14 deaths in 20 years... how many millions of truckers are on the road at any given second, yet only a couple die a day. The trucking industry has a MUCH better record.
The shuttle has only a 98% non-fatal mission rate... imagine if you had a fatal car crash every 50th time you went out.
I completely agree... which is why I've always dreamed of making a MORE usable interface for WinAMP, one that is easier to use and ALSO looks better than the original...... of course, I'm a lazy git, and I have more doodles than results, but hey, it's a dream.:-)
Because a program that queries thousands of servers would take HOURS to query them all if it had to negotiate a connection, query, then break down the connection for EVERY SINGLE ONE of the servers it queries.
It's not uncommon for me to query 20 thousand servers in a few minutes. Doing this with a stateful method would take over an hour. Imagine downloading 20 thousand 500 byte images from 20 thousand web servers. With a well written program, you should be able to do 20 a second... IF you have Windows NT (or derivatives, like 2000 or XP) or Linux. Windows 9x wouldn't be able to do more than 3 or 4, because it can't handle the massive number of TCP connections that NT can.
Using UDP, on Windows 9x or NT or Linux, I can query 100-200 servers per second.
The advantages of a connectionless protocol are clear. Yes, we may need to consider an alternative, but don't bash them for stupidity when you don't know the first thing about what you're talking about.
At 11 months, Jack (a child I babysit who lives downstairs from me) was walking frequently. His sister, a year older, did not really walk much until 15 months, but he was much faster. He was walking at 10 months, running a month later, climbing stairs a month after that and jumping all over the place (never falling) a month after that. It is not that uncommon.
I think you have clouded vision... or don't play many games. Many game companies have put out consistently good work for years... id, Raven, Blizzard. Some have declined... Maxis perhaps, maybe Epic if you're not an Unreal Tournament fan. Many have released several great games then gone under, like Looking Glass. But I can't think of many companies that used to put out great games, but only put out crap now... except for EA!
What baffles me is why you think EA has not 'declined', since they went from releasing a wide variety of great games in the late 80s and early 90s to releasing rehash after rehash of sports sim today... they haven't made a game with something new in it for nearly 5 years. They bought and then destroyed Origin, one of my favorite developers of all time.
... for an awards show that focuses on the personalities and not the people who make it happen. That would be like awards for best movie that included no director awards.
Laura Croft is a fictional entity. It does not deserve an award. You do not give out awards to the character, you give them to the actor.
There is a slight difference... in Brin's Uplift series, the universe is extremely fuedal, with lordly races 'uplifting' the tiny and weak races and holding them in servitude for billions of years.
But Brin's characters specifically fights AGAINST this regime, showing the flaws in the system. Brin paints Humanity as the exception to the rule. And the characters are generally an ensemble of good people all going through their lives, happening to be in the right place and the right time to make a difference... not superhuman heroes who carve chunks from dragons as a matter of daily course.
So Brin's Uplift world is about normal humans (or monkeys, or dolphins, or aliens) in spectacular situations, NOT like heroic fantasy in which it is about spectacular humans overcoming spectacular odds.
I think that if you believe that the Uplift trilogy is about the success of fuedal/fascist society, you have not read it very well, if at all.
P.S. I greatly enjoy LOTR and other works of heroic fantasy. I think Brin is a rather preachy person, though I love his books too. But he is NOT hypocritical, his books follow his philosophy very closely.
I'm glad that the Cowboy Bebop movie is finally out, though I have only a slim chance to see it in theaters... I'll probably have to wait for the DVD.
For those who have not heard of Cowboy Bebop, it's a dark humor anime with a very unique soundtrack... very stylish. 26 OAV episodes, 13 of which were released for TV, 13 only on OAV... you can often tell which are which pretty easily, since the OAV only episodes are darker and carry more of the plot. It's worth a view if you like anime, and if you don't like anime... well, may God save your soul! ^_^
Re:as cheap as older pentium machines are
on
Ultima 7 in Windows?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Because original Ultima 7 runs like crap on anything FASTER than a 386.
It had no speed limitations. It runs as fast as it can given the CPU, which means it is very fast on a 486, and unplayable on a Pentium.
Having a new way to play that does not require a reboot, a second PC and monitor, etc, and also adds in speed limiting is a good thing.
LOS code is already in the game. As in 'you cannot see your target'
Yes, it is already in the game. And the server calculates it when it has to... which is ONLY when you select that creature as your combat target, and try to fire. Every time you shoot at a creature, the server calculates LOS (a very cpu intensive task).
The server does NOT calculate LOS 10 times a second for every creature, object, and character within 100 yards of the player. Can you see the difference there? The two or THREE orders of magnitude extra CPU that would require?
There are many things that the client MUST know, for performance and usability reasons.
Every request the client makes for information means another round trip access to the server. Another complex decision by the server whether the client should be allowed that information. When you have 100K users online, making requests like that dozens of times a second, it can get JUST A TINY BIT LAGGY.
To alleviate these issues, the server sends some information to every client. The game map. The nearby creatures that the client may need to render at any moment. The current statistics of all the players equipment. All this information the client NEEDS to know.
Here is an example of one thing people often think the client does NOT need to know... creatures that are behind a hill, or not in the players cone of view. However, what if the player whips around to look behind them? How disorienting and unplayable would it be if every time you turned it took half a second before you saw ANYTHING other than terrain? As for obstructed creatures, would you want to go around a corner in a dungeon and not see anything for half a second until the server caught up? Not to mention the exhaustively difficult math required to accurately determine whether you have line of sight to something or not.
Thin clients DON'T WORK. At least, not in MMORPG's. Works for MUDs though. If you don't mind, I'll be going back to my DikuMUD now.:-)
Not politically correct, but A+ on funny.:-) I used to have an epileptic cat though, and I'd have to say it's closer to 'fish-out-of-water' than 'runaway-sex-toy'.
The names you quoted made me literally laugh out loud. Ahhh. They sound like names a computer programmer would give to works his software turned out, were he not a music major himself.
I do tech support as my fulltime job. I sometimes have people do things in DOS, more often in Windows. I would like to say that, given the choice between walking people through clicking on icons, or reading them a long text command with letters and symbols, I'll take the icons EVERY TIME.
You have no IDEA how difficult it is to get someone to hear your accurately when typing, how common typos are for computer newbies, and how difficult to diagnose it is when they mistype it. Some of my most painful experiences have involved getting a user to type a simple 'extract' command string to restore a missing file.
I agree that it is annoying dealing with the variations between operating systems... have you considered the annoyance about dealing with the variations of *nix flavors? How do I disable a daemon from starting on bootup in RedHat... or Suse... or FreeBSD...
I'm sorry, but the difference between commands in various unix flavors (useradd, adduser, user add) is just as frustrating when trying to support multiple flavors as the differences between versions of Windows.
It only takes a couple questions (in general) to figure out what version of Windows they are running. I don't even bother asking anymore... I just start taking them through the fixes, and figure out what version they have along the way, based on their responses.
"You don't have a tab labeled Server Type? You probably have Windows Millenium, right? Yeah, click on Networking instead." I'm sure similar problems happen when users have different flavors of X Windows managers.
Be careful what you ask for... you might just get it.
... the whole 'get free stuff' mentality that many convention goers have. I almost never get the T-Shirts or pens or whatever because I simply don't care. I go to see the products... not even the booth babes will sway my attention.
I don't understand the concept of spending over $1000 on tickets and hotels just to gawk at boobs and pick up some free T-Shirts.
If you want a T-Shirt, visit a damn mall... it'll cost a lot less.
What do the spiders have to do with the movie? I felt that is the whole sequence with the spiders had been removed, there would have been no change to the story. They were just there for the SFX.
50 years ago Hagrid, true to his nature, had a dangerous pet that was blamed for the death of the original child (Myrtle). This pet WAS the giant spider. Hagrid HIMSELF thought that the spider may have been the cause of the current attacks... he was probably nearly convinced himself of his guilt during his trial 50 years ago.
So Hagrid THOUGHT the giant spider was the cause... he was wrong. However, the spider itself provided a clue, as did the fact that the spiders ran away. There was not a whole LOT of plot relating to the spider scene, but it was not gratuitous.
What was up with the car? It was never cleared up. No motive, etc.
The kids don't know either. It's a semi-ntelligent magical item. The book never explained it either really, why the car chose to help them. It's just magic.:-)
How about the water? Why does it keep showing up?
The first petrification, with the cat, the floor was wet due to being just washed. The other occasions were due to it being at a bathroom.
The attacks seem a bit contrived. Contrived in the lethality. Wouldn't you expect more from something like that thing? Why are they not finished off?
It's a kids book... everything has to end up happy. Yes it is contrived.
Since I have not read the books, it appears that a lot of things were not connected in the movie. I had the feeling a lot of things were just thrown in to fill out the story's length without adding any good connective tissue.
Obviously in any translation from a book to a movie, something is lost. The movie was VERY true to the book, very little was lost, but this also means that some items were not linked as clearly, not explained as fully as perhaps they should have been.
Mee'sa Dobby? I guess he will be explained in the sequel, which I will probably need to see to resolve a few loose ends.
An example of something not explained fully in the movie. Dobby knew of the plot the Malfoy's were hatching, and tried to warn Harry off... extremely ineffectually. Perhaps because he has lived for so long among the Malfoys, he only sees trickery and violence as a solution to problems. Maybe he's just stupid.:-)
The movie makes more sense if you've read the book, because things that were glossed over are given the full treatment in the book, so you have more background for every character and scene. As a translation of the book? It's magnificent. As a standalone movie? Merely good, with problems.
Does not work like that
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 5, Informative
To break Wine, they need to break backwards compatibility. Their existing MASSIVE market of users and companies that use old programs on new Windows will prevent them from ever doing this like you say.
After the articles a couple weeks ago about the utility of bayesian spam filters, I knew it was merely a matter of time before it was put into Mozilla.:-)
Who wants to watch a video on their pc as opposed to the big screen tv upstairs?
My computer as Dolby Digital surround sound with 5.1. My TV has two integrated speakers on the front that provide 'stereo' sound if you sit 2 feet from it. The TV is larger, but my computer has much richer color output. For me at least, the computer wins out.
Slashdot Mirror
14 deaths in 20 years... how many millions of truckers are on the road at any given second, yet only a couple die a day. The trucking industry has a MUCH better record.
The shuttle has only a 98% non-fatal mission rate... imagine if you had a fatal car crash every 50th time you went out.
I completely agree... which is why I've always dreamed of making a MORE usable interface for WinAMP, one that is easier to use and ALSO looks better than the original... ... of course, I'm a lazy git, and I have more doodles than results, but hey, it's a dream. :-)
It's not uncommon for me to query 20 thousand servers in a few minutes. Doing this with a stateful method would take over an hour. Imagine downloading 20 thousand 500 byte images from 20 thousand web servers. With a well written program, you should be able to do 20 a second... IF you have Windows NT (or derivatives, like 2000 or XP) or Linux. Windows 9x wouldn't be able to do more than 3 or 4, because it can't handle the massive number of TCP connections that NT can.
Using UDP, on Windows 9x or NT or Linux, I can query 100-200 servers per second.
The advantages of a connectionless protocol are clear. Yes, we may need to consider an alternative, but don't bash them for stupidity when you don't know the first thing about what you're talking about.
At 11 months, Jack (a child I babysit who lives downstairs from me) was walking frequently. His sister, a year older, did not really walk much until 15 months, but he was much faster. He was walking at 10 months, running a month later, climbing stairs a month after that and jumping all over the place (never falling) a month after that. It is not that uncommon.
Score for your post, -1 Confusing
I think you have clouded vision... or don't play many games. Many game companies have put out consistently good work for years... id, Raven, Blizzard. Some have declined... Maxis perhaps, maybe Epic if you're not an Unreal Tournament fan. Many have released several great games then gone under, like Looking Glass. But I can't think of many companies that used to put out great games, but only put out crap now... except for EA!
What baffles me is why you think EA has not 'declined', since they went from releasing a wide variety of great games in the late 80s and early 90s to releasing rehash after rehash of sports sim today... they haven't made a game with something new in it for nearly 5 years. They bought and then destroyed Origin, one of my favorite developers of all time.
... for an awards show that focuses on the personalities and not the people who make it happen. That would be like awards for best movie that included no director awards.
Laura Croft is a fictional entity. It does not deserve an award. You do not give out awards to the character, you give them to the actor.
Original Animated Video, or Original Video Animation (OVA and OAV are pretty interchangable)
There is a slight difference... in Brin's Uplift series, the universe is extremely fuedal, with lordly races 'uplifting' the tiny and weak races and holding them in servitude for billions of years.
But Brin's characters specifically fights AGAINST this regime, showing the flaws in the system. Brin paints Humanity as the exception to the rule. And the characters are generally an ensemble of good people all going through their lives, happening to be in the right place and the right time to make a difference... not superhuman heroes who carve chunks from dragons as a matter of daily course.
So Brin's Uplift world is about normal humans (or monkeys, or dolphins, or aliens) in spectacular situations, NOT like heroic fantasy in which it is about spectacular humans overcoming spectacular odds.
I think that if you believe that the Uplift trilogy is about the success of fuedal/fascist society, you have not read it very well, if at all.
P.S. I greatly enjoy LOTR and other works of heroic fantasy. I think Brin is a rather preachy person, though I love his books too. But he is NOT hypocritical, his books follow his philosophy very closely.
I'm glad that the Cowboy Bebop movie is finally out, though I have only a slim chance to see it in theaters... I'll probably have to wait for the DVD.
For those who have not heard of Cowboy Bebop, it's a dark humor anime with a very unique soundtrack... very stylish. 26 OAV episodes, 13 of which were released for TV, 13 only on OAV... you can often tell which are which pretty easily, since the OAV only episodes are darker and carry more of the plot. It's worth a view if you like anime, and if you don't like anime... well, may God save your soul! ^_^
Because original Ultima 7 runs like crap on anything FASTER than a 386.
It had no speed limitations. It runs as fast as it can given the CPU, which means it is very fast on a 486, and unplayable on a Pentium.
Having a new way to play that does not require a reboot, a second PC and monitor, etc, and also adds in speed limiting is a good thing.
Hmm. Maybe you did not read my comment, or got confused... I was agreeing with you. Nearly everything you said was a repeat of my comment.
The server does NOT calculate LOS 10 times a second for every creature, object, and character within 100 yards of the player. Can you see the difference there? The two or THREE orders of magnitude extra CPU that would require?
There are many things that the client MUST know, for performance and usability reasons.
:-)
Every request the client makes for information means another round trip access to the server. Another complex decision by the server whether the client should be allowed that information. When you have 100K users online, making requests like that dozens of times a second, it can get JUST A TINY BIT LAGGY.
To alleviate these issues, the server sends some information to every client. The game map. The nearby creatures that the client may need to render at any moment. The current statistics of all the players equipment. All this information the client NEEDS to know.
Here is an example of one thing people often think the client does NOT need to know... creatures that are behind a hill, or not in the players cone of view. However, what if the player whips around to look behind them? How disorienting and unplayable would it be if every time you turned it took half a second before you saw ANYTHING other than terrain? As for obstructed creatures, would you want to go around a corner in a dungeon and not see anything for half a second until the server caught up? Not to mention the exhaustively difficult math required to accurately determine whether you have line of sight to something or not.
Thin clients DON'T WORK. At least, not in MMORPG's. Works for MUDs though. If you don't mind, I'll be going back to my DikuMUD now.
'vibrating'
:-) I used to have an epileptic cat though, and I'd have to say it's closer to 'fish-out-of-water' than 'runaway-sex-toy'.
Not politically correct, but A+ on funny.
The names you quoted made me literally laugh out loud. Ahhh. They sound like names a computer programmer would give to works his software turned out, were he not a music major himself.
Which may even describe this Schickele guy.
I will have to go there and take a look, thanks.
I do tech support as my fulltime job. I sometimes have people do things in DOS, more often in Windows. I would like to say that, given the choice between walking people through clicking on icons, or reading them a long text command with letters and symbols, I'll take the icons EVERY TIME.
You have no IDEA how difficult it is to get someone to hear your accurately when typing, how common typos are for computer newbies, and how difficult to diagnose it is when they mistype it. Some of my most painful experiences have involved getting a user to type a simple 'extract' command string to restore a missing file.
I agree that it is annoying dealing with the variations between operating systems... have you considered the annoyance about dealing with the variations of *nix flavors? How do I disable a daemon from starting on bootup in RedHat... or Suse... or FreeBSD...
I'm sorry, but the difference between commands in various unix flavors (useradd, adduser, user add) is just as frustrating when trying to support multiple flavors as the differences between versions of Windows.
It only takes a couple questions (in general) to figure out what version of Windows they are running. I don't even bother asking anymore... I just start taking them through the fixes, and figure out what version they have along the way, based on their responses.
"You don't have a tab labeled Server Type? You probably have Windows Millenium, right? Yeah, click on Networking instead." I'm sure similar problems happen when users have different flavors of X Windows managers.
Be careful what you ask for... you might just get it.
... the whole 'get free stuff' mentality that many convention goers have. I almost never get the T-Shirts or pens or whatever because I simply don't care. I go to see the products... not even the booth babes will sway my attention.
I don't understand the concept of spending over $1000 on tickets and hotels just to gawk at boobs and pick up some free T-Shirts.
If you want a T-Shirt, visit a damn mall... it'll cost a lot less.
They can make THEIR product use the NEW features on their NEW OS.
But that has nothing to do with REMOVING the OLD features from their NEW OS.
Two completely separate situations that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Yes, but this blockbuster is based on a book that has had more book sales than most BLOCKBUSTERS.
50 years ago Hagrid, true to his nature, had a dangerous pet that was blamed for the death of the original child (Myrtle). This pet WAS the giant spider. Hagrid HIMSELF thought that the spider may have been the cause of the current attacks... he was probably nearly convinced himself of his guilt during his trial 50 years ago.
So Hagrid THOUGHT the giant spider was the cause... he was wrong. However, the spider itself provided a clue, as did the fact that the spiders ran away. There was not a whole LOT of plot relating to the spider scene, but it was not gratuitous.
The kids don't know either. It's a semi-ntelligent magical item. The book never explained it either really, why the car chose to help them. It's just magic.
The first petrification, with the cat, the floor was wet due to being just washed. The other occasions were due to it being at a bathroom.
It's a kids book... everything has to end up happy. Yes it is contrived.
Obviously in any translation from a book to a movie, something is lost. The movie was VERY true to the book, very little was lost, but this also means that some items were not linked as clearly, not explained as fully as perhaps they should have been.
An example of something not explained fully in the movie. Dobby knew of the plot the Malfoy's were hatching, and tried to warn Harry off... extremely ineffectually. Perhaps because he has lived for so long among the Malfoys, he only sees trickery and violence as a solution to problems. Maybe he's just stupid.
The movie makes more sense if you've read the book, because things that were glossed over are given the full treatment in the book, so you have more background for every character and scene. As a translation of the book? It's magnificent. As a standalone movie? Merely good, with problems.
To break Wine, they need to break backwards compatibility. Their existing MASSIVE market of users and companies that use old programs on new Windows will prevent them from ever doing this like you say.
Most spam lists filter out .gov addresses for just that reason. They're not completely stupid.
Unfortunately.
That's what whitelists are for. Whitelist the people/domains that forward you legitimate spam.
After the articles a couple weeks ago about the utility of bayesian spam filters, I knew it was merely a matter of time before it was put into Mozilla. :-)