What other forces? The electrostatic force doesn't apply, for one, because the black hole is not charged. Since it isn't affected by that force it can actually move through matter like a hot knife through butter. Are there other forces that would tend to repel atoms from black holes?
I was actually talking about mass, not about charge. They're colliding protons, not neutrons, because you can't really accelerate a neutron with a particle accelerator.
OK, OK, I'll admit it was also to cheat a bit, and pretend it's not a charged black hole. That doesn't change the result by all that much, but it keeps the equations a lot simpler.
Point taken. I'll even up the ante and admit that I forgot to actually multiply by the 3 the last time. (I guess I should pay more attention.) So including your 15000 instead of 5, that radius ends up 9000 times larger than I calculated. Ok, let's round it to 10,000 since we ignored decimals so far. So we delete four zeroes from the calculation of how it stacks compared to a helium atom. Now instead of 42 zeroes after the decimal point, there are 38. It's still a ludicriously small black hole.
I also kind of doubt that all the energy will end up as mass. I'd expect quite the hard gamma rays to be produced too.
Funnily enough, though, Leonardo da Vinci seems to aggree with the summary, though. He wrote: "As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself."
I will agree though that it does seem a bit baffling a quote, coming from, you know, Leonardo da Vinci.
On the other hand, even Leonardo da Vinci does sorta illustrate his point. While he did excel in a handful of domains, his interest sprawling into others has produced less than briliant results. He actually wrote that salamanders are born from fire, or such gems as, "The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue."
So maybe he did have a point with that quote about divided minds. If he had devoted more of his efforts to, I don't know, engineering, instead of dabbling into where salamanders come from, I'm sure he would have had a bigger return from that investment. Who knows how many more inventions of pure genius we would have had in that case?
Actually, from where I look at it, it's been a far sadder story. It's been a story of _ignoring_ all that neuroscience was gradually discovering, and worshipping false figures of authority, and chasing chimeras born out of their self-importance.
In other words, we left it to mathematicians. Since, you know, they're usually smart guys and maths is such a valuable tool. So they wrote really cool theorems and postulated them as being obviously necessary for an AI. For no bloody obvious reason, often, and certainly no proof-of-concept system to show why it's even useful at all. But, hey, he's a smart guy, so he _obviously_ must be right when he pulls an unsupported assertion that his latest unrelated theorem is key to an AI.
My favourite example of that stupidity taken to the extremes, was the relatively recent "AI" prize for compressing Wikipedia. Just because some smart mathematician thought that _obviously_ an AI would need to pack its database in as few bits as possible. So obviously whichever algorithm won at compressing Wikipedia would be the best thing for an AI.
Well, let's stop right there. While using a finite number of neurons or transistors efficiently does make superficial sense, it's nowhere near proven that it's actually needed or even useful for an AI, and we have very little indication that lossless compression is used by any Real Intelligence. What we did have there was a mathematical theorem saying what's the absolute minimum number of bits needed to encode a message. That's it. It didn't really say anything about when it's the best data structure for any given problem, AI included.
That extra step was pulled out of the arse, based on little more than handwaving (it stands to reason, ya know?;) and appeal to false authority.
Actually processing that data, for AI purposes and otherwise, runs into a lot more problems than that. E.g., ok, now you've used arithmetic compression on Wikipedia, and made it what some compressors call a "solid archive" too (didn't reset the stream for each file, basically) because it tends to compress better on the whole, and won the contest. Now what? How do you use that to answer a question like, "what happened to the last Western Roman Emperor?"
Are you going to now decompress the whole giant thing just to access the relevant files? See that thing about solid archives: you can't unpack any file unless you first uncompress everything that came before it. That's one example of a choice where what's good for compression, isn't good for quickly retrieving data and following links to what really interests you.
And what about indexing? What about the whole graph of hyperlinks? How about we take care of representing those in a form that's actually useful for a machine, before we worry about compressing the whole thing?
And we haven't even gotten in the mess of hints that we have from neurology, stage magic tricks, optical illusions research, etc, about how the brain _actually_ works.
That's been the real problem and reason why we haven't made progress in half a century. It wasn't just a matter of not understanding it, it was a matter of _ignoring_ everything that was known, and what became known in the meantime.
It was basically, like watching a bunch of people sit in their ivory towers and postulate that trees _must_ be purple. It stands to reason, really. I mean, green light is the peak of the transmitted spectrum through the atmosphere. It's the most abundant basically. Any efficient photosynthesis system would obviously absorb green, not reflect it. If you absolutely must reflect something, reflect the less abundant red and blue (so you get purple leaves), not green. In fact, the whole notion of green trees is blatantly absurd. Why would nature waste most of the incoming energy like that?;)
So only now we're starting to make some progress by forgetting all that, and starting anew with a more bayesian approach. This one actually seems to work for a change, and doesn't conflict much with what we k
Well, exactly how small black holes _are_ we talking about? Because it seems to me that the whole scare is due to a few people's not really understanding physics.
Gravity is actually the weakest force at a particle level. But ok, let's imagine a really really small gravity well.
Arguably the interesting thing about one would be, basically, "up to what distance can it gobble things up." In other words, the the Schwarzschild radius.
I'll use simplified version, which is: 3km for something weighing as much as our Sun, and it varies linearly with mass from there. Literally. For Something the size of Earth it would be 9mm, btw, but they won't collide particles weighing the same as _Earth_ there. If they did, I'd worry about _recoil_ before I worry about black holes.
So how big a black hole will they create there? Say, about the weight of two neutrons? _Three_ neutrons? Heck, let's be generous and smash a whole five neutrons together. Each neutron weighs 1.67492729x10^27 kg. So 5 of them is very approximately 8x10^-27 kg. The Sun weighs 1.9891×10^30 kg, let's say 2x10^30 kg.
So we get roughly 3km times 4x10^-57 km, or 4x10^-54 metres. That's the ridiculously infinitesimal size, up to which it could gobble matter. By comparison a helium atom has a radius of 31 picometres, or approx 3x10^-11 metres. Our black hole is about 10 to the 43'th power smaller than that. Write a zero, a dot, 42 more zeroes and a 1. That's how much smaller that black hole is than a helium atom.
To be absorbed by it, another particle would have to come that close to it, overcoming all other forces. Which become pretty damn strong when you try to get that close.
In effect, the _only_ way for that "black hole" to gobble any other particle, is for that other particle to be shot directly at it with an even bigger particle accelerator. With some incredible (and thanks to that guy Heisenberg, also pretty much impossible) accuracy. Otherwise, it will be bounced around by the other atoms, without ever getting close enough to one to actually absorb one and get bigger and meaner.
If that's the big threat to Earth, well, I've seen scarier kittens than that;)
Before I start, yeah, I do subscribe to the POV that IQ tests are just a trainable skill, and thus measure only... how good you are at IQ tests. Plus, I don't think one number is anywhere near able to sum up the gamut of human skills and abilities and talents.
That said, I do seem to recall that there _are_ differences in the brain wiring of different people. E.g., IIRC it was even linked here on Slashdot that Asperger's Syndrome causes neurons to form more connections and be much more reluctant to break old connections. E.g., they seem to have found a gene responsible for ADHD, which, again, causes the brain to work differently.
And in the end, is it that big a surprise? How your whole body looks like, and how it works, is dictated by some proteins which are encoded by some genes. E.g., we already identified, say, the protein which is encoded differently for a human brain as opposed to a chimp brain. And sometimes seemingly unrelated proteins affect the various pathways and reactions. E.g., a broken MC1R doesn't just give you red hair, but also has effects including different fight-or-flight priorities and pain sensitivity.
Because "God" doesn't seem to believe in neat, orthogonal, cohesive coding. Or rather, because we're the result of some random mutations that worked. If modifying another protein to fix the effect of the first works too, chances are you get that instead of fixing the first one. We're the result of some billions of years of spaghetti code and layers upon layers of hacks, that often address the symptoms instead of the real problem. We even have pieces of DNA that seem to be both code and data segment (very loosely using those terms, anyway.) We have deliberately self-modifying code, fer crying out loud. (That's how the immune system can match almost any foreign protein.)
At any rate, there are a lot of genes at work there. There are mutations in every generation. There are recessive traits. Etc. So it's not that far fetched that some people's brains would be wired slightly differently.
Whether that's good or bad, if up for debate. And, yes, IQ isn't measuring that. But you can't say that everyone has the same brain and only differs in how focused they are.
Heck, even that focus itself seems to be often a result of genes. E.g., Asperger's Syndrome has a narrow focus of interest as one of its almost invariant symptoms. The ability to hyperfocus is right behind on that list. So even that goes back to genes and brain wiring, it seems.
Basically, I dunno, I have no problem believing that some people _are_ born smarter. Again, it may not be measured by IQ, but I believe it's happening.
Actually, AFAIK, models never were the problem in racing games. Trademarks were.
There are already games like Tokyo Xtreme Racer which have models of actual cars, but call them something else than the trademark. E.g., "Mazda RX-7 Type RZ" becomes "FD3RKK" and if you look closely on the car, it says "Madda". Others are even less obfuscated, so for example a Porsche Carrera 964 Turbo becomes "964T" and a Dodge Viper GTS is called "VGTS". But otherwise, the car looked exactly like the real thing. (Well, at least until you went Rice-Boy on it, and installed a huge wing, funky lights, decals, etc;)
It's when you use someone else's trademark to make money out of it, that they start getting their panties in a knot. And are even legally required to defend their trademark or lose it.
And although around these parts both are lumped together under "OMG, IP is bad", trademarks are really a different thing and have a very different legal status. This ruling only said anything about copyright. If your game calls a car, say, "Toyota Celica GT-Four 1998", you still have a trademark problem and you have to license it from Toyota. Likely still on their terms. If you call it something like "ST205" like in TXR, though, now it's even official that Toyota has no rights over your 3D model of it.
Again, the problem never was risk of lawsuit over showing their car crumpled, or everyone who ever published photos of an accident would be equally at risk. The problem was that you have to sign a contract with the manufacturer to use their trademark. And being a contract, it contains whatever conditions are acceptable to both. If you breach the terms of the contract, well, you'll likely get sued for that, not for copyright. Plus, as a bonus, you've just shot yourself in the foot: that's one license you won't get for the sequel. Being that they bought each other like crazy over time, that could mean a lot of cars you won't be able to license in the next game.
All things considered, though, it probably won't change much. Those trademarks are what gets more than half the players to play that game. So Sony, EA and the gang will continue to license them from the trademark owner, and still have to agree to a bunch of conditions in the process.
But... "The fossil-a large wing bone called the humerus"... could it not be just as likely that it was simply a mutated form of a known parrot that was around at that time (of which the time is hard to define) and possibly died because of said deformaties?
Exactly which part of "the oldest and most northerly remains of a parrot ever discovered" translates to you into "a known parrot that was around at that time"? No, seriously.
Also, is it not possible that this bird was caged in some Captains quarters of a ship, and this was deformed because of that?
Dude, let's put it like this:
- this thing is 54 _million_ years old
- humans, as in Homo Sapiens, are about 200,000 years old
- even Neanderthals, the only other species that ever reached sentience, isn't that horribly much older. The proto-neanderthals reached Europe some 350-500 thousand years ago, but the fully evolved Neanderthals are a mere 130,000 years old.
- the split between the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees happened some 6 million years ago. Which is to say that at that point, the most evolved form of life was something that was dumber and more primitive than the chimp. It's _not_ something that would build ships and sail the fjords.
So exactly what species would that captain be, 54 million years ago. Are we talking some time-travelling alien that took a different species of parrot from a later time, and then went back to 54 million years ago to dump its skeleton there and confuse a species that didn't even exist yet? Or what?
It's true that there is a degree of cluelessness in recruiting across the whole software development and IT industries, and not just in the UK. The difference for the game industry is that, basically, they usually can get away with worse stuff than everyone else.
It's just a nasty product of supply and demand, so to speak. There's a steady supply of idealistic young nerds coming out of college, or sometimes straight out of high school, with an idea that they _must_ work in the games industry. Because games are cool, challenging stuff done by really smart people, and they're not gonna end up wearing suits and writing database programs in VB like _those_ boring guys. There's simply more of them than there are jobs in the games industry. Orders of magnitude more.
And as is the case when supply vastly outstrips demand, you'll find someone who'll sell it to you for a ridiculously low price. Just because he found no other buyers anyway.
So the industry actually gets a steady stream of people who'll actually take a 15k job, and be perfectly content to be treated like dirt and asked to do 80+ hour weeks too.
Unfortunately, that brings us to their skills shortage:
1. Those tend to be rather inexperienced. There's virtually nobody who made their experience as a high-paid enterprise archited or senior developper, and then suddenly decides to become a game designer for a quarter of the pay and twice the work hours. Everyone who gets in the game industry does it from the bottom, with very little experience where it matters.
2. And by the time they did get their experience in the games industry, they're burned out and bitter, and lost most of that juvenile idealism. So they move on to better paying and lower stress jobs. The games industry is actively bleeding that experience out, as fast as it gets it.
Incidentally, that's also a somewhat different skills shortage than you describe. In the games industry it's not that some PHB wants you to have 5+ years experience with the exact version of IDE they have there. They'd be happy to get you with 5+ years experience, period. Provided that you still work for as little money as a complete newbie, and have just as little self-respect as their usual employees, of course. And that's where they start having a problem. By the time they've got 5 years experience at all, half of those people have left the industry for good. And it only goes downhill from there.
Well, maybe. The only issue I do take issue with, is the misguided idea that it's some art form that can't be trained. As you yourself note, experience and knowledge _do_ play a major role.
You're right, if you take someone with absolutely no imagination, just teaching them algorithms won't suffice. But conversely, I've seen plenty of people who had just the imagination, and it didn't really compensate for lack of knowledge and experience. They did dumb and inefficient things anyway. Granted, some where _creatively_ dumb and inefficient, but still...
The "art" in a game is in the interaction with the user. You can't see it, you can only feel it.
That's game _design_, not game programming. Even if sometimes the same people do both, that doesn't make it a part of programming.
Put another way, games programming takes talent. Not everybody can do it. If it were uncreative then that wouldn't be true - monkeys could be trained to do it.
Heh. During my somewhat brief time in game programming, my impression was that half those people _are_ trained monkeys. Actually, make that: _poorly_ trained monkeys. With delusions of grandeur. Most of the game code I've actually seen from them... well, not only it wasn't especially smart (most seem to confuse obfuscation and optimization, and achieve only the former), but some of it was worthy of The Daily WTF.
I've been in both camps and, as I was saying, I've had funny self-important ideas too. "See, I'm so cool and smart and all cutting edge because I'm doing games. Unlike those boring suits doing non-creative, boring database stuff in VB. I bet they're there just because they're not smart enough to code games."
Heh. Man, I had my head so far up my own arse, I'd have made some yoga gurus envious.
In practice, having seen both sides and been on both sides, I can tell you that the only real reason they're not in games, is that they're smarter than to be paid a pittance and get 80 hour week demands.
Now don't get me wrong, you can't teach everyone to be a good programmer. Or for some people to program at all. But if you could teach someone to be good at coding, they'll be just as good at coding games. That domain simply isn't special in any form or shape. Yes, anyone who can think algorithmically and design and implement a good program in any other domain, could do game good programming too. No worse than any other kind of programming.
Actually, creativity is a tiny small part of programming. Programming is basically a funnily-formalized maths. And sometimes even that programming language notation isn't enough, and you actually have to do old fashioned maths with large matrixes and multi-dimensional geometries and theorems named after long-dead Greeks or French guys. And some domains of it need some other knowledge too: e.g., the physics engines another poster mentioned.
It's not art, where expressing yourself in unorthodox ways that make the viewer question the establishment. If it were art, sure, creativity would be everything. But it's an algorithm that has to execute on a very anal-retentive machine, and solve a very well defined program.
If Picasso didn't draw a human anywhere near correct, it's good art. If you make a program that's nowhere near correct, it's just buggy. If your code draws the polygons for the eyes in the wrong positions, like Picasso did, it's not some thought-provoking art, it's a graphics glitch and you get to fix it. Ditto if your shaders end up producing halos like in Van Gogh's paintings. If Picasso or Tzara ignored some centuries of accepted artistic methods, it was innovative. If you do the same in a program, it's just wasting your employer's money on reinventing the wheel, and usually doing a piss-poor job too.
You're not making art. You're writing a program. Art and creativity come into play when you come up with an idea. But then you have to sit down and actually implement it. That's plain old work and skill, and it _can_ be trained.
In other words, if you think you can just ignore two millenia of maths, half a millenium of physics, and half a century of algorithms, and you'll do as good (or even better) a job just because you're teh uber-creative guy... I'll call bull on that. It doesn't work like that. That's not just man hours, but many man-millenia that were needed to discover or prove all that stuff. And there were likely some guys in there that were both smarter and more creative than you, no matter who you are. You can't just skip all that and think you'll just get creative and invent it on your own in an afternoon when you need it.
Yes, it helps to have a little creativity, and combine those algorithms in smart ways. Fine. But you still need to learn them, or at least know they exist. In an ideal world, even understand why they work, and why they're better than the dumb brute-force stuff produced by teh creative people without training. But at the very least, know that they exist, so you can google them later.
Now all this may sound a bit harsh. I've been at the same point, and had the same dumb ideas, so you get _some_ sympathy there. But guess what? That was just the ADHD talking. It's just an excuse for lacking the willpower to just sit down and learn. But in practice, you're not _that_ smart, and I'm not _that_ smart either. You can't just snap your fingers and reinvent what others needed centuries to discover. I can't either.
Jesus F Christ, forget the kinship. The quote about pine needles is just about the most retarded thing I've heard in ages.
Having lots of thin needles near each other is actually a pretty good heatsink design. No, seriously. Not as good as some ducted designs, and not as cheap to make as shaved copper fins, but nevertheless, if you're going to blow air through it, it gets heat out rather impressively well. Per weight, it has a _lot_ of surface to exchange heat through.
Evergreens don't "stay warm like fingers in a mitten" in winter, but, among other things, have one or more of the following reasons for what they are:
1. The needles allow the snow to fall off the trees easier than a broad leaf. (But not all evergreens have needles, btw.)
2. Many contain chemicals that act, effectively, like anti-freeze. You can't stay warm like fingers in a mitten when you can't produce your own warmth. Your fingers stay warm in a mitten just because they produce their own heat, and the mitten keeps it in. If you were cold blooded, like a tree, even keeping them tight together and even a mitten wouldn't last you all winter. The best you can do is try not to freeze as early.
But even so, they're photosynthesizing a lot slower in winter, and when the temperature drops enough and that water freezes anyway, not at all.
3. They grow in areas with less sunlight, warmth and soil nutrients, so they can't afford to just lose the leaves and consume nutrients to make more in spring. So even if temperature drops enough that they do freeze, they keep their leaves because they can't afford to just drop them all and make a new batch later. They keep their needles for _years_.
4. The thick needles and waxy cover help conserve water. Basically they try to lose as little as possible, among other things, because #2 and because getting more from the ground is a pain in winter anyway.
So, seriously, this looks to me like the most retarded kind of pseudo-science. The kind that just imagines some fairy-tale explanation. Worse yet, one based on little more than anthropomorphizing the damn trees.
Nukes are such an overkill weapon, that nobody wants to use it. It's a bit like showing up with a grenade at bar brawl in a small bar. There's no real way to use it without (A) hurting yourself too, and (B) ending up looking like a bigger arsehole than goatse.cx if you even wave it around.
You could bring a gun to that fight. That has some deterrent value. You can have a gun _and_ a grenade. That gets you a bit of a crazy arsehole reputation, but it's taken seriously. But if only option is to kill yourself together with everyone around, it works more against you than for you.
Ditto for nukes. If your only defense option is, basically, "I'll wipe out my whole population in a nuclear war to show you I mean business", it's not much of a defense. I can see most of that population prefer to be conquered than die a fiery radioactive death. You have to have a credible way to escalate the threat, basically.
Not just the Armageddon or nothing. The overkill option is there as just a little extra threat. You might use it, or maybe not, but it's a possibility. It's worth something as an extra little bit of threat, on top of the threat of playing conventional Baghdad Bingo (you know, "F16"... "M1"... "B2"...;), not just by itself.
I mean, think a USA whose _only_ option are the nukes. Now think that, say, an even worse hard-liner than Putin wins the Russian elections, and they decide to take Alaska back. What do you do? Do you think the people in Alaska would rather die in global thermonuclear war than learn Russian and lose their government subsidies? What about, say, the guys in the rest of the USA? Do you think most of them care _that_ much about Alaska to want a nuke on their own home, rather than leave Alaska to the Russians? Seriously?
Look, I'm not American and I'm not a fan of Bush's aggressive stance, to say the least. Trust me, that's putting it very mildly. Yes, give peace a chance. Please.
But I think it's stupid to blame weapons for it. Even if you're the most peaceful and passive nation on Earth, you still need weapons. You need a big stick to keep those off your lawn, who'd rather not give peace a chance. Sad but true.
And as a final parting thought: look at the Bushmen. Peaceful buggers, and never killed anyone. You know what the effect was? They got pushed into a desert, by being slaughtered wholesale by the Bantu _and_ Europeans who wanted their land. Their only saving was that nobody wanted that desert, so they were still allowed to live there. Otherwise, they might have become extinct long before we even got to them. We're not talking just killing a couple of people in a terrorist attack (which is about how much it would work out as, if you scale it to their population.) We're talking all out genocide against them.
My even better question is: why is "bah, it requires physical access" seen as an automatic "don't worry about it" around these parts?
Yes, maybe a home computer doesn't have more people logging in. But:
- Workstations at work have lots of people who can log into them. If I come really early or stay late, I can go to any workstation (and a few laptops) in the building and log in with my own account. If it's possible to escalate your rights from there, I could get access to everyone's local and temporary files. Go see what the department boss is doing. Go see with which suppliers do the purchasing guys deal. I'm sure their competitors will love knowing what kind of discount they could negotiate and still steal that contract. Walk to the other building and get the CAD guys' designs.
Plus there are a lot of people who can physically get near any computer, up to CEO level. Like, say, the janitors.
- Servers even more so. There are servers where hundreds of people can log in. If you can escalate your rights to root, you can get to their files. Or you can install some rootkit on the bloody server. Or even one disgruntled L1 support guy about to quit can escalate his rights, reconfigure the backups, and do a "rm -rf/". Etc.
So basically not arguing with your point, but even _if_ the answer were "OMG, you need to be physically at that computer" or "OMG you'd need to be logged in anyway", it still wouldn't be much of a saving grace. There _are_ more uses for computers than as someone's email and surfing rig at home.
As an ex-AA guy, I can tell you that even hitting something that moves fast and low with a gun is hard enough, and requires sophisticated radars and computer-controlled guns. I.e. noone does it by turning cranks any more.
Throwing some satchel by hand, on the top of something that moves at 288 miles per hour... well, if you can do that, you're Superman.
The phenomenon was more complex indeed, but I'm just pointing at the weapon development aspect alone, not trying to write a whole analysis of WW2 in one message.
And even that ends up pointing at weapons largely.
E.g., yes, they relocated the industry. What did they end up producing with it? Thousands of T-34's, millions of SMGs, increasingly competitive aircraft which (combined with the Luftwaffe losses in the west and having half of it tied to defend against stragegic bombing) helped turn air superiority the other way around, etc.
E.g., yes, the Panther was competitive with the T-34. Because it was a shameless copy of the T-34 with some minor improvements. But again, it comes back to my point that you have to make better weapons.
E.g., yes, the Tiger was a mighty fine tank, and the 88mm FLAK was great in the early stages. And eventually it had to deal with such things as the IS-2 heavy tank, and the 100mm Soviet AT guns, and the SU-152 (nicknamed Zveroboy, "beast killer", for what it did to a Panther or Tiger even with the HE round.) I'll skip over the whole analysis, but, again, you need to have modern weapons.
Really, that's my whole point. That you can't just stop and say, "OMG, it's obscene and immoral to develop more stuff that can drop a bomb on some guys. We'll stop researching those right now."
Well, while I might even join in lamenting about using them for offensive purposes, I'm afraid you don't really have that much choice about developing new weapons. Simply put, those who don't live by the sword, get to be at the wrong end of the sword.
Or to put it otherwise, ask the USSR how they felt in 1941 about still having mostly old BT tanks and outdated aircraft. What saved them were the new and vastly superior T-34. Or ask Poland about how well their cavalry divisions did when attacked by tanks.
Seriously, it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. Being a pacifist with no (modern) weapons only works if everyone else around is. Otherwise, well, you have to have the deterrent of being the guy with the biggest stick.
And we all tried forcing everyone to be peaceful and put a limit to their military. Like, you know, between the two world wars. Turns out that, as the only result, a bunch of people just lied about how big their ship were, or about what they're researching. Germany for example called their tank research and prototypes agricultural tractors for a while. (I guess you can't blame a guy for having guns in his tractor too. Just ask any mid-west farmer.;)
Another issue, he warns, is that "V-STAR seems more like a packaging exercise than a true innovation and "none of the technologies is new."
Seems to me to be:
A) saying that it's reasonable possible to make it, since there are no big surprises to be expected from anything in it, and
B) kind of a lame complaint. Innovation by combining existing elements is really the norm. The train was equally just an exercise in packaging a steam engine (which technically wasn't new, since it had been done before to pump water out of mine shafts) and a cart. Guns appeared as a packaging exercise between a bell and some funny powder used in fireworks. Nobel's dynamite was an exercise in literally packaging nitroglycerin and diatomaceous earth. Etc.
Basically, I'm sorry, but the age of discovering something completely new and based on nothing that came before it ended, I dunno, in stone age or so. Ever since, all we make is built on stuff that came before it.
2. Picking on the guy's credentials, again, I have some problems with it:
A) I see no incredible claim in there. It just says that he was trained as an engineer and worked as a manager. Hardly "all over the place" or incredible. I see a dozen people every day when I go to work, which fit the exact same bill.
B) they don't say that any of his claims are false. Did he lie about it? Did he get fired for incompetence from any of those companies? Does he have some history of not achieving what he promises? Or WTF is the problem? It should be easy to prove whether he actually was a manager at Intel or Toshiba, no? So tell me if he lied, not some lame attempt at making it sound ridiculous by itself.
C) seems to me to be exactly what they need for the job, especially once they said that there are no obvious flaws with the idea. You need someone who can organize research, development and production, hence, a manager.
D) it's, at best, an ad-hominem and as per points 2.A to 2.C a pretty lame one.
Now I'm not saying they should necessarily give him money, but the Wired article is an exercise in journalistic stupidity at best.
And once you include all the free-and-Free games in Ubuntu's repository, you have more games than were released for the Atari 7800 (60 titles) and Virtual Boy (22) put together. And no, not all of them are just Tetris clones either.
Look, I'm not trying to dis Linux or anything. It's great for work or casual browsing any email.
But for games, umm, how do I say this tactfully?
1. the "you have more games than were released for the Atari 7800 (60 titles) and Virtual Boy (22) put together" doesn't say much. Both were flops and had pitiful numbers of games release, compared to any other platform. And even less original games. So it's a bit like saying that a drink tastes better than diarrhea. Or that a movie was more entertaining than root canal and a kick in the nuts put together. They comparison point is so low, that it doesn't really say much.
Now if you could compare it to the Atari 2600, or NES, that would be something.
2. I've seen the list of those 42 top commercial games, and I even commented on that story. I'll even raise you about a dozen more Loki ports, and a few commercial adventures that work well in ScummVM.
Nothing against them as such, kudos for porting them, but some are as much as 10 years old. My idea of having a gaming rig is more along the lines of, dunno, "I wanna play Age Of Conan which just got released", than like "I wanna play Knights And Merchants which I've already played in the 90's. And thought it sucked." Or much as Quake 3 Arena was a fine game for 2000, let's face it, there's a very limited number of people who still play _that_ online. You get the idea.
3. The free games... well, I've _tried_ a bunch of them. Yes, not all are Tetris clones. Pingus is a clone of Lemmings (an 1991 game) and the copy I tried, never had more than the tutorial levels. Some are clones of Missile Command (from 1980), the most notable of which being probably Penguin Command. Some are clones of Arkanoid (1986), and no matter what twists you give them (e.g., Briquolo), it's still f-ing Arkanoid, you know? Ditto, replacing the cute little dinosaur with a penguin doesn't make, say, Frozen Bubble be anything else than a clone of Puzzle Bobble / Bust-A-Move from 1994. I can even think of a moderately passable clone of 2D Mario games from the 80's, namely SuperTux. Etc.
I've seen very little in the way of original games there, and even fewer that don't look like old ass. Sorry, _classic_ ass.
Now I can't have any demands there given that they're free. I can see they couldn't afford an army of graphics artists or a celebrity game designer. I know that. Thanks for the intention, guys, and all that. But being that I'm not exactly below poverty line either, I'd really rather pay for a commercial-grade game.
Look, again, I'm not trying to put down Linux across the board. But for the narrow domain called "video games", it wouldn't really be my first choice. Sorry.
Well, I guess it depends on what you do with that computer. If Ubuntu does the trick for you, more power to you.
On the other hand, while I _am_ writing this on a SuSE 10.0 machine, I wouldn't really want Linux on my gaming rig. I know, Wine, bla, bla, bla. Tried that route some time ago, wasn't worth the effort. Does it even work with most games' copy-protection these days, or do you still need a crack just to run your legitimately purchased game in Wine?
So, well, different tools for different folks.
Actually, here's what makes it difficult
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Understanding Privacy
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, what makes anything difficult with humans is our being herd animals. We do stuff that we think would please the herd and make us better liked by our peers. Because we're nice and social like that.
Unfortunately, that can be used jujutsu style against us. Enter: groupthink. And there are those who figured out how to do that. It's not new, it's at least ten thousand years old, very probably even more.
Groupthink is a funny thing. Take for example a bunch of farmers, like in the infamous Goering quote, who each independently would rather work their farm than go risk death and crippling in a war where they have nothing to gain. Independently, each would rather _not_ go to war. Put them in a situation where each thinks "OMG, I'd lose face if the others think I'm a coward and unpatriotic" and watch them thump their chests and screaming pro-war slogans. Watch them cheer for the very things they despise secretly. Or conversely shaking a fist and yelling against the very things they desire.
And after a short while, cognitive dissonance kicks in, and they even lie to themselves that they really want those things they hate, and they really hate those things they want.
It's the emperor's new clothes story. Get a bunch of people who think everyone else sees those non-existent clothes, and that their standing would fall dramatically if they don't. Watch them all swear that they can see them clothes. In fact, watch cognitive dissonance kick in, and see them convince even themselves that they _do_ kinda see the clothes.
Where the Grimm Brothers got it wrong, is that that phenomenon is _very_ hard to unravel. In the story, all it takes is one kid shouting "the emperor is naked", for the whole charade to come apart. In reality, that wouldn't do jack squat.
In reality, for you to be brave, someone else must be a coward. To provide the comparison. For you to be smart, someone else must be stupid. For you to be a superior audiophile who hears the difference in downloaded MP3s with an audiophile Ethernet cable, someone else must be inferior enough to not hear it. Etc. The child shouting "the emperor is naked" just provides that other term of the comparison. It makes everyone else in the crowd pat their backs and congratulate each other that they're not like that simpleton kid who can't see the clothes.
It's a funny thing too, in that it's not even the emperor's guards that make it happen. They're at best a catalyst to get it started. Two hundred years later the emperor could be dead and his heirs guillotined long ago, the country could be a democracy, and the "clothes" could be in a museum showing the craftsmanship in the old days. Or maybe as proof of the excesses of nobility in the old days. And people would still come and squint and convince themselves that they _can_ see some fabulous clothes behind the glass. Just because everyone else does.
So what does this have to do with privacy? Well, that's why you have to explain to people exactly what privacy is and that it's not some shameful failing to need your personal space. Because there are plenty of those trying to make it sound like you're some horrible monster and your peers would surely shun you if you want privacy. The ball is already rolling towards turning it into a group-think situation, and there are interested parties pushing the ball in that direction too. You need more than just, well, "privacy is privacy, duh, and of course you need it" to defuse that.
Never been to one of those keynotes, so I'm just working with what the media gives me. Such stories as this one right here on Slashdot, but originally from Wired:
Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, 'We don't have a product yet.' The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. 'It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,' says someone who was in the meeting.
That's not the only one, but I'm too lazy to search for more right now.
Maybe they got applause on the stage. But the story that got told to and by the media thereafter was the above: 200 of those guys couldn't make shit until The Great Man scared them into working. It's not a flattering story.
YES! They probably are mostly zealots and fanboys otherwise they'd be working for M$. Pretty much anyone with an Apple becomes a zealboy so they have about 5% of the computing audience to hire from and most of them don't know they're being shafted, they're just working a dream job for the company that made the friendly overpriced computer they love.
I know you're being sarcastic, but that does touch a subject that I've genuinely wondered about.
See most stories we're graced with from Apple (which isn't to say it's a comprehensive set, but just that that's the image that Apple itself is perfectly happy to give) is that everything happened because of the Great Man Steve Jobs, and (thinly veiled) in spite of those lazy incompetent engineers. X is all due to the Great Man's vision. Y was personally tested by the Great Man. Z only happened because the Great Man yelled at the engineers and told them to make the things He wants. W happened because, frighteningly enough, the Great Man didn't yell for a change, but just fixed the engineers with his iciest stare and asked them when are they going to get it done. Etc.
Frankly, it gives the impression of something more like Stalin's USSR or Mao's China than anything even vaguely resembling a company or a boss I'd like to work for. Not saying that it's necessarily that bad, I wouldn't know, but that's the impression that Apple's propaganda machine leaves. Seen from outside, and if the question came, "well, would I want to quit my job and try to get a job there?", it doesn't exactly sound motivational, to say the least.
Even skipping past the other implications, I never heard the Great Man giving credit to anyone else but himself. You hear all the time about how the iPod's success is because Steve Jobs himself said how loud the volume button should go, but you never hear who was actually the guy who designed the bloody thing. Well, not from Apple. It's not hard to dig up the names, but I'd like just once to hear Apple just come out and say "we'd like to thank these guys for making it possible."
Even from MS, for all its other sins, you hear about who championed, say, their getting into the whole Internet thing, against Bill Gates's vision. Or about those two guys whose bright idea was to make DirectX instead of just going with the OpenGL flow. Heck, you even hear about the Bob clusterfuck being the brain child of Melinda Gates. Good or bad, it's not particularly hard to find out who was really behind what.
I'm not saying that Bill Gates is a nice guy, and Ballmer probably even less so. But between one narcissistic bully who at least gives credit, and a narcissistic bully who doesn't, Bill comes out as a bit less of a low life on my scale.
Frankly, just about the only positive thing I hear about Apple as an employer, is that they don't discriminate against anyone. Their world is so centered around the cult of Steve Jobs, that there is no room for caring whether you're black, gay or whatever else. You're the worthless peon, and that's enough about you already.
Now I hear that the wages aren't that great either.
So, really, please help me understand. Why _do_ those guys go work there? I'm genuinely curious.
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually talking about mass, not about charge. They're colliding protons, not neutrons, because you can't really accelerate a neutron with a particle accelerator.
OK, OK, I'll admit it was also to cheat a bit, and pretend it's not a charged black hole. That doesn't change the result by all that much, but it keeps the equations a lot simpler.
Point taken. I'll even up the ante and admit that I forgot to actually multiply by the 3 the last time. (I guess I should pay more attention.) So including your 15000 instead of 5, that radius ends up 9000 times larger than I calculated. Ok, let's round it to 10,000 since we ignored decimals so far. So we delete four zeroes from the calculation of how it stacks compared to a helium atom. Now instead of 42 zeroes after the decimal point, there are 38. It's still a ludicriously small black hole.
I also kind of doubt that all the energy will end up as mass. I'd expect quite the hard gamma rays to be produced too.
Funnily enough, though, Leonardo da Vinci seems to aggree with the summary, though. He wrote: "As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself."
I will agree though that it does seem a bit baffling a quote, coming from, you know, Leonardo da Vinci.
On the other hand, even Leonardo da Vinci does sorta illustrate his point. While he did excel in a handful of domains, his interest sprawling into others has produced less than briliant results. He actually wrote that salamanders are born from fire, or such gems as, "The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue."
So maybe he did have a point with that quote about divided minds. If he had devoted more of his efforts to, I don't know, engineering, instead of dabbling into where salamanders come from, I'm sure he would have had a bigger return from that investment. Who knows how many more inventions of pure genius we would have had in that case?
Actually, from where I look at it, it's been a far sadder story. It's been a story of _ignoring_ all that neuroscience was gradually discovering, and worshipping false figures of authority, and chasing chimeras born out of their self-importance.
In other words, we left it to mathematicians. Since, you know, they're usually smart guys and maths is such a valuable tool. So they wrote really cool theorems and postulated them as being obviously necessary for an AI. For no bloody obvious reason, often, and certainly no proof-of-concept system to show why it's even useful at all. But, hey, he's a smart guy, so he _obviously_ must be right when he pulls an unsupported assertion that his latest unrelated theorem is key to an AI.
My favourite example of that stupidity taken to the extremes, was the relatively recent "AI" prize for compressing Wikipedia. Just because some smart mathematician thought that _obviously_ an AI would need to pack its database in as few bits as possible. So obviously whichever algorithm won at compressing Wikipedia would be the best thing for an AI.
Well, let's stop right there. While using a finite number of neurons or transistors efficiently does make superficial sense, it's nowhere near proven that it's actually needed or even useful for an AI, and we have very little indication that lossless compression is used by any Real Intelligence. What we did have there was a mathematical theorem saying what's the absolute minimum number of bits needed to encode a message. That's it. It didn't really say anything about when it's the best data structure for any given problem, AI included.
That extra step was pulled out of the arse, based on little more than handwaving (it stands to reason, ya know?;) and appeal to false authority.
Actually processing that data, for AI purposes and otherwise, runs into a lot more problems than that. E.g., ok, now you've used arithmetic compression on Wikipedia, and made it what some compressors call a "solid archive" too (didn't reset the stream for each file, basically) because it tends to compress better on the whole, and won the contest. Now what? How do you use that to answer a question like, "what happened to the last Western Roman Emperor?"
Are you going to now decompress the whole giant thing just to access the relevant files? See that thing about solid archives: you can't unpack any file unless you first uncompress everything that came before it. That's one example of a choice where what's good for compression, isn't good for quickly retrieving data and following links to what really interests you.
And what about indexing? What about the whole graph of hyperlinks? How about we take care of representing those in a form that's actually useful for a machine, before we worry about compressing the whole thing?
And we haven't even gotten in the mess of hints that we have from neurology, stage magic tricks, optical illusions research, etc, about how the brain _actually_ works.
That's been the real problem and reason why we haven't made progress in half a century. It wasn't just a matter of not understanding it, it was a matter of _ignoring_ everything that was known, and what became known in the meantime.
It was basically, like watching a bunch of people sit in their ivory towers and postulate that trees _must_ be purple. It stands to reason, really. I mean, green light is the peak of the transmitted spectrum through the atmosphere. It's the most abundant basically. Any efficient photosynthesis system would obviously absorb green, not reflect it. If you absolutely must reflect something, reflect the less abundant red and blue (so you get purple leaves), not green. In fact, the whole notion of green trees is blatantly absurd. Why would nature waste most of the incoming energy like that? ;)
So only now we're starting to make some progress by forgetting all that, and starting anew with a more bayesian approach. This one actually seems to work for a change, and doesn't conflict much with what we k
Well, exactly how small black holes _are_ we talking about? Because it seems to me that the whole scare is due to a few people's not really understanding physics.
Gravity is actually the weakest force at a particle level. But ok, let's imagine a really really small gravity well.
Arguably the interesting thing about one would be, basically, "up to what distance can it gobble things up." In other words, the the Schwarzschild radius.
I'll use simplified version, which is: 3km for something weighing as much as our Sun, and it varies linearly with mass from there. Literally. For Something the size of Earth it would be 9mm, btw, but they won't collide particles weighing the same as _Earth_ there. If they did, I'd worry about _recoil_ before I worry about black holes.
So how big a black hole will they create there? Say, about the weight of two neutrons? _Three_ neutrons? Heck, let's be generous and smash a whole five neutrons together. Each neutron weighs 1.67492729x10^27 kg. So 5 of them is very approximately 8x10^-27 kg. The Sun weighs 1.9891×10^30 kg, let's say 2x10^30 kg.
So we get roughly 3km times 4x10^-57 km, or 4x10^-54 metres. That's the ridiculously infinitesimal size, up to which it could gobble matter. By comparison a helium atom has a radius of 31 picometres, or approx 3x10^-11 metres. Our black hole is about 10 to the 43'th power smaller than that. Write a zero, a dot, 42 more zeroes and a 1. That's how much smaller that black hole is than a helium atom.
To be absorbed by it, another particle would have to come that close to it, overcoming all other forces. Which become pretty damn strong when you try to get that close.
In effect, the _only_ way for that "black hole" to gobble any other particle, is for that other particle to be shot directly at it with an even bigger particle accelerator. With some incredible (and thanks to that guy Heisenberg, also pretty much impossible) accuracy. Otherwise, it will be bounced around by the other atoms, without ever getting close enough to one to actually absorb one and get bigger and meaner.
If that's the big threat to Earth, well, I've seen scarier kittens than that ;)
Before I start, yeah, I do subscribe to the POV that IQ tests are just a trainable skill, and thus measure only... how good you are at IQ tests. Plus, I don't think one number is anywhere near able to sum up the gamut of human skills and abilities and talents.
That said, I do seem to recall that there _are_ differences in the brain wiring of different people. E.g., IIRC it was even linked here on Slashdot that Asperger's Syndrome causes neurons to form more connections and be much more reluctant to break old connections. E.g., they seem to have found a gene responsible for ADHD, which, again, causes the brain to work differently.
And in the end, is it that big a surprise? How your whole body looks like, and how it works, is dictated by some proteins which are encoded by some genes. E.g., we already identified, say, the protein which is encoded differently for a human brain as opposed to a chimp brain. And sometimes seemingly unrelated proteins affect the various pathways and reactions. E.g., a broken MC1R doesn't just give you red hair, but also has effects including different fight-or-flight priorities and pain sensitivity.
Because "God" doesn't seem to believe in neat, orthogonal, cohesive coding. Or rather, because we're the result of some random mutations that worked. If modifying another protein to fix the effect of the first works too, chances are you get that instead of fixing the first one. We're the result of some billions of years of spaghetti code and layers upon layers of hacks, that often address the symptoms instead of the real problem. We even have pieces of DNA that seem to be both code and data segment (very loosely using those terms, anyway.) We have deliberately self-modifying code, fer crying out loud. (That's how the immune system can match almost any foreign protein.)
At any rate, there are a lot of genes at work there. There are mutations in every generation. There are recessive traits. Etc. So it's not that far fetched that some people's brains would be wired slightly differently.
Whether that's good or bad, if up for debate. And, yes, IQ isn't measuring that. But you can't say that everyone has the same brain and only differs in how focused they are.
Heck, even that focus itself seems to be often a result of genes. E.g., Asperger's Syndrome has a narrow focus of interest as one of its almost invariant symptoms. The ability to hyperfocus is right behind on that list. So even that goes back to genes and brain wiring, it seems.
Basically, I dunno, I have no problem believing that some people _are_ born smarter. Again, it may not be measured by IQ, but I believe it's happening.
Actually, AFAIK, models never were the problem in racing games. Trademarks were.
There are already games like Tokyo Xtreme Racer which have models of actual cars, but call them something else than the trademark. E.g., "Mazda RX-7 Type RZ" becomes "FD3RKK" and if you look closely on the car, it says "Madda". Others are even less obfuscated, so for example a Porsche Carrera 964 Turbo becomes "964T" and a Dodge Viper GTS is called "VGTS". But otherwise, the car looked exactly like the real thing. (Well, at least until you went Rice-Boy on it, and installed a huge wing, funky lights, decals, etc;)
It's when you use someone else's trademark to make money out of it, that they start getting their panties in a knot. And are even legally required to defend their trademark or lose it.
And although around these parts both are lumped together under "OMG, IP is bad", trademarks are really a different thing and have a very different legal status. This ruling only said anything about copyright. If your game calls a car, say, "Toyota Celica GT-Four 1998", you still have a trademark problem and you have to license it from Toyota. Likely still on their terms. If you call it something like "ST205" like in TXR, though, now it's even official that Toyota has no rights over your 3D model of it.
Again, the problem never was risk of lawsuit over showing their car crumpled, or everyone who ever published photos of an accident would be equally at risk. The problem was that you have to sign a contract with the manufacturer to use their trademark. And being a contract, it contains whatever conditions are acceptable to both. If you breach the terms of the contract, well, you'll likely get sued for that, not for copyright. Plus, as a bonus, you've just shot yourself in the foot: that's one license you won't get for the sequel. Being that they bought each other like crazy over time, that could mean a lot of cars you won't be able to license in the next game.
All things considered, though, it probably won't change much. Those trademarks are what gets more than half the players to play that game. So Sony, EA and the gang will continue to license them from the trademark owner, and still have to agree to a bunch of conditions in the process.
Now now, I wasn't talking about Bush this time ;)
Exactly which part of "the oldest and most northerly remains of a parrot ever discovered" translates to you into "a known parrot that was around at that time"? No, seriously.
Dude, let's put it like this:
- this thing is 54 _million_ years old
- humans, as in Homo Sapiens, are about 200,000 years old
- even Neanderthals, the only other species that ever reached sentience, isn't that horribly much older. The proto-neanderthals reached Europe some 350-500 thousand years ago, but the fully evolved Neanderthals are a mere 130,000 years old.
- the split between the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees happened some 6 million years ago. Which is to say that at that point, the most evolved form of life was something that was dumber and more primitive than the chimp. It's _not_ something that would build ships and sail the fjords.
So exactly what species would that captain be, 54 million years ago. Are we talking some time-travelling alien that took a different species of parrot from a later time, and then went back to 54 million years ago to dump its skeleton there and confuse a species that didn't even exist yet? Or what?
Heh.
Well, the short answer is: sorta.
It's true that there is a degree of cluelessness in recruiting across the whole software development and IT industries, and not just in the UK. The difference for the game industry is that, basically, they usually can get away with worse stuff than everyone else.
It's just a nasty product of supply and demand, so to speak. There's a steady supply of idealistic young nerds coming out of college, or sometimes straight out of high school, with an idea that they _must_ work in the games industry. Because games are cool, challenging stuff done by really smart people, and they're not gonna end up wearing suits and writing database programs in VB like _those_ boring guys. There's simply more of them than there are jobs in the games industry. Orders of magnitude more.
And as is the case when supply vastly outstrips demand, you'll find someone who'll sell it to you for a ridiculously low price. Just because he found no other buyers anyway.
So the industry actually gets a steady stream of people who'll actually take a 15k job, and be perfectly content to be treated like dirt and asked to do 80+ hour weeks too.
Unfortunately, that brings us to their skills shortage:
1. Those tend to be rather inexperienced. There's virtually nobody who made their experience as a high-paid enterprise archited or senior developper, and then suddenly decides to become a game designer for a quarter of the pay and twice the work hours. Everyone who gets in the game industry does it from the bottom, with very little experience where it matters.
2. And by the time they did get their experience in the games industry, they're burned out and bitter, and lost most of that juvenile idealism. So they move on to better paying and lower stress jobs. The games industry is actively bleeding that experience out, as fast as it gets it.
Incidentally, that's also a somewhat different skills shortage than you describe. In the games industry it's not that some PHB wants you to have 5+ years experience with the exact version of IDE they have there. They'd be happy to get you with 5+ years experience, period. Provided that you still work for as little money as a complete newbie, and have just as little self-respect as their usual employees, of course. And that's where they start having a problem. By the time they've got 5 years experience at all, half of those people have left the industry for good. And it only goes downhill from there.
Well, maybe. The only issue I do take issue with, is the misguided idea that it's some art form that can't be trained. As you yourself note, experience and knowledge _do_ play a major role.
You're right, if you take someone with absolutely no imagination, just teaching them algorithms won't suffice. But conversely, I've seen plenty of people who had just the imagination, and it didn't really compensate for lack of knowledge and experience. They did dumb and inefficient things anyway. Granted, some where _creatively_ dumb and inefficient, but still...
That's game _design_, not game programming. Even if sometimes the same people do both, that doesn't make it a part of programming.
Heh. During my somewhat brief time in game programming, my impression was that half those people _are_ trained monkeys. Actually, make that: _poorly_ trained monkeys. With delusions of grandeur. Most of the game code I've actually seen from them... well, not only it wasn't especially smart (most seem to confuse obfuscation and optimization, and achieve only the former), but some of it was worthy of The Daily WTF.
I've been in both camps and, as I was saying, I've had funny self-important ideas too. "See, I'm so cool and smart and all cutting edge because I'm doing games. Unlike those boring suits doing non-creative, boring database stuff in VB. I bet they're there just because they're not smart enough to code games."
Heh. Man, I had my head so far up my own arse, I'd have made some yoga gurus envious.
In practice, having seen both sides and been on both sides, I can tell you that the only real reason they're not in games, is that they're smarter than to be paid a pittance and get 80 hour week demands.
Now don't get me wrong, you can't teach everyone to be a good programmer. Or for some people to program at all. But if you could teach someone to be good at coding, they'll be just as good at coding games. That domain simply isn't special in any form or shape. Yes, anyone who can think algorithmically and design and implement a good program in any other domain, could do game good programming too. No worse than any other kind of programming.
Actually, creativity is a tiny small part of programming. Programming is basically a funnily-formalized maths. And sometimes even that programming language notation isn't enough, and you actually have to do old fashioned maths with large matrixes and multi-dimensional geometries and theorems named after long-dead Greeks or French guys. And some domains of it need some other knowledge too: e.g., the physics engines another poster mentioned.
It's not art, where expressing yourself in unorthodox ways that make the viewer question the establishment. If it were art, sure, creativity would be everything. But it's an algorithm that has to execute on a very anal-retentive machine, and solve a very well defined program.
If Picasso didn't draw a human anywhere near correct, it's good art. If you make a program that's nowhere near correct, it's just buggy. If your code draws the polygons for the eyes in the wrong positions, like Picasso did, it's not some thought-provoking art, it's a graphics glitch and you get to fix it. Ditto if your shaders end up producing halos like in Van Gogh's paintings. If Picasso or Tzara ignored some centuries of accepted artistic methods, it was innovative. If you do the same in a program, it's just wasting your employer's money on reinventing the wheel, and usually doing a piss-poor job too.
You're not making art. You're writing a program. Art and creativity come into play when you come up with an idea. But then you have to sit down and actually implement it. That's plain old work and skill, and it _can_ be trained.
In other words, if you think you can just ignore two millenia of maths, half a millenium of physics, and half a century of algorithms, and you'll do as good (or even better) a job just because you're teh uber-creative guy... I'll call bull on that. It doesn't work like that. That's not just man hours, but many man-millenia that were needed to discover or prove all that stuff. And there were likely some guys in there that were both smarter and more creative than you, no matter who you are. You can't just skip all that and think you'll just get creative and invent it on your own in an afternoon when you need it.
Yes, it helps to have a little creativity, and combine those algorithms in smart ways. Fine. But you still need to learn them, or at least know they exist. In an ideal world, even understand why they work, and why they're better than the dumb brute-force stuff produced by teh creative people without training. But at the very least, know that they exist, so you can google them later.
Now all this may sound a bit harsh. I've been at the same point, and had the same dumb ideas, so you get _some_ sympathy there. But guess what? That was just the ADHD talking. It's just an excuse for lacking the willpower to just sit down and learn. But in practice, you're not _that_ smart, and I'm not _that_ smart either. You can't just snap your fingers and reinvent what others needed centuries to discover. I can't either.
Jesus F Christ, forget the kinship. The quote about pine needles is just about the most retarded thing I've heard in ages.
Having lots of thin needles near each other is actually a pretty good heatsink design. No, seriously. Not as good as some ducted designs, and not as cheap to make as shaved copper fins, but nevertheless, if you're going to blow air through it, it gets heat out rather impressively well. Per weight, it has a _lot_ of surface to exchange heat through.
Evergreens don't "stay warm like fingers in a mitten" in winter, but, among other things, have one or more of the following reasons for what they are:
1. The needles allow the snow to fall off the trees easier than a broad leaf. (But not all evergreens have needles, btw.)
2. Many contain chemicals that act, effectively, like anti-freeze. You can't stay warm like fingers in a mitten when you can't produce your own warmth. Your fingers stay warm in a mitten just because they produce their own heat, and the mitten keeps it in. If you were cold blooded, like a tree, even keeping them tight together and even a mitten wouldn't last you all winter. The best you can do is try not to freeze as early.
But even so, they're photosynthesizing a lot slower in winter, and when the temperature drops enough and that water freezes anyway, not at all.
3. They grow in areas with less sunlight, warmth and soil nutrients, so they can't afford to just lose the leaves and consume nutrients to make more in spring. So even if temperature drops enough that they do freeze, they keep their leaves because they can't afford to just drop them all and make a new batch later. They keep their needles for _years_.
4. The thick needles and waxy cover help conserve water. Basically they try to lose as little as possible, among other things, because #2 and because getting more from the ground is a pain in winter anyway.
So, seriously, this looks to me like the most retarded kind of pseudo-science. The kind that just imagines some fairy-tale explanation. Worse yet, one based on little more than anthropomorphizing the damn trees.
Nukes are such an overkill weapon, that nobody wants to use it. It's a bit like showing up with a grenade at bar brawl in a small bar. There's no real way to use it without (A) hurting yourself too, and (B) ending up looking like a bigger arsehole than goatse.cx if you even wave it around.
You could bring a gun to that fight. That has some deterrent value. You can have a gun _and_ a grenade. That gets you a bit of a crazy arsehole reputation, but it's taken seriously. But if only option is to kill yourself together with everyone around, it works more against you than for you.
Ditto for nukes. If your only defense option is, basically, "I'll wipe out my whole population in a nuclear war to show you I mean business", it's not much of a defense. I can see most of that population prefer to be conquered than die a fiery radioactive death. You have to have a credible way to escalate the threat, basically.
Not just the Armageddon or nothing. The overkill option is there as just a little extra threat. You might use it, or maybe not, but it's a possibility. It's worth something as an extra little bit of threat, on top of the threat of playing conventional Baghdad Bingo (you know, "F16"... "M1"... "B2"...;), not just by itself.
I mean, think a USA whose _only_ option are the nukes. Now think that, say, an even worse hard-liner than Putin wins the Russian elections, and they decide to take Alaska back. What do you do? Do you think the people in Alaska would rather die in global thermonuclear war than learn Russian and lose their government subsidies? What about, say, the guys in the rest of the USA? Do you think most of them care _that_ much about Alaska to want a nuke on their own home, rather than leave Alaska to the Russians? Seriously?
Look, I'm not American and I'm not a fan of Bush's aggressive stance, to say the least. Trust me, that's putting it very mildly. Yes, give peace a chance. Please.
But I think it's stupid to blame weapons for it. Even if you're the most peaceful and passive nation on Earth, you still need weapons. You need a big stick to keep those off your lawn, who'd rather not give peace a chance. Sad but true.
And as a final parting thought: look at the Bushmen. Peaceful buggers, and never killed anyone. You know what the effect was? They got pushed into a desert, by being slaughtered wholesale by the Bantu _and_ Europeans who wanted their land. Their only saving was that nobody wanted that desert, so they were still allowed to live there. Otherwise, they might have become extinct long before we even got to them. We're not talking just killing a couple of people in a terrorist attack (which is about how much it would work out as, if you scale it to their population.) We're talking all out genocide against them.
Just something to think about.
My even better question is: why is "bah, it requires physical access" seen as an automatic "don't worry about it" around these parts?
/". Etc.
Yes, maybe a home computer doesn't have more people logging in. But:
- Workstations at work have lots of people who can log into them. If I come really early or stay late, I can go to any workstation (and a few laptops) in the building and log in with my own account. If it's possible to escalate your rights from there, I could get access to everyone's local and temporary files. Go see what the department boss is doing. Go see with which suppliers do the purchasing guys deal. I'm sure their competitors will love knowing what kind of discount they could negotiate and still steal that contract. Walk to the other building and get the CAD guys' designs.
Plus there are a lot of people who can physically get near any computer, up to CEO level. Like, say, the janitors.
- Servers even more so. There are servers where hundreds of people can log in. If you can escalate your rights to root, you can get to their files. Or you can install some rootkit on the bloody server. Or even one disgruntled L1 support guy about to quit can escalate his rights, reconfigure the backups, and do a "rm -rf
So basically not arguing with your point, but even _if_ the answer were "OMG, you need to be physically at that computer" or "OMG you'd need to be logged in anyway", it still wouldn't be much of a saving grace. There _are_ more uses for computers than as someone's email and surfing rig at home.
As an ex-AA guy, I can tell you that even hitting something that moves fast and low with a gun is hard enough, and requires sophisticated radars and computer-controlled guns. I.e. noone does it by turning cranks any more.
Throwing some satchel by hand, on the top of something that moves at 288 miles per hour... well, if you can do that, you're Superman.
The phenomenon was more complex indeed, but I'm just pointing at the weapon development aspect alone, not trying to write a whole analysis of WW2 in one message.
And even that ends up pointing at weapons largely.
E.g., yes, they relocated the industry. What did they end up producing with it? Thousands of T-34's, millions of SMGs, increasingly competitive aircraft which (combined with the Luftwaffe losses in the west and having half of it tied to defend against stragegic bombing) helped turn air superiority the other way around, etc.
E.g., yes, the Panther was competitive with the T-34. Because it was a shameless copy of the T-34 with some minor improvements. But again, it comes back to my point that you have to make better weapons.
E.g., yes, the Tiger was a mighty fine tank, and the 88mm FLAK was great in the early stages. And eventually it had to deal with such things as the IS-2 heavy tank, and the 100mm Soviet AT guns, and the SU-152 (nicknamed Zveroboy, "beast killer", for what it did to a Panther or Tiger even with the HE round.) I'll skip over the whole analysis, but, again, you need to have modern weapons.
Really, that's my whole point. That you can't just stop and say, "OMG, it's obscene and immoral to develop more stuff that can drop a bomb on some guys. We'll stop researching those right now."
Well, while I might even join in lamenting about using them for offensive purposes, I'm afraid you don't really have that much choice about developing new weapons. Simply put, those who don't live by the sword, get to be at the wrong end of the sword.
Or to put it otherwise, ask the USSR how they felt in 1941 about still having mostly old BT tanks and outdated aircraft. What saved them were the new and vastly superior T-34. Or ask Poland about how well their cavalry divisions did when attacked by tanks.
Seriously, it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. Being a pacifist with no (modern) weapons only works if everyone else around is. Otherwise, well, you have to have the deterrent of being the guy with the biggest stick.
And we all tried forcing everyone to be peaceful and put a limit to their military. Like, you know, between the two world wars. Turns out that, as the only result, a bunch of people just lied about how big their ship were, or about what they're researching. Germany for example called their tank research and prototypes agricultural tractors for a while. (I guess you can't blame a guy for having guns in his tractor too. Just ask any mid-west farmer.;)
1. from the same Wired page:
Seems to me to be:
A) saying that it's reasonable possible to make it, since there are no big surprises to be expected from anything in it, and
B) kind of a lame complaint. Innovation by combining existing elements is really the norm. The train was equally just an exercise in packaging a steam engine (which technically wasn't new, since it had been done before to pump water out of mine shafts) and a cart. Guns appeared as a packaging exercise between a bell and some funny powder used in fireworks. Nobel's dynamite was an exercise in literally packaging nitroglycerin and diatomaceous earth. Etc.
Basically, I'm sorry, but the age of discovering something completely new and based on nothing that came before it ended, I dunno, in stone age or so. Ever since, all we make is built on stuff that came before it.
2. Picking on the guy's credentials, again, I have some problems with it:
A) I see no incredible claim in there. It just says that he was trained as an engineer and worked as a manager. Hardly "all over the place" or incredible. I see a dozen people every day when I go to work, which fit the exact same bill.
B) they don't say that any of his claims are false. Did he lie about it? Did he get fired for incompetence from any of those companies? Does he have some history of not achieving what he promises? Or WTF is the problem? It should be easy to prove whether he actually was a manager at Intel or Toshiba, no? So tell me if he lied, not some lame attempt at making it sound ridiculous by itself.
C) seems to me to be exactly what they need for the job, especially once they said that there are no obvious flaws with the idea. You need someone who can organize research, development and production, hence, a manager.
D) it's, at best, an ad-hominem and as per points 2.A to 2.C a pretty lame one.
Now I'm not saying they should necessarily give him money, but the Wired article is an exercise in journalistic stupidity at best.
Look, I'm not trying to dis Linux or anything. It's great for work or casual browsing any email.
But for games, umm, how do I say this tactfully?
1. the "you have more games than were released for the Atari 7800 (60 titles) and Virtual Boy (22) put together" doesn't say much. Both were flops and had pitiful numbers of games release, compared to any other platform. And even less original games. So it's a bit like saying that a drink tastes better than diarrhea. Or that a movie was more entertaining than root canal and a kick in the nuts put together. They comparison point is so low, that it doesn't really say much.
Now if you could compare it to the Atari 2600, or NES, that would be something.
2. I've seen the list of those 42 top commercial games, and I even commented on that story. I'll even raise you about a dozen more Loki ports, and a few commercial adventures that work well in ScummVM.
Nothing against them as such, kudos for porting them, but some are as much as 10 years old. My idea of having a gaming rig is more along the lines of, dunno, "I wanna play Age Of Conan which just got released", than like "I wanna play Knights And Merchants which I've already played in the 90's. And thought it sucked." Or much as Quake 3 Arena was a fine game for 2000, let's face it, there's a very limited number of people who still play _that_ online. You get the idea.
3. The free games... well, I've _tried_ a bunch of them. Yes, not all are Tetris clones. Pingus is a clone of Lemmings (an 1991 game) and the copy I tried, never had more than the tutorial levels. Some are clones of Missile Command (from 1980), the most notable of which being probably Penguin Command. Some are clones of Arkanoid (1986), and no matter what twists you give them (e.g., Briquolo), it's still f-ing Arkanoid, you know? Ditto, replacing the cute little dinosaur with a penguin doesn't make, say, Frozen Bubble be anything else than a clone of Puzzle Bobble / Bust-A-Move from 1994. I can even think of a moderately passable clone of 2D Mario games from the 80's, namely SuperTux. Etc.
I've seen very little in the way of original games there, and even fewer that don't look like old ass. Sorry, _classic_ ass.
Now I can't have any demands there given that they're free. I can see they couldn't afford an army of graphics artists or a celebrity game designer. I know that. Thanks for the intention, guys, and all that. But being that I'm not exactly below poverty line either, I'd really rather pay for a commercial-grade game.
Look, again, I'm not trying to put down Linux across the board. But for the narrow domain called "video games", it wouldn't really be my first choice. Sorry.
Well, I guess it depends on what you do with that computer. If Ubuntu does the trick for you, more power to you.
On the other hand, while I _am_ writing this on a SuSE 10.0 machine, I wouldn't really want Linux on my gaming rig. I know, Wine, bla, bla, bla. Tried that route some time ago, wasn't worth the effort. Does it even work with most games' copy-protection these days, or do you still need a crack just to run your legitimately purchased game in Wine?
So, well, different tools for different folks.
Actually, what makes anything difficult with humans is our being herd animals. We do stuff that we think would please the herd and make us better liked by our peers. Because we're nice and social like that.
Unfortunately, that can be used jujutsu style against us. Enter: groupthink. And there are those who figured out how to do that. It's not new, it's at least ten thousand years old, very probably even more.
Groupthink is a funny thing. Take for example a bunch of farmers, like in the infamous Goering quote, who each independently would rather work their farm than go risk death and crippling in a war where they have nothing to gain. Independently, each would rather _not_ go to war. Put them in a situation where each thinks "OMG, I'd lose face if the others think I'm a coward and unpatriotic" and watch them thump their chests and screaming pro-war slogans. Watch them cheer for the very things they despise secretly. Or conversely shaking a fist and yelling against the very things they desire.
And after a short while, cognitive dissonance kicks in, and they even lie to themselves that they really want those things they hate, and they really hate those things they want.
It's the emperor's new clothes story. Get a bunch of people who think everyone else sees those non-existent clothes, and that their standing would fall dramatically if they don't. Watch them all swear that they can see them clothes. In fact, watch cognitive dissonance kick in, and see them convince even themselves that they _do_ kinda see the clothes.
Where the Grimm Brothers got it wrong, is that that phenomenon is _very_ hard to unravel. In the story, all it takes is one kid shouting "the emperor is naked", for the whole charade to come apart. In reality, that wouldn't do jack squat.
In reality, for you to be brave, someone else must be a coward. To provide the comparison. For you to be smart, someone else must be stupid. For you to be a superior audiophile who hears the difference in downloaded MP3s with an audiophile Ethernet cable, someone else must be inferior enough to not hear it. Etc. The child shouting "the emperor is naked" just provides that other term of the comparison. It makes everyone else in the crowd pat their backs and congratulate each other that they're not like that simpleton kid who can't see the clothes.
It's a funny thing too, in that it's not even the emperor's guards that make it happen. They're at best a catalyst to get it started. Two hundred years later the emperor could be dead and his heirs guillotined long ago, the country could be a democracy, and the "clothes" could be in a museum showing the craftsmanship in the old days. Or maybe as proof of the excesses of nobility in the old days. And people would still come and squint and convince themselves that they _can_ see some fabulous clothes behind the glass. Just because everyone else does.
So what does this have to do with privacy? Well, that's why you have to explain to people exactly what privacy is and that it's not some shameful failing to need your personal space. Because there are plenty of those trying to make it sound like you're some horrible monster and your peers would surely shun you if you want privacy. The ball is already rolling towards turning it into a group-think situation, and there are interested parties pushing the ball in that direction too. You need more than just, well, "privacy is privacy, duh, and of course you need it" to defuse that.
I know you're being sarcastic, but that does touch a subject that I've genuinely wondered about.
See most stories we're graced with from Apple (which isn't to say it's a comprehensive set, but just that that's the image that Apple itself is perfectly happy to give) is that everything happened because of the Great Man Steve Jobs, and (thinly veiled) in spite of those lazy incompetent engineers. X is all due to the Great Man's vision. Y was personally tested by the Great Man. Z only happened because the Great Man yelled at the engineers and told them to make the things He wants. W happened because, frighteningly enough, the Great Man didn't yell for a change, but just fixed the engineers with his iciest stare and asked them when are they going to get it done. Etc.
Frankly, it gives the impression of something more like Stalin's USSR or Mao's China than anything even vaguely resembling a company or a boss I'd like to work for. Not saying that it's necessarily that bad, I wouldn't know, but that's the impression that Apple's propaganda machine leaves. Seen from outside, and if the question came, "well, would I want to quit my job and try to get a job there?", it doesn't exactly sound motivational, to say the least.
Even skipping past the other implications, I never heard the Great Man giving credit to anyone else but himself. You hear all the time about how the iPod's success is because Steve Jobs himself said how loud the volume button should go, but you never hear who was actually the guy who designed the bloody thing. Well, not from Apple. It's not hard to dig up the names, but I'd like just once to hear Apple just come out and say "we'd like to thank these guys for making it possible."
Even from MS, for all its other sins, you hear about who championed, say, their getting into the whole Internet thing, against Bill Gates's vision. Or about those two guys whose bright idea was to make DirectX instead of just going with the OpenGL flow. Heck, you even hear about the Bob clusterfuck being the brain child of Melinda Gates. Good or bad, it's not particularly hard to find out who was really behind what.
I'm not saying that Bill Gates is a nice guy, and Ballmer probably even less so. But between one narcissistic bully who at least gives credit, and a narcissistic bully who doesn't, Bill comes out as a bit less of a low life on my scale.
Frankly, just about the only positive thing I hear about Apple as an employer, is that they don't discriminate against anyone. Their world is so centered around the cult of Steve Jobs, that there is no room for caring whether you're black, gay or whatever else. You're the worthless peon, and that's enough about you already.
Now I hear that the wages aren't that great either.
So, really, please help me understand. Why _do_ those guys go work there? I'm genuinely curious.