My biggest complaint about the battle sequences is the hideous lack of strategy the leaders seem to have. I don't care who you are: a cavalry charge against a huge rank of spearmen is not a smart idea, and we see it happen at least twice in the series.
Check Central and Eastern Europe warfare history, especially the history of Poland's wars against Sweden. For decades Swedish pikemen had no chance against Polish winged 'husaria' - not until good firearms were constructed. Impact of well led cavalry charge is terrible.
That is true about the one song thing but if it catches on it may be the death of the album, which i think will be a loss:- Think the white album, I love some of the lesser know ones on that more than the 'commercial' ones, which i would never know but for the album:)
Why? Bands will still be able to record albums and you will still be able to buy them - if you really like a couple of songs from an album you can buy all of them and enjoy. And some albums will be specifically advertised as "worth to buy whole album"
Hmmm... how about customers suing MS on a basis that they were misinformed? I am not sure if EULA covers this - and if it does then it is a good opportunity to challenge it in court. If enough big customers have to pay huge enough royalties we may see some interesting things happening in near future
As much as I despise Mr. Gates, I have to correct you. The infamous "640kB should be enough" was not in fact stated by Billy Bub, it was someone at IBM or Panasonic (who actually created the PC). Bill agreed, kinda, but he did not state that 640 was enough.
I know but who cares? My comment was a joke on a popular urban myth. Does the myth have to be correct to laugh at it?
If you are destroyed and then replicated, you are effectively dead. Consider if you could meet your replicate before being destroyed. He would say to you: "Ok, I don't need you anymore, so I destroy you now." Is that good for you? Maybe it is good for him, but certainly not good for the real you.
Long, long time ago Lem in his "Dialogs" did exactly the same - he proved that even if you could teleportate somebody by disassembling his body and reassembling it in a new place it would still mean that the first person would be dead.
The biggest reasons for The Beatles making it big was their pure, raw talent, plus their strong drive to be the toppermost of the poppermost
...plus George Martin - this one man himself proves how important is a music producer even to the best band. Of course they were great, but without him they might be just another band on the level of The Animals - good, very good, but not that great. So, yes, talent is important, most important, but "support" meaning a good manager, a good producer, a good recording engineer also help to produce, no, to create great music.
Imagine two things: people switch to ogg and Ogg bitrate peeling gets available. So what you do? You quickly download a peeled song, listen to it to identify if it is real or fake and then continue download or grab another file.
Of course this is kind of difficult to automate, you have to do it by yourself, but still it is much better than dealing with hash numbers.
I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in Poland there is plenty of fiber along main power cables - they even considered going into ISP businnes themselves, I don't know if they finally decided. Anyway, I would assume that other power companies also have good network - the only question is if they have good (fat) connections with the Net.
The question is: would/. react the same way if it was beloved Apple instead of Microsoft? Or less beloved, but not that hated Sun? Sun and apple are also generic words (although not generic in the computers context whereas the term "windows" is). So if they tried something like this in the past a quick Slashdot search would give us the answer if it is typical MS bashing or is it a justified reaction to a stupid act.
Hmmm... and maybe neither Apple nor Sun tried something like this? Then maybe we keep bashing MS because what it does is wrong?
Probably I could answer these questions myself, but I tried "Apple trademark", "Apple AND trademark", "+Apple +trademark" and Slashdot search keeps displaying me OR results instead of AND and I don't have time to play with it more.
Licq does pretty good job both with displaying different languages and localisation (at least it is quite well translated to Polish). The only problem there is that you can choose encoding on program-wide basis, so it will be difficult to chat with different people in their native languages.
So I would recommend it for western languages and gg or ekg (two excelent gadu-gadu clients) for chats with your Polish friends
Raf
Not only people who played as kids
on
The Aging Gamer
·
· Score: 1
Not only kids grew up but also as gaming becomes more and more mainstream adults who never played as kids now start to play.
My father is 64, he plays Baldur's Gate, Majesty, Diablo II, Planescape: Torment. In Starcraft he is better than me. The first game he ever played was WarCraft. How old was he then? Something like 57 probably.
And I have heard that many elderly people play Everquest for example. So, simply gaming became yet another entertaining activity like chess, fishing or watching TV
Sugar cane processing produces this distilled alcohol. That's great that is is cheaper than gasoline NOW, but what happens when the demand increases? Sugar cane growth is limited by the land and regions it can be grown. And growing it takes some time, so there is an increase in demand and supply stays the same. Distilled alcohol prices rise above gasoline quickly and all of a sudden the whole distilled alcohol plane is starting to cost you MORE than the gasoline did.
Don't forget sugar beet which can grow in the US and Europe. I know that Poland for example produces too much sugar and world market prices for sugar are lowest ever. There are huge reserves in sugar production. And what is more important: it is not just sugar you can use to produce alcohol. Most of ethanol is produced from grain or potatoes and it is cheap.
The only problem is taxation: consumable ethanol everywhere is subject to huge taxation (that's why vodka is expensive even though its production is cheap) so you need double taxation, one for consumable ethanol, the other for fuel. But this means you need control so people don't produce fuel ethanol and sell it on black market.
Anyway, ethanol prices are not a problem. Taxation and petrol lobbies are a problem.
Fortunately in Europe it is possible. We have this Strasbourg Tribunal or whatever it is called and if you feel oppressed by the goverment - you can sue it. They have quite strict rules (i.e. you have to try first all possible official ways in your country to get your problem solved) and I don't know what is the effect of winning the case - but for sure it is possible.
I just wonder if they would accept a reason: "I couldn't bring a serial cable to my country".
If I wasn't going to buy the music anyway, then no one loses anything by me having a copy.
You're right of course, but the service or software that enables you to do it this way enables also millions of others who download _instead_ of buying. And there is _no_ possibility to distinguish. Either you ban both groups or allow both groups.
Of course, the logical solution is to lower CD prices to the point when better sound quality plus additional benefits (lyrics, nice cover, "good" feeling of supporting artists and not recording companies) will persuade enough people to go and buy the CD. I have no problem paying 10$ for a good CD, it is 15£ like in the UK that makes me start AudioGalaxy.
But if companies want to keep their revenue same obscenely high - they have no other way than to make the whole thing illegal.
Culture is being re-defined right before our eyes. For centuries, art and technology have been considered separate parts of culture. Now, because we live in an information society, they may be be coming together.
Well, if by "centuries" you mean "two hundred years" then true, but before industrialisation all technology was basicaly art - without strict rules, management plans and so on. To make a precise clock in the 17th century you would need knowledge but also same sometimes not very well defined skills that today make a difference between a merely good programmer and a real hacker. The same you could say about a smith (especialy a weapon smith), an architect (nothing like a "civil engineer" then) and about many other then-high-tech professions.
And look at 17th and 18th century microscopes, telescopes, clocks and all other scientific instruments - everything had to be not only useful but pretty as well.
So, I think we simply return to good old times when there was still art and poetry in technology.
It is an old thing. Always and everywhere some young males have an urgeing desire to destroy something just for destroing it. Today if they have muscles they go and smash windows, destroy park benches or just bully others. If they don't - they rund DoS attacks.
Let us say it straight: there is no difference between a script kiddy and a brainless thug who ie. cuts bus seats with a knife.
Well, it would be nice to carry around my ~/. directory, but this is just a couple hundred MB. The whole music collection (maybe even uncompressed, just wav format) in a device size of a typical mp3 player - that's the good thing. I move around a lot and taking lots of cdroms/CDs is quite inconvenient.
Or maybe different: forget PDAs, mp3 players and so on. Think about a key-ring device, like these USB storages, just with a couple of GBs on it, so you can carry _everything_ you need on it, like your home directory, which means you just plug it in any compatible computer (any unix, linux, MacOSX or whatever) and you feel at home: all your files, all your settings, your mp3s, your emacs and mutt configs (OK, I know _these_ would fit on a floppy;-) are right here, just log in and enjoy.
Surely, I would like a thing like that.
Then of course a question: what is the power consumption of such memory compared to hard drives? Would it increase or reduce battery lifetime in notebooks? Well, for sure it would be faster and not so noisy as HD.
Hmm... Good point, but not perfect. If you look around you'll notice that most people don't care about such things. As long as they get their soap operas, their cornflakes and their supermarkets they're as happy as people in "Brave New World".
And who protests? Geeks, living partialy in some abstract cyberspace, and various idealists like libertarians or people who still believe in American Democracy as some ideal being which exists and now is threatened by evil FBI, NSA or whatever. All these are also kind of outsiders.
So, I would say, we're somewhere in between: nobody's gonna use rats if you say that the goverment is evil, and most of the people are happy with their freedom shrinking, but still, it's just _most_ of the people, not everyone.
Many times it seemed that something (i.e. industrial revolution, Enlightenment) would change the humanity, that people would start to think by themselves, not just listen to authorities (the Church, the Goverment, media). But then always the result was the same: most people just want to be told what to believe in, what to do, what is good or bad, and they want to have simple pleasures (circus or instant messaging).
Just read some texts from the eighteenth century and compare them to Wired style - the same hope for "the new epoque", common discussion, extinction of extremes, liberty and fraternity. And then came 1815 and later Victorian Era, Bismarck and World Wars. And now we have Sept 11th and anti-terrorist regulations.
Nothing new, just the same crap again and again
Rav
P.S. Though, I must say, it's one of few Katz's articles I read with interest...
It has been known for some time that the earliest stages of dreaming can be strongly influenced by sensory input just before going to sleep. Whereas you cannot predict exactly what will be in the dream, it is fairly certain some of it will relate to what was happening just before you fall asleep. This is not as true of dreams later in the evening.
Yes, true, but it's true as well that we usually remember only thing we dream of just before waking up. So, we would not remember dreams influenced by this device anyway - unless we set up some alarm waking us up each time we leave REM phase.
Anyone reminded of those supercavitation torpedoes? Yet another area where those "technologically backward" russians are by far more advanced than the west...
Just how much brainwashing do we get?
Come on, they were first on orbit, their MiG-29 used to be considered better than their western counterparts - I think these facts are well known worldwide, so what brainwashing?
Soviet Union was technologicaly behind and as well is Russia if you don't stick to military technology. Go to an average Russian house and just look for a mobile, a PC - you probably won't find any unless you search in Moscow or Skt. Petersburg. And Russian TV sets were famous in the Eastern Block as "home explosive kits" because they tended to explode "just because". And these lovely Russian clocks famous as "the fastest in the world".
I come from Poland and I used a lot of these "far more advanced" Russian technology and I know how everyone counted their money because it was better to buy (extremely expensive for us then) no-brand western or Asian electronic equipement than to stick to Russian stuff.
And now even their military industry is falling behind due to fund reductions.
Realistic sims were never easy. I remember dozens of frustrating hours when I tried to put my Su-27 safely on an carrier's deck and many hours of studying various plane sims manuals. Man, it seems you needed a pilot license to play some of those sims.
And it is just the same with realistic soldiers sims. Some people want to feel "real" war, this means this feeling that it is not just your skills, you need also a lot of luck not to win, but to survive. That each bullet can bring death.
I remember playing AvP for the first time and the total surprise when _one_ headshot was enough to send my Powerful Xenomorph to oblivion. And I kinda liked it. Finaly I had to _think_ instead of just runrunrunjumpfirechangeweaponstrafe like in any quakeish game.
But I agree that sometimes it kills gameplay though there are a lot of people who like it this way.
Someone has mentioned here the old "War games" movie. I think he/she was right: RSS _can_ do the same. As in the movie the game showed that there is no way to win a global nuclear conflict, so RSS show that a war has very poor "gameplay": war is about dying in pain, that one bullet is sometimes enough, that there is no room there for one-against-all kind of stuff. And I think it's a good lecture for youngsters who want to be soldiers. Give him one mission to play _once_. And then say: there is no restart button. You're dead man. Do you still want to join the Army?
And they mean to use these games in an actual training. I think it is better when squad leaders will face such situation in a sim first than in the battlefield.
So, soon we may have such officers as in "Aliens": dozens of missions in sims and none in RL.
Seriously though, this is good news, the more data we have on Mars, the easier it will be when we attempt to colonize it.
Sending unmanned probes: of course
Sending a manned mission: why not?
But to colonise it? Give me just one reason to justify such an incredibly expensive task.
Of course, we should explore space, not only because of spin-offs or "Americas ingenuity and power", but because of the everpresent human curiosity, which is the force behind most of the fundamental research.
But colonisation is something completely different. And BTW, what do you mean by colonisation? Sending a couple of scientists for a year or something, like to an orbital space station? Or maybe terraforming of Mars? In this case let us maybe start with terraforming Sahara.
Slashdot Mirror
Check Central and Eastern Europe warfare history, especially the history of Poland's wars against Sweden. For decades Swedish pikemen had no chance against Polish winged 'husaria' - not until good firearms were constructed. Impact of well led cavalry charge is terrible.
Raf
Why? Bands will still be able to record albums and you will still be able to buy them - if you really like a couple of songs from an album you can buy all of them and enjoy. And some albums will be specifically advertised as "worth to buy whole album"
Raf
Hmmm... how about customers suing MS on a basis that they were misinformed? I am not sure if EULA covers this - and if it does then it is a good opportunity to challenge it in court. If enough big customers have to pay huge enough royalties we may see some interesting things happening in near future
Raf
I know but who cares? My comment was a joke on a popular urban myth. Does the myth have to be correct to laugh at it?
Cheers
Raf
I think that's what he meant in first place. "640 kB of cache should be enough for everyone!"
Raf
does not mean this
Nearly two orders of magnitude faster means almost 100 times faster, not twice faster.
Raf
Long, long time ago Lem in his "Dialogs" did exactly the same - he proved that even if you could teleportate somebody by disassembling his body and reassembling it in a new place it would still mean that the first person would be dead.
Raf
...plus George Martin - this one man himself proves how important is a music producer even to the best band. Of course they were great, but without him they might be just another band on the level of The Animals - good, very good, but not that great. So, yes, talent is important, most important, but "support" meaning a good manager, a good producer, a good recording engineer also help to produce, no, to create great music.
Raf
Imagine two things: people switch to ogg and Ogg bitrate peeling gets available. So what you do? You quickly download a peeled song, listen to it to identify if it is real or fake and then continue download or grab another file.
Of course this is kind of difficult to automate, you have to do it by yourself, but still it is much better than dealing with hash numbers.
Raf
I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in Poland there is plenty of fiber along main power cables - they even considered going into ISP businnes themselves, I don't know if they finally decided. Anyway, I would assume that other power companies also have good network - the only question is if they have good (fat) connections with the Net.
Raf
The question is: would /. react the same way if it was beloved Apple instead of Microsoft? Or less beloved, but not that hated Sun? Sun and apple are also generic words (although not generic in the computers context whereas the term "windows" is). So if they tried something like this in the past a quick Slashdot search would give us the answer if it is typical MS bashing or is it a justified reaction to a stupid act.
Hmmm... and maybe neither Apple nor Sun tried something like this? Then maybe we keep bashing MS because what it does is wrong?
Probably I could answer these questions myself, but I tried "Apple trademark", "Apple AND trademark", "+Apple +trademark" and Slashdot search keeps displaying me OR results instead of AND and I don't have time to play with it more.
Raf
Licq does pretty good job both with displaying different languages and localisation (at least it is quite well translated to Polish). The only problem there is that you can choose encoding on program-wide basis, so it will be difficult to chat with different people in their native languages.
So I would recommend it for western languages and gg or ekg (two excelent gadu-gadu clients) for chats with your Polish friends
Raf
Not only kids grew up but also as gaming becomes more and more mainstream adults who never played as kids now start to play.
My father is 64, he plays Baldur's Gate, Majesty, Diablo II, Planescape: Torment. In Starcraft he is better than me. The first game he ever played was WarCraft. How old was he then? Something like 57 probably.
And I have heard that many elderly people play Everquest for example. So, simply gaming became yet another entertaining activity like chess, fishing or watching TV
Raf
Don't forget sugar beet which can grow in the US and Europe. I know that Poland for example produces too much sugar and world market prices for sugar are lowest ever. There are huge reserves in sugar production. And what is more important: it is not just sugar you can use to produce alcohol. Most of ethanol is produced from grain or potatoes and it is cheap.
The only problem is taxation: consumable ethanol everywhere is subject to huge taxation (that's why vodka is expensive even though its production is cheap) so you need double taxation, one for consumable ethanol, the other for fuel. But this means you need control so people don't produce fuel ethanol and sell it on black market.
Anyway, ethanol prices are not a problem. Taxation and petrol lobbies are a problem.
Raf
I know it's offtopic, but...
...
:-)
it's hard to sue the gov't; I wonder why
Fortunately in Europe it is possible. We have this Strasbourg Tribunal or whatever it is called and if you feel oppressed by the goverment - you can sue it. They have quite strict rules (i.e. you have to try first all possible official ways in your country to get your problem solved) and I don't know what is the effect of winning the case - but for sure it is possible.
I just wonder if they would accept a reason: "I couldn't bring a serial cable to my country".
Anyway, for now luckily we don't have DMCA
Raf
If I wasn't going to buy the music anyway, then no one loses anything by me having a copy.
You're right of course, but the service or software that enables you to do it this way enables also millions of others who download _instead_ of buying. And there is _no_ possibility to distinguish. Either you ban both groups or allow both groups.
Of course, the logical solution is to lower CD prices to the point when better sound quality plus additional benefits (lyrics, nice cover, "good" feeling of supporting artists and not recording companies) will persuade enough people to go and buy the CD. I have no problem paying 10$ for a good CD, it is 15£ like in the UK that makes me start AudioGalaxy.
But if companies want to keep their revenue same obscenely high - they have no other way than to make the whole thing illegal.
Raf
Culture is being re-defined right before our eyes. For centuries, art and technology have been considered separate parts of culture. Now, because we live in an information society, they may be be coming together.
Well, if by "centuries" you mean "two hundred years" then true, but before industrialisation all technology was basicaly art - without strict rules, management plans and so on. To make a precise clock in the 17th century you would need knowledge but also same sometimes not very well defined skills that today make a difference between a merely good programmer and a real hacker. The same you could say about a smith (especialy a weapon smith), an architect (nothing like a "civil engineer" then) and about many other then-high-tech professions.
And look at 17th and 18th century microscopes, telescopes, clocks and all other scientific instruments - everything had to be not only useful but pretty as well.
So, I think we simply return to good old times when there was still art and poetry in technology.
Raf
Why asking?
It is an old thing. Always and everywhere some young males have an urgeing desire to destroy something just for destroing it. Today if they have muscles they go and smash windows, destroy park benches or just bully others. If they don't - they rund DoS attacks.
Let us say it straight: there is no difference between a script kiddy and a brainless thug who ie. cuts bus seats with a knife.
Raf
Well, it would be nice to carry around my ~/. directory, but this is just a couple hundred MB. The whole music collection (maybe even uncompressed, just wav format) in a device size of a typical mp3 player - that's the good thing. I move around a lot and taking lots of cdroms/CDs is quite inconvenient.
;-) are right here, just log in and enjoy.
Or maybe different: forget PDAs, mp3 players and so on. Think about a key-ring device, like these USB storages, just with a couple of GBs on it, so you can carry _everything_ you need on it, like your home directory, which means you just plug it in any compatible computer (any unix, linux, MacOSX or whatever) and you feel at home: all your files, all your settings, your mp3s, your emacs and mutt configs (OK, I know _these_ would fit on a floppy
Surely, I would like a thing like that.
Then of course a question: what is the power consumption of such memory compared to hard drives? Would it increase or reduce battery lifetime in notebooks? Well, for sure it would be faster and not so noisy as HD.
Raf
Hmm... Good point, but not perfect. If you look around you'll notice that most people don't care about such things. As long as they get their soap operas, their cornflakes and their supermarkets they're as happy as people in "Brave New World".
And who protests? Geeks, living partialy in some abstract cyberspace, and various idealists like libertarians or people who still believe in American Democracy as some ideal being which exists and now is threatened by evil FBI, NSA or whatever. All these are also kind of outsiders.
So, I would say, we're somewhere in between: nobody's gonna use rats if you say that the goverment is evil, and most of the people are happy with their freedom shrinking, but still, it's just _most_ of the people, not everyone.
Rav
Many times it seemed that something (i.e. industrial revolution, Enlightenment) would change the humanity, that people would start to think by themselves, not just listen to authorities (the Church, the Goverment, media). But then always the result was the same: most people just want to be told what to believe in, what to do, what is good or bad, and they want to have simple pleasures (circus or instant messaging).
Just read some texts from the eighteenth century and compare them to Wired style - the same hope for "the new epoque", common discussion, extinction of extremes, liberty and fraternity. And then came 1815 and later Victorian Era, Bismarck and World Wars. And now we have Sept 11th and anti-terrorist regulations.
Nothing new, just the same crap again and again
Rav
P.S. Though, I must say, it's one of few Katz's articles I read with interest...
It has been known for some time that the earliest stages of dreaming can be strongly influenced by sensory input just before going to sleep. Whereas you cannot predict exactly what will be in the dream, it is fairly certain some of it will relate to what was happening just before you fall asleep. This is not as true of dreams later in the evening.
Yes, true, but it's true as well that we usually remember only thing we dream of just before waking up. So, we would not remember dreams influenced by this device anyway - unless we set up some alarm waking us up each time we leave REM phase.
That would be tiring...
Raf
Anyone reminded of those supercavitation torpedoes? Yet another area where those "technologically backward" russians are by far more advanced than the west...
Just how much brainwashing do we get?
Come on, they were first on orbit, their MiG-29 used to be considered better than their western counterparts - I think these facts are well known worldwide, so what brainwashing?
Soviet Union was technologicaly behind and as well is Russia if you don't stick to military technology. Go to an average Russian house and just look for a mobile, a PC - you probably won't find any unless you search in Moscow or Skt. Petersburg. And Russian TV sets were famous in the Eastern Block as "home explosive kits" because they tended to explode "just because". And these lovely Russian clocks famous as "the fastest in the world".
I come from Poland and I used a lot of these "far more advanced" Russian technology and I know how everyone counted their money because it was better to buy (extremely expensive for us then) no-brand western or Asian electronic equipement than to stick to Russian stuff.
And now even their military industry is falling behind due to fund reductions.
Rav
Realistic sims were never easy. I remember dozens of frustrating hours when I tried to put my Su-27 safely on an carrier's deck and many hours of studying various plane sims manuals. Man, it seems you needed a pilot license to play some of those sims.
And it is just the same with realistic soldiers sims. Some people want to feel "real" war, this means this feeling that it is not just your skills, you need also a lot of luck not to win, but to survive. That each bullet can bring death.
I remember playing AvP for the first time and the total surprise when _one_ headshot was enough to send my Powerful Xenomorph to oblivion. And I kinda liked it. Finaly I had to _think_ instead of just runrunrunjumpfirechangeweaponstrafe like in any quakeish game.
But I agree that sometimes it kills gameplay though there are a lot of people who like it this way.
Someone has mentioned here the old "War games" movie. I think he/she was right: RSS _can_ do the same. As in the movie the game showed that there is no way to win a global nuclear conflict, so RSS show that a war has very poor "gameplay": war is about dying in pain, that one bullet is sometimes enough, that there is no room there for one-against-all kind of stuff. And I think it's a good lecture for youngsters who want to be soldiers. Give him one mission to play _once_. And then say: there is no restart button. You're dead man. Do you still want to join the Army?
And they mean to use these games in an actual training. I think it is better when squad leaders will face such situation in a sim first than in the battlefield.
So, soon we may have such officers as in "Aliens": dozens of missions in sims and none in RL.
Rav
Seriously though, this is good news, the more data we have on Mars, the easier it will be when we attempt to colonize it.
Sending unmanned probes: of course
Sending a manned mission: why not?
But to colonise it? Give me just one reason to justify such an incredibly expensive task.
Of course, we should explore space, not only because of spin-offs or "Americas ingenuity and power", but because of the everpresent human curiosity, which is the force behind most of the fundamental research.
But colonisation is something completely different. And BTW, what do you mean by colonisation? Sending a couple of scientists for a year or something, like to an orbital space station? Or maybe terraforming of Mars? In this case let us maybe start with terraforming Sahara.
Rav