Actually, the Datahand site claims you can increase your typing speed. I think I believe it, it looks like a very well thought out device. But for $1200 it ought to just type for you.
In comparison, that bowl thing claims you can acheive a whopping 52% of your regular typing speed, and seems like a horrible design.
The half keyboard (the one that claims 90%) isn't intended to replace a traditional keyboard, but rather to be used with handheld devices. It's small and easily portable, though I still think the Stowaway folding keyboard is a better idea. It's a full-sized keyboard that folds up to about the size of a Palm.
Ok. I was just going by what I thought I'd read in the documentation. Either they were wrong, or have found a way to make it work since the last time I read the docs. Either way, good news.
Does VNC not count for remote GUI login? You can use an NT/2000 completely remote if you install it as a service. (You can't log in to a Win9x box with VNC, but you can still run it - you're just screwed if it reboots). And it's even under the GPL.
Not sure what PC Anywhere does or doesn't do, but I can personally attest to VNC being one awesome little program. There are also X versions, and clients for everything from Palm to Linux to Windows.
If I were to make a game that needed the Amiga OS, could I ship a version of the Amiga OS with my game without increasing the price? Realistically, 5 people in the world are going to have this "Amiga" environment installed on their PCs, for anyone else it would have to be included with the game to make this a reasonable proposition, and I don't think Amiga is giving it away.
I will be happy if I am wrong. I was an Amiga fanatic back in the day. I'd love to see something bearing the Amiga name make a comeback (however little it has to do with actual Amigas)
Now that the idea has been put forward, however, I think a more likely propositon for a universal environment for games would be an X-box emulator/VM. Anyone know any reason that wouldn't be by far the easiest route to go, with X-box hardware being basically a PC anyway?
Well, 2 of us had previously worked together in a telecommuting environment, and it was naturally and obviously invaluable there. We liked it enough that we gave it a try once we wound up working together again for another company, despite the fact that we did, indeed, feel silly doing so. But it quickly became apparent after we got a few more people in on it that was easily worthwhile.
I don't know how you'd convince people to do it otherwise. If they're using ICQ or AIM, or telecommuting some of the time, you could relate it to that (it's much better for a group environment). Otherwise it might be a hard sell.
I don't telecommute, but we still use IRC as our war room. Everyone new thinks it's a lousy idea, until they try it for a couple of hours, then they're all converts. Having an IRC server, even when everyone's in cubes or offices in a 50 foot radius, is still a great thing. It's tons faster than email or walking over to ask stupid questions like "Did you check that file in yet?" and much less distracting than a phone call or a walk-over.
It's also great for passing URLs to good time wasting sites around, so I'm not certain it actually helps productivity, but I'm fairly certain it hasn't hurt either. I highly recommend it to everyone, no matter how silly you feel at first talking to people 20 feet away via IRC.
I've been a MediaOne cable modem customer in LA for about 2.5 years. I've got one of the big finned cable modems too, looks cool. It has also been outstanding service for practically the whole time, barring about a month when the operation of the service was switched over to RoadRunner (which was before the AT&T merger).
I wrote themto tell them that I would cancel their wonderful service the day they put this plan into effect. I did so through their web page, so probably no one important will ever hear of it, but you never know. I'd really hate to have to cancel it, finding a DSL provider with comparable service would not be easy (though at least there's some choice there.)
I think this is realisitic. This is something that's meant to be installed at the same time as the OS, by people who don't know the first thing about Linux. The idea being, you wouldn't install anything by hand, it would all be on the CD in the first place. For a PREVIEW release, it's reasonable to expect folks to go download a bunch of stuff that they're going to install by default in whatever distributions decide to include this. For Nautilus to be anything other than a preview,it needs to be bundled with a distribution. If I were them, I would not be concerning myself with what a bunch of current Linux users have to go through to install it. We are not their target, but we CAN help to make it easy for the people who are (those of us who think bringing inexperienced people to Linux is a good thing, anyway:-)
I wish I hadn't posted to this thread, so that I could moderate this up as insightful.
I have an app I want to write that probably 5 other people will have implemented by the time I get the chance to start, some 3-4 months from now. Then it'll be too late to matter. (Not saying what it is, I might be wrong. I will say I intend to write a GUI Linux version and a windows command-line version just to piss everyone in the whole world off;-)
I don't think ideas are a dime a dozen. Crappy ideas, maybe. But the really powerful ideas don't take much to implement. Napster is pretty easy to implement, especially the way they've done it (unlinked servers - linked would be much better). It was the idea that mattered, and they got there first. Web browsers are hard to implement now, but it wasn't so tough in the early days when there wasn't anything but text, links, and pictures to render. And that's all it took to make the web take off. Most improvements since have been incremental, it's just the sum of those improvements that makes it difficult to start over.
What's hard to come by is time. You either need to be able to not get paid for your time: you're a student (and not studying as hard as you should be;), or willing to sacrifice a whole lot of free time, or just rich. Or else you need to get funding somehow. Someone else (one of those damn students, probably) will find a way to implement something first, or at least better, if it's a good idea and you don't do it right away.
Anyway, I don't think there's "catching up" needed in most cases. Once you've got a certain level of skill, it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Keep looking and you'll find something no one else has done, or something you know you can do better than anyone's done before.
So, here's an idea for you: Distributed instant messaging. Why has no one done it yet? Or if they have, where is the "+1 Informative" linked reply to this comment to prove me wrong? (Or a "+1 Funny" link to sendmail.com)
Try the "file" command in a shell sometime. It knows lots of stuff, including most of your examples, and a whole lot more. Put the same database into Eazel (which you can do, it's open source) and there you go. If you further allow it to choose plugins/applications based on what it figures out, it'll be exactly what you're thinking of.
For anyone who didn't read the article, Warren Spector was one of the original Looking Glass designers, and was even involved with the first Thief early on. He's produced many fine games, and I believe he'll do a good job on Thief 3. I don't think it'll be exactly the Thief 3 we would have gotten from Looking Glass, but I do believe we'll get a game worthy of the name Thief.
The rest of the LG team(s) have spread to the wind, but some of them are still together. They won't be doing Thief, but I bet we'll see something great from them too, somewhere down the road.
That was wrong, what I saw back then was not an eyeball tracker, but a head orientation tracker. Not quite the same thing, but interchangeable from a software point of view.
I propose that all X window manager authors add the EyeballFocus setting, complementing MouseFocus, SloppyFocus, and ClickToFocus, immediately, thus avoiding any possible claims of "innovation" from Microsoft. Just create an X extension that accepts x,y screen coordinates from an arbitrary source, and worry about pesky issues like hardware later.
Alright, so this was meant to be funny, but there are actually eyeball tracker->mouse replacements out there, I saw one in use ten or more years ago. Has anyone made one work under X?
Re:No different from "Go" menu -- but also there's
on
Web Site "Lock-In"
·
· Score: 3
In Linux netscape, the middle button opens a link in a new window. In IE, shift-click does it. I open most things with the middle button when I know I'm going to want to come back to the original page. Back doesn't work very well on many pages if you've scrolled to somewhere in the middle (Slashdot stories are a prime example!)
Q: Can I produce my own random numbers, or must I use random(), and the provided flip_biased_coin() and biased_roshambo()? >/p>
A: You may use your own random number generator, but it must use a fixed seed, so that the tournament results are reproducible, given a fixed seed to srandom(). However, there is little to be gained from using your own RNG.
It seems to me that since they've also told you that random() is to be used, someone very clever could try to predict the opponent's choices based on sequence random() is returning. You aren't allowed to reseed it of course, but if your code is getting a certain sequence of numbers, is it possible to write code to figure out the current seed, and thus the entire sequence of numbers? Based on where your code winds up picking up the sequence, you know how many random numbers the opponent generated each round. Using that, you can possibly draw a correlation between the numbers you know he's getting and the choices he makes.
Granted, this is a longshot, and I know I'm not that clever, but on the other hand, there are lots of random number generators out there free for the taking. I'd spend the few minutes to add one to my code just to guarantee an attack like this won't work.
I'd like to know what these people are using that is so loud. Maybe they just don't remember what stuff USED to sound like.
I remember my Apple ][ didn't have any fans at all, so except for the floppy drives was completely silent. That's what stuff used to sound like. Total silence except when reading a disk. That goes for all those 8-bit computers, they just didn't need fans unless you added a whole bunch of extra stuff inside the case.
I have one P200 that's several years old and is pretty darn quiet. Good case, good fan (yeah, only one fan, imagine that!). Everything else I use is loud. Mostly only loud enough to be annoying when I stop to think about, like when someone posts a story about it to slashdot. But nevertheless, loud.
They did fire a bunch of people and moved their headquarters to Seattle. But they do still make games. I've got a friend who's a programmer there, so there's at least one internal devlopment team (probably several, but I don't know what other than his is ongoing), plus they publish Half-life and Homeworld, among others, and distribute Blizzard's games. They're doing alright. As for LSL, no idea. But it was funny question given the context.
My original reply was just to ask whether or not the Canadian law that allows anyone to retransmit a broadcast without permission as long as it isn't modified in any way would count conversion from analog to digital as a modification or not. A simple question. DBS providers have no relevance to the matter at hand since they have permission to retransmit.
The law in question was Canadian, and applied to people rebroadcasting without permission. Don't DBS providers generally have permission from the networks they carry, just as cable companies do? Maybe not, what do I know.
I think the first guy was probably right that there's a distinction between content and signal modification, but if it isn't specifically worded that way, I can see the broadcasters winning in court anyway.
This is a good test of slashdot: does anyone actually read replies after more than a day has passed?
Isn't digitally encoding an analog video signal a modification? Is there specific wording in the law that would allow it? Otherwise my uneducated guess would be that it's going to fail in the courts again.
I think I figured it out, but it took a minute. Hari Seldon was the guy in Foundation. Don't think I've ever heard it out loud, which in my case means "Harry" and "Hari" are worlds apart, but I guess not everyone's brain works the same way. Spelling flame? Nah, just posted in case anyone else has a poor mapping of written to spoken words.
I think anyone who sees the gaming industry as a haven for programmers hasn't really seen the gaming industry. Making games is not like playing games. The hours are long, and the pay is generally less then you'd get in other fields (not always, just generally). You have to love making games to last in the gaming industry. If you don't, don't get into games.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the Datahand site claims you can increase your typing speed. I think I believe it, it looks like a very well thought out device. But for $1200 it ought to just type for you.
In comparison, that bowl thing claims you can acheive a whopping 52% of your regular typing speed, and seems like a horrible design.
The half keyboard (the one that claims 90%) isn't intended to replace a traditional keyboard, but rather to be used with handheld devices. It's small and easily portable, though I still think the Stowaway folding keyboard is a better idea. It's a full-sized keyboard that folds up to about the size of a Palm.
No, everything east of the San Andreas will one day fall into the Atlantic.
Ok. I was just going by what I thought I'd read in the documentation. Either they were wrong, or have found a way to make it work since the last time I read the docs. Either way, good news.
Does VNC not count for remote GUI login? You can use an NT/2000 completely remote if you install it as a service. (You can't log in to a Win9x box with VNC, but you can still run it - you're just screwed if it reboots). And it's even under the GPL. Not sure what PC Anywhere does or doesn't do, but I can personally attest to VNC being one awesome little program. There are also X versions, and clients for everything from Palm to Linux to Windows.
If I were to make a game that needed the Amiga OS, could I ship a version of the Amiga OS with my game without increasing the price? Realistically, 5 people in the world are going to have this "Amiga" environment installed on their PCs, for anyone else it would have to be included with the game to make this a reasonable proposition, and I don't think Amiga is giving it away.
I will be happy if I am wrong. I was an Amiga fanatic back in the day. I'd love to see something bearing the Amiga name make a comeback (however little it has to do with actual Amigas)
Now that the idea has been put forward, however, I think a more likely propositon for a universal environment for games would be an X-box emulator/VM. Anyone know any reason that wouldn't be by far the easiest route to go, with X-box hardware being basically a PC anyway?
Well, 2 of us had previously worked together in a telecommuting environment, and it was naturally and obviously invaluable there. We liked it enough that we gave it a try once we wound up working together again for another company, despite the fact that we did, indeed, feel silly doing so. But it quickly became apparent after we got a few more people in on it that was easily worthwhile.
I don't know how you'd convince people to do it otherwise. If they're using ICQ or AIM, or telecommuting some of the time, you could relate it to that (it's much better for a group environment). Otherwise it might be a hard sell.
I don't telecommute, but we still use IRC as our war room. Everyone new thinks it's a lousy idea, until they try it for a couple of hours, then they're all converts. Having an IRC server, even when everyone's in cubes or offices in a 50 foot radius, is still a great thing. It's tons faster than email or walking over to ask stupid questions like "Did you check that file in yet?" and much less distracting than a phone call or a walk-over. It's also great for passing URLs to good time wasting sites around, so I'm not certain it actually helps productivity, but I'm fairly certain it hasn't hurt either. I highly recommend it to everyone, no matter how silly you feel at first talking to people 20 feet away via IRC.
I've been a MediaOne cable modem customer in LA for about 2.5 years. I've got one of the big finned cable modems too, looks cool. It has also been outstanding service for practically the whole time, barring about a month when the operation of the service was switched over to RoadRunner (which was before the AT&T merger). I wrote themto tell them that I would cancel their wonderful service the day they put this plan into effect. I did so through their web page, so probably no one important will ever hear of it, but you never know. I'd really hate to have to cancel it, finding a DSL provider with comparable service would not be easy (though at least there's some choice there.)
I think this is realisitic. This is something that's meant to be installed at the same time as the OS, by people who don't know the first thing about Linux. The idea being, you wouldn't install anything by hand, it would all be on the CD in the first place. For a PREVIEW release, it's reasonable to expect folks to go download a bunch of stuff that they're going to install by default in whatever distributions decide to include this. For Nautilus to be anything other than a preview,it needs to be bundled with a distribution. If I were them, I would not be concerning myself with what a bunch of current Linux users have to go through to install it. We are not their target, but we CAN help to make it easy for the people who are (those of us who think bringing inexperienced people to Linux is a good thing, anyway :-)
I wish I hadn't posted to this thread, so that I could moderate this up as insightful.
;-)
;), or willing to sacrifice a whole lot of free time, or just rich. Or else you need to get funding somehow. Someone else (one of those damn students, probably) will find a way to implement something first, or at least better, if it's a good idea and you don't do it right away.
I have an app I want to write that probably 5 other people will have implemented by the time I get the chance to start, some 3-4 months from now. Then it'll be too late to matter. (Not saying what it is, I might be wrong. I will say I intend to write a GUI Linux version and a windows command-line version just to piss everyone in the whole world off
I don't think ideas are a dime a dozen. Crappy ideas, maybe. But the really powerful ideas don't take much to implement. Napster is pretty easy to implement, especially the way they've done it (unlinked servers - linked would be much better). It was the idea that mattered, and they got there first. Web browsers are hard to implement now, but it wasn't so tough in the early days when there wasn't anything but text, links, and pictures to render. And that's all it took to make the web take off. Most improvements since have been incremental, it's just the sum of those improvements that makes it difficult to start over.
What's hard to come by is time. You either need to be able to not get paid for your time: you're a student (and not studying as hard as you should be
Anyway, I don't think there's "catching up" needed in most cases. Once you've got a certain level of skill, it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Keep looking and you'll find something no one else has done, or something you know you can do better than anyone's done before.
So, here's an idea for you: Distributed instant messaging. Why has no one done it yet? Or if they have, where is the "+1 Informative" linked reply to this comment to prove me wrong? (Or a "+1 Funny" link to sendmail.com)
Try the "file" command in a shell sometime. It knows lots of stuff, including most of your examples, and a whole lot more. Put the same database into Eazel (which you can do, it's open source) and there you go. If you further allow it to choose plugins/applications based on what it figures out, it'll be exactly what you're thinking of.
For anyone who didn't read the article, Warren Spector was one of the original Looking Glass designers, and was even involved with the first Thief early on. He's produced many fine games, and I believe he'll do a good job on Thief 3. I don't think it'll be exactly the Thief 3 we would have gotten from Looking Glass, but I do believe we'll get a game worthy of the name Thief. The rest of the LG team(s) have spread to the wind, but some of them are still together. They won't be doing Thief, but I bet we'll see something great from them too, somewhere down the road.
Just as a side note, I did NOT check the "Post Anonymously" button on that one (nor this one, should it also come out anonymously). But whatever.
That was wrong, what I saw back then was not an eyeball tracker, but a head orientation tracker. Not quite the same thing, but interchangeable from a software point of view.
I propose that all X window manager authors add the EyeballFocus setting, complementing MouseFocus, SloppyFocus, and ClickToFocus, immediately, thus avoiding any possible claims of "innovation" from Microsoft. Just create an X extension that accepts x,y screen coordinates from an arbitrary source, and worry about pesky issues like hardware later.
Alright, so this was meant to be funny, but there are actually eyeball tracker->mouse replacements out there, I saw one in use ten or more years ago. Has anyone made one work under X?
In Linux netscape, the middle button opens a link in a new window. In IE, shift-click does it. I open most things with the middle button when I know I'm going to want to come back to the original page. Back doesn't work very well on many pages if you've scrolled to somewhere in the middle (Slashdot stories are a prime example!)
Run! Run for your lives!
It seems to me that since they've also told you that random() is to be used, someone very clever could try to predict the opponent's choices based on sequence random() is returning. You aren't allowed to reseed it of course, but if your code is getting a certain sequence of numbers, is it possible to write code to figure out the current seed, and thus the entire sequence of numbers? Based on where your code winds up picking up the sequence, you know how many random numbers the opponent generated each round. Using that, you can possibly draw a correlation between the numbers you know he's getting and the choices he makes.
Granted, this is a longshot, and I know I'm not that clever, but on the other hand, there are lots of random number generators out there free for the taking. I'd spend the few minutes to add one to my code just to guarantee an attack like this won't work.
I remember my Apple ][ didn't have any fans at all, so except for the floppy drives was completely silent. That's what stuff used to sound like. Total silence except when reading a disk. That goes for all those 8-bit computers, they just didn't need fans unless you added a whole bunch of extra stuff inside the case.
I have one P200 that's several years old and is pretty darn quiet. Good case, good fan (yeah, only one fan, imagine that!). Everything else I use is loud. Mostly only loud enough to be annoying when I stop to think about, like when someone posts a story about it to slashdot. But nevertheless, loud.
They did fire a bunch of people and moved their headquarters to Seattle. But they do still make games. I've got a friend who's a programmer there, so there's at least one internal devlopment team (probably several, but I don't know what other than his is ongoing), plus they publish Half-life and Homeworld, among others, and distribute Blizzard's games. They're doing alright. As for LSL, no idea. But it was funny question given the context.
My original reply was just to ask whether or not the Canadian law that allows anyone to retransmit a broadcast without permission as long as it isn't modified in any way would count conversion from analog to digital as a modification or not. A simple question. DBS providers have no relevance to the matter at hand since they have permission to retransmit.
I think the first guy was probably right that there's a distinction between content and signal modification, but if it isn't specifically worded that way, I can see the broadcasters winning in court anyway.
This is a good test of slashdot: does anyone actually read replies after more than a day has passed?
Isn't digitally encoding an analog video signal a modification? Is there specific wording in the law that would allow it? Otherwise my uneducated guess would be that it's going to fail in the courts again.
I think I figured it out, but it took a minute. Hari Seldon was the guy in Foundation. Don't think I've ever heard it out loud, which in my case means "Harry" and "Hari" are worlds apart, but I guess not everyone's brain works the same way. Spelling flame? Nah, just posted in case anyone else has a poor mapping of written to spoken words.
I think anyone who sees the gaming industry as a haven for programmers hasn't really seen the gaming industry. Making games is not like playing games. The hours are long, and the pay is generally less then you'd get in other fields (not always, just generally). You have to love making games to last in the gaming industry. If you don't, don't get into games.