If you haven't read Cryptonomicon from Neal Stephenson, now is the time. It's a grueling journey (800+ pages) but well worth your time. It's available in soft cover now too, relatively cheap. It'll make you want to read his work again, once you get past his weird 2nd person narrative style.
Ironically enough, I like Stephenson better than Gibson now (for his more current works), when in the beginning I sought the same type of material as Gibson and found Stephenson. Cryptonomicon is an epic masterpiece that spans many decades. I can't wait for his next novel.
Part of his 'dark cyberpunk' appeal in his past books was indeed the social repercussions of technology and how it affected both micro and macrocosms. In Neuromancer, Case was a loner, a hacker and a drug addict and ended up getting fried trying to crack a system. Alot of his friends ended up getting flatlined also. This paralleled the do-no-harm crackers back in the day (think Free Kevin) that really didn't damage systems, just explored them and exploited them. Ultimately Case wasn't in it for the money, he was in it for the challenge, the thrill of the hunt. 99% of real 'hackers' are in it for the same reason (and yes I know the difference between hacker and cracker). Gibson really distilled the cracker/hacker ethic at the time of that novel and focused it into a well-rounded character.
Gibson has always been about exploring social connotations of technical evolution; hell, the whole genre is about that. Asimov had his decades of exploring the concept of humans living with robots and the pitfalls and joys they might encounter. Gibson now seems to be taking less the position of fortune teller and more the position of commentator on our times. Unless you're living in a coma, PR won't come as a surprise, and it's version of tomorrow could literally be tomorrow.
Call me old fashioned, but I liked his writing better when he wrote about the gritty, dirty underworld of the supercool. Maybe he SHOULD stop blogging.;)
Re:steganography, reviewers and dictionaries....
on
William Gibson on Blogging
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· Score: 5, Informative
Don't waste your time. Actually, if you're a big fan of his older stuff (Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, etc) then you'll probably hate it. I thought he started losing it around the time of All Tomorrow's Parties (but I doubt anyone here would agree with me) and this book continues in the same wandering, aimless, boring prose. Gone is his trademark mile-a-minute, high tech crime and criminals, ultra-cool underworld, replaced with a cleaner view of tomorrow.
Come on. It's based on the premise of someone releasing video clips onto the internet and people finding them. There's a whole cult following, and a marketing mogul catches wind of it and finances the main character so she can get to the root of it. Bor-ing. But since ATP was so bad, I decided to give him another chance. Never again, Mr. Gibson. At least I have the older books to remember when he was great.
BTW nazi mods, this isn't a troll. Take it with a grain of salt.
I don't know where you live, but here in Dallas, you can get Airband for high speed internet to businesses, schools, condos, etc.
Airband rocks. Their connection is never down and they have no wiring to you, it's all 100% wireless. They throw an antenna on your roof, you wire some ethernet to their box inside, and you've got their service.
In this situation (in this town) I'd get Airband with a decent bandwidth plan. You can either go wired by doing ethernet to each unit or you can go wireless. Personally I'd choose ethernet just for flexibility (i.e. the cards are cheaper than donuts and everyone has one at this point). Wireless is a good concept but expensive to introduce. Not sure if the residents want to fuel the convenience of wireless AND buy their own hardware to boot.
At any rate, if you can get Airband or a similar wireless service where you live, go for it. My friend and I were gaming with a 30 ping during a horrible thunderstorm that took out a power transformer a block away and cut the lights twice. Never dropped a packet.:)
"I'd not seen that the United States was looking to take over other countries to send American Peoples there to settle and have 16 kids a family and out-breed the "Untermensch"."
Have a look at the Jewish settlements pushing into what used to be Palestinian land. Pretty familiar according to your words. And the immigrant status given to new and proven Jews is a pretty sweet deal as well.
If that were the case then Namco would've sued them a long, long time ago for using the Pac Man logo (which I guarantee is copyrighted) on one of the character's shirts in every strip.
Strangely enough, either Namco knows and doesn't care, or they have no clue that Pac Man is in every strip. It can be argued that Pac Man isn't represented in a good light due to the frequent cursing in the strips and weird situations he ends up in. Then again, Namco isn't American Greetings.
Overall I see no idea why American Greetings gives a shit about this one strip. Strawberry Shortcake, as a valuable product, has been stone dead since the mid eighties. They'd be lucky to pull in $100 a year from that expired product line. No cartoons = no sales.
Re:Small form factor roundup on Ars today
on
Mini-Box M-100
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· Score: 1
Props to the low user number.:)
And honestly, nothing has changed since the good old 300A to 450 days of the Celeron. Bump the multiplier, bump the voltage if necessary. Every good motherboard will provide you with incremental settings for everything. My Soyo Dragon Platinum lets me bump voltage by half-steps and all that jazz.
If anything, overclocking has gotten better over the years. The only drawback is that Athlons run hot to begin with, so overclocking isn't always an option unless you're positive you've got a wonderful heat sink and plenty of fans. The old Celerons could handle it because they could throttle themselves instead of melting down. I think Athlons still can't do this.
You just gave me a great idea. I've been looking for a mame-friendly tiny box to hook up to the TV, and this may just be the thing.
Better yet, with a tiny backlit, full color lcd display, I could haul around a 1/2 din sized arcade. No hard drive necessary, as I could load all the roms I want onto a compact flash card. I was thinking about getting a GamePark32 for this but I may change my mind now.
Then again, the GamePark is $300 cheaper. Oh well.
Re:3 words: Car Ogg Player
on
Mini-Box M-100
·
· Score: 1
Actually he's right, newer processors do float better than integer from what I've seen. Typically though, Intel has been worse at float and better at integer and AMD's have been the exact opposite. Might be my imagination, but I believe ugly hacks like MMX and 3dNow were designed to make up for the shortcomings in older x86 chipsets.
I challenge you to find 4 apps that require and/or excel with MMX. MMX was just never really utilized. SSE and SSE2, that's a different story.
2d quality? Who gives a rat's ass? Nvidia is 'good enough' and the 3d image quality and speed is better than 'good enough'. I've had zero complaints with my ti4200.
Then again, I don't spend 90% of my time in Photoshop either. ATI might matter then, but right now, it doesn't.
My favorite thing about AG was that it had a nice little linux shell client that worked alongside the web interface. You're right, it just worked and it worked well most of the time.
giFT, Kazaa, Shareazaa and all the bullshit these days is a test of patience.
Uh, actually, I'd venture a guess and say that about 75% of movie covers in a rental store have sexy women on them. I'm not talking about the 'romantic comedy' or 'drama' sections either.
Face it, the minute the marketroids in this country decided that sex sells, it was all over. Even Baywatch, with zero content, sells T&A worldwide and is still really popular.
There will always be those who grab something for the cover and those who grab something for the content. Same goes for books or anything else. I'll take my movies in a plain brown box with a decent (i.e. not the asinine Blockbuster-esque) summary on the box. Ever notice just how many sci-fi movies have shiny reflective covers? Future = sci fi = shiny metallics.
Unfortunately it's like this everywhere. I'm a big fan of Sport Compact Car but couldn't care less about the boobgirls they have on every freakin' ad.
Evidently it was hell working on that film. The weather, the close quarters, and Kubrick's style really contributed to a subtext of madness the characters portrayed. I think Nicholson actually did go a little crazy for real, but it was intentional.
What leads you to believe it "would look like ass on a PS2"? The hardware on the Xbox isn't even current compared to the pc dev systems that Id is coding the game on. Remember 9 months ago when Carmack was saying 'get a geforce4 or radeon 9xxx so you can play Doom3'?
It won't look any worse on PS2 than it will the Xbox.
I remember reading about a prototype car from Mazda called the HX-7 a few years ago. It had a rotary engine and was designed to burn hydrogen. The fuel delivery system used compressed hydrogen pellets, which were either theoretical at the time or undergoing development. The pellets would shoot into the tank and the tank would heat up, releasing the hydrogen under great pressure into the fuel lines.
Too bad it never got built, but who knows, if Wired's issue before last is right, we might have it in a decade or so.
Your engineering point is especially well made when you consider two more performance factors. 1. hp/liter and 2. specific output. My wife's new 2003 Accord v6 coupe makes around 240hp with its 3.0 liter engine. Following this design logic, an 8.3 liter engine should have around 650+ hp. I'm no Viper expert but I think stock, the v10 has around 500hp and plenty of torque. That seems wasteful from my perspective. Also the 2.0 liter 4 cylinder engine in the s2000 makes almost 240hp. Granted, it's a miracle of japanese engineering and it revs like crazy and has crappy torque, but it still has remarkable peak hp for its displacement. The Viper does one thing exceedingly well: illustrate the inferiority of old-school pushrod engineering.
All in all the Viper, from an engineering standpoint, is a pretty big disappointment. I'll take a Supra or an NSX over it any day when it comes to rwd supercars.
Slashdot Mirror
If you haven't read Cryptonomicon from Neal Stephenson, now is the time. It's a grueling journey (800+ pages) but well worth your time. It's available in soft cover now too, relatively cheap. It'll make you want to read his work again, once you get past his weird 2nd person narrative style.
Ironically enough, I like Stephenson better than Gibson now (for his more current works), when in the beginning I sought the same type of material as Gibson and found Stephenson. Cryptonomicon is an epic masterpiece that spans many decades. I can't wait for his next novel.
It's the level with the really high framerates and unlimited polygons and lighting effects.
Oh and you're not armed. Or shouldn't be. It's one of those wacky RPG's where anything can happen.
Yeah really, where's the karma whore posting the BitTorrent link to the demo?
Part of his 'dark cyberpunk' appeal in his past books was indeed the social repercussions of technology and how it affected both micro and macrocosms. In Neuromancer, Case was a loner, a hacker and a drug addict and ended up getting fried trying to crack a system. Alot of his friends ended up getting flatlined also. This paralleled the do-no-harm crackers back in the day (think Free Kevin) that really didn't damage systems, just explored them and exploited them. Ultimately Case wasn't in it for the money, he was in it for the challenge, the thrill of the hunt. 99% of real 'hackers' are in it for the same reason (and yes I know the difference between hacker and cracker). Gibson really distilled the cracker/hacker ethic at the time of that novel and focused it into a well-rounded character.
;)
Gibson has always been about exploring social connotations of technical evolution; hell, the whole genre is about that. Asimov had his decades of exploring the concept of humans living with robots and the pitfalls and joys they might encounter. Gibson now seems to be taking less the position of fortune teller and more the position of commentator on our times. Unless you're living in a coma, PR won't come as a surprise, and it's version of tomorrow could literally be tomorrow.
Call me old fashioned, but I liked his writing better when he wrote about the gritty, dirty underworld of the supercool. Maybe he SHOULD stop blogging.
Don't waste your time. Actually, if you're a big fan of his older stuff (Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, etc) then you'll probably hate it. I thought he started losing it around the time of All Tomorrow's Parties (but I doubt anyone here would agree with me) and this book continues in the same wandering, aimless, boring prose. Gone is his trademark mile-a-minute, high tech crime and criminals, ultra-cool underworld, replaced with a cleaner view of tomorrow.
Come on. It's based on the premise of someone releasing video clips onto the internet and people finding them. There's a whole cult following, and a marketing mogul catches wind of it and finances the main character so she can get to the root of it. Bor-ing. But since ATP was so bad, I decided to give him another chance. Never again, Mr. Gibson. At least I have the older books to remember when he was great.
BTW nazi mods, this isn't a troll. Take it with a grain of salt.
I don't know where you live, but here in Dallas, you can get Airband for high speed internet to businesses, schools, condos, etc.
:)
Airband rocks. Their connection is never down and they have no wiring to you, it's all 100% wireless. They throw an antenna on your roof, you wire some ethernet to their box inside, and you've got their service.
In this situation (in this town) I'd get Airband with a decent bandwidth plan. You can either go wired by doing ethernet to each unit or you can go wireless. Personally I'd choose ethernet just for flexibility (i.e. the cards are cheaper than donuts and everyone has one at this point). Wireless is a good concept but expensive to introduce. Not sure if the residents want to fuel the convenience of wireless AND buy their own hardware to boot.
At any rate, if you can get Airband or a similar wireless service where you live, go for it. My friend and I were gaming with a 30 ping during a horrible thunderstorm that took out a power transformer a block away and cut the lights twice. Never dropped a packet.
Actually it'd be something like...
In Soviet Russia...the PC silences YOU
"I'd not seen that the United States was looking to take over other countries to send American Peoples there to settle and have 16 kids a family and out-breed the "Untermensch"."
Have a look at the Jewish settlements pushing into what used to be Palestinian land. Pretty familiar according to your words. And the immigrant status given to new and proven Jews is a pretty sweet deal as well.
If that were the case then Namco would've sued them a long, long time ago for using the Pac Man logo (which I guarantee is copyrighted) on one of the character's shirts in every strip.
Strangely enough, either Namco knows and doesn't care, or they have no clue that Pac Man is in every strip. It can be argued that Pac Man isn't represented in a good light due to the frequent cursing in the strips and weird situations he ends up in. Then again, Namco isn't American Greetings.
Overall I see no idea why American Greetings gives a shit about this one strip. Strawberry Shortcake, as a valuable product, has been stone dead since the mid eighties. They'd be lucky to pull in $100 a year from that expired product line. No cartoons = no sales.
Props to the low user number. :)
And honestly, nothing has changed since the good old 300A to 450 days of the Celeron. Bump the multiplier, bump the voltage if necessary. Every good motherboard will provide you with incremental settings for everything. My Soyo Dragon Platinum lets me bump voltage by half-steps and all that jazz.
If anything, overclocking has gotten better over the years. The only drawback is that Athlons run hot to begin with, so overclocking isn't always an option unless you're positive you've got a wonderful heat sink and plenty of fans. The old Celerons could handle it because they could throttle themselves instead of melting down. I think Athlons still can't do this.
You just gave me a great idea. I've been looking for a mame-friendly tiny box to hook up to the TV, and this may just be the thing.
Better yet, with a tiny backlit, full color lcd display, I could haul around a 1/2 din sized arcade. No hard drive necessary, as I could load all the roms I want onto a compact flash card. I was thinking about getting a GamePark32 for this but I may change my mind now.
Then again, the GamePark is $300 cheaper. Oh well.
Actually he's right, newer processors do float better than integer from what I've seen. Typically though, Intel has been worse at float and better at integer and AMD's have been the exact opposite. Might be my imagination, but I believe ugly hacks like MMX and 3dNow were designed to make up for the shortcomings in older x86 chipsets.
I challenge you to find 4 apps that require and/or excel with MMX. MMX was just never really utilized. SSE and SSE2, that's a different story.
2d quality? Who gives a rat's ass? Nvidia is 'good enough' and the 3d image quality and speed is better than 'good enough'. I've had zero complaints with my ti4200.
Then again, I don't spend 90% of my time in Photoshop either. ATI might matter then, but right now, it doesn't.
That rules. Your p2p client is better than your OS.
My favorite thing about AG was that it had a nice little linux shell client that worked alongside the web interface. You're right, it just worked and it worked well most of the time.
giFT, Kazaa, Shareazaa and all the bullshit these days is a test of patience.
Ho ho! That's the same attitude most companies take towards linux gaming and/or OSX gaming as well.
Ironic, isn't it? If you don't make the games you don't attract the gamers..but without the gamers, why make the game? Chicken, egg.
Uh, actually, I'd venture a guess and say that about 75% of movie covers in a rental store have sexy women on them. I'm not talking about the 'romantic comedy' or 'drama' sections either.
Face it, the minute the marketroids in this country decided that sex sells, it was all over. Even Baywatch, with zero content, sells T&A worldwide and is still really popular.
There will always be those who grab something for the cover and those who grab something for the content. Same goes for books or anything else. I'll take my movies in a plain brown box with a decent (i.e. not the asinine Blockbuster-esque) summary on the box. Ever notice just how many sci-fi movies have shiny reflective covers? Future = sci fi = shiny metallics.
Unfortunately it's like this everywhere. I'm a big fan of Sport Compact Car but couldn't care less about the boobgirls they have on every freakin' ad.
True, I'm just waiting for Myxlplyx to be Dubya's running mate in the next elections.
I think you might be referring to the vibrator stick attachment that syncs up with that music game. Looks pretty liberal to me :)
Evidently it was hell working on that film. The weather, the close quarters, and Kubrick's style really contributed to a subtext of madness the characters portrayed. I think Nicholson actually did go a little crazy for real, but it was intentional.
And Olive Oyl nearly quit the film 3 times.
LOL look at the crackhead moderation today!
I get a -1 flamebait, down from my +2 normal postings, and the original flamebaiter claiming 'it will look like ass on ps2' gets a +5.
Tell your dealer I said wassup.
What leads you to believe it "would look like ass on a PS2"? The hardware on the Xbox isn't even current compared to the pc dev systems that Id is coding the game on. Remember 9 months ago when Carmack was saying 'get a geforce4 or radeon 9xxx so you can play Doom3'?
It won't look any worse on PS2 than it will the Xbox.
I remember reading about a prototype car from Mazda called the HX-7 a few years ago. It had a rotary engine and was designed to burn hydrogen. The fuel delivery system used compressed hydrogen pellets, which were either theoretical at the time or undergoing development. The pellets would shoot into the tank and the tank would heat up, releasing the hydrogen under great pressure into the fuel lines.
Too bad it never got built, but who knows, if Wired's issue before last is right, we might have it in a decade or so.
Actually the Lotus Elise with the Integra Type R engine conversion is a bad little beast as well.
:)
You can spank Mustang Cobras with it too.
Your engineering point is especially well made when you consider two more performance factors. 1. hp/liter and 2. specific output. My wife's new 2003 Accord v6 coupe makes around 240hp with its 3.0 liter engine. Following this design logic, an 8.3 liter engine should have around 650+ hp. I'm no Viper expert but I think stock, the v10 has around 500hp and plenty of torque. That seems wasteful from my perspective. Also the 2.0 liter 4 cylinder engine in the s2000 makes almost 240hp. Granted, it's a miracle of japanese engineering and it revs like crazy and has crappy torque, but it still has remarkable peak hp for its displacement. The Viper does one thing exceedingly well: illustrate the inferiority of old-school pushrod engineering.
All in all the Viper, from an engineering standpoint, is a pretty big disappointment. I'll take a Supra or an NSX over it any day when it comes to rwd supercars.