Ah, but if DirecTV had kept playing hardball, they would have lost face as well. By "caving", they arguably lost the battle (a 20% price increase over 7 years isn't *that* bad), but they're winning the war now. They got some great free advertising. You can bet nobody else is going to push hard when *their* contracts come up. Even Viacom is likely to go softer next time, if only to avoid a repeat.
Lose the battle, win the war. That's a *good* strategy.
Looking at those pictures, I'm reminded of the undergarments in the Elder Scrolls games. For those who aren't familiar, they're a series of video games in a fairly generic fantasy setting (the gameplay is fantastic and unique, they're great games, don't get me wrong, but the setting could be mistaken for many other Tolkien knock-offs).
Anyways, one of the things you commonly do is loot the bodies of bandits and whatnot that you kill. And if you take their clothes, they're left laying there in their underwear (not removable for ESRB reasons). In the case of females, it looks almost exactly like the ones in the article. I had always thought it a bit anachronistic for the time period the games were portraying - obviously modern designs made using old materials don't fit "Generic Medieval Fantasy Europe" - but it turns out it may not be.
Which doesn't explain how the game developers knew, of course, but they seem to have been right by accident.
Most phones are *already* pretty much all screen. Even my highly outdated Droid I has only a small area that is not-screen - 1cm on the top and bottom, 1/2cm on the sides. And from what I've seen, newer phones tend to have even less non-screen space.
So if you want a bigger screen, you kind of have to get a bigger phone. Or a projector, but that brings in its own problems (how do you play Angry Birds on it?).
/. fucked up the formatting - it's supposed to read "10^5 Tesla", not "105 Tesla". Or, to be more explicit, 100,000 Tesla, which in indeed roughly 10,000x the strength of the magnetic field we can sustain.
The real reason to complain is the rather obvious GPL violation going on. Microsoft needs release all big boobs under the GPL (or a compatible license) in order to avoid legal problems.
At many schools, the policy is "any student in a fight gets suspended/expelled, even if they were just the punching bag". And some of them define a "fight" as anything aggressive - I have seen students punished for yelling at each other under that rule.
From how I read GP's post, he was proposing prison sentences for teachers/administrators who punish students for self-defense, but I agree that he phrased it rather poorly.
They should be able to have a program "translate" JS!Arabic to JS!English with relative ease. You just parse the script, replacing Arabic keywords with English keywords (that's even how I suspect they're doing it). You could probably even have an interpreter that can mix several languages.
I actually had a similar idea myself, years and years ago. Never did anything with it, though, and my plan was for C, not Javascript.
Oh, and in any case, comments and filenames often *are* in other languages already. So there are already barriers between coders of different languages.
I'm posting this mainly because you mentioned Asus, and I've sworn an oath of vengeance against them.
Asus sucks. It seems to have started sucking recently, last year or two. But they suck.
Dell laptops crack within weeks. My Asus laptop fried itself within hours. And then took over a month to repair. And when I finally did get it back, it was in a cheap cardboard box instead of the original packaging they had insisted I use, and the power cable they had also insisted I return was half-missing as well. And this was after they'd already fucked me over by taking two months to get ship it out in the first place.
So yeah. Fuck Asus. They're worse than Dell, in my book.
Joining WW1 on the side of Germany would have been retarded. Britain had naval dominance, so it would be a military failure. Britain also was (and is) a massive trading partner for the US, so it would have screwed up our economy as well.
And, while you may be right in saying if the US hadn't entered the war, WW2 wouldn't have happened, you could also make the case that if there had been an actual conquest of Germany (rather than surrender), WW2 would not have happened. And without the US, that conquest would have been impossible.
Interfering with other countries was also par for the course at the time. Remember China? Of course not - you seem to rewrite history, forgetting that it was the US that originally pushed for the League of Nations (before backing out due to political infighting), and that *all* the "Great Powers" neglected to actually enforce League decisions. Even had the US joined, it would not have succeeded.
Yes and No. Not Valve decides if the games use DRM, the developers do (or publisher). Games which do not have DRM on them can be played without Steam with no problem, even games with DRM might be played without Steam with no problem. The assumption that you're only able to play the games if you're logged into Steam is wrong, that depends on the game. Also, I don't see how a CreditCard/PayPal issue could lock you out of your account?
It's a bit more complex than even that. Steam itself is, essentially, DRM. It does try to prevent you from running games you have not purchased. And in extreme circumstances, they will ban your account if you're caught flat-out pirating games. However, they are relatively light in the DRM department, so many companies choose to include additional DRM (which gives them a small extra icon on their store page, saying "includes non-Steam DRM", so at least you're informed).
I have tried to directly run many Steam games. All of them either launched Steam first to ensure I was authorized, or they simply refused to launch.
Same statement as above, it depends on the games itself. In my opinion, it is far more likely that the Ubisoft authentication servers are getting shut down then Steam. Also, if you don't tell anyone I'll tell you my master plan for that situation...I'll crack every single game I bought on Steam...every single one. It's a sad situation that I have to break stuff to make it work, but in all honesty, I paid something between $1 and $10 for every game...I'll go that extra mile. I mean, if I'd paid $55 for the game, and then it breaks I'd be pissed! But $1? 10 minutes spending in Google, done...I'm in. And I know that it does not answer your question, but that's my idea to that, and I know where you're coming from, but that's my plan.
This is my position as well. I know there is already fake Steam server software, used by pirates to blanket-authenticate themselves for every game on the system. If Steam ever shuts down, I do fully intend to grab a copy of that (I used to have it bookmarked, but seem to have lost it) and continue playing all my games.
That's because if there's one company out there which will get it right, it's Valve! All other game companies have degraded into some sort of money whore, but Valve still is a shop of enthusiasts and geeks which are coding for enthusiasts and geeks.
And there's a reason for that. Valve is not publicly traded. You cannot be a shareholder in Valve without being an employee. So the only people who profit from it are the people working there, not Wall Street "investors". And, as they are apparently quite well-paid, they don't need to resort to evil in order to get more money. They are quite unique in being a highly successful, profitable company that flat-out refuses to publicly sell its stock.
I think I mainly come across as one because I'm reacting to a rabidly anti-DRM culture. Is there an antonym for fanboy, where one blindly hates (instead of loves) regardless of logic? If there is such a word, that describes most/.ers' stance on DRM.
I'm not like that. I do not mind DRM when it does not prevent me from doing what I want to do. Steam, as it happens, rarely prevents me from doing things I want to do. I have no moral opposition to reasonable checks that I bought the game. Do you complain about retail stores having RFID tags and scanners at the doors? And yet if you applied some of the arguments I've seen here to the retail example, you'd get rants against that.
I'm only human. I see what, to me, is a fundamentally illogical stance, and I argue against it rather more vigorously than I would against someone I only slightly disagreed with.
Is Steam perfect? Of course not. There's the bugs (my categories never persist properly, it likes to ignore my update settings, it doesn't always take well to a dropped connection), there's the forums (never go there), there's the unresponsiveness, there's the need to install roughly ten million versions of the Visual C++ Runtime, and plenty of others. And if anyone *were* to say that Steam is perfect and flawless, I would argue against them as well. But I simply have not needed to argue that point here. So I appear to be one-sided simply because I have not needed to argue against the other extreme.
I will end by noting that I present facts as facts, and my experiences and opinions as my own. I present the parts that support my argument, and concede the parts that do not (rather than try to hide them).
PS: The game gifting thing is a bit more complicated than that. Some packs do allow you to give away copies of games you already own. I did so with the Orange Box (HL2, E1, E2, Portal and TF2). I already owned HL2 and Ep1, so I gave those to my cousin. Other packs don't let you do so. That's determined by the game publisher, not Valve.
Misinformed PS3 fanboys are a very vocal bunch. But these are the same people who still insist the PS3 is basically a desk-sized supercomputer - they're almost a cult, some of them.
Plenty of PS3 fans are much more reasonable - some even agree with Hotz.
Unlikely - the Mac port does not do so. Although they did use DOSBox for many old game rereleases - Doom, Wolfenstein, etc. all run in an embedded DOSBox when installed from Steam. So I guess Wine isn't entirely out of the question.
However, I still think it's a good thing - the Mac Steam port seemed to trigger off a small wave of other Mac game ports. The same could very well happen for Linux. And native ports are always better than emulating.
Except that, as of now, the *definition* of a planet involves "an orbit [...] free of other large objects". So that's like saying "the Moon would qualify as a planet if it orbited the Sun instead of the Earth", or more succinctly, "Pluto would be a planet if it weren't for the things that make it not a planet".
Binary dwarf planets, sure. That seems a reasonable argument. But even treating Pluto and Charon as a single entity can't upgrade them to planet status.
The difference between the two approaches is a difference of perception - in one, the *human* is considered the primary while the *computer* is the backup; in the other the *computer* is the primary and the *human* is the backup.
Now, obviously, both of those elements can fail. Humans are fallible drivers, as I well know. Computers can crash, or just fail to process events properly. No matter what, you will get accidents under any of these. Hell, we still get train crashes, and they're bound to tracks and subject to tight top-down management.
I think the most likely outcome is this: we begin using computer failovers, expanding on those we already have (antilock brakes, cruise control, lane following, automatic parallel parking). Both because this allows for gradual testing and improvement of each module, and because as a society I don't think we can handle going directly to full computer control.
Eventually, however, the computers will be good enough at driving that you'll be able to have them take full control. And eventually, doing that will be commonplace.
Random idea here - has there been any research into re-using old bombers for this? A B-52 Stratofortress can carry over 30,000kg, and already has most of the fittings to carry and air-drop large, rocket-shaped objects. Would whatever modifications needed be small enough to not require recertification? I'm not an expert, or even knowledgeable about this whole thing, but it seems at least plausible.
I recently got a new laptop (Asus G75 - but do NOT buy from Asus, because their customer service fucking SUCKS).
The first time I'd gotten it, it broke within hours (have I mentioned Asus sucks?), so when I got it back, I wanted to stress-test it to make sure it wouldn't fry itself again. So I loaded up Crysis. Set all options to maximum.
ALL options.
Some scenes *are* photorealistic, at least at 1920x1080@60Hz. It's not perfect - sometimes the shadows are too sharp, or plant textures too repetitive. Fire particles don't look at all right. Water reflect/refract is too perfect, too clean. Any any scene with a person's face visible up-close is right out, especially if they're talking (Crytek can't seem to synch audio and animation perfectly).
But holy crap, when it works, it works. It looks as good as any movie I play on the same display.
I'm not naive. I know we're nowhere near hitting the maximum graphics can reach. And even once we hit photorealism, we'll keep making progress at making better non-photorealistic graphics. But it definitely seems the limiting technology today is more "display" than "processor".
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Ah, but if DirecTV had kept playing hardball, they would have lost face as well. By "caving", they arguably lost the battle (a 20% price increase over 7 years isn't *that* bad), but they're winning the war now. They got some great free advertising. You can bet nobody else is going to push hard when *their* contracts come up. Even Viacom is likely to go softer next time, if only to avoid a repeat.
Lose the battle, win the war. That's a *good* strategy.
Same order of magnitude. 1.0E1, 1.2E1, 5.0E1, they're all effectively the same distance from 1.0E5.
Looking at those pictures, I'm reminded of the undergarments in the Elder Scrolls games. For those who aren't familiar, they're a series of video games in a fairly generic fantasy setting (the gameplay is fantastic and unique, they're great games, don't get me wrong, but the setting could be mistaken for many other Tolkien knock-offs).
Anyways, one of the things you commonly do is loot the bodies of bandits and whatnot that you kill. And if you take their clothes, they're left laying there in their underwear (not removable for ESRB reasons). In the case of females, it looks almost exactly like the ones in the article. I had always thought it a bit anachronistic for the time period the games were portraying - obviously modern designs made using old materials don't fit "Generic Medieval Fantasy Europe" - but it turns out it may not be.
Which doesn't explain how the game developers knew, of course, but they seem to have been right by accident.
Most phones are *already* pretty much all screen. Even my highly outdated Droid I has only a small area that is not-screen - 1cm on the top and bottom, 1/2cm on the sides. And from what I've seen, newer phones tend to have even less non-screen space.
So if you want a bigger screen, you kind of have to get a bigger phone. Or a projector, but that brings in its own problems (how do you play Angry Birds on it?).
/. fucked up the formatting - it's supposed to read "10^5 Tesla", not "105 Tesla". Or, to be more explicit, 100,000 Tesla, which in indeed roughly 10,000x the strength of the magnetic field we can sustain.
The real reason to complain is the rather obvious GPL violation going on. Microsoft needs release all big boobs under the GPL (or a compatible license) in order to avoid legal problems.
Penalty! Invalid politicization of scientific debate - five minutes in the penalty box!
This is entertainment delivered by modern day gladiators who sacrifice health and life in a quest for money and immortality through fame.....
I'm confused... how does that differ from every other "sport", again?
Yes.
At many schools, the policy is "any student in a fight gets suspended/expelled, even if they were just the punching bag". And some of them define a "fight" as anything aggressive - I have seen students punished for yelling at each other under that rule.
From how I read GP's post, he was proposing prison sentences for teachers/administrators who punish students for self-defense, but I agree that he phrased it rather poorly.
They should be able to have a program "translate" JS!Arabic to JS!English with relative ease. You just parse the script, replacing Arabic keywords with English keywords (that's even how I suspect they're doing it). You could probably even have an interpreter that can mix several languages.
I actually had a similar idea myself, years and years ago. Never did anything with it, though, and my plan was for C, not Javascript.
Oh, and in any case, comments and filenames often *are* in other languages already. So there are already barriers between coders of different languages.
I'm posting this mainly because you mentioned Asus, and I've sworn an oath of vengeance against them.
Asus sucks. It seems to have started sucking recently, last year or two. But they suck.
Dell laptops crack within weeks. My Asus laptop fried itself within hours. And then took over a month to repair. And when I finally did get it back, it was in a cheap cardboard box instead of the original packaging they had insisted I use, and the power cable they had also insisted I return was half-missing as well. And this was after they'd already fucked me over by taking two months to get ship it out in the first place.
So yeah. Fuck Asus. They're worse than Dell, in my book.
Joining WW1 on the side of Germany would have been retarded. Britain had naval dominance, so it would be a military failure. Britain also was (and is) a massive trading partner for the US, so it would have screwed up our economy as well.
And, while you may be right in saying if the US hadn't entered the war, WW2 wouldn't have happened, you could also make the case that if there had been an actual conquest of Germany (rather than surrender), WW2 would not have happened. And without the US, that conquest would have been impossible.
Interfering with other countries was also par for the course at the time. Remember China? Of course not - you seem to rewrite history, forgetting that it was the US that originally pushed for the League of Nations (before backing out due to political infighting), and that *all* the "Great Powers" neglected to actually enforce League decisions. Even had the US joined, it would not have succeeded.
Yes and No. Not Valve decides if the games use DRM, the developers do (or publisher). Games which do not have DRM on them can be played without Steam with no problem, even games with DRM might be played without Steam with no problem. The assumption that you're only able to play the games if you're logged into Steam is wrong, that depends on the game. Also, I don't see how a CreditCard/PayPal issue could lock you out of your account?
It's a bit more complex than even that. Steam itself is, essentially, DRM. It does try to prevent you from running games you have not purchased. And in extreme circumstances, they will ban your account if you're caught flat-out pirating games. However, they are relatively light in the DRM department, so many companies choose to include additional DRM (which gives them a small extra icon on their store page, saying "includes non-Steam DRM", so at least you're informed).
I have tried to directly run many Steam games. All of them either launched Steam first to ensure I was authorized, or they simply refused to launch.
Same statement as above, it depends on the games itself. In my opinion, it is far more likely that the Ubisoft authentication servers are getting shut down then Steam. Also, if you don't tell anyone I'll tell you my master plan for that situation...I'll crack every single game I bought on Steam...every single one. It's a sad situation that I have to break stuff to make it work, but in all honesty, I paid something between $1 and $10 for every game...I'll go that extra mile. I mean, if I'd paid $55 for the game, and then it breaks I'd be pissed! But $1? 10 minutes spending in Google, done...I'm in. And I know that it does not answer your question, but that's my idea to that, and I know where you're coming from, but that's my plan.
This is my position as well. I know there is already fake Steam server software, used by pirates to blanket-authenticate themselves for every game on the system. If Steam ever shuts down, I do fully intend to grab a copy of that (I used to have it bookmarked, but seem to have lost it) and continue playing all my games.
That's because if there's one company out there which will get it right, it's Valve! All other game companies have degraded into some sort of money whore, but Valve still is a shop of enthusiasts and geeks which are coding for enthusiasts and geeks.
And there's a reason for that. Valve is not publicly traded. You cannot be a shareholder in Valve without being an employee. So the only people who profit from it are the people working there, not Wall Street "investors". And, as they are apparently quite well-paid, they don't need to resort to evil in order to get more money. They are quite unique in being a highly successful, profitable company that flat-out refuses to publicly sell its stock.
I'd like to think I'm just a fan, not a fanboy.
I think I mainly come across as one because I'm reacting to a rabidly anti-DRM culture. Is there an antonym for fanboy, where one blindly hates (instead of loves) regardless of logic? If there is such a word, that describes most /.ers' stance on DRM.
I'm not like that. I do not mind DRM when it does not prevent me from doing what I want to do. Steam, as it happens, rarely prevents me from doing things I want to do. I have no moral opposition to reasonable checks that I bought the game. Do you complain about retail stores having RFID tags and scanners at the doors? And yet if you applied some of the arguments I've seen here to the retail example, you'd get rants against that.
I'm only human. I see what, to me, is a fundamentally illogical stance, and I argue against it rather more vigorously than I would against someone I only slightly disagreed with.
Is Steam perfect? Of course not. There's the bugs (my categories never persist properly, it likes to ignore my update settings, it doesn't always take well to a dropped connection), there's the forums (never go there), there's the unresponsiveness, there's the need to install roughly ten million versions of the Visual C++ Runtime, and plenty of others. And if anyone *were* to say that Steam is perfect and flawless, I would argue against them as well. But I simply have not needed to argue that point here. So I appear to be one-sided simply because I have not needed to argue against the other extreme.
I will end by noting that I present facts as facts, and my experiences and opinions as my own. I present the parts that support my argument, and concede the parts that do not (rather than try to hide them).
PS: The game gifting thing is a bit more complicated than that. Some packs do allow you to give away copies of games you already own. I did so with the Orange Box (HL2, E1, E2, Portal and TF2). I already owned HL2 and Ep1, so I gave those to my cousin. Other packs don't let you do so. That's determined by the game publisher, not Valve.
Why do you hate America?
Do you *really* want the full list, or should I just point you to the last half century of American history?
Misinformed PS3 fanboys are a very vocal bunch. But these are the same people who still insist the PS3 is basically a desk-sized supercomputer - they're almost a cult, some of them.
Plenty of PS3 fans are much more reasonable - some even agree with Hotz.
At least not until the comments started.
Unlikely - the Mac port does not do so. Although they did use DOSBox for many old game rereleases - Doom, Wolfenstein, etc. all run in an embedded DOSBox when installed from Steam. So I guess Wine isn't entirely out of the question.
However, I still think it's a good thing - the Mac Steam port seemed to trigger off a small wave of other Mac game ports. The same could very well happen for Linux. And native ports are always better than emulating.
"Used to"?
Indeed.
You know what happens when someone forgets to check the bounds of their array and starts writing data to another process's memory?
Yeah. Imagine if that other process was your visual cortex.
Except that, as of now, the *definition* of a planet involves "an orbit [...] free of other large objects". So that's like saying "the Moon would qualify as a planet if it orbited the Sun instead of the Earth", or more succinctly, "Pluto would be a planet if it weren't for the things that make it not a planet".
Because Pluto is not a planet.
Binary dwarf planets, sure. That seems a reasonable argument. But even treating Pluto and Charon as a single entity can't upgrade them to planet status.
The difference between the two approaches is a difference of perception - in one, the *human* is considered the primary while the *computer* is the backup; in the other the *computer* is the primary and the *human* is the backup.
Now, obviously, both of those elements can fail. Humans are fallible drivers, as I well know. Computers can crash, or just fail to process events properly. No matter what, you will get accidents under any of these. Hell, we still get train crashes, and they're bound to tracks and subject to tight top-down management.
I think the most likely outcome is this: we begin using computer failovers, expanding on those we already have (antilock brakes, cruise control, lane following, automatic parallel parking). Both because this allows for gradual testing and improvement of each module, and because as a society I don't think we can handle going directly to full computer control.
Eventually, however, the computers will be good enough at driving that you'll be able to have them take full control. And eventually, doing that will be commonplace.
Random idea here - has there been any research into re-using old bombers for this? A B-52 Stratofortress can carry over 30,000kg, and already has most of the fittings to carry and air-drop large, rocket-shaped objects. Would whatever modifications needed be small enough to not require recertification? I'm not an expert, or even knowledgeable about this whole thing, but it seems at least plausible.
I recently got a new laptop (Asus G75 - but do NOT buy from Asus, because their customer service fucking SUCKS).
The first time I'd gotten it, it broke within hours (have I mentioned Asus sucks?), so when I got it back, I wanted to stress-test it to make sure it wouldn't fry itself again. So I loaded up Crysis. Set all options to maximum.
ALL options.
Some scenes *are* photorealistic, at least at 1920x1080@60Hz. It's not perfect - sometimes the shadows are too sharp, or plant textures too repetitive. Fire particles don't look at all right. Water reflect/refract is too perfect, too clean. Any any scene with a person's face visible up-close is right out, especially if they're talking (Crytek can't seem to synch audio and animation perfectly).
But holy crap, when it works, it works. It looks as good as any movie I play on the same display.
I'm not naive. I know we're nowhere near hitting the maximum graphics can reach. And even once we hit photorealism, we'll keep making progress at making better non-photorealistic graphics. But it definitely seems the limiting technology today is more "display" than "processor".