Inversely, what part of "accidents happen" don't you understand? The risk associated with an item isn't assessed only from the best case scenario. It has to average out all scenarios over how likely they are.
I'd consider photos of provocative poses in a bikini a lot more "offensive"/inappropriate/whatever than nursing. Yet the policy of "no bare tits" is making black and white an issue that is really a grey area -- what the GP complained bout.
The idea of "equal rights" makes no sense whatsoever. What we should worry about is "equivalent rights" or some other suitable catch phrase. In this particular case, it means that, if I can't show my primary sexual characteristics, nor can a female. That means my groin has to be covered. For a female, it extends to the breasts as well. If, for example, I were to have a child, I'd say that my paternity leave shouldn't be *quite* as long as my GF's maternity leave: She's the one who has to physically recover from it, and there's a period where she doesn't need my help but isn't quite in work shape yet. Of course, this is before the extended leave one of us may take, which is really a matter of each couple's personal preference.
Of course, the devil is in the details. Much in the same way that a flaccid penis is somewhat devoid of a sexual connotation, a woman breastfeeding is really not all that hot either. To me, it fires up my paternal side, rather than making me horny. I can only assume that most reasonable males would have similar reactions.
OK, that wasn't the easiest sentence to parse ever, but I still thought it clear that what came after the colon qualified roguelikes, not modern games. As in: roguelikes are more like chess and tetris, where you're supposed to replay loads of times, rather than like most modern games, that favor one single long playthrough.
Regarding MMOs, what you see is what you get. The whole game is one big timesink, only question is where the balance between time sink and drudgery lies. If you don't like that sort of gameplay (which is perfectly legitimate), don't pick it up. Picking up an action game that promises 100 hours of gameplay to find out it's 20 hours of gameplay done 5 times because there's some cockblocks in there and you're forced to repeat things over and over is where the problem lies.
And yes, I agree that repeating a level from the top isn't necessarily a timesink. One has only to look at RTS types to find an example of gameplay where starting over will, 9 times out of 10, involve a radical change of strategy. And there's action games with slightly more linear gameplay styles, with the strategy variations you mentioned.
However, this discussion cropped up around Prince of Persia, which is sort of a platformer (which is really just a sort of puzzle game with less thinking and more dexterity) besides being an action game. If you played Portal, I'm sure you'll have noticed that dying never involved going back further than the beginning of the present puzzle. Most games of the sort would've had you at the top of the level (unless you'd manually saved), and would've had artificially longer playthroughs just because of that.
You have a point, but it's mostly as an addendum, really. It's not that games shouldn't at all "punish" you for failure (there's Lucasarts graphic adventures for that), but rather that games shouldn't punish you with time sinks -- which was the article's point. Certain gameplay elements are fun done once, but become horrible if you have to repeat them. For example, if you have a gauntlet run immediately before a boss fight, having a checkpoint/savespot/whatever in between is more or less essential (unless, of course, the gauntlet is meant to be a part of the boss fight itself). Taking this guy's point to the extreme, this is why most modern games have eschewed the whole 1-up system for a save system: the time sink from having to start over from the top is too large. Of course, there's also the roguelikes you mentioned, which are more like tetris or chess than they are like most modern computer games: You're supposed to re-play LOADS of times, with comparatively short games each time, rather than one very long play-through.
Personally, from the Ubisoft PoP series I only played Warrior Within, but the system there was pretty cool: the Sands of Time meter gave you a number of "rewinds" that took the apparent grind out of repeating tricky bits (even the best load/save routines for modern games hold you out of the game for a few seconds, which makes it feel more drawn out than the in-game rewind), and their limited (if not too scarce) nature kept open the possibility of failure. Not being able to save anywhere gives you short term goals (get to the next save spot), while having save spots close enough to each other that having to stop playing on a moment's notice isn't a biggie.
No it isn't. How do you know that a particular sector of the hard disk isn't failing, causing access to that one sector to be a thousand times slower than other sectors? This is why experiments are supposed to be run many times, across different platforms, and the aggregate results taken. Without multiple experimental replicates you have no way of showing that the results you observe generalise at all; the observed problem could just be one bad run.
True, reducing statistical bias is an important point. So is taking all the data into account and making sure your conclusions are consistent with all of it -- and doing so while not adding superfluous factors to the equation.
My argument came in two points. First, that the performance difference was too big to be attributed to disk layout (which you then countered with faulty sectors, which is grabbing for straws). Moreover, I stated that the result was consistent with the other tests. Which is likelier: "there's a hard disk defect on the specific bit of the platter that windows was accessing, and that particular test performed worse than it should, fortuitously yielding a performance difference in line with the other tests" or "this one individual test performed the same as most of the other tests (OpenGL being the exception, for known reasons), indicating consistency between test results"?
Ooops. Forgot to mention that, also, just because the code is the same doesn't mean that the compiler is, or that the compiler's output for different platforms is, or that the problem isn't in the platform-specific code. Or, in this case and as was mentioned elsewhere, perhaps the dominating issue is that the JVM versions are different and the one used in Linux is head and shoulders above in overall performance.
So... all this tells us is that in their configurations, Linux runs their Java programs faster.. which if thats ALL you care about is fine... but most users also care about other services either OS provides.
Precisely. There are so many much larger things at hand at so many levels, that disk layout, bad sectors, etc are really a minor, minor issue.
Indeed, you're rambling. Partitioning schemes are not very relevant for this test suite. The only test that could realistically be considered HDD-bound is the file encryption one, and even then the performance difference is too large to be attributed to which bit of the disk you're reading. I'd guess that on-the-fly encryption is must more CPU-bound than it is HDD-bound, and under that light that test proves consistent with all the other raw maths performance tests.
If anything, what I'd like to see is the 3D rendering bit redone with an nVidea card (that actually has decent drivers), to actually test their assertion that the performance loss on the linux side is really due to the graphics drivers.
The NAND and NOR names actually from the fact that all logical gates can be constructed from NAND or NOR gates. In particular, latches can be built from either two NORs or two NANDs. This property can be used to make complex logic by just making masses of NANDs/NORs chained the right way rather than specifically making all the bits and pieces in an integrated circuit different.
I would suggest that for the time being, while the kids are using them in school, lock them down, maybe a timer from 8 to 3 you cannot go to facebook or myspace etc, but after hours those restrictions are lifted, and when the student leaves the school you can give them the admin password to unlock everything, though that would require a spreadsheet of the computers serials and the admin password, but that's not too tough.
"Not too tough", yet you still describe something that is just begging for problems (giving/removing admin privileges on a daily basis? On a machine you have less physical access to than the users? sheesh!), and would best be done by... you know... using some sort of filtering software on the school's internet connection. Revolutionary thinking, I know.
I'd rather run free software like Ubuntu that they *want* to be freely run though, rather than software like OSX where, even when you bought and own it, they are going to try to tell you what you can and can't do with it.
Irrespectively of discussions on the morality of the specific things asked, Ubuntu has loads of (is mostly?) GPL software, which is vastly criticized by BSD aficionados precisely because "they are going to try to tell you what you can and can't do with it", so you might want to be more careful about the criticisms you level at people.
Re-writing the GP's point "is airport-support like cd recording support, so third party wifi cards suffer from the same integration issues as third party CD-Rs, which aren't quite supported?". It wasn't that unparsable to begin with though.
Funny, I don't have a single DRMed piece of music in my iPod. I just have my CD collection ripped to MP3, and copied over to the iPod. Using the device does not mandate using the store, you know? And of all the DRM schemes around, the one that freely lets you exploit the "analogue hole" by burning to CD and re-ripping (yes, I know, you lose quality) is "less evil" than most anyway.
I think you're completely confusing the notion of "rewarding" and "fun". If you're a physicist, for example, you're still going to spend long hours integrating, differentiating, and doing all sorts of boring as hell calculations of several other sorts. That work is hardly "fun", yet the pay off at the end is quite rewarding. I don't find my work (programming) particularly fun in and of itself. But I do find it rewarding. I can also have fun programming though, or sometimes both. On the other hand, I'm an avid fan of board games, and I find them quite fun, if hardly rewarding. There are occasional pearls like Go, which is quite fun, but enough of a mental exercise that makes learning new stuff about it remarkably rewarding.
Lets say you want to install skype. You head over to skype.com, and you choose download. If you get the windows version, you'll then install using a more or less standard windows installer. If you choose to get the ubuntu version, you'll get a.deb, about equivalent to a windows.msi -- double click, wait, done. If you want to install applications that are equally supported in Windows and Linux, you'll get Linux installations that are as simple as Windows ones.
Now, let's say you know you want some sort of drawing program. You don't quite know which one, you just want something. In Ubuntu, you head over to the Applications thing (can't recall what it's called, always use synaptic), browse to the right category, check the short descriptions for something that seems interesting, double click. How would this process go in Windows? Can you honestly say it'd be simpler? (Yes, I'm disregarding Paint, just the same as I'm disregarding that most linux installs have Gimp.)
What's happening here is not "It looks like you're writing a cover letter. Let me help you with that." Google is starting on top of a functioning search engine, and then it's tweaking results.
If you're a frothing at the mouth "Wikipedia isn't reliable" hater, downmod wikipedia enough, and google should take the hint and stop making Wikipedia rank #2 or #3 in mostly any search where they have an article. If you're a rabid "I want Jimbo Wales's children" wiki-lover, upmod it, and it'll go to #1 on most searches rather than the #2 or #3 I mentioned. If you lean right, upmod fox news. If you lean left, upmod cnn (or something, other than the stereotypical Fox, I don't really know the US media political leanings all that well).
yes, of course. But, to give an easy and stereotypical example, writing lisp-style functional/recursive code in C is a royal pain in the arse (function pointers are not friendly things to work with), while writing procedural code in lisp sucks to no end as well (its standard looping facilities being several kinds of bad all at once). "the language is technically capable of" is different from "the language makes it feasible". That feasibility is more often than not measurable in the end result (bugs, time to implement, etc etc).
Yes, I figure you have been at "Excellent" for a while longer than I've been around. And yes, "an" account. Sock puppets are even more pathetic than karma whoring:). It wasn't an attack on you, so much as at the notion of "the quickest way to Excellent is (...)". Who cares? It's slashdot, not the legislative elections.
Buttonless is ever so slightly off the mark. The new macbooks (vanilla/air/pro) all have a "buttonless" trackpad, where, rather than a discrete button, the whole trackpad acts as one (and I mean mechanically, not tapping - it hinges on the top iirc).
Slashdot Mirror
Inversely, what part of "accidents happen" don't you understand? The risk associated with an item isn't assessed only from the best case scenario. It has to average out all scenarios over how likely they are.
I'd consider photos of provocative poses in a bikini a lot more "offensive"/inappropriate/whatever than nursing. Yet the policy of "no bare tits" is making black and white an issue that is really a grey area -- what the GP complained bout.
The idea of "equal rights" makes no sense whatsoever. What we should worry about is "equivalent rights" or some other suitable catch phrase. In this particular case, it means that, if I can't show my primary sexual characteristics, nor can a female. That means my groin has to be covered. For a female, it extends to the breasts as well. If, for example, I were to have a child, I'd say that my paternity leave shouldn't be *quite* as long as my GF's maternity leave: She's the one who has to physically recover from it, and there's a period where she doesn't need my help but isn't quite in work shape yet. Of course, this is before the extended leave one of us may take, which is really a matter of each couple's personal preference.
Of course, the devil is in the details. Much in the same way that a flaccid penis is somewhat devoid of a sexual connotation, a woman breastfeeding is really not all that hot either. To me, it fires up my paternal side, rather than making me horny. I can only assume that most reasonable males would have similar reactions.
and there would be a re-productivity curve for employees too
What, you're saying a change to OO.o would make employees reproduce? Seriously, made-up faux technical speech make baby jesus cry.
You play different modern games than I do! ;)
OK, that wasn't the easiest sentence to parse ever, but I still thought it clear that what came after the colon qualified roguelikes, not modern games. As in: roguelikes are more like chess and tetris, where you're supposed to replay loads of times, rather than like most modern games, that favor one single long playthrough.
Regarding MMOs, what you see is what you get. The whole game is one big timesink, only question is where the balance between time sink and drudgery lies. If you don't like that sort of gameplay (which is perfectly legitimate), don't pick it up. Picking up an action game that promises 100 hours of gameplay to find out it's 20 hours of gameplay done 5 times because there's some cockblocks in there and you're forced to repeat things over and over is where the problem lies.
And yes, I agree that repeating a level from the top isn't necessarily a timesink. One has only to look at RTS types to find an example of gameplay where starting over will, 9 times out of 10, involve a radical change of strategy. And there's action games with slightly more linear gameplay styles, with the strategy variations you mentioned.
However, this discussion cropped up around Prince of Persia, which is sort of a platformer (which is really just a sort of puzzle game with less thinking and more dexterity) besides being an action game. If you played Portal, I'm sure you'll have noticed that dying never involved going back further than the beginning of the present puzzle. Most games of the sort would've had you at the top of the level (unless you'd manually saved), and would've had artificially longer playthroughs just because of that.
You have a point, but it's mostly as an addendum, really. It's not that games shouldn't at all "punish" you for failure (there's Lucasarts graphic adventures for that), but rather that games shouldn't punish you with time sinks -- which was the article's point. Certain gameplay elements are fun done once, but become horrible if you have to repeat them. For example, if you have a gauntlet run immediately before a boss fight, having a checkpoint/savespot/whatever in between is more or less essential (unless, of course, the gauntlet is meant to be a part of the boss fight itself). Taking this guy's point to the extreme, this is why most modern games have eschewed the whole 1-up system for a save system: the time sink from having to start over from the top is too large. Of course, there's also the roguelikes you mentioned, which are more like tetris or chess than they are like most modern computer games: You're supposed to re-play LOADS of times, with comparatively short games each time, rather than one very long play-through.
Personally, from the Ubisoft PoP series I only played Warrior Within, but the system there was pretty cool: the Sands of Time meter gave you a number of "rewinds" that took the apparent grind out of repeating tricky bits (even the best load/save routines for modern games hold you out of the game for a few seconds, which makes it feel more drawn out than the in-game rewind), and their limited (if not too scarce) nature kept open the possibility of failure. Not being able to save anywhere gives you short term goals (get to the next save spot), while having save spots close enough to each other that having to stop playing on a moment's notice isn't a biggie.
Enough hard data for you?
Granted, there's no 'A' to point at and say 'RTFA', but the summary says the paper was reviewed for the conference.
No it isn't. How do you know that a particular sector of the hard disk isn't failing, causing access to that one sector to be a thousand times slower than other sectors? This is why experiments are supposed to be run many times, across different platforms, and the aggregate results taken. Without multiple experimental replicates you have no way of showing that the results you observe generalise at all; the observed problem could just be one bad run.
True, reducing statistical bias is an important point. So is taking all the data into account and making sure your conclusions are consistent with all of it -- and doing so while not adding superfluous factors to the equation.
My argument came in two points. First, that the performance difference was too big to be attributed to disk layout (which you then countered with faulty sectors, which is grabbing for straws). Moreover, I stated that the result was consistent with the other tests. Which is likelier: "there's a hard disk defect on the specific bit of the platter that windows was accessing, and that particular test performed worse than it should, fortuitously yielding a performance difference in line with the other tests" or "this one individual test performed the same as most of the other tests (OpenGL being the exception, for known reasons), indicating consistency between test results"?
Ooops. Forgot to mention that, also, just because the code is the same doesn't mean that the compiler is, or that the compiler's output for different platforms is, or that the problem isn't in the platform-specific code. Or, in this case and as was mentioned elsewhere, perhaps the dominating issue is that the JVM versions are different and the one used in Linux is head and shoulders above in overall performance.
So... all this tells us is that in their configurations, Linux runs their Java programs faster.. which if thats ALL you care about is fine... but most users also care about other services either OS provides.
Precisely. There are so many much larger things at hand at so many levels, that disk layout, bad sectors, etc are really a minor, minor issue.
Indeed, you're rambling. Partitioning schemes are not very relevant for this test suite. The only test that could realistically be considered HDD-bound is the file encryption one, and even then the performance difference is too large to be attributed to which bit of the disk you're reading. I'd guess that on-the-fly encryption is must more CPU-bound than it is HDD-bound, and under that light that test proves consistent with all the other raw maths performance tests.
If anything, what I'd like to see is the 3D rendering bit redone with an nVidea card (that actually has decent drivers), to actually test their assertion that the performance loss on the linux side is really due to the graphics drivers.
The NAND and NOR names actually from the fact that all logical gates can be constructed from NAND or NOR gates. In particular, latches can be built from either two NORs or two NANDs. This property can be used to make complex logic by just making masses of NANDs/NORs chained the right way rather than specifically making all the bits and pieces in an integrated circuit different.
Minor addition: JBOD can be
or
Since it's spanning "just a bunch of disks", it can be literally "just a bunch of disks", without the matched size that RAID requires.
I would suggest that for the time being, while the kids are using them in school, lock them down, maybe a timer from 8 to 3 you cannot go to facebook or myspace etc, but after hours those restrictions are lifted, and when the student leaves the school you can give them the admin password to unlock everything, though that would require a spreadsheet of the computers serials and the admin password, but that's not too tough.
"Not too tough", yet you still describe something that is just begging for problems (giving/removing admin privileges on a daily basis? On a machine you have less physical access to than the users? sheesh!), and would best be done by... you know... using some sort of filtering software on the school's internet connection. Revolutionary thinking, I know.
Please consider that: 1. Catholics are a subset of Christians, and 2. Fundamentalist is a descriptor, not a subcategory
I'd rather run free software like Ubuntu that they *want* to be freely run though, rather than software like OSX where, even when you bought and own it, they are going to try to tell you what you can and can't do with it.
Irrespectively of discussions on the morality of the specific things asked, Ubuntu has loads of (is mostly?) GPL software, which is vastly criticized by BSD aficionados precisely because "they are going to try to tell you what you can and can't do with it", so you might want to be more careful about the criticisms you level at people.
Re-writing the GP's point "is airport-support like cd recording support, so third party wifi cards suffer from the same integration issues as third party CD-Rs, which aren't quite supported?". It wasn't that unparsable to begin with though.
Funny, I don't have a single DRMed piece of music in my iPod. I just have my CD collection ripped to MP3, and copied over to the iPod. Using the device does not mandate using the store, you know? And of all the DRM schemes around, the one that freely lets you exploit the "analogue hole" by burning to CD and re-ripping (yes, I know, you lose quality) is "less evil" than most anyway.
I think you're completely confusing the notion of "rewarding" and "fun". If you're a physicist, for example, you're still going to spend long hours integrating, differentiating, and doing all sorts of boring as hell calculations of several other sorts. That work is hardly "fun", yet the pay off at the end is quite rewarding. I don't find my work (programming) particularly fun in and of itself. But I do find it rewarding. I can also have fun programming though, or sometimes both. On the other hand, I'm an avid fan of board games, and I find them quite fun, if hardly rewarding. There are occasional pearls like Go, which is quite fun, but enough of a mental exercise that makes learning new stuff about it remarkably rewarding.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
Lets say you want to install skype. You head over to skype.com, and you choose download. If you get the windows version, you'll then install using a more or less standard windows installer. If you choose to get the ubuntu version, you'll get a .deb, about equivalent to a windows .msi -- double click, wait, done. If you want to install applications that are equally supported in Windows and Linux, you'll get Linux installations that are as simple as Windows ones.
Now, let's say you know you want some sort of drawing program. You don't quite know which one, you just want something. In Ubuntu, you head over to the Applications thing (can't recall what it's called, always use synaptic), browse to the right category, check the short descriptions for something that seems interesting, double click. How would this process go in Windows? Can you honestly say it'd be simpler? (Yes, I'm disregarding Paint, just the same as I'm disregarding that most linux installs have Gimp.)
What's happening here is not "It looks like you're writing a cover letter. Let me help you with that." Google is starting on top of a functioning search engine, and then it's tweaking results.
If you're a frothing at the mouth "Wikipedia isn't reliable" hater, downmod wikipedia enough, and google should take the hint and stop making Wikipedia rank #2 or #3 in mostly any search where they have an article. If you're a rabid "I want Jimbo Wales's children" wiki-lover, upmod it, and it'll go to #1 on most searches rather than the #2 or #3 I mentioned. If you lean right, upmod fox news. If you lean left, upmod cnn (or something, other than the stereotypical Fox, I don't really know the US media political leanings all that well).
yes, of course. But, to give an easy and stereotypical example, writing lisp-style functional/recursive code in C is a royal pain in the arse (function pointers are not friendly things to work with), while writing procedural code in lisp sucks to no end as well (its standard looping facilities being several kinds of bad all at once). "the language is technically capable of" is different from "the language makes it feasible". That feasibility is more often than not measurable in the end result (bugs, time to implement, etc etc).
Yes, I figure you have been at "Excellent" for a while longer than I've been around. And yes, "an" account. Sock puppets are even more pathetic than karma whoring :). It wasn't an attack on you, so much as at the notion of "the quickest way to Excellent is (...)". Who cares? It's slashdot, not the legislative elections.
Buttonless is ever so slightly off the mark. The new macbooks (vanilla/air/pro) all have a "buttonless" trackpad, where, rather than a discrete button, the whole trackpad acts as one (and I mean mechanically, not tapping - it hinges on the top iirc).