And as for other platforms, the Mac and Solaris versions of IE might be free now, but there is no guarantee that will last forever. If Microsoft was ever completely successful in eliminating competing browsers, you could bet that they would start charging for IE on non-Windows platforms.
And from a legal perspective "I would charge for it if I could" is good enough to make the change from a free product to a commercial one? Well, then small groups of people working on non-commercial entities CAN hold trademarks!
If my physical property rights ran out and I was forced to give up my toothbrush, I would suddenly be unable to brush my teeth. If my copyright on my IP (say, The Muppet Show) ran out I would still be able to do everything I could before, EXCEPT use the law to eliminate all competition in the market for that specific piece of IP (eg, Other people could rebroadcast the Muppet Show whether they paid me or not!).
Let's say 10% of those 10K people are doing searches. That saturates a 56K modem, assuming you can really get your packets down to 56 bytes
That would saturate your connection if they did a search on average every 8 seconds (Since 56kBITs can only hold 125 56 BYTE packets). That doesn't seem likely since it takes them 13 seconds for the DSL users to do spam everyone with requests.
How do you fit "The Orb - A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center Of the Ultraworld, Live in Dusseldorf 1994" into 56 bytes?
In the world of Digital Signal Processing, aliasing is the result of periodic sampling introducing artifacts into the signal. For instance, a 1001 hz tone sampled 1000 times a second will sound like a 1 hz tone.
In video, this comes out as edges (which are local areas of high frequency) coming out funny or jaggedy. Close together diagonal lines will cause Moire patterns. et cetera.
Antialiasing is any attempt to eliminate these artifacts. At really low resolutions, antialiased stuff will look blurry, while non-antialiased stuff will look blocky. Typically, the eye will be a lot more forgiving to a little blurriness than it will to the regular patterns of moire patterns and stair step edges.
I have always assumed that this was the result of a bunch of coherent light being messed up (when it bounces off the wall) and interfering with itself. Why else would this require a laser rather than any other light source?
www.eidola.org is running out of my closet. Since it's posting on/. last night I've come to be very thankful for that fact.
Incedently, the reason for this is that Eidola is in its infancy, and rather than make snappy screen-shots, Paul's instead decided to spend his time focusing on the language itself. It's not necessarily inherently visual, but given that it's NOT necessarily text-based either, the idea of having lots of different and useful graphical views of your program seems an obvious one.
What are you looking for? A game that is not about limited resources? A game that is about sharing and cooperation rather than competition?
There are plenty of board games that sort of fit into the first category. Torres is an interesting mix - the you get points by having your knights high up in big castles. So everyone's trying to build at the same time, and pretty much everything you do will help someone else. But to do well, you have to choose things which help you more than other players, which violates the spirit of the second criterion. Carcassonne is another game which has a vaguely similar building mechanic. These games don't really emphasize scarsity (though there is of course some scarcity of space, and you have a limited number of turns, so those are scarce in a sense), but they can be fiercly competitive.
If you're looking for cooperative board games, there aren't very many. However, Reiner Knizia's Lord Of The Rings is a fantastic example of one. You're still trying to manage a bunch of limited resources, but if you don't share them well, you'll all lose. It's really a fun game, if somewhat complicated, and unless you have more than three players, it's really hard to win. I wouldn't recommend this one for real small children.
In between is Bohnanza, which is a bean trading card game. The goal is to grow enough beans of a certain type that you can harvest them for money. But you only have two bean fields, and each field can only hold one type of bean. If you draw the wrong kind of bean, you might have to harvest your crop prematurely - unless you can trade it away (or even give it away!). Great game, not real complicated, not very competitive (you can at the end count up who has more money, but nobody really cares), encourages a high degree of cooperation.
Depending on the age of the kids, you might try playing scrabble, but not keep track of the scores.
On the note of "victorian parlor games", are a lot of modern party games. Apples To Apples is a good one. If you can't find these locally, Fun Again Games will sell them over the net.
You say this as a joke, but it seems to me a very clear element of a fantasy game's draw is that it's not directly tied to your real life. But never even mind any discussion of escapism. A common trait of many games is that they test the players' skills in a limited and well-defined context (which may include or exclude strength, motor skills, persuasiveness, tactical thinking, or even luck). A game is "fair" if this context is the only context which is really relevant to game performance. Therefore, it's 'fair' for me to use force in wrestling, but not in chess (as in chess, physical prowess is beyond the scope of the game).
I consider selling and buying characters and game-items "cheating" (in that United States Brand Dollars are unambiguously outside of the scope of an FRPG) and I consider it completely reasonable for Sony to eject players who are cheating.
All computer generated figures depicted in this film would be 18 years or older if they existed. Any appearances otherwise are the result of virtual hormonal imbalances.
That sounds well and good, but for that to be effective you need a smooth conductive surface to get maximum heat-sink / chip energy transfer. I doubt the tops of a hundred broken microfans qualify.
Regardless of how good the ``emulation'' is, it seems like it'd be faster and more efficient to optimize for the real hardware
Yes, it may seem that way. However the actuality is that compile-time optimization can be inferior to RUN-TIME optimization.
So never minding forward compatibility, you probably will wind up with faster code compiling for intel. As for hand-written Crusoe Assembly, obviously that's theoretically capable of the maximum performance, however depending on the instruction set, from a practical point of view it may not be possible to surpass translated i86 code.
You COULD have a firewall with only one ethernet jack. Just give the dreamcast an internal and external IP, all the other computers internal IPs, and plug everything you can find with an RJ45 jack into the same fully switched hub.
All the 10^x crap is fine, but let's call a spade a spade.
$60 billion US.
Well, if you're an american. It's $60 thousand million in England (a billion there is 10^12)
You can't store anything client side, because you cannot trust the clients. It doesn't matter how much encryption or checksums you have on the client - the bad guys have all the code on the client, and can reverse engineer it down to the metal if they have to. They can write proxies that pretend to be properly checksummed, and behind the scenes are doing whatever they want.
That is false. Store the character on the client, and a checksum on the server. when you connect, send the character to the server (it has to know it anyways). If they don't match, you lose. If they do match, well it doesn't matter what you do from there since that's the character you're using, and now that you're playing the server can make sure it doesn't do anything funky!
A more appealing alternative is to keep a encrypted checksum on the client side rather than the server side. If you want to play on a different computer instead of moving the character file you need to move a checksum, which at least is smaller. If your desktop box gets hacked, then your diablo 2 character is comprimised (assuming that there is not password authentication also), but that's doable anyways with keyboard sniffers and so on.
I think that the biggest problem with the gaming industry today, is that it takes too much resources to make a game, which is why you need to convince someone that it will sell well, which means that tried and true formulae are chosen.
That said, I don't really believe that we're totally without creativity in modern games. There are some different games coming out - The Sims, Fantavision, Black & White.
A good phone service would be a voice recognition which lets me say in effect that I want to talk to Joe Blow in Detroit.
Some mobile phones allow you to do this with numbers in their internal phonebook.
I had a friend who's office's voicemail system worked this way too. You would say "Victor Thompson" and it would figure out whose mailbox to use. He told me that some of his coworkers (with strangely spelled names) you had to guess a few times before you pronounced it the way it through. One guy nobody ever figured out how to say it right. (You could always fall back on some kind of numeric addressing scheme (like spell the name using the keypad, I'd guess))
Let's reduce this to a simpler case for purposes of example.
You have two sensors, one of which detects 100 hz signals, the other of which detects 200 hz signals. If you have a signal between the two (say, 141.2 hz) you will see some reaction from each of the two sensors. The ratio of these will allow you to guess what frequency it is. However what if the signal is NOT actually 141.2 hz, but the sum of a 100 hz signal and a 200 hz signal? You can't tell the difference, without adding another sensor.
If you are colorblind, you won't see holes in the spectrum, the levels that your brain DOES recieve will be continuous, and not 'flat', but you will lose some detail of the true nature of the signal.
Slashdot Mirror
Better not. If you do Sega will set you up the bomb.
And as for other platforms, the Mac and Solaris versions of IE might be free now, but there is no guarantee that will last forever. If Microsoft was ever completely successful in eliminating competing browsers, you could bet that they would start charging for IE on non-Windows platforms.
And from a legal perspective "I would charge for it if I could" is good enough to make the change from a free product to a commercial one? Well, then small groups of people working on non-commercial entities CAN hold trademarks!
If my physical property rights ran out and I was forced to give up my toothbrush, I would suddenly be unable to brush my teeth. If my copyright on my IP (say, The Muppet Show) ran out I would still be able to do everything I could before, EXCEPT use the law to eliminate all competition in the market for that specific piece of IP (eg, Other people could rebroadcast the Muppet Show whether they paid me or not!).
the patent office should get a percentage of the proceeds of patent licensing fees,
That's terrible! That encorages them to grant all the patents they can get away with!
Let's say 10% of those 10K people are doing searches. That saturates a 56K modem, assuming you can really get your packets down to 56 bytes
That would saturate your connection if they did a search on average every 8 seconds (Since 56kBITs can only hold 125 56 BYTE packets). That doesn't seem likely since it takes them 13 seconds for the DSL users to do spam everyone with requests.
How do you fit "The Orb - A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center Of the Ultraworld, Live in Dusseldorf 1994" into 56 bytes?
In the world of Digital Signal Processing, aliasing is the result of periodic sampling introducing artifacts into the signal. For instance, a 1001 hz tone sampled 1000 times a second will sound like a 1 hz tone.
In video, this comes out as edges (which are local areas of high frequency) coming out funny or jaggedy. Close together diagonal lines will cause Moire patterns. et cetera.
Antialiasing is any attempt to eliminate these artifacts. At really low resolutions, antialiased stuff will look blurry, while non-antialiased stuff will look blocky. Typically, the eye will be a lot more forgiving to a little blurriness than it will to the regular patterns of moire patterns and stair step edges.
Hope that helps
-me
I have always assumed that this was the result of a bunch of coherent light being messed up (when it bounces off the wall) and interfering with itself. Why else would this require a laser rather than any other light source?
8 inches is between 20 and 21 cm. It is not 24 cm.
www.eidola.org is running out of my closet. Since it's posting on /. last night I've come to be very thankful for that fact.
Incedently, the reason for this is that Eidola is in its infancy, and rather than make snappy screen-shots, Paul's instead decided to spend his time focusing on the language itself. It's not necessarily inherently visual, but given that it's NOT necessarily text-based either, the idea of having lots of different and useful graphical views of your program seems an obvious one.
What are you looking for? A game that is not about limited resources? A game that is about sharing and cooperation rather than competition?
There are plenty of board games that sort of fit into the first category. Torres is an interesting mix - the you get points by having your knights high up in big castles. So everyone's trying to build at the same time, and pretty much everything you do will help someone else. But to do well, you have to choose things which help you more than other players, which violates the spirit of the second criterion. Carcassonne is another game which has a vaguely similar building mechanic. These games don't really emphasize scarsity (though there is of course some scarcity of space, and you have a limited number of turns, so those are scarce in a sense), but they can be fiercly competitive.
If you're looking for cooperative board games, there aren't very many. However, Reiner Knizia's Lord Of The Rings is a fantastic example of one. You're still trying to manage a bunch of limited resources, but if you don't share them well, you'll all lose. It's really a fun game, if somewhat complicated, and unless you have more than three players, it's really hard to win. I wouldn't recommend this one for real small children.
In between is Bohnanza, which is a bean trading card game. The goal is to grow enough beans of a certain type that you can harvest them for money. But you only have two bean fields, and each field can only hold one type of bean. If you draw the wrong kind of bean, you might have to harvest your crop prematurely - unless you can trade it away (or even give it away!). Great game, not real complicated, not very competitive (you can at the end count up who has more money, but nobody really cares), encourages a high degree of cooperation.
Depending on the age of the kids, you might try playing scrabble, but not keep track of the scores. On the note of "victorian parlor games", are a lot of modern party games. Apples To Apples is a good one. If you can't find these locally, Fun Again Games will sell them over the net.
Kind of like real life, eh?
You say this as a joke, but it seems to me a very clear element of a fantasy game's draw is that it's not directly tied to your real life. But never even mind any discussion of escapism. A common trait of many games is that they test the players' skills in a limited and well-defined context (which may include or exclude strength, motor skills, persuasiveness, tactical thinking, or even luck). A game is "fair" if this context is the only context which is really relevant to game performance. Therefore, it's 'fair' for me to use force in wrestling, but not in chess (as in chess, physical prowess is beyond the scope of the game).
I consider selling and buying characters and game-items "cheating" (in that United States Brand Dollars are unambiguously outside of the scope of an FRPG) and I consider it completely reasonable for Sony to eject players who are cheating.
All computer generated figures depicted in this film would be 18 years or older if they existed. Any appearances otherwise are the result of virtual hormonal imbalances.
Two words: surface area
Increasing the surface area allows you to move air slower and still get adequate cooling. That's all it does.
That sounds well and good, but for that to be effective you need a smooth conductive surface to get maximum heat-sink / chip energy transfer. I doubt the tops of a hundred broken microfans qualify.
Regardless of how good the ``emulation'' is, it seems like it'd be faster and more efficient to optimize for the real hardware
Yes, it may seem that way. However the actuality is that compile-time optimization can be inferior to RUN-TIME optimization.
So never minding forward compatibility, you probably will wind up with faster code compiling for intel. As for hand-written Crusoe Assembly, obviously that's theoretically capable of the maximum performance, however depending on the instruction set, from a practical point of view it may not be possible to surpass translated i86 code.
You COULD have a firewall with only one ethernet jack. Just give the dreamcast an internal and external IP, all the other computers internal IPs, and plug everything you can find with an RJ45 jack into the same fully switched hub.
All the 10^x crap is fine, but let's call a spade a spade.
$60 billion US.
Well, if you're an american. It's $60 thousand million in England (a billion there is 10^12)
You can't store anything client side, because you cannot trust the clients. It doesn't matter how much encryption or checksums you have on the client - the bad guys have all the code on the client, and can reverse engineer it down to the metal if they have to. They can write proxies that pretend to be properly checksummed, and behind the scenes are doing whatever they want.
That is false. Store the character on the client, and a checksum on the server. when you connect, send the character to the server (it has to know it anyways). If they don't match, you lose. If they do match, well it doesn't matter what you do from there since that's the character you're using, and now that you're playing the server can make sure it doesn't do anything funky!
A more appealing alternative is to keep a encrypted checksum on the client side rather than the server side. If you want to play on a different computer instead of moving the character file you need to move a checksum, which at least is smaller. If your desktop box gets hacked, then your diablo 2 character is comprimised (assuming that there is not password authentication also), but that's doable anyways with keyboard sniffers and so on.
I think that the biggest problem with the gaming industry today, is that it takes too much resources to make a game, which is why you need to convince someone that it will sell well, which means that tried and true formulae are chosen.
That said, I don't really believe that we're totally without creativity in modern games. There are some different games coming out - The Sims, Fantavision, Black & White.
Which is worse, breathing radioactive dust, or drinking radioactive water? (and growing food in it, kids playing in it, etc)
It is better to drink radioactive water within a 50 mile radius than to harm people a thousand miles downwind of you with radioactive rain and air.
Sure, the question is "what's 6 x 7?"...
That's not what the scrabble set says!
Um. The data on a CDROM is not exactly stacked on top of itself, you know.
Easy. It's 1-800-TOYOTA-1
A good phone service would be a voice recognition which lets me say in effect that I want to talk to Joe Blow in Detroit.
Some mobile phones allow you to do this with numbers in their internal phonebook.
I had a friend who's office's voicemail system worked this way too. You would say "Victor Thompson" and it would figure out whose mailbox to use. He told me that some of his coworkers (with strangely spelled names) you had to guess a few times before you pronounced it the way it through. One guy nobody ever figured out how to say it right. (You could always fall back on some kind of numeric addressing scheme (like spell the name using the keypad, I'd guess))
Let's reduce this to a simpler case for purposes of example.
You have two sensors, one of which detects 100 hz signals, the other of which detects 200 hz signals. If you have a signal between the two (say, 141.2 hz) you will see some reaction from each of the two sensors. The ratio of these will allow you to guess what frequency it is. However what if the signal is NOT actually 141.2 hz, but the sum of a 100 hz signal and a 200 hz signal? You can't tell the difference, without adding another sensor.
If you are colorblind, you won't see holes in the spectrum, the levels that your brain DOES recieve will be continuous, and not 'flat', but you will lose some detail of the true nature of the signal.