"The deal is once you sell it, you can never get it back."
If the voting scenario in the article were written the same way, I doubt as many people would give up voting for a scholarship. One election for kids who have little to no income? Big deal. There will be another election in 2 years and another Presidential election in 4. Given how fast legislation is pushed through Congress (not fast at all), the odds of something legislatively catastrophic happening are small. I'd play the odds and take the scholarship.
Besides, in many areas the candidate list is already pretty well defined. Giving up your right to vote in such a scenario is a sort of meta-vote. If there were someone running you either strongly supported or strongly opposed, you would just opt to not cash in. Cashing in shows that you approve enough of any potential candidates to not care about which of the potential candidates actually gets the job.
"Is it worth it now to create a whole rendering path that is only usable to 9% of your users?"
Right. Vista users who don't have DirectX 10 preinstalled can no longer install it? Has anyone ever even installed a version DirectX by itself? Every time I've upgraded versions is because I'm installing a game and it tells me I need to (and then runs the DX installer for me). If Valve were actively developing for DX10, that 9% would shoot up to almost the entire Vista userbase.
Magazine publishers do want longer features as a counterpoint to... something. I didn't read that far but I see what you're saying and agree that the article is right.
"Yeah and like you said you aren't a professional. I am and I swear by them."
Professional what? A professional who uses power tools is about as ubiquitous as a professional in the IT field. I was a professional framer and a professional electrician (both residential) at times and I never cared for cordless drills. I always needed a saw so I had to run a power cord either way since cordless saws seem to hold their charge for about 10 seconds. Might as well use a corded drill in that case. I did have one of those Paslode Impulse orange guns for a while that I used on quick punch out work. Those run on both battery and a compressed air cartridge and are pretty nice if you'll be in and out before the battery pack craps out on you. And note that the reason the Impulse is nice isn't because it doesn't have a power cord but because it doesn't have an air hose to run (or compressor to hook up). If the Impulse had to be plugged in to a power outlet, I still would've used it just as often. But like I mentioned earlier, it all depends on what type of professional you are.
"but I know I get the same experience watching nfl on my 26" sd crt as i do watching it on my uncles 52" sony."
Interesting you should bring up that example. I bought a 32" HDTV as my most recent TV to replace my aging 27" standard def. The only reason I did so was because I had a PC hooked up to my old TV and wanted to be able to read the screen better with the new TV. I didn't really care about HD movies or TV or anything else. But when I saw the NFL in HD I was blown away. The quality of picture was awesome and the widescreen lets you see a lot more of the field. I still don't particularly care about HD television. When my HD signal is bad, I just switch to the NTSC broadcast. But I'll sit there for 20 minutes before an NFL game messing with the antennae so I get a stable HD feed for the game. Even the wife made comments about how much better HD broadcast football is. Arrested Development, House, Journeyman, Heroes, and the lot are just as good on my old TV which is now in the bedroom.
"While I can agree with you that the system is broken because there's no such thing at a "zero" rated game, but I do not see the difference between 100 points and 4 stars, besides it being simply "divided by 25"."
While there's no difference between 100 pts and 4 stars, there's a world of difference between a 75 and 3 stars. Generally speaking, video games don't score under 70 or so unless they're complete crap.
Then again, that doesn't really make the rating system broken since we can make sense of it. The only broken part of video game reviews is that the reviews happen in places almost completely dependent on revenue from the items being reviewed.
Not necessarily. You could have a very flexible schedule that requires 60-80 hours per week of work just as easily as you could have a nice work/life balance in a 9-5 job that only requires you to be there from 9 to 5. Besides, if the writer were trying to make any implication from A to B, the word "and" is hardly appropriate to make the connection.
The US military recently tried to shut down Project Gutenberg's hosting server. Project Gutenberg listened to the server's cries of "No disassemble!" and with the help of Project Sheedy, helped the server to safety.
It does annoy me greatly when these two are written interchangeably. My daughter is in the 2-6 age group and has a Leapster that is gathering dust. She plays plenty of games but not video games. She loves soccer, Candy Land, and Sorry. All kids play games of some sort. The kids in the survey are playing video games more. I'd be interested to see what they stopped doing to spend more time on the PC playing video games. I'd wager it most of them gave up time from some sort of non-video game.
"Swarms of South American Killer Bees have been spotted crossing the border into California. Sightings have mostly been confined to rural areas....Eyewitnesses say that the bees are yellow and black and dress much the way Eli Wallach did in the movie, The Magnificent Seven (1960). The bees are also overweight...(radio clicks off)."
Sounds about right. Mario certainly fits the Killer Bees profile. It was only a matter of time. Hide you pollen, folks. At least he hasn't found a Landshark suit.
So the leader of the retard squad from Smokin Aces is capt Kirk now? I generally dislike Matt Damon but even I have to admit that's a BIG step down. Next thing you know they'll be telling us that Matthew Watterhouse has agreed to take the role.
Don't at least ABC and Fox already do this? I distinctly remember watching Andy Barker this way and I'm pretty sure it's also how I watched the Lost finale. Frankly, both of those systems suck hard. Lost kept skipping and the quality of Andy Barker was dismal. And I thought that NBC offered online viewing of select shows anyways? Or was that just recaps?
"Until Halo, anyone who played games online or off was a computer/gamer dork."
How old are you, log0n? I see the incredibly low Slashdot ID. Surely you're old enough to remember back before arcades became dark rooms full of upright video cabinets. When I was very young, I remember the arcade being a sort of carnival without the rides that teenagers of all varieties would go to. And most of them would at least dabble in playing the video games present. It wasn't "online" play but it was certainly social interaction through gaming.
"Quake.. Doom.. Unreal.. HL1/CS.. even Goldeneye (going console).. only played by gamers and the rest of the world looked down upon us."
You should've been in college when Goldeneye came out. That was the first time I had EVER seen people sitting around playing video games during a kegger. Granted, it was still mostly guys actually playing but there was a crowd watching and nobody who was playing was ever looked down upon for it. And most of them didn't play many video games before or since. I was in grad school by the time Halo came out so I can't really compare atmosphere. Halo never came across to me as a mainstream thing.
"I would think that you if you lack sufficient skill to operate high-tech device [including understanding how to turn it off], you would restrict yourself to lower-tech devices."
And I think that if you lack sufficient skill to design the interface of a high-tech device [including being able to clearly indicate when the phone is off vs. when it is asleep], you should restrict yourself to designing lower-tech devices. An On/Off switch isn't exactly a high-tech concept. We have on/off switches on just about every piece of electronics made. If the designer can't make the on/off switch behave like every other such switch on the planet, I just can't feel blame the user for not wading through a technical document to figure that out.
I wasn't giving advice. I have no idea how to be a good writer but I imagine copying someone else's style isn't the best route. You put some things in quotation marks that I never said and never meant to imply. I just want producers of science fiction shows to hire good writers. I don't really care how they get them or what aspiring writers need to do to be good but I can tell you that a lot of later Trek and a lot of other sci-fi on TV today (looking at you, Flash) isn't written very well.
Have you read the original? It's not that far off. The important plot elements are mostly the same. Ellison wanted his name removed because he was to arrogant to make the changes that needed to be made for budget and time constraints so someone else did it for him and that made him mad.
"You'd think the perfect episode would be one with space battles, fighting, and space babes. Instead, "City on the Edge of Forever" is often lauded as the best episode ever. Why is this?"
For the same reason that the best Outer Limits episode is "Demon with the Glass Hand" and one of the best 80's Twilight Zone episodes is "Shatterday": because Harlan Ellison wrote it. Good sci-fi starts with good writers.
"Now, imagine if the JVM could detect a certain procedure is doing a LOT of user-kernel switches, and therefore can be moved to kernel space."
It doesn't take much to image it but it would take an awful lot to make that happen. Programming in kernel space is a whole other sport. The VM would have to be smart enough to translate what can be translated (ex. memory allocation) but some things just don't translate. Call one linked library and you're toast (or just delaying when you do your kernel to user space context switch). There's also the possibility of a payload hiding and waiting for kernel space access to run roughshod over the entire system. I realize that running through a VM gives you some guarantees that you don't have in compiled languages but I don't think that alone would be enough. Is there current research being done in this area? I'd be very interested in seeing what kinds of ideas are out there for tackling the more obvious (and even less obvious) challenges of running switch heavy user space code up in the kernel. I'm really not trying to rip your supposition. I just think the idea is so cool I'm not sure it can be done accurately. Lock coarsening is a parlor trick in comparison.
So Kaladis talked to Microsoft's best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend who heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who works somewhere in a Microsoft call center who saw Autopatcher in use at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty ironclad. It's my understanding that they can pursue legal action against Autopatcher at their leisure even if the Microsoft employee in question was accurately reflecting Microsoft-as-a-whole's knowledge of Autopatcher.
"Save the cheerleader, save the world!"
But Peter already saved the cheerleader so we could save the world in the stupidest and most anit-climactic fashion possible.
Slashdot Mirror
"The deal is once you sell it, you can never get it back."
If the voting scenario in the article were written the same way, I doubt as many people would give up voting for a scholarship. One election for kids who have little to no income? Big deal. There will be another election in 2 years and another Presidential election in 4. Given how fast legislation is pushed through Congress (not fast at all), the odds of something legislatively catastrophic happening are small. I'd play the odds and take the scholarship.
Besides, in many areas the candidate list is already pretty well defined. Giving up your right to vote in such a scenario is a sort of meta-vote. If there were someone running you either strongly supported or strongly opposed, you would just opt to not cash in. Cashing in shows that you approve enough of any potential candidates to not care about which of the potential candidates actually gets the job.
"Is it worth it now to create a whole rendering path that is only usable to 9% of your users?"
Right. Vista users who don't have DirectX 10 preinstalled can no longer install it? Has anyone ever even installed a version DirectX by itself? Every time I've upgraded versions is because I'm installing a game and it tells me I need to (and then runs the DX installer for me). If Valve were actively developing for DX10, that 9% would shoot up to almost the entire Vista userbase.
I don't know if Will Wheaton is the right baseline. I've never gone on a trip in the woods to see a dead body or had leeches stuck to my dugan.
Magazine publishers do want longer features as a counterpoint to... something. I didn't read that far but I see what you're saying and agree that the article is right.
"Yeah and like you said you aren't a professional. I am and I swear by them."
Professional what? A professional who uses power tools is about as ubiquitous as a professional in the IT field. I was a professional framer and a professional electrician (both residential) at times and I never cared for cordless drills. I always needed a saw so I had to run a power cord either way since cordless saws seem to hold their charge for about 10 seconds. Might as well use a corded drill in that case. I did have one of those Paslode Impulse orange guns for a while that I used on quick punch out work. Those run on both battery and a compressed air cartridge and are pretty nice if you'll be in and out before the battery pack craps out on you. And note that the reason the Impulse is nice isn't because it doesn't have a power cord but because it doesn't have an air hose to run (or compressor to hook up). If the Impulse had to be plugged in to a power outlet, I still would've used it just as often. But like I mentioned earlier, it all depends on what type of professional you are.
"but I know I get the same experience watching nfl on my 26" sd crt as i do watching it on my uncles 52" sony."
Interesting you should bring up that example. I bought a 32" HDTV as my most recent TV to replace my aging 27" standard def. The only reason I did so was because I had a PC hooked up to my old TV and wanted to be able to read the screen better with the new TV. I didn't really care about HD movies or TV or anything else. But when I saw the NFL in HD I was blown away. The quality of picture was awesome and the widescreen lets you see a lot more of the field. I still don't particularly care about HD television. When my HD signal is bad, I just switch to the NTSC broadcast. But I'll sit there for 20 minutes before an NFL game messing with the antennae so I get a stable HD feed for the game. Even the wife made comments about how much better HD broadcast football is. Arrested Development, House, Journeyman, Heroes, and the lot are just as good on my old TV which is now in the bedroom.
"While I can agree with you that the system is broken because there's no such thing at a "zero" rated game, but I do not see the difference between 100 points and 4 stars, besides it being simply "divided by 25"."
While there's no difference between 100 pts and 4 stars, there's a world of difference between a 75 and 3 stars. Generally speaking, video games don't score under 70 or so unless they're complete crap.
Then again, that doesn't really make the rating system broken since we can make sense of it. The only broken part of video game reviews is that the reviews happen in places almost completely dependent on revenue from the items being reviewed.
Not necessarily. You could have a very flexible schedule that requires 60-80 hours per week of work just as easily as you could have a nice work/life balance in a 9-5 job that only requires you to be there from 9 to 5. Besides, if the writer were trying to make any implication from A to B, the word "and" is hardly appropriate to make the connection.
"One of their primary concerns is a flexible schedule and healthy work/life balance."
Apparently Generation Taco lacks basic counting skills.
The US military recently tried to shut down Project Gutenberg's hosting server. Project Gutenberg listened to the server's cries of "No disassemble!" and with the help of Project Sheedy, helped the server to safety.
"they recently sent us a flier telling us about channel changes and that we would be not receiving a couple of channels that we currently get"
"Then next year the bill only goes up $1 over our current plan."
Wow. Less channels for only $1 more per year. Where do I sign up?
It does annoy me greatly when these two are written interchangeably. My daughter is in the 2-6 age group and has a Leapster that is gathering dust. She plays plenty of games but not video games. She loves soccer, Candy Land, and Sorry. All kids play games of some sort. The kids in the survey are playing video games more. I'd be interested to see what they stopped doing to spend more time on the PC playing video games. I'd wager it most of them gave up time from some sort of non-video game.
Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things Downtown.
"Swarms of South American Killer Bees have been spotted crossing the border into California. Sightings have mostly been confined to rural areas....Eyewitnesses say that the bees are yellow and black and dress much the way Eli Wallach did in the movie, The Magnificent Seven (1960). The bees are also overweight...(radio clicks off)."
Sounds about right. Mario certainly fits the Killer Bees profile. It was only a matter of time. Hide you pollen, folks. At least he hasn't found a Landshark suit.
So the leader of the retard squad from Smokin Aces is capt Kirk now? I generally dislike Matt Damon but even I have to admit that's a BIG step down. Next thing you know they'll be telling us that Matthew Watterhouse has agreed to take the role.
Don't at least ABC and Fox already do this? I distinctly remember watching Andy Barker this way and I'm pretty sure it's also how I watched the Lost finale. Frankly, both of those systems suck hard. Lost kept skipping and the quality of Andy Barker was dismal. And I thought that NBC offered online viewing of select shows anyways? Or was that just recaps?
"Until Halo, anyone who played games online or off was a computer/gamer dork."
How old are you, log0n? I see the incredibly low Slashdot ID. Surely you're old enough to remember back before arcades became dark rooms full of upright video cabinets. When I was very young, I remember the arcade being a sort of carnival without the rides that teenagers of all varieties would go to. And most of them would at least dabble in playing the video games present. It wasn't "online" play but it was certainly social interaction through gaming.
"Quake.. Doom.. Unreal.. HL1/CS.. even Goldeneye (going console).. only played by gamers and the rest of the world looked down upon us."
You should've been in college when Goldeneye came out. That was the first time I had EVER seen people sitting around playing video games during a kegger. Granted, it was still mostly guys actually playing but there was a crowd watching and nobody who was playing was ever looked down upon for it. And most of them didn't play many video games before or since. I was in grad school by the time Halo came out so I can't really compare atmosphere. Halo never came across to me as a mainstream thing.
"I would think that you if you lack sufficient skill to operate high-tech device [including understanding how to turn it off], you would restrict yourself to lower-tech devices."
And I think that if you lack sufficient skill to design the interface of a high-tech device [including being able to clearly indicate when the phone is off vs. when it is asleep], you should restrict yourself to designing lower-tech devices. An On/Off switch isn't exactly a high-tech concept. We have on/off switches on just about every piece of electronics made. If the designer can't make the on/off switch behave like every other such switch on the planet, I just can't feel blame the user for not wading through a technical document to figure that out.
I wasn't giving advice. I have no idea how to be a good writer but I imagine copying someone else's style isn't the best route. You put some things in quotation marks that I never said and never meant to imply. I just want producers of science fiction shows to hire good writers. I don't really care how they get them or what aspiring writers need to do to be good but I can tell you that a lot of later Trek and a lot of other sci-fi on TV today (looking at you, Flash) isn't written very well.
Have you read the original? It's not that far off. The important plot elements are mostly the same. Ellison wanted his name removed because he was to arrogant to make the changes that needed to be made for budget and time constraints so someone else did it for him and that made him mad.
"You'd think the perfect episode would be one with space battles, fighting, and space babes. Instead, "City on the Edge of Forever" is often lauded as the best episode ever. Why is this?"
For the same reason that the best Outer Limits episode is "Demon with the Glass Hand" and one of the best 80's Twilight Zone episodes is "Shatterday": because Harlan Ellison wrote it. Good sci-fi starts with good writers.
"Now, imagine if the JVM could detect a certain procedure is doing a LOT of user-kernel switches, and therefore can be moved to kernel space."
It doesn't take much to image it but it would take an awful lot to make that happen. Programming in kernel space is a whole other sport. The VM would have to be smart enough to translate what can be translated (ex. memory allocation) but some things just don't translate. Call one linked library and you're toast (or just delaying when you do your kernel to user space context switch). There's also the possibility of a payload hiding and waiting for kernel space access to run roughshod over the entire system. I realize that running through a VM gives you some guarantees that you don't have in compiled languages but I don't think that alone would be enough. Is there current research being done in this area? I'd be very interested in seeing what kinds of ideas are out there for tackling the more obvious (and even less obvious) challenges of running switch heavy user space code up in the kernel. I'm really not trying to rip your supposition. I just think the idea is so cool I'm not sure it can be done accurately. Lock coarsening is a parlor trick in comparison.
So Kaladis talked to Microsoft's best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend who heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who works somewhere in a Microsoft call center who saw Autopatcher in use at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty ironclad. It's my understanding that they can pursue legal action against Autopatcher at their leisure even if the Microsoft employee in question was accurately reflecting Microsoft-as-a-whole's knowledge of Autopatcher.
"Save the cheerleader, save the world!" But Peter already saved the cheerleader so we could save the world in the stupidest and most anit-climactic fashion possible.
MythSwiper, no MythSwiping!
Oh man...