Are we looking at the same screenshots?
on
New DOOM III Shots
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· Score: 2, Insightful
2 things make these shots "next generation"
Bump mapping. VERY FEW games up until this point have used it, and I've always thought that was a real shame. A good bump-map can make a world of difference.
Lighting! If you look at the dog-bull-beasty shot again, you'll notice that all the light is coming through in little bars. These bars show up on the beast, and it casts a shadow as well.
The zombie-with-too-damn-many-eyes-beasty shot shows that it is casting shadows on itself. Another cool lighting thing.
The first TV cyborg *I* can think of was the 6 million dollar man. A GOOD GUY.
Or how about RoboCop. Or... well, you get the idea.
Yeah yeah... you can just as easily make a list of bad guys (terminator, borg, etc), but my point is that your hollywood bashing is, in this isolated case, unwaranted.
Just this once.
Re:Old idea with problems.. but promising..
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 1
Interesting, and I'll leave the others to rail against your math and the consequences you point out.
But why are you only considering 'mass going up'. What about 'mass going down'. As soon as it becomes feasable (and a beanstalk will make it happen that much sooner), you can bet people will start mining off-planet. And some of those resources will end up headed back down the gravity well.
And someone else has already mentioned that the earth acquire's a fair bit of mass naturally, in the form of space dust, meteorites and what have you.
The sky is not falling. The ground is not rising. Everything is okay. Deep breaths. There ya go... all better.
Re:SpamCop does more harm than good.
on
Meet the Spammers
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· Score: 1
It seems to me that the most viable attack against spammers is financail. We make it too expensive for them to be profitable.
And one of the ways to do this is to smack them around (legally speaking) when they cross various lines.
And this is WAY OVER. So set the attack-lawyers on them, and watch with glee as little chunks of spam spatter the walls.
"If that really is the case, it means that TNT2 cards are capable of all the neat tricks gforce cards only allot slower."
Kinda sorta but not really. An updated driver for a TNT2 board could emulate in software all the silicon a TNT2 is missing. That's true regardless of what card you have. There are software-only OpenGL drivers out there....but that's not really what you're after, is it? Maybe I just didn't understand you. I usually understand raving loonies just fine (professional courtesy and all that:P), but you're thinking just strikes me as a little out of kilter.
I have fond memories of waking up on the keyboard from a long night of playing Omega. Fortunately that keyboard had one of those plastic cover thingies, because I drooled all over it while I slept. Ah... the good ol' days.
If I recall correctly, you had to actually buy all the components of your tanks (including the option of a CPU upgrade), and could then field teams of tanks.
I don't recall that the tanks could actually talk to one another though.
Actually, the original RC2 ending was pretty damn clever. None of that bash-the-brains-out-on-the-sidewalk-while-he's-sti ll-watching-ride-em-cowboy crap.
Remember the drugs they gave him? That cansiter of Nuke? It was a bomb.
Drugs'll kill ya, especially when they're loaded with c-4.
They couldn't outfight the new RC so they had to outsmart him. The ending they used was a steamy pile in comparison.
I find it VASTLY amusing that all the signers of that petition are either:
a: wondering if this is a great troll or an example of Vast Stupidity b: convinced it's a result of stupidity and railing against everyone else (including the hundreds of like-minded posters) who are obviously all morons.
There is a SINGLE genuine affermative signing in there, and I'm not so sure it's not a joke either.
If it's not a matter compiler, I'm not interested. Make your own jewelry? Whoopdey fricken doo. Make anything that'll fit inside a 2' cube? Sign me the hell up.
As a programmer, I've always enjoyed the whole 'tweak a line of code and rebuild' phenomenon... and thought that people who work with real-world matterials kinda got jipped. Then I read Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"... and that was just perfect. Lined up pretty much exactly with a line of reasoning I'd hit upon maybe a month before. Funny how life throws things like that at you from time to time. Yup... all those people who think an intellegence created the universe are just wacky.
Correct. One does not need religion to determine that we're all better off if we agree not to kill/steal-from/eat/rape/etc. each other. In fact, Game Theory gives us the tools to PROVE THIS mathematically. Prisoner's dilemma and all that.
But that doesn't mean we should discount religion in general, and Judaism and its descendants in particular. %90 of the 10 commandments can be proven to be valid advice in game theory. "Keep the Sabbath holy" is beyond its reach.
But that doesn't invalidate the 10 commandments. If anything, it should support them. Thousands of years ago, people were given advice that we now KNOW to be good. People were given a creation story that is (arguably) accurate (big bang == "let there be light", plants appeared, fish, then animals, then finally man... birds before animals? oops.. maybe 'fish' should read 'reptiles and dinosaurs' but I digress).
What am I getting at? -You're right, morality doesn't need to be supported by religion. -Does that invalidate religion? No... quite the opposite. Every time scientific reality and Christianity line up, that's just another validation of my belief.
He also says that he's completely honest and trustworthy. Just ask him. He'll tell you. So he's working in top secret, but just happens to spill his guts to you? Sad.
Did you actually buy into all this, or are you just trolling?
Sounds like they only conclusion they'll be able to draw is that zero gee causes bed-sores and a stiff neck.
Previous studies on women who spend too much time on their backs have determined that zero gee can cause pregnancy and may lead to hanging out with Italian men named Guido.
I'm just objecting to the whole tone of your message... you want to be safe and you're willing to spend the freedoms of those around you to have it... News flash: MY freedom is not YOURS to give away. And the worse things get, the closer to that 'willing to die for' line I get... not that I'm anywhere near it now, but maybe some day.
Furthermore, the whole "anyone who would die for a cause is a nut" angle rubs me the wrong damn way.
Is there NOTHING that you would die for? That you would kill for? To protect your loved ones? To protect a total stranger? (die? nah... but kill... tough call) To protect someone with whom you share quite a bit (a buddy from work?).
Is there nothing in this world that is more valuable to you than your own life? I've met people who's answer to that was 'no'. Selfish (and often lonely) bastards, every one. I pitied them.
So there are people... perfectly reasonable people... who would rather lay down their lives than see X happen.
Just because you perceive religion to be unimportant, doesn't make it so to others. Sorry.
Having said that, suicide bombing for Islam isn't the act of a healthy individual. One of the tenants of Islam (as I understand them... could be off here) is that you not attack an unarmed person... that includes a soldier that just dropped their weapon. The Old Testament lays it out quite simply: Don't kill. Crusaders, suicide bombers... same deal. Both are (or were) wrong based on a straight-forward interpretation of their own religions.
To wrap up this not-so-little tirade: 1) trading safety for freedom is bad. 2) there are things in this world that I hold to be more valuable than my life. I am not alone. I am not any more (or less;) crazy than the next guy. 3) 9/11 sucked, but seeing the US turned into a police-state sucks MORE. 4) Various random and/or spastic points with only tangential relevance. 5) You're wrong. Agree with me.;P
The cops are from the present, but their little pet psi's can see into the future... "Sheepab is going to kill the goatsex guy tommorow... do we want to stop him, or just slap his wrist after the fact?"
Only if the reviewers are: a: Lazy. They didn't really read the code before hand and just ripped through it in the review meeting itself. Been guilty of this a few times myself. b: Morons.
Any code that disagrees with its comment is a problem. Whether you need to change the code or the comment is something that needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. THIS case is pretty obviously a code flaw.
I think your hypothetical example is doing a disservice to your coworkers. VERY FEW people would let that slide if they actually looked at it.
'code reviews will NOT catch the most insidious and costly mistakes, such as general architecture design flaws, race conditions, and memory leaks.'
Uhmm... NO.
Leaks: I don't know about you, but I've found quite a few RESOURCE leaks in code reviews (memory, files, you name it). Besides, many memory leak detectors can only detect leaks as they happen. If the leak is in some error-handling branch, many tools will never see it.
Race conditions: We don't work much with multi-threaded code, so I've never even run across a race condition in 'live' code. Can't really comment.
Design Flaws: Yup. To paraphrase... "Hey, Joe Coder! That way is dumb. Do it like this instead."
Code reviews are Very Important.
And "Code Complete" rocks. Go read it NOW.
Don't get me wrong... Tools are great. Any bug that can be detected automatically, should be. But that doesn't make code reviews any less valuable.
Okay, IF this works then we're looking at a reactionless space drive. No more need to haul huge canisters of highly explosive chemicals around (once you're in orbit). Just throw together a gravity drive and a sufficiently powerful generator (yeah... 'just'), and away you go. It'd make the ion drive in DS-1 obsolete in a Big Hurry.
And theres a relatively easy way to test this one too.
Put one of these gravoelctric generator thingies on a scale, with some mass above it. Flip the switch. Did it get heavier?
It still might not be possible to get a net force out of this... it may well be that you'd just attract the superconductor to the ship. In which case you'd have to point the gravity waves at your destination. And then the whole 'inversly proportional to the square of the distance' thing will kill your efficiency in a big hurry.
Yet another 'but': If these waves are linear/coherent, then the force may well fall off linearly rather than exponentially. Heck, it might not fall off at all.
Can anyone could the number of 'what if's' in the above ravings? I ran out of fingers.
I think that someone starting off with these mental tools straight out of college can avoid all the 'sweat & tears' that we had to go through.
I haven't personally derived each and every pattern described in Design Patterns (just 1 in fact)... but that doens't mean I don't find them useful. Quite the opposite.
Now I 'grok' the pattern I worked out for myself more than the others, but that doesn't mean I don't use them.
I still think this would be a bit much to through at someone early on, but perhaps after they've got a language under their belt, along with some basic concepts....
Slashdot Mirror
2 things make these shots "next generation"
Bump mapping. VERY FEW games up until this point have used it, and I've always thought that was a real shame. A good bump-map can make a world of difference.
Lighting! If you look at the dog-bull-beasty shot again, you'll notice that all the light is coming through in little bars. These bars show up on the beast, and it casts a shadow as well.
The zombie-with-too-damn-many-eyes-beasty shot shows that it is casting shadows on itself. Another cool lighting thing.
Go look again.
The first TV cyborg *I* can think of was the 6 million dollar man. A GOOD GUY.
Or how about RoboCop. Or... well, you get the idea.
Yeah yeah... you can just as easily make a list of bad guys (terminator, borg, etc), but my point is that your hollywood bashing is, in this isolated case, unwaranted.
Just this once.
Interesting, and I'll leave the others to rail against your math and the consequences you point out.
But why are you only considering 'mass going up'. What about 'mass going down'. As soon as it becomes feasable (and a beanstalk will make it happen that much sooner), you can bet people will start mining off-planet. And some of those resources will end up headed back down the gravity well.
And someone else has already mentioned that the earth acquire's a fair bit of mass naturally, in the form of space dust, meteorites and what have you.
The sky is not falling. The ground is not rising. Everything is okay. Deep breaths. There ya go... all better.
It seems to me that the most viable attack against spammers is financail. We make it too expensive for them to be profitable.
And one of the ways to do this is to smack them around (legally speaking) when they cross various lines.
And this is WAY OVER. So set the attack-lawyers on them, and watch with glee as little chunks of spam spatter the walls.
"If that really is the case, it means that TNT2 cards are capable of all the neat tricks gforce cards only allot slower."
...but that's not really what you're after, is it? Maybe I just didn't understand you. I usually understand raving loonies just fine (professional courtesy and all that :P), but you're thinking just strikes me as a little out of kilter.
Kinda sorta but not really. An updated driver for a TNT2 board could emulate in software all the silicon a TNT2 is missing. That's true regardless of what card you have. There are software-only OpenGL drivers out there.
I have fond memories of waking up on the keyboard from a long night of playing Omega. Fortunately that keyboard had one of those plastic cover thingies, because I drooled all over it while I slept. Ah... the good ol' days.
If I recall correctly, you had to actually buy all the components of your tanks (including the option of a CPU upgrade), and could then field teams of tanks.
I don't recall that the tanks could actually talk to one another though.
Have there been any successful reproductions of a zero-point experiment?
I'm not trying to come down on someone like 'the establishment' and laugh at that-which-is-different.
Any experimental data to back up this theory, or is it all just a paper on a web site?
Actually, the original RC2 ending was pretty damn clever. None of that bash-the-brains-out-on-the-sidewalk-while-he's-sti ll-watching-ride-em-cowboy crap.
Remember the drugs they gave him? That cansiter of Nuke? It was a bomb.
Drugs'll kill ya, especially when they're loaded with c-4.
They couldn't outfight the new RC so they had to outsmart him. The ending they used was a steamy pile in comparison.
Bad Hollywood! BAD! No paycheck.
I think this has more to do with practice than with gaming.
Two things could easily lead to reflexes fast enough to pull this off:
Juggling. You get REALLY GOOD at catching stuff. Have you learned to juggle since highschool?
Knocking over Many Things, and TRYING to catch them. Practice makes perfect.
All that being said, I'd like to see some measurement of reaction time across gamer/non-gamer lines... because you just might be right.
Subject: "Mod parent up"
sig: "Moderators suck"
Does anyone else find this amusing?
I find it VASTLY amusing that all the signers of that petition are either:
a: wondering if this is a great troll or an example of Vast Stupidity
b: convinced it's a result of stupidity and railing against everyone else (including the hundreds of like-minded posters) who are obviously all morons.
There is a SINGLE genuine affermative signing in there, and I'm not so sure it's not a joke either.
I call it a good troll. Well done good sir!
If it's not a matter compiler, I'm not interested. Make your own jewelry? Whoopdey fricken doo. Make anything that'll fit inside a 2' cube? Sign me the hell up.
As a programmer, I've always enjoyed the whole 'tweak a line of code and rebuild' phenomenon... and thought that people who work with real-world matterials kinda got jipped. Then I read Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"... and that was just perfect. Lined up pretty much exactly with a line of reasoning I'd hit upon maybe a month before. Funny how life throws things like that at you from time to time. Yup... all those people who think an intellegence created the universe are just wacky.
Shyeah! And a monkey might fly out of my butt!
No no... I meant "Open Source" rather than "Operating System". Honest mistake.
I suspect that IBM's services devision is doing just fine, but has anyone heard any numbers?
Step 1: Convince investors that OS can be a viable business model
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit.
Is anyone out there Genuinely Doing Well in the business of OS? I know RH has (almost?) turned a profit, but other than that, what's out there?
Correct. One does not need religion to determine that we're all better off if we agree not to kill/steal-from/eat/rape/etc. each other. In fact, Game Theory gives us the tools to PROVE THIS mathematically. Prisoner's dilemma and all that.
But that doesn't mean we should discount religion in general, and Judaism and its descendants in particular. %90 of the 10 commandments can be proven to be valid advice in game theory. "Keep the Sabbath holy" is beyond its reach.
But that doesn't invalidate the 10 commandments. If anything, it should support them. Thousands of years ago, people were given advice that we now KNOW to be good. People were given a creation story that is (arguably) accurate (big bang == "let there be light", plants appeared, fish, then animals, then finally man... birds before animals? oops.. maybe 'fish' should read 'reptiles and dinosaurs' but I digress).
What am I getting at?
-You're right, morality doesn't need to be supported by religion.
-Does that invalidate religion? No... quite the opposite. Every time scientific reality and Christianity line up, that's just another validation of my belief.
He also says that he's completely honest and trustworthy. Just ask him. He'll tell you.
So he's working in top secret, but just happens to spill his guts to you? Sad.
Did you actually buy into all this, or are you just trolling?
Sounds like they only conclusion they'll be able to draw is that zero gee causes bed-sores and a stiff neck.
Previous studies on women who spend too much time on their backs have determined that zero gee can cause pregnancy and may lead to hanging out with Italian men named Guido.
And ya caught me... I'll bite.
;) crazy than the next guy. ;P
I'm just objecting to the whole tone of your message... you want to be safe and you're willing to spend the freedoms of those around you to have it... News flash: MY freedom is not YOURS to give away. And the worse things get, the closer to that 'willing to die for' line I get... not that I'm anywhere near it now, but maybe some day.
Furthermore, the whole "anyone who would die for a cause is a nut" angle rubs me the wrong damn way.
Is there NOTHING that you would die for? That you would kill for?
To protect your loved ones?
To protect a total stranger? (die? nah... but kill... tough call)
To protect someone with whom you share quite a bit (a buddy from work?).
Is there nothing in this world that is more valuable to you than your own life? I've met people who's answer to that was 'no'. Selfish (and often lonely) bastards, every one. I pitied them.
So there are people... perfectly reasonable people... who would rather lay down their lives than see X happen.
Just because you perceive religion to be unimportant, doesn't make it so to others. Sorry.
Having said that, suicide bombing for Islam isn't the act of a healthy individual. One of the tenants of Islam (as I understand them... could be off here) is that you not attack an unarmed person... that includes a soldier that just dropped their weapon. The Old Testament lays it out quite simply: Don't kill. Crusaders, suicide bombers... same deal. Both are (or were) wrong based on a straight-forward interpretation of their own religions.
To wrap up this not-so-little tirade:
1) trading safety for freedom is bad.
2) there are things in this world that I hold to be more valuable than my life. I am not alone. I am not any more (or less
3) 9/11 sucked, but seeing the US turned into a police-state sucks MORE.
4) Various random and/or spastic points with only tangential relevance.
5) You're wrong. Agree with me.
no no no....
The cops are from the present, but their little pet psi's can see into the future... "Sheepab is going to kill the goatsex guy tommorow... do we want to stop him, or just slap his wrist after the fact?"
Only if the reviewers are:
a: Lazy. They didn't really read the code before hand and just ripped through it in the review meeting itself. Been guilty of this a few times myself.
b: Morons.
Any code that disagrees with its comment is a problem. Whether you need to change the code or the comment is something that needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. THIS case is pretty obviously a code flaw.
I think your hypothetical example is doing a disservice to your coworkers. VERY FEW people would let that slide if they actually looked at it.
'code reviews will NOT catch the most insidious and costly mistakes, such as general architecture design flaws, race conditions, and memory leaks.'
Uhmm... NO.
Leaks:
I don't know about you, but I've found quite a few RESOURCE leaks in code reviews (memory, files, you name it). Besides, many memory leak detectors can only detect leaks as they happen. If the leak is in some error-handling branch, many tools will never see it.
Race conditions:
We don't work much with multi-threaded code, so I've never even run across a race condition in 'live' code. Can't really comment.
Design Flaws:
Yup. To paraphrase... "Hey, Joe Coder! That way is dumb. Do it like this instead."
Code reviews are Very Important.
And "Code Complete" rocks. Go read it NOW.
Don't get me wrong... Tools are great. Any bug that can be detected automatically, should be. But that doesn't make code reviews any less valuable.
Where the fuck did that come from? Just cross posting from alt.porn.generic-stories-no-one-believes-actually- happened or what?
The man who founded Aikido was called "Morihei Ueshiba". Your guess at a pronunciation is as good as mine.
Holy crap.
Okay, IF this works then we're looking at a reactionless space drive. No more need to haul huge canisters of highly explosive chemicals around (once you're in orbit). Just throw together a gravity drive and a sufficiently powerful generator (yeah... 'just'), and away you go. It'd make the ion drive in DS-1 obsolete in a Big Hurry.
And theres a relatively easy way to test this one too.
Put one of these gravoelctric generator thingies on a scale, with some mass above it. Flip the switch. Did it get heavier?
It still might not be possible to get a net force out of this... it may well be that you'd just attract the superconductor to the ship. In which case you'd have to point the gravity waves at your destination. And then the whole 'inversly proportional to the square of the distance' thing will kill your efficiency in a big hurry.
Yet another 'but': If these waves are linear/coherent, then the force may well fall off linearly rather than exponentially. Heck, it might not fall off at all.
Can anyone could the number of 'what if's' in the above ravings? I ran out of fingers.
I disagree.
I think that someone starting off with these mental tools straight out of college can avoid all the 'sweat & tears' that we had to go through.
I haven't personally derived each and every pattern described in Design Patterns (just 1 in fact)... but that doens't mean I don't find them useful. Quite the opposite.
Now I 'grok' the pattern I worked out for myself more than the others, but that doesn't mean I don't use them.
I still think this would be a bit much to through at someone early on, but perhaps after they've got a language under their belt, along with some basic concepts....