If I'm understanding you correctly, I can see two possible problems (at first glance). The first is the overhead introduced by crypto: even at it's fastest, it will always add some latency to the data transmission (simply because the data has to be processed on both ends before it can be received or sent), and it requires additional processor time to manage the encryption. I'm not sure how much, but it could be a fair bit if you are transmitting several dozen times a second (which multiplayer games customarily do). This isn't a problem in BitTorrent where latency and computational overhead are not terribly important. It is a potentially very large problem in a multiplayer action game where the CPU may already be taxed and low latency is absolutely vital.
Secondly, a large number of malicious nodes could probably poison the system, or at least a part of it. This also could also be a problem: cheaters and trolls sometimes run in packs.
Well, EA did once produce some good games, so them I suppose. They still have some potential: Zynga never had any. Zynga are also pretty blatant about ripping off other games producers (indie game makers included), EA are usually not quite so bad in that area at least.
They are also really, really, really new technology. I'd be incredibly shocked if they weren't disappointing to someone who isn't looking at them for their potential, but rather for what they can do now. What they can do now is little more than gimmicks. What they could do, and what this kind of technology (not necessarily Google's, but someone's) almost certainly will do in a few years. Hopefully at the very least Google's efforts will help shut down the patents that trolls will inevitably try to use to stifle innovation (assuming Google themselves don't, which I quite hope they don't).
(1) The disclosures shall be made in a clear andconspicuous manner, to be determined by the Federal Trade Commission.
(2) The disclosures shall be displayed in a clear and conspicuous manner on the website of a person
required to make such disclosures, except that if
such person does not maintain a website, such person shall file such disclosures with the appropriate
Commission.
So probably not in a EULA, although it would be up to the FTC to make the appropriate regulation. In any case, they also have to report it to the FTC, and on their website, so people will be able to know about it, which is a significant improvement over the current situation.
The original footage was 4fps and not exactly 1080p, so yes, and it's to be expected. I imagine with a lot more work you could eliminate most of it, but that would probably require adjusting every frame by hand (which would be extremely laborious). And by that point the end result will be even more made-up than the current result.
What case? This never went to court. Twitter decided that now that the Occupy movement has blown over, it's cheaper to comply and frankly not very damaging to their public image because most people wont even notice. Twitter doesn't care about your rights.
Read TFA next time before you comment or you will look ignorant... again. It went to court, the court ordered the documents handed over or they would be held in contempt and fined. Twitter handed them over, but appealed the decision (the messages are sealed pending the results of that appeal).
And? Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is over 300 years old. Great works of art don't become less beautiful because they are old.
Video games do. Well, technically they were ugly to begin with, we just didn't notice because it was the best we had (and usually better than what came before). The graphics, mind you, not the gameplay.
The center is actually the center of mass for the Earth-Sun. Actually, I believe it's the center of mass for the whole solar system, but if we treat it as a 2-body problem it's just the Earth-Sun. If only the Earth was affecting the Sun with it's gravity, the distance would be right twice a year (assuming the major or minor axis) or 4 times (if you use some other axis), since the Sun would be traveling in an ellipse identical to the Earth's but proportionately smaller, so it would be on the fall on the axis at the same time as the Earth would every single year.
In reality the Sun is also moved by the other planets, so the distance will never be correct, since it isn't moving on a pure ellipse at all. Also the Earth isn't either. That's why we use the average distance over a few years, since that will always be the average. Except for the fact that the Sun is losing mass, and therefore gravity, so Earth gets further away every year, so the average is itself changing.
What does the mass of the Sun have to do with the distance between the Sun and Earth?
Good grief! I'm having flashbacks to the lectures about units from my physics teacher!
The more massive a body, the stronger the gravity. The stronger the gravitational field, the closer Earth will end up to the Sun for a given speed (the Earth's speed in this case being more or less a constant. I'm simplifying since the Earth speeds up and slows down as it orbits, but the point is still the same). Likewise, with less mass the Earth will end up farther away.
Also relativistic effects, but those are (probably) a lot less pronounced.
Unfortunately, no. Not, at least, through any official method (there might be some unofficial workarounds, but those probably technically fall under the realm of "cracks", so use/Google them at your own risk). They needed the SDK installed because that gives the Source engine to modders for free (otherwise it would require a probably rather expensive license to be used standalone).
I still don't understand what was wrong with the original Half-Life?
The graphics are 14 years old. If you're sick of the remake, just don't play it. It's not like anyone is forcing you to, or even charging you money if you actually do want to. If people want to spend their time upgrading a 14 year old game that they really love because they think it would be even better with modern(ish) graphics, they can. And for the people doing so, it serves as a nice resume builder as well, whereas making their own game would probably not receive nearly so much press and would therefore be far less impressive.
It isn't practical to do this. Radar requires a relatively large investment of energy. GPS signals (by comparison) are extremely weak and low-energy. In other words, GPS systems don't have the power to do it. Nor the size for that matter: radar at these scales requires rather large emitters and receivers, in the scale of 20+ meters. Hard to do that on a GPS satellite (or any satellite, for that matter).
Not really. A small step towards a holodeck, maybe but not a holodeck. More like a 360 projection. People have built rooms like this for various purposes (usually scientific projects), although not usually using a single device to project the whole room. Aside from technical difficulties with distortion in doing that (which MS claims to be working around), the shadows of anyone standing in the room prevents that from being a really reliable method, although it might work for a game system where the whole-room projection is just an add-on feature and doesn't need to be 100% reliable.
If Opus at 128kbps is comparable to another codec at 192kpbs (as an example), you can save disk space by using Opus instead. But regardless, Opus is primarily intended for the real-time streaming field, rather than at-rest files. It excels in that field: the fact it can also be used for everything else just means you can use 1 codec for everything, even if there isn't necessarily a compelling reason for people with only at-rest files to switch.
They were taking photographs of a military installation that they intended to reproduce inside Arma III. That almost certainly means moderately detailed shots of buildings, security measures, and military personal, which is illegal in some (most? all?) countries.
Note: in the US, you can take pictures of aircraft or historical buildings, but not restricted areas. The point is to prevent surveillance intended to find weaknesses in security that can be exploited, aka "casing the joint". Pretty standard practice in the military. They should have definitely have asked for permission first.
So you are assuming they put an iPad into the cockpit but didn't think of a charger? Besides, both pilot and co-pilot will almost certainly be carrying one, and they might even have a backup onboard just in case. Probably be a lot easier to find important information as well: 35 pounds is a few thousand pages at least, and flipping through that in the confines of a cockpit is probably a major PITA.
Last I knew, those "experts" were pretty much on target -- vast swathes of humanity have been starving to death since there were vast swathes of humanity. Malthus totally got it right except for two developments he couldn't foresee. The first (the Green Revolution) is only a temporary fix-- all it ultimately did was to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, not to change the basics of Malthusian economics. The second factor (effective birth control) is the only reason you can remain ignorant enough to call Malthus wrong.
So you're saying he got everything right, except for the parts he got completely wrong? That's like saying I could fly if I it wasn't for gravity (I could, actually, just have to build a couple of little wings). Yes, if you ignore the progress of human technology our population would be 1/100th of what it is right now (quick number from Wikipedia says world population was 15 million before agriculture was invented, so actually more like 1/466th, but close enough).
But that's the point: humanity is evolving in our ability to control our world just about as fast as required to sustain our ability to produce more people, which guess what? Gives us more intelligent people to make even more discoveries that allow more advancement. The tremendous advancements in science over the past hundred years or so isn't just a result of things like the scientific method. You have more people being born, you end up with more smart people (in terms of sheer numbers), and scientific advancement comes from the absolute number of scientists working, not the relative amount. So the more people, the faster we advance as a race, which in turn allows us to survive with more people. It's rarely mentioned, but population expansion is one huge factor in our advancement of technology. Just think about it: if Einstein is 1 in a billion, there are now 7 people as smart as him alive today, while there was only 1 when he lived.
Eventually bad shit will happen. Eventually, someone might actually get a model that accurately predicts it. Dismissing this new research because someone years ago made the same predictions with simpler, inaccurate models is not a logically sound basis to dismiss new research. If there is something amiss with the new research, dismiss it on those grounds. That is skepticism. Dismissing based on the fact Malthus was wrong* is not sound.
*Malthus was only wrong about missing the Green Revolution. However, the amount of food extractable from any given acre cannot continue to increase forever. There is still an upper limit ahead.
Per acre, sure. However, there may not be a limit on the number of possible acres. It's quite possible to literally create new farmland using hydroponics and similar systems (layered greenhouses and the like). The upper limit is in energy (we can use sunlight for quite some time yet with good optics) and raw materials. Interestingly, one of those raw materials is CO2, which serves as a nice potential solution for one of our other problems as well.
Possible now? Maybe not, but if there is one thing everyone should learn from history, it's that humans tend to make the currently impossible possible given the right incentive. And starvation is one hell of a motivator.
The advantage to the moon is assembly of parts can be done their under the effects of gravity. Assembling large projects from parts might sound easier in micro-gravity, but maneuvering becomes such a pain it's a lot easier for humans to work under gravitational effects (it's how we evolved to operate). It also has signs of ice for water, so you could potentially use it as a cheap source for that, and may well have other viable minerals usable in space exploration. We are a far way from mining the Moon for Earth use. Unless we find some extremely rare mineral there (like Platinum), most stuff we need is vastly easier to find on Earth. No, mining and manufacturing on the Moon would be as a staging ground for further exploration. Escape velocity there is ~1/3 Earth's, so it's about as easy to transfer from there to deep-space as it would be from LEO anyways.
Not to mention it would serve as a nice test of our ability to establish a base on another world without being out of (relatively easy) reach of Earth, and there is a ton of Lunar science to be done on the surface yet.
That's right, the only possible way to disagree with the study is if you are opposed to science. A study that took as data online polls on blogs. Yep, some sound science right there. (/sarcasm)
A wheeled vehicle cannot travel over certain kinds of terrain at all, never mind with speed. A legged robot can. It doesn't need to be demonstrated, it's simply obvious that it is possible. This robot may not be able to (probably doesn't have the flexibility and co-ordination to lift it's legs the right way), but you can see it is possible simply by looking at a biological organism doing it. You don't start at the end (running up a rocky mountain), you start at the beginning (running on a treadmill).
And nothing is really stopping you from putting wheels on a legged robot for the best of both worlds, aside from finding space on the robot in the first place.
So what if it "should" be? I don't care what "should" be. My question is not why it exists, my question is why
a) I don't know about it as the customer
b) I cannot disable it
c) it is enabled by default.
a) Because you shouldn't need to
b) and c) are the same: because part of the point is to regain access to the device if a customer screws up the account login. It's meant as a failsafe. Not much of a failsafe if they can just disable it (or if it can be disabled by accident for that matter). No, devices like that shouldn't be used in highly sensitive work, but it is a pretty widespread practice in the industry to have such backdoors.
They do work well. But something else might work better, especially for gaming which is where Valve is interested. Lots of 3rd party tools try various little things, like built-in displays, but without a standardization and widespread support they are mostly just gimmicks. The wheel example is an interesting one. Wheels work just fine for moderately light-weight vehicles traveling over relatively smooth terrain. But tanks use treads, not wheels, because that is better for what they need. We won't know if something similar exists for gaming until someone comes up with something (console controllers, for example, are actually better for some games, such as platformers or racers, though not for FPS or RTS games). The trick is to try.
OK, you're right. They aren't illegal. That is to say, they aren't illegal under the letter of the law (because they paid a lot of money to help write those laws), they're legal ones that write the laws that they then use to bully, intimidate, and extort individuals to pay them money while ensuring no one can form competition against them.
They totally are a cartel, though, and a thoroughly scummy one at that.
Slashdot Mirror
WINDOWS, not Linux.
When even the geeks pass on Linux for games, is there any hope?
Well, from the FAQ on the linked site:
Will there be a Linux build of the server?
Yes, there are both Win32 and Linux builds of the server
So... yeah, troll elsewhere.
If I'm understanding you correctly, I can see two possible problems (at first glance). The first is the overhead introduced by crypto: even at it's fastest, it will always add some latency to the data transmission (simply because the data has to be processed on both ends before it can be received or sent), and it requires additional processor time to manage the encryption. I'm not sure how much, but it could be a fair bit if you are transmitting several dozen times a second (which multiplayer games customarily do). This isn't a problem in BitTorrent where latency and computational overhead are not terribly important. It is a potentially very large problem in a multiplayer action game where the CPU may already be taxed and low latency is absolutely vital.
Secondly, a large number of malicious nodes could probably poison the system, or at least a part of it. This also could also be a problem: cheaters and trolls sometimes run in packs.
Who's side are we supposed to be on?
Well, EA did once produce some good games, so them I suppose. They still have some potential: Zynga never had any. Zynga are also pretty blatant about ripping off other games producers (indie game makers included), EA are usually not quite so bad in that area at least.
They are also really, really, really new technology. I'd be incredibly shocked if they weren't disappointing to someone who isn't looking at them for their potential, but rather for what they can do now. What they can do now is little more than gimmicks. What they could do, and what this kind of technology (not necessarily Google's, but someone's) almost certainly will do in a few years. Hopefully at the very least Google's efforts will help shut down the patents that trolls will inevitably try to use to stifle innovation (assuming Google themselves don't, which I quite hope they don't).
(1) The disclosures shall be made in a clear andconspicuous manner, to be determined by the Federal Trade Commission.
(2) The disclosures shall be displayed in a clear and conspicuous manner on the website of a person required to make such disclosures, except that if such person does not maintain a website, such person shall file such disclosures with the appropriate Commission.
So probably not in a EULA, although it would be up to the FTC to make the appropriate regulation. In any case, they also have to report it to the FTC, and on their website, so people will be able to know about it, which is a significant improvement over the current situation.
The original footage was 4fps and not exactly 1080p, so yes, and it's to be expected. I imagine with a lot more work you could eliminate most of it, but that would probably require adjusting every frame by hand (which would be extremely laborious). And by that point the end result will be even more made-up than the current result.
What case? This never went to court. Twitter decided that now that the Occupy movement has blown over, it's cheaper to comply and frankly not very damaging to their public image because most people wont even notice. Twitter doesn't care about your rights.
Read TFA next time before you comment or you will look ignorant... again. It went to court, the court ordered the documents handed over or they would be held in contempt and fined. Twitter handed them over, but appealed the decision (the messages are sealed pending the results of that appeal).
The graphics are 14 years old.
And? Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is over 300 years old. Great works of art don't become less beautiful because they are old.
Video games do. Well, technically they were ugly to begin with, we just didn't notice because it was the best we had (and usually better than what came before). The graphics, mind you, not the gameplay.
The center is actually the center of mass for the Earth-Sun. Actually, I believe it's the center of mass for the whole solar system, but if we treat it as a 2-body problem it's just the Earth-Sun. If only the Earth was affecting the Sun with it's gravity, the distance would be right twice a year (assuming the major or minor axis) or 4 times (if you use some other axis), since the Sun would be traveling in an ellipse identical to the Earth's but proportionately smaller, so it would be on the fall on the axis at the same time as the Earth would every single year.
In reality the Sun is also moved by the other planets, so the distance will never be correct, since it isn't moving on a pure ellipse at all. Also the Earth isn't either. That's why we use the average distance over a few years, since that will always be the average. Except for the fact that the Sun is losing mass, and therefore gravity, so Earth gets further away every year, so the average is itself changing.
What does the mass of the Sun have to do with the distance between the Sun and Earth?
Good grief! I'm having flashbacks to the lectures about units from my physics teacher!
The more massive a body, the stronger the gravity. The stronger the gravitational field, the closer Earth will end up to the Sun for a given speed (the Earth's speed in this case being more or less a constant. I'm simplifying since the Earth speeds up and slows down as it orbits, but the point is still the same). Likewise, with less mass the Earth will end up farther away.
Also relativistic effects, but those are (probably) a lot less pronounced.
Unfortunately, no. Not, at least, through any official method (there might be some unofficial workarounds, but those probably technically fall under the realm of "cracks", so use/Google them at your own risk). They needed the SDK installed because that gives the Source engine to modders for free (otherwise it would require a probably rather expensive license to be used standalone).
I still don't understand what was wrong with the original Half-Life?
The graphics are 14 years old. If you're sick of the remake, just don't play it. It's not like anyone is forcing you to, or even charging you money if you actually do want to. If people want to spend their time upgrading a 14 year old game that they really love because they think it would be even better with modern(ish) graphics, they can. And for the people doing so, it serves as a nice resume builder as well, whereas making their own game would probably not receive nearly so much press and would therefore be far less impressive.
It isn't practical to do this. Radar requires a relatively large investment of energy. GPS signals (by comparison) are extremely weak and low-energy. In other words, GPS systems don't have the power to do it. Nor the size for that matter: radar at these scales requires rather large emitters and receivers, in the scale of 20+ meters. Hard to do that on a GPS satellite (or any satellite, for that matter).
Not really. A small step towards a holodeck, maybe but not a holodeck. More like a 360 projection. People have built rooms like this for various purposes (usually scientific projects), although not usually using a single device to project the whole room. Aside from technical difficulties with distortion in doing that (which MS claims to be working around), the shadows of anyone standing in the room prevents that from being a really reliable method, although it might work for a game system where the whole-room projection is just an add-on feature and doesn't need to be 100% reliable.
If Opus at 128kbps is comparable to another codec at 192kpbs (as an example), you can save disk space by using Opus instead. But regardless, Opus is primarily intended for the real-time streaming field, rather than at-rest files. It excels in that field: the fact it can also be used for everything else just means you can use 1 codec for everything, even if there isn't necessarily a compelling reason for people with only at-rest files to switch.
They were taking photographs of a military installation that they intended to reproduce inside Arma III. That almost certainly means moderately detailed shots of buildings, security measures, and military personal, which is illegal in some (most? all?) countries.
Note: in the US, you can take pictures of aircraft or historical buildings, but not restricted areas. The point is to prevent surveillance intended to find weaknesses in security that can be exploited, aka "casing the joint". Pretty standard practice in the military. They should have definitely have asked for permission first.
So you are assuming they put an iPad into the cockpit but didn't think of a charger? Besides, both pilot and co-pilot will almost certainly be carrying one, and they might even have a backup onboard just in case. Probably be a lot easier to find important information as well: 35 pounds is a few thousand pages at least, and flipping through that in the confines of a cockpit is probably a major PITA.
Last I knew, those "experts" were pretty much on target -- vast swathes of humanity have been starving to death since there were vast swathes of humanity. Malthus totally got it right except for two developments he couldn't foresee. The first (the Green Revolution) is only a temporary fix-- all it ultimately did was to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, not to change the basics of Malthusian economics. The second factor (effective birth control) is the only reason you can remain ignorant enough to call Malthus wrong.
So you're saying he got everything right, except for the parts he got completely wrong? That's like saying I could fly if I it wasn't for gravity (I could, actually, just have to build a couple of little wings). Yes, if you ignore the progress of human technology our population would be 1/100th of what it is right now (quick number from Wikipedia says world population was 15 million before agriculture was invented, so actually more like 1/466th, but close enough).
But that's the point: humanity is evolving in our ability to control our world just about as fast as required to sustain our ability to produce more people, which guess what? Gives us more intelligent people to make even more discoveries that allow more advancement. The tremendous advancements in science over the past hundred years or so isn't just a result of things like the scientific method. You have more people being born, you end up with more smart people (in terms of sheer numbers), and scientific advancement comes from the absolute number of scientists working, not the relative amount. So the more people, the faster we advance as a race, which in turn allows us to survive with more people. It's rarely mentioned, but population expansion is one huge factor in our advancement of technology. Just think about it: if Einstein is 1 in a billion, there are now 7 people as smart as him alive today, while there was only 1 when he lived.
Eventually bad shit will happen. Eventually, someone might actually get a model that accurately predicts it. Dismissing this new research because someone years ago made the same predictions with simpler, inaccurate models is not a logically sound basis to dismiss new research. If there is something amiss with the new research, dismiss it on those grounds. That is skepticism. Dismissing based on the fact Malthus was wrong* is not sound.
*Malthus was only wrong about missing the Green Revolution. However, the amount of food extractable from any given acre cannot continue to increase forever. There is still an upper limit ahead.
Per acre, sure. However, there may not be a limit on the number of possible acres. It's quite possible to literally create new farmland using hydroponics and similar systems (layered greenhouses and the like). The upper limit is in energy (we can use sunlight for quite some time yet with good optics) and raw materials. Interestingly, one of those raw materials is CO2, which serves as a nice potential solution for one of our other problems as well.
Possible now? Maybe not, but if there is one thing everyone should learn from history, it's that humans tend to make the currently impossible possible given the right incentive. And starvation is one hell of a motivator.
The advantage to the moon is assembly of parts can be done their under the effects of gravity. Assembling large projects from parts might sound easier in micro-gravity, but maneuvering becomes such a pain it's a lot easier for humans to work under gravitational effects (it's how we evolved to operate). It also has signs of ice for water, so you could potentially use it as a cheap source for that, and may well have other viable minerals usable in space exploration. We are a far way from mining the Moon for Earth use. Unless we find some extremely rare mineral there (like Platinum), most stuff we need is vastly easier to find on Earth. No, mining and manufacturing on the Moon would be as a staging ground for further exploration. Escape velocity there is ~1/3 Earth's, so it's about as easy to transfer from there to deep-space as it would be from LEO anyways.
Not to mention it would serve as a nice test of our ability to establish a base on another world without being out of (relatively easy) reach of Earth, and there is a ton of Lunar science to be done on the surface yet.
That's right, the only possible way to disagree with the study is if you are opposed to science. A study that took as data online polls on blogs. Yep, some sound science right there. (/sarcasm)
A wheeled vehicle cannot travel over certain kinds of terrain at all, never mind with speed. A legged robot can. It doesn't need to be demonstrated, it's simply obvious that it is possible. This robot may not be able to (probably doesn't have the flexibility and co-ordination to lift it's legs the right way), but you can see it is possible simply by looking at a biological organism doing it. You don't start at the end (running up a rocky mountain), you start at the beginning (running on a treadmill).
And nothing is really stopping you from putting wheels on a legged robot for the best of both worlds, aside from finding space on the robot in the first place.
So what if it "should" be? I don't care what "should" be. My question is not why it exists, my question is why a) I don't know about it as the customer b) I cannot disable it c) it is enabled by default.
a) Because you shouldn't need to
b) and c) are the same: because part of the point is to regain access to the device if a customer screws up the account login. It's meant as a failsafe. Not much of a failsafe if they can just disable it (or if it can be disabled by accident for that matter). No, devices like that shouldn't be used in highly sensitive work, but it is a pretty widespread practice in the industry to have such backdoors.
They do work well. But something else might work better, especially for gaming which is where Valve is interested. Lots of 3rd party tools try various little things, like built-in displays, but without a standardization and widespread support they are mostly just gimmicks. The wheel example is an interesting one. Wheels work just fine for moderately light-weight vehicles traveling over relatively smooth terrain. But tanks use treads, not wheels, because that is better for what they need. We won't know if something similar exists for gaming until someone comes up with something (console controllers, for example, are actually better for some games, such as platformers or racers, though not for FPS or RTS games). The trick is to try.
OK, you're right. They aren't illegal. That is to say, they aren't illegal under the letter of the law (because they paid a lot of money to help write those laws), they're legal ones that write the laws that they then use to bully, intimidate, and extort individuals to pay them money while ensuring no one can form competition against them.
They totally are a cartel, though, and a thoroughly scummy one at that.