You think warnings are going to help? They made a whole big hype about putting warnings on cigarette packs. Raised the price to do it.
Sorry, I don't know you. But this is asinine feel-good legislation. A debit card is an electronic checkbook. It contains, in one way or another, your account information.
You know that. Unless you're one of the people in 1990 that didn't know nicotine was addictive.
I fully agree they have a responsibility to protect their customers -- as much as is financially and practically feasible. But please. Signs don't solve problems. Or make a damn bit of difference in anything.
"But I also think that those producing these check cards should be required to advertise the hazards of having one of these cards (not in small print and maybe required in advertisement of these cards, similar to what is required with pharmaceutical drugs on television) and/or that if a debit or check card is issued a separate account should be required for its use, and users informed of the issues of placing all of their money in the same account that their debit card has access to."
Your argument is that you didn't know someone could steal your money? You were not aware of the hazards of carrying money (in whatever sense) in the modern world?
I'm sorry your account got cleaned out, identity theft is hardcore and there needs to be a lot more support and it needs to be treated like a much bigger crime than it is. I used to work in the check-authorization industry. It was awful to see these poor people getting their identity stolen and their life ruined.
But please. This is feel-good, 'blame the company'/lawsuit mitigation crap. It doesn't actually do anything. And it isn't anything that people shouldn't know already.
If we want to make a difference, we need a separate government bureau that is devoted to preventing/tracking/prosecuting/educating/defending citizens from/to/about identity theft. Smoke and lights aren't going to solve the problem. And they'll just make it more obnoxious and 8th grade-level instructions to do business with my bank. I hate that.
Again, it's not my intention to attack the OP personally. But those are the last things that are going to actually do any thing to help the problem. They will, though, cause the government/banks/credit card companies to spend a little bit of money, make a lot of noise, not make the situation any safer, and triple the hassle of doing through daily life. Airport security anyone?
Any conclusion that does not assume there is other life in the universe is hopelessly Creation-ist and/or human-centric.
Any conclusion that accepts that beings capable of making ~87 light year voyages are going to crash into a freaking planet or come anal probe a red-neck in Kentucky is hopelessly absurd.
They've mastered FTL, they've mastered force fields or whatever it took to survive impacts with micro-meteors at Light+, they've managed to find one little marble, in an infinite velvet blanket, they're going to crash in the last.001 of the last 1% of the most difficult voyage humanity has ever conceived of? Then they come all this way, doodle some shit in a cornfield in Kansas, ass-probe some dude in Delaware, eviscerate some cows in Vermont, and go home. Wtf? Really? That's stupid.
That's like driving to your Aunt's house in California, and pulling into the drive way and breaking the flag off her mailbox and going back home.
Plus, we have nukes. Sure, there's a chance they have a star trek force field and nukes are so low tech they don't matter any more. But it's more likely their ship is made of metal or plastic and being caught in an airburst will rip it apart like any other physical structure we know of. Doesn't really sound like a risk worth taking, even to find out what happens when you sodomize the herdlings with a metal probe.
Maybe the whole thing is drunk teenagers, from Alpha Centauri? Like a frat hazing. They dodge the ICBM radar, swoop down, seize a redneck and drag him up into their saucer amidst homoerotic/in-group social status building shoulder punching and man-hugging and then fire up the alien beer-bong and do keg (?saucer?) stands and dissect the terran.
Playing the Assassin's Creed series lately really brought home to me how MMO's are basically just MUDs.
Sure they have pretty graphics, but even the most sophisticated don't take the basic step of letting you have some body-control, like AC does.
In effect, in any kind of chat or roleplay or whatever, even in some of the MMO's in combat, it's just a MUD.
Text scrolls by, and all the sparkly effects and 17mp on-the-fly rendered graphics are just a frame to house the same old text game that geeks have been doing since the mid-70s.
There doesn't seem to be any real interest in expanding beyond the basic MUD paradigm, grind, grind, grind.
Assassin's Creed doesn't take it nearly far enough, but letting you have control of your arms/legs/etc is at least 1% of a step toward where the technology needs to go before it expands beyond what you could do with Pueblo and a MUD 20 years ago. Which is connect graphics (and/or HTML) to text.
I'm really surprised that there's such potential here, and MMO's have really been around for 10 years, solidly now. And have created entire new disciplines of economy, social science, etc. But there's really nothing being done to expand the scope of what you can do with them.
I just see such potential in this technology, and I guess it is disappointing to see it stagnate and to find out that once you filter out all the hype and advertising it's just a MUD. Under the hood, there's nothing. Dunno.
Thanks. This is one of the best answers I've ever seen on here. It should have been moderated much higher. It still seems like photo-realistic textures, or the textures from a photograph, could be used. And...by...being better/more realistic they'd be visually superior to latex-sheen looking CGI. Without 'costing' any more resources than generating that flat shiny plastic look that CGI has (up until the last year or two anyway.)
Okay, so this is slightly off-topic, but something I've always wondered about.
I can take a 12megapixel picture. And reduce it down to a 12k gif. Or 120k or whatever the compression results are.
At that point, it's just a.gif. (or.jpg or whatever). The computer doesn't know it's any different than a.gif I created in MSPaint, right?
So if I open GameMaker 7, and use that photo as one of the frames in my character's animation. By repetition, I could create a character moving and walking frame by frame.
Right? What's wrong with this?
I understand that on-the-fly rendering is nice. And that the goal is to get a computer to generate a 'real' picture. But. The difference between a 'great' game and an okay one is the graphics. I could (if I could draw) take a pencil and do one of those black and white sketches that almost looks like a photo, and scan it in and use it too.
What are the technical hurdles or barriers that prevent someone from just doing this?
Send a letter to your congress(person). That's the only way this kind of thing will stop, it's the only way an investigation of this incident will happen, it's the only way that 'foreigners' will be able to feel safe coming into the country.
I think you could do a touch screen that takes them to a limited number of sites, kids like touch screens. You could take them to google, and wikipedia, and show them how wikipedia is bigger than X number of stacks of encyclopedias. Then you could talk about Tim Berners-Lee and html/http and how that revolutionized the internet. You should start out with the arpa and tcp/ip and gopher and fetch and telnet and all those things most people don't know about any more. Give them real information. Real history.
Then progress up into the modern day, maybe like 3 rooms, past, present, future? Put a big quote up on the wall, the Arthur C. Clarke (I think) one, "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (or whatever.) Teach them the wonder and joy of computers. You'll make 1-2% of them geeks for life. Show them how space flight and medical procedures and everything else on the cutting edge of technology is dependent on computers.
I don't think coding has to be hard, necessarily. But...part of good, clean code is 'problem-solving'. Making sure that the logic of the code flows right and that there's no ugliness in it.
It is sort of like being a basketball player. We could probably make a ball that would help you target the net and could use fin stabilizers and gps and whatever to be more accurate. That's what the IDE you two are talking about is doing. It doesn't help you, at all, be a good basketball player. And if you dumb it down enough, it stops being a sport (which in code terms might be a good thing, for everybody to be able to write code any time they want to do anything they want it to do), and more importantly, it stops being something people worry about doing well. It is a skill, and the pursuit of excellence in that skill is the only way new discoveries are made or great accomplishments are...accomplished.
A lot of processor manufacturers hide the deficiencies of entire OS or apps by just pouring on more power. It works. But it doesn't work as well as writing good apps to begin with. It's nice to have all that extra power, but to me, it is a shame to waste it on inefficient processes.
When I went to the CS department at college, they informed me the C++ classes I took in junior college were no longer applicable to their CS degree, because they'd changed what was CS210-211 to ADA from C++. "Because we wanted students to spend less time debugging and more time writing code". Er...I'm no master coder, but in my experience, any project over 100 lines involves spending more time debugging than actually writing code. I thought that's just how it was.
I am all for languages that are easier to use. But coding should be hard. It is hard. And setting people up with the expectation that there's very little debugging involved, or that they can write killer apps in 45 minutes is crazy and counter-productive.
I have always been curious about this. And about why people don't just use back orifice for even home network configuration? I've never used it, but I'd be interested in hearing why other people don't.
There is this pretension of counter-culture. This idea that buying a mac is an act of rebellion against the 'oppressive overlords'. That Macs are 'more green' and 'more consumer friendly' and in general, Apple has done a good job of seamlessly integrating the organic/recycling/conservationist creedo into their advertising campaigns.
You see this same thing in SUV ads. Green earth and blue skies, and scenic natural wonders. They co-opt recycling visual cues to associate one of the worst offenders with 'naturalness'.
The truth is, Apple had a monopoly on academic institutions in the 1980s. They were beating the pants off IBM in those days, at least in the home/school markets. Businesses were still using IBMs, but everything at home and at school, from kindergarten to college, was Apple. The ][e was ubiquitous in middle and high schools all over the country.
IBM has never exactly been 'young and hungry', they've always been 'blue chip', but...they were definitely younger and hungrier then.
My point, really is, I think it is okay if you prefer Macs. That's fine. But the average end-user for a mac is not much different than the average end-user for a PC. Except, the PC end users don't have ignorant, sanctimonious discussions with you about how their product is better and how they bought it to not support a Big Evil Corporation. While completely ignoring that Apple is no different than Microsoft. They're equally interested in a monopoly, they're equally interested in their bottom line, to the detriment of the consumer/end-user. They're just worse at it. They're not as skilled monopolists and evil overlords. But please people. An incompetent, bumbling, drunken [generic evil person] is no less evil than one who is competent.
Hopefully, though, if Apple keeps doing things that don't really help their bottom line all that much, but do manage to sabotage their carefully cultivated public image, like this, I won't have to have this conversation with Mac-Afficionado/Soccer-Daddy man anymore.
Actually, I thought that you could create a + sign of keys for each finger. Which is essentially how it works for a keyboard, but there's more diagonals. Basically, each finger has five positions, up, down, left, right, and center/"home row". That allows you to type everything but 'z' with just quick flicks of your fingers in a variety of directions. Since writing is a linear means of information storage (you can only enter one character at a time, no matter how fast you can type, or otherwise it loses its value as a recording) it shouldn't involve any more complicated learning processes for us than typing now does. Just a new way of doing the same thing. But it does reduce a keyboard to 10-small divits in a piece of plastic, and a few sensors which really aren't any more complicated than current touch screen technology. And, as an added advantage, in 10 years, it should be relatively easy to track the positions of each finger in a dynamic/uncontrolled environment. Which means it should get easier and easier to completely do away with this "keyboard" and go with one of those laser-projected keyboard systems, thus reducing the size of hardware even further, by doing away with any kind of hardware keyboard at all.
My concern with the Wii, as a gamer, has always been about the lack of quality. So many of even the PS3/xbox games are becoming 'rhythm games'. Which is code for button-mashing nonsense. In the PS3's motion controller, there's already games like Godfather (&2) where you have to fling the controller through space, while holding buttons, to get it to do something.
All of these gimmicks, all of these excuses to skimp on game development, graphics, story, take away from games. The Wii's 'goal' is to sell gaming to a bigger market. To induct non-gamers into becoming gamers. Except. Those people aren't going to want deeply involving stories supported by state-of-the-art graphics and sound-scores, with ever-closer-to-reality physics engines. They just want the ball to bounce on the screen it a soft, gentle arc when they fling their Wii-daikatana around the room. Or the little cartoon character to jump (and giggle obnoxiously simultaneously).
In other words, once we accept that motivated self-interest is the only way to get people to act, do, or perform in a certain way, Nintendo is created a motivated self-interest to create 'easy', 'fun', 'simple' games with a lot of pretty pictures. There's even apparently a cheat mode in the newest Wii that lets you skip parts of games that are too hard for little Johnny or Susie. And the market is about 100 times bigger than the market for CoD or GTA or anything else you'd care to play.
This is compounded by the problem of market cohesion, there are fewer and fewer, but bigger and bigger, participants in the market. With Activision's, for instance, known history of screwing players, skimping on game quality (long term sales) for making E3 release dates (short term sales dollars), and other wise being 'in it for the money', how long is it before some big company realizes anybody with an AA in CS can write the equivalent of original Donkey Kong for the Wii, in two weeks and that at that rate, they can pump out 26 games for the 'casual gamer' a year from one code/dev team./rant
I ran a server for work, apache + qmail + squirrel mail + clamav + spamassassin on Debian Sarge (and I think later Woody, not sure about the timing of that) on a 233mhrz, 32mb ram, 8gig HD box for several years. Then the drive fused solid and the box seized up. But it took like 3-4, maybe even 5 years before that happened. I don't know much about the linux dev world, and if you can still find a copy of Sarge around somewhere, or even if it'll run on your particular architecture, Debian wouldn't run on the replacement for that box. But if you can find it, I can't imagine why it wouldn't work. And it's footprint is pretty small.
I loved this series when it first came out. Then Rand Al'Jordan turned it into a giant money suck. The last half of the series appears to exist exclusively to fatten Jordan, et al's bank account, while massacring as many trees as possible. Thousands and thousands of pages of NOTHING HAPPENING.
I think these books are a classic case of the cash-cow mentality that Stephen King, Anne Rice, James Patterson, and every other major commercially-successful author has gained in the last 20 or so years. We see the same thing with TV and to a lesser extent movie 'franchises'. The story no longer matters as much as the money it is possible to bilk from the fans. Quality goes down hill, the whole purpose of writing the story becomes, not to tell a story, but to effortlessly 'convert' your bank balance to a positive number.
Then again, maybe it is not effortlessly. If school taught me anything it is that making up BS that doesn't say anything is usually harder than just studying.
I am baffled by the number of people saying, "Just use pen and paper that's the best way for me." How is that an answer to the question? "We don't need none of that there change stuff. If dinosaurs were good enough for Jesus to ride to pre-school then they're good enough for those people younger than me."
It sounds to me like a simple keyboard map would solve a lot of your problems. Map your F-keys (function) to various...functions. I can think of a couple of ways to do it off the top of my head, but a customized software solution shouldn't be too incredibly hard either. Just requires a text entry field, some math-specific formatting of the text, and the ability to hold down shift or control or iKey or something to define when you're typing 'special' pre/custom-defined characters.
I understood at one time that the www. prefix was indicative of someone following a standard? All 'legitimate' websites used www, while those who were a bit more dodgy, or less professional, or didn't follow the ICANN (maybe) protocol skipped the prefix. Is this still technically a standard? Anybody know what the deal with that is/was? Just geeky curiousity.
That's a good point, I hadn't really thought of it when I posted this. But it seems to be a strategy, in the console wars, that you release your game on one console 6 months before the other. The 'early adopters' will flock to your console if they want the game bad enough.
My thinking behind the 4-5 good games line was sort of the...4-5 tugs on the rope model, rather than relying on one particular app. Presumably, it would take a couple weeks, at least, to port. And if I can get 'CoolGame2009' for free, if I dual boot or run a Linux game box, why would I pay for it on Win? If I'm not going to pay for it, why would a developer spend the time on it? At least until they catch up and realize that it's pulling customers away. This is sort of the model Firefox did, I think. They created that critical mass/groundswell, now they lead the development cycle. MS/GC/etc run along behind them cobbling together every FF innovation into their new version.
FF might only have 40% market share (last I read 6+ months ago), but they've achieved the status of critical innovator. Whatever is in their browser is guaranteed to show up in the others ASAP. That's a position of significant leverage.
Seriously, if you want Linux to really take off and outnumber Windows on home PCs, one of the strategies I'd consider would be to create 4-5 really good games not available on MS/Mac products. *nix geeks do a lot of ragging on GUI users, but exert little real effort to give them motivation to change.
All it would take is one superior game, one superior product and you'd get a massive influx of dual-booters. There's been a lot of work lately on making easy-to-install *nix flavors, Debian, CentOS, can both in my experience be installed by a child with no outside help (I even did it.) But unless you're running a server for something or just like to be confused, there's no motivation for it. If you gave people a game, an app, an experience they couldn't have on another OS, you'd provide real motivation.
Despite the current trends, good games don't require super graphics or movie tie-ins or big name voice actors. The best games, have always just needed better-than-suck graphics, superior user interface, and/or something that makes the game hook. Generally a little quirk or wrinkle in the game playing experience that no one else has ever figured out how to iron out. Something about the UI that just works. There are whole series of games that really aren't all that great as far as games go, but just have such a great interface that people keep coming back to them. Then again, there was a game on Windows3.1 shareware that came pre-installed called CastleWin. Was one of the coolest games I've ever played, just a Rogue-clone with graphics, you could re-name your items, and do a few other neat tricks. Still can't find that one anywhere.
Its main objectives include the 'automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence.' == made of win
If the EU gives me a dollar, a day, for the rest of my life, I promise not to introduce this bot to bash.org/IRC.
On the other hand, if it dynamically defines normal as 'the most common behavior observed' Europeans can pretty much do whatever they want and feel confident that they're within a safe margin of typical internet behavior. Either that or the EU will have to release a patch that explains to the bot how threats of homosexual rape, pimping out 'your mom', and other wholesome and sundry activities that appear to exist on any forum/medium online are not truly normal.
Er...my web browser is going to keep track of that for me? Or some site it goes to? How much does that cost?
If you're going to be condescending, you should probably make a distinction between a web browser and a computer. I've got IE, FF, Lynx and Chrome. And not a single one of them can do even basic addition or subtraction, as far as I know. Let alone keep a running tally of numbers that may or may not be updated on a second by second basis. By multiple people in the house/on the network, at the same time.
As for the rest, perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I can buy a paper for 50 cents and everybody in the house can read it. In addition, people of my same socio-economic class commonly discuss relevant bits of news of the day and I can go check up on those at a variety of sources, even if it's just the local newstand or newspaper dispenser's headlines. At the point where you price the lower (and larger) end of our socio-economic scale out of the information, you suddenly create even more ignorance in the largest voting block. I can't possibly envision how this is a good idea, unless you're a politician.
This trend, coupled with the Fox News/infotainment/edu-tising/etc trend we see in TV news means that online news is the only way to get a broad picture and different sides of an issue. Not to mention it being the best way to dig deeper on something.
Actually, I can get a broadband ADSL 768/128 connection for $26.00 (US) a month. And I can get an old laptop for a couple hundred dollars, or maybe even one of those $100 laptops, someday. I'm more concerned with those people who make up the bulk of the population that are 'just scraping by'. Rather than the people who are homeless/slowly dying of malnourishment. Fortunately, in the Western world at least, they're not the largest component of the population.
What's a micro-payment? Twelve cents? Twelve dollars? My first question: How do you track micro-payments, in your checkbook? Let's say, one day, I read 100 articles on 17 (or 7 for that matter) different sites. One site charges 8 cents, another charges 75 cents, another a buck twelve, per article. How do I track how much money I spent? There would need to be a RSS-like "over"-service that tracks all of that.
Second, what if I'm poor. Dirt poor? Where do I get this credit card to make this 'micro-payment'? I think, if you're below a certain economic margin you can't even get a debit card. I know you couldn't 10 years ago. More importantly, if I'm poor, where do I get this money to read the news? It staggers me that the internet is for and about information...but we continually discuss putting barriers in between people and information. Like this one. While at the same time railing at the gods that our users are too dumb and uneducated and 'just don't want to learn (information)'.
There are already trends that indicate a technological caste system. People who can write applications to publish/sort/sift information, and people who use those applications. Someone who actually bothers to learn HTML and someone who takes a 6 week class at the local JC on how to use Dreamweaver. There's a higher tier, the people who write {favorite html editor}. News organizations are known as "The Fifth Estate", in a democracy they have a special place, without being melodramatic, something of a sacred place, even.
You don't get educated end users by making information complicated, hard to understand, or...too expensive for the largest socio-economic class to access.
K.
Slashdot Mirror
You think warnings are going to help? They made a whole big hype about putting warnings on cigarette packs. Raised the price to do it.
Sorry, I don't know you. But this is asinine feel-good legislation. A debit card is an electronic checkbook. It contains, in one way or another, your account information.
You know that. Unless you're one of the people in 1990 that didn't know nicotine was addictive.
I fully agree they have a responsibility to protect their customers -- as much as is financially and practically feasible. But please. Signs don't solve problems. Or make a damn bit of difference in anything.
"But I also think that those producing these check cards should be required to advertise the hazards of having one of these cards (not in small print and maybe required in advertisement of these cards, similar to what is required with pharmaceutical drugs on television) and/or that if a debit or check card is issued a separate account should be required for its use, and users informed of the issues of placing all of their money in the same account that their debit card has access to."
Your argument is that you didn't know someone could steal your money? You were not aware of the hazards of carrying money (in whatever sense) in the modern world?
I'm sorry your account got cleaned out, identity theft is hardcore and there needs to be a lot more support and it needs to be treated like a much bigger crime than it is. I used to work in the check-authorization industry. It was awful to see these poor people getting their identity stolen and their life ruined.
But please. This is feel-good, 'blame the company'/lawsuit mitigation crap. It doesn't actually do anything. And it isn't anything that people shouldn't know already.
If we want to make a difference, we need a separate government bureau that is devoted to preventing/tracking/prosecuting/educating/defending citizens from/to/about identity theft. Smoke and lights aren't going to solve the problem. And they'll just make it more obnoxious and 8th grade-level instructions to do business with my bank. I hate that.
Again, it's not my intention to attack the OP personally. But those are the last things that are going to actually do any thing to help the problem. They will, though, cause the government/banks/credit card companies to spend a little bit of money, make a lot of noise, not make the situation any safer, and triple the hassle of doing through daily life. Airport security anyone?
K.
Any conclusion that does not assume there is other life in the universe is hopelessly Creation-ist and/or human-centric.
Any conclusion that accepts that beings capable of making ~87 light year voyages are going to crash into a freaking planet or come anal probe a red-neck in Kentucky is hopelessly absurd.
They've mastered FTL, they've mastered force fields or whatever it took to survive impacts with micro-meteors at Light+, they've managed to find one little marble, in an infinite velvet blanket, they're going to crash in the last .001 of the last 1% of the most difficult voyage humanity has ever conceived of? Then they come all this way, doodle some shit in a cornfield in Kansas, ass-probe some dude in Delaware, eviscerate some cows in Vermont, and go home. Wtf? Really? That's stupid.
That's like driving to your Aunt's house in California, and pulling into the drive way and breaking the flag off her mailbox and going back home.
Plus, we have nukes. Sure, there's a chance they have a star trek force field and nukes are so low tech they don't matter any more. But it's more likely their ship is made of metal or plastic and being caught in an airburst will rip it apart like any other physical structure we know of. Doesn't really sound like a risk worth taking, even to find out what happens when you sodomize the herdlings with a metal probe.
Maybe the whole thing is drunk teenagers, from Alpha Centauri? Like a frat hazing. They dodge the ICBM radar, swoop down, seize a redneck and drag him up into their saucer amidst homoerotic/in-group social status building shoulder punching and man-hugging and then fire up the alien beer-bong and do keg (?saucer?) stands and dissect the terran.
K.
I love you. This cracked me up.
K.
Playing the Assassin's Creed series lately really brought home to me how MMO's are basically just MUDs.
Sure they have pretty graphics, but even the most sophisticated don't take the basic step of letting you have some body-control, like AC does.
In effect, in any kind of chat or roleplay or whatever, even in some of the MMO's in combat, it's just a MUD.
Text scrolls by, and all the sparkly effects and 17mp on-the-fly rendered graphics are just a frame to house the same old text game that geeks have been doing since the mid-70s.
There doesn't seem to be any real interest in expanding beyond the basic MUD paradigm, grind, grind, grind.
Assassin's Creed doesn't take it nearly far enough, but letting you have control of your arms/legs/etc is at least 1% of a step toward where the technology needs to go before it expands beyond what you could do with Pueblo and a MUD 20 years ago. Which is connect graphics (and/or HTML) to text.
I'm really surprised that there's such potential here, and MMO's have really been around for 10 years, solidly now. And have created entire new disciplines of economy, social science, etc. But there's really nothing being done to expand the scope of what you can do with them.
I just see such potential in this technology, and I guess it is disappointing to see it stagnate and to find out that once you filter out all the hype and advertising it's just a MUD. Under the hood, there's nothing. Dunno.
K.
Remember kids, you can't break a few eggs without making an omelet.
K.
Thanks. This is one of the best answers I've ever seen on here. It should have been moderated much higher. It still seems like photo-realistic textures, or the textures from a photograph, could be used. And...by...being better/more realistic they'd be visually superior to latex-sheen looking CGI. Without 'costing' any more resources than generating that flat shiny plastic look that CGI has (up until the last year or two anyway.)
K.
Okay, so this is slightly off-topic, but something I've always wondered about.
I can take a 12megapixel picture. And reduce it down to a 12k gif. Or 120k or whatever the compression results are.
At that point, it's just a .gif. (or .jpg or whatever). The computer doesn't know it's any different than a .gif I created in MSPaint, right?
So if I open GameMaker 7, and use that photo as one of the frames in my character's animation. By repetition, I could create a character moving and walking frame by frame.
Right? What's wrong with this?
I understand that on-the-fly rendering is nice. And that the goal is to get a computer to generate a 'real' picture. But. The difference between a 'great' game and an okay one is the graphics. I could (if I could draw) take a pencil and do one of those black and white sketches that almost looks like a photo, and scan it in and use it too.
What are the technical hurdles or barriers that prevent someone from just doing this?
K.
Send a letter to your congress(person). That's the only way this kind of thing will stop, it's the only way an investigation of this incident will happen, it's the only way that 'foreigners' will be able to feel safe coming into the country.
K.
I think you could do a touch screen that takes them to a limited number of sites, kids like touch screens. You could take them to google, and wikipedia, and show them how wikipedia is bigger than X number of stacks of encyclopedias. Then you could talk about Tim Berners-Lee and html/http and how that revolutionized the internet. You should start out with the arpa and tcp/ip and gopher and fetch and telnet and all those things most people don't know about any more. Give them real information. Real history.
Then progress up into the modern day, maybe like 3 rooms, past, present, future? Put a big quote up on the wall, the Arthur C. Clarke (I think) one, "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (or whatever.) Teach them the wonder and joy of computers. You'll make 1-2% of them geeks for life. Show them how space flight and medical procedures and everything else on the cutting edge of technology is dependent on computers.
K.
I don't think coding has to be hard, necessarily. But...part of good, clean code is 'problem-solving'. Making sure that the logic of the code flows right and that there's no ugliness in it.
It is sort of like being a basketball player. We could probably make a ball that would help you target the net and could use fin stabilizers and gps and whatever to be more accurate. That's what the IDE you two are talking about is doing. It doesn't help you, at all, be a good basketball player. And if you dumb it down enough, it stops being a sport (which in code terms might be a good thing, for everybody to be able to write code any time they want to do anything they want it to do), and more importantly, it stops being something people worry about doing well. It is a skill, and the pursuit of excellence in that skill is the only way new discoveries are made or great accomplishments are...accomplished.
A lot of processor manufacturers hide the deficiencies of entire OS or apps by just pouring on more power. It works. But it doesn't work as well as writing good apps to begin with. It's nice to have all that extra power, but to me, it is a shame to waste it on inefficient processes.
K.
When I went to the CS department at college, they informed me the C++ classes I took in junior college were no longer applicable to their CS degree, because they'd changed what was CS210-211 to ADA from C++. "Because we wanted students to spend less time debugging and more time writing code". Er...I'm no master coder, but in my experience, any project over 100 lines involves spending more time debugging than actually writing code. I thought that's just how it was.
I am all for languages that are easier to use. But coding should be hard. It is hard. And setting people up with the expectation that there's very little debugging involved, or that they can write killer apps in 45 minutes is crazy and counter-productive.
K.
I have always been curious about this. And about why people don't just use back orifice for even home network configuration? I've never used it, but I'd be interested in hearing why other people don't.
K.
Apple is basically the Volkswagen of computers.
There is this pretension of counter-culture. This idea that buying a mac is an act of rebellion against the 'oppressive overlords'. That Macs are 'more green' and 'more consumer friendly' and in general, Apple has done a good job of seamlessly integrating the organic/recycling/conservationist creedo into their advertising campaigns.
You see this same thing in SUV ads. Green earth and blue skies, and scenic natural wonders. They co-opt recycling visual cues to associate one of the worst offenders with 'naturalness'.
The truth is, Apple had a monopoly on academic institutions in the 1980s. They were beating the pants off IBM in those days, at least in the home/school markets. Businesses were still using IBMs, but everything at home and at school, from kindergarten to college, was Apple. The ][e was ubiquitous in middle and high schools all over the country.
IBM has never exactly been 'young and hungry', they've always been 'blue chip', but...they were definitely younger and hungrier then.
My point, really is, I think it is okay if you prefer Macs. That's fine. But the average end-user for a mac is not much different than the average end-user for a PC. Except, the PC end users don't have ignorant, sanctimonious discussions with you about how their product is better and how they bought it to not support a Big Evil Corporation. While completely ignoring that Apple is no different than Microsoft. They're equally interested in a monopoly, they're equally interested in their bottom line, to the detriment of the consumer/end-user. They're just worse at it. They're not as skilled monopolists and evil overlords. But please people. An incompetent, bumbling, drunken [generic evil person] is no less evil than one who is competent.
Hopefully, though, if Apple keeps doing things that don't really help their bottom line all that much, but do manage to sabotage their carefully cultivated public image, like this, I won't have to have this conversation with Mac-Afficionado/Soccer-Daddy man anymore.
K.
Actually, I thought that you could create a + sign of keys for each finger. Which is essentially how it works for a keyboard, but there's more diagonals. Basically, each finger has five positions, up, down, left, right, and center/"home row". That allows you to type everything but 'z' with just quick flicks of your fingers in a variety of directions. Since writing is a linear means of information storage (you can only enter one character at a time, no matter how fast you can type, or otherwise it loses its value as a recording) it shouldn't involve any more complicated learning processes for us than typing now does. Just a new way of doing the same thing. But it does reduce a keyboard to 10-small divits in a piece of plastic, and a few sensors which really aren't any more complicated than current touch screen technology. And, as an added advantage, in 10 years, it should be relatively easy to track the positions of each finger in a dynamic/uncontrolled environment. Which means it should get easier and easier to completely do away with this "keyboard" and go with one of those laser-projected keyboard systems, thus reducing the size of hardware even further, by doing away with any kind of hardware keyboard at all.
K.
My concern with the Wii, as a gamer, has always been about the lack of quality. So many of even the PS3/xbox games are becoming 'rhythm games'. Which is code for button-mashing nonsense. In the PS3's motion controller, there's already games like Godfather (&2) where you have to fling the controller through space, while holding buttons, to get it to do something.
All of these gimmicks, all of these excuses to skimp on game development, graphics, story, take away from games. The Wii's 'goal' is to sell gaming to a bigger market. To induct non-gamers into becoming gamers. Except. Those people aren't going to want deeply involving stories supported by state-of-the-art graphics and sound-scores, with ever-closer-to-reality physics engines. They just want the ball to bounce on the screen it a soft, gentle arc when they fling their Wii-daikatana around the room. Or the little cartoon character to jump (and giggle obnoxiously simultaneously).
In other words, once we accept that motivated self-interest is the only way to get people to act, do, or perform in a certain way, Nintendo is created a motivated self-interest to create 'easy', 'fun', 'simple' games with a lot of pretty pictures. There's even apparently a cheat mode in the newest Wii that lets you skip parts of games that are too hard for little Johnny or Susie. And the market is about 100 times bigger than the market for CoD or GTA or anything else you'd care to play.
This is compounded by the problem of market cohesion, there are fewer and fewer, but bigger and bigger, participants in the market. With Activision's, for instance, known history of screwing players, skimping on game quality (long term sales) for making E3 release dates (short term sales dollars), and other wise being 'in it for the money', how long is it before some big company realizes anybody with an AA in CS can write the equivalent of original Donkey Kong for the Wii, in two weeks and that at that rate, they can pump out 26 games for the 'casual gamer' a year from one code/dev team. /rant
K.
I ran a server for work, apache + qmail + squirrel mail + clamav + spamassassin on Debian Sarge (and I think later Woody, not sure about the timing of that) on a 233mhrz, 32mb ram, 8gig HD box for several years. Then the drive fused solid and the box seized up. But it took like 3-4, maybe even 5 years before that happened. I don't know much about the linux dev world, and if you can still find a copy of Sarge around somewhere, or even if it'll run on your particular architecture, Debian wouldn't run on the replacement for that box. But if you can find it, I can't imagine why it wouldn't work. And it's footprint is pretty small.
K.
I loved this series when it first came out. Then Rand Al'Jordan turned it into a giant money suck. The last half of the series appears to exist exclusively to fatten Jordan, et al's bank account, while massacring as many trees as possible. Thousands and thousands of pages of NOTHING HAPPENING.
I think these books are a classic case of the cash-cow mentality that Stephen King, Anne Rice, James Patterson, and every other major commercially-successful author has gained in the last 20 or so years. We see the same thing with TV and to a lesser extent movie 'franchises'. The story no longer matters as much as the money it is possible to bilk from the fans. Quality goes down hill, the whole purpose of writing the story becomes, not to tell a story, but to effortlessly 'convert' your bank balance to a positive number.
Then again, maybe it is not effortlessly. If school taught me anything it is that making up BS that doesn't say anything is usually harder than just studying.
K.
I am baffled by the number of people saying, "Just use pen and paper that's the best way for me." How is that an answer to the question? "We don't need none of that there change stuff. If dinosaurs were good enough for Jesus to ride to pre-school then they're good enough for those people younger than me."
It sounds to me like a simple keyboard map would solve a lot of your problems. Map your F-keys (function) to various...functions. I can think of a couple of ways to do it off the top of my head, but a customized software solution shouldn't be too incredibly hard either. Just requires a text entry field, some math-specific formatting of the text, and the ability to hold down shift or control or iKey or something to define when you're typing 'special' pre/custom-defined characters.
K.
I understood at one time that the www. prefix was indicative of someone following a standard? All 'legitimate' websites used www, while those who were a bit more dodgy, or less professional, or didn't follow the ICANN (maybe) protocol skipped the prefix. Is this still technically a standard? Anybody know what the deal with that is/was? Just geeky curiousity.
K.
That's a good point, I hadn't really thought of it when I posted this. But it seems to be a strategy, in the console wars, that you release your game on one console 6 months before the other. The 'early adopters' will flock to your console if they want the game bad enough.
My thinking behind the 4-5 good games line was sort of the...4-5 tugs on the rope model, rather than relying on one particular app. Presumably, it would take a couple weeks, at least, to port. And if I can get 'CoolGame2009' for free, if I dual boot or run a Linux game box, why would I pay for it on Win? If I'm not going to pay for it, why would a developer spend the time on it? At least until they catch up and realize that it's pulling customers away. This is sort of the model Firefox did, I think. They created that critical mass/groundswell, now they lead the development cycle. MS/GC/etc run along behind them cobbling together every FF innovation into their new version.
FF might only have 40% market share (last I read 6+ months ago), but they've achieved the status of critical innovator. Whatever is in their browser is guaranteed to show up in the others ASAP. That's a position of significant leverage.
K.
Thank you. Yes. There goes the next two days.:)
K.
Seriously, if you want Linux to really take off and outnumber Windows on home PCs, one of the strategies I'd consider would be to create 4-5 really good games not available on MS/Mac products. *nix geeks do a lot of ragging on GUI users, but exert little real effort to give them motivation to change.
All it would take is one superior game, one superior product and you'd get a massive influx of dual-booters. There's been a lot of work lately on making easy-to-install *nix flavors, Debian, CentOS, can both in my experience be installed by a child with no outside help (I even did it.) But unless you're running a server for something or just like to be confused, there's no motivation for it. If you gave people a game, an app, an experience they couldn't have on another OS, you'd provide real motivation.
Despite the current trends, good games don't require super graphics or movie tie-ins or big name voice actors. The best games, have always just needed better-than-suck graphics, superior user interface, and/or something that makes the game hook. Generally a little quirk or wrinkle in the game playing experience that no one else has ever figured out how to iron out. Something about the UI that just works. There are whole series of games that really aren't all that great as far as games go, but just have such a great interface that people keep coming back to them. Then again, there was a game on Windows3.1 shareware that came pre-installed called CastleWin. Was one of the coolest games I've ever played, just a Rogue-clone with graphics, you could re-name your items, and do a few other neat tricks. Still can't find that one anywhere.
K.
Its main objectives include the 'automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence.' == made of win
If the EU gives me a dollar, a day, for the rest of my life, I promise not to introduce this bot to bash.org/IRC.
On the other hand, if it dynamically defines normal as 'the most common behavior observed' Europeans can pretty much do whatever they want and feel confident that they're within a safe margin of typical internet behavior. Either that or the EU will have to release a patch that explains to the bot how threats of homosexual rape, pimping out 'your mom', and other wholesome and sundry activities that appear to exist on any forum/medium online are not truly normal.
K.
Er...my web browser is going to keep track of that for me? Or some site it goes to? How much does that cost?
If you're going to be condescending, you should probably make a distinction between a web browser and a computer. I've got IE, FF, Lynx and Chrome. And not a single one of them can do even basic addition or subtraction, as far as I know. Let alone keep a running tally of numbers that may or may not be updated on a second by second basis. By multiple people in the house/on the network, at the same time.
As for the rest, perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I can buy a paper for 50 cents and everybody in the house can read it. In addition, people of my same socio-economic class commonly discuss relevant bits of news of the day and I can go check up on those at a variety of sources, even if it's just the local newstand or newspaper dispenser's headlines. At the point where you price the lower (and larger) end of our socio-economic scale out of the information, you suddenly create even more ignorance in the largest voting block. I can't possibly envision how this is a good idea, unless you're a politician.
This trend, coupled with the Fox News/infotainment/edu-tising/etc trend we see in TV news means that online news is the only way to get a broad picture and different sides of an issue. Not to mention it being the best way to dig deeper on something.
Actually, I can get a broadband ADSL 768/128 connection for $26.00 (US) a month. And I can get an old laptop for a couple hundred dollars, or maybe even one of those $100 laptops, someday. I'm more concerned with those people who make up the bulk of the population that are 'just scraping by'. Rather than the people who are homeless/slowly dying of malnourishment. Fortunately, in the Western world at least, they're not the largest component of the population.
K.
What's a micro-payment? Twelve cents? Twelve dollars? My first question: How do you track micro-payments, in your checkbook? Let's say, one day, I read 100 articles on 17 (or 7 for that matter) different sites. One site charges 8 cents, another charges 75 cents, another a buck twelve, per article. How do I track how much money I spent? There would need to be a RSS-like "over"-service that tracks all of that. Second, what if I'm poor. Dirt poor? Where do I get this credit card to make this 'micro-payment'? I think, if you're below a certain economic margin you can't even get a debit card. I know you couldn't 10 years ago. More importantly, if I'm poor, where do I get this money to read the news? It staggers me that the internet is for and about information...but we continually discuss putting barriers in between people and information. Like this one. While at the same time railing at the gods that our users are too dumb and uneducated and 'just don't want to learn (information)'. There are already trends that indicate a technological caste system. People who can write applications to publish/sort/sift information, and people who use those applications. Someone who actually bothers to learn HTML and someone who takes a 6 week class at the local JC on how to use Dreamweaver. There's a higher tier, the people who write {favorite html editor}. News organizations are known as "The Fifth Estate", in a democracy they have a special place, without being melodramatic, something of a sacred place, even. You don't get educated end users by making information complicated, hard to understand, or...too expensive for the largest socio-economic class to access. K.