That's the downside from copy protection. If you make it too weak, it is easily cracked. If you make it to strong, you lock out legit users.
Actually, it's kinda funny: you get the worst of both. I haven't seen _any_ copy protected game yet that didn't have a crack. _And_ you always end up inconveniencing some legitimate users, though the numbers and extent vary.
It doesn't even buy you time. The cracks are often out before the game actually hits the shelves. For all big name copy protections there are even standardized cracks that just need to be tweaked a bit to work with the latest title.
Even if, ad absurdum, you managed to buy some time, how much? A week? So who'd be forced to go legit by it? The pirates who are too stupid to google for a crack and/or too impatient to wait a couple of days? Is anyone who's already in a mind that only stupid people pay for what they could steal (a mentality that seems rather common among freeloaders, sad to say) going to go, "OMG, I'll have to do what I preached for years as stupid, because otherwise I have to skip playing it on the very day it's released?" I don't think so. And again, that's assuming that for a change it would not be cracked immediately. I wouldn't bet too much on it.
The best you can hope is to, well, gain nothing and not tick off too many or too much. That's it, really.
1. Actually, as someone who had a lot of interest in physics, I don't see it as at odds with physics either. The history of physics and even chemistry is littered with observed phenomena or correlations, for which we had no good explanation after a while, or conversely for which we couldn't yet do a controlled experiment.
As an example of the former, black body radiation had been a problem since 1859. It's been almost half a century of failed attempts at explaining it, until Planck in despair gave up on the last hope of explaining it via the accepted physics (according to his own confession) and came up with the quantum theory. At first even he didn't think of it as more than a mathematical construct. As an example of the latter, well, it would be even more time afterwards until we could actually observe a single photon.
As an even better example of the latter, anything which involves astronomical distances or masses is still well beyond our possibilities to do a controlled experiment. We can't create a type I supernova in any lab, for example. We must rely on whatever happens to happen when we look up there, and some stuff took an awfully long time. Some still hasn't conclusively happened, so it's all based, you guessed, on correlations.
It happens in chemistry or medicine too. For example there was this observed correlation that low doses of quinine treat malaria, while high doses cause the same symptoms as malaria. (/That observation alone was what got homeopathy started. Later we learned what really happened there, but nevertheless it wouldn't have happened without that original observation that if you take quinine you get rid of malaria. We also got stuck with a bunch of pseudo-science quacks in the process, but I guess that's life.
So basically the idiots who tagged this "correlationisnotcausation", well, are just idiots and hadn't read even the whole summary before jumping in to polish their logo. It already spelled out that it's not the stickers that directly cause accidents. They don't really represent one side of science against another side.
2. That said, if I'm allowed to nitpick, I do think that the whole idea of science is to try to study causation and make falsifiable predictions. It's not just engineering college, it's the very idea of it all. And it applies equally to psychology, sociology, economics, whatever else. We don't just list some funny observed correlations for the sake of going "wow, that's amazing" and move on. We want to know why it happens, and how it can be predicted or influenced. That's the whole point of doing it.
Yes, we don't always immediately know what causes it. Sometimes we just have an observation and correlation, and smart people scratch their head, come up with hypotheses and test them. That's ok. Happens in physics too, as I was saying. But, nevertheless, the ultimate goal is to understand exactly what happens there, and why.
Well, that's ok then, because they never claimed causation. If you read even the summary, they don't say that bumper stickers cause accidents. In fact, the hypothesis is that a third factor ("territoriality") causes both.
Basically that:
1. being territorial makes you mark your car. Sorta like dogs piss on trees and hydrants. Except smell markings don't work well with humans, so we use visible cues instead.
2. being territorial makes you act like the road is yours, or that everyone within X metres is in your personal space and should play by your rules. And when they don't, you might take it upon you to teach them a lesson or flex your muscles otherwise.
So they don't even seem to contradict your assessment much.
Look, I'll be the first to join in the "correlation != causation" chorus when it's warranted. But some people seen to have a knee jerk reaction to post it, even when nobody claimed causation in the first place.
Or was balking at "researchers" the whole purpose of that exercise?;)
The thing is, though: why bother? We already have simpler maths to describe the same phenomena and theories. Remember Occam's Razor, basically. If the same thing can be described simpler, and without multiplying unneeded entities like strings and branes, then why take the scenic route?
Having one set of equations to rule them all, one set to find them, one set to bring them all and in the darkness bind them... erm... wrong movie;) Well, it's a noble goal, but not at the expense of making everything more complicated than it already is, without explaining anything new.
It also seems to me to defeat the whole idea of physics. The idea is to simplify the model to whatever is strictly necessary. If you just have to calculate in what time a mag-lev train travelling at 200 mph would go from Peking to Shanghai, you don't even need to know what mass or size the train is. If you want to calculate the engine to reach that speed, mass and shape become very important, but the colour of the train is still useless. The idea is to simplify maths, not make it more complicated.
That is partially incorrect, or at least not as black and white as you make it sound.
The short version is: Lack of ethics alone is no guarantee of success, by itself. There is more than one kind of sociopath, and more than one outcome. The smart ones do end up CEOs and on the cover of magazines. The stupid ones end up bankrupt and/or in jail.
So while stealing your competitor's customers _is_ good, the real issue is how you do it.
A. Spam is a rather low probability of success business. The majority of people don't answer to it, and in fact far more just become annoyed at you and/or blacklist you. It works for spamming normal people, because, well, if 0.1% of the recipients buy something, and you spammed ten million, well, you do the maths. The same maths can work against you when you're dealing with a small number of corporate customers. If you spam 20 corporations you got from one CC, chances are you'll gain nothing, and get only the bad parts.
B. Spam works mostly on, well, dumb people. Companies have too many layers of people whose job is to prevent doing something stupid. Your spam would have to go through everyone from the mail admin whose job is to block spam (if nothing else, because the CEO wouldn't get any job done at all if he was buried alive in a billion spam messages), to procurement and controlling, to the secretary of the boss you're trying to spam. Even that boss probably isn't as dumb as you assume, if he got to be successful in business, but even he is not the only one you must get past.
But even if they were no better than the average population, that chance goes down spectacularly by sheer number of people involved. Even if you managed to craft your spam as to get a whole 1% response rate from normal people, if there are as little as 3 different people who have to approve that purchase, the chance becomes one in a million.
Companies also move slowly and don't change suppliers or providers overnight. It's not like spamming Joe Sixpack who might be drunk enough to go, "ya know, I always wanted herbal pills." A company of any size above mom-and-pop shops will even deal with you at all, doesn't do things on a drunk impulse. There'll be lots of meetings and memos shoved around before you even get a chance to make your offer. Trying to bypass that process might work, if you're some manager's cousin or drinking buddy, but don't think that just one email is anywhere near enough. An offer out of nowhere that didn't go through that approval process, will most likely be ignored completely.
C. While it may be good for business to be a sociopath, it's very bad for business to get the reputation as one. The successful sociopath is the one who always has a convincing excuse or pretext, not the one advertises, basically, "I have my own company and I'm a bigger arsehole than goatse.cx." Businesses try hard to whitewash their reputation and pose as honest, upstanding pillars of the community. Because it's good for business. PR backlashes can do a hell of a lot of harm. Daikatana for example is the most visible example of a game that was merely mediocre, but got thoroughly sunk by a hell of bad PR backlash. It works in other domains too.
Becoming known as a spammer works when you have nothing to lose. If you're a two bit crook selling pressed parsley pills as ancient herbal medicines out of your basement, well, you don't really have much to lose. It's not like you have steady long-term customers or a business depending on your image in any community, so you can't lose them. If you are a more traditional business, though, you may not want that kind of reputation. And even the two bit crooks eventually have to change names, make more fly-by-night companies, etc, to keep peddling their goods.
D. Spam gets blacklisted fast. There's a reason spammers use faked senders, backscatter, etc. Because otherwise they get blocked fast, their ISP pulls the plug, etc.
And again, companies have people whose _job_ is to make sure spam doesn't get through. They _will_
The sad thing is that each time I think about a story, "nah, nobody can be _that_ clueless", someone just has to selflessly offer himself as an example of even greater lack of clue. Seriously, I've seen so much WTF code in practice -- what with being the guy brought over when everything else failed miserably -- that now nothing seems unbelievable any more.
There are people who simply don't know even the basic syntax out there, much less the basic CS notions, and still got hired because they were the cheapest. Sadder still, only a minority of them get fired for gross incompetence.
Seriously, I've seen people who didn't even know what quotes do in Java, pretend they're Java gurus. Literally. One needed an explanation of why Java complains when he writes something like getUserData(John Smith), Java gives him a syntax error.
Another one needed some explaining as to why if he declares a variable in the constructor, it's not visible in another method. Seemed to essentially assume that since the constructor has the same name as the class, that's where you declare class members. Right? Mind you, the whole concept of scope seemed a bit fuzzy to him.
One particularly promising young padawan tried to "fix" a bug by changing every single if in the program from
if (someCondition()) {
to
if (someCondition() == true) {
Actually insisted that the bug was now fixed. 'Cause Java generates different code when you write "== true." Ookaayy.
An inventive guy tried to get around some data objects being invariant (you know, all getters and no setters) by writing basically a method like this:
public void nuller(String x) {
x = null;
}
Was genuinely surprised that calling "nuller(someDataObject.getName())" didn't actually set the name to null. Took some explaining to understand that it's not some Java bug, but, really, how it's supposed to work.
An _architect_ made a whole team use the boxed objects (Integer, Character, Boolean) instead of the primitive types (int, char, boolean) in all method calls, as a speed optimization. See, if you have an Integer parameter, Java only copies a pointer, not the whole int. (That was before Java 5 and its automatic boxing and unboxing, too, btw.) Sadder even, nobody in that team had any objections.
And that's just the simple ones, the ones that can be told in one paragraph. There are more, but let's not write a whole tome.
So, really, there are some truly monumentally clueless people out there. And they do random clueless things, until by sheer brute force they arrive at something which survives their testing with a couple of clicks in the GUI. Yay, they solved the problem. (Not.) Give them enough time and lack of interest to actually get a book and learn, and it'll grow into an "experience" of such witch-doctor tricks that worked once, and cargo cult code that tries to look like something they saw once, but they never understood why.
So, well, if you see some code sample that looks like it _must_ be a fabricated story... well, it is at least _possible_ that it's true. And know that someone somewhere probably wrote an even bigger abomination.
In a few more "Moore cycles" this will be that and the game will have changed again.
So then I'll buy a machine which fits my need for _that_ game. And it will probably still be a different one from what all the "OMG, noone needs anything faster" gang think I should get.
What you want will have changed again too.
Very much so. And I'll get a machine and a way of working that fits that, not your funny ideas that everyone should use Cytrix to do their hobbies.
Get over it. This is Progress.
No. This is your strawman.
By the time That is this wireless broadband will be assumed and you will have forgotten the question.
No. Chances are I'll still want to use one computer, not virtual desktops into a _second_ home computer. That idea will still be just as retarded then as it is now.
No, I'm not telling you what to do with your computer and where or when. I'm telling you how to do what you want with your computer right now wherever you want. I really don't think the difference is subtle at all and I don't thing being this helpful is presumptive.
You actually told me when I shouldn't do that, that I should wait until I'm somewhere else, and even claimed that you don't see why anyone would want to do that then.
So, you know, at least show some backbone. Pretending you said something different within the same thread is _lame_.
But, yes, you also proposed some... funny solutions. Guess what? Using a second computer is more expensive, uses up more electricity, has abysmal performance for a lot of applications (the latency kills anything that needs a lot of screen redraw), and depends on a third resource being there when I need it. Compared to just getting a laptop which can do that right there, it's just an incredibly inefficient Rube Goldberg contraption. It's akin to building a mouse trap out of a ventilator, which makes a toy ship sail, then hits a ball which falls on a seesaw, then [...] until the safe falls on the mouse. Instead of just using a plain old mouse trap. Even if it works, what's the point? Same here. Why _should_ I use two computers, some expensive terminal server software, and depend on broadband availability, when just buying a bigger laptop does the same job simpler and cheaper? No, seriously. If that's your being "helpful", I'll take my chances without your help, thank you very much.
If you do, well I'm sorry. Let me recommend a solution.
ROFL. So basically, if I disagree with your view of how I should do my work, I need anxiety treatments.
Dude, get over yourself. No, seriously. You're just another arse-clown pretending you're teh-uber genius, and what would we all do without you enlightening us about how to use our computers. You're not. You're just another in an army of arse-clowns with their head so far up their own arses, that they don't notice the world outside them.
Hmm, gives me an idea. If I even see an ad for asdjhfgkjbadjghiougscvo or similar, how about I send you lots and lots of clicks on it? Maybe mail the link to a few people. IM it around a bit. Post it on a newsgroup. And a few IRC channels at that.
I mean, if anyone wants to track my reading habits, heh, they might as well pay for the privilege.
Heck, I'm even in a mind to organize some kind of a group of people who automatically send a HTTP get to such links. It'd be just a get, not actually parsed or anything, to minimize the possibility of a security problem. Tracked people unite, so to speak. The kind of PHB who absolutely wants to know when everyone read his emails and exactly how often, won't do it just once. Might as well make sure that the expenses keep it in check a bit, and/or that higher management will eventually ask why is all that marketing money spent on adwords and exactly how much did it improve sales or brand recognition.
One more time... these things cost five hundred clams. They do all the stuff laptops do, including run business productivity apps. They're cute and they fit on the plane well. They last all day on one charge. They play media. They have USB ports . They have wireless. They support all of the remote desktop technologies you've ever heard of. They come with software that's truly free, and you can install as much more as you want for free via the Applications menu. They play video and audio. Your choice of operating systems are available. Some of them have firewire. FSM preserve us what the heck do you want from a mini laptop for a measly five Benjamins? Sex?
I don't want anything in particular from it right now. I also don't see why it can't grow to do more later, in a few Moore cycles. It is very much possible to develop apps or run a database app on a 1024x600 screen, so why would I not wish to eventually be able to do just that eventually?
And if it can't do that atm, well, then maybe I'll get a larger laptop then. Yes, it'll cost more than 5 Benjamins, but, oh well, that's life. That's not to say that there's no market for the Eee, just that some people have different needs and have to use a different tool. Different tools for different jobs, and all that.
In a nutshell, I'm just sick and tired of people ranting about how everyone doesn't and shouldn't need faster computers. People who think that if they just read email and paint powerpoint presentations, or maybe admin a few servers over remote desktop or SSH, then surely noone else could _possibly_ have any use for more. I hate to break this to you, but you're not the yardstick and platinum standard for humanity as a whole. Different people have different jobs, hobbies, tastes and needs. Some need a lot less CPU power than you do, or indeed none at all. Some need a lot more. You can stop pretending that everyone should need exactly as big a computer as you do.
Have you not heard of Citrix? Remote Desktop? Cellular modems? It's possible to have all of this happening on your mainframe, the attached supercomputer cluster, and a few thousand desktops and access them all from the laptop referenced in the fine article via VPN tunnel over wireless modem, public wi-fi, hotel room Internet, or any other mode you choose. I actually do this all day.
On a plane? Most airlines still don't even allow phones. Or do you propose that for a hobby at home I should set up a mainframe in my basement and tunnel into it, instead of having all I need on a laptop? Or that my mom needs to use remote desktop to edit her holiday photos? Surely you're able to see how pointless that would be. _Why_ should I go through all those loops, instead of simply installing the apps I need right there on my computer?
I know of no reason why I'd need to debug an Oracle database, edit a photo for press, or update my CAD drawing while I was mid-stream fishing, nor while I was boarding a plane. For some things you just have to wade to shore, wait until the flight is airborne, pull up your pants
Dude, did you just presume to tell me what I must do with my computer and where? Do you want to pay me a salary to do the things _you_ wish me to do in that time, or what the fuck?
Basically that should already give you ranting folks pause for thought and point the obvious flaw. If you have to introduce restrictions for what I can do and where and when, and generally it becomes what _you_ want to do instead of what _I_ want to do, then the whole "nobody needs a faster computer" charade falls flat on its face. If it needs those changes of plans, then it's not what _I_ need in a computer.
Look, no offense, but it's already getting old to hear that computers surely are used only for reading email and maybe watching a DVD. I keep hearing that since the 90's, and it didn't really get more true over time.
Even my old mom is into digital photos as a hobby. And I don't mean just taking the photos, but serious heavy duty filtering and processing too. Yeah, she could go do something else while those finish, but in practice that's not half as much fun. Waiting for a computer to finish something is, funnily enough, a lot more annoying than doing it by hand in 20 times the time. Because it's time when you do nothing but wait.
Plus some laptops are used for work, and some hobbies _are_ the exact same that other people call work. Some are used essentially as a portable desktop, rather than something to keep you amused on a plane or to haul your powerpoint presentations with.
E.g., you can have an application server, an Oracle database, and an IDE on your laptop, and notice the difference, for example. Waiting for, say, WebSphere to spend a quarter of an hour to start up with a lot of EJB's, trust me, you'll start thinking "man, I wish I had a faster machine." Especially when you've had to restart it just because you changed a tiny little detail in the configs and it can't use it without a restart. Twiddling your thumbs while Ant builds the project or while WebSphere deploys it, even more so. And the database alone can need arbitrary amounts of RAM and HDD just to do its job.
And then there are the cases where you need to debug it. Only recently, in version 6.1 IBM finally allegedly managed to be able to debug with the JIT enabled. Previously it would run in interpreted mode. Now that's enough to negate the last decade of Moore's Law in one fell swoop.
Other people use their computer for rendering, CAD, maths, simulations, etc. There are many ways to eat all those CPU cycles and then some.
And then there are the games. Some people use their laptop as, basically, an ultra-portable desktop that can be hauled to a LAN party with a minimum of fuss and effort.
Basically if your use for a computer is just to read emails, well, good for you. But you can stop extrapolating that everyone else doesn't need a fast one.
Especially when it comes to ATI, I wouldn't count the chicks before they actually hatch. They have a knack, really a talent, a _gift_, for screwing up half the time.
I also wouldn't take any theoretical numbers as gospel. For either of the two. They both love to talk about theoretical gigatexels per second and GB/s of memory bandwidth as if the pipelines will always be fully used, every cycle, and memory was a continuous read that never had any RAS and CAS cycles in there.
But especially for ATI. They have that talent again for screwing up, but with good maths to back up the idea that it should have worked.
Starting from the original Radeon, which _should_ have had exactly the number of texturing units to fully utilize the memory bandwidth, and no more. (I.e., without wasting silicon on units which would just stall waiting for data anyway.) It should have run circles around NVidia's card of the same generation, right? In practice, it fell a bit short.
Or look at the more recent HD2xxx and HD3xxx cards. In theory the HD2600's unified architecture should have done miracles, but in practice it never quite worked that well. In theory, the HD38xx should have fixed that, except it barely made it competitive with an 8800 GT. In some games. At some resolutions. On a good day.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against either of the two. If anything, I used to dislike Nvidia a bit, which made me favour the ATI's. But, if I'm to learn anything from history, I'm a bit wary of making such bold pronouncements as "This will crush the GT280 in just about every conceivable benchmark". There are already plenty of cases where such prophecies were made, and just ended up with the prophecised Nvidia-killer quickly repackaged as "see, we don't want to compete at the top end. We'll just make it a mid-end card, ok? It's not that we can't compete at the top, mind you. We just suddenly find it obscene to charge $500 for a graphics card."
Or to put it otherwise, too often I've heard one or the other (but, again, ATI a bit more) crying "Wolf" and they barely managed to produce a dachshund. I'll wait until I actually see the big bad wolf this time, before joining in the chorus marveling at what a big, strong and fast wolf it is.
Heh. Duly noted, but... in Knights and Merchants you'd command some troops to go from here to there, say, a longer distance. Like mass them diagonally across the map. And they'd not just run through enemies. They'd run to a completely different edge of the map, and try to run in place against it.
I'm not just talking AI there, as in, not calculating the best path to avoid fire. I'm talking as in, it couldn't get from point X to point Y, when told exactly where to go, and it had a clear way between them. I'm used to the AI taking bad decisions and not applying elementary tactics. Heck, that's practically part of the flavour for RTS;) But having to babysit the troops in 30 ft increments just to follow a road, was kinda a new experience.
Well, technically, yes, there have been more games ported to Linux, back in the Loki Games days. Stuff like IIRC Call To Power or Railroad Tycoon (IIRC) 2. Well, those are the two I actually own. There probably are a few more.
That said, do note that the list is already containing some... rather... "classic" ones. Gorky 17, for example is a 1999 games for example, so it's rapidly approaching a decade old. So is Creatures 3. Knights and Merchants is from 1998. (And even back then it was a crap game, with some of the worst pathfinding (among other sins) I've seen in a RTS. And not very popular either. So it's... unsettling to see that as one of the best games for Linux.)
Quake 3 was a good game, back then, but it's from 1999 too. Ok, they have Quake 3 Arena there, which is from 2000.
Don't get me wrong, there's newer stuff in that list too, and some good stuff too. But, nevertheless, it's basically 42 games spread across 10 bloody years. Yeah, so some would be closer to one end than others, but that doesn't invalidate the point much. You're probably better off trying to use Wine than waiting for those commercial Linux games to trickle in.
Reminds me of a "compression program" back in the early 90's. Seemed to compress better than Zip or RAR and was pretty fast too. You could also test it by compressing and uncompressing a few files, and you got your original back.
Turns out it just copied the contents to a temporary file and "uncompressing" got them back from there, while the "archive" was just random junk. Better yet, the temporary file was just a circular buffer, so when it filled, old data got discarded.
Actually, I'd argue that it's both rather expectable _and_ at the same time meaningless.
The basic nucleotides and aminoacids can be formed rather quickly even in a retort in the lab, given the right conditions (similar to those of primal Earth). But even that is somewhat misleading: really they just need a lot of energy. Carbon and nitrogen just tend to do that, and we're talking simple building blocks, not a whole ribosome.
What took an awfully long time is those actually becoming _life_. I.e., those assembling, by sheer chance, in a self-replicating configuration.
Really, there's nothing special about finding isolated aminoacids or nucleotides. They're not yet life, they're the Lego blocks that actual life is made of. Aminoacids are not a miracle by themselves, but in the fact that they can be assembled in proteins that can react with any chemical you wish. Or produce another chemical that reacts with it. Including assemble other proteins. Nucleotides are even more meaningless by themselves. They can form a RNA strand, which is what the first and simplest life used. But the RNA strand does nothing whatsoever by itself. It needs some proteins that (A) replicate it, and (B) translate it to other proteins, before it can count as life.
The "miracle" isn't when you have aminoacids and nucleotides. It's when you have at least some kind of RNA replicase and some kind of a ribosome.
So basically "ZOMG, we found a nucleotide on a meteorite" is simultaneously:
1. not that surprising, since really they form anywhere.
2. rather meaningless for life on Earth, in that we have plenty of proof that they formed withing minutes on Earth too, with the conditions back then. So a couple of those molecules maybe came on a meteorite too. Big deal, compared to the whole billions of tons of them forming right here.
3. rather unlikely as a source of life on Earth. Sooner or later those molecules break down. They don't last for ever. And we're not talking self-replicating life, but some building blocks which still needed to combine into a configuration that can be called "life", by sheer chance. That means lots and lots of them, and lots and lots of time. It's kinda absurd to assume that meteorites kept bringing billions of tons of them, for billions of years, until they finally recombined into some kind of ribosome.
4. it at best brings some extra insight into it all. If they're as easy to form as to even exist in meteorites, well, it just makes it easier to believe that we had a lot here too. In fact, maybe we had them earlier than we thought, as Earth itself formed out of dust which coalesced into meteorite, which coalesced into a planet. The last one captured was the one that ejected a chunk of Earth and created the Moon. So maybe we had some building blocks before Earth even formed. It also means we can expect almost any planet anywhere to have _some_ of the building blocks, and evolve life, if the conditions and timing are right.
But again, not an awful lot of insight that we didn't already have anyway.
Not going to disagree with what you wrote about skepticism, mind you. It just seems to me that skepticism is really a subset of what the summary _really_ asks. Challenging strong beliefs is ok, and even vital. But IMHO "what could possibly go wrong" is a much broader question, and in some aspects even orthogonal to it.
I see and personally know people who are perfectly able to be skeptical when it comes to religion or weird beliefs, yet steadfastly refuse to even think about what could go wrong with their plan. Not because they think they're so smart they couldn't possibly go wrong. But they seem to get genuinely annoyed if you force them to think about the possible bad outcomes of whatever they're doing. They live in their shiny-happy positive world, think shiny-happy positive thoughts, and avoid thinking depressing (to them) thoughts like "is it possible that I'm heading towards an epic fail?" Some will even call you names if you insist on forcing them to think of what could go wrong.
I think it's really about optimism vs pessimism.
The best example that I've seen again and again are mom and dad. Mom is a pessimist. She likes to think about what could possibly go wrong, and be prepared in advance. If she went to a tropical beach resort in July, she'll be prepared for the case that it'll snow. No, seriously, she'll take a suitcase just for the extra sweaters for that kind of event. Dad is an optimist. He'll just plough ahead, expect the best possible outcome, and know that he can fix things when they happen. No need to think about failure in advance. He'll just take a round detour if he took the wrong exit off the highway, and he'll go buy some sweaters there and then if it snows at the beach. And get annoyed as soon as mom even starts talking about her Plan B (and C and D and E) for the case things go awfully, spectacularly wrong.
They're both skeptics and atheists, mind you. One likes to think about what could go wrong, one doesn't. That's really all.
Or to get back to engineering, I see it in the code of some of my co-workers. They're skeptics, they're atheists, but they can't (or don't want to) even think about "what happens if the file isn't there?" And the code shows it.
So I think what we really need isn't as much to teach engineers to be skeptics. We need to teach them to be pessimists.
In fact, now that I think of it, I don't even really care if they believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster / Invisible Pink Uniform / Beardie In The Sky, or even in a colourful cocktail of conspiracy theories. It's not like belief in a largely passive deity will affect their design by much. Let them be non-skeptical, for all I care. But I'd like them to genuinely stop and think what happens when they have to do with the Bastard User From Hell and his trusty sidekick, Dumbest Imaginable User. What happens when those wribfe "no idea" in a date field, delete your DLL's to make room for your porn collection, enter an ICQ number instead of an IP address, edit the user ID in the URL to change their password, upload a whole porn DVD in an upload-your-own-icon page, and surf on sites which exist only to serve buffer overflows and SQL injection. _That_ is where you separate the good engineers or even security experts from the wannabees.
Well, that sounds like it would work perfectly with a wiimote.
Plus, they've already done something like that to Conker. A cutesy, kids' games squirrel turned into a serial-cussing, heavy-drinking, shit-dodging maniac. (And I mean, really, dodging dollops of feces.) Apparently just to make a point that Nintendo isn't a kiddies-only company any more, and now publishes that kind of stuff too. And as a bonus, why wait for deviant fanfic to rape your childhood memories and favourite characters, when you can get it done professionally by its creators?
So I'm kinda still waiting for when they get such ideas like, say, Mario or Link finally fucks the princess. I mean, seriously, after how often those guys save the princess, you'd think she'd put out by now. Hold the wiimote at your crotch and thrust. It's got sensors for that kind of thing, doesn't it? Maybe they'll even figure out how to use the balance board in it too;)
Or for the all-important casual-gaming female demographic, something like Zelda's Vibrator Training. You know, while Link is busy with his crossbow;)
Or how about playing the kidnapper and having some BDSM sessions with the princess? If the wiimote can be used as a tennis racket, why not as, say, a whip or paddle handle?;)
And for the really deviant market segment, Mario Goatse. I'll let you figure that out on your own;)
Maybe because for Joe Sixpack what matters is "how well they reperesent _my_ point of view?" If the answer is "neither", in a sense, yes, they're both the same.
Essentially it's like having to choose between two women as your wife. (Assuming you're a guy.) One is cute, but is really a guy in drag, dumb as a brick and only talks about his/her hypochondriac imaginary diseases. The other is smart and has big tits, but weighs 300 pounds at 5 ft tall, is butt-ugly and is the stereotypical rabid man-hater. Which one, would you say, better represents your tastes in women?
And if you have an urge to say, "whoa, dude, that's a false dichotomy. There are more kinds of women than that!", congrats, then you get my point perfectly. It shouldn't be a dichotomy in the first place.
Way I see it, it's the same in two-party politics. You have to choose between two package deals, and you're lucky if one issue of each really represents your views.
Yes, but the point was that it was incremental. It was the steady progress that eventually made us live better than those Achaeans, not the "singularities" which plunged us into chaos.
Actually, even if it kept accelerating, singularities (as some fancy world for when you divide by zero, or otherwise your model breaks down) so far never created some utopia.
The last one we had was the Great Depression. The irony of it was that it was the mother of all crises of _overproduction_. Humanity, or at least the West, was finally at the point where we could produce far more than anyone needed.
So much that the old-style laissez-faire free-market-automatically-fixes-everything capitalism model pretty much just broke down. There just was no solution to how much a country should produce. Hence my calling it a singularity.
By any kind of optimistic logic, it should have been the land of milk and honey. It was actually _the_ greatest economic collapse in known history, and produced very much misery and poverty.
And the funny thing is, the result was... well, that we learned to tweak the old model and produce less. We still go to work daily, and a lot of companies still want overtime, and a whole bunch of people still are dirt-poor. We just divert more and more of that work into marketing, services and government spending. It's a better life than the downwards spiral of the 19'th century, no doubt. But basically no miracle has happened, and no utopia has resulted. The improvement for the average citizen was incremental, not some revolution.
That was actually one of the least destructive "singularities". Previous ones produced stuff like, for example, the two world wars, as the death throes of old-style colonialism. When the model based on just keeping expanding into new territories and markets reached the end, we just went at each other's throats instead. A somewhat similar "singularity" arguably helped the Roman Empire collapse, and ushered in a collapse of trade and return to barbarism. The death throes of feudalism created a very bloody wave of revolutions.
All the way back to the border between Bronze Age and Iron Age in Europe, where... well, we don't know exactly what happened there, but whole civilizations were displaced or enslaved, whole cities were razed, and Europe-wide trade just collapsed. Ancient Greece for example, although most people just think of it as a continuous "Greece", had a collapse of the Mycenaean civilization and Achaean language it had before, and after some 300 years of the Greek Dark Ages, suddenly almost everyone there speaks Dorian instead. The Greeks and Greek language of Homer, are not the same as those of Pericles. (An Achaean League was formed much later, but apparently had not much to do with the original Achaeans.) And, look, they displaced the Ionians too in their way.
We recovered after each of them, no doubt, but basically the key word is: recovered. It never created some utopian/transcendence golden age.
So, well, _if_ our technology model ends up dividing by zero, I'd expect the same to happen. There'll be much misery and pain, we'll _probably_ recover after a while, and life will go on.
Yes, I still say it's impossible for a Gauss distribution of skills, which is what you get in practically any skill. A situation where 90% of the drivers are 100% perfect and 10% are at a pure 0% skill is so far from the normal distribution, that it would be a revelation and breakthrough discovery in itself.
Plus, it has a few more touches of SF. A 0 skill driver would be one who doesn't know _anything_ about driving, not even in which lane he's supposed to drive, or how he can turn right. Even if some of those managed to pass the driving test, they're not going to drive for very long until either the cops or natural selection gets them off the roads. It's a ludicriously unrealistic premise right there.
My point: stop being cavalier about using "mathematical certainty" ass hat!
_My_ point is, learn a bit more maths before calling people "ass hat". Yes, so you managed to use elementary addition and even multiplication and division. I'm sure your parents are proud of you. Get a bit further, say up to statistics, and then we'll talk;)
Since I hate it when idiots claim mathematical certainty when they can't back it up, I'm calling you out on your obvious error in your understanding of averages.
That's ok. I hate it when idiots pollute a thread with posts just to the effect of, "look, I found someone who made an error!" as their only claim to glory. But you don't see me trying to stop you from posting. God knows that if you're at the stage where you have to "prove" that there's someone between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, you already know you're a loser. Anything I could say here won't be any worse anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's kinda funny: you get the worst of both. I haven't seen _any_ copy protected game yet that didn't have a crack. _And_ you always end up inconveniencing some legitimate users, though the numbers and extent vary.
It doesn't even buy you time. The cracks are often out before the game actually hits the shelves. For all big name copy protections there are even standardized cracks that just need to be tweaked a bit to work with the latest title.
Even if, ad absurdum, you managed to buy some time, how much? A week? So who'd be forced to go legit by it? The pirates who are too stupid to google for a crack and/or too impatient to wait a couple of days? Is anyone who's already in a mind that only stupid people pay for what they could steal (a mentality that seems rather common among freeloaders, sad to say) going to go, "OMG, I'll have to do what I preached for years as stupid, because otherwise I have to skip playing it on the very day it's released?" I don't think so. And again, that's assuming that for a change it would not be cracked immediately. I wouldn't bet too much on it.
The best you can hope is to, well, gain nothing and not tick off too many or too much. That's it, really.
1. Actually, as someone who had a lot of interest in physics, I don't see it as at odds with physics either. The history of physics and even chemistry is littered with observed phenomena or correlations, for which we had no good explanation after a while, or conversely for which we couldn't yet do a controlled experiment.
As an example of the former, black body radiation had been a problem since 1859. It's been almost half a century of failed attempts at explaining it, until Planck in despair gave up on the last hope of explaining it via the accepted physics (according to his own confession) and came up with the quantum theory. At first even he didn't think of it as more than a mathematical construct. As an example of the latter, well, it would be even more time afterwards until we could actually observe a single photon.
As an even better example of the latter, anything which involves astronomical distances or masses is still well beyond our possibilities to do a controlled experiment. We can't create a type I supernova in any lab, for example. We must rely on whatever happens to happen when we look up there, and some stuff took an awfully long time. Some still hasn't conclusively happened, so it's all based, you guessed, on correlations.
It happens in chemistry or medicine too. For example there was this observed correlation that low doses of quinine treat malaria, while high doses cause the same symptoms as malaria. (/That observation alone was what got homeopathy started. Later we learned what really happened there, but nevertheless it wouldn't have happened without that original observation that if you take quinine you get rid of malaria. We also got stuck with a bunch of pseudo-science quacks in the process, but I guess that's life.
So basically the idiots who tagged this "correlationisnotcausation", well, are just idiots and hadn't read even the whole summary before jumping in to polish their logo. It already spelled out that it's not the stickers that directly cause accidents. They don't really represent one side of science against another side.
2. That said, if I'm allowed to nitpick, I do think that the whole idea of science is to try to study causation and make falsifiable predictions. It's not just engineering college, it's the very idea of it all. And it applies equally to psychology, sociology, economics, whatever else. We don't just list some funny observed correlations for the sake of going "wow, that's amazing" and move on. We want to know why it happens, and how it can be predicted or influenced. That's the whole point of doing it.
Yes, we don't always immediately know what causes it. Sometimes we just have an observation and correlation, and smart people scratch their head, come up with hypotheses and test them. That's ok. Happens in physics too, as I was saying. But, nevertheless, the ultimate goal is to understand exactly what happens there, and why.
You, sir, are an inspiration to us men everywhere. I guess we now just need to buy our wives 18-wheeler trucks, to enjoy some incredible sex.
Well, that's ok then, because they never claimed causation. If you read even the summary, they don't say that bumper stickers cause accidents. In fact, the hypothesis is that a third factor ("territoriality") causes both.
;)
Basically that:
1. being territorial makes you mark your car. Sorta like dogs piss on trees and hydrants. Except smell markings don't work well with humans, so we use visible cues instead.
2. being territorial makes you act like the road is yours, or that everyone within X metres is in your personal space and should play by your rules. And when they don't, you might take it upon you to teach them a lesson or flex your muscles otherwise.
So they don't even seem to contradict your assessment much.
Look, I'll be the first to join in the "correlation != causation" chorus when it's warranted. But some people seen to have a knee jerk reaction to post it, even when nobody claimed causation in the first place.
Or was balking at "researchers" the whole purpose of that exercise?
The thing is, though: why bother? We already have simpler maths to describe the same phenomena and theories. Remember Occam's Razor, basically. If the same thing can be described simpler, and without multiplying unneeded entities like strings and branes, then why take the scenic route?
;) Well, it's a noble goal, but not at the expense of making everything more complicated than it already is, without explaining anything new.
Having one set of equations to rule them all, one set to find them, one set to bring them all and in the darkness bind them... erm... wrong movie
It also seems to me to defeat the whole idea of physics. The idea is to simplify the model to whatever is strictly necessary. If you just have to calculate in what time a mag-lev train travelling at 200 mph would go from Peking to Shanghai, you don't even need to know what mass or size the train is. If you want to calculate the engine to reach that speed, mass and shape become very important, but the colour of the train is still useless. The idea is to simplify maths, not make it more complicated.
That is partially incorrect, or at least not as black and white as you make it sound.
The short version is: Lack of ethics alone is no guarantee of success, by itself. There is more than one kind of sociopath, and more than one outcome. The smart ones do end up CEOs and on the cover of magazines. The stupid ones end up bankrupt and/or in jail.
So while stealing your competitor's customers _is_ good, the real issue is how you do it.
A. Spam is a rather low probability of success business. The majority of people don't answer to it, and in fact far more just become annoyed at you and/or blacklist you. It works for spamming normal people, because, well, if 0.1% of the recipients buy something, and you spammed ten million, well, you do the maths. The same maths can work against you when you're dealing with a small number of corporate customers. If you spam 20 corporations you got from one CC, chances are you'll gain nothing, and get only the bad parts.
B. Spam works mostly on, well, dumb people. Companies have too many layers of people whose job is to prevent doing something stupid. Your spam would have to go through everyone from the mail admin whose job is to block spam (if nothing else, because the CEO wouldn't get any job done at all if he was buried alive in a billion spam messages), to procurement and controlling, to the secretary of the boss you're trying to spam. Even that boss probably isn't as dumb as you assume, if he got to be successful in business, but even he is not the only one you must get past.
But even if they were no better than the average population, that chance goes down spectacularly by sheer number of people involved. Even if you managed to craft your spam as to get a whole 1% response rate from normal people, if there are as little as 3 different people who have to approve that purchase, the chance becomes one in a million.
Companies also move slowly and don't change suppliers or providers overnight. It's not like spamming Joe Sixpack who might be drunk enough to go, "ya know, I always wanted herbal pills." A company of any size above mom-and-pop shops will even deal with you at all, doesn't do things on a drunk impulse. There'll be lots of meetings and memos shoved around before you even get a chance to make your offer. Trying to bypass that process might work, if you're some manager's cousin or drinking buddy, but don't think that just one email is anywhere near enough. An offer out of nowhere that didn't go through that approval process, will most likely be ignored completely.
C. While it may be good for business to be a sociopath, it's very bad for business to get the reputation as one. The successful sociopath is the one who always has a convincing excuse or pretext, not the one advertises, basically, "I have my own company and I'm a bigger arsehole than goatse.cx." Businesses try hard to whitewash their reputation and pose as honest, upstanding pillars of the community. Because it's good for business. PR backlashes can do a hell of a lot of harm. Daikatana for example is the most visible example of a game that was merely mediocre, but got thoroughly sunk by a hell of bad PR backlash. It works in other domains too.
Becoming known as a spammer works when you have nothing to lose. If you're a two bit crook selling pressed parsley pills as ancient herbal medicines out of your basement, well, you don't really have much to lose. It's not like you have steady long-term customers or a business depending on your image in any community, so you can't lose them. If you are a more traditional business, though, you may not want that kind of reputation. And even the two bit crooks eventually have to change names, make more fly-by-night companies, etc, to keep peddling their goods.
D. Spam gets blacklisted fast. There's a reason spammers use faked senders, backscatter, etc. Because otherwise they get blocked fast, their ISP pulls the plug, etc.
And again, companies have people whose _job_ is to make sure spam doesn't get through. They _will_
There are people who simply don't know even the basic syntax out there, much less the basic CS notions, and still got hired because they were the cheapest. Sadder still, only a minority of them get fired for gross incompetence.
Seriously, I've seen people who didn't even know what quotes do in Java, pretend they're Java gurus. Literally. One needed an explanation of why Java complains when he writes something like getUserData(John Smith), Java gives him a syntax error.
Another one needed some explaining as to why if he declares a variable in the constructor, it's not visible in another method. Seemed to essentially assume that since the constructor has the same name as the class, that's where you declare class members. Right? Mind you, the whole concept of scope seemed a bit fuzzy to him.
One particularly promising young padawan tried to "fix" a bug by changing every single if in the program from to Actually insisted that the bug was now fixed. 'Cause Java generates different code when you write "== true." Ookaayy.
An inventive guy tried to get around some data objects being invariant (you know, all getters and no setters) by writing basically a method like this: Was genuinely surprised that calling "nuller(someDataObject.getName())" didn't actually set the name to null. Took some explaining to understand that it's not some Java bug, but, really, how it's supposed to work.
An _architect_ made a whole team use the boxed objects (Integer, Character, Boolean) instead of the primitive types (int, char, boolean) in all method calls, as a speed optimization. See, if you have an Integer parameter, Java only copies a pointer, not the whole int. (That was before Java 5 and its automatic boxing and unboxing, too, btw.) Sadder even, nobody in that team had any objections.
And that's just the simple ones, the ones that can be told in one paragraph. There are more, but let's not write a whole tome.
So, really, there are some truly monumentally clueless people out there. And they do random clueless things, until by sheer brute force they arrive at something which survives their testing with a couple of clicks in the GUI. Yay, they solved the problem. (Not.) Give them enough time and lack of interest to actually get a book and learn, and it'll grow into an "experience" of such witch-doctor tricks that worked once, and cargo cult code that tries to look like something they saw once, but they never understood why.
So, well, if you see some code sample that looks like it _must_ be a fabricated story... well, it is at least _possible_ that it's true. And know that someone somewhere probably wrote an even bigger abomination.
So then I'll buy a machine which fits my need for _that_ game. And it will probably still be a different one from what all the "OMG, noone needs anything faster" gang think I should get.
Very much so. And I'll get a machine and a way of working that fits that, not your funny ideas that everyone should use Cytrix to do their hobbies.
No. This is your strawman.
No. Chances are I'll still want to use one computer, not virtual desktops into a _second_ home computer. That idea will still be just as retarded then as it is now.
You actually told me when I shouldn't do that, that I should wait until I'm somewhere else, and even claimed that you don't see why anyone would want to do that then.
So, you know, at least show some backbone. Pretending you said something different within the same thread is _lame_.
But, yes, you also proposed some... funny solutions. Guess what? Using a second computer is more expensive, uses up more electricity, has abysmal performance for a lot of applications (the latency kills anything that needs a lot of screen redraw), and depends on a third resource being there when I need it. Compared to just getting a laptop which can do that right there, it's just an incredibly inefficient Rube Goldberg contraption. It's akin to building a mouse trap out of a ventilator, which makes a toy ship sail, then hits a ball which falls on a seesaw, then [...] until the safe falls on the mouse. Instead of just using a plain old mouse trap. Even if it works, what's the point? Same here. Why _should_ I use two computers, some expensive terminal server software, and depend on broadband availability, when just buying a bigger laptop does the same job simpler and cheaper? No, seriously. If that's your being "helpful", I'll take my chances without your help, thank you very much.
ROFL. So basically, if I disagree with your view of how I should do my work, I need anxiety treatments.
Dude, get over yourself. No, seriously. You're just another arse-clown pretending you're teh-uber genius, and what would we all do without you enlightening us about how to use our computers. You're not. You're just another in an army of arse-clowns with their head so far up their own arses, that they don't notice the world outside them.
Oh, I assumed as much. I also assume it will add up, for anyone who makes a habit of doing that in their emails.
Hmm, gives me an idea. If I even see an ad for asdjhfgkjbadjghiougscvo or similar, how about I send you lots and lots of clicks on it? Maybe mail the link to a few people. IM it around a bit. Post it on a newsgroup. And a few IRC channels at that.
I mean, if anyone wants to track my reading habits, heh, they might as well pay for the privilege.
Heck, I'm even in a mind to organize some kind of a group of people who automatically send a HTTP get to such links. It'd be just a get, not actually parsed or anything, to minimize the possibility of a security problem. Tracked people unite, so to speak. The kind of PHB who absolutely wants to know when everyone read his emails and exactly how often, won't do it just once. Might as well make sure that the expenses keep it in check a bit, and/or that higher management will eventually ask why is all that marketing money spent on adwords and exactly how much did it improve sales or brand recognition.
I don't want anything in particular from it right now. I also don't see why it can't grow to do more later, in a few Moore cycles. It is very much possible to develop apps or run a database app on a 1024x600 screen, so why would I not wish to eventually be able to do just that eventually?
And if it can't do that atm, well, then maybe I'll get a larger laptop then. Yes, it'll cost more than 5 Benjamins, but, oh well, that's life. That's not to say that there's no market for the Eee, just that some people have different needs and have to use a different tool. Different tools for different jobs, and all that.
In a nutshell, I'm just sick and tired of people ranting about how everyone doesn't and shouldn't need faster computers. People who think that if they just read email and paint powerpoint presentations, or maybe admin a few servers over remote desktop or SSH, then surely noone else could _possibly_ have any use for more. I hate to break this to you, but you're not the yardstick and platinum standard for humanity as a whole. Different people have different jobs, hobbies, tastes and needs. Some need a lot less CPU power than you do, or indeed none at all. Some need a lot more. You can stop pretending that everyone should need exactly as big a computer as you do.
On a plane? Most airlines still don't even allow phones. Or do you propose that for a hobby at home I should set up a mainframe in my basement and tunnel into it, instead of having all I need on a laptop? Or that my mom needs to use remote desktop to edit her holiday photos? Surely you're able to see how pointless that would be. _Why_ should I go through all those loops, instead of simply installing the apps I need right there on my computer?
Dude, did you just presume to tell me what I must do with my computer and where? Do you want to pay me a salary to do the things _you_ wish me to do in that time, or what the fuck?
Basically that should already give you ranting folks pause for thought and point the obvious flaw. If you have to introduce restrictions for what I can do and where and when, and generally it becomes what _you_ want to do instead of what _I_ want to do, then the whole "nobody needs a faster computer" charade falls flat on its face. If it needs those changes of plans, then it's not what _I_ need in a computer.
Look, no offense, but it's already getting old to hear that computers surely are used only for reading email and maybe watching a DVD. I keep hearing that since the 90's, and it didn't really get more true over time.
Even my old mom is into digital photos as a hobby. And I don't mean just taking the photos, but serious heavy duty filtering and processing too. Yeah, she could go do something else while those finish, but in practice that's not half as much fun. Waiting for a computer to finish something is, funnily enough, a lot more annoying than doing it by hand in 20 times the time. Because it's time when you do nothing but wait.
Plus some laptops are used for work, and some hobbies _are_ the exact same that other people call work. Some are used essentially as a portable desktop, rather than something to keep you amused on a plane or to haul your powerpoint presentations with.
E.g., you can have an application server, an Oracle database, and an IDE on your laptop, and notice the difference, for example. Waiting for, say, WebSphere to spend a quarter of an hour to start up with a lot of EJB's, trust me, you'll start thinking "man, I wish I had a faster machine." Especially when you've had to restart it just because you changed a tiny little detail in the configs and it can't use it without a restart. Twiddling your thumbs while Ant builds the project or while WebSphere deploys it, even more so. And the database alone can need arbitrary amounts of RAM and HDD just to do its job.
And then there are the cases where you need to debug it. Only recently, in version 6.1 IBM finally allegedly managed to be able to debug with the JIT enabled. Previously it would run in interpreted mode. Now that's enough to negate the last decade of Moore's Law in one fell swoop.
Other people use their computer for rendering, CAD, maths, simulations, etc. There are many ways to eat all those CPU cycles and then some.
And then there are the games. Some people use their laptop as, basically, an ultra-portable desktop that can be hauled to a LAN party with a minimum of fuss and effort.
Basically if your use for a computer is just to read emails, well, good for you. But you can stop extrapolating that everyone else doesn't need a fast one.
Especially when it comes to ATI, I wouldn't count the chicks before they actually hatch. They have a knack, really a talent, a _gift_, for screwing up half the time.
I also wouldn't take any theoretical numbers as gospel. For either of the two. They both love to talk about theoretical gigatexels per second and GB/s of memory bandwidth as if the pipelines will always be fully used, every cycle, and memory was a continuous read that never had any RAS and CAS cycles in there.
But especially for ATI. They have that talent again for screwing up, but with good maths to back up the idea that it should have worked.
Starting from the original Radeon, which _should_ have had exactly the number of texturing units to fully utilize the memory bandwidth, and no more. (I.e., without wasting silicon on units which would just stall waiting for data anyway.) It should have run circles around NVidia's card of the same generation, right? In practice, it fell a bit short.
Or look at the more recent HD2xxx and HD3xxx cards. In theory the HD2600's unified architecture should have done miracles, but in practice it never quite worked that well. In theory, the HD38xx should have fixed that, except it barely made it competitive with an 8800 GT. In some games. At some resolutions. On a good day.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against either of the two. If anything, I used to dislike Nvidia a bit, which made me favour the ATI's. But, if I'm to learn anything from history, I'm a bit wary of making such bold pronouncements as "This will crush the GT280 in just about every conceivable benchmark". There are already plenty of cases where such prophecies were made, and just ended up with the prophecised Nvidia-killer quickly repackaged as "see, we don't want to compete at the top end. We'll just make it a mid-end card, ok? It's not that we can't compete at the top, mind you. We just suddenly find it obscene to charge $500 for a graphics card."
Or to put it otherwise, too often I've heard one or the other (but, again, ATI a bit more) crying "Wolf" and they barely managed to produce a dachshund. I'll wait until I actually see the big bad wolf this time, before joining in the chorus marveling at what a big, strong and fast wolf it is.
Heh. Duly noted, but... in Knights and Merchants you'd command some troops to go from here to there, say, a longer distance. Like mass them diagonally across the map. And they'd not just run through enemies. They'd run to a completely different edge of the map, and try to run in place against it.
;) But having to babysit the troops in 30 ft increments just to follow a road, was kinda a new experience.
I'm not just talking AI there, as in, not calculating the best path to avoid fire. I'm talking as in, it couldn't get from point X to point Y, when told exactly where to go, and it had a clear way between them. I'm used to the AI taking bad decisions and not applying elementary tactics. Heck, that's practically part of the flavour for RTS
Well, technically, yes, there have been more games ported to Linux, back in the Loki Games days. Stuff like IIRC Call To Power or Railroad Tycoon (IIRC) 2. Well, those are the two I actually own. There probably are a few more.
That said, do note that the list is already containing some... rather... "classic" ones. Gorky 17, for example is a 1999 games for example, so it's rapidly approaching a decade old. So is Creatures 3. Knights and Merchants is from 1998. (And even back then it was a crap game, with some of the worst pathfinding (among other sins) I've seen in a RTS. And not very popular either. So it's... unsettling to see that as one of the best games for Linux.)
Quake 3 was a good game, back then, but it's from 1999 too. Ok, they have Quake 3 Arena there, which is from 2000.
Don't get me wrong, there's newer stuff in that list too, and some good stuff too. But, nevertheless, it's basically 42 games spread across 10 bloody years. Yeah, so some would be closer to one end than others, but that doesn't invalidate the point much. You're probably better off trying to use Wine than waiting for those commercial Linux games to trickle in.
Reminds me of a "compression program" back in the early 90's. Seemed to compress better than Zip or RAR and was pretty fast too. You could also test it by compressing and uncompressing a few files, and you got your original back.
Turns out it just copied the contents to a temporary file and "uncompressing" got them back from there, while the "archive" was just random junk. Better yet, the temporary file was just a circular buffer, so when it filled, old data got discarded.
Actually, I'd argue that it's both rather expectable _and_ at the same time meaningless.
The basic nucleotides and aminoacids can be formed rather quickly even in a retort in the lab, given the right conditions (similar to those of primal Earth). But even that is somewhat misleading: really they just need a lot of energy. Carbon and nitrogen just tend to do that, and we're talking simple building blocks, not a whole ribosome.
What took an awfully long time is those actually becoming _life_. I.e., those assembling, by sheer chance, in a self-replicating configuration.
Really, there's nothing special about finding isolated aminoacids or nucleotides. They're not yet life, they're the Lego blocks that actual life is made of. Aminoacids are not a miracle by themselves, but in the fact that they can be assembled in proteins that can react with any chemical you wish. Or produce another chemical that reacts with it. Including assemble other proteins. Nucleotides are even more meaningless by themselves. They can form a RNA strand, which is what the first and simplest life used. But the RNA strand does nothing whatsoever by itself. It needs some proteins that (A) replicate it, and (B) translate it to other proteins, before it can count as life.
The "miracle" isn't when you have aminoacids and nucleotides. It's when you have at least some kind of RNA replicase and some kind of a ribosome.
So basically "ZOMG, we found a nucleotide on a meteorite" is simultaneously:
1. not that surprising, since really they form anywhere.
2. rather meaningless for life on Earth, in that we have plenty of proof that they formed withing minutes on Earth too, with the conditions back then. So a couple of those molecules maybe came on a meteorite too. Big deal, compared to the whole billions of tons of them forming right here.
3. rather unlikely as a source of life on Earth. Sooner or later those molecules break down. They don't last for ever. And we're not talking self-replicating life, but some building blocks which still needed to combine into a configuration that can be called "life", by sheer chance. That means lots and lots of them, and lots and lots of time. It's kinda absurd to assume that meteorites kept bringing billions of tons of them, for billions of years, until they finally recombined into some kind of ribosome.
4. it at best brings some extra insight into it all. If they're as easy to form as to even exist in meteorites, well, it just makes it easier to believe that we had a lot here too. In fact, maybe we had them earlier than we thought, as Earth itself formed out of dust which coalesced into meteorite, which coalesced into a planet. The last one captured was the one that ejected a chunk of Earth and created the Moon. So maybe we had some building blocks before Earth even formed. It also means we can expect almost any planet anywhere to have _some_ of the building blocks, and evolve life, if the conditions and timing are right.
But again, not an awful lot of insight that we didn't already have anyway.
Not going to disagree with what you wrote about skepticism, mind you. It just seems to me that skepticism is really a subset of what the summary _really_ asks. Challenging strong beliefs is ok, and even vital. But IMHO "what could possibly go wrong" is a much broader question, and in some aspects even orthogonal to it.
I see and personally know people who are perfectly able to be skeptical when it comes to religion or weird beliefs, yet steadfastly refuse to even think about what could go wrong with their plan. Not because they think they're so smart they couldn't possibly go wrong. But they seem to get genuinely annoyed if you force them to think about the possible bad outcomes of whatever they're doing. They live in their shiny-happy positive world, think shiny-happy positive thoughts, and avoid thinking depressing (to them) thoughts like "is it possible that I'm heading towards an epic fail?" Some will even call you names if you insist on forcing them to think of what could go wrong.
I think it's really about optimism vs pessimism.
The best example that I've seen again and again are mom and dad. Mom is a pessimist. She likes to think about what could possibly go wrong, and be prepared in advance. If she went to a tropical beach resort in July, she'll be prepared for the case that it'll snow. No, seriously, she'll take a suitcase just for the extra sweaters for that kind of event. Dad is an optimist. He'll just plough ahead, expect the best possible outcome, and know that he can fix things when they happen. No need to think about failure in advance. He'll just take a round detour if he took the wrong exit off the highway, and he'll go buy some sweaters there and then if it snows at the beach. And get annoyed as soon as mom even starts talking about her Plan B (and C and D and E) for the case things go awfully, spectacularly wrong.
They're both skeptics and atheists, mind you. One likes to think about what could go wrong, one doesn't. That's really all.
Or to get back to engineering, I see it in the code of some of my co-workers. They're skeptics, they're atheists, but they can't (or don't want to) even think about "what happens if the file isn't there?" And the code shows it.
So I think what we really need isn't as much to teach engineers to be skeptics. We need to teach them to be pessimists.
In fact, now that I think of it, I don't even really care if they believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster / Invisible Pink Uniform / Beardie In The Sky, or even in a colourful cocktail of conspiracy theories. It's not like belief in a largely passive deity will affect their design by much. Let them be non-skeptical, for all I care. But I'd like them to genuinely stop and think what happens when they have to do with the Bastard User From Hell and his trusty sidekick, Dumbest Imaginable User. What happens when those wribfe "no idea" in a date field, delete your DLL's to make room for your porn collection, enter an ICQ number instead of an IP address, edit the user ID in the URL to change their password, upload a whole porn DVD in an upload-your-own-icon page, and surf on sites which exist only to serve buffer overflows and SQL injection. _That_ is where you separate the good engineers or even security experts from the wannabees.
Well, that sounds like it would work perfectly with a wiimote.
Plus, they've already done something like that to Conker. A cutesy, kids' games squirrel turned into a serial-cussing, heavy-drinking, shit-dodging maniac. (And I mean, really, dodging dollops of feces.) Apparently just to make a point that Nintendo isn't a kiddies-only company any more, and now publishes that kind of stuff too. And as a bonus, why wait for deviant fanfic to rape your childhood memories and favourite characters, when you can get it done professionally by its creators?
So I'm kinda still waiting for when they get such ideas like, say, Mario or Link finally fucks the princess. I mean, seriously, after how often those guys save the princess, you'd think she'd put out by now. Hold the wiimote at your crotch and thrust. It's got sensors for that kind of thing, doesn't it? Maybe they'll even figure out how to use the balance board in it too
Or for the all-important casual-gaming female demographic, something like Zelda's Vibrator Training. You know, while Link is busy with his crossbow
Or how about playing the kidnapper and having some BDSM sessions with the princess? If the wiimote can be used as a tennis racket, why not as, say, a whip or paddle handle?
And for the really deviant market segment, Mario Goatse. I'll let you figure that out on your own
Maybe because for Joe Sixpack what matters is "how well they reperesent _my_ point of view?" If the answer is "neither", in a sense, yes, they're both the same.
Essentially it's like having to choose between two women as your wife. (Assuming you're a guy.) One is cute, but is really a guy in drag, dumb as a brick and only talks about his/her hypochondriac imaginary diseases. The other is smart and has big tits, but weighs 300 pounds at 5 ft tall, is butt-ugly and is the stereotypical rabid man-hater. Which one, would you say, better represents your tastes in women?
And if you have an urge to say, "whoa, dude, that's a false dichotomy. There are more kinds of women than that!", congrats, then you get my point perfectly. It shouldn't be a dichotomy in the first place.
Way I see it, it's the same in two-party politics. You have to choose between two package deals, and you're lucky if one issue of each really represents your views.
Well, that's easy. See, if you have a painfully slow drive, you use it less. So it'll last you for decades ;)
Yes, but the point was that it was incremental. It was the steady progress that eventually made us live better than those Achaeans, not the "singularities" which plunged us into chaos.
Actually, even if it kept accelerating, singularities (as some fancy world for when you divide by zero, or otherwise your model breaks down) so far never created some utopia.
The last one we had was the Great Depression. The irony of it was that it was the mother of all crises of _overproduction_. Humanity, or at least the West, was finally at the point where we could produce far more than anyone needed.
So much that the old-style laissez-faire free-market-automatically-fixes-everything capitalism model pretty much just broke down. There just was no solution to how much a country should produce. Hence my calling it a singularity.
By any kind of optimistic logic, it should have been the land of milk and honey. It was actually _the_ greatest economic collapse in known history, and produced very much misery and poverty.
And the funny thing is, the result was... well, that we learned to tweak the old model and produce less. We still go to work daily, and a lot of companies still want overtime, and a whole bunch of people still are dirt-poor. We just divert more and more of that work into marketing, services and government spending. It's a better life than the downwards spiral of the 19'th century, no doubt. But basically no miracle has happened, and no utopia has resulted. The improvement for the average citizen was incremental, not some revolution.
That was actually one of the least destructive "singularities". Previous ones produced stuff like, for example, the two world wars, as the death throes of old-style colonialism. When the model based on just keeping expanding into new territories and markets reached the end, we just went at each other's throats instead. A somewhat similar "singularity" arguably helped the Roman Empire collapse, and ushered in a collapse of trade and return to barbarism. The death throes of feudalism created a very bloody wave of revolutions.
All the way back to the border between Bronze Age and Iron Age in Europe, where... well, we don't know exactly what happened there, but whole civilizations were displaced or enslaved, whole cities were razed, and Europe-wide trade just collapsed. Ancient Greece for example, although most people just think of it as a continuous "Greece", had a collapse of the Mycenaean civilization and Achaean language it had before, and after some 300 years of the Greek Dark Ages, suddenly almost everyone there speaks Dorian instead. The Greeks and Greek language of Homer, are not the same as those of Pericles. (An Achaean League was formed much later, but apparently had not much to do with the original Achaeans.) And, look, they displaced the Ionians too in their way.
We recovered after each of them, no doubt, but basically the key word is: recovered. It never created some utopian/transcendence golden age.
So, well, _if_ our technology model ends up dividing by zero, I'd expect the same to happen. There'll be much misery and pain, we'll _probably_ recover after a while, and life will go on.
There's already a word for faked grassroots movement: astroturfing. You know, after the brand of fake turf.
Plus, it has a few more touches of SF. A 0 skill driver would be one who doesn't know _anything_ about driving, not even in which lane he's supposed to drive, or how he can turn right. Even if some of those managed to pass the driving test, they're not going to drive for very long until either the cops or natural selection gets them off the roads. It's a ludicriously unrealistic premise right there.
_My_ point is, learn a bit more maths before calling people "ass hat". Yes, so you managed to use elementary addition and even multiplication and division. I'm sure your parents are proud of you. Get a bit further, say up to statistics, and then we'll talk
That's ok. I hate it when idiots pollute a thread with posts just to the effect of, "look, I found someone who made an error!" as their only claim to glory. But you don't see me trying to stop you from posting. God knows that if you're at the stage where you have to "prove" that there's someone between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, you already know you're a loser. Anything I could say here won't be any worse anyway.