Not really an issue with this article since people have already posted the full text, but newspaper sites often let you in if you have a Google Referer: header. Get one by copying the link, pasting it into a Google search box thingy, and then the 'If the URL is valid...' link.
They're changing their name to "Christian Scientific American.
There's already the Christian Science Monitor, but it appears to take a more balanced, secular approach to journalism. How dare it!:-)
As for Scientific American, it'll probably be July or August before I get round to reading this April edition as a UK subscriber. Okay, maybe not quite that long, but the issues do seem to take the slow boat across the Atlantic...
Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink(TM) technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex. Plus, it's low in carbs!
Yes, but what if all I want is a nice cup of tea?
Sounds too much like the Nutrimatic from Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, to be honest...
A. This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.
Is this why they included a bunch of Apple stickers with my iBook?
I now have an Apple-branded lavatory, amongst other things (the aforementioned loo also claims to be 'designed for Windows 98', but that's another story). So will I legally be allowed to install Mac OS X on it? Okay, it may be stretching the definition of 'computer' a little, but it's no worse in terms of Turing-completeness than your average offering from Dell...;-)
I've bought well over a dozen LCD montitors from Apple, Dell, and Philips in recent months and I have not seen a single dead pixel on any of them.
I've got an iBook G4. It's got several dead pixels. Except they're almost impossible to spot - there's an always-off red pixel a little below the middle-right of the menu bar, for instance, which I've just spent the last minute finding again. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of apparently-dead-pixel-free screens were like this.
Dust on the screen is a bigger problem for me.
I think you'd need to assess dead pixels on a case-by-case basis, though - my digital camera's got an always-on red pixel in the middle of its screen and it's terribly obvious and highly distracting. The pictures it takes are fine, of course, but if the sole purpose of the device was to show pictures (or video or games) on its screen, then I'd be pretty annoyed, and with good reason.
Sony seems to have the right idea - people complaining about a tiny dark or off-colour speck should certainly be discouraged, but there remains an avenue for those with the real horror stories to tell...
You don't get the full 50 hp of a gasoline motor from 0 rpm. Most cars these days get their peak HP at around 4500 rpms, and the 50hp engine would start out at around 10 hp from 0 mph.
And this, gentlemen, is why we use steam engines. Maximum torque at stationary!
(And yes, I do have my very own steam-powered traction engine, but admittedly it's only about 30cm long. Call me the miniaturised Fred Dibnah...)
Stay the hell away from the "gaming industry" as a career. Find an interesting job in programming something else, and write games as a hobby.
I muck about designing single-player maps for my favourite games. Occasionally, I even get round to releasing one. People seem to like what I do, even if the plots are wilfully obtuse and cryptic.
I probably could get a job in the gaming industry, but I really can't be bothered. I'd rather be able to completely change the ending of one of my maps at a whim than have to follow some long, drawn-out design spec for a game I might not particularly enjoy. Working on Half-Life n could be great, working on the more likely Barbie's Fashion Designer n+1 wouldn't be.
So, I'm messing about pushing quirky game engines around, building scenes more complex than any in the original games, concentrating and tweaking the gameplay I enjoy. I don't bother with voice acting (in the style of Marathon, plain text can beat all but the very best voices), new textures are those I mangle together with the Gimp and my digital camera.
I build maps I enjoy playing. If anyone else likes them too, then that's their problem. Why do I do this?
'Cause it's fun. Isn't that what games are about?:-)
For the first, everybody knows what all their fonts look like already. For the second, it slows the program down something awful to have to load and cache a few hundred fonts every time the program starts.
Papyrus 3 on my 8MHz Atari ST did this show-fonts-in-their-own-faces thing for the font selector dialogue box. With Truetype fonts. And with no performance issues at startup either - it had an option to save the current font cache to file.
Who knows, maybe the latest Photoshop can do this too...;-)
Just to clarify - royalty-free means that you won't get charged however many times or for whatever you use it for, but it may well mean you have to pay some one-off fee for a particular image.
I've no idea what the Photoshop deal is, or whether the images are truly 'free' or not, but I read the description and immediately saw it as another money-making scheme...:-/
Has it occurred to you that they may have different teams working on their different projects?
Personally, I'd much rather have new single-player content than, well, anything else - so I'm really looking forward to whatever their single-player mapping team produces!
Yup. Half-Life 2's lighting system is startlingly advanced in places, but a lot of its more interesting effects are a bit... Subtle.
I'm admittedly not too keen on the (rather crude) dynamic shadows from model entities - if the shadows took account of nearby bright lights then things wouldn't be so bad - but I really like a lot of the other aspects, such as those directional lightmaps and lighting on models which is gloriously subtle and realistic.
I'm intrigued as to what Valve will do with HDR. I got Far Cry running with HDR the other day, and it looked genuinely horrible. Over-saturated colours, too much bloom in the wrong places and none of the right ones, and everything looking terribly unrealistic. With a bit of luck, Valve might do something a bit more understated and photographically realistic - they've managed it with shaders and normal-mapping, which people seem to assume aren't in Half-Life 2 because they're used so well...
First announced in early February, yes, but I think this'll be the first we see of it beyond some rough concept sketches.
I'm intrigued as to what the Source engine will be able to do when given room to breathe - Half-Life 2's maps were highly optimised, with just about every unnecessary surface made invisible or clipped-off to make the physics simpler. The seemingly huge, far-reaching environments usually weren't, but instead were clever simulations thereof. Okay, so it did mean it could run pretty well on my old PC, but I've got a new one now...;-)
Certainly, on a practical note, the awful harm a lot of parents inflict on their children by their incompetence as parents is a far more pressing issue. How can we be worried about gender when so many parents are so awful at parenting?
Because sex-selection of embryos is notoriously unreliable, and thus a significant number of children born thanks to this kind of procedure will be of the 'wrong' sex.
Psychiatric implications on both child and parents are left as an exercise for the reader.
Another vote for the Tandy Model-100 family. A highly functional portable computer that ran forever on batteries. My teacher had it when I was a kid in school and got to use it. The thing was perfect.
I acquired the NEC equivalent of one of those some years ago - it's one of the reasons my programming to this day is a bit... efficient. At least I don't remove all whitespace for speed of execution any more!
Bastard evil thing went and died recently, and now just displays flickering, corrupted rubbish on the screen. Bah...
I also had one of these, but it wouldn't die. Chucked it out recently, after getting GEM and Windows 1.0 to run on it. I'm so cruel...;-)
Typical British ISPs provide a USB modem for ADSL or an Ethernet/USB Cable modem, and a driver/configurator disk. No consumer ISP provides a NAT router by default (its a costly option, and usually a crappy rebranded far-eastern product that crashes all the time).
I got a fairly decent NAT router with my ADSL account with a small UK ISP. They also block a variety of Windows-worm-attracting ports by default - you have to ask to get them unblocked, and then they'll run a quick port-scan on your system to make sure you're not a sitting duck.
I've not actually needed any ports unblocking, and I'd class myself as a fairly advanced user. So why can't the big-name ISPs do this as well? Okay, it's not going to stop browser malware, email trojans and the like, but it'll definitely help against the nastier, faster-spreading worms...
What I want from Top Gear, and get, is an hours worth of quality Sunday evening entertainment.
I'm a non-motorist. I've never owned a car and I have no intention of getting one unless I absolutely have to (I do have a driving licence). I'm a big user of public transport (often of the continental-trains-going-at-hundreds-of-kilometres -per-hour variety). I can't stand Jeremy Clarkson. He'd probably hate me.
But still, I think Top Gear is great. A bunch of Neanderthals messing about with cars in really funny ways on a Sunday evening? Excellent!
I don't get Fifth Gear on TV around here. I used to get Top Gear though. Top Gear kicked ass, but then it turned crappy. Apparently the crew who made the Kick Ass-version of Top Gear went on and made Fifth Gear.
What, the old Top Gear where they'd do highly informative, terribly boring month-long road-tests of sub-one-litre hatchbacks suitable for decomposing pensioners and the like?
Useful, maybe, but nothing beats the majesty of the new Top Gear crew attempting to destroy a Toyota Hilux by setting fire to it, drowning it in the sea and finally explosively demolishing a block of flats beneath it.
Oh, and video 'downloads' available from that page too, as they have been for a while. No sign of their wilful, spectacular destruction of caravans, though...;-)
If it really is for normal credit card transactions, what happens when someone from the USA, for example (because our credit cards do not require a PIN) comes to make a purchase?
You sign instead.
This also applies to people (like me) who simply can't remember the PIN - and cashiers also seem to have forgotten that (a) the person actually has to sign the receipt (I've had to prompt someone to hand it over) and (b) they have to check the signature against the card as well.
In terms of security, it's a bit lacking. The PIN system itself might be completely secure (heh), but the signature system is as bad as it's ever been - does anyone know when (or even if) it's going to be phased out?
You can do something similar to generate top-down, non-perspective views of more modern games like Half-Life, which has a whole bunch of development features for making map 'overviews'.
Unfortunately, despite the original Half-Life's apparently seamless world, there are plenty of overlaps between different maps, so it's highly unlikely anyone could build a sensible map of Black Mesa that way.
Half-Life 2 might be more promising, and I believe it's got the same overview commands - I think I need to experiment to find out if City 17 really could be 'mapped' in this manner, even if it were to prove rather difficult to navigate through the highly-3D building mazes present with the 2D map produced...
The idea of sending an AI for aliens to interrogate reminded me of something, and after a bit of Googling I found what I was looking for.
In the Fountains of Paradise, a certain Mr. Arthur Clarke proposes an alien civilisation communicating with others by means of the 'Starglider' probe - basically a small, easily-accelerated device with a highly advanced AI on board. Naturally, our own Solar System is the temporary host for of one of these, and as an aside, it disproves the entirety of our religious works in the matter of a few minutes after some foolish groups decide to transmit them to it...
Slashdot Mirror
Now I KNOW we are back to regular Slashdot. Attempts to run Linux on everything solid. :)
Actually, I recently managed to install Linux on a cubic metre of fresh air. I'd take photos, but it admittedly looks a bit unimpressive...
Not really an issue with this article since people have already posted the full text, but newspaper sites often let you in if you have a Google Referer: header. Get one by copying the link, pasting it into a Google search box thingy, and then the 'If the URL is valid...' link.
Like this...
They're changing their name to "Christian Scientific American.
:-)
There's already the Christian Science Monitor, but it appears to take a more balanced, secular approach to journalism. How dare it!
As for Scientific American, it'll probably be July or August before I get round to reading this April edition as a UK subscriber. Okay, maybe not quite that long, but the issues do seem to take the slow boat across the Atlantic...
Yes, but what if all I want is a nice cup of tea?
Sounds too much like the Nutrimatic from Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, to be honest...
I'm wondering if it's going to become like Have I Got News For You, with a new guest Doctor for each series.
(I, for one, welcome our new time-travelling Boris Johnson overlords!)
Is this why they included a bunch of Apple stickers with my iBook?
I now have an Apple-branded lavatory, amongst other things (the aforementioned loo also claims to be 'designed for Windows 98', but that's another story). So will I legally be allowed to install Mac OS X on it? Okay, it may be stretching the definition of 'computer' a little, but it's no worse in terms of Turing-completeness than your average offering from Dell...
I've bought well over a dozen LCD montitors from Apple, Dell, and Philips in recent months and I have not seen a single dead pixel on any of them.
I've got an iBook G4. It's got several dead pixels. Except they're almost impossible to spot - there's an always-off red pixel a little below the middle-right of the menu bar, for instance, which I've just spent the last minute finding again. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of apparently-dead-pixel-free screens were like this.
Dust on the screen is a bigger problem for me.
I think you'd need to assess dead pixels on a case-by-case basis, though - my digital camera's got an always-on red pixel in the middle of its screen and it's terribly obvious and highly distracting. The pictures it takes are fine, of course, but if the sole purpose of the device was to show pictures (or video or games) on its screen, then I'd be pretty annoyed, and with good reason.
Sony seems to have the right idea - people complaining about a tiny dark or off-colour speck should certainly be discouraged, but there remains an avenue for those with the real horror stories to tell...
You don't get the full 50 hp of a gasoline motor from 0 rpm. Most cars these days get their peak HP at around 4500 rpms, and the 50hp engine would start out at around 10 hp from 0 mph.
And this, gentlemen, is why we use steam engines. Maximum torque at stationary!
(And yes, I do have my very own steam-powered traction engine, but admittedly it's only about 30cm long. Call me the miniaturised Fred Dibnah...)
Stay the hell away from the "gaming industry" as a career. Find an interesting job in programming something else, and write games as a hobby.
:-)
I muck about designing single-player maps for my favourite games. Occasionally, I even get round to releasing one. People seem to like what I do, even if the plots are wilfully obtuse and cryptic.
I probably could get a job in the gaming industry, but I really can't be bothered. I'd rather be able to completely change the ending of one of my maps at a whim than have to follow some long, drawn-out design spec for a game I might not particularly enjoy. Working on Half-Life n could be great, working on the more likely Barbie's Fashion Designer n+1 wouldn't be.
So, I'm messing about pushing quirky game engines around, building scenes more complex than any in the original games, concentrating and tweaking the gameplay I enjoy. I don't bother with voice acting (in the style of Marathon, plain text can beat all but the very best voices), new textures are those I mangle together with the Gimp and my digital camera.
I build maps I enjoy playing. If anyone else likes them too, then that's their problem. Why do I do this?
'Cause it's fun. Isn't that what games are about?
For the first, everybody knows what all their fonts look like already. For the second, it slows the program down something awful to have to load and cache a few hundred fonts every time the program starts.
;-)
Papyrus 3 on my 8MHz Atari ST did this show-fonts-in-their-own-faces thing for the font selector dialogue box. With Truetype fonts. And with no performance issues at startup either - it had an option to save the current font cache to file.
Who knows, maybe the latest Photoshop can do this too...
Just to clarify - royalty-free means that you won't get charged however many times or for whatever you use it for, but it may well mean you have to pay some one-off fee for a particular image.
:-/
I've no idea what the Photoshop deal is, or whether the images are truly 'free' or not, but I read the description and immediately saw it as another money-making scheme...
Has it occurred to you that they may have different teams working on their different projects?
Personally, I'd much rather have new single-player content than, well, anything else - so I'm really looking forward to whatever their single-player mapping team produces!
Yup. Half-Life 2's lighting system is startlingly advanced in places, but a lot of its more interesting effects are a bit ... Subtle.
I'm admittedly not too keen on the (rather crude) dynamic shadows from model entities - if the shadows took account of nearby bright lights then things wouldn't be so bad - but I really like a lot of the other aspects, such as those directional lightmaps and lighting on models which is gloriously subtle and realistic.
I'm intrigued as to what Valve will do with HDR. I got Far Cry running with HDR the other day, and it looked genuinely horrible. Over-saturated colours, too much bloom in the wrong places and none of the right ones, and everything looking terribly unrealistic. With a bit of luck, Valve might do something a bit more understated and photographically realistic - they've managed it with shaders and normal-mapping, which people seem to assume aren't in Half-Life 2 because they're used so well...
With that said, HL2 was awesome and almost worth the wait, and i'll end up buying the expansion. *sigh*
Well, I'm definitely not going to buy this particular expansion...
'Cause it'll be a free download!
First announced in early February, yes, but I think this'll be the first we see of it beyond some rough concept sketches.
;-)
I'm intrigued as to what the Source engine will be able to do when given room to breathe - Half-Life 2's maps were highly optimised, with just about every unnecessary surface made invisible or clipped-off to make the physics simpler. The seemingly huge, far-reaching environments usually weren't, but instead were clever simulations thereof. Okay, so it did mean it could run pretty well on my old PC, but I've got a new one now...
Certainly, on a practical note, the awful harm a lot of parents inflict on their children by their incompetence as parents is a far more pressing issue. How can we be worried about gender when so many parents are so awful at parenting?
Because sex-selection of embryos is notoriously unreliable, and thus a significant number of children born thanks to this kind of procedure will be of the 'wrong' sex.
Psychiatric implications on both child and parents are left as an exercise for the reader.
Designer babies, eh?
;-)
I want an Armani.
(With apologies to Kate Charlesworth of New Scientist...)
Another vote for the Tandy Model-100 family. A highly functional portable computer that ran forever on batteries. My teacher had it when I was a kid in school and got to use it. The thing was perfect.
... efficient. At least I don't remove all whitespace for speed of execution any more!
;-)
I acquired the NEC equivalent of one of those some years ago - it's one of the reasons my programming to this day is a bit
Bastard evil thing went and died recently, and now just displays flickering, corrupted rubbish on the screen. Bah...
I also had one of these, but it wouldn't die. Chucked it out recently, after getting GEM and Windows 1.0 to run on it. I'm so cruel...
Typical British ISPs provide a USB modem for ADSL or an Ethernet/USB Cable modem, and a driver/configurator disk. No consumer ISP provides a NAT router by default (its a costly option, and usually a crappy rebranded far-eastern product that crashes all the time).
I got a fairly decent NAT router with my ADSL account with a small UK ISP. They also block a variety of Windows-worm-attracting ports by default - you have to ask to get them unblocked, and then they'll run a quick port-scan on your system to make sure you're not a sitting duck.
I've not actually needed any ports unblocking, and I'd class myself as a fairly advanced user. So why can't the big-name ISPs do this as well? Okay, it's not going to stop browser malware, email trojans and the like, but it'll definitely help against the nastier, faster-spreading worms...
Seems to me that most spammers will just disallow incoming mail.
Could this be used to some advantage?
If the remote mail-server refuses to accept email, don't accept email from it in return?
What I want from Top Gear, and get, is an hours worth of quality Sunday evening entertainment.
s -per-hour variety). I can't stand Jeremy Clarkson. He'd probably hate me.
I'm a non-motorist. I've never owned a car and I have no intention of getting one unless I absolutely have to (I do have a driving licence). I'm a big user of public transport (often of the continental-trains-going-at-hundreds-of-kilometre
But still, I think Top Gear is great. A bunch of Neanderthals messing about with cars in really funny ways on a Sunday evening? Excellent!
I don't get Fifth Gear on TV around here. I used to get Top Gear though. Top Gear kicked ass, but then it turned crappy. Apparently the crew who made the Kick Ass-version of Top Gear went on and made Fifth Gear.
;-)
What, the old Top Gear where they'd do highly informative, terribly boring month-long road-tests of sub-one-litre hatchbacks suitable for decomposing pensioners and the like?
Useful, maybe, but nothing beats the majesty of the new Top Gear crew attempting to destroy a Toyota Hilux by setting fire to it, drowning it in the sea and finally explosively demolishing a block of flats beneath it.
Oh, and video 'downloads' available from that page too, as they have been for a while. No sign of their wilful, spectacular destruction of caravans, though...
If it really is for normal credit card transactions, what happens when someone from the USA, for example (because our credit cards do not require a PIN) comes to make a purchase?
You sign instead.
This also applies to people (like me) who simply can't remember the PIN - and cashiers also seem to have forgotten that (a) the person actually has to sign the receipt (I've had to prompt someone to hand it over) and (b) they have to check the signature against the card as well.
In terms of security, it's a bit lacking. The PIN system itself might be completely secure (heh), but the signature system is as bad as it's ever been - does anyone know when (or even if) it's going to be phased out?
You can do something similar to generate top-down, non-perspective views of more modern games like Half-Life, which has a whole bunch of development features for making map 'overviews'.
Unfortunately, despite the original Half-Life's apparently seamless world, there are plenty of overlaps between different maps, so it's highly unlikely anyone could build a sensible map of Black Mesa that way.
Half-Life 2 might be more promising, and I believe it's got the same overview commands - I think I need to experiment to find out if City 17 really could be 'mapped' in this manner, even if it were to prove rather difficult to navigate through the highly-3D building mazes present with the 2D map produced...
The idea of sending an AI for aliens to interrogate reminded me of something, and after a bit of Googling I found what I was looking for.
In the Fountains of Paradise, a certain Mr. Arthur Clarke proposes an alien civilisation communicating with others by means of the 'Starglider' probe - basically a small, easily-accelerated device with a highly advanced AI on board. Naturally, our own Solar System is the temporary host for of one of these, and as an aside, it disproves the entirety of our religious works in the matter of a few minutes after some foolish groups decide to transmit them to it...