I though I said it clearly enough. Apparently, at two people - the clueless moderator and you - have poor reading comprehension skills. May be a slightly more detailed explanation helps.
My mother always knew how to pronounce the plural of 'nosok' in genitive case. Then my father started testing her all the time. Very quickly she forgot the right form and now avoids the word altogether. I do the same. True story.
Same thing happened to the Centipede, when a stupid Ant asked her how she manages to walk. When she started thinking about it, she realised she doesn't have a clue. She has to use fucking wheelchair now.
The moral of the story is that if you would so kindly please leave us all alone (those of us who don't know the 'correct' spelling and those of us who still do), chances are that the situation will either improve or stay the same. But if you will pester us with your elite grammanazi skills, it will definitely worsen. Language is not something that you should think about when using. Practice helps, caustic remarks doesn't. If Blaine Hilton asks you for spelling advice, feel free to give it. Until than, may I ask you to STFU.
You know, I never made a mistake like that before I started seeing speling zilots who always make a point about this. Than I started reading slashdot and it was more then enough to confuse me.:( Please stop this holy war and leave us alone!!!
There is a free game sponsored by the WWF called Save the Leopard!/A. It's an economical/ecological simulator about some saving some sort of Leopard in Siberia (a real issue nowdays).
According to earlier interviews, the WWF planned to look into the strategies of the best players to apply them in the real world.
We seem to agree that computer-generated semi-random objects (trees, individual houses, cars, etc.) are good.
As for the levels, I can give a few examples. Worlds in Civilization, Colonization and UFO/X-Com were simply excellent. There was also an excellent map generator for Warcraft 2. Of course, creating an algorithm to generate a believable world (especially large realistic 3D worlds) is not simple. But it can (and will eventually) be done and meanwhile there can be a variable degree of automation. Imagine making a car simulator where you can generate a world with a single mouse click and then create a race track with a single mouse drag.:) The rest would be taken care of by the world-generation engine. Then you can tweak as much as you want, but only where you need it. Imagine finishing the project under budget.;) With computer-assisted level generation it might be possible.
When product activation is widespread, Dell, Gateway, and every other computer manufacturer can kiss their asses goodbye.
Or they might just say "fuck you" to the software industry and switch to hardware without accessible ID numbers. How could you tie your software to the computer when all computers look the same?:)
I can recommend an excellent antivirus solution - AVP (AntiVirus Protection), a prize-winning and blah-blah-blah. It is a policy of the company that protecting the public from viruses is more important than maximizing their own profits, which is why they intentionally allow pirated copies of their program to download regular updates. Think which company would you rather trust the well-being of your PCs - Symantec that is willing to implement a potentially risky product activation or Kaspersky Lab? Don't forget, any product activation system may crash eventually, just like MS systems did, and you will not be able to enable your antivirus for hours or even days. It would be really helpful for writers of the NextBigVirus to DDoS Symantec product activation servers, not Windows Update...
Here is some insight from the Soviet Russia (not longer soviet, though) and from a staunch supporter of communism (although not a member of any communist party).:)
First, in Soviet Russia there was a lot of private property. What was absent was private property on means of production. You could own a sewing machine, but you couldn't own a hundred of them and hire others to sew for you.
The factories and plants didn't belong to the nomenclatura either. They had some limited control over it and were well-compensated for their work (likewise Clinton was compensated for being a president, but he still went bankrupt after paying a few lawyers), but they weren't capitalists to any large extent.
And now back to KaZaA.:) It is in fact heralding the coming transition to communism, howether unlikely it may sound to you and the rest of Americans. There are other signs as well. MIT initiative, BBC initiative, abundant cheap diamonds, printers for 3d plastic objects and for integrated circuits, free software, etc. Communism will come quite soon, brought upon you by nanotechnology and AI, but don't be afraid.:) I personally think that it will provide the human societies much a few so badly needed decades of peace, abundance and prosperity, to foster coltural and moral growth and to prepare for the transition to posthumanity after some time.
Much more dangerous is anti-comminism in the form of corporate-backed totalitarian oppression and imperialism (which was rightly called the most advanced form of capitalism even before America became the aggressive superpower it is now).
This is actually not "funny", it's insightful. There was a standard interface for Unix. Did it destroy it? No! Did it spoil the OSS movement? Hell, no! DId it turn programmers into blabbering idiots? Yeah, may be.:) So why does anyone think that GUI standard will be bad?
Heck, it is not simple to do, but the idea is extremely simple. Design a unified interface system (call it a "standard") that everyone is happy with. If there are some fundamental differences between KDE and Gnome, add an extra layer of abstraction and let them make two different implementations that would still work with all other layers. Then all you will need to run all and any applications on your system will probably be a small wrapper that will provide extra functionality not included in your GUI.
Big deal. Buy a complete state-of-the-art game engine with free updates. Cost? Several thousand dollars. Do you fancy cool lightning and shadows? Give id a call. Want better interactivty, physics and character animation? Try Valve's Source. Don't have several thousand dollars? Get a slightly less advanced engine very cheaply or even for free.
Re:Consider the Film Industry
on
Razor Blade Games?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
LOTR trilogy (to name just one example)
Yeah talking about sci-fi and fantasy, there are lots of great movies made nowdays! Consider for example the FOTR and the Matrix. Innovation! Creativity! Style! And there is also TTT and the Matrix 2! And it doesn't stop there - there is also ROTK and the Matrix 3! So many good sci-fi/fantasy movies, I am so happy that the movie industry no longer makes crap like Hulk/Core/LXG/T3/etc.
No, thank you. I would rather live without LOTR trilogy on the big screen, but with a wide variety of diverse medium-budget movies.
I bet many people are thinking about whom they can sue instead.;)
But honestly, it's a brilliant idea.:) Some companies have already developed parametric character models. If we are to believe Valve, all scientists in HL2 will look different. And the upcoming Sims 2 will feature even greater variability. Improve this technology a bit, add extra controls, easier tools and you solved the problem of designing new characters. Want an evil villain? Move some sliders (ugly - 70%, evil - 100%, old - 60%, crazy - 80%, smart - 65%).:) A producer of the original system can update this a couple of time, until they can make completely realistic models that can be simplified automatically as necessary.
The same can be done for other objects. Recently the Driver 3 developers said that their biggest cost is designing the world, even though most of the buildings are still just empty boxes. The solution is similar - create a parametric function-based object called "house" that could be tweaked from igloo to WTC.:) Same with objects. Finally write a world generator that would create a random world filled with these objects. Voila. All problems solved.
And who should be making that decision? The one who's pirating, or the one who's stuff is being pirated? Of course the one who's pirating. After all, you don't see Buhler AG or ABB (manufactureres of various industrial equipment) deciding to "invest" in Brazil. They wait for Brazilian companies to make the decision to buy their equipment. In the same way, Brazilian government decided to make this investment, not Linus or RMS. Similarly, pirates decide to invest in Brazil or Russia the pirated Windows and Office copies.
If pirates are so gung-ho about helping the economy? Then they should use their own money to do so, and not unwilling participants. Pirates, like all entrepreneurs, mostly care about their profits. Fortunately, markets often are able to turn the greed of capitalists into economic wealth for the society. Same here. Pirates see an opportunity that can benefit them and others and build a business on that.
I'm well aware that various forms of piracy are considered illegal in many places today, my point is that economically that doesn't make any difference. Copying MS Office deprives Microsoft of income. Copying RedHat Linux (as opposed to buying) deprives RedHat of income in a similar way. The latter is legal, the former isn't, but there is no economic difference.
125 fps would be more appropriate... And still 10 Terabit will support 50 players even with 125 fps and 6000x4500 uncompressed 4*16 bit colour (RGBE or something like that with 16 bits per colour). But that's just insane, why 10 Terabit? 640 Gigabit should be enough for everyone!:)
But I wonder if this is a long term solution? The only feasible long-term solution that I can see right now is uploading all players (brain scan, digitalisation and uploading) to controlled server environment, where they are prevented from cheating.
and then the aimbots and see-through-wall hacks become even more effective, as they can track every single player in the screen at all times.
To solve the cheating problem "once and for all", you can render the picture on the server and just send that 1024x768 bitmap 60 times per second.:) Try to see-through that!
and possibly allow us to skip centuries or eons of technological progress
You see, that's exactly the catch. We haven't yet encountered those advanced alien civilizations and it might be that we will never ever find them. So for the time being we have no conceivable way to "skip centuries or eons of technological progress" and need to proceed gradually and step by step. That's why we needed Moon landing, that's why we needed Fon Braun's rockets, that's why we need to travel to Mars. And since we cannot be sure which attempts will be fruitful and which will not, we need to try everything and diversify. Personally I think that at present almsot all space exploration is waste of time and resources, because in my opinion nanotech and AI are much more important, since they might actually allow us to "skip centuries or eons of technological progress" and jump straight to intergalactic travel. But I am not so sure as to insist that we stop our space programs, because I may be wrong and space might be important even in short term.
You don't need to worry about that, because: 1) you are not designing this AI system, so you should mostly care about the final result, not minor potential temporary problems that can and will be resolved 2) aviation is one of the most safety-conscious and well-regulated industries 3) these engineers are not stupid or evil to deploy a system that is less safe then existing ones
Visiting nearby stars is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some habitable planets in other star systems? What would that mean? That we can colonize world other than Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.
I'm far more interested in either travelling to Andromeda Galaxy or visiting another dimensions after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's attention and are achievable if the public is behind it.
Actually I think it should be made by the ThriXXX people (that's cool stuff and not a dialer/troyan). The technology is already here to render a sexy 3d-girl on your desktop that would move convincingly enough and give you technical (and other) advice. Even if you don't add state-of-the-art speech engine, it would still be very attractive to many users. People will enjoy their AI assistant and not complain that it is annoying. In fact, the more often she will appear and say something, the happier user will be.:)
Once the user is happy, of course, you can "leverage the user-base" and use this technology to sell stuff. [:( ] / [:) ]
May be someone can write a module for Alice integration with Slashdot. I think the dialog-based parsing engine would work just great after some tweaking.
An alternative approach would be to first parse Slashdot archives to get a lot of posts, articles and moderation data and then use Bayesian theory to decide which sentences/keywords should be included to produce highest moderation based on the words in the blurb (or the linked article, but parsing that would be against/. spirit).
It can be further enhanced using the poetry evolution engine. If we limit the system to very short posts (cliche jokes or smartass oneliners), it might work quite well (feedback, of course, would be the moderation).
Mechanical or electronic nanocomputers made mostly from carbon are entirely possible. Carbon is an excellent conductor, insulator and semiconductor (currently achieved using by inserting various molecules inside nanotubes). Why would you need gold? Uranium or Plutonium are needed today, but won't be needed in the future. And when you need some minor amounts of various elements, you can always get them from seawater, or from soil, or from air or from anything else. There is life everywhere on Earth, which suggests that there are enough raw materials everywhere to build self-assembling programmable nanorobots and nanocomputers as well.
Yep. And in some countries things aren't copyrighted unless released in this country withing a certain period. After that, if still not officially available, they are public domain. And in yet some other countries the copyrights are limited (I mean limited as in non-perpetual). For example (my favourite example), in Russia most movies released before 1973 are public domain (at least according to the Russian Ministry of Culture). So if you stumble upon an avi with Steamboat Willie, Bambi or Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs on *.ru site, feel free to piss Disney off. Downloading it is legal as said elsewhere in this discussion, and uploading it is legal, because it is in public domain.
P.S. If anyone is interested to invest a couple thousand USD to open a classic public domain movie distribution site in Russia, youarewelcome.
BTW, not trolling at all, but I always argued that these same arguments apply to piracy. Hopefully after discussions like this people will understand that stealing is not always stealing. Sometimes it's free investment for the economy.
Disclaimer: pirated software has some unique advantages and disadvantages over free software. The author of this post has thousands dollars worth of pirated software on his PC and tens of thousands on legally purchased pirated CDs.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I though I said it clearly enough. Apparently, at two people - the clueless moderator and you - have poor reading comprehension skills. May be a slightly more detailed explanation helps.
My mother always knew how to pronounce the plural of 'nosok' in genitive case. Then my father started testing her all the time. Very quickly she forgot the right form and now avoids the word altogether. I do the same. True story.
Same thing happened to the Centipede, when a stupid Ant asked her how she manages to walk. When she started thinking about it, she realised she doesn't have a clue. She has to use fucking wheelchair now.
The moral of the story is that if you would so kindly please leave us all alone (those of us who don't know the 'correct' spelling and those of us who still do), chances are that the situation will either improve or stay the same. But if you will pester us with your elite grammanazi skills, it will definitely worsen. Language is not something that you should think about when using. Practice helps, caustic remarks doesn't. If Blaine Hilton asks you for spelling advice, feel free to give it. Until than, may I ask you to STFU.
You know, I never made a mistake like that before I started seeing speling zilots who always make a point about this. Than I started reading slashdot and it was more then enough to confuse me. :( Please stop this holy war and leave us alone!!!
There is a free game sponsored by the WWF called Save the Leopard!/A. It's an economical/ecological simulator about some saving some sort of Leopard in Siberia (a real issue nowdays).
According to earlier interviews, the WWF planned to look into the strategies of the best players to apply them in the real world.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to write originally, believe it or not. Thanks for proofreading my post, I promise I will do better next time. :)
We seem to agree that computer-generated semi-random objects (trees, individual houses, cars, etc.) are good.
:) The rest would be taken care of by the world-generation engine. Then you can tweak as much as you want, but only where you need it. Imagine finishing the project under budget. ;) With computer-assisted level generation it might be possible.
As for the levels, I can give a few examples. Worlds in Civilization, Colonization and UFO/X-Com were simply excellent. There was also an excellent map generator for Warcraft 2. Of course, creating an algorithm to generate a believable world (especially large realistic 3D worlds) is not simple. But it can (and will eventually) be done and meanwhile there can be a variable degree of automation. Imagine making a car simulator where you can generate a world with a single mouse click and then create a race track with a single mouse drag.
When product activation is widespread, Dell, Gateway, and every other computer manufacturer can kiss their asses goodbye.
:)
Or they might just say "fuck you" to the software industry and switch to hardware without accessible ID numbers. How could you tie your software to the computer when all computers look the same?
Oh, man, you are my hero now! You deserve an order for that!
I can recommend an excellent antivirus solution - AVP (AntiVirus Protection), a prize-winning and blah-blah-blah. It is a policy of the company that protecting the public from viruses is more important than maximizing their own profits, which is why they intentionally allow pirated copies of their program to download regular updates. Think which company would you rather trust the well-being of your PCs - Symantec that is willing to implement a potentially risky product activation or Kaspersky Lab? Don't forget, any product activation system may crash eventually, just like MS systems did, and you will not be able to enable your antivirus for hours or even days. It would be really helpful for writers of the NextBigVirus to DDoS Symantec product activation servers, not Windows Update...
BTW, the creators (Kaspersky Lab.) also maintain a great online virus encyclopedia.
Here is some insight from the Soviet Russia (not longer soviet, though) and from a staunch supporter of communism (although not a member of any communist party). :)
:) It is in fact heralding the coming transition to communism, howether unlikely it may sound to you and the rest of Americans. There are other signs as well. MIT initiative, BBC initiative, abundant cheap diamonds, printers for 3d plastic objects and for integrated circuits, free software, etc. Communism will come quite soon, brought upon you by nanotechnology and AI, but don't be afraid. :) I personally think that it will provide the human societies much a few so badly needed decades of peace, abundance and prosperity, to foster coltural and moral growth and to prepare for the transition to posthumanity after some time.
First, in Soviet Russia there was a lot of private property. What was absent was private property on means of production. You could own a sewing machine, but you couldn't own a hundred of them and hire others to sew for you.
The factories and plants didn't belong to the nomenclatura either. They had some limited control over it and were well-compensated for their work (likewise Clinton was compensated for being a president, but he still went bankrupt after paying a few lawyers), but they weren't capitalists to any large extent.
And now back to KaZaA.
Much more dangerous is anti-comminism in the form of corporate-backed totalitarian oppression and imperialism (which was rightly called the most advanced form of capitalism even before America became the aggressive superpower it is now).
This is actually not "funny", it's insightful. There was a standard interface for Unix. Did it destroy it? No! Did it spoil the OSS movement? Hell, no! DId it turn programmers into blabbering idiots? Yeah, may be. :) So why does anyone think that GUI standard will be bad?
Heck, it is not simple to do, but the idea is extremely simple. Design a unified interface system (call it a "standard") that everyone is happy with. If there are some fundamental differences between KDE and Gnome, add an extra layer of abstraction and let them make two different implementations that would still work with all other layers. Then all you will need to run all and any applications on your system will probably be a small wrapper that will provide extra functionality not included in your GUI.
Big deal. Buy a complete state-of-the-art game engine with free updates. Cost? Several thousand dollars. Do you fancy cool lightning and shadows? Give id a call. Want better interactivty, physics and character animation? Try Valve's Source. Don't have several thousand dollars? Get a slightly less advanced engine very cheaply or even for free.
LOTR trilogy (to name just one example)
Yeah talking about sci-fi and fantasy, there are lots of great movies made nowdays! Consider for example the FOTR and the Matrix. Innovation! Creativity! Style! And there is also TTT and the Matrix 2! And it doesn't stop there - there is also ROTK and the Matrix 3! So many good sci-fi/fantasy movies, I am so happy that the movie industry no longer makes crap like Hulk/Core/LXG/T3/etc.
No, thank you. I would rather live without LOTR trilogy on the big screen, but with a wide variety of diverse medium-budget movies.
I bet many people are thinking about whom they can sue instead. ;)
:) Some companies have already developed parametric character models. If we are to believe Valve, all scientists in HL2 will look different. And the upcoming Sims 2 will feature even greater variability. Improve this technology a bit, add extra controls, easier tools and you solved the problem of designing new characters. Want an evil villain? Move some sliders (ugly - 70%, evil - 100%, old - 60%, crazy - 80%, smart - 65%). :) A producer of the original system can update this a couple of time, until they can make completely realistic models that can be simplified automatically as necessary.
:) Same with objects. Finally write a world generator that would create a random world filled with these objects. Voila. All problems solved.
But honestly, it's a brilliant idea.
The same can be done for other objects. Recently the Driver 3 developers said that their biggest cost is designing the world, even though most of the buildings are still just empty boxes. The solution is similar - create a parametric function-based object called "house" that could be tweaked from igloo to WTC.
And who should be making that decision? The one who's pirating, or the one who's stuff is being pirated?
Of course the one who's pirating. After all, you don't see Buhler AG or ABB (manufactureres of various industrial equipment) deciding to "invest" in Brazil. They wait for Brazilian companies to make the decision to buy their equipment. In the same way, Brazilian government decided to make this investment, not Linus or RMS. Similarly, pirates decide to invest in Brazil or Russia the pirated Windows and Office copies.
If pirates are so gung-ho about helping the economy? Then they should use their own money to do so, and not unwilling participants.
Pirates, like all entrepreneurs, mostly care about their profits. Fortunately, markets often are able to turn the greed of capitalists into economic wealth for the society. Same here. Pirates see an opportunity that can benefit them and others and build a business on that.
I'm well aware that various forms of piracy are considered illegal in many places today, my point is that economically that doesn't make any difference. Copying MS Office deprives Microsoft of income. Copying RedHat Linux (as opposed to buying) deprives RedHat of income in a similar way. The latter is legal, the former isn't, but there is no economic difference.
125 fps would be more appropriate... :)
And still 10 Terabit will support 50 players even with 125 fps and 6000x4500 uncompressed 4*16 bit colour (RGBE or something like that with 16 bits per colour). But that's just insane, why 10 Terabit? 640 Gigabit should be enough for everyone!
But I wonder if this is a long term solution?
The only feasible long-term solution that I can see right now is uploading all players (brain scan, digitalisation and uploading) to controlled server environment, where they are prevented from cheating.
and then the aimbots and see-through-wall hacks become even more effective, as they can track every single player in the screen at all times.
:) Try to see-through that!
To solve the cheating problem "once and for all", you can render the picture on the server and just send that 1024x768 bitmap 60 times per second.
and possibly allow us to skip centuries or eons of technological progress
You see, that's exactly the catch. We haven't yet encountered those advanced alien civilizations and it might be that we will never ever find them. So for the time being we have no conceivable way to "skip centuries or eons of technological progress" and need to proceed gradually and step by step. That's why we needed Moon landing, that's why we needed Fon Braun's rockets, that's why we need to travel to Mars. And since we cannot be sure which attempts will be fruitful and which will not, we need to try everything and diversify. Personally I think that at present almsot all space exploration is waste of time and resources, because in my opinion nanotech and AI are much more important, since they might actually allow us to "skip centuries or eons of technological progress" and jump straight to intergalactic travel. But I am not so sure as to insist that we stop our space programs, because I may be wrong and space might be important even in short term.
You don't need to worry about that, because:
1) you are not designing this AI system, so you should mostly care about the final result, not minor potential temporary problems that can and will be resolved
2) aviation is one of the most safety-conscious and well-regulated industries
3) these engineers are not stupid or evil to deploy a system that is less safe then existing ones
Visiting nearby stars is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some habitable planets in other star systems? What would that mean? That we can colonize world other than Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.
I'm far more interested in either travelling to Andromeda Galaxy or visiting another dimensions after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's attention and are achievable if the public is behind it.
Actually I think it should be made by the ThriXXX people (that's cool stuff and not a dialer/troyan). The technology is already here to render a sexy 3d-girl on your desktop that would move convincingly enough and give you technical (and other) advice. Even if you don't add state-of-the-art speech engine, it would still be very attractive to many users. People will enjoy their AI assistant and not complain that it is annoying. In fact, the more often she will appear and say something, the happier user will be. :)
:( ] / [ :) ]
Once the user is happy, of course, you can "leverage the user-base" and use this technology to sell stuff. [
May be someone can write a module for Alice integration with Slashdot. I think the dialog-based parsing engine would work just great after some tweaking.
/. spirit).
An alternative approach would be to first parse Slashdot archives to get a lot of posts, articles and moderation data and then use Bayesian theory to decide which sentences/keywords should be included to produce highest moderation based on the words in the blurb (or the linked article, but parsing that would be against
It can be further enhanced using the poetry evolution engine. If we limit the system to very short posts (cliche jokes or smartass oneliners), it might work quite well (feedback, of course, would be the moderation).
Any volunteers?
Mechanical or electronic nanocomputers made mostly from carbon are entirely possible. Carbon is an excellent conductor, insulator and semiconductor (currently achieved using by inserting various molecules inside nanotubes). Why would you need gold? Uranium or Plutonium are needed today, but won't be needed in the future. And when you need some minor amounts of various elements, you can always get them from seawater, or from soil, or from air or from anything else. There is life everywhere on Earth, which suggests that there are enough raw materials everywhere to build self-assembling programmable nanorobots and nanocomputers as well.
Yep. And in some countries things aren't copyrighted unless released in this country withing a certain period. After that, if still not officially available, they are public domain. And in yet some other countries the copyrights are limited (I mean limited as in non-perpetual). For example (my favourite example), in Russia most movies released before 1973 are public domain (at least according to the Russian Ministry of Culture). So if you stumble upon an avi with Steamboat Willie, Bambi or Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs on *.ru site, feel free to piss Disney off. Downloading it is legal as said elsewhere in this discussion, and uploading it is legal, because it is in public domain.
P.S. If anyone is interested to invest a couple thousand USD to open a classic public domain movie distribution site in Russia, you are wel come.
BTW, not trolling at all, but I always argued that these same arguments apply to piracy. Hopefully after discussions like this people will understand that stealing is not always stealing. Sometimes it's free investment for the economy.
;)
Disclaimer: pirated software has some unique advantages and disadvantages over free software. The author of this post has thousands dollars worth of pirated software on his PC and tens of thousands on legally purchased pirated CDs.
How about distributing signed blacklists over the net from ISP to ISP (like DNS, Usenet, etc.)? You can't DDoS the whole Internet, can you?