One that I've been thinking of for a while is Kademlia-over-Tor. It seems like a natural matchup, and if you packaged the Tor client with SecureMule (or whatever you'd call it) it would only be maybe six times slower than normal.:)
Another nice advantage: suddenly firewalls don't matter, since every computer is connecting outwards to servers.
On the other hand, a nice stopgap solution is to just force eMule to route through Tor right now. You end up with a LowID but it works. Especially if you don't demand blazing speed.
I got great use out of concrete blocks. Lots of damage and they don't obstruct your vision nearly as badly . . . although you can't use 'em as a shield.
We're playing a very large game with about 8 players. One of us has gone off on their own adventure, and our GM had planned this and recruited a second GM to handle his part. These were both happening simultaneously, so we're sitting in different rooms playing.
At one point, the lone player pokes his head into our room and asks "Does anyone know the target number for major invasive surgery?"
"Do you want a rack of single-purpose devices costing from $100 to $250 each or do you want one $400 to $500 device, the PC?"
Right now I have two computers.
My main computer is the powerhouse. It does everything, it has lots of storage space, etc etc.
My second computer is relatively new, and relatively slow. And relatively low-power. It's fast enough to run SNES emulators, and it's got TV-out so I can plug it into a TV if I want, but mostly it's just an email, web browsing, and IRC box. Right now it also functions as a gateway.
I don't much like having an "important" computer being a gateway at the same time, though. If it gets hacked, well, it's got a lot of sensitive data on it. So I'm getting another even smaller less powerful box for a dedicated gateway.
I'm also planning on getting yet another low-power box to act as a file sharing box, and run it over an anonymizing network (by setting up the gateway to route *everything* coming from one ethernet port through the anonymizing network.)
My main computer is starting to have problems with its hard drive and I've always been a little leery of putting all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. So I'm also going to get a RAID system - low-speed CPU, heavy RAID hardware, 8 300gb SATA drives in RAID 5 with a hot spare, for a total of 1.8tb. I'll run continuous backup updates off the other systems onto this one, and also use this one for storing anything that doesn't mind being accessed across the network (music, movies, not games).
This is five specialized computers, and if any of them die, it's fine. My chat box can take over if the gateway dies. If the storage server dies, it just needs new hardware - it's not going to have three hard drives die at once! - and even if it does, all the important data is probably stored on one of the other computers too. My chat box, games box, and security box are also obviously noncritical, now that any important data will be backed up on the storage server.
So in answer to your question. Would I rather have a rack of single-purpose devices costing $100 to $250 each, all independently upgradable, none as a single point of failure, each customized to perform its duty perfectly?
Or would I rather buy a single $500 device which has to be upgraded in one chunk, where failure is catastrophic, and which may not perform adequately in one or more important areas?
I'm considering building an unstoppable army of a million killer robots, and hire them out to the highest bidder in a plot to rule the world. Can I get a Slashdot story also?
I'll have to wait until someone else designs the robots, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to buy them, or why I wouldn't just rule the world myself, but that doesn't really matter right now. I'm just considering it.
I've got no doubt at all that his death was 90%+ due to overwork, possibly exacerbated by my taking a somewhat defiant stance in public several days earlier.
I don't know, what do you think? Did he ever think of that?
I work 40 hour weeks. Eight hours a day, five days a week. Sometimes ten hours a day, four days a week - depends on my schedule and how I'm feeling.
Usually, two or three of those days I don't get anything done. I write a few lines of code, run a build, get bored waiting, read Slashdot (or k5, or gamasutra, or somethingawful, or bash.org, or webcomics), repeat.
Occasionally I sit down and suddenly everything clicks and I get, like, a week's worth of work done in a day.
Generally, at my job, I tackle crazy insane problems that nobody's even sure are possible. And so I need lots of mulling time ("how am I even going to approach this?") and it works for me. More than one person has been surprised at how much I get done . . . I don't really mention how little time I actually spend working.:P
So far today's been slackoff, but I can feel my brain revving up. Once I'm done with Slashdot I think I can get some real work done today.:)
Tell him to get a job at a smaller game company instead. I worked at Snowblind Studios doing various algorithmic stuff (random map generation, automaps, texture compression, polyreduction). A few friends of mine work at Cryptic (City of Heroes) on various parts of the toolchain, last I heard.
If you work at a sucky company, you get to do sucky work. Go to work at a good company - he's probably got a nice resume at this point.
I've never understood why blatant corporate or political lying isn't a finable offense. It seems so simple - if someone in a public office says something obviously wrong, or displays a study that clearly contradicts their claim, slap 'em with a fine. If someone in a corporate structure does the same, hit the corporation with a fine.
Why is this so difficult?
Oh yeah, because the people who make laws got there by lying.
That introduces an entire new set of problems - HL2 often has levels where you can see the beginning and end at the same time. Dynamic loading generally restricts you to being able to see a level and a half at a time, at most, and if you're making the levels smaller, that can quickly turn into "oh boy another corridor".
Metroid Prime could have run up against this problem, but they were careful to have large panoramic rooms - and if you look closely, the large panoramic rooms are generally relatively low on features and polygons.
TANSTAAFL.
Yes, there are ways to do it. There are always ways to do it. There are also always tradeoffs.
Ironically, I've had more trouble with the crash report app than with Firefox itself. I eventually gave up and just didn't report crashes. At some point it stops being worth my time.
On the other hand, it also demonstrates my point - that trip-and-fall animation is taking up valuable RAM, and it wouldn't be necessary at all if it didn't have dynamic loading.;)
(Can't wait to try out J&D3. Stupid lots-of-games-coming-out-all-at-once.)
Oddly, while I often get motion sickness in FPSes, that simply wasn't a problem in HL2. No idea why. Not complaining.
I've sort-of linked it to excessively high FPS, so any game that runs at 80 or 90 brings it out. Therefore I tend to crank detail settings up. Worked well this time, since the game is so stunningly beautiful.:)
There *are* fast ways of loading levels that AFAIK PC games don't tend to use. I've never been quite sure why - maybe just lack of experience in the console world and the tradeoffs you *have* to make, and therefore they don't think about some of those tradeoffs on the PC. You do end up with a bit of a data size hit, which (ironically) is a much greater problem on the PC than the console.
I'm not talking creatively - I'm talking about technically. Memory management and data consistency is tough enough without having to deal with pieces of the level moving in and out of memory. (I wonder what Jak&Daxter does when the disc is glitchy and it can't load fast enough?)
It's flat-out deadly on the console, but notice that games that do this either break their levels up into LOTS of little rooms or have relatively low polys and low texture counts. TANSTAAFL. Sacrifices will always be made.
If Half-Life 2 had no loading, but the graphics weren't as good, would you consider this a reasonable tradeoff?
Would the other people who bought it consider it a reasonable tradeoff?
Spending a minute loading? That's crazy. I really do get ten-second loads most of the time, and I've got an older computer. Even three minutes of play to ten seconds of load isn't that bad.
I never said it wasn't possible. It is, of course, possible. It's just difficult.
Personally I found Dungeon Siege to be a brutally boring game after the first few hours. I'd rather they spent that time working on gameplay than seamless loading. They might have created a game that was fun.:P
The problem is that, in the end, nobody really cares. Loading seamlessly is hard and raises system requirements quite a bit (since not only do you need to hold two levels in memory at times, but you also need to be loading an entire new level while the player is playing.)
And in the end nobody's going to say "Well, I *would* buy Half-Life 2. But every ten or fifteen minutes I have to spend ten seconds waiting for a new level to load. So I won't."
I noticed the stuttering, but for me it's just a second or two, nothing serious. The "loading" screens are far worse, and I doubt those are going away.
The big problem for me was texture corruption. I'd have random colored triangles on apparently random textures. Finally tracked down a fix - turn off "Catalyst AI" in the Catalyst Control Panel (apparently it's an ATI-only problem), which required that I *get* the Catalyst Control Panel.
Bah.
On the other hand, I just finished the game, and it rocked. If anyone wants to read my review it's here:P
"A lunar space elevator would work differently than one based on Earth. Unlike our own planet, which rotates every 24 hours, the Moon only turns on its axis once every 29 days; the same amount of time it takes to complete one orbit around the Earth. This is why we can only ever see one side of the Moon. The concept of geostationary orbit doesn't really make sense around the Moon.
There are, however, five places in the Earth-Moon system where you could put an object of low mass - like a satellite... or a space elevator counterweight - and have them remain stable with very little energy: the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. The L1 point, a spot approximately 58,000 km above the surface of the Moon, will work perfectly."
Slashdot Mirror
One that I've been thinking of for a while is Kademlia-over-Tor. It seems like a natural matchup, and if you packaged the Tor client with SecureMule (or whatever you'd call it) it would only be maybe six times slower than normal. :)
Another nice advantage: suddenly firewalls don't matter, since every computer is connecting outwards to servers.
On the other hand, a nice stopgap solution is to just force eMule to route through Tor right now. You end up with a LowID but it works. Especially if you don't demand blazing speed.
I got great use out of concrete blocks. Lots of damage and they don't obstruct your vision nearly as badly . . . although you can't use 'em as a shield.
That's why they're all low-power systems. My powerhouse remains off when I'm not actively using it.
Not D&D, but funny anyway.
We're playing a very large game with about 8 players. One of us has gone off on their own adventure, and our GM had planned this and recruited a second GM to handle his part. These were both happening simultaneously, so we're sitting in different rooms playing.
At one point, the lone player pokes his head into our room and asks "Does anyone know the target number for major invasive surgery?"
Dead silence.
(Turned out it was 4.)
"Do you want a rack of single-purpose devices costing from $100 to $250 each or do you want one $400 to $500 device, the PC?"
Right now I have two computers.
My main computer is the powerhouse. It does everything, it has lots of storage space, etc etc.
My second computer is relatively new, and relatively slow. And relatively low-power. It's fast enough to run SNES emulators, and it's got TV-out so I can plug it into a TV if I want, but mostly it's just an email, web browsing, and IRC box. Right now it also functions as a gateway.
I don't much like having an "important" computer being a gateway at the same time, though. If it gets hacked, well, it's got a lot of sensitive data on it. So I'm getting another even smaller less powerful box for a dedicated gateway.
I'm also planning on getting yet another low-power box to act as a file sharing box, and run it over an anonymizing network (by setting up the gateway to route *everything* coming from one ethernet port through the anonymizing network.)
My main computer is starting to have problems with its hard drive and I've always been a little leery of putting all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. So I'm also going to get a RAID system - low-speed CPU, heavy RAID hardware, 8 300gb SATA drives in RAID 5 with a hot spare, for a total of 1.8tb. I'll run continuous backup updates off the other systems onto this one, and also use this one for storing anything that doesn't mind being accessed across the network (music, movies, not games).
This is five specialized computers, and if any of them die, it's fine. My chat box can take over if the gateway dies. If the storage server dies, it just needs new hardware - it's not going to have three hard drives die at once! - and even if it does, all the important data is probably stored on one of the other computers too. My chat box, games box, and security box are also obviously noncritical, now that any important data will be backed up on the storage server.
So in answer to your question. Would I rather have a rack of single-purpose devices costing $100 to $250 each, all independently upgradable, none as a single point of failure, each customized to perform its duty perfectly?
Or would I rather buy a single $500 device which has to be upgraded in one chunk, where failure is catastrophic, and which may not perform adequately in one or more important areas?
I'll take the rack, thanks.
Or alternatively, they were launching the mass at 23 271.3448 mph, which provides almost exactly 4.7 tons, and they just decided to round a little.
I'm considering building an unstoppable army of a million killer robots, and hire them out to the highest bidder in a plot to rule the world. Can I get a Slashdot story also?
I'll have to wait until someone else designs the robots, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to buy them, or why I wouldn't just rule the world myself, but that doesn't really matter right now. I'm just considering it.
What part of "MY OWN HOME VIDEOS" do you not understand?
Home videos, also known as "videos taken in the home".
I've got no doubt at all that his death was 90%+ due to overwork, possibly exacerbated by my taking a somewhat defiant stance in public several days earlier.
I don't know, what do you think? Did he ever think of that?
Hell yes.
:P
:)
I work 40 hour weeks. Eight hours a day, five days a week. Sometimes ten hours a day, four days a week - depends on my schedule and how I'm feeling.
Usually, two or three of those days I don't get anything done. I write a few lines of code, run a build, get bored waiting, read Slashdot (or k5, or gamasutra, or somethingawful, or bash.org, or webcomics), repeat.
Occasionally I sit down and suddenly everything clicks and I get, like, a week's worth of work done in a day.
Generally, at my job, I tackle crazy insane problems that nobody's even sure are possible. And so I need lots of mulling time ("how am I even going to approach this?") and it works for me. More than one person has been surprised at how much I get done . . . I don't really mention how little time I actually spend working.
So far today's been slackoff, but I can feel my brain revving up. Once I'm done with Slashdot I think I can get some real work done today.
Tell him to get a job at a smaller game company instead. I worked at Snowblind Studios doing various algorithmic stuff (random map generation, automaps, texture compression, polyreduction). A few friends of mine work at Cryptic (City of Heroes) on various parts of the toolchain, last I heard.
If you work at a sucky company, you get to do sucky work. Go to work at a good company - he's probably got a nice resume at this point.
I've never understood why blatant corporate or political lying isn't a finable offense. It seems so simple - if someone in a public office says something obviously wrong, or displays a study that clearly contradicts their claim, slap 'em with a fine. If someone in a corporate structure does the same, hit the corporation with a fine.
Why is this so difficult?
Oh yeah, because the people who make laws got there by lying.
That introduces an entire new set of problems - HL2 often has levels where you can see the beginning and end at the same time. Dynamic loading generally restricts you to being able to see a level and a half at a time, at most, and if you're making the levels smaller, that can quickly turn into "oh boy another corridor".
Metroid Prime could have run up against this problem, but they were careful to have large panoramic rooms - and if you look closely, the large panoramic rooms are generally relatively low on features and polygons.
TANSTAAFL.
Yes, there are ways to do it. There are always ways to do it. There are also always tradeoffs.
Ironically, I've had more trouble with the crash report app than with Firefox itself. I eventually gave up and just didn't report crashes. At some point it stops being worth my time.
Hah. That's absolutely beautiful.
;)
On the other hand, it also demonstrates my point - that trip-and-fall animation is taking up valuable RAM, and it wouldn't be necessary at all if it didn't have dynamic loading.
(Can't wait to try out J&D3. Stupid lots-of-games-coming-out-all-at-once.)
Oddly, while I often get motion sickness in FPSes, that simply wasn't a problem in HL2. No idea why. Not complaining.
:)
I've sort-of linked it to excessively high FPS, so any game that runs at 80 or 90 brings it out. Therefore I tend to crank detail settings up. Worked well this time, since the game is so stunningly beautiful.
But at least it ran smoothly! :)
I refer to it as "Progress Quest with pretty graphics".
I'm not. High-detail textures.
There *are* fast ways of loading levels that AFAIK PC games don't tend to use. I've never been quite sure why - maybe just lack of experience in the console world and the tradeoffs you *have* to make, and therefore they don't think about some of those tradeoffs on the PC. You do end up with a bit of a data size hit, which (ironically) is a much greater problem on the PC than the console.
I'm not talking creatively - I'm talking about technically. Memory management and data consistency is tough enough without having to deal with pieces of the level moving in and out of memory. (I wonder what Jak&Daxter does when the disc is glitchy and it can't load fast enough?)
It's flat-out deadly on the console, but notice that games that do this either break their levels up into LOTS of little rooms or have relatively low polys and low texture counts. TANSTAAFL. Sacrifices will always be made.
If Half-Life 2 had no loading, but the graphics weren't as good, would you consider this a reasonable tradeoff?
Would the other people who bought it consider it a reasonable tradeoff?
Spending a minute loading? That's crazy. I really do get ten-second loads most of the time, and I've got an older computer. Even three minutes of play to ten seconds of load isn't that bad.
I never said it wasn't possible. It is, of course, possible. It's just difficult.
:P
Personally I found Dungeon Siege to be a brutally boring game after the first few hours. I'd rather they spent that time working on gameplay than seamless loading. They might have created a game that was fun.
The problem is that, in the end, nobody really cares. Loading seamlessly is hard and raises system requirements quite a bit (since not only do you need to hold two levels in memory at times, but you also need to be loading an entire new level while the player is playing.)
And in the end nobody's going to say "Well, I *would* buy Half-Life 2. But every ten or fifteen minutes I have to spend ten seconds waiting for a new level to load. So I won't."
And therefore it doesn't get changed.
The big problem for me was texture corruption. I'd have random colored triangles on apparently random textures. Finally tracked down a fix - turn off "Catalyst AI" in the Catalyst Control Panel (apparently it's an ATI-only problem), which required that I *get* the Catalyst Control Panel.
Bah.
On the other hand, I just finished the game, and it rocked. If anyone wants to read my review it's here :P
I think it wouldn't actually work to put something in geostationary orbit - the Earth would screw the orbit up too much.
:)
That being said, I'm not an astrophysicist, and so I don't honestly know - I was just copying the article for the purpose of yelling "RTFA".
"A lunar space elevator would work differently than one based on Earth. Unlike our own planet, which rotates every 24 hours, the Moon only turns on its axis once every 29 days; the same amount of time it takes to complete one orbit around the Earth. This is why we can only ever see one side of the Moon. The concept of geostationary orbit doesn't really make sense around the Moon.
There are, however, five places in the Earth-Moon system where you could put an object of low mass - like a satellite... or a space elevator counterweight - and have them remain stable with very little energy: the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. The L1 point, a spot approximately 58,000 km above the surface of the Moon, will work perfectly."
In other words, RTFA.