But Pac-Man did have an end of a sort, as in the original game, if you managed to hit level 256, the byte that stored the level would roll over to 0 and it would become unplayable as the game tried to draw too many fruits.
That's not quite right. Apple's Universal Binaries are actually two sets of compiled code, one for PPC, one for Intel. The OS just picks the right one to run based on the hardware. The code base has to be fiddled from one type to the next, as PPC and Intel don't share the same endian-ness. Depending on how a particular application is written, though, this could be a big pain or a little pain.
Yeah, that's part of what I was getting at, but I didn't make it very clear. I meant that the increased popularity and use would come mainly from the average user who has a pirate copy of Photoshop sitting about, not from the professionals whose company buys the program for them, and for whom the GIMP simply won't cut the mustard.
I do think you're right on about the free exposure that Adobe gets from all the pirate copies, as well. The average user is never going to pay full price for Photoshop, but it's by far the most popular photo-editing program out there, so that's the one everyone wants to get. If they see a pirated version of Photoshop vs. a free version of GIMP, nearly everyone goes for Photoshop on name recognition alone.
If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently. I know tons of people who use Photoshop and praise it to the heavens, but not a single one of them actually put the money down on it. I work in a university environment, so there're lots of legal copies of Photoshop around, but a lot of people work with their own hardware, so many copies that get used for preparing images for publication aren't legitimate.
I use the GIMP for the same tasks, and get results that are just as good, though. I think that for most image processing, the GIMP does everything the average user needs it to do, and more. I'm not denying that it doesn't meet the needs of certain professionals. However, if people weren't able to get pirated copies of Photoshop readily, they'd find that the GIMP does the job they need it to do.
It may mean something that they listed plastic, glass, and metal, and it may not. In fracture, these materials usually behave very differently. Glass is nearly a perfect brittle fracture, while the tip of the crack in plastics often distorts, so that it doesn't concentrate stress as effectively, meaning that it takes more energy to propogate the crack through the material.
However, the article doesn't say anything about their conditions, and it's possible to construct samples of most materials that will fracture in a brittle manner. You always make those calculation before doing crack opening tests to make sure that you're measuring the right type of cracking behavior.
So, in short, they may have something that's applicable across a lot of different types of situations, and they may not. The article seems to imply that it works in a lot of different materials, but the method of cracking they describe seems to imply a brittle fracture, so it's hard to tell.
Unfortunately, it becomes clear from looking at Jack Thompson's previous interactions with various entities (Janet Reno, Penny-Arcade, various individuals who've questioned his methods or viewpoints on message boards, and even the National Institute on Media and the Family) that shutting his mouth is not an option.
I have to agree with your statement about how vague many of the criteria for these diagnosis are. I've talked about this with my father who has been a public schoolteacher in a rural area of the Midwest for more than 30 years. He's observed (non-scientifically, to qualify this, just his observations) a correlation between what the hot psychological problem at the time is, and how many students in the district have them. When ADD was being talked about a lot, they had a huge upswing in the number of kids who had ADD.
I also have to say that a lot of this, not all, but a lot of this smacks of parents who don't want to take responsibility for raising little hellions. My kid's not bad, he has a disorder, so you can't punish him for cursing at the teachers and disrupting classes. I believe that there are a lot of kids who have real problems, but vague diagnosis, particularly like those mentioned in the article, where the syndrome has various symptoms, only a few of which need be present to make a diagnosis, open the door for diagnosis of people who don't have the disorder at all.
I agree that when identical twins share the condition 90% of the time, its not coincidence. However, if this condition is genetically pre-determined, or even pre-disposed, shouldn't identical twins share it to a much higher percentage? A few nines at least, it seems to me. It seems that this fact of only a 90% correlation in identical twins shows that there is some other factor that sets the thing in motion.
I remember the first 3d accelerator card I saw specifically touted making Doom run faster. It was a Creative Labs card. I've no idea if it was the first, but it was the first I saw in a store. I remember thinking how pointless it was just to have a graphics card that would make your games run faster. Shows what I know, or knew.
There *has* to be an analog signal initially. Pickups work by making an analog sinal from the vibrations of the guitar string through the induced magnetic field of the pickups. It'd then have to be converted to digital to transmit via ethernet, but the initial signal itself will be 100% analog. To do otherwise, you'd have to radically re-engineer a basic system design (magnetic pickups) that's been working fine since the 40's.
Re:Why waste all the time developing "gyros"...
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
Falling forward, as you put it, does not create the drive of the machine. It may generate a limited amount of forward thrust right as you take off, but from there, the thing must drive itself. After it has brought you back to an equilibrium state of being balanced it takes no more power to drive it forward than a "traditional" moped with two wheels of the same weight or even three, although you would incur a bit of extra power drain due to friction of the third wheel.
You see, the post was not simply candidly discussing an excerpt from the article. He made a stretch in saying that the cough was a product of smoking, and then went off into a really annoying tangent. You see, you moron, tying into an imagined connection for a personal rant isn't following the topic.
Personally, I own a PS2, and have an X-box on pre-order. Probably pick up a gamecube if I have the cash and if more games that pique my interest come out for it. I'm not saying that Waverace and Luigi's Mansion aren't good games, just that they don't really interest me. Rogue Leader, on the other hand, looks great, and I'm hoping for an X-box port.
What you said, though, about Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot with the US only launch at first my or may not be true. It is true that a larger percentage of Japanese are willing to buy video games, don't forget that the US has more than twice the population, (about 135M vs 285M) so does that make up for the fact that more would buy the game in Japan, percentage-wise? Maybe, maybe not. Also, don't forget that this is the first US maker to release a game system since Atari, and if memory serves, Atari didn't do simultaneous US and Japanese releases. That's actually an unfair comment, as the market has changed significantly since then, but my point still holds, I think. Japanese makers release their systems on home turf before going offshore. I see no reason why an American maker shouldn't do the same. It's just too bad that the timing will push them over the line on the holiday shopping in Japan.
The main thing I'm excited about in X-box is the ease of development. A stripped W2K kernel and development with a standard development package for a familiar hardware set should spur on the smaller development houses that don't have the cash to develop for hard-to-program setups like PS2. We could get some really great, inventive games out of the smaller houses, which would be great.
The whole point is that you can't rip a CD like this with ease on a computer. It has corrupted data that will sour your rip. When playing a CD, your computer or CD player averages the data, and you don't notice the corrupted bit, but when you play the ripped version digitally, you no longer average data, so the rip doesn't play correctly. The only way to make an mp3 of it is to take the analog input from a player and convert that to digital before encoding.
She seems to be thinking of the best possible situation, in which we not only have time to sit down and learn to use a program at a reasonable pace, but that we'd actually care to learn all of its features.
For one, practically no one just sits down to learn a new program with nothing but time on their hands and a desire to learn how to do it. We learn to use the program because there is some pressing need for us to use it. For example, I'm now learning LaTeX because I'll have a real need to set documents in the near future. I'd be pissed if I missed my deadline because the program decided I didn't know enough to typeset an equation yet.
Second, programs get used for diverse purposes, so while someone might use excel for balancing their checkbook, someone at a steel mill is calculating run yields, and and engineering student is solving systems of equations to see if a truss will collapse. Other than a few basic commands, none of these people are using the same features of the program, and they probably have no desire to learn how to do what the others do, it's useless to them. So, how would the program know what to teach you, because I don't think for a second that its smart enough to decipher what you're doing and teach you the necessary skills to do just that. Games, otoh, have a defined goal, and pretty much all the skills it teaches you will be used. Very different.
I don't think that this would work for the simple reason that the Dreamcast could do do this out of the box, with the exception of the IM feature. And the DC was anywhere from $100-$200 cheaper than the PS2 depending on what point in its life you compare prices at, so you could still buy a keyboard and mouse and be under the $300 base price of a PS2. If people really wanted that sort of a setup, the DC would have sold better than it did.
I know all the region encoding is for movie studios to maintain high profits when they make a theatrical release of a movie half a year later in other parts of the world. No one wants to spend the equivalent of US$10 to see a flick if they already own the DVD.
I'm waiting for them to start checking ID's when coming in to the theaters to make sure that you live in an acceptible part of the world to see the film. "I'm sorry sir, but you're from England and the film isn't due to be relased there for another six months, so you can't see it yet. Have a nice day."
Just make your case out of austenitic steel and it won't shatter with liquid nitrogen in it (austenitic doesn't get brittle at low T).
Also, that liquid nitrogen is some nasty stuff, froze part of my hand once when filling a jug with it. Very painful, very large blisters, ick.
It occurs to me that what was said about writing programs to particular hardware has some analogues in the video game industry. Every developer is free to decide how the user should interface with their game. That leads to things like what has been hassling me recently, where I bought a new game, and it uses the analog sticks on the PS2 to control motion. One stick moves the character, the other changes direction/looks around. The problem is, I already own games like this, except they have the sticks set up in opposite manner (i.e. old game uses the left stick to look, new game uses the right). This creates huge annoying problems when playing, especially when I'm in a tight situation and my immediate instinct goes with the old control setup and I die quickly.
I'm not saying that this can be corrected in the video game market, as games are generally too specialized in what they do to make an overlying interface ineffective, but why do we need to try to import these problems to computers? I'm sure some developers would be diametrically opposed on how fundamental aspects of a program should operate, leaving the average user in the same situation, except here, it would actually be something necessary (for job, school, etc.) as opposed to just a game.
If this is using the same design I've seen for the maglev proposed for Pittsburgh, the train actually wraps around the track and the magnet pulls the flanges up to within a few inches of the rail to make the train float.
I'd say Sony is much more guilty of this than Sega. I own a DC and PS2, and right now you're quite right about the state of PS2 games, they're mostly crap (except for the sports games, I've heard, but I don't care for them). The DC has some great games - Crazy Taxi, Skies of Arcadia, Sonic, VOOT, Chu-Chu Rocket, Samba de Amigo. These are just the ones that Sega has put out. Chu-Chu and Samba especially show some commitment to making cool games, regardless of what genres are selling millions of copies at the moment. I've been playing Skies of Arcadia, great game, and not at all a Final Fantasy clone. I think Sega's headed the right direction, they already have some great stuff, and more on the way, now if Sony would just follow suit so I could do something with my PS2 besides watch DVD's.
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But Pac-Man did have an end of a sort, as in the original game, if you managed to hit level 256, the byte that stored the level would roll over to 0 and it would become unplayable as the game tried to draw too many fruits.
Pac-Man page on Wikipedia
That's not quite right. Apple's Universal Binaries are actually two sets of compiled code, one for PPC, one for Intel. The OS just picks the right one to run based on the hardware. The code base has to be fiddled from one type to the next, as PPC and Intel don't share the same endian-ness. Depending on how a particular application is written, though, this could be a big pain or a little pain.
Yeah, that's part of what I was getting at, but I didn't make it very clear. I meant that the increased popularity and use would come mainly from the average user who has a pirate copy of Photoshop sitting about, not from the professionals whose company buys the program for them, and for whom the GIMP simply won't cut the mustard.
I do think you're right on about the free exposure that Adobe gets from all the pirate copies, as well. The average user is never going to pay full price for Photoshop, but it's by far the most popular photo-editing program out there, so that's the one everyone wants to get. If they see a pirated version of Photoshop vs. a free version of GIMP, nearly everyone goes for Photoshop on name recognition alone.
If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently. I know tons of people who use Photoshop and praise it to the heavens, but not a single one of them actually put the money down on it. I work in a university environment, so there're lots of legal copies of Photoshop around, but a lot of people work with their own hardware, so many copies that get used for preparing images for publication aren't legitimate.
I use the GIMP for the same tasks, and get results that are just as good, though. I think that for most image processing, the GIMP does everything the average user needs it to do, and more. I'm not denying that it doesn't meet the needs of certain professionals. However, if people weren't able to get pirated copies of Photoshop readily, they'd find that the GIMP does the job they need it to do.
It may mean something that they listed plastic, glass, and metal, and it may not. In fracture, these materials usually behave very differently. Glass is nearly a perfect brittle fracture, while the tip of the crack in plastics often distorts, so that it doesn't concentrate stress as effectively, meaning that it takes more energy to propogate the crack through the material.
However, the article doesn't say anything about their conditions, and it's possible to construct samples of most materials that will fracture in a brittle manner. You always make those calculation before doing crack opening tests to make sure that you're measuring the right type of cracking behavior.
So, in short, they may have something that's applicable across a lot of different types of situations, and they may not. The article seems to imply that it works in a lot of different materials, but the method of cracking they describe seems to imply a brittle fracture, so it's hard to tell.
Unfortunately, it becomes clear from looking at Jack Thompson's previous interactions with various entities (Janet Reno, Penny-Arcade, various individuals who've questioned his methods or viewpoints on message boards, and even the National Institute on Media and the Family) that shutting his mouth is not an option.
I have to agree with your statement about how vague many of the criteria for these diagnosis are. I've talked about this with my father who has been a public schoolteacher in a rural area of the Midwest for more than 30 years. He's observed (non-scientifically, to qualify this, just his observations) a correlation between what the hot psychological problem at the time is, and how many students in the district have them. When ADD was being talked about a lot, they had a huge upswing in the number of kids who had ADD.
I also have to say that a lot of this, not all, but a lot of this smacks of parents who don't want to take responsibility for raising little hellions. My kid's not bad, he has a disorder, so you can't punish him for cursing at the teachers and disrupting classes. I believe that there are a lot of kids who have real problems, but vague diagnosis, particularly like those mentioned in the article, where the syndrome has various symptoms, only a few of which need be present to make a diagnosis, open the door for diagnosis of people who don't have the disorder at all.
I agree that when identical twins share the condition 90% of the time, its not coincidence. However, if this condition is genetically pre-determined, or even pre-disposed, shouldn't identical twins share it to a much higher percentage? A few nines at least, it seems to me. It seems that this fact of only a 90% correlation in identical twins shows that there is some other factor that sets the thing in motion.
I remember the first 3d accelerator card I saw specifically touted making Doom run faster. It was a Creative Labs card. I've no idea if it was the first, but it was the first I saw in a store. I remember thinking how pointless it was just to have a graphics card that would make your games run faster. Shows what I know, or knew.
There *has* to be an analog signal initially. Pickups work by making an analog sinal from the vibrations of the guitar string through the induced magnetic field of the pickups. It'd then have to be converted to digital to transmit via ethernet, but the initial signal itself will be 100% analog. To do otherwise, you'd have to radically re-engineer a basic system design (magnetic pickups) that's been working fine since the 40's.
Falling forward, as you put it, does not create the drive of the machine. It may generate a limited amount of forward thrust right as you take off, but from there, the thing must drive itself. After it has brought you back to an equilibrium state of being balanced it takes no more power to drive it forward than a "traditional" moped with two wheels of the same weight or even three, although you would incur a bit of extra power drain due to friction of the third wheel.
You see, the post was not simply candidly discussing an excerpt from the article. He made a stretch in saying that the cough was a product of smoking, and then went off into a really annoying tangent. You see, you moron, tying into an imagined connection for a personal rant isn't following the topic.
Personally, I own a PS2, and have an X-box on pre-order. Probably pick up a gamecube if I have the cash and if more games that pique my interest come out for it. I'm not saying that Waverace and Luigi's Mansion aren't good games, just that they don't really interest me. Rogue Leader, on the other hand, looks great, and I'm hoping for an X-box port.
What you said, though, about Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot with the US only launch at first my or may not be true. It is true that a larger percentage of Japanese are willing to buy video games, don't forget that the US has more than twice the population, (about 135M vs 285M) so does that make up for the fact that more would buy the game in Japan, percentage-wise? Maybe, maybe not. Also, don't forget that this is the first US maker to release a game system since Atari, and if memory serves, Atari didn't do simultaneous US and Japanese releases. That's actually an unfair comment, as the market has changed significantly since then, but my point still holds, I think. Japanese makers release their systems on home turf before going offshore. I see no reason why an American maker shouldn't do the same. It's just too bad that the timing will push them over the line on the holiday shopping in Japan.
The main thing I'm excited about in X-box is the ease of development. A stripped W2K kernel and development with a standard development package for a familiar hardware set should spur on the smaller development houses that don't have the cash to develop for hard-to-program setups like PS2. We could get some really great, inventive games out of the smaller houses, which would be great.
No.
The whole point is that you can't rip a CD like this with ease on a computer. It has corrupted data that will sour your rip. When playing a CD, your computer or CD player averages the data, and you don't notice the corrupted bit, but when you play the ripped version digitally, you no longer average data, so the rip doesn't play correctly. The only way to make an mp3 of it is to take the analog input from a player and convert that to digital before encoding.
She seems to be thinking of the best possible situation, in which we not only have time to sit down and learn to use a program at a reasonable pace, but that we'd actually care to learn all of its features.
For one, practically no one just sits down to learn a new program with nothing but time on their hands and a desire to learn how to do it. We learn to use the program because there is some pressing need for us to use it. For example, I'm now learning LaTeX because I'll have a real need to set documents in the near future. I'd be pissed if I missed my deadline because the program decided I didn't know enough to typeset an equation yet.
Second, programs get used for diverse purposes, so while someone might use excel for balancing their checkbook, someone at a steel mill is calculating run yields, and and engineering student is solving systems of equations to see if a truss will collapse. Other than a few basic commands, none of these people are using the same features of the program, and they probably have no desire to learn how to do what the others do, it's useless to them. So, how would the program know what to teach you, because I don't think for a second that its smart enough to decipher what you're doing and teach you the necessary skills to do just that. Games, otoh, have a defined goal, and pretty much all the skills it teaches you will be used. Very different.
I don't think that this would work for the simple reason that the Dreamcast could do do this out of the box, with the exception of the IM feature. And the DC was anywhere from $100-$200 cheaper than the PS2 depending on what point in its life you compare prices at, so you could still buy a keyboard and mouse and be under the $300 base price of a PS2. If people really wanted that sort of a setup, the DC would have sold better than it did.
I know all the region encoding is for movie studios to maintain high profits when they make a theatrical release of a movie half a year later in other parts of the world. No one wants to spend the equivalent of US$10 to see a flick if they already own the DVD.
I'm waiting for them to start checking ID's when coming in to the theaters to make sure that you live in an acceptible part of the world to see the film. "I'm sorry sir, but you're from England and the film isn't due to be relased there for another six months, so you can't see it yet. Have a nice day."
Just make your case out of austenitic steel and it won't shatter with liquid nitrogen in it (austenitic doesn't get brittle at low T). Also, that liquid nitrogen is some nasty stuff, froze part of my hand once when filling a jug with it. Very painful, very large blisters, ick.
It occurs to me that what was said about writing programs to particular hardware has some analogues in the video game industry. Every developer is free to decide how the user should interface with their game. That leads to things like what has been hassling me recently, where I bought a new game, and it uses the analog sticks on the PS2 to control motion. One stick moves the character, the other changes direction/looks around. The problem is, I already own games like this, except they have the sticks set up in opposite manner (i.e. old game uses the left stick to look, new game uses the right). This creates huge annoying problems when playing, especially when I'm in a tight situation and my immediate instinct goes with the old control setup and I die quickly. I'm not saying that this can be corrected in the video game market, as games are generally too specialized in what they do to make an overlying interface ineffective, but why do we need to try to import these problems to computers? I'm sure some developers would be diametrically opposed on how fundamental aspects of a program should operate, leaving the average user in the same situation, except here, it would actually be something necessary (for job, school, etc.) as opposed to just a game.
If this is using the same design I've seen for the maglev proposed for Pittsburgh, the train actually wraps around the track and the magnet pulls the flanges up to within a few inches of the rail to make the train float.
I'd say Sony is much more guilty of this than Sega. I own a DC and PS2, and right now you're quite right about the state of PS2 games, they're mostly crap (except for the sports games, I've heard, but I don't care for them). The DC has some great games - Crazy Taxi, Skies of Arcadia, Sonic, VOOT, Chu-Chu Rocket, Samba de Amigo. These are just the ones that Sega has put out. Chu-Chu and Samba especially show some commitment to making cool games, regardless of what genres are selling millions of copies at the moment. I've been playing Skies of Arcadia, great game, and not at all a Final Fantasy clone. I think Sega's headed the right direction, they already have some great stuff, and more on the way, now if Sony would just follow suit so I could do something with my PS2 besides watch DVD's.