The link's web server does not seem to be responding, so I have no idea what they are proposing. I think a reputation system somewhat similar to slashdot's might be very useful if correctly implemented - users could establish a reputation for themselves over time, and edits by users with a bad reputation (or no reputation) might receive more scrutiny.
This might help with an unrelated problem: giving recognition to people who make good edits. I suspect a lot of people wouldn't post as often (or word their posts as carefully) here on slashdot if they weren't trying to acrue good karma. Getting good karma is in one sense a game; it gives users a goal to achieve. But it's also a way of telling users they're appreciated by the community. I know I get a warm fuzzy feeling whenever my posts are modded up. I think that Wikipedia could benefit greatly from a similar system of community recognition for good contributors.
The danger is that a reputation system might encourage groupthink, but I'm not really sure that happens much here on slashdot.
Though the paper is somewhat ambiguous in this regard, I suspect for the study that they used body orientation rather than head orientation to determine gaze.
So, sending radio through a narrow metal pipe. Doesn't the pipe just absorb the signal? Any rf engineers care to comment? I think I'll lump this in with antigravity and perpetual motion devices until I hear a convincing argument otherwise.
(Given that the whole article is about a particular paper, they should have given a proper citation, or at least told us what the title of the paper was.)
My summary of their findings: on average, female characters stand closer to female characters than male characters stand to male characters. Distance between male-female pairs has larger variability than distance between same-gender pairs. This is the same as what happens in real life.
Is that based on the great-circle distance, or the euclidean tunnel-through-the-earth distance?
Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue?
on
GNOME 2.16 Released
·
· Score: 1
Documentation is what always sucks in Linux desktop. Check out for once M$Windows one.
I don't think this is really a documentation issue. I think that if you need to read the docs to find out how to paste a full path into a file-save dialogue, that interface is poorly designed and should be fixed. (Of course, it should be well documented as well, but users should be able to regard the docs as a last resort if they can't figure something out, not required reading.)
Tags are definately a better idea. There are no absolutes.
I agree with you there - genres aren't mutually exclusive. (I suppose heirarchical classification schemes are a relic of libraries; a book can't be in two places at once, after all.)
Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue?
on
GNOME 2.16 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When I do a save-as in gnome, I get a window that asks for a name and a folder. So far so good. Unfortunately, the "folder" selector is not a filesystem browser, but a list of "shortcuts". These are named after the last part of the path name - unfortunatly, this gives absolutely no insight as to where in the filesystem tree this folder is. They could show the full path name, or have a tooltip pop up if the mouse hovers over, or something. There are also some default shortcuts with ambiguous names: Desktop and Filesystem. The former, I happen to know through corresponds to ~/Desktop (and no, I don't use nautilus*, so it doesn't show up on my actual desktop). The latter is a mystery, but apparently I don't have permission to save there, wherever it is.
Now, if I haven't configured a shortcut for the folder I want (and this is done manually - for some reason gnome doesn't just remember my most recent folders), I have to click on "browse for other folders". Since this is usually what I want to do anyways, it's a little tedious to have to go looking for it every time. Here it gets downright confusing. On the left is a pane that looks like the contents of a current working directory, but is actually just the same list of shortcuts I had just a moment ago decided I wasn't interested in; double clicking one of these entries does, however, navigate the real filesystem browser to that shortcut. The real list-view filesystem browser is on the right. With this I don't have much complaint, except that there isn't an obvious way to paste a path in from somewhere else.
The lack of full pathname plagues other parts of gnome as well - consider the "save screenshot" window, invoked with [printscreen]. It remembers where I last saved a screenshot, but where is the full path? I have to select "other" from the dropdown list to find out where it is.
*An observation: if you disable nautilus, gnome won't set up your wallpaper when you log in. You can still set it *manually* from the preferences/desktop background dialogue, but it will revert to default after login out and back in.
I may be incorrect about either of these points, so someone please say so if I am wrong, but I can think of two reasons to prefer gnome over kde:
1) gtk is written in C, whereas QT is C++, making it less easy to use from C programs.
2) gtk is licensed as lgpl, whereas qt is gpl. This means that a non-gpled program (such as a commercial application) can be linked with gtk with no problems, but with qt the developers must pay licensing fees.
I suppose it's true that any game X could be classified in the genre of "games that are like X", but in the case of Scorched Earth there aren't very many similar games, so it's about as close to being its own genre as any I can think of. Lemmings also comes to mind. Magic carpet is somewhat the opposite, in that it fits into a lot of genres that don't usually fit together: action/flight sim/strategy/god game, and in the end it doesn't "feel" quite like any of those, at least to me.
The wikipedia article listed Katamari Damacy and The Incredible Machine as genre-defying. (I haven't played either, so I can't really say.)
But does it have a useable file-save dialogue?
on
GNOME 2.16 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I use gnome regularly, but am always momentarily confused by the file-save dialogue no matter how many times I see it. Gnome is very nice in a lot of ways, but I think in terms of decent interface design, it needs a lot of work.
I have observed that many of the things I like are hard to classify in terms of things that were created before. On the other hand, many of the things that bore me can easily be classified.
What might this mean? Perhaps the difficulty of classifying existing games into genres is a good indicator of the state of the game industry.
It might be an interesting exercise not to list existing genres, but to make a list of games that are hard to classify, and use it as a benchmark against any genre list.
I think that most of the time, a simple model like the one you proposed would be mostly believable. However, there are many corner cases to consider, and a model that only does what the developers programmed it to do may not always be realistic. For instance, if all your critters are on one island and your trees are on another, shouldn't all the critters die out, assuming they need trees to survive? (Perhaps they are termites or goats?)
A user might reasonably expect that he/she can erect a fence around a plot of land and create a local ecology independent of the surrounding ecology (with the exception of weather, which is harder to control). It may be hard to make a statistical model obey such fences, and set the spawn rate separately inside and outside the fence. However, if a specific critter can't reach the specific resources it needs, the game server can simply kill it off (or, at least, prevent it from reproducing).
why program your game for a dedicated AI card if you're just going to have to make it work on computers without one?
Perhaps the card could be most useful not on the client, but in dedicated mmorpg servers. I know WoW could definitely use some smarter mobiles. Sometimes I think whoever designed the AI was inspired by the green turtles from Super Mario 1. I'd like to see games with smarter mobs and NPCs, and any game with a realistic ecology (for instance, suppose mobs don't magically spawn, they procreate the old fashioned way, and must eat food (a limited resource) to survive) would require many more mobs than a WoW-like game in order to prevent players from destroying the environment. Simulating millions of intelligent mobs would likely be very expensive computationally.
And it isn't like you can just let it float or move it around as the need arises, it has to be firmly attached to the planet.
Not true, some designs call for a floating tether point, which can be moved as necessary when the need arises for the cable to dodge space debris. It may not be possible to move it quickly enough to dodge, say, a hurricane; but it need not be absolutely fixed either. On the other hand, it does need to be sufficiently massive to not get picked up out of the ocean and flung into space by the cable tension.
We have those on large appliances in the US too, I assume its compulsory. I would like to see the same thing on smaller products, though; lots of small, inefficient products can waste a lot of power - not so much, perhaps, as a drafty house, but every little bit helps. Right now, electronics manufacturers have nearly zero incentive to make energy-efficient products, and consumers have a difficult time making informed buying decisions.
I would also ban standby mode and try to find ways for consumer electronics to generate DC power more efficiently.
I don't think that banning standby mode altogether is a good idea; if implemented correctly, the energy consumption should be negligible. I think the easiest way right now to reduce electricity consumption without significant negative side-effects would be manditory energy-use labeling on all electronic devices (including components like video cards and hard drives) sold. These labels should state the maximum energy use (in watts) of the device when in use, idle (on and ready for use, but not actually doing anything), and in standby mode.
A big problem right now is that consumers have no way of comparing products in terms of energy efficiency (save for water heaters and the like, which are already subject to such rules). When consumers aren't educated, bad products prevail.
But when we get into presentation-quality raytraces (at least with Povray), my P4-2.4HT takes 3-4 minutes per frame.
I don't know that povray rendering time is necessarily a good indicator of the maximum performance of a real-time ray tracer. From Ray Tracing News:
The Saarbrucken folks presented their design for an RPU, a ray-tracing processing unit. It's not considerably different than today's GPUs, having just a bit more specialized hardware here and there. Interesting stat: their *software* ray tracer is about 30x faster than the freely-available POVRay ray tracer. Now, I could probably speed POVRay up by 2x by some tuning of this and that, but 30x is pretty incredible. More on this topic later in this issue.
Not that I'm disparaging povray; it has many interesting features and a wonderful programmer-friendly scene description language. However, I don't think rendering speed is necessarily its strong point.
Yet, Slashdot is probably a better model for academic review than the current system, because Slashdot permits many more people to contribute and it permits a true discussion between authors and among reviewers. An even better model might be Digg because it also permits the stories to be peer selected.
Kuro5hin is a great example of how peer review can work very well - most of the time. Articles only make it through the voting queue if they get 70 more "accept" votes than "reject" votes. A typical conference paper gets reviewed by about three people. In general, typos, grammatical mistakes, poor english and boring prose in accepted articles are rare; on the other hand, k5 has some trouble with dupe accounts and users who will vote for anything with profanity in the title, so sometimes the voting results seem a little arbitrary.
If someone were to set up a journal according to the K5 model, it seems reasonable to initally invite some professors into the system as reviewers, then allow new users to become reviewers by getting an article accepted, or getting invited in by someone who is already a reviewer (though perhaps the number of invites should be limited to prevent one person from inviting hundreds of people).
They actually already do a manditory partial recount. From the article:
Concern over the machines led the Alaska Legislature in 2005 to pass a law requiring a mandatory hand count of ballots in one randomly selected precinct in every election district.
Even if this is statistically likely to capture widespread fraud, I still think a total recount should always be done. It's not that much extra work, and it is important that the average person believe the election results are legitimate (and the best way to do that is to make vote fraud as difficult as we know how to make it).
this is the best thing that could have happened
on
Diebold Flops in Alaska
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I am of the opinion that hand counts of paper ballot receipts (printed by the voting machine, verified by the voter, then dropped in a box at the site of the election) should always be done, regardless of whether it was a close race. Otherwise, Diebold could avoid a recount by fabricating a landslide. From the perspective of avoiding vote fraud, I can't think of a better method of running an election than forced recounts, though for convenience sake its nice to have a quick, initial electronic tally which can be verified later.
Re:Unfounded Criticism
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
I'm all for the criticism of the United States military. Or even the government. But it really angries up my blood when someone (who's probably never been in a war) criticizes a soldier who's trying to enjoy what may be the last months of his or her life.
First, I don't think the article was very critical of the military - it's just describing the situation. Secondly, the argument you're using is a dangerous one - it can be used to justify just about anything. I don't think that military personnel should be criticized for frivolous things, but I also like to think that our military is held to very high standards, and if our military personell are indeed purchasing large quantities of bootleg content from locals, what kind of message does it send, especially in parts of the world that can't afford to license our genetically modified food or buy our patented life-saving drugs?
I think the number one weapon against the United States military is the IED (Improvised Explosive Devices). And these things blow up without warning. If you're super alert or playing a DS Lite in your vehicle, it's not going to make a difference when one of those things go off.
I'm not sure if this is entirely true. I haven't served in the military or been to Iraq, so what I have heard comes second hand from stories I hear on NPR and elsewhere, but my understanding is that the local neighborhoods generally have a good idea of when and where IEDs have been planted - it is, after all, rather hard not to notice people digging up the city streets to plant the IEDs. Consequently, if you notice the people acting differently, such as the lack of children present where they otherwise normally would be, that's a good indication that maybe you should turn around and go a different route.
That's something that a person might not notice unless they're very observant and paying careful attention. And the article does mention that those who do dangerous work tend not to bring distracting devices with them:
And those who spend time outside the walls of their compounds have little use for big screen TVs or videogames--they are worried about staying alive. One soldier said that "your initial package guys, like Rangers, Marines, Recon types, LRS guys, Special Forces and so on, will not take much of anything downrange that doesn't go boom. It simply isn't conducive to keeping your mind on the task at hand, which is staying alive."
Slashdot Mirror
The link's web server does not seem to be responding, so I have no idea what they are proposing. I think a reputation system somewhat similar to slashdot's might be very useful if correctly implemented - users could establish a reputation for themselves over time, and edits by users with a bad reputation (or no reputation) might receive more scrutiny.
This might help with an unrelated problem: giving recognition to people who make good edits. I suspect a lot of people wouldn't post as often (or word their posts as carefully) here on slashdot if they weren't trying to acrue good karma. Getting good karma is in one sense a game; it gives users a goal to achieve. But it's also a way of telling users they're appreciated by the community. I know I get a warm fuzzy feeling whenever my posts are modded up. I think that Wikipedia could benefit greatly from a similar system of community recognition for good contributors.
The danger is that a reputation system might encourage groupthink, but I'm not really sure that happens much here on slashdot.
Thanks for the explanation, I now see that the approach is at least plausible.
I wonder what happens when when the RF signal hits a bend or a tee junction or a valve that isn't all the way open?
Though the paper is somewhat ambiguous in this regard, I suspect for the study that they used body orientation rather than head orientation to determine gaze.
Ah, that makes a bit more sense than the original article. I don't know much about waveguides other than their applications in cantennas.
So, sending radio through a narrow metal pipe. Doesn't the pipe just absorb the signal? Any rf engineers care to comment? I think I'll lump this in with antigravity and perpetual motion devices until I hear a convincing argument otherwise.
Nick Yee, Jeremy N Bailenson, Mark Urbanek, Francis Chang, Dan Merget, The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments.
(Given that the whole article is about a particular paper, they should have given a proper citation, or at least told us what the title of the paper was.)
My summary of their findings: on average, female characters stand closer to female characters than male characters stand to male characters. Distance between male-female pairs has larger variability than distance between same-gender pairs. This is the same as what happens in real life.
Is that based on the great-circle distance, or the euclidean tunnel-through-the-earth distance?
When I do a save-as in gnome, I get a window that asks for a name and a folder. So far so good. Unfortunately, the "folder" selector is not a filesystem browser, but a list of "shortcuts". These are named after the last part of the path name - unfortunatly, this gives absolutely no insight as to where in the filesystem tree this folder is. They could show the full path name, or have a tooltip pop up if the mouse hovers over, or something. There are also some default shortcuts with ambiguous names: Desktop and Filesystem. The former, I happen to know through corresponds to ~/Desktop (and no, I don't use nautilus*, so it doesn't show up on my actual desktop). The latter is a mystery, but apparently I don't have permission to save there, wherever it is.
Now, if I haven't configured a shortcut for the folder I want (and this is done manually - for some reason gnome doesn't just remember my most recent folders), I have to click on "browse for other folders". Since this is usually what I want to do anyways, it's a little tedious to have to go looking for it every time. Here it gets downright confusing. On the left is a pane that looks like the contents of a current working directory, but is actually just the same list of shortcuts I had just a moment ago decided I wasn't interested in; double clicking one of these entries does, however, navigate the real filesystem browser to that shortcut. The real list-view filesystem browser is on the right. With this I don't have much complaint, except that there isn't an obvious way to paste a path in from somewhere else.
The lack of full pathname plagues other parts of gnome as well - consider the "save screenshot" window, invoked with [printscreen]. It remembers where I last saved a screenshot, but where is the full path? I have to select "other" from the dropdown list to find out where it is.
*An observation: if you disable nautilus, gnome won't set up your wallpaper when you log in. You can still set it *manually* from the preferences/desktop background dialogue, but it will revert to default after login out and back in.
I may be incorrect about either of these points, so someone please say so if I am wrong, but I can think of two reasons to prefer gnome over kde:
1) gtk is written in C, whereas QT is C++, making it less easy to use from C programs.
2) gtk is licensed as lgpl, whereas qt is gpl. This means that a non-gpled program (such as a commercial application) can be linked with gtk with no problems, but with qt the developers must pay licensing fees.
The wikipedia article listed Katamari Damacy and The Incredible Machine as genre-defying. (I haven't played either, so I can't really say.)
I use gnome regularly, but am always momentarily confused by the file-save dialogue no matter how many times I see it. Gnome is very nice in a lot of ways, but I think in terms of decent interface design, it needs a lot of work.
I have observed that many of the things I like are hard to classify in terms of things that were created before. On the other hand, many of the things that bore me can easily be classified.
What might this mean? Perhaps the difficulty of classifying existing games into genres is a good indicator of the state of the game industry.
It might be an interesting exercise not to list existing genres, but to make a list of games that are hard to classify, and use it as a benchmark against any genre list.
To begin with, I will start the list with:
Hmm, that's all I can think of at the moment.
I think that most of the time, a simple model like the one you proposed would be mostly believable. However, there are many corner cases to consider, and a model that only does what the developers programmed it to do may not always be realistic. For instance, if all your critters are on one island and your trees are on another, shouldn't all the critters die out, assuming they need trees to survive? (Perhaps they are termites or goats?)
A user might reasonably expect that he/she can erect a fence around a plot of land and create a local ecology independent of the surrounding ecology (with the exception of weather, which is harder to control). It may be hard to make a statistical model obey such fences, and set the spawn rate separately inside and outside the fence. However, if a specific critter can't reach the specific resources it needs, the game server can simply kill it off (or, at least, prevent it from reproducing).
Perhaps the card could be most useful not on the client, but in dedicated mmorpg servers. I know WoW could definitely use some smarter mobiles. Sometimes I think whoever designed the AI was inspired by the green turtles from Super Mario 1. I'd like to see games with smarter mobs and NPCs, and any game with a realistic ecology (for instance, suppose mobs don't magically spawn, they procreate the old fashioned way, and must eat food (a limited resource) to survive) would require many more mobs than a WoW-like game in order to prevent players from destroying the environment. Simulating millions of intelligent mobs would likely be very expensive computationally.
Isn't it 20 years?
We have those on large appliances in the US too, I assume its compulsory. I would like to see the same thing on smaller products, though; lots of small, inefficient products can waste a lot of power - not so much, perhaps, as a drafty house, but every little bit helps. Right now, electronics manufacturers have nearly zero incentive to make energy-efficient products, and consumers have a difficult time making informed buying decisions.
I don't think that banning standby mode altogether is a good idea; if implemented correctly, the energy consumption should be negligible. I think the easiest way right now to reduce electricity consumption without significant negative side-effects would be manditory energy-use labeling on all electronic devices (including components like video cards and hard drives) sold. These labels should state the maximum energy use (in watts) of the device when in use, idle (on and ready for use, but not actually doing anything), and in standby mode.
A big problem right now is that consumers have no way of comparing products in terms of energy efficiency (save for water heaters and the like, which are already subject to such rules). When consumers aren't educated, bad products prevail.
I don't know that povray rendering time is necessarily a good indicator of the maximum performance of a real-time ray tracer. From Ray Tracing News:
Not that I'm disparaging povray; it has many interesting features and a wonderful programmer-friendly scene description language. However, I don't think rendering speed is necessarily its strong point.
Kuro5hin is a great example of how peer review can work very well - most of the time. Articles only make it through the voting queue if they get 70 more "accept" votes than "reject" votes. A typical conference paper gets reviewed by about three people. In general, typos, grammatical mistakes, poor english and boring prose in accepted articles are rare; on the other hand, k5 has some trouble with dupe accounts and users who will vote for anything with profanity in the title, so sometimes the voting results seem a little arbitrary.
If someone were to set up a journal according to the K5 model, it seems reasonable to initally invite some professors into the system as reviewers, then allow new users to become reviewers by getting an article accepted, or getting invited in by someone who is already a reviewer (though perhaps the number of invites should be limited to prevent one person from inviting hundreds of people).
Even if this is statistically likely to capture widespread fraud, I still think a total recount should always be done. It's not that much extra work, and it is important that the average person believe the election results are legitimate (and the best way to do that is to make vote fraud as difficult as we know how to make it).
I am of the opinion that hand counts of paper ballot receipts (printed by the voting machine, verified by the voter, then dropped in a box at the site of the election) should always be done, regardless of whether it was a close race. Otherwise, Diebold could avoid a recount by fabricating a landslide. From the perspective of avoiding vote fraud, I can't think of a better method of running an election than forced recounts, though for convenience sake its nice to have a quick, initial electronic tally which can be verified later.
That's something that a person might not notice unless they're very observant and paying careful attention. And the article does mention that those who do dangerous work tend not to bring distracting devices with them: