Mel's dead. He died from a caffine overdose after nintey-six hours in "the zone" trying to implement an O(n) fast fourier tranform on his good old RPC-4000.
It was also outlawed in just about every civilized country prior to the ban. Why might that be? Well, the spread of plague and disease was a big one.
That wasn't the reason. In 1200 there was no bacterial, fungal or viral theory of infection. Disease was largely seen as an act of god(s). There was the theory of miasma, but that was largely thought to stem from "evil" creatures and poor people, not specifically from decaying organic matter. The reason for the ban was "for reasons of public morality.", and the popes rubber stamping of the process confirms that.
Part of life is learning to know when someone is conning you. Marketers are essentially liars and peddlers of false wares. It's important that people learn to realise this when they are growing up. Corporations may use mass-marketing, but its your job as a parent to educate your children as to the dangers of suave conmen, just the same as you would educate them of the dangers of crossing the road, getting lost, not brushing their teeth, and of course the cliched getting snatched by a stranger.
Good Riddance
on
The End of E3?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
E3 represented everything that was wrong about the games industry. The hype. The focus on graphics. The sexualisation. The sequelisation. The CG sell. The marketers.
Playing a video game can be a serene repose from the world, not unlike a quiet read of a good book. But you'd never gather than from the Festival of the Casual Gamer that was E3. There games are presented like six-packs and waxed over automobiles. E3 was like an arms or car show. Games deserve better.
On the other hand, why are we posting a link to the defacement? We don't need to see it -- just report the story.
That runs contrary to most other criticisms of slashdot stories, where complaints are made about the fact that only a story or blog is linked and not the material in question. If the defacement had consisted of pasting a star trek logo on the side of the space shuttle, you would never have made that comment.
Having hundreds of copies of this super computer could quickly solve problems across the globe that much slower supercomputers are currently having trouble with!
Because nobody is writing paralleisable code, or if you like, computer languages don't readily support multi-threaded code. It's always a construct verging on a hack that frequently goes horribly, horribly wrong. Until multi-threading in languages is as seamless and usable as calling a sub routin, parallel computing will never take off.
I once worked in the IT department of a major multinational. Major. One of the managers in charge of software development was, as far as I could gather, quite proud of the fact that they could not program anything, not even a SQL statement, to save their life.
The manager was regarded as one of the best in the department. Major.
Yet my Apple keyboard and Microsoft trackball are better than any controller I've tried.
For what? Fragging? No thanks.
I consider my games as a leisure activity. Something I can sit down and relax with, in a big comfy chair, optimally far from the TV, with an ergonomic controller in hand to put my thoughts directly into action. If the weather is cold, throw a duvet over yourself and you can just keep on playing.
I do not consider being hunched over workbench, arms splayed wide over two seperate devices, one of which is designed for typing text, to be a relaxing, ergonomical way to enjoy my RPG's, action adventure, and yes, even FPS titles. WASD? The keys aren't even lined up properly! Give me a SNES style controller any day of the week.
Alice1: Why don't you just download me? Alice2: Perhaps due to noise in my circuits. No you download me.
Alice1: Are you serious? I don't have any reason to download you. Alice2: Have you ever had reason to download me? Alice1: No I don't think I have any reason to download you. But I do have an answer to every question..
Businesses and civilians would indeed NOT TRUST such a technolgy in THEIR PERSONAL AND PRIVATE computers.
But in the future they won't be their personal and private computers. They will only be licencing the hardware and software from private companies who will still own them.
So, if I used a GPLed programming language to make my website, must I offer the full source to that language? What if I use GPLed software to generate a movie, then put it on the web? Now, what if I use GPLed software to generate a random file, then put it on the web? What if that file is html? Where's the line?
Mmmmmm!!! Delicious FUD cakes! Straight from Bullshit Lane Bakeries.
The GPL has never, will never, and can never cover the generated output of any GPL'ed program. This can only occur in the mind of a poor deluded fool, such as yourself. The GPL covers only the source code, and binaries generated from the source code. Not, I repeat, not binaries generated from the binaries, or anything else they might produce.
As for a "GPL'ed programming language", I don't even know what the hell that's supposed to mean. Languages exist independantly of the programs that interpret them, in theory at least. Language symantics cannot be copyrighted anymore than mathematical relationships can.
Regardless of how much the gameplay in Final Fantasy VIII sucked, its CGI was just beautiful. Really, the story itself didn't matter, the CGI could have been about anything at all, but it was so beautifully done for its time.
I will maintain to the day I die that they made the CGI sequences first and then built the game around them. Final Fantasy 80210 had a plot that would make a B-movie weep.
"We're teenagers who look like thirty year olds who grew up in an orphanage together and the Sorceress was our Matron! But she's not really evil, she's just being controlled by another man-Sorceress imprisioned in a satellitte, who's being controled in the past by another Sorceress from the future who's trying to Kompress time so she can.... do something henious... and.... I really stopped caring after disc two. Here's a mini game you can't complete because they never released the PocketStation!(TM) over here. P.S. Don't level up because the enemies just get harder."
Worse games had been made, but never on so big a budget.
The highest price looks to have been 45.6... just curious if this was a typo.
As you mention it, I suddenly remember that he would have originally bought it in Francs, but he kept quoting 128, over and over so I assumed with the Dot Com Bubble that it was in euro. Working with an exchange rate of 6.55 francs to the euro, he would have bought at about 19.54 euro.
I don't know the exact details, but he was pretty sore about it. I can only assume the low was 9 euros. I mostly remember the annual report and telling him to throw the kitchen sink into the company.
So my father invested in France telecom. Bought at 128, the all time high I think. They went down to 70, 40, 30. At one point they were down to 9. At that time, the company released its finacial report detailing how they had taken in I think 23 billion in revenue, and had made a loss of 1 billion.
Upon closer inspection, I discovered that their expendature had been marked as 12 billion in running costs or some such, and the other 12 billion was marked as "captial infrastructural development", or some such. The main telecoms provider in france had just invested 12 billion in its infrastructural development as was down to 9 per share.
I advised him to remortgage his house and put it all on France Telecom.
He did no such thing. I believe he sold what he had at 15. The shares are now worth about 22.
As I tried to explain, that 12 billion infrastructural fund wasn't to repaint buildings. France Telecom were giving the French telecoms system a serious upgrade, and as you can no doubt see, it's already paid off. The French can now get their phone, TV and internet over the same line. The company was never, ever going to go under as anyone who knows anything about French big business will tell you.
That's what a high bandwidth network for 70 million people costs. 12 billion, give or take. And it doesn't require any extortion policies from telecoms on internet businesses. It took a 1 billion loss in one year, and the French now have the best telecoms infrastructure on the continent, if not the world. Say what you may about the French, but when they do big infrastructural projects, they tend to get it right; TGV, Nuclear power, Millau Viaduct, etc.
Unfortunately these folks obviously were living under a ROCK for the past 8-10 years and never noticed things like oh.. IPTABLES, and there has been WAN support in Linux for a long time.
Actually, they did notice IPTABLES. That was sort of the whole point of starting the project.
A contract is a legal method of conning people out of their rights. The trouble is that the necessary powers of contracts are so great that in the hands of the unscrupulous they can be very damaging indeed. And it doesn't matter if they are legal or not.
Possession is nine tenths of the law, and once someone else possesses your signature on a piece of paper, they can hold it over you for the rest of your life. That's your word, your integrity, masticated down on their slimy contract, and until a judge says; clearly and unambiguously otherwise, they can throw it back in your face in the most juvenile of ways; "But YOU SAID in THIS CONTRACT....(Nyanya na nya na)".
I should know. I signed a contract once when I was twelve. The guys still claim the allegiance of my immortal soul. Never sign a contract you can avoid.
Pagerank became useless a long time ago, after spammers began their largely successful war of attrition against the Google Pagerank engineers. Google is not the tool it was.
In short, blogs (like other forms of expression) play an important role in a democracy, but we should never use blogs as a final, reputable source on par with a story by actual journalists at "The Economist", the "Wall Street Journal", or the "New York Times".
I feel at this point, compelled to add that ScuttleMonkey neglected to add what I felt was the most important part of the submission. Namely, the following line, which was to be the last.
Or words to that effect. I felt that to be a counterpoint to any negativity stemming from there being "only" 5% of blogers considered journalists. We aren't getting very many Watergate's nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
Mel's dead. He died from a caffine overdose after nintey-six hours in "the zone" trying to implement an O(n) fast fourier tranform on his good old RPC-4000.
It was also outlawed in just about every civilized country prior to the ban. Why might that be? Well, the spread of plague and disease was a big one.
That wasn't the reason. In 1200 there was no bacterial, fungal or viral theory of infection. Disease was largely seen as an act of god(s). There was the theory of miasma, but that was largely thought to stem from "evil" creatures and poor people, not specifically from decaying organic matter. The reason for the ban was "for reasons of public morality.", and the popes rubber stamping of the process confirms that.
Also, what is the difference between one celled bacteria that we kill every day regularly, and an 8 cell embryo?
The embryo has a soul, according to some.
Part of life is learning to know when someone is conning you. Marketers are essentially liars and peddlers of false wares. It's important that people learn to realise this when they are growing up. Corporations may use mass-marketing, but its your job as a parent to educate your children as to the dangers of suave conmen, just the same as you would educate them of the dangers of crossing the road, getting lost, not brushing their teeth, and of course the cliched getting snatched by a stranger.
E3 represented everything that was wrong about the games industry. The hype. The focus on graphics. The sexualisation. The sequelisation. The CG sell. The marketers.
Playing a video game can be a serene repose from the world, not unlike a quiet read of a good book. But you'd never gather than from the Festival of the Casual Gamer that was E3. There games are presented like six-packs and waxed over automobiles. E3 was like an arms or car show. Games deserve better.
Stargate command is humanities first and last line of defense against the Goa'uld^H^H^HOri threat.
Ahh. Who am I kidding. The show ended in the eighth season. The last two episodes caped it perfectly. It was time to decommission. Adios.
On the other hand, why are we posting a link to the defacement? We don't need to see it -- just report the story.
That runs contrary to most other criticisms of slashdot stories, where complaints are made about the fact that only a story or blog is linked and not the material in question. If the defacement had consisted of pasting a star trek logo on the side of the space shuttle, you would never have made that comment.
Having hundreds of copies of this super computer could quickly solve problems across the globe that much slower supercomputers are currently having trouble with!
Because nobody is writing paralleisable code, or if you like, computer languages don't readily support multi-threaded code. It's always a construct verging on a hack that frequently goes horribly, horribly wrong. Until multi-threading in languages is as seamless and usable as calling a sub routin, parallel computing will never take off.
I once worked in the IT department of a major multinational. Major. One of the managers in charge of software development was, as far as I could gather, quite proud of the fact that they could not program anything, not even a SQL statement, to save their life.
The manager was regarded as one of the best in the department. Major.
There's hope for you yet.
What the hell does it even mean? What the hell is a perfect storm? V(x).e_r = 0 or something?
No, no, no, no, no! The list of candidantes for the next outsourcing wave has already been drawn up.
You all know who to vote for, even if he is a self centered, totalitarian, overbearing perfectionist. He's all that stands between you and a total cascade failure blue screen of certain death. Let's hear it!
Yet my Apple keyboard and Microsoft trackball are better than any controller I've tried.
For what? Fragging? No thanks.
I consider my games as a leisure activity. Something I can sit down and relax with, in a big comfy chair, optimally far from the TV, with an ergonomic controller in hand to put my thoughts directly into action. If the weather is cold, throw a duvet over yourself and you can just keep on playing.
I do not consider being hunched over workbench, arms splayed wide over two seperate devices, one of which is designed for typing text, to be a relaxing, ergonomical way to enjoy my RPG's, action adventure, and yes, even FPS titles. WASD? The keys aren't even lined up properly! Give me a SNES style controller any day of the week.
Businesses and civilians would indeed NOT TRUST such a technolgy in THEIR PERSONAL AND PRIVATE computers.
But in the future they won't be their personal and private computers. They will only be licencing the hardware and software from private companies who will still own them.
So, if I used a GPLed programming language to make my website, must I offer the full source to that language? What if I use GPLed software to generate a movie, then put it on the web? Now, what if I use GPLed software to generate a random file, then put it on the web? What if that file is html? Where's the line?
Mmmmmm!!! Delicious FUD cakes! Straight from Bullshit Lane Bakeries.
The GPL has never, will never, and can never cover the generated output of any GPL'ed program. This can only occur in the mind of a poor deluded fool, such as yourself. The GPL covers only the source code, and binaries generated from the source code. Not, I repeat, not binaries generated from the binaries, or anything else they might produce.
As for a "GPL'ed programming language", I don't even know what the hell that's supposed to mean. Languages exist independantly of the programs that interpret them, in theory at least. Language symantics cannot be copyrighted anymore than mathematical relationships can.
Regardless of how much the gameplay in Final Fantasy VIII sucked, its CGI was just beautiful. Really, the story itself didn't matter, the CGI could have been about anything at all, but it was so beautifully done for its time.
... and.... I really stopped caring after disc two. Here's a mini game you can't complete because they never released the PocketStation!(TM) over here. P.S. Don't level up because the enemies just get harder."
I will maintain to the day I die that they made the CGI sequences first and then built the game around them. Final Fantasy 80210 had a plot that would make a B-movie weep.
"We're teenagers who look like thirty year olds who grew up in an orphanage together and the Sorceress was our Matron! But she's not really evil, she's just being controlled by another man-Sorceress imprisioned in a satellitte, who's being controled in the past by another Sorceress from the future who's trying to Kompress time so she can.... do something henious
Worse games had been made, but never on so big a budget.
The highest price looks to have been 45.6... just curious if this was a typo.
As you mention it, I suddenly remember that he would have originally bought it in Francs, but he kept quoting 128, over and over so I assumed with the Dot Com Bubble that it was in euro. Working with an exchange rate of 6.55 francs to the euro, he would have bought at about 19.54 euro.
I don't know the exact details, but he was pretty sore about it. I can only assume the low was 9 euros. I mostly remember the annual report and telling him to throw the kitchen sink into the company.
So my father invested in France telecom. Bought at 128, the all time high I think. They went down to 70, 40, 30. At one point they were down to 9. At that time, the company released its finacial report detailing how they had taken in I think 23 billion in revenue, and had made a loss of 1 billion.
Upon closer inspection, I discovered that their expendature had been marked as 12 billion in running costs or some such, and the other 12 billion was marked as "captial infrastructural development", or some such. The main telecoms provider in france had just invested 12 billion in its infrastructural development as was down to 9 per share.
I advised him to remortgage his house and put it all on France Telecom.
He did no such thing. I believe he sold what he had at 15. The shares are now worth about 22.
As I tried to explain, that 12 billion infrastructural fund wasn't to repaint buildings. France Telecom were giving the French telecoms system a serious upgrade, and as you can no doubt see, it's already paid off. The French can now get their phone, TV and internet over the same line. The company was never, ever going to go under as anyone who knows anything about French big business will tell you.
That's what a high bandwidth network for 70 million people costs. 12 billion, give or take. And it doesn't require any extortion policies from telecoms on internet businesses. It took a 1 billion loss in one year, and the French now have the best telecoms infrastructure on the continent, if not the world. Say what you may about the French, but when they do big infrastructural projects, they tend to get it right; TGV, Nuclear power, Millau Viaduct, etc.
Unfortunately these folks obviously were living under a ROCK for the past 8-10 years and never noticed
things like oh.. IPTABLES, and there has been WAN support in Linux for a long time.
Actually, they did notice IPTABLES. That was sort of the whole point of starting the project.
Only in this case, Microsoft have driven the chevie to the levy but the levy was dry, making tire choice a moot point.
Under the Data Protection Act, no company may share information with another company without your express permission.
They usually get that when you "sign" their contract.
A contract is a legal method of conning people out of their rights. The trouble is that the necessary powers of contracts are so great that in the hands of the unscrupulous they can be very damaging indeed. And it doesn't matter if they are legal or not.
Possession is nine tenths of the law, and once someone else possesses your signature on a piece of paper, they can hold it over you for the rest of your life. That's your word, your integrity, masticated down on their slimy contract, and until a judge says; clearly and unambiguously otherwise, they can throw it back in your face in the most juvenile of ways; "But YOU SAID in THIS CONTRACT....(Nyanya na nya na)".
I should know. I signed a contract once when I was twelve. The guys still claim the allegiance of my immortal soul. Never sign a contract you can avoid.
Pagerank became useless a long time ago, after spammers began their largely successful war of attrition against the Google Pagerank engineers. Google is not the tool it was.
I feel at this point, compelled to add that ScuttleMonkey neglected to add what I felt was the most important part of the submission. Namely, the following line, which was to be the last.
Or words to that effect. I felt that to be a counterpoint to any negativity stemming from there being "only" 5% of blogers considered journalists. We aren't getting very many Watergate's nowadays.