Blizzard has fixed the item loss issues and rolled the realm back to a state captured the previous day, resulting in all items being restored with a loss of under 48 hours of user playtime. See their Battle.Net Status post.
It sure is nice to see that when people talk about Battle.Net, they usually complain about problems with a game service that they don't even pay for
while being too lazy to investigate the cause.
It is part of the printed New York Times Sunday magazine. They put it up on the web a day early, I guess, but "tomorrow's news today" is almost always a necessity because of printing and distribution delays on paper media.
On a side note, I got a copy of the Sunday Times on my driveway this morning, and I don't even subscribe to it.
... Use the nForce, Luke?
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 2
You could at least say something in the writeup about what the nForce is - is it a new graphics card? A motherboard? A chipset? A toaster oven?
I know almost everyone else follows hardware development religiously, but I had no clue what this post was about. The linked article didn't help much at first since it assumed the reader already knew what was being reviewed.
Pentagon officials today reversed a six-month-old policy that stated that used whiteboards must be pulvarized with sledgehammers before being thrown out or given away. This move allows whiteboards to be donated to classrooms.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is credited with discovering that nonclassified material could be removed from the whiteboard with an eraser.
An anonymous source close to the Pentagon has stated that this is undisputably the smartest decision the government has made in years.
Re:This can't be for real
on
Duct Tape
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· Score: 1
He didn't understand the equations behind nuclear physics, or even basic chemical soluability. He simply found out what materials he needed, figured out ways of getting them, and consulted the Atomic Chemistry chapter of his high-school textbook for how to combine them.
The basic idea of nuclear reactors is simple: atoms with too many neutrons split up, releasing radiation. Some atoms release neutrons when they split up. Get a lot of these atoms, toss a few neutrons in on your own, and let the reaction feed itself until it runs out of unsplit atoms.
And I thought I was the only person in the world who knew the lyrics to songs by Ten Years After...
Hello, thats the wrong license
on
Swarmcast GPLed
·
· Score: 4
You've successfully quoted the Sun Java Web Start license. Now please click the word 'license' in Swarmcast's about box and you will see that there are no such reservations or claims.
Slightly off topic, but a really cool app for their 'Media Terminal' would be some form of broadband connection (a built-in cable modem, WiFi or HomePNA support) and a phone jack for internet telephony - like the new Linksys broadband routers.
This would be a great way to get the cable companies to recommend this box, because it could theoretically replace a lot of normal telephone usage and give the cable companies the edge in providing services to home users. Not to mention the conveniece of paying less than 10 cents a minute to Europe or Asia...
These pictures are truly fascinating, and they are stunningly beautiful. Unfortunately they are also somewhat fake.
Every single one of these pictures has been manually "tweaked" for optimal contrast and color balance, according to the page. In fact, it says that different regions of the same image are tweaked differently. Basically, someone brightened and sharpened in Photoshop, making the colors hyperrealistic and more pleasing to the eye. But what you see is not necessarily the natural or original colors that were photographed.
Because the site does not show the un-retouched composite images, we cannot judge the success of his RGB photography and we cannot come to our own conclusions on what the photographed scenes truly looked like.
If cloning were done by dividing an original cell into two, then yes, it would be fairly safe.
Cloning is usually done by taking cells from a living creature, however, and placing them into a newly-emptied egg cell. This is dangerous like you wouldn't believe, because the DNA of the clone is prematurely aged. The telomeres at the ends of strings are much shorter, and eventually the DNA degenerates and cannot be copied. Cloned animals (including the famous Dolly, IIRC) often exhibit serious problems after only a few years of life.
As for the reduction of diversity, this is only the case for mass cloning. If the population is cloned entirely, thus doubling its size, there is no problem with loss of genetic diversity.
Bleem! was designed by people who knew all about the tricks that warez groups might try to crack their product, so they use every undocumented trick in the Windows API to try to be unhackable. Plus, the Bleem CD has something like 32 tracks of data and audio both with specific corrupt sectors. The WinASPI layer fails in a very specific way when reading parts of that disc, and Bleem won't start if it doesn't. But because of the way the CD-ROM is abstracted by the kernel, Wine can't properly emulate that behavior.
An MD5 or any other checksum is only "unique" for a given file it it has as many bits as the original file.
If you have 36 bits of data and do a 32-bit checksum, there are 16 (2^(36-32)) possible files that will all have that same checksum.
Even if you use two non-overlapping algorithms, you cannot recreate the original file. You can create a file that has the same MD5, the same CRC32, and the same file length, but the data will be completely different.
In linux, there is a difference between using it and knowing how it works. But you cannot use mathematics without understanding it, and you cannot understand math without also knowing how to apply it.
So unless there is something here that most graduate-level courses are missing, I don't see how you can possibly learn any faster than by studying at a university.
What cave have you been living in? Black and White is the latest game from Peter Molyneux (designer of Populous and Dungeon Keeper, formerly of Bullfrog).
Call me a cynical bastard, but I never thought this would work out in the first place. I know I'm underinformed on the topic, but I still think that it was an impossible dream. You can't make money on a set-top box.
Sony loses money on every Playstation sold; Sega was almost dragged under by the Dreamcast. TiVo and WebTV have mandatory service fees. Remember the fuss over the i-Opener hack? You can't sell consumer equipment without guaranteed way to make back the losses.
Indrema had no guaranteed revenue stream. Their income was from game royalties; however, they didn't have any big-name titles lined up. And to attract serious developers would require a sizable user-base, meaning that the consoles would have to be sold underprice (just so they can be competetive) for a long time before the money started coming back in. I can't imagine that anybody would risk investing in a company which guaranteed short-term losses and had only a marginal shot at ever making money back.
Yeah, yeah, you can tell me that you and your friends would have all bought Indremas, but do you really think that these boxes stood a chance at attracting a large number of users? If you were given the choice between a PS2 and an Indrema at the same price, which one would you honestly pick? And if you factor in the brand-name recognition of Sony or Nintendo (in the eyes of Joe Average at least), there's just no hope for the Indrema. (BTW, the only reason the Xbox might succeed is that Microsoft can afford to hemorrage cash for years -- not to mention their serious marketing power.)
So it was a nice idea, sure, but there was just no way it was going to work out in the end. Nobody wants to invest in something that might not ever make money.
Well, at the current stages at least, anyone who would use WINE for gaming wouldn't be calling tech support. By the time WINE moves to the average user, it will be robust enough to handle almost any application better than Windows itself would. Or so goes the plan.
WINE and the TransGaming patches are not another abstraction layer, I should add; they are an alternative implenetation of Microsoft's DirectX APIs. DirectX does not run on top of the TransGaming patches. It's rather like how Mesa is a replacement for OpenGL.
1) Wine Is Not an Emulator. It is a binary loader and API translator. Windows.EXE files are loaded and executed directly by Wine, without any form of CPU instruction translation involved.
2) TransGaming's patches are not pay-only. The patches are and will always be free. Subscribers simply get to vote on what is the next priority game to get working, and it is a way to donate money directly to the project
Actually, TransGaming has already integrated their DirectDraw patches back into the Wine cvs tree. With the latest release of Wine and the TransGaming patches, I can run Starcraft, Halflife, Diablo II (cracked to remove incompatible copy protection), and Alice.
That's hardly vaporware. They've made huge progress in only a few months.
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard has fixed the item loss issues and rolled the realm back to a state captured the previous day, resulting in all items being restored with a loss of under 48 hours of user playtime. See their Battle.Net Status post.
It sure is nice to see that when people talk about Battle.Net, they usually complain about problems with a game service that they don't even pay for while being too lazy to investigate the cause.
All you need to do is reply to the autoresponse and you are guaranteed to get a human being. It says so right in the email.
It is part of the printed New York Times Sunday magazine. They put it up on the web a day early, I guess, but "tomorrow's news today" is almost always a necessity because of printing and distribution delays on paper media. On a side note, I got a copy of the Sunday Times on my driveway this morning, and I don't even subscribe to it.
You could at least say something in the writeup about what the nForce is - is it a new graphics card? A motherboard? A chipset? A toaster oven? I know almost everyone else follows hardware development religiously, but I had no clue what this post was about. The linked article didn't help much at first since it assumed the reader already knew what was being reviewed.
Pentagon officials today reversed a six-month-old policy that stated that used whiteboards must be pulvarized with sledgehammers before being thrown out or given away. This move allows whiteboards to be donated to classrooms.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is credited with discovering that nonclassified material could be removed from the whiteboard with an eraser.
An anonymous source close to the Pentagon has stated that this is undisputably the smartest decision the government has made in years.
He didn't understand the equations behind nuclear physics, or even basic chemical soluability. He simply found out what materials he needed, figured out ways of getting them, and consulted the Atomic Chemistry chapter of his high-school textbook for how to combine them. The basic idea of nuclear reactors is simple: atoms with too many neutrons split up, releasing radiation. Some atoms release neutrons when they split up. Get a lot of these atoms, toss a few neutrons in on your own, and let the reaction feed itself until it runs out of unsplit atoms.
And I thought I was the only person in the world who knew the lyrics to songs by Ten Years After...
You've successfully quoted the Sun Java Web Start license. Now please click the word 'license' in Swarmcast's about box and you will see that there are no such reservations or claims.
You are the weakest link. Goodbye!
This would be a great way to get the cable companies to recommend this box, because it could theoretically replace a lot of normal telephone usage and give the cable companies the edge in providing services to home users. Not to mention the conveniece of paying less than 10 cents a minute to Europe or Asia...
Every single one of these pictures has been manually "tweaked" for optimal contrast and color balance, according to the page. In fact, it says that different regions of the same image are tweaked differently. Basically, someone brightened and sharpened in Photoshop, making the colors hyperrealistic and more pleasing to the eye. But what you see is not necessarily the natural or original colors that were photographed.
Because the site does not show the un-retouched composite images, we cannot judge the success of his RGB photography and we cannot come to our own conclusions on what the photographed scenes truly looked like.
If cloning were done by dividing an original cell into two, then yes, it would be fairly safe.
Cloning is usually done by taking cells from a living creature, however, and placing them into a newly-emptied egg cell. This is dangerous like you wouldn't believe, because the DNA of the clone is prematurely aged. The telomeres at the ends of strings are much shorter, and eventually the DNA degenerates and cannot be copied. Cloned animals (including the famous Dolly, IIRC) often exhibit serious problems after only a few years of life.
As for the reduction of diversity, this is only the case for mass cloning. If the population is cloned entirely, thus doubling its size, there is no problem with loss of genetic diversity.
If someone reads Slashdot, you can bet that he (or she) has already seen The Matrix.
Never going to happen.
Bleem! was designed by people who knew all about the tricks that warez groups might try to crack their product, so they use every undocumented trick in the Windows API to try to be unhackable. Plus, the Bleem CD has something like 32 tracks of data and audio both with specific corrupt sectors. The WinASPI layer fails in a very specific way when reading parts of that disc, and Bleem won't start if it doesn't. But because of the way the CD-ROM is abstracted by the kernel, Wine can't properly emulate that behavior.
So it's realy never going to happen.
Yes, these two guys claim to have invented peer-to-peer network synchronization.
An MD5 or any other checksum is only "unique" for a given file it it has as many bits as the original file. If you have 36 bits of data and do a 32-bit checksum, there are 16 (2^(36-32)) possible files that will all have that same checksum. Even if you use two non-overlapping algorithms, you cannot recreate the original file. You can create a file that has the same MD5, the same CRC32, and the same file length, but the data will be completely different.
In linux, there is a difference between using it and knowing how it works. But you cannot use mathematics without understanding it, and you cannot understand math without also knowing how to apply it.
So unless there is something here that most graduate-level courses are missing, I don't see how you can possibly learn any faster than by studying at a university.
http://www.bwgame.com/
http://www.lionhead.com/
http://www.planetblackandwhite.com/
Gamespot review (9.3/10)
Sony loses money on every Playstation sold; Sega was almost dragged under by the Dreamcast. TiVo and WebTV have mandatory service fees. Remember the fuss over the i-Opener hack? You can't sell consumer equipment without guaranteed way to make back the losses.
Indrema had no guaranteed revenue stream. Their income was from game royalties; however, they didn't have any big-name titles lined up. And to attract serious developers would require a sizable user-base, meaning that the consoles would have to be sold underprice (just so they can be competetive) for a long time before the money started coming back in. I can't imagine that anybody would risk investing in a company which guaranteed short-term losses and had only a marginal shot at ever making money back.
Yeah, yeah, you can tell me that you and your friends would have all bought Indremas, but do you really think that these boxes stood a chance at attracting a large number of users? If you were given the choice between a PS2 and an Indrema at the same price, which one would you honestly pick? And if you factor in the brand-name recognition of Sony or Nintendo (in the eyes of Joe Average at least), there's just no hope for the Indrema. (BTW, the only reason the Xbox might succeed is that Microsoft can afford to hemorrage cash for years -- not to mention their serious marketing power.)
So it was a nice idea, sure, but there was just no way it was going to work out in the end. Nobody wants to invest in something that might not ever make money.
Perhaps it's called the violence chip because you will beat the crap out of your television when you forget the override code.
WINE and the TransGaming patches are not another abstraction layer, I should add; they are an alternative implenetation of Microsoft's DirectX APIs. DirectX does not run on top of the TransGaming patches. It's rather like how Mesa is a replacement for OpenGL.
2) TransGaming's patches are not pay-only. The patches are and will always be free. Subscribers simply get to vote on what is the next priority game to get working, and it is a way to donate money directly to the project
Please view these screenshots and then tell me again that Wine doesn't run anything.
Actually, TransGaming has already integrated their DirectDraw patches back into the Wine cvs tree. With the latest release of Wine and the TransGaming patches, I can run Starcraft, Halflife, Diablo II (cracked to remove incompatible copy protection), and Alice. That's hardly vaporware. They've made huge progress in only a few months.