"how bout splitting the images apart a few milimetres to give realistic 3d images"
You need to do a bit more than just "split the images apart" to get the 3d effect you're referring to. Firstly the hardware needs to support this. There are a few ways you can do this. One is to have two seperate VGA signals, one for each eye. This makes the hardware more expensive bulky and complicated. Another common way is to interlace the two signals into one, and split it again at the eyepiece, but this drops your effective resolution for each eye from 800x600 to 800x300. Another way is to have each alternate frame on the signal go to each eye, alternately. This halves the effective refresh rate of each eye's display.
Note that all of the above options make all the electronics notably more expensive, complicated and unwieldy, and in general this is not worth it, since the "3d effect" is fairly minimal.
That's only the hardware problems. The software you're using has to support it too. Windows most certainly has no such features, and extremely few games do. Even if a game were to do this, then the game programmers would be responsible for providing the signal in the way the particular hardware wanted the signal (i.e. interlaced or frame-interleave.) This is a reasonable effort, considering that less than 0.01% of a games market has the hardware to handle this.
Also a game has to render twice as quickly to get the same frame rate as without the 3d effect. If your QuakeIIIarena is rendering in "mono" mode at 60Hz, it will drop to 30Hz update rate, if frame-interleave mode is used.
Also for this effect to work properly there must be a means to calibrate the display piece or the software for an individual's IPP (inter-pupillary distance, the distance between your eyes.)
The "3d effect" is anyway fairly minimal. It means nothing in non-3d apps like windows, web-surfing etc, and it doesn't mean very much in 3d simulation apps (e.g. games) unless the objects you're looking at are fairly close. So in general I don't think the added costs to the device would be worth it. The market is too small anyway for that. If the technology was cheap and common, sure, but not yet. Give it maybe another 5 or 15 years.
Another problem is that while it might be nice to have a bit of 3d effect, it won't really be worth too much if you can't "look around" in your 3d world. So you would probably want to have some sort of 3dof/6dof tracking device to track the orientation of your head so you could look around. Once again the software has to support this, and once again it makes the whole setup more bulky and expensive.
Hmm.. so I suppose if you knew someone who worked in a molecular biology lab with a PCR machine (my boss's wife does, for example), you may be able to create some pretty good counterfeits that would pass their authenticity tests.
The usual one-upmanship battle, never ends, does it?
"And btw, this holds for developers of games too. Carmack and friends could put their skills to more positive ends designing medical software, or some other positive work rather than rendering polygons"
Something a lot of people don't seem to think about (perhaps partially because poverty is so scarce in the United States) is that while it may not seem to directly benefit people (in the way medicine does) creating industries around entertainment, it *does* benefit the millions of people who find jobs within these industries and make enough to live comfortably. This applies to any entertainment industry, i.e. movies and television, not just computer game. There is not much point in making wonderful advancements in medicine, if half your population can't afford those medical advancements. The gaming industry creates so many jobs that allow people to be able to afford to benefit from the medical advancements. Come live in a 3rd world ("developing") country for a while, you learn to appreciate just how valuable those jobs can be when those jobs just don't exist.
I don't see entertainment as a waste of time myself - I work hard while I'm working, but I love to relax by (amongst other things) playing Quake. Its good to have a balance.
"I'm a gamer (a little anyway), but I thought skills where things that help you accomplish a task, make you a little money, or push you forward in life. Sorry but I don't see fragging 500 people in a tourney as a skill"
Well (using your definition) I don't see how knocking a little white ball into a hole with a stick is a "skill". Nonetheless it seems to have made a lot of money for Tiger woods. I don't see how throwing a ball through a little hoop is a "skill", but I don't know, it seems to have gotten Michael Jordan pretty far in life. Pushing balls into holes with a stick isn't a "skill"? It's gotten Steve Davis pretty far.
Most sports have an extremely simple premise. That does not mean that it does not take skill to become accomplished in those sports, nor does it mean that you shouldn't be able to make money doing it.
I mean, they're glorifying the twitch reflex, and the ability to run a flipping maze
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but all sports are based on extremely simple premises (e.g. golf, "get the little ball into the hole with a stick", or soccer, "get the ball through those posts", or snooker, "knock balls into a hole with a stick", or hurdles, "fastest guy to run to a line while jumping over poles" etc etc, not to even get started on the Olympics.) In spite of this there are multi-million dollar tournaments for these games that are also incredibly stupid and overglorified, according to your arguments. I suppose you think "traditional" sports are "real" sports but computer gaming isn't? Thats pure hypocrisy.
"Given the hardware that these guys are using, and the time that they've thrown into becoming "l33t", I could probably kick ass with the best of them"
Yeah right; put your money where your mouth is. If you'd actually played QUake properly you'd know there is more to it than just the twitch reflex.
Only 3 reboots? Try putting an already installed Windows hard disk into a different computer - I've had over *10* reboots before it was up and running again.
Quake3 is in no way at all pushing to enhance "realism", and if you'd actually played it then you would know that. The game itself is very abstract and I would say "cartoony". This is by design, and it isn't intended to be realistic at all. In my opinion (and millions of others) it is a very fun game to play.
Some people like games that tend toward realism. If thats what you want play something like Counterstrike.
Why do you seem to think that a game is supposed to be realistic to be fun? What a stupid idea.
Of course rocket jumps are entirely unrealistic, of course you can't fire a real rocket launcher into the ground underneath you without killing yourself. But they do add to the game.
I don't see you accusing Pacman (one of the most popular games of all time) of not being realistic, why is that?
Netscape starts slower, but my guess is that this is because IE is essentially loaded into memory at startup and is there ALL THE TIME (presumably this brilliant innovative element of software design is of some or other benefit to consumers, or whatever MS wants you to believe.)
But in my experience, Netscape runs quite a bit faster than IE. Just the other day I installed NN, and opened both IE and NN each with two windows onto the same pages. IE was *much* slower at both displaying the pages and "alt-tabbing" between the windows. IE's redrawing of the display was not only noticeable slower (Celeron 333 w128MB RAM) but also had ugly flickery overdraw effects (the type of effects you see on games that don't use back-buffers.) NN did not suffer from those problems.
This wasn't the new Mozilla-based NN either, it was still the old one (4.7 I think)
NN is also much faster at opening up new windows than IE. Try it out.
I guess the main reason I mostly still use IE is that it gets installed with Windows. And since we all know how often a Windows user (and in particular a Windows developer) has to reinstall Windows, its more convenient to use IE.
"Most Open Source Advocates have never produced any art or IP contributions"
Oh please; I am insulted by your childish generalisations.
What's your IP contribution, trolling on/.?
I don't advocate or even condone breaking the law (with the exception of civil disobedience, which serves an important purpose); but being forced to buy on average a dozen songs for each song that you actually want is called "being ripped off", especially when new technologies completely obliterate all remaining technical reasons for this practice.
The issue around mp3's, which you apparently missed, is this:
The technology now exists to sell people only the songs that they actually want.
Record companies and aging musicians, instead of adopting these new technologies, are attempting to fight them, since they would no longer be allowed to rip people off in the above-mentioned manner. Business models should be built around technologies, not the other way round.
This is the extremely simple and clear issue that is actually at heart here.
Obviously the guys over at ZDNet were perusing their hit statistics and noticed they were waning (we haven't seen such a crappo article from them in quite a while.)
Simple solution: post deliberate flamebait, aim for the slashdot effect, your hit statistics go through the roof, advertising revenues rise.
Hmm.. yes, I was unaware.. I was aware that Netscape had it; but regarding OE I just assumed that even if MS did put it in, it would be weak encryption (i.e. no encryption.)
The "it'll allow us to catch more criminals" is the usual catch-all phrase that suckers the sheeple into supporting bills that destroy their rights. Throw in a few choice keywords like "child pornography" or "terrorism", get the puppy-dog media to publish it, and you've got the support of probably 3/4 of the US. Sometimes I get the impression that most people would actually prefer to live like domestic animals, controlled and "protected" by the government - no rights, but at least they wouldn't have to think for themselves.
"Educating people" about PGP will never work; most people aren't bothered to make the effort required to learn. Also you have the "it sounds too complex" attitude. A great number of people think that it sounds too complex to download and install *any* third party software (eg Netscape Navigator), or they're afraid to ("I heard you get viruses from downloading software") etc etc. What are the chances you're going to convince these people to figure out PGP?
The only way to make email encryption widely used and easily accessible is to have all popular email programs support strong encryption natively and in easy-to-use manner. That means Outlook Express, Netscape, Pegasus mail etc. It must basically come installed with the email program (remember, number 1 reason that people "choose" IE over NN is "it came with my computer").
I find it disturbing that major email programs don't already have strong encryption support, considering that privacy is such a basic right, and considering how much communication is in the form of email these days.
"But the fact is, the record company has invested in marketing and promoting - are you saying they don't deserve to reap some rewards from that investment?"
Nobody "deserves" to reap rewards just because they made an investment. If they invested smartly then they may well get rewards, but that is their *luck*, not their *right*. If somebody blindly keeps investing in technologies and methods that are becoming more outdated and obsolete as each day passes, they are going to lose money. Iridium is a good example of people who made a huge investment, and lost it all, just because of the difficulty in judging the market. It is cruel and harsh, but that is how capitalism works - they didn't "deserve" rewards just because they worked so hard.
One of the fundamental rules of business is that you have to learn to adapt your business model to fit new technologies and methods. If you are inflexible in this regard, your business will stagnate and die. This is unfortunately exactly what the record industry is doing - they are trying to fight new methods in order to fit their current business model. The only way for them to stay alive in the long term is to adopt their business model to fit the new methods. Eventually they will realise this (possibly after hiring some "new blood") and change their ways.
My main problem with the record industry at the moment is that you are normally forced to buy in the region of a dozen songs for each song that you actually want. This is a deliberate tactic to rip people off. I want to be able to pay only for the songs I want.
Anyone developing UI's that many people will have to use (this is a subtle hint to GNOME developers (the default window manager has a nice look but a horrible feel, sorry to say it)) should at least have studied existing literature on UI design. (Windows has an OK UI, but there is still huge room for improvement there, this is a subtle hint to MS developers:)
One book I am aware of that discusses the things kcbrown mentioned is Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice (Foley,Van Dam,Feiner,Hughes).
This book covers graphics in general, but has a fairly meaty section on UI design. Anyone know of any other decent references?
It doesn't look to me like the people who did the studies are confusing correlation with causality (as many here have stated), not at all: read about the second study - random "experiment group" played a violent game (Wolfenstein 3D, to top it off, which is a cartoon compared to new games like Soldier of fortune) and a random "control" group played Myst. The experiment group behaved more "aggressively" afterwards. They did not choose aggressive people for the experiment group.
As much as we may hate seeing the media blame video games for incidents like Columbine, we should not simply go into denial and 'adopt a defensive stance' the moment anyone makes any mention of the possibility of even a vague link. Consider for a moment that this (intelligent) study may have some substance. Many studies have already shown that watching violent behaviour on television increases violent behaviour (any first year psychology course), this is known, and there is no reason why video games shouldn't have similar, perhaps even worse, effects.
This does not mean that games are evil, or that they should be banned. We should just learn to deal with the fact they can have effects. What this study should be telling us is not that games are evil, but that playing of games does need a certain amount of moderation, maturity, and an understanding that violence may solve video game problems, but not real life problems (duh). Well-raised adults can thus handle playing violent games, but parents have to be responsible parents, and have to teach their kids that violence is not a solution to real life problems. 10-year old kids shouldn't be playing Soldier of Fortune in the first place. That means that parents have to actually start "parenting" their kids.
The people doing all the poor rationalizations on this thread should (with all due respect) get their heads out the sand.
Remember, acknowledging that this study may possibly be right does not, in any way, mean agreeing with the stupid mainstream media articles about how video games are responsible for Columbine. We know that this obviously isn't the case - Columbine, it seems, was caused by a complex combination of factors - untreated mental illness, endless harassment and alienation, loneliness etc.
If the scientific method is to mean anything, then we have to treat studies like this objectively, and acknowledge that they may be right even when we don't agree with what they are saying. That makes for the distinction between "scientist" and "zealot".
Whenever I post to slashdot, I am basically full aware that I essentially no longer have any control over where my words will end up. I realise this. My posts may end up in thousands of proxy servers, cache's, people may save them to disk, chop quotes from them, republish them etc.. chances are I will never even know about it, so there is nothing I can do. In fact, chances are there are organizations who perform auto-profiling on/. users and posts. Copyright? How many people on the web case about copyright when they "File/Save As" or "Right-click/save-as" on images and web pages while they're browsing?
I post anyway, despite all this. I don't see how you could have posted to slashdot without realising any of this; and if you don't agree with it, don't damn well post. I won't believe you if you try to tell you were of ignorant of this when you posted.
"Have you considered that some posters will want to be credited for what they wrote? I certainly would"
I imagine the logistics of attempting to track down the author of every post on those threads (just to get permission from the two or three who would want to be credited) would have made the book an impossibility (there is no way in hell you're going to be able to do it; I live in South Africa and made several posts to those threads, were they supposed to phone me to get my permission? They would first had to get my work phone number, somehow - then they would have had to get hold of me during business hours in GMT+2 time.. etc etc, you get the idea, multiply by however many thousands of people posted). So (from their perspective) I imagine there were only two options: (1) publish the book with all comments anonymous, or (2) don't publish the book at all. I myself would rather have the book, as it is, than have no book.
So get over it. Your whining over your IP sounds even worse than Metallica's.
"No, no and no. "Congress shall make no law," the First Amendment tells us, to abridge the freedom of speech"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that it is already illegal to send spam-faxes. Since Spam email has the same characteristics as spam faxes (i.e. the recipient pays to receive the spam) I don't see why they shouldn't be treated the same in the law.
I think that if this Khronos group really wants to be useful, then the best thing they could do is to take OpenGL and start developing new updated versions to keep it on par (or further), feature-wise, with Direct3D. OpenGL is good, but the newer versions of Direct3D have begun to overtake OpenGL in terms of new features, and if nobody starts creating an "OpenGL 2" (with all current extensions incorporated into the API, and some new features added) then OpenGL will die.
It is easy for groups like Khronos to fall into the trap of trying to create the most wonderful, complete API they can, and ending up spending years and years before they even have a version 1 that is useful to anyone. The existence of Khronos is likely to distract attention from efforts such as SDL, and if they fall into that trap then this may actually set back gaming API's. I hope they go for some sort of RAD/evolutionary software design approach, so that we can quickly have a version 1 to play with, even if its not "complete". (SDL is relatively successful because they didn't try to put everything into version 1; GGI is trying to be complete and is taking forever.)
I think this group would be better off helping to complete SDL 1.2 (to begin with), and then helping out with future versions; and in parallel, working on OpenGL 2.
Other potential dangers lurk, such as MS "extending" their spec. Believe me, if this group looks like a threat to DirectX, MS *will* retaliate in full force.. especially with the X-box in the wings, whose major purpose of existence is practically to help push DirectX further into a position of dominance.
MS presumably uses some sort of check-in/check-out source code control system, so as long as they've kept backups of the source database it should be quite easy for them to locate the rogue programmer. Whether that programmer was anti-MS or not, I suspect that either way he/she'll be looking for another job real soon.
One of the goals of Netscape (and Mozilla) has always been to produce software that runs on a large variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux.)
If you view Netscape as a type of platform itself (which it is, really) then Netscape does have a consistent UI - it looks, feels and behaves the same no matter where you use it. This is very important for this type of software - it means that someone who uses Netscape at home will automatically feel at home if (for example) the touch-screen shopping guide terminal at the shopping mall uses Netscape for the interface. The same applies to whatever new device chooses to run Netscape.
If Netscape used the native UI for each platform, you would have exactly the problem the article describes - that the interface of the software would change all the time - only this time the UI would change whenever the user went somewhere else, rather than whenever the user changed skins.
Thus if you consider the needs of Netscape in this sense, having a consistent default UI for Netscape is extremely wise and very good for the customer. (To make this argument you have to assume that Netscape was intended to become pervasively used in a world filled with embedded devices running Netscape and computers running a variety of different OS's and not just Windows. This is not an unreasonable argument to make in terms of Netscape design decisions, since that is what they originally wanted, but it will probably never happen, MS is just too powerful.)
The only way to solve this is to come up with one single global standard for a UI, and then for everything after that to model itself after that. I doubt this would ever work. Microsoft would reject it like they reject every other standard that isn't their own. Linux geeks would reject it because they like ultra-configurability of interfaces.
"Isn't it pretty much long dead as a platform? Anybody actually use minix out there"
As Tanenbaum has repeatedly said (and you can confirm if you go read his website) he explicitly wants MINIX to be used as an instructional aid in OS design, that students could learn their way around easily in a single-semester OS course
This makes a lot of sense to me. MINIX would no longer server it's purpose as a teaching aid if somebody tried to turn it into a viable platform. Sure, you can fork it if you want (at heart, that is why we now have Linux) but the original MINIX should stay what it is. There is definitely a need for something like this, which MINIX fills.
I have no idea what it means for MINIX now that it is BSD (compared to before), considering AST's intentions; but I suspect it may have to do with peoples' freedom to redistribute the OS (as opposed to having to get it from AST's website) - I very vaguely remember reading something like that on AST's website years ago - but it was pretty long ago, so I may be wrong.
The point is, AST most certainly isn't trying to suddenly play catch-up to Linux (some sort of 'too little too late thing) - many other posters here seem to think he is.
Tanenbaum owes neither you nor the "free UNIX community" anything.
Tanenbaum has contributed a huge amount to the programming industry has it is, not only with his contribution of MINIX (which as a freely available scaled down UNIX was not only ahead of its time but has helped thousands of programmers learn about OS programming, many of whom have used this knowledge to advance OS'es like Linux) but also with the large amount of research he has done and the books he has written. All of this, just for ungrateful little AC rats like you.
While people like you sit and demand free stuff, and whine about other people's free stuff, other people are actually out there doing research and coding, 'advancing free UNIXes'.
"There is a big difference between "not being complete" and "lying.""
As far I'm concerned, not making the information available to the press is censorship in cases like that.
In the South Africa case, the information was literally not made available to anyone outside the small group of people involved.
The "lying" part of it, the police reports etc, were typically only exposed many years later, in this case, the Truth and Reconciliation commission. The press received no information at the time of the crimes, not false information.
So yes, I believe that qualifies as censorship - the government actively conspiring to ensure that information about its own human rights violations is never allowed to reach the press.
"And I don't believe that the parent article said anything about the US being infallible"
I wasn't responding to the article. I was responding to the opinion some had that this was a good thing based on the notion of protecting people who are actually innocent from being smeared in the press. That is true, but I believe that it is definitely a bad thing when police gag's like this become pervasive enough to allow the government to hide its own illegal activities. I can promise you, whatever your own opinions, that there are a huge number of americans who believe that cover-ups of the sort I described only happen in other places, like 'backwards third-world countries'. It was just a caution to keep that in mind before going forward in this direction (policies like that can tend to spread easily when the government decides it likes them.)
"The police no longer have to be as complete when reporting crime statistics to media"
Back in the bad old days of apartheid here in South Africa, the police (under control of the government) would often arrest black activists and other people more generally associated with anti-apartheid activism. Many of these people died while in police custody, with police reports typically attributing the cause of death to things like "natural causes", accidents, or "self-inflicted injuries". Of course, virtually none of this information was ever allowed to go to press.
But nothing like that could ever happen in the great, infallible US of A... right?
Slashdot Mirror
"how bout splitting the images apart a few milimetres to give realistic 3d images"
You need to do a bit more than just "split the images apart" to get the 3d effect you're referring to. Firstly the hardware needs to support this. There are a few ways you can do this. One is to have two seperate VGA signals, one for each eye. This makes the hardware more expensive bulky and complicated. Another common way is to interlace the two signals into one, and split it again at the eyepiece, but this drops your effective resolution for each eye from 800x600 to 800x300. Another way is to have each alternate frame on the signal go to each eye, alternately. This halves the effective refresh rate of each eye's display.
Note that all of the above options make all the electronics notably more expensive, complicated and unwieldy, and in general this is not worth it, since the "3d effect" is fairly minimal.
That's only the hardware problems. The software you're using has to support it too. Windows most certainly has no such features, and extremely few games do. Even if a game were to do this, then the game programmers would be responsible for providing the signal in the way the particular hardware wanted the signal (i.e. interlaced or frame-interleave.) This is a reasonable effort, considering that less than 0.01% of a games market has the hardware to handle this.
Also a game has to render twice as quickly to get the same frame rate as without the 3d effect. If your QuakeIIIarena is rendering in "mono" mode at 60Hz, it will drop to 30Hz update rate, if frame-interleave mode is used.
Also for this effect to work properly there must be a means to calibrate the display piece or the software for an individual's IPP (inter-pupillary distance, the distance between your eyes.)
The "3d effect" is anyway fairly minimal. It means nothing in non-3d apps like windows, web-surfing etc, and it doesn't mean very much in 3d simulation apps (e.g. games) unless the objects you're looking at are fairly close. So in general I don't think the added costs to the device would be worth it. The market is too small anyway for that. If the technology was cheap and common, sure, but not yet. Give it maybe another 5 or 15 years.
Another problem is that while it might be nice to have a bit of 3d effect, it won't really be worth too much if you can't "look around" in your 3d world. So you would probably want to have some sort of 3dof/6dof tracking device to track the orientation of your head so you could look around. Once again the software has to support this, and once again it makes the whole setup more bulky and expensive.
Hmm .. so I suppose if you knew someone who worked in a molecular biology lab with a PCR machine (my boss's wife does, for example), you may be able to create some pretty good counterfeits that would pass their authenticity tests.
The usual one-upmanship battle, never ends, does it?
"And btw, this holds for developers of games too. Carmack and friends could put their skills to more positive ends designing medical software, or some other positive work rather than rendering polygons"
Something a lot of people don't seem to think about (perhaps partially because poverty is so scarce in the United States) is that while it may not seem to directly benefit people (in the way medicine does) creating industries around entertainment, it *does* benefit the millions of people who find jobs within these industries and make enough to live comfortably. This applies to any entertainment industry, i.e. movies and television, not just computer game. There is not much point in making wonderful advancements in medicine, if half your population can't afford those medical advancements. The gaming industry creates so many jobs that allow people to be able to afford to benefit from the medical advancements. Come live in a 3rd world ("developing") country for a while, you learn to appreciate just how valuable those jobs can be when those jobs just don't exist.
I don't see entertainment as a waste of time myself - I work hard while I'm working, but I love to relax by (amongst other things) playing Quake. Its good to have a balance.
"I'm a gamer (a little anyway), but I thought skills where things that help you accomplish a task, make you a little money, or push you forward in life. Sorry but I don't see fragging 500 people in a tourney as a skill"
Well (using your definition) I don't see how knocking a little white ball into a hole with a stick is a "skill". Nonetheless it seems to have made a lot of money for Tiger woods. I don't see how throwing a ball through a little hoop is a "skill", but I don't know, it seems to have gotten Michael Jordan pretty far in life. Pushing balls into holes with a stick isn't a "skill"? It's gotten Steve Davis pretty far.
Most sports have an extremely simple premise. That does not mean that it does not take skill to become accomplished in those sports, nor does it mean that you shouldn't be able to make money doing it.
I mean, they're glorifying the twitch reflex, and the ability to run a flipping maze
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but all sports are based on extremely simple premises (e.g. golf, "get the little ball into the hole with a stick", or soccer, "get the ball through those posts", or snooker, "knock balls into a hole with a stick", or hurdles, "fastest guy to run to a line while jumping over poles" etc etc, not to even get started on the Olympics.) In spite of this there are multi-million dollar tournaments for these games that are also incredibly stupid and overglorified, according to your arguments. I suppose you think "traditional" sports are "real" sports but computer gaming isn't? Thats pure hypocrisy.
"Given the hardware that these guys are using, and the time that they've thrown into becoming "l33t", I could probably kick ass with the best of them"
Yeah right; put your money where your mouth is. If you'd actually played QUake properly you'd know there is more to it than just the twitch reflex.
Quite frankly you sound a little jealous to me.
"and getting 500 frags in a Quake tournamen't won't get you laid!"
Maybe not, but having $100000+ in the bank (from winning a Quake tournament) most probably will.
Only 3 reboots? Try putting an already installed Windows hard disk into a different computer - I've had over *10* reboots before it was up and running again.
'to enhance "realism"'
Quake3 is in no way at all pushing to enhance "realism", and if you'd actually played it then you would know that. The game itself is very abstract and I would say "cartoony". This is by design, and it isn't intended to be realistic at all. In my opinion (and millions of others) it is a very fun game to play.
Some people like games that tend toward realism. If thats what you want play something like Counterstrike.
Why do you seem to think that a game is supposed to be realistic to be fun? What a stupid idea.
Of course rocket jumps are entirely unrealistic, of course you can't fire a real rocket launcher into the ground underneath you without killing yourself. But they do add to the game.
I don't see you accusing Pacman (one of the most popular games of all time) of not being realistic, why is that?
"It runs slower (see Netscape vs. IE)"
Netscape starts slower, but my guess is that this is because IE is essentially loaded into memory at startup and is there ALL THE TIME (presumably this brilliant innovative element of software design is of some or other benefit to consumers, or whatever MS wants you to believe.)
But in my experience, Netscape runs quite a bit faster than IE. Just the other day I installed NN, and opened both IE and NN each with two windows onto the same pages. IE was *much* slower at both displaying the pages and "alt-tabbing" between the windows. IE's redrawing of the display was not only noticeable slower (Celeron 333 w128MB RAM) but also had ugly flickery overdraw effects (the type of effects you see on games that don't use back-buffers.) NN did not suffer from those problems.
This wasn't the new Mozilla-based NN either, it was still the old one (4.7 I think)
NN is also much faster at opening up new windows than IE. Try it out.
I guess the main reason I mostly still use IE is that it gets installed with Windows. And since we all know how often a Windows user (and in particular a Windows developer) has to reinstall Windows, its more convenient to use IE.
"Most Open Source Advocates have never produced any art or IP contributions"
Oh please; I am insulted by your childish generalisations.
What's your IP contribution, trolling on /.?
I don't advocate or even condone breaking the law (with the exception of civil disobedience, which serves an important purpose); but being forced to buy on average a dozen songs for each song that you actually want is called "being ripped off", especially when new technologies completely obliterate all remaining technical reasons for this practice.
The issue around mp3's, which you apparently missed, is this:
This is the extremely simple and clear issue that is actually at heart here.
Obviously the guys over at ZDNet were perusing their hit statistics and noticed they were waning (we haven't seen such a crappo article from them in quite a while.)
Simple solution: post deliberate flamebait, aim for the slashdot effect, your hit statistics go through the roof, advertising revenues rise.
Ignore it!
Hmm .. yes, I was unaware .. I was aware that Netscape had it; but regarding OE I just assumed that even if MS did put it in, it would be weak encryption (i.e. no encryption.)
The "it'll allow us to catch more criminals" is the usual catch-all phrase that suckers the sheeple into supporting bills that destroy their rights. Throw in a few choice keywords like "child pornography" or "terrorism", get the puppy-dog media to publish it, and you've got the support of probably 3/4 of the US. Sometimes I get the impression that most people would actually prefer to live like domestic animals, controlled and "protected" by the government - no rights, but at least they wouldn't have to think for themselves.
"Educating people" about PGP will never work; most people aren't bothered to make the effort required to learn. Also you have the "it sounds too complex" attitude. A great number of people think that it sounds too complex to download and install *any* third party software (eg Netscape Navigator), or they're afraid to ("I heard you get viruses from downloading software") etc etc. What are the chances you're going to convince these people to figure out PGP?
The only way to make email encryption widely used and easily accessible is to have all popular email programs support strong encryption natively and in easy-to-use manner. That means Outlook Express, Netscape, Pegasus mail etc. It must basically come installed with the email program (remember, number 1 reason that people "choose" IE over NN is "it came with my computer").
I find it disturbing that major email programs don't already have strong encryption support, considering that privacy is such a basic right, and considering how much communication is in the form of email these days.
"But the fact is, the record company has invested in marketing and promoting - are you saying they don't deserve to reap some rewards from that investment?"
Nobody "deserves" to reap rewards just because they made an investment. If they invested smartly then they may well get rewards, but that is their *luck*, not their *right*. If somebody blindly keeps investing in technologies and methods that are becoming more outdated and obsolete as each day passes, they are going to lose money. Iridium is a good example of people who made a huge investment, and lost it all, just because of the difficulty in judging the market. It is cruel and harsh, but that is how capitalism works - they didn't "deserve" rewards just because they worked so hard.
One of the fundamental rules of business is that you have to learn to adapt your business model to fit new technologies and methods. If you are inflexible in this regard, your business will stagnate and die. This is unfortunately exactly what the record industry is doing - they are trying to fight new methods in order to fit their current business model. The only way for them to stay alive in the long term is to adopt their business model to fit the new methods. Eventually they will realise this (possibly after hiring some "new blood") and change their ways.
My main problem with the record industry at the moment is that you are normally forced to buy in the region of a dozen songs for each song that you actually want. This is a deliberate tactic to rip people off. I want to be able to pay only for the songs I want.
Anyone developing UI's that many people will have to use (this is a subtle hint to GNOME developers (the default window manager has a nice look but a horrible feel, sorry to say it)) should at least have studied existing literature on UI design. (Windows has an OK UI, but there is still huge room for improvement there, this is a subtle hint to MS developers :)
One book I am aware of that discusses the things kcbrown mentioned is Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice (Foley,Van Dam,Feiner,Hughes).
This book covers graphics in general, but has a fairly meaty section on UI design. Anyone know of any other decent references?
It doesn't look to me like the people who did the studies are confusing correlation with causality (as many here have stated), not at all: read about the second study - random "experiment group" played a violent game (Wolfenstein 3D, to top it off, which is a cartoon compared to new games like Soldier of fortune) and a random "control" group played Myst. The experiment group behaved more "aggressively" afterwards. They did not choose aggressive people for the experiment group.
As much as we may hate seeing the media blame video games for incidents like Columbine, we should not simply go into denial and 'adopt a defensive stance' the moment anyone makes any mention of the possibility of even a vague link. Consider for a moment that this (intelligent) study may have some substance. Many studies have already shown that watching violent behaviour on television increases violent behaviour (any first year psychology course), this is known, and there is no reason why video games shouldn't have similar, perhaps even worse, effects.
This does not mean that games are evil, or that they should be banned. We should just learn to deal with the fact they can have effects. What this study should be telling us is not that games are evil, but that playing of games does need a certain amount of moderation, maturity, and an understanding that violence may solve video game problems, but not real life problems (duh). Well-raised adults can thus handle playing violent games, but parents have to be responsible parents, and have to teach their kids that violence is not a solution to real life problems. 10-year old kids shouldn't be playing Soldier of Fortune in the first place. That means that parents have to actually start "parenting" their kids.
The people doing all the poor rationalizations on this thread should (with all due respect) get their heads out the sand.
Remember, acknowledging that this study may possibly be right does not, in any way, mean agreeing with the stupid mainstream media articles about how video games are responsible for Columbine. We know that this obviously isn't the case - Columbine, it seems, was caused by a complex combination of factors - untreated mental illness, endless harassment and alienation, loneliness etc.
If the scientific method is to mean anything, then we have to treat studies like this objectively, and acknowledge that they may be right even when we don't agree with what they are saying. That makes for the distinction between "scientist" and "zealot".
Whenever I post to slashdot, I am basically full aware that I essentially no longer have any control over where my words will end up. I realise this. My posts may end up in thousands of proxy servers, cache's, people may save them to disk, chop quotes from them, republish them etc .. chances are I will never even know about it, so there is nothing I can do. In fact, chances are there are organizations who perform auto-profiling on /. users and posts. Copyright? How many people on the web case about copyright when they "File/Save As" or "Right-click/save-as" on images and web pages while they're browsing?
I post anyway, despite all this. I don't see how you could have posted to slashdot without realising any of this; and if you don't agree with it, don't damn well post. I won't believe you if you try to tell you were of ignorant of this when you posted.
"Have you considered that some posters will want to be credited for what they wrote? I certainly would"
I imagine the logistics of attempting to track down the author of every post on those threads (just to get permission from the two or three who would want to be credited) would have made the book an impossibility (there is no way in hell you're going to be able to do it; I live in South Africa and made several posts to those threads, were they supposed to phone me to get my permission? They would first had to get my work phone number, somehow - then they would have had to get hold of me during business hours in GMT+2 time .. etc etc, you get the idea, multiply by however many thousands of people posted). So (from their perspective) I imagine there were only two options: (1) publish the book with all comments anonymous, or (2) don't publish the book at all. I myself would rather have the book, as it is, than have no book.
So get over it. Your whining over your IP sounds even worse than Metallica's.
"No, no and no. "Congress shall make no law," the First Amendment tells us, to abridge the freedom of speech"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that it is already illegal to send spam-faxes. Since Spam email has the same characteristics as spam faxes (i.e. the recipient pays to receive the spam) I don't see why they shouldn't be treated the same in the law.
I think that if this Khronos group really wants to be useful, then the best thing they could do is to take OpenGL and start developing new updated versions to keep it on par (or further), feature-wise, with Direct3D. OpenGL is good, but the newer versions of Direct3D have begun to overtake OpenGL in terms of new features, and if nobody starts creating an "OpenGL 2" (with all current extensions incorporated into the API, and some new features added) then OpenGL will die.
It is easy for groups like Khronos to fall into the trap of trying to create the most wonderful, complete API they can, and ending up spending years and years before they even have a version 1 that is useful to anyone. The existence of Khronos is likely to distract attention from efforts such as SDL, and if they fall into that trap then this may actually set back gaming API's. I hope they go for some sort of RAD/evolutionary software design approach, so that we can quickly have a version 1 to play with, even if its not "complete". (SDL is relatively successful because they didn't try to put everything into version 1; GGI is trying to be complete and is taking forever.)
I think this group would be better off helping to complete SDL 1.2 (to begin with), and then helping out with future versions; and in parallel, working on OpenGL 2.
Other potential dangers lurk, such as MS "extending" their spec. Believe me, if this group looks like a threat to DirectX, MS *will* retaliate in full force
MS presumably uses some sort of check-in/check-out source code control system, so as long as they've kept backups of the source database it should be quite easy for them to locate the rogue programmer. Whether that programmer was anti-MS or not, I suspect that either way he/she'll be looking for another job real soon.
Netscape has a consistent UI .. across platforms.
One of the goals of Netscape (and Mozilla) has always been to produce software that runs on a large variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux.)
If you view Netscape as a type of platform itself (which it is, really) then Netscape does have a consistent UI - it looks, feels and behaves the same no matter where you use it. This is very important for this type of software - it means that someone who uses Netscape at home will automatically feel at home if (for example) the touch-screen shopping guide terminal at the shopping mall uses Netscape for the interface. The same applies to whatever new device chooses to run Netscape.
If Netscape used the native UI for each platform, you would have exactly the problem the article describes - that the interface of the software would change all the time - only this time the UI would change whenever the user went somewhere else, rather than whenever the user changed skins.
Thus if you consider the needs of Netscape in this sense, having a consistent default UI for Netscape is extremely wise and very good for the customer. (To make this argument you have to assume that Netscape was intended to become pervasively used in a world filled with embedded devices running Netscape and computers running a variety of different OS's and not just Windows. This is not an unreasonable argument to make in terms of Netscape design decisions, since that is what they originally wanted, but it will probably never happen, MS is just too powerful.)
The only way to solve this is to come up with one single global standard for a UI, and then for everything after that to model itself after that.
I doubt this would ever work. Microsoft would reject it like they reject every other standard that isn't their own. Linux geeks would reject it because they like ultra-configurability of interfaces.
"Isn't it pretty much long dead as a platform? Anybody actually use minix out there"
As Tanenbaum has repeatedly said (and you can confirm if you go read his website) he explicitly wants MINIX to be used as an instructional aid in OS design, that students could learn their way around easily in a single-semester OS course
This makes a lot of sense to me. MINIX would no longer server it's purpose as a teaching aid if somebody tried to turn it into a viable platform. Sure, you can fork it if you want (at heart, that is why we now have Linux) but the original MINIX should stay what it is. There is definitely a need for something like this, which MINIX fills.
I have no idea what it means for MINIX now that it is BSD (compared to before), considering AST's intentions; but I suspect it may have to do with peoples' freedom to redistribute the OS (as opposed to having to get it from AST's website) - I very vaguely remember reading something like that on AST's website years ago - but it was pretty long ago, so I may be wrong.
The point is, AST most certainly isn't trying to suddenly play catch-up to Linux (some sort of 'too little too late thing) - many other posters here seem to think he is.
Tanenbaum owes neither you nor the "free UNIX community" anything.
Tanenbaum has contributed a huge amount to the programming industry has it is, not only with his contribution of MINIX (which as a freely available scaled down UNIX was not only ahead of its time but has helped thousands of programmers learn about OS programming, many of whom have used this knowledge to advance OS'es like Linux) but also with the large amount of research he has done and the books he has written. All of this, just for ungrateful little AC rats like you.
While people like you sit and demand free stuff, and whine about other people's free stuff, other people are actually out there doing research and coding, 'advancing free UNIXes'.
"There is a big difference between "not being complete" and "lying.""
As far I'm concerned, not making the information available to the press is censorship in cases like that.
In the South Africa case, the information was literally not made available to anyone outside the small group of people involved.
The "lying" part of it, the police reports etc, were typically only exposed many years later, in this case, the Truth and Reconciliation commission. The press received no information at the time of the crimes, not false information.
So yes, I believe that qualifies as censorship - the government actively conspiring to ensure that information about its own human rights violations is never allowed to reach the press.
"And I don't believe that the parent article said anything about the US being infallible"
I wasn't responding to the article. I was responding to the opinion some had that this was a good thing based on the notion of protecting people who are actually innocent from being smeared in the press. That is true, but I believe that it is definitely a bad thing when police gag's like this become pervasive enough to allow the government to hide its own illegal activities. I can promise you, whatever your own opinions, that there are a huge number of americans who believe that cover-ups of the sort I described only happen in other places, like 'backwards third-world countries'. It was just a caution to keep that in mind before going forward in this direction (policies like that can tend to spread easily when the government decides it likes them.)
"The police no longer have to be as complete when reporting crime statistics to media"
Back in the bad old days of apartheid here in South Africa, the police (under control of the government) would often arrest black activists and other people more generally associated with anti-apartheid activism. Many of these people died while in police custody, with police reports typically attributing the cause of death to things like "natural causes", accidents, or "self-inflicted injuries". Of course, virtually none of this information was ever allowed to go to press.
But nothing like that could ever happen in the great, infallible US of A ... right?