Because then, you only have one level of reply, if one of them isn't directed at you. If I sent you a message, and you replied to me and Sandy, I would know that Sandy got your message. If Sandy then replies to it to you, I don't get any notification that she has sent a message to you.
From the looks of what MS is doing, you'd be able to see any comments pertaining to the original e-mail that you sent.
As for the gas comment, what the heck are you thinking? If the "ingredients" of gasoline were a secret, then the price of gas would be much higher, there would be different gasses for different cars, and I wouldn't be able to get my Kia Rio fuel at the same gas station that I get my Honda Civic fuel from. Gasoline is not a secret. It is octane for the most part, with residue chemicals from the process that produced it. (octane, lead, trace amounts of other carbon compounds, etc).
Some Gas may have ethanol added, but that compound is by no means a secret to humankind. If I had pure octane, and mixed it with ethanol on a 87-13 basis, I'd be able to run my car without a problem.
If this product uses a central server (Exchange), then there is no need for trying to understand the language of the email at all. Exchange will know when someone has sent a message that is a reply to another message that it has stored somewhere. As such, Exchange will then make available the "thread data," which the Outlook clients will then render in a nice color-coded format.
INO, Exchange will track the parent ID of every message, with the root nodes (inciting emails) having 0 or -1 as the id. Everything else then builds on top of that, like a normal tree. Exchange will know what emails are replys because people will hit the "Reply" button. If the user decides to create a new email every time they reply to something, I'm sure this functionality won't work. If that happened, then you would actually need to solve the natural-language parsing problem.
Another note: Luther was not the founder of protestantism either. He happened to be the charismatic guy that was the figurehead for the protestant movement, but he wasn't the founder, nor did he desire to be. I would say that the origins of protestantism lie with St. Augustine, or at least his theology. It's pretty safe to say that the Catholics hold St. Thomas Acquinas very dear to heart, and much of their theology decends from him, whereas Augustine was heavily studied by Luther and his counterparts.
Protestantism itself is amusing, because it started with a small group of priests in Rome who called themselves "Evangelicals." The popular belief that was not preached, but it was encouraged by the Church, was that one could attain salvation by way of works and penitance. The counter-point presented came from the school of thought called "via-moderna," which stated that God was so great that he could forgive anyone's sins if he wanted, as well as show grace upon anyone he wanted. This, combined with a history of questions among various monks regarding "if I join this order, will my pieity be greater, and thus will God show his grace on me?"
So, protestantism evolved from these questions and teachings, pointing all the way back to Augustine. Augustine was this guy who led the wild life, to the point where his mother prayed for him every night. There was a point in Augustine's life, however, where he completely turned around and led the life of a monk. Having led this life of impieity, then gaining God's grace clashed with what the Catholics were pushing, and so he took a back seat to Acquinas.
Luther, then, became the conscious objector to the practices of the Catholic Church, and wanted to reform it without splitting it. He was the vocal advocate of reform, but he sure didn't found it. (In fact, the 95 thesis that he posted were a complaint against the overuse of indulgences, and there was actually a posting by a different guy about a year earlier that actually listed the complaints that the protestants had with the core theology of the Church.)
Isn't mtu on a T3? When I was there, they were part of that whole Internet2 roll-out, and excess bandwidth was piped through the T3 that was installed. I seem to recall that they also serve as an ISP for NMU and Lake Superior State, and Sault St. Marie, with a T1 going to each of them.
I don't see any reference to the audio streams coming from the internet. Streams happen all over the place, and are used extensively for many different applications. An audio editing studio, for instance, will use audio streaming.
What they're saying is that with the increased bus, you won't see a clog in the bandwidth if you are working with high definition audio and video. It makes sense, and really isn't something to rant about. This looks more like an ad that is targeted to Hollywood / Weta Studios types of people, but could be interpreted as being for the consumer.
Funny. ArsTechnica had a winamp plugin that I've used for ages called "NowPlaying." It provided global hot keys, as well as other interesting stuff. Search their forums for it, if you aren't using 5.0
Re:Preference for "geek" over "nerd"
on
We Are All Nerds Now
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The way I learned the distinction came from the president of Rose Hulman:
"Geeks like to tinker with technical stuff, but nerds like to tinker with technical stuff and
know what they are doing."
I understood that completely. I had a good friend that was a geek, by this definition. He had a computer, and played games, chatted on IRC, and downloaded music with it. Every couple of weeks, though, he'd call me over to fix the damn thing because he'd fucked up his registry, or he decided to open his computer and muck around with the hardware or something.
I've had a geek for a roommie too, which was amusing. My "nerd" buddies and I would do various things to his machine, as mean as it is. We put PCAnywhere on it, and took control of it one night and turned on his mp3 player... he always left his speakers on full-blast, so he started thinking he had a virus. That's when he'd go to us and ask us to fix his 'virus problem.'
The problem with writing to/dev/dsp is that you can have an application that hogs the device. If I'm running GAIM, and it decides to horde the dsp, I won't be able to get XMMS to play music until I kill GAIM.
The difference between UNIX/X/esd and Windows is that if you have multiple audio streams going to the output, Windows automatically muxes them. With esd, you don't have that.
I'm not sure what the ARts solution does, since I don't use it. The only experience that I've had with it, however, is the problem of too many choices. I've got software that expects/dev/dsp to be completely unused, ala Quake 3. Audio won't work if I'm running ARts. I've got software that looks for esd instead of ARts, so I won't be hearing sound from them, either.
There needs to be standardization of all applications on which sound server that they're going to use. If Xouvert provides a good server 'under the hood, that would probably make it that much easier to standardize everything. If this happens, then it is a Good Thing. If it doesn't, it will be a Good Option.
It's pretty easy to give an example. Say you have a network of five machines, one of them has the http port forwarded to it. Some kid outside finds your address, and starts flooding you. You immediately notice a hit in performance, because your personal web server is getting pinged from hell, or it's uploading tons of crap.
So, you have a firewall at the in-pipe that you set to deny all packets from this kid's IP. You will immediately see packet traffic on your own network decrease, and you can resume your happy protected life.
If you had a software firewall running, your network would still be bogged down from the ip traffic, and your machine would be working twice as hard because it's serving, and it's checking ip headers.
You have to ask yourself whether it matters or not. If there's one less species to study, big deal. The species is gone, and we're not going to learn much about how it's going to interact with nature in the future.
Mankind has done far less to this world than natural disasters have. There have been floods which have wiped out 98% of all life on this planet. Temperatures have risen at various times, ice ages have formed, etc.
There's nothing that we can do, save nuking everything on the face of the Earth, which can not be corrected in time. Hell, even if we did nuke everything on Earth, there'd probably be some strain of something that manages to survive and thrive.
I doubt that it's a religious issue. Many people attach an emotional argument to the situation, then extrapolate it to the extreme. They're worried that we're going to try genetically engineering humans next, and whatever.
My religion, Christianity, doesn't really define anything in this realm. It's pretty explicit in the Bible that man has dominion over the animals. Of course, there's the problem of some wacko thinking that he's God because he can inject a gene into a cell, but that's a personal issue, not societal.
If history is brought up with examples of religion vs. science, the best thing to do is to point to the "religion" and ask whether or not what the leaders are saying is actually founded in their theology, if it's founded in their fears, or if it's founded in their complete departure from their theology. The greatest heretics of all time were probably leaders of the church.
It doesn't change the fact that he's as much of a dumb-ass as Bush. The words he spoke were probably written by someone else, and he lacked the insight to modify the words to make a bit more sense. Then again, he could use a lesson in humility.
In the strict sense, a mod uses the same executable as the original game. You can run CS by running the Half-Life executable and loading the CS module. This is the same for NWN and Quake 3.
The Jedi Knight II team had access to the Quake 3 source code, and made a few modifications to it. It's the same as Valve's HL, or Raven's games (Heretic, Hexen, RTCW), or the probably now-forgotten Corridor 7 (Remember the box? "Based on the Wolfenstein 3-D engine!").
A mod is replacing the scripting of the engine, the graphics, and models in such a way that you get a new game. The graphical quality doesn't get any better, unless you've used better resolution textures or something.
There was an earlier Wolfenstein hack that included Santa, I think.
The funniest mods I remember were the fartman and pr0nDoom mods. Seeing a monster with a big ass that farts fireballs is childishly hilarious, and picking up a nekkid low-res chick while hearing "Pizza Pizza" is right up there.
I think the first full mod was Alien-Doom though. It was the coolest thing around for quite a while.
Re:Building a mod inside a level editor...
on
NYT on Game Mods
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· Score: 1
It could be really easy to do with SVG / EPS / PS type diagram/image formats. They already use vertexes and chords (paths) and all that good stuff.
That would be an interesting thing... Use groups of paths of different colors to define different elevations, super-impose them on top of eachother, and generate the map file that way. I remember the old WAD editors for Doom, and how much cut&paste would have saved the day.
Too bad you need heavy duty 3-D tools like 3DSMax (or yeah, notepad and a lot of spare time) to do modeling for the newer engines.
Re:It's not really all THAT odd...
on
NYT on Game Mods
·
· Score: 1
I waited until they released the "Ultimate Platinum Collection Super Pack from Hell." Then I waited till the price on that hit about $25, and then picked it up. I was too much of a fanboy of Quake 3 and Unreal, so I hated HL (There were people who would flame back and forth about which was better, yada... ick).
It's come to the point where ID releases a "Quake," and it's only a demo of the technology for others to license. I'm glad they put effort into RTCW , but I wonder what the depth of Doom 3 is going to be like. Unreal 2003 was kinda like that too, the story was weak, the gameplay was shallow, etc.
Half-life, on the other hand, is awesome. I like involved RPG'ish FPS's, so HL and DX were what I should have paid full price for. I ended up picking the DX "gold edition super-pack from hell plus soundtrack" up for near full price, so I don't feel too guilty about that.
It is, however, a Wrapper! It contains a layer that does some computations that exists between the Windows stuff and the Linux stuff, so it does incur some processor power in addition to memory.
I don't know how efficient it all is, but with 2.4 ghz machines at $500 nowadays, I don't see what the big deal is. Emulator, Wrapper, Whatever.
Sure, there are multiple tools that solve the same problem, but honestly, what difference does it make? The last time I checked, the community was centered on creating quality software for the joy of creating quality software, not for competition with the closed source world. If there are debates, religious battles, and bad blood, it is all because of the fierce competitiveness that developers have with eachother over that one point: who creates the better quality software?
The flames also arise when one developer realizes that his "baby" is being copied and revamped in a major way, and that he has less or no control over that fork. Ownership and pride of ownership are huge factors in the flames. No one likes to see a patch that they've written get shot down, even though there was a better solution proposed by someone else.
I think that the main problem with the community is that there are far too many people who try to take the principals of the closed source world and try to apply them to the OS community. The two are apples and pickup-trucks, the only thing they have in common are the atoms that make them up.
You might not need to know. Windows archetecture is so easy to work with, that all they'd need to do is iterate through all the devices and send random messages to them all. In time, the correct sequence would be used, and then the cash drawer spills it's contents, or the machine reboots repeatedly.
Granted, I doubt script kiddies would know enough to do this, but I imagine that there's enough interest there so that an old cracker might give it a try.
Slashdot Mirror
Because then, you only have one level of reply, if one of them isn't directed at you. If I sent you a message, and you replied to me and Sandy, I would know that Sandy got your message. If Sandy then replies to it to you, I don't get any notification that she has sent a message to you.
From the looks of what MS is doing, you'd be able to see any comments pertaining to the original e-mail that you sent.
As for the gas comment, what the heck are you thinking? If the "ingredients" of gasoline were a secret, then the price of gas would be much higher, there would be different gasses for different cars, and I wouldn't be able to get my Kia Rio fuel at the same gas station that I get my Honda Civic fuel from. Gasoline is not a secret. It is octane for the most part, with residue chemicals from the process that produced it. (octane, lead, trace amounts of other carbon compounds, etc).
Some Gas may have ethanol added, but that compound is by no means a secret to humankind. If I had pure octane, and mixed it with ethanol on a 87-13 basis, I'd be able to run my car without a problem.
... last struggle of the Third Age.
It was the last struggle of the Second Age, which ushered in the Third Age.
If this product uses a central server (Exchange), then there is no need for trying to understand the language of the email at all. Exchange will know when someone has sent a message that is a reply to another message that it has stored somewhere. As such, Exchange will then make available the "thread data," which the Outlook clients will then render in a nice color-coded format.
INO, Exchange will track the parent ID of every message, with the root nodes (inciting emails) having 0 or -1 as the id. Everything else then builds on top of that, like a normal tree. Exchange will know what emails are replys because people will hit the "Reply" button. If the user decides to create a new email every time they reply to something, I'm sure this functionality won't work. If that happened, then you would actually need to solve the natural-language parsing problem.
So is an ordination.
Another note: Luther was not the founder of protestantism either. He happened to be the charismatic guy that was the figurehead for the protestant movement, but he wasn't the founder, nor did he desire to be. I would say that the origins of protestantism lie with St. Augustine, or at least his theology. It's pretty safe to say that the Catholics hold St. Thomas Acquinas very dear to heart, and much of their theology decends from him, whereas Augustine was heavily studied by Luther and his counterparts.
Protestantism itself is amusing, because it started with a small group of priests in Rome who called themselves "Evangelicals." The popular belief that was not preached, but it was encouraged by the Church, was that one could attain salvation by way of works and penitance. The counter-point presented came from the school of thought called "via-moderna," which stated that God was so great that he could forgive anyone's sins if he wanted, as well as show grace upon anyone he wanted. This, combined with a history of questions among various monks regarding "if I join this order, will my pieity be greater, and thus will God show his grace on me?"
So, protestantism evolved from these questions and teachings, pointing all the way back to Augustine. Augustine was this guy who led the wild life, to the point where his mother prayed for him every night. There was a point in Augustine's life, however, where he completely turned around and led the life of a monk. Having led this life of impieity, then gaining God's grace clashed with what the Catholics were pushing, and so he took a back seat to Acquinas.
Luther, then, became the conscious objector to the practices of the Catholic Church, and wanted to reform it without splitting it. He was the vocal advocate of reform, but he sure didn't found it. (In fact, the 95 thesis that he posted were a complaint against the overuse of indulgences, and there was actually a posting by a different guy about a year earlier that actually listed the complaints that the protestants had with the core theology of the Church.)
Isn't mtu on a T3? When I was there, they were part of that whole Internet2 roll-out, and excess bandwidth was piped through the T3 that was installed. I seem to recall that they also serve as an ISP for NMU and Lake Superior State, and Sault St. Marie, with a T1 going to each of them.
A little /. action isn't going to do much.
I don't see any reference to the audio streams coming from the internet. Streams happen all over the place, and are used extensively for many different applications. An audio editing studio, for instance, will use audio streaming.
What they're saying is that with the increased bus, you won't see a clog in the bandwidth if you are working with high definition audio and video. It makes sense, and really isn't something to rant about. This looks more like an ad that is targeted to Hollywood / Weta Studios types of people, but could be interpreted as being for the consumer.
Funny. ArsTechnica had a winamp plugin that I've used for ages called "NowPlaying." It provided global hot keys, as well as other interesting stuff. Search their forums for it, if you aren't using 5.0
The way I learned the distinction came from the president of Rose Hulman:
I understood that completely. I had a good friend that was a geek, by this definition. He had a computer, and played games, chatted on IRC, and downloaded music with it. Every couple of weeks, though, he'd call me over to fix the damn thing because he'd fucked up his registry, or he decided to open his computer and muck around with the hardware or something.
I've had a geek for a roommie too, which was amusing. My "nerd" buddies and I would do various things to his machine, as mean as it is. We put PCAnywhere on it, and took control of it one night and turned on his mp3 player... he always left his speakers on full-blast, so he started thinking he had a virus. That's when he'd go to us and ask us to fix his 'virus problem.'
The problem with writing to /dev/dsp is that you can have an application that hogs the device. If I'm running GAIM, and it decides to horde the dsp, I won't be able to get XMMS to play music until I kill GAIM.
The difference between UNIX/X/esd and Windows is that if you have multiple audio streams going to the output, Windows automatically muxes them. With esd, you don't have that.
I'm not sure what the ARts solution does, since I don't use it. The only experience that I've had with it, however, is the problem of too many choices. I've got software that expects /dev/dsp to be completely unused, ala Quake 3. Audio won't work if I'm running ARts. I've got software that looks for esd instead of ARts, so I won't be hearing sound from them, either.
There needs to be standardization of all applications on which sound server that they're going to use. If Xouvert provides a good server 'under the hood, that would probably make it that much easier to standardize everything. If this happens, then it is a Good Thing. If it doesn't, it will be a Good Option.
It's pretty easy to give an example. Say you have a network of five machines, one of them has the http port forwarded to it. Some kid outside finds your address, and starts flooding you. You immediately notice a hit in performance, because your personal web server is getting pinged from hell, or it's uploading tons of crap.
So, you have a firewall at the in-pipe that you set to deny all packets from this kid's IP. You will immediately see packet traffic on your own network decrease, and you can resume your happy protected life.
If you had a software firewall running, your network would still be bogged down from the ip traffic, and your machine would be working twice as hard because it's serving, and it's checking ip headers.
You have to ask yourself whether it matters or not. If there's one less species to study, big deal. The species is gone, and we're not going to learn much about how it's going to interact with nature in the future.
Mankind has done far less to this world than natural disasters have. There have been floods which have wiped out 98% of all life on this planet. Temperatures have risen at various times, ice ages have formed, etc.
There's nothing that we can do, save nuking everything on the face of the Earth, which can not be corrected in time. Hell, even if we did nuke everything on Earth, there'd probably be some strain of something that manages to survive and thrive.
I doubt that it's a religious issue. Many people attach an emotional argument to the situation, then extrapolate it to the extreme. They're worried that we're going to try genetically engineering humans next, and whatever.
My religion, Christianity, doesn't really define anything in this realm. It's pretty explicit in the Bible that man has dominion over the animals. Of course, there's the problem of some wacko thinking that he's God because he can inject a gene into a cell, but that's a personal issue, not societal.
If history is brought up with examples of religion vs. science, the best thing to do is to point to the "religion" and ask whether or not what the leaders are saying is actually founded in their theology, if it's founded in their fears, or if it's founded in their complete departure from their theology. The greatest heretics of all time were probably leaders of the church.
It doesn't change the fact that he's as much of a dumb-ass as Bush. The words he spoke were probably written by someone else, and he lacked the insight to modify the words to make a bit more sense. Then again, he could use a lesson in humility.
In the strict sense, a mod uses the same executable as the original game. You can run CS by running the Half-Life executable and loading the CS module. This is the same for NWN and Quake 3.
The Jedi Knight II team had access to the Quake 3 source code, and made a few modifications to it. It's the same as Valve's HL, or Raven's games (Heretic, Hexen, RTCW), or the probably now-forgotten Corridor 7 (Remember the box? "Based on the Wolfenstein 3-D engine!").
A mod is replacing the scripting of the engine, the graphics, and models in such a way that you get a new game. The graphical quality doesn't get any better, unless you've used better resolution textures or something.
There was an earlier Wolfenstein hack that included Santa, I think.
The funniest mods I remember were the fartman and pr0nDoom mods. Seeing a monster with a big ass that farts fireballs is childishly hilarious, and picking up a nekkid low-res chick while hearing "Pizza Pizza" is right up there.
I think the first full mod was Alien-Doom though. It was the coolest thing around for quite a while.
It could be really easy to do with SVG / EPS / PS type diagram/image formats. They already use vertexes and chords (paths) and all that good stuff.
That would be an interesting thing... Use groups of paths of different colors to define different elevations, super-impose them on top of eachother, and generate the map file that way. I remember the old WAD editors for Doom, and how much cut&paste would have saved the day.
Too bad you need heavy duty 3-D tools like 3DSMax (or yeah, notepad and a lot of spare time) to do modeling for the newer engines.
I waited until they released the "Ultimate Platinum Collection Super Pack from Hell." Then I waited till the price on that hit about $25, and then picked it up. I was too much of a fanboy of Quake 3 and Unreal, so I hated HL (There were people who would flame back and forth about which was better, yada... ick).
It's come to the point where ID releases a "Quake," and it's only a demo of the technology for others to license. I'm glad they put effort into RTCW , but I wonder what the depth of Doom 3 is going to be like. Unreal 2003 was kinda like that too, the story was weak, the gameplay was shallow, etc.
Half-life, on the other hand, is awesome. I like involved RPG'ish FPS's, so HL and DX were what I should have paid full price for. I ended up picking the DX "gold edition super-pack from hell plus soundtrack" up for near full price, so I don't feel too guilty about that.
No, it isn't an Emulator.
It is, however, a Wrapper! It contains a layer that does some computations that exists between the Windows stuff and the Linux stuff, so it does incur some processor power in addition to memory.
I don't know how efficient it all is, but with 2.4 ghz machines at $500 nowadays, I don't see what the big deal is. Emulator, Wrapper, Whatever.
Hitler's favorite movie was Metropolis.
Ah, so that's where all the Mayans went. The mystery is solved!
I don't see the problem.
Sure, there are multiple tools that solve the same problem, but honestly, what difference does it make? The last time I checked, the community was centered on creating quality software for the joy of creating quality software, not for competition with the closed source world. If there are debates, religious battles, and bad blood, it is all because of the fierce competitiveness that developers have with eachother over that one point: who creates the better quality software?
The flames also arise when one developer realizes that his "baby" is being copied and revamped in a major way, and that he has less or no control over that fork. Ownership and pride of ownership are huge factors in the flames. No one likes to see a patch that they've written get shot down, even though there was a better solution proposed by someone else.
I think that the main problem with the community is that there are far too many people who try to take the principals of the closed source world and try to apply them to the OS community. The two are apples and pickup-trucks, the only thing they have in common are the atoms that make them up.
You might not need to know. Windows archetecture is so easy to work with, that all they'd need to do is iterate through all the devices and send random messages to them all. In time, the correct sequence would be used, and then the cash drawer spills it's contents, or the machine reboots repeatedly.
Granted, I doubt script kiddies would know enough to do this, but I imagine that there's enough interest there so that an old cracker might give it a try.
I say we just turn Telnet on, and connect it to the internet. That ought to secure those puppies like cement shoes in the river.