At least, now they do. The requirements for game development are increasing every day, stretching development cycles and requiring more resources.
id's games have always been about groundbreaking technology, so it's not surprising that as development costs expand, gameplay filligrees in id titles suffer (relative to the competition). id uses its games as technology demos. Don't get me wrong, I love 'em, but their focus is not on the sort of game logic that distinguishes the experiences this story refers to (no, I haven't RTFA yet). Let's face it: AI is an interesting area that needs improvement, but programming headshots is boring. Making realtime rendering engines as good as they can be is a real technical challenge, and something that id can do better than anyone else. That's what makes them unique, and consequently it's also what makes them money -- not from game sales, but from engine licensing.
the buttons; the plastic casing; the use of symbols to convey meaning; and of course the device's flagrant use of electricity. Face it, they were asking for this.
The doubleclick drone has a point: advertising-supported sites will be hurt by ad blocking. People are talking about innovation and new opportunities, but c'mon -- remember when the internet advertising bubble burst, and sites like Penny-Arcade had to go begging? We didn't get micropayments or sponsorship deals or anything else out of that. All we got was talented content authors going begging.
I don't mind having things sold to me -- what I mind is having things sold to me intrusively. That includes pop-ups, flash, and most importantly, being tracked. I don't want there to be a profile corresponding to my IP on doubleclick's servers.
Adblock prevents GETs for particular domains from ever being made, I believe. That's no good, because it is easily measurable on the server side, resulting in fewer payments to the site owners. A better solution would be to use GreaseMonkey-style client scripts to filter particularly egregious advertising. Your bandwidth will be wasted on the ads, yes, but c'mon -- that's not a big concern for most of us. You won't have to experience the ads, but there'll be no way for the advertisers to know that. Clickthrough revenues would go down -- but of course, that could be automated too.
The point is to make advertising less effective without unduly hurting the content authors it supports or the people trying to sell their products. Ultimately this may drive the cost of advertising to tech-savvy audiences up (and thereby lead to less of it being purchased), but I doubt it will significantly affect the overall demand for the products we buy. Put another way, I might not end up buying from ThinkGeek if Slashdot ads are suppressed, but my total geeky t-shirt budget is likely to remain about the same. Ideally this would result in industry resources being shifted away from advertising and toward uses that actually provide a better experience for the customer. This is probably wishful thinking, though, and perhaps a reduction in advertising really would lead to a reduction in demand for geek-goods, the same way as it would for other demographics.
I thought there was no such thing as a central C&C on botnets. An infected pc, can be a member of many botnets.
Yes, but there'll be one trojan per botnet. Script kiddies don't like to share, and in fact the current trend is supposedly groups assembling botnets and then auctioning off their services to spammers. Given that, you can see why the botnet "owner" wouldn't want to allow access to other evildoers.
Thanks -- I should've included the link. But it is probably worth noting that their online store isn't really competitive with the likes of newegg (or even buy.com) on a day to day basis. Occasionally you'll see a great microcenter.com deal on fatwallet, but not all that often.
We've got one here in the DC area, and it's a pretty great store. Not as impressive a selection as Fry's, but competitive in terms of price. And they tend to have a pretty good selection of really great blowout deals on a month to month basis on routers, last-gen videocards and miscellaneous geek paraphenalia like rechargeable batteries and memory card readers.
Does that make them more prone to cancer by giving the cancer cells extra food?
Are you more prone to being attacked by feral monkeys if you keep bananas in the house?
Pregnant women are more susceptible to some kinds of cancer, but primarily because of the hormonal changes they undergo.
In the case of folate, perhaps an existing cancer could be made worse, but given that it's an essential nutrient eliminating folate from your diet in order to remain cancer-free isn't a very practical idea.
It's worked for them so far (how many times have we heard that Apple is 'almost dead'?), so why change their strategy now?
Conversely, how many times have we heard that Microsoft is almost dead?
Look, I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong about this. But I find it strange when people start arguing against Apple lowering prices or licensing their technology because "it's their only advantage".
It's not an advantage. Apple is not winning. They are having a period of success right now, and I'm glad for it, but do you really think they constitute a genuine threat to MS?
Now, you can argue that Apple's high prices and refusal to foster a commodity hardware market are what have allowed them to retain their technical excellence. But given the general agreement about the high quality of Apple products, it should be obvious to everyone that these decisions are not why Apple's marketshare is as big as it is -- they're why it's as small as it is.
It's practically a tautology. Because the motivations behind the cutting edge of the body modification movement is grounded in shock value. Although most of us would now agree that tattoos and earrings are legitimate forms of personal expression, the front lines of BM are grounded in confrontationalism.
No doubt many people will object to this and suggest that implanted horns or split tongues are really self-expression dying to get out. They'll claim that that guy with the tiger tattoos and implanted whiskers was tragically born a tiger in a man's body. They'll claim that these idiots are clever artists, not just shock-value peddlers couching their wares in banal observation and bad music (yes, I've seen them live).
I respectfully disagree with those people. Sure, they serve their purpose, and perhaps split tongues will become so popular that 12th grade girls the world over will make rational decisions about whether the procedure expresses something they wish to convey about themselves. If that happens I'm sure popular opinion will shift against discriminating against those with split tongues.
But in the meantime at least part of the forefront of BM is about shocking and making people upset. There'll be discrimination against it; frankly, I suspect that its adherents would be upset if there weren't.
The PowerPC chips have always had some interesting feature, or excelled at some particular benchmark. Maybe they were faster, maybe they were slower. That's not the point. It was always possible to benchmark some obscure x86 worst case scenario to "prove" that they were selling the fastest computer in the world, ever.
I suspect the number of people that were stupid enough to really, earnestly believe in those benchmarks wasn't that large. And there's no reason why Apple can't now claim a group of people who were previously put off by the prospect of getting fewer flops for their dollar.
You have to remember that if a move by Apple alienates a percentage of Mac users identical to the percentage of PC users that it entices, it's a net win for Apple.
There is no evidence that Mars is "frozen solid". It could still have a soft core. In any case, it is likely to be rather warm in the middle, still.
I was under the impression than Mars has no appreciable magnetic field, and that a potential explanation for this was the dynamo of molten iron that the earth enjoys had cooled to solidification on Mars.
others have said it, but that's what I'd suggest. if it's a closed network of folks wanting to contact each other, i2p might be a good idea. for an even smaller network, openvpn is great.
with any of these, I'd suggest using truecrypt (or the knoppix solution mentioned elsewhere in this discussion). it'd be important to make sure than all your webcache directories are located on the bestcrypt volume.
it will be interesting to see if a market will open for this type of vehicle
allow me to spoil the surprise: no, it won't.
As others have pointed out, compressed air can't be stored in sufficient quantities to make this very practical. This has been done before -- for small systems that have to deliver a lot of power quickly it's fine, and it may even offer advantages in situations where using electrical components would be a problem, but it's just doesn't offer many practical advantages over batteries or fuel cells.
Yes, burned CDs suffer from bitrot. But most of the other sources of data loss you mention are either very rare or not applicable. Conversions are usually lossy, but they generally don't need to be performed more than once. If someone wants to download a divx rip of a DVD, the original mpeg2 stream has suffered a lossy recompression, yes, but each subsequent transmission of that divx file doesn't result in more loss. This is in contrast to analog formats -- the act of distribution necessarily introduces a loss of quality. That's not the case with digital files.
Your concerns about transmission errors and hard disk failures are just silly. These things happen, but rarely, and certainly not in a way that introduces quality defects in the "authoritative" copy of a piece of media on a p2p network (ie, the most popular copy of a file, with same-hash files considered identical (b/c they are)). You might want to have a look at wikipedia's entries under "crc" and "hashing". Your intuition that bits occasionally get flipped is correct, but when it happens it's almost always detected and corrected.
this is a bit like being concerned about your car getting stolen thanks to a recently unearthed Sumerian master key.
The odds of it fitting the (biological) lock are astronomically small, and if it did, the odds of it not having been beaten by advances in (lock technology / immune systems) are very, very small.
Radioactive materials certainly occur naturally, and there are indeed cases of naturally-occuring nuclear reactors.
Only one, I believe.
It is entirely within the realms of possibility that natural radioactivity kept the inside of the bones sterilized, so that organic decay could not take place.
Could biological material really be kept irradiated enough to reliably cook bacteria for millions of years, but not get denatured itself? I guess anything's possible -- this could be a well-done dino -- but I'd happily take any bets tendered that radiation didn't have anything to do with this.
I've met Nye several times, and he's always seemed like a nice guy. You can learn a lot just by standing around him, drinking beer.
Beakman was an actor. Comparing shows is fine -- just a matter of taste, I suppose. But Nye is the only one of the two with actual scientific chops (he was an aeronautic engineer prior to getting involved with Almost Live).
I remember hearing an interesting tidbit in a pharmacology class. Recovering addicts are supposed to avoid environments associated with their substance abuse. There's a psychological reason for this, but also a biological one (although obviously it's tough to draw a line between the two on issues like this).
For most drugs, a variation of Newton's law applies: each induced effect will have an opposite (and increasingly proportional) effect. This is why drug dosage frequently needs to be increased over time; it's also why, after a night of drinking, you might wake up unusually early feeling jittery -- your body has responded to the depressant with an unusually excited state, and one the depressant is metabolized, it takes a little while for things to settle back to equilibrium.
Anyway, the point is this: if you put a heroin user in the basement where they always shot up, their body will produce a response: their heartrate and blood pressure will go up, and they may become more sensitive to pain. The body is getting ready to partially counteract the administration of the heroin. This exacerbates the perceived need for the heroin, making a relapse more likely.
All of which is a long way of saying that yes, the body appears to learn, based on sensory input, what its biochemical state "ought" to be.
gyroscopic controllers. Sounds likely to me. Very Nintendo-ish, and the original quote said it *wasn't* new technology, just tech that hadn't previously been applied to gaming.
not only that, he quit over being forced to use what by all accounts in a pretty good tool.
I get that some people hate doing Windows development at all, but honestly C# coding in.NET is just a huge step up from everything that preceded it. Did he really enjoy MFC that much?
not only that, he quit over being forced to use what by all accounts in a pretty good tool.
I get that some people hate doing Windows development at all, but honestly C# coding in.NET is just a huge step up from everything that preceded it. Did he really enjoy MFC that much?
Slashdot Mirror
At least, now they do. The requirements for game development are increasing every day, stretching development cycles and requiring more resources.
id's games have always been about groundbreaking technology, so it's not surprising that as development costs expand, gameplay filligrees in id titles suffer (relative to the competition). id uses its games as technology demos. Don't get me wrong, I love 'em, but their focus is not on the sort of game logic that distinguishes the experiences this story refers to (no, I haven't RTFA yet). Let's face it: AI is an interesting area that needs improvement, but programming headshots is boring. Making realtime rendering engines as good as they can be is a real technical challenge, and something that id can do better than anyone else. That's what makes them unique, and consequently it's also what makes them money -- not from game sales, but from engine licensing.
the buttons; the plastic casing; the use of symbols to convey meaning; and of course the device's flagrant use of electricity. Face it, they were asking for this.
hilarious stuff, man
The doubleclick drone has a point: advertising-supported sites will be hurt by ad blocking. People are talking about innovation and new opportunities, but c'mon -- remember when the internet advertising bubble burst, and sites like Penny-Arcade had to go begging? We didn't get micropayments or sponsorship deals or anything else out of that. All we got was talented content authors going begging.
I don't mind having things sold to me -- what I mind is having things sold to me intrusively. That includes pop-ups, flash, and most importantly, being tracked. I don't want there to be a profile corresponding to my IP on doubleclick's servers.
Adblock prevents GETs for particular domains from ever being made, I believe. That's no good, because it is easily measurable on the server side, resulting in fewer payments to the site owners. A better solution would be to use GreaseMonkey-style client scripts to filter particularly egregious advertising. Your bandwidth will be wasted on the ads, yes, but c'mon -- that's not a big concern for most of us. You won't have to experience the ads, but there'll be no way for the advertisers to know that. Clickthrough revenues would go down -- but of course, that could be automated too.
The point is to make advertising less effective without unduly hurting the content authors it supports or the people trying to sell their products. Ultimately this may drive the cost of advertising to tech-savvy audiences up (and thereby lead to less of it being purchased), but I doubt it will significantly affect the overall demand for the products we buy. Put another way, I might not end up buying from ThinkGeek if Slashdot ads are suppressed, but my total geeky t-shirt budget is likely to remain about the same. Ideally this would result in industry resources being shifted away from advertising and toward uses that actually provide a better experience for the customer. This is probably wishful thinking, though, and perhaps a reduction in advertising really would lead to a reduction in demand for geek-goods, the same way as it would for other demographics.
Yes, but there'll be one trojan per botnet. Script kiddies don't like to share, and in fact the current trend is supposedly groups assembling botnets and then auctioning off their services to spammers. Given that, you can see why the botnet "owner" wouldn't want to allow access to other evildoers.
Thanks -- I should've included the link. But it is probably worth noting that their online store isn't really competitive with the likes of newegg (or even buy.com) on a day to day basis. Occasionally you'll see a great microcenter.com deal on fatwallet, but not all that often.
We've got one here in the DC area, and it's a pretty great store. Not as impressive a selection as Fry's, but competitive in terms of price. And they tend to have a pretty good selection of really great blowout deals on a month to month basis on routers, last-gen videocards and miscellaneous geek paraphenalia like rechargeable batteries and memory card readers.
Are you more prone to being attacked by feral monkeys if you keep bananas in the house?
Pregnant women are more susceptible to some kinds of cancer, but primarily because of the hormonal changes they undergo.
In the case of folate, perhaps an existing cancer could be made worse, but given that it's an essential nutrient eliminating folate from your diet in order to remain cancer-free isn't a very practical idea.
Conversely, how many times have we heard that Microsoft is almost dead?
Look, I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong about this. But I find it strange when people start arguing against Apple lowering prices or licensing their technology because "it's their only advantage".
It's not an advantage. Apple is not winning. They are having a period of success right now, and I'm glad for it, but do you really think they constitute a genuine threat to MS?
Now, you can argue that Apple's high prices and refusal to foster a commodity hardware market are what have allowed them to retain their technical excellence. But given the general agreement about the high quality of Apple products, it should be obvious to everyone that these decisions are not why Apple's marketshare is as big as it is -- they're why it's as small as it is.
It's practically a tautology. Because the motivations behind the cutting edge of the body modification movement is grounded in shock value. Although most of us would now agree that tattoos and earrings are legitimate forms of personal expression, the front lines of BM are grounded in confrontationalism.
No doubt many people will object to this and suggest that implanted horns or split tongues are really self-expression dying to get out. They'll claim that that guy with the tiger tattoos and implanted whiskers was tragically born a tiger in a man's body. They'll claim that these idiots are clever artists, not just shock-value peddlers couching their wares in banal observation and bad music (yes, I've seen them live).
I respectfully disagree with those people. Sure, they serve their purpose, and perhaps split tongues will become so popular that 12th grade girls the world over will make rational decisions about whether the procedure expresses something they wish to convey about themselves. If that happens I'm sure popular opinion will shift against discriminating against those with split tongues.
But in the meantime at least part of the forefront of BM is about shocking and making people upset. There'll be discrimination against it; frankly, I suspect that its adherents would be upset if there weren't.
no hint of it on the big trackers, nobody on IRC has seen it... looks like a fake to me.
Personally, I'm hoping for a command line paperclip assistant.
+----------+|need help?|
+----------+
@
U
C:\>
man, slashdot makes it hard to produce proper ascii-art jokes
I suspect the number of people that were stupid enough to really, earnestly believe in those benchmarks wasn't that large. And there's no reason why Apple can't now claim a group of people who were previously put off by the prospect of getting fewer flops for their dollar.
You have to remember that if a move by Apple alienates a percentage of Mac users identical to the percentage of PC users that it entices, it's a net win for Apple.
I was under the impression than Mars has no appreciable magnetic field, and that a potential explanation for this was the dynamo of molten iron that the earth enjoys had cooled to solidification on Mars.
others have said it, but that's what I'd suggest. if it's a closed network of folks wanting to contact each other, i2p might be a good idea. for an even smaller network, openvpn is great.
with any of these, I'd suggest using truecrypt (or the knoppix solution mentioned elsewhere in this discussion). it'd be important to make sure than all your webcache directories are located on the bestcrypt volume.
could I buy this product, configure Asterisk and have it forward calls received on my landline to a SIPphone?
"no, *you* couldn't configure Asterisk" is probably the right answer, but pretend for a second that I could. Is this possible?
allow me to spoil the surprise: no, it won't.
As others have pointed out, compressed air can't be stored in sufficient quantities to make this very practical. This has been done before -- for small systems that have to deliver a lot of power quickly it's fine, and it may even offer advantages in situations where using electrical components would be a problem, but it's just doesn't offer many practical advantages over batteries or fuel cells.
Yes, burned CDs suffer from bitrot. But most of the other sources of data loss you mention are either very rare or not applicable. Conversions are usually lossy, but they generally don't need to be performed more than once. If someone wants to download a divx rip of a DVD, the original mpeg2 stream has suffered a lossy recompression, yes, but each subsequent transmission of that divx file doesn't result in more loss. This is in contrast to analog formats -- the act of distribution necessarily introduces a loss of quality. That's not the case with digital files. Your concerns about transmission errors and hard disk failures are just silly. These things happen, but rarely, and certainly not in a way that introduces quality defects in the "authoritative" copy of a piece of media on a p2p network (ie, the most popular copy of a file, with same-hash files considered identical (b/c they are)). You might want to have a look at wikipedia's entries under "crc" and "hashing". Your intuition that bits occasionally get flipped is correct, but when it happens it's almost always detected and corrected.
this is a bit like being concerned about your car getting stolen thanks to a recently unearthed Sumerian master key. The odds of it fitting the (biological) lock are astronomically small, and if it did, the odds of it not having been beaten by advances in (lock technology / immune systems) are very, very small.
Radioactive materials certainly occur naturally, and there are indeed cases of naturally-occuring nuclear reactors.
Only one, I believe.
It is entirely within the realms of possibility that natural radioactivity kept the inside of the bones sterilized, so that organic decay could not take place.
Could biological material really be kept irradiated enough to reliably cook bacteria for millions of years, but not get denatured itself? I guess anything's possible -- this could be a well-done dino -- but I'd happily take any bets tendered that radiation didn't have anything to do with this.
I've met Nye several times, and he's always seemed like a nice guy. You can learn a lot just by standing around him, drinking beer.
Beakman was an actor. Comparing shows is fine -- just a matter of taste, I suppose. But Nye is the only one of the two with actual scientific chops (he was an aeronautic engineer prior to getting involved with Almost Live).
I remember hearing an interesting tidbit in a pharmacology class. Recovering addicts are supposed to avoid environments associated with their substance abuse. There's a psychological reason for this, but also a biological one (although obviously it's tough to draw a line between the two on issues like this).
For most drugs, a variation of Newton's law applies: each induced effect will have an opposite (and increasingly proportional) effect. This is why drug dosage frequently needs to be increased over time; it's also why, after a night of drinking, you might wake up unusually early feeling jittery -- your body has responded to the depressant with an unusually excited state, and one the depressant is metabolized, it takes a little while for things to settle back to equilibrium.
Anyway, the point is this: if you put a heroin user in the basement where they always shot up, their body will produce a response: their heartrate and blood pressure will go up, and they may become more sensitive to pain. The body is getting ready to partially counteract the administration of the heroin. This exacerbates the perceived need for the heroin, making a relapse more likely.
All of which is a long way of saying that yes, the body appears to learn, based on sensory input, what its biochemical state "ought" to be.
gyroscopic controllers. Sounds likely to me. Very Nintendo-ish, and the original quote said it *wasn't* new technology, just tech that hadn't previously been applied to gaming.
not only that, he quit over being forced to use what by all accounts in a pretty good tool.
.NET is just a huge step up from everything that preceded it. Did he really enjoy MFC that much?
I get that some people hate doing Windows development at all, but honestly C# coding in
not only that, he quit over being forced to use what by all accounts in a pretty good tool. I get that some people hate doing Windows development at all, but honestly C# coding in .NET is just a huge step up from everything that preceded it. Did he really enjoy MFC that much?