On top of all that, he either totally ignored all the bad reviews for the product, or there were none. If there were no reviews at all, that's a sign in itself, and can be considered a bad review.
So let's assume that mysterious, but very apparently very popular firewall X did indeed have a ton of good reviews. Doesn't that pretty much leave him as an edge-case? Someone who is either using the product as it was not intended, or so incompetent that nothing the company can do will straighten the problem out? The company is probably relying on his 'availability' to troubleshoot because they cannot replicate the problem in their labs.
I've already read this before, and the same comments apply: Eyesight != visual ability
Sure, they can pick things out better... But they can't actually SEE better. It's not like they needed glasses before and now they don't. This is merely human pattern-recognition training.
How many results has it produced? How many aliens have we verified the existence of? How many areas of the known universe can we say are probable to contain extra-terrestrial life?
None.
While there was tremendous success in the technical aspects of the project, there has been absolutely no success in the actual goal.
I'm sure any tea-totaler would count the project as a loss so far, but most people with any scientific background understand that there have been many benefits from the project that were not anticipated, distributed processing being 1 of the big successes.
Yes, and in case that isn't clear enough, you will also overheat your PS3, heat your house to the point that cooling is now necessary, and generally annoy your entire family by screaming 'no, it's folding!' when they want to play PS3.
Yeah, it somehow doesn't seem like a real great idea.
Computers seem like a good idea because we geeks tend to leave our computers 24/7 anyhow. Consoles don't get the same treatment, though.
No, the virtual world in Ender's Game (which actually had nothing to do with the title, just to make that clear) was a system designed to lead the children on a path of self-exploration. It had very, very little to do with what the child wanted and had everything to do with what the child needed.
Wright's comment deals only with wants, and not at all with needs.
His comment is interesting, though. He's suggesting that a TheSims-type player would be playing a game with marriage, kids, and happy music while a Halo-type player would end up with lightning and dark music, and an alien invasion. A game that could adapt this much would pretty much be the ultimate game and would therefore destroy the games industry. Thank heavens it isn't possible yet, or in the near future.
I agreed with you right up until "If advertisers smartened up and only paid per lead actually generated, it would pretty much kill these sites overnight."...
That's untrue for the same reason that spam still exists: People DO click the links, and they DO buy! It's amazing, and horrifying, and several other adjectives, but it's also true.
When I was younger, I thought that griefers (people who exists merely to make trouble for others) were just video game lowlifes. Now, of course, I understand that it's merely the video game equivalent of real life, once again. Spammers, cyber-squatters, and other internet jerks continue to amaze me. I really do wonder how they sleep at night.
"The twelve year old kid who thinks Gears of War is the best thing going can take a look at these graphics, popular before his birth, and get a sense that his beloved past-time is part of something greater, something he can defend to non-gamers as being inherently valuable."
Inherently valuable? What does the game media provide to this story that a book, movie, or news report does not? Nothing, except the ability to become numbed by it.
"When it came time to pull the trigger, she felt demonstrable remorse for the act, but then wondered if she'd feel the same the second time.
The repetition lessoned the humanity of the action, until she reported feeling like she wasn't killing people but simply scoring points in a game. Eventually she got bored, went to the library, and "ended" the game. "
Yes, she got so numb that killing people bored her. Oh yeah, way to go!
No, this game would have just disappeared if not for having been dropped from the contest.
While I tend to agree they they won't add the touch-screen (too bad, it'd be nice), I disagree about the screen size. The 4.3 inch screen (their marketing worked, I remember the screen size) has been one of the major features, but I really don't notice the difference between playing that and playing a DS, which has a much smaller screen.
Why? It's a hand-held. You hold it close when you play it. It doesn't need a monster screen.
If they reworked the controls to give it a better analog stick (instead of a nub) and made it lighter, I think it'd be a more marketable device. Of course, they're going to have to work on the game selection as well. I can count the PSP games I like on 1 hand. I like quite a few more DS games, and quite a few more yet on all the consoles, except the PS3. (As opposed to hand-helds. And yes, I include the PSX and PS2 in that list.)
No, instead Dell has deals with those companies to do the support themselves. If Dell pays some company to support Open Office for them, it's no longer free to Dell. If they don't, they're distributing software that their customers have no support for.
Hey, that's not nice. Maybe his kids are just dumber than my cats? It might not be his parenting skills at all.
Seriously, though. Shit happens and kids aren't careful. Backups are a necessity in information situation, including movies and games. If the company you work for lost even $50 worth of anything, they'd not be real happy. Why should a family be any different?
"Self study" is wrong. Don't study, do. Put what you've learned, and some that you haven't, to use. Create things that have some use to you. Get a good handle on the language and its practical application at the same time.
The first projects you make will be crap. It's pretty much guaranteed. Make them anyhow. You'll be amazed at what you learn and how well you learn it when you step outside the comfortable little setting the classroom has created.
As a bonus, you'll have at least 1 project to put on your resume to show you were actually interested in programming, rather than just taking classes.
Congratulations. You have the distinction of being the only reply to my (apparently trollish) comment with any real information whatsoever. Everyone else just said, 'it costs a lot of money, duh!'
I was actually more worried about how grainy the images are than the color, and you are correct that I was worried about color because I thought it was important. Optics is obviously not my field because I never considered taking images from several wavelengths (I had completely ignored things outside the human-visible range) and using them individually, instead of combining the data all at once.
On the other hand, 'pretty pictures' are an essential part of this mission as well. The ignorant public (apparently including me) doesn't feel the immediate impact of the mission without them. If we want to keep sending gajillion dollar probes, the public needs to see immediate and long-term benefits both. Immediately meaning pretty pictures and preliminary analyses, and long-term meaning real-world applications for the knowledge gained. PR is an unfortunate necessity for any business, including the government.
It was launched last year. If my $450 cellphone can have a color camera with decent resolution, so can this gajillion dollar probe. (Excuse me, it was only $650 million. Yeah, definitely couldn't have afforded a color camera.)
If this probe had been launched a decade ago, I'd have thought nothing of a B&W camera with shitty pics. But last year? Give me a freaking break.
And yes, I'm fully aware of what the original computers looked like. We passed that stage LONG ago for computers, rockets, and cameras.
Great, so we'll have crappy black & white photos of the non-planet Pluto as well! I -so- can't wait!
Seriously? We launch a gajillion dollar probe, chance it in a sling around the largest planet in our solar system to only save 3 years, and we get black and white photos that have more noise than my cell-phone's camera!?
You should have left out the mess about the tv, etc. It isn't affected and has nothing to do with this. Mentioning it only clouds the issue.
The only difference is the livingroom, kitchen, and hall lights. So assuming you have 3 bulbs in the kitchen, 3 in the living room, and 1 in the hall, that's 7 bulbs that are on an extra hour a day.
It sounds like you're already at least a little energy-conscious, too, as most people will turn on a light if it's not quite bright enough in the room. You just leave them off, apparently. (I'm talking about the hall and kitchen, here.) So for most people, that only leaves the living room. And quite a few people watch the morning news before work, to get a handle on weather and traffic, especially. There's the living room lights on, too.
So for most people, as you encouraged me to think about, there is no difference. For the energy-conscious bunch, there's very little difference. And for me personally, there's no difference. DST or not, I get up before the sun has even thought about peeking its lazy ass over the horizon, and I'm home LONG before it decides to take a rest.
In the end, I think more energy savings come not from the DST itself, but from getting people to talk about saving energy.
Two last thoughts: Lightbulbs are getting more efficient every year. The saved energy from this scheme reduces every year. I wonder where the line is that we spend more energy talking and setting clocks than we save from the change?
Last thought: I used to hear this was 'for the children' so they wouldn't stand at the bus-stop in the dark. Why not just let them go to school an hour later, instead, if they're really worried about that? Most children already get home before their working parents, so it's not that.
But they're not crazy, so they have 2 recorders. For the first hour, they start both recorders. Starting with the second hour, they replace the first tape, leaving the first tape with only an hour. On the third hour, they replace the second tape. 4th hour, first tape again, etc, etc.
This leaves them with 26 tapes for a 24 hour period, 2 of them with only an hour. (First and last) It guarantees that no piece of the sequence is lost when the changeover occurs, and provide a little redundancy.
It's also possible that they used 3 recorders and overlapped a little on the change, and used less than 1-hour rotations, to allow any single tape to be lost or damaged, as well.
Cuz if you spend 24 hours reciting numbers to get in the Guiness Book... You'd damned well better get it on tape.
I don't know that this is how they did it, but it's my theory. They'd be crazy to do less... But then, they recited numbers for 24 hours. So...
I think, instead of using Second Life as a base, they should have started from scratch and fixed some of the 'issues' with Second Life.
You can't use anything but primitives. Making a non-simple object often requires more polys and ingenuity than it should. A cowboy hat, for example.
Proprietary scripting language. Going with Lua (more popular) or Ruby (my choice) would not only be easier to use, but would also let budding geeks learn a good language. SL is implementing.NET, if I remember correctly, though. Not bad as a third choice.
Texture maps, shaders, etc, etc. SL supports no advanced graphical features.
I'm sure someone will say 'get off yer lazy butt and do it yourself', but it's obviously not that easy. I don't have the time, money, or skill to create an entire virtual 3D world that is user-scriptable. And gathering a team of those who DO have those things is tough on a from-scratch project.
The SF.net CompileFarm was not there to provide 'power'. It was there to provide access to different systems for compilation of your project. Anyone using it for 'power' was abusing it. It also had nothing to do with a render farm.
No, it was a spinoff from Final Fantasy. It later spawned the Mana series.
Doesn't matter, cuz it's the wrong one. It was Final Fantasy Legend that I was thinking of. I haven't played it in over a decade, and couldn't remember which it was. And yes, FFL was actually the SaGa series renamed. But it's enough like FF1-3 that it doesn't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
And you deserve what happened to you when you opened it!
(Yes, nothing happened. And you SO deserved it.)
On top of all that, he either totally ignored all the bad reviews for the product, or there were none. If there were no reviews at all, that's a sign in itself, and can be considered a bad review.
So let's assume that mysterious, but very apparently very popular firewall X did indeed have a ton of good reviews. Doesn't that pretty much leave him as an edge-case? Someone who is either using the product as it was not intended, or so incompetent that nothing the company can do will straighten the problem out? The company is probably relying on his 'availability' to troubleshoot because they cannot replicate the problem in their labs.
I've already read this before, and the same comments apply: Eyesight != visual ability
Sure, they can pick things out better... But they can't actually SEE better. It's not like they needed glasses before and now they don't. This is merely human pattern-recognition training.
How many results has it produced? How many aliens have we verified the existence of? How many areas of the known universe can we say are probable to contain extra-terrestrial life?
None.
While there was tremendous success in the technical aspects of the project, there has been absolutely no success in the actual goal.
I'm sure any tea-totaler would count the project as a loss so far, but most people with any scientific background understand that there have been many benefits from the project that were not anticipated, distributed processing being 1 of the big successes.
It's all about perspective.
Yes, and in case that isn't clear enough, you will also overheat your PS3, heat your house to the point that cooling is now necessary, and generally annoy your entire family by screaming 'no, it's folding!' when they want to play PS3.
Yeah, it somehow doesn't seem like a real great idea.
Computers seem like a good idea because we geeks tend to leave our computers 24/7 anyhow. Consoles don't get the same treatment, though.
"operate a motor vehicle"
o bjcompl.html
The motor vehicle is not doing the operating. It is not 'a subject' at all. In fact, it's a direct object. http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/
No, the virtual world in Ender's Game (which actually had nothing to do with the title, just to make that clear) was a system designed to lead the children on a path of self-exploration. It had very, very little to do with what the child wanted and had everything to do with what the child needed.
Wright's comment deals only with wants, and not at all with needs.
His comment is interesting, though. He's suggesting that a TheSims-type player would be playing a game with marriage, kids, and happy music while a Halo-type player would end up with lightning and dark music, and an alien invasion. A game that could adapt this much would pretty much be the ultimate game and would therefore destroy the games industry. Thank heavens it isn't possible yet, or in the near future.
I agreed with you right up until "If advertisers smartened up and only paid per lead actually generated, it would pretty much kill these sites overnight." ...
That's untrue for the same reason that spam still exists: People DO click the links, and they DO buy! It's amazing, and horrifying, and several other adjectives, but it's also true.
When I was younger, I thought that griefers (people who exists merely to make trouble for others) were just video game lowlifes. Now, of course, I understand that it's merely the video game equivalent of real life, once again. Spammers, cyber-squatters, and other internet jerks continue to amaze me. I really do wonder how they sleep at night.
"The twelve year old kid who thinks Gears of War is the best thing going can take a look at these graphics, popular before his birth, and get a sense that his beloved past-time is part of something greater, something he can defend to non-gamers as being inherently valuable."
Inherently valuable? What does the game media provide to this story that a book, movie, or news report does not? Nothing, except the ability to become numbed by it.
"When it came time to pull the trigger, she felt demonstrable remorse for the act, but then wondered if she'd feel the same the second time.
The repetition lessoned the humanity of the action, until she reported feeling like she wasn't killing people but simply scoring points in a game. Eventually she got bored, went to the library, and "ended" the game. "
Yes, she got so numb that killing people bored her. Oh yeah, way to go!
No, this game would have just disappeared if not for having been dropped from the contest.
While I tend to agree they they won't add the touch-screen (too bad, it'd be nice), I disagree about the screen size. The 4.3 inch screen (their marketing worked, I remember the screen size) has been one of the major features, but I really don't notice the difference between playing that and playing a DS, which has a much smaller screen.
Why? It's a hand-held. You hold it close when you play it. It doesn't need a monster screen.
If they reworked the controls to give it a better analog stick (instead of a nub) and made it lighter, I think it'd be a more marketable device. Of course, they're going to have to work on the game selection as well. I can count the PSP games I like on 1 hand. I like quite a few more DS games, and quite a few more yet on all the consoles, except the PS3. (As opposed to hand-helds. And yes, I include the PSX and PS2 in that list.)
No, instead Dell has deals with those companies to do the support themselves. If Dell pays some company to support Open Office for them, it's no longer free to Dell. If they don't, they're distributing software that their customers have no support for.
Hey, that's not nice. Maybe his kids are just dumber than my cats? It might not be his parenting skills at all.
Seriously, though. Shit happens and kids aren't careful. Backups are a necessity in information situation, including movies and games. If the company you work for lost even $50 worth of anything, they'd not be real happy. Why should a family be any different?
"Self study" is wrong. Don't study, do. Put what you've learned, and some that you haven't, to use. Create things that have some use to you. Get a good handle on the language and its practical application at the same time.
The first projects you make will be crap. It's pretty much guaranteed. Make them anyhow. You'll be amazed at what you learn and how well you learn it when you step outside the comfortable little setting the classroom has created.
As a bonus, you'll have at least 1 project to put on your resume to show you were actually interested in programming, rather than just taking classes.
Congratulations. You have the distinction of being the only reply to my (apparently trollish) comment with any real information whatsoever. Everyone else just said, 'it costs a lot of money, duh!'
I was actually more worried about how grainy the images are than the color, and you are correct that I was worried about color because I thought it was important. Optics is obviously not my field because I never considered taking images from several wavelengths (I had completely ignored things outside the human-visible range) and using them individually, instead of combining the data all at once.
On the other hand, 'pretty pictures' are an essential part of this mission as well. The ignorant public (apparently including me) doesn't feel the immediate impact of the mission without them. If we want to keep sending gajillion dollar probes, the public needs to see immediate and long-term benefits both. Immediately meaning pretty pictures and preliminary analyses, and long-term meaning real-world applications for the knowledge gained. PR is an unfortunate necessity for any business, including the government.
It was launched last year. If my $450 cellphone can have a color camera with decent resolution, so can this gajillion dollar probe. (Excuse me, it was only $650 million. Yeah, definitely couldn't have afforded a color camera.)
If this probe had been launched a decade ago, I'd have thought nothing of a B&W camera with shitty pics. But last year? Give me a freaking break.
And yes, I'm fully aware of what the original computers looked like. We passed that stage LONG ago for computers, rockets, and cameras.
Great, so we'll have crappy black & white photos of the non-planet Pluto as well! I -so- can't wait!
Seriously? We launch a gajillion dollar probe, chance it in a sling around the largest planet in our solar system to only save 3 years, and we get black and white photos that have more noise than my cell-phone's camera!?
You should have left out the mess about the tv, etc. It isn't affected and has nothing to do with this. Mentioning it only clouds the issue.
The only difference is the livingroom, kitchen, and hall lights. So assuming you have 3 bulbs in the kitchen, 3 in the living room, and 1 in the hall, that's 7 bulbs that are on an extra hour a day.
It sounds like you're already at least a little energy-conscious, too, as most people will turn on a light if it's not quite bright enough in the room. You just leave them off, apparently. (I'm talking about the hall and kitchen, here.) So for most people, that only leaves the living room. And quite a few people watch the morning news before work, to get a handle on weather and traffic, especially. There's the living room lights on, too.
So for most people, as you encouraged me to think about, there is no difference. For the energy-conscious bunch, there's very little difference. And for me personally, there's no difference. DST or not, I get up before the sun has even thought about peeking its lazy ass over the horizon, and I'm home LONG before it decides to take a rest.
In the end, I think more energy savings come not from the DST itself, but from getting people to talk about saving energy.
Two last thoughts: Lightbulbs are getting more efficient every year. The saved energy from this scheme reduces every year. I wonder where the line is that we spend more energy talking and setting clocks than we save from the change?
Last thought: I used to hear this was 'for the children' so they wouldn't stand at the bus-stop in the dark. Why not just let them go to school an hour later, instead, if they're really worried about that? Most children already get home before their working parents, so it's not that.
You're assuming a couple things. Allow me to assume some different ones.
They use a standard T120 http://www.high-techproductions.com/video1.htm and do indeed get 2 hours per tape in NTSC format.
But they're not crazy, so they have 2 recorders. For the first hour, they start both recorders. Starting with the second hour, they replace the first tape, leaving the first tape with only an hour. On the third hour, they replace the second tape. 4th hour, first tape again, etc, etc.
This leaves them with 26 tapes for a 24 hour period, 2 of them with only an hour. (First and last) It guarantees that no piece of the sequence is lost when the changeover occurs, and provide a little redundancy.
It's also possible that they used 3 recorders and overlapped a little on the change, and used less than 1-hour rotations, to allow any single tape to be lost or damaged, as well.
Cuz if you spend 24 hours reciting numbers to get in the Guiness Book... You'd damned well better get it on tape.
I don't know that this is how they did it, but it's my theory. They'd be crazy to do less... But then, they recited numbers for 24 hours. So...
http://www.libsecondlife.org/wiki/Main_Page
"The libsecondlife and libsecondlife-java projects both provide the additional flexibility of having a BSD license,"
Your definition of 'not FOSS' is radically different from mine, then. BSD License is just about as open as you get.
Should have RTFA then. Mono is 1000 times faster in the tests they've done so far.
"not open-sourcing their server code"
According to TFS and TFA both, LL hasn't decided yet.
"someone else can create a FOSS server"
As stated in a previous post, OpenSim is already in development. You can already log in and move around. No scripting yet, though.
I think, instead of using Second Life as a base, they should have started from scratch and fixed some of the 'issues' with Second Life.
You can't use anything but primitives. Making a non-simple object often requires more polys and ingenuity than it should. A cowboy hat, for example.
Proprietary scripting language. Going with Lua (more popular) or Ruby (my choice) would not only be easier to use, but would also let budding geeks learn a good language. SL is implementing .NET, if I remember correctly, though. Not bad as a third choice.
Texture maps, shaders, etc, etc. SL supports no advanced graphical features.
I'm sure someone will say 'get off yer lazy butt and do it yourself', but it's obviously not that easy. I don't have the time, money, or skill to create an entire virtual 3D world that is user-scriptable. And gathering a team of those who DO have those things is tough on a from-scratch project.
Hahaha, okay. I stand corrected on the 'power' statement. It still has nothing to do with a renderfarm, though.
The SF.net CompileFarm was not there to provide 'power'. It was there to provide access to different systems for compilation of your project. Anyone using it for 'power' was abusing it. It also had nothing to do with a render farm.
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Seiken_Densetsu
No, it was a spinoff from Final Fantasy. It later spawned the Mana series.
Doesn't matter, cuz it's the wrong one. It was Final Fantasy Legend that I was thinking of. I haven't played it in over a decade, and couldn't remember which it was. And yes, FFL was actually the SaGa series renamed. But it's enough like FF1-3 that it doesn't matter.