Sorry, but the risks associated with carting THAT MUCH SHIT around the world so that someone can sit in 20-something heat rather than 30-something heat (which is basically what they are for), putting dozens or hundreds of extra lives in danger so that a handful can feel slightly cooler, of them being acclimatised to a (ironically named) Legionnaire's disease-risk, cool environment when they have to take an instantaneous temperature hit the second they need to leap into action, etc. are vastly worse than them being slightly warmer while doing the same bloody job.
A/C is a *fucking* luxury, especially for a soldier who has to wade through shit and blood for most of the day. I'd much rather they didn't have A/C and they had vastly less shit and blood to wade through, and fewer people's blood on their hands (did you not read the article where is says how many people are killed in THOUSANDS of convoys that would be totally unnecessary, or in vastly reduced numbers, were all that fuel and equipment not carted around the world for the sake of an officer not getting a little sweaty under the armpits?).
I don't give a shit for energy efficiency - I give a shit about them being an effective and worthwhile military, where money is going on DEFENCE (which possibly, I suppose, could include attack under certain situations) doing the minimum amount of work necessary so they can actually go somewhere else useful and be redeployed to somewhere where they are making a difference instead. Not one barging into the very countries that are producing the oil (with the impetus of protecting American supply lines) that gets shipped to the US to be refined and then carted via military personnel back into the same bloody "war zone" that the US themselves voluntarily created and sustain in a foreign without any declaration of war ANYWHERE, no "enemy", no "target", nothing - in order to keep a tent 10 degrees cooler when, as pointed out in the article, that would fund an awful lot of extra help, extra equipment and potentially a lot less time "in action" for thousands of troops posted there, pretty much unnecessarily.
If they are being shot at, they need better armour and armament, not A/C. Military costs take up more than any other government-funded thing combined (including pensions, healthcare - in countries bright enough to supply it for free, education, etc.) For instance, that's a fifth of the UK's entire healthcare budget, just on A/C - and we treat EVERYONE for free. If the people dying in hospitals in the UK (including wounded soldiers) don't need that amount, and that expense, of air-conditioning, I very much doubt that the military does either.
It's not a question of cutting them to the bare minimum, or denying them rest-time. It's a question of pissing away money that would be better spent elsewhere and would have VASTLY more of an effect on their health, security, pensions, etc. than funding thousands convoys to carry a flammable fluid into war-zones for the sake of a handful of degrees Celsius.
Well, air-con isn't very energy efficient. So you're getting a shed-load of energy from somewhere. If you're talking entire camps hooked up, that's dozens KW's of capacity all day long, every day. A/C is actually quite a substantial chunk of any business's electrical cost that has it installed.
Now if you are indeed running mobile sites via fuel-based generators, that's a shed-load of inefficiency and cost again there. Ever run a petrol- or diesel-generator? Works out about 5-10 times more expensive than grid electric. Not to mention that if you're without it even for an hour, the A/C has to "warm-start" and pull a ton more energy than normal.
Now you're in a "hostile" country, you can't plug into the grid, and your fuel has to be DRIVEN in, using more fuel, in batches that will last you, say, a week at a time - it will form quite a significant chunk of your transport to move that much fuel around. Loading, movement, weight, unloading, fuelling, etc. That's a lot of work to cause, just for a liquid only intended to cool tents (and I imagine actual fuel costs for transport are a fraction of what would be used in A/C).
Add in losses, thefts, inefficiencies, the fact that fuel in those countries probably hasn't been bought at the local petrol station (but, ironically, comes from oil shipped from the Middle East to the US only to be refined and then shipped back again at great expense under military escort), that you're cooling a tent (the stupidest thing I ever heard), that the equipment use is probably unmonitored (so nobody is really aware if one unit is on all day, every day for no reason), etc. etc. and I can quite believe it.
Soon, this will become another one of those "and the Russians used a pencil" sayings - I bet every other military just has their soldiers adapt to the same conditions as the people they are fighting - cheaper, more sensible, more efficient and a lot greater sense.
Sorry - your military-grade communication and data equipment can't handle a temperature range inside a tent and has to be specially protected? Then it should have its own built-in ruggedisation and cooling.
Seriously, you think that soldiers should have air-conditioned rooms except possibly in a hospital? Unless the locals all have A/C and unless you're NOT siting your camps properly, I find that tricky to believe.
As a comparison - I'd be interested to know how much, say, a foreign military that's helping the US over there, but originally from a colder country (say the UK) is spending on A/C over there. I'd be seriously disappointed if it was rounded down in millions and came to greater than zero.
Yes, and solar is already incredibly worthless without having to steal only "some" of the light, while letting the rest through, and being transparent (or at least semi-transparent), and not being 4-inch-thick, and providing access to the conductor to carry the electricity away, in a glass panel tested to all the relevant standards, on a couple of hundred square meters on the side of a building in a city (which won't be in direct sunlight for quite a lot of the time, unless it's the tallest building around for quite a long distance because of shadows!), with technology that's been suggested and abandoned a dozen times before but never successfully implemented, not to mention the COST of installing all that solar (presumably at design, because retro-fitting will be a bit of a nightmare) for exactly how much gain? A handful of kilowatt-hours every day (which you could save just by cutting out a couple of windows and replacing with a better insulator) assuming even the most efficient panels in use today. It will cost more to run the lifts to move that glass into place and in copper to wire them up than it will ever generate in its usable lifetime... same old solar story as always.
5.7 fatalities per billion km travelled, when under human control, according to my country's provided statistics.
So if you have about 32000 of these cars, each travelling 32,000km (that's a billion car-km in total), you should expect about 5 fatal accidents in total, or less, from that number of automated cars over, say, at least a year of driving, to make them "better" than a human driver. To me, that seems a ludicrously tiny number, and even the statistics for your "crash once in a thousand times" are laughable out by orders of magnitude for even the average human driver.
The problem is that to find out how well that statistic carries into autonomous vehicles, you can't extrapolate from the 5-10 that exist at the moment - you can't just run them for 100,000,000 miles each. You have to put 32,000 cars on the road for 32,000km and see how many people die. And THEN, if it's more than 5, you wasted all of that effort. Hence it will take DECADES until the testing is adequate enough to let them loose on the roads even under restrictive legislations. Why should such technology be put on roads quicker than, say, a trial of a new drug, for instance?
And I'm reminded that out of all the "autonomous" vehicle footage I've seen (for several decades, and we still don't have them), I've seen more accidents than successful trials.
There was a clip only last year with two brand-new prototype Volvos with a new technology that should make collisions "impossible". They drove two of them face-on to each other at 30mph in front of the press. About a dozen times, the cars were wrecked. Once, it applied the brakes and avoided a collisions. That was at a press conference to show off the state-of-the-art on an "uncrashable" car in controlled situations, in the simplest of scenarios.
Automated cars have an AWFULLY long way to go before they get close to the average driver level on a "normal" road. Not quite so far if they have their "own" roads but that's an expense that no government will pick up, especially when they can barely afford the transport systems they already have - and no car manufacturer is going to build you a road and have to absorb the liability they would push away in the first instance by expecting segregated roads.
Maybe in a hundred years. Possibly in 50. But it's going to be DECADES or more before automated cars become anywhere near mainstream because they just AREN'T good enough.
Driver - unless the car manufacturer REALLY wants to pick up the enormous tab for every potential liability in every single car they sell (and these car's price tag would then reflect that).
I wouldn't even want to imagine the carnage that an auto-run car can cause at 80mph, even with the best systems in the world. Even planes have mile-wide exclusion zones around them etc. and still "the autopilot was on" isn't an excuse to get out of a pilot not doing his job. When you're doing 70mph and there's a 2-second gap between you and the car in front, it's hard enough for a human to interpret the best action quickly enough (and 99.99% of the time that action is "brake!"), let alone a computer that can't really "see" at all.
Ordinary roads are just not good enough for automated cars. You're going to get these thing grinding to a halt because there's a cardboard box in the road, or a plastic bag, or a pothole. They're going to steer off the road or take an exit unintentionally because the lane markings are obscured or worn. They're going to take out wing mirrors because the system couldn't see the true width of the nearby cars quickly enough. They're going to return control to the human at odd times.
People already don't pay enough attention to the road. Don't give them any more gadgets that allow them (whether illegal or not) to take their eyes off it even more. If you want automated cars, build an automated road (We have them. They are called train tracks).
I have to say - I can't remember the last time I upgraded a video card (it may have been the AGP era), and I play 20+ hours a week just on Steam games.
Since we hit the CPU speed limits, and software authors can't just make you upgrade, there comes a point where a computer is "good enough" for the vast majority of games for almost its entire usable life. By the time it comes to upgrades, it's usually cheaper to just buy a new computer with the components you want than trying to force your motherboard into CPU upgrades, RAM upgrades, GPU upgrades, PSU upgrades to cope with the above, etc.
I was one of the first people with a 3DFX card, back in the day, and it was worth it then - it literally made the impossible possible. Now a new graphics card might let you get a handful more FPS, or move to a slightly higher res but pretty much they all do what you want and the difference between the most expensive and the cheapest doesn't really justify the price difference. If you do upgrade, you'll usually looking at higher specs across the board rather than a super-expensive graphics card in a machine without enough RAM / cores to actually fill it up with data.
I also manage networks for a living - I haven't upgraded an internal card in nearly a decade on that side, except on servers (RAID cards, network cards, etc.). My work laptop was bought by my workplace as the cheapest thing we could find which had an Intel chip and certain other unrelated specifications (e.g. number pad, etc.). It has a GT130M in it and - although I don't play the very-latest-and-greatest - there's nothing I've thrown at it yet where it's really struggled. Especially in the laptop arena, a combined CPU/GPU is a brilliant idea because it forgoes that long journey over the bus to an under-funded mobile graphics chip that you can't upgrade anyway, but the heat would be a worry. I haven't ever used the ExpressCard slot in my laptop for anything.
Everybody moaned about combining the FPU "because it just bumps up the price and we won't use it". Everybody moaned about integrated sound - but I haven't bothered to buy a sound card in over a decade. At the moment, the bugbear is integrated graphics (which have been around for a LONG time) but nobody except hardcore gamers are really noticing a problem and the situation is improving all the time.
I don't think it's a trend you'll be able to stop, and I think the separate graphics card market has been dropping off in recent years in favour of integrated chipsets precisely because nobody is really willing to pay hundreds in order to barely notice a difference in their graphics capabilities (gamers would notice, business users, laptop users, ordinary families, etc. wouldn't).
Some idiot had his computer open to abuse and lost private data that correlates to money (and the 000,000$ figure is nothing but guesswork - he didn't "invest" that amount of money in Bitcoin only to lose it - that's what he *estimates* his stuff was worth if he had tried to sell it and all he "spent" was various amount of CPU cycles amounting nowhere close to that figure). Basically, he has his "credit card" number stolen. That's not a breach of the system, just a breach of his inadequate security procedures surrounding something he considered to have a value of several years earnings.
Basically: Pillock.
Having said that, I have to agree with the OP. In the last year, I've come closer to never returning to this site again than I ever have in the past. I don't even know why I have it on my "always open" list of sites, probably force-of-habit more than actual interest.
Besides patents for various hardware inventions incorporated into DVD's, you'd also have to pay for software decoding licences (e.g. MPEG licenses).
Quite often, both types are charged depending on the number of devices you intend to sell. A 10,000 run of a cheap DVD player won't be subject to the same fee as a 10,000,000 run of a big-selling console. And, yes, they basically make those fees and sliding scales up as they see fit.
That said, even 10 Euros per unit is a hefty chunk of a "fee" on a multi-billion dollar console (basically, 5% of Wii U income - NOT profit - would be sent to a licensing authority and patent holders).
Nintendo could have a license if it wanted - I think it's just proved with the Wii that it's really not necessary (for every person WITH the DVD hack - when it used to work on the drive firmware - I can name 100 who have a Wii and *don't* have the hack) and thus that 5% can be put into, say, licensing decent displays, touch-screen patents, motion-control patents or whatever else instead.
It's a games console. It doesn't need to play MP3 (proven by its removal from Wii's Photo Channel), doesn't need to play DVD's or Blu-Ray (proven by the absence and later "blocking" of DVD capabilities on the Wii drives), etc. It just needs to load and play a game. Too many other devices let you do everything like that if you really want, and to worry about a new one not supporting it is silly. Take out the gimmicks, you take out the patent licensing and instantly get less hassle and more profit that you can use to make the GAMES side of the device better.
Who says you need to BUY a PC? You only need to be able to run your game on it. You can put out a test version, an alpha, a beta, recruit a test group (mainly for free with such projects), take it round your mate's house and let his girlfriend try and break it etc.
Indie doesn't mean you can't do the same things, just on a smaller scale. Hell, if it comes to it, RENT a PC for a couple of days, borrow a joystick of a certain type you haven't used before, try it out on all your friends computers, etc. Testing doesn't mean big perfect test rigs (in fact, the opposite). If you try it on 20 people's machines (not at all difficult to arrange just among family and friends), that's 20 more configurations tested than before. And much more "real world" than buying a brand new, latest-service-pack, perfectly-matched-component setup from a big computer store.
Devs must be forced to play all ports of their game with several different PC's, controllers, players, connections, etc. be made to use every menu a hundred times, and be forced to watch other people do the same and FIX the problems.
Which would immediately expose all those flaws straight away, and give them an incentive to fix the damn things (because AFTERWARDS they will be made to do the same again and again and again).
In the past we used to call it play-testing. Apparently now we call it "That'll do".
You can make excuses all you like - the game is sub-par compared to even budget titles released YEARS (and in some cases even a decade) ago. You don't need to have the latest-and-greatest graphics - and I play more indie games with 2D graphics than I play anything else any more - but if you expect someone to lay out full-price, you need to have something to sell.
You can't sell nostalgia, only ruin it. Selling humour is subjective and requires a humour professional (i.e. comedian), especially if that humour is incredibly niche and potentially offensive if you get it wrong. The "humour" in the game consists of swearing and making jokes that an 11-year-old would consider distasteful (and that's saying something!), and reads like a checklist of offensive terms was referenced in order to make each "joke". I'm no prude when it comes to jokes and it would take an awful lot to "offend" me, especially if I chose to "be offended" voluntarily - but this game just *isn't* funny, and tries to make up by being seen as offensive or off-the-wall, and that's its biggest problem.
I agree that *someone* would always be disappointed but as someone who played Duke when it was first out, this game is actually a step backwards from the original. A step back from a nearly-15-year-old game! I'm not into "serious" FPS at all - my games are entertainment to wile away the hours, and that *usually* means not having to think, plan, strategise, etc. - but this is one of the most linear, boring and predictable (in terms of what comes around the next corner) games I've ever seen.
The engine is vastly capable of handling more but... just doesn't. Modern computers are more than capable of handling more but can struggle on this (!).
They had all the time in the world. They had a legendary release date and could easily have spent a decade on it. They had so many great developers and decades of assets and ideas. They had all the capability in the world. And what you end up with is a boring, tedious, linear, ill-thought-out, budget-style FPS with offensive humour and some references to its predecessor thrown in to make it "special".
And what makes it worse - some of the pre-release clips from YEARS ago actually put this game entirely to shame, and those bits never made it in.
Have a look at Counterstrike: Condition Zero. It comes with the various iterations of that game that were abandoned pre-release, including an FPS/adventure-style mode built in the CS vein. It wasn't great, but it could have stood alone, and is still fun to play through even today. It was abandoned for something infinitely better (even though it became just-another CS mod) on a shorter timescale than intended and sold by the bucketload, without the bad rap that this got.
DNF is a massive disappointment. Having the meme of Duke Nukem Forever's release date around would actually be BETTER than the game itself. It's another Daikatana, although spectacularly, it's somehow worse.
"China source of hacking attempts on US" (no matter how dubious that is in terms of finding the actual SOURCE of the hack attempt rather than someone else acting through a random proxy)
with:
"Hacking could be an act of war" (no matter how stupid that is, because any half-decent military system with anything "useful" should be COMPLETELY inaccessible from the Internet).
Just how much money do you think you can make out of some sunken, waterlogged, extremely heavy rusted steel box, lodged underwater at great depth, in potentially treacherous conditions, on a major shipping lane, which contains mostly sea-salt and water-corroded goods which were packaged in things only slightly better than you see on your local shop shelves?
It would cost more to *find* them and raise them than it would to just buy a whole new container of brand new equivalent goods - or else they WOULDN'T be down there still.
So you didn't check your account for 38 days. That's actually quite silly, in this modern age when you can logon any time you choose.
But more importantly you *paid* it? There's more than one way to be an idiot, apparently. And I hope you told your "local bank" where to stick it, even if you didn't end up taking them to court for failing to protect your account.
Sorry, but if that's how you run a business (totally believing salespeople that are leeching from you, without bothering to once pick up a calculator or estimate / limit demand yourself), then you deserve everything you get.
If I phone up a company and convince them to let me issue coupons for their services as much as I like, they are the suckers, not me, because I won't have to do any work to cover those coupons whereas they will (and will get the bad press etc.)
This is now the FOURTH sob-story I've read about a business not working out what a deal means before signing up to it, getting too much demand at zero profit that they're legally required to oblige, and then whining that it's someone else's fault they can't do maths.
I'm not a ruthless businessman by any means - when I had my business, I was more likely to err on the side of customer satisfaction than my own profits quite often. But I never made a loss, and never signed a deal I hadn't thought through, never reneged on a deal, and NEVER operated at a loss or even zero profit.
You go to Groupon to get bodies through your door. If you don't think about how you're going to handle that demand, or what will happen if it's too much, then you're not running a business, you're merely offering services. It's like advertising an offer on TV that everyone gets a free lesson or whatever and then being surprised that you have 10,000 people on your books, no time to fulfill them, no conversions to long-term customers (you can't handle the demand you created, so why would I expect you to handle me returning as well?), and an obligation to lose money on everyone who comes through the door because you didn't think it through.
Groupon may be tricky salesman, maybe even erring on the side of con artists at points - but you know what, they're salesman. That's how EVERY salesman I've ever seen operate actually operates. If you don't know how to handle them and see through the crap then you're going to get stung by everyone from the guy selling you shampoo for your hairdressers to your accountant - GroupOn would just be one of many.
Everyone I've said this to in the past used the "yeah, but REAL driving doesn't make that practical... " kind of excuse.
I think I proved them wrong when, in Central London, someone cut across two lanes to end up in front of me (in my braking space) and hit the car in front of me and *still* I was able to come to a complete stop without hitting either of them (and fortunately, there was a gap behind me).
The impact stopped the rear car - the idiot who started it - dead (no brakelights came on at all!) and shoved the front car into the car in front of him, into the car in front of that, etc. but with less than half of my inner-London braking distance, I brought my car to a complete stop (with inches to spare but my braking distance was being cut into rather than absorbed in normal braking), laughed (that's my kind of humour), waited for the traffic to clear and then drove around the line of fender-benders.
The only person I feel slightly sorry for is the guy at the very front - the guy who hit them was a moron who wasn't watching in front and everyone else was too close and thus damaged themselves twice as much as necessary and involved the car in front of them in an insurance nightmare.
10 years ago, I graduated from the University of London (QM Campus) - Maths and Computer Science. The basic systems (the library, general "computer" places, offices etc.) were all Windows (2000/NT4). The arty-departments all used Mac's. The Computing department had dual boot Windows/Linux with identical software on each (and cross-OS logins that actually worked, which is novel at the time). The Mathematics department didn't care what you used and had dual-OS-compatible software for the main part. All were officially supported, and you could literally use whatever you wanted so long as it complied with the standards and didn't break things. Hell, some of the old CNC etc. machines were DOS-based!
I don't know whether that's changed since but I would be surprised (and a bit disappointed) if you still couldn't use whatever you wanted in your particular area. Windows as a common base, a "known-good" if you like for those who aren't studying an IT-based course, but some *nix support should be a given in any sufficiently reputable university nowadays, and in the CS department? Just TRY and force them onto one OS - that's kinda the point of a lot of the projects and teaching you are given, platform independence, standardised code, interoperability, close-to-the-max performance, etc..
I'd be surprised if an open-source OS wasn't the norm for some of the more in-depth topics where you're literally playing with OS design and experimenting, etc. Hell, even the EE department used Linux for a hell of a lot of stuff, most of it custom-built. And if you're supporting that, supporting a desktop OS in a locked down config is infinitely easier.
I'd worry about the quality of a CS course in a university that didn't have support for that sort of tinkering and compatibility. To me, it would smack of rubber-stamped degree courses and a handful of years doing assignments exactly how you were told to do them and no deviation allowed. That doesn't bode well for their Masters, PhD, research side of things, which would make me worry where they get their money (although a corporate-sponsored educational establishment is far from unheard of nowadays).
I don't think I'd have touched my university at the time if I didn't already know they were running those kinds of hybrid systems.
Would somebody like to point out that they don't CAUSE accidents because people slam on their brakes - that's due, exclusively, to already-bad drivers (of the kind that the system is designed to catch / remove / discourage) having insufficient braking distance between them and the car in front and is a phenomenon that will happen even if the red light didn't exist (e.g. if a child ran out into that road every two minutes or whatever).
So the police's response is to abandon the cameras? Don't catch one kind of driving-rule-violating idiot because you often find a different kind of driving-rule-violating idiot instead?
Red-light cameras are ubiquitous over here in the UK. I can't say that I've ever seen one activate (whereas I see a speed camera per month or so flash someone who also wasn't paying attention enough to notice the bright-yellow, signposted box at the side of the road).
And certainly people don't lobby for red-light cameras to be removed - if you get caught on them, you were breaking the law. If you have an accident because you couldn't stop before the guy in front, you were breaking the law (driving without due care and attention). If you run into the back of someone who has braked for a speed camera - yes, they're a pillock but you were STILL BREAKING THE LAW by being too close.
They may not be "safer" but then abandoning them entirely so people now KNOW they can run those cameras and see virtually zero punishment is infinitely more dangerous (and harder to record in statistics without some device recording how many people run red lights, for example).
How about putting a camera facing BOTH ways and then convicting those people who have insufficient braking distance enough to hit someone queueing at a red light (or stopping hard to prevent themselves getting caught in a red light). The fact is that if someone's car is hit while doing that you were BOTH going too fast while approaching a red or amber light!
And, personally, safety is the kind of thing you spend money on. It's only in stupid countries like mine that the police expect to make a profit on something like that (and get universally moaned at when they do, ironically!).
There's a demo (I believe) and it's on Steam anyway.
It's kinda like a X-COM/UFO turn-based shooter but where both players turns are submitted independently and then played out simultaneously (so your perfect plan that you submitted may go awry because your artillery gets shot from behind before he can move by someone you couldn't see).
Each "turn" is 5-seconds of gameplay and you can only issue orders in between turns (and take as long as you like - it can be anything from 10 seconds to play-by-email timings until your opponents sends *their* turn) with the next 5 seconds decided by a central server depending on the orders given and what happens in the world in those 5 seconds.
Units are few and maps are all the same "electric blue" but with different layouts, objectives, mix of units, etc. Certainly good fun and very nice if you miss X-COM-by-email from the past.
Am I the only person who would actually prefer the Windows 3.1 interface to still be around today? No more "close next to maximise", a nice "desktop" that you can organise how you like, and in subfolders, without things popping up at random places on the screen, and no Start Menu / Taskbar / Quick Launch horror, and everything taking precisely as much effort to draw as absolutely necessary (no gradient title bars, horrid skins, etc.).
There was something sweet, simple, endearing and DAMN FAST about the 3.1 shell that I haven't found anywhere since. It flew even on 200MHz machines.
By a strange coincidence, TH is one of the inspirations for my game (though my idea has nothing to do with hospitals or theme parks, and will hopefully be a bit more "grown-up" - TH was rather Fisher-Price in terms of gameplay, graphics and humour).
Aw, if only Bullfrog were still around in their original form...
Slashdot Mirror
If you use compliant CSS, yes it does:
http://devfiles.myopera.com/articles/5042/gradients_demo.html
renders fine, for instance.
Sorry, but the risks associated with carting THAT MUCH SHIT around the world so that someone can sit in 20-something heat rather than 30-something heat (which is basically what they are for), putting dozens or hundreds of extra lives in danger so that a handful can feel slightly cooler, of them being acclimatised to a (ironically named) Legionnaire's disease-risk, cool environment when they have to take an instantaneous temperature hit the second they need to leap into action, etc. are vastly worse than them being slightly warmer while doing the same bloody job.
A/C is a *fucking* luxury, especially for a soldier who has to wade through shit and blood for most of the day. I'd much rather they didn't have A/C and they had vastly less shit and blood to wade through, and fewer people's blood on their hands (did you not read the article where is says how many people are killed in THOUSANDS of convoys that would be totally unnecessary, or in vastly reduced numbers, were all that fuel and equipment not carted around the world for the sake of an officer not getting a little sweaty under the armpits?).
I don't give a shit for energy efficiency - I give a shit about them being an effective and worthwhile military, where money is going on DEFENCE (which possibly, I suppose, could include attack under certain situations) doing the minimum amount of work necessary so they can actually go somewhere else useful and be redeployed to somewhere where they are making a difference instead. Not one barging into the very countries that are producing the oil (with the impetus of protecting American supply lines) that gets shipped to the US to be refined and then carted via military personnel back into the same bloody "war zone" that the US themselves voluntarily created and sustain in a foreign without any declaration of war ANYWHERE, no "enemy", no "target", nothing - in order to keep a tent 10 degrees cooler when, as pointed out in the article, that would fund an awful lot of extra help, extra equipment and potentially a lot less time "in action" for thousands of troops posted there, pretty much unnecessarily.
If they are being shot at, they need better armour and armament, not A/C. Military costs take up more than any other government-funded thing combined (including pensions, healthcare - in countries bright enough to supply it for free, education, etc.) For instance, that's a fifth of the UK's entire healthcare budget, just on A/C - and we treat EVERYONE for free. If the people dying in hospitals in the UK (including wounded soldiers) don't need that amount, and that expense, of air-conditioning, I very much doubt that the military does either.
It's not a question of cutting them to the bare minimum, or denying them rest-time. It's a question of pissing away money that would be better spent elsewhere and would have VASTLY more of an effect on their health, security, pensions, etc. than funding thousands convoys to carry a flammable fluid into war-zones for the sake of a handful of degrees Celsius.
Well, air-con isn't very energy efficient. So you're getting a shed-load of energy from somewhere. If you're talking entire camps hooked up, that's dozens KW's of capacity all day long, every day. A/C is actually quite a substantial chunk of any business's electrical cost that has it installed.
Now if you are indeed running mobile sites via fuel-based generators, that's a shed-load of inefficiency and cost again there. Ever run a petrol- or diesel-generator? Works out about 5-10 times more expensive than grid electric. Not to mention that if you're without it even for an hour, the A/C has to "warm-start" and pull a ton more energy than normal.
Now you're in a "hostile" country, you can't plug into the grid, and your fuel has to be DRIVEN in, using more fuel, in batches that will last you, say, a week at a time - it will form quite a significant chunk of your transport to move that much fuel around. Loading, movement, weight, unloading, fuelling, etc. That's a lot of work to cause, just for a liquid only intended to cool tents (and I imagine actual fuel costs for transport are a fraction of what would be used in A/C).
Add in losses, thefts, inefficiencies, the fact that fuel in those countries probably hasn't been bought at the local petrol station (but, ironically, comes from oil shipped from the Middle East to the US only to be refined and then shipped back again at great expense under military escort), that you're cooling a tent (the stupidest thing I ever heard), that the equipment use is probably unmonitored (so nobody is really aware if one unit is on all day, every day for no reason), etc. etc. and I can quite believe it.
Soon, this will become another one of those "and the Russians used a pencil" sayings - I bet every other military just has their soldiers adapt to the same conditions as the people they are fighting - cheaper, more sensible, more efficient and a lot greater sense.
Sorry - your military-grade communication and data equipment can't handle a temperature range inside a tent and has to be specially protected? Then it should have its own built-in ruggedisation and cooling.
Seriously, you think that soldiers should have air-conditioned rooms except possibly in a hospital? Unless the locals all have A/C and unless you're NOT siting your camps properly, I find that tricky to believe.
As a comparison - I'd be interested to know how much, say, a foreign military that's helping the US over there, but originally from a colder country (say the UK) is spending on A/C over there. I'd be seriously disappointed if it was rounded down in millions and came to greater than zero.
Yes, and solar is already incredibly worthless without having to steal only "some" of the light, while letting the rest through, and being transparent (or at least semi-transparent), and not being 4-inch-thick, and providing access to the conductor to carry the electricity away, in a glass panel tested to all the relevant standards, on a couple of hundred square meters on the side of a building in a city (which won't be in direct sunlight for quite a lot of the time, unless it's the tallest building around for quite a long distance because of shadows!), with technology that's been suggested and abandoned a dozen times before but never successfully implemented, not to mention the COST of installing all that solar (presumably at design, because retro-fitting will be a bit of a nightmare) for exactly how much gain? A handful of kilowatt-hours every day (which you could save just by cutting out a couple of windows and replacing with a better insulator) assuming even the most efficient panels in use today. It will cost more to run the lifts to move that glass into place and in copper to wire them up than it will ever generate in its usable lifetime... same old solar story as always.
5.7 fatalities per billion km travelled, when under human control, according to my country's provided statistics.
So if you have about 32000 of these cars, each travelling 32,000km (that's a billion car-km in total), you should expect about 5 fatal accidents in total, or less, from that number of automated cars over, say, at least a year of driving, to make them "better" than a human driver. To me, that seems a ludicrously tiny number, and even the statistics for your "crash once in a thousand times" are laughable out by orders of magnitude for even the average human driver.
The problem is that to find out how well that statistic carries into autonomous vehicles, you can't extrapolate from the 5-10 that exist at the moment - you can't just run them for 100,000,000 miles each. You have to put 32,000 cars on the road for 32,000km and see how many people die. And THEN, if it's more than 5, you wasted all of that effort. Hence it will take DECADES until the testing is adequate enough to let them loose on the roads even under restrictive legislations. Why should such technology be put on roads quicker than, say, a trial of a new drug, for instance?
And I'm reminded that out of all the "autonomous" vehicle footage I've seen (for several decades, and we still don't have them), I've seen more accidents than successful trials.
There was a clip only last year with two brand-new prototype Volvos with a new technology that should make collisions "impossible". They drove two of them face-on to each other at 30mph in front of the press. About a dozen times, the cars were wrecked. Once, it applied the brakes and avoided a collisions. That was at a press conference to show off the state-of-the-art on an "uncrashable" car in controlled situations, in the simplest of scenarios.
Automated cars have an AWFULLY long way to go before they get close to the average driver level on a "normal" road. Not quite so far if they have their "own" roads but that's an expense that no government will pick up, especially when they can barely afford the transport systems they already have - and no car manufacturer is going to build you a road and have to absorb the liability they would push away in the first instance by expecting segregated roads.
Maybe in a hundred years. Possibly in 50. But it's going to be DECADES or more before automated cars become anywhere near mainstream because they just AREN'T good enough.
Driver - unless the car manufacturer REALLY wants to pick up the enormous tab for every potential liability in every single car they sell (and these car's price tag would then reflect that).
I wouldn't even want to imagine the carnage that an auto-run car can cause at 80mph, even with the best systems in the world. Even planes have mile-wide exclusion zones around them etc. and still "the autopilot was on" isn't an excuse to get out of a pilot not doing his job. When you're doing 70mph and there's a 2-second gap between you and the car in front, it's hard enough for a human to interpret the best action quickly enough (and 99.99% of the time that action is "brake!"), let alone a computer that can't really "see" at all.
Ordinary roads are just not good enough for automated cars. You're going to get these thing grinding to a halt because there's a cardboard box in the road, or a plastic bag, or a pothole. They're going to steer off the road or take an exit unintentionally because the lane markings are obscured or worn. They're going to take out wing mirrors because the system couldn't see the true width of the nearby cars quickly enough. They're going to return control to the human at odd times.
People already don't pay enough attention to the road. Don't give them any more gadgets that allow them (whether illegal or not) to take their eyes off it even more. If you want automated cars, build an automated road (We have them. They are called train tracks).
Join my ISP.
£7000000 a year for unfiltered access.
But we only charge £10 a year if you want our "family-safe" version.
Instantaneous filtering of every customer, completely legitimately, at the customer's own "request".
I have to say - I can't remember the last time I upgraded a video card (it may have been the AGP era), and I play 20+ hours a week just on Steam games.
Since we hit the CPU speed limits, and software authors can't just make you upgrade, there comes a point where a computer is "good enough" for the vast majority of games for almost its entire usable life. By the time it comes to upgrades, it's usually cheaper to just buy a new computer with the components you want than trying to force your motherboard into CPU upgrades, RAM upgrades, GPU upgrades, PSU upgrades to cope with the above, etc.
I was one of the first people with a 3DFX card, back in the day, and it was worth it then - it literally made the impossible possible. Now a new graphics card might let you get a handful more FPS, or move to a slightly higher res but pretty much they all do what you want and the difference between the most expensive and the cheapest doesn't really justify the price difference. If you do upgrade, you'll usually looking at higher specs across the board rather than a super-expensive graphics card in a machine without enough RAM / cores to actually fill it up with data.
I also manage networks for a living - I haven't upgraded an internal card in nearly a decade on that side, except on servers (RAID cards, network cards, etc.). My work laptop was bought by my workplace as the cheapest thing we could find which had an Intel chip and certain other unrelated specifications (e.g. number pad, etc.). It has a GT130M in it and - although I don't play the very-latest-and-greatest - there's nothing I've thrown at it yet where it's really struggled. Especially in the laptop arena, a combined CPU/GPU is a brilliant idea because it forgoes that long journey over the bus to an under-funded mobile graphics chip that you can't upgrade anyway, but the heat would be a worry. I haven't ever used the ExpressCard slot in my laptop for anything.
Everybody moaned about combining the FPU "because it just bumps up the price and we won't use it". Everybody moaned about integrated sound - but I haven't bothered to buy a sound card in over a decade. At the moment, the bugbear is integrated graphics (which have been around for a LONG time) but nobody except hardcore gamers are really noticing a problem and the situation is improving all the time.
I don't think it's a trend you'll be able to stop, and I think the separate graphics card market has been dropping off in recent years in favour of integrated chipsets precisely because nobody is really willing to pay hundreds in order to barely notice a difference in their graphics capabilities (gamers would notice, business users, laptop users, ordinary families, etc. wouldn't).
There was no security breach in terms of Bitcoin.
Some idiot had his computer open to abuse and lost private data that correlates to money (and the 000,000$ figure is nothing but guesswork - he didn't "invest" that amount of money in Bitcoin only to lose it - that's what he *estimates* his stuff was worth if he had tried to sell it and all he "spent" was various amount of CPU cycles amounting nowhere close to that figure). Basically, he has his "credit card" number stolen. That's not a breach of the system, just a breach of his inadequate security procedures surrounding something he considered to have a value of several years earnings.
Basically: Pillock.
Having said that, I have to agree with the OP. In the last year, I've come closer to never returning to this site again than I ever have in the past. I don't even know why I have it on my "always open" list of sites, probably force-of-habit more than actual interest.
Besides patents for various hardware inventions incorporated into DVD's, you'd also have to pay for software decoding licences (e.g. MPEG licenses).
Quite often, both types are charged depending on the number of devices you intend to sell. A 10,000 run of a cheap DVD player won't be subject to the same fee as a 10,000,000 run of a big-selling console. And, yes, they basically make those fees and sliding scales up as they see fit.
That said, even 10 Euros per unit is a hefty chunk of a "fee" on a multi-billion dollar console (basically, 5% of Wii U income - NOT profit - would be sent to a licensing authority and patent holders).
Nintendo could have a license if it wanted - I think it's just proved with the Wii that it's really not necessary (for every person WITH the DVD hack - when it used to work on the drive firmware - I can name 100 who have a Wii and *don't* have the hack) and thus that 5% can be put into, say, licensing decent displays, touch-screen patents, motion-control patents or whatever else instead.
It's a games console. It doesn't need to play MP3 (proven by its removal from Wii's Photo Channel), doesn't need to play DVD's or Blu-Ray (proven by the absence and later "blocking" of DVD capabilities on the Wii drives), etc. It just needs to load and play a game. Too many other devices let you do everything like that if you really want, and to worry about a new one not supporting it is silly. Take out the gimmicks, you take out the patent licensing and instantly get less hassle and more profit that you can use to make the GAMES side of the device better.
Who says you need to BUY a PC? You only need to be able to run your game on it. You can put out a test version, an alpha, a beta, recruit a test group (mainly for free with such projects), take it round your mate's house and let his girlfriend try and break it etc.
Indie doesn't mean you can't do the same things, just on a smaller scale. Hell, if it comes to it, RENT a PC for a couple of days, borrow a joystick of a certain type you haven't used before, try it out on all your friends computers, etc. Testing doesn't mean big perfect test rigs (in fact, the opposite). If you try it on 20 people's machines (not at all difficult to arrange just among family and friends), that's 20 more configurations tested than before. And much more "real world" than buying a brand new, latest-service-pack, perfectly-matched-component setup from a big computer store.
I think this can all be made much simpler:
Devs must be forced to play all ports of their game with several different PC's, controllers, players, connections, etc. be made to use every menu a hundred times, and be forced to watch other people do the same and FIX the problems.
Which would immediately expose all those flaws straight away, and give them an incentive to fix the damn things (because AFTERWARDS they will be made to do the same again and again and again).
In the past we used to call it play-testing. Apparently now we call it "That'll do".
You can make excuses all you like - the game is sub-par compared to even budget titles released YEARS (and in some cases even a decade) ago. You don't need to have the latest-and-greatest graphics - and I play more indie games with 2D graphics than I play anything else any more - but if you expect someone to lay out full-price, you need to have something to sell.
You can't sell nostalgia, only ruin it. Selling humour is subjective and requires a humour professional (i.e. comedian), especially if that humour is incredibly niche and potentially offensive if you get it wrong. The "humour" in the game consists of swearing and making jokes that an 11-year-old would consider distasteful (and that's saying something!), and reads like a checklist of offensive terms was referenced in order to make each "joke". I'm no prude when it comes to jokes and it would take an awful lot to "offend" me, especially if I chose to "be offended" voluntarily - but this game just *isn't* funny, and tries to make up by being seen as offensive or off-the-wall, and that's its biggest problem.
I agree that *someone* would always be disappointed but as someone who played Duke when it was first out, this game is actually a step backwards from the original. A step back from a nearly-15-year-old game! I'm not into "serious" FPS at all - my games are entertainment to wile away the hours, and that *usually* means not having to think, plan, strategise, etc. - but this is one of the most linear, boring and predictable (in terms of what comes around the next corner) games I've ever seen.
The engine is vastly capable of handling more but... just doesn't. Modern computers are more than capable of handling more but can struggle on this (!).
They had all the time in the world. They had a legendary release date and could easily have spent a decade on it. They had so many great developers and decades of assets and ideas. They had all the capability in the world. And what you end up with is a boring, tedious, linear, ill-thought-out, budget-style FPS with offensive humour and some references to its predecessor thrown in to make it "special".
And what makes it worse - some of the pre-release clips from YEARS ago actually put this game entirely to shame, and those bits never made it in.
Have a look at Counterstrike: Condition Zero. It comes with the various iterations of that game that were abandoned pre-release, including an FPS/adventure-style mode built in the CS vein. It wasn't great, but it could have stood alone, and is still fun to play through even today. It was abandoned for something infinitely better (even though it became just-another CS mod) on a shorter timescale than intended and sold by the bucketload, without the bad rap that this got.
DNF is a massive disappointment. Having the meme of Duke Nukem Forever's release date around would actually be BETTER than the game itself. It's another Daikatana, although spectacularly, it's somehow worse.
Yeah, now combine:
"China source of hacking attempts on US" (no matter how dubious that is in terms of finding the actual SOURCE of the hack attempt rather than someone else acting through a random proxy)
with:
"Hacking could be an act of war" (no matter how stupid that is, because any half-decent military system with anything "useful" should be COMPLETELY inaccessible from the Internet).
Just how much money do you think you can make out of some sunken, waterlogged, extremely heavy rusted steel box, lodged underwater at great depth, in potentially treacherous conditions, on a major shipping lane, which contains mostly sea-salt and water-corroded goods which were packaged in things only slightly better than you see on your local shop shelves?
It would cost more to *find* them and raise them than it would to just buy a whole new container of brand new equivalent goods - or else they WOULDN'T be down there still.
So you didn't check your account for 38 days. That's actually quite silly, in this modern age when you can logon any time you choose.
But more importantly you *paid* it? There's more than one way to be an idiot, apparently. And I hope you told your "local bank" where to stick it, even if you didn't end up taking them to court for failing to protect your account.
Sorry, but if that's how you run a business (totally believing salespeople that are leeching from you, without bothering to once pick up a calculator or estimate / limit demand yourself), then you deserve everything you get.
If I phone up a company and convince them to let me issue coupons for their services as much as I like, they are the suckers, not me, because I won't have to do any work to cover those coupons whereas they will (and will get the bad press etc.)
This is now the FOURTH sob-story I've read about a business not working out what a deal means before signing up to it, getting too much demand at zero profit that they're legally required to oblige, and then whining that it's someone else's fault they can't do maths.
I'm not a ruthless businessman by any means - when I had my business, I was more likely to err on the side of customer satisfaction than my own profits quite often. But I never made a loss, and never signed a deal I hadn't thought through, never reneged on a deal, and NEVER operated at a loss or even zero profit.
You go to Groupon to get bodies through your door. If you don't think about how you're going to handle that demand, or what will happen if it's too much, then you're not running a business, you're merely offering services. It's like advertising an offer on TV that everyone gets a free lesson or whatever and then being surprised that you have 10,000 people on your books, no time to fulfill them, no conversions to long-term customers (you can't handle the demand you created, so why would I expect you to handle me returning as well?), and an obligation to lose money on everyone who comes through the door because you didn't think it through.
Groupon may be tricky salesman, maybe even erring on the side of con artists at points - but you know what, they're salesman. That's how EVERY salesman I've ever seen operate actually operates. If you don't know how to handle them and see through the crap then you're going to get stung by everyone from the guy selling you shampoo for your hairdressers to your accountant - GroupOn would just be one of many.
Everyone I've said this to in the past used the "yeah, but REAL driving doesn't make that practical... " kind of excuse.
I think I proved them wrong when, in Central London, someone cut across two lanes to end up in front of me (in my braking space) and hit the car in front of me and *still* I was able to come to a complete stop without hitting either of them (and fortunately, there was a gap behind me).
The impact stopped the rear car - the idiot who started it - dead (no brakelights came on at all!) and shoved the front car into the car in front of him, into the car in front of that, etc. but with less than half of my inner-London braking distance, I brought my car to a complete stop (with inches to spare but my braking distance was being cut into rather than absorbed in normal braking), laughed (that's my kind of humour), waited for the traffic to clear and then drove around the line of fender-benders.
The only person I feel slightly sorry for is the guy at the very front - the guy who hit them was a moron who wasn't watching in front and everyone else was too close and thus damaged themselves twice as much as necessary and involved the car in front of them in an insurance nightmare.
10 years ago, I graduated from the University of London (QM Campus) - Maths and Computer Science. The basic systems (the library, general "computer" places, offices etc.) were all Windows (2000/NT4). The arty-departments all used Mac's. The Computing department had dual boot Windows/Linux with identical software on each (and cross-OS logins that actually worked, which is novel at the time). The Mathematics department didn't care what you used and had dual-OS-compatible software for the main part. All were officially supported, and you could literally use whatever you wanted so long as it complied with the standards and didn't break things. Hell, some of the old CNC etc. machines were DOS-based!
I don't know whether that's changed since but I would be surprised (and a bit disappointed) if you still couldn't use whatever you wanted in your particular area. Windows as a common base, a "known-good" if you like for those who aren't studying an IT-based course, but some *nix support should be a given in any sufficiently reputable university nowadays, and in the CS department? Just TRY and force them onto one OS - that's kinda the point of a lot of the projects and teaching you are given, platform independence, standardised code, interoperability, close-to-the-max performance, etc..
I'd be surprised if an open-source OS wasn't the norm for some of the more in-depth topics where you're literally playing with OS design and experimenting, etc. Hell, even the EE department used Linux for a hell of a lot of stuff, most of it custom-built. And if you're supporting that, supporting a desktop OS in a locked down config is infinitely easier.
I'd worry about the quality of a CS course in a university that didn't have support for that sort of tinkering and compatibility. To me, it would smack of rubber-stamped degree courses and a handful of years doing assignments exactly how you were told to do them and no deviation allowed. That doesn't bode well for their Masters, PhD, research side of things, which would make me worry where they get their money (although a corporate-sponsored educational establishment is far from unheard of nowadays).
I don't think I'd have touched my university at the time if I didn't already know they were running those kinds of hybrid systems.
Would somebody like to point out that they don't CAUSE accidents because people slam on their brakes - that's due, exclusively, to already-bad drivers (of the kind that the system is designed to catch / remove / discourage) having insufficient braking distance between them and the car in front and is a phenomenon that will happen even if the red light didn't exist (e.g. if a child ran out into that road every two minutes or whatever).
So the police's response is to abandon the cameras? Don't catch one kind of driving-rule-violating idiot because you often find a different kind of driving-rule-violating idiot instead?
Red-light cameras are ubiquitous over here in the UK. I can't say that I've ever seen one activate (whereas I see a speed camera per month or so flash someone who also wasn't paying attention enough to notice the bright-yellow, signposted box at the side of the road).
And certainly people don't lobby for red-light cameras to be removed - if you get caught on them, you were breaking the law. If you have an accident because you couldn't stop before the guy in front, you were breaking the law (driving without due care and attention). If you run into the back of someone who has braked for a speed camera - yes, they're a pillock but you were STILL BREAKING THE LAW by being too close.
They may not be "safer" but then abandoning them entirely so people now KNOW they can run those cameras and see virtually zero punishment is infinitely more dangerous (and harder to record in statistics without some device recording how many people run red lights, for example).
How about putting a camera facing BOTH ways and then convicting those people who have insufficient braking distance enough to hit someone queueing at a red light (or stopping hard to prevent themselves getting caught in a red light). The fact is that if someone's car is hit while doing that you were BOTH going too fast while approaching a red or amber light!
And, personally, safety is the kind of thing you spend money on. It's only in stupid countries like mine that the police expect to make a profit on something like that (and get universally moaned at when they do, ironically!).
There's a demo (I believe) and it's on Steam anyway.
It's kinda like a X-COM/UFO turn-based shooter but where both players turns are submitted independently and then played out simultaneously (so your perfect plan that you submitted may go awry because your artillery gets shot from behind before he can move by someone you couldn't see).
Each "turn" is 5-seconds of gameplay and you can only issue orders in between turns (and take as long as you like - it can be anything from 10 seconds to play-by-email timings until your opponents sends *their* turn) with the next 5 seconds decided by a central server depending on the orders given and what happens in the world in those 5 seconds.
Units are few and maps are all the same "electric blue" but with different layouts, objectives, mix of units, etc. Certainly good fun and very nice if you miss X-COM-by-email from the past.
Am I the only person who would actually prefer the Windows 3.1 interface to still be around today? No more "close next to maximise", a nice "desktop" that you can organise how you like, and in subfolders, without things popping up at random places on the screen, and no Start Menu / Taskbar / Quick Launch horror, and everything taking precisely as much effort to draw as absolutely necessary (no gradient title bars, horrid skins, etc.).
There was something sweet, simple, endearing and DAMN FAST about the 3.1 shell that I haven't found anywhere since. It flew even on 200MHz machines.
And yet they've posted four IPv6 stories in the past month (and dozens before) where EVERYONE brings this up too.
You'd think they'd have bothered to do it by now. Shows you how "with the geeks" this site really is.
By a strange coincidence, TH is one of the inspirations for my game (though my idea has nothing to do with hospitals or theme parks, and will hopefully be a bit more "grown-up" - TH was rather Fisher-Price in terms of gameplay, graphics and humour).
Aw, if only Bullfrog were still around in their original form...