In the 1980s most game programmers had no training and no degree. They coded for fun and got very good at it, but had poor code organization from a high level perspective. The only game programmers I know from that era (mid 1980s to the early 1990s) that actually got a CSci degree wrote 2-3 games before they were 20 and then went to school to get out of the industry (most game companies are run like startups, so there is a lot of work required).
These days, special programming, design and art schools are devoted to games. Even college classes are available - when I was in school in the early 1990s it was hard to even find a computer graphics class. It's a very different industry than it was.
A US officer that pulls a guy over for going 40 in a 25 can write a ticket for going 15 miles over the speed limit as well as a ticket for defective equipment in the car. I got a warning for both of these in Wisconsin (going ~65 in a 55) and the officer said he would have ticketed me for both, but said he was at his quota so was going to let me off with a warning. I was very lucky - I was 18 at the time, driving a junker and it in fact had a defective speedometer, odometer, and cruise control (which would accelerate about 20 mph over where I set it) and had I been ticketed, I would have gone to jail because I didn't have a credit card or enough cash on hand to pay immediately (as per the Wisconsin law, at least at that time - not sure what it is now). I actually had him lead me out to get to the correct speed because I was on my way to Chicago and had a long way to go (I was close to Madison at the time) and was scared shitless about getting pulled over again (incidentally, I have NEVER been pulled over again - I don't generally speed).
I'd have to say the same - I never feel guilty. When I'm on the road, I may leech off a hotspot (possibly from a nearby hotel) to check my e-mail or maybe stocks. I've never felt guilty about this, and it may actually influence where I stay the next time I go through that area. I can see prosecuting abusive use, but IMO, they are offering this service to gain you as a customer, whether it be now or in the future. There is no reason why they can't set up a neighbornode or other captive portal - a local coffee shop here has exactly that - you need to register to gain access to the wider internet, have throttled access and a time limit (and register with an e-mail address, though you can fake that like I did - I also spoofed my MAC address because I can).
As for leeching off neighborhood wireless, I can't say I do it - the 5 routers on my block are all secure. I was tempted to offer up a free wifi hotspot for a while, but a coworker bought my WRT-54G when I upgraded to a high-speed wireless-n (my laptop had it built in), so I decided it wasn't worth it.
Women traditionally didn't do math and science in the US and it was actively discouraged until the educational amendments act in the early 1970s (I was too young to remember this, my mom [a master of science] told me about it - about 300 times).
The general belief now is sexism in the field, and I can see that, and I think it starts at an early age - I was as mean to girls in the computer lab as the jocks were to me on the playground (I was even pretty good at some sports, but my exercise-induced asthma made my skills dubiously useful and thus I was a target). I didn't even know a girl that used a computer much until high school and she was the daughter of a guy that worked at Cray Research and had grown up with them. At that time, however, neither of us did much computing (it was much more fun to hang out at the mall or beach or go see bands).
Ray tracing in default form uses a point light source, so you get hard shadows - in fact, traditional Ray Tracing does specular lighting very well but diffuse poorly. To fix the global illumination model for soft shadows/soft lighting you need to use some technique such as photon mapping or BSSRDFs (Bidirectional Surface Scattering Reflection Distribution Function, a technique mostly used for subsurface scattering). You could also use something like Radiosity, but that is horribly expensive (O(n^3) I believe), so not really suited for realtime.
It is much easier to do realistic diffuse lighting in a rasterizer currently, but reflections are easier to do in ray tracing. As I've pointed out before, there are advantages and disadvantages to both, and whatever Intel or nVidia or whomever says, the technologies will likely converge (in fact, many shaders I've looked at recently use mini-ray tracers or pseudo ray tracers, but most of these are "self-aware" as opposed to "scene aware").
I'd have to agree with you on reducing this to gender issues - the article informed me that I code like a girl. Now I have to delete some helpful comments to regain my masculinity.
Unlucky you - I know many, but they all work for large companies. A friend of my wife's was a programmer for IBM, for instance and I work with a bunch at my office. Almost all of the older ones started as analysts and moved to programming (so no CSCI degree). The younger ones mainly looked for job stability and benefits and I'd say half are foreign born (in the programming - discounting publications and Q/A and other non-programming areas).
As for why there are so few, I'd blame the cultural issue in the US where women are generally pushed away from math and science. A team I work with in India is all female and overall they have around 40% women because it isn't shunned there.
Everyone involved in war is a war criminal in some way. von Braun did not ask for slave workers, he was given them and ordered to use them. He did not force them to work, guards did. What he did not do was stop them from being mistreated or killed, but in a paranoid police state that is a surefire way to get yourself killed.
As I recall, he claimed never have gone to the concentration camp itself (most were run by the most loyal party members) and called the worker conditions deplorable in the facility he administrated and did go to.
At the original Nuremberg trials nobody hung for less than that - everyone involved directly contributed in some way and were not in the middle. Only two slave camp administrators were involved - (Fritz?) Sauckel, who organized and ran the labor camps (and got death) and Albert Speer, his superior, who used them to build armaments (and got 20 years in prison). Speer's book, Inside the Third Reich, was even a textbook in a history class I took.
War is horrible, and bad things happen. Circumstances like this are still happening - arresting people without a trial? The United States did that in World War 2 (mostly Japanese, but also some Germans and Italians) and still does it today (Guantanamo Bay). Slave labor? Well, the prison labor system in the US currently pays prisoners as little as 21 cents an hour, which is pretty close, using prison labor is on the rise, and America has a history of it (chain gangs and the like). You can claim they are helping pay for their room and board or whatever, but that could be flipped to argue for WW2 prisoners as well.
Yeah, the joke's been around since at least 1987 (I have a button from GenCon that year), but it always pops up in election years and seemed very appropriate at that moment;)
Chaosium has T-Shirts with that slogan, as well, but I'm getting a database error from their web site at the moment.
effluent means "to flow," (not necessarily as in "raw sewage" as someone later points out) so it could be like a river, but the big word that fits the context is ebullient (lively, enthusiastic).
I'll forgive him because the poster is in marketing - no other person would use a phrase like "praise for this outreach." From the old office horoscope joke:
MARKETING You are ambitious yet stupid. You chose a marketing degree to avoid having to study in college, concentrating instead on drinking and socializing, which is pretty much what your job responsibilities are now. Least compatible with Sales.
I think it's more than OSS - Visual Studio Express (win) and Xcode (mac) IDEs are free without support. Many companies will sign support and software deals, including mine, which got a Windows+Visual Studio+MS-SQL+support bundle, which likely undercut whatever other tools manufacturers could offer when licensed separately (we also have xcode/macOS/hardware deal, but it is fairly small).
We use only one piece of OSS that I know of outside of the gnu compiler (and Linux platform), but it's a biggie, and not gnu - the Eclipse IDE and framework). This was IBM's baby before being rolled off into a non-profit (backed by them and other industry companies). With a commercial-friendly license it is not traditional open-source and a lot of commercial programmers that I know like and use it (personally, I'm not a huge fan, but it may be a blender-vs-other-CAD-tools like issue - I'm not familiar with it and it works different than other IDEs).
hmm... that doesn't seem right - I don't know how much they cost originally, but I'm pretty sure I only paid $12-14 for the books (Monster Manual was $14 I believe). If I still had my books, I'd check the MSRP, which is printed near the ISBN on the back, but I sold them long ago when I moved to 2nd edition. Of course, that's not counting all the other books I bought (MM2, Deities and Demigods, Fiend Folio, Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures and Legends and Lore [because I lost my Deities book]).
2nd edition I think were mostly $18-20, so that sounds about right. I remember sticker shock when I was upgrading to second edition.
There was a lot of convincing evidence. Aside from the crazy friend who had claimed to have done it (and other murders), I was convinced only someone very close to Hans or Hans himself could have done it.
Her boyfriend called in the missing persons report and then she didn't show up to pick up her kids at school - then Hans (and Hans alone) said she had secretly gone back to Russia. The back seat of Hans' car was missing and the floor had been flooded. He'd been driving a different car after she disappeared. Some of her blood was found at his residence. He bought a book about committing the perfect murder (I think right after he became a suspect). He had a large amount of cash on him when he was arrested (like he was about to flee the country).
As I recall, he said the V2 being used as a weapon was "his darkest day" because he wanted it used for space travel.
Whether it influenced his joining the SS or not, civilian rocketry was forbidden by the Nazi party, so it was either join them or don't do it. While I don't know his personal beliefs, in many ways he was a victim of circumstance - he was an SS officer before he claimed to have known about the deaths in labor camps (though I'm sure he knew they were anti-semitic) and at one point was under investigation by the gestapo during the war for anti-patriotic thinking. Given the situation and the government running a police state spying and incarcerating anyone that opposed them, I imagine he felt powerless to change it.
Free Linux (like Ubuntu) has a huge downside for the corporate world: no centralized support (aka someone to push the blame to). My company refused to even acknowledge Linux until companies appeared and charged hundreds of dollars for it (in support contracts).
My main problem with adopting Linux at work is that I would have no network access (we use proprietary software that is licensed for Windows only). I could sit on one of the QA machines, but I can't get e-mail documents, etc from them (need to install software and those machines have VMs and get cleaned often).
I should correct that - I didn't mean to suggest WinFS was part of MinWin, only that WinFS and MinWin were being developed concurrently for Vista (before Vista's move to 2003) and reportedly had been tuned and tied fairly heavily together before the move. In some form or another it has existed since Cairo in the 1990s (went through that era's naming merry-go-round, too, but the only names I remember are from products that were released like the COM-DCOM-OLE-ActiveX). Some features of WinFS reportedly depended entirely on the kernel being MinWin, and I'm pretty sure kernel and ADO.NET dependencies were cited as why it was pulled from the release (it's been a while).
You're right on Win 2008, though - I had thought Vista was being built concurrently with Windows 2008 on top of the Windows 2003 kernel but it seems the projects were merged when Vista moved to 2003 and 2008 itself was indeed built on top of Vista.
I wasn't aware that NTFS supported arbitrary metadata tagging - it certainly isn't exposed, even in Vista and the only information I can find on it is limited. NTFS itself isn't a terrible FS, but it is slow compared to some other modern filesystems (Sun claims ZFS is 7.5x faster, for instance) and is one of the few OS's left with a 255 character path + filename limit. Capacity limits in the exabytes is decent, but not future-proof (I work with at least one customer with data in the exabytes already, but they are a Solaris house).
This is exactly my standpoint, though to be honest, both Lost and Heroes grew on me after a slow start (and then I had to bitstream the older episodes...). In fact, the only real turn off I had with Lost was that stupid black wind monster thing. This has been one of my worst problems with Abrams shows - they start realistically and then move slowly to the absurd. Alias, for instance, got to the point where a couple of people could take on an army - it was silly. Fortunately, after 1-2 silly episodes they get grounded back in more realistic situations.
BSG always seemed to me to be trying to be modern times with spaceships. The medicine in particular is worse than 20th century (dare I say 19th?). I'm surprised they aren't lighting a fire on the ship and cauterizing limbs. There are some aspects of the re-imagining I like, but the political squabbling in light of their situation seems a bit far-fetched, especially since there's nothing forcing them to follow the Galactica (I mean, you can follow the big baseship and be protected by it and accept military law, or try to survive on your own, right?). The effort to tie the series into current events I think is one of the worst parts about it.
How about failures, though?
Some series, like the now defunct Bionic Woman (also by the BSG people) weren't bad in concept, but once again poor in execution. Probably the worst thing about it was the name - I just don't think this one was ready for resurrection. I liked the characters, and I think they executed the bionics well (even had cyber-psychosis), but the plot was weak and it fell between the cracks trying to appeal to both men and women (action and romance without something that appeals to both sexes, like mystery and espionage themes - it had some of the latter, but it wasn't very fleshed out). This show made some of the same faux-pas's as Dark Angel - superhuman practically invincible stuff - Hollywood has to get over jumping through glass windows down two stories unhurt. This was cool in the 1970s, but we're smarter now.
Jericho - this one started fast, then had a bunch of stupid things that killed my interest. Why would a farming town be short of food? The midwest provides food for the entire nation, not just themselves (barring spoiling). My grandpa never bought food when he ran a farm (the only fruit they ever had at that time were Apples, which got canned in the fall). The winter jackets were absurd for the climate - anyone from that neck of the woods would know how to bundle up on the really cold days. About the only thing I could understand was infighting, because I imagine there would be people that would try to take, but others would band together to defend and help with the farms. A farm that couldn't arm a small militia would be a new one to me - every farmer I've ever known owns 2-3 shotguns and several rifles (most smaller caliber, however).
I agree - you could have the most beautiful math equations in the world and 99.999% of the population wouldn't give a rip. That includes me, and I minored in math and may even know what they're talking about if I cared enough to read the equations.
Monkeys with bionic limbs is another story entirely.
according to MS it means "Future Storage" - I guess they meant that literally.
From what I understand, WinFS was cut from Vista because it was designed around the MinWin kernel, not the Windows 2003 kernel (used in Vista) and it would take too long to convert it and get the bugs out. The Windows 2008 Server kernel is an updated Windows 2003 kernel, so basically they're saying this will be an updated Vista, not a move to a new underlying architecture (probably out of fear that they would need to break the driver model again). Unless they've done a whole lot of porting during and after Vista, don't be surprised if WinFS gets chopped next (if it hasn't been already). I'm still crossing my fingers, but not holding my breath.
It is really unfortunate because the NTFS is horribly outdated and lacks many modern features that help find files. From a user perspective, being able to tag files with search-able information is invaluable, and is the main reason I only store my photos and non-Word documents on Linux and Mac.
Actually, it was on the History Channel a couple nights ago, but figures the source info is on wiki as well. The History Channel had a lot more on the new age cults surrounding it and the hunt for the skulls to prevent the apocalypse in 2012. Incidentally I tried to go to Lubaantun several years ago but we ended up not going because of rain (the only nice day I was there we did SCUBA). The rest of that trip was up north staying in Cancun and Cozumel, and I did get to Chichen Itza (coolest ruins I've ever been to) and Tulum (woulda been awesome had I not been to Chichen Itza first).
Most if not all of the Crystal Skulls are fake artifacts. All of the ones tested date to the 19th century.
The most famous one, the Mitchell-Hedges skull has not been allowed to be studied, but it was reportedly found in Lubaantun in Belize (when it was British Honduras). The problem is, no one acknowledges the finder, Anna Mitchell-Hedges was at the dig, though later her adopted father said in his autobiography (I think) the skull was at least 3600 years old. I severely doubt that it is authentic and believe it is more of a money/attention grab, but it fits well with Indiana Jones since all of the movies have been about mythological objects that may or may not be real.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1980s most game programmers had no training and no degree. They coded for fun and got very good at it, but had poor code organization from a high level perspective. The only game programmers I know from that era (mid 1980s to the early 1990s) that actually got a CSci degree wrote 2-3 games before they were 20 and then went to school to get out of the industry (most game companies are run like startups, so there is a lot of work required).
These days, special programming, design and art schools are devoted to games. Even college classes are available - when I was in school in the early 1990s it was hard to even find a computer graphics class. It's a very different industry than it was.
In the US, ignorance is not an excuse.
A US officer that pulls a guy over for going 40 in a 25 can write a ticket for going 15 miles over the speed limit as well as a ticket for defective equipment in the car. I got a warning for both of these in Wisconsin (going ~65 in a 55) and the officer said he would have ticketed me for both, but said he was at his quota so was going to let me off with a warning. I was very lucky - I was 18 at the time, driving a junker and it in fact had a defective speedometer, odometer, and cruise control (which would accelerate about 20 mph over where I set it) and had I been ticketed, I would have gone to jail because I didn't have a credit card or enough cash on hand to pay immediately (as per the Wisconsin law, at least at that time - not sure what it is now). I actually had him lead me out to get to the correct speed because I was on my way to Chicago and had a long way to go (I was close to Madison at the time) and was scared shitless about getting pulled over again (incidentally, I have NEVER been pulled over again - I don't generally speed).
I'd have to say the same - I never feel guilty. When I'm on the road, I may leech off a hotspot (possibly from a nearby hotel) to check my e-mail or maybe stocks. I've never felt guilty about this, and it may actually influence where I stay the next time I go through that area. I can see prosecuting abusive use, but IMO, they are offering this service to gain you as a customer, whether it be now or in the future. There is no reason why they can't set up a neighbornode or other captive portal - a local coffee shop here has exactly that - you need to register to gain access to the wider internet, have throttled access and a time limit (and register with an e-mail address, though you can fake that like I did - I also spoofed my MAC address because I can).
As for leeching off neighborhood wireless, I can't say I do it - the 5 routers on my block are all secure. I was tempted to offer up a free wifi hotspot for a while, but a coworker bought my WRT-54G when I upgraded to a high-speed wireless-n (my laptop had it built in), so I decided it wasn't worth it.
There have been arrests for it in the US for several years. I'm not sure how many of these were prosecuted, but I've heard of others and I believe one was prosecuted (but it may have been Michigan, which has separate laws).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060622-7111.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070522-michigan-man-arrested-for-using-cafes-free-wifi-from-his-car.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/07/07/tech/main707361.shtml
Women traditionally didn't do math and science in the US and it was actively discouraged until the educational amendments act in the early 1970s (I was too young to remember this, my mom [a master of science] told me about it - about 300 times).
The general belief now is sexism in the field, and I can see that, and I think it starts at an early age - I was as mean to girls in the computer lab as the jocks were to me on the playground (I was even pretty good at some sports, but my exercise-induced asthma made my skills dubiously useful and thus I was a target). I didn't even know a girl that used a computer much until high school and she was the daughter of a guy that worked at Cray Research and had grown up with them. At that time, however, neither of us did much computing (it was much more fun to hang out at the mall or beach or go see bands).
Ray tracing in default form uses a point light source, so you get hard shadows - in fact, traditional Ray Tracing does specular lighting very well but diffuse poorly. To fix the global illumination model for soft shadows/soft lighting you need to use some technique such as photon mapping or BSSRDFs (Bidirectional Surface Scattering Reflection Distribution Function, a technique mostly used for subsurface scattering). You could also use something like Radiosity, but that is horribly expensive (O(n^3) I believe), so not really suited for realtime.
It is much easier to do realistic diffuse lighting in a rasterizer currently, but reflections are easier to do in ray tracing. As I've pointed out before, there are advantages and disadvantages to both, and whatever Intel or nVidia or whomever says, the technologies will likely converge (in fact, many shaders I've looked at recently use mini-ray tracers or pseudo ray tracers, but most of these are "self-aware" as opposed to "scene aware").
I'd have to agree with you on reducing this to gender issues - the article informed me that I code like a girl. Now I have to delete some helpful comments to regain my masculinity.
Unlucky you - I know many, but they all work for large companies. A friend of my wife's was a programmer for IBM, for instance and I work with a bunch at my office. Almost all of the older ones started as analysts and moved to programming (so no CSCI degree). The younger ones mainly looked for job stability and benefits and I'd say half are foreign born (in the programming - discounting publications and Q/A and other non-programming areas).
As for why there are so few, I'd blame the cultural issue in the US where women are generally pushed away from math and science. A team I work with in India is all female and overall they have around 40% women because it isn't shunned there.
Everyone involved in war is a war criminal in some way. von Braun did not ask for slave workers, he was given them and ordered to use them. He did not force them to work, guards did. What he did not do was stop them from being mistreated or killed, but in a paranoid police state that is a surefire way to get yourself killed.
As I recall, he claimed never have gone to the concentration camp itself (most were run by the most loyal party members) and called the worker conditions deplorable in the facility he administrated and did go to.
At the original Nuremberg trials nobody hung for less than that - everyone involved directly contributed in some way and were not in the middle. Only two slave camp administrators were involved - (Fritz?) Sauckel, who organized and ran the labor camps (and got death) and Albert Speer, his superior, who used them to build armaments (and got 20 years in prison). Speer's book, Inside the Third Reich, was even a textbook in a history class I took.
War is horrible, and bad things happen. Circumstances like this are still happening - arresting people without a trial? The United States did that in World War 2 (mostly Japanese, but also some Germans and Italians) and still does it today (Guantanamo Bay). Slave labor? Well, the prison labor system in the US currently pays prisoners as little as 21 cents an hour, which is pretty close, using prison labor is on the rise, and America has a history of it (chain gangs and the like). You can claim they are helping pay for their room and board or whatever, but that could be flipped to argue for WW2 prisoners as well.
Yeah, the joke's been around since at least 1987 (I have a button from GenCon that year), but it always pops up in election years and seemed very appropriate at that moment ;)
Chaosium has T-Shirts with that slogan, as well, but I'm getting a database error from their web site at the moment.
effluent means "to flow," (not necessarily as in "raw sewage" as someone later points out) so it could be like a river, but the big word that fits the context is ebullient (lively, enthusiastic).
I'll forgive him because the poster is in marketing - no other person would use a phrase like "praise for this outreach." From the old office horoscope joke:
MARKETING You are ambitious yet stupid. You chose a marketing degree to avoid having to study in college, concentrating instead on drinking and socializing, which is pretty much what your job responsibilities are now. Least compatible with Sales.
or the MOST evil
If it weren't for the citizenship issues, I'd say Cthulhu in 2008!
I think it's more than OSS - Visual Studio Express (win) and Xcode (mac) IDEs are free without support. Many companies will sign support and software deals, including mine, which got a Windows+Visual Studio+MS-SQL+support bundle, which likely undercut whatever other tools manufacturers could offer when licensed separately (we also have xcode/macOS/hardware deal, but it is fairly small).
We use only one piece of OSS that I know of outside of the gnu compiler (and Linux platform), but it's a biggie, and not gnu - the Eclipse IDE and framework). This was IBM's baby before being rolled off into a non-profit (backed by them and other industry companies). With a commercial-friendly license it is not traditional open-source and a lot of commercial programmers that I know like and use it (personally, I'm not a huge fan, but it may be a blender-vs-other-CAD-tools like issue - I'm not familiar with it and it works different than other IDEs).
hmm... that doesn't seem right - I don't know how much they cost originally, but I'm pretty sure I only paid $12-14 for the books (Monster Manual was $14 I believe). If I still had my books, I'd check the MSRP, which is printed near the ISBN on the back, but I sold them long ago when I moved to 2nd edition. Of course, that's not counting all the other books I bought (MM2, Deities and Demigods, Fiend Folio, Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures and Legends and Lore [because I lost my Deities book]).
2nd edition I think were mostly $18-20, so that sounds about right. I remember sticker shock when I was upgrading to second edition.
There was a lot of convincing evidence. Aside from the crazy friend who had claimed to have done it (and other murders), I was convinced only someone very close to Hans or Hans himself could have done it.
Her boyfriend called in the missing persons report and then she didn't show up to pick up her kids at school - then Hans (and Hans alone) said she had secretly gone back to Russia.
The back seat of Hans' car was missing and the floor had been flooded. He'd been driving a different car after she disappeared.
Some of her blood was found at his residence.
He bought a book about committing the perfect murder (I think right after he became a suspect).
He had a large amount of cash on him when he was arrested (like he was about to flee the country).
As I recall, he said the V2 being used as a weapon was "his darkest day" because he wanted it used for space travel.
Whether it influenced his joining the SS or not, civilian rocketry was forbidden by the Nazi party, so it was either join them or don't do it. While I don't know his personal beliefs, in many ways he was a victim of circumstance - he was an SS officer before he claimed to have known about the deaths in labor camps (though I'm sure he knew they were anti-semitic) and at one point was under investigation by the gestapo during the war for anti-patriotic thinking. Given the situation and the government running a police state spying and incarcerating anyone that opposed them, I imagine he felt powerless to change it.
Free Linux (like Ubuntu) has a huge downside for the corporate world: no centralized support (aka someone to push the blame to). My company refused to even acknowledge Linux until companies appeared and charged hundreds of dollars for it (in support contracts).
My main problem with adopting Linux at work is that I would have no network access (we use proprietary software that is licensed for Windows only). I could sit on one of the QA machines, but I can't get e-mail documents, etc from them (need to install software and those machines have VMs and get cleaned often).
I can answer that one - Windows Genuine Advantage. MS's futile attempt to curb piracy.
I should correct that - I didn't mean to suggest WinFS was part of MinWin, only that WinFS and MinWin were being developed concurrently for Vista (before Vista's move to 2003) and reportedly had been tuned and tied fairly heavily together before the move. In some form or another it has existed since Cairo in the 1990s (went through that era's naming merry-go-round, too, but the only names I remember are from products that were released like the COM-DCOM-OLE-ActiveX). Some features of WinFS reportedly depended entirely on the kernel being MinWin, and I'm pretty sure kernel and ADO.NET dependencies were cited as why it was pulled from the release (it's been a while).
You're right on Win 2008, though - I had thought Vista was being built concurrently with Windows 2008 on top of the Windows 2003 kernel but it seems the projects were merged when Vista moved to 2003 and 2008 itself was indeed built on top of Vista.
I wasn't aware that NTFS supported arbitrary metadata tagging - it certainly isn't exposed, even in Vista and the only information I can find on it is limited. NTFS itself isn't a terrible FS, but it is slow compared to some other modern filesystems (Sun claims ZFS is 7.5x faster, for instance) and is one of the few OS's left with a 255 character path + filename limit. Capacity limits in the exabytes is decent, but not future-proof (I work with at least one customer with data in the exabytes already, but they are a Solaris house).
This is exactly my standpoint, though to be honest, both Lost and Heroes grew on me after a slow start (and then I had to bitstream the older episodes...). In fact, the only real turn off I had with Lost was that stupid black wind monster thing. This has been one of my worst problems with Abrams shows - they start realistically and then move slowly to the absurd. Alias, for instance, got to the point where a couple of people could take on an army - it was silly. Fortunately, after 1-2 silly episodes they get grounded back in more realistic situations.
BSG always seemed to me to be trying to be modern times with spaceships. The medicine in particular is worse than 20th century (dare I say 19th?). I'm surprised they aren't lighting a fire on the ship and cauterizing limbs. There are some aspects of the re-imagining I like, but the political squabbling in light of their situation seems a bit far-fetched, especially since there's nothing forcing them to follow the Galactica (I mean, you can follow the big baseship and be protected by it and accept military law, or try to survive on your own, right?). The effort to tie the series into current events I think is one of the worst parts about it.
How about failures, though?
Some series, like the now defunct Bionic Woman (also by the BSG people) weren't bad in concept, but once again poor in execution. Probably the worst thing about it was the name - I just don't think this one was ready for resurrection. I liked the characters, and I think they executed the bionics well (even had cyber-psychosis), but the plot was weak and it fell between the cracks trying to appeal to both men and women (action and romance without something that appeals to both sexes, like mystery and espionage themes - it had some of the latter, but it wasn't very fleshed out). This show made some of the same faux-pas's as Dark Angel - superhuman practically invincible stuff - Hollywood has to get over jumping through glass windows down two stories unhurt. This was cool in the 1970s, but we're smarter now.
Jericho - this one started fast, then had a bunch of stupid things that killed my interest. Why would a farming town be short of food? The midwest provides food for the entire nation, not just themselves (barring spoiling). My grandpa never bought food when he ran a farm (the only fruit they ever had at that time were Apples, which got canned in the fall). The winter jackets were absurd for the climate - anyone from that neck of the woods would know how to bundle up on the really cold days. About the only thing I could understand was infighting, because I imagine there would be people that would try to take, but others would band together to defend and help with the farms. A farm that couldn't arm a small militia would be a new one to me - every farmer I've ever known owns 2-3 shotguns and several rifles (most smaller caliber, however).
I agree - you could have the most beautiful math equations in the world and 99.999% of the population wouldn't give a rip. That includes me, and I minored in math and may even know what they're talking about if I cared enough to read the equations.
Monkeys with bionic limbs is another story entirely.
according to MS it means "Future Storage" - I guess they meant that literally.
From what I understand, WinFS was cut from Vista because it was designed around the MinWin kernel, not the Windows 2003 kernel (used in Vista) and it would take too long to convert it and get the bugs out. The Windows 2008 Server kernel is an updated Windows 2003 kernel, so basically they're saying this will be an updated Vista, not a move to a new underlying architecture (probably out of fear that they would need to break the driver model again). Unless they've done a whole lot of porting during and after Vista, don't be surprised if WinFS gets chopped next (if it hasn't been already). I'm still crossing my fingers, but not holding my breath.
It is really unfortunate because the NTFS is horribly outdated and lacks many modern features that help find files. From a user perspective, being able to tag files with search-able information is invaluable, and is the main reason I only store my photos and non-Word documents on Linux and Mac.
Actually, it was on the History Channel a couple nights ago, but figures the source info is on wiki as well. The History Channel had a lot more on the new age cults surrounding it and the hunt for the skulls to prevent the apocalypse in 2012. Incidentally I tried to go to Lubaantun several years ago but we ended up not going because of rain (the only nice day I was there we did SCUBA). The rest of that trip was up north staying in Cancun and Cozumel, and I did get to Chichen Itza (coolest ruins I've ever been to) and Tulum (woulda been awesome had I not been to Chichen Itza first).
Thanks a lot, jackass, you just called me a nerd AND a dork.
I'm afraid I screwed up on the girlfriend thing, though, and got married. That really wrecked my dork and nerd credentials.
Most if not all of the Crystal Skulls are fake artifacts. All of the ones tested date to the 19th century.
The most famous one, the Mitchell-Hedges skull has not been allowed to be studied, but it was reportedly found in Lubaantun in Belize (when it was British Honduras). The problem is, no one acknowledges the finder, Anna Mitchell-Hedges was at the dig, though later her adopted father said in his autobiography (I think) the skull was at least 3600 years old. I severely doubt that it is authentic and believe it is more of a money/attention grab, but it fits well with Indiana Jones since all of the movies have been about mythological objects that may or may not be real.