I can't see why they could possibly think that RFID tags in official documents is a good idea. Their reasons (increased security and harder to forge) just don't hold water; how can it be more secure to have your details passed to anyone within range with a reader? If they want to add extra security to cards what's wrong with a bar code or embedded chip that can be read using a handheld reader at very close range? Having the ability to read the cards at a distance is a liability unless used for nefarious purposes; i.e. put a reader next to every intersection and track every driver's movements.
As well as getting around it there's the flip-side of using it to your advantage; once you've identified what makes a picture uncopyable, start selling T-shirts with that design on them.
...anyone who may have wanted to write a Windows virus got their virus written and released before XP service pack 2 was released and made the whole business impossible so of course the stats look worse for this year, right?
There is one killer (IMHO) feature that Opera has that Mozilla doesn't; the ability to magnify pages. I browse on a 21" monitor sitting some distance from it and use this facility all the time to make sites readable. I know you can increase the font size in Mozilla but Opera scales the whole page, images and all so the formatting is preserved. No other browser that I'm aware of does this.
Every christmas we make a tree at work out of dead motherboards and cards with a broken monitor tube for a base and strung with broken cables. No pictures to hand though, sorry...
I'm not sure how well this technique would work in the real world when you have a huge range of systems trying to connect to you. If you set the number of bits in the token so a fast Pentium 4 based system will take two seconds to compute it how many hours would it take a 386, palm-pilot, or Internet enabled phone? Conversely, if you set the number of bits low so that slow systems can compute them in reasonable time then someone with a much faster computer will not be slowed by any noticeable rate and the system becomes useless. If this system is taken up surely it will do more to discriminate against people without state-of-the-art hardware. Surfing is annoying enough on a very slow machine without having to wait for 30 minutes to compute the RPOW before the site will let you connct.
Why is it scientists always use weird units? I have absolutely no clue of what "the implicit information storage that corresponds to all of the hard disks made in the world this year, multiplied by the number of years the universe has been around" actually represents in bytes.
I don't think it really matters exactly how large it is; it will never be used because it will take years to format it.
There have been many studies linking violence in movies and video games to violent crimes committed later in life.
I bet there's an even greater correlation between people who commit violent crimes in later life and people who drank milk as children but no-one would start a campaign to ban milk drinking.
That pause is deliberate and set in the preferences (Tools/Preferences/Windows/Loading). It stops the formatting from jumping around as more of the page is downloaded. Set it to 0 and see what happens as images that aren't tagged with a size are loaded and the formatting has to shift to accomodate them. Same thing with tables having to be expanded to display large cells. Well written pages still display ok but others jump about all over the place as the renderer redraws everything over and over.
As no-one else has mentioned it I'll be the first to point out that if you want to try raytracing for free on just about any platform you'll want POVRAY.
It's about time that Car Wars was turned into a PC game. Autoduel was severely limited by the hardware available and I've been waiting almost 20 years for someone to have another go. I know it's not really based on Car Wars, as the article points out, but hopefully it will have the same feel to it.
I wonder why Car Wars was never turned into a PC or Console game? It's a ready-made extensive system with a lot of source material that would seem to be ideal for a strategy game.
This seems a lot of money to preserve what is mostly a large metal tube. What are they planning on doing that will cost that much? It's a museum piece so the components don't have to be kept in working order; it just has to look intact wherever they are visible.
I find it pretty interesting that Microsoft would have the gall to make such ridiculous statements.
Not just ridiculous, outright false.
Actually, it seems that it is true. I installed it last night and saw the following in the readme file that is displayed while installing:
Important: After installing iTunes 4.1 for Windows, you'll only be able to transfer music to your iPod using iTunes. To transfer music from MusicMatch Jukebox or Audible Manager to your iPod, you'll need to first import the music into iTunes. For more information, search iTunes and Music Store Help.
Incidently, I remembered seeing this but had to reinstall the program to view it again; it seems that I'm expected to remember the licensing agreement without ever being able to read it again or refer back to it if I want to check the conditions.
I only tried that option once - they split the screen into several (16 I think) layers and it really did work...for a few seconds at a time then I'd lose it and spend a minute or so trying to focus just right again. The game was unplayable in this mode, of course, but it was impressive all the same.
Back in 1993 (or was it 1994?), Doom probably sold as many PC systems as MS Office. Just about everyone I knew, myself included, took one look at Doom and revised their opinions of PCs as gaming machines. Before Doom PCs were seen as business-only machines by gamers. Both the Atari-ST and Amiga platforms were better looking and had better games. Gaming machines and consoles were optimised for fast sprite blitting and horizontal scrolling games were by far the most common. Doom was probably the first game to really make a convincing 3D environment ( I know there were others before Doom based on ray-casting engines, such as Castle Wolfenstein and Legends of Valour, but they still didn't look very good). I still remember Doom being reported as a phenomena on the BBC evening news (probably on a slow news day, but still). Now that good graphics and immersive environments are ubiquitous it's hard to see how Doom could have been such a quantum leap for gaming. I suppose you just had to have been there. If you want to see for yourself, simply search for 'abaondonware' and download a few games from 1993/1994 to see what the state of gaming was back then - Doom really was revolutionary.
I bought DAOC about one week after it was released in Europe. I went through the registration process and waited for the email with my password to arrive. When it hadn't arrived after a couple of hours I tried to register again only to get an error message stating that my account had already been opened and I should login with the email they had already sent me. Next morning I still had no password, so I tried to contact them. Their website and documentation only give one email address for technical support, so I sent a polite request asking for this to be sorted out but got no reply. Over the next week I sent an email every day, getting more blunt and less polite each day. I never received a reply to any of these emails. One week, and seven unanswered emails, later I returned the game for a refund - the only game I've ever returned. MMORPGs live or die on the quality of their support - DAOC Europe didn't have any support at all when I tried to use it.
Never having stepped into a casino, I don't understand what all the fuss is about.
As I undertand it, the cards are placed at the bottom of the deck after each hand and if someone can keep track of them for a few hands they will know the order of the cards and gain a huge advantage.
Why don't they just shuffle the deck after each hand if this is a problem?
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see why they could possibly think that RFID tags in official documents is a good idea. Their reasons (increased security and harder to forge) just don't hold water; how can it be more secure to have your details passed to anyone within range with a reader? If they want to add extra security to cards what's wrong with a bar code or embedded chip that can be read using a handheld reader at very close range? Having the ability to read the cards at a distance is a liability unless used for nefarious purposes; i.e. put a reader next to every intersection and track every driver's movements.
As well as getting around it there's the flip-side of using it to your advantage; once you've identified what makes a picture uncopyable, start selling T-shirts with that design on them.
...anyone who may have wanted to write a Windows virus got their virus written and released before XP service pack 2 was released and made the whole business impossible so of course the stats look worse for this year, right?
There is one killer (IMHO) feature that Opera has that Mozilla doesn't; the ability to magnify pages. I browse on a 21" monitor sitting some distance from it and use this facility all the time to make sites readable. I know you can increase the font size in Mozilla but Opera scales the whole page, images and all so the formatting is preserved. No other browser that I'm aware of does this.
Every christmas we make a tree at work out of dead motherboards and cards with a broken monitor tube for a base and strung with broken cables. No pictures to hand though, sorry...
Mosh Mosh Revolution?
I'm not sure how well this technique would work in the real world when you have a huge range of systems trying to connect to you. If you set the number of bits in the token so a fast Pentium 4 based system will take two seconds to compute it how many hours would it take a 386, palm-pilot, or Internet enabled phone? Conversely, if you set the number of bits low so that slow systems can compute them in reasonable time then someone with a much faster computer will not be slowed by any noticeable rate and the system becomes useless. If this system is taken up surely it will do more to discriminate against people without state-of-the-art hardware. Surfing is annoying enough on a very slow machine without having to wait for 30 minutes to compute the RPOW before the site will let you connct.
Why is it scientists always use weird units? I have absolutely no clue of what "the implicit information storage that corresponds to all of the hard disks made in the world this year, multiplied by the number of years the universe has been around" actually represents in bytes.
I don't think it really matters exactly how large it is; it will never be used because it will take years to format it.
There have been many studies linking violence in movies and video games to violent crimes committed later in life.
I bet there's an even greater correlation between people who commit violent crimes in later life and people who drank milk as children but no-one would start a campaign to ban milk drinking.
That pause is deliberate and set in the preferences (Tools/Preferences/Windows/Loading). It stops the formatting from jumping around as more of the page is downloaded. Set it to 0 and see what happens as images that aren't tagged with a size are loaded and the formatting has to shift to accomodate them. Same thing with tables having to be expanded to display large cells. Well written pages still display ok but others jump about all over the place as the renderer redraws everything over and over.
and kilo's for weed
Which is odd because, in the UK at least, weed is still sold in ounces.
...and the Atari ST.
Why not get maximum lift and just use a vacuum rather than a lighter-than-air gas?
As no-one else has mentioned it I'll be the first to point out that if you want to try raytracing for free on just about any platform you'll want POVRAY.
I haven't seen the movie but there's no reason the textures can't be generated procedurally. Checkout this for example.
How is it that they can get a mobile phone signal from ontop a glacier yet I can't get a signal from my house?
I wonder why Car Wars was never turned into a PC or Console game? It's a ready-made extensive system with a lot of source material that would seem to be ideal for a strategy game.
A fascinating and eye-opening book.
This seems a lot of money to preserve what is mostly a large metal tube. What are they planning on doing that will cost that much? It's a museum piece so the components don't have to be kept in working order; it just has to look intact wherever they are visible.
Not just ridiculous, outright false.
Actually, it seems that it is true. I installed it last night and saw the following in the readme file that is displayed while installing:
Important: After installing iTunes 4.1 for Windows, you'll only be able to transfer music to your iPod using iTunes. To transfer music from MusicMatch Jukebox or Audible Manager to your iPod, you'll need to first import the music into iTunes. For more information, search iTunes and Music Store Help.
Incidently, I remembered seeing this but had to reinstall the program to view it again; it seems that I'm expected to remember the licensing agreement without ever being able to read it again or refer back to it if I want to check the conditions.
I only tried that option once - they split the screen into several (16 I think) layers and it really did work...for a few seconds at a time then I'd lose it and spend a minute or so trying to focus just right again. The game was unplayable in this mode, of course, but it was impressive all the same.
Back in 1993 (or was it 1994?), Doom probably sold as many PC systems as MS Office. Just about everyone I knew, myself included, took one look at Doom and revised their opinions of PCs as gaming machines.
Before Doom PCs were seen as business-only machines by gamers. Both the Atari-ST and Amiga platforms were better looking and had better games.
Gaming machines and consoles were optimised for fast sprite blitting and horizontal scrolling games were by far the most common. Doom was probably the first game to really make a convincing 3D environment ( I know there were others before Doom based on ray-casting engines, such as Castle Wolfenstein and Legends of Valour, but they still didn't look very good).
I still remember Doom being reported as a phenomena on the BBC evening news (probably on a slow news day, but still).
Now that good graphics and immersive environments are ubiquitous it's hard to see how Doom could have been such a quantum leap for gaming. I suppose you just had to have been there.
If you want to see for yourself, simply search for 'abaondonware' and download a few games from 1993/1994 to see what the state of gaming was back then - Doom really was revolutionary.
I bought DAOC about one week after it was released in Europe. I went through the registration process and waited for the email with my password to arrive. When it hadn't arrived after a couple of hours I tried to register again only to get an error message stating that my account had already been opened and I should login with the email they had already sent me.
Next morning I still had no password, so I tried to contact them. Their website and documentation only give one email address for technical support, so I sent a polite request asking for this to be sorted out but got no reply. Over the next week I sent an email every day, getting more blunt and less polite each day. I never received a reply to any of these emails.
One week, and seven unanswered emails, later I returned the game for a refund - the only game I've ever returned. MMORPGs live or die on the quality of their support - DAOC Europe didn't have any support at all when I tried to use it.
Or my favourite, which I've seen twice now, is to not remove the little bit of tape that covers the paste.
Why don't they just shuffle the deck after each hand if this is a problem?