It's because they are using new superconducting processing elements that contain electrons with an equal probability of being in any particular position of the superconducter. As other elements pull these electrons off the probability wave collapses and the absence of the electron can be detected on the other side of the superconductor sooner than it would have taken light to travel this far. With this resulting Faster than light communication goes the associated backward time effects. This means the signals are processed for the proceeding operations first. As a result the first visible operation performed is the output.
There have been notable technical difficulties in getting the system up and running, not least of which involves convincing the engineers that they have to connect more than just the monitor up to make it work even though the results are already being displayed. They just don't get this destiny thing.
I have always thought that lots of people should build their own OS, It is a great way to try new ideas. The thing that stops me from doing it is drivers. I don't want to write a million and one drivers to allow people to use my OS.
Using Vesa for a video driver is ok on a small scale but even the Atheos docs say "This will ofcourse be un-accelerated and *really really* slow!!"
Is there any way to strip drivers from other systems?
If drivers had to be written for hobby OS/s could they be written in a plug-in style so that a driver for the TurboFlarp4 could be developed for Atheos and used under other OS/s (or vice/versa)?
From the point of view of an outsider, it has always seemed a bit odd having USA claim that it is the land of the free when it seems that they are at best slightly above average.
It was created at one time by the artist's hand, and no copy or duplicate will ever be just like it.
So when we develop replicator technology Art will cease to exist?
A lithograph by M.C. Escher will exist as part of a limited run, each print numbered uniquely with the collector knowing that lower numbers equal higher quality.
Surely the defining factor of quality should be what the image looks like! If lithograph images 3-7 had a crumb corrupting the image which fell off after 7, the remaining images must be of higher quality. If not That's a pretty weird definition of quality.
One of the major incentives for developing on consoles is that you don't have to do huge amounts of testing to make sure it works on different hardware configurations. The idea is that if it runs on one then it'll run on all.
Now Microsoft is already trying to excuse crashes by claiming hardware differences. These differences simply should not be there. It's supposed to be a console dammit!
Now many people are either predicting the success or failure of the X-Box. I just like to think of one constant that has been with Microsoft from the beginning.
The first version of pretty much every Microsoft product sucks.
But for those learning maths for its own sake - which I would hope is the case for someone studying it at university - it has to be the other way around. To gain an understanding of maths is to gain an understanding of abstract concepts not applications.
But this certainly isn't the case. In my programming work I need to use math at a university level to solve problems that turn up, but I have never received any useful training from a math department. Anything useful that I know has come from talented colleagues who managed to show me what the tools are and how to use them.
I will grant, however, that may in fact not be an artifact of the departments being more interested in pure mathematics than applications but rather that they have more interest in pure mathematics than teaching.
I have tried many times to break into the world of mathematics and have failed each time. I Have even been checked out for things like dislexia, I was told that Not only was I not dislexic but I should be able to breeze a masters.
I now have one piece of evidence that it might be the mathematicians and not the material that is the problem. I have now obtained A+ grades in Logic. How? Logic is covered by the Philosophy department.
Now if only I could get them to teach me calculus.
Anyone who knows how an intelegent (if poor speller) person can learn advanced math in an alternative way I would be interested to hear.
It all depend on the AMD's supply. I'm not sure how they are doing now but they were recently in a position of having more buyers for chips than they could actually produce.
They could up the price but then they would lose a lot of the inertia that they have built up with the number of people leaving Intel.
In this position, any large advertising campaign would just be needless expence.
It's worrying to hear that advanced scientific projects (ie: NASA Mars probe) are not using metric already though.
As far as I was aware they were. It was only the PR dept that converted everything to imperial. Of course most of the rest of the world gets it converted back to metric going through a form of chinese whispers, Except of course in china where presumably the whispers would make sense. Of course given current events there is evidence to suggest that they have their own problems when it comes to agreeing on measurements, most notably at the moment would be distance.
2. A year ago I would have said this also. Unfortunately there is a problem with this. The game I am currently working on is 640x480x16. The problem is on newer cards the performance is extremely poor. The hardware focuses on high speed 3d and this seems to impact upon 2d performance. My game doesn't scroll and has relativly few moving objects and still takes a bit of a speed hit. On these systems I have had the best performance by drawing into a system memory back buffer then copying onto the screen at pageflip, but this still has relativly poor perfomance. My next game will probably use 3d acceleration even if the game itself is 2d.
3. Agree. Unless it's robotron:-)
4. This reminds me of "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Salvor Hardin (Asimov)
with a response from someone I forget "To the incompetent, violence _is_ the last refuge"
I don't think that this one really has an impact on the quality of the game. I agree that a poor game is likely to have these things but I think that having these things doesn't make the game necessarily poor.
5. A bit of a sticky one. Have you ever sat down and thought "I know I'll make a new genre!" It's not a very easy thing to do, especially if you want the genre to be fun.
6. Agree. _Man_ do I agree.
7. Disagree. You need some form of death animation for units. I beleive the justification is wrong when it says death animations are non-interative. The death abnimation conveys a message. "This thing is no longer here because it [blew up/got splatted/shrunk to the size of a pea]"
If game objects just disappeared then this will lead to confusion on the players part as to what actually happened. The game I am working upon at the moment actualy utilizes explosions for chain reactions and to destroy obstructions. On the other hand the old and new versions of the Raiden arcade game is a good example of making a game worse with explosions. The newer version of Raiden is much harder to play because of the visual noise introduced by explosions.
8. Tend to agree here. Take Dune 2 for example. The evil Harkonen who plan to conquer Dune.
The insidious Ordos who insidiously plan to take Dune.
The noble Atredies whose mission it is to control Dune.
[ick]
9. Agree. BTW, What would an abstract game that conained non sequiturs be like.
10. Fair enough, But what if your development team wears nothing but black, (around here thats likely). But then I'm from a country where black is the national colour (and a couple of yodeling lesbians are considered family entertainment.
Of course none of this is going to get a game developer any money to actually make the game. Perhaps it is time that the game industry starts supplying grants for experimental works. Presumably there are enough companies out there that would show an interest in pooling together to suport little projects if it would mean that publishers were more amenenable towards let them go in that direction themselves later on.
Yes but 1984 was also a movie. I would expect that far more people have seen the movie than have read the story. I don't think I read it (We did animal farm at school).
If the people fighting in the debate sent some funding to an independant filmmaker to make something like 'The Trial' into a movie then it would be a step into providing a better public understanding of the concepts that Solove considers important. Of course the degree of funding would have a lot of impact on the results if they were wanting to drive the Hollywood hype machine, but even a lowish budget affair would probably get a good chance of being shown in schools.
I'm not sure how much money the various lobby groups have, but it would be an interesting option at the very least. It might even be a possiblility that you could convince some producer types that you could make a profitable version and have a real budget.
If it had a real budget everyone could wear nice suits like in Gattaga:-)
I would have thought that the real agument against with virtual child pornography is that it would allow pedophiles to believe that sexual acts with children were socially acceptable.
I assume (having not encountered any child pornography despite being on the net since 1990) that the pornography depicts the acts in a favourable light where there are no signifacnt bad consequences.
Rather than wheting a pedophiles appetite I would think it more likely that it allows them to justify their actions by considering their acts to not be harmful and not uncommon.
I'm no expert on free speach but personally I would not like to have this stuff allowed. On the other hand I don't like the idea of peoples free speach being constrained. By locking out virtual porn you create the potential for many more restrictions that I would disagree with.
I find the description of the idea of a lotteries as a stupid tax to be rather odd.
People who buy lottery tickets do not buy them with the expectation that the long term benefits will gain them a profit. I have never _ever_ found a person who believed that.
Lottery tickets give you a chance to be wealthy. For many who buy those tickets it is their only chance. Pretty much everybody knows that their chances are slim but people who buy tickets believe that the possibility of being wealthy is worth the expense of a lottery ticket. A slim chance is much better than no chance.
As for myself, I don't buy lottery tickets, but I also don't deride those who do.
Why not just get a 747 and slap some huge rockets onto it and put it into orbit.
Then eveyone would have comfy seats too.
Why not make something that some people want?
on
KBasic
·
· Score: 1
There are are a lot of comments here from people who are commenting about the various properties(good or bad) of BASIC. These are being used as arguments for or against development of KBasic.
Surely the only thing that should really matter is whether or not people want such a thing. Presumeably if people are writing this thing there are at least some who want it.
If you don't like BASIC don't use it. It is very simple to do, but why complain when you hear that other people are making it possible for themselves to use BASIC?
I think the bulk of things in NewDeal are not written in NewBasic. They certainly existed a long time before NewBasic was ready for primetime.
In the original PC-Geos (not really original if you count C64) Apps were written in assembly. Geos2/NewDeal stuff was written with a cross assembling/compiling system.
I was impressed with Geos when I had a 76k WYSIWYG word processor that did everything I wanted.
It has since suffered a little bloat (doesn't support XT's very well anymore) but is still quite impressive.
I'm always suspicious of US remakes of UK programs
on
More Junkyard Wars
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· Score: 1
I watched the UK 'Who's line is it anyway?' I don't watch the US version anymore. It just doesn't have the same feel. Especially when both shows had the same 'improvised' acts on both shows (like Ryan doing hunted deer in party quirks)
I have quite a few doubts that the US version of Scrapheap will fare any better.
The article on consoles, like many US gaming articles, paints the picture of the Sega consoles dying because of Nintendo dominance. Few seem to realise that this is not the case worldwide.
Here in New Zealand, stores carried the Master System and MegaDrive(Genesis) and it was rare to even see a Nintendo console.
I beleive this is the case in other countries also.
As far as I can tell the Master System and MegaDrive died because of the same reason all consoles die, old age.
Even though the lack of a swap file capability for the Amiga meant you sometimes you didn't have enough memory to do some things it did give you a certain philosophy that worked well.
If you can run it, it will run well. If an app _has_ to use lots of memory because of it's fundimental nature (such as image processing) it will intelegently do the swapping itself.
Because memory was not considered vitually unlimited people developed with an eye towards keeping memory requirements down.
The requirements of programs for OS's with swap files have rocketed over the last few years.
It's sad to see the Amiga style of operation disappear without any debate as to the merits of it. People made swap files because they could, not because they were essential.
Bill Gates reputedly once said '640k should be enough for anybody'. In my own mind I think that 64 meg should be enough for most people, yet I routinely do tasks on 64meg machines that are swapping merrily away. It's not because I'm not considering the possibilities of things that could be done (Like Bill did) but rather that I feel that those things could be done in 64Meg. I fell like my memory is going to waste.
I have ICQ running at te moment. It's using 6 meg, I haven't a clue what it actually puts in that 6 meg. If memory were not considered unlimited how much would it be using?
Slashdot Mirror
It's because they are using new superconducting processing elements that contain electrons with an equal probability of being in any particular position of the superconducter. As other elements pull these electrons off the probability wave collapses and the absence of the electron can be detected on the other side of the superconductor sooner than it would have taken light to travel this far. With this resulting Faster than light communication goes the associated backward time effects. This means the signals are processed for the proceeding operations first. As a result the first visible operation performed is the output.
There have been notable technical difficulties in getting the system up and running, not least of which involves convincing the engineers that they have to connect more than just the monitor up to make it work even though the results are already being displayed. They just don't get this destiny thing.
I have always thought that lots of people should build their own OS, It is a great way to try new ideas. The thing that stops me from doing it is drivers. I don't want to write a million and one drivers to allow people to use my OS.
Using Vesa for a video driver is ok on a small scale but even the Atheos docs say "This will ofcourse be un-accelerated and *really really* slow!!"
Is there any way to strip drivers from other systems?
If drivers had to be written for hobby OS/s could they be written in a plug-in style so that a driver for the TurboFlarp4 could be developed for Atheos and used under other OS/s (or vice/versa)?
Since the other reply to this wasn't particularly well formed.
Look at http://www.aclu.org for plenty of examples of lack of freedom.
and with regard to Free Speech in particular, http://www.aclu.org/issues/freespeech/hmfs.html
From the point of view of an outsider, it has always seemed a bit odd having USA claim that it is the land of the free when it seems that they are at best slightly above average.
It's nice to hear that the rural poor in third world countries have a way to recharge their cell phone batteries
Art != Trading value.
One of the major incentives for developing on consoles is that you don't have to do huge amounts of testing to make sure it works on different hardware configurations. The idea is that if it runs on one then it'll run on all.
Now Microsoft is already trying to excuse crashes by claiming hardware differences. These differences simply should not be there. It's supposed to be a console dammit!
Now many people are either predicting the success or failure of the X-Box. I just like to think of one constant that has been with Microsoft from the beginning.
The first version of pretty much every Microsoft product sucks.
But this certainly isn't the case. In my programming work I need to use math at a university level to solve problems that turn up, but I have never received any useful training from a math department. Anything useful that I know has come from talented colleagues who managed to show me what the tools are and how to use them.
I will grant, however, that may in fact not be an artifact of the departments being more interested in pure mathematics than applications but rather that they have more interest in pure mathematics than teaching.
I have tried many times to break into the world of mathematics and have failed each time. I Have even been checked out for things like dislexia, I was told that Not only was I not dislexic but I should be able to breeze a masters.
I now have one piece of evidence that it might be the mathematicians and not the material that is the problem. I have now obtained A+ grades in Logic. How? Logic is covered by the Philosophy department.
Now if only I could get them to teach me calculus.
Anyone who knows how an intelegent (if poor speller) person can learn advanced math in an alternative way I would be interested to hear.
if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well.
From most of the flash sites I encounter, being blind would give you an aesthetic advantage.
It all depend on the AMD's supply. I'm not sure how they are doing now but they were recently in a position of having more buyers for chips than they could actually produce.
They could up the price but then they would lose a lot of the inertia that they have built up with the number of people leaving Intel.
In this position, any large advertising campaign would just be needless expence.
It's worrying to hear that advanced scientific projects (ie: NASA Mars probe) are not using metric already though.
As far as I was aware they were. It was only the PR dept that converted everything to imperial. Of course most of the rest of the world gets it converted back to metric going through a form of chinese whispers, Except of course in china where presumably the whispers would make sense. Of course given current events there is evidence to suggest that they have their own problems when it comes to agreeing on measurements, most notably at the moment would be distance.
1. Fair enough, I tend to agree.
:-)
2. A year ago I would have said this also. Unfortunately there is a problem with this. The game I am currently working on is 640x480x16. The problem is on newer cards the performance is extremely poor. The hardware focuses on high speed 3d and this seems to impact upon 2d performance. My game doesn't scroll and has relativly few moving objects and still takes a bit of a speed hit. On these systems I have had the best performance by drawing into a system memory back buffer then copying onto the screen at pageflip, but this still has relativly poor perfomance. My next game will probably use 3d acceleration even if the game itself is 2d.
3. Agree. Unless it's robotron
4. This reminds me of "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Salvor Hardin (Asimov)
with a response from someone I forget "To the incompetent, violence _is_ the last refuge"
I don't think that this one really has an impact on the quality of the game. I agree that a poor game is likely to have these things but I think that having these things doesn't make the game necessarily poor.
5. A bit of a sticky one. Have you ever sat down and thought "I know I'll make a new genre!" It's not a very easy thing to do, especially if you want the genre to be fun.
6. Agree. _Man_ do I agree.
7. Disagree. You need some form of death animation for units. I beleive the justification is wrong when it says death animations are non-interative. The death abnimation conveys a message. "This thing is no longer here because it [blew up/got splatted/shrunk to the size of a pea]"
If game objects just disappeared then this will lead to confusion on the players part as to what actually happened. The game I am working upon at the moment actualy utilizes explosions for chain reactions and to destroy obstructions. On the other hand the old and new versions of the Raiden arcade game is a good example of making a game worse with explosions. The newer version of Raiden is much harder to play because of the visual noise introduced by explosions.
8. Tend to agree here. Take Dune 2 for example. The evil Harkonen who plan to conquer Dune.
The insidious Ordos who insidiously plan to take Dune.
The noble Atredies whose mission it is to control Dune.
[ick]
9. Agree. BTW, What would an abstract game that conained non sequiturs be like.
10. Fair enough, But what if your development team wears nothing but black, (around here thats likely). But then I'm from a country where black is the national colour (and a couple of yodeling lesbians are considered family entertainment.
Of course none of this is going to get a game developer any money to actually make the game. Perhaps it is time that the game industry starts supplying grants for experimental works. Presumably there are enough companies out there that would show an interest in pooling together to suport little projects if it would mean that publishers were more amenenable towards let them go in that direction themselves later on.
Yes but 1984 was also a movie. I would expect that far more people have seen the movie than have read the story. I don't think I read it (We did animal farm at school).
:-)
If the people fighting in the debate sent some funding to an independant filmmaker to make something like 'The Trial' into a movie then it would be a step into providing a better public understanding of the concepts that Solove considers important. Of course the degree of funding would have a lot of impact on the results if they were wanting to drive the Hollywood hype machine, but even a lowish budget affair would probably get a good chance of being shown in schools.
I'm not sure how much money the various lobby groups have, but it would be an interesting option at the very least. It might even be a possiblility that you could convince some producer types that you could make a profitable version and have a real budget.
If it had a real budget everyone could wear nice suits like in Gattaga
I would have thought that the real agument against with virtual child pornography is that it would allow pedophiles to believe that sexual acts with children were socially acceptable.
I assume (having not encountered any child pornography despite being on the net since 1990) that the pornography depicts the acts in a favourable light where there are no signifacnt bad consequences.
Rather than wheting a pedophiles appetite I would think it more likely that it allows them to justify their actions by considering their acts to not be harmful and not uncommon.
I'm no expert on free speach but personally I would not like to have this stuff allowed. On the other hand I don't like the idea of peoples free speach being constrained. By locking out virtual porn you create the potential for many more restrictions that I would disagree with.
It's a bit of a problem really.
How quickly do bits get corrupted? I would have thought that with a load of error correction and a device continually fixing things up again would grant you quite a bit of stability© Really there isn't anything preventing storing 128 bits¥or more for every byte© If any go wrong they should be correctable before the byte becomes unrecoverable© The only thing that this wouldn't help is if bursts of radiation take out all of the data very quickly, Is this what happens?
I would also have though that the same should go for processors© If you sent up a satelite chock full of FPGA's ¥presubably with every cell containing a lot of redundancy on their state memory you could make work arounds for many failures, lik say a NASA Screwdriver going through one of the PCBs©
How well can the radiation conditions of space be replicated on earth for testing tis sort of thing?
How about picking a day and get eveyone to buy a piece of software and then open it up read the EULA, then refuse it and return the thing.
Presumably if the EULA starts becomming an inconvenience they might start getting a bit more reasonable.
Either that or perhaps just get all the programmers out there to put an EULA on their own Software.
How about inserting into the EULA somewhere.
Either that or just going for peoples' firstborn
This is yet another example of poor science© It has almost become the case that science means wearing a white lab coat while stating something as fact©
This is causing significant backlash©
The growth of psychic hotlines, faith healing and other panaceas is at least partly due to poor science© If the bar isn't held high enough that only science can qualify many other things can get through©
Here in New Zealand there was a prominant case of a boy with cancer where the boy's parents rejected traditional therapy and went with some quantum vibration panacia© The boy died a couple of weeks ago© Many people are blaming the parents, but could they have any way of rating one over another© Both treatments were applied by people who said they would work©
There have been many cases where medicine has shown use of poor science© There are diseases that people have fought for years to have the medical community investigate them, let alone accept their existance© Many people distrust doctors these days©
This effect happens in other areas© People have commented that all the major advances in physics occur after the previous generation of physicists die out¥I can't claim to actually know that is true however
Scientists' reputations are declining in this world© One day I would like to see Philosophy of Science taught early at school© When everybody is throwing information at you claiming they are facts© Everybody needs to be able to evaluate whether or not whether or not that information comes from a reliable method©
I find the description of the idea of a lotteries as a stupid tax to be rather odd.
People who buy lottery tickets do not buy them with the expectation that the long term benefits will gain them a profit. I have never _ever_ found a person who believed that.
Lottery tickets give you a chance to be wealthy. For many who buy those tickets it is their only chance. Pretty much everybody knows that their chances are slim but people who buy tickets believe that the possibility of being wealthy is worth the expense of a lottery ticket. A slim chance is much better than no chance.
As for myself, I don't buy lottery tickets, but I also don't deride those who do.
Why not just get a 747 and slap some huge rockets onto it and put it into orbit.
Then eveyone would have comfy seats too.
There are are a lot of comments here from people who are commenting about the various properties(good or bad) of BASIC. These are being used as arguments for or against development of KBasic.
Surely the only thing that should really matter is whether or not people want such a thing. Presumeably if people are writing this thing there are at least some who want it.
If you don't like BASIC don't use it. It is very simple to do, but why complain when you hear that other people are making it possible for themselves to use BASIC?
I think the bulk of things in NewDeal are not written in NewBasic. They certainly existed a long time before NewBasic was ready for primetime.
In the original PC-Geos (not really original if you count C64) Apps were written in assembly. Geos2/NewDeal stuff was written with a cross assembling/compiling system.
I was impressed with Geos when I had a 76k WYSIWYG word processor that did everything I wanted.
It has since suffered a little bloat (doesn't support XT's very well anymore) but is still quite impressive.
I watched the UK 'Who's line is it anyway?' I don't watch the US version anymore. It just doesn't have the same feel. Especially when both shows had the same 'improvised' acts on both shows (like Ryan doing hunted deer in party quirks)
I have quite a few doubts that the US version of Scrapheap will fare any better.
The article on consoles, like many US gaming articles, paints the picture of the Sega consoles dying because of Nintendo dominance. Few seem to realise that this is not the case worldwide.
Here in New Zealand, stores carried the Master System and MegaDrive(Genesis) and it was rare to even see a Nintendo console.
I beleive this is the case in other countries also.
As far as I can tell the Master System and MegaDrive died because of the same reason all consoles die, old age.
And boy do their web bages blow goats.
Ahh, but the logo is printed sideways so it just goes upside down.
Mirrors only flip sides not top/bottom, otherwise you'd be looking at your feet when you look in the miiror.
;-)
Is that circular thing on the end a digital camera? If it is then it would seem that it is sitting in front of a mirror taking a photo of itself.
Anyone know the price this thing is aming for?
Even though the lack of a swap file capability for the Amiga meant you sometimes you didn't have enough memory to do some things it did give you a certain philosophy that worked well.
If you can run it, it will run well. If an app _has_ to use lots of memory because of it's fundimental nature (such as image processing) it will intelegently do the swapping itself.
Because memory was not considered vitually unlimited people developed with an eye towards keeping memory requirements down.
The requirements of programs for OS's with swap files have rocketed over the last few years.
It's sad to see the Amiga style of operation disappear without any debate as to the merits of it. People made swap files because they could, not because they were essential.
Bill Gates reputedly once said '640k should be enough for anybody'. In my own mind I think that 64 meg should be enough for most people, yet I routinely do tasks on 64meg machines that are swapping merrily away. It's not because I'm not considering the possibilities of things that could be done (Like Bill did) but rather that I feel that those things could be done in 64Meg. I fell like my memory is going to waste.
I have ICQ running at te moment. It's using 6 meg, I haven't a clue what it actually puts in that 6 meg. If memory were not considered unlimited how much would it be using?