Stephen Hawking, despite his celebrity status (which has more to do with his wheelchair than anything else), wasn't taken very seriously by physicists.
In short, they think his information paradox and work on black holes (his lifes work), is a bunch of crap?
You probably saw the same Discovery special about it. So whats the scoop, should I care what he says? Is he more qualified to tell me the nature of the universe than Pat Robertson is?
You couldn't just say "laptop", so you're awfully proud of it. No doubt brand loyal to Apple (iPod, etc), and no doubt it impresses your neckbearded friends.
Yeah, carry it around the world. Scoff and chuckle at all the inferiors using inferior technology (nobody gives a fuck about Apple outside the US).
You won't come home with it. Someone will stab you in the head and take it. He'll probably rape you too, and successfully use the "he asked for it, look at his fucking laptop" defense in court.
Fuck you and your submission. "HAY GUYS WHAT APPLE STUFF WULD U TAKE? HERE IS A LIST OF TEH APPEL STUFF I OWN!"
My sister t-boned another car because she was reaching for her phone on the passenger side floor
Prove that in court.
Statistically the 25 year old with the muscle car causes more wrecks, and more financial damage. People with "pristine" driving records cause an enormous amount of wrecks, because "pristine" could mean a) you just got your license, or b) you hardly ever drive.
Most "good" drivers have their fair share of speeding and parking infractions.
I dunno if you were into Halo 2, but the online experience quickly degraded into modem glitchers and snipers using a hacked mouse keyboard. Or people shutting off their madden games jsut before a loss so it wont affect their rank. On a "good day" you have a 12 year old calling you a faggot. Fuck online gaming.
If a guy causes an accident while texting, playing gameboy, doodling with his iPod, or brushing his teeth, or masturbating charge him with reckless endangerment or careless driving.
We don't need new goofy specific laws. It's already illegal to drive while you're distracted by something else.
I don't get this, either. KDE or Gnome, sure, but when KDE is on my desktop I don't see a lot of difference between Suse or Mandriva, and one's German while the other one's French.
That's fine until you want to install something. Then you find out that there is no package for what you want for your distro, and your off compiling by hand, or trying to hack something else, etc.
Maybe you want PPTP server, but your distro only has client support. Or for commercial products on linux (I'm thinking Sybase right now), you need certain versions of certain libraries, and you can only get support for certain versions of certain distros. A Dell box running Mandriva may be useless to people looking to run Sybase ASE and turf MS SQL Server.
As for why people care whether OEM's ship linux or not, I have no idea. I think most of them are just assholes.
Ya it's like shipping DVD players without movies to watch, or a video game console without a game to play, or a 200 CD jukebox - WITH NO MUSIC ON IT!?!
The computer works just fine out of the box. Pop in a bootable CD and watch it do it's thing, or have fun setting the date in the bios.
I don't get the fuss about pre-installed linux. Isn't it enough that OEMs will ship a PC with no OS installed? There's just too many flavors and dickitry and infighting in the linux world, and I guarantee what Dell pre-installed on their boxes wouldn't be "the linux I want". Maybe it'll have KDE, and I want gnome, maybe it'll have gnome and I want fwvm, etc.
Pre-installing Windows makes sense from a volume licensing standpoint - the consumer gets windows cheaper than retail. And the first thing I (and many others) usually do is flatten and reinstall anyways, to get rid of all the preloaded settings and software I don't want.
But (most) distros are free, so whats the big deal? Install ubunto or gentoo or whatever by yourself.
There were nonlinear platformers before SMB3. I could go back to the Jumpman series on C64, where how you finished one stage would influence the next, other times it could be random. I'm trying to remember a game where you moved around a map, and performed little levels, very much like SMB3, but can't think of it. You did stuff like that in Bionic Commando, though, that predates SMB3.
This isn't really about firsts so much as it is about first big commercial hits - Doom was by no means the first FPS.
If I were to credit Nintendo for platformers, I'd go all the way back to the original Donkey Kong - which broke a lot of new ground. It had different levels, with different objectives on each - in an era where a video game was by and large "same level over and over, but harder and faster"
It, following Pac Man's lead, also had characters - ones you could market over and over.
It was also the first time I know of that the movie and game industries clashed in a big way, Universal suing over the name Kong, then losing a huge countersuit to Nintendo in the end.
Also, DK was supposed to be Popeye, but the licensing fell through, so they changed Brutus into an ape, and replaced Popeye with a charicature based on one of their US warehouse managers and named him Jump Man (so the legend goes). After a new license was cooked up, they made a whole new Popeye game (another one of my favorites).
Episodic content isnt episodic if it takes years between "episodes", and the "episodes" feel more like expansion packs for a game you've bought.
If they could spew out an hours worth of gameplay a week, I'd be interested. As it is, I don't even remember what happened in the last half life "episode", so the upcoming one just registers in my brain as "shitty budget title fps that I'll beat in an hour"
These aren't episodes: they're just really crappy sequels.
The next time an overclocking fanatic tries to tell you why his AMD CPU is so much better than your Intel CPU (or vice versa), you'll not only be able to follow the whole discussion, you'll be able to argue back.
But you'll see nothing on Apple's decision to move from PowerPC to Core, or the competitive battle between AMD and Intel. For that matter, you'll see almost nothing at all about AMD or its products.
You'll be able to fight back with not knowing what the fuck you're talking about, like a true slashdot poster!
Act fast, supplies are limited and demand is high!
Every buzzword you've ever heard about CPUs is covered: front end vs. back end, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, pipeline stalls, SIMD, direct-mapped vs. N-way set associative mapping.
You too can pose as a tech-literate computer expert on slashdot, merely by reading what you would consider remedial level material, if you were what you thought you were.
That is a big reason why Nintendo is still in business.
They can create a hit-game without a blockbuster budget in the 10s of millions. Simple graphics and fun gameplay carry many of their top-tier titles.
There've been similar successes on other consoles - Katamari Damacy comes to mind. But most of the industry seems to be migrating towards the big-budget blockbusters.
Think about how much the auto industry is making on hybrids, or hell, the ridiculous term "fuel economy".
Here you have a vehicle which costs considerably more, is underpowered, much more expensive to maintain (replace that bank of batteries in 5 years?), and yet people buy them and happily attach the word "economy".
Toyota and all the other hybrid frontrunners are cashing in on this, big time.
Notice you can't rent a hybrid at rental places (I've never seen one), yet they replace their fleets every year or two. What does that say about the longevity and value of the vehicles? I haven't met anybody who owns one yet - lots of people lease them.
Even the fuel economy is doubtful, or straight up false, in most of the country. I travel about 40 miles up the highway to work, usually around 70-80mph, depending on when I pass the one speed trap I know is there. I don't hit any city traffic, am rarely at a red light, and rarely travel 20mph. If I owned a hybrid, would I not just have a basic IC engine thats hauling around a few hundered pounds of batteries?
Nintendo is the only player who is basically a game designer first, hardware manufacturer second. They're first-party titles are about the only thing that will count for exclusive, unless they one day go Sega's route of only publishing games.
Anything else is prone to follow the dollar.
What you see now is "limited exclusivity". GTA3 was exclusive to PS2, until they ported it to XBox. RE series was exclusive to the Gamecube for a short time.
Third parties would be foolish to let themselves get locked in, like they did to Nintendo back in the day. But I forsee the same thing for some first/second-party titles too, non-Nintendo that is.
I wouldn't be shocked to see Halo 3 ported to PS3, after it's XBox 360 and PC run, of course. I wouldn't be shocked to see a Metal Gear title on something other than a playstation, like, say, gamecube.
Hell, I wouldn't even be shocked to see Zelda titles on the CD-I.
It's not about dorks, it's about casual piracy. Anybody can download Quake 4 for th PC from piratebay and be playing. XBox 360 piracy involves modding your DVD firmware (and unless your console is old removing the epoxy from the firmware to do so), burning DL-DVDrs in just the right way, etc.
Many people who own consoles don't even think of piracy, know it's possible, or care. They just want something they can turn on and play.
AMD simply capitalizes on the marketting microsoft does - and hardly do any of their own. This is nothing new. People attach a buzzword that someone else worked to make popular to their products all the time, think "XTreme".
Your average schmo just sees "Athlon XP" on the card at best buy, and thinks it "runs windows better". It's smart marketing on AMD's part.
Part of the problem is labelling someone a "skeptic" and assuming what they think.
I know the earth is warming.
I accept that man is affecting the rate of warming, but I wonder to what extent.
My problem is that the earth's climate is not a static model, yet all of the "science" that manages to trickle down to my CNN screen seems to assume that it is. People project that "such and such will happen in 50 years if we dont.. blah blah", and my bullshit detector goes off. That sort of malthusian talk is pure nonsense.
I don't believe in a "day after tomorrow" nightmare scenario. I don't believe teh world will end in my lifetime, or in my great-great-great-great grandkids lifetime. As far as doomsday scenarios go, we still got bigger fish to fry, IMO.
What I know is that we dont know remotely enough to understand the system, and this business of shouting-down scientists, other than through the established practice of peer review, doesn't help us out any.
A scientist who "dissents" (how can there be dissention in the pursuit of facts?) is somebody who's results and conclusions don't match with the picture given to society by the media.
Real scientists aren't on teams. They measure, observe, record, and conclude. The one's who judge aren't scientists - they're activists.
TFA is more about the death threats he's recieved, and the general unwillingness to believe anything other than worst-case "day after tomorrow" type scenarios.
I don't think any true climatologists have such a dim view - but the media does, and Al Gore does, and a large community of activists do. And those activists have the same mindset of those who murder doctors at abortion clinics, or assault people wearing fur coats.
How are you going to have any sort of open discourse or intelligent discussion, or any sort of pursuit of the "truth" with such people involved?
Believing something other than "mainstream science" these days has some nasty consequences. Science has sort of replaced religion to a lot of people, and people vehemently defend Darwin like a religious fundy would defend the Bible.
I wonder if there are any true-life Galilleo's out there, muzzled and silent, who's name won't be known for centuries, when they're proven right?
Space could be "cleaned". Think of lobbing large objects up, not putting them in orbit, to "take the hits", knocking other debris out of orbit and back to earth, or something not unlike a huge net.
Theres a fair amount of research going on on the subject. It's pretty much a given we're going to need a way to deal with space-debris, both man-made and natural.
Slashdot Mirror
3D desktop effects? WHY do i need that? WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO BUY A NEW VIDEO CARD FOR SOME GAY NEW OS?!!?!?
ITS A FUCKING SCAM AND I'M ANGRY
oh wait, I thought you said vista
LINUX IS ASOME! not as good as apples or google but its still pretty good!
Stephen Hawking, despite his celebrity status (which has more to do with his wheelchair than anything else), wasn't taken very seriously by physicists.
In short, they think his information paradox and work on black holes (his lifes work), is a bunch of crap?
You probably saw the same Discovery special about it. So whats the scoop, should I care what he says? Is he more qualified to tell me the nature of the universe than Pat Robertson is?
You couldn't just say "laptop", so you're awfully proud of it. No doubt brand loyal to Apple (iPod, etc), and no doubt it impresses your neckbearded friends.
Yeah, carry it around the world. Scoff and chuckle at all the inferiors using inferior technology (nobody gives a fuck about Apple outside the US).
You won't come home with it. Someone will stab you in the head and take it. He'll probably rape you too, and successfully use the "he asked for it, look at his fucking laptop" defense in court.
Fuck you and your submission. "HAY GUYS WHAT APPLE STUFF WULD U TAKE? HERE IS A LIST OF TEH APPEL STUFF I OWN!"
My sister t-boned another car because she was reaching for her phone on the passenger side floor
Prove that in court.
Statistically the 25 year old with the muscle car causes more wrecks, and more financial damage. People with "pristine" driving records cause an enormous amount of wrecks, because "pristine" could mean a) you just got your license, or b) you hardly ever drive.
Most "good" drivers have their fair share of speeding and parking infractions.
I dunno if you were into Halo 2, but the online experience quickly degraded into modem glitchers and snipers using a hacked mouse keyboard. Or people shutting off their madden games jsut before a loss so it wont affect their rank. On a "good day" you have a 12 year old calling you a faggot. Fuck online gaming.
If a guy causes an accident while texting, playing gameboy, doodling with his iPod, or brushing his teeth, or masturbating charge him with reckless endangerment or careless driving.
We don't need new goofy specific laws. It's already illegal to drive while you're distracted by something else.
I don't get this, either. KDE or Gnome, sure, but when KDE is on my desktop I don't see a lot of difference between Suse or Mandriva, and one's German while the other one's French.
That's fine until you want to install something. Then you find out that there is no package for what you want for your distro, and your off compiling by hand, or trying to hack something else, etc.
Maybe you want PPTP server, but your distro only has client support. Or for commercial products on linux (I'm thinking Sybase right now), you need certain versions of certain libraries, and you can only get support for certain versions of certain distros. A Dell box running Mandriva may be useless to people looking to run Sybase ASE and turf MS SQL Server.
As for why people care whether OEM's ship linux or not, I have no idea. I think most of them are just assholes.
Ya it's like shipping DVD players without movies to watch, or a video game console without a game to play, or a 200 CD jukebox - WITH NO MUSIC ON IT!?!
The computer works just fine out of the box. Pop in a bootable CD and watch it do it's thing, or have fun setting the date in the bios.
I don't get the fuss about pre-installed linux. Isn't it enough that OEMs will ship a PC with no OS installed? There's just too many flavors and dickitry and infighting in the linux world, and I guarantee what Dell pre-installed on their boxes wouldn't be "the linux I want". Maybe it'll have KDE, and I want gnome, maybe it'll have gnome and I want fwvm, etc.
Pre-installing Windows makes sense from a volume licensing standpoint - the consumer gets windows cheaper than retail. And the first thing I (and many others) usually do is flatten and reinstall anyways, to get rid of all the preloaded settings and software I don't want.
But (most) distros are free, so whats the big deal? Install ubunto or gentoo or whatever by yourself.
There were nonlinear platformers before SMB3. I could go back to the Jumpman series on C64, where how you finished one stage would influence the next, other times it could be random. I'm trying to remember a game where you moved around a map, and performed little levels, very much like SMB3, but can't think of it. You did stuff like that in Bionic Commando, though, that predates SMB3.
This isn't really about firsts so much as it is about first big commercial hits - Doom was by no means the first FPS.
If I were to credit Nintendo for platformers, I'd go all the way back to the original Donkey Kong - which broke a lot of new ground. It had different levels, with different objectives on each - in an era where a video game was by and large "same level over and over, but harder and faster"
It, following Pac Man's lead, also had characters - ones you could market over and over.
It was also the first time I know of that the movie and game industries clashed in a big way, Universal suing over the name Kong, then losing a huge countersuit to Nintendo in the end.
Also, DK was supposed to be Popeye, but the licensing fell through, so they changed Brutus into an ape, and replaced Popeye with a charicature based on one of their US warehouse managers and named him Jump Man (so the legend goes). After a new license was cooked up, they made a whole new Popeye game (another one of my favorites).
Episodic content isnt episodic if it takes years between "episodes", and the "episodes" feel more like expansion packs for a game you've bought.
If they could spew out an hours worth of gameplay a week, I'd be interested. As it is, I don't even remember what happened in the last half life "episode", so the upcoming one just registers in my brain as "shitty budget title fps that I'll beat in an hour"
These aren't episodes: they're just really crappy sequels.
Think of the caching flash in a hybrid drive.
And why wouldn't you want your pen drive to last 2 1/2 times longer?
Would it be that you're an AMD "fan" and are rooting against your home teams rival?
The next time an overclocking fanatic tries to tell you why his AMD CPU is so much better than your Intel CPU (or vice versa), you'll not only be able to follow the whole discussion, you'll be able to argue back.
But you'll see nothing on Apple's decision to move from PowerPC to Core, or the competitive battle between AMD and Intel. For that matter, you'll see almost nothing at all about AMD or its products.
You'll be able to fight back with not knowing what the fuck you're talking about, like a true slashdot poster!
Act fast, supplies are limited and demand is high!
Every buzzword you've ever heard about CPUs is covered: front end vs. back end, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, pipeline stalls, SIMD, direct-mapped vs. N-way set associative mapping.
You too can pose as a tech-literate computer expert on slashdot, merely by reading what you would consider remedial level material, if you were what you thought you were.
Episodic content was the end of Valve for me.. Releasing a game with 2 hours of gameplay every 2 years?
What a joke.
Maybe someday someone will buy up the franchise and turn out another AAA Half-Life title. Valve obviously isn't up to the job anymore.
(Didn't RTFA, I'm sure it's some sort of "they should package Steam(tm) cuz it's da futore of da gamze!", or similar Steam vs Live pissing match)
That is a big reason why Nintendo is still in business.
They can create a hit-game without a blockbuster budget in the 10s of millions. Simple graphics and fun gameplay carry many of their top-tier titles.
There've been similar successes on other consoles - Katamari Damacy comes to mind. But most of the industry seems to be migrating towards the big-budget blockbusters.
I wouldn't be any more shocked than I would be seeing Office for Macs.
Think about how much the auto industry is making on hybrids, or hell, the ridiculous term "fuel economy".
Here you have a vehicle which costs considerably more, is underpowered, much more expensive to maintain (replace that bank of batteries in 5 years?), and yet people buy them and happily attach the word "economy".
Toyota and all the other hybrid frontrunners are cashing in on this, big time.
Notice you can't rent a hybrid at rental places (I've never seen one), yet they replace their fleets every year or two. What does that say about the longevity and value of the vehicles? I haven't met anybody who owns one yet - lots of people lease them.
Even the fuel economy is doubtful, or straight up false, in most of the country. I travel about 40 miles up the highway to work, usually around 70-80mph, depending on when I pass the one speed trap I know is there. I don't hit any city traffic, am rarely at a red light, and rarely travel 20mph. If I owned a hybrid, would I not just have a basic IC engine thats hauling around a few hundered pounds of batteries?
Nintendo is the only player who is basically a game designer first, hardware manufacturer second. They're first-party titles are about the only thing that will count for exclusive, unless they one day go Sega's route of only publishing games.
Anything else is prone to follow the dollar.
What you see now is "limited exclusivity". GTA3 was exclusive to PS2, until they ported it to XBox. RE series was exclusive to the Gamecube for a short time.
Third parties would be foolish to let themselves get locked in, like they did to Nintendo back in the day. But I forsee the same thing for some first/second-party titles too, non-Nintendo that is.
I wouldn't be shocked to see Halo 3 ported to PS3, after it's XBox 360 and PC run, of course. I wouldn't be shocked to see a Metal Gear title on something other than a playstation, like, say, gamecube.
Hell, I wouldn't even be shocked to see Zelda titles on the CD-I.
It's not about dorks, it's about casual piracy. Anybody can download Quake 4 for th PC from piratebay and be playing. XBox 360 piracy involves modding your DVD firmware (and unless your console is old removing the epoxy from the firmware to do so), burning DL-DVDrs in just the right way, etc.
Many people who own consoles don't even think of piracy, know it's possible, or care. They just want something they can turn on and play.
AMD simply capitalizes on the marketting microsoft does - and hardly do any of their own. This is nothing new. People attach a buzzword that someone else worked to make popular to their products all the time, think "XTreme".
Your average schmo just sees "Athlon XP" on the card at best buy, and thinks it "runs windows better". It's smart marketing on AMD's part.
Part of the problem is labelling someone a "skeptic" and assuming what they think.
I know the earth is warming.
I accept that man is affecting the rate of warming, but I wonder to what extent.
My problem is that the earth's climate is not a static model, yet all of the "science" that manages to trickle down to my CNN screen seems to assume that it is. People project that "such and such will happen in 50 years if we dont.. blah blah", and my bullshit detector goes off. That sort of malthusian talk is pure nonsense.
I don't believe in a "day after tomorrow" nightmare scenario. I don't believe teh world will end in my lifetime, or in my great-great-great-great grandkids lifetime. As far as doomsday scenarios go, we still got bigger fish to fry, IMO.
What I know is that we dont know remotely enough to understand the system, and this business of shouting-down scientists, other than through the established practice of peer review, doesn't help us out any.
A scientist who "dissents" (how can there be dissention in the pursuit of facts?) is somebody who's results and conclusions don't match with the picture given to society by the media.
Real scientists aren't on teams. They measure, observe, record, and conclude. The one's who judge aren't scientists - they're activists.
TFA is more about the death threats he's recieved, and the general unwillingness to believe anything other than worst-case "day after tomorrow" type scenarios.
I don't think any true climatologists have such a dim view - but the media does, and Al Gore does, and a large community of activists do. And those activists have the same mindset of those who murder doctors at abortion clinics, or assault people wearing fur coats.
How are you going to have any sort of open discourse or intelligent discussion, or any sort of pursuit of the "truth" with such people involved?
Believing something other than "mainstream science" these days has some nasty consequences. Science has sort of replaced religion to a lot of people, and people vehemently defend Darwin like a religious fundy would defend the Bible.
I wonder if there are any true-life Galilleo's out there, muzzled and silent, who's name won't be known for centuries, when they're proven right?
Space could be "cleaned". Think of lobbing large objects up, not putting them in orbit, to "take the hits", knocking other debris out of orbit and back to earth, or something not unlike a huge net.
Theres a fair amount of research going on on the subject. It's pretty much a given we're going to need a way to deal with space-debris, both man-made and natural.