Are you saying its possible to determine whether raising cows or other meat sources takes up more resources than growing plants? Cows eat a whopping ~ 100 lbs a day of feed! That's several tonnes into feeding just one cow (though I've no idea how many portions of meat you get out of that, but I'm guessing it's probably lousy efficiency).
I think I read somewhere that way more grain goes into feeding cattle (like, millions of tonnes more per year, as in the vast majority of grain produced) goes into feeding cattle rather than being eaten directly (which certainly seems plausible given how many cows we must go through and much they seem to eat).
We are omnivores after all, and from what I understand, at least some meat is part of a healthy diet. Actually, as omnivores we can live entirely and completely healthily on vegetables and fruit alone, but it is efficient (certainly it would be in the 'wild') to top that up with insects/the odd bit of of meat. Not that we can't handle much larger amounts of meat just fine too, of course (maybe not Elvis quantities with no side effects, but still a huge amount it would seem).
Worth pointing out we can't do the same the other way round though (i.e. we can't subsist entirely or even nearly exclusively on meat, or we'd die). Of course even mash/fries and peas count. Probably McDonald's milkshakes too (I think a primary ingredient in that is actually potato extract of some kind).
Alternately, as long as we're tossing around impossible-to-implement solutions, how about one where people just stop churning out children quite so often, and then we wouldn't have problems feeding everyone? The only sure fire way to do that seems to be to drive the education and wealth levels up. As soon as nations have become wealthy and educated people seem to stop having babies, with the birth rate levelling out completely, or falling (France and Japan have experienced this I think, and other European countries). The immigrant population invariably continues to increase, so they numbers stay up, but it seems like good news over all.
A good incentive to spread wealth and promote education globally I think. It seems like avoiding a nightmarish scenario of an over populated planet might be something that will take care of itself if we can bring everyone up to an equitable level.
PS: Minor pet hate (sorry for being a pain in the ass about this... ) but seeing the word 'carnivorous' used in relation to human diet windows me right up.:-) I of course know what you meant, but I like to point out for those that get it that while as omnivores, we can live exclusively on a diet of vegetables and fruit, we can't live on an exclusively (or even primarily - for long) meat diet.
Naturally there is always one guy at a table in a restaurant who likes to make a point by announcing he's a carnivore, as if he's part lion or perhaps part dinosaur, which I keep thinking would be like me claiming to have four stomachs for the digestion of cud, or something equally wacky.
Got to love being an omnivore though, even for just eating fruit and vegetables the pointy cutting teeth at the front are awesome and will still get to have flat grindy teeth at the back - must be better than having nothing but pointy teeth you can't mush stuff up with (as is observably inconvenient when cats or some dogs end up awkwardly trying to chew up big crunchy biscuits) or just boring old flat teeth you can't cut with. Yay for us.
Failures-at-life? That is an incredibly arrogant, ignorant statement.
"Yes, what were those immigrants thinking? They should be in college instead of dallying about the meat processing plants! Why, they're to blame for the suffering of the animals we eat. The dumb brutes have an electric cattle prod and they know how to use it."
I know what *I'm* thinking. Well I'm thinking you are maybe a racist. Or, in your defence, that people where you are who do that kind of work are most immigrant workers or minorities - which is a fair enough assumption but is not so true here IME (though that has started to change in the last couple of years due to new legislation).
I've know well three people who worked in processing plants (beef,chicken and fish) none of them immigrants (or minorities) or from anything like poor families. All - every one of them - had more formal education than I have had, and I know two of them were from wealthier families (not sure about the other). They all hated it (we've talked about it) but hey they are all grown men, they are the ones responsible for their own lives and their own choices.
Those who have had equal or better chances can't still at 30 (or older, in at least one of the above cases) can't credibly continue to blame 'society' for their bad life choices (and believe me, people with no good reason seem to do that endlessly - one of the aforementioned is a good for nothing relative of mine and it's his mantra). At some point it's only fair to expect grown adults to take responsibility for themselves.
You can think it's an "incredibly arrogant, ignorant statement" if you like, I left school before my 16th birthday, started work, got my own place at 17 (later, my first mortgage at 19), always paid my own way and never claimed a day of social security, I've just worked my ass off and by and large worked a fair bit harder than my contemporaries . Damn right I'm arrogant in that regard. If you want a better job, put the hours in till you're good enough and then go looking for it. What's standing in your way?
Incidentally, I think that's an outlook that most economic migrating (who are of course genuinely at a disadvantage, or they wouldn't be migrating) historically have the least difficulty with - they are already the one's who've been willing to up sticks and move to another country to find better work. Which is not something that most us will (thankfully) ever feel we have to go through.
what game are these people failing at? Life is about survival, if they work at the plant to make ends meet they are winning. You might still think you'd be a winner in that scenario, but I would be astoundingly pissed at myself if I ever ended up in a job half as bad as that (e.g. telesales, traffic warden, burger flipper).
I have exactly squat in the way of qualifications or higher education, and left home at 17 (no endless moochy moochy from parents syndrome here), I'm not a rocket scientist nor have I had inherited money to fall back on so I tend do be less than sympathetic to 'hard luck' stories from people old enough to be masters of their own destiny.
Mostly people don't care. If you think that, try brutally kicking a dog in front of them or try and get them to watch a video of a slaughter house (cows, pigs, chickens) in action.
I bet good money they care and find it quite distressing, but as I've said, that they try not to think about it too much. So, while virtually everyone know what slaughterhouses are really like, great effort goes into not thinking about it and into justifying it that it's okay because they are "just animals" (who do that sort of thing to each other anyway) and that's somehow they are all totally divorced from exclusively humans feelings (like pain, fear, suffering). You see the same arguments over and over.
A while back, a TV station showed a country cook (a bit of a twat, by all accounts) taking in a "normal" family out for a weekend for some traditional country life, which included him trapping, skinning, cooking and eating a rabbit. The family on the screen (all lardy burger munchers) all accused him of being 'an animal' for being so barbaric, and the program generated record complaints, even though he wasn't the least bit inhumane about it. It was seen as unacceptably barbaric to *show* (even though far worse goes on behind closed doors).
I quite accept you might not care what happens to animals or even possibly other people - I've met several people with that attitude to animals and other people - it is sociopathic behaviour however (and generally frowned upon in western society).
"I don't think anyone is claiming to be able to quantify life in a practical way (as if 1000 worms were equal to a single cow), but that doesn't invalidate choosing to be less, rather than more destructive" Where do you draw that line? You do realize the destruction caused in making your house, computer, clothes, etc. Wouldn't it be less destructive to just live on a farm and grow your own food? The answer is right there!
It might equally be phrased as:
"Just because you are not the re-incarnation of Jebus himself should not be taken as license to spend your entire life being a complete cunt to the rest of the Universe."
As a working example of the principle in action:
When faced with a scenario like "Do you want to order (a) the veal (b) the free range game bird or the (c) vegetable bake?"
(a) The answer Jason Voorhees would pick (this is only slightly better than "Just bring me a live baby and I'll drink blood straight from it's neck"). (b) A reasonable answer. (c) Extra credit.
Actually, I was going to post that the original prion/BSE post was a bit manic
It is a bit, but then I keep thinking about it and it gets *worse*.:-)
I think GM is in principle great, and I don't think that wizzend looking organic food tastes better than super-hyped pesticide food or those odd screwed-with strawberries (the ones that are insanely huge AND taste really sweet). In a blind test I can't tell the difference between an organic potato or a non-organic one (though in a non-blind test it's easy to spot the small organic one with big pits in - that still cost more per lbs - a mile off). My mother disagrees strongly, but then she collects "healing crystals" and likes tarot cards. God damn hippies.
I am still worried about how much in it's infancy this stuff all is though - I'm not personally worried I'm going to get Brain Cancer from eating too many GM Oranges, but on a global scale. It reminds me of mass produced medication was handled in the 50's, when it was a fledgling industry. Though it's not like we have all the answers now, clearly things have improved and we have at least some processes in place which (as hinted at in the summary) we largely don't have for food (GM or cloned), yet.
While not a hoax, it was certainly hyped up by the media - but it was not the media that caused the political storm of other countries using it as an excuse to protect their markets (France in particular IIRC, though they were by no means alone) which lead to a 'collapse' of the export market (and subsequent subsidy handouts, which in the UK are greatly reshaping - for the better I think - the way we manage land).
That was a big part of the story that was hyped up (and was a big deal), as was the poor way in which the government handled the 'crisis' (which was the biggest story of all IIRC). It is true that BSE is much more common in other countries, and even seen as nothing unusual (though always a problem if it is detected in a herd) and it may well have blown over if the government hadn't handled it so oddly, though I think your right to implicate the media as bearing responsibility too.
"How many people in this world have died to mad cow disease? Less the a hundred? You have a better chance of dying in a swimming pool, driving a car, riding a bike, or being struck by lightening."
Oh for sure. Though if they had kept at it for years and we hadn't changed the practice, it could easily have been a much bigger problem further down the line, and it's entirely possible we'd discover other long term issues too (even things we might be passing on, and that might impact over generations, for example).
It seems a slim risk, a bit like a (bad) far fetch sci-fi movie plot, but the BSE/CJD has shown weird ass stuff like that can happen, with globalised food production it could represent a greater and entirely unnecessary risk.
I don't avoid GM foods particularly (personally, I like the big, round juicy fruit sprayed with no-doubt cancer causing pesticides more than the small, knobbly Organic stuff) and I think globalisation is generally a Good Thing (for political and economic reasons), it doesn't seem prudent to get cocky about this sort of thing though.
We've been there before with so many other products (e.g. if you are pregnant be sure to (not) take some Thalidomide to help with the morning sickness and as an anti-inflammatory for your swollen ankles). It just seems crazy to rush headlong and 'assume' it will all be fine and no one will get hurt.
As far as cloning goes... you are not going to die eating a cloned animal.
If you eat one once, I'm sure it's just fine, maybe even safer than eating a random cow you don't know the history of (if the cloning process was of very high quality and all things being equal). That doesn't describe a very likely future scenario though.
If millions of people effectively eat that same cow for decades, and it turns out there is something funny about it's genetic makeup that has a knock on effect for even a small percentage of the population, then a lot of people could find themselves with some serious problems. It might be increase susceptibility to certain cancers, it could make people more prone to Alzheimer's, it could be another neurological condition, we just don't know, but we do know it can, and has happened before. And for what? To save a couple of pence on each hamburger sold (*literally*). Not worth going in for all guns blazing IMO.
I'm not try to be melodramatic about it, but think about how many screwed up two-headed, six-legged or three tailed goats get created for every decent quality clone that goes in front of the camera and even the 'good' clones don't last long - a clone is, in many ways, the age of the original PLUS it's own age (never mind the other problems under the surface due to damaged DNA).
That is, if you were to take a 35 year old human, and clone him, at 15 they'd have medical complaints (including cancers) you'd only expect to see on a 50 year old. Even with a impossibly perfect cloning process, the individual would be lucky to live to be 35 themselv
Won't someone think of the collateral damage to the helpless invertebrates?
Just to treat that argument seriously for a minute:
What about all the invertebrates killed in the production of the tonnes of grain to feed to the cow? Cows eat around 100 lbs a day, that's a lot of feed and consequently requires intensive farming (typically things like soya in the US, not so much grass - contrary to what's regularly shown in dairy commercials).
Additionally, it's reasonable to suppose that worms suffer less than cow's do when they are inadvertently killed now and then (the number killed would still be pail by comparison) as they are not as developed lifeforms. The panic, fear (stampeding) and abuse that in slaughterhouses is well known, it's not like the minimum wage failures-at-life who work in rendering plants actually give a crap about animal welfare, they've got an electric cattle prod and they know how to use it.
The increasingly popular practice of slaughtering animals by cutting their throats and leaving them to (slowly) bleed to death so that they meat can be sold as Halal is not something we should shrug off as 'okay', it's barbaric frankly. People tend not to like thinking about the production process, certainly it's not something that comes up in school, for example, it's kept out of the way where we don't have to think about it.
Typically, people say to themselves 'animals don't feel pain or fear like we do', while there is no denying that cows are not exactly equipped with the sharpest tools in the box, anyone who has had a cat or dog (or even say, a horse) knows they can be happy, bored, confused, in a bad mood and dream in a way that's instantly recognizable to us (and of course, people can and do eat cats and dogs too).
I don't think anyone is claiming to be able to quantify life in a practical way (as if 1000 worms were equal to a single cow), but that doesn't invalidate choosing to be less, rather than more destructive. It is surely better to eat what you hunt, than to hunt and kill purely for self gratification, for example.
I certainly squat/spray things round the house that are liable to bite or string me (mosquitoes, hornets, etc.) but if it's just a bee or a spider I pop in a jar and bung it out the window, it's not a big deal unless you are a total pansy. Though, I actually trapped the last mosquito in my room in a jar and chucked it out the window, though here the mosquito's - while just as noisy - are big and slow and easy to catch, much like the bees here (YMMV - you wouldn't likely catch me doing the same thing in the Mediterranean, for example).
Self styled 'hard men' often seem to love squashing spiders and other harmless bugs (even Woodlice) I've noticed, and usually not even with their bare hands (more often armed with a primitive makeshift twatting weapon). I'm not sure what that is all about and (as little as I apparently know about women) they don't seem to be impressed with that sort of behavior, perhaps other guys are and I'm just not getting it. I would maybe be a bit impressed if someone killed a hornet with their bare hands, but killing slowly moving crane flies with a bit of rolled up paper is like a level 60 ganking level 30's in Hillsbrad Foothills.
First we had the geniuses who went ahead with the money saving plan "Let's feed sheep's brains to cows!" which resulted in mad cow disease (which, when infected meat is eaten, can cause incurable and fatal neurological disease CJD in humans). Feeding meat to cows was clearly bad and wrong in ways that don't (shouldn't) need explaining to anyone and *blammo*, well what do you know, karma bites.
OT: Interestingly, Wikipedia says that in the US testing kits for BSE are banned (and presumably only conducted by the FDA then), and states "US Sixty-five nations have full or partial restrictions on importing U.S. beef products because of concerns that U.S. testing lacks sufficient rigor. As a result, exports of U.S. beef declined from $3.8 billion in 2003, before the first mad cow was detected in the US, to $1.4 billion in 2005.". Per head of population, CJD incidents in the US seem to be lower than in Europe/UK though, as US cattle seem to be typically fed on soya (which is at least vaguely sensible, it's a plant for starters - though oddities like artificial 'fish' proteins in GM soya give some cause for concern).
If feeding sheep to cows can screw people up through contamination of the food chain, there has surely got to be some grounds for being seriously concerned about the prospect of problems that might come from consuming cloned meat (specifically if it's on a regular basis - e.g. the same clone being eaten by people all over the world every time they go to a McDonald's, one nasty defect and *blammo* (again)).
As with the BSE crisis, if/when something goes wrong, I suspect the people and companies responsible for producing the goods will not even be investigated or in any way penalised (in fact, they will probably get huge subsidies as cattle farmers in the UK did to make up for the subsequent drop in the market, even though it was their own mess and it was public money that was spent cleaning it up).
Not as big a problem as if one of the clones had a cellular mutation that ended up giving it superpowers (telekinesis, invincibility, the ability to make chocolate milk, etc.) but still, I suspect This Will Not End Well.
It could of course be a much more humane way way to produce veal, dairy cows (without having to drag calves away at birth and feed them supplements) and healthily beef cows without resorting to steroids (though I suspect the industry will keep using them), so it seems not to all bad from a consumer perspective. Ultimately, it would be great to be able to produce meat without having to produce real living animals in the first place. Transmetropolitan 'human foot on a stick' anyone? I hear it's toe licking good...
I said "unjustly" in the sense that the PS3 listings that were being removed clearly met all of craigslist's rules.
I think many here would argue it's still just, irrespective of it meeting craigslist rules or not.
But scalping is a good thing in that it makes it possible for people willing to pay more
Alternatively, it make it nigh on impossible for people willing to pay a reasonable price to get hold of one, and so the products (or tickets) go unused, ultimately satisfying very few people (and so being detrimental overall).
I've seen this both at events and with consoles (typically with loads of people then complaining they couldn't get tickets/consoles through offical channels and having witnessed myself items subsequently being withdrawn from eBay or failing to meet minimum bits, and in the case of tickets, loads of scalpers trying to sell tickets at the door to no avail, and the venue being only 3/4 full despite tickets having 'sold out' in the first hour). The 'empty seats' issue being one of the reasons why tickets for major sports events are often so heavily controlled and tied to a name on photo ID these days (due to unused tickets meaning less people attending the event, and so harming sales of food/drink/t-shirts, etc).
Loads of scalpers end up with excess goods (consoles, tickets, etc) - and potential customers (gamers, music fans, sports fans) end up pissed off and can't buy what they wanted. The summary is right, it's not a good way to make money, if it was I think it's likely event ticket scalpers would not resemble homeless people (as they invariably do). It's seems evident that most people who feel the need to result to gambling on being able to resell consoles as a way to make money are not comfortably off either (if they are, then they are irredeemably greedy).
It only makes money for a very select few, as we've simply seen that there are not tens of thousands of people willing to pay insane prices for consoles rather than wait two months, hell there are barely hundreds of people willing to pay significantly over the RRP, yet scalpers screw up by vastly overestimating demand. "Oh look, that one guy made 10,000 USD selling one on eBay! I should be able to get that too!" (and thinking they are hard done by and blaming others when it doesn't work for them).
e.g. Saying things like "The concert was promoted poorly", or "the team/band/console is no good" rather than thinking they were undone by their own greed.
I saw my I got my X-Box 360 bundle in a store in the middle of London for 380 UKP (IIRC) about a month after they came out. Even though there were no units in store anywhere else, it sat there for a week before I went 'Screw it, I'm thinking of getting an HDTV next month or so, may as well get one now if it's only 80 UKP more, it's not like I'm hard up'. The same story is repeating itself now with the Wii and PS3, in that people arn't willing to pay much over the RRP and would rather just wait.
There is currently a Wii in the same shop also for sale at 360 UKP (bizzarely enough). Normal RRP is 180 UKP, can't get them in any other shops, it has been there for two weeks just being ignored (frankly even I'm surprised, nearly bought it myself). This is a shop that scalps professionally, right in the middle of London (Zone 1, TCR) and people are not paying it much attention even at Christmas. Looks like people are waiting for more stock (which will invariably be around at the end of Jan). They also have a PS3, but it's an import version (no idea what crazy price it's selling at, or if it's even for sale).
If there were no scalpers, people would just hire placeholders.
I doubt that. Only the very wealthy (or incredibly determined and fiscally irresponsible;-) could afford to have someone do that for a reasonable amount of money - or you'd have to give the job to a person who needed the money so badly most people would be worried about them doing something like scalping i
MySpace, Digg and even Second Life do not go down for hours at a time every week (as WoW invariably does, with it's sure-fire maintenance overruns), the only MMO worse than WoW in this respect has been Eve Online with it's daily hour long maintenance (which also frequently overruns).
Servers do not need to be taken down to do backups, and updates to code should only require a downtime in the order of a small number of minutes. It's just lazy programming or bad management that don't care enough about the user experience to prioritise this feature (or both), it's not like it's a small team of developers in a startup struggling to make a game here - they are obviously good developers and they have the resources to get it right. It's great to see they are getting round to it at last!
The quality of the the title is generally outstanding, certainly compared to the quality of titles in the industry as a whole. It's a rock solid game with great attention to detail - brilliantly executed and immediately appealing to both first-time MMO players and more 'hardcore' gamers. However, the apporach to server management is dreadful and starkly contrasts with this.
As I write this, EU Battlegroup 5 (a cluster of 5 different servers) is totally offline so players on that server can't play and may not be able to for some time (I expect it will come up boxing day, if we are lucky). Unless Blizzard improve the process for managing servers the user experience is still going to be poor in this regard.
Sadly, the customer support bad too : unlike in Soth Park:WoW you can't *really* phone support, you have to use a web based interface or raise a ticket in game, where upon a flunky will fail to understand the problem (using diversionary tactics such as not reading your tickets properly and failing to understand words of more than two syllables), tell out right lies (such as claiming there was a server roll back when there wasn't and that's why it's fucked up and they aren't going to help you, even though your problem is specifically addressed in the AUP and it says they will do everything they can to fix if it does happen) flat out ignoring your queries (had this with billing) and of course they don't care if your server does go down, they don't have a way to escallate that sort of thing it seems.
And so, you end up posting on/. about it on Christmas day.:-(
Guestures will never take off as a means of user input. It will be a cold day in hell before Wii see that sort of interface on a home computing system.
More seriously, what is so difficult to imagine a system in the future (ala MR) that can react to slight, minor movements (something the Wii allows for with it's remote - technically you need need to make over the top movements to use it, but that's fun to do). You needen't keep your hands in the air right out in front of you, though subtle and lazy movements might have looked odd on screen.
Not that I think the UI in MR was very good from a practicle point of view - surely a PITA to use (would rather have a decent form interface, tabbed UI and maybe spider charts for searching through data as seen in MR).
This interface from the BBC series 'Torchwood' (a Doctor Who spinnoff) is similar, and quite cool though - based on the interface used in the series itself and has some good bonus / background material for fans of the show. As with Minority Report, the LCD screens in Torchwood can only display varing shades of the colour blue for some reason (even when playing back FMV).
Thankfully it also has a more practical and boring HTML version (the BBC seem to understand the importance of accessibility).
It was on x86 first though (NeXT Step / Open Step / Rhapsody - which could be described just Open Step with some new window decoration, but largely the same widget set). It seems almost certain development was largely concurrent and that they didn't really drop support for x86 (even if they did focus testing and optimisation on the 'live' target platform, PPC).
I quite agree. I am typically not in favour of reducing functionality for increased security when there are viable alternatives, but disabling HTML email seems like a smart move in this case. It's simple and unlikely to be really inconvenient and it's had numerous problems for ages, I'm more a bit surprised they are only doing this now (personally I would have started with it off in an environment like the DoD).
While its true that many users unwittingly generate HTML email, pretty much all clients that do generate plain text versions too (using MIME/multipart) - it's easy to configure a mail server just to strip the HTML parts (not sure about Exchange, but certainly with something like Exim). Of course if Microsoft took a better approach to handling potential issues like this (by handling HTML messages better by default), I don't think anyone would have even seen HTML formatted messages as a risk (though they'd still be inconvinent in some other scenarios).
It's probably not a Mac Mini - it's physically clearly too small to contain a hard drive and large amounts of flash memory is an unlikely scenario and of course at that size (and with no fan) it would be a big struggle to fit a full system onto a board that small. Even without the optical drive the mac mini is what, twice as big still? (with the PCMCIA + slot + BT attachment and HD taking up a lot of that, but also the fan and heatsync IIRC).
It's surely going have an embedded OS's of some sort, though a basic Darwin system with a custom GUI app (nothing as heavyweight as Quartz) seems more likely than anything really resembling Mac OS X. Though I rather expect it will just have a custom embedded OS as I can't see why they'd bother to use the Darwin Kernel in this instance, for the same reasons as they didn't with the iPod - name there are plenty of existing serviceable embedded OS's to choose from (and it would also be probably easier to just have someone write a new one specifically for the iTV).
It would certainly be way cooler if it had a working UNIX alike OS (open for hackery) but I don't think that's in Apple's best interest as I don't think it would be the simplest/cheapest option for them. Still, it's got to have a decent framebuffer I guess (given the point of the thing is to display video at a decent resolution) so, assuming it's using some non-bizzaro embedded chipset, you probably could fit a cut down Linux / BSD kernel on it (even if it's just with some basic software - giving you something like a Sun Ray system - maybe mount what you can't fit on it off an NFS share or just re-display an exported/tunneled X session).
They are when the content is as dynamic as it is in Second Life... as you would realise, had you put a little thought into it.
Regarding "is as dynamic as it is in Second Life" it is of course worth me pointing out that most objects in SL you'd expect to be dynamic (cars, jet packs, robot suits, etc.) have little or no actual animation going on. If you are lucky you'll get some (annoying) scripted sound and a single short and simple animation (for example, a door might open and close on someone's house).
From an end user perspective functionally it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the level of interactivity of objects were pre-built once the creator was ready to publish them. You could still have doors that open when you click the handle, windows that can be rolled down on a car, wheels that spin, lights that flash or wing mirrors that could be moved. You could still have buildings with revolving doors, escalators and be able to place other objects in them if you wanted.
I don't know why you don't get that. If you still disagree, try giving me an example of an interactive object that you couldn't do with a pre-rendered model (bearing in mind my previous comment about objects being able to be made of objects and support for scripting and dynamic boundary boxes). Two or three would be good, some nice practical examples, a sentence each should be fine unless you'd like to expand on them.
If you actually knew a little bit about 3D engines
I'm a developer for a living, and I've written, for fun, 3D software starting with QuickDraw 3D (going back a decade) and moving to OpenGL. I don't do anything as interesting as games development for a living but I do know quite a bit about existing engines, model design, level design and event scripting in modern 3D software. I'm not about to write an engine any time soon, but I'm comfortable with OpenGL, and discussing features of modern engines (parallax mapping, GLSL, volumetric shadows vs. shadow mapping - and other neat stuff SL's graphics engine doesn't have).
The developers of Havoc would say THE SAME THINGS AS I AM... their demo is not actually dynamic, most of the textures etc are precalculated. It is demonstrating the physics, not showing off the 3d card.
I disagree. I certainly think the Havok developers would make a robust co-hereat argument either way. I tend to think they would disagree with your apparent assertion that writing your own graphics engine (such as it is) rather than just licensing one (like SL licensed their physics engine) would be the best way to go.
Actually, I was thinking of one of the completely straight up texture-less demo's from Havok, as it happens. I did laugh at the line 'textures etc are precalulated' -(e.g. Do you think SL uses procedural textures? What do you actually think 'etc' might include? How would you imagine that line of argument makes SL look better, rather than worse (given the straight up Havok demo's are real physics and animation time too)?
As mentioned, SL uses the Havok engine as does Halo and - most relevant of all here - Half Life 2, it just doesn't preform as well, and that's even though it's level of sophistication when it comes to object interaction is not nearly as impressive as HL2. Not that it needs to, but it could at least try and come close enough to not be the sort of nightmare users have described try to use here. The excesses possible in Garry's mod for HL2 (with scriptable objects, AI, rag dolls and real time physics) are a good example of what SL could be be like, if it was any good.
Now I wouldn't use the HL2 engine because it's not really up to handling very large terrain (unlike the Unreal engine, or the ID's new engine for Quake Wars, or even Soldner's terrain engine - personally that's my favourite part of it, I think it's technically kick ass) but is no reason in the world why you couldn't add dynamically downloaded pre-built scripted objects (take something like the car from HL2) to an engine like Unrea
Note for anyone reading this, my previous post was not 'flamebait', it's true, the software sucks for the reasons I've outlined. I have nothing against Linden Labs or Second Life or any other online 'virtual worlds' vendors and it's fair to point out they almost all suck for largely the same reasons, but suck they do.
None of the 3D engines you talk about could handle the job. All of them precompute and cache things to speed up the display.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can easily have a scripting engine, set item box boundries and define levels of interactivity (and even do animations) all in real time using mostly pre-rendered objects (e.g. in the case of animations even making an 'object', such as a beach buggy, out of say 5 objects tied together (i.e. a chassis object and four wheel objects)).
Second Life cannot do that because absolutely everything in the world is dynamic.
Not so, which you'd realise if you'd put a little thought into it.
Now, perhaps, the engine could do with optimising more... but you cannot compare it with Quake/Unreal etc etc. It does MUCH more work per frame.
There is no perhaps about it, even for what it is doing in real time it should be a lot faster, they have do be doing something deserving of The Daily WTF for it to be running as badly as it does, truly. The developers of the major physics engines, such as Havoc, have real time demo code that puts the poor performance of SL's engine into prespective (demos which do a lot more with a large number of primitive objects and with really good collition detection on them).
I am quite aware of the (obvious) differences between the SL engine and say the Unreal, Quake or Battlfield series engines (with their pre-rendered worlds and objects). The whole idea behind having pre-built models is that it would solve a lot of the problems that SL developers have not been able to resolve.
None of that precludes it from still from having fully interactable pre-built models that can be downloaded on the fly (in fact, IIRC, the Quake series has had the option for players to have their own models that can be sent out to clients only the fly during a match since Quake 2 / 3, which must be like ~ 8 years ago now - and that was when most players at the time where 56k - a simple example, but proves the point somewhat).
A more relevant example might be Soldner - while it is infamous for a myriad of other reasons (it was abandoned commercially before being finished, has broken netcode and was quite unstable and JoWooD, the production company behind it, are widely disliked) the actual 3D performs well and looks reasonable, has fully deformable terrain that streches for miles, and is highly interactable (with scriptable pre-rendered objects - e.g. buildings with walls that can be demolished by tank shells, destructable doors and windows).
It's not a huge leap to think of how you'd then add the dynamic downloading of pre-built (scripted) objects.
Don't we wail about Newbies everywhere else? There could be a side benefit that only certain people "get it" and stay. Anyone who doesn't... "doesn't deserve to be there".
In this case, I think the problem is the interface is terrible and clearly designed by someone who doesn't 'get it' - personally I find it easier to create my own objects in OpenGL in my own code than using their interface to do the same thing, it really is that clunky. Even moving around is painful thanks to floaty controls and because the client side collision detection is terrible. That's some pretty basic stuff to have nailed down, I would be embarrassed to have written this software.
Added to that the 'real time streaming' aspect of it is dire too. Either their peering/transit isn't that great, or, I suspect, their systems often just can't handle the load. The client does nothing to help matters but not caching sufficiently, and being very slow to read from cache when it is. It doesn't handle drawing-in objects in the world well either, no attempt to fill them in nicely (when it could draw a construction banner around them while it loads a building or given area, for example).
Lastly, the rendering performance, features and quality of 3D engine are all poor! Even on an AMD-FX CPU, a couple of gigs of DDR RAM and two 7800 GTX cards in SLI it's still slow as hell (even without it really bothering to do things like collision detection). God knows what it's doing, it performs like a developers 'my first DirectX 3D environment' run on an old Pentium 2 Celeron (really, genuinely).
The whole thing is an over hyped marketing exercise of no technical merit IMO, and it's never going to take off because it's so badly broken (unless it's entirely re-worked, to the extent it's a new product - but I figure that's highly unlikely). Star Wars Galaxy with it's player built cities w/ deforming terrain (but fixed 'craftable' items) was far better executed technically, and even it wasn't all that great in that respect (for example, it too suffered from pop up because they didn't bother to put in client side caching for player placed world objects).
It certainly is an exclusive community - essentially just of people all trying to make money selling goods, mostly to no-one and (believe it or not, it's really true) a large furry community, for some reason I can't fathom. I don't think may people who arn't trying to make money on it are interested in using the software beyond a brief trial for a couple of days.
Personally, if they didn't know how to write their own engine (which they clearly didn't) I think they should have done what both World of Warcraft and Lineage 2 (and 3) have done and just licensed the Unreal engine (or used similar). Then content creators could have created models in a decent external modelling tool, allowing them to add sophisticated animations to them. The collision detection would work, the performance would be great and getting the controls right would have been easy (just a case of 'tweak a the example code from the engine vendor'.
The Metaverse concept of Second Life is still attractive, but the Linden Labs implementation is just stupidly bad. Same problem with Active Worlds and a host of other similar offerings. It's like no one in these company has ever tried an MMOG (or indeed used any interface featuring standard click to move / WASD controls). I can understand a lack of polish, but the consistent inability of these companies to get the fundamentals like movement right is something I find mind boggling.
FYI, where I am, 20 USD will get you no more than 2 medium lattes from Starbucks (YMMV).
I do think people shouldn't whine that they spent 20 USD on a game and now feel burned given it seemed obvious what to expect from the extensive in game footage and screen shots released in advance. It was clearly not going to be up to the same standard as the the first SiN game and from the in the in-game footage both the level design and game play look pretty uninspired (serviceable, but rather tedious).
I think it was best SiN died now rather than continuing to flog a dead horse. The first title was _really_ good, this follow came across more like a Hollywood sequel style attempt to cash in on the name. Though lack luster, technically the offering seemed competently executed. Anyone with any competence would have immediately realised how bland the proposal was.
I would bet good money this was a management screw up, and that someone without the relevant experience or ability (i.e. some weasel who knows bupkis about games) was in charge of overseeing the development (that would also explain why much of the team has now split). Anyone in management who was even vaguely competent, and actually plays games now and again, would surely have realised how badly lacking the proposed follow up was before development had begun.
(Sadly, even in low level management having a completely lack of familiarity with products being developed seems to be par for the course in many companies.)
What does that have to do with the very real poisoning of a British citizen?
I appreciate that not paying any real attention to events outside the US and wading in half cocked are common national pastimes, but even so, if you (and the previous poster) knew anything about the story then the point the parent was making might not have gone right over your head as it has done.
The media in the UK are all but making out everyone is at risk from radiation poisoning as a result of contamination, with references to the not less than three aircraft, and various hotels and restaurants visited by the victim that are showing traces of contamination. Obviously, the public is not at any risk from that sort of contamination (at least, no more than they are just living in some of the more radioactive cities in the UK). That's why it's relevant that it's not liable to harmful unless ingested.
As far as all responsible news sources are currently reporting, no associates of Mr Litvinenko have actually 'fallen ill' even though a number of people are also contaminated. Again, explicit relevancy there (they are not liable to actually become ill just as a result of hanging around near Mr Litvinenko - even though, as with his former partner, they are technically now contaminated with Polonium-210).
I belive that as both + and - characters (also used for this sort of thing) are valid in the local part (as per RFC2822) they could equally be used to identify entirely seperate mailboxes, belonging to different users.
It's certainly not unique to GMail, but it seems valid to refer to it as a feature of GMail (as it's certainly not supported by all providers and to knowleage there is no overwhelming school of thought or indeed RFC that says mail servers ought to behave that way).
Personally I prefer the @username.domain.com approach, but YMMV.
Yeah, but with a 50" Plasma, on the plus side I don't have to have the heating on in the living room - though I do have to turn on the aircon on if I'm staying in watching the TV during the summer (sadly, I'm not kidding).
Oh and that includes a standard mount and side panel speakers (though I have since had it mounted on the wall). About a week or two after I'd bought it, you could get the same deal from Richer Sounds for about 200 UKP less, that was the cheapest you could get them for back then. I expect prices will fall quite a bit again by this time next year too (making 1080p sets much more affordable).
Slashdot Mirror
I think I read somewhere that way more grain goes into feeding cattle (like, millions of tonnes more per year, as in the vast majority of grain produced) goes into feeding cattle rather than being eaten directly (which certainly seems plausible given how many cows we must go through and much they seem to eat). We are omnivores after all, and from what I understand, at least some meat is part of a healthy diet. Actually, as omnivores we can live entirely and completely healthily on vegetables and fruit alone, but it is efficient (certainly it would be in the 'wild') to top that up with insects/the odd bit of of meat. Not that we can't handle much larger amounts of meat just fine too, of course (maybe not Elvis quantities with no side effects, but still a huge amount it would seem).
Worth pointing out we can't do the same the other way round though (i.e. we can't subsist entirely or even nearly exclusively on meat, or we'd die). Of course even mash/fries and peas count. Probably McDonald's milkshakes too (I think a primary ingredient in that is actually potato extract of some kind).
A good incentive to spread wealth and promote education globally I think. It seems like avoiding a nightmarish scenario of an over populated planet might be something that will take care of itself if we can bring everyone up to an equitable level.
PS: Minor pet hate (sorry for being a pain in the ass about this
Naturally there is always one guy at a table in a restaurant who likes to make a point by announcing he's a carnivore, as if he's part lion or perhaps part dinosaur, which I keep thinking would be like me claiming to have four stomachs for the digestion of cud, or something equally wacky.
Got to love being an omnivore though, even for just eating fruit and vegetables the pointy cutting teeth at the front are awesome and will still get to have flat grindy teeth at the back - must be better than having nothing but pointy teeth you can't mush stuff up with (as is observably inconvenient when cats or some dogs end up awkwardly trying to chew up big crunchy biscuits) or just boring old flat teeth you can't cut with. Yay for us.
"Yes, what were those immigrants thinking? They should be in college instead of dallying about the meat processing plants! Why, they're to blame for the suffering of the animals we eat. The dumb brutes have an electric cattle prod and they know how to use it."
I know what *I'm* thinking. Well I'm thinking you are maybe a racist. Or, in your defence, that people where you are who do that kind of work are most immigrant workers or minorities - which is a fair enough assumption but is not so true here IME (though that has started to change in the last couple of years due to new legislation).
I've know well three people who worked in processing plants (beef,chicken and fish) none of them immigrants (or minorities) or from anything like poor families. All - every one of them - had more formal education than I have had, and I know two of them were from wealthier families (not sure about the other). They all hated it (we've talked about it) but hey they are all grown men, they are the ones responsible for their own lives and their own choices.
Those who have had equal or better chances can't still at 30 (or older, in at least one of the above cases) can't credibly continue to blame 'society' for their bad life choices (and believe me, people with no good reason seem to do that endlessly - one of the aforementioned is a good for nothing relative of mine and it's his mantra). At some point it's only fair to expect grown adults to take responsibility for themselves.
You can think it's an "incredibly arrogant, ignorant statement" if you like, I left school before my 16th birthday, started work, got my own place at 17 (later, my first mortgage at 19), always paid my own way and never claimed a day of social security, I've just worked my ass off and by and large worked a fair bit harder than my contemporaries . Damn right I'm arrogant in that regard. If you want a better job, put the hours in till you're good enough and then go looking for it. What's standing in your way?
Incidentally, I think that's an outlook that most economic migrating (who are of course genuinely at a disadvantage, or they wouldn't be migrating) historically have the least difficulty with - they are already the one's who've been willing to up sticks and move to another country to find better work. Which is not something that most us will (thankfully) ever feel we have to go through.
I have exactly squat in the way of qualifications or higher education, and left home at 17 (no endless moochy moochy from parents syndrome here), I'm not a rocket scientist nor have I had inherited money to fall back on so I tend do be less than sympathetic to 'hard luck' stories from people old enough to be masters of their own destiny. Mostly people don't care. If you think that, try brutally kicking a dog in front of them or try and get them to watch a video of a slaughter house (cows, pigs, chickens) in action.
I bet good money they care and find it quite distressing, but as I've said, that they try not to think about it too much. So, while virtually everyone know what slaughterhouses are really like, great effort goes into not thinking about it and into justifying it that it's okay because they are "just animals" (who do that sort of thing to each other anyway) and that's somehow they are all totally divorced from exclusively humans feelings (like pain, fear, suffering). You see the same arguments over and over.
A while back, a TV station showed a country cook (a bit of a twat, by all accounts) taking in a "normal" family out for a weekend for some traditional country life, which included him trapping, skinning, cooking and eating a rabbit. The family on the screen (all lardy burger munchers) all accused him of being 'an animal' for being so barbaric, and the program generated record complaints, even though he wasn't the least bit inhumane about it. It was seen as unacceptably barbaric to *show* (even though far worse goes on behind closed doors).
I quite accept you might not care what happens to animals or even possibly other people - I've met several people with that attitude to animals and other people - it is sociopathic behaviour however (and generally frowned upon in western society). "I don't think anyone is claiming to be able to quantify life in a practical way (as if 1000 worms were equal to a single cow), but that doesn't invalidate choosing to be less, rather than more destructive" Where do you draw that line? You do realize the destruction caused in making your house, computer, clothes, etc. Wouldn't it be less destructive to just live on a farm and grow your own food? The answer is right there!
It might equally be phrased as:
"Just because you are not the re-incarnation of Jebus himself should not be taken as license to spend your entire life being a complete cunt to the rest of the Universe."
As a working example of the principle in action:
When faced with a scenario like "Do you want to order (a) the veal (b) the free range game bird or the (c) vegetable bake?"
(a) The answer Jason Voorhees would pick (this is only slightly better than "Just bring me a live baby and I'll drink blood straight from it's neck").
(b) A reasonable answer.
(c) Extra credit.
Actually, I was going to post that the original prion/BSE post was a bit manic
:-)
It is a bit, but then I keep thinking about it and it gets *worse*.
I think GM is in principle great, and I don't think that wizzend looking organic food tastes better than super-hyped pesticide food or those odd screwed-with strawberries (the ones that are insanely huge AND taste really sweet). In a blind test I can't tell the difference between an organic potato or a non-organic one (though in a non-blind test it's easy to spot the small organic one with big pits in - that still cost more per lbs - a mile off). My mother disagrees strongly, but then she collects "healing crystals" and likes tarot cards. God damn hippies.
I am still worried about how much in it's infancy this stuff all is though - I'm not personally worried I'm going to get Brain Cancer from eating too many GM Oranges, but on a global scale. It reminds me of mass produced medication was handled in the 50's, when it was a fledgling industry. Though it's not like we have all the answers now, clearly things have improved and we have at least some processes in place which (as hinted at in the summary) we largely don't have for food (GM or cloned), yet.
""Mad cow" disease is a basically a media hoax. "
While not a hoax, it was certainly hyped up by the media - but it was not the media that caused the political storm of other countries using it as an excuse to protect their markets (France in particular IIRC, though they were by no means alone) which lead to a 'collapse' of the export market (and subsequent subsidy handouts, which in the UK are greatly reshaping - for the better I think - the way we manage land).
That was a big part of the story that was hyped up (and was a big deal), as was the poor way in which the government handled the 'crisis' (which was the biggest story of all IIRC). It is true that BSE is much more common in other countries, and even seen as nothing unusual (though always a problem if it is detected in a herd) and it may well have blown over if the government hadn't handled it so oddly, though I think your right to implicate the media as bearing responsibility too.
"How many people in this world have died to mad cow disease? Less the a hundred? You have a better chance of dying in a swimming pool, driving a car, riding a bike, or being struck by lightening."
Oh for sure. Though if they had kept at it for years and we hadn't changed the practice, it could easily have been a much bigger problem further down the line, and it's entirely possible we'd discover other long term issues too (even things we might be passing on, and that might impact over generations, for example).
It seems a slim risk, a bit like a (bad) far fetch sci-fi movie plot, but the BSE/CJD has shown weird ass stuff like that can happen, with globalised food production it could represent a greater and entirely unnecessary risk.
I don't avoid GM foods particularly (personally, I like the big, round juicy fruit sprayed with no-doubt cancer causing pesticides more than the small, knobbly Organic stuff) and I think globalisation is generally a Good Thing (for political and economic reasons), it doesn't seem prudent to get cocky about this sort of thing though.
We've been there before with so many other products (e.g. if you are pregnant be sure to (not) take some Thalidomide to help with the morning sickness and as an anti-inflammatory for your swollen ankles). It just seems crazy to rush headlong and 'assume' it will all be fine and no one will get hurt.
As far as cloning goes... you are not going to die eating a cloned animal.
If you eat one once, I'm sure it's just fine, maybe even safer than eating a random cow you don't know the history of (if the cloning process was of very high quality and all things being equal). That doesn't describe a very likely future scenario though.
If millions of people effectively eat that same cow for decades, and it turns out there is something funny about it's genetic makeup that has a knock on effect for even a small percentage of the population, then a lot of people could find themselves with some serious problems. It might be increase susceptibility to certain cancers, it could make people more prone to Alzheimer's, it could be another neurological condition, we just don't know, but we do know it can, and has happened before. And for what? To save a couple of pence on each hamburger sold (*literally*). Not worth going in for all guns blazing IMO.
I'm not try to be melodramatic about it, but think about how many screwed up two-headed, six-legged or three tailed goats get created for every decent quality clone that goes in front of the camera and even the 'good' clones don't last long - a clone is, in many ways, the age of the original PLUS it's own age (never mind the other problems under the surface due to damaged DNA).
That is, if you were to take a 35 year old human, and clone him, at 15 they'd have medical complaints (including cancers) you'd only expect to see on a 50 year old. Even with a impossibly perfect cloning process, the individual would be lucky to live to be 35 themselv
Won't someone think of the collateral damage to the helpless invertebrates?
Just to treat that argument seriously for a minute:
What about all the invertebrates killed in the production of the tonnes of grain to feed to the cow? Cows eat around 100 lbs a day, that's a lot of feed and consequently requires intensive farming (typically things like soya in the US, not so much grass - contrary to what's regularly shown in dairy commercials).
Additionally, it's reasonable to suppose that worms suffer less than cow's do when they are inadvertently killed now and then (the number killed would still be pail by comparison) as they are not as developed lifeforms. The panic, fear (stampeding) and abuse that in slaughterhouses is well known, it's not like the minimum wage failures-at-life who work in rendering plants actually give a crap about animal welfare, they've got an electric cattle prod and they know how to use it.
The increasingly popular practice of slaughtering animals by cutting their throats and leaving them to (slowly) bleed to death so that they meat can be sold as Halal is not something we should shrug off as 'okay', it's barbaric frankly. People tend not to like thinking about the production process, certainly it's not something that comes up in school, for example, it's kept out of the way where we don't have to think about it.
Typically, people say to themselves 'animals don't feel pain or fear like we do', while there is no denying that cows are not exactly equipped with the sharpest tools in the box, anyone who has had a cat or dog (or even say, a horse) knows they can be happy, bored, confused, in a bad mood and dream in a way that's instantly recognizable to us (and of course, people can and do eat cats and dogs too).
I don't think anyone is claiming to be able to quantify life in a practical way (as if 1000 worms were equal to a single cow), but that doesn't invalidate choosing to be less, rather than more destructive. It is surely better to eat what you hunt, than to hunt and kill purely for self gratification, for example.
I certainly squat/spray things round the house that are liable to bite or string me (mosquitoes, hornets, etc.) but if it's just a bee or a spider I pop in a jar and bung it out the window, it's not a big deal unless you are a total pansy. Though, I actually trapped the last mosquito in my room in a jar and chucked it out the window, though here the mosquito's - while just as noisy - are big and slow and easy to catch, much like the bees here (YMMV - you wouldn't likely catch me doing the same thing in the Mediterranean, for example).
Self styled 'hard men' often seem to love squashing spiders and other harmless bugs (even Woodlice) I've noticed, and usually not even with their bare hands (more often armed with a primitive makeshift twatting weapon). I'm not sure what that is all about and (as little as I apparently know about women) they don't seem to be impressed with that sort of behavior, perhaps other guys are and I'm just not getting it. I would maybe be a bit impressed if someone killed a hornet with their bare hands, but killing slowly moving crane flies with a bit of rolled up paper is like a level 60 ganking level 30's in Hillsbrad Foothills.
Indeed!
First we had the geniuses who went ahead with the money saving plan "Let's feed sheep's brains to cows!" which resulted in mad cow disease (which, when infected meat is eaten, can cause incurable and fatal neurological disease CJD in humans). Feeding meat to cows was clearly bad and wrong in ways that don't (shouldn't) need explaining to anyone and *blammo*, well what do you know, karma bites.
OT: Interestingly, Wikipedia says that in the US testing kits for BSE are banned (and presumably only conducted by the FDA then), and states "US Sixty-five nations have full or partial restrictions on importing U.S. beef products because of concerns that U.S. testing lacks sufficient rigor. As a result, exports of U.S. beef declined from $3.8 billion in 2003, before the first mad cow was detected in the US, to $1.4 billion in 2005.". Per head of population, CJD incidents in the US seem to be lower than in Europe/UK though, as US cattle seem to be typically fed on soya (which is at least vaguely sensible, it's a plant for starters - though oddities like artificial 'fish' proteins in GM soya give some cause for concern).
If feeding sheep to cows can screw people up through contamination of the food chain, there has surely got to be some grounds for being seriously concerned about the prospect of problems that might come from consuming cloned meat (specifically if it's on a regular basis - e.g. the same clone being eaten by people all over the world every time they go to a McDonald's, one nasty defect and *blammo* (again)).
As with the BSE crisis, if/when something goes wrong, I suspect the people and companies responsible for producing the goods will not even be investigated or in any way penalised (in fact, they will probably get huge subsidies as cattle farmers in the UK did to make up for the subsequent drop in the market, even though it was their own mess and it was public money that was spent cleaning it up).
Not as big a problem as if one of the clones had a cellular mutation that ended up giving it superpowers (telekinesis, invincibility, the ability to make chocolate milk, etc.) but still, I suspect This Will Not End Well.
It could of course be a much more humane way way to produce veal, dairy cows (without having to drag calves away at birth and feed them supplements) and healthily beef cows without resorting to steroids (though I suspect the industry will keep using them), so it seems not to all bad from a consumer perspective. Ultimately, it would be great to be able to produce meat without having to produce real living animals in the first place. Transmetropolitan 'human foot on a stick' anyone? I hear it's toe licking good...
I said "unjustly" in the sense that the PS3 listings that were being removed clearly met all of craigslist's rules.
;-) could afford to have someone do that for a reasonable amount of money - or you'd have to give the job to a person who needed the money so badly most people would be worried about them doing something like scalping i
I think many here would argue it's still just, irrespective of it meeting craigslist rules or not.
But scalping is a good thing in that it makes it possible for people willing to pay more
Alternatively, it make it nigh on impossible for people willing to pay a reasonable price to get hold of one, and so the products (or tickets) go unused, ultimately satisfying very few people (and so being detrimental overall).
I've seen this both at events and with consoles (typically with loads of people then complaining they couldn't get tickets/consoles through offical channels and having witnessed myself items subsequently being withdrawn from eBay or failing to meet minimum bits, and in the case of tickets, loads of scalpers trying to sell tickets at the door to no avail, and the venue being only 3/4 full despite tickets having 'sold out' in the first hour). The 'empty seats' issue being one of the reasons why tickets for major sports events are often so heavily controlled and tied to a name on photo ID these days (due to unused tickets meaning less people attending the event, and so harming sales of food/drink/t-shirts, etc).
Loads of scalpers end up with excess goods (consoles, tickets, etc) - and potential customers (gamers, music fans, sports fans) end up pissed off and can't buy what they wanted. The summary is right, it's not a good way to make money, if it was I think it's likely event ticket scalpers would not resemble homeless people (as they invariably do). It's seems evident that most people who feel the need to result to gambling on being able to resell consoles as a way to make money are not comfortably off either (if they are, then they are irredeemably greedy).
It only makes money for a very select few, as we've simply seen that there are not tens of thousands of people willing to pay insane prices for consoles rather than wait two months, hell there are barely hundreds of people willing to pay significantly over the RRP, yet scalpers screw up by vastly overestimating demand. "Oh look, that one guy made 10,000 USD selling one on eBay! I should be able to get that too!" (and thinking they are hard done by and blaming others when it doesn't work for them).
e.g. Saying things like "The concert was promoted poorly", or "the team/band/console is no good" rather than thinking they were undone by their own greed.
I saw my I got my X-Box 360 bundle in a store in the middle of London for 380 UKP (IIRC) about a month after they came out. Even though there were no units in store anywhere else, it sat there for a week before I went 'Screw it, I'm thinking of getting an HDTV next month or so, may as well get one now if it's only 80 UKP more, it's not like I'm hard up'. The same story is repeating itself now with the Wii and PS3, in that people arn't willing to pay much over the RRP and would rather just wait.
There is currently a Wii in the same shop also for sale at 360 UKP (bizzarely enough). Normal RRP is 180 UKP, can't get them in any other shops, it has been there for two weeks just being ignored (frankly even I'm surprised, nearly bought it myself). This is a shop that scalps professionally, right in the middle of London (Zone 1, TCR) and people are not paying it much attention even at Christmas. Looks like people are waiting for more stock (which will invariably be around at the end of Jan). They also have a PS3, but it's an import version (no idea what crazy price it's selling at, or if it's even for sale).
If there were no scalpers, people would just hire placeholders.
I doubt that. Only the very wealthy (or incredibly determined and fiscally irresponsible
The article says "As a result of the internal investigation, Apple said it would record $84 million in expenses related to the options awards.".
Is this from expenses incurred as a result of the investigation or are these expenses that were not recorded previously, but should have been?
MySpace, Digg and even Second Life do not go down for hours at a time every week (as WoW invariably does, with it's sure-fire maintenance overruns), the only MMO worse than WoW in this respect has been Eve Online with it's daily hour long maintenance (which also frequently overruns).
/. about it on Christmas day. :-(
Servers do not need to be taken down to do backups, and updates to code should only require a downtime in the order of a small number of minutes. It's just lazy programming or bad management that don't care enough about the user experience to prioritise this feature (or both), it's not like it's a small team of developers in a startup struggling to make a game here - they are obviously good developers and they have the resources to get it right. It's great to see they are getting round to it at last!
The quality of the the title is generally outstanding, certainly compared to the quality of titles in the industry as a whole. It's a rock solid game with great attention to detail - brilliantly executed and immediately appealing to both first-time MMO players and more 'hardcore' gamers. However, the apporach to server management is dreadful and starkly contrasts with this.
As I write this, EU Battlegroup 5 (a cluster of 5 different servers) is totally offline so players on that server can't play and may not be able to for some time (I expect it will come up boxing day, if we are lucky). Unless Blizzard improve the process for managing servers the user experience is still going to be poor in this regard.
Sadly, the customer support bad too : unlike in Soth Park:WoW you can't *really* phone support, you have to use a web based interface or raise a ticket in game, where upon a flunky will fail to understand the problem (using diversionary tactics such as not reading your tickets properly and failing to understand words of more than two syllables), tell out right lies (such as claiming there was a server roll back when there wasn't and that's why it's fucked up and they aren't going to help you, even though your problem is specifically addressed in the AUP and it says they will do everything they can to fix if it does happen) flat out ignoring your queries (had this with billing) and of course they don't care if your server does go down, they don't have a way to escallate that sort of thing it seems.
And so, you end up posting on
Guestures will never take off as a means of user input. It will be a cold day in hell before Wii see that sort of interface on a home computing system.
More seriously, what is so difficult to imagine a system in the future (ala MR) that can react to slight, minor movements (something the Wii allows for with it's remote - technically you need need to make over the top movements to use it, but that's fun to do). You needen't keep your hands in the air right out in front of you, though subtle and lazy movements might have looked odd on screen.
Not that I think the UI in MR was very good from a practicle point of view - surely a PITA to use (would rather have a decent form interface, tabbed UI and maybe spider charts for searching through data as seen in MR).
This interface from the BBC series 'Torchwood' (a Doctor Who spinnoff) is similar, and quite cool though - based on the interface used in the series itself and has some good bonus / background material for fans of the show. As with Minority Report, the LCD screens in Torchwood can only display varing shades of the colour blue for some reason (even when playing back FMV).
Thankfully it also has a more practical and boring HTML version (the BBC seem to understand the importance of accessibility).
It was on x86 first though (NeXT Step / Open Step / Rhapsody - which could be described just Open Step with some new window decoration, but largely the same widget set). It seems almost certain development was largely concurrent and that they didn't really drop support for x86 (even if they did focus testing and optimisation on the 'live' target platform, PPC).
I quite agree. I am typically not in favour of reducing functionality for increased security when there are viable alternatives, but disabling HTML email seems like a smart move in this case. It's simple and unlikely to be really inconvenient and it's had numerous problems for ages, I'm more a bit surprised they are only doing this now (personally I would have started with it off in an environment like the DoD).
While its true that many users unwittingly generate HTML email, pretty much all clients that do generate plain text versions too (using MIME/multipart) - it's easy to configure a mail server just to strip the HTML parts (not sure about Exchange, but certainly with something like Exim). Of course if Microsoft took a better approach to handling potential issues like this (by handling HTML messages better by default), I don't think anyone would have even seen HTML formatted messages as a risk (though they'd still be inconvinent in some other scenarios).
It's probably not a Mac Mini - it's physically clearly too small to contain a hard drive and large amounts of flash memory is an unlikely scenario and of course at that size (and with no fan) it would be a big struggle to fit a full system onto a board that small. Even without the optical drive the mac mini is what, twice as big still? (with the PCMCIA + slot + BT attachment and HD taking up a lot of that, but also the fan and heatsync IIRC).
It's surely going have an embedded OS's of some sort, though a basic Darwin system with a custom GUI app (nothing as heavyweight as Quartz) seems more likely than anything really resembling Mac OS X. Though I rather expect it will just have a custom embedded OS as I can't see why they'd bother to use the Darwin Kernel in this instance, for the same reasons as they didn't with the iPod - name there are plenty of existing serviceable embedded OS's to choose from (and it would also be probably easier to just have someone write a new one specifically for the iTV).
It would certainly be way cooler if it had a working UNIX alike OS (open for hackery) but I don't think that's in Apple's best interest as I don't think it would be the simplest/cheapest option for them. Still, it's got to have a decent framebuffer I guess (given the point of the thing is to display video at a decent resolution) so, assuming it's using some non-bizzaro embedded chipset, you probably could fit a cut down Linux / BSD kernel on it (even if it's just with some basic software - giving you something like a Sun Ray system - maybe mount what you can't fit on it off an NFS share or just re-display an exported/tunneled X session).
They are when the content is as dynamic as it is in Second Life... as you would realise, had you put a little thought into it.
Regarding "is as dynamic as it is in Second Life" it is of course worth me pointing out that most objects in SL you'd expect to be dynamic (cars, jet packs, robot suits, etc.) have little or no actual animation going on. If you are lucky you'll get some (annoying) scripted sound and a single short and simple animation (for example, a door might open and close on someone's house).
From an end user perspective functionally it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the level of interactivity of objects were pre-built once the creator was ready to publish them. You could still have doors that open when you click the handle, windows that can be rolled down on a car, wheels that spin, lights that flash or wing mirrors that could be moved. You could still have buildings with revolving doors, escalators and be able to place other objects in them if you wanted.
I don't know why you don't get that. If you still disagree, try giving me an example of an interactive object that you couldn't do with a pre-rendered model (bearing in mind my previous comment about objects being able to be made of objects and support for scripting and dynamic boundary boxes). Two or three would be good, some nice practical examples, a sentence each should be fine unless you'd like to expand on them.
If you actually knew a little bit about 3D engines
I'm a developer for a living, and I've written, for fun, 3D software starting with QuickDraw 3D (going back a decade) and moving to OpenGL. I don't do anything as interesting as games development for a living but I do know quite a bit about existing engines, model design, level design and event scripting in modern 3D software. I'm not about to write an engine any time soon, but I'm comfortable with OpenGL, and discussing features of modern engines (parallax mapping, GLSL, volumetric shadows vs. shadow mapping - and other neat stuff SL's graphics engine doesn't have).
The developers of Havoc would say THE SAME THINGS AS I AM... their demo is not actually dynamic, most of the textures etc are precalculated. It is demonstrating the physics, not showing off the 3d card.
I disagree. I certainly think the Havok developers would make a robust co-hereat argument either way. I tend to think they would disagree with your apparent assertion that writing your own graphics engine (such as it is) rather than just licensing one (like SL licensed their physics engine) would be the best way to go.
Actually, I was thinking of one of the completely straight up texture-less demo's from Havok, as it happens. I did laugh at the line 'textures etc are precalulated' -(e.g. Do you think SL uses procedural textures? What do you actually think 'etc' might include? How would you imagine that line of argument makes SL look better, rather than worse (given the straight up Havok demo's are real physics and animation time too)?
As mentioned, SL uses the Havok engine as does Halo and - most relevant of all here - Half Life 2, it just doesn't preform as well, and that's even though it's level of sophistication when it comes to object interaction is not nearly as impressive as HL2. Not that it needs to, but it could at least try and come close enough to not be the sort of nightmare users have described try to use here. The excesses possible in Garry's mod for HL2 (with scriptable objects, AI, rag dolls and real time physics) are a good example of what SL could be be like, if it was any good.
Now I wouldn't use the HL2 engine because it's not really up to handling very large terrain (unlike the Unreal engine, or the ID's new engine for Quake Wars, or even Soldner's terrain engine - personally that's my favourite part of it, I think it's technically kick ass) but is no reason in the world why you couldn't add dynamically downloaded pre-built scripted objects (take something like the car from HL2) to an engine like Unrea
Note for anyone reading this, my previous post was not 'flamebait', it's true, the software sucks for the reasons I've outlined. I have nothing against Linden Labs or Second Life or any other online 'virtual worlds' vendors and it's fair to point out they almost all suck for largely the same reasons, but suck they do.
None of the 3D engines you talk about could handle the job. All of them precompute and cache things to speed up the display.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can easily have a scripting engine, set item box boundries and define levels of interactivity (and even do animations) all in real time using mostly pre-rendered objects (e.g. in the case of animations even making an 'object', such as a beach buggy, out of say 5 objects tied together (i.e. a chassis object and four wheel objects)).
Second Life cannot do that because absolutely everything in the world is dynamic.
Not so, which you'd realise if you'd put a little thought into it.
Now, perhaps, the engine could do with optimising more... but you cannot compare it with Quake/Unreal etc etc. It does MUCH more work per frame.
There is no perhaps about it, even for what it is doing in real time it should be a lot faster, they have do be doing something deserving of The Daily WTF for it to be running as badly as it does, truly. The developers of the major physics engines, such as Havoc, have real time demo code that puts the poor performance of SL's engine into prespective (demos which do a lot more with a large number of primitive objects and with really good collition detection on them).
I am quite aware of the (obvious) differences between the SL engine and say the Unreal, Quake or Battlfield series engines (with their pre-rendered worlds and objects). The whole idea behind having pre-built models is that it would solve a lot of the problems that SL developers have not been able to resolve.
None of that precludes it from still from having fully interactable pre-built models that can be downloaded on the fly (in fact, IIRC, the Quake series has had the option for players to have their own models that can be sent out to clients only the fly during a match since Quake 2 / 3, which must be like ~ 8 years ago now - and that was when most players at the time where 56k - a simple example, but proves the point somewhat).
A more relevant example might be Soldner - while it is infamous for a myriad of other reasons (it was abandoned commercially before being finished, has broken netcode and was quite unstable and JoWooD, the production company behind it, are widely disliked) the actual 3D performs well and looks reasonable, has fully deformable terrain that streches for miles, and is highly interactable (with scriptable pre-rendered objects - e.g. buildings with walls that can be demolished by tank shells, destructable doors and windows).
It's not a huge leap to think of how you'd then add the dynamic downloading of pre-built (scripted) objects.
Don't we wail about Newbies everywhere else? There could be a side benefit that only certain people "get it" and stay. Anyone who doesn't ... "doesn't deserve to be there".
In this case, I think the problem is the interface is terrible and clearly designed by someone who doesn't 'get it' - personally I find it easier to create my own objects in OpenGL in my own code than using their interface to do the same thing, it really is that clunky. Even moving around is painful thanks to floaty controls and because the client side collision detection is terrible. That's some pretty basic stuff to have nailed down, I would be embarrassed to have written this software.
Added to that the 'real time streaming' aspect of it is dire too. Either their peering/transit isn't that great, or, I suspect, their systems often just can't handle the load. The client does nothing to help matters but not caching sufficiently, and being very slow to read from cache when it is. It doesn't handle drawing-in objects in the world well either, no attempt to fill them in nicely (when it could draw a construction banner around them while it loads a building or given area, for example).
Lastly, the rendering performance, features and quality of 3D engine are all poor! Even on an AMD-FX CPU, a couple of gigs of DDR RAM and two 7800 GTX cards in SLI it's still slow as hell (even without it really bothering to do things like collision detection). God knows what it's doing, it performs like a developers 'my first DirectX 3D environment' run on an old Pentium 2 Celeron (really, genuinely).
The whole thing is an over hyped marketing exercise of no technical merit IMO, and it's never going to take off because it's so badly broken (unless it's entirely re-worked, to the extent it's a new product - but I figure that's highly unlikely). Star Wars Galaxy with it's player built cities w/ deforming terrain (but fixed 'craftable' items) was far better executed technically, and even it wasn't all that great in that respect (for example, it too suffered from pop up because they didn't bother to put in client side caching for player placed world objects).
It certainly is an exclusive community - essentially just of people all trying to make money selling goods, mostly to no-one and (believe it or not, it's really true) a large furry community, for some reason I can't fathom. I don't think may people who arn't trying to make money on it are interested in using the software beyond a brief trial for a couple of days.
Personally, if they didn't know how to write their own engine (which they clearly didn't) I think they should have done what both World of Warcraft and Lineage 2 (and 3) have done and just licensed the Unreal engine (or used similar). Then content creators could have created models in a decent external modelling tool, allowing them to add sophisticated animations to them. The collision detection would work, the performance would be great and getting the controls right would have been easy (just a case of 'tweak a the example code from the engine vendor'.
The Metaverse concept of Second Life is still attractive, but the Linden Labs implementation is just stupidly bad. Same problem with Active Worlds and a host of other similar offerings. It's like no one in these company has ever tried an MMOG (or indeed used any interface featuring standard click to move / WASD controls). I can understand a lack of polish, but the consistent inability of these companies to get the fundamentals like movement right is something I find mind boggling.
FYI, where I am, 20 USD will get you no more than 2 medium lattes from Starbucks (YMMV).
I do think people shouldn't whine that they spent 20 USD on a game and now feel burned given it seemed obvious what to expect from the extensive in game footage and screen shots released in advance. It was clearly not going to be up to the same standard as the the first SiN game and from the in the in-game footage both the level design and game play look pretty uninspired (serviceable, but rather tedious).
I think it was best SiN died now rather than continuing to flog a dead horse. The first title was _really_ good, this follow came across more like a Hollywood sequel style attempt to cash in on the name. Though lack luster, technically the offering seemed competently executed. Anyone with any competence would have immediately realised how bland the proposal was.
I would bet good money this was a management screw up, and that someone without the relevant experience or ability (i.e. some weasel who knows bupkis about games) was in charge of overseeing the development (that would also explain why much of the team has now split). Anyone in management who was even vaguely competent, and actually plays games now and again, would surely have realised how badly lacking the proposed follow up was before development had begun.
(Sadly, even in low level management having a completely lack of familiarity with products being developed seems to be par for the course in many companies.)
What does that have to do with the very real poisoning of a British citizen?
I appreciate that not paying any real attention to events outside the US and wading in half cocked are common national pastimes, but even so, if you (and the previous poster) knew anything about the story then the point the parent was making might not have gone right over your head as it has done.
The media in the UK are all but making out everyone is at risk from radiation poisoning as a result of contamination, with references to the not less than three aircraft, and various hotels and restaurants visited by the victim that are showing traces of contamination. Obviously, the public is not at any risk from that sort of contamination (at least, no more than they are just living in some of the more radioactive cities in the UK). That's why it's relevant that it's not liable to harmful unless ingested.
As far as all responsible news sources are currently reporting, no associates of Mr Litvinenko have actually 'fallen ill' even though a number of people are also contaminated. Again, explicit relevancy there (they are not liable to actually become ill just as a result of hanging around near Mr Litvinenko - even though, as with his former partner, they are technically now contaminated with Polonium-210).
It's not 'ignorant bullshit', the previous poster made a factual statement and was correct.
I belive that as both + and - characters (also used for this sort of thing) are valid in the local part (as per RFC2822) they could equally be used to identify entirely seperate mailboxes, belonging to different users.
It's certainly not unique to GMail, but it seems valid to refer to it as a feature of GMail (as it's certainly not supported by all providers and to knowleage there is no overwhelming school of thought or indeed RFC that says mail servers ought to behave that way).
Personally I prefer the @username.domain.com approach, but YMMV.
Yeah, but with a 50" Plasma, on the plus side I don't have to have the heating on in the living room - though I do have to turn on the aircon on if I'm staying in watching the TV during the summer (sadly, I'm not kidding).
Oh and that includes a standard mount and side panel speakers (though I have since had it mounted on the wall). About a week or two after I'd bought it, you could get the same deal from Richer Sounds for about 200 UKP less, that was the cheapest you could get them for back then. I expect prices will fall quite a bit again by this time next year too (making 1080p sets much more affordable).
Mine is from the PDP 506 range, purchased getting on for a year ago now.