Maybe I'm just jaded, but it's not really impressive in 2009, when it's practically the 100th time people have done this and you can assemble a similar light show in a matter of hours with readily-available equipment and software.
Ten years ago we were saying "Huh, neat!" at these setups, today it's more of a "Lern2hack" reaction.
They might luck out and find they have an offsite backup: their users. I've seen it happen more than a few times, where a community site got wiped out, then cooperatively recovered by its users.
I don't know avsim.com, but if their content was organized as a large download repository, there is a strong change at least one of their users obsessively copied every last file. Flight sims are a rather geeky niche, someone might even have a spidered copy of the whole site. I've seen people spider the dumbest things, so surely something like avsim.com would have been spidered at least once by a data-hoarding wacko.
Reduced creativity is part of the problem, but another aspect is there is simply "too much creativity", in the sense that today, practically anyone can produce anything with very little investment. Those same eyeballs are being spread more thinly because there is so much goddamned content out there.
There's also the disproportionate salaries in the movie industry, that were certainly nowhere near as distorted back then as they are now. Does it really "cost" 100 million to shoot a Bond movie, or does it cost more like 5 million with a bunch of greedy pseudo-thespians accounting for the remainder ? The concept of celebrity actors is nothing new, but their hyper-commercialization and glamorization seems to have sustained dizzying heights since the 90's.
Cut out those extraneous costs, and suddenly the 60:1 margin isn't so ludicrous anymore. The cost of computer-based visual effects is at an all-time low thanks to mass availability of the tools and exploitative offshore labour, so a Bond movie could be a whole lot cheaper if they went back to their roots and focused on the characters themselves, instead of the name-brand puppets portraying them.
But now where am I going to find fresh tech-savvy whores to choke ? I've grown quite fond of our pre-strangulation dissertations on the fractal permutations of chia pet arrangements.
I'd like a computer that speeds up, every time I smash the keyboard or mouse in anger, you know, like a human would...
That should be easier to implement than my previous suggestion, which was a speech recognition algo that interprets swearing in various languages and can tell the difference in intensity between "Ah crap" and "STUPID F&@#IN' GODDAMNED TABARNAK MOTHERF&*@&#$ OUTLOOK!".
Riiiiiiiight... except in a balanced, rational world, the laws would be so simple and equitable that one set of laws could apply to the entire nation, without offending one or the other.
It's not like localized authority is ever used to balance things out, they just use it to favor the city, police, uptowners, and/or relatives thereof. They create loopholes to benefit the few, at the expense of the many.
Well now, if you're wearing the company's logo on your head, you're not naked now are you ?
The problem with these overreaching contracts is we let them get away with it, because people are goddamned chickenshits when it comes to money. When faced with the choice between getting a shit job with a shit contract, or turning it down and looking for a more respectful employer, people always go with #1. Well sure enough, as time goes by, option #1 shoves its hand farther up your ass and before you know it, clause #36 of your employment contract has you giving daily handjobs to the entire executive board.
At some point, we gotta grow some balls and tell these bastards "NO! I am not your bitch! Fuck your contract and fuck you!", or start investing in the personal lubricant industry.
If you still want that shit job, if you somehow enjoy being treated like a child and chastised for every little shred of humanity you have left in you, by all means move to Britain, they love your kind! The rest of us would much rather have our private lives unhindered by the fine print of wage slavery.
Right, except now they're regulating other people's products (apps), because the App Store is the only outlet for these apps. You can't even set up your own self-distribution anymore, they locked that down with one of the updates, and made the "developer installation" tedious enough to render it commercially unviable. The fact that they arbitrarily reject applications based on their own hyper-conservative/protective opinions just makes it so much more personal.
That's more like Ford going to every single Jiffy Lube, raising 400-ton steel doors in front of the auto bays with a lock only Ford can open, and then telling all owners of red Mustangs to go fuck themselves. After all, there's a chance they might be illegal street racers, so let's just assume they're all guilty.
There are some good torrents, and some bad ones. It's not Apple's place to discriminate. Need an analogy ? There are some good black people, and some bad ones too. Does that mean Apple should ban all black people from owning an iPhone because they might be criminals ? How is the BitTorrent issue any different ?
Suing: "It's still my fucking phone, and my expensive lawyer will tear you a new one for purposely destroying my property."
Seriously, just file it in Texas or something. Of the thousands of judges in the nation, you only need one crooked bastard to side with you, slap Apple with a nasty verdict setting a precedent for others to follow, and basically playing dirty just like they like to do.
Publishers want their ads to be seen, so they can generate revenue. They hate AdBlock because it cuts into their revenue.
AdBlock users hate ads. They don't want to see any ads.
They are polar opposites, you simply cannot reconcile these two parties. Establishing a "don't block me" list in AdBlock will only result in mass abandonment by AdBlock users, who will flock to a forked or alternative plugin that does what it says on the tin, without any backhanded deals.
Do you think the ad publishers would ever consider asking US, the users, if we'd mind seeing their ads ? No, they shove them up there and make us punch the monkey or watch their obnoxious videos, you know, to politely remind me that Tiger Woods would very much like it if I bought razor blades in-between blog posts, you know, because Tiger cares.
It's quite simple: if AdBlock sells out, someone else will write an unbroken plugin to replace it, and if that fails, well I guess we'll have to make do with proxomitron. Either way, AdBlock loses.
You've already paid for the game, now do yourself a favor and download the crack to rid yourself of this DRM hell.
As someone who's Windows install got hosed by some rootkit-type DRM just a few weeks ago, I can quite frankly tell you that I'll never again buy installer game from [redacted] publisher, as long as they continue using the DRM that fucked up my PC. For once, the pirated copy is an upgrade from this invasive filth.
The whole PAL/NTSC issue is really caused by differing video standards - the frame rate is usually no biggie for games (the engine can adapt), but the resolution difference is a tricky one as it requires most bitmap data to be resized, ruining pixel-perfect graphics and fine details.
The good thing about HDTV is the resolutions are now the same, only the framerates differ (50hz vs 60hz). This should greatly minimize the technical justification for region coding. It doesn't address the political reasons, but if the hardware is fully capable of running foreign software, it makes it much easier to debate the issue and tear these profiteering crooks a new asshole over it.
Maybe it's the idealism talking, but I've always thought these laws/rules were a joke. War is genocide, plain and simple. If someone is looking to destroy me and everyone that looks, talks and walks like me, there is no piece of paper in the world that will protect them from my wrath. Fuck the Geneva Convention, fuck the rules of engagement - wearing a uniform, waving a flag and following arbitrary rules doesn't automagically pardon mass murder. This ain't fucking Parcheesi!
We already have laws to define criminal activities. If some foreigner breaks into a few servers, you arrest and prosecute them for computer abuse. They didn't hold a gun to your head, they didn't threaten thousands of lives with religious zealotry... so why call it war ?
Someone has to say it, might as well be me, but Microsoft is actually doing the right thing wrt virtualization.
It's Intel that's at fault here for disabling VT on some of their SKUs. I recently got burned by this, having bought a quad-core CPU for Xen, when I found out the hard way that this chip didn't have VT (a Q8300). Now the funny thing is of the fifteen or so quad-core Intels, only two have VT disabled.
What the fuck is Intel thinking ?
That sort of nonsense is enough to get me thinking about AMD again. That's how pissed off I was, to have blown $300 on a processor that surely has the feature on-die yet is disabled. I would understand this pedantry on $50 Celerons, but certainly not on a quad marketed to developers and gamers.
If Win7 requires VT, that means Intel will need to pull their shit together and stop releasing crippled products to artificially segment the market. They have officially entered the world of commodity computing, either they play along or they get their ass kicked to the curb by value-leader AMD.
Activation is a pain in the ass, always has been. The only result of this "stronger" activation will be more piracy, because the cracked version is liberated from this draconian bullshit.
It's true for games, it's even more true for Windows. If I have the option of installing my genuine, licenced copy and fuss with reactivation every time I upgrade (few months), or going with a cracked/VLK version that doesn't have that nagware, I'll go with the cracked one, because my time is actually worth something to me and I'm not about to waste an hour on the phone with Microsoft's 3rd-world scripted support staff to beg for permission to upgrade my hard disk.
Image quality vs bitrate means very little without mentioning CPU/memory usage. H.264's greatest weakness is the heavy CPU load on playback, it's just not friendly to low-cost and/or mobile devices. If Theora can get within the ballpark in terms of quality, but beat H.264 in speed, that could be the edge it needs to hit the mainstream.
Right now it's little more than an academic experiment. Floating point everything can give you fantastic quality, but it will crawl so slowly that people will choose a lesser-quality alternative that runs faster.
That's part of the problem. Erlang's structure and concepts are not easily carried over to imperative languages.
It probably doesn't help that most Erlang programs' performance is sorely disappointing. The interpreters and native code compilers are largely to blame for this, but it still makes Erlang unpalatable to most developers, in its current state. It's hard to coax people into learning it, if they can't immediately benefit from its use.
a simple implementation that works with a single tab (not sessions support, no secure connections, either on Linux or Windows, probably not even based on Firefox)
Oh wait, I got a great idea for a name: Netscape Navigator 3!
I gotta admit, I never really saw what the big fuss was over Duke Nukem. I didn't like the first two platformers, they were shitty knockoffs of Keen, developed in-house so they wouldn't have to pay dividends to iD. Then came Cosmo, Bio Menace, Monster Bash... all cheap platformers that played like stuttery 256-color remakes of 10-year old CGA games.
Rise of the Triad was probably their greatest success, again because it ran on someone else's engine, someone competent (Carmack). It was cheesy and outdated, but the camp style and chaotic multiplayer action more than made up for its flaws. That game is still played to this day, because it's such a riot. The same cannot be said of DN3D.
Duke 3D looked and felt awkward at the time, even compared to its older cousin Doom. It was just a shit game with artificially-implanted "cool" in the form of strippers and sound bites. The animation was stuttery, the scripts were glitchy, and multiplayer was a painfully disorienting exercise, what with all the lag...
It certainly didn't help that they milked the franchine with countless rehashes: Duke Atomic, Duke Megaton, Duke this Duke that... all the same crap engine, on every damned platform.
Another shop that danced with failure was Epic Megagames, with their ill-fated One Must Fall franchise. At least they had the sense not to put all their eggs in one basket, so when OMF2 fizzled, they recovered with Unreal and Unreal Tournament. 3DR had no such backup plan, after a while it seemed like they were dragging DNF along as a joke, how could anyone possibly be still working on that tired old project, with no money and no publishing partners ? Where would the money come from ? What made them think everyone would run out to buy it ? Even fifteen years ago, it was obvious that the gaming industry was cutthroat, and a single mistake was enough to ruin the company. It has happened thousands of times, why would 3D Realms not be bound to the rules of reality ?
I, for one, was never looking forward to DNF. I am grateful that someone finally contracted Prey out to people who could actually develop and release it, and it was pretty damned decent when it finally did get released, but 3D Realms itself was always a 3rd-rate shop in my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm just jaded, but it's not really impressive in 2009, when it's practically the 100th time people have done this and you can assemble a similar light show in a matter of hours with readily-available equipment and software.
Ten years ago we were saying "Huh, neat!" at these setups, today it's more of a "Lern2hack" reaction.
They might luck out and find they have an offsite backup: their users. I've seen it happen more than a few times, where a community site got wiped out, then cooperatively recovered by its users.
I don't know avsim.com, but if their content was organized as a large download repository, there is a strong change at least one of their users obsessively copied every last file. Flight sims are a rather geeky niche, someone might even have a spidered copy of the whole site. I've seen people spider the dumbest things, so surely something like avsim.com would have been spidered at least once by a data-hoarding wacko.
Reduced creativity is part of the problem, but another aspect is there is simply "too much creativity", in the sense that today, practically anyone can produce anything with very little investment. Those same eyeballs are being spread more thinly because there is so much goddamned content out there.
There's also the disproportionate salaries in the movie industry, that were certainly nowhere near as distorted back then as they are now. Does it really "cost" 100 million to shoot a Bond movie, or does it cost more like 5 million with a bunch of greedy pseudo-thespians accounting for the remainder ? The concept of celebrity actors is nothing new, but their hyper-commercialization and glamorization seems to have sustained dizzying heights since the 90's.
Cut out those extraneous costs, and suddenly the 60:1 margin isn't so ludicrous anymore. The cost of computer-based visual effects is at an all-time low thanks to mass availability of the tools and exploitative offshore labour, so a Bond movie could be a whole lot cheaper if they went back to their roots and focused on the characters themselves, instead of the name-brand puppets portraying them.
Because the gov't hasn't figured out how to tax it (yet?!)
But now where am I going to find fresh tech-savvy whores to choke ? I've grown quite fond of our pre-strangulation dissertations on the fractal permutations of chia pet arrangements.
I'd like a computer that speeds up, every time I smash the keyboard or mouse in anger, you know, like a human would...
That should be easier to implement than my previous suggestion, which was a speech recognition algo that interprets swearing in various languages and can tell the difference in intensity between "Ah crap" and "STUPID F&@#IN' GODDAMNED TABARNAK MOTHERF&*@&#$ OUTLOOK!".
Riiiiiiiight... except in a balanced, rational world, the laws would be so simple and equitable that one set of laws could apply to the entire nation, without offending one or the other.
It's not like localized authority is ever used to balance things out, they just use it to favor the city, police, uptowners, and/or relatives thereof. They create loopholes to benefit the few, at the expense of the many.
Well now, if you're wearing the company's logo on your head, you're not naked now are you ?
The problem with these overreaching contracts is we let them get away with it, because people are goddamned chickenshits when it comes to money. When faced with the choice between getting a shit job with a shit contract, or turning it down and looking for a more respectful employer, people always go with #1. Well sure enough, as time goes by, option #1 shoves its hand farther up your ass and before you know it, clause #36 of your employment contract has you giving daily handjobs to the entire executive board.
At some point, we gotta grow some balls and tell these bastards "NO! I am not your bitch! Fuck your contract and fuck you!", or start investing in the personal lubricant industry.
If you still want that shit job, if you somehow enjoy being treated like a child and chastised for every little shred of humanity you have left in you, by all means move to Britain, they love your kind! The rest of us would much rather have our private lives unhindered by the fine print of wage slavery.
You really expect AC to give a damn ?
For all we know, maybe it was Maddox himself! But more likely it was kdawson being cute.
Right, except now they're regulating other people's products (apps), because the App Store is the only outlet for these apps. You can't even set up your own self-distribution anymore, they locked that down with one of the updates, and made the "developer installation" tedious enough to render it commercially unviable. The fact that they arbitrarily reject applications based on their own hyper-conservative/protective opinions just makes it so much more personal.
That's more like Ford going to every single Jiffy Lube, raising 400-ton steel doors in front of the auto bays with a lock only Ford can open, and then telling all owners of red Mustangs to go fuck themselves. After all, there's a chance they might be illegal street racers, so let's just assume they're all guilty.
There are some good torrents, and some bad ones. It's not Apple's place to discriminate. Need an analogy ? There are some good black people, and some bad ones too. Does that mean Apple should ban all black people from owning an iPhone because they might be criminals ? How is the BitTorrent issue any different ?
Suing: "It's still my fucking phone, and my expensive lawyer will tear you a new one for purposely destroying my property."
Seriously, just file it in Texas or something. Of the thousands of judges in the nation, you only need one crooked bastard to side with you, slap Apple with a nasty verdict setting a precedent for others to follow, and basically playing dirty just like they like to do.
Okay, here's common sense 101:
Publishers want their ads to be seen, so they can generate revenue. They hate AdBlock because it cuts into their revenue.
AdBlock users hate ads. They don't want to see any ads.
They are polar opposites, you simply cannot reconcile these two parties. Establishing a "don't block me" list in AdBlock will only result in mass abandonment by AdBlock users, who will flock to a forked or alternative plugin that does what it says on the tin, without any backhanded deals.
Do you think the ad publishers would ever consider asking US, the users, if we'd mind seeing their ads ? No, they shove them up there and make us punch the monkey or watch their obnoxious videos, you know, to politely remind me that Tiger Woods would very much like it if I bought razor blades in-between blog posts, you know, because Tiger cares.
It's quite simple: if AdBlock sells out, someone else will write an unbroken plugin to replace it, and if that fails, well I guess we'll have to make do with proxomitron. Either way, AdBlock loses.
You've already paid for the game, now do yourself a favor and download the crack to rid yourself of this DRM hell.
As someone who's Windows install got hosed by some rootkit-type DRM just a few weeks ago, I can quite frankly tell you that I'll never again buy installer game from [redacted] publisher, as long as they continue using the DRM that fucked up my PC. For once, the pirated copy is an upgrade from this invasive filth.
The whole PAL/NTSC issue is really caused by differing video standards - the frame rate is usually no biggie for games (the engine can adapt), but the resolution difference is a tricky one as it requires most bitmap data to be resized, ruining pixel-perfect graphics and fine details.
The good thing about HDTV is the resolutions are now the same, only the framerates differ (50hz vs 60hz). This should greatly minimize the technical justification for region coding. It doesn't address the political reasons, but if the hardware is fully capable of running foreign software, it makes it much easier to debate the issue and tear these profiteering crooks a new asshole over it.
Maybe it's the idealism talking, but I've always thought these laws/rules were a joke. War is genocide, plain and simple. If someone is looking to destroy me and everyone that looks, talks and walks like me, there is no piece of paper in the world that will protect them from my wrath. Fuck the Geneva Convention, fuck the rules of engagement - wearing a uniform, waving a flag and following arbitrary rules doesn't automagically pardon mass murder. This ain't fucking Parcheesi!
We already have laws to define criminal activities. If some foreigner breaks into a few servers, you arrest and prosecute them for computer abuse. They didn't hold a gun to your head, they didn't threaten thousands of lives with religious zealotry... so why call it war ?
Someone has to say it, might as well be me, but Microsoft is actually doing the right thing wrt virtualization.
It's Intel that's at fault here for disabling VT on some of their SKUs. I recently got burned by this, having bought a quad-core CPU for Xen, when I found out the hard way that this chip didn't have VT (a Q8300). Now the funny thing is of the fifteen or so quad-core Intels, only two have VT disabled.
What the fuck is Intel thinking ?
That sort of nonsense is enough to get me thinking about AMD again. That's how pissed off I was, to have blown $300 on a processor that surely has the feature on-die yet is disabled. I would understand this pedantry on $50 Celerons, but certainly not on a quad marketed to developers and gamers.
If Win7 requires VT, that means Intel will need to pull their shit together and stop releasing crippled products to artificially segment the market. They have officially entered the world of commodity computing, either they play along or they get their ass kicked to the curb by value-leader AMD.
Activation is a pain in the ass, always has been. The only result of this "stronger" activation will be more piracy, because the cracked version is liberated from this draconian bullshit.
It's true for games, it's even more true for Windows. If I have the option of installing my genuine, licenced copy and fuss with reactivation every time I upgrade (few months), or going with a cracked/VLK version that doesn't have that nagware, I'll go with the cracked one, because my time is actually worth something to me and I'm not about to waste an hour on the phone with Microsoft's 3rd-world scripted support staff to beg for permission to upgrade my hard disk.
Hold out your hands, you just won a dozen internets!
Image quality vs bitrate means very little without mentioning CPU/memory usage. H.264's greatest weakness is the heavy CPU load on playback, it's just not friendly to low-cost and/or mobile devices. If Theora can get within the ballpark in terms of quality, but beat H.264 in speed, that could be the edge it needs to hit the mainstream.
Right now it's little more than an academic experiment. Floating point everything can give you fantastic quality, but it will crawl so slowly that people will choose a lesser-quality alternative that runs faster.
That's part of the problem. Erlang's structure and concepts are not easily carried over to imperative languages.
It probably doesn't help that most Erlang programs' performance is sorely disappointing. The interpreters and native code compilers are largely to blame for this, but it still makes Erlang unpalatable to most developers, in its current state. It's hard to coax people into learning it, if they can't immediately benefit from its use.
a simple implementation that works with a single tab (not sessions support, no secure connections, either on Linux or Windows, probably not even based on Firefox)
Oh wait, I got a great idea for a name: Netscape Navigator 3!
I gotta admit, I never really saw what the big fuss was over Duke Nukem. I didn't like the first two platformers, they were shitty knockoffs of Keen, developed in-house so they wouldn't have to pay dividends to iD. Then came Cosmo, Bio Menace, Monster Bash... all cheap platformers that played like stuttery 256-color remakes of 10-year old CGA games.
Rise of the Triad was probably their greatest success, again because it ran on someone else's engine, someone competent (Carmack). It was cheesy and outdated, but the camp style and chaotic multiplayer action more than made up for its flaws. That game is still played to this day, because it's such a riot. The same cannot be said of DN3D.
Duke 3D looked and felt awkward at the time, even compared to its older cousin Doom. It was just a shit game with artificially-implanted "cool" in the form of strippers and sound bites. The animation was stuttery, the scripts were glitchy, and multiplayer was a painfully disorienting exercise, what with all the lag...
It certainly didn't help that they milked the franchine with countless rehashes: Duke Atomic, Duke Megaton, Duke this Duke that... all the same crap engine, on every damned platform.
Another shop that danced with failure was Epic Megagames, with their ill-fated One Must Fall franchise. At least they had the sense not to put all their eggs in one basket, so when OMF2 fizzled, they recovered with Unreal and Unreal Tournament. 3DR had no such backup plan, after a while it seemed like they were dragging DNF along as a joke, how could anyone possibly be still working on that tired old project, with no money and no publishing partners ? Where would the money come from ? What made them think everyone would run out to buy it ? Even fifteen years ago, it was obvious that the gaming industry was cutthroat, and a single mistake was enough to ruin the company. It has happened thousands of times, why would 3D Realms not be bound to the rules of reality ?
I, for one, was never looking forward to DNF. I am grateful that someone finally contracted Prey out to people who could actually develop and release it, and it was pretty damned decent when it finally did get released, but 3D Realms itself was always a 3rd-rate shop in my mind.
Maybe even news services could be covered by your property tax
They'll have to toss out all the shock-advertising and conservative spin before that shit ever flies.
The value in owning a newspaper is not the profit of distributing the rag, but in the power of your particular spin.
The kind of spin mega-corps like to fund as it subtly promotes their brands and lends them massive lobbying clout.
Survey says ? WHOOSH!