This doesn't even count the fact that optical media is still subject to the same degradation and bitrot that tape is.
And anyone who thinks electromagnetic tape is "dead" is naive or just ignorant. People have been predicting the death of tape for decades, and it's no more true today than it was in the 70's. Modern EM tape is typically rated for 15 to 30 years of retention, and as long as it is not over-exposed to moisture during storage, it has proven to be able to last that long: otherwise, the manufacturers would be out of business because the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies - the majority of whom backup to tape and send it off-site - would have sued them to extinction.
"CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer. However, a variety of factors discussed in the sources cited in FAQ 15, below, may result in a much shorter life span for CDs/DVDs."
I'm not going to help edit, because I have little or no use for what common consensus is. I'm interested in fact and truth, not public opinion.
Q.E.D., you are, then, part of problem, and have no right to whine or complain because you can't be bothered to help fix it. Go use Britannica, then... which was found as late as 2005 to be generally no more accurate or reliable than the Wikipedia, with broadly similar error levels. Or how about Nature, who themselves state that retractions in their journal have risen ten-fold in the last decade, even while the number of submissions has only increased 50%. Because they're utterly reliable and the peer-review process can't be subverted, right? How many times was that now-discredited MMR vaccination study reprinted as golden gospel, for how many years? How many times has an outsider to academia and private industry journals made a stunning breakthrough that might have come sooner if only some critical bit information had been publicly available, instead of buried in a back-issue of a private publication? How many millions or billions of dollars have been wasted re-reviewing science that was based on something once taken for truth by the major journal in its field, only to later be proven false?
Like any other information source, Wikipedia will only be as correct and factual as the people contributing to it can muster, and without the help of subject matter experts determined to make sure the truth is told, it will be bottomed on the knowledge available; the Wikipedia, however, has a much larger pool of knowledge and experience available to it - if people choose to take part - than any journal or trade magazine. If people who have and can source/prove/demonstrate the facts on developing, highly technical or contentious subjects would commit to contributing as much to making sure the Wikipedia is accurate as they do to closed academic journals that no one but academics ever read, then we'd be in a much better place, with a better educated populace, as a result of access to true and up-to-date information, as opposed to last year's conjecture and common wisdom. For that matter, how many times did Britannica, for example, choose not to cover a subject - or not cover one in as much detail as was available - in order to conform to demands of governments and corporations, which do not affect the Wikipedia? Somehow I doubt they'd have ever penned more than a footnote - much less an entire article - about FOGBANK... oh wait, look, not even a footnote.
What would lead you to believe that a group of 10 supposed experts in a field editing at a journal are infallible and never make mistakes, but 100 or 1000 people - some of whom may also be just as expert, or even the same experts - cannot come just as close to truth and fact? What makes you think the scientific and history communities have more than a few dozen things they can all settle on as incontrovertible, accepted fact that no one can reasonably debate? Let me guess, you're the same anonymous coward that was arguing a few weeks ago that nobody can make money on making open-source software and that all FOSS sucks because only large corporations get anything done?
How about show me an established article in the Wikipedia - and not a revision someone is vandalizing - that is purporting something to be "fact" that is provably just "public opinion", and wrong at that... and I'll show you an article you should have just fixed, assuming you can demonstrate said fact from a reliable, neutral source. Otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude you're just mad because someone reverted your edits on an article when you tried to assert a claim on a debatable subject and couldn't back it up.
No, the answer is not for a bunch of people to elect another bunch of people via popularity contest to exercise power over everybody else, especially including the people who didn't want the people who got elected in the first place.
The better answer would be for people like yourself to, instead of throwing their hands in the air and blaming everybody but themselves for the problem, to actually get involved in efforts to combat those doing wrong, such as taking part in Wikipedia's anti-vandalism process, as opposed to just crying about evil corporations, etc.
Remember, governments aren't interested in people, they're interested in furthering themselves and their own authority. No matter the intentions they start with, democracies evolve into tyrannies nearly without fail: Plato pretty well nailed it with the Five Regimes. It's one thing when participation in a body with a government is voluntary, but when you propose to place everyone under your "protection", whether they want it or not, you're a mob with mafioso leanings at best.
If this is an issue of genuine concern to the Wikimedia Foundation and their leadership, they can alter their policies to combat it. I don't propose to know how best or even if they should do so, but they have the ability to respond as they see fit, and there are undoubtedly options they could pursue if the threat is great enough. Let them and their governing body choose whether to subject themselves to some other governing body or shielding organization, if they wish to abrogate their own control and responsibility, but to suggest everybody should be de facto subject to another group of people making decisions for nearly everyone else based on principles they may not share is how you get the mess we have with most of the world governments today.
Nice fallacy, namely your assertion that commercial vendors actually do any work, especially after-the-fact... you know, like all the updates MS has made to the registry editor over the years, or the extensive CLI functionality, and let us not forget their impressively powerful and flexible search/scheduling options they built into Outlook./sarcasm
You keep using that word ("you")... but I do not think it means what you think it means. I believe the word you're looking for is "I", because if your assertion were true, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD and many others wouldn't exist - or wouldn't exist as they do today - with a huge amount of software being continuously developed by people who are happy to keep doing it so they have the tools they want/need to do what they want to do.
Maybe *you* kept getting ripped off because you were doing it wrong. Meanwhile, I'm going to go have drinks with my buddies from Redhat who get paid perfectly well.
They ignored the Mechwarrior: Living Legends (aka MWLL) developers, its community, and everything that came before in every previous Mechwarrior game. I've got significant other dirt I could share, but will refrain so as not to burn bridges and put other people in uncomfortable situations, but suffice it to say they have shown themselves to be underhanded enough to threaten people's careers and industry connections if anyone in the know should dare to actually tell the truth about their behavior.
In any event, there has never been even a hint of a reason to believe that PGI has any interest in learning from the successes and failures of anyone else, that they have any interest in listening to or heeding the demands of the community - without whom there is no reason for their game to exist, and so this should be their highest priority - or has any desire to do anything but milk the Mechwarrior property - that they muscled a large team of devoted volunteer developers out of making a free game in because they were intimidated by their ability to produce high-quality work for free - of all the money they can.
As for Garnaralf's diatribe above:
The fact that it's selling means nothing. It's the first commercial Mechwarrior game - a series with hundreds of novels to its credit and a fan base spanning 30 years - since the atrocity that was MechAssault (aka MechAssFault or MechsAsFail) so it was unquestionably going to attract a large number of downloads (which means nothing. I presume they count my player account towards their playerbase, and I've never actually done anything more than register my user name) and user registrations. Making a game free to play also means nothing, and has no reflection on the goodness of the company making it: it's a viable business model, nothing more.
The LONGSTANDING Mechwarrior community (almost 30 years old now) has by and large shown nothing but hate and derision for 3rd Person Views, at the very least since Mechwarrior IV, where it was well known to be a game ruiner: the MWLL team patently refused to consider it; 90% of MWO's players, by PGI's own polls, said they did not want a 3rd Person View, and made it clear that if there was to be such a mode, they did not want to play in the same match as other people using it due to the fact that it breaks immersion, changes the tactical mechanic, and provides an unfair advantage to those using it over those who don't. So what did PGI do? Ignore them, implement it anyway, then lied about separating 1st/3rd person players into different matches, repeatedly: that's not the sign of a "good company". I'm not sure what else you're basing your assessment on besides the fact that they make a game of which you are clearly a player, but if anyone needs to put down the crack pipe and do a more thorough investigation of reality, it's probably you.
Where was PGI's social consciousness BEFORE a player's daughter passed from cancer that obviously resulted in a social media campaign that they elected to pile on to to improve their image? You *do* realize that they get a HUGE tax break for that, right? The amount of money a game earns for a charity by pulling on players heartstrings and offering them up something that took almost no effort or time on their part (did I mention I'm a texture artist with significant CryEngine experience as well as friends and professional contacts at CryTek? There is, maybe 20 minutes of texture work, *tops*, on that Jenner, and 5 minutes of XML to edit the weapons config, plus 10 minutes to commit it to the build) in return for that charity donation is also not an indicator of a company's goodness: how much of their own profits did they donate? How much did the owner and executive officers pony up out of their own pockets? How much is the company going to be donating - regardless of charities - to cancer prevention every year from now on?
No, without going into excessive detail or listing my qualifications (I know I have them, I was there, I was involved),
One of the prime edicts of journalism is that you write for your audience, at a level your audience can understand; if you put math in it, less than 1% of the people reading the article, even in the NYT, are going to take anything useful from it besides whatever claim the headline or opening paragraph asserts.
In general, this means that for reporting intended to be consumed by the masses - as opposed to that published in specialized industry journals where certain assumptions can be made about the reader's education level - we write at a 9th to 10th grade reading level. There was even a small amount of noise a while back about one of Obama's speeches that was written even further down at about an 8th grade level.
In effect, this means no, you don't publish articles in the NYT or even WSJ that rely on what is, even for most college-educated readers, NP-hard mathematics that will make no sense to most readers and do absolutely nothing but confuse everyone else, thus failing to communicate the ideas the story is trying to convey in the first place and defeating the purpose of having published it outside of academic journals. You publish in the NYT or the like to reach and spread your message to the widest possible readership, not to reach the handful of specialists in your field who understand the math in question. He's trying to educate people and get them to think, sure, but that doesn't mean that he realistically expect any non-trivial percentage of the intended audience to possess the education or background to be able to make use of anything but generalities and concepts, as opposed to the fine mathematical mechanics underlying his assertion.
I'm better educated than most of my peers - in general, anyway - and quite literate in scientific theories and principles, but I'm also not an engineer, physicist or mathematician, and if you write an article that relies high-order maths to explain its premise, not even I am going to get anything but the gist: I most certainly am not going to grok it any better for the inclusion of math. Of my group of friends, peers and co-workers, only a very small portion of even that bright group of people would benefit from it, at which point you're talking about a readership that is significantly less than 0.25% of the population.
Q.E.D., no, articles written for general or popular consumption that are not inherently targeted at a narrow readership with relevant expertise should not be founded or premised upon the use of math to explain or convey concepts.
LOL... "muck about", he says, as if that is relevant.
At least Unity lets you create and publish games, and for free at that. Go ahead and "muck about" in CryEngine, get something like the basis of a game conceptualized, start building and importing assets and writing code. Let me know how relevant or useful that is when you realize you need more than $1 million USD per license for CryEngine and everything you learned "mucking about" has no bearing on development processes or standards in an engine you can actually afford to release in without being owned by a AAA-class publisher or succeeding in a record-breaking Kickstarter. There's a REASON indie devs don't use CryEngine.
Because otherwise, CryEngine has little to no bearing on developing in any other engine. How do I know this? By spending 3 years as a member of the dev team for Mechwarrior: Living Legends, as well as being a developer at my own studio, working in... you guessed it, Unity3D. After the MWLL project wound down, a group of us set out to start our own studio, and even with numerous, highly-placed contacts at CryTek, we *still* chose Unity for a reason: value, because Unity is actually affordable by us merely mortal developers without Chris Roberts-like bank accounts and industry connections and multi-million dollar Kickstarters.
I could release a game in Unity tomorrow. It might look like crap and have bugs, but I canrelease and publish a game in 24 hours. CryEngine? HAH, good luck with that. At best, it still won't work or look any better than my Unity game would, due mainly to the quality and quantity of art that I could produce, which the engine has nothing to do with, and the amount of code I could pump out, which CryEngine doesn't just automagically make better. If you've never *worked* with CryEngine (ala, more than just "mucking about"), you simply aren't qualified to comment about features being locked away or unavailable in Unity, much less things just working, because no matter the features CryEngine might let you "muck about" with, they're not relevant if you can't afford the engine license in the first place. Despite what the fanboys think, CryEngine is not some shining bastion of game engine perfection that can do no wrong: and it is a giant square peg that fits in a giant square hole, filling a purpose, whereas Unity is a little more like a bunch of legos - the starter kit for which is FREE - that, when assembled, fit a series of differently shaped, if generally smaller holes, and it fits them well.
I doubt anyone who has actually published a title in CryEngine AND Unity would say this is is really anything more than and apples and oranges comparison at best, as they are different engines with different strengths and weaknesses, and they fill different niches within the game development community.
Nastygram sent to custserv@games-workshop.com telling them what I think of their parsimonious self-aggrandizement.
It's one thing to know you're annoying, it's another thing when the people you count on to buy your products start flooding your inbox TELLING you you're being obnoxious.
After all, the FCC says that a complaint from one person is the equivalent of 50,000 people (or somesuch ridiculous figure) who are just as upset but didn't or couldn't send a complaint, right? In any event, I'll not be buying their products until they can stop acting like greedy little children who think they own everything they can lay hands on or claim to, and I'll be encouraging others to do the same.
Indeed! What's not to LOVE about the idea of building a multi-billion dollar piece of scientific equipment whose scale qualifies it for one of the most mammoth--yet still delicate--engineering projects in human history, which depends critically on the entire thing staying in one piece (usually built below-ground) and in perfect alignment...
in one of the most seismologically active countries on the planet.
No... there's a lighthouse in the middle of Prussia. A white house in a, Red Square.
I'm living in films for the sake of Russia, a kino runner for the DDR, and the 52 daughters of the Revolution turn gold to chrome.
But seriously, lyrics to old goth songs notwithstanding... I know a lot of my fellow Americans are naive about a lot of things, but comparing our media, bad as it is, to China or Russia's, much less to North Korea's, of all places, is at best naive in the extreme, and a good sign someone has been drinking kool-aid they shouldn't be.
Do what I do for my textures, and embed a "watermark" of your signature or something similar deep into the final image where it can't / won't be seen by anybody who doesn't know where or what to look for, in multiple places where the pixels are conducive to such masquerading. It's almost a form of steganography, where the message to be sent is a verification of the authors' identity and claims of original work.
I do mine in such a way that even if I leave one such image that can be readily seen, there are at least a half dozen more than cannot be found without a side-by-side comparison of source and production images with and without the "watermarks" (impossible without someone getting hold of my.PSD's). Keep the true "source".psd for yourself, create another for disbursing to students that contains several "watermarks" with an extreme level of transparency well-blended into many or all of the layers so they'll have an example.psd to "reverse engineer", and then separately give them the actual un-watermarked original source images, which they should then be expected to chuse to assemble the final image themselves. You might even put an entirely separate watermark into the source images, so you can check to see which watermarks the submitted image has, as opposed to checking only for the source mark.
If they put in enough time and effort to actually successfully circumvent this technique by finding and either eliminating or duplicating all the various marks, then they've probably got the requisite skills to pass the original challenge... at least if you do it the way I do.
My "signature" is in at least 3 places in this image, buried deep in different layers with heavy transparency masks, and it would have to be altered drastically to be guaranteed to remove all traces of it.
Programmers and other I.T. professionals shun unions for one major reason: they are illogical, and make no sense, with no real purpose, value or function in a modern society with strong civil rights and a functioning legal system that will enforce the relevant laws that prevent the worst abuses and excesses. No one in the U.S. is compelled to work anywhere they do not want to, and all are free to leave their jobs for better ones, or to simply choose not to work for a bad one. The consequences of that action is purely their own, but you're still free to make the choice and determine that the pay is not worth the hardship. For us, already saddled with excess requirements, inefficient bureaucracies, non-IT literate management or corporate leadership, and everything else, this would just be intentionally putting more roadblocks and inefficiencies in the way of the very people whose job it is to leverage technology to make people more efficient, and Q.E.D., unions make no sense.
I'll be damned if I'm going to put myself in a position where I have to call someone at a union before I'm allowed to open up my PC or server case to add some more RAM, or before I can comment in some code, lest I inspire someone else's wrath or ire because I'm "threatening their job" by doing something that the union says only one person can do.
No one with the basic logic and reasoning skills necessary to pursue a successful career in computing--or any other scientific endeavor--who is not also blinded by some philosophical, religious or political propaganda could possibly perform an analysis of unions, both modern and historic, and come to the conclusion that they would be of any real benefit to themselves or their industry. Unions are just like licensing and regulation schemes that serve only as a form of protectionism from healthy competition in a free market, as well as protection from their own negligence and failure, making it difficult or outright impossible to hold them responsible for their own actions. Unions are in no way necessary to "protect workers' rights", as that is what the law is for, and what the law does,no to mention our system of political representation, whose job it is to change or introduce legislation that protects citizens. Add on top the modern advantages of educatoin for all who want it (and even for those who don't), and instantaneous communications / mass media, and the kinds of gross abuses that necessitated the rise of the first modern unions in the 30's are functionally impossible for a company to get away with these days: even Foxconn, in China of all places, finds itself unable to get away with such abuses unnoticed, yet it is exactly this kind of forced socialism that defines labor unions where such abuse becomes more possible. Let's also not forget that modern labor unions are almost indistinguishable from medieval European "Guilds" that were so reviled by the end of their time, and whose demise was in no small part responsible for the rise of modern industrialism.
Unions--membership in which, in states that support them, is generally compulsory... if you want to work, that is--have no place, benefit, or value in free market capitalism and a free and liberty-loving society. In the 30's and 40's, maybe, but those days are long since gone, and this is a different country today than it was then. They help no one but themselves, and too often are determined to be the parasite that kills the host. I simply cannot see how anyone with the capacity to work in computing for living could come to a different conclusion after an honest examination of the facts.
Oh, and in reply to Animats above... there's nothing there that shows that union as being of any tangible benefit to society at large, much less the field of animation, in a free society where people can choose their own employment at will: the guild outlived those other studios for one
Indeed, you are correct: my only claim in this regard was that it is the most often made request by backers, and this remains true with Star Citizen as well.
As a CryEngine developer myself, with several close contacts in both art and code at CryTek, well... let's just say that while I think it could be done, I'm not holding my breath either for a native *nix port of Star Citizen. That doesn't change the fact that no developer these days working on a new engine has any excuse for choosing DirectX over OpenGL.
There is no good reason not to develop on OpenGL, especially if you only have resources to develop for or the other, since OpenGL runs on anything, but DirectX restricts you specifically to Win* systems.
Major studios, however, can't seem to see the writing on the wall, much less read it, which is why indie studios and crowd-funding projects are taking the industry by storm, as witnessed with the recent campaigns for Planetary Annihilation, Project Eternity and the still-in-progress Star Citizen. On all of these projects (and many others besides), the number one request by backers or potential backers has consistently been for Linux and Mac support.
If you're a *nix user of any skill or experience and running Ubuntu who is genuinely concerned about performance and stability, you should probably be running Debian anyway and pointing to the Ubuntu repos for anything that might be missing or too old for your liking.
150 some posts, and not one mention (from any of them with a score of 2 or higher) mentioned gas-discharge tubes??
Surge protectors will not protect from lightning. No consumer-grade UPS on the market will survive or actually protect from a full-on lightning strike, nor will most consumer-grade "whole-house" systems.
The best thing you're likely to find that will ACTUALLY do the job requested is a gas-discharge tube.
Correct. I would never pay EA or the like a single dime more for a game than I have to, and I usually give them what they ask for only grudgingly.
OTOH, I have "overpaid" anywhere from 50% - 100% for every one of the 5 Humble Bundles I have purchased, not only willingly, but happily.
A little goodwill earned by treating the customer not just well, but better than you have to, will go a long way in not only earning repeat business, but in the customer overlooking when you occasionally get things wrong, or being willing to patronize your business even when they may not need to.
This may be a joke, but it is worth pointing out that the Plutonium used in RTGs is not fissile, and can't be used to make bombs. Pu-238 is only useful for RTGs. The isotope used in bombs is Pu-239, which is a common product of Uranium based reactors.
Producing Pu-238 is actually very difficult, as described in the above link. Unfortunately, the worlds supply is dwindling, and this endangers many upcoming space missions. One attractive option for creating more is to use Liquid fluoride thorium reactors, where Pu-238 is one of many useful products created.
It's also worth noting that you're talking about nuclear weapons. It can be used to make "dirty" bombs, however.
Really? Lucas isn't greedy? He musters the entire weight of his fortune, business and legal team against little guys selling bits of plastic; this is neither the first nor the only example of such behavior, as there is the beginnings of a clear pattern dating back to 1984 when he sued FASA Games over the use of the word "droid", leading to their game "BattleDroids" being renamed "BattleTech".
I appreciate your sentiment, and would agree that Lucas' ex-wife probably had a lot to do with his earlier films being any good (since none of his films since then haven't been), but regardless of his lifestyle, he's still a greedy, arrogant schmuck.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't even count the fact that optical media is still subject to the same degradation and bitrot that tape is.
And anyone who thinks electromagnetic tape is "dead" is naive or just ignorant. People have been predicting the death of tape for decades, and it's no more true today than it was in the 70's. Modern EM tape is typically rated for 15 to 30 years of retention, and as long as it is not over-exposed to moisture during storage, it has proven to be able to last that long: otherwise, the manufacturers would be out of business because the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies - the majority of whom backup to tape and send it off-site - would have sued them to extinction.
On the other hand, according to archives.gov:
"CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer. However, a variety of factors discussed in the sources cited in FAQ 15, below, may result in a much shorter life span for CDs/DVDs."
I'm not going to help edit, because I have little or no use for what common consensus is. I'm interested in fact and truth, not public opinion.
Q.E.D., you are, then, part of problem, and have no right to whine or complain because you can't be bothered to help fix it. Go use Britannica, then... which was found as late as 2005 to be generally no more accurate or reliable than the Wikipedia, with broadly similar error levels. Or how about Nature, who themselves state that retractions in their journal have risen ten-fold in the last decade, even while the number of submissions has only increased 50%. Because they're utterly reliable and the peer-review process can't be subverted, right? How many times was that now-discredited MMR vaccination study reprinted as golden gospel, for how many years? How many times has an outsider to academia and private industry journals made a stunning breakthrough that might have come sooner if only some critical bit information had been publicly available, instead of buried in a back-issue of a private publication? How many millions or billions of dollars have been wasted re-reviewing science that was based on something once taken for truth by the major journal in its field, only to later be proven false?
Like any other information source, Wikipedia will only be as correct and factual as the people contributing to it can muster, and without the help of subject matter experts determined to make sure the truth is told, it will be bottomed on the knowledge available; the Wikipedia, however, has a much larger pool of knowledge and experience available to it - if people choose to take part - than any journal or trade magazine. If people who have and can source/prove/demonstrate the facts on developing, highly technical or contentious subjects would commit to contributing as much to making sure the Wikipedia is accurate as they do to closed academic journals that no one but academics ever read, then we'd be in a much better place, with a better educated populace, as a result of access to true and up-to-date information, as opposed to last year's conjecture and common wisdom. For that matter, how many times did Britannica, for example, choose not to cover a subject - or not cover one in as much detail as was available - in order to conform to demands of governments and corporations, which do not affect the Wikipedia? Somehow I doubt they'd have ever penned more than a footnote - much less an entire article - about FOGBANK... oh wait, look, not even a footnote.
What would lead you to believe that a group of 10 supposed experts in a field editing at a journal are infallible and never make mistakes, but 100 or 1000 people - some of whom may also be just as expert, or even the same experts - cannot come just as close to truth and fact? What makes you think the scientific and history communities have more than a few dozen things they can all settle on as incontrovertible, accepted fact that no one can reasonably debate? Let me guess, you're the same anonymous coward that was arguing a few weeks ago that nobody can make money on making open-source software and that all FOSS sucks because only large corporations get anything done?
How about show me an established article in the Wikipedia - and not a revision someone is vandalizing - that is purporting something to be "fact" that is provably just "public opinion", and wrong at that... and I'll show you an article you should have just fixed, assuming you can demonstrate said fact from a reliable, neutral source. Otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude you're just mad because someone reverted your edits on an article when you tried to assert a claim on a debatable subject and couldn't back it up.
I'd also really like to se
No, the answer is not for a bunch of people to elect another bunch of people via popularity contest to exercise power over everybody else, especially including the people who didn't want the people who got elected in the first place.
The better answer would be for people like yourself to, instead of throwing their hands in the air and blaming everybody but themselves for the problem, to actually get involved in efforts to combat those doing wrong, such as taking part in Wikipedia's anti-vandalism process, as opposed to just crying about evil corporations, etc.
Remember, governments aren't interested in people, they're interested in furthering themselves and their own authority. No matter the intentions they start with, democracies evolve into tyrannies nearly without fail: Plato pretty well nailed it with the Five Regimes. It's one thing when participation in a body with a government is voluntary, but when you propose to place everyone under your "protection", whether they want it or not, you're a mob with mafioso leanings at best.
If this is an issue of genuine concern to the Wikimedia Foundation and their leadership, they can alter their policies to combat it. I don't propose to know how best or even if they should do so, but they have the ability to respond as they see fit, and there are undoubtedly options they could pursue if the threat is great enough. Let them and their governing body choose whether to subject themselves to some other governing body or shielding organization, if they wish to abrogate their own control and responsibility, but to suggest everybody should be de facto subject to another group of people making decisions for nearly everyone else based on principles they may not share is how you get the mess we have with most of the world governments today.
Nice fallacy, namely your assertion that commercial vendors actually do any work, especially after-the-fact... you know, like all the updates MS has made to the registry editor over the years, or the extensive CLI functionality, and let us not forget their impressively powerful and flexible search/scheduling options they built into Outlook. /sarcasm
You keep using that word ("you")... but I do not think it means what you think it means. I believe the word you're looking for is "I", because if your assertion were true, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD and many others wouldn't exist - or wouldn't exist as they do today - with a huge amount of software being continuously developed by people who are happy to keep doing it so they have the tools they want/need to do what they want to do.
Maybe *you* kept getting ripped off because you were doing it wrong. Meanwhile, I'm going to go have drinks with my buddies from Redhat who get paid perfectly well.
Leicester is correctly pronounced "lay-ses-ter".
No it isn't. It's pronounced "les-ter".
Source: I've been there. Also, this.
Mod parent +5 Sane and Cogent.
In any event, there has never been even a hint of a reason to believe that PGI has any interest in learning from the successes and failures of anyone else, that they have any interest in listening to or heeding the demands of the community - without whom there is no reason for their game to exist, and so this should be their highest priority - or has any desire to do anything but milk the Mechwarrior property - that they muscled a large team of devoted volunteer developers out of making a free game in because they were intimidated by their ability to produce high-quality work for free - of all the money they can.
As for Garnaralf's diatribe above:
The fact that it's selling means nothing. It's the first commercial Mechwarrior game - a series with hundreds of novels to its credit and a fan base spanning 30 years - since the atrocity that was MechAssault (aka MechAssFault or MechsAsFail) so it was unquestionably going to attract a large number of downloads (which means nothing. I presume they count my player account towards their playerbase, and I've never actually done anything more than register my user name) and user registrations. Making a game free to play also means nothing, and has no reflection on the goodness of the company making it: it's a viable business model, nothing more.
The LONGSTANDING Mechwarrior community (almost 30 years old now) has by and large shown nothing but hate and derision for 3rd Person Views, at the very least since Mechwarrior IV, where it was well known to be a game ruiner: the MWLL team patently refused to consider it; 90% of MWO's players, by PGI's own polls, said they did not want a 3rd Person View, and made it clear that if there was to be such a mode, they did not want to play in the same match as other people using it due to the fact that it breaks immersion, changes the tactical mechanic, and provides an unfair advantage to those using it over those who don't. So what did PGI do? Ignore them, implement it anyway, then lied about separating 1st/3rd person players into different matches, repeatedly: that's not the sign of a "good company". I'm not sure what else you're basing your assessment on besides the fact that they make a game of which you are clearly a player, but if anyone needs to put down the crack pipe and do a more thorough investigation of reality, it's probably you.
Where was PGI's social consciousness BEFORE a player's daughter passed from cancer that obviously resulted in a social media campaign that they elected to pile on to to improve their image? You *do* realize that they get a HUGE tax break for that, right? The amount of money a game earns for a charity by pulling on players heartstrings and offering them up something that took almost no effort or time on their part (did I mention I'm a texture artist with significant CryEngine experience as well as friends and professional contacts at CryTek? There is, maybe 20 minutes of texture work, *tops*, on that Jenner, and 5 minutes of XML to edit the weapons config, plus 10 minutes to commit it to the build) in return for that charity donation is also not an indicator of a company's goodness: how much of their own profits did they donate? How much did the owner and executive officers pony up out of their own pockets? How much is the company going to be donating - regardless of charities - to cancer prevention every year from now on?
No, without going into excessive detail or listing my qualifications (I know I have them, I was there, I was involved),
One of the prime edicts of journalism is that you write for your audience, at a level your audience can understand; if you put math in it, less than 1% of the people reading the article, even in the NYT, are going to take anything useful from it besides whatever claim the headline or opening paragraph asserts.
In general, this means that for reporting intended to be consumed by the masses - as opposed to that published in specialized industry journals where certain assumptions can be made about the reader's education level - we write at a 9th to 10th grade reading level. There was even a small amount of noise a while back about one of Obama's speeches that was written even further down at about an 8th grade level.
In effect, this means no, you don't publish articles in the NYT or even WSJ that rely on what is, even for most college-educated readers, NP-hard mathematics that will make no sense to most readers and do absolutely nothing but confuse everyone else, thus failing to communicate the ideas the story is trying to convey in the first place and defeating the purpose of having published it outside of academic journals. You publish in the NYT or the like to reach and spread your message to the widest possible readership, not to reach the handful of specialists in your field who understand the math in question. He's trying to educate people and get them to think, sure, but that doesn't mean that he realistically expect any non-trivial percentage of the intended audience to possess the education or background to be able to make use of anything but generalities and concepts, as opposed to the fine mathematical mechanics underlying his assertion.
I'm better educated than most of my peers - in general, anyway - and quite literate in scientific theories and principles, but I'm also not an engineer, physicist or mathematician, and if you write an article that relies high-order maths to explain its premise, not even I am going to get anything but the gist: I most certainly am not going to grok it any better for the inclusion of math. Of my group of friends, peers and co-workers, only a very small portion of even that bright group of people would benefit from it, at which point you're talking about a readership that is significantly less than 0.25% of the population.
Q.E.D., no, articles written for general or popular consumption that are not inherently targeted at a narrow readership with relevant expertise should not be founded or premised upon the use of math to explain or convey concepts.
Because this is a valid, independent 3rd-party poll that can't be manipulated by the government, so its data *must* be relevant... right???
LOL... "muck about", he says, as if that is relevant.
At least Unity lets you create and publish games, and for free at that. Go ahead and "muck about" in CryEngine, get something like the basis of a game conceptualized, start building and importing assets and writing code. Let me know how relevant or useful that is when you realize you need more than $1 million USD per license for CryEngine and everything you learned "mucking about" has no bearing on development processes or standards in an engine you can actually afford to release in without being owned by a AAA-class publisher or succeeding in a record-breaking Kickstarter. There's a REASON indie devs don't use CryEngine.
Because otherwise, CryEngine has little to no bearing on developing in any other engine. How do I know this? By spending 3 years as a member of the dev team for Mechwarrior: Living Legends, as well as being a developer at my own studio, working in... you guessed it, Unity3D. After the MWLL project wound down, a group of us set out to start our own studio, and even with numerous, highly-placed contacts at CryTek, we *still* chose Unity for a reason: value, because Unity is actually affordable by us merely mortal developers without Chris Roberts-like bank accounts and industry connections and multi-million dollar Kickstarters.
I could release a game in Unity tomorrow. It might look like crap and have bugs, but I can release and publish a game in 24 hours. CryEngine? HAH, good luck with that. At best, it still won't work or look any better than my Unity game would, due mainly to the quality and quantity of art that I could produce, which the engine has nothing to do with, and the amount of code I could pump out, which CryEngine doesn't just automagically make better. If you've never *worked* with CryEngine (ala, more than just "mucking about"), you simply aren't qualified to comment about features being locked away or unavailable in Unity, much less things just working, because no matter the features CryEngine might let you "muck about" with, they're not relevant if you can't afford the engine license in the first place. Despite what the fanboys think, CryEngine is not some shining bastion of game engine perfection that can do no wrong: and it is a giant square peg that fits in a giant square hole, filling a purpose, whereas Unity is a little more like a bunch of legos - the starter kit for which is FREE - that, when assembled, fit a series of differently shaped, if generally smaller holes, and it fits them well.
I doubt anyone who has actually published a title in CryEngine AND Unity would say this is is really anything more than and apples and oranges comparison at best, as they are different engines with different strengths and weaknesses, and they fill different niches within the game development community.
Nastygram sent to custserv@games-workshop.com telling them what I think of their parsimonious self-aggrandizement.
It's one thing to know you're annoying, it's another thing when the people you count on to buy your products start flooding your inbox TELLING you you're being obnoxious.
After all, the FCC says that a complaint from one person is the equivalent of 50,000 people (or somesuch ridiculous figure) who are just as upset but didn't or couldn't send a complaint, right? In any event, I'll not be buying their products until they can stop acting like greedy little children who think they own everything they can lay hands on or claim to, and I'll be encouraging others to do the same.
Indeed! What's not to LOVE about the idea of building a multi-billion dollar piece of scientific equipment whose scale qualifies it for one of the most mammoth--yet still delicate--engineering projects in human history, which depends critically on the entire thing staying in one piece (usually built below-ground) and in perfect alignment...
in one of the most seismologically active countries on the planet.
Brilliant!
No... there's a lighthouse in the middle of Prussia. A white house in a, Red Square.
I'm living in films for the sake of Russia, a kino runner for the DDR, and the 52 daughters of the Revolution turn gold to chrome.
But seriously, lyrics to old goth songs notwithstanding... I know a lot of my fellow Americans are naive about a lot of things, but comparing our media, bad as it is, to China or Russia's, much less to North Korea's, of all places, is at best naive in the extreme, and a good sign someone has been drinking kool-aid they shouldn't be.
Do what I do for my textures, and embed a "watermark" of your signature or something similar deep into the final image where it can't / won't be seen by anybody who doesn't know where or what to look for, in multiple places where the pixels are conducive to such masquerading. It's almost a form of steganography, where the message to be sent is a verification of the authors' identity and claims of original work.
I do mine in such a way that even if I leave one such image that can be readily seen, there are at least a half dozen more than cannot be found without a side-by-side comparison of source and production images with and without the "watermarks" (impossible without someone getting hold of my .PSD's). Keep the true "source" .psd for yourself, create another for disbursing to students that contains several "watermarks" with an extreme level of transparency well-blended into many or all of the layers so they'll have an example .psd to "reverse engineer", and then separately give them the actual un-watermarked original source images, which they should then be expected to chuse to assemble the final image themselves. You might even put an entirely separate watermark into the source images, so you can check to see which watermarks the submitted image has, as opposed to checking only for the source mark.
If they put in enough time and effort to actually successfully circumvent this technique by finding and either eliminating or duplicating all the various marks, then they've probably got the requisite skills to pass the original challenge... at least if you do it the way I do.
My "signature" is in at least 3 places in this image, buried deep in different layers with heavy transparency masks, and it would have to be altered drastically to be guaranteed to remove all traces of it.
Programmers and other I.T. professionals shun unions for one major reason: they are illogical, and make no sense, with no real purpose, value or function in a modern society with strong civil rights and a functioning legal system that will enforce the relevant laws that prevent the worst abuses and excesses. No one in the U.S. is compelled to work anywhere they do not want to, and all are free to leave their jobs for better ones, or to simply choose not to work for a bad one. The consequences of that action is purely their own, but you're still free to make the choice and determine that the pay is not worth the hardship. For us, already saddled with excess requirements, inefficient bureaucracies, non-IT literate management or corporate leadership, and everything else, this would just be intentionally putting more roadblocks and inefficiencies in the way of the very people whose job it is to leverage technology to make people more efficient, and Q.E.D., unions make no sense.
I'll be damned if I'm going to put myself in a position where I have to call someone at a union before I'm allowed to open up my PC or server case to add some more RAM, or before I can comment in some code, lest I inspire someone else's wrath or ire because I'm "threatening their job" by doing something that the union says only one person can do.
No one with the basic logic and reasoning skills necessary to pursue a successful career in computing--or any other scientific endeavor--who is not also blinded by some philosophical, religious or political propaganda could possibly perform an analysis of unions, both modern and historic, and come to the conclusion that they would be of any real benefit to themselves or their industry. Unions are just like licensing and regulation schemes that serve only as a form of protectionism from healthy competition in a free market, as well as protection from their own negligence and failure, making it difficult or outright impossible to hold them responsible for their own actions. Unions are in no way necessary to "protect workers' rights", as that is what the law is for, and what the law does,no to mention our system of political representation, whose job it is to change or introduce legislation that protects citizens. Add on top the modern advantages of educatoin for all who want it (and even for those who don't), and instantaneous communications / mass media, and the kinds of gross abuses that necessitated the rise of the first modern unions in the 30's are functionally impossible for a company to get away with these days: even Foxconn, in China of all places, finds itself unable to get away with such abuses unnoticed, yet it is exactly this kind of forced socialism that defines labor unions where such abuse becomes more possible. Let's also not forget that modern labor unions are almost indistinguishable from medieval European "Guilds" that were so reviled by the end of their time, and whose demise was in no small part responsible for the rise of modern industrialism.
Unions--membership in which, in states that support them, is generally compulsory... if you want to work, that is--have no place, benefit, or value in free market capitalism and a free and liberty-loving society. In the 30's and 40's, maybe, but those days are long since gone, and this is a different country today than it was then. They help no one but themselves, and too often are determined to be the parasite that kills the host. I simply cannot see how anyone with the capacity to work in computing for living could come to a different conclusion after an honest examination of the facts.
Oh, and in reply to Animats above... there's nothing there that shows that union as being of any tangible benefit to society at large, much less the field of animation, in a free society where people can choose their own employment at will: the guild outlived those other studios for one
Indeed, you are correct: my only claim in this regard was that it is the most often made request by backers, and this remains true with Star Citizen as well.
As a CryEngine developer myself, with several close contacts in both art and code at CryTek, well... let's just say that while I think it could be done, I'm not holding my breath either for a native *nix port of Star Citizen. That doesn't change the fact that no developer these days working on a new engine has any excuse for choosing DirectX over OpenGL.
There is no good reason not to develop on OpenGL, especially if you only have resources to develop for or the other, since OpenGL runs on anything, but DirectX restricts you specifically to Win* systems.
Major studios, however, can't seem to see the writing on the wall, much less read it, which is why indie studios and crowd-funding projects are taking the industry by storm, as witnessed with the recent campaigns for Planetary Annihilation, Project Eternity and the still-in-progress Star Citizen. On all of these projects (and many others besides), the number one request by backers or potential backers has consistently been for Linux and Mac support.
Add to that the fact that from the very beginning of the Humble Bundle program, Linux users have consistently donated more for their games (and significantly so) than Windows and Mac users, and there can be no question that just because they use a free OS, Linux users are more than willing to pay for games they can play natively, and developing for it is just a good idea all around: better performance, wider market, less licensing hassle... what's to lose?
If you're a *nix user of any skill or experience and running Ubuntu who is genuinely concerned about performance and stability, you should probably be running Debian anyway and pointing to the Ubuntu repos for anything that might be missing or too old for your liking.
News flash: Warren Buffet unsustainable, irrelevant.
Not news: No one cares what he thinks, and no one cares about his news services and the combination of drivel, pablum and feces they spew.
150 some posts, and not one mention (from any of them with a score of 2 or higher) mentioned gas-discharge tubes?? Surge protectors will not protect from lightning. No consumer-grade UPS on the market will survive or actually protect from a full-on lightning strike, nor will most consumer-grade "whole-house" systems. The best thing you're likely to find that will ACTUALLY do the job requested is a gas-discharge tube.
Correct. I would never pay EA or the like a single dime more for a game than I have to, and I usually give them what they ask for only grudgingly. OTOH, I have "overpaid" anywhere from 50% - 100% for every one of the 5 Humble Bundles I have purchased, not only willingly, but happily. A little goodwill earned by treating the customer not just well, but better than you have to, will go a long way in not only earning repeat business, but in the customer overlooking when you occasionally get things wrong, or being willing to patronize your business even when they may not need to.
Gravity is a harsh mistress.
This may be a joke, but it is worth pointing out that the Plutonium used in RTGs is not fissile, and can't be used to make bombs. Pu-238 is only useful for RTGs. The isotope used in bombs is Pu-239, which is a common product of Uranium based reactors.
Producing Pu-238 is actually very difficult, as described in the above link. Unfortunately, the worlds supply is dwindling, and this endangers many upcoming space missions. One attractive option for creating more is to use Liquid fluoride thorium reactors, where Pu-238 is one of many useful products created.
It's also worth noting that you're talking about nuclear weapons. It can be used to make "dirty" bombs, however.
According to the Merman religion they get 17 sturgeons in the afterlife if the die whilst killing the land people.
Virgin sturgeon, at that.
Really? Lucas isn't greedy? He musters the entire weight of his fortune, business and legal team against little guys selling bits of plastic; this is neither the first nor the only example of such behavior, as there is the beginnings of a clear pattern dating back to 1984 when he sued FASA Games over the use of the word "droid", leading to their game "BattleDroids" being renamed "BattleTech". I appreciate your sentiment, and would agree that Lucas' ex-wife probably had a lot to do with his earlier films being any good (since none of his films since then haven't been), but regardless of his lifestyle, he's still a greedy, arrogant schmuck.