Of course, if you type in news.com as a URL in a browser, it works.
So this is interesting. Google is mad at News.Com, and Google (who pride themselves on being a world class search engine) have either missed News.Com, or have kill-filed it.
Which leads us to ask, Mr. Google: Are you incompetent or are you controlling access to information in a way that would make, say, the People's Republic of China sigh with admiration.
Ooops, forgot Google is already collaborating on restricting access to information with the PRC. I guess it is 'access to what Sergei and Larry can make money allowing you to find or NOT find' not 'access to information' that drives google. Wouldn't bother me if they didn't have what amounts to damned near a information access monopology (googlezon, anyone).
I think that this goes back to the original point of the post, which was more aimed at RPG/MMO than it was at 'PC GAMING' in general.
First, I'm a greybeard. I've been running RPG's fairly seriously for 30 years. I've written fiction, I've written software (including some text based games in the mainframe days)... That's my background.
Okay, so here is my take on this.
Number 1: RPG's are story driven. The player(s) need to accomplish something in the world, and even if the means is largely combat, the point is some meaningful change in the world (trivially, the status or 'level' of the characters, but in most games, either power or saving the world or....). So let's call this the 'Quest.'
Number 2: There needs to be a backdrop for Quests to happen against. This needs to be something approximating a believable world. Hence the fact that, pound for pound, gaming 'world' books outweigh gaming 'rule' books, and most rule books have a huge amount of 'world' content in them as well.
Number 3: (as has been stated in this thread) There is a social process at work - the players know each other, as do the characters - that prevents PKing in most cases. In my experience, people who PK either get PK'd in turn, or get thrown out of a gaming group. This breaks down in a larger social setting - for example, in RPG tournaments there is more of this than in 'friends' games.
So.... How is it that we can conceive of a MMO working? First of all, story is just about absent. Quests are things like 'camping' and 'go kill Joe, get his foo.' Not 'someone is undermining the security of northwest Lafania, and the villagers are looking for a champion, and....'
Second, the worlds themselves are fairly flat/boring/uninteresting, and this is inevitable because they are settings not for one group of adventurers, but for thousands of groups. There is no background for a Quest because there is no background - no solidity to the environment that provides meaningful context for actions...
Third, the social group doesn't help create a good game, but works against it. PK'ing has no real cost. At least, it is hard to have it cost. Sure, you can have reputation systems, but people can create new characters to get away from their bad rep. This just isn't necessary in f2f rpg's
So in every way, an online MMO fails to be a real rpg. This doesn't have to be so. For example, you could:
(1) Create an instance of a world for each group of say 20 players, so that the ratio of players to background characters and world story threads would be much higher. Too expensive?
(2) Have the game simulate warfare, where people had simple roles - that's been done, and it works much better, but it ain't role playing, it is virtual combat with personification...
(3) Develop strong AI capable of making up stories, keeping them coherent, adapting them to events as players interact with the world,... In other words, to be 'Game Masters.' Not holding my breath on strong AI :
We should give up on RPG's being 'on a computer.' Sure, 'assisted by a computer' perhaps, but even that doesn't work well (as experiments with say Neverwinter Nights will demonstrate)...
I had an employee a few years ago who didn't seem to understand the idea of uninterrupted work. I regularly close my door and get work done - research, coding, whatever - and the rule around the lab is, if the door is closed, you leave the person alone. This one guy didn't seem to understand this - I mean, he didn't WANT to have this apply to him...
He would come up with really annoying ways to interrupt, like hammering on my door really hard, or standing in front of the door talking loudly. The final straw, that resulted in his near-decapitation, was one incident where he emailed me, emailed me five minutes later to complain I hadn't responded, then borrowed a security key to let himself in to my office to ask why I wasn't answering email.
Geothermal energy relies on abnormal temperature gradients in the earth, usually caused by igneous intrusions in the shallow subsurface or by radically thinned crust caused by rift valleys (like the East African rift, or the Rio Grande rift in New Mexico, or...).
One apparently pervasive myth here on Slashdot is that you just 'make' power and then 'use' it. Sorry, that doesn't work. You have to 'make' power and then GET IT to where you will use it. Transmission line losses for power can be severe. One of the compelling reasons for using oil is that you use relatively little of it to move the rest to where you need it....
So... there are relatively few areas well suited to geothermal energy in the world. Very very few of these are near population centres that really need the power. There are a few moderate sized installations around - South Island of New Zealand, for example - but for the most part people don't build cities on top of geyser fields or for that matter, near them....
You have to look at the total cost of power - the cost of doing the research, plus the equipment procurement, plus the disposal of the old equipment factory, plus plus plus. In this kind of scheme, different kinds of power turn out to be economic. Geothermal just doesn't cut it - not enough of it, not in the right places, and quite expensive to keep the plants running.
By the way, one of the significant issues with the plants in New Zealand is that the super hot fluids are highly corrosive, so they eat the equipment, so you need better engineering and have high maintenance costs, so.... it's barely economic in the long run.
Sure, the hardware rocks. And the game demo is impressive. But the real issue facing games now is not hardware 'rocking' or not; at least, this generation may be the end of that being the significant problem.
The more significant problem is not RENDERING the world or having characters running AROUND in the world, it is building the world in the first place. Sure, in highly scripted game the game designer can prebuild some set pieces. As more and more artists get involved to make it pretty on higher and higher resolution devices this gets more expensive. And the game worlds don't get more interesting. Most of the current MMORPG's suffer from this - the stories are limited to camping and simple quests, or PVP, and the worlds are not that pretty even on hardware that would ALLOW them to be.
Given a bunch of cell chips, why not use AI to build worlds (or at least, extensions to worlds like side alleys,....) on the fly. That way the game would be different each time. That way art modules (tiles in 3d...) could be put together in recombinant ways,....
It's not like the machines are lacking the CPU power to do this kind of grammar based world generation. Or for that matter, grammar based narrative generation (in other words, a quest generator with limited scope).
Remember, given more CPU power, you CAN choose to spend it on interesting things....
So... as for the new "button" on the controller... the one with the rather appropriate "X"...
Given that it doesn't LOOK like it is supposed to rotate (note the aligned X that points to 4 (unreadable...) letters in the photo, how about:
A 3d orientation sensor... similar to a 'bubble level' on a carpenters tool... useful in games to allow the handset to replicate 3 degrees of freedom (pitch, roll, yaw) in games.
Of course, from a HCI/Usability point of view, the question would be whether using the OTHER buttons without shifting the 3 degrees of position information (jiggling the controller) would be possible...
Note that IBM has for years sold a 6-degree-of-freedom mouse (3 translation, 3 rotation) for VR and CADCAM applications. And many VR apps have 3dof or 6dof controllers.
Of course, it would be even cooler if it was 6dof but... probably too high tech.
Clearing up a couple of confusions seen above....
First, there are (at least) three types of resolution in remote sensing: spatial, spectral, and temporal. In other words, how small a thing can you see, how much 'color' information can you see, and how often can you see, any one area. Color is actually a misleading term here because many of the 'things' that a sensor sees are not visible to the human eye.
Spatial Resolution: The best spaceborne non-military platforms are now at.5m pixel resolution. That means you can see the shadow of a person on a bright day, can get a good view of a large building, can map streets and traffic, and so on. There are military systems that are in the sub-10cm range and there are persistant rumours of systems in the 1-2cm range using adaptive optics.
Spectral Resolution: First, most sensors look at fairly narrow wavelength ranges. This means that a sensor seeing 'red' isn't seeing all of what YOU would call red, it's seeing a slice of that. Most sensors are themed - they are built so see wavelengths that allow fairly easy discrimination between natural features in one subject area. Landsat has (mostly) bands for discrimination of healthy and unhealthy vegetation from soil, rock, and water - it was originally a 'biomapping' satellite. One rock mapping band was added so it is somewhat useful for rock discrimination too. You can always add more bands to a satellite, but this dramatically increases download time, and many modern satellites are essentially limited by the power and time to download what they see: a high spatial resolution, high spectral resolution satellite would spend lots of time just downloading.
If a satellite has a few bands (up to say 20... no real rule here) it is called multispectral. If it has one 'all spectra together in one grey image' band that is called a panchromatic sensor. If it has a lot of bands (... more than 20) in one sensor that is called hyperspectral. As you add bands, download time increases and calibration sensitivity problems get severe. Most hyperspectral systems currently used are airborne.
There are also active satellites - these transmit radiation and then wait for the 'echo.' Canada's RADARSAT is an example. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is another example of an active system based on RADAR. The 'cutting edge' in active systems right now is in LIDAR - laser ranging for 3d - but these are pretty much airborne at the moment, though this will undoubtably change.
Temporal resolution means 'how often do you see the same area.' Some satellites are in stationary orbits - they look at the same thing all day - and some are in orbits that have return periods. Some are mildly steerable (pointable, for example) and can do oblique views for 3d. Landsat, for example, only sees the same area every few weeks (can't remember the return period to be honest....) whereas lots of weather sats just sit in one place.
So.... depending on what you mean by resolution, and especially depending on what you are looking at, different sats are useful.
Finally (... will he ever shut up...) once you have a 'scene' for an area there is a huge amount that can be accomplished with image processing, including sharping, fusing with other types of imagery, construction of 3d views,....
So....
the point of this EU initiative is to have a medium spatial resolution, medium-to-fairly-high spectral resolution image of a large area, calibrated properly so that image processing (e.g. to identify health in crops) is meaningful across the entire composite scene, so scientific studies can be done......
RandomRob
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. Just tried something.
I typed News.com into Google. No hits. Hmm.
So I tried ZDNet and a few others. Lots of hits.
Of course, if you type in news.com as a URL in a browser, it works.
So this is interesting. Google is mad at News.Com, and Google (who pride themselves on being a world class search engine) have either missed News.Com, or have kill-filed it.
Which leads us to ask, Mr. Google: Are you incompetent or are you controlling access to information in a way that would make, say, the People's Republic of China sigh with admiration.
Ooops, forgot Google is already collaborating on restricting access to information with the PRC. I guess it is 'access to what Sergei and Larry can make money allowing you to find or NOT find' not 'access to information' that drives google. Wouldn't bother me if they didn't have what amounts to damned near a information access monopology (googlezon, anyone).
Just some thoughts.
RandomRob
First, I'm a greybeard. I've been running RPG's fairly seriously for 30 years. I've written fiction, I've written software (including some text based games in the mainframe days)... That's my background.
Okay, so here is my take on this.
Number 1: RPG's are story driven. The player(s) need to accomplish something in the world, and even if the means is largely combat, the point is some meaningful change in the world (trivially, the status or 'level' of the characters, but in most games, either power or saving the world or....). So let's call this the 'Quest.'
Number 2: There needs to be a backdrop for Quests to happen against. This needs to be something approximating a believable world. Hence the fact that, pound for pound, gaming 'world' books outweigh gaming 'rule' books, and most rule books have a huge amount of 'world' content in them as well.
Number 3: (as has been stated in this thread) There is a social process at work - the players know each other, as do the characters - that prevents PKing in most cases. In my experience, people who PK either get PK'd in turn, or get thrown out of a gaming group. This breaks down in a larger social setting - for example, in RPG tournaments there is more of this than in 'friends' games.
So.... How is it that we can conceive of a MMO working? First of all, story is just about absent. Quests are things like 'camping' and 'go kill Joe, get his foo.' Not 'someone is undermining the security of northwest Lafania, and the villagers are looking for a champion, and....'
Second, the worlds themselves are fairly flat/boring/uninteresting, and this is inevitable because they are settings not for one group of adventurers, but for thousands of groups. There is no background for a Quest because there is no background - no solidity to the environment that provides meaningful context for actions...
Third, the social group doesn't help create a good game, but works against it. PK'ing has no real cost. At least, it is hard to have it cost. Sure, you can have reputation systems, but people can create new characters to get away from their bad rep. This just isn't necessary in f2f rpg's
So in every way, an online MMO fails to be a real rpg. This doesn't have to be so. For example, you could:
(1) Create an instance of a world for each group of say 20 players, so that the ratio of players to background characters and world story threads would be much higher. Too expensive?
(2) Have the game simulate warfare, where people had simple roles - that's been done, and it works much better, but it ain't role playing, it is virtual combat with personification...
(3) Develop strong AI capable of making up stories, keeping them coherent, adapting them to events as players interact with the world,... In other words, to be 'Game Masters.' Not holding my breath on strong AI :
We should give up on RPG's being 'on a computer.' Sure, 'assisted by a computer' perhaps, but even that doesn't work well (as experiments with say Neverwinter Nights will demonstrate)...
-- RandomRob --
I had an employee a few years ago who didn't seem to understand the idea of uninterrupted work. I regularly close my door and get work done - research, coding, whatever - and the rule around the lab is, if the door is closed, you leave the person alone. This one guy didn't seem to understand this - I mean, he didn't WANT to have this apply to him...
He would come up with really annoying ways to interrupt, like hammering on my door really hard, or standing in front of the door talking loudly. The final straw, that resulted in his near-decapitation, was one incident where he emailed me, emailed me five minutes later to complain I hadn't responded, then borrowed a security key to let himself in to my office to ask why I wasn't answering email.
Sigh.
Geothermal energy relies on abnormal temperature gradients in the earth, usually caused by igneous intrusions in the shallow subsurface or by radically thinned crust caused by rift valleys (like the East African rift, or the Rio Grande rift in New Mexico, or...).
One apparently pervasive myth here on Slashdot is that you just 'make' power and then 'use' it. Sorry, that doesn't work. You have to 'make' power and then GET IT to where you will use it. Transmission line losses for power can be severe. One of the compelling reasons for using oil is that you use relatively little of it to move the rest to where you need it....
So... there are relatively few areas well suited to geothermal energy in the world. Very very few of these are near population centres that really need the power. There are a few moderate sized installations around - South Island of New Zealand, for example - but for the most part people don't build cities on top of geyser fields or for that matter, near them....
You have to look at the total cost of power - the cost of doing the research, plus the equipment procurement, plus the disposal of the old equipment factory, plus plus plus. In this kind of scheme, different kinds of power turn out to be economic. Geothermal just doesn't cut it - not enough of it, not in the right places, and quite expensive to keep the plants running.
By the way, one of the significant issues with the plants in New Zealand is that the super hot fluids are highly corrosive, so they eat the equipment, so you need better engineering and have high maintenance costs, so.... it's barely economic in the long run.
RandomRob
The more significant problem is not RENDERING the world or having characters running AROUND in the world, it is building the world in the first place. Sure, in highly scripted game the game designer can prebuild some set pieces. As more and more artists get involved to make it pretty on higher and higher resolution devices this gets more expensive. And the game worlds don't get more interesting. Most of the current MMORPG's suffer from this - the stories are limited to camping and simple quests, or PVP, and the worlds are not that pretty even on hardware that would ALLOW them to be.
Given a bunch of cell chips, why not use AI to build worlds (or at least, extensions to worlds like side alleys,....) on the fly. That way the game would be different each time. That way art modules (tiles in 3d...) could be put together in recombinant ways, ....
It's not like the machines are lacking the CPU power to do this kind of grammar based world generation. Or for that matter, grammar based narrative generation (in other words, a quest generator with limited scope).
Remember, given more CPU power, you CAN choose to spend it on interesting things....
RandomRob...
So... as for the new "button" on the controller... the one with the rather appropriate "X"...
Given that it doesn't LOOK like it is supposed to rotate (note the aligned X that points to 4 (unreadable...) letters in the photo, how about:
A 3d orientation sensor... similar to a 'bubble level' on a carpenters tool... useful in games to allow the handset to replicate 3 degrees of freedom (pitch, roll, yaw) in games.
Of course, from a HCI/Usability point of view, the question would be whether using the OTHER buttons without shifting the 3 degrees of position information (jiggling the controller) would be possible...
Note that IBM has for years sold a 6-degree-of-freedom mouse (3 translation, 3 rotation) for VR and CADCAM applications. And many VR apps have 3dof or 6dof controllers.
Of course, it would be even cooler if it was 6dof but... probably too high tech.
RandomRob
Clearing up a couple of confusions seen above.... First, there are (at least) three types of resolution in remote sensing: spatial, spectral, and temporal. In other words, how small a thing can you see, how much 'color' information can you see, and how often can you see, any one area. Color is actually a misleading term here because many of the 'things' that a sensor sees are not visible to the human eye. Spatial Resolution: The best spaceborne non-military platforms are now at .5m pixel resolution. That means you can see the shadow of a person on a bright day, can get a good view of a large building, can map streets and traffic, and so on. There are military systems that are in the sub-10cm range and there are persistant rumours of systems in the 1-2cm range using adaptive optics.
Spectral Resolution: First, most sensors look at fairly narrow wavelength ranges. This means that a sensor seeing 'red' isn't seeing all of what YOU would call red, it's seeing a slice of that. Most sensors are themed - they are built so see wavelengths that allow fairly easy discrimination between natural features in one subject area. Landsat has (mostly) bands for discrimination of healthy and unhealthy vegetation from soil, rock, and water - it was originally a 'biomapping' satellite. One rock mapping band was added so it is somewhat useful for rock discrimination too. You can always add more bands to a satellite, but this dramatically increases download time, and many modern satellites are essentially limited by the power and time to download what they see: a high spatial resolution, high spectral resolution satellite would spend lots of time just downloading.
If a satellite has a few bands (up to say 20... no real rule here) it is called multispectral. If it has one 'all spectra together in one grey image' band that is called a panchromatic sensor. If it has a lot of bands (... more than 20) in one sensor that is called hyperspectral. As you add bands, download time increases and calibration sensitivity problems get severe. Most hyperspectral systems currently used are airborne.
There are also active satellites - these transmit radiation and then wait for the 'echo.' Canada's RADARSAT is an example. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is another example of an active system based on RADAR. The 'cutting edge' in active systems right now is in LIDAR - laser ranging for 3d - but these are pretty much airborne at the moment, though this will undoubtably change.
Temporal resolution means 'how often do you see the same area.' Some satellites are in stationary orbits - they look at the same thing all day - and some are in orbits that have return periods. Some are mildly steerable (pointable, for example) and can do oblique views for 3d. Landsat, for example, only sees the same area every few weeks (can't remember the return period to be honest....) whereas lots of weather sats just sit in one place.
So.... depending on what you mean by resolution, and especially depending on what you are looking at, different sats are useful.
Finally (... will he ever shut up ...) once you have a 'scene' for an area there is a huge amount that can be accomplished with image processing, including sharping, fusing with other types of imagery, construction of 3d views, ....
So....
the point of this EU initiative is to have a medium spatial resolution, medium-to-fairly-high spectral resolution image of a large area, calibrated properly so that image processing (e.g. to identify health in crops) is meaningful across the entire composite scene, so scientific studies can be done... ...
RandomRob