The point of having a massively multiplayer game is so that large numbers of players interact, otherwise why not just make work like diablo where everyone just plays with people they have agreed to play with. The point of making large numbers of people interact could be many things; however the G part of MMPOG means game, thus you might expect peole to treat it as a game and try to win. Now most MMPOGS don't actually have a way to win, so players make up their own rules. For some, winning and "beating the system" are the same thing, or at least, the interesting thing since the AIs have always been too simple.
So while stalking and calling names etc is certainly uncalled for, messing with other people seems to be the whole point of most MMPOGS. With guild v guild and kingdom v kingdom and pvp, what do you expect but that people will be competitive. And competition means winners and loser, and in an MMPOG thats one winner and a thousand losers.
So the games bring it upon themselves in a way, the unhappy newbies being picked on by the powergaming kiddies. Thats what they are designed to do, deep down. And since the rules arent written down anywhere, and in fact change randomly, who is to say what is legal and what is not, really, if the game lets you do it, it must be legal unless they tell you otherwise, and even then like in sports, is it only not legal if the umpire notices?
You have stopped using Google News because the NYtimes charges money? This makes no sense. Have you not noticed the green "and related" link under every header on google? If there is a story you want to read in the Google news headlines, but the link goes to a register site, just click the "and related" link and find usually hundreds of the same story at other sites that are free.
Thats the beauty of Google News. You can read the spin on the same and similar stories from lots of different sites to get a broader view.
I don't think I am alone among Gibson's fans in being of the opinion that the more hip the author became with tech, the less hip his writing became.
Although they are based on similar themes, "Neuromancer" was a psechedelic ride through things unimagined before, "Pattern Recognition" is a familiar drab story about internet fanboys.
For Gibson, I say, write what you don't know, please!
Speech recognition engines are actually primed with textual language models. This is simply because large databases such as newspapers are available. So while they don't do so well for natural english, they do better for written style such as..well newspaper print. So a writer, especially a jounalist, may find that speech recognition works better for them than the 'masses'.
This article is just confusion. Somehow the loss of obscure human languages effects programming? In what way? Neither article links makes any mention of such a thing.
In fact, the very fact that a universal human semantic language seems to exist implies that the loss of specific languages doesn't make any difference.
Also, human languages and programming languages are very different. Programming languages that actually work are designed with BNF syntax, a very structured formal style that can't begin to describe human language; human language is organic and has no destinct syntax (its statistical only).
Thus, the thesis of the article 1) isnt supported in the links and 2) doesnt make sense.
For years now we've been hearing about "holographic memory" as if its some sort of holy grail of information density. But this makes no sense: if there is a film that is high enough quality to record a hologram, that same film should be usable with a non-holographic format that has an even higher density (The computation of a digital hologram is lossy). Now one possible advantage to holographic media is that it could be very robust to data loss, as the holography process distributes the data across the media. However, this feature is not even mention in the article.
Windows is already hackable and riddled with security holes. How many barn doors there are isn't going to change the number of chickens that escape. The limit of security is not a technical one, it is a human one: how many sociopaths bent on destruction of innocent bystanders are there. No doubt there are a few, and no doubt the network nature of internet gives them leverage disporportional to their numbers, however more ways of commiting the same heinous hacks isn't going to make much impact on their influence.
What you say is absolutely true, video games spend so much time chasing technology there is no time for refining a proper production model.
However, characterizing this as "Broken" is premature. The video game industry is vigorous and growing; it is an industry that has not matured yet. An now is not the right time for it to mature because the fact is the technology is no "there" yet. When will it be there? Thats just a matter of opinion, but one can hope that it does not mirror TV's adoption of NTSC and rather continues driving innovation into new areas like maybe realtime digital holography:)
Its been a couple years, but I have seen the real source code for windows NT. All I have seen so far here is a file list, but I can say these things about it: 1) I cannot confirm that this is a legitimate file list. 2) I can confirm that every tree and file I am specifically aware of is missing. 3) This is definetely not the entire source tree. 4) There are many dubious file names such as "words of wisdom from dennis.eml ", zero length, and "gnumakefile" that definetely appear out of place.
My guess is that someone has taken some licenced source code and "sexed it up" to troll internet.
The odds of getting one's hands on the full source to NT4/2K are slim to none--even most Microsoft folks couldn't do that.
This is incorrect.
Its funny how people build up ideas in their heads about what its like in a large corporation, somehow like a hollywood movie with lots of people with dark shades and guns ala "The Net".
No, inside Microsoft is a lot more like "Office Space" and anybody with motivation could get the entire source with little trouble.
First off, DNA evidence is based on bodily fluids which will still have the persons real DNA. Secondly, DNA evidence can only be legitimately used to clear the innocent, not prove guilt. DNA tests are not 100% identifying, but can be used to say that a particular sample does not match. This is a very important distinction when the population is large, which, in fact, it is. Thus even if part of your cloned kidney somehow ended up at a crime scene, it would only fail to remove you from the pool of suspects. Other correlating evidence would be needed to establish guilt.
Do you really mean to say that you don't know what good your own technology is? One would think you would investigate uses that your potential clients would find beneficial, rather groping around slashdot for a wizzy demo.
Really, downloading a movie quickly probably won't impress most people in the slightest what with digitial TV and Tivo it will still just look like bad video on a computer monitor.
Now if you target your market for people who could really benefit from high speed internet, like for example, decreasing a companies national payroll download from a day to a minute, you might make some headway.
The final conclusion:dont let it matter too much
on
Lawmakers Game The System
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As so many online games and forums such as slashdot have proven, their will always be people who manipulate, troll, or game the system in a democracy. Most systems use a form of dictatorship to keep people in line. Slashdot has editors who not only ban crapflooders, but decide what things people get to even think abouto on the site. Apparently more egalitarian systems such as Kuro5hin start slipping into failure modes and the editors have to uncloak to fix them. Online games of course have game masters and sysops that have the power to ban naughty players. The same applies to governments of all sorts. So if it becomes clear that any sort of government on the masses is going to susceptable to cheats, hacks and manipulators, the conclusion must be that the thing must not be allowed to become too important. Game and internet forums already have the built in, regardless of what some slashdot readers might think;) To keep government from becoming important, the individual must choose to be responsible and independent of the government, lest they become manipulated into little slave cells by the greedy and unscrupulous.
SCO's case is stronger than the linux community admits. I have seen similar cases with substantially less evidence win. [SCO has agreements and licenses directly and indirectly with IBM, and it has a source base to make claims from]. Judges and juries are not technical and therefore must listen to experts. SCO's experts will do their best because they have a bone to pick, IBMs may not simply because IBM is a huge emotionless corporation. The jury will makes its decision based on the passion and acting ability of the presenters, and so its a coin toss, not a shoe in.
My guess is that what will actually happen is: IBM will settle with SCO, possibly drop out of linux development, and the linux community will take a big black eye.
Is the linux community prepared for this eventuality?
Change the code as quickly as possible. This will give more credence to open source's commitment to their customers than making snarky comments about how the code does not infinge.
"Customers" want to know the community is looking out for their best interests, and that means limiting liability in the event that SCO wins their case. And they can win: this is the law, not logic.
This would not be admission of guilt; it would simply be limiting liability. It is the smart thing to do.
If linux does not change the code, and SCO wins the case on the grounds that the law is technically moronic, linux will lose huge credibility. If linux does change the code and SCO loses its case, no harm done.
Re:How and Why C# Was Made
on
How C# Was Made
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is history before java that matters too; Such as Microsoft had its own processor independant P-Code compiler nearly a decade before java, but kept it private probably as a competitive advantage. This is a cold irony.
Microsoft was worried about java even before it became popular; for the simple reason that if a portable internet language did become popular, it would obviate the need for windows.
Microsoft did not get their hat handed to them when they attempted to co-opt java: seems to have worked nicely.
I see the whole PI thing as evidence of a hoax. Sagan new that PI contained all possible messages, and that a sufficiently clever mathematician could trick people ala the bible code. I still expect something like this to happen one day, for there are ways of searching mathematical formulas for sets of strings, rather than specific ones. Thus, you describe something similar to what you want, and set a supercomputer out for a year or two finding the best matches, then, sort through them for one that you can trick people with, and construct an outrageous story to explain how you arrived at the idea.
Your accountants and your tech staff are totally different people right? If the accountants want to use Windows, and your techs want to use Linux, why not?
I can totally understand the desire to be in total control of the software on your mission critical VoIP system, and Open Source makes a lot of sense. But forcing accountants who know zip about it to use Linux is foolhardy; the time wasted fumbling with an unfamiliar system will dwarf any savings (financial and spiritual) gained by using some open source thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of having a massively multiplayer game is so that large numbers of players interact, otherwise why not just make work like diablo where everyone just plays with people they have agreed to play with.
The point of making large numbers of people interact could be many things; however the G part of MMPOG means game, thus you might expect peole to treat it as a game and try to win. Now most MMPOGS don't actually have a way to win, so players make up their own rules. For some, winning and "beating the system" are the same thing, or at least, the interesting thing since the AIs have always been too simple.
So while stalking and calling names etc is certainly uncalled for, messing with other people seems to be the whole point of most MMPOGS. With guild v guild and kingdom v kingdom and pvp, what do you expect but that people will be competitive. And competition means winners and loser, and in an MMPOG thats one winner and a thousand losers.
So the games bring it upon themselves in a way, the unhappy newbies being picked on by the powergaming kiddies. Thats what they are designed to do, deep down. And since the rules arent written down anywhere, and in fact change randomly, who is to say what is legal and what is not, really, if the game lets you do it, it must be legal unless they tell you otherwise, and even then like in sports, is it only not legal if the umpire notices?
You have stopped using Google News because the NYtimes charges money? This makes no sense. Have you not noticed the green "and related" link under every header on google?
If there is a story you want to read in the Google news headlines, but the link goes to a register site, just click the "and related" link and find usually hundreds of the same story at other sites that are free.
Thats the beauty of Google News. You can read the spin on the same and similar stories from lots of different sites to get a broader view.
I don't think I am alone among Gibson's fans in being of the opinion that the more hip the author became with tech, the less hip his writing became.
Although they are based on similar themes,
"Neuromancer" was a psechedelic ride through things unimagined before, "Pattern Recognition" is a familiar drab story about internet fanboys.
For Gibson, I say, write what you don't know, please!
Try "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner, written in 1968. Substantially similar story to Neuromancer, clearly..an influence.
Speech recognition engines are actually primed with textual language models. This is simply because large databases such as newspapers are available. So while they don't do so well for natural english, they do better for written style such as..well newspaper print. So a writer, especially a jounalist, may find that speech recognition works better for them than the 'masses'.
This article is just confusion. Somehow the loss of obscure human languages effects programming? In what way? Neither article links makes any mention of such a thing.
In fact, the very fact that a universal human semantic language seems to exist implies that the loss of specific languages doesn't make any difference.
Also, human languages and programming languages are very different. Programming languages that actually work are designed with BNF syntax, a very structured formal style that can't begin to describe human language; human language is organic and has no destinct syntax (its statistical only).
Thus, the thesis of the article 1) isnt supported in the links and 2) doesnt make sense.
For years now we've been hearing about "holographic memory" as if its some sort of holy grail of information density. But this makes no sense: if there is a film that is high enough quality to record a hologram, that same film should be usable with a non-holographic format that has an even higher density (The computation of a digital hologram is lossy).
Now one possible advantage to holographic media is that it could be very robust to data loss, as the holography process distributes the data across the media. However, this feature is not even mention in the article.
A researcher at the University of Michigan is trying to help who?
Look at the size of that thing! Its huge! Nobody I know who actually uses their PDA would carry around something so big.
Windows is already hackable and riddled with security holes. How many barn doors there are isn't going to change the number of chickens that escape.
The limit of security is not a technical one, it is a human one: how many sociopaths bent on destruction of innocent bystanders are there. No doubt there are a few, and no doubt the network nature of internet gives them leverage disporportional to their numbers, however more ways of commiting the same heinous hacks isn't going to make much impact on their influence.
What you say is absolutely true, video games spend so much time chasing technology there is no time for refining a proper production model.
:)
However, characterizing this as "Broken" is premature. The video game industry is vigorous and growing; it is an industry that has not matured yet. An now is not the right time for it to mature because the fact is the technology is no "there" yet. When will it be there? Thats just a matter of opinion, but one can hope that it does not mirror TV's adoption of NTSC and rather continues driving innovation into new areas like maybe realtime digital holography
rufusdufus
Anonymous Coward
I rest my case.
Its been a couple years, but I have seen the real source code for windows NT. All I have seen so far here is a file list, but I can say these things about it:
1) I cannot confirm that this is a legitimate file list.
2) I can confirm that every tree and file I am specifically aware of is missing.
3) This is definetely not the entire source tree.
4) There are many dubious file names such as "words of wisdom from dennis.eml
", zero length, and "gnumakefile" that definetely appear out of place.
My guess is that someone has taken some licenced source code and "sexed it up" to troll internet.
The odds of getting one's hands on the full source to NT4/2K are slim to none--even most Microsoft folks couldn't do that.
This is incorrect.
Its funny how people build up ideas in their heads about what its like in a large corporation, somehow like a hollywood movie with lots of people with dark shades and guns ala "The Net".
No, inside Microsoft is a lot more like "Office Space" and anybody with motivation could get the entire source with little trouble.
First off, DNA evidence is based on bodily fluids which will still have the persons real DNA. Secondly, DNA evidence can only be legitimately used to clear the innocent, not prove guilt. DNA tests are not 100% identifying, but can be used to say that a particular sample does not match. This is a very important distinction when the population is large, which, in fact, it is.
Thus even if part of your cloned kidney somehow ended up at a crime scene, it would only fail to remove you from the pool of suspects. Other correlating evidence would be needed to establish guilt.
Isn't this exactly like saying that a faulty fire-alarm caused a fire? This is a non-sequitor used as a smokescreen to cover up the real cause.
Do you really mean to say that you don't know what good your own technology is? One would think you would investigate uses that your potential clients would find beneficial, rather groping around slashdot for a wizzy demo.
Really, downloading a movie quickly probably won't impress most people in the slightest what with digitial TV and Tivo it will still just look like bad video on a computer monitor.
Now if you target your market for people who could really benefit from high speed internet, like for example, decreasing a companies national payroll download from a day to a minute, you might make some headway.
As so many online games and forums such as slashdot have proven, their will always be people who manipulate, troll, or game the system in a democracy. Most systems use a form of dictatorship to keep people in line. Slashdot has editors who not only ban crapflooders, but decide what things people get to even think abouto on the site. Apparently more egalitarian systems such as Kuro5hin start slipping into failure modes and the editors have to uncloak to fix them. Online games of course have game masters and sysops that have the power to ban naughty players. ;)
The same applies to governments of all sorts.
So if it becomes clear that any sort of government on the masses is going to susceptable to cheats, hacks and manipulators, the conclusion must be that the thing must not be allowed to become too important.
Game and internet forums already have the built in, regardless of what some slashdot readers might think
To keep government from becoming important, the individual must choose to be responsible and independent of the government, lest they become manipulated into little slave cells by the greedy and unscrupulous.
This is an unfounded, even dangerous, generalization.
For you, I recommend moderation in breathing.
SCO's case is stronger than the linux community admits. I have seen similar cases with substantially less evidence win. [SCO has agreements and licenses directly and indirectly with IBM, and it has a source base to make claims from].
Judges and juries are not technical and therefore must listen to experts. SCO's experts will do their best because they have a bone to pick, IBMs may not simply because IBM is a huge emotionless corporation. The jury will makes its decision based on the passion and acting ability of the presenters, and so its a coin toss, not a shoe in.
My guess is that what will actually happen is: IBM will settle with SCO, possibly drop out of linux development, and the linux community will take a big black eye.
Is the linux community prepared for this eventuality?
Change the code as quickly as possible. This will give more credence to open source's commitment to their customers than making snarky comments about how the code does not infinge.
"Customers" want to know the community is looking out for their best interests, and that means limiting liability in the event that SCO wins their case. And they can win: this is the law, not logic.
This would not be admission of guilt; it would simply be limiting liability. It is the smart thing to do.
If linux does not change the code, and SCO wins the case on the grounds that the law is technically moronic, linux will lose huge credibility.
If linux does change the code and SCO loses its case, no harm done.
There is history before java that matters too; Such as Microsoft had its own processor independant P-Code compiler nearly a decade before java, but kept it private probably as a competitive advantage. This is a cold irony.
Microsoft was worried about java even before it became popular; for the simple reason that if a portable internet language did become popular, it would obviate the need for windows.
Microsoft did not get their hat handed to them when they attempted to co-opt java: seems to have worked nicely.
I see the whole PI thing as evidence of a hoax. Sagan new that PI contained all possible messages, and that a sufficiently clever mathematician could trick people ala the bible code.
I still expect something like this to happen one day, for there are ways of searching mathematical formulas for sets of strings, rather than specific ones. Thus, you describe something similar to what you want, and set a supercomputer out for a year or two finding the best matches, then, sort through them for one that you can trick people with, and construct an outrageous story to explain how you arrived at the idea.
Your accountants and your tech staff are totally different people right? If the accountants want to use Windows, and your techs want to use Linux, why not?
I can totally understand the desire to be in total control of the software on your mission critical VoIP system, and Open Source makes a lot of sense. But forcing accountants who know zip about it to use Linux is foolhardy; the time wasted fumbling with an unfamiliar system will dwarf any savings (financial and spiritual) gained by using some open source thing.