The use of applied math in software engineering is a bit of a misconception. What we really do most is encode logic, which is what computers understand. Math can help with analyzing things like performance and also may be necessary for specific applications, but being able to design a set of logical steps to reach a solution (and then encode those steps in the syntax of a programming language) is what most of software engineering is about.
Now VIIV may help that along but the technology has already been in existence (and in use) for years.
Well... except for maybe the DRM controls that VIIV will provide...
These are exactly my thoughts. Any COTS out-of-the-box solution is going to be too restrictive. After having the freedom of using my own setup to do what I want, I doubt I could be happy with some DRM-ridden device.
Just more evidence that the FCC is a corrupt department that has become a government pawn (a sort of "inside man") of the media and telco industries. They did the same thing with the broadcast flag, remember? The courts had to shoot it down. It's time for someone to wake up and smell what they're cookin', and shake things up at the FCC.
I didn't know that VIA actually had a following. Last I checked, there were two groups of people who used their stuff: those who tolerated it and those who didn't know any better.
I got a bad taste in my mouth with their AMD K6-2 chipsets (Apollo MVP?) and continued to have lackluster experiences with their mobo chipsets straight up through Socket A. As someone who prefers to use AMD (more bang for the buck) I've been sticking to nVidia nForce chipsets for the past couple of years. I don't plan to give VIA another chance any time soon, unless maybe I see something from VIA get favored by a lot of serious review sites.
The notion that multiplayer in a LAN environment where it's just you and friends on a team versus a number of bots seems to be an anathema in gaming circles any more. Apparently, the rest of the gaming community wants deathmatch or team deathmatch against other humans, and that's all - or so the developers seem to think.
I, too, am frustrated at the complete dearth of cooperative multiplayer games on the market. For a while, most games were single-player with a deathmatch multiplayer mode tacked on; I think this was largely thanks to the Quake 3 engine, which spawned a whole bunch of FPS games fitting the previous description. Developers then let themselves slip into a rut with regards to what multiplayer features games should have. Now, MMORPGs have come along and polarized everything, and we're seeing nothing but single-player FPSes and MMORPGs.
... they should change madden releases to bi-yearly
... Will they lose money? I dunno.
I think you answered your own question. Unless a radical shift occurs at the executive level, EA would never throw away a good 40% of their guaranteed profits, must less invest additional resources in more risky games.
As you can see, the only way they're willing to publish something "original" is if - for example - it's made by a famous game designer.
EFF's Derek Slater in an awareness campaign... is urging those inflicted with one of Sony BMG's rootkit infected CDs to collect what is due to them."
Well the EFF isn't doing a very good job. Almost nobody I know - even computer geeks like myself - has heard or taken note of the whole Sony rootkit fiasco. I only know about it myself because of Slashdot. I was dragged along to Wal-Mart when visiting my brother recently, and had to explain the whole thing to several members my family when I saw that they were shopping for music CDs.
Incidentally, I didn't find it very easy to identify which ones were Sony discs (some said BMG or something similar, but other than that I didn't recognize any labels). I ended up just warning them away from anything that didn't have the official "compact disc digital audio" logo on the package, just to be safe.
I'm somewhat opposed to the home desktop being replaced by a dumb terminal, mostly on the grounds that it will reduce user privacy and artifically limit the scope of possible use. There are a couple of factors to consider, however:
1. At least in the U.S., there just isn't a good enough broadband Internet infrastructure to handle the bandwidth required to drive a dumb terminal and provide anything near the current desktop experience with games, movies, etc.
2. Even if point 1 wasn't an issue, it'd still be a gradual process to get people to switch to something like that, plus it would take time for various service providers to come up with the hardware and software infrastructure to do it, and finally there'd be a big market war.
3. There's also the point to be made that Microsoft still maintains its industry presence largely via Windows, and a move to dumb terminals plugged into a server-side experience would cause a dramatic shift in Windows' - and thus Microsoft's - role (if not toss it right out the window, pun intended).
Bottom line: I give desktops at least another 10-20 years before someone vaulted into the future from today would have a hard time recognizing a home computer.
Anyone who has used mods/addons will tell you that playing WoW on a console would be stupid. There's no way the Blizzard nor Microsoft would set something up to let users download and install fan-created mods/addons either. It just wouldn't happen.
Plus, just because you CAN plug in a keyboard and/or mouse doesn't mean that they can expect it of everyone who wants to play. Thus, they'd again need to cripple the game's interface in order to make it playable with a controller.
"The Times had requested the documents in December under the Freedom of Information Act but sued upon being unsatisfied with the Pentagon's response that the request was being processed as quickly as possible..."
By "processing" I bet they meant shredding documents.
Even if I set aside the flawed logic, why does the music biz get it all? What about other businesses that are hurt by "copying". Surely some of this money should go to software companies, as well as private media/content producers that distribute their work via CDs.
The other parties listed don't have good enough lobbyists, nor enough money/interest/low moral fiber to bribe lawmakers for a piece of the pie.
I can't comment on the execution, but the general idea is great. It's nice to see the industry come up with an innovative solution instead of just lobbying the government for anti-consumer legislation all the time.
Also, the summary's wording is confusing: Yum! owns KFC (not the other way around), as well as several other high-profile fast food chains such as Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.
I think they designed the box with XP in mind, as it really needs 512MB of RAM as a minimum in order to function well. If you do *any* gaming or anything else more memory intensive than surfing web pages and listening to MP3s, XP will bog down with less than 1GB. A lot of people who (like me) build their own boxes are now starting to actually put in 2GB of RAM in order for more memory-intensive games to be able to coexist with WinXP without causing lots of swapping to/from disk.
That Ars box is really not any good for games (would at the *very* least need some kind of 3D card, as I don't think on-board chips are quite there yet - although I could be wrong), so I agree that by better defining its intended uses they could have decreased the cost even further.
Re:Drugs is a misused word in the english language
on
Games Are Not Drugs
·
· Score: 1
In modern usage, what has happened is that narcotics and hallucinogenics such as Opium, Pot, Cocaine, LSD, etc. are commonly referred to as drugs, with an implicit chemically addictive component. Anything taken as a prescription or for medical purposes is called what it is - a medication, often short-handed as "meds".
Ah, so then by that logic "drug stores" really are primarily intended to serve as distribution networks for pseudoephedrine for use in the manufacture of illegal drugs! I knew it!
On a serious note, I still hear medication (perscription or over-the-counter) referred to primarily as "drugs". "Meds" is a more colloquial term that hasn't caught on as much in my experience.
I was disappointed when I found out that they weren't talking about how WoW teaches you that wolves only eat non-seafood meat, while tigers and such eat both fish and non-seafood meat. In what universe are dogs more picky than cats about food, you ask? Warcraft, of course.
1) Buy a neato Blu-Ray drive for your PC for $400 2) Plug video card's DVI-out to your 1080p plasma TV's DVI-in 3) Buy $40 copy of King Kong on Blu-Ray 4) Get really pissed off that you're forced to watch the movie in 480p because your video card didn't support HDCP.
5. Rip disc to hard drive 6. Take disc back to the store and demand a refund 7. Either run a program to remove protection from the ripped data, or play with a special open-source player that knows how to circumvent it on the fly 8. Enjoy.
If they're going to treat us like criminals then we may as well live up to their expectations.
Yeah. It doesn't really fix anything though. It's hard to explain, but the problem isn't that things are getting washed out. Unfortunately the brightness and contrast controls on LCDs seem to have different effects from their CRT counterparts as well, probably due to inherent differences in the way they produce light and colors.
Is the actual brightness of the white point something that is also measured by hardware calibration tools?
I would have to agree that the clarity and brightness of LCDs simply blows CRTs out of the water. However, I've also noticed that they tend to have more severe color reproduction issues. I'm thinking of investing in one of those calibration devices, but I wonder how much you can really adjust things in hardware (and of course software adjustments reduce the total number of colors that can be displayed). I've got dual LCDs at work, and one of them is slightly red-shifted (compared to the other) in a way that cannot be corrected in hardware or software. At home, the vividness (contrast?) of my widescreen LCD (especially reds) results in less realistic flesh tones than on my secondary CRT monitor.
Is it just me, or are the moderators getting increasingly harsh with this kind of thing? I don't know about you, but I'm going to meta-moderate more regularly from now on. I just meta-moderated yesterday for the first time in months and spotted two moderations that I thought were too harsh. We've got to make sure that these people don't get moderator points by calling them on the carpet for it via meta-moderation.
(BTW, this post is off-topic. Mod me down if you want, but I would suggest instead using the points in a positive way, such as modding up insightful/informative/interesting posts)
I'm frustrated to hear that people consulted in "the industry" as well as the panel of judges for the competition thought that the game concept was too edgy to be marketed. We NEED edgy. We NEED an injection of fresh ideas like these in the industry.
The problem is that it's grown beyond "by gamers, for gamers" into a huge industry run by corporate executives and marketing groups, with the people actually putting their souls into the games being the lowest on the ladder.
Slashdot Mirror
The use of applied math in software engineering is a bit of a misconception. What we really do most is encode logic, which is what computers understand. Math can help with analyzing things like performance and also may be necessary for specific applications, but being able to design a set of logical steps to reach a solution (and then encode those steps in the syntax of a programming language) is what most of software engineering is about.
Now VIIV may help that along but the technology has already been in existence (and in use) for years.
Well... except for maybe the DRM controls that VIIV will provide...
These are exactly my thoughts. Any COTS out-of-the-box solution is going to be too restrictive. After having the freedom of using my own setup to do what I want, I doubt I could be happy with some DRM-ridden device.
Perhaps this was AT&T giving us a preview of what's to come with the Tiered Internet?
perhaps a useful way to channel Steve Ballmer's aggression too.
Chair throwing is more of a pro-wrestling thing than a boxing thing last I checked...
Just more evidence that the FCC is a corrupt department that has become a government pawn (a sort of "inside man") of the media and telco industries. They did the same thing with the broadcast flag, remember? The courts had to shoot it down. It's time for someone to wake up and smell what they're cookin', and shake things up at the FCC.
"F**k you very much, the FCC" - Eric Idle, The FCC Song - released for free here: http://www.pythonline.com/plugs/idle/
In Soviet Britain, the rules waive Britannia!
"this board is only 'for those who like VIA"
I didn't know that VIA actually had a following. Last I checked, there were two groups of people who used their stuff: those who tolerated it and those who didn't know any better.
I got a bad taste in my mouth with their AMD K6-2 chipsets (Apollo MVP?) and continued to have lackluster experiences with their mobo chipsets straight up through Socket A. As someone who prefers to use AMD (more bang for the buck) I've been sticking to nVidia nForce chipsets for the past couple of years. I don't plan to give VIA another chance any time soon, unless maybe I see something from VIA get favored by a lot of serious review sites.
Would have been nice to know from the summary that it's being broadcast to subscribers only.
The notion that multiplayer in a LAN environment where it's just you and friends on a team versus a number of bots seems to be an anathema in gaming circles any more. Apparently, the rest of the gaming community wants deathmatch or team deathmatch against other humans, and that's all - or so the developers seem to think.
I, too, am frustrated at the complete dearth of cooperative multiplayer games on the market. For a while, most games were single-player with a deathmatch multiplayer mode tacked on; I think this was largely thanks to the Quake 3 engine, which spawned a whole bunch of FPS games fitting the previous description. Developers then let themselves slip into a rut with regards to what multiplayer features games should have. Now, MMORPGs have come along and polarized everything, and we're seeing nothing but single-player FPSes and MMORPGs.
i dutifully buy an EA football game once a year
...
they should change madden releases to bi-yearly
...
Will they lose money? I dunno.
I think you answered your own question. Unless a radical shift occurs at the executive level, EA would never throw away a good 40% of their guaranteed profits, must less invest additional resources in more risky games.
As you can see, the only way they're willing to publish something "original" is if - for example - it's made by a famous game designer.
EFF's Derek Slater in an awareness campaign ... is urging those inflicted with one of Sony BMG's rootkit infected CDs to collect what is due to them."
Well the EFF isn't doing a very good job. Almost nobody I know - even computer geeks like myself - has heard or taken note of the whole Sony rootkit fiasco. I only know about it myself because of Slashdot. I was dragged along to Wal-Mart when visiting my brother recently, and had to explain the whole thing to several members my family when I saw that they were shopping for music CDs.
Incidentally, I didn't find it very easy to identify which ones were Sony discs (some said BMG or something similar, but other than that I didn't recognize any labels). I ended up just warning them away from anything that didn't have the official "compact disc digital audio" logo on the package, just to be safe.
I'm somewhat opposed to the home desktop being replaced by a dumb terminal, mostly on the grounds that it will reduce user privacy and artifically limit the scope of possible use. There are a couple of factors to consider, however:
1. At least in the U.S., there just isn't a good enough broadband Internet infrastructure to handle the bandwidth required to drive a dumb terminal and provide anything near the current desktop experience with games, movies, etc.
2. Even if point 1 wasn't an issue, it'd still be a gradual process to get people to switch to something like that, plus it would take time for various service providers to come up with the hardware and software infrastructure to do it, and finally there'd be a big market war.
3. There's also the point to be made that Microsoft still maintains its industry presence largely via Windows, and a move to dumb terminals plugged into a server-side experience would cause a dramatic shift in Windows' - and thus Microsoft's - role (if not toss it right out the window, pun intended).
Bottom line: I give desktops at least another 10-20 years before someone vaulted into the future from today would have a hard time recognizing a home computer.
Anyone who has used mods/addons will tell you that playing WoW on a console would be stupid. There's no way the Blizzard nor Microsoft would set something up to let users download and install fan-created mods/addons either. It just wouldn't happen.
Plus, just because you CAN plug in a keyboard and/or mouse doesn't mean that they can expect it of everyone who wants to play. Thus, they'd again need to cripple the game's interface in order to make it playable with a controller.
"The Times had requested the documents in December under the Freedom of Information Act but sued upon being unsatisfied with the Pentagon's response that the request was being processed as quickly as possible..."
By "processing" I bet they meant shredding documents.
Even if I set aside the flawed logic, why does the music biz get it all? What about other businesses that are hurt by "copying". Surely some of this money should go to software companies, as well as private media/content producers that distribute their work via CDs.
The other parties listed don't have good enough lobbyists, nor enough money/interest/low moral fiber to bribe lawmakers for a piece of the pie.
I can't comment on the execution, but the general idea is great. It's nice to see the industry come up with an innovative solution instead of just lobbying the government for anti-consumer legislation all the time.
Also, the summary's wording is confusing: Yum! owns KFC (not the other way around), as well as several other high-profile fast food chains such as Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.
I think they designed the box with XP in mind, as it really needs 512MB of RAM as a minimum in order to function well. If you do *any* gaming or anything else more memory intensive than surfing web pages and listening to MP3s, XP will bog down with less than 1GB. A lot of people who (like me) build their own boxes are now starting to actually put in 2GB of RAM in order for more memory-intensive games to be able to coexist with WinXP without causing lots of swapping to/from disk.
That Ars box is really not any good for games (would at the *very* least need some kind of 3D card, as I don't think on-board chips are quite there yet - although I could be wrong), so I agree that by better defining its intended uses they could have decreased the cost even further.
In modern usage, what has happened is that narcotics and hallucinogenics such as Opium, Pot, Cocaine, LSD, etc. are commonly referred to as drugs, with an implicit chemically addictive component. Anything taken as a prescription or for medical purposes is called what it is - a medication, often short-handed as "meds".
Ah, so then by that logic "drug stores" really are primarily intended to serve as distribution networks for pseudoephedrine for use in the manufacture of illegal drugs! I knew it!
On a serious note, I still hear medication (perscription or over-the-counter) referred to primarily as "drugs". "Meds" is a more colloquial term that hasn't caught on as much in my experience.
I was disappointed when I found out that they weren't talking about how WoW teaches you that wolves only eat non-seafood meat, while tigers and such eat both fish and non-seafood meat. In what universe are dogs more picky than cats about food, you ask? Warcraft, of course.
Was there ever a point at which it was *not* on hold? I guess one of the owners wants a new boat, eh?
They should announce that Duke Nukem Forever will be a launch title. That would make an awesome article on The Onion!
1) Buy a neato Blu-Ray drive for your PC for $400
2) Plug video card's DVI-out to your 1080p plasma TV's DVI-in
3) Buy $40 copy of King Kong on Blu-Ray
4) Get really pissed off that you're forced to watch the movie in 480p because your video card didn't support HDCP.
5. Rip disc to hard drive
6. Take disc back to the store and demand a refund
7. Either run a program to remove protection from the ripped data, or play with a special open-source player that knows how to circumvent it on the fly
8. Enjoy.
If they're going to treat us like criminals then we may as well live up to their expectations.
Yeah. It doesn't really fix anything though. It's hard to explain, but the problem isn't that things are getting washed out. Unfortunately the brightness and contrast controls on LCDs seem to have different effects from their CRT counterparts as well, probably due to inherent differences in the way they produce light and colors.
Is the actual brightness of the white point something that is also measured by hardware calibration tools?
I would have to agree that the clarity and brightness of LCDs simply blows CRTs out of the water. However, I've also noticed that they tend to have more severe color reproduction issues. I'm thinking of investing in one of those calibration devices, but I wonder how much you can really adjust things in hardware (and of course software adjustments reduce the total number of colors that can be displayed). I've got dual LCDs at work, and one of them is slightly red-shifted (compared to the other) in a way that cannot be corrected in hardware or software. At home, the vividness (contrast?) of my widescreen LCD (especially reds) results in less realistic flesh tones than on my secondary CRT monitor.
Is it just me, or are the moderators getting increasingly harsh with this kind of thing? I don't know about you, but I'm going to meta-moderate more regularly from now on. I just meta-moderated yesterday for the first time in months and spotted two moderations that I thought were too harsh. We've got to make sure that these people don't get moderator points by calling them on the carpet for it via meta-moderation.
(BTW, this post is off-topic. Mod me down if you want, but I would suggest instead using the points in a positive way, such as modding up insightful/informative/interesting posts)
I'm frustrated to hear that people consulted in "the industry" as well as the panel of judges for the competition thought that the game concept was too edgy to be marketed. We NEED edgy. We NEED an injection of fresh ideas like these in the industry.
The problem is that it's grown beyond "by gamers, for gamers" into a huge industry run by corporate executives and marketing groups, with the people actually putting their souls into the games being the lowest on the ladder.