WTF are you talking about? I just checked my toilet and for sure there is water in there... it's different from US toilets only in that there is no "stageing" area, instead there is a water-filled bowl that leads directly outward...
true. I'm from germany and have a really hard time understanding the swiss. Coming from abroard I'd definately go someplace where they speak closest to the written form. For german that would be up north or around Cologne.
that's still not persitance. I'd imagine it would be worse then respawn mechanics actually because the player would be fooled at first and then very disappointed when he sees the village cycle to state 0 again.
I really don't know what you mean. Are you saying that mean temperature is not a part of the behaviour of the chaotic system 'climate'? I (and humanity) could care far less about the bounds of the climatic system as should we touch those as evidenced by (inter-)planetary history we are gone anyways. Climate modeling is speaking to the specific behaviour of a not-so-well-understood chaotic system 50 years in the future trying to pin down a specifc sequence of permutations along the way in order to do so. No amount of statistics can fix those flaws.
ahhhh! There isn't one! It's a very laymany response but it happens to be correct even though many might not realize why. Weather and climate modeling face much the same challenges: both are chaotic systems and for both we can not determine precisly enough all variables that have to be considered. But climate modeling is worse! It iterates way more often, taking its own flawed output as input and thereby magnifying the errors in the model a thousandfold. This "weather but not climate" mandra sometimes reminds me of the ID crowd with their "micro evolution != macro evolution". Unless you can predict the weather day to day world wide you can not HOPE to have any accuracy in long term climate forecast. For more info look up chaotic systems and marvel at how hard it is to even calculate precise orbits for 3 gravitionally bound bodies.
Would be true if we could determine all variables affecting the climate to a very precise degree. This isn't the case and therefore any model based predictions are worth nothing exactly because of the chaotic nature of the system.
this would imply that it was stable in any useful sense to begin with. It wasn't and it never will be.
Re:Maybe if Americans worked and did not whine?
on
My Job Went To India
·
· Score: 1
from my expirience in the "Industry" I can confidently say that you can contract at Tata and get a bunch of barely english speaking people that would have a hard time passing the turing test. Then you can waste expensive western man power to clean up the mess. Instructing these guys is like programming except that they tend to have forgotten the next day... That's one of the reasons offshoring is even being rolled back these days. I wonder what domain your product is for but would guess it's a very easy to specify problem with a technically unchallenging solution that works standalone so no integration tasks would be necessary. That would indeed be software you'd get done well in India...
gravity is required in the sun and as far as our efforts go it seems mandatory, too, in order to harness fusion for energy generation. As it stands now, fusion is just a very expensive way to create helium...
I personally think that people returning a lost bill are a little stupid. Just consider the logistics of the thing. How can the person that has lost it prove it's his? Would he even consider going to the police? Would the police officer even file it properly or just send you on your way and pocket the 20? Anyways, you have a clear case of "everything was so much better in the old days". World War Two anyone? Soviet Russia? Vietnam and Korea? Nixon in drag? Watergate? If you just became jaded in the last few years then you haven't been paying attention before. I doubt there ever was a truly innocent age.
Anyone who knows anything about encryption should be aware that encryption can never serve as copy protection in this context. You want to show the user your video so at some point so you have to decrypt. PCs are a wide open architecture so there is bound to be someplace where a program can siphon of the decrypted content. Once this such a program is written and made public it is going to be "an easy to use tool". Unless you control the hardware and have a very restrictive operating system "content protection" will just not work. On PC/Windows thats just not the case and any company claiming otherwise is comitting false advertisment.
By the way, has anyone tried using a technique similar to what FRAPS does with games? I would think that just recording the contents of a window would be a very generic way to rip anything without having to muck about with the respective player software.
Yes, real time ray tracing is not currently feasible. I think we all knew that. This demo is a peek at the future. You know how everyone wonders what to do with the bazillion cores that CPU vendors are planning bring out? Raytracing might be it for games. Ray tracing, in addition to being more realistic is also a lot easier to implement and very easy to paralize. I think it will be a relieve for developers to get *all* lighting and shadow on *all* objects with one relatively simple alorithm.
I think so too. Average, really. I suspect this demo wasn't done for end consumers though. It just shows that real time raytracing might be feasable in a few years which is very important to know if you are planing on doing a new game engine sometime in the future. Look at this:
the definition of ray tracing is that it's "brute force". This real time renders are still spectacular. A while back it was consencus that ray tracing would never be done in realtime and now we already have prototypes.
"occasional video game". That made me smile because appearantly the simultanious full utilization of CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, sound card, ethernet, harddrive and PSU for hours and hours won't turn up driver and hardware faults. In comparison, the servers we use at work have it easy: minimal load on CPU, no graphics or sound to speak of, in an air conditioned room with regulated power connections.
Anyways, I recently tried installing fedora and some other distro I don't remember. Fedora hang on install already, the other one would randomly lock up with only the gnome running. Mind you, vanilla installations. I don't even want to talk about getting wireless to work without causing kernel panics...
No matter, XPs stability considering the wide range of hardware supported right out of the box is very, very good and judging from my and other peoples expirience with linux I would say it's unrivaled. Of course it's never going to be a hundred percent but if your drivers are good and you get BSODs it's a sure bet that you have a hardware fault.
If your windows XP crashes more then once in a blue moon you got serious issues with your hardware and/or device drivers. NT never had stability issues provided that hardware and drivers were sound.
I agree with you. I don't pirate games anymore because I'm hooked on WoW anyway, have money now and don't really like downloading executables from people I don't know.
Back in the days, piracy primarely was done to play with friends. Somebody would usually have an original copy even after the advent of DSL. But it's clear to see that 10 people * 10 games is money you don't usually have just lying around when you are in school and anyways it's much too much to play a couple of hours with your friends. Second reason to pirate is the stupid requirement to leave the CD in the drive while playing. It's like a reverse slippery slope: you buy a game, look for a solution because you don't want to drag around cds + cases with you and then realize that you needn't pay at all. And that's what most piracy in the end comes down too: money. It's a basic human trait: if you can get something for nothing, most will.
There isn't a solution to piracy and unless the internet is fully controlled by government there never will be. Things a developer can do to minimize piracy are:
- build a good reputation, espececially on the technical side. If people are confident that your product will be quality they are more likely to buy
- get your face out there and be likeable as developers and as a company. It's much easier to pirate from a faceless company (hello EA:) then from people you 'know'.
- copy protection is broken and will remain broken as long as the computer and OS architecture stays what it is. Leave it out from the get go thereby saving costs and making it more likely that people buy your stuff. Make sure to put a sticker with "will run without CD/DVD" on the box. Rely on online key authentication instead.
- if the game has multiplayer include a "multiplayer install" that let's people on a LAN install the game and only play on LAN mp with it. Make sure to advertise this on the box.
- if you have an online distribution system make sure that you include pay options that are common in other regions. Almost no one shares the north american tradition of putting their credit card number in online forms. Indeed, most europeans don't have a credit card, have it only for emergencies or travel or only use it offline.
- make sure to have a unfied installer for all languages where the user can choose. Most stuff I pirate nowadays I do because I can't legally get an original language version and I just hate translators with all my heart. This mostly applies to TV shows though.
- synchronize releases accross the whole world. Delayed releases for europe and asia are kind of insulting to the people living there.
The truth is that no employer likes an employee leaving for half a year or longer because of maternity leave of otherwise. I think that child birth and rearing are private affairs and the consequences should be handled by the parents but if you gonna have maternity leave laws than at least spread the burden by making it paternity leave and allowing for stay-home dads. This was implemented here in Germany recently was more successful then was expected. In time I hope there will be an equal number of stay home moms and dads and this will be the day when women get the same salary for the same work.
If you do this you don't get the desired result by political correctness. A recent study confirmed as much by showing that young women tend to favour law and medicine over physics and IT.
Actually it was said that blacks where subhumans and ape-like with considerably less intelligence. No one is saying this about women. From my environment I know that people barely get away with the old and tired women + parking let alone asserting that women can't do equal work or aren't smart like men. Someone saying that would get laughed out of the room. I suspect that moving up to higher echelons intelligence wise would amplify this.
I'm convinced though that men and women have genetical differences in cognition and behavior that are far greater than any genetic differences between the different 'races' (black, asian, white etc). It's quite obvious in how women speak differently (not worse!) from men, in any strata of society. Most women I know i.e. (except my mum, go figure) find it hell to sit in front of a computer without any human interaction and much prefer jobs where they meet and communicate to people. In my mind women are the glue that hold society together though elegant webs of social networks and I find it hard to believe that this is not genetically caused. It also perfectly explains why women dislike IT and 'hard' science and tend to go for law, medicine or teaching. There is nothing gained from suggesting to women through quotas that they can only be equal if the go for careers that are not to their liking.
Your perspective is a bit gloomy. The MMORPG game system you criticize has a very long history dating back to pen and paper roleplaying game and has nothing to do with the subscription model. Rather it's the other way around, I'd think. Stats and loot are mechanics that are important for a lot of players of these games. Sure, you don't need to kill lower level monsters but through the level increase you become capable of defeating bigger and meaner ones. Mechanically it's just matching increased dps with increased hit points but visually and story wise you are going from wolves to dragons. Man, slaying a dragon! Unfortunately some are so jaded that they cease playing the game and game the mechanics instead. No wonder they get bored! If you try really hard to minimize risk and only look out for rewards you'll soon find everything you do becomes a job. Yes, fights with NPCs should be more tactical, yes, game worlds should be more dynamic and yes inovation beyond RNG need to happen BUT if the players themselves actively resist getting drawn in there is nothing the developer can do.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF are you talking about? I just checked my toilet and for sure there is water in there ... it's different from US toilets only in that there is no "stageing" area, instead there is a water-filled bowl that leads directly outward ...
true. I'm from germany and have a really hard time understanding the swiss. Coming from abroard I'd definately go someplace where they speak closest to the written form. For german that would be up north or around Cologne.
that's still not persitance. I'd imagine it would be worse then respawn mechanics actually because the player would be fooled at first and then very disappointed when he sees the village cycle to state 0 again.
>> such that you need to be level X to play it forces you into meaningless activities
does not follow. The main story trunk could easily be made so that you are sufficiently powerful to go some place once you need to for the story.
I really don't know what you mean. Are you saying that mean temperature is not a part of the behaviour of the chaotic system 'climate'? I (and humanity) could care far less about the bounds of the climatic system as should we touch those as evidenced by (inter-)planetary history we are gone anyways. Climate modeling is speaking to the specific behaviour of a not-so-well-understood chaotic system 50 years in the future trying to pin down a specifc sequence of permutations along the way in order to do so. No amount of statistics can fix those flaws.
ahhhh! There isn't one! It's a very laymany response but it happens to be correct even though many might not realize why. Weather and climate modeling face much the same challenges: both are chaotic systems and for both we can not determine precisly enough all variables that have to be considered. But climate modeling is worse! It iterates way more often, taking its own flawed output as input and thereby magnifying the errors in the model a thousandfold. This "weather but not climate" mandra sometimes reminds me of the ID crowd with their "micro evolution != macro evolution". Unless you can predict the weather day to day world wide you can not HOPE to have any accuracy in long term climate forecast. For more info look up chaotic systems and marvel at how hard it is to even calculate precise orbits for 3 gravitionally bound bodies.
Would be true if we could determine all variables affecting the climate to a very precise degree. This isn't the case and therefore any model based predictions are worth nothing exactly because of the chaotic nature of the system.
this would imply that it was stable in any useful sense to begin with. It wasn't and it never will be.
from my expirience in the "Industry" I can confidently say that you can contract at Tata and get a bunch of barely english speaking people that would have a hard time passing the turing test. Then you can waste expensive western man power to clean up the mess. Instructing these guys is like programming except that they tend to have forgotten the next day ... That's one of the reasons offshoring is even being rolled back these days. I wonder what domain your product is for but would guess it's a very easy to specify problem with a technically unchallenging solution that works standalone so no integration tasks would be necessary. That would indeed be software you'd get done well in India ...
gravity is required in the sun and as far as our efforts go it seems mandatory, too, in order to harness fusion for energy generation. As it stands now, fusion is just a very expensive way to create helium ...
I personally think that people returning a lost bill are a little stupid. Just consider the logistics of the thing. How can the person that has lost it prove it's his? Would he even consider going to the police? Would the police officer even file it properly or just send you on your way and pocket the 20? Anyways, you have a clear case of "everything was so much better in the old days". World War Two anyone? Soviet Russia? Vietnam and Korea? Nixon in drag? Watergate? If you just became jaded in the last few years then you haven't been paying attention before. I doubt there ever was a truly innocent age.
Anyone who knows anything about encryption should be aware that encryption can never serve as copy protection in this context. You want to show the user your video so at some point so you have to decrypt. PCs are a wide open architecture so there is bound to be someplace where a program can siphon of the decrypted content. Once this such a program is written and made public it is going to be "an easy to use tool". Unless you control the hardware and have a very restrictive operating system "content protection" will just not work. On PC/Windows thats just not the case and any company claiming otherwise is comitting false advertisment.
By the way, has anyone tried using a technique similar to what FRAPS does with games? I would think that just recording the contents of a window would be a very generic way to rip anything without having to muck about with the respective player software.
Yes, real time ray tracing is not currently feasible. I think we all knew that. This demo is a peek at the future. You know how everyone wonders what to do with the bazillion cores that CPU vendors are planning bring out? Raytracing might be it for games. Ray tracing, in addition to being more realistic is also a lot easier to implement and very easy to paralize. I think it will be a relieve for developers to get *all* lighting and shadow on *all* objects with one relatively simple alorithm.
I think so too. Average, really. I suspect this demo wasn't done for end consumers though. It just shows that real time raytracing might be feasable in a few years which is very important to know if you are planing on doing a new game engine sometime in the future. Look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Glasses_800_edit.png
It's hard to believe that's a rendered picture. In a few years game graphics will look like *this*. That's the signifcance of this demo.
the definition of ray tracing is that it's "brute force". This real time renders are still spectacular. A while back it was consencus that ray tracing would never be done in realtime and now we already have prototypes.
The IOC thinks it owns Tibet now? Are they crazy? Go youtube!
"occasional video game". That made me smile because appearantly the simultanious full utilization of CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, sound card, ethernet, harddrive and PSU for hours and hours won't turn up driver and hardware faults. In comparison, the servers we use at work have it easy: minimal load on CPU, no graphics or sound to speak of, in an air conditioned room with regulated power connections.
...
Anyways, I recently tried installing fedora and some other distro I don't remember. Fedora hang on install already, the other one would randomly lock up with only the gnome running. Mind you, vanilla installations. I don't even want to talk about getting wireless to work without causing kernel panics
No matter, XPs stability considering the wide range of hardware supported right out of the box is very, very good and judging from my and other peoples expirience with linux I would say it's unrivaled. Of course it's never going to be a hundred percent but if your drivers are good and you get BSODs it's a sure bet that you have a hardware fault.
If your windows XP crashes more then once in a blue moon you got serious issues with your hardware and/or device drivers. NT never had stability issues provided that hardware and drivers were sound.
there is an option to turn off rebooting on blue screen. It comes in handy if you actually want to see the error ...
I agree with you. I don't pirate games anymore because I'm hooked on WoW anyway, have money now and don't really like downloading executables from people I don't know.
:) then from people you 'know'.
Back in the days, piracy primarely was done to play with friends. Somebody would usually have an original copy even after the advent of DSL. But it's clear to see that 10 people * 10 games is money you don't usually have just lying around when you are in school and anyways it's much too much to play a couple of hours with your friends. Second reason to pirate is the stupid requirement to leave the CD in the drive while playing. It's like a reverse slippery slope: you buy a game, look for a solution because you don't want to drag around cds + cases with you and then realize that you needn't pay at all. And that's what most piracy in the end comes down too: money. It's a basic human trait: if you can get something for nothing, most will.
There isn't a solution to piracy and unless the internet is fully controlled by government there never will be. Things a developer can do to minimize piracy are:
- build a good reputation, espececially on the technical side. If people are confident that your product will be quality they are more likely to buy
- get your face out there and be likeable as developers and as a company. It's much easier to pirate from a faceless company (hello EA
- copy protection is broken and will remain broken as long as the computer and OS architecture stays what it is. Leave it out from the get go thereby saving costs and making it more likely that people buy your stuff. Make sure to put a sticker with "will run without CD/DVD" on the box. Rely on online key authentication instead.
- if the game has multiplayer include a "multiplayer install" that let's people on a LAN install the game and only play on LAN mp with it. Make sure to advertise this on the box.
- if you have an online distribution system make sure that you include pay options that are common in other regions. Almost no one shares the north american tradition of putting their credit card number in online forms. Indeed, most europeans don't have a credit card, have it only for emergencies or travel or only use it offline.
- make sure to have a unfied installer for all languages where the user can choose. Most stuff I pirate nowadays I do because I can't legally get an original language version and I just hate translators with all my heart. This mostly applies to TV shows though.
- synchronize releases accross the whole world. Delayed releases for europe and asia are kind of insulting to the people living there.
The truth is that no employer likes an employee leaving for half a year or longer because of maternity leave of otherwise. I think that child birth and rearing are private affairs and the consequences should be handled by the parents but if you gonna have maternity leave laws than at least spread the burden by making it paternity leave and allowing for stay-home dads. This was implemented here in Germany recently was more successful then was expected. In time I hope there will be an equal number of stay home moms and dads and this will be the day when women get the same salary for the same work.
If you do this you don't get the desired result by political correctness. A recent study confirmed as much by showing that young women tend to favour law and medicine over physics and IT.
Actually it was said that blacks where subhumans and ape-like with considerably less intelligence. No one is saying this about women. From my environment I know that people barely get away with the old and tired women + parking let alone asserting that women can't do equal work or aren't smart like men. Someone saying that would get laughed out of the room. I suspect that moving up to higher echelons intelligence wise would amplify this.
I'm convinced though that men and women have genetical differences in cognition and behavior that are far greater than any genetic differences between the different 'races' (black, asian, white etc). It's quite obvious in how women speak differently (not worse!) from men, in any strata of society. Most women I know i.e. (except my mum, go figure) find it hell to sit in front of a computer without any human interaction and much prefer jobs where they meet and communicate to people. In my mind women are the glue that hold society together though elegant webs of social networks and I find it hard to believe that this is not genetically caused. It also perfectly explains why women dislike IT and 'hard' science and tend to go for law, medicine or teaching. There is nothing gained from suggesting to women through quotas that they can only be equal if the go for careers that are not to their liking.
For unknown reasons, intercourse orgasms release four times more prolactin than masturbatory orgasms, according to a recent study
I bet it's conditioning. 8AM testosterone peak, masturbation, shower, breakfast -> do the math.
Your perspective is a bit gloomy. The MMORPG game system you criticize has a very long history dating back to pen and paper roleplaying game and has nothing to do with the subscription model. Rather it's the other way around, I'd think. Stats and loot are mechanics that are important for a lot of players of these games. Sure, you don't need to kill lower level monsters but through the level increase you become capable of defeating bigger and meaner ones. Mechanically it's just matching increased dps with increased hit points but visually and story wise you are going from wolves to dragons. Man, slaying a dragon! Unfortunately some are so jaded that they cease playing the game and game the mechanics instead. No wonder they get bored! If you try really hard to minimize risk and only look out for rewards you'll soon find everything you do becomes a job. Yes, fights with NPCs should be more tactical, yes, game worlds should be more dynamic and yes inovation beyond RNG need to happen BUT if the players themselves actively resist getting drawn in there is nothing the developer can do.