Sweden, Norway and Denmark, at least, have (by American standards hyper-strict) privacy laws concerning among other things reading/monitoring other peoples' private email, and there have been cases where e-mails have been discarded as evidence because they were presumed confidential. (As far as I understand it, that means storing and using your employees private emails, say, in court, would be an offense similar in nature to illegal wiretapping.)
I doubt this will be any more disruptive than SSE1, SSE2, SSE3 or SSE4 was. They stayed synched when going 64-bits, after all. They can compete on speed and features, but both would lose if they destroyed the x86 platform by becoming incompatible.
I've been toying with this idea a bit, what if we become able to completely engineer life forms as complex as, say, bugs and plants. That would put the notion of biodiversity in another perspective. "So what if these species are endangered, if we need something like it, we'll just create it again." And any newly created lifeform would be 'close to extinction', and yet at the same time a artificial, manufactured product. I'm thinking a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with something that so clearly raises questions about the value of life.
Mm. Guess I'll have to look up the real stuff someday. I see Project Gutenberg has something. About sex scenes in the version of One Thousand and One Nights I read, there were some, but they were quite tastefully done. I probably wouldn't read the tale of the three slave girls arguing law fighting over a caliph's erection to someone as a bedtime story, though. The translator had noted that previous translations had given the books a somewhat unearned reputation as pure porn. I guess he added at least some bias in the other direction, though.
How so? I read Grimm's fairy tales as a kid, and I can't recall them being unusually violent as fairy tales go. Did I get a sanitized edition? It was a lot cleaner than, say, One Thousand and One Nights, which I also read, where people had their eyes stabbed out on a fairly regular basis.
Well, yeah, it's hard to see how the result of combining things that already are considered artforms, like story, music and graphics, in a way meant to evoke emotional responses in the peruser, is not itself an artform. Similarly it would seem weird that fiction should be art, but interactive fiction should not.
I think the problem is, when people start going "But is it art?", they almost invariably wander of trying to exactly define 'art', which is a sinkhole a discussion may never get out of again. Better to use induction; if a story can be art, then so can any game with a plot.
What you listed I would call games incorporating a philosophical theme. (Except the Tetris thing... Joke or art major?)
A (certainly non-exhaustive) list of some more games I would consider consider above-averagely artistic. Not listing any deep themes they discuss or such, I don't look for that. They just have that 'art feeling': - Deus Ex - System Shock 2 - Fallout - Planescape: Torment - Hotel Dusk: Room 215 - Final Fantasy VI, VII - Divi-Dead - Tsukihime
Without going into detail, I consider each of those, in different ways, to deserve to be considered not just an artwork as in the result of a creative effort, but 'art'. Now some of these, like Fallout, did push the envelope quite a bit. (Killing children and prostituting your wife, anyone? Lucky Jack Thompson weren't on the scene in those days.)
And yes, I know I've included Japanese porn games. Interestingly, I don't think the sex scenes are an integral part of either of those games, and in the case of Tsukihime, they even feel pretty badly tacked on.
I have assumed that one the reasons Microsoft have been pushing the virtual machine based.NET platform is that the recent switch to 64-bit x86 demonstrated one of the disadvantages to closed source software; that users can't easily recompile it for their architecture. They know that if they bind themself too tightly to x86, they'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of their life. And as you point out, a Windows running on another architecture isn't worth anything if all the applications people want to run are stuck to x86.
When (a) your software is entirely open source, or (b) all your software runs on a virtual machine, you're free to run on whatever makes sense.
I'm not sure how the comment previews are 'gobbling up space'. What else would you put there? Agreed that they may not be wanted by all, and might be done optional. What currently annoys me about them is that I don't see any way of telling whether the preview is the whole comment. I end up expanding them just in case, only to find out that yes, that was just a one-liner. Other than that, this might make for a fine use of the karma adjustment for small posts.
Treshold -1: Uncut and Raw Highlight treshold -1: Uncut and Raw
Now it's just like nested, but without the annoying page splits. I find a highlight treshold of 1 works fine, with messages I previously would have hidden now just not 'highlighted'.
I don't quite understand it myself, but I think that would be referring to experiments like Bell inequalities, which apparently somehow disproves the existance of local hidden variables, which is what most deterministically inclined people (like Einstein) initially suggest when confronted with quantum randomness.
I don't know why you'd single out open source, this applies to code at large. I think it's just one of those '90% percent of everything is crap' things.
They could use the ISP. Going beyond passive wiretapping, they could tack the trojan onto any binaries the suspect downloaded. No one really check the checksums anyway... (Incidentally, shouldn't every responsible browser show the checksum of recently downloaded files? And yet I know of no browser that does so...)
No dude, you got it all wrong! See, it's more like there's this guy. With an ice cream van, see? And this guy, he spends tons of money making ice cream receipts. It's insane, and it doesn't help that his vendors are all spoiled primadonnas, either. The guy pays like a million dollars just for nuts, and I don't know why he keeps buying from them, because the nuts taste like shit. But anyway, he makes ice cream, and a lot of the flavours suck, but some of them are really great, though sometimes it's hard to tell, so you just have to buy one and see. But that was fine, ya know? I used to buy one from time to time. But see, then some people started making their own ice cream. Hey, nothing wrong with that, don't get me wrong, it's cheap, and you can eat it at home. But thing is, they were using his recipes. Now me, I don't support that. I mean, guy used a lot of money researching those recipes, only fair that he gets something in return, no? But see, this guy now, the one with the ice cream van, he just goes nuts. Bat-shit crazy. Now every time I come to buy some ice cream he yells at me and calls me an ice-thief. Then he smears ice cream in my face and laughs at me. You still get ice cream, it's not that, but I don't know man... Sometimes I feel it's just not worth the bother anymore.
Do you have it from good sources that it is easier to write bug free software for the same tasks (OS stuff) using functional languages?
Even if you are describing your program in an inherently parallel way, the chips that the program will run on still execute them serially. Do you trust the computer to do the job of serializing the tasks better than a human with a traditional real-time OS? It may manage it, but the result is much less transparent. And it is usually harder to ensure specific running times when you're programming at a higher level.
I know what they are, but it's hard to know how much I need to know about them before critizising, when you don't actually say what features would make them a good fit for a car OS. I thought everyone agreed that low-level OS stuff like drivers were one of the things that weren't practical to do functional-style? Even if the languages you suggest somehow were a good fit, I wouldn't use something so exotic for a project like this. While I don't know what languages cars are typically programmed in, I doubt most car manufacturers have a surplus of experienced Haskell programmers.
If he's working on a system where size matters, he'll want to use precise terms to describe it. That's hardly pretentious, any more than NASA being meticulous to specify whether they're using imperial or metric units.
Cochlear implants are pretty neat, though. Yeah, blind people are a lot worse of, at best getting severely crappy resolutions and fps. If they ever reach VGA resolutions, I guess a lot of non-blind people are going to want one as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Sweden, Norway and Denmark, at least, have (by American standards hyper-strict) privacy laws concerning among other things reading/monitoring other peoples' private email, and there have been cases where e-mails have been discarded as evidence because they were presumed confidential. (As far as I understand it, that means storing and using your employees private emails, say, in court, would be an offense similar in nature to illegal wiretapping.)
I doubt this will be any more disruptive than SSE1, SSE2, SSE3 or SSE4 was.
They stayed synched when going 64-bits, after all. They can compete on speed and features, but both would lose if they destroyed the x86 platform by becoming incompatible.
Oh, be fair. It's only 33 orders of magnitude. (base 10, anyway)
"In two seconds, the pilot is going to panic and accidently push the stick sharply forward, as he reacts to my sudden preemtive forward tilt."
I've been toying with this idea a bit, what if we become able to completely engineer life forms as complex as, say, bugs and plants.
That would put the notion of biodiversity in another perspective. "So what if these species are endangered, if we need something like it, we'll just create it again." And any newly created lifeform would be 'close to extinction', and yet at the same time a artificial, manufactured product.
I'm thinking a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with something that so clearly raises questions about the value of life.
Mm. Guess I'll have to look up the real stuff someday. I see Project Gutenberg has something.
About sex scenes in the version of One Thousand and One Nights I read, there were some, but they were quite tastefully done. I probably wouldn't read the tale of the three slave girls arguing law fighting over a caliph's erection to someone as a bedtime story, though.
The translator had noted that previous translations had given the books a somewhat unearned reputation as pure porn. I guess he added at least some bias in the other direction, though.
Why, what they gonna do? Beat him up?
How so? I read Grimm's fairy tales as a kid, and I can't recall them being unusually violent as fairy tales go. Did I get a sanitized edition?
It was a lot cleaner than, say, One Thousand and One Nights, which I also read, where people had their eyes stabbed out on a fairly regular basis.
Well, yeah, it's hard to see how the result of combining things that already are considered artforms, like story, music and graphics, in a way meant to evoke emotional responses in the peruser, is not itself an artform. Similarly it would seem weird that fiction should be art, but interactive fiction should not.
I think the problem is, when people start going "But is it art?", they almost invariably wander of trying to exactly define 'art', which is a sinkhole a discussion may never get out of again. Better to use induction; if a story can be art, then so can any game with a plot.
What you listed I would call games incorporating a philosophical theme. (Except the Tetris thing... Joke or art major?)
A (certainly non-exhaustive) list of some more games I would consider consider above-averagely artistic. Not listing any deep themes they discuss or such, I don't look for that. They just have that 'art feeling':
- Deus Ex
- System Shock 2
- Fallout
- Planescape: Torment
- Hotel Dusk: Room 215
- Final Fantasy VI, VII
- Divi-Dead
- Tsukihime
Without going into detail, I consider each of those, in different ways, to deserve to be considered not just an artwork as in the result of a creative effort, but 'art'.
Now some of these, like Fallout, did push the envelope quite a bit. (Killing children and prostituting your wife, anyone? Lucky Jack Thompson weren't on the scene in those days.)
And yes, I know I've included Japanese porn games. Interestingly, I don't think the sex scenes are an integral part of either of those games, and in the case of Tsukihime, they even feel pretty badly tacked on.
I have assumed that one the reasons Microsoft have been pushing the virtual machine based .NET platform is that the recent switch to 64-bit x86 demonstrated one of the disadvantages to closed source software; that users can't easily recompile it for their architecture. They know that if they bind themself too tightly to x86, they'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of their life. And as you point out, a Windows running on another architecture isn't worth anything if all the applications people want to run are stuck to x86.
When (a) your software is entirely open source, or (b) all your software runs on a virtual machine, you're free to run on whatever makes sense.
I'm not sure how the comment previews are 'gobbling up space'. What else would you put there? Agreed that they may not be wanted by all, and might be done optional.
What currently annoys me about them is that I don't see any way of telling whether the preview is the whole comment. I end up expanding them just in case, only to find out that yes, that was just a one-liner. Other than that, this might make for a fine use of the karma adjustment for small posts.
Treshold -1: Uncut and Raw
Highlight treshold -1: Uncut and Raw
Now it's just like nested, but without the annoying page splits. I find a highlight treshold of 1 works fine, with messages I previously would have hidden now just not 'highlighted'.
Or ctrl-h.
Hm... I guess a truly anti-evolution candidate would be more like this
I don't quite understand it myself, but I think that would be referring to experiments like Bell inequalities, which apparently somehow disproves the existance of local hidden variables, which is what most deterministically inclined people (like Einstein) initially suggest when confronted with quantum randomness.
Then why on earth do game companies grant him permission, knowing it'll suck? Those things are bad enough to destroy a franchise just by association.
I don't know why you'd single out open source, this applies to code at large. I think it's just one of those '90% percent of everything is crap' things.
They could use the ISP. Going beyond passive wiretapping, they could tack the trojan onto any binaries the suspect downloaded. No one really check the checksums anyway... (Incidentally, shouldn't every responsible browser show the checksum of recently downloaded files? And yet I know of no browser that does so...)
No dude, you got it all wrong! See, it's more like there's this guy. With an ice cream van, see? And this guy, he spends tons of money making ice cream receipts. It's insane, and it doesn't help that his vendors are all spoiled primadonnas, either. The guy pays like a million dollars just for nuts, and I don't know why he keeps buying from them, because the nuts taste like shit. But anyway, he makes ice cream, and a lot of the flavours suck, but some of them are really great, though sometimes it's hard to tell, so you just have to buy one and see. But that was fine, ya know? I used to buy one from time to time. But see, then some people started making their own ice cream. Hey, nothing wrong with that, don't get me wrong, it's cheap, and you can eat it at home. But thing is, they were using his recipes. Now me, I don't support that. I mean, guy used a lot of money researching those recipes, only fair that he gets something in return, no? But see, this guy now, the one with the ice cream van, he just goes nuts. Bat-shit crazy. Now every time I come to buy some ice cream he yells at me and calls me an ice-thief. Then he smears ice cream in my face and laughs at me. You still get ice cream, it's not that, but I don't know man... Sometimes I feel it's just not worth the bother anymore.
Do you have it from good sources that it is easier to write bug free software for the same tasks (OS stuff) using functional languages?
Even if you are describing your program in an inherently parallel way, the chips that the program will run on still execute them serially. Do you trust the computer to do the job of serializing the tasks better than a human with a traditional real-time OS? It may manage it, but the result is much less transparent. And it is usually harder to ensure specific running times when you're programming at a higher level.
I know what they are, but it's hard to know how much I need to know about them before critizising, when you don't actually say what features would make them a good fit for a car OS. I thought everyone agreed that low-level OS stuff like drivers were one of the things that weren't practical to do functional-style?
Even if the languages you suggest somehow were a good fit, I wouldn't use something so exotic for a project like this. While I don't know what languages cars are typically programmed in, I doubt most car manufacturers have a surplus of experienced Haskell programmers.
If he's working on a system where size matters, he'll want to use precise terms to describe it. That's hardly pretentious, any more than NASA being meticulous to specify whether they're using imperial or metric units.
Cochlear implants are pretty neat, though. Yeah, blind people are a lot worse of, at best getting severely crappy resolutions and fps. If they ever reach VGA resolutions, I guess a lot of non-blind people are going to want one as well.
Not a chance. No one ever became a large and successful software firm by using Microsoft source management tools...
The employees must love them. I know how much they adore those exposed 'try me' buttons.