While all good authors may be voracious readers, it does not follow that all voracious readers are good authors.
Thus my point is that while all good game programmers might be voracious gamers, it does not follow that all voracious gamers, as the OP claims to be, are (or can be) good game programmers.
Put bluntly, just because one is enjoys and is good at playing "Pac Man" does not mean you have the intellect, or even the general interest, to program a computer.
The trick is going to be figuring out the instantaneous velocity of my hammer at the time of impact. I should be able to approximate it with a stopwatch and a helper. The delta momentum will be the momentum - zero, since the hammer is coming to a complete stop.
Any thoughts on how to figure out the instantaneous velocity of the hammer at the time it strikes an object?
I use Youtube as my music jukebox at work. I search for just about any song that pops into my head and someone has uploaded a "video" of it to Youtube, so I listen and minimize the browser. It's nice.
>States/cities/counties/etc. don't complete based on tax rates.
I know for a fact this is untrue.
When Hyundai set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, there were huge tax incentives for them to do so.
When Bass Pro Shops set up shop in Prattvile, Alabama, they get a deal where they could split the sales tax revenue with the city.
States and cities DO make sweetheart tax incentive deals with big businesses in the hopes of luring them to set up shop in their jurisdiction, because of the revenue and jobs they bring to the area.
>Bravo to North Carolina for calling these online retailers to be responsible.
Hope they enjoy no Amazon-related resellers operating in their state.
Taxes are how states compete for business. Raise taxes on a business that can operate anywhere else and avoid the tax, guess what? They are leaving town.
>One measure we give is we have 20 different "steps" for using a condom properly, and they're out >of order, and some are not real steps. Out of ~250 teenagers, most of whom have taken sex ed, >been exposed to safer sex info all their lives, only 6 got that exercise 100% correct (all real >steps in proper order, all fake steps removed), and only 42 got all the real steps in the correct >order (but kept some of the fake steps). The kids have been taught, but retention isn't so hot - >we're coming up with better ways to teach this.
This is pretty fucking pathetic. But partly, I blame you guys for coming up with TWENTY steps for putting on a condom.
This is not rocket science. You take it out of the foil, figure out which way the thing rolls, stick it on your penis, and roll it on down until it doesn't roll anymore. Give it a couple tugs on the tip to make a place for the sperm to go and you're ready for battle, soldier. I count FIVE steps.
>What makes you think you can't do the exact same thing with Blu-ray?
Nothing. Slysoft provides software for that, too. Unless you crank the quality settings way up high, though (with resulting high file sizes) your output will be sub-blu-ray quality.
>At normal viewing distance I honestly can't tell the difference.
I rip the DVDs I buy using SlySofts AnyDVD, so that I can dump all the advertisements and FBI warnings and the like. I've got my encoder settings to 3-pass and and a good quality so that most movies end up about 1.7 - 2GB in size. This does produce some quality artifacts in the end product.
But in the end, in my opinion, it's the STORY that makes the movie, not the film quality, and the convenience of ripped movies far outweighs any quality degradation.
So if you're going to rip and re-encode your movies, blue-ray is a waste of time.
>There are trade-offs, yes, but I think the suburbs sort of need to die. People don't realize that >they're a relatively recent invention (suburbs arguably didn't exist until about half a century ago), >and I think it's a social experiment which has failed.
People with money are always going to pay to move away from the riff-raff. And you can bet the parts of town being torn down are not the areas where the people with money live.
Do you think the people with money are going to tolerate all the riff-raff moving next door to them, so they can let THOSE houses go to shit, too?
Nope.
The people with money are going to go buy up those nice, new, "back to nature" parts of town and build nice houses on them once again.
In 50 years we'll be tearing down the houses that the people with money are living in today.
>No, this is probably incorrect. I'm not purporting to be an expert on pedagogy, but the books >need sufficient worked examples to illustrate the basic methods and variations of attack. >After that, "answers in the back of the book" serve limited utility.
As I said previously, this has never worked for me. I know what you are supposed to do is read the chapter, and it supposedly explains the concepts, which you are then supposed to apply to solving the problems. But this has never worked for me. What works for me is to do lots of problems, until I see the pattern of how to solve those kinds of problems. I know this makes me an anathema to true mathematicians, but I'm afraid at this stage of my education what I'm mostly interested in is learning how to do the required problems and so pass the course. I'm 38 years old and have been working in the mechanical engineering field for 17 years now, long enough to know that most of the Calculus I am learning will never be used, just as every other ME I've ever worked with told me.
So for me, the critical, immediate need is to learn how to identify and solve specific kinds of math problems. The best way I have found to learn this is to do lots of examples, so that you can learn to recognize the patterns and act on them.
>Of course, they can help to an extent ("I'm out by a factor of two", etc.) but they are far from the >be-all end-all. A handy thing about mathematics is that if you're right, you're right.
But without answers, you don't know if you're right or not.
>Hence why the "even numbers have solutions only" style is so successful.
But this renders all the odd problems useless to me, since I can't know if I'm right or not after I do them. And, since I'm usually apt to do them wrong, if I do them anyway I am re-inforcing the wrong way to solve the problem.
This problem is complicated by the fact that in most texts, you are lucky if you get two or three problems per step up in problem difficulty. Which means you have two or three problems to learn each successive concept. When you are learning the material by doing the problems, if half of those problems you don't know whether you did them right or not it severely limits your ability to learn the material.
>And much like what the fellow above me said - just check the answer yourself! Integrals, >differentiate and so forth. It's only in the higher level maths courses where checking becomes >harder than the problem itself, at which stage those who have trouble with mathematics have given up anyway.
Well I have trouble with mathematics, but I certainly have never given up.:)
Over some 20 years of school on-and-off school work, I have taken calculus I twice (got a C and a B), calculus II 6 times (W,F,D,F,B,B) and calculus III once (D).
I do find the checking harder than the problem itself, as checking supposes you understand the material well enough to devise check systems, which I never have. I find that the checking ends up taking as much time as the problem, which takes long enough as it is.
At this point I have given up on any thought of acquiring any deep understanding of the material. I just need to be able to identify and solve the problems. I'm looking for the cookie cutter solutions. Solutions tell me right away if I've got the right cutter or not.
>So learn how to check your work. First, look at your answer and try to determine whether it makes sense, >and then see if you made any silly algebra mistakes. Then if you're learning integration, for example, >take the derivative and see if you get the original function back again. If you're learning differential >equations, plug your purported solution in and see if it is actually a solution. In many situations, >you have more than one method available to solve a problem, so try both and see if they produce the same thing.
The problem with this approach is time. In addition to the time it takes to simply do the problems, I would have to then start an investigative process to try and determine if I got the right answer or not. While this would certainly lead to a deeper understanding of the process, I don't have the time for it. I simply want to learn the process at hand and knowing whether or not I got the right answer allows me to either move on with confidence right away or right away begin analyzing my work to check for errors.
Further, this all assumes that I understand the material well enough to understand what kinds of answers make sense. Frequently I don't.
>In the real world you don't have a solution manual, so it's a valuable skill to be able to check your >work without one. Furthermore, some students use solution manuals badly: if they don't get the right answer, >they tinker with their work until their answer matches the right one, with no understanding of what they did >wrong or what they did to correct it. It's a good idea to not have all of the answers available; for calculus, half >seems about the right proportion.
When you eliminate the answers for half the problems, I don't bother doing those problems, unless they are required as homework. If I can't tell if the answer is right, then as often as not I've done the problem wrong, and now I've taught myself how to do the problems incorrectly.
Fortunately, thus far I have been able to find a solution manual for my calculus texts online.
If you simply randomly tinker with your work until the answer matches, with no understanding of what you did, then you will fail the exams.
I believe the ability to check your work is crucial.
This is why I am a firm believer that all math texts should offer the solutions to ALL the problems in the back of the book.
The way I learn to do math problems is by doing LOTS of math problems. Finally, after I have done enough of them, I see the pattern, and I have learned the mathematic principles behind the problems.
This, of course, is precisely backwards of how math is taught. They try to teach the mathematic principles, and then from that you are supposed to deduce how to do the problems. This has never worked for me.
I have to lots of problems, and finally I see the pattern.
In order for the lots of problems to be useful, however, I have to have the answers to the problems so that I can tell whether I did the problem right or not. There are not enough problems in textbooks now as it is. If I can only do the even ones (because that is all answers are available for) then that has cut my available problems to do in half. To me, there is no point in doing the problems that have no answers because I have no way to know if I did it right or not.
And the real problem is, if you spend your time "learning" how to do a bunch of math problems incorrectly (though you didn't know it), you have to "deprogram" yourself once you are shown how to do it correctly. I would rather know right away (by having the solution available) whether I made a mistake or not, so I can figure out what I did wrong and move forward.
Of course teachers don't want to give all the answers to the texts because they want easy homework assignments to hand out and grade.
I think this is crap for two reasons:
First, and most importantly, if you cheat on your homework, YOU ARE FUCKED ON EXAMS. Period.
Secondly, for many texts nowadays you can find a torrent for the teachers solution manual. I've done this for texts when I can, but not all are available.
Wolfram Alpha has the ability for me to possibly plug in difficult math problems and find the answer, and then I can figure out how to get that answer myself, WHICH IS WHAT LEARNING MATHEMATICS IS ALL ABOUT.
This whole cheating thing in Mathematics is just way overblown. Let students cheat on their homework. They will, absolutely and without question, fail their exams, and thus, the course. End of story.
I just have never understood the appeal of console gaming.
I started out gaming on an Atari 2600. Since that day, I have been buying better and better computing hardware for playing games. The PC is not only a much better gaming platform, it is multi-functional.
Consoles are like going backwards to me. I do not understand the appeal. Anything a console can do a PC can do.
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I would be very skeptical of a GPS in my cell phone, as I would expect there to be some kind of fee to use it.
The thing I like about stand-alone GPS devices is you buy them one time and that's it. No recurring fees - the GPS system is free to everyone.
I'm sure if and when they launch a GPS replacement they will try and make it subscription based in order to get the signals.
While all good authors may be voracious readers, it does not follow that all voracious readers are good authors.
Thus my point is that while all good game programmers might be voracious gamers, it does not follow that all voracious gamers, as the OP claims to be, are (or can be) good game programmers.
Put bluntly, just because one is enjoys and is good at playing "Pac Man" does not mean you have the intellect, or even the general interest, to program a computer.
So far, you seem to say you are interested in programming games because you are interested in playing them.
What you really need to figure out is "are you interested in programming".
Just because you like playing games does not mean you will enjoy, or even have the aptitude for, programming.
>Force = delta momentum/delta time
That answered the question right there.
All I gotta do now is go figure out how to calculate the momentum of the hammer of X mass swung with speed Y.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum
Looks like momentum = mass * velocity
The trick is going to be figuring out the instantaneous velocity of my hammer at the time of impact. I should be able to approximate it with a stopwatch and a helper. The delta momentum will be the momentum - zero, since the hammer is coming to a complete stop.
Any thoughts on how to figure out the instantaneous velocity of the hammer at the time it strikes an object?
I believe this is the best write-up of the financial disaster I have ever read.
OK, serious question here.
Let's say I can take a hammer and swing it and flatten a piece of wire.
How can I calculate what the equivalent force would be required to do the same deformation by, say, squeezing the wire in a vise?
In other words, how can I relate impulse into a constant force?
Definitely there are too many commercials on cable TV.
On the very rare ocassions I fire up the TV and channel surf, it goes like this:
click (commercial) click (commercial) click (commercial) click (rerun I've seen) click (commercial) click (movie I already own unedited-for-TV copy of) click (commercial) click (religious programming) click (commercial) click (commercial) click (Spanish channel)
Booooooring.
The only reason we have cable at all is because it is only $10 more per month to have cable WITH internet then without it.
I hardly ever watch TV. It's internet or netflix.
I use Youtube as my music jukebox at work. I search for just about any song that pops into my head and someone has uploaded a "video" of it to Youtube, so I listen and minimize the browser. It's nice.
Would more time have helped the Americans against the British in their revolution?
No, what these people need are guns and the will to use them.
>States/cities/counties/etc. don't complete based on tax rates.
I know for a fact this is untrue.
When Hyundai set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, there were huge tax incentives for them to do so.
When Bass Pro Shops set up shop in Prattvile, Alabama, they get a deal where they could split the sales tax revenue with the city.
States and cities DO make sweetheart tax incentive deals with big businesses in the hopes of luring them to set up shop in their jurisdiction, because of the revenue and jobs they bring to the area.
>Bravo to North Carolina for calling these online retailers to be responsible.
Hope they enjoy no Amazon-related resellers operating in their state.
Taxes are how states compete for business. Raise taxes on a business that can operate anywhere else and avoid the tax, guess what? They are leaving town.
I have wondered when we would reach the point of trying atmospheric processing to correct some of our global warming issues.
I think it's great.
>One measure we give is we have 20 different "steps" for using a condom properly, and they're out
>of order, and some are not real steps. Out of ~250 teenagers, most of whom have taken sex ed,
>been exposed to safer sex info all their lives, only 6 got that exercise 100% correct (all real
>steps in proper order, all fake steps removed), and only 42 got all the real steps in the correct
>order (but kept some of the fake steps). The kids have been taught, but retention isn't so hot -
>we're coming up with better ways to teach this.
This is pretty fucking pathetic. But partly, I blame you guys for coming up with TWENTY steps for putting on a condom.
This is not rocket science. You take it out of the foil, figure out which way the thing rolls, stick it on your penis, and roll it on down until it doesn't roll anymore. Give it a couple tugs on the tip to make a place for the sperm to go and you're ready for battle, soldier. I count FIVE steps.
>What makes you think you can't do the exact same thing with Blu-ray?
Nothing. Slysoft provides software for that, too. Unless you crank the quality settings way up high, though (with resulting high file sizes) your output will be sub-blu-ray quality.
>At normal viewing distance I honestly can't tell the difference.
I rip the DVDs I buy using SlySofts AnyDVD, so that I can dump all the advertisements and FBI warnings and the like. I've got my encoder settings to 3-pass and and a good quality so that most movies end up about 1.7 - 2GB in size. This does produce some quality artifacts in the end product.
But in the end, in my opinion, it's the STORY that makes the movie, not the film quality, and the convenience of ripped movies far outweighs any quality degradation.
So if you're going to rip and re-encode your movies, blue-ray is a waste of time.
>There are trade-offs, yes, but I think the suburbs sort of need to die. People don't realize that
>they're a relatively recent invention (suburbs arguably didn't exist until about half a century ago),
>and I think it's a social experiment which has failed.
People with money are always going to pay to move away from the riff-raff. And you can bet the parts of town being torn down are not the areas where the people with money live.
Do you think the people with money are going to tolerate all the riff-raff moving next door to them, so they can let THOSE houses go to shit, too?
Nope.
The people with money are going to go buy up those nice, new, "back to nature" parts of town and build nice houses on them once again.
In 50 years we'll be tearing down the houses that the people with money are living in today.
I did not know what tethering was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethering
>No, this is probably incorrect. I'm not purporting to be an expert on pedagogy, but the books
>need sufficient worked examples to illustrate the basic methods and variations of attack.
>After that, "answers in the back of the book" serve limited utility.
As I said previously, this has never worked for me. I know what you are supposed to do is read the chapter, and it supposedly explains the concepts, which you are then supposed to apply to solving the problems. But this has never worked for me. What works for me is to do lots of problems, until I see the pattern of how to solve those kinds of problems. I know this makes me an anathema to true mathematicians, but I'm afraid at this stage of my education what I'm mostly interested in is learning how to do the required problems and so pass the course. I'm 38 years old and have been working in the mechanical engineering field for 17 years now, long enough to know that most of the Calculus I am learning will never be used, just as every other ME I've ever worked with told me.
So for me, the critical, immediate need is to learn how to identify and solve specific kinds of math problems. The best way I have found to learn this is to do lots of examples, so that you can learn to recognize the patterns and act on them.
>Of course, they can help to an extent ("I'm out by a factor of two", etc.) but they are far from the
>be-all end-all. A handy thing about mathematics is that if you're right, you're right.
But without answers, you don't know if you're right or not.
>Hence why the "even numbers have solutions only" style is so successful.
But this renders all the odd problems useless to me, since I can't know if I'm right or not after I do them. And, since I'm usually apt to do them wrong, if I do them anyway I am re-inforcing the wrong way to solve the problem.
This problem is complicated by the fact that in most texts, you are lucky if you get two or three problems per step up in problem difficulty. Which means you have two or three problems to learn each successive concept. When you are learning the material by doing the problems, if half of those problems you don't know whether you did them right or not it severely limits your ability to learn the material.
>And much like what the fellow above me said - just check the answer yourself! Integrals,
>differentiate and so forth. It's only in the higher level maths courses where checking becomes
>harder than the problem itself, at which stage those who have trouble with mathematics have given up anyway.
Well I have trouble with mathematics, but I certainly have never given up. :)
Over some 20 years of school on-and-off school work, I have taken calculus I twice (got a C and a B), calculus II 6 times (W,F,D,F,B,B) and calculus III once (D).
I do find the checking harder than the problem itself, as checking supposes you understand the material well enough to devise check systems, which I never have. I find that the checking ends up taking as much time as the problem, which takes long enough as it is.
At this point I have given up on any thought of acquiring any deep understanding of the material. I just need to be able to identify and solve the problems. I'm looking for the cookie cutter solutions. Solutions tell me right away if I've got the right cutter or not.
>So learn how to check your work. First, look at your answer and try to determine whether it makes sense,
>and then see if you made any silly algebra mistakes. Then if you're learning integration, for example,
>take the derivative and see if you get the original function back again. If you're learning differential
>equations, plug your purported solution in and see if it is actually a solution. In many situations,
>you have more than one method available to solve a problem, so try both and see if they produce the same thing.
The problem with this approach is time. In addition to the time it takes to simply do the problems, I would have to then start an investigative process to try and determine if I got the right answer or not. While this would certainly lead to a deeper understanding of the process, I don't have the time for it. I simply want to learn the process at hand and knowing whether or not I got the right answer allows me to either move on with confidence right away or right away begin analyzing my work to check for errors.
Further, this all assumes that I understand the material well enough to understand what kinds of answers make sense. Frequently I don't.
>In the real world you don't have a solution manual, so it's a valuable skill to be able to check your
>work without one. Furthermore, some students use solution manuals badly: if they don't get the right answer,
>they tinker with their work until their answer matches the right one, with no understanding of what they did
>wrong or what they did to correct it. It's a good idea to not have all of the answers available; for calculus, half
>seems about the right proportion.
When you eliminate the answers for half the problems, I don't bother doing those problems, unless they are required as homework. If I can't tell if the answer is right, then as often as not I've done the problem wrong, and now I've taught myself how to do the problems incorrectly.
Fortunately, thus far I have been able to find a solution manual for my calculus texts online.
If you simply randomly tinker with your work until the answer matches, with no understanding of what you did, then you will fail the exams.
Yes, but if you are willing and able to successfully cheat on exams, then the entire issue about Wolfram-Alpha to cheat on homework is moot.
I believe the ability to check your work is crucial.
This is why I am a firm believer that all math texts should offer the solutions to ALL the problems in the back of the book.
The way I learn to do math problems is by doing LOTS of math problems. Finally, after I have done enough of them, I see the pattern, and I have learned the mathematic principles behind the problems.
This, of course, is precisely backwards of how math is taught. They try to teach the mathematic principles, and then from that you are supposed to deduce how to do the problems. This has never worked for me.
I have to lots of problems, and finally I see the pattern.
In order for the lots of problems to be useful, however, I have to have the answers to the problems so that I can tell whether I did the problem right or not. There are not enough problems in textbooks now as it is. If I can only do the even ones (because that is all answers are available for) then that has cut my available problems to do in half. To me, there is no point in doing the problems that have no answers because I have no way to know if I did it right or not.
And the real problem is, if you spend your time "learning" how to do a bunch of math problems incorrectly (though you didn't know it), you have to "deprogram" yourself once you are shown how to do it correctly. I would rather know right away (by having the solution available) whether I made a mistake or not, so I can figure out what I did wrong and move forward.
Of course teachers don't want to give all the answers to the texts because they want easy homework assignments to hand out and grade.
I think this is crap for two reasons:
First, and most importantly, if you cheat on your homework, YOU ARE FUCKED ON EXAMS. Period.
Secondly, for many texts nowadays you can find a torrent for the teachers solution manual. I've done this for texts when I can, but not all are available.
Wolfram Alpha has the ability for me to possibly plug in difficult math problems and find the answer, and then I can figure out how to get that answer myself, WHICH IS WHAT LEARNING MATHEMATICS IS ALL ABOUT.
This whole cheating thing in Mathematics is just way overblown. Let students cheat on their homework. They will, absolutely and without question, fail their exams, and thus, the course. End of story.
>Move out of your mother's basement, start a family and you'll begin to understand.
Thank you for playing. I'm married with two kids, and own my own home.
I just have never understood the appeal of console gaming.
I started out gaming on an Atari 2600. Since that day, I have been buying better and better computing hardware for playing games. The PC is not only a much better gaming platform, it is multi-functional.
Consoles are like going backwards to me. I do not understand the appeal. Anything a console can do a PC can do.
We'll see how disinterested Microsoft is.