No motherboard has ever died on me, despite being on almost continuously and generally being the cheapest crap money can buy. Just where do you get yours ?-)
Protect consumers from pirated software??? What if I don't want to be protected???
Then you are clearly a pirate, and as we all know pirates like to hump little cabin boys, making you a pedophile as well. Furthermore, pirates spread terror, so you are a terrorist too. Rot in secret CIA prison after being tortured to death, you enemy combatant scum, you !
It's going to be a "re-imagined" series.. Kirk will be played by Anthony Michael Hall, and Spock will be played by Andie MacDowell... that's right, a CHICK!
But will this increase or decrease the number of pornographic fan fiction stories featuring the two ?-)
In Soviet Russia, all-seeing demonic eye watches you!
Soviet Russia, being an atheistic state, cannot logically believe in the existence of demons, since they are supernatural entities and atheism means denial that such entities exist. Therefore, the correct form is:
In Soviet Russia, all-seeing eye watches you!
And, seeing what other article was in the front page, I'd say that:
Sure, I learned a lot from hacking, tinkering, and reading my way through High School and Middle School; but curiously enough, none of it counted as completed homework assignments. It certainly didn't earn me any sympathy from the teachers who's classes I was falling asleep in during the day.
Bah ! In my youth I slept four hours per night and never once fell asleep during class ! Recesses are for taking naps. And it helps to wear a lot of black so you have somewhere to rest your eyes when all the bright colors make your head hurt:).
Frankly, a lot of the objections I'm reading here sound like people who don't have any good study habits to pass on, don't much like learning or encouraging their children, and are content to let a dead end job become a dead end life. Sometimes I still come here clinging to a tiny, forlorn, dusty hope that Slashdot averages better than that - way to crush my hope guys! (And no, I'm not new here.)
Well, to be fair, it is pretty difficult for a mortal to not have a dead end life:).
That's one of the benefits of being a parent/adult who has finished their schooling and is working to feed/educate/entertain their children. When the kids grow up, get their own job and start paying their own way, THEN they can watch as much TV as they want on a school/work night.
Yeah, and they've learned the fine art of hypocrisy to boot:).
Ok, if the game plot/mechanics were specifically taylored to the nature of peer to peer networks, I imagine it could work. But given the limitations, you'd have a very specific type of game. What I think you would end up with is only a very loosely connected group of worlds rather than cells within a single, coherent game.
You can make either, but a network of connected worlds works better when cell servers go up and down - in a unified world certain cells becoming inaccessible will seem weird, to put it mildly. It also allows the cell network to grow better - a unified world needs to have the cell network reflect the geometry of the world to work well.
Perhaps it could be the MMOG version of the Web - worlds with links (portals) to other worlds ?
Owning the server doesn't necessarily equate to "power" unless you are worried about cheating.
It does - you can force a locally running program to do whatever you want, or, using Real Ultimate Power, remove the plug from the wall.
But I thought you said cheating wasn't a consideration.
It cannot possibly be prevented in a setup like that, so the game must be designed so that cheating is meaningless.
I would like to see a free MMOG idea that was even worth such an effort to design as p2p.
Well, if you can get the underlaying technology layer working well, then what's stopping you from designing your own ? Or joining an existing world and making your corner of it work differently ? That's one of the reasons I'm so interested in p2p-MMOG. It would reduce the barrier of entry significantly by removing the need to run a server.
But if the game is open source, anyone can start a free server. Anyone who dared charge for the game would quickly see people leaving for the free servers that are out there.
You do realize that this is a good thing for the players, right ?
There would have to be some technical requirement driving the P2P design. I don't see any real "social" barriers. Free hosting is not really that hard to find.
Free hosting that scales to thousands or tens of thousands of players and doesn't pull the plug when someone finds their kid engaged in cybersex in-game ? I don't think so.
Oh, gee, is that all? Seems to me that that is the difficult part. Not only do clients crash, but also disconnect, reconnect, etc. Any game with lots of players has clients connecting and disconnecting all the time. You're going to spend all your time repartitioning and synchronizing the game world. Not to mention all the game data that will be lost when a cell disappears leaving any player in it in limbo.
I'm talking about sandbox games, not the kind where cheating matters - think cyberspace, not World of Warcraft. With cheating meaningless, you can simply have the client reconnect to any cell it happens to know about, and these cells can take the clients word for the players state.
Of course, if the client maintained connections to more than one cell (for example, to the cell the player is currently on and every neighbouring cell), the only real question is to which of these neighbouring cells should the player be teleported ? THe collapsed part could simply be unavailable until that cell comes back.
If you don't care about making the gameworld a single space, you could even work such events into the game plotline - maybe the universe collapsed, and the cells are the remaining splinters, connected loosely to each other with ever-changing connections and popping in and out of existence randomly ? The players would then try to survive in this post-apocalyptic multiverse.
At some point you are going to need a dedicated "tracker." And you might as well just make that the game server. And if that server can't handle the whole game world, then you add another and have them control cells.
That costs money, so you'll have to make it somehow. It also means that you have all the power in the game (since you control the server on which everything depends), so no other user has any.
Having centralized game servers actually SOLVED the problems with peer to peer gaming... not the other way around.
It solved some technical issues, but added a lot of social ones. Basically, only large corporations can run MMOG servers, but nearly anyone can run a Gnutella client. I want to see a MMOG that does not depend on any such authority, but only from its players.
You're right. You'd have to at least partition the game world. But as I hope I showed, there are fundamental problem with P2P networks that make it totally unsuitable for modern massively multiplayer gaming.
But nothing says that modern massively multiplayer gaming needs to stay incompatible with the concept. Or that this thing has anything to do with modern MMORPGs - my interest is seeing if such a thing could be done as Free Open Source and without the need of central server (which always means that someone has final control over the game, and likely monthly fees as well).
NextGenTel is 100% evil, utterly incompetent and offer damn fast connections really cheap.
Except that they don't offer fast connections, not really. No matter how fast the ADSL part is, if the connection is throttled from there to the public Internet, the connection is not fast. Which means that this is an attempt at fraud.
And a peer to peer game like that would not work. Note that with bittorrent you don't have a connection to every other person in the swarm, which would be required to synchronize game data.
No. This is only required if each client needs to hold the whole gameworld. However, if you divide the gameworld into cells (the wolrd can still be one huge area, this division is purely an implementation detail), and assign each cell to a client, and make each client connect to the clients with neighbouring cells, then you can simply connect to the peer holding the cell you're currently on. You walk over its limits, and you connect to the peer holding the cell you're now on and disconnect from the old one (in practice you'd want to hold connections to the cells that are next to the one you're currently in to ensure smooth transitions and allowing you to see over the cell border when near it). Since each client is the authoritative source for its own cell data, it doesn't need to update anything besides the clients connected to it (and possibly the neighbouring cell), and the world scales infinitely (and of course each client can have more than one cell, depending on its capacity).
You still need to specify behavior for when parts of gameworld crash, for example.
And to make things worse, you are not guaranteed information in any particular order. Your client performance would only be as good as your weakest peer link. A peer to peer game would be quite unscalable beyond 2 or maybe 3 clients.
Like I hope I showed, this is purely a design issue, not a fundamental property of P2P networks.
Look at me! I'm white and American -- I shouldn't have to compete for my job!
I'm a Finnish librarian with a beautiful pale pink skin. That said, I don't think that anyone should have to run like crazy just to stay in place. Because that's what this "improve your skillset to compete" crap actually is.
The reason why government exists is to ensure the survival and wellbeing of its subjects. If it is unable to do that, it is time to replace it with one that does. The more I see the economy go to Hell because various governments cling to free trade and laissez-faire capitalism, the more willing I'm becoming to vote in the lunatic fringe.
If you find yourself sliding out of the job market, then get some more skills.
No amount of skills is going to offset an order of magnitude in living expenditures (and thus wage required to survive), especially since the Indians can simply acquire them as well. Besides, the positions demanding top skills go to the top people, and the chances are that you are not amongst them, no matter how much your ego may disagree.
...renewed arguments that Earth can't be more than a few thousand years old tops, since there's no way soft tissue would survive for millions of years ?
There's no topic on Slashdot which some atheist or theist wouldn't use to throw a (usually idiotic) barb at their opposition, and this one is basically begging for it. So let the flamefest begin !
Sorry but that is a total troll. You obviously haven't run Java apps in a hell of a long time. With generational and incremental gc these kind of pauses don't happen any more.
I have, with both 1.5 and 1.6 beta. The problem, like I said, is that when full collection is needed, the program needs to traverse the object network, bringing memory pages in from swap in a random pattern. What's worse, if a single page contains many objects, it could be brought in, pushed out, accessed again, and so on.
It's a fundamental incompatibility between garbage collection and swap.
What the FBI, CIA and NSA are looking for are truthful, honest people who will not be influenced by alcohol, drugs, money, or personal benefit at the sake of national security.
The problem with that is that someone who puts national security over his own interests is likely to put it above anyone else's interests too. In other words he'll happily torture you to get you to confess.
Maybe I'm being a bit too cynical here, but it seems to me that anyone fanatical enough to put his nation above his own interests should be kept from any position of power until he matures a bit, since letting him near them will likely end up causing more harm than good.
But a lot of those things have been polished in the recent Java 1.5 and will get even better in Java 1.6. UI got speedier, many bugs have been fixed, gc has been improved and most of all the performance in general is faster.
As long as you don't hit swap. Once you do, garbage collection lasts for minutes due to having to traverse nearly all of applications memory. I don't think that problem can be solved in an userspace app.
1) More consistency: a lot of Ajax code right of the bat deals just with different browser version and JavaScript versions, that's too many "if"s and "else"s to make it fun. With Java the developer has a clean slate work with, less workarounds means cleaner, more maintainable code.
Except that the API documentation lies. Graphics2D methods that are specified as never blocking block. Methods that are supposed to return on true on success always return false, despite being succesfull. And methods throw random, undocumented exceptions. Then there's this weird bug where image scaling takes 10 times as much time if the source image is not in sRGB color space. All this in Sun's own Java implementation. I hate to think what bugs will surface if the program is ran in other implementations.
So no, you don't get rid of workarounds in Java, at least in the GUI.
And I'll make it clear now I'm no fan of anime, hentai or any other related shite either.
Of course you're not. You happened by 4chan completely by accident, have never looked at any boards besides/b/, and keep on watching it just because of funny animal pictures. And to laugh at the sad geeks without lives who drool over the stuff.
I just think it goes slightly over the line from "geeky" into "just plain weird".
Worrying about your public image in the Internet under an alias goes slightly over the line from "lack of self-confidence" into "just plain sad";).
For the record: I visit 4chan, monstergirl and shoujoai.com, have written a Bash scripts to download the new pics from my favorite boards (not just 4chan either), have several gigabytes of hentai and furry (funny animal porn) pictures, spend my Friday nights looking for more, collect Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks despite not being social enough to find any other gamers and am proud of myself for this. Oh, and I'm a librarian.
From my sixth-floor apartment I stab at thee, Real Life !
Allowing users of your product complete freedom is a nice ideal, but it's not possible to do under the current laws unless you place no value on branding.
Laws have nothing to do with it, it's just base logic: if anyone can call their code (which, in the most extreme case contains not a single line of the original codebase it was derived from) "Firefox", then "Firefox" means absolutely nothing. So while a lot of stupid things can be blamed on the current legal system, this is not one of them.
I'm a regular 4chan/b/* reader, and that managed to actually gross me out more than anything I've seen on/b/.
Why ? Is drooling over a web browser mascot somehow inherently worse than drooling over cartoon characters ? Especially when a lot of those Firefox drawings are well-drawn and sexy ?
Besides I, for one, prefer this to Clippy, and welcome our new foxy web browser overlords.
I mean, it's just a fucking web browser.
Hmm. If we consider Firefox to have originated as Netscape Navigator, it was born in the year 1994. That makes it just 12 years old. In other words, these pics are all child porn !
The Hubbert peak. The end of the era of cheap energy. Oil won't run out, it'll just get more and more expensive to produce, taking up a larger and larger proportion of the economy.
Switch to nuclear and run vechiles with hydrogen, batteries or vegetable oil. The anti-nuclear morons will complain, but they will anyway no matter what you do. Or drill a deep hole in the ground, drop some water there and watch geothermal heat turn it to steam. Or build tidal or wave harnesses in coastal regions to harness said water motions. And so on.
The whole peak oil hysteria is caused because we humans are lazy and haven't bothered improving our energy production technology significantly in a century or so. Maybe it will give the long-needed kick in the rear to start making rational, rather than just money-making, choices in energy policy.
There will have to be something very valuable in space to justify the energy required to get there.
How about endless amount of sunlight that can be harnessed and beamed back to Earth or used to power factories in orbit or in Moon) ?
Yeah, and if someone invented a star trek replicator, but it had to be seeded with something to scan, the candy industry would freak out against them because people could copy their candy bars instead of buying them. But eventually, we all know what would happen.
Replicators would be declared illegal and anyone caught owning one would face decades of jail time and had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for compensation on imaginary losses to the candy industry. Unless, of course, he would settle out of court for a few thousand dollars worth of "protection". Which remains me, have the RIAA and MPAA already paid their license fees to Mafia for using its patented business model ?
If you get something for free, the terrorists have already won and communism rises from its grave.
Slashdot Mirror
No motherboard has ever died on me, despite being on almost continuously and generally being the cheapest crap money can buy. Just where do you get yours ?-)
Then you are clearly a pirate, and as we all know pirates like to hump little cabin boys, making you a pedophile as well. Furthermore, pirates spread terror, so you are a terrorist too. Rot in secret CIA prison after being tortured to death, you enemy combatant scum, you !
Now that is a mental image I didn't need !
Daess fis kount ass tortire fen ?-)
But will this increase or decrease the number of pornographic fan fiction stories featuring the two ?-)
Soviet Russia, being an atheistic state, cannot logically believe in the existence of demons, since they are supernatural entities and atheism means denial that such entities exist. Therefore, the correct form is:
In Soviet Russia, all-seeing eye watches you!
And, seeing what other article was in the front page, I'd say that:
In Corporate America, the Ear is upon you!
Bah ! In my youth I slept four hours per night and never once fell asleep during class ! Recesses are for taking naps. And it helps to wear a lot of black so you have somewhere to rest your eyes when all the bright colors make your head hurt :).
Think of the children, support wanton teenage sexual behavior !
And hands-on practical approach to sex education. I'd volunteer as a teacher, just for the good of the community ;).
Well, to be fair, it is pretty difficult for a mortal to not have a dead end life :).
Yeah, and they've learned the fine art of hypocrisy to boot :).
You can make either, but a network of connected worlds works better when cell servers go up and down - in a unified world certain cells becoming inaccessible will seem weird, to put it mildly. It also allows the cell network to grow better - a unified world needs to have the cell network reflect the geometry of the world to work well.
Perhaps it could be the MMOG version of the Web - worlds with links (portals) to other worlds ?
It does - you can force a locally running program to do whatever you want, or, using Real Ultimate Power, remove the plug from the wall.
It cannot possibly be prevented in a setup like that, so the game must be designed so that cheating is meaningless.
Well, if you can get the underlaying technology layer working well, then what's stopping you from designing your own ? Or joining an existing world and making your corner of it work differently ? That's one of the reasons I'm so interested in p2p-MMOG. It would reduce the barrier of entry significantly by removing the need to run a server.
You do realize that this is a good thing for the players, right ?
Free hosting that scales to thousands or tens of thousands of players and doesn't pull the plug when someone finds their kid engaged in cybersex in-game ? I don't think so.
I'm talking about sandbox games, not the kind where cheating matters - think cyberspace, not World of Warcraft. With cheating meaningless, you can simply have the client reconnect to any cell it happens to know about, and these cells can take the clients word for the players state.
Of course, if the client maintained connections to more than one cell (for example, to the cell the player is currently on and every neighbouring cell), the only real question is to which of these neighbouring cells should the player be teleported ? THe collapsed part could simply be unavailable until that cell comes back.
If you don't care about making the gameworld a single space, you could even work such events into the game plotline - maybe the universe collapsed, and the cells are the remaining splinters, connected loosely to each other with ever-changing connections and popping in and out of existence randomly ? The players would then try to survive in this post-apocalyptic multiverse.
That costs money, so you'll have to make it somehow. It also means that you have all the power in the game (since you control the server on which everything depends), so no other user has any.
It solved some technical issues, but added a lot of social ones. Basically, only large corporations can run MMOG servers, but nearly anyone can run a Gnutella client. I want to see a MMOG that does not depend on any such authority, but only from its players.
But nothing says that modern massively multiplayer gaming needs to stay incompatible with the concept. Or that this thing has anything to do with modern MMORPGs - my interest is seeing if such a thing could be done as Free Open Source and without the need of central server (which always means that someone has final control over the game, and likely monthly fees as well).
Except that they don't offer fast connections, not really. No matter how fast the ADSL part is, if the connection is throttled from there to the public Internet, the connection is not fast. Which means that this is an attempt at fraud.
No. This is only required if each client needs to hold the whole gameworld. However, if you divide the gameworld into cells (the wolrd can still be one huge area, this division is purely an implementation detail), and assign each cell to a client, and make each client connect to the clients with neighbouring cells, then you can simply connect to the peer holding the cell you're currently on. You walk over its limits, and you connect to the peer holding the cell you're now on and disconnect from the old one (in practice you'd want to hold connections to the cells that are next to the one you're currently in to ensure smooth transitions and allowing you to see over the cell border when near it). Since each client is the authoritative source for its own cell data, it doesn't need to update anything besides the clients connected to it (and possibly the neighbouring cell), and the world scales infinitely (and of course each client can have more than one cell, depending on its capacity).
You still need to specify behavior for when parts of gameworld crash, for example.
Like I hope I showed, this is purely a design issue, not a fundamental property of P2P networks.
I'm a Finnish librarian with a beautiful pale pink skin. That said, I don't think that anyone should have to run like crazy just to stay in place. Because that's what this "improve your skillset to compete" crap actually is.
The reason why government exists is to ensure the survival and wellbeing of its subjects. If it is unable to do that, it is time to replace it with one that does. The more I see the economy go to Hell because various governments cling to free trade and laissez-faire capitalism, the more willing I'm becoming to vote in the lunatic fringe.
No amount of skills is going to offset an order of magnitude in living expenditures (and thus wage required to survive), especially since the Indians can simply acquire them as well. Besides, the positions demanding top skills go to the top people, and the chances are that you are not amongst them, no matter how much your ego may disagree.
...renewed arguments that Earth can't be more than a few thousand years old tops, since there's no way soft tissue would survive for millions of years ?
There's no topic on Slashdot which some atheist or theist wouldn't use to throw a (usually idiotic) barb at their opposition, and this one is basically begging for it. So let the flamefest begin !
I have, with both 1.5 and 1.6 beta. The problem, like I said, is that when full collection is needed, the program needs to traverse the object network, bringing memory pages in from swap in a random pattern. What's worse, if a single page contains many objects, it could be brought in, pushed out, accessed again, and so on.
It's a fundamental incompatibility between garbage collection and swap.
The problem with that is that someone who puts national security over his own interests is likely to put it above anyone else's interests too. In other words he'll happily torture you to get you to confess.
Maybe I'm being a bit too cynical here, but it seems to me that anyone fanatical enough to put his nation above his own interests should be kept from any position of power until he matures a bit, since letting him near them will likely end up causing more harm than good.
As long as you don't hit swap. Once you do, garbage collection lasts for minutes due to having to traverse nearly all of applications memory. I don't think that problem can be solved in an userspace app.
Except that the API documentation lies. Graphics2D methods that are specified as never blocking block. Methods that are supposed to return on true on success always return false, despite being succesfull. And methods throw random, undocumented exceptions. Then there's this weird bug where image scaling takes 10 times as much time if the source image is not in sRGB color space. All this in Sun's own Java implementation. I hate to think what bugs will surface if the program is ran in other implementations.
So no, you don't get rid of workarounds in Java, at least in the GUI.
And OS-tans ? What's your take on them ?-)
Of course you're not. You happened by 4chan completely by accident, have never looked at any boards besides /b/, and keep on watching it just because of funny animal pictures. And to laugh at the sad geeks without lives who drool over the stuff.
Worrying about your public image in the Internet under an alias goes slightly over the line from "lack of self-confidence" into "just plain sad" ;).
For the record: I visit 4chan, monstergirl and shoujoai.com, have written a Bash scripts to download the new pics from my favorite boards (not just 4chan either), have several gigabytes of hentai and furry (funny animal porn) pictures, spend my Friday nights looking for more, collect Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks despite not being social enough to find any other gamers and am proud of myself for this. Oh, and I'm a librarian.
From my sixth-floor apartment I stab at thee, Real Life !
Laws have nothing to do with it, it's just base logic: if anyone can call their code (which, in the most extreme case contains not a single line of the original codebase it was derived from) "Firefox", then "Firefox" means absolutely nothing. So while a lot of stupid things can be blamed on the current legal system, this is not one of them.
I don't. What does "f*ck" mean ?
Why ? Is drooling over a web browser mascot somehow inherently worse than drooling over cartoon characters ? Especially when a lot of those Firefox drawings are well-drawn and sexy ?
Besides I, for one, prefer this to Clippy, and welcome our new foxy web browser overlords.
Hmm. If we consider Firefox to have originated as Netscape Navigator, it was born in the year 1994. That makes it just 12 years old. In other words, these pics are all child porn !
Please think of the children, ban Firefox !
Switch to nuclear and run vechiles with hydrogen, batteries or vegetable oil. The anti-nuclear morons will complain, but they will anyway no matter what you do. Or drill a deep hole in the ground, drop some water there and watch geothermal heat turn it to steam. Or build tidal or wave harnesses in coastal regions to harness said water motions. And so on.
The whole peak oil hysteria is caused because we humans are lazy and haven't bothered improving our energy production technology significantly in a century or so. Maybe it will give the long-needed kick in the rear to start making rational, rather than just money-making, choices in energy policy.
How about endless amount of sunlight that can be harnessed and beamed back to Earth or used to power factories in orbit or in Moon) ?
Replicators would be declared illegal and anyone caught owning one would face decades of jail time and had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for compensation on imaginary losses to the candy industry. Unless, of course, he would settle out of court for a few thousand dollars worth of "protection". Which remains me, have the RIAA and MPAA already paid their license fees to Mafia for using its patented business model ?
If you get something for free, the terrorists have already won and communism rises from its grave.