A few months ago, I started using Linux. When I began, I told others that I was "just experimenting", and that it was "just for fun". But I couldn't stop. I started using Linux every day. I stopped socializing with others, and never changed the tux shirt that I wore constantly. I began to berate technology that wasn't open-source. Worst of all, I began to partake in gross and neglegant homosexual behavior. I'm not sure if I was gay before I started using linux, or if it corrupted me in some way, but that is not the point.
One day, when at a book store checking out "Gaynal Magazine" (the premire magazine about the linux community), I was approached by a fellow linux user. We started talking about linux and homosexuality, and he invited me to hang out with him at this gay bath-house.
This gay bathhouse, known as the "White Swallow", was a linux-users dream come true!!! I still remember my first night. The whole slashdot crew was there, giving out free bj's and anal grease. RMS was getting gangbanged, and Rob Malda offered his anus to me.
I became a regular at this bath-house, but that's how the nightmare began. I didn't know that every single one of them had AIDS, and that I had become infected.
I was crushed. I stopped using Linux immediately, but that didn't help improve my health.
I want to warn others about the dangers of using Linux. I don't want anyone to make the same mistake that I did. What do you recommend?
- dying of aids Michigan.
Dear Gentle Sir:
Thanks for writing in. The last time I addressed Linux as a gateway to unhealthy practices such as faggotry and drug-use, I had a chance to warn my reader before it was too late. I'm sorry to see that with you, the situation is irreversible. I am glad you want to share your message, however, and to that I'll discuss your plight for others to see.
You didn't mention what prompted your initial foray into Linux and Open Source, but I imagine it happened innocently enough at first. Perhaps you were the poor unknowing victim of a dirty zealot, such as ESR, or maybe it was just a quiet link to Slashdot that began your slide into Hell. The price of health is constant vigilance, but to the uninformed that's difficult. ESR and the Slashdot staff prey exactly upon such marks.
The bathhouse, the "White Swallow," was more of a dream-come-true to the predators than new Linux users know. Not a single participant in the raw anal gangbangs or semenistic orgies there spoke once about their terrible secrets and with good reason. That was their chance to have your forever, and it looks like they did just that. I can't imagine the feeling that washed over you when you discovered the terrible truth. I can only pray for your peace and that others never share that emotion.
My recommendation to you is to become an anti-Open Source zealot. Write essays and post them to Slashdot about the terrible secrets and conspiracies that the cock-lusting Open Source world harbors. Wear FreeBSD t-shirts, especially the one where the Beastie is fucking Tux up the ass (give it back to'em!). When you see a Linux "install party" happening, call the authorities immediately and tell them there's a filthy circle-jerk about to take place. Wear a mouth guard to prevent biting your pillow at night, one of the most embarassing side effects of Linux. Make sure you're running at least Windows if you can't get to a Mac. Using a proper OS is a must-- even though it's "too late" for you, you can still set an example.
I wish you luck as you begin your lonely journey down a road few travel. Hold your head high as you proceed, refusing to let Open Source claim another victim. They may have ruined your body, but they lose-- and we win-- inf your mind remains free to the end.
"At these Hollywood meetings, the same thing has happened to me more than once, with multiple people," he says. "I describe the game I want to do. I tell them, 'I can deliver you a triple-A title for this cost.'" Spector names a high figure; no one has ever yet written a check that big. "They think it over. Then they say, 'What could you do with twice as much money?'
"I think the big media players may be here to stay this time. The Hollywood establishment mostly isn't setting up game publishing and development arms the way they have in the past; they seem more interested in partnering with people in the game business, using our expertise instead of assuming theirs translates over. It isn't just movie studios looking to get into games, it's the media conglomerates that own the movie studios. Also, the major agencies - CAA, ICM, and others - are moving into the game space, bringing their clout and packaging prowess. There's a more integrated approach to things that makes me think this time it's for real. It might even succeed."
So we'll continue to see publishers licensing movies and TV for adaptation as games. Is this syndrome, as some argue, strangling the industry? Does it mean the death of creative game design?
Not to Spector. More than perhaps anyone in the game business, Warren Spector sees licensing as an opportunity.
Betting Safe If you write much about the electronic game industry, you can save time by defining certain phrases as macros in your word processor: "risk-averse publishers," "spiraling development costs," "studios caught in the middle," and more. The terms pepper every discussion of the benighted state of electronic gaming. Production costs rise faster than sales, so it grows ever more expensive for newcomers to enter the market. Out of thousands of games released every year, major retailers stock fewer than 200. A game may have a shelf life measured in weeks, and the top 20 titles capture the bulk of the profits. Most of the rest fail disastrously.
In this environment, the few remaining game publishers seek the known, the reliable. They seek licenses, which bring pre-sold audiences. They want developers to work on licensed games, not new concepts. "The irony," observes Spector (among many others!), "is that The Sims wasn't a licensed property, Grand Theft Auto wasn't licensed, Diablo... The big hits are the original properties. But licenses are the safe bets."
Some find this situation abominable. Not Spector. At the March 2003 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, in his design keynote speech "Sequels & Adaptations: Design Innovation in a Risk-Averse World," Spector took a pragmatic approach. Without addressing whether it was desirable to make licensed games, he argued that if developers can secure nothing but licensed projects, they should embrace the job and challenge themselves. Citing advantages a license gives, such as free marketing, fan buy-in, and "cool sandboxes to play in," Spector advised developers to "find ways to innovate within [the] boundaries of player expectation and publisher need. Games are not driven by fiction, character or context. Games are driven by gameplay."
Spector's GDC keynote received strongly mixed reviews: "Half the audience reviled me for weeks after," he says. "Half the audience hailed me as a hero. I figure that constituted a total success. I believe every word I said up on that stage, and [I] hoped to hell my beliefs would get people hopping mad and thinking."
He got Greg Costikyan, anyway. A longtime industry gadfly and proponent of alternative ways to make and sell games - and Spector's old prep-school buddy at the Horace Mann School in New York City - Costikyan posted a lengthy rebuttal on his blog. "[There's] nothing wrong with sequels and licensed products - in moderation. The problem [...] is that they're beginning to overwhelm original work. Here we are, like Balboa, shocked with wild surmise as we face a vast unknown Pacific of enormous creative possibility - and all we can do is lic
Warren Spector says we can thrive through adaptation
by Allen Varney
"The biggest names in Hollywood want to get into games," says Warren Spector. "Movies aren't showing double-digit annual growth any more, the way the game industry does. People in Hollywood say, 'Okay, four out of five games lose money, just like movies - but if I get a hit like Halo or Grand Theft Auto I can make, what, a hundred million, 200 million? And making a game costs way less than making a movie? Wow!' So I've been meeting with lots of people - they're flying me around first class - it's just nuts."
Hollywood is interested in Warren Spector. When he's not running his new Junction Point Studios in Austin, Texas, the designer/producer is meeting with SoCal industry bigwigs who can write nine-figure checks. The execs know how to talk with him; Spector has a master's degree in Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas - Austin, where he wrote his thesis on Warner Brothers cartoons and taught courses on film production. "I know just enough to be dangerous."
But more to the point, he has what they want. With 16 years of experience producing computer games, first for Origin (Ultima VI: The False Prophet, Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, System Shock, and many more), then Looking Glass Technologies and ION Storm Austin (Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows), Spector offers what the studios prize: a track record.
Tiny tubes of carbon, crafted into the shape of a Y, could revolutionise the computer industry, suggests new research.
The work has shown that Y-shaped carbon nanotubes are easily made and act as remarkably efficient electronic transistors - the toggles used to control the flow of electrons through computer circuits.
But the nanotransistors are just a few hundred millionths of a metre in size -roughly 100 times smaller than the components used in today's microprocessors. They could, therefore, be used to create microchips several orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones used in computers today, with no increase in chip size.
Prab Bandaru and colleagues at the University of California in San Diego, and Apparao Rao, of Clemson Univeristy in South Carolina, both in the US, started by growing ordinary carbon nanotubes through chemical vapour deposition.
But they added iron-titanium particles to spur the growth of an extra nanotube branch attached to the main stem. The overall structure assumed a Y-shape and the catalyst particles were absorbed into the tubes at the branching point (see image). Smaller still
Experiments then showed that applying a voltage to the stem of the Y precisely controls the flow of electrons through the other two branches. The switching capacity of these nanostructures is, in comparable to that of today's silicon transistors.
And, whereas current silicon transistors have been shrunk to around 100 nanometres, the Y-shaped nanotubes measure just tens of nanometres in size. Eventually, they could even be shrunk to just a few nanometres, the researchers suggest.
Previous efforts to construct transistors using carbon nanotubes have involved attaching the tubes to larger silicon elements. By contrast, the Y-junction transistors are made entirely from carbon nanotubes. New era
"The transistor is fully self-contained," Bandaru told New Scientist. "The discovery heralds a new era of nanoelectronics in that functionality can be harnessed using all-carbon devices."
Bandaru says the main remaining worry is how to manufacture complex nanotube-based circuitry reliably. Nonetheless, he is optimistic about the future of nanotube-based electronics.
"One must remember that for the Pentium chips which now have over 500 million transistors, the progenitor was a simple integrated circuit with two transistors in 1958," Bandaru says. "We are probably at the same stage with Y-junctions and the future looks good."
Slashdot Mirror
Are you a virgin?
Yes
No
A few months ago, I started using Linux. When I began, I told others that I was "just experimenting", and that it was "just for fun". But I couldn't stop. I started using Linux every day. I stopped socializing with others, and never changed the tux shirt that I wore constantly. I began to berate technology that wasn't open-source. Worst of all, I began to partake in gross and neglegant homosexual behavior. I'm not sure if I was gay before I started using linux, or if it corrupted me in some way, but that is not the point.
One day, when at a book store checking out "Gaynal Magazine" (the premire magazine about the linux community), I was approached by a fellow linux user. We started talking about linux and homosexuality, and he invited me to hang out with him at this gay bath-house.
This gay bathhouse, known as the "White Swallow", was a linux-users dream come true!!! I still remember my first night. The whole slashdot crew was there, giving out free bj's and anal grease. RMS was getting gangbanged, and Rob Malda offered his anus to me.
I became a regular at this bath-house, but that's how the nightmare began. I didn't know that every single one of them had AIDS, and that I had become infected.
I was crushed. I stopped using Linux immediately, but that didn't help improve my health.
I want to warn others about the dangers of using Linux. I don't want anyone to make the same mistake that I did. What do you recommend?
- dying of aids
Michigan.
Dear Gentle Sir:
Thanks for writing in. The last time I addressed Linux as a gateway to unhealthy practices such as faggotry and drug-use, I had a chance to warn my reader before it was too late. I'm sorry to see that with you, the situation is irreversible. I am glad you want to share your message, however, and to that I'll discuss your plight for others to see.
You didn't mention what prompted your initial foray into Linux and Open Source, but I imagine it happened innocently enough at first. Perhaps you were the poor unknowing victim of a dirty zealot, such as ESR, or maybe it was just a quiet link to Slashdot that began your slide into Hell. The price of health is constant vigilance, but to the uninformed that's difficult. ESR and the Slashdot staff prey exactly upon such marks.
The bathhouse, the "White Swallow," was more of a dream-come-true to the predators than new Linux users know. Not a single participant in the raw anal gangbangs or semenistic orgies there spoke once about their terrible secrets and with good reason. That was their chance to have your forever, and it looks like they did just that. I can't imagine the feeling that washed over you when you discovered the terrible truth. I can only pray for your peace and that others never share that emotion.
My recommendation to you is to become an anti-Open Source zealot. Write essays and post them to Slashdot about the terrible secrets and conspiracies that the cock-lusting Open Source world harbors. Wear FreeBSD t-shirts, especially the one where the Beastie is fucking Tux up the ass (give it back to'em!). When you see a Linux "install party" happening, call the authorities immediately and tell them there's a filthy circle-jerk about to take place. Wear a mouth guard to prevent biting your pillow at night, one of the most embarassing side effects of Linux. Make sure you're running at least Windows if you can't get to a Mac. Using a proper OS is a must-- even though it's "too late" for you, you can still set an example.
I wish you luck as you begin your lonely journey down a road few travel. Hold your head high as you proceed, refusing to let Open Source claim another victim. They may have ruined your body, but they lose-- and we win-- inf your mind remains free to the end.
Best Wishes,
Cmdr Coon
Yep, missed it :-/
"At these Hollywood meetings, the same thing has happened to me more than once, with multiple people," he says. "I describe the game I want to do. I tell them, 'I can deliver you a triple-A title for this cost.'" Spector names a high figure; no one has ever yet written a check that big. "They think it over. Then they say, 'What could you do with twice as much money?'
"I think the big media players may be here to stay this time. The Hollywood establishment mostly isn't setting up game publishing and development arms the way they have in the past; they seem more interested in partnering with people in the game business, using our expertise instead of assuming theirs translates over. It isn't just movie studios looking to get into games, it's the media conglomerates that own the movie studios. Also, the major agencies - CAA, ICM, and others - are moving into the game space, bringing their clout and packaging prowess. There's a more integrated approach to things that makes me think this time it's for real. It might even succeed."
So we'll continue to see publishers licensing movies and TV for adaptation as games. Is this syndrome, as some argue, strangling the industry? Does it mean the death of creative game design?
Not to Spector. More than perhaps anyone in the game business, Warren Spector sees licensing as an opportunity.
Betting Safe
If you write much about the electronic game industry, you can save time by defining certain phrases as macros in your word processor: "risk-averse publishers," "spiraling development costs," "studios caught in the middle," and more. The terms pepper every discussion of the benighted state of electronic gaming. Production costs rise faster than sales, so it grows ever more expensive for newcomers to enter the market. Out of thousands of games released every year, major retailers stock fewer than 200. A game may have a shelf life measured in weeks, and the top 20 titles capture the bulk of the profits. Most of the rest fail disastrously.
In this environment, the few remaining game publishers seek the known, the reliable. They seek licenses, which bring pre-sold audiences. They want developers to work on licensed games, not new concepts. "The irony," observes Spector (among many others!), "is that The Sims wasn't a licensed property, Grand Theft Auto wasn't licensed, Diablo... The big hits are the original properties. But licenses are the safe bets."
Some find this situation abominable. Not Spector. At the March 2003 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, in his design keynote speech "Sequels & Adaptations: Design Innovation in a Risk-Averse World," Spector took a pragmatic approach. Without addressing whether it was desirable to make licensed games, he argued that if developers can secure nothing but licensed projects, they should embrace the job and challenge themselves. Citing advantages a license gives, such as free marketing, fan buy-in, and "cool sandboxes to play in," Spector advised developers to "find ways to innovate within [the] boundaries of player expectation and publisher need. Games are not driven by fiction, character or context. Games are driven by gameplay."
Spector's GDC keynote received strongly mixed reviews: "Half the audience reviled me for weeks after," he says. "Half the audience hailed me as a hero. I figure that constituted a total success. I believe every word I said up on that stage, and [I] hoped to hell my beliefs would get people hopping mad and thinking."
He got Greg Costikyan, anyway. A longtime industry gadfly and proponent of alternative ways to make and sell games - and Spector's old prep-school buddy at the Horace Mann School in New York City - Costikyan posted a lengthy rebuttal on his blog. "[There's] nothing wrong with sequels and licensed products - in moderation. The problem [...] is that they're beginning to overwhelm original work. Here we are, like Balboa, shocked with wild surmise as we face a vast unknown Pacific of enormous creative possibility - and all we can do is lic
LICENSING: LIVE WITH IT
Warren Spector says we can thrive through adaptation
by Allen Varney
"The biggest names in Hollywood want to get into games," says Warren Spector. "Movies aren't showing double-digit annual growth any more, the way the game industry does. People in Hollywood say, 'Okay, four out of five games lose money, just like movies - but if I get a hit like Halo or Grand Theft Auto I can make, what, a hundred million, 200 million? And making a game costs way less than making a movie? Wow!' So I've been meeting with lots of people - they're flying me around first class - it's just nuts."
Hollywood is interested in Warren Spector. When he's not running his new Junction Point Studios in Austin, Texas, the designer/producer is meeting with SoCal industry bigwigs who can write nine-figure checks. The execs know how to talk with him; Spector has a master's degree in Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas - Austin, where he wrote his thesis on Warner Brothers cartoons and taught courses on film production. "I know just enough to be dangerous."
But more to the point, he has what they want. With 16 years of experience producing computer games, first for Origin (Ultima VI: The False Prophet, Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, System Shock, and many more), then Looking Glass Technologies and ION Storm Austin (Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows), Spector offers what the studios prize: a track record.
Y-shaped nanotubes are ready-made transistors
Tiny tubes of carbon, crafted into the shape of a Y, could revolutionise the computer industry, suggests new research.
The work has shown that Y-shaped carbon nanotubes are easily made and act as remarkably efficient electronic transistors - the toggles used to control the flow of electrons through computer circuits.
But the nanotransistors are just a few hundred millionths of a metre in size -roughly 100 times smaller than the components used in today's microprocessors. They could, therefore, be used to create microchips several orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones used in computers today, with no increase in chip size.
Prab Bandaru and colleagues at the University of California in San Diego, and Apparao Rao, of Clemson Univeristy in South Carolina, both in the US, started by growing ordinary carbon nanotubes through chemical vapour deposition.
But they added iron-titanium particles to spur the growth of an extra nanotube branch attached to the main stem. The overall structure assumed a Y-shape and the catalyst particles were absorbed into the tubes at the branching point (see image).
Smaller still
Experiments then showed that applying a voltage to the stem of the Y precisely controls the flow of electrons through the other two branches. The switching capacity of these nanostructures is, in comparable to that of today's silicon transistors.
And, whereas current silicon transistors have been shrunk to around 100 nanometres, the Y-shaped nanotubes measure just tens of nanometres in size. Eventually, they could even be shrunk to just a few nanometres, the researchers suggest.
Previous efforts to construct transistors using carbon nanotubes have involved attaching the tubes to larger silicon elements. By contrast, the Y-junction transistors are made entirely from carbon nanotubes.
New era
"The transistor is fully self-contained," Bandaru told New Scientist. "The discovery heralds a new era of nanoelectronics in that functionality can be harnessed using all-carbon devices."
Bandaru says the main remaining worry is how to manufacture complex nanotube-based circuitry reliably. Nonetheless, he is optimistic about the future of nanotube-based electronics.
"One must remember that for the Pentium chips which now have over 500 million transistors, the progenitor was a simple integrated circuit with two transistors in 1958," Bandaru says. "We are probably at the same stage with Y-junctions and the future looks good."