maybe it is actually better for survival of the species if they are stupid and gullible
Indeed. I can think of a couple of things:
"Of course I love you! Now let's have sex"
"Yeah of course I'm wearing a condom!" etc (kind of like in "Knocked Up").
In Glasgow (where I was born) and here in Aberdeen there are indeed a lot of young single parents.. we worked out that one girl in our class's mother (who was a single parent and was moving around a lot to avoid the father or something.. that girl was only in our class for a few months) must have been 15 when she was born.. actually I never thought before that could mean that she was 14 when she conceived. Such is the way of things here in Scotland!
Actually, that review describes it exactly as I expected after carefully watching a few of the demonstration videos on YouTube - there isn't any more to it that rhythmic movement (and I doubt you can even pass or fail, it's probably more about just making novel interpretations of songs through using weird instruments and messing about with the timing). No individual 'notes' to play unless perhaps you're playing the drums. Doesn't sound like there is any challenge - personally I need a challenge to stay interested in something. Since I completed everything but Through the Fire and the Flames on Guitar Hero III, I have hardly played it since (as the challenge then has quite a jump in difficulty and I don't consider the time I'd need to put into practicing as proportional to the reward..).
So like I said, fine for those who just want to mess about, but very shallow when it comes to actually being a game. I know that the word "toy" wasn't an actual translation, but I can see what he was getting at. I've already left my Wii at home with my mum and little sister anyway soon after getting my PS3 - I probably will never ask for it back (but I do like to play a bit of Wii Fit when I visit).
Wow, after having RTFA I have to say that the computer is pretty dumb. Cheap parlour tricks like introducing spelling errors do not a Turing Test winner make.. I didn't know about the criteria for the test in such detail before, I didn't realise that they tested both a human and the AI at the same time, and that it only had to get a 30% uncertainty among the judges to 'pass'.
The NLP program I wrote to simulate my sister is better than Ultra Hal. Of course that program just generally turns everything around into an insult and says "so's your face" a lot.
Intelligence doesn't have to involve "desires". Problem solving doesn't require desires. A human may desire to work towards a goal, but a human could also design a program that will alow a computer to "intelligently" work out the solution to a problem without itself having any desire. Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean that the computer understands the nature of problem in hand, just that it can come up with correct or "good enough" answers to problems within a certain domain.
Intelligence is obviously pretty hard to quantify, and in my psychology classes at university I remember there being at least two types of psychologically recognised intelligence: normal IQ type problem solving, and 'emotional intelligence' which would probably be a lot more difficult for a computer to emulate. Even when it comes to IQ tests some people may score fantastically on one test and abysmally on others (especially for those with Autism or other mental issues).
So, we are able to make algorithms that are very intelligent (or at least give a consistent impression of intelligence, which really amounts to the same thing) in certain domains. The Turing Test is much more general though, and that's what makes it difficult. It basically requires bringing together several fields of AI research to be able to adequately pass the test - it would have to parse language, account for typing errors or mispelled words, have a bit of 'general knowledge', be able to solve riddles, questions to do with basic physics and maths and so on.. I'd be interested to see what sorts of questions people think should be used to judge whether the AI has passed or not. I wouldn't be surprised if some humans could fail the Turing Test, if they just have poor general knowledge, or english wasn't their first language!:)
Someone has since moderated me "under-rated" on the same comment anyway for some reason. Nice to know that at least one other slashdotter agrees with either my moderation philosophy, or my actual comment..
Sounds like you basically just like 'puzzle games'. I like them a little too, but they lose their appeal pretty quickly. Loco Rocco can be completed in like half an hour the first time and then even faster once you get the hang of it.. and there only seems to be one level?
Portal was okay, but ultimately again just a puzzle game. Once you complete it, that's it.
I love Grand Theft Auto and any game that allows you to free roam, as it has a lot more replay value for me. And it has plenty of creativity and beauty. Beautiful sunsets and sunrises, hilarious ingame TV&radio shows, the great 'sandbox' type environment, minigames where you can play pool, bowling, darts and so on. It's just good fun. If you believe all that hype and just think it's about stuff like killing prostitutes then that's up to you, but you're missing out on a great series of games in that case. I can appreciate that you may just not enjoy 'shooting' games, but don't think a game is crap just because it's mainstream. A lot of games these days truly are boring, but the GTA games have been some of the few games out in the last few years that I actually enjoyed. I haven't even completed IV yet just because I enjoy driving round and doing the minigames with the 'friends' and such like I said. I'm probably only 50%-75% through the missions.
I think you should just stick with the Wii or DS if you enjoy quirky short lived games.. I really liked Twilight Princess but the rest of the time the game that saw the most play on my Wii was Need For Speed Carbon.. the others were all completed far too quickly.
When you say 'play'.. I'm assuming you mean "wave your arm around a bit", because Wii Music looked atrociously shallow even compared to games like Guitar Hero. The drums could be good if they did them well, but I'm not hoping for much at all from that title.
I liked Wii Sports, and Wii Fit is good fun, but Wii Music to me seems too much to me like having your 50th birthday party in McDonalds, or putting rally cars on a scalextric type track so that they can't fall off the sides.
No doubt some people will find it fun, but I kind of pity them. I admit I enjoy Guitar Hero, a lot. But at least it is challenging in its own way, despite not really being like a real guitar. It has longevity - took me a few months to complete all the GH3 setlist tracks on expert from never having played it before. Wii Music looks like it will be fun for 2 minutes, and then you forget about it. It would be a great demo to include with the Wii, but as it is a separate game, they better only be charging at most £15 for it..
I am a self taught guitarist and drummer too, but some people honestly just don't have the dexterity, coordination or perhaps consistency to play. Sure I agree that sometimes it comes down to dedication and practice - unless someone has some physical or mental disability which prevents them from progressing - but you have to concede that some people simply find it a lot easier to play instruments than others ('virtuouso' types). Same as a lot of people just find maths or running easy while others struggle. They still have to do the learning or training, but their basic hardware is just better suited to these things.
I agree that people should give the guitar a go if they are interested though. If you're really interested, you will put in the effort and you will eventually get it. I took saxophone lessons for a few months but I didn't care for it and didn't want to do the 30 minutes prescribed practice each day. I do consider myself mostly "self taught" - but I did have a year of free tuition as part of my music classes in one of my high schools, after I'd already been teaching myself from a chord dictionary, books and tab for a few months. That teacher just wanted me to practice for around 10 minutes a day - but sometimes I'd end up practicing for hours just because I enjoy playing the guitar.
L2Play guitar oh yeah that would actually involve talent.
I can play guitar. I still find Guitar Hero lots of fun. I didn't think I would, but I happened to play it at a friend's house and within a couple of days I'd bought my own copy.
Rock Band is even better (despite all but Green Grass and High Tide being incredibly easy for guitar even on expert) because singing or playing the drums on Rock Band are basically the same as playing IRL. Yes, I play real drums too, though I start to struggle at about halfway through the expert setlist on Rock Band since I'm self taught.
Disliking something because it's popular is not a "legitimate reason". I admit that sometimes I can't help but dislike things like the iPod and iPhone due to all the hype (but I still like Macs - I liked them a decade before the iPod ever appeared). There are usually valid criticisms to be levelled too - for example iPods/iPhones tend to be pricier than equivalent devices that offer the same or more features - but disliking something just because it is popular is just being awkward for the sake of it.
You could, however, moderate them according to the content of their current post regardless of how you feel about them as a person. I even modded up one of my 'freaks' last week. I don't give a shit about personal vendettas.
If you mean you mod posts down as overrated when you feel the content doesn't deserve the karma bonus, I wouldn't have so much problem with that.
People can be ignorant on certain topics while knowledgeable in others. I know I have plenty of gaps in my knowledge of the world, but I like to learn which is why I am here in the first place.
People can also have bad days when they end up losing their rag and end up posting flamebait or trolling a group of people they see as morons. There may be no real justification for such childish behaviour, but downmodding a person's posts just because you don't like that person is even more childish IMO.
More like a mix of the quicklaunch and taskbar. You can customise it to hold whatever applications you want, and it also keeps track of all open applications, as well as minimised windows and the trashcan.
I only have OS 10.4 and it doesn't have any option of showing regularly used applications that I can see. Perhaps that's a 10.5 thing - either that or the wording of the patent is just overly ambiguous (since you can indeed customise it manually to show regularly used apps).
Well, the dock can auto magnify icons when you put the cursor over them, and provides some useful shortcuts like being able to specify whether an item should be loaded on startup if you right click on its icon in the Dock. It's more analagous to the quick launch plus the task bar though because it keeps track of currently open applications and hidden windows too.
No, I don't think it's worthy of a patent, it's just a menu bar and probably a lot of the ideas in it have prior art. I don't really think software should be able to be patented anyway.. copyright is enough for me to protect distribution of complete applications. If someone else can copy my design and improve on it, then good for them..
I used to think the Dock was quite tacky when I first saw it, but now that I've set it up with only the applications I use regularly, I'm used to using it as a tool and have grown to like it. I just realised right now that I've disabled the auto-magnification of icons (I forgot I even did that) - that's probably the reason I stopped thinking of it as a gimmicky/tacky..
Would be nice if mods could explain how a comment is 'overrated' when it hasn't even been rated to begin with. I'd rather have a comment berating me for my choices in programming language than some moron who probably marked me 'overrated' just because he's upset he wasted his money on a Vista machine.
Thanks for the compliments:) A few people have said I have a good eye for that stuff - probably not surprising since all my siblings have ended up going to art school, so I reckon it runs in the family somewhat:) I was just the odd one out studying Computer Science - though I'm the eldest so it didn't seem odd at the time, and it's what our dad studied, so it isn't that weird that I'm interested in it too.
you'd be surprised at the kind of complex behaviors that can emerge from relatively basic AI
Yep, I can easily believe you there. I used to have my bots do simple stuff like wait once they got to a corner, and then they had more chance to start moving forward once a team-mate was close I think, that kind of thing, it worked pretty well. Once I remember reading on a forum someone commenting on an amazingly specific team behaviour my bots were doing (they were called TEAMbot after all!), which I knew I hadn't coded in there at all and they were just imagining that the bots were smarter than they actually were. They did have a fair amount of smarts by the time I'd finished with them though - they could use flashbangs or try to sneak in areas where they previously died, they could radio for backup (and respond to requests for backup), CTs would protect the bomb if they found it lying around, or you could order your team to rush by saying 'storm the front' and the like - they were more likely to obey commands if they had a good obedience rating on their personality file (which also defined how good they were at aiming, what their favourite type of weapon was, how chatty they were, whether they could run in one direction while facing another direction, and so on), etc. It was a little sad when I started playing online and realised that most people just play CS as if it's another deathmatch game and ignore the objectives!
You seem to be the only other person to notice my first thought - does it really matter if the language is interpreted anyway and has a version for your platform?
I like Perl, I started using it last year and have been using it to write web apps, but when it comes to writing Windows applications I wouldn't start out using Perl. I haven't even looked much into.NET either. I've just been writing any Windows applications in Delphi - which possibly ends up compiling its code in such a way to use.NET APIs where possible, but again I haven't really looked into it:) The apps I've written with Delphi 2007 seem to work fine in Vista anyway (our MD bought a Vista machine just for the "ooh, shiny!" factor:/ ).
Sounds good. I was eventually going to look into more eastern philosophies anyway, as my current logical (hopefully) musings have led me to believe that the only man-made belief systems that make real sense are ones that don't start out by condemning all non-believers - since no one religion has had, nor will ever have 100% coverage of humanity (or any other species AFAIK!).
Have ordered a copy from Amazon that has the teachers' material and students' workbook combined, thanks for the recommendation:)
Will maybe get back to you in another 2 years when I've joined a monastery in Tibet or Kyoto! That seems just as far fetched to me now as the idea that I'd lose my Christian faith would have been to me 2 years ago.
That's still too much of a delay. If it is imperative that customers be served immediately (as it would be in an online banking site or other for-profit site), you'd better start bringing in extra receptionists before you reach capacity, or you're going to lose business to competitors..
I'm not sure if your last sentence is rhetorical or not.. most businesses will be able to measure peak call times and alter their staff requirements accordingly. It's no different for servers, apart from you don't have to pay a salary to the machines that are waiting on standby so it makes a lot more sense to dynamically vary the group size even when peak times are not predictable.
But then how do you get to 'brag' about how green your system is while the customer has to wait for the servers to come online? That was the best idea in the article! It's like having a receptionist who has to take a 5 minute drive into work every time the phone rings..
I agree with you! It's just like how I took this $10 watch down to 200 metres depth without any issues! Oh wait, it's broken. Hmm. When did that happen?
Indeed, my morality is almost entirely the same, just with a few differences on sexual issues and the like (my brother is gay - I'd already accepted that, but I still had to consider it "wrong" from a Christian perspective). Pretty much all my family and the majority of my friends are Christians, so I have little choice but to continue to be influenced by Christian values too. I know a lot of good, genuine Christians, but I also know some crappy ones. No different to the rest of us then.
Thanks - I am indeed trying to be content that there are some things we cannot know in this life. As a Christian I was content to put too many things down to 'god' as you say, and had all but stopped being amazed by the wonders all around me, since they were just stuff that god had made and ultimately would mean nothing in the wider context of eternity.
I still perhaps have a bit of a nihilistic streak, but I'm working toward trying to find or create my own meaning in life again:) The whole of existence sometimes just seems like a bad joke to me - that anything would exist at all, just 'exist' for the hell of it. It's crazy. Was funny to see RAW say that death seemed like a joke too (on his wiki article). I guess he hadn't really worked out "the answer" any more than the rest of us, but at least he had a good crack at it, and was going into it with his eyes open so to speak.. if there is any existence and 'judgement' after this life, you'd hope that they'd give marks for effort!
The method we were actually taught was a quick stamp on the brakes to scrub of some initial speed, let up to steer around the obstacle and then I guess it didn't matter so much after that. We tried that at a succession of speeds gradually getting faster just to analyse our steering and so on. I've not driven any other non ABS cars for years though so I can't really practice proper threshold braking now anyway (apart from in computer games, which isn't quite the same but I do tend to just pump the brakes if I get a lockup rather than try to analyse everything in depth.. you can't 'feel' things happening in a computer game so it's more awkward)
I passed high school physics too, though it was 7 years ago and I don't even remember there being 2 different types of friction (despite getting an A for 'Higher' level physics).
I used to assume that skidding is bad for braking distances, as it seemed natural, but I had read and was told by police drivers that ABS could be bad for braking distances since it is not necessarily designed to stop the car as efficiently as possible - it is designed to keep the wheels rolling so that the driver can retain steering control. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd go the wrong end of the stick wrt what surfaces it's bad on, or if they just didn't actually know themselves as the instructors weren't exactly the rocket scientist type (but they knew a lot about safe driving, that's for sure). I just assumed they were correct.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe it is actually better for survival of the species if they are stupid and gullible
Indeed. I can think of a couple of things:
"Of course I love you! Now let's have sex"
"Yeah of course I'm wearing a condom!" etc (kind of like in "Knocked Up").
In Glasgow (where I was born) and here in Aberdeen there are indeed a lot of young single parents.. we worked out that one girl in our class's mother (who was a single parent and was moving around a lot to avoid the father or something.. that girl was only in our class for a few months) must have been 15 when she was born.. actually I never thought before that could mean that she was 14 when she conceived. Such is the way of things here in Scotland!
Actually, that review describes it exactly as I expected after carefully watching a few of the demonstration videos on YouTube - there isn't any more to it that rhythmic movement (and I doubt you can even pass or fail, it's probably more about just making novel interpretations of songs through using weird instruments and messing about with the timing). No individual 'notes' to play unless perhaps you're playing the drums. Doesn't sound like there is any challenge - personally I need a challenge to stay interested in something. Since I completed everything but Through the Fire and the Flames on Guitar Hero III, I have hardly played it since (as the challenge then has quite a jump in difficulty and I don't consider the time I'd need to put into practicing as proportional to the reward..).
So like I said, fine for those who just want to mess about, but very shallow when it comes to actually being a game. I know that the word "toy" wasn't an actual translation, but I can see what he was getting at. I've already left my Wii at home with my mum and little sister anyway soon after getting my PS3 - I probably will never ask for it back (but I do like to play a bit of Wii Fit when I visit).
Wow, after having RTFA I have to say that the computer is pretty dumb. Cheap parlour tricks like introducing spelling errors do not a Turing Test winner make.. I didn't know about the criteria for the test in such detail before, I didn't realise that they tested both a human and the AI at the same time, and that it only had to get a 30% uncertainty among the judges to 'pass'.
The NLP program I wrote to simulate my sister is better than Ultra Hal. Of course that program just generally turns everything around into an insult and says "so's your face" a lot.
Intelligence doesn't have to involve "desires". Problem solving doesn't require desires. A human may desire to work towards a goal, but a human could also design a program that will alow a computer to "intelligently" work out the solution to a problem without itself having any desire. Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean that the computer understands the nature of problem in hand, just that it can come up with correct or "good enough" answers to problems within a certain domain.
Intelligence is obviously pretty hard to quantify, and in my psychology classes at university I remember there being at least two types of psychologically recognised intelligence: normal IQ type problem solving, and 'emotional intelligence' which would probably be a lot more difficult for a computer to emulate. Even when it comes to IQ tests some people may score fantastically on one test and abysmally on others (especially for those with Autism or other mental issues).
So, we are able to make algorithms that are very intelligent (or at least give a consistent impression of intelligence, which really amounts to the same thing) in certain domains. The Turing Test is much more general though, and that's what makes it difficult. It basically requires bringing together several fields of AI research to be able to adequately pass the test - it would have to parse language, account for typing errors or mispelled words, have a bit of 'general knowledge', be able to solve riddles, questions to do with basic physics and maths and so on.. I'd be interested to see what sorts of questions people think should be used to judge whether the AI has passed or not. I wouldn't be surprised if some humans could fail the Turing Test, if they just have poor general knowledge, or english wasn't their first language! :)
Ah. I'd mod that one informative ;)
Someone has since moderated me "under-rated" on the same comment anyway for some reason. Nice to know that at least one other slashdotter agrees with either my moderation philosophy, or my actual comment..
Sounds like you basically just like 'puzzle games'. I like them a little too, but they lose their appeal pretty quickly. Loco Rocco can be completed in like half an hour the first time and then even faster once you get the hang of it.. and there only seems to be one level?
Portal was okay, but ultimately again just a puzzle game. Once you complete it, that's it.
I love Grand Theft Auto and any game that allows you to free roam, as it has a lot more replay value for me. And it has plenty of creativity and beauty. Beautiful sunsets and sunrises, hilarious ingame TV&radio shows, the great 'sandbox' type environment, minigames where you can play pool, bowling, darts and so on. It's just good fun. If you believe all that hype and just think it's about stuff like killing prostitutes then that's up to you, but you're missing out on a great series of games in that case. I can appreciate that you may just not enjoy 'shooting' games, but don't think a game is crap just because it's mainstream. A lot of games these days truly are boring, but the GTA games have been some of the few games out in the last few years that I actually enjoyed. I haven't even completed IV yet just because I enjoy driving round and doing the minigames with the 'friends' and such like I said. I'm probably only 50%-75% through the missions.
I think you should just stick with the Wii or DS if you enjoy quirky short lived games.. I really liked Twilight Princess but the rest of the time the game that saw the most play on my Wii was Need For Speed Carbon.. the others were all completed far too quickly.
When you say 'play'.. I'm assuming you mean "wave your arm around a bit", because Wii Music looked atrociously shallow even compared to games like Guitar Hero. The drums could be good if they did them well, but I'm not hoping for much at all from that title.
I liked Wii Sports, and Wii Fit is good fun, but Wii Music to me seems too much to me like having your 50th birthday party in McDonalds, or putting rally cars on a scalextric type track so that they can't fall off the sides.
No doubt some people will find it fun, but I kind of pity them. I admit I enjoy Guitar Hero, a lot. But at least it is challenging in its own way, despite not really being like a real guitar. It has longevity - took me a few months to complete all the GH3 setlist tracks on expert from never having played it before. Wii Music looks like it will be fun for 2 minutes, and then you forget about it. It would be a great demo to include with the Wii, but as it is a separate game, they better only be charging at most £15 for it..
I am a self taught guitarist and drummer too, but some people honestly just don't have the dexterity, coordination or perhaps consistency to play. Sure I agree that sometimes it comes down to dedication and practice - unless someone has some physical or mental disability which prevents them from progressing - but you have to concede that some people simply find it a lot easier to play instruments than others ('virtuouso' types). Same as a lot of people just find maths or running easy while others struggle. They still have to do the learning or training, but their basic hardware is just better suited to these things.
I agree that people should give the guitar a go if they are interested though. If you're really interested, you will put in the effort and you will eventually get it. I took saxophone lessons for a few months but I didn't care for it and didn't want to do the 30 minutes prescribed practice each day. I do consider myself mostly "self taught" - but I did have a year of free tuition as part of my music classes in one of my high schools, after I'd already been teaching myself from a chord dictionary, books and tab for a few months. That teacher just wanted me to practice for around 10 minutes a day - but sometimes I'd end up practicing for hours just because I enjoy playing the guitar.
L2Play guitar oh yeah that would actually involve talent.
I can play guitar. I still find Guitar Hero lots of fun. I didn't think I would, but I happened to play it at a friend's house and within a couple of days I'd bought my own copy.
Rock Band is even better (despite all but Green Grass and High Tide being incredibly easy for guitar even on expert) because singing or playing the drums on Rock Band are basically the same as playing IRL. Yes, I play real drums too, though I start to struggle at about halfway through the expert setlist on Rock Band since I'm self taught.
Disliking something because it's popular is not a "legitimate reason". I admit that sometimes I can't help but dislike things like the iPod and iPhone due to all the hype (but I still like Macs - I liked them a decade before the iPod ever appeared). There are usually valid criticisms to be levelled too - for example iPods/iPhones tend to be pricier than equivalent devices that offer the same or more features - but disliking something just because it is popular is just being awkward for the sake of it.
"Oh, Darwin!" just doesn't have the same ring to it...
I don't know, I could imagine some of the more zealous Apple fanboys find that appropriate ;) I love my Macs, but not that much.
That's nice.
You could, however, moderate them according to the content of their current post regardless of how you feel about them as a person. I even modded up one of my 'freaks' last week. I don't give a shit about personal vendettas.
If you mean you mod posts down as overrated when you feel the content doesn't deserve the karma bonus, I wouldn't have so much problem with that.
People can be ignorant on certain topics while knowledgeable in others. I know I have plenty of gaps in my knowledge of the world, but I like to learn which is why I am here in the first place.
People can also have bad days when they end up losing their rag and end up posting flamebait or trolling a group of people they see as morons. There may be no real justification for such childish behaviour, but downmodding a person's posts just because you don't like that person is even more childish IMO.
More like a mix of the quicklaunch and taskbar. You can customise it to hold whatever applications you want, and it also keeps track of all open applications, as well as minimised windows and the trashcan.
I only have OS 10.4 and it doesn't have any option of showing regularly used applications that I can see. Perhaps that's a 10.5 thing - either that or the wording of the patent is just overly ambiguous (since you can indeed customise it manually to show regularly used apps).
Well, the dock can auto magnify icons when you put the cursor over them, and provides some useful shortcuts like being able to specify whether an item should be loaded on startup if you right click on its icon in the Dock. It's more analagous to the quick launch plus the task bar though because it keeps track of currently open applications and hidden windows too.
No, I don't think it's worthy of a patent, it's just a menu bar and probably a lot of the ideas in it have prior art. I don't really think software should be able to be patented anyway.. copyright is enough for me to protect distribution of complete applications. If someone else can copy my design and improve on it, then good for them..
I used to think the Dock was quite tacky when I first saw it, but now that I've set it up with only the applications I use regularly, I'm used to using it as a tool and have grown to like it. I just realised right now that I've disabled the auto-magnification of icons (I forgot I even did that) - that's probably the reason I stopped thinking of it as a gimmicky/tacky..
Would be nice if mods could explain how a comment is 'overrated' when it hasn't even been rated to begin with. I'd rather have a comment berating me for my choices in programming language than some moron who probably marked me 'overrated' just because he's upset he wasted his money on a Vista machine.
Thanks for the compliments :) A few people have said I have a good eye for that stuff - probably not surprising since all my siblings have ended up going to art school, so I reckon it runs in the family somewhat :) I was just the odd one out studying Computer Science - though I'm the eldest so it didn't seem odd at the time, and it's what our dad studied, so it isn't that weird that I'm interested in it too.
you'd be surprised at the kind of complex behaviors that can emerge from relatively basic AI
Yep, I can easily believe you there. I used to have my bots do simple stuff like wait once they got to a corner, and then they had more chance to start moving forward once a team-mate was close I think, that kind of thing, it worked pretty well. Once I remember reading on a forum someone commenting on an amazingly specific team behaviour my bots were doing (they were called TEAMbot after all!), which I knew I hadn't coded in there at all and they were just imagining that the bots were smarter than they actually were. They did have a fair amount of smarts by the time I'd finished with them though - they could use flashbangs or try to sneak in areas where they previously died, they could radio for backup (and respond to requests for backup), CTs would protect the bomb if they found it lying around, or you could order your team to rush by saying 'storm the front' and the like - they were more likely to obey commands if they had a good obedience rating on their personality file (which also defined how good they were at aiming, what their favourite type of weapon was, how chatty they were, whether they could run in one direction while facing another direction, and so on), etc. It was a little sad when I started playing online and realised that most people just play CS as if it's another deathmatch game and ignore the objectives!
You seem to be the only other person to notice my first thought - does it really matter if the language is interpreted anyway and has a version for your platform?
I like Perl, I started using it last year and have been using it to write web apps, but when it comes to writing Windows applications I wouldn't start out using Perl. I haven't even looked much into .NET either. I've just been writing any Windows applications in Delphi - which possibly ends up compiling its code in such a way to use .NET APIs where possible, but again I haven't really looked into it :) The apps I've written with Delphi 2007 seem to work fine in Vista anyway (our MD bought a Vista machine just for the "ooh, shiny!" factor :/ ).
Sounds good. I was eventually going to look into more eastern philosophies anyway, as my current logical (hopefully) musings have led me to believe that the only man-made belief systems that make real sense are ones that don't start out by condemning all non-believers - since no one religion has had, nor will ever have 100% coverage of humanity (or any other species AFAIK!).
Have ordered a copy from Amazon that has the teachers' material and students' workbook combined, thanks for the recommendation :)
Will maybe get back to you in another 2 years when I've joined a monastery in Tibet or Kyoto! That seems just as far fetched to me now as the idea that I'd lose my Christian faith would have been to me 2 years ago.
That's still too much of a delay. If it is imperative that customers be served immediately (as it would be in an online banking site or other for-profit site), you'd better start bringing in extra receptionists before you reach capacity, or you're going to lose business to competitors..
I'm not sure if your last sentence is rhetorical or not.. most businesses will be able to measure peak call times and alter their staff requirements accordingly. It's no different for servers, apart from you don't have to pay a salary to the machines that are waiting on standby so it makes a lot more sense to dynamically vary the group size even when peak times are not predictable.
But then how do you get to 'brag' about how green your system is while the customer has to wait for the servers to come online? That was the best idea in the article! It's like having a receptionist who has to take a 5 minute drive into work every time the phone rings..
Not everyone can afford a 911..
I agree with you! It's just like how I took this $10 watch down to 200 metres depth without any issues! Oh wait, it's broken. Hmm. When did that happen?
I like your thinking! But wait, on second thought forget the hookers and the rubbing.. no wait, that isn't right..
Indeed, my morality is almost entirely the same, just with a few differences on sexual issues and the like (my brother is gay - I'd already accepted that, but I still had to consider it "wrong" from a Christian perspective). Pretty much all my family and the majority of my friends are Christians, so I have little choice but to continue to be influenced by Christian values too. I know a lot of good, genuine Christians, but I also know some crappy ones. No different to the rest of us then.
Thanks - I am indeed trying to be content that there are some things we cannot know in this life. As a Christian I was content to put too many things down to 'god' as you say, and had all but stopped being amazed by the wonders all around me, since they were just stuff that god had made and ultimately would mean nothing in the wider context of eternity.
I still perhaps have a bit of a nihilistic streak, but I'm working toward trying to find or create my own meaning in life again :) The whole of existence sometimes just seems like a bad joke to me - that anything would exist at all, just 'exist' for the hell of it. It's crazy. Was funny to see RAW say that death seemed like a joke too (on his wiki article). I guess he hadn't really worked out "the answer" any more than the rest of us, but at least he had a good crack at it, and was going into it with his eyes open so to speak.. if there is any existence and 'judgement' after this life, you'd hope that they'd give marks for effort!
The method we were actually taught was a quick stamp on the brakes to scrub of some initial speed, let up to steer around the obstacle and then I guess it didn't matter so much after that. We tried that at a succession of speeds gradually getting faster just to analyse our steering and so on. I've not driven any other non ABS cars for years though so I can't really practice proper threshold braking now anyway (apart from in computer games, which isn't quite the same but I do tend to just pump the brakes if I get a lockup rather than try to analyse everything in depth.. you can't 'feel' things happening in a computer game so it's more awkward)
I passed high school physics too, though it was 7 years ago and I don't even remember there being 2 different types of friction (despite getting an A for 'Higher' level physics).
I used to assume that skidding is bad for braking distances, as it seemed natural, but I had read and was told by police drivers that ABS could be bad for braking distances since it is not necessarily designed to stop the car as efficiently as possible - it is designed to keep the wheels rolling so that the driver can retain steering control. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd go the wrong end of the stick wrt what surfaces it's bad on, or if they just didn't actually know themselves as the instructors weren't exactly the rocket scientist type (but they knew a lot about safe driving, that's for sure). I just assumed they were correct.
Thanks for the recap anyway, every little helps.