Untrue. You have no way to measure his weight. He could be just compacting it into himself, gaining weight and density instead of weight and size like you are probably doing.
It's my own personal theory that Pac-Man is intending to eat until he becomes the first ever sentient black hole.
This alleged "All Time Top 10" is utterly, completely irrelevant. They miss out on several key players in the strategy RPG genre.
First, as many people have pointed out, they completely overlooked Shining Force in all its incarnations. In considering the worth of a title, you need to consider the way it was when it was released as well as how it stacks up now. Shining Force was revolutionary when it was released.
Second, they completely ignore several incredible strategy-based RPGs for the computer. Two that come immediately to mind are Fallout and Baldur's Gate. Fallout had a unique idea, a great character system, gorgeous graphics (at the time), and awesome weapons. Baldur's Gate (especially in 2) was insanely well-balanced, had that awesome turn-based/real-time strategy engine blending, had an unrivalled spell set in terms of selection, casting mechanics, and effects, an engrossing plot, and more.
Put BG2 up against anything the consoles have to offer. Anything. To feel like you've completed the game at all, there's at least 100 hours of gameplay. Every battle is unlike the last, and until halfway through the game, you'll need to come up with a radically different strategy than the last. The AI isn't even that good, but the differences in the characters are so great that you need to find that perfect balance.
Hell, even the original Fallout compares very favourably to today's console RPGs.
It has to do with the limitations of the.avi file format..AVI requires elaborate hacks to "support" VBR audio tracks, subtitles, multiple audio tracks, etc..OGM allows for a lot more functionality..MKV provides even more and has a generally superior architecture, but it's working on its marketshare currently.
You think plants are crazy? Check out bacteria. They swap so many genes its unbelievable. And if the genes kill that bacteria, well, it's been selected against. That won't prevent them from picking up genes elsewhere.
A shovel-full of dirt contains a regular frenzy of bacteria swapping genes not unlike getting fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, and earthworms together for a big bisexual orgy. The only difference is that with the bacteria, it actually works from time-to-time because they haven't specialized as much.
Plants are a lot of fun though 'coz they're multi-cellular and we can actually see what's going on. With bacteria, we just have staining, which is a piss-poor substitute for watching that little green mass of cells differentiate over several days.
The album that pundits claim really established Metal as a genre and provided the roots for later changes was Deep Purple's Machine Head, released in 1972. Even so, metal itself has spawned many sub-genres since then. Prog metal, death metal, etc.
There are nearly as many variants of metal as there are of electronic music. All of which have evolved outside of your given timeframe.
To see an interesting proof of this, take a well-encoded (DivX or Xvid) MPEG-4 movie, and corrupt a frame or two. Watch the patterns the corruption makes. The corruption then moves in 3D, as though it's overlapped onto the object that it occurred on.
It doesn't matter a lick if the codec is used commercially yet.If they make it, and make it good enough (as they certainly seem to be doing), the corporations will pick it up for their own uses.
Take LAME for an example: They've spent several years coding on it, and just recently have they finally gotten recognition from commercial players. Now, there are many places that rely on LAME for high-quality MP3 production. These places still send royalties to the patent holders, but they pay nothing for the software. I expect that xvid could do similarly.
That said, it would be nice if they used a license that would require commercial use to give them a financial kickback so they can con continue to code, and perhaps even provide an incentive for development of the codec. I don't know if the commercial users of LAME do any such thing. It'd be nice to see though.
If you want to learn to use XHTML, read the spec. It's really rather straightforward.
The W3C has put a lot of effort into making all their specifications very easy to learn. Furthermore, they all make great reference tools, as they are the *official specification*. Everything else has to measure up to them.
Wrong! Wrong wrong wrong! Most epidemics are not a result of microbes/viruses tailor-made for our immune system. An example of a virus that's evolved to work very closely with humanity is Herpes. It does not kill us, instead it resides in us and only comes out on occasion to infect. When it does, it's not a particularly major thing (unless it's genital).
The other major "epidemics" are all opportunists. Avian flu. Ebola. AIDS. Black plague. The reason they were so lethal/dangerous was because they were poorly adapted to life in humans. They came from some other species. The resevoir in nature is not humans.
As medical science progresses, we'll get to the point where there are very few sicknesses that have a human resevoir. All new future illnesses will come from external sources.
Cuts need to be made somewhere. Until the federal government kicks some money into health care, we simply don't have enough money to go around.
It sucks; I'm a student too. But until the US puts more restraint onto its version of capitalism, we need to be able to compete, and Campbells changes are a step towards that.
I know a lot of the policies (ie. tax cuts for the rich) aren't necessarily savoury for the average voter, but it attracts business. Business is what grows the economy.
32bit MP3s are entirely possible. However, the present psychoacoustics usually limit the effective bitdepth to around 16 anyhow, because we can't perceive much more than that. MP3s have no dependance on bitdepth; you could theoretically make a 1024-bit MP3 and have it entirely compliant; the problem at that point is that the standard MP3 frame sizes are too small to contain all the information.
CD was not all Sony. Philips played a role in there too, so much so that they own the copyright for the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" symbol that appears everywhere on audio CDs. They've even gone so far as to deny the symbol to albums that implement DRM and copy protection.
A sample-rate increase may be nice, as it would limit ringing.
If I tried to make a 20khz sound with 40khz sampling, I wouldn't hear a thing. Take two samples of one wave equidistant, and you get the middle and the beginning of the wave, which are always the same value. At 4X the sampling, you get a saw wave (or worse, a muffled trapazoid if you phase shift 45 deg). So, if you do 20Khz at 80Khz, you're still screwed. How many points do you need on a wave to make it smooth? I would say at least 8 at high frequencies (and that has a chance of only getting you about 66% of the power). That's about 160Khz for 20Khz sound.
No. You're wrong. At 40kHz, up to a 19.999kHz signal can be recreated with complete accuracy. Just because you think the signal would look trapezoidal if you did a linear interpretation doesn't mean that's what actually happens. If you did a simple linear interpretation, you'd add overtones up to your sampling frequency. To accurately interpolate the signal, you'd use the sinc(x) function, which will not affect the ~20kHz signal at all.
A 44kHz signal reproduces sound up to 22kHz very accurately. The only possible limitation is that when the audio is low-pass limited to 22kHz or whereever they decide to cap, the filtration process can leave theoretically "audible" ringing. Increasing the maximum sampling frequency only decreases this ringing. You won't be able to hear any other changes, as human hearing caps out at around 20kHz.
Please, please, please learn some actual signal processing before littering Slashdot with your half-literate tripe. Thank you.
I do understand the technology, and none of what you write is new to me. I was referring to sessions; the precise term eluded me. So far, sessions have support in every ISO9660-reading device I've dealt with (and I own several), and are a nice method of enabling a level of writable support to the file system. I do understand it wouldn't be very feasible to use as a file system for an MP3 device. Yet it could work, and I've used sessions to do precisely this for my (CD-based) portable.
China's moving against any imported technology that it could produce domestically. Any. This trend is not new to me either. They're a sovereign nation, and they're free to ignore any sort of MS licensing they desire. They've shown in the past they don't care about stepping on Microsoft's toes. They also have the power to ignore patents.
Remember, the MP3 device developer can simply develop a competing standard and a simple program to upload files to the device. There are plenty of alternate free file systems I'm sure they could utilize.
I'd say that if anyone was lacking understanding, it would be you lacking understanding of business. The profit margins involved in this technology are much higher than those of FireWire. Here we are dealing with end-products that consumers use. Businesses will be eager to have the opportunity to use a supported codebase for their FAT access and thus not have to deal with possible bug problems in their own code. I know business mentality first hand; my dad is a (moderately successful) CEO, and I have many friends in the industry.
Regardless, you seem to be inclined to assume I know less than I do, and with some of the claims (ie. the big DRM conspiracy) you're making, I'm expecting "YHBT" somewhere down the line. I'd rather not be insulted. So this will be my last reply. Nevermind how off-topic you've gone trying to "prove" me wrong.
I've refuted (or let you refute) all the points you made in the original comment. I'm done. I'm sorry. You lost this one.
And thus you refute your original point, that MS is trying to push DRM file systems by adding this levy.
ISO 9660 is only usually used on CD, I know. Thus the mention of CD-based MP3 players. It wouldn't be too much of a hack to add MP3s on a different track; there are provisions in the spec to allow for some modification between revisions. It's not out of the question, and reasonably intelligent software could do it easily.
Firewire is not the same thing as an MP3 player. They are extremely different things. Furthermore, they can use a different format. They already use ISO9660 if they read from CD. Meanwhile, Firewire is a connector format. Connector formats and MP3 players are very, very dissimilar, especially where this "mass-margin" quote comes in. Your analogy does not hold. 0.25 is quite a bit smaller than 1.0 as well. And they get a (possibly questionably) reliable bit of code-based implementation. It may cost more to develop an in-house solution than to use Microsoft's. It may be a bit of a blow to established companies, but this may assist new companies to come to the fore.
Furthermore, my response your quote:
MS is trying to reduce the number of MP3 players that expose an easy to use file system interface rather than whatever DRM-of-the-day system is popular.
holds true. The entire quote is utter bullshit. If your quote was true, they'd use some other filesystem. I don't know much in the way of DRM/"secure" filesystems, but I'd imagine the licensing fee would be a bit more than $0.25 per unit! There is no conspiracy, regardless of whether this is Slashdot or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Untrue. You have no way to measure his weight. He could be just compacting it into himself, gaining weight and density instead of weight and size like you are probably doing.
It's my own personal theory that Pac-Man is intending to eat until he becomes the first ever sentient black hole.
You sure you don't know anybody for whom that statement may not be true?
This alleged "All Time Top 10" is utterly, completely irrelevant. They miss out on several key players in the strategy RPG genre.
First, as many people have pointed out, they completely overlooked Shining Force in all its incarnations. In considering the worth of a title, you need to consider the way it was when it was released as well as how it stacks up now. Shining Force was revolutionary when it was released.
Second, they completely ignore several incredible strategy-based RPGs for the computer. Two that come immediately to mind are Fallout and Baldur's Gate. Fallout had a unique idea, a great character system, gorgeous graphics (at the time), and awesome weapons. Baldur's Gate (especially in 2) was insanely well-balanced, had that awesome turn-based/real-time strategy engine blending, had an unrivalled spell set in terms of selection, casting mechanics, and effects, an engrossing plot, and more.
Put BG2 up against anything the consoles have to offer. Anything. To feel like you've completed the game at all, there's at least 100 hours of gameplay. Every battle is unlike the last, and until halfway through the game, you'll need to come up with a radically different strategy than the last. The AI isn't even that good, but the differences in the characters are so great that you need to find that perfect balance.
Hell, even the original Fallout compares very favourably to today's console RPGs.
It has to do with the limitations of the .avi file format. .AVI requires elaborate hacks to "support" VBR audio tracks, subtitles, multiple audio tracks, etc. .OGM allows for a lot more functionality. .MKV provides even more and has a generally superior architecture, but it's working on its marketshare currently.
You think plants are crazy? Check out bacteria. They swap so many genes its unbelievable. And if the genes kill that bacteria, well, it's been selected against. That won't prevent them from picking up genes elsewhere.
A shovel-full of dirt contains a regular frenzy of bacteria swapping genes not unlike getting fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, and earthworms together for a big bisexual orgy. The only difference is that with the bacteria, it actually works from time-to-time because they haven't specialized as much.
Plants are a lot of fun though 'coz they're multi-cellular and we can actually see what's going on. With bacteria, we just have staining, which is a piss-poor substitute for watching that little green mass of cells differentiate over several days.
The album that pundits claim really established Metal as a genre and provided the roots for later changes was Deep Purple's Machine Head, released in 1972. Even so, metal itself has spawned many sub-genres since then. Prog metal, death metal, etc.
There are nearly as many variants of metal as there are of electronic music. All of which have evolved outside of your given timeframe.
To see an interesting proof of this, take a well-encoded (DivX or Xvid) MPEG-4 movie, and corrupt a frame or two. Watch the patterns the corruption makes. The corruption then moves in 3D, as though it's overlapped onto the object that it occurred on.
And once again, we prove that Mac hardware is superior: even emulated, it does infinite loops in 15 minutes!
It doesn't matter a lick if the codec is used commercially yet.If they make it, and make it good enough (as they certainly seem to be doing), the corporations will pick it up for their own uses.
Take LAME for an example: They've spent several years coding on it, and just recently have they finally gotten recognition from commercial players. Now, there are many places that rely on LAME for high-quality MP3 production. These places still send royalties to the patent holders, but they pay nothing for the software. I expect that xvid could do similarly.
That said, it would be nice if they used a license that would require commercial use to give them a financial kickback so they can con continue to code, and perhaps even provide an incentive for development of the codec. I don't know if the commercial users of LAME do any such thing. It'd be nice to see though.
If you want to learn to use XHTML, read the spec. It's really rather straightforward.
The W3C has put a lot of effort into making all their specifications very easy to learn. Furthermore, they all make great reference tools, as they are the *official specification*. Everything else has to measure up to them.
OMG ROFL BBQ UML!
Wrong! Wrong wrong wrong! Most epidemics are not a result of microbes/viruses tailor-made for our immune system. An example of a virus that's evolved to work very closely with humanity is Herpes. It does not kill us, instead it resides in us and only comes out on occasion to infect. When it does, it's not a particularly major thing (unless it's genital).
The other major "epidemics" are all opportunists. Avian flu. Ebola. AIDS. Black plague. The reason they were so lethal/dangerous was because they were poorly adapted to life in humans. They came from some other species. The resevoir in nature is not humans.
As medical science progresses, we'll get to the point where there are very few sicknesses that have a human resevoir. All new future illnesses will come from external sources.
Cuts need to be made somewhere. Until the federal government kicks some money into health care, we simply don't have enough money to go around.
It sucks; I'm a student too. But until the US puts more restraint onto its version of capitalism, we need to be able to compete, and Campbells changes are a step towards that.
I know a lot of the policies (ie. tax cuts for the rich) aren't necessarily savoury for the average voter, but it attracts business. Business is what grows the economy.
"Ran" is grammatically incorrect, at least as far as British Columbia is concerned. "Fucked over" would be more semantically accurate.
Despite the fact that the parent post is a "you insensitive clod" post and is misspelled, it contains a very useful point.
Never heard of a game called Decent. Sounds decent.
I've played *Descent* before though, and that was a good game.
Bang on. Welcome to my Friends list.
Sure, it's patriotic, and I'm Canadian, but I completely understand where you're going with that and it's cool and I agree.
A few nitpicks:
32bit MP3s are entirely possible. However, the present psychoacoustics usually limit the effective bitdepth to around 16 anyhow, because we can't perceive much more than that. MP3s have no dependance on bitdepth; you could theoretically make a 1024-bit MP3 and have it entirely compliant; the problem at that point is that the standard MP3 frame sizes are too small to contain all the information.
CD was not all Sony. Philips played a role in there too, so much so that they own the copyright for the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" symbol that appears everywhere on audio CDs. They've even gone so far as to deny the symbol to albums that implement DRM and copy protection.
A sample-rate increase may be nice, as it would limit ringing.
No. You're wrong. At 40kHz, up to a 19.999kHz signal can be recreated with complete accuracy. Just because you think the signal would look trapezoidal if you did a linear interpretation doesn't mean that's what actually happens. If you did a simple linear interpretation, you'd add overtones up to your sampling frequency. To accurately interpolate the signal, you'd use the sinc(x) function, which will not affect the ~20kHz signal at all.
A 44kHz signal reproduces sound up to 22kHz very accurately. The only possible limitation is that when the audio is low-pass limited to 22kHz or whereever they decide to cap, the filtration process can leave theoretically "audible" ringing. Increasing the maximum sampling frequency only decreases this ringing. You won't be able to hear any other changes, as human hearing caps out at around 20kHz.
Please, please, please learn some actual signal processing before littering Slashdot with your half-literate tripe. Thank you.
Rephlex is a completely seperate entity. Thus, unless the Rephlex artists decide to ditch Rephlex for Warp, chances are it won't happen.
A self-respecting one, obviously.
China's moving against any imported technology that it could produce domestically. Any. This trend is not new to me either. They're a sovereign nation, and they're free to ignore any sort of MS licensing they desire. They've shown in the past they don't care about stepping on Microsoft's toes. They also have the power to ignore patents.
Remember, the MP3 device developer can simply develop a competing standard and a simple program to upload files to the device. There are plenty of alternate free file systems I'm sure they could utilize.
I'd say that if anyone was lacking understanding, it would be you lacking understanding of business. The profit margins involved in this technology are much higher than those of FireWire. Here we are dealing with end-products that consumers use. Businesses will be eager to have the opportunity to use a supported codebase for their FAT access and thus not have to deal with possible bug problems in their own code. I know business mentality first hand; my dad is a (moderately successful) CEO, and I have many friends in the industry.
Regardless, you seem to be inclined to assume I know less than I do, and with some of the claims (ie. the big DRM conspiracy) you're making, I'm expecting "YHBT" somewhere down the line. I'd rather not be insulted. So this will be my last reply. Nevermind how off-topic you've gone trying to "prove" me wrong.
I've refuted (or let you refute) all the points you made in the original comment. I'm done. I'm sorry. You lost this one.
And thus you refute your original point, that MS is trying to push DRM file systems by adding this levy.
ISO 9660 is only usually used on CD, I know. Thus the mention of CD-based MP3 players. It wouldn't be too much of a hack to add MP3s on a different track; there are provisions in the spec to allow for some modification between revisions. It's not out of the question, and reasonably intelligent software could do it easily.
Furthermore, my response your quote:
holds true. The entire quote is utter bullshit. If your quote was true, they'd use some other filesystem. I don't know much in the way of DRM/"secure" filesystems, but I'd imagine the licensing fee would be a bit more than $0.25 per unit! There is no conspiracy, regardless of whether this is Slashdot or not.Okay: I got a lump of coal. :P