In the larger context around this issue, "embedded" means "mass produced" means "tremendous pressure to reduce per-unit costs" means "cheaper parts, plzzz!" means "32k chip is much better than 64k chip".
So that's what's going on here. It's not about the $3000 car super-radio. It's about the millions of $14-at-cost standard basic installed AM/FM radios. Or processing units in a handheld computer, watch, or game, etc. Or whatever.
Duke Nukem had bridges, ledges, and so on. The map was true 3D in that sense, though the rendering was not true 3D.
Duke Nukem and predecessors all used a trick of matrices to do what amounts to a 3D rendering -- by preventing you from looking up and down* they could remove an entire set of multiplications in the 3D rendering matrices, effectively speeding it up a magnitude, highly useful for old PCs. Yes, this ran just fine on pre-Pentium class 486 and even 386 machines.
Now Quake was the first true 3D game in that it included not just maps with bridges, etc. but the renderer was true 3D too. I.e. it didn't use that matrix reduction trick. You could tilt up and down and even flip over (though this wasn't allowed) to your heart's content.
* You could tilt up and down, but that was a distortion overlay trick, not an alteration of the rendering angle. This is why things started looking odd when you did that. Also, whether objects are "sprites" or true 3D objects is irrelevant for this discussion. Even the most modern games use sprites for particle effects, though that stretches the definition of sprite -- in this context it means a 2-D flat plane rendered in a 3D world, rather than a 3D object = a bunch of 2D planes assembled into some geometric object. Originally, a sprite was a 2D visual tied to hardware, with hardware-level control over it. And you didn't "redraw" them the hard way, you used the sprite mechanics independent of whatever background and other things you did draw "the hard way." And thus the number of sprites were fixed -- 4 I think for the old Atari, more for Colecovision.
Well, much of data processing is processing massive amounts of it in a similar fashion. This is done in an assembly-line fashion, with multiple stages of operation (called pipelining in computer science) with a chunk of data being worked on at each different stage. The stages typically involve pieces of loading, massaging, and unloading* the data.
So if the whole process takes 5 minutes, who cares if there's a 10 second overhead time prepping and kicking off the process.
But if they're trying to do it in general with millions of tiny bits of data, all processed differently, rather than large chunks of similar data, the overhead becomes dominant.
And, as mentioned, the old-school HDD compression layers made things faster because you could load the compressed info from the HDD and decompress it in RAM much faster than loading all those bytes off the HDD, uncompressed. That's not much of an issue anymore because most of the masses of data (.mp3,.jpg,.mpeg) are all highly compressed anyway, giving little advantage in byte size vs. uncompressed anymore.
"The design is not just small, but efficient. So efficient, in fact, that the tiny space cube doesn't have any bulky fans, relying instead on convection currents to keep it cool when in space."...because 31 Oct = 18 Dec! Haw haw haw!
Duke Nukem 3D's teleporters would teleport your weapon shots, too.
I loved shooting the rocket launcher into it only to hear a buddy die on the other side of the map as the rocket appeared and continued on its way.
I don't recall if you jumped into the teleporter if you'd exit and continue your jump arc, but there is precident for "movement in progress" teleportation.
Also don't forget to lock down the jewelry, the liquor cabinet, and so on. And don't just put some necklaces between mattresses or in a cup on the window sill over the sink.
Same for money, (real) silverware and silver dishes, gold-plated stuff, valuable stuff just sitting around in the basement or other places people don't go often.
Storytelling is overrated in favor of good old WOW factor and immersion. Consider the (first) Half-Life.
10 minutes went by before you could even exit the monorail. You were drooling at the attention to detail and immersion. And that was before you saw the spider walker construction equipment moving around.
And it was another 20 after that before you shot your first shot. It was already one of the greatest games ever made before you did much more than look around and "go to work" that day.
The first Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, some others, these all had an astounding WOW factor, but very little in terms of some deeply moving story. Much more of a wrapper thrown around some levels.
Subsequent Quakes actually lost a lot of this charm by changing the "story" from one of a marine fighting mythical monsters to one of a space marine fighting another species trying to invade Earth.
So while a good story can add to a game, it neither creates, nor is sufficient, to generate the WOW factory necessary to make a hit.
EverQuest toyed with the idea of letting you play a level 1-5 Orc running around in the newbie lands. On logging in, instead of picking a char to play, you'd click a special button and find yourself dumped into the body of a yard trash NPC.
The idea was to give some player smarts to the yard trash to spice things up. It never went anywhere. Anyone know why? It seems like it would be a tremendously fun option.
Some day a game will come along that will allow more stuff like that, it will turn out to be very popular, and will become part of the standard design of MMORPGs in the future, the way instancing, auction houses, and other newer developments have added to the "standard" game over the years.
Star Wars doesn't even know what a vibrosword actually is.
It's a real technology akin to a electric turkey slicer on steriods. The principle is you have a little device that causes the blade to vibrate back and forth a miniscule amount but at incredibile speeds. More akin to a hum than a reciprocation.
The theory is that this will effectively induce a slicing motion back and forth at a level large enough to do normal cutting, i.e. separation of molecules, and the vibration is such a high speed it should slice through flesh and so on like butter.
Other than that, the vibrosword is nothing special, and would be sliced in half just like a "regular" sword.
If they're going to technobabble something, they really shouldn't pick the name of something that's already defined.
> Only the very first missions are actually flown in a no-shields TIE-Fighter. > Later you get to fly TIEs with shields
Darth Vader: Admiral Pooet
Admiral Pooet: Yes, Lord Vader?
Vader: Whose bright idea was it to send out recruits in ships without proper shielding?
Admiral Pooet: It was mine, Lord Vader. They didn't deserve it because then it would be too easy to accomplish their missions.
Vader: And this lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of these fighters?
Admiral Pooet: Yyyy...essss.
Vader: The Empire has vast resources, Admiral, but not infinite ones. Have you never heard the old saying that if you find yourself in a fair fight, you haven't done your homework?
(Pooet collapses)
Vader: Admiral Foopfoop?
Admiral Foopfoop: (visibly uncomfortable) Yes, Lord Vader?
Vader: Please send for Moff Krunktor. I wish to discuss with him sending out recruit stormtroopers with defective blasters that have a tough killing those little squeeky mouse/doggie robots in fewer than 8 hits.
Foopfoop: Yes, Lord Vader.
Vader: (To himself) Which reminds me, I have to go have a "chat" with the Sith Academy teacher on Korriban. I don't like these pathetic lightsabers the young Sith are using which can't seem to effortlessly cut through a metal sword or suit of armor, to say nothing of melting a huge hole in a reinforced door.
Ya, save the franchise? The prequels crashed the franchise into a thick, thick wall. This cartoony CGI thing is like trying to start the engine and then accelerate, from an initial position inside the wall itself.
> Ugly animation
Ugly? They're duplicating that ridiculously gigantic upper torso ala the modern Superman and Batman cartoons, aren't they?
It's beyond stupid and redundant. Hackers already have whole lists of all known words and proper nouns, not to mention common misspellings, and automated scripts to add 1's, caps to normal "spots", etc., if necessary.
So it would be fairly easy, if it would take awhile, to generate the password hash for every single MP3 floating around and hook it to your own search bot.
And, as usual, social engineering overrides this too.
> Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people > and objects invisible.
I see the nerd's dream is almost complete. Just finish this off and then you can go stand in the girls' gym locker room. As long as you tiptoe around quietly and don't bump into things you should be fine.
Oh, wait! I forgot! The thing'll need to cloak not just sight and maybe sound, but also stench. Based on the Saturday morning Warhammer backroom at the local hobby shop when I pick up my kid, nerds of college age and beyond give off a horrible stench owing to a lack of bathing. Given there's no known solution to reduce this stench (or else the nerds would, obviously, use it), a "stench cloak" will have to be developed.
> "When Cassini makes its closest approach (50 km) during the flyby of the > moon Enceladus next Monday 11 August, the spacecraft will be zipping by > too quickly to turn and image in the usual way"
And here I thought Eve Online was making up a whole bunch of BS in the name of "game balancing".
Ya. Both at the border to get into the US, and after you get in. At least the former you'll be aware of. The latter doesn't even get secret court oversight anymore.
And no one would use it to spy on Obama or cronie's competitor's secrets or anything. No sir, that'd be wrong. You have to trust us we're just looking for terrists.
Look, power hungery politicians ("Let's provide Internet for dem farmers and udder folk out in cuntryside!") started heaving billions at private business, and some took it and maybe did it fraudulently.
It's a free country. You don't have to go live in the boondocks. You can, of course, if you want to. But don't whine when you can't get easy access to Internet. Or Phone. Or natural gas. Or electricity. Or even, in some cases, a passable road.
That's the hard fact of reality. They're being "cut off" from something they would, possibly, have never gotten on their own. You can guy satellite Internet anywhere. Why it's being spoon-fed to them by politicians so they can play "see what good things I do!" games at the next election, I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice 99% of the posts ignore that crucial word.
In the larger context around this issue, "embedded" means "mass produced" means "tremendous pressure to reduce per-unit costs" means "cheaper parts, plzzz!" means "32k chip is much better than 64k chip".
So that's what's going on here. It's not about the $3000 car super-radio. It's about the millions of $14-at-cost standard basic installed AM/FM radios. Or processing units in a handheld computer, watch, or game, etc. Or whatever.
Duke Nukem had bridges, ledges, and so on. The map was true 3D in that sense, though the rendering was not true 3D.
Duke Nukem and predecessors all used a trick of matrices to do what amounts to a 3D rendering -- by preventing you from looking up and down* they could remove an entire set of multiplications in the 3D rendering matrices, effectively speeding it up a magnitude, highly useful for old PCs. Yes, this ran just fine on pre-Pentium class 486 and even 386 machines.
Now Quake was the first true 3D game in that it included not just maps with bridges, etc. but the renderer was true 3D too. I.e. it didn't use that matrix reduction trick. You could tilt up and down and even flip over (though this wasn't allowed) to your heart's content.
* You could tilt up and down, but that was a distortion overlay trick, not an alteration of the rendering angle. This is why things started looking odd when you did that. Also, whether objects are "sprites" or true 3D objects is irrelevant for this discussion. Even the most modern games use sprites for particle effects, though that stretches the definition of sprite -- in this context it means a 2-D flat plane rendered in a 3D world, rather than a 3D object = a bunch of 2D planes assembled into some geometric object. Originally, a sprite was a 2D visual tied to hardware, with hardware-level control over it. And you didn't "redraw" them the hard way, you used the sprite mechanics independent of whatever background and other things you did draw "the hard way." And thus the number of sprites were fixed -- 4 I think for the old Atari, more for Colecovision.
Well, much of data processing is processing massive amounts of it in a similar fashion. This is done in an assembly-line fashion, with multiple stages of operation (called pipelining in computer science) with a chunk of data being worked on at each different stage. The stages typically involve pieces of loading, massaging, and unloading* the data.
So if the whole process takes 5 minutes, who cares if there's a 10 second overhead time prepping and kicking off the process.
But if they're trying to do it in general with millions of tiny bits of data, all processed differently, rather than large chunks of similar data, the overhead becomes dominant.
And, as mentioned, the old-school HDD compression layers made things faster because you could load the compressed info from the HDD and decompress it in RAM much faster than loading all those bytes off the HDD, uncompressed. That's not much of an issue anymore because most of the masses of data (.mp3, .jpg, .mpeg) are all highly compressed anyway, giving little advantage in byte size vs. uncompressed anymore.
* Softball lobbed for somebody
There's small and then there's small.
The article continues:
"The design is not just small, but efficient. So efficient, in fact, that the tiny space cube doesn't have any bulky fans, relying instead on convection currents to keep it cool when in space." ...because 31 Oct = 18 Dec! Haw haw haw!
Duke Nukem 3D's teleporters would teleport your weapon shots, too.
I loved shooting the rocket launcher into it only to hear a buddy die on the other side of the map as the rocket appeared and continued on its way.
I don't recall if you jumped into the teleporter if you'd exit and continue your jump arc, but there is precident for "movement in progress" teleportation.
From the new list of "features":
> nullptr: a name for the null pointer
#define nullptr NULL
There, that was hard.
Also don't forget to lock down the jewelry, the liquor cabinet, and so on. And don't just put some necklaces between mattresses or in a cup on the window sill over the sink.
Same for money, (real) silverware and silver dishes, gold-plated stuff, valuable stuff just sitting around in the basement or other places people don't go often.
Storytelling is overrated in favor of good old WOW factor and immersion. Consider the (first) Half-Life.
10 minutes went by before you could even exit the monorail. You were drooling at the attention to detail and immersion. And that was before you saw the spider walker construction equipment moving around.
And it was another 20 after that before you shot your first shot. It was already one of the greatest games ever made before you did much more than look around and "go to work" that day.
The first Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, some others, these all had an astounding WOW factor, but very little in terms of some deeply moving story. Much more of a wrapper thrown around some levels.
Subsequent Quakes actually lost a lot of this charm by changing the "story" from one of a marine fighting mythical monsters to one of a space marine fighting another species trying to invade Earth.
So while a good story can add to a game, it neither creates, nor is sufficient, to generate the WOW factory necessary to make a hit.
The second could be fixed by reducing or eliminating the XP and "drops".
"But then nobody will want to fight them!"
A. No. It's more exciting. Only sickening losers would run from this in favor of pointless leveling. What were you playing the game for again?
B. That's what the first "problem" is for. :)
> and BJ Blazkowicz's new ability to "shroud" himself.
I first read this as "and BJ Blazkowicz's new ability to "shard" himself."
"Uhhh, that's not very productive."
Don't laugh.
EverQuest toyed with the idea of letting you play a level 1-5 Orc running around in the newbie lands. On logging in, instead of picking a char to play, you'd click a special button and find yourself dumped into the body of a yard trash NPC.
The idea was to give some player smarts to the yard trash to spice things up. It never went anywhere. Anyone know why? It seems like it would be a tremendously fun option.
Some day a game will come along that will allow more stuff like that, it will turn out to be very popular, and will become part of the standard design of MMORPGs in the future, the way instancing, auction houses, and other newer developments have added to the "standard" game over the years.
Star Wars doesn't even know what a vibrosword actually is.
It's a real technology akin to a electric turkey slicer on steriods. The principle is you have a little device that causes the blade to vibrate back and forth a miniscule amount but at incredibile speeds. More akin to a hum than a reciprocation.
The theory is that this will effectively induce a slicing motion back and forth at a level large enough to do normal cutting, i.e. separation of molecules, and the vibration is such a high speed it should slice through flesh and so on like butter.
Other than that, the vibrosword is nothing special, and would be sliced in half just like a "regular" sword.
If they're going to technobabble something, they really shouldn't pick the name of something that's already defined.
But they got rid of Tony "Bush's Puppy" Blaire! This was supposed to stop!
I'm sure of it. After all, we know from history that's how things work. In my heart it would work that way. :rollseyes:
> Bioware has been working on a KOTOR-era MMO for a few years. I was recently confirmed.
What does your religion have to do with it?
Oh, wait. Jedi. Nevermind.
> Only the very first missions are actually flown in a no-shields TIE-Fighter.
> Later you get to fly TIEs with shields
Darth Vader: Admiral Pooet
Admiral Pooet: Yes, Lord Vader?
Vader: Whose bright idea was it to send out recruits in ships without proper shielding?
Admiral Pooet: It was mine, Lord Vader. They didn't deserve it because then it would be too easy to accomplish their missions.
Vader: And this lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of these fighters?
Admiral Pooet: Yyyy...essss.
Vader: The Empire has vast resources, Admiral, but not infinite ones. Have you never heard the old saying that if you find yourself in a fair fight, you haven't done your homework?
(Pooet collapses)
Vader: Admiral Foopfoop?
Admiral Foopfoop: (visibly uncomfortable) Yes, Lord Vader?
Vader: Please send for Moff Krunktor. I wish to discuss with him sending out recruit stormtroopers with defective blasters that have a tough killing those little squeeky mouse/doggie robots in fewer than 8 hits.
Foopfoop: Yes, Lord Vader.
Vader: (To himself) Which reminds me, I have to go have a "chat" with the Sith Academy teacher on Korriban. I don't like these pathetic lightsabers the young Sith are using which can't seem to effortlessly cut through a metal sword or suit of armor, to say nothing of melting a huge hole in a reinforced door.
Ya, save the franchise? The prequels crashed the franchise into a thick, thick wall. This cartoony CGI thing is like trying to start the engine and then accelerate, from an initial position inside the wall itself.
> Ugly animation
Ugly? They're duplicating that ridiculously gigantic upper torso ala the modern Superman and Batman cartoons, aren't they?
"Hey, baby. Wanna see my heavy particles?"
"Hey, no, how you doin? Wanna see my large hadron collider?"
"Hey, baby. Wanna go in the back and see...the injection apparatus?"
"Hey, baby. Wanna see my microscopic object that only lasts a nanosecond before it goes away? Oh, wait. That came out wrong."
It's beyond stupid and redundant. Hackers already have whole lists of all known words and proper nouns, not to mention common misspellings, and automated scripts to add 1's, caps to normal "spots", etc., if necessary.
So it would be fairly easy, if it would take awhile, to generate the password hash for every single MP3 floating around and hook it to your own search bot.
And, as usual, social engineering overrides this too.
> Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people
> and objects invisible.
I see the nerd's dream is almost complete. Just finish this off and then you can go stand in the girls' gym locker room. As long as you tiptoe around quietly and don't bump into things you should be fine.
Oh, wait! I forgot! The thing'll need to cloak not just sight and maybe sound, but also stench. Based on the Saturday morning Warhammer backroom at the local hobby shop when I pick up my kid, nerds of college age and beyond give off a horrible stench owing to a lack of bathing. Given there's no known solution to reduce this stench (or else the nerds would, obviously, use it), a "stench cloak" will have to be developed.
> Computer Beats Pro At US Go Congress
Now if only we could find a robot that could beat Congress like a pro.
> "When Cassini makes its closest approach (50 km) during the flyby of the
> moon Enceladus next Monday 11 August, the spacecraft will be zipping by
> too quickly to turn and image in the usual way"
And here I thought Eve Online was making up a whole bunch of BS in the name of "game balancing".
Oh come on. They probably had the same mailman for those two years.
Neanderthals and Humans Diverged 660K Years Ago
Odd, given the Earth is only 8000 years old and that Neanderthal (isn't it Neander t al now?) bones are planted by the Devil to deceive us.
Ya. Both at the border to get into the US, and after you get in. At least the former you'll be aware of. The latter doesn't even get secret court oversight anymore.
And no one would use it to spy on Obama or cronie's competitor's secrets or anything. No sir, that'd be wrong. You have to trust us we're just looking for terrists.
So what? Oranges are not the only fruit.
Look, power hungery politicians ("Let's provide Internet for dem farmers and udder folk out in cuntryside!") started heaving billions at private business, and some took it and maybe did it fraudulently.
It's a free country. You don't have to go live in the boondocks. You can, of course, if you want to. But don't whine when you can't get easy access to Internet. Or Phone. Or natural gas. Or electricity. Or even, in some cases, a passable road.
That's the hard fact of reality. They're being "cut off" from something they would, possibly, have never gotten on their own. You can guy satellite Internet anywhere. Why it's being spoon-fed to them by politicians so they can play "see what good things I do!" games at the next election, I don't know.
Oh, wait. That was the reason.