I liked Snow Crash too, like many other people, and I'm not a native English reader/speaker/writer. With his down to earth style of writing, Stephen is able to skip right onwards to the more interesting bits of a story where heroic characters are in all sorts of precarious situations and problems. On the other hand, he is able to fill loads of sections with total and utter rambles that you wonder if you should really read on. But you usually do read on. And it usually is worth it, too.
I remember SnowCrash going religious about half way through, rambling on and on about the meta configuration of religions. But the metafors start piling up near the end, and the hystorical background somwhat enriches your understanding of the real message he's bringing. Stephenson is trying to make the book itself resemble the Metaverse, which is why some of it sounds a bit chaotic and wired. But that's mainly why I like the book, to be able to find out what this Stephenson character is trying to say, not having all the answers spooned up immediately.
Then of course, the cool settings, fast paced timing, sexy character traits, a malfunctioning society and intense situations are extremely sci-fi and thus interesting to any techno fanatic. Who would not want to try out the virtual worlds of SnowCrash, to walk with Hiro, and riding boards with Y.T., harpooning vehicles..
What I'd really like to point out here is a certain section of the U.S. Army report on Iraqi prisoner abuse titled "OTHER FINDINGS/OBSERVATIONS".
Exactly. They excelled in believing the enemy image that they needed to believe to carry out their military tasks with excellence as well. The reason why those incidents took place, is because some soldiers have been simlpy too long in the frontlines. Some soldiers are allready serving in Iraq for 19 months. Their reality has been reduced to 'kill or be killed'. They have no control over their 'enemy', and their 'enemy image' has been broadened from the Iraqi army/regime to the whole Iraqi populace.
Imagine yourself, having no control over your enemy, being utterly frustrated with the war, and fearing every day some bomb is going to go off near your head. Being near some detained people under these circumstances, for whatever reason, will probably be enough for a lot of people to just completely freak out.
I'm not trying to talk them out of their guilt, because they are guilty, but I think the whole U.S. military is to blame. And the American public as well. The American society absolutely loves the military for their acts of grandeur, in a simplistic kind of way. I hope now finally these photos will wake up people from the ncie dream they have about sophisticated technology in the hands of simple minds at the helm of the most destructive force in the entire world for far too long, and imho, for the wrong reasons. The US prides itself continuously on their morality, their faith, and the fact that god will be on their side. But American morality often is not more than pretty lyrics that keep the dream alive. The reality is that those men serving in the military have been completely brainwashed in order to kill in the most efficient way, and that our modern military society even then EXPECTS THEM TO BE MORALY sane. But I'm afraid these supermen never have, do not and will never exist.
So please stop touting about how well they acted in war, when in fact, they are completely fucked up in their heads. Thank you.
You are right though, there is that danger that the country is going to get run-over by the vast masses in our western & eastern mega societies, even more so because of the LOTR movies, which, by the way, were not my incentive to visit the country.
I went there purely for nature and extreme sporting (hang-gliding/bunji/skydive/biking/tramping), and I got all of that and bucketloads more. I mean.. I saw the Millford Sound with a clear blue sky, for christ sake!;) Sadly I didn't have that luck at Mirror Lake. I took about 1000 photos..
You obviously don't know shit. As a European, having been in NZ for one month straight dramtically changes your view on the way current EU life is so full of stress that it barely is able to breath naturally.
NZ is quite frankly the most perfect spot on earth I have ever seen / been to.
Big thanks for a wonderfull vacation to the allways helpfull and sympathetic NewZeelanders and maori folks!!
Demosntrating for bandwith, that I agree with, but what the fuck does it have to do with pirating? And how is linking the 2 in the same demonstration goin to help the other?
Apart from the typical "Arrr" comments made around here, I'd like to tell everyone I think this is seriously fucked up and not helping A) bandwith demands and B) piracy, should I have some sympathy for it. If I didn't know any better, I would suspect the RIAA dressed up and staged this in order to get e-liberal governments like the Swedisch gov to back down. If these are truely 'e-pirates' then I think they just organised the most backwards effective event ever. It's hard enough that people are having to put up a hard fight over better patent regulations in EU, now those clowns are trying to bring the world the virtues of 'piracy'. Blatant fucktards!
It's somewhat necessary to note that Fairlight is not just a warez group, but also is a famous demoscene participant, having produced leading demos/intros/graphics and music in c64 and pc sections.
Fairlight is more than just the scum everybody will certainly take them for. The present demoscene has it's early roots in hacker and cracker groups. As a result, Fairlight is probably the longest standing group in the scene, and it is no surprise they are linked to the warez scene.
Another thing to note is that the current entertainment industry (think games and movies) is filled with loads of people working their ass off, that got to know their tricks of the trade *because* there was/is a warez scene.
We also experienced this, when simply the boxes would have slightly different localisation settings, and different motherboards (& CPU's). Apparently, our software rendering tool interpreted some data for certain plugins differently, and because of this, which sometimes resulted in layers of different sizes and resolution, alignment problems, color differences and so on.. the whole farm had to be taken down bit by bit to figure out why. In the end we ended up rendering on only a 3rd of the capacity because even ghosting the good systems did not help.
Memory bottleneck limits intelligence Single spot in brain determines size of visual scratch pad. 15 April 2004 TANGUY CHOUARD
The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain.
The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say.
"This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.
Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, or lines in different orientations. If shown a similar image a second later, they will be able to recognise whether three or four of these spots and lines are identical to the first set or not.
But some people can only catch one or two things in a glance, while others can capture up to five.
This very short-term memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a computer with a larger working memory can crank through problems more quickly, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills.
A person's working memory capacity can be determined using simple psychological tests. But now two teams of researchers report in Nature that they can see it in brain scans too.
Keep it in mind
One of the teams, led by Edward Vogel of the University of Oregon in Eugene, found that the electrical activity in a single section of the brain, as detected through electrodes attached to the scalp, is directly related to short-term working memory1.
The team first tested subjects with an image of two coloured dots, waiting a second between flashes and asking the subjects if the image had changed. They then ramped up the test to four dots.
A large increase in the subject's brain activity on the four-dot test indicated that his or her memory capacity had not been pushed to its limit. No increase in electrical activity indicated that his or her working memory had topped out on the two-dot test. By graphing these responses, the team worked out the exact size of each subject's working memory.
A second team, led by René Marois of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, used functional magnetic resonance imaging during similar tasks to accurately locate the part of the brain being used for short-term visual memory2.
Both teams concluded that everything depended on the same tiny spot in the posterior parietal cortex.
"It is amazing that both groups should converge on the same area in the end," says Duncan. Since the task involves remembering many different aspects of each object, including spatial position, orientation and colour, most people thought that several parts of the brain would be involved, he says.
There are still many other aspects to human intelligence that are governed by other parts of the brain, the authors of both studies warn. But the capacity of one's working memory may form a bottleneck for certain kinds of intelligence, they say.
Tanguy Chouard is a senior biological sciences editor at Nature
References Vogel, E. K. & Machizawa, M. G. . Nature, 428, 748 - 751, doi:10.1038/nature02447 (2004). Todd, J. J. & Marois, R. . Nature, 428, 751 - 754, doi:10.1038/nature02466 (2004).
Well the real issue here is if, using these means, you are not killing what you try to protect so vigourously. I know that I will not fly into the USA anymore, because I do not intend to pay up a privacy-tax in order for a foreign government to be able to deal with their problems.
I won't even go into the war issue. I don't like the way you define freedom in the form that A Lincoln has put it, nor the generalisations you make about those who have a different view about this matter. The reasons to erode privacy and freedom may be many, but don't loose yourself in your discourse to much while trying to protect exactly those same kind of values.
Nice to see some demo interest again on/. There are more of these perls, for example Keen Like Frog's 4K (!) implementation of the game Magic Carpet by Bullfrog. Unfortunately, right now I can't provide a link to the production because most of pouet.net is down since scene.org had some HD trouble a few days ago, but things should become available pretty soon again.
Since I am a free man, nobody has the right the retain my personal information. Including these airliners. Since I cannot force the airliners, or the USA to not disperse and use my personal information, I will simply be forced to DENY them this information, and this effectively means that I don't fly into the USA with these airliners anymore.
Global organizations, especially those dominated by third-countries (or soon to be third-world countries like France), are notorious for using the fascade of internationalism as a mask for the pursuit of their own selfish interests.
.. which makes it OK for the US to do pursuit it's own selfish interests, regardless if that claim would be true or not.
I'm baffled to see that now the WTO is seen as a EU-dominated international organisation, while it is that same, often "socialist" or "communist" tagged, EU that rallied up largely and violently and on numerous occasions against it's decisions and practices.
And do a little homework before you start blathering about the US withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol. The US Senate never ratified it, since liberal poster-boy Bill Clinton never submitted it. Can't withdraw from a treaty you were never agreed to.
Regardless of who did or didn't sign Kyoto, the US is not social when it comes to defending the living standards and climat of this planet. This is particularly bad because a wealthy, beautifull, large but realtively low populated country is fucking up for all other smaller, less powerfull but much more dense populated countries, and not even caring about it! Where are those good christian american tv-drilled values now?
I remember when that first came out it ran like crap over bnet and they weren't expecting it to be as hard on their servers. Are they gonna test this with like 10,000 people and open it up to over 1,000,000 when it's finally released and realized hey this wasn't such a good idea we should have done more testing?
Yeah. What numbers do you suggest? In reality, online mmorpgs are in a constant beta phase (content wise) anyway, and both the client and server systems are constantly tweaked and enhanced during the lifetime. You really can't know what to expect just by testing alone, you have to run it live under real-live circumstances. There is a fine line to walk between beta and 'gold', the differnce being mainly that beta is a way to get people's interest without making money, but also without pretending to run crash free or sluggish. If all goes well for Blizzard, the gold version is allmost exactly like the beta, but then usually beta players expect 'huge' improvements to continue with their accounts, and that's why things can get quite shakey.
Shh.. hush.. come here.. let me give you a taste of injecting weird stuff in a freaky way in rather special places after I abduct you first, and it will all be allright soon.
No one has proven that UFO's doesn't come from earth itself. So maybe they left earth and hovering over Mars now.
Ok, so first they're here, but we're not suppose to know or that they come from mars, right. Then when we do find out, they're suddenly seen on mars, which we were not supposed to find out. AND THEN YOU TELL ME THEY FRIGGIN COME FROM EARTH?
Actually this movie is a remake BECAUSE the last one was that bad. There would not be an audience if the last one truely rocked, like AKIRA or GITS still does today.
If you read the Appleseed comic books (and I mean books) then you'll see that they're among the best comics around (imho).
And Oni, though it promissed a lot, did not deliver. This is however seems to do so! Once again, I want fucking simultaneous movie releases in europe, now!!
I've had the opportunity to visit both conferences in 2002. There's no denying that the papers and sessions at SIG are less practical than those on the GDC, but the level is usually just as high. Game tech IS academic by nature, because it pushes limits and tries out new things. Maybe games were scorned in the past because they were the product of some lonely freaks hammering away in dorm room chambers, but these days are over. Even the academic world will have a tough hand at trying to keep up with the Industry. I think the reverse is more likely to happen, i.e. people from the industry going back to the academic world to rightiously 'claim their fame'.
There aren't going to be any big surprises. If I had to name a few obvious things that can be expected to happen, they would be the following:
I think that pop-corn bubble is about to burst. Home cinema's and DVD's are fighting back box-office theatre income as we speak, and legal filesharing and DVD writers are only going to accelerate this process. The debate on whether this is legal will probably either boost or break the infant online media shops.
The developments in digital photocam segments are important enough for somebody to throw in the next crazy idea and make a business out of it.
Airliners, travell agencies and booking offices will increasingly feel a need to merge their services and data.
Over the last 5 years, consolidation has been the keyword for market players. I see cable/DSL/wireless networking and cell phone operators further continuing on that road, possibly even with content or media giants.
Online gaming will probably be the biggest selling online service at the end of 2004.
I also think spam/virus fighting services and/or products are going to sell hotter than ever.
I see smaller ventures growing into maturity, by building on existing frameworks by Sun, Microsoft and Mono and making a successfull business out of small and medium internet services. This is more a hope than a well funded consideraion, but I do see the potential in those technologies. The only problem is that they need a good focussed target product to bring out the beauty.
This is one of those comments that make you say "well, duh!", and then somebody just goes on and invents something that does this. It is quite a challenge on numerous levels.. would be impressive if someone pulled this one off..
Now that the ghost is out of the bottle, I think we can prepare ourselves for dramatic internet attacks in the coming weeks / months, and much shorter TTL values, and longer loading times.
What can be done effectively to detect and remove file entries?
I'm surprised no one thinks of health as a component of your Actor class.
Just define an interface for the actor class with a DoDamage ( source, amount ) method, and plugg in whatever type of DoDamage implementation you fance at any one time. Statechanges of the actor plugs different components. Done.
Yes, virtual fuctions are slow on PS2, but do fine on all other architectures.
So, yes it functions somewhat like Flash of today, but that DOES NOT mean it is meant to replace Flash. Instead, it should be the new OS UI rendering engine that FLASH itself uses to draw FLASH applets in a browser window. (Get it, it is the vector engine under applications and things like Flash will use to render on screen.)
How interesting. Flash technology running on top flash-like technology. How difficult would it be to 'optimize' this and offer a 'better' "standalone" product than competing software makers ?
When MS undertakes anything at all, you should read: conquer all marketshare, in 8 years if possible. The only things that are not getting along as planned are their hardware divisions.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked Snow Crash too, like many other people, and I'm not a native English reader/speaker/writer. With his down to earth style of writing, Stephen is able to skip right onwards to the more interesting bits of a story where heroic characters are in all sorts of precarious situations and problems. On the other hand, he is able to fill loads of sections with total and utter rambles that you wonder if you should really read on. But you usually do read on. And it usually is worth it, too.
I remember SnowCrash going religious about half way through, rambling on and on about the meta configuration of religions. But the metafors start piling up near the end, and the hystorical background somwhat enriches your understanding of the real message he's bringing. Stephenson is trying to make the book itself resemble the Metaverse, which is why some of it sounds a bit chaotic and wired. But that's mainly why I like the book, to be able to find out what this Stephenson character is trying to say, not having all the answers spooned up immediately.
Then of course, the cool settings, fast paced timing, sexy character traits, a malfunctioning society and intense situations are extremely sci-fi and thus interesting to any techno fanatic. Who would not want to try out the virtual worlds of SnowCrash, to walk with Hiro, and riding boards with Y.T., harpooning vehicles..
Or perhaps the Guantanamo prisoners have thought of this evil scheme to smuggle in video games to ameliorate their housing conditions.
What I'd really like to point out here is a certain section of the U.S. Army report on Iraqi prisoner abuse titled "OTHER FINDINGS/OBSERVATIONS".
Exactly. They excelled in believing the enemy image that they needed to believe to carry out their military tasks with excellence as well. The reason why those incidents took place, is because some soldiers have been simlpy too long in the frontlines. Some soldiers are allready serving in Iraq for 19 months. Their reality has been reduced to 'kill or be killed'. They have no control over their 'enemy', and their 'enemy image' has been broadened from the Iraqi army/regime to the whole Iraqi populace.
Imagine yourself, having no control over your enemy, being utterly frustrated with the war, and fearing every day some bomb is going to go off near your head. Being near some detained people under these circumstances, for whatever reason, will probably be enough for a lot of people to just completely freak out.
I'm not trying to talk them out of their guilt, because they are guilty, but I think the whole U.S. military is to blame. And the American public as well. The American society absolutely loves the military for their acts of grandeur, in a simplistic kind of way. I hope now finally these photos will wake up people from the ncie dream they have about sophisticated technology in the hands of simple minds at the helm of the most destructive force in the entire world for far too long, and imho, for the wrong reasons. The US prides itself continuously on their morality, their faith, and the fact that god will be on their side. But American morality often is not more than pretty lyrics that keep the dream alive. The reality is that those men serving in the military have been completely brainwashed in order to kill in the most efficient way, and that our modern military society even then EXPECTS THEM TO BE MORALY sane. But I'm afraid these supermen never have, do not and will never exist.
So please stop touting about how well they acted in war, when in fact, they are completely fucked up in their heads. Thank you.
-:)
You are right though, there is that danger that the country is going to get run-over by the vast masses in our western & eastern mega societies, even more so because of the LOTR movies, which, by the way, were not my incentive to visit the country.
I went there purely for nature and extreme sporting (hang-gliding/bunji/skydive/biking/tramping), and I got all of that and bucketloads more. I mean.. I saw the Millford Sound with a clear blue sky, for christ sake!
You obviously don't know shit. As a European, having been in NZ for one month straight dramtically changes your view on the way current EU life is so full of stress that it barely is able to breath naturally.
NZ is quite frankly the most perfect spot on earth I have ever seen / been to.
Big thanks for a wonderfull vacation to the allways helpfull and sympathetic NewZeelanders and maori folks!!
Demosntrating for bandwith, that I agree with, but what the fuck does it have to do with pirating? And how is linking the 2 in the same demonstration goin to help the other?
Apart from the typical "Arrr" comments made around here, I'd like to tell everyone I think this is seriously fucked up and not helping A) bandwith demands and B) piracy, should I have some sympathy for it. If I didn't know any better, I would suspect the RIAA dressed up and staged this in order to get e-liberal governments like the Swedisch gov to back down. If these are truely 'e-pirates' then I think they just organised the most backwards effective event ever. It's hard enough that people are having to put up a hard fight over better patent regulations in EU, now those clowns are trying to bring the world the virtues of 'piracy'. Blatant fucktards!
It's somewhat necessary to note that Fairlight is not just a warez group, but also is a famous demoscene participant, having produced leading demos/intros/graphics and music in c64 and pc sections.
Fairlight is more than just the scum everybody will certainly take them for. The present demoscene has it's early roots in hacker and cracker groups. As a result, Fairlight is probably the longest standing group in the scene, and it is no surprise they are linked to the warez scene.
Another thing to note is that the current entertainment industry (think games and movies) is filled with loads of people working their ass off, that got to know their tricks of the trade *because* there was/is a warez scene.
The system is a hypocrit.
We also experienced this, when simply the boxes would have slightly different localisation settings, and different motherboards (& CPU's). Apparently, our software rendering tool interpreted some data for certain plugins differently, and because of this, which sometimes resulted in layers of different sizes and resolution, alignment problems, color differences and so on.. the whole farm had to be taken down bit by bit to figure out why. In the end we ended up rendering on only a 3rd of the capacity because even ghosting the good systems did not help.
Memory bottleneck limits intelligence
Single spot in brain determines size of visual scratch pad.
15 April 2004
TANGUY CHOUARD
The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain.
The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say.
"This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.
Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, or lines in different orientations. If shown a similar image a second later, they will be able to recognise whether three or four of these spots and lines are identical to the first set or not.
But some people can only catch one or two things in a glance, while others can capture up to five.
This very short-term memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a computer with a larger working memory can crank through problems more quickly, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills.
A person's working memory capacity can be determined using simple psychological tests. But now two teams of researchers report in Nature that they can see it in brain scans too.
Keep it in mind
One of the teams, led by Edward Vogel of the University of Oregon in Eugene, found that the electrical activity in a single section of the brain, as detected through electrodes attached to the scalp, is directly related to short-term working memory1.
The team first tested subjects with an image of two coloured dots, waiting a second between flashes and asking the subjects if the image had changed. They then ramped up the test to four dots.
A large increase in the subject's brain activity on the four-dot test indicated that his or her memory capacity had not been pushed to its limit. No increase in electrical activity indicated that his or her working memory had topped out on the two-dot test. By graphing these responses, the team worked out the exact size of each subject's working memory.
A second team, led by René Marois of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, used functional magnetic resonance imaging during similar tasks to accurately locate the part of the brain being used for short-term visual memory2.
Both teams concluded that everything depended on the same tiny spot in the posterior parietal cortex.
"It is amazing that both groups should converge on the same area in the end," says Duncan. Since the task involves remembering many different aspects of each object, including spatial position, orientation and colour, most people thought that several parts of the brain would be involved, he says.
There are still many other aspects to human intelligence that are governed by other parts of the brain, the authors of both studies warn. But the capacity of one's working memory may form a bottleneck for certain kinds of intelligence, they say.
Tanguy Chouard is a senior biological sciences editor at Nature
References
Vogel, E. K. & Machizawa, M. G. . Nature, 428, 748 - 751, doi:10.1038/nature02447 (2004).
Todd, J. J. & Marois, R. . Nature, 428, 751 - 754, doi:10.1038/nature02466 (2004).
Well the real issue here is if, using these means, you are not killing what you try to protect so vigourously. I know that I will not fly into the USA anymore, because I do not intend to pay up a privacy-tax in order for a foreign government to be able to deal with their problems.
I won't even go into the war issue. I don't like the way you define freedom in the form that A Lincoln has put it, nor the generalisations you make about those who have a different view about this matter. The reasons to erode privacy and freedom may be many, but don't loose yourself in your discourse to much while trying to protect exactly those same kind of values.
Nice to see some demo interest again on
Since I am a free man, nobody has the right the retain my personal information. Including these airliners. Since I cannot force the airliners, or the USA to not disperse and use my personal information, I will simply be forced to DENY them this information, and this effectively means that I don't fly into the USA with these airliners anymore.
Global organizations, especially those dominated by third-countries (or soon to be third-world countries like France), are notorious for using the fascade of internationalism as a mask for the pursuit of their own selfish interests.
I'm baffled to see that now the WTO is seen as a EU-dominated international organisation, while it is that same, often "socialist" or "communist" tagged, EU that rallied up largely and violently and on numerous occasions against it's decisions and practices.
And do a little homework before you start blathering about the US withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol. The US Senate never ratified it, since liberal poster-boy Bill Clinton never submitted it. Can't withdraw from a treaty you were never agreed to.
Regardless of who did or didn't sign Kyoto, the US is not social when it comes to defending the living standards and climat of this planet. This is particularly bad because a wealthy, beautifull, large but realtively low populated country is fucking up for all other smaller, less powerfull but much more dense populated countries, and not even caring about it! Where are those good christian american tv-drilled values now?
I remember when that first came out it ran like crap over bnet and they weren't expecting it to be as hard on their servers. Are they gonna test this with like 10,000 people and open it up to over 1,000,000 when it's finally released and realized hey this wasn't such a good idea we should have done more testing?
Yeah. What numbers do you suggest? In reality, online mmorpgs are in a constant beta phase (content wise) anyway, and both the client and server systems are constantly tweaked and enhanced during the lifetime. You really can't know what to expect just by testing alone, you have to run it live under real-live circumstances. There is a fine line to walk between beta and 'gold', the differnce being mainly that beta is a way to get people's interest without making money, but also without pretending to run crash free or sluggish. If all goes well for Blizzard, the gold version is allmost exactly like the beta, but then usually beta players expect 'huge' improvements to continue with their accounts, and that's why things can get quite shakey.
Shh.. hush.. come here.. let me give you a taste of injecting weird stuff in a freaky way in rather special places after I abduct you first, and it will all be allright soon.
No one has proven that UFO's doesn't come from earth itself. So maybe they left earth and hovering over Mars now.
Ok, so first they're here, but we're not suppose to know or that they come from mars, right. Then when we do find out, they're suddenly seen on mars, which we were not supposed to find out. AND THEN YOU TELL ME THEY FRIGGIN COME FROM EARTH?
Couldn't resist sorry.
Actually this movie is a remake BECAUSE the last one was that bad. There would not be an audience if the last one truely rocked, like AKIRA or GITS still does today.
If you read the Appleseed comic books (and I mean books) then you'll see that they're among the best comics around (imho).
And Oni, though it promissed a lot, did not deliver. This is however seems to do so! Once again, I want fucking simultaneous movie releases in europe, now!!
I've had the opportunity to visit both conferences in 2002. There's no denying that the papers and sessions at SIG are less practical than those on the GDC, but the level is usually just as high. Game tech IS academic by nature, because it pushes limits and tries out new things. Maybe games were scorned in the past because they were the product of some lonely freaks hammering away in dorm room chambers, but these days are over. Even the academic world will have a tough hand at trying to keep up with the Industry. I think the reverse is more likely to happen, i.e. people from the industry going back to the academic world to rightiously 'claim their fame'.
There aren't going to be any big surprises. If I had to name a few obvious things that can be expected to happen, they would be the following:
I think that pop-corn bubble is about to burst. Home cinema's and DVD's are fighting back box-office theatre income as we speak, and legal filesharing and DVD writers are only going to accelerate this process. The debate on whether this is legal will probably either boost or break the infant online media shops.
The developments in digital photocam segments are important enough for somebody to throw in the next crazy idea and make a business out of it.
Airliners, travell agencies and booking offices will increasingly feel a need to merge their services and data.
Over the last 5 years, consolidation has been the keyword for market players. I see cable/DSL/wireless networking and cell phone operators further continuing on that road, possibly even with content or media giants.
Online gaming will probably be the biggest selling online service at the end of 2004.
I also think spam/virus fighting services and/or products are going to sell hotter than ever.
I see smaller ventures growing into maturity, by building on existing frameworks by Sun, Microsoft and Mono and making a successfull business out of small and medium internet services. This is more a hope than a well funded consideraion, but I do see the potential in those technologies. The only problem is that they need a good focussed target product to bring out the beauty.
"rather than swinging from place to place."
This is one of those comments that make you say "well, duh!", and then somebody just goes on and invents something that does this. It is quite a challenge on numerous levels.. would be impressive if someone pulled this one off..
Now that the ghost is out of the bottle, I think we can prepare ourselves for dramatic internet attacks in the coming weeks / months, and much shorter TTL values, and longer loading times.
What can be done effectively to detect and remove file entries?
I'm surprised no one thinks of health as a component of your Actor class.
Just define an interface for the actor class with a DoDamage ( source, amount ) method, and plugg in whatever type of DoDamage implementation you fance at any one time. Statechanges of the actor plugs different components. Done.
Yes, virtual fuctions are slow on PS2, but do fine on all other architectures.
So, yes it functions somewhat like Flash of today, but that DOES NOT mean it is meant to replace Flash. Instead, it should be the new OS UI rendering engine that FLASH itself uses to draw FLASH applets in a browser window. (Get it, it is the vector engine under applications and things like Flash will use to render on screen.)
How interesting. Flash technology running on top flash-like technology. How difficult would it be to 'optimize' this and offer a 'better' "standalone" product than competing software makers ?
When MS undertakes anything at all, you should read: conquer all marketshare, in 8 years if possible. The only things that are not getting along as planned are their hardware divisions.