The problem with that is that LoadMediaFromDisk() and CreateMediaOnTheFly() generate most of their load in two different parts of the computer. In the case of CreateMediaOnTheFly(), the part it uses happens to be one that's probably already pretty busy just running the game engine.
Longer load times aren't just it. There would also be more load times - most computers cant fit nearly as much stuff in RAM as they can on the hard disk, so you wouldn't be able to procedurally generate, say, an entire level in a visually complex FPS before the game starts. You'd be looking at longer load times/and/ more of them. Having to wait for a room to load while you're in the middle of a deathmatch is probably not going to make for an enjoyable gaming experience.
Re:Editorial Oversight != Truth (i.e. FOX News)
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 2, Informative
Fox has to report things that everyone else is reporting, otherwise their reputation will only get worse. Part of it's in the way that Fox News reports things - wordings, the details they pay most attention to, spin, etc.
Part of it's that Fox News doesn't even claim to be a legitimate news organization. Please, please, please let us not forget that Fox News is the organization that won the court decision in Florida saying they are under no obligation to not outright lie about the news.
Though, of course, I suppose that anyone who is willing to trust a news outlet that has freely admitted, "Yup, we lie about the news, and we're going to fight to defend our right to do so in court," can be free to do so. And they can be free to claim that anyone who detracts from Fox News is just being partisan, too. After all, politics in the USA has never been about right or wrong, or what's best for the country or its citizens. It's more of a 230-year-long pissing match akin to the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, with the unfortunate detail that it also has an affect on people's lives.
SMB networking is built into OS X. Very few Mac users I know even realize there's a difference between SMB shares and AFP shares, and wonder why our network volumes are showing up in "Local" and "Workgroup."
Modern-day slavery is a completely different monster from the kind of slavery that westerners practised in the 19th century and before. It don't see how opening old wounds is going to help us fight it any better; if anything it distracts us from the problem, and possibly even belittles it. It encourages people to think of slavery purely in terms of a government-sanctioned institution; it encourages people to think of cotton fields and harbors.
When I tell people that there are more slaves in the USA today than there were in 1860, they don't believe me. It has never occurred to them to think of slavery as something that happens one person at a time and is spread finely and invisibly throughout society. It's fixed in their minds as a particularly brutal form of racial subjugation. Maybe if we stopped constantly reciting slavery in the form that mostly ended (in the US) over a century ago, it would be easier for people to wrap their minds around slavery as it happens today. We have to get people to do that before we can get anything resembling the mass movement of people that it would take to root out what has become one of the most insidious and deeply underground parts of the black market.
So yeah, I agree, it's important to never forget the past. But living in the past can only hurt us, and this is one way that it does.
There's a point at which we're keeping the wound from healing because we keep picking at the scab every time it itches.
As long as we let slavery control our thinking in any way by doing things like playing the slave card every time a racial issue comes up, we'll never escape its legacy. You can keep evoking the memory of slavery in your own mind all you want - and I hope you have fun dwelling in the ugly past. If you need me I'll be in the better future.
Those are words that are used in a particular field (computers, in this case) that are created to deal with new concepts that are introduced in that field. In other words, they're just jargon.
A buzzword is a word that generates 'buzz', i.e., it's getting a lot of attention and seems to pop up everywhere, even in places where it doesn't make sense. Sometimes even the word doesn't make sense, or becomes so popular that its meaning becomes fuzzy as people who never solidly grasped its original meaning begin to use it regularly. Multi-threaded was a buzzword in the late 90s, multimedia is starting to wane but it's been a buzzword for a long time. Lessee, some others I can think of are framework, leverage, cyberspace, online, legacy, foo-killer, and collaborative.
Oh boo hoo. Would "It should be less ugly" be better?
OT: noisy banners!?
on
Five That Fell
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You want to know a great way to get me to stop reading your article right away?
Include a banner ad that makes a lot of annoying noises that appear without warning and are deafeningly loud, especially through headphones. Of course, simply causing physical pain for your readers is never a good stopping point, so why not add insult to injury by giving no way to turn the damn ad off?
And then all the bad formatting. . . great job, guys.
Part of it may have been that showing that a medication can reduce heart disease takes a whole lot longer than showing that a medication can reduce cholesterol levels. The extra time it takes would mean that it takes longer to get the drug to market.
I doubt it was cholesterol either... as he would have been on any medication around to stop that.
It seems to me that you're suggesting that people who are on cholesterol medication never die of coronary heart disease. Really, they only lower the mortality rate by about 10%, making them less effective than a good cholesterol reduction diet. Of course, neither is a magic bullet - he could have been on Lipitor and eating Ornish and he'd still be under a high risk of dying from heart disease if he already had off-the-wall cholesterol levels.
At my office, we get around this by using some homegrown VB apps to do the import instead of Access's built-in import functionality - which is admittedly crappy.
I don't have Access on this computer, so I can't test it, but it seems like Access should be able to import images from Excel files somehow. If not, I'm sure you can whip up a separate app to run the import and get the images in somehow.
After that, why not do all the reporting with Access? Attach a few VBScripts to some buttons and zoom.
Given that, what does "Separation of church and state" really mean, anyway?
The fundamental difference between church and state is that religion generally claims an absolute athority handed down from above and a dogmatic set of rules that cannot be changed. The state generally claims its power from something more mundane, be it social contract or use of force, and is recognized as something that can be modified or replaced.
This distinction is the reason why at least some degree of separation of church and state is necessary in a liberal society.
It's staggering how many managers don't realise this, and hamstring their dev teams with their personal, half-baked, technically-incompetent ideas and/or with excessive procedures and beaucratic reporting because the manager "has to know what's going on". Of course he does, up to a point, but what exactly is he going to do if a developer does tell him that a bug fix was delayed by a day because {$TECHNOBABBLE}?
The most important thing is never having knowledge, but knowing when your knowledge ends. This is the case in every situation I've encountered. When I was working tech support the absolute worst callers were ones who thought they were computer savvy and weren't (the best callers usually being ones who didn't know a damn thing about computers and were quite happy to make this clear). The most annoying management decisions are the ones made about things managment has never touched and without asking for/paying attention to advice coming from the people who are actually doing it. The most annoying software I use comes from developers who think they know better than the users what the feature set should be. Heck, I know people who have gotten themselves into serious financial trouble by jumping into the stock market on a tip without taking the time to learn how the market works or taking any time to research the tip. (I just saved a none too tech-savvy friend a whole lot of money by working hard to convince him to stay the hell away from the Vonage IPO.)
That's how I tend to do all of my testing, too. When I started combining an F-Script console with the "Fix" button, debugging became almost fun. I can just keep poking and prodding at a bug until I pin it down without having to worry nearly so much about continually dragging the program back to the conditions where the bug came out or any of that, because I can bang out an F-Script block that does that on the fly for me, and then tweak it as needed without ever having to restart the program.
On top of that, the biggest objective benefit of developing Cocoa apps in Java was taken away with the addition of a garbage collector to the Objective-C runtime.
I suppose there's still the benefit of allowing people who already know Java to work with a familiar language, but of course OS X also provides Java developers with a set of APIs that should be much more familiar than Cocoa. In a sense, the Cocoa-Java bridge was always a solution in need of a problem.
F-Script can also be plugged into an app that wasn't designed to have it attached. From what I understand, PyInjector was created by following in the footsteps of FScriptAnywhere.
Right, which is a huge advantage of F-Script over what I've seen of PyObjC. The only major difference between passing a message in F-Script and passing one in ObjC is that I use parentheses instead of square brackets. PyObjC has to go through some rather unnatural contortions in order to do the same, and it kind of made the code hurt my eyes a little bit, and I could see where it could make reading others' code a bit confusing.
I'm also wondering, does PyObjC have "tab completion" for code the way the built-in F-Script console does? I've gotten really used to that in XCode; Python would have to be a damn sight better than F-Script for the switch to it to accelerate my coding more than the loss of Code Sense-style symbol completion would slow it down.
I've been using F-Script for a while now; it's solid, it plays very nicely with Cocoa, and includes a lot of nice time-saving syntactic sugar. Its syntax is also simple enough that I can use it for an application scripting language that users can pick up in a few minutes. The F-Script pallette for IB is also rather convenient; it means I can throw a debugging (or scripting) console into any app of mine with almost zero effort.
I don't really care if an Apple employee is working on one but not the other; F-Script is mature enough that it's not like I need to be afraid that the project will be orphaned before it's completed or anything like that. Nor do I care if Apple has blessed PyObjC or not. Apple also put scads of time and money into what I had always heard was a rather hacked Cocoa-Java bridge, only to essentially orphan it a year ago. And dare I mention AppleScript?
I haven't tried PyObjC, so I can't tell you if F-Script is a better choice or not, all I know is that it's a good choice. So I'll turn the question around - what makes PyObjC a better choice?
There once was a man who made his living by waking up in the morning, fishing until he caught enough to feed his family, taking it home to cook, and spending the evenings talking with his family.
One day, a rich man saw what he was doing and told him that, if he would just fish a little bit longer so that he could catch more fish than he needed, he could sell the extra. If he saved that money, he could buy a boat. With a boat, he could catch more fish, until he had the money to hire others to run the boat for him. Then he could live a life of leisure and do anything he wanted with his days while he paid others to catch fish for him.
The fisherman thought a moment and replied, "If I could do anything I wanted today, I'd get up and fish all morning. Then I'd go home, eat a good meal with my family, and play with my wife and children the rest of the day."
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that is that LoadMediaFromDisk() and CreateMediaOnTheFly() generate most of their load in two different parts of the computer. In the case of CreateMediaOnTheFly(), the part it uses happens to be one that's probably already pretty busy just running the game engine.
/and/ more of them. Having to wait for a room to load while you're in the middle of a deathmatch is probably not going to make for an enjoyable gaming experience.
Longer load times aren't just it. There would also be more load times - most computers cant fit nearly as much stuff in RAM as they can on the hard disk, so you wouldn't be able to procedurally generate, say, an entire level in a visually complex FPS before the game starts. You'd be looking at longer load times
Fox has to report things that everyone else is reporting, otherwise their reputation will only get worse. Part of it's in the way that Fox News reports things - wordings, the details they pay most attention to, spin, etc.
Part of it's that Fox News doesn't even claim to be a legitimate news organization. Please, please, please let us not forget that Fox News is the organization that won the court decision in Florida saying they are under no obligation to not outright lie about the news.
Though, of course, I suppose that anyone who is willing to trust a news outlet that has freely admitted, "Yup, we lie about the news, and we're going to fight to defend our right to do so in court," can be free to do so. And they can be free to claim that anyone who detracts from Fox News is just being partisan, too. After all, politics in the USA has never been about right or wrong, or what's best for the country or its citizens. It's more of a 230-year-long pissing match akin to the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, with the unfortunate detail that it also has an affect on people's lives.
SMB networking is built into OS X. Very few Mac users I know even realize there's a difference between SMB shares and AFP shares, and wonder why our network volumes are showing up in "Local" and "Workgroup."
I heard part of that was that PC Accelerator grabbed up a bunch of PC Gamer's staff.
And I've used a wired one on a cell phone before.
The only thing about this that might be new is that it uses Bluetooth.
Modern-day slavery is a completely different monster from the kind of slavery that westerners practised in the 19th century and before. It don't see how opening old wounds is going to help us fight it any better; if anything it distracts us from the problem, and possibly even belittles it. It encourages people to think of slavery purely in terms of a government-sanctioned institution; it encourages people to think of cotton fields and harbors.
When I tell people that there are more slaves in the USA today than there were in 1860, they don't believe me. It has never occurred to them to think of slavery as something that happens one person at a time and is spread finely and invisibly throughout society. It's fixed in their minds as a particularly brutal form of racial subjugation. Maybe if we stopped constantly reciting slavery in the form that mostly ended (in the US) over a century ago, it would be easier for people to wrap their minds around slavery as it happens today. We have to get people to do that before we can get anything resembling the mass movement of people that it would take to root out what has become one of the most insidious and deeply underground parts of the black market.
So yeah, I agree, it's important to never forget the past. But living in the past can only hurt us, and this is one way that it does.
There's a point at which we're keeping the wound from healing because we keep picking at the scab every time it itches.
As long as we let slavery control our thinking in any way by doing things like playing the slave card every time a racial issue comes up, we'll never escape its legacy. You can keep evoking the memory of slavery in your own mind all you want - and I hope you have fun dwelling in the ugly past. If you need me I'll be in the better future.
Those are words that are used in a particular field (computers, in this case) that are created to deal with new concepts that are introduced in that field. In other words, they're just jargon.
A buzzword is a word that generates 'buzz', i.e., it's getting a lot of attention and seems to pop up everywhere, even in places where it doesn't make sense. Sometimes even the word doesn't make sense, or becomes so popular that its meaning becomes fuzzy as people who never solidly grasped its original meaning begin to use it regularly. Multi-threaded was a buzzword in the late 90s, multimedia is starting to wane but it's been a buzzword for a long time. Lessee, some others I can think of are framework, leverage, cyberspace, online, legacy, foo-killer, and collaborative.
Oh boo hoo. Would "It should be less ugly" be better?
You want to know a great way to get me to stop reading your article right away?
Include a banner ad that makes a lot of annoying noises that appear without warning and are deafeningly loud, especially through headphones. Of course, simply causing physical pain for your readers is never a good stopping point, so why not add insult to injury by giving no way to turn the damn ad off?
And then all the bad formatting. . . great job, guys.
Part of it may have been that showing that a medication can reduce heart disease takes a whole lot longer than showing that a medication can reduce cholesterol levels. The extra time it takes would mean that it takes longer to get the drug to market.
I doubt it was cholesterol either... as he would have been on any medication around to stop that.
It seems to me that you're suggesting that people who are on cholesterol medication never die of coronary heart disease. Really, they only lower the mortality rate by about 10%, making them less effective than a good cholesterol reduction diet. Of course, neither is a magic bullet - he could have been on Lipitor and eating Ornish and he'd still be under a high risk of dying from heart disease if he already had off-the-wall cholesterol levels.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
At my office, we get around this by using some homegrown VB apps to do the import instead of Access's built-in import functionality - which is admittedly crappy.
I don't have Access on this computer, so I can't test it, but it seems like Access should be able to import images from Excel files somehow. If not, I'm sure you can whip up a separate app to run the import and get the images in somehow.
After that, why not do all the reporting with Access? Attach a few VBScripts to some buttons and zoom.
The state is a church, and the church is a state.
Given that, what does "Separation of church and state" really mean, anyway?
The fundamental difference between church and state is that religion generally claims an absolute athority handed down from above and a dogmatic set of rules that cannot be changed. The state generally claims its power from something more mundane, be it social contract or use of force, and is recognized as something that can be modified or replaced.
This distinction is the reason why at least some degree of separation of church and state is necessary in a liberal society.
You hear that sound? That's the sound of a joke whizzing right over your head. ;)
It's staggering how many managers don't realise this, and hamstring their dev teams with their personal, half-baked, technically-incompetent ideas and/or with excessive procedures and beaucratic reporting because the manager "has to know what's going on". Of course he does, up to a point, but what exactly is he going to do if a developer does tell him that a bug fix was delayed by a day because {$TECHNOBABBLE}?
The most important thing is never having knowledge, but knowing when your knowledge ends. This is the case in every situation I've encountered. When I was working tech support the absolute worst callers were ones who thought they were computer savvy and weren't (the best callers usually being ones who didn't know a damn thing about computers and were quite happy to make this clear). The most annoying management decisions are the ones made about things managment has never touched and without asking for/paying attention to advice coming from the people who are actually doing it. The most annoying software I use comes from developers who think they know better than the users what the feature set should be. Heck, I know people who have gotten themselves into serious financial trouble by jumping into the stock market on a tip without taking the time to learn how the market works or taking any time to research the tip. (I just saved a none too tech-savvy friend a whole lot of money by working hard to convince him to stay the hell away from the Vonage IPO.)
That's how I tend to do all of my testing, too. When I started combining an F-Script console with the "Fix" button, debugging became almost fun. I can just keep poking and prodding at a bug until I pin it down without having to worry nearly so much about continually dragging the program back to the conditions where the bug came out or any of that, because I can bang out an F-Script block that does that on the fly for me, and then tweak it as needed without ever having to restart the program.
On top of that, the biggest objective benefit of developing Cocoa apps in Java was taken away with the addition of a garbage collector to the Objective-C runtime.
I suppose there's still the benefit of allowing people who already know Java to work with a familiar language, but of course OS X also provides Java developers with a set of APIs that should be much more familiar than Cocoa. In a sense, the Cocoa-Java bridge was always a solution in need of a problem.
F-Script can also be plugged into an app that wasn't designed to have it attached. From what I understand, PyInjector was created by following in the footsteps of FScriptAnywhere.
Right, which is a huge advantage of F-Script over what I've seen of PyObjC. The only major difference between passing a message in F-Script and passing one in ObjC is that I use parentheses instead of square brackets. PyObjC has to go through some rather unnatural contortions in order to do the same, and it kind of made the code hurt my eyes a little bit, and I could see where it could make reading others' code a bit confusing.
I'm also wondering, does PyObjC have "tab completion" for code the way the built-in F-Script console does? I've gotten really used to that in XCode; Python would have to be a damn sight better than F-Script for the switch to it to accelerate my coding more than the loss of Code Sense-style symbol completion would slow it down.
I've been using F-Script for a while now; it's solid, it plays very nicely with Cocoa, and includes a lot of nice time-saving syntactic sugar. Its syntax is also simple enough that I can use it for an application scripting language that users can pick up in a few minutes. The F-Script pallette for IB is also rather convenient; it means I can throw a debugging (or scripting) console into any app of mine with almost zero effort.
I don't really care if an Apple employee is working on one but not the other; F-Script is mature enough that it's not like I need to be afraid that the project will be orphaned before it's completed or anything like that. Nor do I care if Apple has blessed PyObjC or not. Apple also put scads of time and money into what I had always heard was a rather hacked Cocoa-Java bridge, only to essentially orphan it a year ago. And dare I mention AppleScript?
I haven't tried PyObjC, so I can't tell you if F-Script is a better choice or not, all I know is that it's a good choice. So I'll turn the question around - what makes PyObjC a better choice?
Heh, I take it you noticed I didn't do any proofreading, too? ;)
That reminds me of a parable.
There once was a man who made his living by waking up in the morning, fishing until he caught enough to feed his family, taking it home to cook, and spending the evenings talking with his family.
One day, a rich man saw what he was doing and told him that, if he would just fish a little bit longer so that he could catch more fish than he needed, he could sell the extra. If he saved that money, he could buy a boat. With a boat, he could catch more fish, until he had the money to hire others to run the boat for him. Then he could live a life of leisure and do anything he wanted with his days while he paid others to catch fish for him.
The fisherman thought a moment and replied, "If I could do anything I wanted today, I'd get up and fish all morning. Then I'd go home, eat a good meal with my family, and play with my wife and children the rest of the day."