It's my understanding that the 0-day scene is a "l33t protest" about poor distribution models. Think about it - a couple of people with a little spare time and access can get the latest movie or game to anyone in the world* before you can even buy it in the shops in the one country where it gets first release. These people really show up the inefficiencies in the system - and it's the inefficiencies that make a lot of people rich. So, naturally, someone notices and wants to stamp on them.
Quake 3 was fast, but unreal tournament (and 2k4) has the game speed slider... push it to maximum and you need to drink espresso between frags to have a hope of keeping up. 2k4 also has some fancy jumping and dodging moves like CPMA, though not really on the same level.
Anyway, more on topic - Quake 4 will have Doom 3 style lighting, so I'd expect that the single player will have lots of shooting at shadows and the multiplayer will be a camper's paradise. So it'll be different to previous Quake games whatever happens.
TOS had fit girls in skimpy outifts every other episode! Remember the ship's uniform? Miniskirts on a space ship...
TNG had Marina Sirtis on the bridge where her whole function was to provide clevage.
DS9? Dabo girls! Nana Visitor in that leather outfit in the alternate-universe episodes was probably the sexiest thing on TV that year...
Star Trek was always about hot alien girls. 7 of 9 and that vulcan on Enterprise are completely in line with the rest of the series. You can't blame that on Berman.
S:AaB was a great show, but would it have been so well remembered if half the cast hadn't been unexpectedly killed in the final episode? All the depression and death was what really made the series.
If you're talking about colonising planets, then we have Earth, Mars, the Moon that have decent amounts of sunlight and survivable surface temperatures. If you want to go for outer planets/moons there's Pluto, Charon, Titan, Ganymede, Calisto, Europa, Triton and maybe Io (not sure you could live there, it's very hostile). So, colonising other planets only gets you a ~5 times the livable surface area of Earth. It's a temporary fix.
Earth's surface is 70% water. We'd have to do something pretty incredible to it to make it unpurifiable. We have no shortage of iron either - check a junk yard. Same for carbon, the planet is chock-full of plants.
As raw materials to use off Earth, I can see the point of using asteroids. But I'd be very surprised indeed to see asteroid/comet material used down here.
As for the nuclear armageddon argument, it's arguable that multiple planets would be a bad thing... there's a huge counter-incentive to letting of nukes on Earth if you have nowhere else to go, and if it means the end of the species. But imagine a situation with two planets, where faction 1 only has a presence on planet A, and faction 2 has people on A and B. Faction 2 "wins" by nuking planet A. Not good. I still think multiple planets is a reasonable response to this problem, but it needs to be accompanied by disarmament, political systems which prevent madmen from taking power and social systems which prevent them from acting as terrorists, reconcilliation processes between conflicting factions and a general commitment towards peace and rationality. And until we get those things sorted out, we'd perhaps be better off not exporting our conflicts outside Earth.
Not to disagree with your overall point, but VOIP isn't all that latency sensitive. The speed of sound in air alone means you get 6 milliseconds of round-trip latency per meter seperating people talking. Games can be very latency sensitive, the difference between two people shooting first can be a few milliseconds, though given monitor refresh rates anything under 15ms is a lottery... so if you did magically control your ISPs routers you wouldn't be unjustified in giving your games the same or higher QoS priority than VOIP
Yeah, and in your life you will spend 25 years asleep, 1 year on the toilet, 2 years driving, etc, etc. I don't own a TV, but I probably watch about 2 hours a week of downloaded programmes or DVDs - I do it whilst I'm doing other stuff, like eating, so I've not even really lost any time.
Why would a hard phone give superior quality to a soft phone? The link you provide doesn't explain. Do you mean for VOIP to POTS calls?
I use skype for PC to PC voice chat and the quality is very much better than a real phone, probably because I have much better speakers than you could ever fit into a handset, and more bandwidth than a phone line.
And, while I'm posting, I might as well point out that it's the VLT (Very Large Telescope), not VLTI. Maybe you were thinking of VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry - a technique for high resolution radio images)?
One more thing - ground based telescopes like VLT are better than Hubble at many things, are catching up in resolution, but are inferior when it comes to background. They see things through the atmosphere, which glows faintly and makes it harder to see things like dim distant galaxies. Hubble can see things which are dimmer, which is important for cosmology since dim things are often far away.
"I'm quite impressed with the rendering quality of the XBox vs. its contenders, at least with regards to the pictures in this article."
Towards the end of the article they start talking about Xbox 2... I think that's what Huxley is coming out for and they just don't clearly state it. They say "next generation" several times. I'd be pretty surprised if a current-gen console could do the lighting in those shots (though Doom 3 is getting ported so maybe I'm wrong).
Anyway, who needs Huxley? Quake 2 supported 128(+?) players. 128 is enough for anyone!:)
It seems this game has crappy unit AI and compensates by being too slow - if the AI was better players would no doubt get bored.
Anyway, what RTS games are you playing? Most of my favourites (e.g. Total Annihilation) have variable play speeds... adjust it to suit your own preference.
This is about defending against the secret service. They have a habit of wandering into your office with guns and confisicating your computer, plus the post-it notes stuck to it...
So, why not use a different term? Saying "I am a Christian" or wearing a cross is shorthand for saying "I am irrational, hate Arabs and am glad people go to Hell to be tortured". Saying "I have certain religious ideas" will invite people who care to ask you to clarify your position. No misunderstanding, no pigeonholing, apart from people who want to be in the Christian pigeonhole with all its negative (to most people) connotations.
Number 6 was a robot? Man, that Prisoner show was even deeper than I thought. Mind you, I missed that Ivanova was a lesbian first time round too...
Re:At last, Iain M Banks gets a bit of recognition
on
2005 Hugo Nominations
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Banks is my favourite author, but I don't think his treatment of the super-intelligent AI characters is that impressive. To me they often come across somewhat like teenagers (they're always plotting and acting fairly immaturely) with minds that operate much faster rather than any smarter or wiser.
I don't think this is Bank's fault... for quite a few reasons actually. Firstly, writing someone significantly smarter than you is close to impossible.
He also postulates in one of his books that all intelligence past a certain level is equivalent with only differences in speed and capacity (a kind of Turing principle for sentience), which doesn't seem unreasonable. But his AIs should be at that level, whereas I often felt that they didn't have the situational mastery that you might expect - they sometimes completely understand a situation before it's even begun, but they can also act on crazy impulses and be singleminded. I would expect they would always be on perfect form.
Finally, he says that AIs are coloured by the people who create them... and the people of the Culture are pretty immature. Perhaps he's saying something about them.
Anyway, I understand that The Algebraist isn't a Culture novel, so perhaps Banks will get his Hugo since he doesn't have to write in the minefield that is super-intelligences.
Slashdot Mirror
It's my understanding that the 0-day scene is a "l33t protest" about poor distribution models. Think about it - a couple of people with a little spare time and access can get the latest movie or game to anyone in the world* before you can even buy it in the shops in the one country where it gets first release.
These people really show up the inefficiencies in the system - and it's the inefficiencies that make a lot of people rich. So, naturally, someone notices and wants to stamp on them.
*bandwidth permitting
Quake 3 was fast, but unreal tournament (and 2k4) has the game speed slider... push it to maximum and you need to drink espresso between frags to have a hope of keeping up. 2k4 also has some fancy jumping and dodging moves like CPMA, though not really on the same level.
Anyway, more on topic - Quake 4 will have Doom 3 style lighting, so I'd expect that the single player will have lots of shooting at shadows and the multiplayer will be a camper's paradise. So it'll be different to previous Quake games whatever happens.
Did you ever *watch* Star Trek?
TOS had fit girls in skimpy outifts every other episode! Remember the ship's uniform? Miniskirts on a space ship...
TNG had Marina Sirtis on the bridge where her whole function was to provide clevage.
DS9? Dabo girls! Nana Visitor in that leather outfit in the alternate-universe episodes was probably the sexiest thing on TV that year...
Star Trek was always about hot alien girls. 7 of 9 and that vulcan on Enterprise are completely in line with the rest of the series. You can't blame that on Berman.
S:AaB was a great show, but would it have been so well remembered if half the cast hadn't been unexpectedly killed in the final episode? All the depression and death was what really made the series.
Preventing outlook express from displaying html emails wouldn't hurt either - you couldn't use html tricks to fake your way past spam filters then.
(yeah, pine user...)
If you're talking about colonising planets, then we have Earth, Mars, the Moon that have decent amounts of sunlight and survivable surface temperatures. If you want to go for outer planets/moons there's Pluto, Charon, Titan, Ganymede, Calisto, Europa, Triton and maybe Io (not sure you could live there, it's very hostile).
So, colonising other planets only gets you a ~5 times the livable surface area of Earth. It's a temporary fix.
Earth's surface is 70% water. We'd have to do something pretty incredible to it to make it unpurifiable. We have no shortage of iron either - check a junk yard. Same for carbon, the planet is chock-full of plants.
As raw materials to use off Earth, I can see the point of using asteroids. But I'd be very surprised indeed to see asteroid/comet material used down here.
As for the nuclear armageddon argument, it's arguable that multiple planets would be a bad thing... there's a huge counter-incentive to letting of nukes on Earth if you have nowhere else to go, and if it means the end of the species. But imagine a situation with two planets, where faction 1 only has a presence on planet A, and faction 2 has people on A and B. Faction 2 "wins" by nuking planet A. Not good.
I still think multiple planets is a reasonable response to this problem, but it needs to be accompanied by disarmament, political systems which prevent madmen from taking power and social systems which prevent them from acting as terrorists, reconcilliation processes between conflicting factions and a general commitment towards peace and rationality. And until we get those things sorted out, we'd perhaps be better off not exporting our conflicts outside Earth.
"Any place that's navigable with two legs is definitely navigable with wheels"
:p
Like a ladder?
Not to disagree with your overall point, but VOIP isn't all that latency sensitive. The speed of sound in air alone means you get 6 milliseconds of round-trip latency per meter seperating people talking.
Games can be very latency sensitive, the difference between two people shooting first can be a few milliseconds, though given monitor refresh rates anything under 15ms is a lottery... so if you did magically control your ISPs routers you wouldn't be unjustified in giving your games the same or higher QoS priority than VOIP
Yeah, and in your life you will spend 25 years asleep, 1 year on the toilet, 2 years driving, etc, etc. I don't own a TV, but I probably watch about 2 hours a week of downloaded programmes or DVDs - I do it whilst I'm doing other stuff, like eating, so I've not even really lost any time.
Why would a hard phone give superior quality to a soft phone? The link you provide doesn't explain. Do you mean for VOIP to POTS calls?
I use skype for PC to PC voice chat and the quality is very much better than a real phone, probably because I have much better speakers than you could ever fit into a handset, and more bandwidth than a phone line.
-If you know what a "Tardis" is.
So the entire population of the UK are geeks? Why can't I find anyone to join my Babylon 5 - Call of Cthulu crossover LARP then?
.
.
(That was a joke. If anyone does offer to join I will be very scared.)
D'oh. I had actually heard they were using VLT for interferometry, but it didn't occur to me that maybe that was what he was talking about...
Thanks for the correction. And congratulations on the paper.
Worst mispelling I've seen on /. yet... You have woken my latent spelling nazi.
It's called Spitzer.
And, while I'm posting, I might as well point out that it's the VLT (Very Large Telescope), not VLTI. Maybe you were thinking of VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry - a technique for high resolution radio images)?
One more thing - ground based telescopes like VLT are better than Hubble at many things, are catching up in resolution, but are inferior when it comes to background. They see things through the atmosphere, which glows faintly and makes it harder to see things like dim distant galaxies. Hubble can see things which are dimmer, which is important for cosmology since dim things are often far away.
"I'm quite impressed with the rendering quality of the XBox vs. its contenders, at least with regards to the pictures in this article."
:)
Towards the end of the article they start talking about Xbox 2... I think that's what Huxley is coming out for and they just don't clearly state it. They say "next generation" several times.
I'd be pretty surprised if a current-gen console could do the lighting in those shots (though Doom 3 is getting ported so maybe I'm wrong).
Anyway, who needs Huxley? Quake 2 supported 128(+?) players. 128 is enough for anyone!
It seems this game has crappy unit AI and compensates by being too slow - if the AI was better players would no doubt get bored.
Anyway, what RTS games are you playing? Most of my favourites (e.g. Total Annihilation) have variable play speeds... adjust it to suit your own preference.
Anyone who gets compared to Shatner has something to worry about.
This is about defending against the secret service. They have a habit of wandering into your office with guns and confisicating your computer, plus the post-it notes stuck to it...
So, why not use a different term? Saying "I am a Christian" or wearing a cross is shorthand for saying "I am irrational, hate Arabs and am glad people go to Hell to be tortured".
Saying "I have certain religious ideas" will invite people who care to ask you to clarify your position. No misunderstanding, no pigeonholing, apart from people who want to be in the Christian pigeonhole with all its negative (to most people) connotations.
Hey! Astronomy has geeky acronyms too! I was looking at an SDSS FITS file of a QSO I thought might be a ULIRG just the other day...
Number 6 was a robot? Man, that Prisoner show was even deeper than I thought.
Mind you, I missed that Ivanova was a lesbian first time round too...
Banks is my favourite author, but I don't think his treatment of the super-intelligent AI characters is that impressive. To me they often come across somewhat like teenagers (they're always plotting and acting fairly immaturely) with minds that operate much faster rather than any smarter or wiser.
I don't think this is Bank's fault... for quite a few reasons actually. Firstly, writing someone significantly smarter than you is close to impossible.
He also postulates in one of his books that all intelligence past a certain level is equivalent with only differences in speed and capacity (a kind of Turing principle for sentience), which doesn't seem unreasonable. But his AIs should be at that level, whereas I often felt that they didn't have the situational mastery that you might expect - they sometimes completely understand a situation before it's even begun, but they can also act on crazy impulses and be singleminded. I would expect they would always be on perfect form.
Finally, he says that AIs are coloured by the people who create them... and the people of the Culture are pretty immature. Perhaps he's saying something about them.
Anyway, I understand that The Algebraist isn't a Culture novel, so perhaps Banks will get his Hugo since he doesn't have to write in the minefield that is super-intelligences.
AFP or APF or FP?
OK, you win. But it's a shame we can't settle this properly in a Heihachi vs Link round of soul calibur...
Uh, "link" is a word. It's often used on websites, as in "here is a link to our review of soul calibur 2 for the gamecube"
Also, the game's called soul calibur.
Mind you, I do think Sony can fuck off. And so can all the other console makers who've ever had an exclusive without a good reason.