That's an effective reiteration of my 2nd paragraph, yes. My point about the humor, again, is that it's not reduced enough to matter for health concerns. For example, you'll hear things like "my doctor told me to cut down on sodium so I switched to sea salt" (and kept using the same amount) or "gee whiz sodium is the devil according to the Internet". It's got to be on the order of a few individual grains of table salt, if that, per meal - although I have not personally measured that assumption to see how accurate it is. So it's a delusion more than anything that using sea salt offers enough of a reduction to matter over the course of your lifetime - people want to rationalize away the doctor's advice so they can enjoy more of a flavor.
"I can have more of it because it has less of a bad ingredient" is the primary fallacy at work here. Kind of like getting diet soda so you can super-size it because it has fewer grams of sugar, or skipping the soda and getting an extra tall caramel frappucino instead, right? Surely these ideas will offer no detriment to your health!
Meanwhile, look up detritus, which is what gives sea salt its color and flavor. It's fascinating to see what different things imbue colors and flavors. Science!
You know what's really funny, is that some people use sea salt because they think it contains less sodium. I'm not even kidding.
Of course since this is Slashdot, I have to say that technically, due to the detritus in the sea salt, they may be correct on such a microscopic level that it doesn't matter unless you consume tons and tons of the stuff.
You're dead accurate with the stability sermon there. Let me tack onto it.
Factor in all of the components that cause instability. Cheap RAM (fewer layers on the PCBs than the good stuff) and power supplies (meaningless 80+ labels and poor performance under spiky loads/bad power) and rebranded video cards (same PCB issue) are huge culprits for system instability, and they do in fact market these cheap parts in the gamer segment with fancy packaging and promotional deals like free games.
I have a tip for the DIY crowd. You probably would agree, having been there too. When you sort by price and pick the lowest cost parts, you're buying instability. A lot of the cool yo yo extreme 8ghz overclock gg noob pro tuner kids do this so they can blow a larger slice of the project budget on fancy UV water cooling and lights. These are the same people who drop big money on a new system every year, to try and stay that much further ahead of the other cool tuner kids' FPS in Age of Dutycraft 3 or whatever else $fadgame is at the moment. Well, here's the thing. Chintzy components that don't reject as much interference are going to pick up the increase when you really start slamming the system. Then it'll get unpredictably (or perhaps predictably, if I can guarantee it will happen?) crashy under load. Cheap is cheap, there's no way around it, and masking it with expensive cooling systems will not make cheap parts less cheap.
I have a feeling a lot of the "drivers suck!" crowd is still going off their experience seven years ago, when that was the unquestionable truth of the matter. Yes, they sucked. Past tense, sucked. Right now? Works just fine for me and the local gamer cafes, thank you. I crank up my settings as well with an AMD card. I could crank them up just as high with an nVidia card. It really makes no difference, they both work very well.
I suspect it's largely automated. It could easily be generic stubs generated by automatic code parsers, with a few comments written by the one severely overworked employee/volunteer (depending on the language) who's been tasked with documenting these things. That would really explain a lot.
See also: * Javadoc * POD * pydoc * phpDocumentor * Doxygen * XML comments in C#/VB
It's easy to use these tools, and difficult to produce quality output.
where WGLTHREF is a struct with its own equally dense description full of UINT8s and ENUMs etc on another page, and there's no specification in sight to the Wangle packing specification, just a note that it's packed according to the Wangle packing specification. This happens whenever I want to call a Microsoft API, and then I have to figure out for myself how to translate that to C#. That's when I wind up on a site like StackOverflow (where people get it "figured out" with some obscure bug that surfaces later) or pinvoke.net (where the docs are usually too incomplete to be useful).
This is the problem with MSDN documentation. But we've got it good compared to other language developers, I guess...
Don't forget Cyrix, which used to be everywhere in the '90s, and lives on in the form of VIA C7 / Nano today. It's mostly in netbooks now, but there is competition and they know it.
I like my Intel chips, but I also remember them getting busted for something akin to collusion in a lot of markets. If they had played by the rules, we probably would see a lot of alternatives.
I get what you're saying, but Vista needed enthusiast-level graphics hardware or it lagged and stuttered constantly. I beta-tested it and used the RTM version (and following that, the service packs) on several machines and the only ones that felt like it could keep up with the base operating system were the ones with good graphics hardware. In my opinion, the base OS should feel a lot smoother than Vista did on a middle-of-the-line enterprise workstation.
Then there were all the missing and buggy drivers, because of a new architecture that the vendors had to code for. That was a total unmitigated disaster.
The next Zelda title is coming out in December and it's a re-release of Wind Waker, a *Gamecube* game. They really dropped the ball on getting 1st party titles out there.
I have a few ideas, but my favorite one is: Put a Tetris game on there that I can play from another room on the controller. I'd buy that. That's what sold a lot of Game Boys, remember?
Section 4 of the Google Play Legal Information says the following, which means you're buying the app from the provider of the app (the developer) and not Google, which seems to mean that the developer is in fact the merchant whether he realizes it or not. It doesn't really surprise me that the merchant gets this information but it does surprise me that the developer doesn't realize they are the merchant! Maybe it needs to be spelled out more clearly to all parties.
Which ad analytics companies are using this? I read all the linked material and all I see is some lofty assertion that two companies are already using it. Name and shame them, would you please?
Description: Gasoline is spilled on the ground and lit with a match. Then diesel is spilled on the ground and numerous attempts are made to light it with one then several matches.
Yep. You're correct that someone will always crack the DRM. Restrictions like these mar the beauty of digital information though. Just because someone makes a way to break DRM, doesn't make DRM less evil. A lot of people use that to justify not caring about it - since it won't affect them. You shouldn't have to de-DRM things you buy. Not having DRM would count as beautiful.
I have the Playstation re-releases of the SNES Final Fantasy series and Chrono Trigger. You're right, that delay is horrible. It also happens when you pull up the menu! Who thought that would be okay??
I would. Those are at least readable and pronounceable. Simple names stick in the average consumer's memory and win extra brain share. I don't speak faceroll. I can read and write it, but I can't speak it. If it's hard to speak or you have to really focus on how to pronounce it, it will get passed over for an inferior program with a simpler name.
Edlin is a holdover from early DOS days where the 8 character limit was still in place, and is based on an old CP/M tool from the days when full-screen text editing was too performance-intensive to be feasible. It's not used a whole lot. So it's weird that you'd pick that one out of a hat.
Outlook is a useful planning tool, giving you an outlook on your week. (When it functions correctly, which is asking a lot.)
Excel sounds like something you'd want to do, and being a spreadsheet tool, it's a killer combination for business execs. Believe me, things that sound like success keywords go a long way with those guys. Call a web portal "ValuWeb Cloud Portal 2.0 Enterprise" or something like that and it'll be mandatory-use next week.
You're right, and you probably could have posted it as yourself to get the credit for it.
I think it's entirely related to social skills, not knowledge or capability. It's not limited to intelligent people, nor skilled people, nor nerds. Here are some real-life samples from other areas of life... and these are based upon personal observations I've made, they are not made up.
Out in the country: "I just got this Ford truck and it's awesome!" followed by "Ford sucks! You should have bought a Chevy, I bet that thing falls apart next month!"
Some iPhone users: "Ugh, I can't believe Instagram would sell out and go on Android, now I have to look at what POOR PEOPLE are eating!"
Gun owners: "You bought WHAT little pea shooter? What a girly little excuse for a gun. Lemme show you what you should have bought..."
Downtown: "West side for life!" "East side!" "West side! Thug life!" "CRIPS!" "BLOODS FOREVER!" *gunshots* *dead people and broken homes and families*
Cats & dogs: "Dogs are SO much better than cats. I don't know what anyone would own a cat." "Well cats have X attributes and Y whatever else" "Yeah well they're still stupid and so are you for liking them."
Mac vs PC: "I don't know why you'd want a PC, they are so complicated and buggy. People who like them are nerds and they need to stop being nerds and switch to Mac." "Might as well get a Playskool My First Computer then, in fact get someone else to use it for you, because you obviously can't handle technology."
Red Sox vs Yankees: "Yankees suck!" "27 championship rings say they don't, where are yours? Why do you like things I don't like?! You're a moron!"
Certain trolls and their counter-trolls: "XYZ solution! Use it and worship my goodness! I have credentials! Anyone who disagrees with me is obviously wrong and wants a fight!" "No way, get outta here! You're a jerk! Why do people still pay any attention to you? Everyone block this guy!"
Religious trolls: "$deity said this, so you're never going to have any hope and should just die!" "Well @deities are stupid and you're stupid for believing in them!"
I could go on forever. Nobody would have called ALL of these people nerds, but they all have the same problem. I could go on, but you're still 100% right on about it being a social skill-related issue. It just extends outward to all populations! It's just not something they teach in school, or on TV, or anywhere really... parents need to do this and if the kids are left to themselves to be raised by people on the Internet, well... you know what happens. They learn to be like those people. Kids are taught in school to have safe activities and not injure each other physically, but not really to respect each others' opinions... so everyone just wants to be right all the time and they want recognition that they're right, who cares about anyone else.
You're right, it's not going to cause permanent damage in most cases at that distance. However, I think the major complaint here is the temporary blindness that happens from a bright flash when your eyes are acclimated to a dark environment. It's a problem because it makes it impossible to see out the window and read the instrument panel. The biological mechanism is basically a bleaching of the pigments in your eye, which take a decent amount time to recover before you can see again.
Try it sometime, sit in an unlit room for 20-30 minutes (so you fully switch to scotopic vision) then pop a camera flash in your face. No camera? Go for a walk at night, and when you come back, put your car's headlights on and briefly walk in front of the car and look into the lights. No car? Wake up in the middle of the night and flick the bathroom lights on. It's a painful assault on the senses and leaves you temporarily blinded or partially blinded. You wouldn't want to drive a car while in that state, so imagine piloting an airplane like that while some joker is lasering the cockpit.
In summary, night vision is important while flying at night and bright lights disable night vision for long enough to be a big problem.
Out of curiosity, since I like to ask fellow players - Have you tried any of the following? AmpliTube, Guitar Rig, Axe FX, anything like that? I've been pretty happy with the results using the Trace Elliot model in AmpliTube, myself.
It's true for many pairs of ears that 44.1 is overkill. However: The next commonly available samplerate down from 44.1 Khz is 32 Khz, which gives you a highest reproducible frequency of 16 KHz. I'll take 44.1 instead, in that case, since I do still have some hearing left over that. Not that there's a lot of musically relevant sound there, but there is some little bit of air up there that sounds pleasant to my ears.
DAT can go up to 48 KHz 16 bit. A lot of studios used it, and many still do.
Computer interfaces and software typically run at 96 KHz 24 bit or in some cases 192 KHz 24 bit. The newer versions of software like Pro Tools and Mixcraft allow 32 bit sample resolution. Though, normally you run whatever your digital interface and VST plugins can support, which can be limiting. Even the uber-high-end Waves plugins don't go higher than 24 bit resolution.
Hmm, is that the default setting for it? If so, then never mind, that would be unlikely to happen.
If it becomes ubiquitous I'm sure it'll be like ActiveX warnings eventually... people will be trained to just click the button to make the message go away when it appears.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, I did not know about the KCl... what's the proportion, or does it vary widely? I used to use that to make flash paper.
I've seen the low-sodium salt at the local supermarkets, but I haven't tried it. I wonder how it tastes?
That's an effective reiteration of my 2nd paragraph, yes. My point about the humor, again, is that it's not reduced enough to matter for health concerns. For example, you'll hear things like "my doctor told me to cut down on sodium so I switched to sea salt" (and kept using the same amount) or "gee whiz sodium is the devil according to the Internet". It's got to be on the order of a few individual grains of table salt, if that, per meal - although I have not personally measured that assumption to see how accurate it is. So it's a delusion more than anything that using sea salt offers enough of a reduction to matter over the course of your lifetime - people want to rationalize away the doctor's advice so they can enjoy more of a flavor.
"I can have more of it because it has less of a bad ingredient" is the primary fallacy at work here. Kind of like getting diet soda so you can super-size it because it has fewer grams of sugar, or skipping the soda and getting an extra tall caramel frappucino instead, right? Surely these ideas will offer no detriment to your health!
Meanwhile, look up detritus, which is what gives sea salt its color and flavor. It's fascinating to see what different things imbue colors and flavors. Science!
It gets lonely.
You know what's really funny, is that some people use sea salt because they think it contains less sodium. I'm not even kidding.
Of course since this is Slashdot, I have to say that technically, due to the detritus in the sea salt, they may be correct on such a microscopic level that it doesn't matter unless you consume tons and tons of the stuff.
You're dead accurate with the stability sermon there. Let me tack onto it.
Factor in all of the components that cause instability. Cheap RAM (fewer layers on the PCBs than the good stuff) and power supplies (meaningless 80+ labels and poor performance under spiky loads/bad power) and rebranded video cards (same PCB issue) are huge culprits for system instability, and they do in fact market these cheap parts in the gamer segment with fancy packaging and promotional deals like free games.
I have a tip for the DIY crowd. You probably would agree, having been there too. When you sort by price and pick the lowest cost parts, you're buying instability. A lot of the cool yo yo extreme 8ghz overclock gg noob pro tuner kids do this so they can blow a larger slice of the project budget on fancy UV water cooling and lights. These are the same people who drop big money on a new system every year, to try and stay that much further ahead of the other cool tuner kids' FPS in Age of Dutycraft 3 or whatever else $fadgame is at the moment. Well, here's the thing. Chintzy components that don't reject as much interference are going to pick up the increase when you really start slamming the system. Then it'll get unpredictably (or perhaps predictably, if I can guarantee it will happen?) crashy under load. Cheap is cheap, there's no way around it, and masking it with expensive cooling systems will not make cheap parts less cheap.
I have a feeling a lot of the "drivers suck!" crowd is still going off their experience seven years ago, when that was the unquestionable truth of the matter. Yes, they sucked. Past tense, sucked. Right now? Works just fine for me and the local gamer cafes, thank you. I crank up my settings as well with an AMD card. I could crank them up just as high with an nVidia card. It really makes no difference, they both work very well.
I suspect it's largely automated. It could easily be generic stubs generated by automatic code parsers, with a few comments written by the one severely overworked employee/volunteer (depending on the language) who's been tasked with documenting these things. That would really explain a lot.
See also:
* Javadoc
* POD
* pydoc
* phpDocumentor
* Doxygen
* XML comments in C#/VB
It's easy to use these tools, and difficult to produce quality output.
I find it's more like:
HRESULT WINAPI throbTheWangle(_In_ const void *lpPackedWangle, _In_ WGLTHREF HowMuch)
where WGLTHREF is a struct with its own equally dense description full of UINT8s and ENUMs etc on another page, and there's no specification in sight to the Wangle packing specification, just a note that it's packed according to the Wangle packing specification. This happens whenever I want to call a Microsoft API, and then I have to figure out for myself how to translate that to C#. That's when I wind up on a site like StackOverflow (where people get it "figured out" with some obscure bug that surfaces later) or pinvoke.net (where the docs are usually too incomplete to be useful).
This is the problem with MSDN documentation. But we've got it good compared to other language developers, I guess...
Don't forget Cyrix, which used to be everywhere in the '90s, and lives on in the form of VIA C7 / Nano today. It's mostly in netbooks now, but there is competition and they know it.
I like my Intel chips, but I also remember them getting busted for something akin to collusion in a lot of markets. If they had played by the rules, we probably would see a lot of alternatives.
Touch screen Tetris is nowhere near as fun as playing with buttons, though.
I get what you're saying, but Vista needed enthusiast-level graphics hardware or it lagged and stuttered constantly. I beta-tested it and used the RTM version (and following that, the service packs) on several machines and the only ones that felt like it could keep up with the base operating system were the ones with good graphics hardware. In my opinion, the base OS should feel a lot smoother than Vista did on a middle-of-the-line enterprise workstation.
Then there were all the missing and buggy drivers, because of a new architecture that the vendors had to code for. That was a total unmitigated disaster.
The next Zelda title is coming out in December and it's a re-release of Wind Waker, a *Gamecube* game. They really dropped the ball on getting 1st party titles out there.
I have a few ideas, but my favorite one is: Put a Tetris game on there that I can play from another room on the controller. I'd buy that. That's what sold a lot of Game Boys, remember?
Section 4 of the Google Play Legal Information says the following, which means you're buying the app from the provider of the app (the developer) and not Google, which seems to mean that the developer is in fact the merchant whether he realizes it or not. It doesn't really surprise me that the merchant gets this information but it does surprise me that the developer doesn't realize they are the merchant! Maybe it needs to be spelled out more clearly to all parties.
( via https://play.google.com/intl/en_us/about/play-terms.html )
Direct, Agency and App Sales.
When you buy Products from Google Play you will buy them either:
(a) directly from Google (which is referred to as “Google”, “we”, “our”, or “us” in these Terms) (a “Direct Sale”);
(b) from the provider of the Product (the “Provider”), where Google is acting as agent for the Provider (an “Agency Sale”); or
(c) in the case of Android apps, from the Provider of the app (an “App Sale”).
Which ad analytics companies are using this? I read all the linked material and all I see is some lofty assertion that two companies are already using it. Name and shame them, would you please?
Even more video! A guy tries to light a diesel spill with a blowtorch.
http://youtu.be/xMJQFl4az9I
Everybody likes video!
http://youtu.be/3LeRSPuA5Z4
Description: Gasoline is spilled on the ground and lit with a match. Then diesel is spilled on the ground and numerous attempts are made to light it with one then several matches.
Yep. You're correct that someone will always crack the DRM. Restrictions like these mar the beauty of digital information though. Just because someone makes a way to break DRM, doesn't make DRM less evil. A lot of people use that to justify not caring about it - since it won't affect them. You shouldn't have to de-DRM things you buy. Not having DRM would count as beautiful.
I have the Playstation re-releases of the SNES Final Fantasy series and Chrono Trigger. You're right, that delay is horrible. It also happens when you pull up the menu! Who thought that would be okay??
I would. Those are at least readable and pronounceable. Simple names stick in the average consumer's memory and win extra brain share. I don't speak faceroll. I can read and write it, but I can't speak it. If it's hard to speak or you have to really focus on how to pronounce it, it will get passed over for an inferior program with a simpler name.
Edlin is a holdover from early DOS days where the 8 character limit was still in place, and is based on an old CP/M tool from the days when full-screen text editing was too performance-intensive to be feasible. It's not used a whole lot. So it's weird that you'd pick that one out of a hat.
Outlook is a useful planning tool, giving you an outlook on your week. (When it functions correctly, which is asking a lot.)
Excel sounds like something you'd want to do, and being a spreadsheet tool, it's a killer combination for business execs. Believe me, things that sound like success keywords go a long way with those guys. Call a web portal "ValuWeb Cloud Portal 2.0 Enterprise" or something like that and it'll be mandatory-use next week.
You're right, and you probably could have posted it as yourself to get the credit for it.
I think it's entirely related to social skills, not knowledge or capability. It's not limited to intelligent people, nor skilled people, nor nerds. Here are some real-life samples from other areas of life... and these are based upon personal observations I've made, they are not made up.
Out in the country: "I just got this Ford truck and it's awesome!" followed by "Ford sucks! You should have bought a Chevy, I bet that thing falls apart next month!"
Some iPhone users: "Ugh, I can't believe Instagram would sell out and go on Android, now I have to look at what POOR PEOPLE are eating!"
Gun owners: "You bought WHAT little pea shooter? What a girly little excuse for a gun. Lemme show you what you should have bought..."
Downtown: "West side for life!" "East side!" "West side! Thug life!" "CRIPS!" "BLOODS FOREVER!" *gunshots* *dead people and broken homes and families*
Cats & dogs: "Dogs are SO much better than cats. I don't know what anyone would own a cat." "Well cats have X attributes and Y whatever else" "Yeah well they're still stupid and so are you for liking them."
Mac vs PC: "I don't know why you'd want a PC, they are so complicated and buggy. People who like them are nerds and they need to stop being nerds and switch to Mac." "Might as well get a Playskool My First Computer then, in fact get someone else to use it for you, because you obviously can't handle technology."
Red Sox vs Yankees: "Yankees suck!" "27 championship rings say they don't, where are yours? Why do you like things I don't like?! You're a moron!"
Certain trolls and their counter-trolls: "XYZ solution! Use it and worship my goodness! I have credentials! Anyone who disagrees with me is obviously wrong and wants a fight!" "No way, get outta here! You're a jerk! Why do people still pay any attention to you? Everyone block this guy!"
Religious trolls: "$deity said this, so you're never going to have any hope and should just die!" "Well @deities are stupid and you're stupid for believing in them!"
I could go on forever. Nobody would have called ALL of these people nerds, but they all have the same problem. I could go on, but you're still 100% right on about it being a social skill-related issue. It just extends outward to all populations! It's just not something they teach in school, or on TV, or anywhere really... parents need to do this and if the kids are left to themselves to be raised by people on the Internet, well... you know what happens. They learn to be like those people. Kids are taught in school to have safe activities and not injure each other physically, but not really to respect each others' opinions... so everyone just wants to be right all the time and they want recognition that they're right, who cares about anyone else.
Random passers-by, can you see the problems here?
You're right, it's not going to cause permanent damage in most cases at that distance. However, I think the major complaint here is the temporary blindness that happens from a bright flash when your eyes are acclimated to a dark environment. It's a problem because it makes it impossible to see out the window and read the instrument panel. The biological mechanism is basically a bleaching of the pigments in your eye, which take a decent amount time to recover before you can see again.
Try it sometime, sit in an unlit room for 20-30 minutes (so you fully switch to scotopic vision) then pop a camera flash in your face. No camera? Go for a walk at night, and when you come back, put your car's headlights on and briefly walk in front of the car and look into the lights. No car? Wake up in the middle of the night and flick the bathroom lights on. It's a painful assault on the senses and leaves you temporarily blinded or partially blinded. You wouldn't want to drive a car while in that state, so imagine piloting an airplane like that while some joker is lasering the cockpit.
In summary, night vision is important while flying at night and bright lights disable night vision for long enough to be a big problem.
Out of curiosity, since I like to ask fellow players - Have you tried any of the following? AmpliTube, Guitar Rig, Axe FX, anything like that? I've been pretty happy with the results using the Trace Elliot model in AmpliTube, myself.
It's true for many pairs of ears that 44.1 is overkill. However: The next commonly available samplerate down from 44.1 Khz is 32 Khz, which gives you a highest reproducible frequency of 16 KHz. I'll take 44.1 instead, in that case, since I do still have some hearing left over that. Not that there's a lot of musically relevant sound there, but there is some little bit of air up there that sounds pleasant to my ears.
It depends on their equipment.
DAT can go up to 48 KHz 16 bit. A lot of studios used it, and many still do.
Computer interfaces and software typically run at 96 KHz 24 bit or in some cases 192 KHz 24 bit. The newer versions of software like Pro Tools and Mixcraft allow 32 bit sample resolution. Though, normally you run whatever your digital interface and VST plugins can support, which can be limiting. Even the uber-high-end Waves plugins don't go higher than 24 bit resolution.
I never sausage jokes in a Slashdot thread
Hmm, is that the default setting for it? If so, then never mind, that would be unlikely to happen.
If it becomes ubiquitous I'm sure it'll be like ActiveX warnings eventually... people will be trained to just click the button to make the message go away when it appears.