Here's what I said: I realize "thinking ahead" in chess requires an incredible amount of mental calculation and is probably more complex than any videogame out there.
Here's what you said: There is a lot more going on in chess that there is in any current game.
Sound familar? I explicity said, yeah, chess is more complex than any videogame (although I said "probably" more complex... maybe there's games I don't know about). The irony of calling my statement "patently ridiculous" while basically restating it and calling it your own is delicious.
I wouldn't call chess "real-time". True, you usually don't have unlimited time to ponder your move, but not it's real-time in the sense that most videogames are. Chess is turn-based, with distinct movement phases for each player. Unless you're playing some new version of chess where both players move simultaneously? That could be fun.
So, to restate, VIDEOGAMES ARE NOT MORE COMPLEX THAN CHESS. I was saying though, that at higher levels of competition, there is some pretty amazing thinking going on in games that goes far beyond "twitch" reflexes, and unlike chess, it's real-time.
Here's what I said:
I realize "thinking ahead" in chess requires an incredible amount of mental calculation and is probably more complex than any videogame out there
Here's what you said: Are you delusional? Starcraft requires no where near the "mental ability" as does chess.
Um, that's what I *said*... you basically accuse me of being delusional, then echo what I said. Nice. It used to be, we made fun of Slashdot readers who didn't read the linked story. Then came a new wave of readers who didn't even read the *news post* on Slashdot's front page that they were replying to. The replies to this latest post of mine are representative of the third wave of ridiculous posters- ones who don't even read the post they're flaming! Congratulations, you're are the forefront of a (not-so-new) generation.
The level it's played at nowadays involves mind games and knowing your oponent. This is not your father's video game (not that your father actually had video games). Many times, Street Fighter has even been compared with chess.
This is a really interesting point. A lot of people bitch and moan about things like chess going down the tubes in favor of videogames, but I believe that top videogame players are on a par mentally with top chess players.
It's somewhat an apples vs. oranges comparison, true, since videogames and chess are emphasizing different areas of the brain, but if you've never seen "pro"-type players I don't think you can realize what another mental level these people are on. Look at an RTS game like StarCraft... they're managing hundreds of units in real-time. It's amazing to watch.
Don't flame me... I realize "thinking ahead" in chess requires an incredible amount of mental calculation and is probably more complex than any videogame out there. However, videogame players do it in real time!
I can't figure out how it's legal in the US that management can walk away from a dead company with millions of dollars in their pockets, while the employees walk away thousands in the hole
I agree that it shouldn't be legal for the executives to plunder a company. However, it's pretty simple to avoid being owed huge sums of money by your employer... DON'T WORK IF THEY'RE NOT PAYING YOU. It's simple, really.
While I'm usually pretty socialist in my views, this is a case where I don't think we need a specific law - just a little common sense.
That's sort of like saying "well, the Wright brothers' airplane only few for a minute or so. Close, but still more work is needed before this is really an exciting milestone"
It's a heck of a milestone. Of course it's not useful yet, but they're not claiming it is.
Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast was great... except for the fact that you spend 2/3 of the game playing as boring stupid characters other than Sonic. ARRGH! What were they thinking?
The camera wasn't perfect, but I didn't think it was really any worse than any other 3D platformer. I didn't have a major gripe about it.
I've always hoped that Disney would purchase Pixar. They do great work and would be a valuable addition to Disney. Buy them, and then leave them alone. Don't interfere in that division.
I wish I was naive as you! Your world must be a beautiful place. Pixar would have nothing to gain from such an agreement except large sums of cash for the executives. Now, are you naive enough to think that Disney would want nothing in return for large sums of cash? Of course they aren't. They'd want more control over Pixar's movies.
I'm seriously finding it hard to figure what benefits you think would arise from such an arrangement. It's not like Pixar is cash-strapped; their films have all been quite profitable, with big grosses and low costs of production compared to non-CG fare.
I've never seen Flash add any value whatsoever to a site. This is an awful move, yet one that's sure to succeed because salespeople and the great unwashed ignorant masses like shiny things.
unlike the ingenious Gameboy Advance low poer color screen which requires sunlight but last a long time on its batteries.
You were doing pretty good until you called the GBA screen "ingenious". Even in bright light, that thing is horrible. Literally, no hyperbole, that screen is the worst screen ever created. Bar none.
Having your batteries last a long time doesn't do you any good if your EYES wear out after five minutes.
"Because of all of the mostly useless formatting information."
OK. So you don't like useless formatting information. Fair enough, I agree. I still don't see what that has to do with dynamically generated pages as opposed to precompiled or manually generated HTML.
I really don't think you know what you're talking about.
There's plenty of reasons to go with dynamically generated pages if you don't, strictly speaking, need them...
Future-proof, should your site ever grow to be one that needs to be updated mad often
Separation of content and style. You can do a web page update by filling out a form, without having to think about HTML
Some people just LIKE to program. Or they want to teach themselves PHP/Perl/ASP/etc and want to do a small test case
Dynamically generated pages aren't "messier". In fact they're much cleaner because everything is uniformly formatted.
I cannot fathom why you think dynamically-generated pages consume more bandwidth. They consume more CPU on the server, sure, but bandwidth? I don't think so.
There is NO NEED for you to dynamicaly generate every last little bleeping thing just to make the occasional news update easier.
I don't understand this suggestion. Unless server load becomes an issue and dynamically generating the pages makes the pages load noticably slower to the end user, what does it matter?
Of course, content is king. But one of the tradeoffs is always nice graphics vs. load time.
To some extent, you can have your cake and eat it too- a fair number of graphics, as well as a page that displays quickly if you always use the "height" and "width" attributes in your IMG tags to manually specifiy the dimensions of your graphic. This way, the user's browser can go ahead and render the rest of the page quickly before the graphics are downloaded since you've alreay told it how big that image will be.
This is potentially a HUGE gain in the perceived load time for your site. I hate waiting for a bunch of graphics to load, but if I can start reading the page while the graphics load in the background I don't really mind.
The "alt" attribute for your IMG tags is important, too. This "alt" description is what gets displayed before the image has loaded, or if the user has graphics turned off or is using a non-graphical browser (maybe they're visually impaired!).
Additionally, descriptive "alt" tags help your images get ranked higher in image search engines, such as Google's. This is an increasingly popular way for people to find your site.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. The 2666mhz P4 manages to outperform the 16666mhz Athlon! Wow, what an engineering feat.:)
On the other hand though, Intel is really pulling away in raw clock speed. Obviously AMD wipes the floor with Intel at the same clock speed, but that fact is AMD looks to be nowhere close to getting over the 2GHZ mark.
The AMD vs. Intel debate is starting to sound a exactly like the Mac vs. PC clock speed debates, where G4s clobbered P2's and P3's at equivalant clock speeds, but the Intel chips were available at SUCH higher MHZ that the issue was moot.
It won't help me sleep, but if everybody read the article next time, it will help everybody else read Slashdot. And then maybe they'll get to bed a little sooner since they didn't have to read/write/wade through as many redundant posts raising issue already covered in the article.:)
PS: If you use the "no score +1 bonus" option, they're usually a little easier on the pseudo-offtopic posts like these. Although, by typing that, I'm just begging to get this one modded down!
If you read the article, you'd see that near the end of the article, the guy comments on this. He states that P2P networks built on HTTP are mostly "hackery".
I guess the moderator who modded you up didn't read the article, either. Nice.
That's cool, I didn't think the losses encoders could get such good compression.
Now you've got me curious. Two questions... did you mean to say "average of 60% and a maximum of 75%", or are the words "average" and "maximum" in the right place, and you typo'd the numbers? Second, what sort of source material do you get those numbers with (music genre if applicable).
I guess lossless compression is a bit more of a contender if it can put up numbers like that. Thanks for the informative post.:)
There are lossless audio formats out there. The best ones generally compress at around 2:1. I believe the most popular one is called Shorten, commonly abbreviated to.SHN. It's quite popular with show tapers, from what I understand.
The thing is though, when encoded right, Mp3's are practically indistinguishable from the source, even by "golden ears", or by looking at the waveforms.
When I say "high quality mp3", I'm talking about high bitrate VBR mp3's encoded with newer versions of LAME. See www.r3mix.net for more info. Even with 8:1 compression you get 4 times as much music as lossless formats, at practically indistinguishable quality.
Unfortunately, 99% of the mp3's you see out there on the web are recorded at low bitrates with crappy encoders.:-)
Now, I'm not saying that lossless compression doesn't have its place... once audio is lossy-compressed once, even if it's compressed well, it's essentially useless for further editing if you care about sound quaslity. But for just LISTENING to music, trading uncompressed audio seems like overkill no matter how much bandwidth and storage space you have....
You stumbled over the truth when you typed "but who has mp3's under 128k?", but then you picked yourself up and kept right on walking past it, never letting it slow you down.;)
This isn't a competitor for mp3. They're obviously not TRYING to compete in the high bandwidth area, where mp3 (as you correctly noted) has such a lion's share of the market that it probably won't be unseated in the neat future.
By focusing on 8-32kbps bitrates, they're obviously shooting for a whole different market... probably for the 2-way real-time and streaming communications markets, where mega-low bitrates come into play.
I don't think they're trying to replace the 128kbps+ music that's commonly downloaded off the internet.
Re:The future of MRE's should be a dead-end
on
The Future of MREs
·
· Score: 2
I haven't been in the military myself nor eaten an MRE, but I'm thinking that working your ass off on a real or simulated battlefield would certainly make any food taste better at the end of a day!
Most ex-military types I've talked to have said the same thing. While they weren't exactly raving about MRE's, they said you'd be suprised at what tastes good after the 10th consecutive hardest day of your life.
Wrong. Where do you think that $50.00 goes? Your local cable company has to pay cable channels for the use of their programming.
Or did you think they get HBO for free, and then sell it to you and make an obscene profit margin? If you think that, then you're doubly dumb - dumb for thinking it, and dumb for not starting your own cable company so you can cash in.;-)
it's going to force a lot of hack VB programmers to get their sh!t together and start writing code that doens't look like the top-down crap I wrote in Apple Basic in 4th grade.
This is very insightful. As a guy who's been programming in the Windows world for a while, I can tell you the ease and ubiquity of Visual Basic have definitely produced a ton of bad code, and allowed a lot of unskilled people to quicky hack out a lot of bad code. It's not that VB's such a bad language (for what's it's supposed to do), you can actually produce nice code with it if you wat. You could probably say the same about Perl or many other languages of course.
And if you can't get internet access, I'm sorry, but you really shouldn't be a programmer. It's almost like saying you want to learn to play football, but can't be bothered to find a field.
True, but in many places in the world, unlimited Internet access is not a reality or is unaffordable. The way things are going, with ISPs increasingly cracking down on high bandwidth users, who knows if it will even be a reality in a few years? Plus, some people need to program on the go on laptops and such and aren't always plugged into the 'net.
So, I think the idea of including a CDROM, with an active website for errata and other updates, is the best idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what I said:
I realize "thinking ahead" in chess requires an incredible amount of mental calculation and is probably more complex than any videogame out there.
Here's what you said:
There is a lot more going on in chess that there is in any current game.
Sound familar? I explicity said, yeah, chess is more complex than any videogame (although I said "probably" more complex... maybe there's games I don't know about). The irony of calling my statement "patently ridiculous" while basically restating it and calling it your own is delicious.
I wouldn't call chess "real-time". True, you usually don't have unlimited time to ponder your move, but not it's real-time in the sense that most videogames are. Chess is turn-based, with distinct movement phases for each player. Unless you're playing some new version of chess where both players move simultaneously? That could be fun.
So, to restate, VIDEOGAMES ARE NOT MORE COMPLEX THAN CHESS. I was saying though, that at higher levels of competition, there is some pretty amazing thinking going on in games that goes far beyond "twitch" reflexes, and unlike chess, it's real-time.
Here's what I said:
I realize "thinking ahead" in chess requires an incredible amount of mental calculation and is probably more complex than any videogame out there
Here's what you said:
Are you delusional? Starcraft requires no where near the "mental ability" as does chess.
Um, that's what I *said*... you basically accuse me of being delusional, then echo what I said. Nice. It used to be, we made fun of Slashdot readers who didn't read the linked story. Then came a new wave of readers who didn't even read the *news post* on Slashdot's front page that they were replying to. The replies to this latest post of mine are representative of the third wave of ridiculous posters- ones who don't even read the post they're flaming! Congratulations, you're are the forefront of a (not-so-new) generation.
The level it's played at nowadays involves mind games and knowing your oponent. This is not your father's video game (not that your father actually had video games). Many times, Street Fighter has even been compared with chess.
This is a really interesting point. A lot of people bitch and moan about things like chess going down the tubes in favor of videogames, but I believe that top videogame players are on a par mentally with top chess players.
It's somewhat an apples vs. oranges comparison, true, since videogames and chess are emphasizing different areas of the brain, but if you've never seen "pro"-type players I don't think you can realize what another mental level these people are on. Look at an RTS game like StarCraft... they're managing hundreds of units in real-time. It's amazing to watch.
Don't flame me... I realize "thinking ahead" in chess requires an incredible amount of mental calculation and is probably more complex than any videogame out there. However, videogame players do it in real time!
I can't figure out how it's legal in the US that management can walk away from a dead company with millions of dollars in their pockets, while the employees walk away thousands in the hole
I agree that it shouldn't be legal for the executives to plunder a company. However, it's pretty simple to avoid being owed huge sums of money by your employer... DON'T WORK IF THEY'RE NOT PAYING YOU. It's simple, really.
While I'm usually pretty socialist in my views, this is a case where I don't think we need a specific law - just a little common sense.
That's sort of like saying "well, the Wright brothers' airplane only few for a minute or so. Close, but still more work is needed before this is really an exciting milestone"
It's a heck of a milestone. Of course it's not useful yet, but they're not claiming it is.
Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast was great... except for the fact that you spend 2/3 of the game playing as boring stupid characters other than Sonic. ARRGH! What were they thinking?
The camera wasn't perfect, but I didn't think it was really any worse than any other 3D platformer. I didn't have a major gripe about it.
I've always hoped that Disney would purchase Pixar. They do great work and would be a valuable addition to Disney. Buy them, and then leave them alone. Don't interfere in that division.
I wish I was naive as you! Your world must be a beautiful place. Pixar would have nothing to gain from such an agreement except large sums of cash for the executives. Now, are you naive enough to think that Disney would want nothing in return for large sums of cash? Of course they aren't. They'd want more control over Pixar's movies.
I'm seriously finding it hard to figure what benefits you think would arise from such an arrangement. It's not like Pixar is cash-strapped; their films have all been quite profitable, with big grosses and low costs of production compared to non-CG fare.
..because all it adds is FLASH, not SUBSTANCE.
I've never seen Flash add any value whatsoever to a site. This is an awful move, yet one that's sure to succeed because salespeople and the great unwashed ignorant masses like shiny things.
unlike the ingenious Gameboy Advance low poer color screen which requires sunlight but last a long time on its batteries.
You were doing pretty good until you called the GBA screen "ingenious". Even in bright light, that thing is horrible. Literally, no hyperbole, that screen is the worst screen ever created. Bar none.
Having your batteries last a long time doesn't do you any good if your EYES wear out after five minutes.
"Because of all of the mostly useless formatting information."
OK. So you don't like useless formatting information. Fair enough, I agree. I still don't see what that has to do with dynamically generated pages as opposed to precompiled or manually generated HTML.
I really don't think you know what you're talking about.
There is NO NEED for you to dynamicaly generate every last little bleeping thing just to make the occasional news update easier.
I don't understand this suggestion. Unless server load becomes an issue and dynamically generating the pages makes the pages load noticably slower to the end user, what does it matter?
Of course, content is king. But one of the tradeoffs is always nice graphics vs. load time.
To some extent, you can have your cake and eat it too- a fair number of graphics, as well as a page that displays quickly if you always use the "height" and "width" attributes in your IMG tags to manually specifiy the dimensions of your graphic. This way, the user's browser can go ahead and render the rest of the page quickly before the graphics are downloaded since you've alreay told it how big that image will be.
This is potentially a HUGE gain in the perceived load time for your site. I hate waiting for a bunch of graphics to load, but if I can start reading the page while the graphics load in the background I don't really mind.
The "alt" attribute for your IMG tags is important, too. This "alt" description is what gets displayed before the image has loaded, or if the user has graphics turned off or is using a non-graphical browser (maybe they're visually impaired!).
Additionally, descriptive "alt" tags help your images get ranked higher in image search engines, such as Google's. This is an increasingly popular way for people to find your site.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. The 2666mhz P4 manages to outperform the 16666mhz Athlon! Wow, what an engineering feat. :)
On the other hand though, Intel is really pulling away in raw clock speed. Obviously AMD wipes the floor with Intel at the same clock speed, but that fact is AMD looks to be nowhere close to getting over the 2GHZ mark.
The AMD vs. Intel debate is starting to sound a exactly like the Mac vs. PC clock speed debates, where G4s clobbered P2's and P3's at equivalant clock speeds, but the Intel chips were available at SUCH higher MHZ that the issue was moot.
It won't help me sleep, but if everybody read the article next time, it will help everybody else read Slashdot. And then maybe they'll get to bed a little sooner since they didn't have to read/write/wade through as many redundant posts raising issue already covered in the article. :)
PS: If you use the "no score +1 bonus" option, they're usually a little easier on the pseudo-offtopic posts like these. Although, by typing that, I'm just begging to get this one modded down!
If you read the article, you'd see that near the end of the article, the guy comments on this. He states that P2P networks built on HTTP are mostly "hackery".
I guess the moderator who modded you up didn't read the article, either. Nice.
You're correct.
At first I thought he meant the files were deflated by 60%... so a 1MB audio file would be compressed to ~400KB...
That's cool, I didn't think the losses encoders could get such good compression.
:)
Now you've got me curious. Two questions... did you mean to say "average of 60% and a maximum of 75%", or are the words "average" and "maximum" in the right place, and you typo'd the numbers? Second, what sort of source material do you get those numbers with (music genre if applicable).
I guess lossless compression is a bit more of a contender if it can put up numbers like that. Thanks for the informative post.
There are lossless audio formats out there. The best ones generally compress at around 2:1. I believe the most popular one is called Shorten, commonly abbreviated to .SHN. It's quite popular with show tapers, from what I understand.
:-)
The thing is though, when encoded right, Mp3's are practically indistinguishable from the source, even by "golden ears", or by looking at the waveforms.
When I say "high quality mp3", I'm talking about high bitrate VBR mp3's encoded with newer versions of LAME. See www.r3mix.net for more info. Even with 8:1 compression you get 4 times as much music as lossless formats, at practically indistinguishable quality.
Unfortunately, 99% of the mp3's you see out there on the web are recorded at low bitrates with crappy encoders.
Now, I'm not saying that lossless compression doesn't have its place... once audio is lossy-compressed once, even if it's compressed well, it's essentially useless for further editing if you care about sound quaslity. But for just LISTENING to music, trading uncompressed audio seems like overkill no matter how much bandwidth and storage space you have....
You stumbled over the truth when you typed "but who has mp3's under 128k?", but then you picked yourself up and kept right on walking past it, never letting it slow you down. ;)
This isn't a competitor for mp3. They're obviously not TRYING to compete in the high bandwidth area, where mp3 (as you correctly noted) has such a lion's share of the market that it probably won't be unseated in the neat future.
By focusing on 8-32kbps bitrates, they're obviously shooting for a whole different market... probably for the 2-way real-time and streaming communications markets, where mega-low bitrates come into play.
I don't think they're trying to replace the 128kbps+ music that's commonly downloaded off the internet.
I haven't been in the military myself nor eaten an MRE, but I'm thinking that working your ass off on a real or simulated battlefield would certainly make any food taste better at the end of a day!
Most ex-military types I've talked to have said the same thing. While they weren't exactly raving about MRE's, they said you'd be suprised at what tastes good after the 10th consecutive hardest day of your life.
Wrong. Where do you think that $50.00 goes? Your local cable company has to pay cable channels for the use of their programming.
;-)
Or did you think they get HBO for free, and then sell it to you and make an obscene profit margin? If you think that, then you're doubly dumb - dumb for thinking it, and dumb for not starting your own cable company so you can cash in.
it's going to force a lot of hack VB programmers to get their sh!t together and start writing code that doens't look like the top-down crap I wrote in Apple Basic in 4th grade.
This is very insightful. As a guy who's been programming in the Windows world for a while, I can tell you the ease and ubiquity of Visual Basic have definitely produced a ton of bad code, and allowed a lot of unskilled people to quicky hack out a lot of bad code. It's not that VB's such a bad language (for what's it's supposed to do), you can actually produce nice code with it if you wat. You could probably say the same about Perl or many other languages of course.
Ring-bound books are seriously the best idea I've heard in a long time. Mr. Publisher Guy, take note!
I hate trying to put paperweights and things on top of a book to hold it open to a particular page while I'm typing...
And if you can't get internet access, I'm sorry, but you really shouldn't be a programmer. It's almost like saying you want to learn to play football, but can't be bothered to find a field.
True, but in many places in the world, unlimited Internet access is not a reality or is unaffordable. The way things are going, with ISPs increasingly cracking down on high bandwidth users, who knows if it will even be a reality in a few years? Plus, some people need to program on the go on laptops and such and aren't always plugged into the 'net.
So, I think the idea of including a CDROM, with an active website for errata and other updates, is the best idea.