sandy bridge is only going to be like 20-30% faster then what's available right now, the last two generations after core 2 duo have only had modest games in the 20%-30 range. I've not been impressed at all lately, it seems technological leaps have slowed right down for cpu's at least.
"Yet again and again I see students come here, and cloister themselves from the language, culture, food, etc. It baffles me."
It shouldn't, the idea that people want to mix outside their ethnic group is a historical anomaly, this is why conservatives laugh a bit at liberals in the US. Mixing people from wildly different backgrounds sounds nice in theory but not in practice. Most people stick to their own ethnic/cultural groups.
... MMO's are definitely an area I doubt will ever have a "peak budget" as huge markets like asia and india have serious economies of scale.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
"Yes, but OS/2 was still way better than Win95"
Not in terms of interface. This is one thing that software developers of the era never got and the same reason linux didn't take off, you should copy interfaces of widely used programs or mimick them to ease the transition to your Operating system. I look at the progress linux has made from early versions to ubuntu and it's like night and fucking day in terms of usability.
Not really, considering every single console and even UBISOFTS secure DRM on Assasins creed 2 was cracked. Not to mention starcraft 2 had a crack working the day it was released. It's not too good to be true since given the past history of cracking protection measures, it's quite simply a matter of time and perseverance. How much energy are you willing to expend to protect/crack something?
That's basically what it comes down to. Considering the Wii and xbox 360 have been hacked from Day 1, the sales of their games like Call of duty haven't really been affected, piracy is the industries scapegoat for high development costs and recycled gameplay concepts. The industries technolust is what drove game development costs so high that the game industry has turned to conservativeness and risk aversion due to monetary costs involved in modern game production. But lets be frank - companies put themselves here with their technolust. No gamer forced developers or these companies to release the latest and greatest. It's all based on inertia. When a 2D super mario bros Wii can outsell most 3D games on most platforms you have to ask yourself - was all this technolust really necessary?
"The point is that the fact that someone could use help does not necessarily mean that they suffer from a psychiatric disorder"
Yes but disorders are defined in terms of functioning within a society, i.e. without help many people would likely off themselves or possibly in worst circumstances turn to crime, etc.
There may be "nothing" apparently wrong with them but obviously their developmental history took a wrong turn somewhere. You have to understand that people end up in psych system because collectively we are in denial and don't give much of a fuck about the fate of one another, this is a fundamental human problem that is not easily fixed since we've met the enemy and he is us.
... they are not committed to the platform since they adopted xbox as their strategy for entering the gaming market. Only in hindsight did they realize the damage they did for the relevancy of their platform as a whole. The nerd in me hopes linux and linux apps finally comes of age and the only reason people will keep windows around is for certain games and more and more real work will be done on linux or within the browser.
""we don't know what the problem is and in fact there may not even be any problem, but let's put a stamp on it anyway" (I'm not a psychiatrist, but my father is and I talked about it with him)"
Yeah right, like this qualifies you for saying anything about it. Real severe autism certainly does exist and that there is quite strong evidence that their is in fact a spectrum. See temple grandin:
Now just watching her now she seems "more normal" but you can tell their is something off about her right away and if you had no idea of her developmental history you could easily write her off as just another psychiatrists "fake disorder".
Similar to what you get with intelligence, from very stupid to very smart. The idea that things are monolithic (well understood, easily dismissed as nonsense) instead of highly complex and difficult to understand is a huge problem with human understanding of not just autism but human traits and disease in general.
So autism can range in it's severity, since "Autism" is a rubric for a host complicated factors not well understood that leads to all sorts of real life issues.
One of the real issues is
1) Humans are profoundly ignorant, oblivious and stupid at all levels of society 2) If you do not believe this, check out how medicine was practiced in the 1800's and long before that.
Like many things autistic spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed but why why people are diagnosed on the autistic spectrum is in the first place is to get help. People are insanely insanely prejudiced against one another that do not fit the behaviour of the masses and so they become discriminated against in employment and in other avenues of life. So it's little wonder why many people think psychiatry is bunkum, they want the other to be easy to understand and to justify their their ignorance and innate prejudices against others. People want answers to complicated questions within their narrow window of existence, I'm sorry but reality does not work like this for anyone who has actually looked at the history of medicine and psychiatry in particular. Entire generations of people existed in darkness simply because it was beyond their ages understanding and understanding of autism today still suffers from this same phenomenon.
It's easy to to try to discredit something you've never known anyone living with or experience their daily behavior on a regular basis.
Considering the state of our world and how cowardly everyone is when it comes to protecting their jobs or income, we need more of these kinds of jerks.
I'm not saying there aren't people with genuine sleep problems but it's a lot easier to to fall asleep and get sleepy when you've actually exerted yourself to some extent.
"Yet, this doesn't explain why I can't sleep at 11:30pm when the house is dead quiet. {sigh}"
You haven't expended enough energy. I find that many people that can't sleep also don't exercise or have sedentary lifestyles. If you add exercise to your life you can bet you'll get tired eventually. You should really only go to sleep when you're tired, when you feel sleepy. I used to have trouble falling asleep until I added walking/exercising an hour or two a day.
Expending energy goes a long way to solving sleep problems.
"The 90% piracy rate is quite much the norm with PC games. The sad thing is that PC gamers will destroy their own gaming platform by doing so"
No, it has nothing to do with this. Starcraft 2 was one of the fastest selling PC games, an indie game like machinarium is in a niche genre (adventure) and most gamers fall only into a handful of genre's. Not to mention many gamers don't like indie games as they are old (and often stale) game designs.
How about the reason many games fail is due to game developers lack of market research in what we actually want as gamers? That is the biggest issue. Piracy is a bullshit argument, if you make a game people actually want and you market the shit out of it they will buy it. The problem for most game developers is obscurity not piracy.
You've missed the point of course, not all information (or patterns) need to be generated, only a finite subset will ever needs to be found to be useful, to put it another way you can make a million variations of a fork, but it's still useful as a fork.
"amazing considering that there was no trainer in the system;"
Not really, it's merely selecting patterns it is not aware of if it's patterns are "successful" or not. If you run a pattern generator long enough you can get all possible patterns within a finite possibility space.
"Take email privacy, for example. This is ludicrously easy problem to solve"
The problem is not with your geek friends, the problem is that the designers of email didn't design for privacy, that was the problem. People were too ignorant that the tech was going to be adopted on mass, so it was never mandated as default in the design of email systems.
That's the REAL issue. Your bank doesn't you to have to manually setup software encryption when accessing your bank account online, the truth is of course ISP's could get away with being insecure because no one was the wiser in terms of the masses and because no one expected the internet to become as big as it was. Email existed long before the internet was popular and as big as it is now.
Energy is the lifeblood of any economy, therefore it is the most fucked with by corporatiosn and governments in the world in the geopolitical arena, you act like oil is not a strategic resource of utmost importance to the very foundation of modern economies. They get away with it because energy prices are too important militarily and geopolitically. If only the free market fuckups would think about the real world - why do we have militaries? Why do countries invade other countries? It sure as fucking hell is not to bring "democracy" or "world peace" or any of that bullshit. It's to control resources, price fixing is just another weapon in economic warfare, you act like countries are at peace with one another - they are at war with one another always, that's what captialism is fundamentally - social warfare. You know there was this guy named karl marx and others like Thorstein veblen who explained all this shit?
"Perhaps it's the opposite problem. Because comp sci classes don't cover anything but the basic basics"
Or perhaps it's because most highschool teachers are incapable of teaching basic comp sci? Truth is highschool is a joke, and even a lot of college courses are a joke. The good people in comp sci are outnumbered by people who suck at it.
I don't think you mean to say this, I think you mean making arbitrary models or metaphors and remapping them onto new scenarios is what we do best. Most of what we do is taking things we've already learned and mixing them and matching them in new ways, I doubt imprecision is our advantage since our ability to sift what details matter from what details don't given our limited computational ability is the whole point if context. i.e. you don't have to go through every little detail you are aware of and millions you aren't aware of to get started.
"e. It's fantastic to have validation that humans are still excellent pattern recognition engines compared even to very modern algorithms and powerful computers."
Computers primary advantage is speed, for all our pattern recognition capability are mathematical capability is pretty limited besides modern computers. I think it's our ability to stitch or see things as wholes instead of millions of unconnected parts that gives us an advantage - we can recognize things like context that speed up the process significantly whether we are consciously aware or unconsciously recognizing context.
... of something like google wave given the ineptitude of the masses is idiotic, something that would replace email/IM is going to take time to build (like on the order of decades). Why are companies trying to get an "instant win"? This lack of effort is disturbing. If it's not adopted immediately an din large numbers it's suddenly niche and a flop?
I think the issue is not the technology but rather whether the teacher is capable of using it effectively, I think the biggest problem is that the actual software (if used) needs to be catered to the needs of what is being taught.
"The whole point of this article is what I've said in every piracy argument I've been involved in: if no one buys quality PC games, they won't be made any more"
The problem is game quality, even the recently released starcraft 2 was ho-hum. So many PC games are released broken and without tools. It's a catch-22, no publisher wants to commit the resources to make sure the game is really good, everyone pirates it and finds out it's so-so and they find out it's not worth paying for.
Take Supreme commander 1 + 2 both games were unfinished on release, Supcom 1's AI was completely broken and Supcom 2 had moddiging forcefully disabled and ripped out of it as per request by the publisher (since the demo had modding enabled).
The truth is - the developers suck at making games and all too often are under resourced and are not committed to their games beyond pump and dump. Transformers War for cybertron is a case in point - technically proficient port but the controls, framerate, etc they didn't bother changing at all. You couldn't change your controls in the PC version of Transformers... I mean wtf?
"I don't need my linux box booting as slow as my windows."
Next generation User interfaces will need to be 3D eventually for some applications, check out taggalaxy or thebrain. Thebrain especially would benefit from decent hybridization of 2D and 3D user interfaces.
Slashdot Mirror
sandy bridge is only going to be like 20-30% faster then what's available right now, the last two generations after core 2 duo have only had modest games in the 20%-30 range. I've not been impressed at all lately, it seems technological leaps have slowed right down for cpu's at least.
"Yet again and again I see students come here, and cloister themselves from the language, culture, food, etc. It baffles me."
It shouldn't, the idea that people want to mix outside their ethnic group is a historical anomaly, this is why conservatives laugh a bit at liberals in the US. Mixing people from wildly different backgrounds sounds nice in theory but not in practice. Most people stick to their own ethnic/cultural groups.
This is why they should just use bandwidth numbers. I never understood why they started language unrelated to the specifications.
... MMO's are definitely an area I doubt will ever have a "peak budget" as huge markets like asia and india have serious economies of scale.
"Yes, but OS/2 was still way better than Win95"
Not in terms of interface. This is one thing that software developers of the era never got and the same reason linux didn't take off, you should copy interfaces of widely used programs or mimick them to ease the transition to your Operating system. I look at the progress linux has made from early versions to ubuntu and it's like night and fucking day in terms of usability.
Not really, considering every single console and even UBISOFTS secure DRM on Assasins creed 2 was cracked. Not to mention starcraft 2 had a crack working the day it was released. It's not too good to be true since given the past history of cracking protection measures, it's quite simply a matter of time and perseverance. How much energy are you willing to expend to protect/crack something?
That's basically what it comes down to. Considering the Wii and xbox 360 have been hacked from Day 1, the sales of their games like Call of duty haven't really been affected, piracy is the industries scapegoat for high development costs and recycled gameplay concepts. The industries technolust is what drove game development costs so high that the game industry has turned to conservativeness and risk aversion due to monetary costs involved in modern game production. But lets be frank - companies put themselves here with their technolust. No gamer forced developers or these companies to release the latest and greatest. It's all based on inertia. When a 2D super mario bros Wii can outsell most 3D games on most platforms you have to ask yourself - was all this technolust really necessary?
"The point is that the fact that someone could use help does not necessarily mean that they suffer from a psychiatric disorder"
Yes but disorders are defined in terms of functioning within a society, i.e. without help many people would likely off themselves or possibly in worst circumstances turn to crime, etc.
There may be "nothing" apparently wrong with them but obviously their developmental history took a wrong turn somewhere. You have to understand that people end up in psych system because collectively we are in denial and don't give much of a fuck about the fate of one another, this is a fundamental human problem that is not easily fixed since we've met the enemy and he is us.
... they are not committed to the platform since they adopted xbox as their strategy for entering the gaming market. Only in hindsight did they realize the damage they did for the relevancy of their platform as a whole. The nerd in me hopes linux and linux apps finally comes of age and the only reason people will keep windows around is for certain games and more and more real work will be done on linux or within the browser.
""we don't know what the problem is and in fact there may not even be any problem, but let's put a stamp on it anyway" (I'm not a psychiatrist, but my father is and I talked about it with him)"
Yeah right, like this qualifies you for saying anything about it. Real severe autism certainly does exist and that there is quite strong evidence that their is in fact a spectrum. See temple grandin:
Now just watching her now she seems "more normal" but you can tell their is something off about her right away and if you had no idea of her developmental history you could easily write her off as just another psychiatrists "fake disorder".
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html
Similar to what you get with intelligence, from very stupid to very smart. The idea that things are monolithic (well understood, easily dismissed as nonsense) instead of highly complex and difficult to understand is a huge problem with human understanding of not just autism but human traits and disease in general.
So autism can range in it's severity, since "Autism" is a rubric for a host complicated factors not well understood that leads to all sorts of real life issues.
One of the real issues is
1) Humans are profoundly ignorant, oblivious and stupid at all levels of society
2) If you do not believe this, check out how medicine was practiced in the 1800's and long before that.
Like many things autistic spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed but why why people are diagnosed on the autistic spectrum is in the first place is to get help. People are insanely insanely prejudiced against one another that do not fit the behaviour of the masses and so they become discriminated against in employment and in other avenues of life. So it's little wonder why many people think psychiatry is bunkum, they want the other to be easy to understand and to justify their their ignorance and innate prejudices against others. People want answers to complicated questions within their narrow window of existence, I'm sorry but reality does not work like this for anyone who has actually looked at the history of medicine and psychiatry in particular. Entire generations of people existed in darkness simply because it was beyond their ages understanding and understanding of autism today still suffers from this same phenomenon.
It's easy to to try to discredit something you've never known anyone living with or experience their daily behavior on a regular basis.
"Kind of comes off as a narcissistic jerk here."
Considering the state of our world and how cowardly everyone is when it comes to protecting their jobs or income, we need more of these kinds of jerks.
I'm not saying there aren't people with genuine sleep problems but it's a lot easier to to fall asleep and get sleepy when you've actually exerted yourself to some extent.
"Yet, this doesn't explain why I can't sleep at 11:30pm when the house is dead quiet. {sigh}"
You haven't expended enough energy. I find that many people that can't sleep also don't exercise or have sedentary lifestyles. If you add exercise to your life you can bet you'll get tired eventually. You should really only go to sleep when you're tired, when you feel sleepy. I used to have trouble falling asleep until I added walking/exercising an hour or two a day.
Expending energy goes a long way to solving sleep problems.
"The 90% piracy rate is quite much the norm with PC games. The sad thing is that PC gamers will destroy their own gaming platform by doing so"
No, it has nothing to do with this. Starcraft 2 was one of the fastest selling PC games, an indie game like machinarium is in a niche genre (adventure) and most gamers fall only into a handful of genre's. Not to mention many gamers don't like indie games as they are old (and often stale) game designs.
How about the reason many games fail is due to game developers lack of market research in what we actually want as gamers? That is the biggest issue. Piracy is a bullshit argument, if you make a game people actually want and you market the shit out of it they will buy it. The problem for most game developers is obscurity not piracy.
You've missed the point of course, not all information (or patterns) need to be generated, only a finite subset will ever needs to be found to be useful, to put it another way you can make a million variations of a fork, but it's still useful as a fork.
"amazing considering that there was no trainer in the system;"
Not really, it's merely selecting patterns it is not aware of if it's patterns are "successful" or not. If you run a pattern generator long enough you can get all possible patterns within a finite possibility space.
"Take email privacy, for example. This is ludicrously easy problem to solve"
The problem is not with your geek friends, the problem is that the designers of email didn't design for privacy, that was the problem. People were too ignorant that the tech was going to be adopted on mass, so it was never mandated as default in the design of email systems.
That's the REAL issue. Your bank doesn't you to have to manually setup software encryption when accessing your bank account online, the truth is of course ISP's could get away with being insecure because no one was the wiser in terms of the masses and because no one expected the internet to become as big as it was. Email existed long before the internet was popular and as big as it is now.
"I just don't get it."
Energy is the lifeblood of any economy, therefore it is the most fucked with by corporatiosn and governments in the world in the geopolitical arena, you act like oil is not a strategic resource of utmost importance to the very foundation of modern economies. They get away with it because energy prices are too important militarily and geopolitically. If only the free market fuckups would think about the real world - why do we have militaries? Why do countries invade other countries? It sure as fucking hell is not to bring "democracy" or "world peace" or any of that bullshit. It's to control resources, price fixing is just another weapon in economic warfare, you act like countries are at peace with one another - they are at war with one another always, that's what captialism is fundamentally - social warfare. You know there was this guy named karl marx and others like Thorstein veblen who explained all this shit?
... will just fight back. The idea they can end internet anonymity is bullshit, programmers and smart people can always way's to game the system.
"Perhaps it's the opposite problem. Because comp sci classes don't cover anything but the basic basics"
Or perhaps it's because most highschool teachers are incapable of teaching basic comp sci? Truth is highschool is a joke, and even a lot of college courses are a joke. The good people in comp sci are outnumbered by people who suck at it.
"Imprecision is our main advantage"
I don't think you mean to say this, I think you mean making arbitrary models or metaphors and remapping them onto new scenarios is what we do best. Most of what we do is taking things we've already learned and mixing them and matching them in new ways, I doubt imprecision is our advantage since our ability to sift what details matter from what details don't given our limited computational ability is the whole point if context. i.e. you don't have to go through every little detail you are aware of and millions you aren't aware of to get started.
"e. It's fantastic to have validation that humans are still excellent pattern recognition engines compared even to very modern algorithms and powerful computers."
Computers primary advantage is speed, for all our pattern recognition capability are mathematical capability is pretty limited besides modern computers. I think it's our ability to stitch or see things as wholes instead of millions of unconnected parts that gives us an advantage - we can recognize things like context that speed up the process significantly whether we are consciously aware or unconsciously recognizing context.
... of something like google wave given the ineptitude of the masses is idiotic, something that would replace email/IM is going to take time to build (like on the order of decades). Why are companies trying to get an "instant win"? This lack of effort is disturbing. If it's not adopted immediately an din large numbers it's suddenly niche and a flop?
I think the issue is not the technology but rather whether the teacher is capable of using it effectively, I think the biggest problem is that the actual software (if used) needs to be catered to the needs of what is being taught.
"The whole point of this article is what I've said in every piracy argument I've been involved in: if no one buys quality PC games, they won't be made any more"
The problem is game quality, even the recently released starcraft 2 was ho-hum. So many PC games are released broken and without tools. It's a catch-22, no publisher wants to commit the resources to make sure the game is really good, everyone pirates it and finds out it's so-so and they find out it's not worth paying for.
Take Supreme commander 1 + 2 both games were unfinished on release, Supcom 1's AI was completely broken and Supcom 2 had moddiging forcefully disabled and ripped out of it as per request by the publisher (since the demo had modding enabled).
The truth is - the developers suck at making games and all too often are under resourced and are not committed to their games beyond pump and dump. Transformers War for cybertron is a case in point - technically proficient port but the controls, framerate, etc they didn't bother changing at all. You couldn't change your controls in the PC version of Transformers... I mean wtf?
"I don't need my linux box booting as slow as my windows."
Next generation User interfaces will need to be 3D eventually for some applications, check out taggalaxy or thebrain. Thebrain especially would benefit from decent hybridization of 2D and 3D user interfaces.
http://www.taggalaxy.com/
http://www.thebrain.com/