Frankly, this is Valve's job to remove the cd-check which is, like I said many times, utterly useless since activating Hl2 thru steam with your cd key is good enough to prove that one person has a legit copy.
I wouldn't be surprised if the CD check is some condition for distribution from Vivendi - the fact that there's some much more effective copy protection system behind the scenes is probably irrelevant to the Vivendi lawyers (I imagine).
As for the hullaballoo about supposedly legitimate users being blocked - here, I'm reminded of tales of woe on the Steam forums where honest, law-abiding users have had their utterly real, store-bought copies of Half-Life 1 banned, only for the Steam administrators to reveal that the HL1 CD key in question has been widely distributed on the internet, and perhaps even never existed as a retail key in the first place. But, if these users would be so kind as to scan their Half-Life CD case with the appropriate key visible, to act as proof of purchase - but wait! "They don't have scanners/fax machines/whatever in my country, you insensitive clod!" "My dog ate the CD case!" "Waaah!"
It's easy to make up a story about being banned unjustly. ("Hey, Valve's Steam thing hosed someone's entire computer - I read it on the interweb so it must be true!") I'm sure there are places where the process has fallen down, and a few innocent accounts banned. It does sound like Valve needs to speed up reinstatement of proper accounts from what I've heard, but it's not surprising they take so long if they have all the jokers to deal with as well...
Talking about digital photography - if you've got a family member who's got Windows and a digital camera but finds the included software overly slow and/or complicated, give Picasa a try. Standard disclaimer - I'm in no way affiliated with the company, just someone who was really impressed with how straightforward Picasa is to use.
Non-patronising, doesn't spam the user with constant hand-holding, but incredibly simple - importing photos, organising them, printing and emailing them (even from Mozilla Thunderbird), it's a very impressive program. Plus it runs remarkably well on older computers - my mother has it running on a 333MHz K6-2, and it feels much faster than iPhoto 4 on my iBook...
Highly recommended!
Re:Um, this is interesting
on
A New Elena Story
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I believe some interview with Gabe Newell said that their inspiration for HL2 was to be an eastern european city. I think they did an awesome job.
I'm in the non-Eastern-European Brussels at the moment, but I can't help but see City 17 everywhere. There's even a Combine Citadel in the middle, or perhaps I mean the European Parliament - it's definitely slowly consuming its way through the city anyhow.;-)
Erm.. Wasn't it supposed to look more like a giant trainer than a bowling ball?
Beneath it lay uncovered a huge starship, one hundred and fifty metres long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white and mindboggingly beautiful. At the heart of it, unseen, lay a small gold box which carried within it the most brain-wretching device ever conceived, a device which made this starship unique in the history of the galaxy, a device after which the ship had been named - The Heart of Gold.
EA is there to make money, not take care of people. If they are treating their employees poorly who cares? If the game is good I'll buy it, if it's not I won't.
Somehow, I think many Slashdotters would love the policies of Margaret Thatcher. Hell, she's not quite dead yet, and she's newly widowed - why not marry the wizened old bastard?
Electronic Arts, like all other companies, is comprised of people. If their creation can behave in an utterly inhumane manner, operating only to increase some arbitrary numbers in a computer system somewhere, then what's the point? Why bother with any niceties whatsoever, as nobody else seems to do? Kick the employees when they're down, exploit their enthusiasm and just hope the latest product gets finished before they burn out and find some sort of work elsewhere. And, if they start demanding more reasonable hours, or even paid overtime, then just sack them or outsource the work to some even more badly exploited sods the other side of the world...
Screw the welfare state. If workers want to live, they should work for it. Screw free healthcare, screw any kind of regulation on how employers treat their employees - if they're so unhappy, they can go elsewhere, even if conditions there are just as bad - all brought on by the unending, mindless competition and lower costs demanded by the holy, almighty dollar. No need to be decent people, no need for random acts of kindness - after all, there's no such thing as society. All that counts is money.
Why should a company treat its employees well? Because it is an institution created by human beings.
This is hardly fair as MSN search is in very early beta while Google and the rest have been around for several years
I started using Google when it said 'beta' on its front page - I used it because it frequently gave far better results than all the other search engines of the time.
I've got a Gmail account. That's 'beta' too. I use that for webmail because I find it's better than all the competitors.
I can accept glitches and unexpected behaviour in a beta product, as long as the benefits outweigh the problems. MSN's new search still isn't particularly good when it's working properly - and it's definitely not significantly better than its more mature rivals. So, as web users, why should anyone bother?
I'm sort of torn on the whole issue. On the one hand, The Inq is spot-on that it's cool that Valve has found a way to make sure that everyone can be the first guy to play the game
I''ll be on a PC-less business trip in Belgium and France from the 14th to the 25th, you insensitive clod!
And even when I do get back, my PC's in dire need of replacement. Argh!:-)
I remember typing that program in from one of the Antic magazines. Those were the good ol days. Between 1-2 days to generate each picture. Now we can do it in a matter of seconds on the average PC.
Why not do it in real time? A fairly old program, with smooth zooming into various fractals. Worked well on an old Pentium, looks bloody amazing on a modern machine!
Does various tricks to avoid calculating too much, and is rather clever about it...
The interview was very complex, so I broke it down into sentences, but the sentences were as complex as the overall article. How could that be?
Yes, but was it complex, or merely complicated?
I recently rewrote a quotation for why some work would cost a client more using a similar line of thought, swapping the word 'complicated' for 'complex', because it sounds so much more... Complex.
It really brought a smile to my face when I saw a certain Mr. B. Mandelbrot essentially agreeing with my use of the English language.:-)
I can't remember where I read it, but I recall the main failure of fractal compression of video wasn't decompression, but in compression. There might be parameters for a fractal algorithm with results which might almost perfectly match the data, but finding parameters would involve a massive trawl through possible inputs until something vaguely suitable turns up.
Basically, with no nicely predictable way of converting input into algorithm parameters, there wasn't much chance of encoding video in any vaguely real-time manner, at least not without massive brute-force computation. Imagine MPEG, JPEG etc. without the Fast Fourier Transform - if you did it all by guessing the coefficients for the sine series, you wouldn't get anywhere fast...
I think this argument was described in some interview relating to that new Dirac wavelet-based codec from the BBC, but I can't find it...:-)
Enough experience to work on a game, but not one game, ever.
If you want to mess around with games programming, have a go at modding. You get an entire game and its content pre-built, and you can change it about as much or as little as you like.
Someone I know has done some seriously cool OpenGL hacks* to Half-Life, getting it to use modern per-pixel shaders and suchlike, for instance. You can write a whole new renderer if you're so inclined, and still have some working netcode and so on to fall back on. Program AI with bots, or mess about enhancing existing coding, there's all sorts of stuff you can do. With Quakes 1 and 2, there's the entire engine source code available under the GPL - and it doesn't matter if you don't like FPS games, as I've seen driving, flight-sim and RTS games in Half-Life, for a start.:-)
No, you don't get paid, but as a hobby it's brilliant fun. Plus if you do want to move into the games industry proper, even after reading the article, you can have a decent portfolio of work to demonstrate...
(* 'Hacks' in the old sense, not the pathetic see-through-walls multiplayer cheats variety...)
Simple solution? Don't do it. At one point in my career I was good enough at fomenting revolts that even the Indian and Russian contractors joined in.
Sudden vision of a certain managers' office...
Boss A: "That Rocketboy, he's revolting."
Boss B: "Yes, he is. Utterly revolting. His personal hygiene - euch!"
Boss A: "No, seriously. He's really revolting! Have you heard what he's been saying to people?"
Boss B: "Was it revolting?"
Boss A: "Gah! You're not listening to me!"
Boss C: "Hey, guys, the Russians and Indians are revolting too!"
...
Ahem.
Why I don't want to work in the games industry
on
EA Games: The Human Story
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've been working on map design for various computer games in my spare time for the last six years or so. I haven't actually releasedmanymapsyet, but with my skills in map design and texture art I could almost certainly get a job in the games industry. Several of my friends already have, and are working on games you've almost certainly heard of.
Except I don't want to work there. From what I've heard, EA isn't alone, with many young, idealistic people working for long hours on lacklustre games because, well, it's what they always wanted to do. If they give up because of lack of pay, or quit because they simply can't continue to work like that, then there's always someone else to hire, someone else who hasn't learned how bad some of the employers can be.
So, I keep modding as a hobby, mapping purely for enjoyment. It's much more fun being able to work on your own projects without some looming deadline, without a boss breathing down your back. The games market is already saturated with clones, sequels and utter trash, and the chances of working on something memorable are pretty slight. Instead of working on Barbie's Fashion Adventure 7, I can build my own Twelve Monkeys-inspired, ultra-dark adventure in Half-Life 2 (one of my upcoming projects!)
However, I'm intrigued by Wideload Games' new approach, contracting in work as and when required with just a core team working on a project full-time. It's not so dissimilar to the work I'm doing at the moment, as a freelance web programmer and designer, and I wonder if it'll catch on. No, I wouldn't be able to make a full-time living from it, but it could make for some interesting side work, assuming anyone would want me...:-)
A bigger index does not equal better search results, however, with the press this will generate, it will equal profits.
It would be terribly easy to get trillions of pages indexed. For instance, a site I've been working on has a public calendar system, with results fished out of a database. There are very few actual events in it at the moment, but with the 'Previous' and 'Next' links it'll run from 1970 to 2038. A naïve web-crawler would index every single month for every single year, but Google would appear to have crawled over just a few, presumably flagging the pages as too similar to warrant further investigation.
With stuff like public web forums, Slashdot and the like, I can easily imagine comparatively small sites producing thousands of pages apiece. Is there useful information in there? Quite possibly, but it definitely needs treating in a different manner to an old-fashioned, static-pages-only site...
Colour materials are another matter. Because they are based on chemical dyes instead of silver crystals, they are subject to chemical change (i.e. fading). Current films quote longevity of 50 to 100 years.
A minor fade can still be pretty bad. I found an envelope of 1980s-era colour prints as taken by my father - all seemingly of a number of people with cameras standing outside, near some flowerbeds and low fences.
On closer inspection, I noticed the very faint, faded image of the Taj Mahal in the background, near-indistinguishable from the sky.
So, the photos are now useless, unless I scan them in and do some pretty heavy enhancement - but then what am I supposed to do with the results?:-)
While it is ture that they wear out too, But if you keep them in good contition they can easilly last for hundreds of years.
Nobody's too sure how long inkjet printouts will last. My own printer's inks and paper are supposedly safe for a century (according to accelerated ageing tests using ultra-violet lamps, or something similar), but I'll still be keeping all the original JPEGs, regularly backed up on to some lowest-common-denominator medium (currently CDRs).
Professional digital photo prints are likely be be pretty long-lasting if they're the optical ones done on to real light-sensitive photographic paper - they'll probably be identical to conventional colour photos. Keep them out the light, in a cool, dry place, and they probably won't fade significantly for decades.
At my former university, they had a corridor with a glass wall which went past the machine room full of supercomputers, many with flashy-looking blinkenlights arranged into grids or in the form of graphical processor-monitoring screens. There were often some weird and wonderful smaller machines, like some Linux-running, Itanium-powered (according to the labels) SGI workstations - this was late 2000, early 2001 or so, and I haven't seen a single Itanic since...
The biggest machine was a huge Cray T3E - I don't recall any blinkenlights on it, but it didn't need them! I recently heard that turing.mcc.ac.uk has since been dismantled, presumably because it was no longer cost-effective for its mere few hundred Gflops. I've no idea what was done with it and its parts, or what (if anything) it has been replaced with, but it's what I thought of when I saw this article.:-)
With some fonts (especially those fixed width fonts in code editors) a "l" (small "L") looks exactly the same as a "1" (a one), which makes sure that the guy maintaining the code will have fun a-plenty.
For ease of writing such horrid code, I recommend the Bistream Vera Sans Mono typeface. All those characters can be distinguished from each other, and there are bold, italic and bold-italic variants for your syntax highlighting needs. Just because you want to confuse and antagonise your fellow cow-orkers doesn't mean you have to suffer yourself!
Different techniques for generating computer game animation are always appreciated - animation can contribute hugely towards the realism of the game, making even basic character models appear 'alive', but (like audio) you can't exactly distill good animation into a few tech-spec bullet points.
For instance, System Shock 2's 3D character modelling was terrible, but its monsters became eerily lifelike (and far more scary) thanks to the motion-captured animation. Capturing 'real' movements as in motion capture and the video stuff as in the article is one thing, automatically generated parametric animation is another, something which may (or may not) revolutionise the gaming world.
Okay, it's not going to completely replace old-fashioned animation, but it can still be an intriguing way of gluing those 'phrases' together. I'm reminded of some of Ken Perlin's work in this - where simple stick-figures move in a much more 'real' manner than the near-photorealistic characters in many modern games. Apparently his faces were the inspiration for the facial animation system in Half-Life 2.
Oh, and incidentally, if anyone happens to be a game animator with a bit of free time, click on my signature's link. Greatly appreciated.:-)
Rover site is silent on this? Try reading the press releases when they come out.
From the site:
Possible explanations under consideration include the action of wind removing some dust from the solar panels or the action of frost causing dust to clump. "We seem to have had several substantial cleanings of the solar panels," Erickson said.
Seems that perhaps all those Slashdotters who always ask why wipers couldn't have been installed, or claim that dust was immediately going to kill power, can finally be silenced?
One aspect of a particularly long mission like the Mars Rovers is that it acts as a real-world test-bed for the new technologies. Maybe the dust buildup isn't nearly as big an issue as was originally thought, and maybe they've found a good compromise between power consumption and keeping the rover innards warm with the 'deep sleep' capacity. Still, the machinery will fail eventually - here's to hoping that however it does fail, it'll provide them with more information on how to improve things for future missions!
The word 'Xen' does seem to be a bit overused - maybe not as closely as 'Phoenix' or 'Firebird' were for Mozilla, but it's still pretty bad, even if the virtualisation Xen has reached the top of the pile...
Sure, absolutely. I mean, why provide widget writers with the benefit of multitasking and protected memory when you could lump them all together in the same process?
Dashboard widgets are written in interpreted Javascript, doing their display with HTML and CSS. If they can crash each other, you've got serious problems that need fixing elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, this is Valve's job to remove the cd-check which is, like I said many times, utterly useless since activating Hl2 thru steam with your cd key is good enough to prove that one person has a legit copy.
I wouldn't be surprised if the CD check is some condition for distribution from Vivendi - the fact that there's some much more effective copy protection system behind the scenes is probably irrelevant to the Vivendi lawyers (I imagine).
As for the hullaballoo about supposedly legitimate users being blocked - here, I'm reminded of tales of woe on the Steam forums where honest, law-abiding users have had their utterly real, store-bought copies of Half-Life 1 banned, only for the Steam administrators to reveal that the HL1 CD key in question has been widely distributed on the internet, and perhaps even never existed as a retail key in the first place. But, if these users would be so kind as to scan their Half-Life CD case with the appropriate key visible, to act as proof of purchase - but wait! "They don't have scanners/fax machines/whatever in my country, you insensitive clod!" "My dog ate the CD case!" "Waaah!"
It's easy to make up a story about being banned unjustly. ("Hey, Valve's Steam thing hosed someone's entire computer - I read it on the interweb so it must be true!") I'm sure there are places where the process has fallen down, and a few innocent accounts banned. It does sound like Valve needs to speed up reinstatement of proper accounts from what I've heard, but it's not surprising they take so long if they have all the jokers to deal with as well...
Talking about digital photography - if you've got a family member who's got Windows and a digital camera but finds the included software overly slow and/or complicated, give Picasa a try. Standard disclaimer - I'm in no way affiliated with the company, just someone who was really impressed with how straightforward Picasa is to use.
Non-patronising, doesn't spam the user with constant hand-holding, but incredibly simple - importing photos, organising them, printing and emailing them (even from Mozilla Thunderbird), it's a very impressive program. Plus it runs remarkably well on older computers - my mother has it running on a 333MHz K6-2, and it feels much faster than iPhoto 4 on my iBook...
Highly recommended!
I believe some interview with Gabe Newell said that their inspiration for HL2 was to be an eastern european city. I think they did an awesome job.
;-)
I'm in the non-Eastern-European Brussels at the moment, but I can't help but see City 17 everywhere. There's even a Combine Citadel in the middle, or perhaps I mean the European Parliament - it's definitely slowly consuming its way through the city anyhow.
6 more hours at work before I can get home. This is going to be the slowest day ever...
:-)
I'm four hundred miles and over a week away from my (obsolete) PC, you insensitive clod!
Trust me to have to have to go on a business trip just before HL2 was released...
EA is there to make money, not take care of people. If they are treating their employees poorly who cares? If the game is good I'll buy it, if it's not I won't.
Somehow, I think many Slashdotters would love the policies of Margaret Thatcher. Hell, she's not quite dead yet, and she's newly widowed - why not marry the wizened old bastard?
Electronic Arts, like all other companies, is comprised of people. If their creation can behave in an utterly inhumane manner, operating only to increase some arbitrary numbers in a computer system somewhere, then what's the point? Why bother with any niceties whatsoever, as nobody else seems to do? Kick the employees when they're down, exploit their enthusiasm and just hope the latest product gets finished before they burn out and find some sort of work elsewhere. And, if they start demanding more reasonable hours, or even paid overtime, then just sack them or outsource the work to some even more badly exploited sods the other side of the world...
Screw the welfare state. If workers want to live, they should work for it. Screw free healthcare, screw any kind of regulation on how employers treat their employees - if they're so unhappy, they can go elsewhere, even if conditions there are just as bad - all brought on by the unending, mindless competition and lower costs demanded by the holy, almighty dollar. No need to be decent people, no need for random acts of kindness - after all, there's no such thing as society. All that counts is money.
Why should a company treat its employees well? Because it is an institution created by human beings.
This is hardly fair as MSN search is in very early beta while Google and the rest have been around for several years
I started using Google when it said 'beta' on its front page - I used it because it frequently gave far better results than all the other search engines of the time.
I've got a Gmail account. That's 'beta' too. I use that for webmail because I find it's better than all the competitors.
I can accept glitches and unexpected behaviour in a beta product, as long as the benefits outweigh the problems. MSN's new search still isn't particularly good when it's working properly - and it's definitely not significantly better than its more mature rivals. So, as web users, why should anyone bother?
I'm sort of torn on the whole issue. On the one hand, The Inq is spot-on that it's cool that Valve has found a way to make sure that everyone can be the first guy to play the game
:-)
I''ll be on a PC-less business trip in Belgium and France from the 14th to the 25th, you insensitive clod!
And even when I do get back, my PC's in dire need of replacement. Argh!
You forgot Pico!!! Or is that Poland?
;-)
I'm pretty sure pico came pre-installed on my iBook.
Quite fortunate, as I absolutely loathe both vi and emacs.
I remember typing that program in from one of the Antic magazines. Those were the good ol days. Between 1-2 days to generate each picture. Now we can do it in a matter of seconds on the average PC.
Why not do it in real time? A fairly old program, with smooth zooming into various fractals. Worked well on an old Pentium, looks bloody amazing on a modern machine!
Does various tricks to avoid calculating too much, and is rather clever about it...
The interview was very complex, so I broke it down into sentences, but the sentences were as complex as the overall article. How could that be?
:-)
Yes, but was it complex, or merely complicated?
I recently rewrote a quotation for why some work would cost a client more using a similar line of thought, swapping the word 'complicated' for 'complex', because it sounds so much more... Complex.
It really brought a smile to my face when I saw a certain Mr. B. Mandelbrot essentially agreeing with my use of the English language.
I can't remember where I read it, but I recall the main failure of fractal compression of video wasn't decompression, but in compression. There might be parameters for a fractal algorithm with results which might almost perfectly match the data, but finding parameters would involve a massive trawl through possible inputs until something vaguely suitable turns up.
:-)
Basically, with no nicely predictable way of converting input into algorithm parameters, there wasn't much chance of encoding video in any vaguely real-time manner, at least not without massive brute-force computation. Imagine MPEG, JPEG etc. without the Fast Fourier Transform - if you did it all by guessing the coefficients for the sine series, you wouldn't get anywhere fast...
I think this argument was described in some interview relating to that new Dirac wavelet-based codec from the BBC, but I can't find it...
Someone I know has done some seriously cool OpenGL hacks* to Half-Life, getting it to use modern per-pixel shaders and suchlike, for instance. You can write a whole new renderer if you're so inclined, and still have some working netcode and so on to fall back on. Program AI with bots, or mess about enhancing existing coding, there's all sorts of stuff you can do. With Quakes 1 and 2, there's the entire engine source code available under the GPL - and it doesn't matter if you don't like FPS games, as I've seen driving, flight-sim and RTS games in Half-Life, for a start.
No, you don't get paid, but as a hobby it's brilliant fun. Plus if you do want to move into the games industry proper, even after reading the article, you can have a decent portfolio of work to demonstrate...
(* 'Hacks' in the old sense, not the pathetic see-through-walls multiplayer cheats variety...)
Simple solution? Don't do it. At one point in my career I was good enough at fomenting revolts that even the Indian and Russian contractors joined in.
...
Sudden vision of a certain managers' office...
Boss A: "That Rocketboy, he's revolting."
Boss B: "Yes, he is. Utterly revolting. His personal hygiene - euch!"
Boss A: "No, seriously. He's really revolting! Have you heard what he's been saying to people?"
Boss B: "Was it revolting?"
Boss A: "Gah! You're not listening to me!"
Boss C: "Hey, guys, the Russians and Indians are revolting too!"
Ahem.
I've been working on map design for various computer games in my spare time for the last six years or so. I haven't actually released many maps yet, but with my skills in map design and texture art I could almost certainly get a job in the games industry. Several of my friends already have, and are working on games you've almost certainly heard of.
:-)
Except I don't want to work there. From what I've heard, EA isn't alone, with many young, idealistic people working for long hours on lacklustre games because, well, it's what they always wanted to do. If they give up because of lack of pay, or quit because they simply can't continue to work like that, then there's always someone else to hire, someone else who hasn't learned how bad some of the employers can be.
So, I keep modding as a hobby, mapping purely for enjoyment. It's much more fun being able to work on your own projects without some looming deadline, without a boss breathing down your back. The games market is already saturated with clones, sequels and utter trash, and the chances of working on something memorable are pretty slight. Instead of working on Barbie's Fashion Adventure 7, I can build my own Twelve Monkeys-inspired, ultra-dark adventure in Half-Life 2 (one of my upcoming projects!)
However, I'm intrigued by Wideload Games' new approach, contracting in work as and when required with just a core team working on a project full-time. It's not so dissimilar to the work I'm doing at the moment, as a freelance web programmer and designer, and I wonder if it'll catch on. No, I wouldn't be able to make a full-time living from it, but it could make for some interesting side work, assuming anyone would want me...
A bigger index does not equal better search results, however, with the press this will generate, it will equal profits.
It would be terribly easy to get trillions of pages indexed. For instance, a site I've been working on has a public calendar system, with results fished out of a database. There are very few actual events in it at the moment, but with the 'Previous' and 'Next' links it'll run from 1970 to 2038. A naïve web-crawler would index every single month for every single year, but Google would appear to have crawled over just a few, presumably flagging the pages as too similar to warrant further investigation.
With stuff like public web forums, Slashdot and the like, I can easily imagine comparatively small sites producing thousands of pages apiece. Is there useful information in there? Quite possibly, but it definitely needs treating in a different manner to an old-fashioned, static-pages-only site...
Hire a college student to debug the file format and convert to RTF or other current format.
For old word processor documents, the Unix strings utility is often sufficient, especially for non-formatting-dependent content like a novel.
I converted some ancient stuff from my Atari ST's First Word like that - worked absolutely fine...
Colour materials are another matter. Because they are based on chemical dyes instead of silver crystals, they are subject to chemical change (i.e. fading). Current films quote longevity of 50 to 100 years.
:-)
A minor fade can still be pretty bad. I found an envelope of 1980s-era colour prints as taken by my father - all seemingly of a number of people with cameras standing outside, near some flowerbeds and low fences.
On closer inspection, I noticed the very faint, faded image of the Taj Mahal in the background, near-indistinguishable from the sky.
So, the photos are now useless, unless I scan them in and do some pretty heavy enhancement - but then what am I supposed to do with the results?
While it is ture that they wear out too, But if you keep them in good contition they can easilly last for hundreds of years.
:-)
Nobody's too sure how long inkjet printouts will last. My own printer's inks and paper are supposedly safe for a century (according to accelerated ageing tests using ultra-violet lamps, or something similar), but I'll still be keeping all the original JPEGs, regularly backed up on to some lowest-common-denominator medium (currently CDRs).
Professional digital photo prints are likely be be pretty long-lasting if they're the optical ones done on to real light-sensitive photographic paper - they'll probably be identical to conventional colour photos. Keep them out the light, in a cool, dry place, and they probably won't fade significantly for decades.
Still, keep those JPEGs...
At my former university, they had a corridor with a glass wall which went past the machine room full of supercomputers, many with flashy-looking blinkenlights arranged into grids or in the form of graphical processor-monitoring screens. There were often some weird and wonderful smaller machines, like some Linux-running, Itanium-powered (according to the labels) SGI workstations - this was late 2000, early 2001 or so, and I haven't seen a single Itanic since...
:-)
The biggest machine was a huge Cray T3E - I don't recall any blinkenlights on it, but it didn't need them! I recently heard that turing.mcc.ac.uk has since been dismantled, presumably because it was no longer cost-effective for its mere few hundred Gflops. I've no idea what was done with it and its parts, or what (if anything) it has been replaced with, but it's what I thought of when I saw this article.
With some fonts (especially those fixed width fonts in code editors) a "l" (small "L") looks exactly the same as a "1" (a one), which makes sure that the guy maintaining the code will have fun a-plenty.
:-)
For ease of writing such horrid code, I recommend the Bistream Vera Sans Mono typeface. All those characters can be distinguished from each other, and there are bold, italic and bold-italic variants for your syntax highlighting needs. Just because you want to confuse and antagonise your fellow cow-orkers doesn't mean you have to suffer yourself!
Download 'em here...
Different techniques for generating computer game animation are always appreciated - animation can contribute hugely towards the realism of the game, making even basic character models appear 'alive', but (like audio) you can't exactly distill good animation into a few tech-spec bullet points.
:-)
For instance, System Shock 2's 3D character modelling was terrible, but its monsters became eerily lifelike (and far more scary) thanks to the motion-captured animation. Capturing 'real' movements as in motion capture and the video stuff as in the article is one thing, automatically generated parametric animation is another, something which may (or may not) revolutionise the gaming world.
Okay, it's not going to completely replace old-fashioned animation, but it can still be an intriguing way of gluing those 'phrases' together. I'm reminded of some of Ken Perlin's work in this - where simple stick-figures move in a much more 'real' manner than the near-photorealistic characters in many modern games. Apparently his faces were the inspiration for the facial animation system in Half-Life 2.
Oh, and incidentally, if anyone happens to be a game animator with a bit of free time, click on my signature's link. Greatly appreciated.
From the site:Seems that perhaps all those Slashdotters who always ask why wipers couldn't have been installed, or claim that dust was immediately going to kill power, can finally be silenced?
One aspect of a particularly long mission like the Mars Rovers is that it acts as a real-world test-bed for the new technologies. Maybe the dust buildup isn't nearly as big an issue as was originally thought, and maybe they've found a good compromise between power consumption and keeping the rover innards warm with the 'deep sleep' capacity. Still, the machinery will fail eventually - here's to hoping that however it does fail, it'll provide them with more information on how to improve things for future missions!
How about my Xen with no jumping puzzles? :-)
The word 'Xen' does seem to be a bit overused - maybe not as closely as 'Phoenix' or 'Firebird' were for Mozilla, but it's still pretty bad, even if the virtualisation Xen has reached the top of the pile...
Sure, absolutely. I mean, why provide widget writers with the benefit of multitasking and protected memory when you could lump them all together in the same process?
Dashboard widgets are written in interpreted Javascript, doing their display with HTML and CSS. If they can crash each other, you've got serious problems that need fixing elsewhere.