It kind of sounds interesting in theory, but I see two big issues. One is of course price, its way more expensive then just a laser printer and regular paper for a start. The other issue is simply user behavior, can you really train your users to behave well enough that a sheet survives anywhere near 1000 prints? Even 100 reprints sounds like a stretch, yet it is not enough to make it cheaper then paper. There are also use cases where its not clear how to handle them. What is if you want to mark something? What is when you want to bundle multiple pages? You can't just staple them. And so on.
An eBook reader sounds like a much better and cheaper alternative.
The annoying part about the movie is the "blue light == nice robot" and "red light == evil robot", thats a rather stupid way to get a point across to the audience and heavily violates the books. That aside the main problem with the movie is simply the name. It didn't start out as an adoption of "I, Robot", that name and a few scenes and concepts got retrofitted into a completly different story later on, so of course fans of the book won't be all that happy with it.
Ignore the name and you end up with what is a pretty decent Sci-Fi movie, that actually scratches some interesting topics along the way. The ending still feels rather simplistic and primitive, so it is by no means a perfect movie, but a good bit better then many other movies that call themselves "Sci-Fi".
The intro video doesn't say if it is possible to click multiple times on a Flattr button or pay larger chunks of "money", which would be needed if the scheme should be fair (blog post typed in a few minutes has a different value then a game that might have taken month or years to create).
Other then that, the scheme sounds quite good, as it is based around a flat fee, so you don't risk going bankrupt by clicking a few to many buttons and it also reduces the mental overhead that a normal payment would create.
After all, it's not like the pictures somehow snuck onto the interwebs without the users knowledge,
The photo didn't, but the info did. Normally your name or at least your address is something you keep away from random strangers on the Internet, but if you post a photo with EXIF data you open that up to everybody. You also link your real name to your pseudonym or in turn allow others to connect different pseudonyms that you might have wanted to keep seperate. If you post photos regularly they can also reconstruct what you are doing all day and especially when. And of course cropping the picture might not actually crop the thumbnail in the EXIF data.
EXIF data also as plenty of legitimate use, that doesn't stop it from being pretty open to abuse.
The trouble is that creating something fun, isn't always fun. Money is a good incentive to walk the last mile to add that extra polish which turns a neat idea into an actually good game.
Nothing stops you from just using old hardware, there are tons of old PCs still floating around, so it shouldn't be to hard to find one. If you want to use your modern hardware, use DOSBox. Sure, getting the proper original game play experience back can be a little troublesome at times, but there is a big difference between something requiring a little bit of work and something being flat out impossible thanks to DRM or centralized servers.
The biggest practical issue I had with getting 15 year old PC stuff to run was that many games of that time no longer used DOS, but Windows with its early incarnations of DirectX, which meant that they won't run in DOSbox and neither on a modern Windows. Getting Windows98 along with the drivers installed was a little troublesome, but still doable, getting the drivers was actually the biggest problem, as many vendors (especially Creative) just don't offer them anymore, so you better have a backup.
Fretting about not being able to play a 15-year-old game just seems silly to me.
We aren't taking about 15 year old games, we are talking about 5 year old games, some of which you might have bought yesterday as Xbox Classic on your Xbox360.
Well, how long do you honestly expect them to support it? 20 years?
Till they go bankrupt and after that I expect the server binaries to be released.
I mean we are speaking about Microsoft here, not some small Indie developer where every penny counts. It shouldn't be to hard for them to just let their server stuff run in a VM on some spare hardware.
And by the way, 8.5 years was the time when the Xbox was released, but they are selling multiplayer Xbox1 games, via XboxLive on the Xbox360 *right now*. Its not like the service has been completly forgotten and is only used by three people in the whole world.
You need a third party that makes you familiar with the author in the first place, as you are not going to browse through thousands of blogs till you find something interesting. This is the sole reason why iTunes/iPod and Kindle are so popular and bands selling MP3/PDFs on their private webpages is problematic, as they simply are harder to find that way and a lot more work is involved in getting the MP3/PDFs.
The article states that he communicates through a keyboard device in his right hand (perhaps like Stephen Hawking's), not by "facillitated communication".
FC refers to somebody else grabbing the patient hand and then moving it over the keyboard and that is exactly what was happening in this case, he didn't even look at the keyboard and the speed of input would even be troublesome for somebody who isn't in a comma. He did at much typing as keyboard cat did play music.
Depends, if they can clearly distinguish between "Yes", "No" and "Patient didn't respond", their rate of success might be ok. On the other side if they just did go with "Yes" and "No" it indeed looks like random chance. After all we got the thinking dead salmon, so there is quite a bit of wiggle room in fMRI.
In the end the only real proof would be if they could actually get real communication going, not just six questions, which really seems a little low. So lets wait and see for further studies before jumping to conclusions.
Why should it matter if browsers are multi-threaded?
With Flash, Javascript and dynamic AJAX webpages its easy to have the browser actually burn some serious CPU. Even worse is that it actually can get quite unresponsive while doing so. Having a proper multithreaded browser would mean that plugins and tabs would all run in separate threads and the whole thing could become a lot more responsive.
There's a lot going on in a modern system: $ ps -ef | wc -l 146
Those are just idling process, actual CPU activity is extremely low. It doesn't really make a difference if you have 1 idle threads or 100, you don't need CPU power for those either way and multicore doesn't make idling faster. The processes that actually use CPU power on the other side are seldom broken up into multiple threads, so you quite frequently see your system at 50% usage on a multicore, with the second processor idling along.
Can most programmes really be written to take advantage of so many cores?
No, for most programs that would be quite complicated, however most programs idle around all the time anyway, so that wouldn't be an big issue. Those programs that actually burn CPU (video de/encoding, Photoshop/Gimp filters, etc.) on the other side could for most part easily be parallelized. The issue of course is that basically all program languages we have in use make parallelization hard, so nobody is doing it unless they specifically optimize their stuff for multi-core, which in turn means that most programs in actual use today can't take advantage of multicore.
The fascinating part is that the parents themselves fell for it. I can understand how the ideomotor effect makes a simple pendulum swing, but I have a hard time grasping how it works that people actually write meaningful things that way without noticing it.
James Randi has written a comment about the Belgium case, also links to a video clearly showing how its obviously fake.
Science isn't about debating, its about evidence and data. And the evidence that vaccines cause autism just isn't there, on the other side there is plenty of evidence that vaccines are extremely beneficial and that the current vaccination scare actually kills people.
Great idea, lets just ignore science and go with our good old preconceived notion and waste efforts on solution that do not work because they are simple and make us feel good. The fact that you don't like the outcome of the study doesn't make it wrong.
This isn't denying freedom: it's protecting freedom by preventing manipulation.
Thats quite frankly complete and utter bullshit. If you deny the anonymity, you basically deny the right to speak against those that are in power, as you open yourself up for direct attack and might likely be shut down if you get a little to annoying.
Manipulation is a non-issue, it doesn't matter much if person says something or a 1000 sock puppets, the ideas are out there either way. If the ideas are fundamentally wrong, debunk them and don't throw out the freedom of speech.
Which other game is there that comes even close to matching the amount of open exploration and deep story along with good gun play that Mass Effect has to offer? Mass Effect is pretty unique in what it does.
Also the side quests wheren't half bad, it was actually quite a bit of fun and gave the game a good feel of openness and freedom, missing in most other games.
They had reasons to come along with you, sure, but they didn't have much effect on the plot after they joined.
In ME2 its basically the same, even worse actually, as the plot follows a very strict structure of having a "find squad member"-mission and then a "do something for squad member"-mission" repeated 11 times for all members. Along that are a handful of main story missions, but they don't really do much, its basically" insects are abducting people, go kill them". With no real twists or turns or connections to the squad missions.
That said, I don't really mind that. The universe is still among the most interesting around and characters and dialog are very interesting over all, but its more of a point&click adventure kind of story without puzzles, then a big branching thing with lots of choice and consequence.
Re:Finished it... Good game, but horrid planet sca
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
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· Score: 1
It's for upgrading your ship - might make the game easier, but not required, near as I could tell.
The ship updates are required, at least when you want to see the good ending, and minerals are also used for normal weapon upgrades, so they are a central part of the game. You can of course still skip those, but then nobody forced you to go all planet exploring in the first Mass Effect either.
Not really, the outcome of your action stays pretty much the same most of the time, its more a choice between nice guy and asshole then between good and evil. This is one of my long standing core issues with Bioware games, its always about flat black&white issues, its never about actual choice. There are no two ways to solve a problem as a nice guy, there is only the play asshole one, which when you play as a nice guy is of course a non option.
Well, just because they labeled it that way doesn't make it true. Its basically just a "you don't know whats coming" mission. You actually can die, but you have to screw up pretty badly for that.
a major enemy in charge of them.
Saren was a much more interesting character then that random insect thing. Also there is basically no discovery going on, the main plot is "there are insect things, go kill them", no twists, no turns, thats it. Its extremely straight forward and all the interesting facts of the backstory you already know from part one.
The core problem with the game in terms of story is simply that its just to mechanical, you spend most of the time doing unconnected missions to collect your teammates and a tiny few relativly uninteresting main story missions in between. ME1 had a lot more interesting stuff going on.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 1
What do you mean?
In ME1 you had a dedicated function to tell them to seek cover, you didn't have to actually have to tell them where to go, they would figure that out automatically. And they also felt more responsive, in ME2 they never really seem to follow my orders, but always ended up running all over the place.
I'm not sure how to make squadmates generically attack someone, but I suspect it's possible.
It is possible by aiming at an enemy and pressing the walk-to key. I however overlooked that on my first run as I assumed they had removed that function, as its no longer part of the pause screen as it was in ME1.
It's only flat compared to the first game,
Well thats the point. Have you ever seen a bridge in ME2? ME2 is extremely flat an primitive in its level design, for the worst case just comprare the presidium in ME1 to the one in ME2. In ME1 its a huge complex space, in ME2 its three boring rooms connected by stairs and a fourth room that isn't connected at all to the rest.
Complaining they changed the 'elevators' loading screen to a different loading screen seems somewhat silly, as the elevators locked them into some weird area layouts to justify them.
The problem is that the loading screens are terrible, for one they break the immersion, as they pull you right out of the game. Same goes for the annoying mission end screen. And they often don't fit, the shuttle pickup animaiton for example often shows you how you get picked up from the ground, when that already happened in a regular cutscene before. I would have much preferred if they would have used shorter elevator rides, then those ugly loading screen.
Sadly, it's a heavy weapon, so only people with heavy weapons can carry it.
The problem with heavy weapons is that they are a dedicated weapon and you have to switch to it first, with grenades you could just throw them in the mid of a fire fight, which felt a good bit more fluent in terms of gameplay.
Slashdot Mirror
It kind of sounds interesting in theory, but I see two big issues. One is of course price, its way more expensive then just a laser printer and regular paper for a start. The other issue is simply user behavior, can you really train your users to behave well enough that a sheet survives anywhere near 1000 prints? Even 100 reprints sounds like a stretch, yet it is not enough to make it cheaper then paper. There are also use cases where its not clear how to handle them. What is if you want to mark something? What is when you want to bundle multiple pages? You can't just staple them. And so on.
An eBook reader sounds like a much better and cheaper alternative.
The annoying part about the movie is the "blue light == nice robot" and "red light == evil robot", thats a rather stupid way to get a point across to the audience and heavily violates the books. That aside the main problem with the movie is simply the name. It didn't start out as an adoption of "I, Robot", that name and a few scenes and concepts got retrofitted into a completly different story later on, so of course fans of the book won't be all that happy with it.
Ignore the name and you end up with what is a pretty decent Sci-Fi movie, that actually scratches some interesting topics along the way. The ending still feels rather simplistic and primitive, so it is by no means a perfect movie, but a good bit better then many other movies that call themselves "Sci-Fi".
The intro video doesn't say if it is possible to click multiple times on a Flattr button or pay larger chunks of "money", which would be needed if the scheme should be fair (blog post typed in a few minutes has a different value then a game that might have taken month or years to create).
Other then that, the scheme sounds quite good, as it is based around a flat fee, so you don't risk going bankrupt by clicking a few to many buttons and it also reduces the mental overhead that a normal payment would create.
After all, it's not like the pictures somehow snuck onto the interwebs without the users knowledge,
The photo didn't, but the info did. Normally your name or at least your address is something you keep away from random strangers on the Internet, but if you post a photo with EXIF data you open that up to everybody. You also link your real name to your pseudonym or in turn allow others to connect different pseudonyms that you might have wanted to keep seperate. If you post photos regularly they can also reconstruct what you are doing all day and especially when. And of course cropping the picture might not actually crop the thumbnail in the EXIF data.
EXIF data also as plenty of legitimate use, that doesn't stop it from being pretty open to abuse.
The trouble is that creating something fun, isn't always fun. Money is a good incentive to walk the last mile to add that extra polish which turns a neat idea into an actually good game.
Did it ever occur to you that criminals work under the assumption that they don't get caught and that thus harder punishment doesn't really do much?
Nothing stops you from just using old hardware, there are tons of old PCs still floating around, so it shouldn't be to hard to find one. If you want to use your modern hardware, use DOSBox. Sure, getting the proper original game play experience back can be a little troublesome at times, but there is a big difference between something requiring a little bit of work and something being flat out impossible thanks to DRM or centralized servers.
The biggest practical issue I had with getting 15 year old PC stuff to run was that many games of that time no longer used DOS, but Windows with its early incarnations of DirectX, which meant that they won't run in DOSbox and neither on a modern Windows. Getting Windows98 along with the drivers installed was a little troublesome, but still doable, getting the drivers was actually the biggest problem, as many vendors (especially Creative) just don't offer them anymore, so you better have a backup.
Fretting about not being able to play a 15-year-old game just seems silly to me.
We aren't taking about 15 year old games, we are talking about 5 year old games, some of which you might have bought yesterday as Xbox Classic on your Xbox360.
Well, how long do you honestly expect them to support it? 20 years?
Till they go bankrupt and after that I expect the server binaries to be released.
I mean we are speaking about Microsoft here, not some small Indie developer where every penny counts. It shouldn't be to hard for them to just let their server stuff run in a VM on some spare hardware.
And by the way, 8.5 years was the time when the Xbox was released, but they are selling multiplayer Xbox1 games, via XboxLive on the Xbox360 *right now*. Its not like the service has been completly forgotten and is only used by three people in the whole world.
What do the two of us need anyone else for ?
You need a third party that makes you familiar with the author in the first place, as you are not going to browse through thousands of blogs till you find something interesting. This is the sole reason why iTunes/iPod and Kindle are so popular and bands selling MP3/PDFs on their private webpages is problematic, as they simply are harder to find that way and a lot more work is involved in getting the MP3/PDFs.
The article states that he communicates through a keyboard device in his right hand (perhaps like Stephen Hawking's), not by "facillitated communication".
FC refers to somebody else grabbing the patient hand and then moving it over the keyboard and that is exactly what was happening in this case, he didn't even look at the keyboard and the speed of input would even be troublesome for somebody who isn't in a comma. He did at much typing as keyboard cat did play music.
Depends, if they can clearly distinguish between "Yes", "No" and "Patient didn't respond", their rate of success might be ok. On the other side if they just did go with "Yes" and "No" it indeed looks like random chance. After all we got the thinking dead salmon, so there is quite a bit of wiggle room in fMRI.
In the end the only real proof would be if they could actually get real communication going, not just six questions, which really seems a little low. So lets wait and see for further studies before jumping to conclusions.
Why should it matter if browsers are multi-threaded?
With Flash, Javascript and dynamic AJAX webpages its easy to have the browser actually burn some serious CPU. Even worse is that it actually can get quite unresponsive while doing so. Having a proper multithreaded browser would mean that plugins and tabs would all run in separate threads and the whole thing could become a lot more responsive.
There's a lot going on in a modern system:
$ ps -ef | wc -l
146
Those are just idling process, actual CPU activity is extremely low. It doesn't really make a difference if you have 1 idle threads or 100, you don't need CPU power for those either way and multicore doesn't make idling faster. The processes that actually use CPU power on the other side are seldom broken up into multiple threads, so you quite frequently see your system at 50% usage on a multicore, with the second processor idling along.
Can most programmes really be written to take advantage of so many cores?
No, for most programs that would be quite complicated, however most programs idle around all the time anyway, so that wouldn't be an big issue. Those programs that actually burn CPU (video de/encoding, Photoshop/Gimp filters, etc.) on the other side could for most part easily be parallelized. The issue of course is that basically all program languages we have in use make parallelization hard, so nobody is doing it unless they specifically optimize their stuff for multi-core, which in turn means that most programs in actual use today can't take advantage of multicore.
The fascinating part is that the parents themselves fell for it. I can understand how the ideomotor effect makes a simple pendulum swing, but I have a hard time grasping how it works that people actually write meaningful things that way without noticing it.
James Randi has written a comment about the Belgium case, also links to a video clearly showing how its obviously fake.
Science isn't about debating, its about evidence and data. And the evidence that vaccines cause autism just isn't there, on the other side there is plenty of evidence that vaccines are extremely beneficial and that the current vaccination scare actually kills people.
Great idea, lets just ignore science and go with our good old preconceived notion and waste efforts on solution that do not work because they are simple and make us feel good. The fact that you don't like the outcome of the study doesn't make it wrong.
This isn't denying freedom: it's protecting freedom by preventing manipulation.
Thats quite frankly complete and utter bullshit. If you deny the anonymity, you basically deny the right to speak against those that are in power, as you open yourself up for direct attack and might likely be shut down if you get a little to annoying.
Manipulation is a non-issue, it doesn't matter much if person says something or a 1000 sock puppets, the ideas are out there either way. If the ideas are fundamentally wrong, debunk them and don't throw out the freedom of speech.
Which other game is there that comes even close to matching the amount of open exploration and deep story along with good gun play that Mass Effect has to offer? Mass Effect is pretty unique in what it does.
Also the side quests wheren't half bad, it was actually quite a bit of fun and gave the game a good feel of openness and freedom, missing in most other games.
That should be easy to fix, shouldn't it? Just fetch all images from the CSS instead of doing it on demand.
They had reasons to come along with you, sure, but they didn't have much effect on the plot after they joined.
In ME2 its basically the same, even worse actually, as the plot follows a very strict structure of having a "find squad member"-mission and then a "do something for squad member"-mission" repeated 11 times for all members. Along that are a handful of main story missions, but they don't really do much, its basically" insects are abducting people, go kill them". With no real twists or turns or connections to the squad missions.
That said, I don't really mind that. The universe is still among the most interesting around and characters and dialog are very interesting over all, but its more of a point&click adventure kind of story without puzzles, then a big branching thing with lots of choice and consequence.
It's for upgrading your ship - might make the game easier, but not required, near as I could tell.
The ship updates are required, at least when you want to see the good ending, and minerals are also used for normal weapon upgrades, so they are a central part of the game. You can of course still skip those, but then nobody forced you to go all planet exploring in the first Mass Effect either.
Not really, the outcome of your action stays pretty much the same most of the time, its more a choice between nice guy and asshole then between good and evil. This is one of my long standing core issues with Bioware games, its always about flat black&white issues, its never about actual choice. There are no two ways to solve a problem as a nice guy, there is only the play asshole one, which when you play as a nice guy is of course a non option.
An actual, literal suicide mission.
Well, just because they labeled it that way doesn't make it true. Its basically just a "you don't know whats coming" mission. You actually can die, but you have to screw up pretty badly for that.
a major enemy in charge of them.
Saren was a much more interesting character then that random insect thing. Also there is basically no discovery going on, the main plot is "there are insect things, go kill them", no twists, no turns, thats it. Its extremely straight forward and all the interesting facts of the backstory you already know from part one.
The core problem with the game in terms of story is simply that its just to mechanical, you spend most of the time doing unconnected missions to collect your teammates and a tiny few relativly uninteresting main story missions in between. ME1 had a lot more interesting stuff going on.
What do you mean?
In ME1 you had a dedicated function to tell them to seek cover, you didn't have to actually have to tell them where to go, they would figure that out automatically. And they also felt more responsive, in ME2 they never really seem to follow my orders, but always ended up running all over the place.
I'm not sure how to make squadmates generically attack someone, but I suspect it's possible.
It is possible by aiming at an enemy and pressing the walk-to key. I however overlooked that on my first run as I assumed they had removed that function, as its no longer part of the pause screen as it was in ME1.
It's only flat compared to the first game,
Well thats the point. Have you ever seen a bridge in ME2? ME2 is extremely flat an primitive in its level design, for the worst case just comprare the presidium in ME1 to the one in ME2. In ME1 its a huge complex space, in ME2 its three boring rooms connected by stairs and a fourth room that isn't connected at all to the rest.
Complaining they changed the 'elevators' loading screen to a different loading screen seems somewhat silly, as the elevators locked them into some weird area layouts to justify them.
The problem is that the loading screens are terrible, for one they break the immersion, as they pull you right out of the game. Same goes for the annoying mission end screen. And they often don't fit, the shuttle pickup animaiton for example often shows you how you get picked up from the ground, when that already happened in a regular cutscene before. I would have much preferred if they would have used shorter elevator rides, then those ugly loading screen.
Sadly, it's a heavy weapon, so only people with heavy weapons can carry it.
The problem with heavy weapons is that they are a dedicated weapon and you have to switch to it first, with grenades you could just throw them in the mid of a fire fight, which felt a good bit more fluent in terms of gameplay.