Also, protections that cripple a game aren't that new, I've had DOS games totally glitch out (intentionally) because it was cracked. Of course those protections were broken the minute it was known, and it bothered nobody, and with everything so easy piratable on the DS I guess the developers had to do something.
This would be newsworthy if it gave vuvuzela's in legit copies, but this is just a non-story.
MSE is the only anti-virus ever installed on this windows install.
I wipe most of my XP boxes every 6-8 months (and install from an nlited clean XP SP3 disk), due to clutter from certain programs, and I really make sure to never have installed two different anti-virus packages on the same install of windows.
Microsoft Security Essentials regularly freaks out on my x32 XP box. It just crashes, causing 25% CPU usage (which is one hardware thread on an Atom 330). The mouse still responds, some programs respond but explorer usually locks up, along with everything becoming horribly slow. Killing the process fixes it, and MSE pops back in a couple of minutes, and then works normally for the rest of day.
Without that flaw, you could say it's just perfect. Doesn't take a lot of resources (even on an atom), is free with a valid Windows license, and keeps your system pretty much clean.
Proprietary software will still exist, and can steal all they want from the opensource community because there is nothing protecting the code. The GPL uses copyright to enforce free sharing from third parties. Without copyright; it's either all locked up, or you place it in the public domain, so that everyone can do with it as they wish. And as a commercial product, somebody stealing your code would be legal. So you wouldn't want that either, since a computer would probably be just some toy without them.
A better alternative would be to only address commercial copyright infringement (think of large scale counterfeiters, selling pirated MP3's, commercial bootlegs of performances, not granny who had her grandson come over, or some useless anime AMV, sueing them until the point of financial suicide), but you won't see that any time soon, with everybody being greedy bastards.
The wiimote uses both a accelerometer as well as a vision based setup
You stack this "sensor bar" on top of your TV, which contains two IR LED's (replacing the white circle flicker thing that was used with lightguns) The front of the wiimote contains an IR camera, and the wiimote itself processes the image into two lightblobs, which get transmitted to the Wii. It then tracks those blobs to get a reference on the rotation on the TV-facing axis of the wiimote, the distance between the blobs for the distance between the mote and the TV, the position of the blobs for the part of the screen the wiimote is pointing at, and it uses the accelerometers to try to guess things when it has no direct line-of-sight with the sensor bar. An accelerometer alone would never give enough accuracy to pinpoint the location a wiimote is pointing at, only a general idea on how the thing is rotated compared to the earth g-vector.
In terms of hardware, the Playstation Move comes closest to the wii, but instead of having two light points on your TV, the sensor is next to the TV with the players waving light points around. Kinect uses a whole different setup, projecting a IR grid on the room, and then using IR sensors to pickup the distance between a gridpoint in 2D and 3D projected space.
What is not standard about the USB ports on the Xbox? You can even hook up a regular old USB keyboard to it (makes debugging so much easier, by just adding some keyboard listeners to your code and let them fire debug stuff), it's the only device except for my PC that will charge my MP3 player (USB power handshake thing) , and inside the plastic shell lies a regular laptop SATA drive, with a funky connector to connect it to the Xbox (I've broken the thing open because my drive likes to spin down after initial boot, giving me a E68, but a quick disconnect-connect fixes that). That the drive is signed by microsoft with a file on the first couple of sectors is just DRM/anti-piracy/money grabbing, but you can rip it out, format it and use it as a normal drive, nothing abnormal about it.
If you're really so gung-ho for open, I don't see why you would be interested in a PS3, with all the rampant "shove it up your ass" anti-modding updates sony has been going on for the last year or so, or the fact that you'd have to re-encode your MKV's to watch on the damn thing.
The perfect open system is a Windows PC (Linux gaming is still a sad affair, even with Wine) with a beefy videocard, a x360 controller, all hooked up to a nice TV. The Games For Windows thing makes it almost into an Xbox (can't tell the difference between Just Cause 2 PC or Xbox, even the tooltips give you the correct icons0, you get better graphics and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. A cheap dualcore system with a 5770 goes for not that much money these days, and can keep up at full HD resolutions with ease. Also gives you access to every codec you will ever need, as well as multitasking, free multiplayer gaming, home entertainment system and whatever you cook up yourself in whatever programming language that you prefer.
PS: Slight hate on the PS3 for all the "fsck linux" attitude, but not intentional as a flame post
On-Topic: I hope they release some sort of (un)official extension for XNA with kinect integration soon, do that and I will buy the thing in a trifle, just to do some hacking with it. I'd guess the thing could also be used at parties: no flying wii-motes to hit expensive TV's:D.
What you describe is pretty much what XNA is all about.
100$/year access to run code on the machine (with full access to 5 of the 6 cores, and full access to the graphics card), you can privatly publish to your own xbox to test stuff, and it's community approved for placement in the Indie Marketplace where you can sell your stuff, which will only be denied if you either have serious bugs (bug handling is okay, as long as the machine doesnt crash or display some random error message), and you can't do certain things like have a game where avatars have sex or something of that nature.
Only downside is that you can't set the price for your stuff to 0, it has to be a minimum of either 60 or 80 MS Points (can't remember exactly).
That's a whole load of solar panels. I also spot a sort-of chessboard next to the entrance and a basketball court on the parking lot, but the whole place looks pretty deserted, with only a few people walking around and the parking lot is pretty empty.
I work at a DIY store and we get directions on how to 'interact' with customers, and with most of the things (like greeting people etc) I'm fine with, but there are things like pushing store loyalty cards, harassing customers with help or recommending crappy (but with higher turnover rates) products is where I draw the line, and I will simply not do that.
When I'm at work, I either walk around and stock shelves until somebody asks me something, or they are gazing at a shelf not knowing what they need. I've become pretty good at guessing someones needs just by looking at them (people lingering in front of a certain product usually have doubts, or need more information but are a bit shy to ask someone in the store), and never had anyone being upset or angry for me asking that they need help. Most of the times, they really need some help deciding and wihout my help would go with something to completely fsck their diy job up (like hardglueing certain types of PVC that melt when they come in contact which such glue). I know how annoying it can be if you just want to browse around and you get constantly harassed, so I try my best to not disturb people when they are shopping.
I wish most retail employees would do that though, viewing from a customers perspective instead of a money perspective.
6 keys, and you get solitaire, works from windows 95 to windows 7, assuming it got installed (not always the case with slipstreamed PCs).
I love the fact that Microsoft provided this great entertainment product (have you seen the stats on Steam? It's brilliant), also, gives me something to do behind the paint mixer computer at the DIY store I work at when there isn't that much to do.
Everybody here (dutchlantis) have atleast 2 bikes, me included.
I have my school bike (that I park next to a train station, it has been stolen 3 times but I found it somewhere in town with the lock all fscked up, only has one working gear and the back wheel is pretty bent), a regular bike for just when riding to someone or when I know I can park it somewhere without being nicked, and one that is just a trash bike which I don't even lock, useful when going to a bar or something where the likely-hood of someone just trashing your bike for the fun of it is pretty high.
My garage contains enough parts to build about 2 complete bicycles, and is just for parts so that I can throw broken bits of the 3 'good' bikes away and replace them in a hurry, and of course when one of the bikes break down or have a flat tire, you can always take the bike that is a bit worse but still working.
On the part of not locking down things also decreases the chances of someone trying breaking it to steal it. Good example would be a friend that has to park a car in the center of Amsterdam, on which he never locks, has a sticker on the side window saying it isn't locked and doesn't have anything valuable in it. He used to have one of his windows smashed in once a week, but no window smashings in the last year, just people opening the car to see if anything can be stolen from it, instead of throwing a brick or a 20+ kilo manhole cover through a windows. Yeah, Amsterdam is a nice place to live...
Why is faster-then-light impossible? (Yes I know about general relativity and for an object to accelerate to C you need infinite time and energy, but lets set that aside)
We never encountered anything faster then light, and that have some theories why faster then light is impossible, but that doesn't mean that it actually is impossible. People once thought the earth was flat, we couldn't fly or go faster then the speed of sound, or reach the moon, we thought that atoms are the smallest particles in existence, etc, etc.
I'm using it as a samba box/torrent client/htpc, and I didn't want to wad through the "omg only patent-free" dickwadery that is linux (Yeah I know, get them from some repository, but I'd rather just install one codec pack and be done with it).
Windows XP Professional, with 2 GB of ram, but with Intel Extreme Slideshow, instead of the ION board (that came out a couple of months after I purchased mine). Everything else on it flies (XP boots in what, 14 seconds or something)
The only reason I'm considering upgrading my Atom HTPC (from where I am typing this post) is so that slashdot doesn't freeze my whole browser while loading a story in a tab. Sure, I've fixed it now by setting it to the old no-javascript page, but it's account tied so now it's both crap on my HTPC as well as my laptop.
For the rest, I can play 1080p with intel onboard graphics, can browse the internet and listen to music, all for under 50 watts, and the system was 300 euro 2 years ago , when the atom 330 was launched. The only problems are youtube in fullscreen mode, or slashdot.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
I'm afraid the voice recognition in 7 is still rubbish, you need to train it first with some stupid wizard, and then it only sorta works on commands. Transcribing is still horrible and I only get some reasonable results if I speak to it in a full-on british accent. I'm not even FROM the UK!
What i've noticed with on-board sound is that after a while, it starts picking up garbage signal from the processor and amplifies that, mostly because it is sharing ground with the rest of the motherboard. So you can hear 5000 hz buzzing over the line-out or speakers when the processor is busy. I've noticed this with those realtek HD sound things on 3 different PC's with different audio chipsets.
Standalone audio cards probably have some filters for that, on top of better DAC's.
I disagree on that, games themselves now ARE probably 10000x more complex.
Think of Mario:
One object which has to do some collision detection, movement and input, and some other things (koopa's) that just move about on one axis.
Think of GTA4:
A whole city where parts of it have hundreds of physics-enabled objects, some of which can be interacted with, destroyable cars, pedestrians, rubbish, along with complex missions (well, sorta), collision detection for both movement as well as shooting, and so on.
New games are a lot more complicated.
But that is no reason to just ditch quality assurance and ship a half-assed attempt at porting a game from console to pc, where everything must be set on low because the developers can't be assed to properly change code so it works reasonable on the pc.
Most laptops have stupid Intel graphic chips that bolt onto the motherboard, but some laptops connect the graphics card to the motherboard using a MXM connector (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module).
I'd really hope that gets standardized, since it's being one of the most important components in a computer nowadays, with graphical acceleration not only for games but for example Photoshop, or all the nice CUDA things you can do with it.
But it's a funny sight when the venue won't be sold out, and all the ticket scalpers are desperate and lowering their prices.
I got in Muse at some concert, for about 25 euro for a seat (purchased it the evening before the concert), where as TicketNazi's want 52 euros + handling + whatever fees.
The venue get their money, the scalper is ~30 euros out of pocket and I saw a great concert.
Slashdot Mirror
Server farm services farm servers.
I'm pretty sure there is a barn somewhere with a bar, using something provided by the USDA.
I think something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvLCnKqYWzA&t=2m5s (4 screens with each different difficulty level, you obviously only play on 1 screen.)
Also, protections that cripple a game aren't that new, I've had DOS games totally glitch out (intentionally) because it was cracked.
Of course those protections were broken the minute it was known, and it bothered nobody, and with everything so easy piratable on the DS I guess the developers had to do something.
This would be newsworthy if it gave vuvuzela's in legit copies, but this is just a non-story.
MSE is the only anti-virus ever installed on this windows install.
I wipe most of my XP boxes every 6-8 months (and install from an nlited clean XP SP3 disk), due to clutter from certain programs, and I really make sure to never have installed two different anti-virus packages on the same install of windows.
Still thanks for the tip though.
The worldwide number of FB users is equal to the number of US citizens.
So there is plenty of Americans who don't have a facebook account :).
Microsoft Security Essentials regularly freaks out on my x32 XP box. It just crashes, causing 25% CPU usage (which is one hardware thread on an Atom 330).
The mouse still responds, some programs respond but explorer usually locks up, along with everything becoming horribly slow.
Killing the process fixes it, and MSE pops back in a couple of minutes, and then works normally for the rest of day.
Without that flaw, you could say it's just perfect. Doesn't take a lot of resources (even on an atom), is free with a valid Windows license, and keeps your system pretty much clean.
Tell your friends :)
No copyright = no GPL.
Proprietary software will still exist, and can steal all they want from the opensource community because there is nothing protecting the code.
The GPL uses copyright to enforce free sharing from third parties. Without copyright; it's either all locked up, or you place it in the public domain, so that everyone can do with it as they wish. And as a commercial product, somebody stealing your code would be legal. So you wouldn't want that either, since a computer would probably be just some toy without them.
A better alternative would be to only address commercial copyright infringement (think of large scale counterfeiters, selling pirated MP3's, commercial bootlegs of performances, not granny who had her grandson come over, or some useless anime AMV, sueing them until the point of financial suicide), but you won't see that any time soon, with everybody being greedy bastards.
The wiimote uses both a accelerometer as well as a vision based setup
You stack this "sensor bar" on top of your TV, which contains two IR LED's (replacing the white circle flicker thing that was used with lightguns)
The front of the wiimote contains an IR camera, and the wiimote itself processes the image into two lightblobs, which get transmitted to the Wii. It then tracks those blobs to get a reference on the rotation on the TV-facing axis of the wiimote, the distance between the blobs for the distance between the mote and the TV, the position of the blobs for the part of the screen the wiimote is pointing at, and it uses the accelerometers to try to guess things when it has no direct line-of-sight with the sensor bar. An accelerometer alone would never give enough accuracy to pinpoint the location a wiimote is pointing at, only a general idea on how the thing is rotated compared to the earth g-vector.
In terms of hardware, the Playstation Move comes closest to the wii, but instead of having two light points on your TV, the sensor is next to the TV with the players waving light points around. Kinect uses a whole different setup, projecting a IR grid on the room, and then using IR sensors to pickup the distance between a gridpoint in 2D and 3D projected space.
What is not standard about the USB ports on the Xbox? You can even hook up a regular old USB keyboard to it (makes debugging so much easier, by just adding some keyboard listeners to your code and let them fire debug stuff), it's the only device except for my PC that will charge my MP3 player (USB power handshake thing) , and inside the plastic shell lies a regular laptop SATA drive, with a funky connector to connect it to the Xbox (I've broken the thing open because my drive likes to spin down after initial boot, giving me a E68, but a quick disconnect-connect fixes that). That the drive is signed by microsoft with a file on the first couple of sectors is just DRM/anti-piracy/money grabbing, but you can rip it out, format it and use it as a normal drive, nothing abnormal about it.
If you're really so gung-ho for open, I don't see why you would be interested in a PS3, with all the rampant "shove it up your ass" anti-modding updates sony has been going on for the last year or so, or the fact that you'd have to re-encode your MKV's to watch on the damn thing.
The perfect open system is a Windows PC (Linux gaming is still a sad affair, even with Wine) with a beefy videocard, a x360 controller, all hooked up to a nice TV. The Games For Windows thing makes it almost into an Xbox (can't tell the difference between Just Cause 2 PC or Xbox, even the tooltips give you the correct icons0, you get better graphics and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. A cheap dualcore system with a 5770 goes for not that much money these days, and can keep up at full HD resolutions with ease. Also gives you access to every codec you will ever need, as well as multitasking, free multiplayer gaming, home entertainment system and whatever you cook up yourself in whatever programming language that you prefer.
PS: Slight hate on the PS3 for all the "fsck linux" attitude, but not intentional as a flame post
On-Topic: I hope they release some sort of (un)official extension for XNA with kinect integration soon, do that and I will buy the thing in a trifle, just to do some hacking with it. I'd guess the thing could also be used at parties: no flying wii-motes to hit expensive TV's :D.
What you describe is pretty much what XNA is all about.
100$/year access to run code on the machine (with full access to 5 of the 6 cores, and full access to the graphics card), you can privatly publish to your own xbox to test stuff, and it's community approved for placement in the Indie Marketplace where you can sell your stuff, which will only be denied if you either have serious bugs (bug handling is okay, as long as the machine doesnt crash or display some random error message), and you can't do certain things like have a game where avatars have sex or something of that nature.
Only downside is that you can't set the price for your stuff to 0, it has to be a minimum of either 60 or 80 MS Points (can't remember exactly).
I doubt as sponsors, more as participants.
That's a whole load of solar panels. I also spot a sort-of chessboard next to the entrance and a basketball court on the parking lot, but the whole place looks pretty deserted, with only a few people walking around and the parking lot is pretty empty.
I love this view, it's like simcity, but real!
Go watch Memento.
Well, tha's more like 2.5D.
I know the feeling.
I work at a DIY store and we get directions on how to 'interact' with customers, and with most of the things (like greeting people etc) I'm fine with, but there are things like pushing store loyalty cards, harassing customers with help or recommending crappy (but with higher turnover rates) products is where I draw the line, and I will simply not do that.
When I'm at work, I either walk around and stock shelves until somebody asks me something, or they are gazing at a shelf not knowing what they need. I've become pretty good at guessing someones needs just by looking at them (people lingering in front of a certain product usually have doubts, or need more information but are a bit shy to ask someone in the store), and never had anyone being upset or angry for me asking that they need help. Most of the times, they really need some help deciding and wihout my help would go with something to completely fsck their diy job up (like hardglueing certain types of PVC that melt when they come in contact which such glue). I know how annoying it can be if you just want to browse around and you get constantly harassed, so I try my best to not disturb people when they are shopping.
I wish most retail employees would do that though, viewing from a customers perspective instead of a money perspective.
Windows-r sol enter
6 keys, and you get solitaire, works from windows 95 to windows 7, assuming it got installed (not always the case with slipstreamed PCs).
I love the fact that Microsoft provided this great entertainment product (have you seen the stats on Steam? It's brilliant), also, gives me something to do behind the paint mixer computer at the DIY store I work at when there isn't that much to do.
You are so spot-on it's not even funny.
Everybody here (dutchlantis) have atleast 2 bikes, me included.
I have my school bike (that I park next to a train station, it has been stolen 3 times but I found it somewhere in town with the lock all fscked up, only has one working gear and the back wheel is pretty bent), a regular bike for just when riding to someone or when I know I can park it somewhere without being nicked, and one that is just a trash bike which I don't even lock, useful when going to a bar or something where the likely-hood of someone just trashing your bike for the fun of it is pretty high.
My garage contains enough parts to build about 2 complete bicycles, and is just for parts so that I can throw broken bits of the 3 'good' bikes away and replace them in a hurry, and of course when one of the bikes break down or have a flat tire, you can always take the bike that is a bit worse but still working.
On the part of not locking down things also decreases the chances of someone trying breaking it to steal it. Good example would be a friend that has to park a car in the center of Amsterdam, on which he never locks, has a sticker on the side window saying it isn't locked and doesn't have anything valuable in it. He used to have one of his windows smashed in once a week, but no window smashings in the last year, just people opening the car to see if anything can be stolen from it, instead of throwing a brick or a 20+ kilo manhole cover through a windows. Yeah, Amsterdam is a nice place to live...
Why is faster-then-light impossible? (Yes I know about general relativity and for an object to accelerate to C you need infinite time and energy, but lets set that aside)
We never encountered anything faster then light, and that have some theories why faster then light is impossible, but that doesn't mean that it actually is impossible. People once thought the earth was flat, we couldn't fly or go faster then the speed of sound, or reach the moon, we thought that atoms are the smallest particles in existence, etc, etc.
Not linux I'm afraid.
I'm using it as a samba box/torrent client/htpc, and I didn't want to wad through the "omg only patent-free" dickwadery that is linux (Yeah I know, get them from some repository, but I'd rather just install one codec pack and be done with it).
Windows XP Professional, with 2 GB of ram, but with Intel Extreme Slideshow, instead of the ION board (that came out a couple of months after I purchased mine). Everything else on it flies (XP boots in what, 14 seconds or something)
The only reason I'm considering upgrading my Atom HTPC (from where I am typing this post) is so that slashdot doesn't freeze my whole browser while loading a story in a tab. Sure, I've fixed it now by setting it to the old no-javascript page, but it's account tied so now it's both crap on my HTPC as well as my laptop.
For the rest, I can play 1080p with intel onboard graphics, can browse the internet and listen to music, all for under 50 watts, and the system was 300 euro 2 years ago , when the atom 330 was launched. The only problems are youtube in fullscreen mode, or slashdot.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
I'm afraid the voice recognition in 7 is still rubbish, you need to train it first with some stupid wizard, and then it only sorta works on commands.
Transcribing is still horrible and I only get some reasonable results if I speak to it in a full-on british accent. I'm not even FROM the UK!
What i've noticed with on-board sound is that after a while, it starts picking up garbage signal from the processor and amplifies that, mostly because it is sharing ground with the rest of the motherboard. So you can hear 5000 hz buzzing over the line-out or speakers when the processor is busy. I've noticed this with those realtek HD sound things on 3 different PC's with different audio chipsets.
Standalone audio cards probably have some filters for that, on top of better DAC's.
>> Now a days I would like a tupperware popsicle maker kit so as to add ethanol.
You need some hard-core freezing equipment to make ethanol popsicles though.
Dutch (set to US-International with dead keys) keyboard: AltGr + 5
Yay standardisation!
I disagree on that, games themselves now ARE probably 10000x more complex.
Think of Mario:
One object which has to do some collision detection, movement and input, and some other things (koopa's) that just move about on one axis.
Think of GTA4:
A whole city where parts of it have hundreds of physics-enabled objects, some of which can be interacted with, destroyable cars, pedestrians, rubbish, along with complex missions (well, sorta), collision detection for both movement as well as shooting, and so on.
New games are a lot more complicated.
But that is no reason to just ditch quality assurance and ship a half-assed attempt at porting a game from console to pc, where everything must be set on low because the developers can't be assed to properly change code so it works reasonable on the pc.
Graphic cards.
Most laptops have stupid Intel graphic chips that bolt onto the motherboard, but some laptops connect the graphics card to the motherboard using a MXM connector (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module).
I'd really hope that gets standardized, since it's being one of the most important components in a computer nowadays, with graphical acceleration not only for games but for example Photoshop, or all the nice CUDA things you can do with it.
But it's a funny sight when the venue won't be sold out, and all the ticket scalpers are desperate and lowering their prices.
I got in Muse at some concert, for about 25 euro for a seat (purchased it the evening before the concert), where as TicketNazi's want 52 euros + handling + whatever fees.
The venue get their money, the scalper is ~30 euros out of pocket and I saw a great concert.