Google should clearly get into the water business. The techniques they have developed for piping data from the great data lakes in upper Canada would really solve those water problems in the American southwest.
Data is more unlimited than water because we completely control its distribution. Water is plentiful in Chicago, for example, because it's directly next to a huge freshwater lake. In Los Angeles or Phoenix it's a much more complicated story. The middle of the US relies almost entirely on the Ogallala Aquifer, with attendant problems. Even the U.S. Southeast, which is a traditionally wet "humid subtropical" climate zone, has had a decade or so of rather severe drought-related problems.
Water requires treatment; it requires physical plant; it requires nontrivial connections to every single portion of a city; it's a necessity; and a single point of failure can cause pressure loss over a wide area resulting in a very expensive repair. Bandwidth has none of these issues. It's limited only by the amount of cable the ISP is willing to run, and their hardware. Nothing as complex as aquifer physics is involved.
Nah. Your standard end user doesn't even understand the concept of software, really. I know people who think Windows is Office, and so on. These aren't people who are totally ignorant—they work with computers every day—they're just not very good at reading. Their excuse is usually "I don't want to think about that stuff, I want to get my work done," never realizing that thirty minutes of thinking about "that stuff" could save them hours of frustration.
When I heard someone who's worked in a white-collar environment for fifteen years refer to Office 2007 as "Windows Word 2007," I nearly lost it.
Actually, it lists the results in multiple places. It's used to correct OCR at The Internet Archive. I don't think there's a specific list where you can see what was corrected by the reCAPTCHA method, although there is a post about it in their announcements forum.
This is not an attempt to falsify the teaching of evolution. These backwards magical-thinking buffoons have no evidence, no tests, nothing to point to a different theory; they have a book. A book they believe trumps the evidence of our own eyes and our most advanced scientific methods. These people aren't asking for ID to be taught because they don't think evolution explains the evidence; they are asking for ID to be taught because they don't think.
I may be mistaken about the DLLs. I haven't paid attention to IE in great detail since IE6 (besides trying to make sites work with its broken CSS), after MS claimed that it was going to be "standards-compliant" and utterly failed to deliver.
Your article, however, looks to me like FUD. They picked three of the worst sites on the Internet to test any sort of performance that a business might be interested in. Two corporate sites relying on badly-programmed Javascript and Flash, and what seems to be a proof-of-concept of a Flash-based 3D engine? Odd choices.
"Hah! We have them now! These commercial sites aimed at kids don't perform very well!"
That's odd. The performance I'm seeing is far better than any other browser I've used, and it hasn't crashed in a couple of weeks of heavy use. The memory footprint is improved and the UI response is much faster. This is including a dozen or so extensions.
I'm a little bit confused by what you mean when you say IE8 outperforms FF3. Is it memory usage? (IE under-reports because it rides the coattails of explorer.exe.) Is it loading speed? (IE is faster because it rides the coattails of explorer.exe.) Is it rendering speed? I haven't seen anything to suggest that IE8 is any faster than other IEs, and it still has some nicely broken CSS issues.
...because everyone who is expected to live in an area must be paid in accordance with the cost of living in the area. If your garbage men can't afford to live near where they work, they will have to move farther away which will cause them to financially collapse when the price of fuel rises. Remember, pay is relative to location. $30/hr. is excellent pay out in the sticks, but if you live in New York it's not so much--and it's not like you can drive out to Iowa to buy groceries.
If you don't pay people a wage that will allow them to live with some measure of decency, you get unrest. Unrest is a bad thing. (Strikes are just about the most positive way unrest manifests.)
Furthermore, "deserve" is an interesting word. What does anyone "deserve?" The only reason most of us in the United States (and Europe, etc.) can have the standard of living that we do is because we had the incredibly good luck to discover that you can use "rock oil" for a lot of things. Weirdly enough, that rock oil mostly occurs underneath populations that maybe aren't so fortunate.
Think about it like this: you might not think garbage men and other low-skill workers "deserve" a living wage or a pension if you are an Objectivist or a person of like persuasion, but you also deserve nothing. You don't deserve to not starve to death. "Deserts" are a human conceit. It's a silly argument to say that "you could have been born in Sudan" or something similar, because you couldn't have (you wouldn't be yourself), but note that the majority of people are born in vastly less comfortable positions than people in the West.
Yes, you're right. If the people who draft the rules write them poorly, then the loopholes will be exploited. It's more disgust that they left these loopholes; even that these loopholes might have been intentional on the part of some of the original drafters of the process.
I hate committees.
Allowing mercenary corporate entities to corrupt the standardization process has negative implications? I'm amazed. I never would have guessed that violating the spirit of the rules while abiding by the letter could lead to problems in the future. Nor would I have guessed that punitive/preventative measures would need to be drafted into those rules to prevent abuse.
If you can't see how a small team creating a fun, unique, and interesting game relying on mechanics instead of thousands of man-hours worth of art might be important to an industry currently weighted down by a thousand similar "next gen" "HD" games that play like bad renditions of the same things we played ten years ago, you need to rethink your hobbies.
For the last ten years or so the gaming industry has seemed to be all about franchises, once-a-year iterations of games with little content and less innovation.
Portal isn't about the plot--the plot helps it be endearing, but as you say it's "not-so-indepth." That doesn't mean it's bad (as you seem to imply), it just means that it's light. It's a humorous game. Nobody is claiming it's Faulkner. What it is is a capably done small-team game with mechanics which can lead to a thousand iterations of interesting puzzles (there are already a few custom maps with interesting puzzles involved). There are already several custom maps.
There is no video game written as well as East of Eden or Blood Meridian. That's not the point of video games; the point of video games is gameplay, and Portal is an absolute masterpiece of gameplay in an industry where that virtue has been forgotten. It's challenging (try the advanced levels and extra challenges if you don't think so) and unique. In addition to that, it's got a well-presented, witty storyline with more funny-per-minute than any game I've played--without resorting to the asinine juvenile humor most "funny" games rely on.
Hiding in your last statement, of course, there's a lesson about preconceptions. I leave that for you to find.
Narbacular Drop is the same concept, of course, but it's really nothing like portal in its gameplay. It's slow and buggy where Portal sometimes takes reflexes and is smooth as silk. The ND guys really benefit from Valve's superior art and design experience.
Perhaps they only learned from his mistakes, sure. I'm open to that idea, particularly since I don't even like the man or his writings. Just remember that "great" can also mean "influential."
Almost nothing we do is of particular significance in the "real world," given sufficient abstraction--does it apply to "eating food" or "producing children?" All of the things we enjoy are just part of an artificial culture, and it's a bit odd to say that art and the study of art don't have any significance when those have been around a very long time. Don't get me wrong: I understand that things like tech skills and science are more likely to make money, and am a tech worker, but I know a lot of smart people who have no aesthetic judgment and no familiarity with great works at all (or what might make them "great"), and I think it's a sad, unnecessary, and severely limiting outlook on the world. I have one friend who told me, for example: "I don't think reading is good. It makes you pessimistic."
Huh.
That said, I love books of many genres, but my lifetime is limited and I have to make selections. When I was younger, I read indiscriminately, Hardy Boys books and so on, but eventually developed more discernment. That's not to say I look for "great writers." I look for well-written books. Lois McMaster Bujold, Stephen Brust, George R. R. Martin, and Neal Stephenson are examples within the science fiction/fantasy genres. I keep meaning to get around to Gene Wolfe and Vernor Vinge, but I've been on a kick of reading Haruki Murakami recently, and am currently working on Céline's Journey to the End of the Night.
What I find offensive, actually, is that a few people I know (Kenneth, are you reading this?) read absolute garbage--Star Trek novelizations, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels, and so on--and then claim that there's no difference between them and, say, Martin. That sentiment is... alien to me.
What? Your comment makes no sense. He drew influence from Faulkner; his first novels are set in the South and are clearly in the Faulknerian style. With Blood Meridian, he began to develop his own style to a greater degree and moved away from Faulkner's influence. I don't know that he's directly influenced by Hemingway, but he has moved to a spartan style of writing reminiscent of the writers who have been influenced by Hemingway.
Look: just because something isn't science or isn't about computers doesn't mean it's all the territory of a "pompous ass." You can plainly look at books before Hemingway and after Hemingway and see the change in style. There's about a generation of lag, but he started a movement toward a simpler realistic style in American storytelling, just as Faulkner heavily influenced the Southern writers who followed him.
Of course, IHBT, but this is such a common attitude that it gets on my nerves.
Actually, I personally dislike Hemingway, but he's generally recognized as a great writer. It's not so much his plots that make him so popular--his style was simply developmentally necessary to the later course of American fiction. Essentially, Faulkner and Hemingway were the creators of two latter-day American aesthetics: Faulkner's convolutions, heavy on description and atmosphere, versus Hemingway's spare and economical style. You can see the tension between the two in one of our present great writers, Cormac McCarthy--his earlier novels are plainly Faulknerian, while his latest (The Road) is almost devoid of excess detail.
Well, he's usually counted "American" because he emigrated, and his greatest fame is in his English writing. He's an odd case, but I think (given his writing style and residence) you can call him an American writer. That's how he's usually taught, too.
The U.S. has (and has had) plenty of great writers. Pickings were a bit slim in the 19th Century, but the 20th made up for it: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Nabokov... I have never understood the fascination with Heinlein. I think he must have been "childhood reading" for a lot of people, and so gets a free pass. He's not a great writer. (Gene Wolfe--also an American--might be. Samuel R. Delaney--New Yorkese just like Wolfe--gets a lot of credit, too, though I've never liked his style.)
RTFArticle Summary. It applies only to public information, not to private communication. Man, it used to be that people didn't RTFA--now they don't even read past the title.:(
What's your opinion on Akira Yamaoka? An entirely different genre, of course, but I find that I enjoy his music more than any of the RPG baroque-wannabe music these days. Some of it's even beautiful.
Slashdot Mirror
Google should clearly get into the water business. The techniques they have developed for piping data from the great data lakes in upper Canada would really solve those water problems in the American southwest.
Data is more unlimited than water because we completely control its distribution. Water is plentiful in Chicago, for example, because it's directly next to a huge freshwater lake. In Los Angeles or Phoenix it's a much more complicated story. The middle of the US relies almost entirely on the Ogallala Aquifer, with attendant problems. Even the U.S. Southeast, which is a traditionally wet "humid subtropical" climate zone, has had a decade or so of rather severe drought-related problems. Water requires treatment; it requires physical plant; it requires nontrivial connections to every single portion of a city; it's a necessity; and a single point of failure can cause pressure loss over a wide area resulting in a very expensive repair. Bandwidth has none of these issues. It's limited only by the amount of cable the ISP is willing to run, and their hardware. Nothing as complex as aquifer physics is involved.
Nah. Your standard end user doesn't even understand the concept of software, really. I know people who think Windows is Office, and so on. These aren't people who are totally ignorant—they work with computers every day—they're just not very good at reading. Their excuse is usually "I don't want to think about that stuff, I want to get my work done," never realizing that thirty minutes of thinking about "that stuff" could save them hours of frustration. When I heard someone who's worked in a white-collar environment for fifteen years refer to Office 2007 as "Windows Word 2007," I nearly lost it.
Actually, it lists the results in multiple places. It's used to correct OCR at The Internet Archive. I don't think there's a specific list where you can see what was corrected by the reCAPTCHA method, although there is a post about it in their announcements forum.
Richard Feynman had a bit to say about textbook selection.
This is not an attempt to falsify the teaching of evolution. These backwards magical-thinking buffoons have no evidence, no tests, nothing to point to a different theory; they have a book. A book they believe trumps the evidence of our own eyes and our most advanced scientific methods. These people aren't asking for ID to be taught because they don't think evolution explains the evidence; they are asking for ID to be taught because they don't think.
Wait. Convince the pharmacist you're not going to drink isopropyl alcohol?
I may be mistaken about the DLLs. I haven't paid attention to IE in great detail since IE6 (besides trying to make sites work with its broken CSS), after MS claimed that it was going to be "standards-compliant" and utterly failed to deliver. Your article, however, looks to me like FUD. They picked three of the worst sites on the Internet to test any sort of performance that a business might be interested in. Two corporate sites relying on badly-programmed Javascript and Flash, and what seems to be a proof-of-concept of a Flash-based 3D engine? Odd choices. "Hah! We have them now! These commercial sites aimed at kids don't perform very well!"
That's odd. The performance I'm seeing is far better than any other browser I've used, and it hasn't crashed in a couple of weeks of heavy use. The memory footprint is improved and the UI response is much faster. This is including a dozen or so extensions. I'm a little bit confused by what you mean when you say IE8 outperforms FF3. Is it memory usage? (IE under-reports because it rides the coattails of explorer.exe.) Is it loading speed? (IE is faster because it rides the coattails of explorer.exe.) Is it rendering speed? I haven't seen anything to suggest that IE8 is any faster than other IEs, and it still has some nicely broken CSS issues.
...because everyone who is expected to live in an area must be paid in accordance with the cost of living in the area. If your garbage men can't afford to live near where they work, they will have to move farther away which will cause them to financially collapse when the price of fuel rises. Remember, pay is relative to location. $30/hr. is excellent pay out in the sticks, but if you live in New York it's not so much--and it's not like you can drive out to Iowa to buy groceries.
If you don't pay people a wage that will allow them to live with some measure of decency, you get unrest. Unrest is a bad thing. (Strikes are just about the most positive way unrest manifests.)
Furthermore, "deserve" is an interesting word. What does anyone "deserve?" The only reason most of us in the United States (and Europe, etc.) can have the standard of living that we do is because we had the incredibly good luck to discover that you can use "rock oil" for a lot of things. Weirdly enough, that rock oil mostly occurs underneath populations that maybe aren't so fortunate.
Think about it like this: you might not think garbage men and other low-skill workers "deserve" a living wage or a pension if you are an Objectivist or a person of like persuasion, but you also deserve nothing. You don't deserve to not starve to death. "Deserts" are a human conceit. It's a silly argument to say that "you could have been born in Sudan" or something similar, because you couldn't have (you wouldn't be yourself), but note that the majority of people are born in vastly less comfortable positions than people in the West.
Yes, you're right. If the people who draft the rules write them poorly, then the loopholes will be exploited. It's more disgust that they left these loopholes; even that these loopholes might have been intentional on the part of some of the original drafters of the process. I hate committees.
Allowing mercenary corporate entities to corrupt the standardization process has negative implications? I'm amazed. I never would have guessed that violating the spirit of the rules while abiding by the letter could lead to problems in the future. Nor would I have guessed that punitive/preventative measures would need to be drafted into those rules to prevent abuse.
If you can't see how a small team creating a fun, unique, and interesting game relying on mechanics instead of thousands of man-hours worth of art might be important to an industry currently weighted down by a thousand similar "next gen" "HD" games that play like bad renditions of the same things we played ten years ago, you need to rethink your hobbies.
For the last ten years or so the gaming industry has seemed to be all about franchises, once-a-year iterations of games with little content and less innovation.
Portal isn't about the plot--the plot helps it be endearing, but as you say it's "not-so-indepth." That doesn't mean it's bad (as you seem to imply), it just means that it's light. It's a humorous game. Nobody is claiming it's Faulkner. What it is is a capably done small-team game with mechanics which can lead to a thousand iterations of interesting puzzles (there are already a few custom maps with interesting puzzles involved). There are already several custom maps.
There is no video game written as well as East of Eden or Blood Meridian. That's not the point of video games; the point of video games is gameplay, and Portal is an absolute masterpiece of gameplay in an industry where that virtue has been forgotten. It's challenging (try the advanced levels and extra challenges if you don't think so) and unique. In addition to that, it's got a well-presented, witty storyline with more funny-per-minute than any game I've played--without resorting to the asinine juvenile humor most "funny" games rely on.
Hiding in your last statement, of course, there's a lesson about preconceptions. I leave that for you to find.
Narbacular Drop is the same concept, of course, but it's really nothing like portal in its gameplay. It's slow and buggy where Portal sometimes takes reflexes and is smooth as silk. The ND guys really benefit from Valve's superior art and design experience.
Nabokov lived in the U.S. for some years. As for Hemingway, well, anyone can have him as far as I'm concerned, if they really want him.
Perhaps they only learned from his mistakes, sure. I'm open to that idea, particularly since I don't even like the man or his writings. Just remember that "great" can also mean "influential."
Almost nothing we do is of particular significance in the "real world," given sufficient abstraction--does it apply to "eating food" or "producing children?" All of the things we enjoy are just part of an artificial culture, and it's a bit odd to say that art and the study of art don't have any significance when those have been around a very long time. Don't get me wrong: I understand that things like tech skills and science are more likely to make money, and am a tech worker, but I know a lot of smart people who have no aesthetic judgment and no familiarity with great works at all (or what might make them "great"), and I think it's a sad, unnecessary, and severely limiting outlook on the world. I have one friend who told me, for example: "I don't think reading is good. It makes you pessimistic."
Huh.
That said, I love books of many genres, but my lifetime is limited and I have to make selections. When I was younger, I read indiscriminately, Hardy Boys books and so on, but eventually developed more discernment. That's not to say I look for "great writers." I look for well-written books. Lois McMaster Bujold, Stephen Brust, George R. R. Martin, and Neal Stephenson are examples within the science fiction/fantasy genres. I keep meaning to get around to Gene Wolfe and Vernor Vinge, but I've been on a kick of reading Haruki Murakami recently, and am currently working on Céline's Journey to the End of the Night.
What I find offensive, actually, is that a few people I know (Kenneth, are you reading this?) read absolute garbage--Star Trek novelizations, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels, and so on--and then claim that there's no difference between them and, say, Martin. That sentiment is... alien to me.
What? Your comment makes no sense. He drew influence from Faulkner; his first novels are set in the South and are clearly in the Faulknerian style. With Blood Meridian, he began to develop his own style to a greater degree and moved away from Faulkner's influence. I don't know that he's directly influenced by Hemingway, but he has moved to a spartan style of writing reminiscent of the writers who have been influenced by Hemingway. Look: just because something isn't science or isn't about computers doesn't mean it's all the territory of a "pompous ass." You can plainly look at books before Hemingway and after Hemingway and see the change in style. There's about a generation of lag, but he started a movement toward a simpler realistic style in American storytelling, just as Faulkner heavily influenced the Southern writers who followed him. Of course, IHBT, but this is such a common attitude that it gets on my nerves.
Actually, I personally dislike Hemingway, but he's generally recognized as a great writer. It's not so much his plots that make him so popular--his style was simply developmentally necessary to the later course of American fiction. Essentially, Faulkner and Hemingway were the creators of two latter-day American aesthetics: Faulkner's convolutions, heavy on description and atmosphere, versus Hemingway's spare and economical style. You can see the tension between the two in one of our present great writers, Cormac McCarthy--his earlier novels are plainly Faulknerian, while his latest (The Road) is almost devoid of excess detail.
Well, he's usually counted "American" because he emigrated, and his greatest fame is in his English writing. He's an odd case, but I think (given his writing style and residence) you can call him an American writer. That's how he's usually taught, too.
The U.S. has (and has had) plenty of great writers. Pickings were a bit slim in the 19th Century, but the 20th made up for it: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Nabokov... I have never understood the fascination with Heinlein. I think he must have been "childhood reading" for a lot of people, and so gets a free pass. He's not a great writer. (Gene Wolfe--also an American--might be. Samuel R. Delaney--New Yorkese just like Wolfe--gets a lot of credit, too, though I've never liked his style.)
RTFArticle Summary. It applies only to public information, not to private communication. Man, it used to be that people didn't RTFA--now they don't even read past the title. :(
Frankenstein and Dracula actually aren't very well written. They're interesting more for what they influenced, rather than what they are.
No, it died from the beginning. It was a flawed premise.
What's your opinion on Akira Yamaoka? An entirely different genre, of course, but I find that I enjoy his music more than any of the RPG baroque-wannabe music these days. Some of it's even beautiful.