I don't think you can withdraw money from an account just because you have a bank routing number from a check. Otherwise I could just take any voided check and withdraw large sums of money using that number. I believe you need to present at least some forms of identification or passwords or whatnot.
I bet that they have a few "issues" with the money transfer and somehow you end up paying $1000 to fix those issues.
In related news, studies have shown that people who own BMWs are richer than those who own Volvos. According to top economist Richard P. Fudgemocker, "This is proof that the key to financial success is spending money on an expensive car."
Earl Worthly, a certified financial planner, supports Fudgemocker's claim. "I encourage all my clients to buy expensive cars because of the strong link between owning expensive cars and high salaries. Most of the time a BMW, Lexus, or Mercedes is sufficient. But sometimes one of my clients is in dire need of financial assistance, or just wants to fast track. For them, I recommend a Porsche or Lamborghini."
Volvo dealers are outraged by this news. Many Volvo customers have attempted to return their cars. "I can't believe I bought a volvo, jeaprodizing the 20% raise I received at my job!" said Mary Edgerman, a recently promoted manager at UA-Corp. "I owe it to my familty to buy a far more expensive car. What if I got a pay cut because of my Volvo?"
Most major auto manufacturers predict a shift to higher end cars, trucks, and SUVs. An anonymous Marketting executive at GM confirmed that prices will drastically increase for their entire line of Cadillacs. "It's scientifically proven that expensive automobiles are the key to financial success. At GM, we offer even more financial stability by raising the sticker cost. We're banking on a 10% increase in sales, but 15% wouldn't suprise us either."
I made the sig before Slashdot had a shorter max sig length and never bothered changing it. The official quote is:
"Like the situation at ski resorts of young women looking for husbands and husbands looking for young women, the situation is not as symmetric as it appears."
I once had the displeasure of working with UWIN in a corporate setting. I had just been transfered to a group that produced a tool consisting of 4 posix-compliant C programs multithreaded together using Ksh scripts to glue pieces. No disrespected intended to Ksh itself, the whole code was an utter an complete pile. (As for functionality, the optimal solution involved 1 perl script, no C code or ksh, and it would have taken me a few weeks to do it.) The code took some 2 or 3 years to write, presumably because they used all sorts of great but unnecessary posix features like shared memory maps. Apparently the code really did run fine on a system like Solaris.
Anyway, everyone who worked on the project left the group in 6 months, but the PHB hadn't figured this out. The product was 2 years overdue for their Solaris to Windows port. The engineers decided to use UWIN rather than rewrite in Windows because they thought it would be less effort. Those engineers had since left. What we discovered working with with the Global Technologies company supporting UWIN was that UWIN didn't properly support most of the strange features our code used. Roughly 95% of the problems were due to Posix incompatabilities in UWIN. I would routinely spend 2 weeks talking with Global Technologies pointing out that the bug really was their fault and why the solution was NOT for us to change our code to match their bug behavior. After they hacked together their changes, they didn't even bother testing if the change left their code Posix compliant, expecting us to test. After that, they'd say that it must be our fault it doesn't work and the cycle would complete, until I could show where else they messed up.
A few months later I left for a group working on useful things.
Anyway, UWIN is a great idea, but the people developing it are completely incompetant. (A few times it turned out that I knew more about posix features than they did, and I'm just a standard software engineer.)
At Motorola, I worked on a project where we wrote a simulator in Perl to interact with a complicated piece of Cell Phone hardware. The hardware ran compiled C code. We once found a bug where the perl simulator sent network packets so fast that the C code crashed from overflow! We actually had to cripple the (perl) simulation to send code downloads slower so the system wouldn't crash.
Incidently, badly written ksh looks a lot like badly written perl. I've never seen well written ksh, but I know Perl is a far more expressive language, so logically Perl code has more potential to be readable.
Basically what David Korn says is that all the good shells (or at least popular shells) are similar in terms of interactivity: bash, tcsh, zsh, ksh, and a handfull of others. His selling point is that Ksh has far superior scripting capabilities than the other shells.
As a shell, I personally prefer zsh because the interactivity is a little more customizable than ksh. As a scripting language, I personally prefer Perl because the scripting is more syntactically flexible. (That's a nice way of saying that Perl lets you write both readable code and slash code.)
I won't claim that ksh scripts are inherently messier than a dedicated scripting language. Perhaps I've only seen bad examples of ksh scripts, and I've seen my share of bad perl scripts as well. I will claim, however, that there are other scripting languages which are more expressive than ksh and other shells which are more interactive than ksh.
So I think it's great that ksh scores a 9 out of 10 on interactivity and an 8 out of 10 on scripting, but I can't help but think that Ksh has bridesmaid syndrome-- always second to something else. Sure, you can use your shell to script. You can use your emacs text editor to read news, mail, and play games if you want to. Personally I'd rather have more functionality in each specific area, be it interactivity or scripting.
Simple! Take the job offer at the new company and bring your friends' business cards with them. Part of the facts of life is that sometimes companies don't work out. If you truly believe your coworkers are talented, they should have no trouble getting jobs as well. But don't let management hold you back just because you think you have an obligation to support your friends who are as employable as you are.
I can attest that the game is alive and doing better than ever. One box of cards is around $70, and a new set gets released three times a year. Factor in a few other random costs and you're looking at a $300/year hobby to stay seriously connected with a local scene. Now compare that to the cost of a Golf hobby!
There are a few people who make enough money from Magic: The Gathering to make it their only source of income, but those are few and far between. Most people just play local tournaments for maybe $5 entry, $50 prize. All things considered, the game is excellently designed and fairly cheap to keep up with.
I'm just 23 right now, but I'm an avid Jethro Tull Fan. Their new music is good, but in a different way from their old music. My favorite Tull album was released the very month I was _born_! So it's not just a generations thing (although I'm not a Beatles fan), and I still listen to some random 80s and 90s music.
Quite honestly, music really does suck now. It's not your imagination. The problem is that people learn to like whatever they're told to like. And since the early 90s (maybe 1993), the record companies have put more and more control into the radio stations. That's why you'll hear stuff like, "Here's the new one from N'Sync!" when the song was released 9 months ago. Radio has turned into music advertising for a few selected bands that the RIAA has chosen for the "big money winners" this year. This lets them better predict which CDs will sell well, maximizing profits.
In other words, new music sucks because the RIAA learned that you don't need good music to make a profit.
Incidently, this profit maximization is the reason the RIAA hates Napster. It gives people access to a very wide range of songs which makes it nearly impossible to predict which CDs people will buy next.
... but the seventh star is extremely hard to see. I once heard a story that in Arabia, they used to use the Pleiades to select their scouts. If a man could describe the position of all 7 stars, then he had eye sight good enough to be a scout.
This is still news for nerds (I hope), and I can't think of a more popular story than Lord of the Rings (with the possible exceptions of Star Wars and Star Trek.)
When I play Quake3, my left hand covers 17 keys, doing everything from movement to weapon selection to zooming getting the score. When I play Thief, my left hand covers 21 keys. And of course, the right hand always does looking with the mouse and attacking. What makes them think that 9 keys is a big advantage? It's only useful if, #1, you are a pure keyboard user, and #2, your right hand is on the inverted T arrow keys.
I knew one guy who was a pure keyboard user, but he was actually pretty good. He kept both hands on the home key and then used the right hand for moving and looking with the left hand for weapon selection. I think he had special macro keys bound to make him turn ultra-fast as well. Of course, that's still no substitute for a good mouse.
If you're curious about my config, I keey my left fingers on W-E-R-T. I use the 3x3 square of 1-2-3/Q-W-E/A-S-D for weapon selection (yes, I really do use all the weapons). This is much faster than using a mouse wheel or otherwise cycling. More commonly used weapons are closer to the home row, which reduces finger stress. I use T/G for forward/backward and R/F for left/right. Since you never want to move both forward and backwards, or both left and right, you only need 2 fingers to move, which frees up 2 fingers for faster weapon selection. The other 4 keys are score (tab, handled by pinky), zoom (space-- thumb), walk (alt-- thumb), and use (B-- thumb). Fire, crouch, and jump are on the mouse buttons.
Thief has even more bindings because you have 3 different walk speeds, 4 inventory commands, and you need lean left/right. Now how could you put all of those onto 9 buttons? Maybe it would work for Counterstrike, when you rarely switch weapons...
Everyone dress warm tonight, because the first post on a slashdot artical was actually ON TOPIC. You know what that means... Ice skating down the river Styx.:)
I've probably said it before, but I'll say it again. How the universe was created (theory: Big Bang) is different what caused that creation to occur (theory: either God or no causality). These are two different questions and not mutually exclusive.
There's a fair amount of measurable evidence supporting the Big Bang theory, so I'll go with it for now.
On the subject of God versus no causality, I'll support the existance of a God. My arguments are similar to Rees' (the precise state of the constants of the universe necessary to support life are no coincidence), although I don't believe all of his "arguments".
For example, what's so big about 3 Dimensions? There's nothing hard about life existing in 4 or higher dimensions, although I agree that 2 dimensions is impossible. You have issues laying out some connected graphs in 2 dimensions. (Try drawing a pentagram (aka K5) without having any line cross any other.)
What about plank's constant? I've heard that very bad things happen if the constant is exactly what it is, but he doesn't meantion it. And his theory that "other universes could exist" is hardly a newsworthy theory. He's basically saying, "We're lucky enough to pick the right lottery numbers!" I'm saying, "We're lucky enough that someone picked the right lottery numbers for us!"
I heard from someone who works at Xerox that pretty much everyone in the company is looking for a new job, and has been for the past few months. This is just a rumor, of course, but I would be surprised if Xerox did NOT go Bankrupt. Someone said he helped his boss's boss print out a resume. I guess things don't bode very well for the company...
And remember, you heard it on Slashdot, so it must be true!
For starters, I spent the last two years working in Motorola's Cell Phone division, working with Cell Phones and Base Stations. Cell phones really do work like that. There is a base station determined time window at which base stations are required to check registration for new phones in the coverage area. If this window is small, the base stations have to check up the mobile phones more often which involves far more frequent Base Station and Mobile communication, even for phones that are powered on but not in use! The plus side to a smaller window is that the mobiles power up (and down) much faster.
As for the body's electrical field and the impact of other electrical fields on it... The theoretical answer is that equipment exists that measures the strength and homogeneousness of a person's electrical field. Cancer patients and other people in poor physical health have much weaker fields, and the fields tend to be distorted and patchy. In contrast, pregnant women have much larger, "fuller" fields. There was an art exhibit done on this, actually, contrasting the outputted electrical field pictures of people based on their health in life. You could probably find information on this online with a google search.
Anyway, the point is that putting any strong electrical field inside of the body's electrical field causes distortions, and this is a "bad" thing. I don't know if it's bad enough to cause cancer, but it's bad enough to cause a headache.
If you want an empyrical test, try this. Plug in a laptop computer, turn it on, and make sure the power saving mode is OFF, so it should stay on for a while. Start up some CPU intensive program like PoV. Find a quite place for it and take a nap with your head on the laptop. See how you feel in an hour or two. High power usage laptops should illustrate better, of course. Hopefully that will be scientific enough to satisfy your own curiosity. (You did want a real scientific experiment, right? You're not closed minded...:)
Just because you get headaches doesn't mean that the transmission to and from the base station is causing that headache. It could very well be from the electrical field of the phone interfering with your body's electrical field. Normally this isn't a good thing, but because your brain uses a fair amount of low level electricity, putting any active circuit near it is a Bad Thing(tm). I'd bet that your cell phone uses a sizable amount of electricity.
Another option is that you're in a high population zone where more cell phones are in use. This means each phone needs to "shout louder" to be heard over the others, which means both more transmissions and more battery usage. Also, some places (such as Taiwan) have regulations for how often Base Stations need to keep in contact with cell phones. In Taiwan, your battery life will be much lower than in other areas, which will definitly contribute to the total amount of stray electricity interfering with your brain.
Funny you should mention that! I've played Action Quake and Counterstrike some against people who really enjoyed the game (although I did not). When I watched them play, they just charged in and shot things. One side one, the other lost, and they started another round. They had a great time.
When I jumped in the game, I immediately realized that because all the weapons were hitscan (immediate hit, no delay like a rocket launcher) and dealt a lot of damage, whoever got the first shot in won. Therefore the best strategy was to camp in an area and wait for the other team to get bored and attack. In my estimation, the team that attacked first lost over 70% of the battles. (In one 3 hour round of LAN action quake, I had more frags than the enemy team combined-- and it was the first time I'd ever played the mod!)
Therefore, the optimal strategy in counterstrike and action quake is to wait until they attack. Note that this is NOT fun. Counterstrike is fun only as long as people always charge in guns-a-blazing.
Too bad the gameplay for counterstrike encouraged camping. The reason the gameplay encourages camping is the prevelance of hitscan weapons, which in turn is based on a firm founding in reality at the expense of fun. This is a clear example of where a variety of unrealistic weapons (eg. Rocket Launcher, railgun, etc.) would encourage more attacking, creating more action, and therefore be more fun.
If you want to add on some realism later, that's great. Realism _is_ a good thing, but gameplay is better. Don't choose realism just because it makes your mind feel better.
I remember an interview with a lead developer at Lookglass, during the development of thief. The interviewer asked the question, "How do you make the tradeoff between making something realistic and adding good gameplay?"
"If reality was so much fun, people wouldn't need to play games."
That pretty much sums it up. Lots of people like "realistic" first person shooters. There's nothing wrong with that, but the people who prefer realistic FPS games over games with extremely well balanced gameplay (like Thief and Quake 3) usually have trouble with the "suspension of disbelief".
Myself, I have no problems believing I can carry 8 weapons, each weighing 40 pounds, and 1000 pounds of ammunition, and then jump over a 6 foot tall alien, doing a perfect 180 before landing. I guess I'm just gifted.:)
In general, the larger number of weapon fire modes you have, the less variety you have in skilled deathmatching. Think about this for example. Lets say I have a Q3A map where the only weapons are gauntlet (duh), machinegun (duh), shotgun, and Grenades. Assuming the map has enough hallways, then all 4 of those weapons will be useful on that level. Even gauntlet and grenades will be worth playing (in the hallways, around corners). Now lets say I add a rocket launcher to that map. All of a sudden, Gauntlet is worthless because people have a good short range weapon. Machine Gun is also bad because it's mainly good at medium to long range. But with a rocket launcher on the board, you can just charge people and finish them off with the shotgun if necessary. Grenades also decrease in usefulness as there are more explosives on the level.
One of the great things about Q3A weapons is that they're tweaked so that every weapon could still be useful in a variety of situations, no matter how many weapons are on the map. The exception is the BFG, of course, which dominates every map you find it on. This just shows that "more weapons" does not mean "more variety".
To me, this is the fatal flaw of Unreal Tournament. There are something like 18 different fire modes total in the game, but only 5 are really playable in a combat situation: Plasma Fire mode 2, Flack 1, Flack 2 (occasionally), Shock Rifle combo (1 and 2), and Rockets. So you end up with at most 35% of your weapon fire modes being used.
In contrast, on Quake Maps I find that over 80% of the weapons are useful when playing. So Unreal Tournament encourages people to find one of the 5 good weapons are fire away while Quake 3 encourages people to find the best weapon in a combat situation.
The conclusion is that adding more weapon fire modes increases the glitz factor of the game like Unreal Tournament, but you lose long term game replayability. So don't expect ST:EF to last long as a deathmatch game.
Incidently, this explains why Unreal Tournament was prefered over Q3A when UT was first release, by about 60% to 40%. But as people play the games more, Q3A has the lead by roughly 55% to 45%. Q3A just has more replayability. You can grab these statistics from the gamespy stats page. Of course, Halflife's user base trumps all of the other games combined. That's because Halflife has counterstrike, which appeals to people who don't like traditional first person shooters (ie. need "realistic weapons" that are almost completely identical because they're all instant hit weapons.;)
-Ted
Or in other words, "Karl Marx was wrong"
on
A Letter from 2020
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· Score: 3
I guess what I'm trying to say is...
There is no difference in motivation between joe blue collar and joe white collar. It's just that the white collar folks have more means than everyone else.
It's a catagorical denial of Marxism, actually. Marx claims that eventually the working class will overthrow the ruling class and live in Utopia. "THIS revolution will be different! This revolution will be the LAST!"
What Marx fails to see is that the problem is not with the means (money and power) but the motive (greed and pride). Not all humans have money and power, but almost all humans are greedy and proud. It is pure hubris to claim that we the workers as a whole would act any different if we were in power.
There are two courses of action. You can become agnostic apathetic-- another term for a cynic, meaning you don't do anything. Or you can shed the evil motives and then work the means in favor of humanity (and against the system itself).
Clearly this is a difficult task, but only because personal humility is learned one mind at a time. It's easy to coordinate selfish people, but it's hard to even find self-sacrificing people, much less become one.
-Ted
Businesses don't corrupt politicians...
on
A Letter from 2020
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· Score: 5
People corrupt politicians. Business are just made up of hundreds and thousands of people who want to get ahead in life, and the upper management uses the weight of the organization to force some changes. Labor parties do the same thing. So do religious groups. Sure, individuals used to have a voice in politics, but the voice of a large collective silences many individuals. So lets not target "Businesses". People as a whole are willing to backstab each other to get a step up in life, and we are part of that society. Business isn't the problem. Humanity is, and by extension, _we_ are the problem.
Of course, that's not an excuse for agnostic apathy. Sure, the agnostic apathetics are technically correct-- they don't know anything and they don't care about anything. You don't worry about your foundation breaking when you haven't built anything. Rather, we must understand and expect that this is how the world works, and we need to manipulate the system for the greater good of everyone, not just for our own "greater good".
Only when we finally admit that We are the problem can we benefit humanity as a whole. Until then, everyone is still wrapped in their own selfishness and pride.
-Ted
(Score -1: Karma Whore)
No, it really is about single player
on
New Doom Details
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· Score: 2
Remember that in the days of Doom, most people didn't even know that multi-player capabilities existed! You needed to start doom with command line arguments to set that up. And people still played doom for years. They made tons of single player mods and maps. The entire mod community has its roots in Doom.
Now think about the current best single player only games like Thief 2. I played Thief and Thief 2 through. Know what I did after that? Played it again on a higher skill. With self-imposed restrictions. Then I downloaded a bunch of user maps and played those. I'm still in love with those games.
Doom 2000's success as a game is tied into two factors:
#1: How fun the cooperative game mode is
#2: How easy the editor is to use
If the game is fun to play _with_ your friends, not against them, and if the editor doesn't stand in the way of creating good levels, the game will be successful.
I remember having many conversations on this topic with my friends a few years ago. In the end, we concluded that the question of, "Is he a replicant?" was more important than the answer of "Yes" or "No". Rather, the possibility that he's a replicant is what we savour.
We also noticed a few other well thought out sections of the movie. For example, remember J.F. Sebastian, the man with accelerated aging? He represents a human with the same problem as a replicant. His duality is Rachel, who is a replicant with the same problem as humans-- emotions. If I remember, most major characters in the film fit into some kind of pair opposite duality, centered around Decker.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you can withdraw money from an account just because you have a bank routing number from a check. Otherwise I could just take any voided check and withdraw large sums of money using that number. I believe you need to present at least some forms of identification or passwords or whatnot.
I bet that they have a few "issues" with the money transfer and somehow you end up paying $1000 to fix those issues.
-Ted
In related news, studies have shown that people who own BMWs are richer than those who own Volvos. According to top economist Richard P. Fudgemocker, "This is proof that the key to financial success is spending money on an expensive car."
Earl Worthly, a certified financial planner, supports Fudgemocker's claim. "I encourage all my clients to buy expensive cars because of the strong link between owning expensive cars and high salaries. Most of the time a BMW, Lexus, or Mercedes is sufficient. But sometimes one of my clients is in dire need of financial assistance, or just wants to fast track. For them, I recommend a Porsche or Lamborghini."
Volvo dealers are outraged by this news. Many Volvo customers have attempted to return their cars. "I can't believe I bought a volvo, jeaprodizing the 20% raise I received at my job!" said Mary Edgerman, a recently promoted manager at UA-Corp. "I owe it to my familty to buy a far more expensive car. What if I got a pay cut because of my Volvo?"
Most major auto manufacturers predict a shift to higher end cars, trucks, and SUVs. An anonymous Marketting executive at GM confirmed that prices will drastically increase for their entire line of Cadillacs. "It's scientifically proven that expensive automobiles are the key to financial success. At GM, we offer even more financial stability by raising the sticker cost. We're banking on a 10% increase in sales, but 15% wouldn't suprise us either."
Film at 11...
"It'll be out in 2 weeks!" Of course, it's always 2 weeks from the present point in time... No wonder nothing ever gets release! :)
-Ted
I made the sig before Slashdot had a shorter max sig length and never bothered changing it. The official quote is:
"Like the situation at ski resorts of young women looking for husbands and husbands looking for young women, the situation is not as symmetric as it appears."
-Ted
I once had the displeasure of working with UWIN in a corporate setting. I had just been transfered to a group that produced a tool consisting of 4 posix-compliant C programs multithreaded together using Ksh scripts to glue pieces. No disrespected intended to Ksh itself, the whole code was an utter an complete pile. (As for functionality, the optimal solution involved 1 perl script, no C code or ksh, and it would have taken me a few weeks to do it.) The code took some 2 or 3 years to write, presumably because they used all sorts of great but unnecessary posix features like shared memory maps. Apparently the code really did run fine on a system like Solaris.
Anyway, everyone who worked on the project left the group in 6 months, but the PHB hadn't figured this out. The product was 2 years overdue for their Solaris to Windows port. The engineers decided to use UWIN rather than rewrite in Windows because they thought it would be less effort. Those engineers had since left. What we discovered working with with the Global Technologies company supporting UWIN was that UWIN didn't properly support most of the strange features our code used. Roughly 95% of the problems were due to Posix incompatabilities in UWIN. I would routinely spend 2 weeks talking with Global Technologies pointing out that the bug really was their fault and why the solution was NOT for us to change our code to match their bug behavior. After they hacked together their changes, they didn't even bother testing if the change left their code Posix compliant, expecting us to test. After that, they'd say that it must be our fault it doesn't work and the cycle would complete, until I could show where else they messed up.
A few months later I left for a group working on useful things.
Anyway, UWIN is a great idea, but the people developing it are completely incompetant. (A few times it turned out that I knew more about posix features than they did, and I'm just a standard software engineer.)
-Ted
At Motorola, I worked on a project where we wrote a simulator in Perl to interact with a complicated piece of Cell Phone hardware. The hardware ran compiled C code. We once found a bug where the perl simulator sent network packets so fast that the C code crashed from overflow! We actually had to cripple the (perl) simulation to send code downloads slower so the system wouldn't crash.
Incidently, badly written ksh looks a lot like badly written perl. I've never seen well written ksh, but I know Perl is a far more expressive language, so logically Perl code has more potential to be readable.
-Ted
Basically what David Korn says is that all the good shells (or at least popular shells) are similar in terms of interactivity: bash, tcsh, zsh, ksh, and a handfull of others. His selling point is that Ksh has far superior scripting capabilities than the other shells.
As a shell, I personally prefer zsh because the interactivity is a little more customizable than ksh. As a scripting language, I personally prefer Perl because the scripting is more syntactically flexible. (That's a nice way of saying that Perl lets you write both readable code and slash code.)
I won't claim that ksh scripts are inherently messier than a dedicated scripting language. Perhaps I've only seen bad examples of ksh scripts, and I've seen my share of bad perl scripts as well. I will claim, however, that there are other scripting languages which are more expressive than ksh and other shells which are more interactive than ksh.
So I think it's great that ksh scores a 9 out of 10 on interactivity and an 8 out of 10 on scripting, but I can't help but think that Ksh has bridesmaid syndrome-- always second to something else. Sure, you can use your shell to script. You can use your emacs text editor to read news, mail, and play games if you want to. Personally I'd rather have more functionality in each specific area, be it interactivity or scripting.
-Ted
Simple! Take the job offer at the new company and bring your friends' business cards with them. Part of the facts of life is that sometimes companies don't work out. If you truly believe your coworkers are talented, they should have no trouble getting jobs as well. But don't let management hold you back just because you think you have an obligation to support your friends who are as employable as you are.
-Ted
I can attest that the game is alive and doing better than ever. One box of cards is around $70, and a new set gets released three times a year. Factor in a few other random costs and you're looking at a $300/year hobby to stay seriously connected with a local scene. Now compare that to the cost of a Golf hobby!
There are a few people who make enough money from Magic: The Gathering to make it their only source of income, but those are few and far between. Most people just play local tournaments for maybe $5 entry, $50 prize. All things considered, the game is excellently designed and fairly cheap to keep up with.
-Ted
I'm just 23 right now, but I'm an avid Jethro Tull Fan. Their new music is good, but in a different way from their old music. My favorite Tull album was released the very month I was _born_! So it's not just a generations thing (although I'm not a Beatles fan), and I still listen to some random 80s and 90s music.
Quite honestly, music really does suck now. It's not your imagination. The problem is that people learn to like whatever they're told to like. And since the early 90s (maybe 1993), the record companies have put more and more control into the radio stations. That's why you'll hear stuff like, "Here's the new one from N'Sync!" when the song was released 9 months ago. Radio has turned into music advertising for a few selected bands that the RIAA has chosen for the "big money winners" this year. This lets them better predict which CDs will sell well, maximizing profits.
In other words, new music sucks because the RIAA learned that you don't need good music to make a profit.
Incidently, this profit maximization is the reason the RIAA hates Napster. It gives people access to a very wide range of songs which makes it nearly impossible to predict which CDs people will buy next.
-Ted
... but the seventh star is extremely hard to see. I once heard a story that in Arabia, they used to use the Pleiades to select their scouts. If a man could describe the position of all 7 stars, then he had eye sight good enough to be a scout.
-Ted
This is still news for nerds (I hope), and I can't think of a more popular story than Lord of the Rings (with the possible exceptions of Star Wars and Star Trek.)
-Ted
When I play Quake3, my left hand covers 17 keys, doing everything from movement to weapon selection to zooming getting the score. When I play Thief, my left hand covers 21 keys. And of course, the right hand always does looking with the mouse and attacking. What makes them think that 9 keys is a big advantage? It's only useful if, #1, you are a pure keyboard user, and #2, your right hand is on the inverted T arrow keys.
I knew one guy who was a pure keyboard user, but he was actually pretty good. He kept both hands on the home key and then used the right hand for moving and looking with the left hand for weapon selection. I think he had special macro keys bound to make him turn ultra-fast as well. Of course, that's still no substitute for a good mouse.
If you're curious about my config, I keey my left fingers on W-E-R-T. I use the 3x3 square of 1-2-3/Q-W-E/A-S-D for weapon selection (yes, I really do use all the weapons). This is much faster than using a mouse wheel or otherwise cycling. More commonly used weapons are closer to the home row, which reduces finger stress. I use T/G for forward/backward and R/F for left/right. Since you never want to move both forward and backwards, or both left and right, you only need 2 fingers to move, which frees up 2 fingers for faster weapon selection. The other 4 keys are score (tab, handled by pinky), zoom (space-- thumb), walk (alt-- thumb), and use (B-- thumb). Fire, crouch, and jump are on the mouse buttons.
Thief has even more bindings because you have 3 different walk speeds, 4 inventory commands, and you need lean left/right. Now how could you put all of those onto 9 buttons? Maybe it would work for Counterstrike, when you rarely switch weapons...
-Ted
Everyone dress warm tonight, because the first post on a slashdot artical was actually ON TOPIC. You know what that means... Ice skating down the river Styx. :)
-Ted
I've probably said it before, but I'll say it again. How the universe was created (theory: Big Bang) is different what caused that creation to occur (theory: either God or no causality). These are two different questions and not mutually exclusive.
:)
There's a fair amount of measurable evidence supporting the Big Bang theory, so I'll go with it for now.
On the subject of God versus no causality, I'll support the existance of a God. My arguments are similar to Rees' (the precise state of the constants of the universe necessary to support life are no coincidence), although I don't believe all of his "arguments".
For example, what's so big about 3 Dimensions? There's nothing hard about life existing in 4 or higher dimensions, although I agree that 2 dimensions is impossible. You have issues laying out some connected graphs in 2 dimensions. (Try drawing a pentagram (aka K5) without having any line cross any other.)
What about plank's constant? I've heard that very bad things happen if the constant is exactly what it is, but he doesn't meantion it. And his theory that "other universes could exist" is hardly a newsworthy theory. He's basically saying, "We're lucky enough to pick the right lottery numbers!" I'm saying, "We're lucky enough that someone picked the right lottery numbers for us!"
Who cares, really...
-Ted
I heard from someone who works at Xerox that pretty much everyone in the company is looking for a new job, and has been for the past few months. This is just a rumor, of course, but I would be surprised if Xerox did NOT go Bankrupt. Someone said he helped his boss's boss print out a resume. I guess things don't bode very well for the company...
And remember, you heard it on Slashdot, so it must be true!
-Ted
For starters, I spent the last two years working in Motorola's Cell Phone division, working with Cell Phones and Base Stations. Cell phones really do work like that. There is a base station determined time window at which base stations are required to check registration for new phones in the coverage area. If this window is small, the base stations have to check up the mobile phones more often which involves far more frequent Base Station and Mobile communication, even for phones that are powered on but not in use! The plus side to a smaller window is that the mobiles power up (and down) much faster.
:)
As for the body's electrical field and the impact of other electrical fields on it... The theoretical answer is that equipment exists that measures the strength and homogeneousness of a person's electrical field. Cancer patients and other people in poor physical health have much weaker fields, and the fields tend to be distorted and patchy. In contrast, pregnant women have much larger, "fuller" fields. There was an art exhibit done on this, actually, contrasting the outputted electrical field pictures of people based on their health in life. You could probably find information on this online with a google search.
Anyway, the point is that putting any strong electrical field inside of the body's electrical field causes distortions, and this is a "bad" thing. I don't know if it's bad enough to cause cancer, but it's bad enough to cause a headache.
If you want an empyrical test, try this. Plug in a laptop computer, turn it on, and make sure the power saving mode is OFF, so it should stay on for a while. Start up some CPU intensive program like PoV. Find a quite place for it and take a nap with your head on the laptop. See how you feel in an hour or two. High power usage laptops should illustrate better, of course. Hopefully that will be scientific enough to satisfy your own curiosity. (You did want a real scientific experiment, right? You're not closed minded...
-Ted
Just because you get headaches doesn't mean that the transmission to and from the base station is causing that headache. It could very well be from the electrical field of the phone interfering with your body's electrical field. Normally this isn't a good thing, but because your brain uses a fair amount of low level electricity, putting any active circuit near it is a Bad Thing(tm). I'd bet that your cell phone uses a sizable amount of electricity.
Another option is that you're in a high population zone where more cell phones are in use. This means each phone needs to "shout louder" to be heard over the others, which means both more transmissions and more battery usage. Also, some places (such as Taiwan) have regulations for how often Base Stations need to keep in contact with cell phones. In Taiwan, your battery life will be much lower than in other areas, which will definitly contribute to the total amount of stray electricity interfering with your brain.
-Ted
Funny you should mention that! I've played Action Quake and Counterstrike some against people who really enjoyed the game (although I did not). When I watched them play, they just charged in and shot things. One side one, the other lost, and they started another round. They had a great time.
When I jumped in the game, I immediately realized that because all the weapons were hitscan (immediate hit, no delay like a rocket launcher) and dealt a lot of damage, whoever got the first shot in won. Therefore the best strategy was to camp in an area and wait for the other team to get bored and attack. In my estimation, the team that attacked first lost over 70% of the battles. (In one 3 hour round of LAN action quake, I had more frags than the enemy team combined-- and it was the first time I'd ever played the mod!)
Therefore, the optimal strategy in counterstrike and action quake is to wait until they attack. Note that this is NOT fun. Counterstrike is fun only as long as people always charge in guns-a-blazing.
Too bad the gameplay for counterstrike encouraged camping. The reason the gameplay encourages camping is the prevelance of hitscan weapons, which in turn is based on a firm founding in reality at the expense of fun. This is a clear example of where a variety of unrealistic weapons (eg. Rocket Launcher, railgun, etc.) would encourage more attacking, creating more action, and therefore be more fun.
If you want to add on some realism later, that's great. Realism _is_ a good thing, but gameplay is better. Don't choose realism just because it makes your mind feel better.
-Ted
I remember an interview with a lead developer at Lookglass, during the development of thief. The interviewer asked the question, "How do you make the tradeoff between making something realistic and adding good gameplay?"
:)
"If reality was so much fun, people wouldn't need to play games."
That pretty much sums it up. Lots of people like "realistic" first person shooters. There's nothing wrong with that, but the people who prefer realistic FPS games over games with extremely well balanced gameplay (like Thief and Quake 3) usually have trouble with the "suspension of disbelief".
Myself, I have no problems believing I can carry 8 weapons, each weighing 40 pounds, and 1000 pounds of ammunition, and then jump over a 6 foot tall alien, doing a perfect 180 before landing. I guess I'm just gifted.
-Ted
One of the great things about Q3A weapons is that they're tweaked so that every weapon could still be useful in a variety of situations, no matter how many weapons are on the map. The exception is the BFG, of course, which dominates every map you find it on. This just shows that "more weapons" does not mean "more variety".
To me, this is the fatal flaw of Unreal Tournament. There are something like 18 different fire modes total in the game, but only 5 are really playable in a combat situation: Plasma Fire mode 2, Flack 1, Flack 2 (occasionally), Shock Rifle combo (1 and 2), and Rockets. So you end up with at most 35% of your weapon fire modes being used.
In contrast, on Quake Maps I find that over 80% of the weapons are useful when playing. So Unreal Tournament encourages people to find one of the 5 good weapons are fire away while Quake 3 encourages people to find the best weapon in a combat situation.
The conclusion is that adding more weapon fire modes increases the glitz factor of the game like Unreal Tournament, but you lose long term game replayability. So don't expect ST:EF to last long as a deathmatch game.
Incidently, this explains why Unreal Tournament was prefered over Q3A when UT was first release, by about 60% to 40%. But as people play the games more, Q3A has the lead by roughly 55% to 45%. Q3A just has more replayability. You can grab these statistics from the gamespy stats page. Of course, Halflife's user base trumps all of the other games combined. That's because Halflife has counterstrike, which appeals to people who don't like traditional first person shooters (ie. need "realistic weapons" that are almost completely identical because they're all instant hit weapons. ;)
-Ted
I guess what I'm trying to say is...
There is no difference in motivation between joe blue collar and joe white collar. It's just that the white collar folks have more means than everyone else.
It's a catagorical denial of Marxism, actually. Marx claims that eventually the working class will overthrow the ruling class and live in Utopia. "THIS revolution will be different! This revolution will be the LAST!"
What Marx fails to see is that the problem is not with the means (money and power) but the motive (greed and pride). Not all humans have money and power, but almost all humans are greedy and proud. It is pure hubris to claim that we the workers as a whole would act any different if we were in power.
There are two courses of action. You can become agnostic apathetic-- another term for a cynic, meaning you don't do anything. Or you can shed the evil motives and then work the means in favor of humanity (and against the system itself).
Clearly this is a difficult task, but only because personal humility is learned one mind at a time. It's easy to coordinate selfish people, but it's hard to even find self-sacrificing people, much less become one.
-Ted
People corrupt politicians. Business are just made up of hundreds and thousands of people who want to get ahead in life, and the upper management uses the weight of the organization to force some changes. Labor parties do the same thing. So do religious groups. Sure, individuals used to have a voice in politics, but the voice of a large collective silences many individuals. So lets not target "Businesses". People as a whole are willing to backstab each other to get a step up in life, and we are part of that society. Business isn't the problem. Humanity is, and by extension, _we_ are the problem.
Of course, that's not an excuse for agnostic apathy. Sure, the agnostic apathetics are technically correct-- they don't know anything and they don't care about anything. You don't worry about your foundation breaking when you haven't built anything. Rather, we must understand and expect that this is how the world works, and we need to manipulate the system for the greater good of everyone, not just for our own "greater good".
Only when we finally admit that We are the problem can we benefit humanity as a whole. Until then, everyone is still wrapped in their own selfishness and pride.
-Ted
(Score -1: Karma Whore)
Remember that in the days of Doom, most people didn't even know that multi-player capabilities existed! You needed to start doom with command line arguments to set that up. And people still played doom for years. They made tons of single player mods and maps. The entire mod community has its roots in Doom.
Now think about the current best single player only games like Thief 2. I played Thief and Thief 2 through. Know what I did after that? Played it again on a higher skill. With self-imposed restrictions. Then I downloaded a bunch of user maps and played those. I'm still in love with those games.
Doom 2000's success as a game is tied into two factors:
#1: How fun the cooperative game mode is
#2: How easy the editor is to use
If the game is fun to play _with_ your friends, not against them, and if the editor doesn't stand in the way of creating good levels, the game will be successful.
-Ted
I remember having many conversations on this topic with my friends a few years ago. In the end, we concluded that the question of, "Is he a replicant?" was more important than the answer of "Yes" or "No". Rather, the possibility that he's a replicant is what we savour.
We also noticed a few other well thought out sections of the movie. For example, remember J.F. Sebastian, the man with accelerated aging? He represents a human with the same problem as a replicant. His duality is Rachel, who is a replicant with the same problem as humans-- emotions. If I remember, most major characters in the film fit into some kind of pair opposite duality, centered around Decker.
-Ted