Well, being vegan I refuse to take flu shots because they're incubated using fertilized chicken eggs. But I'm also pragmatic; if it's a treatment that will save my life, I will take it. That doesn't mean I approve of animal-based research -- I hope we continue to make strides towards moving away from that, it's barbaric -- but I don't live in a utopia.
Yeah, that was mostly because NeXTSTEP used Display Postscript as its display rendering engine. So it didn't have to do much translation work to send a Postscript of your file to the printer. A 68030-based Macintosh was certainly not as fast.
I suggest you put you knee back in its jerk, and consider for a moment how you would feel if they were to offer a grant that was only available to men..
What? They are offering a grant to only one gender. Discrimination based on ANY gender (or race) should be quickly shamed for what it is -- favoritism based on arbitrary physical qualities of the person. You're basically arguing that this is reparation for a systemic advantage by males. That only serves to *enforce* a gender divide. Fix the educational system, fix the cultural bias, but this doesn't fix anything. The courts have repeatedly turned down the notion of affirmative action, and philosophically this kind of thing is no different.
I think your viewpoint is a bit narrow. The "Arab Spring" was indeed about freedom from tyrannies, not about religious revolutions. But opportunistic religious groups have used the power vacuums to insert themselves.
There's no doubt that many Egyptians are conservative, but there is more of a split between the conservative (and less educated) rural areas and the cities like Cairo that generally have more progressive populaces. On top of that, you have the two religious Islamist groups, the fairly moderate Muslim Brotherhood, and the Sharia Law-loving Salafists, who are in discussions behind-the-scenes as to how radical to go. Unfortunately it seems that the Salafists are calling the shots and though I think privately the MB would acknowledge it's a mistake, the MB has limited power.
I find it ridiculous when Americans act superior about Islamist states though; look at all the religion-motivated laws being passed in America lately that are taking women's rights back to the Mad Men days. We're just as much in the hands of a conservative Christian cabal as Egypt is with Islam, and we have just as much of a split between rural people who want to impose their ethical worldview on everyone else and more secular populations in the big cities.
His amps weren't just about being louder. The tone of Marshall amps is stellar.
But in his defense, Pete Townsend of The Who is the one who demanded louder amps for their concerts. Most amplification systems at concert halls back then were seriously lacking for rock n roll, so you had to have a loud amp. Pete begged Jim to make a louder amp, and he came up with the 100-watt Marshall. Then of course every band wanted one, and I guess you could say there was a concert loudness war for a while (parodied by Spinal Tap's moniker "England's Loudest Band"), but as others have said that had nothing to do with the loudness war of the recorded music (which was indeed detrimental to the music itself).
All you Anonymous Cowards sound like the slashdotters who still think Windows sucks as bad as Win95. Recent versions of Flash have made great strides in CPU consumption (after Adobe got a much-needed kick in the ass). Try 11.2 and tell me it still spikes on video playback. If you're talking about a page full of Flash ads, that's because ads are designed under the flawed assumption that they have 100% of resources available. I'm sure HTML5 ads, if we ever see those, will suffer similarly.
Yeah...Epic threw the Citadel demo together last year to show at an Adobe event. I assume it's pretty early code and totally unoptimized. Still, those are PS3-quality textures and models, so the RAM footprint isn't going to be tiny.
Strange, works for me on Mac OS X 10.6.8: http://imagebin.org/206224 What platform are you on? Sounds like perhaps bad driver support for your video card.:/
And I agree their demo needs some work. They need to implement texture/model streaming instead of forcing you to download the whole level up-front.
That's the Unreal Engine "Citadel" demo, running in Flash (you'll need 11.2 to run it) -- the controls kinda suck because I think they just did a quick port from the iOS version, but you'll get the idea. I don't think it's 60fps, but I assume that's an older build and still has debug code.
Really now. I can respect an anti-Flash opinion based on a desire for open standards (even though the SWF format is open), but saying Flash is terrible tech is just me-too ignorance. What other web framework can you composite 2d animation, advanced typography, h264 movies, native sound processing, and a 60fps native 3D rendering engine at your leisure? Try making audiotool in HTML5. There's nothing better for creating multimedia content. There are simply no IDEs anywhere near as mature for HTML5. Actionscript 3.0 is a pretty great language, a bit like Java, that encourages good coding style, but without weighing down development speed with too much cruft. It's what Javascript could have been if Microsoft hadn't sabotaged the ECMAScript 4 deliberations.
And what other web framework has let developers deliver quality games? Unity, sure, but most people don't have the plug-in. Go ahead, what do you recommend that people should have used the last 10 years for web-based gaming? Yeah...I thought so.
Even though Adobe is run by fucking morons, Flash is still a great platform, and they are not giving up on Flash completely. I imagine the future of Flash is more of a Unity-style thing where you develop in Flash and then export to various platforms. Epic wouldn't have spent the time and money porting Unreal Engine unless they had confidence in Adobe's roadmap.
As I said, if someone has philosophical differences with Flash as a platform, I can respect that. But all you people mouthing off about Flash without even understanding the issues only do more harm than good.
Problem is, early on we were objectively winning the war in Afghanistan. The Taliban was getting their asses kicked. But then Bush decided to invade Iraq and diverted most of the troops to that morass. The Taliban had time to regroup and restrategize, and by the time Bush noticed Afghanistan again the conflict had gotten away from us. Now we're stuck in Afghanistan mostly for political reasons; namely, Obama didn't want to pull out and look like a weak-on-defense Democrat, but everyone knows the war is already lost. The real losers are going to be the Afghan people, who will be once again subjected to brutality and archaic abridgments of rights (especially the women) after we leave.
By the time corporations are going around suing each other over patents, they're just walking dead. Thoughtfulness, innovation, and often humanity has already long passed from their corpus and what's left is a rotting stench of lawyers and predatory executives.
Funny how people say that digital goods should not be counted as a specific piece of property until suddenly their personal interests are at stake. [I'm not targeting you personally; I don't know what your take on digital goods is.]
Either files are real property, or they are not. If they are, then they must be so consistently whether it is your file on a server that you have been denied access to, or whether it is someone downloading a 'copyright-infringed' mp3 from a torrent site. If not, then the files uploaded to sharing servers are just copies; not the original item, and in that case people should've made a backup copy in a digital space that they control.
Either way, it seems like our legal definition of property is way behind the technical state of the art.
Crowdsourcing in general is illegal because of hucksters tricking people out of their investment dollars.
And how exactly is this different from every election campaign? You could consider every campaign contribution an "investment" (corporations certainly do), and your "return" is the policies you want enacted. And the individual investors in these political candidates almost invariably get tricked.
Maybe you need to read my comment again. They "sold out" by severely compromising characters, story, tone, art style, et al. I have no problem with someone benefiting financially from their work. Look at Scott Pilgrim -- O'Malley did really well off of the movie license, but he also made sure the spirit of the characters and story was kept intact. By contrast, it was obvious that E&L saw dollar signs and let other people run amok with the series. The turtles' namesakes took their art seriously; E&L just wanted the loot.
Yup, agreed. Eastman and Laird sold out a LONNNNG time ago, with the cartoon and then the films. I suppose most people don't realize that the original comics took themselves fairly seriously considering the characters and the universe. The art style was B&W, gritty and really quite nice. The original Turtles were tongue-in-cheek, but not brainless slapstick as the cartoon turned them into. TL;DR = original comics were for adults, cartoon/films = for kids. I can't blame E&L for cashing in, but they have very little artistic integrity.
As an aside, there was a pen & paper gameset based on the TMNT universe of the comics in the late 80s which I remember being surprisingly quite good.
Editors, this article is a complete troll. This has nothing to do with "News for Nerds", and it's not even newsworthy.
For the record, it was recently published that President Obama is in talks with Russia to give some classified tactical information about United States nuclear missiles in return for Russia's approval of the missile defense systems.
Since the connections are streamed in chunks, Flash Media Server knows what media is currently playing and can't really be "hijacked" by the Flash client. It knows when the playing time is done and controls serving the next stream (interstitial ad, movie, whatever) to the client. The Flash client is basically a dumb terminal in this respect. [note: this is only regarding FMS when serving via RTMP streams]
Adobe makes some dumb mistakes, but they put a decent amount of effort into their DRM for media streaming (precisely to win over content companies). Of course it's possible that their encryption scheme could be hacked; I'd be a fool to say otherwise. But I'm quite certain it's not as easy as decompiling the SWF and finding an encryption key.
Which is why services that rely on video interstitials use Flash Media Server to control this kind of thing from the server-side. More importantly, it allows for encrypted streams. For companies like Netflix & Hulu, HTML5 video won't be acceptable to content providers until it supports these kinds of features.
Totally agree with #1. Though I think this is more in keeping your sanity in check than short-term productivity gains. #2 is something I'm struggling with. I'm working for myself now, trying to build a business, and though I always worked hard, now I find it difficult to know when to call it a day. There's so much to do, so many goals I have, and most of the time I pass on social activities. I seem to have lost that work-life balance completely, but I'm not even sure where I want that line to be.
It originates from the French word metre [accent lost on slashdot], and before that the Greek word metron (to measure). Obviously in French the r is pronounced first. There's plenty of examples of American English taking on archaic spellings or words wholesale from other languages, so I don't think there's much room to boast of American linguistic pragmatism here.
Some rough calculations. Let's say Atari sells your game for $2.99. $3 to make it easier. $3.00 x 70% = $2.10. That is the profit after Apple takes their cut. $2.10 x 2% = $0.042. So Atari's generous 2% profit share nets you about 4 cents off of every app purchase. 4 cents!
Okay, so how many app purchases would it take to make that other $50,000? 1,190,476. Almost 1.2 million. Huh.
And how much does Atari make from those 1.1 million app purchases? $2,449,999. Yup. You get $50,000, they get $2.4 million. Seems fair!...Yeah. Right!
Read the rules. First, this isn't just an "idea". You have to submit a final game to them if they like the idea. So really you're just a contractor.
Now, the rules. You don't get $100k in cash. You get $50k in cash:
The highest-scoring Winner will receive up to One Hundred Thousand U.S. Dollars ($100,000.00), comprised of a Prize of Fifty Thousand U.S. Dollars ($50,000.00) with the opportunity to earn a Prize Maximum of up to an additional Fifty Thousand U.S. Dollars ($50,000.00), in connection with sales of the PONG® Pak app. Approximate retail value (“ARV”): up to $100,000.00.
So, you get $50k for the ideas and building the app, and then you get up to $50k from sales of the app. And of course you are not getting all the profit. You will be getting 2% of the profit, so good luck ever seeing that other $50k:
For purposes of clarification, each Finalist shall receive a proportion of the twenty percent (20%) Revenue Share equal to the total Revenue Share divided by the total number of Finalists’ Games included in the PONG® Pak app. By way of example only, if there are ten (10) Finalists, then each Finalist shall receive an equal portion of the Revenue Share (two percent (2%)).
I guess it would be okay as a resume builder, but money-wise Atari is asking you to bend over.
I guess you're under the impression that DARPA is just about killer robots and Mach 20 self-guided missiles. Maybe you forgot DARPA tried to create the Total Information Awareness program [Most TIA programs are still running under different names]. Maybe you didn't see Rugan's All Things D interview where she admitted to "working closely" with Google. What better way to make the DARPA-Google relationship more cozy than to install a DARPA director at Google's skunkworks arm?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, being vegan I refuse to take flu shots because they're incubated using fertilized chicken eggs. But I'm also pragmatic; if it's a treatment that will save my life, I will take it. That doesn't mean I approve of animal-based research -- I hope we continue to make strides towards moving away from that, it's barbaric -- but I don't live in a utopia.
Yeah, that was mostly because NeXTSTEP used Display Postscript as its display rendering engine. So it didn't have to do much translation work to send a Postscript of your file to the printer. A 68030-based Macintosh was certainly not as fast.
What? They are offering a grant to only one gender. Discrimination based on ANY gender (or race) should be quickly shamed for what it is -- favoritism based on arbitrary physical qualities of the person. You're basically arguing that this is reparation for a systemic advantage by males. That only serves to *enforce* a gender divide. Fix the educational system, fix the cultural bias, but this doesn't fix anything. The courts have repeatedly turned down the notion of affirmative action, and philosophically this kind of thing is no different.
I think your viewpoint is a bit narrow. The "Arab Spring" was indeed about freedom from tyrannies, not about religious revolutions. But opportunistic religious groups have used the power vacuums to insert themselves.
There's no doubt that many Egyptians are conservative, but there is more of a split between the conservative (and less educated) rural areas and the cities like Cairo that generally have more progressive populaces. On top of that, you have the two religious Islamist groups, the fairly moderate Muslim Brotherhood, and the Sharia Law-loving Salafists, who are in discussions behind-the-scenes as to how radical to go. Unfortunately it seems that the Salafists are calling the shots and though I think privately the MB would acknowledge it's a mistake, the MB has limited power.
I find it ridiculous when Americans act superior about Islamist states though; look at all the religion-motivated laws being passed in America lately that are taking women's rights back to the Mad Men days. We're just as much in the hands of a conservative Christian cabal as Egypt is with Islam, and we have just as much of a split between rural people who want to impose their ethical worldview on everyone else and more secular populations in the big cities.
His amps weren't just about being louder. The tone of Marshall amps is stellar.
But in his defense, Pete Townsend of The Who is the one who demanded louder amps for their concerts. Most amplification systems at concert halls back then were seriously lacking for rock n roll, so you had to have a loud amp. Pete begged Jim to make a louder amp, and he came up with the 100-watt Marshall. Then of course every band wanted one, and I guess you could say there was a concert loudness war for a while (parodied by Spinal Tap's moniker "England's Loudest Band"), but as others have said that had nothing to do with the loudness war of the recorded music (which was indeed detrimental to the music itself).
All you Anonymous Cowards sound like the slashdotters who still think Windows sucks as bad as Win95. Recent versions of Flash have made great strides in CPU consumption (after Adobe got a much-needed kick in the ass). Try 11.2 and tell me it still spikes on video playback. If you're talking about a page full of Flash ads, that's because ads are designed under the flawed assumption that they have 100% of resources available. I'm sure HTML5 ads, if we ever see those, will suffer similarly.
Yeah...Epic threw the Citadel demo together last year to show at an Adobe event. I assume it's pretty early code and totally unoptimized. Still, those are PS3-quality textures and models, so the RAM footprint isn't going to be tiny.
This is what it's supposed to look like anyway, sucks that it didn't work on your Linux box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZmFaxBhAo4
Strange, works for me on Mac OS X 10.6.8: http://imagebin.org/206224 :/
What platform are you on? Sounds like perhaps bad driver support for your video card.
And I agree their demo needs some work. They need to implement texture/model streaming instead of forcing you to download the whole level up-front.
See for yourself.
That's the Unreal Engine "Citadel" demo, running in Flash (you'll need 11.2 to run it) -- the controls kinda suck because I think they just did a quick port from the iOS version, but you'll get the idea. I don't think it's 60fps, but I assume that's an older build and still has debug code.
Less terrible technology? Abomination?
Really now. I can respect an anti-Flash opinion based on a desire for open standards (even though the SWF format is open), but saying Flash is terrible tech is just me-too ignorance. What other web framework can you composite 2d animation, advanced typography, h264 movies, native sound processing, and a 60fps native 3D rendering engine at your leisure? Try making audiotool in HTML5. There's nothing better for creating multimedia content. There are simply no IDEs anywhere near as mature for HTML5. Actionscript 3.0 is a pretty great language, a bit like Java, that encourages good coding style, but without weighing down development speed with too much cruft. It's what Javascript could have been if Microsoft hadn't sabotaged the ECMAScript 4 deliberations.
And what other web framework has let developers deliver quality games? Unity, sure, but most people don't have the plug-in. Go ahead, what do you recommend that people should have used the last 10 years for web-based gaming? Yeah...I thought so.
Do I need to remind you that Epic recently ported the latest version of Unreal Engine to Flash? WebGL can't touch what is being done in Flash.
Even though Adobe is run by fucking morons, Flash is still a great platform, and they are not giving up on Flash completely. I imagine the future of Flash is more of a Unity-style thing where you develop in Flash and then export to various platforms. Epic wouldn't have spent the time and money porting Unreal Engine unless they had confidence in Adobe's roadmap.
As I said, if someone has philosophical differences with Flash as a platform, I can respect that. But all you people mouthing off about Flash without even understanding the issues only do more harm than good.
Problem is, early on we were objectively winning the war in Afghanistan. The Taliban was getting their asses kicked. But then Bush decided to invade Iraq and diverted most of the troops to that morass. The Taliban had time to regroup and restrategize, and by the time Bush noticed Afghanistan again the conflict had gotten away from us. Now we're stuck in Afghanistan mostly for political reasons; namely, Obama didn't want to pull out and look like a weak-on-defense Democrat, but everyone knows the war is already lost. The real losers are going to be the Afghan people, who will be once again subjected to brutality and archaic abridgments of rights (especially the women) after we leave.
By the time corporations are going around suing each other over patents, they're just walking dead. Thoughtfulness, innovation, and often humanity has already long passed from their corpus and what's left is a rotting stench of lawyers and predatory executives.
Funny how people say that digital goods should not be counted as a specific piece of property until suddenly their personal interests are at stake. [I'm not targeting you personally; I don't know what your take on digital goods is.]
Either files are real property, or they are not. If they are, then they must be so consistently whether it is your file on a server that you have been denied access to, or whether it is someone downloading a 'copyright-infringed' mp3 from a torrent site. If not, then the files uploaded to sharing servers are just copies; not the original item, and in that case people should've made a backup copy in a digital space that they control.
Either way, it seems like our legal definition of property is way behind the technical state of the art.
And how exactly is this different from every election campaign? You could consider every campaign contribution an "investment" (corporations certainly do), and your "return" is the policies you want enacted. And the individual investors in these political candidates almost invariably get tricked.
Maybe you need to read my comment again. They "sold out" by severely compromising characters, story, tone, art style, et al. I have no problem with someone benefiting financially from their work. Look at Scott Pilgrim -- O'Malley did really well off of the movie license, but he also made sure the spirit of the characters and story was kept intact. By contrast, it was obvious that E&L saw dollar signs and let other people run amok with the series. The turtles' namesakes took their art seriously; E&L just wanted the loot.
Yup, agreed. Eastman and Laird sold out a LONNNNG time ago, with the cartoon and then the films. I suppose most people don't realize that the original comics took themselves fairly seriously considering the characters and the universe. The art style was B&W, gritty and really quite nice. The original Turtles were tongue-in-cheek, but not brainless slapstick as the cartoon turned them into. TL;DR = original comics were for adults, cartoon/films = for kids. I can't blame E&L for cashing in, but they have very little artistic integrity.
As an aside, there was a pen & paper gameset based on the TMNT universe of the comics in the late 80s which I remember being surprisingly quite good.
Editors, this article is a complete troll. This has nothing to do with "News for Nerds", and it's not even newsworthy.
For the record, it was recently published that President Obama is in talks with Russia to give some classified tactical information about United States nuclear missiles in return for Russia's approval of the missile defense systems.
Since the connections are streamed in chunks, Flash Media Server knows what media is currently playing and can't really be "hijacked" by the Flash client. It knows when the playing time is done and controls serving the next stream (interstitial ad, movie, whatever) to the client. The Flash client is basically a dumb terminal in this respect. [note: this is only regarding FMS when serving via RTMP streams]
Adobe makes some dumb mistakes, but they put a decent amount of effort into their DRM for media streaming (precisely to win over content companies). Of course it's possible that their encryption scheme could be hacked; I'd be a fool to say otherwise. But I'm quite certain it's not as easy as decompiling the SWF and finding an encryption key.
Which is why services that rely on video interstitials use Flash Media Server to control this kind of thing from the server-side. More importantly, it allows for encrypted streams. For companies like Netflix & Hulu, HTML5 video won't be acceptable to content providers until it supports these kinds of features.
Totally agree with #1. Though I think this is more in keeping your sanity in check than short-term productivity gains.
#2 is something I'm struggling with. I'm working for myself now, trying to build a business, and though I always worked hard, now I find it difficult to know when to call it a day. There's so much to do, so many goals I have, and most of the time I pass on social activities. I seem to have lost that work-life balance completely, but I'm not even sure where I want that line to be.
"ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French mètre." - Oxford American Dictionary.
[And yes, slashdot didn't actually eat the accent; I was an idiot]
It originates from the French word metre [accent lost on slashdot], and before that the Greek word metron (to measure). Obviously in French the r is pronounced first. There's plenty of examples of American English taking on archaic spellings or words wholesale from other languages, so I don't think there's much room to boast of American linguistic pragmatism here.
Some rough calculations. Let's say Atari sells your game for $2.99. $3 to make it easier.
$3.00 x 70% = $2.10. That is the profit after Apple takes their cut.
$2.10 x 2% = $0.042. So Atari's generous 2% profit share nets you about 4 cents off of every app purchase. 4 cents!
Okay, so how many app purchases would it take to make that other $50,000?
1,190,476. Almost 1.2 million. Huh.
And how much does Atari make from those 1.1 million app purchases? ...Yeah. Right!
$2,449,999. Yup. You get $50,000, they get $2.4 million. Seems fair!
Read the rules. First, this isn't just an "idea". You have to submit a final game to them if they like the idea. So really you're just a contractor.
Now, the rules. You don't get $100k in cash. You get $50k in cash:
So, you get $50k for the ideas and building the app, and then you get up to $50k from sales of the app. And of course you are not getting all the profit. You will be getting 2% of the profit, so good luck ever seeing that other $50k:
I guess it would be okay as a resume builder, but money-wise Atari is asking you to bend over.
I guess you're under the impression that DARPA is just about killer robots and Mach 20 self-guided missiles. Maybe you forgot DARPA tried to create the Total Information Awareness program [Most TIA programs are still running under different names]. Maybe you didn't see Rugan's All Things D interview where she admitted to "working closely" with Google. What better way to make the DARPA-Google relationship more cozy than to install a DARPA director at Google's skunkworks arm?