I remember reading an issue of a gaming mag back in 1998 and seeing some early screenshots of a DNF build based on the Quake II engine back then. Then in 1999, their first video trailer for the E3. Back then, it looked like they had a ton of material already made, like the game was almost ready for a release. I started hanging out around their forums for a bit, and at the start, things were nice and friendly over there.
However, as the years passed, people began asking more and more questions about the game, and when it was going to be released. The forum moderator, Joe Siegler, started locking more and more threads, and banning more and more users. Overall, they've been very secretive about the development process. Now I suppose people will say that's because they didn't have much to say, since they weren't doing much of anything...
BUT, recently (a few months ago), I saw a video somewhere (don't remember), where someone went to the 3DR offices, and actually played some kind of pre-beta build of the game. The guy said the game looked quite polished and almost complete, and that it was fun, that the fans wouldn't be disappointed. So really, it makes you wonder, what the hell happened?
Visibly, they have something playable *now*... And it amazes me they weren't able to complete this game in something like 13-14 years (it's been rumored development started as early as 1995-1996). Even if they only had one guy to make the maps and one modeler, in 13 years, they could have made a s*** ton of material. Not to mention they licensed the Unreal engine... It's not like they had to create one from scratch.
As others have suggested, it really looks like lots of their work was wasted continuously starting over. Everytime they "switched engine", all the assets were probaby remade. That, and it seems like the management had unclear requirements and misplaced perfectionism. This actually isn't the first project they screw up. The game, Prey, was originally being developped by them, but they gave up on it, apparently when it was close to being completed... Another company later recreated the game, not 3D Realms.
This is just sad too because, chances are, this game will never be open sourced. The publishers will keep the rights, and more likely than not, it will just sit on some backup media somewhere, never being used. It's possible the rights could be sold to some other company, I suppose, to try and milk the franchise some more, but I believe we can now officially say that DNF is dead.
Even if it was 10GBs worth of data, once an attacker can sneak into the system, it's possible to download it all without getting noticed... If the server has a fat pipe, it's likely nobody will notice a minor amount of additional overhead. However, there remains the question of how the attacker could know that there are no additional backups.
There have been ransom cases like this before, dating as far back as the 80s I believe (perhaps even the 70s), where it was an inside job, and the attackers stole all the physical backup media.
It's possible the attackers worked there, and thought they could get enough money this way to "disappear". This seems stupid to me, however. There just doesn't seem to be a way for them to get those 10 millions without being traced.
>> Why do lesbians, gays, and bisexuals allow themselves to be lumped together with transgenders. To me, the layman, they seem like VERY different things.
I'm a male-to-female transsexual with a girlfriend. When I kiss her in public, we sometimes get weird looks... People view us as a lesbian couple. That's something I have in common with the LGBT community, but... If you think about it, lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people get discriminated against for the same reason: because some people (often bible thumping idiots) view what we are and what we do as being wrong. Transsexuals also claim the same thing as gay people: we're like this from birth, and it's our right to do what we need to be happy.
>> The latter, at the extreme, cut off their genitalia. This is a group I have a little more trouble viewing as "normal". Or am I just too hung up on the extreme?
Sexual Reassignment Surgery (SRS) involves no "cutting off". In the male-to-female case, it is typically done through penile inversion. The tissues are reused. They even use the head of the penis to create a small clitoris, which most often functions quite well. You should also realize that there are many transsexuals, like me, who have no plans to undergo SRS. The surgery, at this stage, while cosmetically realistic, does not interest me. It's too expensive, it involves risks, and it won't allow me to carry a child (yet).
"If we learn enough about the brain you could get a button that causes you to have an unending orgasm..."
Well, I've heard that has already been done on mice... The story went that researchers had managed to hook the "orgasm center" of a mouse to a button, and placed the said button next to another button that dispensed food. The mouse then repeatedly pressed the orgasm button until it starved and died.
Well, if you could also somehow recreate the person's body, and fabricate a new brain based on your measured parameters (be it a biological or computerized brain), this would bring potential immortality to reality.
As for the copy problem... It's true that should a person die and their body and brain be replicated, they wouldn't be the original. However... If it was a very accurate copy, they couldn't tell, you couldn't tell, so why should it really matter? If you had a girlfriend, she died, and a copy was made, you could still potentially both life your life as if it had never happened.
Furthermore, consider the idea that a very large proportion of the molecules making the neurons of your brain have been replaced over your lifetime... You *are not* the same person you were 10 years ago, from a physical standpoint... Does that make you not you?
This tool may well never be accurate enough to back people's brain up (not to mention that how neurons are connected might not be the only important factor, some people have suggested that our memories are chemically encoded). However, in the short term , this tool has an incredible potential just for studying the brain and trying to understand it better. It could finally allow us to create a fairly detailed map of how all the different areas of the brain are connected together.
>> Mathematics is said to have an "uncanny" ability to model the universe. My pet theory is what we call our mind is a self referencing MATHEMATICAL MODEL of the universe that emerges from the cellular colonies we refer to as ourselves.
Our ability to think, our mind, is the result of the evolutionary process that lead to the appearance of our species. Intelligence is, in my opinion, very much an evolutionary trick to allow us to better adapt to a constantly changing environment. Simple cells have the ability to change which genes they express, and how much, based on what nutrients they have access to, among other things (thus adapting to a changing environment). They could almost be said to be "intelligent". Our brain is just intelligence on a much higher scale.
So I'll say, our mind is not a mathematical model of anything. It's an evolved computational system that makes us better able to survive. For us to better adapt, it has to be flexible. Thinking and deductive ability makes it flexible, the power to *understand* what goes on in your environment is very important. However, the mind isn't a model of anything, our mind merely tries to model/approximate/learn our environment so it can better understand it, to maximize our chances of survival. And by environment, I mean our immediate environment, things that are relevant to our daily life. Most people don't care to understandhow the universe works to any degree, much less model it.
>> That would be like saying you are offended by goatse but are A-O.K. with gay marriage.
First of all, goatse has nothing to do with gay marriage. The goatse guy could very well, in fact, not be gay, and you'd be foolish to assume all gay people practice anal sex, or portray their masturbatory acts on the internet. As for gay marriage, it's just like straight marriage, but with two same-sex individuals.
As for being A-OK... I'm A-OK with *both* gay marriage and the goatse guy. Why? Because both involve other people doing things that don't impact my life in any way, and I'm not a bigot who runs around telling people how to live their life. You also have to realize that encouraging gay people to have stable relationships and safe sex is probably better than trying to deny their existence and force them into some underground subculture full of prostitution and unsafe sex.
>> the correct default would be to have all variables initialised by default but with the option to let variables non-initialised which can be useful as a performance optimisation
C was designed at a time when compilers didn't do much in the way of optimization. Hence keywords like "register" and "inline", which are now quite often ignored by the compiler. I would say the best thing would be to initialize variables by default, except when the compiler can prove that a variable does not need to be initialized on creation (ie: the programmer will always initialize it himself before it is used). This way you get most of the performance benefits without the programmer having to think about it (and without the possibility that he might introduce a mistake).
I feel the same way. I never ever had problems with defective audio CDs, or none that my non-audiophile ears could detect anyways! Furthermore, aren't audio CD sales constantly dropping? Do we really need more odd physical media formats?
I'm a grad student in computer science at a prominent Canadian university, and so far, two of my supervisors were women. Almost half of the profs here are women, and they're all quite competent. They probably know much more than you ever will about algorithms...
When anonymous cowards get modded down like this, their ip address should be blocked for 24 hours, and the visibility of the comment should be reduced.... Just an idea...
I've seen local ad campaigns financed by the music industry predicting "the end of music" before. Nevermind the fact that music may be as old, or perhaps even older than spoken language...
What's needed is simply a paradigm shift. The music industry, before records, cassettes and CDs became relatively inexpensive and commonplace, was mostly about selling live shows. Live shows are something people will probably always be willing to pay for. Perhaps artists simply need to do more of that, and count less on pre-recorded music sales?
Surely there's a way for musical artists to keep making money, if money is the reason they make music, although I suspect some people do it for other reasons too! Music will never die. It's as old as mankind, if not older (if you exclude older humanoid species from "mankind").
But of course... This is why we now have 32GB+ USB keys... Because the RIAA/MPAA would never allow devices with this kind of capacity and read/write access to fall into our hands! Seriously... Why don't you take off that tinfoil hat?
The reason we're not seeing any of those insanely dense holographic storage technologies and other forms of vaporware is because right now, it doesn't work. The huge claims in this article are either the result of journalists not understanding what's going on, or researchers trying to get funding.
I believe the rover accumulates energy in batteries. At some point, these batteries will be dead, so even with completely clean solar panels, it couldn't operate forever. Plus, other components on it could break.
They've shown that martian wind can actually keep the solar panels "clean enough" for long time periods... So if anything, this suggests that not including cleaning equipment is perfectly fine, even for long missions.
That being said, NASA is working on more advanced rovers, including some that can tackle more uneven terrain, if I'm not mistaken. We most likely will see rovers with more equipment on them, or specialized for different purposes.
I'm assuming each block currently has its own rechargeable battery. If so, without some working wireless power transmission or at least a wireless charger, the blocks could become tremendously annoying. You would play with them, and then eventually they'd start randomly running out of juice while you're doing something... But obviously not all at the same time, you'd just have less and less blocks to play with.
It's likely that if you cloned one, you'd need to implant his/her DNA into a human egg cell, and also possibly fill some small gaps with human DNA... Considering the neanderthal would be born out of a human woman, have intelligence perhaps not that far from our own, and possibly speech capability...
I say, why not raise it like any human child. Don't lock it in a lab like some scary creature. Just give it an adoptive family, try to raise it like a normal human, and observe its development very closely. There is no way we'd be able to replicate its "natural environment" anyways, so we might as well treat it decently, and learn everything we can that way.
Of course it's arbitrary... They most-likely added some extra code to check how many "apps" are running (excluding antiviruses). They had to spend extra time modifying the OS to enforce this artificial limitation.
Eg:
#define MAX_RUNNING_APPS 3
// Function to count how many apps are running, excluding AV
int countRunningApps();
// Function called when an app is loaded
void onAppLoad()
{
if (countRunningApps() >= MAX_RUNNING_APPS)
inviteUserToUpgradeOS();
else
loadApp();
}
Some people just completely reject the idea of closed source software. Since BSD allows open source software to be modified into closed source software, they view it as a bad thing.
The GPL forces everyone to make their contributions open, which does have some nice benefits when it comes to encouraging improvement of software... However, it's often incompatible with the way many companies develop software.
Many large software development companies would never want to open source their software. They believe it would allow people to steal their trade secrets. To these companies, the BSD license is a viable option, but not the GPL.
I personally think it would be nice if everything was completely open, but I think that's the kind of utopic vision the world is not ready for.
If this works out nearly as well as they say it will, this will be what the original EEE should have been. The 10" screen will be more readable, the slightly larger keyboard more comfortable, while keeping the unit light and portable compared to a regular laptop.
Furthermore, the chipset being integrated into the 45nm CPU will fix the problem of having an outdated chipset that consumes several times more power than your CPU does (negating the benefits of a low power CPU). We might finally see some *good* battery life on these things.
Now, we just have to hope the price won't suck. I'm placing my bet at ~$550-700, pretty much as expensive as an OK regular laptop, but more portable...
I agree with the parent. A contract granting you a yearly raise for the next 5 years, for example, is much more worthwhile for you. Why take the risk of losing out in the long term, when you could ask for a raise effective immediately instead? You can do whatever you want with the money, starting now, investing it in whatever projects you may have. Shares of this small company, however, may be diluted, or worthless in the long run, as others have pointed out.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading an issue of a gaming mag back in 1998 and seeing some early screenshots of a DNF build based on the Quake II engine back then. Then in 1999, their first video trailer for the E3. Back then, it looked like they had a ton of material already made, like the game was almost ready for a release. I started hanging out around their forums for a bit, and at the start, things were nice and friendly over there.
However, as the years passed, people began asking more and more questions about the game, and when it was going to be released. The forum moderator, Joe Siegler, started locking more and more threads, and banning more and more users. Overall, they've been very secretive about the development process. Now I suppose people will say that's because they didn't have much to say, since they weren't doing much of anything...
BUT, recently (a few months ago), I saw a video somewhere (don't remember), where someone went to the 3DR offices, and actually played some kind of pre-beta build of the game. The guy said the game looked quite polished and almost complete, and that it was fun, that the fans wouldn't be disappointed. So really, it makes you wonder, what the hell happened?
Visibly, they have something playable *now*... And it amazes me they weren't able to complete this game in something like 13-14 years (it's been rumored development started as early as 1995-1996). Even if they only had one guy to make the maps and one modeler, in 13 years, they could have made a s*** ton of material. Not to mention they licensed the Unreal engine... It's not like they had to create one from scratch.
As others have suggested, it really looks like lots of their work was wasted continuously starting over. Everytime they "switched engine", all the assets were probaby remade. That, and it seems like the management had unclear requirements and misplaced perfectionism. This actually isn't the first project they screw up. The game, Prey, was originally being developped by them, but they gave up on it, apparently when it was close to being completed... Another company later recreated the game, not 3D Realms.
This is just sad too because, chances are, this game will never be open sourced. The publishers will keep the rights, and more likely than not, it will just sit on some backup media somewhere, never being used. It's possible the rights could be sold to some other company, I suppose, to try and milk the franchise some more, but I believe we can now officially say that DNF is dead.
Even if it was 10GBs worth of data, once an attacker can sneak into the system, it's possible to download it all without getting noticed... If the server has a fat pipe, it's likely nobody will notice a minor amount of additional overhead. However, there remains the question of how the attacker could know that there are no additional backups.
There have been ransom cases like this before, dating as far back as the 80s I believe (perhaps even the 70s), where it was an inside job, and the attackers stole all the physical backup media. It's possible the attackers worked there, and thought they could get enough money this way to "disappear". This seems stupid to me, however. There just doesn't seem to be a way for them to get those 10 millions without being traced.
>> Why do lesbians, gays, and bisexuals allow themselves to be lumped together with transgenders. To me, the layman, they seem like VERY different things.
I'm a male-to-female transsexual with a girlfriend. When I kiss her in public, we sometimes get weird looks... People view us as a lesbian couple. That's something I have in common with the LGBT community, but... If you think about it, lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people get discriminated against for the same reason: because some people (often bible thumping idiots) view what we are and what we do as being wrong. Transsexuals also claim the same thing as gay people: we're like this from birth, and it's our right to do what we need to be happy.
>> The latter, at the extreme, cut off their genitalia. This is a group I have a little more trouble viewing as "normal". Or am I just too hung up on the extreme?
Sexual Reassignment Surgery (SRS) involves no "cutting off". In the male-to-female case, it is typically done through penile inversion. The tissues are reused. They even use the head of the penis to create a small clitoris, which most often functions quite well. You should also realize that there are many transsexuals, like me, who have no plans to undergo SRS. The surgery, at this stage, while cosmetically realistic, does not interest me. It's too expensive, it involves risks, and it won't allow me to carry a child (yet).
What if there is no such thing as a soul?
"If we learn enough about the brain you could get a button that causes you to have an unending orgasm..."
Well, I've heard that has already been done on mice... The story went that researchers had managed to hook the "orgasm center" of a mouse to a button, and placed the said button next to another button that dispensed food. The mouse then repeatedly pressed the orgasm button until it starved and died.
Well, if you could also somehow recreate the person's body, and fabricate a new brain based on your measured parameters (be it a biological or computerized brain), this would bring potential immortality to reality.
As for the copy problem... It's true that should a person die and their body and brain be replicated, they wouldn't be the original. However... If it was a very accurate copy, they couldn't tell, you couldn't tell, so why should it really matter? If you had a girlfriend, she died, and a copy was made, you could still potentially both life your life as if it had never happened.
Furthermore, consider the idea that a very large proportion of the molecules making the neurons of your brain have been replaced over your lifetime... You *are not* the same person you were 10 years ago, from a physical standpoint... Does that make you not you?
This tool may well never be accurate enough to back people's brain up (not to mention that how neurons are connected might not be the only important factor, some people have suggested that our memories are chemically encoded). However, in the short term , this tool has an incredible potential just for studying the brain and trying to understand it better. It could finally allow us to create a fairly detailed map of how all the different areas of the brain are connected together.
Even if they only ported open source games to it, you could have 3D shooters from *this decade* such as nexuiz running on it:
http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/
Furthermore, the possibility of using this as a networked HD media player box makes it much more interesting.
My only worry is that this device may well be just vaporware. Pre-order often means "will never materialize", unfortuately.
>> Mathematics is said to have an "uncanny" ability to model the universe. My pet theory is what we call our mind is a self referencing MATHEMATICAL MODEL of the universe that emerges from the cellular colonies we refer to as ourselves.
Our ability to think, our mind, is the result of the evolutionary process that lead to the appearance of our species. Intelligence is, in my opinion, very much an evolutionary trick to allow us to better adapt to a constantly changing environment. Simple cells have the ability to change which genes they express, and how much, based on what nutrients they have access to, among other things (thus adapting to a changing environment). They could almost be said to be "intelligent". Our brain is just intelligence on a much higher scale.
So I'll say, our mind is not a mathematical model of anything. It's an evolved computational system that makes us better able to survive. For us to better adapt, it has to be flexible. Thinking and deductive ability makes it flexible, the power to *understand* what goes on in your environment is very important. However, the mind isn't a model of anything, our mind merely tries to model/approximate/learn our environment so it can better understand it, to maximize our chances of survival. And by environment, I mean our immediate environment, things that are relevant to our daily life. Most people don't care to understandhow the universe works to any degree, much less model it.
>> That would be like saying you are offended by goatse but are A-O.K. with gay marriage.
First of all, goatse has nothing to do with gay marriage. The goatse guy could very well, in fact, not be gay, and you'd be foolish to assume all gay people practice anal sex, or portray their masturbatory acts on the internet. As for gay marriage, it's just like straight marriage, but with two same-sex individuals.
As for being A-OK... I'm A-OK with *both* gay marriage and the goatse guy. Why? Because both involve other people doing things that don't impact my life in any way, and I'm not a bigot who runs around telling people how to live their life. You also have to realize that encouraging gay people to have stable relationships and safe sex is probably better than trying to deny their existence and force them into some underground subculture full of prostitution and unsafe sex.
>> the correct default would be to have all variables initialised by default but with the option to let variables non-initialised which can be useful as a performance optimisation
C was designed at a time when compilers didn't do much in the way of optimization. Hence keywords like "register" and "inline", which are now quite often ignored by the compiler. I would say the best thing would be to initialize variables by default, except when the compiler can prove that a variable does not need to be initialized on creation (ie: the programmer will always initialize it himself before it is used). This way you get most of the performance benefits without the programmer having to think about it (and without the possibility that he might introduce a mistake).
I feel the same way. I never ever had problems with defective audio CDs, or none that my non-audiophile ears could detect anyways! Furthermore, aren't audio CD sales constantly dropping? Do we really need more odd physical media formats?
I'm a grad student in computer science at a prominent Canadian university, and so far, two of my supervisors were women. Almost half of the profs here are women, and they're all quite competent. They probably know much more than you ever will about algorithms...
When anonymous cowards get modded down like this, their ip address should be blocked for 24 hours, and the visibility of the comment should be reduced.... Just an idea...
I've seen local ad campaigns financed by the music industry predicting "the end of music" before. Nevermind the fact that music may be as old, or perhaps even older than spoken language...
What's needed is simply a paradigm shift. The music industry, before records, cassettes and CDs became relatively inexpensive and commonplace, was mostly about selling live shows. Live shows are something people will probably always be willing to pay for. Perhaps artists simply need to do more of that, and count less on pre-recorded music sales?
Surely there's a way for musical artists to keep making money, if money is the reason they make music, although I suspect some people do it for other reasons too! Music will never die. It's as old as mankind, if not older (if you exclude older humanoid species from "mankind").
But of course... This is why we now have 32GB+ USB keys... Because the RIAA/MPAA would never allow devices with this kind of capacity and read/write access to fall into our hands! Seriously... Why don't you take off that tinfoil hat?
The reason we're not seeing any of those insanely dense holographic storage technologies and other forms of vaporware is because right now, it doesn't work. The huge claims in this article are either the result of journalists not understanding what's going on, or researchers trying to get funding.
Now just how do you think slashdot survived the dot-com crash!
</tinfoilhat>
I believe the rover accumulates energy in batteries. At some point, these batteries will be dead, so even with completely clean solar panels, it couldn't operate forever. Plus, other components on it could break.
They've shown that martian wind can actually keep the solar panels "clean enough" for long time periods... So if anything, this suggests that not including cleaning equipment is perfectly fine, even for long missions.
That being said, NASA is working on more advanced rovers, including some that can tackle more uneven terrain, if I'm not mistaken. We most likely will see rovers with more equipment on them, or specialized for different purposes.
I'm assuming each block currently has its own rechargeable battery. If so, without some working wireless power transmission or at least a wireless charger, the blocks could become tremendously annoying. You would play with them, and then eventually they'd start randomly running out of juice while you're doing something... But obviously not all at the same time, you'd just have less and less blocks to play with.
You obviously don't watch much, HD Porn is already available!
It's likely that if you cloned one, you'd need to implant his/her DNA into a human egg cell, and also possibly fill some small gaps with human DNA... Considering the neanderthal would be born out of a human woman, have intelligence perhaps not that far from our own, and possibly speech capability...
I say, why not raise it like any human child. Don't lock it in a lab like some scary creature. Just give it an adoptive family, try to raise it like a normal human, and observe its development very closely. There is no way we'd be able to replicate its "natural environment" anyways, so we might as well treat it decently, and learn everything we can that way.
Of course it's arbitrary... They most-likely added some extra code to check how many "apps" are running (excluding antiviruses). They had to spend extra time modifying the OS to enforce this artificial limitation.
// Function to count how many apps are running, excluding AV
// Function called when an app is loaded
Eg:
#define MAX_RUNNING_APPS 3
int countRunningApps();
void onAppLoad()
{
if (countRunningApps() >= MAX_RUNNING_APPS)
inviteUserToUpgradeOS();
else
loadApp();
}
Some people just completely reject the idea of closed source software. Since BSD allows open source software to be modified into closed source software, they view it as a bad thing.
The GPL forces everyone to make their contributions open, which does have some nice benefits when it comes to encouraging improvement of software... However, it's often incompatible with the way many companies develop software.
Many large software development companies would never want to open source their software. They believe it would allow people to steal their trade secrets. To these companies, the BSD license is a viable option, but not the GPL.
I personally think it would be nice if everything was completely open, but I think that's the kind of utopic vision the world is not ready for.
You probably mean gender identity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity).
If this works out nearly as well as they say it will, this will be what the original EEE should have been. The 10" screen will be more readable, the slightly larger keyboard more comfortable, while keeping the unit light and portable compared to a regular laptop.
Furthermore, the chipset being integrated into the 45nm CPU will fix the problem of having an outdated chipset that consumes several times more power than your CPU does (negating the benefits of a low power CPU). We might finally see some *good* battery life on these things.
Now, we just have to hope the price won't suck. I'm placing my bet at ~$550-700, pretty much as expensive as an OK regular laptop, but more portable...
I agree with the parent. A contract granting you a yearly raise for the next 5 years, for example, is much more worthwhile for you. Why take the risk of losing out in the long term, when you could ask for a raise effective immediately instead? You can do whatever you want with the money, starting now, investing it in whatever projects you may have. Shares of this small company, however, may be diluted, or worthless in the long run, as others have pointed out.