I think this was the best part, the one that many companies really need to pay attention to:
Create new ways to promote your geeks
If you don't want to lose your geeks, you have to find a way to give them promotions without turning them into managers.
That is the key problem with every company I've worked for (okay, so it's only two, but stories from friends at other companies have all been similar). They assume that the geeky jobs are at the bottom of the ladder and the PHB jobs are higher up. It's not so much that I want to put myself 'above' the managers, as it is that I want to see better stratification amongst the geeks. Too many companies have job titles that assume all geeks are the same. Most good managers know that isn't true, but they aren't in charge of the job titles, that's Human Resources, and so even the good managers can't do anything about the problem on their own. A kernel hacker with 10 years experience writing drivers *is* a different class of geek from a newly graduated 23-year old in need of some starting experience.
The only reason I haven't bothered to learn DVORAK is that too much of my favorite software has dependancies on keyboard layout (for example, VI using HJKL for the cursor movement, or using the QWE/ASD/ZXC keys for a nine-key directional pad in some video games) This software is very QWERTY dependant.
The other problem is that those xmodmap solutions don't do you a bit of good on the console screen.
To those who have said that good creativity is more important than the rules, I agree. But you need to recognize that when you throw out all the really dumb AD&D rules, and add some of your own, that you can't really say you are plainy AD&D anymore. You are playing a homebrew game *based on* AD&D.
The fact that pretty much every single group felt the need to so heavily butcher the AD&D rules to make them palatable is evidence for how bad they were. Hence, as to the subject at hand, a movie that was *actually* trying to model the AD&D system properly would be laughable. A movie that does the same thing most gaming groups did, and throws away all the self-contradictory stupid rules, could be rather fun.
Okay, Here's a few points in there that were more than just mild 'FUD', but were acutal falsehoods.
Windows NT has 37 percent lower TCO than UNIX. There is no reason to believe that Linux is significantly different than other versions of UNIX when it comes to TCO.
Uhm, err. There is plenty of reason to believe that, given that the cost of the OS is very signifigant on commercial UNIXen. With the SGI's we have I end up having to get licenses for such 'extensive' add-ons as being able to print postscript to a printer (I'm not kidding). And having a working compiling environment. Commerical UNIXen ship OS's that don't have as many 'goodies' as Linux does, so when you use Linux as the base you don't have to buy as much of the OS at extra-cost as you do with commercial Unixen.
Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium. These costs have to be factored into the total cost model.
Bullshit. They don't have to be factored in unless you actually decide you need them. We aren't all big-time commercial operations that need that sort of thing.
For example how many certified engineers are there for Linux? How easy is it to find skilled development and support people for Linux?
I'm sorry, but an MSCE diploma is not worth the paper its printed on. The existance of the ability to get that kind of thing without any actual talent or knowlege just cheapens the value of the certificate. (and is unfair to those MSCEs who actually are qualified and get lost among the hordes.) The existance of hordes of MSCEs is not going to make any real difference to how easy it is to find good qualified employees.
All systems are vulnerable to security issues, however it's important to note that Linux uses the same security model as the original UNIX implementations- a model that was not designed from the ground up to be secure.
Uhm, hello, what planet are these people from? The 'original' security model of UNIX has about as much to do with modern UNIXen like Linux as the 'original' security model of DOS 1.0 has to do with Windows NT.
Linux has not supported key security accreditation standards. Every member of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 3.5 has been evaluated at either a C2 level under the U.S. Government's evaluation process or at a C2-equivalent level under the British Government's ITSEC process.
Great, so your NT enterprise server is going to be plenty secure so long as it isn't connected to your network at all (That's what C2 refers to). Big Furry Deal. Linux hasn't bothered with the certification because there's absolutely no point to it. It could probably pass it, but so what? C2 doesn't mean anything useful.
Configuring Linux security requires an administrator to be an expert in the intricacies of the operating system and how components interact. Misconfigure any part of the operating system and the system could be vulnerable to attack. Windows NT security is easy to set up and administer with tools such as the Security Configuration Editor.
Oh, come on now! Even most Windows advocates will say that having an unknowlegable person set up the security of a Windows NT server is a recipie for disaster. Just because the interface to do so is prettier doesn't alleviate the need for a well knowlegable person to decide what values should be used to fill in the blanks.
Linux does not provide support for the broad range of hardware in use today; Windows NT 4.0 currently supports over 39,000 systems and devices on the Hardware Compatibility List. Linux does not support important ease-of-use technologies such as Plug and Play, USB, and Power Management
Windows doesn't run on Macs, nor on Sparcs, nor on Alphas (not anymore), and so on. If you remember that fact, and start a phallus-waving contest of comparing the number of pieces of hardware that are supported, Windows won't look so hot anymore. Windows only supports more hardware if you limit your comparasins to the Intel PC. (And even then WINDOWS DOESN'T SUPPORT THE HARDWARE!!! THE HARDWARE SUPPORTS WINDOWS. Microsoft isn't writing those drivers, the hardware manufacturers are.)
And this one is my favorite (I don't have time to list everything and I'm getting tired, so I'll just cut to the most glaring stupidity): In one section they start by saying: Reality: Linux Needs Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories Then they immediately proceed to list some anecdotal stories for places that use NT, RIGHT AFTER TELLING US that that same kind of anecdotal evidence is insufficient to show anything: Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, First Union Capital Markets, Nasdaq and many others run mission critical applications on Windows NT 4.0.
What a bunch of maroons. The sad part is that many a PHB will read this and never once consider that maybe they should take pro-NT information that comes from Microsoft with a little healthy skepticism. For some dumb reason, people who are normally healthily skeptical with other companys' claims drop all skepticism at Microsoft's claims. I don't understand it.
If you are using Netscape on Linux and can't read that ugly font they used worth a damn, this advice might help:
Go into Edit|Preferences, pick Appearance|Fonts. For the Variable Width Font, pick "Utopia".
This will render the site readable (if not palatable.)
The problem is that, in general Windows users prefer gigantic real-estate wasting fonts. So the default Netscape font on Windows is actually a lot bigger than the default Netscape font on Linux. The site had some style sheets tailored for Netscape up near the top (I did a 'view source), but they were tailored to the font sizes Netscape uses on Windows, not the sizes it uses on Linux. So when it says to make a font be a few sizes smaller than normal, it looks fine on Windows, where 'normal' size is so huge, but not on Linux where 'normal' size is smaller.
Utopia is a particulary large font even at the Linux Netscape default of '12 points', and so that renders something a bit more readable.
Hmm, If they succeed at trying to model the AD&D rules properly, then the movie will really suck, otherwise it could be a good fantasy movie. I love RPG's, and yes, I got started with AD&D, but I'll never play it again, preferrring pretty much *any* other system. It's just too 'wrong' in every way and it fails to model the genre it is attempting to model (high fantasy).
Things AD&D models poorly: You can't have a Robin Hood, since theives suck at all combat including ranged weapons (that never made sense - A thief should be the best class with 'cowardly' weapons like bows and thrown daggars, but he's not.) You can't have the classic power struggles between mages, since mages are nothing more than containers for pre-fab spells with pre-fab effects. (No concept of mana or power). You can't have someone get better at something by being taught, since you know at level 1 exactly what all the abilities you will ever have for the rest of your life are (class), and you can't escape from that box.
Every average person you meet on the street will be wooden and alike in ability, since there is no effective difference between a STR of 10 and an STR of 14 or an INT of 10 and an INT of 14, etc... You have to go into the extremes before your main stats actually make any difference that actually matters in the game.
It will take over 10 blows with an axe to kill a very experienced criminal at an execution.
An experienced soldier can fall from a greater height without dying than an unexperienced one, for some, err, strange reason.
A street urchin who wants to iprove his theiving skills could do so by actually sneaking and picking pockets, but he'd be able to learn these skills faster if he instead went around killing people at random. For some, err, strange reason.
A mage who casts a spell would suddenly forget everything about that spell after he was done. For some, err, strange reason.
Humans run at the same speed as each other.
Humans are incapable of cross-training in multiple disciplines at once, while other races are, for some, err, strange reason.
A thief or assasin who sneaks up on a victim from behind can kill him in one easy blow, unless the victim is well travelled and experienced (in which case quadruple damage from a daggar through the heart still only hurts him enough to make him mad, for some, err, strange reason.)
Well, actually I'll probably end up seeing this movie anyway, since it will either be a good fantasy movie (meaning it totally ignores the AD&D rules), or it will be so oozing with cheese that I'll enjoy it in an MST3K kind of a way. In either case I agree that it will be quite the geek-fest.
By that definition, any program in Windows that might install any updates to any files whatsoever is a virus. So if that new game you bought updates a DLL, its a virus because it changes or deletes data on your system or does some action without you knowing it.
Reagan was a talented spokesman and figurehead, and he knew that that was his role in things. It's his cabinet that made all the big decisions and knew about politics and government. That was how come his occasional senility didn't cause major trouble - he wasn't really running the day-to-day stuff anyway. I'll leave off the question as to whether his term had a posative or negative effect. I don't care to comment on that, only on the fact that he was a figurehead.
There are a lot of people in Chicago who drive north into Wisconsin for quick little weekend trips or cheap summer vacation camping. Most of Illinois' forests, what little there once were, have been cleared off for flat farmland. Wisconsin has more woods, although it has some cleared out areas too. So there are a lot of places to go canoeing, hiking, camping, skiing, snowmobiling and whatnot. The problem is that all it takes are a few bastards to make the whole group look bad, and for a while there was a feeling that when you saw an Illinois license plate, you cringed. It was unfair and irrational, but that's what the common feeling was. There was also often a sense that a lot of Chigacoans saw Wisconsin as being their backyard playground, and this caused some resentment.
I don't know how much of this sentiment is still around. It's kinda dumb when you think about it - these people are bringing in lots of money, so be nice.
Look, we all know this kid was in the wrong, but what does worry me is that the govt is using this as an 'example' case. That is plain wrong. The punishment for ONE person committing ONE crime should match the servity of that ONE crime. It should not match the severity of all the other criminals you were unable to catch. I fear that they are going to end up taking out their frustrations at not being able to catch other crackers on this one scapegoat kid.
Also, the following quote from the article should scare anyone who gives a damn about privacy on the net:
"It is not that these are super whiz kids; it is the technology that gives them the ability to cover their tracks enough that you can have a hard time making a criminal case against them," said a senior federal investigator.
What this guy is trying to imply is that privacy is a tool of crackers, and if only there weren't so much privacy they wouldn't be able to get away with their crimes. Notice how he makes it out to sound as if the technology is going out of its way to make it easy to be anonymous. What a load of crap! If the technology does nothing, then anonymity is the default. The technology has to go out of its way to track people, not the other way around. (The web server has to actively engage in logging activity. It takes *less* effort to forget the accesses than it does to create logs and keep track of them.)
(Sorry, I couldn't resist the urge to name-drop also.) The editor Brian Paul made for modelling Pixar's old 'Go' files got passed on to me as a Practicum project a bit later on (I went to the same school, but Brian graduated before I got there. I think I saw him in person only once, when he came back to the tiny UW-Oshkosh to give a talk to the CS club.) Anyway, the problem was that 'Go' was no longer being used much and everything had shifted to 'Renderman'. I was charged with the task of altering the editor so that it read/wrote Renderman.rib files instead of Go files. This was supposed to be a fairly dead-simple project but it turned out to be harder than expected because the innards of the editor were tied to the 'go' format rather tightly. For example, 'go' was left-handed like all older graphics systems were, but Renderman is right-handed. Simply finding all the places were this flipped the math was an interesting task. (I often made the mistake of flipping the math in two places along the pipeline such that I flipped it back to lefthanded again.)
The second major obsticle was that 'go' used camera and lookat point notation while Renderman simply stored the transformation matrix and nothing else. This meant that it was possible to recreate the camera point and lookat *direction*, but not the exact lookat point. This was a problem because the editor used the lookat point as the point to swing around when rotating the camera, and thus if you loose this information, the scene swings wildly when you rotate the camera and looks more like a 'pan' than a rotate. The solution was to assume that the scene was 'near' the world's origin point, and thus when recreating the lookat point, you pick the point along the lookat vector that is closest to the origin. (Simple math - find the point along the lookat vector where you get zero for the dot product of the lookat vector and a vector from the origin to the lookat point. A dot product of zero indicates perpendicular vectors, so that must be the closest point to the origin.)
Anyway, the project passed on to someone else when I left (I can't remember his name, but I remember the face), and it was mostly working then and he was going to add new features to it to take advantage of Renderman features that were not in Go.
I hope that long-winded answer helps satisfy your curiosity. I didn't meet him in person up close, but from fiddling with his source code I'd agree with your notion that he's quite a 3D guru. Some of that math was pretty neat and there was some things where at first glance it seems the algorithms shouldn't have worked but they did anyway. (Further examination showed that Brian was just being more clever than I could handle.) That guy is pretty darn cool. I wish him the best of luck in his new job.
If ___________ are outlawed, only outlaws will have _________________..plural noun .. same plural noun
There, you have just made a magical phrase that can be used to argue against every single law ever made at any time in any place.
The gun advocates need to be more careful. Stop using such shoddy logic if you want to win people to your cause. This won't work. (Yes I know this wasn't about gun control, but you are borrowing their phraseology.)
The things you attribute to Christianity are actually effects of Monotheism vs Polytheism *in general*, and are not specific to Christianity. Monotheism means only one god, and we humans have a hard time imagining that this one single god could be *that* involved in every single dinky little activity there is. We therefore start to picture a god that only gets involved in the really big things on a daily basis. For the smaller things, like how objects fall and how boats float, he makes up rules for them and then lets them run on their own most of the time. This attitude is an improvement over inventing a god for every dinky little thing, but that's not really saying much.
Saying Chrisitianity is good for science because polytheism is worse is a bit like saying navy blue is a light color because it's not black.
Geek guys *wish* there were more geek girls out there. It is exactly the opposite of what you say. The fact that there are fewer female techies than male ones is a constant source of frustration for us geeky guys. It means we have to either compete for the few geek girls, which is a very oversaturated 'market' or we have to try to find that rarity among rarities: a non-geek who doesn't mind being around geeks. (That's rare whether you are talking women or men).
What the hell does "4 hours" of online time a day mean? If I leave the internet connection up that long, but only use it sporadically, does that mean I am addicted? If I log into my ISP at noon, read e-mail, then do nothing for an hour, then send an e-mail, then do nothing until 3:00 pm and then do some web surfing until 4:00 pm, does that count? This is a boneheaded metric to use to measure this. You can't just measure time spent connected, otherwise anyone with an 8-hour a day job at a company that is connected would be considered addicted. You have to measure actual usage of that connection, and that doesn't work either. If my browser 'uses' the connection to download a page in 10 seconds, and then I read that page for 10 minutes, I only used the connection for ten seconds. The rest of the time I was not 'using' the internet. Okay, so maybe you could measure the tinme spent by the user using internet-aware applications. Wait, nope, that doesn't really work either because there are many applications that are internet capable but for which the internet is not their primary purpose (like a file manager that can show you an FTP site with the same interface as your own hard drive, or a word processor that can export HTML to a web page.
This study starts from the flawed assumption that there is some magic difference between being 'on-line' and not being on-line. There isn't. Not on real OS's which have been 'internet aware' since almost the dawn of the internet (Unix).
I was specifically talking about putting that much money *on your desk* as your workstation. Do you really have a $80k PC on your desk? (which is for your personal use only, not just a server that happens to be stored on your desk.)
But, getting back to the Sagan book, Ellie used some decoding scheme of her own invention to come up with that circle. You could take your random sequence of nonzero digits and map it to a numeric representation with radix 9 and still have every possible number buried in there somewhere.
If you can find pi in an infinately long random string chosen from ten characters (0-9) you can also find it in an infinately long random string of chosen from nine characters (1-9). You could also find it in a binary representation - you just have to pick some decoding scheme that makes use of the characters that exist in the string.
For your sin of assuming "hacker" always implies "cracker", your pennance is to write "hacker != cracker" on the chalkboard 500 times. (No fair writing a program to do it either.)
I was going to make some pithy comment, but you took all the fun out of it with that statement. You have summed up all religion in one statement: claiming you "know" something a-priori is not thinking.
Im my case is the opposite. The chance to get out and go to church is one of the things I miss now that I'm an atheist. (I was raised Bah'ii, so "church" isn't quite the right word, but I don't want to waste time on the details here.) Anyway, I really enjoyed the social get-togethers. And (unlike a lot of so-called loving Christians), they were very inclusive and non-judgemental of other religions, and the groups were very eclectic, and the religious ceremony was actually fun and friendly. I really miss all of that. But I can't justify pretending to believe something I don't just to get some comradery. It seems cheap and hollow.
So, to re-iterate - I am a counterexample. I don't eschew religion because it makes you meet people. I eschew it *despite* the fact that it makes you meet people. I won't lie just to get more friends.
Re-read his statement more carefully. He mentioned that the bible has been used as an an excuse to do bad things, but he did not make the claim that this is what causes the bible to be false. The bible is false on facts alone. Bad morality is just a side-effect of that.
The way I read it, they aren't ditching the Visual Workstation. They are ditching the idea of running NT on the Visual Workstation. This is a smart idea, and not just because I like Linux better than NT. The problem is that the kinds of customers who are into NT are generally not the same sorts of customers who will pay for the highest-end whizbang hardware. They want cheap Dells and Gateways. The sorts of customers who are willing to pay $5000 for a workstation that has amazingly fast busses and cards are usually the sort who don't mind using Unix. This was SGI's dumb mistake. The intersection of the set of all people who prefer NT and the set of all people who care about high bus rates and high end graphics is a very small set. They might get a few graphic designers in the movie industry and that's about it.
Sagan's book may be fiction, but if you look long enough you *will* find a circle embedded in PI. You will also find all the works of Shakespere encoded in ascii (as well as EBCDIC somewhere else in the sequence). The infinite monkeys are hard at work inside PI. (This is the point Sagan seemed to miss in the ending of his book. Even if She *found* a circle in PI that would prove nothing.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to lose your geeks, you have to find a way to give them promotions without turning them into managers.
That is the key problem with every company I've worked for (okay, so it's only two, but stories from friends at other companies have all been similar). They assume that the geeky jobs are at the bottom of the ladder and the PHB jobs are higher up. It's not so much that I want to put myself 'above' the managers, as it is that I want to see better stratification amongst the geeks. Too many companies have job titles that assume all geeks are the same. Most good managers know that isn't true, but they aren't in charge of the job titles, that's Human Resources, and so even the good managers can't do anything about the problem on their own. A kernel hacker with 10 years experience writing drivers *is* a different class of geek from a newly graduated 23-year old in need of some starting experience.
The other problem is that those xmodmap solutions don't do you a bit of good on the console screen.
The fact that pretty much every single group felt the need to so heavily butcher the AD&D rules to make them palatable is evidence for how bad they were. Hence, as to the subject at hand, a movie that was *actually* trying to model the AD&D system properly would be laughable. A movie that does the same thing most gaming groups did, and throws away all the self-contradictory stupid rules, could be rather fun.
- Windows NT has 37 percent lower TCO than UNIX. There is no reason to believe that Linux is significantly different than other versions of UNIX when it comes to TCO.
- Uhm, err. There is plenty of reason to believe that, given that the cost of the OS is very signifigant on commercial UNIXen. With the SGI's we have I end up having to get licenses for such 'extensive' add-ons as being able to print postscript to a printer (I'm not kidding). And having a working compiling environment. Commerical UNIXen ship OS's that don't have as many 'goodies' as Linux does, so when you use Linux as the base you don't have to buy as much of the OS at extra-cost as you do with commercial Unixen.
- Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium. These costs have to be factored into the total cost model.
- Bullshit. They don't have to be factored in unless you actually decide you need them. We aren't all big-time commercial operations that need that sort of thing.
- For example how many certified engineers are there for Linux? How easy is it to find skilled development and support people for Linux?
- I'm sorry, but an MSCE diploma is not worth the paper its printed on. The existance of the ability to get that kind of thing without any actual talent or knowlege just cheapens the value of the certificate. (and is unfair to those MSCEs who actually are qualified and get lost among the hordes.) The existance of hordes of MSCEs is not going to make any real difference to how easy it is to find good qualified employees.
- All systems are vulnerable to security issues, however it's important to note that Linux uses the same security model as the original UNIX implementations- a model that was not designed from the ground up to be secure.
- Uhm, hello, what planet are these people from? The 'original' security model of UNIX has about as much to do with modern UNIXen like Linux as the 'original' security model of DOS 1.0 has to do with Windows NT.
- Linux has not supported key security accreditation standards. Every member of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 3.5 has been evaluated at either a C2 level under the U.S. Government's evaluation process or at a C2-equivalent level under the British Government's ITSEC process.
- Great, so your NT enterprise server is going to be plenty secure so long as it isn't connected to your network at all (That's what C2 refers to). Big Furry Deal. Linux hasn't bothered with the certification because there's absolutely no point to it. It could probably pass it, but so what? C2 doesn't mean anything useful.
- Configuring Linux security requires an administrator to be an expert in the intricacies of the operating system and how components interact. Misconfigure any part of the operating system and the system could be vulnerable to attack. Windows NT security is easy to set up and administer with tools such as the Security Configuration Editor.
- Oh, come on now! Even most Windows advocates will say that having an unknowlegable person set up the security of a Windows NT server is a recipie for disaster. Just because the interface to do so is prettier doesn't alleviate the need for a well knowlegable person to decide what values should be used to fill in the blanks.
- Linux does not provide support for the broad range of hardware in use today; Windows NT 4.0 currently supports over 39,000 systems and devices on the Hardware Compatibility List. Linux does not support important ease-of-use technologies such as Plug and Play, USB, and Power Management
- Windows doesn't run on Macs, nor on Sparcs, nor on Alphas (not anymore), and so on. If you remember that fact, and start a phallus-waving contest of comparing the number of pieces of hardware that are supported, Windows won't look so hot anymore. Windows only supports more hardware if you limit your comparasins to the Intel PC. (And even then WINDOWS DOESN'T SUPPORT THE HARDWARE!!! THE HARDWARE SUPPORTS WINDOWS. Microsoft isn't writing those drivers, the hardware manufacturers are.)
And this one is my favorite (I don't have time to list everything and I'm getting tired, so I'll just cut to the most glaring stupidity): In one section they start by saying:Reality: Linux Needs Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories
Then they immediately proceed to list some anecdotal stories for places that use NT, RIGHT AFTER TELLING US that that same kind of anecdotal evidence is insufficient to show anything:
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, First Union Capital Markets, Nasdaq and many others run mission critical applications on Windows NT 4.0.
What a bunch of maroons. The sad part is that many a PHB will read this and never once consider that maybe they should take pro-NT information that comes from Microsoft with a little healthy skepticism. For some dumb reason, people who are normally healthily skeptical with other companys' claims drop all skepticism at Microsoft's claims. I don't understand it.
Go into Edit|Preferences, pick Appearance|Fonts. For the Variable Width Font, pick "Utopia".
This will render the site readable (if not palatable.)
The problem is that, in general Windows users prefer gigantic real-estate wasting fonts. So the default Netscape font on Windows is actually a lot bigger than the default Netscape font on Linux. The site had some style sheets tailored for Netscape up near the top (I did a 'view source), but they were tailored to the font sizes Netscape uses on Windows, not the sizes it uses on Linux. So when it says to make a font be a few sizes smaller than normal, it looks fine on Windows, where 'normal' size is so huge, but not on Linux where 'normal' size is smaller.
Utopia is a particulary large font even at the Linux Netscape default of '12 points', and so that renders something a bit more readable.
Things AD&D models poorly:
You can't have a Robin Hood, since theives suck at all combat including ranged weapons (that never made sense - A thief should be the best class with 'cowardly' weapons like bows and thrown daggars, but he's not.) You can't have the classic power struggles between mages, since mages are nothing more than containers for pre-fab spells with pre-fab effects. (No concept of mana or power). You can't have someone get better at something by being taught, since you know at level 1 exactly what all the abilities you will ever have for the rest of your life are (class), and you can't escape from that box.
Every average person you meet on the street will be wooden and alike in ability, since there is no effective difference between a STR of 10 and an STR of 14 or an INT of 10 and an INT of 14, etc... You have to go into the extremes before your main stats actually make any difference that actually matters in the game.
It will take over 10 blows with an axe to kill a very experienced criminal at an execution.
An experienced soldier can fall from a greater height without dying than an unexperienced one, for some, err, strange reason.
A street urchin who wants to iprove his theiving skills could do so by actually sneaking and picking pockets, but he'd be able to learn these skills faster if he instead went around killing people at random. For some, err, strange reason.
A mage who casts a spell would suddenly forget everything about that spell after he was done. For some, err, strange reason.
Humans run at the same speed as each other.
Humans are incapable of cross-training in multiple disciplines at once, while other races are, for some, err, strange reason.
A thief or assasin who sneaks up on a victim from behind can kill him in one easy blow, unless the victim is well travelled and experienced (in which case quadruple damage from a daggar through the heart still only hurts him enough to make him mad, for some, err, strange reason.)
Well, actually I'll probably end up seeing this movie anyway, since it will either be a good fantasy movie (meaning it totally ignores the AD&D rules), or it will be so oozing with cheese that I'll enjoy it in an MST3K kind of a way. In either case I agree that it will be quite the geek-fest.
It did remove the need for paper.
The problem is that it did not remove the desire for paper.
That definition is lame and unworkable.
Reagan was a talented spokesman and figurehead, and he knew that that was his role in things. It's his cabinet that made all the big decisions and knew about politics and government. That was how come his occasional senility didn't cause major trouble - he wasn't really running the day-to-day stuff anyway. I'll leave off the question as to whether his term had a posative or negative effect. I don't care to comment on that, only on the fact that he was a figurehead.
And yeah, verily did the prophets of RedHat predict that there would soon be a great wind in the upcoming year:
Red Hat Linux 5.0 (Hurricane) Login: _
I don't know how much of this sentiment is still around. It's kinda dumb when you think about it - these people are bringing in lots of money, so be nice.
Also, the following quote from the article should scare anyone who gives a damn about privacy on the net:
- "It is not that these are super whiz kids; it is the technology that gives them the ability to cover their tracks enough that you can have a hard time making a criminal case against them," said a senior federal investigator.
What this guy is trying to imply is that privacy is a tool of crackers, and if only there weren't so much privacy they wouldn't be able to get away with their crimes. Notice how he makes it out to sound as if the technology is going out of its way to make it easy to be anonymous. What a load of crap! If the technology does nothing, then anonymity is the default. The technology has to go out of its way to track people, not the other way around. (The web server has to actively engage in logging activity. It takes *less* effort to forget the accesses than it does to create logs and keep track of them.)The second major obsticle was that 'go' used camera and lookat point notation while Renderman simply stored the transformation matrix and nothing else. This meant that it was possible to recreate the camera point and lookat *direction*, but not the exact lookat point. This was a problem because the editor used the lookat point as the point to swing around when rotating the camera, and thus if you loose this information, the scene swings wildly when you rotate the camera and looks more like a 'pan' than a rotate. The solution was to assume that the scene was 'near' the world's origin point, and thus when recreating the lookat point, you pick the point along the lookat vector that is closest to the origin. (Simple math - find the point along the lookat vector where you get zero for the dot product of the lookat vector and a vector from the origin to the lookat point. A dot product of zero indicates perpendicular vectors, so that must be the closest point to the origin.)
Anyway, the project passed on to someone else when I left (I can't remember his name, but I remember the face), and it was mostly working then and he was going to add new features to it to take advantage of Renderman features that were not in Go.
I hope that long-winded answer helps satisfy your curiosity. I didn't meet him in person up close, but from fiddling with his source code I'd agree with your notion that he's quite a 3D guru. Some of that math was pretty neat and there was some things where at first glance it seems the algorithms shouldn't have worked but they did anyway. (Further examination showed that Brian was just being more clever than I could handle.) That guy is pretty darn cool. I wish him the best of luck in his new job.
If ___________ are outlawed, only outlaws will have _________________. .plural noun . . same plural noun
There, you have just made a magical phrase that can be used to argue against every single law ever made at any time in any place.
The gun advocates need to be more careful. Stop using such shoddy logic if you want to win people to your cause. This won't work. (Yes I know this wasn't about gun control, but you are borrowing their phraseology.)
Saying Chrisitianity is good for science because polytheism is worse is a bit like saying navy blue is a light color because it's not black.
Geek guys *wish* there were more geek girls out there. It is exactly the opposite of what you say. The fact that there are fewer female techies than male ones is a constant source of frustration for us geeky guys. It means we have to either compete for the few geek girls, which is a very oversaturated 'market' or we have to try to find that rarity among rarities: a non-geek who doesn't mind being around geeks. (That's rare whether you are talking women or men).
This study starts from the flawed assumption that there is some magic difference between being 'on-line' and not being on-line. There isn't. Not on real OS's which have been 'internet aware' since almost the dawn of the internet (Unix).
I was specifically talking about putting that much money *on your desk* as your workstation. Do you really have a $80k PC on your desk? (which is for your personal use only, not just a server that happens to be stored on your desk.)
If you can find pi in an infinately long random string chosen from ten characters (0-9) you can also find it in an infinately long random string of chosen from nine characters (1-9). You could also find it in a binary representation - you just have to pick some decoding scheme that makes use of the characters that exist in the string.
For your sin of assuming "hacker" always implies "cracker", your pennance is to write "hacker != cracker" on the chalkboard 500 times. (No fair writing a program to do it either.)
I was going to make some pithy comment, but you took all the fun out of it with that statement. You have summed up all religion in one statement: claiming you "know" something a-priori is not thinking.
So, to re-iterate - I am a counterexample. I don't eschew religion because it makes you meet people. I eschew it *despite* the fact that it makes you meet people. I won't lie just to get more friends.
Re-read his statement more carefully. He mentioned that the bible has been used as an an excuse to do bad things, but he did not make the claim that this is what causes the bible to be false. The bible is false on facts alone. Bad morality is just a side-effect of that.
The way I read it, they aren't ditching the Visual Workstation. They are ditching the idea of running NT on the Visual Workstation. This is a smart idea, and not just because I like Linux better than NT. The problem is that the kinds of customers who are into NT are generally not the same sorts of customers who will pay for the highest-end whizbang hardware. They want cheap Dells and Gateways. The sorts of customers who are willing to pay $5000 for a workstation that has amazingly fast busses and cards are usually the sort who don't mind using Unix. This was SGI's dumb mistake. The intersection of the set of all people who prefer NT and the set of all people who care about high bus rates and high end graphics is a very small set. They might get a few graphic designers in the movie industry and that's about it.
Sagan's book may be fiction, but if you look long enough you *will* find a circle embedded in PI. You will also find all the works of Shakespere encoded in ascii (as well as EBCDIC somewhere else in the sequence). The infinite monkeys are hard at work inside PI. (This is the point Sagan seemed to miss in the ending of his book. Even if She *found* a circle in PI that would prove nothing.)