Many moons ago, I had a friend who was a nuclear engineer at a power plant. His plant didn't have a separate computer network for the reactor simply because computers weren't allow to connect to the reactor. Anything piece of hardware with enough complexity to achieve Turing completeness was forbidden. When he wanted to add a monitoring circuit somewhere that included more than some piddly number of transistors, he had to document ever possible state that the system could enter.
I guess that I'm now officially paranoid. I misread the title as "NC State Police Create Most Powerful Positron Beam Ever". I then started to imagine the inevitable YouTube videos.
That logic is ridiculous. If Windows 95 was 95 times better than Windows 1.0, that would imply that Windows 98 was 97% the stuff as same as Windows 95.
This is why you should never post on Slashdot when you're upset (with "you" meaning "I"). It's been a pet peeve of mine that people treat the ranking system like some pancea for voting problems, so I got emotional and sloppy with my writing. Anyway, if anyone is still reading this thread, the most of the complaints which have been loged against my post are valid. Read up on the theorem for yourself and learn what it can and can't tell you. Looking it up for yourself is why we have an Internet.
Al, Bob, and Chuck are running for the same office in a town with only three eligible voters. Currently, the three voters are expected to vote as follows
Al, Chuck, Bob
Al, Chuck, Bob
Bob, Chuck, Al
This gives us Al at 5, Bob at 7, and Chuck at 6. Chuck calls in help from his two friend, Dave and Ed. Now, they don't really have anything to offer, but Dave is blind and Ed is in a wheelchair, so everyone feels bad about putting them last. The election now comes to:
Al, Chuck, Dave, Ed, Bob
Al, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Bob
Bob, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Al
Chuck still comes out to six votes, but Al is now at seven, so Chuck wins the election. While this is an admittedly silly example, since there are more candidates than voters, it is an illustration that an unpopular third party candidate can still change the outcome of the election. In fact, there's a mathematical proof (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) which specifically states that there is no completely fair voting scheme. The unpopular third part falls under the "independence of irrelevant alternatives" section. In order to eliminate this problem, you have to give up one of the other attributes. In practice, most people who truly fix the third party hole wind up with a system where you can cause a candidate to lose by voting for him.
Actually, they're doing one better. If you've purchased Opera for the Wii, you can transfer it over to your PC. In fact, they're so generous that you can even keep the copy on your Wii while still running the one on your desktop. Compare that with those stingy bastards at Firefox. I spent ten times as much on Firefox as I did on Opera, yet they STILL feel that I don't deserve a copy for my Wii. Greedy, money grubbing assholes.
Actually, there used to be an OSDN dating site. I think it was one of those weird, cross license things where they shared their personals with a bunch of other sites. Anyway, considering how shortly lived it was, I guess the obvious flaws in the idea outweighed the benefits.
The problem with turning classical literature into games is that most would be impossible to win:
"How do you beat Hamlet? I always die in act five."
"You played GTA: Crime and Punishment? It blows. You do one mission and your character just turns himself in to the cops."
"Stupid computer teammates always cause more trouble than playing alone."
"I know what you mean. Every time I play through Of Mice and Men, I wind up shooting Lenny.
Get Albatross
Taken
Drop Albatross
You cannot drop the Albatross
Drop Albatross
You cannot drop the Albatross
Drop Albatross
You cannot drop the Albatross
Welcome to The Scarlet Letter. Press X to accept humiliation from townfolk. Press Y to accept humiliation from your secret lover. Press B to accept humiliation from your disguised husband. Press A to jump.
I actually remember reading this idea a few years back in a reputable science journal. The idea there was using E&M fields to create "high" energy densities in front of the ship and "low" energy densities behind it. From general relativity, energy and mass warp space time, so that's what would cause the ship to move. I guess that the patent filler might be calling an area filled with a strong electric field a "high pressure vaccuum" since it contains no appreciable mass. However, the author of the paper also pointed out one fatal flaw in the program. In order for the GR equations to work out properly, the "low pressure vaccuum" area would need a strongly negative energy density. The author concluded that, without a major revolution in physics that allowed the creation of negative energy in arbitrary amounts, the idea was nothing more than a mathematical curiosity.
I was about to leave a snarky comment about how acheologists don't exactly look at cave paintings with an electron microscope. Then, I remembered hearing about using lasers to map the exact surface of the monoliths at Stonehenge. Frankly, pulling out the electron microscopes can't be that much further off.
I've been beta testing the program for, gosh, at least a year now and I can assure you that it's not a Ponzi scheme, but rather the old Kodak business model. It used to be that Kodak gave you the camera, but sold you the film. Well, for as long as DAZ has been in existence, the main source of their income has been the sale of 3D models. They're just releasing the program because it means more people will be potential customers. Oh, this also frees them from being solely dependent on the existence of Curious Labs' Poser product, which is just good business planning. Finally, the whole Tell-Ware thing isn't mandatory. Back when you downloaded Doom off of a BBS, ID didn't require you to share the game with three of your friends; they simply hoped that you did. In reality, this will only spread geometrically if people believe that their friends will be interested in it.
Never heard of the Wandering Jew for example? Note the vast number of literary works that have made reference to that one manifestation of the theme.
Dante's Inferno is a guided tour of Hell. Just like book six of the Aeneid. Of course, that was just a rip off of the corresponding part of the Odyssey, which itself stole the idea from the epic of Gilgamesh. Thus, Dante, Virgil, and Homer are all worthless hacks using cliched ideas.
Or, it could just be that great literature is allowed to use an old theme. Besides, compared to revenge, love, and faith, this theme is pretty darn unpopular. Your wikipedia link only showed it appearing only about ten times in this century; compared with all the books, movies, and comics that have been written, it's a darn scarce theme. It is hardly hackneyed as hell. Furthermore, I can't claim to have read all the works listed, but I don't believe that the use of multiple incarnations and the lasting consequences of unremembered actions is particularly a staple of the genre; that makes at least one unique aspect. Furthermore, you complained that the theme came as no surprise. Were you surpised when Canton died as the end of A Tale of Two Cities? Were you shocked when Hercules dragged Alcestis out of Hades? Of course not, since these events were foreshadowed to death. Can you blame Planescape: Torment when it does the same?
Finally, I do want to make the concession that the game is not great literature. My camparison between Planescape and Alcestis was to prove a point and not because I think it's an equal comparison. I can go to my bookstore and find fifty books that are far better. What make Planescape unique is that I can go to my local bookstore and find fifty books that are worse. It can't compare with Dostoevsky, but I think it can hold it's own against Dan Brown or Michael Crichton. After years of Tomb Raider and Doom, I think gamers were excited to finally have something to point to and say "This is not crap!"
I feel the need to point out that it wasn't really Thor's beam. It was O'Neill that designed it (with the help of the knowledge of the Ancients). Thor just built the first unit.
My knowing this fact tells me that I really need to get a life.
Check your local newspaper for the next surplus auction of your local school district. At the last one I went to, someone bought 24 overhead projectors for $1 (mainly to get the auctioneer to move on to the good stuff).
Well, there is a possible method for it to still work, but you have to dip even further into scifi. Basically, if a civilization on a distant planet has already discovered time travel, we could use their time machine to head back to this convention. However, this also means that any time travel that will visit must come frmo far enough in the future that
Mankind has explored enough of the universe to find a civilization who invented the time machine many years ago (you must account for travel time from their planet back here for the conference).
Mankind has established friendly enough diplomatic relations with this species that they'll let us borrow it.
Humanity has nothing better to do with its time than find old conferences and travel back to them.
You actually mentioned the Photoshop? Bah! Photoshop is absolute crap compared to Mozilla. Photoshop can't handle Javascript, CSS, or even Gopher. Heck, it can't even set up a HTTPS connection. Even links can set up an HTTPS connection.
But I'm supposed to believe that Photoshop is one of the best web browsers ever? Please...
(Picasa is supposed to organize your photos, not edit them. Editing is just a side feature that they added in case you're too lazy to open up Gimp. So, Picasa us a crappy photo editing program, but it's pretty good at organize pictures. Good at what it's designed for, sucks at what it's not)
First off, I never intended to claim that that was the truth of the situation: I just said that that was how Nintendo saw the world and that it would be a cold day in Hell before they embrace an open platform.
Second, you mentioned that the industry tanked because of supply and demand. Well, when Nintendo put the restrictions on the platform, they choked off some of the supply. From Econ 101, when you decrease the supply and demand remains constant, the price goes up and the number of units sold goes down. However, during the crash, the price per unit sold wasn't enough to recoup the expenses from designing a good game. Cutting off the supply increased the price enough that it was more economically feasible to make good games.
Finally, as much as my inner Linux advocate would love to claim otherwise, open systems haven't had the best luck on the console. The 3DO was pretty open and we all know how that went. The system currently used as paragon of openess is the Dreamcast, which pulled Sega out of the hardware business. In the modern consoles, the XBox is probably the most customizable of the bunch but it's still lagging behind the PS2. Furthermore, Microsoft is looking eliminate the functionality which made the XBox so open in the first place with the sequel, so it's not like Nintendo is the only company that restricts development.
As for why we haven't seen a crash in the PC game market, there's two differences there. With the console market, you had a console that existed only for games. The PC has a myriad of uses, so when there's a dip in the PC gaming market, people are still buying PC's for when the market returns. Furthermore, I would argue that the PC games haven't had a crash like the consoles did simply because, to the best of my knowledge, PC games haven't been as popular as the console.
Now, I still believe that Nintendo has a lot of price fixing bastards who screwed over a lot of American customers. I think that their policies on censorship were pretty ridiculous. I even think that they usually do lock their system down tighter than the need have (from what I've read, the developer requirements for the N64 were just ludicrous). However, I also feel that there are some merits to Nintendo's arguments such that they should not be viewed as simple propaganda. I also don't see significant evidence that opening up the platform would bring more benefit to the company than it would cost them in headache. Now, my knowledge of videogame history is imperfect, so if there's some stellar example of an open platform stealing the show or if I'm wrong about the statistics of console game salve versus PC games, please correct me. Just don't think that I'm spounting off some Nintendo party line without at least putting some thought into it.
There are economic and historical reasons why Nintendo will never do this. As is well documented, Nintendo's main source of income isn't hardware sales, but licenses to use the platform. It's completely true that Nintendo would have more developers and probably sell a lot more units due to all the cheap games available. It's also completely true that AT&T could become the number one cellular provider by not charging for service; it's just economic suicide.
The other problem is a matter of history and personal bias, so it may not be as certain as the economic issues. The big video game crash that killed the Atari, Intellivision, et al. was partially brought about by the fact that anyone who wanted to make a game could do it - even if they had bad ideas. The market was flooded with thousands of crappy games and it was difficult to find the true gems amongst the garbage. When Nintendo released the NES, the wanted to avoid those same mistakes and put restriction on what could be released for their platform. While the most famous examples are the company's notorious censorship, they also had debugging requirements. They even put a limit that you couldn't release more than six games a year. The result was that Nintendo flourished where others had fallen. Now, you could argue that modern games require such vast resources that the shovelware of yore is no longer an issue. However, considering that licensing was one of the ideas that brought the company to the power it has today, they aren't going to abandon it until after the ship has already sunk.
I'm no longer going to try and calm my self by binging on planets. I know I've done that before, but that's okay, because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me
Slashdot Mirror
Many moons ago, I had a friend who was a nuclear engineer at a power plant. His plant didn't have a separate computer network for the reactor simply because computers weren't allow to connect to the reactor. Anything piece of hardware with enough complexity to achieve Turing completeness was forbidden. When he wanted to add a monitoring circuit somewhere that included more than some piddly number of transistors, he had to document ever possible state that the system could enter.
We also occassionally use "light" as an antonym for "heavy".
I guess that I'm now officially paranoid. I misread the title as "NC State Police Create Most Powerful Positron Beam Ever". I then started to imagine the inevitable YouTube videos.
That logic is ridiculous. If Windows 95 was 95 times better than Windows 1.0, that would imply that Windows 98 was 97% the stuff as same as Windows 95.
Wait a second...
I think you need to reread the article. It clearly states that consumer solutions are just as good as Enterprise one.
I own and have read both books. What do I win?
This is why you should never post on Slashdot when you're upset (with "you" meaning "I"). It's been a pet peeve of mine that people treat the ranking system like some pancea for voting problems, so I got emotional and sloppy with my writing. Anyway, if anyone is still reading this thread, the most of the complaints which have been loged against my post are valid. Read up on the theorem for yourself and learn what it can and can't tell you. Looking it up for yourself is why we have an Internet.
- Al, Chuck, Bob
- Al, Chuck, Bob
- Bob, Chuck, Al
This gives us Al at 5, Bob at 7, and Chuck at 6. Chuck calls in help from his two friend, Dave and Ed. Now, they don't really have anything to offer, but Dave is blind and Ed is in a wheelchair, so everyone feels bad about putting them last. The election now comes to:- Al, Chuck, Dave, Ed, Bob
- Al, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Bob
- Bob, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Al
Chuck still comes out to six votes, but Al is now at seven, so Chuck wins the election. While this is an admittedly silly example, since there are more candidates than voters, it is an illustration that an unpopular third party candidate can still change the outcome of the election. In fact, there's a mathematical proof (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) which specifically states that there is no completely fair voting scheme. The unpopular third part falls under the "independence of irrelevant alternatives" section. In order to eliminate this problem, you have to give up one of the other attributes. In practice, most people who truly fix the third party hole wind up with a system where you can cause a candidate to lose by voting for him.Actually, they're doing one better. If you've purchased Opera for the Wii, you can transfer it over to your PC. In fact, they're so generous that you can even keep the copy on your Wii while still running the one on your desktop. Compare that with those stingy bastards at Firefox. I spent ten times as much on Firefox as I did on Opera, yet they STILL feel that I don't deserve a copy for my Wii. Greedy, money grubbing assholes.
Actually, there used to be an OSDN dating site. I think it was one of those weird, cross license things where they shared their personals with a bunch of other sites. Anyway, considering how shortly lived it was, I guess the obvious flaws in the idea outweighed the benefits.
"I know what you mean. Every time I play through Of Mice and Men, I wind up shooting Lenny.
Taken
Drop Albatross
You cannot drop the Albatross
Drop Albatross
You cannot drop the Albatross
Drop Albatross
You cannot drop the Albatross
I actually remember reading this idea a few years back in a reputable science journal. The idea there was using E&M fields to create "high" energy densities in front of the ship and "low" energy densities behind it. From general relativity, energy and mass warp space time, so that's what would cause the ship to move. I guess that the patent filler might be calling an area filled with a strong electric field a "high pressure vaccuum" since it contains no appreciable mass. However, the author of the paper also pointed out one fatal flaw in the program. In order for the GR equations to work out properly, the "low pressure vaccuum" area would need a strongly negative energy density. The author concluded that, without a major revolution in physics that allowed the creation of negative energy in arbitrary amounts, the idea was nothing more than a mathematical curiosity.
I was about to leave a snarky comment about how acheologists don't exactly look at cave paintings with an electron microscope. Then, I remembered hearing about using lasers to map the exact surface of the monoliths at Stonehenge. Frankly, pulling out the electron microscopes can't be that much further off.
I've been beta testing the program for, gosh, at least a year now and I can assure you that it's not a Ponzi scheme, but rather the old Kodak business model. It used to be that Kodak gave you the camera, but sold you the film. Well, for as long as DAZ has been in existence, the main source of their income has been the sale of 3D models. They're just releasing the program because it means more people will be potential customers. Oh, this also frees them from being solely dependent on the existence of Curious Labs' Poser product, which is just good business planning. Finally, the whole Tell-Ware thing isn't mandatory. Back when you downloaded Doom off of a BBS, ID didn't require you to share the game with three of your friends; they simply hoped that you did. In reality, this will only spread geometrically if people believe that their friends will be interested in it.
Or, it could just be that great literature is allowed to use an old theme. Besides, compared to revenge, love, and faith, this theme is pretty darn unpopular. Your wikipedia link only showed it appearing only about ten times in this century; compared with all the books, movies, and comics that have been written, it's a darn scarce theme. It is hardly hackneyed as hell. Furthermore, I can't claim to have read all the works listed, but I don't believe that the use of multiple incarnations and the lasting consequences of unremembered actions is particularly a staple of the genre; that makes at least one unique aspect. Furthermore, you complained that the theme came as no surprise. Were you surpised when Canton died as the end of A Tale of Two Cities? Were you shocked when Hercules dragged Alcestis out of Hades? Of course not, since these events were foreshadowed to death. Can you blame Planescape: Torment when it does the same?
Finally, I do want to make the concession that the game is not great literature. My camparison between Planescape and Alcestis was to prove a point and not because I think it's an equal comparison. I can go to my bookstore and find fifty books that are far better. What make Planescape unique is that I can go to my local bookstore and find fifty books that are worse. It can't compare with Dostoevsky, but I think it can hold it's own against Dan Brown or Michael Crichton. After years of Tomb Raider and Doom, I think gamers were excited to finally have something to point to and say "This is not crap!"
My knowing this fact tells me that I really need to get a life.
Check your local newspaper for the next surplus auction of your local school district. At the last one I went to, someone bought 24 overhead projectors for $1 (mainly to get the auctioneer to move on to the good stuff).
Mankind has explored enough of the universe to find a civilization who invented the time machine many years ago (you must account for travel time from their planet back here for the conference).
But I'm supposed to believe that Photoshop is one of the best web browsers ever? Please...
(Picasa is supposed to organize your photos, not edit them. Editing is just a side feature that they added in case you're too lazy to open up Gimp. So, Picasa us a crappy photo editing program, but it's pretty good at organize pictures. Good at what it's designed for, sucks at what it's not)
Second, you mentioned that the industry tanked because of supply and demand. Well, when Nintendo put the restrictions on the platform, they choked off some of the supply. From Econ 101, when you decrease the supply and demand remains constant, the price goes up and the number of units sold goes down. However, during the crash, the price per unit sold wasn't enough to recoup the expenses from designing a good game. Cutting off the supply increased the price enough that it was more economically feasible to make good games.
Finally, as much as my inner Linux advocate would love to claim otherwise, open systems haven't had the best luck on the console. The 3DO was pretty open and we all know how that went. The system currently used as paragon of openess is the Dreamcast, which pulled Sega out of the hardware business. In the modern consoles, the XBox is probably the most customizable of the bunch but it's still lagging behind the PS2. Furthermore, Microsoft is looking eliminate the functionality which made the XBox so open in the first place with the sequel, so it's not like Nintendo is the only company that restricts development.
As for why we haven't seen a crash in the PC game market, there's two differences there. With the console market, you had a console that existed only for games. The PC has a myriad of uses, so when there's a dip in the PC gaming market, people are still buying PC's for when the market returns. Furthermore, I would argue that the PC games haven't had a crash like the consoles did simply because, to the best of my knowledge, PC games haven't been as popular as the console.
Now, I still believe that Nintendo has a lot of price fixing bastards who screwed over a lot of American customers. I think that their policies on censorship were pretty ridiculous. I even think that they usually do lock their system down tighter than the need have (from what I've read, the developer requirements for the N64 were just ludicrous). However, I also feel that there are some merits to Nintendo's arguments such that they should not be viewed as simple propaganda. I also don't see significant evidence that opening up the platform would bring more benefit to the company than it would cost them in headache. Now, my knowledge of videogame history is imperfect, so if there's some stellar example of an open platform stealing the show or if I'm wrong about the statistics of console game salve versus PC games, please correct me. Just don't think that I'm spounting off some Nintendo party line without at least putting some thought into it.
The other problem is a matter of history and personal bias, so it may not be as certain as the economic issues. The big video game crash that killed the Atari, Intellivision, et al. was partially brought about by the fact that anyone who wanted to make a game could do it - even if they had bad ideas. The market was flooded with thousands of crappy games and it was difficult to find the true gems amongst the garbage. When Nintendo released the NES, the wanted to avoid those same mistakes and put restriction on what could be released for their platform. While the most famous examples are the company's notorious censorship, they also had debugging requirements. They even put a limit that you couldn't release more than six games a year. The result was that Nintendo flourished where others had fallen. Now, you could argue that modern games require such vast resources that the shovelware of yore is no longer an issue. However, considering that licensing was one of the ideas that brought the company to the power it has today, they aren't going to abandon it until after the ship has already sunk.
I'm no longer going to try and calm my self by binging on planets. I know I've done that before, but that's okay, because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me