While everyone is grumbling (and rightfully so) about the privacy issues raised by this, there is another tragedy that is taking place as well. One of the things that made (and somewhat still makes) America great is the public infrastructure we have. Public defenders, public schools, public parks, public libraries, and public roads are only a few examples of these benefits we have, and they represent the communal prosperty that we enjoy as a country. Over time, the quality and even existence of these things have been threatened by various forces. All of these things have faced budget cut backs or attempts at commercialization.
Certainly for individuals who can afford it, private schools, or pay-per-mile roads will benefit them more as they no longer need to support individuals who can't afford it. The whole point of these public services in the first place was to provide these basic utilities to the entire community and not a select few. It seems that we as a society have become much less concerned about the welfare of the whole, and only for the welfare of the rich.
I've just lost any rememnant of respect I had for redhat because of this move. If redhat is willing to actively discriminate against a country for financial gain, then perhaps *I* am willing to actively discriminate against redhat when it comes to any of the research labs, computer labs, and servers that I administer.
It's important to make the distinction here. nVidia has opensourced the parser and compiler for CG, but they control the language. Look at it this way, nvidia needs something to show off NV30 with, and CG will be the thing to do it. This is in direct competition with the opengl 2.0 and DX9 HLSLs though, and you can bet that they won't be steering CG in any directions favorable to their competition like ATI or 3DLabs. It's fine if nVidia wants to do their own thing, but realize that this cg isn't nearly as open as the "opensource" headline makes it sound.
Really I did. I drove all the way out to microcenter with my friend because supposedly they had "linux games". I was looking for Alpha Centauri... Or maybe Heroes of Might and Magic III. Or whatever that RTS game was that got ported over. If they had sc3k, I would have payed retail, taken it home, and even would have been pretty happy knowing I supported a linux company. I got there, and what did they have? Quake3. That's it. Yeah yeah, when I called, I should have asked more than simply "do you carry linux games?". Yeah yeah, I could have gone online and ordered the software from any number of online stores. But buying games isn't like buying a word processor. It's scratching an itch. You go out, and you want to buy a game, and you want it right then.
Anyway, I ended up with a $10 copy of Alpha Centauri for windows. Had a jumped through extra hoops, and waited a bit longer, I could have had loki's version for linux. It looks like I wasn't the only one that wasn't willing to do it.
This story just makes me think of the simpsons quote: "Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually that I didn't even notice."
Lesbian barbarian women sex to wierd hentai alien sex? What's next?!:)
Nite_Hawk
Well, I might have believed you had I not just read the gnome-2-0-list and seen that the hub issue isn't nearly what you make it out to be. A couple of months ago Havoc did some brainstorming with some other people about a hypothetical component system known as "the hub" to unify linux. The paper was never released to the public, and was only circulated to a couple other developers to get their insight to see if it was actually a good idea or not.
The beginning of the end for debian? Corel being one of the most popular distrobutions? I don't know what people around here have been smoking, but of all the people I know, debian is used the most. Granted, it's not the easiest thing to get installed and running, but once you've got it setup, it's great. It's interesting how people who like a product tend to predict the "begining of the end" for it's competitors. How many times have you heard linux bigots say that it's the beginning of the end for microsoft? Or how about Microsoft people talking about the end of Apple? Or NT people talking about the end of UNIX as a whole? As long as there are people that still care about it, it'll keep being a worthy distro to install.
Nite_Hawk
Heh, atleast they seem to be releazing it at this point. I think the networks are a little overzealous to declare a winner.:)
Anyway, I'm happy, Nader has 7% in MN here so he'll get his funding if the trend is the same in the other states.
Alot of people here seem to be praising the 22" Apple LCD display, though I have to say that I'm not all that impressed with it. We have one here at work, and it's exhibited some issues. The center of the screen is darker than the edges, so you get this wierd shadowed effect. There are a couple geometry problems as well, with certain areas of the screen not lining up as well as you would expect. It's made it unsuitable for some of the vision studies that are done here, so now it's just pretty much used as an over-glorified workstation monitor (Still a rather nice one). I guess my suggestion would be that when you factor in how much this display costs, you really should be getting perfection, and so far our experience with it here has been unimpressive.
It was interesting seeing Tom talk so confidently about the future of computers and internet appliances in general near the end of the article. I found the article to be fairly good until that point, but it revealed the same problems I've found with his site, and many other hardware sites in general. Certain authors make claims about current products, and future products without backing up the information in any way. This ranges from benchmarks to opinions. In the article, he dismisses the Playstation II as being "proprietary", and also says that the so called microsoft "x-box" will be able to undercut in both price and performance, without once backing up that claim. Even if the x-box is the wave of the future, and can beat out the psx2 in both price and performance, that doesn't mean that it is good for AMD's future. He simply says that "it is believed" (by who?) to be based on the splitfire chip by AMD. This single statement is the only link that is made to his apparent thesis: "All of these factors compounded with the fact that personal computing is about to undergo a profound transformation set the stage for AMD's ascension and Intel's collapse." His arguement about the x-box is not supported by fact, and because the x-box only is rumored to use an AMD chip, it also does not support his thesis statement.
Does anyone else notice similar issues with hardware review sites? Perhaps I'm being too nitpicky, but it seems that there is a lack of quality in hardware reviews that is not found in most other scientific research papers. It would be to their own benefit to attempt to improve on the quality of their texts, rather than offering so much quantity.
We'll have to watch what Nvidia does, because they are in kind of a bad situation with thier drivers. They have a gaming board that is extremely fast. A DDR geforce is faster in many, if not all GL tests than a Oxygen GVX1 "professional" card that costs about $350 more. At the same time though, they want "professionals" to buy their Quadro (quattro?) card for ~$800, which is going to be a bigger cash cow than the geforce on a card to card basis. With opensource drivers for both cards, The quadro will only sell based on it's hardware merits and name recognition, rather than also being the only card to have full opengl drivers. If I remember correctly (let me know if I'm wrong) the Quadro has a peak polygon rate of 17M triangles/sec. The current theoretical max on the Geforce is 15M triangles/sec, but realistic peak is 10M. Now, perhaps this will be enough to differentiate the Quadro, but for triple the price? The way that they could "fix" this, (and other cards seem to have done this in the past) would be to simply release a mini-gl driver for games, lacking certain functions that would make the card useful to use in "professional" programs. That means that they either would have to keep the drivers close sourced, or impossible to fix/modify in time before the next generation card hits the market. By the time the new card hits, it doesn't matter if the old one has good GL drivers, because the next generation should offer something useful over the old one.
Personally, I think this is the game they are playing. Develop mesa drivers, but make them fairly hard to understand and don't release Quadro drivers. They can hope that this will delay professional quality drivers for mesa for the geforce and quadro long enough that they can keep ahead of the game. At the same time, release professional quality drivers for the Quadro with a new rendering infistructure that is closed source in some form, and offer this as a solution for Maya and other highend applications. Because your already paying in the thousands for maya, an extra couple hundred for the opengl software that is certified 1.2 compliant probably won't be any skin off thier backs. This way, Nvidia is happy, SGI is happy, the consumer with deep pockets doesn't really care, but the consumer that wants the most out of his "gaming" card that wants it to live to it's full potential might be annoyed.
If apple continues on with the Quicktime4 legacy, I don't know how you can accurately say that OSX is about consistency. Sherlock2, QT4, the iMac's DVD player, how many other applications have to circumvent the OS deisgn just to stand out and be different? Apple has cut back drastically on their HIG (Human Interface Group), and it shows. Bruce Tognazzini, who started that group is quoted as saying "in the hands of an amateur, slavish fidelity to the way a real-world artefact would act is often carried way too far... I suspect you will see a lot more ego-driven design before things get better" in reference to Apple's Quicktime4 design.
In addition, I'm not entirely sure what your getting at with "dept of admin capability" but I can assure you that linux's administration capabilities are QUITE good if your willing to work with configuration files, which makes a lot more sense to me than a binary registry does. Of course, if you don't like text configuration files, then it's probably not for you.
I don't believe the defense is claiming that it won't happen, but rather, the point of their software isn't to make it happen. As they noted, it was already possible to pirate dvds without their program, and that the primary use of their program is to view DVD content. Pirating the content would be pretty useless if you didn't have a means to play it, unless you intended to sell it. In the same way, a vcrs primary purpose isn't necessarily to pirate rented movies, though they are used as such fairly often. If someone kills a man, no matter what the object, it was the man, not the object that did the killing. Maybe we should find out what leads to the murder rather than banning the knife that was used in the killing? Just my opinion.
It really shouldn't matter all that much if people hit the targets, even accidently. The idea would be to draw the fire of the auto-aiming software so that they run out of ammo and make themselves well known to other people. That's why I don't think you'd need to have the server actually "do" anything to anyone that hits a target, just having the auto-aimer always shoot at those targets would be punishment enough to deter people from wanting to use them.
I'm not totally sure about the second case, as I'm not terribly familiar with quake's object placement methods. Arn't there certain locations that players always respawn? Would it be possible to use those locations, and then have these target bots just kind of float around aimlessly? as long as they are treated as "players" I think it should work..
I'm wondering if we would need any form of punishment at all. If the aiming bot is hitting a fake target 75% of the time, they'll run out of ammo pretty quickly, and also be pretty susceptable to other people hitting them. not only would other people be able to easily spot them, but they'd also be able to hear their gun go off all the time and essentially "track" them without cheating. you'd know to run away if you were low on health.;) People would also easily know who was cheating and team up on em too.:) it'd be kinda funny if you had them respawn in close quarter areas, so that if they use a rocket launcher they blow themselves up.;)
You wouldn't need for them to be kicked out at all. If a target gets hit, have it respawn in another place. You just keep enough of them floating around that the AI is shooting fairly often at the "wrong" targets wasting it's ammo and openning itself up to be shot by other players while it's shooting at fakes.
As for the texturing, you wouldn't need it to always be transparent. You could have differing textures, even ones that are generated server side at the start of each game. The human brain currently still is going to be better at pattern recognition than a desktop computer trying to do it in realtime while at the same time trying to play a game of quake. That's what we'd want to capitalize on. Granted, this means that the server would need to send that texture to the client, and that's a dead giveaway if no other textures are being sent. Though because certain teams seem to be able to have their own textures in some of the screenshots I've seen, perhaps it would be possible it hide them. Anyway, most solutions are going to have some problems atleast..
You can make an AI do anything you want if you give it enough processing power, time, memeory, etc etc. The point would be to make it so hard to do so, and so computationally intensive that it would be irrelevant. If you could force the computer player to have to analyize visual information similar to how the human brain does so to determain wether or not it's "fake", the computation power to do so in realtime would be pretty intense. Now, if the client can simple say "this model is only 6 polygons, ignore it" then it's fairly easy. But if the client has to say, determain if a movement pattern that the faked player is moving in is random or human generated, then the problem becomes a bit more difficult. And if the player in question doesn't move, does that mean it's faked or could it still be real? does the AI want to take the chance that it could be a human siting still until it comes into range, and then blasts it's head off? Should it just shoot all players that are sitting still incase they are human?
Alternatively, it might try to do a texture analysis of some sort, though that could involve even more intensive computational power. Each texture on each polygon would have to be anylized to see if it qualifies as a "faked" client or not. What if 1 pixel was set for green while the rest are transparent? What if on the other side it's 20 pixels of green with 1 transparent? what if it's a random mix of transparent and different shades of green?
Once you start adding variables to the equation, pattern recognition, especially in realtime, becomes pretty intense, and if the client is trying to play the game on top of it, things could get pretty nasty, which is the point. They may be able to make the AI crack your scheme and be able to determain if a player is faked or not, but if the faked player is done well, it will add so much overhead that it won't be worth doing.
The auto-aiming thing does indeed seem to be a problem. I wonder if it would be possible in some way to "confuse" such programs by limiting the information they have available to make decisions. You mentioned changing it so that you couldn't see players around corners. Perhaps in addition to this, something could be implemented so that you have a system of probabilities. It would be hard, and probably rather cumbersome to implement. Though if you could, in some reasonable way, limit the client to "there is a 50% chance that another player exists in the shadows straight ahead of you." the auto-aiming program would be forced to choose targets of highest probability. If you could also implement shadow "cues" that appear to be models of people ahead of you, (like when you scare yourself into thinking that a chair in a dark room is really a monster or a burglar) it may be enough to make auto-aiming additions unintiutive, as they shoot targets that don't exist. Of course in a bright hallway, it doesn't really help all that much.
The other question would be how to render a polygon based model that has a 50% chance of existing. I suppose you could use transparency, though it would be questionable how accurate it would look. It would be nice to be able to remove or add other cues to tell someone if an object is there; the shadow and depth information, contrast to the background, etc.
Perhaps another way might be to have invisible "targets" scattered throughout the level. Essentially a target that no human player can see/hear, or with information that the human player knows to ignore, but that would draw fire from auto-clients that just use client position information to aim/shoot. Again, I'm not sure how feasable this is. If you have an opengl model with completely transparent textures, how much overhead would it add? could a model with only say 6 polygons be used with mayb dull green texture so as not to be obtrusive? Would it be easy for people to code in checks for the fake players into the auto-aiming clients?
Well, I don't know how feasible this all really is, as I'm mostly thinking in physical terms rather than polygons and models. I think limiting the useful information the client has available might be the way to go, if it can be done. Just something to think about perhaps.. Anyway, Thanks again for all the hard work John, it really is apreciated!
I never thought I'd say this, but maybe that scheme class I just got done taking actually did me some good.;) You see, the instructor pounded the idea of abstraction layers into our heads over and over and over again. Never ever let the subprocess (ie client) of a program have access to global variables if they don't have to. Part of this is already there, the client just passes values on to the server. The server code is what needs to be changed. If it could verify every move as being legal or illegal, this problem could be fixed. This would mean that the central server would have a lot more work to do, especially for large multiplayer games, but these days I think most mid end machines should be able to handle it. You basically just have the client do everything it does already, but change the server so that any move that the client tries to make is checked. Does the player still have this much ammo? Is it a valid move for this player to try to go through this wall? Can the gun this player fired do this much damage? etc. If the client tries to make an invalid move, it means instant death. If both the client and server are working the way they are supposed to, you shouldn't need to sync because they will be counting things like bullets the same way, so it shouldn't really be anymore network overhead.
If you wanted to get fancy, you could create a mechanism so that when a client logs in, it recieves a set of variables as the "ruleset" for what everything does. (IE how much damage a specific type of ammo does, how fast bullets move etc.) In that ruleset, if something isn't defined, it just uses the default, taking up less bandwidth.
In my scheme class, we actually just wrote a basic AI game player to play a game that's kind of a cross between 21, and cross-four. It was implemented very similar to above, but on a much simpler scale. I think it would work for something like quake, but I'm still not sure what the overhead on the server would be to check everything that the player is trying to do. It also wouldn't eliminate the problems of nightvision type stuff. Maybe we could implement a system were in the shadows, the server reports a 50% chance of "seeing" a client being there, and it's the job of the client to render that in whatever way it can do best. So if someone always draws a player being there with a 50% chance of him not being there, and that player fires, he tells other people were he is, and they know where to shoot.
I've seen a lot of speculation about it, some people have said it's actually a composition of two different songs from the 20s, others have said it's all written by Poledouris. It was interesting seeing the responces here, I wanted to see who would respond with what.:) I'm not Russian myself, so I don't know the specific inaccuracies of the song. I do enjoy it though, and I'm glad that a couple people seem to have responded.:)
Holodna hmoora. Eemruchnoh v'doosheh Kak mohg znat ya shtoh tee oomriosh? Do svidonia, byehreg rodnoy Kak nam troodnag pridstahvit shtoh eto nyeh sohn. Rodina, dom radnoy, Do svidonia Rodina. Ay. Avepakhod, avepakhod, nass val nahmarskaya zhdyot nyehdazh dyotsyah. Nass zah vootmarskaya dah, ee preeboy!
Just threw that out to get people thinking. Pretty music, if you get a change to listen to it. It's pretty easy to let yourself get caught up in the song, even if the lyrics don't apply to the country who's side you'd seemingly be on. Hope of a Revolution does seem to inspire people to do things they otherwise wouldn't. (I leave it to the reader to figure out the words to the song if they feel so inclined. Dejanews helps.)
Re:A good argument for moderating articles, this i
on
Planet Gattaca
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I think you need to dig a bit deeper than that. Saying "That religion has caused more wars than 'any other force in history'" isn't exactly correct. In some cases it's the action of the people that follow those religions, but not the religion itself. (atleast, in the case of say, christianity.) If you look at the Gospels, the general message is of forgiveness, and *not* waging huge bloody wars for the sake of defending your position. It's not the actual religion then that is then causing the war, but the followers willingness to put the belief on a pedistal. This enables them to completely disobey the teachings of the religion to "protect" it. The religion is a belief and concept, it can't do anything of it's own power. I don't believe it's correct to say that it has anything at all on it's hands, because it isn't capible of doing anything. Christians do have blood on thier hands, the same as everyone else, which is what is really important. People need to recognize that everyone does to a certain extent. Christians simply beleive that it can be washed off by grace.
Slashdot Mirror
While everyone is grumbling (and rightfully so) about the privacy issues raised by this, there is another tragedy that is taking place as well. One of the things that made (and somewhat still makes) America great is the public infrastructure we have. Public defenders, public schools, public parks, public libraries, and public roads are only a few examples of these benefits we have, and they represent the communal prosperty that we enjoy as a country. Over time, the quality and even existence of these things have been threatened by various forces. All of these things have faced budget cut backs or attempts at commercialization.
Certainly for individuals who can afford it, private schools, or pay-per-mile roads will benefit them more as they no longer need to support individuals who can't afford it. The whole point of these public services in the first place was to provide these basic utilities to the entire community and not a select few. It seems that we as a society have become much less concerned about the welfare of the whole, and only for the welfare of the rich.
Nuts, if only I was 305 users earlier...
How *DARE* they.
I've just lost any rememnant of respect I had for redhat because of this move. If redhat is willing to actively discriminate against a country for financial gain, then perhaps *I* am willing to actively discriminate against redhat when it comes to any of the research labs, computer labs, and servers that I administer.
Nite_Hawk
It's important to make the distinction here. nVidia has opensourced the parser and compiler for CG, but they control the language. Look at it this way, nvidia needs something to show off NV30 with, and CG will be the thing to do it. This is in direct competition with the opengl 2.0 and DX9 HLSLs though, and you can bet that they won't be steering CG in any directions favorable to their competition like ATI or 3DLabs. It's fine if nVidia wants to do their own thing, but realize that this cg isn't nearly as open as the "opensource" headline makes it sound.
Really I did. I drove all the way out to microcenter with my friend because supposedly they had "linux games". I was looking for Alpha Centauri... Or maybe Heroes of Might and Magic III. Or whatever that RTS game was that got ported over. If they had sc3k, I would have payed retail, taken it home, and even would have been pretty happy knowing I supported a linux company. I got there, and what did they have? Quake3. That's it. Yeah yeah, when I called, I should have asked more than simply "do you carry linux games?". Yeah yeah, I could have gone online and ordered the software from any number of online stores. But buying games isn't like buying a word processor. It's scratching an itch. You go out, and you want to buy a game, and you want it right then.
Anyway, I ended up with a $10 copy of Alpha Centauri for windows. Had a jumped through extra hoops, and waited a bit longer, I could have had loki's version for linux. It looks like I wasn't the only one that wasn't willing to do it.
Nite_Hawk
This story just makes me think of the simpsons quote: "Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually that I didn't even notice." Lesbian barbarian women sex to wierd hentai alien sex? What's next?! :)
Nite_Hawk
Well, I might have believed you had I not just read the gnome-2-0-list and seen that the hub issue isn't nearly what you make it out to be. A couple of months ago Havoc did some brainstorming with some other people about a hypothetical component system known as "the hub" to unify linux. The paper was never released to the public, and was only circulated to a couple other developers to get their insight to see if it was actually a good idea or not.
1 -June/msg00311.html
Here is a link to havoc's explanation:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/200
If you read the next message in that thread, you'll notice that the person Havoc is refering to agreed he was acting paranoid.
Nothing to see here. Move Along.
The beginning of the end for debian? Corel being one of the most popular distrobutions? I don't know what people around here have been smoking, but of all the people I know, debian is used the most. Granted, it's not the easiest thing to get installed and running, but once you've got it setup, it's great. It's interesting how people who like a product tend to predict the "begining of the end" for it's competitors. How many times have you heard linux bigots say that it's the beginning of the end for microsoft? Or how about Microsoft people talking about the end of Apple? Or NT people talking about the end of UNIX as a whole? As long as there are people that still care about it, it'll keep being a worthy distro to install. Nite_Hawk
Heh, atleast they seem to be releazing it at this point. I think the networks are a little overzealous to declare a winner. :)
Anyway, I'm happy, Nader has 7% in MN here so he'll get his funding if the trend is the same in the other states.
Alot of people here seem to be praising the 22" Apple LCD display, though I have to say that I'm not all that impressed with it. We have one here at work, and it's exhibited some issues. The center of the screen is darker than the edges, so you get this wierd shadowed effect. There are a couple geometry problems as well, with certain areas of the screen not lining up as well as you would expect. It's made it unsuitable for some of the vision studies that are done here, so now it's just pretty much used as an over-glorified workstation monitor (Still a rather nice one). I guess my suggestion would be that when you factor in how much this display costs, you really should be getting perfection, and so far our experience with it here has been unimpressive.
Mark Nelson
It was interesting seeing Tom talk so confidently about the future of computers and internet appliances in general near the end of the article. I found the article to be fairly good until that point, but it revealed the same problems I've found with his site, and many other hardware sites in general. Certain authors make claims about current products, and future products without backing up the information in any way. This ranges from benchmarks to opinions. In the article, he dismisses the Playstation II as being "proprietary", and also says that the so called microsoft "x-box" will be able to undercut in both price and performance, without once backing up that claim. Even if the x-box is the wave of the future, and can beat out the psx2 in both price and performance, that doesn't mean that it is good for AMD's future. He simply says that "it is believed" (by who?) to be based on the splitfire chip by AMD. This single statement is the only link that is made to his apparent thesis: "All of these factors compounded with the fact that personal computing is about to undergo a profound transformation set the stage for AMD's ascension and Intel's collapse." His arguement about the x-box is not supported by fact, and because the x-box only is rumored to use an AMD chip, it also does not support his thesis statement.
Does anyone else notice similar issues with hardware review sites? Perhaps I'm being too nitpicky, but it seems that there is a lack of quality in hardware reviews that is not found in most other scientific research papers. It would be to their own benefit to attempt to improve on the quality of their texts, rather than offering so much quantity.
What odds will you give? :)
We'll have to watch what Nvidia does, because they are in kind of a bad situation with thier drivers. They have a gaming board that is extremely fast. A DDR geforce is faster in many, if not all GL tests than a Oxygen GVX1 "professional" card that costs about $350 more. At the same time though, they want "professionals" to buy their Quadro (quattro?) card for ~$800, which is going to be a bigger cash cow than the geforce on a card to card basis. With opensource drivers for both cards, The quadro will only sell based on it's hardware merits and name recognition, rather than also being the only card to have full opengl drivers. If I remember correctly (let me know if I'm wrong) the Quadro has a peak polygon rate of 17M triangles/sec. The current theoretical max on the Geforce is 15M triangles/sec, but realistic peak is 10M. Now, perhaps this will be enough to differentiate the Quadro, but for triple the price? The way that they could "fix" this, (and other cards seem to have done this in the past) would be to simply release a mini-gl driver for games, lacking certain functions that would make the card useful to use in "professional" programs. That means that they either would have to keep the drivers close sourced, or impossible to fix/modify in time before the next generation card hits the market. By the time the new card hits, it doesn't matter if the old one has good GL drivers, because the next generation should offer something useful over the old one.
Personally, I think this is the game they are playing. Develop mesa drivers, but make them fairly hard to understand and don't release Quadro drivers. They can hope that this will delay professional quality drivers for mesa for the geforce and quadro long enough that they can keep ahead of the game. At the same time, release professional quality drivers for the Quadro with a new rendering infistructure that is closed source in some form, and offer this as a solution for Maya and other highend applications. Because your already paying in the thousands for maya, an extra couple hundred for the opengl software that is certified 1.2 compliant probably won't be any skin off thier backs. This way, Nvidia is happy, SGI is happy, the consumer with deep pockets doesn't really care, but the consumer that wants the most out of his "gaming" card that wants it to live to it's full potential might be annoyed.
If apple continues on with the Quicktime4 legacy, I don't know how you can accurately say that OSX is about consistency. Sherlock2, QT4, the iMac's DVD player, how many other applications have to circumvent the OS deisgn just to stand out and be different? Apple has cut back drastically on their HIG (Human Interface Group), and it shows. Bruce Tognazzini, who started that group is quoted as saying "in the hands of an amateur, slavish fidelity to the way a real-world artefact would act is often carried way too far... I suspect you will see a lot more ego-driven design before things get better" in reference to Apple's Quicktime4 design.
In addition, I'm not entirely sure what your getting at with "dept of admin capability" but I can assure you that linux's administration capabilities are QUITE good if your willing to work with configuration files, which makes a lot more sense to me than a binary registry does. Of course, if you don't like text configuration files, then it's probably not for you.
The best Dressed obviously has to go to TUX. ;)
I don't believe the defense is claiming that it won't happen, but rather, the point of their software isn't to make it happen. As they noted, it was already possible to pirate dvds without their program, and that the primary use of their program is to view DVD content. Pirating the content would be pretty useless if you didn't have a means to play it, unless you intended to sell it. In the same way, a vcrs primary purpose isn't necessarily to pirate rented movies, though they are used as such fairly often. If someone kills a man, no matter what the object, it was the man, not the object that did the killing. Maybe we should find out what leads to the murder rather than banning the knife that was used in the killing? Just my opinion.
It really shouldn't matter all that much if people hit the targets, even accidently. The idea would be to draw the fire of the auto-aiming software so that they run out of ammo and make themselves well known to other people. That's why I don't think you'd need to have the server actually "do" anything to anyone that hits a target, just having the auto-aimer always shoot at those targets would be punishment enough to deter people from wanting to use them.
I'm not totally sure about the second case, as I'm not terribly familiar with quake's object placement methods. Arn't there certain locations that players always respawn? Would it be possible to use those locations, and then have these target bots just kind of float around aimlessly? as long as they are treated as "players" I think it should work..
I'm wondering if we would need any form of punishment at all. If the aiming bot is hitting a fake target 75% of the time, they'll run out of ammo pretty quickly, and also be pretty susceptable to other people hitting them. not only would other people be able to easily spot them, but they'd also be able to hear their gun go off all the time and essentially "track" them without cheating. you'd know to run away if you were low on health. ;) People would also easily know who was cheating and team up on em too. :) ;)
it'd be kinda funny if you had them respawn in close quarter areas, so that if they use a rocket launcher they blow themselves up.
You wouldn't need for them to be kicked out at all. If a target gets hit, have it respawn in another place. You just keep enough of them floating around that the AI is shooting fairly often at the "wrong" targets wasting it's ammo and openning itself up to be shot by other players while it's shooting at fakes.
As for the texturing, you wouldn't need it to always be transparent. You could have differing textures, even ones that are generated server side at the start of each game. The human brain currently still is going to be better at pattern recognition than a desktop computer trying to do it in realtime while at the same time trying to play a game of quake. That's what we'd want to capitalize on. Granted, this means that the server would need to send that texture to the client, and that's a dead giveaway if no other textures are being sent. Though because certain teams seem to be able to have their own textures in some of the screenshots I've seen, perhaps it would be possible it hide them. Anyway, most solutions are going to have some problems atleast..
You can make an AI do anything you want if you give it enough processing power, time, memeory, etc etc. The point would be to make it so hard to do so, and so computationally intensive that it would be irrelevant. If you could force the computer player to have to analyize visual information similar to how the human brain does so to determain wether or not it's "fake", the computation power to do so in realtime would be pretty intense. Now, if the client can simple say "this model is only 6 polygons, ignore it" then it's fairly easy. But if the client has to say, determain if a movement pattern that the faked player is moving in is random or human generated, then the problem becomes a bit more difficult. And if the player in question doesn't move, does that mean it's faked or could it still be real? does the AI want to take the chance that it could be a human siting still until it comes into range, and then blasts it's head off? Should it just shoot all players that are sitting still incase they are human?
Alternatively, it might try to do a texture analysis of some sort, though that could involve even more intensive computational power. Each texture on each polygon would have to be anylized to see if it qualifies as a "faked" client or not. What if 1 pixel was set for green while the rest are transparent? What if on the other side it's 20 pixels of green with 1 transparent? what if it's a random mix of transparent and different shades of green?
Once you start adding variables to the equation, pattern recognition, especially in realtime, becomes pretty intense, and if the client is trying to play the game on top of it, things could get pretty nasty, which is the point. They may be able to make the AI crack your scheme and be able to determain if a player is faked or not, but if the faked player is done well, it will add so much overhead that it won't be worth doing.
The auto-aiming thing does indeed seem to be a problem. I wonder if it would be possible in some way to "confuse" such programs by limiting the information they have available to make decisions. You mentioned changing it so that you couldn't see players around corners. Perhaps in addition to this, something could be implemented so that you have a system of probabilities. It would be hard, and probably rather cumbersome to implement. Though if you could, in some reasonable way, limit the client to "there is a 50% chance that another player exists in the shadows straight ahead of you." the auto-aiming program would be forced to choose targets of highest probability. If you could also implement shadow "cues" that appear to be models of people ahead of you, (like when you scare yourself into thinking that a chair in a dark room is really a monster or a burglar) it may be enough to make auto-aiming additions unintiutive, as they shoot targets that don't exist. Of course in a bright hallway, it doesn't really help all that much.
The other question would be how to render a polygon based model that has a 50% chance of existing. I suppose you could use transparency, though it would be questionable how accurate it would look. It would be nice to be able to remove or add other cues to tell someone if an object is there; the shadow and depth information, contrast to the background, etc.
Perhaps another way might be to have invisible "targets" scattered throughout the level. Essentially a target that no human player can see/hear, or with information that the human player knows to ignore, but that would draw fire from auto-clients that just use client position information to aim/shoot. Again, I'm not sure how feasable this is. If you have an opengl model with completely transparent textures, how much overhead would it add? could a model with only say 6 polygons be used with mayb dull green texture so as not to be obtrusive? Would it be easy for people to code in checks for the fake players into the auto-aiming clients?
Well, I don't know how feasible this all really is, as I'm mostly thinking in physical terms rather than polygons and models. I think limiting the useful information the client has available might be the way to go, if it can be done. Just something to think about perhaps.. Anyway, Thanks again for all the hard work John, it really is apreciated!
If you wanted to get fancy, you could create a mechanism so that when a client logs in, it recieves a set of variables as the "ruleset" for what everything does. (IE how much damage a specific type of ammo does, how fast bullets move etc.) In that ruleset, if something isn't defined, it just uses the default, taking up less bandwidth.
In my scheme class, we actually just wrote a basic AI game player to play a game that's kind of a cross between 21, and cross-four. It was implemented very similar to above, but on a much simpler scale. I think it would work for something like quake, but I'm still not sure what the overhead on the server would be to check everything that the player is trying to do. It also wouldn't eliminate the problems of nightvision type stuff. Maybe we could implement a system were in the shadows, the server reports a 50% chance of "seeing" a client being there, and it's the job of the client to render that in whatever way it can do best. So if someone always draws a player being there with a 50% chance of him not being there, and that player fires, he tells other people were he is, and they know where to shoot.
I've seen a lot of speculation about it, some people have said it's actually a composition of two different songs from the 20s, others have said it's all written by Poledouris. It was interesting seeing the responces here, I wanted to see who would respond with what. :) I'm not Russian myself, so I don't know the specific inaccuracies of the song. I do enjoy it though, and I'm glad that a couple people seem to have responded. :)
Eemruchnoh v'doosheh
Kak mohg znat ya shtoh tee oomriosh?
Do svidonia, byehreg rodnoy
Kak nam troodnag pridstahvit shtoh eto nyeh sohn.
Rodina, dom radnoy,
Do svidonia Rodina.
Ay. Avepakhod, avepakhod, nass val nahmarskaya zhdyot nyehdazh dyotsyah.
Nass zah vootmarskaya dah, ee preeboy!
Salute otsam ee nashem dedum
Zahvietum eekh fsigdah vierney.
Tepierre nichtoh, nee astanoivit,
Pabiedney shark, radnoy straney.
Tiy pliyvee, pliyvee bestrashna,
Gordest say viernykh marieye.
Revoluytziye nadezhdah sgoostk vierif sekh luydeye.
V'oktyabreh, v'oktyabreh,
Rahpar tu ium miy nashe pabiediy.
V'oktyabreh, v'oktyabreh,
Novie meeir fahli numnashy dehidiy.
Just threw that out to get people thinking. Pretty music, if you get a change to listen to it. It's pretty easy to let yourself get caught up in the song, even if the lyrics don't apply to the country who's side you'd seemingly be on. Hope of a Revolution does seem to inspire people to do things they otherwise wouldn't. (I leave it to the reader to figure out the words to the song if they feel so inclined. Dejanews helps.)
I think you need to dig a bit deeper than that. Saying "That religion has caused more wars than 'any other force in history'" isn't exactly correct. In some cases it's the action of the people that follow those religions, but not the religion itself. (atleast, in the case of say, christianity.) If you look at the Gospels, the general message is of forgiveness, and *not* waging huge bloody wars for the sake of defending your position. It's not the actual religion then that is then causing the war, but the followers willingness to put the belief on a pedistal. This enables them to completely disobey the teachings of the religion to "protect" it. The religion is a belief and concept, it can't do anything of it's own power. I don't believe it's correct to say that it has anything at all on it's hands, because it isn't capible of doing anything. Christians do have blood on thier hands, the same as everyone else, which is what is really important. People need to recognize that everyone does to a certain extent. Christians simply beleive that it can be washed off by grace.