Posts made by Groaner
-
RE: Dreams of widows running on Linux (and not just hardware)
Anyone who has read The Old New Thing for any length of time and thus knows of the decades of compatibility hacks Microsoft has implemented to keep legacy software running will be able to tell you that this is a lost cause.
Unless the plan is to break all that software and piss off a lot of people.
-
RE: Console Wars IX
@Atazhaia said in Console Wars IX:
Anyone else looking at consoles, or are you full PC Gaming Master Race?
The only reason I own any console more recent than the PS2 is that it was a housewarming gift.
-
RE: Epic Store (and other "Occupy Steam" movements)
@MrL said in Epic Store (and other "Occupy Steam" movements):
There's plenty of hobbies that don't require expensive high tech stuff and as a result are cheap. Gaming is not cheap at all.
A $1-2k investment in a decent rig with a life expectancy of 5+ years plus ~$10-60 per game isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. I'll give you that it's not going to be as cheap as chess or hiking, but it's pretty reasonable for the hours of entertainment returned.
What I've spent on my car during certain years would pay for a couple decades of gaming. Excluding, of course, games that expect you to invest thousands of dollars to be competitive.
-
RE: Epic Store (and other "Occupy Steam" movements)
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Epic Store (and other "Occupy Steam" movements):
@DogsB said in Epic Store (and other "Occupy Steam" movements):
cheaper games
No. If you cannot (or often wouldn't) afford games, please get another hobby
If one can't afford games, what hobbies can one afford? Gaming is one of the cheaper hobbies. There are far more expensive diversions out there:
-
RE: Local e-mail clients?
@Zenith said in Local e-mail clients?:
Arlen Specter, who died somewhere in the middle of the Obama administration.
And yet his Specter lives on in your inbox.
-
RE: Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?
@dkf said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@mikehurley said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.
Funny, isn't it? I was bored out of my skull when I worked at a supermarket, but the politics and drama were effectively non-existent. I have no desire to go back, though, as the mental games you had to play to stay sane for a 6-8 hour shift were not worth it*.
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
I think the difference is between "for all intents and purposes, it's half" and "literally half". You're going to have juice and meat bits (no calculus required!) on the cutting device when you're done so you'll never have "literally half". But that's irrelevant for practical purposes.
Edit: you could have half of the remainder I suppose, but never half of the original.
Or you could take your deli meats and weigh them in a geographical area with different average density (or on top of a mountain), but that's an order of magnitude more than 21-year-old me was going for.
That implies (together with the fact that gravitational fields are continuous) that it might be possible to find an area where the weight is exactly half a pound.
Absolutely. I imagine the contours of such an area could be described by a 0 cm-wide line, with a total enclosed area of 0 m2.
-
RE: Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?
@mikehurley said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.
Funny, isn't it? I was bored out of my skull when I worked at a supermarket, but the politics and drama were effectively non-existent. I have no desire to go back, though, as the mental games you had to play to stay sane for a 6-8 hour shift were not worth it*.
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
I think the difference is between "for all intents and purposes, it's half" and "literally half". You're going to have juice and meat bits (no calculus required!) on the cutting device when you're done so you'll never have "literally half". But that's irrelevant for practical purposes.
Edit: you could have half of the remainder I suppose, but never half of the original.
Or you could take your deli meats and weigh them in a geographical area with different average density (or on top of a mountain), but that's an order of magnitude more than 21-year-old me was going for.
-
RE: Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.
Funny, isn't it? I was bored out of my skull when I worked at a supermarket, but the politics and drama were effectively non-existent. I have no desire to go back, though, as the mental games you had to play to stay sane for a 6-8 hour shift were not worth it*.
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
-
RE: Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
So then I don't understand the case I can make to hire me over some mook from Durkadurkastan.
Well, I would imagine that being a native English speaker and U.S. Citizen puts you way ahead of the crowd, for one.
If all I'm supposed to do is exactly what I'm told exactly how I'd told exactly when I'm told, the limiting factor is the employer. If what to do, how to do it better, and getting it done faster are all off the table....no wonder I'm being asked crap like Avengers vs Justice League. So I just need to stop applying/interviewing/pitching where the management likes Marvel!
Yes, organizational fit is incredibly important. In some shops, you will have a great deal of creative freedom. In others, you'll be paid six figures to be a good little soldier who only works on "approved" tasks in a manner aligned with the architecture of the application.
It's funny we're having this conversation because I'm on a conference call right now where my boss is suddenly peddling a primitive version of the intranet site a colleague and I were trying to pitch almost two years ago at this point. We couldn't get any traction because Managed SharePoint was so ridiculously limited and no other options were entertained because we were supposed to stay in our lane and play technically helpless like good little MIS drones. That initiative, like everything else, was all Very Important for management except we had zero support on actually making something happen until the Right Person could get around to crapping whatever out.
Phil Factor and others have commented on this phenomenon:
The whole IT management structure of the company seemed to focus on stopping the initiative, and the moment it looked like succeeding, announced that it was their doing or idea in the first place.
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
That's the level that some shops would like it to be. A developer is a developer is a developer. Fire an expensive one and hire a new one at three quarters the price. To some extent, a change like that wouldn't be entirely bad if it put a damper on the ambitions of all the 25-year-olds who feel entitled to a $170k salary simply because they've been copy-pasting code from StackOverflow for a year or two.
-
RE: Redesigning my retail software/database - part 1
@Zenith said in Redesigning my retail software/database - part 1:
So instead of MacroInventory, I have MacroInventoryBase, MacroInventoryDates, MacroInventoryAmounts, MacroInventoryOther, and MacroInventoryView that joins on column Key. A trigger might create blank rows in three other tables from MacroInventoryBase but MacroInventoryView is readonly because even SQL 2012 barked at me over views deriving from more than one table.
I'm pretty sure you can have a modifiable view that consists of multiple joins, even in 2000, as long as you have proper
INSTEAD OF
triggers. You will of course need to be able to properly direct the changes to each of the underlying tables in your trigger. I worked on something that split out ten different entities stored in the same table back in the day and I seem to remember updates against the compatibility view working swimmingly. There is, of course, a performance hit, but nothing is free.Now that I typed this all out, I think the best course is probably to bite the bullet and keep one table. SQL doesn't seem to bitch about the functions if the one referenced in the computer column is a placeholder function that simply points to a different real function. That seems stupid and I was hoping there was some sort of setting like how SSMS defaults to making tables non-alterable for some reason.
SQL Server 2000 has lots of quirks with determinism requirements for functions. You are also stuck with a DBMS that's 20 years old:
Edit: I also sort of want to add some error checking into the tables. Part of the current iteration of the software calculates stuff from two different POVs and flags where they don't add up. The idea of fighting the interface every time I need to tweak those calculations is not appealing though.
I would recommend indexed views as a solution to catch complex data integrity requirements (e.g. when requirements are violated, the view gains a duplicate row and a key violation), but I believe that would require 2008. On 2000, it's
rule
s and check constraints. -
RE: Redesigning my retail software/database - part 1
@Zenith said in Redesigning my retail software/database - part 1:
Con: It will be a pain to update multiple tables because a view linking them isn't writable.
INSTEAD OF
triggers? -
RE: Tinder is shit
@boomzilla What a See You Next Tuesday.
Also, she's lying. The reason she was reaching out was less that she wanted to give him her perspective, and more that she wanted to ruin him. I particularly appreciate the juxtaposition of "I hope you get what you deserve" and "Wish you the best."
-
RE: OCR for badly damaged images
@sockpuppet7 said in OCR for badly damaged images:
@Gąska Just found this at the front page of hacker news:
An OCR solution that doesn't cost $X0,000 and isn't GPL/AGPL? What is this world coming to?
-
RE: OCR for badly damaged images
@bobjanova said in OCR for badly damaged images:
My company's done some work with digitisation providers, and we were asked to add OCR capabilities to our product. When we were investigating we didn't find anything better than Tesseract. But with any handwritten or faded documents you're likely to need significant manual correction, at least.
I tried using Tesseract several years ago on scanned handwritten documents and it was in no way reliable or useful. I think you might have to train it with a handwriting font or something of that nature to get useful results.
-
RE: FedEx Tracking XML Schema
@abarker said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
@Groaner said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
Fascinating. I don't recall signing up to be the world's foremost authority on file format storage efficiency - I signed up to make an offhand comment about how a supposedly bloated file format compressed surprisingly well in my testing. To anyone familiar with how compression algorithms work, this should be non-intuitive, but interesting. Is there a new rule around here where we're all expected to post from a position of authority with reams of data to back up our statements? If so, I'm going to hold the rest of you to it and I expect post volume to plummet accordingly.
YMBNH. Pedantry is one of the top 5 desirable activities on this forum.
Can you name the other four?
-
RE: FedEx Tracking XML Schema
@Gąska said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
@Groaner said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
@abarker said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
@Groaner said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
I don't get the hate for XML. If the verbosity is offensive, it compresses very nicely, such that compressed CSV offered less than a 15% reduction in archive size over compressed XML in some testing I did.
XML doesn't always translate well to CSV, so that isn't a very good comparison. A better comparison would be XML versus JSON.
EDIT: Yeah, I'm a day late. So what?
Well, in my use case, it did.
And in my use case, converting Bash shell script into Windows batch file was a matter of changing file extension. There's a reason people say anecdote is no evidence.
Fascinating. I don't recall signing up to be the world's foremost authority on file format storage efficiency - I signed up to make an offhand comment about how a supposedly bloated file format compressed surprisingly well in my testing. To anyone familiar with how compression algorithms work, this should be non-intuitive, but interesting. Is there a new rule around here where we're all expected to post from a position of authority with reams of data to back up our statements? If so, I'm going to hold the rest of you to it and I expect post volume to plummet accordingly.
-
RE: FedEx Tracking XML Schema
@dfdub said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
@Groaner said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
Comparing compressed XML vs. compressed JSON is left as an exercise to the reader.
No one's forcing you.
-
RE: FedEx Tracking XML Schema
@abarker said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
@Groaner said in FedEx Tracking XML Schema:
I don't get the hate for XML. If the verbosity is offensive, it compresses very nicely, such that compressed CSV offered less than a 15% reduction in archive size over compressed XML in some testing I did.
XML doesn't always translate well to CSV, so that isn't a very good comparison. A better comparison would be XML versus JSON.
EDIT: Yeah, I'm a day late. So what?
Well, in my use case, it did. Going from compressed XML to compressed CSV (since the data was tabular and didn't contain nested hierarchies) yielded meager gains. Comparing compressed XML vs. compressed JSON is left as an exercise to the reader.
-
RE: SQL Server weirdness
@Unperverted-Vixen said in SQL Server weirdness:
@Groaner said in SQL Server weirdness:
Also, Microsoft broke IDENTITY back in SQL Server 2012 iirc in that a server restart adds 1000 to IDENTITY values such that the life expectancy of an int column is drastically reduced.
That's news to me. I haven't seen that on our SQL Server 2016 servers at all...
It looks like there's now a database option to get around it.
But it has been an issue for a while.
-
RE: SQL Server weirdness
@izzion said in SQL Server weirdness:
@dangeRuss
Under most cases, GUID is worse than VARCHAR for a PK field (especially if NEWID is used), since it's none of the properties that a good key field should have (Sequential, Monotonic, Narrow) and also isn't a meaningful business value. If you're using an auto-generated GUID as a PK / FK field, you probably should be using an IDENTITY field (INT, or BIGINT if number of rows is required) insteadGUIDs can make replication a lot easier as then you don't have to remap IDs on insertion/update between multiple remote systems. But then again, you don't need to use the GUID as a clustering key. And while 16 bytes is wider than 8 or 4, it's also a lot narrower than some of the 700+ byte clustering keys that I've seen in the wild. Some people like their natural keys for some reason.
Otherwise I'd agree. Also, Microsoft broke
IDENTITY
back in SQL Server 2012 iirc in that a server restart adds 1000 toIDENTITY
values such that the life expectancy of anint
column is drastically reduced. I've been meaning to learn how to use sequences, which are Microsoft's recommended replacement for this issue, but have been too lazy to do so so far. They're also a lot more work than just typing thirteen-ish characters for a column definition. -
RE: The Official Don't-Interpret-My-Dreams Thread
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Don't-Interpret-My-Dreams Thread:
@Groaner Nice EW plug. I'm still not going to buy
EWQLSO is a pretty impressive product for how old it is. I didn't even know it had those string effects until I was searching for them for this post and saw a bunch of people on audio forums complaining about how they had heard those effects in every goddamn movie trailer, TV show, etc. I guess it's like the Wilhelm Scream or bad kerning in that once you recognize it, you hate it. But even today, I appreciate Symphonic Orchestra far more than Hollywood Orchestra, as the former is extremely versatile and has a lot of options for what it is, and the latter is a far bigger drain on resources and valuable SSD space and bizarrely sounds smaller and chamber-y when it's supposed to be bigger and more epic than SO.
PLAY-based libraries are also dirt-cheap compared to some of the alternatives, especially if you have a ComposerCloud subscription to try them before buying individually. Pricewise, I'd much rather pay a couple hundred bucks per sample library than $650-700 for each of the Metropolis Arks, or anything that requires dropping $400 for KONTAKT full in addition to the library (which makes products like 8dio Majestica annoying), or one of the stupidly-expensive VSL collections.
-
RE: FedEx Tracking XML Schema
I don't get the hate for XML. If the verbosity is offensive, it compresses very nicely, such that compressed CSV offered less than a 15% reduction in archive size over compressed XML in some testing I did.
-
RE: The Official Don't-Interpret-My-Dreams Thread
I was wandering around my townhouse and noticed that the walls on the bottom floor of my unit were gone, such that one could easily walk between my house and the adjacent units. Without walls to separate us, a couple of my neighbors were lounging around on the furniture therein. Now, while we were on the bottom floor, there was also a staircase going down, leading to a metal door. Since all of us were surprised that there was a floor beneath the one we were all on, we all went over to explore, opened the door, and went in.
Inside, there was a tiled floor and stainless steel fixtures and equipment that you might either see in the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant or in some industrial facility. We continued walking down this hallway for a while, until we encountered another metal door, with a roughly 1-foot-wide glass porthole you could see through. There wasn't anything of interest that we could see through the window, and one of us was about to open the door, but all of a sudden, I began to hear a long, slow, chromatic clustered string glissando (sounding something like what's at 23:09 if embedding eats the time code):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEIevWuwfCo&t=1389
"Hang on," I admonished my companions. "I'm pretty sure there's a jumpscare behind that door."
"How do you figure," inquired one. "Doesn't look like there's anything on the other side."
"No, listen," I insisted. "Don't you hear the strings?"
"Actually... yeah." We all stood transfixed, staring through the porthole of the door, sure that it was either about to be blown off its hinges by an explosion, or some gigantic alien creature's immense strength, as the strings' pitch continued to climb. The pitch climbed even faster as one of us carefully grabbed the door handle, opened the latch and pushed the door open.
And then I woke up.
-
RE: Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon
@DoctorJones said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@Lorne-Kates said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@Gąska said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@pie_flavor well, have you ever read YT comments? Would you really want to hang out with those guys?
At least most of those DissChords tend to be exclusive for Patreon subscribers. You'd be surprised how effective even the most bare minimal financial investment into a niche community can be.
"For only $5 a month, you too can be an exclusive member of the Official Fuck You Give Me Money community!"
Is there a Fuck You Give Me Money OnlyFans yet?
-
RE: A picture book written in C code
@Gąska said in A picture book written in C code:
@Byte9 also, I categorically disagree with the statement in the trailer at timestamp 0:56-1:00. No, knowing C is rarely ever useful, and certainly it doesn't make you any better at more modern languages based on C - if anything, it makes you worse, so suggesting people should learn C first is actively harmful.
Man, you would have loved the CS department at the university I went to. People who had ostensibly never done any sort of programming before were cast off into the wilderness with C and doing all their work SSH'ed into a Solaris cluster. In their defense, this was circa 2003, and the department would switch over to Java in a couple years for entry-level classes, but they were still trying to fail out as many students as possible (one lecturer even admitted as much to his students).
-
RE: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations
I wish this week wasn't super crazy (for reasons previously outlined in the Lounge) so that I could devote more time and attention to the issue, but after reading through everything, I had some thoughts:
To borrow buzzwords that have been floating around the news, was this whole predicament a case of a few bad apples, or a systemic problem? In the case of the former, once the bad apples are dealt with, would the problem not be solved and things could go back to normal with no changes in policy?
That we are looking at building new policies suggests to me that there is at least some thinking that it's a systemic problem. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with that assertion, but if we are going in that direction, we should be very careful about identifying what the systemic problem is, and coming up with a solution for it.
At the same time, I can understand the typical practice in our industry of:
- Solving the immediate problem
- Putting in measures to make sure it never happens again
But I'm not sure I quite understand what sort of changes are being proposed, apart from looking for a new moderation team.
-
RE: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations
I read the other thread and that was an interesting ride.
So are we getting a CoC now?
-
RE: US Chemical Safety Board
"I lived in Torrance for 30 years that refinery blows up every couple of years."
-
RE: US Chemical Safety Board
@Watson said in US Chemical Safety Board:
Is it just me, or is the narration irritatingly slow? I had to run the videos at 1.25x speed just to get a reasonable-sounding wpm. In fact, it made all the speech sound more natural (except for that Irish-I-think-he-was bloke).
As these are government publications, there may be some accessibility concerns which demand the admittedly slow rate.
-
RE: US Chemical Safety Board
@dfdub said in US Chemical Safety Board:
@Groaner
I don't know anything about chemical manufacturing, but it sounds like unlike the first two companies, which were "only" negligent, these guys were willfully and knowingly endangering the public. How can anyone think that absolutely never inspecting large, highly pressurized containers for caustic chemicals would lead to anything else than a major catastrophe? Especially after it was proven that the containers were unsafe by a prior incident? At that point, even a high-school dropout with zero chemistry and physics knowledge should have realized that they were literally sitting on a time bomb.There was some known dice-rolling in at least the case of the Phosgene Shed, company officials were concerned that if they invested a couple million on a safer design, it would set a precedent that they would have to make that kind of investment anytime there were toxic chemicals involved. This video goes into more detail on that around the 10 minute mark (and a couple other unrelated incidents at the plant in a short period). It also has Sexy Miss Lucy, which is another plus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISNGimMXL7M
But yes, if your apparatus is capable of accelerating shards of an 8-inch-thick steel tank to the point where they become deadly projectiles, and you're aware of the possibility, that's a problem.
-
RE: US Chemical Safety Board
@HardwareGeek said in US Chemical Safety Board:
I don't know if it was posted here or showed up in my YT suggestions a long time ago, but I've seen at least the first of these before.
Supposedly there's a drinking game.
-
RE: US Chemical Safety Board
Let's bring open buckets of MEK into a penstock, strategically placing them between the work area and the only exit, spray MEK everywhere in a futile attempt to clean equipment, and not bring along any respirators or fire extinguishers. What could possibly go wrong?
-
RE: US Chemical Safety Board
Eight inch steel walls are much less reassuring when they are containing a NaOH solution at 29,000psi.
-
RE: US Chemical Safety Board
So my design for the plant is almost complete. I just have one remaining issue. We have this open-air storage area for phosgene, a very toxic gas that's a reagent in our process, and I'm trying to decide on what to call it.
How about the "Phosgene Shed?"
Has a nice ring to it, gotta admit. -
US Chemical Safety Board
YouTube keeps shoving this channel into my recommendations. I'm sure you all will appreciate it as the content is very similar to this site, except involving industrial plants instead of software and, sadly, occasional casualties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tflm9mttAAI
Okay, so our process requires NaClO and H2SO4. To make things convenient, why don't we put the fill lines next to each other?
I like that idea! It's a very efficient use of space.
How will people know which fill line is which?
Well, that's part of the operator's job, to direct filling operations. He'll have the fill lines memorized, so there's no need to label them.
What happens if there's user error?
The great part of this design is that the valves are right next to the fill lines, so the operator or truck driver can easily shut off flow if something goes wrong!
This seems like a pretty solid design! You know, I think we can probably safely lock up the emergency respirators since they'll never be needed.On another note, Miss Lucy here looks like quite the strong, independent, and sophisticated lady. I wonder if she'd be up for some, um... "human factors analysis" over at my place?
-
RE: Ace Online
The election results involved upsets on both fronts! On ANI, the Southeast/south Asian bloc voted in droves for their preferred candidate (while the front runners ended up ostensibly splitting the vote):
And on BCU, the sole candidate failed where even African dictators succeed with a grand total of 0%!
Most likely, everyone assumed he was going to win and thus nobody voted for him. Thus, the GM intervened and appointed him to the position, and he sent a thankful nation mail:
And he's already put together an administration. ANI's new leader has yet to even appoint his subleads.
ANI won NCP this past month, but the nation is not off to a great start. Will ANI's new leadership rise to the occasion and deliver another victorious month?
-
RE: The Official Status Thread
@Benjamin-Hall said in The Official Status Thread:
Is there a "preferred" version of minecraft? Is it still just the Java version?
Depends on how much you care about mods. It's sort of a Python 2 vs. Python 3 problem. Do you pick the old, crappy version with broader support, or the new, better, more performant version that has little outside support?
-
RE: The Official Status Thread
@mott555 said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin I bet you can drive faster than me illegally, too. The 3000 RPM redline limits my top speed to about 95 MPH.
Sounds more like a problem of gearing than redline. My car's governed at 155 and probably tops out around 180 without said governor, but top gear redlines around 220MPH last I ran the numbers.
-
RE: Ace Online
Formations
One of the last actions of the outgoing ANI Chairman was to send a nation mail about formations, and thus presented an opportunity to talk about them. As I mentioned earlier, formations are like parties in other MMOs, but with a twist: the formation leader has the ability to allow the rest of the members to follow his flight in, well... formation.
There are a variety of shapes of formation flight:
And these aren't all for show, but some of them have useful effects, as ex-Chairman explains:
The most frequently used shape is Wall Formation, since it divides damage taken on one formation member across the whole formation.
Players are not forced into formation flight, but join it by getting near the formation leader and hitting F2 until their gear "sticks" to the leader. It's equally easy to leave formation flight.
Formations are also useful when the formation leader might be a fast I-Gear, and other members have slower engines as all members in formation flight are "glued" to the leader and can be dragged at the leader's flight speed. This property also makes them very useful for WP alting, as the formation leader can open up six instances of the game, drag five of his alts along for the ride and get 6x the war points for a war event. As I mentioned before, WP alting is bannable, but these days, the community finds the more egregious cases to be amusing, and critics of alt-draggers are admonished not to "hate the hustle."
-
RE: Ace Online
In a possibly unprecedented move, the ANI Chairman has resigned (most likely due to people bitching about his leadership skills and repeatedly insulting him)! A fellow brigade member has been appointed as his replacement:
The election has also gotten interesting for both nations, as old candidates have dropped out and new candidates have emerged:
If these gaps in numeric sequence look too much like the handiwork of an autoincrement column to you, rumor has it that the game uses a SQL Server backend. Candidate #5, now the incumbent due to his aforementioned appointment, brings a wealth of experience to the table, and a hearty campaign promise:
Candidate #2 was the favorite to win, but Candidate #5 throwing his hat into the ring has complicated the contest.
On BCU, both candidates dropped out, and now a third candidate has emerged, running unopposed:
Candidate #3's platform seems to be metacommentary about a brigade on the other nation.
Tomorrow's the last day for any new candidates to register. How will these changes impact the contest?
-
RE: Discussion of NodeBB Updates
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@boomzilla said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Attn: @ben_lubar
Careful with the backup though. If @Groaner's PhD level essay about that vidyagame gets lost...
I haven't even gotten to the really good shit yet. That entails explaining a few more systems, but we're getting there.
-
RE: Ace Online
Memorable Locations (part 2!)
The Pandea continent presented new environments which were equally, if not more innovative.
Atus Beach
If a zone in Ace has "Beach" in it, it's not a sleepy resort town with palm trees swaying in the wind, and probably not a place where you'd want to vacation:
It might seem convenient that there's a tunnel going into the mountain, but the construction team clearly spared no expense as they HOLLOWED OUT THE WHOLE MOUNTAIN in the process.
Slope Port
Slope Port is a harbor of some sort, and this structure appears to be made of corrugated cardboard.
Like Atus Beach, it has a hollowed-out mountain Just Because™.
But this hollowed-out mountain is also accessible from the top via a sort of ventilation duct. Yes, those fan blades spin and you have to carefully time them to fly through without hitting them. To some extent, this game was ahead of its time in that it has simple player-world and player-NPC collision mechanics.
Pandea A/B Point
These zones are intended to mirror the Dens, but with a twist - they are less linear, with intertwined, forked paths and have long vertical tunnels as well which can offer a tactical advantage:
Daisy Riverhead
What's not to love about a floating pyramid complete with its own self-sustaining waterfalls?
Orina Peninsula
Like its ANI equivalent, Slope Port, Orina has a hollowed-out mountain AND annoying fans. But it also has convenient fixed access vents from the top.
The ventilation system is also a bit more complex than Slope Port, with several tunnels and fans:
-
RE: Ace Online
Memorable Locations
Ace has some of the most unique and interesting environment designs I've ever seen. The game is designed for large-scale PvP, and apart from the slideshow framerates during large-scale wars, it's one thing the game gets right and you can see that intent reflected in some of the environments.
The Dens
Surrounding Bark City are Den of Site - A and B, and while the game is light on lore, they appear to be part of some gigantic railway tunnel system. For scale, the rails are tall enough that A-Gears parked on either side cannot see or shoot through them. Here is where the infamous "den wars" occur. Den wars can be organic world PvP, or arise as the remnant of a more "scheduled" war, where each nation tries to push the other all the way back to its respective spawn.
Lumein Volcano
As you might imagine, a zone named Lumein Volcano might be a pretty hot place, but it's also home to the stone tiki Gigantic God Lumein which has missile launchers for knees. I mean, what's not to like?
Once you kill him, you have to kill his glowing yellow heart (also visible here) which covers the portal to the next zone. If you're not quick enough, the heart respawns, blocking your access and you have to kill it again, which is most annoying.
G-ARK
While there are plenty of wide-open areas, sometimes there are tight spaces you'll have to fly through. G-ARK is a ship so massive that it itself is a zone, and there are many narrow corridors with twists and turns to be navigated to get through it:
Fantasy Flow
Much of the action takes place near the surface of the planet Phillon, but there are several zones that occur in the surrounding outer space. Fantasy Flow is a dreamy asteroid field with a colorful skybox and Gigantic Space Bugs:
-
RE: Ace Online
@TwelveBaud said in Ace Online:
@Groaner I noticed one of the stops in the NGC chain is not proper-named, and one appears to have no name and no color.
Good catch! That would be El Dorado Metropolis, an inaccessible zone that was formally supposed to be added to the game at some point:
Supposedly, some players who are running illegal private servers have been able to explore it, but otherwise that chain ends for the rest of us at Mirny Stope.
-
RE: Ace Online
The World
The planet Phillon (and its immediate vicinity) isn't one contiguous region as you might expect of a more modern or more-AAA MMO, but divided into zones which are connected by warp gates. So it becomes convenient to express the world map in the form of a subway map:
If you look closely, you will probably notice that there are multiple pathways (or chains) through the world. This is a Good Thing™, as it means there are multiple routes, making it harder to choke off access. If you look even more closely, you may notice that some of the branching seems unnatural. The "oldest" routes between Arlington City and Bygeniou City were through Bark City and Rock's Nest. The moon maps (between Denebola and Castor) are sort of off in their own little world, and are mostly irrelevant except to WP capsule grinders who want an abundance of mid-level, easy-to-kill mobs.
Later came the
PandariaPandea continent, which was bolted-in to the existing world by adding another warp gate to Bach Mountain Chain on the BCU side, and Edmont Valley on the ANI side.While it's less obvious from this map, a warp was also added to Lumein Volcano to bolt in another new chain starting at Ash Lane and a third, unplayable NPC faction called Next Generation City (NGC), who serve as the antagonists for that chain.
-
RE: Ace Online
Classes
While there are only four classes, or "gears," there are surprisingly quite a few viable stat and equipment builds for each, depending on your goals. Most equipment is unique to each gear, but there is some equipment that can be shared. Some people will argue that certain gears are better than others, but all of them are useful and important for different reasons.
A-Gear
Nicknamed the "Anima Mortar" on the character creation screen (and nowhere else), A-Gears (AGs) are tanks, in both the traditional MMO sense and the "it has guns and moves around on the ground" sense. In fact, they are the only gear type that can move around while on the ground, and some of the endgame engines allow them to move at ridiculous speeds (~550 m/s) while on the ground, making them arguably the second fastest gear in the game.
AGs are notable for their skill Siege Mode, which immobilizes them, but at the same time triples their gun firing rate. Players worth their salt will have weapons with enough reattack enchants and affixes to be able to shoot 15 shots per second in this state (depending on the player's local framerate. Yes, this is a ). While sieged, you can move your mouse and lock on to targets, and your gun will track the target as it flies above you. This is controversial, as players of other gear types complain that AGs require no skill (not entirely true!) since it's point and click. However, there are a few tricks players can use to break the lock. AGs are in fact quite vulnerable when sieged, so they have an ability called Barrier which protects them from missiles for 15 seconds (with a 1-minute cooldown).
When on the ground while not sieged, AGs can turn invisible, making them sort of a "rogue/assassin" class as well, and a lot of playing AG well comes down to tactics. They also have useful and incredibly annoying debuffs that slow a target temporarily (Snare) or prevent shield regeneration (Shield Paralyze), as well as a massive damage AoE skill called Hypershot with a 15-30 minute cooldown (depending on skill rank).
The great thing about Snare is that it can be used on friendly targets as well as enemy targets, and snaring your allies is a very easy way to get them to loudly complain and curse at you. Repeatedly snaring allies every time the skill's cooldown expires is quite effective for this purpose.
B-Gear
The B-Gear (BG), known as the "Brandy Burg" on the character creation screen (and nowhere else) is the average class, the Mario class, and a bomber. While they are neither the fastest gear nor the gear with the most health, they are a big damage dealer that can frequently oneshot weaker opponents. BGs rely on their skills Ground Bombing Mode and Air Bombing Mode, which add 4-5 extra missiles to the normal firing pattern at their highest ranks, so that instead of launching one or two missiles per volley, you could be launching ten or more, hence the massive damage output.
Like AGs, BGs also have a skill that turns them invisible, called Invisible, and they are not limited to using it while on the ground, which makes them essential for stealth assault. BGs lack annoying debuffs, but they have Big Boom, which deals their current hitpoints in AoE damage, piercing defense and evasion, on a 15-30 minute cooldown like Hypershot. Frequently, BGs will carry special armors in their inventories with energy enchants to maximize their Big Boom damage.
I-Gear
The I-Gear (IG), nicknamed the "Idle Sniper" on the character creation screen (and nowhere else - noticing a pattern yet?) is the fastest gear in the game, capable of flying at up to 560-580m/s in bursts. It's also the most glass-cannoney, and one of the more simple gears to play, so that players can focus on the basics of flying, turning and rolling (invincibility frames against missiles, all gears can roll) without having to spam other skills as much as one would with other gears in the process. Now, while other gears have to wait several seconds between rolls, IGs have a skill called Chain Rolling which allows repeated rolling. This helps mitigate their relatively low health, along with their characteristic high evasion stats.
IGs get an annoying debuff called Silence which disables the targeted gear's abilities for several seconds. Their 15-30 minute cooldown skill is called Berserker, which drastically increases both missile firing rate and firing pattern for 30 seconds. It's often invoked as a "last stand" measure, or to deal a lot of damage to one or more targets in a very short period.
M-Gear
Nicknamed the "Meadow Burgle" (whatever the heck a burgle is) on the character creation screen, the MG is the support class. As you would expect of a healer/buffer class, MGs have both targeted and formation (formations are like parties in other MMOs) heals, and potent buffs to damage, defense and evasion. These buffs are so potent that people will often create an alt and hide it somewhere in the map to repeatedly apply buffs. This practice is known as buffbotting, and is actually permissible under some circumstances, but is bannable under others (much of the reasoning has to do with WP alting, but more on that later).
MGs have a vitally important skill called Call of Hero (CoH), which summons any formation member to the MG's position from anywhere in the world, and while it has a warmup of a few seconds, it can be cast fairly frequently. This allows an MG to get help if enemies are targeting it, or to sneak a whole army through the backdoor. Players often will beg for a CoH rather than fly across the world to a war, and depending on the enemy's defenses, this may be a reasonable request or just laziness. Some players might prep their buffbots to send a CoH at the last second if their main character is close to death.
If that doesn't make them a formidable support class, they can also temporarily make themselves Invincible (at the cost of their weapons being disabled for the duration), and have a supremely annoying skill called Purify, which removes all buffs and debuffs on the targeted character and cancels active skills like Siege Mode, Ground/Air Bombing Mode, Hypershot, Big Boom, and Berserker. MGs are tasked with spamming Purify on notable players from the other nation to both annoy them and make them easier to kill. Their 15-30 minute cooldown skill is Full Recovery, which is the quintessential targetable clutch heal.
MGs have the slowest engines (400-460m/s), but they can fly backwards with Reverse Engine to evade attackers, and also make up for their lower speeds with their high defense (and/or evasion, if a good evasion armor is available). They can also be dragged by a faster gear in formation flight if need be (more on that later).
-
RE: Ace Online
@TwelveBaud said in Ace Online:
@Groaner said in Ace Online:
Will players with 100+ accounts
Not sure if you mean players with an account that's attained Level 100, or players with 100 individual accounts. Either way is sure to be hilarious.
The latter (players who are in possession of over 100 unique accounts). I'm fairly conservative in that I have fewer than ten myself. You don't really need 100 unless you are trying hard to swing an election, are a farmer at high risk of getting banned, or are engaging in antics which tread dangerously close to getting banned.
If I have not yet communicated it thus far, one of the most appealing things about this game is the nostalgic Wild West feel of an '00s MMO, before everything became tied to a Steam ID or Facebook login or whatnot. Such an environment only cultivates such antics.
-
RE: Tinder is shit
@topspin said in Tinder is shit:
@Carnage it’s kind of interesting to see (though not in a good way) that the ratio of women to men successfully getting dates is so high that people actually just use it to get a free dinner every day.
The rebuttal/complaint I keep hearing from the other side of the aisle is, "Yeah, so what if we can get dates whenever we want? You men can get long-term relationships much easier than we can!"
Almost glad I just pay my own stuff. I mean, not getting any dates, but at least not paying for it.
The rules of thumb I've heard involve going no further than coffee for a first date, or "one drink and one hour of your time" at bars. Given the present exploitative climate, I think that only makes sense. There might indeed be a princess out there who is worth a dinner date, but she has to earn it first.