Standardize online play, humm, lets think, what company has already done this?
Yeah, thats right, Steam and Stardock both have these features (well, ok, not voice chat, but the other things). Both are free, cross-platform, and supported by many, many developers.
Congrats M$, for entering a market where not only do you have two strong competetors, but you offer a clearly inferior service for vast amounts more money.
The stepped sphere idea is a good one, especially if you use a series of steps that are only a few miles wide. The reason you'd do that instead of immense steps is mostly because big steps would increase the amount of raw materials needed for construction significantly more than a series of small steps. Considering that a dyson sphere already requires several huge planets(jupiter and bigger) worth of materials to construct, an extra expendature of 50% more raw materials, which dont necessarilly need to be of any quality, filler rock can be used for the steps because they dont really need to support anything more than whatever sits on their surface.
Either that or a light framework that can support buildings placed upon it. The light framework might be the best solution because of the fact that any extra mass on the sphere would cause more strain on stabilization systems and rotational systems, and make them slower to respond due to the huge increass of mass of the sphere.
You know, after this whole long discussion, I really must say that I like using the word "light" in the context of a framework that would require more metal than all metals found on the entire planet earth.
You know, if they made you wait a full week to redeem any money you put into the system, it would HEAVILLY discourage botters. Because, they'd spend, lets say, 20$ on their bots, have them go earn some money, if the bot gets discovered in the first week then they not only lose the 20$ they spent, but whatever that bot earned in that week and the time spent with the end machine running said bot.
I still think the sphere makes sense, because about 80% of it would still have gravity enough to support life, and the remaining 20% can be completely covered in solar panels to power the rest of the sphere, and whatever other energy needs you may have.
I say 80%, because even when your 9/10ths down the side of a spinning sphere, theres still enough centrifugal force to keep something there instead of falling inwards, the gravity might be 1/10th of earth normal, but thats liveable.
If you spun the equater up to about 1.5g you could extend the useable surface by a considerable amount. At a guess I'd say 90% could support life (IE: not fall off), and 70-80% would have enough gravity to be within normal human long-term tolerances. People coming from the low-g regions would be significantly taller and more dexterous than those from the high-g regions, but no medical problems that even today's medicine couldn't deal with.
A cloud of small solar-panel ships would be more efficient, especially because the panels could be rotated out of place for maintance without loss of power (assuming you had on hand a few extra un-used panels to swap around while you do maintance work). It might be better than a dyson sphere, but they would be more wastefull because dyson spheres use the sphere shape of their construction to get around the fact that they'd have to be constantly thrusting away from the central star. Though, of course, you could have the solar-panel ships spinning around the star in a very close, very fast orbit, but that makes it very difficult to do repairs, and increases the chance of a single engine failure causing many panels to fall into the gravity well.
Assuming you have enough thrusters, and a good controll program, you could easilly compensate for up to 50-90% of the total thrusters being offline at a time, allowing you to do repairs at your leasure. And a dyson sphere DOESNT HAVE poles, none, its uniformally the same temperature the whole sphere over (minus whatever height differences, as peaks would be a bit colder due to less atmosphere or the bottoms of the oceans which could be a bit colder).
If you spin a dyson sphere, you dont have to simulate gravity, at all, and if the spinning mechanism failed, you would have a LOT of time to deal with it, as it would take a while for something spinning that fast to spin down to a point where people start falling off the surface. Assuming the loss of spin comes from too few functioning thrusters, then you would have an even slower spin-down because the tursters would compensate for the loss, at least a little.
Portals are a staple of most dyson spheres, but with something that big, the odds of having to leave very often are rather unlikely. Even if you did need to leave, reinforced circular portals would be good,it wouldnt compromise the strength of the sphere if it was curved at the same rate, and could be built as needed. Any single LARGE (drive a planet through it) portal could be difficult, but would not be impossible.
You could stabilize it with a large number of low yeild thrusters placed on the outside of the sphere, keeping the sun at the center without needing to have any physical contact with it. These thrusters could also be used to spin the sphere, causing a centrifugal force that pushes outward from the sun, needing no cealing whatsoever (assuming you were at least earth's distance from the sun away, at all points), because things would fall away from the central gravity of the sun. This would then solve the problem of not having rivers or lakes, and needing two layers of a sphere.
It could be enough if its a night-time charger for laptops. Set the laptop down before you go to bed, pick it up and haul it with you in the morning...
Well, to be fair, its not always good to have a repuation of never releasing a single game on time, ever, so it does fit the first definition of infamous.
I've seen people put on 3 day out-of-school suspension for punching their buddy lightly in the shoulder and saying "you jerk". All in a friendly manner. And no, theres no more to the story, I was walking right next to him at the time.
You have point 2 backwards. If a game is released quickly, and is a buggy unplayable mess, it will get bad reviews and will never sell. If its released late, they lose a tiny part of the market that isnt willing to wait for them, and they instead get better reviews and better sales.
This is why I did not mention the expansion. Blizzard recently has been taking a more "EA" stance on product quality since World of Warcraft has come out.
A small game developer can barely afford to write the sound/imput/ect other drivers even that first time.
Additionally, most find it easier (especially with the right incentive programs that M$ provides) to write for DX rather than OpenGL.
Also, keep in mind, the market share (for gaming) they're working with for open platform distribution is an order of magnitude smaller than the market share of windows.
Oh yes, you can "do without" the windows games by "not having to think about" windows. It sounds an aweful lot like you are implying that Linux or Gentoo are somehow easier and more intuitive.
Additionally, do you know how expensive it is to cross platform produce? Making something from a Windows only game into a Windows/Linux/Gentoo/8billion other versions of Linux/unix/ect distribution is an absolutely massive undertaking thats only performed by game companies that know they're going to be selling to over 50% of the computer gaming market.
You know, Blizzard is infamous for releasing games when they deem them ready, and not shoving them out the door unprepaired. Remember starcraft's release date problems? Remember World of Warcraft's? I really wish more game companies would follow this trend, releasing finished and high quality games rather than shoving stuff out the door and hoping to patch it later.
Lets see you run some video games on Gentoo. Sure, M$ has an unstable unreliable operating system, but I don't want to have to spend an hour configuring my system every time I get a new game.
Well, while the article seems to have a clue what they're talking about, you certainly don't.
Intelligent design really is a bunch of lazy researchers throwing their hands up in the air and saying "It's too complicated, I dont want to figure it out, must be God."
The PS3 really bungled their launch, and they didn't provide any competion at all.
The Xbox360 marketed itself to "hardcore" gamers who spend all day playing, and has little appeal to casual gamers and the general public at large.
This left 80% of the market open for the Wii to sell to, and they effectively had no competition.
Well, untill someone actually says "no, you can't do that", then he really DOES have the ability to do whatever he wants.
Example: Shooting someone is illegal, yet you go out into times square and shoot someone in the face. A cop comes out and looks at the dead guy, looks at you, and sort of shrugs and walks off. Do you feel like you broke the law? What if you do it every day before work, and eventually a cop says "Hey, maybe it'd be a good idea to stop shooting people". Did you break the law then?
We really haven't done anything to show Bush that he is anything less than an absolute monarch in his kingdom.
Well, considering the vast, VAST majority of people have pirated music, at this point they can basically target any home address they want. Ocasionally they'll target someone who doesn't own a computer, but really, what are the odds of that? http://www.designnine.com/news/node/643
What? You need prior art for my argument that things can be reverse engineered and then mass produced quickly... Fine with me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China
But then what about companies that spend MILLIONS of dollars making a product, with thousands of people having worked on at least a small part of it? Even if they did keep a secret, they'd only have a few months in the marketplace before some knock-off-vendor was making cheap copies or doing the same thing with their products.
Slashdot Mirror
Standardize online play, humm, lets think, what company has already done this?
Yeah, thats right, Steam and Stardock both have these features (well, ok, not voice chat, but the other things). Both are free, cross-platform, and supported by many, many developers.
Congrats M$, for entering a market where not only do you have two strong competetors, but you offer a clearly inferior service for vast amounts more money.
The stepped sphere idea is a good one, especially if you use a series of steps that are only a few miles wide. The reason you'd do that instead of immense steps is mostly because big steps would increase the amount of raw materials needed for construction significantly more than a series of small steps. Considering that a dyson sphere already requires several huge planets(jupiter and bigger) worth of materials to construct, an extra expendature of 50% more raw materials, which dont necessarilly need to be of any quality, filler rock can be used for the steps because they dont really need to support anything more than whatever sits on their surface.
Either that or a light framework that can support buildings placed upon it. The light framework might be the best solution because of the fact that any extra mass on the sphere would cause more strain on stabilization systems and rotational systems, and make them slower to respond due to the huge increass of mass of the sphere.
You know, after this whole long discussion, I really must say that I like using the word "light" in the context of a framework that would require more metal than all metals found on the entire planet earth.
You know, if they made you wait a full week to redeem any money you put into the system, it would HEAVILLY discourage botters. Because, they'd spend, lets say, 20$ on their bots, have them go earn some money, if the bot gets discovered in the first week then they not only lose the 20$ they spent, but whatever that bot earned in that week and the time spent with the end machine running said bot.
I still think the sphere makes sense, because about 80% of it would still have gravity enough to support life, and the remaining 20% can be completely covered in solar panels to power the rest of the sphere, and whatever other energy needs you may have.
I say 80%, because even when your 9/10ths down the side of a spinning sphere, theres still enough centrifugal force to keep something there instead of falling inwards, the gravity might be 1/10th of earth normal, but thats liveable.
If you spun the equater up to about 1.5g you could extend the useable surface by a considerable amount. At a guess I'd say 90% could support life (IE: not fall off), and 70-80% would have enough gravity to be within normal human long-term tolerances. People coming from the low-g regions would be significantly taller and more dexterous than those from the high-g regions, but no medical problems that even today's medicine couldn't deal with.
A cloud of small solar-panel ships would be more efficient, especially because the panels could be rotated out of place for maintance without loss of power (assuming you had on hand a few extra un-used panels to swap around while you do maintance work). It might be better than a dyson sphere, but they would be more wastefull because dyson spheres use the sphere shape of their construction to get around the fact that they'd have to be constantly thrusting away from the central star. Though, of course, you could have the solar-panel ships spinning around the star in a very close, very fast orbit, but that makes it very difficult to do repairs, and increases the chance of a single engine failure causing many panels to fall into the gravity well.
Assuming you have enough thrusters, and a good controll program, you could easilly compensate for up to 50-90% of the total thrusters being offline at a time, allowing you to do repairs at your leasure. And a dyson sphere DOESNT HAVE poles, none, its uniformally the same temperature the whole sphere over (minus whatever height differences, as peaks would be a bit colder due to less atmosphere or the bottoms of the oceans which could be a bit colder).
If you spin a dyson sphere, you dont have to simulate gravity, at all, and if the spinning mechanism failed, you would have a LOT of time to deal with it, as it would take a while for something spinning that fast to spin down to a point where people start falling off the surface. Assuming the loss of spin comes from too few functioning thrusters, then you would have an even slower spin-down because the tursters would compensate for the loss, at least a little.
Portals are a staple of most dyson spheres, but with something that big, the odds of having to leave very often are rather unlikely. Even if you did need to leave, reinforced circular portals would be good,it wouldnt compromise the strength of the sphere if it was curved at the same rate, and could be built as needed. Any single LARGE (drive a planet through it) portal could be difficult, but would not be impossible.
Why couldn't you spin a dyson sphere?
You could stabilize it with a large number of low yeild thrusters placed on the outside of the sphere, keeping the sun at the center without needing to have any physical contact with it. These thrusters could also be used to spin the sphere, causing a centrifugal force that pushes outward from the sun, needing no cealing whatsoever (assuming you were at least earth's distance from the sun away, at all points), because things would fall away from the central gravity of the sun. This would then solve the problem of not having rivers or lakes, and needing two layers of a sphere.
I thought these issues were addressed by Dyson...
Wow, you're incredably lazy, it says in the SECOND SENTANCE of the article. Its a google-run community site.
It could be enough if its a night-time charger for laptops. Set the laptop down before you go to bed, pick it up and haul it with you in the morning...
Well, to be fair, its not always good to have a repuation of never releasing a single game on time, ever, so it does fit the first definition of infamous.
I've seen people put on 3 day out-of-school suspension for punching their buddy lightly in the shoulder and saying "you jerk". All in a friendly manner. And no, theres no more to the story, I was walking right next to him at the time.
You have point 2 backwards. If a game is released quickly, and is a buggy unplayable mess, it will get bad reviews and will never sell. If its released late, they lose a tiny part of the market that isnt willing to wait for them, and they instead get better reviews and better sales.
This is why I did not mention the expansion. Blizzard recently has been taking a more "EA" stance on product quality since World of Warcraft has come out.
A small game developer can barely afford to write the sound/imput/ect other drivers even that first time.
Additionally, most find it easier (especially with the right incentive programs that M$ provides) to write for DX rather than OpenGL.
Also, keep in mind, the market share (for gaming) they're working with for open platform distribution is an order of magnitude smaller than the market share of windows.
Oh yes, you can "do without" the windows games by "not having to think about" windows. It sounds an aweful lot like you are implying that Linux or Gentoo are somehow easier and more intuitive.
Additionally, do you know how expensive it is to cross platform produce? Making something from a Windows only game into a Windows/Linux/Gentoo/8billion other versions of Linux/unix/ect distribution is an absolutely massive undertaking thats only performed by game companies that know they're going to be selling to over 50% of the computer gaming market.
You know, Blizzard is infamous for releasing games when they deem them ready, and not shoving them out the door unprepaired. Remember starcraft's release date problems? Remember World of Warcraft's? I really wish more game companies would follow this trend, releasing finished and high quality games rather than shoving stuff out the door and hoping to patch it later.
Lets see you run some video games on Gentoo. Sure, M$ has an unstable unreliable operating system, but I don't want to have to spend an hour configuring my system every time I get a new game.
Well, while the article seems to have a clue what they're talking about, you certainly don't.
Intelligent design really is a bunch of lazy researchers throwing their hands up in the air and saying "It's too complicated, I dont want to figure it out, must be God."
So, can someone explain to me why the board of FILM is the so called authority on how engrossing games are when compaired to films?
The PS3 really bungled their launch, and they didn't provide any competion at all.
The Xbox360 marketed itself to "hardcore" gamers who spend all day playing, and has little appeal to casual gamers and the general public at large.
This left 80% of the market open for the Wii to sell to, and they effectively had no competition.
Well, untill someone actually says "no, you can't do that", then he really DOES have the ability to do whatever he wants.
Example:
Shooting someone is illegal, yet you go out into times square and shoot someone in the face. A cop comes out and looks at the dead guy, looks at you, and sort of shrugs and walks off. Do you feel like you broke the law? What if you do it every day before work, and eventually a cop says "Hey, maybe it'd be a good idea to stop shooting people". Did you break the law then?
We really haven't done anything to show Bush that he is anything less than an absolute monarch in his kingdom.
Ugh, Stargate references? And you wern't even kind enough to make references back from when it was good...
Well, considering the vast, VAST majority of people have pirated music, at this point they can basically target any home address they want. Ocasionally they'll target someone who doesn't own a computer, but really, what are the odds of that? http://www.designnine.com/news/node/643
What? You need prior art for my argument that things can be reverse engineered and then mass produced quickly... Fine with me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China
But then what about companies that spend MILLIONS of dollars making a product, with thousands of people having worked on at least a small part of it? Even if they did keep a secret, they'd only have a few months in the marketplace before some knock-off-vendor was making cheap copies or doing the same thing with their products.
Well, when you've got the money to hire BOTH Itallian leg-breakers, and a German hit-squad, then you get a little respect.