For some strange reason, all our updates now involve distributing a bundle that includes all the changed files (rather than just the changed part of a file), so the update bundle is much larger than it needs to be.
This is a bad idea in case the target image doesn't match exactly what you expected it to be. For instance, the target file may be one of several previous versions... which version do you create a diff against? Or do you bundle ALL possible diffs? Oops, we just lost our advantage in size, and we made things a hell of a lot more complicated or ourselves and the user. Or what happens if the file has been somehow altered unexpectedly, via corruption or malware? No way to solve that little issue.
It's far safer and simpler to simply distribute the entirety of the new files, at the expense of some potentially wasted bandwidth.
Is it really too much work for a security researcher to send an e-mail to product-security@apple.com? About five seconds of searching got me Apple's support page and that e-mail address.
This guy admittedly didn't even try. And bugs that affect functionality are an entirely different matter than serious security issues. When dealing with a zero day, the decision on whether to announce it publicly depends on a number of factors.
The very act of announcing it publicly guarantees that new exploits will explode in the wild (as this article confirms). And the reality is that very few OS X users will have seen this idiot's initial posting a month ago. Did you? I sure didn't. In the meantime, my system was and is now vulnerable to a hell of a lot more malware than it otherwise would have been.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you. Bad on Apple for making a stupid mistake in the first place and being slow to fix it, but I'm not giving this guy a pass either.
Ugh, don't give this asshole more traffic. I think there's a reason few people are linking to his blog directly. He released the details of this bug without even attempting to contact Apple. When asked why he didn't do so, he replied "Why should I?" Later he states that "Responsible disclosure is simply a way of redirecting blame for a vulnerability from the vendor to the reporter." Right on his blog he's advertising his own presentations. Essentially, he's making news about this at the expense of user safety in order to promote himself and his services.
Are you kidding me? Hell, I don't know who Boing Boing is. No, seriously, I'd heard the name mentioned once or twice, but I had no idea what it was until I just now took a quick peek at the site. And I still don't know exactly what it is.
I'd also bet the vast majority of US citizens have never heard of Boing Boing.
I'm exaggerating a bit, as I was going for a humorous remark. So, killing the joke dead and answering your question seriously, yes, I've heard of Eve Online, and know quite a bit about it, but haven't played it. In terms of economies and designer math skills, MMOs are a slight exception. They take their in-game economies very seriously, and some are known to hire actual economists to help guide their virtual trade and monetary policies.
Designers don't necessarily avoid math, but they often use it in ways that drives programmers insane. For instance, they'll use formulas in spreadsheets to calculate tables of figures for loot, armor, damage, etc, and then painstakingly enter all those figures by hand. Why? This allows them the freedom to individually tweak components as desired. Programmers look at this and shake their heads, because we're hardwired to avoid that sort of redundancy whenever possible. For whatever reasons, some designers seem to revel in it.
Many designers tend to be control freaks. They're deathly afraid of automatic, feedback driven, or chaotic systems (all of which could apply to an economy), and often for good reason, as some outlier condition could tend to cause autonomous systems to spiral out of control. This is why most MMO in-world "economies" are tightly controlled affairs, with lots of limiters to prevent things from going too far in any particular direction too quickly. Programmers are always suggesting ways to create automatic and chaotic environments driven by algorithms, but designers want carefully scripted and planned systems, because they want to control and tweak it.
From the description, it appears this designer only turned to math as a last resort, because there was simply no time to do the sort of hand-tweaking that designers typically do. They were impressed enough with the results (gosh, math actually works!) that they wrote about how they did it. And the programmers on the team are probably thinking "I told you so. In fact, I told you so years ago, and you only listened to me when your back was up against a wall."
I think you're missing a key point. "Cloud" tends to imply massive scalability on demand. For instance, if you need to to perform a finite set of large-scale computations, it would make sense to rent some temporary space for those. That's "cloud computing". Buying your own hardware would be an insane waste of money. A practical example: an company producing an MMO might purchase server space to run client simulation bots to load-test their servers prior to releasing the game.
As another example, large companies can rent you long-term storage space for FAR less money than it would cost you to maintain that storage space yourself. That's "cloud storage". For consumers AND corporations, online backup service is an absolutely killer feature of the cloud. I back up all my critical documents and source data for my little startup company on Amazon S3 servers, and it costs me under a dollar a month, since documents and source files are tiny, and you just pay for what you use.
There's another specialized but important cloud service, which is "content delivery networks". Akamai is a good example of this, as a provider that very few consumers even know about. Very few companies have the available bandwidth and distributed network that Akamai has, so it makes sense for companies to rely on a network like theirs to help handle large spikes in internet content delivery, such as they might see during major product releases.
I'm a lot less bullish on a lot of the other cloud-based hype. For instance, the notion that all these Internet of Things devices need to be directly connected to the internet instead of just your own intranet is insane. And there's a lot of modern software that's needlessly tied to "the cloud" which has very little benefit for the consumer. All it means is that your software dies when the service dies. That's the dark side of the cloud, no pun intended.
You don't need to be some cloud fanboy to realize that it does have a few killer applications that a simple LAMP server could never handle.
A single-player game just needs to *simulate* an economy, meaning that you need to ensure there isn't some loophole that allows the player to gain an infinite amount of loot through some simple, expedient task. In a real economy, prices are adjusted according to supply and demand, of course. It's a natural feedback mechanism that ensures such "loopholes" are very short-lived.
So, the question becomes "how do you set prices so that it *appears* a real economy is at work, rather than just a designer arbitrarily setting prices?" It's not as simple a problem as it sounds like, and it's a real-world problem that does, in fact, need solving. Don't get hung up on whether an economy is "real" or not in a videogame. In a single-player game, you don't question whether the AI is really thinking something profound, right? The issue is how to create the most convincing illusion of a real, living world, while still ensuring the game is challenging enough and enjoyable for the players.
Yep, it annoys me a bit when at the beginning of a game, it costs a gold coin to stay a night at the inn at the beginning of the game, but it costs 100 gold coins at the end of the game in the "end game" areas. Granted, these are not games that are attempting any sort of "serious" world-building like Witcher 3. It still seems lazy, though - they should use other means for removing money from the player.
I've also thought it somewhat lazy for developers to have a single coin type (typically "gold coins"). I've always thought that designers who resorted to that sort of currency never really understood how incredibly valuable a single gold coin actually is. Common goods are typically highly over-valued, and weapons and armor actually tend to be undervalued. It's ridiculous for a fish to cost 5 gold coins while a sword, even a basic starter sword, might only cost 100. Granted, I think most gamers don't really care about such things, but just once I'd like to see a videogame at least attempt to make a realistic stab at this.
MMOs (particularly "theme park" types) have a particular problem with their economies, in that goods are essentially created from nothing in limitless supplies, and the final products from crafting last an infinitely long time. As such, they need to figure out how to create viable viable "gold sinks", or ways of removing money from the economy in ways that doesn't irritate the players too much. I've always thought that, no matter the solution they came up with, it always ended up feeling rather artificial (or simply inadequate), and it often ended in a massively inflationary economy.
I'm still working my way through the first two Witcher games. As soon as I'm ready to play the third, I'll have to take some note of the general economy and see if it ended up as satisfying to play as one hopes.
Who prints? I almost *never* print anything for my personal use. But if you're in business for yourself, you invariably have to print stuff. You'll need a scanner as well, incidentally. A lot of government agencies or banks still require you to send in paper documents of various kinds. Essentially, I find myself needing to print documents once or twice a year. I prefer not to outsource the printing of confidential documents like that.
And inevitably, I need to buy one or more new ink cartridges, because the old ones have dried out and no longer print. Sigh... Once in a while, I can manually clean the heads and coerce them into printing, but most of the time I have to buy a new set.
If it helps you, think of it more as an "HD (or Full HD) appropriate texture resolution", as that's in fact what it really is - properly matching texture resolutions to modern screen resolutions. But I understand your frustration when people use terminology incorrectly.
It always annoys me when people describe a game as "laggy", because if the game has any netcode / multiplayer, I have no idea if they meant laggy in the "proper" sense, meaning latency in network code, or laggy in the "slang" sense, meaning low or jittery frame rates. It's been irritating that we've never been able to get a good term for low frame rate to stick.
So, sorry if it offends your sensibilities if people use the term "HD" incorrectly, but it's really hard to fight the tide unless you can come up with a better name for it. At the moment, "HD textures" seems to be the dominant term for increasing in-game texture resolution.
No, these look to be fairly normal adult websites. I took a look at a couple of them, as someone above posted a link to a document with the full list. I couldn't download the list, but I could just barely make out a few site names.
Among the few I perused, I found most were fairly conventional sex sites, with one site targeting gay men. From what I can see, this is simply a list of the most *popular* adult websites. For instance, I saw xxx.com is on the list, which seems to be a standard hardcore sex site. I'd imagine that one is popular simply by virtue of it's domain. Playboy.com is also on the list, so you know that's nothing too extreme.
Oh, damn... yeah, done that as well. Frustrating as hell, because it just doesn't make sense until you finally figure out you're not even debugging the code you're working with.
Other variations of "the impossible is happening" include:
* Syncing to new code, recompiling, and crashing. Crashes only go away once you force a full rebuilt to update stale precompiled headers. * Program crashes mysteriously, and only is fixed after the machine is rebooted (likely some process in RAM has been corrupted). * When you get automated crash debug reports from hundreds of thousands of customers, you eventually realize that a staggering number of people simply have bad hardware, due to the impossible crashes that occur (e.g. a = b + c;// --- crashes here. all variables are integers). * Compiler or hardware bugs - thankfully much more rare than they used to be.
Kaul said the government was working on a long-term solution and suggested the ban would not remain indefinitely.
I'm dying to know what sort of "long-term solution" would be acceptable to those who feel a need to ban or block others from watching pornography. Drug therapy? Morality police? Castration? Shotgun weddings?
Protein shakes, no. There are plenty of products that offer complete dietary nutrition in a shake, and have done so for a long time, like Metagenics' Ultrameal. These are often labeled as "medical food". There are specific variants for people that have various dietary restrictions, etc.
Generally speaking, I'd say you can consider an "HD texture" to be any in-game texture where you can't see the individual pixels sized significantly greater than the native resolution of your screen. That is, if it looks blocky on-screen, it's not HD.
There's no way to say exactly what resolution this entails, because it all depends on how far away the camera can get during typical gameplay, combined with how far the artist stretched a single texture across a given set of geometry. Naturally, the bar as been raised quite a bit with 4K monitors and resolutions, but I think most people would still consider never seeing a scaled texture at 1080p to be a pretty good visual experience.
Sure, there's no official definition for "HD textures" in a game, but you tend to know it when you see it.
No one said US (or Russian, for that matter, where these women were from) citizens were afraid of ISIS. We have a few advantages, namely:
a) We're protected by a powerful military that would stomp ISIS in a head-to-head engagement, and b) we are physical separated from them by vast distances.
No, I think "repulsed" is probably more accurate. Those in the direct line of fire probably feel a bit differently.
When you're trying to create a general-purpose operating system, especially one that runs on common commodity hardware, the scope and complexity of your project is already largely decided. There's no such thing as a "simple" operating system nowadays, unless you're willing to discard quite a few features most developers and users take for granted.
Development time goes up with the number of developers.
I'm guessing you can't have really meant that literally. A simple thought experiment makes it clear that the optimal development number for any project is not one programmer.
What I'm guessing you're referring to the assertion (assuming you're talking about the mythical man-month) that development time is extended when adding new programmers to an already late project. It really doesn't apply to general development-team scaling, because even if efficiency per developer goes down with larger teams, it doesn't reduce it to negative gains.
More developers mean a lot of would-be-nice-to-have tasks get implemented, instead of just the absolutely-must-have tasks. If you want to call this "additional complexity", that's fine. The rest of the world call them "features".
Perhaps, but that's not what they're working with, since this is the original source. This language and it's horrible style was obviously invented in a day when the size of your variables and source files was actually a real consideration, and machine efficiency was prioritized over programmer efficiency. It looks like assembly language for distributed databases.
That's precisely the opposite of what most large-scale enterprise systems need nowadays. Computers are incredibly powerful and cheap and programmers are very costly, so modern languages should (and do) reflect that reality.
He's actually a perfect example of how well slashdot's moderation system typically works. Oddly enough, he's demonstrating the exact opposite of what he's intending, especially since no one is joining him in his angry little crusade.
Anyhow, back on topic. It seems like we might as well expand the regular internet's capacity to transfer this much data. Streaming video has a practical limitation beyond which there's no point in increasing resolution or fidelity. There's also finite amount of video you'd need to stream or download (essentially, one 24-hour HD stream per person), beyond which you're going to venture into a fairly extreme outlier. So, I think the notion that capacity needs to increase forever seems flawed. Just like most computers are far more powerful than needed, at some point, bandwidth will far exceed what a typical user needs in day to day life. At that point, occasional transfers of very large amounts of data by researchers, universities, or corporations won't be a problem, because there will be a lot of headroom for those sorts of burst transfers.
Still, for the short term, this seems like a smart idea for universities. Until consumer pressure or competition forces expansion of the national network, I think this makes sense. I'd imagine the investment is largely a one-time cost, with maintenance being far less expensive over the long term. The only question is whether the investment will pay off before the commercial internet capacity and costs are equivalent. Given how sluggishly things have been evolving (compared to other regions), I'd say they're probably making the right decision.
Disney's attempt was a pretty flagrant abuse of the law (definitely the spirit of the law, if perhaps not the letter), as was Edison's, and occurred precisely *because* it's actually difficult to find highly trained workers in the US that will work for peanuts. So, I'm not so sure that's a great example. The solution to H1B abuse isn't to unionize, but to fix the H1B laws.
The ability to move from job to job has enhanced my earning power and career opportunities, personally speaking. Each move to a new company was also accompanied by a better wage, better company and working conditions, better benefits, and more responsibilities. Yes, I've been laid off as well, and that's never fun, but in general, I think not being tied to a union has been a positive thing for me.
Reasonable frequent migration between companies is also a good source of idea and methodology cross-pollination. I've seen people that stick to a single company for most of their career, and in my opinion, their thinking often tends to be the most rigid - less able to adapt to new and better ideas. Granted, new isn't always better, but it's almost inevitable that *eventually* a new and better way will be found for doing almost *everything*.
Wow... I mean... wow. This is the definition of a "write-only" language. I'm pretty sure you'd need external documentation just describing what these routines do, because it sure as hell looks like you're not going to derive it from this encryption disguised as source code. I thought perhaps you had chosen some particularly horrible section, like maybe it was a data definition of some sort. Nope, after sifting through a bunch of code, it pretty much all looked like that. My brain hurts just trying to parse and make sense of some of that code.
Is it any wonder that, with a language like this, it can't be easily extended and upgraded to meet demands? Yeah, okay, it's understandable now why they're tossing the whole thing. Open source or not, I can't imagine there are many people today who are able to extend or even maintain this monstrosity in perpetuity.
You'd be better off choosing as an example something other than a piece of software that a significant percentage of businesses on the planet pay for and use with no significant problems whatsoever. It could be argued that MS Word may be one of the most successful pieces of software in history. There are plenty of examples of terrible closed-source, proprietary software. Why not use one of those?
Slashdot Mirror
For some strange reason, all our updates now involve distributing a bundle that includes all the changed files (rather than just the changed part of a file), so the update bundle is much larger than it needs to be.
This is a bad idea in case the target image doesn't match exactly what you expected it to be. For instance, the target file may be one of several previous versions... which version do you create a diff against? Or do you bundle ALL possible diffs? Oops, we just lost our advantage in size, and we made things a hell of a lot more complicated or ourselves and the user. Or what happens if the file has been somehow altered unexpectedly, via corruption or malware? No way to solve that little issue.
It's far safer and simpler to simply distribute the entirety of the new files, at the expense of some potentially wasted bandwidth.
Is it really too much work for a security researcher to send an e-mail to product-security@apple.com? About five seconds of searching got me Apple's support page and that e-mail address.
This guy admittedly didn't even try. And bugs that affect functionality are an entirely different matter than serious security issues. When dealing with a zero day, the decision on whether to announce it publicly depends on a number of factors.
The very act of announcing it publicly guarantees that new exploits will explode in the wild (as this article confirms). And the reality is that very few OS X users will have seen this idiot's initial posting a month ago. Did you? I sure didn't. In the meantime, my system was and is now vulnerable to a hell of a lot more malware than it otherwise would have been.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you. Bad on Apple for making a stupid mistake in the first place and being slow to fix it, but I'm not giving this guy a pass either.
Ugh, don't give this asshole more traffic. I think there's a reason few people are linking to his blog directly. He released the details of this bug without even attempting to contact Apple. When asked why he didn't do so, he replied "Why should I?" Later he states that "Responsible disclosure is simply a way of redirecting blame for a vulnerability from the vendor to the reporter." Right on his blog he's advertising his own presentations. Essentially, he's making news about this at the expense of user safety in order to promote himself and his services.
A real piece of work.
Are you kidding me? Hell, I don't know who Boing Boing is. No, seriously, I'd heard the name mentioned once or twice, but I had no idea what it was until I just now took a quick peek at the site. And I still don't know exactly what it is.
I'd also bet the vast majority of US citizens have never heard of Boing Boing.
I'm exaggerating a bit, as I was going for a humorous remark. So, killing the joke dead and answering your question seriously, yes, I've heard of Eve Online, and know quite a bit about it, but haven't played it. In terms of economies and designer math skills, MMOs are a slight exception. They take their in-game economies very seriously, and some are known to hire actual economists to help guide their virtual trade and monetary policies.
Designers don't necessarily avoid math, but they often use it in ways that drives programmers insane. For instance, they'll use formulas in spreadsheets to calculate tables of figures for loot, armor, damage, etc, and then painstakingly enter all those figures by hand. Why? This allows them the freedom to individually tweak components as desired. Programmers look at this and shake their heads, because we're hardwired to avoid that sort of redundancy whenever possible. For whatever reasons, some designers seem to revel in it.
Many designers tend to be control freaks. They're deathly afraid of automatic, feedback driven, or chaotic systems (all of which could apply to an economy), and often for good reason, as some outlier condition could tend to cause autonomous systems to spiral out of control. This is why most MMO in-world "economies" are tightly controlled affairs, with lots of limiters to prevent things from going too far in any particular direction too quickly. Programmers are always suggesting ways to create automatic and chaotic environments driven by algorithms, but designers want carefully scripted and planned systems, because they want to control and tweak it.
From the description, it appears this designer only turned to math as a last resort, because there was simply no time to do the sort of hand-tweaking that designers typically do. They were impressed enough with the results (gosh, math actually works!) that they wrote about how they did it. And the programmers on the team are probably thinking "I told you so. In fact, I told you so years ago, and you only listened to me when your back was up against a wall."
I think you're missing a key point. "Cloud" tends to imply massive scalability on demand. For instance, if you need to to perform a finite set of large-scale computations, it would make sense to rent some temporary space for those. That's "cloud computing". Buying your own hardware would be an insane waste of money. A practical example: an company producing an MMO might purchase server space to run client simulation bots to load-test their servers prior to releasing the game.
As another example, large companies can rent you long-term storage space for FAR less money than it would cost you to maintain that storage space yourself. That's "cloud storage". For consumers AND corporations, online backup service is an absolutely killer feature of the cloud. I back up all my critical documents and source data for my little startup company on Amazon S3 servers, and it costs me under a dollar a month, since documents and source files are tiny, and you just pay for what you use.
There's another specialized but important cloud service, which is "content delivery networks". Akamai is a good example of this, as a provider that very few consumers even know about. Very few companies have the available bandwidth and distributed network that Akamai has, so it makes sense for companies to rely on a network like theirs to help handle large spikes in internet content delivery, such as they might see during major product releases.
I'm a lot less bullish on a lot of the other cloud-based hype. For instance, the notion that all these Internet of Things devices need to be directly connected to the internet instead of just your own intranet is insane. And there's a lot of modern software that's needlessly tied to "the cloud" which has very little benefit for the consumer. All it means is that your software dies when the service dies. That's the dark side of the cloud, no pun intended.
You don't need to be some cloud fanboy to realize that it does have a few killer applications that a simple LAMP server could never handle.
As a professional videogame programmer, I can assure you that it's fairly newsworthy when a game designer uses math to solve problems like these.
A single-player game just needs to *simulate* an economy, meaning that you need to ensure there isn't some loophole that allows the player to gain an infinite amount of loot through some simple, expedient task. In a real economy, prices are adjusted according to supply and demand, of course. It's a natural feedback mechanism that ensures such "loopholes" are very short-lived.
So, the question becomes "how do you set prices so that it *appears* a real economy is at work, rather than just a designer arbitrarily setting prices?" It's not as simple a problem as it sounds like, and it's a real-world problem that does, in fact, need solving. Don't get hung up on whether an economy is "real" or not in a videogame. In a single-player game, you don't question whether the AI is really thinking something profound, right? The issue is how to create the most convincing illusion of a real, living world, while still ensuring the game is challenging enough and enjoyable for the players.
Yep, it annoys me a bit when at the beginning of a game, it costs a gold coin to stay a night at the inn at the beginning of the game, but it costs 100 gold coins at the end of the game in the "end game" areas. Granted, these are not games that are attempting any sort of "serious" world-building like Witcher 3. It still seems lazy, though - they should use other means for removing money from the player.
I've also thought it somewhat lazy for developers to have a single coin type (typically "gold coins"). I've always thought that designers who resorted to that sort of currency never really understood how incredibly valuable a single gold coin actually is. Common goods are typically highly over-valued, and weapons and armor actually tend to be undervalued. It's ridiculous for a fish to cost 5 gold coins while a sword, even a basic starter sword, might only cost 100. Granted, I think most gamers don't really care about such things, but just once I'd like to see a videogame at least attempt to make a realistic stab at this.
MMOs (particularly "theme park" types) have a particular problem with their economies, in that goods are essentially created from nothing in limitless supplies, and the final products from crafting last an infinitely long time. As such, they need to figure out how to create viable viable "gold sinks", or ways of removing money from the economy in ways that doesn't irritate the players too much. I've always thought that, no matter the solution they came up with, it always ended up feeling rather artificial (or simply inadequate), and it often ended in a massively inflationary economy.
I'm still working my way through the first two Witcher games. As soon as I'm ready to play the third, I'll have to take some note of the general economy and see if it ended up as satisfying to play as one hopes.
Who prints? I almost *never* print anything for my personal use. But if you're in business for yourself, you invariably have to print stuff. You'll need a scanner as well, incidentally. A lot of government agencies or banks still require you to send in paper documents of various kinds. Essentially, I find myself needing to print documents once or twice a year. I prefer not to outsource the printing of confidential documents like that.
And inevitably, I need to buy one or more new ink cartridges, because the old ones have dried out and no longer print. Sigh... Once in a while, I can manually clean the heads and coerce them into printing, but most of the time I have to buy a new set.
If it helps you, think of it more as an "HD (or Full HD) appropriate texture resolution", as that's in fact what it really is - properly matching texture resolutions to modern screen resolutions. But I understand your frustration when people use terminology incorrectly.
It always annoys me when people describe a game as "laggy", because if the game has any netcode / multiplayer, I have no idea if they meant laggy in the "proper" sense, meaning latency in network code, or laggy in the "slang" sense, meaning low or jittery frame rates. It's been irritating that we've never been able to get a good term for low frame rate to stick.
So, sorry if it offends your sensibilities if people use the term "HD" incorrectly, but it's really hard to fight the tide unless you can come up with a better name for it. At the moment, "HD textures" seems to be the dominant term for increasing in-game texture resolution.
No, these look to be fairly normal adult websites. I took a look at a couple of them, as someone above posted a link to a document with the full list. I couldn't download the list, but I could just barely make out a few site names.
Among the few I perused, I found most were fairly conventional sex sites, with one site targeting gay men. From what I can see, this is simply a list of the most *popular* adult websites. For instance, I saw xxx.com is on the list, which seems to be a standard hardcore sex site. I'd imagine that one is popular simply by virtue of it's domain. Playboy.com is also on the list, so you know that's nothing too extreme.
Oh, damn... yeah, done that as well. Frustrating as hell, because it just doesn't make sense until you finally figure out you're not even debugging the code you're working with.
Other variations of "the impossible is happening" include:
* Syncing to new code, recompiling, and crashing. Crashes only go away once you force a full rebuilt to update stale precompiled headers. // --- crashes here. all variables are integers).
* Program crashes mysteriously, and only is fixed after the machine is rebooted (likely some process in RAM has been corrupted).
* When you get automated crash debug reports from hundreds of thousands of customers, you eventually realize that a staggering number of people simply have bad hardware, due to the impossible crashes that occur (e.g. a = b + c;
* Compiler or hardware bugs - thankfully much more rare than they used to be.
Kaul said the government was working on a long-term solution and suggested the ban would not remain indefinitely.
I'm dying to know what sort of "long-term solution" would be acceptable to those who feel a need to ban or block others from watching pornography. Drug therapy? Morality police? Castration? Shotgun weddings?
Protein shakes, no. There are plenty of products that offer complete dietary nutrition in a shake, and have done so for a long time, like Metagenics' Ultrameal. These are often labeled as "medical food". There are specific variants for people that have various dietary restrictions, etc.
It's the next article down here on slashdot.
Generally speaking, I'd say you can consider an "HD texture" to be any in-game texture where you can't see the individual pixels sized significantly greater than the native resolution of your screen. That is, if it looks blocky on-screen, it's not HD.
There's no way to say exactly what resolution this entails, because it all depends on how far away the camera can get during typical gameplay, combined with how far the artist stretched a single texture across a given set of geometry. Naturally, the bar as been raised quite a bit with 4K monitors and resolutions, but I think most people would still consider never seeing a scaled texture at 1080p to be a pretty good visual experience.
Sure, there's no official definition for "HD textures" in a game, but you tend to know it when you see it.
No one said US (or Russian, for that matter, where these women were from) citizens were afraid of ISIS. We have a few advantages, namely:
a) We're protected by a powerful military that would stomp ISIS in a head-to-head engagement, and
b) we are physical separated from them by vast distances.
No, I think "repulsed" is probably more accurate. Those in the direct line of fire probably feel a bit differently.
When you're trying to create a general-purpose operating system, especially one that runs on common commodity hardware, the scope and complexity of your project is already largely decided. There's no such thing as a "simple" operating system nowadays, unless you're willing to discard quite a few features most developers and users take for granted.
Development time goes up with the number of developers.
I'm guessing you can't have really meant that literally. A simple thought experiment makes it clear that the optimal development number for any project is not one programmer.
What I'm guessing you're referring to the assertion (assuming you're talking about the mythical man-month) that development time is extended when adding new programmers to an already late project. It really doesn't apply to general development-team scaling, because even if efficiency per developer goes down with larger teams, it doesn't reduce it to negative gains.
More developers mean a lot of would-be-nice-to-have tasks get implemented, instead of just the absolutely-must-have tasks. If you want to call this "additional complexity", that's fine. The rest of the world call them "features".
It's nowhere near special enough, though.
Perhaps, but that's not what they're working with, since this is the original source. This language and it's horrible style was obviously invented in a day when the size of your variables and source files was actually a real consideration, and machine efficiency was prioritized over programmer efficiency. It looks like assembly language for distributed databases.
That's precisely the opposite of what most large-scale enterprise systems need nowadays. Computers are incredibly powerful and cheap and programmers are very costly, so modern languages should (and do) reflect that reality.
He's actually a perfect example of how well slashdot's moderation system typically works. Oddly enough, he's demonstrating the exact opposite of what he's intending, especially since no one is joining him in his angry little crusade.
Anyhow, back on topic. It seems like we might as well expand the regular internet's capacity to transfer this much data. Streaming video has a practical limitation beyond which there's no point in increasing resolution or fidelity. There's also finite amount of video you'd need to stream or download (essentially, one 24-hour HD stream per person), beyond which you're going to venture into a fairly extreme outlier. So, I think the notion that capacity needs to increase forever seems flawed. Just like most computers are far more powerful than needed, at some point, bandwidth will far exceed what a typical user needs in day to day life. At that point, occasional transfers of very large amounts of data by researchers, universities, or corporations won't be a problem, because there will be a lot of headroom for those sorts of burst transfers.
Still, for the short term, this seems like a smart idea for universities. Until consumer pressure or competition forces expansion of the national network, I think this makes sense. I'd imagine the investment is largely a one-time cost, with maintenance being far less expensive over the long term. The only question is whether the investment will pay off before the commercial internet capacity and costs are equivalent. Given how sluggishly things have been evolving (compared to other regions), I'd say they're probably making the right decision.
Disney's attempt was a pretty flagrant abuse of the law (definitely the spirit of the law, if perhaps not the letter), as was Edison's, and occurred precisely *because* it's actually difficult to find highly trained workers in the US that will work for peanuts. So, I'm not so sure that's a great example. The solution to H1B abuse isn't to unionize, but to fix the H1B laws.
The ability to move from job to job has enhanced my earning power and career opportunities, personally speaking. Each move to a new company was also accompanied by a better wage, better company and working conditions, better benefits, and more responsibilities. Yes, I've been laid off as well, and that's never fun, but in general, I think not being tied to a union has been a positive thing for me.
Reasonable frequent migration between companies is also a good source of idea and methodology cross-pollination. I've seen people that stick to a single company for most of their career, and in my opinion, their thinking often tends to be the most rigid - less able to adapt to new and better ideas. Granted, new isn't always better, but it's almost inevitable that *eventually* a new and better way will be found for doing almost *everything*.
Wow... I mean... wow. This is the definition of a "write-only" language. I'm pretty sure you'd need external documentation just describing what these routines do, because it sure as hell looks like you're not going to derive it from this encryption disguised as source code. I thought perhaps you had chosen some particularly horrible section, like maybe it was a data definition of some sort. Nope, after sifting through a bunch of code, it pretty much all looked like that. My brain hurts just trying to parse and make sense of some of that code.
Is it any wonder that, with a language like this, it can't be easily extended and upgraded to meet demands? Yeah, okay, it's understandable now why they're tossing the whole thing. Open source or not, I can't imagine there are many people today who are able to extend or even maintain this monstrosity in perpetuity.
I offer MS Word in evidence.
You'd be better off choosing as an example something other than a piece of software that a significant percentage of businesses on the planet pay for and use with no significant problems whatsoever. It could be argued that MS Word may be one of the most successful pieces of software in history. There are plenty of examples of terrible closed-source, proprietary software. Why not use one of those?