not true - two forms of spyware exist on mac and linux, but not nearly as destructive as on Windows where they can install without the user's knowledge (with certain formerly default security settings).
The first form is tracking cookies. You visit a site, they update the cookie and at some point the cookie is harvested, giving the spyware company information such as hits on the site, favorite page(s), etc.
The second type is a java based tracking, like RedSheriff. You can prevent both by turning off cookies and java, but I generally just live with them because I need cookies and java on for work (meaning I need fairly refined security subset and I don't think it's worth the effort at the moment).
Windows is getting better - I believe with Windows SP2 you now always get a prompt when something like this tries to install itself with the default security settings (where before it just installed it). The part that annoys me is that the software is still downloaded into a temporary location, so my virus checker goes nuts since it sees most of this stuff as a virus. I should be prompted before this stuff _downloads_, not before it installs.
If you want to get technical, the USA is not a Democracy, it's a Republic. A Democracy is mob rule, while a Republic is representative rule. You sorta alluded to that in paragraph 2 but not in paragraph 1... The communists had no ruling by the people and I don't believe there's ever been a successful Communist country - they're all Communist Dictatorships. A Communist Dictatorship is a hybrid that insists on a single ruler to dictate the spread of wealth and relies on the strength of its army to maintain control rather than the cooperation of the people.
The main problem with Communism in pure form is incentives for hard work get diluted on the masses, so it generally deteriorates into a welfare state when used on a large populace. In small groups it works great - Mennonites, for example, are basically a Communist group - though that could be argued because they aren't forced to share, they just do for the good of the community.
A free market has nothing to do with Communism, technically, but is generally associated with Democracy because of the Dictatorship imposing on what you can or cannot have. A true Communism does not block freedom of choice for what you can or cannot have.
In a nutshell, Communism and Democracies are great ideals, but tend towards Anarchy. Dictatorships and Republics are more stable due to their central leadership (and therefore quicker control of laws, armies, and resource allocation). Communism and Democracy are not mutually exclusive - you could have a Communist Democracy where everyone gets to vote (for laws and military actions) but all resources are divvied equally.
not all memory is created equal. Corsair memory has some excellent guides here
First, though, the mini gets no advantage from DDR, because DDR requires 2 chips for full speed, so already 1 bad thing about the mini...
I have no idea of what Apple is sticking in this, but most likely it's CAS 2.5, because that's the most common. I don't believe you get CAS 2.5, because I recall that depends on having too ram chips. Anyhow, in general, you want a low CAS number for better performance.
bah - most people are trainable, but make sure they get a quote on how much it will cost them at a dealer, first.
I cleaned up a computer like this once, then trained the user in firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-spam/spyware. I also told him where he got the spyware and viruses in the first place - audiogalaxy, porn sites, and free movie stream sites. I told him first off, if a site wants to automatically install software on your system without saying "download x software to view this site properly, it is probably software with a nefarious purpose. Yes, there are exceptions - macromedia flash is OK, as is Acrobat, but most of the time you see these sites, they'll at least ask you if you want to download the software first.
I just checked up on his computer a little over a year later, and everything is great - up to date virus checker, spam/spyware checker, and firewall. He still uses IE and outlook, but his spam/spyware software filters 99% of the junk out. I got him to not use preview pane in outlook, which stops auto-launching outlook viruses provided the message is deleted without ever being viewed (hey, every little bit helps). It's not perfection, but a huge step forward.
I can see why - gcc on ppc was poorly optimized and all rendering was done in software. Apple and the ppc linux folk have made progress in optimizing gcc for PPC and Apple has been offloading more and more of the graphics responsibilities to hardware. Then there's taking the NeXT code and targeting a specific CPU set, rather than a general CPU set like in the past.
If the porn industry was such big tech early adopters, why is 99% of it shot with poor lighting on cheap handicams? HDTV capable cameras are expensive (but dropping in price) and the quality is available to 2-5% of your market share. Why sell to an Apple audience when 100% of your audience runs Windows (since all the HDTV people can view regular TV)? At best you have a niche market and have to charge more for it accordingly. Yeah, you could pan-and-scan the movie and put them on a single DVD, but that isn't cheap. Zits and acne scars could be cured by makeup and to a lesser extent, digital effects. I'm sure the cheaper of the two is done all the time.
beta and VHS took off because you could record programs as well as view stuff on them and had little to do with the porn industry initially. After prices dropped to affordable levels and around the time the MPAA lost its "fair use" case, the porn industry (and just about everyone else) moved in. Why do you think laser-disc never took off?
HDTV hasn't taken off because you either need an ungodly heavy projection screen monitor or an ungodly expensive flat screen TV. Many people find projection displays blurry (it was bad in the past, and that stigma has lasted) but the other options, plasma and LCD are still unaffordable. Most people are not willing to spend more than $500 for a TV, and that gets you a 13" (33cm) LCD monitor or a 48"+ (122cm) tube TV. 9 out of 10 people in the US would choose the tube TV because we have the space and like the larger viewing area.
If anything, I'd say the porn industry did early adoption of the Internet, and with good reason. I'd take an educated guess that their key demographic is 18-34 year olds, and the majority of users with access on the switch were probably 18-25 and perfect for their demographic. I say this because most 34 year olds I know have at least one kid of at least 6 years of age and only one computer the kid uses (with blocking software added).
yeah - so I thought. The engine is supposedly quite far along, but content takes years for RPGs usually. I wouldn't be surprised if they borrowed a lot of stuff from their other engines, though (inventory management, for instance).
hey - thought of another Fallout 3... knowing Bethesda, it will be released, but will be about 4 years in coming:)
I don't know about that - I really wasn't interested in the Apple ][ until Sabotage (paratrooper on the PC) came around. After playing that, I wanted to learn to write something like that and learned BASIC. BASIC was too slow, so I learned Apple ][ Assembly. It cascaded from there. I sucked at algebra, myself, but was a god at Geometry, so that made up for it. Quite honestly, I use so little math in my day-to-day coding it doesn't really matter.
A friend of mine from HS was encoraged to learn computers because her dad worked with Seymore Cray. She was never quite the programmer my group was (very few people were - how many 12-14 year olds do you know that are writing code professionally?), but she was the only female geek I knew in that era. Her dad encouraged creativity - think of something you want on the computer, then try and create it. He would then help her design and help her when she got stuck writing code.
complaining about slashdotting her blog before the first 5 posts were up?
I admit, I wasn't much of a fan of the book, but watched the miniseries anyway. I've seen worse adaptations, but I can certainly see why fans (and the author) are unhappy. I taped it for a good friend of mine who _worships_ Earthsea, so I really want to see the look of horror on his face when I show it to him (yes, I am that evil).
Not quite - the idea was that business people could read the code and understand what it was doing because it's written in an "English-like" syntax, not that they could actually write the code. This was a huge sell for banks and other industries where the business-folk didn't trust the programmer-folk. MBAs would never stoop to program - God forbid, they need those brain cells for absorbing alcohol:)
and if the parent of the parent is wondering what the acronym is, it's COmmon Business Oriented Language. Unless you choose to work for a bank, you will most likely never see it, just like FORTRAN is pretty much dead outside the Mechanical Engineering world.
yeah - the problem is, the point of the magnetic strip was to get external sources such as bars to swipe it to verify the information rather than just judging by the picture. In this sense, the initiative was a royal flop (I think because the state wanted ridiculous usage fees). I think my card was swiped once the entire time I had a mag strip on it, and that was at club bundle (my name - group of clubs that share a cover) that got shut down for too many underage drinkers. It's also easy to demagnatize, which leaves the check up to a visual one again.
how many of these countries have mandatory education, and what is the dropout ratio? If only the kids that want to go or are smart enough to go to school attend, I can see how that would inflate their percentages.
not that America hasn't put a social stigma against math and science and overly fuels its sports and fashion industries. I got beat up by the jocks just like every other red-blooded nerd. At least I now don't work in a dead-end factory job swilling cheap beer every night and dreading going home to my wife and 12 kids like those losers (most of 'em seem to know nothing about birth control). I just read that something like.02% of COLLEGE grads play pro football, and most of those high school losers didn't even make it to college because of barely passing GPAs. I think they just had this overwhelming belief that sports would carry them throughout life and were wrong. My job may suck, but it's better than making window frames (which I know at least 4 of them do) and pays MUCH better. I can't imagine only getting paid $12/hour in my career with little or no hope of advancement. No wonder I see them going into the local bar for $2 2-for-1s on Bud light (despite their Cowboy-Neal-on-a-bad-day gut - no offense intended C.N.:)
aside from their choice of using.sl instead of.so (for that matter, Apple's use of dylib bugs me, too), HP-UX really isn't that bad. From a compatibility and performance standpoint, I've always liked it better than AIX, though I'd still pick Solaris if forced to pick a commercial UNIX.
I'm getting new AIX hardware soon (at work), so I'll have to see if they boosted performance in the past 2 years, but I think the OS sucks so bad I doubt it'll matter.
I don't miss Tru64 - too many portibility problems. I'm glad I don't need to support that one anymore (or Runix/Sinix... or even Alpha NT).
I thankfully got out when the game was just out of beta and sold off my most valuable card (a beta force field, though I also had a 1st ed force field, too) for $250. I can't believe some moron paid me that much for a piece of cardboard, though he probably turned around and sold it for more. Seeing that I only bought about $100 worth of cards, I came out ahead, unlike the other people I played the game with, one who dropped $10000 (easy, probably more) over 2 years to replace his smoking habit.
if you really want to get technical, another use of the d10 in 2nd edition (and maybe 1st, but I don't remember as my books were stolen in elementary school) the thieving skills, which used percentages, were ripped pretty much directly from Thieves' Guild (another early D&D clone). The other major use of d10s were some of the original treasure tables.
D&D 3rd edition standardized on the D20, so the percentile dice argument from RoleMaster is silly. Rolemaster began as an extension to D&D (adding critical hits and injuries), but moved into its own system not too long later (I know people with the original parchment pamphlet for arms law, which we call pre-0th edition:)
Rolemaster as a system was broken from a spellcaster standpoint up until 3rd edition - you start with mages that can just boil water and end with mages that can destroy large armies. Unfortunately, 3rd edition introduced a system that made character creation a 3 hour chore if you could even figure it out, but did finally make 1st and 2nd level mages somewhat useful (hey - I can cast a shock bolt at first level and I don't need a 100 empathy and risk a 35% chance of killing myself in the process!).
Anyhow, my point isn't to bash RM, as I would say it's the system I'm most familiar with as a player, but rather to say all game systems have their flaws. Some of my best roleplayed characters were from D&D, though the DM often ended up killing my character early because I spent all my secondary skills on ventriloquism rather than weapons skills and couldn't stand up to a "lowly troll." I played in a Rolemaster tourney that was entirely munchkinized and a D&D game with no combat that was all RPing. Both were tournaments, and I even won the first one, though it was maybe 5 minutes of Roleplaying and 3 1/2 hours of straight combat. I'm not a bad RolePlayer, but I've found fantasy isn't my forte - I generally lost in any fantasy RPG tournament play, but won in more modern settings (Call of Cthulhu and even a Twilight 2000 win, way back in 1991)
you've been suckered in by WotC. Truth is, it's very difficult to get a 1-30 (or 0-29) roll on a d20. Trust me, I've tried it.
It's even hard to fake it using 2 d20s, but you could say reroll the high die on a 19 or 20 and divide the number by 3, choosing 1-6 as a 0, 7-12 as a 1, and 13-18 as a 2 and dividing the low die by 2. Unfortunately, then you'll get the person that wants to divide by 3 and use 0,3,6,9,12,15,18 as 0, 1,4,7,10,13,16 as 1, and 2,5,8,11,14,17 as 2. Gamers will typically change these systems on the fly to get the best results, so they need to declare which they are using before making the roll.
As you can see, a single d30 roll is much easier. Alternatively, a d6 and d10 can be used, as there is less opportunity for the gamer to fudge the roll than above, as the gamer could fudge either of the d20 divisions. As a better alternative, you could use d20/20*30 to get an approximate value for a 1-30, but you'll be missing some intermediary numbers. This seems best with the WotC 3rd+ edition rules, so you probably want to use that, as that will OBVIOUSLY produce the most realistic results you brainwashed lump of foetid kobold dung.
p.s. I have far too much time on my hands, and really have no clue who you are, so take this whole message with a grain of salt:)
Re:Workers of the World Unite
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 1
There are negatives to unions, as well.
Union bosses often ask for CEO level salaries, so basically your dues pay for another guy to get rich.
Tenure and other position and pay guarantees promote mediocrity since there is no incentive to perform well.
If you're earning minimum wage, a union is actually a detriment in most cases because most people won't work minimum wage jobs long and the fees have a substantial effect on their income with little monetary benefit in return. It'd be even worse if the dues are fixed scale and not based on salary, as the people earning the least pay largest percentage (though I don't know if any unions use fixed scale).
Unions price fix labor costs in some cases, like auto repair. Again, a mixed blessing - you know they can't charge you 2 days worth of work to flush a radiator, but an honest non-union mechanic can probably do it for 1/2 the cost - but a dishonest one can milk you for twice the cost.
Anyhow, I doubt EA is the only company like this - the computer industry in general (and especially games) is pretty overbearing on the time of their employees. Yes, EA is a bit on the extreme side, but that's a good reason to leave the company after two years (usually the minimum to get another job in the games industry). Out of college I worked 80 hour weeks, but now won't work more than 60, and only during crunch (I'm typically ~50). That extra time I put into open source work, house maintenance, and keeping my wife happy... and reading slashdot:)
This is in Vivendi's best interest, and doesn't mean Vivendi hates its customers. Best Buy should not be putting the game on the shelf until its official release date. This is no different than videotapes/DVDs - heck, as one example, when I worked for a movie distribution company we got Aladdin two full weeks before it could be shipped to the video outlets or sold (versus the more common 2-3 days lead-time) and had to hold them for that long. Vivendi (and everyone else) does this so print ads can be synchronized for the release event and everyone can get the software at the same time, as well as avoiding legal problems if a company advertises that the software will be release but then doesn't get their shipment on time. Only so much can be printed and shipped in any given day, so often the printing & packaging and shipping happens over several weeks, which is why release dates are set that don't always match when the software arrives.
Forcing Valve to hold back also makes sense - if they don't, everyone will buy the game on steam and not in the retail box (except through Best Buy) to get it first.
I'm not positive, but it looks vague enough to also cover quaternion math (4 dimensional math that does basically the same thing as the matrix math you describe, but in less operations), which explains why just about every manufacturer is in violation. There really isn't much matrix math in commercial engines these days, at least not in the rendering code (which this patent is for).
Not to mention c++ didn't really have namespaces or RTTI until ~mid-nineties (therefore, not sure if MS uses them). Virtual functions were pretty stable by the early nineties (when I started learning C++), but performance was pretty bad, IMO. I spent some time converting a flight sim from C to C++ at the time and had to rewrite large sections of code to not use virtuals after getting a 3x performance hit (probably more - I had numerous optimizations, as well) compared to the C equivalent due to the lookup table. Templates were pretty shaky (certainly no STL), and try-catch blocks were practically non-existent until the late 90s.
Hrm... my understanding is that a handle (pointer to a pointer) is more for memory management than for interface. The idea is that you declare some objects as Handles, which allows Windows (or mac, as they originated there) to move the memory and the second pointer so that the move is transparent to the user and thus reduce memory fragmentation.
Yeah, global memory is bad, and I somehow feel there is more to it than just backward compatibility to 16 bit, like maybe a lot of core code depends on it for performance reasons (e.g. interapplication communication). That's just a guess, though - I have no clue:)
I admit, most of the wheat beers I've had are Pilsners of some kind (typically brewed as a lager, not an ale, though I've had a Pilsner ale once). Ales generally don't keep as well as lagers, so I'm guessing that is why I don't see many imported wheat ales (and humorously, Bud advertises their 'born on date' when lagers already skank much slower than ales). I've never had a Belgian and I don't think even a German weizen (at least not by that name), nor have I seen them available in any import section of any liquor stores... probably because they needed more room for Old swill and Blatz (yeah, we have all the 'quality' beers in my neck of the woods).
Slashdot Mirror
not true - two forms of spyware exist on mac and linux, but not nearly as destructive as on Windows where they can install without the user's knowledge (with certain formerly default security settings).
The first form is tracking cookies. You visit a site, they update the cookie and at some point the cookie is harvested, giving the spyware company information such as hits on the site, favorite page(s), etc.
The second type is a java based tracking, like RedSheriff. You can prevent both by turning off cookies and java, but I generally just live with them because I need cookies and java on for work (meaning I need fairly refined security subset and I don't think it's worth the effort at the moment).
Windows is getting better - I believe with Windows SP2 you now always get a prompt when something like this tries to install itself with the default security settings (where before it just installed it). The part that annoys me is that the software is still downloaded into a temporary location, so my virus checker goes nuts since it sees most of this stuff as a virus. I should be prompted before this stuff _downloads_, not before it installs.
If you want to get technical, the USA is not a Democracy, it's a Republic. A Democracy is mob rule, while a Republic is representative rule. You sorta alluded to that in paragraph 2 but not in paragraph 1... The communists had no ruling by the people and I don't believe there's ever been a successful Communist country - they're all Communist Dictatorships. A Communist Dictatorship is a hybrid that insists on a single ruler to dictate the spread of wealth and relies on the strength of its army to maintain control rather than the cooperation of the people.
The main problem with Communism in pure form is incentives for hard work get diluted on the masses, so it generally deteriorates into a welfare state when used on a large populace. In small groups it works great - Mennonites, for example, are basically a Communist group - though that could be argued because they aren't forced to share, they just do for the good of the community.
A free market has nothing to do with Communism, technically, but is generally associated with Democracy because of the Dictatorship imposing on what you can or cannot have. A true Communism does not block freedom of choice for what you can or cannot have.
In a nutshell, Communism and Democracies are great ideals, but tend towards Anarchy. Dictatorships and Republics are more stable due to their central leadership (and therefore quicker control of laws, armies, and resource allocation). Communism and Democracy are not mutually exclusive - you could have a Communist Democracy where everyone gets to vote (for laws and military actions) but all resources are divvied equally.
not all memory is created equal. Corsair memory has some excellent guides here
First, though, the mini gets no advantage from DDR, because DDR requires 2 chips for full speed, so already 1 bad thing about the mini...
I have no idea of what Apple is sticking in this, but most likely it's CAS 2.5, because that's the most common. I don't believe you get CAS 2.5, because I recall that depends on having too ram chips. Anyhow, in general, you want a low CAS number for better performance.
bah - most people are trainable, but make sure they get a quote on how much it will cost them at a dealer, first.
I cleaned up a computer like this once, then trained the user in firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-spam/spyware. I also told him where he got the spyware and viruses in the first place - audiogalaxy, porn sites, and free movie stream sites. I told him first off, if a site wants to automatically install software on your system without saying "download x software to view this site properly, it is probably software with a nefarious purpose. Yes, there are exceptions - macromedia flash is OK, as is Acrobat, but most of the time you see these sites, they'll at least ask you if you want to download the software first.
I just checked up on his computer a little over a year later, and everything is great - up to date virus checker, spam/spyware checker, and firewall. He still uses IE and outlook, but his spam/spyware software filters 99% of the junk out. I got him to not use preview pane in outlook, which stops auto-launching outlook viruses provided the message is deleted without ever being viewed (hey, every little bit helps). It's not perfection, but a huge step forward.
I can see why - gcc on ppc was poorly optimized and all rendering was done in software. Apple and the ppc linux folk have made progress in optimizing gcc for PPC and Apple has been offloading more and more of the graphics responsibilities to hardware. Then there's taking the NeXT code and targeting a specific CPU set, rather than a general CPU set like in the past.
If the porn industry was such big tech early adopters, why is 99% of it shot with poor lighting on cheap handicams? HDTV capable cameras are expensive (but dropping in price) and the quality is available to 2-5% of your market share. Why sell to an Apple audience when 100% of your audience runs Windows (since all the HDTV people can view regular TV)? At best you have a niche market and have to charge more for it accordingly. Yeah, you could pan-and-scan the movie and put them on a single DVD, but that isn't cheap. Zits and acne scars could be cured by makeup and to a lesser extent, digital effects. I'm sure the cheaper of the two is done all the time.
beta and VHS took off because you could record programs as well as view stuff on them and had little to do with the porn industry initially. After prices dropped to affordable levels and around the time the MPAA lost its "fair use" case, the porn industry (and just about everyone else) moved in. Why do you think laser-disc never took off?
HDTV hasn't taken off because you either need an ungodly heavy projection screen monitor or an ungodly expensive flat screen TV. Many people find projection displays blurry (it was bad in the past, and that stigma has lasted) but the other options, plasma and LCD are still unaffordable. Most people are not willing to spend more than $500 for a TV, and that gets you a 13" (33cm) LCD monitor or a 48"+ (122cm) tube TV. 9 out of 10 people in the US would choose the tube TV because we have the space and like the larger viewing area.
If anything, I'd say the porn industry did early adoption of the Internet, and with good reason. I'd take an educated guess that their key demographic is 18-34 year olds, and the majority of users with access on the switch were probably 18-25 and perfect for their demographic. I say this because most 34 year olds I know have at least one kid of at least 6 years of age and only one computer the kid uses (with blocking software added).
Yeah! #3 is a UNIX permissions bug that shouldn't affect Windows at all, and I thankfully still have a copy of IE on my Solaris box.
I worry about the fact that Microsoft hasn't updated it in about 5 years, but I should at least get some security through obscurity!
yeah - so I thought. The engine is supposedly quite far along, but content takes years for RPGs usually. I wouldn't be surprised if they borrowed a lot of stuff from their other engines, though (inventory management, for instance).
:)
hey - thought of another Fallout 3... knowing Bethesda, it will be released, but will be about 4 years in coming
I don't know if they missed this one, or if it's not going to make 2005...
Dragon Age
I don't know about that - I really wasn't interested in the Apple ][ until Sabotage (paratrooper on the PC) came around. After playing that, I wanted to learn to write something like that and learned BASIC. BASIC was too slow, so I learned Apple ][ Assembly. It cascaded from there. I sucked at algebra, myself, but was a god at Geometry, so that made up for it. Quite honestly, I use so little math in my day-to-day coding it doesn't really matter.
A friend of mine from HS was encoraged to learn computers because her dad worked with Seymore Cray. She was never quite the programmer my group was (very few people were - how many 12-14 year olds do you know that are writing code professionally?), but she was the only female geek I knew in that era. Her dad encouraged creativity - think of something you want on the computer, then try and create it. He would then help her design and help her when she got stuck writing code.
complaining about slashdotting her blog before the first 5 posts were up?
I admit, I wasn't much of a fan of the book, but watched the miniseries anyway. I've seen worse adaptations, but I can certainly see why fans (and the author) are unhappy. I taped it for a good friend of mine who _worships_ Earthsea, so I really want to see the look of horror on his face when I show it to him (yes, I am that evil).
Not quite - the idea was that business people could read the code and understand what it was doing because it's written in an "English-like" syntax, not that they could actually write the code. This was a huge sell for banks and other industries where the business-folk didn't trust the programmer-folk. MBAs would never stoop to program - God forbid, they need those brain cells for absorbing alcohol :)
and if the parent of the parent is wondering what the acronym is, it's COmmon Business Oriented Language. Unless you choose to work for a bank, you will most likely never see it, just like FORTRAN is pretty much dead outside the Mechanical Engineering world.
yeah - the problem is, the point of the magnetic strip was to get external sources such as bars to swipe it to verify the information rather than just judging by the picture. In this sense, the initiative was a royal flop (I think because the state wanted ridiculous usage fees). I think my card was swiped once the entire time I had a mag strip on it, and that was at club bundle (my name - group of clubs that share a cover) that got shut down for too many underage drinkers. It's also easy to demagnatize, which leaves the check up to a visual one again.
how many of these countries have mandatory education, and what is the dropout ratio? If only the kids that want to go or are smart enough to go to school attend, I can see how that would inflate their percentages.
.02% of COLLEGE grads play pro football, and most of those high school losers didn't even make it to college because of barely passing GPAs. I think they just had this overwhelming belief that sports would carry them throughout life and were wrong. My job may suck, but it's better than making window frames (which I know at least 4 of them do) and pays MUCH better. I can't imagine only getting paid $12/hour in my career with little or no hope of advancement. No wonder I see them going into the local bar for $2 2-for-1s on Bud light (despite their Cowboy-Neal-on-a-bad-day gut - no offense intended C.N. :)
not that America hasn't put a social stigma against math and science and overly fuels its sports and fashion industries. I got beat up by the jocks just like every other red-blooded nerd. At least I now don't work in a dead-end factory job swilling cheap beer every night and dreading going home to my wife and 12 kids like those losers (most of 'em seem to know nothing about birth control). I just read that something like
aside from their choice of using .sl instead of .so (for that matter, Apple's use of dylib bugs me, too), HP-UX really isn't that bad. From a compatibility and performance standpoint, I've always liked it better than AIX, though I'd still pick Solaris if forced to pick a commercial UNIX.
I'm getting new AIX hardware soon (at work), so I'll have to see if they boosted performance in the past 2 years, but I think the OS sucks so bad I doubt it'll matter.
I don't miss Tru64 - too many portibility problems. I'm glad I don't need to support that one anymore (or Runix/Sinix... or even Alpha NT).
apparently you don't know Magic's true name, yet
"Crack for gamers"
I thankfully got out when the game was just out of beta and sold off my most valuable card (a beta force field, though I also had a 1st ed force field, too) for $250. I can't believe some moron paid me that much for a piece of cardboard, though he probably turned around and sold it for more. Seeing that I only bought about $100 worth of cards, I came out ahead, unlike the other people I played the game with, one who dropped $10000 (easy, probably more) over 2 years to replace his smoking habit.
if you really want to get technical, another use of the d10 in 2nd edition (and maybe 1st, but I don't remember as my books were stolen in elementary school) the thieving skills, which used percentages, were ripped pretty much directly from Thieves' Guild (another early D&D clone). The other major use of d10s were some of the original treasure tables.
:)
D&D 3rd edition standardized on the D20, so the percentile dice argument from RoleMaster is silly. Rolemaster began as an extension to D&D (adding critical hits and injuries), but moved into its own system not too long later (I know people with the original parchment pamphlet for arms law, which we call pre-0th edition
Rolemaster as a system was broken from a spellcaster standpoint up until 3rd edition - you start with mages that can just boil water and end with mages that can destroy large armies. Unfortunately, 3rd edition introduced a system that made character creation a 3 hour chore if you could even figure it out, but did finally make 1st and 2nd level mages somewhat useful (hey - I can cast a shock bolt at first level and I don't need a 100 empathy and risk a 35% chance of killing myself in the process!).
Anyhow, my point isn't to bash RM, as I would say it's the system I'm most familiar with as a player, but rather to say all game systems have their flaws. Some of my best roleplayed characters were from D&D, though the DM often ended up killing my character early because I spent all my secondary skills on ventriloquism rather than weapons skills and couldn't stand up to a "lowly troll." I played in a Rolemaster tourney that was entirely munchkinized and a D&D game with no combat that was all RPing. Both were tournaments, and I even won the first one, though it was maybe 5 minutes of Roleplaying and 3 1/2 hours of straight combat. I'm not a bad RolePlayer, but I've found fantasy isn't my forte - I generally lost in any fantasy RPG tournament play, but won in more modern settings (Call of Cthulhu and even a Twilight 2000 win, way back in 1991)
you've been suckered in by WotC. Truth is, it's very difficult to get a 1-30 (or 0-29) roll on a d20. Trust me, I've tried it.
:)
It's even hard to fake it using 2 d20s, but you could say reroll the high die on a 19 or 20 and divide the number by 3, choosing 1-6 as a 0, 7-12 as a 1, and 13-18 as a 2 and dividing the low die by 2. Unfortunately, then you'll get the person that wants to divide by 3 and use 0,3,6,9,12,15,18 as 0, 1,4,7,10,13,16 as 1, and 2,5,8,11,14,17 as 2. Gamers will typically change these systems on the fly to get the best results, so they need to declare which they are using before making the roll.
As you can see, a single d30 roll is much easier. Alternatively, a d6 and d10 can be used, as there is less opportunity for the gamer to fudge the roll than above, as the gamer could fudge either of the d20 divisions. As a better alternative, you could use d20/20*30 to get an approximate value for a 1-30, but you'll be missing some intermediary numbers. This seems best with the WotC 3rd+ edition rules, so you probably want to use that, as that will OBVIOUSLY produce the most realistic results you brainwashed lump of foetid kobold dung.
p.s. I have far too much time on my hands, and really have no clue who you are, so take this whole message with a grain of salt
There are negatives to unions, as well.
:)
Union bosses often ask for CEO level salaries, so basically your dues pay for another guy to get rich.
Tenure and other position and pay guarantees promote mediocrity since there is no incentive to perform well.
If you're earning minimum wage, a union is actually a detriment in most cases because most people won't work minimum wage jobs long and the fees have a substantial effect on their income with little monetary benefit in return. It'd be even worse if the dues are fixed scale and not based on salary, as the people earning the least pay largest percentage (though I don't know if any unions use fixed scale).
Unions price fix labor costs in some cases, like auto repair. Again, a mixed blessing - you know they can't charge you 2 days worth of work to flush a radiator, but an honest non-union mechanic can probably do it for 1/2 the cost - but a dishonest one can milk you for twice the cost.
Anyhow, I doubt EA is the only company like this - the computer industry in general (and especially games) is pretty overbearing on the time of their employees. Yes, EA is a bit on the extreme side, but that's a good reason to leave the company after two years (usually the minimum to get another job in the games industry). Out of college I worked 80 hour weeks, but now won't work more than 60, and only during crunch (I'm typically ~50). That extra time I put into open source work, house maintenance, and keeping my wife happy... and reading slashdot
This is in Vivendi's best interest, and doesn't mean Vivendi hates its customers. Best Buy should not be putting the game on the shelf until its official release date. This is no different than videotapes/DVDs - heck, as one example, when I worked for a movie distribution company we got Aladdin two full weeks before it could be shipped to the video outlets or sold (versus the more common 2-3 days lead-time) and had to hold them for that long. Vivendi (and everyone else) does this so print ads can be synchronized for the release event and everyone can get the software at the same time, as well as avoiding legal problems if a company advertises that the software will be release but then doesn't get their shipment on time. Only so much can be printed and shipped in any given day, so often the printing & packaging and shipping happens over several weeks, which is why release dates are set that don't always match when the software arrives.
Forcing Valve to hold back also makes sense - if they don't, everyone will buy the game on steam and not in the retail box (except through Best Buy) to get it first.
I'm not positive, but it looks vague enough to also cover quaternion math (4 dimensional math that does basically the same thing as the matrix math you describe, but in less operations), which explains why just about every manufacturer is in violation. There really isn't much matrix math in commercial engines these days, at least not in the rendering code (which this patent is for).
Patent reading hurts the brain. Mine is swollen.
Not to mention c++ didn't really have namespaces or RTTI until ~mid-nineties (therefore, not sure if MS uses them). Virtual functions were pretty stable by the early nineties (when I started learning C++), but performance was pretty bad, IMO. I spent some time converting a flight sim from C to C++ at the time and had to rewrite large sections of code to not use virtuals after getting a 3x performance hit (probably more - I had numerous optimizations, as well) compared to the C equivalent due to the lookup table. Templates were pretty shaky (certainly no STL), and try-catch blocks were practically non-existent until the late 90s.
:)
Hrm... my understanding is that a handle (pointer to a pointer) is more for memory management than for interface. The idea is that you declare some objects as Handles, which allows Windows (or mac, as they originated there) to move the memory and the second pointer so that the move is transparent to the user and thus reduce memory fragmentation.
Yeah, global memory is bad, and I somehow feel there is more to it than just backward compatibility to 16 bit, like maybe a lot of core code depends on it for performance reasons (e.g. interapplication communication). That's just a guess, though - I have no clue
I was so hoping for him to mention Solitaire, then realized that's what I play when I don't want to get anything done :)
I admit, most of the wheat beers I've had are Pilsners of some kind (typically brewed as a lager, not an ale, though I've had a Pilsner ale once). Ales generally don't keep as well as lagers, so I'm guessing that is why I don't see many imported wheat ales (and humorously, Bud advertises their 'born on date' when lagers already skank much slower than ales). I've never had a Belgian and I don't think even a German weizen (at least not by that name), nor have I seen them available in any import section of any liquor stores... probably because they needed more room for Old swill and Blatz (yeah, we have all the 'quality' beers in my neck of the woods).
ok - didn't find that one on the features list, but the list I was looking at was old.
fonts and support and additional Q/A testing were the main reason cited when it first split off.