Someone mod the the parent comment up. It is dead on the money. Sure, lots of adds have used flash for annoying things, but that's hardly Flash's fault. Lots of Viruses have been written in C. As a tool, Flash is still a fairly useful one, and one that fills a fairly unique niche on the internet. It's just too bad that the only face of flash that most people see these days are the "bad" examples, involving "mystery meat" menus, needless graphics and animations that must be waited through to get to content, and annoying popup adds.
and the keys aren't exactly layed with gaming in mind.
Actually, according to most reviews I've seen of it [and supported by the little sample one they have at EB games] the buttons ON the n-gag e weren't really layed out with gaming in mind either. I'm not really sure WHAT was in mind when they were layed out, but it wasn't gaming. (If I had to hazard a guess what WAS on mind though, I think I'd have to say it was "pain".)
I know companies have been known to do it... but... I thought part of the patent law process was that you had to have a working model, in order to be awarded a patent?
(I'm not a patent lawyer, so I could be very wrong on this, and probably am)
How does that work then? Could I go out and patent something, like say, "Faster-than-light spaceship drive" and sit back and wait for someone to develop it, and then get rich?
That seems kinda messed up...
Not that that is any reason it couldn't be real...
I only ask, because the Gaming Intelligence Agency (GIA) closed it's site over a year ago... (The site was www.thegia.com) (The link in the story is just a mirror...)
let's just say that the odds of the XBox making them money is quite low.
Ahh, but there's the trick. It doesn't HAVE to make them money right now. This is microsoft we're talking about. They can afford to take a hit. (Heck, if they wanted to, they could probably afford to just GIVE every household in the united states an XBox) Making money would be nice for them right now, but that's more of a side bonus. The main thing they need to do is cost their competitors (Sony/nintendo/etc) market share. Even if they have to sell at a loss for a while to do that, they can probably afford to. And having a complete monopoly on household gaming would almost certainly be worth that kind of investment....
That sort of depends on how you classify "free will" then, doesn't it? I mean, if from one view point, it's inevitable that you will choose path A over path B, then... even though you have to go through the trouble of actually "choosing" path A at the time, anyone who had the external view point would have know that your choosing path A was inevitable. And so you weren't really "choosing" at all. (Or at least, you may have seen it as a choice, but from the external view point, your choosing path A was a certainty.) (Things that are inevitable probably don't really count as choices, even if they seem like choices at the time.)
So... Does that really leave "free will"? Or just the illusion of it, since we can't see the predetermined timeline in its entirety?
It WAS.... before a neat little piece of legislation passed a few years back, called the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act"...
Now not only is it illegal to try to find ways around it, (or "circumvent access control measures") but it's even illegal to TALK about a way to get around it that someone ELSE found. And heaven forbid you post a web link to their work....
Looking back at a lot of the things RIAA has gone after, it's not clear (to me, at least) that they NEED a legal requirement. Because, in lou of laws to support their interest, they just use... boatloads of money to support their interest. Oh, and to make laws to support their interest, if it looks like something that might come up often.
Fortunately, in this case, if they go after big ISPs, big ISPs might have enough money to duke it out. I really hope that's what happens, and they don't just go "Ok", and agree to jointly help RIAA screw over the general populace of consumers...
Dang, now I don't know if I should write letters to my congressman, or to my AT&T broadband rep...
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it.
Maybe there are less people who don't know how to use flash and want to than there are who already know how, but don't have $500 to fork over for the full version. (I know I certainly fall into the second catagory...)
(and to be fair, flash has one of the better built-in tutorials for learning how to use it.)
But as was mentioned in the article, it is up for debate as to how accurate it's analasys of "plagurized" material is. And if the student is falsely accused, then what is their recourse?
I think THIS is what they ment by Placebo; it doesn't necesarily fix the problem of plagurism, but as long as everyone THINKS it does, they they won't plagurize for fear of retribution. Sort of a "the emperor's new anti-plagurism program".
I liked how the gameboy advance game they thought was the most violent was Super Streetfighter II turbo. Aparently they didn't even bat an eye at Advance wars, (a very cool game) where commanders cheerfully sacrifice hoards of soldiers in battles being fought because "Hey, you're fun to fight! Wanna have another war?" "Ok!"
Why do I get the impression that the way they decide which games are violent is by reading the back of the box?
Not that I necessarily object to the idea of creating a resource for parents to check to find out what games/toys are violent, but really... It would be nice to have the people compiling such resources have at least some idea what they're talking about.
After all, if you believe the back of the box, then Daikatana has "Superior artificial intelligence" and "two highly trained sidekicks"...
Ok, I'm not exactly a psycho starcraft nut, but I feel I should offer a few words in it's defense:
There definatly IS some strategy in it. A resonable amount, in fact. It's just that since it IS possible to win against a lot of people (not to mention the computer) by just building a big attack force and steamrolling over them, lots of people do it.
But a few things it DOES do right:
Supply lines:
Ok, they're short, but they ARE there. If you destroy a bunch of the enemy's builder unit, (the one that goes and mines mineral or gas) then you can seriously disrupt their economy. Which means they have to re-establish their cash flow, which means you gain time on them. Unfortunately, since the lines are short, they're easy to guard later in the game. But again, at least they're there.
Terrain and Placement:
There's a fair amount of terrain advantage built into the game, but people don't always use/remember it. Higher ground, for example, gives a HUGE advantage. (Units only take about 2/3 damage from range attacks) And if you put units under trees or other cover, they also get bonuses.
Chokepoints:
Well, lots of games have this, but again, if you set up your defenses around easily defendable chokepoints, you'll tend to kill a lot of stuff.
Recon:
This is a big one, and is often ignored by people who just go for "build the biggest fleet". Every unit in the game has some kind of counter. For any given unit X, there is at least one unit Y, such that if you spend the same amount of cash on X as I spend on Y, I'll come out ahead. Knowing what your opponent is building can be a HUGE advantage in fighting them, because blizzard made sure that every unit could be dealt with. And of course, the tech tree is expensive enough that you can't buy everything anyway, so it is important to know what areas you can develop to do the most damage to your opponent.
Special abilities:
All the races have 3 (well, 2 if you're zerg) "spellcasting" units. Units with special abilities. Now, while it's extremely annoying that they'll never think to use these abilities on their own, they still are capable of doing some neat things with them. While it does require user micromanagement (one of my primary complaints with the game, actually) you can do some fairly creative things with some of the spells on occasion.
"Unintentional points of strategy":
And of course, there are some points of strategy that get used every so often that probably weren't intended by blizard, but that work because of how the game is set up. For example, putting all of your flying units over your ground units, so that your opponent can't click on them. It's not an especially sporting strategy, but it works.
Anyway, this post has gotten long enough. But if you ask me, StarCraft has less problems with strategy (or lack thereof) than it does with micromanagement.
Just how necessary is it to be able to write to the registry? Especially when developing new applications? I mean, (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) isn't the registry just a big place you can dump things to effectivly be global variables? Isn't the only thing it's usually used for just user prefrences? And if you had to, (especially if you were developing in an enviornment where you couldn't access the registry) couldn't you just simulate the whole thing with files?
Am I completely out of the loop on the registry here? I mean, yes, it's a convienent place to dump things, but how necessary is it, REALLY? Particularly for developing?
Of course, not being able to install new programs is annoying, since most of them use the registry quite a bit... But on the other hand, if you develop in a situation where you can't change the registry, then at least OTHER people will be able to install YOUR program in a locked down enviornment, since IT probably won't rely on registry settings...
...When starting a new country, make sure that you don't pick a name that has the first two letters of someone else's country, or you might not be able to get a TLD for it! And then, no digital e-commerce revolution for you!
This is just my opinion, but I think this is completely the wrong way to go about it. I think an analogy will help explain what I mean. Suppose I show you a picture, then ask you to write a program which generates pictures....
A much better approach in the case of the picture (and I would assert in the case of life) would be to give up the reductive approach. Instead, one should focus on the function the picture serves and try to replicate that. I.e. try to do the same job rather than trying to do the job in the same way.
This is exactly the approach used by Samuael when he wrote his groundbreaking checkers playing program in the 80s. He wanted to make a program that would play checkers the way people do. So he started comming up with all sorts of interesting ideas for how to do it, such as search trees with alpha-beta pruning, buffering board scores, etc.
He ended up with a program that played checkers extremely well. Unfortunatly, it did so in a way that was NOTHING LIKE the way real people play checkers. Particularly in light of various insights from psychologists and neuroscientists, it has become aparent that people play checkers in a signifigantly different fashion than this program did. (We don't really use search trees nearly as much, for example)
The moral of this story (I think) is that if you want to emulate a complex system, if you go from the direction of "This is what I want it to do; how would I set up something to behave like it", then you'll probably get something that is quite a bit different from what you're looking for. Particularly in the case of extremely complex systems (such as life or AI) the possibility that your implimentation is the same as that of the example you're trying to duplicate is probably pretty tiny.
So while I'll freely admidt (without having actually read the book) that to my thinking, starting subatomic might be a little in the extreme, I think that it is at least aproaching the problem from the right end.
I can't think of any particular problems with the logic if we envision the universe we live in as deterministic. After all, on a sub-atomic level, everything moves fairly predictably. Granted, it would have to be an extremely complex formula/expression, but just because we can't solve it yet doesn't mean it couldn't exist. What logical problems were you thinking about?
Of course, Life (like intelligence, as well as countless other things) is only beautifully mysterious and profound until we understand how it works. After we figure THAT out, it's only just beautiful.
One of the things that has hurt the dreamcast is that it's games are actually fairly easy to pirate with a standard CD burner. So you can create Dreamcast CDs with standard CD hardware, so I'd imagine that working out how to read them is quite within the relm of possibility.
Of course, this is simply hypothesis, but on the other hand, the evil warez-romz-cdz-mongers have to make their dreamcast-cd dumpz somehow, and given how common they are, it can't be THAT hard...
Ever since the dreamcast's release, it's games have been extremely impressive. Not just graphically, (Yes they're pretty) but as far as gameplay and innovation. Sega has been churning out some very top notch pieces of software for their system, many of which have sadly gone unnoticed, or not been enough to save the dreamcast. Samba de amigo is reputedly awsome, if you can get past the $200 pricetag for the game (you have to buy 2 maraccas at $70 apiece to get the full experience) Grandia 2 and Skies of arcadia are getting incredible reviews as far as RPGs go. Guilty gear X and Marvel vs Capcom 2 are probably the two prettiest fighting games I've seen in a long time, in terms of graphics.
etc, and so on.
The problem with the dreamcast has definatly not been a lack of quality gams. So the idea that these games might survive and endure beyond the dreamcast's now dismal-looking lifespan should make quite a few people happy. If nothing else, it beats waiting around the extra couple of years for Dreamcast emulators to become usable...
Yay! New technology! The constant flow of progress. For example, these new innovations help solve the problems of "Not enough annoying 'in your face' web content", "Signal/Noise ratio of web is too high", and "Surfing via modem is too blindingly fast".
[/sarcasm]
I suppose it's a lost cause, but I REALLY wish that advertisers would just give it up, and leave us in peace. Unfortunatly, what I see as a "advertisment-free sanctuary", they see as "an unexplored market demographic". And sadly, since they're the ones with the money, their vision wins out. Hmph. I think that when I get rich, and have made my millions, I'll pick couple hundred worthy websites, and offer to finance them so that they can dispense with the banner adds forevermore.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone mod the the parent comment up. It is dead on the money. Sure, lots of adds have used flash for annoying things, but that's hardly Flash's fault. Lots of Viruses have been written in C. As a tool, Flash is still a fairly useful one, and one that fills a fairly unique niche on the internet. It's just too bad that the only face of flash that most people see these days are the "bad" examples, involving "mystery meat" menus, needless graphics and animations that must be waited through to get to content, and annoying popup adds.
and the keys aren't exactly layed with gaming in mind.
Actually, according to most reviews I've seen of it [and supported by the little sample one they have at EB games] the buttons ON the n-gag e weren't really layed out with gaming in mind either. I'm not really sure WHAT was in mind when they were layed out, but it wasn't gaming. (If I had to hazard a guess what WAS on mind though, I think I'd have to say it was "pain".)
I know companies have been known to do it... but... I thought part of the patent law process was that you had to have a working model, in order to be awarded a patent?
(I'm not a patent lawyer, so I could be very wrong on this, and probably am)
How does that work then? Could I go out and patent something, like say, "Faster-than-light spaceship drive" and sit back and wait for someone to develop it, and then get rich?
That seems kinda messed up...
Not that that is any reason it couldn't be real...
Old news maybe?
I only ask, because the Gaming Intelligence Agency (GIA) closed it's site over a year ago... (The site was www.thegia.com) (The link in the story is just a mirror...)
let's just say that the odds of the XBox making them money is quite low.
Ahh, but there's the trick. It doesn't HAVE to make them money right now. This is microsoft we're talking about. They can afford to take a hit. (Heck, if they wanted to, they could probably afford to just GIVE every household in the united states an XBox) Making money would be nice for them right now, but that's more of a side bonus. The main thing they need to do is cost their competitors (Sony/nintendo/etc) market share. Even if they have to sell at a loss for a while to do that, they can probably afford to. And having a complete monopoly on household gaming would almost certainly be worth that kind of investment....
That sort of depends on how you classify "free will" then, doesn't it? I mean, if from one view point, it's inevitable that you will choose path A over path B, then... even though you have to go through the trouble of actually "choosing" path A at the time, anyone who had the external view point would have know that your choosing path A was inevitable. And so you weren't really "choosing" at all. (Or at least, you may have seen it as a choice, but from the external view point, your choosing path A was a certainty.) (Things that are inevitable probably don't really count as choices, even if they seem like choices at the time.)
So... Does that really leave "free will"? Or just the illusion of it, since we can't see the predetermined timeline in its entirety?
... Make a beowulf cluster of'em!
I vote 6 *HOURS*...
It WAS.... before a neat little piece of legislation passed a few years back, called the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act"...
Now not only is it illegal to try to find ways around it, (or "circumvent access control measures") but it's even illegal to TALK about a way to get around it that someone ELSE found. And heaven forbid you post a web link to their work....
I'd agree with you, except...
Looking back at a lot of the things RIAA has gone after, it's not clear (to me, at least) that they NEED a legal requirement. Because, in lou of laws to support their interest, they just use... boatloads of money to support their interest. Oh, and to make laws to support their interest, if it looks like something that might come up often.
Fortunately, in this case, if they go after big ISPs, big ISPs might have enough money to duke it out. I really hope that's what happens, and they don't just go "Ok", and agree to jointly help RIAA screw over the general populace of consumers...
Dang, now I don't know if I should write letters to my congressman, or to my AT&T broadband rep...
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it.
Maybe there are less people who don't know how to use flash and want to than there are who already know how, but don't have $500 to fork over for the full version. (I know I certainly fall into the second catagory...)
(and to be fair, flash has one of the better built-in tutorials for learning how to use it.)
But as was mentioned in the article, it is up for debate as to how accurate it's analasys of "plagurized" material is. And if the student is falsely accused, then what is their recourse?
I think THIS is what they ment by Placebo; it doesn't necesarily fix the problem of plagurism, but as long as everyone THINKS it does, they they won't plagurize for fear of retribution. Sort of a "the emperor's new anti-plagurism program".
Maybe Phillips has had less problem with copying than Sony has then? After all, when was the last time YOU saw a "m0z4rtz" directory on HotLine?
I liked how the gameboy advance game they thought was the most violent was Super Streetfighter II turbo. Aparently they didn't even bat an eye at Advance wars, (a very cool game) where commanders cheerfully sacrifice hoards of soldiers in battles being fought because "Hey, you're fun to fight! Wanna have another war?" "Ok!"
Why do I get the impression that the way they decide which games are violent is by reading the back of the box?
Not that I necessarily object to the idea of creating a resource for parents to check to find out what games/toys are violent, but really... It would be nice to have the people compiling such resources have at least some idea what they're talking about.
After all, if you believe the back of the box, then Daikatana has "Superior artificial intelligence" and "two highly trained sidekicks"...
With our luck, no, it won't violate the DCMA.
But trying to circumvent (stop) it probably will.
Feh.
Funny how chess games never end up like that. :P
Ok, I'm not exactly a psycho starcraft nut, but I feel I should offer a few words in it's defense:
There definatly IS some strategy in it. A resonable amount, in fact. It's just that since it IS possible to win against a lot of people (not to mention the computer) by just building a big attack force and steamrolling over them, lots of people do it.
But a few things it DOES do right:
Supply lines:
Ok, they're short, but they ARE there. If you destroy a bunch of the enemy's builder unit, (the one that goes and mines mineral or gas) then you can seriously disrupt their economy. Which means they have to re-establish their cash flow, which means you gain time on them. Unfortunately, since the lines are short, they're easy to guard later in the game. But again, at least they're there.
Terrain and Placement:
There's a fair amount of terrain advantage built into the game, but people don't always use/remember it. Higher ground, for example, gives a HUGE advantage. (Units only take about 2/3 damage from range attacks) And if you put units under trees or other cover, they also get bonuses.
Chokepoints:
Well, lots of games have this, but again, if you set up your defenses around easily defendable chokepoints, you'll tend to kill a lot of stuff.
Recon:
This is a big one, and is often ignored by people who just go for "build the biggest fleet". Every unit in the game has some kind of counter. For any given unit X, there is at least one unit Y, such that if you spend the same amount of cash on X as I spend on Y, I'll come out ahead. Knowing what your opponent is building can be a HUGE advantage in fighting them, because blizzard made sure that every unit could be dealt with. And of course, the tech tree is expensive enough that you can't buy everything anyway, so it is important to know what areas you can develop to do the most damage to your opponent.
Special abilities:
All the races have 3 (well, 2 if you're zerg) "spellcasting" units. Units with special abilities. Now, while it's extremely annoying that they'll never think to use these abilities on their own, they still are capable of doing some neat things with them. While it does require user micromanagement (one of my primary complaints with the game, actually) you can do some fairly creative things with some of the spells on occasion.
"Unintentional points of strategy":
And of course, there are some points of strategy that get used every so often that probably weren't intended by blizard, but that work because of how the game is set up. For example, putting all of your flying units over your ground units, so that your opponent can't click on them. It's not an especially sporting strategy, but it works.
Anyway, this post has gotten long enough. But if you ask me, StarCraft has less problems with strategy (or lack thereof) than it does with micromanagement.
Just how necessary is it to be able to write to the registry? Especially when developing new applications? I mean, (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) isn't the registry just a big place you can dump things to effectivly be global variables? Isn't the only thing it's usually used for just user prefrences? And if you had to, (especially if you were developing in an enviornment where you couldn't access the registry) couldn't you just simulate the whole thing with files?
Am I completely out of the loop on the registry here? I mean, yes, it's a convienent place to dump things, but how necessary is it, REALLY? Particularly for developing?
Of course, not being able to install new programs is annoying, since most of them use the registry quite a bit... But on the other hand, if you develop in a situation where you can't change the registry, then at least OTHER people will be able to install YOUR program in a locked down enviornment, since IT probably won't rely on registry settings...
...When starting a new country, make sure that you don't pick a name that has the first two letters of someone else's country, or you might not be able to get a TLD for it! And then, no digital e-commerce revolution for you!
This is just my opinion, but I think this is completely the wrong way to go about it. I think an analogy will help explain what I mean. Suppose I show you a picture, then ask you to write a program which generates pictures....
A much better approach in the case of the picture (and I would assert in the case of life) would be to give up the reductive approach. Instead, one should focus on the function the picture serves and try to replicate that. I.e. try to do the same job rather than trying to do the job in the same way.
This is exactly the approach used by Samuael when he wrote his groundbreaking checkers playing program in the 80s. He wanted to make a program that would play checkers the way people do. So he started comming up with all sorts of interesting ideas for how to do it, such as search trees with alpha-beta pruning, buffering board scores, etc.
He ended up with a program that played checkers extremely well. Unfortunatly, it did so in a way that was NOTHING LIKE the way real people play checkers. Particularly in light of various insights from psychologists and neuroscientists, it has become aparent that people play checkers in a signifigantly different fashion than this program did. (We don't really use search trees nearly as much, for example)
The moral of this story (I think) is that if you want to emulate a complex system, if you go from the direction of "This is what I want it to do; how would I set up something to behave like it", then you'll probably get something that is quite a bit different from what you're looking for. Particularly in the case of extremely complex systems (such as life or AI) the possibility that your implimentation is the same as that of the example you're trying to duplicate is probably pretty tiny.
So while I'll freely admidt (without having actually read the book) that to my thinking, starting subatomic might be a little in the extreme, I think that it is at least aproaching the problem from the right end.
I can't think of any particular problems with the logic if we envision the universe we live in as deterministic. After all, on a sub-atomic level, everything moves fairly predictably. Granted, it would have to be an extremely complex formula/expression, but just because we can't solve it yet doesn't mean it couldn't exist. What logical problems were you thinking about?
Of course, Life (like intelligence, as well as countless other things) is only beautifully mysterious and profound until we understand how it works. After we figure THAT out, it's only just beautiful.
One of the things that has hurt the dreamcast is that it's games are actually fairly easy to pirate with a standard CD burner. So you can create Dreamcast CDs with standard CD hardware, so I'd imagine that working out how to read them is quite within the relm of possibility.
Of course, this is simply hypothesis, but on the other hand, the evil warez-romz-cdz-mongers have to make their dreamcast-cd dumpz somehow, and given how common they are, it can't be THAT hard...
You know, this would actually be VERY nice...
Ever since the dreamcast's release, it's games have been extremely impressive. Not just graphically, (Yes they're pretty) but as far as gameplay and innovation. Sega has been churning out some very top notch pieces of software for their system, many of which have sadly gone unnoticed, or not been enough to save the dreamcast. Samba de amigo is reputedly awsome, if you can get past the $200 pricetag for the game (you have to buy 2 maraccas at $70 apiece to get the full experience) Grandia 2 and Skies of arcadia are getting incredible reviews as far as RPGs go. Guilty gear X and Marvel vs Capcom 2 are probably the two prettiest fighting games I've seen in a long time, in terms of graphics.
etc, and so on.
The problem with the dreamcast has definatly not been a lack of quality gams. So the idea that these games might survive and endure beyond the dreamcast's now dismal-looking lifespan should make quite a few people happy. If nothing else, it beats waiting around the extra couple of years for Dreamcast emulators to become usable...
Yay! New technology! The constant flow of progress. For example, these new innovations help solve the problems of "Not enough annoying 'in your face' web content", "Signal/Noise ratio of web is too high", and "Surfing via modem is too blindingly fast".
[/sarcasm]
I suppose it's a lost cause, but I REALLY wish that advertisers would just give it up, and leave us in peace. Unfortunatly, what I see as a "advertisment-free sanctuary", they see as "an unexplored market demographic". And sadly, since they're the ones with the money, their vision wins out. Hmph. I think that when I get rich, and have made my millions, I'll pick couple hundred worthy websites, and offer to finance them so that they can dispense with the banner adds forevermore.