Hopefully this will keep publishers from shipping broken/empty games with plans of patching them up later (*cough* UT3 *cough*); and we could go back to actually getting a working game on the disk, not a game in need of a patch and more content.
Before someone replies with the usual "this has been disproven time and again so stop bringing it up" I thought I'd just paraphrase some of NYT's writing on this. NYT should be plenty liberal to be listened to on this matter by all. They saw it coming nearly 10 years ago.
From NY Times (Sept 30th 1999) by By STEVEN A. HOLMES.
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. [personal side note: it's indirectly Bush's fault, too, for not fixing the problem]
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.
''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''
Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.
''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''
Under Fannie Mae's pilot program, consumers who qualify can secure a mortgage with an interest rate one percentage point above that of a conventional, 30-year fixed rate mortgage of less than $240,000 -- a rate that currently averages about 7.76 per cent. If the borrower makes his or her monthly payments on time for two years, the one percentage point premium is dropped.
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.
The problem slashdot will always have is that as the people who contribute learn more and more interesting things (that we would like to learn too), their time becomes more valuable and they have less time/energy to contribute knowledge.
It's still better than all the other link agg. sites (reddit, and we won't even bother mentioning the other one).
This has nothing to do with the Higgs. All they have potentially discovered is a new quark bound state. The fact that it is not expected is also not surprising since it is fantastically hard to be able to calculate what bound states there should be.
This is because quarks bind via the strong force and while we understand the principles behind this force what they imply is that at low energy the basic mathematical method typically used (perturbation theory) does not work because the force becomes so strong. Unfortunately nobody has found a real way around this so approximations are used and, not being fundamentally correct, these sometimes get things wrong.
As a particle experimentalist it looks like there are two promissing approaches to really solve this properly. The first is using huge, massively parallel computers and a technique called lattice QCD where you divide space and time into points and solve numerically. The computing power has just recently begun to be enough to start producing useful, believable results. the other technique is a result of string theory that has shown that a really strong force like QCD is mathematically equivalent to a weak force (which can be calculated) but in more than 3+1 dimensions....so there might actually be something useful coming out of string theory sooner than anticipated!
Somebody start a folding program for this; I'm not much interested in protein folding but being able to work towards a foreseeable end from which conclusions could be drawn would keep me interested.
Mod parent up. This is REALLY the best article I've EVER read about SSD performance. If you are interested in buying an SSD do yourself a favor and read it, and understand it.
Anand consistently delivers top notch articles. They've had the same, unobtrusive, useful interface for the last, oh, 8 years now? They haven't pumped the site full of advertisements either like some other *cough tomshardware cough* websites.
For other good reads from Anandtech check out the DX11 writeup or their Intel SSD article.
If you want a way to ensure China replaces the US as the next world superpower, you can be assured legislating crazy stuff like "removing all CO2 released into the atmosphere" is one of them. The environmental impact of CO2 hasn't even been proven. Nobody has stood up and said "um, if the environment is as stagnant and unchanging as you're saying, please explain the existence of the medieval grape and wine industries, or why we have archeological evidence of the Vikings producing wine in south Greenland, something is nowhere near possible given the current climate." Clearly, we're missing something about the environment.
The global warming group is a religous cult interested in legislating away the success of America. They did it to California and New York. Next up is America, if you let them.
But look at the environmental impact of solar power. You need an area the size of Texas in the southern US to replace the power needs of just California.
Remember all those pictures the greenies showed us of the caribou or whatever grazing by the oil pipelines in Alaska? Side note: whatever animal it was, they found that animals population has been exploding-- they all stay next to the oil pipelines because they're warm. Anyways, which do you think is better-- a pipeline through Alaska, or 700,000km^2 of land where ABSOLUTELY NOTHING can grow? If the greenies were trying to market this new technology to the greenies (and weren't telling them the name of it [solar]), they would say no way, for the same reason they say "no way" to oil pipelines through Alaska. It only works because they're trying to market it to a more rational group.
Of course they've cut down on discoveries. They have no need to go search for more oil.
Last year when it was $150 a barrel companies started searching (not Exxon, they knew it was a bubble and just kept their profits; very smart of them) and found new sources. Problem? Now that we're back at $40, there's no point in making the capital investment to extract the stuff; it's cheaper and they have plenty left where they have already built wells.
No, no field day here. They'll say "SEE??? This is why we need the government to subsidize it! It's cost prohibitive up front, and you can't make a profit on it, until the government subsidizes the first part (say, research into more efficient panels), THEN it becomes worth spending the money on".
I haven't come up with a good reply to that...I say it's not worth the taxpayer's money, he says it is. If they support it I don't see why they can't just fund it with their own money then.
I'll second that. Electrolyzing water is easy and makes a minor ex/implosion; we used a 100mL beaker. Was plenty of fun to entertain us 6th graders Other stuff we did: -we were put in groups and learned about flux, magnets, etc; and created a DC motor. The length of the rotating armature, and the number of windings we used was up to us. -had to research and build our own electrostatic generator. Only about half of the groups' generators worked, the best one was able to produce 1/2" sparks.
Yeah! The rascally evil students are wasting all the bandwidth on things like youtube, games, iTunes and Netflix movie downloads, etc. Perfectly illegitimate uses, the cable company should cut them off.
Might be Fox. I don't watch 24 for that very reason. Glacial plot. 8 minutes of interesting developments at the beginning of new episode. 30 minutes of fluff-- drama with Chloe, Jack Bauer calling somebody and telling them he doesn't have time to explain why he needs the code, blah blah, and then 6-8 more minutes at the end of interesting developments to get you back next episode.
I wouldn't blame them for pulling it. Episodes 1-2 were terrible. 3 was bearable, yet only because of a plot twist. Episode 4 actually went somewhere, finally had some of the clever banter between characters that made Firefly special. Finally starting to care about what happens to them.
I'd say it's entirely Joss's fault if Fox wants to cancel it. I have better things to do than watch garbage like eps 1-2. Had I not gotten bored and ended up watching Ep3, I would have left and never come back. We know what Joss is capable of, and this certainly isn't it.
What is this "homebrew game developer" you talk about? They are welcome to develop anything they want on the PC. Saying you want it on a console on TV is a copout. You just want to be able to pirate.
The shrapnel also buried itself 1" into the gelatin dummy (who had the same resistance to penetration [gotta be a better term for this but you get the point] as human flesh).
IIRC, this occurred at ~300x. I think GP is a little wrong on the 16x thing. The limitation has been making a high enough powered laser to heat the bits to 200C in the split second the bit is being written.
I don't like the physics system. There's too much sliding-- path dependency. Feels almost like Tribes/Legends*.
The grapple is a neat gameplay element, but the implementation is terrible-- the line from you to the grapple point jitters back and forth across the screen.
Legends is a free Tribes game; worth checking out.
Slashdot Mirror
Gnome will always be slow...
why can't these scientists just devote their work to curing the common cold or the flu?
How will our immune system end up looking without a frequent visitor to give it a work out?
or better: "Because you haven't donated enough money to them"
GP probably thinks the government (IE, you) should pay for it.
Hopefully this will keep publishers from shipping broken/empty games with plans of patching them up later (*cough* UT3 *cough*); and we could go back to actually getting a working game on the disk, not a game in need of a patch and more content.
If we had declared the Fed illegal, then September 15th would have been the last day you would have withdrawn from your savings account.
Before someone replies with the usual "this has been disproven time and again so stop bringing it up" I thought I'd just paraphrase some of NYT's writing on this. NYT should be plenty liberal to be listened to on this matter by all. They saw it coming nearly 10 years ago.
From NY Times (Sept 30th 1999) by By STEVEN A. HOLMES.
Original links here and here.
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. [personal side note: it's indirectly Bush's fault, too, for not fixing the problem]
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.
''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''
Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.
''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''
Under Fannie Mae's pilot program, consumers who qualify can secure a mortgage with an interest rate one percentage point above that of a conventional, 30-year fixed rate mortgage of less than $240,000 -- a rate that currently averages about 7.76 per cent. If the borrower makes his or her monthly payments on time for two years, the one percentage point premium is dropped.
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.
The problem slashdot will always have is that as the people who contribute learn more and more interesting things (that we would like to learn too), their time becomes more valuable and they have less time/energy to contribute knowledge.
It's still better than all the other link agg. sites (reddit, and we won't even bother mentioning the other one).
This has nothing to do with the Higgs. All they have potentially discovered is a new quark bound state. The fact that it is not expected is also not surprising since it is fantastically hard to be able to calculate what bound states there should be.
This is because quarks bind via the strong force and while we understand the principles behind this force what they imply is that at low energy the basic mathematical method typically used (perturbation theory) does not work because the force becomes so strong. Unfortunately nobody has found a real way around this so approximations are used and, not being fundamentally correct, these sometimes get things wrong.
As a particle experimentalist it looks like there are two promissing approaches to really solve this properly. The first is using huge, massively parallel computers and a technique called lattice QCD where you divide space and time into points and solve numerically. The computing power has just recently begun to be enough to start producing useful, believable results. the other technique is a result of string theory that has shown that a really strong force like QCD is mathematically equivalent to a weak force (which can be calculated) but in more than 3+1 dimensions....so there might actually be something useful coming out of string theory sooner than anticipated!
Somebody start a folding program for this; I'm not much interested in protein folding but being able to work towards a foreseeable end from which conclusions could be drawn would keep me interested.
Let them eat cake, I'm going to the moon baby!
If you would send them to the moon instead they could eat cheese.
Mod parent up. This is REALLY the best article I've EVER read about SSD performance. If you are interested in buying an SSD do yourself a favor and read it, and understand it.
Anand consistently delivers top notch articles. They've had the same, unobtrusive, useful interface for the last, oh, 8 years now? They haven't pumped the site full of advertisements either like some other *cough tomshardware cough* websites.
For other good reads from Anandtech check out the DX11 writeup or their Intel SSD article.
If you want a way to ensure China replaces the US as the next world superpower, you can be assured legislating crazy stuff like "removing all CO2 released into the atmosphere" is one of them. The environmental impact of CO2 hasn't even been proven. Nobody has stood up and said "um, if the environment is as stagnant and unchanging as you're saying, please explain the existence of the medieval grape and wine industries, or why we have archeological evidence of the Vikings producing wine in south Greenland, something is nowhere near possible given the current climate." Clearly, we're missing something about the environment.
The global warming group is a religous cult interested in legislating away the success of America. They did it to California and New York. Next up is America, if you let them.
But look at the environmental impact of solar power. You need an area the size of Texas in the southern US to replace the power needs of just California.
Remember all those pictures the greenies showed us of the caribou or whatever grazing by the oil pipelines in Alaska? Side note: whatever animal it was, they found that animals population has been exploding-- they all stay next to the oil pipelines because they're warm. Anyways, which do you think is better-- a pipeline through Alaska, or 700,000km^2 of land where ABSOLUTELY NOTHING can grow? If the greenies were trying to market this new technology to the greenies (and weren't telling them the name of it [solar]), they would say no way, for the same reason they say "no way" to oil pipelines through Alaska. It only works because they're trying to market it to a more rational group.
Of course they've cut down on discoveries. They have no need to go search for more oil.
Last year when it was $150 a barrel companies started searching (not Exxon, they knew it was a bubble and just kept their profits; very smart of them) and found new sources. Problem? Now that we're back at $40, there's no point in making the capital investment to extract the stuff; it's cheaper and they have plenty left where they have already built wells.
No, no field day here. They'll say "SEE??? This is why we need the government to subsidize it! It's cost prohibitive up front, and you can't make a profit on it, until the government subsidizes the first part (say, research into more efficient panels), THEN it becomes worth spending the money on".
I haven't come up with a good reply to that...I say it's not worth the taxpayer's money, he says it is.
If they support it I don't see why they can't just fund it with their own money then.
I'll second that. Electrolyzing water is easy and makes a minor ex/implosion; we used a 100mL beaker. Was plenty of fun to entertain us 6th graders
Other stuff we did:
-we were put in groups and learned about flux, magnets, etc; and created a DC motor. The length of the rotating armature, and the number of windings we used was up to us.
-had to research and build our own electrostatic generator. Only about half of the groups' generators worked, the best one was able to produce 1/2" sparks.
Yeah! The rascally evil students are wasting all the bandwidth on things like youtube, games, iTunes and Netflix movie downloads, etc. Perfectly illegitimate uses, the cable company should cut them off.
Fortunately, the 2nd Amendment still holds.
Chance for monopoly means investors are willing to invest more of their money-->more R&D.
The one that got me was "Quid Pro Apple"
Might be Fox. I don't watch 24 for that very reason. Glacial plot. 8 minutes of interesting developments at the beginning of new episode. 30 minutes of fluff-- drama with Chloe, Jack Bauer calling somebody and telling them he doesn't have time to explain why he needs the code, blah blah, and then 6-8 more minutes at the end of interesting developments to get you back next episode.
I wouldn't blame them for pulling it. Episodes 1-2 were terrible. 3 was bearable, yet only because of a plot twist. Episode 4 actually went somewhere, finally had some of the clever banter between characters that made Firefly special. Finally starting to care about what happens to them.
I'd say it's entirely Joss's fault if Fox wants to cancel it. I have better things to do than watch garbage like eps 1-2. Had I not gotten bored and ended up watching Ep3, I would have left and never come back. We know what Joss is capable of, and this certainly isn't it.
What is this "homebrew game developer" you talk about? They are welcome to develop anything they want on the PC. Saying you want it on a console on TV is a copout. You just want to be able to pirate.
The shrapnel also buried itself 1" into the gelatin dummy (who had the same resistance to penetration [gotta be a better term for this but you get the point] as human flesh).
IIRC, this occurred at ~300x.
I think GP is a little wrong on the 16x thing. The limitation has been making a high enough powered laser to heat the bits to 200C in the split second the bit is being written.
Oh please, because the king of Norway is in any way comparable to Saddam Hussein. Yep, he might as well change his name.
Sheesh.
I don't like the physics system. There's too much sliding-- path dependency. Feels almost like Tribes/Legends*.
The grapple is a neat gameplay element, but the implementation is terrible-- the line from you to the grapple point jitters back and forth across the screen.
Legends is a free Tribes game; worth checking out.
I have, back when it was called swiftfox. Still very laggy.