Voxels don't necessarily actually need to be rendered as cubes. Algorithmicly it is possible to draw a cube on screen without really using polygons in the conventional sense of coding. There is no need to mathematically establish a surface between 3 or more vertexes in order to UV-map your texture or gourad shade etc.
A voxel can be rendered as a point sprite, a square, a circle, a single pixel (with some kind of interpolation) just about whatever floats your boat. Voxels really are rendering without polygons as they are not at all dependant on that kind of method.
More interesting would be searching for unusual things, such as unexplained changes in a stars spectrum or luminosity. What might cause such a thing? A civilization playing around with things like a dyson sphere.
NSA and the Department of Homeland Insecurity likely already have face recognition software trawling websites including social network websites recognizing the same people popping up in photographs all over the world. I doubt it's effective in practice, if they have this, but in theory, this would be the technique to be able to 'search' for say, a suspected terrorist, drawing down shots of faces from all over the world. Someones holiday snap of a crowd in some city. pulled down from flickr. may put a pin in the map as far as tracking a known suspect goes. Nevermind what realtime access to urban CCTV that seems to be popping up in many cities all over the world.
^^^You see what I did there right... I fixed it for myself, i put 'IN' in front of 'security'.
The irony of DRM is that Pirated material is 100% DRM free and you own it forever in a conveniently manageable format.
These pirates (gosh, who would do that? ahem) never get to invoke Vista/7's draconian DRM code in this case.
It's not really often pointed out that DRM directly promotes piracy and encourages previous non-caring disc-in and push-play users to learn about how to circumvent protection.
In certain situations the increased performance of a SSD removes a bottleneck which would result in increased CPU/memory load. On certain platforms this means these components would spend less time in their lower power states, ie lowered cpu multiplier or core voltage level.
Tasks for task a SSD saves power, possibly more than would be lost by any higher CPU speed steps, but in something like a looping benchmark more work is done in the same time therefore more power draw.
Research data is typically large. In the mid-late 90s I recall a researcher planning to move 10 TB of data internationally. It wasn't exactly unprecedented either. The internet was simply not capable of such a transfer. Eventually they had to ship it on many disks.
The problem is with such raw data, ie from a radio telescope, is you need all of it, you can't really cut any out before it's even processed.
This is a lot less of a issue today with research networks all hooked into multi-gigabit pipes. But there are still very large datasets researchers are attempting to work with that are simply not cheap to handle.
I think this is a great idea, it's nice being able to share it but as far as the really sexy big research going on these days I don't see it being much of a point-click-download service!
I used to work for retail store that sold new and used games along side each other. Customers had a very strong preference for hunting a bargain amongst the used games. We also had alot of new titles coming back after 2-3 weeks for cash or trade-in (the barcodes would still scan...) that had obviously been played out, ripped to ISO and user was looking to recoup some of their hard earned dosh.
There was remarkable interest in very old classic games from 5-10 years old and more.
Long after I left the store came under bullying tactics regarding it's sale of used games... we were asked to send off trade-ins (like to be destroyed therefore removed from the market) and were pressured into stopping buying used games... since I haven't worked there in 6 years I will say that, but will say no more.
Console has the myth of being cheap. Initial entry for the hardware seems easier than a PC, but once you've accessorised and got a stack of games you've got your budget for a pc.
A reasonable gaming experience on the pc, at least to the level of graphical experience you get on a PS3/360 is actually rather cheap. Infact a PS3's GPU is less powerful than a cheap 9600 GT / 8800 GT graphics card.
(ok, I do conceed console games are much more optimized for the hardware and have no significant operating system and software driver overhead)
At the end of the day you don't even need a $200+ graphics card to play most games, especially if you are turning off AA and AF (Which still isn't worth the performance hit).
The PC hardware prOn websites are very deep in the pockets of vendors, if you hadn't guessed that from the way they tout $300 and $400 graphics cards as if they are absolutely essiental equipment. You only need to reduce a little detail to get many games running on cheaper or older grpahics cards. Often the reduction doesn't retract much from the game experience.
... the increasing rhetoric from google on being pro-open source. Google perhaps is anticipating anti-trust movement, and has been tactfully not appearing anti-competitive. They have actually released a lot of code to the community and mark my words this would be part of their defence, with mandatory comparison to Microsoft.
Troubleshooting and problem analysis is a complex heuristic process taking into account many pieces of information. How would one replicate that in documentation or software?
It's not really something that can be distilled into documentation.
If your IT department is half up to snuff it'll have asset and change management databases, a knowledge base and a library of technical documentation. This should be sufficient, provided you have the people to pull it all together.
So go to your management and say you can document everything except the fine art of troubleshooting, it's not possible to. That said, a good search able knowledge base goes a long way (Wiki's often have inadequate search). You'll find your more astute techs using google heavily, and using google to search something like Microsoft knowledge base, or other wikis, forums and KBs, because the built-in search is usually rubbish.
Documenting technical procedures is bad for job security.
The unfortunate and somewhat inconvenient truth is that there will always be a protectionist culture in IT. Too gooder documentation will mean management will ask serious questions about why they need expensive staff with qualifications when they see how simple some things really are - that someone who has natural smarts and the Knack, can do the same job just as well as long as you can let them get at the information they need.
Not that this doesn't happen, that some outfits have the inspired idea they can employ an army of monkeys, give them some instructions and watch revenue roll in. Only to find that it doesn't work.
Seriously, in our industry we make money out of things that are broken, always need improvement and have planned obsolescence. It's a fine balance, and perfectionists from other areas may not like the way we do things and ask for things that are somewhat impossible and likely detrimental so tread carefully. Very carefully.
FEAR 1 had slo-mo so TFA is wrong/misinformed, it's not impossible to code.
Then again it is patently clear the reviewer had not really played the original at all.
It took on the form that once activated, the other team, or all other players would have lower fire rate, and movement speed. It would feel like being stuck in treacle. Overall physics of the game was slowed down too, so the slo-mo holder would have improved aim.
The necessary drawback is while you are in possession of slow-mo you'd have a position marker (and glow brightly, and make a booming noise), and everyone would hunt you down in the 20-25 seconds for it to charge up. If you could run long enough to charge it up, you could then deliver serious pwnage for a few seconds. A very interesting gameplay dynamic and it worked well enough in deathmatch.
It worked best in team deathmatch however, and was a hell of a lot of fun - the slo-mo worked on your whole team. Only one person holding the slo-mo would be marked, so the other players could defend. For a few seconds your team could rampage and completely own (turn gore/particle settings right up for maximum results). This had the necessary effect of forcing players to work together and strategise otherwise you'd have your ass handed to you by a bunch of noobs should they have some form of organized play. It was definatley quite fun, provided your not a set-in-your ways FPS gamer like the reviewer implies he is.
Otherwise the game was mediocre when played online. Often, overpowered weapons in small maps with too many players and many choke points meant the game was just messy carnage if players treated it like run-and-gun shooters. Although it meant that you could drop your weapon and go chuck norris with unarmed attacks. Fun.
Mutliplayer made F.E.A.R. worthwhile because the SP, while good, didn't have much replay value. If F.E.A.R 2 doesn't have slo-mo in multiplayer I'm not going to buy it, because this really does sound like more of the same with a graphics upgrade and a console port. F.E.A.R. Combat is a free download and will just do fine for now.
It seems patently obvious that is merely a file protection system (as per pervious versions of Windows since way back) and not any feature that could be confirmed as DRM. I'm not certain of this as I'm still tinkering with Windows 7, but it seems that the file protection has now been extended to applications that opt-in.
A.dll file changing is most often an indicator of a virus/trojan, malware etc. Least often it is some power users patching a binary. This feature existed in some form in previous versions only for system files. It was pretty badly implemented but it did protect XP/2003 from some degree of attacks.
Largely this feature would be a good thing if extended to applications.
Application gets exploited: Windows cans it.
Unfortunately TFA goes straight to the assumption of DRM. They also don't really attempt to circumvent it or even to actually go see if you can turn SFC off in Windows 7 (looking for it now)
Military submarines know their position largely by calculating distance, speed, direction and time taken, they also take into account expected currents and this data is all considered against charts of course. Without active sonar, gps, but with only compass orientation this is the only way to navigate thousands of feet down. Naturally over a period of silent running a submarine will become less and less certain about it's position. This doesn't really matter too much in the massive expanse of ocean, only occasionally surfacing to get a fix from a satellite.
Add to that that submarines don't exactly report to each other where they are.
The odds of a submarine hitting anything in the oceans is extremely remote. It's very very hard to fit your head around the cubic volume of the oceans, even when you have a submarine limited to only the top 1000-3000ft of it!
This is the very definition of a freak occurance.
Infact so unusual and unlikely that I'm quite certain these two submarines were somewhat aware of the presence of the other, were likely following and playing a bit of cat and mouse perhaps (really what else is there to do down there?). But both running silent and lacking any positive fix, there would always be the chance of a collision. No surprises they collided at slow speed - this would be right if they were in maximum stealth.
AMD's 4x4 Quad-FX dual socket motherboards were also a flop. AMD's line of FX-7x series processors for these boards were a limited run. Now considered collectors items. If you can find them! Intel's Skulltrail, was much hyped, but it is now very much quietly pensioned off by Intel, although it a few more boards sold than 4x4.
Anyway where are the Mandatory FLOP puns I was expecting? (Considering this is a brilliant set-up by article poster)
Slashdot Mirror
In case of presidential death, I understand there is some redundancy: they have a hot-swappable vice president who would assume power.
Voxels don't necessarily actually need to be rendered as cubes. Algorithmicly it is possible to draw a cube on screen without really using polygons in the conventional sense of coding. There is no need to mathematically establish a surface between 3 or more vertexes in order to UV-map your texture or gourad shade etc.
A voxel can be rendered as a point sprite, a square, a circle, a single pixel (with some kind of interpolation) just about whatever floats your boat. Voxels really are rendering without polygons as they are not at all dependant on that kind of method.
Bruce Perens, while doing great work, is not a lawyer.
http://xkcd.com/546/
More interesting would be searching for unusual things, such as unexplained changes in a stars spectrum or luminosity. What might cause such a thing? A civilization playing around with things like a dyson sphere.
Considering the stakes, shouldn't we err on the side of caution?
Please explain how we can test "climate change".
Gee I dunno, make lots of measurements?
NSA and the Department of Homeland Insecurity likely already have face recognition software trawling websites including social network websites recognizing the same people popping up in photographs all over the world. I doubt it's effective in practice, if they have this, but in theory, this would be the technique to be able to 'search' for say, a suspected terrorist, drawing down shots of faces from all over the world. Someones holiday snap of a crowd in some city. pulled down from flickr. may put a pin in the map as far as tracking a known suspect goes. Nevermind what realtime access to urban CCTV that seems to be popping up in many cities all over the world.
^^^You see what I did there right... I fixed it for myself, i put 'IN' in front of 'security'.
The irony of DRM is that Pirated material is 100% DRM free and you own it forever in a conveniently manageable format.
These pirates (gosh, who would do that? ahem) never get to invoke Vista/7's draconian DRM code in this case.
It's not really often pointed out that DRM directly promotes piracy and encourages previous non-caring disc-in and push-play users to learn about how to circumvent protection.
The nature of science is that uncertainty is quantified, however deniers crackpots and the ignorant love to re-frame this as a discrepancy.
The Crab system civilization turns on it's first Large Hadron Collider......
In certain situations the increased performance of a SSD removes a bottleneck which would result in increased CPU/memory load. On certain platforms this means these components would spend less time in their lower power states, ie lowered cpu multiplier or core voltage level.
Tasks for task a SSD saves power, possibly more than would be lost by any higher CPU speed steps, but in something like a looping benchmark more work is done in the same time therefore more power draw.
This phenomena Had tom's hardware fooled http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html ("The SSD Power Consumption Hoax : Flash SSDs Donâ(TM)t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime â" they Reduce It")
They later posted a retraction after some people pointed out this flaw.
I would like to see optimizations in linux to take this into account this effect. Perhaps increasing power saving state thresholds to compensate.
Research data is typically large. In the mid-late 90s I recall a researcher planning to move 10 TB of data internationally. It wasn't exactly unprecedented either. The internet was simply not capable of such a transfer. Eventually they had to ship it on many disks.
The problem is with such raw data, ie from a radio telescope, is you need all of it, you can't really cut any out before it's even processed.
This is a lot less of a issue today with research networks all hooked into multi-gigabit pipes. But there are still very large datasets researchers are attempting to work with that are simply not cheap to handle.
I think this is a great idea, it's nice being able to share it but as far as the really sexy big research going on these days I don't see it being much of a point-click-download service!
I used to work for retail store that sold new and used games along side each other. Customers had a very strong preference for hunting a bargain amongst the used games. We also had alot of new titles coming back after 2-3 weeks for cash or trade-in (the barcodes would still scan...) that had obviously been played out, ripped to ISO and user was looking to recoup some of their hard earned dosh.
... since I haven't worked there in 6 years I will say that, but will say no more.
Console has the myth of being cheap. Initial entry for the hardware seems easier than a PC, but once you've accessorised and got a stack of games you've got your budget for a pc.
There was remarkable interest in very old classic games from 5-10 years old and more.
Long after I left the store came under bullying tactics regarding it's sale of used games... we were asked to send off trade-ins (like to be destroyed therefore removed from the market) and were pressured into stopping buying used games
A reasonable gaming experience on the pc, at least to the level of graphical experience you get on a PS3/360 is actually rather cheap. Infact a PS3's GPU is less powerful than a cheap 9600 GT / 8800 GT graphics card.
(ok, I do conceed console games are much more optimized for the hardware and have no significant operating system and software driver overhead)
At the end of the day you don't even need a $200+ graphics card to play most games, especially if you are turning off AA and AF (Which still isn't worth the performance hit).
The PC hardware prOn websites are very deep in the pockets of vendors, if you hadn't guessed that from the way they tout $300 and $400 graphics cards as if they are absolutely essiental equipment. You only need to reduce a little detail to get many games running on cheaper or older grpahics cards. Often the reduction doesn't retract much from the game experience.
Obviously they have canned this idea - pardon the pun - most likely due to being inundanted by requests for domains like .cheezburger
... the increasing rhetoric from google on being pro-open source. Google perhaps is anticipating anti-trust movement, and has been tactfully not appearing anti-competitive. They have actually released a lot of code to the community and mark my words this would be part of their defence, with mandatory comparison to Microsoft.
I would have thought they would be experimenting with cats, which Schrodinger demonstrated have strange quantum properties.
It's not really something that can be distilled into documentation.
If your IT department is half up to snuff it'll have asset and change management databases, a knowledge base and a library of technical documentation. This should be sufficient, provided you have the people to pull it all together.
So go to your management and say you can document everything except the fine art of troubleshooting, it's not possible to. That said, a good search able knowledge base goes a long way (Wiki's often have inadequate search). You'll find your more astute techs using google heavily, and using google to search something like Microsoft knowledge base, or other wikis, forums and KBs, because the built-in search is usually rubbish.
Documenting technical procedures is bad for job security.
The unfortunate and somewhat inconvenient truth is that there will always be a protectionist culture in IT. Too gooder documentation will mean management will ask serious questions about why they need expensive staff with qualifications when they see how simple some things really are - that someone who has natural smarts and the Knack, can do the same job just as well as long as you can let them get at the information they need.
Not that this doesn't happen, that some outfits have the inspired idea they can employ an army of monkeys, give them some instructions and watch revenue roll in. Only to find that it doesn't work.
Seriously, in our industry we make money out of things that are broken, always need improvement and have planned obsolescence. It's a fine balance, and perfectionists from other areas may not like the way we do things and ask for things that are somewhat impossible and likely detrimental so tread carefully. Very carefully.
FEAR 1 had slo-mo so TFA is wrong/misinformed, it's not impossible to code.
Then again it is patently clear the reviewer had not really played the original at all.
It took on the form that once activated, the other team, or all other players would have lower fire rate, and movement speed. It would feel like being stuck in treacle. Overall physics of the game was slowed down too, so the slo-mo holder would have improved aim.
The necessary drawback is while you are in possession of slow-mo you'd have a position marker (and glow brightly, and make a booming noise), and everyone would hunt you down in the 20-25 seconds for it to charge up. If you could run long enough to charge it up, you could then deliver serious pwnage for a few seconds. A very interesting gameplay dynamic and it worked well enough in deathmatch.
It worked best in team deathmatch however, and was a hell of a lot of fun - the slo-mo worked on your whole team. Only one person holding the slo-mo would be marked, so the other players could defend. For a few seconds your team could rampage and completely own (turn gore/particle settings right up for maximum results). This had the necessary effect of forcing players to work together and strategise otherwise you'd have your ass handed to you by a bunch of noobs should they have some form of organized play. It was definatley quite fun, provided your not a set-in-your ways FPS gamer like the reviewer implies he is.
Otherwise the game was mediocre when played online. Often, overpowered weapons in small maps with too many players and many choke points meant the game was just messy carnage if players treated it like run-and-gun shooters. Although it meant that you could drop your weapon and go chuck norris with unarmed attacks. Fun.
Mutliplayer made F.E.A.R. worthwhile because the SP, while good, didn't have much replay value. If F.E.A.R 2 doesn't have slo-mo in multiplayer I'm not going to buy it, because this really does sound like more of the same with a graphics upgrade and a console port. F.E.A.R. Combat is a free download and will just do fine for now.
IANAL
YANAL
GTFO
If a minor or invalid accepts a EULA doesn't the legal responsibility fall to the legal guardian? Thus applies to pets?
TMFA is a masterful slashdot troll and a pretty flithy piece of FUD on the side.
So my question is who do I see about getting 10 minutes of my life back?
It seems patently obvious that is merely a file protection system (as per pervious versions of Windows since way back) and not any feature that could be confirmed as DRM. I'm not certain of this as I'm still tinkering with Windows 7, but it seems that the file protection has now been extended to applications that opt-in.
.dll file changing is most often an indicator of a virus/trojan, malware etc. Least often it is some power users patching a binary. This feature existed in some form in previous versions only for system files. It was pretty badly implemented but it did protect XP/2003 from some degree of attacks.
A
Largely this feature would be a good thing if extended to applications.
Application gets exploited: Windows cans it.
Unfortunately TFA goes straight to the assumption of DRM. They also don't really attempt to circumvent it or even to actually go see if you can turn SFC off in Windows 7 (looking for it now)
Military submarines know their position largely by calculating distance, speed, direction and time taken, they also take into account expected currents and this data is all considered against charts of course. Without active sonar, gps, but with only compass orientation this is the only way to navigate thousands of feet down. Naturally over a period of silent running a submarine will become less and less certain about it's position. This doesn't really matter too much in the massive expanse of ocean, only occasionally surfacing to get a fix from a satellite.
Add to that that submarines don't exactly report to each other where they are.
The odds of a submarine hitting anything in the oceans is extremely remote. It's very very hard to fit your head around the cubic volume of the oceans, even when you have a submarine limited to only the top 1000-3000ft of it!
This is the very definition of a freak occurance.
Infact so unusual and unlikely that I'm quite certain these two submarines were somewhat aware of the presence of the other, were likely following and playing a bit of cat and mouse perhaps (really what else is there to do down there?). But both running silent and lacking any positive fix, there would always be the chance of a collision. No surprises they collided at slow speed - this would be right if they were in maximum stealth.
AMD's 4x4 Quad-FX dual socket motherboards were also a flop. AMD's line of FX-7x series processors for these boards were a limited run. Now considered collectors items. If you can find them! Intel's Skulltrail, was much hyped, but it is now very much quietly pensioned off by Intel, although it a few more boards sold than 4x4.
Anyway where are the Mandatory FLOP puns I was expecting? (Considering this is a brilliant set-up by article poster)
(Mandatory wiki linkage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Quad_FX_platform)
*checks*
...
Yep... we need a new internet