I know and have hired many people in the field, and I say that abstract theory is more important that assembly. Yes there is great value in knowing the details of how the processor works, but really, anybody can pick that up.
What more people have difficulty in is algorithm and data structure theory, which has more intellecual leverage than the simplicities of assembly.
For example, who is going to build a better database, one who knows assembly or one who can compute big O algorithmic runtime? I say the latter.
When an authority claims that these pictures are tamper-resistant the cost to the public when the technology being broken will be raised. It will allow people to relax their judgement when trusting 'photo' evidence and perhaps not be sufficiently skeptical of them. If the members of the jury believes only goverment spies and elite hackers have the ability to forge digital pictures, its going to be easy for them to ignore the possibility that any goober who read the instructions on internet could do it too.
For subversive and criminal types, this technology invites new and improved cons and scams based on so-called immutable evidence.
What if you had a different piece of hardware other than the camera that can write to the memory card? I wonder...can you buy those off the shelf today?
Comcast cable customers have no hard limit on their download speed. I was getting over 3 megabits since it was AT&T's network. The bandwidth a customer gets is proportional to the number of people on the node, and since some people like myself out in the boonies only have one or two other people sharing our nodes, our bandwith is really high. Anyone who says they are doubling their top download speed to 3 megabits are stepping way out of the wording I have ever heard them use: they have NEVER confirmed ANY bandwidth numbers even when directly asked. This is because they cannot guarantee any particular bandwidth for any particular customer. Finally, I would note that Comcast upgraded the network this winter, and my bandwith is now...very very high. Thus, it is quite possible that someone could download a terabyte of data each month.
The big trend these days is to make games balanced. Witness games like Asheron's call 2 or Star Wars galaxies: balanced as a bubble level. Boring as hell. Rather than focus on balance, game designers should focus on the fun factor. Look at D&D, the longest running RPG of them all: not balanced. Bards are wimps and Clerics are boss. Multiplayer Neverwinter Nights is great anyway, because its not a competition for dominance, its an endeavor for fun.
When it comes to MMPORGS, the concept of storytelling is too limited to provide sufficient gameplay. You see game after game fall into the pit of storytelling for a game that is supposed to have thousands of hours of entertainment. They end up being lame and boring because the only way to tell a story for a thousand hours is to be very slow in the telling!
Its many flaws aside, Shadowbane is a good example of an RPG style MMPORG that does not use story as its main device; instead, it uses guild vs guild dynamics to keep gameplay gripping continually.
I think that the future of great games is not in great story telling, but in great themes and player dynamics that can outlast any pre-defined storyline.
Neverwinter Nights has a huge community of custom content creators. The Neverwinter Vault has tons of user made custom content from 3d models to music to character portraits. You can find help from the community for anything you need from dialog management to using 3dstudio. With so much support, you can start with a 'prefab' world and simply populate with your own custom story and ease yourself into the building process as deep as you choose to go.
There are thousands of modules made by fans already, some of them are actually better than the one's shipped by bioware. Theres a lot to be learned about level designed in there, good bad and ugly!
I love fantasy and sci-fi movies, but even as a huge fan I have to admit that they are generally lacking a certain type of humanity that makes them relevenant. Contrast LoTR with Monster. One is epic with magic and elves and dark lords. The other is all cheap hotels and prostitutes. LoTR gives little insight into its characters and their motivations. The characters play flat cartoon characters who suffer from faux anxiety they always overcome for no apparent reason to go onto victory. Monster's characters on the other hand are real. Like people you really know. Then movie provides insights into the mind of a serial murderer and leave you with a deep understanding not of a monster, but of a human being. Leaving monster gave me a deeper feeling of having done something worthwhile than all 3 rings combined. I think mainly because the characters are so well done you feel like you really go to know someone, rather than just watch them on stage waving swords about.
BASIC was written by Bill Gates, not Paul Allen. Microsoft was founded in 1975 and release its first product, BASIC in 1976.
The original author of Q[uick and dirty]DOS was Tim Patterson who much later went to work for Microsoft in the compiler group. Bill gates did not work on the code.
I went down and bought a cheap system, set it up in about 10 minutes, and it works great! Easiest network I ever setup. The bandwidth I get is higher than my cable bandwidth, so no problems in that area, and it works in every room in my house.
Being a standard makes it easy for me to buy components for my handheld, laptop, and desktops while still being cheap. And bonus! My cards are compatible with my company and also most of the coffee shops in the area.
Can you describe a system that works better? That I can buy today? Or would it just be a joke?
How history gets twisted! Microsoft wrote OS/2! To say they broke its back is ridiculous! They spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing and marketting it, IBM spend a billion on marketing. They couldnt sell it. Back before the phrase was "developers developers developers" and "windows windows windows", the original chant was "os/2 os/2 os/2". Steve Baller would come running down the hall by my office (i was an MSDOS developer) shouting "OS/2 OS/2 OS/2" letting us know our project was doomed.
Oregon state recognizes the danger of gasoline and does not allow you to pump your own gas into your car. The law was created when a bride in her wedding gown burned to death while at the pumps.
My computer typically has the sound turned off and is at high resolution. The ad samples are quite hilarious as I have to squint to see them and can't make heads nor tail anyway since no sound. This test will prove to be flop I think.
I can't find my copy at the moment to check the wordng, but there is a section in Larry King's book "Tell it to the King" that has a section that reads exactly like this. I guess two people can report the same thing with words so very similar, but somehow I think being attributed to Neal Stephenson can't be right.
Making space launches cheaper and having a permanent presense in space will in enable the creation of power satellites that can in time totally replace all polluting power sources.
It looks to me like spending more on space infrastructure actually does lead to a solution to dependence on fossil fuel!
Some filesystem standards include a field for location as well as date and time; usually this is the offset from GMT. Even in today's macroscopic time terms this is a useful way to keep track of when a file was *actually* created or modified.
If you are going to be keeping track of time down to the plank scale, wouldn't you also need to keep track of location for that precision to mean much?
The point is that there are already commercial operations that do achieve these numbers. They do so in order to provide a valuable service: placing satellites in orbit. Surely you recognize the spurious nature of your argument; the two numbers I list are reflections of the scale of the energy requirements needed for useful space travel in terms of the numbers given in the article; they are a way to do a comparison. Thus your comments on 200 mile orbit and acceleration are not relevant.
Its great that this plane managed 920mph. It certainly possible that the spaceshipone team will win the X-Prize by achieveing 330,000 feet.
But is this goal really a stepping stone to space?
Altitude alone is not especially useful since the pull of gravity will still exert its force upon the craft. The hard part about space travel is achieving orbit, a state where the craft has effectively escaped the earth's gravity well. Escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour. Geosynchronous orbit, the distance an object must reach to be in a stationary orbit above the ground is 117,427,200 feet. These numbers are better than order of magnitude higher than the X-prize requirements.
So I wonder if the X-prize is really meaningful in the scale of realistic space flight?
Gamers are going to be able to consume the flops for a long time yet to come. After photorealistic comes holographic, then holo-realistic, then immersive holographic, then immersive-realistic. Then augmented intelligence. All the way up to full personality upload and immortality! I want it all!
Rember when DOS gave the message "Invalid command" if you typed garbage at the command prompt? An astounding number of people complained because they thought the computer was calling them an "in-vuh-lid" and took great offense to it. MS had to change that and several other messages in order to keep certain large accounts.
I use the 'large' font setting in Internet Explorer 6 so I can read the text a distance from the screen. In the original example page, the fonts size is correct. In the 'final example' the font size of the article text on the front page is WAY TOO LARGE, although the text is the correct size when an article is actually viewed. Why is the article text on the new page so much larger than the original example with large font settings?
The smallest airplanes you can buy at the hobby store use a capacitor for power. You charge the capacitor with a battery and get about a minute of flight. Maybe this could use something like that.
I know a lot about the question under discussion; I am a co-author of Windows NT. I know it was not based on VMS because I have seen the code, and in fact wrote some of it myself.
I have no way on this forum to prove the veracity of my authority (nor do I want to reveal my identity), nor in fact any way to provide evidence beyond my own authority: what would you have me do? Post the entire source of NT and VMS and then some sort of algorithm (vetted by you?) that proves that the code is different?
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I know and have hired many people in the field, and I say that abstract theory is more important that assembly. Yes there is great value in knowing the details of how the processor works, but really, anybody can pick that up.
What more people have difficulty in is algorithm and data structure theory, which has more intellecual leverage than the simplicities of assembly.
For example, who is going to build a better database, one who knows assembly or one who can compute big O algorithmic runtime? I say the latter.
When an authority claims that these pictures are tamper-resistant the cost to the public when the technology being broken will be raised. It will allow people to relax their judgement when trusting 'photo' evidence and perhaps not be sufficiently skeptical of them. If the members of the jury believes only goverment spies and elite hackers have the ability to forge digital pictures, its going to be easy for them to ignore the possibility that any goober who read the instructions on internet could do it too.
For subversive and criminal types, this technology invites new and improved cons and scams based on so-called immutable evidence.
What if you had a different piece of hardware other than the camera that can write to the memory card? I wonder...can you buy those off the shelf today?
Comcast cable customers have no hard limit on their download speed. I was getting over 3 megabits since it was AT&T's network.
The bandwidth a customer gets is proportional to the number of people on the node, and since some people like myself out in the boonies only have one or two other people sharing our nodes, our bandwith is really high.
Anyone who says they are doubling their top download speed to 3 megabits are stepping way out of the wording I have ever heard them use: they have NEVER confirmed ANY bandwidth numbers even when directly asked. This is because they cannot guarantee any particular bandwidth for any particular customer.
Finally, I would note that Comcast upgraded the network this winter, and my bandwith is now...very very high.
Thus, it is quite possible that someone could download a terabyte of data each month.
The big trend these days is to make games balanced. Witness games like Asheron's call 2 or Star Wars galaxies: balanced as a bubble level. Boring as hell.
Rather than focus on balance, game designers should focus on the fun factor.
Look at D&D, the longest running RPG of them all: not balanced. Bards are wimps and Clerics are boss. Multiplayer Neverwinter Nights is great anyway, because its not a competition for dominance, its an endeavor for fun.
When it comes to MMPORGS, the concept of storytelling is too limited to provide sufficient gameplay. You see game after game fall into the pit of storytelling for a game that is supposed to have thousands of hours of entertainment. They end up being lame and boring because the only way to tell a story for a thousand hours is to be very slow in the telling!
Its many flaws aside, Shadowbane is a good example of an RPG style MMPORG that does not use story as its main device; instead, it uses guild vs guild dynamics to keep gameplay gripping continually.
I think that the future of great games is not in great story telling, but in great themes and player dynamics that can outlast any pre-defined storyline.
Neverwinter Nights has a huge community of custom content creators. The Neverwinter Vault has tons of user made custom content from 3d models to music to character portraits. You can find help from the community for anything you need from dialog management to using 3dstudio. With so much support, you can start with a 'prefab' world and simply populate with your own custom story and ease yourself into the building process as deep as you choose to go.
There are thousands of modules made by fans already, some of them are actually better than the one's shipped by bioware. Theres a lot to be learned about level designed in there, good bad and ugly!
I love fantasy and sci-fi movies, but even as a huge fan I have to admit that they are generally lacking a certain type of humanity that makes them relevenant.
Contrast LoTR with Monster. One is epic with magic and elves and dark lords. The other is all cheap hotels and prostitutes.
LoTR gives little insight into its characters and their motivations. The characters play flat cartoon characters who suffer from faux anxiety they always overcome for no apparent reason to go onto victory.
Monster's characters on the other hand are real. Like people you really know. Then movie provides insights into the mind of a serial murderer and leave you with a deep understanding not of a monster, but of a human being.
Leaving monster gave me a deeper feeling of having done something worthwhile than all 3 rings combined. I think mainly because the characters are so well done you feel like you really go to know someone, rather than just watch them on stage waving swords about.
BASIC was written by Bill Gates, not Paul Allen. Microsoft was founded in 1975 and release its first product, BASIC in 1976.
The original author of Q[uick and dirty]DOS was Tim Patterson who much later went to work for Microsoft in the compiler group. Bill gates did not work on the code.
I went down and bought a cheap system, set it up in about 10 minutes, and it works great! Easiest network I ever setup. The bandwidth I get is higher than my cable bandwidth, so no problems in that area, and it works in every room in my house.
Being a standard makes it easy for me to buy components for my handheld, laptop, and desktops while still being cheap. And bonus! My cards are compatible with my company and also most of the coffee shops in the area.
Can you describe a system that works better? That I can buy today? Or would it just be a joke?
How history gets twisted! Microsoft wrote OS/2! To say they broke its back is ridiculous! They spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing and marketting it, IBM spend a billion on marketing. They couldnt sell it.
Back before the phrase was "developers developers developers" and "windows windows windows", the original chant was "os/2 os/2 os/2". Steve Baller would come running down the hall by my office (i was an MSDOS developer) shouting "OS/2 OS/2 OS/2" letting us know our project was doomed.
Oregon state recognizes the danger of gasoline and does not allow you to pump your own gas into your car. The law was created when a bride in her wedding gown burned to death while at the pumps.
Bah, who needs these glasses when you can have immortality rings for the low low price of 25 bucks? Alexchiu.com.
My computer typically has the sound turned off and is at high resolution. The ad samples are quite hilarious as I have to squint to see them and can't make heads nor tail anyway since no sound.
This test will prove to be flop I think.
I wasnt saying its not in the it, but rather, its not original...
I can't find my copy at the moment to check the wordng, but there is a section in Larry King's book "Tell it to the King" that has a section that reads exactly like this. I guess two people can report the same thing with words so very similar, but somehow I think being attributed to Neal Stephenson can't be right.
Making space launches cheaper and having a permanent presense in space will in enable the creation of power satellites that can in time totally replace all polluting power sources.
It looks to me like spending more on space infrastructure actually does lead to a solution to dependence on fossil fuel!
Some filesystem standards include a field for location as well as date and time; usually this is the offset from GMT. Even in today's macroscopic time terms this is a useful way to keep track of when a file was *actually* created or modified.
If you are going to be keeping track of time down to the plank scale, wouldn't you also need to keep track of location for that precision to mean much?
The point is that there are already commercial operations that do achieve these numbers. They do so in order to provide a valuable service: placing satellites in orbit.
Surely you recognize the spurious nature of your argument; the two numbers I list are reflections of the scale of the energy requirements needed for useful space travel in terms of the numbers given in the article; they are a way to do a comparison. Thus your comments on 200 mile orbit and acceleration are not relevant.
Its great that this plane managed 920mph. It certainly possible that the spaceshipone team will win the X-Prize by achieveing 330,000 feet.
But is this goal really a stepping stone to space?
Altitude alone is not especially useful since the pull of gravity will still exert its force upon the craft. The hard part about space travel is achieving orbit, a state where the craft has effectively escaped the earth's gravity well.
Escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour. Geosynchronous orbit, the distance an object must reach to be in a stationary orbit above the ground is 117,427,200 feet.
These numbers are better than order of magnitude higher than the X-prize requirements.
So I wonder if the X-prize is really meaningful in the scale of realistic space flight?
Gamers are going to be able to consume the flops for a long time yet to come. After photorealistic comes holographic, then holo-realistic, then immersive holographic, then immersive-realistic. Then augmented intelligence. All the way up to full personality upload and immortality! I want it all!
Rember when DOS gave the message "Invalid command" if you typed garbage at the command prompt? An astounding number of people complained because they thought the computer was calling them an "in-vuh-lid" and took great offense to it. MS had to change that and several other messages in order to keep certain large accounts.
I use the 'large' font setting in Internet Explorer 6 so I can read the text a distance from the screen. In the original example page, the fonts size is correct. In the 'final example' the font size of the article text on the front page is WAY TOO LARGE, although the text is the correct size when an article is actually viewed.
Why is the article text on the new page so much larger than the original example with large font settings?
The smallest airplanes you can buy at the hobby store use a capacitor for power. You charge the capacitor with a battery and get about a minute of flight. Maybe this could use something like that.
I know a lot about the question under discussion; I am a co-author of Windows NT. I know it was not based on VMS because I have seen the code, and in fact wrote some of it myself.
I have no way on this forum to prove the veracity of my authority (nor do I want to reveal my identity), nor in fact any way to provide evidence beyond my own authority: what would you have me do? Post the entire source of NT and VMS and then some sort of algorithm (vetted by you?) that proves that the code is different?
So believe me or not; makes no difference to me.