Sure its a stupid, overly simple game. But it isn't designed to compete with Metal Gear. Its a simple game for young kids. When they get a little older, they will be bored with it, and be ready to move on to more complex games. Whats more, they will have a taste for games that do require some thinking and stategy for success. Personally, I think that that is much better than the kids a little old who seem to gravitate to whatever FPS has the most gore... Remember Quake, which iD actually PROMISED wouldn't have a storyline or characters?
When there is already a freely available, generally used, constantly updated, and almost endlessly exstensible IRC client already available for Windows, why are you making another one? And if you do, can't you at least give it a name not governed by (lowecase consonant)IRC?
Of course it is--there are over 80 of them in low orbits. Wasting millions of dollars trying to sue Motorola is ridiculous though. The odds that Motorola's contributions to the environment kill someone someone in the world are undoubtably far greater than 1:250, though-- Its a far better place to start than whining about the miniscule chance of satallite chunks coming down and killing someone.
Ok, the odds are 1:250 that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE (out of 6 billion+ people) will die from a Iridium reenty--That is 1 in 1.2 TRILLION that you will, personally. In other words, astronomically low. It's probably more likely that your monitor will explode, killing you as you attempt pull off a successful FP, than it is a piece of an Iridium will land on you. Does that mean you should sue CmdrTaco?
The internal combustion engines in our cars are 100 years old, and nothing has really come along to replace them. The only workable electrics still have a combustion engine them. Goes to show that at any point refining an existing technology is almost easier than making a new one. I don't know if we'll ever see the demise of the CRT--maybe once LCD screens start obeying Moore's law like every other transistor based technolofy.
Re:I too have developed a thin storage medium
on
Floppy CDs And DVDs?
·
· Score: 1
Oh come on, those things had a half life of about 3 days before you started getting the infamous "General Read Failure" message. And then AOL stopped including a write protect tab.
Still, anyone remember the AOL disk autorequestor webpage? You filled in your name and address and it would send x number of e-mail requests to AOL for free disks. Then a couple weeks later the mailman would come by, glaring at you, with about 15 disks in his bag. That was classic. Of course, nowadays dot-coms just give money away.
I just love "emerging markets"
I would think centrifugal force (ok, intertia for all you refrence frame nitpicks) would have some stabilizing factor. I'm not sure what the plastic adapter disk looks like, but perhaps that could provide stiffening as well. Anyway, the point is that these can be manufactured more easily for promotional type deals, not as a safe storage medium for important data. I can see this-there are zillions of cheap CDs kicking around that you wouldn't use more than once or twice--video game demos, etc.
What I want to know is: Do they still spark in the microwave?
All this talk makes me wonder: couldn't one just overload the recording devices? On my computer, running Windows and serving files over IRC on a LAN on a T3 (read : an entirely unoptimized setup, except for the size of the final pipe) I can reliably send 3+ gigs a day of data, mostly to people with far slower connection. If I transmitted at a sustained 500 KBps (quite possible) I would be able to send about 1.8 gigs per hour. My particular part of the LAN in my school serves about 300-400 people and is 100Mbit - 100/10 * 3600 is about 36/gigs an hour. How big is the hard disk on a Carnivore box? If everyone, or even 10 people (5%) were to run a program that sent low priority packets to fill up the bandwidth that is currently unused, it would take at least $20 an hour of HD space to log all that traffic or $500 a day. And that is just for one small residence hall in one univeristy--there are millions of @home and DSL users out and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses with a T1/3/etc connection--even a 128kBit up will fill almost 2 gigs in one day. Even the FBI doesn't have that kind of cash, especially for a project that is on as thin ice constitutionally as this one Mixing up the ports used would make it harder to find the relative drops in the bucket that make up the web pages and mail messages. One could even make the junk packets consist of words selected from a dictionary, so as to fool software that only looks for English text or something along those lines.
The simple fact is that you pay for the infrastructure no matter whether it is a publicly built one or a privately built one. Nobody is making money off of mobile phones yet, the infrastucure is just too new. Everyone's land-line telephone service (and whatever other service you buy from a phone company) bills are increased, simply because these companies are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into making a network, and rip one out whenever a new standard arrives. If you go with a private, competitive system, though, you end up paying for several networks: one for each competitor, and substantial installation, and later, removal costs. If you don't think you pay because you didn't buy from those other companies, think again: They likely defaulted on literally dozens of loans from various financial institutions and spent millions of dollars of venture captital on a phone system that was only to be torn down. That money could have gone into any number of other things. If you have a savings account, and especially if you have a mutual fund, that is YOUR money being used. And in a open market, when things are all said and done, what guarantee is their that your iDEN phone that you bought in LA will work in New York when CDMA prevailed there and your provider scaled back your service? Today, you can buy a GSM phone, and it will work everywhere in the world, except the US. Perhaps it isn't the bleeding edge or even close. But when you come down to it, dozens of other countries have gone with GSM and we'd be stupid not to follow.
The size of the file you are downloading is irrelevant to the Gnutella network: the actual files are sent directly from computer to computer, not over the network. The purpose of caching servers would be to cache what ids have what keys, not the actual data. Probably the reason why nobody can download anything is that the whole thing is so slow and the clients so unstable that everyone gives up on the whole thing after about 5 minutes, which is just long enough to reply to a keyword, handshake, start a download, and have the thing GPF...
No, more value in gold=less value in currency. Or wait, maybe more value available to be turned into currency? Or perhaps more desire for overseas luxury items, reducing power of dollar? Or perhaps reduction in gold investments (they'd be worth less) meaning more invested in companies meaning more value for dollar? Or investment resulting in inflation resulting in less value for dollar?
Whatever it is, the tech boom is over. Or just beginning. Or has been going on since 1950/1965/1980/1995. Or something. Whatever, just keep Greenspan in the US.
I'm really having trouble seeing this as something to get worked up over. If I build a house, it is possible for anyone to go to the deeds office and find out that I own the land, and even how much the county thinks it is worth. If it is a commercial building, they may even give out the blueprints and results of code inspections. How is a domain name different? If your message is so important that you are willing to pay a regular fee and obtain the appropriate resources to make it available, it should be worth making it possible to contact you. If whois is really such an anathema, there are many other options available: the free nameserver pages (cjb.net, et al), free pages hosted on geocities, I suppose freenet if that ever becomes functional.
Aside from that, being able to be contacted in case of an emergency is important--when script kiddies take your machine and use it to DoS someone on your day off, wouldn't you appreciate a phone call? Or can you depend on someone getting your e-mail address when your pipe is full? IMHO, the best option is a central database for this kind of thing.
Perhaps with the reemergence of extreme hardline communisism in Russia, someone will decide that it is the Will Of The People to build a Trans-Siberian pipeline right next to the railroad...
That's exactly the reason why there is a computer control system. A stable aircraft is like a ball in a salad bowl: the center of the bowl represents straight and level flight. As you move further away from center (more complex manuever), it gets harder to push the marble up the side. An unstable aircraft inverts the salad bowl, meaning small corrections get bigger (marble rolling down sides), but adds a computer controlled finger to push the marble back to center. When a pilot wants to turn manuever hard though, the finger stops pushing. What this means though, is that the plane is far more responsive and faster acting than a traditional craft. It is possible, in fact likely, that this response occurs far faster than a human is capable of adjusting for, meaning that the person will always be a little behind. What plane designers discovered is that they had to do things like look at how fast the contol device was moving and try to make an guess as to where the pilot wanted it, long before the hand got there, to reducing the lag, or else the plane seemed either ridiculously twitchy or incredibly sluggish. These systems, I understand are getting pretty advanced and intellegent, and without them it would be impossible to ever reach the full capability of the unstable design.
About limits of wing strength: this is essentially a design parameter. Most military aircraft are designed to have some safety factor beyond what pilot can undergo, but at some point its better to save weight than make a plane that can take a turn that would kill a pilot. Many civilian aircraft are designed for much less than 9 Gs, and it is the pilots responsibility to know those limits. Concievably the unmanned vehicles could be made with far stronger wings, if pulling high Gs is worth the weight cost (with over the horizon missile systems, I'm not sure it is)
As I remember, the problem there was we got lazy and started letting the darn things design themselves... at which point evolution took over and discovered that robots that didn't kill each other lasted longer.
First, the original reply was a joke, but its still an interesting topic... An auto takeoff would be even easier than an autolanding. Whereas landing requires getting the plane into a small specific area and then flying an approach, along a very narrowly defined corridor in a very specific amount of time (so you don't end up on the top of someone taking or taxiing), takeoffs consist of little more than open the throttles up, then setting a climb--both pretty easy for a pilot or an aircraft. I think the only reason they haven't been implemented yet is that there is a fairly elaborate system of clearances at most major airports leading up to that point, and once you're there, the actual takeoff is trivial. The main reason full ILS for autolandings is only available at a few airports is the cost of installing the ridiculously precise radio beacons that were needed up until recently... With the removal of selective availiblity of GPS, this is now an option, and there is a distinct possibility that even more accurate satellite systems will become a reality.
The FAA is probably one of the most cautious organizations in existance, and they have a long history of waiting until technology is proven before allowing its use. State of the art aircraft today essentially display the ultimate in technology that was available ten years ago, when the FAA began reviewing it.
For some reason, this discussion seems to have focused on the idea that we have only two choices:
A) Machines picking targets with little or no human intervention, but with the powers of radar, IFF, radiation counters, video cameras, etc.
or B) People controlling the machines without any sort of electronic back up.
This is ridiculous. People and machines have different strengths and weaknesses. Even if an IFF works 100% of the time, it still needs a human to determine whether an enemy should be targeted, ignored, or avoided. And that is one of the easier problems for a machine. On the other hand, people have problems too--we're relativly fragile, get tired, need heavy life support, and can't detect radio signals. What this system does is exactly what makes sense--it allows the people to control the machine remotely and make the hard decisions, while the machine gets up close and personal.
Dial-A-Song was/. long before/. existed. My best friend had a shirt in eigth grade (~8 years ago) with the words "Always Free/Always Busy" and the phone number (no, I'm not enough of a fan to remember it).
You could easily then use DivX to compress them to something much more reasonable in size--900 Kbps (smaller case b!) still looks about as good as old school broadcast tv and much better than VCR. Makes things about 400 megs/hr. Plus, when you give a copy to your friend, it doesn't look worse for the wear.
I'd be interested to know the legality of doing this off of somewhere like HBO--the quality would be as good as a DVD, right? But you are definitly allowed to tape movies off of HBO and watch them later (unless thats been taken away too.)
(ducks as all the film heads come out to decry the end of western civilization as precipitated by digital compressed video)
Actually, a few basic statistical principals show that once you have even a few thousand votes the chances of the winner being different from the one predicted is incredibly small--essentially, the odds go down by a factor of two for every additional vote on one side or another. This does assume that the votes are counted in no particular order, a reasonable assumption for each state race but not for the electoral college
(coast are democratic, central states aren't, polls close progressivly)
Is this a joke? How on earth was this calculated? The numbers seems to make a little bit of sense, but there is no explanation at all of what anything means!
Slashdot Mirror
... do you think the original story sets some kind of record for most obscene amount of over hyperlinking?
This appeared on a website quite a few months ago, thus any POTY honors would by quite misplaced... Still a very humourous piece...
Sure its a stupid, overly simple game. But it isn't designed to compete with Metal Gear. Its a simple game for young kids. When they get a little older, they will be bored with it, and be ready to move on to more complex games. Whats more, they will have a taste for games that do require some thinking and stategy for success. Personally, I think that that is much better than the kids a little old who seem to gravitate to whatever FPS has the most gore... Remember Quake, which iD actually PROMISED wouldn't have a storyline or characters?
When there is already a freely available, generally used, constantly updated, and almost endlessly exstensible IRC client already available for Windows, why are you making another one? And if you do, can't you at least give it a name not governed by (lowecase consonant)IRC?
Of course it is--there are over 80 of them in low orbits. Wasting millions of dollars trying to sue Motorola is ridiculous though. The odds that Motorola's contributions to the environment kill someone someone in the world are undoubtably far greater than 1:250, though-- Its a far better place to start than whining about the miniscule chance of satallite chunks coming down and killing someone.
Ok, the odds are 1:250 that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE (out of 6 billion+ people) will die from a Iridium reenty--That is 1 in 1.2 TRILLION that you will, personally. In other words, astronomically low. It's probably more likely that your monitor will explode, killing you as you attempt pull off a successful FP, than it is a piece of an Iridium will land on you. Does that mean you should sue CmdrTaco?
The internal combustion engines in our cars are 100 years old, and nothing has really come along to replace them. The only workable electrics still have a combustion engine them. Goes to show that at any point refining an existing technology is almost easier than making a new one. I don't know if we'll ever see the demise of the CRT--maybe once LCD screens start obeying Moore's law like every other transistor based technolofy.
Oh come on, those things had a half life of about 3 days before you started getting the infamous "General Read Failure" message. And then AOL stopped including a write protect tab. Still, anyone remember the AOL disk autorequestor webpage? You filled in your name and address and it would send x number of e-mail requests to AOL for free disks. Then a couple weeks later the mailman would come by, glaring at you, with about 15 disks in his bag. That was classic. Of course, nowadays dot-coms just give money away. I just love "emerging markets"
I would think centrifugal force (ok, intertia for all you refrence frame nitpicks) would have some stabilizing factor. I'm not sure what the plastic adapter disk looks like, but perhaps that could provide stiffening as well. Anyway, the point is that these can be manufactured more easily for promotional type deals, not as a safe storage medium for important data. I can see this-there are zillions of cheap CDs kicking around that you wouldn't use more than once or twice--video game demos, etc. What I want to know is: Do they still spark in the microwave?
All this talk makes me wonder: couldn't one just overload the recording devices? On my computer, running Windows and serving files over IRC on a LAN on a T3 (read : an entirely unoptimized setup, except for the size of the final pipe) I can reliably send 3+ gigs a day of data, mostly to people with far slower connection. If I transmitted at a sustained 500 KBps (quite possible) I would be able to send about 1.8 gigs per hour. My particular part of the LAN in my school serves about 300-400 people and is 100Mbit - 100/10 * 3600 is about 36/gigs an hour. How big is the hard disk on a Carnivore box? If everyone, or even 10 people (5%) were to run a program that sent low priority packets to fill up the bandwidth that is currently unused, it would take at least $20 an hour of HD space to log all that traffic or $500 a day. And that is just for one small residence hall in one univeristy--there are millions of @home and DSL users out and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses with a T1/3/etc connection--even a 128kBit up will fill almost 2 gigs in one day. Even the FBI doesn't have that kind of cash, especially for a project that is on as thin ice constitutionally as this one Mixing up the ports used would make it harder to find the relative drops in the bucket that make up the web pages and mail messages. One could even make the junk packets consist of words selected from a dictionary, so as to fool software that only looks for English text or something along those lines.
The simple fact is that you pay for the infrastructure no matter whether it is a publicly built one or a privately built one. Nobody is making money off of mobile phones yet, the infrastucure is just too new. Everyone's land-line telephone service (and whatever other service you buy from a phone company) bills are increased, simply because these companies are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into making a network, and rip one out whenever a new standard arrives. If you go with a private, competitive system, though, you end up paying for several networks: one for each competitor, and substantial installation, and later, removal costs. If you don't think you pay because you didn't buy from those other companies, think again: They likely defaulted on literally dozens of loans from various financial institutions and spent millions of dollars of venture captital on a phone system that was only to be torn down. That money could have gone into any number of other things. If you have a savings account, and especially if you have a mutual fund, that is YOUR money being used. And in a open market, when things are all said and done, what guarantee is their that your iDEN phone that you bought in LA will work in New York when CDMA prevailed there and your provider scaled back your service? Today, you can buy a GSM phone, and it will work everywhere in the world, except the US. Perhaps it isn't the bleeding edge or even close. But when you come down to it, dozens of other countries have gone with GSM and we'd be stupid not to follow.
Because once something gets classified, it takes about a billion dollars of FOIA lawsuits to change that....
The size of the file you are downloading is irrelevant to the Gnutella network: the actual files are sent directly from computer to computer, not over the network. The purpose of caching servers would be to cache what ids have what keys, not the actual data. Probably the reason why nobody can download anything is that the whole thing is so slow and the clients so unstable that everyone gives up on the whole thing after about 5 minutes, which is just long enough to reply to a keyword, handshake, start a download, and have the thing GPF...
No, more value in gold=less value in currency. Or wait, maybe more value available to be turned into currency? Or perhaps more desire for overseas luxury items, reducing power of dollar? Or perhaps reduction in gold investments (they'd be worth less) meaning more invested in companies meaning more value for dollar? Or investment resulting in inflation resulting in less value for dollar? Whatever it is, the tech boom is over. Or just beginning. Or has been going on since 1950/1965/1980/1995. Or something. Whatever, just keep Greenspan in the US.
I'm really having trouble seeing this as something to get worked up over. If I build a house, it is possible for anyone to go to the deeds office and find out that I own the land, and even how much the county thinks it is worth. If it is a commercial building, they may even give out the blueprints and results of code inspections. How is a domain name different? If your message is so important that you are willing to pay a regular fee and obtain the appropriate resources to make it available, it should be worth making it possible to contact you. If whois is really such an anathema, there are many other options available: the free nameserver pages (cjb.net, et al), free pages hosted on geocities, I suppose freenet if that ever becomes functional. Aside from that, being able to be contacted in case of an emergency is important--when script kiddies take your machine and use it to DoS someone on your day off, wouldn't you appreciate a phone call? Or can you depend on someone getting your e-mail address when your pipe is full? IMHO, the best option is a central database for this kind of thing.
Perhaps with the reemergence of extreme hardline communisism in Russia, someone will decide that it is the Will Of The People to build a Trans-Siberian pipeline right next to the railroad...
true, true
That's exactly the reason why there is a computer control system. A stable aircraft is like a ball in a salad bowl: the center of the bowl represents straight and level flight. As you move further away from center (more complex manuever), it gets harder to push the marble up the side. An unstable aircraft inverts the salad bowl, meaning small corrections get bigger (marble rolling down sides), but adds a computer controlled finger to push the marble back to center. When a pilot wants to turn manuever hard though, the finger stops pushing. What this means though, is that the plane is far more responsive and faster acting than a traditional craft. It is possible, in fact likely, that this response occurs far faster than a human is capable of adjusting for, meaning that the person will always be a little behind. What plane designers discovered is that they had to do things like look at how fast the contol device was moving and try to make an guess as to where the pilot wanted it, long before the hand got there, to reducing the lag, or else the plane seemed either ridiculously twitchy or incredibly sluggish. These systems, I understand are getting pretty advanced and intellegent, and without them it would be impossible to ever reach the full capability of the unstable design. About limits of wing strength: this is essentially a design parameter. Most military aircraft are designed to have some safety factor beyond what pilot can undergo, but at some point its better to save weight than make a plane that can take a turn that would kill a pilot. Many civilian aircraft are designed for much less than 9 Gs, and it is the pilots responsibility to know those limits. Concievably the unmanned vehicles could be made with far stronger wings, if pulling high Gs is worth the weight cost (with over the horizon missile systems, I'm not sure it is)
As I remember, the problem there was we got lazy and started letting the darn things design themselves... at which point evolution took over and discovered that robots that didn't kill each other lasted longer.
First, the original reply was a joke, but its still an interesting topic... An auto takeoff would be even easier than an autolanding. Whereas landing requires getting the plane into a small specific area and then flying an approach, along a very narrowly defined corridor in a very specific amount of time (so you don't end up on the top of someone taking or taxiing), takeoffs consist of little more than open the throttles up, then setting a climb--both pretty easy for a pilot or an aircraft. I think the only reason they haven't been implemented yet is that there is a fairly elaborate system of clearances at most major airports leading up to that point, and once you're there, the actual takeoff is trivial. The main reason full ILS for autolandings is only available at a few airports is the cost of installing the ridiculously precise radio beacons that were needed up until recently... With the removal of selective availiblity of GPS, this is now an option, and there is a distinct possibility that even more accurate satellite systems will become a reality. The FAA is probably one of the most cautious organizations in existance, and they have a long history of waiting until technology is proven before allowing its use. State of the art aircraft today essentially display the ultimate in technology that was available ten years ago, when the FAA began reviewing it.
For some reason, this discussion seems to have focused on the idea that we have only two choices: A) Machines picking targets with little or no human intervention, but with the powers of radar, IFF, radiation counters, video cameras, etc. or B) People controlling the machines without any sort of electronic back up. This is ridiculous. People and machines have different strengths and weaknesses. Even if an IFF works 100% of the time, it still needs a human to determine whether an enemy should be targeted, ignored, or avoided. And that is one of the easier problems for a machine. On the other hand, people have problems too--we're relativly fragile, get tired, need heavy life support, and can't detect radio signals. What this system does is exactly what makes sense--it allows the people to control the machine remotely and make the hard decisions, while the machine gets up close and personal.
Dial-A-Song was /. long before /. existed. My best friend had a shirt in eigth grade (~8 years ago) with the words "Always Free/Always Busy" and the phone number (no, I'm not enough of a fan to remember it).
You could easily then use DivX to compress them to something much more reasonable in size--900 Kbps (smaller case b!) still looks about as good as old school broadcast tv and much better than VCR. Makes things about 400 megs/hr. Plus, when you give a copy to your friend, it doesn't look worse for the wear. I'd be interested to know the legality of doing this off of somewhere like HBO--the quality would be as good as a DVD, right? But you are definitly allowed to tape movies off of HBO and watch them later (unless thats been taken away too.) (ducks as all the film heads come out to decry the end of western civilization as precipitated by digital compressed video)
Actually, a few basic statistical principals show that once you have even a few thousand votes the chances of the winner being different from the one predicted is incredibly small--essentially, the odds go down by a factor of two for every additional vote on one side or another. This does assume that the votes are counted in no particular order, a reasonable assumption for each state race but not for the electoral college (coast are democratic, central states aren't, polls close progressivly)
Is this a joke? How on earth was this calculated? The numbers seems to make a little bit of sense, but there is no explanation at all of what anything means!