This reminds me of the "Broken Windows" theory. (Please, don't make the OS joke that is begging to be said.) A good explanation is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows
Whatever the original root cause, of course, the effect is the same once it takes hold: The lowest common denominator often is the expression of the group as a whole. (Barring a really great leader of some sort.) This is expressed most succinctly in the following: http://despair.com/teamwork.html
So bad behavior (or making poor decisions) is virus-like. The question to be answered is: can good behavior (making good decisions) also be formed to be virus-like?
We are in a financial crisis, and the government wants to see if there is ice on the moon? There's plenty on this planet. I can make some for you in my freezer and you can save 20 billion dollars.
Why do you hate science? And, no, I'm not being facetious. Humanity is reaching a potential ceiling on this planet's resources, and you deride efforts to determine whether we can ever get off this rock and sustain ourselves?
Some (probably all) genres need more history.
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For example, CRPGs don't all trace back to Ultima. Within that same age of gestation there were also such luminaries as Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, Phantasie, Questron, and others. In fact, I always kind of disliked the single-avatar system of Ultima/Questron and preferred the controlling a party of players ala Bard's Tale/Wizardry/Phantasie. Also, Questron was one of the first games that I came across that used mini-games for certain tests, which was quite novel.
I agree that the arcade was the birthplace of a lot of great titles and ideas, but the Apple ][, C=64, Amiga 500, and Atari ST all were fantastic petri dishes for the wild growth and speciation of all the games we know and love. I think some of the titles mentioned in the book can be traced back to much more fundamental roots and that in many cases those roots are plural, in the form of several good games that were synthesized into a transformative game title that broke through to the mass market.
I also agree that some of these games really aren't "vintage." If you can play it without digging out old equipment of finding an emulator, then it doesn't really qualify.
If you read Cringely's article, make sure you also read through the comments, as there are several really insightful threads (and Bob says as much in his replies) posted by readers. Specifically the comments that talk about the fact that while the TMI design and control room layout was extremely bad, it was really an incompetent operations staff (or one operator) who did have the skills/training to kick the non-technical managers out of the room and use their expertise to get the situation under control.
I'm not quite sure a stud finder is going to do the job here... even one that detects by sensing the ferrous nails. Do RFID chips set of metal detectors in airports?
Evidently you guys didn't read the entire article, because the thieves returned the unit after three weeks due to the police attention. So the ISP triangulated the unit, the police scouted the location, the farm owner got wind of the heat and hid the evidence, the the farmer got rid of the hot equipment by returning it to the location they stole it from.
The most interesting thing is that it sounds like the farmer hooked it back up to the water and electrical systems when they put it back. Talk about a conscientous thief.
So yes, the device in essence rescued itself becase it screamed for help and brought so much attention to its location that the thief returned the device.
The exact quote from Patton (the motion picture) is:
"Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"
I read Patton's book "War as I knew it" and have to say that he must have been much more colorful in person than he paints himself in his own book.
So, at some point in the future we can expect a blockbuster movie in which the pasty army lieutenant protagonist proclaims, "Chang, you magnificent bastard, I stole your source code!"
[Cut to scene of several officers gathered to power off a compromised machine while a solemn voiceover explains that this poor machine knew no vices... well, except for that once obfuscated directory full of morale-boosting images.]
Irrelevant question. The question you meant to ask was "What percentage of all health care is to treat conditions resulting from smoking?"
Whether or not they die young or old is of secondary importance to the question of how long they spent dying due to preventable lifestyle choices. I note that you did not respond to my post about CDC statistics.
"Health" isn't a boolean value, you know. Most people live through years of poor health before finally kicking the bucket, regardless of the age they die at. Only a few up and snuff it with no prior warning.
Education is a good thing: The better your education, the lower the chance that you will smoke, eat crap food, or engage in other lifestyle risks that are statistically proven to shorten or complicate your life in the long run.
Your post is not Insightful, except for those who want to support your short-sighted worldview that lifestyle of an individual doesn't impact the community as a whole.
The best part about that site is the fact that he's writing a non-fiction book about it... and a future chapter will be about unicorns.
Until such time that we find unicorn fossils or bones, I don't think that adding a chapter about them to your non-fiction book is going to go over very well.
Because these people hate the Constitution. They hate our freedoms and rights the Constitution instructs them to protect. They hate us. Because we get in the way of business, which is to spend on war the maximum amount Americans can make or borrow.
No, they don't hate the constitution. No, they don't hate our freedoms. In fact, they consider themselves more concerned and patriot in defending our nation than you will ever be.
No, they are simply misguided. Do not attribute to malice that which can be attributed to idiocy.
So shouldn't this technically be called a flux capacitor?
Obligatory Star Trek reference? Are you sure about that? I mean, this is slashdot... I'm pretty sure the bylaws state that this sort of egregious failure in referencing historically momentous geek culture is a capital crime.
Please do not try this "wit" thing again until such time as you can correctly discern and describe the relative merits of a "Jeffries Tube" and contrast it with the fabled circuit featured in Back to the Future.
Actually, you don't. Raytracing is a mathematical model that attempts to simulate light behavior in reality. And, as is true for most simulations, it is a gross simplification of reality. The mathematical model used for approaching realism is irrelevant, just so long as the result is closer to the perceived goal.
And, of course, we are assumng that modeling visual reality is the perceived goal, which it is not in many cases.
You shouldn't be surprised, because it already exists. It just so happens that the old M-Audio Delta 410 PCI cards have a "monitor" mixing point that is logically right smack in the middle between the inputs and outputs of the card. I use Rhapsody to queue up an album, then record it straight into Cakewalk Sonar 7 without ever leaving the digital realm.
However, keep in mind that these streamed songs are compressed, so there will be some slight loss of quality as a result. For most people, it's sounds just as good as CDs... but there's always someone out there who wants SACD quality.
There is a bit of effort required to tag all the tracks properly, but I find that by properly naming them when saving them, I can use Cakewalk's Pyro Audio Creator tool to do all the mp3 conversion and re-tagging quite easily.
Plus, on the bonus side, you can do some minor remastering if you like. I find that some older tracks really do sound a bit better if you toss them through something like Izotope Ozone 3 or a similar post-processor/mastering plugin. Depends entirely upon the track, though, as most contemporary music is already smashed up against the 0db ceiling. However, for something like The Stone Roses, whose recording always seemed to be a bit tinny and weak on the low end, a little multiband shaping helps in my opinion. Indeed, bumping up tracks masterd at the old -6db ceiling prevents you from playing volume-pong when you're shuffling between old and new tracks.
Anyhow, I highly recommend the Delta 410 for those who are willing to stick with 32-bit XP... it's an old enough card that 64-bit drivers haven't appeared. And their Firewire 410 doesn't have that central mixing/sampling point that allows direct stream recording. I'm not sure about their other cards' capabilities. Regardless, if you are industrious you can always find a way around the limitation... even if it's getting two cards with coax/digital ins/outs such that you can record the output from one to the other's inputs. (And I do believe that doing so would never cross a DAC, so you're still in the all-digital realm.)
As a final piece of advice: If you really like a band, buy their CD. Or, better yet, go to one of their concerts to show your support.
I found that writing a bot for Dark Age of Camelot was more a matter of designing a custom UI that could be easily parsed by reading screen pixels every 200ms, rather than futzing about in memory. Sure, you might be able to get more information by poking memory, but that kind of activity is exactly what any anti-bot code will be looking for. I avoided the problem of acting like a bot by acting like a human: Reading screen information and not taking actions that a human wouldn't have been able to manage.
Thousands of accounts were banned when they made a clean sweep of all the Radar users, and I assumed that their methods for detecting radar (sniffing the data stream and/or local memory) so I avoided using those techniques. My downfall was the fact that I didn't know that certain types of CSR chat do not get written to the chat log. However, that was only a suspension, despite the fact that it was one account's second infraction. (They're a dying game, so they seem to be getting a bit more lenient about actually banning people.) Still, I decided I'd had enough fun with the project and cancelled the accounts.
Frankly, it was a lot of fun. The bot was written as a way to get back into the swing of programming without getting bored. And balancing bot behaviors to properly work as a team is pretty interesting. Unfortunately, I stopped before I got the chance to implement the netcode that would have shared bot status, which would have allowed for group supportive behaviors that made some types of situations deadly with bots that didn't communicate. I may go back to that some day, but for now I've got other projects to chase.
I never used the bots in PvP/RvR combat (pretty pointless, as there is just too many situational events occuring for a bot to be useful given the input constraints) just in PvE combat. I have to admit that it was a lot of fun to see what sort of three-account combinations could be made to effectively grind without a human touching the keyboard.
For those that are curious: I was caught because I was chain pulling Grogatos (Alb-side Insta-pop deep purp mob that drops Granite Pin items) and didn't realize that the mob is a factioned NPC that is part of the quests in Dartmoor. Those pins sell for 5Plat a pop, so it was good while it lasted.;)
Actually, I consider tactile feedback to be just as important as you... and perhaps they'll solve that issue right on the display. But what they cannot solve is the fact that touching the display -- ANY display -- invariably results with oily smudges and food smears. I already am annoyed by how often I have to dust a screen and get a cloth to gently wipe down all the fingerprints, errant sneeze spots, and whatever else collects on the screen surface.
I suppose there'll be a switch that disables the screen for the frequent times you'll need to wipe down the whole mess with a disinfecting towelette.
Until such time that computers can parse human speech and interact with you directly, it'll still be necessary to use traditional input methods. And even then... there are so many tasks that make keyboard and mouse input so much easier. Having to point with your actual arm and hand requires a lot more muscle activity than mousing around with your forearm and wrist. I can see that carpal-rotator-cuff stands to become the next RSI if we start using touch screens exclusively.
I suppose this is mitigated by the fact that people who are going to perform heavy duty work will opt for a docking station that gives them a workstation setup that is more conducive to human physiology. Especially having the monitor correctly located with respect to your source materials and desktop. I always find myself hunching forward when using a laptop without external screen and keyboard.
Spherical pizza would be difficult to cook properly, though. Frankly I think you'd be much better off to cook a cylindrical pizza in a centerfuge, with the toppings on the inside.
In fact... I think I need to file a patent on this method...
Actually, the Popular Demo is much larger than the rest of their demos. Might have something to do with actual digitized music tracks being in the mix there.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the "Broken Windows" theory. (Please, don't make the OS joke that is begging to be said.) A good explanation is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows Whatever the original root cause, of course, the effect is the same once it takes hold: The lowest common denominator often is the expression of the group as a whole. (Barring a really great leader of some sort.) This is expressed most succinctly in the following: http://despair.com/teamwork.html So bad behavior (or making poor decisions) is virus-like. The question to be answered is: can good behavior (making good decisions) also be formed to be virus-like?
We are in a financial crisis, and the government wants to see if there is ice on the moon? There's plenty on this planet. I can make some for you in my freezer and you can save 20 billion dollars.
Why do you hate science? And, no, I'm not being facetious. Humanity is reaching a potential ceiling on this planet's resources, and you deride efforts to determine whether we can ever get off this rock and sustain ourselves?
For example, CRPGs don't all trace back to Ultima. Within that same age of gestation there were also such luminaries as Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, Phantasie, Questron, and others. In fact, I always kind of disliked the single-avatar system of Ultima/Questron and preferred the controlling a party of players ala Bard's Tale/Wizardry/Phantasie. Also, Questron was one of the first games that I came across that used mini-games for certain tests, which was quite novel.
I agree that the arcade was the birthplace of a lot of great titles and ideas, but the Apple ][, C=64, Amiga 500, and Atari ST all were fantastic petri dishes for the wild growth and speciation of all the games we know and love. I think some of the titles mentioned in the book can be traced back to much more fundamental roots and that in many cases those roots are plural, in the form of several good games that were synthesized into a transformative game title that broke through to the mass market.
I also agree that some of these games really aren't "vintage." If you can play it without digging out old equipment of finding an emulator, then it doesn't really qualify.
...DIDN'T have the skills...
Ugh. Screw up one little contraction and the whole comment goes haywire.
If you read Cringely's article, make sure you also read through the comments, as there are several really insightful threads (and Bob says as much in his replies) posted by readers. Specifically the comments that talk about the fact that while the TMI design and control room layout was extremely bad, it was really an incompetent operations staff (or one operator) who did have the skills/training to kick the non-technical managers out of the room and use their expertise to get the situation under control.
I'm not quite sure a stud finder is going to do the job here... even one that detects by sensing the ferrous nails. Do RFID chips set of metal detectors in airports?
I take it you missed the part that said Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman's words into plain English:
Advice to the scientists: When you first get back up after the explosion, make sure to stay away from the lip of the pit one screen to your left.
Evidently you guys didn't read the entire article, because the thieves returned the unit after three weeks due to the police attention. So the ISP triangulated the unit, the police scouted the location, the farm owner got wind of the heat and hid the evidence, the the farmer got rid of the hot equipment by returning it to the location they stole it from.
The most interesting thing is that it sounds like the farmer hooked it back up to the water and electrical systems when they put it back. Talk about a conscientous thief.
So yes, the device in essence rescued itself becase it screamed for help and brought so much attention to its location that the thief returned the device.
The exact quote from Patton (the motion picture) is:
"Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"
I read Patton's book "War as I knew it" and have to say that he must have been much more colorful in person than he paints himself in his own book.
So, at some point in the future we can expect a blockbuster movie in which the pasty army lieutenant protagonist proclaims, "Chang, you magnificent bastard, I stole your source code!"
[Cut to scene of several officers gathered to power off a compromised machine while a solemn voiceover explains that this poor machine knew no vices... well, except for that once obfuscated directory full of morale-boosting images.]
Go ahead and post a link to the statistics that show this assertion as valid against national data.
Irrelevant question. The question you meant to ask was "What percentage of all health care is to treat conditions resulting from smoking?"
Whether or not they die young or old is of secondary importance to the question of how long they spent dying due to preventable lifestyle choices. I note that you did not respond to my post about CDC statistics.
"Health" isn't a boolean value, you know. Most people live through years of poor health before finally kicking the bucket, regardless of the age they die at. Only a few up and snuff it with no prior warning.
Survey Says: You're wrong.
Your lovely anecdotes appeals to a simplistic logic that doesn't stand up in the face of actual statistics.
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/state_data/data_highlights/2006/index.htm
For every person that dies there are 20 people living with health issues as a result of smoking.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/smoking.htm
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/smoking.html
Education is a good thing: The better your education, the lower the chance that you will smoke, eat crap food, or engage in other lifestyle risks that are statistically proven to shorten or complicate your life in the long run.
Your post is not Insightful, except for those who want to support your short-sighted worldview that lifestyle of an individual doesn't impact the community as a whole.
The best part about that site is the fact that he's writing a non-fiction book about it... and a future chapter will be about unicorns.
Until such time that we find unicorn fossils or bones, I don't think that adding a chapter about them to your non-fiction book is going to go over very well.
Because these people hate the Constitution. They hate our freedoms and rights the Constitution instructs them to protect. They hate us. Because we get in the way of business, which is to spend on war the maximum amount Americans can make or borrow.
No, they don't hate the constitution. No, they don't hate our freedoms. In fact, they consider themselves more concerned and patriot in defending our nation than you will ever be.
No, they are simply misguided. Do not attribute to malice that which can be attributed to idiocy.
So shouldn't this technically be called a flux capacitor?
Obligatory Star Trek reference? Are you sure about that? I mean, this is slashdot... I'm pretty sure the bylaws state that this sort of egregious failure in referencing historically momentous geek culture is a capital crime.
Please do not try this "wit" thing again until such time as you can correctly discern and describe the relative merits of a "Jeffries Tube" and contrast it with the fabled circuit featured in Back to the Future.
Every time I walk out to my car I see raytracing.
Actually, you don't. Raytracing is a mathematical model that attempts to simulate light behavior in reality. And, as is true for most simulations, it is a gross simplification of reality. The mathematical model used for approaching realism is irrelevant, just so long as the result is closer to the perceived goal.
And, of course, we are assumng that modeling visual reality is the perceived goal, which it is not in many cases.
Well then, at the minimum we're approaching Spinal Mount Plasma Cannon (Factor 1).
Lord, do I miss dying in character creation...
You shouldn't be surprised, because it already exists. It just so happens that the old M-Audio Delta 410 PCI cards have a "monitor" mixing point that is logically right smack in the middle between the inputs and outputs of the card. I use Rhapsody to queue up an album, then record it straight into Cakewalk Sonar 7 without ever leaving the digital realm.
However, keep in mind that these streamed songs are compressed, so there will be some slight loss of quality as a result. For most people, it's sounds just as good as CDs... but there's always someone out there who wants SACD quality.
There is a bit of effort required to tag all the tracks properly, but I find that by properly naming them when saving them, I can use Cakewalk's Pyro Audio Creator tool to do all the mp3 conversion and re-tagging quite easily.
Plus, on the bonus side, you can do some minor remastering if you like. I find that some older tracks really do sound a bit better if you toss them through something like Izotope Ozone 3 or a similar post-processor/mastering plugin. Depends entirely upon the track, though, as most contemporary music is already smashed up against the 0db ceiling. However, for something like The Stone Roses, whose recording always seemed to be a bit tinny and weak on the low end, a little multiband shaping helps in my opinion. Indeed, bumping up tracks masterd at the old -6db ceiling prevents you from playing volume-pong when you're shuffling between old and new tracks.
Anyhow, I highly recommend the Delta 410 for those who are willing to stick with 32-bit XP... it's an old enough card that 64-bit drivers haven't appeared. And their Firewire 410 doesn't have that central mixing/sampling point that allows direct stream recording. I'm not sure about their other cards' capabilities. Regardless, if you are industrious you can always find a way around the limitation... even if it's getting two cards with coax/digital ins/outs such that you can record the output from one to the other's inputs. (And I do believe that doing so would never cross a DAC, so you're still in the all-digital realm.)
As a final piece of advice: If you really like a band, buy their CD. Or, better yet, go to one of their concerts to show your support.
I found that writing a bot for Dark Age of Camelot was more a matter of designing a custom UI that could be easily parsed by reading screen pixels every 200ms, rather than futzing about in memory. Sure, you might be able to get more information by poking memory, but that kind of activity is exactly what any anti-bot code will be looking for. I avoided the problem of acting like a bot by acting like a human: Reading screen information and not taking actions that a human wouldn't have been able to manage.
;)
Thousands of accounts were banned when they made a clean sweep of all the Radar users, and I assumed that their methods for detecting radar (sniffing the data stream and/or local memory) so I avoided using those techniques. My downfall was the fact that I didn't know that certain types of CSR chat do not get written to the chat log. However, that was only a suspension, despite the fact that it was one account's second infraction. (They're a dying game, so they seem to be getting a bit more lenient about actually banning people.) Still, I decided I'd had enough fun with the project and cancelled the accounts.
Frankly, it was a lot of fun. The bot was written as a way to get back into the swing of programming without getting bored. And balancing bot behaviors to properly work as a team is pretty interesting. Unfortunately, I stopped before I got the chance to implement the netcode that would have shared bot status, which would have allowed for group supportive behaviors that made some types of situations deadly with bots that didn't communicate. I may go back to that some day, but for now I've got other projects to chase.
I never used the bots in PvP/RvR combat (pretty pointless, as there is just too many situational events occuring for a bot to be useful given the input constraints) just in PvE combat. I have to admit that it was a lot of fun to see what sort of three-account combinations could be made to effectively grind without a human touching the keyboard.
For those that are curious: I was caught because I was chain pulling Grogatos (Alb-side Insta-pop deep purp mob that drops Granite Pin items) and didn't realize that the mob is a factioned NPC that is part of the quests in Dartmoor. Those pins sell for 5Plat a pop, so it was good while it lasted.
Actually, I consider tactile feedback to be just as important as you... and perhaps they'll solve that issue right on the display. But what they cannot solve is the fact that touching the display -- ANY display -- invariably results with oily smudges and food smears. I already am annoyed by how often I have to dust a screen and get a cloth to gently wipe down all the fingerprints, errant sneeze spots, and whatever else collects on the screen surface.
I suppose there'll be a switch that disables the screen for the frequent times you'll need to wipe down the whole mess with a disinfecting towelette.
Until such time that computers can parse human speech and interact with you directly, it'll still be necessary to use traditional input methods. And even then... there are so many tasks that make keyboard and mouse input so much easier. Having to point with your actual arm and hand requires a lot more muscle activity than mousing around with your forearm and wrist. I can see that carpal-rotator-cuff stands to become the next RSI if we start using touch screens exclusively.
I suppose this is mitigated by the fact that people who are going to perform heavy duty work will opt for a docking station that gives them a workstation setup that is more conducive to human physiology. Especially having the monitor correctly located with respect to your source materials and desktop. I always find myself hunching forward when using a laptop without external screen and keyboard.
Spherical pizza would be difficult to cook properly, though. Frankly I think you'd be much better off to cook a cylindrical pizza in a centerfuge, with the toppings on the inside.
In fact... I think I need to file a patent on this method...
Personally, I was hoping that Mr. Stoat-Throat-Warbler-Mangrove would get the nod, but that's what I get for backing the Silly Party.
Do you mind if we call it "Bruce", just to keep things clear?
Actually, the Popular Demo is much larger than the rest of their demos. Might have something to do with actual digitized music tracks being in the mix there.