So games have a specific target audience. It's pretty much the same audience that likes mainstream hollywood movies
I'm pretty sure that once women like my girlfriend who likes chickflicks and hates Van Damme movies starts to play (and buy) computer games, the industry will change accordingly. ...however, I'm not holdning my breath.
For a lot of people, 3D graphics and animation is "something you make in a program like 3D studio". However, there are a great deal of innovation and research going on "behind the scenes".
The math of 3D is both beautiful and complex. Remember, there's a big difference between 3D used in, for instance, a 3D architecture model of a bridge and a computer game. The architecht wants a precise model - the computer game will trade reality for speed of rendering.
The point is, new algorithms and methods are invented all the time. It takes a lot of hard work to develop these algorithms.
My suggestion is a pure scientific awards for "developing an algorithm or method that improves the speed or quality of 3D rendering".
This is such a bad idea I don't know where to start.
1) It will kill most mailinglists
2) It requires me to pay to get rid of something I never asked for (spam)
3) It will kill a lot of clueless admins. Sure, I've often toyed with the idea of killing those who runs an open relay, but imagine getting a bill for $10000000 because a spammer abused your open relay. Nowadays, most people will close the relay once someone tells them about it and get on with their life. In the future, they'll be broke.
4) It will require wast amounts of ressources to collect the fee and maintain accounts of all internet users. This will, in turn, make internet access more expensive for the end user. After all, someone has to pay fo all the logistics, and that someone is you and me.
At first I thought "why don't you just fire a gun instead of expensive x-rays". But once X-ray emitting devices becomes small enough, this could be a new spy gadget. Walk up to the metal detector in the airport. Point your pencil (with built in X-rays) to the scanner and zap it. Then walk right in.
Or, it can be used for lesser evil stuff as well. In the office. Find the cubicle with the guy that just hates computers. Every time you walk by him to get a cup of coffee, zap his computer with your device. Try to time it so he loses maximum amount of work. Then sit back and watch him go postal.
The goggles look really cool, and with a 800x600 display I can think of numerous applications.
Imagine going to an art museum and instead of borrowing a tape-recorder that tells you what you are looking at, you borrow a pair of goggles and information pops up next to the item.
Or - you're trying to find your way around in an unknown city. Large arrows directing you in the right direction will emerge (based on your GPS)
Last, but not least, I can go online with my GPRS phone and follow all my favorite IRC channels while skiing;)
We all know that spammers live in trailer parks and flips burgers at McDonalds to make money to buy new accounts when the old ones are nuked. Now, if you can get one our of IP for the price of a burger I expect all of McDonalds IP range to end up in SPEWS faster than you can say "do you want fries with that?" Any ideas how to avoid this?
"If you say a lie often enough it becomes truth"... I've never seen nor heard any solid evidence that Echelon exists. But the press has been using the word "echelon" as a common denominator for all intelligence involving electronic surveilance.
Now, I'm not denying it's existence (nor am I trying to start a discussion wether it does or not), I'm just saying that journalists should be more careful when they chose their words.
I don't get it. The sole idea about DLL is, that they are dynamically linked libraries (hence the name;) shared by applications. This new idea suggest that, in theory, every program can have their own unique DLL. What's wrong with this picture? It's a workaround because today, programmers create DLL's that are not backwards compatible thus breaking older programs once the DLL has been overwritten. Yes, the workaround will work, but at the same time it undermines the idea of sharing libraries and it doesn't exactly urge programmers to write nice code that doesn't break existant functionality. /Christian
Great, so now I can add a procmail filter to remove all mails beginning with [ADV] and voila - Bob's your uncle and I'm free of spam.
Oh yeah - I also need to filter (adv)..and [AD]...and [-ad-]... and {A - D - V - E - E - R - T - I - S - M - E - N - T } and... well, you get my drift. The point is this:
Spam that identifies itself as spam is still spam, and I already know it's spam without a prefix. So what good is it?
With a standard prefix, Joe Luser can use his Outlook to filter the spam after it has been downloaded. Now, those who does that, wouldn't buy anything from spammers anyway. So the spammer doesn't care. To accomplish his return rate, he just sends out another million emails.. and another one.
There's only one law that will ever work. Don't send commercial email unless the receiver asked for it. All the other suggestions and implementations are just jumping through hoops.
Putting aside my general "I hate MS" opinion for a second here, this is good news. The folks at Hotmail is doing us all a favour by sueing spammers. Remember, that albeit we're all swamped with spam, there aren't that many spammers out there. Recent studies (based on equal amount of facts and handwaving) shows that less than 200 spammers account for 95% of all the spam we receive. Thusly, if MS could sue the bejezus out of some of them, it would help all of us./Christian
I thought conspiracy theories were left behind in the 80's along with Limahl and Ted Danson. But I see they're still breathing, and even making slashdot news.
I don't know if anyone but the kooks at google-watch takes stuff like this serious, but it still makes me angry. A cookie... uuuh - now there's some scary echelon big brother shit. A COOKIE for gods sake. C'mon - I've seen better kooks on usenet.
It's always a good idea to save a piece of history. Traditionally, it's been done by writing a book. As we've seen, a book can be read thousands of years later. But what about digital information? The media types changes rapidly and todays storage is obselete tomorrow. So, how will the historians read a "Seedee" 100 years from now? Ok, assuming they actually managed to build a device that can read the data of a CD, the data will most likely be corrupted, since CD's has limited lifespan.
Now, the only way to accomplish this is to make it a dynamic storage. That is, go with the flow and when a new sooper dooper storage device is invented, copy the data to that, thusly ensuring two things. 1) The data is "refreshed" 2) The data can be read by the contemporary hardware.
Global opt out lists has been done before, and they've all failed.
Now, don't get me wrong, a law against spam is very much needed, only it has to do a little bit better than this one.
The common denominator for all the useless spam laws is, that they put too much work on the shoulders of the end user. In a perfect world, the end user wouldn't have to worry about spam if they didn't request it.
If you'll allow me for a moment to blow my own horn, let me introduce you to a law that actually works. It's nation wide, and prohibits spam. Yes - the anti-spam law in Denmark is quite precise, and the ombudsman goes right in the throat of those who violates it. Basically, the law says: Do not send commercial email to people without their consent. Of course there's more to it that that, but the bare bones of the law is, that the only valid way of sending commercial email is by opt-in. Since the burden of proof is on the sender, confirmed opt-in goes without saying.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hi Boss, I can't come to work today. My grandma died and is burried in Nebraska"
20 minutes later...
"Chris? Is that you?"
"No boss... I'm in Nebraska"
"Don't lie to me - you're near by. I can tell by this Trepia program"
"But boss... I..ahem.."
"Chris - didn't your grandma die last august?"
So games have a specific target audience. It's pretty much the same audience that likes mainstream hollywood movies
...however, I'm not holdning my breath.
I'm pretty sure that once women like my girlfriend who likes chickflicks and hates Van Damme movies starts to play (and buy) computer games, the industry will change accordingly.
For a lot of people, 3D graphics and animation is "something you make in a program like 3D studio". However, there are a great deal of innovation and research going on "behind the scenes".
The math of 3D is both beautiful and complex. Remember, there's a big difference between 3D used in, for instance, a 3D architecture model of a bridge and a computer game. The architecht wants a precise model - the computer game will trade reality for speed of rendering.
The point is, new algorithms and methods are invented all the time. It takes a lot of hard work to develop these algorithms.
My suggestion is a pure scientific awards for "developing an algorithm or method that improves the speed or quality of 3D rendering".
How about it?
He's been involved in the spamming business for 6 months
He spent the first 5 months researching and one month of spamming
He spent $10.000 on spam-software
He claims he made $1000 a week.
4 weeks times $1000=$4000 income.
$4000 income minus $10.000 is -$6000. So, the guy loses $6000 on spamming.
Film at eleven...
This is such a bad idea I don't know where to start.
/christian
1) It will kill most mailinglists
2) It requires me to pay to get rid of something I never asked for (spam)
3) It will kill a lot of clueless admins. Sure, I've often toyed with the idea of killing those who runs an open relay, but imagine getting a bill for $10000000 because a spammer abused your open relay. Nowadays, most people will close the relay once someone tells them about it and get on with their life. In the future, they'll be broke.
4) It will require wast amounts of ressources to collect the fee and maintain accounts of all internet users. This will, in turn, make internet access more expensive for the end user. After all, someone has to pay fo all the logistics, and that someone is you and me.
At first I thought "why don't you just fire a gun instead of expensive x-rays". But once X-ray emitting devices becomes small enough, this could be a new spy gadget. Walk up to the metal detector in the airport. Point your pencil (with built in X-rays) to the scanner and zap it. Then walk right in.
Or, it can be used for lesser evil stuff as well. In the office. Find the cubicle with the guy that just hates computers. Every time you walk by him to get a cup of coffee, zap his computer with your device. Try to time it so he loses maximum amount of work. Then sit back and watch him go postal.
The goggles look really cool, and with a 800x600 display I can think of numerous applications.
;)
Imagine going to an art museum and instead of borrowing a tape-recorder that tells you what you are looking at, you borrow a pair of goggles and information pops up next to the item.
Or - you're trying to find your way around in an unknown city. Large arrows directing you in the right direction will emerge (based on your GPS)
Last, but not least, I can go online with my GPRS phone and follow all my favorite IRC channels while skiing
We all know that spammers live in trailer parks and flips burgers at McDonalds to make money to buy new accounts when the old ones are nuked. Now, if you can get one our of IP for the price of a burger I expect all of McDonalds IP range to end up in SPEWS faster than you can say "do you want fries with that?" Any ideas how to avoid this?
"If you say a lie often enough it becomes truth"... I've never seen nor heard any solid evidence that Echelon exists. But the press has been using the word "echelon" as a common denominator for all intelligence involving electronic surveilance.
Now, I'm not denying it's existence (nor am I trying to start a discussion wether it does or not), I'm just saying that journalists should be more careful when they chose their words.
I wonder if Monica Lewinsky will be applying for this internship. After all, it doesn't seem to suck.
I don't get it. The sole idea about DLL is, that they are dynamically linked libraries (hence the name ;) shared by applications. This new idea suggest that, in theory, every program can have their own unique DLL. What's wrong with this picture? It's a workaround because today, programmers create DLL's that are not backwards compatible thus breaking older programs once the DLL has been overwritten. Yes, the workaround will work, but at the same time it undermines the idea of sharing libraries and it doesn't exactly urge programmers to write nice code that doesn't break existant functionality.
/Christian
Great, so now I can add a procmail filter to remove all mails beginning with [ADV] and voila - Bob's your uncle and I'm free of spam.
/Christian
Oh yeah - I also need to filter (adv)..and [AD]...and [-ad-]... and {A - D - V - E - E - R - T - I - S - M - E - N - T } and... well, you get my drift. The point is this:
Spam that identifies itself as spam is still spam, and I already know it's spam without a prefix. So what good is it?
With a standard prefix, Joe Luser can use his Outlook to filter the spam after it has been downloaded. Now, those who does that, wouldn't buy anything from spammers anyway. So the spammer doesn't care. To accomplish his return rate, he just sends out another million emails.. and another one.
There's only one law that will ever work. Don't send commercial email unless the receiver asked for it. All the other suggestions and implementations are just jumping through hoops.
Putting aside my general "I hate MS" opinion for a second here, this is good news. The folks at Hotmail is doing us all a favour by sueing spammers. Remember, that albeit we're all swamped with spam, there aren't that many spammers out there. Recent studies (based on equal amount of facts and handwaving) shows that less than 200 spammers account for 95% of all the spam we receive. Thusly, if MS could sue the bejezus out of some of them, it would help all of us. /Christian
I thought conspiracy theories were left behind in the 80's along with Limahl and Ted Danson. But I see they're still breathing, and even making slashdot news.
I don't know if anyone but the kooks at google-watch takes stuff like this serious, but it still makes me angry. A cookie... uuuh - now there's some scary echelon big brother shit. A COOKIE for gods sake. C'mon - I've seen better kooks on usenet.
It's always a good idea to save a piece of history. Traditionally, it's been done by writing a book. As we've seen, a book can be read thousands of years later. But what about digital information? The media types changes rapidly and todays storage is obselete tomorrow. So, how will the historians read a "Seedee" 100 years from now? Ok, assuming they actually managed to build a device that can read the data of a CD, the data will most likely be corrupted, since CD's has limited lifespan.
Now, the only way to accomplish this is to make it a dynamic storage. That is, go with the flow and when a new sooper dooper storage device is invented, copy the data to that, thusly ensuring two things. 1) The data is "refreshed" 2) The data can be read by the contemporary hardware.
Global opt out lists has been done before, and they've all failed.
Now, don't get me wrong, a law against spam is very much needed, only it has to do a little bit better than this one.
The common denominator for all the useless spam laws is, that they put too much work on the shoulders of the end user. In a perfect world, the end user wouldn't have to worry about spam if they didn't request it.
If you'll allow me for a moment to blow my own horn, let me introduce you to a law that actually works. It's nation wide, and prohibits spam. Yes - the anti-spam law in Denmark is quite precise, and the ombudsman goes right in the throat of those who violates it. Basically, the law says: Do not send commercial email to people without their consent. Of course there's more to it that that, but the bare bones of the law is, that the only valid way of sending commercial email is by opt-in. Since the burden of proof is on the sender, confirmed opt-in goes without saying.