I'm guessing traditional scrollbars don't work very well with a dynamically expanding+contracting collaborative message. You'd be chasing the scrollbar button all over as people add and delete chunks of text.
Agreed. I totally understand the necessity of charging for bandwidth, but they need to be honest about it. This is one of those unfortunate cases where no company wants to be the first to stop advertising "unlimited" and risk getting beat up for it by their (still-lying) competitors.
Right, but to this moment Google is still pretending they didn't hear it.
This is roughly akin to me leaving someone voicemail while you yell your password behind me. I'm not recording your password on purpose, I don't care about, and I'm not doing anything with it. But yes, if you go through my friend's voicemails you can hear some moron screaming his password in the background.
That doesn't make me "creepy and wrong", it just makes that moron a...well, moron.
Yes. Humans wouldn't be terribly interesting creatures if that's all they could do, would they? All we'd have in the world is 1 human, "Eve", who keeps dying after birthing a new Eve.
Now a human giving birth to *multiple* humans and then dying off? THAT is what makes life "life". I'm pretty sure this is the expected definition of self replication - an entity creating multiple copies of itself before dying. This gives us robust exponential growth. In the Eve scenario, as soon as any one Eve dies before giving birth, the entire "species" is dead.
The article is a bit mystifying, but it does refer several times to the original "gemini" being destroyed while a single new one is created. It also seems to require the "tape" of glider "bits" coming into it to create the copy, which makes it even less "replicating" than a basic glider.
It's more like kicking a very big pattern across the screen than it is "self-replication". Gemini moves from one location to another far away, and it required a swift kick to get it there. In this case the kicking is probably more interesting than the moving.
That's an awesome pattern for sure. But to be a self-replicating pattern, the glider-gun breeder would need to breed glider-gun breeders. (did I get that right?)
I still can't tell from the comments if the pattern in the article is *actually* self-replicating, or if it just destroys itself while creating a single copy. If that's all it does, this doesn't sound any more remarkable than your basic glider, which also "replicates and destroys itself" as it moves across the screen.
What is actually more interesting from reading TFA, is that he's feeding a tape of "instructions" into a turing machine. At least thats how the article makes it sound like this works. Other references in the article to non-destructive copies such as a photocopier sound like unwarranted sensationalism.
Wolfram is also referenced in the article as calling the "self-replicating pattern" unimpressive. He references a single-dimension automata that cycles through a pattern, effectively the same thing this much-much-more-elaborate pattern is doing.
Face it, in NO MMO whatsoever there is any skill. You need skill for chess, you need skill for throwing a disk far away, you don't need skill for an MMO,
If you're saying need, I would agree with you. WOW takes an interesting approach where anyone can play, but you're forced to make a tradeoff between skill and time.
A skilled player may level in 1/4th the time of a bad player. Skilled guild may finish their instance run in 1/3rd the time of a casual guild, where the casual guild may take 4 more hours for their run and still not finish the instance that week.
Everyone can play. But the better players get rewarded for being better, and the bad players don't hit a solid brick wall that makes them give up. Instead the bad players may hit a soft wall of corpse runs or slow leveling and eventually stop playing.
they are games of patience with trickle reward.
Agreed, all skill controls is the speed of the trickle. And there is no skill level at which it goes up from trickle to firehose-blast. Skill can get it up to maybe water fountain speed at best.
That's great pricing! I might've gone with an expensive Shuttle when I got mine because I wanted RAID at the time.
The new mac mini is less than half the size of a Shuttle, but this is one of the places (unlike cell phones) where size doesn't matter past a certain point. As long as it's quiet and doesn't look crappy, it'll work in the TV room.
Also - strongly agree on the expansion part. I put a Geforce7800 in my Shuttle and used it as my gaming PC for a couple years before retiring it to the family room.
But as commenters point out, it's still bigger/uglier than the mac mini, and the price gets close to the mac mini if you want similar hardware (core 2 duo).
I would never get one myself, but I imagine a large part of that pricing is getting that hardware in such a small package. I can get a Dell for $400 or $500 with similar specs, but it's a mid-tower with no hdmi port, not a 1.5" "entertainment center device".
I built a Shuttle SFF PC once, and the barebones kit started around $200-$400, and that's before dropping in a CPU and RAM. And again, it's at least 2-3 times the size of the mac mini, and doesn't come with an OS. I'm using XBMC currently, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
Agreed - it seems like you could make a very simple algorithm to ban an IP for X days if it gets skipped immediately by the partner a certain number of times in a row. You could even make a separate "offensive" skip button, to differentiate between genitals and, say, the person going to the kitchen for a drink and leaving chatroulette up.
Agreed. I don't know anyone who gets reliable reception anymore. We had to do the "dance around the room with the antenna" ritual to get a signal 1 night a week to watch LOST. After dealing with blank periods of missing signal and missing copious sections of the show, we gave up and now pay comcast for "basic cable", which actually reduced our monthly bill by a couple dollars. They give you a discount on internet of (say) $15 with any TV service, but then the basic cable costs $12. Go figure. Still a massive headache as they cut out our internet the first time they came by.
To this day I blame DTV for my not being able to figure out what happened on LOST.
Thanks for the followups. Gigantic mess is the best way to put it - auto-run simply should not be enabled by default, and XP should have a security update to disable it as well. It's such an obvious exploit mechanism, it's kind of unbelievable it's still around, even after the sony rootkit and other high profile exploits.
From what I recall of a few government classes in school, the interstate commerce clause is the (only?) wedge federal government has used to break into various matters that were pretty clearly intended to be reserved for the state to govern.
Are you suggesting that software contract violation is the only way Blizzard can prevent bots?
No, OP said "Of course they want to prevent bots, that's totally understandable." I took that to imply the OP thinks there is another course of legal action Blizzard should be taking instead of the copyright approach. No snottiness intended.
In this case I understand glider to be running WOW in emulation, essentially, which does make typical bot-detection methods rather fruitless.
Are you suggesting that there either is already or should be a different legal remedy for software contract violation other than copyright infringement?
Is it though? Is the workplace really private? How many millions of workers already have cameras pointed at them throughout the day, or most of the day? Every worker in retail, every worker in restaurants, most workers in office buildings. You'd almost have to ask "how many regular workers DONT have cameras pointed at them".
If this many workers are already being recorded in the workplace, I think police officers would be one of the LAST workers we would want to take cameras off of. As much for the officers' defense and pursuit of criminals as for prosecuting officers for wrongdoing.
When you have fiat currencies, central banks which can create money(wealth) out of thin air, and central banks/goverments which can the rules overnight and indulge in massive bailouts of the well connected, you start to notice real economies are pretty much the same kind of sham as virtual game economies, the stakes are just higher.
Agreed, I've seen some very real demonstrations of that in the current economy. Not to mention Wal-mart and the control it exerts over the companies it works with.
Slashdot Mirror
1) I keep an electronic printout for my personal records.
An electronic printout? You mean like "print to pdf"?
It reminds me of the story of the patent office (?) printing e-mails then scanning them back in. Or the Arlington Cemetary.
I don't have an iPad, but I do think printing in this day and age is utterly stupid.
(and nonetheless, sometimes necessary)
I'm guessing traditional scrollbars don't work very well with a dynamically expanding+contracting collaborative message. You'd be chasing the scrollbar button all over as people add and delete chunks of text.
Agreed. I totally understand the necessity of charging for bandwidth, but they need to be honest about it. This is one of those unfortunate cases where no company wants to be the first to stop advertising "unlimited" and risk getting beat up for it by their (still-lying) competitors.
Right, but to this moment Google is still pretending they didn't hear it.
This is roughly akin to me leaving someone voicemail while you yell your password behind me. I'm not recording your password on purpose, I don't care about, and I'm not doing anything with it. But yes, if you go through my friend's voicemails you can hear some moron screaming his password in the background.
That doesn't make me "creepy and wrong", it just makes that moron a...well, moron.
Konqueror/KDE in any version
Internet Explorer (any version) on Windows XP
Google Chrome on Windows XP
Safari on Windows XP
I get the impression that the products you're referring to are Konqueror and Windows XP?
That's a remarkably accurate and non-sensational description of what Gemini does. Thanks!
Yes. Humans wouldn't be terribly interesting creatures if that's all they could do, would they? All we'd have in the world is 1 human, "Eve", who keeps dying after birthing a new Eve.
Now a human giving birth to *multiple* humans and then dying off? THAT is what makes life "life". I'm pretty sure this is the expected definition of self replication - an entity creating multiple copies of itself before dying. This gives us robust exponential growth. In the Eve scenario, as soon as any one Eve dies before giving birth, the entire "species" is dead.
Wow. Thanks for the links!
The article is a bit mystifying, but it does refer several times to the original "gemini" being destroyed while a single new one is created. It also seems to require the "tape" of glider "bits" coming into it to create the copy, which makes it even less "replicating" than a basic glider.
It's more like kicking a very big pattern across the screen than it is "self-replication". Gemini moves from one location to another far away, and it required a swift kick to get it there. In this case the kicking is probably more interesting than the moving.
That's an awesome pattern for sure. But to be a self-replicating pattern, the glider-gun breeder would need to breed glider-gun breeders. (did I get that right?)
I still can't tell from the comments if the pattern in the article is *actually* self-replicating, or if it just destroys itself while creating a single copy. If that's all it does, this doesn't sound any more remarkable than your basic glider, which also "replicates and destroys itself" as it moves across the screen.
What is actually more interesting from reading TFA, is that he's feeding a tape of "instructions" into a turing machine. At least thats how the article makes it sound like this works. Other references in the article to non-destructive copies such as a photocopier sound like unwarranted sensationalism.
Wolfram is also referenced in the article as calling the "self-replicating pattern" unimpressive. He references a single-dimension automata that cycles through a pattern, effectively the same thing this much-much-more-elaborate pattern is doing.
I've heard about the Turing machine pattern, do you have a link about the pattern that emulates the game itself?
I searched some but only found your comment and various crawler-spam "fact" sites that crawled a page briefly mentioning such a pattern exists. :P
You would need a glider gun that shoots out more glider guns.
Which would be hella fun, actually.
Face it, in NO MMO whatsoever there is any skill. You need skill for chess, you need skill for throwing a disk far away, you don't need skill for an MMO,
If you're saying need, I would agree with you. WOW takes an interesting approach where anyone can play, but you're forced to make a tradeoff between skill and time.
A skilled player may level in 1/4th the time of a bad player. Skilled guild may finish their instance run in 1/3rd the time of a casual guild, where the casual guild may take 4 more hours for their run and still not finish the instance that week.
Everyone can play. But the better players get rewarded for being better, and the bad players don't hit a solid brick wall that makes them give up. Instead the bad players may hit a soft wall of corpse runs or slow leveling and eventually stop playing.
they are games of patience with trickle reward.
Agreed, all skill controls is the speed of the trickle. And there is no skill level at which it goes up from trickle to firehose-blast. Skill can get it up to maybe water fountain speed at best.
That's great pricing! I might've gone with an expensive Shuttle when I got mine because I wanted RAID at the time.
The new mac mini is less than half the size of a Shuttle, but this is one of the places (unlike cell phones) where size doesn't matter past a certain point. As long as it's quiet and doesn't look crappy, it'll work in the TV room.
Also - strongly agree on the expansion part. I put a Geforce7800 in my Shuttle and used it as my gaming PC for a couple years before retiring it to the family room.
Ack, just scrolled down and saw talk of the Dell Zino - never heard of that before:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1686750&cid=32577940
But as commenters point out, it's still bigger/uglier than the mac mini, and the price gets close to the mac mini if you want similar hardware (core 2 duo).
I would never get one myself, but I imagine a large part of that pricing is getting that hardware in such a small package. I can get a Dell for $400 or $500 with similar specs, but it's a mid-tower with no hdmi port, not a 1.5" "entertainment center device".
I built a Shuttle SFF PC once, and the barebones kit started around $200-$400, and that's before dropping in a CPU and RAM. And again, it's at least 2-3 times the size of the mac mini, and doesn't come with an OS. I'm using XBMC currently, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
Agreed - it seems like you could make a very simple algorithm to ban an IP for X days if it gets skipped immediately by the partner a certain number of times in a row. You could even make a separate "offensive" skip button, to differentiate between genitals and, say, the person going to the kitchen for a drink and leaving chatroulette up.
Agreed. I don't know anyone who gets reliable reception anymore. We had to do the "dance around the room with the antenna" ritual to get a signal 1 night a week to watch LOST. After dealing with blank periods of missing signal and missing copious sections of the show, we gave up and now pay comcast for "basic cable", which actually reduced our monthly bill by a couple dollars. They give you a discount on internet of (say) $15 with any TV service, but then the basic cable costs $12. Go figure. Still a massive headache as they cut out our internet the first time they came by.
To this day I blame DTV for my not being able to figure out what happened on LOST.
Thanks for the followups. Gigantic mess is the best way to put it - auto-run simply should not be enabled by default, and XP should have a security update to disable it as well. It's such an obvious exploit mechanism, it's kind of unbelievable it's still around, even after the sony rootkit and other high profile exploits.
Um, there IS a trial/inquest here. Why do you think Germany is looking at this information? And isn't the US House looking into it as well?
So as silly as it is, yes there is a trial. And yes, it is equally ridiculous when individuals are criminalized for doing the same thing.
From what I recall of a few government classes in school, the interstate commerce clause is the (only?) wedge federal government has used to break into various matters that were pretty clearly intended to be reserved for the state to govern.
Are you suggesting that software contract violation is the only way Blizzard can prevent bots?
No, OP said "Of course they want to prevent bots, that's totally understandable." I took that to imply the OP thinks there is another course of legal action Blizzard should be taking instead of the copyright approach. No snottiness intended.
In this case I understand glider to be running WOW in emulation, essentially, which does make typical bot-detection methods rather fruitless.
Are you suggesting that there either is already or should be a different legal remedy for software contract violation other than copyright infringement?
Is it though? Is the workplace really private? How many millions of workers already have cameras pointed at them throughout the day, or most of the day? Every worker in retail, every worker in restaurants, most workers in office buildings. You'd almost have to ask "how many regular workers DONT have cameras pointed at them".
If this many workers are already being recorded in the workplace, I think police officers would be one of the LAST workers we would want to take cameras off of. As much for the officers' defense and pursuit of criminals as for prosecuting officers for wrongdoing.
When you have fiat currencies, central banks which can create money(wealth) out of thin air, and central banks/goverments which can the rules overnight and indulge in massive bailouts of the well connected, you start to notice real economies are pretty much the same kind of sham as virtual game economies, the stakes are just higher.
Agreed, I've seen some very real demonstrations of that in the current economy. Not to mention Wal-mart and the control it exerts over the companies it works with.