This is not a dictatorship (current evidence to the contrary), and the president can't just do whatever they want without the support of Congress.
If the White House is the head of the country, then Congress must surely be the legs.
This is exactly what has frustrated me the most about my fellow countrymen. Its almost as if folks dont' quite understand that there are three branches of the government at work here; there's only so much a president can do without Congress' help.
If people want change, real, palpable, history-making change, they need to opt for a different kind of representation in Congress first. If the president (then) isn't inline with a reformed Congress, they face the reality of loosing that second term to someone who is.
Sounds like that reviewer was watching a rerun of the Matrix.
Kidding aside, seeing as how the original 'ghost' movie was obviously a point of inspiration for the Matrix, I can hardly see that as being a negative review. Part of the point behind Ghost in the Shell is that it takes cyberpunk on a deep spiritual bent, all the while bullets and cyber-carnage fills the screen.
Everything mentioned in that negative review is essential to the franchise, so I for one am not deterred in the least.:)
Well the titanium was for a mold, not the implant. But if your jaw was lined with titanium, prior to your 10 rounds with Mike Tyson, I think you'd find that the results would be less than desireable.
Imagine if the crumple zone on the front of your car was equally indestructable.
Instead of your jaw absorbing the impact of a collision (i.e. a mean right hook), your new inflexible jawbone would try to more or less tear free from your face. That's provided your head doesn't spin to the side first, in which case your neck (along with your spine) will take the brunt of the impact.
Anyone remember Wipeout:XL (Wipeout:2097 for those not in the US)?
The load screens were adverts for Redbull:
"Redbull increases reaction time!"
Of course it was done with a certain level of cool, so I didn't mind.
I suppose that as long as these ad placements are done with the same degree of control as, say, movie-based product-placement is, then it could be a real win-win for *some* games. It'd be nice to have advertisers pay a studio to put a coke machine in the next Rainbow 6 game as opposed to the other way around.
Having ad companies push updated magazine covers, billboards and vending machine art to online game clients would just keep things fresh.
If you were to write a large-scale system, you wouldn't be that suprised to find that a significant portion of time and space is dedicated to allowing various components to communicate. The same applies to organizations of people, not just machines and software objects. Software teams themselves must be as oriented toward conveying information horizontally (between one another) as they are vertically (between the mind and the software being created).
In essence, you must dedicate a portion of a team's time to communication so they may coordinate and accomplish the same task under the same guidelines and goals. The tricky part is knowing how much is enough and how much is too little. Its more complicated than abolishing weekly status meetings in favor of more brainstorming sessions, or requiring x% of code to be comments and documentation.
Quite possibly the best example of what is required of a quality team, and how communication needs scale along with team sizes, is the Capability Maturity Model.
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html
The CMM attempts to cover the spectrum of software team types (level 1 to 5) as a sliding scale from start-up to an "ideal" controlled process environment. This is not for everybody, and is certainly not a quick-fix for any company. Instead it drives home the concept of strong communication first, with the end product being software. It's also not without its critics.
http://www.satisfice.com/articles/cmm.htm
Another decent process, that has been getting a lot less press lately is the Rational Unified Process. RUP, at its core, attempts to establish a well defined communication pipeline for creating software from start to finish. It also attempts to create well defined roles in that process that map easily onto existing roles in most software shops. Ultimately, using RUP feels a lot like 'programming the workplace' itself which can make it a cinch to grasp for developers.
http://ootips.org/rup.html
RUP too, has some flaws. It foists UML down the reader's throat, as virtually every aspect of the process is documented in UML as well as plain text. This is great for developers and PM's but tends to fall apart once other non-developers are given raw RUP documentation (QA staff, PHB's etc). One needs to be aware that RUP is an abstraction of a process, not the actual process you define and use.
Regardless of what methodology you use, be it a pre-packaged one or something home-grown, your software team must learn to communicate everything project related so they behave as a single cohesive system.
I just can't get the image of a deranged Burt Rutan staggering around on the spaceport Tarmac, raving in a bad Russian Accent about his "overthruster".
And right after that: what hardware do I need to run Doom3, what is the MSRP and how many vital organs should I plan on selling in order to cover the costs?
Anyone who's ever stayed at a Motel 6 knows one thing for certain: people are horribly messy and smell bad. Outside of stripping a room down to bare drywall and starting over, you're going to have odor problems over time.
One would think that these habitats would be semi-disposable given how "cheap" they are, which sovles some of the problem (you'd want to replace them periodically anyway for safety reasons). Outside of that, you're looking at bringing shloads of activated charcoal and enzymatic air cleaners to do the job.
Maybe it was more popular in the states, but I'm suprised that Mega Man (Rock Man in Japan) wasn't listed at all. Good to see Castlevania in the mix, but this collection really needs more Konami/Ultra titles like Contra, Jackal, TMNT and Metal Gear.
Kid Icarus? I'm sorry, but that game has the most obnoxious music in *any* NES title ever created. Why anyone would subject themselves to reliving that I'll never know.:)
I'd reccomend the Pragmatic Programmer, as it covers a wealth of best practice while maintaining a good dose of humor through some very entertaining rehtoric.
Design Patterns, as was mentioned here already is a *must have* (IMO) for any developer, even if you're coding Cold-Fusion scripts all day. After all, there are other ways to take advantage of the object-oriented philosophy w/o an OO language.
UML is a great communication tool (language), but it can't do everything, even though it tries. Ultimately, it really just helps standardize the world of bubble-drawings, inheritance diagrams and object interaction sketches and use-cases that everyone used to publish before 1995.
IMO, a referece is only as good as you find yourself opening it, and a langauge like this only as good as those around you understand it. I'd reccomend a good lightweight reference and mabye a tutorial or three to get familiar with the bulk of UML. The reference will come in handy later when you encounter symbols or diagrams that you may need to translate/learn quickly. UML, in its entirety is a very deep topic with a lot of ground to cover, so be prepared for a time investment if you want to go for the whole thing.
Outside of all this, I'm afraid the truely advanced stuff is all hiding away in the ACM's conference archives, the IEEE's archives and innumerable studies and papers from CS Phd's and the like. A lot is available online, but you can still find some concepts and studies that have stood the test of time at the library (Dead Tree Format). Your local University's mathematics section is a good place to start.
Working in another language enough to understand the nuances and advantages to its grammar can do wonders for expanding how you tackle problems. To truely get the most out of a new language, you need to approach it as a cross-training exercise and try to learn what you can from what doesn't cross the language barrier, and carry everything else with you. This is like football players learning ballet: knowing how to pirouette won't get you more touchdowns, but learning balance and grace will help you dodge tackles and blocks.
For example: In the case of learning ASM after C, you'll understand in far more depth the impact of iteration vs recursion and pass-by-value vs pass-by-reference. But if you just learn one language all by itself, for itself, you're not going to acquire the kind of depth and understanding that you seek.
I was at the small (public) meeting held at Goddard Space Flight Center just last night, regarding Cassini's SOI.
Basically they did a few basic things to mitigate risk when attempting this.
- Massive retro burn to decrease velocity: Saturn's gravity was speeding the probe up. - Aimed at the space between rings so it go through *mostly* empty space... twice, since it had to come back through the rings on its way back out. - Flipped the craft around 180-degress so the high-gain antenna dish would act as a shield for the rest of the probe. (pretty clever if you ask me).
I'm just happy to see that it worked. Although I wonder what condition the dish is in now.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a dictatorship (current evidence to the contrary), and the president can't just do whatever they want without the support of Congress.
If the White House is the head of the country, then Congress must surely be the legs.
This is exactly what has frustrated me the most about my fellow countrymen. Its almost as if folks dont' quite understand that there are three branches of the government at work here; there's only so much a president can do without Congress' help.
If people want change, real, palpable, history-making change, they need to opt for a different kind of representation in Congress first. If the president (then) isn't inline with a reformed Congress, they face the reality of loosing that second term to someone who is.
Sounds like that reviewer was watching a rerun of the Matrix.
:)
Kidding aside, seeing as how the original 'ghost' movie was obviously a point of inspiration for the Matrix, I can hardly see that as being a negative review. Part of the point behind Ghost in the Shell is that it takes cyberpunk on a deep spiritual bent, all the while bullets and cyber-carnage fills the screen.
Everything mentioned in that negative review is essential to the franchise, so I for one am not deterred in the least.
Thank you for de-buzzing the article for me.
And here I was thinking that someone managed to combine RSS and MP3 to achieve some sort of quantum tunneling or space-time-woojie on an iPod.
The heliopause was the first thing I thought of when I saw this article on slashdot.
I'm honestly not getting the point of all the other threads here on the board, it should be pretty obvious what's going on out there.
Trebek: And now for Final Jeopardy! Write down a letter in the alphabet... any letter at all, like 'A' or 'X'.
/letter/ 2... yea.
Trebek: Okay, lets see what you wrote down. Jeff you wrote, a '2'...?
Jeff Goldblum: Uh.. what is the
Trebek: I hate all of you.
Either Unobtainium or Deaminite.
i d= 9509105
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=112052&c
Well the titanium was for a mold, not the implant. But if your jaw was lined with titanium, prior to your 10 rounds with Mike Tyson, I think you'd find that the results would be less than desireable.
Imagine if the crumple zone on the front of your car was equally indestructable.
Instead of your jaw absorbing the impact of a collision (i.e. a mean right hook), your new inflexible jawbone would try to more or less tear free from your face. That's provided your head doesn't spin to the side first, in which case your neck (along with your spine) will take the brunt of the impact.
You definately need to listen to this then:
s ic / ...click on the "We Must Destroy X10" link.
http://artists.iuma.com/IUMA/Bands/kompressormu
And no, Kompressor doesn't take himself seriously either.
Anyone remember Wipeout:XL (Wipeout:2097 for those not in the US)?
The load screens were adverts for Redbull:
"Redbull increases reaction time!"
Of course it was done with a certain level of cool, so I didn't mind.
I suppose that as long as these ad placements are done with the same degree of control as, say, movie-based product-placement is, then it could be a real win-win for *some* games. It'd be nice to have advertisers pay a studio to put a coke machine in the next Rainbow 6 game as opposed to the other way around.
Having ad companies push updated magazine covers, billboards and vending machine art to online game clients would just keep things fresh.
If you were to write a large-scale system, you wouldn't be that suprised to find that a significant portion of time and space is dedicated to allowing various components to communicate. The same applies to organizations of people, not just machines and software objects. Software teams themselves must be as oriented toward conveying information horizontally (between one another) as they are vertically (between the mind and the software being created).
In essence, you must dedicate a portion of a team's time to communication so they may coordinate and accomplish the same task under the same guidelines and goals. The tricky part is knowing how much is enough and how much is too little. Its more complicated than abolishing weekly status meetings in favor of more brainstorming sessions, or requiring x% of code to be comments and documentation.
Quite possibly the best example of what is required of a quality team, and how communication needs scale along with team sizes, is the Capability Maturity Model.
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html
The CMM attempts to cover the spectrum of software team types (level 1 to 5) as a sliding scale from start-up to an "ideal" controlled process environment. This is not for everybody, and is certainly not a quick-fix for any company. Instead it drives home the concept of strong communication first, with the end product being software. It's also not without its critics.
http://www.satisfice.com/articles/cmm.htm
Another decent process, that has been getting a lot less press lately is the Rational Unified Process. RUP, at its core, attempts to establish a well defined communication pipeline for creating software from start to finish. It also attempts to create well defined roles in that process that map easily onto existing roles in most software shops. Ultimately, using RUP feels a lot like 'programming the workplace' itself which can make it a cinch to grasp for developers.
http://ootips.org/rup.html
RUP too, has some flaws. It foists UML down the reader's throat, as virtually every aspect of the process is documented in UML as well as plain text. This is great for developers and PM's but tends to fall apart once other non-developers are given raw RUP documentation (QA staff, PHB's etc). One needs to be aware that RUP is an abstraction of a process, not the actual process you define and use.
Regardless of what methodology you use, be it a pre-packaged one or something home-grown, your software team must learn to communicate everything project related so they behave as a single cohesive system.
Cheesy, yes. Horrifying... erm.. no. Inspiring... depends on how you define 'inspiration'. ;)
Personally, when it comes to DIY science and rocketry in the desert, I tend to think of the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
I just can't get the image of a deranged Burt Rutan staggering around on the spaceport Tarmac, raving in a bad Russian Accent about his "overthruster".
Did anyone else read that as "Lawsuits Three hundred and twenty-one studios out of buisness"?
Now that I RTFA, I'm a touch relieved that it was only one studio that went under.
I'm more partial to the name Bat-le-wagon myself.
So, the next question is release dates.
And right after that: what hardware do I need to run Doom3, what is the MSRP and how many vital organs should I plan on selling in order to cover the costs?
I head a rumor that it's being shrink-wrapped and bundled along with MS Longhorn. ;)
anyways, props to the grandparent - too funny.
:)
Thanks!
And the translation is courtesy of babelfish [original english -> to spanish], in case anyone (grammar troll de español?) wondered.
En Rusia soviética, el microchip le programa!
My thought exactly.
Anyone who's ever stayed at a Motel 6 knows one thing for certain: people are horribly messy and smell bad. Outside of stripping a room down to bare drywall and starting over, you're going to have odor problems over time.
One would think that these habitats would be semi-disposable given how "cheap" they are, which sovles some of the problem (you'd want to replace them periodically anyway for safety reasons). Outside of that, you're looking at bringing shloads of activated charcoal and enzymatic air cleaners to do the job.
Oh, and one of my favorites, although not very well known, is Bionic Commando.
Clearly one of the unsung heroes of the good 'ol NES. That is one of my all time favorites as well.
I've been waiting for a sequel/reprisal/whatever now for 14 years. Hell, I'd even settle for a quake mod based on it.
This may help:
Poetry Quotes
Maybe it was more popular in the states, but I'm suprised that Mega Man (Rock Man in Japan) wasn't listed at all. Good to see Castlevania in the mix, but this collection really needs more Konami/Ultra titles like Contra, Jackal, TMNT and Metal Gear.
:)
Kid Icarus? I'm sorry, but that game has the most obnoxious music in *any* NES title ever created. Why anyone would subject themselves to reliving that I'll never know.
I'd reccomend the Pragmatic Programmer, as it covers a wealth of best practice while maintaining a good dose of humor through some very entertaining rehtoric.
Design Patterns, as was mentioned here already is a *must have* (IMO) for any developer, even if you're coding Cold-Fusion scripts all day. After all, there are other ways to take advantage of the object-oriented philosophy w/o an OO language.
UML is a great communication tool (language), but it can't do everything, even though it tries. Ultimately, it really just helps standardize the world of bubble-drawings, inheritance diagrams and object interaction sketches and use-cases that everyone used to publish before 1995.
IMO, a referece is only as good as you find yourself opening it, and a langauge like this only as good as those around you understand it. I'd reccomend a good lightweight reference and mabye a tutorial or three to get familiar with the bulk of UML. The reference will come in handy later when you encounter symbols or diagrams that you may need to translate/learn quickly. UML, in its entirety is a very deep topic with a lot of ground to cover, so be prepared for a time investment if you want to go for the whole thing.
Outside of all this, I'm afraid the truely advanced stuff is all hiding away in the ACM's conference archives, the IEEE's archives and innumerable studies and papers from CS Phd's and the like. A lot is available online, but you can still find some concepts and studies that have stood the test of time at the library (Dead Tree Format). Your local University's mathematics section is a good place to start.
Working in another language enough to understand the nuances and advantages to its grammar can do wonders for expanding how you tackle problems. To truely get the most out of a new language, you need to approach it as a cross-training exercise and try to learn what you can from what doesn't cross the language barrier, and carry everything else with you. This is like football players learning ballet: knowing how to pirouette won't get you more touchdowns, but learning balance and grace will help you dodge tackles and blocks.
For example: In the case of learning ASM after C, you'll understand in far more depth the impact of iteration vs recursion and pass-by-value vs pass-by-reference. But if you just learn one language all by itself, for itself, you're not going to acquire the kind of depth and understanding that you seek.
All true. But it was worth it, IMO, just to talk to some of the people who *built* the thing. ;)
I was at the small (public) meeting held at Goddard Space Flight Center just last night, regarding Cassini's SOI.
Basically they did a few basic things to mitigate risk when attempting this.
- Massive retro burn to decrease velocity: Saturn's gravity was speeding the probe up.
- Aimed at the space between rings so it go through *mostly* empty space... twice, since it had to come back through the rings on its way back out.
- Flipped the craft around 180-degress so the high-gain antenna dish would act as a shield for the rest of the probe. (pretty clever if you ask me).
I'm just happy to see that it worked. Although I wonder what condition the dish is in now.
Nifty. But as long as they don't have the best of Ron Hubbard or these guys, then I really don't see the point.