I think Nintendo is on the right track with its versatile new controller. But it is only one of several possible features that could make consoles more attractive.
Extra video outs is another. How hard can it be to support that, obviously at some cost of detail or refresh rate? Give me up to three screens, racing and shooter games that use them, and let me salivate at the idea of attaching three projectors.
No-treshold wireless networking is another thing. I want to be able to place four consoles in a room and have them instantly build a network. Nothing fancy, just a low-bandwidth thing to do deathmatches over.
Finally, I want voice input. So simple, so useful, yet never done.
China can't conquer anything without defeating both the US and Russia first. And even if they could, Japan wouldn't be a sensible target - too difficult to convince of cooperation, and too useful in its current state as a market. Mongolia, Nepal and India with their traditional Maoist opposition groups would be the obvious targets if China was aggressive. But it isn't.
Perhaps the contract with their lawyers says the latter have to spend 1% of their pay on SCO licenses. An IT investment of course, and deductible from taxes.
I can't quite imagine this will become a mature product. When people can walk in a VR world, they will expect to be able to use other forms of movement as well. Running alone is a major problem: anything beyond a slow walk will require tiles that can move as quick as a running person and, while doing so, are also able to stop and change directions within fractions of a second. Then people (once suspension of disbelief is good) occasionally will jump, which I guess is another hard problem. Any single mistake in the system, when used with a helmet, is likely to result in injury to the user. I'm sooooo not designing this.
What - beyond the wow factor - is a technology that only allows for slow VR movement actually useful for?
Alright. Let's assume a mature OSS software project like Apache was closed source. Why exactly would that create more IT jobs? The software is written and while everything can be made better, it is mostly doing its job very well. Closed source status would feed a sales department, and managment, but not a lot of IT people.
My idea is simple: much software there is currently demand for has already been written. Many programmer jobs are simply obsolete, especially in well-developed areas like office software. If it was all closed source, people couldn't freely download it, but they still wouldn't demand other software and thus create a lot of software developer jobs.
Of course this only concerns software development, but that seems to be the part of IT you were speaking about, anyway. I am also a aware a huge portion of software developers are and will be doing good and necessary work. Still I think that software development, overall, has a natural inclination towards making itself redundant - and this kills jobs. OSS just additionally kills sales and some managment.
You are right. Still, to shed more light on this...
The "only" problem is that oil production capacities can't be expanded in the short term. Oil companies are currently throwing about 81.7 million barrels on the market, per day. The maximum technically possible without further investments is something like 83 million. Once that is reached, there won't be enough oil for everyone and price will increase exponentially.
People currently believe the trend can be inversed by production increases, because the increase in oil consumption in China and India in particular, while fast, seems managable. The bigger problem is that of the 81.7 million, 2 million are coming from the Russian company Yukos that their government is apparently intent to drive into bankrupcy, and 1.7 million are coming from Iraq and have been shown to be quite vulnerable in the past. If any of these sources stops producing even for a few days, $50 is a rather optimistic estimate.
terminator mode; acquire target, take in strategic positioning, calculate chance of survival, and then attack/flee. This is what happens to all FPS players given enough time playing.
Wrong. I haven't played (or seen) Doom 3 yet, but a friend of mine, who did and has basically played through every FPS of the last 5 years and is quite an ace at Counterstrike - in short: as pro as it gets - commented to me: "Anyone unafraid in this game is not human." You may disagree, but apparently, FPS skill does not automatically prevent a good scare experience. He loves the game, BTW.
Movie-like mental state changing special effects do NOT belong in videogames
This game obviously did freak you out, and that makes it interesting. You probably don't want to, but you do recommend Doom 3.
I claim any significant OSS project cannot be closed down. Everyone has the source, everyone knows how to communicate anonymously, hence everyone can continue the project without fear of legal issues. Of course, one could not gain reputation from doing so, but one might work without this incentive - out of altruism to users, or out of friggin hate for whichever competitor drove one underground.
If someone starts a massive patents war, the big players will shell out billions to lawyers and courts, one or two of them will go down, and when the dust settles, OSS will come back out in the open... unharmed.
Re:I think it hasn't been explored enough
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
The manual for the Kabbala game might take several years to read though.
Depends on how serious you take it. If taking some liberties, I'm sure one could make an interesting action game with a kabbalist background. Or a background from any other religion, for that matter - why not frag Ifrit in the service of Allah? As long as you don't attempt something like an adventure game that requires in-depth knowledge of some mystical worldview to complete, and as long as the graphics rock, I don't see a problem.
Of course, people would complain the religion in question wasn't treated appropriately. But then again, many christians I know think certain pastors and priests don't treat their religion appropriately, either.
The list of games in the article is not complete. There was at least one other game in another version of Polyplay. I have to admit I forgot the name, but it was supposed to mean steering Buran through an asteroid belt. You evaded lumps that kept crossing the screen horizontally at increasing speeds. You could also shoot, but only one shot could be on the screen at any time and hitting amounted to having the asteroid reset to a position at the end of the screen. IIRC, it scrolled from left to right, not the common right-to-left way.
I'm not quite sure, but I think there also was an Asteroids clone. Perhaps I'm mixing this up with "Schiessbude" - after all, I played this machine 15 years ago and wasn't even in school then. But it is a pity I don't remember more of the Buran game - MAME doesn't have this one, and if none of the three machines left have it, it is probably lost.
The real threat to Microsoft is not Linux. It's OpenOffice.
And to stay on topic: Firefox is not a threat, either. Microsoft can easily afford giving up the browser market, now that the terrain in internet technology isn't as unclaimed as it was in the time of Netscape.
The key to really harming Microsoft lies in reverse engineering.DOC - no more, no less.
What's probably missing from a lot of your reporting (or at least is covered very minimally, especially when compared to the coverage the abuse of Iraqi prisoners got) is the UN oil for food scandal and the beheading of hostages by Iraqi terrorists. From what I've seen the turnover of power to the Iraqi interim government has also gotten little press.
True for the oil for food thing, but (IMHO) not for the beheadings and turnover of power.
I found it rather ridiculous how much coverage Abu Ghraib got, while similar things on a far larger scale are almost completely ignored simply because they happen in Russia and China.
They also found that the Drudge Report and Fox News Special Report were pretty much at the true center of the political spectrum.
...of the USA. I'm German, and I like to watch a lot of news channels from different nations. Even CNN seems rather on the right hand side of things compared with major news channels from other (western) countries.
For example, just recently, there was this study of Oxford Research International that found, among other things, that Iraqi acceptance of violence against US troops has risen from 17 to 31 percent over the last five months. 33 percent favor immediate retreat of all US troops from Iraq, as opposed to 15 percent in february. Those are facts which liberals (people who don't value the myth of a "tiny minority" of unhappy Iraqis over reality) would find highly significant. However, I didn't find any of this on CNN.com. Other news services such as the German Tagesschau reported it.
Please understand that I don't intend to flame, or start a political discussion. I just find this a fitting example of how US news services seem to lean to the right, compared on an international scale. It illustrates that left and right are relative terms.
To me, being used to leverage a better discount from your competitor, isn't much of a "win" for the adoption of Linux.
But it is a win for me, the customer. I don't give a shit for Linux, or Windows, or whatever else makes my computer tick. But if supporting Linux means I get to pay less, I support Linux.
Even if Microsoft does come out with the Xbox 2 sooner it would have to be light years ahead of the PS2 to get an audience
My bet is on VR capabilities. Seriously - why shouldn't anyone pick up the idea of the helmet and glove again? It'd be a unique selling point and it'd generate a huge media buzz too. Also, we are approaching the limit of what a TV screen can deliver to the viewer fairly rapidly, HDTV or not.
On the other hand, nothing of the sort is happening right now, and can only guess some people are probably sitting on patents. Other ideas?
I think it is much more likely we will see something like that on a tank or plane. Lots of flat surfaces and a power supply should make this much easier than camouflaging people.
However, I very much doubt even that is practical in military use - as others have said, there are other means of finding targets than the optical one. And if I got it right, the "translucency" is achieved by making the object reflect (read: emit) extra light. I would imagine this makes the system impractical in more situations than not.
The German "Behörde für die Unterlagen der Staatsicherheit" did get the Rosenholz Files eventually - although some think in abridged form. I don't know whether they handed over their files to the CIA, but it wouldn't surprise me.
After all, those files aren't really secret. Every German citizen who bothers to make an application is entitled to seeing any files concerning him, and every journalist and historician (or person with a minimum of wit that can pretend to be one) can access a lot of those files.
But they could put something like a gigantic Coca Cola logo on the bottom of that 2-miles-wide station. Of course this thing would only be visible in an area some dozen miles wide, only in very good weather and at day time. And the station is currently not designed to be flat - rather, it consists of five tubes if I interpret the sketch in the article correctly.
But I would imagine if any big company was looking for a major marketing scoop, and the guys who do this can use a hundred million dollars, they should be able to reach some agreement. A two miles wide disc twenty miles up should be an awesome ad platform, and it should be worth enough to fund further and faster development of this system.
I realized that the source of his distaste for metric was really just the instinctive reaction social animals use to build communities. The 'Us Vs. Them' filter that we all use to clump ourselves into social groups.
So this filter would likely be more pronounced in regions of the world where the metric system has not been accepted yet. Funny I can get international politics explained to me while reading stuff about sheets of paper.
True, but these systems aren't meant to work with a very large image database. They will mostly look whether your iris matches the one on your passport, or - at most - identify you as a member of a small group of possible matches (say employees). And in most cases, you'll probably get to try several times.
I don't doubt the shit will hit the fan from several other directions, as others have stated here, but this one is pretty safe.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Nintendo is on the right track with its versatile new controller. But it is only one of several possible features that could make consoles more attractive.
Extra video outs is another. How hard can it be to support that, obviously at some cost of detail or refresh rate? Give me up to three screens, racing and shooter games that use them, and let me salivate at the idea of attaching three projectors.
No-treshold wireless networking is another thing. I want to be able to place four consoles in a room and have them instantly build a network. Nothing fancy, just a low-bandwidth thing to do deathmatches over.
Finally, I want voice input. So simple, so useful, yet never done.
China can't conquer anything without defeating both the US and Russia first. And even if they could, Japan wouldn't be a sensible target - too difficult to convince of cooperation, and too useful in its current state as a market. Mongolia, Nepal and India with their traditional Maoist opposition groups would be the obvious targets if China was aggressive. But it isn't.
Perhaps the contract with their lawyers says the latter have to spend 1% of their pay on SCO licenses. An IT investment of course, and deductible from taxes.
I can't quite imagine this will become a mature product. When people can walk in a VR world, they will expect to be able to use other forms of movement as well. Running alone is a major problem: anything beyond a slow walk will require tiles that can move as quick as a running person and, while doing so, are also able to stop and change directions within fractions of a second. Then people (once suspension of disbelief is good) occasionally will jump, which I guess is another hard problem. Any single mistake in the system, when used with a helmet, is likely to result in injury to the user. I'm sooooo not designing this.
What - beyond the wow factor - is a technology that only allows for slow VR movement actually useful for?
Alright. Let's assume a mature OSS software project like Apache was closed source. Why exactly would that create more IT jobs? The software is written and while everything can be made better, it is mostly doing its job very well. Closed source status would feed a sales department, and managment, but not a lot of IT people.
My idea is simple: much software there is currently demand for has already been written. Many programmer jobs are simply obsolete, especially in well-developed areas like office software. If it was all closed source, people couldn't freely download it, but they still wouldn't demand other software and thus create a lot of software developer jobs.
Of course this only concerns software development, but that seems to be the part of IT you were speaking about, anyway. I am also a aware a huge portion of software developers are and will be doing good and necessary work. Still I think that software development, overall, has a natural inclination towards making itself redundant - and this kills jobs. OSS just additionally kills sales and some managment.
You are right. Still, to shed more light on this...
The "only" problem is that oil production capacities can't be expanded in the short term. Oil companies are currently throwing about 81.7 million barrels on the market, per day. The maximum technically possible without further investments is something like 83 million. Once that is reached, there won't be enough oil for everyone and price will increase exponentially.
People currently believe the trend can be inversed by production increases, because the increase in oil consumption in China and India in particular, while fast, seems managable. The bigger problem is that of the 81.7 million, 2 million are coming from the Russian company Yukos that their government is apparently intent to drive into bankrupcy, and 1.7 million are coming from Iraq and have been shown to be quite vulnerable in the past. If any of these sources stops producing even for a few days, $50 is a rather optimistic estimate.
terminator mode; acquire target, take in strategic positioning, calculate chance of survival, and then attack/flee. This is what happens to all FPS players given enough time playing.
Wrong. I haven't played (or seen) Doom 3 yet, but a friend of mine, who did and has basically played through every FPS of the last 5 years and is quite an ace at Counterstrike - in short: as pro as it gets - commented to me: "Anyone unafraid in this game is not human." You may disagree, but apparently, FPS skill does not automatically prevent a good scare experience. He loves the game, BTW.
Movie-like mental state changing special effects do NOT belong in videogames
This game obviously did freak you out, and that makes it interesting. You probably don't want to, but you do recommend Doom 3.
I claim any significant OSS project cannot be closed down. Everyone has the source, everyone knows how to communicate anonymously, hence everyone can continue the project without fear of legal issues. Of course, one could not gain reputation from doing so, but one might work without this incentive - out of altruism to users, or out of friggin hate for whichever competitor drove one underground.
If someone starts a massive patents war, the big players will shell out billions to lawyers and courts, one or two of them will go down, and when the dust settles, OSS will come back out in the open... unharmed.
The manual for the Kabbala game might take several years to read though.
Depends on how serious you take it. If taking some liberties, I'm sure one could make an interesting action game with a kabbalist background. Or a background from any other religion, for that matter - why not frag Ifrit in the service of Allah? As long as you don't attempt something like an adventure game that requires in-depth knowledge of some mystical worldview to complete, and as long as the graphics rock, I don't see a problem.
Of course, people would complain the religion in question wasn't treated appropriately. But then again, many christians I know think certain pastors and priests don't treat their religion appropriately, either.
The list of games in the article is not complete. There was at least one other game in another version of Polyplay. I have to admit I forgot the name, but it was supposed to mean steering Buran through an asteroid belt. You evaded lumps that kept crossing the screen horizontally at increasing speeds. You could also shoot, but only one shot could be on the screen at any time and hitting amounted to having the asteroid reset to a position at the end of the screen. IIRC, it scrolled from left to right, not the common right-to-left way.
I'm not quite sure, but I think there also was an Asteroids clone. Perhaps I'm mixing this up with "Schiessbude" - after all, I played this machine 15 years ago and wasn't even in school then. But it is a pity I don't remember more of the Buran game - MAME doesn't have this one, and if none of the three machines left have it, it is probably lost.
The real threat to Microsoft is not Linux. It's OpenOffice.
.DOC - no more, no less.
And to stay on topic: Firefox is not a threat, either. Microsoft can easily afford giving up the browser market, now that the terrain in internet technology isn't as unclaimed as it was in the time of Netscape.
The key to really harming Microsoft lies in reverse engineering
Why was this modded funny? The file is at large, although not widespread yet.
What's probably missing from a lot of your reporting (or at least is covered very minimally, especially when compared to the coverage the abuse of Iraqi prisoners got) is the UN oil for food scandal and the beheading of hostages by Iraqi terrorists. From what I've seen the turnover of power to the Iraqi interim government has also gotten little press.
True for the oil for food thing, but (IMHO) not for the beheadings and turnover of power.
I found it rather ridiculous how much coverage Abu Ghraib got, while similar things on a far larger scale are almost completely ignored simply because they happen in Russia and China.
They also found that the Drudge Report and Fox News Special Report were pretty much at the true center of the political spectrum.
...of the USA. I'm German, and I like to watch a lot of news channels from different nations. Even CNN seems rather on the right hand side of things compared with major news channels from other (western) countries.
For example, just recently, there was this study of Oxford Research International that found, among other things, that Iraqi acceptance of violence against US troops has risen from 17 to 31 percent over the last five months. 33 percent favor immediate retreat of all US troops from Iraq, as opposed to 15 percent in february. Those are facts which liberals (people who don't value the myth of a "tiny minority" of unhappy Iraqis over reality) would find highly significant. However, I didn't find any of this on CNN.com. Other news services such as the German Tagesschau reported it.
Please understand that I don't intend to flame, or start a political discussion. I just find this a fitting example of how US news services seem to lean to the right, compared on an international scale. It illustrates that left and right are relative terms.
4I^3 7I-I3? 0I^ vv17I-I0I_I7 13375p34I!!!!!!!!!!0I\I30I\I30I\I33l3v3n Does that offer comfort?
To me, being used to leverage a better discount from your competitor, isn't much of a "win" for the adoption of Linux.
But it is a win for me, the customer. I don't give a shit for Linux, or Windows, or whatever else makes my computer tick. But if supporting Linux means I get to pay less, I support Linux.
Even if Microsoft does come out with the Xbox 2 sooner it would have to be light years ahead of the PS2 to get an audience
My bet is on VR capabilities. Seriously - why shouldn't anyone pick up the idea of the helmet and glove again? It'd be a unique selling point and it'd generate a huge media buzz too. Also, we are approaching the limit of what a TV screen can deliver to the viewer fairly rapidly, HDTV or not.
On the other hand, nothing of the sort is happening right now, and can only guess some people are probably sitting on patents. Other ideas?
I think it is much more likely we will see something like that on a tank or plane. Lots of flat surfaces and a power supply should make this much easier than camouflaging people.
However, I very much doubt even that is practical in military use - as others have said, there are other means of finding targets than the optical one. And if I got it right, the "translucency" is achieved by making the object reflect (read: emit) extra light. I would imagine this makes the system impractical in more situations than not.
The German "Behörde für die Unterlagen der Staatsicherheit" did get the Rosenholz Files eventually - although some think in abridged form. I don't know whether they handed over their files to the CIA, but it wouldn't surprise me.
After all, those files aren't really secret. Every German citizen who bothers to make an application is entitled to seeing any files concerning him, and every journalist and historician (or person with a minimum of wit that can pretend to be one) can access a lot of those files.
...why doesn't Apple release an OS X that runs on x86 hardware?
But they could put something like a gigantic Coca Cola logo on the bottom of that 2-miles-wide station. Of course this thing would only be visible in an area some dozen miles wide, only in very good weather and at day time. And the station is currently not designed to be flat - rather, it consists of five tubes if I interpret the sketch in the article correctly.
But I would imagine if any big company was looking for a major marketing scoop, and the guys who do this can use a hundred million dollars, they should be able to reach some agreement. A two miles wide disc twenty miles up should be an awesome ad platform, and it should be worth enough to fund further and faster development of this system.
Just what I thought. Give these guys one percent of NASA's budget, and you'll have the most cost-effective investment in a while.
I realized that the source of his distaste for metric was really just the instinctive reaction social animals use to build communities. The 'Us Vs. Them' filter that we all use to clump ourselves into social groups.
So this filter would likely be more pronounced in regions of the world where the metric system has not been accepted yet. Funny I can get international politics explained to me while reading stuff about sheets of paper.
Rather gruesomely, the system checked for a pulse in the iris to ensure that you hadn't got a life-size photograph...
Very interesting. Although I guess that, with video systems ever increasing in quality, this won't stop a determined thief five years into the future.
True, but these systems aren't meant to work with a very large image database. They will mostly look whether your iris matches the one on your passport, or - at most - identify you as a member of a small group of possible matches (say employees). And in most cases, you'll probably get to try several times.
I don't doubt the shit will hit the fan from several other directions, as others have stated here, but this one is pretty safe.