This is getting ridiculous. Back in 2000, a Slashdotting was a serious issue. But with today's fast servers and abundant bandwidth, you have to be hosting on your home DSL line to get killed this easily. Hell, I've had both $8.00/mo shared hosting boxes (PHP/static HTML) and $120/mo dedicated boxes (ASP/J2EE/PHP) both survive proper Slashdottings/Diggs.
There's no excuse for going belly-up this easy. An over-bandwidth message I could see, but otherwise...:-/
Because good electrical insulation and overload protection circuitry was so common back then, right? I can definitely see a magnetically charged atmosphere being a big problem for electronic devices. I'm not sure if it's as big of a problem as it seems, though. Someone mentioned airplanes. Well, they're shielded against lightening strikes and stray electromagnetic fields.
Modern computers have heavy rubberizing on the wires going into the system, with protection circuitry on most powered ports. (e.g. USB) In addition, the heavy metal frame of the computer acts as a ground for excess electrical energy. Which should provide some protection against a charged atmosphere.
Cell phones and other wireless devices may become useless due to interference, but I doubt they'd be damaged en masse by the event. Going by the effects of EMPs, you usually you need a long stretch of metal (e.g. an antenna of 30 inches or longer) to provide sufficient conductance to burn out the device.
Cars are another area that would be less of a problem than you might think. My understanding is that recent government tests have shown that the protection of the car body means that far fewer modern cars and trucks are susceptible to EMP effects than originally thought. (Which actually makes an EMP weapon far less useful than originally thought.)
So when all is said and done, a solar storm would likely be a major PITA, but it's not the end of civilization as we know it. Satellites are almost certainly the greatest concern as they have very little protection from the elements of space. Of course, the electronics are also hardened for the environment, so the situation may not be as dire as one might think.
...and BAMMO!, loose half the resolution in each eye.
Not necessarily. The monitor can have twice the vertical resolution with pixels that are twice as wide as tall. For non-3D viewing, each scanline is doubled. This would give the same resolution as your average monitor. But when viewing 3D, each pixel would show the stereoscopic information for that scanline.
RealD however uses a single projector that alternately projects the right-eye frame and left-eye frame, and circularly polarizes these frames, clockwise for the right-eye and counterclockwise for the left-eye, using a liquid-crystal screen placed in front of the projector lens
Basically, it's still polarization. That's the key to getting each eye to see its own image.
Back then [Wisconsin police] demanded payment in full, in cash, or you went to jail.
I lived in Wisconsin at the time, and I had never heard of such a thing. Besides being awfully fishy, it circumvents due process. It's infinitely more difficult to challenge a ticket you already paid!
Methinks either your friend is pulling your leg, or he came across a dirty cop who gave him a line of bull in an attempt to extort money.
Stupid. When I was in New York, all the ticket machines at the train stations spat out $1 coins as change. Usually the new gold ones that are closer to the size of a quarter, but there were a few of the silver, over-sized coins. I'd be pretty P.O.ed if a business didn't accept them as legal tender.
Where do I get them & can I pay for these Federal Reserve Notes using my Credit Card?
Yes.
Go to your bank and hand them your credit card. Tell them you'd like an advance of $50 payable in "Federal Reserve Notes". You will then become the proud owner of multiple Federal Reserve Notes. (Most likely in the sums of $20, $20, and $10 or $20, $10, $10, $5, and $5.)
My Asus GeForce 2 shipped with a pair of shutter glasses. The darn things did frak' all on the pack-in game. (Soldier of Fortune) I pretty much tried them out once, then stuck 'em into storage. Shutter glasses are highly overrated.
If manufacturers really want 3D gaming with true depth perception, monitor and GPU manufacturers should work together to create polarized computer monitors. Simply turn on the 3D effect, put on a pair of stylish shades with mismatched lenses, and BAMMO! Instant 3D.
Wow, that's awful. How many copies did you manage to sell? Even if the book sold poorly, I'm shocked that your royalties would be that low. Did you at least get an advance? Or some other income? I mean, your subject is very much a niche, so low numbers are to be expected, but that's some of the worst returns I've ever heard of.
To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmers' magazines left standing.
Tell me about it. I've professionally written some articles in the past, and it seems like there's almost nothing left to write for anymore. Either the magazine is so specific so as to be little more than an advertisement (e.g. Oracle or DB2 magazine) or the magazine doesn't pay (in any meaningful sense of the term) for articles. (e.g. Java Developers Journal) Time will tell if web-based publications will manage to support the same eco-system of authors or if it's time to go write a book.
Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.
^This. In addition, I'd like to preemptively warn you away from worrying about "Java can be decompiled" or "Javascript shows the source code!" The bits and pieces of your code simply aren't that valuable. Either someone is going to steal it outright (in which case you've got them on Copyright Infringement) or they're already experienced enough to re-implement what you've done. And in the time it would take to pull your code out of context, modify it to work in a new environment, then attempt to disguise its origins, it would have been faster to re-implement the concept from scratch!
So in short, don't worry about the technology. Obtain your Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents as necessary. Those are your real protection.
From my understanding of the way it works, you'd STILL hold the copyright, you've just granted an unlimited license to everyone with that.
I don't believe this is correct. If you explicitly and validly release a copyrighted work into public domain, then it leaves your control permanently. Everyone has the exact same rights to the work as yourself.
The catch-22 is usually in how rights are intertwined. For example, Firefox is released under a very permissive license that gives many of the same benefits as public domain. Yet due to trademark law you can't call your distribution Firefox without the blessing of the Mozilla organization.
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement. End result? The reactor will be as safe or safer than installing a Diesel Generator in the same location. But it will be more powerful, economical, and environmentally friendly.
The Internet Channel is Opera-based. It supports Widgets, but has no plugin architecture. Not that it would help. VirtualApple is written for Windows and Windows alone. It would be a major porting effort to make it work on another OS.
(cue music)And so I plaaaaay my... Intel-e-viiiiision.(/cue music)
Intellivision rocks the world. I don't care what anyone says about the controllers. Dreadnaught Factor rocked. Utopia rocked. Shark! Shark! rocked. Space Spartans rocked. Astrosmash rocked. Burgertime rocked. Diner rocked. Thin Ice rocked. Vec--
Oh hell, just go here and imagine that only 10% of that list sucks. And there you have the only ever instance of an inverted Sturgeon's Law.
BTW, have you seen the prices on DSDD media these days?
About $1 a disk. Which isn't that bad. Not as good as they were back in the day, but probably not too far off after adjusting for inflation.
The best place I've found for floppies is (the oddly obvious) http://www.floppydisk.com/. The disks come well packed and are of high quality. I have not had a single disk fail. Not sure if that's cheaper than your current source, but it might be worth looking into.:-)
Here's a question for those of you who know more about the details of space engineering than I: One of the changes made to the STS during the early days of flight was that the main tank was left unpainted. This gave the Shuttle launch stack its trademark rust-orange color. By making this simple change, NASA realized they could shave off hundreds of tons of launch weight, thereby increasing available payload. (Not that the shuttle ever used it, but that's another issue.)
Yet I can't help but notice the shine of a fresh coat of pain on the Falcon rocket. They even went through the trouble of stenciling "SpaceX" in large letters along the length of the craft. Is there any particular engineering reason why rockets are still covered in paint, or is this entirely an aesthetics issue?
I remember games running fine on DOS because the OS wasn't trying to do all kinds of crap under them
Not to detract from your point, but you have a rather rosy recollection of DOS, my friend!;-)
The way I remember it, the first step for every new game I got was to spend a half-hour working out a custom boot-disk that provided enough low-mem while loading all the drivers required by the game. After which I'd throw the disk in the box for the game so that I was only a reboot away from playing the game. God, what a pain in the arse that was!:-P
Get Linux to the point where things run better on it than on Windows or Mac, on equivalent hardware (since it is equivalent nowadays), and you might attract more game development.
Honestly, it's the chicken and the egg problem. No game developer is going to spend the money to make Linux a first-class release unless there's a significant user base. And I imagine their market research currently tells them that the Mac is a better prospect than the Linux community.
In short, it's not a technological problem. It's a business problem. And the greater Linux community is not a business. It does not react to the nuances of the market, but rather provides an OS that appeals primarily to its user-base of developers and contributors.:-)
If game developers were to develop games that would run on a PS3 Linux using open APIs, it could be easily recompiled to run on a PC running Linux. Now you've developed for two platforms at the same time.
And now that the PS3 browser has Flash 9, you can make Flash games on the PS3 and tell everyone they work on the computer as well!
Except for the minor issue of: WHY?
Using the Flash games example, there was a push to make flash gaming happen on the Wii simply because of the Wii's more interesting control scheme. First developers tried to understand mouse motions in a way that would evoke a new experience with the Wii remote. Then they managed to get a hold of development information to target the motion and multiplayer capabilities of the remote. So there was a valid reason to target the system. Despite the superior flash support of the PS3, no one is falling over themselves to create a "PS3Cade" because there is no special access to the hardware. You simply hook up a keyboard/mouse and use it like a PC.
Besides that, there's the issue that Sony has locked out the GPU on the PS3 specifically so that owners don't use Linux as a cheap development platform for PS3 games. Without GPU access, you're going to be limited to more crude games than would normally be possible on a PC. And with web gaming working its way up the low end, there's little room in-between for PS3-targeted games.
Linux would be great for gaming, since the OS itself uses so little memory, it means there's a good chance that games are going to run faster than on Windows (XP) with explorer.exe taking up a large chunk of memory.
/me finds nearest wall.
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
Ok, now that that's out of my system... your statement is completely and utterly incorrect. Memory usage is generally not a major factor in performance unless the system becomes memory constrained. In that case a system that is not starving for memory will absolutely outperform a system which is not. But in today's world of 2GB+ systems, explorer.exe is not exactly the biggest memory hog. (Try your web browser for a good start.) Video games often worry more about the space available in the GPU's memory than the amount of main memory available.
Secondly, the vast majority of Linux users are going to launch their game via their favorite desktop environment. Since the feature-rich KDE and GNOME desktops are the most popular, there's a good chance that their Linux-based desktops are eating just as much if not more memory than Windows XP's explorer.exe. But no one is really concerned about that on today's multi-GB systems, so I recommend you either not worry about it or run something slimmer like XFCE.
Thirdly, am I the only one who remembers the late 90's where much of the Linux community took it for granted that Linux was faster than Windows? That is, until benchmarks came out in '99 that showed that Windows had a significant performance advantage, especially in I/O heavy areas such as web serving. The news did result in a newfound focus to make Linux highly competitive, but it seems to me sir that your post needlessly repeats history.
Let me see if I've got this straight: PC gaming was a huge market during the 90's and first half of the 2000's. In the past few years, the PC market has been on the decline, propped up only by the massive MMORPG sales. Now in 2009, a year by which there are three incredible consoles on the market that easily make 80%+ of PC gaming irrelevant, we hear a call to action for more Linux games?
Um, sure. I'll get right on that.
Gamers are adventurous folks. That right there is a positive sign. Linux adopters often need to be adventurous in order to even install a new operating system. But even better, gamers often build their own computers, either from scratch, a barebones kit, or a stripped down retail box.
Do they? There was a time when that was certainly true. A lot of the remaining PC gamers I've seen purchase overpriced Alienware hardware and refer to it as their "rig". No offense to the remaining serious gamers who build their own PCs, but the incredible market power that used to be behind PC Gaming simply isn't there anymore. Look elsewhere for your coup de grace.
Robotron X, aka Robotron 64. I have that disc and the key issue was that it was all flash and no substance. Just a quick port of the original mechanics to a 3D playing field. Spice it up with a bit of rainbow colored graphics and the result is... boring. Very boring.
It was a perfect example of how oldies are cloned in an almost cargo-cult fashion. All the elements appear to be there, but the core gameplay somehow ends up missing. The result is a lifeless husk that looks like it should be fun, but isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
This is getting ridiculous. Back in 2000, a Slashdotting was a serious issue. But with today's fast servers and abundant bandwidth, you have to be hosting on your home DSL line to get killed this easily. Hell, I've had both $8.00/mo shared hosting boxes (PHP/static HTML) and $120/mo dedicated boxes (ASP/J2EE/PHP) both survive proper Slashdottings/Diggs.
There's no excuse for going belly-up this easy. An over-bandwidth message I could see, but otherwise... :-/
Because good electrical insulation and overload protection circuitry was so common back then, right? I can definitely see a magnetically charged atmosphere being a big problem for electronic devices. I'm not sure if it's as big of a problem as it seems, though. Someone mentioned airplanes. Well, they're shielded against lightening strikes and stray electromagnetic fields.
Modern computers have heavy rubberizing on the wires going into the system, with protection circuitry on most powered ports. (e.g. USB) In addition, the heavy metal frame of the computer acts as a ground for excess electrical energy. Which should provide some protection against a charged atmosphere.
Cell phones and other wireless devices may become useless due to interference, but I doubt they'd be damaged en masse by the event. Going by the effects of EMPs, you usually you need a long stretch of metal (e.g. an antenna of 30 inches or longer) to provide sufficient conductance to burn out the device.
Cars are another area that would be less of a problem than you might think. My understanding is that recent government tests have shown that the protection of the car body means that far fewer modern cars and trucks are susceptible to EMP effects than originally thought. (Which actually makes an EMP weapon far less useful than originally thought.)
So when all is said and done, a solar storm would likely be a major PITA, but it's not the end of civilization as we know it. Satellites are almost certainly the greatest concern as they have very little protection from the elements of space. Of course, the electronics are also hardened for the environment, so the situation may not be as dire as one might think.
Not necessarily. The monitor can have twice the vertical resolution with pixels that are twice as wide as tall. For non-3D viewing, each scanline is doubled. This would give the same resolution as your average monitor. But when viewing 3D, each pixel would show the stereoscopic information for that scanline.
Whoops, grabbed the wrong bit there:
Basically, it's still polarization. That's the key to getting each eye to see its own image.
*Ahem*
Thus my suggestion for polarization. ;-)
I lived in Wisconsin at the time, and I had never heard of such a thing. Besides being awfully fishy, it circumvents due process. It's infinitely more difficult to challenge a ticket you already paid!
Methinks either your friend is pulling your leg, or he came across a dirty cop who gave him a line of bull in an attempt to extort money.
Stupid. When I was in New York, all the ticket machines at the train stations spat out $1 coins as change. Usually the new gold ones that are closer to the size of a quarter, but there were a few of the silver, over-sized coins. I'd be pretty P.O.ed if a business didn't accept them as legal tender.
Yes.
Go to your bank and hand them your credit card. Tell them you'd like an advance of $50 payable in "Federal Reserve Notes". You will then become the proud owner of multiple Federal Reserve Notes. (Most likely in the sums of $20, $20, and $10 or $20, $10, $10, $5, and $5.)
My Asus GeForce 2 shipped with a pair of shutter glasses. The darn things did frak' all on the pack-in game. (Soldier of Fortune) I pretty much tried them out once, then stuck 'em into storage. Shutter glasses are highly overrated.
If manufacturers really want 3D gaming with true depth perception, monitor and GPU manufacturers should work together to create polarized computer monitors. Simply turn on the 3D effect, put on a pair of stylish shades with mismatched lenses, and BAMMO! Instant 3D.
That might not be as sure-fire as you think...
http://newsmine.org/content.php?ol=security/police-militarization/bestbuy-shopper-arrested-for-two-dollar-bills.txt
Wow, that's awful. How many copies did you manage to sell? Even if the book sold poorly, I'm shocked that your royalties would be that low. Did you at least get an advance? Or some other income? I mean, your subject is very much a niche, so low numbers are to be expected, but that's some of the worst returns I've ever heard of.
Tell me about it. I've professionally written some articles in the past, and it seems like there's almost nothing left to write for anymore. Either the magazine is so specific so as to be little more than an advertisement (e.g. Oracle or DB2 magazine) or the magazine doesn't pay (in any meaningful sense of the term) for articles. (e.g. Java Developers Journal) Time will tell if web-based publications will manage to support the same eco-system of authors or if it's time to go write a book.
Probably just time to write a book. ;-)
^This. In addition, I'd like to preemptively warn you away from worrying about "Java can be decompiled" or "Javascript shows the source code!" The bits and pieces of your code simply aren't that valuable. Either someone is going to steal it outright (in which case you've got them on Copyright Infringement) or they're already experienced enough to re-implement what you've done. And in the time it would take to pull your code out of context, modify it to work in a new environment, then attempt to disguise its origins, it would have been faster to re-implement the concept from scratch!
So in short, don't worry about the technology. Obtain your Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents as necessary. Those are your real protection.
I don't believe this is correct. If you explicitly and validly release a copyrighted work into public domain, then it leaves your control permanently. Everyone has the exact same rights to the work as yourself.
The catch-22 is usually in how rights are intertwined. For example, Firefox is released under a very permissive license that gives many of the same benefits as public domain. Yet due to trademark law you can't call your distribution Firefox without the blessing of the Mozilla organization.
So caveat emptor.
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement. End result? The reactor will be as safe or safer than installing a Diesel Generator in the same location. But it will be more powerful, economical, and environmentally friendly.
The Internet Channel is Opera-based. It supports Widgets, but has no plugin architecture. Not that it would help. VirtualApple is written for Windows and Windows alone. It would be a major porting effort to make it work on another OS.
(cue music)And so I plaaaaay my... Intel-e-viiiiision.(/cue music)
Intellivision rocks the world. I don't care what anyone says about the controllers. Dreadnaught Factor rocked. Utopia rocked. Shark! Shark! rocked. Space Spartans rocked. Astrosmash rocked. Burgertime rocked. Diner rocked. Thin Ice rocked. Vec--
Oh hell, just go here and imagine that only 10% of that list sucks. And there you have the only ever instance of an inverted Sturgeon's Law.
About $1 a disk. Which isn't that bad. Not as good as they were back in the day, but probably not too far off after adjusting for inflation.
The best place I've found for floppies is (the oddly obvious) http://www.floppydisk.com/. The disks come well packed and are of high quality. I have not had a single disk fail. Not sure if that's cheaper than your current source, but it might be worth looking into. :-)
Here's a question for those of you who know more about the details of space engineering than I: One of the changes made to the STS during the early days of flight was that the main tank was left unpainted. This gave the Shuttle launch stack its trademark rust-orange color. By making this simple change, NASA realized they could shave off hundreds of tons of launch weight, thereby increasing available payload. (Not that the shuttle ever used it, but that's another issue.)
Yet I can't help but notice the shine of a fresh coat of pain on the Falcon rocket. They even went through the trouble of stenciling "SpaceX" in large letters along the length of the craft. Is there any particular engineering reason why rockets are still covered in paint, or is this entirely an aesthetics issue?
Not to detract from your point, but you have a rather rosy recollection of DOS, my friend! ;-)
The way I remember it, the first step for every new game I got was to spend a half-hour working out a custom boot-disk that provided enough low-mem while loading all the drivers required by the game. After which I'd throw the disk in the box for the game so that I was only a reboot away from playing the game. God, what a pain in the arse that was! :-P
Honestly, it's the chicken and the egg problem. No game developer is going to spend the money to make Linux a first-class release unless there's a significant user base. And I imagine their market research currently tells them that the Mac is a better prospect than the Linux community.
In short, it's not a technological problem. It's a business problem. And the greater Linux community is not a business. It does not react to the nuances of the market, but rather provides an OS that appeals primarily to its user-base of developers and contributors. :-)
And now that the PS3 browser has Flash 9, you can make Flash games on the PS3 and tell everyone they work on the computer as well!
Except for the minor issue of: WHY?
Using the Flash games example, there was a push to make flash gaming happen on the Wii simply because of the Wii's more interesting control scheme. First developers tried to understand mouse motions in a way that would evoke a new experience with the Wii remote. Then they managed to get a hold of development information to target the motion and multiplayer capabilities of the remote. So there was a valid reason to target the system. Despite the superior flash support of the PS3, no one is falling over themselves to create a "PS3Cade" because there is no special access to the hardware. You simply hook up a keyboard/mouse and use it like a PC.
Besides that, there's the issue that Sony has locked out the GPU on the PS3 specifically so that owners don't use Linux as a cheap development platform for PS3 games. Without GPU access, you're going to be limited to more crude games than would normally be possible on a PC. And with web gaming working its way up the low end, there's little room in-between for PS3-targeted games.
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
Ok, now that that's out of my system... your statement is completely and utterly incorrect. Memory usage is generally not a major factor in performance unless the system becomes memory constrained. In that case a system that is not starving for memory will absolutely outperform a system which is not. But in today's world of 2GB+ systems, explorer.exe is not exactly the biggest memory hog. (Try your web browser for a good start.) Video games often worry more about the space available in the GPU's memory than the amount of main memory available.
Secondly, the vast majority of Linux users are going to launch their game via their favorite desktop environment. Since the feature-rich KDE and GNOME desktops are the most popular, there's a good chance that their Linux-based desktops are eating just as much if not more memory than Windows XP's explorer.exe. But no one is really concerned about that on today's multi-GB systems, so I recommend you either not worry about it or run something slimmer like XFCE.
Thirdly, am I the only one who remembers the late 90's where much of the Linux community took it for granted that Linux was faster than Windows? That is, until benchmarks came out in '99 that showed that Windows had a significant performance advantage, especially in I/O heavy areas such as web serving. The news did result in a newfound focus to make Linux highly competitive, but it seems to me sir that your post needlessly repeats history.
Learn from history, least you repeat it. ;-)
Let me see if I've got this straight: PC gaming was a huge market during the 90's and first half of the 2000's. In the past few years, the PC market has been on the decline, propped up only by the massive MMORPG sales. Now in 2009, a year by which there are three incredible consoles on the market that easily make 80%+ of PC gaming irrelevant, we hear a call to action for more Linux games?
Um, sure. I'll get right on that.
Do they? There was a time when that was certainly true. A lot of the remaining PC gamers I've seen purchase overpriced Alienware hardware and refer to it as their "rig". No offense to the remaining serious gamers who build their own PCs, but the incredible market power that used to be behind PC Gaming simply isn't there anymore. Look elsewhere for your coup de grace.
Robotron X, aka Robotron 64. I have that disc and the key issue was that it was all flash and no substance. Just a quick port of the original mechanics to a 3D playing field. Spice it up with a bit of rainbow colored graphics and the result is... boring. Very boring.
It was a perfect example of how oldies are cloned in an almost cargo-cult fashion. All the elements appear to be there, but the core gameplay somehow ends up missing. The result is a lifeless husk that looks like it should be fun, but isn't.
*checks Wikipedia* So they did! In that case, the GP was just uncoordinated and missed out on a great control scheme. :-P