There was an old game called I-War that did this. It was really cool. Flying a spaceship using realistic physics is extremely different from a standard flight sim. For instance, one bombing technique was to fire thrusters to the side of the target, turn to point directly at it and then fire thrusters at just the right amount to "orbit" the target. Really fun.
There had been plans to make a B5 game using realistic physics and from what I heard, they got fairly far before the project was canceled because they didn't think it'd get sales with the show being over.
If that AGP card is being used to generate a $ prompt (i.e. X is not running), it is extremely unlikely it is hitting its maximum power usage...or even a tenth of its maximum power usage.
If I were the original story author, the first thing I would do would be to plug in a Kill-o-watt and determine exactly what the power consumption was, before going through lots of effort to get rid of the card.
Why not just put the AGP card in a box next to the machine and put it back in if you ever get in a situation where it doesn't respond to SSH?
But how much power do you really think you are saving, here? If the original card was some ass-kicker power hungry thing aimed at gamers, your best bet might be to just go spend $15 on some low-end crappy (and low power consuming) graphics card. Hell...most self respecting geeks I know have ten of those in their garage.
Because I have seen resumes from people that claimed 10+ years of C++ who could not answer the question "how do you declare an abstract class in C++?"
That is not a joke. Absolutely true.
Maybe you don't need a class for a particular task, and maybe you are God's gift to programming, but until you display that knowledge, I can't take your resume's word for it. I've found it *extremely* useful to ask the above in phone interviews because it allows me to get rid of the idiots without wasting too much of my time.
Anyone can put "15 years experience" on a resume, and there are plenty of complete idiots who have managed to get that much experience. I've had the misfortune to work with at least two different people who had over 15 years experience but were completely incompetent as programmers.
When I interview, I give questions that don't have one right answer...if you give me an answer that works, awesome. But plenty of people with "15 years experience" give "er...uh..." followed by vague or unworkable solutions as an answer. That pretty much validates the need.
"15 years experience" on a resume means nothing unless followed up with either a display of competence in a testing situation are a trustworthy personal recommendation.
Speaking as someone who interviewed 30+ people over the last year: I can ask you a whole bunch of questions and listen to your answers, or I can sit you in a room and have you write down the answers and spend a 1/4 of the time going over those answers to see if they are right. Given that, in my estimation, 3/4s of the people I've interviewed were almost entirely incompetent at the technical skills claimed on their resume, I've been increasingly tempted to take the later route to save myself the time.
Given the number of people claiming to be ubergurus who know jack shit, some sort of test, either in person in an interview session or with some kind of test is a requirement. The way to identify competence is to ask questions taht require it to be displayed. This can be done verbally in an interview or with pen and paper.
Personally, I prefer interviews that include tests, because it means that the company is more interested in knowledge and skill than ability to bullshit in an interview. I've met plenty of people in interviews who could talk a mile a minute about any buzzword you could name but got the deer in the headlights look if you asked them to solve the simplest problem with code.
In my case, I noticed that the population figure for a major city didn't match the value given in the reference the wiki page linked to, so I change it to the correct one. I did this three times, and every time it was reverted. It is hard to imagine how I could have done something more valid than making a post to match the damn citation. My impression is that someone considered it their pet page and was reverting my changes immediately, without bothering to research because they didn't recognize my username.
What I find most amusing about this story is that the last time I read lots of handwringing about how a movie was massively over budget and was headed for disaster was for a James Cameron film called "Titanic".
So you are saying that jobs are fleeing from the US to China because the US is becoming "redistributionist"?
You might want to investigate the political and economic system of China before you hold them up as an alternative to Obama's "socialism".
What is driving "offshoring" is not taxes, it's pure free-market forces. Labor is more expensive here than it is there, so companies attempt to cut costs by moving the labor there. Companies don't increase presence in China because the US raises taxes 5%. They move to China because they can hire a college educated engineer there for $15k a year.
Legally speaking, there is a huge difference between covering someone else's song and using the actual audio of their performance. An artist cannot prevent their own song from being covered, hence this.
The issue isn't singing someone else's song, as that has a long, long tradition and is not prevented legally. The question is whether you should be able to take the Beatles master tapes, muck around with them, and release the result without either their permission or paying them.
Sounds like my experience. I made a fix to something that was obviously wrong. (Referred to a "2006 census". It was reverted. Changed the text again with a more explicit note. My change was reverted and changed to refer to a source. I noticed that the number in the text was not the same as the source and so fixed the number. This was reverted. Only after doing this again and explicitly calling out the original text as wrong did it stick.
It was very clear that my changes were being reverted out of hand, without thought.
Darwin's theory describes how the evolution occurs through the process of mutation and natural selections. Mutation is a core part of the theory, as core as selection.
This is why a lot of libraries use something else. GPL requires anyone who uses their code to open their own code. BSD style licenses don't. Hence companies that don't want to open their code use libraries using BSD style licenses. Hence projects that use BSD licenses tend to be more popular. (This is also why anyone more concerned with widespread adoption than open source, like a language author or a format proponent, chooses a BSD style license.)
The thing is, genes can very rarely determine results...they can just change statistical likelihoods. If the mutation causes the adult to be 4% stronger, it can't really effect whether the animal gets eaten as a little fluffy baby. In that sense, it takes luck, essentially, for the gene to get to the point where it can have an effect.
A mutation may be beneficial, but luck may mean that some times the gene gets wiped out when limited to a single individual anyway. The case you are talking about, the instant when an individual represents the first mutation, is pretty much the only time when the fate of one individual matters, an even then, not really as the same mutation may independently arise in more than one. A 4% increase in strength is beneficial, but if the first creature who randomly gets dealt that mutation gets struck by lightening, it won't matter a damn. It is only really when the mutation flows into the population as a whole that evolution becomes more deterministic because it is only then that the slight differences in survival rates can swamp random chance.
No...it is about populations. Individuals die. Evolution happens when genes spread through populations. It is a very common error to think that evolution has anything to do with optimizing the success of the individual.
It's cost/benefits. Imagine an animal. Now tweak it slightly. That tweak may increase the incidence of some sorts of death and decrease the incidence of other sorts of death. Does the one outweigh the other? If so, over time, there will be more and more animals with that tweak.
That's evolution in a nutshell.
Evolution means that if a change that makes humans 10% smarter and therefore much more successful hunters and therefore less likely to starve but means a 4% increased infant mortality then that change will spread throughout the population.
Remember that it is not about individuals...it is about populations. Look at how the human mind and body works and breaks down and tells me if it looks like something designed to be optimal, or something randomly created that balances efficiencies and deficiencies to maximize broad statistical success of reproduction. In which worldview does cancer make sense?
Not to mention that Evolution is an algorithm that very much suffers from local maxima. Even given infinite time, creatures might not become perfectly adapted.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an old game called I-War that did this. It was really cool. Flying a spaceship using realistic physics is extremely different from a standard flight sim. For instance, one bombing technique was to fire thrusters to the side of the target, turn to point directly at it and then fire thrusters at just the right amount to "orbit" the target. Really fun.
There had been plans to make a B5 game using realistic physics and from what I heard, they got fairly far before the project was canceled because they didn't think it'd get sales with the show being over.
If that AGP card is being used to generate a $ prompt (i.e. X is not running), it is extremely unlikely it is hitting its maximum power usage...or even a tenth of its maximum power usage.
If I were the original story author, the first thing I would do would be to plug in a Kill-o-watt and determine exactly what the power consumption was, before going through lots of effort to get rid of the card.
I think it is more about making themselves happy.
Why not just put the AGP card in a box next to the machine and put it back in if you ever get in a situation where it doesn't respond to SSH?
But how much power do you really think you are saving, here? If the original card was some ass-kicker power hungry thing aimed at gamers, your best bet might be to just go spend $15 on some low-end crappy (and low power consuming) graphics card. Hell...most self respecting geeks I know have ten of those in their garage.
Good programmers *never* copy and paste. They move the code into a function and call that. (Or otherwise refactor.)
Yes. There are a lot of crappy tests out there. That doesn't mean testing in general is worthless.
Because I have seen resumes from people that claimed 10+ years of C++ who could not answer the question "how do you declare an abstract class in C++?"
That is not a joke. Absolutely true.
Maybe you don't need a class for a particular task, and maybe you are God's gift to programming, but until you display that knowledge, I can't take your resume's word for it. I've found it *extremely* useful to ask the above in phone interviews because it allows me to get rid of the idiots without wasting too much of my time.
Anyone can put "15 years experience" on a resume, and there are plenty of complete idiots who have managed to get that much experience. I've had the misfortune to work with at least two different people who had over 15 years experience but were completely incompetent as programmers.
When I interview, I give questions that don't have one right answer...if you give me an answer that works, awesome. But plenty of people with "15 years experience" give "er...uh..." followed by vague or unworkable solutions as an answer. That pretty much validates the need.
"15 years experience" on a resume means nothing unless followed up with either a display of competence in a testing situation are a trustworthy personal recommendation.
Speaking as someone who interviewed 30+ people over the last year: I can ask you a whole bunch of questions and listen to your answers, or I can sit you in a room and have you write down the answers and spend a 1/4 of the time going over those answers to see if they are right. Given that, in my estimation, 3/4s of the people I've interviewed were almost entirely incompetent at the technical skills claimed on their resume, I've been increasingly tempted to take the later route to save myself the time.
Given the number of people claiming to be ubergurus who know jack shit, some sort of test, either in person in an interview session or with some kind of test is a requirement. The way to identify competence is to ask questions taht require it to be displayed. This can be done verbally in an interview or with pen and paper.
Personally, I prefer interviews that include tests, because it means that the company is more interested in knowledge and skill than ability to bullshit in an interview. I've met plenty of people in interviews who could talk a mile a minute about any buzzword you could name but got the deer in the headlights look if you asked them to solve the simplest problem with code.
The Massachusetts colony did not have a profitable product for many decades and was quite as successful as Jamestown.
In my case, I noticed that the population figure for a major city didn't match the value given in the reference the wiki page linked to, so I change it to the correct one. I did this three times, and every time it was reverted. It is hard to imagine how I could have done something more valid than making a post to match the damn citation. My impression is that someone considered it their pet page and was reverting my changes immediately, without bothering to research because they didn't recognize my username.
It's been divided like this for years, as anyone non-anointed who has tried a perfectly accurate revision well knows.
What I find most amusing about this story is that the last time I read lots of handwringing about how a movie was massively over budget and was headed for disaster was for a James Cameron film called "Titanic".
So you are saying that jobs are fleeing from the US to China because the US is becoming "redistributionist"?
You might want to investigate the political and economic system of China before you hold them up as an alternative to Obama's "socialism".
What is driving "offshoring" is not taxes, it's pure free-market forces. Labor is more expensive here than it is there, so companies attempt to cut costs by moving the labor there. Companies don't increase presence in China because the US raises taxes 5%. They move to China because they can hire a college educated engineer there for $15k a year.
I think I first read it on talk.computers in 1984.
I don't get it. Why do people just press buttons to make a pixelated sky move around when they could fly a real plane!?
I don't get it. Why do people press buttons in a certain order to make a virtual person through a football when they could go play in the park!?
I don't get it. Why do people move a plastic wheel around to move a fake car around a track when they could take their own car to a racetrack!?
Legally speaking, there is a huge difference between covering someone else's song and using the actual audio of their performance. An artist cannot prevent their own song from being covered, hence this.
The issue isn't singing someone else's song, as that has a long, long tradition and is not prevented legally. The question is whether you should be able to take the Beatles master tapes, muck around with them, and release the result without either their permission or paying them.
Sounds like my experience. I made a fix to something that was obviously wrong. (Referred to a "2006 census". It was reverted. Changed the text again with a more explicit note. My change was reverted and changed to refer to a source. I noticed that the number in the text was not the same as the source and so fixed the number. This was reverted. Only after doing this again and explicitly calling out the original text as wrong did it stick.
It was very clear that my changes were being reverted out of hand, without thought.
Darwin's theory describes how the evolution occurs through the process of mutation and natural selections. Mutation is a core part of the theory, as core as selection.
This is why a lot of libraries use something else. GPL requires anyone who uses their code to open their own code. BSD style licenses don't. Hence companies that don't want to open their code use libraries using BSD style licenses. Hence projects that use BSD licenses tend to be more popular. (This is also why anyone more concerned with widespread adoption than open source, like a language author or a format proponent, chooses a BSD style license.)
The thing is, genes can very rarely determine results...they can just change statistical likelihoods. If the mutation causes the adult to be 4% stronger, it can't really effect whether the animal gets eaten as a little fluffy baby. In that sense, it takes luck, essentially, for the gene to get to the point where it can have an effect.
A mutation may be beneficial, but luck may mean that some times the gene gets wiped out when limited to a single individual anyway. The case you are talking about, the instant when an individual represents the first mutation, is pretty much the only time when the fate of one individual matters, an even then, not really as the same mutation may independently arise in more than one. A 4% increase in strength is beneficial, but if the first creature who randomly gets dealt that mutation gets struck by lightening, it won't matter a damn. It is only really when the mutation flows into the population as a whole that evolution becomes more deterministic because it is only then that the slight differences in survival rates can swamp random chance.
No...it is about populations. Individuals die. Evolution happens when genes spread through populations. It is a very common error to think that evolution has anything to do with optimizing the success of the individual.
This time next year, CMX will be entirely dead.
It's cost/benefits. Imagine an animal. Now tweak it slightly. That tweak may increase the incidence of some sorts of death and decrease the incidence of other sorts of death. Does the one outweigh the other? If so, over time, there will be more and more animals with that tweak.
That's evolution in a nutshell.
Evolution means that if a change that makes humans 10% smarter and therefore much more successful hunters and therefore less likely to starve but means a 4% increased infant mortality then that change will spread throughout the population.
Remember that it is not about individuals...it is about populations. Look at how the human mind and body works and breaks down and tells me if it looks like something designed to be optimal, or something randomly created that balances efficiencies and deficiencies to maximize broad statistical success of reproduction. In which worldview does cancer make sense?
Not to mention that Evolution is an algorithm that very much suffers from local maxima. Even given infinite time, creatures might not become perfectly adapted.