Steeling a gun, smuggling it or trying to obtain it any other way gives a chance to catch those people before they can do any harm. As long as guns are legal and easy to obtain on the other side you can't do much until the moment some crazy person pulls the trigger.
Could you point me to the part in the Windows 7 EULA that says that the system will randomly self destruct and replace itself with a different OS at some random point in the future?
The GPL tries to protect interfaces as well, that's why there is a LGPL. With the GPL the idea is that when you use it, your whole program has to follow it. However when interfaces are no longer copyrightable, then that falls apart and linking to a GPL library from a non-GPL piece of software becomes ok. There are some situations where this might not hold true like code inlining, static linking, etc., but in general the GPL would essentially become a the LGPL when APIs and ABIs are non-copyrightable. The FSF's stance on this always felt more like wishful thinking then hard legal ground and is kind of incompatible with their own idea that APIs shouldn't be copyrightable. That logic they apply however only to other peoples libraries, not their own.
Yep, and those types of questions are actually used in the Winograd Schema Challenge as a alternative to the Turing test. While those questions aren't testing everything a human might be able to do over a text terminal, they have the big advantage of being objective and easily quantifiable. The Turing Test depends to much on the qualifications of the judge, simple multiple choice questions don't have that problem.
It's not quite that simple. 360 with a single camera can be trivially stitched together because you can rotate the camera around a single point. With two cameras you are no longer dealing with just rotation, when you rotate a pair of cameras the individual cameras get translated as well, since they are offset from the point of rotation. If you try to stitch the images together you will get very noticable seams, especially when objects are close to the camera. There are ways around that with lots of cameras and more intelligent stitching algorithms, but so far it's still an open area of research on how to do it best. And even if you successfully stitch things together, you have still the problem that a simple 3D video can't deal with head tilt or head translation, so maybe some kind of depthmap/voxel format is needed to make 3D video really pleasent and less of a hack.
In terms of features Krita is great, but it's also very slow and sluggish. Just doing basic stuff like scrolling the view around makes it use 100% CPU and render at like 5FPS, even on a trivial single layer image. This sluggishness makes it not very fun to work with and it has been that way for years.
Any "settings" come in the form of easy-to-read dials or buttons.
I'd wish that would be the case. Most home appliances have absolutely horrible user interfaces, completely meaningless symbols instead of text are extremely common. If you get text, it's often squished in some tiny LCD display that requires all worlds to be abbreved. Some functions are only accesible via magical key combinations. Manuals are just as bad, as they tend to explain half a dozens variations of a product at once, while you of course only own a single one of them and so on.
Computer interfaces aren't exactly great either, but overall they are far cleaner and more logical then most of the stuff I have seen in home appliances. The only reason why home appliances don't cause more trouble is because their functionality is so limited that you can memorize the one or two button sequences that make them work and ignore most of the other features they offer.
The big problem with open webcams and such is that they use default passwords in the first place. Those really should outlawed and considered a violation of product safety. There is no reason for them to exist. The other big issues is that the devices aren't transparent for the user. If the webcam is broadcasting things to the Internet, there is no user visible indication that it is doing so. This one is harder to fix, but with all the fancy tech we have, it shouldn't be impossible to get a wireless status report from a device telling you what it's doing. Most devices of course allow that already in some form, but not with a standard interface or protocol.
Carmack is trying to convince Samsung to produce such screens/firmware (see his talk at Oculus Connect). It even goes beyond G-sync, he wants to have programmable interlacing, so that you can't just tell when something gets refresh, but what parts (i.e. every third line). So it's definitely on their radar, but it might still take a while till we go from re-purposed phone screens to screens specifically made for VR.
But every new game they put out has been an iteratively improved copy of a lower-tech game with great gameplay put out by someone else.
Was Lost Vikings inspired by anything in particular? RPM Racing and Blackthorn took a lot of inspiration from RC Pro Am and Flashback, but I can't think of anything that quite matches Lost Vikings.
As speaker setup this might be to complicated and a waste of effort, however motion tracked virtual reality headsets are right around the corner and with them you can do some really fancy binaural 3D sound rendering on the cheap. So I would assume that the success of this depends in large part on if they will let people write support for it for the virtual-cinema players that already exist or if they shoot it dead with patents.
While there are some fancy light field displays that might be able to adjust for vision defects in software, those are still years after. However the Oculus Rift has swappable lenses, so it shouldn't be to hard to design some lenses that correct whatever vision defect you might have. The consumer version will probably have some adjustable optics to correct for vision issues, at least thats how the first wave of consumer VR headsets back in 1995 worked.
The motion sickness on the first Rift was in large part caused by the lack of position tracking that resulted in mismatches between what you saw and where your head was, that's now fixed. The DK2 has IR markers and a tracking camera that will track your head position. The DK2 also has a low persistence display that removes a lot of the motion blur that happened with the first Rift. For most people the DK2 seems to eliminate motion sickness almost completely. There might still be issues when the game itself is extremely fast paced, but most games build for VR are using a much slower and more realistic pace, so it should be fine for most part.
You have to have a game installed and launched at least once before you can play it in Offline mode. Meaning you can't play your backuped games until you have Internet again. There also was the issue that you couldn't play games that are in the mid of a patching, but I think Steam fixed that a few month ago with their changes to the way downloading works.
While on the topic, why do spreadsheets use a plain grid in the first place? Why don't they use database-like tables with labled columns? The way spreadsheets mix data and presentation never made sense to me. It's like doing programming with raw memory addresses, instead of variable names and there is little you can do to structure and query the data properly. And meanwhile coming from the other side, the grid really sucks for doing layout of the data, as you are forced to use the same column and row spacing across the whole grid, even so most data actually on the grid in non-uniform.
Quite true, I would however not call "Miner Wars 2081" a multiplayer game. While it was originally planed to have heavier focus on multiplayer, that never got properly developed and what is there, is now mostly useless with the servers being empty. That said, the game has a fully fledged single player game with a 15h long story driven campaign, which turns out surprisingly interesting. It's basically a modern take on Descent 3, just with better graphics, physics and everything.
Reviews never get updated when a game gets patched, so they tend to be a really terrible indicator for the quality of "Early Access" games. The game also got a lot of backslash from early backers because the MMO part never go finished, which makes a lot of the user reviews look kind of terrible as well. Anyway, I played the game only month after the release and never even heard about the whole MMO issue until long after and from my perspective it was absolutely awesome. A worthy Descent 3 successor as far as single player is concerned. As mentioned, the MMO left overs can be a bit confusing and the game doesn't explain some aspects very well (mined minerals can be used as engine fuel). So it can take a bit to figure out how to properly play the game, but once over that hurdle it's a blast, turned out far better then I had hoped for.
It was originally planed to be a MMO, but it never became one. Miner Wars 2081 is a good old regular story driven single player game. There are some left over from it's open-world/MMO roots still in the game (e.g. locations that look like they would offer side-missions, but are just completely empty, ability to dig into asteroids and mine minerals, ship systems that are much ore complex then they need to, etc.), but none of that really goes anywhere, it's all just dead ends that the developers never got around to finish. Anyway, the core single player campaign is surprisingly good, varied missions, nice voice acting, Firefly-ish plot, 15h long and just a ton of fun once you figured out your way around the kinks of the game. My only complaint would be that the games weapons and enemies aren't quite as interesting as they were in Descent, but the mission design makes up for it. I had more fun with this game then I had with Descent 3.
There is also Retrovirus, another game heavily inspired by Descent, but I haven't played much of that yet.
Yep, the important difference is that the Pi is actually available to people who want, OLPC never sold to the public, only through time limited G1G1. Never understood why they would make it so hard to buy one.
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Steeling a gun, smuggling it or trying to obtain it any other way gives a chance to catch those people before they can do any harm. As long as guns are legal and easy to obtain on the other side you can't do much until the moment some crazy person pulls the trigger.
Could you point me to the part in the Windows 7 EULA that says that the system will randomly self destruct and replace itself with a different OS at some random point in the future?
The GPL tries to protect interfaces as well, that's why there is a LGPL. With the GPL the idea is that when you use it, your whole program has to follow it. However when interfaces are no longer copyrightable, then that falls apart and linking to a GPL library from a non-GPL piece of software becomes ok. There are some situations where this might not hold true like code inlining, static linking, etc., but in general the GPL would essentially become a the LGPL when APIs and ABIs are non-copyrightable. The FSF's stance on this always felt more like wishful thinking then hard legal ground and is kind of incompatible with their own idea that APIs shouldn't be copyrightable. That logic they apply however only to other peoples libraries, not their own.
The "const int", "//" comments and mixing declarations and code are pretty typical for C++ and atypical for C code (but allowed in C99 I think).
Yep, and those types of questions are actually used in the Winograd Schema Challenge as a alternative to the Turing test. While those questions aren't testing everything a human might be able to do over a text terminal, they have the big advantage of being objective and easily quantifiable. The Turing Test depends to much on the qualifications of the judge, simple multiple choice questions don't have that problem.
It's not quite that simple. 360 with a single camera can be trivially stitched together because you can rotate the camera around a single point. With two cameras you are no longer dealing with just rotation, when you rotate a pair of cameras the individual cameras get translated as well, since they are offset from the point of rotation. If you try to stitch the images together you will get very noticable seams, especially when objects are close to the camera. There are ways around that with lots of cameras and more intelligent stitching algorithms, but so far it's still an open area of research on how to do it best. And even if you successfully stitch things together, you have still the problem that a simple 3D video can't deal with head tilt or head translation, so maybe some kind of depthmap/voxel format is needed to make 3D video really pleasent and less of a hack.
In terms of features Krita is great, but it's also very slow and sluggish. Just doing basic stuff like scrolling the view around makes it use 100% CPU and render at like 5FPS, even on a trivial single layer image. This sluggishness makes it not very fun to work with and it has been that way for years.
Any "settings" come in the form of easy-to-read dials or buttons.
I'd wish that would be the case. Most home appliances have absolutely horrible user interfaces, completely meaningless symbols instead of text are extremely common. If you get text, it's often squished in some tiny LCD display that requires all worlds to be abbreved. Some functions are only accesible via magical key combinations. Manuals are just as bad, as they tend to explain half a dozens variations of a product at once, while you of course only own a single one of them and so on.
Computer interfaces aren't exactly great either, but overall they are far cleaner and more logical then most of the stuff I have seen in home appliances. The only reason why home appliances don't cause more trouble is because their functionality is so limited that you can memorize the one or two button sequences that make them work and ignore most of the other features they offer.
The big problem with open webcams and such is that they use default passwords in the first place. Those really should outlawed and considered a violation of product safety. There is no reason for them to exist. The other big issues is that the devices aren't transparent for the user. If the webcam is broadcasting things to the Internet, there is no user visible indication that it is doing so. This one is harder to fix, but with all the fancy tech we have, it shouldn't be impossible to get a wireless status report from a device telling you what it's doing. Most devices of course allow that already in some form, but not with a standard interface or protocol.
Carmack is trying to convince Samsung to produce such screens/firmware (see his talk at Oculus Connect). It even goes beyond G-sync, he wants to have programmable interlacing, so that you can't just tell when something gets refresh, but what parts (i.e. every third line). So it's definitely on their radar, but it might still take a while till we go from re-purposed phone screens to screens specifically made for VR.
She then gets what is pretty universally considered a mediocre game at best to have amazing reviews
Could you stop repeating those lies please. Depression Quest is a Freeware game that got *zero* reviews.
But every new game they put out has been an iteratively improved copy of a lower-tech game with great gameplay put out by someone else.
Was Lost Vikings inspired by anything in particular? RPM Racing and Blackthorn took a lot of inspiration from RC Pro Am and Flashback, but I can't think of anything that quite matches Lost Vikings.
As speaker setup this might be to complicated and a waste of effort, however motion tracked virtual reality headsets are right around the corner and with them you can do some really fancy binaural 3D sound rendering on the cheap. So I would assume that the success of this depends in large part on if they will let people write support for it for the virtual-cinema players that already exist or if they shoot it dead with patents.
While there are some fancy light field displays that might be able to adjust for vision defects in software, those are still years after. However the Oculus Rift has swappable lenses, so it shouldn't be to hard to design some lenses that correct whatever vision defect you might have. The consumer version will probably have some adjustable optics to correct for vision issues, at least thats how the first wave of consumer VR headsets back in 1995 worked.
The motion sickness on the first Rift was in large part caused by the lack of position tracking that resulted in mismatches between what you saw and where your head was, that's now fixed. The DK2 has IR markers and a tracking camera that will track your head position. The DK2 also has a low persistence display that removes a lot of the motion blur that happened with the first Rift. For most people the DK2 seems to eliminate motion sickness almost completely. There might still be issues when the game itself is extremely fast paced, but most games build for VR are using a much slower and more realistic pace, so it should be fine for most part.
You have to have a game installed and launched at least once before you can play it in Offline mode. Meaning you can't play your backuped games until you have Internet again. There also was the issue that you couldn't play games that are in the mid of a patching, but I think Steam fixed that a few month ago with their changes to the way downloading works.
While on the topic, why do spreadsheets use a plain grid in the first place? Why don't they use database-like tables with labled columns? The way spreadsheets mix data and presentation never made sense to me. It's like doing programming with raw memory addresses, instead of variable names and there is little you can do to structure and query the data properly. And meanwhile coming from the other side, the grid really sucks for doing layout of the data, as you are forced to use the same column and row spacing across the whole grid, even so most data actually on the grid in non-uniform.
Quite true, I would however not call "Miner Wars 2081" a multiplayer game. While it was originally planed to have heavier focus on multiplayer, that never got properly developed and what is there, is now mostly useless with the servers being empty. That said, the game has a fully fledged single player game with a 15h long story driven campaign, which turns out surprisingly interesting. It's basically a modern take on Descent 3, just with better graphics, physics and everything.
Reviews never get updated when a game gets patched, so they tend to be a really terrible indicator for the quality of "Early Access" games. The game also got a lot of backslash from early backers because the MMO part never go finished, which makes a lot of the user reviews look kind of terrible as well. Anyway, I played the game only month after the release and never even heard about the whole MMO issue until long after and from my perspective it was absolutely awesome. A worthy Descent 3 successor as far as single player is concerned. As mentioned, the MMO left overs can be a bit confusing and the game doesn't explain some aspects very well (mined minerals can be used as engine fuel). So it can take a bit to figure out how to properly play the game, but once over that hurdle it's a blast, turned out far better then I had hoped for.
You can do all of that. You might want to check your input configuration.
It was originally planed to be a MMO, but it never became one. Miner Wars 2081 is a good old regular story driven single player game. There are some left over from it's open-world/MMO roots still in the game (e.g. locations that look like they would offer side-missions, but are just completely empty, ability to dig into asteroids and mine minerals, ship systems that are much ore complex then they need to, etc.), but none of that really goes anywhere, it's all just dead ends that the developers never got around to finish. Anyway, the core single player campaign is surprisingly good, varied missions, nice voice acting, Firefly-ish plot, 15h long and just a ton of fun once you figured out your way around the kinks of the game. My only complaint would be that the games weapons and enemies aren't quite as interesting as they were in Descent, but the mission design makes up for it. I had more fun with this game then I had with Descent 3. There is also Retrovirus, another game heavily inspired by Descent, but I haven't played much of that yet.
Yep, the important difference is that the Pi is actually available to people who want, OLPC never sold to the public, only through time limited G1G1. Never understood why they would make it so hard to buy one.