If only Nintendo had kept the name Revolution for their new console. I wouldn't want to join a competition to see how long I could hold my urine, but I would totally enter to see how long I can stay in a centrifuge without passing out.
When the full potential of procedural texturing is realized in gaming, it will all but remove the need for a dedicated texture artist.
Unfortunately, you have to replace your dedicated texture artists with just as many dedicated procedural texture artists. Or even more expensive engineers cranking out procedural shaders with exposed sliders for the artists to tune.
We can't tell if its a good tradeoff because they don't give us hard numbers.
The engine as a whole was already less efficient because it was using its own electricity to run the pump. Changing that to using the boiler's heat directly is no different.
The purpose of this design is to remove the inefficiency of transforming energy from heat to electricity to pressure, and just use the heat to generate pressure directly. The assumption they seem to make is that the loss in efficiency from the electrically powered pump is significant, more so than the energy loss from a less than optimal Carnot cycle involving small temperature gradients. Since the efficiency for a small temperature gradient Carnot cycle is already so low, they may be right.
For the CS majors out there, the constant factors in this application outweigh the asymptotic behavior. They're working on removing constant factors.
But in an MMO, you can chat with friends without being scolded by an employer, you can use any program you want such as Winamp or a voice comm to talk to people.
I disagree. My grandmother was telling my mom she heard about Sony's DRM rootkit on the news. Then next time I visited, my mom asked if she had to worry about any CDs ruining her computer. I told her that she should watch for any label that says 'copy protected disc', or whatever they put on them these days, but that in general.
They problems are starting to travel through non-geek circles. Maybe you'll get a blank stare if you say Sony DRM or rootkit, but if you say 'audio CD that jacks up your computer', there might be a glimmer or recognition.
This sounds remarkably similar to the argument that P2P software companies should share the blame for copyright infringements, since they provide an environment that makes it easy, and in some cases, automatic ("effectively handing out daggers").
While I admit that the system administrator will probably be punished by his company for his mistakes, I certainly don't think he should share the guilt of a criminal case. He cost his company $20,000 dollars, but being incompetent at your job does not mean you go to jail (though I suppose there are exceptions in the legal and medical professions).
It does bother me that the metric in this case is the cost to the company for performing the investigation. For example, the system administrator may have had a backup ready and waiting, but couldn't use it because Aventis wanted to spend $20k finding the person responsible for the crime.
If someone broke into my house and stole my computer, I could legitimately show that the burgler owed me a couple thousand dollars for hardware costs, plus the information on my hard drive. But what if I became paranoid and installed a new security system for $50k, and hired someone for $20k to watch my bank accounts 24/7 in case the thief used my personal information to perform various identity theft crimes. I don't think I should be able to claim that the thief stole $70k dollars from me in a criminal court. However, I could probably sue the thief for emotional distress (can you tell I'm from the U.S. yet?), resulting in decisions which cost me $70k dollars.
It seems like computer law is being implemented here as a loose mix of the two.
The problem isn't that role-playing is silly. Personally, I think the annoying 14-year-old is role-playing perfectly when he shouts "GODDAMN ALLIANCE", even knowing that it will be transformed into gibberish for the opposing side. He has become his character, and is responding as he should in such an environment. Game terms like corpse camping and ganking are fine -- they're unique to the world, but they're certainly in character. After all, you're playing someone who can't die, and yet is killed repeatedly. 'Murder' doesn't quite work in this situation.
It's very hard for two big beefy male barbarians to relate to each other when they're being played by skinny geeky computer nerds (i.e. "Swords are cool!" "[grunt]!"), but its really easy for said computer nerds to relate to each other by chatting about video games, television, computers, or all the noobs currently ruining the game. Role-playing is difficult, and even in a pen-and-paper group, there is a separate channel for talking out of character. WoW doesn't have this as much -- it has a bunch of channels, all of which can and should be used for OOC conversations. So it's harder to cut off the real-world from your game playing, if you desire such an environment.
Case-in-point: I would love to turn off the general channel in Alterac Valley -- it's filled with whining and drama from beginning to end. But the fight is organized between bouts of drama, because there isn't always a full raid group (unlike the smaller battlegrounds), and the general channel (and random shouting) is the best place to do it.
They had this in Everquest, it was called languages. You started with a few (based on your race), and you learned more by being exposed to other people speaking the language to you. The number of languages you could learn was unlimited, but you could learn them all given enough time.
Guess what happened? During any downtime (like boat rides), people made macros that spammed their local channels (say, party) with the language of their choice. Going to a boat was like visiting a multi-lingual chat channel filled with bots. And eventually, everyone could speak every other language. The only problems were that languages were fairly useless, and there was no way to limit the player from learning more, to give them an incentive to become specialized in one languages (instead of the universal polyglot).
But if you convert this to illnesses, you come up with some interesting possiblities.
Players would be encouraged to create disease infested areas, to expose each other to whatever germs they had managed to pick up. If diseases were deadly enough, this would have to be some sort of anti-hospital run by a class that could give high amounts of regeneration (druid, priest, cleric).
I can see this working better as some sort of elemental effect. Make the effect more constant (so that players can't spam themselves), and reverse the effect (so that the element works better as time goes on) and suddenly you give an incentive for players to stop camping in one spot forever. Give them an advantage once they're infused with one element against some other element, and you produce useful paths of destruction for each player to follow.
I remember hearing this argument somewhere before. Something about P2P software companies making money on advertising when the primary use of their product is the illegal distribution of copyrighted goods.
And then there is the argument that video game companies should be penalized for puting mature content in their games because individual stores sold their properly-marked-as-mature video games to minors, which the local city/county/state didn't like.
If you want to sue the pharmaceutical company for endangering your life by providing medical supplies in bulk, you are of course allowed to (this is America after all). But last time I checked, we don't penalize companies (too often) for legally selling products that are then used in an illegal manner.
I'm sure the practicing doctor had all the necessary paper work to request this and other drugs as prescription medication. The fact that he was eventually noticed for the bulk amount is proof that the system can detect some form of abuse. But this certainly isn't a reason to crack down on the medical industry, any more than it is a reason to start putting P2P software and game companies in check.
Yes, its true, Nintendo has made a unique product which offers something new to consumers, backwards compatibility with their huge library of old titles, and the possiblity of both multimedia support (see the article's mention of the Play-Yan adapter) and PDA capabilities (it already has a touch screen, and the GameBoy had digital assistant software years ago).
I'm sure the GameBoy will be wiped off the map any time now, right after the Macintosh (pesky unique architecture), the iPod (inability to work with millions of competing formats), and CDs (who needs an entrenched user base when you could have 5 hojillion gigs on one fingernail).
It makes more sense to try to sell to hardcore gamers anyway, and fight for their attention from movies, mp3 players, PC titles, and pr0n; instead of the millions of children begging their parents for Pokemon. Definitely a doomed marketing strategy and business plan.
Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta catch them all . . .
Another good approach is to type random letters (or use prexisting letters on the screen) and cut-and-paste them into your password. That way you can't even use the keylog information in some sort of dictionary attack. I've used this a number of times to type information at public terminals without keyboards, since most people forget to disable the right-click/context menu, and you can access copy and paste through mouse movements alone.
The concern is not about filtering websites from companies in China. The filter's job is to stop information from all other websites from entering China. Eventually, the Great Firewall of China could start filtering anything that did not have a government approved Chinese character domain name. This wouldn't stop too much business, but would represent a significant hurdle for most non-business websites, especially those focused on "corrupt western influences".
I'm not saying this is a good enough reason to not support Chinese character domain names. But I think it was the point of the original post's comment.
Slashdot Mirror
If only Nintendo had kept the name Revolution for their new console. I wouldn't want to join a competition to see how long I could hold my urine, but I would totally enter to see how long I can stay in a centrifuge without passing out.
Ever¥one knows how to t¥pe the ¥en sign -- ctrl-v.
If a http server gives you a picture of a nude woman because your computer requested one, its masturbation.
If a player gives you the view of their avatar without clothes due to your leet mack-daddy skillz, its sex.
We can't tell if its a good tradeoff because they don't give us hard numbers. The engine as a whole was already less efficient because it was using its own electricity to run the pump. Changing that to using the boiler's heat directly is no different. The purpose of this design is to remove the inefficiency of transforming energy from heat to electricity to pressure, and just use the heat to generate pressure directly. The assumption they seem to make is that the loss in efficiency from the electrically powered pump is significant, more so than the energy loss from a less than optimal Carnot cycle involving small temperature gradients. Since the efficiency for a small temperature gradient Carnot cycle is already so low, they may be right. For the CS majors out there, the constant factors in this application outweigh the asymptotic behavior. They're working on removing constant factors.
I disagree. My grandmother was telling my mom she heard about Sony's DRM rootkit on the news. Then next time I visited, my mom asked if she had to worry about any CDs ruining her computer. I told her that she should watch for any label that says 'copy protected disc', or whatever they put on them these days, but that in general.
They problems are starting to travel through non-geek circles. Maybe you'll get a blank stare if you say Sony DRM or rootkit, but if you say 'audio CD that jacks up your computer', there might be a glimmer or recognition.
This sounds remarkably similar to the argument that P2P software companies should share the blame for copyright infringements, since they provide an environment that makes it easy, and in some cases, automatic ("effectively handing out daggers").
While I admit that the system administrator will probably be punished by his company for his mistakes, I certainly don't think he should share the guilt of a criminal case. He cost his company $20,000 dollars, but being incompetent at your job does not mean you go to jail (though I suppose there are exceptions in the legal and medical professions).
It does bother me that the metric in this case is the cost to the company for performing the investigation. For example, the system administrator may have had a backup ready and waiting, but couldn't use it because Aventis wanted to spend $20k finding the person responsible for the crime.
If someone broke into my house and stole my computer, I could legitimately show that the burgler owed me a couple thousand dollars for hardware costs, plus the information on my hard drive. But what if I became paranoid and installed a new security system for $50k, and hired someone for $20k to watch my bank accounts 24/7 in case the thief used my personal information to perform various identity theft crimes. I don't think I should be able to claim that the thief stole $70k dollars from me in a criminal court. However, I could probably sue the thief for emotional distress (can you tell I'm from the U.S. yet?), resulting in decisions which cost me $70k dollars.
It seems like computer law is being implemented here as a loose mix of the two.
The problem isn't that role-playing is silly. Personally, I think the annoying 14-year-old is role-playing perfectly when he shouts "GODDAMN ALLIANCE", even knowing that it will be transformed into gibberish for the opposing side. He has become his character, and is responding as he should in such an environment. Game terms like corpse camping and ganking are fine -- they're unique to the world, but they're certainly in character. After all, you're playing someone who can't die, and yet is killed repeatedly. 'Murder' doesn't quite work in this situation.
It's very hard for two big beefy male barbarians to relate to each other when they're being played by skinny geeky computer nerds (i.e. "Swords are cool!" "[grunt]!"), but its really easy for said computer nerds to relate to each other by chatting about video games, television, computers, or all the noobs currently ruining the game. Role-playing is difficult, and even in a pen-and-paper group, there is a separate channel for talking out of character. WoW doesn't have this as much -- it has a bunch of channels, all of which can and should be used for OOC conversations. So it's harder to cut off the real-world from your game playing, if you desire such an environment.
Case-in-point: I would love to turn off the general channel in Alterac Valley -- it's filled with whining and drama from beginning to end. But the fight is organized between bouts of drama, because there isn't always a full raid group (unlike the smaller battlegrounds), and the general channel (and random shouting) is the best place to do it.
They had this in Everquest, it was called languages. You started with a few (based on your race), and you learned more by being exposed to other people speaking the language to you. The number of languages you could learn was unlimited, but you could learn them all given enough time.
Guess what happened? During any downtime (like boat rides), people made macros that spammed their local channels (say, party) with the language of their choice. Going to a boat was like visiting a multi-lingual chat channel filled with bots. And eventually, everyone could speak every other language. The only problems were that languages were fairly useless, and there was no way to limit the player from learning more, to give them an incentive to become specialized in one languages (instead of the universal polyglot).
But if you convert this to illnesses, you come up with some interesting possiblities.
Players would be encouraged to create disease infested areas, to expose each other to whatever germs they had managed to pick up. If diseases were deadly enough, this would have to be some sort of anti-hospital run by a class that could give high amounts of regeneration (druid, priest, cleric).
I can see this working better as some sort of elemental effect. Make the effect more constant (so that players can't spam themselves), and reverse the effect (so that the element works better as time goes on) and suddenly you give an incentive for players to stop camping in one spot forever. Give them an advantage once they're infused with one element against some other element, and you produce useful paths of destruction for each player to follow.
I remember hearing this argument somewhere before. Something about P2P software companies making money on advertising when the primary use of their product is the illegal distribution of copyrighted goods.
And then there is the argument that video game companies should be penalized for puting mature content in their games because individual stores sold their properly-marked-as-mature video games to minors, which the local city/county/state didn't like.
If you want to sue the pharmaceutical company for endangering your life by providing medical supplies in bulk, you are of course allowed to (this is America after all). But last time I checked, we don't penalize companies (too often) for legally selling products that are then used in an illegal manner.
I'm sure the practicing doctor had all the necessary paper work to request this and other drugs as prescription medication. The fact that he was eventually noticed for the bulk amount is proof that the system can detect some form of abuse. But this certainly isn't a reason to crack down on the medical industry, any more than it is a reason to start putting P2P software and game companies in check.
Yes, its true, Nintendo has made a unique product which offers something new to consumers, backwards compatibility with their huge library of old titles, and the possiblity of both multimedia support (see the article's mention of the Play-Yan adapter) and PDA capabilities (it already has a touch screen, and the GameBoy had digital assistant software years ago).
I'm sure the GameBoy will be wiped off the map any time now, right after the Macintosh (pesky unique architecture), the iPod (inability to work with millions of competing formats), and CDs (who needs an entrenched user base when you could have 5 hojillion gigs on one fingernail).
It makes more sense to try to sell to hardcore gamers anyway, and fight for their attention from movies, mp3 players, PC titles, and pr0n; instead of the millions of children begging their parents for Pokemon. Definitely a doomed marketing strategy and business plan.
Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta catch them all . . .
Another good approach is to type random letters (or use prexisting letters on the screen) and cut-and-paste them into your password. That way you can't even use the keylog information in some sort of dictionary attack. I've used this a number of times to type information at public terminals without keyboards, since most people forget to disable the right-click/context menu, and you can access copy and paste through mouse movements alone.
The concern is not about filtering websites from companies in China. The filter's job is to stop information from all other websites from entering China. Eventually, the Great Firewall of China could start filtering anything that did not have a government approved Chinese character domain name. This wouldn't stop too much business, but would represent a significant hurdle for most non-business websites, especially those focused on "corrupt western influences". I'm not saying this is a good enough reason to not support Chinese character domain names. But I think it was the point of the original post's comment.