REPENT! Repent ye geeky sinners! For the end of days is upon ye!
Lo! As it is written, there shall befall a great and terrible calamity upon all the kin of the nerdy, and their most precious gadgets and devices shall be laid low by the machinations of the wicked! And they shall lament, and make agitated phone calls even in the early hours of the late morning!
And there shall be a great moaning as the geeky rise to diagnose the woes of their parents and uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors and co-workers and friends and even children! Naught will your warnings save you as the wretched shall pay no need. And ye shall be swamped with piteous wails and whinges as the masses of humanity beat down thy doors and fill up they inboxes with useless protestations and opinions and heed not thy councils.
Thou shalt spend thy last days overseeing the procurement and installation of countless digital devices. Yea, in peoples very living rooms! And thou shalt be condemned to maintain and provide unpaid support for each and every one of these cheap and buggy imports till the end of thy unhappy life.
Repent geeky sinners! Give up thy sinful social ways and cast off thy connections to society, like the mathematicians and programmers of old! Give up thy internet and telephone connections and families and social life! Give up and repent, lest ye be danmed! REPENT!
OK seriously, the above post is pretty screwed up in Firefox. I've got floating tab bars or something all over the post as well as throughout the thread and the tt font is coming out at 16 point or in some very large font.
These css screw ups have been happening a lot lately. Then again I am using the older (and better) comment system.
The Wii itself is not the problem. It's technical specs are not the problem. The problem is the people making games for it and their overall lackluster approach to the whole process. Nintendo and their marketing are to blame for this.
When they ported Resident Evil 4 to the Wii with new controls, they managed to make it look worse than the original Gamecube version which could be run from the very same console. This is typical of the kind of shoddy workmanship that is put into most Wii games. Games like Mario Galaxy and Metroid show what the Wii is capable of if effort is put in, but most developers aren't willing to go to such lengths.
It's not just graphics. The overall quality of Wii games is consistently lower than the average for PS2, DS and Gamecube titles. Games are short, rely too much on motion control, lack additional content and generally fall far below the value for money mark. Universally, developers have decided that Wii owners are 4-10 year olds and soccer moms who will spend $60 and 60 minutes on a game before becoming bored. The way you have to flail your arms about to play some titles, I can't say I really blame them.
As an experiment, the Wii has both hugely succeeded and epically failed. Yes, it has succeeded in selling game consoles to a massively wider mainstream market. But it has also succeeded in proving that in any industry, the mainstream market does not desire quality. The mainstream wants crud. They spend huge amounts on sugary gop and if you serve them up sirloin they'll complain because they prefer the slop.
The doom of the Wii has been sealed by its user base and existing game library. It doesn't matter if the next Zelda game surpasses the Ocarina of Time or if the definitive FPS of our time is a Wii exclusive. Most existing Wii owners do not want "Triple A" titles or anything close to it. They want Cooking Mama and Wii Fit and Mario Kart, because that's want Nintendo has told them they want, and that's what they got and thats all they'll ever want now.
So, no developer is really going to spend the effort making a quality Wii title. They're going to make crud. As times passed, this became a self fulfilling prophecy to the point that normal video game players stopped buying Wii's or sold them. The fate of Madworld, poor as it was, is indicative of this trend. It's now a vicious circle which the Wii, and probably Nintendo, have no hope of ever escaping.
The Wii could have been a success story. Ultimately, graphics don't count for a awful lot when it comes to quality titles, and the breadth and depth of titles on the PS2 prove what can be done with limited hardware. Alas, the Wii did not take this route. Instead of providing affordable quality, it has provided cheap, and you got what you paid for.
It didn't have to be like this. The Wii could have been the next PS2. But it isn't. Instead it's the next MySpace.
BTW, a very ill-advised design choice of Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0211/ Ask any numerical analyst to know why it is a terrible idea to solve a linear system with inv(A)*b. But make sure you have at least half an hour free.
To make a long story short; solving Ax=b by calculating x=inv(A)*b is a terrible idea because calculating inv(A) is an inherently difficult thing. While it would be extremely useful to have inv(A), it's not strictly neccessary to obtain in in order to solve Ax=b.
At the most basic level, the technique which most would be aware of to solve Ax=b is basic Gauss Elimination, with an augmented matrix and back substitution. In fact, this is often the very first thing people learn how to do in a linear algebra course. It isn't much better than finding the inverse, but it saves a lot of computation in the long run.
Of course there are many other techniques. Happily however, most packages can now automatically make the best choice on which technique to use, depending on the properties of A. In Matlab and Octave, it all boils down to using the left division operator like so x=A\b instead of the inverse calculating x=inv(A)*b
Using the first command, Matlab and Octave will choose a technique that best suits the matrix A. This page has a list of all the techniques that Matlab can use to solve the linear system. To my knowledge, Octave has a number of techniques as well, but I'm not sure if it's as comprehensive as Matlab. Also, Octave's left division operator has been known to have bugs.
And to return to the main topic, Octave and Matlab both use LAPACK extensively, which is written completely in Fortran(and based on BLAS). There's really no other language for linear algebra.
Your morals already have a poor reflection. You've spent your time going over the pedantics of civil vs criminal and spouting latin terms that you've completely set aside the fact that peoples property is being taken from them, by force, without fair trial or just compensation.
I don't care if they're drug dealers. I really don't. I don't care if they're murdering peodophile terrorists. A court should not be able to take away their property with proving that it was ill gotten. Currently, the owners have to prove it wasn't, if they even get a chance to do that.
What's the logic behind this? To win the War on Drugs? Boo hoo. I'm a teetotaler and I don't give a flying fig whether people get high on alcohol, cannabis, cocaine or heroin. It's all the one to me. But so are all defendants. I don't care how evil anyone thinks they are. Justice for all means justice for all, not for people you think deserve it.
In the past, when an aristocrat or lord committed a crime against a lesser citizen, they were not held to account in the same way as an ordinary man would. Instead of summary justice, they needed only to pay a small fine or make some other slight amends. This included crimes such as aggravated assault and murder.
Ah, 2007. George W. Bush was president, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was above 12,000, credit was cheap and homes were expensive, and no one but forum goons knew about RapeLay.
But now times are hard and circuses too expensive to hold so frequently. And so, the masses must be occupied with something else. Moral outrage serves quite well in this regard.
Think about it. Who honestly gives a flying fiddlers about some cartoon sex abuse in a game for Japanese recluses? Is this the kind of thing that keeps people in Nebraska up at night. No.
People like outrage. It's a form of entertainment. People like to hear about all kinds of lurid and obscene stories so that they can feel morally superior and have an opportunity to get themselves all riled up. It's a great way to kill boredom. Just think about who gets the most interested in these moral crusades? It is hard working 9 to 5'ers who earn their keep and spend their free time productively. No. It's the TV addicts, and idle homewives, and OAPs who have nothing better to do with their time than get excited about what single Japanese men masturbate to.
As soon as the cash runs dry and the good times are over, the moral reactionaries come crawling out of the woodwork. It's a fine time to be conservative. But rest assured when the money returns and people have the means to party again, these same people will swing the night away with the best of them.
Re:Worth thinking about
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Not a bad retrospective, and interesting in that it illustrates some of the reasons for Unix's success: availability of source, and the ability for the user to create and replace tools easily.
Exactly. Unix has survived for as long as it has because it was built from, encouraged and profited from a culture of free innovation. Indeed, moreso that its actual code, I would argue that it is this culture that constitutes exactly what is meant by Unix.
Unix is not just an OS. It is a culture. Indeed, there is really no one "Unix" operating system. Or at least, no one widely used one called "Unix". Linux, BSD, OSX, BeOS, all can be called *nix systems. But what unifies them is not their internal mechanisms or algorithms or standards. What links them is the culture of the people who use them, and who build them. The idea of freely sharing tools, building on the work of others, understanding the whole of the machine, making magic happen with code; that is what Unix really is. You just don't see this kind of thinking in groups using other operating systems.
It's no surprise that the GPL and open source in general were born from the minds of Unix hackers. In many ways, the GPL only formalises the culture of academic openness, innovation and free sharing of ideas that existed throughout the Unix timeline. It's true that Unix was regarded by Big Corps as a money making excercise, but that's not how hackers saw it. They saw Unix and the programs that ran on it as part of their culture, and more importantly, heritage.
Unix has become more than source code or a framework. Is a significant part of our society. The norms and customs of Unix hackers have become their own tradition and even law in places. Unix and the hacker culture are a way our society has found to cope with the recent addition of computers, a way that has served well as the they and the internet become more and more pervasive. Like the old traditions and customs that founded our legal and civil systems, the Unix culture has formed the foundation of how we deal with the integration of computers into our lives.
The culture, traditions and ethics of Unix will probably outlast the lines of source that make up the programs, or the architectures they ran on. I expect Unix and hacker culture, or their descendants, will still be around in another 40 or 400 years, forming the philosophical foundation of a digital age.
It did! But, there's really only so many times you can run through Mercy Hospital before the experience becomes a little dull. Unpredictable certainly(to a point). But the difference between meeting a witch on the roof verse the reception area is kind of moot by the 50th playthrough.
After a while, even Left 4 Dead became routine. Despite the procedural content, after a few playthroughs you simply got to know the game and all its little tricks. The unpredictability became tactical, not strategic. I've played with people who can call smoker and hunter spawns before they even happen. People who know and scavenge every drop off point. People who know zombie dispersal patterns and bottling strategies. People with flawless plans for every panic event. Essentially, there are only 4 maps, so this wasn't very hard.
The game needed new expansions. Proper expansions. New maps, new campaigns, new game modes, new special infected, new survivors, new weapons, etc, etc. To keep things fresh. It was more than feasible. When you see how one man recreated the police station from Resident Evil 2 as a L4D map, Valve's tardiness in bringing out new maps becomes more incriminating.
Personally, I think the reason behind a new game verse new expansions has less to do with technical issues, and more to do with Microsoft. Specifically, the 360 port of L4D. Basically, Microsoft promote paid downloadable content, and weren't happy with the free updates for L4D that Valve were pushing out on the 360. In addition, all new achievements on the 360 must be tied to paid content, meaning Valve couldn't release new maps for free and give achievements for them at the same time.
In short, the 360 port of L4D has tied Valves hands with the entire game. For any major update they create, they'll invoke more of Microsoft's ire and that of their fans. A brand new game allows them to break the deadlock, but will probably end up creating a new one. You can fully expect that in future, L4D games will have minimal expansions and new games will be preferred to expansions in all cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you have a better method of measuring this quality objectively, I for one am all ears.
Here's three screaming kids. Your move.
No. We need The Killer.
Dnon'pt lijsetin too hiemm! Thhaat fowul bpotchchedd tehh hwole oupparaasion! Weere roooined!!
REPENT! Repent ye geeky sinners! For the end of days is upon ye!
Lo! As it is written, there shall befall a great and terrible calamity upon all the kin of the nerdy, and their most precious gadgets and devices shall be laid low by the machinations of the wicked! And they shall lament, and make agitated phone calls even in the early hours of the late morning!
And there shall be a great moaning as the geeky rise to diagnose the woes of their parents and uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors and co-workers and friends and even children! Naught will your warnings save you as the wretched shall pay no need. And ye shall be swamped with piteous wails and whinges as the masses of humanity beat down thy doors and fill up they inboxes with useless protestations and opinions and heed not thy councils.
Thou shalt spend thy last days overseeing the procurement and installation of countless digital devices. Yea, in peoples very living rooms! And thou shalt be condemned to maintain and provide unpaid support for each and every one of these cheap and buggy imports till the end of thy unhappy life.
Repent geeky sinners! Give up thy sinful social ways and cast off thy connections to society, like the mathematicians and programmers of old! Give up thy internet and telephone connections and families and social life! Give up and repent, lest ye be danmed! REPENT!
OK seriously, the above post is pretty screwed up in Firefox. I've got floating tab bars or something all over the post as well as throughout the thread and the tt font is coming out at 16 point or in some very large font.
These css screw ups have been happening a lot lately. Then again I am using the older (and better) comment system.
The Wii itself is not the problem. It's technical specs are not the problem. The problem is the people making games for it and their overall lackluster approach to the whole process. Nintendo and their marketing are to blame for this.
When they ported Resident Evil 4 to the Wii with new controls, they managed to make it look worse than the original Gamecube version which could be run from the very same console. This is typical of the kind of shoddy workmanship that is put into most Wii games. Games like Mario Galaxy and Metroid show what the Wii is capable of if effort is put in, but most developers aren't willing to go to such lengths.
It's not just graphics. The overall quality of Wii games is consistently lower than the average for PS2, DS and Gamecube titles. Games are short, rely too much on motion control, lack additional content and generally fall far below the value for money mark. Universally, developers have decided that Wii owners are 4-10 year olds and soccer moms who will spend $60 and 60 minutes on a game before becoming bored. The way you have to flail your arms about to play some titles, I can't say I really blame them.
As an experiment, the Wii has both hugely succeeded and epically failed. Yes, it has succeeded in selling game consoles to a massively wider mainstream market. But it has also succeeded in proving that in any industry, the mainstream market does not desire quality. The mainstream wants crud. They spend huge amounts on sugary gop and if you serve them up sirloin they'll complain because they prefer the slop.
The doom of the Wii has been sealed by its user base and existing game library. It doesn't matter if the next Zelda game surpasses the Ocarina of Time or if the definitive FPS of our time is a Wii exclusive. Most existing Wii owners do not want "Triple A" titles or anything close to it. They want Cooking Mama and Wii Fit and Mario Kart, because that's want Nintendo has told them they want, and that's what they got and thats all they'll ever want now.
So, no developer is really going to spend the effort making a quality Wii title. They're going to make crud. As times passed, this became a self fulfilling prophecy to the point that normal video game players stopped buying Wii's or sold them. The fate of Madworld, poor as it was, is indicative of this trend. It's now a vicious circle which the Wii, and probably Nintendo, have no hope of ever escaping.
The Wii could have been a success story. Ultimately, graphics don't count for a awful lot when it comes to quality titles, and the breadth and depth of titles on the PS2 prove what can be done with limited hardware. Alas, the Wii did not take this route. Instead of providing affordable quality, it has provided cheap, and you got what you paid for.
It didn't have to be like this. The Wii could have been the next PS2. But it isn't. Instead it's the next MySpace.
Excepting the simulation that's already been running for the last 4 billion years that is.
To make a long story short; solving Ax=b by calculating x=inv(A)*b is a terrible idea because calculating inv(A) is an inherently difficult thing. While it would be extremely useful to have inv(A), it's not strictly neccessary to obtain in in order to solve Ax=b.
At the most basic level, the technique which most would be aware of to solve Ax=b is basic Gauss Elimination, with an augmented matrix and back substitution. In fact, this is often the very first thing people learn how to do in a linear algebra course. It isn't much better than finding the inverse, but it saves a lot of computation in the long run.
Of course there are many other techniques. Happily however, most packages can now automatically make the best choice on which technique to use, depending on the properties of A. In Matlab and Octave, it all boils down to using the left division operator like so
x=A\b
instead of the inverse calculating
x=inv(A)*b
Using the first command, Matlab and Octave will choose a technique that best suits the matrix A. This page has a list of all the techniques that Matlab can use to solve the linear system. To my knowledge, Octave has a number of techniques as well, but I'm not sure if it's as comprehensive as Matlab. Also, Octave's left division operator has been known to have bugs.
And to return to the main topic, Octave and Matlab both use LAPACK extensively, which is written completely in Fortran(and based on BLAS). There's really no other language for linear algebra.
A pervert has been punished. What more justice does anyone need?
Your morals already have a poor reflection. You've spent your time going over the pedantics of civil vs criminal and spouting latin terms that you've completely set aside the fact that peoples property is being taken from them, by force, without fair trial or just compensation.
I don't care if they're drug dealers. I really don't. I don't care if they're murdering peodophile terrorists. A court should not be able to take away their property with proving that it was ill gotten. Currently, the owners have to prove it wasn't, if they even get a chance to do that.
What's the logic behind this? To win the War on Drugs? Boo hoo. I'm a teetotaler and I don't give a flying fig whether people get high on alcohol, cannabis, cocaine or heroin. It's all the one to me. But so are all defendants. I don't care how evil anyone thinks they are. Justice for all means justice for all, not for people you think deserve it.
In the past, when an aristocrat or lord committed a crime against a lesser citizen, they were not held to account in the same way as an ordinary man would. Instead of summary justice, they needed only to pay a small fine or make some other slight amends. This included crimes such as aggravated assault and murder.
Our society is not so different.
Given that "masturbation" literally means "self-harm", I'd fully agree with calling tweets public masturbation.
Perhaps we should say more precisely: The mode of all twits is one tweet.
Yes, but people with astrophysics degrees haven't been laid by dirty old men, so it all balances out.
But now times are hard and circuses too expensive to hold so frequently. And so, the masses must be occupied with something else. Moral outrage serves quite well in this regard.
Think about it. Who honestly gives a flying fiddlers about some cartoon sex abuse in a game for Japanese recluses? Is this the kind of thing that keeps people in Nebraska up at night. No.
People like outrage. It's a form of entertainment. People like to hear about all kinds of lurid and obscene stories so that they can feel morally superior and have an opportunity to get themselves all riled up. It's a great way to kill boredom. Just think about who gets the most interested in these moral crusades? It is hard working 9 to 5'ers who earn their keep and spend their free time productively. No. It's the TV addicts, and idle homewives, and OAPs who have nothing better to do with their time than get excited about what single Japanese men masturbate to.
As soon as the cash runs dry and the good times are over, the moral reactionaries come crawling out of the woodwork. It's a fine time to be conservative. But rest assured when the money returns and people have the means to party again, these same people will swing the night away with the best of them.
.... Oh, wait.
Exactly. Unix has survived for as long as it has because it was built from, encouraged and profited from a culture of free innovation. Indeed, moreso that its actual code, I would argue that it is this culture that constitutes exactly what is meant by Unix.
Unix is not just an OS. It is a culture. Indeed, there is really no one "Unix" operating system. Or at least, no one widely used one called "Unix". Linux, BSD, OSX, BeOS, all can be called *nix systems. But what unifies them is not their internal mechanisms or algorithms or standards. What links them is the culture of the people who use them, and who build them. The idea of freely sharing tools, building on the work of others, understanding the whole of the machine, making magic happen with code; that is what Unix really is. You just don't see this kind of thinking in groups using other operating systems.
It's no surprise that the GPL and open source in general were born from the minds of Unix hackers. In many ways, the GPL only formalises the culture of academic openness, innovation and free sharing of ideas that existed throughout the Unix timeline. It's true that Unix was regarded by Big Corps as a money making excercise, but that's not how hackers saw it. They saw Unix and the programs that ran on it as part of their culture, and more importantly, heritage.
Unix has become more than source code or a framework. Is a significant part of our society. The norms and customs of Unix hackers have become their own tradition and even law in places. Unix and the hacker culture are a way our society has found to cope with the recent addition of computers, a way that has served well as the they and the internet become more and more pervasive. Like the old traditions and customs that founded our legal and civil systems, the Unix culture has formed the foundation of how we deal with the integration of computers into our lives.
The culture, traditions and ethics of Unix will probably outlast the lines of source that make up the programs, or the architectures they ran on. I expect Unix and hacker culture, or their descendants, will still be around in another 40 or 400 years, forming the philosophical foundation of a digital age.
Not as much as he loves you!
It did! But, there's really only so many times you can run through Mercy Hospital before the experience becomes a little dull. Unpredictable certainly(to a point). But the difference between meeting a witch on the roof verse the reception area is kind of moot by the 50th playthrough.
After a while, even Left 4 Dead became routine. Despite the procedural content, after a few playthroughs you simply got to know the game and all its little tricks. The unpredictability became tactical, not strategic. I've played with people who can call smoker and hunter spawns before they even happen. People who know and scavenge every drop off point. People who know zombie dispersal patterns and bottling strategies. People with flawless plans for every panic event. Essentially, there are only 4 maps, so this wasn't very hard.
The game needed new expansions. Proper expansions. New maps, new campaigns, new game modes, new special infected, new survivors, new weapons, etc, etc. To keep things fresh. It was more than feasible. When you see how one man recreated the police station from Resident Evil 2 as a L4D map, Valve's tardiness in bringing out new maps becomes more incriminating.
Personally, I think the reason behind a new game verse new expansions has less to do with technical issues, and more to do with Microsoft. Specifically, the 360 port of L4D. Basically, Microsoft promote paid downloadable content, and weren't happy with the free updates for L4D that Valve were pushing out on the 360. In addition, all new achievements on the 360 must be tied to paid content, meaning Valve couldn't release new maps for free and give achievements for them at the same time.
In short, the 360 port of L4D has tied Valves hands with the entire game. For any major update they create, they'll invoke more of Microsoft's ire and that of their fans. A brand new game allows them to break the deadlock, but will probably end up creating a new one. You can fully expect that in future, L4D games will have minimal expansions and new games will be preferred to expansions in all cases.
Oh! To visit Cambridge once a-gain!
Cheat to get your institution a higher place in the college rankings of course!
As a mathematician, I can assure you that the time a student must spend to learn the material is no indicator of their ability with it.
By which you mean; accept the multitude of barriers and prejudices I and others put against them.
"Share"! As if Last.fm would give such valuable data away for free.