We need different WM's cut-and-paste to talk to each other.
We need a standard whereby a single action adds an item to _all_ your WM's menus.
We need focused unified efforts towards bringing out a rock solid desktop, but this needn't (and shouldn't) mean one distribution, one desktop. It should mean common standards.
OTOH, detailed random generation is a good way to inspire ideas you may not have thought of ("Hmm, the land of the lords of light is right next to the orc-filled blightland - how can that be? Maybe if...").
BTW, your example is not inconsistent. It's ironic (in hindsight), but it's not inconsistent.
You speak of films (and I'll raise you novels). In films and novels (at least good ones), someone has usually developed a huge amount of detail that you never see on screen. Because the fictional setting has its own foundations and, for the setting to feel authentic, the creators have to acknowledge and build on that, even if the audience never see it.
"Censorship" isn't a black and white term with a clear dividing line.
Yes, it's censorship when measures are taken to prevent anyone from distributing the material. It's a lesser degree of censorship when measures are taken to restrict the distribution of the material.
The trouble with the 'free market' theory is that it assumes consumers are omniscient about choosing the right product (for them). Does the average Walmart shopper even _know_ that the Walmart version of a song is not the standard?
To some extent you can say it's the consumer's job to find out, but there are many, many fields to find out about, only so many hours in the day and quite often numerous experts touting contradictory opinions about products!
Censorship doesn't even necessarily require restricting access to a product - restricting access to _knowledge_ of that product does just as good a job.
Developpers know the inner workings and there isn't much new territory to discover here or tricks to figure out.
Historically this hasn't been the case. On fixed hardware it still takes a while for developers to learn all the tricks (and develop new ones).
I remember towards the end of its life my Commodore 64 was coming out with 256-colour games with 64 sprites on the screen simultaneously. For a 16-colour system that only supported 8 sprites on screen at once, this was pretty impressive!
Since I just did an accounting course, allow me to (hopefully) clarify:
There are five types of items that can appear in your accounts. Everything on your books will be one of these five things.
Revenue: This is your income. (Salary, money from selling books, etc.)
Expenses: This is money you expend without getting anything lasting in exchange. (eg. petrol costs, electricity bills, ).
Assets: This is anything that you have that you can gain a benefit from. Cash is an asset, for example, as is your CD collection. If you expect the asset to last 12 months or more, it is called a "Fixed Asset".
Assets are often prone to deterioration - being 'used up'. In business this is modelled via 'depreciation'.
Effectively this means that every year, you transform some of the value of the asset into an expense. eg. If you have a car worth $5000 that you expect to last 10 years, you might write off $500 of its value every year. So after 4 years it would be worth $3000 on your books, for example.
A car is something you derive benefit from, so it is an asset. The costs of running it are expenses, and every year the value of the asset depreciates until it is all expensed.
Liabilities: This is everything you owe. So, for example, if you purchase a fridge for $500 and don't have to pay until the end of the month, you add a $500 liability to your books until you've paid. (You also add the $500 asset "Fridge" onto your books). When you pay for the fridge you decrease your "cash" asset by $500). So until the fridge depreciates, you have had no change in your net value (equity). You've just traded cash assets worth $500 for a fridge asset worth $500)
Equity: This is your net value. It equals your assets minus your liabilities.
And, for completeness sake:
Net Profit: This is your revenue minus your expenses for a period. It will be marked by an equal rise in your equity. eg. if you made $8,000 net profit over a year, this might take the form of your "loan" liability decreasing by $2500, an asset "Car" valued at $5000 appearing and the asset "CD Collection" increasing by $500 in value.
P.S. Note that "CD Collection" is one asset. This is a matter of personal preference. It's equally valid to treat each CD as a separate asset - and the books would come out the same in the end...
So the code threw an exception when it divided by zero: That's a _wanted_ thing (because technically dividing by zero is an error state. You don't want to just skip over something like that when it could be guiding a missile or steering the ship).
This is true, but it should fail _gracefully_. The software should detect that the program wants to divide by zero before it tries to do it and shunt to an appropriate subroutine.
In any software where ruggedness is a priority, all modules should be designed to respond appropriately to any possible inputs - even ones that they're never supposed to receive...
The problem is that many pages create JavaScript popups when you click on a link, and for this reason Mozilla allows you to enable or disable this separately. There are many reasons you would want to enable click-triggered popups, so most folks will want/need to leave this on.
That is why the Galeon (optional) feature of causing pop-ups to appear in new tabs is great. It 'allows' pop-ups to occur, in case they're important, but keeps them under control all in the one window...
Because your opposition is another warrior with different weapons,powers,etc.
If you want a non-confrontational challenge, try something constructive, like programming.
Why is it so offensive to you that others might enjoy different things in their gaming? The name of the genre "Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying" suggests a lot more variety than hack-n-slash - there's more than enough room there for everyone to do what they enjoy.
There's no need for games to cater only to my tastes - or only to your tastes...
Where the hell is the fun or challenge in that?
That's similar to the barney game for the sega genesis that was made a few years back, where the goals were to hug everyone.
You're kidding, right?
You seriously think that in a world swarming with dangerous monsters it's less challenging to play a peaceful cleric than a muscly warrior with weapons out the wazoo!?!?!?
As to fun, I can't really see the fun in "see monster, hack, repeat" but to each their own...
That's not realism you're talking about - it's detail.
Certainly increased detail is always more evocative. But this is equally true whether you're going from some wire-framed flight sim on the Commodore 64 to Commanche 4, or from Populous to Black and White.
Black and White is decidedly _un_realistic (I haven't seen too many giant humanoid zebras eating cityfolk and casting water miracles lately), but B&W has been finely detailed so it's more evocative than Populous.
Heck, which is more popular: Quake III / Unreal Tournament or Project IGI? Project IGI is a lot more realistic (one shot=one kill, no save points or bounce-pads, etc.) but many people find it too realistic to be fun.
There is currently a push towards more realism in games, but IMO what gamers ultimately want is detail and fun - and when the market realises this there'll be a swing back the other way...
I'm not really up on American patent law. Is it possible for the man on the street to challenge obvious and generally stupid patents? Is it possible to set up an organisation dedicated to this?
It could be. Non-profit organisations are allowed to fundraise - so long as any funds raised are channelled back into the assigned purpose of the organisation. I believe the law is a bit picky about what it allows as the focus of a non-profit organisation. If "porting games to Linux" IS allowed, it's well within the law and spirit of a non-profit organisation to pay programmers on salary to port games, then channel income into paying for them, licences etc. Ideally, you would make 'profit' which would be used to salary on more programmers, etc. etc.
It's hard for non-profit organisations to get the capital to start off large scale because they aren't able to make the money from shares that a public company would, but once they _become_ large, you don't have CEOs, Boards of Directors and Shareholders sucking the income away (as long as you limit potential CEO/Directorial abuse in your constitution).
Actually, the issue isn't whether or not Microsoft "deserves" to be where it is. The issue is that any company with as much cloat as Microsoft has impacts negatively on the freedom, diversity and competitiveness of the market that it is in.
I don't think it would be that hard to redo the chargen (though redoing the combat system would be a lot harder).
Really though, GURPS is not the best system for this sort of game. GURPS is a far more realistic RPG than AD&D - it doesn't do the "mortal demigods with oodles of hitpoints" subgenre as well as AD&D.
More likely though is that they'll just file off the serial numbers and change the system just enough that it's not infringing copyright.
Reminds me of Ascendancy. Exceptionally and inexplicably addictive game, but very limited to the four X's. One game I had a race declare war on me that I had met _once_ some years ago and was located on the opposite side of the galaxy. Some 18 years later it approached me for peace talks, even though there had been absolutely no contact between our empires in the interim.
This is a natural side-effect of being able to 'build' units. About the only game I've seen where this makes sense is the original Total Annihilation with it's nanotechnology and robot troops.
Ah, now if you had to recruit troops from local villages or something that would be very interesting. Or even if the game kept track of the population. If you're an extension of a larger war, your troop allocations will be constrained by the empire's war needs. If you're the entire war force, you're limited to the population of your empire (and you want to leave enough people to keep industry going too).
Aha! That's it! What if you had a finite pool of people (or a slow rate of 'growing' more) and the more that _weren't_ warriors, the faster your side could advance technologically and industrially?
No-one's saying that the people who created the game shouldn't be reimbursed, or that they don't deserve a healthy profit.
Hell, if a model can be found where the game is paid for and the medium is freely distributable, it _helps_ the game developers, 'cos they're suddenly forking out a lot less for distribution.
You mistakenly assume that my motivation was to "bolster my point". Actually, what motivates me here is that I simply find the level of illiteracy on slashdot annoying.
Let's not forget how international the internet is: English may be this guy's second, third or fourth language. I have a great deal of respect for multi-lingual people - their english is sometimes a bit off grammatically, but it's a hell of a lot better than my Chinese / German / Indonesian / Swedish / whatever. Not to mention that English is widely accepted as one of the hardest languages to learn...
AI is _not_ like the search for the Holy Grail.
on
Autonomic Computing
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· Score: 1
The search for the Holy Grail is an attempt to achieve a very specific, discrete target. Either you retrieve the grail or you don't. AI, OTOH, is not a specific goal - it's a field that's developing all the time. We may not have built "HAL" yet - and it's possible we may never do so, though I personally doubt it - but AI continues delivering breakthroughs, from beating chess-masters, to robot dogs, to alife algorithms being used in stock management, to computer games, to intelligent algorithms in network management...
Autonomic computing will likely be the same; first an idle curiousity, then of niche use, then of widespread use as the field develops...
The AMD Model numbers are designed to roughly equate with the performance of an Intel CPU in Mhz (the Athlon 1800 canes the P4-2000, but AMD rated in anticipation of an improvement in the P4). Yes, ideally, Megahertz would be totally thrown out the window, but Intel are unlikely to play ball while they're in the lead Mhz-wise. So AMD have come up with a performance measurement system that allows them to rate their CPUs on other than Mhz, while simultaneously retaining easy performace comparison to Intel CPUs. It strikes me as a well thought approach...
We have flat screens, we have lightpen recognition, we have gesture recognition (this is probably the bit that needs most work).
What I envision is something the size of a clipboard (though probably thicker), the entire front surface of which is a flatscreen display that can be written on with a stylus.
The WIMP could be almost totally eliminated. You write what you want to do and can even store custom gestures for frequently used tasks. The only time something WIMP-like appears is if you need to know what programs you have available. The Virtual Paper would recognise filenames and URL formats (for example) so just writing "www.bob.com" would open your browser and "letter.txt" would open the file in your text editor.
You could have a virtual eraser at the end of your stylus (like my graphics tablet has now). Things would be automatically copied to clipboard when you circled them, and pasted where you tap.
You could press the edge of your virtual paper against someone else's to transfer files. With wireless technology, your virtual paper can hook into the office LAN.
No mouse, no keyboard, much more natural interface. The only problem I can foresee is that it wouldn't work well for games...
Both the image with the data and the "key" image are presumably of something innocuous. The key image could be posted on a public website and noone would know it's a key. Who's going to notice that (eg) the cat pictures on the personal home page of little Sue from Oregon and the pictures posted to the mailing list for Peruvian cat-fancier's are (seemingly) identical?
Slashdot Mirror
I would say rather that we need common standards.
We need different WM's cut-and-paste to talk to each other.
We need a standard whereby a single action adds an item to _all_ your WM's menus.
We need focused unified efforts towards bringing out a rock solid desktop, but this needn't (and shouldn't) mean one distribution, one desktop. It should mean common standards.
Is this really true, or is market 'growth' simply a matter of harvesting natural capital and calling it 'growth'?
Surely, the true amount of wealth/resources is a zero-sum game even if the $$$ don't necessarily reflect that?
OTOH, detailed random generation is a good way to inspire ideas you may not have thought of ("Hmm, the land of the lords of light is right next to the orc-filled blightland - how can that be? Maybe if...").
BTW, your example is not inconsistent. It's ironic (in hindsight), but it's not inconsistent.
You speak of films (and I'll raise you novels). In films and novels (at least good ones), someone has usually developed a huge amount of detail that you never see on screen. Because the fictional setting has its own foundations and, for the setting to feel authentic, the creators have to acknowledge and build on that, even if the audience never see it.
"Censorship" isn't a black and white term with a clear dividing line.
Yes, it's censorship when measures are taken to prevent anyone from distributing the material. It's a lesser degree of censorship when measures are taken to restrict the distribution of the material.
The trouble with the 'free market' theory is that it assumes consumers are omniscient about choosing the right product (for them). Does the average Walmart shopper even _know_ that the Walmart version of a song is not the standard?
To some extent you can say it's the consumer's job to find out, but there are many, many fields to find out about, only so many hours in the day and quite often numerous experts touting contradictory opinions about products!
Censorship doesn't even necessarily require restricting access to a product - restricting access to _knowledge_ of that product does just as good a job.
And I thought I was the only one who remembered that episode. :)
"Dy-mok at Tanagra" wanders through my head every time I shop at Dymocks Bookstore...
Developpers know the inner workings and there isn't much new territory to discover here or tricks to figure out.
Historically this hasn't been the case. On fixed hardware it still takes a while for developers to learn all the tricks (and develop new ones).
I remember towards the end of its life my Commodore 64 was coming out with 256-colour games with 64 sprites on the screen simultaneously. For a 16-colour system that only supported 8 sprites on screen at once, this was pretty impressive!
Since I just did an accounting course, allow me to (hopefully) clarify:
There are five types of items that can appear in your accounts. Everything on your books will be one of these five things.
Revenue: This is your income. (Salary, money from selling books, etc.)
Expenses: This is money you expend without getting anything lasting in exchange. (eg. petrol costs, electricity bills, ).
Assets: This is anything that you have that you can gain a benefit from. Cash is an asset, for example, as is your CD collection. If you expect the asset to last 12 months or more, it is called a "Fixed Asset".
Assets are often prone to deterioration - being 'used up'. In business this is modelled via 'depreciation'.
Effectively this means that every year, you transform some of the value of the asset into an expense. eg. If you have a car worth $5000 that you expect to last 10 years, you might write off $500 of its value every year. So after 4 years it would be worth $3000 on your books, for example.
A car is something you derive benefit from, so it is an asset. The costs of running it are expenses, and every year the value of the asset depreciates until it is all expensed.
Liabilities: This is everything you owe. So, for example, if you purchase a fridge for $500 and don't have to pay until the end of the month, you add a $500 liability to your books until you've paid. (You also add the $500 asset "Fridge" onto your books). When you pay for the fridge you decrease your "cash" asset by $500). So until the fridge depreciates, you have had no change in your net value (equity). You've just traded cash assets worth $500 for a fridge asset worth $500)
Equity: This is your net value. It equals your assets minus your liabilities.
And, for completeness sake:
Net Profit: This is your revenue minus your expenses for a period. It will be marked by an equal rise in your equity. eg. if you made $8,000 net profit over a year, this might take the form of your "loan" liability decreasing by $2500, an asset "Car" valued at $5000 appearing and the asset "CD Collection" increasing by $500 in value.
P.S. Note that "CD Collection" is one asset. This is a matter of personal preference. It's equally valid to treat each CD as a separate asset - and the books would come out the same in the end...
So the code threw an exception when it divided by zero: That's a _wanted_ thing (because technically dividing by zero is an error state. You don't want to just skip over something like that when it could be guiding a missile or steering the ship).
This is true, but it should fail _gracefully_. The software should detect that the program wants to divide by zero before it tries to do it and shunt to an appropriate subroutine.
In any software where ruggedness is a priority, all modules should be designed to respond appropriately to any possible inputs - even ones that they're never supposed to receive...
The problem is that many pages create JavaScript popups when you click on a link, and for this reason Mozilla allows you to enable or disable this separately. There are many reasons you would want to enable click-triggered popups, so most folks will want/need to leave this on.
That is why the Galeon (optional) feature of causing pop-ups to appear in new tabs is great. It 'allows' pop-ups to occur, in case they're important, but keeps them under control all in the one window...
Why is it so offensive to you that others might enjoy different things in their gaming? The name of the genre "Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying" suggests a lot more variety than hack-n-slash - there's more than enough room there for everyone to do what they enjoy.
There's no need for games to cater only to my tastes - or only to your tastes...
That's not realism you're talking about - it's detail.
Certainly increased detail is always more evocative. But this is equally true whether you're going from some wire-framed flight sim on the Commodore 64 to Commanche 4, or from Populous to Black and White.
Black and White is decidedly _un_realistic (I haven't seen too many giant humanoid zebras eating cityfolk and casting water miracles lately), but B&W has been finely detailed so it's more evocative than Populous.
Heck, which is more popular: Quake III / Unreal Tournament or Project IGI? Project IGI is a lot more realistic (one shot=one kill, no save points or bounce-pads, etc.) but many people find it too realistic to be fun.
There is currently a push towards more realism in games, but IMO what gamers ultimately want is detail and fun - and when the market realises this there'll be a swing back the other way...
I'm not really up on American patent law. Is it possible for the man on the street to challenge obvious and generally stupid patents? Is it possible to set up an organisation dedicated to this?
It could be. Non-profit organisations are allowed to fundraise - so long as any funds raised are channelled back into the assigned purpose of the organisation. I believe the law is a bit picky about what it allows as the focus of a non-profit organisation. If "porting games to Linux" IS allowed, it's well within the law and spirit of a non-profit organisation to pay programmers on salary to port games, then channel income into paying for them, licences etc. Ideally, you would make 'profit' which would be used to salary on more programmers, etc. etc.
It's hard for non-profit organisations to get the capital to start off large scale because they aren't able to make the money from shares that a public company would, but once they _become_ large, you don't have CEOs, Boards of Directors and Shareholders sucking the income away (as long as you limit potential CEO/Directorial abuse in your constitution).
Actually, the issue isn't whether or not Microsoft "deserves" to be where it is. The issue is that any company with as much cloat as Microsoft has impacts negatively on the freedom, diversity and competitiveness of the market that it is in.
I don't think it would be that hard to redo the chargen (though redoing the combat system would be a lot harder).
Really though, GURPS is not the best system for this sort of game. GURPS is a far more realistic RPG than AD&D - it doesn't do the "mortal demigods with oodles of hitpoints" subgenre as well as AD&D.
More likely though is that they'll just file off the serial numbers and change the system just enough that it's not infringing copyright.
Reminds me of Ascendancy. Exceptionally and inexplicably addictive game, but very limited to the four X's. One game I had a race declare war on me that I had met _once_ some years ago and was located on the opposite side of the galaxy. Some 18 years later it approached me for peace talks, even though there had been absolutely no contact between our empires in the interim.
Truly weird...
This is a natural side-effect of being able to 'build' units. About the only game I've seen where this makes sense is the original Total Annihilation with it's nanotechnology and robot troops.
Ah, now if you had to recruit troops from local villages or something that would be very interesting. Or even if the game kept track of the population. If you're an extension of a larger war, your troop allocations will be constrained by the empire's war needs. If you're the entire war force, you're limited to the population of your empire (and you want to leave enough people to keep industry going too).
Aha! That's it! What if you had a finite pool of people (or a slow rate of 'growing' more) and the more that _weren't_ warriors, the faster your side could advance technologically and industrially?
The point is simply this:
It cost a lot to make the game.
It cost almost nothing to make the CDs.
So how come we're paying per CD?
No-one's saying that the people who created the game shouldn't be reimbursed, or that they don't deserve a healthy profit.
Hell, if a model can be found where the game is paid for and the medium is freely distributable, it _helps_ the game developers, 'cos they're suddenly forking out a lot less for distribution.
You mistakenly assume that my motivation was to "bolster my point". Actually, what motivates me here is that I simply find the level of illiteracy on slashdot annoying. Let's not forget how international the internet is: English may be this guy's second, third or fourth language. I have a great deal of respect for multi-lingual people - their english is sometimes a bit off grammatically, but it's a hell of a lot better than my Chinese / German / Indonesian / Swedish / whatever. Not to mention that English is widely accepted as one of the hardest languages to learn...
The search for the Holy Grail is an attempt to achieve a very specific, discrete target. Either you retrieve the grail or you don't. AI, OTOH, is not a specific goal - it's a field that's developing all the time. We may not have built "HAL" yet - and it's possible we may never do so, though I personally doubt it - but AI continues delivering breakthroughs, from beating chess-masters, to robot dogs, to alife algorithms being used in stock management, to computer games, to intelligent algorithms in network management...
Autonomic computing will likely be the same; first an idle curiousity, then of niche use, then of widespread use as the field develops...
The AMD Model numbers are designed to roughly equate with the performance of an Intel CPU in Mhz (the Athlon 1800 canes the P4-2000, but AMD rated in anticipation of an improvement in the P4). Yes, ideally, Megahertz would be totally thrown out the window, but Intel are unlikely to play ball while they're in the lead Mhz-wise. So AMD have come up with a performance measurement system that allows them to rate their CPUs on other than Mhz, while simultaneously retaining easy performace comparison to Intel CPUs. It strikes me as a well thought approach...
My understanding is that most motherboards don't yet have support for the in-chip thermal diodes - once they do, the issue will be worth a relook
We have flat screens, we have lightpen recognition, we have gesture recognition (this is probably the bit that needs most work).
What I envision is something the size of a clipboard (though probably thicker), the entire front surface of which is a flatscreen display that can be written on with a stylus.
The WIMP could be almost totally eliminated. You write what you want to do and can even store custom gestures for frequently used tasks. The only time something WIMP-like appears is if you need to know what programs you have available. The Virtual Paper would recognise filenames and URL formats (for example) so just writing "www.bob.com" would open your browser and "letter.txt" would open the file in your text editor.
You could have a virtual eraser at the end of your stylus (like my graphics tablet has now). Things would be automatically copied to clipboard when you circled them, and pasted where you tap.
You could press the edge of your virtual paper against someone else's to transfer files. With wireless technology, your virtual paper can hook into the office LAN.
No mouse, no keyboard, much more natural interface. The only problem I can foresee is that it wouldn't work well for games...
Both the image with the data and the "key" image are presumably of something innocuous. The key image could be posted on a public website and noone would know it's a key. Who's going to notice that (eg) the cat pictures on the personal home page of little Sue from Oregon and the pictures posted to the mailing list for Peruvian cat-fancier's are (seemingly) identical?