"God particle" appears to have originated in Dell Publishing's censorship of "goddamn particle", which was originally chosen because of the difficulty faced by particle physicists in producing an excitation of the Higgs field. Had the title of the book instead been The G.D. Particle, there probably wouldn't have needed to be as much "sex[ing] up".
Science proceeds toward understanding of nature that is less wrong* over time. So it's very probable that Einstein didn't have the whole story.
Aristotle was wrong about the relationship between mass and acceleration due to gravity. Galileo Galilei proved him wrong. Galileo was wrong about gravity being independent of location. Isaac Newton proved him wrong. Newton was wrong about the effect of gravity at what we now call relativistic speeds. Albert Einstein proved him wrong. Einstein was still wrong about "God doesn't play dice with the world." Each of them stood on giants' shoulders to become less wrong.
For cooperative games it's tolerable, but not optimal depending on the game.
Agreed.
In [some action RPGs for Super NES, PlayStation, and PlayStation 2], if any player has the menu open, gameplay basically pauses
Blame those particular games' developers for that. The solution going forward is not to remove the possibility of split-screen but to fix shoddy menu design. Arrange the menu to fit in one player's half of the screen, and pause only when the menu button is held down for a second. This may have been too much to handle on the Super NES, with its 64K of VRAM and three usable scrolling layers, but the hardware limit must have been overcome between the fourth and fifth generations, as GoldenEye starts to get it right.
Windows is the only multi-window operating system I could find installed on detachable laptops. The other operating system on detachable laptops is Android, which per Google CDD has a window management policy of all maximized all the time except on those few apps specifically coded for Samsung's proprietary extensions.
One is more likely to own four controllers than four gaming PCs.
Why wouldn't you have a PC for each person in your household?
For one thing, PC != gaming PC. An older laptop with Intel integrated graphics is fine for homework, Facebook, and games from the OpenGL 1 era (pre-2006), but unlikely to make a good gaming PC for recent games. For another, by "person in your household" did you include only residents or also visitors?
My question is, with mid-level machines coming with 16gig of RAM, why would I need compression at all?
Because not all machines are mid-level. With a lot of smaller machines, especially phones, tablets, and detachable laptops, the 1-2 GB that comes soldered on when you buy it is all you get.
I'm not afraid. DriveSpace had the DoubleGuard feature, which patched MS-DOS to add canaries around critical file system data structures in RAM. This saved my bacon a few times when I was developing graphics code and accidentally introduced undefined behavior.
What makes people like you think that the O/S should be held responsible for buggy applications?
If applications are included with the default install of an operating system distribution, such as Edge with Windows 10, then of course the distributor is responsible for them. And if the bug is in the standard library provided with a compiler, it's the fault of the compiler publisher, which is often also the operating system publisher.
ObZram: Once RAM compression becomes commonplace, a memory allocator that zeroes out recently freed memory will be more space-efficient. A standard library that does not do this when under memory pressure will be considered "buggy", even if it's published by the operating system publisher.
Single level storage - a single address space for everything, and let the dedicated I/O controller sort out what needs to be in memory at any one time.
In a single-level storage model, the main RAM acts as a cache for mmap'd disks. The compressed part of RAM would then act as an additional cache level, which reduces the number of capacity misses that need to reach the disk.
Or, just put 8+GB of RAM in your machine
That's fine on a recent desktop, not so fine on an older desktop with few slots or on a compact or detachable laptop with soldered-in RAM.
On a laptop or tablet, the backlight probably draws far more juice than the CPU. So if the CPU can complete a task more quickly by not hitting the HDD or eMMC as often, the backlight won't need to be on as long, which saves power. I wonder whether this is a simple enough task to be put on the little cores in ARM's big-little configuration.
Eventually they'll sell you a box that "inspires you to think of the game you'd like to play", but there'll be nothing in the box
Do you mean a direction like WarioWare DIY? It's shorter than the previous WarioWare games but comes with a built-in modding tool. Or Super Mario Maker?
They also can't start their tabletop role playing games unless they bring their books and dice and character sheets.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, those are cheap enough that the DM can afford a spare copy of the core books, the current campaign's sourcebooks, and set of dice. In addition, unlike the family PC, tabletop RPG materials have only a single purpose, which means someone else in the household is unlikely to need to use them for some other purpose that night.
Provided your family is rich enough to buy stations for all gamers in the household plus whomever they have over.
If they play computer games together they bring computers or have left a rig at the friend's house that they regularly play at.
"[Having] left a rig at the friend's house" is a bit more expensive for computer games than for tabletop games. One is more likely to own four controllers than four gaming PCs.
OK, you win, s/16/18/g. Or which countries require drivers to be 21 or older? I think CronoCloud's point is that by the time one has a bachelor's degree in any field related to professional video game development, one is old enough to drive and ought to be rich enough to pay for driving lessons, a car, and insurance.
Do any other than Saudi Arabia require drivers to be male?
Or would you recommend creating the vector animation in Flash, rendering to AVI, and sending that to the viewer as MP4 and WebM? That not only bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests)
You can export directly to other video formats with Flash / ToonBoom (etc) and publish those to YouTube
That's what "bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests)". In an era when more people are browsing the Internet over a connection with a limit of 2, 3, 5, or 10 GB per month, a usable vector animation solution becomes helpful. (I said "rendering to AVI" but meant more generally rendering to any high-quality intermediate that can be transcoded to smaller sizes.)
[Context: drinkypoo's claim that split-screen is irrelevant because tablets have replaced consoles despite a touch screen's unsuitability for certain genres]
Or are people actually buying external gamepads like MOGA for use with their tablets and phones?
Do you see people using them on public transportation, or when waiting? Then no. [...] if I'm going to buy a game that would be played best with physical controls, [...] that's what the Vita is for.
In the three years that the PlayStation Vita has been out, I haven't seen one of those on public transportation either.
Slashdot Mirror
Likewise, NEWTON WAS NOT WRONG! That was the foundation for more than 200 years, from 1687 to 1915.
"God particle" appears to have originated in Dell Publishing's censorship of "goddamn particle", which was originally chosen because of the difficulty faced by particle physicists in producing an excitation of the Higgs field. Had the title of the book instead been The G.D. Particle, there probably wouldn't have needed to be as much "sex[ing] up".
So take your pick, is Einstein wrong
Science proceeds toward understanding of nature that is less wrong* over time. So it's very probable that Einstein didn't have the whole story.
Aristotle was wrong about the relationship between mass and acceleration due to gravity. Galileo Galilei proved him wrong. Galileo was wrong about gravity being independent of location. Isaac Newton proved him wrong. Newton was wrong about the effect of gravity at what we now call relativistic speeds. Albert Einstein proved him wrong. Einstein was still wrong about "God doesn't play dice with the world." Each of them stood on giants' shoulders to become less wrong.
* Yes, "less wrong" is a thing. Assuming that "wrong" is an ungradable adjective like "unique", "perfect", and "parallel" is a fallacy.
I call the only girl who can defeat Oddjob: Civilian 1.
For cooperative games it's tolerable, but not optimal depending on the game.
Agreed.
In [some action RPGs for Super NES, PlayStation, and PlayStation 2], if any player has the menu open, gameplay basically pauses
Blame those particular games' developers for that. The solution going forward is not to remove the possibility of split-screen but to fix shoddy menu design. Arrange the menu to fit in one player's half of the screen, and pause only when the menu button is held down for a second. This may have been too much to handle on the Super NES, with its 64K of VRAM and three usable scrolling layers, but the hardware limit must have been overcome between the fourth and fifth generations, as GoldenEye starts to get it right.
Windows is the only multi-window operating system I could find installed on detachable laptops. The other operating system on detachable laptops is Android, which per Google CDD has a window management policy of all maximized all the time except on those few apps specifically coded for Samsung's proprietary extensions.
Once you have diluted the problem down to Saudi Arabian women
I didn't intend to dilute it that far. A controller is still cheaper than driving lessons, a car, and insurance.
And to do the local multiplayer on a single station you need to have enough controllers for all gamers in the household plus whomever they have over
A spare controller is far less expensive than a spare desktop computer, graphics card, monitor, copy of Windows, and copy of each game.
One is more likely to own four controllers than four gaming PCs.
Why wouldn't you have a PC for each person in your household?
For one thing, PC != gaming PC. An older laptop with Intel integrated graphics is fine for homework, Facebook, and games from the OpenGL 1 era (pre-2006), but unlikely to make a good gaming PC for recent games. For another, by "person in your household" did you include only residents or also visitors?
I'll believe you when I can buy dead cow sandwiches with bitcoins. Right now, Wendy's takes dollars.
My normal advice would still be, that RAM today is so cheap, that you should always have enough to avoid paging
Can you get 8 GB in a 10" laptop, or are you stuck with, say, the 2 GB in an ASUS Transformer Book T100?
My question is, with mid-level machines coming with 16gig of RAM, why would I need compression at all?
Because not all machines are mid-level. With a lot of smaller machines, especially phones, tablets, and detachable laptops, the 1-2 GB that comes soldered on when you buy it is all you get.
I'm not afraid. DriveSpace had the DoubleGuard feature, which patched MS-DOS to add canaries around critical file system data structures in RAM. This saved my bacon a few times when I was developing graphics code and accidentally introduced undefined behavior.
What makes people like you think that the O/S should be held responsible for buggy applications?
If applications are included with the default install of an operating system distribution, such as Edge with Windows 10, then of course the distributor is responsible for them. And if the bug is in the standard library provided with a compiler, it's the fault of the compiler publisher, which is often also the operating system publisher.
ObZram: Once RAM compression becomes commonplace, a memory allocator that zeroes out recently freed memory will be more space-efficient. A standard library that does not do this when under memory pressure will be considered "buggy", even if it's published by the operating system publisher.
Single level storage - a single address space for everything, and let the dedicated I/O controller sort out what needs to be in memory at any one time.
In a single-level storage model, the main RAM acts as a cache for mmap'd disks. The compressed part of RAM would then act as an additional cache level, which reduces the number of capacity misses that need to reach the disk.
Or, just put 8+GB of RAM in your machine
That's fine on a recent desktop, not so fine on an older desktop with few slots or on a compact or detachable laptop with soldered-in RAM.
On a laptop or tablet, the backlight probably draws far more juice than the CPU. So if the CPU can complete a task more quickly by not hitting the HDD or eMMC as often, the backlight won't need to be on as long, which saves power. I wonder whether this is a simple enough task to be put on the little cores in ARM's big-little configuration.
But you probably couldn't put it into large-scale production until the RAM Doubler patents ran out.
Eventually they'll sell you a box that "inspires you to think of the game you'd like to play", but there'll be nothing in the box
Do you mean a direction like WarioWare DIY? It's shorter than the previous WarioWare games but comes with a built-in modding tool. Or Super Mario Maker?
They also can't start their tabletop role playing games unless they bring their books and dice and character sheets.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, those are cheap enough that the DM can afford a spare copy of the core books, the current campaign's sourcebooks, and set of dice. In addition, unlike the family PC, tabletop RPG materials have only a single purpose, which means someone else in the household is unlikely to need to use them for some other purpose that night.
Provided your family is rich enough to buy stations for all gamers in the household plus whomever they have over.
If they play computer games together they bring computers or have left a rig at the friend's house that they regularly play at.
"[Having] left a rig at the friend's house" is a bit more expensive for computer games than for tabletop games. One is more likely to own four controllers than four gaming PCs.
OK, you win, s/16/18/g. Or which countries require drivers to be 21 or older? I think CronoCloud's point is that by the time one has a bachelor's degree in any field related to professional video game development, one is old enough to drive and ought to be rich enough to pay for driving lessons, a car, and insurance.
Do any other than Saudi Arabia require drivers to be male?
If you want vector graphics, there's always SVG. Which can also be animated, by the way.
I'm aware that SVG and Canvas can be animated. But what graphical timeline-based editor should one use to animate them? Edge Animate is rental only.
Or would you recommend creating the vector animation in Flash, rendering to AVI, and sending that to the viewer as MP4 and WebM? That not only bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests)
You can export directly to other video formats with Flash / ToonBoom (etc) and publish those to YouTube
That's what "bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests)". In an era when more people are browsing the Internet over a connection with a limit of 2, 3, 5, or 10 GB per month, a usable vector animation solution becomes helpful. (I said "rendering to AVI" but meant more generally rendering to any high-quality intermediate that can be transcoded to smaller sizes.)
Why do you ask a question you already know the answer to?
Because I don't know the answer. Plenty of Slashdot users have expressed interest in living room PCs.
Not far off from "Charge!", one of the activites in Nintendo's Wii Play. Ride the bulls and plow into defenseless scarecrows.
[Context: drinkypoo's claim that split-screen is irrelevant because tablets have replaced consoles despite a touch screen's unsuitability for certain genres]
Or are people actually buying external gamepads like MOGA for use with their tablets and phones?
Do you see people using them on public transportation, or when waiting? Then no.
[...]
if I'm going to buy a game that would be played best with physical controls, [...] that's what the Vita is for.
In the three years that the PlayStation Vita has been out, I haven't seen one of those on public transportation either.