I don't think lala has much of a chance to become successful, but who knows, maybe. But, if it did become popular, the price of a song wouldn't remain a dime. I remember people plunking 25c into jukeboxes in the 80's to play a song ONCE. Given inflation, that's like 65c today (according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor). I've never heard of an industry that willingly reduced prices. Forces have forced them to, for now, but you can bet they are trying to figure out how to get song prices back up to where you pay 75c to just listen to a song once, and 3-5 bucks to buy a perpetual (non-transferable, if they can help it) license.
Honestly, I'm happy with a buck a song. When you consider the jukebox, you are getting to keep the song for the price of 4 plays at 1980-prices. I think Lala is a stupid idea, but I love Amazon MP3s, Walmart MP3s, and iTunes+ (that is, the unencrypted songs). The only problem I have with Amazon, Walmart, and iTunes is that it's hard to actually find new music, because you only get to hear like 15 seconds of a song. It's awefully hard to tell if you actually like a song in 15 seconds. Sometimes it's hard to tell even if you are getting the recording you've heard before and like, or some funky recording that just doesn't sound right.
Something like Lala might be a good way to find music that you intend on purchasing higher-quality tracks from other stores, but gives you a cheap way to hear new music. Still, for that, there's plenty of Internet radio, and places like last.fm.
Which is why every single DRM system anyone ever devises, will instantly be defeated. If you can listen to it, you can record it, yeah? The problem with Wireshark (though, apparently, not in this particular case) is that if the stream is encrypted, wireshark is just grabbing cyphertext. But, at some point, to listen to it, they MUST decrypt the stream, and once it's decrypted you could potentially capture it in hardware, or more simply, by recording the output of the sound card.
To protect whistleblowers, aren't there? Although, that might only be in the government, and maybe government contractors. Not sure if it extends to the private sector.
The thing I'm puzzled about is, I thought that the electronic payment networks (MasterCard, Visa, Discover, Amex, etc) had very specific requirements for data security, including audits, which filter down to merchants (I realize that merchants don't generally do business directly with the networks [unless, maybe, they're Walmart or Sears], and instead go through intermediate companies that 'resell' the network services, but I thought the security requirements, and audit regimen, bubble down through the whole hierarchy?)
It's hard to say without large studies, I suppose, but I have a hypothesis that (note, I'm not an economics student or scientist, just my general observations/musings here, as a layperson), not just in software development, but in general, recessions and depressions pave the way for the next economic boom cycle. As this applies to software development, I think the parent is right - just because you might not be working on a job that is directly related to software development, doesn't necessarily mean you aren't doing something toward that end. You might go back to school, thinking that in a tough economy, it can't hurt to get some more education. You might contribute to Open Source, as the parent thinks (and proposed by the original article).
You might do software development on your own time that you don't plan to release as open source, but figure you can spend a few years developing it, and just about the time it's ready for release, the boom cycle will be about to begin again and there may be an opportunity to publish the software commercially and make your fortune.
. . . On company time unless you have written permission from your employer and a copy of the open-source license for the project signed by the President or General Counsel of the company. Seriously, the parent's suggestion just sounds like an invitation for another SCO-style 10 year lawsuit, to me.
"If I had the money to spend I'd help support them because I'd love to see them get the money to build a truly open video card that could compete with it's modern rivals."
This makes me wonder if someone could setup a foundation of some sort to act similar to Public Radio/Television. I don't have the money to build or run a radio or TV station, but when 15000 people donate 50 or 100 bucks, suddenly the money is there to run the radio station. The problem with this, however, is that public radio and television are fairly well developed at this point. People immediately get benefit for the money they donate (in fact, benefit before they donate). Whereas with hardware design like this, there's no guarantee that any decent, full consumer product will ever be produced (that is, it's speculative), and even if it is, the best you as sponsor can hope for is that you get a discount when the product is released.
At least, it doesn't appear to me that it would. The product page states that the thing is sold blank. Unprogrammed. Meaning it's not gonna run *anything* till someone programs the thing. Once someone codes it up to run OpenGL/Direct3D decently, maybe it could run 3D games OK; kinda hard to tell. The hardware in it appears to be top-notch, in terms of lots of high-speed ram. Can anyone give us any idea what kind of performance that FPGA can give?
It looks like, basically, this thing is a $1400 prototype that OEM's could use as the basis for a consumer video card.
Can someone out there who knows more about hardware design and fab than I do tell me - once someone has come up with decent programming for an FPGA, can non-programmable, cheaper, maybe even faster, chips be fabbed? I assume that is generally how the design process works - start with an expensive, programmable chip, get the firmware correct, then mass produce non-programmable chips that are much cheaper?
Ok, let me rephrase that bit about SETI; yes, we probably should listen - even if the chances are remote, it may still be possible to receive signals from other civilizations. What is stupid is people thinking that as soon as we start listening, we should quickly find signals. We could listen for millenia upon millenia and not necessarily hear anything.
Yes, we should probably listen, but we shouldn't make over-much of the lack of finding any signals.
Maybe, by listening in on alien communications, we could learn new insights into science and math, so that would be useful. But that is a very limited 'subset' of what people generally have in mind when they think of communication. General diplomatic messages of goodwill, and exchanges of knowledge, could certainly, over great periods of time, be accomplished, if we had civilizations sufficiently close. Within a couple hundred light years' of time, maybe. Greater than that, and I still think speed of light communication is kind of impossible.
Considering they are using light relays, that actually seems kinda slow? I suppose, though, now that I think about it more, that makes sense. The transmission of info from one tower to the next via light is fast, but they probably needed well over a hundred towers to reach from GB to Rome (and maybe a ship or two in the English Channel?).
Each 'telegrapher' would probably take several minutes to receive then relay the message (and they probably used some sort of error checking/correction procedure, to verify they had the message correct before forwarding, which might add another few minutes at each tower).
So, I guess your right, that is pretty impressive given the distance, and the limitation of line-of-sight relays (and they didn't have telescopes/binoculars to increase line of sight between towers).
Well, yeah, possibly. I suppose we must listen, on the small chance that that does happen. I guess my frustration is people, even people like Stephen Hawking, assuming it's likely SETI should find something.
Again, even if another intelligent species created such a beacon, unless it just so happened that the 'lifetime' of transmission of that beacon was during a pretty narrow window of opportunity, it's likely that the signal either passed us long ago, and is no longer detectable, or we will have to listen for a very, *very* long time before we find anything.
It seems to me that, at a point where groups of people are essentially completely isolated from each other, with the only communications being art, entertainment, and educational literature, they are effectively seperate civilizations. Sure, it might be possible for mankind to spread to other planets and establish completely new, isolated civilizations, but before your transmissions reached them, there is a good chance that they would no longer even understand your language.
A new tower of babel, once again caused by reaching for the heavens.
It's true that civilizations can exist when it takes weeks or months, maybe even a small number of years for the message to reach it's destination. On the scale of thousands of years, what could you *possibly* say that would be useful or relevant to anyone living at that time? How would you even know if anyone would still be alive at the signals destination?
I mean, think about it, if the signal takes 30,000 years to reach it's destination, not only would everyone who was alive when you sent the signal be dead, but roughly 1000 generations would have lived and died. Governments, societies, religions would likely have all come and gone, risen and fallen. New species might possibly have evolved (though, I suppose, 30,000 years is fairly small in the timescale of evolutionary theory).
The one and only thing I can think of that might be of some sort of use for speed-of-light communications to other points in the galaxy is simply for publishing significant works of art, literature, etc, that other planets might find amusing or educational in thousands of years' time. By the time they reach it, it will be History, and likely not applicable to 'modern' Earth anyhow.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but communication with neutrinos would still NOT be faster than light, right? I'm sorry, but I don't think any galaxy-spanning civilization can possibly exist without FTL communication. Like, thousands of times FTL, because of the massive distances involved. According to one site the Milky Way is about 90,000 light years across. Which means it would take, let's see, 90,000 years (hard math, there) for a signal to cross the galaxy. Not exactly useful for galactic communications.
This is also why I think projects like SETI@Home are ridiculously stupid. Even if other intelligent life did evolve elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, unless they evolved sooner than us (by at least the amount of time it would take for signals to travel from their world(s) ) their signals likely wouldn't have reached us yet. It's also possible that they evolved, developed RF technology, then either died out (and so stopped sending coherent signals), or moved on to FTL comms that we currently have no idea how to receive, or even the basic principles that they are based on (since we currently have no notion of any possible way for information to travel faster than the speed of light).
Since we've only been receiving RF signals for about 100 years, the window of opportunity for other civilizations' RF signals to reach us during the period in which we were 'listening' is ridiculously small.
Neutrino comms might be good for communicating inside of our Solar system, but unless they travel FTL, it would take a message a little over 4 years just to reach the next closest star to our Solar system. That seems pretty useless to me.
I think there is a reason most games have a semi-automatic operation for characters. That reason is lag/latency. If my computer meets the requirements for AoC,I might check it out over the summer. But, every MMO I've ever played has suffered, to one extent or another, from latency issues. With MMOG's, this seems to be even more of an issue, for some reason, than with your typical minimally-multiplayer game (like FPS's, or RPG's like Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, etc, where you run your own server, basically).
It'll be very interesting to see if you can get the level of responsiveness out of AoC which would be required for a more 'interactive' experience.
Ok, ok, I know some people don't like the comic-book hero concept. But, that said, I thought CoH was pretty innovative, in terms of having game play that, in a lot of ways, is quite different from most of the other mmorpgs I've played. Less emphasis on 'gear' (still some emphasis on that - they introduce a crafting system last year to create better stuff than you can buy from NPC's, but, it's not *so* much better that you can't get by with the standard stuff, if you want to).
But, the real place where CoH shines, in my opinion, is grouping. With a decent group (it doesn't even have to be a finely tuned group, though a little bit of tuning never hurts), gameplay is much brisker than in most other MMORPG's I've played. In my experience, with most MMOG's, whether you are soloing, or in a group, you are fighting one enemy at a time, or a very small number of enemies at a time (maybe 2-4). The differnce with the group is that instead of the 1 or 2 enemies you are fighting being equal level, you might take on 2 enemies that are +1 or +2 levels higher than the highest member of the group.
With CoH, you will often be fighting 10-12 enemies at a time, which has a very comic-book feel, and a very heroic feel to it, if you ask me. It's mayhem, and it's fast, and there's not a lot of downtime. It's not uncommon for a group to just steamroll from one pack of enemies to the next on a map. This is partly due to CoH's approach to powersets.
Many MMORPG's have a pretty small/restricted number of character powersets to choose from, with a fairly small total number of different types of powers. CoH has a *lot* of different types of powers in the game. This can be confusing, especially at first, when you are learning the game - I have to confess that I don't really know all of the powersets available, but I have a good understanding of most of them. Most MMO's have a 'healer' class for instance, and possibly one 'buffer' class. CoH has the "Defender" and "Controller" arch-types, and in each of those archtypes, there are 6 or 8 different classes, with a mix of a variety of different powers. You have the "Empathy" powerset, available to both Defenders and Controllers (as a 'Primary' for Defenders, which means they can use it more effectively - larger effects on each of the powers, and in some cases, able to use the powers much more frequently, as a 'Secondary' set for Controllers), which is the closest to the classic 'healer' class from most other games. But, even the Empathy set doesn't exclusively have heals - they also have several decent buffs. But, where it gets interesting is powersets like Radiation, ForceFields, Sonic Manipulation, and Kinetics.
Some of the effects that Defenders and Controllers can apply outside of healing:
* Faster movement (like, *much* faster, not 5% faster), faster power recharge (that is, each power has a certain amount of time you must wait before you can re-use it again; for some of the powers this is 5 or 10 seconds, for others, 2 minutes, and for yet others 10 minutes), * Faster/higher jumping * Flying * Faster energy recharge (you have a pool of energy which is required to use your powers [similar to most games which have some concept of spells or special abilities] which is about 100 points when full [there are a small number of ways to increase this in the game - I think you can max it at 110 or 115]; run out of energy and your gonna have a hard time defeating enemies) * Higher Defense - you get hit by enemies much less often * Higher Resistance - you take less damage when enemies do hit you * Higher Accuracy - you hit enemies more often * Higher Damage * Status protection (avoid getting knocked down, stunned, etc)
What I think makes CoH stand out from other games is, more than the effects available (because, well, obviously they aren't completely unique), is the magnitude that the game allows the effects to reach. Most games I've seen go out of there
Man, some people on Slashdot need a clue-by-four upside the head. The parent was a well written alternate point of view, so let's mod it a troll! For a site where so many people get in an uproar about censorship, it sure seems like sometimes this community does an awful lot of self-censoring.
Most people think of the fifth amendment as just the right to not incriminate yourself. But it also goes on to say. . .
". ..nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
I would say that, were this air force initiative technologically successfuly, it, at least, could not be used on any computers of US citizens, because of the fifth ammendment. Of course, what the government will say is that this capability would only be used against computers of foreign nationals, foreign corporations, and foreign governments. I'm still not sure that makes it right, unless the foreign nation is at war with us, and then it should only be allowed against nations that are directly at war with us.
As the parent mentions, this isn't OLPC 'dumping' Linux. They are just giving the countries who will be buying these things another option for Windows. Probably a waste on that hardware, but, really, I do believe some countries probably *want* Windows on the laptops. They probably feel that if they are going to educate kids about computers, the kids should get some exposure to Windows. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable.
I don't want people to take away from this that I am a MS fanboi - I very much am not. But, why shouldn't the purchasing countries have the option to get Windows if they want it? I hope people don't totally abandon OLPC in terms of quitting the development of software for the Linux-based SugarOS, in protest against this. This just makes it that much more important that the Open Source/Free Software communities continue to work with OLPC and make the Free Software available for it the best they can. In fact, I have a bit of a prediction. I think this whole thing will fall apart of it's own accord when Microsoft can't actually get Windows XP to run decently on the XO, so as long as the Free Software developers don't walk away in protest, I bet they will end up using the Linux based software in the end.
There is only, mainly, one question I walk away from this with, however - from what I've seen of SugarOS so far, I don't really think it matter much, from a user's perspective, what is running underneath it (what I mean by that is, while the laptops might be slower and more prone to crash with Windows [or maybe not], the *user interface experience* will be the same - that is to say, all the kids will see is Sugar, right?). So, I guess I wonder, from OLPC's standpoint, *why* they would bother putting the Windows XP kernel underneath of it, if the kids are just basically going to be using the same SugarOS and the applications developed for it. Why not use the Linux kernel which is better to begin with than the XP kernel, and has already, and continues to be, tuned just for the OLPC hardware?
I don't really know much about this device, but let's, for the moment, assume it can't actually hurt anyone, just make them uncomfortable / stun them. Is it really a weapon then?
I wonder what the next name will be. I doubt they'll just double 360, that's kind of lame. No doubt, in the great tradition of Microsoft products, they will choose a succession of names where you could absolutely, positively not tell the order of release of the products from the name. Without knowing computer history, please put the following products in order of release:
Windows Vista, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows 3.1; Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio.Net
(Of course, I expect most people on/. would know the correct order, but the point is, Microsoft is legendary for using inconsistent, meaningless names.)
So, in that spirit, we could have names like XBox Pro, XBox Gold, XBox Platinum, XBox Horizon, XBox 400, XBox 4000, Super XBox, XBox Supra, YBox, XBox 128 (I think that would be particularly unlikely, though, because it would appear to be a 'downgrade' from XBox 360). The possibilities for stupid names are endless.
There is a difference between something not currently being understood, and something not being understandable. I've heard people talk about this argument that, since we don't understand X, the only explanation for it is God, and call it the "God of the Gaps" - that is, the argument that God must exist to explain a current gap in our understanding of the universe. The problem is, science keeps coming along filling in those gaps. Yes, it usually, so far, has introduced at least one new gap for every gap it fills in, but the point is, our current ignorance of the mechanism for some observable phenomenon, or hole in our current theories (like the theory of the Big Bang necessarily raises the obvious question - what caused the Big Bang to happen? What came before the Big Bang?) does not in and of itself prove the existence of God.
My point is, when your whole faith is based upon a gap in knowledge, there is a significant chance that the argument for your faith can be discredited by advances in Science. We may, quite possibly, in the course of time come to understand how to correlate "certain chemical and electrical processes" with "self-awareness". As for "We have no way to tell what happens to our 'souls' before birth or after death", currently we have no way to tell if we actually have souls. The concept of the soul comes from a faith in the supernatural. I'm not saying we do not have souls, but what I'm saying is, how could you possibly tell what happens to 'souls', when you can't even find any way to actually prove the existence of a soul? I can't come up with any meaningful theory of how many Unicorns it would take to move an object of Mass 'M' up a hill with incline I, since I can't prove the existence of Unicorns or come up with any kind of average force that an average Unicorn can apply on an object.
A few comments. I generally agree with the basic premise of your comments, but I have some feedback on a few things. . .
First, in the interest of disclosure, I would like to mention I am protestant, not Catholic. However, to the best of my ability, I'm going to try to stick to constructive, neutral discussion. I would point out that almost every comment I'm going to make in the context of the Catholic church applies just as equally, if not *more* (in some cases) to protestants.
I think the reason the stereotypes exist is because, even though not *everyone* who follows Catholicism, or maybe even *most*, there are probably vocal people in the Catholic church who hold such views (stereotypes, as bad as they are, generally do have *some* kind of basis in reality at some point). It is often the case that such people are the most dogmatic and pushy about their beliefs, trying to force them on everyone else. Which brings me to point number 2. . .
"the Church is also against extra-marital sex, and if you are determined to ignore the last point, what stops you to ignore also the first one?" I think that, probably, the issues here are a couple things. First, education. I do not know if this is still the case, but I believe that historically, the Catholic church was against even *telling* people about condoms and that they could limit their risk of getting STD's by using them, because it was felt this was about the same as encouraging people to sin. Of course, people are going to sin anyhow, but there are those who believe that STD's are God's will for sinners (for example, Pat Buchanan, I believe, represents this school of thought). Again, I don't think that's representative of the majority of either Catholics or Protestants, though it certainly is true for a very vocal, and not exactly tiny, minority.
Back to the point at hand, I think historically (I may be wrong here), the Catholic church exerted influence on governments, and just generally on the population, to not discuss such things, not teach such things to youth or adults. Maybe even make it illegal to sell prophylactics. So, the question is, if there is a way to prevent the spread of, e.g. AIDS, and some group, such as the Catholic Church, suppresses information about the way to prevent the spread of the disease, is it somehow unfair to then blame that group for the spread of the disease?
I don't really know. I suspect it might certainly be possible to do a wine-like layer to run Mac Apps on other platforms, but I think Mac isn't *quite* as close to Unix as you think. Well, that is, Mac has, I think, a full Unix compatibility layer, but then in addition to that, they have all the Mac-only stuff like Quartz, Cocoa API, Carbon API, etc, which are not standard Unix libraries. Additionally, Mac OS X uses, I believe, a slightly different standard Filesystem structure than other Unix-like systems. For example, Macs have an "Applications" directory, I believe, where applications are 'installed' by dropping a folder for the application into the Applications directory (not completely unlike "Program Files" on Windows, but rather unlike the rest of the Unix like systems where a single application might have executables in/usr/bin,/usr/local/bin, or some other directory, config files in/etc, library files in/lib,/usr/lib,/usr/local/lib,/opt/libs, etc.
Mostly, I think the hardest part of creating a compatibility layer for MacOS apps would probably be re-creating the Cocoa and Carbon API's, though. There may be other API's that also need to be re-created (I think Mac's have something similar in concept to DirectX for accellerated media playback, image manipulation, etc).
I was wondering, as soon as I read the GP, what you do if a system doesn't have/dev/random? And there is the crux of the problem. If you want to write portable code that could potentially be deployed on any OS with a compiler/runtime for your language, you are going to have to either include a random number generator of some sort with your code, or use one provided by the standard system libraries for your language, e.g the rand() function in the C library - (but I get the impression that people don't feel the C rand() function is sufficiently random).
Now, you might do a test, to see if/dev/random exists, and use it, else use the other random source you fall back on. But, at that point, either your random number generator is strong enough, or it isn't. Assuming you ship a sufficiently strong random number generator with your software, why even bother with some non-portable system dependent feature like/dev/random?
And, I bet the questions I ask provide the answer to the original GP's question - why not use/dev/random? Because it's not portable.
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Samba isn't Windows, this isn't a Windows vulnerability. Thanks for playing. Try again.
I don't think lala has much of a chance to become successful, but who knows, maybe. But, if it did become popular, the price of a song wouldn't remain a dime. I remember people plunking 25c into jukeboxes in the 80's to play a song ONCE. Given inflation, that's like 65c today (according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor). I've never heard of an industry that willingly reduced prices. Forces have forced them to, for now, but you can bet they are trying to figure out how to get song prices back up to where you pay 75c to just listen to a song once, and 3-5 bucks to buy a perpetual (non-transferable, if they can help it) license.
Honestly, I'm happy with a buck a song. When you consider the jukebox, you are getting to keep the song for the price of 4 plays at 1980-prices. I think Lala is a stupid idea, but I love Amazon MP3s, Walmart MP3s, and iTunes+ (that is, the unencrypted songs). The only problem I have with Amazon, Walmart, and iTunes is that it's hard to actually find new music, because you only get to hear like 15 seconds of a song. It's awefully hard to tell if you actually like a song in 15 seconds. Sometimes it's hard to tell even if you are getting the recording you've heard before and like, or some funky recording that just doesn't sound right.
Something like Lala might be a good way to find music that you intend on purchasing higher-quality tracks from other stores, but gives you a cheap way to hear new music. Still, for that, there's plenty of Internet radio, and places like last.fm.
Which is why every single DRM system anyone ever devises, will instantly be defeated. If you can listen to it, you can record it, yeah? The problem with Wireshark (though, apparently, not in this particular case) is that if the stream is encrypted, wireshark is just grabbing cyphertext. But, at some point, to listen to it, they MUST decrypt the stream, and once it's decrypted you could potentially capture it in hardware, or more simply, by recording the output of the sound card.
To protect whistleblowers, aren't there? Although, that might only be in the government, and maybe government contractors. Not sure if it extends to the private sector.
The thing I'm puzzled about is, I thought that the electronic payment networks (MasterCard, Visa, Discover, Amex, etc) had very specific requirements for data security, including audits, which filter down to merchants (I realize that merchants don't generally do business directly with the networks [unless, maybe, they're Walmart or Sears], and instead go through intermediate companies that 'resell' the network services, but I thought the security requirements, and audit regimen, bubble down through the whole hierarchy?)
It's hard to say without large studies, I suppose, but I have a hypothesis that (note, I'm not an economics student or scientist, just my general observations/musings here, as a layperson), not just in software development, but in general, recessions and depressions pave the way for the next economic boom cycle. As this applies to software development, I think the parent is right - just because you might not be working on a job that is directly related to software development, doesn't necessarily mean you aren't doing something toward that end. You might go back to school, thinking that in a tough economy, it can't hurt to get some more education. You might contribute to Open Source, as the parent thinks (and proposed by the original article).
You might do software development on your own time that you don't plan to release as open source, but figure you can spend a few years developing it, and just about the time it's ready for release, the boom cycle will be about to begin again and there may be an opportunity to publish the software commercially and make your fortune.
. . . On company time unless you have written permission from your employer and a copy of the open-source license for the project signed by the President or General Counsel of the company. Seriously, the parent's suggestion just sounds like an invitation for another SCO-style 10 year lawsuit, to me.
"If I had the money to spend I'd help support them because I'd love to see them get the money to build a truly open video card that could compete with it's modern rivals."
This makes me wonder if someone could setup a foundation of some sort to act similar to Public Radio/Television. I don't have the money to build or run a radio or TV station, but when 15000 people donate 50 or 100 bucks, suddenly the money is there to run the radio station. The problem with this, however, is that public radio and television are fairly well developed at this point. People immediately get benefit for the money they donate (in fact, benefit before they donate). Whereas with hardware design like this, there's no guarantee that any decent, full consumer product will ever be produced (that is, it's speculative), and even if it is, the best you as sponsor can hope for is that you get a discount when the product is released.
At least, it doesn't appear to me that it would. The product page states that the thing is sold blank. Unprogrammed. Meaning it's not gonna run *anything* till someone programs the thing. Once someone codes it up to run OpenGL/Direct3D decently, maybe it could run 3D games OK; kinda hard to tell. The hardware in it appears to be top-notch, in terms of lots of high-speed ram. Can anyone give us any idea what kind of performance that FPGA can give?
It looks like, basically, this thing is a $1400 prototype that OEM's could use as the basis for a consumer video card.
Can someone out there who knows more about hardware design and fab than I do tell me - once someone has come up with decent programming for an FPGA, can non-programmable, cheaper, maybe even faster, chips be fabbed? I assume that is generally how the design process works - start with an expensive, programmable chip, get the firmware correct, then mass produce non-programmable chips that are much cheaper?
Ok, let me rephrase that bit about SETI; yes, we probably should listen - even if the chances are remote, it may still be possible to receive signals from other civilizations. What is stupid is people thinking that as soon as we start listening, we should quickly find signals. We could listen for millenia upon millenia and not necessarily hear anything.
Yes, we should probably listen, but we shouldn't make over-much of the lack of finding any signals.
Maybe, by listening in on alien communications, we could learn new insights into science and math, so that would be useful. But that is a very limited 'subset' of what people generally have in mind when they think of communication. General diplomatic messages of goodwill, and exchanges of knowledge, could certainly, over great periods of time, be accomplished, if we had civilizations sufficiently close. Within a couple hundred light years' of time, maybe. Greater than that, and I still think speed of light communication is kind of impossible.
Considering they are using light relays, that actually seems kinda slow? I suppose, though, now that I think about it more, that makes sense. The transmission of info from one tower to the next via light is fast, but they probably needed well over a hundred towers to reach from GB to Rome (and maybe a ship or two in the English Channel?).
Each 'telegrapher' would probably take several minutes to receive then relay the message (and they probably used some sort of error checking/correction procedure, to verify they had the message correct before forwarding, which might add another few minutes at each tower).
So, I guess your right, that is pretty impressive given the distance, and the limitation of line-of-sight relays (and they didn't have telescopes/binoculars to increase line of sight between towers).
Well, yeah, possibly. I suppose we must listen, on the small chance that that does happen. I guess my frustration is people, even people like Stephen Hawking, assuming it's likely SETI should find something.
Again, even if another intelligent species created such a beacon, unless it just so happened that the 'lifetime' of transmission of that beacon was during a pretty narrow window of opportunity, it's likely that the signal either passed us long ago, and is no longer detectable, or we will have to listen for a very, *very* long time before we find anything.
It seems to me that, at a point where groups of people are essentially completely isolated from each other, with the only communications being art, entertainment, and educational literature, they are effectively seperate civilizations. Sure, it might be possible for mankind to spread to other planets and establish completely new, isolated civilizations, but before your transmissions reached them, there is a good chance that they would no longer even understand your language.
A new tower of babel, once again caused by reaching for the heavens.
It's true that civilizations can exist when it takes weeks or months, maybe even a small number of years for the message to reach it's destination. On the scale of thousands of years, what could you *possibly* say that would be useful or relevant to anyone living at that time? How would you even know if anyone would still be alive at the signals destination?
I mean, think about it, if the signal takes 30,000 years to reach it's destination, not only would everyone who was alive when you sent the signal be dead, but roughly 1000 generations would have lived and died. Governments, societies, religions would likely have all come and gone, risen and fallen. New species might possibly have evolved (though, I suppose, 30,000 years is fairly small in the timescale of evolutionary theory).
The one and only thing I can think of that might be of some sort of use for speed-of-light communications to other points in the galaxy is simply for publishing significant works of art, literature, etc, that other planets might find amusing or educational in thousands of years' time. By the time they reach it, it will be History, and likely not applicable to 'modern' Earth anyhow.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but communication with neutrinos would still NOT be faster than light, right? I'm sorry, but I don't think any galaxy-spanning civilization can possibly exist without FTL communication. Like, thousands of times FTL, because of the massive distances involved. According to one site the Milky Way is about 90,000 light years across. Which means it would take, let's see, 90,000 years (hard math, there) for a signal to cross the galaxy. Not exactly useful for galactic communications.
This is also why I think projects like SETI@Home are ridiculously stupid. Even if other intelligent life did evolve elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, unless they evolved sooner than us (by at least the amount of time it would take for signals to travel from their world(s) ) their signals likely wouldn't have reached us yet. It's also possible that they evolved, developed RF technology, then either died out (and so stopped sending coherent signals), or moved on to FTL comms that we currently have no idea how to receive, or even the basic principles that they are based on (since we currently have no notion of any possible way for information to travel faster than the speed of light).
Since we've only been receiving RF signals for about 100 years, the window of opportunity for other civilizations' RF signals to reach us during the period in which we were 'listening' is ridiculously small.
Neutrino comms might be good for communicating inside of our Solar system, but unless they travel FTL, it would take a message a little over 4 years just to reach the next closest star to our Solar system. That seems pretty useless to me.
I think there is a reason most games have a semi-automatic operation for characters. That reason is lag/latency. If my computer meets the requirements for AoC,I might check it out over the summer. But, every MMO I've ever played has suffered, to one extent or another, from latency issues. With MMOG's, this seems to be even more of an issue, for some reason, than with your typical minimally-multiplayer game (like FPS's, or RPG's like Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, etc, where you run your own server, basically).
It'll be very interesting to see if you can get the level of responsiveness out of AoC which would be required for a more 'interactive' experience.
Ok, ok, I know some people don't like the comic-book hero concept. But, that said, I thought CoH was pretty innovative, in terms of having game play that, in a lot of ways, is quite different from most of the other mmorpgs I've played. Less emphasis on 'gear' (still some emphasis on that - they introduce a crafting system last year to create better stuff than you can buy from NPC's, but, it's not *so* much better that you can't get by with the standard stuff, if you want to).
But, the real place where CoH shines, in my opinion, is grouping. With a decent group (it doesn't even have to be a finely tuned group, though a little bit of tuning never hurts), gameplay is much brisker than in most other MMORPG's I've played. In my experience, with most MMOG's, whether you are soloing, or in a group, you are fighting one enemy at a time, or a very small number of enemies at a time (maybe 2-4). The differnce with the group is that instead of the 1 or 2 enemies you are fighting being equal level, you might take on 2 enemies that are +1 or +2 levels higher than the highest member of the group.
With CoH, you will often be fighting 10-12 enemies at a time, which has a very comic-book feel, and a very heroic feel to it, if you ask me. It's mayhem, and it's fast, and there's not a lot of downtime. It's not uncommon for a group to just steamroll from one pack of enemies to the next on a map. This is partly due to CoH's approach to powersets.
Many MMORPG's have a pretty small/restricted number of character powersets to choose from, with a fairly small total number of different types of powers. CoH has a *lot* of different types of powers in the game. This can be confusing, especially at first, when you are learning the game - I have to confess that I don't really know all of the powersets available, but I have a good understanding of most of them. Most MMO's have a 'healer' class for instance, and possibly one 'buffer' class. CoH has the "Defender" and "Controller" arch-types, and in each of those archtypes, there are 6 or 8 different classes, with a mix of a variety of different powers. You have the "Empathy" powerset, available to both Defenders and Controllers (as a 'Primary' for Defenders, which means they can use it more effectively - larger effects on each of the powers, and in some cases, able to use the powers much more frequently, as a 'Secondary' set for Controllers), which is the closest to the classic 'healer' class from most other games. But, even the Empathy set doesn't exclusively have heals - they also have several decent buffs. But, where it gets interesting is powersets like Radiation, ForceFields, Sonic Manipulation, and Kinetics.
Some of the effects that Defenders and Controllers can apply outside of healing:
* Faster movement (like, *much* faster, not 5% faster), faster power recharge (that is, each power has a certain amount of time you must wait before you can re-use it again; for some of the powers this is 5 or 10 seconds, for others, 2 minutes, and for yet others 10 minutes),
* Faster/higher jumping
* Flying
* Faster energy recharge (you have a pool of energy which is required to use your powers [similar to most games which have some concept of spells or special abilities] which is about 100 points when full [there are a small number of ways to increase this in the game - I think you can max it at 110 or 115]; run out of energy and your gonna have a hard time defeating enemies)
* Higher Defense - you get hit by enemies much less often
* Higher Resistance - you take less damage when enemies do hit you
* Higher Accuracy - you hit enemies more often
* Higher Damage
* Status protection (avoid getting knocked down, stunned, etc)
What I think makes CoH stand out from other games is, more than the effects available (because, well, obviously they aren't completely unique), is the magnitude that the game allows the effects to reach. Most games I've seen go out of there
Man, some people on Slashdot need a clue-by-four upside the head. The parent was a well written alternate point of view, so let's mod it a troll! For a site where so many people get in an uproar about censorship, it sure seems like sometimes this community does an awful lot of self-censoring.
Most people think of the fifth amendment as just the right to not incriminate yourself. But it also goes on to say. . .
.nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
". .
I would say that, were this air force initiative technologically successfuly, it, at least, could not be used on any computers of US citizens, because of the fifth ammendment. Of course, what the government will say is that this capability would only be used against computers of foreign nationals, foreign corporations, and foreign governments. I'm still not sure that makes it right, unless the foreign nation is at war with us, and then it should only be allowed against nations that are directly at war with us.
As the parent mentions, this isn't OLPC 'dumping' Linux. They are just giving the countries who will be buying these things another option for Windows. Probably a waste on that hardware, but, really, I do believe some countries probably *want* Windows on the laptops. They probably feel that if they are going to educate kids about computers, the kids should get some exposure to Windows. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable.
I don't want people to take away from this that I am a MS fanboi - I very much am not. But, why shouldn't the purchasing countries have the option to get Windows if they want it? I hope people don't totally abandon OLPC in terms of quitting the development of software for the Linux-based SugarOS, in protest against this. This just makes it that much more important that the Open Source/Free Software communities continue to work with OLPC and make the Free Software available for it the best they can. In fact, I have a bit of a prediction. I think this whole thing will fall apart of it's own accord when Microsoft can't actually get Windows XP to run decently on the XO, so as long as the Free Software developers don't walk away in protest, I bet they will end up using the Linux based software in the end.
There is only, mainly, one question I walk away from this with, however - from what I've seen of SugarOS so far, I don't really think it matter much, from a user's perspective, what is running underneath it (what I mean by that is, while the laptops might be slower and more prone to crash with Windows [or maybe not], the *user interface experience* will be the same - that is to say, all the kids will see is Sugar, right?). So, I guess I wonder, from OLPC's standpoint, *why* they would bother putting the Windows XP kernel underneath of it, if the kids are just basically going to be using the same SugarOS and the applications developed for it. Why not use the Linux kernel which is better to begin with than the XP kernel, and has already, and continues to be, tuned just for the OLPC hardware?
I don't really know much about this device, but let's, for the moment, assume it can't actually hurt anyone, just make them uncomfortable / stun them. Is it really a weapon then?
I wonder what the next name will be. I doubt they'll just double 360, that's kind of lame. No doubt, in the great tradition of Microsoft products, they will choose a succession of names where you could absolutely, positively not tell the order of release of the products from the name. Without knowing computer history, please put the following products in order of release:
/. would know the correct order, but the point is, Microsoft is legendary for using inconsistent, meaningless names.)
Windows Vista, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows 3.1;
Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio.Net
(Of course, I expect most people on
So, in that spirit, we could have names like XBox Pro, XBox Gold, XBox Platinum, XBox Horizon, XBox 400, XBox 4000, Super XBox, XBox Supra, YBox, XBox 128 (I think that would be particularly unlikely, though, because it would appear to be a 'downgrade' from XBox 360). The possibilities for stupid names are endless.
There is a difference between something not currently being understood, and something not being understandable. I've heard people talk about this argument that, since we don't understand X, the only explanation for it is God, and call it the "God of the Gaps" - that is, the argument that God must exist to explain a current gap in our understanding of the universe. The problem is, science keeps coming along filling in those gaps. Yes, it usually, so far, has introduced at least one new gap for every gap it fills in, but the point is, our current ignorance of the mechanism for some observable phenomenon, or hole in our current theories (like the theory of the Big Bang necessarily raises the obvious question - what caused the Big Bang to happen? What came before the Big Bang?) does not in and of itself prove the existence of God.
My point is, when your whole faith is based upon a gap in knowledge, there is a significant chance that the argument for your faith can be discredited by advances in Science. We may, quite possibly, in the course of time come to understand how to correlate "certain chemical and electrical processes" with "self-awareness". As for "We have no way to tell what happens to our 'souls' before birth or after death", currently we have no way to tell if we actually have souls. The concept of the soul comes from a faith in the supernatural. I'm not saying we do not have souls, but what I'm saying is, how could you possibly tell what happens to 'souls', when you can't even find any way to actually prove the existence of a soul? I can't come up with any meaningful theory of how many Unicorns it would take to move an object of Mass 'M' up a hill with incline I, since I can't prove the existence of Unicorns or come up with any kind of average force that an average Unicorn can apply on an object.
A few comments. I generally agree with the basic premise of your comments, but I have some feedback on a few things. . .
First, in the interest of disclosure, I would like to mention I am protestant, not Catholic. However, to the best of my ability, I'm going to try to stick to constructive, neutral discussion. I would point out that almost every comment I'm going to make in the context of the Catholic church applies just as equally, if not *more* (in some cases) to protestants.
I think the reason the stereotypes exist is because, even though not *everyone* who follows Catholicism, or maybe even *most*, there are probably vocal people in the Catholic church who hold such views (stereotypes, as bad as they are, generally do have *some* kind of basis in reality at some point). It is often the case that such people are the most dogmatic and pushy about their beliefs, trying to force them on everyone else. Which brings me to point number 2. . .
"the Church is also against extra-marital sex, and if you are determined to ignore the last point, what stops you to ignore also the first one?" I think that, probably, the issues here are a couple things. First, education. I do not know if this is still the case, but I believe that historically, the Catholic church was against even *telling* people about condoms and that they could limit their risk of getting STD's by using them, because it was felt this was about the same as encouraging people to sin. Of course, people are going to sin anyhow, but there are those who believe that STD's are God's will for sinners (for example, Pat Buchanan, I believe, represents this school of thought). Again, I don't think that's representative of the majority of either Catholics or Protestants, though it certainly is true for a very vocal, and not exactly tiny, minority.
Back to the point at hand, I think historically (I may be wrong here), the Catholic church exerted influence on governments, and just generally on the population, to not discuss such things, not teach such things to youth or adults. Maybe even make it illegal to sell prophylactics. So, the question is, if there is a way to prevent the spread of, e.g. AIDS, and some group, such as the Catholic Church, suppresses information about the way to prevent the spread of the disease, is it somehow unfair to then blame that group for the spread of the disease?
I don't really know. I suspect it might certainly be possible to do a wine-like layer to run Mac Apps on other platforms, but I think Mac isn't *quite* as close to Unix as you think. Well, that is, Mac has, I think, a full Unix compatibility layer, but then in addition to that, they have all the Mac-only stuff like Quartz, Cocoa API, Carbon API, etc, which are not standard Unix libraries. Additionally, Mac OS X uses, I believe, a slightly different standard Filesystem structure than other Unix-like systems. For example, Macs have an "Applications" directory, I believe, where applications are 'installed' by dropping a folder for the application into the Applications directory (not completely unlike "Program Files" on Windows, but rather unlike the rest of the Unix like systems where a single application might have executables in /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, or some other directory, config files in /etc, library files in /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, /opt/libs, etc.
Mostly, I think the hardest part of creating a compatibility layer for MacOS apps would probably be re-creating the Cocoa and Carbon API's, though. There may be other API's that also need to be re-created (I think Mac's have something similar in concept to DirectX for accellerated media playback, image manipulation, etc).
I was wondering, as soon as I read the GP, what you do if a system doesn't have /dev/random? And there is the crux of the problem. If you want to write portable code that could potentially be deployed on any OS with a compiler/runtime for your language, you are going to have to either include a random number generator of some sort with your code, or use one provided by the standard system libraries for your language, e.g the rand() function in the C library - (but I get the impression that people don't feel the C rand() function is sufficiently random).
/dev/random exists, and use it, else use the other random source you fall back on. But, at that point, either your random number generator is strong enough, or it isn't. Assuming you ship a sufficiently strong random number generator with your software, why even bother with some non-portable system dependent feature like /dev/random?
/dev/random? Because it's not portable.
Now, you might do a test, to see if
And, I bet the questions I ask provide the answer to the original GP's question - why not use