Point well taken, if you actually recompile everything under Gentoo, and occasionally recompile everything for a new library or framework, you don't have compatibility problems. Unfortunately:
A. Not everything is available as source code. E.g., God help you if you want WebSphere's sources and you're not working in the WebSphere team at IBM.
B. Compiling everything is not always an economical or comfortable solution. While, again, I'll admit that it fixes pretty much any compatibility issues, a full recompile can take _days_ on top of the line computers. Doubly so on some old 2.0 GHz P4 (or less) people still have around at home or at the office.
Many games have an online component, yeah. Guess what? The vast majority of gaming still happens off-line. The online crack-smoking smack-talking in-your-face CS clans are a very vocal minority, but a tiny minority nevertheless. For each online game sold, there are more than a dozen purely off-line console games being sold.
Ditto for MMOs. They're a very tempting proposition for a publisher, because it promises to make some people keep paying every month. But again, they're actually a minority. Units sold they're a spit in the bucket even compared to the number of non-online consoles sold. Assuming that everyone who bought a console also got one single game for it, it already makes the MMO market look not even like a niche, but like a narrow crack.
I.e., the majority of games sold are _not_ protected by their online component. Anyone could get their console chipped, without even needing any technical savvy.
But again, in practice they don't.
So, again, take your darkest most pirate-infested corner of the USA, and you still have some 60% of people actually _paying_ for their software.
Not because they're too stupid to defeat a silly protection that was cracked before the game even hit the shelves. But because, as I've said, for a lot of people the choices aren't only free beer or stolen beer.
Disclaimer: I'm a bit of a Windows fan, so your mileage may vary.
That said, you know, actually they're not that incompatible.
I've ran for example WebSphere and Eclipse on SuSE, Gentoo, and a coleague installed them on RedHat too. My brother runs them on Mandrake. Binaries too, no recompiling needed. No problems there. I also don't recall having to get a different binary version of, say, OOo for different Linux flavours. It runs just as crappy on them all.
It's not yet perfect, yes, but differences tend to be minor. E.g., where they put their scripts or some config files, or whether KDE and Gnome go into/opt or into/usr. Nothing that a desktop application really needs to know about.
Linux still has compatibility problems of its own, in the form of the DLL hell. (Well,.so but same idea.) Each F/OSS app seems to want its very own version of some library, which in turns requires a bunch of other libraries to be in a whole other version than what you have on the system.
But that's hardly something that has to do with distro fragmentation. You're just as likely to run into that problem on any distro.
"95% of all windows boxes must contain 100% pirated software."
And I'll call bull on that. Except maybe if you're talking China or ex-USSR where they can't even afford to pay hundreds of bucks for a text editor or 40 bucks for a game. (If a game costs as much as your monthly salary, or more, and you also have to eat out of that salary... well, moral decisions just get a lot easier.)
Even by the BSA's BS statistics, about the highest software piracy rate in the USA is in North Dakota, at almost 40%. And in some states it's in the low teens.
That's a bloody far cry from your 95% bullshit.
And bear in mind that there's a reason there's BS in BSA. Their statistics are inflated beyond belief. If some chinese kid downloads 3DS Max to toy around with making models for a game (e.g., "X2: The Threat" only supports 3DS Max models), the BSA counts it as $6000 lost sales. On account that surely every single kid, even in china, would have paid $6000 to make mods for a $40 game.
Yeah, right. Dunno in which country kids get $6000 as pocket change.
I.e., again, in practice, the real piracy rate is actually lower than that.
The reason why a majority of Americans or Europeans pay for their software isn't that we're more stupid than the Chinese and just can't find a crack. It's because we're not the kind of cheapskate whose only options are free beer or stolen beer. Because it's the morally right thing to do.
Some of us actually paid for Windows. Yes, go figure. I went and bought the Win2K copy I'm writing this on. Retail. And for Linux too, for that matter. The SuSE 9.0 I use at work, I've actually went and bought the funny green box. And for a ton of other software, copy-protected stuff included.
In fact, I'll tell you what: if Microsoft could actually come up with a copy-protection scheme that actually _works_ and actually stops pirates, Microsoft would have my heartfelt gratitude. Speaking as a consumer, and no, I don't work for MS. I'm sick and tired of seeing good games companies going bankrupt, while freeloading cheapskates (some driving SUVs and sports cars) leech their games on P2P.
(On the other hand, crap that only inconveniences the paying customer and doesn't actually do anything to pirates, I've still had enough of.)
At some point people figured that photos can be used for more than the faces of your loved ones. Or that the printing press can be used for more than novels and bibles. Or that films don't have to involve car chases: they can just as well be used to teach.
However in the case of "games" we're somehow still stuck with the wrong definition. Everything that involves any kind of simulation _has_ to be called a game, and/or has to be designed as a game.
We're told for example that the 9/11 terrorists used MS's Flight Simulator "game" to train. Well guess what? By the definition in any other medium, it's not a game. It's a very complex and realistic airplane simulation, that only incidentally also happens to have any entertainment value. It _is_ all about training to fly an airplane to start with.
If it was a film, it would have been called training material. But since it happens on the computer, it's called a "game".
E.g., we're told that the US army uses "games" to train its soldiers. No, they don't. They use some complex tactical or vehicle simulators, which only incidentally could also be viewed as a "game". I doubt that the purpose is simply to spend an entertaining evening collecting points and powerups and talking smack to other platoons. It's training, not a "game".
E.g., conversely, as Will Wright noticed when he was designing The Sims, most people who bought some serious software tools like 3D home or garden designers were actually using them as a sort of a game.
So basically I'd say that we're stuck with a wrong definition dating from back when games meant pacman eating pills on a simplistic 2D maze. It was entertaining, no doubt, but hardly representative of the direction "games" take today. There were no realistic skills or lessons to be learned from PacMan. It was just entertainment.
Today we have more and more complex simulations, which incidentally are also entertaining. A lot of times the entertainment value is _because_ of their being a better learning tool, and allowing you to experiment things which would be impractical or impossible to try IRL. No, I don't mean rocket jumps, I mean for example piloting a jumbo jet.
Or to put it otherwise, it's sorta like some people go driving around on weekends just because they like driving. Yet noone would file cars under "toys". They're a serious tool which, incidentally, can also be used for entertainment by some people.
Hmm. I keep hearing about how vinyl is a more accurate representation, and how I should trust my ears. Well, I do trust my ears. But here's the funny part: so far my ears tell me otherwise. It's not about watching pretty graphs, it's about how it sounds.
I grew up on vinyl and magnetic tapes. (And I mean tape reels, not cassettes.) And lemme tell you: good riddance. I'm not in the least nostalgic about it.
They were noisy, and they were pretty much a low pass filter. And I mean _noisy_. Soft screeches and clicks as every dust particle or imperfection was also converted into sound, well, those were the name of the analog game.
Yes, vinyl is a direct mechanical representation, and that is it's _problem_. You're talking a mechanical device, with all the mechanical limitations that come from that. Such as erosion (which eventually flattens high tones out), dust particles, non-linear frequency response due to mechanical inertia, wobbly bearings, and different linear speeds at different positions on the disc. (Hence, different frequency responses.)
And analog had another problem: each copy would be worse than the original. No, I don't mean pirated copy, I mean that a lot of copying would happen between what was recorded and what you bought on vinyl or tape.
E.g., the mechanical imprecision of pressing the disc. You are not listening off the master plates, you're listening off a cheaply pressed replica which is _not_ faithful down to the micron. If you think that that process alone does not lose a lot, you haven't given it much thought.
E.g., it was probably recorded on tape and then transferred to that master plate. In the process any imperfection along the amplifier _and_ mechanical chain, got passed along to the copy you bought.
I.e., in the end you got an approximation of an approximation of an approximation. Less is lost? Ha. In practice, _more_ is lost. And you could say more is added: noise.
For all the bullshit about how slicing sound into samples and recombining it is bad, you can instantly tell a digitally recorded sound from old tapes played through tubes. The CD is the one which still has all the high tones, while the tape-and-tubes setup is the one which sounds like it's played through a low pass filter.
Strangely enough, the sliced and recombined version actually lost less. For starters it didn't lose anything when being copied around: the 7th copy of the 7th copy of a digital signal, still is identical to the original. So by the time it gets to you on a CD, it's still an identical copy of the original sample.
What slicing and recombining does is add harmonics. Luckily, though, they're waay out of the range your ears pick.
You want that warm analog FM-and-tubes sensation with solid state and CDs? That's easy. Open WinAmp and set the equalizer so it's tappers after around the middle of the scale and hits zero at the rightmost slider. There you go: all that warm all bass sound you were pining for.
Simulating vinyl might be a more tricky proposition, though. Just adding more white noise (such as a few high speed case fans) doesn't quite reproduce that screechy and clicky experience. I'm sure some kind folks could be persuaded into writing a screech-and-click open-source module;)
That said, I will aggree with your statement about speakers. Cheap computer speakers, and even some of the non-cheap 7.1 ones, sound like crap. Last ones I tried just for experiment sake, sounded literally like an AM radio at the bottom of a plastic barrel. And the tweeters on some monitors sound like the music is played through a cheap digital watch. So, yeah, a good set of hi fi speakers are a must.
Which basically boils down to the fact we've all known for a long while: that tubes actually have _lower_ fidelity.
Well, I don't have much of a problem with that. If someone likes that kind of distortion or frequency response, I'm not going to argue against a question of personal taste.
The thing that gets my goat is when it's basically getting into the kind of pseudoscience that you mention: about how solid state isn't accurate enough, or somehow clips the sound although you can't see that on any osciloscope, etc. And how adding a tube (i.e., more distortion) somehow turns a cheap mobo into high-end hifi equipment.
It's basically like arguing that the old sepia-and-white photos are more accurate than a modern colour photo off a cheap Polaroid camera. I have no problem with them preferring a sepia tinted photo, or sound "coloured" by tubes, for nostalgia sake. I just hate it when it degenerates into some pseudo-science about how the old version is really more accurate.
That said, as was said, nowadays you can get the same kind of frequency response with solid state equipment. You don't have to switch headphones to get more bass, you can just mess with the equalizer. Or write a filter plugin for WinAmp, Foobar, or whichever media player you're using.
Ditto for tubes. You can mangle the signal in software nowadays to simulate any kind of electronic or accoustic circuit or environment. You can have your MP3's sound like they're played through tubes _and_ in a cathedral, if that is what floats your boat.
So IMHO, well, we all might as well stop pretending that having tubes around is anything else than nostalgia.
When you wave the prospect of big undeserved gains in front of someone, there is a chance that greed kicks in. In fact, that it kicks in to such an extent as to give their brains an emergency shutdown.
E.g., after the fall of communism, pyramid schemes swept across Eastern Europe like a tsunami. Some people sold their houses, emptied their savings accounts, etc, to join in some harebrained pyramid scheme or another.
Since it invariably involved some variant of "each person gets the money from X other persons", it just _begged_ the question "well, and when everyone dumped their money into it, what happens to the _last_ idiots in the line. Who will _they_ get money from?" But apparently greed was enough to shut people's brains out.
It's not even a new thing. Historically other such mass-attacks of idiocy include the tulip bulb madness in Holland, or Law's replacing the whole French currency with pumped up stock in a non-existing company. We're talking whole countries, from Regent to nobles to workers to beggars, who basically had their brains shut down by pure greed.
And I'm thinking that a _lot_ of what happens in the corporate world is IMHO remarkably well explained by this theory.
It also doesn't help that clue must be heavier than air. The higher you go up the corporate pyramid, the thinner it gets.
What I'm getting at is that a frontal attack on IBM to get bought is sheer idiocy. IBM is an IP bastion itself, so it has the army of lawyers and the experience in dealing with _exactly_ this kind of crap. Or with giving someone this kind of crap.
Other stuff like threatening with fraudulent invoices or suing their own customers, _if_ actually planned as such, and not just for pump-and-dump sake, is an even bigger idiocy
The whole scheme is so _obviously_ stupid, that _if_ Darl & Co actually believed in it, the only explanation I have is that greed shut down their brains.
And again, we have a case of clue being heavier than air. Or of PHB's thinking they're above clue.
I can't believe that noone tried to offer them some free clue. E.g., with Caldera/SCO having been a linux shop and still having a distro for download, they had plenty of Linux people inside their own organization. Didn't any of those try passing some free complimentary clue upwards when the assault on Linux began? I don't believe that.
But again, clue was probably too heavy to go upwards. It probably ran into the kind of PHB who's not about to start taking feedback from lowly worthless peons. You serfs better not start questioning the emperor's new clothes.
Actually, you know, it's even better than the Emperor's New Clothes story. In the story, people only _pretend_ to see the clothes, for peer pressure. (And I'd guess also not to end up explaining stuff to the Emperor's guards, in the comfort of the Emperor's dungeon.)
In reality, people actually lie to themselves.
Tell some poor idiot often enough that he's somehow inferior if he can't hear how it sounds better through granddad's old crap radio... and the poor idiot starts actually convincing _himself_ that he too can hear the difference. 'Cause otherwise he'd be inferior, and that's bad.
If the Emperor's New Clothes story happened IRL, people wouldn't just pretend to others that they too see the clothes. They'd squint and lie to themselves until they're convinced they too can see the fine clothes. Just look at all those fabulous colours.
It is SFV (stupid fashion victim) syndrome wrapped in pseudo-science language. No more, no less.
And the pseudo-science it comes wrapped in, invariably shows massive ignorance of the real science. It invariably boils down to "uh, you can't see it on any osciloscope or signal analyzer, but transistors do this and that evil thing to your signal." Well, guess what? If it's some mystical thing that can't be measured or detected in any way, it's no more than some poor man's religion.
And it's still ignoring that nowadays it's usually paired with transistors nevertheless. E.g., that signal went first through the transistors in the iPod. Whatever evil satanistic marks those transistors put on the signal, it's already there before it even reached the tubes.
And you talk about 8 bit or 16 bit or 24 bit quantization, which is a good topic to bring up, since they're still playing music from an iPod. It's still quantized, and it still has the artefacts from lossy MPEG or AAC encoding.
Or I've seen at least one mobo which paired an el-cheapo crap on-board sound chip with a tube, and suddenly it was audiophile equipment. As if there was some _magic_ in the tube that goes back on the causality line and also stops the sound chip from doing a crappy noisy job.
The whole bullshit is that passing _any_ signal through a tube magically makes it better. Suddenly it no longer matters that it's quantized at 8 bits, _and_ lost a ton of harmonics and gained new ones due to lossy encoding. The magical +5 tube knew what the sound should have been like, and erased all those artefacts. Basically turning lossy compression into lossless compression.
That's high magic, folks. ('Cause science and technology it sure ain't.) Don't try it at home. Only high elves certified by the Mages' Guild can infuse tubes with that kind of arcane power.
Which is all that this is. People wanting real hard to believe in basically magic. Magical tallismans which solve this or that by magic. Just because they're there.
So basically the CEO and politicians are just expendable pawns, and there's some super-government so secret... yet so well known that even a dying president or pharma CEO doesn't dare fund a cure. Riight. So _millions_ of people around the world are affraid of this super-power, but still noone knows it exists.
Do I need to point out the idiocy of this standard conspiracy theory, or do you start realizing it yourself by now?
Air bases are easy. Mostly noone gives a damn about what's happening inside. And those who do go in and out, mostly don't have anything noteworthy to say anyway. "Yeah, today we ran around and then we had a meal." Doesn't make for a big newsflash.
But when something noteworthy does happen, such as the recent torturing of prisoners, guess what? All those people start talking. And when what they say is interesting enough, people start listening.
_That_ is the real problem with these conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies and secrets tend to not stay that secret, once more than 2-3 people are involved. Conspiracies which involve millions of people? Heh. Dream on.
Either way, it never ceases to amaze me how many people want really hard to believe in basically magic. There's always some silver bullet which solves all problems, ends world hunger, cures all diseases, makes untrained burger-flippers write enterprise programs, etc. Guess a fairy tale beats actually facing reality, eh?
And since we're in a topic about spam, it's gullible idiots like these which make spam work and keep the spam tsunami coming upon the rest of us. There's always some such magical solution they're willing to believe: some magic cure-all drug, some bullshit diploma that noone will question, some loan they'll never have to repay, etc. And no shortage of scammers taking advantage of that lack o' brains.
And the really sad part is that these bullshit stories would be damn easy to prove: e.g., you don't even need to try too hard to find out what medicine did the Soviet block actually have.
But naah. Let's believe what the nice spammer said. Surely he wouldn't lie about those pills he's selling. Surely they're really some super-secret Soviet miracle pill. And those who say it's really pressed chalk with some funny dye, are all part of a conspiracy funded by the big pharma.
The problem with curing a disease is that you have to kill some cells which aren't that fundamentally different from the normal cells in your body. In the case of viral diseases, they _are_ your normal cells, only slightly reprogrammed by the virus.
Hence most of the medicine is actually mildly toxic. Almost all of it, in high enough concentrations, can cause severe damage to the liver, kidneys, and/or other body parts.
So the trick to treating a disease, is to maintain a concentration just high enough to sorta harm the bacteria over time, but low enough so the normal cells aren't _too_ harmed. Hence taking small doses 3 times a day, for a week or more.
A dose which could kill all bacteria or mutated cells in one pill, would have an effect on your liver comparable to a shotgun blast at close range.
Point in case: my own mom, who basically stuffed herself with antibiotics and sulphamids back then, is now struggling just to stay alive. Her liver is basically destroyed. Maybe it's not a coincidence. She also thought that she was smarter than the doctors back then. Looking in retrospect, maybe she shouldn't have been that smart, eh?
So maybe the next time a doctor tells you some pills to take 3 times a day... maybe it's not some evil pharma conspiracy. Maybe the poor bugger is just trying to not cause permanent damage.
Let me tell you a little secret: I actually was on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, in the bad old days of the Cold War. It also happens that several family friends were doctors.
Guess what? If such wonder drugs ever existed, the soviets (and the whole soviet block) didn't use them either. Wonder why. Maybe because such wonder drugs only ever existed in crackpot conspiracy theories, but never In Real Life?
And don't tell me it was also the "evil" westen pharma corporations who were stopping the Soviets from using their own medicine. (I don't remember the West stoping the Soviets from building nukes or breeding hot strains of smallpox, for example.)
I'll tell you something funny: the whole Eastern European block had a very liberal policy when it came to antibiotics. And plenty of corruption. One way or the other, you could get pretty much any medicine you bloody pleased, whether you actually needed it or not. (Or whether it could even work at all for your disease or not.) Kids were routinely stuffed full of antibiotics and sulphamids at the slightest sign of a cold.
Yet noone ever got such a miracle cure. Even there, when you did get prescribed medicine, it was 3-4 times a day, for a week or more. Just like in the West. Go figure.
And if you needed an operation, they didn't just sprinkle some magic potion. They used sterilized equipment and aseptic rooms, just like in the West. Go figure.
So please spare me the bullshit conspiracy theories.
There is no magic wand that you can just wave and make the illness go away. There never was, never will be. Not on the Western side, not on the Soviet side, and not in China either.
And if there was one, those same pharma companies could patent it and have a monopoly on magic wands for 20 years straight. The one who had a magic wand that cures, say, diabetes, could sell it for a fortune per milligram, and make one helluva lot more profit from that than from being the 100'th guy selling cheap generic insulin.
Plus if there was one, what do you thing would happen the first time a pharma executive, or doctor or pharmacist got a fatal disease? Do you expect me to believe they'd just patiently await their own death, rather than threaten their profits? Better yet, that millions of doctors and pharmacists _all_ keep the secret rather than save their own lives or the lives of their children.
Dude, there is no amount of money in the world that could buy that.
20% performance is actually in the "too good to be true" range IMHO. I certainly wouldn't even begin to mind it.
I would be interested, though, if they implicitly meant on "nearly identical hardware". No, I don't just mean speed.
But for example the PC and the Mac are nearly identical architectures (if with different CPUs), and with identical graphics chips. The PC and the Playstation 2 are not. Even when emulating the old Playstation, you run into the problem that Sony's graphics chips aren't actually even vaguely similar to the direction that PC graphics chips took.
You can most certainly still emulate that on PC style hardware, but the work involved is non-trivial enough to cost more than 20% speed. It doesn't have to be something slow per se, just cost more than just piping the vertexes to the GPU via DMA. Even something as trivial as having to reverse the endianness of the vertex coordinates, can put a dent on emulation speed, and hardware can easily be even more different than that.
Basically, don't get me wrong, I still want a Mac which can play all PC games, so that would certainly be enough for me.
But I just doubt the claim that it can emulate _any_ hardware on _any_ other hardware at 80% CPU efficiency and nearly 100% graphics efficiency. On some hardware combinations that's just simply physically impossible.
Last time I posted something like "it was a scientist who made your CPU possible", I got replies along the lines of "no bloody way. It was an engineer". Hence including that disclaimer this time.
Guess what? Science is _based_ on not knowing everything.
Scientists not admitting they don't know everything? Well, gee, I thought they even told you exactly what they don't know yet and/or are trying to find out, each time a new experiment is performed. Whenever a new particle accelerator is built, whenever a new probe is sent into space, whenever someone builds a bigger telescope, whenever they bury some sophisticated particle detector deep, they'll conveniently tell you exactly which part of the unknown they're trying to probe.
If anyone believed we already have the absolute truth already, we wouldn't need those. In fact, we could just as well shut down the existing ones and send everyone home. Nothing left to discover, no?
But that's not the case.
The whole idea of science is that we don't know everything. If you want absolute truths, those are that-a-way, through the door marked "religion". Science is in the other direction.
In science at most we might have a good enough approximation for stuff we're able to measure already. And for a given class of problems.
E.g., Newton's mechanics are accurate enough for everyday stuff: things weighing between milligrams and thousands of tonnes, at relatively slow speeds. If you move away from that in any way, the approximation is no longer enough, and more detailed theories become necessary. That's why we have relativism, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and so on.
We do _not_ however have an explanation for stuff noone has measured before, or for problems which didn't even exist before.
E.g., for what happens at sub-atomic particles under a certain size. That's why we keep building bigger accelerators. 'Cause we have no clue what happens there, why or how. We're trying to find out, 'cause so far noone measured anything in that range.
E.g., for exactly the problem in this article. Noone before had measured what happens when you chuck a rock (or a spacecraft) far enough outside the solar system. It's a new problem, and, yes, the scientists are very open about it: noone has a clue what's happening there or why.
But that's ok. That's how science work.
What will happen is that we devise new experiments, measure some more, and then we'll have enough data to make a better theory. One which will allow us to chuck spacecrafts better.
See, for all its "absolute truths" and the knee-jerk jumping to point fingers at scientists, that's one thing that religion can't do: eventually tell you _how_ to do something right.
Everything you see about you, such as the electronics in the computer you typed that on, didn't happen because someone shrugged and said "uh... guess because God wanted it to be so". It came to be possible because some scientists openly admitted what they don't know yet, and proceeded to measure and devise theories.
(And someone will point out that engineers were also needed to make an actual device based on those theories. Indeed. Personally I just think of engineers as a branch of science. The applied kind of science, as opposed to the theoretical kind. Still science either way.)
Theories which don't just explain why something already happened, but how to make it happen again. And how to control it when you make it happen. How to make it happen slightly differently.
But again, it invariably started with someone saying "well, we have no bloody clue why _that_ happens. We'll need to measure some more and do some serious thinking."
So basically a snow storm _could_ _have_ frozen and broken the water pipes, but in practice it didn't. A fire could have reached the propane tanks, but it didn't. Etc.
So let's not just bury the propane tanks, let's turn the whole house into a bunker. In fact, to make it completely idiotic, they bury the house, but the propane tanks are _still_ outside.
Well, I don't know about you, but it seems to me like the whole damn life is essentially a series of almost-hits. E.g.:
- Cars pass by within 3 ft of me when I'm on the sidewalk. One _could_ hit me, but in practice none never did.
- The last round of flu at the office could have been some mutant alien genetically-engineered killer virus and killed us all, but in practice it wasn't.
- Scary terrorists could blow up the building I live in, or the one I work in, but in practice it beats me why would they bother. There are more visible targets out there, you know.
- The neighbour could turn out to secretly be a serial killer, but in practice they're all really old people. The mental image of one of them chasing me, hobbling on their frail legs and walking stick at maybe 1 MPH fails to be scary. Or realistic.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically that's life. It's scary, it's unpredictable, and shit _could_ happen. Deal with it. Take reasonable precautions, but not this.
You can't just bury yourself in a bunker and shut off the whole rest of the world. (Tempting as it might be at times for some of us introverts;) You can't just live the rest of your life in a bunker, on the off chance that some day disaster will strike without warning, and by Jove, you'll be underground when that happens.
It wouldn't work either.
If a virus epidemic broke out, how long could you live underground on four slabs of elk and 2000 gallons of propane. Then what? Then you go outside and catch the epidemic anyway. You're going to hunt what in that post-apocalypse world? Well, animals who probably carry the killer virus, if any survived it.
Ditto for a nuclear apocalypse. Ok, you're safe underground for a few months, then what? Then you go out and brave the radiation and nuclear waste, that's what.
As was pointed before, there's a difference between stress and pressure. And I really don't think _anyone_ thrives under a PHB which produces just stress.
E.g., the kind of example you give is the prime one. Keep telling someone that he's a no good loser and his job might as well be outsourced, and you'll only cause stress and a morale drop. Force someone to do long hours, and _then_ tell them they're still not good enough, you cause an even bigger morale drop.
I've worked with such people, and I have friends which worked with such people. I do remember one case when such a PHB caused a mass resignation of all programmers and designers at the same time. But I really don't remember anyone thriving on it.
Now there are people you can scare into working harder, by playing on their insecurities. People who are complexed and/or terminally scared of losing their job, for example. (I know someone, for example, who is wrongly convinced that he's too old to get hired in IT any more, so he lets the boss overwork him and verbally abuse him all day long.) But they won't thrive on it. They'll work harder all right, but then they'll just get stressed and sick like everyone else.
There are positive ways to _motivate_ someone into working harder. That's pressure. The key is to work on _raising_ morale, not on lowering it.
(And for the PHB's in the audience, that doesn't mean mandatory pointless meetings. Those never actually raise morale.)
E.g., among us nerds (and especially among young ones) some praise and recognition goes a _very_ long way. Lots of people overwork themselves every day just because they know someone will notice.
E.g., speaking of recognition, it always goes a long way to know that the rewards or praise are based on merit, not on nepotism or PC criteria. Seeing the most competent guy/girl be the first fired, and the biggest catastrophe _and_ slacker get promoted, is one way to drive morale down all the way.
E.g., if you give people the impression that the company cares about them, some of them will care for the company in return.
E.g., a sense of purpose also goes a long way. Working on some pointless collection of buzzwords that marketting thought up, and makes no sense, is not much fun. On the other hand, knowing that someone actually needs that program and for what, you'd be surprised what that can do.
E.g., honest feedback and bidirectional communication can do a whole lot. Again, I don't mean pointless ego-masturbation meetings, I mean actual communication. Even if someone has an unreasonable objection, do take the time to explain honestly why it can't be done. (Even if it's "we ran out of budget" or "I said the same thing, but the client really wants that feature anyway." It shows the boss is on your side, after all.)
That theory is based on the false assumptions that deadlines will still be based on an average 40 hour week, and generally that your employer won't start taking that unpaid overtime for granted.
What happens in practice is that it starts being taken for granted. Even _if_ you don't work for a git who fancies himself a supreme ruler.
The fact remains that business plans and deadlines get set by extrapolating what worked so far. If project X1 was done in Y days and for Z dollars, then project X2 will be planned by extrapolating the data from X1.
It's not that they're evil, it's just proper management of resources. People are good at hiding behind such euphemisms.
Basically if you put in 12 hour shifts 7 days a week to finish project X1... you'll be expected to do the same in project X2 too. And then in project X3 too.
And then by X4, you'll be at the point where those 84 hour weeks aren't even seen as your undying loyalty to the company, but as the baseline. You're not the good guy if you stay 84 hours there, you're the lazy git to fire when you only stay 82 hours.
Been there before. After a couple of years of, well, not having a life and being cheerful to work 7 days a week, and sometimes up to 16-18 hours a day, it got predictably taken for granted.
I was also starting to get tired. And to get this nagging sensation that, far from being some exception to get one project finished, now projects were now planned to _require_ that kind of work. And any mis-planning will be extra.
Then I started having surrealistic discussions with the boss.
There was one project which was spectacularly mis-planned even for 84 hour weeks. Well, I was expected to do overtime to finish it. Overtime meaning: above the now "normal" 12-16 hours shifts!
The boss threatened with all sorts of crap, up to some surrealistic threat to sue me for 1 million dollars damages if the project isn't ready on time. Of course, I knew too that there's no way in heck that would get more than a laugh in any court. But it left me with a very bitter taste.
I ended up doing literally 24 hour shifts to finish that project. It was ready on time.
By the next project, I explicitly requested that it be planned for a normal 5 day work week. I told the boss that I wanted to have the weekend free at least now and then. Or at least the Sundays, ffs.
His answer? Quite literally: "Wth do you need free wekends for? You'd just sit at the computer anyway."
When I insisted, he threatened with a pay cut if I don't work at least 70 hours a week. Apparently the whole business plan and offer to the potential client were indeed already _based_ on at least that.
Needless to say, I don't work for that asshole any more, but it was an interesting lesson nevertheless: if you let people keep screwing you, expect them to take that for granted. Whole business plans will be made around you being the one screwed.
Except you seem to miss in which section of slashdot this is: games.slashdot.org
Those dual macs are nice, no doubt, but until their games library grows a little (as in, about 10 times), "gaming" is just about the last word I'd associate with them.
Well, first of all, I meant "efficient" actually as in "effective". That pulse of gamma radiation did a thorough job of causing the biggest mass extinction in history.
But even if we talk efficiency as in physics: compare it to rising the ocean level that much. Even completely melting the polar caps won't do. We're talking either:
A. bringing a helluva lot of water from somewhere else. Which ought to cost a helluva lot of energy. Or
B. just creating more water. Which means even more energy. Think: E=m*c^2.
By comparison, detonating a star could require little more than giving it a nudge. It already has the fuel right there.
And perhaps more importantly: the flood just begs a lot of uncomfortable questions. The supernova just looks like an accident. Nothing suspicious about it.
If only those numbers weren't just pulled out of some marketroid's arse just because they look good.
Remember that it's from the same guys who brought you the 14" display with only 10" visible. Or 16ms TFT panels which actually show about 120ms worth of ghosting.
Or 18 bit colour TFT panels + dithering being sold as 24 bit panels. On account that surely making the display shimmer and flicker as it approximates colours by switching between other colours, is exactly what you always wanted in a TFT.
(Someone remind me why a 20-30 Hz shimmer on TFT is better for my eyes than the 85 Hz flicker of a CRT? No really, I keep forgetting.)
The computer industry as a whole is a pretty sad display of lies, shameless lies and IT marketting. But the display part of the industry has got to take the cake.
At least half of the progress since the days of 120ms panels is just more creative ways to measure it, and/or to fudge the numbers.
So basically what I'm getting at is: when you'll see a 5ms display on sale, you can rest assured that it's really a 30-40ms real latency fudged down to 5ms by the marketting department. And after the dithering is applied too, you can probably count on 40-50ms or more.
I really wouldn't set my hopes too high about being able to display 100 fps without ghosting anywhere in the next 5 years.
An "up close and personal" supernova might have been responsible for the Cambrian-Ordovician mass extinctions and glacial age, some 0.5 billion of years ago. The massive pulse of gamma ray turned the ozone layer into a brown nitrous dioxide layer.
In turn that (A) allowed UV radiation from the sun to cook a lot of organisms. Yes, including those under water. _And_ (B) affected the climate so massively, that the Earth was turned into a cosmic ball of ice for an awfully long time. _And_ (C) must have caused one hell of a nitrous acid rain.
So I'd say you _really_ don't want to see one up close and personal.
(On the other hand, _if_ there's a God, you have to give the guy some credit. This is a much more clever way to devastate a planet than just a flood. Very efficient too.)
1. You actually did something, and actually the right thing. That's the only way: you either want to talk to people, or you don't. If you do, then fscking go talk to someone already. You did. Good.
The one category that's starting to get on my nerves though, is the kind that gives even the rest of us nerds a bad name. The kind which would like to be an extrovert, but won't actually go and talk to someone then. Just makes a whiny angsty self-pity soap opera out of it.
And I think these are the bulk of any such service selling a false illusion.
2. You also approached the problem from the sane end. You wanted to talk to women, you went to a dating agency. Seems like sound logic to me.
It's not even the only way to approach it in a manageable way. E.g., to someone who wants to talk about their interests, the local LUG/JUG/wargaming group/whatever is another way to meet someone with similar interests.
It's all stuff that's been around for quite a while before these "friends networks" too. Anyone who actually wanted to do something about making friends, could already do so. So again, since you did, I'd say you're the perfect example of someone who did _not_ need these "friend network" scams.
These aren't really for meeting people or making friends, they're for giving idiots an illusion. Letting people pretend that they have 200 friends via 6 degrees of association or via ZIP proximity or whatever other idiotic criterion. Except in practice it's just a group of perfect strangers, picked by irrelevant criteria.
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Point well taken, if you actually recompile everything under Gentoo, and occasionally recompile everything for a new library or framework, you don't have compatibility problems. Unfortunately:
A. Not everything is available as source code. E.g., God help you if you want WebSphere's sources and you're not working in the WebSphere team at IBM.
B. Compiling everything is not always an economical or comfortable solution. While, again, I'll admit that it fixes pretty much any compatibility issues, a full recompile can take _days_ on top of the line computers. Doubly so on some old 2.0 GHz P4 (or less) people still have around at home or at the office.
Many games have an online component, yeah. Guess what? The vast majority of gaming still happens off-line. The online crack-smoking smack-talking in-your-face CS clans are a very vocal minority, but a tiny minority nevertheless. For each online game sold, there are more than a dozen purely off-line console games being sold.
Ditto for MMOs. They're a very tempting proposition for a publisher, because it promises to make some people keep paying every month. But again, they're actually a minority. Units sold they're a spit in the bucket even compared to the number of non-online consoles sold. Assuming that everyone who bought a console also got one single game for it, it already makes the MMO market look not even like a niche, but like a narrow crack.
I.e., the majority of games sold are _not_ protected by their online component. Anyone could get their console chipped, without even needing any technical savvy.
But again, in practice they don't.
So, again, take your darkest most pirate-infested corner of the USA, and you still have some 60% of people actually _paying_ for their software.
Not because they're too stupid to defeat a silly protection that was cracked before the game even hit the shelves. But because, as I've said, for a lot of people the choices aren't only free beer or stolen beer.
Disclaimer: I'm a bit of a Windows fan, so your mileage may vary.
/opt or into /usr. Nothing that a desktop application really needs to know about.
.so but same idea.) Each F/OSS app seems to want its very own version of some library, which in turns requires a bunch of other libraries to be in a whole other version than what you have on the system.
That said, you know, actually they're not that incompatible.
I've ran for example WebSphere and Eclipse on SuSE, Gentoo, and a coleague installed them on RedHat too. My brother runs them on Mandrake. Binaries too, no recompiling needed. No problems there. I also don't recall having to get a different binary version of, say, OOo for different Linux flavours. It runs just as crappy on them all.
It's not yet perfect, yes, but differences tend to be minor. E.g., where they put their scripts or some config files, or whether KDE and Gnome go into
Linux still has compatibility problems of its own, in the form of the DLL hell. (Well,
But that's hardly something that has to do with distro fragmentation. You're just as likely to run into that problem on any distro.
"95% of all windows boxes must contain 100% pirated software."
And I'll call bull on that. Except maybe if you're talking China or ex-USSR where they can't even afford to pay hundreds of bucks for a text editor or 40 bucks for a game. (If a game costs as much as your monthly salary, or more, and you also have to eat out of that salary... well, moral decisions just get a lot easier.)
Even by the BSA's BS statistics, about the highest software piracy rate in the USA is in North Dakota, at almost 40%. And in some states it's in the low teens.
That's a bloody far cry from your 95% bullshit.
And bear in mind that there's a reason there's BS in BSA. Their statistics are inflated beyond belief. If some chinese kid downloads 3DS Max to toy around with making models for a game (e.g., "X2: The Threat" only supports 3DS Max models), the BSA counts it as $6000 lost sales. On account that surely every single kid, even in china, would have paid $6000 to make mods for a $40 game.
Yeah, right. Dunno in which country kids get $6000 as pocket change.
I.e., again, in practice, the real piracy rate is actually lower than that.
The reason why a majority of Americans or Europeans pay for their software isn't that we're more stupid than the Chinese and just can't find a crack. It's because we're not the kind of cheapskate whose only options are free beer or stolen beer. Because it's the morally right thing to do.
Some of us actually paid for Windows. Yes, go figure. I went and bought the Win2K copy I'm writing this on. Retail. And for Linux too, for that matter. The SuSE 9.0 I use at work, I've actually went and bought the funny green box. And for a ton of other software, copy-protected stuff included.
In fact, I'll tell you what: if Microsoft could actually come up with a copy-protection scheme that actually _works_ and actually stops pirates, Microsoft would have my heartfelt gratitude. Speaking as a consumer, and no, I don't work for MS. I'm sick and tired of seeing good games companies going bankrupt, while freeloading cheapskates (some driving SUVs and sports cars) leech their games on P2P.
(On the other hand, crap that only inconveniences the paying customer and doesn't actually do anything to pirates, I've still had enough of.)
At some point people figured that photos can be used for more than the faces of your loved ones. Or that the printing press can be used for more than novels and bibles. Or that films don't have to involve car chases: they can just as well be used to teach.
However in the case of "games" we're somehow still stuck with the wrong definition. Everything that involves any kind of simulation _has_ to be called a game, and/or has to be designed as a game.
We're told for example that the 9/11 terrorists used MS's Flight Simulator "game" to train. Well guess what? By the definition in any other medium, it's not a game. It's a very complex and realistic airplane simulation, that only incidentally also happens to have any entertainment value. It _is_ all about training to fly an airplane to start with.
If it was a film, it would have been called training material. But since it happens on the computer, it's called a "game".
E.g., we're told that the US army uses "games" to train its soldiers. No, they don't. They use some complex tactical or vehicle simulators, which only incidentally could also be viewed as a "game". I doubt that the purpose is simply to spend an entertaining evening collecting points and powerups and talking smack to other platoons. It's training, not a "game".
E.g., conversely, as Will Wright noticed when he was designing The Sims, most people who bought some serious software tools like 3D home or garden designers were actually using them as a sort of a game.
So basically I'd say that we're stuck with a wrong definition dating from back when games meant pacman eating pills on a simplistic 2D maze. It was entertaining, no doubt, but hardly representative of the direction "games" take today. There were no realistic skills or lessons to be learned from PacMan. It was just entertainment.
Today we have more and more complex simulations, which incidentally are also entertaining. A lot of times the entertainment value is _because_ of their being a better learning tool, and allowing you to experiment things which would be impractical or impossible to try IRL. No, I don't mean rocket jumps, I mean for example piloting a jumbo jet.
Or to put it otherwise, it's sorta like some people go driving around on weekends just because they like driving. Yet noone would file cars under "toys". They're a serious tool which, incidentally, can also be used for entertainment by some people.
A real FPS player ain't taking shit from anyone.
Hmm. I keep hearing about how vinyl is a more accurate representation, and how I should trust my ears. Well, I do trust my ears. But here's the funny part: so far my ears tell me otherwise. It's not about watching pretty graphs, it's about how it sounds.
;)
I grew up on vinyl and magnetic tapes. (And I mean tape reels, not cassettes.) And lemme tell you: good riddance. I'm not in the least nostalgic about it.
They were noisy, and they were pretty much a low pass filter. And I mean _noisy_. Soft screeches and clicks as every dust particle or imperfection was also converted into sound, well, those were the name of the analog game.
Yes, vinyl is a direct mechanical representation, and that is it's _problem_. You're talking a mechanical device, with all the mechanical limitations that come from that. Such as erosion (which eventually flattens high tones out), dust particles, non-linear frequency response due to mechanical inertia, wobbly bearings, and different linear speeds at different positions on the disc. (Hence, different frequency responses.)
And analog had another problem: each copy would be worse than the original. No, I don't mean pirated copy, I mean that a lot of copying would happen between what was recorded and what you bought on vinyl or tape.
E.g., the mechanical imprecision of pressing the disc. You are not listening off the master plates, you're listening off a cheaply pressed replica which is _not_ faithful down to the micron. If you think that that process alone does not lose a lot, you haven't given it much thought.
E.g., it was probably recorded on tape and then transferred to that master plate. In the process any imperfection along the amplifier _and_ mechanical chain, got passed along to the copy you bought.
I.e., in the end you got an approximation of an approximation of an approximation. Less is lost? Ha. In practice, _more_ is lost. And you could say more is added: noise.
For all the bullshit about how slicing sound into samples and recombining it is bad, you can instantly tell a digitally recorded sound from old tapes played through tubes. The CD is the one which still has all the high tones, while the tape-and-tubes setup is the one which sounds like it's played through a low pass filter.
Strangely enough, the sliced and recombined version actually lost less. For starters it didn't lose anything when being copied around: the 7th copy of the 7th copy of a digital signal, still is identical to the original. So by the time it gets to you on a CD, it's still an identical copy of the original sample.
What slicing and recombining does is add harmonics. Luckily, though, they're waay out of the range your ears pick.
You want that warm analog FM-and-tubes sensation with solid state and CDs? That's easy. Open WinAmp and set the equalizer so it's tappers after around the middle of the scale and hits zero at the rightmost slider. There you go: all that warm all bass sound you were pining for.
Simulating vinyl might be a more tricky proposition, though. Just adding more white noise (such as a few high speed case fans) doesn't quite reproduce that screechy and clicky experience. I'm sure some kind folks could be persuaded into writing a screech-and-click open-source module
That said, I will aggree with your statement about speakers. Cheap computer speakers, and even some of the non-cheap 7.1 ones, sound like crap. Last ones I tried just for experiment sake, sounded literally like an AM radio at the bottom of a plastic barrel. And the tweeters on some monitors sound like the music is played through a cheap digital watch. So, yeah, a good set of hi fi speakers are a must.
Which basically boils down to the fact we've all known for a long while: that tubes actually have _lower_ fidelity.
Well, I don't have much of a problem with that. If someone likes that kind of distortion or frequency response, I'm not going to argue against a question of personal taste.
The thing that gets my goat is when it's basically getting into the kind of pseudoscience that you mention: about how solid state isn't accurate enough, or somehow clips the sound although you can't see that on any osciloscope, etc. And how adding a tube (i.e., more distortion) somehow turns a cheap mobo into high-end hifi equipment.
It's basically like arguing that the old sepia-and-white photos are more accurate than a modern colour photo off a cheap Polaroid camera. I have no problem with them preferring a sepia tinted photo, or sound "coloured" by tubes, for nostalgia sake. I just hate it when it degenerates into some pseudo-science about how the old version is really more accurate.
That said, as was said, nowadays you can get the same kind of frequency response with solid state equipment. You don't have to switch headphones to get more bass, you can just mess with the equalizer. Or write a filter plugin for WinAmp, Foobar, or whichever media player you're using.
Ditto for tubes. You can mangle the signal in software nowadays to simulate any kind of electronic or accoustic circuit or environment. You can have your MP3's sound like they're played through tubes _and_ in a cathedral, if that is what floats your boat.
So IMHO, well, we all might as well stop pretending that having tubes around is anything else than nostalgia.
When you wave the prospect of big undeserved gains in front of someone, there is a chance that greed kicks in. In fact, that it kicks in to such an extent as to give their brains an emergency shutdown.
E.g., after the fall of communism, pyramid schemes swept across Eastern Europe like a tsunami. Some people sold their houses, emptied their savings accounts, etc, to join in some harebrained pyramid scheme or another.
Since it invariably involved some variant of "each person gets the money from X other persons", it just _begged_ the question "well, and when everyone dumped their money into it, what happens to the _last_ idiots in the line. Who will _they_ get money from?" But apparently greed was enough to shut people's brains out.
It's not even a new thing. Historically other such mass-attacks of idiocy include the tulip bulb madness in Holland, or Law's replacing the whole French currency with pumped up stock in a non-existing company. We're talking whole countries, from Regent to nobles to workers to beggars, who basically had their brains shut down by pure greed.
And I'm thinking that a _lot_ of what happens in the corporate world is IMHO remarkably well explained by this theory.
It also doesn't help that clue must be heavier than air. The higher you go up the corporate pyramid, the thinner it gets.
What I'm getting at is that a frontal attack on IBM to get bought is sheer idiocy. IBM is an IP bastion itself, so it has the army of lawyers and the experience in dealing with _exactly_ this kind of crap. Or with giving someone this kind of crap.
Other stuff like threatening with fraudulent invoices or suing their own customers, _if_ actually planned as such, and not just for pump-and-dump sake, is an even bigger idiocy
The whole scheme is so _obviously_ stupid, that _if_ Darl & Co actually believed in it, the only explanation I have is that greed shut down their brains.
And again, we have a case of clue being heavier than air. Or of PHB's thinking they're above clue.
I can't believe that noone tried to offer them some free clue. E.g., with Caldera/SCO having been a linux shop and still having a distro for download, they had plenty of Linux people inside their own organization. Didn't any of those try passing some free complimentary clue upwards when the assault on Linux began? I don't believe that.
But again, clue was probably too heavy to go upwards. It probably ran into the kind of PHB who's not about to start taking feedback from lowly worthless peons. You serfs better not start questioning the emperor's new clothes.
Actually, you know, it's even better than the Emperor's New Clothes story. In the story, people only _pretend_ to see the clothes, for peer pressure. (And I'd guess also not to end up explaining stuff to the Emperor's guards, in the comfort of the Emperor's dungeon.)
In reality, people actually lie to themselves.
Tell some poor idiot often enough that he's somehow inferior if he can't hear how it sounds better through granddad's old crap radio... and the poor idiot starts actually convincing _himself_ that he too can hear the difference. 'Cause otherwise he'd be inferior, and that's bad.
If the Emperor's New Clothes story happened IRL, people wouldn't just pretend to others that they too see the clothes. They'd squint and lie to themselves until they're convinced they too can see the fine clothes. Just look at all those fabulous colours.
Kinda sad.
It is SFV (stupid fashion victim) syndrome wrapped in pseudo-science language. No more, no less.
And the pseudo-science it comes wrapped in, invariably shows massive ignorance of the real science. It invariably boils down to "uh, you can't see it on any osciloscope or signal analyzer, but transistors do this and that evil thing to your signal." Well, guess what? If it's some mystical thing that can't be measured or detected in any way, it's no more than some poor man's religion.
And it's still ignoring that nowadays it's usually paired with transistors nevertheless. E.g., that signal went first through the transistors in the iPod. Whatever evil satanistic marks those transistors put on the signal, it's already there before it even reached the tubes.
And you talk about 8 bit or 16 bit or 24 bit quantization, which is a good topic to bring up, since they're still playing music from an iPod. It's still quantized, and it still has the artefacts from lossy MPEG or AAC encoding.
Or I've seen at least one mobo which paired an el-cheapo crap on-board sound chip with a tube, and suddenly it was audiophile equipment. As if there was some _magic_ in the tube that goes back on the causality line and also stops the sound chip from doing a crappy noisy job.
The whole bullshit is that passing _any_ signal through a tube magically makes it better. Suddenly it no longer matters that it's quantized at 8 bits, _and_ lost a ton of harmonics and gained new ones due to lossy encoding. The magical +5 tube knew what the sound should have been like, and erased all those artefacts. Basically turning lossy compression into lossless compression.
That's high magic, folks. ('Cause science and technology it sure ain't.) Don't try it at home. Only high elves certified by the Mages' Guild can infuse tubes with that kind of arcane power.
Which is all that this is. People wanting real hard to believe in basically magic. Magical tallismans which solve this or that by magic. Just because they're there.
So basically the CEO and politicians are just expendable pawns, and there's some super-government so secret... yet so well known that even a dying president or pharma CEO doesn't dare fund a cure. Riight. So _millions_ of people around the world are affraid of this super-power, but still noone knows it exists.
Do I need to point out the idiocy of this standard conspiracy theory, or do you start realizing it yourself by now?
Air bases are easy. Mostly noone gives a damn about what's happening inside. And those who do go in and out, mostly don't have anything noteworthy to say anyway. "Yeah, today we ran around and then we had a meal." Doesn't make for a big newsflash.
But when something noteworthy does happen, such as the recent torturing of prisoners, guess what? All those people start talking. And when what they say is interesting enough, people start listening.
_That_ is the real problem with these conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies and secrets tend to not stay that secret, once more than 2-3 people are involved. Conspiracies which involve millions of people? Heh. Dream on.
Either way, it never ceases to amaze me how many people want really hard to believe in basically magic. There's always some silver bullet which solves all problems, ends world hunger, cures all diseases, makes untrained burger-flippers write enterprise programs, etc. Guess a fairy tale beats actually facing reality, eh?
And since we're in a topic about spam, it's gullible idiots like these which make spam work and keep the spam tsunami coming upon the rest of us. There's always some such magical solution they're willing to believe: some magic cure-all drug, some bullshit diploma that noone will question, some loan they'll never have to repay, etc. And no shortage of scammers taking advantage of that lack o' brains.
And the really sad part is that these bullshit stories would be damn easy to prove: e.g., you don't even need to try too hard to find out what medicine did the Soviet block actually have.
But naah. Let's believe what the nice spammer said. Surely he wouldn't lie about those pills he's selling. Surely they're really some super-secret Soviet miracle pill. And those who say it's really pressed chalk with some funny dye, are all part of a conspiracy funded by the big pharma.
Heh.
The problem with curing a disease is that you have to kill some cells which aren't that fundamentally different from the normal cells in your body. In the case of viral diseases, they _are_ your normal cells, only slightly reprogrammed by the virus.
Hence most of the medicine is actually mildly toxic. Almost all of it, in high enough concentrations, can cause severe damage to the liver, kidneys, and/or other body parts.
So the trick to treating a disease, is to maintain a concentration just high enough to sorta harm the bacteria over time, but low enough so the normal cells aren't _too_ harmed. Hence taking small doses 3 times a day, for a week or more.
A dose which could kill all bacteria or mutated cells in one pill, would have an effect on your liver comparable to a shotgun blast at close range.
Point in case: my own mom, who basically stuffed herself with antibiotics and sulphamids back then, is now struggling just to stay alive. Her liver is basically destroyed. Maybe it's not a coincidence. She also thought that she was smarter than the doctors back then. Looking in retrospect, maybe she shouldn't have been that smart, eh?
So maybe the next time a doctor tells you some pills to take 3 times a day... maybe it's not some evil pharma conspiracy. Maybe the poor bugger is just trying to not cause permanent damage.
Let me tell you a little secret: I actually was on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, in the bad old days of the Cold War. It also happens that several family friends were doctors.
Guess what? If such wonder drugs ever existed, the soviets (and the whole soviet block) didn't use them either. Wonder why. Maybe because such wonder drugs only ever existed in crackpot conspiracy theories, but never In Real Life?
And don't tell me it was also the "evil" westen pharma corporations who were stopping the Soviets from using their own medicine. (I don't remember the West stoping the Soviets from building nukes or breeding hot strains of smallpox, for example.)
I'll tell you something funny: the whole Eastern European block had a very liberal policy when it came to antibiotics. And plenty of corruption. One way or the other, you could get pretty much any medicine you bloody pleased, whether you actually needed it or not. (Or whether it could even work at all for your disease or not.) Kids were routinely stuffed full of antibiotics and sulphamids at the slightest sign of a cold.
Yet noone ever got such a miracle cure. Even there, when you did get prescribed medicine, it was 3-4 times a day, for a week or more. Just like in the West. Go figure.
And if you needed an operation, they didn't just sprinkle some magic potion. They used sterilized equipment and aseptic rooms, just like in the West. Go figure.
So please spare me the bullshit conspiracy theories.
There is no magic wand that you can just wave and make the illness go away. There never was, never will be. Not on the Western side, not on the Soviet side, and not in China either.
And if there was one, those same pharma companies could patent it and have a monopoly on magic wands for 20 years straight. The one who had a magic wand that cures, say, diabetes, could sell it for a fortune per milligram, and make one helluva lot more profit from that than from being the 100'th guy selling cheap generic insulin.
Plus if there was one, what do you thing would happen the first time a pharma executive, or doctor or pharmacist got a fatal disease? Do you expect me to believe they'd just patiently await their own death, rather than threaten their profits? Better yet, that millions of doctors and pharmacists _all_ keep the secret rather than save their own lives or the lives of their children.
Dude, there is no amount of money in the world that could buy that.
20% performance is actually in the "too good to be true" range IMHO. I certainly wouldn't even begin to mind it.
I would be interested, though, if they implicitly meant on "nearly identical hardware". No, I don't just mean speed.
But for example the PC and the Mac are nearly identical architectures (if with different CPUs), and with identical graphics chips. The PC and the Playstation 2 are not. Even when emulating the old Playstation, you run into the problem that Sony's graphics chips aren't actually even vaguely similar to the direction that PC graphics chips took.
You can most certainly still emulate that on PC style hardware, but the work involved is non-trivial enough to cost more than 20% speed. It doesn't have to be something slow per se, just cost more than just piping the vertexes to the GPU via DMA. Even something as trivial as having to reverse the endianness of the vertex coordinates, can put a dent on emulation speed, and hardware can easily be even more different than that.
Basically, don't get me wrong, I still want a Mac which can play all PC games, so that would certainly be enough for me.
But I just doubt the claim that it can emulate _any_ hardware on _any_ other hardware at 80% CPU efficiency and nearly 100% graphics efficiency. On some hardware combinations that's just simply physically impossible.
Last time I posted something like "it was a scientist who made your CPU possible", I got replies along the lines of "no bloody way. It was an engineer". Hence including that disclaimer this time.
Guess what? Science is _based_ on not knowing everything.
Scientists not admitting they don't know everything? Well, gee, I thought they even told you exactly what they don't know yet and/or are trying to find out, each time a new experiment is performed. Whenever a new particle accelerator is built, whenever a new probe is sent into space, whenever someone builds a bigger telescope, whenever they bury some sophisticated particle detector deep, they'll conveniently tell you exactly which part of the unknown they're trying to probe.
If anyone believed we already have the absolute truth already, we wouldn't need those. In fact, we could just as well shut down the existing ones and send everyone home. Nothing left to discover, no?
But that's not the case.
The whole idea of science is that we don't know everything. If you want absolute truths, those are that-a-way, through the door marked "religion". Science is in the other direction.
In science at most we might have a good enough approximation for stuff we're able to measure already. And for a given class of problems.
E.g., Newton's mechanics are accurate enough for everyday stuff: things weighing between milligrams and thousands of tonnes, at relatively slow speeds. If you move away from that in any way, the approximation is no longer enough, and more detailed theories become necessary. That's why we have relativism, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and so on.
We do _not_ however have an explanation for stuff noone has measured before, or for problems which didn't even exist before.
E.g., for what happens at sub-atomic particles under a certain size. That's why we keep building bigger accelerators. 'Cause we have no clue what happens there, why or how. We're trying to find out, 'cause so far noone measured anything in that range.
E.g., for exactly the problem in this article. Noone before had measured what happens when you chuck a rock (or a spacecraft) far enough outside the solar system. It's a new problem, and, yes, the scientists are very open about it: noone has a clue what's happening there or why.
But that's ok. That's how science work.
What will happen is that we devise new experiments, measure some more, and then we'll have enough data to make a better theory. One which will allow us to chuck spacecrafts better.
See, for all its "absolute truths" and the knee-jerk jumping to point fingers at scientists, that's one thing that religion can't do: eventually tell you _how_ to do something right.
Everything you see about you, such as the electronics in the computer you typed that on, didn't happen because someone shrugged and said "uh... guess because God wanted it to be so". It came to be possible because some scientists openly admitted what they don't know yet, and proceeded to measure and devise theories.
(And someone will point out that engineers were also needed to make an actual device based on those theories. Indeed. Personally I just think of engineers as a branch of science. The applied kind of science, as opposed to the theoretical kind. Still science either way.)
Theories which don't just explain why something already happened, but how to make it happen again. And how to control it when you make it happen. How to make it happen slightly differently.
But again, it invariably started with someone saying "well, we have no bloody clue why _that_ happens. We'll need to measure some more and do some serious thinking."
So basically a snow storm _could_ _have_ frozen and broken the water pipes, but in practice it didn't. A fire could have reached the propane tanks, but it didn't. Etc.
So let's not just bury the propane tanks, let's turn the whole house into a bunker. In fact, to make it completely idiotic, they bury the house, but the propane tanks are _still_ outside.
Well, I don't know about you, but it seems to me like the whole damn life is essentially a series of almost-hits. E.g.:
- Cars pass by within 3 ft of me when I'm on the sidewalk. One _could_ hit me, but in practice none never did.
- The last round of flu at the office could have been some mutant alien genetically-engineered killer virus and killed us all, but in practice it wasn't.
- Scary terrorists could blow up the building I live in, or the one I work in, but in practice it beats me why would they bother. There are more visible targets out there, you know.
- The neighbour could turn out to secretly be a serial killer, but in practice they're all really old people. The mental image of one of them chasing me, hobbling on their frail legs and walking stick at maybe 1 MPH fails to be scary. Or realistic.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically that's life. It's scary, it's unpredictable, and shit _could_ happen. Deal with it. Take reasonable precautions, but not this.
You can't just bury yourself in a bunker and shut off the whole rest of the world. (Tempting as it might be at times for some of us introverts;) You can't just live the rest of your life in a bunker, on the off chance that some day disaster will strike without warning, and by Jove, you'll be underground when that happens.
It wouldn't work either.
If a virus epidemic broke out, how long could you live underground on four slabs of elk and 2000 gallons of propane. Then what? Then you go outside and catch the epidemic anyway. You're going to hunt what in that post-apocalypse world? Well, animals who probably carry the killer virus, if any survived it.
Ditto for a nuclear apocalypse. Ok, you're safe underground for a few months, then what? Then you go out and brave the radiation and nuclear waste, that's what.
As was pointed before, there's a difference between stress and pressure. And I really don't think _anyone_ thrives under a PHB which produces just stress.
E.g., the kind of example you give is the prime one. Keep telling someone that he's a no good loser and his job might as well be outsourced, and you'll only cause stress and a morale drop. Force someone to do long hours, and _then_ tell them they're still not good enough, you cause an even bigger morale drop.
I've worked with such people, and I have friends which worked with such people. I do remember one case when such a PHB caused a mass resignation of all programmers and designers at the same time. But I really don't remember anyone thriving on it.
Now there are people you can scare into working harder, by playing on their insecurities. People who are complexed and/or terminally scared of losing their job, for example. (I know someone, for example, who is wrongly convinced that he's too old to get hired in IT any more, so he lets the boss overwork him and verbally abuse him all day long.) But they won't thrive on it. They'll work harder all right, but then they'll just get stressed and sick like everyone else.
There are positive ways to _motivate_ someone into working harder. That's pressure. The key is to work on _raising_ morale, not on lowering it.
(And for the PHB's in the audience, that doesn't mean mandatory pointless meetings. Those never actually raise morale.)
E.g., among us nerds (and especially among young ones) some praise and recognition goes a _very_ long way. Lots of people overwork themselves every day just because they know someone will notice.
E.g., speaking of recognition, it always goes a long way to know that the rewards or praise are based on merit, not on nepotism or PC criteria. Seeing the most competent guy/girl be the first fired, and the biggest catastrophe _and_ slacker get promoted, is one way to drive morale down all the way.
E.g., if you give people the impression that the company cares about them, some of them will care for the company in return.
E.g., a sense of purpose also goes a long way. Working on some pointless collection of buzzwords that marketting thought up, and makes no sense, is not much fun. On the other hand, knowing that someone actually needs that program and for what, you'd be surprised what that can do.
E.g., honest feedback and bidirectional communication can do a whole lot. Again, I don't mean pointless ego-masturbation meetings, I mean actual communication. Even if someone has an unreasonable objection, do take the time to explain honestly why it can't be done. (Even if it's "we ran out of budget" or "I said the same thing, but the client really wants that feature anyway." It shows the boss is on your side, after all.)
Etc, etc, etc.
That theory is based on the false assumptions that deadlines will still be based on an average 40 hour week, and generally that your employer won't start taking that unpaid overtime for granted.
What happens in practice is that it starts being taken for granted. Even _if_ you don't work for a git who fancies himself a supreme ruler.
The fact remains that business plans and deadlines get set by extrapolating what worked so far. If project X1 was done in Y days and for Z dollars, then project X2 will be planned by extrapolating the data from X1.
It's not that they're evil, it's just proper management of resources. People are good at hiding behind such euphemisms.
Basically if you put in 12 hour shifts 7 days a week to finish project X1... you'll be expected to do the same in project X2 too. And then in project X3 too.
And then by X4, you'll be at the point where those 84 hour weeks aren't even seen as your undying loyalty to the company, but as the baseline. You're not the good guy if you stay 84 hours there, you're the lazy git to fire when you only stay 82 hours.
Been there before. After a couple of years of, well, not having a life and being cheerful to work 7 days a week, and sometimes up to 16-18 hours a day, it got predictably taken for granted.
I was also starting to get tired. And to get this nagging sensation that, far from being some exception to get one project finished, now projects were now planned to _require_ that kind of work. And any mis-planning will be extra.
Then I started having surrealistic discussions with the boss.
There was one project which was spectacularly mis-planned even for 84 hour weeks. Well, I was expected to do overtime to finish it. Overtime meaning: above the now "normal" 12-16 hours shifts!
The boss threatened with all sorts of crap, up to some surrealistic threat to sue me for 1 million dollars damages if the project isn't ready on time. Of course, I knew too that there's no way in heck that would get more than a laugh in any court. But it left me with a very bitter taste.
I ended up doing literally 24 hour shifts to finish that project. It was ready on time.
By the next project, I explicitly requested that it be planned for a normal 5 day work week. I told the boss that I wanted to have the weekend free at least now and then. Or at least the Sundays, ffs.
His answer? Quite literally: "Wth do you need free wekends for? You'd just sit at the computer anyway."
When I insisted, he threatened with a pay cut if I don't work at least 70 hours a week. Apparently the whole business plan and offer to the potential client were indeed already _based_ on at least that.
Needless to say, I don't work for that asshole any more, but it was an interesting lesson nevertheless: if you let people keep screwing you, expect them to take that for granted. Whole business plans will be made around you being the one screwed.
Except you seem to miss in which section of slashdot this is: games.slashdot.org
Those dual macs are nice, no doubt, but until their games library grows a little (as in, about 10 times), "gaming" is just about the last word I'd associate with them.
Well, first of all, I meant "efficient" actually as in "effective". That pulse of gamma radiation did a thorough job of causing the biggest mass extinction in history.
But even if we talk efficiency as in physics: compare it to rising the ocean level that much. Even completely melting the polar caps won't do. We're talking either:
A. bringing a helluva lot of water from somewhere else. Which ought to cost a helluva lot of energy. Or
B. just creating more water. Which means even more energy. Think: E=m*c^2.
By comparison, detonating a star could require little more than giving it a nudge. It already has the fuel right there.
And perhaps more importantly: the flood just begs a lot of uncomfortable questions. The supernova just looks like an accident. Nothing suspicious about it.
If only those numbers weren't just pulled out of some marketroid's arse just because they look good.
Remember that it's from the same guys who brought you the 14" display with only 10" visible. Or 16ms TFT panels which actually show about 120ms worth of ghosting.
Or 18 bit colour TFT panels + dithering being sold as 24 bit panels. On account that surely making the display shimmer and flicker as it approximates colours by switching between other colours, is exactly what you always wanted in a TFT.
(Someone remind me why a 20-30 Hz shimmer on TFT is better for my eyes than the 85 Hz flicker of a CRT? No really, I keep forgetting.)
The computer industry as a whole is a pretty sad display of lies, shameless lies and IT marketting. But the display part of the industry has got to take the cake.
At least half of the progress since the days of 120ms panels is just more creative ways to measure it, and/or to fudge the numbers.
So basically what I'm getting at is: when you'll see a 5ms display on sale, you can rest assured that it's really a 30-40ms real latency fudged down to 5ms by the marketting department. And after the dithering is applied too, you can probably count on 40-50ms or more.
I really wouldn't set my hopes too high about being able to display 100 fps without ghosting anywhere in the next 5 years.
An "up close and personal" supernova might have been responsible for the Cambrian-Ordovician mass extinctions and glacial age, some 0.5 billion of years ago. The massive pulse of gamma ray turned the ozone layer into a brown nitrous dioxide layer.
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In turn that (A) allowed UV radiation from the sun to cook a lot of organisms. Yes, including those under water. _And_ (B) affected the climate so massively, that the Earth was turned into a cosmic ball of ice for an awfully long time. _And_ (C) must have caused one hell of a nitrous acid rain.
So I'd say you _really_ don't want to see one up close and personal.
Some reading on this topic:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/headate
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/dispatch/story/0,1
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
(On the other hand, _if_ there's a God, you have to give the guy some credit. This is a much more clever way to devastate a planet than just a flood. Very efficient too.)
1. You actually did something, and actually the right thing. That's the only way: you either want to talk to people, or you don't. If you do, then fscking go talk to someone already. You did. Good.
The one category that's starting to get on my nerves though, is the kind that gives even the rest of us nerds a bad name. The kind which would like to be an extrovert, but won't actually go and talk to someone then. Just makes a whiny angsty self-pity soap opera out of it.
And I think these are the bulk of any such service selling a false illusion.
2. You also approached the problem from the sane end. You wanted to talk to women, you went to a dating agency. Seems like sound logic to me.
It's not even the only way to approach it in a manageable way. E.g., to someone who wants to talk about their interests, the local LUG/JUG/wargaming group/whatever is another way to meet someone with similar interests.
It's all stuff that's been around for quite a while before these "friends networks" too. Anyone who actually wanted to do something about making friends, could already do so. So again, since you did, I'd say you're the perfect example of someone who did _not_ need these "friend network" scams.
These aren't really for meeting people or making friends, they're for giving idiots an illusion. Letting people pretend that they have 200 friends via 6 degrees of association or via ZIP proximity or whatever other idiotic criterion. Except in practice it's just a group of perfect strangers, picked by irrelevant criteria.