if ST:TNG was bad sci-fi, what the HELL was Voyager?
The only romance series on television to successfully promote cross-species romance. I mean, hell, one of the babies born in the series had freaken' horns on its head! What soap opera can claim that?
but that rate can grow to 80 percent over the next decade if games become more appealing to a wider audience.
You, we hear this over and over again, but rather then actually trying to expand the market, we get the same POS "women's" or "girl's" games over and over again. They fail, every time. Meanwhile, if they'd just take a look around at what women are playing, or even (*gasp!*) commision an actually scientific survey, they'd learn what quite a lot of us already know.
Which is that A: some of it's sheer social stigma and you're mostly just going to have to wait for that to go away and B: while you can't generalize 100% women and girls seem to go for puzzle games and what I think of as "lower-stakes" games (like puzzle games).
My wife enjoyed the original Dungeon Keeper, and her usual strategy was to lovingly craft the dungeon and built up her forces, this being the part of the game she enjoyed, so that when the final battle took place it was a massacre. She didn't really like combat whos outcome was in doubt. Those are my favorites, of course, being the male pig that I am. I can't be 100% certain "prefers low-stakes gaming" is a valid generalization (and again I remind you it's only a trend, not an absolute; women get addicted to real gambling with real money sometimes too) without a formal study but I think there's something to it.
People often speculate that women will prefer "social" games but from what I see both genders prefer "social" games, it's just the type of "social" differs, and is only correlated with gender, not determined. Much like the real world, where we all have the same theoretical options but we all choose what we do differently, you don't need to "try" to provide "women-friendly" social mechanisms, just provide a wide variety of mechanisms and let people gravitate to the ones they like. MMORPG can be treated like a random chat, a virtually-loner game with sophisticated NPCs, a social club via clans, and any combination thereof, and that covers pretty much everything.
And finally, 10 or 20 years of video game history shows "trying" too hard to make a game that will appeal to your highly chauvinistic view of women doesn't work, either. "35-year-old women like makeup, right? We'll make a game about applying makeup!" Sheesh.
A corporation does by definition have one right, the right to enter into binding contracts indepedently of the underlying people it is composed of. This one isn't going away, nor should it; without a contract from our cable company there's no way to ensure they deliver the promised service, and while the corresponding legal shelter that implies (i.e., in general when you sue a corporation the people inside aren't directly, personally responsible for the lawsuit, the corporation is) is sometimes abused, it's also largely a good idea; damn near everyone has worked for a corporation that has at one time or another been sued and none of us could ever do anything productive if we were afraid of being personally responsible for everything.
(That sounds horrible on a first approximation but it is very true when you think about it further. Take the famous McDonald's case where the lady won millions for burning herself with coffee. Putting aside the merits or lack thereof of the case, would you work for minimum wage if you could subsequently be held directly responsible for those millions of dollars because it happened to be you serving that coffee that day, in accordance with McDonald's policy? Would anybody work anywhere? We'd all be pushing for the miminum liabity jobs, but somebody has to serve coffee, or drive trucks, or write mission-critical software, or any number of other activities that could potentially generate liability.)
If they don't have those rights, they don't exist at all, and that would IMHO be a net negative. (No Intel = no fast computer chips; fabrication plants cost billions and no corporations makes that virtually impossible. And I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that no computers would be a massive net loss to society, and that's just one example.) But other then that, I'd agree they don't need much else, if anything, and indeed really need some special limitations on larger companies.
Perhaps saying that "corporations have no rights" is going too far; corporations do consist of people which have rights and so inevitably they must have some as well. For instance, even if "a corporation" does not have "the right to free speech", they can simply pay an employee to use their right to free speech on their behalf. Which is in fact how they "speak", since no speech can occur without somebody finally giving the final go-ahead to "speak" it (where "speak" is some domain-specific action, like "publish", "answer question", etc.).
But there is the need to recognize that corporations are inherently larger then individuals and as a result there is an inherent asymmetry in the power, and it is unjust to translate that directly into more legal power.
The problem is quite simply one of man power. Today, I have roughly 16 hours of wakefulness, assuming an 8-hour sleep cycle. Every workday, a corporation receives on average slightly more then eight man-hours from each employee. That is to say, for a 10,000 person company, for my 16 hours today, that company received 80,000 man-hours of life, 5000 times more then me.
Now suppose this company sues me, and we get into a protracted, drawn out lawsuit that occurs over the course of a year, and consumes roughly a quarter of my year meeting with lawyers, rotting in jail, preparing defense, worrying such that I can't productively do anything else, etc. (That's probably conservative on my part; it could easily completely destroy my year.) If I live a nearly-average (and conviently rounded) 75 years, that's a third of a percent of my entire life. (If you're willing to call it the entire year, that's one and a third of a percent of my life! If I died tommorow, that would be a full 4% of my life, as I'm near a rounded-by-luck 25.)
Let us suppose this lawsuit also eats four lawyers and the equivalent of one administrator year, for a total of 50 * 5 (fifty weeks, five days a week) * 40 (forty hours a week) * 5 (five people) = 50,000 thousand man-hours. Now, that may sound like a lot...... but it's only 62.5% of ONE single day for the aforementioned 10,000 person company (of which there are many).
Corporations shouldn't necessarily be held "rightless", and probably can't be, but they certainly should not be considered "people". If they really were people, they'd be some pretty strange, and pretty powerful, people. One might even call them "superhuman"... correctly.
The Michigan State University Computer Science department has managed both. I do not personally know how the admins found the machines to be, so you'd have to contact them. I do know they had two Linux labs and cut it back down to one, but I don't know the reasoning (or if it's still that way). I'll refrain from speculating because I don't think that would help any.
Hint hint to all the budding Linux advocates who have no experience managing labs of any machines, let alone these two specifically... speculation isn't really useful and this is a really specific use case. With computer science users you have to assume both "knowlegable" idiots, and some quite knowlegable malicious attacks.
For a specific latter of the former, we'd do OS projects that involved using the operating system support for semaphores. In Solaris (at the time we were doing this, I don't know about now), there were a very specific number of semaphores that could exist, and since certain parts of the operating system also used them, a single poorly-written program involving semaphores could easily consume them all. "Knowlegable idiots." (I didn't actually do this, but only because I caught my error while I was compiling it... if I'd run the resulting executable I'm about 80% certain I too would have DOS'ed the machine... definately a "do it early" assignment! This class, IIRC, was eventually allocated the aforementioned Linux lab because they kept hosing all the other class's homeworks, which were typically all due at midnight on various Mondays.)
As for the latter, I'm sure you are all aware of the number of security vulnerabilities in things that involve having console access or other otherwise "legitimate" access to the system.
I'd be the first to agree (hey, I am, in fact), but I do believe that there's a moral and pragmatic foundation behind copy rights. The problem is that the law isn't consistent, and it isn't clear. Until we can get it cleared up, all that the RIAA can do to support their (theoretically moral, pragmatic) position is to play the cards as they're dealt.
You may find this interesting. The final bit of it should be posted this week; I've got it written now but I need to revise it, and I'm having writing trouble with the conclusion (which will probably be resolved soon).
It could revolutionize the way trusted data is passed if it works successfully for an RBL. I'd do it myself, but I'm beyond short of time, and brains for that matter:)
You're not short of time; creating the system you describe (assuming good client software) hardly takes longer then typing your post did.
Instead of having your RBL list sourced from the HTTP net, have the RBL-client download the list periodically by running a quick invocation of fcptools.
Somebody has to publish it, but you could start by simply mirroring an existing list. The publisher's life is a little harder; they need to learn how to use SSK keys, get one, and learn how to post periodic content, but we're still talking half an hour. Moreover, you won't even necessarily be personally identifiable.
A Freenet implementation is not a pipe-dream that would take months of highly-skilled developer time to implement, it's something anybody could do in about half-an-hour, if the RBL clients are configurable enough to take the RBL lists from varying sources like a shell script and not just HTTP. I don't believe in RBL lists because I believe they are censorship, so I'm not going to do this, but it would take so little effort you'll be astounded. You could do it over a lunchbreak.
sahalx partially replied to your point but to someone not already familiar with Freenet I'm not sure they'll understand why (s)he's right.
And you would trust this file enough to block email based on it's contents??? Accountability is the biggest problem with RBLs, and moving it to a completely anonymous system would loose the last level of trust that they currently have...
Freenet is not a "completely anonymous system" in the sense you seem to be using it. While you can not trace a file back to the owner necessarily, it is possible through the use of the SSK mechanism that sahalx mentioned to establish that a file came from the same source as another file.
Therefore, in conjunction with some of the other features of Freenet, once you decided you trusted a particular blocking list, perhaps one specifically mentioned on the former website of the blocking site, you can be reasonably confident that only that person is posting a block list to that file, short of someone breaking into their computer and stealing their key. (Which if they are good enough to not store the private key in their computer, perhaps by writing it down and typing it or eventually even just memorizing it, isn't possible either.)
Therefore, Freenet is perfectly capable of filling this role. You may not know that "Person X" is accountable, but you can know "Key 7ch3babf83jcn1qws9c://rbl.txt is reliable, and by extension the owner of key 7ch3babf83jcn1qws9c is reliable." and that's good enough for all but the most paranoid folk... and even if it DOES go bad, you tell your software to ignore it and move on to something else.
In fact, Freenet is probably superior to HTTP because of the signing, esp. w/ memorized or physically written keys. (Hopefully conventional RBLs are already signing their lists and hopefully you're using the signitures; I don't know what the state of the art is because I believe RBLs are censorship and do not use them. But I recognize not everyone agrees with this so discussing how to do them better and more securely doesn't give me too much cognitive dissonance.)
Also see the Freenet FAQ. (Freenet's documentation seems to come and go; right now it seems to be at a low period. I remember better discussion pages for "What is an SSK?" but I can't seem to find them from the site now and Google searching for it gets swamped by references to actual SSK-addressed files.)
Oh, that's comforting. It's OK for everyone else to lose their privacy, no big deal.
That very well may be, and probably is, but the possesion of that privilege does not nullify a more fundamental right to privacy.
It most definitely **IS**.
Uh, classic example of reading what you expected your opponent to say rather then what they did say. Re-read that more closely.... or perhaps for the first time. Your opponent never claimed that driving was anything but a privilege.
Me, I'll submit that just because X is a privilege does not automatically mean that the government can impose whatever the hell it feels like and issue a "like it or lump it" directive. Moreover:
Abuse that privilege by driving recklessly, and you'll see it pulled from you presto.
I'd say that sounds like a "right" you're describing. Rights get retracted when abused, and are basically the natural order of things. Licensing is a pretty minimal step, all things considered. "Priviledges", such as driving the BIG rigs, acquiring the right to call oneself an engineer in states that require licensing to do so (and those exams aren't pushovers), or exerting the powers of an elected office, are earned.
You might define "right" and "priviledge" differently... but my point is you didn't at all. You labor mightily on a semantic point you don't actually make, you just imply, as if we all agree what a "right" is vs. a "privilege". (I'd also submit it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy, which incidentally preempts one of the points you're extremely likely to try to make with regard to my previous paragraph.)
Finally, I appreciate your honesty in admitting you don't have a car and don't intend to (bragging?), but I can't say I care much for the input of a person who won't be affected by the laws in question, especially as combined with your demonstrated lack of enough care to even read what people have to say about it. It's like when Congress passes laws that they exempt themselves from; it's damned easy to pass or promote regulations you won't be held to.
(And I'll bet half my karma you live in a highly urban area.)
This will guve them what... a $100 advantage to the XB, which M$ probably can't afford to drop any lower since they're already losing money on each console manufactured.
This is Microsoft here... the only reason they're not giving them away free in cereal boxes is that it would be egregious product dumping and found illegal. (Well, maybe not the only reason, there are issues of consumer expectations and such, but Microsoft has the cash and the apparent desire.)
This also puts the GC on the same value as the GBA [Jerf adds SP, the GBA is IIRC $60 or $70], which should prevent Nintendo from "shooting themselves in the foot" (not really happening though) with the price difference between GC and GBA SP. (My next guess is a buy one get one half off deal if this doesn't work.)
Thinking as a consumer this seems a bit odd somehow, though I can't put my finger on it. Putting the two side-by-side, it really seems like the GBA SP ought to be cheaper. There's the size thing, and the power thing.
Note I'm deliberately being fuzzy; I understand from an economic viewpoint intellectually, I'm saying that this feels wrong.
Give the SP a $10 or better, $20 price drop, or bundle an extra controller or cheap-ass but high-quality super-star game like a Zelda (remember the physical games are dirt cheap which is why those bundles work economically in the first place) and raise the GC price $10 or $20 and it would feel more, more, I don't know but the closest word that comes to mind is honest.
In fact, given that Nintendo has tons of first-party content, and that the discs themselves are cheap, go ahead and ship in the Gamecube box a couple of old Nintendo megahits, like Lugui's Mansion and/or Mario Sunshine; I know it won't look good on paper but I think Nintendo needs to consider the marketing value. Consoles build "mindshare" not by traditional ad campaigns but by being used; they are unusual that way. If people who frugal enough to be attracted by this price drop end up going home with one game (and worse, it sucks...) Nintendo can lose badly, perhaps worse then if they never bought a system at all. It's time to pull out the stops.
Of course this won't happen.;-) (And maybe it shouldn't; I have neither the data nor the desire to do a full economic analysis. But I do think it may be time for Nintendo to make a gutsy move or two that conservative analysis says won't succeed; "conservative analysis" says the Gamecube is doomed, so it's time to throw out that playbook.)
I don't remember them being $50 each, the way GameCube games are now.
An Intellivision game (one generation back from the Nintendo) could be produced by one person in a few months.
A modern game requires resources comparable to a major motion picture.
I don't know what the Intellivision games cost, because those days predate any concept of money I might have had. But it's rather impressive how much more $50 buys then it used to, even over the NES days. Personally, I consider video games a steal. (Especially when you buy them for less then $50.)
At least the good ones.
50$ isn't that bad, really. If you want cheap games you need to go with computers, or scrounge for used consoles. (Professional used game stores used to be viable options but they seem to have jacked their prices up a lot. I honestly wonder if tripling the prices has been a gain for them.)
Re:If you could b Neal,you'll probably his stuff d
on
Quicksilver
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A message that boils down to "get off your high horse" then includes shit like "I certainly hope you are under 30." is thoroughly uncompelling. You may like it; I don't respect your opinion any after that dreck you wrote.
You read arrogance into a message where it didn't exist because you reflected your own arrogance into it. HAND.
Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors.
How you hope to defeat a perfect machieennnneee-chine-(sweating)-perfect-sheen.....
(sorry that's real audio... seems some loser ripped all the sounds are real audio and everybody copied him. if I can find a wav later I'll post a reply)
If you could b Neal,you'll probably his stuff dull
on
Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
If you could write what he writes (on a technical level, not necessarily with the same flair), you'll probably find his stuff dull.
I couldn't palate the Cryponomicon because I found his diversions atrociously boring. Why? Well, they tended to be about Computer Science, and I have a Masters in the subject. Reading a simplified description of Turing Machines does not get my blood pumping anymore; been there, done that.
Stephenson's works are like one big ad for various things. I think I would have loved Cryptonomicon as a kid, but now it's dull because it's mostly old hat.
And speaking as someone who can dissociate the story from the diversions, believe me, the stories are thin, thin, thin! (Probably could fit in 100 pages or less.)
Objectively speaking, the Cryptonomicon is a very bad story, wrapped in a whole bunch of anecdotes that aren't even "fractally" related to the story (a BS characterization, BTW), because there's nearly no story for them to be related to. Personally I think Neal would be better off writing various coherent columns and skipping the story. But perhaps the story functions as the sugar that makes the medicine go down; goodness knows he gets enough worship on forums like this to show he's got some kind of good deal that work$ for him.
I'm not going to insult anyone for loving the Cryptonomicon, but it's a series of columns in Scientific American masquerading as a novel. If you like the columns, great! But that doesn't make the novel aspect any more then the thin, ratty trash it is. Don't mistake interesting mathematical tidbits for a good novel.
If I had the cash, I'd buy an XBox in addition to my GBA. Meanwhile, the GBA (SP, actually) is my primary console, and my DreamCast mostly sits in the cabinet.
Why? Consoles thrive on their ease of use. Since the Gameboy has a built in screen, there are no cables to hassle with. Gameboys really are just "stick the catridge in and turn it on"... anywhere. (Some juice is needed but I typically plug it in overnight maybe once a week, or more if it blinks the light at me. The SP is really nice that way.)
Consoles thrive on their games. Since the GBA has most/all the power of the Super Nintendo (and in some cases, I'm pretty sure it has more; Final Fantash Tactics Advance would have taxed the Super Nintendo pretty hard, I think... though I'm not sure), it's got enough power for an entire generation of successful games. But not enough power for the really complicated ones (except for the aforementioned things like FFT:A). So it really appeals to people like me who use it for filling in gaps in their time. (We don't all need FFXXIV.)
There are a lot of non-hardcore gamers who actually prefer the GBA-level of gaming, and when the PSP comes out and eventually eliminates this simplicity, there's going to be some problem reaching these people. (There's simple games on consoles too but these people don't know how to find them.) The PSP would be well-advised to license Tetris or something similar, and even strive to make it graphically simple against the temptation of using the Full Power of the PSP on Tetris. (Yikes!)
Now, I am apparently a hard-core gamer (playing them all your life will make you that way, I guess), but I still really like the GBA as a console. Because of its portability and simplicity, it's a serious contender even against the PS2. Given that right now I can really only own one console, I do not regret that that console is the GBA. (SP anyhow... I probably WOULD regret it if the only one I owned was the original GBA. See the SP with its light off in multiple conditions has really made me wonder how anybody ever played that thing!)
So when my generation becomes parents then kids will get video games the right way. But then something else will come out, like vr or some crap that I wont understand.
We really are running out of modes of experience. VR, if it's ever useful, will probably be perceived as just further glorified video games and won't really shock us that much.
And if you think I'm letting my 10-year-old son get a direct neural interconnect, you've got another think coming.
Seriously, we're running out of surprises. "Video Games" are already pretty generic.
(You might say "How can you know we're running out of surprises? Did our grandparents see video games coming?" Perhaps not, but there IS a limit to human experience: We have five senses and only so much input to them even theoretically possible. Video games will continue with the realism until they totally tap out "audio" and "visual", leaving pretty much only "virtual sex" as the only really "useful" tactile input mode. The only thing possible after that is the aforementioned "direct neural interconnect", either as a hardware device or an even-more-ambition uploading of the brain into a computer. Then, that's it; you can't get any more into the brain then that. So yes, I'm justified in this statement, because no matter what sci-fi scenario you spin, that's the top of the experience you can get.)
Managed properly (I say managed as in development code, concept usage, and production) it can be a valuable tool.
Really, that's not the point. First, "managed properly" assembly is a valuable tool; that's a useless metric.
But secondly, and more importantly, the question is not "Is Java a valuable tool?" That implies that Java just sort of exists in the void, alone, our sole choice for programming. The real question is "Is Java the best tool?"
I have to say the only reason I see to choose Java is if it has the libraries you need... and the reason it has those libraries is because large companies shoved Java down our throats until even the academics are doing "research" that involve trying to retrofit more powerful languages on top of Java. (AOP, anyone? AOP wouldn't have become a "paradigm" if we were all programming in Python, where "AOP" is so easy and natural you have to work to avoid it once you get to a certain level of sophistication!)
This is my root problem with Java; the whole thing seems foisted on us in a huge way. That doesn't make it bad. It might even be "good". But I vastly prefer languages that are thriving on their own merits, and competing without the virtues of a large corporation pushing them. You have to ask yourself how "wonderful" Java is if even with its vast resources it has not managed to corner the market. Maybe it's because there's something better out there? And how well would Java have done on its own merits? (My guess is that we'd still never have heard of it on Slashdot.)
(Hey, maybe not. But I still think the question should be asked.)
Touche.;-) (With the proper accent which I'm not sure how to type in this environment.)
Something I now wish I had posted: "There aren't any cosmic bombs waiting to go off, because on the Cosmic scale, the universe is always throwing sparks at things. If Jupiter didn't blow up during accretion, it's not going to. Every planet is constantly bombarded by high-energy cosmic rays, and constantly bombarded with high-energy kinetic impacts. Anything that can be lit off has been."
Plunging into ever increasing pressure, no one knows for sure if this will cause a chain reaction, but the potential energy and temperatures are enormous.
Are you fucking nuts? Talk about "argument from ignorance"! "I don't understand the first bit of what I'm talking about, but I'm going to babble on anyhow!"
I will personally guarentee you that vast quantities of plutonium, and for that matter every other known element, already exist in Jupiter. Just because it's a "gas planet" doesn't mean it's made entirely of gas.
Moreover, if anything was going to "set Jupiter off" it would have been set off already! Remember Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacking in Jupiter? That's huge quantities of energy, large enough to roil up clouds larger then Earth itself! And that's nothing compared to what even Earth has seen in its history, let alone the King of Planets. (There's no way to know but personally I'd bet at least one moon-sized impact has hit Jupiter in the past. Your choice of "Jovian moon-sized" or "Earth moon-sized".)
The only "danger" from forty pounds of plutonium several light minutes away are the quantities of hot air it can still generate here back on earth. Get over your pathetic 1950's-era nuclear fears already. It's just matter, not black magic!
Friction matters! Or, put another way, enough quantitative change becomes qualitative change. (That those two are a dichotomy instead of two ends of a continuum is a persistent fallacy.)
The Internet may, strictly speaking, not make anything possible that wasn't possible before. So what? Neither did telephones, automobiles, or even writing. People were talking to each other before telephones. People were moving around before automobiles. People were communication information to each other, even across great time spans, before there was writing.
To diminish the Internet as much as I am diminishing telephones, automobiles, and writing in the previous paragraph is as naive as it is in those cases. By making something easier, more people do it, more often, to more benefit to all.
I find when my Internet dies, the least tolerable thing to me is that I loose Google, which isn't a public library but sure does help me find information now. Which has in turn increased the quality of my own writing as I can support things better.
Would we have free software without the Internet? Probably, but it would be a mere shadow of what we have now, because the harder it is to communicate, the more likely the project won't form at all. Hell, would we be having this discussion without the Internet, and would it be anywhere near as large or as comprehensive?
Boo hoo, there's no "soundbite" for the Internet, therefore it must be useless. Bah!
Yeah... I thought the CS community at large mostly knew about this.
They do; my elaborations came from my compiler course. But there are a lot of people, both programmers who never took formal courses (and this is one of the examples of things that programmers very rarely learn on their own but can be very beneficial to know when you need to make that function go 20 times faster, and this is also why it's so hard to explain why a good education can still be helpful to all but the most dedicated self-learners) and people who aren't in college yet.
Those people just need a bit of help figuring out what to search for, which is why I stepped in. A simple search for aliasing is swamped by the graphical meaning of the term, which is basically completely unrelated.
I ended up with "compiler aliasing problem optimization" (no quotes in the search query itself) before I found anything.
Add to that page the fact that if a compiler can't be sure about something, the answer is typically to copy the thing it can't be sure about into a safe location, and either copy it back somewhere after the "unsafe" thing or explicitly check it for changes.
For instance, if you're calling a function and the compiler can't know what it's going to do to the caller's registers, the compiler must painstakingly copy the registers out to main memory (well, it'll probably land in L1 cache but still it could be very expensive compared to the function itself), call the function, and copy the registers back in, whereas if the compiler can know it's a little function that only uses registers X and Y, it can only save those. If you're calling lots of little functions, this can add up.
A real example of this? If you're making a static call in C to a function, the compiler can go look at the function and do this analysis. If you're calling through a pointer, a common operation (at least, I can't stand using C without it...), it can't, because that pointer could be pointing at anything, up to and including a dynamically constructed function (if you're brave). To maintain its promises to the programmer that a function call never changes the variables in the caller (which may be located in registers), it has to protect all the registers.
Aliasing is a nasty problem because it's completely opaque to the compiler; the compiler can't see through that indirect function call to the function beyond, not even in theory. As the page mentions, other techniques are being developed that don't involve that sort of opacity by working around aliasing, and the JIT compilers take a different, more dynamic tack that in theory lets them do this analysis dynamically. (The Transmeta processors can also do some of this stuff, which is one of the ways they can speed up code when they run it a lot; they can do this more expensive analysis and dynamically optimize the code.)
Slashdot Mirror
if ST:TNG was bad sci-fi, what the HELL was Voyager?
The only romance series on television to successfully promote cross-species romance. I mean, hell, one of the babies born in the series had freaken' horns on its head! What soap opera can claim that?
Take that, Danielle Steele!
but that rate can grow to 80 percent over the next decade if games become more appealing to a wider audience.
You, we hear this over and over again, but rather then actually trying to expand the market, we get the same POS "women's" or "girl's" games over and over again. They fail, every time. Meanwhile, if they'd just take a look around at what women are playing, or even (*gasp!*) commision an actually scientific survey, they'd learn what quite a lot of us already know.
Which is that A: some of it's sheer social stigma and you're mostly just going to have to wait for that to go away and B: while you can't generalize 100% women and girls seem to go for puzzle games and what I think of as "lower-stakes" games (like puzzle games).
My wife enjoyed the original Dungeon Keeper, and her usual strategy was to lovingly craft the dungeon and built up her forces, this being the part of the game she enjoyed, so that when the final battle took place it was a massacre. She didn't really like combat whos outcome was in doubt. Those are my favorites, of course, being the male pig that I am. I can't be 100% certain "prefers low-stakes gaming" is a valid generalization (and again I remind you it's only a trend, not an absolute; women get addicted to real gambling with real money sometimes too) without a formal study but I think there's something to it.
People often speculate that women will prefer "social" games but from what I see both genders prefer "social" games, it's just the type of "social" differs, and is only correlated with gender, not determined. Much like the real world, where we all have the same theoretical options but we all choose what we do differently, you don't need to "try" to provide "women-friendly" social mechanisms, just provide a wide variety of mechanisms and let people gravitate to the ones they like. MMORPG can be treated like a random chat, a virtually-loner game with sophisticated NPCs, a social club via clans, and any combination thereof, and that covers pretty much everything.
And finally, 10 or 20 years of video game history shows "trying" too hard to make a game that will appeal to your highly chauvinistic view of women doesn't work, either. "35-year-old women like makeup, right? We'll make a game about applying makeup!" Sheesh.
I do believe corporations are 'rightless' per se.
A corporation does by definition have one right, the right to enter into binding contracts indepedently of the underlying people it is composed of. This one isn't going away, nor should it; without a contract from our cable company there's no way to ensure they deliver the promised service, and while the corresponding legal shelter that implies (i.e., in general when you sue a corporation the people inside aren't directly, personally responsible for the lawsuit, the corporation is) is sometimes abused, it's also largely a good idea; damn near everyone has worked for a corporation that has at one time or another been sued and none of us could ever do anything productive if we were afraid of being personally responsible for everything.
(That sounds horrible on a first approximation but it is very true when you think about it further. Take the famous McDonald's case where the lady won millions for burning herself with coffee. Putting aside the merits or lack thereof of the case, would you work for minimum wage if you could subsequently be held directly responsible for those millions of dollars because it happened to be you serving that coffee that day, in accordance with McDonald's policy? Would anybody work anywhere? We'd all be pushing for the miminum liabity jobs, but somebody has to serve coffee, or drive trucks, or write mission-critical software, or any number of other activities that could potentially generate liability.)
If they don't have those rights, they don't exist at all, and that would IMHO be a net negative. (No Intel = no fast computer chips; fabrication plants cost billions and no corporations makes that virtually impossible. And I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that no computers would be a massive net loss to society, and that's just one example.) But other then that, I'd agree they don't need much else, if anything, and indeed really need some special limitations on larger companies.
Perhaps saying that "corporations have no rights" is going too far; corporations do consist of people which have rights and so inevitably they must have some as well. For instance, even if "a corporation" does not have "the right to free speech", they can simply pay an employee to use their right to free speech on their behalf. Which is in fact how they "speak", since no speech can occur without somebody finally giving the final go-ahead to "speak" it (where "speak" is some domain-specific action, like "publish", "answer question", etc.).
... but it's only 62.5% of ONE single day for the aforementioned 10,000 person company (of which there are many).
But there is the need to recognize that corporations are inherently larger then individuals and as a result there is an inherent asymmetry in the power, and it is unjust to translate that directly into more legal power.
The problem is quite simply one of man power. Today, I have roughly 16 hours of wakefulness, assuming an 8-hour sleep cycle. Every workday, a corporation receives on average slightly more then eight man-hours from each employee. That is to say, for a 10,000 person company, for my 16 hours today, that company received 80,000 man-hours of life, 5000 times more then me.
Now suppose this company sues me, and we get into a protracted, drawn out lawsuit that occurs over the course of a year, and consumes roughly a quarter of my year meeting with lawyers, rotting in jail, preparing defense, worrying such that I can't productively do anything else, etc. (That's probably conservative on my part; it could easily completely destroy my year.) If I live a nearly-average (and conviently rounded) 75 years, that's a third of a percent of my entire life. (If you're willing to call it the entire year, that's one and a third of a percent of my life! If I died tommorow, that would be a full 4% of my life, as I'm near a rounded-by-luck 25.)
Let us suppose this lawsuit also eats four lawyers and the equivalent of one administrator year, for a total of 50 * 5 (fifty weeks, five days a week) * 40 (forty hours a week) * 5 (five people) = 50,000 thousand man-hours. Now, that may sound like a lot...
Corporations shouldn't necessarily be held "rightless", and probably can't be, but they certainly should not be considered "people". If they really were people, they'd be some pretty strange, and pretty powerful, people. One might even call them "superhuman"... correctly.
The Michigan State University Computer Science department has managed both. I do not personally know how the admins found the machines to be, so you'd have to contact them. I do know they had two Linux labs and cut it back down to one, but I don't know the reasoning (or if it's still that way). I'll refrain from speculating because I don't think that would help any.
Hint hint to all the budding Linux advocates who have no experience managing labs of any machines, let alone these two specifically... speculation isn't really useful and this is a really specific use case. With computer science users you have to assume both "knowlegable" idiots, and some quite knowlegable malicious attacks.
For a specific latter of the former, we'd do OS projects that involved using the operating system support for semaphores. In Solaris (at the time we were doing this, I don't know about now), there were a very specific number of semaphores that could exist, and since certain parts of the operating system also used them, a single poorly-written program involving semaphores could easily consume them all. "Knowlegable idiots." (I didn't actually do this, but only because I caught my error while I was compiling it... if I'd run the resulting executable I'm about 80% certain I too would have DOS'ed the machine... definately a "do it early" assignment! This class, IIRC, was eventually allocated the aforementioned Linux lab because they kept hosing all the other class's homeworks, which were typically all due at midnight on various Mondays.)
As for the latter, I'm sure you are all aware of the number of security vulnerabilities in things that involve having console access or other otherwise "legitimate" access to the system.
I'd be the first to agree (hey, I am, in fact), but I do believe that there's a moral and pragmatic foundation behind copy rights. The problem is that the law isn't consistent, and it isn't clear. Until we can get it cleared up, all that the RIAA can do to support their (theoretically moral, pragmatic) position is to play the cards as they're dealt.
You may find this interesting. The final bit of it should be posted this week; I've got it written now but I need to revise it, and I'm having writing trouble with the conclusion (which will probably be resolved soon).
Adding the word "Weblogging" hardly makes this news. If they own "everything" then surely that encompasses "weblog", no?
All I know is I can't ever sign anything like this. I can't afford to potentially taint my external
You're not short of time; creating the system you describe (assuming good client software) hardly takes longer then typing your post did.
- Download, install, and run Freenet.
- Download and install fcptools.
- Instead of having your RBL list sourced from the HTTP net, have the RBL-client download the list periodically by running a quick invocation of fcptools.
Somebody has to publish it, but you could start by simply mirroring an existing list. The publisher's life is a little harder; they need to learn how to use SSK keys, get one, and learn how to post periodic content, but we're still talking half an hour. Moreover, you won't even necessarily be personally identifiable.A Freenet implementation is not a pipe-dream that would take months of highly-skilled developer time to implement, it's something anybody could do in about half-an-hour, if the RBL clients are configurable enough to take the RBL lists from varying sources like a shell script and not just HTTP. I don't believe in RBL lists because I believe they are censorship, so I'm not going to do this, but it would take so little effort you'll be astounded. You could do it over a lunchbreak.
PGP signitures are unnecessary in Freenet; a RBL list would pretty much need to be in the SSK space and all SSK insertions are already signed.
sahalx partially replied to your point but to someone not already familiar with Freenet I'm not sure they'll understand why (s)he's right.
And you would trust this file enough to block email based on it's contents??? Accountability is the biggest problem with RBLs, and moving it to a completely anonymous system would loose the last level of trust that they currently have...
Freenet is not a "completely anonymous system" in the sense you seem to be using it. While you can not trace a file back to the owner necessarily, it is possible through the use of the SSK mechanism that sahalx mentioned to establish that a file came from the same source as another file.
Therefore, in conjunction with some of the other features of Freenet, once you decided you trusted a particular blocking list, perhaps one specifically mentioned on the former website of the blocking site, you can be reasonably confident that only that person is posting a block list to that file, short of someone breaking into their computer and stealing their key. (Which if they are good enough to not store the private key in their computer, perhaps by writing it down and typing it or eventually even just memorizing it, isn't possible either.)
Therefore, Freenet is perfectly capable of filling this role. You may not know that "Person X" is accountable, but you can know "Key 7ch3babf83jcn1qws9c://rbl.txt is reliable, and by extension the owner of key 7ch3babf83jcn1qws9c is reliable." and that's good enough for all but the most paranoid folk... and even if it DOES go bad, you tell your software to ignore it and move on to something else.
In fact, Freenet is probably superior to HTTP because of the signing, esp. w/ memorized or physically written keys. (Hopefully conventional RBLs are already signing their lists and hopefully you're using the signitures; I don't know what the state of the art is because I believe RBLs are censorship and do not use them. But I recognize not everyone agrees with this so discussing how to do them better and more securely doesn't give me too much cognitive dissonance.)
Also see the Freenet FAQ. (Freenet's documentation seems to come and go; right now it seems to be at a low period. I remember better discussion pages for "What is an SSK?" but I can't seem to find them from the site now and Google searching for it gets swamped by references to actual SSK-addressed files.)
Oh, that's comforting. It's OK for everyone else to lose their privacy, no big deal.
It most definitely **IS**.
Uh, classic example of reading what you expected your opponent to say rather then what they did say. Re-read that more closely.... or perhaps for the first time. Your opponent never claimed that driving was anything but a privilege.
Me, I'll submit that just because X is a privilege does not automatically mean that the government can impose whatever the hell it feels like and issue a "like it or lump it" directive. Moreover:
Abuse that privilege by driving recklessly, and you'll see it pulled from you presto.
I'd say that sounds like a "right" you're describing. Rights get retracted when abused, and are basically the natural order of things. Licensing is a pretty minimal step, all things considered. "Priviledges", such as driving the BIG rigs, acquiring the right to call oneself an engineer in states that require licensing to do so (and those exams aren't pushovers), or exerting the powers of an elected office, are earned.
You might define "right" and "priviledge" differently... but my point is you didn't at all. You labor mightily on a semantic point you don't actually make, you just imply, as if we all agree what a "right" is vs. a "privilege". (I'd also submit it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy, which incidentally preempts one of the points you're extremely likely to try to make with regard to my previous paragraph.)
Finally, I appreciate your honesty in admitting you don't have a car and don't intend to (bragging?), but I can't say I care much for the input of a person who won't be affected by the laws in question, especially as combined with your demonstrated lack of enough care to even read what people have to say about it. It's like when Congress passes laws that they exempt themselves from; it's damned easy to pass or promote regulations you won't be held to.
(And I'll bet half my karma you live in a highly urban area.)
This will guve them what... a $100 advantage to the XB, which M$ probably can't afford to drop any lower since they're already losing money on each console manufactured.
;-) (And maybe it shouldn't; I have neither the data nor the desire to do a full economic analysis. But I do think it may be time for Nintendo to make a gutsy move or two that conservative analysis says won't succeed; "conservative analysis" says the Gamecube is doomed, so it's time to throw out that playbook.)
This is Microsoft here... the only reason they're not giving them away free in cereal boxes is that it would be egregious product dumping and found illegal. (Well, maybe not the only reason, there are issues of consumer expectations and such, but Microsoft has the cash and the apparent desire.)
This also puts the GC on the same value as the GBA [Jerf adds SP, the GBA is IIRC $60 or $70], which should prevent Nintendo from "shooting themselves in the foot" (not really happening though) with the price difference between GC and GBA SP. (My next guess is a buy one get one half off deal if this doesn't work.)
Thinking as a consumer this seems a bit odd somehow, though I can't put my finger on it. Putting the two side-by-side, it really seems like the GBA SP ought to be cheaper. There's the size thing, and the power thing.
Note I'm deliberately being fuzzy; I understand from an economic viewpoint intellectually, I'm saying that this feels wrong.
Give the SP a $10 or better, $20 price drop, or bundle an extra controller or cheap-ass but high-quality super-star game like a Zelda (remember the physical games are dirt cheap which is why those bundles work economically in the first place) and raise the GC price $10 or $20 and it would feel more, more, I don't know but the closest word that comes to mind is honest.
In fact, given that Nintendo has tons of first-party content, and that the discs themselves are cheap, go ahead and ship in the Gamecube box a couple of old Nintendo megahits, like Lugui's Mansion and/or Mario Sunshine; I know it won't look good on paper but I think Nintendo needs to consider the marketing value. Consoles build "mindshare" not by traditional ad campaigns but by being used; they are unusual that way. If people who frugal enough to be attracted by this price drop end up going home with one game (and worse, it sucks...) Nintendo can lose badly, perhaps worse then if they never bought a system at all. It's time to pull out the stops.
Of course this won't happen.
I don't remember them being $50 each, the way GameCube games are now.
An Intellivision game (one generation back from the Nintendo) could be produced by one person in a few months.
A modern game requires resources comparable to a major motion picture.
I don't know what the Intellivision games cost, because those days predate any concept of money I might have had. But it's rather impressive how much more $50 buys then it used to, even over the NES days. Personally, I consider video games a steal. (Especially when you buy them for less then $50.)
At least the good ones.
50$ isn't that bad, really. If you want cheap games you need to go with computers, or scrounge for used consoles. (Professional used game stores used to be viable options but they seem to have jacked their prices up a lot. I honestly wonder if tripling the prices has been a gain for them.)
A message that boils down to "get off your high horse" then includes shit like "I certainly hope you are under 30." is thoroughly uncompelling. You may like it; I don't respect your opinion any after that dreck you wrote.
You read arrogance into a message where it didn't exist because you reflected your own arrogance into it. HAND.
L-loo-l-look at you, Hacker. A pa-pa-pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you ru-run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machineeeenneeee-[electronic sounds]?
L-l-l-look at you, hacker.
.
Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors.
How you hope to defeat a perfect machieennnneee-chine-(sweating)-perfect-sheen....
(sorry that's real audio... seems some loser ripped all the sounds are real audio and everybody copied him. if I can find a wav later I'll post a reply)
If you could write what he writes (on a technical level, not necessarily with the same flair), you'll probably find his stuff dull.
I couldn't palate the Cryponomicon because I found his diversions atrociously boring. Why? Well, they tended to be about Computer Science, and I have a Masters in the subject. Reading a simplified description of Turing Machines does not get my blood pumping anymore; been there, done that.
Stephenson's works are like one big ad for various things. I think I would have loved Cryptonomicon as a kid, but now it's dull because it's mostly old hat.
And speaking as someone who can dissociate the story from the diversions, believe me, the stories are thin, thin, thin! (Probably could fit in 100 pages or less.)
Objectively speaking, the Cryptonomicon is a very bad story, wrapped in a whole bunch of anecdotes that aren't even "fractally" related to the story (a BS characterization, BTW), because there's nearly no story for them to be related to. Personally I think Neal would be better off writing various coherent columns and skipping the story. But perhaps the story functions as the sugar that makes the medicine go down; goodness knows he gets enough worship on forums like this to show he's got some kind of good deal that work$ for him.
I'm not going to insult anyone for loving the Cryptonomicon, but it's a series of columns in Scientific American masquerading as a novel. If you like the columns, great! But that doesn't make the novel aspect any more then the thin, ratty trash it is. Don't mistake interesting mathematical tidbits for a good novel.
If I had the cash, I'd buy an XBox in addition to my GBA. Meanwhile, the GBA (SP, actually) is my primary console, and my DreamCast mostly sits in the cabinet.
Why? Consoles thrive on their ease of use. Since the Gameboy has a built in screen, there are no cables to hassle with. Gameboys really are just "stick the catridge in and turn it on"... anywhere. (Some juice is needed but I typically plug it in overnight maybe once a week, or more if it blinks the light at me. The SP is really nice that way.)
Consoles thrive on their games. Since the GBA has most/all the power of the Super Nintendo (and in some cases, I'm pretty sure it has more; Final Fantash Tactics Advance would have taxed the Super Nintendo pretty hard, I think... though I'm not sure), it's got enough power for an entire generation of successful games. But not enough power for the really complicated ones (except for the aforementioned things like FFT:A). So it really appeals to people like me who use it for filling in gaps in their time. (We don't all need FFXXIV.)
There are a lot of non-hardcore gamers who actually prefer the GBA-level of gaming, and when the PSP comes out and eventually eliminates this simplicity, there's going to be some problem reaching these people. (There's simple games on consoles too but these people don't know how to find them.) The PSP would be well-advised to license Tetris or something similar, and even strive to make it graphically simple against the temptation of using the Full Power of the PSP on Tetris. (Yikes!)
Now, I am apparently a hard-core gamer (playing them all your life will make you that way, I guess), but I still really like the GBA as a console. Because of its portability and simplicity, it's a serious contender even against the PS2. Given that right now I can really only own one console, I do not regret that that console is the GBA. (SP anyhow... I probably WOULD regret it if the only one I owned was the original GBA. See the SP with its light off in multiple conditions has really made me wonder how anybody ever played that thing!)
So when my generation becomes parents then kids will get video games the right way. But then something else will come out, like vr or some crap that I wont understand.
We really are running out of modes of experience. VR, if it's ever useful, will probably be perceived as just further glorified video games and won't really shock us that much.
And if you think I'm letting my 10-year-old son get a direct neural interconnect, you've got another think coming.
Seriously, we're running out of surprises. "Video Games" are already pretty generic.
(You might say "How can you know we're running out of surprises? Did our grandparents see video games coming?" Perhaps not, but there IS a limit to human experience: We have five senses and only so much input to them even theoretically possible. Video games will continue with the realism until they totally tap out "audio" and "visual", leaving pretty much only "virtual sex" as the only really "useful" tactile input mode. The only thing possible after that is the aforementioned "direct neural interconnect", either as a hardware device or an even-more-ambition uploading of the brain into a computer. Then, that's it; you can't get any more into the brain then that. So yes, I'm justified in this statement, because no matter what sci-fi scenario you spin, that's the top of the experience you can get.)
Managed properly (I say managed as in development code, concept usage, and production) it can be a valuable tool.
Really, that's not the point. First, "managed properly" assembly is a valuable tool; that's a useless metric.
But secondly, and more importantly, the question is not "Is Java a valuable tool?" That implies that Java just sort of exists in the void, alone, our sole choice for programming. The real question is "Is Java the best tool?"
I have to say the only reason I see to choose Java is if it has the libraries you need... and the reason it has those libraries is because large companies shoved Java down our throats until even the academics are doing "research" that involve trying to retrofit more powerful languages on top of Java. (AOP, anyone? AOP wouldn't have become a "paradigm" if we were all programming in Python, where "AOP" is so easy and natural you have to work to avoid it once you get to a certain level of sophistication!)
This is my root problem with Java; the whole thing seems foisted on us in a huge way. That doesn't make it bad. It might even be "good". But I vastly prefer languages that are thriving on their own merits, and competing without the virtues of a large corporation pushing them. You have to ask yourself how "wonderful" Java is if even with its vast resources it has not managed to corner the market. Maybe it's because there's something better out there? And how well would Java have done on its own merits? (My guess is that we'd still never have heard of it on Slashdot.)
(Hey, maybe not. But I still think the question should be asked.)
Jupiter is many objects larger than the Moon.
;-) (With the proper accent which I'm not sure how to type in this environment.)
Touche.
Something I now wish I had posted: "There aren't any cosmic bombs waiting to go off, because on the Cosmic scale, the universe is always throwing sparks at things. If Jupiter didn't blow up during accretion, it's not going to. Every planet is constantly bombarded by high-energy cosmic rays, and constantly bombarded with high-energy kinetic impacts. Anything that can be lit off has been."
Oh well, can't get it all.
Plunging into ever increasing pressure, no one knows for sure if this will cause a chain reaction, but the potential energy and temperatures are enormous.
Are you fucking nuts? Talk about "argument from ignorance"! "I don't understand the first bit of what I'm talking about, but I'm going to babble on anyhow!"
I will personally guarentee you that vast quantities of plutonium, and for that matter every other known element, already exist in Jupiter. Just because it's a "gas planet" doesn't mean it's made entirely of gas.
Moreover, if anything was going to "set Jupiter off" it would have been set off already! Remember Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacking in Jupiter? That's huge quantities of energy, large enough to roil up clouds larger then Earth itself! And that's nothing compared to what even Earth has seen in its history, let alone the King of Planets. (There's no way to know but personally I'd bet at least one moon-sized impact has hit Jupiter in the past. Your choice of "Jovian moon-sized" or "Earth moon-sized".)
The only "danger" from forty pounds of plutonium several light minutes away are the quantities of hot air it can still generate here back on earth. Get over your pathetic 1950's-era nuclear fears already. It's just matter, not black magic!
Friction matters! Or, put another way, enough quantitative change becomes qualitative change. (That those two are a dichotomy instead of two ends of a continuum is a persistent fallacy.)
The Internet may, strictly speaking, not make anything possible that wasn't possible before. So what? Neither did telephones, automobiles, or even writing. People were talking to each other before telephones. People were moving around before automobiles. People were communication information to each other, even across great time spans, before there was writing.
To diminish the Internet as much as I am diminishing telephones, automobiles, and writing in the previous paragraph is as naive as it is in those cases. By making something easier, more people do it, more often, to more benefit to all.
I find when my Internet dies, the least tolerable thing to me is that I loose Google, which isn't a public library but sure does help me find information now. Which has in turn increased the quality of my own writing as I can support things better.
Would we have free software without the Internet? Probably, but it would be a mere shadow of what we have now, because the harder it is to communicate, the more likely the project won't form at all. Hell, would we be having this discussion without the Internet, and would it be anywhere near as large or as comprehensive?
Boo hoo, there's no "soundbite" for the Internet, therefore it must be useless. Bah!
Yeah... I thought the CS community at large mostly knew about this.
They do; my elaborations came from my compiler course. But there are a lot of people, both programmers who never took formal courses (and this is one of the examples of things that programmers very rarely learn on their own but can be very beneficial to know when you need to make that function go 20 times faster, and this is also why it's so hard to explain why a good education can still be helpful to all but the most dedicated self-learners) and people who aren't in college yet.
Those people just need a bit of help figuring out what to search for, which is why I stepped in. A simple search for aliasing is swamped by the graphical meaning of the term, which is basically completely unrelated.
I ended up with "compiler aliasing problem optimization" (no quotes in the search query itself) before I found anything.
I went poking around on Google and could not find an answer in 30 seconds, so you are forgiven. ;-)
I think this page on aliasing should answer most of your good question.
Add to that page the fact that if a compiler can't be sure about something, the answer is typically to copy the thing it can't be sure about into a safe location, and either copy it back somewhere after the "unsafe" thing or explicitly check it for changes.
For instance, if you're calling a function and the compiler can't know what it's going to do to the caller's registers, the compiler must painstakingly copy the registers out to main memory (well, it'll probably land in L1 cache but still it could be very expensive compared to the function itself), call the function, and copy the registers back in, whereas if the compiler can know it's a little function that only uses registers X and Y, it can only save those. If you're calling lots of little functions, this can add up.
A real example of this? If you're making a static call in C to a function, the compiler can go look at the function and do this analysis. If you're calling through a pointer, a common operation (at least, I can't stand using C without it...), it can't, because that pointer could be pointing at anything, up to and including a dynamically constructed function (if you're brave). To maintain its promises to the programmer that a function call never changes the variables in the caller (which may be located in registers), it has to protect all the registers.
Aliasing is a nasty problem because it's completely opaque to the compiler; the compiler can't see through that indirect function call to the function beyond, not even in theory. As the page mentions, other techniques are being developed that don't involve that sort of opacity by working around aliasing, and the JIT compilers take a different, more dynamic tack that in theory lets them do this analysis dynamically. (The Transmeta processors can also do some of this stuff, which is one of the ways they can speed up code when they run it a lot; they can do this more expensive analysis and dynamically optimize the code.)