Yes... have a big night on town with the money. Its... only... a... game!!!!!!!!!
Will inspired programming be recognised?
on
Is Programming Art?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
An artist can break rules in an inspired way and receive the highest praise for it--but sometimes only after they've been dead for a long time.
As a musician, I deal with lots of music from hundreds of years ago, and the best music often takes many years to reach its proper place in public opinion. The art of programming is relatively young, and only pioneering conceptual giants like Babbage (Lovelace?) and Turing spring to my mind as 'great' programmers (though I have never studied computer science).
For example, it's not obvious from a quick search whether any one person was instrumental in conceiving the multi-threaded Apollo Guidance Computer. Unfortunately this is probably the most glamourous computer built in the 1960s, and I fear the rapid pace of tecnological change will keep the art of programming focussed only on the present, relegating both inspired and dull programming to obscurity before proper judgements can be made.
Perhaps these days on the internet the millions on non-native English speakers are exerting some influence. I have enough German to get by in Germany and chat about things to non-English-speakers, but I'll never be able to appreciate poetry or read a novel in German, and enjoy the language at the high level that I enjoy English. And though I can usually be understood, my grammar will always sound wrong to German speakers.
If lazy English speakers see language as solely for communicating basic information, why should they aspire to a level higher than someone for whom English is a second language?
It reminds me of the Muslims in Iraq. The easing of pressure from Saddam and then the occupying forces allows the Sunnis and Shiites to argue amongst themselves (of course I hardly need to add that this behavior isn't restricted to Muslims, Christians, or even religious people). Now that Linux and BSD are beginning to be seen as an alternative to Windows in (parts of) the general computer user community, they're getting the gloves out.
It seems the best thing about XP it that your games will run better, which is definitely not a good motivation for businesses to upgrade
At work, my computer still runs Mac OS9 95% of the time, as the special hardware does the grunt work and the cost of converting third party plug-ins is prohibitive. On the rare occasions I boot into OSX to do one of the few things unavailable in OS9, the pre-emptive multi-tasking makes it much easier to surf and do other unproductive things.
The first time I took my undead mage alt to Oggrimar, I remember thinking the female orc guards were not bad looking. Of course I'd been hanging around with undead for 10 levels by then...
The biggest difference between Alliance and Horde is that Alliance are pretty and Horde are ugly. Heresay says Horde players are more mature, and my mage's guild had lots of guys in their 30s like me. A little extra maturity would definitely help team play in battlegrounds.
New players would be more likely to choose pretty Alliance characters. My first character is a bald gnome version of me, and my second is a (stacked) human version of my girlfriend. If I'd done some research my initial choices may have been different, but I came to WoW from Starcraft and WC3, so was a total noob to MMORPGs.
If there was somehow real money to be made legally by reporting security flaws (and without becoming a criminal and dealing with criminals), there would be much less incentive for hackers to go to the dark side.
Re:When the trustee was a pregnant lady, however .
on
Trust in a Bottle
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· Score: 1
Yes, it's generally a good idea to be trusting the person stimulating your nipples. Maybe oxytocin makes that easier.
As a user of the Macintosh Operating System, I've found my most frustrating moments with Windows to be associated with networking:
Three years ago, being unable to get a PC to play Warcraft on an otherwise Mac LAN network.
Two years ago, taking a lot of effort to get my former housemate's Thinkpad to recognise its own internal modem
Two days ago, trying to configure my current housemate's modern laptop not to log on to some random intermittent wireless network when it's plugged into a perfectly good wired LAN. Haven't worked that one out yet without disabling wireless.
And I thought that my ISP's SMPT server was the only one that worked. It's not a problem for me because I have a desktop computer and use webmail away from home.
I've noticed my friends with laptops duly switching SMPT servers depending on their location. I'll have to tell them to try port 3535
Cambridge astrophysicist Stephen Hawking is amongst those researchers who have pondered the question of wormholes.
In the 1980s, he argued that something fundamental in the laws of physics would prevent wormholes being used for time travel. This idea forms the basis of Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture.
Perhaps needing to use a galaxy's worth of energy for one trip is Hawking's fundamental obstacle.
I can imagine the time travelling beings of the future:
- Luigi's dead. He made great pizza. I think I'll go back a couple of years and get one.
- But you'll have to take out the Andromeda galaxy to do that
- Don't worry, dude. There are billions of galaxies out there!
Re:Speed up the interface a bit!
on
Just a Phone?
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· Score: 1
one thing that does annoy me about the modern handsets is the sluggish interface due to the anti-aliased true-type fonts, animation, heavy operating system overhead (relative to the CPU), colour menus and other crap that gets in the way when you just want to make a quick call
I was quite proud of crashing my Nokia 7110, "an important phone", full of groundbreaking new features, none of them implemented very well.
why not have "Advanced user", "Normal user" and "Dimwit" settings
I hope you're not calling my mother a dimwit;-)
My girlfriend and I were amused to find out that both our mothers carry their numbers round with them in their handbags on a crowded and worn sheet of paper. A phone with an easy to use directory system would be great for them. The ad for it could feature middle-aged people throwing away their sheets of paper!
My parents have the same problem as the British guy. They had a school-aged Chinese boarder for a while, and he got adsl. After his parents worked out that he wasn't doing any work, he went back to China without putting his affairs in order. So if they want adsl, they have to get the line unblocked by talking with the boarder's ISP. But the boarder's uncontactable in China, and Telstra are unwilling (bastards) or unable (stupid) to tell them which ISP is blocking a line that they own. Lucky for them they're happy with dialup.
(or, provided that an emulation-layer for the original platform can be constructed)
I'm definitely no expert in these matters, but if a company has an old mainframe system, how difficult would it be to emulate it on a reliable modern system, and throw all sorts of scenarios at it. If anything came up they'd be able to debug it (by hiring a Fortran guy or girl). That would be much cheaper than a new system, and management wouldn't have to learn a new system.
You should add/opt/local/bin (or wherever you chose to install DarwinPorts) to your shell's path.
If you are using Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" or a Bourne shell (bash, zsh), add the following line to your~/.profile:
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin
This is exactly the sort of thing I come up against each and every time I get excited about running Unix software on my Mac. I fear the gap between my knowledge of Unix basics, and what I need to know to ever do anything useful will never be bridged.
...if these delegates supported Kerry because of their commitment to telephone standards.
I don't imagine they did, so it seems supporting Kerry has poisoned their mind on every topic, including technical matters they deal with professionally. If phone standards can have a right wing slant, Bush will make it happen.
On the flip-side, I have so little respect for Bush that I can't take anything he says seriously, so it goes both ways.
I remember Hindemith quoting a study that scientists had found no difference in the touch (for one note) between a concert pianist and "Mr Smith's umbrella". A good pianist is a button pusher par excellence. They can hit a four or five note chord and bring out one of the notes. With pedalling and "touch" (relative strength of notes maybe) they can make a line sing, which is a fine achievement for what is essentially a percussion instrument.
An acoustic piano doesn't have a volume control. The only control over the volume is the key velocity, as a performer has almost no control over the sound after a key has been hit.
"Lo-def"MIDI would include keystrokes with their velocity, key releases, and when the pedal is engaged and released. I believe Yamaha's hi-def MIDI treats the pedals as continuous controllers so every move can be accurately recorded. They probably log the pressure and speed of release of the keys as well, though this would have only a marginal effect on the sound in all but exceptional circumstances.
In my job as a sound engineer, I regularly edit classical piano music. High-end midi pianos have an amazing potential for recording, as no high fidelity recording can substitute for a real live sound. A recorded midi file would have the feel of an artist, and it would be easy to correct wrong notes.
Extracting a usable midi file from a recording is very sophisticated signal processing. If the pedal is down a new attack can get lost among the wash of notes. The musical score would help if the program knew what notes to expect. Even so, I suspect they chose Glenn Gould because he was very sparing with the pedal when he played Bach.
...to my first and biggest iMac Starcraft cluster. It used my iMac, the host's girlfriend's iMac, and 3 iMacs the Apple shop guy had borrowed from work (plus some kind of laptop and an early model TiBook). This was the first time everything just worked (mainly because previously I thought I had read in LAN Games for Dummies that 127.0.0.x was a good set of numbers to use).
It was an excellent and multicoloured night. The host's girlfriend remarked genially about "boy games" and gave us stuff to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... have a big night on town with the money. Its... only... a... game!!!!!!!!!
As a musician, I deal with lots of music from hundreds of years ago, and the best music often takes many years to reach its proper place in public opinion. The art of programming is relatively young, and only pioneering conceptual giants like Babbage (Lovelace?) and Turing spring to my mind as 'great' programmers (though I have never studied computer science).
For example, it's not obvious from a quick search whether any one person was instrumental in conceiving the multi-threaded Apollo Guidance Computer. Unfortunately this is probably the most glamourous computer built in the 1960s, and I fear the rapid pace of tecnological change will keep the art of programming focussed only on the present, relegating both inspired and dull programming to obscurity before proper judgements can be made.
Perhaps these days on the internet the millions on non-native English speakers are exerting some influence. I have enough German to get by in Germany and chat about things to non-English-speakers, but I'll never be able to appreciate poetry or read a novel in German, and enjoy the language at the high level that I enjoy English. And though I can usually be understood, my grammar will always sound wrong to German speakers.
If lazy English speakers see language as solely for communicating basic information, why should they aspire to a level higher than someone for whom English is a second language?
...as any MMORPG running in 1996 would want to be.
It reminds me of the Muslims in Iraq. The easing of pressure from Saddam and then the occupying forces allows the Sunnis and Shiites to argue amongst themselves (of course I hardly need to add that this behavior isn't restricted to Muslims, Christians, or even religious people). Now that Linux and BSD are beginning to be seen as an alternative to Windows in (parts of) the general computer user community, they're getting the gloves out.
It seems the best thing about XP it that your games will run better, which is definitely not a good motivation for businesses to upgrade
At work, my computer still runs Mac OS9 95% of the time, as the special hardware does the grunt work and the cost of converting third party plug-ins is prohibitive. On the rare occasions I boot into OSX to do one of the few things unavailable in OS9, the pre-emptive multi-tasking makes it much easier to surf and do other unproductive things.
The first time I took my undead mage alt to Oggrimar, I remember thinking the female orc guards were not bad looking. Of course I'd been hanging around with undead for 10 levels by then...
The biggest difference between Alliance and Horde is that Alliance are pretty and Horde are ugly. Heresay says Horde players are more mature, and my mage's guild had lots of guys in their 30s like me. A little extra maturity would definitely help team play in battlegrounds.
New players would be more likely to choose pretty Alliance characters. My first character is a bald gnome version of me, and my second is a (stacked) human version of my girlfriend. If I'd done some research my initial choices may have been different, but I came to WoW from Starcraft and WC3, so was a total noob to MMORPGs.
If there was somehow real money to be made legally by reporting security flaws (and without becoming a criminal and dealing with criminals), there would be much less incentive for hackers to go to the dark side.
Yes, it's generally a good idea to be trusting the person stimulating your nipples. Maybe oxytocin makes that easier.
Windows wireless networking uses cables? Who would have thought? I'm more of a Windows noob than I thought I was ;-)
As a user of the Macintosh Operating System, I've found my most frustrating moments with Windows to be associated with networking:
And I thought that my ISP's SMPT server was the only one that worked. It's not a problem for me because I have a desktop computer and use webmail away from home.
I've noticed my friends with laptops duly switching SMPT servers depending on their location. I'll have to tell them to try port 3535
Perhaps needing to use a galaxy's worth of energy for one trip is Hawking's fundamental obstacle.
I can imagine the time travelling beings of the future:
- Luigi's dead. He made great pizza. I think I'll go back a couple of years and get one.
- But you'll have to take out the Andromeda galaxy to do that
- Don't worry, dude. There are billions of galaxies out there!
I was quite proud of crashing my Nokia 7110, "an important phone", full of groundbreaking new features, none of them implemented very well.
I hope you're not calling my mother a dimwit ;-)
My girlfriend and I were amused to find out that both our mothers carry their numbers round with them in their handbags on a crowded and worn sheet of paper. A phone with an easy to use directory system would be great for them. The ad for it could feature middle-aged people throwing away their sheets of paper!
Or your computer! It could power the video card or something, so you have to exercise to get a decent fps.
My parents have the same problem as the British guy. They had a school-aged Chinese boarder for a while, and he got adsl. After his parents worked out that he wasn't doing any work, he went back to China without putting his affairs in order. So if they want adsl, they have to get the line unblocked by talking with the boarder's ISP. But the boarder's uncontactable in China, and Telstra are unwilling (bastards) or unable (stupid) to tell them which ISP is blocking a line that they own. Lucky for them they're happy with dialup.
Can something invisible be pink?
I'm definitely no expert in these matters, but if a company has an old mainframe system, how difficult would it be to emulate it on a reliable modern system, and throw all sorts of scenarios at it. If anything came up they'd be able to debug it (by hiring a Fortran guy or girl). That would be much cheaper than a new system, and management wouldn't have to learn a new system.
This is exactly the sort of thing I come up against each and every time I get excited about running Unix software on my Mac. I fear the gap between my knowledge of Unix basics, and what I need to know to ever do anything useful will never be bridged.
Beat me to it! :-)
...if these delegates supported Kerry because of their commitment to telephone standards.
I don't imagine they did, so it seems supporting Kerry has poisoned their mind on every topic, including technical matters they deal with professionally. If phone standards can have a right wing slant, Bush will make it happen.
On the flip-side, I have so little respect for Bush that I can't take anything he says seriously, so it goes both ways.
I remember Hindemith quoting a study that scientists had found no difference in the touch (for one note) between a concert pianist and "Mr Smith's umbrella". A good pianist is a button pusher par excellence. They can hit a four or five note chord and bring out one of the notes. With pedalling and "touch" (relative strength of notes maybe) they can make a line sing, which is a fine achievement for what is essentially a percussion instrument.
An acoustic piano doesn't have a volume control. The only control over the volume is the key velocity, as a performer has almost no control over the sound after a key has been hit.
"Lo-def"MIDI would include keystrokes with their velocity, key releases, and when the pedal is engaged and released. I believe Yamaha's hi-def MIDI treats the pedals as continuous controllers so every move can be accurately recorded. They probably log the pressure and speed of release of the keys as well, though this would have only a marginal effect on the sound in all but exceptional circumstances.
In my job as a sound engineer, I regularly edit classical piano music. High-end midi pianos have an amazing potential for recording, as no high fidelity recording can substitute for a real live sound. A recorded midi file would have the feel of an artist, and it would be easy to correct wrong notes.
Extracting a usable midi file from a recording is very sophisticated signal processing. If the pedal is down a new attack can get lost among the wash of notes. The musical score would help if the program knew what notes to expect. Even so, I suspect they chose Glenn Gould because he was very sparing with the pedal when he played Bach.
...to my first and biggest iMac Starcraft cluster. It used my iMac, the host's girlfriend's iMac, and 3 iMacs the Apple shop guy had borrowed from work (plus some kind of laptop and an early model TiBook). This was the first time everything just worked (mainly because previously I thought I had read in LAN Games for Dummies that 127.0.0.x was a good set of numbers to use).
It was an excellent and multicoloured night. The host's girlfriend remarked genially about "boy games" and gave us stuff to eat.