I remember playing that thing when it first came out, and thinking to myself that we were on the verge of some major game AI breakthroughs. I mean, this thing played like a HUMAN, not a robot! You had to beat it with skill and cunning rather than the typical, "find the flaw in the bot and exploit it" scheme.
Of course, the Reaper wasn't perfect. Which isn't surprising when you consider that it was the first of its generation. Unfortunately, the industry pushed in two directions that were mostly incompatible with the further development of such AI:
1. Scripting - The introduction of Half Life kicked off a scripting craze that we still feel today.
2. Online Play - Quakeworld sealed this deal.
We could develop better AI if programmers put their minds to it. The problem-space of simulating how humans are supposed to react in a simulated environment isn't anywhere near as hard as trying to respond to real-world stimuli. (Especially since the AI can use shortcuts and cheats behind the scenes.) Unfortunately, there is little incentive to focus on such AI. So it may take a very long time before we see any real improvements in that area.
GravityZoo is NOT, I repeat NOT converting OpenOffice into a webapp. I don't really want to detract from their idea, so I'll try to be succinct. Basically, GravityZoo has a special client that interacts with the application running on the server. The application on the server is always available, and autostores your data in a GravityZoo Object Storage database.
Supposedly, it's an actual conversion of the application to a networked form rather than a simple remote desktop concept. If I were to make a W.A.G. of the Day, I'd say they're probably going to bus the normal IPC communications over the network. Not revolutionary by itself, but possibly nice if they have a good framework.
While I think that we should go to Mars, I would far rather leave that to the private enterprise. They will be there before 2025.
As much as I wish you were correct, I think you're probably being overly optimistic. Private Enterprises (excluding the big NASA contractors) haven't even made it to orbit yet, and there are precious few signs that any of them will soon. Keep your eye on SpaceX, but don't buy a single one of their dates. I guarantee that each milestone will be missed by several years, mostly because of the difficulty of the business they're in. (It's just the way these things go, I'm afraid.)
On the bright side, having the private sector nipping at NASA's heels is a great way to keep them motivated.;-)
Pretty much. This isn't "Apple Vista" we're talking about here. 10.4 is a good OS and there's no rush to upgrade. I think we'll all survive waiting for 10.5 if it means that the iPhone (something which is completely unavailable to the market) gets here faster.
From a business perspective, Apple doesn't want their major announcements overlapping. So delaying the OS by a few months means that they can provide a steady stream of announcements.
...if I understand this correctly. Basically, a security researcher believes he's found a buffer overflow. However, he has not yet found a way to exploit that overflow because Word keeps crashing. Microsoft says that the crash is preventing any security hazard, and therefore there is none. Correct?
I hate to say it, but I'm going to have to come down on Microsoft's side on this one. If it's a non-exploitable crash, then it's a simple bug in handling corrupt documents and nothing more. The researcher can ring everyone again once an exploit has been found.
As for the DoS potential... seriously, why is everything a "Denial of Service" with these guys? It's a bad document. Word crashes. Life goes on. It's not like your computer is going to become unusable because Word crashed. You get minorly inconvenienced by the jerk who sent you the document, you figure out that the doc is bad, then you move on.
They don't tell you the details of the transaction. I've been party to enough of these deals to know that either Proctor and Gamble is requesting special conditions (e.g. host it themselves -OR- have secure access to the backend -OR- Google has to do a whole bunch of security audits to be certified), or they're only using it in a trial group somewhere in the dark corners of the company. The press releases always make these things seem more impressive than they really are.
Methinks their contract could be held invalid for their illegal activities and failure to keep the company's best interests in mind. At the very least, it will be a small court case for the next 5 years, in which time the company will be able to recover without paying the Darl-ethon a single red cent.;-)
People keep forgetting that in a corporate setting, you'll want to run your own Web Services service. While GMail for companies may make a lot of sense for the little guys, the big guys are only going to do it if they can control it internally. That takes the privacy and security concerns down to almost zero.
As amusing as it is, it wouldn't work. The SEC has recently started halting trades on any company mentioned in such spam emails. I don't remember for how long exactly, but the hold is something like a week. Which means that such spam will most likely do more damage than good.
That's not entirely true. If a company has revenue, there's a possibility that they can trim back to ONLY that revenue. If the revenue coming in is more than the cost to support that revenue stream, then the company can continue on. The problem comes in when your revenue is smaller than the cost of maintaining that revenue. Then you're screwed.
If I were an SCO investor right now, I'd be getting together with the other investors to stage a coup. Do like Take Two and fire the board and executive staff. Then install someone who will fire SCO's "crack" team of lawyers (drugs aren't good for you anyway) and start sweeping through the company firing anyone who's not related to the few revenue streams that SCO actually has. Normally that would be a sad (and often dangerous) thing for a company, but in SCO's case, I doubt that many tears will be shed.
Once the company is pared down, then the focus should be on two areas:
1. Improve the customer relations that SCO has been driving into the ground for so long.
2. Look for ways to leverage the remaining company to produce new or enhanced products; thus opening up new sources of revenue.
Normally, I'd say that this is a plan put forward by a wannabe-CEO looking for a Golden Parachute job. As scary as it sounds though, I think it might actually work in SCO's case. *IF* (and this is a big "if") the investors get their tails in gear and flip the company upside down NOW. The longer they wait, the less likely they are to succeed.
other than a slight pause during explosions the game actually ran quite well.
I'm thinking that you're remembering the game through rose tinted glasses. At the time, quite a lot of games were PAINFULLY slow. (I remember Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego being oddly faster on a CGA PCjr than it was on a beefy EGA XT! Of course, that had everything to do with fill-rates.) So Wing Commander running at 5-10 FPS probably didn't seem so bad. It really was supposed to run faster than that.:)
You couldn't run it with all graphical options on but it would run smoothly otherwise.
I sincerely doubt that. The only "graphical options" it had (other than the extra graphics if you had EMS) was EGA or VGA. I ran (or at least tried to run) Wing Commander on an 8MHz XT with an EGA adapter. It was anything but smooth. Unless you count about 5-10 FPS as "smooth". I did, however, run it on a 486. Which I only realized many years later (and after beating the game) was WAY too fast.:P
The 286 was far from "old hat". Many folks still had XTs or 286s. I had a high-end Turbo XT at the time, and wouldn't upgrade for another year and a half. The 486 was available, but only the richest of rich had them. They were expensive.
You need to remember that there was nothing driving the upgrade cycle at the time. Many people were happy with their Commodore 64s. It wasn't until games like Wing Commander that the upgrade cycle really started. Especially when you consider that a high-end 286 was the minimum specs required for the game.;-)
Wing Commander was developed for the PC and later ported to the Amiga. Not the other way around. At the time of its release, I remember Roberts saying that he made Wing Commander just because everyone was telling him how impossible it was to do on the PC. Of course he kind of cheated seeing as how Wing Commander required a high-end 286. Not that it was a big issue in the long run. The Wing Commander series would push hardware requirements for many years to come, and was a driving force behind the 3 year upgrade cycle.:)
Also wiiarcade.com has a handful of games that will work well with the Wii remote.
I don't think you really want to be sending people to WiiArcade. As you said, they have a handful of games. WiiCade.com has all the same games, plus some good ones, plus games that actually use the gamepad functionality. (As opposed to mouse-only games.) About 300-some games altogether. (At least, if you believe the game ids.)
Another great site to visit is video.stumbleupon.com. They have YouTube videos organized as channels. You can use the Wii Remote's DPad to skip and rate videos.
Last, but not least, FineTune has a nice Wii interface for playing Muzak. In case you're nowhere near an elevator.:P
I always had trouble with flash videos and wmv's playing.
Flash players based on Flash Version 7 work fine. (Adobe refuses to license version 8.) They've actually gotten slightly better thanks to Opera's optimizations.
The browser does not have a media player, nor are there plans for one. I believe they're going to support standard audio files (i.e. WAV; if it hasn't been added already), but that's about it. I wouldn't hold your breath for WMV support.
Q: Did you remember to do the Wii Update before you redownloaded the Opera browser?
Also, Opera doesn't brand this as the "Final" release. In press releases, they're calling it the "Full" version, because there could be updates in the future.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention what *is* in June. June is the release date for multiplayer gaming on the Wii. The Japanese already have it with Pokemon, and the Brits are getting it soon. That leaves us Yanks as the only ones left playing with ourselves.:(
It's mid-April! They've got 2.5 months until the end of June.
Yeah, Zonk has a bad floppy on this one. The final version was originally going to be released on March 16th. It was then pushed back to March 30th. Then (a few days before it was supposed to be released) it was pushed back to "sometime in April". Well, it's "sometime in April", so I'm not surprised that it's here.:P
the only sort of consumer-physological maneuvering from Nintendo in the past would be the vaporware SNES-CDrom addon that was announced supposedly just to screw with Sega.
Say what?
I could be getting this wrong.
Yeah, that sums it up.
Nintendo was committed to a CDRom attachment for the Super NES. The product (known as the "Play Station") almost made it to market. Right up until the CEO of Nintendo read the contract and realized that they had basically sold the farm to Sony. He nixed the deal at the 11th hour. Nintendo then started working with Phillips to create a joint CDRom design.
Nintendo eventually realized that Phillips didn't know their heads from their rears and pulled out. But not before Phillips decided that they had the best thing since sliced bread. Phillips managed to get a license to produce a few Mario and Zelda titles out of the deal, and thus the worst Mario and Zelda games ever imagined were made for the (you guessed it!) Phillips CD-i. Nintendo ended up skipping the CDRom format altogether, and stuck with cartridges until the DVD was available. (GameCube discs are Mini-DVDs recorded at Constant Angular Velocity.)
There is no BeOS-based Palm Software. There should have been, but they never released it.
Why does everyone keep repeating this? Cobalt was released as Palm OS 6.x and was available for licensing. The problem was that no Palm manufacturers licensed Cobalt for use in their devices. The lack of devices pretty much killed Palm OS 6 before consumers ever had a chance to evaluate it.
For those of you unaware, the reason for this dichotomy is because Palm Inc got tired of funding Palm OS and thus spun off PalmSource as a separate company. PalmSource created and released Cobalt, but they were not in a position to create any hardware for it. Palm Inc's failure to produce any hardware for Cobalt resulted in the other Palm manufacturers sticking with the classic Palm OS 5. (aka Garnet) PalmSource eventually went under and was acquired by ACCESS, a Japanese embedded software company.
I forgot to mention: This is blatently incorrect. Cobalt was BeOS based. ALP is Linux based. Actually, to be specific, Cobalt had a new microkernel that was combined with various BeOS multimedia technologies in order to produce the end product.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would the Object Management Group have SSNs on file?
When was game AI good? I'll tell you when.
The Reaper Bot
I remember playing that thing when it first came out, and thinking to myself that we were on the verge of some major game AI breakthroughs. I mean, this thing played like a HUMAN, not a robot! You had to beat it with skill and cunning rather than the typical, "find the flaw in the bot and exploit it" scheme.
Of course, the Reaper wasn't perfect. Which isn't surprising when you consider that it was the first of its generation. Unfortunately, the industry pushed in two directions that were mostly incompatible with the further development of such AI:
1. Scripting - The introduction of Half Life kicked off a scripting craze that we still feel today.
2. Online Play - Quakeworld sealed this deal.
We could develop better AI if programmers put their minds to it. The problem-space of simulating how humans are supposed to react in a simulated environment isn't anywhere near as hard as trying to respond to real-world stimuli. (Especially since the AI can use shortcuts and cheats behind the scenes.) Unfortunately, there is little incentive to focus on such AI. So it may take a very long time before we see any real improvements in that area.
GravityZoo is NOT, I repeat NOT converting OpenOffice into a webapp. I don't really want to detract from their idea, so I'll try to be succinct. Basically, GravityZoo has a special client that interacts with the application running on the server. The application on the server is always available, and autostores your data in a GravityZoo Object Storage database.
Supposedly, it's an actual conversion of the application to a networked form rather than a simple remote desktop concept. If I were to make a W.A.G. of the Day, I'd say they're probably going to bus the normal IPC communications over the network. Not revolutionary by itself, but possibly nice if they have a good framework.
As much as I wish you were correct, I think you're probably being overly optimistic. Private Enterprises (excluding the big NASA contractors) haven't even made it to orbit yet, and there are precious few signs that any of them will soon. Keep your eye on SpaceX, but don't buy a single one of their dates. I guarantee that each milestone will be missed by several years, mostly because of the difficulty of the business they're in. (It's just the way these things go, I'm afraid.)
On the bright side, having the private sector nipping at NASA's heels is a great way to keep them motivated.
Pretty much. This isn't "Apple Vista" we're talking about here. 10.4 is a good OS and there's no rush to upgrade. I think we'll all survive waiting for 10.5 if it means that the iPhone (something which is completely unavailable to the market) gets here faster.
From a business perspective, Apple doesn't want their major announcements overlapping. So delaying the OS by a few months means that they can provide a steady stream of announcements.
DoS (Denial of Service), not DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). There is no "distributed" in crashing these desktop apps.
...if I understand this correctly. Basically, a security researcher believes he's found a buffer overflow. However, he has not yet found a way to exploit that overflow because Word keeps crashing. Microsoft says that the crash is preventing any security hazard, and therefore there is none. Correct?
I hate to say it, but I'm going to have to come down on Microsoft's side on this one. If it's a non-exploitable crash, then it's a simple bug in handling corrupt documents and nothing more. The researcher can ring everyone again once an exploit has been found.
As for the DoS potential... seriously, why is everything a "Denial of Service" with these guys? It's a bad document. Word crashes. Life goes on. It's not like your computer is going to become unusable because Word crashed. You get minorly inconvenienced by the jerk who sent you the document, you figure out that the doc is bad, then you move on.
They don't tell you the details of the transaction. I've been party to enough of these deals to know that either Proctor and Gamble is requesting special conditions (e.g. host it themselves -OR- have secure access to the backend -OR- Google has to do a whole bunch of security audits to be certified), or they're only using it in a trial group somewhere in the dark corners of the company. The press releases always make these things seem more impressive than they really are.
Methinks their contract could be held invalid for their illegal activities and failure to keep the company's best interests in mind. At the very least, it will be a small court case for the next 5 years, in which time the company will be able to recover without paying the Darl-ethon a single red cent. ;-)
People keep forgetting that in a corporate setting, you'll want to run your own Web Services service. While GMail for companies may make a lot of sense for the little guys, the big guys are only going to do it if they can control it internally. That takes the privacy and security concerns down to almost zero.
As amusing as it is, it wouldn't work. The SEC has recently started halting trades on any company mentioned in such spam emails. I don't remember for how long exactly, but the hold is something like a week. Which means that such spam will most likely do more damage than good.
3 5222
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/09/02
That's not entirely true. If a company has revenue, there's a possibility that they can trim back to ONLY that revenue. If the revenue coming in is more than the cost to support that revenue stream, then the company can continue on. The problem comes in when your revenue is smaller than the cost of maintaining that revenue. Then you're screwed.
If I were an SCO investor right now, I'd be getting together with the other investors to stage a coup. Do like Take Two and fire the board and executive staff. Then install someone who will fire SCO's "crack" team of lawyers (drugs aren't good for you anyway) and start sweeping through the company firing anyone who's not related to the few revenue streams that SCO actually has. Normally that would be a sad (and often dangerous) thing for a company, but in SCO's case, I doubt that many tears will be shed.
Once the company is pared down, then the focus should be on two areas:
1. Improve the customer relations that SCO has been driving into the ground for so long.
2. Look for ways to leverage the remaining company to produce new or enhanced products; thus opening up new sources of revenue.
Normally, I'd say that this is a plan put forward by a wannabe-CEO looking for a Golden Parachute job. As scary as it sounds though, I think it might actually work in SCO's case. *IF* (and this is a big "if") the investors get their tails in gear and flip the company upside down NOW. The longer they wait, the less likely they are to succeed.
I'm thinking that you're remembering the game through rose tinted glasses. At the time, quite a lot of games were PAINFULLY slow. (I remember Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego being oddly faster on a CGA PCjr than it was on a beefy EGA XT! Of course, that had everything to do with fill-rates.) So Wing Commander running at 5-10 FPS probably didn't seem so bad. It really was supposed to run faster than that.
I sincerely doubt that. The only "graphical options" it had (other than the extra graphics if you had EMS) was EGA or VGA. I ran (or at least tried to run) Wing Commander on an 8MHz XT with an EGA adapter. It was anything but smooth. Unless you count about 5-10 FPS as "smooth". I did, however, run it on a 486. Which I only realized many years later (and after beating the game) was WAY too fast.
The 286 was far from "old hat". Many folks still had XTs or 286s. I had a high-end Turbo XT at the time, and wouldn't upgrade for another year and a half. The 486 was available, but only the richest of rich had them. They were expensive.
;-)
You need to remember that there was nothing driving the upgrade cycle at the time. Many people were happy with their Commodore 64s. It wasn't until games like Wing Commander that the upgrade cycle really started. Especially when you consider that a high-end 286 was the minimum specs required for the game.
Wing Commander was developed for the PC and later ported to the Amiga. Not the other way around. At the time of its release, I remember Roberts saying that he made Wing Commander just because everyone was telling him how impossible it was to do on the PC. Of course he kind of cheated seeing as how Wing Commander required a high-end 286. Not that it was a big issue in the long run. The Wing Commander series would push hardware requirements for many years to come, and was a driving force behind the 3 year upgrade cycle.
I don't think you really want to be sending people to WiiArcade. As you said, they have a handful of games. WiiCade.com has all the same games, plus some good ones, plus games that actually use the gamepad functionality. (As opposed to mouse-only games.) About 300-some games altogether. (At least, if you believe the game ids.)
Another great site to visit is video.stumbleupon.com. They have YouTube videos organized as channels. You can use the Wii Remote's DPad to skip and rate videos.
Last, but not least, FineTune has a nice Wii interface for playing Muzak. In case you're nowhere near an elevator.
Flash players based on Flash Version 7 work fine. (Adobe refuses to license version 8.) They've actually gotten slightly better thanks to Opera's optimizations.
The browser does not have a media player, nor are there plans for one. I believe they're going to support standard audio files (i.e. WAV; if it hasn't been added already), but that's about it. I wouldn't hold your breath for WMV support.
Besides, WMV sucks.
It shouldn't be.
From Opera: Today Opera Software and Nintendo released the much-anticipated full version of the Internet Channel, powered by the Opera browser.
Nor do I see the words trial anywhere on it. Here's a video showing the same thing I see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6FI5usclV4
Q: Did you remember to do the Wii Update before you redownloaded the Opera browser?
Also, Opera doesn't brand this as the "Final" release. In press releases, they're calling it the "Full" version, because there could be updates in the future.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention what *is* in June. June is the release date for multiplayer gaming on the Wii. The Japanese already have it with Pokemon, and the Brits are getting it soon. That leaves us Yanks as the only ones left playing with ourselves. :(
Yeah, Zonk has a bad floppy on this one. The final version was originally going to be released on March 16th. It was then pushed back to March 30th. Then (a few days before it was supposed to be released) it was pushed back to "sometime in April". Well, it's "sometime in April", so I'm not surprised that it's here.
Say what?
Yeah, that sums it up.
Nintendo was committed to a CDRom attachment for the Super NES. The product (known as the "Play Station") almost made it to market. Right up until the CEO of Nintendo read the contract and realized that they had basically sold the farm to Sony. He nixed the deal at the 11th hour. Nintendo then started working with Phillips to create a joint CDRom design.
Nintendo eventually realized that Phillips didn't know their heads from their rears and pulled out. But not before Phillips decided that they had the best thing since sliced bread. Phillips managed to get a license to produce a few Mario and Zelda titles out of the deal, and thus the worst Mario and Zelda games ever imagined were made for the (you guessed it!) Phillips CD-i. Nintendo ended up skipping the CDRom format altogether, and stuck with cartridges until the DVD was available. (GameCube discs are Mini-DVDs recorded at Constant Angular Velocity.)
Why does everyone keep repeating this? Cobalt was released as Palm OS 6.x and was available for licensing. The problem was that no Palm manufacturers licensed Cobalt for use in their devices. The lack of devices pretty much killed Palm OS 6 before consumers ever had a chance to evaluate it.
For those of you unaware, the reason for this dichotomy is because Palm Inc got tired of funding Palm OS and thus spun off PalmSource as a separate company. PalmSource created and released Cobalt, but they were not in a position to create any hardware for it. Palm Inc's failure to produce any hardware for Cobalt resulted in the other Palm manufacturers sticking with the classic Palm OS 5. (aka Garnet) PalmSource eventually went under and was acquired by ACCESS, a Japanese embedded software company.
I forgot to mention: This is blatently incorrect. Cobalt was BeOS based. ALP is Linux based. Actually, to be specific, Cobalt had a new microkernel that was combined with various BeOS multimedia technologies in order to produce the end product.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/6148/Interview-Pa