How is it that astronauts managed to land on the moon in 1969 but the next mission to get people to the moon will take until 2020? With today's engineering tech - CFD software, advanced materials science, VR simulation, rapid prototyping technology - and lots of commercial sattelites shot into space every year, it should be much easier to get people to the moon and back safely than it must have been in the 60s. Unless of course that landing was faked as some people allege.
Every 3D input device created over the last 15 years has failed without exception. They were either too expensive (datagloves for VR, various space navigator gizmos for CAD), or too crappy to be of any use (P5 glove?), or died because of lack of driver/software support.
So if anyone wants to create a 3D input device that actually gets used by more than 5 people a) design it so it actually works well b) don't overprice it c) don't count on game or software companies to "support" it unless you create a really easy way for software to interface with your device.
As for cellphones being used as a 3D wand, that sounds like a marketing gimmick to me, and a stupid one at that.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the U.S. is a signatory
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm#art17
>> Article 17
>> 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.
>> 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
also interesting
>> Article 7
>> No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.
and
>> Article 20
>> 1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.
Its a motor assisted weight lifting harness ("exoskeleton"? come on...) for aging farmers who struggle with manual farming tasks due to decreased muscle strength. Given the average height of the generation its aimed at and the tasks its designed for (pulling radishes out of the ground, lifting 10Kg sacks of rice) it hardly amounts to Robocop or Gundam.
Nevertheless I hope it doesn't run Windows as its OS, if it has an OS. I would hate to see elderly farmers brought into hospitals with their limbs rotated at strange angles.
Now there's an idea. Any film that doesn't meet minimum quality standards for script, acting, direction and intellectual depth could be electronically tagged and filtered away at ISP level like spam. Web pages wouldn't display flash ads for grotesquely commercial tripe masquerading as a "film". And if you accidentally bought a bad film at an online store, your ISP would automatically swap it out with a good one. What a wonderful service that would be.
The film industry doesn't want to cost the film viewers billions of dollars and countless lost viewing hours that result from bad movies every year. It happens purely by accident, and filtering the bad stuff out at ISP level would be a win-win situation for everyone. =)
Time to lay off the MBA's and producer types and marketing droids and hand game development back to people who can save it. That, ladies and gentlemen of the game industry, would be actual game developers. You know, the guys who sit there and actually write some code. Gamers are tired of your self-aggrandizing interviews, your stupid "nextgen" marketing tripe, your "HD gameplay" trailers, your turning gameplay to shit to promote games that play like GFX demos, your being in bed with M$/Nvidia/ATI to force DX10 on people, your multiple 200Mb patches to get a relatively simple game working. Your everything I guess. You've taken the most fun, creative area of computing and turned it into a shallow, infantile, one dimensional "who cares as long as we're earning money" money-shoot. You've lied to people. You've earned money you don't deserve. And quite frankly, if your main target audience weren't impressionable teens, you'd be royally screwed as industry now. You would have been sued many times over for the lacking quality of your games.
The DRM in Bioshock is an industry first (and hopefully last) on PC. A game that stealth installs a DRM software, counts the number of times it has been installed/uninstalled, and is designed to then commit Harakiri. How wonderful. A $50 game with a self-destruct mechanism built in. Next is the obviously missing widescreen aspect support. Everybody noticed it immediately. But 2K denied there was a problem and kept claiming that the game was tested on and developed for Widescreen. Just as they made a lot of angry posts about the forced DRM disappear.
Then there's the exquisitely dumb AI, the not quite optimized Unreal Engine 3, the crappy console interface for the plasmids and inventory ported as-is from Xbox to PC, the woefully inaccurate weapons, the lack of environment destructibility and the really short singple player game with little replay value.
All in all, the package doesn't rate above 70% despite the polished sound, music and graphics. And that's generous for a game that is so callously DRM'd. I hope they learn from their mistakes for the sequel.
Crysis was released as a buggy beta, with all of the nice plant/objects physics intentionally disabled in DX9 multiplayer (EA/Microsoft want you to buy Vista/DX10 to get that...) and a rushed feel and gamelogic bugs in the last half of the single player game. Result? 92% overall rating on Metacritic, indicating rave reviews all around.
Bioshock was shipped with a really nasty DRM software made by Sony DADC, mandatory internet activation, a 5x limit on installs and uninstalls, no multiplayer, no widescreen support and garbageworthy framerates or crashes on a lot of hardware. Result? 96% overall on Metacritic, indicating fantastic reviews all around.
Unreal Tournament III. Crashcity on many hardware configurations. GPU post-processing that makes everything look blurry. Just like Crysis and Bioshock, a forum full of disappointed or angry customers. Metacritic rating? 85%. Good to very good reviews all around.
All of these games were promoted like crazy, rushed out the door with serious flaws, and the glowing reviews for them have obviously been paid for in hard cash. If you doubt it, Google for "Crysis support forum" "Bioshock support forum" and "Unreal Tournament III support forum". Count the number of people who have serious problems with these games or are angry about the state they were released in.
So yes, game reviews are bought and corruption is the norm rather than an exception in the game industry. No doubt in my mind about that.
Why not a standalone email system? Because Google wants your data going through its servers. Everything Google does has a "logging" "crawling" or "indexing" hook to it that involves the Google infrastructure.
Plus a standalone email system could be decompiled to see what's in it. What happens on Google's servers stays on Google's servers. And quite frankly nobody knows what happens on Google's servers. Not Google users. Not IT specialists. Not privacy experts. Millions of people simply "trust" Google in ways they wouldn't trust a lot of other IT companies.
>> It is speedy, it is ubiquitous, and it is cost effective. If students have privacy concerns they can learn how to forward stuff to a POP account someplace else and delete the mail from the gmail box.
And you believe that hitting 'delete' in the GMail web interface deletes it from the Gmail server? I doubt that. A company that lives from advertising is likely to keep that email as long as it can to analyze long term trends in your messaging habits or in case a data mining algorithm comes along that makes better sense of your historic data.
I would put my money on emails staying in the system for 2 - 3 years.
That's a fairly dumb move I'm afraid. Students will use GMail like a harddrive. They will store their project notes, research writeups and everything else in that account. Once that stuff is in a GMail server, it can be keyword searched to look for research in specific areas and on given topics. And very quickly too, because the Advertising bots will already have indexed the emails for keywords.
When something patentable comes of that research, you may find some obscure company outside Ireland has already filed a patent application for it or something pretty similar. And you will never be able to prove that what you stored in your GMail account wandered, because, you know, Google just doesn't do that kind of thing.
Google has a curious obsession with indexing people's data. The desktop search tool, the gigabyte email accounts, the moves into mobile telephony and storing people's data offsite. A company that wants to get into that stuff needs to be auditable. Google, to the best of my knowledge, has never been subjected to an independent 3rd party audit into how it handles data. They could move terabytes from servers in Europe to servers in the U.S. and you wouldn't hear a thing about it. Just the usual. Google does no evil.
In Europe institutions of higher learning go out of their way to keep corporate fingers away from their students. They don't give information on their students to recruiters, even though recruiters certainly want to know who's "top of class" and how to get to them. They also provide legal advice and assistance to their students. If a student gets pulled into a serious lawsuit and especially an unfair lawsuit, the law department is likely to step in and defend the student.
Handing the emails of thousands of students to companies like Google and MS? That would cause a student protest and lecture walkout large enough to shut down the university and meet with protests from the lecturers and teaching staff as well.
So what the hell is wrong with these colleges? Too cheap to maintain a few e-mail servers? Under political pressure to make student e-mails "accessible" to shadowy third parties? How can you hand thousands of student email accounts to for-profit entities outside the university and still protect your students' basic privacy rights?
Slashdot Mirror
How is it that astronauts managed to land on the moon in 1969 but the next mission to get people to the moon will take until 2020? With today's engineering tech - CFD software, advanced materials science, VR simulation, rapid prototyping technology - and lots of commercial sattelites shot into space every year, it should be much easier to get people to the moon and back safely than it must have been in the 60s. Unless of course that landing was faked as some people allege.
Every 3D input device created over the last 15 years has failed without exception. They were either too expensive (datagloves for VR, various space navigator gizmos for CAD), or too crappy to be of any use (P5 glove?), or died because of lack of driver/software support.
So if anyone wants to create a 3D input device that actually gets used by more than 5 people a) design it so it actually works well b) don't overprice it c) don't count on game or software companies to "support" it unless you create a really easy way for software to interface with your device.
As for cellphones being used as a 3D wand, that sounds like a marketing gimmick to me, and a stupid one at that.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the U.S. is a signatory http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm#art17 >> Article 17 >> 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. >> 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. also interesting >> Article 7 >> No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation. and >> Article 20 >> 1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.
Its a motor assisted weight lifting harness ("exoskeleton"? come on...) for aging farmers who struggle with manual farming tasks due to decreased muscle strength. Given the average height of the generation its aimed at and the tasks its designed for (pulling radishes out of the ground, lifting 10Kg sacks of rice) it hardly amounts to Robocop or Gundam. Nevertheless I hope it doesn't run Windows as its OS, if it has an OS. I would hate to see elderly farmers brought into hospitals with their limbs rotated at strange angles.
This one would probably give the whole family nightmares... http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x25zzd_babyrobot-made-in-japan_news
I think its pretty easy to see why it was so popular. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5_ZiNXsA5c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhNJ0ifIZJo&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPHCLPlWIA0&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY2gK1MPgh8&feature=related
In Soviet XML, ISO falls through YOU!
genius. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADvKn2fRWFs
government host your files for free +)
In Soviet Russia the crowd sources YOU!
oops. gave the prize away early. Now I'll expect a DirectX11 wrapper for Windows 2000 on top of the initial assignment. Hurry up. Time is code! +P
Anyone who can turn this into Crysis 2 by noon tomorrow gets a lolipop and a free In Soviet Russia joke
DEF width = 1280
DEF height = 800
OPENCONSOLE
IF CREATESCREEN(width,height,16) 0
MESSAGEBOX NULL,"Failed to create DirectX screen","Error"
END
ENDIF
FILLSCREEN RGB(255,255,255)
sx = 0.1f
sy = 0.2f
speed = 1
Now there's an idea. Any film that doesn't meet minimum quality standards for script, acting, direction and intellectual depth could be electronically tagged and filtered away at ISP level like spam. Web pages wouldn't display flash ads for grotesquely commercial tripe masquerading as a "film". And if you accidentally bought a bad film at an online store, your ISP would automatically swap it out with a good one. What a wonderful service that would be. The film industry doesn't want to cost the film viewers billions of dollars and countless lost viewing hours that result from bad movies every year. It happens purely by accident, and filtering the bad stuff out at ISP level would be a win-win situation for everyone. =)
Time to lay off the MBA's and producer types and marketing droids and hand game development back to people who can save it. That, ladies and gentlemen of the game industry, would be actual game developers. You know, the guys who sit there and actually write some code. Gamers are tired of your self-aggrandizing interviews, your stupid "nextgen" marketing tripe, your "HD gameplay" trailers, your turning gameplay to shit to promote games that play like GFX demos, your being in bed with M$/Nvidia/ATI to force DX10 on people, your multiple 200Mb patches to get a relatively simple game working. Your everything I guess. You've taken the most fun, creative area of computing and turned it into a shallow, infantile, one dimensional "who cares as long as we're earning money" money-shoot. You've lied to people. You've earned money you don't deserve. And quite frankly, if your main target audience weren't impressionable teens, you'd be royally screwed as industry now. You would have been sued many times over for the lacking quality of your games.
The DRM in Bioshock is an industry first (and hopefully last) on PC. A game that stealth installs a DRM software, counts the number of times it has been installed/uninstalled, and is designed to then commit Harakiri. How wonderful. A $50 game with a self-destruct mechanism built in. Next is the obviously missing widescreen aspect support. Everybody noticed it immediately. But 2K denied there was a problem and kept claiming that the game was tested on and developed for Widescreen. Just as they made a lot of angry posts about the forced DRM disappear. Then there's the exquisitely dumb AI, the not quite optimized Unreal Engine 3, the crappy console interface for the plasmids and inventory ported as-is from Xbox to PC, the woefully inaccurate weapons, the lack of environment destructibility and the really short singple player game with little replay value. All in all, the package doesn't rate above 70% despite the polished sound, music and graphics. And that's generous for a game that is so callously DRM'd. I hope they learn from their mistakes for the sequel.
Crysis was released as a buggy beta, with all of the nice plant/objects physics intentionally disabled in DX9 multiplayer (EA/Microsoft want you to buy Vista/DX10 to get that...) and a rushed feel and gamelogic bugs in the last half of the single player game. Result? 92% overall rating on Metacritic, indicating rave reviews all around. Bioshock was shipped with a really nasty DRM software made by Sony DADC, mandatory internet activation, a 5x limit on installs and uninstalls, no multiplayer, no widescreen support and garbageworthy framerates or crashes on a lot of hardware. Result? 96% overall on Metacritic, indicating fantastic reviews all around. Unreal Tournament III. Crashcity on many hardware configurations. GPU post-processing that makes everything look blurry. Just like Crysis and Bioshock, a forum full of disappointed or angry customers. Metacritic rating? 85%. Good to very good reviews all around. All of these games were promoted like crazy, rushed out the door with serious flaws, and the glowing reviews for them have obviously been paid for in hard cash. If you doubt it, Google for "Crysis support forum" "Bioshock support forum" and "Unreal Tournament III support forum". Count the number of people who have serious problems with these games or are angry about the state they were released in. So yes, game reviews are bought and corruption is the norm rather than an exception in the game industry. No doubt in my mind about that.
Why not a standalone email system? Because Google wants your data going through its servers. Everything Google does has a "logging" "crawling" or "indexing" hook to it that involves the Google infrastructure. Plus a standalone email system could be decompiled to see what's in it. What happens on Google's servers stays on Google's servers. And quite frankly nobody knows what happens on Google's servers. Not Google users. Not IT specialists. Not privacy experts. Millions of people simply "trust" Google in ways they wouldn't trust a lot of other IT companies.
>> It is speedy, it is ubiquitous, and it is cost effective. If students have privacy concerns they can learn how to forward stuff to a POP account someplace else and delete the mail from the gmail box. And you believe that hitting 'delete' in the GMail web interface deletes it from the Gmail server? I doubt that. A company that lives from advertising is likely to keep that email as long as it can to analyze long term trends in your messaging habits or in case a data mining algorithm comes along that makes better sense of your historic data. I would put my money on emails staying in the system for 2 - 3 years.
In Soviet Russia your college email emails YOU! =)
That's a fairly dumb move I'm afraid. Students will use GMail like a harddrive. They will store their project notes, research writeups and everything else in that account. Once that stuff is in a GMail server, it can be keyword searched to look for research in specific areas and on given topics. And very quickly too, because the Advertising bots will already have indexed the emails for keywords. When something patentable comes of that research, you may find some obscure company outside Ireland has already filed a patent application for it or something pretty similar. And you will never be able to prove that what you stored in your GMail account wandered, because, you know, Google just doesn't do that kind of thing. Google has a curious obsession with indexing people's data. The desktop search tool, the gigabyte email accounts, the moves into mobile telephony and storing people's data offsite. A company that wants to get into that stuff needs to be auditable. Google, to the best of my knowledge, has never been subjected to an independent 3rd party audit into how it handles data. They could move terabytes from servers in Europe to servers in the U.S. and you wouldn't hear a thing about it. Just the usual. Google does no evil.
In Europe institutions of higher learning go out of their way to keep corporate fingers away from their students. They don't give information on their students to recruiters, even though recruiters certainly want to know who's "top of class" and how to get to them. They also provide legal advice and assistance to their students. If a student gets pulled into a serious lawsuit and especially an unfair lawsuit, the law department is likely to step in and defend the student. Handing the emails of thousands of students to companies like Google and MS? That would cause a student protest and lecture walkout large enough to shut down the university and meet with protests from the lecturers and teaching staff as well. So what the hell is wrong with these colleges? Too cheap to maintain a few e-mail servers? Under political pressure to make student e-mails "accessible" to shadowy third parties? How can you hand thousands of student email accounts to for-profit entities outside the university and still protect your students' basic privacy rights?