The big problem is that there is an entire generation of college kids that think everything digital is free for the taking unless it is properly secured, and if it is not properly secured then it is basically an invitation to take it.
Most college kids don't have the money to spend on something anyway so it doesn't affect the business model much now, but if they keep this attitude as they grow older and replace the people willing to pay, then there will be a problem.
It's mostly going to be a question of time vs. money. College kids have little money but plenty of time and (hopefully!) smarts so they'll take the free route almost no matter how hard/time consuming it is.
Those of us who have to work for a living, pay bills, do chores and have some kind of social life usually have some disposable income but much less time which means that our time is more valuable to us and therefore we are more likely to pay for something if it's quick and easy rather than get it for free which would be slower and involve more effort.
I expect that a large proportion of the current "steal it if it isn't nailed down, and if it can be pryed loose it doesn't count as nailed down" kids will start buying stuff as they gain enough disposable income that the convenience of buying stuff starts to overide the cost of purchase.
Maybe someone with more of a background in explosives than me can answer this... How real was this threat? How many explosive compounds are there that meet the terrorist's requirements:
1. Look sufficiently like a regular liquid (the police don't seem to know if we were talking water or gel / paste here)
2. Be easily and quickly detonated with a primitive home-made detonator (camera flash was bandied about?)
3. Be able to carry enough onto a plane to cause significant structural damage without causing concern about the amount of this particular liquid that they are carrying.
Most of the explosives / high heat exchange chemicals that I am familiar with don't fit many of these criteria, let alone all, but I freely admit to being ignorant in this field.
You could make a reasonably powerful explosive (tri/di acetone tri/di peroxide) with nail polish remover/paint thinner, battery acid, and peroxide based antiseptic/hair dye. In retail forms these chemicals cannot be combined to manufacture explosives but can be concentrated by heating and still result in clear colourless chemicals that could be carried through airport security in evian bottles in large enough quantities to do serious damage when combined to make explosives.
Quoth TheSalzar (945163) The US is a democracy? man i musta missed somthing. Should recheck the the constitution. And maybe then you will agrea that america is no democracy.
Correct: The United States of America is not a democracy it is in fact a constitutional republic
Nine months might sound like a long while. But consider the lead times for rockets. Can an unscheduled mission be planned, built, prepped, tested, rubberstamped and shot into orbit inside nine months?
You mean something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Ve hicle/. One of its tasks is re-boosting the ISSs orbit. My dad's been working on that project for about 4 years now (fuel/oxidiser pumps and pipework).
There's no real "right" length for a game. It depends on the story the game is trying to tell and the manner in which it does it:
the real trick is to find a game concept that can keep you entertained for as long as you want. For young gamers that can waste the hours away, offer a game that allows for long extended gameplay, but for older players with lives and careers, allow the gameplay to be tuned for more rapid progress.
I think it's already happening, consider the example below:
Call of Duty/MoHAA/Doom III (in single player mode) are heavily scripted "on rails" fps which can be finished in relativly short periods of time. They keep everything tightly under control, tell their stories well, but send the gamer away with the exact same memories as every other player who has finished it. The only way to tune the length of time you'll spend playing is by altering the difficulty level. They are all enjoyable technically competant games but are a little on the shallow side.
GTA:San Andreas/Vice City/other GTAs/Far Cry give the player the freedom to do more or less what the hell they want so the whole level/game world becomes the players own personal sandbox. Because of this they will send a player who has completed them away having had a (at least partially) unique experience.
It is games like these which we are going to see becoming more and more popular as the market for games diversifies. Simply because they allow the potential for someone with alot of free time to play them in obsessive detail, finding every scrap of content and easter-egg that there is going. While still allowing people with less free time to either jump in and just follow the story straight through or mess about and have fun.
For me this gives them a degree of depth that raises them above the polished but formulaic. This should be considered one of the fundamentals of good games design.
I have played both CoD and CS extensivly so I'll offer my take on this.
Killcam when coupled with a built in anticheat almost completly eliminates cheating in CoD.
(As an aside quite alot of the "cheaters" in CS arn't cheating but simply medium to good clan players hanging out on public servers for easy kills)
Weapons in CoD are better balenced with respect to each other. While this does come at the cost of eliminating the economic considerations which added a great deal of interest to CS it brings two benefits: firstly that you don't have to whore one weapon (or weapon type) to win a specific map. Secondly winning a couple of rounds in a row doesn't put a team in a position where they are at a major advantage for the next 2 - 4 rounds and hance promotes more closely fought matches.
Finally the maps in CoD are better designed in terms of promoting a variety of different playstyles and strategies than those in CS (with some notable exceptions like the maps made specifically for CPL tournaments like de_clan_mill1 or the fun maps like cs_mice2_final).
This is not to say that CS is a bad game; it was top of the pile, and rightly so, for years. Just eventually someone came along and made a better one.
No source of information frees the reader of that information from the obligation to read, understand, and think critically about the information it contains. The single best question that you can ask is: "Where's the money?".
Quality varies within sites as well as between sites. Some sites have several different people writing the reviews for them. Some may be good, some less so. They may be working under time constraints or be using unfamiliar hardware/platforms.
Sites are trying to attract readers (which results in more ad revenue) and may therefore make out that small performance differences are more dramatic than they actually are.
In general the better sites will give a detailed description of their testing hardware, methodologies, and their reasoning behind selecting them.
Finally: most people have a favorite site (or sites) which may be based on nothing more than the fact that they like the style or tone of the reviews there so take any recommendations with a pinch of salt.
*sigh* I'd buy Vampire in a heartbeat if they'd patch it to fix the bugs and some of the other shortcomings.
The 1.2 patch AFAIK (I'm only 3/4 of the way through the game ATM) fixes the bugs.
There's enough content to keep me busy for another 20+ hours on this run through and I've missed enough/have enough alternate options left to try that I'm going to have another complete play through it when I've finished.
I wonder if that would even work out in the first place. Can you really just feed a human being by using the corpse of the another human being, then feed the another one when he dies, etc etc, without ever feeding one with real nutrients.
Wouldnt you lose those nutrients that were used by that person?
No you couldn't.
Respiration, the stepwise oxidation of glucose to make ATP, is only about 30% efficient at best. The anabolic pathways that use ATP to build and maintain body tissues are also a great deal less than 100% efficent.
Overall 10% of energy/biomass used by an organism is retained as muscle/fat/other tissue.
I know I need to lay off playing Call of Duty or Counter-Strike when I find myself tracking my co-workers by the sound of their footsteps as they walk around behind the bench I'm working at in the lab with the intention of choosing the perfect moment to toss a flash grenade over my sholder, duck behind the corner of the bench, and come up spraying.
Thankfully my boss is dating a gamer and therefore didn't freak out too much when I mentioned this in my annual appraisal (she just told me that I needed to get a life and/or a girlfriend).
I'm also interested to know if anyone else finds that their performance at a fps improves after they have been dreaming about it. As when I dream about CS I usually find that I can play alot better the day after.
Upgrading from Win2000 to WinXP SP2 needn't be painful.
The company I work for (Wessex Water - regional water and sewerage company in the southwest UK) is doing the same rollout and it's going quite smoothly. On the other hand we haven't outsourced it and are doing it stepwise - noncritical systems first - so our IT guys can squash bugs as they become apparant.
Heaven forbid that such a sensible and useful idea could occur to a government depatment.
Some time ago google used to put microsoft.com at the top of the results if you searched for "more evil than satan himself". This is not a new phenomenon.
Two reasons:
1. I don't see why I should have to buy extra hardware to watch a DVD I already bought, bearing in mind that the reason why DVD-ROMs were made with only a limited number of region changes has now passed (as most standalone DVD players now come from the shop with the ability to change regions).
2. I already have four IDE devices and buying a PCI IDE card adds expense, complexity, increased boot times, and another set of drivers for windows to break at innoportune moments.
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IIRC this was the problem, Kasparov lost 2.5 - 3.5 over a six game match.
However he resigned in game 3 in a position that was drawn not losing - the match should have finished as a 3 - 3 draw.
In which case, what does the rider of the propeller trike use to translate pedel rotations into fan rotations?
I guess it would be a drivetrain, which will have similar bend/straighten frictional losses in the chain compared to a regular bike.
It's mostly going to be a question of time vs. money. College kids have little money but plenty of time and (hopefully!) smarts so they'll take the free route almost no matter how hard/time consuming it is.
Those of us who have to work for a living, pay bills, do chores and have some kind of social life usually have some disposable income but much less time which means that our time is more valuable to us and therefore we are more likely to pay for something if it's quick and easy rather than get it for free which would be slower and involve more effort.
I expect that a large proportion of the current "steal it if it isn't nailed down, and if it can be pryed loose it doesn't count as nailed down" kids will start buying stuff as they gain enough disposable income that the convenience of buying stuff starts to overide the cost of purchase.
Summary of the above:
"The invention of a god or gods will occur when a self-aware organism comprehends the inevitability of its own death."
Maybe someone with more of a background in explosives than me can answer this... How real was this threat? How many explosive compounds are there that meet the terrorist's requirements: 1. Look sufficiently like a regular liquid (the police don't seem to know if we were talking water or gel / paste here) 2. Be easily and quickly detonated with a primitive home-made detonator (camera flash was bandied about?) 3. Be able to carry enough onto a plane to cause significant structural damage without causing concern about the amount of this particular liquid that they are carrying. Most of the explosives / high heat exchange chemicals that I am familiar with don't fit many of these criteria, let alone all, but I freely admit to being ignorant in this field. You could make a reasonably powerful explosive (tri/di acetone tri/di peroxide) with nail polish remover/paint thinner, battery acid, and peroxide based antiseptic/hair dye. In retail forms these chemicals cannot be combined to manufacture explosives but can be concentrated by heating and still result in clear colourless chemicals that could be carried through airport security in evian bottles in large enough quantities to do serious damage when combined to make explosives.
Quoth TheSalzar (945163) The US is a democracy? man i musta missed somthing. Should recheck the the constitution. And maybe then you will agrea that america is no democracy.
Correct: The United States of America is not a democracy it is in fact a constitutional republic
PS. where is the square root button on windows calculator when on scientftic view??!!
There isn't a specific square root button.
You have to hit the "Inv" (inverse) check-box and then the "x^2".
Alternativly you could use the "x^y" button and then 0.5
Nine months might sound like a long while. But consider the lead times for rockets. Can an unscheduled mission be planned, built, prepped, tested, rubberstamped and shot into orbit inside nine months?
e hicle/. One of its tasks is re-boosting the ISSs orbit. My dad's been working on that project for about 4 years now (fuel/oxidiser pumps and pipework).
You mean something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_V
There's no real "right" length for a game. It depends on the story the game is trying to tell and the manner in which it does it:
the real trick is to find a game concept that can keep you entertained for as long as you want. For young gamers that can waste the hours away, offer a game that allows for long extended gameplay, but for older players with lives and careers, allow the gameplay to be tuned for more rapid progress.
I think it's already happening, consider the example below:
Call of Duty/MoHAA/Doom III (in single player mode) are heavily scripted "on rails" fps which can be finished in relativly short periods of time. They keep everything tightly under control, tell their stories well, but send the gamer away with the exact same memories as every other player who has finished it. The only way to tune the length of time you'll spend playing is by altering the difficulty level. They are all enjoyable technically competant games but are a little on the shallow side.
GTA:San Andreas/Vice City/other GTAs/Far Cry give the player the freedom to do more or less what the hell they want so the whole level/game world becomes the players own personal sandbox. Because of this they will send a player who has completed them away having had a (at least partially) unique experience.
It is games like these which we are going to see becoming more and more popular as the market for games diversifies. Simply because they allow the potential for someone with alot of free time to play them in obsessive detail, finding every scrap of content and easter-egg that there is going. While still allowing people with less free time to either jump in and just follow the story straight through or mess about and have fun.
For me this gives them a degree of depth that raises them above the polished but formulaic. This should be considered one of the fundamentals of good games design.
I have played both CoD and CS extensivly so I'll offer my take on this.
Killcam when coupled with a built in anticheat almost completly eliminates cheating in CoD.
(As an aside quite alot of the "cheaters" in CS arn't cheating but simply medium to good clan players hanging out on public servers for easy kills)
Weapons in CoD are better balenced with respect to each other. While this does come at the cost of eliminating the economic considerations which added a great deal of interest to CS it brings two benefits: firstly that you don't have to whore one weapon (or weapon type) to win a specific map. Secondly winning a couple of rounds in a row doesn't put a team in a position where they are at a major advantage for the next 2 - 4 rounds and hance promotes more closely fought matches.
Finally the maps in CoD are better designed in terms of promoting a variety of different playstyles and strategies than those in CS (with some notable exceptions like the maps made specifically for CPL tournaments like de_clan_mill1 or the fun maps like cs_mice2_final).
This is not to say that CS is a bad game; it was top of the pile, and rightly so, for years. Just eventually someone came along and made a better one.
Not to nitpick but:
I can Imagine Castro doing a commercial for Linux:
"Linux. Works for computers as old as myself!" (smokes cigar)
There are no computers as old as Fidel Castro.
Fidel Castro was born in 1926
The concept of the turing machine (which modern computers more or less conform to) was not published until 1937 by Alan Turing.
*sigh* I'd buy Vampire in a heartbeat if they'd patch it to fix the bugs and some of the other shortcomings.
The 1.2 patch AFAIK (I'm only 3/4 of the way through the game ATM) fixes the bugs.
There's enough content to keep me busy for another 20+ hours on this run through and I've missed enough/have enough alternate options left to try that I'm going to have another complete play through it when I've finished.
" American, Canadian, or European?"
F ALawsOfTheGame/Postings/2002/05/12112.htmthe FA website
That's not the only problem:
Soccer pitches can be of variable sizes.
From http://www.thefa.com/TheFA/RulesAndRegulations/FI
Law 1 - The Field of Play
Dimensions
The field of play must be rectangular. The length of the touch line must be greater than the length of the goal line.
Length Minimum 90 m (100 yds) Maximum 120 m (130 yds)
Width Minimum 45 m (50 yds) Maximum 90 m (100 yds)
I wonder if that would even work out in the first place. Can you really just feed a human being by using the corpse of the another human being, then feed the another one when he dies, etc etc, without ever feeding one with real nutrients.
Wouldnt you lose those nutrients that were used by that person?
No you couldn't.
Respiration, the stepwise oxidation of glucose to make ATP, is only about 30% efficient at best. The anabolic pathways that use ATP to build and maintain body tissues are also a great deal less than 100% efficent.
Overall 10% of energy/biomass used by an organism is retained as muscle/fat/other tissue.
For a more thorough discussion of virtual property "ownership" than the links given in TFA try:
"Pitfalls of Virtual Property" by Dr Richard Bartle
Links:
Original PDF
HTML version from google's cache
Xbitlabs got an interview with the corporate marketing director at NVIDIA..
And the thing he seemed most excited about is that Sony's cash is helping to pay for developement of their next-gen GPU
I know I need to lay off playing Call of Duty or Counter-Strike when I find myself tracking my co-workers by the sound of their footsteps as they walk around behind the bench I'm working at in the lab with the intention of choosing the perfect moment to toss a flash grenade over my sholder, duck behind the corner of the bench, and come up spraying.
Thankfully my boss is dating a gamer and therefore didn't freak out too much when I mentioned this in my annual appraisal (she just told me that I needed to get a life and/or a girlfriend).
I'm also interested to know if anyone else finds that their performance at a fps improves after they have been dreaming about it. As when I dream about CS I usually find that I can play alot better the day after.
Parent is modded troll.
Please mod it something more sensible instead - insightful would be my choice.
1. See SCOs pioneering efforts in the field
2. Dust off old patents
3. ?????
4. Profit
Wow. That's just stunningly retarded. You don't belong on this web site.
I am almost speechless at the irony of this...
You must be new here
Upgrading from Win2000 to WinXP SP2 needn't be painful.
The company I work for (Wessex Water - regional water and sewerage company in the southwest UK) is doing the same rollout and it's going quite smoothly. On the other hand we haven't outsourced it and are doing it stepwise - noncritical systems first - so our IT guys can squash bugs as they become apparant.
Heaven forbid that such a sensible and useful idea could occur to a government depatment.
The XGI Volare has two GPUs on one card already. It's been out for some time. It's performance is nothing special. Try this http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/xgi -volari.html for a review.
Some time ago google used to put microsoft.com at the top of the results if you searched for "more evil than satan himself". This is not a new phenomenon.
Two reasons: 1. I don't see why I should have to buy extra hardware to watch a DVD I already bought, bearing in mind that the reason why DVD-ROMs were made with only a limited number of region changes has now passed (as most standalone DVD players now come from the shop with the ability to change regions). 2. I already have four IDE devices and buying a PCI IDE card adds expense, complexity, increased boot times, and another set of drivers for windows to break at innoportune moments.