Disclaimer: ianal, but there may be a really obvious reason why this is a dumb question.
The article states that to dampen complex noise like speech in realtime, a powerful computer must be used. I'm wondering why. If you have the speech going into the system to be cancelled, isn't there a more simple way to sample the amplitude and just amplify that sound to the right level and pump it through some kind of inversion circuit and out the speakers?
I dunno, maybe an "inversion circuit" isn't possible, but you've already got that sound to work with; all you have to do is put it 180 out of phase. It seems like that should be fairly simple. Kind of a shame to complicate such an elegant idea with anything more than basic computer-aided sampling. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty though.
Not to take the piss, but am I wrong in my understanding that noise pollution can be harmful even if you can't hear it? I can't pin down where I read it, and ianal, but isn't it the case that excessive sound waves have a physiological effect that is not consciously noticeable but can still cause fatigue etc?
And if so, where does this leave the noise dampener? It's doubling the sonic wave output, after all. I presume that since the waves are counterphasic, they're pretty much dampened at the location of the user (by definition) so it's all okay, but there's still a lot of excess wave energy floating around. Can other people outside of the quiet zone hear this thing?
Please, don't mod me down for asking ignorant questions...I'd rather you responded.
The problem with watercooling, I would imagine, is not so much the cost as the weight. Water is damn heavy stuff; even a small amount will considerably add to the weight of a case. When you've already got those damn P4 heatsinks, a few hardrives, CD-RW and DVD and of course the PSU, it adds up.
Course, I've never really hefted a water-cooled rig before, so I could be wrong, but that's always been the thing I've wondered about it. If it's as heavy as it sounds, it's no wonder I didn't see any at the last lan.
Now, on the topic, I think the parent post does raise a good point. As Tim Williamson says in the article, "it probably will have some applications, [but] it would seem far easier and more sensible to avoid making noise in the first place." I have to agree. This sound dampener is really nifty, and proof-of-concept of something I've had in my book for a while because it's the kind of thing that's great for privacy in medbays etc, but it's treating the symptoms, not the cause. Obviously the cause can't always be treated, and there is surely place for these devices, but I think it's also important to try to prevent noise pollution simply by trying to create technologies etc that are quieter in the first place.
...anyone? As far as I can tell from the article, this is an uber-expensive hardware version of existing transparency methods, with two differences: 1, there are effectively two desktops you can see at once, so you can switch between them to draw applications into focus; and 2, the second desktop is located physically behind the first, so there is a better 3D effect due to parallax. It would be an interesting idea to try point 1 using software--it might make transparencies more easily manageable--but the only real benefit I can see over software transparencies is point 2.
Which is likely what you'd expect, except it's only 3D in that there are two flat planes for objects to be "projected" onto instead of one. Sure, having apps that would support this with depth-based widgets could be pretty cool, but I wouldn't get too excited. I'd be surprised to see this becoming a mainsteam hit.
Also, if someone could explain how this would benefit gamers (as stated in the article), I'd be keen for a response, coz I'm coming up blank. I can't see Quake being anything but confusing with this...maybe RTSes or RPGs that have sidebars with widgets?
Come on people. It's a toilet. Is there such thing as having too much money, do you think, or is that blasphemy in our modern, apathetic and greed-based society? I understand that there are some instances where this would be genuinely useful (for example, the poster who mentioned living in freezing conditions, where the warmer was really helpful), but for the most part, isn't this perhaps just a good example of how lazy people in "civilised" countries are becoming? Once neural interfaces for typing become commonplace, all that's left to invent is a device to breathe and eat for you.
Yeah, mod me down for being cynical about our great society and thinking this kind of money could actually be put to use in places it's really needed. Sorry for not being a narcissist.
I think you're right. And really, which would you rather have: a company with a manopoly on software, or a company with a manopoly on hardware and software? I think that if IBM had come out on top things might even be much worse than they are now; with their software manopoly they could possibly have done some nasty things to the entire PC market.
from the paperclips-and-chewing-gum dept?
on
Hack in Space
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· Score: 2, Funny
Come on, the guy's a troll. Heck, he can't even differential between "you're" and "your"--so not just a troll, but a badly-educated one. It's sad when I can still see comments like that browsing at +3.
I have not yet been to a Flash site that has anything on it that I was hoping to find, unless it's artwork (which I am interested in on occasion), and generally I gave up trying to navigate in frustration a few minutes later because either it was slow, or it was very badly designed.
The bottom line is that Flash is not an effective tool for creating websites. This is what HTML was designed for. With Flash, there are two things that particularly get my goat:
you can't right-click a link and open it in the background (as I do often with Opera), in order to check out several areas of the site at once. This may sound like something that broadband users would complain about the most, because they can load several pages in parallel quickly, but actually it's something that I find not only helpful for efficiency, but necessary for my sanity as a dialup user, because if I had to click every page in serial I would spend so long waiting for the single page I can view to load that I'd stop using the internet altogether
the second thing is that Flash sites are typically rendered at 640x480 or 800x600 to cater for users with low-end monitors, and cannot be resized unless the designer has actually thought of this (seems like such an obvious thing is either way too simple for Flash designers to think of, or they're just damned lazy). This means that this stupid little website is sitting in the middle of my 1152x864 screen, with an enormous blank space around it. Some people even do this with html for some completely unknown reason; for a good example of a site that uses both Pointless Flash(TM) for a Pointless Entrypage(TM) and Huge Blank Spaces(TM) check out the personal website of someone I don't like very much. I'm sure those people with 21" monitors and 2080x1024 screen resolutions know far better than I what I'm talking about
To be fair, there are sites that use Flash as a banner animation at the top, and it doesn't get in the way and is merely decorative, and that's fine, it's attractive and enhances the site. A good example of this is NZ Gamer Forums, and an example of a site that is annoying in its use of a complete Flash "gui" is its parent site. Yes, it's well-laid out and attractive, but just for starters, try entering your name into the "username" section. If you touch-type like I do, you'll very quickly get over how the animations when you enter a character are neet, and pretty quickly discover how they're very irritating. The sounds, too, are annoying to me. Basically, I think this website could have been made to look similar simply using HTML, and it would have loaded far more quickly (it took a good three minutes to load on my 56k--more than I'm normally willing to wait).
The Forums are an example of Flash used in moderation, and JavaScript used in debatable moderation. I have no problem with it; it does add to the site having those tables light up blue, but it's also not particularly necessary. Mostly the site is very usable, and while there are a lot of images, it doesn't take a hugely long time to load. I think the person who designed the gamer.net.nz site and subsites needs a lesson in accessibility, because his sites are great if you can run Flash and feel like waiting for all the images to load, but get a browser like Opera 6, assume you don't have the flash plugin, and disable images so it loads faster, and you'll get a broken frontpage, and semi-broken threads in the forums because you have to use the horizontal scroll so much--the only thing this guy knows how to do is eye-candy.
The only real gripe I have against JavaScript is the open() function. A lot of people seem to think it's a really great idea to have links open in a new window using this function. I'm all for opening in a new window; I do it on my site all the time--and you'll notice I use basic JavaScript for the image rollovers in the title, because they markedly add to the visual effect of the site without increasing much in the download time. But hey, there's already this great attribute called "target" in the <a> tag! Use it! I loathe sites where I right-click, open a window in the background without checking its exact href in the status bar of my browser, and going back to it a few seconds later expecting it to have loaded and finding a blank page with "javascript:open(window.crap)" in the address bar.
Okay, that last thing about JS was really offtopic. My point is that it doesn't matter how much you rework Flash; it's still going to be slower and less functional than html, and it's still not going to run on as many computers. You're also going to find that most of the people who adopt it are the idiots already designing crap Flash websites. I don't see a winning situation here.
It's an interesting idea, but I think it would run into problems if there were differences with the physics engines used, as there invariably would be. I wouldn't say it's impossible, because "universal interface" implies some kind of compensation for this (as you say, a common interface for movements), but I'm not sure how it would work; maybe if one game took precedence and the other game had its physics altered accordingly--but I can guarantee that would suck for the majority of games. Playing Quake 3 with CounterStrike movement, for example, would bite very badly (although playing CounterStrike with decent strafe-jumping abilities a la CPMA would sure be curious;)).
It would be interesting though, if the universal interface idea was modified slightly so that a number of major game producers collaborated in advance to build a common physics model and game universe, upon which different game modules could be built. That way, each game house could work on a gameplay of their choice (Westwood could design an RTS element, id could design an FPS module, etc), and when they combined them they would still be able to talk to each other. Maybe that's actually what you meant though. It would certainly take more planning than just making a common interface, and it would require heaps of unlikely communication between the different designers, but it would be pretty cool, huh.
I think we should probably leave this to the professionals though...
irony, n. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.
Slashdot is Usiacentric. Usia is capitalist, and the average (conditioned) response to the word "communism" can be expected to be a negative one. The distinction between communism and socialism is seldom made, and is not large anyway--"communism is socialism with electricity", as Stalin put it. Therefore, it could be said that it's ironic that the prevailing opinion on Slashdot is similar in at least some regards to the views of the man who created Socialism.
And yes, Mr Anonymous Coward, I realise that not just Marx could have expressed these views. I guess my innocently light comment was taken a bit seriously? Or is it my high UID? Check my other account; sorry, I'm a "latecomer" to Slashdot. Only been here a year.
Now, in the immortal words of some fellow, why can't we all just be friends?
Sorry dude, my friend and I thought up this concept two years ago:) We've done a large number of designs for a game like you describe, albeit just for the fun of working out different aspects of it. Personally, I think that a Big Game(TM) like this will eventually be designed, but it's likely that it will evolve slowly, as games start to become more massively multiplayer. It also strikes me that it will need to be highly modular; so if you want to be a pilot you run the air combat module; a soldier, the FPS module etc, almost like subgames that all fit into one huge game universe online.
I have little doubt that someone else thought up the idea before my friend and me as well. We based the universe around the novel series I am writing, Raváj, which worked very well being science fiction with realistic bases. I hope we'll see a Big Game sometime reasonably soon, but I'm not holding my breath, since broadband and huge server farms would need to be fairly cheap.
It's ironic that this post is representative of the prevailing opinion on Slashdot (and rightly so, I believe), yet could have been paraphrased from a book on Karl Marx.
Last Thursday I had my first class of a subject called Perspectives on the Media for my journalism degree. Some discussion went into censorship. The lecturer asked who of us believed any kind of censorship in the media was a bad idea, and I confidently poked my hand up. I admit that while I'm aware of how few people have really considered this topic, I was still taken aback to be the only one to put my hand up. I got some weird looks too.
Explaining to these people about precedents and who-decides-what's-bad-and-what's-not didn't make a lot of difference. Examples were then given by other students, regarding not wanting their five year old to download lesbian porn online. I gave up at about that point, considering that there is no State censorship of online material in New Zealand, and that I would then have been going into slightly off-topic areas like decent parenting etc.
It's just a bit disturbing that most people don't even think twice before advocating censorship of a subject that is "generally regarded" as being "damaging". It's curious how few people even think to examine the other side of the coin. And yeah, mod me down as redundant; I'm well aware that aside from the unique example, this is a ME TOO!! post.
...instead of turning your hardrive into a speaker to create more noise, how feasible would it be for drive manufacturers to reduce noise by inserting a speaker that would emit destructive interference to nullify the sound of the drive heads reading, and possibly the whine of spin?
Ianal, and I realise that some quite clever engineering would be needed in terms of timing and frequency, but being a writer and not a physicist I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't at least reduce noise, if not negate it completely.
So, will somebody who actually knows stuff respond and flame me for being an idiot and making suggestions on topics I only have a marginal understanding of?
To be honest, what this reads to me is not so much a significant blunder on the part of the Stargate writers, but simply shallowness on the part of its female (and male) audience.
I think it's truly sad that so many women apparently watched Stargate simply because they were attracted to Daniel Jackson. It also makes me angry that these people are so petty that when their loverboy inconveniently disappears, they start raising hell and spoiling it for the rest of the SG-1 audience who are still enjoying the show and want it to continue in the progression its writers envisaged by moving into films after the end of the sixth season, despite the disappointment of losing the character of Daniel Jackson.
Please realise that I'm not saying that there aren't other problems. I don't know Shanks, and I don't know much about him, so he may well have had good reasons for leaving; reasons that I'd agree with. I haven't seen the most recent episodes so I can't be sure. But as a writer myself, I am very aware that sometimes compromises must be made if you have a long-term plan for your work. I have occasionally changed my writing to reflect an issue I felt was particularly important, and of course some people don't like that.
I am reasonably familiar with the SG-1 writers/creators (Brad Wright, Jon Glassner etc), and they are smart people. It is definitely a very big deal that Shanks has left, because as the Salon article mentions, the interaction of the four main characters was truly spectacular from a writing and acting standpoint. With Shanks gone it will never be as good again. Daniel Jackson was actually my favourite character too, because I could most identify with him (as a geek). However (and this is a very big "however"), what really pisses me off is that the Salon article indicates that huge numbers of people were interested in Daniel because he was "three-dimensional" (and I can accept that audiences can become attached (even obsessively) to a character for romantic reasons, however shallow I think that audience may be), and yet none of them are interested in the show. The show is 3D too! All the characters have a lot of depth. Daniel just appeals to more people.
The government conspiracy story thread has been slowly worked in from early on, as mentioned, and I can see a very obvious reason for that; if I were writing SG-1 I'd have done the same thing, both for the feature film (if they're going in the direction for the feature film that I think they are), and for the development of the SG-1 universe in general. It's hopeless to have a wonderful, diverse tapestry of alien cultures when the events on Earth itself are completely dead and flat. This show isn't just about exploring other planets. It's not Star Trek. It's about people too, and about how worthy goals can be threatened by those too selfish or petty to see them (unsurprisingly, this fact is obviously lost on the members of the audience too petty to see the long-term goals of Stargate). It's unfortunate that people seem to care so little for the long-term story arcs, and don't want to give Stargate a chance despite it proving many times that its writers know what they're doing when it comes to far-reaching developments in the SG-1 universe.
Without seeing the episodes myself, I can't really make any further comments, but I would like to mention that I have written things that, when I went back to them, bore a close and completely unintentional similarity to another piece of writing already published. Usually it's a thread of my novel, and it looks almost like plagiarism of an idea, but as long as I know I'm doing the right thing for my long-term plans, I don't worry too much. If people want to criticise things they really aren't qualified to criticise, they can do that while I get on with writing again. The Stargate writers have demonstrated that they know what they're doing for the last five years. Why do people have to shaft them so quickly for a thread they don't even know the outcome or purpose of? I have my doubts that its even inspired by the X-Files. I just hope my audience is a bit more trusting. All I can conclude from the Salon article is that the "core" audience they speak of was not actually very interested in Stargate at all, and were focusing on Daniel Jackson.
For those interested, get an idea of the atmosphere surrounding BabeMagnet Jackson on forums like Gaters.net or any one of a million Yahoo groups, where, as was mentioned in the Salon article, women cry foul if anything is said about Jackson that doesn't comply with their romantically-motivated ideas. Also check the SG-1 Archive where you could (last I checked) download up to season 5 of SG-1.
Not to put down your interesting post, but there's an easy rationale--and one that I think any fair-minded person would accept--to refute this.
If the RIAA is currently losing money on CDs due to illegal copying (pirating is a ridiculous term), then it seems only reasonable that, if they can prevent this copying, the revenue they'd previously been losing should rightfully belong to them. I agree that the consumer should see some benefit, but it's not something that you could morally hold the RIAA to. As an analogy, think of if you wrote and sold software, and 50% of it was used without paying. That's a 50% revenue loss, and you would be justified in saying that if you could somehow reduce that loss, the money you saved should belong to you. Right? And, since you were barely covering your costs before the savings, that money should go into making your life a bit easier. Right?
All this is, of course, purely hypothetical. The RIAA is hardly lacking for money, and I personally think the Hellmouth should open and swallow them, the MPAA, et al back to whence they sprang.
Darn, I really am behind the times--here I was thinking that wires were still made with copper! When did they start switching over? I'm sure it wasn't on Slashdot...I'd know if it was!
For instance, I will definately buy this book, but I will not buy any CD's because I do not want to support the RIAA, and that's where most of my money will be going. I don't mind supporting a publisher and the author for work which I think is hilarious.
That's all well and good if you don't mind supporting the publisher as well as the author, but you do realise that Simon Travaglia will almost certainly be getting no more than between 1 and 5 cents in every dollar, right? The RIAA might be a huge, greedy manopoly, but that doesn't mean that what they do is unusual. It just means they're the best at it. The fact that they're in an industry where they have, for whatever reasons, become the "standard" and all musical production must go through them (correct me if I'm wrong?) just goes to demonstrate how good they are. However, I might contest that Joe Average knows any more about the RIAA's methods than about any book publisher--the only reason it's a big deal here on Slashdot is because the RIAA is seen as the Big Bad(TM) in the war over intellectual property etc.
This is the reason I very rarely buy books, and also the primary reason that have chosen to copyleft all my work (as a writer), and pursue journalism instead.
As an ex-South African, I feel I'm qualified to say that "digital divide" is a good euphamism for "corruption".
Open source isn't going to help South Africa out of the dirt--not in the slightest teeny way. See, in South Africa, on the one hand you've got extremely rich people, or people just getting by (still mostly white, but the tide seems to be turning), who have all their computers and software, pirated or no, internet access, the whole toot. Try irc.shadowfire.org#zagamers or #chknhd or something if you don't believe me.
On the other hand you've got about 15 or 20 million other people, mostly still black, who have absolutely nothing. Mostly, they keep having absolutely nothing, living their joyous lives in their tin shacks and stealing car batteries to power their TVs because certain rich people don't want to be unrich, and keep those strings a-pulling to make sure that the status quo is maintained. And don't think that those rich people are all South African. Three US corporations (sadly I can't quote which ones) make more money every year than the entire.za GDP. Usian corporations blatantly play the.za market and milk it for all it's worth (no surprise there, although no anti-Usianism is intended), and the South African corporations are about as pure as the undriven yellow snow in comparison if you get my drift.
Open source? Who cares? The only people who can use it at the moment or for the forseeable future are the people who are already forking out R20,000 or more for a new computer every year anyway.
consumers will still be paying much lower prices than in the United States, where monthly bills range as high as the equivalent of $111.
A lot of people, like me in New Zealand where cable is non-existent, and apparently Usians too, would consider $80 a month to be pretty damn reasonable for high-speed, high-volume cable access. When did the idea of paying for what you use become so unfair? If you're a 35 year old housewife who just wants to check her email and have a connection for her kid son to play games online and chat to friends, would you want to be paying the same as someone who downloads three gigs of porn a night, every night?
It was me. I was afraid that after you mispelled "hear" you'd be modded -1: incompetent so I figured I'd help you out by throwing doubt on the matter. Hopefully then some politically correct individual would mod you back up to +1: linguistically-challenged due to cultural differences. Hope you don't mind.
Slashdot Mirror
The article states that to dampen complex noise like speech in realtime, a powerful computer must be used. I'm wondering why. If you have the speech going into the system to be cancelled, isn't there a more simple way to sample the amplitude and just amplify that sound to the right level and pump it through some kind of inversion circuit and out the speakers?
I dunno, maybe an "inversion circuit" isn't possible, but you've already got that sound to work with; all you have to do is put it 180 out of phase. It seems like that should be fairly simple. Kind of a shame to complicate such an elegant idea with anything more than basic computer-aided sampling. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty though.
And if so, where does this leave the noise dampener? It's doubling the sonic wave output, after all. I presume that since the waves are counterphasic, they're pretty much dampened at the location of the user (by definition) so it's all okay, but there's still a lot of excess wave energy floating around. Can other people outside of the quiet zone hear this thing?
Please, don't mod me down for asking ignorant questions...I'd rather you responded.
Course, I've never really hefted a water-cooled rig before, so I could be wrong, but that's always been the thing I've wondered about it. If it's as heavy as it sounds, it's no wonder I didn't see any at the last lan. Now, on the topic, I think the parent post does raise a good point. As Tim Williamson says in the article, "it probably will have some applications, [but] it would seem far easier and more sensible to avoid making noise in the first place." I have to agree. This sound dampener is really nifty, and proof-of-concept of something I've had in my book for a while because it's the kind of thing that's great for privacy in medbays etc, but it's treating the symptoms, not the cause. Obviously the cause can't always be treated, and there is surely place for these devices, but I think it's also important to try to prevent noise pollution simply by trying to create technologies etc that are quieter in the first place.
Yeah, just shifting the cost, I know.
Which is likely what you'd expect, except it's only 3D in that there are two flat planes for objects to be "projected" onto instead of one. Sure, having apps that would support this with depth-based widgets could be pretty cool, but I wouldn't get too excited. I'd be surprised to see this becoming a mainsteam hit.
Also, if someone could explain how this would benefit gamers (as stated in the article), I'd be keen for a response, coz I'm coming up blank. I can't see Quake being anything but confusing with this...maybe RTSes or RPGs that have sidebars with widgets?
...but aren't you whining too? Different gripe, same response.
Yeah, mod me down for being cynical about our great society and thinking this kind of money could actually be put to use in places it's really needed. Sorry for not being a narcissist.
I think you're right. And really, which would you rather have: a company with a manopoly on software, or a company with a manopoly on hardware and software? I think that if IBM had come out on top things might even be much worse than they are now; with their software manopoly they could possibly have done some nasty things to the entire PC market.
What good are these things without duct tape?
Come on, the guy's a troll. Heck, he can't even differential between "you're" and "your"--so not just a troll, but a badly-educated one. It's sad when I can still see comments like that browsing at +3.
The bottom line is that Flash is not an effective tool for creating websites. This is what HTML was designed for. With Flash, there are two things that particularly get my goat:
- you can't right-click a link and open it in the background (as I do often with Opera), in order to check out several areas of the site at once. This may sound like something that broadband users would complain about the most, because they can load several pages in parallel quickly, but actually it's something that I find not only helpful for efficiency, but necessary for my sanity as a dialup user, because if I had to click every page in serial I would spend so long waiting for the single page I can view to load that I'd stop using the internet altogether
- the second thing is that Flash sites are typically rendered at 640x480 or 800x600 to cater for users with low-end monitors, and cannot be resized unless the designer has actually thought of this (seems like such an obvious thing is either way too simple for Flash designers to think of, or they're just damned lazy). This means that this stupid little website is sitting in the middle of my 1152x864 screen, with an enormous blank space around it. Some people even do this with html for some completely unknown reason; for a good example of a site that uses both Pointless Flash(TM) for a Pointless Entrypage(TM) and Huge Blank Spaces(TM) check out the personal website of someone I don't like very much. I'm sure those people with 21" monitors and 2080x1024 screen resolutions know far better than I what I'm talking about
To be fair, there are sites that use Flash as a banner animation at the top, and it doesn't get in the way and is merely decorative, and that's fine, it's attractive and enhances the site. A good example of this is NZ Gamer Forums, and an example of a site that is annoying in its use of a complete Flash "gui" is its parent site. Yes, it's well-laid out and attractive, but just for starters, try entering your name into the "username" section. If you touch-type like I do, you'll very quickly get over how the animations when you enter a character are neet, and pretty quickly discover how they're very irritating. The sounds, too, are annoying to me. Basically, I think this website could have been made to look similar simply using HTML, and it would have loaded far more quickly (it took a good three minutes to load on my 56k--more than I'm normally willing to wait).The Forums are an example of Flash used in moderation, and JavaScript used in debatable moderation. I have no problem with it; it does add to the site having those tables light up blue, but it's also not particularly necessary. Mostly the site is very usable, and while there are a lot of images, it doesn't take a hugely long time to load. I think the person who designed the gamer.net.nz site and subsites needs a lesson in accessibility, because his sites are great if you can run Flash and feel like waiting for all the images to load, but get a browser like Opera 6, assume you don't have the flash plugin, and disable images so it loads faster, and you'll get a broken frontpage, and semi-broken threads in the forums because you have to use the horizontal scroll so much--the only thing this guy knows how to do is eye-candy.
The only real gripe I have against JavaScript is the open() function. A lot of people seem to think it's a really great idea to have links open in a new window using this function. I'm all for opening in a new window; I do it on my site all the time--and you'll notice I use basic JavaScript for the image rollovers in the title, because they markedly add to the visual effect of the site without increasing much in the download time. But hey, there's already this great attribute called "target" in the <a> tag! Use it! I loathe sites where I right-click, open a window in the background without checking its exact href in the status bar of my browser, and going back to it a few seconds later expecting it to have loaded and finding a blank page with "javascript:open(window.crap)" in the address bar.
Okay, that last thing about JS was really offtopic. My point is that it doesn't matter how much you rework Flash; it's still going to be slower and less functional than html, and it's still not going to run on as many computers. You're also going to find that most of the people who adopt it are the idiots already designing crap Flash websites. I don't see a winning situation here.
Just my little rant. Please mod down accordingly.
It would be interesting though, if the universal interface idea was modified slightly so that a number of major game producers collaborated in advance to build a common physics model and game universe, upon which different game modules could be built. That way, each game house could work on a gameplay of their choice (Westwood could design an RTS element, id could design an FPS module, etc), and when they combined them they would still be able to talk to each other. Maybe that's actually what you meant though. It would certainly take more planning than just making a common interface, and it would require heaps of unlikely communication between the different designers, but it would be pretty cool, huh.
I think we should probably leave this to the professionals though...
Slashdot is Usiacentric. Usia is capitalist, and the average (conditioned) response to the word "communism" can be expected to be a negative one. The distinction between communism and socialism is seldom made, and is not large anyway--"communism is socialism with electricity", as Stalin put it. Therefore, it could be said that it's ironic that the prevailing opinion on Slashdot is similar in at least some regards to the views of the man who created Socialism.
And yes, Mr Anonymous Coward, I realise that not just Marx could have expressed these views. I guess my innocently light comment was taken a bit seriously? Or is it my high UID? Check my other account; sorry, I'm a "latecomer" to Slashdot. Only been here a year.
Now, in the immortal words of some fellow, why can't we all just be friends?
I have little doubt that someone else thought up the idea before my friend and me as well. We based the universe around the novel series I am writing, Raváj, which worked very well being science fiction with realistic bases. I hope we'll see a Big Game sometime reasonably soon, but I'm not holding my breath, since broadband and huge server farms would need to be fairly cheap.
But hell yeah, I can't wait :)
It's ironic that this post is representative of the prevailing opinion on Slashdot (and rightly so, I believe), yet could have been paraphrased from a book on Karl Marx.
Kids, this guy is a professional. Don't try this at home.
Um. Okay that came out wrong. I mean no shit huh.
Last Thursday I had my first class of a subject called Perspectives on the Media for my journalism degree. Some discussion went into censorship. The lecturer asked who of us believed any kind of censorship in the media was a bad idea, and I confidently poked my hand up. I admit that while I'm aware of how few people have really considered this topic, I was still taken aback to be the only one to put my hand up. I got some weird looks too.
Explaining to these people about precedents and who-decides-what's-bad-and-what's-not didn't make a lot of difference. Examples were then given by other students, regarding not wanting their five year old to download lesbian porn online. I gave up at about that point, considering that there is no State censorship of online material in New Zealand, and that I would then have been going into slightly off-topic areas like decent parenting etc.
It's just a bit disturbing that most people don't even think twice before advocating censorship of a subject that is "generally regarded" as being "damaging". It's curious how few people even think to examine the other side of the coin. And yeah, mod me down as redundant; I'm well aware that aside from the unique example, this is a ME TOO!! post.
Ianal, and I realise that some quite clever engineering would be needed in terms of timing and frequency, but being a writer and not a physicist I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't at least reduce noise, if not negate it completely.
So, will somebody who actually knows stuff respond and flame me for being an idiot and making suggestions on topics I only have a marginal understanding of?
I think it's truly sad that so many women apparently watched Stargate simply because they were attracted to Daniel Jackson. It also makes me angry that these people are so petty that when their loverboy inconveniently disappears, they start raising hell and spoiling it for the rest of the SG-1 audience who are still enjoying the show and want it to continue in the progression its writers envisaged by moving into films after the end of the sixth season, despite the disappointment of losing the character of Daniel Jackson.
Please realise that I'm not saying that there aren't other problems. I don't know Shanks, and I don't know much about him, so he may well have had good reasons for leaving; reasons that I'd agree with. I haven't seen the most recent episodes so I can't be sure. But as a writer myself, I am very aware that sometimes compromises must be made if you have a long-term plan for your work. I have occasionally changed my writing to reflect an issue I felt was particularly important, and of course some people don't like that.
I am reasonably familiar with the SG-1 writers/creators (Brad Wright, Jon Glassner etc), and they are smart people. It is definitely a very big deal that Shanks has left, because as the Salon article mentions, the interaction of the four main characters was truly spectacular from a writing and acting standpoint. With Shanks gone it will never be as good again. Daniel Jackson was actually my favourite character too, because I could most identify with him (as a geek). However (and this is a very big "however"), what really pisses me off is that the Salon article indicates that huge numbers of people were interested in Daniel because he was "three-dimensional" (and I can accept that audiences can become attached (even obsessively) to a character for romantic reasons, however shallow I think that audience may be), and yet none of them are interested in the show. The show is 3D too! All the characters have a lot of depth. Daniel just appeals to more people.
The government conspiracy story thread has been slowly worked in from early on, as mentioned, and I can see a very obvious reason for that; if I were writing SG-1 I'd have done the same thing, both for the feature film (if they're going in the direction for the feature film that I think they are), and for the development of the SG-1 universe in general. It's hopeless to have a wonderful, diverse tapestry of alien cultures when the events on Earth itself are completely dead and flat. This show isn't just about exploring other planets. It's not Star Trek. It's about people too, and about how worthy goals can be threatened by those too selfish or petty to see them (unsurprisingly, this fact is obviously lost on the members of the audience too petty to see the long-term goals of Stargate). It's unfortunate that people seem to care so little for the long-term story arcs, and don't want to give Stargate a chance despite it proving many times that its writers know what they're doing when it comes to far-reaching developments in the SG-1 universe.
Without seeing the episodes myself, I can't really make any further comments, but I would like to mention that I have written things that, when I went back to them, bore a close and completely unintentional similarity to another piece of writing already published. Usually it's a thread of my novel, and it looks almost like plagiarism of an idea, but as long as I know I'm doing the right thing for my long-term plans, I don't worry too much. If people want to criticise things they really aren't qualified to criticise, they can do that while I get on with writing again. The Stargate writers have demonstrated that they know what they're doing for the last five years. Why do people have to shaft them so quickly for a thread they don't even know the outcome or purpose of? I have my doubts that its even inspired by the X-Files. I just hope my audience is a bit more trusting. All I can conclude from the Salon article is that the "core" audience they speak of was not actually very interested in Stargate at all, and were focusing on Daniel Jackson.
For those interested, get an idea of the atmosphere surrounding BabeMagnet Jackson on forums like Gaters.net or any one of a million Yahoo groups, where, as was mentioned in the Salon article, women cry foul if anything is said about Jackson that doesn't comply with their romantically-motivated ideas. Also check the SG-1 Archive where you could (last I checked) download up to season 5 of SG-1.
If the RIAA is currently losing money on CDs due to illegal copying (pirating is a ridiculous term), then it seems only reasonable that, if they can prevent this copying, the revenue they'd previously been losing should rightfully belong to them. I agree that the consumer should see some benefit, but it's not something that you could morally hold the RIAA to. As an analogy, think of if you wrote and sold software, and 50% of it was used without paying. That's a 50% revenue loss, and you would be justified in saying that if you could somehow reduce that loss, the money you saved should belong to you. Right? And, since you were barely covering your costs before the savings, that money should go into making your life a bit easier. Right?
All this is, of course, purely hypothetical. The RIAA is hardly lacking for money, and I personally think the Hellmouth should open and swallow them, the MPAA, et al back to whence they sprang.
Darn, I really am behind the times--here I was thinking that wires were still made with copper! When did they start switching over? I'm sure it wasn't on Slashdot...I'd know if it was!
That's all well and good if you don't mind supporting the publisher as well as the author, but you do realise that Simon Travaglia will almost certainly be getting no more than between 1 and 5 cents in every dollar, right? The RIAA might be a huge, greedy manopoly, but that doesn't mean that what they do is unusual. It just means they're the best at it. The fact that they're in an industry where they have, for whatever reasons, become the "standard" and all musical production must go through them (correct me if I'm wrong?) just goes to demonstrate how good they are. However, I might contest that Joe Average knows any more about the RIAA's methods than about any book publisher--the only reason it's a big deal here on Slashdot is because the RIAA is seen as the Big Bad(TM) in the war over intellectual property etc.
This is the reason I very rarely buy books, and also the primary reason that have chosen to copyleft all my work (as a writer), and pursue journalism instead.
Btw, it's "definitely" and "CDs".
Open source isn't going to help South Africa out of the dirt--not in the slightest teeny way. See, in South Africa, on the one hand you've got extremely rich people, or people just getting by (still mostly white, but the tide seems to be turning), who have all their computers and software, pirated or no, internet access, the whole toot. Try irc.shadowfire.org#zagamers or #chknhd or something if you don't believe me.
On the other hand you've got about 15 or 20 million other people, mostly still black, who have absolutely nothing. Mostly, they keep having absolutely nothing, living their joyous lives in their tin shacks and stealing car batteries to power their TVs because certain rich people don't want to be unrich, and keep those strings a-pulling to make sure that the status quo is maintained. And don't think that those rich people are all South African. Three US corporations (sadly I can't quote which ones) make more money every year than the entire .za GDP. Usian corporations blatantly play the .za market and milk it for all it's worth (no surprise there, although no anti-Usianism is intended), and the South African corporations are about as pure as the undriven yellow snow in comparison if you get my drift.
Open source? Who cares? The only people who can use it at the moment or for the forseeable future are the people who are already forking out R20,000 or more for a new computer every year anyway.
A lot of people, like me in New Zealand where cable is non-existent, and apparently Usians too, would consider $80 a month to be pretty damn reasonable for high-speed, high-volume cable access. When did the idea of paying for what you use become so unfair? If you're a 35 year old housewife who just wants to check her email and have a connection for her kid son to play games online and chat to friends, would you want to be paying the same as someone who downloads three gigs of porn a night, every night?
Pity about that.
It was me. I was afraid that after you mispelled "hear" you'd be modded -1: incompetent so I figured I'd help you out by throwing doubt on the matter. Hopefully then some politically correct individual would mod you back up to +1: linguistically-challenged due to cultural differences. Hope you don't mind.