Office has a heck of a lot more code than Atari 2600 Space Invaders. And a heck of a lot more ways to interact with the user.
You are a troll. Why else would you compare Office, a suite of business software, with one of the simplest video games every written? That's as stupid as comparing the combined code complexity of GTA, GTAII, GTA3 and GTA: Vice City with that of notepad.
Office bugs aren't 'I press the left button and go right', they're 'I embed an Excel spreadsheet with 500,000 columns and when I change the font to 96-point Comic Sans the first column displays in the wrong font'.
You are a troll. Video game bugs aren't just "I press the left button and go right" either. See the link already provided below. Or there's this one. Or this...
Yep, the area where the Olympics is going to be held is actually much greater than the area of Greater London, where most of the games will be played, and those that are within Greater London will be spread out across the city...
The football games will be played at various stadia up and down the country. Glasgow, Cardiff, Coventry, Newcastle and Manchester. And of course, the sailing will be down in Dorset, slalom canoeing in the Lee Valley in Herts., sprint canoeing and rowing at Dorney Lake nr. Windsor, paralympic cycling at Brands Hatch and mountain-biking at Hadleigh Farm nr. Southend.
An Italian politician has claimed responsibility for helping to fund a ~750km imaginary tunnel to the tune of 45 million Euro. There is no tunnel. Neutrinos (unlike cars) travel quite happily through the Earth without tunnels.
Being nice, and giving her the benefit of the doubt, you can forgive her for thinking a "tunnel" between the two places was necessary. Even if she's minister for Science, she is still just a politician. However, even more embarrassing is the failure of common sense that led her to believe that, should you build a 750km long tunnel, 45 million Euros would even begin to cover it. For comparison, the Channel Tunnel, between South-East England and Northern France is around 50 km long. That project came in over-budget at GBP£4650 million in 1986 money. (Around 5400 million Euro). Though, granted, cars are bigger than neutrinos:)
Secondly, in her eagerness to jump on the bandwagon and accept responsibility for the hard work of the scientists involved, she is being extremely premature in accepting the results of the experiment as absolute fact. "Exceeding the speed of light is an epochal victory for scientific research around the world."
I don't know what is worse. That she believes the tunnel exists, or that she believes that 45 million euro is a significant contribution towards building a 900km long tunnel that doesn't actually exist.
FTFY:)
Ah, but 45 Million euro is far too much for a 900km-long imaginary tunnel! I can build an imaginary tunnel 5 times as long for only 9.99 million Euro (99 cents).
Seriously, though - what's with the "getting dressed for the day was far too strenuous" tripe? I wear sweats or shorts when I work from home - so what? What's wrong with being comfortable?
Yeah, I don't get that either. Who the hell cares? I worked in an office in London where the dress-code was casual. Did people work less than if they'd been wearing suits? No. Now I work for them from the other side of the world, so if I roll out of bed and sit down at my PC in my PJs, do I work less than if I put on jeans and a t-shirt? Again, no.
But then, it's The Register, they have a very tongue-in-cheek, tabloid-esque reporting style. The survey itself isn't as biased or as judgmental as they make out and they seem to have cherry-picked/distorted some of the results. The stats in the survey say that 75% of telecommuters work over 5 hours a day and 35% work 8 hours or more. The headline says 1 in 5 work an hour or less. The exact number is 17% with 25% working less than 4 hours.
The only thing I have against friendly-fire and civilians in military games is when the AI is so appalling that not shooting them becomes the hardest part of the game. E.g. CoD(1 or 2?) I lost count of the number of times the game ended because I shot a Russian comrade because he stupidly ran in front of me.
There's a lot of discussion here saying that all people who intentionally shoot civilians in games are sociopaths, therefore there should be no civilians in military video games...well, that's stupid. Mostly because...it's a game, but also because it's a military video game. If you want to buy a game where you run around and the only people you can kill are monsters, go play Doom 3 or Quake, but some of us prefer realism. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an intentional-civilian-shooter, but leaving civilians (and the potential for them to get hurt) out is to ignore reality. Thirdly, if you have moral qualms about killing virtual civilians, why the fuck do you not mind killing virtual enemy soldiers? It strikes me that a lot of people like to hide behind the pretense that life is black and white, and that good-guys fight the bad-guys in little sterile arenas far away from anything else. If you want to promote morals in a game, then where is the sense in removing the moral choice?! By removing any moral choice from the game, you're not making the game or the players more moral, you're just forcing them to be moral in that particular situation.
That said, I also can't get behind some of the lunatics who think killing a civilian should result in a virtual "court-martial". At worst, killing a civilian should end the game and make you restart/reload but ideally, I think, an acceptable number of civilian casualties should be allowed, to account for accidents/"collateral damage", above which the game ends. I think that strikes a better balance between fun-realism and real-realism. And isn't that the point? Allowing ordinary people the ability to do extraordinary things in a fun way?
Not true. The problem with widespread internet take-up is that more and more idiots are finding their way onto the internet. With the decline of Myspace and Geocities the internet needed a new idiot-sink. Youtube comments, and, indeed, the comments sections of most major news-outlets, draw in these idiots and lock them in combat with one another in a few easily avoidable places.
I only boot into Windows 7 (Home Premium) for games (it was a gift...before that I only played native Linux games like Doom3/ET:QW etc. and what I could play in WINE). Boot time is about the same as a similar-vintage Slackware install i.e. <1minute. W7 seems a little longer sometimes due to the fact that Windows eschews providing any information other than a pulsating logo...but in reality is probably not much different, it's definitely not 10+ minutes. (It's not 10 minutes even if my biggest disk needs a fsck.)
It's a bog-standard install, nothing special and nothing stripped down. AV installed and it's got 100+ games installed on it. The core of the machine is pretty old (~6 years?), an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ with 2Gb RAM (disks are older) and the Graphics card is a GeForce 8600GT with two widescreen 19" LCDs hooked up. So not as whizz-bang as your example, but yeah, not "ancient".
I'm not a numpty, and I have no reason to lie but I realise this is just another anecdote. That said, I also realise that you're being a massive troll. You're denigrating anyone who relates an anecdote that is contrary to your own, surely equally questionable, anecdote. Why is your anecdote beyond reproach?
As someone who is in the process of collecting the consoles of my youth, "cheap" gets you what you'd expect, the loose, crumby, stained, faded console from the bottom of someone's cupboard, or from the box in their attic. If that's what you want, great, but to get a nice one you have to pay more. Not to mention that 5 or 6 consoles multiplied by "cheap" = "expensive". And, personally, I would rather save my consoles the wear and tear of being used every day and sitting exposed in a dusty environment.
It depends what your priorities are, but the benefits of the emulation option that I can see are:
It's a single box (no need for a mess of cables at the back of the TV and no need to swap them in and out)
Younger members of the family don't need to remember which console their favourite game is on, just select it from a list
NES+SNES+Megadrive+Master System+N64+Playstation...etc..: One alone is "cheap", once you add them all up, it comes to "expensive"
One box that can be made to look "wife-friendly" i.e. like it belongs next to your satellite box/expensive TV and not in a child's bedroom
The box can also play DVDs/CDs/BluRay/Movie Files off USB/Hard-drive
Was your comment aimed at the original question asker? If so, I'm not sure why.
"I recently sold a 2011 Mac mini on Craigslist because after using it to rip my Blu-ray collection I tried to use it as a emulation station connected to my TV. However, emulators like Dolphin, BSNES, etc. would cause the Mac mini's fans to spin up like turbine engines — much to[sic] loud for my liking. I ask, therefore: What hardware would you recommend for building a passively cooled mini-system that will serve as a media center's emulation station?"
Its a misnomer that a signature is used for identification purposes. Its used as proof that you agreed to a document not to identify you.
Huh? How can it be proof that I agreed to the document if it doesn't also identify me.
The identification aspect was done before anyone signed anything when you introduced yourself.
Surely, there's a theoretical giant yawning chasm between the point at which you identify yourself to the 2nd party and the point at which they receive a signed copy of a contract though isn't there? E.g. His publisher knows him, great. They email a copy of a contract for him to print, sign and fax back. His assistant prints it, forges his signature and faxes it back. How is that, forged, signature "proof" that he's read and agreed to the contract? (Not rhetorical, happy to hear how...)
I think the point he's making is that a cryptographic signature is much much harder to forge whereas an actual signature can be fairly easily forged. To the extent that is required for the 2nd party in the contract to verify the signature as "correct", it is trivially forged. (Unless the 2nd party is a forensic handwriting analyst.) If you explained those two options to a visiting alien intelligence and asked him which of those two is the only one deemed legally binding, which do you think he would pick? What do you think his reaction would be when you told him the reality of the situation?
I have family members who lived through *major* historical events. Being there didn't tell them why they were there nor why it was so important nor what was happening a few miles away and how that impacted them.
+1 to your point but not sure how it invalidates the idea of "VR learning" as, personally, I think it would depend on the presentation. You're right, being able to put individual events in context is only possible by looking at the bigger picture, but "VR learning" could help put a human face on history. The post you're replying to is trying to make the general point that laptops alone are not enough, but that laptops + content = learning.
To second your "being there" comment though: During WW2, my grandmother worked as a switchboard operator at the cabinet war rooms and spoke with (and even met) VIPs of the time like Churchill. She freely admits that she often had to be told "who that was" after the event by her friends who knew. She has amazing, and often worrying, stories, like being "chased" around the garden by some italian airmen who being de-briefed at the same country house where she was having her R&R. Or jumping into a Kent hedgerow with a man to avoid a bomb dropped by a bomber on its return flight from London. One night, coming back from a dance, a man invited her and her friend to "see something really special", luckily, he only took them up to the roof of a nearby roof so they could watch London burning... Another night, she went out dancing and was asked to dance by a black GI, when a British officer came over and broke them up. Another time a Texan pilot tried to "woo" her with nylons and hand-towels ("you couldn't get nice ones during the war you know") but when she found out he was married she told him to give the ring he'd bought to his wife. There are some other really atypical experiences but her wartime experience is a weirdly convenient microcosm of a lot of stereotypical wartime experiences.
So, she has a "rich" (by which I mean, lurid) and interesting personal history to tell, but she couldn't tell you (and probably couldn't even have told you at the time) about tank movements, air drops, strategy, tactics, intelligence gathering, counter-espionage, etc. (Just as, I imagine, most soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan couldn't tell you about those higher-level details.) So, like you, I don't see VR ever replacing traditional history education but it would be a great complementary experience. After all, that's part of the reason why history teachers take children on school trips to the cabinet war rooms, the Somme or medieval castles.(Or civil war re-enactments for U.S-ians.)
Don't be a dick. Firstly, there are many reasons why a child might have an immunodeficiency that precludes vaccination e.g. children with juvenile ideopathic arthritis are often given immuno-suppressants, i.e. methotrexate. Secondly, and more obviously, not all cancers are fatal. Save the wear and tear on your keyboard next time and keep your ignorance to yourself.
Indeed, it seemed tacked on and contrived in the Mario level shown. Also, there must be numerous 2d portal "clones" by now surely? Why bother with this, just because he ripped the Mario levels/sprites?
Slashdot Mirror
It's the best keyboard for typing AND hitting people!!
ORLY?. (Though admittedly, it sucks for typing)
Some of these flutings were too steady for a toddler, suggesting that an adult guided the child's hand while teaching him or her, (...)
Office has a heck of a lot more code than Atari 2600 Space Invaders. And a heck of a lot more ways to interact with the user.
You are a troll. Why else would you compare Office, a suite of business software, with one of the simplest video games every written? That's as stupid as comparing the combined code complexity of GTA, GTAII, GTA3 and GTA: Vice City with that of notepad.
Office bugs aren't 'I press the left button and go right', they're 'I embed an Excel spreadsheet with 500,000 columns and when I change the font to 96-point Comic Sans the first column displays in the wrong font'.
You are a troll. Video game bugs aren't just "I press the left button and go right" either. See the link already provided below. Or there's this one. Or this...
Yep, the area where the Olympics is going to be held is actually much greater than the area of Greater London, where most of the games will be played, and those that are within Greater London will be spread out across the city...
The football games will be played at various stadia up and down the country. Glasgow, Cardiff, Coventry, Newcastle and Manchester. And of course, the sailing will be down in Dorset, slalom canoeing in the Lee Valley in Herts., sprint canoeing and rowing at Dorney Lake nr. Windsor, paralympic cycling at Brands Hatch and mountain-biking at Hadleigh Farm nr. Southend.
"Then the engineer would then fashion armor for tanks by strapping prayer imbued babies to the outside of it"
Mr President! We must not allow a baby gap! (With apologies to Kubrick)
...but those were due to unforeseen circumstances...
When building an imaginary tunnel, I imagine most circumstances are "unforeseen"; also "unseen".
Inattentive, incompetent, ignorant or stupid? Neither of those options are great, are they?
An Italian politician has claimed responsibility for helping to fund a ~750km imaginary tunnel to the tune of 45 million Euro. There is no tunnel. Neutrinos (unlike cars) travel quite happily through the Earth without tunnels.
:)
Being nice, and giving her the benefit of the doubt, you can forgive her for thinking a "tunnel" between the two places was necessary. Even if she's minister for Science, she is still just a politician. However, even more embarrassing is the failure of common sense that led her to believe that, should you build a 750km long tunnel, 45 million Euros would even begin to cover it. For comparison, the Channel Tunnel, between South-East England and Northern France is around 50 km long. That project came in over-budget at GBP£4650 million in 1986 money. (Around 5400 million Euro). Though, granted, cars are bigger than neutrinos
Secondly, in her eagerness to jump on the bandwagon and accept responsibility for the hard work of the scientists involved, she is being extremely premature in accepting the results of the experiment as absolute fact. "Exceeding the speed of light is an epochal victory for scientific research around the world."
I don't know what is worse. That she believes the tunnel exists, or that she believes that 45 million euro is a significant contribution towards building a 900km long tunnel that doesn't actually exist.
FTFY :)
Ah, but 45 Million euro is far too much for a 900km-long imaginary tunnel! I can build an imaginary tunnel 5 times as long for only 9.99 million Euro (99 cents).
To be fair, 22:07 on 23rd September 2011 UTC is 24th September for a lot of us :)
Also, not the whole game, but in Bioshock 2(?) there was a research camera which rewarded you for capturing footage of the various enemies.
Seriously, though - what's with the "getting dressed for the day was far too strenuous" tripe? I wear sweats or shorts when I work from home - so what? What's wrong with being comfortable?
Yeah, I don't get that either. Who the hell cares? I worked in an office in London where the dress-code was casual. Did people work less than if they'd been wearing suits? No. Now I work for them from the other side of the world, so if I roll out of bed and sit down at my PC in my PJs, do I work less than if I put on jeans and a t-shirt? Again, no.
But then, it's The Register, they have a very tongue-in-cheek, tabloid-esque reporting style. The survey itself isn't as biased or as judgmental as they make out and they seem to have cherry-picked/distorted some of the results. The stats in the survey say that 75% of telecommuters work over 5 hours a day and 35% work 8 hours or more. The headline says 1 in 5 work an hour or less. The exact number is 17% with 25% working less than 4 hours.
I mush be doing it wrong.
How drunk do you have to be to slur your typing?
Yep, this. GP missed the point, but, at the same time, I too am sceptical about that $100m/yr figure...
The only thing I have against friendly-fire and civilians in military games is when the AI is so appalling that not shooting them becomes the hardest part of the game. E.g. CoD(1 or 2?) I lost count of the number of times the game ended because I shot a Russian comrade because he stupidly ran in front of me.
There's a lot of discussion here saying that all people who intentionally shoot civilians in games are sociopaths, therefore there should be no civilians in military video games...well, that's stupid. Mostly because...it's a game, but also because it's a military video game. If you want to buy a game where you run around and the only people you can kill are monsters, go play Doom 3 or Quake, but some of us prefer realism. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an intentional-civilian-shooter, but leaving civilians (and the potential for them to get hurt) out is to ignore reality. Thirdly, if you have moral qualms about killing virtual civilians, why the fuck do you not mind killing virtual enemy soldiers? It strikes me that a lot of people like to hide behind the pretense that life is black and white, and that good-guys fight the bad-guys in little sterile arenas far away from anything else. If you want to promote morals in a game, then where is the sense in removing the moral choice?! By removing any moral choice from the game, you're not making the game or the players more moral, you're just forcing them to be moral in that particular situation.
That said, I also can't get behind some of the lunatics who think killing a civilian should result in a virtual "court-martial". At worst, killing a civilian should end the game and make you restart/reload but ideally, I think, an acceptable number of civilian casualties should be allowed, to account for accidents/"collateral damage", above which the game ends. I think that strikes a better balance between fun-realism and real-realism. And isn't that the point? Allowing ordinary people the ability to do extraordinary things in a fun way?
Not true. The problem with widespread internet take-up is that more and more idiots are finding their way onto the internet. With the decline of Myspace and Geocities the internet needed a new idiot-sink. Youtube comments, and, indeed, the comments sections of most major news-outlets, draw in these idiots and lock them in combat with one another in a few easily avoidable places.
I only boot into Windows 7 (Home Premium) for games (it was a gift...before that I only played native Linux games like Doom3/ET:QW etc. and what I could play in WINE). Boot time is about the same as a similar-vintage Slackware install i.e. <1minute. W7 seems a little longer sometimes due to the fact that Windows eschews providing any information other than a pulsating logo...but in reality is probably not much different, it's definitely not 10+ minutes. (It's not 10 minutes even if my biggest disk needs a fsck.)
It's a bog-standard install, nothing special and nothing stripped down. AV installed and it's got 100+ games installed on it. The core of the machine is pretty old (~6 years?), an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ with 2Gb RAM (disks are older) and the Graphics card is a GeForce 8600GT with two widescreen 19" LCDs hooked up. So not as whizz-bang as your example, but yeah, not "ancient".
I'm not a numpty, and I have no reason to lie but I realise this is just another anecdote. That said, I also realise that you're being a massive troll. You're denigrating anyone who relates an anecdote that is contrary to your own, surely equally questionable, anecdote. Why is your anecdote beyond reproach?
It depends what your priorities are, but the benefits of the emulation option that I can see are:
"I recently sold a 2011 Mac mini on Craigslist because after using it to rip my Blu-ray collection I tried to use it as a emulation station connected to my TV. However, emulators like Dolphin, BSNES, etc. would cause the Mac mini's fans to spin up like turbine engines — much to[sic] loud for my liking. I ask, therefore: What hardware would you recommend for building a passively cooled mini-system that will serve as a media center's emulation station?"
Or 10% are towards the end of their billing cycle and are trying to stay beneath their ridiculous data cap... ;)
Its a misnomer that a signature is used for identification purposes. Its used as proof that you agreed to a document not to identify you.
Huh? How can it be proof that I agreed to the document if it doesn't also identify me.
The identification aspect was done before anyone signed anything when you introduced yourself.
Surely, there's a theoretical giant yawning chasm between the point at which you identify yourself to the 2nd party and the point at which they receive a signed copy of a contract though isn't there? E.g. His publisher knows him, great. They email a copy of a contract for him to print, sign and fax back. His assistant prints it, forges his signature and faxes it back. How is that, forged, signature "proof" that he's read and agreed to the contract? (Not rhetorical, happy to hear how...)
I think the point he's making is that a cryptographic signature is much much harder to forge whereas an actual signature can be fairly easily forged. To the extent that is required for the 2nd party in the contract to verify the signature as "correct", it is trivially forged. (Unless the 2nd party is a forensic handwriting analyst.) If you explained those two options to a visiting alien intelligence and asked him which of those two is the only one deemed legally binding, which do you think he would pick? What do you think his reaction would be when you told him the reality of the situation?
I have family members who lived through *major* historical events. Being there didn't tell them why they were there nor why it was so important nor what was happening a few miles away and how that impacted them.
+1 to your point but not sure how it invalidates the idea of "VR learning" as, personally, I think it would depend on the presentation. You're right, being able to put individual events in context is only possible by looking at the bigger picture, but "VR learning" could help put a human face on history. The post you're replying to is trying to make the general point that laptops alone are not enough, but that laptops + content = learning.
To second your "being there" comment though: During WW2, my grandmother worked as a switchboard operator at the cabinet war rooms and spoke with (and even met) VIPs of the time like Churchill. She freely admits that she often had to be told "who that was" after the event by her friends who knew. She has amazing, and often worrying, stories, like being "chased" around the garden by some italian airmen who being de-briefed at the same country house where she was having her R&R. Or jumping into a Kent hedgerow with a man to avoid a bomb dropped by a bomber on its return flight from London. One night, coming back from a dance, a man invited her and her friend to "see something really special", luckily, he only took them up to the roof of a nearby roof so they could watch London burning... Another night, she went out dancing and was asked to dance by a black GI, when a British officer came over and broke them up. Another time a Texan pilot tried to "woo" her with nylons and hand-towels ("you couldn't get nice ones during the war you know") but when she found out he was married she told him to give the ring he'd bought to his wife. There are some other really atypical experiences but her wartime experience is a weirdly convenient microcosm of a lot of stereotypical wartime experiences.
So, she has a "rich" (by which I mean, lurid) and interesting personal history to tell, but she couldn't tell you (and probably couldn't even have told you at the time) about tank movements, air drops, strategy, tactics, intelligence gathering, counter-espionage, etc. (Just as, I imagine, most soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan couldn't tell you about those higher-level details.) So, like you, I don't see VR ever replacing traditional history education but it would be a great complementary experience. After all, that's part of the reason why history teachers take children on school trips to the cabinet war rooms, the Somme or medieval castles.(Or civil war re-enactments for U.S-ians.)
Don't be a dick. Firstly, there are many reasons why a child might have an immunodeficiency that precludes vaccination e.g. children with juvenile ideopathic arthritis are often given immuno-suppressants, i.e. methotrexate. Secondly, and more obviously, not all cancers are fatal. Save the wear and tear on your keyboard next time and keep your ignorance to yourself.
A) I don't think it was meant as a joke.
2) If it was meant as a joke I suppose I'd better do a laugh now that you've told me: "hah"
Indeed, it seemed tacked on and contrived in the Mario level shown. Also, there must be numerous 2d portal "clones" by now surely? Why bother with this, just because he ripped the Mario levels/sprites?