On Windoze, I set Opera as the default app for opening html docs. When I click on an html file, it opens in Opera, along with ANOTHER instance that displays my home page. Ugggh.
You can't put ALL of them in there. Some games require different kinds of input devices (paddles, keypads, etc...), but I agree.
If I can fit roms every version of every Atarii game ever made on zipped one floppy disk, they should be able to fit all of the games that they are able to liscence for the thing. Maybe that's the issue. Liscencing.
$20 isn't THAT bad when you think about it. When you see these old games at the arcade, 25 cents isn't too much for just ONE game, though you can't beat that arcade experience.
Personally, I am glad that the number of games is limited. When I downloaded Stella, along with every Atarii game ever made, I was disappointed at how fast I destroyed a fond childhood memory. Many of the games that I remembered as GREAT, really sucked. This might have been because I did not play any ONE long enough, since I had 500 at my disposal. To realease them in bits, you can at least destry the Nostalgia slowly!
How "audible" is the image that appears on the Aphex Twin track? Can this be used for digital watermarking for other kinds of music, or would the image be too "loud"?
Well, this seems reasonable. More so because of upload speeds. If a DSL user has ADSL, chances are, their upload speed is cruddy. While, I can download a good-quality DIVX in about two or three hours at 80bs or 90kbs, it the host is fast enough, it will take a long time for someone to download it from me at 8kbs-20kbs.
Enter a P2P such as Grokster that lets you download from multiple users simutaneously. Now my bandwidth is only a piece of someones download speed. Still, without these fast hosts, slower users will have to become more saturated. Things will be slower overall.
This is amusing. Nothing more. Nothing less. Not suprising. Not profound. Amusing.
These Blizzard workers are geeks just like you and me. They "share" files. Their computer chairs, like our own have been custom fit to the shape of their buttocks. If they were not working at Blizzard, they would be downloading WarCraft3 beta and setting up for bnetd play.
They aren't the ones going after bnetd, Bill Roper, or whoever in charge is. For ethical reasons? No. The average worker downloading music has nothing to do with the business end. Of course they have SOME personal stake in the matter and would perhaps like to see bnetd go down (or perhaps not). Is this hypocritical? Perhaps. Unreasonable? No. We all learn to protect what is ours to different degrees. We all want to maximize personal benefits. Otherwise, we may not be downloading free music in the first place.
Nothing profound here. Just rambling.
They are geeks like us.
I bet Sony chose Blizzard (among others) because it is an easy target. They have a certain range of IP addresses, and it is easy to verify people downloading files are from within Blizzard. They have an identifiable source.
Try sending a cease and desist to Verizon, or PacBell, or RCN. Make them send out an "office memo" to all of their users, asking them to stop!
Actually, if this WERE to be common, and I were to use it, when I type in "Cookies", I am looking for information on cookies. I am not looking for a specific brand. If I WANTED nabisco cookies, I would have typed in "nabisco". I want general info on cookies. This is not useful, it is marketing.
So, what would I do? I would go to Google and type in cookies there. That's it.
I hope that this is not another piece of technology that gets taken too far and inevitably falls into the wong hands. If it becomes popular and we start to see the hardware being destributed free or below cost for use on Internet games, beware! It will have all boiled down to marketing.
Think spyware. If ads are placed in the game, they may be monitoring your subconcios response!
We might see (or not realize) that the progress of a game becomes more prefferable when our reaction to certain stimulii "improves".
This could be very therapeutic. It's funny that people need incentive for well-being. Some of us need to learn to chill out!
The Matrix: An Example of Bad Software Engineering
on
The Matrix is Reloading
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Neo's abilities are only possible due to bad software engineering! Think about it, his powers are a major security hole! The Matrix is software. Each "user" has precepts and possible actions. Input and output. The minds plugged into it are subject to the interface supplied by the software engineers. Anything that they can do, but should not be able to do is an example of bad design. Somehow, there is a bug that can be exploited. For instance, in the first Matrix film, we see a boy bending a spoon. This sould not be possible. Perhaps, since it is only one's perception, a person can do anything they want (simply by controlling their own perception). But, the fact that another person can see the spoon bend shows that the "bender" has access to parts of the Matrix system that they should not. Neo, must have somehow gained root privelages, or found out about a buffer over-run.
Fine, he has access. The Operators of the Matrix have already overcome the hard part; Identifying the source of the systems compromise. Why bother sending in tons of agents to hunt down and stop Neo? You don't send viruses out to stop hackers. You write a friggin' patch and call it Matrix v1.2. Realistically, the Matrix should be put off line, and fixed.
You can revolve the laser(s) too can't you? Better yet, why not the disk AND the laser in opposite directions? If the laser moves at the same reate as the disk (not an easy problem to solve, I bet), you will double the "maximum speed"
For my senior CS project on AI, I studied distributed intelligent systems. Autonomous agents working towards a common goal as a team must be able to collaborate in order to be efficient. In a real world situation, these agents may not be able to communicate. They must be able to dynamically figure out their role, and change it if necessary. This requires each agent to observe other team members and guess what their plan is. I used robotic soccer as an example. Given a situation (enemy density and location, ball position/direction) each player must figure out where they should be, and what role they should take on in what they decide to be the optimal configuration. Except for the fact that real soccer players have specified roles, this is close to a real world situation.
This is of course computationally expensive. In the video game case, the program must run smooth in order for the computer to be a significant opponent. A typical team of computer-controlled oppenents tend to share information as if telepathic. The computer must cheat, simply to make the game interesting. If all agents (soccer players) have a shared knowledge base, it can easily be a tough opponent. The computer must often "cheat" for this reason.
For right now, computers are not fast enough to handle the AI with more integerity. The bottom line is that a video game has to be fun. In academia, we are able to put more time into things that are not immediately useful in order to better understand real AI. Of course in the soccer video game situation, the human player also acts as a shared knowledge base for its team, as it controls all of them. In a game like a multi-player shooter, however (ignoring the chatting option), this is more applicable. It is unfair for each computer player to be able to divine the intent of the team members as if controlled by an overmind. Applying this research to video games would result in better realism, provided the CPU could handle it. For now, it would simply not make for a very interesting game. Still, shared knowledge is an interesting problem in AI, and a lot of the work having been done is quite good. But we do have a long way to go.
This research would apply to systems other than video games where each agent may work under a different protocol. Each situation is different, though. Often there will be a standard communication protocol, but sometimes that may break. The distributed system should not cease in this case. Examples are automated military, network routing, manufacturing plants and clustered computing.
The CGI looks incredible. It is weird having Final Fantasy characters mixed in with Goofy and Tarzaan, though.
I wonder what inspired this?!? It looks cool (visually), and Square does tend to make great games, but what were they thinking? What is Disney up to? Why not just a Disney character RPG? This is an odd marriage. Then again, Street Fighter v. X-Men worked well. I saw some screen shots. The Alice in Wonderland parts look great.
You do not need to do anything in order to copy something you have made. No legal steps have to be taken to copyright say, a web page. Hell, you don't even have to write the word copyright anywhere.
You only need to provide a means of proving that you were the original creator. When someone takes my DNA, and changes it to music they do not hold the copyright to it, even if the write copyright 2002 or whatever. I don't think that it would be too difficuly, given the means, to prove that the DNA was mine to begin with. The person who transformed it into 'music' could get a patent, which would be legally binding, if I couldn't prove that the patent was based on something to which I am the copyright holder.
Perhaps they can own copyright and petent for the actual song, but not my DNA. If they COULD.. it would mean that by making DNA into music, no one could reproduce the DNA as a picture or even program code. But I am not even sure if you can put a patent on a derivative work anyway. Anyone?
Another fun use for this technology would be to create video that works with red and blue 3D glasses, that would allow the viewer to watch in 3D or "Normal" mode.
You can create a red and a blue version of the image where pixels are cloned into red and blue counterparts. The pixesls that represent closer points are farther apart, while pixels representing deeper points are paired closer together. This would make for more realistic 3D Images without the need for filming with a special double-lens camera. Without this information, the best you can do is manually Z-buffer different sections. The depth in this case is not dynamic, and objects would normally appear to lie on artificial incremental planes. For instance, an entire human face might be on one plane whereas with this technology, (depending on the sesitivity of the depth info) the nose will be 3-dimensional relative to the person. This is not a specifically useful application, but cool in any case.
Does this mean that I am going to have to get a life? Things are so much easier when you can pretend to have a life, and not have to leave the house!(dmagoo steps outside.. sees a big burning thing in the sky and runs back in, Frightenend.)
Kidding aside, it's a shame that things are not going well. The game has great potential. I suppose I will have to stick to Diablo II for my fix! Perhaps Starwars Galaxies will cater to our needs, even though I anticipate a world with a disproportionate number of Bouty Hunters and Jedi's.
I am wondering who would be in charge of tracking the pageviews and mapping them to the correct surfer. Would this be the same person/service/ISP/software that would then handle the billing?
It seems to me that this may be implemented by big websites that have the resources to do so quite quickly. Many of these big sites do not need the revenue as much as the smaller sites who can not afford to implement it in the first place.
Sites will be more profitable. ISPs will charge more because they can. Small revenue sites could suffer. The net would potentially become corporate-centric.
Of course, ISPs may introduce a new business model where they handle all of this overhead and keep the profits, or use them to subsidize the cost for the smaller business. We may see a few such ISPs, but it seems like a one of those things (like much of Capitalism) where costs are taken in by the common surfer, while all profit goes to already-established big business.
If your mp3's are encoded at 128k, that is about a minute of music per Meg. There are 1024 Megs is a Gig. So, 80 Gigs will give you close to two months straight worth of non-repeating music.
You can encode at twice the bitrate which is just about as good as you can get on mp3. You will still have a month of non-stop listening of CD quality sound!
I don't mind the ads. I think slashdot does not get annoying with them.
Information should be free, and by paying, ones access to information does not become any more powerful.
Slashdot does not get bandwidth for free. Why should it be free for us and subsidized by slashdot?
Why would they be trying to stifle condescending nouns?
I can hardly see the people at Micro$oft who are in charge of these things sitting around in a corporate "think tank", just coming up with this stuff. Could it be that people actually filed complaints?
Perhaps they are simply taking the Disney Cop-Out approach.
Perhaps Micro$oft is trying to be more PR.
We all know however that Nintendo decided that this does not work
Still, I do not say that such an act is justified.
It seems to me that the Dictionary in MS-Word will still deal with these words.
A Thesaurus, however is a tool of suggesting.
It appears that Micro$oft has decided on being less suggestive.
Suppose I write a sentence referring to someone as a dolt. Then, I don't find dolt to be the right word. If that is the case it may bes that the person is not exactly a dolt, but more of an ass. Perhaps Micro$oft does not want to take the flack for someone being referred to as an ass. After all, it would have been suggested by them!
I don't see this as being totally evil. I think that if I want to properly insult another, I should be able to do it on my own.
It would be evil for Microsoft to not allow insulting words all together. To deny their existence by force.
That would be ver 1984.
Still, I am merely speculating, and am curious of their true motives.
The President is going to address various media networks urging caution when airing children's television programs; warning that Bin Laden's orginization Al Qaeda may try to use Sesame Street as a means of sending secret messages to their American terrorist-cell leaders.
Slashdot Mirror
On Windoze, I set Opera as the default app for opening html docs. When I click on an html file, it opens in Opera, along with ANOTHER instance that displays my home page. Ugggh.
Typo in the story. Here is the actual URL:
, 00 . tml
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,52408
You can't put ALL of them in there. Some games require different kinds of input devices (paddles, keypads, etc...), but I agree.
If I can fit roms every version of every Atarii game ever made on zipped one floppy disk, they should be able to fit all of the games that they are able to liscence for the thing. Maybe that's the issue. Liscencing.
$20 isn't THAT bad when you think about it. When you see these old games at the arcade, 25 cents isn't too much for just ONE game, though you can't beat that arcade experience.
Personally, I am glad that the number of games is limited. When I downloaded Stella, along with every Atarii game ever made, I was disappointed at how fast I destroyed a fond childhood memory. Many of the games that I remembered as GREAT, really sucked. This might have been because I did not play any ONE long enough, since I had 500 at my disposal. To realease them in bits, you can at least destry the Nostalgia slowly!
http://www.vinylvideo.com/
This was on slashdot as a quickie about a year ago.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/16/171
How "audible" is the image that appears on the Aphex Twin track? Can this be used for digital watermarking for other kinds of music, or would the image be too "loud"?
Enter a P2P such as Grokster that lets you download from multiple users simutaneously. Now my bandwidth is only a piece of someones download speed. Still, without these fast hosts, slower users will have to become more saturated. Things will be slower overall.
These Blizzard workers are geeks just like you and me. They "share" files. Their computer chairs, like our own have been custom fit to the shape of their buttocks. If they were not working at Blizzard, they would be downloading WarCraft3 beta and setting up for bnetd play.
They aren't the ones going after bnetd, Bill Roper, or whoever in charge is. For ethical reasons? No. The average worker downloading music has nothing to do with the business end. Of course they have SOME personal stake in the matter and would perhaps like to see bnetd go down (or perhaps not). Is this hypocritical? Perhaps. Unreasonable? No. We all learn to protect what is ours to different degrees. We all want to maximize personal benefits. Otherwise, we may not be downloading free music in the first place.
Nothing profound here. Just rambling.
They are geeks like us.
I bet Sony chose Blizzard (among others) because it is an easy target. They have a certain range of IP addresses, and it is easy to verify people downloading files are from within Blizzard. They have an identifiable source.
Try sending a cease and desist to Verizon, or PacBell, or RCN. Make them send out an "office memo" to all of their users, asking them to stop!
Since laws only stop people who obey laws. Not people with a large enough incetive to benefit from sevurity circumvention.
So, what would I do? I would go to Google and type in cookies there. That's it.
I hope that this is not another piece of technology that gets taken too far and inevitably falls into the wong hands. If it becomes popular and we start to see the hardware being destributed free or below cost for use on Internet games, beware! It will have all boiled down to marketing.
Think spyware. If ads are placed in the game, they may be monitoring your subconcios response!
We might see (or not realize) that the progress of a game becomes more prefferable when our reaction to certain stimulii "improves".
This could be very therapeutic. It's funny that people need incentive for well-being. Some of us need to learn to chill out!
Neo's abilities are only possible due to bad software engineering! Think about it, his powers are a major security hole! The Matrix is software. Each "user" has precepts and possible actions. Input and output. The minds plugged into it are subject to the interface supplied by the software engineers. Anything that they can do, but should not be able to do is an example of bad design. Somehow, there is a bug that can be exploited. For instance, in the first Matrix film, we see a boy bending a spoon. This sould not be possible. Perhaps, since it is only one's perception, a person can do anything they want (simply by controlling their own perception). But, the fact that another person can see the spoon bend shows that the "bender" has access to parts of the Matrix system that they should not. Neo, must have somehow gained root privelages, or found out about a buffer over-run.
Fine, he has access. The Operators of the Matrix have already overcome the hard part; Identifying the source of the systems compromise. Why bother sending in tons of agents to hunt down and stop Neo? You don't send viruses out to stop hackers. You write a friggin' patch and call it Matrix v1.2. Realistically, the Matrix should be put off line, and fixed.
Also, think about the lazy people. Sure, if you write CNN, I know where to find it, but I appreciate not having to type it in!
All your consoles are belong to us.
You can revolve the laser(s) too can't you? Better yet, why not the disk AND the laser in opposite directions? If the laser moves at the same reate as the disk (not an easy problem to solve, I bet), you will double the "maximum speed"
This is of course computationally expensive. In the video game case, the program must run smooth in order for the computer to be a significant opponent. A typical team of computer-controlled oppenents tend to share information as if telepathic. The computer must cheat, simply to make the game interesting. If all agents (soccer players) have a shared knowledge base, it can easily be a tough opponent. The computer must often "cheat" for this reason.
For right now, computers are not fast enough to handle the AI with more integerity. The bottom line is that a video game has to be fun. In academia, we are able to put more time into things that are not immediately useful in order to better understand real AI. Of course in the soccer video game situation, the human player also acts as a shared knowledge base for its team, as it controls all of them. In a game like a multi-player shooter, however (ignoring the chatting option), this is more applicable. It is unfair for each computer player to be able to divine the intent of the team members as if controlled by an overmind. Applying this research to video games would result in better realism, provided the CPU could handle it. For now, it would simply not make for a very interesting game. Still, shared knowledge is an interesting problem in AI, and a lot of the work having been done is quite good. But we do have a long way to go.
This research would apply to systems other than video games where each agent may work under a different protocol. Each situation is different, though. Often there will be a standard communication protocol, but sometimes that may break. The distributed system should not cease in this case. Examples are automated military, network routing, manufacturing plants and clustered computing.
The Gaming Intelligence Agency has a short write up on it.
Also, you can see a movie at rpg Gamer.
The CGI looks incredible. It is weird having Final Fantasy characters mixed in with Goofy and Tarzaan, though.
I wonder what inspired this?!? It looks cool (visually), and Square does tend to make great games, but what were they thinking? What is Disney up to? Why not just a Disney character RPG? This is an odd marriage. Then again, Street Fighter v. X-Men worked well. I saw some screen shots. The Alice in Wonderland parts look great.
You only need to provide a means of proving that you were the original creator. When someone takes my DNA, and changes it to music they do not hold the copyright to it, even if the write copyright 2002 or whatever. I don't think that it would be too difficuly, given the means, to prove that the DNA was mine to begin with. The person who transformed it into 'music' could get a patent, which would be legally binding, if I couldn't prove that the patent was based on something to which I am the copyright holder.
Perhaps they can own copyright and petent for the actual song, but not my DNA. If they COULD.. it would mean that by making DNA into music, no one could reproduce the DNA as a picture or even program code. But I am not even sure if you can put a patent on a derivative work anyway. Anyone?
I am a recent Computer Science grad!
Another fun use for this technology would be to create video that works with red and blue 3D glasses, that would allow the viewer to watch in 3D or "Normal" mode.
You can create a red and a blue version of the image where pixels are cloned into red and blue counterparts. The pixesls that represent closer points are farther apart, while pixels representing deeper points are paired closer together. This would make for more realistic 3D Images without the need for filming with a special double-lens camera. Without this information, the best you can do is manually Z-buffer different sections. The depth in this case is not dynamic, and objects would normally appear to lie on artificial incremental planes. For instance, an entire human face might be on one plane whereas with this technology, (depending on the sesitivity of the depth info) the nose will be 3-dimensional relative to the person. This is not a specifically useful application, but cool in any case.
Does this mean that I am going to have to get a life? Things are so much easier when you can pretend to have a life, and not have to leave the house!(dmagoo steps outside.. sees a big burning thing in the sky and runs back in, Frightenend.)
Kidding aside, it's a shame that things are not going well. The game has great potential. I suppose I will have to stick to Diablo II for my fix! Perhaps Starwars Galaxies will cater to our needs, even though I anticipate a world with a disproportionate number of Bouty Hunters and Jedi's.
I am wondering who would be in charge of tracking the pageviews and mapping them to the correct surfer. Would this be the same person/service/ISP/software that would then handle the billing?
It seems to me that this may be implemented by big websites that have the resources to do so quite quickly. Many of these big sites do not need the revenue as much as the smaller sites who can not afford to implement it in the first place.
Sites will be more profitable. ISPs will charge more because they can. Small revenue sites could suffer. The net would potentially become corporate-centric.
Of course, ISPs may introduce a new business model where they handle all of this overhead and keep the profits, or use them to subsidize the cost for the smaller business. We may see a few such ISPs, but it seems like a one of those things (like much of Capitalism) where costs are taken in by the common surfer, while all profit goes to already-established big business.
If your mp3's are encoded at 128k, that is about a minute of music per Meg. There are 1024 Megs is a Gig. So, 80 Gigs will give you close to two months straight worth of non-repeating music.
You can encode at twice the bitrate which is just about as good as you can get on mp3. You will still have a month of non-stop listening of CD quality sound!
I don't mind the ads. I think slashdot does not get annoying with them.
Information should be free, and by paying, ones access to information does not become any more powerful.
Slashdot does not get bandwidth for free. Why should it be free for us and subsidized by slashdot?
Does Microsoft have a specific agenda in this?
Why would they be trying to stifle condescending nouns?
I can hardly see the people at Micro$oft who are in charge of these things sitting around in a corporate "think tank", just coming up with this stuff. Could it be that people actually filed complaints?
Perhaps they are simply taking the Disney Cop-Out approach.
Perhaps Micro$oft is trying to be more PR.
We all know however that Nintendo decided that this does not work
Still, I do not say that such an act is justified.
It seems to me that the Dictionary in MS-Word will still deal with these words.
A Thesaurus, however is a tool of suggesting.
It appears that Micro$oft has decided on being less suggestive.
Suppose I write a sentence referring to someone as a dolt. Then, I don't find dolt to be the right word. If that is the case it may bes that the person is not exactly a dolt, but more of an ass. Perhaps Micro$oft does not want to take the flack for someone being referred to as an ass. After all, it would have been suggested by them!
I don't see this as being totally evil. I think that if I want to properly insult another, I should be able to do it on my own.
It would be evil for Microsoft to not allow insulting words all together. To deny their existence by force.
That would be ver 1984.
Still, I am merely speculating, and am curious of their true motives.
The President is going to address various media networks urging caution when airing children's television programs; warning that Bin Laden's orginization Al Qaeda may try to use Sesame Street as a means of sending secret messages to their American terrorist-cell leaders.