> Second: Why do people think it is necessary to have a gun in their home for defensive purposes? Do you intend to actually fire that gun at a potential burglar?
Uh, why don't you come try to break into my home and find out?
Amen brother. Amen. I have felt the exact same as you for years. I love games. Yet I cannot find a single one I can stand playing for more than 2 minutes. No one makes "Games" in my opinion. Today's crap should be called "Linear, repetitive, entertainment excersizes."
My definition of a game is something where a rather simple set of rules can turn into an almost unlimited possible outcomes. Think of chess. Chess is like Langston's Ant, where just a few rather trivial rules are pitted against each other, yet the tree of possible outcomes and strategies is absolutely insanely difficult to calculate. You could learn to play in an hour, you can spend the rest of your life reading and practicing and always improve. It's truly beautiful.
So with all this powerful hardware, where are the games like that? Where are the carefuly setup rulesets that provide constraints, yet a chaotic, non-linear equation type amount of freedom? Not this "run, run, jump, jump, duck... ooops slipped. Try again. run, run, jump, duck... oops, slipped, try again." Or "kill everybody in a row, run to the exit. Kill everybody in a row, run to the exit." That is embarassingly idiotic.
But, maybe we shouldn't expect otherwise. Games have fallen into the same trap as movies. The demand for payoff is larger, thus the budget must be bigger, because the audience must be wider. The wider the audience, the more dumbed-down the game must become. Ridley Scott said, in Future Noir, the same thing will continue happening to movies till you just can't even break even anymore. Then... maybe... the industry will start over and start nichifying again.
It's sad too. You can see a "hint" of it, like in games like Diablo or Age of Empires, or the Grand Theft Auto series. Give people freedom. That's what they want. Don't setup the path, setup the rules, and people will breathe the kind of life THEY want into the game, by playing it THEIR way. And look what happens, those games become wildly successful. But it's like the idiot game designers miss the point, they give the credit for success to the graphics, so, like for Age of Empires, rather than in the next one, building on the chess like attributes they decided to spend all their time and money on a 3D engine which did exactly nothing for the game. So now we have the exact same ruleset, in fact, dumbed down as compared to AOK, but a glorious new tileset that does nothing for the playability. Its frustrating. Look at this recent Slashdot post and you'll see why the situation isn't going to get any better anytime soon.
Anyway, that's my rant. Sorry, I just agree with the original poster 100% and I hope that one day all the people forwarding the success of the clone army of Quake-style games will taste the true satisfaction of an open/world, Langston's Ant type game, and demand more of it from the game makers.
If you're talking about WindowsXP/2000, you can lockout automatically on a 60 second screensaver or whatever. You can also enable lockout on resume from a suspend. And finally if you just NTFS and a strong name/password, then EFS to encrypt your My Documents (or whever your secret recipes live), someone could physically take the drive out, put it in another machine, and not do much with it. Im sure there are *NIX versions of all of these things too, which, when employed together, can be setup once, and pretty much forgotten about by the end user's standpoint.
Karma (Excellent) jackass. You have a flamebait comment yourself. I was voicing my opinion not attacking someone out of the box. If you want to win people to OpenSource, your atitude isn't the way to do it.
It's a unified set of objects that can be used across multiple languages and multiple technologies. A "framework" if objects that aid in the rapid creation of anything from a windows gui app to a website to a webservice.
Im not some kind of MS cheerleader, but I will say, I'm a perl guy who never liked using Perl to output HTML (sorry Slashdot authors, you guys do great, I just hated doing it), I liked ASP, but VB SUUUUUUCKED when youre used to Perl. So when C# came out, I bought a couple books.
Here I am a few months later, and I just finished a project for a client where I "single handedly" built a fairly complicated retail website (online shopping), 3 web services, 3 command line (cron type) apps that run on their internal servers and keep the webserver's contact and product database up to date across the internet via webservices. And one GUI app to manage some key features from their end. And I did it all in C# using the same.NET objects and building just a few of my own.
Again, this is not an MS employee talking (read my comment history), I'm stating only the truth. Im sure Java is awsome, I spent a little time with it, and honestly was going to move to that next, but C# just seemed slick coming from Perl, and I really have enjoyed working with it.
Incedentally, I don't use Visual Studio.NET for much. It's a fine IDE, and I use it to create GUI apps (Im no masochist, screw trying to place form widgets by typing in pixel coords), but other than that I do the rest with EditPlus.
Give it a look. MS products usually piss me off, and much of what they do is so ill-willed or poorly-thought out, but I swear, I feel like.NET was written by someone ELSE. It's just really nice for small guys like me who want a lot of power.
While having so many different arns of law enforcement might not be quite as effective, disarray decentralizes power. I think I like that. I'm pretty sure I don't want one, super-massive, all-powerful secret service.
It's sort of like a monopoly, it works fine untill they do something wrong - then you're screwed. No thanks, I'd rather have them having to argue with each other, and get caught up in turf wars and duplicated data.
Would be interesting to see if they could create the butterflies with a small video camera as well as a GPS to indentify exactly what theyre looking at, and from what direction.
Send a massive swarm out that all broadcast back small pieces of the scene from different angles. All of the physical location data is combined with the video, a computer back at "base" assembles it all into a 3D VR world.
Then you as a participant ("butterfly tamer" ?)could control the swarm, and as you moved through VR space, the butterflies would move through physical space to try to build up the detail of image necessary for what you're looking at.
Isn't the range on 802.11b like a couple hundred feet? I keep hearing about blanketing the country with WiFi, but the last experience with 802.11b I had was horrible. In an apartment building, I could barely maintain a connection 2 feet from the wireless router. Cordless phones, microwaves, even fishtanks can hinder performance. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see 802.11b working for the masses as an ISP service.
If that is accurate at all, you're talking about 200 people or so. The 80286 ran at 25Mhz at the fastest, and did far less per clock cycle than any modern CPU, but giving both the benefit of the doubt. That would be what looks to be about 200 people times 20 Mhz, so 4 Ghz. Impressive. I think a dual Athlon 2000+ is $450 on Pricewatch.:P Sorry, I know you were making a point, but I couldn't help myself.
...And this is why you shouldn't believe the prerelease specs. Nothing ever performs to spec; trust the benchmarks.
but then again, drivers can be tweaked to skew benchmarks. Trust review sites...
but then again, all the review sites are bought and paid for by various vendors with special interests. Trust your parents.
Oh god... my dad is John Ashcroft... NEVERMIND...
Trade 50 more MPG for your life?
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I admit up front, I have not even begun to examine the crash test data from any of these green-cars. I also realize that crash safety has come a long way in recent years.
Nevertheless, simple physics seems to dictate that if you were in a head-on collision with an Escalade, well, I think I'd rather be driving an Escalade myself than one of these 150 lb hybrid tupperware-mobiles.
Speed limits going up, car weight and size going down. There's all of 4 inches between your forehead and the windshield in an Insight. Eeek. Are you okay with your 16 year old daughter in a tinfoil 2 seater doing 75 on the interstate just to be the only person in your town to save some gas?
Re:Presence exists... big brother is stalking you?
on
5 Predictions for 2012
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· Score: 5, Insightful
if your boss uses it to find out you are not sick and actually going to see Star Wars 3, then you'll hate it.
PDA's will possibly be useful for the long haul if they would keep slimming them down, upping the battery life, but most importantly, they ALL... and I mean ALL Of them, have to have at least 802.11 but preferably some kind of always on cellular (or other type) connection to the net. The net is what makes most every computer useful, (what do you do with your PC when your net connection is down?, other than play games). So a PDA without a 24/7 nailed up connection to all your other PCs, office, home, and web, to me, is just really missing the boat. And Im not talking about some deck of cards sized wart you can plug into the top. It needs to be inside, invisible, and functioning all the time. Then Id stop putting mine in a drawer.
Sorry, as someone who's been through a fire, I must rant.
Oh for the love of God, we're talking about someone's personal home backups. Im pretty sure no one needs daily copies of all their data at 300 mile seperated bank branches. Who are you that your data is that important, Jesus? I think the original question of the article was based around home backup methods. If you own some massive business in the WTC, trust me, youll have better alternatives. A place I know takes a set of tapes down to salt mines in Kansas City every single day, where they're practically oblivious to every kind of catastrophe that leaves most of humanity intact. If this is for home, just dump your drive once in awhile to some CDRs or DVDRs and put them at work or something. Trust me, I lived through a fire in my home (total loss, not just some kitchen fire), and the last thing I was concerned about was my mp3s. What about your wife's wedding dress? What about your pets? Children? All your legal documents? What are you doing to do, keep your grandpa's world war 1 pocket watch in a kryptonite box in a vault at NORAD? Shit happens. If youre one of the 98% youll probably go through life without a single catastrophic disaster, if you have one, we'll, youll pick up the pieces and start over and you'll realize pretty quickly how really little mose of those 0's and 1's mean in the grand scheme of things.
If you have some REAL important shit at your house, chances are it doesnt change daily. Burn it to CD and send a copy to grandma for Christmas once a year if it makes you sleep better at night, but keeping 10 copies of everything across 300 miles of bank safes, and spending $1000 on a firesafe to protect $2 in JPEGs, its all just really retarded when you actually go through a loss like that.
My business partner works from his home in the small town of Dayton, Iowa. We're talking so small they have a caseys, and thats about it. I imagined he'd be on dialup for life. He now has 256k DSL and could go much higher if he wanted to pay for it. Apparently there are some easy-to-implement turn-key solutions for small telephone co-ops. The co-op that runs the phones for his dinky town, another even dinkier town, and one "small" town (maybe 2 caseys!) bought into it. I get the impression what they do is put a DSLAM in each town center, and since no house is outside of a 16,000 wirefoot range, pretty much 1 DSLAM covers the entire town. So the phone co-op buys 3, puts one in each town, and then probably buy into some bigger ISP with a T1 from their main office to the ISP's office or something for the big pipe.
All I know is my jaw about fell off when I learned he could get DSL out where everyone is like 90 years old, and its a 45 minute drive to get to the nearest McDonalds.
The thing you're using to do all this-- it could be... an MP3 player in your car... takes the authorization and downloads the content package from what they call a "content server"...
How many repeaters and miles of Cat5 cable will you need to drive around town connected to the internet?
Is all this bullshit really worth listening to N*Sync, or watching the latest Lord Of the Rings? I mean seriously. Was any movie you saw or song you listened to so important to you that you're willing to be bent over repeatedly, downloading licenses and calling 800 numbers with special ID codes, and keying them in on your little chiclet sized remote for your DVD player and all the other complete nonsense you're going to have to do to listen to "Oops, I did it again."? I stopped paying for cable a couple months ago, and I haven't missed it at all. Maybe the upside to all of this is we'll realize the best things in life are indeed free, and they have nothing to do with pop culture teen idols and special fx hamburger seller mega-movies with budgets the size of most small countries.
Might it also be related to drive "usage"?
Think about it. When there was Windows 3.1, an operating system that fit in 8 megs of RAM, and the average person probably opened 10, 50k Word docs a day. What about now? Games that take 2 gigs of drive space, and probably load half that during play? Playback of 600 meg DiVX movies, web browsing that writes, deletes files absolutely constantly. Streaming hundreds of megs of MP3's off the drive while you work on your 128 meg OS, editing 3gigs of digital video?
Seems to me they also work harder. Not saying the manufacturers aren't at fault but we may be overlooking just how vastly different today's harddrive usage is.
... when Netscape did it to themselves. If you want to talk about standards, go look at charts showing what CSS properties Netscape versions properly support and which ones IE supports. IE kicks its ass all over the place. Netscape is downright broken on some very easy things. Now the new Netscape based on Mozilla, I can't comment. But that's when someone else did all the work for them, maybe Mozilla is fine. But IE is a pretty fast, stable browser that has supported more standards, more correctly than any version of Netscape prior to Mozilla. And if you want to talk about "MS's proprietary HTML tags", yea, Netscape did the same shit, so would anyone trying to own marketshare.
How about an example from around the time of the Great Browser Holy Wars...
NETSCAPE ONLY TAGS - blink - layer - keygen - multicol - nolayer - server - spacer
INTERNET EXPLORER ONLY TAGS - bgsound - iframe - marquee
Hmm... looks like Netscape had more.
Look around you, proprietary "anything" is how you keep money coming in and marketshare up. If youre talking about some kind of open source, community developed code, like Mozilla, then yes, please avoid proprietary stuff. But quit bashing Microsoft just because they have a good browser that supports standards at least as well as their only major competitor and are using the same technique as just about every other capitalist on the planet to make more money and keep investors happy. Netscape sucked and deserved to die.
Now go ahead, mod me down because I stood up for MS.
Ive seen so many of these "X place" is using / switches to "X technology", and it doesnt mean jack. If you want to argue FOR a technology, argue for it, don't use someone picking it as an argument. My local DOT uses OS/2, so do ATMs. What's that mean? OS/2 is perfect? CompUSA's cash register system is a Java program. So Java 0wnZ J00? Someone switches to something all the time, big deal? And most importantly, idiots abound, so just because some place big or small chooses something, doesn't mean it was a good idea, no matter if it's Bob's Taco's, or the DoD.
Dammit, you and Ted Waitt need to figure this out once and for all. Any monitor can have a flat "screen". Flatscreen CRT's have been around forever. Look at most any Sony Trinitron. Flat PANELS refer to LCDs.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, why don't you come try to break into my home and find out?
My definition of a game is something where a rather simple set of rules can turn into an almost unlimited possible outcomes. Think of chess. Chess is like Langston's Ant, where just a few rather trivial rules are pitted against each other, yet the tree of possible outcomes and strategies is absolutely insanely difficult to calculate. You could learn to play in an hour, you can spend the rest of your life reading and practicing and always improve. It's truly beautiful.
So with all this powerful hardware, where are the games like that? Where are the carefuly setup rulesets that provide constraints, yet a chaotic, non-linear equation type amount of freedom? Not this "run, run, jump, jump, duck... ooops slipped. Try again. run, run, jump, duck... oops, slipped, try again." Or "kill everybody in a row, run to the exit. Kill everybody in a row, run to the exit." That is embarassingly idiotic.
But, maybe we shouldn't expect otherwise. Games have fallen into the same trap as movies. The demand for payoff is larger, thus the budget must be bigger, because the audience must be wider. The wider the audience, the more dumbed-down the game must become. Ridley Scott said, in Future Noir, the same thing will continue happening to movies till you just can't even break even anymore. Then ... maybe ... the industry will start over and start nichifying again.
It's sad too. You can see a "hint" of it, like in games like Diablo or Age of Empires, or the Grand Theft Auto series. Give people freedom. That's what they want. Don't setup the path, setup the rules, and people will breathe the kind of life THEY want into the game, by playing it THEIR way. And look what happens, those games become wildly successful. But it's like the idiot game designers miss the point, they give the credit for success to the graphics, so, like for Age of Empires, rather than in the next one, building on the chess like attributes they decided to spend all their time and money on a 3D engine which did exactly nothing for the game. So now we have the exact same ruleset, in fact, dumbed down as compared to AOK, but a glorious new tileset that does nothing for the playability. Its frustrating. Look at this recent Slashdot post and you'll see why the situation isn't going to get any better anytime soon.
Anyway, that's my rant. Sorry, I just agree with the original poster 100% and I hope that one day all the people forwarding the success of the clone army of Quake-style games will taste the true satisfaction of an open/world, Langston's Ant type game, and demand more of it from the game makers.
If you're talking about WindowsXP/2000, you can lockout automatically on a 60 second screensaver or whatever. You can also enable lockout on resume from a suspend. And finally if you just NTFS and a strong name/password, then EFS to encrypt your My Documents (or whever your secret recipes live), someone could physically take the drive out, put it in another machine, and not do much with it. Im sure there are *NIX versions of all of these things too, which, when employed together, can be setup once, and pretty much forgotten about by the end user's standpoint.
Use IE and Passport and you can browse like it's 1984.
Sounds to me like Twitter = Axe.ToGrind();
Get laid someday, it'll help, trust me.
Im not some kind of MS cheerleader, but I will say, I'm a perl guy who never liked using Perl to output HTML (sorry Slashdot authors, you guys do great, I just hated doing it), I liked ASP, but VB SUUUUUUCKED when youre used to Perl. So when C# came out, I bought a couple books.
Here I am a few months later, and I just finished a project for a client where I "single handedly" built a fairly complicated retail website (online shopping), 3 web services, 3 command line (cron type) apps that run on their internal servers and keep the webserver's contact and product database up to date across the internet via webservices. And one GUI app to manage some key features from their end. And I did it all in C# using the same .NET objects and building just a few of my own.
Again, this is not an MS employee talking (read my comment history), I'm stating only the truth. Im sure Java is awsome, I spent a little time with it, and honestly was going to move to that next, but C# just seemed slick coming from Perl, and I really have enjoyed working with it.
Incedentally, I don't use Visual Studio.NET for much. It's a fine IDE, and I use it to create GUI apps (Im no masochist, screw trying to place form widgets by typing in pixel coords), but other than that I do the rest with EditPlus.
Give it a look. MS products usually piss me off, and much of what they do is so ill-willed or poorly-thought out, but I swear, I feel like .NET was written by someone ELSE. It's just really nice for small guys like me who want a lot of power.
It's sort of like a monopoly, it works fine untill they do something wrong - then you're screwed. No thanks, I'd rather have them having to argue with each other, and get caught up in turf wars and duplicated data.
Send a massive swarm out that all broadcast back small pieces of the scene from different angles. All of the physical location data is combined with the video, a computer back at "base" assembles it all into a 3D VR world.
Then you as a participant ("butterfly tamer" ?)could control the swarm, and as you moved through VR space, the butterflies would move through physical space to try to build up the detail of image necessary for what you're looking at.
Isn't the range on 802.11b like a couple hundred feet? I keep hearing about blanketing the country with WiFi, but the last experience with 802.11b I had was horrible. In an apartment building, I could barely maintain a connection 2 feet from the wireless router. Cordless phones, microwaves, even fishtanks can hinder performance. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see 802.11b working for the masses as an ISP service.
If that is accurate at all, you're talking about 200 people or so. The 80286 ran at 25Mhz at the fastest, and did far less per clock cycle than any modern CPU, but giving both the benefit of the doubt. That would be what looks to be about 200 people times 20 Mhz, so 4 Ghz. Impressive. I think a dual Athlon 2000+ is $450 on Pricewatch. :P Sorry, I know you were making a point, but I couldn't help myself.
but then again, drivers can be tweaked to skew benchmarks. Trust review sites...
but then again, all the review sites are bought and paid for by various vendors with special interests. Trust your parents.
Oh god... my dad is John Ashcroft... NEVERMIND...
Nevertheless, simple physics seems to dictate that if you were in a head-on collision with an Escalade, well, I think I'd rather be driving an Escalade myself than one of these 150 lb hybrid tupperware-mobiles.
Speed limits going up, car weight and size going down. There's all of 4 inches between your forehead and the windshield in an Insight. Eeek. Are you okay with your 16 year old daughter in a tinfoil 2 seater doing 75 on the interstate just to be the only person in your town to save some gas?
Leave your phone at home?
PDA's will possibly be useful for the long haul if they would keep slimming them down, upping the battery life, but most importantly, they ALL... and I mean ALL Of them, have to have at least 802.11 but preferably some kind of always on cellular (or other type) connection to the net. The net is what makes most every computer useful, (what do you do with your PC when your net connection is down?, other than play games). So a PDA without a 24/7 nailed up connection to all your other PCs, office, home, and web, to me, is just really missing the boat. And Im not talking about some deck of cards sized wart you can plug into the top. It needs to be inside, invisible, and functioning all the time. Then Id stop putting mine in a drawer.
I mean seriously, it's gonna take more than some CDRW's baby.
Oh for the love of God, we're talking about someone's personal home backups. Im pretty sure no one needs daily copies of all their data at 300 mile seperated bank branches. Who are you that your data is that important, Jesus? I think the original question of the article was based around home backup methods. If you own some massive business in the WTC, trust me, youll have better alternatives. A place I know takes a set of tapes down to salt mines in Kansas City every single day, where they're practically oblivious to every kind of catastrophe that leaves most of humanity intact. If this is for home, just dump your drive once in awhile to some CDRs or DVDRs and put them at work or something. Trust me, I lived through a fire in my home (total loss, not just some kitchen fire), and the last thing I was concerned about was my mp3s. What about your wife's wedding dress? What about your pets? Children? All your legal documents? What are you doing to do, keep your grandpa's world war 1 pocket watch in a kryptonite box in a vault at NORAD? Shit happens. If youre one of the 98% youll probably go through life without a single catastrophic disaster, if you have one, we'll, youll pick up the pieces and start over and you'll realize pretty quickly how really little mose of those 0's and 1's mean in the grand scheme of things.
If you have some REAL important shit at your house, chances are it doesnt change daily. Burn it to CD and send a copy to grandma for Christmas once a year if it makes you sleep better at night, but keeping 10 copies of everything across 300 miles of bank safes, and spending $1000 on a firesafe to protect $2 in JPEGs, its all just really retarded when you actually go through a loss like that.
All I know is my jaw about fell off when I learned he could get DSL out where everyone is like 90 years old, and its a 45 minute drive to get to the nearest McDonalds.
How many repeaters and miles of Cat5 cable will you need to drive around town connected to the internet?
Is all this bullshit really worth listening to N*Sync, or watching the latest Lord Of the Rings? I mean seriously. Was any movie you saw or song you listened to so important to you that you're willing to be bent over repeatedly, downloading licenses and calling 800 numbers with special ID codes, and keying them in on your little chiclet sized remote for your DVD player and all the other complete nonsense you're going to have to do to listen to "Oops, I did it again."? I stopped paying for cable a couple months ago, and I haven't missed it at all. Maybe the upside to all of this is we'll realize the best things in life are indeed free, and they have nothing to do with pop culture teen idols and special fx hamburger seller mega-movies with budgets the size of most small countries.
Seems to me they also work harder. Not saying the manufacturers aren't at fault but we may be overlooking just how vastly different today's harddrive usage is.
hehe
How about an example from around the time of the Great Browser Holy Wars...
NETSCAPE ONLY TAGS - blink - layer - keygen - multicol - nolayer - server - spacer
INTERNET EXPLORER ONLY TAGS - bgsound - iframe - marquee
Hmm... looks like Netscape had more.
Look around you, proprietary "anything" is how you keep money coming in and marketshare up. If youre talking about some kind of open source, community developed code, like Mozilla, then yes, please avoid proprietary stuff. But quit bashing Microsoft just because they have a good browser that supports standards at least as well as their only major competitor and are using the same technique as just about every other capitalist on the planet to make more money and keep investors happy. Netscape sucked and deserved to die.
Now go ahead, mod me down because I stood up for MS.
Ive seen so many of these "X place" is using / switches to "X technology", and it doesnt mean jack. If you want to argue FOR a technology, argue for it, don't use someone picking it as an argument. My local DOT uses OS/2, so do ATMs. What's that mean? OS/2 is perfect? CompUSA's cash register system is a Java program. So Java 0wnZ J00? Someone switches to something all the time, big deal? And most importantly, idiots abound, so just because some place big or small chooses something, doesn't mean it was a good idea, no matter if it's Bob's Taco's, or the DoD.
Snakes! Snakes! They're all over me!
Dammit, you and Ted Waitt need to figure this out once and for all. Any monitor can have a flat "screen". Flatscreen CRT's have been around forever. Look at most any Sony Trinitron. Flat PANELS refer to LCDs.