Yeah - being able to buy an equivalently or better specced machine then a MacBook Prop for less money has always been an option - that has not stopped people from buying MacBooks in the past, so I fail to see the news here. Now, I agree that the new MacBook Pros are a bit disappointing, and that there might be other laptops which compete very well. But the laptop mentioned in this slashvertisement fails to impress.
Yes, this is mostly memory related. Browsers have a tendency to either crash when parsing all the code, or to run out of memory when trying to allocate the memory for the game itself (which emscripten implements using a single big array of bytes in JavaScript). See http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual...
Well, the benchmarks speak a very different story. While IE is slow beyond use, Edge with asm.js actual performs pretty well, much better then Chrome.
In general, I am very happy with the direction MS is taking with Edge, and have so far found it not to be "the new IE" at all, quite to the contrary. Following open web standards, maintaining public page to track new developments (https://status.modern.ie), great performance - all of this sounds very promising to me.
A very similar question was in an XKCD "What If?", but only in the printed book version (which has a bunch of extra chapters compared to the blog): "What would be the last artificial light source to glow when all humans were gone".
IIRC, the conclusion was that it would be status LEDs on space probes or radiation glow from buried nuclear waste.
I was there in 2011, and similarly, I found most larger towns to have an "internet cafe" in the offices of the government operated phone agency. Access was not obviously restricted, but indeed very slow - and expensive at around 8 CUC (=8 USD)/h. If cubans were to pay the same rates, it would be well out of their reach (but I don't know if that's the case, a lot of services in Cuba charge exchangeable CUC to foreigners, but local CUP to Cubans (25 CUP = 1 CUC)).
A lot of people working in any kind of government agencies (universities, etc) would have internet access as work, though.
I think internet access at home is rare (and possibly illegal), and usually only if someone secretly sets up a modem at their work place to dial in from home (they have an extensive wire telephone systems, which is state run, and free to use).
Sorry, wasn't clear enough. "Bikes" as in "Motorbikes".
Police may stop and fine you if your bicycle is not in order, especially if your lights don't work. Whether they actually do that varies a lot between cities.
I currently live in Germany and the technical inspections are all safety related, not cosmetic issues like rust.
Well, they can make a good case for issues to be "safety related". For any older car, rust *is* usually the deal breaker (as it reduces the integrity of the chassis - which is true, but I don't believe that it is indeed a cause for many traffic related injuries which would not happen otherwise). In fact, if your car is old enough to have historic plates, they are actually entitled to complain about cosmetic issues, as the historic plate mandates the car to be kept in a state "worth preserving". Ie, stuff like ("You need to repaint the valve cover in your engine bay as the paint on it became dated").
Regardless of that, I've had inspectors complain about tons of "safety" issues in my car or bikes over the years, including:
-Ripped seat cover ("passenger might be injured if a spring pokes out") -Missing isolation cap on battery pole ("electical fire hazard") -little skull shaped caps on tire valves ("not allowed") -fan would not work on highest setting ("no guarantee of adequate cooling of passengers if going at high temperatures") -Worn out seat -Motorcycle not equipped with a steering column lock -Motorcycle would engine would not auto-shut off when extending footstand (bike was made before these became standard, but that did not matter, had to retrofit)
(These are some examples - I've also met many inspectors much more reasonable then that, but still, I am convinced that the car industry is actually pushing for tighter inspections, as it will mean more new car sells. The car industry is the biggest arm of the german economy, and they do have a lot of power.)
Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections.
This is true. But I doubt that the US has a high rate of dangerous traffic accidents caused by failing cars. I have always felt that the technical inspections we have serve more to subsidize the car industry (by making sure old cars are taken off the road due to some rust or whatever they will come up with), and as a self-service to the inspection agencies to keep them in business. I guess regular brake & light checkups would make sense, but beyond that, I really doubt that there is much actual improvements in safety to be gained.
Replying to myself: My Google skills mislead me, that wikipedia link referred to the Republic of China (Taiwan), not mainland China (which does seem to have capital punishment on drug trafficking, no idea how commonly it is applied).
In all seriousness, is this what happens when you make drugs punishable by the death penalty?
I don't think so. Actually, drugs seem to be very easy to come by in China (At least that was my impression in Beijing earlier this year).
While the death penalty for drug trade exists on paper, according to wikipedia, it has not been applied in over a decade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Tell me, if the exact same thing is true of capitalism, then why is it that all of the self identified capitalist societies have the highest education rates, highest literacy rates, and highest standards of living for everybody overall?
"Education rates" and "Standards of living" or somewhat subjective and thus hard to compare (though I guess what you say is true for many countries, with notable exceptions). "Literacy rates" are hard comparable numbers, and looking at that Cuba is not doing bad:
While it is very true that horn usage has very different cultural implications around the world, characterizing every country outside of the US as "overseas" is a wrong over-generalisation. Most northern-european countries have a very similar interpretation of the horn as you described in the US (minus the part why people get out to kick your ass, usually).
You could by them in the real world (and they did fit the socket) - and they were of course nothing else then relabeled ordinary light bulbs. It was an attempt to both challenge and ridicule the law banning light bulbs in the EU. Well, it did not hold up in court, so you can no longer buy them in the real world, but they actually used to sell them on that site.
Ha, You could buy heatballs instead - They are little radiators which conveniently fit into your lightbulb sockets, and are 90% energy efficient (the remaining 10% of the energy is wasted as light) : http://heatball.de/en/
At the other comment points out, this is for the 0.001%.
But, generally you advertise such products to a wider audience, because why would the 1% (or 0.001%) buy stuff like this if the rest of the world couldn't tell how expensive it is? How big would the appeal of a Rolex watch be, if nobody else could tell that it's not some random no-name watch bough from a market selling chinese junk products (which, ironically, most "Rolexes" are).
After reading several comments that game industry jobs are all sweatshop work, I thought I might share my (different) experience. I work at Unity, so not exactly a games company, but game industry anyways. I've been here for quite a few years no and have always been (and I still am) very happy about my work. While everybody has done overtime work to get urgent fixes done at some time or other, this is not the rule, and we are far from the working conditions in many places described here. The development team has a great culture, we get to work on exciting stuff, and we get plenty of opportunities to try out things which interest us -- as a rule, similar to Google's "20% time", we have FAFF (fridays are for fun) to work on pet projects, as well as regular Hack Weeks, were the whole dev team is brought in to one location to form teams to try new ideas. It's fun.
If you're interested, check out http://unity3d.com/jobs/ - but then, I guess your chances of being hired for an engineering position when fresh out of colleges are somewhat slim, unless you have done some really awesome stuff besides your education. But that will not be any different in any of the other larger companies in the industry.
Germany as well here -- I don't think this "global" release was actually global. Somebody proof me wrong, but I could not find a legal way to watch or download the new episode in my country yet (while watching it illegally is, as always, trivial and free). Maybe "global" as in "all major markets in which where TV shows are by default watched in english" (instead of those countries where you have to wait a year for them to release a badly synchronized version to be able to legally get an original language version).
In my school the principal had all 1500 students gathered in the gym to give some sort of boring speech. In between the students would clap, which I found stupid, because I thought he was talking bullshit. So me and two friends decided to make fun of it, and started clapping in odd places. To our surprise it caught on really well, and quickly everyone joined in - probably some because they got the prank, and others out of reflex. In any case, the situation quickly became hilarious with everyone in the audience clapping as soon as the principal would open his mouth to speak - at some point he started screaming "Stop clapping" - which was of course replied to with a big applause.
I agree. It's been over a decade and it's still in a shitty state. The only reason to use it is (was) reach. It seems that Unreal, which performs better and is tooled better, has the same reach. If you make one of the thousands of shitty games that this "article" refers to, then you'd even make less than the $50k/yr limit, making unreal's UDK free.
But then, if you make shitty games making less then UDKs $50k/yr limit, you likely wouldn't succeed in shipping your game at all without Unity. Unity does make game development very accessible and allows many people to make games (some of them shitty, but also many great ones), without needing to understand all the details of the tech. That won't stop you from using that understanding to make much more pushing games if you can.
Google for places that accept bitcoins. The trade is simply non-existent. Places that reached the news have stopped accepting them and the remaining online shops are the ones you would normally stay a million miles away from. Shady doesn't even begin to describe them.
The argument of bitcoins not having any value because they are not being used for anything but speculation comes up every time bitcoins are discussed. I don't think it's true any more. Underground market places for drugs and other goods which require untraceable money transactions are thriving, and driving a lot of people into buying bitcoins to actually use them for trading, who don't care about speculation or anything. Are those sites shady? Yes. That does not make them any less real. If a large part of the worlds drug trade will use bitcoins for their transactions in the future, that would be a much more stable economy backing this currency than many goverment-backed currencies can claim.
I remember this being discussed on the FF bugzilla years ago. It was seen as a very good idea, but the issue was (at least then) that most audio is played by Flash applets which the browser can't control, thus making it useless in most scenarios. I wonder how Chrome tackles the issue of plugin content playing audio.
Chrome uses it's own build of the flash plugin, which is not using the NPAPI plugin API, but Google's own Pepper API, which has support for Audio built into the API - and thus will handle playback of the audio through the browser, so the browser has full knowlegde and control of the audio.
So long as potential employers are judging you, you would do well to play the game and act like the most professional and dull person in the world. Unless you enjoy going back to your parents and begging to be allowed to live in the basement again.
While this is sadly true for many people, it really depends on your bargaining position. If you are good at what you do and do something which is in good demand -- meaning that you are in a position where you can be somewhat picky about which jobs you take, then this may not matter at all. If I was to be dismissed for a job I applied for on the base of some online pictures of me drinking, then that picture would have likely served a good purpose, as I probably wouldn't have liked working at that place anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah - being able to buy an equivalently or better specced machine then a MacBook Prop for less money has always been an option - that has not stopped people from buying MacBooks in the past, so I fail to see the news here. Now, I agree that the new MacBook Pros are a bit disappointing, and that there might be other laptops which compete very well. But the laptop mentioned in this slashvertisement fails to impress.
Yes, this is mostly memory related. Browsers have a tendency to either crash when parsing all the code, or to run out of memory when trying to allocate the memory for the game itself (which emscripten implements using a single big array of bytes in JavaScript). See http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual...
Well, benchmark results don't really have any units but are arbitrary numbers.
Though, yes, it would have been better to label it with something like "results, higher is better", as that is not clear from the graphs.
Well, the benchmarks speak a very different story. While IE is slow beyond use, Edge with asm.js actual performs pretty well, much better then Chrome.
In general, I am very happy with the direction MS is taking with Edge, and have so far found it not to be "the new IE" at all, quite to the contrary. Following open web standards, maintaining public page to track new developments (https://status.modern.ie), great performance - all of this sounds very promising to me.
Now, if there is any good chance to smuggle a bomb into the white house, this is it.
A very similar question was in an XKCD "What If?", but only in the printed book version (which has a bunch of extra chapters compared to the blog): "What would be the last artificial light source to glow when all humans were gone".
IIRC, the conclusion was that it would be status LEDs on space probes or radiation glow from buried nuclear waste.
I was there in 2011, and similarly, I found most larger towns to have an "internet cafe" in the offices of the government operated phone agency. Access was not obviously restricted, but indeed very slow - and expensive at around 8 CUC (=8 USD)/h. If cubans were to pay the same rates, it would be well out of their reach (but I don't know if that's the case, a lot of services in Cuba charge exchangeable CUC to foreigners, but local CUP to Cubans (25 CUP = 1 CUC)).
A lot of people working in any kind of government agencies (universities, etc) would have internet access as work, though.
I think internet access at home is rare (and possibly illegal), and usually only if someone secretly sets up a modem at their work place to dial in from home (they have an extensive wire telephone systems, which is state run, and free to use).
Sorry, wasn't clear enough. "Bikes" as in "Motorbikes".
Police may stop and fine you if your bicycle is not in order, especially if your lights don't work. Whether they actually do that varies a lot between cities.
I currently live in Germany and the technical inspections are all safety related, not cosmetic issues like rust.
Well, they can make a good case for issues to be "safety related". For any older car, rust *is* usually the deal breaker (as it reduces the integrity of the chassis - which is true, but I don't believe that it is indeed a cause for many traffic related injuries which would not happen otherwise). In fact, if your car is old enough to have historic plates, they are actually entitled to complain about cosmetic issues, as the historic plate mandates the car to be kept in a state "worth preserving". Ie, stuff like ("You need to repaint the valve cover in your engine bay as the paint on it became dated").
Regardless of that, I've had inspectors complain about tons of "safety" issues in my car or bikes over the years, including:
-Ripped seat cover ("passenger might be injured if a spring pokes out")
-Missing isolation cap on battery pole ("electical fire hazard")
-little skull shaped caps on tire valves ("not allowed")
-fan would not work on highest setting ("no guarantee of adequate cooling of passengers if going at high temperatures")
-Worn out seat
-Motorcycle not equipped with a steering column lock
-Motorcycle would engine would not auto-shut off when extending footstand (bike was made before these became standard, but that did not matter, had to retrofit)
(These are some examples - I've also met many inspectors much more reasonable then that, but still, I am convinced that the car industry is actually pushing for tighter inspections, as it will mean more new car sells. The car industry is the biggest arm of the german economy, and they do have a lot of power.)
Those germans are such great drivers.
Except for the fact that that video is taken in Belgium.
Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections.
This is true. But I doubt that the US has a high rate of dangerous traffic accidents caused by failing cars. I have always felt that the technical inspections we have serve more to subsidize the car industry (by making sure old cars are taken off the road due to some rust or whatever they will come up with), and as a self-service to the inspection agencies to keep them in business. I guess regular brake & light checkups would make sense, but beyond that, I really doubt that there is much actual improvements in safety to be gained.
Replying to myself: My Google skills mislead me, that wikipedia link referred to the Republic of China (Taiwan), not mainland China (which does seem to have capital punishment on drug trafficking, no idea how commonly it is applied).
In all seriousness, is this what happens when you make drugs punishable by the death penalty?
I don't think so. Actually, drugs seem to be very easy to come by in China (At least that was my impression in Beijing earlier this year).
While the death penalty for drug trade exists on paper, according to wikipedia, it has not been applied in over a decade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Tell me, if the exact same thing is true of capitalism, then why is it that all of the self identified capitalist societies have the highest education rates, highest literacy rates, and highest standards of living for everybody overall?
"Education rates" and "Standards of living" or somewhat subjective and thus hard to compare (though I guess what you say is true for many countries, with notable exceptions). "Literacy rates" are hard comparable numbers, and looking at that Cuba is not doing bad:
Literacy in Cuba 99.8%
Literacy in US 99%
Source: CIA World fact book: https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...
While it is very true that horn usage has very different cultural implications around the world, characterizing every country outside of the US as "overseas" is a wrong over-generalisation. Most northern-european countries have a very similar interpretation of the horn as you described in the US (minus the part why people get out to kick your ass, usually).
You could by them in the real world (and they did fit the socket) - and they were of course nothing else then relabeled ordinary light bulbs. It was an attempt to both challenge and ridicule the law banning light bulbs in the EU. Well, it did not hold up in court, so you can no longer buy them in the real world, but they actually used to sell them on that site.
Ha, You could buy heatballs instead - They are little radiators which conveniently fit into your lightbulb sockets, and are 90% energy efficient (the remaining 10% of the energy is wasted as light) : http://heatball.de/en/
If it's for the 1%, why advertise it?
At the other comment points out, this is for the 0.001%.
But, generally you advertise such products to a wider audience, because why would the 1% (or 0.001%) buy stuff like this if the rest of the world couldn't tell how expensive it is? How big would the appeal of a Rolex watch be, if nobody else could tell that it's not some random no-name watch bough from a market selling chinese junk products (which, ironically, most "Rolexes" are).
After reading several comments that game industry jobs are all sweatshop work, I thought I might share my (different) experience. I work at Unity, so not exactly a games company, but game industry anyways. I've been here for quite a few years no and have always been (and I still am) very happy about my work. While everybody has done overtime work to get urgent fixes done at some time or other, this is not the rule, and we are far from the working conditions in many places described here. The development team has a great culture, we get to work on exciting stuff, and we get plenty of opportunities to try out things which interest us -- as a rule, similar to Google's "20% time", we have FAFF (fridays are for fun) to work on pet projects, as well as regular Hack Weeks, were the whole dev team is brought in to one location to form teams to try new ideas. It's fun.
If you're interested, check out http://unity3d.com/jobs/ - but then, I guess your chances of being hired for an engineering position when fresh out of colleges are somewhat slim, unless you have done some really awesome stuff besides your education. But that will not be any different in any of the other larger companies in the industry.
Germany as well here -- I don't think this "global" release was actually global. Somebody proof me wrong, but I could not find a legal way to watch or download the new episode in my country yet (while watching it illegally is, as always, trivial and free). Maybe "global" as in "all major markets in which where TV shows are by default watched in english" (instead of those countries where you have to wait a year for them to release a badly synchronized version to be able to legally get an original language version).
Similar experience from my teens:
In my school the principal had all 1500 students gathered in the gym to give some sort of boring speech. In between the students would clap, which I found stupid, because I thought he was talking bullshit. So me and two friends decided to make fun of it, and started clapping in odd places. To our surprise it caught on really well, and quickly everyone joined in - probably some because they got the prank, and others out of reflex. In any case, the situation quickly became hilarious with everyone in the audience clapping as soon as the principal would open his mouth to speak - at some point he started screaming "Stop clapping" - which was of course replied to with a big applause.
I agree. It's been over a decade and it's still in a shitty state. The only reason to use it is (was) reach. It seems that Unreal, which performs better and is tooled better, has the same reach. If you make one of the thousands of shitty games that this "article" refers to, then you'd even make less than the $50k/yr limit, making unreal's UDK free.
But then, if you make shitty games making less then UDKs $50k/yr limit, you likely wouldn't succeed in shipping your game at all without Unity. Unity does make game development very accessible and allows many people to make games (some of them shitty, but also many great ones), without needing to understand all the details of the tech. That won't stop you from using that understanding to make much more pushing games if you can.
Google for places that accept bitcoins. The trade is simply non-existent. Places that reached the news have stopped accepting them and the remaining online shops are the ones you would normally stay a million miles away from. Shady doesn't even begin to describe them.
The argument of bitcoins not having any value because they are not being used for anything but speculation comes up every time bitcoins are discussed. I don't think it's true any more. Underground market places for drugs and other goods which require untraceable money transactions are thriving, and driving a lot of people into buying bitcoins to actually use them for trading, who don't care about speculation or anything. Are those sites shady? Yes. That does not make them any less real. If a large part of the worlds drug trade will use bitcoins for their transactions in the future, that would be a much more stable economy backing this currency than many goverment-backed currencies can claim.
I remember this being discussed on the FF bugzilla years ago. It was seen as a very good idea, but the issue was (at least then) that most audio is played by Flash applets which the browser can't control, thus making it useless in most scenarios. I wonder how Chrome tackles the issue of plugin content playing audio.
Chrome uses it's own build of the flash plugin, which is not using the NPAPI plugin API, but Google's own Pepper API, which has support for Audio built into the API - and thus will handle playback of the audio through the browser, so the browser has full knowlegde and control of the audio.
So long as potential employers are judging you, you would do well to play the game and act like the most professional and dull person in the world. Unless you enjoy going back to your parents and begging to be allowed to live in the basement again.
While this is sadly true for many people, it really depends on your bargaining position. If you are good at what you do and do something which is in good demand -- meaning that you are in a position where you can be somewhat picky about which jobs you take, then this may not matter at all. If I was to be dismissed for a job I applied for on the base of some online pictures of me drinking, then that picture would have likely served a good purpose, as I probably wouldn't have liked working at that place anyways.