Halo is not a revolutionary game by any stretch of the imagination.
True. Halo isn't a bad game per se, but it isn't very imaginative compared to the FPS coming out these days. When it came out a few years ago, it was quite interesting to a game that used a vehicle system not seen since Tribes.
But these days, we've got games out the wazoo with vehicles and lots of fire power.
However, games like Crysis make me actually want to go out and buy a new computer just to play it while Halo 3 just looks like it is just an upgrade to the prior games.
Quad core is all well and good, but are there really that many apps as of yet that can take advantage of it?
Maya 3D
Or any other 3d rendering software where every CPU cycle is used to the last drop.
But other than that I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but multi-cores is very important to these types of apps. It is the different between 12 and 6 hours waiting for the project to render then people will go with the 6 hours.
I'm sure the King of France said the same thing to the angry crowd outside his palace gates.
Of course no one owes anyone anything... But if you don't bother to take care of the people, they tend to "take care" of you. We could have quite easily became another Nazi or Communist country had FDR not instituted his New Deal reforms during the great depression. Free market capitalism works... up until a point.
So they are trying to take down copyrighted content? Doesn't that mean that they can no longer claim protection from DMCA safe-harbor provisions?
IANAL either, but from my understanding you are still protected under safe harbor if you proactively remove copyrighted content or questionable content. As in... Youtube is still protected by safe harbor if they remove a video which was too obscene or violated its ToS without going through DMCA hoops. You don't have to have a common carrier status to be protected from safe harbor I believe.
The sun doesn't go around us, and to think that a species that is outweighed by certain insect species could change the global climate of a planet is just silly.
Give me 100 Nuclear bombs at least 10 megatons each and an active volcano and I can change the global climate pretty quick.
When insects have started their own Manhattan project get back to us.
But seriously, the volcanic explosions at Krakatao appeared to have caused a mini-ice age throughout the world. Mankind could simply reverse global warming but putting a lot of dust and debris into the atmosphere. Using nuclear weapons to do so could theoretically work, but I don't think it would be a great idea due to radiation issues. Perhaps we could use conventional explosives?
But don't ever say mankind doesn't have the power to change the earth's climate because we can and do.
I'm just saying that medieval cathedrals were not well known for their free thinking as apposed to European universities or Muslim scholars of the same time period.
Hence... We have a correlation/causation issue here.
They might all seem like VERY good ideas right now, but your rich, comfortable 60-year old self will thank you if you stick it out right now as you go through this "trapped in a life you hate" phase and keep cranking away.
Actually, my father (who has been retired for a while) worked 30 straight years since his 20's till he retired. He's currently well off and owns 3 houses, but he's always told me that if he had to do it over again he would have gotten a career change or stopped working when he was younger and traveled the world a bit before having a family. He really hated his government job, but he did it for the money.
You could imagine the shock when the doctors told him that they thought he had prostrate cancer only 6 months after retiring. All that hard work for nothing...
Luckily he didn't have cancer but he still tells me "Sometimes the money isn't worth it. You could die any day of the week. Your young. Get a job you like before you get too old!"
But still... You don't want to overspend yourself if you do decide to get a career change.
Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access.
Actually, many of us could not work without an internet connection anyways so it is a moot point for those tied to Blackberries and live connections. Remember how many people freaked out when the Blackberry servers went down?
I've talk to many whose company now includes a Sprint or Verizon card because they need always on connections no matter where they are with the current apps.
on Aug. 16, 1960. Joe Kittinger, during his ascent to 102,800 ft (19.5 miles) in an open gondola, lost pressurization of his right hand. He decided to continue the mission, and the hand became painful and useless as you would expect. However, once back to lower altitudes following his record-breaking parachute jump, the hand returned to normal.
When you so casually throw out "pure skill" what you really mean is pure twitch skill and reflex. Memorization is skill; planning out your strategy based on what you know will happen is also skill.
Again, I'll harp about my favorite genre with FPS games with the hard core realism in which skill does count.
Take Red Orchestra for example. I keep harping on it because it is realistically painful. Historical imbalances have been added to the game to make it close to the real thing as possible.
You have to deal with gun recoil, fatigue, bullet drop, manually reload with your bolt weapons, and also tanks with realistic amror.
You have to know that a Kar98K rifle has a particle range and you have to know how to lead the target. Of course an German rifleman's skill with being a twitch shooter is no good when he has to reload facing a charge by a Soviet with a submachine gun.
And then you have tanks of various power and types which you have to remember how to play. (Panther tank's weak to the side... Tiger's are slow to turn their turrets and the Stalin tanks take way too long to reload... Most of tank combat involves guessing the range and knowing if your enemy can kill you first because he can reload faster which is why if you are a Stalin tank that you should move as soon as you should because the enemy can usually get 2 shots off before you reload the next time if you happened to miss)
Now if they had random maps in RO it would require the player to study objective maps a bit better since no one would know where they were, but due to the maps complexity in RO I seriously doubt they would have pull this off if they tried a new engine.
Specific weapon and other item spawns are important for a few reasons. First, when you spawn and need a weapon, it's good to know where you can get one. It's no fun running around a map looking for a weapon while those who already have weapons try to snipe you.
Technically, if the map was random then everyone would be looking for a weapon and not just you.
That is the point of it being random. When I play online games I usually play games that don't have health packs and weapon pickups as far as realism (I prefer Red Orchestra for a WWII sim) and I will have to admit that I can't play well until I know a map.
But in reality, most of the time when people are fighting in a real war they have none of this benefit of having to fight in a place familiar to either side most of the time. The only way to simulate this in a game like Team Fortress would be random maps.
I hate to say this, but sometimes you want to avoid hosting locations in places that are earthquake, hurricane, or just natural disaster prone if it is that critical.
Then again even places like NYC are victims to total power grid failure once in a blue moon so you do want some type of clustering in place like the prior people mentioned. I can't tell how many times in IT I've heard someone say, "Some guy in Georgia just dug up a major fiber cable with his backhoe!"
There are also some features of NAT that I would like to keep even when using IPv6, the main one being the ability to hide the topology of my networks from the outside world.
Security from obscurity won't help you from an attack form the inside. If someone got a Trojan on a desktop behind the NAT or was the person simply sitting at a machine on your LAN, then NAT as a security method has been simply bypassed.
The same thing applies to an IPv6 network since by its nature IPv6 also cannot defeat an inside attack, but otherwise you can have your firewall refuse to let any communications to those boxes to the outside world and hide your topology that way.
Just because your boxes have addresses that could theoretically called up by someone from the outside won't make a difference if all traffic is denied by default unless it comes from certain addresses.
I want to also mention it maybe a bit more difficult for a man on the inside to port scan the LAN if you are using IPv6 due to the range of possible addresses.
I know you are trying to be humorous, but if Live is anything like Outlook Web Access 2003, you will be missing a good deal of features because you aren't running it in IE (like the right click options). This would apply to Fire Fox users on Windows as well.
The only problem with your long answer is that it's impossible to fully deal with clumsy users without restricting them severely.
Its not as much as restricting them but actually minimizing damage control.
Take for example Excel 2003 (not really OS but still related in the menu structure)
If you open a CSV file and add formulas and formatting, and then save it will warn you that if you save as a CSV it won't of course save the the formatting and formulas and asks if you are sure you want to save the file as CSV format.
Of course most users will read this as "Do you really want to save the file" and hit yes when they really needed to go to file save as and choose.xls as the file format.
Which is why you really need to word your prompts so that it isn't just a Yes or No button (OS X apps usually strive to do this... except for the MS ones for some reason) and that the prompt actually could be understood correctly when only skimming the words.
Of course someone is always going to do the wrong thing, but you have to make it so a person would naturally choose the option that will hurt them less by default.
It helps that Windows is perceived as more vulnerable (though it can be argued it isn't - not that I hold this position myself), but surely some of that is due to the combination of more attacks against it (more home users and businesses) and a less-than-instant response to security holes.
I don't know about you, but if I was a hacker... Having "the first guy to break OS X/Linux security" with a massive security hole on a massive scale would seem rather appealing on my resume. Just think of the bragging rights alone which you could beat over the head of all the naysayers.
So why hasn't there been any persons up to the task?
Digg is venture capital funded, its management would be replaced by the end of the day if they seriously intended to risk any amount of equity in the company over some symbolic statement like that.
Unfortunately for this thinking, Digg requires it users to actually function.
Without its users actually submitted and others sorting through those and actually selecting the articles worth reading then the process would not work. Basically Digg uses free labor and good will of its user base to actually function... Wheras a site like Slashdot could do away with the user submitted stories and still function because it has a true editorial staff.
If the Digg users revolted then the site would cease to function and revenue would cease to come in. Which is why I'm sure the VCs don't want that to happen either.
The long hours, sweat, and money I have put into creating art and paying others to create art... gone. The hours, sweat, and money thousands like me put into it... gone. The only reason you have as much content to copy, particularly good content to copy, is because copyright encouraged others to create it.
And what did all those artists do for 10,000 years before copyright laws?
Certainly Leonardo da Vinci would refuse to paint the Mona Lisa because he could not be assured income because he is afraid someone is going to copy it.
I would argue that art and culture itself has been ruined because people now often do art only to make a living off it and commercialize it to the lowest common dominator. Given that most great artists were poor, did not have children, or relied on patrons just shows that copyright laws were not needed to create great works of art throughout history.
Besides we should be focusing on science and medicine and taking care of serious problems such as cancer, aging, and mortality.
the only reason this drug even exists is becuase money was able to be spent on R&D to create or discover the compound.
To play Devil's advocate, the only thing violated here is the patent which is of course itself government mandated. If you took a pure Laissez-faire (Libertarian) outlook on innovation and economics in which innovation comes from pure competition.... And if there were not patents to begin with (less government interference) there would be more competition on the market and no need for Brazil to force a patent violation because there would be a competitor which could deliver a similar product for less price because of market forces.
The problem here is not that Brazil violated, but rather we are using government to interfere with economics in the first place by granting patents.
Of course you could say "Who would want to R&D something they aren't guaranteed and income if someone steals their idea?"
I would have a hunch someone would come along and still produce such a product due to market forces. The same way that people would still make movies even if there were no copies rights... Because there is still money to be made.
Slashdot Mirror
Halo is not a revolutionary game by any stretch of the imagination.
True. Halo isn't a bad game per se, but it isn't very imaginative compared to the FPS coming out these days. When it came out a few years ago, it was quite interesting to a game that used a vehicle system not seen since Tribes.
But these days, we've got games out the wazoo with vehicles and lots of fire power.
However, games like Crysis make me actually want to go out and buy a new computer just to play it while Halo 3 just looks like it is just an upgrade to the prior games.
Quad core is all well and good, but are there really that many apps as of yet that can take advantage of it?
Maya 3D
Or any other 3d rendering software where every CPU cycle is used to the last drop.
But other than that I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but multi-cores is very important to these types of apps. It is the different between 12 and 6 hours waiting for the project to render then people will go with the 6 hours.
I'm sure the King of France said the same thing to the angry crowd outside his palace gates.
Of course no one owes anyone anything... But if you don't bother to take care of the people, they tend to "take care" of you. We could have quite easily became another Nazi or Communist country had FDR not instituted his New Deal reforms during the great depression. Free market capitalism works... up until a point.
So they are trying to take down copyrighted content? Doesn't that mean that they can no longer claim protection from DMCA safe-harbor provisions?
IANAL either, but from my understanding you are still protected under safe harbor if you proactively remove copyrighted content or questionable content. As in... Youtube is still protected by safe harbor if they remove a video which was too obscene or violated its ToS without going through DMCA hoops. You don't have to have a common carrier status to be protected from safe harbor I believe.
Once every car contains only one hermetically sealed individual we should be 100% safe.
Wouldn't it make more sense to invest in technologies that make bad driving a moot point.
The sun doesn't go around us, and to think that a species that is outweighed by certain insect species could change the global climate of a planet is just silly.
Give me 100 Nuclear bombs at least 10 megatons each and an active volcano and I can change the global climate pretty quick.
When insects have started their own Manhattan project get back to us.
But seriously, the volcanic explosions at Krakatao appeared to have caused a mini-ice age throughout the world. Mankind could simply reverse global warming but putting a lot of dust and debris into the atmosphere. Using nuclear weapons to do so could theoretically work, but I don't think it would be a great idea due to radiation issues. Perhaps we could use conventional explosives?
But don't ever say mankind doesn't have the power to change the earth's climate because we can and do.
No.
I'm just saying that medieval cathedrals were not well known for their free thinking as apposed to European universities or Muslim scholars of the same time period.
Hence... We have a correlation/causation issue here.
They might all seem like VERY good ideas right now, but your rich, comfortable 60-year old self will thank you if you stick it out right now as you go through this "trapped in a life you hate" phase and keep cranking away.
Actually, my father (who has been retired for a while) worked 30 straight years since his 20's till he retired. He's currently well off and owns 3 houses, but he's always told me that if he had to do it over again he would have gotten a career change or stopped working when he was younger and traveled the world a bit before having a family. He really hated his government job, but he did it for the money.
You could imagine the shock when the doctors told him that they thought he had prostrate cancer only 6 months after retiring. All that hard work for nothing...
Luckily he didn't have cancer but he still tells me "Sometimes the money isn't worth it. You could die any day of the week. Your young. Get a job you like before you get too old!"
But still... You don't want to overspend yourself if you do decide to get a career change.
If this was the case, wouldn't more free thinking going on in the giant cathedrals of the time?
Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access.
Actually, many of us could not work without an internet connection anyways so it is a moot point for those tied to Blackberries and live connections. Remember how many people freaked out when the Blackberry servers went down?
I've talk to many whose company now includes a Sprint or Verizon card because they need always on connections no matter where they are with the current apps.
Isn't that what they call "a stranger"?
Dude, have you seen any real women up close? The last thing you want is a girlfriend.
When you so casually throw out "pure skill" what you really mean is pure twitch skill and reflex. Memorization is skill; planning out your strategy based on what you know will happen is also skill.
Again, I'll harp about my favorite genre with FPS games with the hard core realism in which skill does count.
Take Red Orchestra for example. I keep harping on it because it is realistically painful. Historical imbalances have been added to the game to make it close to the real thing as possible.
You have to deal with gun recoil, fatigue, bullet drop, manually reload with your bolt weapons, and also tanks with realistic amror.
You have to know that a Kar98K rifle has a particle range and you have to know how to lead the target. Of course an German rifleman's skill with being a twitch shooter is no good when he has to reload facing a charge by a Soviet with a submachine gun.
And then you have tanks of various power and types which you have to remember how to play. (Panther tank's weak to the side... Tiger's are slow to turn their turrets and the Stalin tanks take way too long to reload... Most of tank combat involves guessing the range and knowing if your enemy can kill you first because he can reload faster which is why if you are a Stalin tank that you should move as soon as you should because the enemy can usually get 2 shots off before you reload the next time if you happened to miss)
Now if they had random maps in RO it would require the player to study objective maps a bit better since no one would know where they were, but due to the maps complexity in RO I seriously doubt they would have pull this off if they tried a new engine.
Specific weapon and other item spawns are important for a few reasons. First, when you spawn and need a weapon, it's good to know where you can get one. It's no fun running around a map looking for a weapon while those who already have weapons try to snipe you.
Technically, if the map was random then everyone would be looking for a weapon and not just you.
That is the point of it being random. When I play online games I usually play games that don't have health packs and weapon pickups as far as realism (I prefer Red Orchestra for a WWII sim) and I will have to admit that I can't play well until I know a map.
But in reality, most of the time when people are fighting in a real war they have none of this benefit of having to fight in a place familiar to either side most of the time. The only way to simulate this in a game like Team Fortress would be random maps.
I hate to say this, but sometimes you want to avoid hosting locations in places that are earthquake, hurricane, or just natural disaster prone if it is that critical.
Then again even places like NYC are victims to total power grid failure once in a blue moon so you do want some type of clustering in place like the prior people mentioned. I can't tell how many times in IT I've heard someone say, "Some guy in Georgia just dug up a major fiber cable with his backhoe!"
There are also some features of NAT that I would like to keep even when using IPv6, the main one being the ability to hide the topology of my networks from the outside world.
Security from obscurity won't help you from an attack form the inside. If someone got a Trojan on a desktop behind the NAT or was the person simply sitting at a machine on your LAN, then NAT as a security method has been simply bypassed.
The same thing applies to an IPv6 network since by its nature IPv6 also cannot defeat an inside attack, but otherwise you can have your firewall refuse to let any communications to those boxes to the outside world and hide your topology that way.
Just because your boxes have addresses that could theoretically called up by someone from the outside won't make a difference if all traffic is denied by default unless it comes from certain addresses.
I want to also mention it maybe a bit more difficult for a man on the inside to port scan the LAN if you are using IPv6 due to the range of possible addresses.
I know you are trying to be humorous, but if Live is anything like Outlook Web Access 2003, you will be missing a good deal of features because you aren't running it in IE (like the right click options). This would apply to Fire Fox users on Windows as well.
Resident Evil wasn't that bad. It pretty much kept very similar to the actual plot line in the video game (minus the STARS characters).
Whereas Super Mario and Doom did not resemble anything at all from the video game.
The only problem with your long answer is that it's impossible to fully deal with clumsy users without restricting them severely.
.xls as the file format.
Its not as much as restricting them but actually minimizing damage control.
Take for example Excel 2003 (not really OS but still related in the menu structure)
If you open a CSV file and add formulas and formatting, and then save it will warn you that if you save as a CSV it won't of course save the the formatting and formulas and asks if you are sure you want to save the file as CSV format.
Of course most users will read this as "Do you really want to save the file" and hit yes when they really needed to go to file save as and choose
Which is why you really need to word your prompts so that it isn't just a Yes or No button (OS X apps usually strive to do this... except for the MS ones for some reason) and that the prompt actually could be understood correctly when only skimming the words.
Of course someone is always going to do the wrong thing, but you have to make it so a person would naturally choose the option that will hurt them less by default.
It helps that Windows is perceived as more vulnerable (though it can be argued it isn't - not that I hold this position myself), but surely some of that is due to the combination of more attacks against it (more home users and businesses) and a less-than-instant response to security holes.
I don't know about you, but if I was a hacker... Having "the first guy to break OS X/Linux security" with a massive security hole on a massive scale would seem rather appealing on my resume. Just think of the bragging rights alone which you could beat over the head of all the naysayers.
So why hasn't there been any persons up to the task?
No patent protection => no public disclosure; the industry would rely on trade secrets.
I would have to argue that this is happening as it is and that more often than not... Other companies invent the same exact thing only to get sued.
Digg is venture capital funded, its management would be replaced by the end of the day if they seriously intended to risk any amount of equity in the company over some symbolic statement like that.
Unfortunately for this thinking, Digg requires it users to actually function.
Without its users actually submitted and others sorting through those and actually selecting the articles worth reading then the process would not work. Basically Digg uses free labor and good will of its user base to actually function... Wheras a site like Slashdot could do away with the user submitted stories and still function because it has a true editorial staff.
If the Digg users revolted then the site would cease to function and revenue would cease to come in. Which is why I'm sure the VCs don't want that to happen either.
The long hours, sweat, and money I have put into creating art and paying others to create art... gone. The hours, sweat, and money thousands like me put into it... gone. The only reason you have as much content to copy, particularly good content to copy, is because copyright encouraged others to create it.
And what did all those artists do for 10,000 years before copyright laws?
Certainly Leonardo da Vinci would refuse to paint the Mona Lisa because he could not be assured income because he is afraid someone is going to copy it.
I would argue that art and culture itself has been ruined because people now often do art only to make a living off it and commercialize it to the lowest common dominator. Given that most great artists were poor, did not have children, or relied on patrons just shows that copyright laws were not needed to create great works of art throughout history.
Besides we should be focusing on science and medicine and taking care of serious problems such as cancer, aging, and mortality.
the only reason this drug even exists is becuase money was able to be spent on R&D to create or discover the compound.
To play Devil's advocate, the only thing violated here is the patent which is of course itself government mandated. If you took a pure Laissez-faire (Libertarian) outlook on innovation and economics in which innovation comes from pure competition.... And if there were not patents to begin with (less government interference) there would be more competition on the market and no need for Brazil to force a patent violation because there would be a competitor which could deliver a similar product for less price because of market forces.
The problem here is not that Brazil violated, but rather we are using government to interfere with economics in the first place by granting patents.
Of course you could say "Who would want to R&D something they aren't guaranteed and income if someone steals their idea?"
I would have a hunch someone would come along and still produce such a product due to market forces. The same way that people would still make movies even if there were no copies rights... Because there is still money to be made.
Wow, how delightfully shallow! If we found out that Newton murdered someone we should all drop newtonian physics!
Well... New did have a whole bunch of people drawn and quartered.