Unlike with most computer virii, there is an incentive to profit with cell virii.
I'm sure there are people already working out how to get these programmable phones to call those phone numbers in certain countries that charge you an outrageous amount per minute. The wireless companies need to take this seriously.
x86 hardware has this all-in-one approach, so I'd say you're pretty much out of luck. Which is a shame because the more they put on the board, the more can go wrong.
Apple builds a lot into a tiny space as well, but their hardware and software is a lot more reliable. That's why most professionals and experts are switching to them.
There are environmental pressures to carnivorism for species that are climbing the food chain because of competition, and environmental pressures to herbivorism for those who top it for longevity (running out of lower elements on the chain to eat.)
Humans, incidentally, have been natural herbivores for hundreds of thousands of years -- one can live longer and healthier as a vegetarian than as a carnivore strictly speaking. But we are considered omnivores because our bodies can tolerate meat as well as plant matter. It is not surprising to see a similar evolution taking place in other species as well; what is surprising is our relative level of resistance to this fact.
It's a great technical achievement, but I'm concerned it will be turned to piracy uses eventually.
It would be nice if console developers would release or permit to be released an official version of Linux for their platforms so that hardware and software exploits didn't need to be used.
This might seem like an odd perspective, but if people are put out of work by the availability of open source competition and are contributing to the problem simply to remain 'on the dole', doesn't this system effectively screw professional programmers?
It's like all the negative of outsourcing without the positive of improving someone else's economy.
I know the hardware is a little more expensive, but I'd most definitely proscribe a Mac Mini instead. PC components just don't seem to be designed with longevity in mind anymore, and it gets worse when you pack all that stuff into a tiny cube.
If you're about the cool factor (which is probably the case here) just buy regular-sized hardware, a polyurethane case and LEDs. You don't even need to put an OS on it, just the stickers.
Not only for plasmonics, but for mutable instruction sets. There has been a tendency in computing innovation to withdraw to yesterday's
discoveries. Tried-and-true approaches offer the twin comforts of backwards
compatibility and tested reliability, attractive propositions to the modern
CEO or venture capitalist savvy enough to recognize the additional benefit
of recognizing further gains on already completed research. Unfortunately,
and in my opinion, this follow-the-leader approach has lead to stagnation in
CPU development. I'll explain using a simplified analogy for the benefit
of the less technically-inclined.
Let us think of a computer processing unit as a juggler, and bytes as mangoes.
Older CPUs would juggle one mango at a time, and frequently require
modifications to the stage to boot. Around the 1980s, they could juggle two
mangoes. Then four around 1990, and today as many as eight at a time! Now
you would be expected to be quite impressed with each leap, notwithstanding
the fact that you really wanted a juggler that could handle melons,
grapefruit, or watermelon slices instead of (or in addition to) mangoes. In
addition, the fact that you are juggling in a zoo where a primate is free to
grab your fruit and substitute twigs (or worse!) mid-juggle owing to something
called "stack smashing" in computer terminology is not supposed to discourage
you.
There is a movement towards something called mutable paragraphs, where as in
English "words" (groups of bytes) can be of different lengths depending on
need. This may mean the ability to exactly fill out a data page for better
efficiency, or to allow the CPU to work with communication protocols in their
element (if a common network packet is 68 bytes long, a word should be ½NP
or 34 bytes in the I/O buffer.) It also means that you use no more CPU space
than you absolutely need to for a computational step, decreasing wear and
tear on your components.
I guess what I'm getting at is that science fiction has nothing on practical interative design for real world technological improvement. Sure, we might get to the same place we read about 50 years ago, but not all in one step.
This takes very little away, but think about what it might add: the ability to pay for tolls, gas, or parking meters without swiping a card. You have to admit that'd be pretty cool.
I'm quite impressed with the rendering quality of the XBox vs. its contenders, at least with regards to the pictures in this article. If they manage a reasonable fps with online MMOFPSing I will seriously consider picking this up.
There are a few ways they could improve on the formula of Planetside however. For one thing, I wish that there was a way to bring in your own maps and limit a particular arena to a certain number of players. For another, having any sort of information tied to your longterm performance such as a level, new abilities or score creates a disincentive to stick your neck out -- if they'd just let you join and play and wipe all your stats out at the end of the hour it'd be a lot more fun! It'd also be nice to have a single-player mode where you could get experience in the gaming world by battling monsters through a series of levels.
Regardless, for restrained multiplayer mayhem I will be investigating this title further.
I hang out on the nanotechnology newsgroup, and while there are a number of complexities standing between a handful of silicone today and a handful of nanobots tomorrow I am optimistic we will see practical nanotechnology within our lifetimes.
It's been interesting watching the discussion evolve from "This is neat in theory" fifteen years ago to "Today we've got a prototypical nanocomputer" months ago. To think that such great things will be accomplished with machines so tiny and technology inconceivable a decade ago. It's been a pleasure to watch the intelligent design of these electronic critters by benevolent creators from the ground up and has given me shall we say ample room to consider the possible origins of biological life.
And now we're talking about terraforming, or making a world to suit ourselves, with this irreducibly complex material. Heady stuff, to say the least.
As a game developer, I have noticed a tendency in computing innovation to withdraw to yesterday's
discoveries. Tried-and-true approaches offer the twin comforts of backwards
compatibility and tested reliability, attractive propositions to the modern
CEO or venture capitalist savvy enough to recognize the additional benefit
of recognizing further gains on already completed research. Unfortunately,
and in my opinion, this follow-the-leader approach has lead to stagnation in
CPU development. I'll explain using a simplified analogy for the benefit
of the less technically-inclined.
Let us think of a computer processing unit as a juggler, and bytes as mangoes.
Older CPUs would juggle one mango at a time, and frequently require
modifications to the stage to boot. Around the 1980s, they could juggle two
mangoes. Then four around 1990, and today as many as eight at a time! Now
you would be expected to be quite impressed with each leap, notwithstanding
the fact that you really wanted a juggler that could handle melons,grapefruit, or watermelon slices instead of (or in addition to) mangoes. In
addition, the fact that you are juggling in a zoo where a primate is free to
grab your fruit and substitute twigs (or worse!) mid-juggle owing to something
called "stack smashing" in computer terminology is not supposed to discourage
you.
There is a movement towards something called mutable paragraphs, where as in
English "words" (groups of bytes) can be of different lengths depending on
need. This may mean the ability to exactly fill out a data page for better
efficiency, or to allow the CPU to work with communication protocols in their
element (if a common network packet is 68 bytes long, a word should be ½NP
or 34 bytes in the I/O buffer.) It also means that you use no more CPU space
than you absolutely need to for a computational step, decreasing wear and
tear on your components.
I guess what I'm getting at is that innovation needs to be less
about protectionism such as DRM or copy protection and more about, well, innovation.
Increase functionality and the content will be made available, increase content and the fans will be content, as we say.
The problem with the game industry is that we're similarly content to rest on our laurels. Independent developers can no longer reach into the domain of the big guys, who are able to level Hollywood-type budgets into special effects and, unfortunately, Hollywood-type scripts and originality into the gameplay. This has turned the industry into something of an interchangeable parts style factory, churning out new real-time strategy, football, MMORPG or first-person shooter units on a yearly basis without any real motivation to improve upon the formula.
In addition to being the penultimate search engine, Google is becoming quite feature-rich as well. It's pretty interesting to realize the subtle way in which they've risen to the top by simply providing what people want -- no more, no less -- in this age when we are saturated with online advertising on every other Internet site.
The Internet has been an excellent tool for communication and entertainment, but as it grows in popularity measures must be taken to control the impact any one member of the community can have on the whole.
As the whole has been pounded pretty heavily, it becomes apparent protections need to be in place on what used to be open bandwidth. Much as with radio, restrictions on use actually create more opportunities than are eliminated -- stopping P2P would mean broad new choices in applications, games and media, stopping hackers would mean better online shopping, and stopping spam would ironically make communication easier and more popular.
Soon we will be using smart cards to get online and perform transactions. It looks like they'll be in our computers now via DRM but maybe that'll help us find a meaningful solution (spam or pirate and your $400 motherboard becomes useless for getting on the Internet.)
I argue that the EU brings this on themselves. It's akin to buffoonery for a nation to insist upon a perfectly good operating system being stripped down to three wheels and a sunroof for ego's sake -- this does not profit the consumer, the company, or even the country. Talk about punching your nose to spite your face. Not only that, but this will cause confusion in the market, and run the risk of introducing incompatibilities down the road with things like applications or service packs making previously warranted but now unwarranted assumptions about the software layout.
Sometimes you must stand firm on your values. Just because the average consumer can't tell a Dick York from a Dick Sargent doesn't mean that altering the formula won't have drastic consequences down the road or even in the long term.
I find neither amazing. Scruples only matter to a politician if there is a risk of discovery and public backlash, and debates over ethical implementation of intellectual property restrictions have nothing on soccer for entertaining the public.
Besides, it's not like programmers will have to stop programming. They'll just have to work for a multinational software developer with a large patent portfolio as a menial instead of creating a startup and generating a large amount of tax income on their own.
Given that it is roughly comparable in gameplay with desktop systems we were using three years ago, and will have grittier titles geared towards mature players, I'd have to say that it's got the edge over the DS.
I don't see myself buying either given the price point (I could get a good Pocket PC for that), and I'm frankly surprised people would sink that kind of cash into any handheld electronic with smash potential, but I suppose that's just priorities. It does look like a lot of fun.
The benefits are obvious: faster speed and reliability. But there are implementation-related issues even beyond the legal ones.
While Europe is relatively small, there is a tendency in all broadcasts to redshift over distance. This effect is more pronounced with dense wavelengths, such as the load ultrawideband will place on airwaves. Redshifting is less of a problem with the visible light spectrum or higher, as they decay into low-energy microwaves, but with radio waves you can experience problems with oscillation such as what happens when someone picks up AM with their teeth.
This could provoke catastrophic and unforeseen consequences, such as birds losing their ability to migrate or remote-controlled devices going haywire, or alternatively no consequences at all. Still, I would feel safer if a couple of years of testing was performed to see what sort of environmental impact this technology has.
The ideal would be to present only advertising that is relevant to you, although the trick of marketing is to figure out how to make anything relevant to you.
While people should be free to do whatever they want with their webpages -- it being the job of the search engine to do the work of sorting -- this tactic of "optimizing for search engines" only has a point if the website is actually indicated in some form in the search topics. Online marketers just don't get that, and seem to figure one pair of eyeballs is as good as another (which they are if you're dealing with CPM ads of course...)
The cost of cable, while high, does not adequately cover the cost of cable programming; commercials do that. But if they're handing out devices that conveniently skip commercials they're decreasing the value of advertising, undercutting the ability of networks to deliver quality programming.
This glut of reality TV ain't just because it's fun and interesting to watch average people compete for big dollars in unrealistic scenarios. There just isn't money to produce cool shows like Farscape or Friends anymore.
Yes, but I'm open to suggestions. I've enjoyed Moria and ZAngband thoroughly, but have exhausted my interest in dungeon crawlers long ago. I've tried Frozen Bubble but have already been spoiled by Puzzle Bobble and the other games I've tried (TuxRacer, bzflag, Glest) didn't particularly impress me, but Glest shows promise.
I am not the type that needs fancy graphics or sound effects in my games, although they are appreciated when tastefully applied, and currently buy more from independent developers than from large publishers -- I found as much amusement in Galactic Civilizations, Pontifex, and Uplink as I did in Knights of the Old Republic 2. What FOSS games would you recommend?
META SHOOT 5000 KEYCHART:
Move left: J
Move right: K
Jump: <META>-J
Shoot: <META>-<CTRL>-K
Save: <META>-F2, type 'cp metashoot.dat metashoot.save.#', where # is the slot in which you want to save, <META>-F1 to return to your game.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure there are people already working out how to get these programmable phones to call those phone numbers in certain countries that charge you an outrageous amount per minute. The wireless companies need to take this seriously.
Apple builds a lot into a tiny space as well, but their hardware and software is a lot more reliable. That's why most professionals and experts are switching to them.
Humans, incidentally, have been natural herbivores for hundreds of thousands of years -- one can live longer and healthier as a vegetarian than as a carnivore strictly speaking. But we are considered omnivores because our bodies can tolerate meat as well as plant matter. It is not surprising to see a similar evolution taking place in other species as well; what is surprising is our relative level of resistance to this fact.
It would be nice if console developers would release or permit to be released an official version of Linux for their platforms so that hardware and software exploits didn't need to be used.
It's like all the negative of outsourcing without the positive of improving someone else's economy.
If you're about the cool factor (which is probably the case here) just buy regular-sized hardware, a polyurethane case and LEDs. You don't even need to put an OS on it, just the stickers.
Let us think of a computer processing unit as a juggler, and bytes as mangoes. Older CPUs would juggle one mango at a time, and frequently require modifications to the stage to boot. Around the 1980s, they could juggle two mangoes. Then four around 1990, and today as many as eight at a time! Now you would be expected to be quite impressed with each leap, notwithstanding the fact that you really wanted a juggler that could handle melons, grapefruit, or watermelon slices instead of (or in addition to) mangoes. In addition, the fact that you are juggling in a zoo where a primate is free to grab your fruit and substitute twigs (or worse!) mid-juggle owing to something called "stack smashing" in computer terminology is not supposed to discourage you.
There is a movement towards something called mutable paragraphs, where as in English "words" (groups of bytes) can be of different lengths depending on need. This may mean the ability to exactly fill out a data page for better efficiency, or to allow the CPU to work with communication protocols in their element (if a common network packet is 68 bytes long, a word should be ½NP or 34 bytes in the I/O buffer.) It also means that you use no more CPU space than you absolutely need to for a computational step, decreasing wear and tear on your components.
I guess what I'm getting at is that science fiction has nothing on practical interative design for real world technological improvement. Sure, we might get to the same place we read about 50 years ago, but not all in one step.
This takes very little away, but think about what it might add: the ability to pay for tolls, gas, or parking meters without swiping a card. You have to admit that'd be pretty cool.
There are a few ways they could improve on the formula of Planetside however. For one thing, I wish that there was a way to bring in your own maps and limit a particular arena to a certain number of players. For another, having any sort of information tied to your longterm performance such as a level, new abilities or score creates a disincentive to stick your neck out -- if they'd just let you join and play and wipe all your stats out at the end of the hour it'd be a lot more fun! It'd also be nice to have a single-player mode where you could get experience in the gaming world by battling monsters through a series of levels.
Regardless, for restrained multiplayer mayhem I will be investigating this title further.
It's been interesting watching the discussion evolve from "This is neat in theory" fifteen years ago to "Today we've got a prototypical nanocomputer" months ago. To think that such great things will be accomplished with machines so tiny and technology inconceivable a decade ago. It's been a pleasure to watch the intelligent design of these electronic critters by benevolent creators from the ground up and has given me shall we say ample room to consider the possible origins of biological life.
And now we're talking about terraforming, or making a world to suit ourselves, with this irreducibly complex material. Heady stuff, to say the least.
Let us think of a computer processing unit as a juggler, and bytes as mangoes. Older CPUs would juggle one mango at a time, and frequently require modifications to the stage to boot. Around the 1980s, they could juggle two mangoes. Then four around 1990, and today as many as eight at a time! Now you would be expected to be quite impressed with each leap, notwithstanding the fact that you really wanted a juggler that could handle melons,grapefruit, or watermelon slices instead of (or in addition to) mangoes. In addition, the fact that you are juggling in a zoo where a primate is free to grab your fruit and substitute twigs (or worse!) mid-juggle owing to something called "stack smashing" in computer terminology is not supposed to discourage you.
There is a movement towards something called mutable paragraphs, where as in English "words" (groups of bytes) can be of different lengths depending on need. This may mean the ability to exactly fill out a data page for better efficiency, or to allow the CPU to work with communication protocols in their element (if a common network packet is 68 bytes long, a word should be ½NP or 34 bytes in the I/O buffer.) It also means that you use no more CPU space than you absolutely need to for a computational step, decreasing wear and tear on your components.
I guess what I'm getting at is that innovation needs to be less about protectionism such as DRM or copy protection and more about, well, innovation. Increase functionality and the content will be made available, increase content and the fans will be content, as we say.
The problem with the game industry is that we're similarly content to rest on our laurels. Independent developers can no longer reach into the domain of the big guys, who are able to level Hollywood-type budgets into special effects and, unfortunately, Hollywood-type scripts and originality into the gameplay. This has turned the industry into something of an interchangeable parts style factory, churning out new real-time strategy, football, MMORPG or first-person shooter units on a yearly basis without any real motivation to improve upon the formula.
Demand better.
So cheers to Google.
As the whole has been pounded pretty heavily, it becomes apparent protections need to be in place on what used to be open bandwidth. Much as with radio, restrictions on use actually create more opportunities than are eliminated -- stopping P2P would mean broad new choices in applications, games and media, stopping hackers would mean better online shopping, and stopping spam would ironically make communication easier and more popular.
Soon we will be using smart cards to get online and perform transactions. It looks like they'll be in our computers now via DRM but maybe that'll help us find a meaningful solution (spam or pirate and your $400 motherboard becomes useless for getting on the Internet.)
Sometimes you must stand firm on your values. Just because the average consumer can't tell a Dick York from a Dick Sargent doesn't mean that altering the formula won't have drastic consequences down the road or even in the long term.
Besides, it's not like programmers will have to stop programming. They'll just have to work for a multinational software developer with a large patent portfolio as a menial instead of creating a startup and generating a large amount of tax income on their own.
Don't install it if you don't want it? I don't think you need to add the toolbar.
I don't see myself buying either given the price point (I could get a good Pocket PC for that), and I'm frankly surprised people would sink that kind of cash into any handheld electronic with smash potential, but I suppose that's just priorities. It does look like a lot of fun.
Unless of course you count machine language interactions with higher-level languages they implement, but I'm not. :)
Thanks, I'll take a look. I tried BZFlag late last year but will try it again; Subspace/Continuum is more my style I think.
Demand better games. Buy independent and wait for the $60 mainstream pap to hit the bargain bin before picking it up.
While Europe is relatively small, there is a tendency in all broadcasts to redshift over distance. This effect is more pronounced with dense wavelengths, such as the load ultrawideband will place on airwaves. Redshifting is less of a problem with the visible light spectrum or higher, as they decay into low-energy microwaves, but with radio waves you can experience problems with oscillation such as what happens when someone picks up AM with their teeth.
This could provoke catastrophic and unforeseen consequences, such as birds losing their ability to migrate or remote-controlled devices going haywire, or alternatively no consequences at all. Still, I would feel safer if a couple of years of testing was performed to see what sort of environmental impact this technology has.
While people should be free to do whatever they want with their webpages -- it being the job of the search engine to do the work of sorting -- this tactic of "optimizing for search engines" only has a point if the website is actually indicated in some form in the search topics. Online marketers just don't get that, and seem to figure one pair of eyeballs is as good as another (which they are if you're dealing with CPM ads of course...)
This glut of reality TV ain't just because it's fun and interesting to watch average people compete for big dollars in unrealistic scenarios. There just isn't money to produce cool shows like Farscape or Friends anymore.
I am not the type that needs fancy graphics or sound effects in my games, although they are appreciated when tastefully applied, and currently buy more from independent developers than from large publishers -- I found as much amusement in Galactic Civilizations, Pontifex, and Uplink as I did in Knights of the Old Republic 2. What FOSS games would you recommend?
META SHOOT 5000 KEYCHART:
Move left: J
Move right: K
Jump: <META>-J
Shoot: <META>-<CTRL>-K
Save: <META>-F2, type 'cp metashoot.dat metashoot.save.#', where # is the slot in which you want to save, <META>-F1 to return to your game.