Oh, com'on, where's your greedy, capitalist spirit? What's a slipped decimal point or two in your thrust calculations compared to $20 TRILLION dollars? Be a man, take some risk!
So, on the one hand we have all the game makers vehemently denying that the violence of FPS's can be blamed for causing young people in the real world to go shoot up their schools, while on the other you have former high-ranking military officers declaring:
"The technology in games has facilitated a revolution in the art of warfare," says David Bartlett, the former chief of operations at the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, a high-level office within the Defense Department and the focal point for computer-generated training at the Pentagon. "When the time came for him" -- meaning Swales -- "to fire his weapon, he was ready to do that. And capable of doing that. His experience leading up to that time, through on-the-ground training and playing 'Halo' and whatever else, enabled him to execute. His situation awareness was up. He knew what he had to do. He had done it before -- or something like it up to that point."
No, it's brilliant!! They can go through *EIGHT* generations of clever product names and tag lines using only *two* characters: Viiv I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII. Think of the savings! It's, it's... REVOLUTIONARY! (lol!)
Sigh... How do great technology companies, founded and nurtured by really smart engineers and scientists, come to this? How do the marketing dweebs slowly, silently lobotomize these bastions of rational thought and clear, concise communication? Ah, Intel, I'm glad I knew ye...
Intel has announced a deal with 3D Realms that Duke Nukem Forever will only run on their Viiv IV platform. Said Intel CEO Paul Otellini, "2009 will be a great year for us, I can just tell!".
At 53, I've been playing computer games since I sat at an VT52 about 30 years ago and saw the computer spit out, "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully."
Then came StarTrek -- on an cool new VT100! A capital 'E' was the Enterprise, a capital 'K' a Klingon ship, a '*' was a star, etc. Oh, and a capital 'S' was the dreaded SuperCommander, a Romulan super-ship. Ooooooo!:)
Of course, it didn't stop there. I was instantly addicted with the original Doom when it came out, and spent many pleasant hours on my Mac IIci playing Myst (yep, I went both ways in those days, PC and Mac). Descent consumed so much of my life I think of it as my EverCrack (which I didn't even dare to try...).
The Diablo series was a fantastic break thru in game play, at least for me. WarCraft was, well, simply a bit slow paced. The first Myth was pretty good, but, again, the speed and adrenaline of the FPS's called. Quake, wow! Quake II? Awesome! But, alas, by this time (early 2000's) my reflexes start to slow, and playing online against others that are 20 years younger starts to tell the tale.
So, the "grey gamer", at least in my case, is really a very long-time gamer. What I'd like to see is either more games like RTCW:ET, where there is more than just fire-and-jump-around going on, or perhaps ways to form "senior" leagues where folks of the same skill (i.e., reflex speed) can play competitively.
The point is, adding non-standard enhancements to C is a long accepted practice. Even when done by big, powerful companies. And, IIRC, no one considered it all that obnoxious, as long as it didn't break old code (i.e., was either a superset feature or could be controlled by compile-time options). It was competing, it was innovation, it was pushing the envelope. Now, all of a sudden, because it's MS, it's "news", it's "oooooooo, scary!". Baloney. This is just slashdot paranoia and/or bias at its worst.
from dictionary.com:
rent (2) Audio pronunciation of "rent" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (rnt)
v.
A past tense and a past participle of rend.
"I don't recall" puts the tense into the past, yes? (no?:-)
So what if MS tries to super-set C++ -- big deal! The industry as a whole has only been doing this to C for, oh, 30 years or so? Have you ever looked at list of advanced, non-standard features of "GNU C" (note the full name in quotes)? And I don't recall in which C compiler I first saw support for the end-of-line comment "//" (Vax C?), but is sure as hell was non-standard at the time. I don't recall any pulling of hair and renting of garments over that.
... look at the hi-res photo and graphic of the virus and immediately think of a conventional high-exposive bomb? The "tail hub" looks like a proximity fuse, the "portal" looks like a screw-in cap plug, and the "dsDNA terminus" and "core" look like a primary fuse. The "dsDNA" looks like the main charge, and the "shell" looks like, well, the shell.
All those little-bitty bombs, floating around in your blood stream, looking for a target to impact and go "BOOM!".
Think I'll need a big scotch before I go to bed tonight so's I can sleep...
...when Mathematics can say whether or not Art is authentic hmmmm... that's not exactly what the article says. It says Mathematics can (possibly) say what is or is not an authentic Rembrandt. It does not metnion being able to determine Art from non-Art.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget: Chase the pretty, young interns (or handsome, young interns -- equal opportunty, etc.)
(I am joking...:-)
An orc has genitals shaped like a Chinese male's head? Cool....(see photo)
I'll bet you a $100 they're not... right after I reach level 45 on WoW...
So, which is it?
No, it's brilliant!! They can go through *EIGHT* generations of clever product names and tag lines using only *two* characters: Viiv I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII. Think of the savings! It's, it's... REVOLUTIONARY! (lol!)
Sigh... How do great technology companies, founded and nurtured by really smart engineers and scientists, come to this? How do the marketing dweebs slowly, silently lobotomize these bastions of rational thought and clear, concise communication? Ah, Intel, I'm glad I knew ye...
Then came StarTrek -- on an cool new VT100! A capital 'E' was the Enterprise, a capital 'K' a Klingon ship, a '*' was a star, etc. Oh, and a capital 'S' was the dreaded SuperCommander, a Romulan super-ship. Ooooooo! :)
Of course, it didn't stop there. I was instantly addicted with the original Doom when it came out, and spent many pleasant hours on my Mac IIci playing Myst (yep, I went both ways in those days, PC and Mac). Descent consumed so much of my life I think of it as my EverCrack (which I didn't even dare to try...).
The Diablo series was a fantastic break thru in game play, at least for me. WarCraft was, well, simply a bit slow paced. The first Myth was pretty good, but, again, the speed and adrenaline of the FPS's called. Quake, wow! Quake II? Awesome! But, alas, by this time (early 2000's) my reflexes start to slow, and playing online against others that are 20 years younger starts to tell the tale.
So, the "grey gamer", at least in my case, is really a very long-time gamer. What I'd like to see is either more games like RTCW:ET, where there is more than just fire-and-jump-around going on, or perhaps ways to form "senior" leagues where folks of the same skill (i.e., reflex speed) can play competitively.
All those little-bitty bombs, floating around in your blood stream, looking for a target to impact and go "BOOM!".
Think I'll need a big scotch before I go to bed tonight so's I can sleep...
...when Mathematics can say whether or not Art is authentic
hmmmm... that's not exactly what the article says. It says Mathematics can (possibly) say what is or is not an authentic Rembrandt. It does not metnion being able to determine Art from non-Art.
I swear, I at first read the'f' as a 't', and, oh, the imagery! What a South Park episode that would make!