You misunderstand the Xbox 360. It isn't designed to be a game platform, it is designed to be a client for Microsoft Media Center that also plays games... sort of a stealth aproach to getting Microsoft into to livingroom so that MS controls your media experience. Likewise, the Cell processor in the PS3 is designed to be best at streaming audio and video, NOT for playing games. Both these boxes are designed for the coming "digital convergence" that will be happening, uh, "real soon now!" Oviously MS and Sony aren't targetting just the game market.
As a side note, I used my PS2 much more often as a DVD player than as a game system.
Yes, it runs Linux! Well, sort of... the I/O processors run Linux; the actual compute nodes run a proprietary low-overhead executive. Linux is a general purpose OS, and interrupting CPUs for system processes and timer ticks has a huge cumulative impact on highly parallel tasks. Ideally, one would want the compute nodes to get a chunk of work and work on nothing else until that chunk of work is finished, i.e. preemptive multitasking is actually a liability for massively parallel machines.
Worse yet, they might start reading The Holy Bible, with it's sordid tales of lust, murder, incest, homosexual rape, etc.... just imagine what kind of ideas they would get out of such obviously subversive literature!
Better batteries aren't enough. If you don't reduce the power consumption of the chips, then you wind up with a small laptop that burns your hands and/or lap every time you use it...
you might go a lot further on that than the empty promises and broken stardom dreams most end up shelving when they get their girlfriend pregnant.
You must be new here.
Jilting at windmills
on
Africa, The MMOG
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· Score: 5, Insightful
1) Africa is a big place with hundreds of different languages and cultures. No single artwork could possible "encompass Africa", it can only try to present a small representative sample.
2) The designer of the game claims both that it will have state of the art graphics and that it will run on low-end computers. Sorry, but you can't do both at the same time! Also, much of the gameplay that works great when you're on the same Ethernet segment as the server is virtually unplayable when you're on a dial-up on a different continent than the server.
In general, you can't be all things to all people; you need to pick your battles and focus on doing just a few things, but doing them well.
Just one question -- how do they keep the mirrors clean?
Just what you'd expect from MIT Media Lab
on
MIT Fashion Show Online
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· Score: 1, Interesting
curated by MIT Media Lab graduate students Maybe these grad students need to stop desparately trying to justify their grant money and get a job in the real world, where, you know, real people have to actually want to buy the stuff you design or you're out of a job...
Engineers (myself included) are notoriously bad at figuring out what the average person would regard as "cool" and want to buy. (With a few exceptions, such as the iPod and RAZR phone.)
Right you are! So you are allowed to form a guild of people that don't care whether someone is GLBT or not, but you are not allowed to form a guild that doesn't like GLBT people, or a guild that is friendly to GBLT people! By that same logic, then, you should be allowed to form an agnostic guild, but not an athiest or christian/jewish/moslem guild... after all, some people might be offended!
Even more hypocritical is the tacit assumption that homosexuals don't have children. I'm in favor of gay marriage because I'm pro-family, and I firmly beleive children with two mommies or two daddies deserve to have all the benefits that children with 1 mommy and 1 daddy have... and yet those same people seeking to make certain types of families unlawful claim they are doing it because they are "pro-family"!
I personally know lesbian couples who have had children through artificial insemination and a gay couple that is fostering 5 HIV positive kids that nobody else wanted -- but they are not allowed to adopt! Why are these children being punished for the sexual preferences of their parents?
Back to the original issue, the game appears to be punishing one group of people because another group of people has a problem with tolerance. Even a small child's conception of fairness would tell you that it would be better to punish the people with the problem. Blizzard is not making an ethical desision, it is making business decision based on the assumption that they have more homophobic customers than queer-friendly ones. The only rational reaction I can think of to this policy is for anybody that cares about human rights to boycott the game, and leave the bigots to call each other dirty names, if that's what they enjoy doing.
Translation: Hell, I'd settle for a game that lets me keep a desktop live on the other monitor so I can download porn at the same time without needing a second PC.
While we're at it, lets have used book resellers pay a kickback to the publisher for every used book sold too! Heck, some of those used books sell for thousands of dollars! What's that, it might be a little difficult to find the publisher of a 200 year old book? Gee, what makes you think the publisher of every game is still in business and still actively selling the game? Fair use rights for games shouldn't be any different from fair use rights for books; the used market makes available to the public parts of our culture that would otherwise be lost because it is no longer economically attractive for the original publishers to continue distributing them. Where else are you going to get an "out of print" book or game?
Game companies upset about selling used games? I've got a better idea: let's donate all our used games to the PUBLIC LIBRARY, then anybody who wants to play the game can check it out and play it for FREE. Game developers might get some sympathy for trying to put used game sellers out of business, but let's see how much support they get when they attack libraries... I can't see any reason why my "fair use" rights to a game should be any different from my fair use rights to a bock... can you?
Nor do they bother to point out that the vast majority of "African Americans" are descended both from Africans and from Europeans (who apparently couldn't resist cute brown-skinned girls), meaning that by rights most blacks should owe themselves reparations!
Obviously use of FISA wasn't feasible when your intention was to scan through ALL traffic, be it voice or internet data, looking for keywords. Even a FISA judge would never authorize that, hence the need for an executive order. I personally think the administration is intentionally trying to misdirect people into thinking that a) only voice calls were tapped and b) only calls between select people inside the US to select people outside the US were monitored. Of course, this was all done in the name of National Security, so any objection or disclosure would be treasonous!
You might want to log the "referrer" tags of all the pages hits you get and notice what percentage of your traffic is actually being driven to your website by google before you start attacking them
You're missing Gilmore's point, which was not that the government had no right to ask for ID, but rather that a free people should not be subject to secret laws. He asked to see the statute that allowed them to check for IDs, and they refused to show it to him. If they can do this, than they can claim ANYTHING they want is authorized by the secret law. For instance, airport security could claim that attractive women are required to give screeners oral sex to prove they are not terrorists, or else they will not be allowed to board the plane. This is very different from a traffic citation, wherein the officer will state the specific statute violated on the ticket, which can then be looked up in any library.
Having a high resale value increases the value of a new car... why doesn't this principle apply to games as well? Won't Sony sell more games if people know they can readily sell them on the used market, thus their cost for the game isn't $50, but rather $50 less what they can resell it for? Do the car manufacturers complain about used car sales cutting into their profits? No, because most people buying a used car probably couldn't afford a new car anyway...
If Sony really wanted to do away the the second-hand market, they should simply offer trade-ins for games - turn in a used game and get a new game at a discount that is greater than the game traders pay for used. Then they could simply destroy all the used games, or resell them themselves at a profit... again, this is exactly what car dealers do.
...we could have a nationwide vote, everyone leaves with a piece of paper with a number printed on it, and can take that number home and verify that their vote was correctly counted on the internet (where public lists of votes are posted) Well, no. While that would be better than the Diebold system, it would still be possible for the person holding your family hostage to demand to see your receipt in order to verify that you voted for the "correct" candidate, thus defeating the purpose of a secret ballot.
Slashdot Mirror
Allowing Trekies to breed can't possibly be any worse for the gene pool than, say, allowing rednecks to breed...
Python or Ruby, yes. Not C++; you'd be much better off with Java than C++.
Agreed. The new Mac Mini is also designed to play nicely as a set top box, although I beleive it requires an add-on converter for the video out.
You misunderstand the Xbox 360. It isn't designed to be a game platform, it is designed to be a client for Microsoft Media Center that also plays games... sort of a stealth aproach to getting Microsoft into to livingroom so that MS controls your media experience. Likewise, the Cell processor in the PS3 is designed to be best at streaming audio and video, NOT for playing games. Both these boxes are designed for the coming "digital convergence" that will be happening, uh, "real soon now!" Oviously MS and Sony aren't targetting just the game market. As a side note, I used my PS2 much more often as a DVD player than as a game system.
Yes, it runs Linux! Well, sort of... the I/O processors run Linux; the actual compute nodes run a proprietary low-overhead executive. Linux is a general purpose OS, and interrupting CPUs for system processes and timer ticks has a huge cumulative impact on highly parallel tasks. Ideally, one would want the compute nodes to get a chunk of work and work on nothing else until that chunk of work is finished, i.e. preemptive multitasking is actually a liability for massively parallel machines.
Worse yet, they might start reading The Holy Bible, with it's sordid tales of lust, murder, incest, homosexual rape, etc.... just imagine what kind of ideas they would get out of such obviously subversive literature!
You won't be able to see the output in bright sunlight. Yeah, as long as you're in a dark room, this projector should be great.
Better batteries aren't enough. If you don't reduce the power consumption of the chips, then you wind up with a small laptop that burns your hands and/or lap every time you use it...
You must be new here.
2) The designer of the game claims both that it will have state of the art graphics and that it will run on low-end computers. Sorry, but you can't do both at the same time! Also, much of the gameplay that works great when you're on the same Ethernet segment as the server is virtually unplayable when you're on a dial-up on a different continent than the server.
In general, you can't be all things to all people; you need to pick your battles and focus on doing just a few things, but doing them well.
Just one question -- how do they keep the mirrors clean?
Engineers (myself included) are notoriously bad at figuring out what the average person would regard as "cool" and want to buy. (With a few exceptions, such as the iPod and RAZR phone.)
Right you are! So you are allowed to form a guild of people that don't care whether someone is GLBT or not, but you are not allowed to form a guild that doesn't like GLBT people, or a guild that is friendly to GBLT people! By that same logic, then, you should be allowed to form an agnostic guild, but not an athiest or christian/jewish/moslem guild... after all, some people might be offended!
I personally know lesbian couples who have had children through artificial insemination and a gay couple that is fostering 5 HIV positive kids that nobody else wanted -- but they are not allowed to adopt! Why are these children being punished for the sexual preferences of their parents?
Back to the original issue, the game appears to be punishing one group of people because another group of people has a problem with tolerance. Even a small child's conception of fairness would tell you that it would be better to punish the people with the problem. Blizzard is not making an ethical desision, it is making business decision based on the assumption that they have more homophobic customers than queer-friendly ones. The only rational reaction I can think of to this policy is for anybody that cares about human rights to boycott the game, and leave the bigots to call each other dirty names, if that's what they enjoy doing.
What's interesting is that this satellite was built by the cadets at the USAF Academy. That must be where the term "space cadet" comes from...
Translation: Hell, I'd settle for a game that lets me keep a desktop live on the other monitor so I can download porn at the same time without needing a second PC.
"I keep right-clicking on her, but no menu ever pops up!"
While we're at it, lets have used book resellers pay a kickback to the publisher for every used book sold too! Heck, some of those used books sell for thousands of dollars! What's that, it might be a little difficult to find the publisher of a 200 year old book? Gee, what makes you think the publisher of every game is still in business and still actively selling the game? Fair use rights for games shouldn't be any different from fair use rights for books; the used market makes available to the public parts of our culture that would otherwise be lost because it is no longer economically attractive for the original publishers to continue distributing them. Where else are you going to get an "out of print" book or game?
Game companies upset about selling used games? I've got a better idea: let's donate all our used games to the PUBLIC LIBRARY, then anybody who wants to play the game can check it out and play it for FREE. Game developers might get some sympathy for trying to put used game sellers out of business, but let's see how much support they get when they attack libraries... I can't see any reason why my "fair use" rights to a game should be any different from my fair use rights to a bock... can you?
Nor do they bother to point out that the vast majority of "African Americans" are descended both from Africans and from Europeans (who apparently couldn't resist cute brown-skinned girls), meaning that by rights most blacks should owe themselves reparations!
Obviously use of FISA wasn't feasible when your intention was to scan through ALL traffic, be it voice or internet data, looking for keywords. Even a FISA judge would never authorize that, hence the need for an executive order. I personally think the administration is intentionally trying to misdirect people into thinking that a) only voice calls were tapped and b) only calls between select people inside the US to select people outside the US were monitored. Of course, this was all done in the name of National Security, so any objection or disclosure would be treasonous!
You might want to log the "referrer" tags of all the pages hits you get and notice what percentage of your traffic is actually being driven to your website by google before you start attacking them
You're missing Gilmore's point, which was not that the government had no right to ask for ID, but rather that a free people should not be subject to secret laws. He asked to see the statute that allowed them to check for IDs, and they refused to show it to him. If they can do this, than they can claim ANYTHING they want is authorized by the secret law. For instance, airport security could claim that attractive women are required to give screeners oral sex to prove they are not terrorists, or else they will not be allowed to board the plane. This is very different from a traffic citation, wherein the officer will state the specific statute violated on the ticket, which can then be looked up in any library.
If Sony really wanted to do away the the second-hand market, they should simply offer trade-ins for games - turn in a used game and get a new game at a discount that is greater than the game traders pay for used. Then they could simply destroy all the used games, or resell them themselves at a profit... again, this is exactly what car dealers do.
...we could have a nationwide vote, everyone leaves with a piece of paper with a number printed on it, and can take that number home and verify that their vote was correctly counted on the internet (where public lists of votes are posted) Well, no. While that would be better than the Diebold system, it would still be possible for the person holding your family hostage to demand to see your receipt in order to verify that you voted for the "correct" candidate, thus defeating the purpose of a secret ballot.