There isn't a great deal in common between a Cesna and an A380. In the latter the computer translates your input into something that is safe for the plane - which it can do just as well with a virtual world and a virtual plane. There is no particular need to have great experience with small planes that, even if you could disconnect all of the fly by wire kit, handle in a matter so different that you might as well suggest that we train for driving big rigs on a bicycle.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of this technology has been risk reduced on military aircraft programs, and in general it has made things safer by giving pilots more realistic training before they even get into the cockpit of a high energy death machine. If I owned a multi-million dollar super jumbo I know I wouldn't feel too happy whenever a pilot sat at the controls for the first time, but I might be a little bit less concerned if they had already flown several hundred hours in a representative simulation.
The Zune is out on display in best buy stores. It has one stand. The video it is showing is grainy and because of the strip lights its hard to see.
Compare and contrast with the iPod Nano - there is only one nano display, but there are about a million Nano's out for people to play with because they are being used as part of demo sets for speakers, headphones, in car entertainment systems, kids toys. There are just a lot more units for people to get their hands on and try out - at this point. I imagine things will be a little bit different when Best Buy has a whole aisle for nothing but Zune protective cases, like the do for iPods right now.
They already do this. Haven't you seen the back of an I94? They actually ask you to tick a yes/no box to say if you were a member of the Nazi Germany administration in the 1940s amongst other things.
Look at usenet. As soon as anyone could use it with low barriers to entry there were enough people there to attack spam and trolls and all of the rest of it.
For many many services the ideal number of people is just above the critical mass level of committed/dedicated users who will put in the time and effort to make things work and just below the level at which it get's noticed by the wrong people. Making it difficult to use (but powerful and flexible - features that are attractive to the dedicated people who add the most value) is a reasonable strategy for community based systems.
Wow, like IRC (and a lot of the rest of the internet) is not just destructive. It *can* be a handy sandbox that prepares people for real life.
I played WoW for about a year, running a major guild. What did I learn?
That I'm good at self depreciating humour.
That I can get people to follow me by being the first one to stand up and provide direction.
That leading people is more about knowing where you are going than how you are going to get there.
How to negotiate peace between two people who have genuinely lost sight of what's important.
Which of those skills have turned out to be useful in my current career? 100% of them. I stand up every day knowing that basically the people I work with are no different to the people I played with, that saying something is better than saying nothing, and that if I get fired hell at least I can enjoy my unemployment hunting for epics with some old friends. It's the same confidence that people who lead sports teams at school get... and now it's available to geeks.
I might point out that being acclimatised to 70 hour working weeks and doing the same boring crap over and over also helps in the real world. Being able to have two priorities and still getting everything done with really limited time isn't exactly bad practice either.
Would I hire ex gamers? Probably. It depends if they have used their time to do something valuable, like learning how to build their confidence, lead, motivate and get along with others - and that's hard to demonstrate.
Like everything else - knowing when you have learned as much as you can and it's time to move on is a big part of determining if online games will be a constructive or destructive thing for you.
There should be some kind of government run website somewhere.
You would answer questions and it would give you license keys to software that you were qualified to use. For example, I might tick:
Engineer (check) Artist ( ) Manager (check) Linux (Check) Mac ( ) Windows ( )
And it would issue keys for website point and click installation software, Vi, apache and Latex - but deny me keys to powerpoint thereby saving the lives of people who might otherwise have to gnaw off their own leg to survive my 8 hour presentation on optimising synergisyms in a web 3.0 environment by sub molecular interactions.
It's ok, if you don't like it just don't download the patch and just continue playing it your way with your mates on the local LAN...
Oh, wait, it's a Steam Game.
Guess you are screwed then. This is what happens when you buy locked down products - and if you want more examples, just look at what happened to SWG (did you get a refund when the game turned into something that you were not sold? could you carry on playing the game you *were* sold?) or World of Warcraft (goodbye, forty man raids, around which a lot of players have built their guilds).
What happens in the future when this kind of crap gets extended to other aspects of life via DRM? Lucas might 'upgrade' every release of star wars automatically when he finishes the new tri-gital remastered version, now with 3D Jar Jar Binks. Apple might cut down the number of times you can burn your purchased songs to CDs without giving you a chance to stick to the old terms and conditions.
Normally such a rant would end with some message of hope for the future. Well here it is: In my case I'm going to work very hard to make sure I'm on the end doing the exploiting, so I get to enjoy it all the way to the bank.
I'm addicted to talking to people. I do it every freaking day, no matter how hard I try to give up! If I go a whole day without talking to someone, I feel bad about life. It's crippling my ability to get anything done....
On the other hand, where there's a problem there's money to be made prolonging the solution.
Dr R.D. MD, BA, MIEEE Internet Councilor Book now, only $932,377 per session!
Having 650,000 people chasing around doing things that do not need to be done is *not* good for the economy unless the end result is that production is greater (over the whole economy) than the gain that could be made of the alternative use of their time.
Now while I could probably be convinced that Windows Vista has _some_ productivity benefits over current systems I doubt it's really that large. In many cases the net contribution of these 650k people is going to be in fact negative as their disruption and need to prove their own continued usefullness actually decreases productivity of society as a whole - fixing things that aren't broken for example.
In this advanced age geeks press a button on their random number generator, using the background radiation of the universe as a source of entropy, to provide an output in the range of 1-n where n is determined by the characteristics of the die placed on the optical scanner.
Thankfully they don't seem to have changed the apparance yet. IBM Ugly doesn't get many plaudits, but it definatly says "this is a laptop with which I could beat you to death for your stupidity and using your rubbish little Acer as a shield isn't going to help you one bit".
Re:Crypto is scary stuff
on
Crypto Snake Oil
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
sci.crypt is a good read if you are interested in Crypto. However it does tend to get a bit antagonistic towards newbies - and it's not hard to see why.
Approximatly every 12.5 minutes someone turns up claiming to have invented a new:
Random number generator Unbreakable encryption method Implimentation of old methods that makes them unbreakable Proof that shows that all crypto is worthless
The percentage of loons is *so* high that anyone who does have an interesting idea (and who doesn't publish in reputable journals) is dismissed out of hand.
For example, here is a typical conversation from the one sane new poster (posted somewhere between the 999,999 people trying to sell "200000 bit quantum crypto based on the randomness of STARS!!!!!"):
<i>** Hi, I'd like to find out if there's a RNG sandbox somewhere so I can play about with some ideas.</i>
<i>* ARGH! Dont impliment your own RNG! It'll be crap! Here, use product X.</i>
Well, yes, that's true. When it comes to crypto there is a 99% chance that what you impliment will not work properly and as a result will be insecure... but stoping on someone who wants to try some ideas out is just plain wrong. All research doesnt have to take place in academic institutions.
That means your annual battery replacement is almost $70,000 (I.E. most of the price of the car.)
Basic sanity check please! If the batteries cost $70k then they cannot afford to sell you the car for $80k! Your estimate is over by a minimum of at _least_ 50% and probably more.
The British Army are, I believe, required to mark out where minefields are and clean them up when they leave the area.
Obviously removing mines is a nervous business (unless you have one of the awesome <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_tank">W W2 style flail tanks</a>, which look like so much fun they should be illegal) and so being able to remotley disable them makes a great deal of sense. The chance of an enemy being able to discover a 256bit AES key is essentially zero and certainly a preferable option to accidentally immolating a bunch of your own sappers in almost all circumstances.
Enough so that, while I still have Gentoo on my desktops, I run it on my powerbook.
It hasn't, however, hurt Apple - as I fully intend to by a MacBook Pro as my next laptop. Sure it'll still run Linux but Apple will be the one getting the money.
Of course it's interesting to note that with the advent of DirectX 10 Linux may actually become the second best gaming platform in front of Windows XP and only just behind Vista*. The knifing in the back of OpenGL is probably going to end the porting of games to OS X except by the really die hard software houses (who, yes, probably make the best games anyway) come to an abrupt end, and I doubt that DX9 game development will consider must past 2 years and definatly not beyond Win XP end of life**.
*Depends on how many laws you wish to violate - Cedega will probably get DX10 support eventually, plus emulation for everything up to DX 9 is very, very good. It's already less painful to play Win 9X era games under Linux than Windows.
**Should have been 2005 given the same support lifespan as Win 2k! Probably no later than early 2008 at best.
The Mac support thing also means that the games tend to support OpenGL, which works a lot better with Cedega or WINE than direct X and allows a (surprisingly large) number of people to play on Linux.
Of the 40 or so hard core MMPORPG players I know, about a third play on Linux. The demographic of hardcore raiders and Linux users must overlap pretty well.
It depends on how they do it. If they impliment a working standards compliant version... well, that'll be great.
Based on what they did to Java, HTML and everything else they have ever touched it'll be a almost compliant version, to an out of date standard, that is a massive pain in the ass to use with non-MS products. (Ref IIS/IE/Frontpage etc etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't a great deal in common between a Cesna and an A380. In the latter the computer translates your input into something that is safe for the plane - which it can do just as well with a virtual world and a virtual plane. There is no particular need to have great experience with small planes that, even if you could disconnect all of the fly by wire kit, handle in a matter so different that you might as well suggest that we train for driving big rigs on a bicycle.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of this technology has been risk reduced on military aircraft programs, and in general it has made things safer by giving pilots more realistic training before they even get into the cockpit of a high energy death machine. If I owned a multi-million dollar super jumbo I know I wouldn't feel too happy whenever a pilot sat at the controls for the first time, but I might be a little bit less concerned if they had already flown several hundred hours in a representative simulation.
The Zune is out on display in best buy stores. It has one stand. The video it is showing is grainy and because of the strip lights its hard to see.
Compare and contrast with the iPod Nano - there is only one nano display, but there are about a million Nano's out for people to play with because they are being used as part of demo sets for speakers, headphones, in car entertainment systems, kids toys. There are just a lot more units for people to get their hands on and try out - at this point. I imagine things will be a little bit different when Best Buy has a whole aisle for nothing but Zune protective cases, like the do for iPods right now.
If it's GPL it'll get ported to Linux and then my marriage will be over! Please! For the love of Mike! I only just escaped from WoW!
They already do this. Haven't you seen the back of an I94? They actually ask you to tick a yes/no box to say if you were a member of the Nazi Germany administration in the 1940s amongst other things.
They don't need to edit anyone out. Just check your Windows EULA - it's in there right after the section concerning rights to your immortal soul.
Look at usenet. As soon as anyone could use it with low barriers to entry there were enough people there to attack spam and trolls and all of the rest of it.
For many many services the ideal number of people is just above the critical mass level of committed/dedicated users who will put in the time and effort to make things work and just below the level at which it get's noticed by the wrong people. Making it difficult to use (but powerful and flexible - features that are attractive to the dedicated people who add the most value) is a reasonable strategy for community based systems.
Work mailboxes are limited to 75mb and auto purged of content over 15 days old.
Does this mean that they will help the OLPC project out with some funding now rather than making fun of it?
Wow, like IRC (and a lot of the rest of the internet) is not just destructive. It *can* be a handy sandbox that prepares people for real life.
I played WoW for about a year, running a major guild. What did I learn?
That I'm good at self depreciating humour.
That I can get people to follow me by being the first one to stand up and provide direction.
That leading people is more about knowing where you are going than how you are going to get there.
How to negotiate peace between two people who have genuinely lost sight of what's important.
Which of those skills have turned out to be useful in my current career? 100% of them. I stand up every day knowing that basically the people I work with are no different to the people I played with, that saying something is better than saying nothing, and that if I get fired hell at least I can enjoy my unemployment hunting for epics with some old friends. It's the same confidence that people who lead sports teams at school get... and now it's available to geeks.
I might point out that being acclimatised to 70 hour working weeks and doing the same boring crap over and over also helps in the real world. Being able to have two priorities and still getting everything done with really limited time isn't exactly bad practice either.
Would I hire ex gamers? Probably. It depends if they have used their time to do something valuable, like learning how to build their confidence, lead, motivate and get along with others - and that's hard to demonstrate.
Like everything else - knowing when you have learned as much as you can and it's time to move on is a big part of determining if online games will be a constructive or destructive thing for you.
There should be some kind of government run website somewhere.
You would answer questions and it would give you license keys to software that you were qualified to use. For example, I might tick:
Engineer (check)
Artist ( )
Manager (check)
Linux (Check)
Mac ( )
Windows ( )
And it would issue keys for website point and click installation software, Vi, apache and Latex - but deny me keys to powerpoint thereby saving the lives of people who might otherwise have to gnaw off their own leg to survive my 8 hour presentation on optimising synergisyms in a web 3.0 environment by sub molecular interactions.
It's ok, if you don't like it just don't download the patch and just continue playing it your way with your mates on the local LAN...
Oh, wait, it's a Steam Game.
Guess you are screwed then. This is what happens when you buy locked down products - and if you want more examples, just look at what happened to SWG (did you get a refund when the game turned into something that you were not sold? could you carry on playing the game you *were* sold?) or World of Warcraft (goodbye, forty man raids, around which a lot of players have built their guilds).
What happens in the future when this kind of crap gets extended to other aspects of life via DRM? Lucas might 'upgrade' every release of star wars automatically when he finishes the new tri-gital remastered version, now with 3D Jar Jar Binks. Apple might cut down the number of times you can burn your purchased songs to CDs without giving you a chance to stick to the old terms and conditions.
Normally such a rant would end with some message of hope for the future. Well here it is: In my case I'm going to work very hard to make sure I'm on the end doing the exploiting, so I get to enjoy it all the way to the bank.
I'm addicted to talking to people. I do it every freaking day, no matter how hard I try to give up! If I go a whole day without talking to someone, I feel bad about life. It's crippling my ability to get anything done. ...
On the other hand, where there's a problem there's money to be made prolonging the solution.
Dr R.D. MD, BA, MIEEE
Internet Councilor
Book now, only $932,377 per session!
Having 650,000 people chasing around doing things that do not need to be done is *not* good for the economy unless the end result is that production is greater (over the whole economy) than the gain that could be made of the alternative use of their time.
Now while I could probably be convinced that Windows Vista has _some_ productivity benefits over current systems I doubt it's really that large. In many cases the net contribution of these 650k people is going to be in fact negative as their disruption and need to prove their own continued usefullness actually decreases productivity of society as a whole - fixing things that aren't broken for example.
I'd hate to go to China and try to play with my Wii and discover that it was disabled until I returned home.
In this advanced age geeks press a button on their random number generator, using the background radiation of the universe as a source of entropy, to provide an output in the range of 1-n where n is determined by the characteristics of the die placed on the optical scanner.
Is actually 300, but since his innovation was a fountain of youth an exception was made.
Thankfully they don't seem to have changed the apparance yet. IBM Ugly doesn't get many plaudits, but it definatly says "this is a laptop with which I could beat you to death for your stupidity and using your rubbish little Acer as a shield isn't going to help you one bit".
sci.crypt is a good read if you are interested in Crypto. However it does tend to get a bit antagonistic towards newbies - and it's not hard to see why.
Approximatly every 12.5 minutes someone turns up claiming to have invented a new:
Random number generator
Unbreakable encryption method
Implimentation of old methods that makes them unbreakable
Proof that shows that all crypto is worthless
The percentage of loons is *so* high that anyone who does have an interesting idea (and who doesn't publish in reputable journals) is dismissed out of hand.
For example, here is a typical conversation from the one sane new poster (posted somewhere between the 999,999 people trying to sell "200000 bit quantum crypto based on the randomness of STARS!!!!!"):
<i>** Hi, I'd like to find out if there's a RNG sandbox somewhere so I can play about with some ideas.</i>
<i>* ARGH! Dont impliment your own RNG! It'll be crap! Here, use product X.</i>
Well, yes, that's true. When it comes to crypto there is a 99% chance that what you impliment will not work properly and as a result will be insecure... but stoping on someone who wants to try some ideas out is just plain wrong. All research doesnt have to take place in academic institutions.
That means your annual battery replacement is almost $70,000 (I.E. most of the price of the car.)
Basic sanity check please! If the batteries cost $70k then they cannot afford to sell you the car for $80k! Your estimate is over by a minimum of at _least_ 50% and probably more.
The British Army are, I believe, required to mark out where minefields are and clean them up when they leave the area.
W W2 style flail tanks</a>, which look like so much fun they should be illegal) and so being able to remotley disable them makes a great deal of sense. The chance of an enemy being able to discover a 256bit AES key is essentially zero and certainly a preferable option to accidentally immolating a bunch of your own sappers in almost all circumstances.
Obviously removing mines is a nervous business (unless you have one of the awesome <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_tank">
Enough so that, while I still have Gentoo on my desktops, I run it on my powerbook.
It hasn't, however, hurt Apple - as I fully intend to by a MacBook Pro as my next laptop. Sure it'll still run Linux but Apple will be the one getting the money.
Because.
(Oh, and also because FreeDOS running in a VM plays some wierd DOS games very well.)
Of course it's interesting to note that with the advent of DirectX 10 Linux may actually become the second best gaming platform in front of Windows XP and only just behind Vista*. The knifing in the back of OpenGL is probably going to end the porting of games to OS X except by the really die hard software houses (who, yes, probably make the best games anyway) come to an abrupt end, and I doubt that DX9 game development will consider must past 2 years and definatly not beyond Win XP end of life**.
*Depends on how many laws you wish to violate - Cedega will probably get DX10 support eventually, plus emulation for everything up to DX 9 is very, very good. It's already less painful to play Win 9X era games under Linux than Windows.
**Should have been 2005 given the same support lifespan as Win 2k! Probably no later than early 2008 at best.
The Mac support thing also means that the games tend to support OpenGL, which works a lot better with Cedega or WINE than direct X and allows a (surprisingly large) number of people to play on Linux.
Of the 40 or so hard core MMPORPG players I know, about a third play on Linux. The demographic of hardcore raiders and Linux users must overlap pretty well.
It depends on how they do it. If they impliment a working standards compliant version... well, that'll be great.
Based on what they did to Java, HTML and everything else they have ever touched it'll be a almost compliant version, to an out of date standard, that is a massive pain in the ass to use with non-MS products. (Ref IIS/IE/Frontpage etc etc.)