I once knew a girl who spent tons of time playing.... Runescape. I tried it at her suggestion and decided that it was the most mind-numbingly boring thing I'd ever attempted. So why did she play?
"She was away from home, didn't know too many people, and probably used it as a social outlet." The preceding sentence is likely true, but it's also a gross oversimplification. It is not as though she had any respect for the people she interacted with in the MMO world: She said they were all "idiot teenagers." But then, this is a girl who freely admitted that many of her real-life 'friends' were people who were younger than she was or who she considered not to be terribly intelligent: She liked to surround herself with idiots so that she looked better to herself by comparison. Runescape was a convenient idiot-zoo for her.
>why do so many people move to the U.S. versus, say Europe or Japan?
There are many immigrants moving to Europe, and many Europeans aren't happy about that: There have been problems. Think French riots, Turks in Germany, "Swedish jobs are for Swedes," and new Dutch immigration laws. It is likely that many countries will follow the Netherlands' lead.
And all that's nothing next to Japan, which is famously xenophobic. To preach national and racial superiority is a great deal more mainstream there than it is in the U.S. Japan is investing so heavily in robotics, for example, largely because it'd rather have machines do work in the country than Filipino immigrants.
I expect that much of this difference is because the U.S., unlike European countries and unlike Japan, is not a nation founded on a unique existing culture or an ethnic identity.
Good question. Not sure of all the answers, but I'll help as much as I can.
First off, PRAM = Phase change RAM.
PRAM is a writable DVD on a chip. It works by heating and cooling material at different rates. By annealing the stuff appropriately, you can cause it to enter either an amorphous or a crystaline state. These two states differ in two ways: Reflectivity and conductivity. You can read and write either with an optical or an electrical system. On a DVD-R, you write a bit by heating with a laser; you read a bit by bouncing a laser off; if it's crystaline stuff you're hitting, it bounces off like a mirror; if it's amorphous, you get less back. On a PRAM chip, this stuff is lined up in an array of cells; you write by heating a cell with a pulse of current shaped to give the correct cooling profile, and you read, in essence, with an ohm-meter.
All that heating sounds like it sucks a lot of power. But then, MRAM requires pretty substantial currents to generate the magnetic fields required to flip the magnets as well, so power consumption on both PRAM and MRAM are, as far as I know, actually about the same.
PRAM does have the advantage of multi-level recording. In my earlier description, I implied that a cell is either entirely in the amorphous state or the crystaline state. In fact, some percentage of the cell is in one state and some percentage is in the other. It is possible, then, to with four levels store two bits in a single cell. I overheard people talking about a 16-level four-bit cell the other day. You can't do that with MRAM.
Nevertheless, they're both contenders, and as far as I know neither is clearly superior. Some companies are researching both.
Also, neither will ever be the "Perfect RAM." Neither will oust DRAM for density or SRAM for speed.
(Whosoever knows more than the above is invited to post a reply.)
...which is funny -- because, before IBM sold the brand name to Lenovo, guess where the laptops were made?
(Hint: Not Ohio.)
This is just politics, pure, xenophobic, and simple.
It's true that you need to watch your back when doing business in China. I've had too many Chinese friends, with too many frightening my-dad-the-doctor-was-approached-to-sell-organs-on -the-black-market type stories to be naive about that. There are plenty of good people, but Communism, poverty, and the greedy allure of soul-crushing Capitalism got together and twisted China into a horrendously corrupt anything-for-a-buck place that makes Enron's board room look like an ivory tower. It makes me thank God for my heretofore suburban American life. But that doesn't mean that Lenovo is a disreputable business, and it certainly doesn't imply that other suppliers should be trusted any more.
I personally own a Dell. My company gave me a Thinkpad. The Thinkpad has a broken monitor latch (plastic). The Dell has thermal problems that cause hard drives to fail with annoying regularity. So neither is perfect. But, broken latch notwithstanding, the Thinkpad feels solid. It also has the perfect dimensions for a laptop, and it runs Debian like a champ -- with rare kernel support for my wifi adapter! (A Cisco Aero, if you're in the market). So of the two, I'd take the Thinkpad.
Besides: When you're running MS Windows as your OS, worrying about the security of your hardware seems like misplaced attention! Why would Beijing design motherboards when they can just hire script kiddies?
If you are nervous, you project, subconsciously, the message that you think you're doing something inappropriate. Other people, also subconsciously, hear that message. There's a hint of sweat on the palms or stutter in the speech that you might not be conscious of, but which, if you're nervous, you will undoubtedly have.
If you're nervous, guys, she'll get nervous, and that's when the HR-calling trigger finger gets itchy. If instead you are relaxed, she will be relaxed. Attitudes are contagious.
(This applies everywhere! Cop pull you over? In a job interview? Everybody runs on instinct!)
>If you don't consider Pacific islanders or native Australians Asian, I'd like to hear what your definition of Asian is. Do you include Israel? India? Russia?
People use words for geography as codewords for race. By "Asian" he probably means "Han." And because of the way geography has shaped the flow and spread of culture, racial "Han-ness" is a pretty good indicator for other cultural characteristics as well. Australians tend to be white instead of Han, and they tend to use diatonic instead of pentatonic scales. That's it.
Group identity is important to people, but it's fundamentally "other"-ist -- race-ist, sex-ist, etc. It's how it works. If we choose transcendent identities like "enlightened person" then sometimes we can get past it. Unfortunately, geographic labels like "Asian" or "European" have too much history and carry too many connotations to be transcendent, and will naturally alienate people.
The other thing which I should acknowledge is that I started to play with graphics programming in the era of the TNT2, and have never had access to hardware which supported either vertex or pixel shaders. I've heard that, since that time, the DirectX API has been made cleaner, and I've also heard that DirectX has done a better job of incorporating vertex/pixel shader support than does OGL, which does so via extensions. So things may have changed since the time that I played with both APIs, and DX may be much nicer now.
I claim no great amounts of experience in corporate America: I am a college student. However, I have had three different internships in three different large corporations. The first was in I.T. for a securities company; the second was as an assistant to a Department Manager for an automaker; my third and current is as an electrical engineer doing VLSI design. From what I have seen, management is concerned primarily with self and departmental image, and managers try above all to minimize "black eyes." Managers shield those below them from politics whenever possible, and try to maximize the amount of company resources that their departments receive, for the benefit of themselves and their employees. The primary decision required is how to allocate resources (mainly employee-time) so as to create the most visible forms of success. What transpires between managers is essentially business-colored politics; visible 'successes' create political capital.
I have an additional complain with DirectX. It's just a royal pain to work with. You need to fill out huge structs to do anything. It's generally messy. And ugly. OpenGL on the other hand is nice to work with. I never understand why games get written in DX instead of OGL...
Lights out for PPC?
on
IBM Opts for AMD
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Better question: Is this lights out for the Power line?
IBM seems to be giving up on their Power cores. That's what concerns me, because it looked like they had a big shot of gaining territory in the gaming-and-entertainment market.
You do have a point. Men are told to take pride in drunken stupidity, and too many do. But women have to deal with at least as many terrible role models as we do, and probably more. Example: Do be careful about that "liberated" part. My college, an ivy, is full of girls who didn't date in high school and who have belatedly decided to overcompensate, under the delusion that self-confident women act like characters from Sex and the City. I know; I dated a girl who aspired to be just that (and learned the hard way that, "if you think time will change [her] ways, don't wait too long.") So -- society screws up men, but it also does plenty to screw up women! (This makes the feat of becoming a decent person, man or woman, all the more impressive.)
There is nothing wrong with using computer games to tell stories!
Yes, Aeris' death was inevitable; yes, the backstory would come out regardless of how you chose to "interact." I don't care. It's the story. Tell me your story, Squaresoft; I want to play along.
Unstructured worlds, in which the player can do whatever he pleases, are often held up as a platonic ideal for roleplaying games. It sounds good, but it's not what I want. What happens when you give players a whole world in which to do as they please? Look at MMOs: It just feels like mindless dungeon-crawling. Look at GTA: They give you a whole city, and it just degenerates, inevitably, into running-around killing cops for no larger purpose. That's not what will keep me interested. Keep me close to a story arc. That's why I'm here.
A good game asks players to make choices; it's true -- but it's easy to present choices: What's hard is to make those choices matter. If more people looked at games as a storytelling medium -- if more people emphasized the continuity of computer games with older media like film and the novel -- then I think we'd have more good single-player games.
"Between Germany and Russia" has been a bad place for most of modern European history: Poland's woes are simply geo-political. The men of Poland are not Polacks; they are Poles -- and the country that cracked the Enigma code machines does not build screen-door submarines!
To the "conservative" Anonymous Coward: The "liberal's" comment (dispite his subsequent research) was really a reference to George W. Bush's draft-dodging during the Vietnam War. Either you are feigning ignorance, or you truly did not understand his comment. I will assume that you are not an entirely stupid man, and that you are simply feigning ignorace in order to exasperate the "liberal" poster. You have likely succeeded. Well done.
Your argument about Vietnam signals that you never had a stake in the war. Let's use an example in which you do have a stake. In many ways, the Iraq War is similar to the Vietnam War: There is no clear end in sight, and no exit strategy. It is a war fought in a third-world country against enemies using guerilla tactics, whose politics we do not adequately comprehend. So: Why are you not fighting? Imagine that you were in the army in Iraq, and that you were killed by a roadside bomb. Your future is gone. Anyone who cares about you is wrecked. Your body has been torn apart. You are dead. Was it worth it?
(Those who advocate war should be required to fight in it.)
Total Annihilation was an RTS player's RTS. That TA inspired players, years later, to rebuild it as the opensource TA:Spring is a testament to its greatness.
But it wasn't as accessible as Blizzard's games. The resource system was less intuitive: The key wasn't amounts of money -- something with which everyone is familiar -- but with rates of change (good Starcraft players understand this as well, but it's a point made more explicitly in the TA resource system). TA also had no real campaign to speak of: Sure, there was a single-player mode with missions, but there were certainly no cutscenes, no important characters, and no story save "Core uploaded their minds to machines. Arm saw this as an abomination. They are now locked in a bitter war of total annihilation." Instead, TA relied almost exclusively on multiplayer (Remember the Boneyards?), which was fine for competitive players, but which doesn't provide much of a sandbox free of ego-crushing defeat to learn in.
So to steal TFA's catchphrase, TA did not have Blizzard's secret sauce. Cavedog had another spice all it's own. Damn shame the lead developers got lured away and the whole ship went under.
I second that; PDF Creator is quite good. It's not 100% flawless, but it works better than the (admittedly older) versions of the Adobe PDF printer I tried to use!
It's just the recordable ones that expire, because the patterns are formed by an organic ink which degrades with time (and which some bacteria like to snack on). Store-bought CDs have physical pits in them which will not go away short of mechanical damage.
Actually, you'd be surprised. Nothing gets into your cells and screws up your DNA like a virus.
Have you heard of HPV (Human Papilloma Virus)? It's a very-common (family) of sexually-transmitted viruses. We've known for a long time that certain types of HPV are the cause of cervical and ovarian cancer in women and testicular cancer in men (e.g.: these cancers are STDs), and more recent research has shown that HPV is also linked to certain forms of skin cancer.
In other words: Yes, cancer can be and often is caused by infectious diseases!
A lot of people say that the future is optical, but I'm not sure the physics allows it. Optical wavelengths are much, much longer than is the wavelength of the electron until you get up to x-rays. That means that feature sizes on some hypothetical optical chip would necessarily be much larger than are feature sizes on an electronic chip. Fiber might be appropriate, as you said, for tying chips together on the motherboard, but that's about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I once knew a girl who spent tons of time playing.... Runescape. I tried it at her suggestion and decided that it was the most mind-numbingly boring thing I'd ever attempted. So why did she play?
"She was away from home, didn't know too many people, and probably used it as a social outlet." The preceding sentence is likely true, but it's also a gross oversimplification. It is not as though she had any respect for the people she interacted with in the MMO world: She said they were all "idiot teenagers." But then, this is a girl who freely admitted that many of her real-life 'friends' were people who were younger than she was or who she considered not to be terribly intelligent: She liked to surround herself with idiots so that she looked better to herself by comparison. Runescape was a convenient idiot-zoo for her.
OK, I'm stumped.
I just thought he saw the bump and the set, and figured he'd finish up with the spike.
>why do so many people move to the U.S. versus, say Europe or Japan?
There are many immigrants moving to Europe, and many Europeans aren't happy about that: There have been problems. Think French riots, Turks in Germany, "Swedish jobs are for Swedes," and new Dutch immigration laws. It is likely that many countries will follow the Netherlands' lead.
And all that's nothing next to Japan, which is famously xenophobic. To preach national and racial superiority is a great deal more mainstream there than it is in the U.S. Japan is investing so heavily in robotics, for example, largely because it'd rather have machines do work in the country than Filipino immigrants.
I expect that much of this difference is because the U.S., unlike European countries and unlike Japan, is not a nation founded on a unique existing culture or an ethnic identity.
Good question. Not sure of all the answers, but I'll help as much as I can.
First off, PRAM = Phase change RAM.
PRAM is a writable DVD on a chip. It works by heating and cooling material at different rates. By annealing the stuff appropriately, you can cause it to enter either an amorphous or a crystaline state. These two states differ in two ways: Reflectivity and conductivity. You can read and write either with an optical or an electrical system. On a DVD-R, you write a bit by heating with a laser; you read a bit by bouncing a laser off; if it's crystaline stuff you're hitting, it bounces off like a mirror; if it's amorphous, you get less back. On a PRAM chip, this stuff is lined up in an array of cells; you write by heating a cell with a pulse of current shaped to give the correct cooling profile, and you read, in essence, with an ohm-meter.
All that heating sounds like it sucks a lot of power. But then, MRAM requires pretty substantial currents to generate the magnetic fields required to flip the magnets as well, so power consumption on both PRAM and MRAM are, as far as I know, actually about the same.
PRAM does have the advantage of multi-level recording. In my earlier description, I implied that a cell is either entirely in the amorphous state or the crystaline state. In fact, some percentage of the cell is in one state and some percentage is in the other. It is possible, then, to with four levels store two bits in a single cell. I overheard people talking about a 16-level four-bit cell the other day. You can't do that with MRAM.
Nevertheless, they're both contenders, and as far as I know neither is clearly superior. Some companies are researching both.
Also, neither will ever be the "Perfect RAM." Neither will oust DRAM for density or SRAM for speed.
(Whosoever knows more than the above is invited to post a reply.)
...which is funny -- because, before IBM sold the brand name to Lenovo, guess where the laptops were made?
(Hint: Not Ohio.)
This is just politics, pure, xenophobic, and simple.
It's true that you need to watch your back when doing business in China. I've had too many Chinese friends, with too many frightening my-dad-the-doctor-was-approached-to-sell-organs-on -the-black-market type stories to be naive about that. There are plenty of good people, but Communism, poverty, and the greedy allure of soul-crushing Capitalism got together and twisted China into a horrendously corrupt anything-for-a-buck place that makes Enron's board room look like an ivory tower. It makes me thank God for my heretofore suburban American life. But that doesn't mean that Lenovo is a disreputable business, and it certainly doesn't imply that other suppliers should be trusted any more.
I personally own a Dell. My company gave me a Thinkpad. The Thinkpad has a broken monitor latch (plastic). The Dell has thermal problems that cause hard drives to fail with annoying regularity. So neither is perfect. But, broken latch notwithstanding, the Thinkpad feels solid. It also has the perfect dimensions for a laptop, and it runs Debian like a champ -- with rare kernel support for my wifi adapter! (A Cisco Aero, if you're in the market). So of the two, I'd take the Thinkpad.
Besides: When you're running MS Windows as your OS, worrying about the security of your hardware seems like misplaced attention! Why would Beijing design motherboards when they can just hire script kiddies?
People smell fear.
If you are nervous, you project, subconsciously, the message that you think you're doing something inappropriate. Other people, also subconsciously, hear that message. There's a hint of sweat on the palms or stutter in the speech that you might not be conscious of, but which, if you're nervous, you will undoubtedly have.
If you're nervous, guys, she'll get nervous, and that's when the HR-calling trigger finger gets itchy. If instead you are relaxed, she will be relaxed. Attitudes are contagious.
(This applies everywhere! Cop pull you over? In a job interview? Everybody runs on instinct!)
> 'Linux believers will have to reach out beyond self-absorbed geeks who learns Klingon and attends science fiction conventions in his spare time.'
It seems he advocates reaching beyond noun-verb agreement as well... and he's not much for making pronouns agree either.
>If you don't consider Pacific islanders or native Australians Asian, I'd like to hear what your definition of Asian is. Do you include Israel? India? Russia?
People use words for geography as codewords for race. By "Asian" he probably means "Han." And because of the way geography has shaped the flow and spread of culture, racial "Han-ness" is a pretty good indicator for other cultural characteristics as well. Australians tend to be white instead of Han, and they tend to use diatonic instead of pentatonic scales. That's it.
Group identity is important to people, but it's fundamentally "other"-ist -- race-ist, sex-ist, etc. It's how it works. If we choose transcendent identities like "enlightened person" then sometimes we can get past it. Unfortunately, geographic labels like "Asian" or "European" have too much history and carry too many connotations to be transcendent, and will naturally alienate people.
The other thing which I should acknowledge is that I started to play with graphics programming in the era of the TNT2, and have never had access to hardware which supported either vertex or pixel shaders. I've heard that, since that time, the DirectX API has been made cleaner, and I've also heard that DirectX has done a better job of incorporating vertex/pixel shader support than does OGL, which does so via extensions. So things may have changed since the time that I played with both APIs, and DX may be much nicer now.
I claim no great amounts of experience in corporate America: I am a college student. However, I have had three different internships in three different large corporations. The first was in I.T. for a securities company; the second was as an assistant to a Department Manager for an automaker; my third and current is as an electrical engineer doing VLSI design. From what I have seen, management is concerned primarily with self and departmental image, and managers try above all to minimize "black eyes." Managers shield those below them from politics whenever possible, and try to maximize the amount of company resources that their departments receive, for the benefit of themselves and their employees. The primary decision required is how to allocate resources (mainly employee-time) so as to create the most visible forms of success. What transpires between managers is essentially business-colored politics; visible 'successes' create political capital.
Oui? Non? What 'decisions' are so mind-blowing?
I have an additional complain with DirectX. It's just a royal pain to work with. You need to fill out huge structs to do anything. It's generally messy. And ugly. OpenGL on the other hand is nice to work with. I never understand why games get written in DX instead of OGL...
Better question: Is this lights out for the Power line?
IBM seems to be giving up on their Power cores. That's what concerns me, because it looked like they had a big shot of gaining territory in the gaming-and-entertainment market.
You do have a point. Men are told to take pride in drunken stupidity, and too many do. But women have to deal with at least as many terrible role models as we do, and probably more. Example: Do be careful about that "liberated" part. My college, an ivy, is full of girls who didn't date in high school and who have belatedly decided to overcompensate, under the delusion that self-confident women act like characters from Sex and the City. I know; I dated a girl who aspired to be just that (and learned the hard way that, "if you think time will change [her] ways, don't wait too long.") So -- society screws up men, but it also does plenty to screw up women! (This makes the feat of becoming a decent person, man or woman, all the more impressive.)
There is nothing wrong with using computer games to tell stories!
Yes, Aeris' death was inevitable; yes, the backstory would come out regardless of how you chose to "interact." I don't care. It's the story. Tell me your story, Squaresoft; I want to play along.
Unstructured worlds, in which the player can do whatever he pleases, are often held up as a platonic ideal for roleplaying games. It sounds good, but it's not what I want. What happens when you give players a whole world in which to do as they please? Look at MMOs: It just feels like mindless dungeon-crawling. Look at GTA: They give you a whole city, and it just degenerates, inevitably, into running-around killing cops for no larger purpose. That's not what will keep me interested. Keep me close to a story arc. That's why I'm here.
A good game asks players to make choices; it's true -- but it's easy to present choices: What's hard is to make those choices matter. If more people looked at games as a storytelling medium -- if more people emphasized the continuity of computer games with older media like film and the novel -- then I think we'd have more good single-player games.
Your post deserves applause, AC.
"Between Germany and Russia" has been a bad place for most of modern European history: Poland's woes are simply geo-political. The men of Poland are not Polacks; they are Poles -- and the country that cracked the Enigma code machines does not build screen-door submarines!
To the "conservative" Anonymous Coward: The "liberal's" comment (dispite his subsequent research) was really a reference to George W. Bush's draft-dodging during the Vietnam War. Either you are feigning ignorance, or you truly did not understand his comment. I will assume that you are not an entirely stupid man, and that you are simply feigning ignorace in order to exasperate the "liberal" poster. You have likely succeeded. Well done.
Your argument about Vietnam signals that you never had a stake in the war. Let's use an example in which you do have a stake. In many ways, the Iraq War is similar to the Vietnam War: There is no clear end in sight, and no exit strategy. It is a war fought in a third-world country against enemies using guerilla tactics, whose politics we do not adequately comprehend. So: Why are you not fighting? Imagine that you were in the army in Iraq, and that you were killed by a roadside bomb. Your future is gone. Anyone who cares about you is wrecked. Your body has been torn apart. You are dead. Was it worth it?
(Those who advocate war should be required to fight in it.)
In what twisted world do you learn about bukakke before you learn about Starcraft?
I'm sorry, man, you must have it rough...
As for Sobriety Checkpoints...I think they are the evil product of cowardly turds who fear what they are told to fear.
Clearly, you've never been close to an alcoholic.
Total Annihilation was an RTS player's RTS. That TA inspired players, years later, to rebuild it as the opensource TA:Spring is a testament to its greatness.
But it wasn't as accessible as Blizzard's games. The resource system was less intuitive: The key wasn't amounts of money -- something with which everyone is familiar -- but with rates of change (good Starcraft players understand this as well, but it's a point made more explicitly in the TA resource system). TA also had no real campaign to speak of: Sure, there was a single-player mode with missions, but there were certainly no cutscenes, no important characters, and no story save "Core uploaded their minds to machines. Arm saw this as an abomination. They are now locked in a bitter war of total annihilation." Instead, TA relied almost exclusively on multiplayer (Remember the Boneyards?), which was fine for competitive players, but which doesn't provide much of a sandbox free of ego-crushing defeat to learn in.
So to steal TFA's catchphrase, TA did not have Blizzard's secret sauce. Cavedog had another spice all it's own. Damn shame the lead developers got lured away and the whole ship went under.
I second that; PDF Creator is quite good. It's not 100% flawless, but it works better than the (admittedly older) versions of the Adobe PDF printer I tried to use!
It's just the recordable ones that expire, because the patterns are formed by an organic ink which degrades with time (and which some bacteria like to snack on). Store-bought CDs have physical pits in them which will not go away short of mechanical damage.
Actually, you'd be surprised. Nothing gets into your cells and screws up your DNA like a virus.
Have you heard of HPV (Human Papilloma Virus)? It's a very-common (family) of sexually-transmitted viruses. We've known for a long time that certain types of HPV are the cause of cervical and ovarian cancer in women and testicular cancer in men (e.g.: these cancers are STDs), and more recent research has shown that HPV is also linked to certain forms of skin cancer.
In other words: Yes, cancer can be and often is caused by infectious diseases!
A lot of people say that the future is optical, but I'm not sure the physics allows it. Optical wavelengths are much, much longer than is the wavelength of the electron until you get up to x-rays. That means that feature sizes on some hypothetical optical chip would necessarily be much larger than are feature sizes on an electronic chip. Fiber might be appropriate, as you said, for tying chips together on the motherboard, but that's about it.