Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
on
Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 1
As I said...there are some significant differences between y2k and the greenhouse problem. We had the tools to do something about the y2k problem...we don't for the greenhouse/polution problem. Hell, even shutting down all industry/car-driving etc can't undo what's already out there and festering in dumps around the world.
And that's the crux...we knew we had a problem, we had the tools and the time to fix it, so we did. Otoh you have something we know too little about except the fact that it's happening and only in global strokes how, but we don't have clue as to how to fix it, and even if we did/we do not have the tools, or the capability to use those tools on the massive scale needed/ to fix the problem.
And as for y2k...worst case scenario? Power stations would have failed and society would have been without power for a day or so. No nukes would have launched, no food shortages would have happened...financial transactions would have been lost, people would have been working overtime for a couple of years to correct the snafu, but the world would not have changed significantly.
Come on...screen pixel density shouldn't mean jack! The only reason it does is because people are too lazy and use huge frickin' bmp's when they could get teh exact same effect, replicable in a thousand different situations, by programming a colour gradient function (look at the classic start menu in windows; you know, when you click on the start button and the menu pops up, on the right of this menu is a coloured bar with your windows version displayed in it...and it's a fucking bitmap!). Now explain to me the diffence in functionality between office 97, 2000 and xp. I'll tell you; there is very little real difference, except for graphics.
I'm a EU-an, and don't know the US constitution by heart, but doesn't the second amendment also have something along the lines of 'by a militia' in there? The way I always thought of it, that means that individual weapon ownership should be illegal, except if you are litterally part of a militia,/with all the duties which that entails/.
Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
on
Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 1
Reading your post, what sprung to my mind is the quote 'they who know history are doomed to see it repeated'. Just because something bad has happened before is no reason to sit idly by as a different form of the same happens again. The whole point of civilisation is to/not/ repeat past mistakes.
Quick example: real hackers (or anyone who bothered to do some (just a tiny amount) research) knew y2k was not something which would bring disaster, only mild discomfort if not dealt with. And anyone with a knowledge of history would have compared this to any other 'the world is going to end' craze of the past millenia (and there have been a few) and pretty much known that y2k wouldn't be as bad as it was made out to be. And hackers who know history? They'd have known/that/ the craze would happen and have some insight as to why.
And then there is stuff like the greenhouse effect, which is not in the above catagory for two reasons: nothing like it has happened before (ice-ages and the like don't count/compare with all the stuff humanity is putting up there) and it is scientific fact (just ask any scientist), against which we don't have any prevention/circumvention tools.
Quite a number of bars in Europe already do this as a so-called 'VIP-treatment'; get an RFID implanted to pay for your drinks/entry (as in you get debited later on your bank account).
Which is exactly the point I'm trying to make...any sane person would not use that as the deciding factor, but would instead go after the most harmfull, instead of the ones which 'smell bad'.
Sorry, but that repetitive, exactly-the-same corridor style in Halo is due to the game being released before it was done...MS forced Bungies hand there...the game was released before it could be done right:)
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
's more a question of volume of new, original games. Sure, the pc started it, but nowadays, most innovative gameplay is to be found on consoles. Pikmin, that rolling-ball thingy game...hell, even Shenmue probably counts.
And I don't even have a console...it's just too expensive and consoles don't have 3d modeling suites (or run Maple, for that matter:))...otherwise I'd get one for the games.
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
The 'no upgrade costs' is not true for consoles though: aftermarket controlers, broadband adapters, memory cards etc etc...I bought my mouse, case and keyboard years ago, and incremental upgrade the internals of my pc.
To put it bluntly, I'd say that the cost for decent gameplay is the same for consoles and the pc...the only real diffence (appart from how you spend the money) is/when/ you pay the price ('cos the xbox/ps2 sure didn't cost $150 at launch).
Now, I do have to say that consoles are getting the mayority of cool, polished, original games. However, the pc does have the mod community..which much to my disapointment only very, very rarely comes up with some real innovation. But it does give you more bang for the buck (as in more of the same for free).
There's an even better, yet much more cynical, reason why NOx and SOx are so heavily regulated; they're the polutants which you can see and smell. SOx isn't even that bad for you, but it smells like shi^H^Hsulfur. There are other polutants which are much, much worse for you, much more deadly, but aren't as readily visible or nasally detectable.
It's sad to say, but politicians go after the obvious, not the bad. If you can't smell it, they seem to be doing their job, even if the crap you can't smell or see is killing you and little is being done to stop the use/spread/contamination.
Actually, it does: he was commenting on how this kind of modeling (using formulae to represent a phenomenon) is in these cases a joke. I countered by showing an example where the science used is not a joke, but actually quite rigorous and applies to a concept, in this case 'significance'.
So yes to 'slighty offtopic', but I would say an interesting aside which tangentially coincides with the parent post.
Certain ones do, others don't. Parralel lines never crossing is one, which is deduced from logic, not observation. And the nice thing (which I'm kinda assuming you know) is that that axiom isn't true in the non-euclidian world we live in.
Despite the URL, there is some serious and, as far as I can tell, correct math proving Bush wrong. Just skip to the last paragraphs to see how mathematics defines 'significant':)
"I don't see how a minister of finance's compliments are going to help commericialize the product."
Check the 3dsolar website; you'll see mention of a tech/innovation prize/firm/whatever which is going to help fund these guys further. Apparently the tech demo was sufficiently impressive to get some funding directly from the say-so of two ministers of a country. Not a small feat to pull off.
"don't use high polygons, I'm more talented than that"
? What, you give your polies dope to smoke or something? And what does using polygons have to do with talent? If you're making realtime gfx, polygons is the only way to go; you're kinda buggering about the long way if you first do NURBS and then convert those ('cos there ain't an engine which can use NURBS directly). So maybe you mean you only do high-poly movie stuff? But then your answer would be more nuanced, showing some actual knowledge of the 3d-arts. Furthermore, if you only work in NURBS, there is no way in hell you where satisfied with your p2 200; NURBS work chugged along on the old pc's (if your 3d package even supported them correctly back then), especially if you did high-poly work.
Yeah, it's a crock...which is why they get to demo for a high french government official and get to present for nVidia. Yup, sure sounds like vapourware.
" OS X, runs smoothly on a G3 700MHz, it runs smoothly on a G4 400MHz, a G4 1GHz won't leave you waiting in any application including Alias' Maya. Hence you don't need a dual 2.5GHz G5 to 'test' OS X, a second hand mac is usually just fine to try it out. (If you look hard enough, there are people giving away old powermac G4s.)"
Winxp runs smooth as silk, if you turn off the un-needed crap like scrolling menus, on a p3 550. And lower, even.
As for your comment about Maya...you don't do 3D work, do you? Or at least not high-end low-poly stuff (around the 3000 tri mark)...
"Their decisions for dragging disks to the trash, and having a one button mouse really DID make sense at the time, but a lot of those decisions are lost on us now,"
Look at that last sentence, and recall the syaing 'move with the times'; legacy shit is just that: crap which shouldn't be there anymore. Or to use a technical term: cruft.
And as for your sig: you're a real asshole if you do that to posts which (obviously) spread wrong/false info or are just plain dumb: they deserve to be modded out of sight, and are in fact the reason moderation was put in place. Wanker.
Except of course when you had to deal with that 'trash can' thing. Whoever thought about the Mac trash can functionality should not just be flogged, drawn and quartered, but shredded, pissed on and burnt in little bits too.
It will make pneumatics cheaper. Instead of large components or electronically driven systems, you can now go to a fully mechanical system to drive yourprneumatic system, which means you don't have to integrate an electronic system into a mechanical one. How's that for a real-world application?
Which is actually quite interesting: if Einstein hadn't dreamt up relativity, and no one else had in the meantime, at one point it would have been force upon us to discover/why/ exactly our satelitees where falling down...
You could make the case that relativity (and many other discoveries) was inevitable...
Bought my T3 a couple of months back...not one problem with it except with the version of Documents to go which was preinstalled (it caused hard resets...which it didn't anymore when I installed the version which came on the installation cd). For the rest: the screws are still in, no humming screen, no loose case...I think only the first run of T3's had those problems...
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As I said...there are some significant differences between y2k and the greenhouse problem. We had the tools to do something about the y2k problem...we don't for the greenhouse/polution problem. Hell, even shutting down all industry/car-driving etc can't undo what's already out there and festering in dumps around the world.
/we do not have the tools, or the capability to use those tools on the massive scale needed/ to fix the problem.
And that's the crux...we knew we had a problem, we had the tools and the time to fix it, so we did. Otoh you have something we know too little about except the fact that it's happening and only in global strokes how, but we don't have clue as to how to fix it, and even if we did
And as for y2k...worst case scenario? Power stations would have failed and society would have been without power for a day or so. No nukes would have launched, no food shortages would have happened...financial transactions would have been lost, people would have been working overtime for a couple of years to correct the snafu, but the world would not have changed significantly.
Dude...invest in a digital camera and take a high-rez pic of your whiteboard...much easier and faster.
Come on...screen pixel density shouldn't mean jack! The only reason it does is because people are too lazy and use huge frickin' bmp's when they could get teh exact same effect, replicable in a thousand different situations, by programming a colour gradient function (look at the classic start menu in windows; you know, when you click on the start button and the menu pops up, on the right of this menu is a coloured bar with your windows version displayed in it...and it's a fucking bitmap!).
Now explain to me the diffence in functionality between office 97, 2000 and xp. I'll tell you; there is very little real difference, except for graphics.
I'm a EU-an, and don't know the US constitution by heart, but doesn't the second amendment also have something along the lines of 'by a militia' in there? /with all the duties which that entails/.
The way I always thought of it, that means that individual weapon ownership should be illegal, except if you are litterally part of a militia,
Reading your post, what sprung to my mind is the quote 'they who know history are doomed to see it repeated'. /not/ repeat past mistakes.
/that/ the craze would happen and have some insight as to why.
:)
Just because something bad has happened before is no reason to sit idly by as a different form of the same happens again. The whole point of civilisation is to
Quick example: real hackers (or anyone who bothered to do some (just a tiny amount) research) knew y2k was not something which would bring disaster, only mild discomfort if not dealt with. And anyone with a knowledge of history would have compared this to any other 'the world is going to end' craze of the past millenia (and there have been a few) and pretty much known that y2k wouldn't be as bad as it was made out to be. And hackers who know history? They'd have known
And then there is stuff like the greenhouse effect, which is not in the above catagory for two reasons: nothing like it has happened before (ice-ages and the like don't count/compare with all the stuff humanity is putting up there) and it is scientific fact (just ask any scientist), against which we don't have any prevention/circumvention tools.
Uhh...sorry, lost track there for a moment
A lot of others in the EU are doing it too; google 'baja beachclub netherlands', for one.
Quite a number of bars in Europe already do this as a so-called 'VIP-treatment'; get an RFID implanted to pay for your drinks/entry (as in you get debited later on your bank account).
Which is exactly the point I'm trying to make...any sane person would not use that as the deciding factor, but would instead go after the most harmfull, instead of the ones which 'smell bad'.
Sorry, but that repetitive, exactly-the-same corridor style in Halo is due to the game being released before it was done...MS forced Bungies hand there...the game was released before it could be done right :)
's more a question of volume of new, original games. Sure, the pc started it, but nowadays, most innovative gameplay is to be found on consoles. Pikmin, that rolling-ball thingy game...hell, even Shenmue probably counts.
:))...otherwise I'd get one for the games.
And I don't even have a console...it's just too expensive and consoles don't have 3d modeling suites (or run Maple, for that matter
The 'no upgrade costs' is not true for consoles though: aftermarket controlers, broadband adapters, memory cards etc etc...I bought my mouse, case and keyboard years ago, and incremental upgrade the internals of my pc.
/when/ you pay the price ('cos the xbox/ps2 sure didn't cost $150 at launch).
To put it bluntly, I'd say that the cost for decent gameplay is the same for consoles and the pc...the only real diffence (appart from how you spend the money) is
Now, I do have to say that consoles are getting the mayority of cool, polished, original games. However, the pc does have the mod community..which much to my disapointment only very, very rarely comes up with some real innovation. But it does give you more bang for the buck (as in more of the same for free).
There's an even better, yet much more cynical, reason why NOx and SOx are so heavily regulated; they're the polutants which you can see and smell. SOx isn't even that bad for you, but it smells like shi^H^Hsulfur. There are other polutants which are much, much worse for you, much more deadly, but aren't as readily visible or nasally detectable.
It's sad to say, but politicians go after the obvious, not the bad. If you can't smell it, they seem to be doing their job, even if the crap you can't smell or see is killing you and little is being done to stop the use/spread/contamination.
Actually, it does: he was commenting on how this kind of modeling (using formulae to represent a phenomenon) is in these cases a joke. I countered by showing an example where the science used is not a joke, but actually quite rigorous and applies to a concept, in this case 'significance'.
So yes to 'slighty offtopic', but I would say an interesting aside which tangentially coincides with the parent post.
Certain ones do, others don't. Parralel lines never crossing is one, which is deduced from logic, not observation. And the nice thing (which I'm kinda assuming you know) is that that axiom isn't true in the non-euclidian world we live in.
This, however, isn't:
:)
http://www.matrix-evolutions.com/
Despite the URL, there is some serious and, as far as I can tell, correct math proving Bush wrong. Just skip to the last paragraphs to see how mathematics defines 'significant'
"I don't see how a minister of finance's compliments are going to help commericialize the product."
Check the 3dsolar website; you'll see mention of a tech/innovation prize/firm/whatever which is going to help fund these guys further. Apparently the tech demo was sufficiently impressive to get some funding directly from the say-so of two ministers of a country. Not a small feat to pull off.
"don't use high polygons, I'm more talented than that"
? What, you give your polies dope to smoke or something? And what does using polygons have to do with talent? If you're making realtime gfx, polygons is the only way to go; you're kinda buggering about the long way if you first do NURBS and then convert those ('cos there ain't an engine which can use NURBS directly).
So maybe you mean you only do high-poly movie stuff? But then your answer would be more nuanced, showing some actual knowledge of the 3d-arts. Furthermore, if you only work in NURBS, there is no way in hell you where satisfied with your p2 200; NURBS work chugged along on the old pc's (if your 3d package even supported them correctly back then), especially if you did high-poly work.
Yeah, it's a crock...which is why they get to demo for a high french government official and get to present for nVidia. Yup, sure sounds like vapourware.
I know I'm being a picky bugger, but still:
" OS X, runs smoothly on a G3 700MHz, it runs smoothly on a G4 400MHz, a G4 1GHz won't leave you waiting in any application including Alias' Maya. Hence you don't need a dual 2.5GHz G5 to 'test' OS X, a second hand mac is usually just fine to try it out. (If you look hard enough, there are people giving away old powermac G4s.)"
Winxp runs smooth as silk, if you turn off the un-needed crap like scrolling menus, on a p3 550. And lower, even.
As for your comment about Maya...you don't do 3D work, do you? Or at least not high-end low-poly stuff (around the 3000 tri mark)...
"Their decisions for dragging disks to the trash, and having a one button mouse really DID make sense at the time, but a lot of those decisions are lost on us now,"
Look at that last sentence, and recall the syaing 'move with the times'; legacy shit is just that: crap which shouldn't be there anymore. Or to use a technical term: cruft.
And as for your sig: you're a real asshole if you do that to posts which (obviously) spread wrong/false info or are just plain dumb: they deserve to be modded out of sight, and are in fact the reason moderation was put in place. Wanker.
Except of course when you had to deal with that 'trash can' thing. Whoever thought about the Mac trash can functionality should not just be flogged, drawn and quartered, but shredded, pissed on and burnt in little bits too.
It will make pneumatics cheaper. Instead of large components or electronically driven systems, you can now go to a fully mechanical system to drive yourprneumatic system, which means you don't have to integrate an electronic system into a mechanical one.
How's that for a real-world application?
Man, I feel like such a science geek, but it's actually E=m*gamma(u)*c^2 :)
Which is actually quite interesting: if Einstein hadn't dreamt up relativity, and no one else had in the meantime, at one point it would have been force upon us to discover /why/ exactly our satelitees where falling down...
You could make the case that relativity (and many other discoveries) was inevitable...
Bought my T3 a couple of months back...not one problem with it except with the version of Documents to go which was preinstalled (it caused hard resets...which it didn't anymore when I installed the version which came on the installation cd). For the rest: the screws are still in, no humming screen, no loose case...I think only the first run of T3's had those problems...