and he replied (quite seriously), "Yes, but this isn't pretentious."
Yeah, chalk one up for the non-mac users. That's right, mr fashionable, mr savvy, mr polo neck sweater! Your fashion has caught up with you, and the rest of us rabble have formed an angry mob! Beware of us and run for the hills because we fear your beauty! First it's the cutting remarks like your friend so eloquently put - next... flaming brands and pitchforks!
While I tend to agree with the main ideals of your post, I do feel the need to point out a few small errors in the hope that they won't be brought up again here:
Ridiculous MS Bashing: This is slashdot. No MS bashing shall be referred to as ridiculous. During a depression: You folks are in a recession at the moment. The common consensus is that a depression only occurs when real GDP growth declines by 10% or more in a year. America isn't near those numbers yet. grudge with MS: Again, here most people have one of those. Please find a better argument. fact that you have some imaginary grudge: Look, either it's real and he has one, or it is imaginary and therefore he cannot have it. Your statement contradicts itself and confuses the reader. that's 15000 people with families: Now, the real point of this whole post was to argue this point. These poor sods getting laid off, working for a software developer, these software developers, these NERDS. They don't have families, they are considered almost iconic if they have gotten to second base! Microsoft isn't laying off 15,000 family members, they are shit-canning 15,000 geeks who live in their parents basement, play Warhammer 40K on weekends while eating pizza and come home after work to play World of Warcraft!
Now back off Anonymous Coward! Back away with these dangerous ideals of yours!
While finding these error rates and posts like the parent are cool, what made me really LAUGH in this article wasn't how many errors or lack of errors or the timing, but that even working out to 2013, they knew exactly how much they were going to charge for this.
Talk about medicine for healing rather than profiteering eh?
The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical.
I like this concept. *cough* Get something that could meltdown, but lets just bury it and forget about it, cause everyone makes things that just don't fail. What's the worst that could happen if it DOES fail?
The lights go out, but it's okay, because everyone glows...
And if you think the level of competence at the RIAA is better than MediaSentry's, why don't you take a survey of the record company shareholders
I don't know if it's just me getting angrier as I get older, but I find that the level of competence is slipping everywhere and in everything. I only have to look around my office to see around half the people that are less than competent, and it seems that it was eons ago that I got above satisfactory customer service during a transaction of some sort.
The latter is NOT a joke, but a prediction, given how "in bed" the UK government is with Microsoft.
Look, given we are all adults here, did the you really need the quotation marks in that comment? I mean although the UK government is a bunch of old geezers and smelly codgers, we don't really think that would be physically in bed with a software corporation. Really.
I actually fall between two and one in your points. I am all for learning all we can about the place and progressing our knowledge, so a strong supporter of point two. Now, I did say that I sort of fall into point one, not so much in terms of that I think space exploration is a waste, I am utterly the opposite of that, but I think we should be looking at what happens on earth. I just do not see that there has to be a relationship between us learning to manage our world and learning to reach for the stars.
Now, the third point, here is why I strongly disagree with it (and surprisingly I won't even be a troll about it - I am sort of in a troll mood at the moment).
The earth is indeed getting crowded fast. We are currently at over six billion people, which has increased from under a billion in the last two hundred years. Extinction levels are currently being fueled by our amazing growth and spread over the surface of the planet - not to mention our hunger. I am actually TOTALLY FOR some massive extinctions to take place SOONER rather than later, but more on that later. I don't think we are ready to go to other planets at all yet. If we can't manage to occupy our home planet and manage the resources and planet properly, we have no greater chance if we move to multiple planets. It's not that this planet is too small for the human race at all. It's that we are not able to control ourselves as a whole to manage what we have.
The thing about getting too big as a race for a planet isn't solved by moving to other planets. Here is why. Unless you plan to move hundreds of MILLIONS of people to other worlds, you won't make so much as a dent in the current world population. Over the next forty years our population is expected to rise to around nine billion. Therefore, to ease the current over-population by moving to other planets, you would need to move 3 billion people off this place in the next forty years. That's just so that we can MAINTAIN the population. That's one in every two people currently on the earth moved off-world in the next forty years.
Now, about mass extinctions. Don't get me wrong here, I am meek and timid for the most part, but I don't really see how as a species we can currently control ourselves enough to sustain ourselves into the future. Yes, technology is moving ahead in leaps and bounds, but I fear that we are moving towards a planetary meltdown in even bigger leaps and bounds. For every good thing that we seem to do, there seem to be around ten bad things we invent. For every person that cares about the environment, there are ten that couldn't care less. Now, I think that we do possibly have a chance, but I think our odds would increase much better if there weren't so many of us. Less people make for less impact, no matter what they do. If a virus came along and culled our numbers down to a tenth or even a hundredth of what they currently are, I feel that technology would have much more of a fighting chance to alleviate the issues that we keep making.
I am well aware that this will likely blow my karma away or have a bunch of OMGOMG! replies, but that's the retrospective mood I am in, so no AC posting:)
makes me proud to be a member of the most advanced country on earth
Not to rain on your parade here mate, but have you actually gone abroad? Take a visit through a few countries, maybe parts of Japan, Belgium, Norway, Denmark or Germany and have a good look around. I think you would be quite amazed at what you see there.
That aside I do hope that the next president lives up to expectations. America needs some true leadership again. Besides, the world needs America to have some true leadership again.
"Well, I haven't actually been to Africa but I saw a documentary on National Geographic. Gee, how much money I saved."
Correct me if I am wrong, but lets say I know nothing about any other culture or country and I just want to learn. Might it not be a better idea to spend a few thousand dollars buying hundreds of documentaries, listening to David Attenborough talk and discuss and getting an overall picture of what is around rather than spending that same money and seeing the african tourist trail from the back of a banged up jeep?
Now, if we were to dispense with the imagery for a moment, don't you think that the money spent on sending a few folks down to Mars for example might not be better spent by sending out say mars rover equivalents to ten planets and moons and asteroids? Sure, we might miss out on having a few meatbags growing crappy potatoes and telling us how much they miss bacon, but we would probably learn a mighty bunch more about the system we live in.
It's still so unbelievable to me that we actually have a satellite and stationary vehicles on another planet and are using them to do stuff there. If you really think about this for a moment in terms of what has to be accomplished for this to work it's just mind-blowing.
In other news grandpa, the war ended, the kids really DID put crackers in your letterbox, people DO walk on your lawn when you aren't looking, oh, and yes, I did pinch your false teeth out of the glass next to your bed one day to scare my dentist. Also, happy eighty-seventh birthday!
Wrong on several counts. Even treating a modem line as a serial line (which it was), before adding on TCP/IP, the maximum bandwidth supported by the phone system was 56k, due to the bit-robbing scheme used for in-band signaling. In the US, the maximum attainable connection speed was further limited to about 53.3k by FCC limits on the power output of modems. The overhead of PPP, IP, and TCP further subtract from the usable bandwidth.
Sorry, are you trying to tell us that dial up 56k modem was slow? Let me tell you mister, in my day 56k modems were FAST! Zippy! I tell you! Maybe not as fandangle as all you noisy kids these days with your wireless and all that, but it was FAST. Yes, I could easily view a web page in three to four minutes!
Now, stop spouting your nonsense about FFC limits and stop using so many acronyms that include the letter P, and for the last time GET OFF MY PORCH!
What, you'd prefer to buy when stocks are up? While it is true that a lot of investors do buy high and sell low, it's really not the best way to make money.
Pfffft! As if! Clearly you know less than nothing about stock market trading. This concept you have of buying low and selling high - a preposterous idea. Clearly you aren't keeping up with the times at all now are you. Honestly, you trolls just need to back away from slashdot with your hairbrained ideas and crazy concepts about stock markets. This whole idea of buying high and selling low has worked perfectly well for the rest of the world for the last year if you haven't been paying attention!
Being an avid MMO player from UO to current, as well as being a 3D developer on the Unreal Engine, I can make for some useful input here.
The original UO was indeed a 2D isometric client. Third Dawn brought 3D aspects to the game, though the world was still rendered in isometric view. It just looked more 3Dish. There were however mods/ports to UO that rendered a 3D world! They were buggy as heck though, but you could (in theory) play in the UO world with a 3D client. (Though it was a third party client).
Now, EQ was a true 3D world. No if's or but's about it.
The whole bit about the number of avatars to display, that's more really related to engine/hardware performance. Basically, when developing an environment developers need to look at polygons on a screen. This is one of the main restricting factors in developing a world. The more polygons a graphics card has to render, the longer it takes. It's not the only thing, but at the time that this patent was filed, it was certainly one of the most important things.
Now, avatars in a game generally have a much much higher polygon count than the environment around them, so naturally restricting the number shown might be very beneficial to rendering a game world nicely, however, soon after this patent was originally filed, a bright spark came up with the idea of not removing entire actors, but adding a LOD factor into models. Basically, it means that the further something is away from the camera, the less polygons it will use. This can also be ingeniously used to reduce the polygons per actor/model in the camera view if the number starts getting too high.
To use the obligatory car analogy, if I want to limit my game engine to displaying 100 polygons on the screen at a time, I can render a car with 100 polygons, but also allow the code to reduce these polygons to 50 if a second car comes onto the screen. Should I need to have 10 cars on the screen at once, they would each be reduced to 10 polygons.
Don't the servers already know the position of the avatar, and the clients just send a vector, that is, a request to move a certain number of units in a particular direction, at which point the server calculates a new position from the original postion + the vector?
The section you write about actors and client/server relative positions is sort of right. It's not far off anyhow. Here is how things work in just about all client/server applications now.
The server sets the original position to the client - when a new level loads for example. The the client sends data as to where it wants to go and both the server and client move the character around. Now, due to a number of factors such as latency, packet loss as well as a number of others, the two locations will become out of sync. However, rather than the server being updated with the client's location, what happens is that the client is updated with the server's location of where it things the character is. This sometimes leads to what is known as the "slingshot effect" where characters (or other actors) suddenly update in the client view and appear to slingshot around the screen to catch up. A notable exception to this rule is World of Warcraft, which does actually have servers that will quite happily allow a character anywhere in the world that the client lets them get. This has resulted in some rather funny "exploits" where people altered their clients and walked past mobs to get to the final boss in an instance and then just started attacking it. This may have been fixed in one of the expansions however. While I am not entirely sure, I think that D&D Online may have also suffered from the client updating the server with actor locations, as I recall there was a considerable number of movement hacks and exploits in that game.
commercials which are screened just before your favorite movie
Oh man, nothing shits me more (well, that's not completely utterly true) than buying a DVD, slotting into my player and having to sit through a minute long "You would not steal a handbag, you would not steal a car..." spammercial. How about this, I bought the fucking DVD, doesn't that mean I am NOT a target audience for spamming me with this ad that I can't skip, can't fast forward through and generally does nothing apart from pissing me off?
A small light int he darkness though, I recently worked out that one of the languages generally skips right past the whole advert. I just have to work out that same language is for the other flavors of the same ad.
Nope, Aussie retailer. I work in head office as a senior analyst. I would assume that most roles around this level would have either a comparable package offered or have a higher salary in exchange for a lack of significant STIP plan.
Slashdot Mirror
and he replied (quite seriously), "Yes, but this isn't pretentious."
Yeah, chalk one up for the non-mac users. That's right, mr fashionable, mr savvy, mr polo neck sweater! Your fashion has caught up with you, and the rest of us rabble have formed an angry mob! Beware of us and run for the hills because we fear your beauty! First it's the cutting remarks like your friend so eloquently put - next... flaming brands and pitchforks!
While I tend to agree with the main ideals of your post, I do feel the need to point out a few small errors in the hope that they won't be brought up again here:
Ridiculous MS Bashing: This is slashdot. No MS bashing shall be referred to as ridiculous.
During a depression: You folks are in a recession at the moment. The common consensus is that a depression only occurs when real GDP growth declines by 10% or more in a year. America isn't near those numbers yet.
grudge with MS: Again, here most people have one of those. Please find a better argument.
fact that you have some imaginary grudge: Look, either it's real and he has one, or it is imaginary and therefore he cannot have it. Your statement contradicts itself and confuses the reader.
that's 15000 people with families: Now, the real point of this whole post was to argue this point. These poor sods getting laid off, working for a software developer, these software developers, these NERDS. They don't have families, they are considered almost iconic if they have gotten to second base! Microsoft isn't laying off 15,000 family members, they are shit-canning 15,000 geeks who live in their parents basement, play Warhammer 40K on weekends while eating pizza and come home after work to play World of Warcraft!
Now back off Anonymous Coward! Back away with these dangerous ideals of yours!
I must have missed that quest...
While finding these error rates and posts like the parent are cool, what made me really LAUGH in this article wasn't how many errors or lack of errors or the timing, but that even working out to 2013, they knew exactly how much they were going to charge for this.
Talk about medicine for healing rather than profiteering eh?
The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical.
I like this concept. *cough* Get something that could meltdown, but lets just bury it and forget about it, cause everyone makes things that just don't fail. What's the worst that could happen if it DOES fail?
The lights go out, but it's okay, because everyone glows...
And if you think the level of competence at the RIAA is better than MediaSentry's, why don't you take a survey of the record company shareholders
I don't know if it's just me getting angrier as I get older, but I find that the level of competence is slipping everywhere and in everything. I only have to look around my office to see around half the people that are less than competent, and it seems that it was eons ago that I got above satisfactory customer service during a transaction of some sort.
The latter is NOT a joke, but a prediction, given how "in bed" the UK government is with Microsoft.
Look, given we are all adults here, did the you really need the quotation marks in that comment? I mean although the UK government is a bunch of old geezers and smelly codgers, we don't really think that would be physically in bed with a software corporation. Really.
Now get off my porch!
I actually fall between two and one in your points. I am all for learning all we can about the place and progressing our knowledge, so a strong supporter of point two. Now, I did say that I sort of fall into point one, not so much in terms of that I think space exploration is a waste, I am utterly the opposite of that, but I think we should be looking at what happens on earth. I just do not see that there has to be a relationship between us learning to manage our world and learning to reach for the stars.
:)
Now, the third point, here is why I strongly disagree with it (and surprisingly I won't even be a troll about it - I am sort of in a troll mood at the moment).
The earth is indeed getting crowded fast. We are currently at over six billion people, which has increased from under a billion in the last two hundred years. Extinction levels are currently being fueled by our amazing growth and spread over the surface of the planet - not to mention our hunger. I am actually TOTALLY FOR some massive extinctions to take place SOONER rather than later, but more on that later. I don't think we are ready to go to other planets at all yet. If we can't manage to occupy our home planet and manage the resources and planet properly, we have no greater chance if we move to multiple planets. It's not that this planet is too small for the human race at all. It's that we are not able to control ourselves as a whole to manage what we have.
The thing about getting too big as a race for a planet isn't solved by moving to other planets. Here is why. Unless you plan to move hundreds of MILLIONS of people to other worlds, you won't make so much as a dent in the current world population. Over the next forty years our population is expected to rise to around nine billion. Therefore, to ease the current over-population by moving to other planets, you would need to move 3 billion people off this place in the next forty years. That's just so that we can MAINTAIN the population. That's one in every two people currently on the earth moved off-world in the next forty years.
Now, about mass extinctions. Don't get me wrong here, I am meek and timid for the most part, but I don't really see how as a species we can currently control ourselves enough to sustain ourselves into the future. Yes, technology is moving ahead in leaps and bounds, but I fear that we are moving towards a planetary meltdown in even bigger leaps and bounds. For every good thing that we seem to do, there seem to be around ten bad things we invent. For every person that cares about the environment, there are ten that couldn't care less. Now, I think that we do possibly have a chance, but I think our odds would increase much better if there weren't so many of us. Less people make for less impact, no matter what they do. If a virus came along and culled our numbers down to a tenth or even a hundredth of what they currently are, I feel that technology would have much more of a fighting chance to alleviate the issues that we keep making.
I am well aware that this will likely blow my karma away or have a bunch of OMGOMG! replies, but that's the retrospective mood I am in, so no AC posting
makes me proud to be a member of the most advanced country on earth
Not to rain on your parade here mate, but have you actually gone abroad? Take a visit through a few countries, maybe parts of Japan, Belgium, Norway, Denmark or Germany and have a good look around. I think you would be quite amazed at what you see there.
That aside I do hope that the next president lives up to expectations. America needs some true leadership again. Besides, the world needs America to have some true leadership again.
"Well, I haven't actually been to Africa but I saw a documentary on National Geographic. Gee, how much money I saved."
Correct me if I am wrong, but lets say I know nothing about any other culture or country and I just want to learn. Might it not be a better idea to spend a few thousand dollars buying hundreds of documentaries, listening to David Attenborough talk and discuss and getting an overall picture of what is around rather than spending that same money and seeing the african tourist trail from the back of a banged up jeep?
Now, if we were to dispense with the imagery for a moment, don't you think that the money spent on sending a few folks down to Mars for example might not be better spent by sending out say mars rover equivalents to ten planets and moons and asteroids? Sure, we might miss out on having a few meatbags growing crappy potatoes and telling us how much they miss bacon, but we would probably learn a mighty bunch more about the system we live in.
It's still so unbelievable to me that we actually have a satellite and stationary vehicles on another planet and are using them to do stuff there. If you really think about this for a moment in terms of what has to be accomplished for this to work it's just mind-blowing.
In other news grandpa, the war ended, the kids really DID put crackers in your letterbox, people DO walk on your lawn when you aren't looking, oh, and yes, I did pinch your false teeth out of the glass next to your bed one day to scare my dentist. Also, happy eighty-seventh birthday!
/disengage_smartass_mode
Wrong on several counts. Even treating a modem line as a serial line (which it was), before adding on TCP/IP, the maximum bandwidth supported by the phone system was 56k, due to the bit-robbing scheme used for in-band signaling. In the US, the maximum attainable connection speed was further limited to about 53.3k by FCC limits on the power output of modems. The overhead of PPP, IP, and TCP further subtract from the usable bandwidth.
Sorry, are you trying to tell us that dial up 56k modem was slow? Let me tell you mister, in my day 56k modems were FAST! Zippy! I tell you! Maybe not as fandangle as all you noisy kids these days with your wireless and all that, but it was FAST. Yes, I could easily view a web page in three to four minutes!
Now, stop spouting your nonsense about FFC limits and stop using so many acronyms that include the letter P, and for the last time GET OFF MY PORCH!
What, you'd prefer to buy when stocks are up? While it is true that a lot of investors do buy high and sell low, it's really not the best way to make money.
Pfffft! As if! Clearly you know less than nothing about stock market trading. This concept you have of buying low and selling high - a preposterous idea. Clearly you aren't keeping up with the times at all now are you. Honestly, you trolls just need to back away from slashdot with your hairbrained ideas and crazy concepts about stock markets. This whole idea of buying high and selling low has worked perfectly well for the rest of the world for the last year if you haven't been paying attention!
Makes me wonder what the point of wireless headsets really are if you ultimately still have to look at the phone to use it.
Well.... duuuuhhhh... it's there so that you can check your called ID and dodge the call from the GF while you are out drinking with the boys!
Hey, if they are squabbling over this sort of thing, it does seem much more fitting to be in the past.
2008 may have indeed been a more accurate description. Personally, I think it should be renamed:
2008 - Year of the RIAA.
Being an avid MMO player from UO to current, as well as being a 3D developer on the Unreal Engine, I can make for some useful input here.
The original UO was indeed a 2D isometric client. Third Dawn brought 3D aspects to the game, though the world was still rendered in isometric view. It just looked more 3Dish. There were however mods/ports to UO that rendered a 3D world! They were buggy as heck though, but you could (in theory) play in the UO world with a 3D client. (Though it was a third party client).
Now, EQ was a true 3D world. No if's or but's about it.
The whole bit about the number of avatars to display, that's more really related to engine/hardware performance. Basically, when developing an environment developers need to look at polygons on a screen. This is one of the main restricting factors in developing a world. The more polygons a graphics card has to render, the longer it takes. It's not the only thing, but at the time that this patent was filed, it was certainly one of the most important things.
Now, avatars in a game generally have a much much higher polygon count than the environment around them, so naturally restricting the number shown might be very beneficial to rendering a game world nicely, however, soon after this patent was originally filed, a bright spark came up with the idea of not removing entire actors, but adding a LOD factor into models. Basically, it means that the further something is away from the camera, the less polygons it will use. This can also be ingeniously used to reduce the polygons per actor/model in the camera view if the number starts getting too high.
To use the obligatory car analogy, if I want to limit my game engine to displaying 100 polygons on the screen at a time, I can render a car with 100 polygons, but also allow the code to reduce these polygons to 50 if a second car comes onto the screen. Should I need to have 10 cars on the screen at once, they would each be reduced to 10 polygons.
Don't the servers already know the position of the avatar, and the clients just send a vector, that is, a request to move a certain number of units in a particular direction, at which point the server calculates a new position from the original postion + the vector?
The section you write about actors and client/server relative positions is sort of right. It's not far off anyhow. Here is how things work in just about all client/server applications now.
The server sets the original position to the client - when a new level loads for example. The the client sends data as to where it wants to go and both the server and client move the character around. Now, due to a number of factors such as latency, packet loss as well as a number of others, the two locations will become out of sync. However, rather than the server being updated with the client's location, what happens is that the client is updated with the server's location of where it things the character is. This sometimes leads to what is known as the "slingshot effect" where characters (or other actors) suddenly update in the client view and appear to slingshot around the screen to catch up. A notable exception to this rule is World of Warcraft, which does actually have servers that will quite happily allow a character anywhere in the world that the client lets them get. This has resulted in some rather funny "exploits" where people altered their clients and walked past mobs to get to the final boss in an instance and then just started attacking it. This may have been fixed in one of the expansions however. While I am not entirely sure, I think that D&D Online may have also suffered from the client updating the server with actor locations, as I recall there was a considerable number of movement hacks and exploits in that game.
It comes preloaded with British you insensitive clod!
Fscking jumping puzzles -- My UID is prime... is yours?
And those fscking puzzles that require you to find a prime number or some sort. Those ones give me the willies!
witness commit perjury when she lies about legality
*ahem*
Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
Did you see the bit where it was around 650 pages? Typing all that takes time you ninny!
Personally, I would be happy to punch out that many pages in a year.
commercials which are screened just before your favorite movie
Oh man, nothing shits me more (well, that's not completely utterly true) than buying a DVD, slotting into my player and having to sit through a minute long "You would not steal a handbag, you would not steal a car..." spammercial. How about this, I bought the fucking DVD, doesn't that mean I am NOT a target audience for spamming me with this ad that I can't skip, can't fast forward through and generally does nothing apart from pissing me off?
A small light int he darkness though, I recently worked out that one of the languages generally skips right past the whole advert. I just have to work out that same language is for the other flavors of the same ad.
Hmmm, I could do with a lot of random numbers while munching down on Monte Carlo's. Here, let me give you few for free.
12, 64, 93, 27, 2, 65, 8.
Now you give me more Monte Carlos. Pronto.
*Dr Evil Voice*
Well, I for one welcome our "Mol-ten Mag-ma" overlords!
Do they have fricken lasers on their heads?
*End Dr Evil Voice*
That's quite valid too - although it really is counting chickens before they hatch.
Memories of "National Lampoons Christmas" or whatever it was come to mind with the swimming pool that Chevvy Chase wanted so badly.
Nope, Aussie retailer. I work in head office as a senior analyst. I would assume that most roles around this level would have either a comparable package offered or have a higher salary in exchange for a lack of significant STIP plan.