The problem is that TCP will guarantee that the client will get the data whether it's timely or not. In a game you're best off using UDP and sending events through as they happen, if a packet is lost than it's up to the game code to determine whether the data should be rebroadcast. For example, if a UDP packet is sent telling the client your character's health is now 110 points and the packet gets lost, you're better off waiting for the next packet to arrive stating your health to be 105 points rather than resending the original. In a fast environment TCP will eventually wind up sending data that may no longer be relevant, it's just a bunch of excess data that gets discarded by the client anyway.
Two: Apple has changed its relationship with the developer community. You no longer have to cough up megabucks for the documentation or tools; they're free for the asking from the Apple Developers' site, and the tools come on the OS X CD.
The problem with Apple isn't so much that's it's a closed system. It WAS their problem, it was the reason they lost to the IBM clones, but we're all beyond that now. The problem is that they're currently trying to emulate existing computer models rather than trying something different. Opening up their systems to open source is a good move, better late than never. But it isn't going to save them, between Microsoft and the Unix derivatives there isn't much room to manuever. Apple's best hope is the home market.
Computers are still alot more difficult to use than they should be. The home market would love a simple box to surf and check their email with but they're not going to buy them unless they can expect that they won't need to be replaced anytime soon. Apple is in the best place to do this, but they need to be able to guarantee the software on their boxes as well as the hardware. They seem to have a reluctance to write their own software if they can help it, probably for the reason you mentioned.
To survive they need to write their own browser, email program, Office compliant word processor, etc. No other company is going to give them what they need, neither will some well meaning ronin programmers. If they don't figure this out they'll just continue the slide towards becomming another generic PC manufacture and I'll never be able to buy my parents a computer they can easily use.
Beth: "Sure you can handle this? You have been frozen for a long time, technology has progressed a long way since then.
Joe: "No problem. No matter how far technology gets, it's all just a bunch of wires connected to other wires.
Beth: "Then what's taking you so long?"
Joe: "Can't seem to find any wires."
News Radio was such a fun show, it's a shame it started sucking in the end and got cancelled. It's also a shame NBC insisted on rotating it's timeslot every few weeks. But we'll have their bizarre quotes for the rest of time, no matter how imprecisely they're quoted.
Having fun is the whole point. It just happens that the result is useful for real work (most of the time).
It never occured to me that open source groups operated in the same way as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Guide's staff would pretty much spend all day partying, all the actual work was done by people who wandered in off the street, saw something that needed to get done, and did it. More than one open source project that operates with this strategy. Just another way Douglas Adams was ahead of his time.
I don't think this is a Republican vs. Democrat issue. Neither side is championing space exploration or more NASA funding in anything other than a token way.
Space exploration really isn't a priority for congress. What is a priority is getting as many government projects for your home state as possible, this is the reason NASA is still in business. NASA has made it a point to spread their contracts all over this nation so that a large number of senators and representatives are benefiting politically. So while no one seems to care what NASA actually accomplishes in space, they care very much what NASA spends here on Earth.
The side effect is that without widespread public support, NASA is just another government program looking to get cut. I wonder how bad of a thing these cuts will be, a drop in budget could cause NASA to stop playing the political game and just focus on unmanned research. I'm all for manned space exploration but there's got to be a better way...
I saw the Linksys router with the phone jack a few months ago and was intrigued enough to do some research. It turns out it really wasn't that cool, they pretty much just route you to some company who wants to be your long distance provider. But the existance of the box, the fact that these devices can already do all the hard work of IP telephony makes me wonder if anyone has looked into hacking them.
More specifically what I'm wondering about is whether it would be possible to set up a telephony server and have a group of these telephony boxes point to it rather than the company that sells them. It would provide a cheap, secondary form of communication that would be very easy to use. Picking up the receiver and pressing 5 on a spare phone on your desk could quickly connect you to a friend without tying up the main line. More interestingly, your server room could have a "red phone" that would ring up another server farm in another country.
So my question is, is anyone doing this stuff? Not a replacement for the phone companies, but an easy way to link these boxes together and form a small phone network?
I don't see why these scientists insist on making everything function at room temperature. At this rate liquid nitrogen will never gain household acceptance. Potentially very useful; you can use it to inflate tires, turn bananas into hammers, and cryogenically store your goldfish when you go on vacation. If this is the future, I'm not sure I want to be here.
This point seems to have not been made, so I guess I'll have to make it. On the surface it may seem like a good idea to block all these ads but think about the repercussions if you do. All of the sites you frequent won't be getting any money from advertisements when you visit them.
The problem is that the people who know how to block ads are the most technical savvy. I don't know to what extent the balance has been already shifted, but as we use these utilities we're making it less profitable to run a geek oriented site than a general one. In other words, if an advertiser can't advertise to us, they're just going to focus all their advertising budget on other sites.
This concern may seem a tad too extreme to some of you, but it's the reason I don't run any ad blocking software. The sites that I frequent I want to do as well as possible, I'll put up with ads for their sake. Granted, there are probably some tricks that can be played to get around this (have the proxy download the pictures even if they're not shown), but we're just dealing with the tip of the iceberg. The Slashdot community is pretty focused on coming up with ways to make sure we can't be monitored or counted. Just think about the consequences before you wipe yourself off the map completely.
True enough, fortunately it looks like some future games will take advantage of the addons but not require them. They indicated that some games will cache information to the hard drive to make them run faster, but you'll still be able to play directly from the discs if you like.
I think Sony and Microsoft are hedging their bets at this point. They are both looking forward to the multiplayer boom that will soon hit the console market and they want to make sure their consoles can handle it. I don't think anyone knows how to build a console only multiplayer game that won't require any patches, odds are that some sort of storage device will be required.
Of course, a hard drive can be a liability as well as a boon. If all the games that are written for the XBox expect a hard drive, the users will have to get used to managing their data. And if a few companies expect to release their games early and patch them later, because you know, the user has a hard drive, that could seriously damage a console's reputation too.
In a year we'll be alot closer to the outcome of these console wars. I'll just be sticking with my PS2 in the meantime, that where all the games I want to buy will be.
'uber-geeks' would need a decent editor with advanced functions such as vi* or emacs, for doing advanced work, whereas pico is basically 'open a file, edit it line by line manually, save file'
Hey, I spent my four years at university programming with Pico in a Unix environment. As I progressed up the classman line, I kept on taking classes that would have, "How to use Emacs" or "How to use vi" sections. The assumption was that everyone would eventually choose a real editor. I never did.
While Unix administrators probably find validity in being able to make extremely rapid changes to text files, it's less useful when programming. It is too common to make a change in some code without actually thinking about the reprocussions, having a less than optimal text editor is a reminder that programming slowly is often the best way to go.
To this day, whenever I set up a Unix box, the Pico/Pine packages are one of the first things I install. They're compact and easy to install, always a nice starting point. I do hope nothing happens that would prevent me from being able to use them in the future.
If you are even thinking about $20 then going the contracting route probably won't work out.
This is a valid concern. Consultants routinely earn so much money that they can't stop to count it all without having their head explode. But that's a rookie mistake, after you've been consulting for a while you're far more likely to die from accidently inhaling a $1,000 bill or having the solid gold brakes on your car melt as you're taking a turn. The key is that it's important to understand what you're getting yourself into before you start down the consulting route, being mega-rich isn't easy.
You fail to take into account how much money is involved in the console market. When you're producing a game with a several million dollar budget, you spend whatever is required to hit your target market. Even if it costs you twice as much to write for the PS2 than the X-Box (which it doesn't of course), you do it because the PS2 market makes it worth while. I suspect a lot of companies will be moving towards cross platform games, spending half a million to hire an additional development team is worth it if you can open up an additional market.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the X-Box has it's own problem. Their DirectX compatability means that the first wave of games for the X-Box will be released for the PC as well, if you already own a PC (as many households do) it's a difficult purchase to justify. Microsoft seems to be signing on a lot more PC game companies than console game companies, it's the latter they really need. People are only going to buy a X-Box if it offers them something they can't get anywhere else, so far it looks like someone who owns both a PS2 and a PC will be able to play any X-Box game.
There is also the Japan factor, something that's easy for us Americans to lose track of. Microsoft has maintained a strong presence in Japan for a long time, they're going to need to expand that. Even if they conquer the American market, the other companies will use the income from Japan to try to retake the states. Microsoft has a very tricky road they need to follow, they may be able to pull it off but it will involve more than just signing up a bunch of PC development houses.
Are you suggesting that GHWB lost because Mr. Clinton was pro-atheist, and GHWB was anti-atheist?
That whole election is ancient history in my mind, but I don't remember even hearing about that when it happened. I doubt that quote by itself cost him very many votes. It does reflect a certain mindset however that made a lot of people nervous.
Although his statement wasn't offensive to the major monotheistic religions, it was pretty damning towards anybody who falls out of the mainstream. The whole church/state seperation forms a wall at the top of a very slippery slope, comdemning one religion that you don't like is not that far away from condemning others. I too found that paper a tad questionable, but that shouldn't detract from the statement itself.
I don't think I can get any farther off topic here, so I'll bid this thread ado. It's just that I do enjoy interesting discourse where ever I can find it, even in a pseudo religious discussion pretending to have something to do with a project that's Linux related named after a French prison.
Yeah, that quote caught my eye too. I did a Google search and found this. And I suppose GB Sr. never figured out how he lost to Clinton...
Re:Using a lot of proprietary components didn't he
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Compaq desktops suck because they are so darn proprietary.
Excuse me while I insert my own anecdote into the mix. A few years ago I was doing workstation support for various departments, one of which had bought exclusively Compaqs. They were interested in upgrading their hardware but didn't have alot to spend so I suggested they start out by replacing their old 15" monitors with some 17"ers. So on my advice they bought a few standard 17" monitors.
Now imagine my surprise when I showed up to install the monitors and found that the 15 pin connectors were incompatable with Compaq's 14 pin video cards. The adapter was identical except that Compaq had filled in one of the holes in their VGA plug and removed the same pin from their monitors. Essentially they wanted to force all their valued customers to only buy Compaq monitors in the future.
I scratched my head over this for a while and eventually came back with a hammer and a small nail. I carefully pounded another hole into the back of each video card. The point is, after years of working with computers, I finally found a computer problem that required a hammer to fix. Only with Compaq.
Really the only thing about the Freenet system is that it guarantees privacy, at least as good a guarantee as one can get on the Internet. Now I can't come up with too many valid reasons for this level of protection, we're all better off if there's accountability at some level. This game is just a first step in developing somewhat realtime applications that use the Freenet engine. One could imagine future versions of Freenet being optimized to the point that they could create a virtual socket between computers. You could realtime chat with people without anybody having a hope of tracking you down. But as I said before, I'm not sure this is a good thing.
You can be pretty fearless when all you have to do is poke a "Play Again?" button if something goes wrong.
As I understand it, there are real world consequences for screwing up in the military's flight and tank simulators. Accidentally blowing up a friendly tank could get you a demotion. Which makes sense, if someone can't get the simulation right you don't want them to be handed a tank in the real world.
In NTSC format required. VHS or LD is fine. Bootleg DVD is fine. MPEG is fine. Subbed or in original Japanese is fine.
Neither is domestically available, but I'm sure you already know that. There are places online where you can buy the Japanese originals, but unless you speak Japanese I'd recommend against watching it that way. I saw Mononoke Hime the first time in raw Japanese and missed out on a bunch of the plot, I would've been better off just waiting the year for the Disney release. Speaking of which, Disney has been promising Laputa for a while now; Nausicaa will be a much longer wait I suspect.
Anyway, you're best bet is to hit IRC and try to get them in mpg format if you have broadband. The quality won't be very good, but neither are most of the bootleg tapes out there. But those movies are well worth the time and energy it takes to retrieve them, they're both exceptional animated fare.
Yes, Animeigo has a history of giving the fans what they want. They capitulated and started producing LDs, just in time for the DVD revolution to take place. Last I heard they were still trying to sell off all their excess AMG LDs. Perhaps they'll be able to produce their DVDs in a timely fashion and sell all of them before something better comes along.
My judgements on MP3 quality
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Sure you can? Have you had someone prepare good MP3s for you and done a real blind test? Until then you only think you can tell. This is the point where fools stop reading - that is, "audiophiles" who think they know everything. As the Insanely Audiophile story showed, some people just like to spend money regardless of necessity.
I wanted the answer to this very same question, so I ran my own listen test. I ripped some of the highest quality tracks I had, encoded at 256, 128, and 64 bitrates, then dumped them back to CD. The process was completely digital, I could be sure that any issues I heard were a result of mp3 encoding. I then played the CD on the better audio systems I had access to.
I determined that 128kb was pretty close to CD quality, I was straining to hear any differences between that and the original. I couldn't tell the difference between the original and 256kb. If I had really wanted to be exact, I could have done a second CD exploring the ranges between 128 and 256 but at that point I'd be pretty much guessing. As a result I'll probably be slowly switching to mp3 for storage purposes, and I can always play the CD in my good system if I decide it matters.
When I first heard of this, the alien warlord concept was the first thing that popped into my head too. But really, it is far more likely that the probe would be discovered by our descendants than some alien race. In a thousand years the human race will most likely either be dead or colonizing other star systems, if it's the latter then our genetic makeup may have been altered significantly. A probe full of pure DNA samples could provide an interesting biological baseline or at least anthropological study.
Of course, I'm still not sending them $50. But the concept kind of validates things for those who do.
Thirty years ago, sure. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, the civilized world plus Yorkshire was a bleak and desolate place devoid of joy and humor. But why do people still find Monty Python funny today?
There's been a whole lot of progress in the last thirty years. Monty Python may have been pioneers of a sort, and they sure made the BBC cringe like no one had before. But do they really hold a candle to Full House or Pee Wee's Great Adventure or any of the other brilliant programs that have followed? No.
No, you're wrong, people love it because it's funny. Perhaps you never got anything out of it, but a lot of other people have. As to why is it funny... one might as well ask why anything is funny. It's absurd and rediculous, yet all of it's humor is seeded with that all important grain of truth. Though it was meant to lampoon Morte D'Arthur, it's humor was a good deal more general than the subject matter. Not to mention the Python players, they played the whole thing through like actors rather than comedians.
I saw Holy Grail for the first time nearly 10 years ago, I had to pause halfway through the opening credits because I was laughing so hard. In the years hence I've come across people from various backgrounds and with various interests that enjoyed the movie. I suspect far from dying out, the movie will remain popular for at least this next generation.
My quantum physics is pretty rusty and it's possible that I didn't have a good grasp on it to begin with, but it seemed to me the black holes would continuously expand. Mathematically all you're talking about is a situation in which the gravitational pull is so great that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. This concept was one of the pillars of quantum physics, there must be a minimum distance that keeps atoms apart otherwise 2 particles could collapse together and form a black hole. Based on my understanding any black hole will continue to collect matter and grow in size regardless of how small it is. If someone has some better info, I'd love to hear it.
From what little I could gather from the web page, there really isn't any weapons potential or real danger in this project. They're essentially taking a ton of energy and focusing it in a small area to see what happens. Really no new technology involved, it's just building the facility that's expensive.
The only threat I can think of would be the creation of a black hole. If such a thing were done, we would indeed be collectively hosed. It's been a long time since studying quantum physics for me, I can't even hazard a guess at how much energy would be required to force the creation of a black hole. Regardless, any belief that such a thing could happen stems from a feeling of overimportance. The first thing astrophysics teaches you is how insignificant the human race is in any physical measurement. I doubt there's enough energy accessible on this planet to do something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
so whats the problem with TCP?
The problem is that TCP will guarantee that the client will get the data whether it's timely or not. In a game you're best off using UDP and sending events through as they happen, if a packet is lost than it's up to the game code to determine whether the data should be rebroadcast. For example, if a UDP packet is sent telling the client your character's health is now 110 points and the packet gets lost, you're better off waiting for the next packet to arrive stating your health to be 105 points rather than resending the original. In a fast environment TCP will eventually wind up sending data that may no longer be relevant, it's just a bunch of excess data that gets discarded by the client anyway.
Two: Apple has changed its relationship with the developer community. You no longer have to cough up megabucks for the documentation or tools; they're free for the asking from the Apple Developers' site, and the tools come on the OS X CD.
The problem with Apple isn't so much that's it's a closed system. It WAS their problem, it was the reason they lost to the IBM clones, but we're all beyond that now. The problem is that they're currently trying to emulate existing computer models rather than trying something different. Opening up their systems to open source is a good move, better late than never. But it isn't going to save them, between Microsoft and the Unix derivatives there isn't much room to manuever. Apple's best hope is the home market.
Computers are still alot more difficult to use than they should be. The home market would love a simple box to surf and check their email with but they're not going to buy them unless they can expect that they won't need to be replaced anytime soon. Apple is in the best place to do this, but they need to be able to guarantee the software on their boxes as well as the hardware. They seem to have a reluctance to write their own software if they can help it, probably for the reason you mentioned.
To survive they need to write their own browser, email program, Office compliant word processor, etc. No other company is going to give them what they need, neither will some well meaning ronin programmers. If they don't figure this out they'll just continue the slide towards becomming another generic PC manufacture and I'll never be able to buy my parents a computer they can easily use.
Beth: "Sure you can handle this? You have been frozen for a long time, technology has progressed a long way since then.
Joe: "No problem. No matter how far technology gets, it's all just a bunch of wires connected to other wires.
Beth: "Then what's taking you so long?"
Joe: "Can't seem to find any wires."
News Radio was such a fun show, it's a shame it started sucking in the end and got cancelled. It's also a shame NBC insisted on rotating it's timeslot every few weeks. But we'll have their bizarre quotes for the rest of time, no matter how imprecisely they're quoted.
Having fun is the whole point. It just happens that the result is useful for real work (most of the time).
It never occured to me that open source groups operated in the same way as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Guide's staff would pretty much spend all day partying, all the actual work was done by people who wandered in off the street, saw something that needed to get done, and did it. More than one open source project that operates with this strategy. Just another way Douglas Adams was ahead of his time.
Pretty cool setup. The pages could use some more information, I'd love to see more information on the touchscreen and the power system you used.
I don't think this is a Republican vs. Democrat issue. Neither side is championing space exploration or more NASA funding in anything other than a token way.
Space exploration really isn't a priority for congress. What is a priority is getting as many government projects for your home state as possible, this is the reason NASA is still in business. NASA has made it a point to spread their contracts all over this nation so that a large number of senators and representatives are benefiting politically. So while no one seems to care what NASA actually accomplishes in space, they care very much what NASA spends here on Earth.
The side effect is that without widespread public support, NASA is just another government program looking to get cut. I wonder how bad of a thing these cuts will be, a drop in budget could cause NASA to stop playing the political game and just focus on unmanned research. I'm all for manned space exploration but there's got to be a better way...
I saw the Linksys router with the phone jack a few months ago and was intrigued enough to do some research. It turns out it really wasn't that cool, they pretty much just route you to some company who wants to be your long distance provider. But the existance of the box, the fact that these devices can already do all the hard work of IP telephony makes me wonder if anyone has looked into hacking them.
More specifically what I'm wondering about is whether it would be possible to set up a telephony server and have a group of these telephony boxes point to it rather than the company that sells them. It would provide a cheap, secondary form of communication that would be very easy to use. Picking up the receiver and pressing 5 on a spare phone on your desk could quickly connect you to a friend without tying up the main line. More interestingly, your server room could have a "red phone" that would ring up another server farm in another country.
So my question is, is anyone doing this stuff? Not a replacement for the phone companies, but an easy way to link these boxes together and form a small phone network?
I don't see why these scientists insist on making everything function at room temperature. At this rate liquid nitrogen will never gain household acceptance. Potentially very useful; you can use it to inflate tires, turn bananas into hammers, and cryogenically store your goldfish when you go on vacation. If this is the future, I'm not sure I want to be here.
This point seems to have not been made, so I guess I'll have to make it. On the surface it may seem like a good idea to block all these ads but think about the repercussions if you do. All of the sites you frequent won't be getting any money from advertisements when you visit them.
The problem is that the people who know how to block ads are the most technical savvy. I don't know to what extent the balance has been already shifted, but as we use these utilities we're making it less profitable to run a geek oriented site than a general one. In other words, if an advertiser can't advertise to us, they're just going to focus all their advertising budget on other sites.
This concern may seem a tad too extreme to some of you, but it's the reason I don't run any ad blocking software. The sites that I frequent I want to do as well as possible, I'll put up with ads for their sake. Granted, there are probably some tricks that can be played to get around this (have the proxy download the pictures even if they're not shown), but we're just dealing with the tip of the iceberg. The Slashdot community is pretty focused on coming up with ways to make sure we can't be monitored or counted. Just think about the consequences before you wipe yourself off the map completely.
True enough, fortunately it looks like some future games will take advantage of the addons but not require them. They indicated that some games will cache information to the hard drive to make them run faster, but you'll still be able to play directly from the discs if you like.
I think Sony and Microsoft are hedging their bets at this point. They are both looking forward to the multiplayer boom that will soon hit the console market and they want to make sure their consoles can handle it. I don't think anyone knows how to build a console only multiplayer game that won't require any patches, odds are that some sort of storage device will be required.
Of course, a hard drive can be a liability as well as a boon. If all the games that are written for the XBox expect a hard drive, the users will have to get used to managing their data. And if a few companies expect to release their games early and patch them later, because you know, the user has a hard drive, that could seriously damage a console's reputation too.
In a year we'll be alot closer to the outcome of these console wars. I'll just be sticking with my PS2 in the meantime, that where all the games I want to buy will be.
'uber-geeks' would need a decent editor with advanced functions such as vi* or emacs, for doing advanced work, whereas pico is basically 'open a file, edit it line by line manually, save file'
Hey, I spent my four years at university programming with Pico in a Unix environment. As I progressed up the classman line, I kept on taking classes that would have, "How to use Emacs" or "How to use vi" sections. The assumption was that everyone would eventually choose a real editor. I never did.
While Unix administrators probably find validity in being able to make extremely rapid changes to text files, it's less useful when programming. It is too common to make a change in some code without actually thinking about the reprocussions, having a less than optimal text editor is a reminder that programming slowly is often the best way to go.
To this day, whenever I set up a Unix box, the Pico/Pine packages are one of the first things I install. They're compact and easy to install, always a nice starting point. I do hope nothing happens that would prevent me from being able to use them in the future.
If you are even thinking about $20 then going the contracting route probably won't work out.
This is a valid concern. Consultants routinely earn so much money that they can't stop to count it all without having their head explode. But that's a rookie mistake, after you've been consulting for a while you're far more likely to die from accidently inhaling a $1,000 bill or having the solid gold brakes on your car melt as you're taking a turn. The key is that it's important to understand what you're getting yourself into before you start down the consulting route, being mega-rich isn't easy.
You fail to take into account how much money is involved in the console market. When you're producing a game with a several million dollar budget, you spend whatever is required to hit your target market. Even if it costs you twice as much to write for the PS2 than the X-Box (which it doesn't of course), you do it because the PS2 market makes it worth while. I suspect a lot of companies will be moving towards cross platform games, spending half a million to hire an additional development team is worth it if you can open up an additional market.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the X-Box has it's own problem. Their DirectX compatability means that the first wave of games for the X-Box will be released for the PC as well, if you already own a PC (as many households do) it's a difficult purchase to justify. Microsoft seems to be signing on a lot more PC game companies than console game companies, it's the latter they really need. People are only going to buy a X-Box if it offers them something they can't get anywhere else, so far it looks like someone who owns both a PS2 and a PC will be able to play any X-Box game.
There is also the Japan factor, something that's easy for us Americans to lose track of. Microsoft has maintained a strong presence in Japan for a long time, they're going to need to expand that. Even if they conquer the American market, the other companies will use the income from Japan to try to retake the states. Microsoft has a very tricky road they need to follow, they may be able to pull it off but it will involve more than just signing up a bunch of PC development houses.
Are you suggesting that GHWB lost because Mr. Clinton was pro-atheist, and GHWB was anti-atheist?
That whole election is ancient history in my mind, but I don't remember even hearing about that when it happened. I doubt that quote by itself cost him very many votes. It does reflect a certain mindset however that made a lot of people nervous.
Although his statement wasn't offensive to the major monotheistic religions, it was pretty damning towards anybody who falls out of the mainstream. The whole church/state seperation forms a wall at the top of a very slippery slope, comdemning one religion that you don't like is not that far away from condemning others. I too found that paper a tad questionable, but that shouldn't detract from the statement itself.
I don't think I can get any farther off topic here, so I'll bid this thread ado. It's just that I do enjoy interesting discourse where ever I can find it, even in a pseudo religious discussion pretending to have something to do with a project that's Linux related named after a French prison.
Yeah, that quote caught my eye too. I did a Google search and found this. And I suppose GB Sr. never figured out how he lost to Clinton...
Compaq desktops suck because they are so darn proprietary.
Excuse me while I insert my own anecdote into the mix. A few years ago I was doing workstation support for various departments, one of which had bought exclusively Compaqs. They were interested in upgrading their hardware but didn't have alot to spend so I suggested they start out by replacing their old 15" monitors with some 17"ers. So on my advice they bought a few standard 17" monitors.
Now imagine my surprise when I showed up to install the monitors and found that the 15 pin connectors were incompatable with Compaq's 14 pin video cards. The adapter was identical except that Compaq had filled in one of the holes in their VGA plug and removed the same pin from their monitors. Essentially they wanted to force all their valued customers to only buy Compaq monitors in the future.
I scratched my head over this for a while and eventually came back with a hammer and a small nail. I carefully pounded another hole into the back of each video card. The point is, after years of working with computers, I finally found a computer problem that required a hammer to fix. Only with Compaq.
Really the only thing about the Freenet system is that it guarantees privacy, at least as good a guarantee as one can get on the Internet. Now I can't come up with too many valid reasons for this level of protection, we're all better off if there's accountability at some level. This game is just a first step in developing somewhat realtime applications that use the Freenet engine. One could imagine future versions of Freenet being optimized to the point that they could create a virtual socket between computers. You could realtime chat with people without anybody having a hope of tracking you down. But as I said before, I'm not sure this is a good thing.
You can be pretty fearless when all you have to do is poke a "Play Again?" button if something goes wrong.
As I understand it, there are real world consequences for screwing up in the military's flight and tank simulators. Accidentally blowing up a friendly tank could get you a demotion. Which makes sense, if someone can't get the simulation right you don't want them to be handed a tank in the real world.
In NTSC format required. VHS or LD is fine. Bootleg DVD is fine. MPEG is fine. Subbed or in original Japanese is fine.
Neither is domestically available, but I'm sure you already know that. There are places online where you can buy the Japanese originals, but unless you speak Japanese I'd recommend against watching it that way. I saw Mononoke Hime the first time in raw Japanese and missed out on a bunch of the plot, I would've been better off just waiting the year for the Disney release. Speaking of which, Disney has been promising Laputa for a while now; Nausicaa will be a much longer wait I suspect.
Anyway, you're best bet is to hit IRC and try to get them in mpg format if you have broadband. The quality won't be very good, but neither are most of the bootleg tapes out there. But those movies are well worth the time and energy it takes to retrieve them, they're both exceptional animated fare.
Yes, Animeigo has a history of giving the fans what they want. They capitulated and started producing LDs, just in time for the DVD revolution to take place. Last I heard they were still trying to sell off all their excess AMG LDs. Perhaps they'll be able to produce their DVDs in a timely fashion and sell all of them before something better comes along.
Sure you can? Have you had someone prepare good MP3s for you and done a real blind test? Until then you only think you can tell. This is the point where fools stop reading - that is, "audiophiles" who think they know everything. As the Insanely Audiophile story showed, some people just like to spend money regardless of necessity.
I wanted the answer to this very same question, so I ran my own listen test. I ripped some of the highest quality tracks I had, encoded at 256, 128, and 64 bitrates, then dumped them back to CD. The process was completely digital, I could be sure that any issues I heard were a result of mp3 encoding. I then played the CD on the better audio systems I had access to.
I determined that 128kb was pretty close to CD quality, I was straining to hear any differences between that and the original. I couldn't tell the difference between the original and 256kb. If I had really wanted to be exact, I could have done a second CD exploring the ranges between 128 and 256 but at that point I'd be pretty much guessing. As a result I'll probably be slowly switching to mp3 for storage purposes, and I can always play the CD in my good system if I decide it matters.
When I first heard of this, the alien warlord concept was the first thing that popped into my head too. But really, it is far more likely that the probe would be discovered by our descendants than some alien race. In a thousand years the human race will most likely either be dead or colonizing other star systems, if it's the latter then our genetic makeup may have been altered significantly. A probe full of pure DNA samples could provide an interesting biological baseline or at least anthropological study.
Of course, I'm still not sending them $50. But the concept kind of validates things for those who do.
Thirty years ago, sure. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, the civilized world plus Yorkshire was a bleak and desolate place devoid of joy and humor. But why do people still find Monty Python funny today? There's been a whole lot of progress in the last thirty years. Monty Python may have been pioneers of a sort, and they sure made the BBC cringe like no one had before. But do they really hold a candle to Full House or Pee Wee's Great Adventure or any of the other brilliant programs that have followed? No.
No, you're wrong, people love it because it's funny. Perhaps you never got anything out of it, but a lot of other people have. As to why is it funny... one might as well ask why anything is funny. It's absurd and rediculous, yet all of it's humor is seeded with that all important grain of truth. Though it was meant to lampoon Morte D'Arthur, it's humor was a good deal more general than the subject matter. Not to mention the Python players, they played the whole thing through like actors rather than comedians.
I saw Holy Grail for the first time nearly 10 years ago, I had to pause halfway through the opening credits because I was laughing so hard. In the years hence I've come across people from various backgrounds and with various interests that enjoyed the movie. I suspect far from dying out, the movie will remain popular for at least this next generation.
My quantum physics is pretty rusty and it's possible that I didn't have a good grasp on it to begin with, but it seemed to me the black holes would continuously expand. Mathematically all you're talking about is a situation in which the gravitational pull is so great that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. This concept was one of the pillars of quantum physics, there must be a minimum distance that keeps atoms apart otherwise 2 particles could collapse together and form a black hole. Based on my understanding any black hole will continue to collect matter and grow in size regardless of how small it is. If someone has some better info, I'd love to hear it.
From what little I could gather from the web page, there really isn't any weapons potential or real danger in this project. They're essentially taking a ton of energy and focusing it in a small area to see what happens. Really no new technology involved, it's just building the facility that's expensive.
The only threat I can think of would be the creation of a black hole. If such a thing were done, we would indeed be collectively hosed. It's been a long time since studying quantum physics for me, I can't even hazard a guess at how much energy would be required to force the creation of a black hole. Regardless, any belief that such a thing could happen stems from a feeling of overimportance. The first thing astrophysics teaches you is how insignificant the human race is in any physical measurement. I doubt there's enough energy accessible on this planet to do something like that.