That might produce ppl that lie in bed all day with a headset and do nothing but play quake, what with all them digital interfaces to the senses. One cool thing -- just think, your audio perception will no longer be limited by having to conduct sound through air. Sign me up!
The framework for cybernetic human companions is already in place -- if you combine Aibo's bran and a RealDoll (with a few modifications), I am sure you can get some pretty interesting results. However, a 'human' companion may not be as nice as a dog (or cat) because they would be much larger, and cost would reflect that. I am not sure how much realdolls cost, but you'd have to implement a moving skeleton, and a rather fast computer inside the rib cage, maybe a gyroscope and some cameras and microphones in the head. (the power plug can either be something in the head covered by hair, or if you don't want real genitalia on your pet human robot, then maybe in there somewhere) Anyway, this type of Terminator-ish skeleton, even if spared the silicon boobs, would get expensive beyond belief, so unless you are willing to trade your Dodge Viper for a human that is clumsy, unable to hold up conversation, and good for nothing but "give me that glass" and "Bend over"... well, let's just say, Sony won't be making these:)
If it is possible for a third party to buy access logs from 2 different web pages, then it is possible to cross-link those. However, given that a lot of ppl have dynamic IP's, it may not be that big of a deal because they can only track on a per-isp basis. However, this can nonetheless be a useful tool in marketing research. This raises the question -- is THIS kind of research ok?
One simple way for software companies to convince me that they are not doing anything stupid is putting "This program in no way communicates any information to any third party other than list-of-functions-goes-here, (like "tells id your GL_RENDERER, sends request for listing of available q3 servers, sends packets to server containing gameplay information") or something of that sort. It'd be real easy for a lawyer to write something like that up, and after the programmers took all the trojans out, then it's fine. After that, if a company gets caught, they face criminal charges about lies lies lies, and have to pay the users of their software through the nose.
UT's performance should be fundamentally the same as q3 performance across OS's on the same hardware. I know for a fact that NVIDIA's X drivers are significantly slower than their windows drivers, but that may be fixed by the time the next major release of X comes around. 3dfx cards might be faster if they don't go through x, but use glide straight, without having to convert gl to glide.
Re:I must be from another planet but...
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
·
· Score: 1
If you are from another planet, I think you'd play the part really well yourself -- maybe you should try writing a letter like that and trying to get in on the fun:) It'd be cool to see an AC from slashdot playing a part in a really cool movie.
One very important advance that is still missing is a uniform automated package delivery system, that can send anything from an envelope that weighs 2 ounces that has your electricity bill to your 90-lb SuperG from Kryotech. Given that, getting some stuff from the local grocery will be quite easy, although pizza delivery boys will not have much to do anymore. That and broadband for everybody.
Given that you can only get audiovisual information, you can still get audiovisual information instead of emails through the telephone -- or if you don't want to pay, dialpad.com. And IRC (or AIM or ICQ) are much faster than email.
It sounds to me like SGI bought it, cut off a chunk of it for money, and will promptly sell it away. Granted, they were competitors and everything, this doesn't sound like good sportsmanship to me. Then again, I've stopped being impressed since they changed their logo:).
I'm exhausted after playing an hour of quake. Weenie! Now that q3 has bots, I can play for hours training to kill kill kill. It's hard to find an internet game with a lot of good players. But man... once I spend all night training, I can really lay it down on my hallmates during the day. Oh yeah, and there are classes.
I went to a rifle range for the first time in my life today. I got to hold a winchester rifle that shot these little short bullets, I think 22-caliber or whatever. Anyway, once you get hold of a gun, it is suprisingly easy to shoot it. You'd think that it would be really different from, say, clicking a mouse button, but in fact, the trigger gives about as much resistance. The gives you a little kick, and you have a hole in the paper you're shooting at. I had a hard time believing that what I was holding could very easily injure, or even kill a person, if aimed just right (which is kind of tricky -- you got to hold pretty still to get a good aim). Anyway, I think it may be quite difficult to realize for a kid that has access to a gun but hasn't been taught properly by his parents that a person holding a gun can actually kill somebody. This is why I think that rating games is a good idea to help parents teach their children correctly, but the burden of raising non-murderous children still remains on the parents. I am a firm supporter of NOT giving children access to firearms, and if firearms are kept, they ought to have locks on them that children do NOT know the combination to. Under those conditions, I think it's safe for a kid to play any kind of game, even if the kid has problems dealing with whatever bugs him.
On a different issue, a teenager is not going to have access to an F-15 stocked with bombs and air-to-air missiles, so those games are ok no matter what.
Me and a friend of mine were writing a physics demo program as a class project a couple of years ago, and we made heavy use of picking insane names for classes and variables. As an example, one of the objects is a bond that obeys Hook's Law, but that needed a manager. So we called the manager a Pimp class. And the instanciation was myPimp. The function that told each bond to update itself, if I remember correctly, was actually called DoIt or something horrific like that. Then there were Erectangles that covered the surface of the solid we were generating... oh man, that was fun.
To make your code understandable only to you, you do not need dozens of methods -- you need only 1. Apply password selection procedures to function names. Remember, a password is your dog's name, but with numbers in it (like your vet's phone number modulo its greatest common factor with 3) and written in h4x0r-speak.
There is *some* semblance of control -- you can allow the number of connections at one time to be no larger than 1 (or 50, if you are so inclined). I think one nice feature would be if napster would remove duplicates for you (maybe based on length and filename, bitrate, etc -- if both match, it must be a duplicate of something else). Also it takes minutes to do searches that don't generate your hit limit right away, and I think taht sucks.
If you can buy processor time on it, I think it'd be neat to just buy enough to get you to the top of the seti@home contributor list, and then bask in the glory of a first post.
For some reason all of this reminds me of a Borg cube --- thousands of nodes, some controlling others, all networked, etc etc. I guess it would kind of suck to be a computational node -- doing integrals in your head 24/7 for weeks at a time sounds kind of painful... Just like preparing for a math exam.
The Doom Sysadmin tool might get *quite* annoying if you have some kind of while(1){fork();} thing going. And if you run it, does it itself show up as a process that can be killed? tee hee:)
I think that the newer game consoles have this already, but the next great feat of accelerating games on a computer is a chip designed specifically to do the physics for you. Then we'd obviously need a standard world-description API, and then there'd be one more thing to fight over.
I also think that a very cool thing would be to have a Dreamcast or PlayStation *card* that you insert into your computer. It could use the CD/DVD drive to read its roms, and then you can play some really cool-looking game while recompiling something, with a minimal drop in speed for each of them.
Granted that MSIE is a big hairy dog that poops on windows's kernel.. Don't get me wrong here, BUT.
I think it is a very powerful feature to have a completely URL-based operating system. This may allow a user to access *any* file on the internet available through a supported protocol just like it's right here. One of the advantages may be an option to remotely install a program -- Just go to their website, run the installation script from there, and let your high-speed internet connection do the rest. No need to bother with downloading the install file, forgetting where you put it, etc etc. I thoroughly believe in the abstraction layer, and reading the contents of any file anywhere all in the same way sounds very good to me.
That aside, I think it sucks that those features would bring down the OS when used.
One current technique is thumping on the ground and listening for an echo of some sort. I wonder if it is possible to make a *really* *really* loud thump somewhere out of the way (like Antarctica) with a *really* *really* big bomb and try to see what's going on down there.
This discussion reminds me of some sory I read somewhere about guys that were doing this thumping technique and wound up destroying the underground civilization they were trying to discover. Does anybody know what the hell I'm talking about?
Maybe the helium is necessary because to be properly heated for reaction, the microbes had to be near a lava flow, which may or may not contain helium from when the earth was formed.
From 10^-35 to 10^-4 s is called the Hadron era And here I was thinking that that era was just being a teenager.:)
Anyway, here's my take on Gold's theory. What he is saying is that at time of creation, God was hodling a very greasy burger and it slipped out of his hand and splattered oil on what we call our universe. The obvious corollory to this is wondering if God knew which side the burger was going to land on once it fell.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just wondering when a robot will be on the market that gave hand jobs, as well as ran errands.
That might produce ppl that lie in bed all day with a headset and do nothing but play quake, what with all them digital interfaces to the senses. One cool thing -- just think, your audio perception will no longer be limited by having to conduct sound through air. Sign me up!
is transmeta a pretty lame name too by your standards? 'cause metalink seems to be...
The framework for cybernetic human companions is already in place -- if you combine Aibo's bran and a RealDoll (with a few modifications), I am sure you can get some pretty interesting results. However, a 'human' companion may not be as nice as a dog (or cat) because they would be much larger, and cost would reflect that. I am not sure how much realdolls cost, but you'd have to implement a moving skeleton, and a rather fast computer inside the rib cage, maybe a gyroscope and some cameras and microphones in the head. (the power plug can either be something in the head covered by hair, or if you don't want real genitalia on your pet human robot, then maybe in there somewhere) Anyway, this type of Terminator-ish skeleton, even if spared the silicon boobs, would get expensive beyond belief, so unless you are willing to trade your Dodge Viper for a human that is clumsy, unable to hold up conversation, and good for nothing but "give me that glass" and "Bend over"... well, let's just say, Sony won't be making these :)
If it is possible for a third party to buy access logs from 2 different web pages, then it is possible to cross-link those. However, given that a lot of ppl have dynamic IP's, it may not be that big of a deal because they can only track on a per-isp basis. However, this can nonetheless be a useful tool in marketing research. This raises the question -- is THIS kind of research ok?
One simple way for software companies to convince me that they are not doing anything stupid is putting "This program in no way communicates any information to any third party other than list-of-functions-goes-here, (like "tells id your GL_RENDERER, sends request for listing of available q3 servers, sends packets to server containing gameplay information") or something of that sort. It'd be real easy for a lawyer to write something like that up, and after the programmers took all the trojans out, then it's fine. After that, if a company gets caught, they face criminal charges about lies lies lies, and have to pay the users of their software through the nose.
UT's performance should be fundamentally the same as q3 performance across OS's on the same hardware. I know for a fact that NVIDIA's X drivers are significantly slower than their windows drivers, but that may be fixed by the time the next major release of X comes around. 3dfx cards might be faster if they don't go through x, but use glide straight, without having to convert gl to glide.
If you are from another planet, I think you'd play the part really well yourself -- maybe you should try writing a letter like that and trying to get in on the fun :) It'd be cool to see an AC from slashdot playing a part in a really cool movie.
One very important advance that is still missing is a uniform automated package delivery system, that can send anything from an envelope that weighs 2 ounces that has your electricity bill to your 90-lb SuperG from Kryotech. Given that, getting some stuff from the local grocery will be quite easy, although pizza delivery boys will not have much to do anymore.
That and broadband for everybody.
Given that you can only get audiovisual information, you can still get audiovisual information instead of emails through the telephone -- or if you don't want to pay, dialpad.com. And IRC (or AIM or ICQ) are much faster than email.
It sounds to me like SGI bought it, cut off a chunk of it for money, and will promptly sell it away. Granted, they were competitors and everything, this doesn't sound like good sportsmanship to me. Then again, I've stopped being impressed since they changed their logo :).
I'm exhausted after playing an hour of quake.
Weenie! Now that q3 has bots, I can play for hours training to kill kill kill. It's hard to find an internet game with a lot of good players. But man... once I spend all night training, I can really lay it down on my hallmates during the day. Oh yeah, and there are classes.
I went to a rifle range for the first time in my life today. I got to hold a winchester rifle that shot these little short bullets, I think 22-caliber or whatever. Anyway, once you get hold of a gun, it is suprisingly easy to shoot it. You'd think that it would be really different from, say, clicking a mouse button, but in fact, the trigger gives about as much resistance. The gives you a little kick, and you have a hole in the paper you're shooting at. I had a hard time believing that what I was holding could very easily injure, or even kill a person, if aimed just right (which is kind of tricky -- you got to hold pretty still to get a good aim). Anyway, I think it may be quite difficult to realize for a kid that has access to a gun but hasn't been taught properly by his parents that a person holding a gun can actually kill somebody. This is why I think that rating games is a good idea to help parents teach their children correctly, but the burden of raising non-murderous children still remains on the parents. I am a firm supporter of NOT giving children access to firearms, and if firearms are kept, they ought to have locks on them that children do NOT know the combination to. Under those conditions, I think it's safe for a kid to play any kind of game, even if the kid has problems dealing with whatever bugs him.
On a different issue, a teenager is not going to have access to an F-15 stocked with bombs and air-to-air missiles, so those games are ok no matter what.
Me and a friend of mine were writing a physics demo program as a class project a couple of years ago, and we made heavy use of picking insane names for classes and variables. As an example, one of the objects is a bond that obeys Hook's Law, but that needed a manager. So we called the manager a Pimp class. And the instanciation was myPimp. The function that told each bond to update itself, if I remember correctly, was actually called DoIt or something horrific like that. Then there were Erectangles that covered the surface of the solid we were generating... oh man, that was fun.
To make your code understandable only to you, you do not need dozens of methods -- you need only 1. Apply password selection procedures to function names. Remember, a password is your dog's name, but with numbers in it (like your vet's phone number modulo its greatest common factor with 3) and written in h4x0r-speak.
There is *some* semblance of control -- you can allow the number of connections at one time to be no larger than 1 (or 50, if you are so inclined).
I think one nice feature would be if napster would remove duplicates for you (maybe based on length and filename, bitrate, etc -- if both match, it must be a duplicate of something else). Also it takes minutes to do searches that don't generate your hit limit right away, and I think taht sucks.
If you can buy processor time on it, I think it'd be neat to just buy enough to get you to the top of the seti@home contributor list, and then bask in the glory of a first post.
For some reason all of this reminds me of a Borg cube --- thousands of nodes, some controlling others, all networked, etc etc.
I guess it would kind of suck to be a computational node -- doing integrals in your head 24/7 for weeks at a time sounds kind of painful... Just like preparing for a math exam.
The Doom Sysadmin tool might get *quite* annoying if you have some kind of while(1){fork();} thing going. :)
And if you run it, does it itself show up as a process that can be killed? tee hee
I think that the newer game consoles have this already, but the next great feat of accelerating games on a computer is a chip designed specifically to do the physics for you. Then we'd obviously need a standard world-description API, and then there'd be one more thing to fight over.
I also think that a very cool thing would be to have a Dreamcast or PlayStation *card* that you insert into your computer. It could use the CD/DVD drive to read its roms, and then you can play some really cool-looking game while recompiling something, with a minimal drop in speed for each of them.
At some point I had never thought about pronouncing it because I just typed it instead. Wonder if it's proper to capitalize or not... ohwell :)
Is Windows 2000 that millenium bug everybody's talking about?
Granted that MSIE is a big hairy dog that poops on windows's kernel.. Don't get me wrong here, BUT.
I think it is a very powerful feature to have a completely URL-based operating system. This may allow a user to access *any* file on the internet available through a supported protocol just like it's right here. One of the advantages may be an option to remotely install a program -- Just go to their website, run the installation script from there, and let your high-speed internet connection do the rest. No need to bother with downloading the install file, forgetting where you put it, etc etc. I thoroughly believe in the abstraction layer, and reading the contents of any file anywhere all in the same way sounds very good to me.
That aside, I think it sucks that those features would bring down the OS when used.
One current technique is thumping on the ground and listening for an echo of some sort. I wonder if it is possible to make a *really* *really* loud thump somewhere out of the way (like Antarctica) with a *really* *really* big bomb and try to see what's going on down there.
This discussion reminds me of some sory I read somewhere about guys that were doing this thumping technique and wound up destroying the underground civilization they were trying to discover. Does anybody know what the hell I'm talking about?
Maybe the helium is necessary because to be properly heated for reaction, the microbes had to be near a lava flow, which may or may not contain helium from when the earth was formed.
From 10^-35 to 10^-4 s is called the Hadron era :)
And here I was thinking that that era was just being a teenager.
Anyway, here's my take on Gold's theory. What he is saying is that at time of creation, God was hodling a very greasy burger and it slipped out of his hand and splattered oil on what we call our universe. The obvious corollory to this is wondering if God knew which side the burger was going to land on once it fell.