Very interesting, and informative. Thanks! However --
Some random guy with a web site was the first guy ever to run Mach on 8 CPUs? Let's just say I doubt it, and leave it at that.
I'm sure you're right. However, this is the first we of the general public have heard of it being done. And, the relative simplicity of "Throw out old CPUs, pop in two shiny new ones" is very illustrative of just how well designed Mach and OSX were. Not only that, it seems that it reflects well on the quality of Apple's general engineering of the platform hardware.
Unless, of course, they somehow figure out that you had an electromagnet in the doorframe.
I imagine that any reasonably trained police force, when executing such a seizure, would have both the training to expect such a thing, and the tools to detect it. Enough people have to have done exactly this that it'd be stupid not to presume so.
Also, what do you do when they send it out the window?:)
Would I actually put a GPS bug in my child's car? No. I would rather buy a pre-paid cellphone and hide it somewhere in the interior of the car with a power adapter spliced to the wiring, and let my child know about it. This for safety, not privacy invasion. Car gets stolen or child comes up missing, one phone call by the police to the cell phone company will locate the car.
I wouldn't be so sure. When I lost my cellular phone, the company could not (or would not?) tell me any info about where it was "last seen". All they could tell me was info on the last phone call I made. While this couldbe handy if it had been stolen and then used, it didn't help to know that I'd called Sonic for directions.
Don't do some half-assed "Wire in a prepaid cell phone" if you're serious about this. Buy a damn Lo-Jack. I realize that it's effectively all they are, but still -- get the real thing.
Well, I would imagine that announcing it is the act that alleges that it happened. So, an announcement that something allegedly did something seems a smidge redundant.
Only a little, though. Better to underscore the uncertainty, if one is not certain, I guess. =) (I thought this had progressed past the "allegedly" stage, though... but then I don't follow news much so I could be wrong.)
I don't understand why this is such a big change. In the time that it takes to see someone's name, you've usually either killed them, or been killed by them (my experiences tend toward the latter;)). If it's a temporary ping on the radar ("Joe saw Bob here..."), it doesn't seem all that useful. If it's permanent, then that would be a HUGE change (and might imbalance things, as good luck hiding once you're marked;)).
Maybe if they made it so that ANY player seen within a cone of vision (maybe 10 degrees from center?) would be visible on radar, so that you could for example sweep an opposing team, and your teammates would be able to see that, for example, there are 4 enemies at a particular point.
*shrugs*. It's cool to be able to see enemies, don't get me wrong... but CS is so fast paced that I don't think i've ever been able to have my crosshairs on a living enemy long enough to see their name.
(Off topic: is there a way to change the opacity of the radar? I hate being unable to read it when there's sky behind it.)
Microsoft has been a regulatory force on the industry
And there you have stumbled upon the main value they provided. They forced all the disparate hardware vendors to support a common OS - MSDOS, and then later Windows, so that hardware became interchangeable.
I agree -- omniscient / super-aiming enemies are very annoying.
One game that did a pretty good job with enemy AI is FEAR, IMO. THey still have super senses (can shoot at me from far far away), but the nice thing is, they DO miss (but don't give them time to snipe;)). Even more importanly, they often try to work as a team, and the levels often give them good opportunities to flank you. Finding and using choke points becomes even more important. What I liked was, they were good enough at flanking that I could expect it, and made planning engagements a bit richer.
Enemies in Rainbow Six games tend to have better than average ai, too, but I really hate that they're freakin' aimbots.:-( I mean... come on. Headshots with an uzi at 80 yards? Wish my guys could shoot that well...
Re:too hard is bad?
on
Prey Review
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Agreed. I'd mod you up, but I want to reply with an example.
Halo for PC. I played it through on normal (or was it easy?) difficulty. Awesome game, excellent story. As I played, I got better, and decided to play it again on Legendary.
Wow. Big difference; lots and LOTS of reloads. It became more a game of "survive this checkpoint and reload till you get the next". I eventually got to the point where it was TOO HARD. I could NOT beat the initial fight on the Truth and Reconciliation ship (after taking the elevator up from the landing zone).
I lost count of the reloads. A large portion was luck (which doors were opened first? could I get an initial sticky grenade on the first guy? Were my teammates a bunch of retards?), but the fact is, I was unable to progress past that point in the game at that level of difficulty. In this case, harder was not completely "better". If that had been the only difficulty level, that would have been poor game design.
I don't mind 30 hours of game play. I do object when 5-10 hours are spent on the same checkpoint with no progress. (I might have reattempted it, but after patching the game, my savegames got toasted and I did not feel like slogging through that level again. *shrugs*.
Had I co-op mode available, this might have been more do-able. As is... screw it. I have better ways to waste my time.
a goal based higher level of functioning with "friendliness" to humans as being the primary goal and improve yourself as a secondary subgoal
"friendliness"... how do we define that? There is the tricky part. It seems that it could be very easy to give a literal definition, leading such a hypothetical AI to institute a nanny-state. Our woes may be decreased, but our joys wouldn't be increased.
Perhaps something like 'maximize human joys' would be a good corrolary.. but even then,i'm not sure it would work.
Their super-small one (12" I think?) and the top model (which I can't quite see why it's SO much more expensive w/o looking in more detail) both are celeron M or pentium M, but the middle two on the page are both Core Duo capable.
Imagine if Stephen Hawking's parents had done that. I'm glad they didn't.
I can empathize with it, but man -- humanity as a whole has certainly benefitted from the labors of people that were depressed, ill, confined to wheelchairs, etc. At least, they have in recent history.
OTOH, imagine if there were a way to detect that your child would be Dumb as opposed to Brilliant. No one wants their kid to be below average... (man, that's a scary line of thought to go down.).
... What's to stop someone from just making up a number? Or, having a bill of currency on hand, but no actual legal copy of the software (e.g., some ISO one's downloaded from the internet)?
A made-up number could conceivably conflict with a future bill used for registration.
Then again, this may not be any worse than the normal "enter the 45 digit serial number from the back of the CD case". I/do/ like that the bill itself is used as proof, hehe.
Overall, it sounds clever, but seems to have weaknesses, not all of which I can identify.
What do Sheriffs care about peoples' wireless network devices? Unless I'm bashing my wife over the head with my access point, I don't want a Sheriff to even tell me what to do with my freggin' network.
I disagree.
Yes, it's less useful than stopping gang violence, or other crimes, but it IS under the umbrella of protecting the public. Many computer users are NOT as savvy as those of us here, and might have NO idea that their network is open to attack, or that their network packets are unencrypted, and thus their credit card numbers and logins are in the clear.
If the police saw you walking around with a BIG FAT wad of bills sticking out of your back pocket, they might stop you and say, "By the way, you might want to hide that money, someone could swipe it". "To serve and protect" has many facets, I imagine. Helping people realize that what they are doing us potentially unsafe (albeit legal) is something that I could consider useful for police to do.
This is what I get for reading the article page from the bottom up.
I read this,
Your character, a PI, goes to an inn in a little shanty town. If you forget to bolt the doors, then a bunch of cultist fishermen kick the door in and tear you apart. If you actually bolt the doors, then it starts a frantic chase where you have to run from room to room bolting the doors behind you....
and immediately thought, "Damn, that sounds like a H.P. Lovecraft story I read a month ago...". I then read a little higher and realized that it was not someone stealing his ideas, but rather someone making a Call of Cthulhu game. I'd even heard of the game before, but hadn't quite processed the name. hehe.
The moral: Don't read from the bottom up!:D (And I can't wait to play Dark Corners of the Earth.)
I have not played Doom3 (more than the demo), but was disappointed. Walking into every room, and expecting an imp, and being right _every time_, got old.
FEAR, on the other hand... wow. I'm a timid gamer as is, but they did a good job of things. (I'm about 4 levels from the last, I think, having crash landed someplace urban looking.)
The hallucinations really creep me out. I know they will happen, and am walking around, but they are always different, have that noise that accompanies them, and are VERY abrupt. Most importantly, they occur at the most unexpected places. Walking down a hallway? Looking out a window? climbing down a stepladder? Yikes! I once repeated the beginning of a level that had such a hallucination, and even EXPECTING it, I was still shocked. Pretty cool.
At some points, things are scary not due to monsters, but due to LACK of enemies. Walking around, why is everything dark and broken? There's blood there... and that thing's obviously broken. What the hell happened here?
ok, didn't mean for this to turn into astream of consciousness review of FEAR. I'll just say that it's scared me more than anything since resident evil. (RE scares me more due to the power of the monsters, and extreme scarcity of resources with which to fight them off. Survival horror my ass, I want a big gun.:D I like that FEAR keeps the scary moments on, while also letting me not worry (too much) that I'm going to be short on ammo.)
I think that it IS fitting, in that it illustrates something that is NOT a right, despite what many computer users seem to feel.
Is it our right to copy music for ourselves? Most of us think so. For giving to others? Most of us don't think so.
Is it a right to usecracked/unlicensed software (that isn't open source / freeware)? MANY people feel that it is. Either "They owe me", or "it's industry standard" or "I'll use it once I graduate" (all excuses I heard in a photoshop vs Gimp thread on a forum I am on) -- all of these are used as rationalizations for why it's OK.
I feel such a position is incorrect, untenable, and indefendable. I'm glad to see things like this covered in such a way that shows that people DO prosecute for things like using unlicensed fonts (as absurd as that may sound), or sue for abusing open source licenses, or whatever.
I think it DOES belong in YRO.
Re:Ok, I was interested before but now....
on
Wii-mote In Action
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· Score: 1
hehe =) I ronically, I've been thinking the same thing. i'd rather play something like this with her than watch Law and Order (which we both love).
Re:Ok, I was interested before but now....
on
Wii-mote In Action
·
· Score: 1
Exactly right. My wife (a non-gamer) asked me last night, "Do we have a Nintendo? I heard about this game called Brain.... age? can we play that together?"
REALLY tempts me to buy two ds lites;) But... meh. saving for a monitor. =(
It would certainly be a more memorable way to hit upon the various parts of the bible. Even better if they worked hard to make it keep to the chronology stated in the bible. Maybe even have multiple "campaigns" : the 40-year Moses campaign (OK more like 45 or more;)), a campaign for after the hebrew nation was well established, etc.:)
The amount of content available actually seems pretty massive. If Rockstar made it, I would actually expect its quality to be pretty good, and would probably buy it.:)
It would sure beat/reading/ it. (though think about it: No need for a strategy guide. Don't know what is suppsoed to happen next? "Try reading chapter 12, verses 23-40!";))
Slashdot Mirror
Very interesting, and informative. Thanks! However --
Some random guy with a web site was the first guy ever to run Mach on 8 CPUs? Let's just say I doubt it, and leave it at that.
I'm sure you're right. However, this is the first we of the general public have heard of it being done. And, the relative simplicity of "Throw out old CPUs, pop in two shiny new ones" is very illustrative of just how well designed Mach and OSX were. Not only that, it seems that it reflects well on the quality of Apple's general engineering of the platform hardware.
I know I'm much more interested in one now. =D
Interns. =)
Unless, of course, they somehow figure out that you had an electromagnet in the doorframe.
:)
I imagine that any reasonably trained police force, when executing such a seizure, would have both the training to expect such a thing, and the tools to detect it. Enough people have to have done exactly this that it'd be stupid not to presume so.
Also, what do you do when they send it out the window?
Would I actually put a GPS bug in my child's car? No. I would rather buy a pre-paid cellphone and hide it somewhere in the interior of the car with a power adapter spliced to the wiring, and let my child know about it. This for safety, not privacy invasion. Car gets stolen or child comes up missing, one phone call by the police to the cell phone company will locate the car.
I wouldn't be so sure. When I lost my cellular phone, the company could not (or would not?) tell me any info about where it was "last seen". All they could tell me was info on the last phone call I made. While this couldbe handy if it had been stolen and then used, it didn't help to know that I'd called Sonic for directions.
Don't do some half-assed "Wire in a prepaid cell phone" if you're serious about this. Buy a damn Lo-Jack. I realize that it's effectively all they are, but still -- get the real thing.
the rest of the people are goatsexd.
:-(
root@blackberry / # ps -uroot |grep d
3 ? 00:00:00 keventd
4 ? 00:00:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
5 ? 00:00:18 kswapd
6 ? 00:00:09 kscand
7 ? 00:00:00 bdflush
8 ? 00:00:20 kupdated
14 ? 00:00:01 kreiserfsd
157 ? 00:00:00 devfsd
359 ? 00:00:00 khubd
1484 ? 00:00:26 sshd
1079 ? 00:00:00 sshd
1099 ? 00:00:00 goatsexd
DAMMIT!
If I could assign mod points, I'd mod you +1.25 insightful, and about -0.25 flamebait. ;)
After several intelligence blunders.... .... the use of the word allegedely is a healthy necessity.
I do agree there. =)
We cannot allow the enemy to have a wibble gap!
Well, I would imagine that announcing it is the act that alleges that it happened. So, an announcement that something allegedly did something seems a smidge redundant.
... but then I don't follow news much so I could be wrong.)
Only a little, though. Better to underscore the uncertainty, if one is not certain, I guess. =) (I thought this had progressed past the "allegedly" stage, though
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers.
I read that as "The Crystal Beavers", and was very confused for a second.
I don't understand why this is such a big change. In the time that it takes to see someone's name, you've usually either killed them, or been killed by them (my experiences tend toward the latter ;)). If it's a temporary ping on the radar ("Joe saw Bob here ..."), it doesn't seem all that useful. If it's permanent, then that would be a HUGE change (and might imbalance things, as good luck hiding once you're marked ;)).
... but CS is so fast paced that I don't think i've ever been able to have my crosshairs on a living enemy long enough to see their name.
Maybe if they made it so that ANY player seen within a cone of vision (maybe 10 degrees from center?) would be visible on radar, so that you could for example sweep an opposing team, and your teammates would be able to see that, for example, there are 4 enemies at a particular point.
*shrugs*. It's cool to be able to see enemies, don't get me wrong
(Off topic: is there a way to change the opacity of the radar? I hate being unable to read it when there's sky behind it.)
Microsoft has been a regulatory force on the industry
And there you have stumbled upon the main value they provided. They forced all the disparate hardware vendors to support a common OS - MSDOS, and then later Windows, so that hardware became interchangeable.
^-- I found that particularly insightful.
I agree -- omniscient / super-aiming enemies are very annoying.
;)). Even more importanly, they often try to work as a team, and the levels often give them good opportunities to flank you. Finding and using choke points becomes even more important. What I liked was, they were good enough at flanking that I could expect it, and made planning engagements a bit richer.
:-( I mean ... come on. Headshots with an uzi at 80 yards? Wish my guys could shoot that well...
One game that did a pretty good job with enemy AI is FEAR, IMO. THey still have super senses (can shoot at me from far far away), but the nice thing is, they DO miss (but don't give them time to snipe
Enemies in Rainbow Six games tend to have better than average ai, too, but I really hate that they're freakin' aimbots.
Agreed. I'd mod you up, but I want to reply with an example.
... screw it. I have better ways to waste my time.
Halo for PC. I played it through on normal (or was it easy?) difficulty. Awesome game, excellent story. As I played, I got better, and decided to play it again on Legendary.
Wow. Big difference; lots and LOTS of reloads. It became more a game of "survive this checkpoint and reload till you get the next". I eventually got to the point where it was TOO HARD. I could NOT beat the initial fight on the Truth and Reconciliation ship (after taking the elevator up from the landing zone).
I lost count of the reloads. A large portion was luck (which doors were opened first? could I get an initial sticky grenade on the first guy? Were my teammates a bunch of retards?), but the fact is, I was unable to progress past that point in the game at that level of difficulty. In this case, harder was not completely "better". If that had been the only difficulty level, that would have been poor game design.
I don't mind 30 hours of game play. I do object when 5-10 hours are spent on the same checkpoint with no progress. (I might have reattempted it, but after patching the game, my savegames got toasted and I did not feel like slogging through that level again. *shrugs*.
Had I co-op mode available, this might have been more do-able. As is
a goal based higher level of functioning with "friendliness" to humans as being the primary goal and improve yourself as a secondary subgoal
... how do we define that? There is the tricky part. It seems that it could be very easy to give a literal definition, leading such a hypothetical AI to institute a nanny-state. Our woes may be decreased, but our joys wouldn't be increased.
.. but even then,i'm not sure it would work.
"friendliness"
Perhaps something like 'maximize human joys' would be a good corrolary
All from shoprcubed.com:
http://shoprcubed.com/products.asp?cat=27
14 inch widescreen
15.4 inch widescreen
Their super-small one (12" I think?) and the top model (which I can't quite see why it's SO much more expensive w/o looking in more detail) both are celeron M or pentium M, but the middle two on the page are both Core Duo capable.
Imagine if Stephen Hawking's parents had done that. I'm glad they didn't.
... (man, that's a scary line of thought to go down.).
I can empathize with it, but man -- humanity as a whole has certainly benefitted from the labors of people that were depressed, ill, confined to wheelchairs, etc. At least, they have in recent history.
OTOH, imagine if there were a way to detect that your child would be Dumb as opposed to Brilliant. No one wants their kid to be below average
... What's to stop someone from just making up a number? Or, having a bill of currency on hand, but no actual legal copy of the software (e.g., some ISO one's downloaded from the internet)?
/do/ like that the bill itself is used as proof, hehe.
A made-up number could conceivably conflict with a future bill used for registration.
Then again, this may not be any worse than the normal "enter the 45 digit serial number from the back of the CD case". I
Overall, it sounds clever, but seems to have weaknesses, not all of which I can identify.
What do Sheriffs care about peoples' wireless network devices? Unless I'm bashing my wife over the head with my access point, I don't want a Sheriff to even tell me what to do with my freggin' network.
I disagree.
Yes, it's less useful than stopping gang violence, or other crimes, but it IS under the umbrella of protecting the public. Many computer users are NOT as savvy as those of us here, and might have NO idea that their network is open to attack, or that their network packets are unencrypted, and thus their credit card numbers and logins are in the clear.
If the police saw you walking around with a BIG FAT wad of bills sticking out of your back pocket, they might stop you and say, "By the way, you might want to hide that money, someone could swipe it". "To serve and protect" has many facets, I imagine. Helping people realize that what they are doing us potentially unsafe (albeit legal) is something that I could consider useful for police to do.
This is what I get for reading the article page from the bottom up.
....
:D (And I can't wait to play Dark Corners of the Earth.)
I read this,
Your character, a PI, goes to an inn in a little shanty town. If you forget to bolt the doors, then a bunch of cultist fishermen kick the door in and tear you apart. If you actually bolt the doors, then it starts a frantic chase where you have to run from room to room bolting the doors behind you
and immediately thought, "Damn, that sounds like a H.P. Lovecraft story I read a month ago...". I then read a little higher and realized that it was not someone stealing his ideas, but rather someone making a Call of Cthulhu game. I'd even heard of the game before, but hadn't quite processed the name. hehe.
The moral: Don't read from the bottom up!
I have not played Doom3 (more than the demo), but was disappointed. Walking into every room, and expecting an imp, and being right _every time_, got old.
... wow. I'm a timid gamer as is, but they did a good job of things. (I'm about 4 levels from the last, I think, having crash landed someplace urban looking.)
... and that thing's obviously broken. What the hell happened here?
:D I like that FEAR keeps the scary moments on, while also letting me not worry (too much) that I'm going to be short on ammo.)
FEAR, on the other hand
The hallucinations really creep me out. I know they will happen, and am walking around, but they are always different, have that noise that accompanies them, and are VERY abrupt. Most importantly, they occur at the most unexpected places. Walking down a hallway? Looking out a window? climbing down a stepladder? Yikes! I once repeated the beginning of a level that had such a hallucination, and even EXPECTING it, I was still shocked. Pretty cool.
At some points, things are scary not due to monsters, but due to LACK of enemies. Walking around, why is everything dark and broken? There's blood there
ok, didn't mean for this to turn into astream of consciousness review of FEAR. I'll just say that it's scared me more than anything since resident evil. (RE scares me more due to the power of the monsters, and extreme scarcity of resources with which to fight them off. Survival horror my ass, I want a big gun.
I think that it IS fitting, in that it illustrates something that is NOT a right, despite what many computer users seem to feel.
Is it our right to copy music for ourselves? Most of us think so.
For giving to others? Most of us don't think so.
Is it a right to usecracked/unlicensed software (that isn't open source / freeware)? MANY people feel that it is. Either "They owe me", or "it's industry standard" or "I'll use it once I graduate" (all excuses I heard in a photoshop vs Gimp thread on a forum I am on) -- all of these are used as rationalizations for why it's OK.
I feel such a position is incorrect, untenable, and indefendable. I'm glad to see things like this covered in such a way that shows that people DO prosecute for things like using unlicensed fonts (as absurd as that may sound), or sue for abusing open source licenses, or whatever.
I think it DOES belong in YRO.
hehe =) I ronically, I've been thinking the same thing. i'd rather play something like this with her than watch Law and Order (which we both love).
Exactly right. My wife (a non-gamer) asked me last night, "Do we have a Nintendo? I heard about this game called Brain .... age? can we play that together?"
;) But ... meh. saving for a monitor. =(
REALLY tempts me to buy two ds lites
It would certainly be a more memorable way to hit upon the various parts of the bible. Even better if they worked hard to make it keep to the chronology stated in the bible. Maybe even have multiple "campaigns" : the 40-year Moses campaign (OK more like 45 or more ;)), a campaign for after the hebrew nation was well established, etc. :)
:)
/reading/ it. (though think about it: No need for a strategy guide. Don't know what is suppsoed to happen next? "Try reading chapter 12, verses 23-40!" ;))
The amount of content available actually seems pretty massive. If Rockstar made it, I would actually expect its quality to be pretty good, and would probably buy it.
It would sure beat