Right. Only with improved healthcare in many parts of the world, we've defeated the natural order of things. It wasn't so long ago, infant and teen mortality rate were significantly higher. I'm talking mid-20th century.
How many people today would have died at birth, if not for modern advances in hospital care ? I think that figure would be a good 10% lower, which would result in a more than 10% reduction in socio-economic problems in today's crisis-driven world.
Copyright infrigement is only detrimental to the health and safety of those who abuse copyright in the first place. The common people do not suffer when their neighbor burns a DVD. The local economy is not negatively affected by the "lost sale", because the money not spent on copyrighted materials is more likely to be spent locally on other goods or services, instead of being funneled to out-of-state gluttons.
As much as I want artists to be fairly compensated, I strongly disagree with the application of copyright law. Litigation never solved anything in this world, it only creates more hatred for one another. It goes against the very purpose of law by promoting and supporting inequality, which is directly detrimental to the health and safety of everyone.
I think the big letdown in Doom 3 was the actual gameplay. The graphics were awesome, and contrary to all the naysayers, I didn't find the hardware requirements that crazy. I always stay a step or two behind the top-end graphics cards... I believe I had an X700 at the time Doom3 was released and it ran fine at High Detail, 1280x1024. I'm quite tolerant of 20-25 framerates so YMMV.
It was the first of the "next-gen" FPSes with its cinematic graphics and fantastic lighting... the darkness worked because it wasn't just tacked on, it added a very thick sense of insecurity. No longer could you run through the halls with rockets blasting everywhere, you actually had to look around and for me, at least, it was an unbearably tense situation that made it absolutely thrilling.
I was less than impressed with the pacing, and I would have certainly appreciated a breather here and there, or some event that makes you feel awesome like a badass gun or new ability (the soul cube was kinda lame). Despite that flaw, it was an impressive game that I keep revisiting once in a while, because the newer releases don't quite own up to it as well as Doom did.
Quake 4 in comparison was a dull thud. The multiplayer felt exactly like Q3 only shinier, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the single-player campaign was uber boring. I hope they don't make the same mistake with Doom 4.
I think what fans are expecting is:
- Crazy graphics a-la Crysis - Gripping storyline and character development - We want to fucking know more about the Doom world! - 3-or-4-way Coop multiplayer ? Pretty please!
Nail at least 3 of those 4 requests and it will be a thundering success.
Have you used any Razer products ever ? Worse build quality than even Logitech, which is impressive because I believe Logitech is one of their manufacturing partners.
Razer mice = brittle junk. I would expect their keyboards to be just as ungood.
True. Every game gets cracked, usually within a few hours or days at best.
Geez, if they can crack console games running exotic hardware and various degrees of hardware/firmware security, then pure PC copy protection doesn't have a chance in hell.
Pirating Bioshock was actually a very important event. It's not so much about the copyright infringement, but the fact that legitimate owners of the game resorted to using the cracked version to avoid DRM bullshit.
Hell, 8-9 years ago I remember setting up a Quake3 keyserver, just so I wouldn't be bothered to find the damned piece of paper every time I patched. If the DRM causes more inconvenience than the crack, the crack wins!
Bioshock's protection was an ass-raping ordeal, which locked out many legitimate users. Considering it's a single-player experience, cracking the executable was a no-brainer from the user's perspective as it didn't remove any functionality. The same will happen with Mass Effect, and I'm sure someone will figure it out for Spore too. It's not even about the 10-day renewal, it's about the principle that when you own something, it's YOURS. Anyone trying to take it from you is a THIEF, whether they had an EULA or not.
If by "tell what was on it before", you mean "fabricate evidence and manipulate the prosecutors", you're absolutely right.
The truth is it's near-impossible to prove what was not on the drive. They can "recover" as much as they need to incriminate whoever they want, and if that fails, well there's always a good ol' bullet to the head.
Of course they say that, but that doesn't mean the acquiring company will actually follow through on those promises.
Game houses rarely "go out of business", they bleed for a couple of years then get blob-sorbed by a big media conglomerate like Vivendi or Sony, and you already know how those big guys love to "do good".
Unless you're the kind of smartass that never admits to their mistakes, you're probably going to want a bigger backspace key so you can drumroll it.
Me, I wish someone would just build a no-compromise keyboard for the 18-hour hacker. The "Happy Hacker" keyboard doesn't cut it for me, too pricey and it still doesn't feel right...
A while ago I had found one that came close, it was a fancy shmancy thing with a touchpad mouse below the space bar. The keys were light but still offered satisfying feedback, it was rather quiet, but the touchpad was too clumsy and unresponsive. I could really use a device that lets me mouse and type simultaneously - that roller bar thing, no love. I've reached the point where I'm considering one-handed bizarro-keyboards.
The way I see it, there are four segments: the $2.99 ghetto keyboard for the common fool, the $29.99 decent keyboard for typical office/coder work, the $59.99 gamer segment ($2.99 cheapo keyboard with LEDs) and finally the ridiculously overpriced exotic keyboards with alternative input methods and/or complex ergo shaping. In my opinion, anything in the first three buckets that doesn't fit the price range is a waste of effort. The 7G keyboard is one such runt, too expensive for gamers, too featureless for the exotic class.
It doesn't. Most BitTorrent clients are already somewhat location-aware, in the sense that they try to prioritize peers according to a number of factors, and each peer can pick and choose who they deal with. Between the two, things usually sort themselves out fairly decently.
Is there room for improvement ? Hell, yes! But I think this Ono thing is fixing a problem that didn't necessarily exist in the first place. What would be nice is to retool the algorithms to favor same-network peers, but that would require extensive documentation of network neighborhoods... can't expect the average Joe to know his ISP's netblocks.
Great idea! Go tell Google, because they're quite possibly the largest source of backscatter spam right now.
The worst thing about backscatter is they are valid messages coming from valid hosts. Greylisting is no help, SPF can't fix it either. Since it has your email address as the original sender, it can be confusing even for the victim.
I also find it extremely ineffective, since I'm clearly not going to click a Cialis link in a bounceback that I allegedly sent out. I'm sure there are some simpler folk out there who would click the link, but would they actually go ahead and participate in the con ? Hopefully less likely than regular spam... I mean, people are astoundingly dumb, but this takes it to a whole new low.
The only difference between the Brazilian coast and the US coast is you can get killed over less money in Brazil. They have problems, just like every other country on earth.
Indeed, which is why the movie is such a failure because it failed to convey the pure anger and lust for justice that defined the character.
Jesus Fucking Christ enough already!
on
Iron Man Released
·
· Score: 1
You know what ? I haven't seen the movie yet. I've only read about it four trillion times on Slashdot. The wife saw it yesterday, and she says it's great, but I'm filled with this vengeful resentment over having it shoved down my throat at every turn.
It's a movie. A work of fiction, committed to film to entertain and to amass profit. It's not the solution to all of life's problems, it's not a life-changing engineering breakthrough, and if it really is as awesome as people claim it to be, then it shouldn't need to be preached all day long as the greatest thing since the acoustic coupler.
If it weren't for all this fanfare, I might have actually gone to see it yesterday, but like many cynics I have this deeply rooted distrust for things that are excessively popular. Why ? Because I know from experience that truly great achievements are rare, but even more rare is the ability of the common human to appreciate such greatness. The way the media (including this withering site) have portrayed this film is akin to fanatic religiosity, which is a very dangerous and condescending M.O.
Because of this madness, I'm going to skip the big screen and wait until it comes out on video. People were almost as enthusiastic about Cloverfield, and I held the same opinion. Perhaps worse even, is that I didn't like Cloverfield when I eventually saw it, and now Iron Man is being lumped into the same pile by mere association.
Shut up already. People come here to read about technology and how it affects us, how we can shape it and use it to our benefit, and helps us become better at what we do, as nerds and free-thinkers. When's the last time an action flick changed the world ?
That is precisely where we diverge. I have zero interest in military applications. If I want to blow random people up, I load up Quake.
The problem with soldiers is there is no ceiling to war escalation. If we have mechas, the enemy will build bigger mechas with insta-gib rifles. Then we'll respond with something more vicious.
Eventually everyone is launching moon-sized nukes at each other and we cease to exist. War is FUCKING stupid.
What else should we expect from a major defense contractor ?
Maybe if a job requires a human to lift 200lb payloads, that job should be redesigned. Throwing 42 quadrillion dollars at an engineering problem for one task is kinda sorta super dumb when the problem can be eliminated entirely with a few brain cells and a case of dr pepper. I don't even know what they're doing, but I'm pretty sure they could streamline it so a simple machine does the heavy lifting, and a simple human pushes the button for their 6-figure income.
Besides, Iron Man sucks. Flying two-tone slab of steel from the 60's, just as weak as every other Marvel B-list movie adaptation (see: Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Punisher). What next, The Falcon ?:P
Thanks for clarifying. I find that power allocation terribly low. We are talking about a full, 42U rack, yes ?
I've rarely seen a respectable 1U slab consume less than 100W, with the 8-core 4Us devouring close to 400W on a busy day. Mind you, I'm in Canada where hydro power is relatively cheap. I guess they do things differently in your neck of the woods.
Minesweeper is a game. It's about as hard on a GPU as most "niche" titles you speak of, because the great majority of low-budget titles are built by glorified VB coders.
I'm not saying a game needs to pound the crap out of my machine to be considered entertaining. What I'm saying is the game industry is full of junk in all segments. Great ideas with crap developers, and crap ideas with great devs. Once in a blue moon, both kinds of geniuses meet up and produce gaming nirvana, the other 99% isn't even worth a screenshot.
As many pixels as they can possibly throw at me, that's how many.
There are people who are perfectly happy with resolutions like 1024x768, good for them! Me, I was running that rez in the 486 days, and gaming it in the late 90's with Voodoo2 and the first GeForce.
The fact that GPUs have scaled faster and larger than CPUs is proof to me that GPGPU is a good idea. I have a beefy PC, and the bulk of what I do involves image processing. If the GPU can do it 10 times faster for less money, that's an epic win and I say bring it on!
Slashdot Mirror
I find that entirely depends on whether all the uppity little copyright bitches are on the rag any particular week.
Better yet: leave the files there. Act as though you didn't even know they existed.
Destroying evidence is proof that the evidence existing AND that you were aware of its illicit nature. It's far more effective to play dumb.
You seem to troll that China is not a threat.
I don't know about the future, but I know tomorrow's invaders won't be speaking Dutch!
Right. Only with improved healthcare in many parts of the world, we've defeated the natural order of things. It wasn't so long ago, infant and teen mortality rate were significantly higher. I'm talking mid-20th century.
How many people today would have died at birth, if not for modern advances in hospital care ? I think that figure would be a good 10% lower, which would result in a more than 10% reduction in socio-economic problems in today's crisis-driven world.
Copyright infrigement is only detrimental to the health and safety of those who abuse copyright in the first place. The common people do not suffer when their neighbor burns a DVD. The local economy is not negatively affected by the "lost sale", because the money not spent on copyrighted materials is more likely to be spent locally on other goods or services, instead of being funneled to out-of-state gluttons.
As much as I want artists to be fairly compensated, I strongly disagree with the application of copyright law. Litigation never solved anything in this world, it only creates more hatred for one another. It goes against the very purpose of law by promoting and supporting inequality, which is directly detrimental to the health and safety of everyone.
I'd be happy with "Useful talent hero", but people would just look up the cheat codes.
I think the big letdown in Doom 3 was the actual gameplay. The graphics were awesome, and contrary to all the naysayers, I didn't find the hardware requirements that crazy. I always stay a step or two behind the top-end graphics cards... I believe I had an X700 at the time Doom3 was released and it ran fine at High Detail, 1280x1024. I'm quite tolerant of 20-25 framerates so YMMV.
It was the first of the "next-gen" FPSes with its cinematic graphics and fantastic lighting... the darkness worked because it wasn't just tacked on, it added a very thick sense of insecurity. No longer could you run through the halls with rockets blasting everywhere, you actually had to look around and for me, at least, it was an unbearably tense situation that made it absolutely thrilling.
I was less than impressed with the pacing, and I would have certainly appreciated a breather here and there, or some event that makes you feel awesome like a badass gun or new ability (the soul cube was kinda lame). Despite that flaw, it was an impressive game that I keep revisiting once in a while, because the newer releases don't quite own up to it as well as Doom did.
Quake 4 in comparison was a dull thud. The multiplayer felt exactly like Q3 only shinier, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the single-player campaign was uber boring. I hope they don't make the same mistake with Doom 4.
I think what fans are expecting is:
- Crazy graphics a-la Crysis
- Gripping storyline and character development
- We want to fucking know more about the Doom world!
- 3-or-4-way Coop multiplayer ? Pretty please!
Nail at least 3 of those 4 requests and it will be a thundering success.
Have you used any Razer products ever ? Worse build quality than even Logitech, which is impressive because I believe Logitech is one of their manufacturing partners.
Razer mice = brittle junk. I would expect their keyboards to be just as ungood.
True. Every game gets cracked, usually within a few hours or days at best.
Geez, if they can crack console games running exotic hardware and various degrees of hardware/firmware security, then pure PC copy protection doesn't have a chance in hell.
Pirating Bioshock was actually a very important event. It's not so much about the copyright infringement, but the fact that legitimate owners of the game resorted to using the cracked version to avoid DRM bullshit.
Hell, 8-9 years ago I remember setting up a Quake3 keyserver, just so I wouldn't be bothered to find the damned piece of paper every time I patched. If the DRM causes more inconvenience than the crack, the crack wins!
Bioshock's protection was an ass-raping ordeal, which locked out many legitimate users. Considering it's a single-player experience, cracking the executable was a no-brainer from the user's perspective as it didn't remove any functionality. The same will happen with Mass Effect, and I'm sure someone will figure it out for Spore too. It's not even about the 10-day renewal, it's about the principle that when you own something, it's YOURS. Anyone trying to take it from you is a THIEF, whether they had an EULA or not.
If by "tell what was on it before", you mean "fabricate evidence and manipulate the prosecutors", you're absolutely right.
The truth is it's near-impossible to prove what was not on the drive. They can "recover" as much as they need to incriminate whoever they want, and if that fails, well there's always a good ol' bullet to the head.
You're saying that real reality being more popular than fake reality is ironic ?
My head asplode.
Of course they say that, but that doesn't mean the acquiring company will actually follow through on those promises.
Game houses rarely "go out of business", they bleed for a couple of years then get blob-sorbed by a big media conglomerate like Vivendi or Sony, and you already know how those big guys love to "do good".
Unless you're the kind of smartass that never admits to their mistakes, you're probably going to want a bigger backspace key so you can drumroll it.
Me, I wish someone would just build a no-compromise keyboard for the 18-hour hacker. The "Happy Hacker" keyboard doesn't cut it for me, too pricey and it still doesn't feel right...
A while ago I had found one that came close, it was a fancy shmancy thing with a touchpad mouse below the space bar. The keys were light but still offered satisfying feedback, it was rather quiet, but the touchpad was too clumsy and unresponsive. I could really use a device that lets me mouse and type simultaneously - that roller bar thing, no love. I've reached the point where I'm considering one-handed bizarro-keyboards.
The way I see it, there are four segments: the $2.99 ghetto keyboard for the common fool, the $29.99 decent keyboard for typical office/coder work, the $59.99 gamer segment ($2.99 cheapo keyboard with LEDs) and finally the ridiculously overpriced exotic keyboards with alternative input methods and/or complex ergo shaping. In my opinion, anything in the first three buckets that doesn't fit the price range is a waste of effort. The 7G keyboard is one such runt, too expensive for gamers, too featureless for the exotic class.
Bingo!
It doesn't. Most BitTorrent clients are already somewhat location-aware, in the sense that they try to prioritize peers according to a number of factors, and each peer can pick and choose who they deal with. Between the two, things usually sort themselves out fairly decently.
Is there room for improvement ? Hell, yes! But I think this Ono thing is fixing a problem that didn't necessarily exist in the first place. What would be nice is to retool the algorithms to favor same-network peers, but that would require extensive documentation of network neighborhoods... can't expect the average Joe to know his ISP's netblocks.
Great idea! Go tell Google, because they're quite possibly the largest source of backscatter spam right now.
The worst thing about backscatter is they are valid messages coming from valid hosts. Greylisting is no help, SPF can't fix it either. Since it has your email address as the original sender, it can be confusing even for the victim.
I also find it extremely ineffective, since I'm clearly not going to click a Cialis link in a bounceback that I allegedly sent out. I'm sure there are some simpler folk out there who would click the link, but would they actually go ahead and participate in the con ? Hopefully less likely than regular spam... I mean, people are astoundingly dumb, but this takes it to a whole new low.
The only difference between the Brazilian coast and the US coast is you can get killed over less money in Brazil. They have problems, just like every other country on earth.
Indeed, which is why the movie is such a failure because it failed to convey the pure anger and lust for justice that defined the character.
You know what ? I haven't seen the movie yet. I've only read about it four trillion times on Slashdot. The wife saw it yesterday, and she says it's great, but I'm filled with this vengeful resentment over having it shoved down my throat at every turn.
It's a movie. A work of fiction, committed to film to entertain and to amass profit. It's not the solution to all of life's problems, it's not a life-changing engineering breakthrough, and if it really is as awesome as people claim it to be, then it shouldn't need to be preached all day long as the greatest thing since the acoustic coupler.
If it weren't for all this fanfare, I might have actually gone to see it yesterday, but like many cynics I have this deeply rooted distrust for things that are excessively popular. Why ? Because I know from experience that truly great achievements are rare, but even more rare is the ability of the common human to appreciate such greatness. The way the media (including this withering site) have portrayed this film is akin to fanatic religiosity, which is a very dangerous and condescending M.O.
Because of this madness, I'm going to skip the big screen and wait until it comes out on video. People were almost as enthusiastic about Cloverfield, and I held the same opinion. Perhaps worse even, is that I didn't like Cloverfield when I eventually saw it, and now Iron Man is being lumped into the same pile by mere association.
Shut up already. People come here to read about technology and how it affects us, how we can shape it and use it to our benefit, and helps us become better at what we do, as nerds and free-thinkers. When's the last time an action flick changed the world ?
That is precisely where we diverge. I have zero interest in military applications. If I want to blow random people up, I load up Quake.
The problem with soldiers is there is no ceiling to war escalation. If we have mechas, the enemy will build bigger mechas with insta-gib rifles. Then we'll respond with something more vicious.
Eventually everyone is launching moon-sized nukes at each other and we cease to exist. War is FUCKING stupid.
You must be new here.
This is Slashdot, not Mensa. BIG difference!
What else should we expect from a major defense contractor ?
:P
Maybe if a job requires a human to lift 200lb payloads, that job should be redesigned. Throwing 42 quadrillion dollars at an engineering problem for one task is kinda sorta super dumb when the problem can be eliminated entirely with a few brain cells and a case of dr pepper. I don't even know what they're doing, but I'm pretty sure they could streamline it so a simple machine does the heavy lifting, and a simple human pushes the button for their 6-figure income.
Besides, Iron Man sucks. Flying two-tone slab of steel from the 60's, just as weak as every other Marvel B-list movie adaptation (see: Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Punisher). What next, The Falcon ?
Thanks for clarifying. I find that power allocation terribly low. We are talking about a full, 42U rack, yes ?
I've rarely seen a respectable 1U slab consume less than 100W, with the 8-core 4Us devouring close to 400W on a busy day. Mind you, I'm in Canada where hydro power is relatively cheap. I guess they do things differently in your neck of the woods.
Minesweeper is a game. It's about as hard on a GPU as most "niche" titles you speak of, because the great majority of low-budget titles are built by glorified VB coders.
I'm not saying a game needs to pound the crap out of my machine to be considered entertaining. What I'm saying is the game industry is full of junk in all segments. Great ideas with crap developers, and crap ideas with great devs. Once in a blue moon, both kinds of geniuses meet up and produce gaming nirvana, the other 99% isn't even worth a screenshot.
As many pixels as they can possibly throw at me, that's how many.
There are people who are perfectly happy with resolutions like 1024x768, good for them! Me, I was running that rez in the 486 days, and gaming it in the late 90's with Voodoo2 and the first GeForce.
The fact that GPUs have scaled faster and larger than CPUs is proof to me that GPGPU is a good idea. I have a beefy PC, and the bulk of what I do involves image processing. If the GPU can do it 10 times faster for less money, that's an epic win and I say bring it on!