The problem with these is that it was always science causing boom in other domains - advances in science revolutionize agriculture, industry, computers. None of these advanced science by much though - computers did, but that wasn't a great revolution. Science is just advancing itself, slowly.
Now if science (or anything for that matter) could really revolutionize science, boosting its progress rapidly, this would create a positive feedback loop. Each of these revolutions was a threshold, one-shot jump because the feedback, advances in science resulting from its influence, were way too small. This is different. Imagine a machine that can design, build and start devices conducting experiments, proving theorems it creates at rapid speed, then basing on the new conclusions, continue. Replace current model where research of a single idea from the moment of the first concept to the item entering production takes a year or five, with one where the new product is ready for shops(?) in 2 hours since first appearing as a spark of idea in the wires, and simultaneously 500 others are being invented.
Except there's completely no use for a $150k car on any roads in any country. It goes into illegal speeding at maybe 20% its power, driving it at 50% available power is in most cases a suicide, and the whole purpose of the remaining power is the promise to increase your penis length by 0mm. Adding superb fuel prevents your penis enlargement tool from expensive repairs and allows for another few horsepower with solemn purpose to increase your penis size by another 0mm.
And if you keep arguing that it makes any sense to buy such a car in the first place, you have a really tiny weiner.
With faster card you might get ever-so-slightly higher performance of the camera. It's like you get maybe 3% increase in performance for double the price of the card. If you're so pro that the 3% matters to you, and you earn enough that double the price is still negligible, it's fine.
With better gasoline for Ferrari the size of your penis doesn't increase even by 0.1%. And no bullshit about being able to get to work faster, or better safety due to increased driving dynamics please!
> I don't see how that's MS' fault or problem. It's a problem of the Windows platform. Whose fault it is is irrelevant, and of course MS doesn't care. It's the problem of users and developers.
> For most, this is largely irrelevent. And in remaining cases it's essential.
If you need to replace the stack, it means the original wasn't good enough for your job. Replacing is likely overwriting some DLLs, easy. Now for -writing- these DLLs (from scratch)...
>This is a fault of hardware manufactures; We're not talking about faults/guilty but about problems. Not all evils of this world are made in Richmond. This is just one of problems with Windows that isn't a direct fault of Microsoft. A problem. In case you don't have tha API docs, in Linux you have the sources to fall back to. In Windows you have a binary driver.
> If you can create a plugin that overrides the default behavior, do you really need to modify the code that shipped?
Yes, the problem lies exactly in that "if". The API to create such plugins is well documented, there are development kits and templates. The problem is writing the actual content of this plugin, for example rewriting a major component of the system from scratch instead of changing a single ++ to -- in the code, because you can't change a part this small, a single function, you need to replace whole library. Even though the actual system interaction part is adding a few header files in your Visual Studio project, then implementing 2-3 interfaces, the actual task of recreating the whole overriden component may be beyond your reach. You can't create such a plugin. You could modify the code if you had access to it.
> its much simplier to create a plugin software module that build a circuit board. It's about as easy to solder in a matching socket into a circuit board and maybe add some glue logic, to make it plug into the other part, as to create a template document for a plugin module. Now what you place inside the plugin module or what is that circuit board composed of, is a different thing - not entirely related to what they plug into.
So we agree about Linux. As for MSDN, sure you can do stuff with that. Once you're through the red tape on the subscription and considered worthy, you get access to scraps from the lord's table. There's still more things you can't do with the system than ones you can do. You have access only to what Microsoft gave you, none of the third party software. You can write very advanced custom software from scratch and make it to interact with Windows as it should. Still, you can't change the core of the system. You do advanced things UNDER windows and intermediate things WITH windows. You can't do the advanced things with windows though - at best you can override, replace. You can't modify the network stack, you can only turn it off and replace with your own. You can't modify the drivers, you can only add a layer of indirection that does a conversion between the driver and kernel, modifying data to your needs, or write the drivers from scratch... reading Linux sources to learn the hardware API. Things you do with the system are intermediate (though still devishly difficult) - interaction, switching on, off, redirecting, overriding - then you bind these to really advanced stuff that exists outside of the system, as add-ons, workarounds, plugins and extensions. Not as actual system modifications.
Sure, you theoretically can do everything the above way. Just like you can get a C64 to run PC software. Simply replace enough hardware. But when does it become a PC case mod?
You'll continue to USE your computer and you end at simple to intermediate tasks, standard tasks. You never approach the advanced ones, in one hand no need, in the other no skill. Exactly my point and the whole meaning of "advanced". Things only few professionals have desire to do, but still things that from time to time need to be done. Impossible on Windows, possible on Linux. Worthless in desktops, essential in highly specialized top-notch facilities. Linux is not quite desktop ready, Windows is useless for most advanced stuff. Your point?
Mostly everything that is made possible by Open Source model - hacking the kernel or any component of the system at will, replacing major chunks of the system with your own components without breaking the rest, releasing your own distribution, modifying device drivers, patching bugs by yourself, not depending on developers' schedule, porting the system to a different CPU architecture... shall I keep going?
No, it's not "nowhere close to being there" and telling this won't give you much crediblity. It's damned close. It isn't there though.
The system works quite well if you do very basic things, and even though it has some quirks, one can get used to them. Of course doing advanced things is harder on Windows than on Linux, so no case here. But the problem lies in the intermediate level. I want to draw pics using a tablet. No way to do it without editing xorg.conf by hand. My sound card doesn't work out of the box. Text file editing again.
Linux used to be "everything is the advanced level". Windows always was "easy and intermediate things are easy level. Advanced is impossible." Windows is trying to bend the end of the curve and make the advanced somewhat possible and not total crap. Linux, becoming the "desktop OS" is lowering the beginning of the curve, "easy and intermediate things are easy level. Advanced is still advanced." The "easy" level is already there. The intermediate is in transition and it will be for quite a while.
I can cook great dinner. I'm pretty good at cooking and treat it as kind of art, rarely following a recipe exactly, inventing my own dishes, which are often quite good. But if I come back home from a trip at 10PM and hungry as a wolf, I want to eat something fast. I open the microwave, throw in a crappy pizza I picked at the 24/7 on my way home, and have a ready meal in 2 minutes. If I had to artfully create each meal I eat, it would get boring really fast. I cook when I want something special.
Gardening isn't my cup of tea but I have a small garden with my own spice herbs. I'd gladly let some automatic device take care of it though - I'm interested in fresh, quality spices, not in growing them.
I absolutely loathe washing. Why shouldn't I? There's nothing cool about washing and I want it taken care of with as little fuss as possible. Luxury. A computer? Sure, with big, quality screen, what good is a game running at 80FPS in 1600x1200 with all shaders active if you watch it on a blurry miscalibrated 14" LCD with dead pixels, and most visuals get lost in the display. Luxury again.
I love long walks, I love bike rides. I hate waking up early, so I take a car to work, because this allows me to sleep 20 minutes longer than if I had to take the bike. If the car is broken, I just wake up earlier and take the bike, but the ride so early is not pleasant at all.
You can get all kinds of luxury stuff and use it only when you want to. And still do things you enjoy doing. Some people hate cooking. Why force them to do it? I like it, but still I use the microwave whenever cooking wouldn't be fun.
Because most people have bad taste. Therefore creating biggest market. If you have good taste, you sell good things to the few with good taste, earning little money. If you have bad taste, you sell crap to crowds, earning fortune.
Except the game doesn't render places you actually -should- see, in case you for example put a plank against a slope and climb it, or generally enter any place that requires more effort than "usually accepted" to reach. This is not on-the-fly backface culling, it's pre-install backface culling - they were culled back in Valve and never made it to your disk, not just got removed by the software as "invisible at the moment". Look at the buildings by the dropship after the air-barrel puzzle in route canal. They are single-polygon rectangles without side walls. There are many more such examples.
Of course this IS a good practice that increases performance. My point is: HL2 uses it to the extreme - few other games keep it that far, culling so much in development phase. But even despite this, it has high requirements. Now if you forced the GPU to render 4 scenes at once instead of one in a game like Half-Life, performance would drop to 1/4. And rendering more scenes instead of one is exactly what the portals mean.
Of COURSE WGA is a VERY essential security update!
While most hotfixes and patches protect you merely from losing your personal info, maybe some money from your account, maybe some time wasted closing popups, WGA protects you (not directly, but by warning you) from sad men in suits and black glasses that come knocking to your door and do some really bad things to you if your copy of Windows is not genuine.
Falk AG is the company that serves ads on slashdot.
One single reason why I have adblock installed on -all- of my machines - because it's so horribly slow for foreign ISPs like mine, that slashdot main page with adblock loads for me in 5 seconds, with ads in some 40. Good to know there's another reason.:)
The problem is that was not a user-provided content, one of millions of user pages, but advertizer content, something you directly get paid for, and certainly it appears in numbers much smaller than the user pages.
'Due dilligence' in schools, for example, may not be assuring no single kid ever smokes crack, but it certainly is making sure the school bus driver doesn't.
Not on "reputable sites". The problem is you don't have to try hard to get to the "less reputable sites". All you need is to type "com" instead of "org" or "net", make a typo or misspell the domain name, click a result that on first sight looks genuine in Google Search, visit a site from your bookmark which is two years old, enter any phpbb-based forum or any site running on older, unpatched IIS. Minor sites get hijacked all the time.
Original CD - very good quality. Lossy compression from original CD - quite good quality CD burned from the lossy compression of original CD - quite good quality (same). Lossy compression of CD burned from the lossy compression of original CD - horrible quality.
If you're recompressing from one lossy format to another using decompression to audio spectrum and recompression with repeated loss, you totally trash the quality. There are programs that allow conversion without decompressing to audio between some formats - most audio formats use different implementations of the same algorithms and the data can be converted from one implementation to other (think converting vector pictures from Corel Draw to Adobe Illustrator without making them into bitmaps and vectorizing again), but this is not always possible. Not sure about Apple too.
Why won't they just create an expansion pack instead? A BIG one? Like, five-ten times the size of the original?
The basic gripe with Fable is that it's too short. The engine is fine. The idea is okay. The game is cool. Why reinvent the wheel and build a completely new engine and not build on the one tried and true?
There are quite a few games that could really use a sequel that doesn't do any engine remake, or just minor tweaks to fix worst annoyances. Especially these "too short" ones.
Create an exit portal leading up and an entrance one in the ceiling. Tricky (timing) but possible. Again law of conservation of energy is violated but in opposite direction. Or trivial if the game ignores damage of hitting the ceiling - most games cause fall damage if you actually -fall- but hitting the ceilings at huge speeds (or grabbing ladders while falling really fast or such) doesn't cause any damage. Anyway, given enough room you can do wonders about losing speed.
More interesting would be to create an infinite loop and fill it with rockets. Lots of rockets flying in straight line continuously. Then reopen the exit portal in front of an enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with these is that it was always science causing boom in other domains - advances in science revolutionize agriculture, industry, computers. None of these advanced science by much though - computers did, but that wasn't a great revolution. Science is just advancing itself, slowly.
Now if science (or anything for that matter) could really revolutionize science, boosting its progress rapidly, this would create a positive feedback loop. Each of these revolutions was a threshold, one-shot jump because the feedback, advances in science resulting from its influence, were way too small. This is different. Imagine a machine that can design, build and start devices conducting experiments, proving theorems it creates at rapid speed, then basing on the new conclusions, continue. Replace current model where research of a single idea from the moment of the first concept to the item entering production takes a year or five, with one where the new product is ready for shops(?) in 2 hours since first appearing as a spark of idea in the wires, and simultaneously 500 others are being invented.
Two or three more presidents like George W Bush and we won't be endangered by the singularity for another 1000 years or so.
Except there's completely no use for a $150k car on any roads in any country. It goes into illegal speeding at maybe 20% its power, driving it at 50% available power is in most cases a suicide, and the whole purpose of the remaining power is the promise to increase your penis length by 0mm. Adding superb fuel prevents your penis enlargement tool from expensive repairs and allows for another few horsepower with solemn purpose to increase your penis size by another 0mm.
And if you keep arguing that it makes any sense to buy such a car in the first place, you have a really tiny weiner.
With faster card you might get ever-so-slightly higher performance of the camera. It's like you get maybe 3% increase in performance for double the price of the card. If you're so pro that the 3% matters to you, and you earn enough that double the price is still negligible, it's fine.
With better gasoline for Ferrari the size of your penis doesn't increase even by 0.1%. And no bullshit about being able to get to work faster, or better safety due to increased driving dynamics please!
There are two essential points to acquiring restricted data.
1) Access the data.
2) Don't get caught.
These guys covered only one point in preparations for their panel.
Then you're dreaming and should wake up.
It's not about iPod being apple. It's about Zune being Microsoft. It CAN'T be good.
> I don't see how that's MS' fault or problem.
It's a problem of the Windows platform. Whose fault it is is irrelevant, and of course MS doesn't care. It's the problem of users and developers.
> For most, this is largely irrelevent.
And in remaining cases it's essential.
If you need to replace the stack, it means the original wasn't good enough for your job. Replacing is likely overwriting some DLLs, easy. Now for -writing- these DLLs (from scratch)...
>This is a fault of hardware manufactures;
We're not talking about faults/guilty but about problems. Not all evils of this world are made in Richmond. This is just one of problems with Windows that isn't a direct fault of Microsoft. A problem. In case you don't have tha API docs, in Linux you have the sources to fall back to. In Windows you have a binary driver.
> If you can create a plugin that overrides the default behavior, do you really need to modify the code that shipped?
Yes, the problem lies exactly in that "if". The API to create such plugins is well documented, there are development kits and templates. The problem is writing the actual content of this plugin, for example rewriting a major component of the system from scratch instead of changing a single ++ to -- in the code, because you can't change a part this small, a single function, you need to replace whole library. Even though the actual system interaction part is adding a few header files in your Visual Studio project, then implementing 2-3 interfaces, the actual task of recreating the whole overriden component may be beyond your reach. You can't create such a plugin. You could modify the code if you had access to it.
> its much simplier to create a plugin software module that build a circuit board.
It's about as easy to solder in a matching socket into a circuit board and maybe add some glue logic, to make it plug into the other part, as to create a template document for a plugin module. Now what you place inside the plugin module or what is that circuit board composed of, is a different thing - not entirely related to what they plug into.
So we agree about Linux. As for MSDN, sure you can do stuff with that. Once you're through the red tape on the subscription and considered worthy, you get access to scraps from the lord's table. There's still more things you can't do with the system than ones you can do. You have access only to what Microsoft gave you, none of the third party software. You can write very advanced custom software from scratch and make it to interact with Windows as it should. Still, you can't change the core of the system. You do advanced things UNDER windows and intermediate things WITH windows. You can't do the advanced things with windows though - at best you can override, replace. You can't modify the network stack, you can only turn it off and replace with your own. You can't modify the drivers, you can only add a layer of indirection that does a conversion between the driver and kernel, modifying data to your needs, or write the drivers from scratch... reading Linux sources to learn the hardware API. Things you do with the system are intermediate (though still devishly difficult) - interaction, switching on, off, redirecting, overriding - then you bind these to really advanced stuff that exists outside of the system, as add-ons, workarounds, plugins and extensions. Not as actual system modifications.
Sure, you theoretically can do everything the above way. Just like you can get a C64 to run PC software. Simply replace enough hardware. But when does it become a PC case mod?
You got nothing.
You'll continue to USE your computer and you end at simple to intermediate tasks, standard tasks. You never approach the advanced ones, in one hand no need, in the other no skill. Exactly my point and the whole meaning of "advanced". Things only few professionals have desire to do, but still things that from time to time need to be done. Impossible on Windows, possible on Linux. Worthless in desktops, essential in highly specialized top-notch facilities. Linux is not quite desktop ready, Windows is useless for most advanced stuff. Your point?
Mostly everything that is made possible by Open Source model - hacking the kernel or any component of the system at will, replacing major chunks of the system with your own components without breaking the rest, releasing your own distribution, modifying device drivers, patching bugs by yourself, not depending on developers' schedule, porting the system to a different CPU architecture... shall I keep going?
No, it's not "nowhere close to being there" and telling this won't give you much crediblity. It's damned close. It isn't there though.
The system works quite well if you do very basic things, and even though it has some quirks, one can get used to them. Of course doing advanced things is harder on Windows than on Linux, so no case here. But the problem lies in the intermediate level. I want to draw pics using a tablet. No way to do it without editing xorg.conf by hand. My sound card doesn't work out of the box. Text file editing again.
Linux used to be "everything is the advanced level".
Windows always was "easy and intermediate things are easy level. Advanced is impossible."
Windows is trying to bend the end of the curve and make the advanced somewhat possible and not total crap.
Linux, becoming the "desktop OS" is lowering the beginning of the curve, "easy and intermediate things are easy level. Advanced is still advanced." The "easy" level is already there. The intermediate is in transition and it will be for quite a while.
The keyword is "options".
I can cook great dinner. I'm pretty good at cooking and treat it as kind of art, rarely following a recipe exactly, inventing my own dishes, which are often quite good. But if I come back home from a trip at 10PM and hungry as a wolf, I want to eat something fast. I open the microwave, throw in a crappy pizza I picked at the 24/7 on my way home, and have a ready meal in 2 minutes. If I had to artfully create each meal I eat, it would get boring really fast. I cook when I want something special.
Gardening isn't my cup of tea but I have a small garden with my own spice herbs. I'd gladly let some automatic device take care of it though - I'm interested in fresh, quality spices, not in growing them.
I absolutely loathe washing. Why shouldn't I? There's nothing cool about washing and I want it taken care of with as little fuss as possible. Luxury. A computer? Sure, with big, quality screen, what good is a game running at 80FPS in 1600x1200 with all shaders active if you watch it on a blurry miscalibrated 14" LCD with dead pixels, and most visuals get lost in the display. Luxury again.
I love long walks, I love bike rides. I hate waking up early, so I take a car to work, because this allows me to sleep 20 minutes longer than if I had to take the bike. If the car is broken, I just wake up earlier and take the bike, but the ride so early is not pleasant at all.
You can get all kinds of luxury stuff and use it only when you want to. And still do things you enjoy doing. Some people hate cooking. Why force them to do it? I like it, but still I use the microwave whenever cooking wouldn't be fun.
Relatively easy. LCD with venetian mirror on the screen. With backlight off it's just a mirror. The problem is it won't work in brightly lit places.
Not nearly scary enough.
Because most people have bad taste. Therefore creating biggest market.
If you have good taste, you sell good things to the few with good taste, earning little money. If you have bad taste, you sell crap to crowds, earning fortune.
Except the game doesn't render places you actually -should- see, in case you for example put a plank against a slope and climb it, or generally enter any place that requires more effort than "usually accepted" to reach. This is not on-the-fly backface culling, it's pre-install backface culling - they were culled back in Valve and never made it to your disk, not just got removed by the software as "invisible at the moment". Look at the buildings by the dropship after the air-barrel puzzle in route canal. They are single-polygon rectangles without side walls. There are many more such examples.
Of course this IS a good practice that increases performance. My point is: HL2 uses it to the extreme - few other games keep it that far, culling so much in development phase. But even despite this, it has high requirements. Now if you forced the GPU to render 4 scenes at once instead of one in a game like Half-Life, performance would drop to 1/4. And rendering more scenes instead of one is exactly what the portals mean.
Of COURSE WGA is a VERY essential security update!
While most hotfixes and patches protect you merely from losing your personal info, maybe some money from your account, maybe some time wasted closing popups, WGA protects you (not directly, but by warning you) from sad men in suits and black glasses that come knocking to your door and do some really bad things to you if your copy of Windows is not genuine.
Fuck.
:)
Falk AG is the company that serves ads on slashdot.
One single reason why I have adblock installed on -all- of my machines - because it's so horribly slow for foreign ISPs like mine, that slashdot main page with adblock loads for me in 5 seconds, with ads in some 40. Good to know there's another reason.
The problem is that was not a user-provided content, one of millions of user pages, but advertizer content, something you directly get paid for, and certainly it appears in numbers much smaller than the user pages.
'Due dilligence' in schools, for example, may not be assuring no single kid ever smokes crack, but it certainly is making sure the school bus driver doesn't.
Not on "reputable sites". The problem is you don't have to try hard to get to the "less reputable sites". All you need is to type "com" instead of "org" or "net", make a typo or misspell the domain name, click a result that on first sight looks genuine in Google Search, visit a site from your bookmark which is two years old, enter any phpbb-based forum or any site running on older, unpatched IIS. Minor sites get hijacked all the time.
Original CD - very good quality.
Lossy compression from original CD - quite good quality
CD burned from the lossy compression of original CD - quite good quality (same).
Lossy compression of CD burned from the lossy compression of original CD - horrible quality.
If you're recompressing from one lossy format to another using decompression to audio spectrum and recompression with repeated loss, you totally trash the quality. There are programs that allow conversion without decompressing to audio between some formats - most audio formats use different implementations of the same algorithms and the data can be converted from one implementation to other (think converting vector pictures from Corel Draw to Adobe Illustrator without making them into bitmaps and vectorizing again), but this is not always possible. Not sure about Apple too.
Why won't they just create an expansion pack instead? A BIG one? Like, five-ten times the size of the original?
The basic gripe with Fable is that it's too short. The engine is fine. The idea is okay. The game is cool. Why reinvent the wheel and build a completely new engine and not build on the one tried and true?
There are quite a few games that could really use a sequel that doesn't do any engine remake, or just minor tweaks to fix worst annoyances. Especially these "too short" ones.
And you STILL didn't finish it yet?
"People always enjoy a good fable. M'aiq has yet to find one, though. Perhaps one day."
Create an exit portal leading up and an entrance one in the ceiling. Tricky (timing) but possible. Again law of conservation of energy is violated but in opposite direction. Or trivial if the game ignores damage of hitting the ceiling - most games cause fall damage if you actually -fall- but hitting the ceilings at huge speeds (or grabbing ladders while falling really fast or such) doesn't cause any damage. Anyway, given enough room you can do wonders about losing speed.
More interesting would be to create an infinite loop and fill it with rockets. Lots of rockets flying in straight line continuously. Then reopen the exit portal in front of an enemy.