Notice where I said 'a few real punk songs scattered in between'?
No? Didn't think so. I wasn't refering to them, or the Sex Pistols. Go ahead, take a look at the track lists for all the Tony Hawk games, see if you can't find the "sk8rpunk" music I was referring to.
I've heard that EVE online is pretty much the closest around. I haven't played it though.
In the same vein, X3 multiplayer would be nice. Think Colony War meets a wide open free form universe like Elder Scrolls. And the latest release of it no longer has StarForce copy protection.
I didn't say the man would be taken at his word. I expect, from experience in just general social conversation, that the guy would get questioned about his skills and have a chance to prove it.
Take any situation from car to computer sales, where males are supposed to be more interested or knowledgeable, and if a man or woman ask the same question they would get different answers.
I didn't mean to imply, like the AC thought, that a man would be allowed to substitute self taught skills for an EE degree. Just that a guy would be given the chance to prove those self taught skills were applicable to the job.
If a woman goes into a job interview and says she is self educated in engineering subjects, she is laughed at. If a man does the same thing at the same interview, what do you expect the result would be?
I'm just guessing, but I would suspect that there are more women geeks out there tinkering with things. For them to get a job in the field, a program like this might be very useful. It won't get the numbers up to 50% of the work force, but if it increases the numbers why bash the idea?
Despite what fundamentalists of any creed seem to claim, 'stupid' is not a religion. Neither is willful ignorance. Though both seem to be political groups these days.
My entire apartment, save the kitchen and bathroom, uses dimmer switches. Most of my lamps use 3-way bulbs, which with incandescents made it easy to use one lamp to either read by or light an entire room. Has anyone seen CF bulbs that can do either of those useful functions?
Society would have to change, if it were commonly available and the law allowed for it to be used all the time. If you could pick out everything that a person said but did not believe, it would change the way most social interactions would take place. Simple pick-up lines like 'you look good in that dress' just wouldn't work.
Religion wouldn't change too much. If everyone could use the devices, you would end up with fewer Ted Haggard's in leadership positions, but otherwise it wouldn't change a thing. And the 'little old lady, ice cream social' gossip might get worse, since 'if someone says it, it must be true, they would know, they used the lie test device.'
Education, well at least no one would get away with lying to kids and pretending it was for their own good. Politics would be interesting, and would be even more fun if the device also had a detector for when the speaker is talking out of their ass.
"Speaker has no facts to back up the previous statement, please disregard all allegations they have just made."
It seems to me to be lazy design that says that booting consists of more than loading code into RAM and establishing state for the internal hardware. I have no idea why OSes must churn away for big fractions of a minute _running_ code. Why can't it just load a snapshot of the desired final state of RAM? Hard disk space is cheaper then flash memory like BIOS. Even if we agreed that we would all spend the extra cash to make the BIOS chip large enough to store the OS, which OS would we all agree to use?
Look at the computer you mentioned, the Apple ][, almost everything it needed was in ROM. It didn't even have to worry about changing hardware when it booted, since it didn't have nice features like PCI slots and ATA hard drives. If you want features like a fast start up, get a computer that doesn't have to deal with changing hardware, variable amounts of memory, and expect to pay through the nose for the flash memory ROM chip that will hold the OS. A little SD or CF card would take a good long time to load an OS image off of, and would take a whole other bus being added to the motherboard.
And I bet Edison got tired of people complaining that "the light doesn't get bright fast enough," or "couldn't this burn brighter, if you designers weren't so lazy." Get rid of all of the features that a modern PC has to deal with, and you could speed the boot time up. If you like being able to replace various hardware, then accept that the trade-off is boot time. Or if you just want the PC to stay 'warm' like an old TV or vacuum tube radio, then put it to sleep or hibernate instead. Same principle, already exists in software, and Windows already knows how to screw it up.
I have ripped my vinyl and CD collection to FLAC for one reason each. CDs break, and the vinyl is old. I'm not going to put Count Basie on the turn table every time I want to listen to him, or when I want to rip it to a different portable device. I have, in the past, ripped a single album several times: once to CD and when I tried to move that to MP3 it had too many artifacts so I ripped it from the vinyl again to get that. Admittedly, the CD had been moved from the car to diskman many times, lost under car seats, and probably carried in paper bags without a case. I had no reason to keep a wav on the PC at that time, and didn't make an MP3 to store because I always had the CD to listen to. Doing that again is too much work, and risk for old albums, when I can put it in lossless format once and work with that.
United Nuclear sells 0.1 microcuries. Polonium 210 emits 4500 curies per gram [1], so that is about.0002 grams per curie. So they are selling 0.00002 micrograms, 0.02 picograms, or if you want to make it look really big, 22 femtograms [2]. How toxic is that? Well, I would suspect there is several times more cyanide in a single apple seed [3].
And wouldn't it be cheaper to get the Polonium from a photography shop,
and not a monitored source of radio isotopes?
[1]According to http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/polonium.pdf
[2]2's are repeating.
[3]Strangely, I could not find anything on the internet about how much toxin there really is in apple seeds. Polonium that needs a breader reactor to create, sure, but the poisonous apples at the farmers market, no one is talking about them!
Portable code is nice, but how much portability do you trade to get the game optimized? Look at the complaints about 'Brand New Game' and see how many people whine that the minimum spec will barely run it.
When a game has to run at top speed on several different platforms, you might have a portable base code and then tune from there. Or you can write tuned code and try to port it if there is enough of a market. Guess which option the publishers are going to want you to take?
Po 210 is the last steps of the U 238 decay cycle towards Lead 206, at least according to my old reference book. And higher energy then even U 238. Working backwards, Bismuth 210 has a low beta decay and short half life (5 days), Lead 210 has a long half life (22 years) and also a low beta decay. What are the chances that this was exposure and not poisoning?
And why is a man in a black suit knocking at my door?
>>"O-genki desu ka" (literally, "are you healthy?") is closer to "how are you?" than to "how do you do".
And that's the problem with literal translations. "What's up, dog?" literally translated to another language would not come across with the same meaning. Familiarity isn't always just a part of the words. It's both the phrase and knowing the context of the phrase. "How do you do," might mean the same in some context as "What's up, dog?" but the former is much more generic and better suited to more types of greetings. It's probably formal enough for use when greeting the President or a big boss in a company.
Japanese has a lot of structure in conversation, where one phrase means one thing when said as a greeting, and another when asked in conversation. Which is all thrown out in actual conversational Japanese, but that is another topic.
Third vote for Sedgewick's Algorithms in C++. I picked up the 2nd edition (I think) hard back for under 10$ some years back. It has been more useful then any of the books that have been required reading while I've worked on my CS degree.
Probably the same problem that percentages suffer when talking about heating or air conditioning systems. They have 95% of what ever the maximum thermodynamic efficiency is. Go shopping for a water heater or a home furnace, look at how many claim 90% or higher, but some how don't manage to burn houses down.
Or, in marketing speech, "why is 75% the maximum efficiency? That should be 100%, and we get 99% of that, so just stamp our unit with 99% and be done with it. The end user doesn't care about science crap."
Maybe if you told the kids WHY you were doing it? And talked to them about it instead of blindly insisting that it will 'make them safer' like the government does.
As a kid, the computer was in the den, near enough to the TV and everything else that I never knew who might look over my shoulder. If I wanted to have a private conversation then all I had to do was mention that it was private would people just kindly bugger off. Granted, I was a teen not a kid by that time, but all I got asked was 'who are you talking to' and that was it. Strangely enough, that was the same thing I would be asked if I was leaving the house with friends. Tell your kids why you are worried about the internet and what they should be warry of. Try not lying to them and they won't have a reason to lie to you.
But lie even once and watch how fast that trust is broken.
Yes it creates community, but are they real friendships? I can't speak for the people playing WoW, but from EQ experience, yes they are. I still keep in touch with people who havn't played in years, went to clubs with them, had them stay at my place when they needed a place to crash. Shared pot and beer with them. Cheered and cried with them.
Sure, only talking to people over IMs or mail causes you to drift apart. So friends you don't see in game grow distant just like friends who move to another state or country. But unless that distance makes them no longer 'real friends' then I would say that yes, games do create real friendships.
http://www.ceebot.com/ceebot/index-e.php
I downloaded the demo a while back, and found it amusing and actually pretty usable. If I remember correctly, even the demo supported simple classes and structs and I think the classes even allowed overloading operators. The basic concept is to allow students to write simple programs that make a little robot do stuff. Take a look at it, it may be too pricey for the school but their links section has some other resources that might also be useful, like CodeRally http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/coderally.
I'd rather them finish the Ori story reasonably quickly and end the show on a moderately high note (probably not as high as season 8, but high nonetheless) rather than dragging it on and on. While it's commendable how they've handled the transition to the new cast, it's not something that can be kept up indefinitely.
And that was the problem I had with the timeing of Sci-fi canceling the show. Everything I had read, from scifi channel and from fan sites, said that the actors and writers had both signed on for both the 10th and 11th seasons. Canning the show in the middle of the 10th season like this, with summer left for filming the second half of the season, I can't help but expect an ending much like Farscape. As the folks over at gateworld.com have said, "Ironically, this is the first year since Season Four that plans were already in place, both creatively and in signed actor contracts, for another year. The show has lived on year-to-year since moving to SCI FI, with the writers forced to write a possible series finale every year -- only to find the show renewed once again." http://www.gateworld.net/news/2006/08/istargate_sg -1i_cancelled_iatlan.shtml
Slashdot Mirror
No? Didn't think so. I wasn't refering to them, or the Sex Pistols. Go ahead, take a look at the track lists for all the Tony Hawk games, see if you can't find the "sk8rpunk" music I was referring to.
All it needs is some Greenday and it will be Guitar Hero: Teen Angst edition.
In the same vein, X3 multiplayer would be nice. Think Colony War meets a wide open free form universe like Elder Scrolls. And the latest release of it no longer has StarForce copy protection.
Have you tried the texture and model packs available for dx2? It's still slow, but it stops looking so clunky.
Take any situation from car to computer sales, where males are supposed to be more interested or knowledgeable, and if a man or woman ask the same question they would get different answers.
I didn't mean to imply, like the AC thought, that a man would be allowed to substitute self taught skills for an EE degree. Just that a guy would be given the chance to prove those self taught skills were applicable to the job.
I'm just guessing, but I would suspect that there are more women geeks out there tinkering with things. For them to get a job in the field, a program like this might be very useful. It won't get the numbers up to 50% of the work force, but if it increases the numbers why bash the idea?
Despite what fundamentalists of any creed seem to claim, 'stupid' is not a religion. Neither is willful ignorance. Though both seem to be political groups these days.
My entire apartment, save the kitchen and bathroom, uses dimmer switches. Most of my lamps use 3-way bulbs, which with incandescents made it easy to use one lamp to either read by or light an entire room. Has anyone seen CF bulbs that can do either of those useful functions?
Religion wouldn't change too much. If everyone could use the devices, you would end up with fewer Ted Haggard's in leadership positions, but otherwise it wouldn't change a thing. And the 'little old lady, ice cream social' gossip might get worse, since 'if someone says it, it must be true, they would know, they used the lie test device.'
Education, well at least no one would get away with lying to kids and pretending it was for their own good. Politics would be interesting, and would be even more fun if the device also had a detector for when the speaker is talking out of their ass.
"Speaker has no facts to back up the previous statement, please disregard all allegations they have just made."
Primitive HTML? Look, I stopped using VRML back in 99, now you want me to use it again just to see a bloody hyperlink?
Look at the computer you mentioned, the Apple ][, almost everything it needed was in ROM. It didn't even have to worry about changing hardware when it booted, since it didn't have nice features like PCI slots and ATA hard drives. If you want features like a fast start up, get a computer that doesn't have to deal with changing hardware, variable amounts of memory, and expect to pay through the nose for the flash memory ROM chip that will hold the OS. A little SD or CF card would take a good long time to load an OS image off of, and would take a whole other bus being added to the motherboard.
And I bet Edison got tired of people complaining that "the light doesn't get bright fast enough," or "couldn't this burn brighter, if you designers weren't so lazy." Get rid of all of the features that a modern PC has to deal with, and you could speed the boot time up. If you like being able to replace various hardware, then accept that the trade-off is boot time. Or if you just want the PC to stay 'warm' like an old TV or vacuum tube radio, then put it to sleep or hibernate instead. Same principle, already exists in software, and Windows already knows how to screw it up.
I have ripped my vinyl and CD collection to FLAC for one reason each. CDs break, and the vinyl is old. I'm not going to put Count Basie on the turn table every time I want to listen to him, or when I want to rip it to a different portable device. I have, in the past, ripped a single album several times: once to CD and when I tried to move that to MP3 it had too many artifacts so I ripped it from the vinyl again to get that. Admittedly, the CD had been moved from the car to diskman many times, lost under car seats, and probably carried in paper bags without a case. I had no reason to keep a wav on the PC at that time, and didn't make an MP3 to store because I always had the CD to listen to. Doing that again is too much work, and risk for old albums, when I can put it in lossless format once and work with that.
United Nuclear sells 0.1 microcuries. Polonium 210 emits 4500 curies per gram [1], so that is about .0002 grams per curie. So they are selling 0.00002 micrograms, 0.02 picograms, or if you want to make it look really big, 22 femtograms [2]. How toxic is that? Well, I would suspect there is several times more cyanide in a single apple seed [3].
And wouldn't it be cheaper to get the Polonium from a photography shop,
and not a monitored source of radio isotopes?
[1]According to http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/polonium.pdf
[2]2's are repeating.
[3]Strangely, I could not find anything on the internet about how much toxin there really is in apple seeds. Polonium that needs a breader reactor to create, sure, but the poisonous apples at the farmers market, no one is talking about them!
Portable code is nice, but how much portability do you trade to get the game optimized? Look at the complaints about 'Brand New Game' and see how many people whine that the minimum spec will barely run it. When a game has to run at top speed on several different platforms, you might have a portable base code and then tune from there. Or you can write tuned code and try to port it if there is enough of a market. Guess which option the publishers are going to want you to take?
Po 210 is the last steps of the U 238 decay cycle towards Lead 206, at least according to my old reference book. And higher energy then even U 238. Working backwards, Bismuth 210 has a low beta decay and short half life (5 days), Lead 210 has a long half life (22 years) and also a low beta decay. What are the chances that this was exposure and not poisoning? And why is a man in a black suit knocking at my door?
>>"O-genki desu ka" (literally, "are you healthy?") is closer to "how are you?" than to "how do you do". And that's the problem with literal translations. "What's up, dog?" literally translated to another language would not come across with the same meaning. Familiarity isn't always just a part of the words. It's both the phrase and knowing the context of the phrase. "How do you do," might mean the same in some context as "What's up, dog?" but the former is much more generic and better suited to more types of greetings. It's probably formal enough for use when greeting the President or a big boss in a company. Japanese has a lot of structure in conversation, where one phrase means one thing when said as a greeting, and another when asked in conversation. Which is all thrown out in actual conversational Japanese, but that is another topic.
Third vote for Sedgewick's Algorithms in C++. I picked up the 2nd edition (I think) hard back for under 10$ some years back. It has been more useful then any of the books that have been required reading while I've worked on my CS degree.
Probably the same problem that percentages suffer when talking about heating or air conditioning systems. They have 95% of what ever the maximum thermodynamic efficiency is. Go shopping for a water heater or a home furnace, look at how many claim 90% or higher, but some how don't manage to burn houses down.
Or, in marketing speech, "why is 75% the maximum efficiency? That should be 100%, and we get 99% of that, so just stamp our unit with 99% and be done with it. The end user doesn't care about science crap."
Maybe if you told the kids WHY you were doing it? And talked to them about it instead of blindly insisting that it will 'make them safer' like the government does.
As a kid, the computer was in the den, near enough to the TV and everything else that I never knew who might look over my shoulder. If I wanted to have a private conversation then all I had to do was mention that it was private would people just kindly bugger off. Granted, I was a teen not a kid by that time, but all I got asked was 'who are you talking to' and that was it. Strangely enough, that was the same thing I would be asked if I was leaving the house with friends. Tell your kids why you are worried about the internet and what they should be warry of. Try not lying to them and they won't have a reason to lie to you.
But lie even once and watch how fast that trust is broken.
And you might want to actually watch the news if you thought the Taliban was governing Iraq.
I don't think Gerber would have any problem sponcering a violent game.
Better then being a grayface, I say.
Yes it creates community, but are they real friendships?
I can't speak for the people playing WoW, but from EQ experience, yes they are. I still keep in touch with people who havn't played in years, went to clubs with them, had them stay at my place when they needed a place to crash. Shared pot and beer with them. Cheered and cried with them.
Sure, only talking to people over IMs or mail causes you to drift apart. So friends you don't see in game grow distant just like friends who move to another state or country. But unless that distance makes them no longer 'real friends' then I would say that yes, games do create real friendships.
http://www.ceebot.com/ceebot/index-e.php I downloaded the demo a while back, and found it amusing and actually pretty usable. If I remember correctly, even the demo supported simple classes and structs and I think the classes even allowed overloading operators. The basic concept is to allow students to write simple programs that make a little robot do stuff. Take a look at it, it may be too pricey for the school but their links section has some other resources that might also be useful, like CodeRally http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/coderally.
I'd rather them finish the Ori story reasonably quickly and end the show on a moderately high note (probably not as high as season 8, but high nonetheless) rather than dragging it on and on. While it's commendable how they've handled the transition to the new cast, it's not something that can be kept up indefinitely.
g -1i_cancelled_iatlan.shtml
And that was the problem I had with the timeing of Sci-fi canceling the show. Everything I had read, from scifi channel and from fan sites, said that the actors and writers had both signed on for both the 10th and 11th seasons. Canning the show in the middle of the 10th season like this, with summer left for filming the second half of the season, I can't help but expect an ending much like Farscape. As the folks over at gateworld.com have said, "Ironically, this is the first year since Season Four that plans were already in place, both creatively and in signed actor contracts, for another year. The show has lived on year-to-year since moving to SCI FI, with the writers forced to write a possible series finale every year -- only to find the show renewed once again." http://www.gateworld.net/news/2006/08/istargate_s
At least Devlin has said there are serious plans for a movie sequal. http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?id=37194