At any rate, they're apparently going to involve the holodeck for the finale....it's like one big last "Fuck You Fans".
I think it's more along the lines of them trying to do a knockoff of Babylon 5's "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" than an attempt to irritate Trek fans.
It could actually be kind of cool. I am not a fan of Enterprise pre-season 3, but this may be a good opportunity for the writers to do some integration of the continuity with that of the other series.
I bet if government ran the phone companies and telecom, we could get service for pennies on the dollar.
How old are you? AT&T used to have a government-granted monopoly on telecom service in the US, which is basically the same thing. Homeowners couldn't even add another wall jack to their house.
I know of a professional audio engineer (first name Colin, now unfortunately dead) who wired his speakers to the amp using 15 amp mains cabling. No kidding and a lovely sound he got too.
My professors at university (I was studying electronic composition at the time) used regular lamp cord soldered to regular silver 1/4" jacks for all their connections. If it's good enough for the people doing the recording, I don't see why I should spend any more for my home system.
Many games have been pushed out the door unfinished. The Legacy of Kain is a famous example, as somewhere in the middle of development they realized they weren't going to make it and cut out huge chunks of game, including the ending, several levels, powerups, etc.
In that case it was painfully obvious that they didn't finish in time, as their game constantly referred to a different number of things to do than you actually had, there were quite a few bugs, empty areas, etc.
I think you are combinining the memory of Soul Reaver with some other game. It never refers to how many different things you need to do. There is only one bug in the entire game that I'm aware of, which is related to a puzzle in Dumah's fortress late in the game, and hardly anyone sees it. There are also no areas in the game that are "empty" unintentionally.
This was made all the worse by the fact that the game was really really good, and if they had convinced their publisher to give them 6 more months for content generation they could have had a staggeringly, legendarily good game.
My understanding is that it would have taken a lot longer than six months, and they'd already delayed the game by about a year. Two of the deleted areas were more or less finished, but their basic design had compatibility issues with the game engine. The last area of the game was not anywhere near completion, AFAIK.
There were about 30 people working on that game, in a very expensive part of the country. If we assume their average salary is $50k (way on the low side), that's another $1.5 million a year to keep the project going even before property and equipment costs. As much as I wish Eidos had the faith in their products to put up that kind of money, I can see why they didn't.
Lucas's ideas are so pedestrian, so cliched, so utterly devoid of originality or creativity. The GOOD GUYS WEAR WHITE (Luke), and the BAD GUYS WEAR BLACK (Vader). (Yeah I know, the stormtroopers break the rule, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they're only white so Vader stood out on film).
I believe it's more accurate to say (as Lucas did in some interview I saw long ago) that the heroes wear colours and the villains are monochrome.
There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that the Jedi are basically hippies, wearing brown because they are in tune with nature.
Another is that he borrowed the whole idea from WWII, where the Nazi uniforms were all black and white (with red accents to look more evil. oh, hey, the Emperor's guards are red.), and the Allies tended to be wearing green and brown and whatnot.
Looking at your post history, you're not normally a dick. So maybe you just need a nap?
Or maybe s/he is just sick of every science discussion on Slashdot devolving into unoriginal attempts at humour that average about 4.3x10^-2 picoCartmans.
Okay, I'm off to the Applied Physics Lab at the UW to steal their argon-ion laser and fusion reactor so I can remote-barbecue me some tasty human flesh.
Kill, kill, kill, oh yes I will, oh yes I will.
D-pad or trigger, I don't really care - If there's humans to destroyed I will be there.
And when they lay me down to die, I hope and pray that I
Will have had a daughter to carry on my legacy of GENOCIDE AGAINST THE FILTHY LITTLE PIGGIES CALLED MANKIND!
This training is deeply ingrained so that at what is called "the moment of truth", you will not hesitate.
I'll buy this. I was playing paintball a few months ago and was surprised by a player from the other team who was walking off the field. I saw him, he didn't have his marker up, and saw he didn't have a band from my team, and without any conscious thought I shot him right in the throat.
But OTOH, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Having reflexes doesn't mean you're going to start killing random people left and right. You have to make a conscious decision to get a real weapon and use it to murder people.
I guess I see it as kind of a conflict in our culture where we praise soldiers and other people who are trained to kill, but at the same time look down on developing that training outside of an actual combat situation.
Being able to use a weapon well is a useful ability. It's what people choose to do with those abilities (and *why* they make those decisions) that we should be concerned about.
No one seems to understand the difference between correlation and causality anymore (or did they ever?).
50% of the population has an IQ of 100 or below.
There are so many stupid, unknowingly-ignorant, and easily-manipulated people in the world that it makes me want to execute a stealth kill on them, jack their car, and use it to drive to the Covenant mothership where I will lay enough waste to become the most legendary sentient-being-slaughtering machine of all time.
The tiny cameras/tiny display devices concept would require so much physical engineering, complexity of materials, and computational power (to figure out which direction to send the re-projected waves in) that I don't think it's at all realistic.
The only way I can ever see true wide-band EM camoflauge being practical is to devise some sort of field that warps the path of the waves around the object being cloaked.
The obvious disadvantage is that with such a device, the cloaked object would not be able to perceive its surroundings. You could stick wired remote sensors on it and put them outside the field, but then you'd end up with small objects that could be still detected by conventional means.
I can't remember where I got it, but it doesn't seem to be online any more. Email me if you want a copy. benlincoln at speakeasy dot net.
It's a little different than I remembered. The picture isn't from the Nuremburg rallies AFAICT, but it is a bunch of the Wehrmacht marching down a street with swastikas in the background. The text is "Because together, we can accomplish so much more."
I coat my office in posters from www.despair.com, which mock the corporate single-word-and-pretty-picture inspirational posters.
They don't have my favourite one. It says something like "Teamwork - it's amazing what we can accomplish together," and the picture is a shot of the Nuremberg rallies.
In order to rent you a DVD, the video store had to buy it. They're sharing it out among a few dozen people, but the disc is still sold and the movie company gets its inch of green (or in this case, millimeter of green, but millimeters add up.)
Also, the versions of video releases sold to rental stores have a *huge* markup. I don't have much experience with the pricing scheme, but I stumbled across a vendor selling the rental version of one of the shitty Nemesis movies for something like $75. This is a movie you can get on DVD for about $5.
I watched the first couple seasons anyway, just in case I was wrong. I wasn't. Somebody tell that shitbag Rick Berman I want those 40-odd hours of my life back.
I watched a few episodes of the first season and hated it. I just checked out the latest two from season four, though, and they're not bad. I actually like them better than most of what I saw of DS9, and nearly all of Voyager.
There weren't any solutions to problems handled by modulating the chroniton cross-field particle array, the story was interesting, and so were the characters. The theme song is still insipid, and the continuity with the original series is poor, but the writers' hearts seem to be in the right place.
It's too bad it took so many years to pull itself up out of the Berman cesspool. Really, what does he do to keep himself in charge of the franchise? Hand-deliver hookers and cocaine to the board of directors every weekend?
I don't know of any OSS systems like this, but they are *very* useful for larger companies.
A few years ago I was working in change control, and updates to software stored on network shares across the company were handled using a decrepit old VB app that generated linear xcopy scripts that updated each server (of which there were about 160 spread across the US) one by one. Most of the servers were on slow links, so distributing a 10MB file could take twelve hours or more.
I hadn't learned to code properly at that time, but we used an enterprise batch scheduler called Control-M* that worked like the original post describes. What I did was wrote a batch script that read a config file and then executed a single robocopy command targeted at the server in the Control-M job definition.
I had a whole array of these jobs, one for every target server, and they all depended on another job that would run at - for example - 11PM. So when that time rolled around, all of the dependent jobs could run. As-is, that would have overloaded the WAN and source server bandwidth. So I assigned what Control-M called a "resource" to all of the jobs. It was just an integer counter that I capped at 16. So at any given time, there were 16 "threads" of robocopy running. It ended up being between 20 and 30 times more efficient than the crappy xcopy scripts.
Anyway, they're really handy, and if there isn't an OSS project like this, it would be a great idea.
* This is not an endorsement of Control-M. In my new(er) job, I'm working as an engineer, and I discovered that the encryption system that it uses for storing account passwords in the registry is so poor that I was able to write a universal decoder for it using only vbscript and Excel. There are certainly other downsides to the app as well, although one cool thing is it runs on just about any platform - Unix, AS/400, OS/390, Windows, etc.
Really, though...the DMCA sucks, but I can't see cheat codes being a violation while game makers keep putting them in on purpose. Aren't they the ones writing code to do different things when we enter the codes in? What next, prison time for opening an easter egg in Word?
The difference here is that they appear to be filing a suit against a hacking group that modified the actual program code of their games.
This to me is an incredible abuse of the DMCA. Hacking a game is like modifying anything else you've bought. It's not like game hackers generally distribute the developer's code, just a set of instructions for modifying the code that is already sitting on other people's consoles or PCs.
IMO this is the equivalent of a car manufacturer suing the makers of nitrous oxide systems or aftermarket body kits.
I'm not even sure why they care anyway - when I had more free time, hacking games was in some ways more fun for me than actually playing them. I extended the play time of Soul Reaver to something like 500 hours because of my extensive hacking of the PC version, for example.
Where I work, everyone loves the IP phones, even though they have B&W displays. I think it's the "I am working on the set of a sci-fi film" effect. Every time I answer my phone, this HUD slides over the screen with the caller's name, number, blood type, vulnerabilities, whether or not they're associated with John Connor, etc.
One of the example apps in the SDK was one that added a file photo and LDAP information about them.
Most of these features are totally useless most of the time, but it looks cool to have one on your desk.
As far as I know, no commercially available VoIP phone uses VNC these days, which is a real pity as its a really neat way to offer easily upgradable services to the end user (forget running mobile code on the edge device, compute power is cheap these days).
Yeah, that's actually a pretty neat idea. I just modified one of my web apps at work to work with the Cisco IP phones, which are all XML-based (and not very smart about parsing certain things). Being able to set up a VNC session to a server running the original, graphic version of the app would have been a lot cooler, and easier to maintain than two versions of the app.
Slashdot Mirror
At any rate, they're apparently going to involve the holodeck for the finale....it's like one big last "Fuck You Fans".
I think it's more along the lines of them trying to do a knockoff of Babylon 5's "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" than an attempt to irritate Trek fans.
It could actually be kind of cool. I am not a fan of Enterprise pre-season 3, but this may be a good opportunity for the writers to do some integration of the continuity with that of the other series.
I bet if government ran the phone companies and telecom, we could get service for pennies on the dollar.
How old are you? AT&T used to have a government-granted monopoly on telecom service in the US, which is basically the same thing. Homeowners couldn't even add another wall jack to their house.
I know of a professional audio engineer (first name Colin, now unfortunately dead) who wired his speakers to the amp using 15 amp mains cabling. No kidding and a lovely sound he got too.
My professors at university (I was studying electronic composition at the time) used regular lamp cord soldered to regular silver 1/4" jacks for all their connections. If it's good enough for the people doing the recording, I don't see why I should spend any more for my home system.
Many games have been pushed out the door unfinished. The Legacy of Kain is a famous example, as somewhere in the middle of development they realized they weren't going to make it and cut out huge chunks of game, including the ending, several levels, powerups, etc.
Yes, you can read more about that on my website.
In that case it was painfully obvious that they didn't finish in time, as their game constantly referred to a different number of things to do than you actually had, there were quite a few bugs, empty areas, etc.
I think you are combinining the memory of Soul Reaver with some other game. It never refers to how many different things you need to do. There is only one bug in the entire game that I'm aware of, which is related to a puzzle in Dumah's fortress late in the game, and hardly anyone sees it. There are also no areas in the game that are "empty" unintentionally.
This was made all the worse by the fact that the game was really really good, and if they had convinced their publisher to give them 6 more months for content generation they could have had a staggeringly, legendarily good game.
My understanding is that it would have taken a lot longer than six months, and they'd already delayed the game by about a year. Two of the deleted areas were more or less finished, but their basic design had compatibility issues with the game engine. The last area of the game was not anywhere near completion, AFAIK.
There were about 30 people working on that game, in a very expensive part of the country. If we assume their average salary is $50k (way on the low side), that's another $1.5 million a year to keep the project going even before property and equipment costs. As much as I wish Eidos had the faith in their products to put up that kind of money, I can see why they didn't.
Lucas's ideas are so pedestrian, so cliched, so utterly devoid of originality or creativity. The GOOD GUYS WEAR WHITE (Luke), and the BAD GUYS WEAR BLACK (Vader). (Yeah I know, the stormtroopers break the rule, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they're only white so Vader stood out on film).
I believe it's more accurate to say (as Lucas did in some interview I saw long ago) that the heroes wear colours and the villains are monochrome.
There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that the Jedi are basically hippies, wearing brown because they are in tune with nature.
Another is that he borrowed the whole idea from WWII, where the Nazi uniforms were all black and white (with red accents to look more evil. oh, hey, the Emperor's guards are red.), and the Allies tended to be wearing green and brown and whatnot.
Looking at your post history, you're not normally a dick. So maybe you just need a nap?
Or maybe s/he is just sick of every science discussion on Slashdot devolving into unoriginal attempts at humour that average about 4.3x10^-2 picoCartmans.
Now if pop can do that, imagine what it does inside you! Pepsi works too.
I'm sure stomach acid would work at least as well as a toilet bowl cleaner. Imagine what *that* does inside of you. Oh, wait.
50% of the population has an IQ of 100 or below.
By the way, this is wrong.
As if to illustrate my point...
Okay, I'm off to the Applied Physics Lab at the UW to steal their argon-ion laser and fusion reactor so I can remote-barbecue me some tasty human flesh.
Kill, kill, kill, oh yes I will, oh yes I will.
D-pad or trigger, I don't really care - If there's humans to destroyed I will be there.
And when they lay me down to die, I hope and pray that I
Will have had a daughter to carry on my legacy of GENOCIDE AGAINST THE FILTHY LITTLE PIGGIES CALLED MANKIND!
This training is deeply ingrained so that at what is called "the moment of truth", you will not hesitate.
I'll buy this. I was playing paintball a few months ago and was surprised by a player from the other team who was walking off the field. I saw him, he didn't have his marker up, and saw he didn't have a band from my team, and without any conscious thought I shot him right in the throat.
But OTOH, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Having reflexes doesn't mean you're going to start killing random people left and right. You have to make a conscious decision to get a real weapon and use it to murder people.
I guess I see it as kind of a conflict in our culture where we praise soldiers and other people who are trained to kill, but at the same time look down on developing that training outside of an actual combat situation.
Being able to use a weapon well is a useful ability. It's what people choose to do with those abilities (and *why* they make those decisions) that we should be concerned about.
No one seems to understand the difference between correlation and causality anymore (or did they ever?).
50% of the population has an IQ of 100 or below.
There are so many stupid, unknowingly-ignorant, and easily-manipulated people in the world that it makes me want to execute a stealth kill on them, jack their car, and use it to drive to the Covenant mothership where I will lay enough waste to become the most legendary sentient-being-slaughtering machine of all time.
The tiny cameras/tiny display devices concept would require so much physical engineering, complexity of materials, and computational power (to figure out which direction to send the re-projected waves in) that I don't think it's at all realistic.
The only way I can ever see true wide-band EM camoflauge being practical is to devise some sort of field that warps the path of the waves around the object being cloaked.
The obvious disadvantage is that with such a device, the cloaked object would not be able to perceive its surroundings. You could stick wired remote sensors on it and put them outside the field, but then you'd end up with small objects that could be still detected by conventional means.
...or they could be a Type III civilization, capturing the energy output of that entire galaxy with one giant device.
I can't remember where I got it, but it doesn't seem to be online any more. Email me if you want a copy. benlincoln at speakeasy dot net.
It's a little different than I remembered. The picture isn't from the Nuremburg rallies AFAICT, but it is a bunch of the Wehrmacht marching down a street with swastikas in the background. The text is "Because together, we can accomplish so much more."
...this would have on the Earth at close range, courtesy a really smart guy who posted on POE News.
I coat my office in posters from www.despair.com, which mock the corporate single-word-and-pretty-picture inspirational posters.
They don't have my favourite one. It says something like "Teamwork - it's amazing what we can accomplish together," and the picture is a shot of the Nuremberg rallies.
In order to rent you a DVD, the video store had to buy it. They're sharing it out among a few dozen people, but the disc is still sold and the movie company gets its inch of green (or in this case, millimeter of green, but millimeters add up.)
Also, the versions of video releases sold to rental stores have a *huge* markup. I don't have much experience with the pricing scheme, but I stumbled across a vendor selling the rental version of one of the shitty Nemesis movies for something like $75. This is a movie you can get on DVD for about $5.
I watched the first couple seasons anyway, just in case I was wrong. I wasn't. Somebody tell that shitbag Rick Berman I want those 40-odd hours of my life back.
I watched a few episodes of the first season and hated it. I just checked out the latest two from season four, though, and they're not bad. I actually like them better than most of what I saw of DS9, and nearly all of Voyager.
There weren't any solutions to problems handled by modulating the chroniton cross-field particle array, the story was interesting, and so were the characters. The theme song is still insipid, and the continuity with the original series is poor, but the writers' hearts seem to be in the right place.
It's too bad it took so many years to pull itself up out of the Berman cesspool. Really, what does he do to keep himself in charge of the franchise? Hand-deliver hookers and cocaine to the board of directors every weekend?
And you just adimtted to the world that you violated the DMCA.
It was for security testing purposes. I submitted my findings to the vendor, who didn't act on them to my knowledge.
I don't know of any OSS systems like this, but they are *very* useful for larger companies.
A few years ago I was working in change control, and updates to software stored on network shares across the company were handled using a decrepit old VB app that generated linear xcopy scripts that updated each server (of which there were about 160 spread across the US) one by one. Most of the servers were on slow links, so distributing a 10MB file could take twelve hours or more.
I hadn't learned to code properly at that time, but we used an enterprise batch scheduler called Control-M* that worked like the original post describes. What I did was wrote a batch script that read a config file and then executed a single robocopy command targeted at the server in the Control-M job definition.
I had a whole array of these jobs, one for every target server, and they all depended on another job that would run at - for example - 11PM. So when that time rolled around, all of the dependent jobs could run. As-is, that would have overloaded the WAN and source server bandwidth. So I assigned what Control-M called a "resource" to all of the jobs. It was just an integer counter that I capped at 16. So at any given time, there were 16 "threads" of robocopy running. It ended up being between 20 and 30 times more efficient than the crappy xcopy scripts.
Anyway, they're really handy, and if there isn't an OSS project like this, it would be a great idea.
* This is not an endorsement of Control-M. In my new(er) job, I'm working as an engineer, and I discovered that the encryption system that it uses for storing account passwords in the registry is so poor that I was able to write a universal decoder for it using only vbscript and Excel. There are certainly other downsides to the app as well, although one cool thing is it runs on just about any platform - Unix, AS/400, OS/390, Windows, etc.
So, are you saying you should be allowed to cut off your catalytic converters and drive around polluting?
Yes, because opponents of total law enforcement are always supporters of total anarchy.
Try playing CS and see if you feel the same way.
I don't play online games. Part of the reason is the large amount of cheating that goes on in them.
What I mean when I talk about hacking games are things like what I did to Soul Reaver, Soul Reaver 2, Blood Omen 2, and Defiance, and what my friend Andrew did to Defiance, and what groups like The GFCC do.
Really, though...the DMCA sucks, but I can't see cheat codes being a violation while game makers keep putting them in on purpose. Aren't they the ones writing code to do different things when we enter the codes in? What next, prison time for opening an easter egg in Word?
The difference here is that they appear to be filing a suit against a hacking group that modified the actual program code of their games.
This to me is an incredible abuse of the DMCA. Hacking a game is like modifying anything else you've bought. It's not like game hackers generally distribute the developer's code, just a set of instructions for modifying the code that is already sitting on other people's consoles or PCs.
IMO this is the equivalent of a car manufacturer suing the makers of nitrous oxide systems or aftermarket body kits.
I'm not even sure why they care anyway - when I had more free time, hacking games was in some ways more fun for me than actually playing them. I extended the play time of Soul Reaver to something like 500 hours because of my extensive hacking of the PC version, for example.
I have bookoo Pentium 133's laying around.
Beaucoup.
- From your friends in the Rechtschreibungmacht
Where I work, everyone loves the IP phones, even though they have B&W displays. I think it's the "I am working on the set of a sci-fi film" effect. Every time I answer my phone, this HUD slides over the screen with the caller's name, number, blood type, vulnerabilities, whether or not they're associated with John Connor, etc.
One of the example apps in the SDK was one that added a file photo and LDAP information about them.
Most of these features are totally useless most of the time, but it looks cool to have one on your desk.
As far as I know, no commercially available VoIP phone uses VNC these days, which is a real pity as its a really neat way to offer easily upgradable services to the end user (forget running mobile code on the edge device, compute power is cheap these days).
Yeah, that's actually a pretty neat idea. I just modified one of my web apps at work to work with the Cisco IP phones, which are all XML-based (and not very smart about parsing certain things). Being able to set up a VNC session to a server running the original, graphic version of the app would have been a lot cooler, and easier to maintain than two versions of the app.