I agree, but I personally extend the definition of "kids" to include fully-grown adults with the social and reasoning capabilities of the latter. Just talk to anyone who works retail; you don't need pimples to make an ass of yourself. I'd wager there's quite a few of those people get around online too. *sigh*
FWIW, I have found that Slashdot is a wonderful haven away from most of these types as the story content is either too impenetrable for these types, or the commentary too insufferable.;)
To see what I'm talking about, just cruise digg.com for stories that have been cross-posted here, and behold.
If I learned one thing back in the 90's doing.com support desk work, it's that a person's intelligence has next to nothing to do with their proficiency with basic technology and computer related tasks. Yes, there's a minimum IQ threshold, but it's not all that high.
Judges sit on the bench for *decades*, typically after they're done being a lawyer, so their experience with the world outside the courthouse may be a tad dated. After all, a lot has happened in 20 years, including spam. Just wait 20 years for some slashdotter lawyer to clock-in at the courthouse and we'll see some things change; albeit entirely too late.
It's like some great corollary to "ignorance of the law is no defense from it": something like "ignorance is no substitute for a sound ruling." If anything the judge should be encouraged to say "I'm in over my head here, let's go to trial since I'm horrible with computer stuff." My guess is that when you get to look in the mirror and say "I am the law" enough times, humility comes at a rather steep price.
I can't speak for everyone, but my own personal resentment toward Mc-Mansions comes from:
1) Over-sized homes on very small pieces of property, greatly increasing the risk of your house catching fire due to your neighbors' stupidity (at least townhomes have firewalls between them)
2) The progressive destruction of the aesthetics of Modern-era housing developments by the spot-replacement of gawdy jumbo housing.
2a) Most are a jumbled mis-mash of imitation luxury concepts, intended only for that portrait shot in the realtor's catalog (e.g. Stone facade + plastic siding, Faux brass lamps + alphalt walkway)
3) Not being able to purchase a reasonably sized home within a reasonable distance from work. Most new development these days is on the order of twice the square-footage I need, at about twice the price I can afford, with about half as much lawn as I would prefer. Plus grass is cheaper to maintain than timber and brick. I would settle for less, if only "they" would build it.
That said I would be all for a Mc-Mansions if there were fewer of them around, with those being more tasefully built. If it's going to cost half a million bucks, it should look and be built like it too.
Now that's an interesting tidbit. So I guess in a sense Keen can claim some amount of intellectual heritage to Quake?
Here's what I'm driving at: I did a rather deep survey of some Quake2 code about 10 years ago and found that it too called the animation control routines "think" functions. Same kind of hackery there too: structs with functions attached.
The part I liked the most (in Q2) was where the save routine simply copied the entire array of game entities to disk as one big slab of bits, taking care to only re-write any entity pointers as indicies back into the array. Loading simply did the reverse. Fast and reliable, if a bit wasteful on disk; I wonder what other things have survived through to ID Tech 5...
If you're right about Google forcing the telcos to open up, then perhaps they've deliberately positioned Android for a two-pronged assault: the other target being Sun's kinda-open-but-not-quite-JavaME. After all, they could have done this with a Python variant or something else entirely, so why Java?
So looking at this from the opposite direction (I downloaded the SDK last night), I think you may have shed some light on Google's rating criteria for the Phase I Challenge. All one has to do is make something that does something the average "G-phone" user would want, but that the cellphone companies wouldn't likely give away without a surcharge or lock-in package. Like you suggest, it's about creating demand for a product that doesn't exist yet, thanks to mobile telco hegemony./me begins work on bandwidth-hungry, GPS enabled Android application.
My three least favorite plot complications are time travel, amnesia, and anything having to do with a "prophecy."
Trek seems to be unusually burdened with a rather long list of bad plot elements; it's kind of what made Red Dwarf possible in the first place. Anyway, these are easily the worst offenders, and I couldn't agree with you more.
The time-travel stuff is what really gets me. There are ways to use all of these devices and not compose total schlock in the process, but this one gets abused the worst. Dr. Who had it right: time-travel has repercussions and consequences, and hence why it's a good mechanic if used in that context*. It's really pointless to have a time-travel story and not wind up someplace different than where you started, since it's time-travel. There's no fun in knowing that everything will be okay no matter what happens, which is what Trek invariably does.
Same goes for prophecy. There's foreshadowing, and then there's giving the whole damn thing away.
Amnesia works, but only if it parallels the audience's ignorance. You have to take away *everything* familiar (ship, tools, etc) rather than have everyone stumble around the ship for an hour until Geordi finds an anomaly in a log somewhere.
(*The latest incarnations of the series have left the Dr orphaned from his race since his home world was removed from existence during a temporal war. In a sense, this brutally shoved some older stories out of cannon since they now exist on a different/false timeline - now that's some good sci-fi!)
I still think it's kinda cool that my old C64 programmer's manual comes with a complete schematic for the entire computer. With it, you could build one from scratch if you wanted to.... although, I'd hate to see what the schematic for your typical Intel mainboard looks like.
Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit...
on
Chefs As Chemists
·
· Score: 1
While I agree that it's right up there with veal, I couldn't help but recall Dennis Leary on the matter:
Because eggplant tastes like eggplant but meat tastes like murder and murder tastes pretty good, doesn't it?
I can't speak for everyone else, but personally, I find Netflix fantastic at providing me access to a seemingly bottomless library of old, independent and foreign movies. I tend to have rather esoteric tastes, so paying for a subscription that is almost on-demand for just about anything I could want is well worth it. Basically they have all the stuff that more space-constrained institutions (Kiosks, Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, etc) can't be bothered with . To that end, I've never had to wait for a movie to become available.
Now on the other hand: if all you want to do is see the major releases and not pay $10 to see it in a theater, then cruising the video kiosk is certainly the way to go.
Lisa: But aren't the dogs even worse? Skinner: We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on dog meat Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas! Skinner: When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death
The funny thing is that, according to the article, corrosion on a connector was the culprit here. So gold-plated interconnects would have actually saved the day.
The mechanical approach I am thinking of would be to have the 'string' weighted and then tension adjusted according to a propellor lifting the weight
Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought of dynamic tension on the ribbon.
Personally I had envisioned a wind-speed prop (doesn't have to be big) that drives a governor, that is in turn attached to a spring-loaded tensioner. A kite, or similar mechanical analog like your string, attached to a tensioner might work too.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to generating enough torque to adjust tension in a way that isn't completely overcome by the torque generated by the resonance of the ribbon. Perhaps something electro-mechanical that can *lock* into place on specific tension settings (like shifting gears in a car - do turbines even do that?) is the way to go.
The point, as I saw it, was not to achieve the ultimate in efficiency in terms of converting Watts of wind power to Watts of electricity. It's all about the cost of materials and maintenance - both up-front and down the road.
Look at it this way: the only reason why automobiles are so popular in the 1st world is that gasoline used to be dirt cheap, and not because cars are particularly efficient at anything. Cheap trumps efficient every time. To that end, the concerns in the "developing" and war-torn places on the globe are much more immediately fiscal and resource constrained than anything else.
Besides, the design is geared towards low wind applications where turbines are less cost efficient. At that point, it doesn't matter how inefficient you design is since it still gives you more bang for your buck than anything else given the circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, but I personally extend the definition of "kids" to include fully-grown adults with the social and reasoning capabilities of the latter. Just talk to anyone who works retail; you don't need pimples to make an ass of yourself. I'd wager there's quite a few of those people get around online too. *sigh*
;)
FWIW, I have found that Slashdot is a wonderful haven away from most of these types as the story content is either too impenetrable for these types, or the commentary too insufferable.
To see what I'm talking about, just cruise digg.com for stories that have been cross-posted here, and behold.
Here's the problem: it's not IQ, it's experience.
.com support desk work, it's that a person's intelligence has next to nothing to do with their proficiency with basic technology and computer related tasks. Yes, there's a minimum IQ threshold, but it's not all that high.
If I learned one thing back in the 90's doing
Judges sit on the bench for *decades*, typically after they're done being a lawyer, so their experience with the world outside the courthouse may be a tad dated. After all, a lot has happened in 20 years, including spam. Just wait 20 years for some slashdotter lawyer to clock-in at the courthouse and we'll see some things change; albeit entirely too late.
It's like some great corollary to "ignorance of the law is no defense from it": something like "ignorance is no substitute for a sound ruling." If anything the judge should be encouraged to say "I'm in over my head here, let's go to trial since I'm horrible with computer stuff." My guess is that when you get to look in the mirror and say "I am the law" enough times, humility comes at a rather steep price.
I can't speak for everyone, but my own personal resentment toward Mc-Mansions comes from:
1) Over-sized homes on very small pieces of property, greatly increasing the risk of your house catching fire due to your neighbors' stupidity (at least townhomes have firewalls between them)
2) The progressive destruction of the aesthetics of Modern-era housing developments by the spot-replacement of gawdy jumbo housing.
2a) Most are a jumbled mis-mash of imitation luxury concepts, intended only for that portrait shot in the realtor's catalog (e.g. Stone facade + plastic siding, Faux brass lamps + alphalt walkway)
3) Not being able to purchase a reasonably sized home within a reasonable distance from work. Most new development these days is on the order of twice the square-footage I need, at about twice the price I can afford, with about half as much lawn as I would prefer. Plus grass is cheaper to maintain than timber and brick. I would settle for less, if only "they" would build it.
That said I would be all for a Mc-Mansions if there were fewer of them around, with those being more tasefully built. If it's going to cost half a million bucks, it should look and be built like it too.
*chuckle*
May I buy a vowel?
I dunno, couldn't it be a "Ghostbusters I, Zuul Battle" unlockable bonus level? I'd buy it for that alone.
Besides, they have to do something with Stay Puft if they're going to make any magazine covers.
FWIW, there was an amateur "Retro Remake" done of this classic not too long ago. Updated graphics, sound, with the same core gameplay:
http://www.remakes.org/comp2006/screenshots.php?page=4
Fortunately, it's one of the better ones on the site. Enjoy.
Um.. Hewey Lewis?
Published in PDF: An Exceptionally Obtuse Format for Everything.
(Or you can grab the tar.gz bundle with a bunch of other formats, all at one time.)
Now that's an interesting tidbit. So I guess in a sense Keen can claim some amount of intellectual heritage to Quake?
Here's what I'm driving at: I did a rather deep survey of some Quake2 code about 10 years ago and found that it too called the animation control routines "think" functions. Same kind of hackery there too: structs with functions attached.
The part I liked the most (in Q2) was where the save routine simply copied the entire array of game entities to disk as one big slab of bits, taking care to only re-write any entity pointers as indicies back into the array. Loading simply did the reverse. Fast and reliable, if a bit wasteful on disk; I wonder what other things have survived through to ID Tech 5...
One more thing. I came across this little writeup:
http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2007/11/13/what-does-android-mean-for-suns-openjdk/
If you're right about Google forcing the telcos to open up, then perhaps they've deliberately positioned Android for a two-pronged assault: the other target being Sun's kinda-open-but-not-quite-JavaME. After all, they could have done this with a Python variant or something else entirely, so why Java?
I hope it works too.
/me begins work on bandwidth-hungry, GPS enabled Android application.
So looking at this from the opposite direction (I downloaded the SDK last night), I think you may have shed some light on Google's rating criteria for the Phase I Challenge. All one has to do is make something that does something the average "G-phone" user would want, but that the cellphone companies wouldn't likely give away without a surcharge or lock-in package. Like you suggest, it's about creating demand for a product that doesn't exist yet, thanks to mobile telco hegemony.
My three least favorite plot complications are time travel, amnesia, and anything having to do with a "prophecy."
Trek seems to be unusually burdened with a rather long list of bad plot elements; it's kind of what made Red Dwarf possible in the first place. Anyway, these are easily the worst offenders, and I couldn't agree with you more.
The time-travel stuff is what really gets me. There are ways to use all of these devices and not compose total schlock in the process, but this one gets abused the worst. Dr. Who had it right: time-travel has repercussions and consequences, and hence why it's a good mechanic if used in that context*. It's really pointless to have a time-travel story and not wind up someplace different than where you started, since it's time-travel. There's no fun in knowing that everything will be okay no matter what happens, which is what Trek invariably does.
Same goes for prophecy. There's foreshadowing, and then there's giving the whole damn thing away.
Amnesia works, but only if it parallels the audience's ignorance. You have to take away *everything* familiar (ship, tools, etc) rather than have everyone stumble around the ship for an hour until Geordi finds an anomaly in a log somewhere.
(*The latest incarnations of the series have left the Dr orphaned from his race since his home world was removed from existence during a temporal war. In a sense, this brutally shoved some older stories out of cannon since they now exist on a different/false timeline - now that's some good sci-fi!)
By the look of things, until the debt collector comes a knockin'.
Isn't it great when you see stuff like that?
... although, I'd hate to see what the schematic for your typical Intel mainboard looks like.
I still think it's kinda cool that my old C64 programmer's manual comes with a complete schematic for the entire computer. With it, you could build one from scratch if you wanted to.
I can't speak for everyone else, but personally, I find Netflix fantastic at providing me access to a seemingly bottomless library of old, independent and foreign movies. I tend to have rather esoteric tastes, so paying for a subscription that is almost on-demand for just about anything I could want is well worth it. Basically they have all the stuff that more space-constrained institutions (Kiosks, Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, etc) can't be bothered with . To that end, I've never had to wait for a movie to become available.
Now on the other hand: if all you want to do is see the major releases and not pay $10 to see it in a theater, then cruising the video kiosk is certainly the way to go.
Lisa: But aren't the dogs even worse?
Skinner: We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on dog meat
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death
I'm also in MD - Montgomery County to be exact.
I'm not seeing the google problem myself, but I have seen other problems. Do you have trouble with mp3 streams (internet radio and the like)?
Seems like my connection gets "bounced" at random which cuts off just about everything I'm doing: IRC, streaming audio, you name it.
The funny thing is that, according to the article, corrosion on a connector was the culprit here. So gold-plated interconnects would have actually saved the day.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought of dynamic tension on the ribbon.
Personally I had envisioned a wind-speed prop (doesn't have to be big) that drives a governor, that is in turn attached to a spring-loaded tensioner. A kite, or similar mechanical analog like your string, attached to a tensioner might work too.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to generating enough torque to adjust tension in a way that isn't completely overcome by the torque generated by the resonance of the ribbon. Perhaps something electro-mechanical that can *lock* into place on specific tension settings (like shifting gears in a car - do turbines even do that?) is the way to go.
*snort* This will be the best prom ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnN17uJQUbc
Voltaire says it better than I can:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU4B8nYKH5E
:: golf clap ::
The point, as I saw it, was not to achieve the ultimate in efficiency in terms of converting Watts of wind power to Watts of electricity. It's all about the cost of materials and maintenance - both up-front and down the road.
Look at it this way: the only reason why automobiles are so popular in the 1st world is that gasoline used to be dirt cheap, and not because cars are particularly efficient at anything. Cheap trumps efficient every time. To that end, the concerns in the "developing" and war-torn places on the globe are much more immediately fiscal and resource constrained than anything else.
Besides, the design is geared towards low wind applications where turbines are less cost efficient. At that point, it doesn't matter how inefficient you design is since it still gives you more bang for your buck than anything else given the circumstances.
As a graduate of Quaker State, I found your comment rather slick.