I think that the article makes a good point - that it is hard to evolve something that is based on one-time play-through value - but then tries to paint all games with too broad a description. Some types of games get better with each repetition - I've played Civ in its incarnations on and off for about ten years - and these games would work in an open-source development model. What about nethack or the various empire type strategy games? GTA is a game that people would have kept coming back to as it was improved and features added. It is only the linear style of story-driven games that would have problems in being developed incrementally...
I'm afriad that you're talking out of your arse. The reason that they don't want you to change seats is because they need people to sit where they are allocated to balance the weight of the plane during take off and landing. If you're on a sparsely filled flight then nobody cares if you sit where you want during the flight. I've done it, and seen others do it many times.
Looking at their info
I'm wondering about Our algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. Now assuming that MPEG-2 is DVD quality then the bitrates tend to be quite high, around 8000kbps. Divx gives reasonable quality at only around 1500kbps. If their quote is true then I'd expect Dirac to use about 4000kbps on broadcast video - so how does it compete with current codecs at all?
No, blood music is the one about the researcher who takes the nanites out of the lab by injecting them into his blood stream. It's a pre-goo story about the coming goo rather than post-goo.
Interesting approach, it sounds like you've worked out that the key is to spend time doing what you enjoy - everything else is just a chore to get there. I took the other route (they sound fairly equivilent) which was to take a wage drop to do what I wanted to do full time. It's three years on, and it only took a year or so to figure out how much stuff I actually *needed* and what was just fluff. The fluff is gone, and that 'low-paying' job leaves me with more than enough cash every month. I see so many people working their asses off doing jobs that they hate... so that they can drive a flashier car, drink their weekends away and buy trinkets to help them not notice. The major difference is that rather than work part-time to fund myself, I just found someone willing to pay me for what I wanted to do. Research is probably one of the most rewarding jobs that there is. The only downside is the lack of time off - it can be a bit demanding when you do your work as much in your dreams as you do while awake. Perhaps I've become a bit spoiled by doing this, but dividing up my time into work and play sounds harsh no matter what the size of the division. Of course if work=play then you don't have to worry about finding creative energy in the evenings because you've spent your whole day working on your own projects. I think that Hardy had the right idea when he said that no matter how good you are, there are only four creative hours in a day. The rest should be spent supporting your ability to use those four hours.
Actually this is nothing for me. Does it work for anyone else? The screenshot looks quite well done but the actual spoof just bombs out on my copy of firefox with an xml parsing error and a *huge* 5000 pixel wide yellow window. That didn't exactly take me in...
Well there isn't anything that you can do with folders that you can't do with labels, and everything that you can do with folders can be done with labels so why clutter up the UI and offer both?
Sorry dude, I think I was hitting the crackpipe when I posted earlier. I've just logged in and tried it and you can't do what I said. I'd assumed that a search for the labels would work but it doesn't seem to. And I got modded to +5 insightful, must have been those long words that I spoke crap with;^) Yeah, the 12-letter thing is a bit of a bummer isn't it?
I think that you've missed the point with the labels, they're not supposed to nest hierarchically because they can overlap. Think query rather than sorting. So in your example you'd use 3 labels; 'Geocaches', 'Watched', and 'Owned'. Then tag your messages with either 'Geocaches' and 'Watched' or 'Geocaches' and 'Owned'. Then search for messages with both labels.
Why on earth do videogames need a decent story line to be a serious artform? You're assuming that because we know a lot about film (which is narrative) and we know a lot about fiction (which is narrative) that videogames have to become more narrative in nature to be on equal footing? So tell me, where is the storyline in sculpture? Or in painting? And yet, I'm sure you wouldn't try to argue that they are not serious art mediums. A game is a fundamentally different type of thing from a story, although some have stories attached to them in a somewhat arbitrary manner.
There is no problem in a treatment of religion in a videogame, but what you won't find is that treatment as a story, presenting a static impression of the authors interpretation of religion. Instead, as the field matures and topics like this are addressed, we will probably find that we start to get games in which people can play with the very concept of religion. What it means, and how the player connects to that.
The treatment of the subject will then be what are the ways in which this thing we call religion can be adjusted and what effects (and to some extent affects) does that have on the world around it. I think that it is safe to assume that the mature field of videogames will be closer to simulation than to narrative.
I just read your journal entry with the essay about patents and wanted to point out a few things. You seem to have comments turned off for your journal entries and a dummy email address so any suggestions for how to do it as this thread isn't really the place...
This patent has to be struck down for being overly broad. It patents the entire idea of looking at information already on the local station and then downloading new stuff from a server. Surely USENET is prior art for this even though it wasn't specifically limited to software, and didn't automatically install the software.
Its not really a question of DVD's. Of course DVD's will be obsolete but if you read the article he's actually claiming that the idea of local portable storage will be dead. That everything will be networked and centralised. He makes the point that why would we carry around some fragile copy of the data when we can just have it delivered across the network to whichever device requires it. This is the microsoft vision now, computers+network access in everything. It's an interesting idea but local portable media has so many uses that I doubt it will disappear. Especially given that it is so cheap to make that it is disposible. Already blank DVD prices are cheap enough to make DVD's disposable and Sony et al are talking about making discs out of cardboard.
I'm afraid that you're wrong. I find it quite easy to sit and read a book whilst watching tv. As another poster has mentioned the actual content in tv is quite small and I get quite bored if just sitting and watching tv. I can quite happily sit with a book and flick backwards and forwards doing both at the same time. Films are harder, and you tend to end up mostly involved in one or the other with the other activity receeding into the background.
The review sucks as well. He says that getting dual vga is an acceptable compromise to gain dual-display, whats wrong with dvi/vga and a dvi->vga converter like the nvidia boards have?
It is a graph, to be precise its a DAG - Directed Acyclic Graph, which in non-technical terms is like a tree but with bits that appear in multiple places.
I guess it's a common enough idea, I've been planning to write some scripts to do it for ages, but they have to cope with the crappy organisation in my music folder at the moment. Naming consistency is the key to making it work sucessfully. I was thinking of having one big flat folder with album sub-folders, each containing the artist / album name, then having text files with genre tags. A script can run over the data and generate a hierarchy built out of sym-links.
Err, the server's down. Does anyone know what 10-digit computation or logisitic separations? I'm used to people spouting crap on/. but normally that's in the comments after the summary, not in it.
Perhaps, but the power from a collection of small specialised commands comes from the ability to recombine them into lots of possible applications. With a command-line, and temporary files or pipes it is easy to do this, I've yet to see a way of combining specialised GUI apps that works as well.
So you're replying to someone pointing out what's wrong with windows and why unix is more usable, and your reply is to point out that you can download cygwin? Can't you see the inherent flaw here, that the best way to match the power of the command prompt is to download a unix subsystem for windows? If the windows philosophy were a good one - building large monolithic applications - then there would be a better way to match the power of the command line than to use unix.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have the faintest idea how DNS works, do you?
I think that the article makes a good point - that it is hard to evolve something that is based on one-time play-through value - but then tries to paint all games with too broad a description. Some types of games get better with each repetition - I've played Civ in its incarnations on and off for about ten years - and these games would work in an open-source development model. What about nethack or the various empire type strategy games? GTA is a game that people would have kept coming back to as it was improved and features added. It is only the linear style of story-driven games that would have problems in being developed incrementally...
It's quite popular here in the UK. You can buy ice in most supermarkets.
Yeah, good point. I meant that if there was seats available during the flight then they don't mind you switching.
Trim tabs sound pretty cool, I'm just going on an explanation by a flight steward so it may not be 100% cosher...
I'm afriad that you're talking out of your arse. The reason that they don't want you to change seats is because they need people to sit where they are allocated to balance the weight of the plane during take off and landing. If you're on a sparsely filled flight then nobody cares if you sit where you want during the flight. I've done it, and seen others do it many times.
But it doesn't cost the BBC anything to broadcast the olympics. As part of the 'crown jewels' they must be shown on the BBC instead of commerical tv.
True, it does block up all day in the schedules...
Looking at their info I'm wondering about Our algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. Now assuming that MPEG-2 is DVD quality then the bitrates tend to be quite high, around 8000kbps. Divx gives reasonable quality at only around 1500kbps. If their quote is true then I'd expect Dirac to use about 4000kbps on broadcast video - so how does it compete with current codecs at all?
No, blood music is the one about the researcher who takes the nanites out of the lab by injecting them into his blood stream. It's a pre-goo story about the coming goo rather than post-goo.
Interesting approach, it sounds like you've worked out that the key is to spend time doing what you enjoy - everything else is just a chore to get there. I took the other route (they sound fairly equivilent) which was to take a wage drop to do what I wanted to do full time. It's three years on, and it only took a year or so to figure out how much stuff I actually *needed* and what was just fluff. The fluff is gone, and that 'low-paying' job leaves me with more than enough cash every month. I see so many people working their asses off doing jobs that they hate ... so that they can drive a flashier car, drink their weekends away and buy trinkets to help them not notice. The major difference is that rather than work part-time to fund myself, I just found someone willing to pay me for what I wanted to do. Research is probably one of the most rewarding jobs that there is. The only downside is the lack of time off - it can be a bit demanding when you do your work as much in your dreams as you do while awake. Perhaps I've become a bit spoiled by doing this, but dividing up my time into work and play sounds harsh no matter what the size of the division. Of course if work=play then you don't have to worry about finding creative energy in the evenings because you've spent your whole day working on your own projects. I think that Hardy had the right idea when he said that no matter how good you are, there are only four creative hours in a day. The rest should be spent supporting your ability to use those four hours.
Actually this is nothing for me. Does it work for anyone else? The screenshot looks quite well done but the actual spoof just bombs out on my copy of firefox with an xml parsing error and a *huge* 5000 pixel wide yellow window. That didn't exactly take me in...
Well there isn't anything that you can do with folders that you can't do with labels, and everything that you can do with folders can be done with labels so why clutter up the UI and offer both?
Sorry dude, I think I was hitting the crackpipe when I posted earlier. I've just logged in and tried it and you can't do what I said. I'd assumed that a search for the labels would work but it doesn't seem to. And I got modded to +5 insightful, must have been those long words that I spoke crap with ;^) Yeah, the 12-letter thing is a bit of a bummer isn't it?
I think that you've missed the point with the labels, they're not supposed to nest hierarchically because they can overlap. Think query rather than sorting. So in your example you'd use 3 labels; 'Geocaches', 'Watched', and 'Owned'. Then tag your messages with either 'Geocaches' and 'Watched' or 'Geocaches' and 'Owned'. Then search for messages with both labels.
Why on earth do videogames need a decent story line to be a serious artform? You're assuming that because we know a lot about film (which is narrative) and we know a lot about fiction (which is narrative) that videogames have to become more narrative in nature to be on equal footing? So tell me, where is the storyline in sculpture? Or in painting? And yet, I'm sure you wouldn't try to argue that they are not serious art mediums. A game is a fundamentally different type of thing from a story, although some have stories attached to them in a somewhat arbitrary manner.
There is no problem in a treatment of religion in a videogame, but what you won't find is that treatment as a story, presenting a static impression of the authors interpretation of religion. Instead, as the field matures and topics like this are addressed, we will probably find that we start to get games in which people can play with the very concept of religion. What it means, and how the player connects to that.
The treatment of the subject will then be what are the ways in which this thing we call religion can be adjusted and what effects (and to some extent affects) does that have on the world around it. I think that it is safe to assume that the mature field of videogames will be closer to simulation than to narrative.
I just read your journal entry with the essay about patents and wanted to point out a few things. You seem to have comments turned off for your journal entries and a dummy email address so any suggestions for how to do it as this thread isn't really the place...
This patent has to be struck down for being overly broad. It patents the entire idea of looking at information already on the local station and then downloading new stuff from a server. Surely USENET is prior art for this even though it wasn't specifically limited to software, and didn't automatically install the software.
Its not really a question of DVD's. Of course DVD's will be obsolete but if you read the article he's actually claiming that the idea of local portable storage will be dead. That everything will be networked and centralised. He makes the point that why would we carry around some fragile copy of the data when we can just have it delivered across the network to whichever device requires it. This is the microsoft vision now, computers+network access in everything. It's an interesting idea but local portable media has so many uses that I doubt it will disappear. Especially given that it is so cheap to make that it is disposible. Already blank DVD prices are cheap enough to make DVD's disposable and Sony et al are talking about making discs out of cardboard.
You sir are so far behind the curve that it looks like a point vanishing in the distance.
I'm afraid that you're wrong. I find it quite easy to sit and read a book whilst watching tv. As another poster has mentioned the actual content in tv is quite small and I get quite bored if just sitting and watching tv. I can quite happily sit with a book and flick backwards and forwards doing both at the same time. Films are harder, and you tend to end up mostly involved in one or the other with the other activity receeding into the background.
How does having a DVI connector consume more power than VGA?
The review sucks as well. He says that getting dual vga is an acceptable compromise to gain dual-display, whats wrong with dvi/vga and a dvi->vga converter like the nvidia boards have?
It is a graph, to be precise its a DAG - Directed Acyclic Graph, which in non-technical terms is like a tree but with bits that appear in multiple places.
I guess it's a common enough idea, I've been planning to write some scripts to do it for ages, but they have to cope with the crappy organisation in my music folder at the moment. Naming consistency is the key to making it work sucessfully. I was thinking of having one big flat folder with album sub-folders, each containing the artist / album name, then having text files with genre tags. A script can run over the data and generate a hierarchy built out of sym-links.
Ahh, I sense a busy sunday afternoon coming on...
Err, the server's down. Does anyone know what 10-digit computation or logisitic separations? I'm used to people spouting crap on /. but normally that's in the comments after the summary, not in it.
Perhaps, but the power from a collection of small specialised commands comes from the ability to recombine them into lots of possible applications. With a command-line, and temporary files or pipes it is easy to do this, I've yet to see a way of combining specialised GUI apps that works as well.
So you're replying to someone pointing out what's wrong with windows and why unix is more usable, and your reply is to point out that you can download cygwin? Can't you see the inherent flaw here, that the best way to match the power of the command prompt is to download a unix subsystem for windows? If the windows philosophy were a good one - building large monolithic applications - then there would be a better way to match the power of the command line than to use unix.