The cell phone issue is mostly centered around early standards. The US telecoms chose the CDMA standard for digital before GSM was complete to get a jump on competition. The rest of the world waited and chose GSM as the standard, and the two technologies are incompatible with one another. While there have been some inroads for GSM in the United States (particularly late entries like the former Deutsch Telecom - now known as T-Mobile), there is still a large investment in CDMA and therefore it is the most common. Some providers have both services and let the buyer decide and there may be dual technology phones, though I've never owned one (only Analog/CDMA). All phone providers are deregulated in the US, so there are choices, but the incumbent (the part that formerly had the monopoly for that area) owns the lines and has to lease them at a fixed rate (though that may have changed - the FCC did a ruling on this that favored the incumbent carrier for DSL and I'm not sure how that affected phone).
There are usually 3 major cell phone providers in most areas and a number of smaller ones. The key is the towers themselves - they usually are put up on private property and the cell providers technically don't need to share them - usually they do, but at a cost to the other provider (this originally started as roaming fees, but some companies charge roaming to "out of area" customers even if the company owns the towers).
As for broadband subsidies, there are entire companies built around "rural" construction subsidies in the US (like NewEdge Networks) - in fact, some second ring suburbs of major cities have better broadband than the city and first ring suburbs despite having less population density. The worst part is building in these "rural" areas is probably more profitable than the city or first ring 'burbs - 2nd ringers are usually more affluent and more likely to both get broadband and pay their bills.
I've heard the best breaks are on rural populations as long as EVERYBODY in that area can get it - even the hermit that is 200 miles from the nearest paved road. Most providers target areas that are are potentially profitable and will avoid any area that might contain such people, so one hermit may be screwing it up for 5000 people that live in the same town. The post office even considered reducing mail stops for people of that sort - having to deliver mail every day except Sunday to an address on a gravel mountain road with only one or two stops is very expensive (several cents of the cost of each stamp is just to cover those people, if I recall correctly) - so is adding all the repeaters you'd need to bring DSL to such a location or run fiber.
Incidentally, I saw a newspaper or magazine article on this specific drug just a week or so ago. I believe it was titled "The promising cancer drug you'll never see." The bottom line was that no major pharmaceutical company in the US is interested in it because they will have to bear the expense to develop it and get FDA approval but never reap any profits because someone can make a generic immediately. If this drug is developed at all, it will likely be overseas or in Canada and then make its way back to the US with grant funding to get the required FDA approval - a process that might take longer than it would for the patent to expire.
yeah, it wasn't a very objective analysis, and opinions seem to hinge entirely on a few features. I can see memory cleanup on exceptions being a legitimate gripe, but the rest of it seems nit-picky. The standard C++ library is bloated, IMO, and while it contains some nice features, I would probably not stick it in a device where memory and storage are at a premium. I've personally programmed PalmOS, but never Symbian, and had plenty of memory related problems there.
Speculatively speaking, even if Cocoa is running on mobiles, it doesn't mean they also support layering it with C++. Obj-C also has some restrictions when mixed with C++, like all declarations of Objective-C objects needing to be pointers. The main benefit of Objective-C, IMO, is that it is a "true" object oriented language with message passing whereas C++ is not. It is possible to make C++ behave like a true object oriented language by implementing message passing for accessors rather than allowing direct access (e.g. accessing public or protected variables) but that is not forced on you.
The writer couldn't even spell "piece of shit" right, spelling it "peace of shit." Why the shit is at peace is beyond me... Maybe they can switch it to "pease of shit" next, which I recall being an old spelling of peas (like in the nursery rhyme pease porridge hot).
That law only applies if he signed a non-compete clause. The post says he did not. Non-compete is very tricky to enforce - see below.
Generally, two week's notice is a courtesy, not a requirement. I've known several people that quit and left the day they turn in their notice.
Even if you sign a non-compete clause and go to a competitor, it's nearly impossible to prosecute in most states. The company I work for now has a bitter relationship with a group that ran off and started a competing company and specifically targeted their product for use with a rival's software just so they would be bought by them (and it worked). They then did recruiting off of phone lists they "stole" from my company in order to siphon off employees, most of whom were forced to sign non-compete clauses after the first group split off. Several people left my company for the rival during this recruitment and were sued (along with the company), but the rival company did a trick of hiring them in a non-identical role (for at least a year) and it was completely unenforcible. They claim they did not have our phone lists and only called friends they knew at our company, but since I got a call by a recruiter of theirs about 1 month after being hired, I would bet that's a lie.
The one I remember is the Bishop bug, which was on the Apple ][ version and apparently made it into the IBM version as well before eventually being fixed. If you use a Bishop with the identify spell and identify item 9 or 0 (or something like that), you gained loads of experience. I am among the discoverers of this bug if not the discoverer (I'm sure other people found it on their own - accidentally finding it was a matter of trying to identify object 8 and hitting 9, then going wtf?!? I just gained a boatload of levels).
All methods of fluid dynamics including the one described here use particle simulations of some kind. Even blob simulations are essentially particle simulators (mesh vertices are the particles). The difference between this method and others is that it apparently defines the flux itself based on the surface curvatures of the objects the particles are interacting with, not the conservation of momentum as per the Navier-Stokes Equations (NSE). POV may have been a bad example by the original poster - I haven't looked at it since the early 1990s myself, but technically bad looking fluid effects would not be its fault since it should theoretically be possible to use ray tracing to give a perfect particle simulation (provided you have enough particles) and given correct physics calculations.
Discrete Geometry - a field that studies finitely surfaced objects (e.g. polygons) Differential Geometry - the study of curved geometric shapes (e.g. spheres) Discrete Differential Geometry is something in-between the two - creating a discrete representation of a differential system is probably the best explanation I can give.
The NSE compute a discrete system (a finite set of points in practice).
only the mazes? I still remember most of the first level, but the scary part is I still have some of (and had all of) the *spells* memorized, as well, which you had to type in at the time you cast. I've only played W1-3 and the demo of 8.
Mage spells I remember (I'm guessing the spelling is still correct - grouped by name similarity, since I have no idea what the levels are/were anymore) Sopic, Katino, Halito, Mahalito, Molito, Masopic, Lakanito, Dalto, Madalto, Tiltowait
heh - judging by the fact that everyone I've ever asked about DSL in my neighborhood only knows about "Qwest" and the cable monopoly is Comcast, the only advantage I see is bringing awareness that there are other choices in the market.
Even my local newspaper only acknowledges Qwest and Comcast - I even e-mailed their main tech reporter a few years ago about maybe doing a piece on DSL choices and he emailed back that, in summary, it wasn't necessary because the other players were "niche" and "irrelevant" (so much for objective journalism from that front...). I've thought about doing an opinion piece or submitting an article, but I'm not actually sure how to get all the information I would need such as size of the companies involved, which carriers are in what CLEC, what line provider do they use (Qwest, Covad, etc), cost analysis, etc. Originally I was going to use BroadbandReports for research, but they still list providers that use Rhythms and Northpoint (both went bankrupt years ago) and don't list Qwest (which I know has service, but they probably don't feel the need to advertise there) when I search providers, so it isn't the most reliable.
it essentially says you can put a 1m or less dish anywhere you own or rent, but you can't put it anywhere you don't own or rent (so if you're on the wrong side of the apartment, you may not have a choice).
not only TV and Satellite dishes, but radio and wireless antennas as well (so called fixed signal antennae).
I suspect the real problem is because high end cards are starting to push Shader unification.
From a chipset standpoint, Intel actually makes decent (not spectacular, but better than many) graphics hardware already, they just don't have hardware transformation and lighting (T&L), which gets offloaded to the CPU. That means you can't be throttling your CPU(s)/cores and need a decent pipe between the hardware and memory. Intel said a couple of years back that it's a myth that the bottleneck is usually in T&L and the problem is actually pixel throughput.
As far as I can tell, that means a) the bottleneck is between geometry (T&L) and shading (pixel hardware), meaning it's because of the software driver. or b) the bottleneck is between shading and the display, meaning Intel's hardware is too crappy to push that many pixels.
The first is a meh (no surprise - it's caused by having geometry in software) the second would be a hardware issue Intel needs to resolve to work with larger displays.
Now back to Shader Unification - basically, if companies like nVidia and ATI move to unified shaders they can assign the types they need as needed and not leave many of them idle. Both of those companies have experience in unified shader architectures already (i.e. the Xbox, and GeForce 8 series), so it wouldn't surprise me if this were the trend of the future. Intel needs to move their software T&L into hardware to create a unified architecture - assuming that is the way of the future.
Another issue is that unified architectures are basically high speed generalized floating point units - these have practical uses in other areas besides graphics (physics, supercomputing, even databases - there are even web pages like this one dedicated to it). Intel has to see this as a threat and know that they need a response should their main competitor, AMD (ATI), go in that direction.
I've never understood why people think the crappy penny stocks the spams advertise are legitimate in any way. I think everybody gets burned once by the stock market (brokers are the devil), but usually you learn to avoid these junk fund scams and invest after legitimate research.
I wish I could magically tell people to NEVER BUY/INVEST FROM ANYTHING SENT BY SPAMMERS as it's almost all scams, crap, or dubiously legal (pharmacies). The only legitimate spam I've gotten ever has been for porn sites (hey, if you like that sort of stuff, feel free to visit the sites), so at least there's some integrity in one Internet industry.
Sadly, I don't think it has anything to do with the OS. The only time my Windows/Linux (dual boot) box or my mac have failed in the past 5 years were due to hard disk failures and a memory module failure. I get called to fix other people's PCs all the time and occasionally I find hardware failure (like my sister-in-law's CPU fan), but usually it's dumb user stuff like my mom's installing Yahoo Search, Comcast Search, and Google Search, then auto-updating to IE7 and not being able to figure out why it crashes (yahoo search was dying, tho I don't know if it was update related or conflict related). My brother-in-law was a huge Napster/Kazaa (and probably porn site judging by cached IE files) abuser, so he had lots of adware and popups (7 or more per URL due to having so much adware), rootkits, and other fun stuff on his machine. The rootkits took me pretty much two solid days to remove, so I told him next time I just format his drive (I had NO IDEA what I was getting into when I started removing the rootkits, but I portscanned the machine afterward and it seems clean).
Sadly, when I worked at a university lab many years ago, it was just the opposite - the macs were locked down (to non-hackers) and the PCs were relatively open aside from virus checkers that were notoriously behind the latest virus trend (oh, those glorious days before auto-update). Not that I really think lockdown helps - I exploited the mac box without much effort using command-option-shift-delete and knew enough about OpenFirmware back then that I may have been able to hack it using command-option-o-f.
you've never seen the documentary on this guy, have you?
he field tests each one *personally*
and while yes, the documentary did paint him in a bad light, the guy's main purpose in life was/is to wrestle a grizzly (to the point he bankrupted his multi-million dollar scrapyard business), and if you can take that seriously you're a better person than I am.
By far the funniest documentary I remember ever seeing, though I haven't seen it since catching it in a university theater many years ago, so I don't know how well it stands the test of time.
It's not Bush's fault Congress was dumb enough to expand his powers after 9/11 and give him the power to do stuff like this. It's also not my fault for the lot of 'em, either, since I've never voted for a national winner (I've tried Dem, Republican, Indie - they all lose).
what's next? - Martial Law? Oh, wait, by law you need the court system to collapse first... or do you? Reagan may have given FEMA that power with executive orders and Bush has since hid the records by executive order 13233.
Bush wasn't kidding when he declared he is the decider last year, but Rummy is out anyway.
wow - that was a joke, I was entirely kidding. Only a masochistic child could love C-INTERCAL (with a syntax that requires commands like PLEASE DO, but if you use PLEASE too much, the compiler thinks you're groveling). I filled in a bunch of power words to make the post ooze sarcasm (e.g. common knowledge) and people still think I was serious.
I wasn't even serious about the C stuff, I figured as much - it was a segue into C-INTERCAL but they are dialects of a one letter name language (C). I actually do know a non-listed 1 letter name, an old BBS scripting language called K! (but if it still exists, I'd be shocked).
I think of it more like: Would you go to celebrities for religious advice? (hello Scientology!) Then why the HELL would you ask them for scientific advice!?
Politicians at least usually have advisers on the issues... unfortunately, most are wack job ultra-conservatives or ultra-liberals, so their views are often very skewed... I guess I vote for duct-taping the politician's mouth, too;)
I agree, but there's only so much that is realistic.
For instance, I doubt the US will stop trying to undermine the Cuban government and will continue to do so secretly and not-so-secretly, and the documents may never get released (heck, as long as we're at war with anyone, the President can just Edict them to the shredder). Cuban expatriates are considered a key in winning Florida elections and since Florida also has the fourth largest pool of electoral college votes, it's in the best interest of the President to continue the embargo for as long as those expatriates support it. As a matter of fact, the US has just started cracking down on violators of the embargo, probably as a push to force a collapse, which would surely win votes - probably more if it doesn't collapse. In years' past, the embargo has basically been ignored - I've heard of lots of US based divers stopping in Mexico or Belize on their way to Cuba, which supposedly has excellent reefs, and their visits most likely helped keep Cuba afloat. Those same people will probably think twice if a reasonable likelihood of 10 years of prison comes with their tourist stop.
I also doubt we'll ever give up on spying on nations we are not at war with, just out of fear of WMD and terrorists.
What astounds me on this whole thing is that the CIA and NSA combined have less than half the documents being released by the FBI - that means most of the documents are about US citizens (the NSA and CIA were, at least until recently, forbidden to spy inside the USA - Bush allowed the NSA to do this by Presidential edict). I'm sure I've had an FBI file since I was a teenager (for checking a number of watch-list books on political ideologies from the library to do a report), but this is almost epic.
I can't believe you don't know this - it's common knowledge that the letter 'P' was skipped because back in the early 80s Wordstar would use control-P to purge your document with no confirmation screen as opposed to Wordperfect's print, so there was an extreme hatred for the letter from people that used Wordstar at work or school and Wordperfect at home (practically everyone not using Cut-N-Paste on an Apple ][, which was, pretty much everyone). It was such a powerful effect that it practically destroyed the Pascal programming language and its.p extensions and nearly killed the Macintosh, which had standardized on Pascal for its operating system. The stigma of the letter has faded, but many old timers would never use a programming language called P.
I'm stuck in the "write once, test everywhere" world of Java. It's amazing how little things slip through the cracks on some platforms. One bug I hit just last week involving focus listeners on a popup window (dialog) was reported against Windows, fixed in Windows and HP-UX, but never tested or fixed on Solaris and Linux until a bug was written against those platforms. You'd think something like that would get heavy testing, but it still slips into production code.
On the plus side, at least java mostly runs on those systems, which is more than I can say about.NET (mono might be available, but I doubt I can convince anyone to use it in a production enterprise environment, even if it were good). We do use.NET on our "Windows initiative," but I'm mostly out of the loop on that one.
I see an opportunity to make PCs more like a utility console. The time is more ripe now for convergence than it was when the term started to get thrown around (back in the late '90s), or even at the advent of the media center PC a few years ago. Why? Because TVs in homes are finally getting resolutions that are more like those of computer monitors and are scaled appropriately for distance viewing (e.g. a 42" or 56" screen for reading from 3-5 feet away rather than a 19" screen from 1 foot) at more affordable price points. Most people want DVR-type functionality, and a PC can give you that, too. Also video on-demand.
Since Vista will use hardware accelerated DirectX contexts (in layman's terms, a context is a graphics card setting with information like resolution, anti-aliasing and number of colors allowing the card to optimize itself for its settings) in its premier modes, there should be less of an issue with switching from Fullscreen to Windowed mode. Unfortunately, I also forsee more developers entrenching on DirectX because there is only limited OpenGL support (Microsoft says 1.3 and deprecated, which means they plan to drop support after 2 more Windows releases). OpenGL games may only work in fullscreen mode using the card's OpenGL version or with the OGL1.3 featureset in Windowed mode because of this (since fullscreen mode can create any hardware context it wants). Earlier versions of Windows were a software based solution, so they didn't have a hardware context (meaning the graphics context of the game could be OpenGL or DirectX).
Windows XP sold retail includes support from Microsoft. Windows XP sold with hardware includes support from the hardware manufacturer, not Microsoft. If you buy an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) CD at the discounted price (~$79 instead of ~$99), you should note that it does not include support from Microsoft and if you call their support line they will redirect you to the manufacturer of your hardware (even if you built it yourself). I believe you can still get support from Microsoft with an OEM CD, but you will pay through the nose for it (I recall $1000 incident fees, but that may have been for businesses - there may be something cheaper like ~$35-$55 fees for home users, or whatever the going rate is now).
As for student software (and hardware), that is a different issue - companies realized a long time ago that people will generally stick with what they learn, so if they learn Photoshop, they will push Photoshop at full retail price for businesses they work with, or try to find a job at a Photoshop house. They will not switch to GIMP or Paintshop Pro or other software unless there is no other choice. Apple would have died a long time ago if they hadn't been feeding machines to school kids and gaining lifelong fans.
In college I scrapped together a workable shooter tech demo in about 2 months, but it was far from being a fun shooter or commercial quality shooter and I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing, having spent the month before that learning to program 3dfx's proprietary graphics programming language glide. I submitted this tech demo and a later revision to a few recruiters, but never landed an industry job or even heard back from any of them outside an indie that tried to hire me before having the game they were working on pulled by their publisher. That's just the way it goes sometimes.
As opposed to what, a digressive Christian? A regressive Christian?
We progressive Christians renounce our Neanderthal brethren!
Sorry, that name just asks to be poked fun at:) my guess is they mean it in a "reformist" vs "conservative" way, but that is regressive, isn't it, since that's the way it was meant in the first place?
I still have problems with the Christian teachings that God is perfect - why would a perfect God creating imperfect anything - how can you be perfect and create imperfection? Most Christians deflect this to the devil, another "perfect" creation of God. Apparently another all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect creature is too lazy to create its own universe, so has to muck with God's. So two all-powerful, all-knowing creatures face off (ok, really slews of them on both sides, separated by "spheres" if you want to believe the stuff written in the middle ages), knowing full well which one is going to win in the end because they're all-knowing, but fight anyway. Satan loses and is banished, but because Satan is all powerful, he can't really be banished... um, anyhow, you can probably see where I'm going here. Don't confuse skepticism with unbelief - I just believe the interpretations of the Bible we have contain lots of contradictions - how can an angry and vengeful God love everyone and preaches forgiveness? Why would a forgiving God turn people into pillars of salt? Speaking of salt, we don't put much value in it, but Romans paid soldiers in salt - that's where the phrase "worth your salt" came from - it was a valuable commodity once. Maybe God is trying to say he didn't think those people were worth anything as worshipers, so maybe they'd be worth more as a valuable commodity.
The best thing about interpretation is everyone has their own;)
Actually, if you mouse over a section of wall in the outhouse some words pop over your head about using dynamite to clear it out. You end up down there in the first place by following quest leads.
My favorite part of the Fallout were the bizarre quotes like "...the drugs, the money, the neverending stream of prostitutes - typical project manager" (about Myron, the Bill Gates-alike character).
I liked both Oblivion and Morrowind to a point, but my main dislike was the leveling monsters in Oblivion. I'd rather have the easy areas stay easy and the game keep pushing you into harder areas by giving you 0 experience for the easy stuff. Even better, have the monsters just run away when you come near.
I found it odd that they removed some of the gameplay (like levitation puzzles) and to be quite honest, the oblivion towers were very repetitive by game end.
Morrowind had a hideously slow pace at the outset and I found it impossible to start the game over after completing it. About 10 hours in I started to enjoy it, but quit playing it when my character was unbeatable and some other games sucked me in.
Daggerfall crashed on startup on my PC and when I finally got to play it a couple of years later on another PC, the game was so buggy and crash-prone it was nearly impossible to play (unpatched). The dungeons became monotonous quickly, but I admit, it was fun for a while. I probably would have liked the game better had I played it when it came out and not a couple of years later.
I never got to play Arena - I started with Daggerfall, and while I played Redguard (an offshoot) a couple of times, I never felt it was worth putting time into.
I love Fallout more than anything Bethesda has put out though, just because there are moments that are laugh-out-loud funny. I think I've played fallout 2 about 20 times with entirely different types of characters because there are so many things you miss building one way or another (stuff like having a high luck to get certain random encounters). I probably would have done the same with FO1, but I had the mac version and sold it when I no longer had a mac (incidentally, I have one again, though it's and old B&W G3). I hate the start of fallout 2, and I know that turned off a lot of people that were not fallout fans - basically, it assumes you know that you need to hit-n-run the scorpions and ants if you're not a bruiser and your character is combat oriented enough to beat a guy at the end. I think I died off about 10 times before I realized I was faster than the ants and scorpions and probably another 10-20 trying to beat the guy at the end with my mostly non-combat (or firearms heavy) char.
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The cell phone issue is mostly centered around early standards. The US telecoms chose the CDMA standard for digital before GSM was complete to get a jump on competition. The rest of the world waited and chose GSM as the standard, and the two technologies are incompatible with one another. While there have been some inroads for GSM in the United States (particularly late entries like the former Deutsch Telecom - now known as T-Mobile), there is still a large investment in CDMA and therefore it is the most common. Some providers have both services and let the buyer decide and there may be dual technology phones, though I've never owned one (only Analog/CDMA). All phone providers are deregulated in the US, so there are choices, but the incumbent (the part that formerly had the monopoly for that area) owns the lines and has to lease them at a fixed rate (though that may have changed - the FCC did a ruling on this that favored the incumbent carrier for DSL and I'm not sure how that affected phone).
There are usually 3 major cell phone providers in most areas and a number of smaller ones. The key is the towers themselves - they usually are put up on private property and the cell providers technically don't need to share them - usually they do, but at a cost to the other provider (this originally started as roaming fees, but some companies charge roaming to "out of area" customers even if the company owns the towers).
As for broadband subsidies, there are entire companies built around "rural" construction subsidies in the US (like NewEdge Networks) - in fact, some second ring suburbs of major cities have better broadband than the city and first ring suburbs despite having less population density. The worst part is building in these "rural" areas is probably more profitable than the city or first ring 'burbs - 2nd ringers are usually more affluent and more likely to both get broadband and pay their bills.
I've heard the best breaks are on rural populations as long as EVERYBODY in that area can get it - even the hermit that is 200 miles from the nearest paved road. Most providers target areas that are are potentially profitable and will avoid any area that might contain such people, so one hermit may be screwing it up for 5000 people that live in the same town. The post office even considered reducing mail stops for people of that sort - having to deliver mail every day except Sunday to an address on a gravel mountain road with only one or two stops is very expensive (several cents of the cost of each stamp is just to cover those people, if I recall correctly) - so is adding all the repeaters you'd need to bring DSL to such a location or run fiber.
Incidentally, I saw a newspaper or magazine article on this specific drug just a week or so ago. I believe it was titled "The promising cancer drug you'll never see." The bottom line was that no major pharmaceutical company in the US is interested in it because they will have to bear the expense to develop it and get FDA approval but never reap any profits because someone can make a generic immediately. If this drug is developed at all, it will likely be overseas or in Canada and then make its way back to the US with grant funding to get the required FDA approval - a process that might take longer than it would for the patent to expire.
yeah, it wasn't a very objective analysis, and opinions seem to hinge entirely on a few features. I can see memory cleanup on exceptions being a legitimate gripe, but the rest of it seems nit-picky. The standard C++ library is bloated, IMO, and while it contains some nice features, I would probably not stick it in a device where memory and storage are at a premium. I've personally programmed PalmOS, but never Symbian, and had plenty of memory related problems there.
Speculatively speaking, even if Cocoa is running on mobiles, it doesn't mean they also support layering it with C++. Obj-C also has some restrictions when mixed with C++, like all declarations of Objective-C objects needing to be pointers. The main benefit of Objective-C, IMO, is that it is a "true" object oriented language with message passing whereas C++ is not. It is possible to make C++ behave like a true object oriented language by implementing message passing for accessors rather than allowing direct access (e.g. accessing public or protected variables) but that is not forced on you.
The writer couldn't even spell "piece of shit" right, spelling it "peace of shit." Why the shit is at peace is beyond me... Maybe they can switch it to "pease of shit" next, which I recall being an old spelling of peas (like in the nursery rhyme pease porridge hot).
That law only applies if he signed a non-compete clause. The post says he did not. Non-compete is very tricky to enforce - see below.
Generally, two week's notice is a courtesy, not a requirement. I've known several people that quit and left the day they turn in their notice.
Even if you sign a non-compete clause and go to a competitor, it's nearly impossible to prosecute in most states. The company I work for now has a bitter relationship with a group that ran off and started a competing company and specifically targeted their product for use with a rival's software just so they would be bought by them (and it worked). They then did recruiting off of phone lists they "stole" from my company in order to siphon off employees, most of whom were forced to sign non-compete clauses after the first group split off. Several people left my company for the rival during this recruitment and were sued (along with the company), but the rival company did a trick of hiring them in a non-identical role (for at least a year) and it was completely unenforcible. They claim they did not have our phone lists and only called friends they knew at our company, but since I got a call by a recruiter of theirs about 1 month after being hired, I would bet that's a lie.
The one I remember is the Bishop bug, which was on the Apple ][ version and apparently made it into the IBM version as well before eventually being fixed. If you use a Bishop with the identify spell and identify item 9 or 0 (or something like that), you gained loads of experience. I am among the discoverers of this bug if not the discoverer (I'm sure other people found it on their own - accidentally finding it was a matter of trying to identify object 8 and hitting 9, then going wtf?!? I just gained a boatload of levels).
Huh?
All methods of fluid dynamics including the one described here use particle simulations of some kind. Even blob simulations are essentially particle simulators (mesh vertices are the particles). The difference between this method and others is that it apparently defines the flux itself based on the surface curvatures of the objects the particles are interacting with, not the conservation of momentum as per the Navier-Stokes Equations (NSE). POV may have been a bad example by the original poster - I haven't looked at it since the early 1990s myself, but technically bad looking fluid effects would not be its fault since it should theoretically be possible to use ray tracing to give a perfect particle simulation (provided you have enough particles) and given correct physics calculations.
Discrete Geometry - a field that studies finitely surfaced objects (e.g. polygons)
Differential Geometry - the study of curved geometric shapes (e.g. spheres)
Discrete Differential Geometry is something in-between the two - creating a discrete representation of a differential system is probably the best explanation I can give.
The NSE compute a discrete system (a finite set of points in practice).
only the mazes? I still remember most of the first level, but the scary part is I still have some of (and had all of) the *spells* memorized, as well, which you had to type in at the time you cast. I've only played W1-3 and the demo of 8.
Mage spells I remember (I'm guessing the spelling is still correct - grouped by name similarity, since I have no idea what the levels are/were anymore)
Sopic, Katino, Halito, Mahalito, Molito, Masopic, Lakanito, Dalto, Madalto, Tiltowait
Cleric spells I remember
Dial, Badial, Dialma, Badialma, Madialma, Matu, Di, Badi, Madi, Mabadi, Porfic, Maporfic, Loktofeit, Malikto, Kadorto
the weird weapons like Blade Cuisinart pop into my head occasionally, too.
heh - judging by the fact that everyone I've ever asked about DSL in my neighborhood only knows about "Qwest" and the cable monopoly is Comcast, the only advantage I see is bringing awareness that there are other choices in the market.
Even my local newspaper only acknowledges Qwest and Comcast - I even e-mailed their main tech reporter a few years ago about maybe doing a piece on DSL choices and he emailed back that, in summary, it wasn't necessary because the other players were "niche" and "irrelevant" (so much for objective journalism from that front...). I've thought about doing an opinion piece or submitting an article, but I'm not actually sure how to get all the information I would need such as size of the companies involved, which carriers are in what CLEC, what line provider do they use (Qwest, Covad, etc), cost analysis, etc. Originally I was going to use BroadbandReports for research, but they still list providers that use Rhythms and Northpoint (both went bankrupt years ago) and don't list Qwest (which I know has service, but they probably don't feel the need to advertise there) when I search providers, so it isn't the most reliable.
specifically, you're referring to this FCC rule
it essentially says you can put a 1m or less dish anywhere you own or rent, but you can't put it anywhere you don't own or rent (so if you're on the wrong side of the apartment, you may not have a choice).
not only TV and Satellite dishes, but radio and wireless antennas as well (so called fixed signal antennae).
I suspect the real problem is because high end cards are starting to push Shader unification.
From a chipset standpoint, Intel actually makes decent (not spectacular, but better than many) graphics hardware already, they just don't have hardware transformation and lighting (T&L), which gets offloaded to the CPU. That means you can't be throttling your CPU(s)/cores and need a decent pipe between the hardware and memory. Intel said a couple of years back that it's a myth that the bottleneck is usually in T&L and the problem is actually pixel throughput.
As far as I can tell, that means
a) the bottleneck is between geometry (T&L) and shading (pixel hardware), meaning it's because of the software driver.
or
b) the bottleneck is between shading and the display, meaning Intel's hardware is too crappy to push that many pixels.
The first is a meh (no surprise - it's caused by having geometry in software) the second would be a hardware issue Intel needs to resolve to work with larger displays.
Now back to Shader Unification - basically, if companies like nVidia and ATI move to unified shaders they can assign the types they need as needed and not leave many of them idle. Both of those companies have experience in unified shader architectures already (i.e. the Xbox, and GeForce 8 series), so it wouldn't surprise me if this were the trend of the future. Intel needs to move their software T&L into hardware to create a unified architecture - assuming that is the way of the future.
Another issue is that unified architectures are basically high speed generalized floating point units - these have practical uses in other areas besides graphics (physics, supercomputing, even databases - there are even web pages like this one dedicated to it). Intel has to see this as a threat and know that they need a response should their main competitor, AMD (ATI), go in that direction.
I've never understood why people think the crappy penny stocks the spams advertise are legitimate in any way. I think everybody gets burned once by the stock market (brokers are the devil), but usually you learn to avoid these junk fund scams and invest after legitimate research.
I wish I could magically tell people to NEVER BUY/INVEST FROM ANYTHING SENT BY SPAMMERS as it's almost all scams, crap, or dubiously legal (pharmacies). The only legitimate spam I've gotten ever has been for porn sites (hey, if you like that sort of stuff, feel free to visit the sites), so at least there's some integrity in one Internet industry.
Sadly, I don't think it has anything to do with the OS. The only time my Windows/Linux (dual boot) box or my mac have failed in the past 5 years were due to hard disk failures and a memory module failure. I get called to fix other people's PCs all the time and occasionally I find hardware failure (like my sister-in-law's CPU fan), but usually it's dumb user stuff like my mom's installing Yahoo Search, Comcast Search, and Google Search, then auto-updating to IE7 and not being able to figure out why it crashes (yahoo search was dying, tho I don't know if it was update related or conflict related). My brother-in-law was a huge Napster/Kazaa (and probably porn site judging by cached IE files) abuser, so he had lots of adware and popups (7 or more per URL due to having so much adware), rootkits, and other fun stuff on his machine. The rootkits took me pretty much two solid days to remove, so I told him next time I just format his drive (I had NO IDEA what I was getting into when I started removing the rootkits, but I portscanned the machine afterward and it seems clean).
Sadly, when I worked at a university lab many years ago, it was just the opposite - the macs were locked down (to non-hackers) and the PCs were relatively open aside from virus checkers that were notoriously behind the latest virus trend (oh, those glorious days before auto-update). Not that I really think lockdown helps - I exploited the mac box without much effort using command-option-shift-delete and knew enough about OpenFirmware back then that I may have been able to hack it using command-option-o-f.
you've never seen the documentary on this guy, have you?
he field tests each one *personally*
and while yes, the documentary did paint him in a bad light, the guy's main purpose in life was/is to wrestle a grizzly (to the point he bankrupted his multi-million dollar scrapyard business), and if you can take that seriously you're a better person than I am.
By far the funniest documentary I remember ever seeing, though I haven't seen it since catching it in a university theater many years ago, so I don't know how well it stands the test of time.
It's not Bush's fault Congress was dumb enough to expand his powers after 9/11 and give him the power to do stuff like this. It's also not my fault for the lot of 'em, either, since I've never voted for a national winner (I've tried Dem, Republican, Indie - they all lose).
How does he (ab)use his power?
Spying on US citizens with the NSA? Illegal by FISA - overridden by executive order.
Spying on the US mail as per this thread? again, illegal and overridden.
illegally detaining Prisoners of War? Already doing that.
what's next? - Martial Law? Oh, wait, by law you need the court system to collapse first... or do you? Reagan may have given FEMA that power with executive orders and Bush has since hid the records by executive order 13233.
Bush wasn't kidding when he declared he is the decider last year, but Rummy is out anyway.
wow - that was a joke, I was entirely kidding. Only a masochistic child could love C-INTERCAL (with a syntax that requires commands like PLEASE DO, but if you use PLEASE too much, the compiler thinks you're groveling). I filled in a bunch of power words to make the post ooze sarcasm (e.g. common knowledge) and people still think I was serious.
I wasn't even serious about the C stuff, I figured as much - it was a segue into C-INTERCAL but they are dialects of a one letter name language (C). I actually do know a non-listed 1 letter name, an old BBS scripting language called K! (but if it still exists, I'd be shocked).
I think of it more like:
;)
Would you go to celebrities for religious advice? (hello Scientology!)
Then why the HELL would you ask them for scientific advice!?
Politicians at least usually have advisers on the issues... unfortunately, most are wack job ultra-conservatives or ultra-liberals, so their views are often very skewed... I guess I vote for duct-taping the politician's mouth, too
I agree, but there's only so much that is realistic.
For instance, I doubt the US will stop trying to undermine the Cuban government and will continue to do so secretly and not-so-secretly, and the documents may never get released (heck, as long as we're at war with anyone, the President can just Edict them to the shredder). Cuban expatriates are considered a key in winning Florida elections and since Florida also has the fourth largest pool of electoral college votes, it's in the best interest of the President to continue the embargo for as long as those expatriates support it. As a matter of fact, the US has just started cracking down on violators of the embargo, probably as a push to force a collapse, which would surely win votes - probably more if it doesn't collapse. In years' past, the embargo has basically been ignored - I've heard of lots of US based divers stopping in Mexico or Belize on their way to Cuba, which supposedly has excellent reefs, and their visits most likely helped keep Cuba afloat. Those same people will probably think twice if a reasonable likelihood of 10 years of prison comes with their tourist stop.
I also doubt we'll ever give up on spying on nations we are not at war with, just out of fear of WMD and terrorists.
What astounds me on this whole thing is that the CIA and NSA combined have less than half the documents being released by the FBI - that means most of the documents are about US citizens (the NSA and CIA were, at least until recently, forbidden to spy inside the USA - Bush allowed the NSA to do this by Presidential edict). I'm sure I've had an FBI file since I was a teenager (for checking a number of watch-list books on political ideologies from the library to do a report), but this is almost epic.
wow - you missed a couple of C dialects, most certainly because they extended the letter name with a word
.p extensions and nearly killed the Macintosh, which had standardized on Pascal for its operating system. The stigma of the letter has faded, but many old timers would never use a programming language called P.
Objective-C and the best programming language in existence, C-Intercal (yeah, yeah - you whitespace lovers can bite me).
I can't believe you don't know this - it's common knowledge that the letter 'P' was skipped because back in the early 80s Wordstar would use control-P to purge your document with no confirmation screen as opposed to Wordperfect's print, so there was an extreme hatred for the letter from people that used Wordstar at work or school and Wordperfect at home (practically everyone not using Cut-N-Paste on an Apple ][, which was, pretty much everyone). It was such a powerful effect that it practically destroyed the Pascal programming language and its
I'm stuck in the "write once, test everywhere" world of Java. It's amazing how little things slip through the cracks on some platforms. One bug I hit just last week involving focus listeners on a popup window (dialog) was reported against Windows, fixed in Windows and HP-UX, but never tested or fixed on Solaris and Linux until a bug was written against those platforms. You'd think something like that would get heavy testing, but it still slips into production code.
.NET (mono might be available, but I doubt I can convince anyone to use it in a production enterprise environment, even if it were good). We do use .NET on our "Windows initiative," but I'm mostly out of the loop on that one.
On the plus side, at least java mostly runs on those systems, which is more than I can say about
I see an opportunity to make PCs more like a utility console. The time is more ripe now for convergence than it was when the term started to get thrown around (back in the late '90s), or even at the advent of the media center PC a few years ago. Why? Because TVs in homes are finally getting resolutions that are more like those of computer monitors and are scaled appropriately for distance viewing (e.g. a 42" or 56" screen for reading from 3-5 feet away rather than a 19" screen from 1 foot) at more affordable price points. Most people want DVR-type functionality, and a PC can give you that, too. Also video on-demand.
Since Vista will use hardware accelerated DirectX contexts (in layman's terms, a context is a graphics card setting with information like resolution, anti-aliasing and number of colors allowing the card to optimize itself for its settings) in its premier modes, there should be less of an issue with switching from Fullscreen to Windowed mode. Unfortunately, I also forsee more developers entrenching on DirectX because there is only limited OpenGL support (Microsoft says 1.3 and deprecated, which means they plan to drop support after 2 more Windows releases). OpenGL games may only work in fullscreen mode using the card's OpenGL version or with the OGL1.3 featureset in Windowed mode because of this (since fullscreen mode can create any hardware context it wants). Earlier versions of Windows were a software based solution, so they didn't have a hardware context (meaning the graphics context of the game could be OpenGL or DirectX).
Windows XP sold retail includes support from Microsoft. Windows XP sold with hardware includes support from the hardware manufacturer, not Microsoft. If you buy an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) CD at the discounted price (~$79 instead of ~$99), you should note that it does not include support from Microsoft and if you call their support line they will redirect you to the manufacturer of your hardware (even if you built it yourself). I believe you can still get support from Microsoft with an OEM CD, but you will pay through the nose for it (I recall $1000 incident fees, but that may have been for businesses - there may be something cheaper like ~$35-$55 fees for home users, or whatever the going rate is now).
As for student software (and hardware), that is a different issue - companies realized a long time ago that people will generally stick with what they learn, so if they learn Photoshop, they will push Photoshop at full retail price for businesses they work with, or try to find a job at a Photoshop house. They will not switch to GIMP or Paintshop Pro or other software unless there is no other choice. Apple would have died a long time ago if they hadn't been feeding machines to school kids and gaining lifelong fans.
In college I scrapped together a workable shooter tech demo in about 2 months, but it was far from being a fun shooter or commercial quality shooter and I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing, having spent the month before that learning to program 3dfx's proprietary graphics programming language glide. I submitted this tech demo and a later revision to a few recruiters, but never landed an industry job or even heard back from any of them outside an indie that tried to hire me before having the game they were working on pulled by their publisher. That's just the way it goes sometimes.
As opposed to what, a digressive Christian? A regressive Christian?
:) my guess is they mean it in a "reformist" vs "conservative" way, but that is regressive, isn't it, since that's the way it was meant in the first place?
;)
We progressive Christians renounce our Neanderthal brethren!
Sorry, that name just asks to be poked fun at
I still have problems with the Christian teachings that God is perfect - why would a perfect God creating imperfect anything - how can you be perfect and create imperfection? Most Christians deflect this to the devil, another "perfect" creation of God. Apparently another all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect creature is too lazy to create its own universe, so has to muck with God's. So two all-powerful, all-knowing creatures face off (ok, really slews of them on both sides, separated by "spheres" if you want to believe the stuff written in the middle ages), knowing full well which one is going to win in the end because they're all-knowing, but fight anyway. Satan loses and is banished, but because Satan is all powerful, he can't really be banished... um, anyhow, you can probably see where I'm going here. Don't confuse skepticism with unbelief - I just believe the interpretations of the Bible we have contain lots of contradictions - how can an angry and vengeful God love everyone and preaches forgiveness? Why would a forgiving God turn people into pillars of salt? Speaking of salt, we don't put much value in it, but Romans paid soldiers in salt - that's where the phrase "worth your salt" came from - it was a valuable commodity once. Maybe God is trying to say he didn't think those people were worth anything as worshipers, so maybe they'd be worth more as a valuable commodity.
The best thing about interpretation is everyone has their own
Actually, if you mouse over a section of wall in the outhouse some words pop over your head about using dynamite to clear it out. You end up down there in the first place by following quest leads.
My favorite part of the Fallout were the bizarre quotes like "...the drugs, the money, the neverending stream of prostitutes - typical project manager" (about Myron, the Bill Gates-alike character).
I liked both Oblivion and Morrowind to a point, but my main dislike was the leveling monsters in Oblivion. I'd rather have the easy areas stay easy and the game keep pushing you into harder areas by giving you 0 experience for the easy stuff. Even better, have the monsters just run away when you come near.
I found it odd that they removed some of the gameplay (like levitation puzzles) and to be quite honest, the oblivion towers were very repetitive by game end.
Morrowind had a hideously slow pace at the outset and I found it impossible to start the game over after completing it. About 10 hours in I started to enjoy it, but quit playing it when my character was unbeatable and some other games sucked me in.
Daggerfall crashed on startup on my PC and when I finally got to play it a couple of years later on another PC, the game was so buggy and crash-prone it was nearly impossible to play (unpatched). The dungeons became monotonous quickly, but I admit, it was fun for a while. I probably would have liked the game better had I played it when it came out and not a couple of years later.
I never got to play Arena - I started with Daggerfall, and while I played Redguard (an offshoot) a couple of times, I never felt it was worth putting time into.
I love Fallout more than anything Bethesda has put out though, just because there are moments that are laugh-out-loud funny. I think I've played fallout 2 about 20 times with entirely different types of characters because there are so many things you miss building one way or another (stuff like having a high luck to get certain random encounters). I probably would have done the same with FO1, but I had the mac version and sold it when I no longer had a mac (incidentally, I have one again, though it's and old B&W G3). I hate the start of fallout 2, and I know that turned off a lot of people that were not fallout fans - basically, it assumes you know that you need to hit-n-run the scorpions and ants if you're not a bruiser and your character is combat oriented enough to beat a guy at the end. I think I died off about 10 times before I realized I was faster than the ants and scorpions and probably another 10-20 trying to beat the guy at the end with my mostly non-combat (or firearms heavy) char.