Does the regular fridge come with the cash equivalent of the various subscriptions, packages and price increases involved in your rendition of putting some cheese in my fridge and writing down my weekly shop on a Post-it? Does it not involve my doctor having any insight at all into my private life other than what I tell them? Cool. Sign me up, if so. One regular fridge and a stackful of cash to buy stuff with.
Though I like the emailing of the SO to get stuff for you, it's easier just to let her do all that herself.
I didn't say the UPC thing *can't* be done. I said it *wouldn't* be done as a matter of course or be accurate enough to rely on. You're still gonna have to check if you have cheese before you go to the shops. And the plain assumption of an expiry date is actually pretty much a lawsuit waiting to happen so you won't see that, or it'll be a build-it-yourself thing.
Optimising energy usage? I agree you could do a lot. But then cutting out the display would probably save more energy use over the product's lifetime (even just manufacture!) than would be saved in an average household versus, say, a simple thermostat or interface-less embedded device. If you wanted to save energy, there's also little point in buying probably the world's most expensive household fridge in order to do so.
The energy company controlling my power? No thanks. That's just the sort of automation that I'm against. And why would a company based entirely on profit from selling you energy want to turn your fridge off (and risk lawsuits as soon as such things because popular because of accidental errors in such commands) when they could just charge you more? The infrastructure and legal system for this does not exist in anything but a lab yet, so it's pie-in-the-sky until it does. Plus, when they make a mistake, you can be sure that I don't want to have a lawsuit over who froze my quiche or let my ice cream melt.
And people didn't have the same arguments against cars or electricity. Both were labour-saving devices where the only big controversies were potential safety issues (e.g. speed / electrocution), at least one of which was driven by the arguments between the two main introducers of electricity (Is DC or AC "safer"? Let's electrocute an elephant!). Nobody was burning electrical plugs at the stake and saying we should all stick to candles (but I'm sure the atmosphere would be comparatively cleaner if we had!). We don't need networked kitchen appliances, but we do need kitchen appliances. We *do* need trains. Hell, my workplace is 50 miles from my house and I either "need" trains or cars to do it (you could run it or cycle it but it would entirely impractical to work that far away then), so I "need" trains in order to provide adequate assurance. Picking random examples of successful technologies and claiming everyone argued against them on the same basis is a pretty poor argument, especially when it's not true. You could probably have brought up the Internet and been a thousand times closer to a successful analogy. But we don't "need" driverless trains, to pick up on your examples and make them more relevant - the Docklands Light Railway in London has no better or worse an accident / incident / delay rate than any other London Underground line and has zero human control on the train. What did they use for the Overground lines that they built years afterwards? Human driven trains.
This is an unnecessary tech, mostly because all the elements it consists of already exist in much simpler, cheaper fashion. Someone's conjoined several general-purpose devices into one single-purpose, locked-down device that doesn't actually provide any advantages that the average people would use (except for gimmick value the first few times) and slapped a large pricetag on it. It's the phone-that's-also-a-calculator-and-stopwatch of the fridge world - chances are nobody would ever use that device for those facilities and/or would be better off buying simpler items instead.
This isn't an "invention" either - it's basically a conglomeration of several decades-old inventions into one device You could probably patent a couple of the ideas but it's basically a "fridge with a computer in it". It's not electricity or even the invention of a mobile phone itself. It's just a fridge with a computer in place of the screen that you get on some high-end fridges (and have for years). Next up, a wardrobe with an electronic lock.
Er... I *don't* want people to know my real age. I *do* look younger than I am and, yes, I do dress down (nothing that could be described better than "casual" during working hours) and have done so since I left uni. It's a kind of privilege that comes from being one of the highest-paid people in my workplace and one of the most critical (my employers are *always* worried about me leaving / getting caught under a bus). The official rules state that the dress code applies to everyone. Somehow every school head I've ever worked for has successfully managed to carve out an exception for that rule for me without me even having to ask or it having to come up in any conversation - while simultaneously berating other staff about exactly the same thing.
I like people being off-guard, getting the wrong idea and underestimating. It makes work-life fun, especially when things like this happen. My entertainment at work is primarily derived from watching other people's pathetic attempts at screwing me over. I actually won a contract by that method once - I was asked to look at an IT system that a large educational company had put into a school. I delivered my verdict to the school in question after the existing contractor had introduced himself to me while I was studying the system. Because I was "just a kid", they came up with lots of bullshit excuses for why the system was so bad, told the school not to hire kids to work on it, and basically tried to smear my name. It proved embarrassing for them when I had to deliver a report to the school on the suitability of their system, having been hired to do exactly that, and was able to quote lots of shortcuts and corner-cutting that they'd done and then tried to pass off with made-up technical explanations (and in some cases had unwittingly implied in what they'd said because they didn't think a "kid" would be listening to what they *weren't* saying). Not only did they make a fool of themselves, they were unable to counter in the meeting because they were caught completely off-balance - having believed that I was just "the IT kid" the school had brought in, rather than an IT consultant hired to evaluate their system - they lost the support contract to me.
It wasn't a one-off. People agree to meetings with me because they assume I'm just the IT kid and they can out-speak me when it comes to meetings between them, myself and my bosses. One guy tried to sell us a Linux network that could "run the Ranger suite" of network management software that we were using on the Windows domains for kids - apparently "there's this thing called WINE that will just run everything Windows on Linux". He didn't like the meeting where I pointed out that I actually know the WINE code quite well, and have my own patches for it, and that I could demonstrate how well WINE would run an AD-connected, group-policy-integrated network management Windows app that would do things like enforce kids not clicking on Control Panel or forcing file associations or even doing things like manage AD users when run on Linux. Let's just say, if you could get past the setup routine at all (with lots of hacks) then it probably *wouldn't* crash if you just ran the desktop client portion of it but it would be hard-pushed to then do things like remove the control panel from the Linux desktop, or stop kids accessing USB drives. He actually stormed out of that meeting (I'd never seen someone do that in a professional meeting before) and lost several hundred thousand pounds worth of contract - I heard he was sacked sometime after. I offered to build a Linux thin-client system better than the company were offering in an afternoon, and did it.
Or when the IT teachers try to claim that their lessons were unable to continue because the IT gear was out of order (i.e. the "blame our not meeting OFSTED inspection criteria on the IT guy" rap). Turns out they never think that I might actually have complete logs of everything, including service and computer availability down to the nearest 5 seconds, or that I de
Source code for anything GPL isn't required to be given to anyone other than those who have a product containing it. If you bought a fridge, then you are entitled to the source to it. Seeing as I don't think they are even on sale yet, it'd be difficult for you to obtain the source code you desire. Even then, it'll only be an ARM linux kernel with some desktop widgets and a closed-source application for doing anything interesting - it's a bit pointless to even *ask* for it, to be honest. TomTom do the same - but they are generous enough to post the source for *anyone* to download, which they aren't required to do - and it's basically an ARM kernel and some open-source projects. Nothing vaguely interesting that we don't already have because that's all contained in a closed-source app that actually does the things like read maps and draw them.
Great! So XBox Live is now a moderated environment and thus take responsibility for anything Nazi-like that slips through their filters, eh? Because obviously they deem things not to be freely "user-created" but that they are the guardians of taste in their own area. So when I *do* find something offensive (which is becoming more a problem with the person being offended than the other being offensive in modern times), I can blame them for letting it slip through.
How does this differ from the ISP's that don't want to take responsibility for moderating user content? (I know there are differences, but there are also critical parallels).
And what if I create a fuss that Nazi-imagery is banned but not {some other random group that caused atrocities}? So Xbox Live have to decide on a moral scale if something is better or worse than the Nazi-imagery and thus issue some kind of official statement to that effect? Or ban anything even slightly controversial (which could be construed to be almost anything with some people)?
It seems an odd thing to create a fuss about and that's why most places that do this sort of thing do it silently (or hide behind a "we considered *your particular* image inappropriate"). I wonder how many pseudo-swastika's (or "worse") there are running around on Xbox Live at this very moment?
Things that are illegal to depict in the first place, fair enough - you don't want child porn images running around on Xbox Live avatars - and in some countries depiction of Nazi-imagery is illegal (France and probably Germany too? I know they banned all Nazi-related eBay auctions, even for memorabilia). But is it actually wrong for someone to depict what is effectively a logo on their avatar? I'm sure that "Jeff's Pork Emporium" has a logo that wouldn't fly in certain strictly-against-pork countries, but does that mean Xbox Live would ban any pig-related imagery across the world on their system?
Nobody wants another Nazi, not even one. However, fear of such things creates silly situations. There are wargames, and have been for 20+ years, where you can actually play the German army and see the swastika and have it emblazoned on your (virtual) arm. Weren't they in the original Wolfenstein, for instance? It's not unreasonable to suggest that someone who plays such a game and likes playing as the German side might want to display a logo on their arm (especially if they see it only as a symbol, e.g. because of their age).
I think they would have been better off saying "We don't want to promote extremism, and we don't want to spend our lives moderating images as to whether they fit the category, so we're just going to have a blanket ban on swastikas." I'm sure that's what they mean but that's not what the original post portrays. It seems more like a "Some people misuse stuff and you can't be trusted not to misuse it so you can't have anything even close to it" - which kinda sounds like the corporate arguments for DRM more than anything else.
Going by things I've seen and bought myself, from just about every major manufacturer and every product type I've ever used, I'd guess that the designers *weren't* that smart. If anything, I bet it goes into a default mode but removes all control (i.e. you can no longer control the thermostat) if it goes wrong. I'm not saying that's certain, or that it's the way to design such a fridge, but it's several hundred layers of unnecessary bullshit in order to keep your food cool.
Hell, we don't even know if the thing actually keeps on working if that machine crashes - nowhere does it give anywhere near enough details to discern that, or exactly what it *does* control. What's the life on a touchscreen? What's the life of an ARM embedded thing running Linux? What's the life of whatever storage medium it uses to do all that fancy stuff (e.g. write cycles)? What's the replacement cost of that part if it fails? What's the cost price of the unit? What's the warranty on those parts?
Now, does it run for 15+ years like every refrigerator I've ever seen / bought / used? I've yet to throw away a non-working fridge, or to have to perform more than trivial maintenance on one. Throwing technology at something like this doesn't make it better. This is a classic example of good advertising - people like you will buy it when in fact a much cheaper, much more reliable fridge is available in any second-hand electrical shop for much less than the price of other gadgets that replace EVERY function it has and more. Please don't cry when you have to buy another one after two years.
"Well, it would be cool to have a list of contents with the date they were put in so you can keep track of things that need to be thrown out (useful for foodservice industry to keep only fresh foods on hand)."
So you want to sit and enter a date for every item you ever put into your fridge? As far as I know, no barcode contains data about expiry dates. If you did, you'd need one on every product. Then you (and your kids) would need to scan everything in and out in order for it to be anywhere near accurate. I'd predict about a month before you got bored and never used that facility ever again, or before you got tired of starting to cook and then realising your son ate your cheese without scanning it out.
"A timer app to beep when you need to pull the turkey out in case your stove doesn't have a timer (I know my gas stove doesn't)."
Buy a 50p kitchen timer.
"Of course the recipe app they mentioned is a good idea."
Wanna have to keep running to the fridge to read the next line of the recipe? Need to keep updating those recipes every week or so? Much simpler to print them out from the net, buy a recipe book and / or buy a cheap device that can display PDF. Not to mention having to buy the damn recipes in the first place.
"Temp contols aswell."
Really? Because fridges don't have those already?
"An app that checks the compressor status and other things (like those industrial air conditioners they use in server rooms to track humidity and such)"
So you can micromanage an environment that you will actually see no advantage to just setting it to a half-decent setting on any modern fridge? I have other things to spend my time on than micro-managing my fridge's environment. Hell, I don't even manage the server rooms in work to this level of detail. So long as it's not an oven in there, with alarms going off, I don't really care. Same for my fridge - no frost, not hot, that'll do. It's not like there's much you can *do* about it even if it is overly humid, etc.
""Hey don't hold the door open kid!" for my son when it detects the door has been sitting there open for 2 minutes."
Educate your son. Get a modern fridge that has a timer with beep-warning. Fit one of those 50p reed-switch sensors you can get to protect doors and windows and set it to a 10 second timer. None of it will stop your son doing that (in fact, for the first few months, he'll do it deliberately to make it talk to him!).
"A passworded door lock so your kids don't try to climb in playing "hide and seek" or try to take a beer out when you go outside for 2 minutes."
You need to supervise your kids better. If they're really that much trouble, a 50p child lock on the fridge will tend to take care of them (higher the better). Don't buy fridges that lock their doors (silly American idea? I don't know but ours are just magnetic catches and they work just fine - even my 2-year-old can open it). And if your kids are stealing your beer, that's not a problem that a gadget on a fridge should be solving.
"Any other cool ideas?"
Yeah, stop over-thinking a household appliance. Yes I *can* connect my toaster to the Internet. There's not a single practical reason why I would ever want to and all the good reasons are actually better done by other methods (and almost infinitely cheaper).
To quote XKCD: God, I'd like to file a bug report....
Then you're even sadder than most of the crowd here. You think that the guy that deals with stupid users and tech support all day long WANTS to come home and have to reboot his fridge? Or check the event logs to see why it didn't stay cold? Or have to fix it after the kids prod too hard / manage to crash the damn thing?
Not all techies want to live their live in a bad 1960's sci-fi movie. I'm quite happy to have a fridge be a fridge. Hell, my last model was the first that was auto-defrosting and that never works as advertised anyway. Sod having to come home to a flooded, smelly, damp kitchen because the damn fridge crashed because it was 2038.
It's called a thermostat. Or possibly, if you want to get REALLY advanced, a couple of them. As would be required for any computer-controlled system too.
Other than that, you've just complicated a mechanical problem to that of a fridge that occasionally requires rebooting, that the kids will crash and that won't perform any better than a non-techy fridge.
Nothing surprising about that, in any country in the world.
Don't do stupid things until you at least have stuff on paper. I was "promised" a huge raise / promotion by the head of the school I was working for. By his count, I would be god earning a living just from the interest on my wages. My immediate boss was about to retire and they wanted me to fill that position AND take over the IT of a few other schools they were merging with. When I asked for it written down, I got a bunch of excuses about hiring practices, HR regulations, local borough advertising requirements etc. but "the job was mine". I politely declined and he kept harassing me for the next few days about it until we had a sit-down meeting, just me and him.
I learned several things:
1) Bosses don't like being told that you don't trust them, but the look on their face when you're honest is priceless. 2) Having another job already lined up - at higher wages and better conditions/hours - is a very, very large bargaining chip, especially if you don't tell them about it until halfway through the meeting (and especially if they don't realise that you could SEE the changes coming months before everyone else and already have something lined up). Having it actually written on paper, with full contracts, is a BIG advantage. 3) The wonderful job / promotion you were offered initially pales in comparison to that which is offered after several rounds of the two employers directly fighting over you. 4) No amount of wonderful job offers actually materialise until you see something on paper - in the end, they could only afford a part-time student on half my hourly rate to replace me. Needless to say, their IT suffered quite a bit. God knows what they'll do when my old boss actually does retire. 5) Talking to me like a child and telling me that it's a wonderful opportunity for someone "my age" is made even more funny when they later go to my immediate boss and actually find out my true age and then all the condescending things they said in the meeting suddenly come flooding back to them. They thought I was 19, turns out I was 29. He either read my HR records wrong or just didn't bother to check at all. My immediate boss literally had to say the line "You *do* know how old he is, don't you? He's not a kid who'll fall for something like that." 6) The satisfaction of going to a new job the next week and occasionally returning to visit your old workplace would cater for any amount of monetary loss once you witness what they have done to the place and who they end up hiring. It's made even better when your new job is paying twice what they were offering you.
I will honestly never forget the look on his face: "Don't you think that's a great offer?" "No." "But why not, it's a wonderful opportunity for someone your age!" "Because I already have a superior offer and, to be honest, I just don't trust you can do what you're promising." Turns out, I was right.
The document here: http://www.dft.gov.uk/adobepdf/162469/221412/217792/4212241/transportstatisticgreatbrit.pdf is very enlightening, for example, especially table 8.1. - 45 casualties per 100m km (62m miles). That's one reported casualty per 1.3 million travelled miles (if I did the maths right). Know I want to know why those statistics are a third of your stated figures, from one extreme to the other!
That means that a driver has an accident (of ANY kind) only once or twice in a driving lifetime, or thereabouts. I call rubbish on that, I think the statistics don't show what you think they show - given that the average "no-claims bonus" is about 3-4 years and there's only one man in the entire UK who hasn't had an single accident (actually insurance claim, which isn't the same thing at all) in over 50 years of driving (according to a news article I read a year or so ago). I think you've looked at *insurance* claims (which isn't the same thing at all) and probably even "fault" insurance claims (i.e. where someone messed up rather than it being unavoidable).
For instance, the UK has about 7 deaths on the road each day, with a population of only 60 million. To fit your statistics there would have to be an enormous driving population and/or an enormous amount of mileage for each. 250,000 are injured on the roads each year. That's 700 a day or thereabouts. I have no reason to believe the UK is significantly statistically different from the US in terms of driving accidents, on average.
I think your statistics are vastly skewed - mainly because most people actually couldn't tell you how far they drove in a year anyway. I also think if you looked at *motorway* deaths it would vastly increase the statistics - almost no-one dies on little side-streets in comparison.
However, I agree that the statistics for cars are probably less scary when expressed as accidents per million miles, but the same would happen for aircraft, trains, ships and anything else and I bet cars are STILL more dangerous in those terms. Large passenger aircraft might kill hundreds or thousands but when they do it makes the news and they mostly do daily trips of 1000's of miles all the time. Hell, I can easily drive 50,000 miles a year if I had a driving job, and that would only see me in an accident every ten years. I have a "near miss" about once or twice a year where only sheer luck and/or psychic ability has prevented an accident.
An autonomous car would be incredibly boring. Hell, driving down long motorways is already incredibly boring and it's nowhere NEAR the most efficient way to do that.
And e-drivers can outpace us already in every statistic. They're still shit for driving in general, though, because like voice recognition, image recognition and everything else where you try to get a computer to do a job in a machine designed for human senses, it'll hit a limit that makes it entirely unable to actually *APPLY* any of those abilities to the job in hand. No point having a Formula 1 driver's reaction times (or better) if you still don't recognise that the blob on the camera is an old granny crossing the road until it's too late.
Think that's a "solved" problem? Just the other month two "uncrashable" cars designed with every sensor you can possibly imagine (including "cheating" by having ultrasonic distance sensors as well as video cameras etc.) by one of the largest car manufacturer's in the world crashed, head-on, several times, in a demo to press about how they would avoid all crashes. They couldn't handle their own test-case reliably enough not to make the manufacturer look like an idiot, let alone a real road - and that test case was basically driving them at each other on an test track knowing they were both going to meet somewhere in the middle. They didn't even *TRY* to apply the brakes because the sensor data was not interpreted as the other (identical) car being a threat to them despite heading towards them, front-on at high-speed with identical systems enabled (so no "sun in your eyes" excuses).
Autonomous cars for the next few generations will REQUIRE their own, individual, separate roads. If not technically, then legally. That's an INCREDIBLE expense and requires all sorts of work and income to just get off the ground. And it will take several generations of those roads being low-risk in terms of accidents before you can merge human and autonomous drivers, or have every road autonomous.
Give the idea up. Maybe your grandchildren will see one operating on a separate road and not raise eyebrows at it. Maybe their grandchildren will be chauffeured everywhere. But the problem is not the technology, response times, engines, or anything else. It's how to TELL the computer, using a programming language, to do things in such a way that it's ALWAYS (or even MOSTLY) safe for it to drive on roads that present unknown obstacles (and that includes entirely autonomous roads where a deer strays into their path, or where debris from a natural disaster like a tree collapsing covers their lane). We're not even 1% of the way to solving that problem yet.
When you can literally put an autonomous car in London, give it a destination and TELL people that if they are run over by the car they get a million pounds, and it can do so without anyone being able to claim that "prize" (and not through being dead), then you can start thinking about driving alongside them. Think of the equivalent in whatever your area of expertise is (e.g. a machine that can keep a patient alive and always respond to their heartbeat / breathing rate / blood content / other symptoms properly) and you'll see why it won't happen for a long time.
Yeah, NASCAR isn't really racing now is it? It's a practice track. I get bored by Formula 1 cars because they all finish within tenths of a second of each other but at least there's something interesting to navigate round. NASCAR is like watching a giant dragster race - interesting for the first few seconds and then it's just more of the same forever.
Tip to Americans: The classification of a "sport" does not entail the spectators wishing everyone would just start fighting to actually provide some entertainment... ice hockey, NASCAR fall under this rule.
Seriously, do NASCAR drivers have one arm's muscles grow longer than the other? Can they even steer right?
It's not a sport, it's a practice track, the sort of thing FIAT had on the roof of its factory to make sure cars ran okay. Short of making a major motion picture (The Italian Job, and no, not that recent heap of shit) which features the track, it's not interesting.
I work for a school - it has 50+ employees, several computer rooms, a laptop / PC in every room and a requirement to be working all day long without fail. I've worked for dozens of schools, from 20 to a 100 employees, starting out from uni with zero experience in working in school IT or even Windows networking. It's not difficult. Even primary schools here demand two-three times more storage, clients and management than your stated project would require.
Before I was hired to run it all, the schools went to Dell, RM or similar and bought the cheapest office servers and got on with it. Usually it was whoever was most IT-literate that decided whether to buy salesman's offer A, B or C. It really is that simple. The kids store hundreds of Gigs of data but there are thousands of Gigs of space on even a basic system. The system is way over-specced for its task but that's because it has to take account of a lot of problems (for office work, moving to another machine is hardly a chore... for a room full of kids that now can't work on an individual computer, it means the lesson is over for them all, weeks of planning are out of the window, the inspector's / parents might well cause trouble, confidence in the system is shaken and the IT guy has a lot of explaining to do). The IT systems in a school RUN the damn school - from door entry, to telephony, to pupil databases, to medical information (necessary to administer vital injections), to class registers (necessary for fire evacuations), to the canteen, to all the invoicing, to paying salaries, to submitting to government-mandated requests, etc. If school IT goes down, the school is basically out of action. Most of them run it on a hidden office server that wouldn't look out of place in a solicitor's office with 3 people and it sits idle 99.9% of the time. There's nothing to scale at this point.
You're not talking Google here. You're talking a server, a set of clients and maybe some storage. The sort of thing that any idiot can set up with an order from a network server manufacturer in under a day even if they opt to install the damn OS on every machine themselves. Hell, the first time I did it, I'd had zero experience with networks outside of a 10BaseT ISA network card and setting IP's - I phoned up Viglen, gave them a minimum spec for machines, agreed the price and got about £100 off by offering to install Server 2003 myself. I set up an AD for a school from bare metal that was more secure, and more usable, than anything they had in their previous network from a big educational-IT supplier with support contract. It took eight hours to do the setup (more was spent on unboxing, waiting for installs, cloning disks from images, etc.) and convert 50+ client machines. It was built alongside their network until I was confident enough to flick the switch on their old server (which they had zero access to) and enable mine. It still runs the whole school - everything. The lessons can't even begin without it because they only have interactive whiteboards, projectors and laptops that are on the domain (so they don't even have a board to draw on if the domain is not operational). I'm still impressed at how well it operates despite being my "first" network for someone else. That was about 8 years ago now, and they normally replace everything after 4 years.
What you're asking isn't difficult. If you *can't* do it, then you shouldn't even be trying, especially if it's for a business. If you were hired to do that, but don't know how, you shouldn't have been. If you've just been nominated at random, then you're better off calling in a supplier to do a one-off build. £11,000 gets you a 16-client, 2-server setup last time I looked, with delivery, full installation, software licensing, hardware support, etc. for a multi-user office setup. They sell them as "insta-network" kits for schools that are new-build, re-build or just want to add another IT suite. I even think that's expensive, but that's only a fraction of the wages of someone for a
Half-life 2 was a rehash of Half-life was a rehash of Quake was a rehash of Doom was a rehash of Wolfenstein 3D, was a rehash of Catacomb 3D.
Just because it was a rehash doesn't mean it was shit.
However, there's far too much "easy money" made by just copying someone else, I agree. But even on a VERY tired genre, a little thought and innovation make all the difference. This is, after all, what made some of the classic games classic - not because they were the "only" space invaders / FPS / platform game, but because they were an *innovative* one.
Ick. It'd be a 3D FPS nightmare and boring as hell.
Syndicate was made great by its simple gameplay that nevertheless let you do a lot and its atmosphere. Sticking it into an FPS would ruin the point of it but that's all a modern studio would want to do. You would literally need some kind of multi-screen control of agents from a similar external perspective, the Blade-Runner-esque environment is nothing with modern graphics but even the things like the music set the mood. You'd literally want to *be* the guy behind the laser-screen controlling the agents like before but in a souped-up interface. I'd have given my right arm for another "view window" on the world so I could watch two parts of the map at once even in the original DOS game.
The problem with moving any established game like that forward is the maintenance of gameplay. Even Syndicate Wars turned an awful lot of people (like me) off because of the gameplay mechanics changes (the graphics were actually pretty spectacular for the time). To be honest, I'd be over the moon with an open-source remake that actually worked. I don't need the flashy graphics, the gameplay was spot-on and quick-fire fun where strategy and tactics actually pay off. Today, it'd just get FPS'd and I'd rather die than play that.
Give us a working FreeSynd. Then we can build from there.
Wow. I think I just touched on the *weirdest* nerve in existence.
Nobody was talking about the art of the sculpture. And in that respect, why on Earth would anyone really care if the code was "real" so long as it was representative? Also, the sculpture *did* have errors in its transcription - quite serious ones that the sculptor had to admit to - so it was probably never even double-checked as being a valid cipher (and therefore could easily be unsolvable due to a silly, simple transcription mistake). And just because 3/4 are intelligible (substitution and transposition ciphers don't really count as "encryption" anyway because their solutions are essentially mathematically trivial and subject to exactly the interpretation of the message described in my post rather than something more concrete) doesn't mean that the fourth isn't complete and utter gibberish. If it were a message intercepted from a sworn enemy not only would you put effort into seeing if that were true, you'd also assume that it could be complete bollocks too - and *THAT* sort of thinking is probably why we *didn't* piss away thousands of man-hours on "encryption" dead-ends, red-herrings etc. in the past. The German's sent fake messages in WWII too, you know.
Don't give me shit and get snotty because you think art surpasses maths... nobody really cares about such things and they're certainly not relevant to, of all things, a slashdot comment concerned the mathematical decryption capabilities of the FBI. We're talking about a cryptographic puzzle on a statue - a puzzle that relies on artistic and fundamentally human interpretation to make any sense, not mathematics - Nobody said there was anything wrong with that or to get snotty but to a *mathematician* the puzzle is uninteresting - that doesn't mean the artwork is. Thanks for dividing everyone into either life-long "logical" or "artistic" mindsets within a single comment. So, to answer the post I was commenting on, this means it is nothing more than a slight distraction and, with authorised supercomputer time, wouldn't be a challenge (because it's purely substitution / transposition ciphers so far). It's a toy, something to occupy a mind not encode a country's military secrets, and we were discussing why "nobody" has yet "cracked" it.
Because if you wanted the artwork to be appreciated, it would probably be better off *not* being decrypted at all. Having such a puzzle solved effectively limits the lifespan of the artwork. But if you *really* wanted the artwork to be appreciated, you couldn't possibly get quite so snotty at someone discussing the biggest and most important element of its basis - that the "encryption" on it is more puzzle-like than some proven mathematics on a bit of paper.
Nope. The greatest fool can ask a question that the wisest man cannot answer.
It's incredible easy to make a cipher so convulated and impractical (e.g. encode by the phase of the moon determined by the fourteenth character, then transpose all vowels, add up the number of strokes within each letter using the Arial font, multiply those numbers by the number 10 places ahead of it, then look those up on a ceasar cipher) that it's boring and uninteresting to decipher it and pretty much "impossible". Unfortunately, it also becomes incredibly useless as a cipher then because it becomes tedious to communicate using it, and the security of a cipher has nothing to do with its difficulty of encryption or decryption procedure - you'll probably find that a couple of supercomputers could find enough patterns in the above "cipher" that they could find the right answers without having to even KNOW the phase of the moon.
The thing about mathematical ciphers is that the method is public and yet they are still incredibly difficult to decrypt. This isn't an interesting cipher, mathematically speaking, because the method is closed so it could be anything. All we have is some jumbled text and (presumably) a sensible answer that we're not privy to. It's more a children's puzzle than a cipher, just a very difficult one - because nobody actually uses this cipher to communicate (so the cipher can be unnecessarily complicated without actually being *secure*, the plaintext could well be complete junk, the message may even be erroneously encoded, and there's only a single - non-militarily-important - instance of an encoded text).
In short - nobody cares. It's like the book-competitions where someone buries treasure and publishes a book which "gives the details" of where it's buried. It's pretty much chance if you find it or not because there is no requirement for the answer to be logical, practical or even decryptable. The one I saw, you had to draw a line from the eye of a character on each artwork-strewn page, through their index finger, to a particular letter in a word on the outside of the page border, then interpret those clues which narrowed things down to an entire field somewhere in the UK - the "winner" was the author's former-flatmate's girlfriend.
The importance of a ciphered message is more related to its origin, the probability of it being an unintentional leak, the probability of it being militarily important, and other non-mathematical factors. Then, if you have the impetus, running it through a supercomputer with what little you know or (infinitely better) getting a couple more messages that use the same scheme and are likely to reveal commonalities. That's how we beat Engima. This is just a puzzle-book, and quite boring because it can actually just be gibberish and nobody would really care.
Nintendo has been in business for a lot longer than almost any company you can name (1889!) and have seen off some enormous rivals several times (Sega, Atari, etc.).
Nintendo make profit on almost everything they release.
Nintendo make big releases every now and again, stringing them on with life support in the form of games that turn out to become famous in their own right.
When Nintendo do plop down a new console it's invariably innovative and top-of-its-game (not necessarily the best hardware, but definitely better in gaming terms).
Nintendo is an inventor. They toil away in their little sheds for years in complete secrecy until one day they walk out, plop something into a business person's hands and blow everyone away. Then while the market are still reeling from that, they just wander quietly back into their shed and aren't seen for another few years when they rinse and repeat.
Precisely BECAUSE they aren't saying "Oh, no, our competitors have something new, we have to copy it in our own way and get back into the game" is why they are able to do what they do. They don't really care about Kinect, or anything else - they have money enough to last a decade, and that gives them a decade to make something even more spectacular without having to worry about the day-to-day running of the businesses. Wiis are still being sold but they have enough to go back into their shed and devote the next few years to R&D and playtesting which the other rivals *cannot*. They will have their own ideas, which might work (Wii) or might flop (VirtualBoy) but will be away from the conventional elements of the time that are competing in the market. And when they deliver their next invention, people will give them millions and, because of using their brains and not just throwing expensive hardware at a problem, they will invariably make profit on every unit sold.
It's also true that they decide what they want in the next, say, Mario game. They decide what they want to be able to do. Then they build a console around that, not the other way around.
You can try to make Nintendo look foolish and show how "you know better" if you want, but invariably you will end up with egg on your face. Nintendo know their market better than anyone - they almost single-handedly invented it. Leave them be. The "Wii 2" (which it will almost certainly NEVER be named) will be to the Wii what the Wii was to the Gamecube, or the Gamecube to the N64, or the N64 to the SNES, or the SNES to the NES, or the equivalent trail in the handheld markets. It will take years to arrive - you'll have just about forgotten about your Wii and Nintendo will be absent from the market for a year or so - and then it'll blow your socks off. After a few months people will complain that it doesn't do X or Y or that it's "outdated" or "underpowered" while Nintendo will have another decade's research money under their belt and be working on the next one.
Nintendo know what they are doing. Sod Wii 2. I want whatever the next stage is - which will be more advanced gameplay-wise than anything on the market in the next few years.
In my Spectrum days, a lot of games weren't completable anyway. Of those that were, I completed exactly one - Nonterraqueous - after myself, my brother and my dad dedicated several nights to mapping the damn thing on the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life. Typically, the next week someone published one in the computer games magazines. But that was it. I never completed Back to Skool which is three screens wide. I never completed any of the other 200+ games.
On consoles, the same thing happened. We completed Mario All-Stars on SNES by just sitting down and working through it hundreds of times as a family. I don't remember completing any other game on SNES.
In the arcades, the same thing happened. I only completed one game - Final Fight - by finding an old dusty machine in an old arcade with my elder brother while my parents were trying to get rid of us - we put about £5 in 10p coins into that machine but eventually we "won". We nearly won at Bad Dudes vs Dragonninja that night too.
On Gameboy, I completed the 2nd Mario game on my own but it wasn't exactly difficult. I also "completed" Tetris on any skill level you care to select. I may have completed TMNT too but it was a very simple game to complete.
On PC, a similar thing happened - most games that "could" be completed I just never bothered to. There are even some in that category that I love playing but have *never* managed to complete. I love Heroes of Might and Magic but have never bothered to "complete" it, I just like playing it. I love Age of Empires II but I've never bothered to complete the campaign, I just like playing it. I love Master of Magic but I've never completed it. I love Syndicate but I've never completed it (stupidly difficult last level doesn't help). I love Driver but I've never completed it (same thing). I have put hundreds of hours into games before now and never completed them. Some of them I don't even know *how* even if they are completable. However, I have completed Half-life 2 and all the episodes. I have completed some games to the point of "every achievement". I have completed some games with the help of tutorials and/or got to the point where, as far as I'm concerned, the game is complete. I have 200 games on my Steam list and completed about 3 or 4 at most.
And what classes as "complete"? Got to the end stage? On what difficulty? Just getting there or getting 100% completion? Does having co-op friends count? Do you have to do it all in one session? Are you allowed continues?
The reasons that people don't "complete" games any more are many, and still the same as always - They never really *did* complete lots of games. They don't need to in order to play for thousands of hours. Sometimes it's not possible to complete the game at all. Sometimes it's stupidly difficult even if they enjoy the game. They don't put the time into any one particular game. They don't like the game enough. The game has more content than can hold their interest. They have a life outside computer games.
To be honest, I've completed many more games in recent years than I ever did before (i.e. when I had lots of free time during the day), but I've also left many games on the very first level or demo thinking "this isn't worth my time". With modern games what puts me off is not being able to just play the damn game. I don't want cutscenes or intros or being forced to watch storyline, I just want to play because that's what I bought a game to do - allow me to play. And it's hard to "complete" a modern game because many of them are multiplayer and / or achievement based and it just means that completing consists of grinding away on silly achievements that you're unlikely to ever hit during the course of the game naturally (think Half-life 2's Gnome achievements).
I don't buy a game to complete it. In fact, I often wish that I never complete any game that I buy because then it gives me more to go back for. I buy a game to play it and have fun. Once I c
It's just properly preparing a computer for interactive desktop use, something which few distros seem to bother to do. As both the patch and the shell script demonstrate, the functionality has been there for ages and even before it was, you could fake something similar. Hell, even Windows just used to give a priority boost to the window that was in the foreground but I remember at the time that being ruled out because it might interfere with server operations on Linux and so the user was left to do that themselves if they wanted.
All either approach does is put each process in its own group so that the resources allocated to one process don't take up a disproportionate amount of the overall resources. It's nothing that we haven't been doing since the early days of multitasking operating systems, it's just that someone worked out that on a modern machine, grouping processes actually works better for an interactive desktop experience than not.
Most Linux computers *aren't* on desktop workloads, so it's useless there because you will get processes starved of attention where you want them to run at full-speed. But the ones that *are* on the desktop should *always* have had scheduler and priority tricks like this because it's been obvious for decades that it makes sense. Nobody bothered because, to be honest, on all the Linux desktops I've ever deployed, running a computer that's that heavily loaded hasn't been advantageous whether or not you could smoothly play back a movie. Most desktops for inexperienced people actually have a single app with the main focus all the time. Even advanced users can struggle with more than a handful of programs running simultaneously. And anyone who's running an amount of processes such that the computer slows to unusable levels in most of them obviously doesn't care about getting the work done on time if they just zap the processes into groups and balance priorities. Yes, your desktop might keep playing HD videos but your kernel compiles are going to take FOREVER while they do that - no different to any other OS. And, let's be honest, how many desktop users actually load their systems heavily enough that they can't watch an HD movie on the kind of hardware that the patch was benchmarked on?
It's an interesting observation of a modern implementation of a very old solution to an almost-non-existent problem. That's why someone is able to look at the patch and do it better in a handful of shell script - it's not rocket science, it's just that nobody bothers to do it for desktop systems. And if you do, then mainly it means that your desktop system is trying to do too much and/or isn't really that vital for you (i.e. if you can't be bothered to move off your kernel compiles to a remote machine, chances are you don't care if they finish in 2 minutes or an hour and thus is your probably *do* want to prioritise your HD movie playing or whatever).
Personally, I never have to play with nice levels or process groups because on my servers I want things to run at full speed and the CPU's are rarely that loaded that having another machine or having strict fairness imposed would help matters, and on my desktops everything works "good enough" and I don't really *want* to try a 64-process kernel compile while watching a HD movie, even if it stands 0.1% chance of making the movie a little jerky. I'll move it off to another machine, do it overnight, wait until the movie is finished etc. because it will then complete in a matter of minutes rather than having to fight for CPU with my HD movie. If I'm compiling a kernel and can't afford a handful of minutes to wait for it to compile, why would I be able to wait, say, an hour and watch an HD movie in the meantime?
I've just used the example loads posted on the patch benchmarks but the same thing holds - if you're at 100% CPU then you have to make trade-offs and this patch / script makes better trade-offs for interactivity at the expense of overall speed. But if you're at 100% CPU then something's probably wrong in the f
Er... you're missing the point. It's not the lag between you and your PC - that's ALWAYS present on whatever system. It's the lag between your PC wanting to processing the input and sending the relevant graphical output. On a conventional PC this is less than the time required for one frame (or else you wouldn't get the framerate that you do). On this system, it's a remote PC over a latent link, that's a lot more. You're still using monitors, USB peripherals and everything else and, yes, you may have slightest reduced *multiplayer* latency because you're effectively logging in remotely to a PC playing a LAN game, but the latency from control input being recieved to graphics card sending a signal to the monitor reflecting the output is VASTLY increased, by orders of magnitude in some cases.
The sub-50ms ping you get from a counterstrike server is only how long it takes the PC to talk to the other computer and get a reply (for a tiny packet). The latency problem here is inserted between the computer successfully receiving your input and then producing a graphic to represent that, where normally that is only limited by the bus and CPU speed of your computer, and where now you have to include a transport across an international network, another computer to perform those same calculations / bus transfers, and then another network transport.
You're basically VNC'ing into a bunch of computers playing a LAN game. Try it. Just because the remote computer gets "20ms ping" to the main server doesn't mean it's more responsive than just playing the game locally.
Dunno about 7 but XP is probably worse. An awful lot of Windows apps have a minimum window size and refuse to allow themselves to be shrunk. So you're into third party apps (strangley usually supplied with the touchpad drivers) to zoom apps (and thus have them unreadable), or perform ALT+click on the window makes it moves no matter where you click, which lets you move windows around even if they are mostly off-screen but steals a hotkey.
In my opinion, Ubuntu etc. have always done a better job at this. At least you can use most Linux apps on a netbook - that's not true of XP. As I say, I don't know about 7. It's not really an OS problem as much as it is purely a netbook problem though. I run school networks where we have 50 kids using OpenOffice on netbook-sized screens at times, we don't have a problem on Ubuntu and I don't need to tell them anything special, they just get on with it (and we're talking 7-10 years old).
The way I read the graphs is: XP and Ubuntu win on almost everything (Ubuntu loses once on Flash on iPlayer but that's hardly surprising), maybe only by a small margin by they do, and Windows 7 takes twice as long to boot as they do. The article doesn't recommend bothering to upgrade to Windows 7 if you already have XP on it, and suggests that Ubuntu would be just as good.
Now, let's look at *value*: Assuming you can get them all for the same price, they all provide roughly equal value (it could be argued that 7 is worse value but only by a small way). However, if you have to pay *any* extra for XP or 7, then you're just as well off with Ubuntu. So, it's all back to the old question: who wants to sell me a netbook with an operating system that's just as good as the others but which is FREE for life? In the early days, that's how netbooks became so cheap and so popular - I know, I worked with the original EEEPC's because a school could afford them but MS wanted about £50 a license to "upgrade" them to XP. Now it seems either Microsoft are giving people Windows for free, or Microsoft are stopping manufacturers from supplying netbooks with only Linux on them. I vote for the latter given previous history.
All this article confirms is that, basically, all the OS's are roughly the same now. A bar chart here or there but on average there is no winner. Thus, the free ones should represent infinitely better value. Strange how the manufacturers don't reflect that in their pricing / OS availability any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the regular fridge come with the cash equivalent of the various subscriptions, packages and price increases involved in your rendition of putting some cheese in my fridge and writing down my weekly shop on a Post-it? Does it not involve my doctor having any insight at all into my private life other than what I tell them? Cool. Sign me up, if so. One regular fridge and a stackful of cash to buy stuff with.
Though I like the emailing of the SO to get stuff for you, it's easier just to let her do all that herself.
I disagree with almost everything in that post.
I didn't say the UPC thing *can't* be done. I said it *wouldn't* be done as a matter of course or be accurate enough to rely on. You're still gonna have to check if you have cheese before you go to the shops. And the plain assumption of an expiry date is actually pretty much a lawsuit waiting to happen so you won't see that, or it'll be a build-it-yourself thing.
Optimising energy usage? I agree you could do a lot. But then cutting out the display would probably save more energy use over the product's lifetime (even just manufacture!) than would be saved in an average household versus, say, a simple thermostat or interface-less embedded device. If you wanted to save energy, there's also little point in buying probably the world's most expensive household fridge in order to do so.
The energy company controlling my power? No thanks. That's just the sort of automation that I'm against. And why would a company based entirely on profit from selling you energy want to turn your fridge off (and risk lawsuits as soon as such things because popular because of accidental errors in such commands) when they could just charge you more? The infrastructure and legal system for this does not exist in anything but a lab yet, so it's pie-in-the-sky until it does. Plus, when they make a mistake, you can be sure that I don't want to have a lawsuit over who froze my quiche or let my ice cream melt.
And people didn't have the same arguments against cars or electricity. Both were labour-saving devices where the only big controversies were potential safety issues (e.g. speed / electrocution), at least one of which was driven by the arguments between the two main introducers of electricity (Is DC or AC "safer"? Let's electrocute an elephant!). Nobody was burning electrical plugs at the stake and saying we should all stick to candles (but I'm sure the atmosphere would be comparatively cleaner if we had!). We don't need networked kitchen appliances, but we do need kitchen appliances. We *do* need trains. Hell, my workplace is 50 miles from my house and I either "need" trains or cars to do it (you could run it or cycle it but it would entirely impractical to work that far away then), so I "need" trains in order to provide adequate assurance. Picking random examples of successful technologies and claiming everyone argued against them on the same basis is a pretty poor argument, especially when it's not true. You could probably have brought up the Internet and been a thousand times closer to a successful analogy. But we don't "need" driverless trains, to pick up on your examples and make them more relevant - the Docklands Light Railway in London has no better or worse an accident / incident / delay rate than any other London Underground line and has zero human control on the train. What did they use for the Overground lines that they built years afterwards? Human driven trains.
This is an unnecessary tech, mostly because all the elements it consists of already exist in much simpler, cheaper fashion. Someone's conjoined several general-purpose devices into one single-purpose, locked-down device that doesn't actually provide any advantages that the average people would use (except for gimmick value the first few times) and slapped a large pricetag on it. It's the phone-that's-also-a-calculator-and-stopwatch of the fridge world - chances are nobody would ever use that device for those facilities and/or would be better off buying simpler items instead.
This isn't an "invention" either - it's basically a conglomeration of several decades-old inventions into one device You could probably patent a couple of the ideas but it's basically a "fridge with a computer in it". It's not electricity or even the invention of a mobile phone itself. It's just a fridge with a computer in place of the screen that you get on some high-end fridges (and have for years). Next up, a wardrobe with an electronic lock.
I'm very forward-looking and whenever I lo
Er... I *don't* want people to know my real age. I *do* look younger than I am and, yes, I do dress down (nothing that could be described better than "casual" during working hours) and have done so since I left uni. It's a kind of privilege that comes from being one of the highest-paid people in my workplace and one of the most critical (my employers are *always* worried about me leaving / getting caught under a bus). The official rules state that the dress code applies to everyone. Somehow every school head I've ever worked for has successfully managed to carve out an exception for that rule for me without me even having to ask or it having to come up in any conversation - while simultaneously berating other staff about exactly the same thing.
I like people being off-guard, getting the wrong idea and underestimating. It makes work-life fun, especially when things like this happen. My entertainment at work is primarily derived from watching other people's pathetic attempts at screwing me over. I actually won a contract by that method once - I was asked to look at an IT system that a large educational company had put into a school. I delivered my verdict to the school in question after the existing contractor had introduced himself to me while I was studying the system. Because I was "just a kid", they came up with lots of bullshit excuses for why the system was so bad, told the school not to hire kids to work on it, and basically tried to smear my name. It proved embarrassing for them when I had to deliver a report to the school on the suitability of their system, having been hired to do exactly that, and was able to quote lots of shortcuts and corner-cutting that they'd done and then tried to pass off with made-up technical explanations (and in some cases had unwittingly implied in what they'd said because they didn't think a "kid" would be listening to what they *weren't* saying). Not only did they make a fool of themselves, they were unable to counter in the meeting because they were caught completely off-balance - having believed that I was just "the IT kid" the school had brought in, rather than an IT consultant hired to evaluate their system - they lost the support contract to me.
It wasn't a one-off. People agree to meetings with me because they assume I'm just the IT kid and they can out-speak me when it comes to meetings between them, myself and my bosses. One guy tried to sell us a Linux network that could "run the Ranger suite" of network management software that we were using on the Windows domains for kids - apparently "there's this thing called WINE that will just run everything Windows on Linux". He didn't like the meeting where I pointed out that I actually know the WINE code quite well, and have my own patches for it, and that I could demonstrate how well WINE would run an AD-connected, group-policy-integrated network management Windows app that would do things like enforce kids not clicking on Control Panel or forcing file associations or even doing things like manage AD users when run on Linux. Let's just say, if you could get past the setup routine at all (with lots of hacks) then it probably *wouldn't* crash if you just ran the desktop client portion of it but it would be hard-pushed to then do things like remove the control panel from the Linux desktop, or stop kids accessing USB drives. He actually stormed out of that meeting (I'd never seen someone do that in a professional meeting before) and lost several hundred thousand pounds worth of contract - I heard he was sacked sometime after. I offered to build a Linux thin-client system better than the company were offering in an afternoon, and did it.
Or when the IT teachers try to claim that their lessons were unable to continue because the IT gear was out of order (i.e. the "blame our not meeting OFSTED inspection criteria on the IT guy" rap). Turns out they never think that I might actually have complete logs of everything, including service and computer availability down to the nearest 5 seconds, or that I de
Just trolling?
Source code for anything GPL isn't required to be given to anyone other than those who have a product containing it. If you bought a fridge, then you are entitled to the source to it. Seeing as I don't think they are even on sale yet, it'd be difficult for you to obtain the source code you desire. Even then, it'll only be an ARM linux kernel with some desktop widgets and a closed-source application for doing anything interesting - it's a bit pointless to even *ask* for it, to be honest. TomTom do the same - but they are generous enough to post the source for *anyone* to download, which they aren't required to do - and it's basically an ARM kernel and some open-source projects. Nothing vaguely interesting that we don't already have because that's all contained in a closed-source app that actually does the things like read maps and draw them.
Great! So XBox Live is now a moderated environment and thus take responsibility for anything Nazi-like that slips through their filters, eh? Because obviously they deem things not to be freely "user-created" but that they are the guardians of taste in their own area. So when I *do* find something offensive (which is becoming more a problem with the person being offended than the other being offensive in modern times), I can blame them for letting it slip through.
How does this differ from the ISP's that don't want to take responsibility for moderating user content? (I know there are differences, but there are also critical parallels).
And what if I create a fuss that Nazi-imagery is banned but not {some other random group that caused atrocities}? So Xbox Live have to decide on a moral scale if something is better or worse than the Nazi-imagery and thus issue some kind of official statement to that effect? Or ban anything even slightly controversial (which could be construed to be almost anything with some people)?
It seems an odd thing to create a fuss about and that's why most places that do this sort of thing do it silently (or hide behind a "we considered *your particular* image inappropriate"). I wonder how many pseudo-swastika's (or "worse") there are running around on Xbox Live at this very moment?
Things that are illegal to depict in the first place, fair enough - you don't want child porn images running around on Xbox Live avatars - and in some countries depiction of Nazi-imagery is illegal (France and probably Germany too? I know they banned all Nazi-related eBay auctions, even for memorabilia). But is it actually wrong for someone to depict what is effectively a logo on their avatar? I'm sure that "Jeff's Pork Emporium" has a logo that wouldn't fly in certain strictly-against-pork countries, but does that mean Xbox Live would ban any pig-related imagery across the world on their system?
Nobody wants another Nazi, not even one. However, fear of such things creates silly situations. There are wargames, and have been for 20+ years, where you can actually play the German army and see the swastika and have it emblazoned on your (virtual) arm. Weren't they in the original Wolfenstein, for instance? It's not unreasonable to suggest that someone who plays such a game and likes playing as the German side might want to display a logo on their arm (especially if they see it only as a symbol, e.g. because of their age).
I think they would have been better off saying "We don't want to promote extremism, and we don't want to spend our lives moderating images as to whether they fit the category, so we're just going to have a blanket ban on swastikas." I'm sure that's what they mean but that's not what the original post portrays. It seems more like a "Some people misuse stuff and you can't be trusted not to misuse it so you can't have anything even close to it" - which kinda sounds like the corporate arguments for DRM more than anything else.
Going by things I've seen and bought myself, from just about every major manufacturer and every product type I've ever used, I'd guess that the designers *weren't* that smart. If anything, I bet it goes into a default mode but removes all control (i.e. you can no longer control the thermostat) if it goes wrong. I'm not saying that's certain, or that it's the way to design such a fridge, but it's several hundred layers of unnecessary bullshit in order to keep your food cool.
Hell, we don't even know if the thing actually keeps on working if that machine crashes - nowhere does it give anywhere near enough details to discern that, or exactly what it *does* control. What's the life on a touchscreen? What's the life of an ARM embedded thing running Linux? What's the life of whatever storage medium it uses to do all that fancy stuff (e.g. write cycles)? What's the replacement cost of that part if it fails? What's the cost price of the unit? What's the warranty on those parts?
Now, does it run for 15+ years like every refrigerator I've ever seen / bought / used? I've yet to throw away a non-working fridge, or to have to perform more than trivial maintenance on one. Throwing technology at something like this doesn't make it better. This is a classic example of good advertising - people like you will buy it when in fact a much cheaper, much more reliable fridge is available in any second-hand electrical shop for much less than the price of other gadgets that replace EVERY function it has and more. Please don't cry when you have to buy another one after two years.
"Well, it would be cool to have a list of contents with the date they were put in so you can keep track of things that need to be thrown out (useful for foodservice industry to keep only fresh foods on hand)."
So you want to sit and enter a date for every item you ever put into your fridge? As far as I know, no barcode contains data about expiry dates. If you did, you'd need one on every product. Then you (and your kids) would need to scan everything in and out in order for it to be anywhere near accurate. I'd predict about a month before you got bored and never used that facility ever again, or before you got tired of starting to cook and then realising your son ate your cheese without scanning it out.
"A timer app to beep when you need to pull the turkey out in case your stove doesn't have a timer (I know my gas stove doesn't)."
Buy a 50p kitchen timer.
"Of course the recipe app they mentioned is a good idea."
Wanna have to keep running to the fridge to read the next line of the recipe? Need to keep updating those recipes every week or so? Much simpler to print them out from the net, buy a recipe book and / or buy a cheap device that can display PDF. Not to mention having to buy the damn recipes in the first place.
"Temp contols aswell."
Really? Because fridges don't have those already?
"An app that checks the compressor status and other things (like those industrial air conditioners they use in server rooms to track humidity and such)"
So you can micromanage an environment that you will actually see no advantage to just setting it to a half-decent setting on any modern fridge? I have other things to spend my time on than micro-managing my fridge's environment. Hell, I don't even manage the server rooms in work to this level of detail. So long as it's not an oven in there, with alarms going off, I don't really care. Same for my fridge - no frost, not hot, that'll do. It's not like there's much you can *do* about it even if it is overly humid, etc.
""Hey don't hold the door open kid!" for my son when it detects the door has been sitting there open for 2 minutes."
Educate your son. Get a modern fridge that has a timer with beep-warning. Fit one of those 50p reed-switch sensors you can get to protect doors and windows and set it to a 10 second timer. None of it will stop your son doing that (in fact, for the first few months, he'll do it deliberately to make it talk to him!).
"A passworded door lock so your kids don't try to climb in playing "hide and seek" or try to take a beer out when you go outside for 2 minutes."
You need to supervise your kids better. If they're really that much trouble, a 50p child lock on the fridge will tend to take care of them (higher the better). Don't buy fridges that lock their doors (silly American idea? I don't know but ours are just magnetic catches and they work just fine - even my 2-year-old can open it). And if your kids are stealing your beer, that's not a problem that a gadget on a fridge should be solving.
"Any other cool ideas?"
Yeah, stop over-thinking a household appliance. Yes I *can* connect my toaster to the Internet. There's not a single practical reason why I would ever want to and all the good reasons are actually better done by other methods (and almost infinitely cheaper).
To quote XKCD: God, I'd like to file a bug report....
Then you're even sadder than most of the crowd here. You think that the guy that deals with stupid users and tech support all day long WANTS to come home and have to reboot his fridge? Or check the event logs to see why it didn't stay cold? Or have to fix it after the kids prod too hard / manage to crash the damn thing?
Not all techies want to live their live in a bad 1960's sci-fi movie. I'm quite happy to have a fridge be a fridge. Hell, my last model was the first that was auto-defrosting and that never works as advertised anyway. Sod having to come home to a flooded, smelly, damp kitchen because the damn fridge crashed because it was 2038.
It's called a thermostat. Or possibly, if you want to get REALLY advanced, a couple of them. As would be required for any computer-controlled system too.
Other than that, you've just complicated a mechanical problem to that of a fridge that occasionally requires rebooting, that the kids will crash and that won't perform any better than a non-techy fridge.
Nothing surprising about that, in any country in the world.
Don't do stupid things until you at least have stuff on paper. I was "promised" a huge raise / promotion by the head of the school I was working for. By his count, I would be god earning a living just from the interest on my wages. My immediate boss was about to retire and they wanted me to fill that position AND take over the IT of a few other schools they were merging with. When I asked for it written down, I got a bunch of excuses about hiring practices, HR regulations, local borough advertising requirements etc. but "the job was mine". I politely declined and he kept harassing me for the next few days about it until we had a sit-down meeting, just me and him.
I learned several things:
1) Bosses don't like being told that you don't trust them, but the look on their face when you're honest is priceless.
2) Having another job already lined up - at higher wages and better conditions/hours - is a very, very large bargaining chip, especially if you don't tell them about it until halfway through the meeting (and especially if they don't realise that you could SEE the changes coming months before everyone else and already have something lined up). Having it actually written on paper, with full contracts, is a BIG advantage.
3) The wonderful job / promotion you were offered initially pales in comparison to that which is offered after several rounds of the two employers directly fighting over you.
4) No amount of wonderful job offers actually materialise until you see something on paper - in the end, they could only afford a part-time student on half my hourly rate to replace me. Needless to say, their IT suffered quite a bit. God knows what they'll do when my old boss actually does retire.
5) Talking to me like a child and telling me that it's a wonderful opportunity for someone "my age" is made even more funny when they later go to my immediate boss and actually find out my true age and then all the condescending things they said in the meeting suddenly come flooding back to them. They thought I was 19, turns out I was 29. He either read my HR records wrong or just didn't bother to check at all. My immediate boss literally had to say the line "You *do* know how old he is, don't you? He's not a kid who'll fall for something like that."
6) The satisfaction of going to a new job the next week and occasionally returning to visit your old workplace would cater for any amount of monetary loss once you witness what they have done to the place and who they end up hiring. It's made even better when your new job is paying twice what they were offering you.
I will honestly never forget the look on his face: "Don't you think that's a great offer?" "No." "But why not, it's a wonderful opportunity for someone your age!" "Because I already have a superior offer and, to be honest, I just don't trust you can do what you're promising." Turns out, I was right.
Mmm.... http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ tells an even more unbelievable story, but that's because it measures total road usage in "passenger km's" which is a bit unwieldy. But there's plenty of source data there - especially under http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/travel-transport/index.html.
The document here: http://www.dft.gov.uk/adobepdf/162469/221412/217792/4212241/transportstatisticgreatbrit.pdf is very enlightening, for example, especially table 8.1. - 45 casualties per 100m km (62m miles). That's one reported casualty per 1.3 million travelled miles (if I did the maths right). Know I want to know why those statistics are a third of your stated figures, from one extreme to the other!
That means that a driver has an accident (of ANY kind) only once or twice in a driving lifetime, or thereabouts. I call rubbish on that, I think the statistics don't show what you think they show - given that the average "no-claims bonus" is about 3-4 years and there's only one man in the entire UK who hasn't had an single accident (actually insurance claim, which isn't the same thing at all) in over 50 years of driving (according to a news article I read a year or so ago). I think you've looked at *insurance* claims (which isn't the same thing at all) and probably even "fault" insurance claims (i.e. where someone messed up rather than it being unavoidable).
For instance, the UK has about 7 deaths on the road each day, with a population of only 60 million. To fit your statistics there would have to be an enormous driving population and/or an enormous amount of mileage for each. 250,000 are injured on the roads each year. That's 700 a day or thereabouts. I have no reason to believe the UK is significantly statistically different from the US in terms of driving accidents, on average.
I think your statistics are vastly skewed - mainly because most people actually couldn't tell you how far they drove in a year anyway. I also think if you looked at *motorway* deaths it would vastly increase the statistics - almost no-one dies on little side-streets in comparison.
However, I agree that the statistics for cars are probably less scary when expressed as accidents per million miles, but the same would happen for aircraft, trains, ships and anything else and I bet cars are STILL more dangerous in those terms. Large passenger aircraft might kill hundreds or thousands but when they do it makes the news and they mostly do daily trips of 1000's of miles all the time. Hell, I can easily drive 50,000 miles a year if I had a driving job, and that would only see me in an accident every ten years. I have a "near miss" about once or twice a year where only sheer luck and/or psychic ability has prevented an accident.
An autonomous car would be incredibly boring. Hell, driving down long motorways is already incredibly boring and it's nowhere NEAR the most efficient way to do that.
And e-drivers can outpace us already in every statistic. They're still shit for driving in general, though, because like voice recognition, image recognition and everything else where you try to get a computer to do a job in a machine designed for human senses, it'll hit a limit that makes it entirely unable to actually *APPLY* any of those abilities to the job in hand. No point having a Formula 1 driver's reaction times (or better) if you still don't recognise that the blob on the camera is an old granny crossing the road until it's too late.
Think that's a "solved" problem? Just the other month two "uncrashable" cars designed with every sensor you can possibly imagine (including "cheating" by having ultrasonic distance sensors as well as video cameras etc.) by one of the largest car manufacturer's in the world crashed, head-on, several times, in a demo to press about how they would avoid all crashes. They couldn't handle their own test-case reliably enough not to make the manufacturer look like an idiot, let alone a real road - and that test case was basically driving them at each other on an test track knowing they were both going to meet somewhere in the middle. They didn't even *TRY* to apply the brakes because the sensor data was not interpreted as the other (identical) car being a threat to them despite heading towards them, front-on at high-speed with identical systems enabled (so no "sun in your eyes" excuses).
Autonomous cars for the next few generations will REQUIRE their own, individual, separate roads. If not technically, then legally. That's an INCREDIBLE expense and requires all sorts of work and income to just get off the ground. And it will take several generations of those roads being low-risk in terms of accidents before you can merge human and autonomous drivers, or have every road autonomous.
Give the idea up. Maybe your grandchildren will see one operating on a separate road and not raise eyebrows at it. Maybe their grandchildren will be chauffeured everywhere. But the problem is not the technology, response times, engines, or anything else. It's how to TELL the computer, using a programming language, to do things in such a way that it's ALWAYS (or even MOSTLY) safe for it to drive on roads that present unknown obstacles (and that includes entirely autonomous roads where a deer strays into their path, or where debris from a natural disaster like a tree collapsing covers their lane). We're not even 1% of the way to solving that problem yet.
When you can literally put an autonomous car in London, give it a destination and TELL people that if they are run over by the car they get a million pounds, and it can do so without anyone being able to claim that "prize" (and not through being dead), then you can start thinking about driving alongside them. Think of the equivalent in whatever your area of expertise is (e.g. a machine that can keep a patient alive and always respond to their heartbeat / breathing rate / blood content / other symptoms properly) and you'll see why it won't happen for a long time.
Yeah, NASCAR isn't really racing now is it? It's a practice track. I get bored by Formula 1 cars because they all finish within tenths of a second of each other but at least there's something interesting to navigate round. NASCAR is like watching a giant dragster race - interesting for the first few seconds and then it's just more of the same forever.
Tip to Americans: The classification of a "sport" does not entail the spectators wishing everyone would just start fighting to actually provide some entertainment... ice hockey, NASCAR fall under this rule.
Seriously, do NASCAR drivers have one arm's muscles grow longer than the other? Can they even steer right?
It's not a sport, it's a practice track, the sort of thing FIAT had on the roof of its factory to make sure cars ran okay. Short of making a major motion picture (The Italian Job, and no, not that recent heap of shit) which features the track, it's not interesting.
I work for a school - it has 50+ employees, several computer rooms, a laptop / PC in every room and a requirement to be working all day long without fail. I've worked for dozens of schools, from 20 to a 100 employees, starting out from uni with zero experience in working in school IT or even Windows networking. It's not difficult. Even primary schools here demand two-three times more storage, clients and management than your stated project would require.
Before I was hired to run it all, the schools went to Dell, RM or similar and bought the cheapest office servers and got on with it. Usually it was whoever was most IT-literate that decided whether to buy salesman's offer A, B or C. It really is that simple. The kids store hundreds of Gigs of data but there are thousands of Gigs of space on even a basic system. The system is way over-specced for its task but that's because it has to take account of a lot of problems (for office work, moving to another machine is hardly a chore... for a room full of kids that now can't work on an individual computer, it means the lesson is over for them all, weeks of planning are out of the window, the inspector's / parents might well cause trouble, confidence in the system is shaken and the IT guy has a lot of explaining to do). The IT systems in a school RUN the damn school - from door entry, to telephony, to pupil databases, to medical information (necessary to administer vital injections), to class registers (necessary for fire evacuations), to the canteen, to all the invoicing, to paying salaries, to submitting to government-mandated requests, etc. If school IT goes down, the school is basically out of action. Most of them run it on a hidden office server that wouldn't look out of place in a solicitor's office with 3 people and it sits idle 99.9% of the time. There's nothing to scale at this point.
You're not talking Google here. You're talking a server, a set of clients and maybe some storage. The sort of thing that any idiot can set up with an order from a network server manufacturer in under a day even if they opt to install the damn OS on every machine themselves. Hell, the first time I did it, I'd had zero experience with networks outside of a 10BaseT ISA network card and setting IP's - I phoned up Viglen, gave them a minimum spec for machines, agreed the price and got about £100 off by offering to install Server 2003 myself. I set up an AD for a school from bare metal that was more secure, and more usable, than anything they had in their previous network from a big educational-IT supplier with support contract. It took eight hours to do the setup (more was spent on unboxing, waiting for installs, cloning disks from images, etc.) and convert 50+ client machines. It was built alongside their network until I was confident enough to flick the switch on their old server (which they had zero access to) and enable mine. It still runs the whole school - everything. The lessons can't even begin without it because they only have interactive whiteboards, projectors and laptops that are on the domain (so they don't even have a board to draw on if the domain is not operational). I'm still impressed at how well it operates despite being my "first" network for someone else. That was about 8 years ago now, and they normally replace everything after 4 years.
What you're asking isn't difficult. If you *can't* do it, then you shouldn't even be trying, especially if it's for a business. If you were hired to do that, but don't know how, you shouldn't have been. If you've just been nominated at random, then you're better off calling in a supplier to do a one-off build. £11,000 gets you a 16-client, 2-server setup last time I looked, with delivery, full installation, software licensing, hardware support, etc. for a multi-user office setup. They sell them as "insta-network" kits for schools that are new-build, re-build or just want to add another IT suite. I even think that's expensive, but that's only a fraction of the wages of someone for a
Half-life 2 was a rehash of Half-life was a rehash of Quake was a rehash of Doom was a rehash of Wolfenstein 3D, was a rehash of Catacomb 3D.
Just because it was a rehash doesn't mean it was shit.
However, there's far too much "easy money" made by just copying someone else, I agree. But even on a VERY tired genre, a little thought and innovation make all the difference. This is, after all, what made some of the classic games classic - not because they were the "only" space invaders / FPS / platform game, but because they were an *innovative* one.
Ick. It'd be a 3D FPS nightmare and boring as hell.
Syndicate was made great by its simple gameplay that nevertheless let you do a lot and its atmosphere. Sticking it into an FPS would ruin the point of it but that's all a modern studio would want to do. You would literally need some kind of multi-screen control of agents from a similar external perspective, the Blade-Runner-esque environment is nothing with modern graphics but even the things like the music set the mood. You'd literally want to *be* the guy behind the laser-screen controlling the agents like before but in a souped-up interface. I'd have given my right arm for another "view window" on the world so I could watch two parts of the map at once even in the original DOS game.
The problem with moving any established game like that forward is the maintenance of gameplay. Even Syndicate Wars turned an awful lot of people (like me) off because of the gameplay mechanics changes (the graphics were actually pretty spectacular for the time). To be honest, I'd be over the moon with an open-source remake that actually worked. I don't need the flashy graphics, the gameplay was spot-on and quick-fire fun where strategy and tactics actually pay off. Today, it'd just get FPS'd and I'd rather die than play that.
Give us a working FreeSynd. Then we can build from there.
Wow. I think I just touched on the *weirdest* nerve in existence.
Nobody was talking about the art of the sculpture. And in that respect, why on Earth would anyone really care if the code was "real" so long as it was representative? Also, the sculpture *did* have errors in its transcription - quite serious ones that the sculptor had to admit to - so it was probably never even double-checked as being a valid cipher (and therefore could easily be unsolvable due to a silly, simple transcription mistake). And just because 3/4 are intelligible (substitution and transposition ciphers don't really count as "encryption" anyway because their solutions are essentially mathematically trivial and subject to exactly the interpretation of the message described in my post rather than something more concrete) doesn't mean that the fourth isn't complete and utter gibberish. If it were a message intercepted from a sworn enemy not only would you put effort into seeing if that were true, you'd also assume that it could be complete bollocks too - and *THAT* sort of thinking is probably why we *didn't* piss away thousands of man-hours on "encryption" dead-ends, red-herrings etc. in the past. The German's sent fake messages in WWII too, you know.
Don't give me shit and get snotty because you think art surpasses maths... nobody really cares about such things and they're certainly not relevant to, of all things, a slashdot comment concerned the mathematical decryption capabilities of the FBI. We're talking about a cryptographic puzzle on a statue - a puzzle that relies on artistic and fundamentally human interpretation to make any sense, not mathematics - Nobody said there was anything wrong with that or to get snotty but to a *mathematician* the puzzle is uninteresting - that doesn't mean the artwork is. Thanks for dividing everyone into either life-long "logical" or "artistic" mindsets within a single comment. So, to answer the post I was commenting on, this means it is nothing more than a slight distraction and, with authorised supercomputer time, wouldn't be a challenge (because it's purely substitution / transposition ciphers so far). It's a toy, something to occupy a mind not encode a country's military secrets, and we were discussing why "nobody" has yet "cracked" it.
Because if you wanted the artwork to be appreciated, it would probably be better off *not* being decrypted at all. Having such a puzzle solved effectively limits the lifespan of the artwork. But if you *really* wanted the artwork to be appreciated, you couldn't possibly get quite so snotty at someone discussing the biggest and most important element of its basis - that the "encryption" on it is more puzzle-like than some proven mathematics on a bit of paper.
Nope. The greatest fool can ask a question that the wisest man cannot answer.
It's incredible easy to make a cipher so convulated and impractical (e.g. encode by the phase of the moon determined by the fourteenth character, then transpose all vowels, add up the number of strokes within each letter using the Arial font, multiply those numbers by the number 10 places ahead of it, then look those up on a ceasar cipher) that it's boring and uninteresting to decipher it and pretty much "impossible". Unfortunately, it also becomes incredibly useless as a cipher then because it becomes tedious to communicate using it, and the security of a cipher has nothing to do with its difficulty of encryption or decryption procedure - you'll probably find that a couple of supercomputers could find enough patterns in the above "cipher" that they could find the right answers without having to even KNOW the phase of the moon.
The thing about mathematical ciphers is that the method is public and yet they are still incredibly difficult to decrypt. This isn't an interesting cipher, mathematically speaking, because the method is closed so it could be anything. All we have is some jumbled text and (presumably) a sensible answer that we're not privy to. It's more a children's puzzle than a cipher, just a very difficult one - because nobody actually uses this cipher to communicate (so the cipher can be unnecessarily complicated without actually being *secure*, the plaintext could well be complete junk, the message may even be erroneously encoded, and there's only a single - non-militarily-important - instance of an encoded text).
In short - nobody cares. It's like the book-competitions where someone buries treasure and publishes a book which "gives the details" of where it's buried. It's pretty much chance if you find it or not because there is no requirement for the answer to be logical, practical or even decryptable. The one I saw, you had to draw a line from the eye of a character on each artwork-strewn page, through their index finger, to a particular letter in a word on the outside of the page border, then interpret those clues which narrowed things down to an entire field somewhere in the UK - the "winner" was the author's former-flatmate's girlfriend.
The importance of a ciphered message is more related to its origin, the probability of it being an unintentional leak, the probability of it being militarily important, and other non-mathematical factors. Then, if you have the impetus, running it through a supercomputer with what little you know or (infinitely better) getting a couple more messages that use the same scheme and are likely to reveal commonalities. That's how we beat Engima. This is just a puzzle-book, and quite boring because it can actually just be gibberish and nobody would really care.
Nintendo has been in business for a lot longer than almost any company you can name (1889!) and have seen off some enormous rivals several times (Sega, Atari, etc.).
Nintendo make profit on almost everything they release.
Nintendo make big releases every now and again, stringing them on with life support in the form of games that turn out to become famous in their own right.
When Nintendo do plop down a new console it's invariably innovative and top-of-its-game (not necessarily the best hardware, but definitely better in gaming terms).
Nintendo is an inventor. They toil away in their little sheds for years in complete secrecy until one day they walk out, plop something into a business person's hands and blow everyone away. Then while the market are still reeling from that, they just wander quietly back into their shed and aren't seen for another few years when they rinse and repeat.
Precisely BECAUSE they aren't saying "Oh, no, our competitors have something new, we have to copy it in our own way and get back into the game" is why they are able to do what they do. They don't really care about Kinect, or anything else - they have money enough to last a decade, and that gives them a decade to make something even more spectacular without having to worry about the day-to-day running of the businesses. Wiis are still being sold but they have enough to go back into their shed and devote the next few years to R&D and playtesting which the other rivals *cannot*. They will have their own ideas, which might work (Wii) or might flop (VirtualBoy) but will be away from the conventional elements of the time that are competing in the market. And when they deliver their next invention, people will give them millions and, because of using their brains and not just throwing expensive hardware at a problem, they will invariably make profit on every unit sold.
It's also true that they decide what they want in the next, say, Mario game. They decide what they want to be able to do. Then they build a console around that, not the other way around.
You can try to make Nintendo look foolish and show how "you know better" if you want, but invariably you will end up with egg on your face. Nintendo know their market better than anyone - they almost single-handedly invented it. Leave them be. The "Wii 2" (which it will almost certainly NEVER be named) will be to the Wii what the Wii was to the Gamecube, or the Gamecube to the N64, or the N64 to the SNES, or the SNES to the NES, or the equivalent trail in the handheld markets. It will take years to arrive - you'll have just about forgotten about your Wii and Nintendo will be absent from the market for a year or so - and then it'll blow your socks off. After a few months people will complain that it doesn't do X or Y or that it's "outdated" or "underpowered" while Nintendo will have another decade's research money under their belt and be working on the next one.
Nintendo know what they are doing. Sod Wii 2. I want whatever the next stage is - which will be more advanced gameplay-wise than anything on the market in the next few years.
In my Spectrum days, a lot of games weren't completable anyway. Of those that were, I completed exactly one - Nonterraqueous - after myself, my brother and my dad dedicated several nights to mapping the damn thing on the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life. Typically, the next week someone published one in the computer games magazines. But that was it. I never completed Back to Skool which is three screens wide. I never completed any of the other 200+ games.
On consoles, the same thing happened. We completed Mario All-Stars on SNES by just sitting down and working through it hundreds of times as a family. I don't remember completing any other game on SNES.
In the arcades, the same thing happened. I only completed one game - Final Fight - by finding an old dusty machine in an old arcade with my elder brother while my parents were trying to get rid of us - we put about £5 in 10p coins into that machine but eventually we "won". We nearly won at Bad Dudes vs Dragonninja that night too.
On Gameboy, I completed the 2nd Mario game on my own but it wasn't exactly difficult. I also "completed" Tetris on any skill level you care to select. I may have completed TMNT too but it was a very simple game to complete.
On PC, a similar thing happened - most games that "could" be completed I just never bothered to. There are even some in that category that I love playing but have *never* managed to complete. I love Heroes of Might and Magic but have never bothered to "complete" it, I just like playing it. I love Age of Empires II but I've never bothered to complete the campaign, I just like playing it. I love Master of Magic but I've never completed it. I love Syndicate but I've never completed it (stupidly difficult last level doesn't help). I love Driver but I've never completed it (same thing). I have put hundreds of hours into games before now and never completed them. Some of them I don't even know *how* even if they are completable. However, I have completed Half-life 2 and all the episodes. I have completed some games to the point of "every achievement". I have completed some games with the help of tutorials and/or got to the point where, as far as I'm concerned, the game is complete. I have 200 games on my Steam list and completed about 3 or 4 at most.
And what classes as "complete"? Got to the end stage? On what difficulty? Just getting there or getting 100% completion? Does having co-op friends count? Do you have to do it all in one session? Are you allowed continues?
The reasons that people don't "complete" games any more are many, and still the same as always - They never really *did* complete lots of games. They don't need to in order to play for thousands of hours. Sometimes it's not possible to complete the game at all. Sometimes it's stupidly difficult even if they enjoy the game. They don't put the time into any one particular game. They don't like the game enough. The game has more content than can hold their interest. They have a life outside computer games.
To be honest, I've completed many more games in recent years than I ever did before (i.e. when I had lots of free time during the day), but I've also left many games on the very first level or demo thinking "this isn't worth my time". With modern games what puts me off is not being able to just play the damn game. I don't want cutscenes or intros or being forced to watch storyline, I just want to play because that's what I bought a game to do - allow me to play. And it's hard to "complete" a modern game because many of them are multiplayer and / or achievement based and it just means that completing consists of grinding away on silly achievements that you're unlikely to ever hit during the course of the game naturally (think Half-life 2's Gnome achievements).
I don't buy a game to complete it. In fact, I often wish that I never complete any game that I buy because then it gives me more to go back for. I buy a game to play it and have fun. Once I c
It's just properly preparing a computer for interactive desktop use, something which few distros seem to bother to do. As both the patch and the shell script demonstrate, the functionality has been there for ages and even before it was, you could fake something similar. Hell, even Windows just used to give a priority boost to the window that was in the foreground but I remember at the time that being ruled out because it might interfere with server operations on Linux and so the user was left to do that themselves if they wanted.
All either approach does is put each process in its own group so that the resources allocated to one process don't take up a disproportionate amount of the overall resources. It's nothing that we haven't been doing since the early days of multitasking operating systems, it's just that someone worked out that on a modern machine, grouping processes actually works better for an interactive desktop experience than not.
Most Linux computers *aren't* on desktop workloads, so it's useless there because you will get processes starved of attention where you want them to run at full-speed. But the ones that *are* on the desktop should *always* have had scheduler and priority tricks like this because it's been obvious for decades that it makes sense. Nobody bothered because, to be honest, on all the Linux desktops I've ever deployed, running a computer that's that heavily loaded hasn't been advantageous whether or not you could smoothly play back a movie. Most desktops for inexperienced people actually have a single app with the main focus all the time. Even advanced users can struggle with more than a handful of programs running simultaneously. And anyone who's running an amount of processes such that the computer slows to unusable levels in most of them obviously doesn't care about getting the work done on time if they just zap the processes into groups and balance priorities. Yes, your desktop might keep playing HD videos but your kernel compiles are going to take FOREVER while they do that - no different to any other OS. And, let's be honest, how many desktop users actually load their systems heavily enough that they can't watch an HD movie on the kind of hardware that the patch was benchmarked on?
It's an interesting observation of a modern implementation of a very old solution to an almost-non-existent problem. That's why someone is able to look at the patch and do it better in a handful of shell script - it's not rocket science, it's just that nobody bothers to do it for desktop systems. And if you do, then mainly it means that your desktop system is trying to do too much and/or isn't really that vital for you (i.e. if you can't be bothered to move off your kernel compiles to a remote machine, chances are you don't care if they finish in 2 minutes or an hour and thus is your probably *do* want to prioritise your HD movie playing or whatever).
Personally, I never have to play with nice levels or process groups because on my servers I want things to run at full speed and the CPU's are rarely that loaded that having another machine or having strict fairness imposed would help matters, and on my desktops everything works "good enough" and I don't really *want* to try a 64-process kernel compile while watching a HD movie, even if it stands 0.1% chance of making the movie a little jerky. I'll move it off to another machine, do it overnight, wait until the movie is finished etc. because it will then complete in a matter of minutes rather than having to fight for CPU with my HD movie. If I'm compiling a kernel and can't afford a handful of minutes to wait for it to compile, why would I be able to wait, say, an hour and watch an HD movie in the meantime?
I've just used the example loads posted on the patch benchmarks but the same thing holds - if you're at 100% CPU then you have to make trade-offs and this patch / script makes better trade-offs for interactivity at the expense of overall speed. But if you're at 100% CPU then something's probably wrong in the f
Er... you're missing the point. It's not the lag between you and your PC - that's ALWAYS present on whatever system. It's the lag between your PC wanting to processing the input and sending the relevant graphical output. On a conventional PC this is less than the time required for one frame (or else you wouldn't get the framerate that you do). On this system, it's a remote PC over a latent link, that's a lot more. You're still using monitors, USB peripherals and everything else and, yes, you may have slightest reduced *multiplayer* latency because you're effectively logging in remotely to a PC playing a LAN game, but the latency from control input being recieved to graphics card sending a signal to the monitor reflecting the output is VASTLY increased, by orders of magnitude in some cases.
The sub-50ms ping you get from a counterstrike server is only how long it takes the PC to talk to the other computer and get a reply (for a tiny packet). The latency problem here is inserted between the computer successfully receiving your input and then producing a graphic to represent that, where normally that is only limited by the bus and CPU speed of your computer, and where now you have to include a transport across an international network, another computer to perform those same calculations / bus transfers, and then another network transport.
You're basically VNC'ing into a bunch of computers playing a LAN game. Try it. Just because the remote computer gets "20ms ping" to the main server doesn't mean it's more responsive than just playing the game locally.
Dunno about 7 but XP is probably worse. An awful lot of Windows apps have a minimum window size and refuse to allow themselves to be shrunk. So you're into third party apps (strangley usually supplied with the touchpad drivers) to zoom apps (and thus have them unreadable), or perform ALT+click on the window makes it moves no matter where you click, which lets you move windows around even if they are mostly off-screen but steals a hotkey.
In my opinion, Ubuntu etc. have always done a better job at this. At least you can use most Linux apps on a netbook - that's not true of XP. As I say, I don't know about 7. It's not really an OS problem as much as it is purely a netbook problem though. I run school networks where we have 50 kids using OpenOffice on netbook-sized screens at times, we don't have a problem on Ubuntu and I don't need to tell them anything special, they just get on with it (and we're talking 7-10 years old).
The way I read the graphs is: XP and Ubuntu win on almost everything (Ubuntu loses once on Flash on iPlayer but that's hardly surprising), maybe only by a small margin by they do, and Windows 7 takes twice as long to boot as they do. The article doesn't recommend bothering to upgrade to Windows 7 if you already have XP on it, and suggests that Ubuntu would be just as good.
Now, let's look at *value*: Assuming you can get them all for the same price, they all provide roughly equal value (it could be argued that 7 is worse value but only by a small way). However, if you have to pay *any* extra for XP or 7, then you're just as well off with Ubuntu. So, it's all back to the old question: who wants to sell me a netbook with an operating system that's just as good as the others but which is FREE for life? In the early days, that's how netbooks became so cheap and so popular - I know, I worked with the original EEEPC's because a school could afford them but MS wanted about £50 a license to "upgrade" them to XP. Now it seems either Microsoft are giving people Windows for free, or Microsoft are stopping manufacturers from supplying netbooks with only Linux on them. I vote for the latter given previous history.
All this article confirms is that, basically, all the OS's are roughly the same now. A bar chart here or there but on average there is no winner. Thus, the free ones should represent infinitely better value. Strange how the manufacturers don't reflect that in their pricing / OS availability any more.