The reason for two parties isn't because we somehow inherently love having two parties -- it's because simple game theory dictates that in a first-past-the-post winner-take-all system your best tactical option is to support the lesser of two evils. The divided-we-fall nature of the game demands this behavior.
Tactical voting in, say, a proportional representation system or in a runoff system leads to very different voting behavior (more so in proportional systems than in runoff systems). For single-candidate elections, Condorcet methods are probably the most resistant to a tactical vote deviating from your actual-who-you-wish-you-could-vote-for vote.
Well, that's not quite true. The Amiga's floppy bus did indeed support 4 devices (as opposed to 2 on the typical IBM/Intel controller), and it was DMA (as opposed to Intel PIO). In fact, it used the same DMA controller as the audio system. =)...but it was only capable of transferring to/from one drive at a time. Traffic destined for other drives would be scheduled in a round-robin fashion. So running 4 drives at once wouldn't give you 4X speed -- just 4X capacity.
Pinball has no cooperative component; it's a "single-player" game. Looking at the popularity of multiplayer and online games, I'd say gamers these days value an experience in which their friends can participate. They don't get that with pinball.
You bring up an interesting observation. =)
It makes me wonder if there could be a way to make competitive pinball -- a double-ended table made more like a hill than a single slope.
Or cooperative pinball with multiple sets of flippers and catchers, where you had to cooperate to fire the balls simultaneously or pass balls to eachother. =)
It's interesting how pinball tastes can vary, too! =D
The Star Trek Next Generation game is my favorite pinball game of all time. I love the launchers and the borg multiball -- real pressure and excitement. =)
Morally, this tosser is no better than the scum who make phoney calls to the fire brigade and throw stones and objects at them. The consequences have the potential to be just as- and possibly more- serious.
Of course, this guy's a hacker- one of us, right. He's not some antisocial ned or chav from a council estate (who'd probably attack you and film it on their mobile phones). So that makes his actions alright, doesn't it? Way to go with the double standards.
Of course he's none of these things! He's not from England. =)
(Honestly, I still don't understand chav subculture or its appeal......or even what makes it distinct. It doesn't seem to have spread across any bodies of water though.)
Oh, I already escaped. =) I'm now living in one of my top 3 favorite cities so I'm set now.
In any case, Ft. Wayne is *not* a small city. It's a major metro area in its own right. You do have jobs. It's not, however, a hotspot, so you'll have to work a bit harder to convince talent from say, North Dakota, to come there (though if you made a good offer and did it right, you could!).
Where should you be looking? Nearby cities that are filled with despair, like Coldwater, MI. Find the young, talented, but repressed geeks who are trapped there, dreaming of a way out. Draw from tiny towns in Kentucky, where a geek dreams of getting away from the rednecks in pickup trucks that throw beer bottles at him.
The key is to find the ones that are talented but trapped. Recruiters normally are too busy trying to poach people within 20 miles of a company's zip code, so these people slip between the cracks. (Lord knows, I have a great job now and I still have to give the finger to an endless stream of recruiters -- where were they when I needed them?)
There's a vast pool of trapped talent in rural areas in the U.S..
As an example, I spent most of my life stuck in Southeast Idaho. There's a surprisingly large geek population there, but not a lot of employment for them. Generally people wind up stuck in low-paying dead-end jobs doing whatever they can (first tier phone tech support at the call centers that constitute the majority of non-agricultural employment, or as IT for a cash-strapped school district that is distrustful of the internet for religious reasons).
Because you are living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have the ability to relocate yourself with the funding necessary to find a job somewhere better. The majority of escapees (including myself) that I know of actually LIED on their resume and put a friend's address on it in a more lucrative market, and then lived homeless/couchsurfed/hitchhiked in order to get to interviews. It takes a lot of guts to throw caution to the wind and do that, and there's so much potential talent out there that could be snagged if employers would just reach out and find people and offer an escape that doesn't involve so much uncertainty.
Most people within 20 miles of Silicon Valley/NoVa tech corridor, etc. have the physical support infrastructure to get a job already. The hidden gems will be found in places where geeks don't have that option. The best places to look are population 25k-75k towns which don't have a major metro area within a 150 mile radius, and a depressed economy that precludes local employment providing enough income for geeks to self-finance a move to the high-cost-of-living of a tech hub.
The first rightful beneficiary of Safe Harbor legislation is Bob's Server Shack. Your average host is content neutral and has no editorial control over your site. You pay a flat fee to him directly -- Bob has no real stake in the "saleability" of your site. Bob is the same as the printer.
Not true.
Bob's Server Shack gets to charge you extra when your usage goes through the roof due to the popularity of your content -- thus giving them more profit. They actually DO have an interest in having customers who have popular data, just like the printer has a vested interest in newspapers selling well, because the printer gets more profit when the newspaper has wider circulation and thus prints more copies.
Because they didn't do anything but take existing ideas/games and put them together in one game.
Sure, they took existing ideas (plural!) and put them together, in a cooperative game. What other game can you think of where the players co-operate, but have to do different things in the process? The closest thing I can think of in relationship is MMO gameplay, but that's a totally different game type....
Er, but you could already do this YEARS ago with the Guitarfreaks/Drummania/Keyboardmania cooperative mode, both in the arcade and with the home console versions.
Seriously, this game still is one of the deepest, most engrossing games I've ever played. =) Especially fun when you're trying to out-compete an opponent's station. This game cries for a modern remake. =)
The problem is that SETI is broken.
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The truth of the matter is that we have no serious SETI effort.
All current SETI activity is built on the assumption that someone is trying to talk to us. Our detection capability is pretty much limited to an alien civilization already knowing we exist and directing extremely powerful, focused broadcasts directly at Earth.
Basically, given our current SETI programs, we couldn't detect Earth's civilization even if we were in the next star system over. We leak a lot of signals, but over vast interstellar distances these signals are weak, can be lost in background noise, and would require a huge antenna or array of antennas to receive. In other words, the we depend on aliens having their own SETI that is vastly more advanced than our own.
A real SETI project would cost many orders of magnitude more, and would require radio telescopes many orders of magnitude more sensitive than we have now. We're talking something on the level of making a crater miles across and making it into a radio dish. Arecibo is puny in comparison to what we need.
Blanketing an area the size of Rhode Island with a dish array might also work (though it would have to be very, very precisely controlled).
Any serious SETI effort that hopes to find someone that doesn't know we're here already and wants to talk to us will cost many many billions of dollars.
I find it interesting that while it touches on Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, it largely fails to look at the Japanese existence of the rest of the series. The naming convention (Vampire Killer/Dracula vs. Castlevania) isn't really addressed, and the author seems largely ignorant of anything but the U.S. incarnations of the games.
For instance, take Dracula X: Nocturne in the Moonlight, a.k.a. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. He talks about the comically bad voice acting......what he fails to note is that this bad acting is a feature of the English version. The original Japanese version of the game has *excellent* voice acting by well-known veteran voice actors. I recommend anyone who hasn't to play a copy of the Japanese version of the game, complete with the original full set of familiars and lack of censorship (yes, Alucard is chugging alcohol, not tea).
Hell, even in the case of the AmigaOne motherboard, you had to have an original Amiga to hook it up to, in order to utilize the existing graphics chipset.
Actually you *can't* do this with the AmigaOne. It was originally planned to have that capability but when they didn't have the time to engineer something like that they just went with designs from the northbridge vendor (and later commissioned a new design that was smaller with integrated graphics).
The Amiga custom chipset (only OCS so far, but AGA isn't such a stretch from that) has been revere-engineered into an FPGA implementation. A PCI card that lets a new Amiga use the old chipset is theoretically possible now (though it would take some juggling of memory maps and some interesting glue logic to make it work right).
Hopefully this means we'll be able to have the Java browser plugin on EVERY platform now. It was really irritating having to build a 32-bit Firefox on an x86-64 system specifically to use crap like the Java plugin and Flash plugin.... I guess the Flash plugin thing is still an issue though. >.;
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp
on
KOffice 1.6 Released
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· Score: 1
...as an addendum -- there's also been instances where I've renamed ASCII text files to ".doc" for the sake of people who had no idea what a text file was.
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp
on
KOffice 1.6 Released
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· Score: 1
I don't have any particular fondness for MS Word, but sometimes you just need to create one when, for example, working with some complete compu-noob who is already approaching the seizure threshold just from trying to understand what a computer is; trying to explain how to convert from ODF might just send him into a coma.
I encounter this when applying for a job where the company insists that my resume be in ".doc format".
In these cases I save my resume in RTF, and rename it as.doc . Word still opens it and the braindead f**kwit in HR is happy and none-the-wiser. (That is, the sort of person who is happy BECAUSE they are not wise. =)
Have been done in Japan looooooong before the U.S. release of "Cooking Mama".
In Japan just about ANY aspect of life has been explored in a game. From graduating high school to bathroom functions to driving a train.
It really makes me wonder why there's so little creativity in the U.S. gaming market. The Sims touches broadly on lots of things, but it doesn't give you an in-depth simulation of anything.
I wish I could somehow zap the world's population with instant Japanese language skills, so everyone would be able to easily see what they were missing. ^^;
...than the guys who go walking down the street peering at houses looking for termite damage that the owner might have missed. Not only do they tell you about a problem that you might not know about, they offer their services to fix it. You're under no obligation to pay them for finding it, but a lot of people are grateful to the person and fork over some cash anyway (and maybe hire them to help more).
If you asked the average person under 20 if they'd give up email or the web, they'd definitely give up email since the only time they probably ever use it is to register for websites that require it, or MAYBE to talk to some of their older relatives.
If they really need to leave someone a message, they can do it on myspace, or if the person's a good friend you SMS their cellphone......but might as well just tell them personally via IM when you next see them online.
Many airports with a Starbucks have T-Mobile Hotspot access points, for some reason they're not listed.
For instance, at SJC (San Jose/Mineta) in Terminal C you can use T-Mobile throughout most of the pre-security areas since there is a big open Starbucks right in the middle.
I think this also goes for airports with integral FedEx/Kinkos locations.
The big problem is that the video output from these consumer video card devices is never synced properly to the source video rate. The "cadence" tests in this article are worthless because no encoding-based pulldown is happening since it's being rendered progressively. The pulldown that's happening instead is taking the progressive source (or god forbid the interlaced source) and displaying it on whatever frame rate your display happens to be set to.
Working with film, this means 24fps. If your display is 70fps, 75fps, etc. that means some ugly pulldown is in store.
What gets even worse, however, is if you use the video output feature of your card in a HTPC setup -- you wind up having it go through ANOTHER PULLDOWN to 29.97fps (NTSC) or 25fps (PAL) FROM THE PULLDOWN YOU DID BEFORE. Even worse it's resampled and scaled for this output.
This is pretty apparent in pans in movies and such -- the pans are never quite smooth exactly.
Also since sound and video are usually totally unsynced subsystems in a HTPC, the audio is often slightly out of sync with the video. This causes an occasional audio or video skip (depending on what the playback software recognizes as canonical sync). For short clips this usually doesn't happen, but the skip will often happen over the course of a movie. If it's syncing to audio, the frameskip/delay is usually not noticeable because it gets lost in all the pulldown issues mentioned earlier.
While it's possible to make a HTPC setup that syncs the video properly to avoid these issues, I've never seen a HTPC setup do it right. I've seen embedded Linux and WinCE devices do it correctly, using custom code to ensure proper video syncing.
Standalone DVD players, even most cheap ones, get everything synced properly to a reference pulldown (29.97 or 25 fps, progressive if supported). Framerate and audio sync is always correct, to the nearest level capable of the pulldown.
It's a shame, because modern LCD/Plasma displays with digital inputs should theoretically be able to handle real 24fps input for film sources, for instance, which is something current DVD players don't do. Try getting your HTPC to output 24Hz and getting your media player, going through all the video and audio APIs of your OS, to sync every frame and every audio sample exactly to it. =P It simply can't be done -- you have to code to the metal.
(In studio environments video editing PCs actually have professional video/audio cards that have custom APIs and synced internal clocks to be able to ensure perfect framerates and audio sync and to make sure playback is timed properly on them. I know someone who's built themselves a HTPC with gear like this and it works great.)
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I'm surprised that Shogo at least didn't make the list. I rather liked that game back when I was messing with the beta. =)
The reason for two parties isn't because we somehow inherently love having two parties -- it's because simple game theory dictates that in a first-past-the-post winner-take-all system your best tactical option is to support the lesser of two evils. The divided-we-fall nature of the game demands this behavior.
Tactical voting in, say, a proportional representation system or in a runoff system leads to very different voting behavior (more so in proportional systems than in runoff systems). For single-candidate elections, Condorcet methods are probably the most resistant to a tactical vote deviating from your actual-who-you-wish-you-could-vote-for vote.
Well, that's not quite true. The Amiga's floppy bus did indeed support 4 devices (as opposed to 2 on the typical IBM/Intel controller), and it was DMA (as opposed to Intel PIO). In fact, it used the same DMA controller as the audio system. =) ...but it was only capable of transferring to/from one drive at a time. Traffic destined for other drives would be scheduled in a round-robin fashion. So running 4 drives at once wouldn't give you 4X speed -- just 4X capacity.
It makes me wonder if there could be a way to make competitive pinball -- a double-ended table made more like a hill than a single slope.
Or cooperative pinball with multiple sets of flippers and catchers, where you had to cooperate to fire the balls simultaneously or pass balls to eachother. =)
It's interesting how pinball tastes can vary, too! =D
The Star Trek Next Generation game is my favorite pinball game of all time. I love the launchers and the borg multiball -- real pressure and excitement. =)
(Honestly, I still don't understand chav subculture or its appeal...
Oh, I already escaped. =) I'm now living in one of my top 3 favorite cities so I'm set now.
In any case, Ft. Wayne is *not* a small city. It's a major metro area in its own right. You do have jobs. It's not, however, a hotspot, so you'll have to work a bit harder to convince talent from say, North Dakota, to come there (though if you made a good offer and did it right, you could!).
Where should you be looking? Nearby cities that are filled with despair, like Coldwater, MI. Find the young, talented, but repressed geeks who are trapped there, dreaming of a way out. Draw from tiny towns in Kentucky, where a geek dreams of getting away from the rednecks in pickup trucks that throw beer bottles at him.
The key is to find the ones that are talented but trapped. Recruiters normally are too busy trying to poach people within 20 miles of a company's zip code, so these people slip between the cracks. (Lord knows, I have a great job now and I still have to give the finger to an endless stream of recruiters -- where were they when I needed them?)
There's a vast pool of trapped talent in rural areas in the U.S..
As an example, I spent most of my life stuck in Southeast Idaho. There's a surprisingly large geek population there, but not a lot of employment for them. Generally people wind up stuck in low-paying dead-end jobs doing whatever they can (first tier phone tech support at the call centers that constitute the majority of non-agricultural employment, or as IT for a cash-strapped school district that is distrustful of the internet for religious reasons).
Because you are living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have the ability to relocate yourself with the funding necessary to find a job somewhere better. The majority of escapees (including myself) that I know of actually LIED on their resume and put a friend's address on it in a more lucrative market, and then lived homeless/couchsurfed/hitchhiked in order to get to interviews. It takes a lot of guts to throw caution to the wind and do that, and there's so much potential talent out there that could be snagged if employers would just reach out and find people and offer an escape that doesn't involve so much uncertainty.
Most people within 20 miles of Silicon Valley/NoVa tech corridor, etc. have the physical support infrastructure to get a job already. The hidden gems will be found in places where geeks don't have that option. The best places to look are population 25k-75k towns which don't have a major metro area within a 150 mile radius, and a depressed economy that precludes local employment providing enough income for geeks to self-finance a move to the high-cost-of-living of a tech hub.
Bob's Server Shack gets to charge you extra when your usage goes through the roof due to the popularity of your content -- thus giving them more profit. They actually DO have an interest in having customers who have popular data, just like the printer has a vested interest in newspapers selling well, because the printer gets more profit when the newspaper has wider circulation and thus prints more copies.
Rock Band just Americanized it.
I'm actually more partial to this one.
Seriously, this game still is one of the deepest, most engrossing games I've ever played. =) Especially fun when you're trying to out-compete an opponent's station. This game cries for a modern remake. =)
The truth of the matter is that we have no serious SETI effort.
All current SETI activity is built on the assumption that someone is trying to talk to us. Our detection capability is pretty much limited to an alien civilization already knowing we exist and directing extremely powerful, focused broadcasts directly at Earth.
Basically, given our current SETI programs, we couldn't detect Earth's civilization even if we were in the next star system over. We leak a lot of signals, but over vast interstellar distances these signals are weak, can be lost in background noise, and would require a huge antenna or array of antennas to receive. In other words, the we depend on aliens having their own SETI that is vastly more advanced than our own.
A real SETI project would cost many orders of magnitude more, and would require radio telescopes many orders of magnitude more sensitive than we have now. We're talking something on the level of making a crater miles across and making it into a radio dish. Arecibo is puny in comparison to what we need.
Blanketing an area the size of Rhode Island with a dish array might also work (though it would have to be very, very precisely controlled).
Any serious SETI effort that hopes to find someone that doesn't know we're here already and wants to talk to us will cost many many billions of dollars.
I find it interesting that while it touches on Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, it largely fails to look at the Japanese existence of the rest of the series. The naming convention (Vampire Killer/Dracula vs. Castlevania) isn't really addressed, and the author seems largely ignorant of anything but the U.S. incarnations of the games.
...what he fails to note is that this bad acting is a feature of the English version. The original Japanese version of the game has *excellent* voice acting by well-known veteran voice actors. I recommend anyone who hasn't to play a copy of the Japanese version of the game, complete with the original full set of familiars and lack of censorship (yes, Alucard is chugging alcohol, not tea).
s .html
For instance, take Dracula X: Nocturne in the Moonlight, a.k.a. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. He talks about the comically bad voice acting...
A *way* better retrospective of the games is at http://castlevania.classicgaming.gamespy.com/game
Check it out. ^^
Hell, even in the case of the AmigaOne motherboard, you had to have an original Amiga to hook it up to, in order to utilize the existing graphics chipset.
Actually you *can't* do this with the AmigaOne. It was originally planned to have that capability but when they didn't have the time to engineer something like that they just went with designs from the northbridge vendor (and later commissioned a new design that was smaller with integrated graphics).
The Amiga custom chipset (only OCS so far, but AGA isn't such a stretch from that) has been revere-engineered into an FPGA implementation. A PCI card that lets a new Amiga use the old chipset is theoretically possible now (though it would take some juggling of memory maps and some interesting glue logic to make it work right).
Hopefully this means we'll be able to have the Java browser plugin on EVERY platform now. It was really irritating having to build a 32-bit Firefox on an x86-64 system specifically to use crap like the Java plugin and Flash plugin.... I guess the Flash plugin thing is still an issue though. >.;
...as an addendum -- there's also been instances where I've renamed ASCII text files to ".doc" for the sake of people who had no idea what a text file was.
I don't have any particular fondness for MS Word, but sometimes you just need to create one when, for example, working with some complete compu-noob who is already approaching the seizure threshold just from trying to understand what a computer is; trying to explain how to convert from ODF might just send him into a coma.
.doc . Word still opens it and the braindead f**kwit in HR is happy and none-the-wiser. (That is, the sort of person who is happy BECAUSE they are not wise. =)
I encounter this when applying for a job where the company insists that my resume be in ".doc format".
In these cases I save my resume in RTF, and rename it as
Have been done in Japan looooooong before the U.S. release of "Cooking Mama".
In Japan just about ANY aspect of life has been explored in a game. From graduating high school to bathroom functions to driving a train.
It really makes me wonder why there's so little creativity in the U.S. gaming market. The Sims touches broadly on lots of things, but it doesn't give you an in-depth simulation of anything.
I wish I could somehow zap the world's population with instant Japanese language skills, so everyone would be able to easily see what they were missing. ^^;
Actually they've put up three. See Shenzhou 6 for the other two.
...than the guys who go walking down the street peering at houses looking for termite damage that the owner might have missed. Not only do they tell you about a problem that you might not know about, they offer their services to fix it. You're under no obligation to pay them for finding it, but a lot of people are grateful to the person and fork over some cash anyway (and maybe hire them to help more).
...and not just in Korea.
...but might as well just tell them personally via IM when you next see them online.
If you asked the average person under 20 if they'd give up email or the web, they'd definitely give up email since the only time they probably ever use it is to register for websites that require it, or MAYBE to talk to some of their older relatives.
If they really need to leave someone a message, they can do it on myspace, or if the person's a good friend you SMS their cellphone...
Many airports with a Starbucks have T-Mobile Hotspot access points, for some reason they're not listed.
For instance, at SJC (San Jose/Mineta) in Terminal C you can use T-Mobile throughout most of the pre-security areas since there is a big open Starbucks right in the middle.
I think this also goes for airports with integral FedEx/Kinkos locations.
The big problem is that the video output from these consumer video card devices is never synced properly to the source video rate. The "cadence" tests in this article are worthless because no encoding-based pulldown is happening since it's being rendered progressively. The pulldown that's happening instead is taking the progressive source (or god forbid the interlaced source) and displaying it on whatever frame rate your display happens to be set to.
Working with film, this means 24fps. If your display is 70fps, 75fps, etc. that means some ugly pulldown is in store.
What gets even worse, however, is if you use the video output feature of your card in a HTPC setup -- you wind up having it go through ANOTHER PULLDOWN to 29.97fps (NTSC) or 25fps (PAL) FROM THE PULLDOWN YOU DID BEFORE. Even worse it's resampled and scaled for this output.
This is pretty apparent in pans in movies and such -- the pans are never quite smooth exactly.
Also since sound and video are usually totally unsynced subsystems in a HTPC, the audio is often slightly out of sync with the video. This causes an occasional audio or video skip (depending on what the playback software recognizes as canonical sync). For short clips this usually doesn't happen, but the skip will often happen over the course of a movie. If it's syncing to audio, the frameskip/delay is usually not noticeable because it gets lost in all the pulldown issues mentioned earlier.
While it's possible to make a HTPC setup that syncs the video properly to avoid these issues, I've never seen a HTPC setup do it right. I've seen embedded Linux and WinCE devices do it correctly, using custom code to ensure proper video syncing.
Standalone DVD players, even most cheap ones, get everything synced properly to a reference pulldown (29.97 or 25 fps, progressive if supported). Framerate and audio sync is always correct, to the nearest level capable of the pulldown.
It's a shame, because modern LCD/Plasma displays with digital inputs should theoretically be able to handle real 24fps input for film sources, for instance, which is something current DVD players don't do. Try getting your HTPC to output 24Hz and getting your media player, going through all the video and audio APIs of your OS, to sync every frame and every audio sample exactly to it. =P It simply can't be done -- you have to code to the metal.
(In studio environments video editing PCs actually have professional video/audio cards that have custom APIs and synced internal clocks to be able to ensure perfect framerates and audio sync and to make sure playback is timed properly on them. I know someone who's built themselves a HTPC with gear like this and it works great.)
James Tiptree's "Crown of Stars" has some fun meat stories in it as well. Recommended reading. ^^
...now we get to hear "WOOD FOR SHEEP!!" live over the network.