Someone mentioned the Genesis version of this game but you're more likely to have access to an XBox. This is one of the few games that is all about cooperation. Two players share health, lives, powerups, and even the screen when they're close together (it shifts to split-screen when you move apart so you can each wander off on your own). It's pretty easy to help out the other player, plus, if you have XBox Live, you could download souped up versions of the characters to make it easier for someone. My ex loved the game and she played almost nothing. Surprisingly, she didn't have much trouble with the controls either.
I really, really wish more companies would produce stuff like this. Co-op and especially co-op network gameplay really needs to happen in a big way.
Through 2011? Well, that should about cover the coffee budget...
Even if clever scientists and engineers are really cheap in South Korea, I have trouble believing this kind of budget is going to produce more than a particularly hostile Roomba.
Arghhhhh... It's sucking at my toes!
Hmmm... now that I think of it... there's definitely a market for that sort of robot.
You guys obviously do a lot of online gaming and its a great way to hang out with your friends. However, most online gaming is player vs. player. It may be team-based, but it's almost always against humans.
That's great, and a lot of fun, but I'm an older gamer and don't have the spare hours to hone my skills against some teenager with unlimited time. or grind away at an MMORPG. I also don't live so close to my friends anymore. I just want to be able to hop online with some friends and play a game together, against the machines, just as if we were all sitting together playing and chatting.
Very few games offer this and, when promised, it always seems to get cancelled late in development. What do you think about this and can you, in your inimitable style, lambaste the industry about it on my behalf (and on behalf of the plenty-of-discretionary-spending-power, limited-free-time time market I represent)?
I know it deserves respect as one of the earliest, but the game was very weak compared to most of its close successors. I never found it engaging, even when it was almost the only option.
Some years later, an arcade in my hometown had a Space Invaders machine running for free. No one touched it. I think I played a couple of games and got bored... I can't help thinking the same fate will follow this venture. Sounds like something no sane arcade owner would buy... more of an executive toy.
Now Donkey Kong, Centipede, Tempest... any of those I would pick up and play with some interest.
The prices on the AMD64 versions are nutty. I understand they have to recoup development costs for the new architecture and that they only expect rich businesses to use it on expensive servers, but I'm testing Opteron for research purposes at a university. There's no way we can afford that in the long haul.
Anyone know if AMD64 support is expected for Fedora? Or what cheaper AMD64 distributions are around? Do they work? The actual details on AMD64 support on distributions' sites are very sketchy.
Heh... you've pretty much described what I'm using now. I'm most interested in what you say about using XML for output data. Are you using any particular DTD/Schema or just cooking up something for each occasion?
I agree that a "monolithic" solution isn't going to do much for you. That's why I'm thinking more in terms of middleware, something that will help me bind these tools together. I envision that some scripting would be necessary to bind in new tools and experimental software for each new project, but I'd like the rest of the framework to remain the same.
I think my own conclusions are pretty much that I want an XML format that can encode all the details: the parameters, what datasets to use, what algorithms to try, and also to store the output data.
Then a small collection of tools (likely written in a scripting language) that will read these XML files and put it in motion. These tools would probably invoke other software to do the actual work (e.g. gnuplot for plotting, AppLeS for distributing jobs, etc...).
I think these tools could see repeat use (especially if they have a plugin interface so new software and capabilities can be added in) and could be shared with others. I certainly don't have any illusions that I'm not going to have to adapt or that it will all run itself, but why are we all constructing this framework individually and from scratch?
I don't see the tools you mentioned as the middleware. I see the "glue", that you mentioned only in passing, as the real issue, and that glue could be a standard file format (or formats) and some tools that work with that.
Ah, you see... there's the problem... I am, in fact, a cheap alternative to the much vaunted "Graduate Student". I'm a "Lazy Graduate Student" (TM), with slow update rates, poor accuracy, and long downtimes. Eventually, I'll probably break down completely into a "Professor", in which case someone will have to find some "Graduate Students" to get the work done...
Writing scripts is my current solution and my desired solution would probably require scripts as glue to bind various applications to the management system. However, this would lead to much less work dedicated to each project.
This would be patent nonsense, if the statement itself had any real meaning. First of all, what is meant by "artificial intelligence", "successful", and "application", in this context.
And what does "self-assembling" or "self-organizing" mean, really? The utexas link is pointing to a bunch of machine learning stuff (I research and publish in AI, sometimes in machine learning) that is frankly quite out of date (no kernel machines, SVMs, or any recent clustering techniques). Unsupervised learning can be seen as some sort of self-organization, but it's certainly not the basis of "all successful applications" of A.I.
The claim that "a number of simple units" being organized into some structure is somehow self-organizing is just plain bizarre. Your computer's memory is a big collection of bits being organized by the programs run. The neural nets, Bayes nets, self-organizing maps, etc. listed on that link are not independent agents communicating to form a structure. They are variables in a program, plain and simple, with one big algorithm massaging them into something useful. True, they might exploit local relationships between certain members (e.g. Bayes nets) but so do many algorithms. You might just as well call QuickSort self-organizing.
Depending on your definition, self-organizing computer systems are either so common as to be uninteresting, or so rare that we pretty much never see them in practical applications.
I know it it's "cool" to see this stuff as some sort of biological meta-machine, but to suggest that this is the only useful viewpoint, or even the dominant one, is simply ridiculous.
The question itself is flawed. Why should participants in the open source movement as a whole take any particular position? Surely that's up to each individuals?
This "we should" or "we shouldn't" is the kind of factionalism that starts wars in the first place.
You make a very good point about the magnitude of the loss vs. the spammer's gain.
But the same argument applies to the Enron collapse. The tens and hundreds of millions that the executives walked away represents not only the loss of some big time investors, but countless small investors (several in the company itself who were encouraged to hold stock by the people robbing them) and many pension plans, which are really just another form of 'small investment'. I doubt the cost to the little guy from this spammer vs. any one of those execs really is comparable.
However, it is probably true that this remedy will have more impact on the other spammers then any Enron-level punishment will have on the other corrupt executives. The former expose themselves by the very nature of their scam. The latter will simply become more careful.
Also consider that the victims in the spammer's case are foolish to trust a random guy on the net who told them to buy something. The victims in the Enron case were, reasonably enough, placing trust in company and investment house reports, auditors, and legislation which the SEC is supposed to keep clean!
I mean... $159,600... wow, no wonder the U.S. economy is down the tubes. It's great that SEC has plenty of time to fry these gnats and beat the war drums, showing they're doing their jobs, so they don't have to go after the multi-billion dollar scam people like Enron, WorldCom, and all the others that have covered their tracks by now.
Spam bugs me as much a next person, but if this is biggest fish they're going to catch that way, I'm sure all those investors and pension plan holders would rather the guns were turned on some more worthy target.
It's amazing how well the war hysteria has worked at smoothing over the corporate scandals. And now spam too...
One of the most interesting things about the Dune series is that it's one of the only series where I don't meet with a general consensus on the quality of the various books. I've met people whose favourites were the first, third, fourth and sixth. Even rankings after favourites aren't consistent. How many novel series do you know where most people don't agree, "The first one was best and blah, blah, blah....".
Don't blindly accept the parent poster's judgement. Even if general experience suggests that sequels are often weak, Dune is a series where I have specifically noticed this odd exception.
>> the ubiquitous Duke Nukem Forever is also touched upon... >This is the first time I've heard of something that doesn't exist yet, and that probably never will, being ubiquitous.
Hmmm... God?
(Atheist humour... I'll probably be modded into hell itself...)
I have actually thought about this. It seems to me that in some movies, the plot and dialogue are actually a drag on the movie, which the action and effects are good. Thus, I think a "pure" action movie, containing little or no dialogue and only implicit plot could be great. It could be a legitimate artform of its own, untainted by cliched plots and tired one-liners. Cinematography, production design, and effects could be managed brilliantly by some directors who can't do anything with their hack actors and who themselves have no taste in scripting. Who's to say this is not legimate art or entertainment?
It's pretty close to a video game I don't have to actually play (who me, lazy?), but think about the way Half-Life worked in terms of making movies, or if you want to go back further, the old game "Another World" (aka "Out of this World". Now there's brilliance...
I like and use Mozilla, but do not use the popup blocking. If a site needs the revenue of popups and I don't value the site enough to tolerate them, I won't go there.
What I worry about is that if too many people block popup, the sites will turn around and block that browser (i.e. Mozilla or modified Netscape 7.0).
Of course, you could always hack Mozilla to pretend to be IE...:)
Bottom line: Sites need revenue and will fight to get it. Think twice before blocking ads at a site you like.
Whenever I felt unappreciated as a sysadmin, I would set up my old rocking chair in the server room. After a peaceful afternoon spent in the gentle breeze of server fans, and with a few critical cables running underneath my chair as I eased back and forth, everyone in the building knew what I did...
Wow... I can't believe Sony is planning a worse development nightmare than PS2 is. I can't speak from personal experience, but from many developer interviews, the general consensus seems to be that it's a pain. As games become larger and larger and more and more complex, developers will want to spend _less_ time fighting with the hardware. The trend is definitely moving away from this very low level hacking and more towards using standard API's (e.g. id is using C++ and OpenGL).
It took almost a year to see any decent apps on PS2 because of the extra development time. Where XBox shares titles with PS2, they typically look as good or somewhat better, and only a few months after launch. Throw out some massive parallel/distributed monster and it'll sink like a stone.
Why is PS2 alive and well today? Because PS1 was traditional architecture, quickly had lots of good apps, and bought them tons of brand loyalty. I don't think that's going to work for them again on the next iteration.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone mentioned the Genesis version of this game but you're more likely to have access to an XBox. This is one of the few games that is all about cooperation. Two players share health, lives, powerups, and even the screen when they're close together (it shifts to split-screen when you move apart so you can each wander off on your own). It's pretty easy to help out the other player, plus, if you have XBox Live, you could download souped up versions of the characters to make it easier for someone. My ex loved the game and she played almost nothing. Surprisingly, she didn't have much trouble with the controls either.
I really, really wish more companies would produce stuff like this. Co-op and especially co-op network gameplay really needs to happen in a big way.
Through 2011? Well, that should about cover the coffee budget...
Even if clever scientists and engineers are really cheap in South Korea, I have trouble believing this kind of budget is going to produce more than a particularly hostile Roomba.
Arghhhhh... It's sucking at my toes!
Hmmm... now that I think of it... there's definitely a market for that sort of robot.
For those who might be fans, Lenny Bruce had a funny bit about pissing in the sink.
b ruce/brucemonologues.html#Pissing
Excerpt here:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/
I understand folks in Redmond celebrate this on the 17th instead...
You guys obviously do a lot of online gaming and its a great way to hang out with your friends. However, most online gaming is player vs. player. It may be team-based, but it's almost always against humans.
That's great, and a lot of fun, but I'm an older gamer and don't have the spare hours to hone my skills against some teenager with unlimited time. or grind away at an MMORPG. I also don't live so close to my friends anymore. I just want to be able to hop online with some friends and play a game together, against the machines, just as if we were all sitting together playing and chatting.
Very few games offer this and, when promised, it always seems to get cancelled late in development. What do you think about this and can you, in your inimitable style, lambaste the industry about it on my behalf (and on behalf of the plenty-of-discretionary-spending-power, limited-free-time time market I represent)?
I know it deserves respect as one of the earliest, but the game was very weak compared to most of its close successors. I never found it engaging, even when it was almost the only option.
Some years later, an arcade in my hometown had a Space Invaders machine running for free. No one touched it. I think I played a couple of games and got bored... I can't help thinking the same fate will follow this venture. Sounds like something no sane arcade owner would buy... more of an executive toy.
Now Donkey Kong, Centipede, Tempest... any of those I would pick up and play with some interest.
...but I was hoping to sleep in that week.
Inflatable office mates
To see what I mean about the premium pricing, consult the following link. x86 and AMD versions are NOT the same price.
RHEL 3 Pricing
The prices on the AMD64 versions are nutty. I understand they have to recoup development costs for the new architecture and that they only expect rich businesses to use it on expensive servers, but I'm testing Opteron for research purposes at a university. There's no way we can afford that in the long haul.
Anyone know if AMD64 support is expected for Fedora? Or what cheaper AMD64 distributions are around? Do they work? The actual details on AMD64 support on distributions' sites are very sketchy.
Heh... you've pretty much described what I'm using now. I'm most interested in what you say about using XML for output data. Are you using any particular DTD/Schema or just cooking up something for each occasion?
I agree that a "monolithic" solution isn't going to do much for you. That's why I'm thinking more in terms of middleware, something that will help me bind these tools together. I envision that some scripting would be necessary to bind in new tools and experimental software for each new project, but I'd like the rest of the framework to remain the same.
I think my own conclusions are pretty much that I want an XML format that can encode all the details: the parameters, what datasets to use, what algorithms to try, and also to store the output data.
Then a small collection of tools (likely written in a scripting language) that will read these XML files and put it in motion. These tools would probably invoke other software to do the actual work (e.g. gnuplot for plotting, AppLeS for distributing jobs, etc...).
I think these tools could see repeat use (especially if they have a plugin interface so new software and capabilities can be added in) and could be shared with others. I certainly don't have any illusions that I'm not going to have to adapt or that it will all run itself, but why are we all constructing this framework individually and from scratch?
I don't see the tools you mentioned as the middleware. I see the "glue", that you mentioned only in passing, as the real issue, and that glue could be a standard file format (or formats) and some tools that work with that.
Ah, you see... there's the problem... I am, in fact, a cheap alternative to the much vaunted "Graduate Student". I'm a "Lazy Graduate Student" (TM), with slow update rates, poor accuracy, and long downtimes. Eventually, I'll probably break down completely into a "Professor", in which case someone will have to find some "Graduate Students" to get the work done...
Writing scripts is my current solution and my desired solution would probably require scripts as glue to bind various applications to the management system. However, this would lead to much less work dedicated to each project.
Seems peculiar that when offering people downloads of the latest RedHat (and Mandrake) that you wouldn't provide RPMs of the client.
Anyone got a lead on this? There are links to some Mandrake packages on rpmfind but they don't work.
This would be patent nonsense, if the statement itself had any real meaning. First of all, what is meant by "artificial intelligence", "successful", and "application", in this context.
And what does "self-assembling" or "self-organizing" mean, really? The utexas link is pointing to a bunch of machine learning stuff (I research and publish in AI, sometimes in machine learning) that is frankly quite out of date (no kernel machines, SVMs, or any recent clustering techniques). Unsupervised learning can be seen as some sort of self-organization, but it's certainly not the basis of "all successful applications" of A.I.
The claim that "a number of simple units" being organized into some structure is somehow self-organizing is just plain bizarre. Your computer's memory is a big collection of bits being organized by the programs run. The neural nets, Bayes nets, self-organizing maps, etc. listed on that link are not independent agents communicating to form a structure. They are variables in a program, plain and simple, with one big algorithm massaging them into something useful. True, they might exploit local relationships between certain members (e.g. Bayes nets) but so do many algorithms. You might just as well call QuickSort self-organizing.
Depending on your definition, self-organizing computer systems are either so common as to be uninteresting, or so rare that we pretty much never see them in practical applications.
I know it it's "cool" to see this stuff as some sort of biological meta-machine, but to suggest that this is the only useful viewpoint, or even the dominant one, is simply ridiculous.
The question itself is flawed. Why should participants in the open source movement as a whole take any particular position? Surely that's up to each individuals?
This "we should" or "we shouldn't" is the kind of factionalism that starts wars in the first place.
You make a very good point about the magnitude of the loss vs. the spammer's gain.
But the same argument applies to the Enron collapse. The tens and hundreds of millions that the executives walked away represents not only the loss of some big time investors, but countless small investors (several in the company itself who were encouraged to hold stock by the people robbing them) and many pension plans, which are really just another form of 'small investment'. I doubt the cost to the little guy from this spammer vs. any one of those execs really is comparable.
However, it is probably true that this remedy will have more impact on the other spammers then any Enron-level punishment will have on the other corrupt executives. The former expose themselves by the very nature of their scam. The latter will simply become more careful.
Also consider that the victims in the spammer's case are foolish to trust a random guy on the net who told them to buy something. The victims in the Enron case were, reasonably enough, placing trust in company and investment house reports, auditors, and legislation which the SEC is supposed to keep clean!
I mean... $159,600... wow, no wonder the U.S. economy is down the tubes. It's great that SEC has plenty of time to fry these gnats and beat the war drums, showing they're doing their jobs, so they don't have to go after the multi-billion dollar scam people like Enron, WorldCom, and all the others that have covered their tracks by now.
Spam bugs me as much a next person, but if this is biggest fish they're going to catch that way, I'm sure all those investors and pension plan holders would rather the guns were turned on some more worthy target.
It's amazing how well the war hysteria has worked at smoothing over the corporate scandals. And now spam too...
One of the most interesting things about the Dune series is that it's one of the only series where I don't meet with a general consensus on the quality of the various books. I've met people whose favourites were the first, third, fourth and sixth. Even rankings after favourites aren't consistent. How many novel series do you know where most people don't agree, "The first one was best and blah, blah, blah....".
Don't blindly accept the parent poster's judgement. Even if general experience suggests that sequels are often weak, Dune is a series where I have specifically noticed this odd exception.
...sweet S.T.U.N. Runner... ahead of its time...
>> the ubiquitous Duke Nukem Forever is also touched upon...
>This is the first time I've heard of something that doesn't exist yet, and that probably never will, being ubiquitous.
Hmmm... God?
(Atheist humour... I'll probably be modded into hell itself...)
I have actually thought about this. It seems to me that in some movies, the plot and dialogue are actually a drag on the movie, which the action and effects are good. Thus, I think a "pure" action movie, containing little or no dialogue and only implicit plot could be great. It could be a legitimate artform of its own, untainted by cliched plots and tired one-liners. Cinematography, production design, and effects could be managed brilliantly by some directors who can't do anything with their hack actors and who themselves have no taste in scripting. Who's to say this is not legimate art or entertainment?
It's pretty close to a video game I don't have to actually play (who me, lazy?), but think about the way Half-Life worked in terms of making movies, or if you want to go back further, the old game "Another World" (aka "Out of this World". Now there's brilliance...
I like and use Mozilla, but do not use the popup blocking. If a site needs the revenue of popups and I don't value the site enough to tolerate them, I won't go there.
:)
What I worry about is that if too many people block popup, the sites will turn around and block that browser (i.e. Mozilla or modified Netscape 7.0).
Of course, you could always hack Mozilla to pretend to be IE...
Bottom line: Sites need revenue and will fight to get it. Think twice before blocking ads at a site you like.
Whenever I felt unappreciated as a sysadmin, I would set up my old rocking chair in the server room. After a peaceful afternoon spent in the gentle breeze of server fans, and with a few critical cables running underneath my chair as I eased back and forth, everyone in the building knew what I did...
Wow... I can't believe Sony is planning a worse development nightmare than PS2 is. I can't speak from personal experience, but from many developer interviews, the general consensus seems to be that it's a pain. As games become larger and larger and more and more complex, developers will want to spend _less_ time fighting with the hardware. The trend is definitely moving away from this very low level hacking and more towards using standard API's (e.g. id is using C++ and OpenGL).
It took almost a year to see any decent apps on PS2 because of the extra development time. Where XBox shares titles with PS2, they typically look as good or somewhat better, and only a few months after launch. Throw out some massive parallel/distributed monster and it'll sink like a stone.
Why is PS2 alive and well today? Because PS1 was traditional architecture, quickly had lots of good apps, and bought them tons of brand loyalty. I don't think that's going to work for them again on the next iteration.