My biggest problem with SGU is none of the characters are even remotely likable. I know stress turns people into jerks but the whole ship is full of them. I wish they'd spend more time exploring more of the ship (kind of like in SGA how they kept finding interesting bits of the city) and have a little fun doing it.
And the whole business with Chloe bores me to tears. Kill her off already.
Hey be careful with that stuff! I heard that my friend's cousin was exposed to that (immersed in it for a lengthy period of time or something) and died! That shit is dangerous!
Guess I got "lucky". I started on 68000 (Amiga), then went to MIPS (SGI) and then 64 bit Dec Alpha in 1993, all before I started working with x86. Got my trial by fire over 20 years ago.
I guess it never occurred to me that a great many programmers never had any exposure to any of those architectures - and likely most programmers these days don't even know they existed.
Another issue comes from endian assumptions. Consider this code:
int64_t foo;// Set foo to something int32_t bar = *(int32_t*)&foo;
This will correctly give you the low 32 bits of foo in bar on a little-endian platform. On a big-endian platform, it will give you the high 32 bits. Most of the time you wouldn't do something this simple, but you might when reading data from a stream of some kind. It's bad practice, but that doesn't mean it's not done. Fortunately, ARM is little endian too, so this isn't an issue porting from x86 to ARM - it caused a lot of problems porting from x86 to PowerPC and SPARC though, especially in code that dumped binary data to files, read it back, and found it in the wrong byte order.
And, of course, there are size issues. In C, the different primitive types all have architecture-dependent sizes. Some people make assumptions about them. For example, it's usually safe to assume that long is big enough to store a void*. Unfortunately, it's not true in win64 (although it is in every other platform I've seen), so code that makes this assumption breaks in 64-bit Windows versions (Itanium and x86-64).
This is just sloppy programming. Let me go out on a limb and say any decent programmer wouldn't do this. Having had to develop for MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, Intel, and ARM, I learned not to do that a long, long time ago. Like proper memory management, these things are entry-level programming mistakes.
Also, the API is basically C (Objective C++). I had no trouble pulling in a ton of my existing C++ imaging code and just compiling it right up, layering a nice UIKit UI over it.
I have an Android phone, but I'll have to learn Java and *PORT* my C++ code to it.
I've served twice. If something came up we wanted more information on, we'd ask the bailiff, during a break, and he/she would pass the request on to the judge, and the judge would address it in some way, either with a description or by bringing someone in.
In my first trial, they had brought in a piece of defective equipment as evidence. During a break we felt that we should have a better look at it, so we asked, and were then allowed to go right up to it to inspect it in detail. This up-close inspection allowed us to come to a decision quicker.
As others have pointed out, good stories seem much harder to come by these days.
I think back fondly to Forrest Gump - a movie CHOCK FULL of "special effects", none of them "visible". Every one added something to the story or visual style of the movie in a totally realistic way.
I think Transformers 2 finally confirmed for me that stuff blowing up wasn't enough. Why someone bothered to make The Expendables I have no idea.
Lose your eyes in a freak combine accident? She's actually bounced back quite nicely. I wonder how much diet/exercise is expressly worded in her contract. Very nice MILF, though I find her canned line regurgitation to be a tad flat. I miss the days when they spent more time on the actual construction/theory than the banter.
That used to annoy the hell out of me too, until I realized my remote had a fast forward button. Now, it's actually a feature. I can watch a whole show in 20 minutes. Great while having breakfast.
I was in 5th grade and our school had just gotten a TRS-80, the first computer I ever saw. Nobody in the school knew what to do with it - it just sat in the library. I and another kid in my class had reputations for being smart and inquisitive - the principal actually brought me broken radios and tape players and things to take apart.
Anyway, the school would send me and the other kid to the library once a day while the class did other stuff, and we taught ourselves to program the computer together, figuring out how to get the tape player working, storing our programs, etc.
That set me up for the rest of my life. In 10th grade (1986-7) I taught myself C while the rest of the class learned Pascal. By the time I got to college I knew more about programming than most of the professors.
Dropped out in 1992 and the rest is history.
I am grateful to the school system I was in (SW Virginia no less) to encourage and support my interest in such gadgetry, and to have the opportunity to learn things at my own pace. It works when done right.
Slashdot Mirror
My biggest problem with SGU is none of the characters are even remotely likable. I know stress turns people into jerks but the whole ship is full of them. I wish they'd spend more time exploring more of the ship (kind of like in SGA how they kept finding interesting bits of the city) and have a little fun doing it.
And the whole business with Chloe bores me to tears. Kill her off already.
That's funny... When I hear "app store" i think: $_ =~ s/app(lication)? store/repository/;
I can't even imagine what you think when you hear "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
I only read Slashdot for the articles - honest!
Hey be careful with that stuff! I heard that my friend's cousin was exposed to that (immersed in it for a lengthy period of time or something) and died!
That shit is dangerous!
Guess I got "lucky". I started on 68000 (Amiga), then went to MIPS (SGI) and then 64 bit Dec Alpha in 1993, all before I started working with x86. Got my trial by fire over 20 years ago.
I guess it never occurred to me that a great many programmers never had any exposure to any of those architectures - and likely most programmers these days don't even know they existed.
Another issue comes from endian assumptions. Consider this code:
This will correctly give you the low 32 bits of foo in bar on a little-endian platform. On a big-endian platform, it will give you the high 32 bits. Most of the time you wouldn't do something this simple, but you might when reading data from a stream of some kind. It's bad practice, but that doesn't mean it's not done. Fortunately, ARM is little endian too, so this isn't an issue porting from x86 to ARM - it caused a lot of problems porting from x86 to PowerPC and SPARC though, especially in code that dumped binary data to files, read it back, and found it in the wrong byte order.
And, of course, there are size issues. In C, the different primitive types all have architecture-dependent sizes. Some people make assumptions about them. For example, it's usually safe to assume that long is big enough to store a void*. Unfortunately, it's not true in win64 (although it is in every other platform I've seen), so code that makes this assumption breaks in 64-bit Windows versions (Itanium and x86-64).
This is just sloppy programming. Let me go out on a limb and say any decent programmer wouldn't do this. Having had to develop for MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, Intel, and ARM, I learned not to do that a long, long time ago. Like proper memory management, these things are entry-level programming mistakes.
I went by Walmart but they didn't have any in stock.
Damn, I thought we were going to get to see some zero-G sex!
It's the only way to be sure.
The hospital was sad to announce that the patient is expected to live, letting yet another idiotic gimp to roam the streets.
He's no Photoshop, that's for sure!
"when rubber hit the anus", I just see a back
The fact is, Prius drivers (apparently) have little to no respect for the others who share their environment.
The Prius is probably so full of smug the driver can't see out the back that well.
I can't stand the "this" meme but if ever there was a time to use it, I think "this" is it.
Here is a trailer someone made that pretty much sums it up.
CPU implemented in minecraft
Exactly.
The really cool thing about that alien ship in Alien was just how *ALIEN* it was.
It'll turn out that humans engineering both the space-jockey species AND the Aliens. BORING. Let me say it again: BOR-ING!
Also, the API is basically C (Objective C++). I had no trouble pulling in a ton of my existing C++ imaging code and just compiling it right up, layering a nice UIKit UI over it.
I have an Android phone, but I'll have to learn Java and *PORT* my C++ code to it.
I've served twice. If something came up we wanted more information on, we'd ask the bailiff, during a break, and he/she would pass the request on to the judge, and the judge would address it in some way, either with a description or by bringing someone in.
In my first trial, they had brought in a piece of defective equipment as evidence. During a break we felt that we should have a better look at it, so we asked, and were then allowed to go right up to it to inspect it in detail. This up-close inspection allowed us to come to a decision quicker.
As others have pointed out, good stories seem much harder to come by these days.
I think back fondly to Forrest Gump - a movie CHOCK FULL of "special effects", none of them "visible". Every one added something to the story or visual style of the movie in a totally realistic way.
I think Transformers 2 finally confirmed for me that stuff blowing up wasn't enough. Why someone bothered to make The Expendables I have no idea.
How were you able to see the whole movie before it comes out on Friday? Did you get into an advance screening?
</sarcasm>
Especially since it didn't have any sails to begin with.
Silly - they don't watch science shows.
Lose your eyes in a freak combine accident? She's actually bounced back quite nicely. I wonder how much diet/exercise is expressly worded in her contract. Very nice MILF, though I find her canned line regurgitation to be a tad flat. I miss the days when they spent more time on the actual construction/theory than the banter.
That used to annoy the hell out of me too, until I realized my remote had a fast forward button. Now, it's actually a feature. I can watch a whole show in 20 minutes. Great while having breakfast.
I was in 5th grade and our school had just gotten a TRS-80, the first computer I ever saw. Nobody in the school knew what to do with it - it just sat in the library. I and another kid in my class had reputations for being smart and inquisitive - the principal actually brought me broken radios and tape players and things to take apart.
Anyway, the school would send me and the other kid to the library once a day while the class did other stuff, and we taught ourselves to program the computer together, figuring out how to get the tape player working, storing our programs, etc.
That set me up for the rest of my life. In 10th grade (1986-7) I taught myself C while the rest of the class learned Pascal. By the time I got to college I knew more about programming than most of the professors.
Dropped out in 1992 and the rest is history.
I am grateful to the school system I was in (SW Virginia no less) to encourage and support my interest in such gadgetry, and to have the opportunity to learn things at my own pace. It works when done right.