I remember renting a racing game for the Gamecube where you earned boost for dangerous driving; it was probably the original Burnout. It was a good game. By default the tracks had traffic, which made the racing more interesting. The sound and graphics were good.
I remember one race in particular. A large part of the race was down a busy multilane freeway (aka turnpike). The only way you could complete each lap in the alloted time was to hold down the boost button on this freeway, and the only way to replenish your boost supply was to drive on the wrong side of the road. So you had to drive at maximum speed directly into oncoming traffic:)
Back in the day we didn't have the computing power to simulate real life well. Games like GTA or Tony Hawk are more engaging because they are more realistic. Driving around a city committing crimes is just real enough to be extra thrilling; so is pulling epic tricks on a skateboard at the mall.
Another game that added realism to its genre was Gran Turismo. You could buy real cars and perform realistic modifications to those cars to improve performance. The cars handled according to their real characteristics. For example, you could easily tell the different between FWD, RWD and AWD.
The ultimate add-on to this would be a module that would allow folks to add real driving locations. You could use GPS to map out the road and a digital camera or video recorder to capture the scenery. Then you could try driving familiar roads with or without traffic, in various types of weather, and most importantly without the repercussions of a real crash.
This game would be even more dangerous because it would give young drivers a terrible model for how to drive real roads. But I bet it would be quite popular if local roads were available.
Or if the lane for oncoming traffic is empty just gun it and drive the wrong way. Or just hop up onto the sidewalk to detour a traffic stoppage. And don't for get the classic "maintain top speed around a 90 degree turn by cutting over the sidwalk, hitting three pedestrians and sideswiping a light pole".
Fortunately the feeling goes away pretty quickly, even if you've been playing all day.
Universes that are not nearly flat don't work like ours.
A closed universe ends up in a Big Crunch in thousands or millions of years; this has been proven insufficient to generate life as we know it. It took 3.5 billion years to progress from the first bacteria-like single celled organisms to thinking humans. And the Sun isn't even particularly old; it's a 3rd generation star. A closed universe would crunch too quickly to allow life to develop sufficiently.
An open universe expands quickly enough that galaxies and stars cannot form. These aggregations of energy are necessary to support life as we know it. Without sufficient energy entropy reigns supreme and life doesn't have the necessary resources to take advantage of self-organization.
Let us postulate that my theory of a universe-generating phenomena is correct. Given this postulation then the odds of OUR galaxy being almost flat are 1 in 1, thanks to the benefit of hindsight. The odds of any randomly generated universe being flat are probably different. However since a non-flat universe cannot support life as we know it this universe cannot reflect on itself and ask the question, "what are the odds?" So only nearly flat universes can spawn the question and therefore the odds of a universe that can support the question are equal to the answer: 1 in 1.
The odds of the universe being very nearly flat are 1 in 1, since we wouldn't be around to calculate those odds if it didn't pan out that way. Similarly the odds of the universe supporting life are 1 in 1 for the same reason.
For all we know there is a natural system that churns out universes on a regular cycle. Usually nothing comes of it, but once in a while the universe pans out and lasts for a while. So far we don't have a way of observing these failed universes. But we can observe other systems that work in a similar fashion.
One could say that we are incredibly lucky to live on a planet with the correct chemical composition at the correct distance from a correctly hot Sun. If we use a sufficiently powerful telescope we can see that there are billions of other stars, and they are all different. Given the rather large number of chances it doesn't seem that odd that at least one of them provided the proper environment for life as we know it.
Our day would change at 4pm according to his plan. Having a date change in the middle of the working day would require a major change to most date-related software.
1. Ripping analog stuff is not as easy as you make it sound. You have to be willing to sit there and babysit the process as x1. You have to be able to spell the artist and song names, which sounds trivial but apparently isn't from the stuff I've seen on P2P. And you have to have decent line-in capabilities to produce acceptable audio quality. Additionally Windows computers need extra software to capture audio that is longer than 1 minute; at least that was the case the last time I ripped an audio cassette. This involves an additional download that many average users are too lazy to make.
2. Everyone has to be willing to share hours of their own ripping work to the multitude of leaches on most P2P networks. This is a social engineering issue that would need a sophisticated software solution, involving more complex permissions based on original material.
DRM isn't about making things impossible, since that is in itself impossible. It's about making copying just difficult enough to keep the unwashed masses buying stuff.
Nowadays many data sources must run 24/7 because they serve data worldwide. It really shouldn't be necessary to shut down the data source to replace a disk. RAID on SCSI can already support hotswapping. The only nuance here is to make sure the physical design of the array allows the operator to replace any cube without removing others.
If you didn't enjoy flying an X-Wing or a Tie Fighter around in the early nineties then just hand in your official Star Wars fan/sucker card right now. You may also be subject to a beating for failing to enjoy X-Wing Alliance and Rogue Leader.
If your favorite Star Wars game is KOTOR then maybe you just don't have what it takes to appreciate the dexterity required for the abovementioned action games.
Games generally don't require a high-end video card; they just look a lot better. Far Cry looks absolutely amazing running at 1600x1200 with lots of filtering. Likewise Doom3, Half-Life 2, etc. And frame rates are much steadier.
I know the difference because I played these games with an older high end card (GF 4400 TI) and then upgraded to a newer high end card (GF 6800 GT) and the difference is huge. The cost was too, but if you amortize that over the lifetime of the card it's less than a cup of coffee a day:)
I have friends and family that are very happy with Mac OS X, and my limited exposure to it has been positive. That said Mac users are generally the worst OS bigots. They will tell you that every problem you've ever had on your PC can be solved with a Mac. And they will tell you this at every opportunity.
They conveniently ignore the never-ending stream of complaints about stuff on our corporate intranet that doesn't work right on OS X. It should be noted that we already support Mozilla/Firefox, so it's not like we just leave everyone without IE twisting in the wind. And they also forget the hundreds of dollars they fork over to AppleCare to fix stuff.
I suspect that the high cost of Mac ownership gives many users the impression that they are a member of the computing elite. Newsflash: it's lonely at the top, and IT cares more about supporting the majority of the users. No IT department would choose to multiply their support headaches with another platform to support unless the payoff was enormous.
The holographic computer interface was the coolest part of that movie. It really looked like a good way to process a lot of dense audiovisual data as quickly as possible. Too many movie computer systems look like nothing more than limited use expert systems with flashy graphics and cheesy sound.
I basically agree with you, but there are some differences that are worth noting.
If someone is being loud and obnoxious on a city street there is generally enough background noise to cover it up, and in many cases you can walk away.
If someone is being loud and obnoxious in a restaurant or a movie theater then they generally tend to attract a lot of negative attention. As a consequence this situation is rare.
Loud and obnoxious people at work suck, because you can't just leave and in many cases you can't ask them to be quiet either. Usually the level of background noise is low as well, which really amplifies the effect of some jerk yelling at one other person on their speakerphone.
Loud and obnoxious people on a plane will suck for the same reasons as at work; you can't leave and the level of background noise isn't high enough to drown them out.
You two have illustrated an important point; only the affluent/technologically savvy enjoy the benefits of circumventing copy protection technology.
The DAT spec for music had a copy protection scheme, but it was ignored in all professional level gear. You had to shell out extra dollars to buy gear that didn't have copy protection.
DVDs are rippable, but you need a computer and a certain minimum level of knowledge. It is possible to build a consumer level device to do this, but no one has (in the US; I suspect you can get a standalone DVD ripper in Asia).
The same holds for region-free DVD viewing. You can pay extra money for a modified consumer level player, or you can do the research and hack the DVD drive in your computer.
Statistics show that firearm possession is a risk factor that leads to higher rates of mortality. If you could correlate an inability to effectively use firearms to a decreased likelihood to possess those same weapons then this same inability could be seen as a positive survival factor.
This is especially relevant since firearm related mortality rates affect young people that have not yet produced offspring, and therefore affect natural selection.
A copyright protects a work of art. An example would be a song I recorded. My copyright doesn't prevent anyone else from recording their songs. There is a very little loss to society by affording me many years of copyright protection.
A patent protects a mechanism that produces something, like music or the reproduction of music. A patent probably protects the codec I use to compress my recording, and possibly the equipment I use to produce my song as well. These patents could prevent others from making their own music. The loss to society is greater, and therefore patent protection must be shorter.
Sun has offered SunRay technology for years. Each SunRay device is a thin client with smart card authentication. Your session follows your smart card so you can use any device on the network. The server software currently runs on Solaris, which is not Linux. but Solaris 10 has the ability to run Linux software, and a Linux version of the SunRay server software is in the works. Solaris runs Mozilla/FireFox/Thunderbird, StarOffice/OpenOffice, and many other apps natively anyway.
The server software has cluster support, so you can add as much hardware as you need. The clients need nothing more than a fast ethernet connection to the server, and a low-bandwidth version for home use is in the works.
I thought the spreadsheet example of summing the values in a column was weak. The code is more complicated than the spreadsheet action because real programming lanuages have much larger problem domains than a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet can afford to have only one additive operator and one type of grouping because that is the only problem domain it understands. Real programs have different levels of scope, different data types, exception handling, etc.
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I remember renting a racing game for the Gamecube where you earned boost for dangerous driving; it was probably the original Burnout. It was a good game. By default the tracks had traffic, which made the racing more interesting. The sound and graphics were good.
:)
I remember one race in particular. A large part of the race was down a busy multilane freeway (aka turnpike). The only way you could complete each lap in the alloted time was to hold down the boost button on this freeway, and the only way to replenish your boost supply was to drive on the wrong side of the road. So you had to drive at maximum speed directly into oncoming traffic
Everything sucks in a vacuum.
There aren't too many ugly super heroes, especially the female ones.
Back in the day we didn't have the computing power to simulate real life well. Games like GTA or Tony Hawk are more engaging because they are more realistic. Driving around a city committing crimes is just real enough to be extra thrilling; so is pulling epic tricks on a skateboard at the mall.
Another game that added realism to its genre was Gran Turismo. You could buy real cars and perform realistic modifications to those cars to improve performance. The cars handled according to their real characteristics. For example, you could easily tell the different between FWD, RWD and AWD.
The ultimate add-on to this would be a module that would allow folks to add real driving locations. You could use GPS to map out the road and a digital camera or video recorder to capture the scenery. Then you could try driving familiar roads with or without traffic, in various types of weather, and most importantly without the repercussions of a real crash.
This game would be even more dangerous because it would give young drivers a terrible model for how to drive real roads. But I bet it would be quite popular if local roads were available.
Or if the lane for oncoming traffic is empty just gun it and drive the wrong way. Or just hop up onto the sidewalk to detour a traffic stoppage. And don't for get the classic "maintain top speed around a 90 degree turn by cutting over the sidwalk, hitting three pedestrians and sideswiping a light pole".
Fortunately the feeling goes away pretty quickly, even if you've been playing all day.
Why would anyone throw out the language/runtime with built-in multithreading support when system processors are becoming increasingly parallel?
Universes that are not nearly flat don't work like ours.
A closed universe ends up in a Big Crunch in thousands or millions of years; this has been proven insufficient to generate life as we know it. It took 3.5 billion years to progress from the first bacteria-like single celled organisms to thinking humans. And the Sun isn't even particularly old; it's a 3rd generation star. A closed universe would crunch too quickly to allow life to develop sufficiently.
An open universe expands quickly enough that galaxies and stars cannot form. These aggregations of energy are necessary to support life as we know it. Without sufficient energy entropy reigns supreme and life doesn't have the necessary resources to take advantage of self-organization.
Let us postulate that my theory of a universe-generating phenomena is correct. Given this postulation then the odds of OUR galaxy being almost flat are 1 in 1, thanks to the benefit of hindsight. The odds of any randomly generated universe being flat are probably different. However since a non-flat universe cannot support life as we know it this universe cannot reflect on itself and ask the question, "what are the odds?" So only nearly flat universes can spawn the question and therefore the odds of a universe that can support the question are equal to the answer: 1 in 1.
The odds of the universe being very nearly flat are 1 in 1, since we wouldn't be around to calculate those odds if it didn't pan out that way. Similarly the odds of the universe supporting life are 1 in 1 for the same reason.
For all we know there is a natural system that churns out universes on a regular cycle. Usually nothing comes of it, but once in a while the universe pans out and lasts for a while. So far we don't have a way of observing these failed universes. But we can observe other systems that work in a similar fashion.
One could say that we are incredibly lucky to live on a planet with the correct chemical composition at the correct distance from a correctly hot Sun. If we use a sufficiently powerful telescope we can see that there are billions of other stars, and they are all different. Given the rather large number of chances it doesn't seem that odd that at least one of them provided the proper environment for life as we know it.
This might work if DST didn't exist. But it does, and it makes calculating offsets in your head hard.
Our day would change at 4pm according to his plan. Having a date change in the middle of the working day would require a major change to most date-related software.
1. Ripping analog stuff is not as easy as you make it sound. You have to be willing to sit there and babysit the process as x1. You have to be able to spell the artist and song names, which sounds trivial but apparently isn't from the stuff I've seen on P2P. And you have to have decent line-in capabilities to produce acceptable audio quality. Additionally Windows computers need extra software to capture audio that is longer than 1 minute; at least that was the case the last time I ripped an audio cassette. This involves an additional download that many average users are too lazy to make.
2. Everyone has to be willing to share hours of their own ripping work to the multitude of leaches on most P2P networks. This is a social engineering issue that would need a sophisticated software solution, involving more complex permissions based on original material.
DRM isn't about making things impossible, since that is in itself impossible. It's about making copying just difficult enough to keep the unwashed masses buying stuff.
Nowadays many data sources must run 24/7 because they serve data worldwide. It really shouldn't be necessary to shut down the data source to replace a disk. RAID on SCSI can already support hotswapping. The only nuance here is to make sure the physical design of the array allows the operator to replace any cube without removing others.
If you didn't enjoy flying an X-Wing or a Tie Fighter around in the early nineties then just hand in your official Star Wars fan/sucker card right now. You may also be subject to a beating for failing to enjoy X-Wing Alliance and Rogue Leader.
If your favorite Star Wars game is KOTOR then maybe you just don't have what it takes to appreciate the dexterity required for the abovementioned action games.
Games generally don't require a high-end video card; they just look a lot better. Far Cry looks absolutely amazing running at 1600x1200 with lots of filtering. Likewise Doom3, Half-Life 2, etc. And frame rates are much steadier.
:)
I know the difference because I played these games with an older high end card (GF 4400 TI) and then upgraded to a newer high end card (GF 6800 GT) and the difference is huge. The cost was too, but if you amortize that over the lifetime of the card it's less than a cup of coffee a day
I have friends and family that are very happy with Mac OS X, and my limited exposure to it has been positive. That said Mac users are generally the worst OS bigots. They will tell you that every problem you've ever had on your PC can be solved with a Mac. And they will tell you this at every opportunity.
They conveniently ignore the never-ending stream of complaints about stuff on our corporate intranet that doesn't work right on OS X. It should be noted that we already support Mozilla/Firefox, so it's not like we just leave everyone without IE twisting in the wind. And they also forget the hundreds of dollars they fork over to AppleCare to fix stuff.
I suspect that the high cost of Mac ownership gives many users the impression that they are a member of the computing elite. Newsflash: it's lonely at the top, and IT cares more about supporting the majority of the users. No IT department would choose to multiply their support headaches with another platform to support unless the payoff was enormous.
The holographic computer interface was the coolest part of that movie. It really looked like a good way to process a lot of dense audiovisual data as quickly as possible. Too many movie computer systems look like nothing more than limited use expert systems with flashy graphics and cheesy sound.
I basically agree with you, but there are some differences that are worth noting.
If someone is being loud and obnoxious on a city street there is generally enough background noise to cover it up, and in many cases you can walk away.
If someone is being loud and obnoxious in a restaurant or a movie theater then they generally tend to attract a lot of negative attention. As a consequence this situation is rare.
Loud and obnoxious people at work suck, because you can't just leave and in many cases you can't ask them to be quiet either. Usually the level of background noise is low as well, which really amplifies the effect of some jerk yelling at one other person on their speakerphone.
Loud and obnoxious people on a plane will suck for the same reasons as at work; you can't leave and the level of background noise isn't high enough to drown them out.
You two have illustrated an important point; only the affluent/technologically savvy enjoy the benefits of circumventing copy protection technology.
The DAT spec for music had a copy protection scheme, but it was ignored in all professional level gear. You had to shell out extra dollars to buy gear that didn't have copy protection.
DVDs are rippable, but you need a computer and a certain minimum level of knowledge. It is possible to build a consumer level device to do this, but no one has (in the US; I suspect you can get a standalone DVD ripper in Asia).
The same holds for region-free DVD viewing. You can pay extra money for a modified consumer level player, or you can do the research and hack the DVD drive in your computer.
Statistics show that firearm possession is a risk factor that leads to higher rates of mortality. If you could correlate an inability to effectively use firearms to a decreased likelihood to possess those same weapons then this same inability could be seen as a positive survival factor.
This is especially relevant since firearm related mortality rates affect young people that have not yet produced offspring, and therefore affect natural selection.
A copyright protects a work of art. An example would be a song I recorded. My copyright doesn't prevent anyone else from recording their songs. There is a very little loss to society by affording me many years of copyright protection.
A patent protects a mechanism that produces something, like music or the reproduction of music. A patent probably protects the codec I use to compress my recording, and possibly the equipment I use to produce my song as well. These patents could prevent others from making their own music. The loss to society is greater, and therefore patent protection must be shorter.
Great! This means we can start combing Ebay for deals on all the atomic clocks that just became obsolete.
They're going to the Country Kitchen Buffet :)
Sun has offered SunRay technology for years. Each SunRay device is a thin client with smart card authentication. Your session follows your smart card so you can use any device on the network. The server software currently runs on Solaris, which is not Linux. but Solaris 10 has the ability to run Linux software, and a Linux version of the SunRay server software is in the works. Solaris runs Mozilla/FireFox/Thunderbird, StarOffice/OpenOffice, and many other apps natively anyway.
The server software has cluster support, so you can add as much hardware as you need. The clients need nothing more than a fast ethernet connection to the server, and a low-bandwidth version for home use is in the works.
I thought the spreadsheet example of summing the values in a column was weak. The code is more complicated than the spreadsheet action because real programming lanuages have much larger problem domains than a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet can afford to have only one additive operator and one type of grouping because that is the only problem domain it understands. Real programs have different levels of scope, different data types, exception handling, etc.