like nature does: could you mate with it and raise off-spring?
Nobody is really sure. Now what?
Also, interbreeding is not always a simple it's possible/impossible thing. Some people who are clearly the same species are uable to raise offspring. Between different but closely related species, it sometimes works, and sometimes it doesn't. Mules are usually infertile, but there are exceptions. Some species that are generally accepted as different species (dog, wolf, coyote, for example) can technically interbreed but rarely do so because of very different behavioural patterns.
It's just not as clear cut as people once thought. It rarely is.
Cannibalism has never been a nutritional thing though. Usually last ditch attempt for survival in extreme conditions or ceremonial. This finding just suggests it went on earlier than previously thought
Well, there's a lot of protein in human meat (just as in any other meat). Of course eating carnivores has a greater risk of giving you some weird new disease, but canibalism, whether ceremonial, cultural or because of extreme conditions, has always happened somewhere on earth.
I may be a meat eater, but any species that can run away from ghosts in a virtual maze and knows to chase them after eating power-pellets is off my menu.
When dropping that kind of cash, women aren't going to be lured into the same kind of marketing that works for a $5 impulse-purchase at the checkout counter.
Some clothes cost as much as a small laptop these days.
Would you be offended if Dell put up a website marketing computers to guys talking about how they look up stuff about cars, boxing, and football? If yes, carry on.
I'll carry on, then. I hate the male stereotypes than we should all love cars, football and think of sex all the time. I love computers and think of games all the time.
The money doesn't matter. Even for $0, being able to tell the world "We can do it, and we just proved it" is worth a lot in PR.
And who says they're not doing that already? There are a lot of companies charging vast sums of money for data recovery. A tiny hobbyist's challenge is nothing in comparison.
I'm not saying that it can be done, I'm just saying that a tiny challenge that everybody ignores proves nothing. Increase the prize money to a million and see what happens.
They should be kept on a different part of the electricity grid, preferably in a differnt postcode.
It all depends on what kind of disasters you want your data to survive. If you want it to survive nuclear war, you need off-shore backup. Preferably in a neutral country that won't get involved in the war.
If you want your data to survive a Vogon constructor fleet, use off-planet backup. Recovering it from the brain of a single surviving human (if any) is going to be costly and painful.
The publicity value of being the one successfully recovering that data is much higher than $500. People who say they could do it but don't because the money's not enough are full of shit.
Do you really think a $500 challenge from some tiny organisation nobody's ever heard of is worth much in PR? I don't.
No, it's developer-limited. For most applications, development time is a bigger issue than execution speed. Only for very heavily used low-level routines (OS stuff, graphics libraries, VMs, etc) is it really worthwhile spending extra effort on extreme optimisation.
If so, is it *the* fastest language?
I don't have any recent benchmarks, but I remember that back in the days of the Java 5 JVM, Java is about 10% slower than equivalent C++, which is pretty good. But since then, JVMs have gotten quite a bit faster. It would surprise me if Java was not on at least equal terms with C++ now, alhough highly optimised low-level C is still going to be faster. But that's also extremely tedious to code.
Those are the questions one should be asking when picking a programming language.
No, the main question you need to ask when picking a language is if your code is going to be maintainable, and how expensive you can afford your maintainance to be. That's still the main timesink in development.
If your application is limited by the CPU, only the fastest language, C, will do for some routines. You may even consider using assembly or machine-optimized code such as Atlas
You accidentally hit the nail right on the head there: C is not necessarily the fastest language, highly optimised custom assembly is. And any language is only as fast as it can be if the programmer knows what he's doing. Some language do more for you to make optimal code easy to write than others.
Java development, in my experience, is more laborious than Python or Ruby. Unless you have big teams of developers who must work close together, I wouldn't recommend Java for anything.
Oh, I agree, Java stopped being an easy development language quite some time ago, and moved to the side of the fast execution languages. This is also why I switched from Java to Ruby. However, I just might switch to Scala because recent JVMs are so incredibly cool. The power of Java these days is more in the awesomeness of the JVM than in the language itself.
Even so, there is an enormous amount of support for Java. It is by far the biggest language for enterprisey server stuff. I think there are as many webframeworks for Java as there are for all other programming languages put together. This is one of the big stengths of Java, but at the same time, this architectural overload is also one of the major hurdles for starting in Java.
However, my point was that Java is pretty fast, which it is. If speed is an issue, Java can be an excellent choice (unlike Ruby, for example). If speed is the only thing that matters, then highly optimised C or assembly is really the only option.
Even so, he can stop supporting users of bad ISPs and encourage them to switch to a proper one. If the users are being frustrated by their own ISP, they need to leave.
On the other side, you have two guys with guns and tons of money. Why do they have guns? Because people with tons of money tend to get robbed a lot.
What I'd like to know is, if they get robbed a lot, then why do they go about creating more trouble and harassing bystanders? Finish refilling the ATM, close it, and if the photographer hasn't robbed you by then, leave him alone. Pass the guy's description to the police and let them handle the rest.
Not an RPG? You're nuts. It's based upon statistics with the outcome of battles determined by those stats (virtual die-rolling). Sounds like the classic RPG to me.
You need to look up what the letters "RPG" actually stand for. Hint: the 'R' is not "roll".
Warcraft II is not an RPG. And WoW is arguably not much of an RPG either. Certainly not one that's about story. I guess Warcraft II doesn't really offer any way to deliver story other than through cutscenes (and in most strategy games you're not supposed to get too involved in the story anyway), but for any game calling itself an RPG, resorting to cutscenes is a cheap cop out.
I find it impossible to believe that, short of heavy city traffic, public transportation is EVER quicker than travelling by car.
Well, there is quite a lot of heavy city traffic, so that's a big chunk you're choosing to ignore right there.
But also, a TGV to the south of France is faster than driving there by car. And a lot more comfortable. Possibly a bit more expensive, but all those French toll roads aren't cheap either.
For the middle distances, however, and especially for destinations that aren't reachable by direct public transport connection, car is usually much faster.
And if a train or bicycle take an extra hour every day, every day... that's the equivalent of a few thousand dollars wasted every year.
That depends entirely on what you do with your time. If you read in the train, or spend your spare time in the gym, train or bicycle can save that much money.
The biggest problem I've seen with these sorts of studies is that they really don't consider realistic decisions from the perspective of the consumer. Even if I bicycle to work 75% of the time, I NEED a car for the occasional long trip, and foul weather.
I could "use public transportation." I'd still drive 5 miles roundtrip to the station every day. And of course, the station is only available 6:30am-8am and return trip 4pm-7pm. So if I need to stay late at work I need my car.
Public transport is just not a very viable option outside of densely populated areas. Those places probably still need public transport for people who don't have a driver's license (too young, too old, too stupid, whatever), but when you live in the country, you simply need a car for serious mobility.
In a city it's different. Several busses and trams stop within a 2 minute walk from my house, and most of them go every 10 or 15 minutes from early in the morning until late in the evening. The nearest train station has lousy service (every 30 minutes), but it's a 15 minute walk or 5 minutes by bike.
When I go to work, it's about 30 minutes by bike or bus, and probably more than that by car (because you can't park anywhere).
My wife, on the other hand, works a couple of towns away, which is 40 minutes by car or about 100 minutes by train (and her office is right next to the train station). Her new job is 20 minutes by car and about an hour or more by public transport.
Imagine you're a normal family now, mom, dad, 2.5 kids, possibly older parents to take care of. On any given day something could happen and you need a car to go help someone out.
Not for me. The future day care for my (only very recently born) son is right next to the bicyle route to work.
If public transportation were ubiquitous, hey, no problem. But it's not. Municipalities run it "as a business" rather than admitting it's a service, a public utility, and admitting that hey, we need to put in enough tax money to make it cover enough areas. It may mean some nights, an empty bus is going up and down the street, but the alternative is people NOT riding in the morning because they're afraid of not being able to get a bus in the evening.
This is completely true. If you want people to use public transport, you need to operate it as a public utility with no expectation of profit (which is at odds with the privatised state of many public transport companies). If you want to make a profit off public transport, it will always remain marginal outside of big cities.
Heck, I'd even put the venerable halflife on the side of "good gameplay, bad story." Seriously - the story was just 'oops, we made a teleporter and now aliens are coming out.' That's basically the same story as DOOM... The only reason it was so awesome story-wise is because they TOLD their crappy story in an extremely well-done way.
That's actually what good story is about: telling it well. Lots of really great classic stories would have been lame if told by an idiot. A good storyteller can make the lamest story exciting.
Of course a truly original and innovative plot would be nice, but those are rare in Hollywood and even in books. Most are about telling some lame cliche in a new, exciting and/or interesting way.
That's exactly not what Torment is. It's a mostly dialogue-driven game that delivers the story through its main mechanism: dialogue. That's the problem with story in many other games: the story is kept outside the actual game, and that makes the story irrelevant. Torment is all about story.
Slashdot Mirror
like nature does: could you mate with it and raise off-spring?
Nobody is really sure. Now what?
Also, interbreeding is not always a simple it's possible/impossible thing. Some people who are clearly the same species are uable to raise offspring. Between different but closely related species, it sometimes works, and sometimes it doesn't. Mules are usually infertile, but there are exceptions. Some species that are generally accepted as different species (dog, wolf, coyote, for example) can technically interbreed but rarely do so because of very different behavioural patterns.
It's just not as clear cut as people once thought. It rarely is.
Cannibalism has never been a nutritional thing though. Usually last ditch attempt for survival in extreme conditions or ceremonial. This finding just suggests it went on earlier than previously thought
Well, there's a lot of protein in human meat (just as in any other meat). Of course eating carnivores has a greater risk of giving you some weird new disease, but canibalism, whether ceremonial, cultural or because of extreme conditions, has always happened somewhere on earth.
I may be a meat eater, but any species that can run away from ghosts in a virtual maze and knows to chase them after eating power-pellets is off my menu.
Yeah, let's only eat non-gamers!
When dropping that kind of cash, women aren't going to be lured into the same kind of marketing that works for a $5 impulse-purchase at the checkout counter.
Some clothes cost as much as a small laptop these days.
Would you be offended if Dell put up a website marketing computers to guys talking about how they look up stuff about cars, boxing, and football? If yes, carry on.
I'll carry on, then. I hate the male stereotypes than we should all love cars, football and think of sex all the time. I love computers and think of games all the time.
The money doesn't matter. Even for $0, being able to tell the world "We can do it, and we just proved it" is worth a lot in PR.
And who says they're not doing that already? There are a lot of companies charging vast sums of money for data recovery. A tiny hobbyist's challenge is nothing in comparison.
I'm not saying that it can be done, I'm just saying that a tiny challenge that everybody ignores proves nothing. Increase the prize money to a million and see what happens.
The content wasn't wiped out by incompetence, but by an asshole hacker. Please make that distinction.
It was wiped out by an asshole hacker, it was lost due to incompetence.
The data seems to have been safe against anything BUT intentional, malicious violence. Whoever did this deserves some violence coming their way.
That still won't get you your data back.
They should be kept on a different part of the electricity grid, preferably in a differnt postcode.
It all depends on what kind of disasters you want your data to survive. If you want it to survive nuclear war, you need off-shore backup. Preferably in a neutral country that won't get involved in the war.
If you want your data to survive a Vogon constructor fleet, use off-planet backup. Recovering it from the brain of a single surviving human (if any) is going to be costly and painful.
The publicity value of being the one successfully recovering that data is much higher than $500. People who say they could do it but don't because the money's not enough are full of shit.
Do you really think a $500 challenge from some tiny organisation nobody's ever heard of is worth much in PR? I don't.
A little blame needs to come from all areas. Not every website or messageboard is run by someone with a CS degree with a minor in website security.
You don't need a degree to make good backups.
However, with communities like that, I'd expect every member of that community to have his own partial offsite backup of the server.
Is your application CPU-limited?
No, it's developer-limited. For most applications, development time is a bigger issue than execution speed. Only for very heavily used low-level routines (OS stuff, graphics libraries, VMs, etc) is it really worthwhile spending extra effort on extreme optimisation.
If so, is it *the* fastest language?
I don't have any recent benchmarks, but I remember that back in the days of the Java 5 JVM, Java is about 10% slower than equivalent C++, which is pretty good. But since then, JVMs have gotten quite a bit faster. It would surprise me if Java was not on at least equal terms with C++ now, alhough highly optimised low-level C is still going to be faster. But that's also extremely tedious to code.
Those are the questions one should be asking when picking a programming language.
No, the main question you need to ask when picking a language is if your code is going to be maintainable, and how expensive you can afford your maintainance to be. That's still the main timesink in development.
If your application is limited by the CPU, only the fastest language, C, will do for some routines. You may even consider using assembly or machine-optimized code such as Atlas
You accidentally hit the nail right on the head there: C is not necessarily the fastest language, highly optimised custom assembly is. And any language is only as fast as it can be if the programmer knows what he's doing. Some language do more for you to make optimal code easy to write than others.
Java development, in my experience, is more laborious than Python or Ruby. Unless you have big teams of developers who must work close together, I wouldn't recommend Java for anything.
Oh, I agree, Java stopped being an easy development language quite some time ago, and moved to the side of the fast execution languages. This is also why I switched from Java to Ruby. However, I just might switch to Scala because recent JVMs are so incredibly cool. The power of Java these days is more in the awesomeness of the JVM than in the language itself.
Even so, there is an enormous amount of support for Java. It is by far the biggest language for enterprisey server stuff. I think there are as many webframeworks for Java as there are for all other programming languages put together. This is one of the big stengths of Java, but at the same time, this architectural overload is also one of the major hurdles for starting in Java.
However, my point was that Java is pretty fast, which it is. If speed is an issue, Java can be an excellent choice (unlike Ruby, for example). If speed is the only thing that matters, then highly optimised C or assembly is really the only option.
Well, when regular influenze kills ~40,000 americans a year,
How many? Don't you guys have any health care or something?
IN JAVA. Speed was obviously not in the design criteria.
The '90s are over. Java is now one of the fastest languages around.
Even so, he can stop supporting users of bad ISPs and encourage them to switch to a proper one. If the users are being frustrated by their own ISP, they need to leave.
On the other side, you have two guys with guns and tons of money. Why do they have guns? Because people with tons of money tend to get robbed a lot.
What I'd like to know is, if they get robbed a lot, then why do they go about creating more trouble and harassing bystanders? Finish refilling the ATM, close it, and if the photographer hasn't robbed you by then, leave him alone. Pass the guy's description to the police and let them handle the rest.
Not an RPG? You're nuts. It's based upon statistics with the outcome of battles determined by those stats (virtual die-rolling). Sounds like the classic RPG to me.
You need to look up what the letters "RPG" actually stand for. Hint: the 'R' is not "roll".
Warcraft II is not an RPG. And WoW is arguably not much of an RPG either. Certainly not one that's about story. I guess Warcraft II doesn't really offer any way to deliver story other than through cutscenes (and in most strategy games you're not supposed to get too involved in the story anyway), but for any game calling itself an RPG, resorting to cutscenes is a cheap cop out.
You forgot your medical bills from when you get hit by a car. They're actually pretty high.
Unless you've got proper medical insurance.
How do you read a laptop stood up with one hand on the rail? Time in a car may be wasted, but so is waiting at a bus stop in the rain for an hour.
My bus stop has a roof.
I find it impossible to believe that, short of heavy city traffic, public transportation is EVER quicker than travelling by car.
Well, there is quite a lot of heavy city traffic, so that's a big chunk you're choosing to ignore right there.
But also, a TGV to the south of France is faster than driving there by car. And a lot more comfortable. Possibly a bit more expensive, but all those French toll roads aren't cheap either.
For the middle distances, however, and especially for destinations that aren't reachable by direct public transport connection, car is usually much faster.
And if a train or bicycle take an extra hour every day, every day... that's the equivalent of a few thousand dollars wasted every year.
That depends entirely on what you do with your time. If you read in the train, or spend your spare time in the gym, train or bicycle can save that much money.
The biggest problem I've seen with these sorts of studies is that they really don't consider realistic decisions from the perspective of the consumer. Even if I bicycle to work 75% of the time, I NEED a car for the occasional long trip, and foul weather.
Maybe you do, but many people don't.
I could "use public transportation." I'd still drive 5 miles roundtrip to the station every day. And of course, the station is only available 6:30am-8am and return trip 4pm-7pm. So if I need to stay late at work I need my car.
Public transport is just not a very viable option outside of densely populated areas. Those places probably still need public transport for people who don't have a driver's license (too young, too old, too stupid, whatever), but when you live in the country, you simply need a car for serious mobility.
In a city it's different. Several busses and trams stop within a 2 minute walk from my house, and most of them go every 10 or 15 minutes from early in the morning until late in the evening. The nearest train station has lousy service (every 30 minutes), but it's a 15 minute walk or 5 minutes by bike.
When I go to work, it's about 30 minutes by bike or bus, and probably more than that by car (because you can't park anywhere).
My wife, on the other hand, works a couple of towns away, which is 40 minutes by car or about 100 minutes by train (and her office is right next to the train station). Her new job is 20 minutes by car and about an hour or more by public transport.
Imagine you're a normal family now, mom, dad, 2.5 kids, possibly older parents to take care of. On any given day something could happen and you need a car to go help someone out.
Not for me. The future day care for my (only very recently born) son is right next to the bicyle route to work.
If public transportation were ubiquitous, hey, no problem. But it's not. Municipalities run it "as a business" rather than admitting it's a service, a public utility, and admitting that hey, we need to put in enough tax money to make it cover enough areas. It may mean some nights, an empty bus is going up and down the street, but the alternative is people NOT riding in the morning because they're afraid of not being able to get a bus in the evening.
This is completely true. If you want people to use public transport, you need to operate it as a public utility with no expectation of profit (which is at odds with the privatised state of many public transport companies). If you want to make a profit off public transport, it will always remain marginal outside of big cities.
Cut scenes don't belong in RPGs either. They should tell the story through the game rather than tacking it on for passive consumption.
Games are not a passive medium. You need to get players involved in the story, rather than making them a passive audience to a crappy movie.
Cut scenes need to die.
Heck, I'd even put the venerable halflife on the side of "good gameplay, bad story." Seriously - the story was just 'oops, we made a teleporter and now aliens are coming out.' That's basically the same story as DOOM... The only reason it was so awesome story-wise is because they TOLD their crappy story in an extremely well-done way.
That's actually what good story is about: telling it well. Lots of really great classic stories would have been lame if told by an idiot. A good storyteller can make the lamest story exciting.
Of course a truly original and innovative plot would be nice, but those are rare in Hollywood and even in books. Most are about telling some lame cliche in a new, exciting and/or interesting way.
That's exactly not what Torment is. It's a mostly dialogue-driven game that delivers the story through its main mechanism: dialogue. That's the problem with story in many other games: the story is kept outside the actual game, and that makes the story irrelevant. Torment is all about story.