Stardock? I got bad news for impulse powered... They can't even get the demo version of Demigod working on my machine... I'm not buying anything through their service.
I'm glad that EA got out of digital distribution. Their old terms of service were HORRIBLE. You had to buy the game, and then give them additional money to keep your license so you could re-download it later. Talk about not understanding the basics of customer service.
Valve/Steam really seems to understand this is about customer service. That said, I think there are too many ads for my liking. If I want to buy a game, I know where to go. That said, the nice thing is that I don't think they advertise anything I already own.
Can they re-arrange carbon atoms to make diamonds? (I know there are other probably much more cost efficient means of doing this, I'm just trying to get some points of reference about what's possible.
They had to make some cuts for the film adaptation. The original cast went in for a read-through of the initial script, and nobody ever heard back from them. That's why we have the abridged version with their understudies.
I agree with a lot of this... The one thing that I've found that turns this on it's head is when people stop doing things for themselves, and start doing things for other people, the "get a life" starts sounding pretty empty.
"Beating wow is a waste of time, get a life" "Hoarding money is a waste of time, get a life" "Trying to get ahead at your job is a waste of time, get a life"
Vs.
"Reducing world hunger is a waste of time, get a life" "Helping people live longer, happier lives is a waste of time, get a life" "Making people smile is a waste of time, get a life"
I know someone will argue that it's social stigma that will make it so that few people are willing to say doing good deeds for others is a waste of time.
That said, I honestly, deeply, believe that most of the things I do for myself are largely a waste of time... The long-term perspective can make many important acts feel hollow and worthless. But helping make the world a better place for those around me? It's an act of defiance against a cold and uncaring universe... It's one of the few things I can think of that DOES matter.
The beauty is not in succeeding in the fight against the inevitable... The beauty is the fight itself.
Yes, it will likely save you a decent amount of power, even with an external HDD. That said, $100 (or even $40) is a lot of power. If you have a decent power management scheme turned on for your 2002 box, then you'll likely have difficulty justifying the cost and effort just on power savings alone. If you live in a smaller space, the space savings may also be worth a bit to you.
That said, this is likely a good thing to keep in mind for future replacement/upgrade/expansion for many of us in a similar situation.
Well hi there! I'm the web admin for Interrobang Studios. We're grateful that people have been interested in Kevin's work doing Watchbabies comics. Since a lot of folks are interested in this strip, we'll be publishing a comic of the Watchbabies strips in the near future.
Right now we're actually in the process of a major site re-org (specifically to get more content like Watchbabies on-site). Anybody who's interested in watchbabies updates can e-mail watchbabies@interrobangstudios.com or subscribe to the Interrobang Studios RSS feed (http://www.interrobangstudios.com/rss.php)
Interestingly, I ~have~ created something for the mass market. Here's an interesting point of note: The people stealing my work are not my customers. The liklihood of them becoming my customers is very small. Therefore: I am not losing anything (the cost to distribute my work is trivial). They are taking nothing from me... They are just using something they have no right to use.
Interestingly enough, this doesn't work both ways: It's almost impossible to take someone who would normally be a pirate, and get them to buy my product. However, poor customer service CAN take someone who is a client, and turn them into a pirate to spite me... But again, at that point, I've already lost the client.
All through high-school, I did miserably. The system and I failed each other. I barely graduated with a 2.1 GPA. I hated school, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my future. However, I was one of those students who went to college anyway, and started as a CS major.
Guess what: I loved it. First semester I got a 3.5 GPA. I had finally found my calling. I've since gone to grad school, and I have a good job, which enables me to support myself and my family at a comfortable quality of life.
So, college was a huge shift in my life. I never saw it coming, neither the high schools nor the college saw it coming (I think my parents were the only ones who had an inkling).
The only thing I can take from my life experience is this: There is no "system of education" that will work for everyone. There are no cut-offs or barriers that can effectively shape people effectively: it's always an internal process.
I'm also left with the realization that my calling could have just as easily been repairing cars, making pottery, or driving tanks. How long would it have been before I found those? Would I have ever?
Fearless exploration into diffrent paths is the only direction I can honestly give anybody. Remove barriers (both up and down) to allow people to find the route best for them.
Be critical of your education (Not only the process, but your response to that process). If you don't enjoy what you're learning then it's time for a different path.
An interesting topic that I've thought about a lot... Because Santa is an interesting phenomenon that people tend to not take seriously, but can lead to some interesting insights (For example: Unlike God, you can talk about Santa at work, and nobody gets offended/defensive, the philosophical discussion usually stays lighthearted).
In one on-line community, there's been much debate about what is "real". My father (though not Christian) looks like, and loves playing, Santa. Starting about this time of year, we'll be walking around the local mall, and from time to time a small kid will point at my father (Usually with a whispered "Mom! It's him!" to a nearby parent). My dad responds with a knowing wink and a smile.
And herein lies the problem: Due to all of my math, science, and physics, I am 100% certain that there is no workshop on the north pole. Yet in that wink, that fleeting moment of the shared secret between child and bearded stranger, Santa exists.
Something else to consider: Reindeer or not, millions of children wake up to gifts from Santa Claus every year. The immiediate response is that the cause is wrong: That the parents/friends/kids bought the presents and put them under the tree. The counter-argument is then: Why did the parents buy the presents? Is the expectation of Santa Claus part of Santa, causing the distribution of christmas gifts in the sleighs now taken the form of UPS, FedEx, and DHL?
I think if Santa Claus is viewed as more of an experience (Like joy, or heartache), it will qickly become apparent that Santa does not need to be corporeal to be real.
Can God been seen in the same way? Depends (Very much!) on the religion.
Makes sense to me... We already know the random access on an SSD blows standard HDDs out of the water (Three of the drives are 1 MS access).
The main things people are looking at now are price and performance comparisons with HDDs.
One of the places that SSDs have been shown to be lackluster (and also perform at various levels) is in sequential transfer rates, so it makes sense to be focusing on that.
As it stands... When the prices drop a bit more, I'm seriously considering RAIDing a couple of these puppies up. Unlike HDDs, RAID performance should increase near linearly with every drive added. Yum.
With this in mind, there are also some cheap upgrades you can get:
Spend that extra $25 on a nicer case. What you spend in cash you may very well save in frustration.
Not worried about drive space so much? Upgrade to a 10,000 RPM drive. The performance difference is noticable to a 7,200 RPM one.
Where NOT to spend extra money: Faster RAM:
- RAM is almost never your speed bottleneck. Look at your HDD, then CPU
SLI:
- Put that extra video card down. Not only will it force you to buy a more expensive mobo, but it doesn't get you the performance boost you'd expect. Much like...
HDD RAID:
- Only really boosts speed when working with single large files in a linear manner. If you're not absolutely sure you need this, then you don't.
Some interesting places to spend money in the future: SSD RAID:
- Doesn't have the bottleneck caused by seek time. Some tests show incredible perfomance boosts. Jury is still out as to what you'll see real-world.
While I love the idea, and the flexibility, afforded by this form factor, I think the OP makes a valid point.
I would LOVE to put a PC cleanly inside a 24oz Jolt can, peanut butter jar, or antique object d'art. I honestly don't have time for that crap and need a cheap enclosure that's ready to go.
Some people won't see this, because they'll have cheaper monitors that automatically dither for them (16.2 M colors created by dithering 1048576 colors instead of displaying a true 16.7 Million).
But the instructions show the problem... The color range is from red 0 to red 255. There are only 256 colors between pure red and black. Sure, there's also 256 shades of many colors near pure red, but you won't use/any/ of those when fading from red to black... So you're left with 255 possible colors between red and black.
Ladies and gentlemen: On a decent monitor, without dithering, you CAN and SHOULD see color banding in this kind of test.
Bumping up to 30 bpp, I'm guessing they're using an RGB space with 10 bits for red, green, and blue, leaving you with 1024 possible colors in that gradient. This is a huge step in approaching the kind of color density the human eye can detect.
Now, the 24 bpp example in the above image looks fine. However, as the size of the image gets larger the more obvious banding will become(Even the 8-bit image would look fine if it were small enough).
We do a lot of dithering at 24 bits-per-pixel, and the results look pretty darn good... But ultimately we're not where we could be. The trained eye will be able to show you exactly where there are image artifacts. The untrained eye, while not always able to point out the problem spots, can still see the difference and will prefer the higher color-depth image because it will seem "crisper" or "more clear".
Since the vast majority of the articles are plain text, they probably just have a couple of regular expressions and similar logic to format the text as needed. The plain-text article just sits in a database, gets called up, and gets transformed for layout in a newspaper, or layout for the web when displayed to the user/printer/etc. It's pretty easy to do.
Ok, so I was able to do the image analysis one, where they take an image, muck with the color, draw a bunch of black lines over it, and then ask you to annotate it with a word from a list.
This is no better, and may be worse, than what we have now, for two reasons.
1) If you fill in the gaps programmatically, and then make the image grayscale, you probably have something you can use for image matching.
2) Much more severely: The interface reduces the number of possible answers by multiple orders of magnitude. For the one I saw I think there were 10 or 15 answers. Even if you kick image recognition to the curb and randomly choose an answer, you'll be right 1/15 times. It'd be trivial to write a program to harvest hundreds of accounts in a day by just picking random answers. Hand that off to a botnet or similar, and this becomes a minor speedbump.
"They don't advance our understanding of the world"
The good ones do.... That's part of the point. Larry the Cable Guy? Jester. Pink Floyd? More than just a Jester. That's why The Wall is still important today.
It means that if you don't put copy protection on your program, and the only way to distribute your program is via download, without copy protection there would be no means to distribute an unlockable trial version. You'd essentially be giving the game away, and hope people would pay you. Either that or have to produce two versions of the game (One trial one full), and then manage that mess.
"Copy protection (whether you call it copy protection or DRM) increases the costs and risks of production and just plain doesn't do anything more than flashing a "don't pirate this game" splash screen would."
Unless, like me, the only means of distribution is over the 'net. In which case, copy protection is the only viable means to differentiate your product from free software.
Slashdot Mirror
A bunch of these guys are doomed...
Stardock? I got bad news for impulse powered... They can't even get the demo version of Demigod working on my machine... I'm not buying anything through their service.
I'm glad that EA got out of digital distribution. Their old terms of service were HORRIBLE. You had to buy the game, and then give them additional money to keep your license so you could re-download it later. Talk about not understanding the basics of customer service.
Valve/Steam really seems to understand this is about customer service. That said, I think there are too many ads for my liking. If I want to buy a game, I know where to go. That said, the nice thing is that I don't think they advertise anything I already own.
~D
Ok then... Along the other person's idea...
Can they re-arrange carbon atoms to make diamonds? (I know there are other probably much more cost efficient means of doing this, I'm just trying to get some points of reference about what's possible.
~D
They had to make some cuts for the film adaptation. The original cast went in for a read-through of the initial script, and nobody ever heard back from them. That's why we have the abridged version with their understudies.
~D
US productivity jumps 20%, divorce rates go down by 50%, and we all find out what "that smell" is.
~D
You're already at +5... Consider yourself at +6 or more.
~D
I agree with a lot of this... The one thing that I've found that turns this on it's head is when people stop doing things for themselves, and start doing things for other people, the "get a life" starts sounding pretty empty.
"Beating wow is a waste of time, get a life"
"Hoarding money is a waste of time, get a life"
"Trying to get ahead at your job is a waste of time, get a life"
Vs.
"Reducing world hunger is a waste of time, get a life"
"Helping people live longer, happier lives is a waste of time, get a life"
"Making people smile is a waste of time, get a life"
I know someone will argue that it's social stigma that will make it so that few people are willing to say doing good deeds for others is a waste of time.
That said, I honestly, deeply, believe that most of the things I do for myself are largely a waste of time... The long-term perspective can make many important acts feel hollow and worthless. But helping make the world a better place for those around me? It's an act of defiance against a cold and uncaring universe... It's one of the few things I can think of that DOES matter.
The beauty is not in succeeding in the fight against the inevitable... The beauty is the fight itself.
~D
Yes, it will likely save you a decent amount of power, even with an external HDD. That said, $100 (or even $40) is a lot of power. If you have a decent power management scheme turned on for your 2002 box, then you'll likely have difficulty justifying the cost and effort just on power savings alone. If you live in a smaller space, the space savings may also be worth a bit to you.
That said, this is likely a good thing to keep in mind for future replacement/upgrade/expansion for many of us in a similar situation.
~D
Well hi there!
I'm the web admin for Interrobang Studios. We're grateful that people have been interested in Kevin's work doing Watchbabies comics. Since a lot of folks are interested in this strip, we'll be publishing a comic of the Watchbabies strips in the near future.
Right now we're actually in the process of a major site re-org (specifically to get more content like Watchbabies on-site). Anybody who's interested in watchbabies updates can e-mail watchbabies@interrobangstudios.com or subscribe to the Interrobang Studios RSS feed (http://www.interrobangstudios.com/rss.php)
~D
Interestingly, I ~have~ created something for the mass market. Here's an interesting point of note:
The people stealing my work are not my customers. The liklihood of them becoming my customers is very small. Therefore: I am not losing anything (the cost to distribute my work is trivial). They are taking nothing from me... They are just using something they have no right to use.
Interestingly enough, this doesn't work both ways: It's almost impossible to take someone who would normally be a pirate, and get them to buy my product. However, poor customer service CAN take someone who is a client, and turn them into a pirate to spite me... But again, at that point, I've already lost the client.
~D
And yet... I'm a counter-case.
All through high-school, I did miserably. The system and I failed each other. I barely graduated with a 2.1 GPA. I hated school, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my future. However, I was one of those students who went to college anyway, and started as a CS major.
Guess what: I loved it. First semester I got a 3.5 GPA. I had finally found my calling. I've since gone to grad school, and I have a good job, which enables me to support myself and my family at a comfortable quality of life.
So, college was a huge shift in my life. I never saw it coming, neither the high schools nor the college saw it coming (I think my parents were the only ones who had an inkling).
The only thing I can take from my life experience is this: There is no "system of education" that will work for everyone. There are no cut-offs or barriers that can effectively shape people effectively: it's always an internal process.
I'm also left with the realization that my calling could have just as easily been repairing cars, making pottery, or driving tanks. How long would it have been before I found those? Would I have ever?
Fearless exploration into diffrent paths is the only direction I can honestly give anybody. Remove barriers (both up and down) to allow people to find the route best for them.
Be critical of your education (Not only the process, but your response to that process). If you don't enjoy what you're learning then it's time for a different path.
~D
Have mod points, can't mod you any higher.
Damn.
~D
On the topic of Santa Claus:
An interesting topic that I've thought about a lot... Because Santa is an interesting phenomenon that people tend to not take seriously, but can lead to some interesting insights (For example: Unlike God, you can talk about Santa at work, and nobody gets offended/defensive, the philosophical discussion usually stays lighthearted).
In one on-line community, there's been much debate about what is "real". My father (though not Christian) looks like, and loves playing, Santa. Starting about this time of year, we'll be walking around the local mall, and from time to time a small kid will point at my father (Usually with a whispered "Mom! It's him!" to a nearby parent). My dad responds with a knowing wink and a smile.
And herein lies the problem: Due to all of my math, science, and physics, I am 100% certain that there is no workshop on the north pole. Yet in that wink, that fleeting moment of the shared secret between child and bearded stranger, Santa exists.
Something else to consider: Reindeer or not, millions of children wake up to gifts from Santa Claus every year. The immiediate response is that the cause is wrong: That the parents/friends/kids bought the presents and put them under the tree. The counter-argument is then: Why did the parents buy the presents? Is the expectation of Santa Claus part of Santa, causing the distribution of christmas gifts in the sleighs now taken the form of UPS, FedEx, and DHL?
I think if Santa Claus is viewed as more of an experience (Like joy, or heartache), it will qickly become apparent that Santa does not need to be corporeal to be real.
Can God been seen in the same way? Depends (Very much!) on the religion.
~D
Makes sense to me... We already know the random access on an SSD blows standard HDDs out of the water (Three of the drives are 1 MS access).
The main things people are looking at now are price and performance comparisons with HDDs.
One of the places that SSDs have been shown to be lackluster (and also perform at various levels) is in sequential transfer rates, so it makes sense to be focusing on that.
As it stands... When the prices drop a bit more, I'm seriously considering RAIDing a couple of these puppies up. Unlike HDDs, RAID performance should increase near linearly with every drive added. Yum.
~D
With this in mind, there are also some cheap upgrades you can get:
Spend that extra $25 on a nicer case. What you spend in cash you may very well save in frustration.
Not worried about drive space so much? Upgrade to a 10,000 RPM drive. The performance difference is noticable to a 7,200 RPM one.
Where NOT to spend extra money:
Faster RAM:
- RAM is almost never your speed bottleneck. Look at your HDD, then CPU
SLI:
- Put that extra video card down. Not only will it force you to buy a more expensive mobo, but it doesn't get you the performance boost you'd expect. Much like...
HDD RAID:
- Only really boosts speed when working with single large files in a linear manner. If you're not absolutely sure you need this, then you don't.
Some interesting places to spend money in the future:
SSD RAID:
- Doesn't have the bottleneck caused by seek time. Some tests show incredible perfomance boosts. Jury is still out as to what you'll see real-world.
~D
While I love the idea, and the flexibility, afforded by this form factor, I think the OP makes a valid point.
I would LOVE to put a PC cleanly inside a 24oz Jolt can, peanut butter jar, or antique object d'art. I honestly don't have time for that crap and need a cheap enclosure that's ready to go.
~D
Some people won't see this, because they'll have cheaper monitors that automatically dither for them (16.2 M colors created by dithering 1048576 colors instead of displaying a true 16.7 Million).
/any/ of those when fading from red to black... So you're left with 255 possible colors between red and black.
But the instructions show the problem... The color range is from red 0 to red 255. There are only 256 colors between pure red and black. Sure, there's also 256 shades of many colors near pure red, but you won't use
Ladies and gentlemen: On a decent monitor, without dithering, you CAN and SHOULD see color banding in this kind of test.
Bumping up to 30 bpp, I'm guessing they're using an RGB space with 10 bits for red, green, and blue, leaving you with 1024 possible colors in that gradient. This is a huge step in approaching the kind of color density the human eye can detect.
You can see an example here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Colour_banding_example01.png
Now, the 24 bpp example in the above image looks fine. However, as the size of the image gets larger the more obvious banding will become(Even the 8-bit image would look fine if it were small enough).
We do a lot of dithering at 24 bits-per-pixel, and the results look pretty darn good... But ultimately we're not where we could be. The trained eye will be able to show you exactly where there are image artifacts. The untrained eye, while not always able to point out the problem spots, can still see the difference and will prefer the higher color-depth image because it will seem "crisper" or "more clear".
~D
Since the vast majority of the articles are plain text, they probably just have a couple of regular expressions and similar logic to format the text as needed. The plain-text article just sits in a database, gets called up, and gets transformed for layout in a newspaper, or layout for the web when displayed to the user/printer/etc. It's pretty easy to do.
~D
Ok, so I was able to do the image analysis one, where they take an image, muck with the color, draw a bunch of black lines over it, and then ask you to annotate it with a word from a list.
This is no better, and may be worse, than what we have now, for two reasons.
1) If you fill in the gaps programmatically, and then make the image grayscale, you probably have something you can use for image matching.
2) Much more severely: The interface reduces the number of possible answers by multiple orders of magnitude. For the one I saw I think there were 10 or 15 answers. Even if you kick image recognition to the curb and randomly choose an answer, you'll be right 1/15 times. It'd be trivial to write a program to harvest hundreds of accounts in a day by just picking random answers. Hand that off to a botnet or similar, and this becomes a minor speedbump.
~D
"They don't advance our understanding of the world"
The good ones do.... That's part of the point. Larry the Cable Guy? Jester. Pink Floyd? More than just a Jester. That's why The Wall is still important today.
~D
Honestly I think it has more to do with being less user-friendly, and people not having any experience with the OS than just "Good things cost more".
~D
If it broke anything on one of my servers or drone machines (Comp sitting in a corner dedicated to a single task), I'd be filing suit for damages.
~D
You know that's totally intractable, right?
For example: 1620x1050 with no AA may be considered unplayable (jaggies) for some, but others it's perfectly fine...
Or, maybe you can turn on the AA, but deactivate shadows, changing your whole "playable" demographic again.
It's like asking someone to benchmark coffee at different resturants to grade whether it is palletable or not.
~D
It means that if you don't put copy protection on your program, and the only way to distribute your program is via download, without copy protection there would be no means to distribute an unlockable trial version. You'd essentially be giving the game away, and hope people would pay you. Either that or have to produce two versions of the game (One trial one full), and then manage that mess.
~D
"Copy protection (whether you call it copy protection or DRM) increases the costs and risks of production and just plain doesn't do anything more than flashing a "don't pirate this game" splash screen would."
Unless, like me, the only means of distribution is over the 'net. In which case, copy protection is the only viable means to differentiate your product from free software.
~D
Because ending in a cliffhanger will result in higher traffic, and thus more revenues for slashdot.
~D