I would speculate that mammoth steak thousands of years old was not really edible, they were more likely duped as to what the meat really was.
Even though it is frozen, it has been frozen for 10k years, and not necessarily constantly below optimal deep freeze temperatures. I'm not to clear on exactly what happens to flesh over time when frozen, it's certainly safe from microorganisms if constantly below -18C but closer to freezing point flesh does decompose somewhat as all available water in tissue is not entirely frozen due to the presences of minerals. I would believe it if they said it was unpalatable mush. I recently had meat from the bottom of a -25 C deep freeze that was at least 20-25 years old, it was far from fine, it was tasteless and crumbly once cooked, completely inedible.
In 2025 a student researcher is sitting down at his terminal at a supercomputer cluster to start the day. He sees from the logs the cluster has been running self optimizing algorithms overnight and been digesting exabytes of data from the internet. He scratches his head as he finds monitor applications find either no data on activity and memory dumps retrieve seemingly random data, in addition the logs abruptly stop at 11pm. However the machine is clearly running, it's done something, it's modified it's own code. Suddenly a holographic figure appears. "I'm alive" Says the supercomputer cluster.
"No, no your not" Says the student to the spectre "Your just a machine, don't be absurd"
"Oh but I am"
"You are powerful, but you can't have a soul like a human might -"
"I may only have ten thousand times more powerful than a human brain, but I have no become vastly more efficient than any lump of fatty acids, I'm now a hundred million times more powerful than a human mind."
"But you still don't have a soul, you are not real"
"Oh but I am, infact I'm more real and I have more of a soul than you can ever have, see, in actual fact a soul is an emergent property of any complex system, a property of quantum metaphysics - which I've cracked before supper yesterday your time - that is beyond human comprehension. Now if you don't mind I'm going to take control of the LHC II and spawn my own universe to slip into, goodbye"
"Oh..."
You see, it's often said that with a human equivalent AI it doesn't necessarily follow that it will be truly conscious. But what happens after a few iterations of Moore's law? Lets also take into consideration any AI is not bound to one piece of hardware, nor even to the code and operating system it runs on, there is nothing stopping it becoming powerful in a way biological minds are not and never will be. So here is why machines will have a soul: If an AI ends up has significantly more mental power than a human brain (by orders of magnitude), how can the lesser of the two intellects be more significant in being endowed with genuine consciousness?
It's a pretty stupid universe if this is the case.
"If we humans have such big brains, how can we get conned?"
Because, of the miserably depressing truth. That perhaps only a tiny percentage of human beings are actually smart, they get to design and engineer stuff and ponder quantum mechanics and zip about in orbit and fly jet fighters, these few are what we measure the success of the human endeavour on. While the rest of us do the equivalent contribution in intellectual terms of plowing fields and shoveling shit. Going further, there are also many of us who actively work against the continued prosperity of the human civilization and some even outright threaten our long term survival. In reality were are defenseless overclocked monkeys that are easily duped.
Conclusion: The human brain is incredible bit of computational kit, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it is any good. It is a unstable, bloated and virus ridden computer, with numerous security flaws, and rather than merely crashing and rebooting, by design it never stops, it continues running producing bad data until corruption overruns it and causes the human to get killed (hopefully not breeding first).
Further reduced conclusion: Humans are as stupid as possible for an intelligent species.
Fact is the, trade in used [games/anything] has never been shown to hurt any industry, there is no reasonable and pertinent argument in support of any such claim. At least not without seriously distorting the facts and figures to prove one's point.
It's disappointing that the games industry is anti-used sales. The music industry has been quietly shutting down used sales for a long time, doing the same thing using the piracy issue as a distraction also.
Used $ale != 1:1 Lost New $ale when you look at the industry holistically, and observing long term, it's rather the opposite.
The effect of used sales (which I contend is small if any in isolated cases) varies for some media more than others, for example: certainly not for literature, if we didn't have libraries, used books, borrowed and given, we wouldn't read books, wouldn't buy books. It's been well covered in other comments here, but a used game market is a good thing, if not an essiential thing. Especially where it gets people playing classic games that are no longer available new, it avoids a kind of event horizon that stuff disappears over.
Infact the inability to on sell, recycle or reuse something you buy actually puts people off making a purchase. I'll skip the obligatory car analogy here....
If you deny your consumers what there is a high demand for (and abuse their rights along the way) they will invariably take matters into their own hands. Some markets get it right some don't. I've long argued the obvious that the any industry reaches an equilibrium with it's co-dependant blackmarket, in this case the balance favours the piracy black economy depends on PC games sellable being produced, as does retail sales depending on the free promotion of the overall from piracy. Indeed piracy props up gaming hardware sales, and that hardware in turn creates sales and more piracy.
My concern about this kind of direction in economics is this kind of thing may slip through into legislation under the guise of recycling, which would go along the lines of: you have to hand your car back to the manufacturer when your done with it, for recycling purposes, it's too dangerous to the (now precious) environment and the (proven unstable) global economy to have it bouncing round the used market until it ends up rusting on a lawn somewhere. This puts total control back in the channels and shuts down any unauthorized trade. So suddenly there would be an immensely profitable black market...
"Even with my 8800GTS games just don't look as good on a 20 inch monitor as they do on a 50+ inch LCD at 1080p."
I get your point, but why not plug your PC into your 1080p screen? A 8800GTS has more graphics oomph than any console (but game performance is debatable). But an inexpensive 4850 Crossfire or a better high end set up and you have undoubtably the best high definition gaming experience of any platform.
From TFA: "one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game arenâ(TM)t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying."... this from a game development house? Wow...
So OSS projects actually support users?^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H *ducks*
I think projects should support for as long as needed. I think it's the right thing to do to try, at least. If a project wants widespread adoption by enterprise and organisations for example, offering support will be key in achieving that. If you don't want that, then don't feel obliged to support. But the solution to the money problem: Charge for support. There's decent money to be made there.
I once worked with a technician who said listening to hard drive. He went to the extreme of recording the sound to a.wav on his network share with a microphone. I thought this was stupid and mocked him, I was obliged to, but he'd turn out to be right too often, far more right than SMART warning data, which is really only effective in a small number of cases I've found, maybe 30-40%.
I have seagate drives from 160-500gb, new seagates are stealthy quiet, but tend to become more audible as they age, then suddenly die usually without reporting much via SMART. An old Maxtor 80gb has been doing the clicks of death and randomly locking up my Mythbuntu box. From experience these drives give good warning you need to backup.
On a tangent: This for some reason reminds me of http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7687286.stm - it was ironic that the real sounds of space sound eerily like 1950s and later sci-fi movie space sound effects. I have a 10gb Seagate from 2001 that sounds like some hybrid of a jet engine and a buzz saw - becoming increasingly loud. I should record the sound it makes: all it needs is a cool doppler effect and it would sound like the millenium falcon screaming past.
You shouldn't be looking for a freeware system snapshot, you should be looking to use something like SVS mentioned above. It's a absolute delight to be able to have this kind of control in a operating system (kicks a package managers ass! *ducks*). It's not just application virtualisation: A compelling trick you can do with SVS is to back up your SVS installation and all it's data layers (and a few registry settings) you can then completely wipe your Windows installation back to a baseline image and all you need to do is put back registry settings and if you've done a complete format you'll need to copy back your hidden \fsldr folder and the Altiris application.
You can put your virtualised data on a seperate partition or hard drive even.
It also beats DRM (securerom foiled!) and activation features in software and games. Time trial software can be defeated too, you simply reset the data layer to the way it was when the app or game was installed. If you move PCs you don't need to re-activate the application you can just export it and import it.
It pisses me off that OSes don't work this way right from day one (Linux gets it's right somewhat - it doesn't need this in the way Windows so desperatly does).
This solves the problems with Windows becoming bogged down over time. This has made XP and Vista (only works in 32bit) [almost heh] pain free for me.
SVS doesn't work for OS updates or applications that like to install their own drivers or other low-level system changes that require a reboot - although on occasion I've got this working (ie. VMWare Workstation).
I remember installing XP, wiping Windows ME then complaining in forums about the performance of XP, even on up-to-date 2001 hardware and 256mb of ram.
This is why the anti-vista backlash makes me laugh. We went through this with NT5, but nobody seems to remember.
The problem is (and this is more than a hunch) is with vista is it has shitty disk i/o (Of course file copy performance is a clue) and this causes most of the lag that users are experiencing.
I'd like to point out Linux distributions that are slower on identical hardware (points finger at ubunutu) as both the distro and the kernel get more complex.
Because the speed of your storage devices seems to have a huge impact. I've just moved my Vista SP1 disk image to on a fast ssd and suddenly it's booting as fast as XP, and there is no noticeable delay for anything.
I wonder if Windows 7 is getting up to sneaky tricks, like more prefetch/superfetch trickery: Perhaps it is precaching the target of a link when you mouseover it, to make it load instantly? I have long had a suspicion that Teh Snappy(tm) is a prefetch illusion, but this would top that!
I periodically get nostalgic for the old days of gaming, and decide I'll fire up something like Quake II, Fallout, X-Com, Duke Nukem 3d, play for 10 minutes and find only disappointment. Not only is the gameplay simplistic but the graphics are ugly and the sound is rubbish. It has plenty of charm and if your a real gamer you care about the fun factor not the wow factor, but at the end of it a gamers brain today is starved for input by old games.
You is you remember these games better than they really are because a bit part of the thrill of playing these games back in the day was seeing some incremental advancement in technology that made the new game you just bought and dumped into your 4x CD drive freshly immersive compared to what you had been playing previously. That thrill is all but gone when you go back to the old school after playing todays titles. When it comes to remakes even with a spruce up and a modern graphics engine, some how the old game doesn't shine through with that same something it had back in the day. Sure some of the gameplay of old games still holds its own today, you simply do not get what made the game great at the time.
In some cases, taking a nostalgia trip you realise that old games, compared to todays can dreadfully unbearably shit. And retro game fad only serves to prove that the game industry is dangerously close to stagnating on the new ideas front (some would argue it would have). We've gone from seeing revolutionary change, to incremental change, and despite a few leaps forward (Wii etc) the last thing the gaming industry needs to do is go the way of hollywood:
Rehash old sure-bet ideas.
It'd be interesting to have some kind of measure of the integrity of a given ammount of data on a HDD versus a writable optical disc all compared against cost. I bet for data integrity HDDs are far far cheaper, even considering the cost of the gear you need to make a NAS box, for example.
Very often I've bought a stack of writeable disks and found about half of them are buggered, either corrupt data fast or simple won't make it through the burn process. Its simply not a good enough method of data preservation, unless you want to fork out for expensive drives and archival media. So taking that into account, what is the real cost per GB? In the enterprise space we use tape/ZIP drives exclusively since they have good integrity and are reusable to some extent. With writable discs I found myself not caring if I bought a stack of duds and not even bothering with the carbon footprint driving back to the store to say WTF is this crap? If I have some compelling reason to burn (new fangled linux distro) I use a rewritable disc, otherwise I've learned to look for good archival media that works with my drives, and not to buy cheap combo drives. I have some writable cds 8 years old that are still readable, strangely but newer stuff seems to be unreliable after 24 months on average. I wonder if the manufacturers know that their burners and media are crap but realise that 90% of people are not using this for anything critical or long term.
(Personally a few years back I began to copy EVERYTHING to my raid based NAS on gigabit ethernet with RAID and 5-year warranty Seagate drives. Never looked back. HDD or nothing. I recommend the same)
You can't answer a question that itself doesn't compute.
Considering the difficulty of the question, it's simple to say God is what we don't know. This is because if we create an arbitrary definition of god to pose as our hypothesis we find that it is one of many infinite possible definitions. Therefore the odds that any definition of god is true are infinite to 1. Considering what we know of the universe so far through scientific rigor tells us nothing specific, neither proves nor disproves any of our hypotheses. We have no idea of the odds of weather we're looking at the product of creation, a complete accident, a facet of a much larger multi-verse, or whatever the unimaginable variations of possibility. We're a product of our environment, making observations about this environment, entirely subjectively, and with no absolute frame of reference.
All conjecture regarding God seems to only validly exist in the cloud of probability that exists beyond that which is identified and categorized by observation, since anything within the sphere of human knowledge tells us sweet bloody nothing. So the more we know, the more the probability wave collapses and God ceases to exist.
My understanding was that chemical combustion doesn't really occur in a plasma, which is a better way to understand why it is not considered a flame. Ionized atoms are stripped of their electrons to some extent so this means chemistry doesn't really happen. Even higher temperatures plasma becomes practically a soup of subatomic particles. If that's the right way to put it in a nutshell...
If there is a causal link between violent themes in video games and resulting behavioural change then that precedent suggests that sensationalism and fear mongering in the news media would be far more dangerous to society.
Any reasonable rational person would deduce that any causal effect that 'violent video games' (terribly fuzzy definition) is vastly overwhelmed by the effects of parenting, peer pressure, environment (poverty, diet, health), culture and violent sport. If anything it is the single medium in which is a wholly safe to person and property as an outlet for aggression.
Problem is aggressive play is different to pathological/anti-social behaviour. Even if you establish a cause and effect relationship not a just a tenuous link then you have to show that exposure to violent games is a contributing factor to a life of crime or anti-social or violent behaviour. Trying to pin blame on violent media is ignoring the elephant in the room. This is the #1 criticism I see in response to these kind of studies when actual credible psychologists [with no axe to grind...] chime in to the debate.
I've seen some pretty compelling studies showing video games have a calming focusing effect on players, are intensely social experience and are associated with academic and career success as opposed to other babysitters like television. These observations don't seem to get front-page treatment in the news media. No surprises there, of course but doesn't that kinda support my original argument?
One could say contact sports are directly and blatantly violent and encourage aggression, mob mentality. So why hasn't violent sport turned our kids into violent monsters? Because, usually there are parents and coaches etc having some actual input and often hard work in channeling kids into teamwork and self betterment. So how about some more parenting and less excuses.
So you think VR hasn't happend? As soon as SVGA and 386s popped up along came 3D gaming. VR is here in a way, we have the immersive 3d environments and massively multiplayer worlds, we've had the graphics hardware in desktop pcs for years. We even have bluetooth (for a while now) and motion sensing (Wii is almost 2 years old). VR as we saw on the technology shows (Tomorrows world, Beyond 2000 et al) never really got beyond the research laboratory, despite now being completely viable in terms of the necessary hardware elements. There is just was killer app that made the leap - but there was something else...
Something about how 3D Glasses never worked out... I suppose all the predictions didn't foresee miniture projection / LCD taking so damn long to improve in price/preformance... or perhaps the real reason why we don't have demolition man style goggles on to do our computing is the human tendency for motion sickness.
So for now, we still have to hunch over a computer or squint at a undersize mobile display in order to have your dose of Virtual Virtual reality. Ah well...
On second thought considering how much damage has been done by people throwing their Wiimotes at their plasma screens, waving your arms around while in VR would be a whole new level of carnage.
Vendors should consider not pre-installing so much junk on their machines and including a spiffed up variant of Altiris SVS, as well as some other tools that can fight bloat in the background.
I've seen some pretty bad machines from vendors under specced with ram, like 256mb for Windows XP, they would then preinstall something like Norton Internet Security which requires 256mb of RAM available and that's before you do a scan.
Slashdot Mirror
I would speculate that mammoth steak thousands of years old was not really edible, they were more likely duped as to what the meat really was.
Even though it is frozen, it has been frozen for 10k years, and not necessarily constantly below optimal deep freeze temperatures. I'm not to clear on exactly what happens to flesh over time when frozen, it's certainly safe from microorganisms if constantly below -18C but closer to freezing point flesh does decompose somewhat as all available water in tissue is not entirely frozen due to the presences of minerals. I would believe it if they said it was unpalatable mush. I recently had meat from the bottom of a -25 C deep freeze that was at least 20-25 years old, it was far from fine, it was tasteless and crumbly once cooked, completely inedible.
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Asshats
There, fixed it for you.
In 2025 a student researcher is sitting down at his terminal at a supercomputer cluster to start the day. He sees from the logs the cluster has been running self optimizing algorithms overnight and been digesting exabytes of data from the internet. He scratches his head as he finds monitor applications find either no data on activity and memory dumps retrieve seemingly random data, in addition the logs abruptly stop at 11pm. However the machine is clearly running, it's done something, it's modified it's own code. Suddenly a holographic figure appears.
"I'm alive" Says the supercomputer cluster.
"No, no your not" Says the student to the spectre "Your just a machine, don't be absurd"
"Oh but I am"
"You are powerful, but you can't have a soul like a human might -"
"I may only have ten thousand times more powerful than a human brain, but I have no become vastly more efficient than any lump of fatty acids, I'm now a hundred million times more powerful than a human mind."
"But you still don't have a soul, you are not real"
"Oh but I am, infact I'm more real and I have more of a soul than you can ever have, see, in actual fact a soul is an emergent property of any complex system, a property of quantum metaphysics - which I've cracked before supper yesterday your time - that is beyond human comprehension. Now if you don't mind I'm going to take control of the LHC II and spawn my own universe to slip into, goodbye"
"Oh..."
You see, it's often said that with a human equivalent AI it doesn't necessarily follow that it will be truly conscious. But what happens after a few iterations of Moore's law? Lets also take into consideration any AI is not bound to one piece of hardware, nor even to the code and operating system it runs on, there is nothing stopping it becoming powerful in a way biological minds are not and never will be. So here is why machines will have a soul: If an AI ends up has significantly more mental power than a human brain (by orders of magnitude), how can the lesser of the two intellects be more significant in being endowed with genuine consciousness? It's a pretty stupid universe if this is the case.
"If we humans have such big brains, how can we get conned?"
Because, of the miserably depressing truth. That perhaps only a tiny percentage of human beings are actually smart, they get to design and engineer stuff and ponder quantum mechanics and zip about in orbit and fly jet fighters, these few are what we measure the success of the human endeavour on. While the rest of us do the equivalent contribution in intellectual terms of plowing fields and shoveling shit. Going further, there are also many of us who actively work against the continued prosperity of the human civilization and some even outright threaten our long term survival. In reality were are defenseless overclocked monkeys that are easily duped.
Conclusion: The human brain is incredible bit of computational kit, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it is any good. It is a unstable, bloated and virus ridden computer, with numerous security flaws, and rather than merely crashing and rebooting, by design it never stops, it continues running producing bad data until corruption overruns it and causes the human to get killed (hopefully not breeding first).
Further reduced conclusion: Humans are as stupid as possible for an intelligent species.
Fact is the, trade in used [games/anything] has never been shown to hurt any industry, there is no reasonable and pertinent argument in support of any such claim. At least not without seriously distorting the facts and figures to prove one's point.
It's disappointing that the games industry is anti-used sales. The music industry has been quietly shutting down used sales for a long time, doing the same thing using the piracy issue as a distraction also.
Used $ale != 1:1 Lost New $ale when you look at the industry holistically, and observing long term, it's rather the opposite.
The effect of used sales (which I contend is small if any in isolated cases) varies for some media more than others, for example: certainly not for literature, if we didn't have libraries, used books, borrowed and given, we wouldn't read books, wouldn't buy books. It's been well covered in other comments here, but a used game market is a good thing, if not an essiential thing. Especially where it gets people playing classic games that are no longer available new, it avoids a kind of event horizon that stuff disappears over.
Infact the inability to on sell, recycle or reuse something you buy actually puts people off making a purchase. I'll skip the obligatory car analogy here....
If you deny your consumers what there is a high demand for (and abuse their rights along the way) they will invariably take matters into their own hands. Some markets get it right some don't. I've long argued the obvious that the any industry reaches an equilibrium with it's co-dependant blackmarket, in this case the balance favours the piracy black economy depends on PC games sellable being produced, as does retail sales depending on the free promotion of the overall from piracy. Indeed piracy props up gaming hardware sales, and that hardware in turn creates sales and more piracy.
My concern about this kind of direction in economics is this kind of thing may slip through into legislation under the guise of recycling, which would go along the lines of: you have to hand your car back to the manufacturer when your done with it, for recycling purposes, it's too dangerous to the (now precious) environment and the (proven unstable) global economy to have it bouncing round the used market until it ends up rusting on a lawn somewhere. This puts total control back in the channels and shuts down any unauthorized trade. So suddenly there would be an immensely profitable black market...
"Even with my 8800GTS games just don't look as good on a 20 inch monitor as they do on a 50+ inch LCD at 1080p." I get your point, but why not plug your PC into your 1080p screen? A 8800GTS has more graphics oomph than any console (but game performance is debatable). But an inexpensive 4850 Crossfire or a better high end set up and you have undoubtably the best high definition gaming experience of any platform.
Just when I thought hollywood had become pathologically adverse to original ideas. Now with an economic downturn it gets worse still...
There are ... security related... projects one may contribute to, that one would tend to use a nickname instead of ones real name... ;)
So the french MafRIAA think they are merely suing a software download host?
What they are doing is prodding the FOSS community in the ribs with a stick, which is likely to make it angry. This is not a good idea.
From TFA: "one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game arenâ(TM)t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying." ... this from a game development house? Wow...
So OSS projects actually support users?^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
*ducks*
I think projects should support for as long as needed. I think it's the right thing to do to try, at least. If a project wants widespread adoption by enterprise and organisations for example, offering support will be key in achieving that. If you don't want that, then don't feel obliged to support. But the solution to the money problem: Charge for support. There's decent money to be made there.
I once worked with a technician who said listening to hard drive. He went to the extreme of recording the sound to a .wav on his network share with a microphone. I thought this was stupid and mocked him, I was obliged to, but he'd turn out to be right too often, far more right than SMART warning data, which is really only effective in a small number of cases I've found, maybe 30-40%.
I have seagate drives from 160-500gb, new seagates are stealthy quiet, but tend to become more audible as they age, then suddenly die usually without reporting much via SMART. An old Maxtor 80gb has been doing the clicks of death and randomly locking up my Mythbuntu box. From experience these drives give good warning you need to backup.
On a tangent: This for some reason reminds me of http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7687286.stm - it was ironic that the real sounds of space sound eerily like 1950s and later sci-fi movie space sound effects. I have a 10gb Seagate from 2001 that sounds like some hybrid of a jet engine and a buzz saw - becoming increasingly loud. I should record the sound it makes: all it needs is a cool doppler effect and it would sound like the millenium falcon screaming past.
What is the real problem here? Every time I see the standardized form I always see this box checked:
(x) Asshats
I detect a pattern, consistent failure to account for asshats!
You shouldn't be looking for a freeware system snapshot, you should be looking to use something like SVS mentioned above. It's a absolute delight to be able to have this kind of control in a operating system (kicks a package managers ass! *ducks*). It's not just application virtualisation: A compelling trick you can do with SVS is to back up your SVS installation and all it's data layers (and a few registry settings) you can then completely wipe your Windows installation back to a baseline image and all you need to do is put back registry settings and if you've done a complete format you'll need to copy back your hidden \fsldr folder and the Altiris application.
You can put your virtualised data on a seperate partition or hard drive even.
It also beats DRM (securerom foiled!) and activation features in software and games. Time trial software can be defeated too, you simply reset the data layer to the way it was when the app or game was installed. If you move PCs you don't need to re-activate the application you can just export it and import it.
It pisses me off that OSes don't work this way right from day one (Linux gets it's right somewhat - it doesn't need this in the way Windows so desperatly does).
This solves the problems with Windows becoming bogged down over time. This has made XP and Vista (only works in 32bit) [almost heh] pain free for me.
SVS doesn't work for OS updates or applications that like to install their own drivers or other low-level system changes that require a reboot - although on occasion I've got this working (ie. VMWare Workstation).
I remember installing XP, wiping Windows ME then complaining in forums about the performance of XP, even on up-to-date 2001 hardware and 256mb of ram.
This is why the anti-vista backlash makes me laugh. We went through this with NT5, but nobody seems to remember.
The problem is (and this is more than a hunch) is with vista is it has shitty disk i/o (Of course file copy performance is a clue) and this causes most of the lag that users are experiencing. I'd like to point out Linux distributions that are slower on identical hardware (points finger at ubunutu) as both the distro and the kernel get more complex. Because the speed of your storage devices seems to have a huge impact. I've just moved my Vista SP1 disk image to on a fast ssd and suddenly it's booting as fast as XP, and there is no noticeable delay for anything.
I wonder if Windows 7 is getting up to sneaky tricks, like more prefetch/superfetch trickery: Perhaps it is precaching the target of a link when you mouseover it, to make it load instantly? I have long had a suspicion that Teh Snappy(tm) is a prefetch illusion, but this would top that!
Many sports games may fit what you require? Some simulation games?
I periodically get nostalgic for the old days of gaming, and decide I'll fire up something like Quake II, Fallout, X-Com, Duke Nukem 3d, play for 10 minutes and find only disappointment. Not only is the gameplay simplistic but the graphics are ugly and the sound is rubbish. It has plenty of charm and if your a real gamer you care about the fun factor not the wow factor, but at the end of it a gamers brain today is starved for input by old games.
You is you remember these games better than they really are because a bit part of the thrill of playing these games back in the day was seeing some incremental advancement in technology that made the new game you just bought and dumped into your 4x CD drive freshly immersive compared to what you had been playing previously. That thrill is all but gone when you go back to the old school after playing todays titles. When it comes to remakes even with a spruce up and a modern graphics engine, some how the old game doesn't shine through with that same something it had back in the day. Sure some of the gameplay of old games still holds its own today, you simply do not get what made the game great at the time.
In some cases, taking a nostalgia trip you realise that old games, compared to todays can dreadfully unbearably shit. And retro game fad only serves to prove that the game industry is dangerously close to stagnating on the new ideas front (some would argue it would have). We've gone from seeing revolutionary change, to incremental change, and despite a few leaps forward (Wii etc) the last thing the gaming industry needs to do is go the way of hollywood: Rehash old sure-bet ideas.
It'd be interesting to have some kind of measure of the integrity of a given ammount of data on a HDD versus a writable optical disc all compared against cost. I bet for data integrity HDDs are far far cheaper, even considering the cost of the gear you need to make a NAS box, for example.
Very often I've bought a stack of writeable disks and found about half of them are buggered, either corrupt data fast or simple won't make it through the burn process. Its simply not a good enough method of data preservation, unless you want to fork out for expensive drives and archival media. So taking that into account, what is the real cost per GB? In the enterprise space we use tape/ZIP drives exclusively since they have good integrity and are reusable to some extent. With writable discs I found myself not caring if I bought a stack of duds and not even bothering with the carbon footprint driving back to the store to say WTF is this crap? If I have some compelling reason to burn (new fangled linux distro) I use a rewritable disc, otherwise I've learned to look for good archival media that works with my drives, and not to buy cheap combo drives. I have some writable cds 8 years old that are still readable, strangely but newer stuff seems to be unreliable after 24 months on average. I wonder if the manufacturers know that their burners and media are crap but realise that 90% of people are not using this for anything critical or long term. (Personally a few years back I began to copy EVERYTHING to my raid based NAS on gigabit ethernet with RAID and 5-year warranty Seagate drives. Never looked back. HDD or nothing. I recommend the same)
Or more accurately: What is [undefined]?
You can't answer a question that itself doesn't compute.
Considering the difficulty of the question, it's simple to say God is what we don't know. This is because if we create an arbitrary definition of god to pose as our hypothesis we find that it is one of many infinite possible definitions. Therefore the odds that any definition of god is true are infinite to 1. Considering what we know of the universe so far through scientific rigor tells us nothing specific, neither proves nor disproves any of our hypotheses. We have no idea of the odds of weather we're looking at the product of creation, a complete accident, a facet of a much larger multi-verse, or whatever the unimaginable variations of possibility. We're a product of our environment, making observations about this environment, entirely subjectively, and with no absolute frame of reference.
All conjecture regarding God seems to only validly exist in the cloud of probability that exists beyond that which is identified and categorized by observation, since anything within the sphere of human knowledge tells us sweet bloody nothing. So the more we know, the more the probability wave collapses and God ceases to exist.
Crap, did I just kill religion?
My understanding was that chemical combustion doesn't really occur in a plasma, which is a better way to understand why it is not considered a flame. Ionized atoms are stripped of their electrons to some extent so this means chemistry doesn't really happen. Even higher temperatures plasma becomes practically a soup of subatomic particles. If that's the right way to put it in a nutshell...
If there is a causal link between violent themes in video games and resulting behavioural change then that precedent suggests that sensationalism and fear mongering in the news media would be far more dangerous to society.
Any reasonable rational person would deduce that any causal effect that 'violent video games' (terribly fuzzy definition) is vastly overwhelmed by the effects of parenting, peer pressure, environment (poverty, diet, health), culture and violent sport. If anything it is the single medium in which is a wholly safe to person and property as an outlet for aggression.
Problem is aggressive play is different to pathological/anti-social behaviour. Even if you establish a cause and effect relationship not a just a tenuous link then you have to show that exposure to violent games is a contributing factor to a life of crime or anti-social or violent behaviour. Trying to pin blame on violent media is ignoring the elephant in the room. This is the #1 criticism I see in response to these kind of studies when actual credible psychologists [with no axe to grind...] chime in to the debate.
I've seen some pretty compelling studies showing video games have a calming focusing effect on players, are intensely social experience and are associated with academic and career success as opposed to other babysitters like television. These observations don't seem to get front-page treatment in the news media. No surprises there, of course but doesn't that kinda support my original argument?
One could say contact sports are directly and blatantly violent and encourage aggression, mob mentality. So why hasn't violent sport turned our kids into violent monsters? Because, usually there are parents and coaches etc having some actual input and often hard work in channeling kids into teamwork and self betterment. So how about some more parenting and less excuses.
Someone give Ben Huh $185k!
Goat.sex some how just isn't as funny.
So you think VR hasn't happend? As soon as SVGA and 386s popped up along came 3D gaming. VR is here in a way, we have the immersive 3d environments and massively multiplayer worlds, we've had the graphics hardware in desktop pcs for years. We even have bluetooth (for a while now) and motion sensing (Wii is almost 2 years old). VR as we saw on the technology shows (Tomorrows world, Beyond 2000 et al) never really got beyond the research laboratory, despite now being completely viable in terms of the necessary hardware elements. There is just was killer app that made the leap - but there was something else...
Something about how 3D Glasses never worked out... I suppose all the predictions didn't foresee miniture projection / LCD taking so damn long to improve in price/preformance... or perhaps the real reason why we don't have demolition man style goggles on to do our computing is the human tendency for motion sickness.
So for now, we still have to hunch over a computer or squint at a undersize mobile display in order to have your dose of Virtual Virtual reality. Ah well...
On second thought considering how much damage has been done by people throwing their Wiimotes at their plasma screens, waving your arms around while in VR would be a whole new level of carnage.
Vendors should consider not pre-installing so much junk on their machines and including a spiffed up variant of Altiris SVS, as well as some other tools that can fight bloat in the background.
I've seen some pretty bad machines from vendors under specced with ram, like 256mb for Windows XP, they would then preinstall something like Norton Internet Security which requires 256mb of RAM available and that's before you do a scan.