Recently, gamespy.com did an interview with a total wanker from id software named Mr. Devine and he kinda talked about this... basically his article said "MMORPGs suck ass and the people who play them are pasty, antisocial morons" with a lot more words.
His primary beef seems to be born from this philosophy of carmacks... he harped on hating sitting around waiting to regen HP (he apparently doesn't know that if he wasn't such a complete tool that he'd have a cleric in his group and it wouldn't be a problem) and things like that - the actions not being fun.
I don't think I'd be out of bounds in saying that id will probably never produce an immersive online experience of any kind if they follow this philosophy, which is fine, I just think they leave out a lot of good games by trying to make everything from running around to getting stuff absolutely fun.
Personally, I dig fishing in Everquest, so I don't think they know what some people consider fun... then again, I did buy Q3 and I love kicking ass at it.
Esperandi Another thing that made Mr. Devines article so irritating was that every other article written by programmers at gamespy.com was actually good! Hell Tim Sweeney wrote a bust-ass piece about programming language design issues and actually responded with a content-filled email when I sent him a mesage!
In that interview Carmack plugs a book I've read many times and I still drool when I read it, "Hackers" by Steven Levy. If you haven't read it, not only I recommend it (cause who the hell am I?), but Carmack does! If you're still not convinced, hop on your local Project Guttenberg mirror, its there (I think maybe only the first few chapters, but it might be the fulltext).
And I felt and still feel the same way John does about that book, i read it and I say I shoulda BEEN there. I sit in college and I say "Dammit, I'm SITTING STILL for 4 years!" but maybe I just have to wait to catch my own wave in a few years like Carmack did... of course, he dropped out of college... hmmm..;)
Esperandi Two words for anyone "sitting still" in college: Independent Study. You invent the course. Do something cutting edge, I'm doing Distributed Computing With Java right now and its a blast compared to my other "set" classes that they've offered for years.
Open Source is about the users, not the programmers. It is about the community, 95% of which is users!
Back in your cage and keep coding! You've got a "day job" for a reason! You chose to be passionate about coding, now the users are going to exploit it.
Wired beat them to the interview and let the guy who invented this stuff write an article in their magazine somewhere around 6 years ago.
The chess thing was probably Marvin Minsky or one of his friends in Tech Square in the AI labs near MIT... read the book "Hackers" by Stephen Levy if you really dig those kinds of guys, its all about the great stuff the guys just beginning in the field did.
Esperandi Sure, this is impressive, but just wait 50 years and check out how good the microwaveable food will be!
Re:Scaling and physical limits
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RNA Computer
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They already have solved NP-complete problems. The problem is, as soon as they solve them, someone says "oh, well then it obviously wasn't NP-complete, we just screwed up before". The very first problem Adelman did with a DNA calculation engine was considered NP-Complete.
Esperandi (it was a travelling salesman hamiltonian path problem of some really high number of cities... something like 5 or 10 more than they said was impossible)
That time is constant as well because they are produced in parallel with splicing, completing, and complementing enzymes.
It can't scale time-wise the same as normal computational machines, just look at what they've done... they've been solving NP-complete problems of degrees never even imagined within the realm of possibility. So maybe it can't solve a 10 trillion city travelling salesman problem without 100,000 gallons of RNA.... so what? It can solve a 10 city one that no one thouhgt would be possible in as much time as it takes a normal computer to solve a 5 or 6 city one.
Esperandi
Re:MOD THE PARENT POST UP!
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RNA Computer
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You've got a hundred thousand terabyte drive to store the solutions on? BTW, it would take several centuries or so to evaluate all of the answers on your compaq.
Esperandi Serial vs parallel actually DOES make a difference, and it takes virtually no time at all to generate all those RNA combinations. It's nice that you can't imagine how reality works so you assume that it is limited to your feeble mind, but it takes much less time to generate "a strand of RNA containing all possible solutions"... it doesn't do that, it generates a few trillion AT THE EXACT SAME TIME. Take everything the RNA does and multiply it by a few trillion and you'll get an idea on how long it'd take to do it serially on a PC;) How many years is a trillion weeks?
Re:What am I missing?
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RNA Computer
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HA! No.... if you had a standard PC, it wouldn't have enough storage space to store the possible solutions (unless you have a few hundred thousand terabyte drives lying around). Until this guy did this, any travelling salesman problem above n=5 was considered NP Complete - meaning theoretically possible, but the calculations would take so long even trying to do it would be stupid... as in it would probably take the age of the universe to calculate it.
Esperandi
Re:this isn't that cool.
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RNA Computer
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Read some more about the tech, they can do binary with it so that means they can do all this and more.
Esperandi
That was DNA, not RNA
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RNA Computer
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This is the first time stuff has been done with RNA, DNA is what Adelman used and what has been used up to this point... so its not old news...
Esperandi
Can't use you're own RNA
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RNA Computer
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You can't use RNA or DNA while its inside living cells... if I knew how to get it out of my cells I could probably do some DNA computing experimentation after reading "DNA Computing."
Esperandi To the paranoiacs: its not the big corporations that stop me from being able to extract DNA from my cells, so don't scream about trademarks or patents or any of that crap.
"is it possible to surrender enough freedom to escape total annihilation from the current regime, but keep enough that it won't happen to whatever we put in place? "
The man who is willing to sacrifice freedom for security will lose both and deserves neither. --- Thomas Jefferson
"If I am say a monopoly I dosn't have to care about anyone because I am the only supplier. I think it is largely impossible because people have greed and avarice."
There are so many problems with this... first, monopolies only come about by consumer support unless they're literally forcing people into buying their product. If the electric company raises its rates to $1000/month I'm going to unsubscribe. You'll sit around and scream that they're forcing you into unsubscription, but you're wrong. You're making a value judgement. Some value judgements are tough. Deal with it. Unless theres a gun in your face or threat of imprisonment, you *ARE*NOT* being forced.
Second, greed is good. Say it over and over until you understand it. If there is an "implacable monopoly" in place that is making its customers unhappy, greed is the only thing that can break it apart. Greed and selfishness on the part of a productive *individual* (not society, cult, group, comittee, tribe, or community) is the only thing that will start a rival that pleases consumers. It will become the next monopoly and rightfully so.
I'm pissed as hell over Intel getting a billion sales from people who just want the name, but you know what? The companies that buy Intel processors are running slower, they'll fall behind. They'll either change their minds or go bankrupt. Only greed will make them change to using better processors.
Have faith in reality. It weeds out the bad automatically. No "evil empire" or evil situation has been eternal or lasted anywhere near as long as the concepts of freedom have.
Esperandi Note: All of the above is only possible in a laissez-faire capitalist system. In every other there are a bunch of other factors that insure monopolies will exist for as long as the government does and that greed is blocked so they can never be challenged by a better company.
"The real question is, are there any other means to try and preserve our freedoms from a certain group, that do not involve giving more power to another group that - history has taught us - will eventually turn around to stab us on the back and push an even more opressive regime upon us? "
Easy question: Thought.
If you don't think and accept whatever comes down the pike and can't change your mind after hearing something on TV, well, you deserve what you get (and probably worse since the world is too damn insulating against personal repurcussions from personal actions).
How about letting the big companies do whatever they want and living your life by putting thought into what you do? Then you don't have to get an ulcer worrying about things that will never happen.
Esperandi You control the big corporations, they don't control you.
I'm one of the few that pursue truth to the point of nitpicking;) As the majority of the world is today, nothing is ever as good as the people who praise it says it is and nothing is as bad as the people who decry it claim. You are contributing to this.
You need to explain to this average person that yes, deCSS *IS* currently being used to pirate DVD movies on countless IRC channels around the world BUT the purpose of the program is to circumvent monopoly and is simply a way of exercising our rights to Fair Use.
When you say "deCSS isn't used for copying DVDs", that's all fine and good if they're ignorant and stay that way, but what happens if they meet one asshole copying DVDs with deCSS and inevitably wearing one of those shirts? _EVERYTHING_ you said gets completely thrown out the window by them and you've lost credibility because you either don't know what you're talking about or you're a liar.
Esperandi Drop by some big IRC servers like Efnet or Undernet, drop by the "moviez" rooms if you don't believe me.
Number 1, i want a t-shirt that says "fsck the system";)
Number 2, theres a reason why this wasn't created by a 3l33t kiddie... 3l33t kiddies never create anything! They just beg and whine to real geeks until they get some scripts or something.
Number 3, keep explaining your shirt! Why the hell do you think you're wearing it? Why do you think people wear yellow ribbons for AIDS or wore blue ribbons for anti-CDA? NOT so they could identify others with the same interests (but this might be why you're wearing the shirt, either that or to set yourself apart).. the reason things like this are created around issues is to disseminate the information! The more people that ask you, the more the shirt is doing its job as long as you're explaining it...
Combine this with that guy who made the supersuits that basically protect you from everything (you can jump off cliffs in it, get shot with a machine gun, get attacked by wild animals, pretty much anything) and it'd kick ass... people will say there are potentials for abuse. What abuse? That someone might hold up a store knowing that if they got shot it wouldn't hurt them? And you think the guy behind the counter wouldn't have the same stuff? What would he old the store up WITH?;)
Esperandi Looking forward to bullet-proof muscles.
There are a great many people using Linux and chanting its mantras at a fast pace that are simply doing it because when they walk into a room, half the people haven't heard of it and the other half don't use it. They have no interest in Linux at all, they only have interest in whatever is the "outcast" OS at a given point in time. They see targetting Microsoft like targetting all of popular culture. They are the loser-lovers. The conformists of a different color. They base everything they think off of popular opinion - they simply turn it around first. They preach individualism and how diversity is the spice of life and crap when in all actuality, they don't have an individual bone in their entire body, they're just as much conformists as the people they lambast.
Watch, the bigger Linux gets, the smaller its faction of die-hard anti-Microsoft fans will get. What will be left is the new businesses infusing Linux with actual innovation, and the Open Source teams around the net.... who will mostly be disgruntled because they remember the good ole days when you could write a utility, generate a readme, and you were good to go. Now the users demand a GUI, a graphical install, and hiding of the OS. Users always ruin everything;)
I was an op in an IRC room for a few months a year ago, and someone was trying this. Well, needless to say we figured it out pretty quickly (all it did was sit there and laughed whenever other people laughed and made some short comments once in awhile).... then everyone just played with it, figuring out what it responded to... if these things start invading programming chat rooms, I'll never be able to get an answer to a question...
If these things are really GREAT however, they'll be able to answer my questions and not just laugh at jokes...
You have no clue what communism is, do you? Communism as an ideal does not involve death camps or any of that crap, communism is when the goods of a society are produced by the productive and shared with everyone by the government (take out the "by the government" words and you have socialism). Nothing more. yes, it ends up producing labor camps and such things, but that's not part of the idea.
Wake up and read the Communist Manifesto, you'd be surprised how much you recognize.
I don't relish the thought of putting in a new CD for each and every single app I want to put it. Surfing the web and you use a separate email client? Turn off the PSX2, take out the CD, put in a new one, reconnect to the Internet (forget cable modems, the thing has a 56k modem!), wait for it to read, read your mail, do the whole swap thing again to resume browsing.
And the likelihood of having a fully functional web browser along with a news reader and email client in the limited memory space of the PSX2 is highly doubtful....
Esperandi Plus, isn't 2D slower than polygons on this thing? I mean, its not made for 2D stuff... and I've never seen a proposal for a 3D GUI that didn't suck
Communism is an idealogical choice, not something your born with. There is no communist "race." being against communism and its implications doesn't make one a rascist...
But perhaps you were responding to some actual rascist posts that got moderated down before I saw them, if so, ignore this.
Slashdot Mirror
Recently, gamespy.com did an interview with a total wanker from id software named Mr. Devine and he kinda talked about this... basically his article said "MMORPGs suck ass and the people who play them are pasty, antisocial morons" with a lot more words.
His primary beef seems to be born from this philosophy of carmacks... he harped on hating sitting around waiting to regen HP (he apparently doesn't know that if he wasn't such a complete tool that he'd have a cleric in his group and it wouldn't be a problem) and things like that - the actions not being fun.
I don't think I'd be out of bounds in saying that id will probably never produce an immersive online experience of any kind if they follow this philosophy, which is fine, I just think they leave out a lot of good games by trying to make everything from running around to getting stuff absolutely fun.
Personally, I dig fishing in Everquest, so I don't think they know what some people consider fun... then again, I did buy Q3 and I love kicking ass at it.
Esperandi
Another thing that made Mr. Devines article so irritating was that every other article written by programmers at gamespy.com was actually good! Hell Tim Sweeney wrote a bust-ass piece about programming language design issues and actually responded with a content-filled email when I sent him a mesage!
In that interview Carmack plugs a book I've read many times and I still drool when I read it, "Hackers" by Steven Levy. If you haven't read it, not only I recommend it (cause who the hell am I?), but Carmack does! If you're still not convinced, hop on your local Project Guttenberg mirror, its there (I think maybe only the first few chapters, but it might be the fulltext).
;)
And I felt and still feel the same way John does about that book, i read it and I say I shoulda BEEN there. I sit in college and I say "Dammit, I'm SITTING STILL for 4 years!" but maybe I just have to wait to catch my own wave in a few years like Carmack did... of course, he dropped out of college... hmmm..
Esperandi
Two words for anyone "sitting still" in college: Independent Study. You invent the course. Do something cutting edge, I'm doing Distributed Computing With Java right now and its a blast compared to my other "set" classes that they've offered for years.
Open Source is about the users, not the programmers. It is about the community, 95% of which is users!
Back in your cage and keep coding! You've got a "day job" for a reason! You chose to be passionate about coding, now the users are going to exploit it.
Esperandi
You've sold your soul to the GPL!
Wired beat them to the interview and let the guy who invented this stuff write an article in their magazine somewhere around 6 years ago.
The chess thing was probably Marvin Minsky or one of his friends in Tech Square in the AI labs near MIT... read the book "Hackers" by Stephen Levy if you really dig those kinds of guys, its all about the great stuff the guys just beginning in the field did.
Esperandi
Sure, this is impressive, but just wait 50 years and check out how good the microwaveable food will be!
They already have solved NP-complete problems. The problem is, as soon as they solve them, someone says "oh, well then it obviously wasn't NP-complete, we just screwed up before". The very first problem Adelman did with a DNA calculation engine was considered NP-Complete.
Esperandi
(it was a travelling salesman hamiltonian path problem of some really high number of cities... something like 5 or 10 more than they said was impossible)
That time is constant as well because they are produced in parallel with splicing, completing, and complementing enzymes.
It can't scale time-wise the same as normal computational machines, just look at what they've done... they've been solving NP-complete problems of degrees never even imagined within the realm of possibility. So maybe it can't solve a 10 trillion city travelling salesman problem without 100,000 gallons of RNA.... so what? It can solve a 10 city one that no one thouhgt would be possible in as much time as it takes a normal computer to solve a 5 or 6 city one.
Esperandi
You've got a hundred thousand terabyte drive to store the solutions on?
;) How many years is a trillion weeks?
BTW, it would take several centuries or so to evaluate all of the answers on your compaq.
Esperandi
Serial vs parallel actually DOES make a difference, and it takes virtually no time at all to generate all those RNA combinations. It's nice that you can't imagine how reality works so you assume that it is limited to your feeble mind, but it takes much less time to generate "a strand of RNA containing all possible solutions"... it doesn't do that, it generates a few trillion AT THE EXACT SAME TIME.
Take everything the RNA does and multiply it by a few trillion and you'll get an idea on how long it'd take to do it serially on a PC
HA! No.... if you had a standard PC, it wouldn't have enough storage space to store the possible solutions (unless you have a few hundred thousand terabyte drives lying around). Until this guy did this, any travelling salesman problem above n=5 was considered NP Complete - meaning theoretically possible, but the calculations would take so long even trying to do it would be stupid... as in it would probably take the age of the universe to calculate it.
Esperandi
Read some more about the tech, they can do binary with it so that means they can do all this and more.
Esperandi
This is the first time stuff has been done with RNA, DNA is what Adelman used and what has been used up to this point... so its not old news...
Esperandi
You can't use RNA or DNA while its inside living cells... if I knew how to get it out of my cells I could probably do some DNA computing experimentation after reading "DNA Computing."
Esperandi
To the paranoiacs: its not the big corporations that stop me from being able to extract DNA from my cells, so don't scream about trademarks or patents or any of that crap.
And we all know how many millionaires rob 7-11s.
Esperandi
"is it possible to surrender enough freedom to escape total annihilation from the current regime, but keep enough that it won't happen to whatever we put in place? "
The man who is willing to sacrifice freedom for security will lose both and deserves neither.
--- Thomas Jefferson
Esperandi
Why do we need groups to act? How about when someone threatens your freedom, you defend it?
When someone threatens mine, I defend it.
If someone chooses not to defend themselves, they do not deserve defense.
let them buy what the media feeds them, I hope it rots them from the inside out. How else do you expect them to learn?
Esperandi
If we take away enough of the consequences, maybe people will stop doing it! Wait...
"If I am say a monopoly I dosn't have to care about anyone because I am the only supplier. I think it is largely impossible because people have greed and avarice."
There are so many problems with this... first, monopolies only come about by consumer support unless they're literally forcing people into buying their product. If the electric company raises its rates to $1000/month I'm going to unsubscribe. You'll sit around and scream that they're forcing you into unsubscription, but you're wrong. You're making a value judgement. Some value judgements are tough. Deal with it. Unless theres a gun in your face or threat of imprisonment, you *ARE*NOT* being forced.
Second, greed is good. Say it over and over until you understand it. If there is an "implacable monopoly" in place that is making its customers unhappy, greed is the only thing that can break it apart. Greed and selfishness on the part of a productive *individual* (not society, cult, group, comittee, tribe, or community) is the only thing that will start a rival that pleases consumers. It will become the next monopoly and rightfully so.
I'm pissed as hell over Intel getting a billion sales from people who just want the name, but you know what? The companies that buy Intel processors are running slower, they'll fall behind. They'll either change their minds or go bankrupt. Only greed will make them change to using better processors.
Have faith in reality. It weeds out the bad automatically. No "evil empire" or evil situation has been eternal or lasted anywhere near as long as the concepts of freedom have.
Esperandi
Note: All of the above is only possible in a laissez-faire capitalist system. In every other there are a bunch of other factors that insure monopolies will exist for as long as the government does and that greed is blocked so they can never be challenged by a better company.
"The real question is, are there any other means to try and preserve our freedoms from a certain group, that do not involve giving more power to another group that - history has taught us - will eventually turn around to stab us on the back and push an even more opressive regime upon us? "
Easy question: Thought.
If you don't think and accept whatever comes down the pike and can't change your mind after hearing something on TV, well, you deserve what you get (and probably worse since the world is too damn insulating against personal repurcussions from personal actions).
How about letting the big companies do whatever they want and living your life by putting thought into what you do? Then you don't have to get an ulcer worrying about things that will never happen.
Esperandi
You control the big corporations, they don't control you.
I'm one of the few that pursue truth to the point of nitpicking ;) As the majority of the world is today, nothing is ever as good as the people who praise it says it is and nothing is as bad as the people who decry it claim. You are contributing to this.
You need to explain to this average person that yes, deCSS *IS* currently being used to pirate DVD movies on countless IRC channels around the world BUT the purpose of the program is to circumvent monopoly and is simply a way of exercising our rights to Fair Use.
When you say "deCSS isn't used for copying DVDs", that's all fine and good if they're ignorant and stay that way, but what happens if they meet one asshole copying DVDs with deCSS and inevitably wearing one of those shirts? _EVERYTHING_ you said gets completely thrown out the window by them and you've lost credibility because you either don't know what you're talking about or you're a liar.
Esperandi
Drop by some big IRC servers like Efnet or Undernet, drop by the "moviez" rooms if you don't believe me.
Number 1, i want a t-shirt that says "fsck the system" ;)
Number 2, theres a reason why this wasn't created by a 3l33t kiddie... 3l33t kiddies never create anything! They just beg and whine to real geeks until they get some scripts or something.
Number 3, keep explaining your shirt! Why the hell do you think you're wearing it? Why do you think people wear yellow ribbons for AIDS or wore blue ribbons for anti-CDA? NOT so they could identify others with the same interests (but this might be why you're wearing the shirt, either that or to set yourself apart).. the reason things like this are created around issues is to disseminate the information! The more people that ask you, the more the shirt is doing its job as long as you're explaining it...
Esperandi
Combine this with that guy who made the supersuits that basically protect you from everything (you can jump off cliffs in it, get shot with a machine gun, get attacked by wild animals, pretty much anything) and it'd kick ass... people will say there are potentials for abuse. What abuse? That someone might hold up a store knowing that if they got shot it wouldn't hurt them? And you think the guy behind the counter wouldn't have the same stuff? What would he old the store up WITH? ;)
Esperandi
Looking forward to bullet-proof muscles.
There are a great many people using Linux and chanting its mantras at a fast pace that are simply doing it because when they walk into a room, half the people haven't heard of it and the other half don't use it. They have no interest in Linux at all, they only have interest in whatever is the "outcast" OS at a given point in time. They see targetting Microsoft like targetting all of popular culture. They are the loser-lovers. The conformists of a different color. They base everything they think off of popular opinion - they simply turn it around first. They preach individualism and how diversity is the spice of life and crap when in all actuality, they don't have an individual bone in their entire body, they're just as much conformists as the people they lambast.
;)
Watch, the bigger Linux gets, the smaller its faction of die-hard anti-Microsoft fans will get. What will be left is the new businesses infusing Linux with actual innovation, and the Open Source teams around the net.... who will mostly be disgruntled because they remember the good ole days when you could write a utility, generate a readme, and you were good to go. Now the users demand a GUI, a graphical install, and hiding of the OS. Users always ruin everything
Esperandi
Seriously, how on earth could this helpful, insightful post EVER be considered a troll?
Is it because he said you need a chain of command and not committees? That's the only thing I could think of, and he's right.
Esperandi
I know this is OT, but this baffled the hell out of me and I wanna know what's up.
I was an op in an IRC room for a few months a year ago, and someone was trying this. Well, needless to say we figured it out pretty quickly (all it did was sit there and laughed whenever other people laughed and made some short comments once in awhile).... then everyone just played with it, figuring out what it responded to... if these things start invading programming chat rooms, I'll never be able to get an answer to a question...
If these things are really GREAT however, they'll be able to answer my questions and not just laugh at jokes...
Esperandi
You have no clue what communism is, do you? Communism as an ideal does not involve death camps or any of that crap, communism is when the goods of a society are produced by the productive and shared with everyone by the government (take out the "by the government" words and you have socialism). Nothing more. yes, it ends up producing labor camps and such things, but that's not part of the idea.
Wake up and read the Communist Manifesto, you'd be surprised how much you recognize.
Esperandi
I don't relish the thought of putting in a new CD for each and every single app I want to put it. Surfing the web and you use a separate email client? Turn off the PSX2, take out the CD, put in a new one, reconnect to the Internet (forget cable modems, the thing has a 56k modem!), wait for it to read, read your mail, do the whole swap thing again to resume browsing.
And the likelihood of having a fully functional web browser along with a news reader and email client in the limited memory space of the PSX2 is highly doubtful....
Esperandi
Plus, isn't 2D slower than polygons on this thing? I mean, its not made for 2D stuff... and I've never seen a proposal for a 3D GUI that didn't suck
Communism is an idealogical choice, not something your born with. There is no communist "race." being against communism and its implications doesn't make one a rascist...
But perhaps you were responding to some actual rascist posts that got moderated down before I saw them, if so, ignore this.
Esperandi