Comment Re:Are they stupid? (Score 1) 733
They're using the UAV to scare birds. They NEED to fly low and loud. Which means they're the perfect target for a #7 shot of 12-gauge.
They're using the UAV to scare birds. They NEED to fly low and loud. Which means they're the perfect target for a #7 shot of 12-gauge.
Progress marches on: keep up or stop for tea with Ozymandias.
Poor Ozymandias should not be accused of stopping for tea or falling behind.
Absolutely. It's Montgomery who stands accused for all those Market Garden deaths.
This is awesome:
O. Jackson, J. Li, and N. D. Nehru. A First Course in Advanced p-Adic Calculus. Zambian Mathematical Society, 1935.
I also systematically refuse the microwave scanners.
I was on my way out of Chicago last week, and was instructed to go through it. I simply told the TSA guy "no". There was a regular metal detector next to it, but he told me I'd get a patdown. No problem I said, but had to wait a couple of minutes for the patdown guy ahead to finish. Then I had a pretty light gloved patdown (nothing to write home about, not even as effective as the one you get in any Arab country airport by default) and then he rubbed a cotton swap on his gloves and sent it through the explosives detector machine. Anyway, it all went without a hitch but the operation itself takes 3-5 minutes.
As I was getting my stuff, I saw another person do the same thing. All we need is for a few more % of people to request the patdown and it'll be utterly impossible for the TSA to handle the demand, thus reducing it to getting rid of the microwave scanners.
Those things need to go.
User scores are not reviewer reviews.
Reviewers have experience and thoughtful analyses but suffer from small sample size and conflicts of interest.
Users have the strength of numbers but suffer from groupthink and emotional coloring.
The way I use MC is that I get a good feel for the game based on user score averages, then look at the reviewers that I like and analyze their pros and cons. Then I make a decision, based on whether the cons are bad enough for me or not.
Diablo 3 on Metacritic is the 2nd highest rated current game.
Don't take averages for truth, they're just averages. Use Metacritic as a source of reviews, find the reviewers (people) who you have the most affinity with over time, and then focus on what their own scores are.
The problem is that the Facebook engineers went too far.
In their hubris (not necessarily generally bad) they thought that they could literally create a very deep interface between their html code and the underlying native APIs. Essentially abstracting the underlying native APIs with a code interpreter that would allow their servers to send the same html to any device, and some additional stuff for those that had other features.
As usual, they started simple and everything worked, but then over a few months they added more features and the stuff kept growing in complexity and ultimately ate crap. And debugging some kind of virtual machine on a smartphone isn't the easiest thing.
So they're finally figuring out that it ain't working, and going back to native development on top of their standard JSON (or whatever) server API.
That's right. KDB is one of the little-known DB systems used in very high performance environments of financial system.
It is so ridiculously small and fast that I just couldn't believe it when I looked at it over 10 years ago.
I just looked now, and the 3.0 version of kdb+ is all of 258k in size (zipped, OS X).
It's got the database engine, q language interpreter and http server among others. And a small sample dataset.
Try it out, it's mind-blowing.
PS: I never did use it in production because (at the time) of the steep learning curve
Obligatory 80s reference:
"Sirius Presents... PLASMANIA! HAHAHAHA"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6krSk2dddaI
(it's the bloodstream, not the intestines, but still...)
There is a massive downside to NAT that any home user at an ISP that has been allowed few IPs will tell you.
Any ISP in a non-western country will probably have been allocated far far fewer IPs than it's got clients. Therefore that ISP will be using NAT on his outside network. Couple that with NAT on the inside network for the home user, and you've got the clusterfucks called NAT444 and (the slightly better) NAT464 among others. They're also commonly called Carrier-grade NAT (CGN) or large-scale NAT (LSN): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
This consistently completely screws up all sorts of connections, such as:
- XBox and Playstation 3 networking (you'll see "NAT Type 3" on the network config)
- FaceTime
- etc...
Basically anything that is a peer-to-peer protocol with reciprocal client-server stuff is shot.
Exactly. And you can carry it around.
Think external applications, like checking soil humidity, motion sensors, etc...
I'm very excited about this.
Especially as a learning tool for my kids, I think that by seeing what is happening they'll get very excited about learning to program.
I already have arduino boards, but it's not the same thing. Here we have a completely self-contained computer with great practical I/O interfaces.
Assuming the autonomy is good, having more cores means more multitasking without impacting the phone's snappiness and perceived user performance. As memory increases in phones, more cores will be quite useful for background apps.
The 2-weapon limit is utterly moronic and problematic for any game that doesn't try to be "realistic". And that's about 90% of the FPSes that should NOT have the weapon limit. I just finished Bulletstorm (had a bucketload of fun, first time in years with an FPS), and even with the myriad ways to switch weapons after pretty much each encounter, I still felt like if they'd given you all the weapons all the time it could have been even more fun.
"Kill with skill" is good, but killing with skill by drilling a guy to the ceiling, shooting a timed exploding flare in his belly and then terminating him with massive 4-barreled buckshot is better. (yes, it's all doable in Bulletstorm, but not the buckshot... You can't have more than 2 weapons + the assault rifle)
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth