I don't pretend to know anything about the effects of daily trips to space on the upper atmosphere. Perhaps it's not much different than the effects of all the airplanes already in the sky every day. Anyone have smarts on this?
Weta Digital in Wellington was heavily involved in 3-D visual effects for James Cameron's Avatar and is also working in 3-D for the first Tintin film, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Look, it's an extra technology that improves movie for those that like the 3-D effect. It doesn't affect the quality of the movie. Good and bad movies will still be made.
The reason I dislike movies being made in 3-D is because once the decision has been made to do so, 95% of the time the 3-D technology drives the movie a la Doctor Tongue. It's like the director/studio just can't help themselves; they have to be constantly drawing attention to it. This drives me crazy.
Hopefully, they will go the "Avatar" route and just make the thing in 3-D, and any "into the camera" stuff will be minimal and come across as natural. If 2-D morphing was exploited when it first came out in the same way as 3-D has historically been exploited, "Willow" would have been a much different movie, and not for the better.
Agreed. Unfortunately, on the rare occasion where I get asked where I would like to be located, I reply, "in a closed office with a door, by myself, on the opposite side of the office from the rest of the team." Management typically thinks I say this because I demand privilege, but what I really desire most is a quiet place at which people don't strike up water cooler conversations three feet away and that is as difficult as possible for people on the team to walk up and start talking to me instead of sending me an email.
And no, I've never been granted that request. Ever. I have always been put out on the main open floor of cubicles amidst the chaos and noise.
...people are less than rational beings when their lives are perceived to be at stake.
Imagine the tin foil hat conspiracies that will start flying regarding government control of these chips to herd people away from sensitive places like, say, keeping protesters away from special events (G8 summits, WHO get-togethers, etc).:)
Yes. It's bad coding. Very very bad coding. And, no offense, but it indicates intellectual laziness on your part.
Any developer worth their salt would spend the time to understand *why* their code is mysteriously working, rather than just throwing up their hands and moving on, as a) it might be working for your test cases but still be incorrect, and b) anyone coming along later will be hosed, as if you couldn't understand it, there's a good chance they won't be able to, either. And of course, d) any developer worth their salt *wants* to know why their code is working, simply because it's interesting and *part of their job*.
Agreed. I started a job with a company that had developed a client server application meant to support thousands of customers at one time. The programmers working there at the time I started were, for the most part, incompetent boobs. Case in point: the first thing I noticed during my whirlwind tour of the server code was the initialization. They would fork the server and have one copy watch the other. When the server crashed (which was frighteningly often), this forked copy would detect it, throw away the crashed server and automatically fork a new one. Naturally, every connected customer would be unceremoniously disconnected whenever this happened and all active transactions were rolled back.
They did this because they got tired of doing it manually, since the server crashed constantly. Once I finished my tour of the code, from which I could fill half a notebook with a sizable list of coding atrocities, the first thing I did was remove the forking initialization code (hehe) based on my personal conviction that the server should not crash. I then spent the next several weeks fixing the astounding number of crash bugs that were now laid bare, and rewriting scads of horrible functions.
Bit off-topic here, but over-engineering structures has been commonplace until around the 19th century when engineers started actually understanding what Hook and Young were saying. With no understanding of stress concentrations and, consequently, why ships kept breaking in two while at sea, people of the day would ensure that the forces acting on their structures were well below the breaking stress of the materials, sometimes by as high as a factor of eight or nine times the breaking stress. This was called the "factor of safety" and often referred to as the "factor of ignorance." Not surprisingly, this puts up the weight and cost of the structure considerably.
This is why early aircraft designers spent more time increasing the power of their engines than trying to deal with reducing the weight of their contraptions; if you throw enough power into it, you can get just about anything to fly.:)
I suspect it's also why people have historically considered heavy structures to be safer than those that are "light and flimsy."
I don't find anything "natural" about a generation of people who necessarily and systematically started destroyed the English language because earlier texting devices (i.e., phones) required one to use a numeric keypad, an absolutely *horrible* method of entering text, as their interface. combind w/the impashens of yuth, its y u get so mny ppl who lern 2 rite like this b4 they even mak it 2 skool.
It would not surprise me that one day, nothing in this post will be flagged as a spelling error.
Slightly off topic, but I rather enjoy reading some of the keyword tags that people come up with on Slashdot. "diabeetes" made me smile, but "givebeesachance" made coffee come out my nose. You win, sir.:)
And I will defend curling as a wonderful pass-time.
This is the second time I've seen someone use the non-word "passtime", so I'm going Spelling Nazi on your ass. "Passtime" or "pass-time" is not a word. The word you're looking for is "pastime."
Before you mod me off-topic, please note I am just as off-topic as the parent and just as informative.:D
An interesting fictional short story about Scrabble obsession. Perhaps the dating of the story is the reason why the highest score in one turn declared in the story is less than that of the carpenter in the article.
Atari retains the Earthworm Jim license. "Non-game assets" means the employees - the studio itself. About 40 people strong, the Shiny people are to be moved into the same office as The Collective, but will still function as an independent studio.
It wasn't on a rack, but I think I'm squeaking by with being on topic.
I used to gut and rewire video game cabinets and took great pride in doing so. Nary a wire would run at an angle other than zero or ninety degrees when I was done with it. Tearing out the old, crap wiring job was a lot of fun. There are a *lot* of bad wiring jobs in video game cabinets.
A friend of mine had picked up a video game cabinet at an auction once (some Tecmo game, as I recall). I was to rewire it for him. The back panel on the cabinet was held on with nails. Once I'd pried it off, I had a peek inside. Oh, my god, the horror.
The first thing I noticed was that *every* single wire in the cabinet was orange. The previous person who worked on it must have only had a big spool of orange wire, or something. Ok, fair enough, you make do with what you've got. Didn't matter anyway because I was ripping it all out. However, the other thing I noticed was that this person must have been running low on orange wire because every single wire in the cabinet ran in a straight line from connection to connection. It was like a great big orange spider web. Most of the wires were so taut you could pluck them and hear a note.
Games like World of Warcraft circumvent that problem by giving the software away free and then charging for the game service, either hourly or monthly.
They don't give the software away for free (like they should). They make you buy it just like any other game. When the expansion comes out, they'll make everyone buy that, too.
- An iPod stuck at the bottom of an opaque blue liquid is not readily identifiable. - The crew were just following procedures. - The guy played dumb about it for a while and didn't say anything. - When he finally did tell the crew, they had already called the incident in, at which point the wheels were already in motion.
Had he spoken up as soon as he'd discovered hi iPod missing and the suddenly strange behaviour of the flight attendants, they might have brushed off the incident.
I agree the the behaviour of most law enforcement people on the ground was way over the top (especially for Canada), I don't believe the airline can be blamed for the actions of its crew. As a co-worker of mine put it: "Landing the plane because of a potential threat inconveniences 200 people, but it's not any worse than thunderstorms and warning lights. From a corporate standpoint (the airline) you'd rather risk being dumb than wrong. Wrong could sink your entire company."
Slashdot Mirror
It's autonomous. It just has no life goals and robot conventions just make it sleepy. Waking it up just makes it grouchy.
I don't pretend to know anything about the effects of daily trips to space on the upper atmosphere. Perhaps it's not much different than the effects of all the airplanes already in the sky every day. Anyone have smarts on this?
"...it is ultimately the content owners' choice to restrict their fans from accessing their content on the platform."
Now that's what I call a back-handed comment.
This must be why people listen to death metal and avoid that easy listening garbage. They are aspiring musicians.
I wonder if Spielberg will manage to improve on the casting and make-up of prior attempts. Especially that beard. Like, wow.
wtf?
The reason I dislike movies being made in 3-D is because once the decision has been made to do so, 95% of the time the 3-D technology drives the movie a la Doctor Tongue. It's like the director/studio just can't help themselves; they have to be constantly drawing attention to it. This drives me crazy.
Hopefully, they will go the "Avatar" route and just make the thing in 3-D, and any "into the camera" stuff will be minimal and come across as natural. If 2-D morphing was exploited when it first came out in the same way as 3-D has historically been exploited, "Willow" would have been a much different movie, and not for the better.
... that in sports, DNF stands for Did Not Finish.
Agreed. Unfortunately, on the rare occasion where I get asked where I would like to be located, I reply, "in a closed office with a door, by myself, on the opposite side of the office from the rest of the team." Management typically thinks I say this because I demand privilege, but what I really desire most is a quiet place at which people don't strike up water cooler conversations three feet away and that is as difficult as possible for people on the team to walk up and start talking to me instead of sending me an email.
And no, I've never been granted that request. Ever. I have always been put out on the main open floor of cubicles amidst the chaos and noise.
...people are less than rational beings when their lives are perceived to be at stake.
Imagine the tin foil hat conspiracies that will start flying regarding government control of these chips to herd people away from sensitive places like, say, keeping protesters away from special events (G8 summits, WHO get-togethers, etc). :)
Yes. It's bad coding. Very very bad coding. And, no offense, but it indicates intellectual laziness on your part.
Any developer worth their salt would spend the time to understand *why* their code is mysteriously working, rather than just throwing up their hands and moving on, as a) it might be working for your test cases but still be incorrect, and b) anyone coming along later will be hosed, as if you couldn't understand it, there's a good chance they won't be able to, either. And of course, d) any developer worth their salt *wants* to know why their code is working, simply because it's interesting and *part of their job*.
Agreed. I started a job with a company that had developed a client server application meant to support thousands of customers at one time. The programmers working there at the time I started were, for the most part, incompetent boobs. Case in point: the first thing I noticed during my whirlwind tour of the server code was the initialization. They would fork the server and have one copy watch the other. When the server crashed (which was frighteningly often), this forked copy would detect it, throw away the crashed server and automatically fork a new one. Naturally, every connected customer would be unceremoniously disconnected whenever this happened and all active transactions were rolled back.
They did this because they got tired of doing it manually, since the server crashed constantly. Once I finished my tour of the code, from which I could fill half a notebook with a sizable list of coding atrocities, the first thing I did was remove the forking initialization code (hehe) based on my personal conviction that the server should not crash. I then spent the next several weeks fixing the astounding number of crash bugs that were now laid bare, and rewriting scads of horrible functions.
Bit off-topic here, but over-engineering structures has been commonplace until around the 19th century when engineers started actually understanding what Hook and Young were saying. With no understanding of stress concentrations and, consequently, why ships kept breaking in two while at sea, people of the day would ensure that the forces acting on their structures were well below the breaking stress of the materials, sometimes by as high as a factor of eight or nine times the breaking stress. This was called the "factor of safety" and often referred to as the "factor of ignorance." Not surprisingly, this puts up the weight and cost of the structure considerably.
This is why early aircraft designers spent more time increasing the power of their engines than trying to deal with reducing the weight of their contraptions; if you throw enough power into it, you can get just about anything to fly. :)
I suspect it's also why people have historically considered heavy structures to be safer than those that are "light and flimsy."
"Damn it! Where are my glasses!?"
I don't find anything "natural" about a generation of people who necessarily and systematically started destroyed the English language because earlier texting devices (i.e., phones) required one to use a numeric keypad, an absolutely *horrible* method of entering text, as their interface. combind w/the impashens of yuth, its y u get so mny ppl who lern 2 rite like this b4 they even mak it 2 skool.
It would not surprise me that one day, nothing in this post will be flagged as a spelling error.
My head asplode.
Slightly off topic, but I rather enjoy reading some of the keyword tags that people come up with on Slashdot. "diabeetes" made me smile, but "givebeesachance" made coffee come out my nose. You win, sir. :)
And I will defend curling as a wonderful pass-time.
This is the second time I've seen someone use the non-word "passtime", so I'm going Spelling Nazi on your ass. "Passtime" or "pass-time" is not a word. The word you're looking for is "pastime."
Before you mod me off-topic, please note I am just as off-topic as the parent and just as informative. :D
I can't remember who said it, but I thought it summed up the major difference between Canada and the U.S. rather well...
"Americans hate government but love politicians. Canadians hate politicians but love government."
"Do Yourself In"?
An interesting fictional short story about Scrabble obsession. Perhaps the dating of the story is the reason why the highest score in one turn declared in the story is less than that of the carpenter in the article.
By the way, there's also an article on Gamespot about this. It includes an interview with Jon Goldman, the CEO of Foundation 9.
Atari retains the Earthworm Jim license. "Non-game assets" means the employees - the studio itself. About 40 people strong, the Shiny people are to be moved into the same office as The Collective, but will still function as an independent studio.
(I read the press release on the Foundation 9 site).
It wasn't on a rack, but I think I'm squeaking by with being on topic.
I used to gut and rewire video game cabinets and took great pride in doing so. Nary a wire would run at an angle other than zero or ninety degrees when I was done with it. Tearing out the old, crap wiring job was a lot of fun. There are a *lot* of bad wiring jobs in video game cabinets.
A friend of mine had picked up a video game cabinet at an auction once (some Tecmo game, as I recall). I was to rewire it for him. The back panel on the cabinet was held on with nails. Once I'd pried it off, I had a peek inside. Oh, my god, the horror.
The first thing I noticed was that *every* single wire in the cabinet was orange. The previous person who worked on it must have only had a big spool of orange wire, or something. Ok, fair enough, you make do with what you've got. Didn't matter anyway because I was ripping it all out. However, the other thing I noticed was that this person must have been running low on orange wire because every single wire in the cabinet ran in a straight line from connection to connection. It was like a great big orange spider web. Most of the wires were so taut you could pluck them and hear a note.
I've never seen anything worse, before or since.
They don't give the software away for free (like they should). They make you buy it just like any other game. When the expansion comes out, they'll make everyone buy that, too.
...bear in mind the following things:
- An iPod stuck at the bottom of an opaque blue liquid is not readily identifiable.
- The crew were just following procedures.
- The guy played dumb about it for a while and didn't say anything.
- When he finally did tell the crew, they had already called the incident in, at which point the wheels were already in motion.
Had he spoken up as soon as he'd discovered hi iPod missing and the suddenly strange behaviour of the flight attendants, they might have brushed off the incident.
I agree the the behaviour of most law enforcement people on the ground was way over the top (especially for Canada), I don't believe the airline can be blamed for the actions of its crew. As a co-worker of mine put it: "Landing the plane because of a potential threat inconveniences 200 people, but it's not any worse than thunderstorms and warning lights. From a corporate standpoint (the airline) you'd rather risk being dumb than wrong. Wrong could sink your entire company."