Games have gotten more and more sucky over the years. Everything is "realistic", slow and boring. Nobody plays the twitch games like Quake where it actually mattered how good your equipment was. This may be why the specialized gamer hardware does nothing.
I have personally found that it's not hard at all to play games like COD, Crysis, Battlefield, etc. on a poor refresh rate LCD and piece of shit optical mouse. It just doesn't matter. There is no way I could kick ass in Quake3 with that stuff though because just moving the mouse fast enough makes it lose tracking. This is where better equipment could show its worth.
If we are to have any hope of using computers to solve the most interesting problems then we will eventually be using parallelism on a massive scale. This is how the physical world works. All those atoms and particles swirling around you are not a serial batch process.
You don't need anything new to use ray tracing. Ray tracing is just a new lighting method. A few minor tweaks to an existing engine and you could use all the models and textures you were already using. The only thing that will change is the shadows, reflections, etc.
At some point when the 3D models get sufficiently complex then ray tracing will become a lot more attractive. With enough complexity you can model the small details that are currently faked with textures. Those small details would be hard to light accurately with rasterization so this is where ray tracing would come in.
Personally I'm finding as games become more realistic looking it's getting really hard to see anything. What we really need is true 3D displays where depth perception and eye focus can do its thing. A 100% realistic scene projected on to a 2D panel requires you to focus on everything at once which makes it difficult to see clearly.
As the lead researcher said, VR 'is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people. What exactly is meant by that? Will this be used to cleanse the impure or something? "Here are your drugs, citizen"... ?
...but I don't play games all that often because there just are not that many modern games for Linux. I spend all my days in Linux doing development work (well, I do run Windows in VMware for development also). I hate having to reboot because it requires me to shut down all the VM's and everything else I normally have going on.
I own UT3, Crysis and other modern games but rarely play because it requires me to reboot into Windows. I still fire up Q3 and UT2004 every so often and while these games are fun, they are old and just don't have the pop of something really pushing the hardware.
I am a gamer though. I have the machine for it (8GB of RAM, the new G92 8800 GTS card, etc) but there just are no games to play.
I thought is that dreams are the same thing as your imagination. They can be made of past experience or just something completely made up. However, even "made up" stuff generally comes from an amalgamation of previous experience.
It's nothing more or less. That's just what dreams are, your brain imagining things because it's bored. I don't know why people try to turn it into something else (eg. something magical).
This isn't to say dreams mean nothing. Imagination is a huge part of how we get about in this world.
Hey, times change. Especially as technology advances. Sort of like how we are not a hunter/gatherer society any more.
I wouldn't consider most people nowadays to really be adults until they are 25 or so and that age seems to be increasing all the time. My theory is they have a lot more leisure time than previous generations and just have no need to grow up that fast. It's not all bad because it's that very leisure time (versus constantly looking for food or whatever) that allows research into all sorts of things that may eventually propel society to new levels. A lot of science and technology breakthroughs are not born out of necessity these days.
It hard to beat hand editable files. It's just too convenient.
It's sort of like HTML/XML/etc. Technically they are not that great. Just a bunch of stupid generic verbose tags. ASN.1 would have been a much better high performance choice. The problem is ASN.1 is really hard to edit by hand, requiring a hex editor and complicated encoding rules or other tools...
Outlook Express comes with S/MIME support out of the box. Thunderbird does too. As do many other applications.
Plus most applications using S/MIME support "other" crypto modules (usually CSP or PKCS#11) which let you do cool things like use a smartcard or other hardware token.
This is all built into a lot of Windows, OSX and Linux applications and has been for years. It's just currently not many people use it.
Python, I could understand reasonably well before I even started reading any "learn Pythong" material. Just a quick observation. I have noticed lots of people mistype Python as Pythong. I do it nearly every single time I type out the whole name. Why is that? It must be something about the pattern of letters or something. Anyone have any ideas?
I noticed they were talking some about possibly making them autonomous. That just seems like a really bad idea. What you would have is a weapon system disconnected from command. The enemy could set up a trap for these machines, capture them and then have some high-tech stuff at their disposal. Unlike a UAV, it seems like it would be pretty easy to catch one of these surface machines using any number of methods even if they normally can protect themselves with weapon systems. If they can't protect themselves then it would be even easier to capture them.
All measures like this are just bandaids and may in fact open up more holes because it adds complexity to an already complex beast.
There is just no way to do this in software. The future is going to be implementing these types of features in well proven hardware. Things like the no-execute bit, virtualization extensions and such are steps in the right direction but eventually I think we will see some really good security measures put into hardware.
users can cut their teeth on it first, then if they want, they can move on to more advanced distros.
The thing is, Ubuntu is an advanced system. It's based on Debian. Sure, it handles a lot of the crap for you and that's a good thing. If you're a power user then it can be tweaked however you need it just like any Linux system. You can even build stuff from source, imagine that.
I have been a Linux user for something like 15 years now and personally I would hate to go back to that ancient SLS/Slackware system or Gentoo which require me to go through a whole bunch of crap just to get a working system. I use Linux as a tool to get stuff done. I don't use Linux because I like screwing around with the operating system (which is the sign of a Linux geek newbie if you ask me).
It's ridiculous to think we could possibly know exactly every force being applied to the craft. The effect is extremely small and is probably a combination of computational accuracy, instrument accuracy, and external modifiers that we can't calculate.
External modifiers would be things like storms on the Sun and other stars (temperature differences, particle emissions), the various particles in space, tiny gravitational forces that are too small to be measured (eg. even the galaxy on the other side of the universe is exerting force on us), etc. Space is not empty, there is dust, electromagnetic energy, black holes, etc.
Again, our science could be 100% accurate but I don't see how we would even begin to think our technology is capable of measuring and calculating every force in the universe(s) exactly.
Over time I think these kids will learn that in the real world where you're trying to get work done, IM is annoying as hell. It's like having someone call you on the phone every few seconds. No thanks.
E-mail, web forums, and other "delayed" forms of communication are so much better for almost everything.
IM is really only a substitute for the phone. And then only when it makes sense, like to save money on long distance or when you need to be quiet.
Yeah but the difference is, unless I'm flying the plane I have more control over my death while not on a plane.
Don't give me that crap about illusion of control either. I know statistically driving a car looks more dangerous but those statistics include every moron on the road and there are a crapload of idiots driving around with no training, no care, and no skill. Those skew the results severely. If all drivers had professional training and took the same care/skill/maintenance that pilots do then maybe you could compare the safety of flying versus driving.
Or maybe if you only examined car accidents where someone was killed and they really truly had absolutely no control over it (extraordinarily rare I would bet). Accidents that aren't your fault are often avoidable, especially with training (motorcycle rider here).
Yeah but I could deal with the confinement at lot better knowing the reward is being on Mars eventually. That and knowing I'm hurling through space at a brazillion miles an hour very far from Earth.
Doing this experiment would drive me insane because there is no payoff for the suffering other than research data.
I found this interesting and went looking for the other research on this ratio stuff. The problem is all the articles I found simply state there is a correlation but they don't say specifically what the correlation is.
I mean if your ring finger is longer than your index finger does that mean more musical ability or less? More aggression or less? More athletic ability or less? etc...
The maximum length of silk is related to the size/weight of the spider. I don't know about spiders but consider a silkworm can spin 1500 feet of silk then scale that up to human weight and I think you get the picture.
There has been a lot of speculation by various people. My thought is that Cylon/human half-breads make up the population of earth. It's all one big cycle of either humans creating Cylons or Cylons creating humans and then eventually intermixing. All humans are actually Cylons and all Cylons are actually human.
It seems logical due the deal with the Cylon internal struggles that have been made obvious they are not single-minded with a bent towards killing all the humans. Some are seeking purpose just like the humans are.
I think depending on how much they play up the mysticism (time travel and all) will determine what the actual cycle looks like. It may be time repeating itself over and over where either the humans or Cylons are created by the other, a war breaks out, then they find Earth and the cycle repeats.
While I totally understand where you are coming from and parents really should make better efforts, given the shear size of the Internet your kids are much more likely to encounter someone wishing to harm them versus the pre-Internet days where their social group was limited physically.
The issue isn't just a matter of parents protecting their kids. Kids (especially teenagers) are only only going to listen to a certain degree. In the limited physical circle it works pretty well because they are unlikely to encounter very many predators in real life so a few mistakes here or there and your kid is generally OK. Bad things still happen but it's not common. On the Internet it is much more common just because the network is providing a focal point therefore it becomes more difficult to protect your kids where one simple slip could land them in trouble. Kids make mistakes, it's part of growing up.
I think that's why people are trying to do more to protect them when it comes to things like the Internet. It's the difference between walking through a war-zone and walking through a minefield in a war-zone.
Slashdot Mirror
Games have gotten more and more sucky over the years. Everything is "realistic", slow and boring. Nobody plays the twitch games like Quake where it actually mattered how good your equipment was. This may be why the specialized gamer hardware does nothing.
I have personally found that it's not hard at all to play games like COD, Crysis, Battlefield, etc. on a poor refresh rate LCD and piece of shit optical mouse. It just doesn't matter. There is no way I could kick ass in Quake3 with that stuff though because just moving the mouse fast enough makes it lose tracking. This is where better equipment could show its worth.
If we are to have any hope of using computers to solve the most interesting problems then we will eventually be using parallelism on a massive scale. This is how the physical world works. All those atoms and particles swirling around you are not a serial batch process.
You don't need anything new to use ray tracing. Ray tracing is just a new lighting method. A few minor tweaks to an existing engine and you could use all the models and textures you were already using. The only thing that will change is the shadows, reflections, etc.
At some point when the 3D models get sufficiently complex then ray tracing will become a lot more attractive. With enough complexity you can model the small details that are currently faked with textures. Those small details would be hard to light accurately with rasterization so this is where ray tracing would come in.
Personally I'm finding as games become more realistic looking it's getting really hard to see anything. What we really need is true 3D displays where depth perception and eye focus can do its thing. A 100% realistic scene projected on to a 2D panel requires you to focus on everything at once which makes it difficult to see clearly.
...but I don't play games all that often because there just are not that many modern games for Linux. I spend all my days in Linux doing development work (well, I do run Windows in VMware for development also). I hate having to reboot because it requires me to shut down all the VM's and everything else I normally have going on.
I own UT3, Crysis and other modern games but rarely play because it requires me to reboot into Windows. I still fire up Q3 and UT2004 every so often and while these games are fun, they are old and just don't have the pop of something really pushing the hardware.
I am a gamer though. I have the machine for it (8GB of RAM, the new G92 8800 GTS card, etc) but there just are no games to play.
I thought is that dreams are the same thing as your imagination. They can be made of past experience or just something completely made up. However, even "made up" stuff generally comes from an amalgamation of previous experience.
It's nothing more or less. That's just what dreams are, your brain imagining things because it's bored. I don't know why people try to turn it into something else (eg. something magical).
This isn't to say dreams mean nothing. Imagination is a huge part of how we get about in this world.
Hey, times change. Especially as technology advances. Sort of like how we are not a hunter/gatherer society any more.
I wouldn't consider most people nowadays to really be adults until they are 25 or so and that age seems to be increasing all the time. My theory is they have a lot more leisure time than previous generations and just have no need to grow up that fast. It's not all bad because it's that very leisure time (versus constantly looking for food or whatever) that allows research into all sorts of things that may eventually propel society to new levels. A lot of science and technology breakthroughs are not born out of necessity these days.
You mean like the Windows registry?
It hard to beat hand editable files. It's just too convenient.
It's sort of like HTML/XML/etc. Technically they are not that great. Just a bunch of stupid generic verbose tags. ASN.1 would have been a much better high performance choice. The problem is ASN.1 is really hard to edit by hand, requiring a hex editor and complicated encoding rules or other tools...
Outlook Express comes with S/MIME support out of the box. Thunderbird does too. As do many other applications.
Plus most applications using S/MIME support "other" crypto modules (usually CSP or PKCS#11) which let you do cool things like use a smartcard or other hardware token.
This is all built into a lot of Windows, OSX and Linux applications and has been for years. It's just currently not many people use it.
These type of flashy animated displays are like flashing HTML text and all the other tacky crap from 90's web design.
It can be done a lot more tastefully.
I noticed they were talking some about possibly making them autonomous. That just seems like a really bad idea. What you would have is a weapon system disconnected from command. The enemy could set up a trap for these machines, capture them and then have some high-tech stuff at their disposal. Unlike a UAV, it seems like it would be pretty easy to catch one of these surface machines using any number of methods even if they normally can protect themselves with weapon systems. If they can't protect themselves then it would be even easier to capture them.
I don't know but in times of a pandemic I sure as hell wouldn't go to the doctor/hospital except as an absolute last resort.
All measures like this are just bandaids and may in fact open up more holes because it adds complexity to an already complex beast.
There is just no way to do this in software. The future is going to be implementing these types of features in well proven hardware. Things like the no-execute bit, virtualization extensions and such are steps in the right direction but eventually I think we will see some really good security measures put into hardware.
users can cut their teeth on it first, then if they want, they can move on to more advanced distros.
The thing is, Ubuntu is an advanced system. It's based on Debian. Sure, it handles a lot of the crap for you and that's a good thing. If you're a power user then it can be tweaked however you need it just like any Linux system. You can even build stuff from source, imagine that.
I have been a Linux user for something like 15 years now and personally I would hate to go back to that ancient SLS/Slackware system or Gentoo which require me to go through a whole bunch of crap just to get a working system. I use Linux as a tool to get stuff done. I don't use Linux because I like screwing around with the operating system (which is the sign of a Linux geek newbie if you ask me).
It's ridiculous to think we could possibly know exactly every force being applied to the craft. The effect is extremely small and is probably a combination of computational accuracy, instrument accuracy, and external modifiers that we can't calculate.
External modifiers would be things like storms on the Sun and other stars (temperature differences, particle emissions), the various particles in space, tiny gravitational forces that are too small to be measured (eg. even the galaxy on the other side of the universe is exerting force on us), etc. Space is not empty, there is dust, electromagnetic energy, black holes, etc.
Again, our science could be 100% accurate but I don't see how we would even begin to think our technology is capable of measuring and calculating every force in the universe(s) exactly.
You just can't physically feel where they are. Plus they can change positions or function on you.
Real physical tactile buttons have their uses.
(* yes, it's not a word)
Over time I think these kids will learn that in the real world where you're trying to get work done, IM is annoying as hell. It's like having someone call you on the phone every few seconds. No thanks.
E-mail, web forums, and other "delayed" forms of communication are so much better for almost everything.
IM is really only a substitute for the phone. And then only when it makes sense, like to save money on long distance or when you need to be quiet.
Yeah but the difference is, unless I'm flying the plane I have more control over my death while not on a plane.
Don't give me that crap about illusion of control either. I know statistically driving a car looks more dangerous but those statistics include every moron on the road and there are a crapload of idiots driving around with no training, no care, and no skill. Those skew the results severely. If all drivers had professional training and took the same care/skill/maintenance that pilots do then maybe you could compare the safety of flying versus driving.
Or maybe if you only examined car accidents where someone was killed and they really truly had absolutely no control over it (extraordinarily rare I would bet). Accidents that aren't your fault are often avoidable, especially with training (motorcycle rider here).
Yeah but I could deal with the confinement at lot better knowing the reward is being on Mars eventually. That and knowing I'm hurling through space at a brazillion miles an hour very far from Earth.
Doing this experiment would drive me insane because there is no payoff for the suffering other than research data.
I found this interesting and went looking for the other research on this ratio stuff. The problem is all the articles I found simply state there is a correlation but they don't say specifically what the correlation is.
I mean if your ring finger is longer than your index finger does that mean more musical ability or less? More aggression or less? More athletic ability or less? etc...
The maximum length of silk is related to the size/weight of the spider. I don't know about spiders but consider a silkworm can spin 1500 feet of silk then scale that up to human weight and I think you get the picture.
There has been a lot of speculation by various people. My thought is that Cylon/human half-breads make up the population of earth. It's all one big cycle of either humans creating Cylons or Cylons creating humans and then eventually intermixing. All humans are actually Cylons and all Cylons are actually human.
It seems logical due the deal with the Cylon internal struggles that have been made obvious they are not single-minded with a bent towards killing all the humans. Some are seeking purpose just like the humans are.
I think depending on how much they play up the mysticism (time travel and all) will determine what the actual cycle looks like. It may be time repeating itself over and over where either the humans or Cylons are created by the other, a war breaks out, then they find Earth and the cycle repeats.
While I totally understand where you are coming from and parents really should make better efforts, given the shear size of the Internet your kids are much more likely to encounter someone wishing to harm them versus the pre-Internet days where their social group was limited physically.
The issue isn't just a matter of parents protecting their kids. Kids (especially teenagers) are only only going to listen to a certain degree. In the limited physical circle it works pretty well because they are unlikely to encounter very many predators in real life so a few mistakes here or there and your kid is generally OK. Bad things still happen but it's not common. On the Internet it is much more common just because the network is providing a focal point therefore it becomes more difficult to protect your kids where one simple slip could land them in trouble. Kids make mistakes, it's part of growing up.
I think that's why people are trying to do more to protect them when it comes to things like the Internet. It's the difference between walking through a war-zone and walking through a minefield in a war-zone.
Ugh, I hate that stuff too. Do they use that to prevent theft?
Did I mention I hate that stuff?
I always use a box-cutter. That is if I have one available, OMG teh terrorist!!111!one1!