I think I remember a serious discussion between two scientists, one who thinks that gravity reduces past the point of average landlass (weightless center), and one who thinks it increases toward the center. Or have I completely imagined that ?
No, that's interesting. Obviously gravitational attraction decreases exponentially with distance, but how about when you're moving into the earth? It's tricky because you can't conveniently model the earth as a point as you would in space.
I think the solution is that you call up the old image of the earth as a ball sitting in a depression on the fabric of space-time. If you trace the curve going into the depression, it's S-shaped....you go slow, then fast, then slow again. That's probably why these two dudes were able to argue about it - they were both assuming a linear solution.
Don't tell me that this was not HIS software, but was Apple's. He was writing it, it was his as well as others. As with most non-free software interests, Apple locked our friend out of his work.
And somehow, this fine post, which cut right to the heart of the matter, was rated OFFTOPIC.
This author is talking about Apple, he's talking about this kid, and he's talking about the meaning and implications of this news item.
How is this offtopic? Who are you, Slashdot moderator, who is your god and how can I destroy him?
OK, let's start with what we know. From the article: "Astronomers are sold on black holes." Yes, they are. Black holes are out there. The question is what's inside.
Nobody can see inside, so it's anybody's calculated guess. The two main problems with the current theory are singularities and entropy.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of singularities. I think it's a cop-out to say, "at some point, all the known laws of space-time break down, and that's that." Many people seem to be of the same mindset, including the authors of this paper. They suggest that at some point, the collapse of the black hole is balanced by some quantum force. Now, if I recall correctly, didn't Hawking already suggest this himself?
As for entropy, Hawking wrote that black holes emit radiation by sucking up nearby anti-particles. I've never understood why black holes should statistically acquire more anti-particles than particles, but then again, nobody understands the statistical nature of matter vs. antimatter anyway. I'll take his word that the math works.
This paper amounts to little more than a comparison between black holes and Condensate, and considering that condensate is near-absolute COLD and black holes are something akin to absolute HOT, I think it's a pretty immature analogy.
The paper isn't even published. Why are we talking about it?
It's true that no computational algorithm can generate truly random numbers, without input from some random physical process
Yes, exactly. Randomness comes from outside the system. Randomness=unknowability. However, somehow you completely avoided connecting this tidbit with the discussion at hand.
Brooks' philosophy is that the physical world is "its own best model." Thus, his robots are non-deterministic by design.
Thank you. Now why did you think that this discussion benefitted from a link to a crypto hash algorithm? Get some exercise, take your Adderol, whatever. Stay focused for christ's sake.
need for high-tech has been there all along
on
The Post 9/11 Tech Boom
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, we've heard JonKatz rave about mainstream corporate movies, now he's repeating the corporate media's perception of the tech economy, which is: "Wow, the tech economy crashed but we still need technology!"
No shit. In the past five years, and unprecedented amount of money was spent on hardware and software. What came of it? Microsoft got stronger, Windows became slower and more insecure, and the Web became full of pop-up ads.
A few people got broadband access, and Cisco sold some routers. That's about it. The rest of the investment capital was spent on dot-com pizza parties.
If you want to say that this country continues to have an underdeveloped tech infrastructure, then say it. But it's insulting to hear media buzzwords like "trends" and "new spending."
Trend means, "Hire marketers now." New spending means, "Get ready for more pizza parties." Neither of these things have anything to do with the long-term planning of a fast and reliable tech infrastructure.
Most software shops doesn't use any formal methodologies until they get a reasonable size. It's what allow them to be competitive when working on projects that are small enough that adding overhead isn't needed.
Formal methodologies are not overhead. You would know this if you were a software engineer.
Whoever modded you up isn't a software engineer either.
Wow. At 68 posts (which took all of 5 minutes to accumulate, I might add), there are 6 recommendations for X Windows and 20 recommendations for VNC. This doesn't even take into consideration all the people who mentioned VNC but recommended Citrix or WTS instead.
Granted, VNC is a great little secret and some tight code, but from a systems standpoint, it's a hack. All it does is throw a bitmap over the wire. Meanwhile, X Windows was built from the ground up to be NETWORKED.
1. A linux box makes a great always-on server. The more data you store on your linux box, the more you can access remotely with ftp, telnet, http, or X. The best setup I can envision (assuming you want to manage your own data) is a linux box in some hosted rack space. But at that point, bandwith becomes a critical issue.
2. Samba would rock if Windows Networking did. I use Windows but store most of my files on a Linux filesystem. It's great when Windows behaves.
3. X rocks. It's ugly but it blows the hell out of VNC. X is remarkably efficient - you can actually tolerate using it at 56k. I haven't used X over a network very much since I was in college, but every time I do, it's a joy. In fact, I think that X is a major part of the solution.
I agree that this issue is something that needs more attention, but honestly, good ol' X already gets us 90% there. Go in with some friends, get a VA Linux box on the cheap and put it in a rack. Run Emacs over the wire. It's been done.
I would imagine it's because that meat is higher in energy, pound for pound. With spacecraft, weight/storage considerations are of paramount importance.
OK let's think about this. You want to provide the maximum amount of food per weight in space. The ideal solution is nothing but canned chili. Obviously this provides 100% weight devoted to food. Chemicals for growing meat are extra; the conversion is not 100% efficient.
But the balancing consideration is the psychology of eating. The main thrust of this research is to provide food that maintains psychological well-being on a long trip.
Offhand, I'd say that green plants would be much more pleasant than a mutant extra passenger, a blob of vat-grown flesh that I'm sure I'd grow to hate.
The researchers should start by examining which foods are nutritious and can be grown in space with solid efficiency. I doubt that meat is one of them. Water used by plants is ultimately recycled; plants implicitly clean the air.
Technically speaking it would be very simple to change the entire show 180deg. by simply editing to change the context of sentences, etc. Would I be free to "edit" this to say "I love abortion because I hate babies"? I don't think this will fly at all.
Yes, exactly, you CAN turn the material around 180 degrees, the same way that you can turn an 80's pop tune into a techno smash.
You sound like George Lucas for being afraid of this.
Would this really be all that interesting? Personally, have access to raw footage isn't all that appealing. It's not like open source software where i can change the code and actually change the functionality. Just seems rather pointless to me.
It's not pointless at all. Get some content editing skills, maybe you'll appreciate content.
On one hand, it's quite common to remix or remake songs. It's true that anything on a major-label CD has all of the proper consent/royalties taken care of, but major labels are a small fraction of the world of music.
When it comes down to it, nobody *really* controls music. No lawyer is going to harass you for riffing Led Zeppelin or whatever in concert. Ever heard of a tribute band? Concert bootlegs? Deejay mixtapes?
On the other hand, images and movies are tightly controlled, even the quality of consumer-grade video recording devices is being restricted now that major electronics companies have "digital piracy" on the brain.
Yeah, maybe there's not much you can do with Cringely's talking head, but then again, maybe there is. Either way, it's a big statement.
Blizzard shuts down innocent websites and programmers, and you guys go promote their fucking products?
Well, I don't know much about that, but what I DO know is that I paid $25 for Starcraft/Brood Wars and I get to play an unlimited amount of networked multiplayer (on their server) pretty much, uh, forever. Pretty good value, no?
Blizzard has always been a company that's lagged a bit behind in making use of new computer power, ie they lock you into a specific screen resolution,
Yeah, well that's because they've focused on the gameplay. I laughed when Starcraft came out because it was almost exactly the same as Warcraft II. But, five years later I'm still playing it, 640 or not, because the gameplay is so fucking solid.
Although I have to say, Diablo II is another story indeed.
I'm afraid WarCraft3 is nothing more than an upgrade of Warcraft2. Sure, its pretty, and will entertain for about a week, but it'll all come down to who can rush faster.
I agree. It doesn't take long to learn how to use the UI efficiently. After that, it's all about how glazed-over your stare is, and how often you clean your mouse. I don't enjoy competing on that level.
I've been waiting about 5 years for a game that has AI scripts for controlling the units. You know, "go attack that base, take out the men first, then start nailing the buildings." Wouldn't be hard, but I think they're afraid of alienating the hyper-reflexive pre-teen set.
By the way, some of the Use Map Settings games on battlenet are entirely cerebral, no rushing/reflexes whatsoever. Once again, $25 you get it all.
Technically, the code is UUDDLRLRBABA, the select and start are just there for choosing players and starting the game, respectively.
YES. Thank you. "Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, SELECT, START." Such idiots.
These people probably played about 3 games of Contra and never any other Konami games because they were always too busy working out, playing lacrosse, getting laid...oh wait, this is Slashdot...well then what's the excuse?:)
Incidentally, the weirdest codes were for the shooter Zanac. One is to press reset 13 times for level select, the other involves lifting the cartridge halfway out of the slot. The latter one was probably unintentional, but it's entirely reproducible. You get all the weapons, and the game still runs fine.
"Moore's Law is too slow for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that semiconductor power doubles roughly every 18 months. "We can't wait 20 years" to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in PlayStation performance, he said.
"Our project managers are too inept for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that forcing software out the door results in slow, buggy performance. "We can't wait 6 or 8 weeks to optimize. We have to hijack the processor to make up for our own management deficiencies."
Okamoto said Sony is working with IBM to apply Big Blue's research in "grid computing," a variation of distributed computing, to the next PlayStation. While he didn't share details, the plan presumably would involve networked game machines sharing software, processing power and data.
So now they're going to expect their developers to write distributed applications? Isn't managing the resources of 1,000 machines a million times harder than managing the resources of one?
Not to mention, IIRC, the major advance in this round of game consoles was memory bandwidth. How is my dinky broadband connection going to help?
Oh yeah, and if everyone is using their playstation 3's simultaneously, where's the extra computing power?
I could go on.
Okamoto added that the recently released kit that allows PlayStation 2 users to run Linux software on the console is the foundation for much of the research.
Yay. Check the GPL. Ask Stallman to set the retail price:)
Looking further ahead, Okamoto saw even bigger changes for Sony's game business. "Maybe the PlayStation 6 or 7 will be based on biotechnology," he said.
Awesome. "Mommy, playstation is hurting me!" "Bad playstation! Hold on, I'll give it the injection."
Xbox glitches Isensee touched on mainly centered on international issues. The game console's bulky controller repelled Japanese consumers, for instance, forcing Xbox to design a slimmed-down version
Japanese people are smaller than us! LOL!!
That includes the Xbox start-up screen, which had to be redesigned for the Xbox's European launch because nobody realized that the German "einstellungen" wouldn't fit in the same text space as "settings."
And when Napoleon marched on Moscow, he didn't realize that it was much further and colder than Spain. Ah, the intricacies of the world....
So you play online games, right? You play Counter-Strike? Team Fortress Classic?
No, not really, just Starcraft.
You hate cheaters? How about downloading patches?
Starcraft downloads patches automatically.
It uses a high-performance distributed file system for fast, scalable content delivery.
I think the bottleneck is probably still the Internet.
This is only a small glimpse of what Steam will be able to do.
So, as usual, you haven't written any code yet.
Here is a familiar scenario: You reinstall Windows on your PC. You then start to reinstall your favorite games, only to discover you can't find your Half-Life CD-Key! Doh! What are you going to do?
I'll put my CD key in a textfile called cd-keys.txt (and maybe I'll even print it out!)
With Steam, all of your authentication information is stored server side.
"With Hitler's Third Reich, all your racial/ethnic information is stored in Berlin!"
After launching Half-Life from Steam, it downloaded the necessary files (which took hardly any time at all - actually it was faster than using a CD)
broadband = T5 in this scenario?
92% wire utilization
Wow, you saturated my connection. Doesn't *every* packet-switched application do this?
GameSpy will have more updates about Steam as it becomes available.
I recently lost my email account of two years because my cable provider was bought-up by another cable company. They gave me two weeks notice and then shut off the old email address. I wasn't able to get straight answers about forwarding, machine names, etc. - they just kept spamming me with the same dumb FAQ about re-configuring Outlook (who the f* uses outlook anyway?;)
If I had a choice, I would drop them on the spot. Long-term reliability is the GREATEST feature of any computer system, and they WILLINGLY screwed it up. Not for technical reasons, either - just to get their damn corporate name into my email address. And their bounce message doesn't even include the name of the new domain.
How do you notify two years' worth of aquaintances that your email has changed, fix every mailing list, every web site account, etc? You can't. It's impossible.
Oh well, someday people will learn to make more noise when this kind of b.s. happens. Making noise works. Try it.
what about all those diagrams and handwritten notes. If not, do you store things in a folder per project, and how do you then stop documentation from getting lost and making sure people store things where they should.
Try hiring a secretary. Organizing and keeping track of documents is centuries-old technology already.
And good luck. You've just admitted that your organization doesn't have even the most basic organizational skill between the lot of you.
Maybe the virtual keyboard could be projected onto a blank 'actual' keyboard, satisfying tactile feedback requirements and language switching requirements in one go...
Or maybe you could just put an LCD screen on each key of a standard keyboard? More expensive, sure, but certainly not as goofy as your idea.
Some Kinesis models are fully-programmable and cost $300, even though they are no more sturdy than a $20 keyboard. Lost in that ridiculous profit margin is the cost of the omitted liquid-crystal displays.
Handwriting recognition systems can be sped up a lot if they learn to trace the line of the pen rather than recognize individual glyphs ("bitmap" mode).
It's pretty easy to read script once you realize that each letter is a unique combination of directional motions rather than a "fixed" image that needs to be duplicated perfectly each time.
Excellent idea (although perhaps red-on-brown isn't the most ergnomic of configurations):)
You think the *color scheme* is unergonomic? How about the keyboard itself?
This keyboard takes even less physical effort to operate than a traditional soft-touch computer keyboard, which already takes almost no effort.
I hated using manual typewriters as a kid, because I wasn't strong enough to press the keys. When I became an adult and realized that I had CTS, I realized that the ability to type is not something you get for free. Your fingers and arms need to be strong, otherwise they get stressed. Computer keyboards do nothing to exercise them.
We need keyboards and input devices that have an operational resistance, that are physically robust and take effort to use. This new keyboard is great for, say, archaeologists in the field. Other than that, it's a step backwards.
I shook hands with an automotive worker the other day. His grip was incredibly strong. There's no reason why mine should be less when my profession is just as manually-oriented.
Of course I'll get flamed for this, but that's how it goes on Slashdot, where the "virtual" trumps the "real" almost as a matter of course.
IF some piece of software outthere does what you want, and it does the job, and it works, and you use it on a regular basis, you should pay for - regarldess of how it was written or what language it was done in.
So what you're saying is, I should pay for the software if it meets my subjective opinion of quality. Sounds to me like we agree.
Other than that, you sound like you are rationalizing your theft.
You just called me a thief but not only didn't you say what it is that I'm stealing, you didn't define theft, either. You said nothing, and you got mod points. Good job.
I agree that it is irrational to expect to make money from shareware. Traditionally, shareware is software that you only have to buy IF YOU WANT TO. It has the word 'share' right in it.
The major problem with software payment systems today is that everyone is trying to sell crap. When I download shareware, I am really just letting someone's VB virus replicate to my computer. That's not my privilege, it's theirs, and the GPL backs me up on this.
Game companies, however, have a limited piracy problem. Why? Because game software is at an altogether higher level than anything written in VB. Games are fast, stable, and have a value that is correlated with simply running the program. But simply owning or running Photoshop doesn't provide value. Using it to make a magazine cover does.
Thus, shareware. Individual users pay as they please.
A better system would be to tie payment to actual productivity, i.e. pay once when you've saved 100 files. Or, 100 saved files and no crashes. Or better yet, 100 saved files, no crashes, and no carpal tunnel from a poorly-written GUI.
See? Software value is highly variable and hard to judge. That's why shareware lets people judge for themselves. Until programmers learn how to write really stable software, payment shouldn't be a right, but a reward.
One thing you have to love about game consoles is that they have analog, ergonomic controllers. And they're plug-and-play. And they're fast, stable, and they take no education to operate.
The PC world has a lot to learn from game consoles. In fact, now that I think about it, the XBox may be the smartest thing that any PC company ever did. Sad that it took Microsoft to think of it, they are usually the last ones to think of anything.
Anyway, I don't know if this GameMan thing makes any sense at all, but it's damn cool that he built it.
The problem with.999c is that friction (space isn't a perfect vacuum) would melt/vaporize all known materials, so how do you construct a ship/probe that can handle that speed? IIRC, at.3C all known materials melt due to friction...
No, the problem with.999c is that THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY prevents it from happening. IIRC you clearly don't RC high school physics class.
How did both you and the guy who responded to you get modded up? This place is insane.
You seem to agree and disagree with this article, and you provide a myriad of incorrect facts to "back up" your "point".
OK so a "myriad" is two. Also, you didn't disprove my points...read on. I like how you used quotation marks, you seem very clever.
Actually, three people died, and we almost lost three more.
Nobody died in transit! And I know about Apollo 13, I saw the movie.
Here you compare an absolute with a relative descriptor. Just because something isn't completely clean doesn't mean it isn't the cleanest thing available.
Right. And nuclear energy is certainly cleaner than solar and wind power. What rock did you crawl out from under?
Also, you compare everything he says with what Zubrin thinks.
No, I compared *two* things he said with what Zubrin thinks. Once again, 2=myriad apparently.
Then at the end you say: Yes, and in order to acquire more solar energy, we need advanced propulsion systems to set up collectors further out in the solar system. So, are you for or against nuclear propultion?
God, you are such a wanker. Why would we want to collect solar energy *further away* from the sun?
Do you agree with the author dispite all the 'flaws' you found in his article, or disagree?
Why does it matter? I don't have a position for or arainst nuclear rockets. I have a position against the accuracy of Homer Hickham's information.
Sorry for the hostility, but I figured that if you could respond to my post without doing any research - or even reading it - I could respond to yours without being nice. You fucking fag.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I remember a serious discussion between two scientists, one who thinks that gravity reduces past the point of average landlass (weightless center), and one who thinks it increases toward the center. Or have I completely imagined that ?
No, that's interesting. Obviously gravitational attraction decreases exponentially with distance, but how about when you're moving into the earth? It's tricky because you can't conveniently model the earth as a point as you would in space.
I think the solution is that you call up the old image of the earth as a ball sitting in a depression on the fabric of space-time. If you trace the curve going into the depression, it's S-shaped....you go slow, then fast, then slow again. That's probably why these two dudes were able to argue about it - they were both assuming a linear solution.
Don't tell me that this was not HIS software, but was Apple's. He was writing it, it was his as well as others. As with most non-free software interests, Apple locked our friend out of his work.
And somehow, this fine post, which cut right to the heart of the matter, was rated OFFTOPIC.
This author is talking about Apple, he's talking about this kid, and he's talking about the meaning and implications of this news item.
How is this offtopic? Who are you, Slashdot moderator, who is your god and how can I destroy him?
OK, let's start with what we know. From the article: "Astronomers are sold on black holes." Yes, they are. Black holes are out there. The question is what's inside.
Nobody can see inside, so it's anybody's calculated guess. The two main problems with the current theory are singularities and entropy.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of singularities. I think it's a cop-out to say, "at some point, all the known laws of space-time break down, and that's that." Many people seem to be of the same mindset, including the authors of this paper. They suggest that at some point, the collapse of the black hole is balanced by some quantum force. Now, if I recall correctly, didn't Hawking already suggest this himself?
As for entropy, Hawking wrote that black holes emit radiation by sucking up nearby anti-particles. I've never understood why black holes should statistically acquire more anti-particles than particles, but then again, nobody understands the statistical nature of matter vs. antimatter anyway. I'll take his word that the math works.
This paper amounts to little more than a comparison between black holes and Condensate, and considering that condensate is near-absolute COLD and black holes are something akin to absolute HOT, I think it's a pretty immature analogy.
The paper isn't even published. Why are we talking about it?
It's true that no computational algorithm can generate truly random numbers, without input from some random physical process
Yes, exactly. Randomness comes from outside the system. Randomness=unknowability. However, somehow you completely avoided connecting this tidbit with the discussion at hand.
Brooks' philosophy is that the physical world is "its own best model." Thus, his robots are non-deterministic by design.
Thank you. Now why did you think that this discussion benefitted from a link to a crypto hash algorithm? Get some exercise, take your Adderol, whatever. Stay focused for christ's sake.
Well, we've heard JonKatz rave about mainstream corporate movies, now he's repeating the corporate media's perception of the tech economy, which is: "Wow, the tech economy crashed but we still need technology!"
No shit. In the past five years, and unprecedented amount of money was spent on hardware and software. What came of it? Microsoft got stronger, Windows became slower and more insecure, and the Web became full of pop-up ads.
A few people got broadband access, and Cisco sold some routers. That's about it. The rest of the investment capital was spent on dot-com pizza parties.
If you want to say that this country continues to have an underdeveloped tech infrastructure, then say it. But it's insulting to hear media buzzwords like "trends" and "new spending."
Trend means, "Hire marketers now." New spending means, "Get ready for more pizza parties." Neither of these things have anything to do with the long-term planning of a fast and reliable tech infrastructure.
Most software shops doesn't use any formal methodologies until they get a reasonable size. It's what allow them to be competitive when working on projects that are small enough that adding overhead isn't needed.
Formal methodologies are not overhead. You would know this if you were a software engineer.
Whoever modded you up isn't a software engineer either.
Wow. At 68 posts (which took all of 5 minutes to accumulate, I might add), there are 6 recommendations for X Windows and 20 recommendations for VNC. This doesn't even take into consideration all the people who mentioned VNC but recommended Citrix or WTS instead.
Granted, VNC is a great little secret and some tight code, but from a systems standpoint, it's a hack. All it does is throw a bitmap over the wire. Meanwhile, X Windows was built from the ground up to be NETWORKED.
Just how many Slashdotters use Linux anyway?
1. A linux box makes a great always-on server. The more data you store on your linux box, the more you can access remotely with ftp, telnet, http, or X. The best setup I can envision (assuming you want to manage your own data) is a linux box in some hosted rack space. But at that point, bandwith becomes a critical issue.
2. Samba would rock if Windows Networking did. I use Windows but store most of my files on a Linux filesystem. It's great when Windows behaves.
3. X rocks. It's ugly but it blows the hell out of VNC. X is remarkably efficient - you can actually tolerate using it at 56k. I haven't used X over a network very much since I was in college, but every time I do, it's a joy. In fact, I think that X is a major part of the solution.
I agree that this issue is something that needs more attention, but honestly, good ol' X already gets us 90% there. Go in with some friends, get a VA Linux box on the cheap and put it in a rack. Run Emacs over the wire. It's been done.
I would imagine it's because that meat is higher in energy, pound for pound. With spacecraft, weight/storage considerations are of paramount importance.
OK let's think about this. You want to provide the maximum amount of food per weight in space. The ideal solution is nothing but canned chili. Obviously this provides 100% weight devoted to food. Chemicals for growing meat are extra; the conversion is not 100% efficient.
But the balancing consideration is the psychology of eating. The main thrust of this research is to provide food that maintains psychological well-being on a long trip.
Offhand, I'd say that green plants would be much more pleasant than a mutant extra passenger, a blob of vat-grown flesh that I'm sure I'd grow to hate.
The researchers should start by examining which foods are nutritious and can be grown in space with solid efficiency. I doubt that meat is one of them. Water used by plants is ultimately recycled; plants implicitly clean the air.
Technically speaking it would be very simple to change the entire show 180deg. by simply editing to change the context of sentences, etc. Would I be free to "edit" this to say "I love abortion because I hate babies"? I don't think this will fly at all.
Yes, exactly, you CAN turn the material around 180 degrees, the same way that you can turn an 80's pop tune into a techno smash.
You sound like George Lucas for being afraid of this.
Would this really be all that interesting? Personally, have access to raw footage isn't all that appealing. It's not like open source software where i can change the code and actually change the functionality. Just seems rather pointless to me.
It's not pointless at all. Get some content editing skills, maybe you'll appreciate content.
On one hand, it's quite common to remix or remake songs. It's true that anything on a major-label CD has all of the proper consent/royalties taken care of, but major labels are a small fraction of the world of music.
When it comes down to it, nobody *really* controls music. No lawyer is going to harass you for riffing Led Zeppelin or whatever in concert. Ever heard of a tribute band? Concert bootlegs? Deejay mixtapes?
On the other hand, images and movies are tightly controlled, even the quality of consumer-grade video recording devices is being restricted now that major electronics companies have "digital piracy" on the brain.
Yeah, maybe there's not much you can do with Cringely's talking head, but then again, maybe there is. Either way, it's a big statement.
Blizzard shuts down innocent websites and programmers, and you guys go promote their fucking products?
Well, I don't know much about that, but what I DO know is that I paid $25 for Starcraft/Brood Wars and I get to play an unlimited amount of networked multiplayer (on their server) pretty much, uh, forever. Pretty good value, no?
Blizzard has always been a company that's lagged a bit behind in making use of new computer power, ie they lock you into a specific screen resolution,
Yeah, well that's because they've focused on the gameplay. I laughed when Starcraft came out because it was almost exactly the same as Warcraft II. But, five years later I'm still playing it, 640 or not, because the gameplay is so fucking solid.
Although I have to say, Diablo II is another story indeed.
I'm afraid WarCraft3 is nothing more than an upgrade of Warcraft2. Sure, its pretty, and will entertain for about a week, but it'll all come down to who can rush faster.
I agree. It doesn't take long to learn how to use the UI efficiently. After that, it's all about how glazed-over your stare is, and how often you clean your mouse. I don't enjoy competing on that level.
I've been waiting about 5 years for a game that has AI scripts for controlling the units. You know, "go attack that base, take out the men first, then start nailing the buildings." Wouldn't be hard, but I think they're afraid of alienating the hyper-reflexive pre-teen set.
By the way, some of the Use Map Settings games on battlenet are entirely cerebral, no rushing/reflexes whatsoever. Once again, $25 you get it all.
Technically, the code is UUDDLRLRBABA, the select and start are just there for choosing players and starting the game, respectively.
:)
YES. Thank you. "Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, SELECT, START." Such idiots.
These people probably played about 3 games of Contra and never any other Konami games because they were always too busy working out, playing lacrosse, getting laid...oh wait, this is Slashdot...well then what's the excuse?
Incidentally, the weirdest codes were for the shooter Zanac. One is to press reset 13 times for level select, the other involves lifting the cartridge halfway out of the slot. The latter one was probably unintentional, but it's entirely reproducible. You get all the weapons, and the game still runs fine.
"Moore's Law is too slow for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that semiconductor power doubles roughly every 18 months. "We can't wait 20 years" to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in PlayStation performance, he said.
:)
"Our project managers are too inept for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that forcing software out the door results in slow, buggy performance. "We can't wait 6 or 8 weeks to optimize. We have to hijack the processor to make up for our own management deficiencies."
Okamoto said Sony is working with IBM to apply Big Blue's research in "grid computing," a variation of distributed computing, to the next PlayStation. While he didn't share details, the plan presumably would involve networked game machines sharing software, processing power and data.
So now they're going to expect their developers to write distributed applications? Isn't managing the resources of 1,000 machines a million times harder than managing the resources of one?
Not to mention, IIRC, the major advance in this round of game consoles was memory bandwidth. How is my dinky broadband connection going to help?
Oh yeah, and if everyone is using their playstation 3's simultaneously, where's the extra computing power?
I could go on.
Okamoto added that the recently released kit that allows PlayStation 2 users to run Linux software on the console is the foundation for much of the research.
Yay. Check the GPL. Ask Stallman to set the retail price
Looking further ahead, Okamoto saw even bigger changes for Sony's game business. "Maybe the PlayStation 6 or 7 will be based on biotechnology," he said.
Awesome. "Mommy, playstation is hurting me!" "Bad playstation! Hold on, I'll give it the injection."
Xbox glitches Isensee touched on mainly centered on international issues. The game console's bulky controller repelled Japanese consumers, for instance, forcing Xbox to design a slimmed-down version
Japanese people are smaller than us! LOL!!
That includes the Xbox start-up screen, which had to be redesigned for the Xbox's European launch because nobody realized that the German "einstellungen" wouldn't fit in the same text space as "settings."
And when Napoleon marched on Moscow, he didn't realize that it was much further and colder than Spain. Ah, the intricacies of the world....
So you play online games, right? You play Counter-Strike? Team Fortress Classic?
No, not really, just Starcraft.
You hate cheaters? How about downloading patches?
Starcraft downloads patches automatically.
It uses a high-performance distributed file system for fast, scalable content delivery.
I think the bottleneck is probably still the Internet.
This is only a small glimpse of what Steam will be able to do.
So, as usual, you haven't written any code yet.
Here is a familiar scenario: You reinstall Windows on your PC. You then start to reinstall your favorite games, only to discover you can't find your Half-Life CD-Key! Doh! What are you going to do?
I'll put my CD key in a textfile called cd-keys.txt (and maybe I'll even print it out!)
With Steam, all of your authentication information is stored server side.
"With Hitler's Third Reich, all your racial/ethnic information is stored in Berlin!"
After launching Half-Life from Steam, it downloaded the necessary files (which took hardly any time at all - actually it was faster than using a CD)
broadband = T5 in this scenario?
92% wire utilization
Wow, you saturated my connection. Doesn't *every* packet-switched application do this?
GameSpy will have more updates about Steam as it becomes available.
Go, code monkeys, go! Work that emacs buffer!!
I recently lost my email account of two years because my cable provider was bought-up by another cable company. They gave me two weeks notice and then shut off the old email address. I wasn't able to get straight answers about forwarding, machine names, etc. - they just kept spamming me with the same dumb FAQ about re-configuring Outlook (who the f* uses outlook anyway? ;)
If I had a choice, I would drop them on the spot. Long-term reliability is the GREATEST feature of any computer system, and they WILLINGLY screwed it up. Not for technical reasons, either - just to get their damn corporate name into my email address. And their bounce message doesn't even include the name of the new domain.
How do you notify two years' worth of aquaintances that your email has changed, fix every mailing list, every web site account, etc? You can't. It's impossible.
Oh well, someday people will learn to make more noise when this kind of b.s. happens. Making noise works. Try it.
what about all those diagrams and handwritten notes. If not, do you store things in a folder per project, and how do you then stop documentation from getting lost and making sure people store things where they should.
Try hiring a secretary. Organizing and keeping track of documents is centuries-old technology already.
And good luck. You've just admitted that your organization doesn't have even the most basic organizational skill between the lot of you.
Maybe the virtual keyboard could be projected onto a blank 'actual' keyboard, satisfying tactile feedback requirements and language switching requirements in one go...
Or maybe you could just put an LCD screen on each key of a standard keyboard? More expensive, sure, but certainly not as goofy as your idea.
Some Kinesis models are fully-programmable and cost $300, even though they are no more sturdy than a $20 keyboard. Lost in that ridiculous profit margin is the cost of the omitted liquid-crystal displays.
Handwriting recognition systems can be sped up a lot if they learn to trace the line of the pen rather than recognize individual glyphs ("bitmap" mode).
It's pretty easy to read script once you realize that each letter is a unique combination of directional motions rather than a "fixed" image that needs to be duplicated perfectly each time.
Excellent idea (although perhaps red-on-brown isn't the most ergnomic of configurations) :)
You think the *color scheme* is unergonomic? How about the keyboard itself?
This keyboard takes even less physical effort to operate than a traditional soft-touch computer keyboard, which already takes almost no effort.
I hated using manual typewriters as a kid, because I wasn't strong enough to press the keys. When I became an adult and realized that I had CTS, I realized that the ability to type is not something you get for free. Your fingers and arms need to be strong, otherwise they get stressed. Computer keyboards do nothing to exercise them.
We need keyboards and input devices that have an operational resistance, that are physically robust and take effort to use. This new keyboard is great for, say, archaeologists in the field. Other than that, it's a step backwards.
I shook hands with an automotive worker the other day. His grip was incredibly strong. There's no reason why mine should be less when my profession is just as manually-oriented.
Of course I'll get flamed for this, but that's how it goes on Slashdot, where the "virtual" trumps the "real" almost as a matter of course.
IF some piece of software outthere does what you want, and it does the job, and it works, and you use it on a regular basis, you should pay for - regarldess of how it was written or what language it was done in.
So what you're saying is, I should pay for the software if it meets my subjective opinion of quality. Sounds to me like we agree.
Other than that, you sound like you are rationalizing your theft.
You just called me a thief but not only didn't you say what it is that I'm stealing, you didn't define theft, either. You said nothing, and you got mod points. Good job.
I agree that it is irrational to expect to make money from shareware. Traditionally, shareware is software that you only have to buy IF YOU WANT TO. It has the word 'share' right in it.
The major problem with software payment systems today is that everyone is trying to sell crap. When I download shareware, I am really just letting someone's VB virus replicate to my computer. That's not my privilege, it's theirs, and the GPL backs me up on this.
Game companies, however, have a limited piracy problem. Why? Because game software is at an altogether higher level than anything written in VB. Games are fast, stable, and have a value that is correlated with simply running the program. But simply owning or running Photoshop doesn't provide value. Using it to make a magazine cover does.
Thus, shareware. Individual users pay as they please.
A better system would be to tie payment to actual productivity, i.e. pay once when you've saved 100 files. Or, 100 saved files and no crashes. Or better yet, 100 saved files, no crashes, and no carpal tunnel from a poorly-written GUI.
See? Software value is highly variable and hard to judge. That's why shareware lets people judge for themselves. Until programmers learn how to write really stable software, payment shouldn't be a right, but a reward.
One thing you have to love about game consoles is that they have analog, ergonomic controllers. And they're plug-and-play. And they're fast, stable, and they take no education to operate.
The PC world has a lot to learn from game consoles. In fact, now that I think about it, the XBox may be the smartest thing that any PC company ever did. Sad that it took Microsoft to think of it, they are usually the last ones to think of anything.
Anyway, I don't know if this GameMan thing makes any sense at all, but it's damn cool that he built it.
The problem with .999c is that friction (space isn't a perfect vacuum) would melt/vaporize all known materials, so how do you construct a ship/probe that can handle that speed? IIRC, at .3C all known materials melt due to friction...
.999c is that THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY prevents it from happening. IIRC you clearly don't RC high school physics class.
No, the problem with
How did both you and the guy who responded to you get modded up? This place is insane.
You seem to agree and disagree with this article, and you provide a myriad of incorrect facts to "back up" your "point".
OK so a "myriad" is two. Also, you didn't disprove my points...read on. I like how you used quotation marks, you seem very clever.
Actually, three people died, and we almost lost three more.
Nobody died in transit! And I know about Apollo 13, I saw the movie.
Here you compare an absolute with a relative descriptor. Just because something isn't completely clean doesn't mean it isn't the cleanest thing available.
Right. And nuclear energy is certainly cleaner than solar and wind power. What rock did you crawl out from under?
Also, you compare everything he says with what Zubrin thinks.
No, I compared *two* things he said with what Zubrin thinks. Once again, 2=myriad apparently.
Then at the end you say: Yes, and in order to acquire more solar energy, we need advanced propulsion systems to set up collectors further out in the solar system. So, are you for or against nuclear propultion?
God, you are such a wanker. Why would we want to collect solar energy *further away* from the sun?
Do you agree with the author dispite all the 'flaws' you found in his article, or disagree?
Why does it matter? I don't have a position for or arainst nuclear rockets. I have a position against the accuracy of Homer Hickham's information.
Sorry for the hostility, but I figured that if you could respond to my post without doing any research - or even reading it - I could respond to yours without being nice. You fucking fag.