Descent is sadly missed. I still remember that feeling of utter vertigo and disorientation when you fly into a cavern, flip upside down, reorient to nearest surface and... wtf which way did I come in? Which way even is 'up'? Aieee! There is no up! I'm stuck in space in the middle of an asteroid with a reactor about to blow! I'm fifteen kinds of dead and my lunch is coming up!
"I never finished Quake. In a lot of ways I consider Doom superior. Although now that I'm older I do appreciate what Quake did, bringing true 3D in compared to Doom's engine, but I hated the game."
Same here. When I first saw Wolfenstein 3D around 1992 my jaw absolutely dropped. Texture mapping! Real-time 3D! Then when I saw Doom it was: Polygonal maps! Lighting! Shotgun!
Then Dark Forces and wow, real laser blasts! Stormtroopers! Cutscenes! A plot! Multi-level buildings! Rotating doors! Looking up and down!
Then Duke Nukem 3D and: interactable objects! City streets! Mirrors! Pool tables! Suddenly a whole virtual world can be simulated!
Then Quake and it was:huh? No colours? No objects? Big ugly blocky stuff which I can't see what it is? Everything a cheap rehash of caves and castles and crates? This is supposed to be better?
Admittedly this was before mouselook was standard - that changed everything.
But it was a big, big letdown, and that's when I realised id could write engines, but not design levels.
"Suddenly, all the industry wanted was shoot'em-ups and blow'em-ups, catering almost exclusively to the lowest common denominator. Gaming became like television, a way to waste time in some brain dead activity that reduced you to a twitching zombie-like state. "
"In theory, you could use a small glass of water, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, as your propellant for an entire trip to Mars and back."
Plus, it makes an entertaining practical joke when someone on board gets thirsty!
However it's more traditional to use a small piece of fairy cake for this purpose.
While it's true that the Pioneers and Voyagers used RTGs, it's interesting that the SNAP program developed both RTGs (odd-numbered) and fission reactors (even numbered). SNAP 10A apparently was the only true reactor to get launched. Only 500 watts though, so not so much bigger than an RTG, but...
"We don't need jerks like you mandating what everyone does just so you can feed your own self-righteous sense of self worth."
But what if jerks like him are mandating what everyone else does NOT to feed any kind of sense of self-worth but as a serious proposed solution to a serious problem?
Some things are simpler to organise and cheaper to manage if everyone does them. That's why we have standards.
"what we call a "Nanny State." That's a Bad Thing."
Why? A political catchphrase is not an argument, nor is it a description of an actually-existing thing. It's just a shout with no verbal content.
Think about this: real nannies exist for a reason. Real states also exist for a reason. There are certain situations where people collectively come to the decision that they don't *want* to tolerate certain types of destructive behaviour, because they cost us all. Any healthy group does this, because normal healthy humans are social creatures. We *like* to modify our behaviour so that it doesn't have stupid outcomes for the group. We call this "learning to socialise". The only people who think that a human must be an absolutely self-sufficient, take-nothing, give-nothing, hardcore screw-my-neighbour loner, are psychologically damaged individuals who haven't learned how to live with others.
It's one thing that such a syndrome exists. It's another that this psychological dysfunction has become a hugely powerful political movement. We don't need to bow down to this false idea of the heroic egotist fighting the mass of zombie sheeple trying to crush his freedom. Instead, look at each case on its merits and realise that collective problems do exist, society is not a bad thing, and that centralised responses sometimes are the right response and sometimes aren't.
So instead of just throwing a content-free slogan around, how about arguing why in *this* specific case, *this* kind of regulation is the wrong response to a serious societal problem?
"There is more to education than how you will function in society."
If that's the case, then why do I need to get mine in the form of a degree-shaped rubber stamp from a Socially Approved Education Provider (TM)?
If education has nothing to do with functioning in a society then surely it would be better for me to take charge of my own education instead of handing it over to an institution?
"Logic, however, doesn't seem to play a very important part in the equation;-)"
Right. As soon as you put data or hardware into a computer that you didn't personally design every gate and opcode yourself - especially if you connect it to a network and download self-updating commercial software - it becomes nondeterministic. The output of your computer is the function of all organisations that it receives data from, and their conflicting social agendas.
Programming hasn't been about logic but rather social engineering, literature and archeology since the distribution of preexisting software package - at least the 1960s, if not earlier. The idea that a lone programmer sat at a machine and wrestled with raw mathematics.... might have been true of Russell and Whitehead, and *maybe* briefly in the early Altair 8800 or Apple II years... but not really. You were always inhabiting someone else's design.
Now on Windows and Linux it's so much harder because when we program we're not just inhabiting one designer's mind, but a cacophony of thousands of them, each of whom wrote a tiny little piece of our software ecosystem. The result is many things, but 'logical' doesn't apply unless you know your machine down to the microcode.
"Our Russian friends had lots of freedom returned for a few years"
Where "freedom" is defined as "economic wild west corruption and massively increased death rate", yes. I can't imagine why they got tired of that.
Not saying Putin is cool, but the average citizen in Russia had a pretty hard time as a direct result of the transition to oligarchy, and it seems like the only people who made out like bandits were, well, bandits. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, only now you have to pay rent with no money.
"To go back to the programming language analogy: it's as if lawyers are programmers who code in an ambiguous language, which runs on hardware which tries to find ways to subvert the intent of the program without contradicting the literal interpretation of its instructions - or find excuses to reject those instructions altogether."
So, it's pretty much exactly like writing Javascript and CSS?
But what about all that looting, raping and killing?
You get much the same amount either way. In the cinema you see it happening on a bigger screen, but your view might be blocked by the person in front....
"versus "securely" routing everything through RIM. That model seems like it makes sense in a 1999 way"
It's my working assumption that RIM is basically a fully integrated member of the US intelligence community, and the fact that highly confidential business communications from major international corporations get routed through their servers - and that they PAY to do this! - is a really nice bonus which they have no intention of giving up. Notice whose phone Obama uses? And how easily it got NSA-modified?
It also intrigues me that setting up Blackberry service on a SIM card requires special telco magic. It's not just running over ordinary Internet over cellphone data service, no. There's some magical Blackberry sauce right down to the cell. That suggests they're a company with a fair bit of clout.
And I think about Crypto AG and wonder, 'Would Blackberry?'
Let's just say that if I owned Blackberry, heck yeah I'd have that 'AES encryption' backdoored to the hilt and be vacuuming up every corporate email I could get my hands on. It's probably best for the world that I don't.
Exciting Offer For First Time Buyers! $10,000.00 Discount Off Retail Price. Minus $10,000.00 Discount, Net Price: $25,000.00... okay I won't be plugging this into my Wii anytime soon.
I had that problem with Freenet back in about 2001 or so.
I have no idea how much content on the network then actually was child pornography, but nearly all the main search/index pages had links claiming to be child porn.
And I was paying for bandwidth to host a node.
After a while I thought 'you know, I really do not need to be facilitating the distribution of this stuff. Whether it is or is not child porn I don't know and I'm not going to click to find out, but it's claiming to be, and that's way too squicky for me. I have free choice to support this or not. I'm freely choosing to out.' And never looked back.
If the search pages had been a little more discreet I'd never have known or cared, I guess. But they weren't, they were in my face every time I logged in, so.... it was an ethical decision on my part.
These days, I really don't care that much about anonymity. I think it was reading Starhawk's 'Webs of Power' who pointed out that even if you're protesting the government, you need to be mil-sec NSA level secure if you want to go the secure route, and if you do that you'll be playing right in the big boys' sandpit using the rules of their game, while the other option is to be completely open, democratic and transparent and use secrecy against them. Pick one or the other, and the open route is generally safer.
In protesting the whole point is to facilitate *democratic* change - so if you have to be blac-bloc secret to 'lead a movement', you have a big danger of doing what the Bolsheviks did and creating a glorious people's revolutionary vanguard which learns the habit of secrecy and control and never gives it up once it gains power. You don't actually change anything by doing that, you just change the labels on the prisons. As Lenin did.
Plus, the end-game of a movement is to change hearts and minds. There's no point in seizing power unless you can convince your peers to join your cause - and if you can do that, you won't *need* to hide anything. Yes, you'll probably get stepped on, but you'll get stepped on harder if you try to play security games.
Just like sometimes in a bad neighbourhood you're safer if you don't have a gun - then every side knows you're a non-combatant.
Slashdot Mirror
"By the early 1980s, games were leaving the monochrome era."
Mmm, Galaxian, 1979. Now that was a shock. 'Games do colour now!'
The plastic overlays over Space Invaders and Pong screens don't count.
"X-axis is roll but allowing the player to roll doesn't make any sense when you're talking about an FPS."
I think games which support 'tilt to side for sneaky look-see' *almost* do roll, just not 360 degrees of it.
Descent is sadly missed. I still remember that feeling of utter vertigo and disorientation when you fly into a cavern, flip upside down, reorient to nearest surface and... wtf which way did I come in? Which way even is 'up'? Aieee! There is no up! I'm stuck in space in the middle of an asteroid with a reactor about to blow! I'm fifteen kinds of dead and my lunch is coming up!
good times, good times.
"I never finished Quake. In a lot of ways I consider Doom superior. Although now that I'm older I do appreciate what Quake did, bringing true 3D in compared to Doom's engine, but I hated the game."
Same here. When I first saw Wolfenstein 3D around 1992 my jaw absolutely dropped. Texture mapping! Real-time 3D! Then when I saw Doom it was: Polygonal maps! Lighting! Shotgun!
Then Dark Forces and wow, real laser blasts! Stormtroopers! Cutscenes! A plot! Multi-level buildings! Rotating doors! Looking up and down!
Then Duke Nukem 3D and: interactable objects! City streets! Mirrors! Pool tables! Suddenly a whole virtual world can be simulated!
Then Quake and it was:huh? No colours? No objects? Big ugly blocky stuff which I can't see what it is? Everything a cheap rehash of caves and castles and crates? This is supposed to be better?
Admittedly this was before mouselook was standard - that changed everything.
But it was a big, big letdown, and that's when I realised id could write engines, but not design levels.
"Suddenly, all the industry wanted was shoot'em-ups and blow'em-ups, catering almost exclusively to the lowest common denominator. Gaming became like television, a way to waste time in some brain dead activity that reduced you to a twitching zombie-like state. "
"Suddenly"?
I think you're forgetting some history.
Maybe this has already happened.
There's an easy way to tell...
"In theory, you could use a small glass of water, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, as your propellant for an entire trip to Mars and back."
Plus, it makes an entertaining practical joke when someone on board gets thirsty!
However it's more traditional to use a small piece of fairy cake for this purpose.
While it's true that the Pioneers and Voyagers used RTGs, it's interesting that the SNAP program developed both RTGs (odd-numbered) and fission reactors (even numbered). SNAP 10A apparently was the only true reactor to get launched. Only 500 watts though, so not so much bigger than an RTG, but...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Nuclear_Auxiliary_Power_Program
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A
"We don't need jerks like you mandating what everyone does just so you can feed your own self-righteous sense of self worth."
But what if jerks like him are mandating what everyone else does NOT to feed any kind of sense of self-worth but as a serious proposed solution to a serious problem?
Some things are simpler to organise and cheaper to manage if everyone does them. That's why we have standards.
"what we call a "Nanny State." That's a Bad Thing."
Why? A political catchphrase is not an argument, nor is it a description of an actually-existing thing. It's just a shout with no verbal content.
Think about this: real nannies exist for a reason. Real states also exist for a reason. There are certain situations where people collectively come to the decision that they don't *want* to tolerate certain types of destructive behaviour, because they cost us all. Any healthy group does this, because normal healthy humans are social creatures. We *like* to modify our behaviour so that it doesn't have stupid outcomes for the group. We call this "learning to socialise". The only people who think that a human must be an absolutely self-sufficient, take-nothing, give-nothing, hardcore screw-my-neighbour loner, are psychologically damaged individuals who haven't learned how to live with others.
It's one thing that such a syndrome exists. It's another that this psychological dysfunction has become a hugely powerful political movement. We don't need to bow down to this false idea of the heroic egotist fighting the mass of zombie sheeple trying to crush his freedom. Instead, look at each case on its merits and realise that collective problems do exist, society is not a bad thing, and that centralised responses sometimes are the right response and sometimes aren't.
So instead of just throwing a content-free slogan around, how about arguing why in *this* specific case, *this* kind of regulation is the wrong response to a serious societal problem?
"There is more to education than how you will function in society."
If that's the case, then why do I need to get mine in the form of a degree-shaped rubber stamp from a Socially Approved Education Provider (TM)?
If education has nothing to do with functioning in a society then surely it would be better for me to take charge of my own education instead of handing it over to an institution?
At least we've already had some experience with this technology.
It's okay, the odds against failure are precisely a million to one.
"Logic, however, doesn't seem to play a very important part in the equation ;-)"
Right. As soon as you put data or hardware into a computer that you didn't personally design every gate and opcode yourself - especially if you connect it to a network and download self-updating commercial software - it becomes nondeterministic. The output of your computer is the function of all organisations that it receives data from, and their conflicting social agendas.
Programming hasn't been about logic but rather social engineering, literature and archeology since the distribution of preexisting software package - at least the 1960s, if not earlier. The idea that a lone programmer sat at a machine and wrestled with raw mathematics.... might have been true of Russell and Whitehead, and *maybe* briefly in the early Altair 8800 or Apple II years... but not really. You were always inhabiting someone else's design.
Now on Windows and Linux it's so much harder because when we program we're not just inhabiting one designer's mind, but a cacophony of thousands of them, each of whom wrote a tiny little piece of our software ecosystem. The result is many things, but 'logical' doesn't apply unless you know your machine down to the microcode.
"Our Russian friends had lots of freedom returned for a few years"
Where "freedom" is defined as "economic wild west corruption and massively increased death rate", yes. I can't imagine why they got tired of that.
Not saying Putin is cool, but the average citizen in Russia had a pretty hard time as a direct result of the transition to oligarchy, and it seems like the only people who made out like bandits were, well, bandits. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, only now you have to pay rent with no money.
How was that a win again?
"To go back to the programming language analogy: it's as if lawyers are programmers who code in an ambiguous language, which runs on hardware which tries to find ways to subvert the intent of the program without contradicting the literal interpretation of its instructions - or find excuses to reject those instructions altogether."
So, it's pretty much exactly like writing Javascript and CSS?
But what about all that looting, raping and killing?
You get much the same amount either way. In the cinema you see it happening on a bigger screen, but your view might be blocked by the person in front....
"Sorry Dirac, but you don't mess with Noether."
Sadly not - it would've been a May-September romance - and he married Margit Wigner instead... but in mathematical physics fan-fiction......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac
Your scale is photons now, yes.
"versus "securely" routing everything through RIM. That model seems like it makes sense in a 1999 way"
It's my working assumption that RIM is basically a fully integrated member of the US intelligence community, and the fact that highly confidential business communications from major international corporations get routed through their servers - and that they PAY to do this! - is a really nice bonus which they have no intention of giving up. Notice whose phone Obama uses? And how easily it got NSA-modified?
It also intrigues me that setting up Blackberry service on a SIM card requires special telco magic. It's not just running over ordinary Internet over cellphone data service, no. There's some magical Blackberry sauce right down to the cell. That suggests they're a company with a fair bit of clout.
And I think about Crypto AG and wonder, 'Would Blackberry?'
Let's just say that if I owned Blackberry, heck yeah I'd have that 'AES encryption' backdoored to the hilt and be vacuuming up every corporate email I could get my hands on. It's probably best for the world that I don't.
"You can't do that any more. The SIM cards are mated to the cell phone IME."
Maybe not in America. Here in New Zealand, on the Vodafone network, we can swap SIMs like amorous kakapos.
Oh man! That's it! Want indeed.
(checks brochure)
Exciting Offer For First Time Buyers! ... okay I won't be plugging this into my Wii anytime soon.
$10,000.00 Discount Off Retail Price.
Minus $10,000.00 Discount, Net Price: $25,000.00
That sounds actually like a fun idea. I wonder how big the ball would need to be for a person to stand on it?
A couple metres maybe? Hmm. That'd probably fall into 'amusement ride' level of safety needed.
I had that problem with Freenet back in about 2001 or so.
I have no idea how much content on the network then actually was child pornography, but nearly all the main search/index pages had links claiming to be child porn.
And I was paying for bandwidth to host a node.
After a while I thought 'you know, I really do not need to be facilitating the distribution of this stuff. Whether it is or is not child porn I don't know and I'm not going to click to find out, but it's claiming to be, and that's way too squicky for me. I have free choice to support this or not. I'm freely choosing to out.' And never looked back.
If the search pages had been a little more discreet I'd never have known or cared, I guess. But they weren't, they were in my face every time I logged in, so.... it was an ethical decision on my part.
These days, I really don't care that much about anonymity. I think it was reading Starhawk's 'Webs of Power' who pointed out that even if you're protesting the government, you need to be mil-sec NSA level secure if you want to go the secure route, and if you do that you'll be playing right in the big boys' sandpit using the rules of their game, while the other option is to be completely open, democratic and transparent and use secrecy against them. Pick one or the other, and the open route is generally safer.
In protesting the whole point is to facilitate *democratic* change - so if you have to be blac-bloc secret to 'lead a movement', you have a big danger of doing what the Bolsheviks did and creating a glorious people's revolutionary vanguard which learns the habit of secrecy and control and never gives it up once it gains power. You don't actually change anything by doing that, you just change the labels on the prisons. As Lenin did.
Plus, the end-game of a movement is to change hearts and minds. There's no point in seizing power unless you can convince your peers to join your cause - and if you can do that, you won't *need* to hide anything. Yes, you'll probably get stepped on, but you'll get stepped on harder if you try to play security games.
Just like sometimes in a bad neighbourhood you're safer if you don't have a gun - then every side knows you're a non-combatant.
http://www.amazon.com/Webs-Power-Starhawk/dp/1897408137/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255641610&sr=8-4
"You can get the X-COM series ( UFO Defense, Terror from the Deep, and Apocalypse ) from various online sources for something like $5 US"
URL?