Blizzard has released a powerful new suite of tools for Starcraft 2 modders and developers that fundamentally change the nature of what's possible in the popular RTS game.
A powerful new suite of tools -- which were developed years ago and withheld for no apparent reason -- that fundamentally change... nothing. What's possible with art assets is probably improved over the art tools the community has already developed for itself, if you have 3ds Max 2011, which is no longer for sale.
It's hard to imagine how this could have even the barest hint of an effect on the custom maps scene.
The 30 dollar RC helicopters at Wal*Mart already have a plastic cage around them so they hit walls and such without snapping the rotors off. This doesn't seem all that different to me, aside from an outer cage on bearings. So what's the big deal?
A fixed cage can protect from damage, but does little to prevent crashes, since collisions will still affect the orientation of the rotor.
I saw nothing in the videos leading me to believe these weren't rc controlled. You can even see a the small orange 4 channel receiver on the supposed bot. Why does an autonomous robot need a 4 channel receiver, unless it's being flown by a pilot?
How they're controlled isn't relevant. The point is that collisions don't interrupt their flight.
How are drones supposed to fight forest fires? With missiles? They sure can't carry enough retardant aloft to even put out a sizable bonfire.
Sure they can. There's no reason a drone couldn't carry as much as any manned aircraft. The RQ-4 is designed for high altitude and long endurance, rather than heavy payload, but even so it can carry 3000 lbs, which is comparable to existing light firefighting aircraft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_firefighting
Carrying an ID is normal and acceptable. Pretty much everyone, everywhere, already carries one or more ID, such as a driver's license, with them on a routine basis.
The school wants its students to carry their IDs, and the students complied. So what? There is no tragedy or controversy there.
TFA is ridiculous. Especially the video. It sounds like something from The Onion.
Although we have all been conditioned to accept that technology will be spying on us all the time in this police state control grid we now find ourselves living in...
Are you fucking kidding me?
No, the tragedy is that these backwards morons don't even understand what they're talking about in the first place.
I think that until we have a health impact study that determines that it is safe for our children, we should not be subjecting them to experimental technology.
"Down with the magical RFID chips! Evil wizard summoned them from hell!", they seem to say.
After all, it's Nintendo--a company that simply refuses to let go of its, "Super Mario plus other cartoony games," forumula. Why would any other software shop take their platform seriously when Nintendo itself does not.
They're not going to just let go of Mario. That's the best selling video game franchise in the world.
Hundreds of millions of sales sounds pretty serious to me.
It's a nonsense device. The summary is also awful. Multiple users playing Starcraft on one screen? Nobody would ever want to do that, especially not at the crazy viewing angles the device uses.
This isn't exactly a new finding. Typographers have known this for over a century, if not multiple centuries. Why do you think newspapers are printed in seriffed typefaces?
This research deals with the shapes, proportions, and spacing of characters in square grotesque and humanist typefaces. It doesn't have anything to do with serifs.
We haven't the foggiest idea whether anyone other than ourselves is capable of suffering. At best we can say that they appear to understand suffering. With animals, we can only say they appear to suffer. The reason is that we don't have a fundamental understanding of consciousness and perception. Until we do, we can only make an educated guess as to the capacity for others to experience suffering.
Because we lack this understanding, we cannot be certain that our own creations lack consciousness. So we must again judge based on the appearance of suffering.
Ergo, any robot which appears to suffer must have at least the same rights as an animal.
Grating rights to robots based on the appearance of suffering is ridiculous.
Harming an animal may cause it to suffer, but harming a robot only causes it to do whatever it was programmed to do in the event it was harmed. Whether or not that involves the robot appearing to suffer is just a decision made by its designers. A robot can be made to appear to suffer, or to appear to not suffer, independently of its actual function.
It's great to see something get this kind of fuel economy, to see where we can take the technology, but it might not be entirely honest to call it a "car".
You could call it a car. You'd just have to make sure to call it a terrible, useless, or impractical car to be accurate.
I mean, sure it has good fuel economy, but all other relevant aspects of a car were completely sacrificed in order to attain it. They apparently even used the lightest driver they could possibly find, an 11 year-old girl, in order to make the numbers even higher.
Pixel shaders do per-pixel calculations. I don't know how much of the total render time is typically taken up by such effects, but having it do ten times as much probably makes a pretty good dent in performance.
The accurate term that should be used in the TOS is "location data" and not just "location statistics". "Data" would contain (precise or approximate) location coordinates while "statistics" should contain only numbers pertaining to locations e.g. "user x was located within 100 meters of location y during month z".
Those "numbers pertaining to locations" sure sound like approximate coordinates to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard has released a powerful new suite of tools for Starcraft 2 modders and developers that fundamentally change the nature of what's possible in the popular RTS game.
A powerful new suite of tools -- which were developed years ago and withheld for no apparent reason -- that fundamentally change... nothing.
What's possible with art assets is probably improved over the art tools the community has already developed for itself, if you have 3ds Max 2011, which is no longer for sale.
It's hard to imagine how this could have even the barest hint of an effect on the custom maps scene.
The 30 dollar RC helicopters at Wal*Mart already have a plastic cage around them so they hit walls and such without snapping the rotors off.
This doesn't seem all that different to me, aside from an outer cage on bearings. So what's the big deal?
A fixed cage can protect from damage, but does little to prevent crashes, since collisions will still affect the orientation of the rotor.
I saw nothing in the videos leading me to believe these weren't rc controlled. You can even see a the small orange 4 channel receiver on the supposed bot.
Why does an autonomous robot need a 4 channel receiver, unless it's being flown by a pilot?
How they're controlled isn't relevant. The point is that collisions don't interrupt their flight.
How are drones supposed to fight forest fires? With missiles? They sure can't carry enough retardant aloft to even put out a sizable bonfire.
Sure they can. There's no reason a drone couldn't carry as much as any manned aircraft.
The RQ-4 is designed for high altitude and long endurance, rather than heavy payload, but even so it can carry 3000 lbs, which is comparable to existing light firefighting aircraft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_firefighting
Its surveillance capabilities have already been used to assist firefighters:
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123073731
All of these images are low res and out of focus.
Photographing falling snowflakes is probably pretty tricky, but some of them are just awful.
eg.
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.01.27_06.25.55.5_flake_17839_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.02.18_22.43.52_flake_1406_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.11.09_06.14.16_flake_107_cam_0.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.02.22_16.06.08.425688_flake_16605_cam_1.png
Carrying an ID is normal and acceptable. Pretty much everyone, everywhere, already carries one or more ID, such as a driver's license, with them on a routine basis.
The school wants its students to carry their IDs, and the students complied. So what? There is no tragedy or controversy there.
TFA is ridiculous. Especially the video. It sounds like something from The Onion.
Although we have all been conditioned to accept that technology will be spying on us all the time in this police state control grid we now find ourselves living in...
Are you fucking kidding me?
No, the tragedy is that these backwards morons don't even understand what they're talking about in the first place.
I think that until we have a health impact study that determines that it is safe for our children, we should not be subjecting them to experimental technology.
"Down with the magical RFID chips! Evil wizard summoned them from hell!", they seem to say.
After all, it's Nintendo--a company that simply refuses to let go of its, "Super Mario plus other cartoony games," forumula. Why would any other software shop take their platform seriously when Nintendo itself does not.
They're not going to just let go of Mario. That's the best selling video game franchise in the world.
Hundreds of millions of sales sounds pretty serious to me.
Wouldn't our smartphones be capable of everything of what a calculator can do?
Certainly. But a dedicated calculator is still going to have some advantages, such as vastly superior battery life.
It's a nonsense device. The summary is also awful. Multiple users playing Starcraft on one screen? Nobody would ever want to do that, especially not at the crazy viewing angles the device uses.
This isn't exactly a new finding. Typographers have known this for over a century, if not multiple centuries. Why do you think newspapers are printed in seriffed typefaces?
This research deals with the shapes, proportions, and spacing of characters in square grotesque and humanist typefaces. It doesn't have anything to do with serifs.
With twice the number of units of its predecessor — StarCraft had a maximum of 1600...
Nope. Starcraft's unit limit is 1700.
We haven't the foggiest idea whether anyone other than ourselves is capable of suffering. At best we can say that they appear to understand suffering. With animals, we can only say they appear to suffer. The reason is that we don't have a fundamental understanding of consciousness and perception. Until we do, we can only make an educated guess as to the capacity for others to experience suffering.
Because we lack this understanding, we cannot be certain that our own creations lack consciousness. So we must again judge based on the appearance of suffering.
Ergo, any robot which appears to suffer must have at least the same rights as an animal.
Grating rights to robots based on the appearance of suffering is ridiculous.
Harming an animal may cause it to suffer, but harming a robot only causes it to do whatever it was programmed to do in the event it was harmed. Whether or not that involves the robot appearing to suffer is just a decision made by its designers. A robot can be made to appear to suffer, or to appear to not suffer, independently of its actual function.
Go extinct twice; achievement unlocked
What will humans do when all work is done automatically by machines?
Pretty much anything they want, probably.
A couple dozen digits of pi exceeds all practical necessity. Calculating it to 10 trillion digits is obviously pointless.
There's no reason to upgrade every year or two like there used to be. That's got to hurt their business even more than tablets and netbooks.
Selling reliable components hurts business? uh ohz
But it's just so outrageous. How dare those people be allowed to translate those things?
They're not being paid in cash. They just enjoy it! Unbelievable!
Someone should stop Valve before it's too late.
pfft
Some star.
P.S. The game also doesn't support steering wheel controllers. A driving game. Seriously.
That's just lazy.
Lazy? Negligent maybe. Or stupid. Or something.
It's something.
It's great to see something get this kind of fuel economy, to see where we can take the technology, but it might not be entirely honest to call it a "car".
You could call it a car. You'd just have to make sure to call it a terrible, useless, or impractical car to be accurate.
I mean, sure it has good fuel economy, but all other relevant aspects of a car were completely sacrificed in order to attain it. They apparently even used the lightest driver they could possibly find, an 11 year-old girl, in order to make the numbers even higher.
I wonder how long this will be "at least a year away."
According to the video in the article, the company is releasing "a competitively priced consumer camera" in 2011, ie no more than six months from now.
After all, there's lots of profit in making sure your games remain playable for decades.
Pixel shaders do per-pixel calculations. I don't know how much of the total render time is typically taken up by such effects, but having it do ten times as much probably makes a pretty good dent in performance.
The accurate term that should be used in the TOS is "location data" and not just "location statistics". "Data" would contain (precise or approximate) location coordinates while "statistics" should contain only numbers pertaining to locations e.g. "user x was located within 100 meters of location y during month z".
Those "numbers pertaining to locations" sure sound like approximate coordinates to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdPDn1KUz_A
How will this technology go everywhere I want it to? I do drive places now which don't actually have proper paved roads.
Unconventional roads don't appear to be a problem. It drove around in the desert just fine.