Ah, apologies. It's complete impossible to tell that apart from the bitching that has lately come into vogue on slashdot... "Hey, if you're going to post something about HTTP what about explaining the acronym to us?"
This differs in a lot of ways, to the point where they aren't even remotely comparable. Most notably, old computers aren't a commodity; you can't take one old computer and reliably substitute it for another.
This is in contrast to new computers, which mostly are; you can pretty much take a new desktop and substitute it for another in the majority of applications. (Of course, there are special needs sometimes, so it isn't purely a commodity.)
This neither counters my supply-demand point, nor my point that you can't, for free, bash old computers into a "commodity" status, it takes time to work them over. Your example is pretty orthogonal to my points.
But it is a good point, and as someone who tries to be a "rational environmentalist" why I believe a suitably adjusted capitalism is the best thing for the environment; inefficiencies have costs to the business, and by "suitably adjusted" I mean making sure that is always the case and they can't externalize the costs. The old saw about the Indians using all of the buffalo while the colonists didn't is no longer applicable; thanks to the forces you describe, we're more efficient than the Indians could have been even in theory. A little too efficient sometimes... we shouldn't feed animals other dead animals of their species.... (I think that cost has been "de-externalized", i.e., "outlawed", but I've heard compliance isn't all you'd like.)
Looking at old PowerBooks (Pre-PowerPC), you can get several color screen PowerBooks for under $50.
No, you can't. You can get a PowerBook for $50. You can not get millions of PowerBooks for $50, for two reasons, each sufficient on their own: One, there aren't that many on the market, the supply is finite and you can not "create" new used products at any useful rate, and two, when you raise the demand, you'll raise the price and they won't be $50 anymore. Economics 101.
Besides, if you're going to create $100 laptops, believe me, you're not going to create a totally new laptop chipset, graphics card, processor, etc. These new $100 laptops will have vastly more "proven" technology than "a random used computer with an unknown history". Seriously, you'll spend more than $100 in time just vetting each machine, installing the build of software that works on this one (but not its neighbor), testing it to make sure it, ya know, works, and by the time all's said and done you're better off just making a new machine.
Your sentiment is a good one for individuals ("he said as he posted to Slashdot from a house that still doesn't have a single GHz machine"), but it is not at all a valid criticism of Negroponte's plan, as it is 100% impractical for his needs on multiple levels.
(I can almost read the replies to this in advance, and all I can say is, wishing doesn't make it so. People who wish to prove me, and the laws of economics, wrong, are invited to go ahead and actually try it. You won't be the first person to break themselves on the laws of supply and demand and the fact that labor can't be valued at $0.)
More reviewing the review
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Arch In Depth
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· Score: 1
Bitmaps? Bitmap images? You voluntarily submitted an article to Slashdot that uses bitmap images? Every single image on that site is 800KB. Or more!
And no, they didn't use actual thumbnails for the images, they link these monstrous images and resize them with HTML.
I don't just not trust the reviewer, I don't trust the site! That is some seriously stunning incompetence for a website.
(Of course, this will either be fixed, or you later "readers" won't be able to get through to the hammered server.)
If you really want to read this and you are on dial-up, don't bother loading the images, they're just "screenshots" of console applications (yes, that's right, 2000 chars of text and some color information; we're talking an image that even with a really crappy 'bitmap' style encoding of the text would only have 4000 bytes was blown up to over a megabyte in some cases), that typically have almost no useful information anyhow.
Remember that modern machines are, essentially, supercomputers. It's easy to forget that a machine with 1% of the power, running software designed to have that much power, can still blaze, and Linux still all has the software from that era.
In fact, if someone puts a bit of work into it, these laptops may have a higher subjective speed than a brand-new laptop would right now. Of course, you too could have that blazing speed if you worked purely in a console, but most of us don't want to work that way.
Using slower memory and even a massively slower processor isn't necessarily a problem. I remember using a 486/33, the first IBM I ever had, and the only thing that slowed that thing down was Windows 3.1. Nowadays I'd expect a 200-ish MHz Pentium level to be nearly free in volume discount, and I had a similar class machine screaming for a good long time. If you stick to the console, it's quite usable and capable at 64MB of relatively slow ram. (I don't know if they can work in 128 at this price point, and in the other direction, 32MB would be fine but the textbook display apps might have to be custom-written and/or customized to fit in that space; you sure aren't going to load X + Adobe Acrobat into that space.)
What you do is take the first half of the mass and put it into retrograde orbits around the planet, then you take the second half, in slightly larger chunks, and put them in prograde orbits. Then you perturb the orbits. This should result in lots of small chunks raining down all over Mars in a slightly prograde direction (so the rotation isn't much affected).
That's a great plan, but thanks to conservation of energy, it doesn't affect the problem I outlined one bit. (I'm assuming by the fact you replied you think it affects it somehow, if not ignore.) Drop the matter fast, drop the matter slow (by human standards), it doesn't change the number of joules the system needs to radiate away. (Throw them together really fast and you add kinetic energy to the mix, but in the interests of fairness we can just ignore that.)
All of the gravitational potential energy goes somewhere. All of it. There is no gaming the system, there is no getting around it, there are no loopholes, there is no (significant in any way unless you want to completely throw away physics) room for me to be in error on this point; the only question is what the exact numbers are. Any mass that would noticably alter the gravity of Mars would impart an unbelievable amount of energy to Mars as heat.
Conservation of energy is the first thing people forget when they become budding celestial mechanics, mostly because it works in ways people are not used to thinking of. Mars isn't at all like a ball of clay you can hold in your hand. Adding mass to Mars is nothing at all like smooshing a bit more clay onto your ball. Your Earthy instincts and imagination are of no use in understanding what happens when significant planetary bodies collide. (Fortunately, the science at this level is fairly simple, Newton could have figured it out.) You can't grow Mars by any significant amount in any reasonable amount of time without also rendering it completely uninhabitable for a long time.
The problem with that idea is "conservation of energy".
Take two inert rocks the size of mars, and suppose they are distant enough initially that they can be treated as point masses w.r.t. each other. Compute the amount of potential energy in the system. (Equality of mass is for convenience.)
Next, distribute that energy evenly amoungst the rest of the mass to find the temperature rise that would convert to.
Finally, compute how long it would take that energy to radiate into space so we could actually stand on this body.
I won't do the math (no time, but props to anyone who posts it), but I suspect it'd be at a minimum thousands of years before we could use Mars. Plus, we stripped the atmosphere during this operation, as would any other attempt to bulk up the mass in any non-astronomical time.
It's not a bad idea per se, but you have remember all of your physics, in particular conservation of energy. (This is all "high school-if-you-were-paying-attention physics, though.) No matter how you slice it, you're going to beat the hell out of the planet and it's going to be a long time before it is usable.
If you put your foot on a back corner (Downleft or sometimes Downright) and it triggers Up, then you have the game set up for controllers rather than for dance pads. In Konamix, DDRMAX, and DDRMAX2, you can turn off "DANCE PLAY" in the options, but in DDR Extreme (U), you can't.
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I would have caught that and that isn't it. It false-triggers sometimes even when no-one is on the mat at all. It is pretty clearly a mat failure.
(In fact, I noticed almost immediately that the buttons weren't laid out physically like they are on the controller, which I found strange. I presume there are historical reasons for that.)
Also thanks for the link. You may find this interesting: I am in the market for exactly one pad. My wife has told me, flat out, that she prefers not knowing how much better at it I am than she is. Given some of our other experiences with trying to game with each other, she is probably right. (Amongst the gaming hardcore, I'd rank pretty low. But that's still my category, whereas my wife is in the "owned a Nintendo but didn't play with it obsessively" category; competent, but in head to head with about anything I come out pretty reliably on top, and she's smart enough to know when I've thrown it so that's no option either. I would guess a lot of Slashdotters know what I mean... and no stereotype posts, please:-) )
It's not just the literal information the guages are carrying. If you write something that is inadvertantly hard to read, and it takes you a second to puzzle it out, that's a second you're not looking at the road, which I'm sure you'll agree is a life critical issue. Certainly nobody can drive with their eyes on the road literally 100% of the time, but every moment you aren't looking at the road better have a direct and important payoff, and "puzzling out the meaning of things that should be understood at a glance" doesn't meet that. That could be the second that matters.
The information on the dash is life-critical, in that poorly-written gauges could make the difference. It's not like you're going to crash in five minutes after doing this hack, it's all a matter of probabilities, but it's not worth toying with in this particular manner.
This is a perfect example of the kind of blinders programmers are typically armed with and that I was talking about, especially in a domain like this where the UI is essentially optimal (at least locally) and familiarity has bred contempt. With user interfaces, the issues go beyond mere existance of information; presentation matters.
Well, how can they review it if the wireless doesn't work?:p
Sorry, that was more the point I was trying to make; upon re-reading you are right that it looks like I'm complaining. What was that line from Douglas Adams about Sirius Cybernetics...? "Their superficial design flaws merely masked the existance of deep design flaws" or something like that. I mention that quote because it applies here...
"On the bright side, it feels squishy, and I think it would be safe to assume that if the console was receiving signals it would be getting them accurately and instantly."... because based on my experience, that is not a safe assumption. Although in this case, I'd say it's one major flaw ("it completely doesn't work") masking a somewhat less major flaw ("it's too cheap"... you can't, fundamentally, fault someone for making something too cheaply... you did, after all, buy it). But still, fun quote.
If it's firing falsely and not springing back up, it sounds like one of the foam sensor separators has been crushed. I'm guessing they have been dancing with shoes, which is usually what leads to that situation.
Unfortunately, I can't tell for how long it has been doing it. We started as rank beginners and I'm still a long way from finishing Tsugaru on Heavy, let alone Extreme (I've got DDRMAX2, translate those terms as necessary and I'm assuming it's the same basic Tsugaru I'm thinking of; even so, you probably know what I mean.), so we didn't fully understand what was going on, nor did we really know that the pad "felt wrong", if you know what I mean, since we didn't have a "feel". I know since the time I took it out of the box, "up" has been hypersensitive, and we may also have damaged it in the beginning even more because we didn't figure out where the foam goes until about week two. (Somewhat embarassing, but I would point out in my defense that not only did I not have a clue, which is a natural phase we all go through:-), there were no instructions included whatsoever.) I only relatively recently noticed how often it is false-triggering during normal use, even on buttons that our feet are nowhere near.
We've pretty much always gone without shoes; I can't guarantee it's never seen them, but it wouldn't be much.
I just really started noticing the lack of un-firing lately, because I've been developing my "not-returning-to-center" skills and that's caused the problem to surface; if I'm doing two LR jump in a row, I have to remember to jump extra high to give the sensors time to untrigger, or if I was holding on L and I have to use it, I have to go unnaturally high to make sure I don't come down on it too soon.
or a used metal pad. But if you're not about to mess around trying to solder sensors onto a homebrew hard mat, the Ignition really is the way to go.
Given the apartment situation I'm in, I couldn't come up with a plausible storage scenario for a metal mat. (Don't worry campers, I'm on the bottom floor! It's concrete below me.) I slide the soft one upright behind the couch (I've already figured I need to minimize folding it), but a metal one would cause wall damage over time. That applies to most ways of hacking the mat to make it solid, too. Otherwise maybe I'd go that route. But at the moment, the Cadillac of soft mats will have to do. It'll be a while before we need more; improvement takes time! Even as I know what I'm doing wrong and "know" how to fix it, converting that into muscle memory is not something you can do just by wishing:-)
I got this Intec one that I can't find a link to online anymore. It looks just like their wireless one, but it isn't wireless. It's hard to correlate it to the reviews for other products, as it is the only pad I've ever used (never even used a real arcade game) and all the reviews for the wireless pad, assuming the hardware is identical, that I've found so far focus on the fact that the wireless doesn't work and they don't even get to reviewing the pad.
Even so, that is not confidence inspiring, no?
At any rate, it has served its true purpose. We know we like it and I always planned to get a "real" pad if so.
We just got into DDR this Christmas. Money is tight at the moment but the next scheduled luxury purchase is now a RedOctane dance mat, the soft $100 one. We have a cheaper one now and it is now ruining my score from false triggering (just sitting there with nobody on it, it fires) and not releasing the trigger correctly. (I'm on the verge of getting the easy AAA's in Light mode and starting to move up to Standard, but the pad makes that impossible.)
I think the key is to avoid the Education Game Trap (it's quite similar); the quickest way to a crappy "educational" game is to take the same-old, same-old and bolt it on to one of the Stardard Generic Game Frameworks. "Answer this math question to advance one space closer to the end." Woohoo, mommy can I please play "Advance The Squares"?
Similarly, I've seen people bolt a crappy racing game onto an exercise bike that in essense consisted of a line advancing forward that you had to stay ahead of, or lose. Woohoo, mommy can I please play "Finish The Boring Task In The Alloted Time"?
DDR isn't trying to make you exercise, but if you expect to play at the higher levels, you'll be sweating.
I'd also love to see a traditional car combat or 'kart' racing game that ran on a bike that you could turn, that used your pedaling as the acceleration with adjustable levels. See, the fun would be the cart game, the exercise the means to an end, instead of the explicit and boring goal.
I thought I didn't like to exercise. Turns out it was the boredom of doing laps that was killing me (semi-literally).
The real world works like this, too, after all, so this should hardly be a shock. Which is more fun, running a mile for no real reason, or a game of soccer, basketball, or water polo? Why do people insist that exercise has to be boring? That's really a relatively recent "innovation", you know. Maybe there's a reason that innovation has coincided with people dying due to lack of exercise?
I think for that, I'd use a linear guage like a progress bar, which you can update as often as you like and let the LCD take care of blurring it "in hardware" (when life hands you lemons, make lemonade:-) ). The number can be a running average of the last second or so to stabalize the number, and with only slightly more cleverness you can ensure that if that number is flopping between two close numbers like "74" and "75" that you'll suppress that.
(You may even be able to kill two birds with one stone here; I'd suspect, though I'd want to test, that an algorithm that says "Don't change the number on the display unless it is more than 1 mph (maybe 2kph) off" would fix most problems.)
Which brings up why I think this whole project is dangerous; this sort of stuff is non-trivial, and I for one wouldn't care to have information critical to my life running on something I whipped up yesterday because I thought it was cool. (I would be confident I could do something with user testing support, but it would certainly take many iterations to get all the bugs and suboptimal behavior out.) We all know how good most programmers are at user-friendly interfaces, so good that I feel I should point out that "user-friendly" also encompasses presenting relevant information in a format that is easy to read since the evidence suggests a lot of programmers haven't caught on to that facet either. Also note the distinction between "bug" and "suboptimal behavior" in my parenthetical, another distinction a lot of programmers miss; functional can be the enemy of usable. I can't wait until you're programming your car dashboard. (Might learn something about the subject, though.)
It's a free country, of course, but if I got the car hacking urge, I'd much rather hack up my radio than my dashboard.
That might work. You're getting into arms race mode, though; it'd be easy to lie to the server you just spammed with any nice page, even including a nice link to the site you just spammed, while being a spam page for everybody else. The text your Bayes filter recieves no longer necessarily matches what is being sent out. That wouldn't be perfect, but that won't bother the spammers.
Remember, in general, against an intelligent human attacker, only intelligent human vigilence can win. You can "what if, what if, what if" to your heart's content and it can even be fun, but you can't write a program to defeat a determined intelligent human all by itself.
As for your first paragraph which boils down to "But I think it would work", I would encourage you to try it. Maybe I'm wrong. But I've done my time with Bayesian filters, and in my considered and dare I say expert opinion, you're not going to be able to Bayes filter incoming HTTP requests meaningfully. It's only an opinion, but it's an informed one, and it'll take a bit more than "I've tried the PHP module and it learns pretty fast" to change my mind.
It seems extremely unlikely to me that a Bayesian filter could work. There isn't enough for it to get a hold of. Plus, too much of the referrer spam is entirely new sites, which can be made up arbitrarily.
Bayesian filters are cool and all, but they aren't magic. If you don't understand them, then when you're wondering "why hasn't somebody tried using a Bayesian filter for this problem?", the answer is probably "because it isn't an appropriate solution". After they got popular for spam, there was a mini-renaissance where people applied them to everything... mostly with mixed or poor results.
Bayes requires a lot of tokens in a relatively constrained domain to work; all English and English-like words used to spam things is fairly constrained vs. the number of times you'll recieve them as spam. Each referrer spamming only gives you very limited info, and the range of domains is much wider... until you see "psxtreme.com" actually go by, you can't have a clue whether it is spam or not, and the fact that "ilovemycheese.com" is spam can't help you decide. This explanation is in non-technical English and is a deliberate simplification.
if you're still posting any kind of statistics or referrers publicly, stop. Spammers wouldn't do this if Bloggers didn't publish that kind of abusable data.
They don't bother checking to see if your site publishes their referrers publically. I don't and I have it anyhow, of course. Also note my site uses a fairly obscure weblogging platform (PyDS), and that I've also customized the templates until there's no recoginizable signiture of any platform on my site, and I was still getting hammered.
I've gone with an.htaccess solution. Here's what I'm currently using, updated just today, based on this:
You'll get spaces in that of course thanks to Slashdot, so either filter them out, or grab it here. (That's a symlink to the real thing, so it includes a couple of things you don't need; if you understand Apache enough to use this, it should be obvious which that is.)
Don't forget to update the first RewriteCond line to match your server name.
Unfortunately, this has known false positives, but nothing too bad for me yet. But this approach won't scale; we'll either need something more sophisticated, or to make it less useful for referrer spammers until they stop doing it. (The recent "nofollow" tag is a good start, since it's Yet Another way to try to steal Google Juice.)
Slashdot Mirror
I just offered to upgrade my wife off of my Duron 800 to a Mac Mini and she declined, citing that exact argument.
I don't *quite* know if that's 2000 vintage, but it's gotta be close.
By including details, which happen to be common to other tellings of the story, yes. The USS Coral Sea, a real ship, never had any such encounter.
You lose big Karma points for posting a Snopes story as truth.
Snopes... if it sounds too good or too funny to be true, you should probably check Snopes. Otherwise, those of us who have will mercilessly mock you.
Ah, apologies. It's complete impossible to tell that apart from the bitching that has lately come into vogue on slashdot... "Hey, if you're going to post something about HTTP what about explaining the acronym to us?"
Explanation.
(Not explaining acronyms is one thing...)
This differs in a lot of ways, to the point where they aren't even remotely comparable. Most notably, old computers aren't a commodity; you can't take one old computer and reliably substitute it for another.
This is in contrast to new computers, which mostly are; you can pretty much take a new desktop and substitute it for another in the majority of applications. (Of course, there are special needs sometimes, so it isn't purely a commodity.)
This neither counters my supply-demand point, nor my point that you can't, for free, bash old computers into a "commodity" status, it takes time to work them over. Your example is pretty orthogonal to my points.
But it is a good point, and as someone who tries to be a "rational environmentalist" why I believe a suitably adjusted capitalism is the best thing for the environment; inefficiencies have costs to the business, and by "suitably adjusted" I mean making sure that is always the case and they can't externalize the costs. The old saw about the Indians using all of the buffalo while the colonists didn't is no longer applicable; thanks to the forces you describe, we're more efficient than the Indians could have been even in theory. A little too efficient sometimes... we shouldn't feed animals other dead animals of their species.... (I think that cost has been "de-externalized", i.e., "outlawed", but I've heard compliance isn't all you'd like.)
That's true, but much of the velocity is dissipated in space, where it's free to radiate.
LOL. Literally. That's just unphysical gibberish. Do you write for Star Trek?
Besides, I think this is the wrong way to do things anyway. Use the asteroids directly as habitats, spinning them for gravity.
From the mouths of babes...
"Velocity radiation"... *chuckle*
JPEGs.
Seriously?
Nope, that's not "stunning" incompetence anymore, but it's still incompetent.
The correct format choices were ".gif" (864,054 -> 4961) or ".png" (-> 4370), and these are lossless.
Still not impressed; it really only adds to my initial impression of incompetence, not removes it.
Looking at old PowerBooks (Pre-PowerPC), you can get several color screen PowerBooks for under $50.
No, you can't. You can get a PowerBook for $50. You can not get millions of PowerBooks for $50, for two reasons, each sufficient on their own: One, there aren't that many on the market, the supply is finite and you can not "create" new used products at any useful rate, and two, when you raise the demand, you'll raise the price and they won't be $50 anymore. Economics 101.
Besides, if you're going to create $100 laptops, believe me, you're not going to create a totally new laptop chipset, graphics card, processor, etc. These new $100 laptops will have vastly more "proven" technology than "a random used computer with an unknown history". Seriously, you'll spend more than $100 in time just vetting each machine, installing the build of software that works on this one (but not its neighbor), testing it to make sure it, ya know, works, and by the time all's said and done you're better off just making a new machine.
Your sentiment is a good one for individuals ("he said as he posted to Slashdot from a house that still doesn't have a single GHz machine"), but it is not at all a valid criticism of Negroponte's plan, as it is 100% impractical for his needs on multiple levels.
(I can almost read the replies to this in advance, and all I can say is, wishing doesn't make it so. People who wish to prove me, and the laws of economics, wrong, are invited to go ahead and actually try it. You won't be the first person to break themselves on the laws of supply and demand and the fact that labor can't be valued at $0.)
Bitmaps? Bitmap images? You voluntarily submitted an article to Slashdot that uses bitmap images? Every single image on that site is 800KB . Or more!
And no, they didn't use actual thumbnails for the images, they link these monstrous images and resize them with HTML.
I don't just not trust the reviewer, I don't trust the site! That is some seriously stunning incompetence for a website.
(Of course, this will either be fixed, or you later "readers" won't be able to get through to the hammered server.)
If you really want to read this and you are on dial-up, don't bother loading the images, they're just "screenshots" of console applications (yes, that's right, 2000 chars of text and some color information; we're talking an image that even with a really crappy 'bitmap' style encoding of the text would only have 4000 bytes was blown up to over a megabyte in some cases), that typically have almost no useful information anyhow.
Remember that modern machines are, essentially, supercomputers. It's easy to forget that a machine with 1% of the power, running software designed to have that much power, can still blaze, and Linux still all has the software from that era.
In fact, if someone puts a bit of work into it, these laptops may have a higher subjective speed than a brand-new laptop would right now. Of course, you too could have that blazing speed if you worked purely in a console, but most of us don't want to work that way.
Using slower memory and even a massively slower processor isn't necessarily a problem. I remember using a 486/33, the first IBM I ever had, and the only thing that slowed that thing down was Windows 3.1. Nowadays I'd expect a 200-ish MHz Pentium level to be nearly free in volume discount, and I had a similar class machine screaming for a good long time. If you stick to the console, it's quite usable and capable at 64MB of relatively slow ram. (I don't know if they can work in 128 at this price point, and in the other direction, 32MB would be fine but the textbook display apps might have to be custom-written and/or customized to fit in that space; you sure aren't going to load X + Adobe Acrobat into that space.)
What you do is take the first half of the mass and put it into retrograde orbits around the planet, then you take the second half, in slightly larger chunks, and put them in prograde orbits. Then you perturb the orbits. This should result in lots of small chunks raining down all over Mars in a slightly prograde direction (so the rotation isn't much affected).
That's a great plan, but thanks to conservation of energy, it doesn't affect the problem I outlined one bit. (I'm assuming by the fact you replied you think it affects it somehow, if not ignore.) Drop the matter fast, drop the matter slow (by human standards), it doesn't change the number of joules the system needs to radiate away. (Throw them together really fast and you add kinetic energy to the mix, but in the interests of fairness we can just ignore that.)
All of the gravitational potential energy goes somewhere. All of it. There is no gaming the system, there is no getting around it, there are no loopholes, there is no (significant in any way unless you want to completely throw away physics) room for me to be in error on this point; the only question is what the exact numbers are. Any mass that would noticably alter the gravity of Mars would impart an unbelievable amount of energy to Mars as heat.
Conservation of energy is the first thing people forget when they become budding celestial mechanics, mostly because it works in ways people are not used to thinking of. Mars isn't at all like a ball of clay you can hold in your hand. Adding mass to Mars is nothing at all like smooshing a bit more clay onto your ball. Your Earthy instincts and imagination are of no use in understanding what happens when significant planetary bodies collide. (Fortunately, the science at this level is fairly simple, Newton could have figured it out.) You can't grow Mars by any significant amount in any reasonable amount of time without also rendering it completely uninhabitable for a long time.
Hello, Big Number Fallacy!
Boy, that's just over a year old and it's almost like I custom wrote it for your post.
The problem with that idea is "conservation of energy".
Take two inert rocks the size of mars, and suppose they are distant enough initially that they can be treated as point masses w.r.t. each other. Compute the amount of potential energy in the system. (Equality of mass is for convenience.)
Next, distribute that energy evenly amoungst the rest of the mass to find the temperature rise that would convert to.
Finally, compute how long it would take that energy to radiate into space so we could actually stand on this body.
I won't do the math (no time, but props to anyone who posts it), but I suspect it'd be at a minimum thousands of years before we could use Mars. Plus, we stripped the atmosphere during this operation, as would any other attempt to bulk up the mass in any non-astronomical time.
It's not a bad idea per se, but you have remember all of your physics, in particular conservation of energy. (This is all "high school-if-you-were-paying-attention physics, though.) No matter how you slice it, you're going to beat the hell out of the planet and it's going to be a long time before it is usable.
If you put your foot on a back corner (Downleft or sometimes Downright) and it triggers Up, then you have the game set up for controllers rather than for dance pads. In Konamix, DDRMAX, and DDRMAX2, you can turn off "DANCE PLAY" in the options, but in DDR Extreme (U), you can't.
:-) )
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I would have caught that and that isn't it. It false-triggers sometimes even when no-one is on the mat at all. It is pretty clearly a mat failure.
(In fact, I noticed almost immediately that the buttons weren't laid out physically like they are on the controller, which I found strange. I presume there are historical reasons for that.)
Also thanks for the link. You may find this interesting: I am in the market for exactly one pad. My wife has told me, flat out, that she prefers not knowing how much better at it I am than she is. Given some of our other experiences with trying to game with each other, she is probably right. (Amongst the gaming hardcore, I'd rank pretty low. But that's still my category, whereas my wife is in the "owned a Nintendo but didn't play with it obsessively" category; competent, but in head to head with about anything I come out pretty reliably on top, and she's smart enough to know when I've thrown it so that's no option either. I would guess a lot of Slashdotters know what I mean... and no stereotype posts, please
Ah, a perfect illustration of what I mean.
It's not just the literal information the guages are carrying. If you write something that is inadvertantly hard to read, and it takes you a second to puzzle it out, that's a second you're not looking at the road, which I'm sure you'll agree is a life critical issue. Certainly nobody can drive with their eyes on the road literally 100% of the time, but every moment you aren't looking at the road better have a direct and important payoff, and "puzzling out the meaning of things that should be understood at a glance" doesn't meet that. That could be the second that matters.
The information on the dash is life-critical, in that poorly-written gauges could make the difference. It's not like you're going to crash in five minutes after doing this hack, it's all a matter of probabilities, but it's not worth toying with in this particular manner.
This is a perfect example of the kind of blinders programmers are typically armed with and that I was talking about, especially in a domain like this where the UI is essentially optimal (at least locally) and familiarity has bred contempt. With user interfaces, the issues go beyond mere existance of information; presentation matters.
Well, how can they review it if the wireless doesn't work? :p
... because based on my experience, that is not a safe assumption. Although in this case, I'd say it's one major flaw ("it completely doesn't work") masking a somewhat less major flaw ("it's too cheap"... you can't, fundamentally, fault someone for making something too cheaply... you did, after all, buy it). But still, fun quote.
Sorry, that was more the point I was trying to make; upon re-reading you are right that it looks like I'm complaining. What was that line from Douglas Adams about Sirius Cybernetics...? "Their superficial design flaws merely masked the existance of deep design flaws" or something like that. I mention that quote because it applies here...
"On the bright side, it feels squishy, and I think it would be safe to assume that if the console was receiving signals it would be getting them accurately and instantly."
If it's firing falsely and not springing back up, it sounds like one of the foam sensor separators has been crushed. I'm guessing they have been dancing with shoes, which is usually what leads to that situation.
:-), there were no instructions included whatsoever.) I only relatively recently noticed how often it is false-triggering during normal use, even on buttons that our feet are nowhere near.
:-)
Unfortunately, I can't tell for how long it has been doing it. We started as rank beginners and I'm still a long way from finishing Tsugaru on Heavy, let alone Extreme (I've got DDRMAX2, translate those terms as necessary and I'm assuming it's the same basic Tsugaru I'm thinking of; even so, you probably know what I mean.), so we didn't fully understand what was going on, nor did we really know that the pad "felt wrong", if you know what I mean, since we didn't have a "feel". I know since the time I took it out of the box, "up" has been hypersensitive, and we may also have damaged it in the beginning even more because we didn't figure out where the foam goes until about week two. (Somewhat embarassing, but I would point out in my defense that not only did I not have a clue, which is a natural phase we all go through
We've pretty much always gone without shoes; I can't guarantee it's never seen them, but it wouldn't be much.
I just really started noticing the lack of un-firing lately, because I've been developing my "not-returning-to-center" skills and that's caused the problem to surface; if I'm doing two LR jump in a row, I have to remember to jump extra high to give the sensors time to untrigger, or if I was holding on L and I have to use it, I have to go unnaturally high to make sure I don't come down on it too soon.
or a used metal pad. But if you're not about to mess around trying to solder sensors onto a homebrew hard mat, the Ignition really is the way to go.
Given the apartment situation I'm in, I couldn't come up with a plausible storage scenario for a metal mat. (Don't worry campers, I'm on the bottom floor! It's concrete below me.) I slide the soft one upright behind the couch (I've already figured I need to minimize folding it), but a metal one would cause wall damage over time. That applies to most ways of hacking the mat to make it solid, too. Otherwise maybe I'd go that route. But at the moment, the Cadillac of soft mats will have to do. It'll be a while before we need more; improvement takes time! Even as I know what I'm doing wrong and "know" how to fix it, converting that into muscle memory is not something you can do just by wishing
I asked my mother for one for Christmas.
I really should have known better.
I got this Intec one that I can't find a link to online anymore. It looks just like their wireless one, but it isn't wireless. It's hard to correlate it to the reviews for other products, as it is the only pad I've ever used (never even used a real arcade game) and all the reviews for the wireless pad, assuming the hardware is identical, that I've found so far focus on the fact that the wireless doesn't work and they don't even get to reviewing the pad.
Even so, that is not confidence inspiring, no?
At any rate, it has served its true purpose. We know we like it and I always planned to get a "real" pad if so.
We just got into DDR this Christmas. Money is tight at the moment but the next scheduled luxury purchase is now a RedOctane dance mat, the soft $100 one. We have a cheaper one now and it is now ruining my score from false triggering (just sitting there with nobody on it, it fires) and not releasing the trigger correctly. (I'm on the verge of getting the easy AAA's in Light mode and starting to move up to Standard, but the pad makes that impossible.)
I think the key is to avoid the Education Game Trap (it's quite similar); the quickest way to a crappy "educational" game is to take the same-old, same-old and bolt it on to one of the Stardard Generic Game Frameworks. "Answer this math question to advance one space closer to the end." Woohoo, mommy can I please play "Advance The Squares"?
Similarly, I've seen people bolt a crappy racing game onto an exercise bike that in essense consisted of a line advancing forward that you had to stay ahead of, or lose. Woohoo, mommy can I please play "Finish The Boring Task In The Alloted Time"?
DDR isn't trying to make you exercise, but if you expect to play at the higher levels, you'll be sweating.
I'd also love to see a traditional car combat or 'kart' racing game that ran on a bike that you could turn, that used your pedaling as the acceleration with adjustable levels. See, the fun would be the cart game, the exercise the means to an end, instead of the explicit and boring goal.
I thought I didn't like to exercise. Turns out it was the boredom of doing laps that was killing me (semi-literally).
The real world works like this, too, after all, so this should hardly be a shock. Which is more fun, running a mile for no real reason, or a game of soccer, basketball, or water polo? Why do people insist that exercise has to be boring? That's really a relatively recent "innovation", you know. Maybe there's a reason that innovation has coincided with people dying due to lack of exercise?
I think for that, I'd use a linear guage like a progress bar, which you can update as often as you like and let the LCD take care of blurring it "in hardware" (when life hands you lemons, make lemonade :-) ). The number can be a running average of the last second or so to stabalize the number, and with only slightly more cleverness you can ensure that if that number is flopping between two close numbers like "74" and "75" that you'll suppress that.
(You may even be able to kill two birds with one stone here; I'd suspect, though I'd want to test, that an algorithm that says "Don't change the number on the display unless it is more than 1 mph (maybe 2kph) off" would fix most problems.)
Which brings up why I think this whole project is dangerous; this sort of stuff is non-trivial, and I for one wouldn't care to have information critical to my life running on something I whipped up yesterday because I thought it was cool. (I would be confident I could do something with user testing support, but it would certainly take many iterations to get all the bugs and suboptimal behavior out.) We all know how good most programmers are at user-friendly interfaces, so good that I feel I should point out that "user-friendly" also encompasses presenting relevant information in a format that is easy to read since the evidence suggests a lot of programmers haven't caught on to that facet either. Also note the distinction between "bug" and "suboptimal behavior" in my parenthetical, another distinction a lot of programmers miss; functional can be the enemy of usable. I can't wait until you're programming your car dashboard. (Might learn something about the subject, though.)
It's a free country, of course, but if I got the car hacking urge, I'd much rather hack up my radio than my dashboard.
That might work. You're getting into arms race mode, though; it'd be easy to lie to the server you just spammed with any nice page, even including a nice link to the site you just spammed, while being a spam page for everybody else. The text your Bayes filter recieves no longer necessarily matches what is being sent out. That wouldn't be perfect, but that won't bother the spammers.
Remember, in general, against an intelligent human attacker, only intelligent human vigilence can win. You can "what if, what if, what if" to your heart's content and it can even be fun, but you can't write a program to defeat a determined intelligent human all by itself.
As for your first paragraph which boils down to "But I think it would work", I would encourage you to try it. Maybe I'm wrong. But I've done my time with Bayesian filters, and in my considered and dare I say expert opinion, you're not going to be able to Bayes filter incoming HTTP requests meaningfully. It's only an opinion, but it's an informed one, and it'll take a bit more than "I've tried the PHP module and it learns pretty fast" to change my mind.
AC says: See the first post in this discussion for how to whitelist certain referer words.
:-)
Thanks. I figured there was something easy to do but I didn't care to dig too deeply
It seems extremely unlikely to me that a Bayesian filter could work. There isn't enough for it to get a hold of. Plus, too much of the referrer spam is entirely new sites, which can be made up arbitrarily.
Bayesian filters are cool and all, but they aren't magic. If you don't understand them, then when you're wondering "why hasn't somebody tried using a Bayesian filter for this problem?", the answer is probably "because it isn't an appropriate solution". After they got popular for spam, there was a mini-renaissance where people applied them to everything... mostly with mixed or poor results.
Bayes requires a lot of tokens in a relatively constrained domain to work; all English and English-like words used to spam things is fairly constrained vs. the number of times you'll recieve them as spam. Each referrer spamming only gives you very limited info, and the range of domains is much wider... until you see "psxtreme.com" actually go by, you can't have a clue whether it is spam or not, and the fact that "ilovemycheese.com" is spam can't help you decide. This explanation is in non-technical English and is a deliberate simplification.
They don't bother checking to see if your site publishes their referrers publically. I don't and I have it anyhow, of course. Also note my site uses a fairly obscure weblogging platform (PyDS), and that I've also customized the templates until there's no recoginizable signiture of any platform on my site, and I was still getting hammered.
I've gone with an
Don't forget to update the first RewriteCond line to match your server name.
Unfortunately, this has known false positives, but nothing too bad for me yet. But this approach won't scale; we'll either need something more sophisticated, or to make it less useful for referrer spammers until they stop doing it. (The recent "nofollow" tag is a good start, since it's Yet Another way to try to steal Google Juice.)