It would simply be nice to have a moderated sub-internet clean of any corporate crap, like a few years ago before everyone and their cat had a modem (and we didn't have this blasted 56k crap, the audacious had ISDN 128k). There wasn't a zillion sites to be indexed on google and even the mediocre search-gone-portal that is Altavista was great back then, given the limited amount of websites and high level of quality content, not just meta tags and link pages. You didn't need napster to find mp3's and there weren't 40 different corrupt copies of the same song you were looking for. Servers were mostly academic and getting 100k/sec on the campus pipe was something to brag about. You could make a webpage about anything without fear of being sued (yes, even warez, cybersquatting and other unlegalities). I could even make a little cash writing shareware apps and doorgames, and I didn't need to spam 256 different search engines in order to gain attention. I deeply miss those days.
I personally don't think they stand much of a chance. We all know how open source projects take forever to advance (even though they advance safely and surely). The big thing about the game industry isn't about delivering a great game, it's about deadlines (which often slip though).
You could have a thousand genius coders, artists, designers and musicians.. but if you let them work on it until the game is nothing less than an orgasm to play, you'll have missed the train by 5 years and you'll have spent most of those 5 years rewriting the engine because it had become obsolete already. Just look at the bad joke that was Daikatana. It took years before they released it, and it looks and feels like an early playstation game.
The maximum turnaround time for a game is about 9 months for a non-rpg game, and up to 15 months for an rpg (which is part of the reason why rpg's always look cheap technology-wise). Now keep in mind that most game companies slip behind their deadlines all the time, despite long hours and plentiful caffeine (and a psychotic project leader driving everyone insane). In contrast we have the open-source model that churns out quality software at a slug's pace. Sure, slow-cooking that steak brings out all the flavor, but sometimes you just want to grill it quick cuz you're hungry. Gamers are hungry.
Ok, on one hand I want to see more cases like this where the little guy silences the big guy's lies. HOWEVER, I don't exactly like seeing the little guy's name on a bunch of -sucks domains. lockheedmartinsucks, microsoftsucks, wiposucks, and surely a bunch more. What's next ? BillcoPCsucks.com ? Geez.. some people just have nothing to do with their money (and minds).
Well I guess I can relate to that somewhat. We all need some money to live normally. Rent, food, broadband, blank cd's.. such are the necessities of life. Once you've got that covered, you're healthy and happy. Does that mean I'm going to work at McPizzaWay all my life ? Sure it would be sufficient to survive, but it's boring and depressing.
Lucky me, the first thing I saw when I was born wasn't the doctor, it was an Atari 400 =) So I spend my days PEEKing and POKEing and here I am now with a confortable no-stress job at the government waiting for the master database to screw up, at which point I will repair it and get back to being lazy. The pay is more than 3 times what I'd be making at McPizzaWay, and I don't need to spend half my salary on therapy to get my mind off chainsaws ("ya want fresh meat ? how about the manager over there ?"). It's a dull job, but it allows me to tinker with other things and doesn't put much strain on my brain.
Sure, I could be making more money doing some bullshit IT job, which in here is basically 10% programming, 90% sucking up. No thanks, I'd rather be lazy and burn cd's all day. I make enough money to be able to ignore it, and that's all that matters to me. I can spend the rest of my time playing everquest or working on my relationship with a clear mind. The importance of money decreases exponentially as its amount increases linearly. For the lazy minded, that means having 10$ compared to 0$ is a big difference, but having 42000 compared to 39000 is just more taxes to pay.
Can't you see a pattern here ? people are now born with a stick up their ass. A month ago people were bitching against the "2001 monolith" that was popping up all over the place, too stiff to just see it as an artistic/fanatic statement. People just don't respect their differences anymore, it's a "Fuck you, fuck me" world.
What you seem to have overlooked is that the US is absolutely paranoid about spying and national security. They would probably have a bunch of people reviewing/testing/fixing the code exactly to avoid this kind of digital sabotage. And even if it does turn out to be more expensive than just developing it all in-house, the government will all write it off as R&D along with the other half of the money that's going straight into the secretary's swiss account. Your tax dollars at work.
I see what you mean, in the sense that by cooperating, both players are better rewarded, but they still come out even. To an aggressive guy like me, the definition of "winning" is "to beat everyone/everything else". Having 14 skittles vs 9 for the opponent is better than having 30 skittles each because it defeats the point of the challenge since no one has been found superior. This whole non-zero sum stuff just doesn't grok.
I do agree this is a disturbance to some, especially those cargo ships, but why the hell can't anybody take it for what it is : a harmless publicity prank ? Sure.. let those psycho rapists walk around, but arrest a bunch of genius students who are just displaying their talent just because some fat cop's not getting laid enough ? Geezus.. life wasn't meant to be taken so damned seriously.
Pointless game. One can never lose if he/she/it always chooses to compete. Best case, the opponent chooses to cooperate and you get 5.. worst case, the opponent competes as well and you both get only 1 (which doesn't advance you at all, but neither does the opponent). The concept itself shows promise though.
Problem : at least here in Canada, the government standard OS is Windows, not Linux. They have a commercial Unix 9 (dunno which vendor) that runs a single app, everything else is Windows/Novell. Governments aren't exactly notorious for jumping onto every piece of experimental hackware.
I guess this gives a new meaning to the expression "battery life". I can just see a coroner stating "This man has a dead battery."
Seems like a great hacking target for terrorists: "If you don't fork over 6 umpzillion dollars in 12 hours, we will activate a high-powered EMP that will stop every artificial heart within a 70-mile radius."
Disclaimer: i'm not a terrorist, just a harmless paranoid sicko.
They don't need software to mistake innocent people for felons and claim the right to harass them until they actually DO something illegal (like punching an abusive cop in the face and forcing them to swallow their badge). Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. High-tech toys give cops more power in the sense that they can monitor more people at any given time. The more they can watch, the happier they are in their voyeuristic little minds. This just keeps on looping and growing exponentially worse until they metaphorically stick the damn cameras right inside our brains with funky little probes that detect drug traces in the bloodstream in realtime and a nanomodem that immediately calls up the station to send a bunch of uniform-wearing thugs to drag you away and beat you until you reveal your sources. Paranoid ? Certainly. Absurd ? Not as much as you might think.
Welcome to the year 2097, have a good, short, establishment-approved life.
If an american politician suggested we take money from the rich to buy Power Ranger toys for the poor, or rather, make them available cheaper to the poor, don't you think it would be stopped?
Of course it would be stopped, because the U.S. government is the icon of corrupt politics in every way. Hyper-capitalism is worsening the gap between the upper class and middle/lower class at a staggering rate. Taking into consideration the unrestful Brazilian society, this government-assisted program looks like mind control, offering near-freebies to those people who are most likely to go berserk and go against the government. Things are pretty bad in some parts down there, riots are just a heartbeat away.
Here in Canada, there's a radically different governmental gimmick for families (which means you gotta have a kid, ah CRAP!) where they give you 500$ off the purchase of a complete PC (minimum AMD K6-2-450), and they whack 20$ off your monthly dialup or cable bill. They want people to get online because all governmental departments are moving their services online. They figure it's cheaper to buy machines and hire a few well-paid ignorant MCSE pseudo-sysadmin-wannabes than to staff a counter with low-wage clerks. Well that's R&D for ya.
All the better. If the advisories were released before a fix was available, the whole damned net would fall to its knees under the hordes of script kiddies.
Am I the only one who believes this is just natural evolution of the game ? It's just becoming more and more like real life, with fraud, treachery, organized "crime" and retards with money running the world. Sure it's "unfair", but life never was fair. Getting rid of this hypocritical selling prohibition would simply open up new paths for expansion of the EverQuest collective conscience. For example, to combat the cheap campers we could come up with some sort of law-enforcement or military regiment. Since this one rule can have such a strong impact on the mindset of many players, there are many new developments that would be made possible.
My other argument is that if someone's stupid enough to pay real money for an unreal item, well I'm not one to stop them. It's surely not as vile as Amway.
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 1
Depends what kind of editing you need to do. If you just want to split it up into smaller pieces without doing any real audio processing (I'm assuming you don't want to run it through a vocoder =) well that can be done with a few utils that work directly on the MP3 stream without recompressing.
As far as the encoding is concerned, I strongly doubt the Fraunhofer codec would be considered the best. Fraunhofer may have produced the first popular MP3 encoders but they certainly don't know much about audio fidelity because their encoders all distort the upper-end of the audio spectrum. I honestly find that our beloved LAME encoder works fine and cleanly. I still have my highs (the resulting MP3 data is actually too clean for my MPTrip, which tends to clip since it wasn't tuned for such strong high-ends). Not only does it retain good sound quality but it is also lightning fast on my PC (p3-850), averaging 9x encoding. That's 9 times more than you need to record live.
Google was great up until a few month ago (maybe even a year), when they started throwing around lots of publicity and at some point they explained to the whole stupid world in simple terms how they made Google better than the rest of the crop (i.e. the Pagerank system). At that point, the web-spammers, those pathetic fscks who spend their whole lives making content-free pages with only links and banners and popups, well they figured it out. They started creating zillions of ditzy pages containing trucks of keywords and only one link to the "real" website they were spamming about.
The concept isn't new, it's just the sheer volume that made Google freak out. The reason behind it is that Google counts the number of links leading to one page as an indicator of that page's actual popularity. So the spammers simply created hundreds, thousands of dummy pages with single, prominently-placed links which fooled Google's crawler.
The temporary solution, as always, will be to come up with a new crawling method that can filter out these poison pages, but of course it will only be a matter of time before someone "cracks" the new crawler. History repeating.
There's just one problem : Look TV is practically dead. It never caught on and the business is "restructuring". Expect it to pop within a year or two.
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 1
Why not just record straight to MP3 format ? you'd fit all that radio into less than 500 megs.
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't want to be the monkey in charge of swapping backup tapes for that filesystem:) It would be a full time job.
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 2
That's a timing issue, not a speed issue. The difference lies in the fact that the shutdown process must sit and wait for the drives to shut down. "$foo=time(); while(time()$foo+2);"
A speed issue would be a delay loop overflow, but anyone still using counter-based delay loops should sit down with a game developer and learn about more robust throttling methods. Every decent computer architecture has a system clock that can be used to accurately measure time in tiny increments.
On any x86 system you can use the system clock to trigger rhythmic interrupts that keep everything in sync. Good old Dos games used this trick to hit 60fps on the mark without having to wait for vertical blanking to occur. Why couldn't an OS scheduler use this technique to manage timeslices and other boring chores ? I don't know about other architectures but surely there is something analogous to this method.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on you drones, mod this up!
It would simply be nice to have a moderated sub-internet clean of any corporate crap, like a few years ago before everyone and their cat had a modem (and we didn't have this blasted 56k crap, the audacious had ISDN 128k). There wasn't a zillion sites to be indexed on google and even the mediocre search-gone-portal that is Altavista was great back then, given the limited amount of websites and high level of quality content, not just meta tags and link pages. You didn't need napster to find mp3's and there weren't 40 different corrupt copies of the same song you were looking for. Servers were mostly academic and getting 100k/sec on the campus pipe was something to brag about. You could make a webpage about anything without fear of being sued (yes, even warez, cybersquatting and other unlegalities). I could even make a little cash writing shareware apps and doorgames, and I didn't need to spam 256 different search engines in order to gain attention. I deeply miss those days.
I personally don't think they stand much of a chance. We all know how open source projects take forever to advance (even though they advance safely and surely). The big thing about the game industry isn't about delivering a great game, it's about deadlines (which often slip though).
You could have a thousand genius coders, artists, designers and musicians.. but if you let them work on it until the game is nothing less than an orgasm to play, you'll have missed the train by 5 years and you'll have spent most of those 5 years rewriting the engine because it had become obsolete already. Just look at the bad joke that was Daikatana. It took years before they released it, and it looks and feels like an early playstation game.
The maximum turnaround time for a game is about 9 months for a non-rpg game, and up to 15 months for an rpg (which is part of the reason why rpg's always look cheap technology-wise). Now keep in mind that most game companies slip behind their deadlines all the time, despite long hours and plentiful caffeine (and a psychotic project leader driving everyone insane). In contrast we have the open-source model that churns out quality software at a slug's pace. Sure, slow-cooking that steak brings out all the flavor, but sometimes you just want to grill it quick cuz you're hungry. Gamers are hungry.
Ok, on one hand I want to see more cases like this where the little guy silences the big guy's lies. HOWEVER, I don't exactly like seeing the little guy's name on a bunch of -sucks domains. lockheedmartinsucks, microsoftsucks, wiposucks, and surely a bunch more. What's next ? BillcoPCsucks.com ? Geez.. some people just have nothing to do with their money (and minds).
Well I guess I can relate to that somewhat. We all need some money to live normally. Rent, food, broadband, blank cd's.. such are the necessities of life. Once you've got that covered, you're healthy and happy. Does that mean I'm going to work at McPizzaWay all my life ? Sure it would be sufficient to survive, but it's boring and depressing.
Lucky me, the first thing I saw when I was born wasn't the doctor, it was an Atari 400 =) So I spend my days PEEKing and POKEing and here I am now with a confortable no-stress job at the government waiting for the master database to screw up, at which point I will repair it and get back to being lazy. The pay is more than 3 times what I'd be making at McPizzaWay, and I don't need to spend half my salary on therapy to get my mind off chainsaws ("ya want fresh meat ? how about the manager over there ?"). It's a dull job, but it allows me to tinker with other things and doesn't put much strain on my brain.
Sure, I could be making more money doing some bullshit IT job, which in here is basically 10% programming, 90% sucking up. No thanks, I'd rather be lazy and burn cd's all day. I make enough money to be able to ignore it, and that's all that matters to me. I can spend the rest of my time playing everquest or working on my relationship with a clear mind. The importance of money decreases exponentially as its amount increases linearly. For the lazy minded, that means having 10$ compared to 0$ is a big difference, but having 42000 compared to 39000 is just more taxes to pay.
Just what we all need : more ignorants.
If I had a nickel every time I felt like punching someone, i'd be moving into Bill Gates' house by now.
Can't you see a pattern here ? people are now born with a stick up their ass. A month ago people were bitching against the "2001 monolith" that was popping up all over the place, too stiff to just see it as an artistic/fanatic statement. People just don't respect their differences anymore, it's a "Fuck you, fuck me" world.
What you seem to have overlooked is that the US is absolutely paranoid about spying and national security. They would probably have a bunch of people reviewing/testing/fixing the code exactly to avoid this kind of digital sabotage. And even if it does turn out to be more expensive than just developing it all in-house, the government will all write it off as R&D along with the other half of the money that's going straight into the secretary's swiss account. Your tax dollars at work.
I see what you mean, in the sense that by cooperating, both players are better rewarded, but they still come out even. To an aggressive guy like me, the definition of "winning" is "to beat everyone/everything else". Having 14 skittles vs 9 for the opponent is better than having 30 skittles each because it defeats the point of the challenge since no one has been found superior. This whole non-zero sum stuff just doesn't grok.
I do agree this is a disturbance to some, especially those cargo ships, but why the hell can't anybody take it for what it is : a harmless publicity prank ? Sure.. let those psycho rapists walk around, but arrest a bunch of genius students who are just displaying their talent just because some fat cop's not getting laid enough ? Geezus.. life wasn't meant to be taken so damned seriously.
Pointless game. One can never lose if he/she/it always chooses to compete. Best case, the opponent chooses to cooperate and you get 5.. worst case, the opponent competes as well and you both get only 1 (which doesn't advance you at all, but neither does the opponent). The concept itself shows promise though.
Problem : at least here in Canada, the government standard OS is Windows, not Linux. They have a commercial Unix 9 (dunno which vendor) that runs a single app, everything else is Windows/Novell. Governments aren't exactly notorious for jumping onto every piece of experimental hackware.
I guess this gives a new meaning to the expression "battery life". I can just see a coroner stating "This man has a dead battery."
Seems like a great hacking target for terrorists: "If you don't fork over 6 umpzillion dollars in 12 hours, we will activate a high-powered EMP that will stop every artificial heart within a 70-mile radius."
Disclaimer: i'm not a terrorist, just a harmless paranoid sicko.
Obviously they plan on generating their revenue by winning every cracking compo on distributed.net by using every Juno user's pc for their own team.
They don't need software to mistake innocent people for felons and claim the right to harass them until they actually DO something illegal (like punching an abusive cop in the face and forcing them to swallow their badge). Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. High-tech toys give cops more power in the sense that they can monitor more people at any given time. The more they can watch, the happier they are in their voyeuristic little minds. This just keeps on looping and growing exponentially worse until they metaphorically stick the damn cameras right inside our brains with funky little probes that detect drug traces in the bloodstream in realtime and a nanomodem that immediately calls up the station to send a bunch of uniform-wearing thugs to drag you away and beat you until you reveal your sources. Paranoid ? Certainly. Absurd ? Not as much as you might think.
Welcome to the year 2097, have a good, short, establishment-approved life.
If an american politician suggested we take money from the rich to buy Power Ranger toys for the poor, or rather, make them available cheaper to the poor, don't you think it would be stopped?
Of course it would be stopped, because the U.S. government is the icon of corrupt politics in every way. Hyper-capitalism is worsening the gap between the upper class and middle/lower class at a staggering rate. Taking into consideration the unrestful Brazilian society, this government-assisted program looks like mind control, offering near-freebies to those people who are most likely to go berserk and go against the government. Things are pretty bad in some parts down there, riots are just a heartbeat away.
Here in Canada, there's a radically different governmental gimmick for families (which means you gotta have a kid, ah CRAP!) where they give you 500$ off the purchase of a complete PC (minimum AMD K6-2-450), and they whack 20$ off your monthly dialup or cable bill. They want people to get online because all governmental departments are moving their services online. They figure it's cheaper to buy machines and hire a few well-paid ignorant MCSE pseudo-sysadmin-wannabes than to staff a counter with low-wage clerks. Well that's R&D for ya.
Subway: A, C, E to 42nd St -
Port Authority; N, R, S, 1, 1, 3, 7, 9 to 42nd Str
Is it just me or does this look like a walkthrough for Zork 3 ?
All the better. If the advisories were released before a fix was available, the whole damned net would fall to its knees under the hordes of script kiddies.
Am I the only one who believes this is just natural evolution of the game ? It's just becoming more and more like real life, with fraud, treachery, organized "crime" and retards with money running the world. Sure it's "unfair", but life never was fair. Getting rid of this hypocritical selling prohibition would simply open up new paths for expansion of the EverQuest collective conscience. For example, to combat the cheap campers we could come up with some sort of law-enforcement or military regiment. Since this one rule can have such a strong impact on the mindset of many players, there are many new developments that would be made possible.
My other argument is that if someone's stupid enough to pay real money for an unreal item, well I'm not one to stop them. It's surely not as vile as Amway.
Depends what kind of editing you need to do. If you just want to split it up into smaller pieces without doing any real audio processing (I'm assuming you don't want to run it through a vocoder =) well that can be done with a few utils that work directly on the MP3 stream without recompressing.
As far as the encoding is concerned, I strongly doubt the Fraunhofer codec would be considered the best. Fraunhofer may have produced the first popular MP3 encoders but they certainly don't know much about audio fidelity because their encoders all distort the upper-end of the audio spectrum. I honestly find that our beloved LAME encoder works fine and cleanly. I still have my highs (the resulting MP3 data is actually too clean for my MPTrip, which tends to clip since it wasn't tuned for such strong high-ends). Not only does it retain good sound quality but it is also lightning fast on my PC (p3-850), averaging 9x encoding. That's 9 times more than you need to record live.
Google was great up until a few month ago (maybe even a year), when they started throwing around lots of publicity and at some point they explained to the whole stupid world in simple terms how they made Google better than the rest of the crop (i.e. the Pagerank system). At that point, the web-spammers, those pathetic fscks who spend their whole lives making content-free pages with only links and banners and popups, well they figured it out. They started creating zillions of ditzy pages containing trucks of keywords and only one link to the "real" website they were spamming about.
The concept isn't new, it's just the sheer volume that made Google freak out. The reason behind it is that Google counts the number of links leading to one page as an indicator of that page's actual popularity. So the spammers simply created hundreds, thousands of dummy pages with single, prominently-placed links which fooled Google's crawler.
The temporary solution, as always, will be to come up with a new crawling method that can filter out these poison pages, but of course it will only be a matter of time before someone "cracks" the new crawler. History repeating.
There's just one problem : Look TV is practically dead. It never caught on and the business is "restructuring". Expect it to pop within a year or two.
Why not just record straight to MP3 format ? you'd fit all that radio into less than 500 megs.
I wouldn't want to be the monkey in charge of swapping backup tapes for that filesystem :) It would be a full time job.
That's a timing issue, not a speed issue. The difference lies in the fact that the shutdown process must sit and wait for the drives to shut down. "$foo=time(); while(time()$foo+2);"
A speed issue would be a delay loop overflow, but anyone still using counter-based delay loops should sit down with a game developer and learn about more robust throttling methods. Every decent computer architecture has a system clock that can be used to accurately measure time in tiny increments.
On any x86 system you can use the system clock to trigger rhythmic interrupts that keep everything in sync. Good old Dos games used this trick to hit 60fps on the mark without having to wait for vertical blanking to occur. Why couldn't an OS scheduler use this technique to manage timeslices and other boring chores ? I don't know about other architectures but surely there is something analogous to this method.