5. Stormtroopers being professional soldiers would take careful aim, set up snipers, etc thus all gun fights end with the good guys dying and quickly.
Not to be too straight-laced, but they could have had the storm troopers do things like that, get set up properly, make advancements, etc, and still have the main characters escape by the skin of their teeth. It would have built up excitement in a way that watching storm trooper after incompetent storm trooper being gunned down just doesn't. At least some percentage of the movie should have been devoted to the storm troopers winning, to build up tension.
A New Hope: Storm troopers rule: killed jawas (off camera)
Storm troopers suck: Took equal losses with the defences of a councelor's ship on a peaceful mission. Can't stop a group of rogues from escaping while they're already in prison. They're scared of Han.
Empire Strikes Back: Storm troopers rule: Took over cloud city (off camera)
Storm troopers suck: Giant battletanks full of the empires strongest weaponry taken down by string. Still can't stop a group of rogues from escaping while they're already in prison. Got shown up by a dwarf with a pot on his head.
Return of the Jedi Storm Troopers Rule: Actually stopped a group of rogues from doing something, and on camera no less!
Storm Troopers Suck: Death of everything they represent. Lost to a bunch of muppets.
Such a silly article. The Game Boy line is doomed. Here it ends. There will never be another Game Boy. Ignore the fact that the DS is currently in 1st place for handheld console sales, thanks to the quirky, original titles that made the game boy popular. Or that the DS plays GBA / GB games and is, by all account, the successor to the Game Boy line. Or that the DS really stands for "A Bloody Game Boy with Dual Screens"
It doesn't exist yet (drives and media aren't available yet). Additionally, games don't need friggin 50gb of space, and access times on first gen games will be deadly slow. Finally, hardware costs and media are drastically more expensive.
I don't think I've ever worked on a game that didn't max out the available space. Admittedly, I haven't worked on a lot of games. But sometimes you would like to pack-in pregen video and don't have the space, or would like to fork all of your audio tracks and apply a pre-generated filter over each one, or would like to stream pregen movies as backgrounds in your metagame, etc. Maybe you'd like to precomp 96 lightmaps on all of your terrain for time-of-day effects and load the appropriate one. Maybe you're faced with an intractable show-stopper on an in-game cutscene with days to go, and you have to decide between pre-generating it or cutting the level. More space always comes in handy.
I've heard a few rumors that say backwards compatibility won't be there
It will be. I heard a rumor that the PS3's explodes the 3rd time you turned it on. Basing buying decisions on rumor and inuendo is dumb.
Microsoft has said that it will be "selectively compatible," which is to say, it will play Halo and maybe the game you are trying to play. Anyone in the emulation scene can tell you that almost emulated is a nice way of saying not done. Of course, they will have time to finish the emulation later, but that doesn't help early adopters out.
So is $300 worth the price of admission? Considering that the PS3 is expected to launch for $400 or more and include more next-gen bells and whistles
I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers. Nobody knows how much any of this will cost. The PS3 has some bells and whistles, but it's also slated to ship a year later, which should proportionally reduce cost. Sony is also making a lot of the hardware themselves, which saves them a bit more... that lets them ignore sunk development cost at the beginning. But both companies have some of the deepest pockets in any industry.
The only technical "feature" the PS3 has over the xbox is the blu-ray drive. And personally, I'm not convinced it is an advantage yet (it'll be worthless if HD-DVD catches on and Blu-ray doesn't).
I'm not sure I see why feature is in quotations. If HD-DVD catches on and Blu-Ray doesn't (which I expect will happen), The PS3 will still have 10X the storage capacity of the Xbox. That's a pretty huge advantage. I think you'll quickly see games being ported from the PS3 chafing at the smaller size.
The xbox has a built in hard drive, which the PS3 lacks. Additionally, if you're into online gaming, Sony STILL hasn't announced their gameplan in that area; Live is probably one of the few things Microsoft got REALLY right with the first gen Xbox. Finally, the "media center" components are supposed to be able to stream music off of your computer (so you can create custom soundtracks while playing your game).
Live is great. Live is wonderful. I really don't want to deal with Microsoft's bloody detailed and occasionally contradictory requirements around Live, nor implementing the buggar in a way that's consistent with the look and feel of a different game. But Microsoft is requiring all X360 games to play nice with Live features, which will be a pain in the tail for all developers everywhere. It's frustrating... as a gamer, it makes me want to buy a 360, but as a developer it makes me want to strangle them. The "media center" stuff appears to be a red herring, if for no other reason than you will need to be sharing your folders over a wireless network, and you should under no circumstances ever share your folders over a wireless network. And, of course, the HDD is a great touch, as always, that I wish Sony shipped with standard.
I must say, as a developer the one feature that I would want in a piece of ha
You can get instant-on systems based around linux... though "instant" actually means a few seconds in tedious reality, they can boot as fast as you can get through the bios check. It's linux bios, and if you're willing to get compatible hardware, it can be quite cool.
If you read the book, the author's primary point is that a bike is fast enough to outrun zombies while still being quiet so as not to attract attention. A truck or other motor vehicle will attract the zombie hordes from miles around, which can swarm over the vehicle in sufficient numbers to stop it.
If you've ever attempted to drive through an Arbor day parade, you'll know what I'm talking about.
The imperfections can help make a ride great. The Revolution at Great America in San Jose, a spinning boat ride that goes over the top, sometimes goes over forwards, and sometimes goes over backwards. You really don't know when it will, or why. Compare that to Superman, the Escape at Magic Mountain, which does exactly the same thing every time, and Superman just seems less interesting.
I must admit, my favorite rides skew to the less predictable. At the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk, there is (was) a ferris wheel which consisted of little egg-shaped cages. The rider was given a bar they could pull on to lock the cages in relationship to the wheel, so that they would very slowly spin over the top. No seat belt, mind you, or safety bar or anything, just a little egg-shaped cage with a small bench and a rider flipping around inside, holding their head off the metal with a well-placed, frequently panicked arm. Drop Zone at Great America has a random timer, to ensure that nobody will know when it is about to fall. It's surprisingly good at catching you when you're not expecting it, no matter how many times you ride it. Even The Pirates of the Carribean at Disneyland has people concurrently going through lengthy looped scenes, so that certain boats see the beginning of the loop, others see the middle, and others the end. The rides at California Adventure seemed too controlled and soulless to be a lot of fun, even if they did do so with a bit of showmanship. The best ride there is the white water raft, because it combines the freeform risk of most raft rides with a lot of little technical controlling tricks (like artificially spinning you up).
Personally, I would want to go on the ride when it fell back. That sounds like a lot more fun than just going forwards for 20 seconds. That sounds really, really thrilling. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was left in on purpose, and I'm sure it helps the ride's reputation.
On the one hand, I understand that software is a big, nasty mess, and bugs frequently aren't the fault of any one person but rather by the interaction of multiple elements.
On the other hand, cry me a river. I work in an industry where a single crash would define a game as unshippable. Some of the games I've worked on had tens of millions of lines of code, and all were debugged thoroughly. A lot of this was through amazing efforts by some very bright people, but primarily this was because crashing of any sort will fail your submission. This will cost you two weeks of development, and maybe 20% of your grosses if you are in a tight time frame. Period. Unless a bug is really obscure it won't ship. Period. Bugs are just not tolerated.
Compare that to Microsoft's libraries that ship with bugs that their own compiler complains about.
Look, if you want to give up and write bad code that crashes and needs user intervention for stupid things, go right ahead. People are actually working on planes that can't be hijacked, and multiple-hull tankers that don't sink. QNX, while very specific, is quite bulletproof. NASA is at least trying to make shuttles that don't crash, though they don't seem to have quality control over their contractors. These people I'll respect for trying.
If you want to tell me that the state of the software industry is exactly where you want it to be, that's your choice. If you want to say that development of a 500 dollar office application used the world over should be held to much lower standards than a 50 dollar toy game, that's your choice. If you feel that frequent crashes, dead systems due to faulty drivers, USB conflicts, TCP-IP stack overloads, and dialogs that make no sense are where we should be, that's your choice. If you liken users on a system you've designed to people eating poison mushrooms in the forest, that's your choice. And that's downright pathetic.
We can do much better. Giving up doesn't help anybody.
I feel compelled to point out that the solution to the opaque "magic box" is not to make it more transparent, but to make sure it doesn't break down. Most users could care less about exactly how the system is doing what they want it do to, they just want it to do it. This is in exactly the same way that most programmers don't give a shit about exactly what registers the system is using on which of the designated processing units, just so long as it executes your code flawlessly.
And processors basically do operate flawlessly, because we demand that from them. But Operating Systems and other pieces of software do not. Values are not checked for ranges, inputs are not checked for validity, dependencies are not maintained, unnecessary components are kept around, etc.
I like to think of my palm pilot as the perfect black box operating system. I don't have any idea what it's doing under the hood, but it always does what it's supposed to do, and I don't have to worry about it. If I want to delve into 68k hacking to get the thing to do special stuff I can... but the choice is mine, not the operating system's.
Personally I use yaps on a Palm Pilot, though I could see using another PDA-based one. The cool trick about YAPS is that you can drag your pen across their keyboard for multiple inputs, effectively allowing you to draw very, very long passwords quickly.
I would use either a PDA-based or a phone based system... something you carry with you at all times, no computer required. Mine has everything from password / logins to credit card information and bank numbers. You're not always near a computer when you need to know your checking account number.
For computer privacy, try dekart private disk. It's a pretty solid encrypter / decrypter that creates virtual drives under XP. Anything you put on a drive is protected, from passwords to applications. And it runs from removable disks. It does tie you to windows, though.
This is not a problem with London. This is a risk of living in the western world, be it New York, Paris, London, or Omaha Nebraska. Compounded over time, the statistic becomes very clear. While dying from terrorism is terrible, it's just about the least of your worries.
Even just considering the UK, 2003 saw 530,000 deaths, or one death every minute of every day. Heart disease killed 200,000 of those people. 5,000 people died from infections and parasites. 3,000 people died in transport accidents. Falling killed 2,000. 100 people froze to death. 8 people died from syphilis.
Again those statistics are just the UK, and just for one year. But it's pretty clear that the biggest killer in the UK is still not Al Quaeda, but Mc Donalds, by a pretty wide margin.
Again, I don't mean to reduce the tragedy felt by the people in London. But death is a tragedy to people no matter how it occured.
It would be great if we could turn around and attack 'the terrorists.' But who are the terrorists? In 9/11, most of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian, a government that is supposedly a friend of western nations. In France, the attackers were French. We could attempt to invade Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Cyprus, and Lebanon, but we'd still be left with North Korea, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Russia, China, and Montana. And that wouldn't get to the root of the problem, which is that people hate the actions of our governments so much that they are willing to die to make a point. It wouldn't crush the malcontentment.
This is not WW2. Impoverishing them until they have nothing left to lose will not solve the problem. It didn't work in Israel, and it won't work for the west.
Get some perspective. You're still thousands of times more likely to die from normal homocide than you are from terrorism. You're thousands of times more likely to take your own life. Sure, we should and can do things to help prevent terrorism... stop supplying Israel with military aid, for example, and replace the silly symbolic airport screenings with something that has a chance of catching people. But ultimately there isn't a whole lot one can do to stop someone who is willing to die, once they've been driven to that point. Spend more time and money putting the west in a positive light around the world, and accept that sometimes bad things will happen.
I feel terrible for the people in London. I fear that the tragedy of this event will be followed by the tragedy of throwing away what is good about their society.
The analogy is false, though, because you're broadcasting your property... All of your analogies imply clear boundary conditions, such as property edges, doors, using someone else's computer, etc. But if you put up an unsecured wireless network which you setup of sufficient strength to permeate your neighbor's property, the boundaries are very different.
If you have a wireless stereo system, which broadcasts to your speakers, and your neighbor picks it up, it's not "stealing" your music if they listen. If you want to share photos with your family and you put up an unsecured internet site, it's not stealing if non-family members visit and download your photos.
The fact of the matter is you've setup a broadcasting network through a section of your neighborhood. Congratulations, you're now a broadcaster. All operating systems will automatically connect with your network (...maybe not BSD). If you had a problem with this, you can very simply turn on WEP.
Which is how the internet works. Everything is assumed public until you put on the slightest bit of security. That's the convention. If you visit a website and they don't authenticate, it's assumed public. If someone sends you a link to a streaming movie and it doesn't ask for a password, it's assumed public. By practical definitions, it is public. We're not talking about bolting on an iron-clad Novell authentication system, we're talking about changing one preference in your network configuration settings.
You bought a piece of land next to a public field, and you didn't put up a fence or any demarkations. People will wander into and out of the field as if it were part of the commons. There is no practical way to ask whose field / network it is, nor any reason to see to ask. By not marking it as private, you have used the conventional method of marking it as public.
Would someone make their network public? Lots of people do it intentionally. In my apartment, I generally see no fewer than 10 or so wireless networks. Of those, half or so are unsecured. There's usually one or two that has the default router name (Linksys, etc). But most have changed their name to something else, which means that the people involved knew enough to go through the setup process and decided to leave their network open to everyone. Why? Mostly it's a desire to share and be neighborly. Oddly enough, the ISP up the street does the same thing. Lots of the businesses have open wireless access in an attempt to get people to come in with their laptops and drink coffee while doing work.
Of course, there are tradeoffs involved all around. Your wireless network is fucking up my other wireless equipment and using the available spectrum in my house. My wireless phones and other devices are using the same unlicensed spectrum, but are now competing with your bloody web surfing to be heard. I accept that you're going to have a wireless network, because those things are useful. And if you decide not to secure it and make it public, it's on me (and all of the other users) to be good citizens and not saturate your upstream by sharing on P2P apps all the time, or queueing up weeks worth of downloads. If you do decide to secure your network, it's neighborly of us to respect those boundaries and not packet hack it, despite WEP's inherent vulnerabilities. It's also neighborly to broadcast your SSID and channel, because in high density areas the difficulties involved in keeping people's networks from stepping on eachother is far greater than the minimal security provided by not broadcasting your SSID.
You marked your network as public, and now you're complaining that it's not private. Fine. Flip the fucking switch so that we know that it's private.
A headset with a gun-shaped controller, where player movement is on the gun and turning the camera is on a gyro attached to the head (along with a triangulated position reference to the console), is probably feasible, right?
Feasible, but laggy and expensive. Taking 20 MS for a character to respond to your input is basically imperceptable on a television, because, well, the rest of the world is whizzing by normally. But taking 20ms to updated a head-mounted VR system is nauseating, as the world drags behind where the world is supposed to be.
Likewise, the tech is pretty expensive. 640x480, when attached to your eyes is basically the highest grade consumer glasses you can get for a reasonable amount of money and yet is still really, really pixelated. For fully immersive VR with believeable resolution, the necessary pixel densities go way up.
So yes, possible. But not good enough to ship yet.
And even the old wisdom that a fatty diet is bad for you, gets challenged...
There are two parts to the claim.
Part 1 is that a very high-fat, very high-sugar diet is bad for you. Eating McDonalds every day, basically, will do terrible things to your health. Period. This we know for a fact, and has been proven many, many times.
Part 2 is that the details of the diet. Should we have any alcohol or none? What percentage of fats to carbs should we have? People make claims about these all of the time, and unfortunately very little seems to have been born out. It seems that the body is very good at adapting to the kinds of dietary behaviors that were prevalant when the body was developing. A higher salt diet might not be a problem for a native Japanese person, but it might be for a Swede, for example. And as such most studies attempting to determine the "best" diet are just fundamentally flawed.
The same thing was true with Sunscreen. On the one hand, we know that people sitting in tanning booths all day long to get that fresh-from-Miami look are ruining their skin. They're going to be prematurely wrinkled, and they're giving themselves a very high chance for skin cancer. So you shouldn't grossly overexpose yourself. On the other hand, the details about how much sun exposure you should get were sketchy. Because there were basically few known benefits to sun exposure, the thinking was "why not stop it all?" Of course this was wrong, in that there were benefits to sun exposure, including reduced depression rates. And now, it seems, reduction in certain types of cancer due to increased vitamin production. But either way, you still shouldn't go into the tanning salons, and if you're going to spend a full day at the beach you should still bring some SPF15 with you.
Despite all this, however, I predict that Nintendo will be around for quite some time (in one form or another at least). Their ability to shift gears when needed (remember how the original NES revived the dying home console market in the first place?) and to develop/market new and innovative -- if not practical and appealing -- ideas will assure them some kind of presence for the forseeable future.
They also have the remarkable ability to be and stay tremendously profitable. Since the launch of the NES, they have not had a single year in the red, and have remained the most profitable game industry company though clever licensing and milking everyone for all they're worth.
Nintendo, like Apple, will be ok. You don't have to have the highest volume to make the most profit.
And the DS is currently outselling the PSP pretty solidly, due mainly to innovative titles and being slightly cheaper.
A: Amazon arguably started the rediculousness with patenting 1-click shopping. It became a poster child for everything that was wrong with the patent system. From then, people realized that basically anything was patentable.
B: Amazon (or at least it's founders) were involved in a failed orginazation that offered rewards to root out bad patents.
C: Amazon continues to get rediculous patents.
In other words, Amazon has put itself squarely in the middle of the stupid patent debate, by A: being the first and B: publically and flagrantly playing both sides.
Maybe it doesn't look that way from the inside, but from the outside Amazon has become a rediculous symbol, and this patent isn't helping.
A firewall doesn't protect everything. A firewall with a clueless user at the helm won't protect you from quite a lot. It won't protect you from buffer overflows, system exploits, or a lot of other automated exploits. It won't protect you from a lot of spoof attacks. It will make you non-pingable, which helps, but anything you have enabled might still be a way in. Saying that having the built-in XP firewall running gives you a 100% chance of not being compromised is like saying that having antilock breaks gives you 100% chance of surviving a crash. It helps, but if it's your only line of defense, you're screwed. Quite frankly it's grossly inappropriate to tell people to not worry anymore. Everyone should pick up a free firewall (of the kind that can detect outgoing traffic, as opposed to SP2), a free AV software package, and a free spyware detector or two.
We just had a bug fly around my work, owning the network. This was with a hardware firewall and AV. Both were working, it was just a bug that was too new and the AV vendor hadn't discovered it yet.
This seems like it would fall under activities on behalf of a company. If you order 30k computers for your company and you have no way to pay, the company goes bankrupt, not you. If you include a popular song in a product your company puts out without permission, your company is liable, not you. If you raid your company's pension funds, sell off their assets, give yourself a big fat bonus, and quit as the company enters bankruptcy, the company is liable not you.
I fail to see how the legal burdern of having unlicensed software on company computers would fall on the shoulders of individuals any more than the legal burden of not poisioning the rivers would.
Of course, this person should document everything, because they will be the fall guy if the fit hits the shan, including (recorded, with permission) conversations with superiors farther up the toem pole. He probably also qualifies for whistleblower status, and if necessary he should consider a pre-emptive strike. It won't make employee relations any easier, but it will legally prevent them from holding him accountable for their decisions.
If they're connected to the other countries, they're connected to the world. What they probably meant was that they have a trunk connection directly to somewhere in africa, etc, and through them the rest of the world. But they didn't say that.
I think everyone expected legal movie playback on a proprietary PSP only disk that cost more than the available DVD to be a complete red herring. It was just a lure to get suckers to buy into the portable gaming machine, and was never supposed to sell at all. That they sold more than 0 movies is a surprise. That they found 100,000 suckers is a triumph.
3.4 million... 92% of which comes from the car and the cover lifestyle. Of the remainder, 78% goes to the butler.
Without those three things, you're only looking at a paultry 55 grand. Take out the cave, pay for your martial arts training per year, and that's a paultry 11k.
Of course none of this covers medical expenses or legal fees. While you may get away with buying zero-deductible coverage for 600 a month (an extra 8 grand a year), you're not going to escape making bail, or bribing your way out of dealing with the cops. Or getting sued by the estate of the Joker when you push him off a building. Or when Harley Quinn sues you for "mental anguish." Or when Warner Brothers sues you for improper use of their trademarked character. Or when you and your butler get sued under RICO. Or... well, you get the idea.
War sucks, everyone does crappy stuff, no one can really take the high ground in the end.
Exactly. I'm not saying bombing Hiroshima was wrong. I'm saying that it was a tremendous loss of life. You might kill less people by killing people, but you certainly don't "save lives" by killing them.
And I'm sure if Germany got the bomb first and nuked New York City it would be seen as merciful and saving lives.
Whether or not you're statistically correct that nuking Japan saved lives, to those of us who lost family in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the argument is in pretty fucking poor taste.
The idea is not just observation, but that the observation was already taken into account. In other words, if you go back and try to run over your own grandpa with a rent-a-wreck, that car is basically guarenteed to break down, and if you had bothered to go over the records for that time period you would know that. But because you didn't, it is a perfectly valid excuse, and if you did, it would be something else.
The universe doesn't allow for paradoxes, and adjusts according to how much slack there is in the available knowledge space. Want to shoot your father? Ever ask him how he got that limp? Want to give yourself advice on stocks? Would you have believed it if you were accosted by a vaguley familiar-looking raving loony on the street trying to sell you on stocks? Would you even remember that it happened?
Don't worry about paradoxes. Quantum mechanics takes care of itself.
Slashdot Mirror
5. Stormtroopers being professional soldiers would take careful aim, set up snipers, etc thus all gun fights end with the good guys dying and quickly.
Not to be too straight-laced, but they could have had the storm troopers do things like that, get set up properly, make advancements, etc, and still have the main characters escape by the skin of their teeth. It would have built up excitement in a way that watching storm trooper after incompetent storm trooper being gunned down just doesn't. At least some percentage of the movie should have been devoted to the storm troopers winning, to build up tension.
A New Hope:
Storm troopers rule:
killed jawas (off camera)
Storm troopers suck:
Took equal losses with the defences of a councelor's ship on a peaceful mission.
Can't stop a group of rogues from escaping while they're already in prison.
They're scared of Han.
Empire Strikes Back:
Storm troopers rule:
Took over cloud city (off camera)
Storm troopers suck:
Giant battletanks full of the empires strongest weaponry taken down by string.
Still can't stop a group of rogues from escaping while they're already in prison.
Got shown up by a dwarf with a pot on his head.
Return of the Jedi
Storm Troopers Rule:
Actually stopped a group of rogues from doing something, and on camera no less!
Storm Troopers Suck:
Death of everything they represent.
Lost to a bunch of muppets.
Such a silly article. The Game Boy line is doomed. Here it ends. There will never be another Game Boy. Ignore the fact that the DS is currently in 1st place for handheld console sales, thanks to the quirky, original titles that made the game boy popular. Or that the DS plays GBA / GB games and is, by all account, the successor to the Game Boy line. Or that the DS really stands for "A Bloody Game Boy with Dual Screens"
Yup. The Game Boy line is done for. Pity that.
Where's the next-gen media format support?
It doesn't exist yet (drives and media aren't available yet). Additionally, games don't need friggin 50gb of space, and access times on first gen games will be deadly slow. Finally, hardware costs and media are drastically more expensive.
I don't think I've ever worked on a game that didn't max out the available space. Admittedly, I haven't worked on a lot of games. But sometimes you would like to pack-in pregen video and don't have the space, or would like to fork all of your audio tracks and apply a pre-generated filter over each one, or would like to stream pregen movies as backgrounds in your metagame, etc. Maybe you'd like to precomp 96 lightmaps on all of your terrain for time-of-day effects and load the appropriate one. Maybe you're faced with an intractable show-stopper on an in-game cutscene with days to go, and you have to decide between pre-generating it or cutting the level. More space always comes in handy.
I've heard a few rumors that say backwards compatibility won't be there
It will be. I heard a rumor that the PS3's explodes the 3rd time you turned it on. Basing buying decisions on rumor and inuendo is dumb.
Microsoft has said that it will be "selectively compatible," which is to say, it will play Halo and maybe the game you are trying to play. Anyone in the emulation scene can tell you that almost emulated is a nice way of saying not done. Of course, they will have time to finish the emulation later, but that doesn't help early adopters out.
So is $300 worth the price of admission?
Considering that the PS3 is expected to launch for $400 or more and include more next-gen bells and whistles
I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers. Nobody knows how much any of this will cost. The PS3 has some bells and whistles, but it's also slated to ship a year later, which should proportionally reduce cost. Sony is also making a lot of the hardware themselves, which saves them a bit more... that lets them ignore sunk development cost at the beginning. But both companies have some of the deepest pockets in any industry.
The only technical "feature" the PS3 has over the xbox is the blu-ray drive. And personally, I'm not convinced it is an advantage yet (it'll be worthless if HD-DVD catches on and Blu-ray doesn't).
I'm not sure I see why feature is in quotations. If HD-DVD catches on and Blu-Ray doesn't (which I expect will happen), The PS3 will still have 10X the storage capacity of the Xbox. That's a pretty huge advantage. I think you'll quickly see games being ported from the PS3 chafing at the smaller size.
The xbox has a built in hard drive, which the PS3 lacks. Additionally, if you're into online gaming, Sony STILL hasn't announced their gameplan in that area; Live is probably one of the few things Microsoft got REALLY right with the first gen Xbox. Finally, the "media center" components are supposed to be able to stream music off of your computer (so you can create custom soundtracks while playing your game).
Live is great. Live is wonderful. I really don't want to deal with Microsoft's bloody detailed and occasionally contradictory requirements around Live, nor implementing the buggar in a way that's consistent with the look and feel of a different game. But Microsoft is requiring all X360 games to play nice with Live features, which will be a pain in the tail for all developers everywhere. It's frustrating... as a gamer, it makes me want to buy a 360, but as a developer it makes me want to strangle them. The "media center" stuff appears to be a red herring, if for no other reason than you will need to be sharing your folders over a wireless network, and you should under no circumstances ever share your folders over a wireless network. And, of course, the HDD is a great touch, as always, that I wish Sony shipped with standard.
I must say, as a developer the one feature that I would want in a piece of ha
You can get instant-on systems based around linux... though "instant" actually means a few seconds in tedious reality, they can boot as fast as you can get through the bios check. It's linux bios, and if you're willing to get compatible hardware, it can be quite cool.
And yes, there are consumer applications in the wild.
If you read the book, the author's primary point is that a bike is fast enough to outrun zombies while still being quiet so as not to attract attention. A truck or other motor vehicle will attract the zombie hordes from miles around, which can swarm over the vehicle in sufficient numbers to stop it.
If you've ever attempted to drive through an Arbor day parade, you'll know what I'm talking about.
The imperfections can help make a ride great. The Revolution at Great America in San Jose, a spinning boat ride that goes over the top, sometimes goes over forwards, and sometimes goes over backwards. You really don't know when it will, or why. Compare that to Superman, the Escape at Magic Mountain, which does exactly the same thing every time, and Superman just seems less interesting.
I must admit, my favorite rides skew to the less predictable. At the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk, there is (was) a ferris wheel which consisted of little egg-shaped cages. The rider was given a bar they could pull on to lock the cages in relationship to the wheel, so that they would very slowly spin over the top. No seat belt, mind you, or safety bar or anything, just a little egg-shaped cage with a small bench and a rider flipping around inside, holding their head off the metal with a well-placed, frequently panicked arm. Drop Zone at Great America has a random timer, to ensure that nobody will know when it is about to fall. It's surprisingly good at catching you when you're not expecting it, no matter how many times you ride it. Even The Pirates of the Carribean at Disneyland has people concurrently going through lengthy looped scenes, so that certain boats see the beginning of the loop, others see the middle, and others the end. The rides at California Adventure seemed too controlled and soulless to be a lot of fun, even if they did do so with a bit of showmanship. The best ride there is the white water raft, because it combines the freeform risk of most raft rides with a lot of little technical controlling tricks (like artificially spinning you up).
Personally, I would want to go on the ride when it fell back. That sounds like a lot more fun than just going forwards for 20 seconds. That sounds really, really thrilling. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was left in on purpose, and I'm sure it helps the ride's reputation.
On the one hand, I understand that software is a big, nasty mess, and bugs frequently aren't the fault of any one person but rather by the interaction of multiple elements.
On the other hand, cry me a river. I work in an industry where a single crash would define a game as unshippable. Some of the games I've worked on had tens of millions of lines of code, and all were debugged thoroughly. A lot of this was through amazing efforts by some very bright people, but primarily this was because crashing of any sort will fail your submission. This will cost you two weeks of development, and maybe 20% of your grosses if you are in a tight time frame. Period. Unless a bug is really obscure it won't ship. Period. Bugs are just not tolerated.
Compare that to Microsoft's libraries that ship with bugs that their own compiler complains about.
Look, if you want to give up and write bad code that crashes and needs user intervention for stupid things, go right ahead. People are actually working on planes that can't be hijacked, and multiple-hull tankers that don't sink. QNX, while very specific, is quite bulletproof. NASA is at least trying to make shuttles that don't crash, though they don't seem to have quality control over their contractors. These people I'll respect for trying.
If you want to tell me that the state of the software industry is exactly where you want it to be, that's your choice. If you want to say that development of a 500 dollar office application used the world over should be held to much lower standards than a 50 dollar toy game, that's your choice. If you feel that frequent crashes, dead systems due to faulty drivers, USB conflicts, TCP-IP stack overloads, and dialogs that make no sense are where we should be, that's your choice. If you liken users on a system you've designed to people eating poison mushrooms in the forest, that's your choice. And that's downright pathetic.
We can do much better. Giving up doesn't help anybody.
I feel compelled to point out that the solution to the opaque "magic box" is not to make it more transparent, but to make sure it doesn't break down. Most users could care less about exactly how the system is doing what they want it do to, they just want it to do it. This is in exactly the same way that most programmers don't give a shit about exactly what registers the system is using on which of the designated processing units, just so long as it executes your code flawlessly.
And processors basically do operate flawlessly, because we demand that from them. But Operating Systems and other pieces of software do not. Values are not checked for ranges, inputs are not checked for validity, dependencies are not maintained, unnecessary components are kept around, etc.
I like to think of my palm pilot as the perfect black box operating system. I don't have any idea what it's doing under the hood, but it always does what it's supposed to do, and I don't have to worry about it. If I want to delve into 68k hacking to get the thing to do special stuff I can... but the choice is mine, not the operating system's.
Personally I use yaps on a Palm Pilot, though I could see using another PDA-based one. The cool trick about YAPS is that you can drag your pen across their keyboard for multiple inputs, effectively allowing you to draw very, very long passwords quickly.
I would use either a PDA-based or a phone based system... something you carry with you at all times, no computer required. Mine has everything from password / logins to credit card information and bank numbers. You're not always near a computer when you need to know your checking account number.
For computer privacy, try dekart private disk. It's a pretty solid encrypter / decrypter that creates virtual drives under XP. Anything you put on a drive is protected, from passwords to applications. And it runs from removable disks. It does tie you to windows, though.
This is not a problem with London. This is a risk of living in the western world, be it New York, Paris, London, or Omaha Nebraska. Compounded over time, the statistic becomes very clear. While dying from terrorism is terrible, it's just about the least of your worries.
Even just considering the UK, 2003 saw 530,000 deaths, or one death every minute of every day. Heart disease killed 200,000 of those people. 5,000 people died from infections and parasites. 3,000 people died in transport accidents. Falling killed 2,000. 100 people froze to death. 8 people died from syphilis.
Again those statistics are just the UK, and just for one year. But it's pretty clear that the biggest killer in the UK is still not Al Quaeda, but Mc Donalds, by a pretty wide margin.
Again, I don't mean to reduce the tragedy felt by the people in London. But death is a tragedy to people no matter how it occured.
It would be great if we could turn around and attack 'the terrorists.' But who are the terrorists? In 9/11, most of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian, a government that is supposedly a friend of western nations. In France, the attackers were French. We could attempt to invade Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Cyprus, and Lebanon, but we'd still be left with North Korea, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Russia, China, and Montana. And that wouldn't get to the root of the problem, which is that people hate the actions of our governments so much that they are willing to die to make a point. It wouldn't crush the malcontentment.
This is not WW2. Impoverishing them until they have nothing left to lose will not solve the problem. It didn't work in Israel, and it won't work for the west.
Get some perspective. You're still thousands of times more likely to die from normal homocide than you are from terrorism. You're thousands of times more likely to take your own life. Sure, we should and can do things to help prevent terrorism... stop supplying Israel with military aid, for example, and replace the silly symbolic airport screenings with something that has a chance of catching people. But ultimately there isn't a whole lot one can do to stop someone who is willing to die, once they've been driven to that point. Spend more time and money putting the west in a positive light around the world, and accept that sometimes bad things will happen.
I feel terrible for the people in London. I fear that the tragedy of this event will be followed by the tragedy of throwing away what is good about their society.
The analogy is false, though, because you're broadcasting your property... All of your analogies imply clear boundary conditions, such as property edges, doors, using someone else's computer, etc. But if you put up an unsecured wireless network which you setup of sufficient strength to permeate your neighbor's property, the boundaries are very different.
If you have a wireless stereo system, which broadcasts to your speakers, and your neighbor picks it up, it's not "stealing" your music if they listen. If you want to share photos with your family and you put up an unsecured internet site, it's not stealing if non-family members visit and download your photos.
The fact of the matter is you've setup a broadcasting network through a section of your neighborhood. Congratulations, you're now a broadcaster. All operating systems will automatically connect with your network (...maybe not BSD). If you had a problem with this, you can very simply turn on WEP.
Which is how the internet works. Everything is assumed public until you put on the slightest bit of security. That's the convention. If you visit a website and they don't authenticate, it's assumed public. If someone sends you a link to a streaming movie and it doesn't ask for a password, it's assumed public. By practical definitions, it is public. We're not talking about bolting on an iron-clad Novell authentication system, we're talking about changing one preference in your network configuration settings.
You bought a piece of land next to a public field, and you didn't put up a fence or any demarkations. People will wander into and out of the field as if it were part of the commons. There is no practical way to ask whose field / network it is, nor any reason to see to ask. By not marking it as private, you have used the conventional method of marking it as public.
Would someone make their network public? Lots of people do it intentionally. In my apartment, I generally see no fewer than 10 or so wireless networks. Of those, half or so are unsecured. There's usually one or two that has the default router name (Linksys, etc). But most have changed their name to something else, which means that the people involved knew enough to go through the setup process and decided to leave their network open to everyone. Why? Mostly it's a desire to share and be neighborly. Oddly enough, the ISP up the street does the same thing. Lots of the businesses have open wireless access in an attempt to get people to come in with their laptops and drink coffee while doing work.
Of course, there are tradeoffs involved all around. Your wireless network is fucking up my other wireless equipment and using the available spectrum in my house. My wireless phones and other devices are using the same unlicensed spectrum, but are now competing with your bloody web surfing to be heard. I accept that you're going to have a wireless network, because those things are useful. And if you decide not to secure it and make it public, it's on me (and all of the other users) to be good citizens and not saturate your upstream by sharing on P2P apps all the time, or queueing up weeks worth of downloads. If you do decide to secure your network, it's neighborly of us to respect those boundaries and not packet hack it, despite WEP's inherent vulnerabilities. It's also neighborly to broadcast your SSID and channel, because in high density areas the difficulties involved in keeping people's networks from stepping on eachother is far greater than the minimal security provided by not broadcasting your SSID.
You marked your network as public, and now you're complaining that it's not private. Fine. Flip the fucking switch so that we know that it's private.
A headset with a gun-shaped controller, where player movement is on the gun and turning the camera is on a gyro attached to the head (along with a triangulated position reference to the console), is probably feasible, right?
Feasible, but laggy and expensive. Taking 20 MS for a character to respond to your input is basically imperceptable on a television, because, well, the rest of the world is whizzing by normally. But taking 20ms to updated a head-mounted VR system is nauseating, as the world drags behind where the world is supposed to be.
Likewise, the tech is pretty expensive. 640x480, when attached to your eyes is basically the highest grade consumer glasses you can get for a reasonable amount of money and yet is still really, really pixelated. For fully immersive VR with believeable resolution, the necessary pixel densities go way up.
So yes, possible. But not good enough to ship yet.
And even the old wisdom that a fatty diet is bad for you, gets challenged...
There are two parts to the claim.
Part 1 is that a very high-fat, very high-sugar diet is bad for you. Eating McDonalds every day, basically, will do terrible things to your health. Period. This we know for a fact, and has been proven many, many times.
Part 2 is that the details of the diet. Should we have any alcohol or none? What percentage of fats to carbs should we have? People make claims about these all of the time, and unfortunately very little seems to have been born out. It seems that the body is very good at adapting to the kinds of dietary behaviors that were prevalant when the body was developing. A higher salt diet might not be a problem for a native Japanese person, but it might be for a Swede, for example. And as such most studies attempting to determine the "best" diet are just fundamentally flawed.
The same thing was true with Sunscreen. On the one hand, we know that people sitting in tanning booths all day long to get that fresh-from-Miami look are ruining their skin. They're going to be prematurely wrinkled, and they're giving themselves a very high chance for skin cancer. So you shouldn't grossly overexpose yourself. On the other hand, the details about how much sun exposure you should get were sketchy. Because there were basically few known benefits to sun exposure, the thinking was "why not stop it all?" Of course this was wrong, in that there were benefits to sun exposure, including reduced depression rates. And now, it seems, reduction in certain types of cancer due to increased vitamin production. But either way, you still shouldn't go into the tanning salons, and if you're going to spend a full day at the beach you should still bring some SPF15 with you.
Despite all this, however, I predict that Nintendo will be around for quite some time (in one form or another at least). Their ability to shift gears when needed (remember how the original NES revived the dying home console market in the first place?) and to develop/market new and innovative -- if not practical and appealing -- ideas will assure them some kind of presence for the forseeable future.
They also have the remarkable ability to be and stay tremendously profitable. Since the launch of the NES, they have not had a single year in the red, and have remained the most profitable game industry company though clever licensing and milking everyone for all they're worth.
Nintendo, like Apple, will be ok. You don't have to have the highest volume to make the most profit.
And the DS is currently outselling the PSP pretty solidly, due mainly to innovative titles and being slightly cheaper.
A: Amazon arguably started the rediculousness with patenting 1-click shopping. It became a poster child for everything that was wrong with the patent system. From then, people realized that basically anything was patentable.
B: Amazon (or at least it's founders) were involved in a failed orginazation that offered rewards to root out bad patents.
C: Amazon continues to get rediculous patents.
In other words, Amazon has put itself squarely in the middle of the stupid patent debate, by A: being the first and B: publically and flagrantly playing both sides.
Maybe it doesn't look that way from the inside, but from the outside Amazon has become a rediculous symbol, and this patent isn't helping.
A firewall doesn't protect everything. A firewall with a clueless user at the helm won't protect you from quite a lot. It won't protect you from buffer overflows, system exploits, or a lot of other automated exploits. It won't protect you from a lot of spoof attacks. It will make you non-pingable, which helps, but anything you have enabled might still be a way in. Saying that having the built-in XP firewall running gives you a 100% chance of not being compromised is like saying that having antilock breaks gives you 100% chance of surviving a crash. It helps, but if it's your only line of defense, you're screwed. Quite frankly it's grossly inappropriate to tell people to not worry anymore. Everyone should pick up a free firewall (of the kind that can detect outgoing traffic, as opposed to SP2), a free AV software package, and a free spyware detector or two.
We just had a bug fly around my work, owning the network. This was with a hardware firewall and AV. Both were working, it was just a bug that was too new and the AV vendor hadn't discovered it yet.
This seems like it would fall under activities on behalf of a company. If you order 30k computers for your company and you have no way to pay, the company goes bankrupt, not you. If you include a popular song in a product your company puts out without permission, your company is liable, not you. If you raid your company's pension funds, sell off their assets, give yourself a big fat bonus, and quit as the company enters bankruptcy, the company is liable not you.
I fail to see how the legal burdern of having unlicensed software on company computers would fall on the shoulders of individuals any more than the legal burden of not poisioning the rivers would.
Of course, this person should document everything, because they will be the fall guy if the fit hits the shan, including (recorded, with permission) conversations with superiors farther up the toem pole. He probably also qualifies for whistleblower status, and if necessary he should consider a pre-emptive strike. It won't make employee relations any easier, but it will legally prevent them from holding him accountable for their decisions.
Alright, I'll respond to this one.
It was a joke. Duh.
If they're connected to the other countries, they're connected to the world. What they probably meant was that they have a trunk connection directly to somewhere in africa, etc, and through them the rest of the world. But they didn't say that.
I think everyone expected legal movie playback on a proprietary PSP only disk that cost more than the available DVD to be a complete red herring. It was just a lure to get suckers to buy into the portable gaming machine, and was never supposed to sell at all. That they sold more than 0 movies is a surprise. That they found 100,000 suckers is a triumph.
3.4 million... 92% of which comes from the car and the cover lifestyle. Of the remainder, 78% goes to the butler.
Without those three things, you're only looking at a paultry 55 grand. Take out the cave, pay for your martial arts training per year, and that's a paultry 11k.
Of course none of this covers medical expenses or legal fees. While you may get away with buying zero-deductible coverage for 600 a month (an extra 8 grand a year), you're not going to escape making bail, or bribing your way out of dealing with the cops. Or getting sued by the estate of the Joker when you push him off a building. Or when Harley Quinn sues you for "mental anguish." Or when Warner Brothers sues you for improper use of their trademarked character. Or when you and your butler get sued under RICO. Or... well, you get the idea.
War sucks, everyone does crappy stuff, no one can really take the high ground in the end.
Exactly. I'm not saying bombing Hiroshima was wrong. I'm saying that it was a tremendous loss of life. You might kill less people by killing people, but you certainly don't "save lives" by killing them.
And I'm sure if Germany got the bomb first and nuked New York City it would be seen as merciful and saving lives.
Whether or not you're statistically correct that nuking Japan saved lives, to those of us who lost family in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the argument is in pretty fucking poor taste.
gives the island fast and reliable phone and Internet links with the rest of Africa and with Europe, India and Malaysia.
I don't think it really counts as a reliable phone or internet link if it doesn't extend to South America, Asia, and the US.
The idea is not just observation, but that the observation was already taken into account. In other words, if you go back and try to run over your own grandpa with a rent-a-wreck, that car is basically guarenteed to break down, and if you had bothered to go over the records for that time period you would know that. But because you didn't, it is a perfectly valid excuse, and if you did, it would be something else.
The universe doesn't allow for paradoxes, and adjusts according to how much slack there is in the available knowledge space. Want to shoot your father? Ever ask him how he got that limp? Want to give yourself advice on stocks? Would you have believed it if you were accosted by a vaguley familiar-looking raving loony on the street trying to sell you on stocks? Would you even remember that it happened?
Don't worry about paradoxes. Quantum mechanics takes care of itself.