Oh no. At my old high-school, at least, they were always clamping down. They actually managed to make outside proxies ineffective simply because they would block them within a day or so of someone using them. Sure, there may have been others out there, but it was better to try to find a way around the filter system in the first place, rather than try to bypass it by hiding the traffic.
Although it did take them several months to get Halo off the computers. One of the upperclassmen somehow managed to get the game on the master ISO they used to reformat. So every time they wiped the drive in an attempt to remove it, they were actually reinstalling it.
Whenever people try to block something, they only succeed in making the users smarter, and those in charge look less competent.
High-school filter proxy blocking Slashdot and Wikipedia? Install firefox, set it to autodetect proxy settings, and it picked up the unfiltered teacher proxy, not the student. When they changed it around so the student proxy was preferred, we figured out the IP and configured it directly.
College filter blocking Facebook? Use the VMWare helpfully installed by the admins, boot up Firefox in Linux, and it uses a direct connection. Heck, I discovered that one by accident.
I'm actually starting to suspect that the real purpose behind school filters is education, not censorship.
Uh, no. Not at all. All it takes is changing:
frame.render_everything(position);
to:
lframe.render_everything(position - offset);
rframe.render_everything(position + offset);
Maybe not even that. Many of the PC 3d solutions do all that just in the driver. They run into some problems, primarily with the HUD, but they usually work just fine.
Hell, OpenGL has had support for 3D at the API level for years, maybe since the beginning. Nobody uses it, but it's there.
This is the reason why CGI films work better than studio films when converted to CG. All you have to do is render everything twice from a slight offset.
This article wasn't really about the technical problems, which are minor. It was about the design problems: how do you present information to the player in 3D?
Citation? Certainly.
"Religions:
Christians 33.32% (of which Roman Catholics 16.99%, Protestants 5.78%, Orthodox 3.53%, Anglicans 1.25%), Muslims 21.01%, Hindus 13.26%, Buddhists 5.84%, Sikhs 0.35%, Jews 0.23%, Baha'is 0.12%, other religions 11.78%, non-religious 11.77%, atheists 2.32% (2007 est.)"
From https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html#People
That puts Catholicism as just under 51% of Christians, well above the other groups.
Uh, Catholicism is the predominant form of Christianity, about 50-70%, if I remember correctly. So it impacts a (admittedly slight) majority of Christians.
The military is surprisingly good at idiot-proofing things. As well as getting through red tape.
And flying cars are still not doable with commercial tech. You could make a roadable airplane, but not a true flying car. Even the roadable airplane's I've seen are cheap only by aircraft standards, running about double a normal car.
For the past few centuries, the biggest technological developments were driven by the military. Mass production started with guns. Aircraft were first made into actual tools by the military. Jet engines. Nuclear power. I don't have to tell you guys how much of modern computing is derived from the military, from ARPANet to microchips. Whatever your thoughts on the ethics of it, the military drives technology.
Now we're just co-opting that process to get me my flying car.
First, you grab the BFG. Then, make a run for the enemy flag. Circle-strafe and rocket-jump when you need the elevation. It's that simple. You could probably gib the entire Pacific that way.
I suppose I worded it rather poorly. By "archetypal" I meant "story and characters we are already familiar with, even if they are new".
Another major feature of spectacle films is that the scene and effects dictate the story, not vice versa. Avatar was as much about the planet as it was about the characters. I wouldn't be surprised if Cameron designed the locations first, then wrote a story that would visit all of them.
Probably the biggest difference between a spectacle film and regular Hollywood shovelware, though, is the amount. A spectacle film is a movie cranked up to eleven. It's bigger, louder, shinier, and above all more expensive than other films.
I'd also dispute your conflation of "archetypal" and "clichéd". Lord of the Rings was built on archetypes, but I doubt most would consider it cliché, at least at the time. The main difference is that archetypal characters fill a well-defined role, while clichéd characters have no depth beyond their specific role.
It doesn't have to be something they actually produce, as long as a reasonable person could confuse it with properly-licensed merchandise. I, as a reasonable person, would not be too surprised to find an actual Jedi-branded "mind control" system. Actually, I think I saw one is ToysRUs once.
Were it a "Jedi-brand Lawnmower" or "Jedi-brand Golf Club (aka Golfsaber)", it might be different, but for something Lucas could reasonably make, and which a reasonable person might think is actually related to Star Wars, yeah, this is completely fair.
Well, the main thing is that it was a "spectacle film". That's an almost unheard-of genre, especially nowadays. The whole point of that genre is an archetypal storyline and a huge focus on scenery and special effects.
Probably the only other well-known example would be "The Ten Commandments", which was one of the last. Huge production costs, big-name people, and what the 1950s considered top-of-the-line special effects. You can see elements of the genre elsewhere ("2001" is a well-known partial example), but there are very, very few pure examples dated after WW2.
People don't watch a spectacle film for the interesting, innovative story. They watch it because of the scenery and special effects and the sheer spectacle of it all. The early ones were basically "look how much I spent making this movie", back when "making this movie" was enough to get viewers.
If you came into it expecting a good sci-fi movie, of course it won't meet those standards. That's like judging a Bond movie by sci-fi standards: it doesn't compare well because it isn't supposed to be compared at all.
On a more personal note, I watched it months after release, on a rented DVD, headphones, and laptop. It was still an interesting movie, better than much of the stuff Hollywood puts out. Not an "instant classic" or anything, but it wasn't horrible, in my opinion.
Well, you could conclude that it's a sinister conspiracy to establish total control, but that seems a bit unlikely, especially since the source doesn't seem to have any real contact with the government yet.
It could also be a case of the inventor failing to consider the real-world usage of the device. After all, it would be effective against felons released from prison. It just wouldn't work against first-time offenders, like, say, suicide bombers.
Occam's Razor indicates that incompetence, not evil, is the more likely cause.
Ignoring all the other problems, like radiation doses or ability to circumvent...
How the hell do they expect to get an X-Ray scan of every major terrorist? By the time you can get one of those, you should already be able to arrest the bastard. So, are you proposing to get a regular scan of everybody, file it somewhere, and then flag it as "terrorist" when you receive information?
Facial recognition is only feasible because getting a picture of someone is easy. Hell, just find their Facebook account, you'll be good. It has a lot of problems, but it's usable because it can identify people that haven't been sent through the system before. This won't stop any terrorists. None. Putting that word in the article is pure buzzword-based marketing.
I know that. It's just that the energy needed to begin the reaction increases with mass, and the resulting energy decreases. Since we have yet to break even with hydrogen, it's unlikely we'll be fusing helium for some time.
More likely, our current measured rates are accurate averages, but this will widen the margin of error. So instead of "five million years old, plus or minus ten thousand years" you might get "five million years old, plus or minus a hundred thousand years".
Well, do you have a better plan for using the resulting helium? IIRC, fusing helium requires even more energy than fusing hydrogen, so we probably can't use it as more fuel. Once the small scientific market is saturated, you might as well use it for balloons. Unless, of course, I'm vastly overestimating the amount of helium fusion reactors will produce.
I see open-source as a minor benefit. If I had to choose between two otherwise identical programs, I'd take the open one, but I'll use whatever works. For games, there isn't an identical copy. I appreciate the quality that open-source produces, but I've only used the code itself twice.
I don't use Linux because it's open. I use it because it's better at certain tasks. Same reason I use Windows. It's better than Linux for gaming. Honestly, Linux is in no shape for real gaming. The drivers are not always stable, and always slower than on Windows, and for programs that are generally GPU-bound, that matters.
DRM, as well, I don't care about, until it stops me from doing what I want to. So far, Steam hasn't stopped me from doing anything. Sometimes it takes some extra time, to enter a password or switch to offline mode, but that's not a barrier, just a slow lane.
It's also possible that they were working on it, but cancelled it. The Steam build for Linux was on the official servers, unlisted, but I didn't hear of anyone getting it to run. Most likely, one programmer took a week to get it to compile, and run on maybe one specific installation, as a test. The higher-ups looked at it, and decided that it wouldn't really be worth it, but the Linux code is probably still there, waiting for a change-of-mind from management. So, all we need to do is build the Linux market share and improve the driver speed, and we're good.
It's also possible that one programmer took the Mac version, and tried compiling it on Linux for shits and giggles, and then that somehow got onto the main servers, where it got discovered, launching all the rumors.
Unfortunately, id is dropping commercial Linux support, at least for Rage. Carmack will still give you a binary, but it's up to you to make it work, and if it doesn't, you're SOL. That's still better than a lot of companies do, and once the Doom 3 engine is open-sourced, we'll be getting more games with better support.
Considering the fat sacks of cash Valve is raking in from Steam? Not likely.
Besides, the customer base is large enough that they COULDN'T shut Steam down without a class-action lawsuit. They're already on shaky ground, legally terming it a "subscription service" to bypass various first-sale laws. Even if they won the suit, they would have lost millions in attorney's fees. It may have been possible several years ago, but Steam has a critical mass of users. While that's a good thing for Valve, in that it makes Steam the de-facto digital distribution system, it also puts some restrictions on them. Namely, if they piss off enough of their users, they'll get sued, big-time.
Detractors look at Steam, and see the DRM, resource usage and potential spyware. Advocates look at Steam, and see the Digital Distribution, community features, automatic updates, and synchronized saves.
It's a matter of which seems more important to you, and I, for one, see the (relatively minor) DRM as worth the other features.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no. At my old high-school, at least, they were always clamping down. They actually managed to make outside proxies ineffective simply because they would block them within a day or so of someone using them. Sure, there may have been others out there, but it was better to try to find a way around the filter system in the first place, rather than try to bypass it by hiding the traffic. Although it did take them several months to get Halo off the computers. One of the upperclassmen somehow managed to get the game on the master ISO they used to reformat. So every time they wiped the drive in an attempt to remove it, they were actually reinstalling it.
Whenever people try to block something, they only succeed in making the users smarter, and those in charge look less competent. High-school filter proxy blocking Slashdot and Wikipedia? Install firefox, set it to autodetect proxy settings, and it picked up the unfiltered teacher proxy, not the student. When they changed it around so the student proxy was preferred, we figured out the IP and configured it directly. College filter blocking Facebook? Use the VMWare helpfully installed by the admins, boot up Firefox in Linux, and it uses a direct connection. Heck, I discovered that one by accident. I'm actually starting to suspect that the real purpose behind school filters is education, not censorship.
That may be the most cynical thing I've read in months. I'm still debating exactly how true it is.
Uh, no. Not at all. All it takes is changing: frame.render_everything(position); to: lframe.render_everything(position - offset); rframe.render_everything(position + offset); Maybe not even that. Many of the PC 3d solutions do all that just in the driver. They run into some problems, primarily with the HUD, but they usually work just fine. Hell, OpenGL has had support for 3D at the API level for years, maybe since the beginning. Nobody uses it, but it's there. This is the reason why CGI films work better than studio films when converted to CG. All you have to do is render everything twice from a slight offset. This article wasn't really about the technical problems, which are minor. It was about the design problems: how do you present information to the player in 3D?
It's the same. October 10 is 10/10 no matter which way you arrange it. Same for January 1, February 2, March 3, April 4, etc.
You're welcome.
Citation? Certainly. "Religions: Christians 33.32% (of which Roman Catholics 16.99%, Protestants 5.78%, Orthodox 3.53%, Anglicans 1.25%), Muslims 21.01%, Hindus 13.26%, Buddhists 5.84%, Sikhs 0.35%, Jews 0.23%, Baha'is 0.12%, other religions 11.78%, non-religious 11.77%, atheists 2.32% (2007 est.)" From https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html#People That puts Catholicism as just under 51% of Christians, well above the other groups.
Uh, Catholicism is the predominant form of Christianity, about 50-70%, if I remember correctly. So it impacts a (admittedly slight) majority of Christians.
I'm pretty sure that was his first idea, but for whatever reason, was unfeasible.
The military is surprisingly good at idiot-proofing things. As well as getting through red tape.
And flying cars are still not doable with commercial tech. You could make a roadable airplane, but not a true flying car. Even the roadable airplane's I've seen are cheap only by aircraft standards, running about double a normal car.
For the past few centuries, the biggest technological developments were driven by the military. Mass production started with guns. Aircraft were first made into actual tools by the military. Jet engines. Nuclear power. I don't have to tell you guys how much of modern computing is derived from the military, from ARPANet to microchips. Whatever your thoughts on the ethics of it, the military drives technology.
Now we're just co-opting that process to get me my flying car.
First, you grab the BFG. Then, make a run for the enemy flag. Circle-strafe and rocket-jump when you need the elevation. It's that simple. You could probably gib the entire Pacific that way.
I mean, seriously, it's so obvious!
I suppose I worded it rather poorly. By "archetypal" I meant "story and characters we are already familiar with, even if they are new".
Another major feature of spectacle films is that the scene and effects dictate the story, not vice versa. Avatar was as much about the planet as it was about the characters. I wouldn't be surprised if Cameron designed the locations first, then wrote a story that would visit all of them.
Probably the biggest difference between a spectacle film and regular Hollywood shovelware, though, is the amount. A spectacle film is a movie cranked up to eleven. It's bigger, louder, shinier, and above all more expensive than other films.
I'd also dispute your conflation of "archetypal" and "clichéd". Lord of the Rings was built on archetypes, but I doubt most would consider it cliché, at least at the time. The main difference is that archetypal characters fill a well-defined role, while clichéd characters have no depth beyond their specific role.
It doesn't have to be something they actually produce, as long as a reasonable person could confuse it with properly-licensed merchandise. I, as a reasonable person, would not be too surprised to find an actual Jedi-branded "mind control" system. Actually, I think I saw one is ToysRUs once.
Were it a "Jedi-brand Lawnmower" or "Jedi-brand Golf Club (aka Golfsaber)", it might be different, but for something Lucas could reasonably make, and which a reasonable person might think is actually related to Star Wars, yeah, this is completely fair.
Well, the main thing is that it was a "spectacle film". That's an almost unheard-of genre, especially nowadays. The whole point of that genre is an archetypal storyline and a huge focus on scenery and special effects.
Probably the only other well-known example would be "The Ten Commandments", which was one of the last. Huge production costs, big-name people, and what the 1950s considered top-of-the-line special effects. You can see elements of the genre elsewhere ("2001" is a well-known partial example), but there are very, very few pure examples dated after WW2.
People don't watch a spectacle film for the interesting, innovative story. They watch it because of the scenery and special effects and the sheer spectacle of it all. The early ones were basically "look how much I spent making this movie", back when "making this movie" was enough to get viewers.
If you came into it expecting a good sci-fi movie, of course it won't meet those standards. That's like judging a Bond movie by sci-fi standards: it doesn't compare well because it isn't supposed to be compared at all.
On a more personal note, I watched it months after release, on a rented DVD, headphones, and laptop. It was still an interesting movie, better than much of the stuff Hollywood puts out. Not an "instant classic" or anything, but it wasn't horrible, in my opinion.
Well, you could conclude that it's a sinister conspiracy to establish total control, but that seems a bit unlikely, especially since the source doesn't seem to have any real contact with the government yet.
It could also be a case of the inventor failing to consider the real-world usage of the device. After all, it would be effective against felons released from prison. It just wouldn't work against first-time offenders, like, say, suicide bombers.
Occam's Razor indicates that incompetence, not evil, is the more likely cause.
Ignoring all the other problems, like radiation doses or ability to circumvent...
How the hell do they expect to get an X-Ray scan of every major terrorist? By the time you can get one of those, you should already be able to arrest the bastard. So, are you proposing to get a regular scan of everybody, file it somewhere, and then flag it as "terrorist" when you receive information?
Facial recognition is only feasible because getting a picture of someone is easy. Hell, just find their Facebook account, you'll be good. It has a lot of problems, but it's usable because it can identify people that haven't been sent through the system before. This won't stop any terrorists. None. Putting that word in the article is pure buzzword-based marketing.
I know that. It's just that the energy needed to begin the reaction increases with mass, and the resulting energy decreases. Since we have yet to break even with hydrogen, it's unlikely we'll be fusing helium for some time.
More likely, our current measured rates are accurate averages, but this will widen the margin of error. So instead of "five million years old, plus or minus ten thousand years" you might get "five million years old, plus or minus a hundred thousand years".
Well, do you have a better plan for using the resulting helium? IIRC, fusing helium requires even more energy than fusing hydrogen, so we probably can't use it as more fuel. Once the small scientific market is saturated, you might as well use it for balloons. Unless, of course, I'm vastly overestimating the amount of helium fusion reactors will produce.
I, too, don't care.
I see open-source as a minor benefit. If I had to choose between two otherwise identical programs, I'd take the open one, but I'll use whatever works. For games, there isn't an identical copy. I appreciate the quality that open-source produces, but I've only used the code itself twice.
I don't use Linux because it's open. I use it because it's better at certain tasks. Same reason I use Windows. It's better than Linux for gaming. Honestly, Linux is in no shape for real gaming. The drivers are not always stable, and always slower than on Windows, and for programs that are generally GPU-bound, that matters.
DRM, as well, I don't care about, until it stops me from doing what I want to. So far, Steam hasn't stopped me from doing anything. Sometimes it takes some extra time, to enter a password or switch to offline mode, but that's not a barrier, just a slow lane.
It's also possible that they were working on it, but cancelled it. The Steam build for Linux was on the official servers, unlisted, but I didn't hear of anyone getting it to run. Most likely, one programmer took a week to get it to compile, and run on maybe one specific installation, as a test. The higher-ups looked at it, and decided that it wouldn't really be worth it, but the Linux code is probably still there, waiting for a change-of-mind from management. So, all we need to do is build the Linux market share and improve the driver speed, and we're good.
It's also possible that one programmer took the Mac version, and tried compiling it on Linux for shits and giggles, and then that somehow got onto the main servers, where it got discovered, launching all the rumors.
Unfortunately, id is dropping commercial Linux support, at least for Rage. Carmack will still give you a binary, but it's up to you to make it work, and if it doesn't, you're SOL. That's still better than a lot of companies do, and once the Doom 3 engine is open-sourced, we'll be getting more games with better support.
Considering the fat sacks of cash Valve is raking in from Steam? Not likely.
Besides, the customer base is large enough that they COULDN'T shut Steam down without a class-action lawsuit. They're already on shaky ground, legally terming it a "subscription service" to bypass various first-sale laws. Even if they won the suit, they would have lost millions in attorney's fees. It may have been possible several years ago, but Steam has a critical mass of users. While that's a good thing for Valve, in that it makes Steam the de-facto digital distribution system, it also puts some restrictions on them. Namely, if they piss off enough of their users, they'll get sued, big-time.
To reword it into something more witty...
Detractors look at Steam, and see the DRM, resource usage and potential spyware.
Advocates look at Steam, and see the Digital Distribution, community features, automatic updates, and synchronized saves.
It's a matter of which seems more important to you, and I, for one, see the (relatively minor) DRM as worth the other features.