Maybe it's just me, but I always thought the real star of Half Life was Black Mesa. It's just such a gloomy, depressing, yet realistic and intriguing place. I cannot imagine getting quite that same "help I'm all alone under a kilometer of rock and concrete with just monsters for company and noone cares and the only ones that do want me dead" feeling when playing a game in a city, under the open sky.
I always thought the best parts of Half Life were the earlier levels, before you get out into the light of day. You start descending into darkness. Pretty quickly after the game proper starts you are teased with being on the surface, but you are forced back down. Then you get the long trek through the missile silo with its nasty yet excellent monster. After you get back to the surface it is still a good game, but it no longer reaches the lofty heights it had reached before.
I agree that Doom 3 was not as spectacular as we could hope for. I think it was the pacing (too regular) and predictability (far too predictable). Real horror works best when you _don't_ know what is in front of you. In Doom 3 you are guaranteed to have two monsters teleporting in and another one appearing from a sliding panel behind you.
I attended a similar competition in 1993 or so. The problem with that competition was that each problem was a math problem, thinly disguised as a computer problem by adding the words "make a program to...". That's nice, but:
* Programmers who program for a living rarely encounter a pure math problem. In fact most of them would suspect the discipline is primarily about databases and web pages, but I digress...
* I was on a team of computer scientists. Our math skills were ok, but nothing special. Thus we lost soundly from math students. We spent a long time on the solution and then a couple of minutes implementing it, before finding it was incorrect. They spent a couple of minutes on the solution and then a long time implementing it, before finding it worked.
My point being: if you are going to have a math contest, advertize it as such. And if you have a programming contest, throw in a few SQL and HTML problems;-)
I guess you don't hire people who compete at sports either? Because athletes are also trying to be nr. 1 all the time, thus making them unsuited for working in a team.
Here's a hint: could it be that those people are competing in a tournament for fun, while having different priorities at work? I guess the people you are looking for are really inflexible, incapable of changing the pace of their work based on the demands of the situation (do you work for the government or a large multinational, by any chance?)...
And from what you've written, it seems the people you are looking for are exactly team-average - anyone who _can_ do better (and that's half your team, rather than just a single 733T coder) should work below capacity (causing them to goof off half the time) while the other half cracks up under stress (since they cannot manage average levels).
Please, do post where you work. I'll be sure never to apply there.
My problem isn't following the recipes, it is that I find it very hard to find the right ingredients. Take his recipe for garlic potatoes: he puts in something called "red potatoes" which I have never seen before in my life. Now, there are four supermarkets and at least two vegetable shops within walking distance of my house, and they probably sell 10-20 different types of potatoes. Can I substitute one of those? Which one would be best? Would having the wrong type of potatoe ruin the recipe, or is that solely caused by my lack of cooking skills?
Would it be enough if we could guarantee that no human could ever reach those waves again after seven days?
Heh, I can already see the headlines in a few hundred years:
"WARP DRIVE INVENTED!"
"RIAA demands infringing technology be placed under their control"
Actually it really would be infringing technology, since it would allow you to "timeshift" any radio or TV transmission to any time of your liking, without even needing to record it.
GPIB or IEEE488.2 is a standard? Why not use National Instruements (or one of the many generic rip-offs) cards that can be had for a few hundred $$$ (or euros). I have seen linux drivers for the NI cards, but have never used them myself.
That's because we already have a large number of HP cards, and they work just fine under Windows. I can only argue for Linux if it presents an advantage, not if it simply costs extra money to replace existing hardware.
No worries though: I know about the NI cards, and we have already bought a batch of them for use in newer, PCI-only machines (the HP cards are ISA). It will be a couple of years to replace all of them, though - they will have to grind down through natural wear and tear.
Heat can be transferred through conduction or radiation. You are right that there is no conduction in space, but radiation still occurs (that's how solar heat gets to us). The problem is that radiation is far less effective than conduction, thus temperature management of any spacecraft is indeed a major issue. For this reason any new spacecraft design undergoes thorough thermal testing in a specially designed vacuum facility.
While I cannot claim to be an expert on thermal analysis, I have been working as a software expert in ESA's spacecraft testing centre for the past six years, writing and maintaining the software used to gather, process, and present thermal data during thermal testing. The big device in the top-left corner of the image is ESA's Large Space Simulator, and the little room a little to the right of that is my office;-)
A thermal test typically lasts a few weeks, and we would typically be gathering data from 1500-2000 sensors (mostly thermocouples and PT100's) on the spacecraft, plus another 1000-1500 from the facility itself (depending on configuration). This adds up to a couple of gigabytes worth of data.
Right now the first ATV (the Autonomous Transfer Vehicle that is scheduled to bring freight to ISS starting next year or so) is being prepped for testing, somewhere at the end of this year.
Since this is/., I should probably add that for presentation and control of the system we use a mix of HP-UX (for historical reasons) and Windows XP PC's. Our main server is an aging HP-UX machine, which we will soon be replacing by a Linux solution. I've been gently pushing Linux for a while now, but one of my problems is that many of the acquisition systems require GPIB support which is hard to find under Linux (there are no drivers available for HP cards).
There are guided tours from the Space Expo, if you are interested.
Moreover, I don't understand what it has to do with debunking databases. I looked through the site and couldn't find much information related to database debunking - well, other than books or reports I was expected to pay for.
Yeah right, I'll pay money to see someone rant against common industry practice... NOT.
The way he uses indentation to show different contexts is also rather confusing. Fortunately I don't care enough to actually want to understand his point. Good thing too - I might have had trouble sleeping tonight, otherwise...
Re:Reiserfs, storage and why do you want this?
on
Database File System
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· Score: 1
While I would agree that many users couldn't organize themselves out of a wet cardboard box, I don't think a keyword system like this would rescue them from their plight. If they cannot be bothered (or are unable) to organize a good directory structure, what on earth makes you think they would be able to use a keyword system? Instead of "..../documents/letters/grandma" they would now have to specify something like . The same people who are unsufficiently organized for directories will also be unsufficiently organized for keywords.
Preemptively, I'd like to point out that I do not believe in an AI word processor that just happens to know you are writing a letter ("Hey! It looks like...") and magically fills in the required keyword fields. I seriously doubt it could come up with useful search information, and if I hadn't actually entered the search terms myself I don't think I'd ever be able to guess what search terms it had come up with for my letter.
All of this does not mean that I do not believe in meta-data, on the contrary. I think it will be massively useful, but only in the hands of power users (the same people who have no trouble organizing things in directories), only for specific types of data (such as MP3's, mail, etc.), and only in addition to directories rather than instead of.
Well, let's see. Hands up everyone who wants to email anyone at Microsoft?
Now _that_ is just unfair. I have sent, by proxy, countless emails to Microsoft. Indeed, addresses such as billg@microsoft.com are among my favorites when I need to enter "my" email address in yet another stupid webform.
I'm assuming Microsoft will soon enough have mail servers that support (or worse, require!) sender ID, and will advertize heavily with this as a supposed extra security feature that OS cannot or will not offer. What I'm wondering: is this in any way a threat to OS and the infrastructure of the web?
Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X?
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 1
Two words: "character terminal". The output system of the computer has to deal with ALL types of terminals, whether X or simply dumb VT100's. These are still used in lots of places, so... Wait. You don't use X to talk to a VT100, there is a dedicated terminal interface for that.
We could do the same thing for printers then: have one interface which is primarily text-oriented, and laid out much like a stream (this can be used to drive text terminals and matrix printers), and one that is primarily graphical (which can be used for X terminals and modern printers).
So your dot matrix can still happily print using nothing more than fopen, fprintf, and fclose (or whatever language you prefer). And at the other end of the spectrum, complex simulations (bar graphs? Don't make me laugh) can still be visualized using complex render commands.
Hey, lighten up: there is still the possibility that mikeymac is a beautiful woman!
...
Ha, I was just pulling your leg!;-)
Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X?
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 1
I don't want to build all those graphics functions into the printer, I want the OS to handle it. Did you miss the remark about the GPU speeding up my rendering? I wasn't talking about putting a GPU in the printer.
So we agree that you create a bitmap first and then either display it on the screen or on the printer. ***WHY*** does there need to be a difference in how you create the bitmap?
Here's a suggestion: Windows has a unified rendering model. MacOS, as far as I'm aware, has it too. AmigaOS had it. In fact the only OS I could think of that doesn't have, and that by strange coincidence has piss-poor printer support, is UNIX. Current thinking, as exemplified by the Cairo project, suggests that unifying rendering is a very good idea. So all the evidence points to a lack of proper design by the X people, and no matter how much you rant about two-way protocols (whatever that is supposed to mean? Do you actually read back the pixels after writing them?) is not going to change that.
Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X?
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 1
Thanks, yes I have done a lot of graphics beyond cut'n'pasting into Word. I write commercial data acquisition, analysis, and presentation software for the space industry (mostly in C++), and I've written quite a few interesting presentations that run on both Windows and UNIX, and can display stuff on the screen _and_ on the printer. And I'm telling you, I want the same primitives for the screen and for the printer. Because in the end they are both just rectangles of pixels, and I don't want a different interface just because that rectangle is interpreted differently. I have better things to do with my time than write and debug the same rendering code twice just because some two-bit punk thought it would be nice to have utterly different interfaces.
I'm still unclear about why you think it would be a good idea to have those different interfaces, BTW. Just naming a few capabilities that are unique to the screen does not invalidate my position. To put this in OO terms (I'm going out on a limb here assuming you are a programmer): screen rendering and printer rendering both inherit from generic rendering. They should not be unrelated classes.
BTW, is there any good reason why an image on the printer should _not_ support real-time shading (is it actually required to be slow?)? Is there a good reason for printers _not_ to display 3D images that make use of lighting, textures, and the other stuff? I mean, if I had a problem like that I'd sure appreciate the ability to just render OpenGL to the printer, and having the OS accelerate the entire thing through the GPU. That would be much better than having to rewrite my entire fucking 3D render engine in fucking postscript, if you'll excuse my language.
How about your qualifications? Or are you just a trollish fanboy who happens to think that whatever X does, must therefore be the One True Path?
I don't think I have ever seen the word "voila" spelled correctly on slashdot before. I suspect you may be French.
Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X?
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 1
So I guess you also believe we should really be using an entirely different set of commands and functions for accessing harddisks and CD's? Since they are also read/write and write-once, respectively.
Personally I'm happy with using cp for copying files. I wouldn't like to need cp_hd2hd, cp_hd2cd, cp_cd2hd, and cp_cd2cd. I'm also happy with using ls for seeing directories, instead of having to choose between ls_hd and ls_cd. I could go on for a while, but I think you get my drift...
And the same thing is true for rendering: whether it is to a dynamic device or a write-once device _really shouldn't matter at all_.
Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X?
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So you need an entirely different interface for printers because on the screen you may have animation? That's a pretty amazing leap of logic.
Answer these two questions, if you will:
* What do you suggest we should be using on the printer?
* Why does it have to be different from what we use for the screen?
For the record, I'm a software developer myself, and I'm extremely happy that I do not need to write and debug my code twice.
Something funny happened to me a couple of years ago: I wanted to downgrade my ISDN line to a normal line (for cost reasons, mostly). They were advertising upgrades all the time, so I figured downgrades were also possible, right?
Wrong. A guy from the telco told me "a contract is a contract. If you pay us the rest of the contract upfront we'll remove it immediately. Otherwise we cannot remove it." The rest of the contract was about 9 months worth of money - quite a large sum.
"What if I just stop paying?" I asked. "Will you still be unable to remove the line?" It turned out this wasn't really a problem - if I stopped paying they would stop providing me with the service. "So if I just stop paying you, I will in fact get what I want?" I asked. And indeed, I would get what I wanted - but, I was told with a smirk, I couldn't actually get another phoneline from them until I had payed whatever money I still owed them (including fines, interest, etc.). "In other words", he stated triumphantly, "you'll never have another phoneline again!"
At that point I explained to him that the days of KPN being a monopoly were over, and that any of the new upstart competitors would be overjoyed to welcome me as a customer. He got a bit grouchy after that, and he had to talk to his boss for a bit, but the end of the story was that I was downgraded from ISDN to a normal line, for free;-)
Look, the whole point of overly broad laws is to allow selective enforcement. Of course they won't enforce strictly! Just enough to keep the powerful in power, and the wealthy rolling in money. And that is really the purpose here...
They might as well outlaw breathing, and arrest people for "air piracy" if they have a bone to pick. It would be convenient to all involved (except the victim, but he's a nobody anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought the best parts of Half Life were the earlier levels, before you get out into the light of day. You start descending into darkness. Pretty quickly after the game proper starts you are teased with being on the surface, but you are forced back down. Then you get the long trek through the missile silo with its nasty yet excellent monster. After you get back to the surface it is still a good game, but it no longer reaches the lofty heights it had reached before.
I agree that Doom 3 was not as spectacular as we could hope for. I think it was the pacing (too regular) and predictability (far too predictable). Real horror works best when you _don't_ know what is in front of you. In Doom 3 you are guaranteed to have two monsters teleporting in and another one appearing from a sliding panel behind you.
Keep in mind that this is Microsoft, saying that Linux is losing. They would lie about this, to make it appear a much larger issue than it really is.
So there's FUD alright, just different from the SCO FUD. And whether it is working is still open for debate.
...they'll give you enough roupe to hang yourself?
* Programmers who program for a living rarely encounter a pure math problem. In fact most of them would suspect the discipline is primarily about databases and web pages, but I digress...
* I was on a team of computer scientists. Our math skills were ok, but nothing special. Thus we lost soundly from math students. We spent a long time on the solution and then a couple of minutes implementing it, before finding it was incorrect. They spent a couple of minutes on the solution and then a long time implementing it, before finding it worked.
My point being: if you are going to have a math contest, advertize it as such. And if you have a programming contest, throw in a few SQL and HTML problems ;-)
I guess you don't hire people who compete at sports either? Because athletes are also trying to be nr. 1 all the time, thus making them unsuited for working in a team.
Here's a hint: could it be that those people are competing in a tournament for fun, while having different priorities at work? I guess the people you are looking for are really inflexible, incapable of changing the pace of their work based on the demands of the situation (do you work for the government or a large multinational, by any chance?)...
And from what you've written, it seems the people you are looking for are exactly team-average - anyone who _can_ do better (and that's half your team, rather than just a single 733T coder) should work below capacity (causing them to goof off half the time) while the other half cracks up under stress (since they cannot manage average levels).
Please, do post where you work. I'll be sure never to apply there.
...but I have absolutely no idea what it means.
Just out of curiosity, which Dutch company was that?
Troll? No, I just don't live in the US, that's all... We don't have Idaho Russet or Yukon Gold potatoes either, we have our own brands.
Heh, I can already see the headlines in a few hundred years:
"WARP DRIVE INVENTED!"
"RIAA demands infringing technology be placed under their control"
Actually it really would be infringing technology, since it would allow you to "timeshift" any radio or TV transmission to any time of your liking, without even needing to record it.
That's because we already have a large number of HP cards, and they work just fine under Windows. I can only argue for Linux if it presents an advantage, not if it simply costs extra money to replace existing hardware.
No worries though: I know about the NI cards, and we have already bought a batch of them for use in newer, PCI-only machines (the HP cards are ISA). It will be a couple of years to replace all of them, though - they will have to grind down through natural wear and tear.
Thanks for the tip anyway ;-)
While I cannot claim to be an expert on thermal analysis, I have been working as a software expert in ESA's spacecraft testing centre for the past six years, writing and maintaining the software used to gather, process, and present thermal data during thermal testing. The big device in the top-left corner of the image is ESA's Large Space Simulator, and the little room a little to the right of that is my office ;-)
A thermal test typically lasts a few weeks, and we would typically be gathering data from 1500-2000 sensors (mostly thermocouples and PT100's) on the spacecraft, plus another 1000-1500 from the facility itself (depending on configuration). This adds up to a couple of gigabytes worth of data.
Right now the first ATV (the Autonomous Transfer Vehicle that is scheduled to bring freight to ISS starting next year or so) is being prepped for testing, somewhere at the end of this year.
Since this is /., I should probably add that for presentation and control of the system we use a mix of HP-UX (for historical reasons) and Windows XP PC's. Our main server is an aging HP-UX machine, which we will soon be replacing by a Linux solution. I've been gently pushing Linux for a while now, but one of my problems is that many of the acquisition systems require GPIB support which is hard to find under Linux (there are no drivers available for HP cards).
There are guided tours from the Space Expo, if you are interested.
Yeah right, I'll pay money to see someone rant against common industry practice... NOT.
The way he uses indentation to show different contexts is also rather confusing. Fortunately I don't care enough to actually want to understand his point. Good thing too - I might have had trouble sleeping tonight, otherwise...
Preemptively, I'd like to point out that I do not believe in an AI word processor that just happens to know you are writing a letter ("Hey! It looks like...") and magically fills in the required keyword fields. I seriously doubt it could come up with useful search information, and if I hadn't actually entered the search terms myself I don't think I'd ever be able to guess what search terms it had come up with for my letter.
All of this does not mean that I do not believe in meta-data, on the contrary. I think it will be massively useful, but only in the hands of power users (the same people who have no trouble organizing things in directories), only for specific types of data (such as MP3's, mail, etc.), and only in addition to directories rather than instead of.
Now _that_ is just unfair. I have sent, by proxy, countless emails to Microsoft. Indeed, addresses such as billg@microsoft.com are among my favorites when I need to enter "my" email address in yet another stupid webform.
I'm assuming Microsoft will soon enough have mail servers that support (or worse, require!) sender ID, and will advertize heavily with this as a supposed extra security feature that OS cannot or will not offer. What I'm wondering: is this in any way a threat to OS and the infrastructure of the web?
We could do the same thing for printers then: have one interface which is primarily text-oriented, and laid out much like a stream (this can be used to drive text terminals and matrix printers), and one that is primarily graphical (which can be used for X terminals and modern printers).
So your dot matrix can still happily print using nothing more than fopen, fprintf, and fclose (or whatever language you prefer). And at the other end of the spectrum, complex simulations (bar graphs? Don't make me laugh) can still be visualized using complex render commands.
Ha, I was just pulling your leg! ;-)
So we agree that you create a bitmap first and then either display it on the screen or on the printer. ***WHY*** does there need to be a difference in how you create the bitmap?
Here's a suggestion: Windows has a unified rendering model. MacOS, as far as I'm aware, has it too. AmigaOS had it. In fact the only OS I could think of that doesn't have, and that by strange coincidence has piss-poor printer support, is UNIX. Current thinking, as exemplified by the Cairo project, suggests that unifying rendering is a very good idea. So all the evidence points to a lack of proper design by the X people, and no matter how much you rant about two-way protocols (whatever that is supposed to mean? Do you actually read back the pixels after writing them?) is not going to change that.
I'm still unclear about why you think it would be a good idea to have those different interfaces, BTW. Just naming a few capabilities that are unique to the screen does not invalidate my position. To put this in OO terms (I'm going out on a limb here assuming you are a programmer): screen rendering and printer rendering both inherit from generic rendering. They should not be unrelated classes.
BTW, is there any good reason why an image on the printer should _not_ support real-time shading (is it actually required to be slow?)? Is there a good reason for printers _not_ to display 3D images that make use of lighting, textures, and the other stuff? I mean, if I had a problem like that I'd sure appreciate the ability to just render OpenGL to the printer, and having the OS accelerate the entire thing through the GPU. That would be much better than having to rewrite my entire fucking 3D render engine in fucking postscript, if you'll excuse my language.
How about your qualifications? Or are you just a trollish fanboy who happens to think that whatever X does, must therefore be the One True Path?
I don't think I have ever seen the word "voila" spelled correctly on slashdot before. I suspect you may be French.
Personally I'm happy with using cp for copying files. I wouldn't like to need cp_hd2hd, cp_hd2cd, cp_cd2hd, and cp_cd2cd. I'm also happy with using ls for seeing directories, instead of having to choose between ls_hd and ls_cd. I could go on for a while, but I think you get my drift...
And the same thing is true for rendering: whether it is to a dynamic device or a write-once device _really shouldn't matter at all_.
Answer these two questions, if you will:
* What do you suggest we should be using on the printer? * Why does it have to be different from what we use for the screen?
For the record, I'm a software developer myself, and I'm extremely happy that I do not need to write and debug my code twice.
Wrong. A guy from the telco told me "a contract is a contract. If you pay us the rest of the contract upfront we'll remove it immediately. Otherwise we cannot remove it." The rest of the contract was about 9 months worth of money - quite a large sum.
"What if I just stop paying?" I asked. "Will you still be unable to remove the line?" It turned out this wasn't really a problem - if I stopped paying they would stop providing me with the service. "So if I just stop paying you, I will in fact get what I want?" I asked. And indeed, I would get what I wanted - but, I was told with a smirk, I couldn't actually get another phoneline from them until I had payed whatever money I still owed them (including fines, interest, etc.). "In other words", he stated triumphantly, "you'll never have another phoneline again!"
At that point I explained to him that the days of KPN being a monopoly were over, and that any of the new upstart competitors would be overjoyed to welcome me as a customer. He got a bit grouchy after that, and he had to talk to his boss for a bit, but the end of the story was that I was downgraded from ISDN to a normal line, for free ;-)
Long live the power of competition.
They might as well outlaw breathing, and arrest people for "air piracy" if they have a bone to pick. It would be convenient to all involved (except the victim, but he's a nobody anyway).