Heh, you mention Peak Oil then in the same breath betray your ignorance as to what it is.
Peak Oil is _not_ "that stuff running out". It is the production of oil reaching a plateau and then going into decline. The peak of a mountain doesn't happen when you reach the valley, it happens when you've got to the top and can't go higher.
Consider this - since 2005 oil production has been on a bumpy plateau with a slight downward trend. There's tons of publicly available data you can research to confirm this. In the meantime worldwide demand continues to go up - where's your magical creation of new oil via supply and demand? Oh yes, Bakken. I'll believe that one when its up & running and producing a few million barrels a day.
You should also realise that the USA's oil production peaked in 1973 - its been all downhill ever since. Even opening up Alaska didn't reverse the decline for long. North Sea peaked in 2000 and its plummeting now. Mexico's Cantarell field is doing the same. Perhaps you should clear your head of the economic "demand will create supply" nonsense and wake up to the geological realities of living on a finite planet with finite resources. Have you checked out the EIA's reports on US inventory levels lately?
Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.
Sound nice in theory, but in practice there's no way it'd work. Most of these worms still rely on dumb users clicking/running attachments, which is how the anti-virus would need to spread as well.
Ok, so you receive an email from a friend (or stranger) saying "here's a great tool to remove viruses from your computer! Click the attachment!". How long before a virus maker starts distributing identical messages with a somewhat different payload?
CGI attempts to emulate reality more cheaply than can be done by traditional F/X, but with the state of CGI advancing so rapidly, older CGI flicks look worse than if they'd been done the traditional way, and yet, even the most high tech and up-to-date CGI doesn't look as good to our eyes as reality, something about the way light bounces off things is my guess.
When you can see obvious lighting defects, such as CGI objects lit up differently from the environment in which they're set, then yes that immediately looks fake. To me though, one of the most common flaws in CGI is that it always tends to be in perfect focus.
They're doing it because they believe that no matter what they do customers won't desert them en masse. They wanted people to buy the Wow campaign and flock to Vista voluntarily, but if that doesn't happen then they'll use their dominance to force Vista on the market.
More than anything else, this is evidence that they don't believe there's any real threat of people switching to linux or MacOSX. In their view they have a monopoly.
Most manufacturers offer their computers with Vista installed, but all it takes is a phone call or email to get them to put XP on it instead. I bought a Dell laptop a few weeks ago with XP & it was very easy to arrange.
TORCS is a more advanced racing simulation than Rars. Its held robot-programming contests for the last 3 years, with another about to start soon.
There have been several robots that use various learning techniques, though none to my knowledge have been full-blown AI/neural net solutions. To be honest, I query the advantages of doing it that way. A robot that has code to plan a smooth & optimal path around the track & calculates braking and steering accordingly will do much better (initially at least) than an AI robot that needs to learn this information. Perhaps bots that use a mix of the two (preplanning to begin with then learning to fine-tune any errors in the plan) would be the best solution.
That wasn't what he implied in the article. Scott Finnie's complaint was that the security prompts are too frequent & annoying, such that people will just click through or turn UAC off. Doing it that way means they can demonstrate how secure it all is - its all about the appearance of being secure and yes, avoiding negative publicity.
Finnie also made the point that listening to end users is no longer their priority - if it was, they'd have implemented user access controls in a more subtle, non-intrusive and usable fashion.
The game's major strength is multiplayer. Both of the metaservers support ranked play and there are many tournaments.
Were it to be open sourced every lamer with a C for Idiots book would be able to introduce the simplest cheats, such as seeing where all the enemies are on the map (the first that springs to mind - there'd be many others).
The fact that this game has been updated by fans of the game without expectation of any reward is sufficient to make it/. worthy. When has anything like that happened before?
The main advantage is that it allows the old apps to be ported to OSX. Without Carbon they'd have to be re-written from scratch - sure that's nice if you have the time and manpower, but for a lot of software houses it would be a huge deterrent.
Yes its crazy to write a brand new program in Carbon, but it was and is essential for moving old apps to OS X quickly and relatively painlessly. Horses for courses.
Slashdot Mirror
Opt-out, and get your name on a government list of "perverts". Oh yes, no problem with that at all!
Peak Oil is _not_ "that stuff running out". It is the production of oil reaching a plateau and then going into decline. The peak of a mountain doesn't happen when you reach the valley, it happens when you've got to the top and can't go higher.
Consider this - since 2005 oil production has been on a bumpy plateau with a slight downward trend. There's tons of publicly available data you can research to confirm this. In the meantime worldwide demand continues to go up - where's your magical creation of new oil via supply and demand? Oh yes, Bakken. I'll believe that one when its up & running and producing a few million barrels a day.
You should also realise that the USA's oil production peaked in 1973 - its been all downhill ever since. Even opening up Alaska didn't reverse the decline for long. North Sea peaked in 2000 and its plummeting now. Mexico's Cantarell field is doing the same. Perhaps you should clear your head of the economic "demand will create supply" nonsense and wake up to the geological realities of living on a finite planet with finite resources. Have you checked out the EIA's reports on US inventory levels lately?
Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.
Me too. The narration added character to the movie, schlocky as it was. Without it the movie seemed dull and ponderous to me.
Sound nice in theory, but in practice there's no way it'd work. Most of these worms still rely on dumb users clicking/running attachments, which is how the anti-virus would need to spread as well. Ok, so you receive an email from a friend (or stranger) saying "here's a great tool to remove viruses from your computer! Click the attachment!". How long before a virus maker starts distributing identical messages with a somewhat different payload?
CGI attempts to emulate reality more cheaply than can be done by traditional F/X, but with the state of CGI advancing so rapidly, older CGI flicks look worse than if they'd been done the traditional way, and yet, even the most high tech and up-to-date CGI doesn't look as good to our eyes as reality, something about the way light bounces off things is my guess.
When you can see obvious lighting defects, such as CGI objects lit up differently from the environment in which they're set, then yes that immediately looks fake. To me though, one of the most common flaws in CGI is that it always tends to be in perfect focus.
Not to mention Australia :(
They're doing it because they believe that no matter what they do customers won't desert them en masse. They wanted people to buy the Wow campaign and flock to Vista voluntarily, but if that doesn't happen then they'll use their dominance to force Vista on the market. More than anything else, this is evidence that they don't believe there's any real threat of people switching to linux or MacOSX. In their view they have a monopoly.
Most manufacturers offer their computers with Vista installed, but all it takes is a phone call or email to get them to put XP on it instead. I bought a Dell laptop a few weeks ago with XP & it was very easy to arrange.
TORCS is a more advanced racing simulation than Rars. Its held robot-programming contests for the last 3 years, with another about to start soon.
There have been several robots that use various learning techniques, though none to my knowledge have been full-blown AI/neural net solutions. To be honest, I query the advantages of doing it that way. A robot that has code to plan a smooth & optimal path around the track & calculates braking and steering accordingly will do much better (initially at least) than an AI robot that needs to learn this information. Perhaps bots that use a mix of the two (preplanning to begin with then learning to fine-tune any errors in the plan) would be the best solution.
That wasn't what he implied in the article. Scott Finnie's complaint was that the security prompts are too frequent & annoying, such that people will just click through or turn UAC off. Doing it that way means they can demonstrate how secure it all is - its all about the appearance of being secure and yes, avoiding negative publicity. Finnie also made the point that listening to end users is no longer their priority - if it was, they'd have implemented user access controls in a more subtle, non-intrusive and usable fashion.
The ISC has clear instructions on how to remove the unofficial patch, although it apparently co-exists ok with Microsoft's patch.
The game's major strength is multiplayer. Both of the metaservers support ranked play and there are many tournaments. Were it to be open sourced every lamer with a C for Idiots book would be able to introduce the simplest cheats, such as seeing where all the enemies are on the map (the first that springs to mind - there'd be many others). The fact that this game has been updated by fans of the game without expectation of any reward is sufficient to make it /. worthy. When has anything like that happened before?
The main advantage is that it allows the old apps to be ported to OSX. Without Carbon they'd have to be re-written from scratch - sure that's nice if you have the time and manpower, but for a lot of software houses it would be a huge deterrent. Yes its crazy to write a brand new program in Carbon, but it was and is essential for moving old apps to OS X quickly and relatively painlessly. Horses for courses.