Methinks Kevin Martin is going to be running for public office soon. Or maybe I'm just so cynical that whenever I see a government agency actually working in my interest I start looking for ulterior motives...
I can verify from personal experience that MY cell phone does cause interference with radios. I'm a Private Pilot and I have a two year old Sony Ericsson. If I forget to turn the phone off, I can hear a cycling beep sound in my headset every time the phone is transmitting (i.e. ranging to a new cell tower or checking my email etc.) The VHF set also shows that it's receiving, so its actually picking something up through the antenna.
It's not particularly loud, and I haven't had any trouble hearing ATC over it. On a commercial jet... with several hundred cell phones, and the much higher importance of ATC calls under IFR... I can see where it could be a major problem.
Are there ways to solve the problem? Sure. Is it really worth spending the resources to test and resolve in light of the social factors? I'd say no. I personally consider time spent on commercial flights as downtime. I don't want people to be able to get ahold of me, I want to read a book or watch a good movie.
If you really are important enough you HAVE to be in communication 24/7... well buy your own jet =)
I live in Southern Illinois (colloquially known as North Kentucky). I can honestly tell you the only reason Rod Blagojevich was elected is because his name is as far from 'Ryan' as possible without using crylic or cuniform.
I'd personally like the state of Illinois to donate the income tax I paid them last year to the ESA.
... A way to force companies to just pack it in... Add the number of customers a company has to the number of people a company employes... and if you can get that many signartures plus one.. the company has to sell off all its assets, split the proceeds up among the shareholders, and have its name added to a "Never Allow" list with the Trademark office.
So a company like SCO... with no real customers... and "As of February 1, 2005 190 employees." (http://ir.sco.com/faq.cfm) We'd just need everyone who's posted in this tread so far to vote to shut them down!
They jumped the shark years ago... now they've crossed the Archeron and are trying to figure out how to pay the ferryman.
The question the court is facing is whether you can copyright an idea, a conjecture.
This really depends on how much money you have to throw at US Sentators...
Somehow I doubt the authors have enough money to elect the Senator from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (D-NC)... Whereas Dan Brown might...
So... I'm going Nostradamus on your ass and predicting that Copyright law takes a minor step back on this one because "The DiVinci Code" has sold a whole heck of a lot better than "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail".
How's that for cynacism cleverly disguised as conspiracy paranoia? =)
Jesus... and I thought it took a long time to format a 100gb drive with NTFS... Please don't give Microsoft a petabyte to play with... Windows Event Horizon (shipping in 2011) will have a default install footprint of 250 terrabytes...
In truth, while multiple monitors is the pancea, if you want something that works today, you should take a look at Natural Point's Track IR product.
It's pointless for FPS games, but for flight and driving Sims it's wonderfully immersive.
Basically you wear a hat with three goofy reflectors on it... the Track IR shines an IR LED at you, and watches the movements of the reflectors. It then translates small movements of your head into larger movements on the screen. Sounds like a gimic, until you try it. Then you realise that you rely on your eyes a lot more for positional data than you do on actual motion.
I play Pacific Fighters and Enemy Engaged Comanche Vs. Havoc fairly regularly. EECH is truely beautiful with the Track IR... switch it into IHIDDS mode, and the chaingun shoots where you look =)
This is support for multiple monitors via the Matrox Parhelia card. The interesting thing about the Matrox is that it treats multiple monitors as one large monitor. Say you had three 1024x786 native panels plugged into it... the operating system (and games) thought it was one large monitor with 3072x768 resolution. This meant that all a game had to do to support multiple monitors was offer support for large weird resolutions, which is fairly easy to do in a totally 3d game. Unfortunatly the Parhelia is several years old, and an order of magnitude behind Nvidia and ATI in terms of fill rate.
When you plug multiple monitors into a new Nvidia or ATI card (or cards in SLI or Crossfire), they actually show up to the OS as additional monitors. This is actually the perfered behaviour because it lets you use monitors with different resolutions and sizes together and in non-traditional arangements. Unfortunatly, it means that actual multiple monitor support has to be specifically coded into games.
As far as actual support afaik the only game that offers REAL multiple monitor support is MS FlightSim '98 and above. I'm sure there are others out there either natively or through mods, and I'd be interested to hear about them.
What killed Novell in the first place was it's inability to intigrate with PCs running Windows. Everyone wanted an Exchange server - so they installed a domain controller - And once they had an NT domain in place there wasn't a whole lot of reason to keep the extra network login box around.
NDS is to this day a better network managment system than Active Directory despite being basically abandoned what, five years ago?
What I keep waiting to see from Novell is a linux based desktop solution given away for free... and a competativly priced server product (Novell on a linux core instead of dos? Yum) and network management system based around NDS.
The only thing that would hold them back then is the same thing that killed them in the first place - You have to have an NT domain in place to effectivly use Exchange (at least for larger installations) - Perhaps it's time to bring Groupwise back with a Thunderbird front end? What's the status of the calandar app in the Mozilla suite anyway?
It'll come down to just how much money Microsoft is willing to dangle in front of Valve up-front for exclusivity (or at least semi-exclusivity).
Valve, of all companies, knows what a huge sales driver the mod / aftermarket community is. Just look at the record sales of Halflife 1 Game of the Year, Counterstrike, Opposing Force, Day of Defeat, etc. Packs, which basically involved NO development cost on Valve's part. These packs were either retail packaging of community created mods (Counterstrike, Day of Defeat) or low cost additional content created by third party studios. (Opposing Force). The primary impetous for purchase however was the ability to play any of the literally hundreds of other mods available free for download.
Now with Steam (admitedly forcibly) in place, Valve has a great system for distribution of other worthwhile mods and "content" packs.
I doubt seriously that Valve will be willing to dampen this revenue stream by moving to a console unless Microsoft offers them enough money to compensate.
Unfortunatly, due to another bug in the game, if you reverse the mouselook axis for infanty... it also reverses the mouse CURSOR in the overlay (Commander, Squad, and Kit Selection) screens. I can live with this for kit selection, and even for quick orders as a squad leader, but until it's fixed, it makes it very difficult to Command.
This is a verifiable and duplicatable bug. I've tried it on half a dozen PCs, with and without the patch, and even with different accounts. (A good friend of mine owns an internet cafe and we tried it on his boxen... he plays reverse moused to... I'm not the only weird one =). Unfortunatly when I contacted technical support with a detailed description of the problem and the steps I took to verify it... this is the response I got:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts. I'm sorry for the difficulty that you are having with Battlefield 2.
However, it sounds like a corrupt enrty in the registry. You may have to uninstall then reinstall the game. Kindly follow the steps below to completely remove the game from your system before reinstalling.
You can manually uninstall the game by removing the files and registry keys associated with it. Be sure to follow these steps exactly as they appear to prevent accidental file/program deletion on your system.
I've been playing computer games since the Apple II days, and I have to agree that recent single player experiences haven't been as fullfilling as I remember older games being.
I remember playing Civ and later Civ 2 for literally days at a time. I remember playing single player Doom all the way through and going back and doing it again and again trying to improve on my level statistics.
With the exception of Vice City (and now San Andreas), I just haven't had this level of involvment with any games in the last few years. Undoubtedly Halflife 2 is a better game than the original Doom, but after playing it through once, I feel no real desire to play it again.
Part of this, of course, can actually be attributed to the "story" aspects of most modern games. In order to be considered a great game now-adays a game HAS to have a coherent and enjoyable story. Unfortunatly, these stories actually DETRACT from the replayability of the title (at least for me) I no more want to replay thirty or forty hours of world saving than I'd want to re-read the Hobbit two weeks after I'd read it. Perhaps in a year or two when my mind has calcified over the plot details this'll be different.
The real killer for me however, has been the rise of multiplayer gaming. No matter how intriguing the gameplay and story of a singleplayer game are, they just can't compare to the thrill and challenge of playing with other actual people. Doom co-op on the Highschool Lan was an epiphany... and then I realised there was a "Deathmatch" mode as well. Then Quakeworld rolled around and suddenly I wasn't just limited to playing against my buddies after school.
For better or worse, multiplayer is here to stay. I'd rather spend my allbeit more-limited play time beating up on the script kiddies in Battlefield 2 or in the sublime fps experience that is Red Orchestra than forgetting to pee yet alone eat while playing Civ 4.... At least FPSes give you a "load" break every once in a while =)
Not to mention spawning a whole new class of consumer electronics.... iPod and clones, home and car.mp3 players, "value added" cd-players that play.mp3's.
I keep waiting for someone to come out with a PDA based around the same toshiba harddrives Apple uses in the iPod (or similar HD... I'm too lazy to google and see if one exists). Apple's proven that they can eliminate most shock and battery life problems inherent in a harddrive by aggressive caching and spinning down the drive, what's stopping someone developing a PDA around the drive? And it really wouldn't bother me too much if Apple came out with a PDA, at least the UI won't suck... and that's getting more important as I age and the old video game muscle starts to spasm...
Honeslty, I can't see myself dropping $500 on a new PDA until It can store 15 gigs of mp3s AND act as a cell phone. Since I'm carrying a PDA, iPod, and phone anyway, there's little point in replacing my venerable old Palm III until I can replace the other devices as well.
Honestly I'm not sure I like this concept. The real economy is not a zero-sum equation. New wealth can always be created in a myriad of ways (mining gold as one example, you put in labor and get out a *hard* commodity) without anyone neccesarily losing out.
It would seem to me that Project Entropia *is* going to be zero-sum. The only way for new weath to come into the economy is from real world money. It certainly wouldn't be plausible for the developer to add new wealth to the virtual world as this would cost them real resouces. Thus for anyone to actually make money playing this game, they would do so at the expense of other players.
P.T. Barnum aside, the idea of getting rich at others expense doesn't particularly sit well with me. The only way I can see to make this viable is for players to make money by selling services of some sort in game. Thus the person you are selling too at least recieved the experience for their buck.
Still, I am glad that casinos are legal most places even though I don't frequent them. If you enjoy this sort of thing, more power to you. I just hope that most people realize what they are getting into.
> "... brings the wireless providers into the mix (it's probably their cell-phone towers)."
Why bother with cell towers... the power company owns more towers, is much less likely to worry about future competition when fixing lease rates etc... and most of them are already leasing space on their towers to lots of other companies for traditional radio relays etc. The power co I used to work for even has wan connectivity to a lot of local towers for that very reason... truck radios etc, broadcast only as far as the local tower, any relaying is then done over land line.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if he meant DHS instead of NSA...
Methinks Kevin Martin is going to be running for public office soon. Or maybe I'm just so cynical that whenever I see a government agency actually working in my interest I start looking for ulterior motives...
The question is whether they're going to free the crosswords. Not to shortz the rest of the paper... but that's what everyone really cares about.
I can verify from personal experience that MY cell phone does cause interference with radios. I'm a Private Pilot and I have a two year old Sony Ericsson. If I forget to turn the phone off, I can hear a cycling beep sound in my headset every time the phone is transmitting (i.e. ranging to a new cell tower or checking my email etc.) The VHF set also shows that it's receiving, so its actually picking something up through the antenna.
It's not particularly loud, and I haven't had any trouble hearing ATC over it. On a commercial jet... with several hundred cell phones, and the much higher importance of ATC calls under IFR... I can see where it could be a major problem.
Are there ways to solve the problem? Sure. Is it really worth spending the resources to test and resolve in light of the social factors? I'd say no. I personally consider time spent on commercial flights as downtime. I don't want people to be able to get ahold of me, I want to read a book or watch a good movie.
If you really are important enough you HAVE to be in communication 24/7... well buy your own jet =)
I think Nintendo itself can claim prior art.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper/ circa 1984...
Is it just me, or does the Xelibri look way too much like a monthly package of birth control pills?
Erm... doesn't Holographic imply three dimensions? Wouldn't it be cubic inch?
I live in Southern Illinois (colloquially known as North Kentucky). I can honestly tell you the only reason Rod Blagojevich was elected is because his name is as far from 'Ryan' as possible without using crylic or cuniform.
I'd personally like the state of Illinois to donate the income tax I paid them last year to the ESA.
... A way to force companies to just pack it in... Add the number of customers a company has to the number of people a company employes... and if you can get that many signartures plus one.. the company has to sell off all its assets, split the proceeds up among the shareholders, and have its name added to a "Never Allow" list with the Trademark office.
So a company like SCO... with no real customers... and "As of February 1, 2005 190 employees." (http://ir.sco.com/faq.cfm) We'd just need everyone who's posted in this tread so far to vote to shut them down!
They jumped the shark years ago... now they've crossed the Archeron and are trying to figure out how to pay the ferryman.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A678576
Jesus... and I thought it took a long time to format a 100gb drive with NTFS... Please don't give Microsoft a petabyte to play with... Windows Event Horizon (shipping in 2011) will have a default install footprint of 250 terrabytes...
Here's a direct link to the .pdf of the original letter from the Canadian Red Cross
gamelaw.org
I can't imagine that this is enforceable... The Army has been using the same symbol at least since Korea =)
google.com
In truth, while multiple monitors is the pancea, if you want something that works today, you should take a look at Natural Point's Track IR product.
It's pointless for FPS games, but for flight and driving Sims it's wonderfully immersive.
Basically you wear a hat with three goofy reflectors on it... the Track IR shines an IR LED at you, and watches the movements of the reflectors. It then translates small movements of your head into larger movements on the screen. Sounds like a gimic, until you try it. Then you realise that you rely on your eyes a lot more for positional data than you do on actual motion.
I play Pacific Fighters and Enemy Engaged Comanche Vs. Havoc fairly regularly. EECH is truely beautiful with the Track IR... switch it into IHIDDS mode, and the chaingun shoots where you look =)
This is support for multiple monitors via the Matrox Parhelia card. The interesting thing about the Matrox is that it treats multiple monitors as one large monitor. Say you had three 1024x786 native panels plugged into it... the operating system (and games) thought it was one large monitor with 3072x768 resolution. This meant that all a game had to do to support multiple monitors was offer support for large weird resolutions, which is fairly easy to do in a totally 3d game. Unfortunatly the Parhelia is several years old, and an order of magnitude behind Nvidia and ATI in terms of fill rate.
When you plug multiple monitors into a new Nvidia or ATI card (or cards in SLI or Crossfire), they actually show up to the OS as additional monitors. This is actually the perfered behaviour because it lets you use monitors with different resolutions and sizes together and in non-traditional arangements. Unfortunatly, it means that actual multiple monitor support has to be specifically coded into games.
As far as actual support afaik the only game that offers REAL multiple monitor support is MS FlightSim '98 and above. I'm sure there are others out there either natively or through mods, and I'd be interested to hear about them.
What killed Novell in the first place was it's inability to intigrate with PCs running Windows. Everyone wanted an Exchange server - so they installed a domain controller - And once they had an NT domain in place there wasn't a whole lot of reason to keep the extra network login box around.
NDS is to this day a better network managment system than Active Directory despite being basically abandoned what, five years ago?
What I keep waiting to see from Novell is a linux based desktop solution given away for free... and a competativly priced server product (Novell on a linux core instead of dos? Yum) and network management system based around NDS.
The only thing that would hold them back then is the same thing that killed them in the first place - You have to have an NT domain in place to effectivly use Exchange (at least for larger installations) - Perhaps it's time to bring Groupwise back with a Thunderbird front end? What's the status of the calandar app in the Mozilla suite anyway?
It'll come down to just how much money Microsoft is willing to dangle in front of Valve up-front for exclusivity (or at least semi-exclusivity).
Valve, of all companies, knows what a huge sales driver the mod / aftermarket community is. Just look at the record sales of Halflife 1 Game of the Year, Counterstrike, Opposing Force, Day of Defeat, etc. Packs, which basically involved NO development cost on Valve's part. These packs were either retail packaging of community created mods (Counterstrike, Day of Defeat) or low cost additional content created by third party studios. (Opposing Force). The primary impetous for purchase however was the ability to play any of the literally hundreds of other mods available free for download.
Now with Steam (admitedly forcibly) in place, Valve has a great system for distribution of other worthwhile mods and "content" packs.
I doubt seriously that Valve will be willing to dampen this revenue stream by moving to a console unless Microsoft offers them enough money to compensate.
...In Soviet Russia, the Buran fleet grounds you!
I would be willing to bet there's a corellation between numbers of MUD players and IT unemployment statistics...
After all... if you're unemployed you can play WoW or EQ...
But a MUD you can play at work and your boss thinks you're coding!
This is a verifiable and duplicatable bug. I've tried it on half a dozen PCs, with and without the patch, and even with different accounts. (A good friend of mine owns an internet cafe and we tried it on his boxen... he plays reverse moused to... I'm not the only weird one =). Unfortunatly when I contacted technical support with a detailed description of the problem and the steps I took to verify it... this is the response I got:
I've been playing computer games since the Apple II days, and I have to agree that recent single player experiences haven't been as fullfilling as I remember older games being.
I remember playing Civ and later Civ 2 for literally days at a time. I remember playing single player Doom all the way through and going back and doing it again and again trying to improve on my level statistics.
With the exception of Vice City (and now San Andreas), I just haven't had this level of involvment with any games in the last few years. Undoubtedly Halflife 2 is a better game than the original Doom, but after playing it through once, I feel no real desire to play it again.
Part of this, of course, can actually be attributed to the "story" aspects of most modern games. In order to be considered a great game now-adays a game HAS to have a coherent and enjoyable story. Unfortunatly, these stories actually DETRACT from the replayability of the title (at least for me) I no more want to replay thirty or forty hours of world saving than I'd want to re-read the Hobbit two weeks after I'd read it. Perhaps in a year or two when my mind has calcified over the plot details this'll be different.
The real killer for me however, has been the rise of multiplayer gaming. No matter how intriguing the gameplay and story of a singleplayer game are, they just can't compare to the thrill and challenge of playing with other actual people. Doom co-op on the Highschool Lan was an epiphany... and then I realised there was a "Deathmatch" mode as well. Then Quakeworld rolled around and suddenly I wasn't just limited to playing against my buddies after school.
For better or worse, multiplayer is here to stay. I'd rather spend my allbeit more-limited play time beating up on the script kiddies in Battlefield 2 or in the sublime fps experience that is Red Orchestra than forgetting to pee yet alone eat while playing Civ 4.... At least FPSes give you a "load" break every once in a while =)
Not to mention spawning a whole new class of consumer electronics.... iPod and clones, home and car .mp3 players, "value added" cd-players that play .mp3's.
I keep waiting for someone to come out with a PDA based around the same toshiba harddrives Apple uses in the iPod (or similar HD... I'm too lazy to google and see if one exists). Apple's proven that they can eliminate most shock and battery life problems inherent in a harddrive by aggressive caching and spinning down the drive, what's stopping someone developing a PDA around the drive? And it really wouldn't bother me too much if Apple came out with a PDA, at least the UI won't suck... and that's getting more important as I age and the old video game muscle starts to spasm...
Honeslty, I can't see myself dropping $500 on a new PDA until It can store 15 gigs of mp3s AND act as a cell phone. Since I'm carrying a PDA, iPod, and phone anyway, there's little point in replacing my venerable old Palm III until I can replace the other devices as well.
Honestly I'm not sure I like this concept. The real economy is not a zero-sum equation. New wealth can always be created in a myriad of ways (mining gold as one example, you put in labor and get out a *hard* commodity) without anyone neccesarily losing out.
It would seem to me that Project Entropia *is* going to be zero-sum. The only way for new weath to come into the economy is from real world money. It certainly wouldn't be plausible for the developer to add new wealth to the virtual world as this would cost them real resouces. Thus for anyone to actually make money playing this game, they would do so at the expense of other players.
P.T. Barnum aside, the idea of getting rich at others expense doesn't particularly sit well with me. The only way I can see to make this viable is for players to make money by selling services of some sort in game. Thus the person you are selling too at least recieved the experience for their buck.
Still, I am glad that casinos are legal most places even though I don't frequent them. If you enjoy this sort of thing, more power to you. I just hope that most people realize what they are getting into.
> "... brings the wireless providers into the mix (it's probably their cell-phone towers)."
Why bother with cell towers... the power company owns more towers, is much less likely to worry about future competition when fixing lease rates etc... and most of them are already leasing space on their towers to lots of other companies for traditional radio relays etc. The power co I used to work for even has wan connectivity to a lot of local towers for that very reason... truck radios etc, broadcast only as far as the local tower, any relaying is then done over land line.