This was one thing definitely missing from the GC (to play N64 games), as compared to the PS2. This will make it a lot easier to sell people a new console.
(And it will be one thing that Microsoft (probably) hasn't got!)
I really don't understand how can this factor be neglected so often. For me, backwards compatibility with the original PSX was the key reason to buy PS2 instead of XBox. I have already had a huge library of PSX games, some of which happen to be among my favorite (Syphon Filter, for example), and - more important - also among my kids favorites (Crash Bandicoot series). Choice of PS2 was a no-brainer for me. If XBox 2 won't have backwards compatibility with XBox (and right now it seems unlikely for it to have, since they chosen entirely different hardware), MS will prove that they are not just evil, they are plain nuts.
Yes, it will. Linux already works on the Gamecube and the Revolution will be backward-compatible.
"Backward compatibility" rarely works for 100% cases, especially when hardware-level hacking is taken into account. You need a hack to actually boot Linux on Game Cube. Whether this hack with work with the next console or not - it's yet to be seen but I don't hold your breath.
Why are we still limited to mice that move in only 2 dimensions. I want a harry-potter-like wand that lets me interact with the environment in more ways than just X and Y.
The problem is that your computer screen is still 2D. Even if you play Doom III on it, the final product is still a 2D rendering of a 3D environment. That's why the experimental 3D GUI never catched on, even if the techology is here. At best, you can get on your screen a sort of 2.5D, like MacOS X and its translucent objects over windows, but still mouse is better to navigate that.
I think the simplest explanation is in eternal stupidity of media moguls on both sides of the pond. They extremely often say "Oh no, it's just a British/American fad, nobody wants in on our side of the pond". Most moronic examples are the refusal of American labels to release the Beatles on the US market ("we don't need British imitation of our rock'n'roll") or what American television did (and did not) with "The Monty Python's Flying Circus". In the age of Internet, it's just much easier to get a "bootleg" edition that, say, a bootleg "Love Me Do" single in 1963. So when British TV fans can't wait to watch some cool American TV shows - they just click and get their bootlegs, before old Auntie Beeb finally wakes up and decide to broadcast it.
Shouldn't that be the other way 'round? Or am I missing somethinig?
Either way you want it, my friend. In MacOS X, you can integrate the gumdropesque beauty of GUI tools with the strange world of Unix under the hood. You can launch AppleScript from cron script or a shell script from AppleScript. To do the former all it takes is to place a command "open foo", where "foo" is your script written in AppleScript ("open foo" generally equals to double-click on foo's icon). To do the latter just include "Tell application Terminal to do script with command bar" in your AppleScript (this would equal to typing bar in your Terminal window).
Doubtless, reputations will be besmirched and careers ruined, some no doubt unjustly. And to what end? The ills of communism were many, but they are in the past.
It's never that simple. The past is always embedded in the present. If you are African-American, you could happily forget the slave past, but you can't escape the question "why my skin color makes it impossible for me to buy a flat in Upper Manhattan?". If you think Central Europe is the only region of the world haunted by ghosts from past crimes... then think again. Or better yet, talk to some Nisei, to some Native Americans or just watch "Graveyard Of The Fireflies" anime with some Japanese friend. So if you are in Poland, you are more than eager to forget about the communist past. But forget it or not, you will still ask yourself this question: why I am a poor wage-slave or unemploeyd, while my secret service tormentor has now a management position in some state-owned company?
It was only 16 years ago that Poland threw off communism with the first free elections in the former Soviet bloc. This list likely contains the names of people that did great harm to others (and also many unrelated people). To simply write offf the list as something that should be forgotten, as some have suggested, would be foolish.
It's not that simple. Surely this list contains the names of people that did great harm - but it also contains the names of people that were harmed. It's just a catalog of everyone who was in scope of the Polish secret service - either as an informer or just as someone who is being followed. It's a list of both the torturers and their victims and there is no easy way to distinguish betwenn both groups (you could be blackmailed or just tortured into being an informer). You could as well take a telephone directory - it would also probably include names from those who do the harm and those who suffer it.
Thank you Slashdot! I'm from Poland and exactly here's the first time I'm reading about this. But I'm a bit worried also. My family name is very popular on the list.
Well, your family name is also quite popular here on Slashdot. Stick around for a while and you will see many other Anonymous Cowards.
Is there really any reason they couldn't have flayed a corpse, though?
It's quite easy for a skilled forensic pathologist to distinguish bruises and weals caused by flogging a dead corpse - and flogging a living, bleeding human being. No forensic expert so far questioned anything about the realism of wounds, weals, bruises, haemorrages, joints dislocations etc. on this body.
And also, artists have been doing amazing things for a long time, some people can just visualize things a certain way that most of us cannot.
The greates painter of that era was Giotto di Bondone. Just check how he pictured human body. Painters of late Middle Ages/early Renaissance had a very naive understanding of human body proportions or perspective.
There is zero evidence not in religious texts of dubious authorship and authenticity which have been carefully selected and edited by the Church. None. Not a word anywhere in spite of the fact that the Roman Empire was in charge and they kept records of everything important.
From the Roman point of view, there was nothing important about Jesus. For the Romans, it was just Yet Another Religious Lunatic who was unfortunate enough to piss off the Jewish elders so they wanted him dead. United States of America also keep records of everything important but don't expect Uncle Sam to record details of death of yet another lunatic in Iraq who pissed of someone in Baghdad and got killed for that (and Palestine meant for the Romans exactly what Iraq means now for us: just some bloody piece of territory full of lunatics wanting to kill each other, where we try to establish Pax Romana/Pax Americana).
That brings up a great philosophical point - If we cloned Jesus, the clone would genetically be the son of God. Would he have all of Jesus's godlike powers (water to wine, part seas, etc.)? Assuming that Jesus received his god-traits from God's DNA, I don't see why not.
Christian answer is: because Jesus had dual nature - both as God and both as a man. You can clone his humanlike "half", but you can't do it with the other half. The question of what was divine and what was human in Jesus Christ was a burning one (literally - disputes like this were settled usually by violent oxidation of those who had lost the argument) in early Christianity. It was finally solved on the council of Chalcedon.
If you really want to clone Jesus, think of one major obstacle: due to Immaculate Conception, Jesus was haploid. There are no other known living specimen of homo sapiens with haploid genome, probably the divine half was required to actually make Jesus body function on molecular level:-)
The fact that it was discovered in Central Europe by a noble family and then sold - at great profit - to a monastary casts great doubt on it, in my opinion.
As far as I know, the Shroud never was in Central Europe. What we know for sure is that in late XIV century it was in posession of French noble family de Charnay and they indeed donated it to a church in Lirey, France. There's no hard evidence on what happened to the Shroud prior to that - maybe de Charnay's had forged it or maybe one of them manged to capture it in the Middle East during the crusades. Prior to about 1350, any guess is as good as any other guess.
Anyway, the image is burned into the cloth (the two burn marks on it are separate, it was partially destroyed in a fire not long after its discovery). The leading belief among the clergy of the time it was discovered was that it was created by placing hot metal plates onto the cloth.
Probably, yeah. But just think how technically could you achieve this level of realism when creating a metal template in XIV century. First you'd have to take a real tormented dead body and then somehow transfer the image on sheer metal plate. With some help of a skilled alchemist you could try to use some sort of camera obscura to achieve this with 1350's technology, but it would be really a hassle. Paradoxically, it would be counterproductive from a forger's point of view. To amaze pilgrim crowds in 1350, you should simply paint the image and presto, the holy relic is all yours. The funny thing about the Shroud is that it seems to be designed specifically to amaze people in our times - modern forensic pathologists can't find any flaw in the anatomical details, modern scientists can't find any pigment, modern photography displays hidden details, invisible to naked eye. Why did the forger work so hard to amaze people 6 centuries later - instead of his contemporary folks, that's a real mystery.
Why does one have to assume that someone was 'tortured to death' ? It may simply be someone who died a peaceful death and was made up to look like JC after being on the cross.
Forensic examination proves that the person whose body is visible on the Shroud died by crucifixion (for example, his shoulder and elbow joints joints are disclocated accordingly), that is, by very slow and painful suffocation. Also his body exhibits traces of flogging by typical Roman flagrum. It is absolutely impossible for Medieval artist to "guess" how to paint it realistically without a real model (actually, it would be a hard task even for contemporary one).
...that God made the entire universe universe, impregnated some woman on a the third planet from a very insignificant star
Please explain what makes you so sure that this is a "very insignificant star". Maybe it isn't? Maybe it is a significant planet orbiting a significant star, after all?
especially the right to insult someone who has beliefs that are not based on anything real
Let me insult you now, because you clearly mistake "beliefs" with "knowledge". By definition, beliefs do not need to be based on anything real. If you want to base something on "anything real" - you need to have a certain belief, namely believe that there is actually something which is both real and accessible to your senses. It's a common belief, but still a belief - you might as well be a classic "brain in a jar" and see only simulacra. This belief is NOT based on anything real, because you base your perception of reality on this belief, so if you'd try to do it otherwise, you'd have a typical fool's circle.
there's nothing DUMB about joking about a piece of cloth that shouldn't really be worth anything to you if you believed it to be real.
Well, if you take the assumption that the Shroud is a medieval counterfeit (and this is also my belief, if you ask) - you'd have to assume that someone in Middle Ages was tortured to death and his dead body was somehow proto-photographed on the linen, which might be possible technically even then. Anatomical details are just too accurate for the Shroud to be merely a paintwork coming from the artist's imagination (medieval painters in the era of Giotto di Bondone simply did not know how to paint human body accurately, this knowledge was rediscovered in late Renaissance). So watching the Shroud, you watch a recording of someone's pain and death. If you find someone's torment and agony funny, I'd say that you are dumb indeed (that's for the insult).
So if they're really cranking out the G5 PBs now, then there's gotta be a bunch of photographers and models running around offices and parks, probably in California, posing for those action shots.
In California kids learn how to say "NDA" before they learn how to say "momma". Seriously, when powerbook 12" and 17" were shown for the first time, Apple already has had prepared a TV ad starring two celebrities - Yao Ming of NBA fame and Verne Troyer, "Mini Me" from the Austin Powers series (that's how 12" got its nickname). Yet these powerbooks took everyone by surprise. Apple could right now be developing iBeam, portable teleportation device, with Paris Hilton starring in commercials being shot right now on Rodeo Drive, and everyone would keep mum, because their Non Disclosure Agreements would basically say that their balls will be teleported if a word comes out about it.
>PS3 will provide graphics indistinguishable from movies.
So, what's left for the PS4 then?
Seriously, improvement in graphics does not interest me as much as genuine improvement in the AI of the computer controlled characters. What's the point of having opponents with "graphics indistinguishable from movies" when they still are as stupid as in the original Quake? I'm really waiting for a first person shooter where your opponents could actually launch some coordinated action against you - and you could also have some small talk with the NPC's, not limited to just a few random prerecorded lines. These random lines were a real mood breaker in "Half-Life" or "Max Payne". All those "Ah, Gordon, good to see you" in the most inappropriate situations...
But why? I really don't understand the draw of the mac as a server. The things people claim macs are good about have to do with intuitive gui, clean gui, conducive to productivity. These are not really important for servers.
What makes you say so? Imagine a small home network. It's quite obvious that in a home network, a silent machine running 24/7 might come handy - to share the printer among all home users, to share the internet connection via Airport/WiFi, to share the common iTunes Music Library for all the home users, to serve as a firewall for home network, to serve Apache to the outside world etc. Why do we rarely see setup like this in non-geeky households? Because it requires geeky skills on both Windows and Linux. That's why you think that servers don't need to be easy to setup and configure - because non-geeks don't even TRY. But if you use Mac Mini, you can setup all the services described above with a few clicks on intuitive icons ("Enable Web Sharing", "Enable Firewall", "Share iTunes Music Library", "Share Printer" etc). Plus - it's silent, so you don't need "server room" in your household, Mac Mini can provide all these services, like, anywhere you want. And just connect a keyboard/monitor whenever you want to change some services or configurations.
What I can't quite make out is if the MiniMac is fanless?
I'm typing this right from the showroom in mini-MWSF in Paris. Silent work is also quite important for me. What can I say is that Mini Mac is totally silent when it works (I literally did press my ear to it). Maybe it has a fan that kicks in once in a while, like in iBooks, but when it just runs - it runs with no fan.
...is to be showcased at MacWorld San Francisco next week, at ATI's own booth (#2217). Personally I'm more anxious to see it that all the alleged "headless eMacs" and "80G iPods". I'm not sure if you can call it vaporware, it was rather a product that missed its deadline for a couple of weeks (and since it was mid-December, availability was delayed to early January).
Why can't someone port the Direct3D API to Linux? This would save a lot of hassle of porting the games to OpenGL.
I don't think so. It's been almost 2 years since DirectX is available for MacOS, developed by British company Coderus. So far, no major breakthrough was achieved this way - main Macintosh game ports are done "the hard way" by companies like Aspyr Media, that's why it takes so long. Only a handful of Mac ports actually use MacDX. It's probably because when you move a game from Windows to Unix-ish environment, you still have to change so many things (Unix privileges etc.) that the 3D API is only a fraction of it.
What would have happened if Albert
Einstein had worked creating amazing pinball games instead of creating the
theory of relativity? Humanity would suffer! Jon carmack is unfortunately
doing JUST THIS, using his gifts at computer coding to create games instead
of furthering the knowledge of humanity.
It's an obvious troll, but I'll feed it to stop proliferation of a dangerous meme. Geniuses never work alone with their thoughts - they need to relax and concentrate in order to pursue their own ideas. Deprive Einstein of his famous pipe, his even more famous violin or his (slightly less) famous yacht and you won't get a genius, you will get someone who is too frustrated to work anymore. The old proverb about geniuses "standing on the shoulder of giants" is only partially true - they also stand on the shoulders of anonymous persons who satisfy their daily needs, just like Einstein stood not just on arms of Poincare or Newton, but also on the shoulders of anonymous guy in some Long Island marina, who kept his yacht ship shape, so Einstein could safely sail and think. You never know who is relaxing his tired mind fragging monsters in Quake this very moment. It could very well be this century's Einstein.
Doom had a very thin, almost inexistant story. It was actually more of a pretext than an actual story. The gameplay made the game shines though, no question about that. And let's not forget the ambient fear of those dark corridors... *shivers*
Well, that's precisely what the name of the company is supposed to mean - in Freudian terms, "id" is the uncouscious, unspoken, instinct-based. "Doom" has very little narrative story - but it has a very complex non-verbal story based on what you aptly descibed, the "ambient fear", the xenophobic loathing of the "other", the pure instinct of agression etc. I think Carmack & Romero were right on this one - FPP appeals better to your id than to your superego. If you want to read lenghty texts, play some cRPG...
Slashdot Mirror
This was one thing definitely missing from the GC (to play N64 games), as compared to the PS2. This will make it a lot easier to sell people a new console. (And it will be one thing that Microsoft (probably) hasn't got!)
I really don't understand how can this factor be neglected so often. For me, backwards compatibility with the original PSX was the key reason to buy PS2 instead of XBox. I have already had a huge library of PSX games, some of which happen to be among my favorite (Syphon Filter, for example), and - more important - also among my kids favorites (Crash Bandicoot series). Choice of PS2 was a no-brainer for me. If XBox 2 won't have backwards compatibility with XBox (and right now it seems unlikely for it to have, since they chosen entirely different hardware), MS will prove that they are not just evil, they are plain nuts.
Yes, it will. Linux already works on the Gamecube and the Revolution will be backward-compatible.
"Backward compatibility" rarely works for 100% cases, especially when hardware-level hacking is taken into account. You need a hack to actually boot Linux on Game Cube. Whether this hack with work with the next console or not - it's yet to be seen but I don't hold your breath.
Why are we still limited to mice that move in only 2 dimensions. I want a harry-potter-like wand that lets me interact with the environment in more ways than just X and Y.
The problem is that your computer screen is still 2D. Even if you play Doom III on it, the final product is still a 2D rendering of a 3D environment. That's why the experimental 3D GUI never catched on, even if the techology is here. At best, you can get on your screen a sort of 2.5D, like MacOS X and its translucent objects over windows, but still mouse is better to navigate that.
Use a headset.
Are you sure that having a Bluetooth wireless unit close to your brain cells will make that much of improvement?
I think the simplest explanation is in eternal stupidity of media moguls on both sides of the pond. They extremely often say "Oh no, it's just a British/American fad, nobody wants in on our side of the pond". Most moronic examples are the refusal of American labels to release the Beatles on the US market ("we don't need British imitation of our rock'n'roll") or what American television did (and did not) with "The Monty Python's Flying Circus". In the age of Internet, it's just much easier to get a "bootleg" edition that, say, a bootleg "Love Me Do" single in 1963. So when British TV fans can't wait to watch some cool American TV shows - they just click and get their bootlegs, before old Auntie Beeb finally wakes up and decide to broadcast it.
>...use an AppleScript to run cron every day,...
Shouldn't that be the other way 'round? Or am I missing somethinig?
Either way you want it, my friend. In MacOS X, you can integrate the gumdropesque beauty of GUI tools with the strange world of Unix under the hood. You can launch AppleScript from cron script or a shell script from AppleScript. To do the former all it takes is to place a command "open foo", where "foo" is your script written in AppleScript ("open foo" generally equals to double-click on foo's icon). To do the latter just include "Tell application Terminal to do script with command bar" in your AppleScript (this would equal to typing bar in your Terminal window).
Doubtless, reputations will be besmirched and careers ruined, some no doubt unjustly. And to what end? The ills of communism were many, but they are in the past.
It's never that simple. The past is always embedded in the present. If you are African-American, you could happily forget the slave past, but you can't escape the question "why my skin color makes it impossible for me to buy a flat in Upper Manhattan?". If you think Central Europe is the only region of the world haunted by ghosts from past crimes... then think again. Or better yet, talk to some Nisei, to some Native Americans or just watch "Graveyard Of The Fireflies" anime with some Japanese friend. So if you are in Poland, you are more than eager to forget about the communist past. But forget it or not, you will still ask yourself this question: why I am a poor wage-slave or unemploeyd, while my secret service tormentor has now a management position in some state-owned company?
It was only 16 years ago that Poland threw off communism with the first free elections in the former Soviet bloc. This list likely contains the names of people that did great harm to others (and also many unrelated people). To simply write offf the list as something that should be forgotten, as some have suggested, would be foolish.
It's not that simple. Surely this list contains the names of people that did great harm - but it also contains the names of people that were harmed. It's just a catalog of everyone who was in scope of the Polish secret service - either as an informer or just as someone who is being followed. It's a list of both the torturers and their victims and there is no easy way to distinguish betwenn both groups (you could be blackmailed or just tortured into being an informer). You could as well take a telephone directory - it would also probably include names from those who do the harm and those who suffer it.
Thank you Slashdot! I'm from Poland and exactly here's the first time I'm reading about this. But I'm a bit worried also. My family name is very popular on the list.
Well, your family name is also quite popular here on Slashdot. Stick around for a while and you will see many other Anonymous Cowards.
Is there really any reason they couldn't have flayed a corpse, though?
It's quite easy for a skilled forensic pathologist to distinguish bruises and weals caused by flogging a dead corpse - and flogging a living, bleeding human being. No forensic expert so far questioned anything about the realism of wounds, weals, bruises, haemorrages, joints dislocations etc. on this body.
And also, artists have been doing amazing things for a long time, some people can just visualize things a certain way that most of us cannot. The greates painter of that era was Giotto di Bondone. Just check how he pictured human body. Painters of late Middle Ages/early Renaissance had a very naive understanding of human body proportions or perspective.
There is zero evidence not in religious texts of dubious authorship and authenticity which have been carefully selected and edited by the Church. None. Not a word anywhere in spite of the fact that the Roman Empire was in charge and they kept records of everything important.
From the Roman point of view, there was nothing important about Jesus. For the Romans, it was just Yet Another Religious Lunatic who was unfortunate enough to piss off the Jewish elders so they wanted him dead. United States of America also keep records of everything important but don't expect Uncle Sam to record details of death of yet another lunatic in Iraq who pissed of someone in Baghdad and got killed for that (and Palestine meant for the Romans exactly what Iraq means now for us: just some bloody piece of territory full of lunatics wanting to kill each other, where we try to establish Pax Romana/Pax Americana).
That brings up a great philosophical point - If we cloned Jesus, the clone would genetically be the son of God. Would he have all of Jesus's godlike powers (water to wine, part seas, etc.)? Assuming that Jesus received his god-traits from God's DNA, I don't see why not.
:-)
Christian answer is: because Jesus had dual nature - both as God and both as a man. You can clone his humanlike "half", but you can't do it with the other half. The question of what was divine and what was human in Jesus Christ was a burning one (literally - disputes like this were settled usually by violent oxidation of those who had lost the argument) in early Christianity. It was finally solved on the council of Chalcedon.
If you really want to clone Jesus, think of one major obstacle: due to Immaculate Conception, Jesus was haploid. There are no other known living specimen of homo sapiens with haploid genome, probably the divine half was required to actually make Jesus body function on molecular level
The fact that it was discovered in Central Europe by a noble family and then sold - at great profit - to a monastary casts great doubt on it, in my opinion.
As far as I know, the Shroud never was in Central Europe. What we know for sure is that in late XIV century it was in posession of French noble family de Charnay and they indeed donated it to a church in Lirey, France. There's no hard evidence on what happened to the Shroud prior to that - maybe de Charnay's had forged it or maybe one of them manged to capture it in the Middle East during the crusades. Prior to about 1350, any guess is as good as any other guess.
Anyway, the image is burned into the cloth (the two burn marks on it are separate, it was partially destroyed in a fire not long after its discovery). The leading belief among the clergy of the time it was discovered was that it was created by placing hot metal plates onto the cloth.
Probably, yeah. But just think how technically could you achieve this level of realism when creating a metal template in XIV century. First you'd have to take a real tormented dead body and then somehow transfer the image on sheer metal plate. With some help of a skilled alchemist you could try to use some sort of camera obscura to achieve this with 1350's technology, but it would be really a hassle. Paradoxically, it would be counterproductive from a forger's point of view. To amaze pilgrim crowds in 1350, you should simply paint the image and presto, the holy relic is all yours. The funny thing about the Shroud is that it seems to be designed specifically to amaze people in our times - modern forensic pathologists can't find any flaw in the anatomical details, modern scientists can't find any pigment, modern photography displays hidden details, invisible to naked eye. Why did the forger work so hard to amaze people 6 centuries later - instead of his contemporary folks, that's a real mystery.
Why does one have to assume that someone was 'tortured to death' ? It may simply be someone who died a peaceful death and was made up to look like JC after being on the cross.
Forensic examination proves that the person whose body is visible on the Shroud died by crucifixion (for example, his shoulder and elbow joints joints are disclocated accordingly), that is, by very slow and painful suffocation. Also his body exhibits traces of flogging by typical Roman flagrum. It is absolutely impossible for Medieval artist to "guess" how to paint it realistically without a real model (actually, it would be a hard task even for contemporary one).
Lots of people died back then and where wrapped in a cloth
...yet their bodies left no visible image on the cloth. This one somehow did. I'm afraid you're missing this point now.
...that God made the entire universe universe, impregnated some woman on a the third planet from a very insignificant star
Please explain what makes you so sure that this is a "very insignificant star". Maybe it isn't? Maybe it is a significant planet orbiting a significant star, after all?
especially the right to insult someone who has beliefs that are not based on anything real
Let me insult you now, because you clearly mistake "beliefs" with "knowledge". By definition, beliefs do not need to be based on anything real. If you want to base something on "anything real" - you need to have a certain belief, namely believe that there is actually something which is both real and accessible to your senses. It's a common belief, but still a belief - you might as well be a classic "brain in a jar" and see only simulacra. This belief is NOT based on anything real, because you base your perception of reality on this belief, so if you'd try to do it otherwise, you'd have a typical fool's circle.
there's nothing DUMB about joking about a piece of cloth that shouldn't really be worth anything to you if you believed it to be real.
Well, if you take the assumption that the Shroud is a medieval counterfeit (and this is also my belief, if you ask) - you'd have to assume that someone in Middle Ages was tortured to death and his dead body was somehow proto-photographed on the linen, which might be possible technically even then. Anatomical details are just too accurate for the Shroud to be merely a paintwork coming from the artist's imagination (medieval painters in the era of Giotto di Bondone simply did not know how to paint human body accurately, this knowledge was rediscovered in late Renaissance). So watching the Shroud, you watch a recording of someone's pain and death. If you find someone's torment and agony funny, I'd say that you are dumb indeed (that's for the insult).
So if they're really cranking out the G5 PBs now, then there's gotta be a bunch of photographers and models running around offices and parks, probably in California, posing for those action shots.
In California kids learn how to say "NDA" before they learn how to say "momma". Seriously, when powerbook 12" and 17" were shown for the first time, Apple already has had prepared a TV ad starring two celebrities - Yao Ming of NBA fame and Verne Troyer, "Mini Me" from the Austin Powers series (that's how 12" got its nickname). Yet these powerbooks took everyone by surprise. Apple could right now be developing iBeam, portable teleportation device, with Paris Hilton starring in commercials being shot right now on Rodeo Drive, and everyone would keep mum, because their Non Disclosure Agreements would basically say that their balls will be teleported if a word comes out about it.
>PS3 will provide graphics indistinguishable from movies.
So, what's left for the PS4 then?
Seriously, improvement in graphics does not interest me as much as genuine improvement in the AI of the computer controlled characters. What's the point of having opponents with "graphics indistinguishable from movies" when they still are as stupid as in the original Quake? I'm really waiting for a first person shooter where your opponents could actually launch some coordinated action against you - and you could also have some small talk with the NPC's, not limited to just a few random prerecorded lines. These random lines were a real mood breaker in "Half-Life" or "Max Payne". All those "Ah, Gordon, good to see you" in the most inappropriate situations...
But why? I really don't understand the draw of the mac as a server. The things people claim macs are good about have to do with intuitive gui, clean gui, conducive to productivity. These are not really important for servers.
What makes you say so? Imagine a small home network. It's quite obvious that in a home network, a silent machine running 24/7 might come handy - to share the printer among all home users, to share the internet connection via Airport/WiFi, to share the common iTunes Music Library for all the home users, to serve as a firewall for home network, to serve Apache to the outside world etc. Why do we rarely see setup like this in non-geeky households? Because it requires geeky skills on both Windows and Linux. That's why you think that servers don't need to be easy to setup and configure - because non-geeks don't even TRY. But if you use Mac Mini, you can setup all the services described above with a few clicks on intuitive icons ("Enable Web Sharing", "Enable Firewall", "Share iTunes Music Library", "Share Printer" etc). Plus - it's silent, so you don't need "server room" in your household, Mac Mini can provide all these services, like, anywhere you want. And just connect a keyboard/monitor whenever you want to change some services or configurations.
What I can't quite make out is if the MiniMac is fanless?
I'm typing this right from the showroom in mini-MWSF in Paris. Silent work is also quite important for me. What can I say is that Mini Mac is totally silent when it works (I literally did press my ear to it). Maybe it has a fan that kicks in once in a while, like in iBooks, but when it just runs - it runs with no fan.
...is to be showcased at MacWorld San Francisco next week, at ATI's own booth (#2217). Personally I'm more anxious to see it that all the alleged "headless eMacs" and "80G iPods". I'm not sure if you can call it vaporware, it was rather a product that missed its deadline for a couple of weeks (and since it was mid-December, availability was delayed to early January).
Why can't someone port the Direct3D API to Linux? This would save a lot of hassle of porting the games to OpenGL.
I don't think so. It's been almost 2 years since DirectX is available for MacOS, developed by British company Coderus. So far, no major breakthrough was achieved this way - main Macintosh game ports are done "the hard way" by companies like Aspyr Media, that's why it takes so long. Only a handful of Mac ports actually use MacDX. It's probably because when you move a game from Windows to Unix-ish environment, you still have to change so many things (Unix privileges etc.) that the 3D API is only a fraction of it.
What would have happened if Albert Einstein had worked creating amazing pinball games instead of creating the theory of relativity? Humanity would suffer! Jon carmack is unfortunately doing JUST THIS, using his gifts at computer coding to create games instead of furthering the knowledge of humanity.
It's an obvious troll, but I'll feed it to stop proliferation of a dangerous meme. Geniuses never work alone with their thoughts - they need to relax and concentrate in order to pursue their own ideas. Deprive Einstein of his famous pipe, his even more famous violin or his (slightly less) famous yacht and you won't get a genius, you will get someone who is too frustrated to work anymore. The old proverb about geniuses "standing on the shoulder of giants" is only partially true - they also stand on the shoulders of anonymous persons who satisfy their daily needs, just like Einstein stood not just on arms of Poincare or Newton, but also on the shoulders of anonymous guy in some Long Island marina, who kept his yacht ship shape, so Einstein could safely sail and think. You never know who is relaxing his tired mind fragging monsters in Quake this very moment. It could very well be this century's Einstein.
Doom had a very thin, almost inexistant story. It was actually more of a pretext than an actual story. The gameplay made the game shines though, no question about that. And let's not forget the ambient fear of those dark corridors... *shivers*
Well, that's precisely what the name of the company is supposed to mean - in Freudian terms, "id" is the uncouscious, unspoken, instinct-based. "Doom" has very little narrative story - but it has a very complex non-verbal story based on what you aptly descibed, the "ambient fear", the xenophobic loathing of the "other", the pure instinct of agression etc. I think Carmack & Romero were right on this one - FPP appeals better to your id than to your superego. If you want to read lenghty texts, play some cRPG...