Wow, guess you never got to the more advanced econ courses, that made about as much sense as when my parents told me "finish your vegetables, there are children starving in China".
If gold-farming wasn't a danger to the online economy, why doesn't the publisher just sell gold outright? I dunno, something about ruining the game for everyone else. Cutting in line is cutting in line, no matter how you rationalize it as being a better use of your time.
That said... why not invent a PSU that can provide one desktop, chargers [phone, ipod, etc], and other low power items? Think of a 5.25" bay device which has "outlets" for other DC devices.:-) That'd be cool.
Wow, maybe it's just me, but I think that article is meant to insult every single gamer (he even almost makes a pass at retro gamers). Everything's got a downside, too pricey, too little power, too easy, too hard... someone's going to complain, and he basically just went down the list and picked the biggest gaffe from each area.
I mean, he even insulted Nintendo on a product he hasn't tried and isn't out yet. That's got to be reaching....
Hey, people wouldn't be pirating music it wasn't for the artists producing it! If we were talking about drugs here, the law gives harsher fines for those who produce and deal drugs than for the average user, so shouldn't the same apply here? So really, the RIAA needs to send one one of those letters to itself before someone really gets hurt.
Intelligent people believe in things. Your love for freedom is like the Republican Party's love for death.
Not only do these things not compare (Republican party sets policies from the top, Slashdot doesn't have policies), it's basically like asking "Have you stopped raping women?". If you say No you are for closed source, if you say Yes you belive in killing people. Plus, if you don't answer, you're supposedly not intelligent or passionate enough to have an opinion.
Besides, the point of the quote was that an intelligent person can see both sides of an argument (the advantages of closed and open source), not that they have differening opinions on different matters (like the Cardinals, don't like the Diamondbacks (US baseball teams)).
I actually am working on this with my family, but after 10 years of AOL, it's pretty ingrained (particularly my Mom who won't get a new anything until what's she's using breaks), so I had to do it in phases (for me, it was about a month between phases, I thought it would be longer).
My first target was my brother, who reads/. ('nuff said). His worry was everyone who emails him at AOL and I told him just to plan on a two year transition to get everyone to his new account. It took us each like a month to get 99% of our friends over, but some are pretty stubborn, or only email occasionally.
Next was my sister, and she's in college so I just brought it up like it was gossip. Spam was her biggest worry, so I showed her how to have multiple acounts that forward to one, and to make a new one if one gets overrun. Phase II done.
Then my Mom, who actually was a lot easier than I feared. I figured I'd move her over slowly, first to AOL webmail (she wanted to be able to choose where AOL saved her attachments), then let her get used to that, but she was also complaining about spam so I said "I can solve that for you" and moved her over in an hour total. She doesn't email that many people so her transition time was almost zero.
My Dad was the toughest and most stubborn, so I knew I really had to bait him into it. He didn't like paying the $15/month for just email, so I prepared to address that as his reason to switch. A few weeks later he brought it up, and he said he didn't want to force us to leave AOL. I reminded him that the rest of had already switched to gmail, and that I could get him moved over too. He uses his work account for most of his email, so he was also easy to convert once he had a reason to.
I pretty much just had to let everyone decide for themselves that gmail was better than AOL, and while we still subscribe to AOL, I only check it once a week to see if anyone's still emailing me there (last person was two months ago, a friend who I haven't talked to in four years).
Everyone's transition time may vary (depending on how many friends they care about keeping), but it's gotta be on their timetable, if you start prodding them (randomly saying "you know, now that I'm on gmail I don't get any spam" is bad) they'll fight you and then blame you when things aren't exactly like they used to be. If they say "I hate paying $15/month for email", just say "Then don't. I don't". Make them ask all the questions: "Oh really? How come?" "I use gmail." "What's gmail?" "Free email" "I heard those get a lot of spam" "Nope, I don't get any spam." etc. Yes, it goes against your geek nature to back up your statements with facts, but just think of it as your greatest challenge ever. Of course, that's what worked for me, YMMV.
I've been thinking about this for years, as I grew up in the ridiculously underfunded California system, so have heard all sorts of arguments about this.
But I've pretty much boiled them all down to one thing: funding. Teachers have so many ideas, so many things they want to do that would make the class interesting, but they can't afford them. And of course the education budget has done nothing but shrink, when you're facing a budget crisis it's easy to lop 1% off education, you don't feel the effects for years, and since you leave it to the schools to make the cuts, you're not a bad guy for firing teachers or cutting their wages.
The benefits go on: the less educated are less likely to question you, not going to realize you're repeating the same mistakes of 20 years ago, and don't understand the numbers when you say we're really not deeply in debt. So there really is no political incentive to improve education - although that does mirror the average American's attitude of expecting something immediately without regard for the future cost.
But as to why I say funding: not only would funding bring in better talent (the private sector pays easily 2x as much here in CA), so it's not just the everything-for-the-kids types, but then schools could afford the basics like books, desks, classroom space, maybe even the soft touches like paint and teacher's assistants. You know, make them respectable places that kids might actually want to spend their time. My high school was built by a jail designer, so it was all bare cinderblock, stainless steel and a single barred window in each room. And this was in the middle of Silicon Valley, not some inner-city!
And btw, if anyone thinks they have some creative ideas of how teachers can be more efficient with the money they have, feel free to share, because I don't know a single teacher who doesn't spend at least part every single day trying to figure out what they can squeeze in their budget. It's not like they're asking for much, unfortunately people want to save that extra 0.1% in taxes more.
So what? Before vacuum tubes there really wasn't any way to save the state information on a magnetic charge (or whatever those things held) reliably, and then after years and years of using those, we got good and have been making the space to store a bit ever smaller.
This is still experimental, so of course it's not consumer ready; ENIAC was built in 1946, and we're not even there yet. I'm sure there are folks on Slashdot who will never get to use a quantum computer first-hand, which sounds depressing, but that's how far off we are. Everyone just sit back and relax for a while on this one....
I'd suggest just buying the software again, but from one of their competitors. Customer support has become a vital part of software, and if theirs is lacking, there are plenty of other companies that I'm sure would believe you and actually honor your purchase.
Or, just try calling back to see if you can talk to another support guy who might be more agreeable. Some times you get support staff who won't get off their ass to do the most reasonable things if it's not specifically in their job description.
Well if you live in San Diego, they've been working on the sensing/networking for about 10 years... of course, it doesn't seem like they've made any progress, as my commute has only gotten longer.
And you can already buy a car (at least here in the USA) with all of the rest of that today (adaptive cruise control, reactive braking) - they just don't call it a PC (but some still run Windows). Btw, you forgot news feeds and gaming - I think by entertainment you meant movies, which have been around longer than the minivan.
I don't think you've thought about this too much, or are just trolling.... basestation? Why? And what sort of privacy issues are you risking by having your car publish that you're travelling 80mph?
Remember how monitors started off as monochrome... then 16-color, then 256, then 16-bit; finally 24 and 32 bit? We didn't go to 64-bit. Why? No one can see that many colors.
Same with sound - we've long passed the point where any video card can reproduce a sound well enough so that 99% of us can't tell the difference between the recorded version and the original.
If you're giving me the option between a $20 and a $200 sound card, and I can't tell the difference, why would I pay the extra cash?
Hrm, from what I've read about Asia, and my Asian friends here, becoming more Western/American is very popular there; whereas to a lot of Americans, "turning Japanese" has nothing to do with Japanese culture.
Well, here in San Diego Cox offers it's digital subscribers different groupings of channels. The minimum you can pay is $9 and that gets you the "standard" Discovery * channels (Wings, Times, Health...) plus one extra group. You can pick from stuff like the Sports & Info (Tech TV, G4, Fox Sports World... - what I got), Movies (Encore *), Lifestyle (History International, Food, etc), International, and 3 others. Each group is $3 (1 for $9 (rip), 3 for $12, 4 for $15), has about ~10 channels in it, mostly in the same theme (although some seem to be where they are for monetary reasons - how is History International not in the Info group?).
And you don't even have to get "standard" cable, I pay $12 for basic (local channels), which gets me $10 off on broadband, then $9 for digital, and $3 for the box... that's a ton of channels that I actually watch for $24. Granted, I think they expect that you pay $30 for the "standard" cable, but considering I (would) watch about 5 of those channels, I'm much happier only paying $12 for 5 channels which I watch - I can always go over to my friend's house if I need to see something on one of those channels.
Yeah, it's not true a-la-carte, but I think the grouping of channels is sort of necessary - both for convenience and costs. And I also don't advocate totally breaking up the "standard" channels - certainly your local channels should always be available, and some stuff like the Weather Channel that you'd never go out of your way to pick. But there are plenty of households where the interest in sports is limited to the major events (Superbowl, World Series, etc) and would never watch the sports channels (ESPN, Fox Sports) - which I hear are some of the most expensive for cable to carry. I like the general interest (USA, WGN, Spike, COM) and informational (DISC, HIST, SciFi) type of channels, and barely watch anything else. I think it would be a great service to break apart "standard" cable into chunks that are $3- $5, and I can say it's defnitely nice the way it's working right now.
I've been saying this for years to my friends, it's really hard to imagine you're in a real world if you keep seeing the same panel in the wall, or (worse) the same panel representing a wall (think Doom). It does make it easier to spot that one panel that is slightly off, indicating you need to blast it with a rocket or, or find a switch somewhere, but in real life every panel would be slightly different than the next. Even look at your cube walls, there are subtle differences between each one that let you sort of find "cloud pictures" (or try your ceiling tile).
I don't really have a solution, as the advances in lighting and level design, not to mention the increased amount of art that can be packed into a CD nowadays have taken care of all my ideas, apart from having an artist draw every single wall uniquely to start out with (ridiculously time consuming). Well, maybe have something like Diablo's random level generator, where a key is stored that is used to generate consistent (within the game) dungeons, but basically uses the same elements. Use it to modify certain parts of the panel, like maybe a few pixel wide micro-scratches or discolorations that you really only notice on a subconcious level.
Oh, and I'm sure someone's mentioned this already, but stop making everything look like plastic! Even plastic doesn't gleam like that, as there's dirt that settles on it (and settles in an uneven way). Materials might actually have whatever index of refraction your physics engine is set to, but if there's 50% dust, or 25% wear, that part isn't going to gleam like it was just polished yesterday. And I don't think sewers get polished very often.
Now that I'm rolling, do game publishers only work in brand-new office buildings? For those of you who are in a building a few years old, look down at the ground next time you walk around (no, not just to avoid eye contact, but actually pay attention to the ground). Notice how the carpet/tile is more worn in high-traffic areas? How next to the water cooler it's a little bit darker, due to splatter over the years? How the edges of wide hallways look like they were installed yesterday? How there are always marks on the walls in stairwells? And how even door handles start to show wear after a few years? It's the little things that we see but don't process that really make things look real - the wrinkles in people's faces. We just need "wrinkles" in our textures.
This one company who knows nothing about cars will team up with another company that knows nothing about cars to produce a car that major auto manufacturers have tried and failed at. They paid a design firm too much and now no one is willing to attempt to sell their vehicle. Laugh at how ugly it is.
James McDonald: "I can give (game players) the same performance you get out of those game boxes"
Yeah, but as with the Nokia N-Gage, just because you can match the specs doesn't mean squat. Technical skill and ability get you only half way there - even Microsoft had a hard lesson to learn about usability (of the controllers) and content (C'mon, did anyone buy the X-box for a reason other than playing Halo?). And is he really dumb enough to think that trying to do a cable box that also plays video games won't prompt MS to come back with an Xbox that also does cable? I hate to say it, but Microsoft is actually really good at picking out (stealing) what others have done right and integrating those ideas. They'll never be the first out the door with anything, but once they get in, they'll market the crap out of anything until they own the market.
Maybe if they went after the market that is currently buying PSOne's they could do it. But for me, if Ford suddenly announced they were putting gaming consoles in their vehicles, I'd better see some non-Ford logo on the actual box if they want me to buy. And considering Ford charges $500 for a basic mp3 player (that doesn't even read ID3!), I'd seriously doubt if Scientific Atlanta could meet the console's price points.
The fanless iMac is louder? Maybe you're exaggerating to make a point; but apart from the occasional clicks from it's hard drive, I can't tell if they're on or off.
Maybe it's because I just came from discussion boards on a different site talking about radar detectors (the ones that help you avoid the cops), but my first thought was it'd be cool if you could wire a radar detector / camera up as the payload and fly it out ahead of your car by a 1/2 mile or so. Hey, it'd even help to spot traffic jams up ahead. Too bad it only goes 50mph - anyone into modding hobby planes?;-)
Actually, I think I'm a bit more informed on this than you. I used to work at a company who specialized in satellite survivability up there. There have already been older satellites which have partially disintegrated (few big pieces, lots of smaller ones, but nothing compared to one exploding) and made the orbits they are in unusable. Fortunately, due to their tiny size (these were among the first ever) they aren't too dangerous, as you surmise.
However, you get one that was launched by a modern rocket, or the Space Shuttle, and you're talking ones that can be approximiately the size of a train engine. And it only takes one object the size of a ball bearing (since it's travelling at thousands of mph) to explode another satellite, or at least kill it and send it spinning out of it's intended orbit. Sure space is huge, and this catastrophic failure won't happen overnight, but each satellite will spill into millions of pieces. A one-in-a-billion (or trillion, or whatever you want to make the odds) chance, done for millions of pieces of debris, for thousands of satellites, continuously, becomes a certainty rapidly.
When we first started sending stuff into space, some smart men figured out that any space weapons (even those pointed at earth) would only prompt counter-measures, and the only way to beat a space-based laser was with something already in orbit.
If one satelite is destroyed the debris will spread and destroy every other satellite in space (not to mention a lot of satelites are nuclear powered). Further, we won't be able to launch something into space for a few thousand years, as we wait for the debris to rain down. Everything from cell phones to the internet to GPS will cease to work, or be severely crippled.
Sure, we may have good intentions in putting weapons up there, and won't destroy anyone else's stuff with our high-tech frying of circuits, but that doesn't re-assure anyone else who might have the weapons turned against them. Hell, the Europeans are launching their own version of GPS just because of the threat of degredation of signal - not that big of deal, but a telling sign for how much the rest of the world trusts the US and Bush's "Nobody tells me what to do" attitude.
I think the US having the ability to rain down death and destruction on anyone who gets in our way does make the world a safer place
Here's something for you to think about: perhaps our overwhelming military actually makes it more dangerous for Americans. Here's an analogy: who liked the school bully? Sure some people were nice to him so they wouldn't be picked on, but I don't know any who liked him for his ability to bully other kids. And you know, there's probably a lot of people who'd swipe his dessert if they got a chance.
The biggest irony I see in our War on Comm^H^H^H^H Terrorism is that we're becoming more and more like the ones we're trying to eradicate. Less freedom, less education (easiest place to steal money from without raising taxes), more propaganda, and moving more to a police state. Of course, nothing drives America like "War", and we've gotten so good at inventing bad guys.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, guess you never got to the more advanced econ courses, that made about as much sense as when my parents told me "finish your vegetables, there are children starving in China".
If gold-farming wasn't a danger to the online economy, why doesn't the publisher just sell gold outright? I dunno, something about ruining the game for everyone else. Cutting in line is cutting in line, no matter how you rationalize it as being a better use of your time.
I don't suppose google has been of any help, has it?
http://www.google.com/search?q=quiet+psu
I seemed to find a pretty quiet PSU pretty easy, dunno about you:
http://www.endpcnoise.com
Because while an external PSU might be cool, you're really only trying to solve the noise problem.
- #5 - Nintendo sucks
- #4 - EA sucks
- #3 - Sony sucks
- #2 - MS sucks
- #1 - PC gaming sucks
Wow, maybe it's just me, but I think that article is meant to insult every single gamer (he even almost makes a pass at retro gamers). Everything's got a downside, too pricey, too little power, too easy, too hard... someone's going to complain, and he basically just went down the list and picked the biggest gaffe from each area.I mean, he even insulted Nintendo on a product he hasn't tried and isn't out yet. That's got to be reaching....
I remember one time I actually didn't study and got an A. I was so totally shocked and wondered why I had done that for the previous 20 years.
Then I realized "oh yeah, I'm a Nerd"....
With all their other personalized services requiring you to log into your gmail account, why do you think this would be different?
Hey, people wouldn't be pirating music it wasn't for the artists producing it! If we were talking about drugs here, the law gives harsher fines for those who produce and deal drugs than for the average user, so shouldn't the same apply here? So really, the RIAA needs to send one one of those letters to itself before someone really gets hurt.
This is how I read the article: Not only do these things not compare (Republican party sets policies from the top, Slashdot doesn't have policies), it's basically like asking "Have you stopped raping women?". If you say No you are for closed source, if you say Yes you belive in killing people. Plus, if you don't answer, you're supposedly not intelligent or passionate enough to have an opinion.
Besides, the point of the quote was that an intelligent person can see both sides of an argument (the advantages of closed and open source), not that they have differening opinions on different matters (like the Cardinals, don't like the Diamondbacks (US baseball teams)).
I actually am working on this with my family, but after 10 years of AOL, it's pretty ingrained (particularly my Mom who won't get a new anything until what's she's using breaks), so I had to do it in phases (for me, it was about a month between phases, I thought it would be longer).
/. ('nuff said). His worry was everyone who emails him at AOL and I told him just to plan on a two year transition to get everyone to his new account. It took us each like a month to get 99% of our friends over, but some are pretty stubborn, or only email occasionally.
My first target was my brother, who reads
Next was my sister, and she's in college so I just brought it up like it was gossip. Spam was her biggest worry, so I showed her how to have multiple acounts that forward to one, and to make a new one if one gets overrun. Phase II done.
Then my Mom, who actually was a lot easier than I feared. I figured I'd move her over slowly, first to AOL webmail (she wanted to be able to choose where AOL saved her attachments), then let her get used to that, but she was also complaining about spam so I said "I can solve that for you" and moved her over in an hour total. She doesn't email that many people so her transition time was almost zero.
My Dad was the toughest and most stubborn, so I knew I really had to bait him into it. He didn't like paying the $15/month for just email, so I prepared to address that as his reason to switch. A few weeks later he brought it up, and he said he didn't want to force us to leave AOL. I reminded him that the rest of had already switched to gmail, and that I could get him moved over too. He uses his work account for most of his email, so he was also easy to convert once he had a reason to.
I pretty much just had to let everyone decide for themselves that gmail was better than AOL, and while we still subscribe to AOL, I only check it once a week to see if anyone's still emailing me there (last person was two months ago, a friend who I haven't talked to in four years).
Everyone's transition time may vary (depending on how many friends they care about keeping), but it's gotta be on their timetable, if you start prodding them (randomly saying "you know, now that I'm on gmail I don't get any spam" is bad) they'll fight you and then blame you when things aren't exactly like they used to be. If they say "I hate paying $15/month for email", just say "Then don't. I don't". Make them ask all the questions: "Oh really? How come?" "I use gmail." "What's gmail?" "Free email" "I heard those get a lot of spam" "Nope, I don't get any spam." etc. Yes, it goes against your geek nature to back up your statements with facts, but just think of it as your greatest challenge ever. Of course, that's what worked for me, YMMV.
I've been thinking about this for years, as I grew up in the ridiculously underfunded California system, so have heard all sorts of arguments about this.
But I've pretty much boiled them all down to one thing: funding. Teachers have so many ideas, so many things they want to do that would make the class interesting, but they can't afford them. And of course the education budget has done nothing but shrink, when you're facing a budget crisis it's easy to lop 1% off education, you don't feel the effects for years, and since you leave it to the schools to make the cuts, you're not a bad guy for firing teachers or cutting their wages.
The benefits go on: the less educated are less likely to question you, not going to realize you're repeating the same mistakes of 20 years ago, and don't understand the numbers when you say we're really not deeply in debt. So there really is no political incentive to improve education - although that does mirror the average American's attitude of expecting something immediately without regard for the future cost.
But as to why I say funding: not only would funding bring in better talent (the private sector pays easily 2x as much here in CA), so it's not just the everything-for-the-kids types, but then schools could afford the basics like books, desks, classroom space, maybe even the soft touches like paint and teacher's assistants. You know, make them respectable places that kids might actually want to spend their time. My high school was built by a jail designer, so it was all bare cinderblock, stainless steel and a single barred window in each room. And this was in the middle of Silicon Valley, not some inner-city!
And btw, if anyone thinks they have some creative ideas of how teachers can be more efficient with the money they have, feel free to share, because I don't know a single teacher who doesn't spend at least part every single day trying to figure out what they can squeeze in their budget. It's not like they're asking for much, unfortunately people want to save that extra 0.1% in taxes more.
So what? Before vacuum tubes there really wasn't any way to save the state information on a magnetic charge (or whatever those things held) reliably, and then after years and years of using those, we got good and have been making the space to store a bit ever smaller.
This is still experimental, so of course it's not consumer ready; ENIAC was built in 1946, and we're not even there yet. I'm sure there are folks on Slashdot who will never get to use a quantum computer first-hand, which sounds depressing, but that's how far off we are. Everyone just sit back and relax for a while on this one....
I'd suggest just buying the software again, but from one of their competitors. Customer support has become a vital part of software, and if theirs is lacking, there are plenty of other companies that I'm sure would believe you and actually honor your purchase.
Or, just try calling back to see if you can talk to another support guy who might be more agreeable. Some times you get support staff who won't get off their ass to do the most reasonable things if it's not specifically in their job description.
Well if you live in San Diego, they've been working on the sensing/networking for about 10 years... of course, it doesn't seem like they've made any progress, as my commute has only gotten longer.
And you can already buy a car (at least here in the USA) with all of the rest of that today (adaptive cruise control, reactive braking) - they just don't call it a PC (but some still run Windows). Btw, you forgot news feeds and gaming - I think by entertainment you meant movies, which have been around longer than the minivan.
I don't think you've thought about this too much, or are just trolling.... basestation? Why? And what sort of privacy issues are you risking by having your car publish that you're travelling 80mph?
Remember how monitors started off as monochrome... then 16-color, then 256, then 16-bit; finally 24 and 32 bit? We didn't go to 64-bit. Why? No one can see that many colors.
Same with sound - we've long passed the point where any video card can reproduce a sound well enough so that 99% of us can't tell the difference between the recorded version and the original.
If you're giving me the option between a $20 and a $200 sound card, and I can't tell the difference, why would I pay the extra cash?
Hrm, from what I've read about Asia, and my Asian friends here, becoming more Western/American is very popular there; whereas to a lot of Americans, "turning Japanese" has nothing to do with Japanese culture.
Well, here in San Diego Cox offers it's digital subscribers different groupings of channels. The minimum you can pay is $9 and that gets you the "standard" Discovery * channels (Wings, Times, Health...) plus one extra group. You can pick from stuff like the Sports & Info (Tech TV, G4, Fox Sports World... - what I got), Movies (Encore *), Lifestyle (History International, Food, etc), International, and 3 others. Each group is $3 (1 for $9 (rip), 3 for $12, 4 for $15), has about ~10 channels in it, mostly in the same theme (although some seem to be where they are for monetary reasons - how is History International not in the Info group?).
And you don't even have to get "standard" cable, I pay $12 for basic (local channels), which gets me $10 off on broadband, then $9 for digital, and $3 for the box... that's a ton of channels that I actually watch for $24. Granted, I think they expect that you pay $30 for the "standard" cable, but considering I (would) watch about 5 of those channels, I'm much happier only paying $12 for 5 channels which I watch - I can always go over to my friend's house if I need to see something on one of those channels.
Yeah, it's not true a-la-carte, but I think the grouping of channels is sort of necessary - both for convenience and costs. And I also don't advocate totally breaking up the "standard" channels - certainly your local channels should always be available, and some stuff like the Weather Channel that you'd never go out of your way to pick. But there are plenty of households where the interest in sports is limited to the major events (Superbowl, World Series, etc) and would never watch the sports channels (ESPN, Fox Sports) - which I hear are some of the most expensive for cable to carry. I like the general interest (USA, WGN, Spike, COM) and informational (DISC, HIST, SciFi) type of channels, and barely watch anything else. I think it would be a great service to break apart "standard" cable into chunks that are $3- $5, and I can say it's defnitely nice the way it's working right now.
I've been saying this for years to my friends, it's really hard to imagine you're in a real world if you keep seeing the same panel in the wall, or (worse) the same panel representing a wall (think Doom). It does make it easier to spot that one panel that is slightly off, indicating you need to blast it with a rocket or, or find a switch somewhere, but in real life every panel would be slightly different than the next. Even look at your cube walls, there are subtle differences between each one that let you sort of find "cloud pictures" (or try your ceiling tile).
I don't really have a solution, as the advances in lighting and level design, not to mention the increased amount of art that can be packed into a CD nowadays have taken care of all my ideas, apart from having an artist draw every single wall uniquely to start out with (ridiculously time consuming). Well, maybe have something like Diablo's random level generator, where a key is stored that is used to generate consistent (within the game) dungeons, but basically uses the same elements. Use it to modify certain parts of the panel, like maybe a few pixel wide micro-scratches or discolorations that you really only notice on a subconcious level.
Oh, and I'm sure someone's mentioned this already, but stop making everything look like plastic! Even plastic doesn't gleam like that, as there's dirt that settles on it (and settles in an uneven way). Materials might actually have whatever index of refraction your physics engine is set to, but if there's 50% dust, or 25% wear, that part isn't going to gleam like it was just polished yesterday. And I don't think sewers get polished very often.
Now that I'm rolling, do game publishers only work in brand-new office buildings? For those of you who are in a building a few years old, look down at the ground next time you walk around (no, not just to avoid eye contact, but actually pay attention to the ground). Notice how the carpet/tile is more worn in high-traffic areas? How next to the water cooler it's a little bit darker, due to splatter over the years? How the edges of wide hallways look like they were installed yesterday? How there are always marks on the walls in stairwells? And how even door handles start to show wear after a few years? It's the little things that we see but don't process that really make things look real - the wrinkles in people's faces. We just need "wrinkles" in our textures.
Well obviously, they failed to account for the millions of units the Phantom will sell. I don't think their numbers are very accurate...
Who, Me? Sarcastic?
This is how the article should have been posted:
This one company who knows nothing about cars will team up with another company that knows nothing about cars to produce a car that major auto manufacturers have tried and failed at. They paid a design firm too much and now no one is willing to attempt to sell their vehicle. Laugh at how ugly it is.
Maybe if they went after the market that is currently buying PSOne's they could do it. But for me, if Ford suddenly announced they were putting gaming consoles in their vehicles, I'd better see some non-Ford logo on the actual box if they want me to buy. And considering Ford charges $500 for a basic mp3 player (that doesn't even read ID3!), I'd seriously doubt if Scientific Atlanta could meet the console's price points.
Maybe it's because I just came from discussion boards on a different site talking about radar detectors (the ones that help you avoid the cops), but my first thought was it'd be cool if you could wire a radar detector / camera up as the payload and fly it out ahead of your car by a 1/2 mile or so. Hey, it'd even help to spot traffic jams up ahead. Too bad it only goes 50mph - anyone into modding hobby planes? ;-)
Actually, I think I'm a bit more informed on this than you. I used to work at a company who specialized in satellite survivability up there. There have already been older satellites which have partially disintegrated (few big pieces, lots of smaller ones, but nothing compared to one exploding) and made the orbits they are in unusable. Fortunately, due to their tiny size (these were among the first ever) they aren't too dangerous, as you surmise.
However, you get one that was launched by a modern rocket, or the Space Shuttle, and you're talking ones that can be approximiately the size of a train engine. And it only takes one object the size of a ball bearing (since it's travelling at thousands of mph) to explode another satellite, or at least kill it and send it spinning out of it's intended orbit. Sure space is huge, and this catastrophic failure won't happen overnight, but each satellite will spill into millions of pieces. A one-in-a-billion (or trillion, or whatever you want to make the odds) chance, done for millions of pieces of debris, for thousands of satellites, continuously, becomes a certainty rapidly.
When we first started sending stuff into space, some smart men figured out that any space weapons (even those pointed at earth) would only prompt counter-measures, and the only way to beat a space-based laser was with something already in orbit.
If one satelite is destroyed the debris will spread and destroy every other satellite in space (not to mention a lot of satelites are nuclear powered). Further, we won't be able to launch something into space for a few thousand years, as we wait for the debris to rain down. Everything from cell phones to the internet to GPS will cease to work, or be severely crippled.
Sure, we may have good intentions in putting weapons up there, and won't destroy anyone else's stuff with our high-tech frying of circuits, but that doesn't re-assure anyone else who might have the weapons turned against them. Hell, the Europeans are launching their own version of GPS just because of the threat of degredation of signal - not that big of deal, but a telling sign for how much the rest of the world trusts the US and Bush's "Nobody tells me what to do" attitude.
The biggest irony I see in our War on Comm^H^H^H^H Terrorism is that we're becoming more and more like the ones we're trying to eradicate. Less freedom, less education (easiest place to steal money from without raising taxes), more propaganda, and moving more to a police state. Of course, nothing drives America like "War", and we've gotten so good at inventing bad guys.