If you consider the possible search space wherin each program's number is located, it's almost infinity to 1 for every useful program.
Not at all! Let's say a useful program these days is somewhere around 8MB. That's 2^23 possible combinations. For the purposes of this discussion I'll assume the number of useful programs in that search space is small enough that we can estimate the odds of finding a useful program in that search space as around 1:2^20 (nice, round number... I wouldn't say there are only 8 useful programs in that search space, but whatever...)
Now, for this "almost infinity to one" thing... comparing the magnitude of infinity to 2^20, there's an infinite factor of difference there. Clearly 1:infinity is a much smaller probability than 1:2^20. 2^40, 2^60, 2^80 are all equally distant from infinity.
Perhaps more to the point... The challenge of finding a useful program in that space by a completely random process is a much different task from crafting a useful program by using the abstractions with which we structure code. Any reasonably good programmer could create FAT or VFAT - though no two implementations or designs are likely to match exactly, there are countless different implementations and designs for the filesystem structure which would have similar practical advantages and weaknesses. (For instance, compare VFAT to UMSDOS... Completely different implementation but they have roughly the same characteristics) The problem is that the value of this one design has been artifically boosted, because it's become a de-facto standard with which devices are expected to be compatible. No one is interested in VFAT these days for its technical merit, they're interested in it because Microsoft's OS uses it and they want to be compatible.
My prediction? Microsoft will do their best to make device manufacturers pay for VFAT, or even FAT if they can manage it. (But who's going to want FAT without VFAT?) Focusing mainly on consumer-visible devices like cameras and such. Then they'll also provide a better filesystem for these devices - maybe NTFS or maybe something new - and to encourage people to use it in devices they'll make it cheaper, or possibly no-cost. With this new filesystem being officially sanctioned by Microsoft with support on MS systems, it may be enough to convince manufacturers that it's a reasonable transition path. They may even make sure it's supported on Mac. But they'll make damn sure they control every aspect of this technology.
They are not mutually exclusive, but one has nothing to do with the other. The issue many of us have with creationists is that they apparently want to bend science to their own agenda, harnessing the education system to spread their own ideology. One can argue using scientific ideas, in order to try and strengthen one's own ideas of how the world works, but true science comes from the willingness to accept the possibility that one's ideas are wrong, by drawing conclusions from experimental data, rather than selectively using pre-existing experimental data and using it to try to prove a point. These people are threatened by science, the fact that its ideas and practices are sometimes in contradiction with their own, and the fact that it claims a well-deserved reputation for representing the high point of accumulated human knowledge about the mechanisms of the world.
God may or may not exist. There is no way to prove the point one way or another, unless god does exist, and makes itself known. Discussions about gods are philosophical in nature. From an educational standpoint that makes it difficult for people who want to promote their own ideas to do so, because philosophy is by nature rather abstract and usually not only open to debate, but actively inviting it.
Science is a little different, in that many of the ideas presented have enough experimental evidence to back them up that there's no value in debating them in a high school environment. That doesn't mean that they're known to be entirely correct, it just means that humanity as a whole has enough confidence in the validity of the ideas that challenging them is not done lightly.
When people push to have creationism and similar ideas taught in a science class, that creates a backlash amongst those of us who respect science. I had been under the impression that the bee flight thing was understood long ago - but if people were using it as an argument against evolution, such an argument is very short-sighted. We cannot be so vain as to assume that anything we are not mightily intelligent enough to understand must be somehow inherently supernatural.
Yeah... And when someone beats me by a full half-lap and then stops at the finish line so they can cross it in reverse as soon as I come near enough to see them, I know what the message is there, too. (My preferred response in this case is to drive around the course wrong-way until I meet them on the other side, when possible.)
I was just commenting that on the one hand, I sort of miss the sort of chatty interaction between rounds of games like Amplitude - though, on the other hand, in some ways the game is just plain better off as a result. Not only does this mean you don't have to listen to people being jerks or whatever, but I also feel like the chatting etiquette, congratulating the winner, talking about what level would be best to play next, etc. - it sort of gets in the way of the actual gameplay. Having the game without chat options sort of accelerates that, people just move along to the next match for as long as they have a decent game going.
No one wants to say it, but one factor that I think may account for increased Nintendo DS and GBA sales is the availability of flash backup cartridges and pirated ROMs.
By that logic the Gamepark 32 should have outsold the GBA, by virtue of its ability to play GBA, SNES, NES, etc. ROMs via emulation on normal, off-the-shelf (SD) flash media.
The GBA is easy enough to homebrew or pirate - just get a flashcart from a seller willing to sell it. The DS is a little more involved. First you need to get past the unit's security while in DS mode, using modified game code to shift execution off to the ROM locations of the GBA slot. From there you can run DS code from the GBA slot, but to actually make it convenient you'd then also have to re-flash your unit's ROM while holding the internal ROM protect jumper closed...
The GBA actually doesn't have mode 7 at all. Rather, features of mode 7 are imitated by using the CPU to change the projection of a layer at each scanline.
Most likely they didn't want to do battle mode over IP because it'd be a lot more sensitive to lag issues than race mode.
Consider: there's not -too- much in race mode that matters, apart from whether your opponent is in front of you, or behind. If you see lag in race mode, most likely it'll mean your opponent's position jumps around (or even that they fall off the track, and mysteriously reappear on it without losing time) - but at a very basic level, the needs of the race are met, in that the relationship between how long it's taking you to get around the track, and how long it's taking them to get around the track is maintained. Every time you get a sync packet from an opponent everything's right with the world again. As for powerups, usually in race mode if you're in a position where you can effectively use a powerup, it won't be too sensitive to lag unless the two players are really right on top of each other. (Drafting doesn't work too well in a laggy game, of course, and in that situation it's tough to say whether a banana peel or other weapon dropped behind the lead player will hit the trailing player...) I guess you could say that while powerups still work in a laggy game, the "combat" aspects of the race mode are those which suffer the most from the lag.
Battle-mode is, of course, completely combat-oriented. The game isn't oriented around a circuit in which there is an "ahead" and "behind", rather everyone's free to race around and try to fire weapons at each other. It could still work but given that the relationship between players' positions is much less consistent than in a race, and since the entire battle game revolves around powerups and direct kart-to-kart interactions, it would be harder to give a good battle game experience than it is to give a good race experience.
I love the online race mode, too - it's sort of frustrating sometimes that you can't communicate with your opponents over the link, but other times it's not. It keeps people focused on the game itself rather than all the bickering that often goes with other online games in between rounds. I'm glad they allow the custom emblems, though - it gives people who want to be a jackass an opportunity to do so, but also allows personalization. Really, though, given the potential for abuse I'm surprised they did it at all.
Actually I think they were just confused by the whole "right-click" thing. They want Microsoft to document the right-click standard so that other companies can make software which is compatible with right-clicking, and so they'll know how to right-click.
One thing I've often wondered about is whether people who do more in-depth technical work with their computers ought to have a UI that's more sophisticated than that designed for "the masses". I think this is something that's too-often ignored. People design UI for the majority of people - which for the majority of people, is the right thing to do. But what about (say) a professional computer programmer? Sure, they have their own niche programs that are suited just to them, and those generally aren't too dumbed-down. But for most everything else they use the same interface as grandma uses to check her e-mail. Is that right?
I wonder sometimes if we do ourselves a disservice, by assuming that we, as developers, aren't a legitimate segment of the user base. Some of it is about the goal of the project in question - if it has to have a high degree of usability among casual users, specializing for adept computer users isn't wise. But I think there's real potential for a system that's made for "us". Something modern and thoughtfully designed, but also very flexible, so that people who know their tastes can be comfortable in it.
I think the absolute worst aspect of GUIs at this point is their poor keyboard control. Keyboard "shortcuts" help but they are very limited, and tab-navigation through fields in apps like Thunderbird is awkward at best. I'd like to see modern apps adopt a control scheme where the keyboard can be used to operate more efficiently than the mouse. Emacs has some strengths in this area - primarily the fact that it allows users to run commands by name with M-x - so if I don't remember the shortcut or the location in the menus of a command, I can M-x and tab-complete and usually find it. Then programs like PINE provide very efficient keyboard navigation through all the most-used aspects of the application. I'd really like to see this kind of control become the norm in GUI apps.
Perhaps the man does not generally live in fear for his life and safety. Was he given reason to believe these people were determined to do him harm, as opposed to, say, telling him there was a problem with his car or something?
I see no insistencies based on that interview. So the man wore a visor. People do that. The decision isn't always based on practicality. I think publishing a non-interview like that is extremely one-sided. The interviewer is allowed to structure the flow of the discussion in any way he chooses, apply any interpretation he sees fit. The interviewee could of course explain his side but he did not consent to the interview, and was under no obligation to do so. The "interview" is nothing but an opinion piece based on one interpretation of the facts, masquerading as an interview.
I've always thought that some of this (not all of it, to be sure) is because subtlety doesn't work very well with the current technology of gaming. Consider:
TV shows are based upon carefully chosen camera angles (and changes thereof) and sets configured for presentation on the small screen. The way the information gets presented to you is part of the composition, so when it's time for you to see a detail, you'll see it.
3-D games need to present enough information to make the game playable. The view is usually utilitarian for that reason, chosen to present the information and still give a reasonable impression of the proper scale of things. Now you may see characters on-screen, who may be right up front or off in the background a bit. On an old-style color TV these characters won't have a lot of pixels to work with - I think this is a contributing factor to why game characters are often over-exaggerated. If they weren't, the recognition of those aspects of the characters would be almost lost, and people would start complaining that the women don't look like women.
Personally, I love the look of real, beautiful women, and I'd rather see that than the over-exaggerated versions. But I think in certain contexts of gaming the decision is a practical one. Of course, there are games where this is less true (like fighting games, where the characters are always right up front) and in those cases I think it just is a matter of bad taste.
I think the main reason I might find it useful (and this depends on how they've implemented tabs) is because I don't like having to open multiple windows in most applications. In Pine (which I still use at home) there are no "new windows" of course, the app's UI has multiple states - top menu, folder list, folder index, message view - and I navigate between those as needed. I personally find that to be neater than opening new windows all the time. Tabs offer similar possibilities.
Who better to advocate Google than Google? Who better to describe the intent of Google's business practices than Google? Consider, this isn't about the business practices about Google only, it's the business practices of a well-known and successful company.
Whether it's fluff depends on your perspective. I'm curious about this, and about how they intend to face the related real-world problems, so to me it's not fluff. For instance, they touch on the problems of maintaining a high degree of communication between team members, and how this is impacted by company growth - how to balance the effort to coddle the employee against the need to keep egos in check and foster the right level of interaction ("packing them in" comes to mind.)
Of course, they could have gone into some kind of depth about "Don't be evil" apart from simply taking the chance to knock Microsoft... The article could have used more depth.
I would mod you down, except I decided I'd rather respond instead. I can't stand posts tagged with something like "but you're all zealots who don't agree with me so you'll mod me down"... Like, what, I'm supposed to read that and think that I'd better not mod you down, lest you be proven right about why you were modded down? No, I'd mod you down because you're trolling, offtopic (by trying to turn the discussion toward the popular politics among Slashdotters and the rating system), and trying to manipulate moderators to ensure that you don't get modded down.
But, sure, OK, you say Windows did it first and it could very well be true as far as I know... In this particular case it's not exactly anything revolutionary, it's just a remote control plus some media player software... But I do believe in credit where it's due.
That's great and all... but suppose I did this, set up my firewall to deal with IPv6 and gave all my machines IPv6 addresses...
Then what? I mean, who do I know who's running IPv6 who would connect to me? Is my PC at work running IPv6? Are my family's computers at my parents' house running IPv6? Is my girlfriend's Airport Extreme running IPv6? Would this help me to connect back to my home computer from any of those places?
Granted, the fact that IPv6 doesn't apparently do anything for my personal needs doesn't invalidate its importance... But I've heard all about IPv6 for years, and it's like, great - but what can I actually do with it?
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so that's one against music piracy.
Anyone else?
Seems like the bandwidth at 1MHz would be kind of narrow, too...
Those stone-age cars were always hard on the feet. Not just from stopping but from starting up, too.
If you consider the possible search space wherin each program's number is located, it's almost infinity to 1 for every useful program.
Not at all! Let's say a useful program these days is somewhere around 8MB. That's 2^23 possible combinations. For the purposes of this discussion I'll assume the number of useful programs in that search space is small enough that we can estimate the odds of finding a useful program in that search space as around 1:2^20 (nice, round number... I wouldn't say there are only 8 useful programs in that search space, but whatever...)
Now, for this "almost infinity to one" thing... comparing the magnitude of infinity to 2^20, there's an infinite factor of difference there. Clearly 1:infinity is a much smaller probability than 1:2^20. 2^40, 2^60, 2^80 are all equally distant from infinity.
Perhaps more to the point... The challenge of finding a useful program in that space by a completely random process is a much different task from crafting a useful program by using the abstractions with which we structure code. Any reasonably good programmer could create FAT or VFAT - though no two implementations or designs are likely to match exactly, there are countless different implementations and designs for the filesystem structure which would have similar practical advantages and weaknesses. (For instance, compare VFAT to UMSDOS... Completely different implementation but they have roughly the same characteristics) The problem is that the value of this one design has been artifically boosted, because it's become a de-facto standard with which devices are expected to be compatible. No one is interested in VFAT these days for its technical merit, they're interested in it because Microsoft's OS uses it and they want to be compatible.
My prediction? Microsoft will do their best to make device manufacturers pay for VFAT, or even FAT if they can manage it. (But who's going to want FAT without VFAT?) Focusing mainly on consumer-visible devices like cameras and such. Then they'll also provide a better filesystem for these devices - maybe NTFS or maybe something new - and to encourage people to use it in devices they'll make it cheaper, or possibly no-cost. With this new filesystem being officially sanctioned by Microsoft with support on MS systems, it may be enough to convince manufacturers that it's a reasonable transition path. They may even make sure it's supported on Mac. But they'll make damn sure they control every aspect of this technology.
Is that a kind of metal? Or am I thinking of "phenominium"?
They are not mutually exclusive, but one has nothing to do with the other. The issue many of us have with creationists is that they apparently want to bend science to their own agenda, harnessing the education system to spread their own ideology. One can argue using scientific ideas, in order to try and strengthen one's own ideas of how the world works, but true science comes from the willingness to accept the possibility that one's ideas are wrong, by drawing conclusions from experimental data, rather than selectively using pre-existing experimental data and using it to try to prove a point. These people are threatened by science, the fact that its ideas and practices are sometimes in contradiction with their own, and the fact that it claims a well-deserved reputation for representing the high point of accumulated human knowledge about the mechanisms of the world.
God may or may not exist. There is no way to prove the point one way or another, unless god does exist, and makes itself known. Discussions about gods are philosophical in nature. From an educational standpoint that makes it difficult for people who want to promote their own ideas to do so, because philosophy is by nature rather abstract and usually not only open to debate, but actively inviting it.
Science is a little different, in that many of the ideas presented have enough experimental evidence to back them up that there's no value in debating them in a high school environment. That doesn't mean that they're known to be entirely correct, it just means that humanity as a whole has enough confidence in the validity of the ideas that challenging them is not done lightly.
When people push to have creationism and similar ideas taught in a science class, that creates a backlash amongst those of us who respect science. I had been under the impression that the bee flight thing was understood long ago - but if people were using it as an argument against evolution, such an argument is very short-sighted. We cannot be so vain as to assume that anything we are not mightily intelligent enough to understand must be somehow inherently supernatural.
Yeah... And when someone beats me by a full half-lap and then stops at the finish line so they can cross it in reverse as soon as I come near enough to see them, I know what the message is there, too. (My preferred response in this case is to drive around the course wrong-way until I meet them on the other side, when possible.)
I was just commenting that on the one hand, I sort of miss the sort of chatty interaction between rounds of games like Amplitude - though, on the other hand, in some ways the game is just plain better off as a result. Not only does this mean you don't have to listen to people being jerks or whatever, but I also feel like the chatting etiquette, congratulating the winner, talking about what level would be best to play next, etc. - it sort of gets in the way of the actual gameplay. Having the game without chat options sort of accelerates that, people just move along to the next match for as long as they have a decent game going.
No one wants to say it, but one factor that I think may account for increased Nintendo DS and GBA sales is the availability of flash backup cartridges and pirated ROMs.
By that logic the Gamepark 32 should have outsold the GBA, by virtue of its ability to play GBA, SNES, NES, etc. ROMs via emulation on normal, off-the-shelf (SD) flash media.
The GBA is easy enough to homebrew or pirate - just get a flashcart from a seller willing to sell it. The DS is a little more involved. First you need to get past the unit's security while in DS mode, using modified game code to shift execution off to the ROM locations of the GBA slot. From there you can run DS code from the GBA slot, but to actually make it convenient you'd then also have to re-flash your unit's ROM while holding the internal ROM protect jumper closed...
The GBA actually doesn't have mode 7 at all. Rather, features of mode 7 are imitated by using the CPU to change the projection of a layer at each scanline.
Most likely they didn't want to do battle mode over IP because it'd be a lot more sensitive to lag issues than race mode.
Consider: there's not -too- much in race mode that matters, apart from whether your opponent is in front of you, or behind. If you see lag in race mode, most likely it'll mean your opponent's position jumps around (or even that they fall off the track, and mysteriously reappear on it without losing time) - but at a very basic level, the needs of the race are met, in that the relationship between how long it's taking you to get around the track, and how long it's taking them to get around the track is maintained. Every time you get a sync packet from an opponent everything's right with the world again. As for powerups, usually in race mode if you're in a position where you can effectively use a powerup, it won't be too sensitive to lag unless the two players are really right on top of each other. (Drafting doesn't work too well in a laggy game, of course, and in that situation it's tough to say whether a banana peel or other weapon dropped behind the lead player will hit the trailing player...) I guess you could say that while powerups still work in a laggy game, the "combat" aspects of the race mode are those which suffer the most from the lag.
Battle-mode is, of course, completely combat-oriented. The game isn't oriented around a circuit in which there is an "ahead" and "behind", rather everyone's free to race around and try to fire weapons at each other. It could still work but given that the relationship between players' positions is much less consistent than in a race, and since the entire battle game revolves around powerups and direct kart-to-kart interactions, it would be harder to give a good battle game experience than it is to give a good race experience.
I love the online race mode, too - it's sort of frustrating sometimes that you can't communicate with your opponents over the link, but other times it's not. It keeps people focused on the game itself rather than all the bickering that often goes with other online games in between rounds. I'm glad they allow the custom emblems, though - it gives people who want to be a jackass an opportunity to do so, but also allows personalization. Really, though, given the potential for abuse I'm surprised they did it at all.
With a 10 gb hard drive, it would take absolute light years to restart/turn on the phone.
Light years are a measure of distance, not time.
Though I guess maybe if you were talking about this in the context of the Kessel Run...
Sounds like "Song of the South"...
You should never let factual information get in the way of a good joke. Or one of my jokes, for that matter.
Ah, but that would make the headline [i]clearly biased[/i]. And as everyone knows that is never allowed to happen on Slashdot.
Actually I think they were just confused by the whole "right-click" thing. They want Microsoft to document the right-click standard so that other companies can make software which is compatible with right-clicking, and so they'll know how to right-click.
One thing I've often wondered about is whether people who do more in-depth technical work with their computers ought to have a UI that's more sophisticated than that designed for "the masses". I think this is something that's too-often ignored. People design UI for the majority of people - which for the majority of people, is the right thing to do. But what about (say) a professional computer programmer? Sure, they have their own niche programs that are suited just to them, and those generally aren't too dumbed-down. But for most everything else they use the same interface as grandma uses to check her e-mail. Is that right?
I wonder sometimes if we do ourselves a disservice, by assuming that we, as developers, aren't a legitimate segment of the user base. Some of it is about the goal of the project in question - if it has to have a high degree of usability among casual users, specializing for adept computer users isn't wise. But I think there's real potential for a system that's made for "us". Something modern and thoughtfully designed, but also very flexible, so that people who know their tastes can be comfortable in it.
I think the absolute worst aspect of GUIs at this point is their poor keyboard control. Keyboard "shortcuts" help but they are very limited, and tab-navigation through fields in apps like Thunderbird is awkward at best. I'd like to see modern apps adopt a control scheme where the keyboard can be used to operate more efficiently than the mouse. Emacs has some strengths in this area - primarily the fact that it allows users to run commands by name with M-x - so if I don't remember the shortcut or the location in the menus of a command, I can M-x and tab-complete and usually find it. Then programs like PINE provide very efficient keyboard navigation through all the most-used aspects of the application. I'd really like to see this kind of control become the norm in GUI apps.
"I'm Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as - oh! Excuse me..."
Perhaps the man does not generally live in fear for his life and safety. Was he given reason to believe these people were determined to do him harm, as opposed to, say, telling him there was a problem with his car or something?
I see no insistencies based on that interview. So the man wore a visor. People do that. The decision isn't always based on practicality. I think publishing a non-interview like that is extremely one-sided. The interviewer is allowed to structure the flow of the discussion in any way he chooses, apply any interpretation he sees fit. The interviewee could of course explain his side but he did not consent to the interview, and was under no obligation to do so. The "interview" is nothing but an opinion piece based on one interpretation of the facts, masquerading as an interview.
The article is the BBC's, so why not the title?
I've always thought that some of this (not all of it, to be sure) is because subtlety doesn't work very well with the current technology of gaming. Consider:
TV shows are based upon carefully chosen camera angles (and changes thereof) and sets configured for presentation on the small screen. The way the information gets presented to you is part of the composition, so when it's time for you to see a detail, you'll see it.
3-D games need to present enough information to make the game playable. The view is usually utilitarian for that reason, chosen to present the information and still give a reasonable impression of the proper scale of things. Now you may see characters on-screen, who may be right up front or off in the background a bit. On an old-style color TV these characters won't have a lot of pixels to work with - I think this is a contributing factor to why game characters are often over-exaggerated. If they weren't, the recognition of those aspects of the characters would be almost lost, and people would start complaining that the women don't look like women.
Personally, I love the look of real, beautiful women, and I'd rather see that than the over-exaggerated versions. But I think in certain contexts of gaming the decision is a practical one. Of course, there are games where this is less true (like fighting games, where the characters are always right up front) and in those cases I think it just is a matter of bad taste.
I think the main reason I might find it useful (and this depends on how they've implemented tabs) is because I don't like having to open multiple windows in most applications. In Pine (which I still use at home) there are no "new windows" of course, the app's UI has multiple states - top menu, folder list, folder index, message view - and I navigate between those as needed. I personally find that to be neater than opening new windows all the time. Tabs offer similar possibilities.
Who better to advocate Google than Google? Who better to describe the intent of Google's business practices than Google? Consider, this isn't about the business practices about Google only, it's the business practices of a well-known and successful company.
Whether it's fluff depends on your perspective. I'm curious about this, and about how they intend to face the related real-world problems, so to me it's not fluff. For instance, they touch on the problems of maintaining a high degree of communication between team members, and how this is impacted by company growth - how to balance the effort to coddle the employee against the need to keep egos in check and foster the right level of interaction ("packing them in" comes to mind.)
Of course, they could have gone into some kind of depth about "Don't be evil" apart from simply taking the chance to knock Microsoft... The article could have used more depth.
I would mod you down, except I decided I'd rather respond instead. I can't stand posts tagged with something like "but you're all zealots who don't agree with me so you'll mod me down"... Like, what, I'm supposed to read that and think that I'd better not mod you down, lest you be proven right about why you were modded down? No, I'd mod you down because you're trolling, offtopic (by trying to turn the discussion toward the popular politics among Slashdotters and the rating system), and trying to manipulate moderators to ensure that you don't get modded down.
But, sure, OK, you say Windows did it first and it could very well be true as far as I know... In this particular case it's not exactly anything revolutionary, it's just a remote control plus some media player software... But I do believe in credit where it's due.
That's great and all... but suppose I did this, set up my firewall to deal with IPv6 and gave all my machines IPv6 addresses...
Then what? I mean, who do I know who's running IPv6 who would connect to me? Is my PC at work running IPv6? Are my family's computers at my parents' house running IPv6? Is my girlfriend's Airport Extreme running IPv6? Would this help me to connect back to my home computer from any of those places?
Granted, the fact that IPv6 doesn't apparently do anything for my personal needs doesn't invalidate its importance... But I've heard all about IPv6 for years, and it's like, great - but what can I actually do with it?
Thank $diety for adblock.
But how diety is adblock? It won't help me lose weight...
I'd like to share a little poem:
'I' before 'E',
except after 'C',
Or when it sounds like an 'A'
as in "Neighbor" or "weigh"