When was the last time you could turn 'color' off in a game?
You mean like how televisions allow the viewer to reduce or remove the amount of color on-screen, whether the viewer is watching traditional programming or a videogame? Or like how during the transition from greyscale to colour broadcasting, it was important for most stations to make sure their content was useful to people with both types of television?
3D is a gimmic, and the fact they offer you the ability to turn it off WHILE playing means it's not required to immerse you in the gameplay.
3D isn't for everyone, at least in its current incarnation. That doesn't necessarily make it a gimmick. Is surround sound a gimmick just because it's not actually required in order to appreciate most films and games?
The developers in this case are smart enough to realize that not everyone who plays their game is going to have a 3D display. Therefore they have to make the game playable in 2D. Making a big-budget game that *required* 3D today would be commercial suicide.
I don't have a 3D TV, and I probably won't for quite awhile. But I do think it's an interesting technology.
...just make it work more or less like a real-world "red dot" gunsight: a translucent marker that appears to hover a few feet in front of the weapon, as long as the user is looking through the sight. I always thought it was a really clever optical design - it's as if (for aiming purposes) the weapon is a couple of meters long, which makes it much easier to determine where the shots are going to go.
Wait... I thought registering to vote determined one's eligibility to serve on a jury. Not registered to vote? No jury duty.
I'm reasonably sure it depends on where you are. In King County, Washington (where I live), the courts will find you by a variety of means, regardless of whether you're registered to vote or not.
They exist so that a driver doesn't have to start slowing down for the turn until after going into the turning lane, eliminating the need to slow down all of the traffic behind them just to make a turn.
Most of the lanes I know of like that are shared between both directions of traffic. Not slowing down before moving into them sounds like a good way to end up in a head-on collision at high speed.
I've heard comments like this before (including from representatives of cities where recycling is required). Why are materials other than paper not handled along these lines:
- Shred/chop/smash the material. - Run the small pieces through a rinse to take care of e.g. unrinsed bottles. - Vibrate or centrifuge the material so the it's sorted by mass. - Skim off the different types of plastic (or metal, etc.) in layers.
? I'm no expert, but I would think that sorting by mass would be a pretty accurate way of separating the types of raw material. Isn't that more or less how junkyards handle metal recycling of old cars?
I have to throw trash down the chute into a central container for my entire apt complex and I know a lot of places here have that mechanism. How are they going to figure out then whose trash is it?
Here in Seattle, the city uses collective punishment. If an apartment complex's waste bins are found in violation of the recyclable materials limits, the owner of the building is fined, and passes it on to all the tenants in the form of increased rent costs.
Is it possible to pay more and be allocated more than one bin to use? If not, how are residents who generate a higher-than-average amount of garbage supposed to ever get all of it taken away?
I grew up in a rural area, with a publicly-accessible landfill. Right now I live in a city, and the closest publicly-accessible waste transfer station is about ten miles away. I'm not sure how the city expects anyone to drop off their waste if it's more than can fit in the bins, especially with their pipe-dream "urban village" (AKA "we'll make it as difficult as possible to drive anywhere, enjoy taking 300% longer to get to your destination because we'll also refuse to provide useful public transportation") mentality.
You look at the keyboard, you press a button. Something changes on the screen, you look at the screen. Then you look at the buttons again. Then you press another button. Then you look at the screen again... It's horrible UI design, not to mention ergonomics.
Meanwhile, back in the traditional keyboard world, when someone is learning a new application, they look at the manual, then look at the keyboard, and press a button. Something changes on the screen, and they look at the manual, then the screen, then the manual, then the keyboard, and press another button.
A reconfigurable keyboard cuts out the middleman of the documentation when learning a new application. It's not for people who already know every keyboard shortcut in every application they use.
Explain to me how this is gonna make my Vi editor sessions more productive, and I'll be ready to listen.
It probably wouldn't make your vi sessions more productive, but it might make vi accessible enough for people like me to use it. I hate vi and emacs and have for literally decades because their UI is intentionally non-accessible. I shouldn't need a printout with instructions to use a text editor. That's why I've always used pico/nano on Unix and Linux.
If Obama "picks his battles", then he must be one of the most particular people in existence, because he doesn't seem to have chosen any that he's actually willing to fight. He gives great speeches, but as soon as the going gets tough, he either abandons the goal entirely or lets it become watered down to the point that it's meaningless.
I still prefer him over the crazed McCain that emerged from the radical Right's illicit bio-warfare laboratory, but I think if the other option had been McCain before he had his mind reprogrammed, that probably would have worked out better.
I believe that there are patents around the randomising idea.
There are active patents on randomizing the order of digits on a numeric keypad-based lock? Point of No Return had a shot with a randomized-order touch-screen lock in 1993, and I'd be a bit surprised if the idea was invented by the prop department for that film.
The PADD was hardly a computer at all, sort of just a dumb device, all of whose wizardry was possible by and controlled from the starships computer core.
Is that indicated somewhere official? I haven't seen them described that way on-screen, although I still have about 20 episodes of Voyager and most of Enterprise to go.
If the PADDs were just dumb terminals, then it makes even less sense that crewmembers would physically hand them to each other.
There's a basic Tricorder app in the Android market (it's even got an LCARS-style UI, which has its pros and cons). It's obviously a far cry from the Star Trek props, but it does have some cool data acquisition and graphing features. For example, it can use the electronic compass in the device as a magnetometer, letting you graph the relative field strength as you move around a room. It also lets you view the raw coordinates from the GPS and cell positioning systems, view a spectrogram of sound captured via the microphone, etc.
I'm not even convinced they originated the idea on Star Trek. I don't have a copy to hand to check, but I vaguely recall Arthur C. Clark writing something about Heywood Floyd reading a newspaper on an electronic tablet like device while en route to the moon in "2001: A Space Odyssey", which was published in 1968.
It's been awhile since I read the book, but in the film, it seems to be a reading device, not a general-purpose tablet computer. IE its interaction appears limited to the equivalent of flipping through a newspaper, as opposed to running applications.
On the topic of the PADD, I've been making my way through the various Star Trek series, and one of the things that's really struck me is how even though the Federation has access to advanced computing power and networking technology, crew members still physically hand each other PADDs to transfer information. In some cases, they'll end up with piles of PADDs on their desks if they're studying a particular topic in depth.
At first I thought that this was something along the lines of how William Gibson didn't think to include cellphones in Neuromancer, because essentially everyone was still using payphones back then. But after more reflection, maybe the Star Trek staff were just more forward-thinking and assumed some sort of draconian DRM scheme that locks data to a particular physical device:).
Isn't it a little disingenuous to compare a Prius to a bottom-of-the-barrel car like the Ford Fiesta? Why not compare apples to apples, like a Prius to a Honda Civic/Ford Focus, or a Ford Fusion to a Honda Accord?
I remember cliffyb saying last year that the average salary for a programmer on a game-team was somewhere around 40-60k/yr. I'd say in the programming industry that's probably a pretty standard salary across the board.
If you're complaining about a salary of 150k/year as a programmer, you need to check yourself. That's a highly unusual salary for any programmer and I kinda doubt that positions like that are going to last in the long term.
I think it really depends on where you're located. In a major US city, $40K-$60K/year for a game developer would be insulting, because game developers are highly-specialized and work ludicrous hours (like virtually everyone in the games industry). I don't think someone could even afford their own apartment (as opposed to sharing one) - let alone buying a home - with that salary in San Francisco, and I know they couldn't in New York City.
Meanwhile, here in Seattle (not the most or least expensive major city), I know a guy who made something like $120K/year managing software deployments to a bank's ATMs, and continues to make approximately that much as a DBA for an independent SaaS provider.
We wrote BASIC programs, played ZORK, and labouriously keyed in source code printed in the likes of "Creative Computing." Today, none of us are blind.
While this is true, the text back in those days was pretty barebones. I couldn't find a screenshot of what the TV output looks like from this device. Is it that same sort of old-school no-frills monospaced font with 40 (or 80 at most) characters per line? Or is it an attempt to shoehorn something with more modern formatting onto a TV via composite signal? I set up a Linux PC as a classic game emulator a year ago, and via composite I had to make the font *much* larger than on my old Apple IIe for it to be readable on a TV connected via composite. I think it was something like 25-30 characters per line. With S-Video it was better, but I would only assume that maybe 10-25% more characters could be squeezed onto each line.
Now wouldn't this effectively get around the grandfather clause, since you have basically created a closed loop? Because unless I missed something you could alter the past while giving your future self the knowledge of what you have done, thus allowing him to do the same and closing the loop.
I'm no expert, but the idea that the universe is a sort of cosmic small claims court judge who will grudgingly let you off the hook for your liabilities if you ticked all the right boxes on form TT-8710 seems... far-fetched to me.
The concept of a paradox is entirely a human concept - in other words, it's in the eye of the observer.
Everything we know about the universe implies that there are physical laws of some kind regarding causality. Don't you think that it's prudent to assume those rules exist, unless someone can come up with a repeatable experiment that demonstrates otherwise? It's certainly an interesting line of research, but if you toss all the basic rules out the window just because it's conceivable they may not actually be 100% accurate, it's almost impossible to make any progress.
But often this definition is too strict, and "FTL" proponents would be happy with arriving someone else faster than it would take light to travel that same journey, without getting caught up in the details of whether you were actually travelling faster than light at any point. There are various possible loopholes - teleportation, moving space itself, using a "hyperspace" to travel in, and so on.
Assuming that the theory of relativity is more or less accurate (specifically regarding the ability of observers moving at relativistic speeds to end up with perceptions of "simultaneous" that are literally different (as opposed to only appearing different due to light-speed lag)), there does not seem to be a way to get around the speed of light without introducing the ability to violate causality. So (again, assuming the theory is essentially correct), either you believe that the past cannot be altered (and therefore no information or objects can move faster than light), or you believe that FTL travel/communication is possible, but as part of the bargain accept that it's also possible to send messages and/or objects backwards in time (e.g. I can send today's winning lottery numbers to myself yesterday). This definitely applies to teleportation. I have to imagine it applies to the use of wormholes as well, since the mechanism doesn't actually seem to matter. If information can get from one point in the universe to another faster than it would get there traveling at lightspeed, causality is broken or relativity is wrong in some way. I would love to see FTL technology, but to me Occam's Razor says that if it were possible to send information into the past, the galaxy (or even the universe) would be overrun with an advanced race that had repeatedly used that ability to obtain the best possible technology in essentially zero time.
then you can imagine that electrons are like tiny planets with people living on them.
When was the last time you saw a planet with a probability cloud for its position instead of a deterministic orbit? Because that would be a pretty awesome photo, and I'd like to see it:).
It hasn't come within 5 AU of the hype from back when it was first proposed.
Wasn't most of the "hype" at the beginning of the Shuttle programme based on the assumption that the fleet was going to be much larger and launches much more frequent? If there were 10 or 20 shuttles in rotation, a multi-month turnaround time wouldn't really be an issue.
I visited the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers earlier this month, and both of them have full-size mockups of the Shuttle on display. The scale of that vehicle is impressive in person. I can't really say I'm disappointed that it's limited to LEO. The orbiter is, what, 10 times the size/mass of the entire Apollo system that sat on top of a Saturn V? Can you imagine the sort of launch stack it would take to get it beyond LEO?
Also, if the design was such a failure, why is the Air Force looking to replicate basically the same thing (except automated) in the wake of the programme cancellation combined with the (at least near-term) void in terms of US launch capability?
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you could turn 'color' off in a game?
You mean like how televisions allow the viewer to reduce or remove the amount of color on-screen, whether the viewer is watching traditional programming or a videogame? Or like how during the transition from greyscale to colour broadcasting, it was important for most stations to make sure their content was useful to people with both types of television?
3D is a gimmic, and the fact they offer you the ability to turn it off WHILE playing means it's not required to immerse you in the gameplay.
3D isn't for everyone, at least in its current incarnation. That doesn't necessarily make it a gimmick. Is surround sound a gimmick just because it's not actually required in order to appreciate most films and games?
The developers in this case are smart enough to realize that not everyone who plays their game is going to have a 3D display. Therefore they have to make the game playable in 2D. Making a big-budget game that *required* 3D today would be commercial suicide.
I don't have a 3D TV, and I probably won't for quite awhile. But I do think it's an interesting technology.
...just make it work more or less like a real-world "red dot" gunsight: a translucent marker that appears to hover a few feet in front of the weapon, as long as the user is looking through the sight. I always thought it was a really clever optical design - it's as if (for aiming purposes) the weapon is a couple of meters long, which makes it much easier to determine where the shots are going to go.
Wait ... I thought registering to vote determined one's eligibility to serve on a jury. Not registered to vote? No jury duty.
I'm reasonably sure it depends on where you are. In King County, Washington (where I live), the courts will find you by a variety of means, regardless of whether you're registered to vote or not.
They exist so that a driver doesn't have to start slowing down for the turn until after going into the turning lane, eliminating the need to slow down all of the traffic behind them just to make a turn.
Most of the lanes I know of like that are shared between both directions of traffic. Not slowing down before moving into them sounds like a good way to end up in a head-on collision at high speed.
I've heard comments like this before (including from representatives of cities where recycling is required). Why are materials other than paper not handled along these lines:
- Shred/chop/smash the material.
- Run the small pieces through a rinse to take care of e.g. unrinsed bottles.
- Vibrate or centrifuge the material so the it's sorted by mass.
- Skim off the different types of plastic (or metal, etc.) in layers.
? I'm no expert, but I would think that sorting by mass would be a pretty accurate way of separating the types of raw material. Isn't that more or less how junkyards handle metal recycling of old cars?
I have to throw trash down the chute into a central container for my entire apt complex and I know a lot of places here have that mechanism. How are they going to figure out then whose trash is it?
Here in Seattle, the city uses collective punishment. If an apartment complex's waste bins are found in violation of the recyclable materials limits, the owner of the building is fined, and passes it on to all the tenants in the form of increased rent costs.
Is it possible to pay more and be allocated more than one bin to use? If not, how are residents who generate a higher-than-average amount of garbage supposed to ever get all of it taken away?
I grew up in a rural area, with a publicly-accessible landfill. Right now I live in a city, and the closest publicly-accessible waste transfer station is about ten miles away. I'm not sure how the city expects anyone to drop off their waste if it's more than can fit in the bins, especially with their pipe-dream "urban village" (AKA "we'll make it as difficult as possible to drive anywhere, enjoy taking 300% longer to get to your destination because we'll also refuse to provide useful public transportation") mentality.
First, they are static.
That's a limitation of the way most holograms have been produced, not a limitation of holography in general.
Secondly, they are not color. This is due to the nature of laser light. It is monochromatic.
So use three of them, like the people who have built colour vector display projectors using red, green, and blue lasers.
There is no holographic output device, like a monitor, on which to show holograms.
That's only because no one has come up with a mass-market device of that type. It's certainly possible to do. I feel like a broken record posting a link to the MIT Media Lab's historical page on the topic, but there it is again.
You look at the keyboard, you press a button. Something changes on the screen, you look at the screen. Then you look at the buttons again. Then you press another button. Then you look at the screen again... It's horrible UI design, not to mention ergonomics.
Meanwhile, back in the traditional keyboard world, when someone is learning a new application, they look at the manual, then look at the keyboard, and press a button. Something changes on the screen, and they look at the manual, then the screen, then the manual, then the keyboard, and press another button.
A reconfigurable keyboard cuts out the middleman of the documentation when learning a new application. It's not for people who already know every keyboard shortcut in every application they use.
Explain to me how this is gonna make my Vi editor sessions more productive, and I'll be ready to listen.
It probably wouldn't make your vi sessions more productive, but it might make vi accessible enough for people like me to use it. I hate vi and emacs and have for literally decades because their UI is intentionally non-accessible. I shouldn't need a printout with instructions to use a text editor. That's why I've always used pico/nano on Unix and Linux.
My Motorola Cliq (which I really like) seems to be forever stuck at 1.5 (thanks T-Mobile).
As far as I know, it's not T-Mobile's fault. It's Google's for refusing to support hardware that's more than a week old.
he picks his battles
If Obama "picks his battles", then he must be one of the most particular people in existence, because he doesn't seem to have chosen any that he's actually willing to fight. He gives great speeches, but as soon as the going gets tough, he either abandons the goal entirely or lets it become watered down to the point that it's meaningless.
I still prefer him over the crazed McCain that emerged from the radical Right's illicit bio-warfare laboratory, but I think if the other option had been McCain before he had his mind reprogrammed, that probably would have worked out better.
I believe that there are patents around the randomising idea.
There are active patents on randomizing the order of digits on a numeric keypad-based lock? Point of No Return had a shot with a randomized-order touch-screen lock in 1993, and I'd be a bit surprised if the idea was invented by the prop department for that film.
The PADD was hardly a computer at all, sort of just a dumb device, all of whose wizardry was possible by and controlled from the starships computer core.
Is that indicated somewhere official? I haven't seen them described that way on-screen, although I still have about 20 episodes of Voyager and most of Enterprise to go.
If the PADDs were just dumb terminals, then it makes even less sense that crewmembers would physically hand them to each other.
There's a basic Tricorder app in the Android market (it's even got an LCARS-style UI, which has its pros and cons). It's obviously a far cry from the Star Trek props, but it does have some cool data acquisition and graphing features. For example, it can use the electronic compass in the device as a magnetometer, letting you graph the relative field strength as you move around a room. It also lets you view the raw coordinates from the GPS and cell positioning systems, view a spectrogram of sound captured via the microphone, etc.
I'm not even convinced they originated the idea on Star Trek. I don't have a copy to hand to check, but I vaguely recall Arthur C. Clark writing something about Heywood Floyd reading a newspaper on an electronic tablet like device while en route to the moon in "2001: A Space Odyssey", which was published in 1968.
It's been awhile since I read the book, but in the film, it seems to be a reading device, not a general-purpose tablet computer. IE its interaction appears limited to the equivalent of flipping through a newspaper, as opposed to running applications.
On the topic of the PADD, I've been making my way through the various Star Trek series, and one of the things that's really struck me is how even though the Federation has access to advanced computing power and networking technology, crew members still physically hand each other PADDs to transfer information. In some cases, they'll end up with piles of PADDs on their desks if they're studying a particular topic in depth.
At first I thought that this was something along the lines of how William Gibson didn't think to include cellphones in Neuromancer, because essentially everyone was still using payphones back then. But after more reflection, maybe the Star Trek staff were just more forward-thinking and assumed some sort of draconian DRM scheme that locks data to a particular physical device :).
After all, the resistors they used didn't have any markers on them, doesn't that qualify as some sort of a DRM scheme?
Is it a DMCA violation if the "DRM" is actually "analogue rights management" and the "circumvention technology" has no digital components?
Isn't it a little disingenuous to compare a Prius to a bottom-of-the-barrel car like the Ford Fiesta? Why not compare apples to apples, like a Prius to a Honda Civic/Ford Focus, or a Ford Fusion to a Honda Accord?
I remember cliffyb saying last year that the average salary for a programmer on a game-team was somewhere around 40-60k/yr. I'd say in the programming industry that's probably a pretty standard salary across the board.
If you're complaining about a salary of 150k/year as a programmer, you need to check yourself. That's a highly unusual salary for any programmer and I kinda doubt that positions like that are going to last in the long term.
I think it really depends on where you're located. In a major US city, $40K-$60K/year for a game developer would be insulting, because game developers are highly-specialized and work ludicrous hours (like virtually everyone in the games industry). I don't think someone could even afford their own apartment (as opposed to sharing one) - let alone buying a home - with that salary in San Francisco, and I know they couldn't in New York City.
Meanwhile, here in Seattle (not the most or least expensive major city), I know a guy who made something like $120K/year managing software deployments to a bank's ATMs, and continues to make approximately that much as a DBA for an independent SaaS provider.
We wrote BASIC programs, played ZORK, and labouriously keyed in source code printed in the likes of "Creative Computing." Today, none of us are blind.
While this is true, the text back in those days was pretty barebones. I couldn't find a screenshot of what the TV output looks like from this device. Is it that same sort of old-school no-frills monospaced font with 40 (or 80 at most) characters per line? Or is it an attempt to shoehorn something with more modern formatting onto a TV via composite signal? I set up a Linux PC as a classic game emulator a year ago, and via composite I had to make the font *much* larger than on my old Apple IIe for it to be readable on a TV connected via composite. I think it was something like 25-30 characters per line. With S-Video it was better, but I would only assume that maybe 10-25% more characters could be squeezed onto each line.
Now wouldn't this effectively get around the grandfather clause, since you have basically created a closed loop? Because unless I missed something you could alter the past while giving your future self the knowledge of what you have done, thus allowing him to do the same and closing the loop.
I'm no expert, but the idea that the universe is a sort of cosmic small claims court judge who will grudgingly let you off the hook for your liabilities if you ticked all the right boxes on form TT-8710 seems... far-fetched to me.
The concept of a paradox is entirely a human concept - in other words, it's in the eye of the observer.
Everything we know about the universe implies that there are physical laws of some kind regarding causality. Don't you think that it's prudent to assume those rules exist, unless someone can come up with a repeatable experiment that demonstrates otherwise? It's certainly an interesting line of research, but if you toss all the basic rules out the window just because it's conceivable they may not actually be 100% accurate, it's almost impossible to make any progress.
But often this definition is too strict, and "FTL" proponents would be happy with arriving someone else faster than it would take light to travel that same journey, without getting caught up in the details of whether you were actually travelling faster than light at any point. There are various possible loopholes - teleportation, moving space itself, using a "hyperspace" to travel in, and so on.
Assuming that the theory of relativity is more or less accurate (specifically regarding the ability of observers moving at relativistic speeds to end up with perceptions of "simultaneous" that are literally different (as opposed to only appearing different due to light-speed lag)), there does not seem to be a way to get around the speed of light without introducing the ability to violate causality. So (again, assuming the theory is essentially correct), either you believe that the past cannot be altered (and therefore no information or objects can move faster than light), or you believe that FTL travel/communication is possible, but as part of the bargain accept that it's also possible to send messages and/or objects backwards in time (e.g. I can send today's winning lottery numbers to myself yesterday).
This definitely applies to teleportation. I have to imagine it applies to the use of wormholes as well, since the mechanism doesn't actually seem to matter. If information can get from one point in the universe to another faster than it would get there traveling at lightspeed, causality is broken or relativity is wrong in some way.
I would love to see FTL technology, but to me Occam's Razor says that if it were possible to send information into the past, the galaxy (or even the universe) would be overrun with an advanced race that had repeatedly used that ability to obtain the best possible technology in essentially zero time.
then you can imagine that electrons are like tiny planets with people living on them.
When was the last time you saw a planet with a probability cloud for its position instead of a deterministic orbit? Because that would be a pretty awesome photo, and I'd like to see it :).
It hasn't come within 5 AU of the hype from back when it was first proposed.
Wasn't most of the "hype" at the beginning of the Shuttle programme based on the assumption that the fleet was going to be much larger and launches much more frequent? If there were 10 or 20 shuttles in rotation, a multi-month turnaround time wouldn't really be an issue.
I visited the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers earlier this month, and both of them have full-size mockups of the Shuttle on display. The scale of that vehicle is impressive in person. I can't really say I'm disappointed that it's limited to LEO. The orbiter is, what, 10 times the size/mass of the entire Apollo system that sat on top of a Saturn V? Can you imagine the sort of launch stack it would take to get it beyond LEO?
Also, if the design was such a failure, why is the Air Force looking to replicate basically the same thing (except automated) in the wake of the programme cancellation combined with the (at least near-term) void in terms of US launch capability?