That Hyrdalisk that was right on top of him was pretty cool though:) Think of all the cool Starcraft shit that could be in the game... Lurkers and Battlecruisers and Goliaths and Archons.. thousand of zerglings..:) could be a fun game.
But of course, who really knows. As with everything, have to wait and see...
Well this is PURE speculation at 2am, so don't take me too seriously. But, with the sizes they're talking about, I don't see how the domino analogy COULD be accurate.. I imagine it's more akin to those hanging steel ball contraptions where you drop one at one end and the energy is transferred to the other end... Now, try and build a NOT gate out of one of those! Not so simple anymore, I think...:)
They say it's 250,000 times smaller than current tech, then they say it's better than current tech plus 40 years of Moore's Law.
Moore's Law states a doubling period of 18 months, or 1.5 years. This gives 26.666... doubling periods for 40 years. So, "if CMOS density follows Moore's Law for 40 more years", it will be 2 ^ 26.666 times smaller, which is in the neighborhood of 106.5 MILLION... that's more than 425 times smaller than "250,000 times smaller".
To reach 250,000 times smaller, under Moore's Law, 27 years would be more than enough.
Well, from a brief glance at the patent in question, it appears to NOT be a patent on "using graphical and textural content on your e-commerce site." as the writeup claims.
It is more along the lines of using these elements to create a customized presentation based on an individual's profile. To quote the first line of the patent (Emphasis mine):
"A system for composing individualized sales presentations created from various textual and graphical information data sources to match customer profiles."
So it's not quite as absurdly broad as the article makes it out to be. Not quite, I said.
Do you remember Future Crew? And the legendary Second Reality demo of '93? (Available here, but can be hard to run properly on modern systems) Apparently many of those guys are now working at Remedy... which may explain why Max Payne is such a graphically beautiful game... I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the Max FX engine employs some nice ASM routines. Also, check out their Final Reality benchmark, the final "cityscape flythrough" is a homage to a nearly identical (albeit flat shaded) sequence in Second Reality. Cool shit.
Some of the 4K demos I've seen written for ASM competitions completely blow my mind... check out this one, it's basically a flythrough of the first level of Descent, with texture mapping, source lighting, animated lava and recharger field, a MIDI soundtrack, etc... all in 4095 bytes!!!
Here is Sanction's home page, it contains a couple more very impressive 4K demos.
"The people going out and buying those new hard drives tend to be overclockers, film traders and other sketchy folks, who either are compensating for a lack of sexual experience or equipment by having more gigs than Joe Sixpack, or are filling up their hard drives with illegally downloaded movies."
Well I can't speak for anyone else, but I like having a huge hard drive so I can take my (legal, thank you) CDs, make Clone CD images on my hard drive, and use Daemon Tools to mount them, which is easier than playing Shiny Plastic Disc Hunt all the time.
Oh, and I loved this bit from the article:
"THG - We imagine that you have a significant quantity of documentation and research as to the cause of hard drive failures. Could you tell us what factors seem to cause the majority of hard drive failures, and within what time frame do you see most of these failures occur?
Maxtor - Hard drive failure modes vary over time. Our desktop drives have an average annual return rate of less than 1% in the first year. Following the first year, the annual return rate continues to lessen over time."
Nice, Maxtor. "What exactly causes hard disk failures?" "X% break every year." HUH?
The top 3 stories on Slashdot, one of which is several hours old, have NO comments listed for them on the front page.... and I get modded down for bringing it up? Nice.
Maybe Slashdot needs a general, day to day message board type thing where people can start their own topics? They could have different sections, like General Discussion, Site Problems, Suggestions, etc.
It just seems ridiculous that we can't have a discussion ABOUT Slashdot on Slashdot anywhere without being labelled "Offtopic".
Sorry, this has nothing to do with the story whatsoever, but where else can I put this?
Does anyone else notice this happening sometimes when visiting Slashdot? It keeps dumping you on the homepage, not logged in, with the OSDN bar at the top and everything, and nothing seems to work, it keeps bringing you back to the homepage when you try and read or post comments.
What's going on? Is their user database crashing or something? Seems to be happening more frequently recently. It's extremely aggravating.
Not that anyone's still reading this thread now... but I though I'd reply anyway.
I use Windows ME at home.. why? For maximum game compatibility. It still crashes on ridiculously rudimentary things like renaming and deleting files, for fuck's sake.
I am aware the NT line is more stable. But Windows XP? No thanks. They're introducing 'features' that spy on you and report back to MS.
You're saying, "Don't hate X. Hate the conditions that allowed X to exist."
Well, pardon my french, but fuck that. At the end of the day, people and organizations are responsible for their own activities, policies, and ethics, not their environment.
As an example, Microsoft forced OEM's to bundle Windows with every system or suffer dire penalties. Our "capitalist system where monopolies can operate with little or no regulation" might have allowed that situtation to evolve, but it certainly didn't force them to do that. They made a choice.
"Why does spam waste your time? Because in a capitalist system it benefits people to flood channels if there is a profit in it. If spammers could not increase their capital by spamming, your time wouldn't be wasted."
Why do robbers rob my house? Because in a capitalist system it benefits people to rob houses if there is a profit in it. If robbers could not increase their capital by robbing, my house wouldn't be robbed.
Now the robber is doing something we (as a society) don't like... But since the mechanisms of capitalism are an underlying cause, we shouldn't hold him responsible?
No. We pass a law against robbing. And my opinion is that there should be laws, guidelines, or regulations concerning spam too, because it causes real world harm... it's the electronic equivalent of dumping unwanted garbage everywhere, and leaving everyone but the perpetrator to cover the costs.
That's great how you picked the closing points of each view, which were practically afterthoughts, and declared that to be the "good portion" of my views.
When I curse Microsoft because Windows crashes, it's not because I have "disdain of the side-effects of capitalism, betraying socialist ancestry." That's a load of over-analytical, pedantic nonsense.
When I curse the spam-merchants because I have to manually go through multiple email accounts daily and methodically delete tons of crap, once again, it's not because I have "disdain of the side-effects of capitalism, betraying socialist ancestry." I don't hate advertising. I have no problem with TV commercials, billboards, banner ads, or whatever. It's the physical act of having to spend time dealing with it that I hate. And Geeks are not alone in that.
He never said it was a prerequisite... he just says the networks in questions do, in fact, "utilize the internet as a means to illegally distribute copyrighted works."
He's right. That's generally what they're being used for right now. Look around. End of story.
"Others, such as the hatred of Microsoft and the loathing of Spam come from a quite reverse philosophy - a principled distain of the side-effects of capitalism, betraying socialist ancestry."
Yeah, whatever. My hatred of Microsoft comes from the lack of stability in their operating systems, and their predatory, monopolistic practices (which have been confirmed in a court of law, thank you very much)
And Spam? Do I even have to address this point? I hate it because it wastes my time, it wastes internet bandwidth and storage space, and the people sending it don't even really have to pay very much to inconvenience the entire email reading planet. It's unbalanced.
"If none of this is making sense to you, try the following mental exercise. Could you sit in a pub with a group of geeks, defend the RIP Act, and convince them that you were still one of them?"
Yes I could. Perhaps I have more open minded friends than you, who are willing to entertain an argument without ostracizing someone with an alternative viewpoint.
I'm a geek because I've loved fooling with computers my entire life, have a profound desire to see technology used to improve the world, and have developed quite a bit of hardware, software, and programming expertise. My political affiliations don't enter into it. Neither do my race, sex, nationality, or religous beliefs.
Director: Up and atom! McBain: Up and at them. Director: Up and ATOM! McBain: Up and atdem! Director: UP AND ATOM! McBain: UP AND ATEM! Director:.. Better
--
We came here to make a movie. A simple movie.. a movie about a radioactive man. But you slick small town folk ruined it! We're going back to Hollywood, where people are still good to each other.
--
Homer: The important thing is.. it's got the perfect part for you.. either one of you. It's about a killer robot driving instructor, who travels back in time for some reason. Ron Howard's attatched to direct! Ron: I am not! Homer: Well. He expressed an interest. Ron: No I didn't! Homer: Did too! Ron: I did not! Homer: You lie! Alec: Yeah, Homer, most movie scripts are 120 pages. This has only seventeen. And several pages just have drawings of the time machine.
--
[sign on a closed-down movie theatre that reads: Yahoo Serious Festival] Lisa: I recognize all three of those words but that statement doesn't make any sense.
--
Lionel Huntz: This is the clearest case of False Advertising I've seen since I sued the movie The Never Ending Story
--
Reporter: Don't you think it's dangerous to send civilians into space? Homer: I'll handle this... the only danger in space is if we land on that terrible Planet of the Apes... wait a minute... Statue of Liberty... THAT WAS OUR PLANET! YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
=============
Because any excuse to spread Simpson's quotes is a good excuse to spread Simpson's quotes:)
Dude, you're preaching to the converted. I'm also a code monkey. I've been messing with computers since before they even USED mice. I use keyboard shortcuts and bindings all the time.
ALL I am saying, is that selecting hyperlinks, that is, picking arbitrary points on a 2D surface, seems ideally suited to the mouse.
These new type-ahead find features on IE for Mac or Mozilla 1.2a look interesting, but come on, one's on a Mac, and one's in a non-mainstream alpha, hardly ubiquitous just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
He never said 'ex' ;)
That Hyrdalisk that was right on top of him was pretty cool though :) Think of all the cool Starcraft shit that could be in the game... Lurkers and Battlecruisers and Goliaths and Archons.. thousand of zerglings.. :) could be a fun game.
But of course, who really knows. As with everything, have to wait and see...
We hate Blizzard because they didn't mention PCs at the end.. only consoles.
Well this is PURE speculation at 2am, so don't take me too seriously. But, with the sizes they're talking about, I don't see how the domino analogy COULD be accurate.. I imagine it's more akin to those hanging steel ball contraptions where you drop one at one end and the energy is transferred to the other end... Now, try and build a NOT gate out of one of those! Not so simple anymore, I think... :)
Also, their math doesn't make sense.
They say it's 250,000 times smaller than current tech, then they say it's better than current tech plus 40 years of Moore's Law.
Moore's Law states a doubling period of 18 months, or 1.5 years. This gives 26.666... doubling periods for 40 years. So, "if CMOS density follows Moore's Law for 40 more years", it will be 2 ^ 26.666 times smaller, which is in the neighborhood of 106.5 MILLION... that's more than 425 times smaller than "250,000 times smaller".
To reach 250,000 times smaller, under Moore's Law, 27 years would be more than enough.
Dammit! I have a mod point left, but there's no "+1 Blasphemous" option. Oh well, you get this reply instead. Keep it up. ;-)
Well, from a brief glance at the patent in question, it appears to NOT be a patent on "using graphical and textural content on your e-commerce site." as the writeup claims.
It is more along the lines of using these elements to create a customized presentation based on an individual's profile. To quote the first line of the patent (Emphasis mine):
"A system for composing individualized sales presentations created from various textual and graphical information data sources to match customer profiles."
So it's not quite as absurdly broad as the article makes it out to be. Not quite, I said.
Do you remember Future Crew? And the legendary Second Reality demo of '93? (Available here, but can be hard to run properly on modern systems) Apparently many of those guys are now working at Remedy... which may explain why Max Payne is such a graphically beautiful game... I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the Max FX engine employs some nice ASM routines. Also, check out their Final Reality benchmark, the final "cityscape flythrough" is a homage to a nearly identical (albeit flat shaded) sequence in Second Reality. Cool shit.
Some of the 4K demos I've seen written for ASM competitions completely blow my mind... check out this one, it's basically a flythrough of the first level of Descent, with texture mapping, source lighting, animated lava and recharger field, a MIDI soundtrack, etc... all in 4095 bytes!!!
Here is Sanction's home page, it contains a couple more very impressive 4K demos.
Well I can't speak for anyone else, but I like having a huge hard drive so I can take my (legal, thank you) CDs, make Clone CD images on my hard drive, and use Daemon Tools to mount them, which is easier than playing Shiny Plastic Disc Hunt all the time.
Oh, and I loved this bit from the article:
Nice, Maxtor. "What exactly causes hard disk failures?" "X% break every year." HUH?
"Copyright extentions will be cut down by the Supreme Court"
Oh MAN I hope you're right.. if they don't, we will continue our descent into a creative dark age, where control, not content, is king.
The case looks promising though, I still have faith in the Supreme Court.
"Literature from the period 1908 and 1928 will now be under the complete control of their owners, which are mostly major corporations."
:)
Anyone else ever think about the fact that you NEVER hear the term "minor corporations"?
</ponderable class="inane">
ROFLMAO :)
Thanks you and good night.
The top 3 stories on Slashdot, one of which is several hours old, have NO comments listed for them on the front page.... and I get modded down for bringing it up? Nice.
Maybe Slashdot needs a general, day to day message board type thing where people can start their own topics? They could have different sections, like General Discussion, Site Problems, Suggestions, etc.
It just seems ridiculous that we can't have a discussion ABOUT Slashdot on Slashdot anywhere without being labelled "Offtopic".
Sorry, this has nothing to do with the story whatsoever, but where else can I put this?
Does anyone else notice this happening sometimes when visiting Slashdot? It keeps dumping you on the homepage, not logged in, with the OSDN bar at the top and everything, and nothing seems to work, it keeps bringing you back to the homepage when you try and read or post comments.
What's going on? Is their user database crashing or something? Seems to be happening more frequently recently. It's extremely aggravating.
In the OP's defense, he never said it was a measure of whether something actually SUCKS or not... just it's reputation.
Not that anyone's still reading this thread now... but I though I'd reply anyway.
I use Windows ME at home.. why? For maximum game compatibility. It still crashes on ridiculously rudimentary things like renaming and deleting files, for fuck's sake.
I am aware the NT line is more stable. But Windows XP? No thanks. They're introducing 'features' that spy on you and report back to MS.
I never claimed anything was causeless.
You're saying, "Don't hate X. Hate the conditions that allowed X to exist."
Well, pardon my french, but fuck that. At the end of the day, people and organizations are responsible for their own activities, policies, and ethics, not their environment.
As an example, Microsoft forced OEM's to bundle Windows with every system or suffer dire penalties. Our "capitalist system where monopolies can operate with little or no regulation" might have allowed that situtation to evolve, but it certainly didn't force them to do that. They made a choice.
"Why does spam waste your time? Because in a capitalist system it benefits people to flood channels if there is a profit in it. If spammers could not increase their capital by spamming, your time wouldn't be wasted."
Why do robbers rob my house? Because in a capitalist system it benefits people to rob houses if there is a profit in it. If robbers could not increase their capital by robbing, my house wouldn't be robbed.
Now the robber is doing something we (as a society) don't like... But since the mechanisms of capitalism are an underlying cause, we shouldn't hold him responsible?
No. We pass a law against robbing. And my opinion is that there should be laws, guidelines, or regulations concerning spam too, because it causes real world harm... it's the electronic equivalent of dumping unwanted garbage everywhere, and leaving everyone but the perpetrator to cover the costs.
What about a flywheel? (Instead of a capacitor)
That's great how you picked the closing points of each view, which were practically afterthoughts, and declared that to be the "good portion" of my views.
When I curse Microsoft because Windows crashes, it's not because I have "disdain of the side-effects of capitalism, betraying socialist ancestry." That's a load of over-analytical, pedantic nonsense.
When I curse the spam-merchants because I have to manually go through multiple email accounts daily and methodically delete tons of crap, once again, it's not because I have "disdain of the side-effects of capitalism, betraying socialist ancestry." I don't hate advertising. I have no problem with TV commercials, billboards, banner ads, or whatever. It's the physical act of having to spend time dealing with it that I hate. And Geeks are not alone in that.
He never said it was a prerequisite... he just says the networks in questions do, in fact, "utilize the internet as a means to illegally distribute copyrighted works."
He's right. That's generally what they're being used for right now. Look around. End of story.
"Others, such as the hatred of Microsoft and the loathing of Spam come from a quite reverse philosophy - a principled distain of the side-effects of capitalism, betraying socialist ancestry."
Yeah, whatever. My hatred of Microsoft comes from the lack of stability in their operating systems, and their predatory, monopolistic practices (which have been confirmed in a court of law, thank you very much)
And Spam? Do I even have to address this point? I hate it because it wastes my time, it wastes internet bandwidth and storage space, and the people sending it don't even really have to pay very much to inconvenience the entire email reading planet. It's unbalanced.
"If none of this is making sense to you, try the following mental exercise. Could you sit in a pub with a group of geeks, defend the RIP Act, and convince them that you were still one of them?"
Yes I could. Perhaps I have more open minded friends than you, who are willing to entertain an argument without ostracizing someone with an alternative viewpoint.
I'm a geek because I've loved fooling with computers my entire life, have a profound desire to see technology used to improve the world, and have developed quite a bit of hardware, software, and programming expertise. My political affiliations don't enter into it. Neither do my race, sex, nationality, or religous beliefs.
Well, at least she got the voice right... the late great Phil Hartman. :)
Hey McBain! Your last movie sucked!
.. Better
:)
I know... we had script problems from day one.
--
Director: Up and atom!
McBain: Up and at them.
Director: Up and ATOM!
McBain: Up and atdem!
Director: UP AND ATOM!
McBain: UP AND ATEM!
Director:
--
We came here to make a movie. A simple movie.. a movie about a radioactive man. But you slick small town folk ruined it! We're going back to Hollywood, where people are still good to each other.
--
Homer: The important thing is.. it's got the perfect part for you.. either one of you. It's about a killer robot driving instructor, who travels back in time for some reason. Ron Howard's attatched to direct!
Ron: I am not!
Homer: Well. He expressed an interest.
Ron: No I didn't!
Homer: Did too!
Ron: I did not!
Homer: You lie!
Alec: Yeah, Homer, most movie scripts are 120 pages. This has only seventeen. And several pages just have drawings of the time machine.
--
[sign on a closed-down movie theatre that reads: Yahoo Serious Festival]
Lisa: I recognize all three of those words but that statement doesn't make any sense.
--
Lionel Huntz: This is the clearest case of False Advertising I've seen since I sued the movie The Never Ending Story
--
Reporter: Don't you think it's dangerous to send civilians into space?
Homer: I'll handle this... the only danger in space is if we land on that terrible Planet of the Apes... wait a minute... Statue of Liberty... THAT WAS OUR PLANET! YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
=============
Because any excuse to spread Simpson's quotes is a good excuse to spread Simpson's quotes
Dude, you're preaching to the converted. I'm also a code monkey. I've been messing with computers since before they even USED mice. I use keyboard shortcuts and bindings all the time.
ALL I am saying, is that selecting hyperlinks, that is, picking arbitrary points on a 2D surface, seems ideally suited to the mouse.
These new type-ahead find features on IE for Mac or Mozilla 1.2a look interesting, but come on, one's on a Mac, and one's in a non-mainstream alpha, hardly ubiquitous just yet.