Bioshock was not that good of a game. It removed the best parts of System Shock, consolised the gameplay and removed any challenge to the player.
Bioshock had no replay value as both choices you could have made led to exactly the same ending. There was no need to ever alter your style of play as you could carry every weapon and every power in the game at once and there were two or three over powered attacks which made it pointless to use anything else, not that it mattered as you simply just couldn't die no matter what you did. 2K completely removed any RPG elements and dumbed down the FPS elements in order to make the game accessable to consoles. If Bioshock 1 is any indication on how Bioshock 2 will turn out I'm not holding my breath for it.
I have to agree with that. Choices in a game can be meaningful if they impact the game, somehow. But ending movies? Do they really think I'm going to play through the entire game again just to see a different 30 seconds of badly rendered movie?
Meaningful choices could include keeping one weapon and dropping another, but as you say, you can carry everything with you all the time. Replay value could also have been increased by experimenting with different powers, but again, you can already do that on your first playthrough so why bother?
Ultimately Bioshock was not a bad game, but it was not a successor to System Shock in any way. Instead it was a highly polished, very pretty Doom-clone. And since I've had enough of those by now, I won't be shelling out for part 2.
What's funny is that there is actually people who think like that. Apparently if we just sit around and wait, things will get better. I call this the dark side of the "invisible hand" of the market.. because it is invisible, people forget how it comes about. In order to get improvement in technology you need a market for that technology. And, typically, you need some loss-leader to create the market in the first place. Government funding serves this purpose well.
The sad thing is that this seems to be pretty much par for the course. If only we wait just a little while and skip all those annoying intermediate steps, we will soon have fantastically good rockets / fusion reactors / whatever else without having to pay anything...
Actually, losing weight has little to do with exercise. You exercise to be healthy, you eat fewer calories than you burn to lose weight.
What have geeks come to these days... Ok, in your own words, you eat fewer calories than you burn to lose weight. To lose weight, you can therefore do one of the following three things:
1. Eat fewer calories.
2. BURN MORE CALORIES.
3. All of the above.
The item under number 2, "burn more calories", is best achieved using exercise. Why you state that losing weight has little to do with exercise, and get modded informative for your efforts, is beyond me...
I'm hardly morbidly obese, but I do struggle to keep my weight down. Maybe that means I'll live ten years less than my peers - I'm willing to accept that. I do try to control my diet, but the fact is that unless somebody comes out with some kind of medical advance I'm not going to be average in weight without a huge amount of effort. I'm not sure that effort is really worth it - I'd rather die happy at 70 than suffer until 80.:) And if somebody comes up with better healthy ways to lose weight that don't involve huge amounts of self-deprivation, then that is just a win-win for everybody.
You know, as long as you think of it as suffering, you won't lose weight. Why not think of it as investing in yourself?
Occasionally I have these late-night eating-urges. I find that by ignoring them for ten minutes, and just focusing on something else, they go away. I'm sure that if I sat down and started feeling incredibly sorry for myself for allowing my poor body to starve, I'd be eating a lot more.
The other thing I do, and I find helps really well, is making sure my house is not stocked with snacks in the first place. If I wanted to snack _right now_, I would have to go to the supermarket to buy snacks first. Typically that barrier is enough to stop me from doing it. I do keep fruit around the house though - if the feeling of hunger has not gone away after ten minutes I eat an apple or a banana or something like that.
I've read this whole discussion so far... Including the summary and article that come at the top. Unfortunately, while it mentions that the majority of deaths were obese people, there is nothing to indicate the extra risk that obese people run: is it only a marginally greater risk of death, or do they all die?
In your case, I sincerely wish you best of luck if and when the flu becomes a global pandemic. You probably still have a couple of months to try to lose some weight to prepare - because despite your words, you have a significant chance of losing weight if you want to. On the other hand, you probably don't have much chance of avoiding the swine flu when it really starts. We'll see if you are still posting come spring.
Sure, and taking someones picture will steal their soul as well. And now you can get a camera and a GPS in a single convenient package, so you can both take the souls of the natives _and_ conveniently avoid their local culture at the same time!
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, my GPS has brought me to more interesting places than I care to count, places I would never have visited without this handy tool pointing the way (or at least helping not to get lost). I'm sure the next generation won't even know what the phrase "getting lost" really means, just as being "out of contact" will have no meaning to them. A map will be about as useful to them as a sextant is to us (what? You sold yours on Ebay years ago? Shameful!). And personally, I wish them all the best with it!
Okay so the fastest engine is using Lucerne, a Java search engine, and this is neither tuned nor horizontally scaled (which it can do very well).
C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.
Oh wait hang on... does this mean that for complex applications the most important performance piece is normally actually the efficiency of the code rather than the efficiency of the base platform and therefore having a language in which it is easier to write efficient code is better than just having the one that is fastest to execute a for loop?
But hell this is Slashdot and Java is Slooooooow...
Actually if you check here, you will find that an implementation of the exact same Lucene done in C++ is about three times faster than Java.
Really? Am I the only person that found it interesting that Lucene, the only non C/C++ implementation, gave some pretty impressive stats? I mean, it's written in Java and although it has a slower index time its search time, index size and relevancy are impressive.
Yes, that's pretty much you yes. Different algorithms, therefore different performance. Reimplement Lucene in C++, then see what the differences are in terms of speed (and if you care, code size, complexity, etc.). Until then the comparison is totally meaningless.
It's too bad this isn't under the AGPL. Maybe it has to be GPL2 because of what it's based on. But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries.
Yesterday I almost broke my daily record with 42 finds, but I came home too late to do the logging. Today the site was down all day long. Well, tomorrow then...
They only dominate the market because of one thing.
They made a search engine that works and doesn't piss everyone off with flashing blinking ads everywhere!
Has anyone else noticed that it works less and less? In particular, the feature whereby it "corrects" words that it feels you have misspelled and then gives you search results based on your new word selection, is *really* not helping my searching. Especially when those words are perfectly fine company names, being corrected to common english phrases...
As a canadian I must unfortunately correct you in that Quebec is part of Canada not the US.
As a European, and thus being possessed of geography skills above that of the average North American, I can ensure you that Canada, Quebec, and the US are all very much part of the continent of America (overseas areas notwithstanding).
Slashdotters really should go and read the original. What the judge recommends doing is to allow news papers to survive is to bar websites from reposting the full news story (paraphrased or not) found in the newspapers. So slashdot is safe, since it only provides a summary of the news story, and so is the internet, since only linking to news articles found in newspapers is discussed.
The judge apparently wrote: "Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent" (emphasis mine)
The linking that he discusses is to all copyrighted materials, not just to newspaper articles. Besides, don't you think the rest of the IP mafia will catch up quickly once such madness goes through? And paraphrasing is specifically mentioned as well....unless you mean another original, in which case I would invite you to post a link while it is still allowed.
I dunno, the NTSB usually drags their feet before stating anything. They usually don't make statements about suspicion of what may have happened without specific evidence. This seems like an unusual announcement from them, not their usual style. I wonder if they are compelled to state a truth that they fell won't be properly addressed otherwise. After all, Airbus is built in Europe not the US.
Personally I wonder if they were compelled to state a suspicion that might otherwise not benefit business interests in the US. After all, Boeing is built in the US not Europe.
See how these stupid slurs work in both directions?
When I drove from California to NC, I wrote a custom app that...
You should be careful with that. The authorities frown on people who program while driving for some reason.
read the GPS lat/long coordinates, searched a database of 5000 fast food places, gas stations, and hotels within 1 mile of I-40, so I could find where I wanted to go even if it was 70 miles up the road, and hit a great big button to search for it so I wouldn't wreck my car, and then enter the coordinates in the navsat program to start driving me there.
Does that count as hacking it?
Not really, you were just using interfaces for their intended purposes here. Besides, while I am sure some people might be greatly in awe of your leet skills, this is actually a basic function of any normal GPS unit...
One of the toughest aspects of calculus-based physics is teaching how to intuit it. Space-based games (i. e., ones involving the behavior of light, planets, and other celestial entities) written to conform to actual physics laws would be a fun way to teach students how to intuit physics.
Do such games actually exist? Every title I can think of has blatantly bogus physics. Even when discounting FTL-travel (which I can forgive on the basis of no one living long enough to actually reach another star during their lifetimes otherwise), you often see simulations in which spaceships behave like planes: they bank, they share common orientation, their relative speed never exceeds something that is humanly understandable, etc.
This generation of students is just damned lucky to have access to such computing power. In the old days, the most readily accessible computing power was an 8080 hobbyist board. Simulating the universe on that is impossible. The students of that era were stuck with just manipulating integrals and derivatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Bioshock was not that good of a game. It removed the best parts of System Shock, consolised the gameplay and removed any challenge to the player.
Bioshock had no replay value as both choices you could have made led to exactly the same ending. There was no need to ever alter your style of play as you could carry every weapon and every power in the game at once and there were two or three over powered attacks which made it pointless to use anything else, not that it mattered as you simply just couldn't die no matter what you did. 2K completely removed any RPG elements and dumbed down the FPS elements in order to make the game accessable to consoles. If Bioshock 1 is any indication on how Bioshock 2 will turn out I'm not holding my breath for it.
I have to agree with that. Choices in a game can be meaningful if they impact the game, somehow. But ending movies? Do they really think I'm going to play through the entire game again just to see a different 30 seconds of badly rendered movie?
Meaningful choices could include keeping one weapon and dropping another, but as you say, you can carry everything with you all the time. Replay value could also have been increased by experimenting with different powers, but again, you can already do that on your first playthrough so why bother?
Ultimately Bioshock was not a bad game, but it was not a successor to System Shock in any way. Instead it was a highly polished, very pretty Doom-clone. And since I've had enough of those by now, I won't be shelling out for part 2.
So, what's going on here? Are the file formats used to store this data *that* bloated?
<genome species="human">... ;-)
What's funny is that there is actually people who think like that. Apparently if we just sit around and wait, things will get better. I call this the dark side of the "invisible hand" of the market.. because it is invisible, people forget how it comes about. In order to get improvement in technology you need a market for that technology. And, typically, you need some loss-leader to create the market in the first place. Government funding serves this purpose well.
The sad thing is that this seems to be pretty much par for the course. If only we wait just a little while and skip all those annoying intermediate steps, we will soon have fantastically good rockets / fusion reactors / whatever else without having to pay anything...
> The item under number 2, "burn more calories", is best achieved using exercise.
I have found setting myself on fire to be way more effective and much faster too.
Whatever works best for you. Really, I'm not picky.
Actually, losing weight has little to do with exercise. You exercise to be healthy, you eat fewer calories than you burn to lose weight.
What have geeks come to these days... Ok, in your own words, you eat fewer calories than you burn to lose weight. To lose weight, you can therefore do one of the following three things:
1. Eat fewer calories.
2. BURN MORE CALORIES.
3. All of the above.
The item under number 2, "burn more calories", is best achieved using exercise. Why you state that losing weight has little to do with exercise, and get modded informative for your efforts, is beyond me...
I'm hardly morbidly obese, but I do struggle to keep my weight down. Maybe that means I'll live ten years less than my peers - I'm willing to accept that. I do try to control my diet, but the fact is that unless somebody comes out with some kind of medical advance I'm not going to be average in weight without a huge amount of effort. I'm not sure that effort is really worth it - I'd rather die happy at 70 than suffer until 80. :) And if somebody comes up with better healthy ways to lose weight that don't involve huge amounts of self-deprivation, then that is just a win-win for everybody.
You know, as long as you think of it as suffering, you won't lose weight. Why not think of it as investing in yourself?
Occasionally I have these late-night eating-urges. I find that by ignoring them for ten minutes, and just focusing on something else, they go away. I'm sure that if I sat down and started feeling incredibly sorry for myself for allowing my poor body to starve, I'd be eating a lot more.
The other thing I do, and I find helps really well, is making sure my house is not stocked with snacks in the first place. If I wanted to snack _right now_, I would have to go to the supermarket to buy snacks first. Typically that barrier is enough to stop me from doing it. I do keep fruit around the house though - if the feeling of hunger has not gone away after ten minutes I eat an apple or a banana or something like that.
I've read this whole discussion so far... Including the summary and article that come at the top. Unfortunately, while it mentions that the majority of deaths were obese people, there is nothing to indicate the extra risk that obese people run: is it only a marginally greater risk of death, or do they all die?
In your case, I sincerely wish you best of luck if and when the flu becomes a global pandemic. You probably still have a couple of months to try to lose some weight to prepare - because despite your words, you have a significant chance of losing weight if you want to. On the other hand, you probably don't have much chance of avoiding the swine flu when it really starts. We'll see if you are still posting come spring.
Well, at least you saw a pretty decent list of monitors that are smaller than 19", with a resolution above 1280x1024, then ;-)
Hope it will do you some good!
Sure, and taking someones picture will steal their soul as well. And now you can get a camera and a GPS in a single convenient package, so you can both take the souls of the natives _and_ conveniently avoid their local culture at the same time!
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, my GPS has brought me to more interesting places than I care to count, places I would never have visited without this handy tool pointing the way (or at least helping not to get lost). I'm sure the next generation won't even know what the phrase "getting lost" really means, just as being "out of contact" will have no meaning to them. A map will be about as useful to them as a sextant is to us (what? You sold yours on Ebay years ago? Shameful!). And personally, I wish them all the best with it!
Check out here as well...
Who am I kidding. The article was posted hours ago while I slept, no one will ever read this now...
Okay so the fastest engine is using Lucerne, a Java search engine, and this is neither tuned nor horizontally scaled (which it can do very well).
C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.
Oh wait hang on... does this mean that for complex applications the most important performance piece is normally actually the efficiency of the code rather than the efficiency of the base platform and therefore having a language in which it is easier to write efficient code is better than just having the one that is fastest to execute a for loop?
But hell this is Slashdot and Java is Slooooooow...
Actually if you check here, you will find that an implementation of the exact same Lucene done in C++ is about three times faster than Java.
Sorry for spoiling your moment there...
Ah, thank you. So indeed, an implementation of the same algorithm turns out to be _three times_ as fast in C++ than it is in Java (see here).
I wonder if eldavojohn wishes to comment on that?
Nothing else to say, really
Really? Am I the only person that found it interesting that Lucene, the only non C/C++ implementation, gave some pretty impressive stats? I mean, it's written in Java and although it has a slower index time its search time, index size and relevancy are impressive.
Yes, that's pretty much you yes. Different algorithms, therefore different performance. Reimplement Lucene in C++, then see what the differences are in terms of speed (and if you care, code size, complexity, etc.). Until then the comparison is totally meaningless.
And gee, what's with the defensive attitude...
The more useful 5 second rule.
That's just utterly disgusting. Do people in the US really believe that you can eat food that's fallen on the floor if you pick it up fast enough?
You seem to know what Maemo actually is. Since the summary doesn't care to enlighten us, could you maybe do the honors?
It's too bad this isn't under the AGPL. Maybe it has to be GPL2 because of what it's based on. But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries.
That's not true.
Geocachers of Slashdot unite!
Yesterday I almost broke my daily record with 42 finds, but I came home too late to do the logging. Today the site was down all day long. Well, tomorrow then...
As for KPexEA: great service!
They only dominate the market because of one thing.
They made a search engine that works and doesn't piss everyone off with flashing blinking ads everywhere!
Has anyone else noticed that it works less and less? In particular, the feature whereby it "corrects" words that it feels you have misspelled and then gives you search results based on your new word selection, is *really* not helping my searching. Especially when those words are perfectly fine company names, being corrected to common english phrases...
As a canadian I must unfortunately correct you in that Quebec is part of Canada not the US.
As a European, and thus being possessed of geography skills above that of the average North American, I can ensure you that Canada, Quebec, and the US are all very much part of the continent of America (overseas areas notwithstanding).
Slashdotters really should go and read the original. What the judge recommends doing is to allow news papers to survive is to bar websites from reposting the full news story (paraphrased or not) found in the newspapers. So slashdot is safe, since it only provides a summary of the news story, and so is the internet, since only linking to news articles found in newspapers is discussed.
The judge apparently wrote: "Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent" (emphasis mine)
The linking that he discusses is to all copyrighted materials, not just to newspaper articles. Besides, don't you think the rest of the IP mafia will catch up quickly once such madness goes through? And paraphrasing is specifically mentioned as well. ...unless you mean another original, in which case I would invite you to post a link while it is still allowed.
...probably the death of Slashdot?
Forget Slashdot. What is Google, but a giant, helpful linkfarm?
And without search engines, how will we ever find anything on the web? In short, it is the death of the web...
I dunno, the NTSB usually drags their feet before stating anything. They usually don't make statements about suspicion of what may have happened without specific evidence. This seems like an unusual announcement from them, not their usual style. I wonder if they are compelled to state a truth that they fell won't be properly addressed otherwise. After all, Airbus is built in Europe not the US.
Personally I wonder if they were compelled to state a suspicion that might otherwise not benefit business interests in the US. After all, Boeing is built in the US not Europe.
See how these stupid slurs work in both directions?
When I drove from California to NC, I wrote a custom app that...
You should be careful with that. The authorities frown on people who program while driving for some reason.
read the GPS lat/long coordinates, searched a database of 5000 fast food places, gas stations, and hotels within 1 mile of I-40, so I could find where I wanted to go even if it was 70 miles up the road, and hit a great big button to search for it so I wouldn't wreck my car, and then enter the coordinates in the navsat program to start driving me there.
Does that count as hacking it?
Not really, you were just using interfaces for their intended purposes here. Besides, while I am sure some people might be greatly in awe of your leet skills, this is actually a basic function of any normal GPS unit...
They are now too expensive as well, and their work will be outsourced to cheaper waffle irons that are presumably located somewhere in Belgium...
One of the toughest aspects of calculus-based physics is teaching how to intuit it. Space-based games (i. e., ones involving the behavior of light, planets, and other celestial entities) written to conform to actual physics laws would be a fun way to teach students how to intuit physics.
Do such games actually exist? Every title I can think of has blatantly bogus physics. Even when discounting FTL-travel (which I can forgive on the basis of no one living long enough to actually reach another star during their lifetimes otherwise), you often see simulations in which spaceships behave like planes: they bank, they share common orientation, their relative speed never exceeds something that is humanly understandable, etc.
This generation of students is just damned lucky to have access to such computing power. In the old days, the most readily accessible computing power was an 8080 hobbyist board. Simulating the universe on that is impossible. The students of that era were stuck with just manipulating integrals and derivatives.
Life is unfair. I hate it.
Should we get off your lawn now?