend Java primarily because it's much more versetile. C# may be useful if your using ASP.NET (as much as I loath to admit it, there are some things I, as a PHP developer, really like about ASP.NET/C#), but for Java you can do web development with JSP, plus you're much more likely to find devices like cell phones, pdas, etc. that run Java.
All that said, as other posters have pointed out- the real goal is to begin to understand Object Oriented programming, GUI development and, if you are at DeVry, it will be your first actual programming class. Learn the ideas behind these and you should be able to pick up either language fairly easily.
it's almost certain that however the metadata is implemented, it will not be transferably to Linux or Mac machines (possibly not even between machines running Visa). While I'm generally happy to criticize microsoft for their lack of interoperability, I don't really see this as a bad thing.
For some documents, particularly within an office, it might be useful to share metadata. In this case it might even be possible to share the metadata. I'm not sure how all of the collaberation stuff works with the newer versions of Office but it seems like it would allow metadata to be shared. Outside of work sorts of situations, I would think it to be preferable that each user creates their own metadata for the document.
Imagine Bob and Jane go on vacation to Italy and decide to email me photos. Bob and Jane might have marked metadata on this as "Vacation 2005" or "Italy". Now when I get the photos they certainly have nothing to do with my vacation 2005 or my trip to italy, so I would probably rather mark them as "Bob and Jane" or something like that.
Or what if someone decided to email you a copy of the goatse guy with the metadata labled "Resume" or something.
I second this. I picked up Sonice Mega Collection + a few months ago on a whim, and the saving and loading times are downright painful. It's also aggrevating that there are so many time-release "features" in the game, like requiring you to spend 50 hours on Sonic 2 before you're allowed to play Sonic 2 + Knuckles.
I only payed $8 for the game used, so I'm not going to complain too much, but there are some real issues with it that should have been dealt with and fixed with before the game shipped. I can't imagine why the saving and loading takes so long (my suspision is that the game is actually storing the full state of the game at the moment you save instead of some data that will tell the game where you were when you saved).
Just to point out a few things...
The rope course idea is terrible. It doesn't give you a gauge of how people react to business preassures, willingness to work late, etc. and under no circumstances should anyone experience the same sort of fear at the workplace as they would facing a choice between making it across some sort of obstacle course twenty feet in the air or plummeting to the ground.
The first thing that pops into my mind is what happens if you find a person who is physically unable to do such a course (and really, you can get in trouble for this if you let them go because of it- unless doing rope courses is really necessary for their day to day operations and not just a one-off whim) or who have a fear of heights.
That aside, I think you completely miss the idea of why someone may be only focused on a paycheck when they come to work for you. I will use myself as an example. There are a few companies who actually do interesting things who I would like to work for- so would a lot of other people, so chances are I'll end up working someplace just for a paycheck. This does not mean that I do not care about programming, it just means that I can sit at home and write code without working for you- in fact I can work on projects important to me, maybe contribute to some open source software, and on the whole still do what I enjoy doing, all without working for you. So why don't I do that, because I need money, those annoying little bill things keep comming in the mail, so I'm selling my free time and talents to you, the employer and I certainly am primarily interested in what sort of rumuneration I will receive.
The thing about it is that these machines are built to appeal to people who do not know how to reinstall the OS. While calling them power users may be a bit of a stretch, all of the PC gamers I know are generally computer literate enough to snap the parts together to build a PC, read on-screen directions to install an OS, etc. These same gamers also all build their own machines, because they know what's important to have to get a good gaming rig.
This machine is aimed at people who don't buy games because they don't know if their computer "has enough gigahertz of hard drive", the sort of people who if you did build a computer for them, would get all pissy that you put a GeForce 4 in the machine, and insist on that "voodoo 5" thing they heard about (yes, this happened to me, no I never did manage to convince them that the GeForce was better).
These people can not reinstall an OS. They want to use their PC like a game console- the PC says "gaming" so they should be able to go and buy a game, and it should work. If this machine cannot do that for those people, then it's a poor product.
I agree. I won't even go so far as to say that if I have children I would allow them unlimited time with the computer, to much of a good thing and all that, however I think that computer use is a very difficult thing to put a hard limit on. Would I want my kids to spend 8 hours a day on IRC and AIM? probably not, but would I be happy if they spent a fair amount of that time doing constructive things like using the web to do research and learn new things I would gladly let them while away a day ocassionally.
Of course I think it also depends a lot on the age of the child. I was 16 before we ever got a computer. Speaking as someone who is not a parent, I would venture to guess that by 16 micromanaging a childs time is much less important than whe they are 6. Besides, a 10 or 12 year old will get much more out of activities with their parents, whereas by the time a child gets to 16 or 17 if their interests are significantly different than that of their parents, there may not be a whole lot a parent could teach them (for example, it's easy for a parent to work with a child under 16 or so and help to teach them math, writing, history, etc. Whereas if I had a 16 year-old who was interested in something like, for the sake of argument, biology (something I know very little about), then it would probably be more productive for them to use the net to do research with my encouragement instead of my interference).
I agree with this. My father used to impose rather insane and completely random time limits on just about everything, and the only thing it did effectively was build up anamosity.
For example, computer use was limited to 10 minutes per day. I should point out that this was inclusive of both recreational and academic use. Have a paper due tomorrow that you need to type up? Hope you can type the whole thing out in less than 10 minutes (minus the two to three minutes it took windows to boot up, and the additional five it took for word to start). The internet was pointless as we had an old modem (probably 14 or 28k) and it would take longer to actually sign on and load a page than we were allowed to use the computer.
In the end my Uncle bought me a computer and pretty much told my dad to fark off and gave it to me dispite is oppositions. I can still remember waiting until everyone else fell asleep at night and sneaking out to hook up my modem to the phone line, using NetZero to connect when it was still actually free to do research for school or ssh into the schools server to write and compile my programming assignments.
In the end, all the rules really made me learn was to hate my father and to have a sort of innate gut reaction that most rules are completely asinine (a gut reaction that actually seems to pan out most of the time upon fruther logical examination) and only exists as something to get around.
Remember, it only takes 1 or 2 asinine rules imposed on your kids before they'll assume ALL of your rules are completely without a point and ignore everything you say instead of just the stupid stuff.
I do a fair bit of CGI profesionally, and I have to say a lot of these images and the work people have done in general on rendering humans is really amazing. There is also a lot more to creating a convincing looking human than to creating a photorealistic city, car, office building, etc.
I've seen better images than what were in the wired article (the other site was slashdotted unfortunately), but they were still highly impressive.
A lot of the problem is that skin is one of the most difficult materials to accurately render. Aside from minor imperfections and blemishes that lend realism to an image, it's difficult to manage proper material attributes that look "real". Such as multiple layers, subsurface refraction, bump mapping, reflectivity, etc.
If I weren't afraid of slashdotting my own server I would post some of my own renders, but I am, so I won't.
Anyone got a cached link of the main site? I'd like to have a look at some of the other entries.
That reminds me of one of the first times I every built a computer. Put everything in and booted up the machine to make sure all was ok. System booted up find, so I screwed everything in, screwed the case on, went to boot it up...nothing.
Took me about an hour to realize that the screwing in any of the PCI cards was shorting out the system. Ended up exchanging the case and all was fine.
I'm not one of the militant anti-tv types that you see every once in a while, but do people really need this?
It's been a few years since I've actually had cable tv or any sort of antenna hooked up to watch tv. There are a few shows I have on DVD, but by and large I do not really watch TV. What gets me since I've more or less stopped watching TV is how much of it most people really watch- the fact is that most of the people I know come home from work every day and watch TV until it's time for bed, and spend the better parts of their weekends also watching TV. At school I cannot sit down in the common area and have a conversation with a friend between classes because the two tvs at either end of the room are always blaring, each with dozens of people sitting around them zoning out until it's time for their next class. I was eating pizza the other day at a small pizza shop, and there were several couples and families all sitting around not talking, but watching the big tv in the corner.
When I visit with family members conversations are always broken up into 5 minute segments during commercials, so they don't miss any TV.
It's not even as though most people I talk to really enjoy what they watch most of the time- usually when the conversation turns to something about TV it's how poor the programming is, how many reruns there are, etc. TV is like this big vortex of suck that attracts peoples attention even if they are not enjoying what's on. I know that if I'm in a room with a TV going, and I do not have anything else specifically on my mind, my attention is invariably drawn to the TV- even if it's something on I distain (luckily, after a few years without TV I can simply get up and walk out of the room instead of being mezmerize d by the flickering box).
All this just makes me wonder, do people really need, or even want, to have constant access to television? What will happen if these become ubiquitous and everyone has access to a TV all the time? I'm not saying the technology is bad, just that there may be consequences of it that go unseen because everyone is looking at their 2" television screen.
I doubt that the 360 will do much better than the original xbox in japan, because it seems to have the same problem as it's predecessor, which is to say that the box is about a quarter the size of the average living room in japan.
In a country where melons are grown inside glass boxes so they are rectangular so they can more efficiently fit into the average apartment, and combining a TV with a fridge is a reasonable space-saving appliance, how can the large and unwieldy 360 appeal to consumers there?
I don't think a lot of the games will do it, AFAIK first person shooters are not very popular in japan.
In fact, I think the biggest obstacle is that japanese games are more popular in the west than western games are popular in japan.
Hmm, I'm using Photoshop CS2, I'll have to check it out. Been using photoshop professionally for going on 6 years, amazing what sort of things you never realize.
Thanks!
Actually, I think this brings up a good point. I do a lot of image editing, and I'm often saving different revisions of the file, if something doesn't work out quite the way I wanted, I can go back to an earlier revision and start there. If a client doesn't care for the end image I've created, it's easy to go back to an earlier revision and make some changes than to have to start over from scratch, or try to add the changes later.
What I end up with are directories for an image where I have "filename-1","filename-2","filename-2-1","filename -2-2"...."filename-6-3-1-3-2-1-3..."
It would be nice to have some sort of way to "save as transaction" or something so that the software could manage multiple revisions like this.
I support all the soldiers who joined before or around the time that 9/11 happened, all the people who beleived that they were protecting their country.
I cannot however support the soldiers who joined after it became apparent that there were many things deeply wrong with the war and with the current regime.
The former are bound to follow the orders of the regime, and joined for noble reasons, the ladder joined in support of a war that was revealed to be unjust and the regime that declared it.
I know that it's an unpopular sentiment, but I think soldiers should be held accountable if they join knowing what the system they are joining into is doing
Now mods, I challenge you to respond to this comment instead of simply modding it down. /didn't post anonymously //stand by what I say ///to much fark, too many slashies
There are no sites censored by default, but there is a handy command in Edbuntu to help filter sites you don't want you kids to see, just drop to a shell and run vi/etc/hosts
as root.:)
Actually, this brings up one of the things that I think might hurt the Revolutions backwards compatibility. I have a pretty large collection of NES, SNES and N64 roms. The main reason I use emulators for these systems is that I simply do not have room to have all of them hooked up to my TV along with a Game Cube, PS2, DVD player, etc.
The other thing though, is that a lot of these emulators offer a lot of additional features, cheat finders being a big one. Being able to use game genie or PAR replay codes, and modify the memory of the game as it's running to create cheats can add a lot of life to older games.
While nintendo has said that some of the older games might get graphical improvements- presumably though the use of video filters that modern emulators user- I find it dubious that they will include some of the features like cheat finders that are available in modern emulators.
There used to be a very successful game store not too far from my house. They just closed down a few months ago to go to a bigger building in a better location (the old place was in a building back behind a liquor store- not very inviting for parents who would drop their kids off there and completely invisible unless you knew it was there).
Anyway, this place did a pretty good job of staying busy dispite it's abysmal location. Here are a few things they did that might help you.
First, instead of those crappy displays with the 10" televisions to try games on, they had a 52" bigscreen with a very nice couch situated in front of it, in a little corner, with surround sound. If there was a console game you were itching to try you could play it on the nice screen for as long as you wanted (unless someone was waiting behind you, then it was a 20minute time limit).
The shop also did not focus exclusively on console video games. They had small LAN area set up where people could pay $10 for an hour on the computers playing a very large selection of games.
To cater to the PC gamers, they kept a few things in stock like mice, mousepads, etc. They even offered a service to recommend and order parts for gamers and would install them into their PCs. They also had LAN tournements about once a month.
To round off the gaming trinity, they also dice, figurines, D&D books, etc. The store had a couple of tables set up in the back for groups to come and roleplay, with a soda and snack machine of course.
It also helped that the people who worked at the shop where honest. If someone asked for a game that sucked, the most common answer would be "We didn't order any of that game because it's terrible, but if you reaaally want it, we can order it for you. You might like $game better though".
Anyway, the point is that they did a lot of things to encourage gamers to hang out. In the end it felt less like a shop, and more like a place for gamers to hang out that just handily happened to sell stuff too.
Anyway, here are a few other tips that are not specific to that game shop.
A lot of people who come to trade games in get pissed. I have a friend who works at gamestop and tells me that at least 3 or 4 times a day, someone will come in with an old version of Madden or something from like the SNES or Genesis days, and want to trade it for the latest and greatest version. When they find out it doesnt work like that, they get PISSED.
Gamestop, at least, has stopped dealing in older and less popular systems like the SNES or the Saturn. You could probably get some business just by dealing with systems dropped by the larger chains.
Friend of mine who works at Gamestop says they have gotten a lot of repeat customers in parents buying games for their kids because they have a policy of politely letting parents know about content in games. Not that they refuse to sell it, but if someone walks in with a 12 year old and buys the latest Grand Theft Auto, they make it a point of pointing out the ESRB ratings anyway. (dons asbestos suit for inevitable flamewar about parents, kids, stores, and game ratings)(I think this is a store policy, not a "all teh gamestops evar" policy).
Lastly, it would be really nice to have a website where customers could search to see if you have a specific game in stock, or reserve things online. Don't know of any local stores that do this, but it seems like it would be convienent if available.
You know, I hear a lot of people say this, and while I have no direct first hand experience with it, I'm inclined to beleive it probably happens. I suspect that a lot of this is caused by the fact that IM, message boards, etc. are something between spoken conversation and writing.
Traditionally, even non-formal writing has been a great deal more formal than conversation, for the fact that when you were writing something, due to the nature of the medium for communication, you had to think about what you wanted to say, write it down, and make sure that the other person could understand it.
Most people do not want to write a letter to someone, and get a letter back a few weeks that just says "what?". Indeed, I think that most people would not even bother answering a letter if it were incoherent enough that they would have to write back requesting explanation.
The same thing applies even moreso to papers, articles, and books. Nobody would write a book and not bother to correct glaring omissions or unclear chapters, and the author most certainly would not expect a majority of readers to compose letters responding to points in the book, and for the author to compose replies to those letters. Let alone to send out copies of all correspondences regarding the book to everyone who has read to book so that everyone can keep up on the developments of the ideas in the book as prompted by the communications of readers.
With email, IM, and Blogs though, it's perfectly acceptable to omit ideas or to be unclear, because communication is cheap and instantaneous.
In other words, with the Internet, the audience has moved from being a passive target to a living and interactive body of people, and even the published word is mutable, changed or appended with ease.
What it comes down to then, I think, is that a lot of the problems with peoples writing stems not from a complete inability to write (I think people today are probably better writers than in the last 50 or 100 years, simply because they write so much more often), but in the inability to accurately determine their target audience, and conceive of a target audience wich is completely non-interactive with the author.
Bellatrix LeStrange was Black's cousin. There was concern that the black family posessions might go to Bellatrix after Sirius's death, even though Sirius has explicitly left Harry everything he owned. Dumbledor settled this in chapter 3 of HBP when he asked harry to call Kreacher and give him an order. Kreacher being forced to follow Harry's orders proved that Harry was indeed the rightful owner of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, and presumably, the black fortune.
Slashdot Mirror
your making the assumption that A, B, and C are all enemies, but what about the following scenario.
A is enemies with B. B is enemies with A and C. A and C are completely neutral towards eachother. As A and C have no emnity with eachother it is beneficial for them to be friends.
Another case would be where B is the primary enemy of A. B is also an enemy of C. A and C are enemies- but the problems between A and C are not as great as those between A and B. Therefore it makes more sense for A and C to team up against B, and then settle their differences after B is out of the way.
I have a similar situation, except without the ability to ride over to the office and drop of a disk full of images.
The last job I had involved uploading a lot of high resolution images. It was faily painful to wait 15 minutes to upload a single image, and then get back "X needs to be just a tad more blue", spend 1 minute tweaking the image, and then send it back. Repeat about 100 times a week and that's about 25 hours a week wasted waiting on files to be uploaded.
I always thought slashdot should have some slashies.
Isn't the web big enough for more than one site with slashies?
Agreed. Actually, what I find most annoying is that there seems to be some sort of lockout that actively prevents google earth running on Wine. I've tried installing it with plain ol' wine, crossover office and Cedega and each time the installer pops-up and complains that I'm not running on a Windows OS and promptly closes.
You'd think a company that sponsors things like the Summer of Code would at least let people TRY to get their product running under something like Wine. (Incidentally, how do they even tell the difference between Wine and the actual Windows API? Is there some sort of isWine() function in the Wine APIs that identify it?).
Just to point out, for those who don't seem to know, using Xmas as opposed to Christmas was never an attempt to desecularize the holiday- and has (likely) been in use for a very long time. It originates with the greek letter Chi (Which looks like an english X) and is the first letter of the word christ in greek. Later Constantine added Rho to create the Labarum (chi-rho) symbol which looks like an X and P superimposed.
In other words, X has always been a traditional symbol for Christ, and a such is NOT a means to desecularlize the holiday or "Remove Christ From Christmas".
\not christian
\\wishes christians would stfu about the xmas vs christmas debate
\\\Won't point out that christmas was originally a pagan holiday, because everyone knows that by now.
\\\\hope that clears things up.
They only picked a few games in each genre, which works out because the one article can work for people who only play a few genres. A lot of people (myself included) will probably have time and a bit of extra cash this time of year to play a few new games. It's pretty annoying when you look at list thinking of getting some pointers on games to pick up and 8 of the 10 games are from genres you don't care about (for example, most lists tend to be heavy on FPS, Racing and Sports games. Since I do not play any of these genres of games as a rule, finding out what the best games in these genres are doesn't really help me much).
A bit of a disclaimer, I've done much more development with Java than with C#. That said, I would recommend Java primarily because it's much more versetile. C# may be useful if your using ASP.NET (as much as I loath to admit it, there are some things I, as a PHP developer, really like about ASP.NET/C#), but for Java you can do web development with JSP, plus you're much more likely to find devices like cell phones, pdas, etc. that run Java.
All that said, as other posters have pointed out- the real goal is to begin to understand Object Oriented programming, GUI development and, if you are at DeVry, it will be your first actual programming class. Learn the ideas behind these and you should be able to pick up either language fairly easily.
it's almost certain that however the metadata is implemented, it will not be transferably to Linux or Mac machines (possibly not even between machines running Visa). While I'm generally happy to criticize microsoft for their lack of interoperability, I don't really see this as a bad thing.
For some documents, particularly within an office, it might be useful to share metadata. In this case it might even be possible to share the metadata. I'm not sure how all of the collaberation stuff works with the newer versions of Office but it seems like it would allow metadata to be shared. Outside of work sorts of situations, I would think it to be preferable that each user creates their own metadata for the document.
Imagine Bob and Jane go on vacation to Italy and decide to email me photos. Bob and Jane might have marked metadata on this as "Vacation 2005" or "Italy". Now when I get the photos they certainly have nothing to do with my vacation 2005 or my trip to italy, so I would probably rather mark them as "Bob and Jane" or something like that.
Or what if someone decided to email you a copy of the goatse guy with the metadata labled "Resume" or something.
I second this. I picked up Sonice Mega Collection + a few months ago on a whim, and the saving and loading times are downright painful. It's also aggrevating that there are so many time-release "features" in the game, like requiring you to spend 50 hours on Sonic 2 before you're allowed to play Sonic 2 + Knuckles.
I only payed $8 for the game used, so I'm not going to complain too much, but there are some real issues with it that should have been dealt with and fixed with before the game shipped. I can't imagine why the saving and loading takes so long (my suspision is that the game is actually storing the full state of the game at the moment you save instead of some data that will tell the game where you were when you saved).
Just to point out a few things...
The rope course idea is terrible. It doesn't give you a gauge of how people react to business preassures, willingness to work late, etc. and under no circumstances should anyone experience the same sort of fear at the workplace as they would facing a choice between making it across some sort of obstacle course twenty feet in the air or plummeting to the ground.
The first thing that pops into my mind is what happens if you find a person who is physically unable to do such a course (and really, you can get in trouble for this if you let them go because of it- unless doing rope courses is really necessary for their day to day operations and not just a one-off whim) or who have a fear of heights.
That aside, I think you completely miss the idea of why someone may be only focused on a paycheck when they come to work for you. I will use myself as an example. There are a few companies who actually do interesting things who I would like to work for- so would a lot of other people, so chances are I'll end up working someplace just for a paycheck. This does not mean that I do not care about programming, it just means that I can sit at home and write code without working for you- in fact I can work on projects important to me, maybe contribute to some open source software, and on the whole still do what I enjoy doing, all without working for you. So why don't I do that, because I need money, those annoying little bill things keep comming in the mail, so I'm selling my free time and talents to you, the employer and I certainly am primarily interested in what sort of rumuneration I will receive.
The thing about it is that these machines are built to appeal to people who do not know how to reinstall the OS. While calling them power users may be a bit of a stretch, all of the PC gamers I know are generally computer literate enough to snap the parts together to build a PC, read on-screen directions to install an OS, etc. These same gamers also all build their own machines, because they know what's important to have to get a good gaming rig.
This machine is aimed at people who don't buy games because they don't know if their computer "has enough gigahertz of hard drive", the sort of people who if you did build a computer for them, would get all pissy that you put a GeForce 4 in the machine, and insist on that "voodoo 5" thing they heard about (yes, this happened to me, no I never did manage to convince them that the GeForce was better).
These people can not reinstall an OS. They want to use their PC like a game console- the PC says "gaming" so they should be able to go and buy a game, and it should work. If this machine cannot do that for those people, then it's a poor product.
I agree. I won't even go so far as to say that if I have children I would allow them unlimited time with the computer, to much of a good thing and all that, however I think that computer use is a very difficult thing to put a hard limit on. Would I want my kids to spend 8 hours a day on IRC and AIM? probably not, but would I be happy if they spent a fair amount of that time doing constructive things like using the web to do research and learn new things I would gladly let them while away a day ocassionally.
Of course I think it also depends a lot on the age of the child. I was 16 before we ever got a computer. Speaking as someone who is not a parent, I would venture to guess that by 16 micromanaging a childs time is much less important than whe they are 6. Besides, a 10 or 12 year old will get much more out of activities with their parents, whereas by the time a child gets to 16 or 17 if their interests are significantly different than that of their parents, there may not be a whole lot a parent could teach them (for example, it's easy for a parent to work with a child under 16 or so and help to teach them math, writing, history, etc. Whereas if I had a 16 year-old who was interested in something like, for the sake of argument, biology (something I know very little about), then it would probably be more productive for them to use the net to do research with my encouragement instead of my interference).
I agree with this. My father used to impose rather insane and completely random time limits on just about everything, and the only thing it did effectively was build up anamosity.
For example, computer use was limited to 10 minutes per day. I should point out that this was inclusive of both recreational and academic use. Have a paper due tomorrow that you need to type up? Hope you can type the whole thing out in less than 10 minutes (minus the two to three minutes it took windows to boot up, and the additional five it took for word to start). The internet was pointless as we had an old modem (probably 14 or 28k) and it would take longer to actually sign on and load a page than we were allowed to use the computer.
In the end my Uncle bought me a computer and pretty much told my dad to fark off and gave it to me dispite is oppositions. I can still remember waiting until everyone else fell asleep at night and sneaking out to hook up my modem to the phone line, using NetZero to connect when it was still actually free to do research for school or ssh into the schools server to write and compile my programming assignments.
In the end, all the rules really made me learn was to hate my father and to have a sort of innate gut reaction that most rules are completely asinine (a gut reaction that actually seems to pan out most of the time upon fruther logical examination) and only exists as something to get around.
Remember, it only takes 1 or 2 asinine rules imposed on your kids before they'll assume ALL of your rules are completely without a point and ignore everything you say instead of just the stupid stuff.
I do a fair bit of CGI profesionally, and I have to say a lot of these images and the work people have done in general on rendering humans is really amazing. There is also a lot more to creating a convincing looking human than to creating a photorealistic city, car, office building, etc.
I've seen better images than what were in the wired article (the other site was slashdotted unfortunately), but they were still highly impressive.
A lot of the problem is that skin is one of the most difficult materials to accurately render. Aside from minor imperfections and blemishes that lend realism to an image, it's difficult to manage proper material attributes that look "real". Such as multiple layers, subsurface refraction, bump mapping, reflectivity, etc.
If I weren't afraid of slashdotting my own server I would post some of my own renders, but I am, so I won't.
Anyone got a cached link of the main site? I'd like to have a look at some of the other entries.
That reminds me of one of the first times I every built a computer. Put everything in and booted up the machine to make sure all was ok. System booted up find, so I screwed everything in, screwed the case on, went to boot it up...nothing.
Took me about an hour to realize that the screwing in any of the PCI cards was shorting out the system. Ended up exchanging the case and all was fine.
I'm not one of the militant anti-tv types that you see every once in a while, but do people really need this?
It's been a few years since I've actually had cable tv or any sort of antenna hooked up to watch tv. There are a few shows I have on DVD, but by and large I do not really watch TV. What gets me since I've more or less stopped watching TV is how much of it most people really watch- the fact is that most of the people I know come home from work every day and watch TV until it's time for bed, and spend the better parts of their weekends also watching TV. At school I cannot sit down in the common area and have a conversation with a friend between classes because the two tvs at either end of the room are always blaring, each with dozens of people sitting around them zoning out until it's time for their next class. I was eating pizza the other day at a small pizza shop, and there were several couples and families all sitting around not talking, but watching the big tv in the corner. When I visit with family members conversations are always broken up into 5 minute segments during commercials, so they don't miss any TV.
It's not even as though most people I talk to really enjoy what they watch most of the time- usually when the conversation turns to something about TV it's how poor the programming is, how many reruns there are, etc. TV is like this big vortex of suck that attracts peoples attention even if they are not enjoying what's on. I know that if I'm in a room with a TV going, and I do not have anything else specifically on my mind, my attention is invariably drawn to the TV- even if it's something on I distain (luckily, after a few years without TV I can simply get up and walk out of the room instead of being mezmerize d by the flickering box).
All this just makes me wonder, do people really need, or even want, to have constant access to television? What will happen if these become ubiquitous and everyone has access to a TV all the time? I'm not saying the technology is bad, just that there may be consequences of it that go unseen because everyone is looking at their 2" television screen.
I doubt that the 360 will do much better than the original xbox in japan, because it seems to have the same problem as it's predecessor, which is to say that the box is about a quarter the size of the average living room in japan.
In a country where melons are grown inside glass boxes so they are rectangular so they can more efficiently fit into the average apartment, and combining a TV with a fridge is a reasonable space-saving appliance, how can the large and unwieldy 360 appeal to consumers there?
I don't think a lot of the games will do it, AFAIK first person shooters are not very popular in japan.
In fact, I think the biggest obstacle is that japanese games are more popular in the west than western games are popular in japan.
Hmm, I'm using Photoshop CS2, I'll have to check it out. Been using photoshop professionally for going on 6 years, amazing what sort of things you never realize.
Thanks!
Actually, I think this brings up a good point. I do a lot of image editing, and I'm often saving different revisions of the file, if something doesn't work out quite the way I wanted, I can go back to an earlier revision and start there. If a client doesn't care for the end image I've created, it's easy to go back to an earlier revision and make some changes than to have to start over from scratch, or try to add the changes later.e -2-2"...."filename-6-3-1-3-2-1-3..."
What I end up with are directories for an image where I have "filename-1","filename-2","filename-2-1","filenam
It would be nice to have some sort of way to "save as transaction" or something so that the software could manage multiple revisions like this.
I support all the soldiers who joined before or around the time that 9/11 happened, all the people who beleived that they were protecting their country.
/didn't post anonymously
//stand by what I say
///to much fark, too many slashies
I cannot however support the soldiers who joined after it became apparent that there were many things deeply wrong with the war and with the current regime.
The former are bound to follow the orders of the regime, and joined for noble reasons, the ladder joined in support of a war that was revealed to be unjust and the regime that declared it.
I know that it's an unpopular sentiment, but I think soldiers should be held accountable if they join knowing what the system they are joining into is doing
Now mods, I challenge you to respond to this comment instead of simply modding it down.
There are no sites censored by default, but there is a handy command in Edbuntu to help filter sites you don't want you kids to see, just drop to a shell and run /etc/hosts :)
vi
as root.
Actually, this brings up one of the things that I think might hurt the Revolutions backwards compatibility. I have a pretty large collection of NES, SNES and N64 roms. The main reason I use emulators for these systems is that I simply do not have room to have all of them hooked up to my TV along with a Game Cube, PS2, DVD player, etc.
The other thing though, is that a lot of these emulators offer a lot of additional features, cheat finders being a big one. Being able to use game genie or PAR replay codes, and modify the memory of the game as it's running to create cheats can add a lot of life to older games.
While nintendo has said that some of the older games might get graphical improvements- presumably though the use of video filters that modern emulators user- I find it dubious that they will include some of the features like cheat finders that are available in modern emulators.
There used to be a very successful game store not too far from my house. They just closed down a few months ago to go to a bigger building in a better location (the old place was in a building back behind a liquor store- not very inviting for parents who would drop their kids off there and completely invisible unless you knew it was there).
Anyway, this place did a pretty good job of staying busy dispite it's abysmal location. Here are a few things they did that might help you.
First, instead of those crappy displays with the 10" televisions to try games on, they had a 52" bigscreen with a very nice couch situated in front of it, in a little corner, with surround sound. If there was a console game you were itching to try you could play it on the nice screen for as long as you wanted (unless someone was waiting behind you, then it was a 20minute time limit).
The shop also did not focus exclusively on console video games. They had small LAN area set up where people could pay $10 for an hour on the computers playing a very large selection of games.
To cater to the PC gamers, they kept a few things in stock like mice, mousepads, etc. They even offered a service to recommend and order parts for gamers and would install them into their PCs. They also had LAN tournements about once a month.
To round off the gaming trinity, they also dice, figurines, D&D books, etc. The store had a couple of tables set up in the back for groups to come and roleplay, with a soda and snack machine of course.
It also helped that the people who worked at the shop where honest. If someone asked for a game that sucked, the most common answer would be "We didn't order any of that game because it's terrible, but if you reaaally want it, we can order it for you. You might like $game better though".
Anyway, the point is that they did a lot of things to encourage gamers to hang out. In the end it felt less like a shop, and more like a place for gamers to hang out that just handily happened to sell stuff too.
Anyway, here are a few other tips that are not specific to that game shop.
A lot of people who come to trade games in get pissed. I have a friend who works at gamestop and tells me that at least 3 or 4 times a day, someone will come in with an old version of Madden or something from like the SNES or Genesis days, and want to trade it for the latest and greatest version. When they find out it doesnt work like that, they get PISSED.
Gamestop, at least, has stopped dealing in older and less popular systems like the SNES or the Saturn. You could probably get some business just by dealing with systems dropped by the larger chains.
Friend of mine who works at Gamestop says they have gotten a lot of repeat customers in parents buying games for their kids because they have a policy of politely letting parents know about content in games. Not that they refuse to sell it, but if someone walks in with a 12 year old and buys the latest Grand Theft Auto, they make it a point of pointing out the ESRB ratings anyway. (dons asbestos suit for inevitable flamewar about parents, kids, stores, and game ratings)(I think this is a store policy, not a "all teh gamestops evar" policy).
Lastly, it would be really nice to have a website where customers could search to see if you have a specific game in stock, or reserve things online. Don't know of any local stores that do this, but it seems like it would be convienent if available.
You know, I hear a lot of people say this, and while I have no direct first hand experience with it, I'm inclined to beleive it probably happens. I suspect that a lot of this is caused by the fact that IM, message boards, etc. are something between spoken conversation and writing.
Traditionally, even non-formal writing has been a great deal more formal than conversation, for the fact that when you were writing something, due to the nature of the medium for communication, you had to think about what you wanted to say, write it down, and make sure that the other person could understand it.
Most people do not want to write a letter to someone, and get a letter back a few weeks that just says "what?". Indeed, I think that most people would not even bother answering a letter if it were incoherent enough that they would have to write back requesting explanation.
The same thing applies even moreso to papers, articles, and books. Nobody would write a book and not bother to correct glaring omissions or unclear chapters, and the author most certainly would not expect a majority of readers to compose letters responding to points in the book, and for the author to compose replies to those letters. Let alone to send out copies of all correspondences regarding the book to everyone who has read to book so that everyone can keep up on the developments of the ideas in the book as prompted by the communications of readers.
With email, IM, and Blogs though, it's perfectly acceptable to omit ideas or to be unclear, because communication is cheap and instantaneous.
In other words, with the Internet, the audience has moved from being a passive target to a living and interactive body of people, and even the published word is mutable, changed or appended with ease.
What it comes down to then, I think, is that a lot of the problems with peoples writing stems not from a complete inability to write (I think people today are probably better writers than in the last 50 or 100 years, simply because they write so much more often), but in the inability to accurately determine their target audience, and conceive of a target audience wich is completely non-interactive with the author.
Bellatrix LeStrange was Black's cousin. There was concern that the black family posessions might go to Bellatrix after Sirius's death, even though Sirius has explicitly left Harry everything he owned. Dumbledor settled this in chapter 3 of HBP when he asked harry to call Kreacher and give him an order. Kreacher being forced to follow Harry's orders proved that Harry was indeed the rightful owner of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, and presumably, the black fortune.