You are totally right about a mouse and keyboard being a superior method of control for fps. Some games like sidescrollers and third-person perspective games do benefit from a standard controller. Unfortunately I don't think everyone knows that. Sony made a push during the release of the ps2 trying to get people to buy a sony keyboard and mouse. At the release I picked up unreal tournament, Quake 3 and the keyboard mouse thinking that this must be the way things will progress. Unfortunately it failed. I've argued this case more than once and many console gamers will insist that they are better on a controller.
I would imagine that most of the people who brought the parts for recycling didn't even wipe the drives they were using. Being a charity it sounds pretty benevolent. I would imagine old hard drives collected in this manner would be pretty valuable...
Is it legal to distribute media that is for profit using the x264 codec in the United States? I was under the impression that x264 infringes on H.264 patents in the US and that distribution of media that is encoded using H.264 has licensing fees associated with it.
I could be way off base here and would like some clarification. If this is true, then VP8, as long as it does not have licensing fees, is by far the way to go. I have been concerned about this as I have been considering developing and distributing video tutorials for 3d apps. It would seriously suck to discover that I was infringing and at risk of legal action.
How about get all the cars off the road, replace with smaller vehicles, eliminate the need for so much road use and mandate that office hours be flexible and staggered.
Whoa... Is it your face I'm gonna see displayed on my TV in the morning reminding me to do my exercises?
Are there not other options? It would be very easy for them to gather information from the online speed test. Provider can easily be determined. All you would need was a check box establishing advertised bandwidth.
I don't... Comcast frequently throttles connections. Aside from that, I am supposed to be at 22 Mbit per sec. It usually idles around 17 18 in tests and drops to 8-12 about 30 minutes into large downloads.
That is definitely not what is advertised.
If this helps the government come down on those practices then great.
One aspect that must be consider, particularly in relevance to our society, is how these feelings have changed over time. I have no statistics to back my perspective on recent changes, only my experience. Anyway, any statistics would be funded by an organization trying to support there views.
I was born in Midwest America. My extended family is Baptist. My immediate family has a Physicist and a doctor of organic chemistry.
In the past ten years, I have seen my entire family radicalize. Many members of my extended family have become extreme evangelicals and many of my immediate family have steered towards agnosticism.
What has been interesting about watching this unfold over time is the changes in how my immediate family defends the rest of our family. 10 years ago I found myself constantly defending the cultural and religious beliefs of my extended family. That has deteriorated with extremist claims that our nation is a Christian nation. I felt attacked. I felt that all those years of defending there right to their beliefs has been squashed by what is now a threat to my beliefs. I have no choice any more but to actively oppose almost anything said by the relatives I love because they want my child exposed to their religion in our schools. They want our government to over-regulate scientific advancements such as stem cell research. They even want our government to conveniently make changes to History curriculum that support their views and not necessarily History http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history. Exclusion of Thomas Jefferson because he believed in a separation of church and state and was not a Christian? Oh boy...
I have always been willing to accept my relatives affiliations with religion. I have always felt a need to defend their right and acted accordingly. I can not say the same is true for my relatives.
As a brief example: When I was in my late teens I visited my relatives and went to church with them. I was introduced to the congregation. Many very nice people approached me after, introducing themselves personally. Later, while in a smaller group, I was introduced again. But now I had to answer some questions.
First: "Where are you from?" I replied: "New York" The Group: "murmur murmur murmur"
Second: "What church do you attend?" I replied: "I don't attend church" The Group: "Murmur Murmur Murmur"
Third: "Well... What is your faith?" I replied: "I classify myself as an agnostic" The Group: "MURMUR MURMUR MURMUR!"
After that situation, I was ostricized, for the rest of the afternoon I received dirty looks or was ignored. Granted, with a few exceptions but very few exceptions. People my own age wanted nothing to do with me.
What the religious members of our larger society need to realize, is that science does not pose a threat. It may raise questions about specific items written by old men a really long time ago but it does not threaten their beliefs. And there are many people like myself that will defend their beliefs, their right to those beliefs, and the relevance of those beliefs. But with what has happened over the past 10 or so years, the moderates like myself are being radicalized out of a need to preserve their own beliefs.
Remember, there are many productive activities relating to games.
He may like writing, look in to that. Writing for video games is becoming more relevant as the technology improves.
He may be interested in art:
If so, get Blender. It is a free 3d animation and modeling package w/ a very substantial community that could help him learn and it can use various scripting languages that it could encourage him to learn. Also, it has a built in game engine. http://www.blender.org/
Try to look at gaming as a large scale production and I am certain he can find some element he is good at and interested in.
I was one of those game obsessed kids. Now I am a 3D artist.
This success is due to Nasa's JPL or Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The successes they have had over the past decade are astounding. I see this as more proof that remote missions are more practical in the short term as opposed to manned missions. Just give JPL some more money and let them do their thing. These are the guys that will discover what we need to know, so as to make manned spaceflight practical.
As a side note, I saw a documentary on spirit and opportunity recently. It was one of the most entertaining and surprisingly dramatic documentaries I have seen.
This is a very important point that is often overlooked.
The counter-argument is that many software companies offer student discounts. Very significant student discounts. However, any student studying graphics today needs many different apps from many different vendors, they also need to upgrade each year to the latest and greatest version. So even though software is priced well for students you can easily be talking about a grand or more per year and at the same time the students still need good hardware which you can't pirate.
I pirated a lot of software while in college. I got a job and now I own thousands of dollars in software that I upgrade every 1 - 1 1/2 years. Had I not been able to find all that software for free and invested the vast amounts of time learning it I'd probably be working as an insurance broker and would not have bought any of the software I now own.
Quit paying the BSA for a service that alienates your future clientele and remember, the software that is too difficult to pirate will never be purchased by the "student" because the "student" in question didn't become familiar with it...
Suggesting? No... Not if you want it to run on the Iphone or Ipad.
The irony is that I agree with many of the statements made by Apple and Jobs about Flash. HTML 5 is much more efficient, particularly on mobile devices. What bothers me is that it is being forced. HTML 5 will win out. Sites that use Flash will steer away from it once they see a benefit, which in the case of web video will be a no brainer. Let the market decide who wins. If this kind of competition doesn't kill Flash it will force Adobe to get their act together.
Apple has created a computing device that's in your pocket to help you in your day to day. They associated an app store and began censoring it. Then they come out with the Ipad. A computing device intended to fill a niche between smart phones and primary computers. This device has the same limitations and is attached to the same censored app store and they announce no cross-platform development for the apps in this store.
I do not like this trend. Make my phone. Make my phone's OS. Don't tell me what I can and can't have on it.
Re:Why Mars and not the Moon?
on
Gardening On Mars
·
· Score: 2, Informative
From the following space.com article:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_dangers_040120.html
Scientists are still working to characterize the dangers and develop the technologies necessary for safe suits and ships.
This much they know:
Any trip beyond Earth orbit will involve radiation threats not faced by residents of the International Space Station, which sits inside the planet's magnetic field.
A 2-1/2-year trip to Mars, including six months of travel time each way, would expose an astronaut to nearly the lifetime limit of radiation allowed under NASA guidelines.
The Moon, with no atmosphere, is more dangerous than the surface of Mars. Lunar forays will have to be brief unless expensive shielded habitats are built.
Mission planners knew the Apollo astronauts would be at grave risk if a strong solar flare occurred during a mission. The short duration of each trip was a key to creating favorable odds.
"A big solar event during one of those missions could have been catastrophic," said Cary Zeitlin, a radiation expert at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "The risk was known. They gambled a bit."
Once again, the purpose of space travel is not to "do something really cool" It is to gain scientific understanding. Any other reason is pointless. A failed mission reduces the amount of scientific knowledge we gain.
Risk is fine. People take risks everyday. Currently and ironically trying to go to Mars is like "shooting the moon." Huge risk with small odds of worthwhile reward.
As you later clarified, the missions you are referencing are irrelevant because they did not carry passengers. C'mon dude... Furthermore you are talking about automated landings for which we have a 20 minute delay before we even get any feedback during landing. Very different situations.
The big problem with risks is Money. Specifically tax payer dollars. If you want to toss a tin can on a trebuchet and try to launch yourself to Mars, be my guest. Not with tax payer dollars. Not until we know what to expect from a manned trip of that duration, and our confident that the trip will succeed in providing valuable research and experience. There's no point otherwise.
That's a gross over simplification. I recently saw an article about an ex-NASA astronaut that is developing a new type of rocket that could cut the travel time to Mars by 1/3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket
It isn't just a matter of "We have the technology to get there" It is also a matter of "How can we get there and still be alive. The most dangerous part about a mission to Mars is getting there and back. There are so many threats presented by space travel and if we are going to try to travel to Mars, we damn well better actually make it there. The easiest way to reduce this risk is spending less time in space and that means getting there faster.
So no, the technology is not ready, has not been ready, and will not be ready for a while.
Just think about it. Imagine a micrometeor ends up being responsible for the failure of a project like this that cost billions. We still have a lot of issues to work out and a lot of knowledge to be gained.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrometeoroid
In the case of first person shooters and online gaming, people often gravitate to a select few maps. I see this a being similar games like soccer, football, basketball, in that you establish a playing field where both parties are very familiar and perform their best on. Switching up levels on the fly can be interesting for certain situations but disruptive in games that have high replay value with select few and well known maps.
This is a good thing. Apple has recently been bullying their competition, the suit against HTC. Remember Apple was sued over patent infringement on the Iphone. They settled out of court. They aren't even offering that possibility in their suit against HTC.
The suit against HTC is a semi-passive attack at Google. With the way Apple is behaving, I don't think google should put any of their products on the Iphone. Keep them on Android and continue to grow android as a very open platform. It's why I ditched the Iphone to begin with. A single company developing this kind of regulatory power over a large group of people is dangerous.
To any of you who for some reason think apple is some kind of enlightened company, you better hope they don't reach a personal computer market share large enough to entice the hackers...
"But I thought Macs don't get viruses," says the Apple fanboy.
Cross platform support is not relevant when speaking of consoles. They are proprietary hardware. In the Case of PC's, the cross platform aspect is between OS's not between systems containing entirely different hardware.
This is only recently the case. OpenGL has had quite a sordid history. While Directx was a terrible API during it first few incarnations, Directx 8 - 11 have been very solid and offers features that OpenGL could not accomplish. OpenGL 3.0 was a hacked together mess and extremely late.
Recently, OpenGL has shown great promise. OpenGL 3.2 addressed many issues but still did not compare feature-wise to Direct11.
New with OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 there is a viable alternative t oDX11. But during the past couple years OpenGL has not been worth the trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
You are totally right about a mouse and keyboard being a superior method of control for fps. Some games like sidescrollers and third-person perspective games do benefit from a standard controller. Unfortunately I don't think everyone knows that. Sony made a push during the release of the ps2 trying to get people to buy a sony keyboard and mouse. At the release I picked up unreal tournament, Quake 3 and the keyboard mouse thinking that this must be the way things will progress. Unfortunately it failed. I've argued this case more than once and many console gamers will insist that they are better on a controller.
Pfffft.... Documentation means nothing. Just look at the amazing work done on the faked moon landing!
http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pUmePicNqIFp8RaGrID5DwhtJFsZAqWCa2OO_8Wa3YcDkJGl-nAXr0ib321V3NFdF3yzGOLvz8xRLpBrTEG4y6g/Mr.Jobs.jpg?psid=1
I would imagine that most of the people who brought the parts for recycling didn't even wipe the drives they were using. Being a charity it sounds pretty benevolent. I would imagine old hard drives collected in this manner would be pretty valuable...
Is it legal to distribute media that is for profit using the x264 codec in the United States? I was under the impression that x264 infringes on H.264 patents in the US and that distribution of media that is encoded using H.264 has licensing fees associated with it.
I could be way off base here and would like some clarification. If this is true, then VP8, as long as it does not have licensing fees, is by far the way to go. I have been concerned about this as I have been considering developing and distributing video tutorials for 3d apps. It would seriously suck to discover that I was infringing and at risk of legal action.
Finally! The Lost ending makes sense! Well... maybe not, but they could of scammed another few seasons had they heard about this earlier.
How about get all the cars off the road, replace with smaller vehicles, eliminate the need for so much road use and mandate that office hours be flexible and staggered.
Whoa... Is it your face I'm gonna see displayed on my TV in the morning reminding me to do my exercises?
Are there not other options? It would be very easy for them to gather information from the online speed test. Provider can easily be determined. All you would need was a check box establishing advertised bandwidth.
I don't...
Comcast frequently throttles connections. Aside from that, I am supposed to be at 22 Mbit per sec. It usually idles around 17 18 in tests and drops to 8-12 about 30 minutes into large downloads.
That is definitely not what is advertised.
If this helps the government come down on those practices then great.
But yeah... I'm not signing up...
Or maybe we can associate another pop-culture reference:
http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/post.aspx?id=416394&show=burns
One aspect that must be consider, particularly in relevance to our society, is how these feelings have changed over time. I have no statistics to back my perspective on recent changes, only my experience. Anyway, any statistics would be funded by an organization trying to support there views.
I was born in Midwest America. My extended family is Baptist. My immediate family has a Physicist and a doctor of organic chemistry.
In the past ten years, I have seen my entire family radicalize. Many members of my extended family have become extreme evangelicals and many of my immediate family have steered towards agnosticism.
What has been interesting about watching this unfold over time is the changes in how my immediate family defends the rest of our family. 10 years ago I found myself constantly defending the cultural and religious beliefs of my extended family. That has deteriorated with extremist claims that our nation is a Christian nation. I felt attacked. I felt that all those years of defending there right to their beliefs has been squashed by what is now a threat to my beliefs. I have no choice any more but to actively oppose almost anything said by the relatives I love because they want my child exposed to their religion in our schools. They want our government to over-regulate scientific advancements such as stem cell research. They even want our government to conveniently make changes to History curriculum that support their views and not necessarily History http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history. Exclusion of Thomas Jefferson because he believed in a separation of church and state and was not a Christian? Oh boy...
I have always been willing to accept my relatives affiliations with religion. I have always felt a need to defend their right and acted accordingly. I can not say the same is true for my relatives.
As a brief example: When I was in my late teens I visited my relatives and went to church with them. I was introduced to the congregation. Many very nice people approached me after, introducing themselves personally. Later, while in a smaller group, I was introduced again. But now I had to answer some questions.
First: "Where are you from?" I replied: "New York" The Group: "murmur murmur murmur"
Second: "What church do you attend?" I replied: "I don't attend church" The Group: "Murmur Murmur Murmur"
Third: "Well... What is your faith?" I replied: "I classify myself as an agnostic" The Group: "MURMUR MURMUR MURMUR!"
After that situation, I was ostricized, for the rest of the afternoon I received dirty looks or was ignored. Granted, with a few exceptions but very few exceptions. People my own age wanted nothing to do with me.
What the religious members of our larger society need to realize, is that science does not pose a threat. It may raise questions about specific items written by old men a really long time ago but it does not threaten their beliefs. And there are many people like myself that will defend their beliefs, their right to those beliefs, and the relevance of those beliefs. But with what has happened over the past 10 or so years, the moderates like myself are being radicalized out of a need to preserve their own beliefs.
Remember, there are many productive activities relating to games.
He may like writing, look in to that. Writing for video games is becoming more relevant as the technology improves.
He may be interested in art:
If so, get Blender. It is a free 3d animation and modeling package w/ a very substantial community that could help him learn and it can use various scripting languages that it could encourage him to learn. Also, it has a built in game engine. http://www.blender.org/
Try to look at gaming as a large scale production and I am certain he can find some element he is good at and interested in.
I was one of those game obsessed kids. Now I am a 3D artist.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
This success is due to Nasa's JPL or Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The successes they have had over the past decade are astounding. I see this as more proof that remote missions are more practical in the short term as opposed to manned missions. Just give JPL some more money and let them do their thing. These are the guys that will discover what we need to know, so as to make manned spaceflight practical.
As a side note, I saw a documentary on spirit and opportunity recently. It was one of the most entertaining and surprisingly dramatic documentaries I have seen.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/welcome-mars/
This is a very important point that is often overlooked.
The counter-argument is that many software companies offer student discounts. Very significant student discounts. However, any student studying graphics today needs many different apps from many different vendors, they also need to upgrade each year to the latest and greatest version. So even though software is priced well for students you can easily be talking about a grand or more per year and at the same time the students still need good hardware which you can't pirate.
I pirated a lot of software while in college. I got a job and now I own thousands of dollars in software that I upgrade every 1 - 1 1/2 years. Had I not been able to find all that software for free and invested the vast amounts of time learning it I'd probably be working as an insurance broker and would not have bought any of the software I now own.
Quit paying the BSA for a service that alienates your future clientele and remember, the software that is too difficult to pirate will never be purchased by the "student" because the "student" in question didn't become familiar with it...
The video is on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SneK7Y7Sl7Q
That was boring... But It was better than Spiderman 3...
Suggesting? No... Not if you want it to run on the Iphone or Ipad. The irony is that I agree with many of the statements made by Apple and Jobs about Flash. HTML 5 is much more efficient, particularly on mobile devices. What bothers me is that it is being forced. HTML 5 will win out. Sites that use Flash will steer away from it once they see a benefit, which in the case of web video will be a no brainer. Let the market decide who wins. If this kind of competition doesn't kill Flash it will force Adobe to get their act together. Apple has created a computing device that's in your pocket to help you in your day to day. They associated an app store and began censoring it. Then they come out with the Ipad. A computing device intended to fill a niche between smart phones and primary computers. This device has the same limitations and is attached to the same censored app store and they announce no cross-platform development for the apps in this store. I do not like this trend. Make my phone. Make my phone's OS. Don't tell me what I can and can't have on it.
From the following space.com article: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_dangers_040120.html Scientists are still working to characterize the dangers and develop the technologies necessary for safe suits and ships. This much they know: Any trip beyond Earth orbit will involve radiation threats not faced by residents of the International Space Station, which sits inside the planet's magnetic field. A 2-1/2-year trip to Mars, including six months of travel time each way, would expose an astronaut to nearly the lifetime limit of radiation allowed under NASA guidelines. The Moon, with no atmosphere, is more dangerous than the surface of Mars. Lunar forays will have to be brief unless expensive shielded habitats are built. Mission planners knew the Apollo astronauts would be at grave risk if a strong solar flare occurred during a mission. The short duration of each trip was a key to creating favorable odds. "A big solar event during one of those missions could have been catastrophic," said Cary Zeitlin, a radiation expert at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "The risk was known. They gambled a bit." Once again, the purpose of space travel is not to "do something really cool" It is to gain scientific understanding. Any other reason is pointless. A failed mission reduces the amount of scientific knowledge we gain. Risk is fine. People take risks everyday. Currently and ironically trying to go to Mars is like "shooting the moon." Huge risk with small odds of worthwhile reward.
As you later clarified, the missions you are referencing are irrelevant because they did not carry passengers. C'mon dude... Furthermore you are talking about automated landings for which we have a 20 minute delay before we even get any feedback during landing. Very different situations.
The big problem with risks is Money. Specifically tax payer dollars. If you want to toss a tin can on a trebuchet and try to launch yourself to Mars, be my guest. Not with tax payer dollars. Not until we know what to expect from a manned trip of that duration, and our confident that the trip will succeed in providing valuable research and experience. There's no point otherwise.
That's a gross over simplification. I recently saw an article about an ex-NASA astronaut that is developing a new type of rocket that could cut the travel time to Mars by 1/3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket It isn't just a matter of "We have the technology to get there" It is also a matter of "How can we get there and still be alive. The most dangerous part about a mission to Mars is getting there and back. There are so many threats presented by space travel and if we are going to try to travel to Mars, we damn well better actually make it there. The easiest way to reduce this risk is spending less time in space and that means getting there faster. So no, the technology is not ready, has not been ready, and will not be ready for a while. Just think about it. Imagine a micrometeor ends up being responsible for the failure of a project like this that cost billions. We still have a lot of issues to work out and a lot of knowledge to be gained. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrometeoroid
In the case of first person shooters and online gaming, people often gravitate to a select few maps. I see this a being similar games like soccer, football, basketball, in that you establish a playing field where both parties are very familiar and perform their best on. Switching up levels on the fly can be interesting for certain situations but disruptive in games that have high replay value with select few and well known maps.
This is a good thing. Apple has recently been bullying their competition, the suit against HTC. Remember Apple was sued over patent infringement on the Iphone. They settled out of court. They aren't even offering that possibility in their suit against HTC.
The suit against HTC is a semi-passive attack at Google. With the way Apple is behaving, I don't think google should put any of their products on the Iphone. Keep them on Android and continue to grow android as a very open platform. It's why I ditched the Iphone to begin with. A single company developing this kind of regulatory power over a large group of people is dangerous.
To any of you who for some reason think apple is some kind of enlightened company, you better hope they don't reach a personal computer market share large enough to entice the hackers...
"But I thought Macs don't get viruses," says the Apple fanboy.
WOW! The robot band at Chucky Cheese is going to be so psyched!
Cross platform support is not relevant when speaking of consoles. They are proprietary hardware. In the Case of PC's, the cross platform aspect is between OS's not between systems containing entirely different hardware.
This is only recently the case. OpenGL has had quite a sordid history. While Directx was a terrible API during it first few incarnations, Directx 8 - 11 have been very solid and offers features that OpenGL could not accomplish. OpenGL 3.0 was a hacked together mess and extremely late. Recently, OpenGL has shown great promise. OpenGL 3.2 addressed many issues but still did not compare feature-wise to Direct11. New with OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 there is a viable alternative t oDX11. But during the past couple years OpenGL has not been worth the trouble.
Reminds me of the PRISM reactors that have been in development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PRISM