ok, that's true -- to be Google2 you'd need a business account, not residential broadband, or they'd hit you with bandwidth caps. Still, it's possible.
One thing tho: you might want to check your NAT setup. I'm a *nix newb, so I bow to your skillz, but my SMC NAT router lets multiple instances of kazaa lite run at one just fine. Doesn't require ports to be opened up or anything...
at least the way things are running now, most ISPs I've encountered use public address space. It's the consumer's choice to use NAT; if they want to be the next google no one is stopping them, they just need to avoid buying a router. Alright, they might have to call their cable company and get some ports opened -- but that's about it.
That's not to say it'll stay this way, or that I think NAT is a great thing, but as it stands NAT is optional for most people.
I for one would love to have public addresses for every machine on my LAN, and replace my NAT router with a simple, small, web-interface firewall box where I can open ports on a per-address basis (I don't think Linksys, D-Link, and the other sub $100 consumer router manufacturers make these, but they should). But in the meantime I'll make do with my SMC's finicky "Virtual Server" port forwarding features.
I stand corrected on the chemistry. However, I didn't see any mention of anthrax, just "bacterial spores". And there's no detail as to how complex an environment was surrounding those spores at the time (they were detected by a group other than the one featured most prominently in the article). But perhaps you were referring to something not in the article of which I'm unaware.
I'm not saying IR spectrometry is useless, just that there's no reason to cripple it by insisting it only be terahz because of privacy concerns. If you're going to snoop, snoop. I'm willing to believe the spectrograph is not going to read my letters and gossip about all the juicy details with its buddy the mail sorter. Insisting on on wavelengths that don't see ink just seems like a ridiculous PR move.
you misunderstand why game keys are crackable. If you're working with local, installed software then the key must follow a pattern to be deemed valid. An online music service doesn't suffer from this limitation. When you have a server you can just generate random keys and make one thousandth of one percent valid. And lock accounts that enter too many incorrect keys in a given period of time.
very impressive, until you consider that the two example substances quoted in the article are nearly identical from a chemical standpoint. MDMA = methylene dioxy methamphetamine. You just add a little methylene branch and stick an oxygen in the carbon ring and you've gone from speed to X.
If I remember my chem 101 correctly, the reason this tech works is because different types of chemical bonds are susceptible to different frequencies of radiation, depending on their strength, which depends on the type of bond, types of atoms involved and their surrounding atomic environment. You shoot a bunch of wavelengths at a molecule and some will be absorbed, and in varying ratios, producing a relatively unique signature. Congratulations, you've just reinvented spectrography.
From dyerlabs.com/chemistry:
Atoms and molecules have only certain distinct (discrete) amounts of energy (energy levels). Relatively small amount of energy are involved in rotation of molecules, and those measurements are done with far infrared and microwave spectrometry. More energy in involved in vibrations between atoms or groups of atoms (infrared). Still more energy is involved in changes of the electronic structure (visible, ultraviolet, X-ray) and nuclear structure (gamma ray).
Terahertz may be a good candidate from a privacy standpoint, but it's in between the not-so-useful microwave and okay-for-identifying-things infrared. So basically this is just a crippled, privacy-compliant form of IR spectrography, and they've discovered that the amphetamine-based molecules can be identified with it. This doesn't mean that other organics can be properly identified by it.
I don't know about Duane Reid stores, but all those others already sell prepaid cards of one form or another, so they presumably already have systems for distribution of these things. The cards probably won't even be plastic, just a fold-out piece of paper with a one-time use code printed on them. My guess is that production costs are at most a few cents per card.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually a more efficient way of selling their merchandise, since they don't have to give a cut of every transaction to the credit card companies.
I had this piece of malware afflict me when I was working overseas for an extended period. With highspeed internet an hour tram/bus/metro ride away. And GPRS, charged-per-kilobyte access for everything else. Not that it would have mattered, since it prevented me from ANY network access of any kind. And of course I had no retail access to english-language software.
So okay, this is pretty much a worst-case scenario, and I suppose I could have had the office express ship me an OS CDROM. But still -- it was a bad situation. Malware that requires you to reinstall your OS is bad, bad stuff.
he (family friend) said this rumor has been floating around the hill for months. So, nothing has actually occurred here, but it does sound like Billy is the man on deck for when Valenti steps down.
UVa -- I'm (almost) 2 years out, and they had java and C# while I was there. And UVa (while a great school) is not an engineering powerhouse. C++ is the workhorse of CS101, but the higher you go through the course offerings at a given college, I'd say the more likely you are to encounter something else. A friend of mine did a considerable amount of LISP programming on his way to a CS degree from Syracuse, for example.
People will tend to use whatever language they already know, and what language they already know will be shaped by what their schools chose to teach them. A good OSS C# compiler would be a very good thing.
their consoles might be cheap. their games are not. all nintendo releases are $49.99 (except, admittedly, for the player's choice series, but those debuted at $49.99). Third party developers frequently release titles at $39.99. I frequently see games for other systems cheaper. And there seem to be more sales at stores like BB for non-GC titles. Plus, the used market seems to be bigger for PS2 and Xbox, based on trips I've made to local video rental stores (Xbox may be comparable -- definitely more used PS2 games though -- could be because of release date, but the effect is the same). Plus there aren't as many preview discs as for the other systems, there's no backward compatibility like the PS2, no online play reducing (potential) bang for the buck...
Don't get me wrong. The only current-generation system I own is a GC. I think their commitment to quality releases makes their games worth the money. But I would say their games are in general more expensive.
since it lets you get the most out of your system. if you space your frames out evenly, sometimes you'll have your system waiting around for the next frame to start when it could be drawing something inbetween. or worse, if one frame takes too long -- say you're running at 10 fps and one especially complex frame takes 0.11 s to render. Now your system is sitting there for 0.9 seconds of wasted time, and it's had to drop a frame.
much easier to just scale everything by the time it took to compose and draw the last frame. Unfortunately, it produces weird artifacts that in id's case translated to slight gameplay advantages for higher-framerate users.
I'm glad they're capping it. 60 fps is plenty -- most users don't even realize how hard it is to tell the difference between framerates over 40 or so (possible, certainly, but it's more subliminal than anything). If I have to read one more console game review that claims a game runs at 60 fps (it's always 60 with them) when they're playing it on an NTSC television, I am gonna go nuts.
that there isn't a fundamental difference between videogames and the art forms that came before them. In virtually every non-abstract game (eg not Tetris) You control the actions of some sort of avatar. Movies, books, plays -- sure, you can and frequently do identify with the characters. But it's not guaranteed. If a character in a work of fiction does something detestable, you can just watch in amazement. I would suggest that it's not the same in a videogame. As Raskolnikov's plunge into insanity unfolds I just keep reading, horrified. If I've just loaded the landlady's apartment level, selected "equip axe" and made sure the directX blood settings are turned up to maximum splatter -- well, it somehow feels a lot less like art.
I guess it boils down to this: people consume media because they're seeking entertainment. Before, media were entertaining because you *experienced* them -- that experience didn't necessarily have to be fun, just affecting (see also: Requiem for a Dream). Games, on the other hand, are fun because of what you're *doing*. And, as far as I can tell, people don't do things for any reason other than "they're fun".
Sure, there are gray areas -- emerging from a night of playing Doom full of adrenaline, having spent the evening worried about demons popping out from behind every corner: I wouldn't say that's fun exactly, but it was invigorating, and enjoyable. But I have yet to see a game experience that can be emotionally harrowing, a game from which the player emerges a little shaken but feeling like the art they've experienced has changed them in a meaningful way.
These are not generation's wars. I do not want to take them from the people who fought them without knowing that I'm doing so for a better reason than a justification for simple, stupid, slaughterhouse entertainment.
Of course I agree there should not be censorship of such games. But I do think we should consider officially bestowing "scum of the earth" status on those who redistill the horrors of war into fun action romps. It's not much different than the japanese rape fantasy mangas mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Do they mean the whole manage artform must be condemned? Obviously not -- manga is clearly can be an art form that really conveys meaning and ideas.
But how many non-despicable rape-related manga are there? I'd say the same could be said for war videogames. I'm sure it's possible to make one; but that's not why people turn to the war genre. They do so as an excuse for violence.
that's all the advice I can offer. I've been working with MCMS for a year or so and the migration from 2001 to 2002 was just godawful. Multiple reproduceable errors that required calls to MS tech support. It was unbelievable how underdeveloped the migration process was.
With that said, the 2002 product integrates nicely with.NET and is actually pretty slick.
I've used it -- my ericsson t39 has support for it. Got a usb bluetooth adapter, used the t39 as a bluetooth modem. it was okay once I got it going, but the configuration was fidgety, and it sucked batteries down. I had to manually turn it on and off if I wanted to get more than a day's use out of the phone on a single charge. Practical range was about a meter.
A couple of friends of mine in college worked on a bluetooth engineering competition. They did not have fond things to say about it. Now we've got devices billed as bluetooth-enabled like the MS wireless keyboard -- its transceiver can't actually work with any other bluetooth devices!
Basically it's slow, fidgety, has poor market penetration and isn't a well-supported standard: too many incompatible implementations. For things like wireless mice it's overkill; for moving data around it's too slow and short range.
take the anti-authoritarian stance of much of the P2P community, the technology that's getting the most mentions on mtv news, add a few doctorates for that glossy, self-righteous veneer, and this is what you get. freenet's doing it already, doing it better, and doing it for people who actually need protection in order to speak out against their governments. this = +5 lame
I'm not sure how this would work... I mean, it's obviously simple for X to say "draw a window this size at this position" and the client can draw it, obviating the need for shoving a bitmap of that window across the network.
I'm not sure how you envision doing this with sound (well, you could do it with predefined sounds, like system sounds -- bells and alerts and such, but I assume this is not what you want). All you could really do would be on-the-fly compression of sound, but the processing overhead would be pretty huge...
the artwork is terrible and the jokes are usually pretty lame. just because something is geeky the community embraces it... bleh. Dilbert and Penny Arcade are both plenty nerdy, but actually funny. Hell, even Foxtrot gets in occasional proof of the author's geekdom and it's consistently excellent.
You are so fucking wrong, I don't know where to begin. First off, regulation of utilities gets us shitty quality, overpriced crap. Power in the US? In case you haven't noticed, CA has had a problem for years because the price set by the gov't was so low that nobody wanted to produce electricity at that price. Have a problem with your power company? Every tried to switch? Oh yeah. You can't. There's zero competition with residential phone, power, water, and in most places cable. Who cares about contracts? Pricing has been racing downward with cell service for years, in case you haven't noticed. My power and water bills have only been going up. I don't know what kind of crack you're smoking, but pass the pipe, dude. You're baked.
Are you seriously suggesting that deregulation has worked well for California? I don't even know where to begin. It's contributed to one of the biggest fiscal crises in that state's history. What else can you say? Enron? Should I bother?
Incidentally, I can switch power companies where I live (VA). Several states have initiatives like this. It lets you choose how your power is generated, among other things.
I'm very happy with my residential phone service. As you said, it's a government-approved monopoly. But it is legally obligated to provide me with a good level of service, is very reliable, and costs me $13 a month.
The reason cell prices have been coming down is market competition -- which long contracts are designed to stifle -- economies of scale and, of course, improved technology. The tech behind your gas and water systems has not been changing much; your prices going up there are the result of inflation and increased demand (natural gas reserves are almost entirely exploited; water supply for a given region is finite).
I know it's tempting to embrace a vision of an unregulated utopia where markets work perfectly -- prices drop to that point on the graph where the lines cross, and you don't have to pay taxes, and you can speed in your big polluting SUV. But economics is more of an internally coherent fantasy world than a science, and those things don't work out in the real world. I pay more for the less-regulated utilities I use and get worse service. That's all I need to know about it.
to the practices of the new utilities. This is a good example of the hassles produced by deregulation and legislative coddling of business. Why is it that for direcTV or cell phone service you have to sign a year-long contract? Why don't you have to do this for power, water, your landline, or cable TV?
The answer is: because those utilities were birthed in an era where that sort of nonsense wasn't tolerated. In order to maximize sales and squeeze every possible dollar from consumers, the noveau-utilities have produced a truly byzantine system. A contract is necessary to pay for your underwritten hardware, to make up for activation costs that may or may not already have been covered by an activation fee, and of course, to slow market forces and squelch competition.
Wireless service companies presumably have newer tech; so why is it more difficult for them to establish accounts than it is for traditional utilities? The water company has to send a guy out to mess around with pipes. Presumably all sprint has to do is make some changes in a database. So why are activation fees comparable for both?
It would be nice to see honest activation fees, realistically priced hardware and an end to contracts. But it ain't gonna happen until these utilities have matured and the regulatory climate in Washington has swung back to a pro-consumer position.
It's not an option to pay the fee -- I believe it's a mandatory fee applied on a monthly basis to fund the initiative. Doesn't matter if you use it or not. I'm basing this assumption on the fact that it's already showing up on some people's bills, despite not yet being available.
So you wouldn't gain much with your method, I'm afraid, once portability begins. Plus, changing websites, business cards, etc is a pain. I'm all for number portability, but do wonder about the justification for the fees that are being attached to it.
well, if you opt out of your contract early there are usually termination fees in that neighborhood
However, number portability is being paid for right now -- most companies have started adding a number portability surcharge to their customers' bills. And in most cases they've said this money will not be refunded even if they succeed in defeating the number portability initiative -- pretty sleazy.
The splintered DOM, deprecated but still overused tags like FONT and SMALL in HTML, the lack of support for an open, scriptable vector graphics format, resulting in the necessity of flash... the web is a mess.
Some IE updates would be nice. What I think we really need, though:
A very good standardized OSS javascript implementation (IE still beats mozilla in my experience)
PNG support
SVG support
An HTML iteration mandating CSS use -- I have to admit I'm not up to date on where w3c is with many of their standards, but it is time to clean up HTML
useful sites that are crippled for noncompliant browsers (slashdot, sourceforge would be a good start) and a mozilla branded plugin for IE that allows it to support the new standards, so that the market can be pushed toward adopting them
Yeah, wishful thinking, I know. But in the absence of strong standards the web is going to keep getting worse and worse, to the point where you *have* to use some huge, glorified browser-sniffing case statement (*cough*ASP.NET*cough*) to do anything advanced and be confident it'll work across browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing tho: you might want to check your NAT setup. I'm a *nix newb, so I bow to your skillz, but my SMC NAT router lets multiple instances of kazaa lite run at one just fine. Doesn't require ports to be opened up or anything...
That's not to say it'll stay this way, or that I think NAT is a great thing, but as it stands NAT is optional for most people.
I for one would love to have public addresses for every machine on my LAN, and replace my NAT router with a simple, small, web-interface firewall box where I can open ports on a per-address basis (I don't think Linksys, D-Link, and the other sub $100 consumer router manufacturers make these, but they should). But in the meantime I'll make do with my SMC's finicky "Virtual Server" port forwarding features.
making it appropriate for forehead application
I'm not saying IR spectrometry is useless, just that there's no reason to cripple it by insisting it only be terahz because of privacy concerns. If you're going to snoop, snoop. I'm willing to believe the spectrograph is not going to read my letters and gossip about all the juicy details with its buddy the mail sorter. Insisting on on wavelengths that don't see ink just seems like a ridiculous PR move.
you misunderstand why game keys are crackable. If you're working with local, installed software then the key must follow a pattern to be deemed valid. An online music service doesn't suffer from this limitation. When you have a server you can just generate random keys and make one thousandth of one percent valid. And lock accounts that enter too many incorrect keys in a given period of time.
If I remember my chem 101 correctly, the reason this tech works is because different types of chemical bonds are susceptible to different frequencies of radiation, depending on their strength, which depends on the type of bond, types of atoms involved and their surrounding atomic environment. You shoot a bunch of wavelengths at a molecule and some will be absorbed, and in varying ratios, producing a relatively unique signature. Congratulations, you've just reinvented spectrography.
From dyerlabs.com/chemistry:
Terahertz may be a good candidate from a privacy standpoint, but it's in between the not-so-useful microwave and okay-for-identifying-things infrared. So basically this is just a crippled, privacy-compliant form of IR spectrography, and they've discovered that the amphetamine-based molecules can be identified with it. This doesn't mean that other organics can be properly identified by it.
Frankly, this seems kind of lame.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually a more efficient way of selling their merchandise, since they don't have to give a cut of every transaction to the credit card companies.
as others have mentioned, tin-foil-lined envelopes should do the trick. And when not in use, wearing them on your head makes for convenient storage.
So okay, this is pretty much a worst-case scenario, and I suppose I could have had the office express ship me an OS CDROM. But still -- it was a bad situation. Malware that requires you to reinstall your OS is bad, bad stuff.
he (family friend) said this rumor has been floating around the hill for months. So, nothing has actually occurred here, but it does sound like Billy is the man on deck for when Valenti steps down.
People will tend to use whatever language they already know, and what language they already know will be shaped by what their schools chose to teach them. A good OSS C# compiler would be a very good thing.
Don't get me wrong. The only current-generation system I own is a GC. I think their commitment to quality releases makes their games worth the money. But I would say their games are in general more expensive.
much easier to just scale everything by the time it took to compose and draw the last frame. Unfortunately, it produces weird artifacts that in id's case translated to slight gameplay advantages for higher-framerate users.
I'm glad they're capping it. 60 fps is plenty -- most users don't even realize how hard it is to tell the difference between framerates over 40 or so (possible, certainly, but it's more subliminal than anything). If I have to read one more console game review that claims a game runs at 60 fps (it's always 60 with them) when they're playing it on an NTSC television, I am gonna go nuts.
I guess it boils down to this: people consume media because they're seeking entertainment. Before, media were entertaining because you *experienced* them -- that experience didn't necessarily have to be fun, just affecting (see also: Requiem for a Dream). Games, on the other hand, are fun because of what you're *doing*. And, as far as I can tell, people don't do things for any reason other than "they're fun".
Sure, there are gray areas -- emerging from a night of playing Doom full of adrenaline, having spent the evening worried about demons popping out from behind every corner: I wouldn't say that's fun exactly, but it was invigorating, and enjoyable. But I have yet to see a game experience that can be emotionally harrowing, a game from which the player emerges a little shaken but feeling like the art they've experienced has changed them in a meaningful way.
These are not generation's wars. I do not want to take them from the people who fought them without knowing that I'm doing so for a better reason than a justification for simple, stupid, slaughterhouse entertainment.
Of course I agree there should not be censorship of such games. But I do think we should consider officially bestowing "scum of the earth" status on those who redistill the horrors of war into fun action romps. It's not much different than the japanese rape fantasy mangas mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Do they mean the whole manage artform must be condemned? Obviously not -- manga is clearly can be an art form that really conveys meaning and ideas.
But how many non-despicable rape-related manga are there? I'd say the same could be said for war videogames. I'm sure it's possible to make one; but that's not why people turn to the war genre. They do so as an excuse for violence.
With that said, the 2002 product integrates nicely with .NET and is actually pretty slick.
c'mon... it's expressly denied, and there is no significant supporting evidence. This is the kind of thing that makes ./ers look like zealots.
A couple of friends of mine in college worked on a bluetooth engineering competition. They did not have fond things to say about it. Now we've got devices billed as bluetooth-enabled like the MS wireless keyboard -- its transceiver can't actually work with any other bluetooth devices!
Basically it's slow, fidgety, has poor market penetration and isn't a well-supported standard: too many incompatible implementations. For things like wireless mice it's overkill; for moving data around it's too slow and short range.
take the anti-authoritarian stance of much of the P2P community, the technology that's getting the most mentions on mtv news, add a few doctorates for that glossy, self-righteous veneer, and this is what you get. freenet's doing it already, doing it better, and doing it for people who actually need protection in order to speak out against their governments. this = +5 lame
I'm not sure how you envision doing this with sound (well, you could do it with predefined sounds, like system sounds -- bells and alerts and such, but I assume this is not what you want). All you could really do would be on-the-fly compression of sound, but the processing overhead would be pretty huge...
big pass on this one for me...
Are you seriously suggesting that deregulation has worked well for California? I don't even know where to begin. It's contributed to one of the biggest fiscal crises in that state's history. What else can you say? Enron? Should I bother?
Incidentally, I can switch power companies where I live (VA). Several states have initiatives like this. It lets you choose how your power is generated, among other things.
I'm very happy with my residential phone service. As you said, it's a government-approved monopoly. But it is legally obligated to provide me with a good level of service, is very reliable, and costs me $13 a month.
The reason cell prices have been coming down is market competition -- which long contracts are designed to stifle -- economies of scale and, of course, improved technology. The tech behind your gas and water systems has not been changing much; your prices going up there are the result of inflation and increased demand (natural gas reserves are almost entirely exploited; water supply for a given region is finite).
I know it's tempting to embrace a vision of an unregulated utopia where markets work perfectly -- prices drop to that point on the graph where the lines cross, and you don't have to pay taxes, and you can speed in your big polluting SUV. But economics is more of an internally coherent fantasy world than a science, and those things don't work out in the real world. I pay more for the less-regulated utilities I use and get worse service. That's all I need to know about it.
The answer is: because those utilities were birthed in an era where that sort of nonsense wasn't tolerated. In order to maximize sales and squeeze every possible dollar from consumers, the noveau-utilities have produced a truly byzantine system. A contract is necessary to pay for your underwritten hardware, to make up for activation costs that may or may not already have been covered by an activation fee, and of course, to slow market forces and squelch competition.
Wireless service companies presumably have newer tech; so why is it more difficult for them to establish accounts than it is for traditional utilities? The water company has to send a guy out to mess around with pipes. Presumably all sprint has to do is make some changes in a database. So why are activation fees comparable for both?
It would be nice to see honest activation fees, realistically priced hardware and an end to contracts. But it ain't gonna happen until these utilities have matured and the regulatory climate in Washington has swung back to a pro-consumer position.
So you wouldn't gain much with your method, I'm afraid, once portability begins. Plus, changing websites, business cards, etc is a pain. I'm all for number portability, but do wonder about the justification for the fees that are being attached to it.
However, number portability is being paid for right now -- most companies have started adding a number portability surcharge to their customers' bills. And in most cases they've said this money will not be refunded even if they succeed in defeating the number portability initiative -- pretty sleazy.
Some IE updates would be nice. What I think we really need, though:
Yeah, wishful thinking, I know. But in the absence of strong standards the web is going to keep getting worse and worse, to the point where you *have* to use some huge, glorified browser-sniffing case statement (*cough*ASP.NET*cough*) to do anything advanced and be confident it'll work across browsers.