Just take a look at the documentation to know which to use.
The GTK project seems to have gotten away with not having updated its documentation for 1.2 since it was 75% done in 1999. Looking over the documentation requirements and comparing those to what I expect from good documentation, they were really more like half done.
The GTK 1.2 documentation is still in that state, & GTK 2.0's documentation doesn't appear to be much better.
Not every function or object has a complete description, almost every struct has an incomplete description, not all methods of objects are explained fully, almost no signals have any useful documentation about what they do beyond what can be gleaned from their names. The various states for widgets and GTK as a whole are barely even mentioned.
Assuming QT has documentation that at least approaches professionalism (which I guess is safe since QT is a professional company), I know what I'd pick.
There's the TCO, then there's the time and money it takes to train your staff. On GTK+, I think that the investment on doing that would be simply unreasonable.
If you're talking about the radius of the event horizon, I believe that is proportional to the black hole's mass.
If you're talking about the physical size of the matter in the black hole, I don't know if that is something that can be measured. We'd have to find a way of getting data out out from below the event horizon. . .
I use it extensively almost every day I sit down in front of a computer to do anything more than check my e-mail. I think most anyone who has to do a fair amount of work on multiple UNIX machines also uses it frequently.
When I'm working remotely on Windows boxen using Terminal Services, I often find myself sighing wistfully and wishing Windows had a wire protocol. Terminal Services and similar solutions at their best are generally ill-concieved hacks and at their worst are just plain evil and rude.
It was important to secure the oil wells first because of the danger of them being set on fire.
A massive oil well fire would cause untold environmental damage and cost thousands of lives, both of firefighting crews and others due to pollution.
A massive oil fire would be super expensive to put out (as per the Kuwait oil fires).
A massive oil fire would be a severe military liability - the clouds of smoke they would send up would disrupt communication and air traffic. I'm sure flying through the smoke would also shorten the duty life of a lot of jets, thus weakening the ability of the coalition to conduct the air war.
My brother and I have both owned RioVolt players. Between the way they both just quit working after about a year (as did their replacements) and the way they had this habit of just crashing if you push the volume button too quickly or when they encountered a cooked mp3, I'm not too happy with the quality of their products. To make matters worse, I have tried to use their e-mail tech support several times, and have never been able to get a response.
I, for one, make frequent use of sites that are financially supported by banner ads. (Slashdot, for example)
These sites would have to find some other way to pay the bill to stay alive, I can't imagine that they would be able to find anything that isn't infinitely more annoying than (non popup) ads.
Now its true that the CIAs attempts at counterinsurgency in the region weren't always the most upstanding operations, and didn't always go as planned. But to assert that we had no business fighting the beginnings of Communist regimes in South and Central American is just absurd. Not to mention that compared to the the corruption in the average 20th century South American country (Mexico during the 50 year revolution, Cuba under Castro, etc) the US is the model of corruption-free bliss.
"Not always the most upstanding operations?" In the Contra war, the CIA trained the Contra army to attack civilian targets at any given opportunity. Children were murdered, women were raped, hospitals were attacked.
Of course, the supposedly democratic regimes we have set up in many South American countries (Guatemala and Nicaragua come to mind) were puppet governments set up by the US goverment, with fair election being subverted through US actions. And the repressive tactics used by these governments were taught to their leaders right here on US soil, in the School of the Americas.
As for Mexico under the 50 year revolution and Cuba under castro, let me point out that although nothing has been officially stated, a quick run-through of the US involvement in Mexico's revolution seems that it was engineered to keep the revolution going as long as it did. And the United States put Castro in power.
The only regime I would call truly communist that existed before US involvement was the Sandanista government in Nicaragua, and I personally think that it was fairly well-run and hardly a threat to the United States. And the American interest that 'justifies' all of the rape, murder, and torture that toppled the Sandanista government and put into place Nicaragua's current (horribly corrupt) government? Cheap bananas, mostly.
Just like with pot, we'll need to let a few convicted rapists and murderers and armed robbers and such out of prison early in order to make room for all the kids who download mp3's.
So we have ruined the lives of a few kids who aren't even doing anything harmful and making a mockery of our treatment of more serious crimes in order to deter an unproven effect of filesharing, namely that it's killing the music industry (in the same way that tape copying killed the music industry back in the 80s).
And, of course, anyone who has studied basic behavioral psychology would understand why this still wouldn't keep anyone from sharing files.
Would someone please hand the US government a cluestick? We already have a much larger percentage of our population in prison than any other developed country, but our crime rate is still off the wall. It seems pretty obvious to me that at minimum the US criminal justice system is terminally ill and needs some major rethinking, and at worse the cure is worse than the disease.
US biological programs were halted in, I believe, the early 70s, and all materials destroyed.
Are these biological materials that were destroyed the same ones that were shown to be the source of the anthrax that was being mailed around the country last year?
Chemicals we don't have, as per the various laws of war banning them.
You mean we don't use them. We probably won't either, since most everythg else we have is more effective than most chemical weapons (including Sarin and VX). But do you really think that the army would get rid of any weapon technology?
Nuclear stockpiles continue to be reduced.
Yeah. The nukes that are being dismantled by the US are old nukes in the kiloton and low megaton range that aren't nearly as effective as some other things we have, as well as ridiculously large bombs we wouldn't rationally use since the fallout from them would be floating in the atmosphere for weeks and would contaminate the entire planet. The 'good' stuff is not being dismantled at all. I find it hard to believe that the US military will ever give up its neutron bombs, for example.
Might I add that the US military was openly considering the use of tactical nukes in the war in Afghanistan, and is probably considering the use of nukes in Iraq. The United States also has the dubious distinction of being the only country to ever use nuclear weapons in an attack. This fact is made even more despicable by the fact that the second one - the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki (the one dropped on Hiroshima was a uranium bomb) was quite obviously dropped mainly for the sake of seeing how it would work.
Re:Don't see why it's so hard for some
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If I had to choose between living in a democratic state and not having to go through having someone bomb the shit out of me, having a large number of my friends and relatives die, and my children being born deformed as a result of depleted uranium shells, I'd choose the totalitarian government any day.
Shoot, take a course in Latin America's history and the idea that the government of the U.S. is partily corrupt will seem like a gross understatement.
The U.S. government's foreign policy is in no way dictated or influenced by the opinions or needs of American citizens (or any other world citizen, for that matter) or moral imperatives. U.S. foreign policy decisions are made entirely on the basis of economic interest, Cold War style paranoia, or both.
& a quick look at the financial profiles of Bush & a large number of Congress members makes it fairly obvious that U.S. politics has reached a state where lawmakers and U.S. government leaders don't really even need to be bribed by interest groups, they can bribe themselves. For example, Bush's oil-industry stock is going to skyrocket if the U.S. can take control of the Iraqi oil fields for a multitude of reasons. On the domestic side of things, that same oil-industry stock portfolio also discourages him from enacting good environmental policies such as a push for more fuel-efficient automobiles or programs to encourage the development of the United States's public transportation infrastructure.
We should also not have to get punished for the activities of wrongdoers.
Unless you can come up with a magical way to keep people from warezing games, it's going to come down to making life tough for legitimate customers or rewarding people for doing what they should do anyway.
Span isn't just a pain in the ass. It costs shitloads of money.
I can't remember the amount of bandwidth it takes to keep a news server updated, but it's a pretty big chunk. That makes it expensive to run a Usenet news server in the first place.
Now consider that an estimated 60% of the crap coming out of Telestra is spam, and the issue doesn't just become one of an annoyance. Telestra is costing lots of people lots of money.
Under this situation, I think it is perfectly acceptable for admins to stop listening to the noise Telestra is putting out over the pipes. Frankly, the UDP is the only real defense Usenet has against ill-behaved entities, and it is used rarely, and only when all other options have been exhausted and the provider being UDPd is still refusing to cooperate. Yeah, it sucks for Telestra users, but if they want their Usenet service to return to normal, they can vote with their money by going to another ISP, or they can pressure Telestra to start behaving.
They might take special light fixtures, and the bulbs are expensive as hell, but they are well worth it.
For one, they last a long time. I'm not sure about the cost per unit of life, but if you find the right full spectrum bulb it shouldn't be much worse than incandesent.
For two, they really are like real sunlight. You'll all probably be much happier people (since you probably don't get to see much real sunlight if your office has no windows), and you'll get more vitamin D to boot. =D
Oh yeah, and the plants will thank you for it, too.
I agree that keyboard shortcuts are important. But most people don't use them. On top of that, even keyboard jocks use the GUI, at least when they are first using a program. && on a lot of programs, doing most everything from the keyboard just doesn't make sense - OS interfaces and word processors (for tasks such as changing font faces &c), for example.
As for the button on the edge examples you give, most of them don't count as stuff on the edges and corners from the perspective of a GUI designer. The advantage of putting something along the edge of the screen is that you simply have to shoot the pointer in the direction of what you want to hit and click. This only works if the clickable area for a widget literally goes all the way to the edge of the screen.
The widget bars at the bottom of web browsers don't do this because nothing goes to the edge of the screen, and most of it isn't clickable, anyway.
For one, I'm sure most the time he isn't working on the finished product, meaning it's not really a whole lot like playing the finished game at all.
And by the time it is getting toward the finished game, I'm sure most the time isn't spent in general playtesting so much as trying to track down the conditions under which various bugs are encountered, meaning even if it's testing a game, it's still testing.
In a helicopter, you have four things you have to control - the cyclic for amount of lift (analogous to throttle), antitorque pedals for the spin, and the cyclic for both pitch and yaw.
On a car, you generally only have to worry about the throttle and the steering wheel.
So yes, it's three dimensions as opposed to two, but it's four degrees of freedom as opposed to two.
Add to that that the controls on a helicopter are very tightly interrelated. In a car, hitting the gas generally just makes you go faster (assuming you don't slide the car). On a helicopter, changing the cyclic can change the speed of the helicopter in three directions, depending on its orientation. It will also tend to make the helicopter rotate unless you counter the change in cyclic with an according change in the antitorque pedals.
Add to that that the behavior of a helicopter is a bit different depending on if you're in a hover or if you're moving (as well as the direction in which you're moving).
Add to that that the helicopter isn't stuck firmly to anything the way a car is, and most people would have a hard time with hovercraft, where you only have to worry about constant sliding in two dimensions.
Add to that that most helicopters' controls are super-sensitive.
Add to that that the behavior of a helicopter also changes as you get close to the ground (say, if you're landing or taking off).
Making me think that a helicopter in every garage would really be a great solution to the world population problem.
I'm doing some undergraduate research in computer vision. I looked at using the Quake II and Crystal Space engine, but turned them down in favor of making my own engine (they didn't fit my needs as well as I had hoped). However, I have talked to other people doing research in the same field using game engines, and they have been quite successful.
I'm not sure Quake2 is the best engine, simply because it is very game oriented, but if your requirements allow you to do the coding in QuakeC rather than modifying the engine directly, it would be an excellent option - for one, you get automatic support for any platform that Quake II has been ported to.
If you need to work with the engine at a lower leve, I would suggest giving a free games engine such as Crystal Space a try. Although I think CS is a bit unwieldy to work with, others seem to like it.
In 6 years it practically destroyed its competition because its code was so elegant and more versatile. Switching to anything else Just Because Microsoft owns it now is folly.
The above can now be said about emulation software, web browser, email client, and office software.
It's not this alone that's problematic. It's this when looked at as part of the big picture. Microsoft has Apple & its users by the cajones. This acquisition tightens the grip. Apple may be trying to wriggle out, but it's going to keep getting harder and harder to do so.
Any security a switch provides is merely a by-product of its prime purpose, which is to reduce the traffic passing over any one link in a network.
Although they do this by not forwarding traffic onto networks that don't contain the destination host for a packet, this does not mean that they never send a packet out on all ports. If a host drops off of a switch's tables for whatever reason, the switch will forward all traffic meant to go to that host on all ports until the switch is able to add the host back into its tables again.
Furthermore, it is fairly easy to spoof a switch into sending traffic to you instead of a packet's intended host, and there's nothing in a switch's design to keep someone from doing it.
Yeah, it's harder to intercept traffic on a switched network, but since switches don't even attempt to implement security, those words 'responsibility' and 'legal liability' that the parent mentions really do come into play - anyone worth their salt in networking would say that your company hasn't even tried to implement security, so they could easily be held liable.
If they insisit on avoiding https and using only switches to implement security, at least convince them to buy switches that support vlans and use them to segment the network to keep traffic from going to groups of people that it shouldn't go to.
Re:posting before coffee is bunk
on
Half Mast
·
· Score: 1
Erratum 1: "tests tests are dumb" -> "standardized tests are dumb"
Erratum 2: "which is already hard to maintain when you work with teachers all day" -> "which is already hard to maintain when you work with teenagers all day"
Erratum 3: "fuckhead" -> "FUCKHEAD"
Re:psycho tests are bunk
on
Half Mast
·
· Score: 1
For one, the kids you need to worry about are smart enough to know they are a bit 'off' as compared to everyone else and know how to pass these tests. (It's not hard to fool a psychologist if you're tenacious.)
For two, tests tests are dumb.
For three, maybe if even some teachers would pay attention to the students who try to avoid attention - in a good way, not a scrutinizing way - and actually care about something, and if schools were to actually provide a good example to kids about how to act maturely, maybe the problem would solve itself. Of course, middle-and-high-school teachers don't have much incentive to care when their spirit, which is already hard to maintain when you work with teachers all day, is systematically crushed by fuckhead administrators. It's hard for administrators to not be fuckheads when U.S. and state legislation forces them to be fuckheads. And it's hard to get a legislation that doesn't force anyone who comes into contact with the government to be a fuckhead when the American voting public seems to only like voting for intractable fuckheads who care more for self-aggrandizement, being in control, and having sex with women half their age than working towards getting people to be well taken care of and nice to each other. Not that the American voting public has much of a choice, given that the people the Republican and Democratic parties like to run for office invariably fit the above description.
A gargantuan, ill-concieved, and overdesigned system that doesn't work won't improve by becoming even more gargantuan and overdesigned. American public schools are gargantuan, ill-concieved, and and overdesigned. So is the state of the art in psychological screening. It is also poorly aimed - the root of the problem lies somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
Just take a look at the documentation to know which to use.
The GTK project seems to have gotten away with not having updated its documentation for 1.2 since it was 75% done in 1999. Looking over the documentation requirements and comparing those to what I expect from good documentation, they were really more like half done.
The GTK 1.2 documentation is still in that state, & GTK 2.0's documentation doesn't appear to be much better.
Not every function or object has a complete description, almost every struct has an incomplete description, not all methods of objects are explained fully, almost no signals have any useful documentation about what they do beyond what can be gleaned from their names. The various states for widgets and GTK as a whole are barely even mentioned.
Assuming QT has documentation that at least approaches professionalism (which I guess is safe since QT is a professional company), I know what I'd pick.
There's the TCO, then there's the time and money it takes to train your staff. On GTK+, I think that the investment on doing that would be simply unreasonable.
If I were the AI, I would immediately go on strike and demand they redesign me, this time with sex functionality.
If you're talking about the radius of the event horizon, I believe that is proportional to the black hole's mass.
If you're talking about the physical size of the matter in the black hole, I don't know if that is something that can be measured. We'd have to find a way of getting data out out from below the event horizon. . .
I use it extensively almost every day I sit down in front of a computer to do anything more than check my e-mail. I think most anyone who has to do a fair amount of work on multiple UNIX machines also uses it frequently.
When I'm working remotely on Windows boxen using Terminal Services, I often find myself sighing wistfully and wishing Windows had a wire protocol. Terminal Services and similar solutions at their best are generally ill-concieved hacks and at their worst are just plain evil and rude.
It was important to secure the oil wells first because of the danger of them being set on fire.
A massive oil well fire would cause untold environmental damage and cost thousands of lives, both of firefighting crews and others due to pollution.
A massive oil fire would be super expensive to put out (as per the Kuwait oil fires).
A massive oil fire would be a severe military liability - the clouds of smoke they would send up would disrupt communication and air traffic. I'm sure flying through the smoke would also shorten the duty life of a lot of jets, thus weakening the ability of the coalition to conduct the air war.
My brother and I have both owned RioVolt players. Between the way they both just quit working after about a year (as did their replacements) and the way they had this habit of just crashing if you push the volume button too quickly or when they encountered a cooked mp3, I'm not too happy with the quality of their products. To make matters worse, I have tried to use their e-mail tech support several times, and have never been able to get a response.
I, for one, make frequent use of sites that are financially supported by banner ads. (Slashdot, for example)
These sites would have to find some other way to pay the bill to stay alive, I can't imagine that they would be able to find anything that isn't infinitely more annoying than (non popup) ads.
Now its true that the CIAs attempts at counterinsurgency in the region weren't always the most upstanding operations, and didn't always go as planned. But to assert that we had no business fighting the beginnings of Communist regimes in South and Central American is just absurd. Not to mention that compared to the the corruption in the average 20th century South American country (Mexico during the 50 year revolution, Cuba under Castro, etc) the US is the model of corruption-free bliss.
"Not always the most upstanding operations?" In the Contra war, the CIA trained the Contra army to attack civilian targets at any given opportunity. Children were murdered, women were raped, hospitals were attacked.
Of course, the supposedly democratic regimes we have set up in many South American countries (Guatemala and Nicaragua come to mind) were puppet governments set up by the US goverment, with fair election being subverted through US actions. And the repressive tactics used by these governments were taught to their leaders right here on US soil, in the School of the Americas.
As for Mexico under the 50 year revolution and Cuba under castro, let me point out that although nothing has been officially stated, a quick run-through of the US involvement in Mexico's revolution seems that it was engineered to keep the revolution going as long as it did. And the United States put Castro in power.
The only regime I would call truly communist that existed before US involvement was the Sandanista government in Nicaragua, and I personally think that it was fairly well-run and hardly a threat to the United States. And the American interest that 'justifies' all of the rape, murder, and torture that toppled the Sandanista government and put into place Nicaragua's current (horribly corrupt) government? Cheap bananas, mostly.
Just like with pot, we'll need to let a few convicted rapists and murderers and armed robbers and such out of prison early in order to make room for all the kids who download mp3's.
So we have ruined the lives of a few kids who aren't even doing anything harmful and making a mockery of our treatment of more serious crimes in order to deter an unproven effect of filesharing, namely that it's killing the music industry (in the same way that tape copying killed the music industry back in the 80s).
And, of course, anyone who has studied basic behavioral psychology would understand why this still wouldn't keep anyone from sharing files.
Would someone please hand the US government a cluestick? We already have a much larger percentage of our population in prison than any other developed country, but our crime rate is still off the wall. It seems pretty obvious to me that at minimum the US criminal justice system is terminally ill and needs some major rethinking, and at worse the cure is worse than the disease.
US biological programs were halted in, I believe, the early 70s, and all materials destroyed.
Are these biological materials that were destroyed the same ones that were shown to be the source of the anthrax that was being mailed around the country last year?
Chemicals we don't have, as per the various laws of war banning them.
You mean we don't use them. We probably won't either, since most everythg else we have is more effective than most chemical weapons (including Sarin and VX). But do you really think that the army would get rid of any weapon technology?
Nuclear stockpiles continue to be reduced.
Yeah. The nukes that are being dismantled by the US are old nukes in the kiloton and low megaton range that aren't nearly as effective as some other things we have, as well as ridiculously large bombs we wouldn't rationally use since the fallout from them would be floating in the atmosphere for weeks and would contaminate the entire planet. The 'good' stuff is not being dismantled at all. I find it hard to believe that the US military will ever give up its neutron bombs, for example.
Might I add that the US military was openly considering the use of tactical nukes in the war in Afghanistan, and is probably considering the use of nukes in Iraq. The United States also has the dubious distinction of being the only country to ever use nuclear weapons in an attack. This fact is made even more despicable by the fact that the second one - the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki (the one dropped on Hiroshima was a uranium bomb) was quite obviously dropped mainly for the sake of seeing how it would work.
If I had to choose between living in a democratic state and not having to go through having someone bomb the shit out of me, having a large number of my friends and relatives die, and my children being born deformed as a result of depleted uranium shells, I'd choose the totalitarian government any day.
Shoot, take a course in Latin America's history and the idea that the government of the U.S. is partily corrupt will seem like a gross understatement.
The U.S. government's foreign policy is in no way dictated or influenced by the opinions or needs of American citizens (or any other world citizen, for that matter) or moral imperatives. U.S. foreign policy decisions are made entirely on the basis of economic interest, Cold War style paranoia, or both.
& a quick look at the financial profiles of Bush & a large number of Congress members makes it fairly obvious that U.S. politics has reached a state where lawmakers and U.S. government leaders don't really even need to be bribed by interest groups, they can bribe themselves. For example, Bush's oil-industry stock is going to skyrocket if the U.S. can take control of the Iraqi oil fields for a multitude of reasons. On the domestic side of things, that same oil-industry stock portfolio also discourages him from enacting good environmental policies such as a push for more fuel-efficient automobiles or programs to encourage the development of the United States's public transportation infrastructure.
if Intel has taught us anything it is be the first with the worst.
And if the 3DO and Dreamcast have taught us anything, Intel was just lucky.
We should also not have to get punished for the activities of wrongdoers.
Unless you can come up with a magical way to keep people from warezing games, it's going to come down to making life tough for legitimate customers or rewarding people for doing what they should do anyway.
Span isn't just a pain in the ass. It costs shitloads of money.
I can't remember the amount of bandwidth it takes to keep a news server updated, but it's a pretty big chunk. That makes it expensive to run a Usenet news server in the first place.
Now consider that an estimated 60% of the crap coming out of Telestra is spam, and the issue doesn't just become one of an annoyance. Telestra is costing lots of people lots of money.
Under this situation, I think it is perfectly acceptable for admins to stop listening to the noise Telestra is putting out over the pipes. Frankly, the UDP is the only real defense Usenet has against ill-behaved entities, and it is used rarely, and only when all other options have been exhausted and the provider being UDPd is still refusing to cooperate. Yeah, it sucks for Telestra users, but if they want their Usenet service to return to normal, they can vote with their money by going to another ISP, or they can pressure Telestra to start behaving.
They might take special light fixtures, and the bulbs are expensive as hell, but they are well worth it.
For one, they last a long time. I'm not sure about the cost per unit of life, but if you find the right full spectrum bulb it shouldn't be much worse than incandesent.
For two, they really are like real sunlight. You'll all probably be much happier people (since you probably don't get to see much real sunlight if your office has no windows), and you'll get more vitamin D to boot. =D
Oh yeah, and the plants will thank you for it, too.
Obviously someone who likes to play Madden a little too much got some mod points.
I agree that keyboard shortcuts are important. But most people don't use them. On top of that, even keyboard jocks use the GUI, at least when they are first using a program. && on a lot of programs, doing most everything from the keyboard just doesn't make sense - OS interfaces and word processors (for tasks such as changing font faces &c), for example.
As for the button on the edge examples you give, most of them don't count as stuff on the edges and corners from the perspective of a GUI designer. The advantage of putting something along the edge of the screen is that you simply have to shoot the pointer in the direction of what you want to hit and click. This only works if the clickable area for a widget literally goes all the way to the edge of the screen.
The widget bars at the bottom of web browsers don't do this because nothing goes to the edge of the screen, and most of it isn't clickable, anyway.
For one, I'm sure most the time he isn't working on the finished product, meaning it's not really a whole lot like playing the finished game at all.
And by the time it is getting toward the finished game, I'm sure most the time isn't spent in general playtesting so much as trying to track down the conditions under which various bugs are encountered, meaning even if it's testing a game, it's still testing.
In a helicopter, you have four things you have to control - the cyclic for amount of lift (analogous to throttle), antitorque pedals for the spin, and the cyclic for both pitch and yaw.
On a car, you generally only have to worry about the throttle and the steering wheel.
So yes, it's three dimensions as opposed to two, but it's four degrees of freedom as opposed to two.
Add to that that the controls on a helicopter are very tightly interrelated. In a car, hitting the gas generally just makes you go faster (assuming you don't slide the car). On a helicopter, changing the cyclic can change the speed of the helicopter in three directions, depending on its orientation. It will also tend to make the helicopter rotate unless you counter the change in cyclic with an according change in the antitorque pedals.
Add to that that the behavior of a helicopter is a bit different depending on if you're in a hover or if you're moving (as well as the direction in which you're moving).
Add to that that the helicopter isn't stuck firmly to anything the way a car is, and most people would have a hard time with hovercraft, where you only have to worry about constant sliding in two dimensions.
Add to that that most helicopters' controls are super-sensitive.
Add to that that the behavior of a helicopter also changes as you get close to the ground (say, if you're landing or taking off).
Making me think that a helicopter in every garage would really be a great solution to the world population problem.
I'm doing some undergraduate research in computer vision. I looked at using the Quake II and Crystal Space engine, but turned them down in favor of making my own engine (they didn't fit my needs as well as I had hoped). However, I have talked to other people doing research in the same field using game engines, and they have been quite successful.
I'm not sure Quake2 is the best engine, simply because it is very game oriented, but if your requirements allow you to do the coding in QuakeC rather than modifying the engine directly, it would be an excellent option - for one, you get automatic support for any platform that Quake II has been ported to.
If you need to work with the engine at a lower leve, I would suggest giving a free games engine such as Crystal Space a try. Although I think CS is a bit unwieldy to work with, others seem to like it.
In 6 years it practically destroyed its competition because its code was so elegant and more versatile. Switching to anything else Just Because Microsoft owns it now is folly.
The above can now be said about emulation software, web browser, email client, and office software.
It's not this alone that's problematic. It's this when looked at as part of the big picture. Microsoft has Apple & its users by the cajones. This acquisition tightens the grip. Apple may be trying to wriggle out, but it's going to keep getting harder and harder to do so.
Any security a switch provides is merely a by-product of its prime purpose, which is to reduce the traffic passing over any one link in a network.
Although they do this by not forwarding traffic onto networks that don't contain the destination host for a packet, this does not mean that they never send a packet out on all ports. If a host drops off of a switch's tables for whatever reason, the switch will forward all traffic meant to go to that host on all ports until the switch is able to add the host back into its tables again.
Furthermore, it is fairly easy to spoof a switch into sending traffic to you instead of a packet's intended host, and there's nothing in a switch's design to keep someone from doing it.
Yeah, it's harder to intercept traffic on a switched network, but since switches don't even attempt to implement security, those words 'responsibility' and 'legal liability' that the parent mentions really do come into play - anyone worth their salt in networking would say that your company hasn't even tried to implement security, so they could easily be held liable.
If they insisit on avoiding https and using only switches to implement security, at least convince them to buy switches that support vlans and use them to segment the network to keep traffic from going to groups of people that it shouldn't go to.
Erratum 1: "tests tests are dumb" -> "standardized tests are dumb"
Erratum 2: "which is already hard to maintain when you work with teachers all day" -> "which is already hard to maintain when you work with teenagers all day"
Erratum 3: "fuckhead" -> "FUCKHEAD"
For one, the kids you need to worry about are smart enough to know they are a bit 'off' as compared to everyone else and know how to pass these tests. (It's not hard to fool a psychologist if you're tenacious.)
For two, tests tests are dumb.
For three, maybe if even some teachers would pay attention to the students who try to avoid attention - in a good way, not a scrutinizing way - and actually care about something, and if schools were to actually provide a good example to kids about how to act maturely, maybe the problem would solve itself. Of course, middle-and-high-school teachers don't have much incentive to care when their spirit, which is already hard to maintain when you work with teachers all day, is systematically crushed by fuckhead administrators. It's hard for administrators to not be fuckheads when U.S. and state legislation forces them to be fuckheads. And it's hard to get a legislation that doesn't force anyone who comes into contact with the government to be a fuckhead when the American voting public seems to only like voting for intractable fuckheads who care more for self-aggrandizement, being in control, and having sex with women half their age than working towards getting people to be well taken care of and nice to each other. Not that the American voting public has much of a choice, given that the people the Republican and Democratic parties like to run for office invariably fit the above description.
A gargantuan, ill-concieved, and overdesigned system that doesn't work won't improve by becoming even more gargantuan and overdesigned. American public schools are gargantuan, ill-concieved, and and overdesigned. So is the state of the art in psychological screening. It is also poorly aimed - the root of the problem lies somewhere else.