Don't forget that Microsoft and Nintendo both do the "hot dog vs hot dog buns" deal too, where their points are sold in rounded units but their products are sold in increments between them. Buy 500 or 1000 points, pay 1200 or 800 for a game. Either way, you're going to end up with leftover points which is intended to persuade you to buy more crap because you've still got points left over. Then you end up not having enough points left over to buy anything, so you're encouraged to buy MORE points.
Look at the Nintendo store - you've got 1200 points, 800 points and 400 point titles. You buy 1500 points, buy a 1200 point game. Now you have 300 points and the cheapest game is 400 points. So you buy 1000 more points, buy your 400 point game and are left over with 900 points. Buy an 800 point game, you have 100 points left.
Or say you're stuck with that 300 points, you buy 500 points, you now have 800 points. Hooray, you can buy 2 400 point games and actually empty your account. Except you now have bought 3 games when all you really wanted was that one 1200 point game.
The whole thing is a grand old scam run like a carnival game.
The whole mindset of the Mac community is one of self delusion that it is just better and makes more sense.
The news flash here is that it isn't and it doesn't. There are as many strange and illogical interface decisions on OS X as there are in any version of Windows. I've used Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and 7 (using it right now) and OS9, OS X Panther, Tiger and Leopard (I use both of the latter extensively at work.)
They all make stupid decisions about their interface.
OS9's Windows 3.1 style multitasking and horrible control strip at the bottom from which you could permanently delete basic computer functions accidentally, Windows 95's autorun and horrible registry/win.ini mishmash, OS X's decision to hide most of the configurability from the user and to remove all trace of GNU from the OS, Windows Vista's UAC and one-way zero-feedback firewall, OSX's Jack Russel Terrier program icons (boing, boing, bang.), Leopard's overloading and abuse of their icon bar at the top (do I really need a time machine, battery, wireless icon, remote desktop icon all on a home desktop machine which is plugged into a wired network?), Windows x64's keeping 2 different Program Files folders, Windows Vista + 7's decision to maintain three separate Start Menu folders or to hide the actual structure of the user folder behind symbolic links, Vista + 7's decisions to make it impossible for programs not run as Administrator to write to their own program directory, thus breaking reverse compatibility for a huge amount of software...
They've all done some very good things too - 95's Explorer was a very sleek file manager beaten only by some of the better DOS ones (based on the better UNIX ones), OS9's "Window" menu paved the way for OSX's Dock which Windows 7 finally copied, Windows XP's intelligent Start Menu which would order programs by common and recent usage, OS X's aforementioned Dock and web-metaphored System Preferences panel (which was copying Windows' Control Panel and which Windows Vista and 7 re-copied for simplicity).
The point here is that both are equally valuable to the home user who is comfortable with either. When making a decision regarding what you are going to buy, you need to weigh what you're getting vs what you're spending.
Unless you deliberately are buying state-of-the-art hardware which is better than what's getting loaded into the latest Macs, you're going to pay more for a Mac. That's just fact. Try it out on Apple's Store. RAM, hard drives, whatever - they're all the same parts, only 2-3 times as expensive. Same principle as buying a game console - they charge more for peripherals to offset the cost of making their platform - which in this case is OS X. OS X is cheaply sold for the same reason that console manufacturers sell PS3s and XBoxes at a loss - their sales strategy demands that they make it up in software and peripherals.
2 years ago, I'd have said an iMac was a good investment - they're a nice self-contained desktop machine, packed with modern hardware, loaded with a friendly operating system that even helps you install a different one or more if you need flexibility and which has a boot disc with useful hard drive diagnostics. 3 years after our department upgraded our old G4s to iMacs, we've had 4 iMacs (out of 25) fail to hardware problems ranging from power supply to optical drive problems, and every time the repair has cost half the price we originally paid for them. OS X turns out to be more secure but less stable than Windows when subjected to heavy use in a multi-user environment, developing ludicrous problems with their remote homes (on Apple servers, no less). Meanwhile, the Windows XP and Ubuntu systems in the same office, built with discount parts for a quarter the price are still working just fine.
You'll find using a Mac that any software you might want for it costs money. Even the stuff you might expect to be freeware or donationware or shareware or whatever, everything has a price tag. It's something in the Mac user communit
I could see this being useful for geological data. Obviously it wouldn't be necessary for just viewing a simple elevation map, but it could prove very handy for exploring ground-penetrating radar and seismograph data onsite.
Bathymetric data might also be a good use for it.
Barring those two applications, the only other logical use would be gaming and 3d movies.
It doesn't have to reward mediocrity either - the game can start out easy in places, hard in others, then adapt to be harder if you are clearly handling the easy areas too easily or have found some trick to finish the hard areas without effort.
Just because you can lower the bar doesn't mean you have to. If a person is obviously sucking, tone it back a bit. If they're not doing too badly but still failing, let them struggle - they'll appreciate the win more when they get there.
Performance and creation were always tied together whenever people got together to perform music. Families would invent new verses for songs, making games out of it.
This tradition was alive in the Boy Scouts when I was a kid. Constant exposure to music is the same as constant exposure to a language - you're going to pick it up and begin to express yourself in it whether you're trying to or not. Having strong roots in performance of other people's music can only encourage creating your own. It won't necessarily be good, but it will be your own.
Let your kid browse the internet in the living room while you read - thus glancing up regularly and supervising to make sure nobody has goatse'd them.
Show your friends the latest stupid thing you found on Youtube.
Attached USB + Controller + Stella = Living room Atari 2600 which can be easily attached and put away when you're done (less easily accomplished in these days of LCD TVs without coax).
Cheap television + keyboard computer = information kiosk. Tired of your friends getting drunk and wanting to use Google on your computer to settle disputes on random shit? Stick one of those in your living room on a pedestal. Call it "The Last Word."
Have a little too much money? Do you like having whiteboards but you consider them lower-class? Buy a large format flat screen television, something cheap which can hack 720p clearance from some home theater "everything must go" sale, stick it on the wall and use this thing on a cheap pedestal table as an art easel. Encourage people to graffiti on your wall with the stylus on the attached screen.
Attach a webcam to one and stick it up in your windowsill and take time lapses of the seasons. Hell, if it's cheap enough, put one in each window.
Or just use one for the same thing you'd use an EEEpc other than reading on the bus to work.
An additional note to the bazaar idea - spread it out a bit. Instead of 3 or 4 flesh-colored statues with infinitely large pockets which vend cornucopiaic supplies of the crap people find in dungeons, there should be a vast marketplace where finding what you want would require retaining the services of a local who could help you find someone who was selling what you want. Then you would physically find the broker in the bazaar amongst the tents who had the goods you were looking for and arrange the purchase. This keeps everybody from being packed into one tiny room as well and reduces the overall time people will be spending congregated around individual NPCs.
Actually, that was another point I had wanted to make but really didn't see any discussions in which it was on topic.
The Ironforge Auction House problem and the Newbie Zone problems are related but extremely distinct game design flaws - you deliberately create an area where congestion will happen because you can't figure out how better to do it.
The auction house problem is related to a material economy - make an item-based economy and people will form marketplaces whether you build one or not. Make it hard or slow to travel and there will be only one or two of these marketplaces. If there were a Dwarven eBay that you can get on wherever and a Gnomish UPS that would ship you things then you wouldn't have the congestion, but you'd reduce opportunity for socialization. Far better would be a shifting bazaar which migrated throughout an otherwise unpopulated zone which was reasonably safe to access. Put NPC characters which afforded some sort of benefit, like purchasing less desirable items for the going market rate and selling them back later. Provide some sort of gradation where the most powerful bazaars are harder to find and travel more quietly and you've introduced not only a fun game mechanic but a good solution to congestion.
The newbie zone problem is a different matter altogether - the designers feel it is necessary to create content which amounts to a tutorial which will keep beginning players from experiencing undue frustration, but it concentrates players together. This is good for the players - they meet peers who can tell them how to do race and location-specific quests, where to buy equipment, how to play their class. This is also bad for the players as it creates scarcity, crowding and a lasting indifference among more senior players who need to spend time in these areas and become tired of answering the same questions over and over. Thus you have congestion without many of the benefits that congestion is created for. Asheron's Call's approach of producing an artificial peerage and mentoring system by which players who collected sworn oaths of fealty would gain in power when their vassals gained power was an interesting idea, but ultimately increased the divide between the experienced players and the newbie players. Ultima Online's approach of putting players right into cities resulted in there being a significant advantage to preying on new players, thus increasing frustration and steepening the learning curve for the newbies. However both had the clear advantage of placing new players socially on the same level as other players and reducing overall congestion by not concentrating and tiering players by character level to as significant a degree.
So ultimately, these problems of congestion, overcrowding and socialization become game design decisions, not technical problems to be solved. The technical solutions can only help mitigate the problems that will inevitably crop up due to human nature - we're social animals so we group together.
This fellow was inadvertently correct. Representing space (volume) by putting sections of it onto single computers is a bad idea. Inevitably, no matter how good your design or how well-ordered your content is, some areas are going to become more popular than others. Hence, you're going to get congestion.
A much better model is representing player (and non-player) actions as work units then distributing them evenly across a network of linked computers then getting an integrated result for each "region" (zone, map, city, whatever) each server frame. Make the server frames something like 50 frames per second and have player actions lag about 2-3 frames behind server-side action and you'll see little delay on the client machines but help mitigate potential race conditions between player actions (both players simultaneously attacking and reporting that they attacked on server frame 2,348,342 and both score a fatal blow on the other).
To mitigate player lag you can distribute update packets based on the density of the update vs the distance of the events from the player vs the player's average data rate.
Well, in theory they should have been able to reproduce the process on a different FPGA, resulting in a different "optimal" adder which may be more or less optimal. Since it seemed to rely on self-interference caused by imperfections in the chip, you'd just have to evolve on other chips until you found a similarly optimal solution. The reason it was only interesting but not useful is that an FPGA is a lot bigger than an actual adder circuit. It took the whole FPGA to evolve the minimal adder and trying to simplify something that specific (and probably relying on exact distances and input voltages to produce the desired output) would be essentially impossible. Thus trying to evolve individual circuits by that method which undercut theoretical optimum designs would require far more waste, far less space and cost efficiency and far more power.
A more appropriate use of GA would be to develop actual silicon in a full simulator much the same as that evolved antenna project NASA backed. If you could come up with a design that always worked as long as fabrication succeeded, that's much more productive and far more efficient.
That the story is true there's little reason to doubt. Ever since that guy in 1997 evolved a 64x64 speech recognition chip on an FPGA using GA, people have been going batshit trying to take advantage of the magic of GA. The odds are good that an optimal solution will arise on a chip which turns out to be specific to that chip. I imagine if you used a GA to evolve something specific to those faulty Pentium chips that it would fail to operate properly on a machine with a non-broken ALU.
Whether it had anything to do with my instructor's company, on the other hand, I don't know.
I had an EE teacher who owned his own little company. His company had done some research using GA to evolve a minimal adder circuit on an FPGA. This adder was simpler than the theoretically optimal adder circuit, using fewer gates than should be possible.
They really thought they had something (it worked every time with no apparent variation on real hardware) and started putting it on a few other FPGAs to test the solution. It didn't work on the other FPGAs.
They did a full analysis of the solution and found out that although some inputs and outputs were mapped to a closed loop not connected to VDD or GND (they had no power and no output), if they were removed from the program on the working FPGA, the adder stopped working. They finally had to chalk it up to relying on electron migration and/or induction currents in the closed loops for a correct answer. They'd accidentally made something like a quantum adder, but it was entirely specific to the silicon they'd evolved it on, making it useful, but not interesting.
Nuclear contamination is not easy to deal with. If it were, do you really think a facility as sophisticated as Yucca mountain would be necessary?
Who says a hole in the ground that you put huge metal canisters into on a rail system is sophisticated? Furthermore, only the EPA said it was necessary. Much less sophisticated means are fully capable of keeping dangerous radiation levels out of the surrounding area for billions of years.
If all of the batteries are properly recycled, the nuclear solution is probably better. but what happens then the owner of the nuclear battery falls overboard and he and his hearing aid are eaten by fishes?
If the batteries are sleeved in a corrosion-resistant canister which is well-reinforced (say, continuous carbon fiber weave), then the fish will crap out a battery.
I made a point in a term paper a few years back that the very nature of GTA, though transgressive, transmits a clear establishment message. You cannot beat the police in GTA. You may escape them, but you cannot stop them. Any attempt to directly oppose the police always inevitably leads to death as there will always be more of them than you. The police in GTA are individually stupid, collectively difficult to evade, and taken as an entire establishment entirely invincible.
Further, there's a recognition (especially in GTA San Andreas) of the fact that the player you embody is fundamentally broken and leads a life devoid of meaning. All of the most likable characters in the games are either killed, betray you or are the "straight men" - the people who point out to your character the failure of their lifestyle.
So although the GTA games allow you to explore your own dark side it seems to guide you to the message that not only is the world better off without your enemies (the people you kill throughout the game) but also without you (the killer).
Actually, I DO read Slashdot on a home HDTV.
Also, they don't sell image composition technology which improves somebody else's web page or video game.
I also find it particularly unlikely that watching a movie on your iPhone from a distance of 15 feet makes it any more watchable than doing so at a distance of 2-3 feet.
I think the absolutely vital reading, assuming a one semester course would have to include:
Jules Verne, Master of the World - a projection of materials technology, social trends along with the naivety with which he and his contemporaries viewed the development of weapons technology.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; not a projection of the future so much as a commentary on the present, he successfully lampoons western society, thumbs his nose at creationism and big bang theory alike and brings the lot together in a brilliant ironic work.
Isaac Asimov, Foundation - A brilliant social commentary as well as a sane prediction of future technology along with the naive approach to artificial intelligence common to his time
William Gibson, Neuromancer - Neuromancer is a cynical dystopian view of the future of computer technology and, beyond that, human interaction with both machines and other humans.
How is it your eye is incapable of discerning the difference between muddy and clear, but it's capable of watching a movie on the tiny iPhone screen?
I find the argument that the human eye doesn't have a very high resolution to be fairly ignorant given that the human eye can pick out details at a range where the highest quality digital cameras break down. We have a superior optical system in all but the most severely damaged or underdeveloped (through developmental or genetic disorder) eyes to any existing display technology. This guy does some good-old-fashioned book research and hand math to figure out that we can probably set a lower bound of 324MP on what the human eye can pick up across its central vision.
I've been playing two or three games from 1999-2000 on my new Windows 7 x64 machine the last few days (gotta love weekend discounts on Steam). I can honestly say that none of the mainstream games from that far back are having problems.
"Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II" (1997) is having problems, but I think that's the ATI drivers rather than Windows 7. I haven't tested much stuff from the late 90s yet, mostly because precious little came out for PC in those days that I thought was worth playing. Half-Life runs fine.
For older games, I typically run them in DosBox anyway, simply so that they can run in a safe sandbox which resembles the environment they were designed to run in. If DosBox doesn't work right, I'll recompile it. More or less the same as what I'd do on my Linux notebook. Linux games are a bit difficult to recompile when you don't have the source code for them (as with Tribes 2, the example the GP used).
Don't let idealism get in the way of recognizing the real issues and non-issues. There are a lot of really great PC games out there now and a rich history of publication which predates any broad acceptance of Linux. There are also a lot of great games out there which aren't on the consoles simply because the costs of entry for console development are prohibitively high for experimental game developers. Windows is a platform used by gamers, so game developers develop for it. The real money may be in consoles, and the real future may be in Linux (or BSD or some other FOSS environment yet to be found) but for the present, gaming is alive, well, evolving and thriving on Windows PCs.
I'm rooting for developers who are going cross-platform, however, because the entire gaming industry is being screwed over by the kind of decisions that proprietary platforms make regarding copy protection (and therefore distribution.) Should code protection by any conventional definition be made a moot point by a widespread adoption of FOSS development, then we'd be buying content (as we should be) rather than the engines (the software to display that content.)
If somebody consistently believes the world is on fire for 20 years, you call them a crazy.
If somebody consistently claims for 20 years that inside the referent of "Earth," "down" is in the direction of the planet's core, you call them "right."
If somebody consistently argues for 20 years that the existence of anything that is not idealistically free is totally destructive to all of the things that are idealistically free.... You give them their own acronym and deify them.
Consistency of opinion and idealistic stance is only constructive and useful when there's no sound evidence contradicting those opinions. Anybody whose opinion cannot be even slightly swayed by evidence that they may not always be right is by definition a crank.
Videogames; mainstream commercial, indie commercial, indie free and open source alike.
They're made for Windows because the people who are most likely to reward them for their efforts with money and opportunities use Windows... because people who make games make them for Windows. It's a complete circle, one which isn't lock-in so much as it is the fact that everybody was already heavily invested in Microsoft before there was any credible alternative. Now there's no money in being the first one to change. Come up with an X-Prize for Linux gaming and some of the necessary applications out there and you've got potential.
Slashdot Mirror
Epic whoosh, or more subtle joke? Too hard to tell.
Beef? You must buy better hot dogs than I.
I use an HP Pavillion dv6, but I'd prefer something with a touchscreen.
Thanks for asking!
Don't forget that Microsoft and Nintendo both do the "hot dog vs hot dog buns" deal too, where their points are sold in rounded units but their products are sold in increments between them. Buy 500 or 1000 points, pay 1200 or 800 for a game. Either way, you're going to end up with leftover points which is intended to persuade you to buy more crap because you've still got points left over. Then you end up not having enough points left over to buy anything, so you're encouraged to buy MORE points.
Look at the Nintendo store - you've got 1200 points, 800 points and 400 point titles. You buy 1500 points, buy a 1200 point game. Now you have 300 points and the cheapest game is 400 points. So you buy 1000 more points, buy your 400 point game and are left over with 900 points. Buy an 800 point game, you have 100 points left.
Or say you're stuck with that 300 points, you buy 500 points, you now have 800 points. Hooray, you can buy 2 400 point games and actually empty your account. Except you now have bought 3 games when all you really wanted was that one 1200 point game.
The whole thing is a grand old scam run like a carnival game.
The whole mindset of the Mac community is one of self delusion that it is just better and makes more sense.
The news flash here is that it isn't and it doesn't. There are as many strange and illogical interface decisions on OS X as there are in any version of Windows. I've used Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and 7 (using it right now) and OS9, OS X Panther, Tiger and Leopard (I use both of the latter extensively at work.)
They all make stupid decisions about their interface.
OS9's Windows 3.1 style multitasking and horrible control strip at the bottom from which you could permanently delete basic computer functions accidentally, Windows 95's autorun and horrible registry/win.ini mishmash, OS X's decision to hide most of the configurability from the user and to remove all trace of GNU from the OS, Windows Vista's UAC and one-way zero-feedback firewall, OSX's Jack Russel Terrier program icons (boing, boing, bang.), Leopard's overloading and abuse of their icon bar at the top (do I really need a time machine, battery, wireless icon, remote desktop icon all on a home desktop machine which is plugged into a wired network?), Windows x64's keeping 2 different Program Files folders, Windows Vista + 7's decision to maintain three separate Start Menu folders or to hide the actual structure of the user folder behind symbolic links, Vista + 7's decisions to make it impossible for programs not run as Administrator to write to their own program directory, thus breaking reverse compatibility for a huge amount of software...
They've all done some very good things too - 95's Explorer was a very sleek file manager beaten only by some of the better DOS ones (based on the better UNIX ones), OS9's "Window" menu paved the way for OSX's Dock which Windows 7 finally copied, Windows XP's intelligent Start Menu which would order programs by common and recent usage, OS X's aforementioned Dock and web-metaphored System Preferences panel (which was copying Windows' Control Panel and which Windows Vista and 7 re-copied for simplicity).
The point here is that both are equally valuable to the home user who is comfortable with either. When making a decision regarding what you are going to buy, you need to weigh what you're getting vs what you're spending.
Unless you deliberately are buying state-of-the-art hardware which is better than what's getting loaded into the latest Macs, you're going to pay more for a Mac. That's just fact. Try it out on Apple's Store. RAM, hard drives, whatever - they're all the same parts, only 2-3 times as expensive. Same principle as buying a game console - they charge more for peripherals to offset the cost of making their platform - which in this case is OS X. OS X is cheaply sold for the same reason that console manufacturers sell PS3s and XBoxes at a loss - their sales strategy demands that they make it up in software and peripherals.
2 years ago, I'd have said an iMac was a good investment - they're a nice self-contained desktop machine, packed with modern hardware, loaded with a friendly operating system that even helps you install a different one or more if you need flexibility and which has a boot disc with useful hard drive diagnostics. 3 years after our department upgraded our old G4s to iMacs, we've had 4 iMacs (out of 25) fail to hardware problems ranging from power supply to optical drive problems, and every time the repair has cost half the price we originally paid for them. OS X turns out to be more secure but less stable than Windows when subjected to heavy use in a multi-user environment, developing ludicrous problems with their remote homes (on Apple servers, no less). Meanwhile, the Windows XP and Ubuntu systems in the same office, built with discount parts for a quarter the price are still working just fine.
You'll find using a Mac that any software you might want for it costs money. Even the stuff you might expect to be freeware or donationware or shareware or whatever, everything has a price tag. It's something in the Mac user communit
I could see this being useful for geological data. Obviously it wouldn't be necessary for just viewing a simple elevation map, but it could prove very handy for exploring ground-penetrating radar and seismograph data onsite.
Bathymetric data might also be a good use for it.
Barring those two applications, the only other logical use would be gaming and 3d movies.
It doesn't have to reward mediocrity either - the game can start out easy in places, hard in others, then adapt to be harder if you are clearly handling the easy areas too easily or have found some trick to finish the hard areas without effort.
Just because you can lower the bar doesn't mean you have to. If a person is obviously sucking, tone it back a bit. If they're not doing too badly but still failing, let them struggle - they'll appreciate the win more when they get there.
NB, I suck at hard video games.
Performance and creation were always tied together whenever people got together to perform music. Families would invent new verses for songs, making games out of it.
This tradition was alive in the Boy Scouts when I was a kid. Constant exposure to music is the same as constant exposure to a language - you're going to pick it up and begin to express yourself in it whether you're trying to or not. Having strong roots in performance of other people's music can only encourage creating your own. It won't necessarily be good, but it will be your own.
Educational gaming machine go!
Let your kid browse the internet in the living room while you read - thus glancing up regularly and supervising to make sure nobody has goatse'd them.
Show your friends the latest stupid thing you found on Youtube.
Attached USB + Controller + Stella = Living room Atari 2600 which can be easily attached and put away when you're done (less easily accomplished in these days of LCD TVs without coax).
Cheap television + keyboard computer = information kiosk. Tired of your friends getting drunk and wanting to use Google on your computer to settle disputes on random shit? Stick one of those in your living room on a pedestal. Call it "The Last Word."
Have a little too much money? Do you like having whiteboards but you consider them lower-class? Buy a large format flat screen television, something cheap which can hack 720p clearance from some home theater "everything must go" sale, stick it on the wall and use this thing on a cheap pedestal table as an art easel. Encourage people to graffiti on your wall with the stylus on the attached screen.
Attach a webcam to one and stick it up in your windowsill and take time lapses of the seasons. Hell, if it's cheap enough, put one in each window.
Or just use one for the same thing you'd use an EEEpc other than reading on the bus to work.
An additional note to the bazaar idea - spread it out a bit. Instead of 3 or 4 flesh-colored statues with infinitely large pockets which vend cornucopiaic supplies of the crap people find in dungeons, there should be a vast marketplace where finding what you want would require retaining the services of a local who could help you find someone who was selling what you want. Then you would physically find the broker in the bazaar amongst the tents who had the goods you were looking for and arrange the purchase. This keeps everybody from being packed into one tiny room as well and reduces the overall time people will be spending congregated around individual NPCs.
Actually, that was another point I had wanted to make but really didn't see any discussions in which it was on topic.
The Ironforge Auction House problem and the Newbie Zone problems are related but extremely distinct game design flaws - you deliberately create an area where congestion will happen because you can't figure out how better to do it.
The auction house problem is related to a material economy - make an item-based economy and people will form marketplaces whether you build one or not. Make it hard or slow to travel and there will be only one or two of these marketplaces. If there were a Dwarven eBay that you can get on wherever and a Gnomish UPS that would ship you things then you wouldn't have the congestion, but you'd reduce opportunity for socialization. Far better would be a shifting bazaar which migrated throughout an otherwise unpopulated zone which was reasonably safe to access. Put NPC characters which afforded some sort of benefit, like purchasing less desirable items for the going market rate and selling them back later. Provide some sort of gradation where the most powerful bazaars are harder to find and travel more quietly and you've introduced not only a fun game mechanic but a good solution to congestion.
The newbie zone problem is a different matter altogether - the designers feel it is necessary to create content which amounts to a tutorial which will keep beginning players from experiencing undue frustration, but it concentrates players together. This is good for the players - they meet peers who can tell them how to do race and location-specific quests, where to buy equipment, how to play their class. This is also bad for the players as it creates scarcity, crowding and a lasting indifference among more senior players who need to spend time in these areas and become tired of answering the same questions over and over. Thus you have congestion without many of the benefits that congestion is created for. Asheron's Call's approach of producing an artificial peerage and mentoring system by which players who collected sworn oaths of fealty would gain in power when their vassals gained power was an interesting idea, but ultimately increased the divide between the experienced players and the newbie players. Ultima Online's approach of putting players right into cities resulted in there being a significant advantage to preying on new players, thus increasing frustration and steepening the learning curve for the newbies. However both had the clear advantage of placing new players socially on the same level as other players and reducing overall congestion by not concentrating and tiering players by character level to as significant a degree.
So ultimately, these problems of congestion, overcrowding and socialization become game design decisions, not technical problems to be solved. The technical solutions can only help mitigate the problems that will inevitably crop up due to human nature - we're social animals so we group together.
This fellow was inadvertently correct. Representing space (volume) by putting sections of it onto single computers is a bad idea. Inevitably, no matter how good your design or how well-ordered your content is, some areas are going to become more popular than others. Hence, you're going to get congestion.
A much better model is representing player (and non-player) actions as work units then distributing them evenly across a network of linked computers then getting an integrated result for each "region" (zone, map, city, whatever) each server frame. Make the server frames something like 50 frames per second and have player actions lag about 2-3 frames behind server-side action and you'll see little delay on the client machines but help mitigate potential race conditions between player actions (both players simultaneously attacking and reporting that they attacked on server frame 2,348,342 and both score a fatal blow on the other).
To mitigate player lag you can distribute update packets based on the density of the update vs the distance of the events from the player vs the player's average data rate.
Of course, that's just my two cents.
Well, in theory they should have been able to reproduce the process on a different FPGA, resulting in a different "optimal" adder which may be more or less optimal. Since it seemed to rely on self-interference caused by imperfections in the chip, you'd just have to evolve on other chips until you found a similarly optimal solution. The reason it was only interesting but not useful is that an FPGA is a lot bigger than an actual adder circuit. It took the whole FPGA to evolve the minimal adder and trying to simplify something that specific (and probably relying on exact distances and input voltages to produce the desired output) would be essentially impossible. Thus trying to evolve individual circuits by that method which undercut theoretical optimum designs would require far more waste, far less space and cost efficiency and far more power.
A more appropriate use of GA would be to develop actual silicon in a full simulator much the same as that evolved antenna project NASA backed. If you could come up with a design that always worked as long as fabrication succeeded, that's much more productive and far more efficient.
That the story is true there's little reason to doubt. Ever since that guy in 1997 evolved a 64x64 speech recognition chip on an FPGA using GA, people have been going batshit trying to take advantage of the magic of GA. The odds are good that an optimal solution will arise on a chip which turns out to be specific to that chip. I imagine if you used a GA to evolve something specific to those faulty Pentium chips that it would fail to operate properly on a machine with a non-broken ALU.
Whether it had anything to do with my instructor's company, on the other hand, I don't know.
gah! Interesting, but not useful.
I had an EE teacher who owned his own little company. His company had done some research using GA to evolve a minimal adder circuit on an FPGA. This adder was simpler than the theoretically optimal adder circuit, using fewer gates than should be possible.
They really thought they had something (it worked every time with no apparent variation on real hardware) and started putting it on a few other FPGAs to test the solution. It didn't work on the other FPGAs.
They did a full analysis of the solution and found out that although some inputs and outputs were mapped to a closed loop not connected to VDD or GND (they had no power and no output), if they were removed from the program on the working FPGA, the adder stopped working. They finally had to chalk it up to relying on electron migration and/or induction currents in the closed loops for a correct answer. They'd accidentally made something like a quantum adder, but it was entirely specific to the silicon they'd evolved it on, making it useful, but not interesting.
Nuclear contamination is not easy to deal with. If it were, do you really think a facility as sophisticated as Yucca mountain would be necessary?
Who says a hole in the ground that you put huge metal canisters into on a rail system is sophisticated? Furthermore, only the EPA said it was necessary. Much less sophisticated means are fully capable of keeping dangerous radiation levels out of the surrounding area for billions of years.
If all of the batteries are properly recycled, the nuclear solution is probably better. but what happens then the owner of the nuclear battery falls overboard and he and his hearing aid are eaten by fishes?
If the batteries are sleeved in a corrosion-resistant canister which is well-reinforced (say, continuous carbon fiber weave), then the fish will crap out a battery.
I made a point in a term paper a few years back that the very nature of GTA, though transgressive, transmits a clear establishment message. You cannot beat the police in GTA. You may escape them, but you cannot stop them. Any attempt to directly oppose the police always inevitably leads to death as there will always be more of them than you. The police in GTA are individually stupid, collectively difficult to evade, and taken as an entire establishment entirely invincible.
Further, there's a recognition (especially in GTA San Andreas) of the fact that the player you embody is fundamentally broken and leads a life devoid of meaning. All of the most likable characters in the games are either killed, betray you or are the "straight men" - the people who point out to your character the failure of their lifestyle.
So although the GTA games allow you to explore your own dark side it seems to guide you to the message that not only is the world better off without your enemies (the people you kill throughout the game) but also without you (the killer).
Actually, I DO read Slashdot on a home HDTV. Also, they don't sell image composition technology which improves somebody else's web page or video game.
I also find it particularly unlikely that watching a movie on your iPhone from a distance of 15 feet makes it any more watchable than doing so at a distance of 2-3 feet.
I think the absolutely vital reading, assuming a one semester course would have to include:
How is it your eye is incapable of discerning the difference between muddy and clear, but it's capable of watching a movie on the tiny iPhone screen?
I find the argument that the human eye doesn't have a very high resolution to be fairly ignorant given that the human eye can pick out details at a range where the highest quality digital cameras break down. We have a superior optical system in all but the most severely damaged or underdeveloped (through developmental or genetic disorder) eyes to any existing display technology. This guy does some good-old-fashioned book research and hand math to figure out that we can probably set a lower bound of 324MP on what the human eye can pick up across its central vision.
I've been playing two or three games from 1999-2000 on my new Windows 7 x64 machine the last few days (gotta love weekend discounts on Steam). I can honestly say that none of the mainstream games from that far back are having problems.
"Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II" (1997) is having problems, but I think that's the ATI drivers rather than Windows 7. I haven't tested much stuff from the late 90s yet, mostly because precious little came out for PC in those days that I thought was worth playing. Half-Life runs fine.
For older games, I typically run them in DosBox anyway, simply so that they can run in a safe sandbox which resembles the environment they were designed to run in. If DosBox doesn't work right, I'll recompile it. More or less the same as what I'd do on my Linux notebook. Linux games are a bit difficult to recompile when you don't have the source code for them (as with Tribes 2, the example the GP used).
Don't let idealism get in the way of recognizing the real issues and non-issues. There are a lot of really great PC games out there now and a rich history of publication which predates any broad acceptance of Linux. There are also a lot of great games out there which aren't on the consoles simply because the costs of entry for console development are prohibitively high for experimental game developers. Windows is a platform used by gamers, so game developers develop for it. The real money may be in consoles, and the real future may be in Linux (or BSD or some other FOSS environment yet to be found) but for the present, gaming is alive, well, evolving and thriving on Windows PCs.
I'm rooting for developers who are going cross-platform, however, because the entire gaming industry is being screwed over by the kind of decisions that proprietary platforms make regarding copy protection (and therefore distribution.) Should code protection by any conventional definition be made a moot point by a widespread adoption of FOSS development, then we'd be buying content (as we should be) rather than the engines (the software to display that content.)
If somebody consistently believes the world is on fire for 20 years, you call them a crazy.
If somebody consistently claims for 20 years that inside the referent of "Earth," "down" is in the direction of the planet's core, you call them "right."
If somebody consistently argues for 20 years that the existence of anything that is not idealistically free is totally destructive to all of the things that are idealistically free.... You give them their own acronym and deify them.
Consistency of opinion and idealistic stance is only constructive and useful when there's no sound evidence contradicting those opinions. Anybody whose opinion cannot be even slightly swayed by evidence that they may not always be right is by definition a crank.
You're allowed to sell it for any price you like, just so long as you give it away for free.
Schroedinger's Cat.
Videogames; mainstream commercial, indie commercial, indie free and open source alike.
They're made for Windows because the people who are most likely to reward them for their efforts with money and opportunities use Windows... because people who make games make them for Windows. It's a complete circle, one which isn't lock-in so much as it is the fact that everybody was already heavily invested in Microsoft before there was any credible alternative. Now there's no money in being the first one to change. Come up with an X-Prize for Linux gaming and some of the necessary applications out there and you've got potential.