I agree that on the face of it this looks like it won't work, but I can see many mitigating circumstances that means it just _might_ work. I think there's a small chance that they might actually be able to pull it off, and if they do it really is a game-changer.
A couple of things that makes me hesitant to call everyone "retarded" if they don't dismiss this before it has even seen the light of day: - They are aiming for The Long Tail of gaming, and I think it's easy to underestimate just how gigantic the amount of cash is in this tail - Not ALL games are hyper timing sensitive - Multiplexing hardware means the same computer can serve Stan in Portland and Sanjay in New Delhi at different times a day (but admittedly only if there are good pipes or the game is not super lag sensitive). - Computer power can be spent or sold in other ways when it's not used for the OnLive gaming system (just look at how Amazon has managed to use their knowledge of scalability into a nice side business that doesn't involve books) - For the most timing sensitive games (1st person FPS), you remove the client-to-client lag, which means the server can run a single cohesive view of the world, and pipe that to the players (so you get rid of one type of lag, which might allow for the server-to-client-video lag with no problem) - If this gets big or they have good partner deals from the beginning, games might get engineered specifically for this network topology from the game developers side, which might take steps to minimize lag problems (I can come up with quite a few ideas just off the top of my head) - If the video algorithm is designed for gaming (as it is), they can degrade quality in the video compression in a smart way to keep the lag to a minimum - who cares if the leaves on the trees in your peripheral vision are a bit blocky when you're in a firefight in Crysis) - They have a few pretty strong industry profiles on their company roster
That said, I am of course also highly sceptical, but I see a sliver of a chance that they might pull it off. And if they do, I really think it will be a game changer (pun intended).
Seriously, has anyone actually paid attention to the stage demo?
Take a look at the first bit with Ridiculous Sunglasses Guy and his avatar - he makes little, uncomplicated poses and the avatar twists itself into pretzels. It's _extremely_ glitchy.
Then they change to the girl playing ricochet, which is something like 500+ ms lagged and it seems clearly impossible to control with any kind of precision. The lag indicates to me that they are using a tremendous amount of smoothing to try and avoid some serious jitter problems.
It looks like it will fall as short of their glitzy marketing video promise as the wii controller did. Any game that is not frustrating to control with this technology will basically be playing itself with small cues from you.
I think it's great that there is work being done in these areas, but I am just astounded that so many people are so readily regurgitating the marketing promises for this technology, when they can even demonstrate it halfway convincingly under completely controlled conditions.
Developers need predictable behaviour
on
The State of Game AI
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As a game developer myself, I can tell you one of the reasons why game developers often use finite state machines for AI instead of advanced neural networks that employ clever learning machine learning algorithms: It's orders of magnitude easier to analyze and understand (and thus debug and fix) how and why a FSM does what it does than a complicated neural network.
When you're making a game, you want results that are easy to predict and easy to schedule - if you decide to make advanced AI and train the NPC behaviors, it's hard to schedule and very hard to pinpoint and definitively fix a problem where one or more NPCs suddenly start acting extremely strange and un-human. And it's hard to fix if they become to clever.
It's one of those cases where simple models can get you most of the way, and it's more reliable and it's much cheaper to develop (in terms of processing time and implementation time).
Care to back that (in my eyes, blatantly wrong) claim with examples?
I think it's the exact opposite.
Compare GTA4 to "Uncharted: Drake's Territory". Compare "Assassins Creed" to "Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction" The visual quality and feel of the exclusive titles is _way_ smoother and better than the two cross platform titles.
Compare Crysis to Gears Of War for PC. Gears of war feels like someone accidentally released a console game for PC without bothering to change a single comma, while Crysis feels like it's actually made for the machine you are playing it on.
I don't have an xbox 360, so I can't say how their exclusive titles compare, but on PS3 the exclusive titles are of remarkably higher quality than the cross platform ones.
It makes sense to me that focusing on a single machine, with all it's strengths and weaknesses, gives you the opportunity to avoid weak spots and exploit strengths fully, while cross platform releases will usually opt for the lowest common denominator for the consoles, and then maybe bolt on some half-assed platform specific features afterwards (like pretty much every cross platform titles use of SIXAXIS on PS3).
An XKCD themed party:)
People can be more or less creative with their interpretation of the theme, and the least creative can just wear a black hat and be mean.
I think they do a ridiculously bad job.
I worked for a game company, and while we had no significant trouble getting grizzly, visceral murders through the rating process as below M, ESRB had problems with hints of nipple showing through a female characters shirt, and they had problems with characters smoking certain types of drugs.
I think the hypersensitivity to sexual(-ish) content and drugs, but non-sensitivity to ultra violent content is a monumental double standard, which smacks all too much of a religion-based concept of ethics.
Evidence of dogs exists in abundance outside of the mind of the drugged subject.
A more accurate analogy would be "If I could make a drug that causes you to think there is a 90 foot pink dinosaur in the room when there isn't one, it does not prove the non-existence of 90 foot pink dinosaurs".
You're right, it doesn't - but science often works as a double negative - it doesn't prove something, but rather it disproves something that is wrong. In some cases - as this one - it simply shows that X isn't the only explanation for Y. And if X involves magical pixies and the tooth fairy, and the other explanation is demonstrable and understandable science, then we usually discard X as a viable explanation for Y (at least until theory X has some supporting evidence).
There is no trace of evidence that chocolate actually exists, but many people talk incessantly about the wonderful substance of chocolate, and how they can often taste it, which is proof to them of chocolates existence.
The chocolate helmet shows that there are perfectly scientific explanations to the taste of chocolate that need not involve invisible Magical Hershey Bars or the great Girardelli factory in the sky.
I think you are missing the point. The problem is not that he is pissed that someone used google to disclose personal details on a news service. The problem is more likely that they disclosed it at all.
No matter where CNET obtained the information, what they did was highly distasteful.
It doesn't matter one iota where they got the information. If he had said "no, you are wrong - it isn't possible to find this information with google", they might have googled themselves to show how possible it actually was. But that's not what he said. And that's not what they did. He didn't say it wasn't possible - he said it was information that was available elsewhere, which is true. In response to this, they decided to gather up a bunch of details about his personal life and put them in an article about general privacy concerns with his company.
As far as I know, a Concorde used something like 10% of it's fuel to run the airconditioner, because it was pushing the thermal barrier (where the friction of the air heats plane to the point where the people inside get cooked). The Concorde was already a high flyer, to get less air friction, and considering the "air breathing" approach they mention in the article, I can't imagine they can go into much thinner air than the Concorde.
Or what? If someone knows, educate me! point me to a link!
I remember reading about people studying how dolphins skin has the ability to counteract turbulance in the water flowing over their skin, which allows them to swim with an extremely low energy cost compared to many other aquatic animals. Maybe mimicking this with nano-materials?:)
I always argue whatever points I feel unfair on my contract. The last 3 jobs I have had, I have had them change that clause so it only includes what I do in my working hours. I find that clause so completely unacceptable, and I think any workplace who would not concede to change it, are a bunch of nasty buggers anyway. I argue that I partake in open source projects and free/shareware. That's usually ample argument.
The last jobs I have had in the industry have been like this:
We need you to be in between 11 AM and 3 PM so we know we can schedule meetings with you. Please warn us if can see you aren't going to be able to make it one day. Other than that, no monitoring, no punishment and other bullshit.
I don't want to work for someone who doesn't trust my common sense. I feel the same way about dresscodes.
This solution only works for email, but it's very nice once it's set up.
I used a free app (the name eludes me) to export my PST folders to.txt with form feed separated emails. Then I wrote a python script that could recognize the different plain-text formats of the various clients I have used (The Bat, Rebecca Mail, etc) and chew them all into one the same format (plaintext with FF separation), after which I wrote another script that put them all into a MySQL database with separate fields for headers, body and the most used fields like from, to and subject. Then I set every email program I have to leave messages on the server, and instead I now have a script that takes all my email every 3 days and sticks it into my database. Then I made a nice little interface for searching emails, and it is SO much nicer and faster than anything any email program has ever offered me in terms of searching, and I am free to switch email clients as much as I want to.
No it's not. I get spam at the rate of 1 spam mail per 6 months or so. Or maybe even less. I can't remember getting a single spam email on my actual email address for about a year.
If you have an account on a crapless domain (i.e. not hotmail.com, msn.com, aol.com and the likes), it all comes down to this very simple rule: Do not, under any circumstance, have your email address posted publicly accessible ANYWHERE on the web. It WILL get trawled. And then it will be spammed relentlessly.
If you have an existing address you don't want to give up, or an address at hotmail.com or a similar place, dump it. Then exercise a bit of common sense about where you use your actual address.
I have a domain which catches email to unknown addresses and put them in my regular mailbox. Whenever I have to give an email address to some place on the web, I use *domain-i-am-currently-visiting*@mydomain.com. So if I am visiting foobar.com, I would put in foorbar.com@mydomain.com. I have been doing this for years. It enables me to see what was the source of the leak when I get spam on one of the addresses. It has taught me one thing: I have never, ever, ever, in all my years of online shopping, forum posting etc, come across a single website that have ignored their own privacy statement. Ever. Even the slightly sketchy sites (like divx subtitle sites) don't leak addresses. I was surprised to realize this.
The only addresses I ever get spam on are the ones I know to be publicly displayed on the web.
I love XML, and I use it anywhere I can get away with it, but I know from my old job, that switching to a binary protocol that is streamlined for the task at hand can give you performance gains over XML protocols that are just plain ridiculous. I think we the results we measured were something like 1000 times as many connections on a custom binary protocol over an XML based one. That was in C++ mind you. YMMV.
My reason for not using it is that I now use a datahand, but that's beside the point. Before I tried switching, but found the following, very, very annoying obstacle: Some software uses scancodes for hotkeys, others use the keymapped values. Some even use both types within the same problem. This was under windows, and it made the switch unbearable, so I eventually decided that I needed to get a hardware dvorak, or drop it. I looked for a hardware dvorak, but it only existed in an english version. I used a danish keyboard at the time. Then I found the datahand, and I decided that was a superior piece of hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that on the face of it this looks like it won't work, but I can see many mitigating circumstances that means it just _might_ work.
I think there's a small chance that they might actually be able to pull it off, and if they do it really is a game-changer.
A couple of things that makes me hesitant to call everyone "retarded" if they don't dismiss this before it has even seen the light of day:
- They are aiming for The Long Tail of gaming, and I think it's easy to underestimate just how gigantic the amount of cash is in this tail
- Not ALL games are hyper timing sensitive
- Multiplexing hardware means the same computer can serve Stan in Portland and Sanjay in New Delhi at different times a day (but admittedly only if there are good pipes or the game is not super lag sensitive).
- Computer power can be spent or sold in other ways when it's not used for the OnLive gaming system (just look at how Amazon has managed to use their knowledge of scalability into a nice side business that doesn't involve books)
- For the most timing sensitive games (1st person FPS), you remove the client-to-client lag, which means the server can run a single cohesive view of the world, and pipe that to the players (so you get rid of one type of lag, which might allow for the server-to-client-video lag with no problem)
- If this gets big or they have good partner deals from the beginning, games might get engineered specifically for this network topology from the game developers side, which might take steps to minimize lag problems (I can come up with quite a few ideas just off the top of my head)
- If the video algorithm is designed for gaming (as it is), they can degrade quality in the video compression in a smart way to keep the lag to a minimum - who cares if the leaves on the trees in your peripheral vision are a bit blocky when you're in a firefight in Crysis)
- They have a few pretty strong industry profiles on their company roster
That said, I am of course also highly sceptical, but I see a sliver of a chance that they might pull it off. And if they do, I really think it will be a game changer (pun intended).
Where you get the 500 ms from?
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&safe=off&q=microsoft%20e3&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#
Seriously, has anyone actually paid attention to the stage demo?
Take a look at the first bit with Ridiculous Sunglasses Guy and his avatar - he makes little, uncomplicated poses and the avatar twists itself into pretzels.
It's _extremely_ glitchy.
Then they change to the girl playing ricochet, which is something like 500+ ms lagged and it seems clearly impossible to control with any kind of precision. The lag indicates to me that they are using a tremendous amount of smoothing to try and avoid some serious jitter problems.
It looks like it will fall as short of their glitzy marketing video promise as the wii controller did.
Any game that is not frustrating to control with this technology will basically be playing itself with small cues from you.
I think it's great that there is work being done in these areas, but I am just astounded that so many people are so readily regurgitating the marketing promises for this technology, when they can even demonstrate it halfway convincingly under completely controlled conditions.
As a game developer myself, I can tell you one of the reasons why game developers often use finite state machines for AI instead of advanced neural networks that employ clever learning machine learning algorithms: It's orders of magnitude easier to analyze and understand (and thus debug and fix) how and why a FSM does what it does than a complicated neural network.
When you're making a game, you want results that are easy to predict and easy to schedule - if you decide to make advanced AI and train the NPC behaviors, it's hard to schedule and very hard to pinpoint and definitively fix a problem where one or more NPCs suddenly start acting extremely strange and un-human. And it's hard to fix if they become to clever.
It's one of those cases where simple models can get you most of the way, and it's more reliable and it's much cheaper to develop (in terms of processing time and implementation time).
Is that guy for real? I can't really tell.
Care to back that (in my eyes, blatantly wrong) claim with examples?
I think it's the exact opposite.
Compare GTA4 to "Uncharted: Drake's Territory".
Compare "Assassins Creed" to "Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction"
The visual quality and feel of the exclusive titles is _way_ smoother and better than the two cross platform titles.
Compare Crysis to Gears Of War for PC.
Gears of war feels like someone accidentally released a console game for PC without bothering to change a single comma, while Crysis feels like it's actually made for the machine you are playing it on.
I don't have an xbox 360, so I can't say how their exclusive titles compare, but on PS3 the exclusive titles are of remarkably higher quality than the cross platform ones.
It makes sense to me that focusing on a single machine, with all it's strengths and weaknesses, gives you the opportunity to avoid weak spots and exploit strengths fully, while cross platform releases will usually opt for the lowest common denominator for the consoles, and then maybe bolt on some half-assed platform specific features afterwards (like pretty much every cross platform titles use of SIXAXIS on PS3).
An XKCD themed party :)
People can be more or less creative with their interpretation of the theme, and the least creative can just wear a black hat and be mean.
"I don't appreciate your analogy very much, Tesla fanboy"
I think they do a ridiculously bad job. I worked for a game company, and while we had no significant trouble getting grizzly, visceral murders through the rating process as below M, ESRB had problems with hints of nipple showing through a female characters shirt, and they had problems with characters smoking certain types of drugs. I think the hypersensitivity to sexual(-ish) content and drugs, but non-sensitivity to ultra violent content is a monumental double standard, which smacks all too much of a religion-based concept of ethics.
Still, that's preferable to someone sniffing your butt when you first meet.
Evidence of dogs exists in abundance outside of the mind of the drugged subject.
A more accurate analogy would be "If I could make a drug that causes you to think there is a 90 foot pink dinosaur in the room when there isn't one, it does not prove the non-existence of 90 foot pink dinosaurs".
You're right, it doesn't - but science often works as a double negative - it doesn't prove something, but rather it disproves something that is wrong. In some cases - as this one - it simply shows that X isn't the only explanation for Y.
And if X involves magical pixies and the tooth fairy, and the other explanation is demonstrable and understandable science, then we usually discard X as a viable explanation for Y (at least until theory X has some supporting evidence).
There is no trace of evidence that chocolate actually exists, but many people talk incessantly about the wonderful substance of chocolate, and how they can often taste it, which is proof to them of chocolates existence.
The chocolate helmet shows that there are perfectly scientific explanations to the taste of chocolate that need not involve invisible Magical Hershey Bars or the great Girardelli factory in the sky.
To be fair, SCE and sonys music division are like 2 different companies.
Where do I sign the partition?
Engraved diamonds for your girlfriends, anyone?
I think you are missing the point.
The problem is not that he is pissed that someone used google to disclose personal details on a news service. The problem is more likely that they disclosed it at all.
No matter where CNET obtained the information, what they did was highly distasteful.
It doesn't matter one iota where they got the information. If he had said "no, you are wrong - it isn't possible to find this information with google", they might have googled themselves to show how possible it actually was.
But that's not what he said. And that's not what they did. He didn't say it wasn't possible - he said it was information that was available elsewhere, which is true.
In response to this, they decided to gather up a bunch of details about his personal life and put them in an article about general privacy concerns with his company.
That is poor taste.
Blank keys is hardly a unique feature. Take a look at Happy Hacking Pro.
As far as I know, a Concorde used something like 10% of it's fuel to run the airconditioner, because it was pushing the thermal barrier (where the friction of the air heats plane to the point where the people inside get cooked).
:)
The Concorde was already a high flyer, to get less air friction, and considering the "air breathing" approach they mention in the article, I can't imagine they can go into much thinner air than the Concorde.
Or what?
If someone knows, educate me! point me to a link!
I remember reading about people studying how dolphins skin has the ability to counteract turbulance in the water flowing over their skin, which allows them to swim with an extremely low energy cost compared to many other aquatic animals.
Maybe mimicking this with nano-materials?
I always argue whatever points I feel unfair on my contract. The last 3 jobs I have had, I have had them change that clause so it only includes what I do in my working hours.
I find that clause so completely unacceptable, and I think any workplace who would not concede to change it, are a bunch of nasty buggers anyway.
I argue that I partake in open source projects and free/shareware. That's usually ample argument.
The last jobs I have had in the industry have been like this:
We need you to be in between 11 AM and 3 PM so we know we can schedule meetings with you. Please warn us if can see you aren't going to be able to make it one day.
Other than that, no monitoring, no punishment and other bullshit.
I don't want to work for someone who doesn't trust my common sense. I feel the same way about dresscodes.
This solution only works for email, but it's very nice once it's set up.
.txt with form feed separated emails.
I used a free app (the name eludes me) to export my PST folders to
Then I wrote a python script that could recognize the different plain-text formats of the various clients I have used (The Bat, Rebecca Mail, etc) and chew them all into one the same format (plaintext with FF separation), after which I wrote another script that put them all into a MySQL database with separate fields for headers, body and the most used fields like from, to and subject.
Then I set every email program I have to leave messages on the server, and instead I now have a script that takes all my email every 3 days and sticks it into my database.
Then I made a nice little interface for searching emails, and it is SO much nicer and faster than anything any email program has ever offered me in terms of searching, and I am free to switch email clients as much as I want to.
No it's not.
I get spam at the rate of 1 spam mail per 6 months or so. Or maybe even less. I can't remember getting a single spam email on my actual email address for about a year.
If you have an account on a crapless domain (i.e. not hotmail.com, msn.com, aol.com and the likes),
it all comes down to this very simple rule:
Do not, under any circumstance, have your email address posted publicly accessible ANYWHERE on the web.
It WILL get trawled. And then it will be spammed relentlessly.
If you have an existing address you don't want to give up, or an address at hotmail.com or a similar place, dump it.
Then exercise a bit of common sense about where you use your actual address.
I have a domain which catches email to unknown addresses and put them in my regular mailbox.
Whenever I have to give an email address to some place on the web, I use *domain-i-am-currently-visiting*@mydomain.com. So if I am visiting foobar.com, I would put in foorbar.com@mydomain.com.
I have been doing this for years. It enables me to see what was the source of the leak when I get spam on one of the addresses.
It has taught me one thing: I have never, ever, ever, in all my years of online shopping, forum posting etc, come across a single website that have ignored their own privacy statement. Ever. Even the slightly sketchy sites (like divx subtitle sites) don't leak addresses.
I was surprised to realize this.
The only addresses I ever get spam on are the ones I know to be publicly displayed on the web.
So it's that easy to avoid spam.
I love XML, and I use it anywhere I can get away with it, but I know from my old job, that switching to a binary protocol that is streamlined for the task at hand can give you performance gains over XML protocols that are just plain ridiculous.
I think we the results we measured were something like 1000 times as many connections on a custom binary protocol over an XML based one.
That was in C++ mind you. YMMV.
Come on Kif! Let's show these freaks what a bloated, runaway military budget can really do!
My reason for not using it is that I now use a datahand, but that's beside the point.
Before I tried switching, but found the following, very, very annoying obstacle:
Some software uses scancodes for hotkeys, others use the keymapped values. Some even use both types within the same problem.
This was under windows, and it made the switch unbearable, so I eventually decided that I needed to get a hardware dvorak, or drop it.
I looked for a hardware dvorak, but it only existed in an english version. I used a danish keyboard at the time.
Then I found the datahand, and I decided that was a superior piece of hardware.