These days producing a video game most closely resembles producing a movie, and the big titles in both are the big budget blockbusters. With so much money at stake in the production budget you can't take many chances by being innovative. Usually that means going with a known genre and known franchise. That doesn't mean there can't be great blockbusters, like GTA San Andreas, but at the core, they're more of the same but polished and refined to the peak of its conventional category. Just like indie filmmakers, there are opportunities for small indie game makers. It's happened before.
Yup, terminal services works great. Just remember to set a strong password on the accounts allowed to remote in. Home users are notoriously lax about choosing passwords. I just wish those home broadband routers could restrict incoming connections by source IP for a little extra security.
$150 is for an OEM license copy that's must be purchased with hardware and it's only licensed for that hardware, unlike the retail version that's reusable on other computers. Theoretically you could move the keyboard and mouse to the new computer and say it's the same hardware, but you're at the mercy of Microsoft if they'll let you reactivate or not.
It's meaningless because you can combine the fuel cell with an arbitrarily large fuel tank. So: fuel cell + small fuel tank = low energy density fuel cell + large fuel tank = high enerygy density fuel cell + no fuel = zero energy density
It's meaningless to compare a fuel cell and battery in energy density. A fuel cell just converts chemical energy to electrical energy. A fuel tank full of methanol is what stores the energy, and the energy density of methanol is something like two orders of magnitude greater than chemical batteries.
You have to look beyond gaming. Apple is already well-positioned where Sony and MS want to be, the home entertainment media hub. That means music, videos, photos, with maybe some web surfing and email. Only missing link now is the Mac mini doesn't have a good fullscreen GUI for HTPC use like Windows MCE or MythTV. You won't run any hardcore 3D games on that 9200 chip, but they'll probably have a few titles for casual gamers. Remember how well The Sims sold, and it didn't need 3D (Sims 2 does need 3D though).
"Since that's the case, how did you group Libertarians with anybody except the extreme right, let alone the far left?"
Libertarians have a naive faith in laissez faire economics. We tried that in 19th century. Some markets may settle into a healthy, competitive environment. Others are vulnerable to market distortions like cartels, oligopolies and various barriers of entry to competition. While the far-left does have noble goals with their agenda, they're equally naive about the economic consequences of their ideas.
"it uses Dorext X for the effect PREVIEWS only. it will not use the video card to speed up rendering time."
That makes sense since AGP is essentially a one way interface. It's fast for sending data to the video card, but slow as hell if you want to read a rendered frame off the video RAM. Maybe PCI express will change that.
"There's a very good reason for the gummint to meddle in this affair though: national security."
News flash! A whole shitload of computers and electronics are already manufactured in China including many U.S. brands that contract out manufacturing to Chinese factories. iPods, Thinkpads, motherboards. If the Chinese wanted to steal our designs or trojan our computers it's already possible theoretically.
What I like about Dell is the warranty service. You can get 3 years of next business day onsite repair for a pretty reasonable price, and some plans cover accidental damage too. The cases have a cheap, flimsy plastic feel to them unlike the built-like-a-tank Thinkpads, but they're durable enough considering the treatment we put them through. We get our share of lemons, but they're always good about warranty repairs.
Besides the temp files that might be written outside of $HOME (/var/tmp?), an encrypted root helps against some attacks, for example mounting the root partition from a boot CD and inserting trojans like a keylogger, backdoor or rootkit. With an encrypted root you still have an unencrypted/boot partition that could also be subverted with a trojaned kernel or initrd, but that's not nearly as straightforward. Also, for the truly paranoid, you could use a removable boot CD or floppy instead of a/boot partition on the hard drive.
OK, I know it doesn't always depend on distance, but 12 miles is roughly correct for my house. The free local vs. intra-LATA calling area might be completely nonsensical, and it doesn't depend on the phone company either. I have both SBC and Verizon in my area, and it's not automatically a toll call calling from one to the other.
Not area codes, prefixes. They're the first three digits after the area code. Some numbers are a toll call even in the same area code. The front of your white pages should have a list of numbers in your free calling area.
Do you want the music to play at each kiosk through an HTTP stream or play at the central server by queueing up songs through the kiosks? Plenty of web based jukeboxes out there that work either way. Some good suggestions in the other replies and don't forget to check Freshmeat and Sourceforge too.
Depends on your phone company, but local calls in the US are free up to about 12 miles away. Beyond that it's a toll call (intra LATA) that costs as much as long distance. You'd better have a good list of local exchanges programmed into your gateway or you'll get a big surprise on your phone bill.
"and all remotely personal information stored on a 256bit AES encrypted volume."
Windows will leave temp files all over the place and your pagefile could have any data that was kept in RAM. The superparanoid run Linux w/ an encrypted root partition and Windows inside a VM from an encrypted disk image.
"If that really is the case, then wouldn't it be a good idea to artificially increase the amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere to reflect away even more sunlight in proportion to the increasing CO2 levels?"
Particulates cause health problems so it may not be the best idea. If you want to control the solar flux, launching a sunshade to the L1 Lagrange point might work better. But as you said tinkering with the solar flux is risky. It won't be easy either. One estimate is 300,000 sq km of mirrors will be needed.
Kyoto isn't enough, and the economic consequences of more expensive energy are real, but I think more expensive energy is inevitable as oil production peaks out. What's really scary is that once cheap oil is gone, the only cheap energy left will be coal, and there's enough coal to last hundreds of years. It's time for creative thinking and high tech solutions. I don't know what might be practical, but I've seen plenty of ideas:
- Pump coal plant exhaust through algae ponds (makes them grow extra fast). - Pump CO2 from coal plant exhaust into empty oil wells (they do that anyway to pressurize them to recover more oil) - Grow algae or soybeans for vegetable oil for biodiesel (A lot of spare capacity there. Something like 70% of US farmland is used for growing animal feed. Cheap hamburgers aren't that important to me)
Sorry, you've commited the fallacy of equivocation, using a key word in an argument with several different meanings. A scientific theory like evolution or global warming doesn't mean idle speculation with no supporting evidence. That's a hypothesis. A scientific theory is a well-tested mathematical model for describing natural events.
"Why would a private firm pay a large sum of money to look at galaxies?"
A private company might take over Hubble to sell telescope time to scientists who DO want to look at galaxies. The question is can it be done profitably? If we use the estimates from the article it might cost $1B to repair the Hubble which would extend its life by six years. Ignoring the time value of money, this works out to $19000/hour for just the repair mission. I'm not familiar with the finance side of astronomy, so maybe someone else could fill me in on this. How do astronomers pay for telescope time? Is there an hourly rate that's paid out of the research grant? I know most telescopes aren't run by for-profit companies.
"To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important."
I liked this quote from the essay, and I can totally relate to it. I took an anthropology class for my social science requirement. I thought, hey this could be fun learning about prehistoric humans. Then I got to the readings. The writing was incredibly (and unnecessarily) dense and obscure. There was maybe one sentence worth of information for every five sentences of text. I wouldn't call it useless, but I could've learned just as much from a few PBS documentaries.
Umm, the printing division at HP has always been their cash cow even before Carly. Printer ink and toner is THE cash cow for all the printer manufacturers, and they all resort to dirty tricks to force customers to buy genuine OEM cartridges. Epson, Lexmark and HP put chips in their cartridges to disable themselves after running empty to discourage refilling. Canon is probably the friendliest of them all to aftermarket ink, and has somewhat more reasonable ink prices. I like my i960, but it's very picky about photo paper. Terrible results with anything except Canon photo paper. The i450 I had before that was just plain terrible.
Slashdot Mirror
These days producing a video game most closely resembles producing a movie, and the big titles in both are the big budget blockbusters. With so much money at stake in the production budget you can't take many chances by being innovative. Usually that means going with a known genre and known franchise. That doesn't mean there can't be great blockbusters, like GTA San Andreas, but at the core, they're more of the same but polished and refined to the peak of its conventional category. Just like indie filmmakers, there are opportunities for small indie game makers. It's happened before.
Do they count phishing as online identity theft? That's really taken off the last year, and it's a lot more efficient than dumpster diving.
"/known a few cops //never been given a terribly hard time"
Let me guess, you're white and clean cut.
Yup, terminal services works great. Just remember to set a strong password on the accounts allowed to remote in. Home users are notoriously lax about choosing passwords. I just wish those home broadband routers could restrict incoming connections by source IP for a little extra security.
$150 is for an OEM license copy that's must be purchased with hardware and it's only licensed for that hardware, unlike the retail version that's reusable on other computers. Theoretically you could move the keyboard and mouse to the new computer and say it's the same hardware, but you're at the mercy of Microsoft if they'll let you reactivate or not.
It's meaningless because you can combine the fuel cell with an arbitrarily large fuel tank. So:
fuel cell + small fuel tank = low energy density
fuel cell + large fuel tank = high enerygy density
fuel cell + no fuel = zero energy density
What you need is a micromechanical gas turbine.
It's meaningless to compare a fuel cell and battery in energy density. A fuel cell just converts chemical energy to electrical energy. A fuel tank full of methanol is what stores the energy, and the energy density of methanol is something like two orders of magnitude greater than chemical batteries.
And liquor bottles? No way you'll find those at an airport duty-free shop.
You have to look beyond gaming. Apple is already well-positioned where Sony and MS want to be, the home entertainment media hub. That means music, videos, photos, with maybe some web surfing and email. Only missing link now is the Mac mini doesn't have a good fullscreen GUI for HTPC use like Windows MCE or MythTV. You won't run any hardcore 3D games on that 9200 chip, but they'll probably have a few titles for casual gamers. Remember how well The Sims sold, and it didn't need 3D (Sims 2 does need 3D though).
"Since that's the case, how did you group Libertarians with anybody except the extreme right, let alone the far left?"
Libertarians have a naive faith in laissez faire economics. We tried that in 19th century. Some markets may settle into a healthy, competitive environment. Others are vulnerable to market distortions like cartels, oligopolies and various barriers of entry to competition. While the far-left does have noble goals with their agenda, they're equally naive about the economic consequences of their ideas.
"it uses Dorext X for the effect PREVIEWS only. it will not use the video card to speed up rendering time."
That makes sense since AGP is essentially a one way interface. It's fast for sending data to the video card, but slow as hell if you want to read a rendered frame off the video RAM. Maybe PCI express will change that.
"There's a very good reason for the gummint to meddle in this affair though: national security."
News flash! A whole shitload of computers and electronics are already manufactured in China including many U.S. brands that contract out manufacturing to Chinese factories. iPods, Thinkpads, motherboards. If the Chinese wanted to steal our designs or trojan our computers it's already possible theoretically.
What I like about Dell is the warranty service. You can get 3 years of next business day onsite repair for a pretty reasonable price, and some plans cover accidental damage too. The cases have a cheap, flimsy plastic feel to them unlike the built-like-a-tank Thinkpads, but they're durable enough considering the treatment we put them through. We get our share of lemons, but they're always good about warranty repairs.
Besides the temp files that might be written outside of $HOME (/var/tmp?), an encrypted root helps against some attacks, for example mounting the root partition from a boot CD and inserting trojans like a keylogger, backdoor or rootkit. With an encrypted root you still have an unencrypted /boot partition that could also be subverted with a trojaned kernel or initrd, but that's not nearly as straightforward. Also, for the truly paranoid, you could use a removable boot CD or floppy instead of a /boot partition on the hard drive.
OK, I know it doesn't always depend on distance, but 12 miles is roughly correct for my house. The free local vs. intra-LATA calling area might be completely nonsensical, and it doesn't depend on the phone company either. I have both SBC and Verizon in my area, and it's not automatically a toll call calling from one to the other.
Not area codes, prefixes. They're the first three digits after the area code. Some numbers are a toll call even in the same area code. The front of your white pages should have a list of numbers in your free calling area.
Do you want the music to play at each kiosk through an HTTP stream or play at the central server by queueing up songs through the kiosks? Plenty of web based jukeboxes out there that work either way. Some good suggestions in the other replies and don't forget to check Freshmeat and Sourceforge too.
Depends on your phone company, but local calls in the US are free up to about 12 miles away. Beyond that it's a toll call (intra LATA) that costs as much as long distance. You'd better have a good list of local exchanges programmed into your gateway or you'll get a big surprise on your phone bill.
"and all remotely personal information stored on a 256bit AES encrypted volume."
Windows will leave temp files all over the place and your pagefile could have any data that was kept in RAM. The superparanoid run Linux w/ an encrypted root partition and Windows inside a VM from an encrypted disk image.
"If that really is the case, then wouldn't it be a good idea to artificially increase the amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere to reflect away even more sunlight in proportion to the increasing CO2 levels?"
Particulates cause health problems so it may not be the best idea. If you want to control the solar flux, launching a sunshade to the L1 Lagrange point might work better. But as you said tinkering with the solar flux is risky. It won't be easy either. One estimate is 300,000 sq km of mirrors will be needed.
Kyoto isn't enough, and the economic consequences of more expensive energy are real, but I think more expensive energy is inevitable as oil production peaks out. What's really scary is that once cheap oil is gone, the only cheap energy left will be coal, and there's enough coal to last hundreds of years. It's time for creative thinking and high tech solutions. I don't know what might be practical, but I've seen plenty of ideas:
- Pump coal plant exhaust through algae ponds (makes them grow extra fast).
- Pump CO2 from coal plant exhaust into empty oil wells (they do that anyway to pressurize them to recover more oil)
- Grow algae or soybeans for vegetable oil for biodiesel (A lot of spare capacity there. Something like 70% of US farmland is used for growing animal feed. Cheap hamburgers aren't that important to me)
Sorry, you've commited the fallacy of equivocation, using a key word in an argument with several different meanings. A scientific theory like evolution or global warming doesn't mean idle speculation with no supporting evidence. That's a hypothesis. A scientific theory is a well-tested mathematical model for describing natural events.
"Why would a private firm pay a large sum of money to look at galaxies?"
A private company might take over Hubble to sell telescope time to scientists who DO want to look at galaxies. The question is can it be done profitably? If we use the estimates from the article it might cost $1B to repair the Hubble which would extend its life by six years. Ignoring the time value of money, this works out to $19000/hour for just the repair mission. I'm not familiar with the finance side of astronomy, so maybe someone else could fill me in on this. How do astronomers pay for telescope time? Is there an hourly rate that's paid out of the research grant? I know most telescopes aren't run by for-profit companies.
"To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important."
I liked this quote from the essay, and I can totally relate to it. I took an anthropology class for my social science requirement. I thought, hey this could be fun learning about prehistoric humans. Then I got to the readings. The writing was incredibly (and unnecessarily) dense and obscure. There was maybe one sentence worth of information for every five sentences of text. I wouldn't call it useless, but I could've learned just as much from a few PBS documentaries.
Umm, the printing division at HP has always been their cash cow even before Carly. Printer ink and toner is THE cash cow for all the printer manufacturers, and they all resort to dirty tricks to force customers to buy genuine OEM cartridges. Epson, Lexmark and HP put chips in their cartridges to disable themselves after running empty to discourage refilling. Canon is probably the friendliest of them all to aftermarket ink, and has somewhat more reasonable ink prices. I like my i960, but it's very picky about photo paper. Terrible results with anything except Canon photo paper. The i450 I had before that was just plain terrible.