Saying that it dwarfs Y2K is rather funny, since Y2K was ridiculously overhyped as a major disaster and it turned out to be less than a small hiccup. Granted, some of that amelioration was due to people noticing the problem and getting worried about it, thereby actively trying to fix it before it got serious, but still...
So here's another MAJOR DISASTER waiting to happen, right? How many people think that this is seriously going to become a major issue in car manufacturing, resulting in a situation that is very difficult and expensive to fix? There are plenty of short-term solutions (many of which we've seen here) that can easily make the problem a non-issue until longer VIN codes are approved and make their way through the system (including database entries as well as the physical machines which stamp the codes).
I would think there'd be a useful distinction between "robot" and "bot" -- robots would be something with a physical presence (e.g., an industrial robot or a toy robot), whereas a bot is a software thing that does things autonomously in some fashion. For instance, based on the headline, I thought that this article was about FPS game bots.
The press release implies at least a little bit that it's going to mix together multiple books into one movie, which seems to be me a big mistake. Ringworld is a self-contained story and should be kept that way; including elements of the sequels is a pattern that the Scifi channel likes to do but doesn't bode well for making a quality miniseries.
The objects out there don't care what you call them. Astronomy doesn't magically change because we call something a "planet" or not, the bodies still have the same properties that they had whether or not you classify them, reclassify them, or unclassify them. The map is not the territory. Those shouting the loudest for reclassification of Pluto as a non-planet, etc., are those who aren't even professional astronomers. That shouldn't tell you a great deal about how important this issue is to the astronomical community.
You mean except for all the asteroids that have hit throughout Earth's history. Certainly the bolide which skipped off the Earth's atmosphere in the 1970s came much closer than 3.4 Earth diameters, since the Earth's atmosphere doesn't extend anywhere near that far.
The name is unofficial -- it takes a while for the IAU to grant official names to asteroids -- and just because it's sizeable (larger than Charon, but smaller than Pluto) doesn't mean it's sparking new controversy over whether it's a planet or not. Practically the only "controversy" about planethood that's ever taken place is among the media and amateurs. Professional astronomers have rarely cared over the details of whether you call Pluto (say) a planet or not; they know that the nomenclature was invented by humans and so the celestial bodies themselves don't feel any compulsion to fit into our little arbitrary lines of demarcation.
That was exactly my point. Game software engineering is just like any other software engineering. The tight deadlines that you mention are hardly limited to the game programming world either.
Game software engineering is software engineering. Pretending like it's something more or less is silly.
You mean game programmers actually have to behave like professional programmers and learn about algorithms and data structures and computer science instead of doing a constant stream of half-assed hacks? God forbid!
It's true that it's looking more and more like we live in a Universe with a nonzero cosmological constant. But that doesn't mean Einstein was right. Einstein introduced a nonzero cosmological constant for a very specific reason: to make a static universe. He lived at a time when the general metaphysical assumption was that the Universe was static and unchanging and had been around forever and always would be. So when he created his field equations and discovered that they insisted that, with a reasonable model, a universe must expand or contract, he introduced a cosmological constant with the intent of negating that expansion or contraction, resulting in a static, unchanging universe. (Specifically, he thought the universe was closed -- this is one of his boundary assumptions in general relativity -- but static.)
Now it turns out that we seem to live in a universe which is not only, to most cosmologists' surprise, open, but also with a nonzero cosmological constant that is accelerating that expansion. The entity -- the cosmological constant -- which Einstein introduced would appear to have some use (though in fact we already knew that, since inflation theory, a pretty solid part of our Standard Model, involves an effective cosmological constant), but not for the reasons he introduced it (that is, our universe is emphatically not static and the cosmological constant does not help it become so). In theoretical physics, you don't get bonus points for getting the right answer for the wrong reasons.
In fact, in many ways, theoretically the cosmological constant is a bad theoretical feature, because it indicates a tweakable parameter that you need to find observationally -- hence, the desire to find the theoretical basis for the value of the cosmological constant.
It's not forgotten, just shelved. Its surface is a corrosive, lead-melting hell; there's really not much of interest there for exploration or exploitation. In the list of Solar System objects to explore or exploit, Venus is way, way, down on the list. As in, arguably dead last.
Just because they said they'd sue someone within three months doesn't create any legal obligation for them to meet that deadline, so counting down those three months is useless. They can sue anybody anytime they damn well please.
Furthermore, if you actually read the Techweb article that's linked to in the headline, you'll see the clear implication that the estimate of 90 days was approximate ("I think you'll certainly be seeing that within the next 90 days").
I mean, come on: Of all the things to call SCO on, this is one of the least constructive.
Especially with this announcement, I'm starting to get worried about the reliability of Google. More and more groups are taking advantage of quirks in Google's ranking system, as has been mentioned in previous Slashdot articles, to the point now where if you're searching for something even a little outside of the pop-culture mainstream (where you will be inundanted with valid hits) you will find tons and tons of automatically generated garbage hits on "providers" who boost their indexes by feeding links to each other. Google is a great service; I hope that in its desire to continue its ever-expanding dominance of the search engine market, they don't let themselves get too complacent and let their search engine technology become stale in the sense of it being so abused that for reliable results you need to look elsewhere.
It actually takes hard work for a cloud of dust to accrete into a planet or star system; current thinking is that you need a tremendous amount of dust and a triggering event (such as a nearby supernova) in order to spin off a small eddy that will one day form a stellar system, much less a planet (current thinking is that planets cannot form in isolation; they'd have to be ejected from their native stellar system). It's easy to have large accumulations of dust and gas that haven't formed stars; just take a look at some photographs of galaxies.
The other point is that the leading thinking is that much of dark matter, if not most, consists of subatomic particles, of a weakly-interacting variety (so-called WIMPs). For reasons that are too complicated to go into in a Slashdot comment, there are good reasons to believe that not all dark matter can be baryonic (i.e., "matter").
It's not purely true that things packed together result in the release of fusion (i.e., the creation of a star). It is true that this process, gravitational contraction, will release heat, but only for a time. Jupiter, for instance, emits more radiation by its own gravitational contraction than it receives from the Sun. However, that emission of heat won't last indefinitely; eventually, it will come into thermal equilibrium and stop emitting heat altogether.
There's another class of objects that you're not taking into account, which is the cores of old, dead stars -- whether white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. Black holes in isolation emit no radiation (not counting Hawking radiation, which is far too feeble for a stellar-massed black hole to qualify as non-dark matter). White dwarfs and neutron stars start off extremely hot, of course, because they are in effect the cores of giants and supergiants, but in these states no further fusion takes place and the objects slowly cool. In the case of white dwarfs of neutron stars, they start off so hot that it will take much longer than the age of the Universe for them to cool to anything like thermal equilibrium, but still you're talking about a massive, compact body which is not emitting any self-generated heat -- only heat left over from its formation.
Dark matter is simply a theory. If Newtonian mechanics is correct (we don't even need to worry about relativistic corrections here), and the laws of physics are the same everywhere (a fundamental principle of science), then there is a lot more matter than we can see (i.e., that is glowing). We can tell this by looking at the rotation curves of galaxies, and even the behavior of clusters of galaxies. There must be a lot of matter there that we can't see, if Newtonian mechanics is a reasonable approximation. It's called dark matter.
Dark matter in and of itself is really not a revolutionary concept. In most wavelengths of light, for instance, you qualify as dark matter (you emit no visible light, although you do emit infrared radiation, so you're not completely dark matter). Look around your room or office. How many things emit electromagnetic radiation. Your computer and your monitor, sure. Your light fixtures and other electronic equipment either emit light or heat. But most of the stuff around you emits internal radiation. A pen is dark matter. A cup of dark matter (once its reached thermal equilibrium, of course). That book is dark matter. The concept of dark matter is not only not revolutionary and mind-blowing, it's downright mundane. Given the survey of stuff in your office/room, is it any surprise that most of the junk in the Universe doesn't emit radiation on its own?
When we start getting into the weird realms of dark matter is when we start applying the Standard Model and find out that it doesn't seem like all that dark matter can be explained by baryonic matter (basically, protons and neutrons -- what we would normally consider matter). That's where things start getting sketchy and speculative, although we have some theories about what might be responsible. But dark matter in and of itself is simply a consequence of the mediocrity principle (that is, the laws of physics operate elsewhere just the same as they do here) and Newtonian gravitation.
All the popular media's fascination with dark matter is only so much hoopla.
Although cheating is a serious problem on some servers, the fact is most claims of cheating are false. It's the beginners who see cheating when it's not there. They come from newbies who don't realize that although they think they are good, there are people much, much better than them. There's a hierarchy of tiers of player skill in FPS games, just like there is in life. Even people in the top tiers will get trounced by people on the even higher tiers.
All the problems that come with people cheating can be eliminated simply by playing on a good, reliable, well-administrated server that you've come to trust. It can take time to find one, but it's worth the investment. In short, don't sell out Quake, Counter-Strike, and its progeny just yet.
Here's an FPS tips site which includes tutorials and information on Quake, Aliens vs. Predator 2, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament 2003, and Wolfenstein.
Slashdot Mirror
So here's another MAJOR DISASTER waiting to happen, right? How many people think that this is seriously going to become a major issue in car manufacturing, resulting in a situation that is very difficult and expensive to fix? There are plenty of short-term solutions (many of which we've seen here) that can easily make the problem a non-issue until longer VIN codes are approved and make their way through the system (including database entries as well as the physical machines which stamp the codes).
Another overhyped non-issue ...
I would think there'd be a useful distinction between "robot" and "bot" -- robots would be something with a physical presence (e.g., an industrial robot or a toy robot), whereas a bot is a software thing that does things autonomously in some fashion. For instance, based on the headline, I thought that this article was about FPS game bots.
I know, what we need is Star Trek: Crusade! With JMS's help we can strive to create a series even more gruesomely awful than Voyager!
I think the idea here is that you train someone you don't know is going to replace you until you get fired.
The press release implies at least a little bit that it's going to mix together multiple books into one movie, which seems to be me a big mistake. Ringworld is a self-contained story and should be kept that way; including elements of the sequels is a pattern that the Scifi channel likes to do but doesn't bode well for making a quality miniseries.
I'm surprised the Ringworld miniseries didn't get more attention. Who cares about Farscape? Tell 'em to find an actual plot and then we'll talk.
The objects out there don't care what you call them. Astronomy doesn't magically change because we call something a "planet" or not, the bodies still have the same properties that they had whether or not you classify them, reclassify them, or unclassify them. The map is not the territory. Those shouting the loudest for reclassification of Pluto as a non-planet, etc., are those who aren't even professional astronomers. That shouldn't tell you a great deal about how important this issue is to the astronomical community.
You mean except for all the asteroids that have hit throughout Earth's history. Certainly the bolide which skipped off the Earth's atmosphere in the 1970s came much closer than 3.4 Earth diameters, since the Earth's atmosphere doesn't extend anywhere near that far.
The name is unofficial -- it takes a while for the IAU to grant official names to asteroids -- and just because it's sizeable (larger than Charon, but smaller than Pluto) doesn't mean it's sparking new controversy over whether it's a planet or not. Practically the only "controversy" about planethood that's ever taken place is among the media and amateurs. Professional astronomers have rarely cared over the details of whether you call Pluto (say) a planet or not; they know that the nomenclature was invented by humans and so the celestial bodies themselves don't feel any compulsion to fit into our little arbitrary lines of demarcation.
This is obviously due to damaged partition tables, not actual "hidden" disk space. That this even got posted is really sad.
That was exactly my point. Game software engineering is just like any other software engineering. The tight deadlines that you mention are hardly limited to the game programming world either.
Game software engineering is software engineering. Pretending like it's something more or less is silly.
How can it be spoilers? It's a freaking prequel!
You mean game programmers actually have to behave like professional programmers and learn about algorithms and data structures and computer science instead of doing a constant stream of half-assed hacks? God forbid!
I'd sure take my cues on world affairs and the dangers of technology from movies like Mission Impossible 2.
Plain and simple.
It's true that it's looking more and more like we live in a Universe with a nonzero cosmological constant. But that doesn't mean Einstein was right. Einstein introduced a nonzero cosmological constant for a very specific reason: to make a static universe. He lived at a time when the general metaphysical assumption was that the Universe was static and unchanging and had been around forever and always would be. So when he created his field equations and discovered that they insisted that, with a reasonable model, a universe must expand or contract, he introduced a cosmological constant with the intent of negating that expansion or contraction, resulting in a static, unchanging universe. (Specifically, he thought the universe was closed -- this is one of his boundary assumptions in general relativity -- but static.)
Now it turns out that we seem to live in a universe which is not only, to most cosmologists' surprise, open, but also with a nonzero cosmological constant that is accelerating that expansion. The entity -- the cosmological constant -- which Einstein introduced would appear to have some use (though in fact we already knew that, since inflation theory, a pretty solid part of our Standard Model, involves an effective cosmological constant), but not for the reasons he introduced it (that is, our universe is emphatically not static and the cosmological constant does not help it become so). In theoretical physics, you don't get bonus points for getting the right answer for the wrong reasons.
In fact, in many ways, theoretically the cosmological constant is a bad theoretical feature, because it indicates a tweakable parameter that you need to find observationally -- hence, the desire to find the theoretical basis for the value of the cosmological constant.
It's not forgotten, just shelved. Its surface is a corrosive, lead-melting hell; there's really not much of interest there for exploration or exploitation. In the list of Solar System objects to explore or exploit, Venus is way, way, down on the list. As in, arguably dead last.
Just because they said they'd sue someone within three months doesn't create any legal obligation for them to meet that deadline, so counting down those three months is useless. They can sue anybody anytime they damn well please.
Furthermore, if you actually read the Techweb article that's linked to in the headline, you'll see the clear implication that the estimate of 90 days was approximate ("I think you'll certainly be seeing that within the next 90 days").
I mean, come on: Of all the things to call SCO on, this is one of the least constructive.
Especially with this announcement, I'm starting to get worried about the reliability of Google. More and more groups are taking advantage of quirks in Google's ranking system, as has been mentioned in previous Slashdot articles, to the point now where if you're searching for something even a little outside of the pop-culture mainstream (where you will be inundanted with valid hits) you will find tons and tons of automatically generated garbage hits on "providers" who boost their indexes by feeding links to each other. Google is a great service; I hope that in its desire to continue its ever-expanding dominance of the search engine market, they don't let themselves get too complacent and let their search engine technology become stale in the sense of it being so abused that for reliable results you need to look elsewhere.
It actually takes hard work for a cloud of dust to accrete into a planet or star system; current thinking is that you need a tremendous amount of dust and a triggering event (such as a nearby supernova) in order to spin off a small eddy that will one day form a stellar system, much less a planet (current thinking is that planets cannot form in isolation; they'd have to be ejected from their native stellar system). It's easy to have large accumulations of dust and gas that haven't formed stars; just take a look at some photographs of galaxies.
The other point is that the leading thinking is that much of dark matter, if not most, consists of subatomic particles, of a weakly-interacting variety (so-called WIMPs). For reasons that are too complicated to go into in a Slashdot comment, there are good reasons to believe that not all dark matter can be baryonic (i.e., "matter").
It's not purely true that things packed together result in the release of fusion (i.e., the creation of a star). It is true that this process, gravitational contraction, will release heat, but only for a time. Jupiter, for instance, emits more radiation by its own gravitational contraction than it receives from the Sun. However, that emission of heat won't last indefinitely; eventually, it will come into thermal equilibrium and stop emitting heat altogether.
There's another class of objects that you're not taking into account, which is the cores of old, dead stars -- whether white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. Black holes in isolation emit no radiation (not counting Hawking radiation, which is far too feeble for a stellar-massed black hole to qualify as non-dark matter). White dwarfs and neutron stars start off extremely hot, of course, because they are in effect the cores of giants and supergiants, but in these states no further fusion takes place and the objects slowly cool. In the case of white dwarfs of neutron stars, they start off so hot that it will take much longer than the age of the Universe for them to cool to anything like thermal equilibrium, but still you're talking about a massive, compact body which is not emitting any self-generated heat -- only heat left over from its formation.
Dark matter is simply a theory. If Newtonian mechanics is correct (we don't even need to worry about relativistic corrections here), and the laws of physics are the same everywhere (a fundamental principle of science), then there is a lot more matter than we can see (i.e., that is glowing). We can tell this by looking at the rotation curves of galaxies, and even the behavior of clusters of galaxies. There must be a lot of matter there that we can't see, if Newtonian mechanics is a reasonable approximation. It's called dark matter.
Dark matter in and of itself is really not a revolutionary concept. In most wavelengths of light, for instance, you qualify as dark matter (you emit no visible light, although you do emit infrared radiation, so you're not completely dark matter). Look around your room or office. How many things emit electromagnetic radiation. Your computer and your monitor, sure. Your light fixtures and other electronic equipment either emit light or heat. But most of the stuff around you emits internal radiation. A pen is dark matter. A cup of dark matter (once its reached thermal equilibrium, of course). That book is dark matter. The concept of dark matter is not only not revolutionary and mind-blowing, it's downright mundane. Given the survey of stuff in your office/room, is it any surprise that most of the junk in the Universe doesn't emit radiation on its own?
When we start getting into the weird realms of dark matter is when we start applying the Standard Model and find out that it doesn't seem like all that dark matter can be explained by baryonic matter (basically, protons and neutrons -- what we would normally consider matter). That's where things start getting sketchy and speculative, although we have some theories about what might be responsible. But dark matter in and of itself is simply a consequence of the mediocrity principle (that is, the laws of physics operate elsewhere just the same as they do here) and Newtonian gravitation.
All the popular media's fascination with dark matter is only so much hoopla.
Although cheating is a serious problem on some servers, the fact is most claims of cheating are false. It's the beginners who see cheating when it's not there. They come from newbies who don't realize that although they think they are good, there are people much, much better than them. There's a hierarchy of tiers of player skill in FPS games, just like there is in life. Even people in the top tiers will get trounced by people on the even higher tiers.
All the problems that come with people cheating can be eliminated simply by playing on a good, reliable, well-administrated server that you've come to trust. It can take time to find one, but it's worth the investment. In short, don't sell out Quake, Counter-Strike, and its progeny just yet.
Here's an FPS tips site which includes tutorials and information on Quake, Aliens vs. Predator 2, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament 2003, and Wolfenstein.
The rumors were started by Slashdot. The original Yahoo! News article quoted in the "Lego to Stop Producing Mindstorms" Slashdot article said absolutely nothing about them dropping Mindstorms at all.