Phelbas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering whirpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
(for those who were wondering as to the provenance of the titles. T.S Eliot's wasteland)
Games right now are pushing a visual envelope because its there to be pushed..
And in someways its easier to throw money at providing whizz-bang physics engine development than it is to do satisfying game-play.
Ancient Domains of Mystery (www.adom.de, runs on linux or windows) is a roguelike game of immense complexity and challenge and i enjoy playing it more than most other slashers i've ever seen.
And the graphics are ASCII, but its the guys evolving life work, not a 2 year development project to get shoved out the door.
As a game it is superior to diabloII in EVERY way
except graphics
maybe once the visual envelope is virtual things will return to questions of balance and game design.
But i think we've got ten years of eye-popping dross ahead.
And i was taught french in school (as are most canadians) but i can't string a sentence together to save my life now.
I can't speak definitively, but in the 2 months i spent traversing china in late 96 the majority of english speakers i met expressed great difficulty in understanding Mandarin chinese.
Chinese, while a beautiful and subtle language suffers from being heavily dialectized.
Puthongua (my speling might be out and in the west we call it mandarin) is currently the lingua franca of China. But a majority of chinese do not speak it and cannot understand it.
English with its relatively simple tonal structure and easy to use (and type) alphabet might well become more common in china than the state dialect.
But the empire long united must divide (ancient chinese proverb)
So i wouldn't be betting on this horse in any event.
I care about lowtax because i think his site is generally funny.
The kid you were talking about was 14.
And he chose to play adult games as an adult and has been laughed at by a lot of people. (mostly deservedly)
Sometimes lowtax crosses a line and I look at what he's done and think "that isn't so funny".
But mostly I laugh my head of and send the page to a friend.
Just because your sense of humour responds to different things to mine/his/anyone elses doesn't mean that a hosted webmaster serving up 15gb of mostly text a day with a banner add on the top of every page shouldn't be paid by the advertisiers pon his pretty darn hot content.
Otherwise there will be no model for little people to make a living on the web.
Remember NASA admits it couldn't rebuild a full Saturn V today if it wanted to.
I'm sure i've seen estimates that it would take 10 years to put another man on the moon as the old tech can't be readily reproduced.
I think it is fair to say that by many outsiders views mankind reached its furthest point of expansion 30 years ago and has since contracted.
Of course you could argue that the voyager probes and that man-hole cover that was accidentally turned into the fastest man-made object in history in the first underground a-bomb test (ture story) have continued to push outward the buble of our exploration.
And lets face it.
Most advanced cultures probably disapear up their own fibre-optic pipes once they do the math on interstellar travel.
Here in Australia where our introduced animals have a smaller gene pool cat and dog breeds have a lot of problems.
Not just obscure breeds but all the popular breeds have trouble with congenital defects (heart disease, displaced hips etc..)
The horse racing industry also has to go to great pains to introduce new bloodlines from overseas.
So I think we can safely say that most species would need to have some variation programmed into the reproduced genetic material or they would quickly revert to their extinct status.
It will become gradually harder to extract (overall not from any given reserve)
There are plenty of non-economic oil-fields that as scarcity takes its toll will become economical.
And shale extraction is just starting to become economical with the current price. Thats as VAST amount of oil.
To say nothing of the gas deposits just being brought online (yes more expensive to handle.. so the oil price needs to be high to support it)
But the dollar-per-kilowatt cost of solar power is dropping every year.
the day it drops below the steadily rising price of the increasingly scarce oil....
Bingo... the dismal science rides to the rescue once more.
And you can bet once the oil companies run out of oil they might start using any of those inventions/patents the conspiracy theorists keep telling us they have locked up.
Really folks...
We won't run out of power until we get to the Heat-Death of the universe.
But we might kill ourselves long before that.
Or just become something we can't even recognise...
Slashdot Mirror
People who didn't understand Newton said the same thing about rockets.
They were wrong too.
Which is not to say this will work.
Just to say don't trust "common sense" over pure maths.
Part 4 - Death by Water
Phelbas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering whirpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
(for those who were wondering as to the provenance of the titles. T.S Eliot's wasteland)
I was saying that gameplay isn't the driving force.
I was saying that its easier to make a mediocre game with whizzbang graphics than to make a good game with mediocre graphics.
Of course the user should notice an interruption of the regular use of the port.
I guess the trick would be to have the trojan play nicely with the porggies that are meant to be using the port?
Doesn't sound TOO hard...
And in someways its easier to throw money at providing whizz-bang physics engine development than it is to do satisfying game-play.
Ancient Domains of Mystery (www.adom.de, runs on linux or windows) is a roguelike game of immense complexity and challenge and i enjoy playing it more than most other slashers i've ever seen.
And the graphics are ASCII, but its the guys evolving life work, not a 2 year development project to get shoved out the door.
As a game it is superior to diabloII in EVERY way
except graphics
maybe once the visual envelope is virtual things will return to questions of balance and game design.
But i think we've got ten years of eye-popping dross ahead.
I can't speak definitively, but in the 2 months i spent traversing china in late 96 the majority of english speakers i met expressed great difficulty in understanding Mandarin chinese.
Puthongua (my speling might be out and in the west we call it mandarin) is currently the lingua franca of China. But a majority of chinese do not speak it and cannot understand it.
English with its relatively simple tonal structure and easy to use (and type) alphabet might well become more common in china than the state dialect.
But the empire long united must divide (ancient chinese proverb)
So i wouldn't be betting on this horse in any event.
Whats worse is my house mate has cut it in two and glued it to the side of one of his model tanks to play Warhammer 40k with!
Every time i see that sucker trundling across the battlefield i'll be reminded of 100 wasted dollars!
Its certainly now an expensive model tank eh?
They make the money back on the games sold.
This will create consoles they don't have to take a loss for. But they'll still get the money for the games sold.
The concern should be whether this can provide reasonable performance. But that should be a market concern.
Sony may pretend to be outraged but i don't think they'll mind much.
and we have yet to see its like in the dirty tricks department. (which costs money)
And that was daddy's money
Right now the chinese see what they view as THEIR water shooting down the mountains into india and the chinese don't like giving ANYTHING away.
The nukes are a means to an end.
They want to be able to ransom the whole of northern india if need be.
Their are no means the Beijing government would stop at to acheive their objectives. Cost is the only factor, and world sanctions are a big cost.
But better yet they can use this as a negotiating tool even if they have no intention of doing it.
"You give us trade concessions, we agree to stop this project"
Same trick the North Koreans have just pulled off
You mean like JFK?
Cunningly leading the nefarious orientals to underestimate the good old USA leading to their current dire economic straits.
Old Man Bush hadn't come from the CIA for nothin y'know...
answer: Yes we can
Can we replicate the functionality of the Saturn V?
Answer: No we cannot
Thats the difference.
yes but we can't replicate the functionality of the Saturn V.
The kid you were talking about was 14.
And he chose to play adult games as an adult and has been laughed at by a lot of people. (mostly deservedly)
Sometimes lowtax crosses a line and I look at what he's done and think "that isn't so funny".
But mostly I laugh my head of and send the page to a friend.
Just because your sense of humour responds to different things to mine/his/anyone elses doesn't mean that a hosted webmaster serving up 15gb of mostly text a day with a banner add on the top of every page shouldn't be paid by the advertisiers pon his pretty darn hot content.
Otherwise there will be no model for little people to make a living on the web.
Be a big corporate site or die.
Thats not the web i want.
I'm sure i've seen estimates that it would take 10 years to put another man on the moon as the old tech can't be readily reproduced.
I think it is fair to say that by many outsiders views mankind reached its furthest point of expansion 30 years ago and has since contracted.
Of course you could argue that the voyager probes and that man-hole cover that was accidentally turned into the fastest man-made object in history in the first underground a-bomb test (ture story) have continued to push outward the buble of our exploration.
And lets face it.
Most advanced cultures probably disapear up their own fibre-optic pipes once they do the math on interstellar travel.
Not just obscure breeds but all the popular breeds have trouble with congenital defects (heart disease, displaced hips etc..)
The horse racing industry also has to go to great pains to introduce new bloodlines from overseas.
So I think we can safely say that most species would need to have some variation programmed into the reproduced genetic material or they would quickly revert to their extinct status.
Or is there a trick you could pull for egg-layers?
There also seems to be a lot of debate as to whether viable DNA can be retreived from all the pickled specimens in all the museums in the world.
Whats the deal there?
if the aluminium were a quarter inch thick it would hurt like hell.
maybe a titanium can could be made even thinner?
I think the cat is out of the bag and if there is a problem it will soon become apparent.
While we are firm and juicy, we only turn red when we get too much sun.
The Government here regards spectrum as its own asset not as a community asset to be regulated for the benefit of all.
They charge BIG dollars for the right to do this kind of thing in "THEIR" spectrum.
It sucks but thats how the system works.
It will become gradually harder to extract (overall not from any given reserve)
There are plenty of non-economic oil-fields that as scarcity takes its toll will become economical.
And shale extraction is just starting to become economical with the current price. Thats as VAST amount of oil.
To say nothing of the gas deposits just being brought online (yes more expensive to handle.. so the oil price needs to be high to support it)
But the dollar-per-kilowatt cost of solar power is dropping every year.
the day it drops below the steadily rising price of the increasingly scarce oil....
Bingo... the dismal science rides to the rescue once more.
And you can bet once the oil companies run out of oil they might start using any of those inventions/patents the conspiracy theorists keep telling us they have locked up.
Really folks...
We won't run out of power until we get to the Heat-Death of the universe.
But we might kill ourselves long before that.
Or just become something we can't even recognise...
As it is, the phone loves to ring at the most pessimal moments, like right after I get home from work and sit on the crapper.
You go to the crapper just AFTER you get home from work?
You mean you haven't discovered that few pleasures in the world to equal that of a long crap on company time?