I have to add to the cons of consoles and pro of computers:
-Consoles: In consoles there's only two or three layouts of the gamepad. Period. If you're used to another control scheme (like me), your out of luck. And more than once all the supplied control schemes suck big time.
-Computers: You can program controls in anyway you like, and even mix them. I have played some games with a gamepad in one hand and a mouse in the other. Beat that!
Thinking about it there's another con in computers:
-Copy protection: Some games have copy protection that will mess your computer, deactivate your virtual drives and probably damage other software. Most of it really sucks.
And, my videocard will be good for a couple of years at least, I don't see any need to buy all games when they're released, I buy them whenever I feel like buying one, besides that, there's plenty of them I haven't played yet. And the image is as good or better than a PS3. I really see that con as a non issue.
I think that in that case, the distribution model is more important than the license.
I mean, 'people who receive the program in than modified form' can simply get it from the original author and skip the middleman. Problem solved. Period.
Monopolies and evil middeman in distribution channels of information are made obsolete by a bit of technology, like iTunes store and all its clones for music or Steam for games (and its lots of future clones, I hope). CVS, SVN and GIT repositories did the same for source code long ago.
In other words: The creation, distribution, and evolution of software enabled by the Internet is more important than the license, as long as that license is not closed source.
Public domain would be enough, as long as there's an Internet. I mean, BSD is like public domain except for some text that should be added and that's all.
(All this is of course invalidated by Software Patents. Evil Software Patents.)
I can say that I have heard more positive things about Vista during launch than I heard about XP during its launch. The architecture change is bigger and better than in 2K->XP. In this regard MS should not be worried...
What's different is what MS has at stake. They _need_ Vista to succeed much more than they needed XP to succeed. And the market perception about MS has changed too. In XP times MS was an OK company. Now they are simply EVIL. Using XP instead of Vista is the only way people has to hurt MS.
Another difference is the huge amount of time it passed since the last release. MS made lots of companies to subscribe to any SO updates that would have happened in the last 6 years.
Then they released nothing during that years. They got the money and provided nothing in exchange of that money. That's a (very valid) reason for a lot of companies to dismiss Vista, as in 'this is payback time'.
So the initial opinion of Vista is in fact better than the initial public opinion of XP. But, public opinion of XP changed slowly but surely towards positive, specially with service pack 2. All its problems were technical and nothing else. Vista has already fixed most of the technical problems and public opinion is still bad. I see no signs of the public opinion of Vista getting better.
Seems like people finally understood that DRM sucks and should be repeled with full force.
I for one will upgrade to OSX instead of upgrading to Vista when the time comes.
I heard a lot of good things related to this album:
- 'The best album after OK computer'
- 'Probably the best album of the year'
And so on. With these reviews it's hard not to want to download and (maybe) pay for it. So I don't think it's really just because of the novelty, but also because of the reviews.
Other albums from other groups will probably have very different reviews. This puts a lot of the marketing might in the hands of the review sites.
Flash is not a technology that make it run fast and nice.
I mean, it will be flash based. I can watch an ugly video in a flash based online player eating a considerable part of my processing power. I can watch the same video with much better quality in stage6.divx.com and it takes no noticeable processing power at all.
And what about GUI Interface guidelines. Every single flash "app" I have ever seen implements GUI elements differently. The mouse wheel has never had a consistent behaviour in flash apps. If the change from Office 2003 to Office 2007 is so huge for users, imagine if all your apps has different GUI controls, GUI metaphors, GUI guidelines, and so on.
Besides that, we already have Java Webstart. And no single big commercial app has been ported to, or written in, Java Webstart.
May be end users don't like non native applications in their systems. May be end users don't like subscription based pricing. May be end users don't like Flash based apps.
I want a competing technology with a decent language and native widgets to emerge. Open source if possible. That would be great.
At least one point of the Aquatic Ape has no counter claims.
That we get healthy eating fish meat and fat, while getting sick eating pork and cow meat and fat. Other terrestrial mammals get no harm from pork and cow meat.
So, while it's nonsense that all the evolutionary traits that makes us humans come from having to swim and fish, at least in a long part of our evolution we ate proteins only from fish, and perhaps most humans from that time where very good swimmers.
I even have a recipient full of Omega-3 pills in my room right now.
My own signature makes me remember why I totally disagree with you.
In a closed system, you can make deterministic predictions about the behaviour of any part of the system as long as its own parts are deterministic, and they are for the most part unless they rely on quantum physics.
But we are not a closed system. We constantly react with the world and in fact, the continuous interaction with the world not only help us to have free will, but in fact is a fundamental part of the free will. In other words, take away the random interactions we have with the world around us and you take away our free will. It will in fact take away more than free will, as a significant part of the computations our brains can do and computers can't is because of this same random interactions with the world.
If we where as deterministic as you assume we are in case no soul exist, then it would be far easier to simulate us with computers than it actually is. And the difficulty of this simulation is not one of scale, simply adding raw computation power will never make some machine as smart as a human.
It is a difficulty of the very premises that people assume makes us smart. A significant part of our own intelligence comes from the outside and how we interact with it. Just isolate someone from any visual, auditive and tactile stimulus to see that he/she becomes insane in a very short time.
We are Turing O-Machines: We are Oracle machines as defined in the very same paper by Turing that started all the artificial intelligence theory. An Oracle Machine is just a machine that can complete some computations impossible to do by any normal Turing Machine using an Oracle that tells it the answer of the computation. The Oracle is out there. We use everything we perceive of the world as an Oracle for the purposes of this theory.
This argument mimics the very same technique that great genius use to achieve their discoveries. They get their inspiration from many many different ideas and perceptions from the world. A computer (simple Turing machine equivalent) will never be able to do that (unless it reacts with its environment and thus became a O-Machine).
We are not deterministic and we will never be, no matter if there's a soul or not.
From: http://www.spangdahlem.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=4207
On the German Autobahn you need to know your geography in order to find your way around. The directions are not listed as north or south, but rather what is the next major city in the direction in which you are heading. Germany is the only country in Europe that does not have a speed limit for many stretches of its Autobahn. Most of the time, however, there is a speed limit, usually 130, 120 or even 100 kilometers/hour. When driving on the Autobahn, keep in mind that the left lane is for passing only. You can be fined for driving in the left lane if you are not passing. Although you will see a lot of it, tailgating, flashing lights, turning on the left turn signal and wild hand gestures are forbidden.
The speed limit for driving within the city is 50 kilometers/hour. Many cities and smaller villages have residential areas with a speed limit of 30 kilometers/hour. Remember that at most intersections you cannot make a right turn on a red light, unless a green arrow sign pointing to the right is displayed. About accidents:
From http://www.collegetermpapers.com/TermPapers/Speech/Life_in_the_fast_lane.shtml
Highway deaths did go up when speed limits were raised but overall deaths on all roadways stayed the same. That is because more people used the highway. The highway with higher speed limits attracts drivers from the slower roads.
On the Autobahn only motorized vehicles with an maximum speed of more than 60 km/h are allowed, no pedestrian, no bikers. As there are fences on both sides no animals and no pedestrians can enter the Autobahn. Therefore accidents with non-vehicles are very rare.
The speeding laws are outdated and only serve to let the police reach their weekly quotas. It is the police who keep them outdated.
In more logical countries it is not illegal to drive fast, but it is illegal to tail-chase other cars. This has shown to reduce accidents much more than speed-limiting laws, as tail-chasing is a very dangerous behavior, but simply speeding is not.
The next time when you drive slow enough but are tail-chasing the car in front of you ask yourself if you're not a reckless driver, just because the law says so.
AFAICT it's harder in some parts than SICP, and its all LOGO based.
I mean, how can you not to love a book that teaches how to simulate arbitrary curved surfaces and later simulate the curvature of space-time with just a turtle?
Nobody is saying that the stuff that teachers impart to their students is the same stuff that the leaders studied. I'm not assuming that.
What I'm assuming is, given that some cultural-education programs in this city worked very well and changed the behavior of some millions of people, for the better, that government iniciatives can work at least in some cases, and work better than the same iniciatives by religious leaders.
Religion is a part of culture, but it is not culture. There are lots of other aspects in it.
You seem to imply that because religion has some 'moral' aspects in it then, it defines the morality of a culture, but the truth is far from it.
As a counterexample: see almost all latin-american countries, its populations are almost 100% religious, but they are incredibly corrupt. I can also find countries with lots of atheists and almost no corruption, like Norway.
In fact, I can deduce (but I should look it up in a library) that Eastern European countries were as corrupt when they had a highly religious population as they are now.
Instead of trying to fix religion and hope that it magically somehow fix everything else, I believe it is better to fix everything else one step at a time, then religion will follow (or dissapear).
I'm an atheist and think that current Christian religion is obsolete and slow progress in a lot of fronts. But I have to see things as objectively as possible.
Two thousand years ago, it was a great improvement. Records show that before Christianity it was common to kill children and youngs, by their parents for various reasons and by priests for religious reasons. Christianity changed that. The family as we know it can be a product of this change. Of course all this is in occident, asian countries were more civilized in that age.
In modern mostly-atheist occidental countries the family is still a valid institution and no one kills their young children, in fact they seem better balanced than us.
Shadows are wrong because in Bioshock, DX10 shadows are "crisper and more detailed" with DX9 shadows being soft.
AND in Call of Juarez, "DX10 mode offers softer, more natural looking shadows" while DX9 shadows are crisp.
Wich means that both DX9 and DX10 can draw soft and crisp shadows, and the difference is just a stupid marketing gimmick to promote DX10 that game companies don't know how to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to add to the cons of consoles and pro of computers:
-Consoles: In consoles there's only two or three layouts of the gamepad. Period. If you're used to another control scheme (like me), your out of luck. And more than once all the supplied control schemes suck big time.
-Computers: You can program controls in anyway you like, and even mix them. I have played some games with a gamepad in one hand and a mouse in the other. Beat that!
Thinking about it there's another con in computers:
-Copy protection: Some games have copy protection that will mess your computer, deactivate your virtual drives and probably damage other software. Most of it really sucks.
And, my videocard will be good for a couple of years at least, I don't see any need to buy all games when they're released, I buy them whenever I feel like buying one, besides that, there's plenty of them I haven't played yet. And the image is as good or better than a PS3. I really see that con as a non issue.
I think that in that case, the distribution model is more important than the license.
I mean, 'people who receive the program in than modified form' can simply get it from the original author and skip the middleman. Problem solved. Period.
Monopolies and evil middeman in distribution channels of information are made obsolete by a bit of technology, like iTunes store and all its clones for music or Steam for games (and its lots of future clones, I hope). CVS, SVN and GIT repositories did the same for source code long ago.
In other words: The creation, distribution, and evolution of software enabled by the Internet is more important than the license, as long as that license is not closed source.
Public domain would be enough, as long as there's an Internet. I mean, BSD is like public domain except for some text that should be added and that's all.
(All this is of course invalidated by Software Patents. Evil Software Patents.)
That post would be a lot weirder if it were actually written by Cowboy Neal.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that)
As a user, this is my perspective.
I can say that I have heard more positive things about Vista during launch than I heard about XP during its launch. The architecture change is bigger and better than in 2K->XP. In this regard MS should not be worried...
What's different is what MS has at stake. They _need_ Vista to succeed much more than they needed XP to succeed. And the market perception about MS has changed too. In XP times MS was an OK company. Now they are simply EVIL. Using XP instead of Vista is the only way people has to hurt MS.
Another difference is the huge amount of time it passed since the last release. MS made lots of companies to subscribe to any SO updates that would have happened in the last 6 years.
Then they released nothing during that years. They got the money and provided nothing in exchange of that money. That's a (very valid) reason for a lot of companies to dismiss Vista, as in 'this is payback time'.
So the initial opinion of Vista is in fact better than the initial public opinion of XP. But, public opinion of XP changed slowly but surely towards positive, specially with service pack 2. All its problems were technical and nothing else. Vista has already fixed most of the technical problems and public opinion is still bad. I see no signs of the public opinion of Vista getting better.
Seems like people finally understood that DRM sucks and should be repeled with full force.
I for one will upgrade to OSX instead of upgrading to Vista when the time comes.
No matter how little the website designer got, it was too much.
I heard a lot of good things related to this album:
- 'The best album after OK computer'
- 'Probably the best album of the year'
And so on. With these reviews it's hard not to want to download and (maybe) pay for it. So I don't think it's really just because of the novelty, but also because of the reviews.
Other albums from other groups will probably have very different reviews. This puts a lot of the marketing might in the hands of the review sites.
If everything you know is courier, it can be true.
;)
I just tried consolas in my favorite text editor and it sucks compared to Lucida Console. Too small, too much space unused.
It has however a very nice comma glyph
Flash is not a technology that make it run fast and nice.
I mean, it will be flash based. I can watch an ugly video in a flash based online player eating a considerable part of my processing power. I can watch the same video with much better quality in stage6.divx.com and it takes no noticeable processing power at all.
And what about GUI Interface guidelines. Every single flash "app" I have ever seen implements GUI elements differently. The mouse wheel has never had a consistent behaviour in flash apps. If the change from Office 2003 to Office 2007 is so huge for users, imagine if all your apps has different GUI controls, GUI metaphors, GUI guidelines, and so on.
Besides that, we already have Java Webstart. And no single big commercial app has been ported to, or written in, Java Webstart.
May be end users don't like non native applications in their systems. May be end users don't like subscription based pricing. May be end users don't like Flash based apps.
I want a competing technology with a decent language and native widgets to emerge. Open source if possible. That would be great.
Don't be silly. In this case that difference doesn't matter at all.
I'm talking about getting the richest company in the world to lose a huge part of its assets, and in consequence a big chunk of its money.
If you think that's possible, good luck talking to Ballmer.
Food and rent should be free wherever I go.
I've been saying it for years now. Of course, then what whould the bums ditch about on... mmm... some public park?
At least one point of the Aquatic Ape has no counter claims.
That we get healthy eating fish meat and fat, while getting sick eating pork and cow meat and fat. Other terrestrial mammals get no harm from pork and cow meat.
So, while it's nonsense that all the evolutionary traits that makes us humans come from having to swim and fish, at least in a long part of our evolution we ate proteins only from fish, and perhaps most humans from that time where very good swimmers.
I even have a recipient full of Omega-3 pills in my room right now.
My own signature makes me remember why I totally disagree with you.
In a closed system, you can make deterministic predictions about the behaviour of any part of the system as long as its own parts are deterministic, and they are for the most part unless they rely on quantum physics.
But we are not a closed system. We constantly react with the world and in fact, the continuous interaction with the world not only help us to have free will, but in fact is a fundamental part of the free will. In other words, take away the random interactions we have with the world around us and you take away our free will. It will in fact take away more than free will, as a significant part of the computations our brains can do and computers can't is because of this same random interactions with the world.
If we where as deterministic as you assume we are in case no soul exist, then it would be far easier to simulate us with computers than it actually is. And the difficulty of this simulation is not one of scale, simply adding raw computation power will never make some machine as smart as a human.
It is a difficulty of the very premises that people assume makes us smart. A significant part of our own intelligence comes from the outside and how we interact with it. Just isolate someone from any visual, auditive and tactile stimulus to see that he/she becomes insane in a very short time.
We are Turing O-Machines: We are Oracle machines as defined in the very same paper by Turing that started all the artificial intelligence theory. An Oracle Machine is just a machine that can complete some computations impossible to do by any normal Turing Machine using an Oracle that tells it the answer of the computation. The Oracle is out there. We use everything we perceive of the world as an Oracle for the purposes of this theory.
This argument mimics the very same technique that great genius use to achieve their discoveries. They get their inspiration from many many different ideas and perceptions from the world.
A computer (simple Turing machine equivalent) will never be able to do that (unless it reacts with its environment and thus became a O-Machine).
We are not deterministic and we will never be, no matter if there's a soul or not.
That really depends on how fast you mean by 'driving fast'.
20% above max in straight and well maintained roads?
Twice the max speed in sinuous and heavily transited roads?
Without context your assertion is meaningless.
http://www.spangdahlem.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=4207 On the German Autobahn you need to know your geography in order to find your way around. The directions are not listed as north or south, but rather what is the next major city in the direction in which you are heading. Germany is the only country in Europe that does not have a speed limit for many stretches of its Autobahn. Most of the time, however, there is a speed limit, usually 130, 120 or even 100 kilometers/hour. When driving on the Autobahn, keep in mind that the left lane is for passing only. You can be fined for driving in the left lane if you are not passing. Although you will see a lot of it, tailgating, flashing lights, turning on the left turn signal and wild hand gestures are forbidden.
The speed limit for driving within the city is 50 kilometers/hour. Many cities and smaller villages have residential areas with a speed limit of 30 kilometers/hour. Remember that at most intersections you cannot make a right turn on a red light, unless a green arrow sign pointing to the right is displayed. About accidents:
From http://www.collegetermpapers.com/TermPapers/Speech/Life_in_the_fast_lane.shtml Highway deaths did go up when speed limits were raised but overall
deaths on all roadways stayed the same. That is because more people
used the highway. The highway with higher speed limits attracts
drivers from the slower roads.
On the Autobahn only motorized vehicles with an maximum speed of more
than 60 km/h are allowed, no pedestrian, no bikers.
As there are fences on both sides no animals and no pedestrians can
enter the Autobahn.
Therefore accidents with non-vehicles are very rare.
It surely depends on the game.
I have a PS2-like logitech controller for my PC, and I can never find enough buttons on it for the controls of the game.
The speeding laws are outdated and only serve to let the police reach their weekly quotas. It is the police who keep them outdated.
In more logical countries it is not illegal to drive fast, but it is illegal to tail-chase other cars. This has shown to reduce accidents much more than speed-limiting laws, as tail-chasing is a very dangerous behavior, but simply speeding is not.
The next time when you drive slow enough but are tail-chasing the car in front of you ask yourself if you're not a reckless driver, just because the law says so.
May I recommend Turtle Geometry to you?
AFAICT it's harder in some parts than SICP, and its all LOGO based.
I mean, how can you not to love a book that teaches how to simulate arbitrary curved surfaces and later simulate the curvature of space-time with just a turtle?
And then edit the .ps file with Gimp?
Learn the postcript language and edit it with emacs?
Editing PDFs like MSWord sounds more than good enough to me to mention it.
Of course pure number of game states does not equal it.
But after you know how to play both games, you can also see the richness of experience for yourself.
I can say that Go can be even more addictive than WoW, if you get really into it.
I think you would enjoy the first part of the Zeitgeist movie then.
Specifically about the things Christianity borrowed from ancient astrology:
You can watch it here:
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/
Nobody is saying that the stuff that teachers impart to their students is the same stuff that the leaders studied. I'm not assuming that.
What I'm assuming is, given that some cultural-education programs in this city worked very well and changed the behavior of some millions of people, for the better, that government iniciatives can work at least in some cases, and work better than the same iniciatives by religious leaders.
Religion proves nothing, too.
However, we can prove dogs exists, not using that drug, but with other means.
Religion is a part of culture, but it is not culture. There are lots of other aspects in it.
You seem to imply that because religion has some 'moral' aspects in it then, it defines the morality of a culture, but the truth is far from it.
As a counterexample: see almost all latin-american countries, its populations are almost 100% religious, but they are incredibly corrupt. I can also find countries with lots of atheists and almost no corruption, like Norway.
In fact, I can deduce (but I should look it up in a library) that Eastern European countries were as corrupt when they had a highly religious population as they are now.
Instead of trying to fix religion and hope that it magically somehow fix everything else, I believe it is better to fix everything else one step at a time, then religion will follow (or dissapear).
It improved things a lot.
I'm an atheist and think that current Christian religion is obsolete and slow progress in a lot of fronts. But I have to see things as objectively as possible.
Two thousand years ago, it was a great improvement. Records show that before Christianity it was common to kill children and youngs, by their parents for various reasons and by priests for religious reasons. Christianity changed that. The family as we know it can be a product of this change. Of course all this is in occident, asian countries were more civilized in that age.
In modern mostly-atheist occidental countries the family is still a valid institution and no one kills their young children, in fact they seem better balanced than us.
Shadows are wrong because in Bioshock, DX10 shadows are "crisper and more detailed" with DX9 shadows being soft.
AND in Call of Juarez, "DX10 mode offers softer, more natural looking shadows" while DX9 shadows are crisp.
Wich means that both DX9 and DX10 can draw soft and crisp shadows, and the difference is just a stupid marketing gimmick to promote DX10 that game companies don't know how to use.