Gaming has been bumbling along as an occasional novelty in the mainstream media since the CS explosion and the massive LAN events of the early noughties. The real point at which gaming can call itself mainstream is when the goofy gaming shows obviously hosted by non-gamers are replaced by serious coverage of tournament events, when CS and QT are presented like poker - serious coverage that the tournament entrants would appreciate, competent commentary by people gamers actually respect and just the occasional explanatory note to naive viewers. When the network execs begin to understand that their thirteen-year-old PS2 owner is a totally different kind of gamer to the WOW-playing, LAN-gaming faithful and realise that gamers aren't one demographic but a broad spectrum with widely diverging tastes and interests. For the moment, gaming is an odd novelty that the mainstream still don't quite get.
Instead of worrying about all this climate change nonsense we can just genetically modify ourselves and our food to suit. Oh, except if these guys had spent half an hour ringing round a few climatolagists they would have found out that the most likely outcome isn't a smooth, predictable change in temperature but wild, chaotic swings in climate caused by a million climate systems and feedback loops (not limited to the gulfstream) going totally out of whack.
Really, he could be the saviour of the games industry or he could be a one hit wonder, he could be a nice guy or an asshole. It's all irrelevant - he produced a superb work of art and should be applauded for it. Everything else is just pointless punditry.
This guy can do what the hell he likes with his money, freedom includes the freedom to be an asshat. What worries me is that in our current bullshit culture of intelligent design, affirmative action and arbitrary 'fairness', management will see this as a reasonable and credible endeavour and embark on a witchunt for anyone not presenting all opinions (no matter how retarded or blatantly false they may be) or daring to teach in a passionate and meaningful way. It doesn't seem at all unlikely to me that within a generation it'll be impossible to express an opinion, play devil's advocate or open up a debate in a classroom without fearing for your job. It's all part of the sterilisation and homogenisation of how we teach young people. Here in the UK the national curriculum means that teachers are required by law to in effect teach to a checklist with OFSTED inspectors ensuring that teaching is done in accordance with this season's fads and fashions and we're suffering for it - in all but the most elite of public(private) schools, there's no time to teach anything but what's on the curriculum and no time to teach that in any meaningful way, leaving our young people with a vast Japanese-style collection of disparate factoids learned by rote but without the skills and experience needed to make sense of them. Employers are increasingly finding that young people have bags of qualifications but can't actually do anything. They've spent all their time analysing Shakespeare 'in accordance with the learning framework', being spoonfed canned opinions on the Suez Crisis and being told 'you need to know this as it's on the exam, but don't ask me to explain it, you don't need to know how it works'. Most British 18 year olds don't know how to write a formal letter, what double-entry bookkeeping is or how to work a lathe but are supposedly better qualified than any generation before them. Those that go to university either get spoonfed more useless shit or spend three years catching up on things they should have learned in the last thirteen, then graduate and wonder why they can't get work.
I'm sure we're all aware of just how much stuff came to us as a spin-off from the space industry. If this technology works, it could revolutionise so many things - roofing felt that lasts hundreds of years, GRP car bodywork that unscuffs itself, effectively crackproof consumer electronics and a plethora of stuff I'm too dull to think of. Early doors, but a fascinating pre-nanotech advance in materials technology.
Because revolutions are exciting.
on
Web 3.0
·
· Score: 1
Everyone wants to jump onboard a cutting-edge bandwagon while there's still room. Unfortunately, real innovation is few and far between and requires determined effort from brilliant people. Fads like Web 2.0 are like get rich schemes for techies - we allow the promise of something for nothing to cloud our rational judgement. Cognitive dissonance kicks in fast and we won't let anyone spoil our dream even when we're haemorraging time and money into obviously dead-end endevours. Eventually some little economic toto pulls the curtain, reality becomes impossible to ignore and the crash comes.
If you can't explain it in fifteen seconds...
on
Web 3.0
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's probably bullshit. The world is full of concepts which aren't really concepts - big balls of fluff that proport to be explaining this hard-to-explain idea but are really just hiding the total lack of substance. Web 2.0 is very much one of them. Web 1.0 is trivial to explain and the concept of hypertext really was revolutionary. A simple idea excecuted well that allows people to do something new, or do something old in a radically new way. Same goes for pagerank, same goes for ebay, same goes for every billion-dollar idea that didn't go out with pets.com. Web 2.0 has no meat, no heart, no simple revolution. Smoke and mirrors for marketers and dwellers of the blogospheric ghetto.
Amazingly enough, many of the really interesting developments in online communities are being driven by people who couldn't give a chuff about Web 2.0 and the blogosphere and are using existing (and in many cases decades old) technologies to do things that weren't envisioned by the designers. 'Democratisation of the hacker ethic', if you need a buzzword. Us insiders get wrapped up in the idea that the net is all about creating a parallel reality but the really interesting stuff that's happening now is non-geeks using old tech in new ways.
I'll assume you're not trying to be funny here, because if you are then you've failed badly. "Ultra Wide" refers to the angle of view, not the aspect ratio. The aspect ratio will still be roughly 4:3 and fit on your monitor, but the camera will capture more of what you see in both axis - think the opposite of zooming in. Photographs with a very broad aspect ratio are referred to as panoramic.
Personally I think this is a step in the right direction simply for featuring a prime lens. Were someone to produce one of these infinitesimally tiny digital compacts with a fixed, sharp 50mm f/1.4 equivalent lens, a fast engine like DIGIC II and a good optical view(or range)finder they'd have Cartier-Bresson rising from the dead to buy one. Seriously, I can't see why clunkers like the R-D1 make it to the market when there'd be so much potential for a tiny camera aimed at pros to provide those of us who've gone all-digital with something to fill the Olympus Trip shaped holes in our glove boxes and overnight bags.
With the arrival of graphical ads and corporate aquisitions it seems that post-IPO Google is abandoning a few of it's old principles in the pursuit of the almighty buck. How long before "Don't be Evil" is gone too? I could kinda live with Google's pseudomonopoly on searching back when their character was spotless, but this may well be the first lurch down a slippery slope. It may just be paranoia, but I think the days of trusting Larry and Sergey are coming to an end.
It's a shame it's not a naitive app, but these days it's mattering less and less that something is browser based. Still, nice that more firms are acknowledging non-windows users, albeit in a slightly lipserviced manner.
We're a slashdot crowd. As a rule, autistics aren't so hot on odd numbers.
Even, even, gotta be even...
We've beaten viruses but not spyware?
on
Antispyware Shootout
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why do the majority of commercial virus scanners seem to work flawlessly when kept up-to-date yet we're still at the point where you may need half a dozen anti-spyware programs to clean up an ordinary windows box? What is it about spyware that makes it seemingly so difficult to shift? Oh, and why are people even recommending routinely using antispyware when it's so much easier, cheaper and cleaner to sort out the problems at the source and just get your security to a tolerable, spyware-proof level?
Capacitance is enormously important in cables. Cheap cable frequently has high capacitance, which is absolutely killer for audio applications. A very small amount of capacitance will quickly rob you of high-frequencies. Anyone who's ever picked up a soldering iron knows the easiest way to filter out high-frequencies is to whack the signal through a small capacitor. Additionally, the quality of connection DOES matter. Cheap connectors will corrode quite quickly which will cause increased resistance but crucially capacitance across the layer of corroded crap. Lots of cheap gold-plated connectors have almost no gold on the plating; gold is sufficiently soft that much of it will wear off within a few insertions, leaving a base metal that will corrode quickly and leave you with a terrible connection. Speaker cables carry hefty currents at low voltage meaning you DO need enough cross-section of cable, otherwise you'll lose the bottom end because it's busy heating up the cable.
Good speakers have between two and eight ohms of impedance. Every extra ohm in the signal chain will sap away the transients. High-impedance cable will reduce the efficiency of the system noticably, but will affect the peaks more than the body of the signal and therefore acting as a compressor. That's not good, as it takes all the power out of percussive sounds.
Anyway, bottom line from someone who buys a heck of a lot of cable is that monster brand cables are really poor value, but it's worth spending a little more than a couple of bucks on cables - a moderately priced own-brand cable will suffice - use your eyes and look at the thickness of cable and the quality of the connectors. Avoid gold-plated connectors.
To the parent, I question your claim to be a physicist, as anyone worth their salt would know that the quality of cable is important and I also ask you this - why do pro system installers who fit audio systems to cinemas and such choose to use decent cables instead of the very cheapest? The client will never see the cable as it gets buried beneath the floor or in a conduit. The installer wants to cut every corner that doesn't harm the quality of the system. Is the vast majority of the pro installation industry deluded? No, they just know that crap cable can make an expensive system sound cheap.
Try it for yourself. Take a quality hifi separates system and try a decent, modestly priced hifi speaker cable, then the cheapest, thinnest, crappiest piece of wire you've got lying around. Do the same with a $15-$20 interconnect and one that came bundled with a mini system you bought in 1983. If you can't hear the difference, I'll personally fedex you a pack of q-tips.
WinCE 2.0 PDA, wind up charger, CF card, $80
on
Low Tech Gutenberg?
·
· Score: 1
Pick any random old winCE PDA from ebay, preferably one that takes standard size batteries, buy a big CF card and a wind-up or solar charger, Send them over wrapped in wadding packed in a video tape box inside a padded envelope. Customs agents will almost certainly just read the postmark from the US, feel that it's a video tape and pass it through. Unlikely to be stolen en route, and if it is, you're only down $70 or $80. You can send another half gigabyte of books for $40 if she can't get the card back to you.
I guess I'm missing something, but haven't we had stand-alone DVD recorders for quite a while now? I bought a DVD recorder functioning exactly like a VCR several months ago. - http://www.dvdrecorder.philips.com/
AC - "Huh? Nazis were on the extreme right, and rose to power in Germany as a reaction to Communism on the left."
Uh, no they're not pal. Common misconception. Left and right refer to economics, not social policy. As the Nazis were National Socialists, they belong far on the left. They didn't rise as a reaction to communism, but in sympathy with it. Germany's economy was in disarray after the first war, and a strong leader who could rebuild the economy was wanted. The nazis opposed communism because they threatened the power of the Reich, not on principle.
There is a very obvious difference. Consentual sex between minors harms no-one but the participants. Drug use does not directly harm anyone but the user. Driving drunk may well kill others.
Laws against drug use are applying public morals to a private act. Laws against drunk driving are applying public morals to a public act. There is a big difference.
Well, I would have modded you up were it not for that last line. Over in the Netherlands, the death rate amongst injecting drug users is approximately 0.05% per year. In "civilized" America, it's nearly 2%. Whether you approve of drug use or not, harm reduction is the only sensible, humane approach.
Virtually all civillian head-mounted-displays weight less than 50g, and therefore crush like a butterfly under heavy impact. I greatly doubt that a tiny LCD would compromise a helmet, and if it does, then why bother with a helmet? If it can't stand up to a tiny piece of plastic shrapnel, what chance does it stand of keeping your brains safe from hurtling steel?
Uh, I don't know what you read into the question, but no sort of laser device is required. The best solution would be a tiny helmet-mounted LCD that could be glanced up at, or a prismatic system to overlay the display onto their view of the world. A laser or ultrasound rangefinder is useless without an optical sight, but one could easily be built into the display, in a manner similar to red-dot sights on firearms.
The idea that a hud compromises situational awareness is somewhat naive. Yes, a poorly-designed system could compromise SA, but a properly thought out HUD system will have no effect on the user's ability to control a vehicle. Frequently, HUD systems vastly improve a user's abilities - modern fighter jets are unflyable without their HUDs. People are working on wearable computers as a way of improving the user's perception, like eyetap.
Slashdot Mirror
Gaming has been bumbling along as an occasional novelty in the mainstream media since the CS explosion and the massive LAN events of the early noughties. The real point at which gaming can call itself mainstream is when the goofy gaming shows obviously hosted by non-gamers are replaced by serious coverage of tournament events, when CS and QT are presented like poker - serious coverage that the tournament entrants would appreciate, competent commentary by people gamers actually respect and just the occasional explanatory note to naive viewers. When the network execs begin to understand that their thirteen-year-old PS2 owner is a totally different kind of gamer to the WOW-playing, LAN-gaming faithful and realise that gamers aren't one demographic but a broad spectrum with widely diverging tastes and interests. For the moment, gaming is an odd novelty that the mainstream still don't quite get.
Instead of worrying about all this climate change nonsense we can just genetically modify ourselves and our food to suit. Oh, except if these guys had spent half an hour ringing round a few climatolagists they would have found out that the most likely outcome isn't a smooth, predictable change in temperature but wild, chaotic swings in climate caused by a million climate systems and feedback loops (not limited to the gulfstream) going totally out of whack.
Really, he could be the saviour of the games industry or he could be a one hit wonder, he could be a nice guy or an asshole. It's all irrelevant - he produced a superb work of art and should be applauded for it. Everything else is just pointless punditry.
This guy can do what the hell he likes with his money, freedom includes the freedom to be an asshat. What worries me is that in our current bullshit culture of intelligent design, affirmative action and arbitrary 'fairness', management will see this as a reasonable and credible endeavour and embark on a witchunt for anyone not presenting all opinions (no matter how retarded or blatantly false they may be) or daring to teach in a passionate and meaningful way. It doesn't seem at all unlikely to me that within a generation it'll be impossible to express an opinion, play devil's advocate or open up a debate in a classroom without fearing for your job. It's all part of the sterilisation and homogenisation of how we teach young people. Here in the UK the national curriculum means that teachers are required by law to in effect teach to a checklist with OFSTED inspectors ensuring that teaching is done in accordance with this season's fads and fashions and we're suffering for it - in all but the most elite of public(private) schools, there's no time to teach anything but what's on the curriculum and no time to teach that in any meaningful way, leaving our young people with a vast Japanese-style collection of disparate factoids learned by rote but without the skills and experience needed to make sense of them. Employers are increasingly finding that young people have bags of qualifications but can't actually do anything. They've spent all their time analysing Shakespeare 'in accordance with the learning framework', being spoonfed canned opinions on the Suez Crisis and being told 'you need to know this as it's on the exam, but don't ask me to explain it, you don't need to know how it works'. Most British 18 year olds don't know how to write a formal letter, what double-entry bookkeeping is or how to work a lathe but are supposedly better qualified than any generation before them. Those that go to university either get spoonfed more useless shit or spend three years catching up on things they should have learned in the last thirteen, then graduate and wonder why they can't get work.
I'm sure we're all aware of just how much stuff came to us as a spin-off from the space industry. If this technology works, it could revolutionise so many things - roofing felt that lasts hundreds of years, GRP car bodywork that unscuffs itself, effectively crackproof consumer electronics and a plethora of stuff I'm too dull to think of. Early doors, but a fascinating pre-nanotech advance in materials technology.
Everyone wants to jump onboard a cutting-edge bandwagon while there's still room. Unfortunately, real innovation is few and far between and requires determined effort from brilliant people. Fads like Web 2.0 are like get rich schemes for techies - we allow the promise of something for nothing to cloud our rational judgement. Cognitive dissonance kicks in fast and we won't let anyone spoil our dream even when we're haemorraging time and money into obviously dead-end endevours. Eventually some little economic toto pulls the curtain, reality becomes impossible to ignore and the crash comes.
It's probably bullshit. The world is full of concepts which aren't really concepts - big balls of fluff that proport to be explaining this hard-to-explain idea but are really just hiding the total lack of substance. Web 2.0 is very much one of them. Web 1.0 is trivial to explain and the concept of hypertext really was revolutionary. A simple idea excecuted well that allows people to do something new, or do something old in a radically new way. Same goes for pagerank, same goes for ebay, same goes for every billion-dollar idea that didn't go out with pets.com. Web 2.0 has no meat, no heart, no simple revolution. Smoke and mirrors for marketers and dwellers of the blogospheric ghetto.
Amazingly enough, many of the really interesting developments in online communities are being driven by people who couldn't give a chuff about Web 2.0 and the blogosphere and are using existing (and in many cases decades old) technologies to do things that weren't envisioned by the designers. 'Democratisation of the hacker ethic', if you need a buzzword. Us insiders get wrapped up in the idea that the net is all about creating a parallel reality but the really interesting stuff that's happening now is non-geeks using old tech in new ways.
I'll assume you're not trying to be funny here, because if you are then you've failed badly. "Ultra Wide" refers to the angle of view, not the aspect ratio. The aspect ratio will still be roughly 4:3 and fit on your monitor, but the camera will capture more of what you see in both axis - think the opposite of zooming in. Photographs with a very broad aspect ratio are referred to as panoramic.
Personally I think this is a step in the right direction simply for featuring a prime lens. Were someone to produce one of these infinitesimally tiny digital compacts with a fixed, sharp 50mm f/1.4 equivalent lens, a fast engine like DIGIC II and a good optical view(or range)finder they'd have Cartier-Bresson rising from the dead to buy one. Seriously, I can't see why clunkers like the R-D1 make it to the market when there'd be so much potential for a tiny camera aimed at pros to provide those of us who've gone all-digital with something to fill the Olympus Trip shaped holes in our glove boxes and overnight bags.
RIP freedom of speech (9/17/1787 - 9/11/2001). You will be sadly missed.
With the arrival of graphical ads and corporate aquisitions it seems that post-IPO Google is abandoning a few of it's old principles in the pursuit of the almighty buck. How long before "Don't be Evil" is gone too? I could kinda live with Google's pseudomonopoly on searching back when their character was spotless, but this may well be the first lurch down a slippery slope. It may just be paranoia, but I think the days of trusting Larry and Sergey are coming to an end.
It's a shame it's not a naitive app, but these days it's mattering less and less that something is browser based. Still, nice that more firms are acknowledging non-windows users, albeit in a slightly lipserviced manner.
We're a slashdot crowd. As a rule, autistics aren't so hot on odd numbers.
Even, even, gotta be even...
Why do the majority of commercial virus scanners seem to work flawlessly when kept up-to-date yet we're still at the point where you may need half a dozen anti-spyware programs to clean up an ordinary windows box? What is it about spyware that makes it seemingly so difficult to shift? Oh, and why are people even recommending routinely using antispyware when it's so much easier, cheaper and cleaner to sort out the problems at the source and just get your security to a tolerable, spyware-proof level?
Capacitance is enormously important in cables. Cheap cable frequently has high capacitance, which is absolutely killer for audio applications. A very small amount of capacitance will quickly rob you of high-frequencies. Anyone who's ever picked up a soldering iron knows the easiest way to filter out high-frequencies is to whack the signal through a small capacitor. Additionally, the quality of connection DOES matter. Cheap connectors will corrode quite quickly which will cause increased resistance but crucially capacitance across the layer of corroded crap. Lots of cheap gold-plated connectors have almost no gold on the plating; gold is sufficiently soft that much of it will wear off within a few insertions, leaving a base metal that will corrode quickly and leave you with a terrible connection. Speaker cables carry hefty currents at low voltage meaning you DO need enough cross-section of cable, otherwise you'll lose the bottom end because it's busy heating up the cable.
Good speakers have between two and eight ohms of impedance. Every extra ohm in the signal chain will sap away the transients. High-impedance cable will reduce the efficiency of the system noticably, but will affect the peaks more than the body of the signal and therefore acting as a compressor. That's not good, as it takes all the power out of percussive sounds.
Anyway, bottom line from someone who buys a heck of a lot of cable is that monster brand cables are really poor value, but it's worth spending a little more than a couple of bucks on cables - a moderately priced own-brand cable will suffice - use your eyes and look at the thickness of cable and the quality of the connectors. Avoid gold-plated connectors.
To the parent, I question your claim to be a physicist, as anyone worth their salt would know that the quality of cable is important and I also ask you this - why do pro system installers who fit audio systems to cinemas and such choose to use decent cables instead of the very cheapest? The client will never see the cable as it gets buried beneath the floor or in a conduit. The installer wants to cut every corner that doesn't harm the quality of the system. Is the vast majority of the pro installation industry deluded? No, they just know that crap cable can make an expensive system sound cheap.
Try it for yourself. Take a quality hifi separates system and try a decent, modestly priced hifi speaker cable, then the cheapest, thinnest, crappiest piece of wire you've got lying around. Do the same with a $15-$20 interconnect and one that came bundled with a mini system you bought in 1983. If you can't hear the difference, I'll personally fedex you a pack of q-tips.
Pick any random old winCE PDA from ebay, preferably one that takes standard size batteries, buy a big CF card and a wind-up or solar charger, Send them over wrapped in wadding packed in a video tape box inside a padded envelope. Customs agents will almost certainly just read the postmark from the US, feel that it's a video tape and pass it through. Unlikely to be stolen en route, and if it is, you're only down $70 or $80. You can send another half gigabyte of books for $40 if she can't get the card back to you.
I guess I'm missing something, but haven't we had stand-alone DVD recorders for quite a while now? I bought a DVD recorder functioning exactly like a VCR several months ago. - http://www.dvdrecorder.philips.com/
AC - "Huh? Nazis were on the extreme right, and rose to power in Germany as a reaction to Communism on the left." Uh, no they're not pal. Common misconception. Left and right refer to economics, not social policy. As the Nazis were National Socialists, they belong far on the left. They didn't rise as a reaction to communism, but in sympathy with it. Germany's economy was in disarray after the first war, and a strong leader who could rebuild the economy was wanted. The nazis opposed communism because they threatened the power of the Reich, not on principle.
Ypu know the rest. This is about as scary as a dust bunny.
Sorry, I assumed the 'due to drug-related causes' was implied.
There is a very obvious difference. Consentual sex between minors harms no-one but the participants. Drug use does not directly harm anyone but the user. Driving drunk may well kill others. Laws against drug use are applying public morals to a private act. Laws against drunk driving are applying public morals to a public act. There is a big difference.
Well, I would have modded you up were it not for that last line. Over in the Netherlands, the death rate amongst injecting drug users is approximately 0.05% per year. In "civilized" America, it's nearly 2%. Whether you approve of drug use or not, harm reduction is the only sensible, humane approach.
Virtually all civillian head-mounted-displays weight less than 50g, and therefore crush like a butterfly under heavy impact. I greatly doubt that a tiny LCD would compromise a helmet, and if it does, then why bother with a helmet? If it can't stand up to a tiny piece of plastic shrapnel, what chance does it stand of keeping your brains safe from hurtling steel?
Uh, I don't know what you read into the question, but no sort of laser device is required. The best solution would be a tiny helmet-mounted LCD that could be glanced up at, or a prismatic system to overlay the display onto their view of the world. A laser or ultrasound rangefinder is useless without an optical sight, but one could easily be built into the display, in a manner similar to red-dot sights on firearms.
The idea that a hud compromises situational awareness is somewhat naive. Yes, a poorly-designed system could compromise SA, but a properly thought out HUD system will have no effect on the user's ability to control a vehicle. Frequently, HUD systems vastly improve a user's abilities - modern fighter jets are unflyable without their HUDs. People are working on wearable computers as a way of improving the user's perception, like eyetap.
Because it's open source, it's compact, it runs on shitty old office PCs, and the ultimate geek motivation - because you can.