Messages

271

Tech Junkie Lounge / Re: Valve Employee Handbook (2012)

« on: June 13, 2012, 04:16:47 PM »

Sounds like management by consensus. The project that gets the resources is the one that engages the majority of or the most skilled team members. The members engage the difficulties along with the successes or the easy stuff for the greater good of the project. I wonder what happens in project phase II.

For the unenlightened:

The Six Phases of a Project

I. Wild Enthusiasm

II. Disillusionment

III. Panic

IV. Quest for the Guilty

V.  Punishment of the Innocent

VI. Praise and Awards for the Non-participants

272

Religion, and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist / Re: Harry Potter and other myths

« on: June 09, 2012, 08:11:52 AM »

From my point of view, faith is not a virtue.  Faith is an abdication of reason and a suppression of one's critical faculties of the kind that allows people to believe things on bad evidence, such as the claims of noted fraudster Joseph Smith about seer stones and golden plates and the Garden of Eden being located in western Missouri.

Anyone who's been to Missouri knows Eden isn't there. 

273

/dev/random / Re: What is the most money you have won at a Casino?

« on: June 09, 2012, 08:05:47 AM »

According to Wikipedia the expected value on any bet is a loss of 5.3 cents for every dollar played. A perfect example of the take your winnings and run philosophy. The payoff on red or black is 1:1 but the odds are 1.111:1 against you. The zeros are the house advantage. The house has a 5.26% advantage, which is pretty high. Single numbers pay off 35:1 but the odds against winning are 37:1. I've never played roulette for money but I've watched it many times. The action is interesting and it's interesting to see the way people bet. The only consistent thing about it though is the house is always sweeping up the chips.

274

weapons / Re: Could not exec cfg when map starts

« on: June 09, 2012, 12:12:08 AM »

So if I understand, R1Q2 is trying to run a config file based on the map name, but because that config file doesn't exist on my computer, I get the message "Couldn't exec xxxxx.cfg". Learn something new every day.

poser

Precisely.

275

/dev/random / Re: What is the most money you have won at a Casino?

« on: June 09, 2012, 12:10:29 AM »

Actually, the best odds in the house is craps, where the house has zero advantage on some bets and only about 1.4% on average on pass/don't pass. You can reduce the house advantage but never eliminate it because you can't bet odds (0% advantage) without a pass/don't pass bet just to play the game but the Odds bet can pay as high as 2:1 on a point of 4 or 10. As in all casino games, the longer you play, the better for the house.

Best win: $240
Worst loss: $400

276

/dev/random / Re: Software patens ever work?

« on: May 09, 2012, 07:04:22 PM »

UNIX came out of Bell Labs but they weren't a software company. UNIX was for running telephone switches. They had a narrow focus on their tools so they missed the market completely. It also lacked the pretty GUI and still suffers from cryptic commands to do common functions.

IIRC, in 1997, SCO UNIX for the 80186/80286 was $495 in a huge box set of some 5 boxes and manuals when MS-DOS was $135 in a single box. A huge blunder for SCO, they could have swept the desktop clean of Microsoft forever if they hadn't been so damned proud of a package they didn't even write themselves.

Several of my friends had HP9000's running HP's version of UNIX III called HP/UX.

277

Science / Re: Evidence of water having flowed on Mars

« on: May 08, 2012, 05:13:34 PM »

All this stuff about ozone. Ozone is just O₃ as opposed to molecular Oxygen which is O₂. Since "more is better" we should develop new ways to generate MORE Ozone so we can all breathe better, more O₃ means that fresh smell of a summer thunderstorm every day instead of that foul stuff called O₂. We should have a crash program to create nuclear powered Ozone generators on the antarctic coast to reinforce the ozone layer and make the antarctic smell "summer fresh". That'll fix the global warming thing once and for all.

278

Politics / Re: Principal Created ‘Suzy’ Facebook Page To Snoop On Students

« on: May 08, 2012, 04:49:29 PM »

Isn't creating a false profile a violation of FB terms and conditions of use? I wonder if FB can now sue the principal and the school district.

279

/dev/random / Re: Hot bitches

« on: May 08, 2012, 04:41:05 PM »

Now overlay that chart with actual human penis length and circumference plot.

280

/dev/random / Re: Get The Picture #10

« on: April 30, 2012, 06:22:42 PM »

Hat guy: OK now, just stick your hand in here, all the way up to your elbow until you feel the clog.
Blue Shirt: Should I be wearing gloves for this?
Hat guy: Naw, your gonna get shit all over yourself either way.

281

Politics / Re: Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

« on: April 28, 2012, 05:32:06 PM »

You have to go into the FDIC records to find out what happened to Sun Trust. When banks become insolvent the FDIC steps in and finds a bank to buy it. If FDIC picks BofA to be the buyer, they just step in and become the new owners. This incest arises because FDIC doesn't want to pay off the depositors, they coerce the neighbor banks to buy the failing one. Now the coerced bank has the liabilities and the failing assets.

(Remember, deposits are liabilities to banks, assets are loans.) When assets aren't paying back, the bank becomes insolvent. They owe more to depositors than they have money to pay.

The result is FDIC can't 'punish' BofA too much, they need them to keep buying smaller banks that were caught up in the frenzy of the bubble and which aren't too big to fail.

Result: BofA, propped up by the FED, becomes even bigger and more corrupt.

Regulation has failed.

282

Jokes / Re: Funny articles

« on: April 11, 2012, 05:38:25 PM »

psycho ex

Not really funny but painful to read.

What's interesting to infer from this story is that he was sitting "innocently" at his computer when she broke in to hit him on the head where upon his scrotum was immediately available for her to grab. There is no description of where his pants were or why his scrotum was exposed to her grasp. Methinks he was not so innocently sitting at his computer. Or perhaps they are both nudists?

283

Jokes / Re: Did you know... [Curiosities]

« on: April 03, 2012, 07:15:12 PM »

China has a one-child policy, regardless of the sex of the child. I believe the rural farmers are exempt but still limited. There have been reports of female babies being euthanized since the preference is for males to take over the family farm. Even so, China has a serious population growth problem.

284

Quake / Re: Kicked for hacked q2.exe

« on: March 26, 2012, 01:28:11 PM »

what is anti cheat and how does this work with rich client , back when i played 7 to 8 years ago the anti cheat was built into the clients . my r1q2 is very old as well v6.5.5.5 i think.  No experiments with old hax , if you seen any old demoes of me playing on this sit there wouldnt even be a questionable doubt . loved the tdm but was never very good at it LOL

Anticheat is a DLL that gets loaded by some clients, such as r1q2 and q2pro for example, that examines files that are loaded into your client for what might be considered cheats. The "legal" modified paks and files can be different depending on the admin settings of the server you are on. The spectrum is fairly consistent but there is room for variation.

The reason it's in a DLL is because there are certain techniques it uses to prevent hacking of the DLL to mask cheats. This is what happened to no-cheat clients, the code was hackable, making them useless.

These hack-suppression techniques also account for the false-positive alerts your anti-virus scanners might issue when they scan the DLL since the anti-hacking code looks like malware to the A-V scanners. Put the DLL into your Quake2 root and put it on your A-V product's safe list.

285

Jokes / Re: Funny Pictures

« on: March 23, 2012, 06:19:46 PM »

Strange.