Can't they make this optional, like, for example, in GTA? GTA was a lousy PS2 port and was programmed for a fixed framerate (30FPS). When ran with a variable frame rate the speed of certain in-game events changed (!), but the programmers still left the option to play with uncapped framerate. Why should Doom 3 be different, especially if variable framerate is not a problem for the engine?
BTW, Doom3 will become irrelevant much sooner with this framerate cap. Do you think any game site would still use Quake3 in video-card benchmarks today if it was capped at 60FPS?:)
Incorrect. The ISP didn't have a site, they hosted it. That's what ISPs do - they host sites. It seems to me from the article that it wasn't owned by the ISP. So the ISP is no more involved by providing hosting than Ford by providing a car.
There was a great sci-fi novel (by Sheckley?). On a remote planet every politician weared a necklace with explosives. And every citizen could press a button to vote against this politician. Enough votes and a small explosion happens. May be something like that would be even better? It would not only solve the P2P problem, but the whole lot of others.
P.S. Of course, the number of necessary vote should be set sufficiently high so that decisions which are not evil, but simply unpopular would not cause an explosion.
You seem to be confusing sharing with trading. The former is giving something to people, the latter means exchanging something for something else.
I like downloading stuff. I like sharing. It just happens that these things usually come together, but even if they weren't, I would be happy serving files to strangers from my PC. When I don't need to download anything, I am still happy to have eMule or KaZaA Lite running.
In Canada anti-child-porn laws cover any discussion of sex with minors. Of course, it would be really stretching it (no pun intended), but your post may qualify.
And in the US the Supreme Court upheld the right of developers to make "Pre-teen Gangbang Extreme". It was ruled that a law banning virtual child porn is unconsitutional - porn is definitely speech, child porn is speech as well, and if nobody is direcly harmed (i.e. no real kids are used), the speech is protected. The strange thing is that there are relatively few porn games made in the US and almost no quality ones. I expect that sometime, as graphics technology improves, someone will make the first great quality porn game and will sell millions of copies. That would create a virtual porn boom and probably lead to the creation of some child porn games as well.
Many of the games that are fairly commonly available in Japan would be illegal to ship into many states of the US because of these types of laws. Some publishers went as far as to change the age of the anime characters. You had a 14, 15 and 16 year old girls in the Japanese version, but in American version they become 18, 19 and 20.:) Of course, the images and the story remain the same.:)
There should be no line. I think that in many cases you should be free to make a game about real people, basically about those who already forsake a large chunk of their privacy. But the courts should have the right to force game developers to pay damages if using real people there was degrading, offensive and blah-blah-blah. Outright banning such games is wrong, because next thing you know books about real people will be outlawed... And then journalists will be required to get a permission from the person to write about him/her.:(
But continuing the analogies, ISP should not be responsible for removing the content, just like Ford is not responsible for taking back the car from the drug dealers when it becomes known what they do. In the rational world where the spirit of the laws is followed, the copyright owner would contact the site owner and ask to remove the offending material. If the webmaster refuses, the copyright owner should sue. If he wins, the court would order the ISP to take down the site. But it no longer happens the right way, alas!
1) Logitech claims their keyboards have strong encryption 2) Chances of anyone eavesdropping on me are virtually zero 3) The computer is on the 8th floor of a residential building. The reception range is about 4 meters. Good luck to anyone trying to get close enough.
That said, these keyboards might not be an ideal solution to everyone. If you want to buy 100+ of them for the company, ask Logitech about specific encryption details or get a couple of them and try snooping on them. As for the computing power, you only need to encrypt a few chars per second. The cheapest, lowest-power consuming and smallest processor would suffice.
Yeah. I assumed 30 cents for Apple in my calculations. In reality it seems to be 19 cents for both Apple and the artist, but that doesn't significantly affect the outcome. My point was that hosting is cheap, when you only host MP3s (AAC) and mostly for paid customers (i.e. even if 90% of the traffic is in previews and 10% in purchased music, Apple still gets about 0.5 cents per Mb, which is more than enough to pay for hosting).
Absolutely. BTW, such thing was left on the Moon by the astronauts. It allowed us to shine a laser there an have it bounce back so that we can measure the distance to the Moon very precisely.
Currently a compromise is necessary. But if there develops a competitive market. If people will not massively abuse potentially possible AAC-CD-MP3-P2P route. If customers will demand the non-DRM music to be able to play it everywhere. If all these things happen, then some company will try again selling DRM-free music. After all, there is that e-music company or something that sells music in standard MP3s.
They are definitely making gross profit from iTunes. Assuming they spent shitloads of $$$ on R&D, they might have high depreciation costs and so their operating profit might be negative. Though even with $40 mln investment figure (crazy, isn't it?) that I heard somewhere and 5 year depreciation period they still need to depreciate about 650 thousand per month. And they sell 2.4 mln songs per month to Apple users only, which makes more than that if we ignore the operating costs for the moment (They can't be high, hosting/traffic is cheap, even with lots of free streaming, as Apple gets 1$ per song). In any case, that's simply a matter of time and increasing their sales. But with Windows they must immediately become profitable. And probably very profitable.
I want to see games where the motivation to continue through the game is to uncover the next part of the plot. Interesting point. But I think FPS is not the best genre to expect that sort of gameplay. Shooters are shooters. You shoot shit up there. Currently if you make it first (or third) person, it's expected that there will be some fighting involved (show me a 1st/3rd person game without fighting). There are already quests whose main selling point is the story (such as this one, a great game, honestly) and also some RPGs. But in 1st/3rd person games you spend a lot of time controlling character's movements and actions. And if you do that, the developers better make it fun, which means fighting (or driving). So a large part of the game is already built around fighting.
One solution is to go away from direct control (like you had screens and very simple movement in quests). Another one, well, make direct brain-computer interface so that people no longer care about controlling a character and can concentrate on the story.
4-inch range? More like four meters. Of course, for uber-sensitive military-grade antenna this is not a limit.
directional aerial? Nope.
encryption? (yeah right!) Is there anything to stop your keyboard becoming a transmitting keylogger for anyone in the neighbourhood to receive? Yes, there is encription. I don't know how secure it is or what algorithm is used, but there is a secure mode. You are shown a 16-digit code on the screen, you type it on the keyboard, press OK and it uses this key to encrypt all transmissions. I don't know if snooping on the keyboard while the key is transmitted compromises security, if Logitech engineers have done their job, it doesn't (public key encription can be used).
After a bit of searching, I found a link to a description of Logitech security technologies for cordless devices. Logitech claims it is the only company making cordless keyboards secure from even professional eavesdropping equipment.
So may be you can use these babies in your company. So far I am satisfied with my cordless setup. I bought the cheapest combo (@~$60) and I am not completely comfortable with the keyboard (I liked old-school keyboards more and have used them for years) and the mouse is not as accurate as I would like it to be (a wired Logitech mouse I used before was better), but these are minor annoyances and are more than compensated with additional mobility and lack of wires. And another model might have solved these problems all together.
How heavy are those? The only reason I always shun cordless mice is that they are bulky and heavy due to needing batteries, but I haven't checked on them recently. Not really heavy. I can't give you the weight, but they are very comfortable. If you have a good (for mouse) table or a large enough mouse pad, or a thin pad that you can move the mouse away from, you don't need to lift the mouse that often (a cordless mouse would work comfortably anywhere, because cords don't get in the way). The best thing is that as opposed to wired mouse and keyboard, you can easily take them with you and move to another table, to your lap, etc. You can't really lift wired keyboard and mouse because they are attached to the case.:) In the past I used USB and PS/2 extention cords to be able to get in the bed for playing some quests or watching movies, but with wireless it's much easier.
Although it may not be very obvious, blue LEDs are often well worth it. Red it much harsher on the eyes and can be very irritating in dark rooms. In particular, I recommend getting really dim LEDs, and expecially avoiding ultra-brights. Even in good lighting, it's damn simple to tell if a light is on, and then it won't be annoying in a dimly lit area. Well, the question is - why would you need that damn LED in the first place!:) To tell you that you have new e-mail or what the volume is, as the author suggests?:))) I have almost all LEDs covered anyway.:) I mean, I can usually tell whether the monitor or computer are on without a LED.;)
As for harddrives, I personally have 3 Samsungs (80,7200+80,5400+120,7200) without extra cooling (although two of them are turned off by Windows after 1 hour of inactivity). But even when they work all the time, they are not too hot. The thing is, there aren't many operations that require fast drive access. Especially not in gaming. IMHO 5400 HDDs are perfectly fine even for the most demanding users.
He was building his own system, and did not have a physical layout capable of surround. Obviously, surround would be worthwhile otherwise, but he was building where it simply could not be done. You mean, he didn't have a dedicated gaming area in his house? Does he live in the basement with his parents?:) You just need two small tables for the rear speakers if it's not possible to fix them on the walls...
Yes, a UPS is needed. How is that related to dual processors? If those were separate comments, then the dual processors are absolutely needed because it is intended to double as a workstation. Well, my point is that his system is nonsensical and not balanced at all. If "it was intended to be a high-end scientific... workstation", UPS is not just needed, it is absolutely necessary. To ignore it is to acknowledge his incompetence.
Those little things really add up, and he was also setting up a workstation. Often, technically perfect quality is essential there. This wasn't a recommendation for a PC if you 'just want to play a nice game of Half-Life 2.' If that is all you want, don't go for a high-end gaming workstation. Not 'just want to play a nice game of Half-Life 2.' HL2 will be quite demanding 3D game. He says he wants to "enjoy [his] games on the weekend". The $1B question: how relevant are those USB audiophilic "things" to enjoying a game of Half-Life 2 (or whatever he plays). The one and only thing you really need is a good subwoofer. This is not classical music, really.:) I mean, it's called high-end gaming workstation, certainly playing games is an important function for it. Setting aside the fact that 90% of the article is completely irrelevant to gaming, even the parts about sound and video are not really interesting. The obvious answer is to get the most expensive ATI and Creative (he gets some uber-brand instead) cards.
And BTW, I am not sure he spoke about the display, did he? If not, that's another glaring omission. All in all, that's a crappy article and an irrelevant story submission.
I agree that peripherals are important, almost as important as the display. Personally I use wireless keyboard and mouse and find it really useful (although the mouse is relatively crappy and would suck balls if not for the fact that it's cordless and optical). But 1) For $40 I can set up a whole computer that would be great for a lot of cool if a bit old games.:) 2) This is (especially with a pulsing blue LED) a good illustration of the overall attitude of the article - buy lots of shiny expensive things.
The author decided to get a single relatively small hard-drive. Yeah, it's 10,000 RPM, but it's just 70Gb. That means less than 30 games can be installed at the same time, even assuming zero movies or music stored there. He advises to do regular backups, but he doesn't seem to be capable of realising how easy would be backing everything up on cheap 80Gb 5400 harddrive.
If I understand correctly, he suggests using stereo speakers, not 4.1 or 5.1 or even 7.1. Yeah, a high-end gaming workstation with only two speakers. Lame!.. And then there is all that dual-processor nonsense. He speaks about reliability, but there isn't even a cheap UPS.
He goes for style and for mythical uber-performance. That's the common attitude among audiophiles - buy gold connectors and other crap $$$. That's utter idiocy if you just want to play a nice game of Half-Life 2 or something. And he doesn't even talk about how many FPS he got with that uber-cool setup.
Yes, from reading the article it looks like the problem most people face is not which component provides the best price-quality ratio, but which component is the most expensive and how I can justify wasting 2 times more money than needed on that.
I am sure more people would find an article useful if it was written from a somewhat realistic viewpoint. He says "I'm paying careful attention not to waste any money either" in the beginning of the article. But if spending $40 on an "incredibly well-built USB aluminum knob that acts like a super scroll wheel" with "a pulsing blue LED light at the base of the unit" is not wasting money, I don't know what is.
There already exist the technology to read the state of neurons (see all experiements with monkey arms, robots with lamprey's brain, etc.). There even exist the technology to read the state of the rat brain remotedly with the accuracy of several neurons. Give these scientists some time (10+ years) and we'll be able to read the state of individual human neurons.
Don't confuse the underlying digital logic and high-level software. If you saw Half-Life 2 running on a monitor without knowing anything about computers, what would you think? Probably that there is a small virtual world inside that box, right?:)
You can run anything over binary logic. You can simulate civilizations, you can simulate molecules, you can simulate thermonuclear explosions, you can simulate galaxies and the Universe itself. All this is already being done. What makes you think that simulating a human mind is impossible? It doesn't matter what kind of hardware runs the simulation. If we can make a quantum computer or analog neural net run a human mind, we can replicate the same on a 486 with a sufficiently large storage device. Heck, we can replicate this with a large piece of paper and an abacus.;)
Note: of course, when you go from analog to digital, you lose some noise and some precision, but if our brain can handle losing millions of neurons per second, it can handle the analog-digital conversion.
There are some explanations, but there is no definite theory yet, which is understandable. Obviously, the first life-forms left no trace, being nothing more than a few organic molecules. We can't find their bones, we can't find their close relatives. We can only speculate at this point about how it might have happened. Hopefully, given enough processing power we will be able to run sufficiently detailed simulations and then set up experiements to test different paths from elements to self-reproducing organic molecules and to cellular DNA life. But today we still have less definite information about origins of life than about origins of galaxies.
I don't believe Penrouse doesn't understand what Godel theorem is. Ergo either he must be lying or you are misinterpreting his arguments. Humans can't prove things that Godel theorem points to. If we prove them, it only takes one extra step to prove the opposite thing as well, that's the beauty of Godel theorem.:)
Am I the only one having troubles deciphering the second word on the second picture?
Re:These things exist....
on
Watching You
·
· Score: 1
Well, things tend to become better and more efficient, we better learn to live with this. As soon as the technology becomes available, many people would buy and start using personal recorders, to save everything they see. It is already feasible, but the equipment would be too bulky. If I already have a tiny computer in my glasses or in my eyeball, why wouldn't I enable the recording function? And if everyone (or at least the police) does that, there would no longer be difference between human monitoring and machine monitoring.
I don't like "the state" recording everyone either, but in my opinion the solution would be not to stop using the technology, but to change the society, so that people no longer want to abuse these capabilities. I.e. there is a whole lot of difference between Finland installing CCTV and USA doing the same.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's not only for tax purposes, but also to limit the percentage from profits paid to director, actors, etc.
Can't they make this optional, like, for example, in GTA? GTA was a lousy PS2 port and was programmed for a fixed framerate (30FPS). When ran with a variable frame rate the speed of certain in-game events changed (!), but the programmers still left the option to play with uncapped framerate. Why should Doom 3 be different, especially if variable framerate is not a problem for the engine?
:)
BTW, Doom3 will become irrelevant much sooner with this framerate cap. Do you think any game site would still use Quake3 in video-card benchmarks today if it was capped at 60FPS?
Incorrect. The ISP didn't have a site, they hosted it. That's what ISPs do - they host sites. It seems to me from the article that it wasn't owned by the ISP. So the ISP is no more involved by providing hosting than Ford by providing a car.
There was a great sci-fi novel (by Sheckley?). On a remote planet every politician weared a necklace with explosives. And every citizen could press a button to vote against this politician. Enough votes and a small explosion happens. May be something like that would be even better? It would not only solve the P2P problem, but the whole lot of others.
P.S. Of course, the number of necessary vote should be set sufficiently high so that decisions which are not evil, but simply unpopular would not cause an explosion.
You seem to be confusing sharing with trading. The former is giving something to people, the latter means exchanging something for something else.
I like downloading stuff. I like sharing. It just happens that these things usually come together, but even if they weren't, I would be happy serving files to strangers from my PC. When I don't need to download anything, I am still happy to have eMule or KaZaA Lite running.
In Canada anti-child-porn laws cover any discussion of sex with minors. Of course, it would be really stretching it (no pun intended), but your post may qualify.
:) Of course, the images and the story remain the same. :)
And in the US the Supreme Court upheld the right of developers to make "Pre-teen Gangbang Extreme". It was ruled that a law banning virtual child porn is unconsitutional - porn is definitely speech, child porn is speech as well, and if nobody is direcly harmed (i.e. no real kids are used), the speech is protected. The strange thing is that there are relatively few porn games made in the US and almost no quality ones. I expect that sometime, as graphics technology improves, someone will make the first great quality porn game and will sell millions of copies. That would create a virtual porn boom and probably lead to the creation of some child porn games as well.
Many of the games that are fairly commonly available in Japan would be illegal to ship into many states of the US because of these types of laws.
Some publishers went as far as to change the age of the anime characters. You had a 14, 15 and 16 year old girls in the Japanese version, but in American version they become 18, 19 and 20.
There should be no line. I think that in many cases you should be free to make a game about real people, basically about those who already forsake a large chunk of their privacy. But the courts should have the right to force game developers to pay damages if using real people there was degrading, offensive and blah-blah-blah. Outright banning such games is wrong, because next thing you know books about real people will be outlawed... And then journalists will be required to get a permission from the person to write about him/her. :(
But continuing the analogies, ISP should not be responsible for removing the content, just like Ford is not responsible for taking back the car from the drug dealers when it becomes known what they do. In the rational world where the spirit of the laws is followed, the copyright owner would contact the site owner and ask to remove the offending material. If the webmaster refuses, the copyright owner should sue. If he wins, the court would order the ISP to take down the site. But it no longer happens the right way, alas!
1) Logitech claims their keyboards have strong encryption
2) Chances of anyone eavesdropping on me are virtually zero
3) The computer is on the 8th floor of a residential building. The reception range is about 4 meters. Good luck to anyone trying to get close enough.
That said, these keyboards might not be an ideal solution to everyone. If you want to buy 100+ of them for the company, ask Logitech about specific encryption details or get a couple of them and try snooping on them. As for the computing power, you only need to encrypt a few chars per second. The cheapest, lowest-power consuming and smallest processor would suffice.
Yeah. I assumed 30 cents for Apple in my calculations. In reality it seems to be 19 cents for both Apple and the artist, but that doesn't significantly affect the outcome. My point was that hosting is cheap, when you only host MP3s (AAC) and mostly for paid customers (i.e. even if 90% of the traffic is in previews and 10% in purchased music, Apple still gets about 0.5 cents per Mb, which is more than enough to pay for hosting).
Absolutely. BTW, such thing was left on the Moon by the astronauts. It allowed us to shine a laser there an have it bounce back so that we can measure the distance to the Moon very precisely.
Currently a compromise is necessary. But if there develops a competitive market. If people will not massively abuse potentially possible AAC-CD-MP3-P2P route. If customers will demand the non-DRM music to be able to play it everywhere. If all these things happen, then some company will try again selling DRM-free music. After all, there is that e-music company or something that sells music in standard MP3s.
They are definitely making gross profit from iTunes. Assuming they spent shitloads of $$$ on R&D, they might have high depreciation costs and so their operating profit might be negative. Though even with $40 mln investment figure (crazy, isn't it?) that I heard somewhere and 5 year depreciation period they still need to depreciate about 650 thousand per month. And they sell 2.4 mln songs per month to Apple users only, which makes more than that if we ignore the operating costs for the moment (They can't be high, hosting/traffic is cheap, even with lots of free streaming, as Apple gets 1$ per song). In any case, that's simply a matter of time and increasing their sales. But with Windows they must immediately become profitable. And probably very profitable.
I want to see games where the motivation to continue through the game is to uncover the next part of the plot.
Interesting point. But I think FPS is not the best genre to expect that sort of gameplay. Shooters are shooters. You shoot shit up there. Currently if you make it first (or third) person, it's expected that there will be some fighting involved (show me a 1st/3rd person game without fighting). There are already quests whose main selling point is the story (such as this one, a great game, honestly) and also some RPGs. But in 1st/3rd person games you spend a lot of time controlling character's movements and actions. And if you do that, the developers better make it fun, which means fighting (or driving). So a large part of the game is already built around fighting.
One solution is to go away from direct control (like you had screens and very simple movement in quests). Another one, well, make direct brain-computer interface so that people no longer care about controlling a character and can concentrate on the story.
4-inch range?
More like four meters. Of course, for uber-sensitive military-grade antenna this is not a limit.
directional aerial?
Nope.
encryption? (yeah right!) Is there anything to stop your keyboard becoming a transmitting keylogger for anyone in the neighbourhood to receive?
Yes, there is encription. I don't know how secure it is or what algorithm is used, but there is a secure mode. You are shown a 16-digit code on the screen, you type it on the keyboard, press OK and it uses this key to encrypt all transmissions. I don't know if snooping on the keyboard while the key is transmitted compromises security, if Logitech engineers have done their job, it doesn't (public key encription can be used).
After a bit of searching, I found a link to a description of Logitech security technologies for cordless devices. Logitech claims it is the only company making cordless keyboards secure from even professional eavesdropping equipment.
So may be you can use these babies in your company. So far I am satisfied with my cordless setup. I bought the cheapest combo (@~$60) and I am not completely comfortable with the keyboard (I liked old-school keyboards more and have used them for years) and the mouse is not as accurate as I would like it to be (a wired Logitech mouse I used before was better), but these are minor annoyances and are more than compensated with additional mobility and lack of wires. And another model might have solved these problems all together.
How heavy are those? The only reason I always shun cordless mice is that they are bulky and heavy due to needing batteries, but I haven't checked on them recently. :) In the past I used USB and PS/2 extention cords to be able to get in the bed for playing some quests or watching movies, but with wireless it's much easier.
:) To tell you that you have new e-mail or what the volume is, as the author suggests? :))) I have almost all LEDs covered anyway. :) I mean, I can usually tell whether the monitor or computer are on without a LED. ;)
:) You just need two small tables for the rear speakers if it's not possible to fix them on the walls...
:) I mean, it's called high-end gaming workstation, certainly playing games is an important function for it. Setting aside the fact that 90% of the article is completely irrelevant to gaming, even the parts about sound and video are not really interesting. The obvious answer is to get the most expensive ATI and Creative (he gets some uber-brand instead) cards.
Not really heavy. I can't give you the weight, but they are very comfortable. If you have a good (for mouse) table or a large enough mouse pad, or a thin pad that you can move the mouse away from, you don't need to lift the mouse that often (a cordless mouse would work comfortably anywhere, because cords don't get in the way). The best thing is that as opposed to wired mouse and keyboard, you can easily take them with you and move to another table, to your lap, etc. You can't really lift wired keyboard and mouse because they are attached to the case.
Although it may not be very obvious, blue LEDs are often well worth it. Red it much harsher on the eyes and can be very irritating in dark rooms. In particular, I recommend getting really dim LEDs, and expecially avoiding ultra-brights. Even in good lighting, it's damn simple to tell if a light is on, and then it won't be annoying in a dimly lit area.
Well, the question is - why would you need that damn LED in the first place!
As for harddrives, I personally have 3 Samsungs (80,7200+80,5400+120,7200) without extra cooling (although two of them are turned off by Windows after 1 hour of inactivity). But even when they work all the time, they are not too hot. The thing is, there aren't many operations that require fast drive access. Especially not in gaming. IMHO 5400 HDDs are perfectly fine even for the most demanding users.
He was building his own system, and did not have a physical layout capable of surround. Obviously, surround would be worthwhile otherwise, but he was building where it simply could not be done.
You mean, he didn't have a dedicated gaming area in his house? Does he live in the basement with his parents?
Yes, a UPS is needed. How is that related to dual processors? If those were separate comments, then the dual processors are absolutely needed because it is intended to double as a workstation.
Well, my point is that his system is nonsensical and not balanced at all. If "it was intended to be a high-end scientific... workstation", UPS is not just needed, it is absolutely necessary. To ignore it is to acknowledge his incompetence.
Those little things really add up, and he was also setting up a workstation. Often, technically perfect quality is essential there. This wasn't a recommendation for a PC if you 'just want to play a nice game of Half-Life 2.' If that is all you want, don't go for a high-end gaming workstation.
Not 'just want to play a nice game of Half-Life 2.' HL2 will be quite demanding 3D game. He says he wants to "enjoy [his] games on the weekend". The $1B question: how relevant are those USB audiophilic "things" to enjoying a game of Half-Life 2 (or whatever he plays). The one and only thing you really need is a good subwoofer. This is not classical music, really.
And BTW, I am not sure he spoke about the display, did he? If not, that's another glaring omission. All in all, that's a crappy article and an irrelevant story submission.
I agree that peripherals are important, almost as important as the display. Personally I use wireless keyboard and mouse and find it really useful (although the mouse is relatively crappy and would suck balls if not for the fact that it's cordless and optical). But :)
1) For $40 I can set up a whole computer that would be great for a lot of cool if a bit old games.
2) This is (especially with a pulsing blue LED) a good illustration of the overall attitude of the article - buy lots of shiny expensive things.
The author decided to get a single relatively small hard-drive. Yeah, it's 10,000 RPM, but it's just 70Gb. That means less than 30 games can be installed at the same time, even assuming zero movies or music stored there. He advises to do regular backups, but he doesn't seem to be capable of realising how easy would be backing everything up on cheap 80Gb 5400 harddrive.
If I understand correctly, he suggests using stereo speakers, not 4.1 or 5.1 or even 7.1. Yeah, a high-end gaming workstation with only two speakers. Lame!..
And then there is all that dual-processor nonsense. He speaks about reliability, but there isn't even a cheap UPS.
He goes for style and for mythical uber-performance. That's the common attitude among audiophiles - buy gold connectors and other crap $$$. That's utter idiocy if you just want to play a nice game of Half-Life 2 or something. And he doesn't even talk about how many FPS he got with that uber-cool setup.
Yes, from reading the article it looks like the problem most people face is not which component provides the best price-quality ratio, but which component is the most expensive and how I can justify wasting 2 times more money than needed on that.
I am sure more people would find an article useful if it was written from a somewhat realistic viewpoint. He says "I'm paying careful attention not to waste any money either" in the beginning of the article. But if spending $40 on an "incredibly well-built USB aluminum knob that acts like a super scroll wheel" with "a pulsing blue LED light at the base of the unit" is not wasting money, I don't know what is.
Well, second one might be ODVIOUSE or even ODVLOUSE, but I don't think the second letter is B.
There already exist the technology to read the state of neurons (see all experiements with monkey arms, robots with lamprey's brain, etc.). There even exist the technology to read the state of the rat brain remotedly with the accuracy of several neurons. Give these scientists some time (10+ years) and we'll be able to read the state of individual human neurons.
Don't confuse the underlying digital logic and high-level software. If you saw Half-Life 2 running on a monitor without knowing anything about computers, what would you think? Probably that there is a small virtual world inside that box, right? :)
;)
You can run anything over binary logic. You can simulate civilizations, you can simulate molecules, you can simulate thermonuclear explosions, you can simulate galaxies and the Universe itself. All this is already being done. What makes you think that simulating a human mind is impossible? It doesn't matter what kind of hardware runs the simulation. If we can make a quantum computer or analog neural net run a human mind, we can replicate the same on a 486 with a sufficiently large storage device. Heck, we can replicate this with a large piece of paper and an abacus.
Note: of course, when you go from analog to digital, you lose some noise and some precision, but if our brain can handle losing millions of neurons per second, it can handle the analog-digital conversion.
There are some explanations, but there is no definite theory yet, which is understandable. Obviously, the first life-forms left no trace, being nothing more than a few organic molecules. We can't find their bones, we can't find their close relatives. We can only speculate at this point about how it might have happened. Hopefully, given enough processing power we will be able to run sufficiently detailed simulations and then set up experiements to test different paths from elements to self-reproducing organic molecules and to cellular DNA life. But today we still have less definite information about origins of life than about origins of galaxies.
I don't believe Penrouse doesn't understand what Godel theorem is. Ergo either he must be lying or you are misinterpreting his arguments. Humans can't prove things that Godel theorem points to. If we prove them, it only takes one extra step to prove the opposite thing as well, that's the beauty of Godel theorem. :)
Am I the only one having troubles deciphering the second word on the second picture?
Well, things tend to become better and more efficient, we better learn to live with this. As soon as the technology becomes available, many people would buy and start using personal recorders, to save everything they see. It is already feasible, but the equipment would be too bulky. If I already have a tiny computer in my glasses or in my eyeball, why wouldn't I enable the recording function? And if everyone (or at least the police) does that, there would no longer be difference between human monitoring and machine monitoring.
I don't like "the state" recording everyone either, but in my opinion the solution would be not to stop using the technology, but to change the society, so that people no longer want to abuse these capabilities. I.e. there is a whole lot of difference between Finland installing CCTV and USA doing the same.