This wouldn't be too off from the mark. The Satsuit was filled with trash. Trash disposal is a bit of a problem on the ISS (you can't just dump it out the airlock, it has to be tracked), and the people onboard saw this as a good opportunity to get rid of some of the backlog.
Like I said, it's a 3d MOO. Pretty much a social environment with building permissions. If you want to beat up monsters it's not the right game for you. If you want to build some weird funky piece of art or even just your own house from basic shapes, then it's worth a second look.
It's also perhaps the best game out there for explorers. The game map is about 2/3 the size of Washington DC, and if you only want to explore then the account (and game) is free. There is a monthly fee if you want to start building permanent structures, although you can build temporary structures (that must be stored in your inventory) all you like with a free account.
In an already crowded field. I wish them a lot of luck, but that laundry list of features sounds like it'll take a whole lot of development time, and as an "also ran" MMO, they're going to have a tough time recouping it.
I wonder if it isn't time for someone to create a semi-generic "engine" for MMOs that developers could buy and modify instead of creating their own every time. Basically, a situation like the FPS market today. It would allow people to create niche games like this without breaking the bank on developing the engine/servers before they even get to the content. Then they could be released with only a small handful of servers and enjoy a modest success without needing 10,000 people a day signing up just to break even. In an environment like that, I'd be excited at the prospect of a SG1 MMO, but in the current environment I fear the game will either run out of money and not be released, or be released in some half finished state that does no justice to the series or the fans.
I'd wager a bet most people (even on Slashdot) had no idea what this software was until their DVD burner suddenly died for no apparent reason halfway through a burn and they had to read online forums to figure out that the problem was with a game they'd bought and installed recently.
I think he should send a letter back to the company asking for verification that the email isn't just the ramblings of some unaffilated nut. If they own up to it, then craft your own legalish looking letter with threatining wording telling them how you're collecting the names of everybody they've done this to so you can form your own harassment lawsuit. I wonder how long it would take them to panic and try to shut you up with hush money? These guys only exist because they call up game companies, give a slick speech with terms like "50% sales loss due to piracy" and the like, and convince them to use the software. If the companies start hearing bad things about them destabalizing users machines and boycotts of their software, they'd probably think twice about buying it from them. They can't afford to have their actual practices brought out into the sunlight.
Have you gone back and actually played Doom I or II recently? Compare that to almost any modern game and tell me it looks just as good. Many parts of Doom were up to the player's imagination (remember the "Suburbs" and "Factory" maps in Doom II?).
The real limiting factor is development time. The more stuff you build into each level, the more time and money it takes. The brown boxes in Doom were pretty easy to make, but these days they won't do at all. You need to add details like windows, roofs, etc... to make your maps compete with the rest of the industry.
That said, there are things that work better with raster graphics than they do on polygons. You can draw in lots of details like ammo packs, cigars, and the like when doing raster graphics that just look bad when plastered on a polygon.
However, there is a catch. As development tools get better and better you can create more complex scenes with less developer time, so over time the situation should improve. In fact I'd argue that this is already happening as you see games that look way better than stuff from even a couple of years ago.
One final note: If you really want to see what happens when you give your deveopers unlimited time to work on maps, check out Second Life, which is sort of a MOO with graphics. The world is almost entirely user created and the build system is powerful enough for people to do some fantastic things.
Could you post links? I've never seen that happen before and I'd like to figure out why it happened to you. The only ones I know that get blocked are Google's ads, to avoid the whole conflict of interest argument. You see how hot under the collar people get about the cache in the first place, imagine if Google put their own ads on it.
The Passion was rated R, there's a good chance it was already illegal to show to a minor in most of those towns.
In case you don't know, it's not unusual for conservative townships to pass laws that add legal weight to what are otherwise industry run or voluntary rating systems like the MPAA ratings or the Comics Code Authority.
Of course these laws are rarely enforced unless a politician wants to make some news right before election time or the proprieter does something to make himself unpopular.
Ah, the entropy argument. Basically, it's impossible to create complexity, you can only ever reduce complexity, meaning complex life cannot possibly evolve from simple life.
While possibly true if the Earth was a closed system over the long run, it completely fails to account for the fact that the Earth is NOT a closed system. In fact we have an enormous energy source right in our backyard (cosmicaly speaking): The Freaking Sun! Also, it makes people crack the joke: "Wow, Einstein's mother must have been one hell of a physicist!".
Here's a fun game you can play while listening to ID vs. Evolution debates: Listen to each argument from the ID side and name which logical fallicy it is based on. Hint: half of the time it is argumentum ad ignorantiam.
One of the nifty tricks ID proponets have done is to vaguely define many aspects of their arguments, allowing them to wiggle away with a "that's not what we ment" argument whenever someone makes a particularly biting point. Ask 10 ID proponents to define exactly what is ment by ID and you'll get 10 different answers. Evolution is in a much tougher spot because being actual science it gets hung up on facts and data that it can't move away from.
You're right, our understanding of Gravity IS incomplete. Maybe we should take the ID approach and just say "Well, I guess it's too hard, a wizard did it" and vow never to study it ever again.
Does this mean I should send a check back to the artist (or really the label, the Artist won't see that money) whenever I sell a CD at a used record store? What about pawn shops? That hardly seems reasonable.
The market dried up partially because with digital music there is no need for any album to ever go out of print again. It used to be that unless you wanted something released in the last year or in the top 1% of the most popular music you were stuck rummaging around through filthy overpriced unorganized secondhand music stores looking for the record.
Now you can have a shiny new copy anytime you like. Since many online music stores naturally discount their music, it's often the case that you can buy the online version cheaper than the secondhand music store version (which was only 20% off of the original cover price anyway).
In this case I think it's fairly obvious that the seller isn't deleting the songs from his computer before selling the iPod. He's buying new iPods, sticking them in the cradle, hitting sync, then putting them up on Ebay for a $400 profit.
While it would be easy enough to prosecute these guys under existing laws, I have no doubt this will be used as an excuse to create even more restrictive and unreasonable laws instead, much the same way AVIs were used as an excuse to create the DMCA, no matter that the law hurt a lot of legitmate users as well.
Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the percentage drop against room temperature. As in:
Pre: 24 degrees Fahrenheit over room temp
Post: 12 degress Fahrenheit over room temp, a 50% savings!
Obviously no amount of undervolting would ever get the processor to absolute zero, it's going to bottom out at room temperature (when reduced to 0 volts).
I think the thing that burns me up the most about this situation is that it's most likely that RIM never even knew about the patent. It's not really a case of patent infringement per say (they didn't go and steal the technology), it's probably a case of: NTP, since they don't have to deal with physical limitations in hardware or market share, saw what was going to obviously be the next step in PDAs and got some patents on the most obvious and sensible way of implementing it. Then they wait for the state of the art to catch up and for some company to blunder into it's patent without realizing it. Wait a few years for the service to get big an popular for maximum payout, and then BAM! launch lawsuit.
Of course there's no way to say for sure that a RIM engineer didn't just steal the patent outright, so the default course of action is to find in favor of the patent holder. The end result is that people doing nothing to actually advance the state of the industry get to leech off of the results of others. Worse, this was a foreign patent for RIM. Would you like to scour the horribly complex and enormous patent system for every country you might ever do business in when building a new product?
It's a shame it's almost impossible to prevent stuff like this from happening without screwing the little guy who actually builds something novel and new and has his work actually stolen by someone else.
I don't know, if I was RIM in that situation, I might just send out one final email to everybody on the network explaining why they're about to go down (including a link to the NTP guys) and then shut the network down. That's probably a bit too passive-agressive for a major company though.
Strangely enough, the goverment ruled that Blackberry can't shut down the part of the network it uses, no matter what the outcome. It turns out that Blackberries get used by people in critical positions and they can't afford to have the system go down over a bad patent.
Still, it seems like NTPs lawyers must be all kinds of awesome. They've been anally raping RIM in the courts since day one.
It always strikes me that if you listen to the rumors, there is ALWAYS a company gearing up to buy out Apple for one reason or another. I don't know what it is about Apple, but people really want to see it bought by some huge conglomerate for some reason.
I doubt SGI ever had any interest in Apple. They were positioning themselves in the server market at the time and Apple had nothing to offer them.
Of course that was back when Apple was tanking and speculation that everybody from SGI to Microsoft to Pepsi was going to buy them out.
I think the CPU is being used to encode the shows here. At least that's why I'm guessing he needed such a beast of a CPU. Encoding 11 streams at once can't be easy. I'm guessing that's why he need such huge system disks too, to buffer the video while his CPU chugs like crazy encoding it.
How many people buy $100 processors for boxes they plan to put more than $400 worth of memory in?
I suppose it's good to know that she got an actual 64 bit chip, not that it'll do her much good with the 32bit version of Windows I installed on the machine anyway.
I put a "64" bit semptron in a machine I built for another person (who was on a very limited budget) and it was my understanding that the chip was based on a 64 bit chip design, but was intentionally neutered down to 32 bits in hardware. I mean it would be great if she actually has a 64 bit machine, but I doubt she'd get much use out of the extra address space anyway. Frankly, people buying Semptrons probably aren't going to be doing lots of things that would benefit from a 64 bit chip anyway. I'm sure in 2-3 years there will be lots of things that run considerably better on a 64 bit architecture, but currently you have to be running huge databases or doing scientific computing to see much benefit.
Yeah, the original AMD chips were generally thought of as "not quite as good as Cyrix". Anybody who cared one whiff about quality back then went Intel. It wasn't until the K6 line that AMD started to really position themselves as a quality chipmaker, and it wasn't really until the Athlon line that they pulled themselves out of the pit of the Computer-Show Beige Box hawked by some greasy fat guy crowd.
I've sometimes wondered if there is any real value in the country code TLDs. Why not flatten the whole structure and just have everyone use the existing.com/.org/etc...? By creating the country specific TLDs it just seems to create a giant mess of differing rules on who can use what tld and when.
Slashdot Mirror
This wouldn't be too off from the mark. The Satsuit was filled with trash. Trash disposal is a bit of a problem on the ISS (you can't just dump it out the airlock, it has to be tracked), and the people onboard saw this as a good opportunity to get rid of some of the backlog.
Like I said, it's a 3d MOO. Pretty much a social environment with building permissions. If you want to beat up monsters it's not the right game for you. If you want to build some weird funky piece of art or even just your own house from basic shapes, then it's worth a second look.
It's also perhaps the best game out there for explorers. The game map is about 2/3 the size of Washington DC, and if you only want to explore then the account (and game) is free. There is a monthly fee if you want to start building permanent structures, although you can build temporary structures (that must be stored in your inventory) all you like with a free account.
In an already crowded field. I wish them a lot of luck, but that laundry list of features sounds like it'll take a whole lot of development time, and as an "also ran" MMO, they're going to have a tough time recouping it.
I wonder if it isn't time for someone to create a semi-generic "engine" for MMOs that developers could buy and modify instead of creating their own every time. Basically, a situation like the FPS market today. It would allow people to create niche games like this without breaking the bank on developing the engine/servers before they even get to the content. Then they could be released with only a small handful of servers and enjoy a modest success without needing 10,000 people a day signing up just to break even. In an environment like that, I'd be excited at the prospect of a SG1 MMO, but in the current environment I fear the game will either run out of money and not be released, or be released in some half finished state that does no justice to the series or the fans.
I'd wager a bet most people (even on Slashdot) had no idea what this software was until their DVD burner suddenly died for no apparent reason halfway through a burn and they had to read online forums to figure out that the problem was with a game they'd bought and installed recently.
That's a pretty clumsy attempt at a troll.
I think he should send a letter back to the company asking for verification that the email isn't just the ramblings of some unaffilated nut. If they own up to it, then craft your own legalish looking letter with threatining wording telling them how you're collecting the names of everybody they've done this to so you can form your own harassment lawsuit. I wonder how long it would take them to panic and try to shut you up with hush money? These guys only exist because they call up game companies, give a slick speech with terms like "50% sales loss due to piracy" and the like, and convince them to use the software. If the companies start hearing bad things about them destabalizing users machines and boycotts of their software, they'd probably think twice about buying it from them. They can't afford to have their actual practices brought out into the sunlight.
Have you gone back and actually played Doom I or II recently? Compare that to almost any modern game and tell me it looks just as good. Many parts of Doom were up to the player's imagination (remember the "Suburbs" and "Factory" maps in Doom II?).
The real limiting factor is development time. The more stuff you build into each level, the more time and money it takes. The brown boxes in Doom were pretty easy to make, but these days they won't do at all. You need to add details like windows, roofs, etc... to make your maps compete with the rest of the industry.
That said, there are things that work better with raster graphics than they do on polygons. You can draw in lots of details like ammo packs, cigars, and the like when doing raster graphics that just look bad when plastered on a polygon.
However, there is a catch. As development tools get better and better you can create more complex scenes with less developer time, so over time the situation should improve. In fact I'd argue that this is already happening as you see games that look way better than stuff from even a couple of years ago.
One final note: If you really want to see what happens when you give your deveopers unlimited time to work on maps, check out Second Life, which is sort of a MOO with graphics. The world is almost entirely user created and the build system is powerful enough for people to do some fantastic things.
TiVo is like Apple, there's always some rumor out there that the company is about to be bought out by some random player.
Could you post links? I've never seen that happen before and I'd like to figure out why it happened to you. The only ones I know that get blocked are Google's ads, to avoid the whole conflict of interest argument. You see how hot under the collar people get about the cache in the first place, imagine if Google put their own ads on it.
The Passion was rated R, there's a good chance it was already illegal to show to a minor in most of those towns.
In case you don't know, it's not unusual for conservative townships to pass laws that add legal weight to what are otherwise industry run or voluntary rating systems like the MPAA ratings or the Comics Code Authority.
Of course these laws are rarely enforced unless a politician wants to make some news right before election time or the proprieter does something to make himself unpopular.
Ah, the entropy argument. Basically, it's impossible to create complexity, you can only ever reduce complexity, meaning complex life cannot possibly evolve from simple life.
While possibly true if the Earth was a closed system over the long run, it completely fails to account for the fact that the Earth is NOT a closed system. In fact we have an enormous energy source right in our backyard (cosmicaly speaking): The Freaking Sun! Also, it makes people crack the joke: "Wow, Einstein's mother must have been one hell of a physicist!".
Here's a fun game you can play while listening to ID vs. Evolution debates: Listen to each argument from the ID side and name which logical fallicy it is based on. Hint: half of the time it is argumentum ad ignorantiam.
One of the nifty tricks ID proponets have done is to vaguely define many aspects of their arguments, allowing them to wiggle away with a "that's not what we ment" argument whenever someone makes a particularly biting point. Ask 10 ID proponents to define exactly what is ment by ID and you'll get 10 different answers. Evolution is in a much tougher spot because being actual science it gets hung up on facts and data that it can't move away from.
You're right, our understanding of Gravity IS incomplete. Maybe we should take the ID approach and just say "Well, I guess it's too hard, a wizard did it" and vow never to study it ever again.
Does this mean I should send a check back to the artist (or really the label, the Artist won't see that money) whenever I sell a CD at a used record store? What about pawn shops? That hardly seems reasonable.
The market dried up partially because with digital music there is no need for any album to ever go out of print again. It used to be that unless you wanted something released in the last year or in the top 1% of the most popular music you were stuck rummaging around through filthy overpriced unorganized secondhand music stores looking for the record.
Now you can have a shiny new copy anytime you like. Since many online music stores naturally discount their music, it's often the case that you can buy the online version cheaper than the secondhand music store version (which was only 20% off of the original cover price anyway).
In this case I think it's fairly obvious that the seller isn't deleting the songs from his computer before selling the iPod. He's buying new iPods, sticking them in the cradle, hitting sync, then putting them up on Ebay for a $400 profit.
While it would be easy enough to prosecute these guys under existing laws, I have no doubt this will be used as an excuse to create even more restrictive and unreasonable laws instead, much the same way AVIs were used as an excuse to create the DMCA, no matter that the law hurt a lot of legitmate users as well.
Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the percentage drop against room temperature. As in:
Pre: 24 degrees Fahrenheit over room temp
Post: 12 degress Fahrenheit over room temp, a 50% savings!
Obviously no amount of undervolting would ever get the processor to absolute zero, it's going to bottom out at room temperature (when reduced to 0 volts).
I think the thing that burns me up the most about this situation is that it's most likely that RIM never even knew about the patent. It's not really a case of patent infringement per say (they didn't go and steal the technology), it's probably a case of: NTP, since they don't have to deal with physical limitations in hardware or market share, saw what was going to obviously be the next step in PDAs and got some patents on the most obvious and sensible way of implementing it. Then they wait for the state of the art to catch up and for some company to blunder into it's patent without realizing it. Wait a few years for the service to get big an popular for maximum payout, and then BAM! launch lawsuit.
Of course there's no way to say for sure that a RIM engineer didn't just steal the patent outright, so the default course of action is to find in favor of the patent holder. The end result is that people doing nothing to actually advance the state of the industry get to leech off of the results of others. Worse, this was a foreign patent for RIM. Would you like to scour the horribly complex and enormous patent system for every country you might ever do business in when building a new product?
It's a shame it's almost impossible to prevent stuff like this from happening without screwing the little guy who actually builds something novel and new and has his work actually stolen by someone else.
I don't know, if I was RIM in that situation, I might just send out one final email to everybody on the network explaining why they're about to go down (including a link to the NTP guys) and then shut the network down. That's probably a bit too passive-agressive for a major company though.
Strangely enough, the goverment ruled that Blackberry can't shut down the part of the network it uses, no matter what the outcome. It turns out that Blackberries get used by people in critical positions and they can't afford to have the system go down over a bad patent.
Still, it seems like NTPs lawyers must be all kinds of awesome. They've been anally raping RIM in the courts since day one.
It always strikes me that if you listen to the rumors, there is ALWAYS a company gearing up to buy out Apple for one reason or another. I don't know what it is about Apple, but people really want to see it bought by some huge conglomerate for some reason.
I doubt SGI ever had any interest in Apple. They were positioning themselves in the server market at the time and Apple had nothing to offer them.
Of course that was back when Apple was tanking and speculation that everybody from SGI to Microsoft to Pepsi was going to buy them out.
I think the CPU is being used to encode the shows here. At least that's why I'm guessing he needed such a beast of a CPU. Encoding 11 streams at once can't be easy. I'm guessing that's why he need such huge system disks too, to buffer the video while his CPU chugs like crazy encoding it.
How many people buy $100 processors for boxes they plan to put more than $400 worth of memory in?
I suppose it's good to know that she got an actual 64 bit chip, not that it'll do her much good with the 32bit version of Windows I installed on the machine anyway.
I put a "64" bit semptron in a machine I built for another person (who was on a very limited budget) and it was my understanding that the chip was based on a 64 bit chip design, but was intentionally neutered down to 32 bits in hardware. I mean it would be great if she actually has a 64 bit machine, but I doubt she'd get much use out of the extra address space anyway. Frankly, people buying Semptrons probably aren't going to be doing lots of things that would benefit from a 64 bit chip anyway. I'm sure in 2-3 years there will be lots of things that run considerably better on a 64 bit architecture, but currently you have to be running huge databases or doing scientific computing to see much benefit.
Yeah, the original AMD chips were generally thought of as "not quite as good as Cyrix". Anybody who cared one whiff about quality back then went Intel. It wasn't until the K6 line that AMD started to really position themselves as a quality chipmaker, and it wasn't really until the Athlon line that they pulled themselves out of the pit of the Computer-Show Beige Box hawked by some greasy fat guy crowd.
I've sometimes wondered if there is any real value in the country code TLDs. Why not flatten the whole structure and just have everyone use the existing .com/.org/etc...? By creating the country specific TLDs it just seems to create a giant mess of differing rules on who can use what tld and when.