I love what Peter has done for us over the years, but he needs to learn the difference between science and engineering. Whatever this will be, it won't be a scientific achievement.
Also, as game AI is mostly smoke and mirrors, it probably won't be a major engineering achievement either.
And how much were these two geniuses paid to come up with this worthless tidbit?
As a fat American who lives in Britain, I can tell you they are utterly obsessed with this non-problem. Obesity is the bugbear du jour in the UK; it fills the media daily.
Britain throws away one million, count 'em, 1,000,000, uneaten pots of yoghurt per DAY -- fact from the BBC. Plastic pots that won't biodegrade. What does THAT cost in global warming?
At my last "open plan" situation my co-workers stole stuff from my desk. They didn't just borrow my stapler, they stole my personal property. There was a lot of general pilferage, in fact, so bad that the company had to install security cameras. The natural temptation was to blame the cleaning staff, but I don't think they were behind it.
Keep your moronic music to yourself, keep your eyes off my screen, and keep your hands off my desk.
Anonymity is the bane of civilized discourse. The only people who need to be anonymous on the Internet are whistleblowers, persons risking oppression under tyranny, and people needing health care information.
Oh, and assholes, of course.
What planet are you on? Gosh, I wonder how Microsoft would respond to someone putting the code for Office online? Banning would be the least of it.
Open source is a good thing; software patents are bad; but EVERY company is legitimately entitled to its trade secrets.
America-centric bollocks. If NASA were razed to the ground and all its employees rounded up and shot, it still would not spell the end of human spaceflight... as John F. Kennedy knew perfectly well when he launched the race to the moon.
Nothing could please the Russians more than to have lost the battle for the moon, but to have won the war for space.
If your message is at all worth reading, it'll be worth reading in two hours when I have time for it. Sod instant messaging, I usually keep my phone turned off and somebody else answers my doorbell.
It's not called being an introvert. It's called being a grownup, with work to do.
What is optimized for games that use multiplayer local play but are developed by smaller studios? Or how should a smaller studio get started?
Xbox Live Arcade, and the PS3's equivalent, and Nintendo's equivalent. The console manufacturers are finally starting to create ways for smaller studios to get their games on their machines.
They are different types of machines optimized for use in different ways. If the console were going to kill the PC it would have done it sometime in the last twenty years or so, doncha think? In the meantime, consoles have gotten more and more expensive (making them less attractive to the casual consumer than, say the SNES was in its day), and PCs have gotten cheaper and cheaper in real terms.
The console is optimized for a group of people sitting around a living room. It sucks for any game requiring a mouse and keyboard.
The PC is optimized for a single person sitting 30 cm away. It sucks for multiplayer local play.
They are different machines. Neither can kill the other, no matter what the fanboys say.
At any given time, the top-end PC will always be more powerful than the top-end console, because the top-end PC costs $5000 and the top-end console is a tenth of that. There will always be gamers who demand that level of power. Likewise, there will always be gamers who enjoy the simplicity of load-and-go gameplay that consoles offer, and don't want or need a PC.
Why the flying purple fuck should I pay my carrier's outrageous rates ($20 per megabyte if I'm in the United States with my European phone) when I can get Wi-Fi for nothing from my kindly hotel, coffee shop, airport, etc.? Particularly as municipal Wi-Fi IS going to happen, maybe not with 802.11g, but with Wimax or something else.
Just do to people what they currently do to the carry-ons: X-ray them. We all lie down on a conveyor belt, get X-rayed, some underpaid bozo looks at our internal organs, and we're done. FAR less hassle than the current system.
If I were Saudi and Libya and Algeria and Chad, I'd carpet the whole freaking Sahara and the Rub-al-Qali with solar cells. Those places sure as hell aren't any good for anything else. And as global warming continues to heat up the planet and desertification increases, we just get more useful land for solar cells. Win-win.
This isn't like George Bush and the NSA doing an end-run around the Constitution, or Communist China. This was a legitimate judicial proceeding in a multi-party country that observes due process of law.
The anonymity of the Internet is not a free pass to commit slander. Either defend your words or shut up.
I've got a short list of people for whom I'd cheerfully pay $1000 to get a wiretap transcript on. Let's see, Dick Cheney, Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas...
I started flying in 1960 when the whole US industry was regulated -- for its own good. There was no hub-and-spoke system. The whole nation was well-covered -- a ticket to Podunk, Iowa didn't cost $1000 simply because it was a low-traffic route. A ticket from A to B cost the same on ANY carrier. Because they couldn't compete on price, they had to compete on service, and the service was damn good. Decent food, bigger seats than now, toys for the kids, free decks of cards, pens, and notepaper for the adults. A single thunderstorm in Chicago didn't screw up the whole nation. Flight attendants weren't horribly overworked on jam-packed flights.
Yeah, it cost a lot more in real dollars. Yeah, not so many people flew in those days (they took the train or the bus, duh). But look what would happen if we implemented it now. The higher prices would drive people back to ground transportation, reducing their carbon footprint. The airlines would have to clean up their acts and start competing on service again. With fewer flights the skies would be safer.
Deregulation brought down prices for anybody flying between major hubs, but drove them through the roof for anything out of the way, and shot the quality of service to hell. Typical short-sighted profit-motive thinking.
OK, so there's a certain amount of variation in the hardware configuration.:) That's what you get with open standards.
Personally I think consoles mostly suck for playing games on. The controller is a crappy input device and the television is a crappy output device. The reason they're such a hit with the public is that they're 0.5 to 0.1 times the price of a PC, and the reason for THAT is -- aha -- they're not open-standard.
If the definition of the chairman's job is to be impartial and to make sure that all sides get a fair hearing (which it may or may not be), then by speaking up as a "private person" with strong views in the middle of a hearing, the chair has just questioned his own qualifications for the job. Consider the effect on the possible outcome -- the committee votes against OOXML, and Microsoft is going to cry foul -- the chair, who runs the show, was biased against them from the start. It discredits the committee.
Suppose a judge in a trial stood up in the middle and said, "I'd like to speak as a private person for a moment, and I think the defendant is GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY! Thank you. Now on with the trial."
I don't know if impartiality is required of the chair in this organization. It certainly isn't on US congressional committees, but a standards organization isn't supposed (in principle, obviously) to be about politics.
Your question is like asking what's the point in hybrid cars because they cost more than a comparable traditional car. The up-front cost is recouped in later savings and it's better for the environment generally, while actually offering a higher standard of service. It's simply a better railway.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, as game AI is mostly smoke and mirrors, it probably won't be a major engineering achievement either.
A major entertainment achievement, possibly.
And how much were these two geniuses paid to come up with this worthless tidbit?
As a fat American who lives in Britain, I can tell you they are utterly obsessed with this non-problem. Obesity is the bugbear du jour in the UK; it fills the media daily.
Britain throws away one million, count 'em, 1,000,000, uneaten pots of yoghurt per DAY -- fact from the BBC. Plastic pots that won't biodegrade. What does THAT cost in global warming?
I'm not anonymous. My name is on my comment.
At my last "open plan" situation my co-workers stole stuff from my desk. They didn't just borrow my stapler, they stole my personal property. There was a lot of general pilferage, in fact, so bad that the company had to install security cameras. The natural temptation was to blame the cleaning staff, but I don't think they were behind it.
Keep your moronic music to yourself, keep your eyes off my screen, and keep your hands off my desk.
Anonymity is the bane of civilized discourse. The only people who need to be anonymous on the Internet are whistleblowers, persons risking oppression under tyranny, and people needing health care information. Oh, and assholes, of course.
Electrical leakage was the least of your problems. If one of those spiky ball things came after you, you were doomed.
"Smack 'em with your dick, smack 'em with your dick. Fuck 'em in the ear, fuck 'em in the ear. Blind the bitch, blind the bitch."
What else need one do, really?
What planet are you on? Gosh, I wonder how Microsoft would respond to someone putting the code for Office online? Banning would be the least of it. Open source is a good thing; software patents are bad; but EVERY company is legitimately entitled to its trade secrets.
America-centric bollocks. If NASA were razed to the ground and all its employees rounded up and shot, it still would not spell the end of human spaceflight... as John F. Kennedy knew perfectly well when he launched the race to the moon.
Nothing could please the Russians more than to have lost the battle for the moon, but to have won the war for space.
If your message is at all worth reading, it'll be worth reading in two hours when I have time for it. Sod instant messaging, I usually keep my phone turned off and somebody else answers my doorbell.
It's not called being an introvert. It's called being a grownup, with work to do.
They are different types of machines optimized for use in different ways. If the console were going to kill the PC it would have done it sometime in the last twenty years or so, doncha think? In the meantime, consoles have gotten more and more expensive (making them less attractive to the casual consumer than, say the SNES was in its day), and PCs have gotten cheaper and cheaper in real terms.
The console is optimized for a group of people sitting around a living room. It sucks for any game requiring a mouse and keyboard.
The PC is optimized for a single person sitting 30 cm away. It sucks for multiplayer local play.
They are different machines. Neither can kill the other, no matter what the fanboys say.
At any given time, the top-end PC will always be more powerful than the top-end console, because the top-end PC costs $5000 and the top-end console is a tenth of that. There will always be gamers who demand that level of power. Likewise, there will always be gamers who enjoy the simplicity of load-and-go gameplay that consoles offer, and don't want or need a PC.
Why the flying purple fuck should I pay my carrier's outrageous rates ($20 per megabyte if I'm in the United States with my European phone) when I can get Wi-Fi for nothing from my kindly hotel, coffee shop, airport, etc.? Particularly as municipal Wi-Fi IS going to happen, maybe not with 802.11g, but with Wimax or something else.
Just do to people what they currently do to the carry-ons: X-ray them. We all lie down on a conveyor belt, get X-rayed, some underpaid bozo looks at our internal organs, and we're done. FAR less hassle than the current system.
If I were Saudi and Libya and Algeria and Chad, I'd carpet the whole freaking Sahara and the Rub-al-Qali with solar cells. Those places sure as hell aren't any good for anything else. And as global warming continues to heat up the planet and desertification increases, we just get more useful land for solar cells. Win-win.
This isn't like George Bush and the NSA doing an end-run around the Constitution, or Communist China. This was a legitimate judicial proceeding in a multi-party country that observes due process of law. The anonymity of the Internet is not a free pass to commit slander. Either defend your words or shut up.
I've got a short list of people for whom I'd cheerfully pay $1000 to get a wiretap transcript on. Let's see, Dick Cheney, Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas...
I started flying in 1960 when the whole US industry was regulated -- for its own good. There was no hub-and-spoke system. The whole nation was well-covered -- a ticket to Podunk, Iowa didn't cost $1000 simply because it was a low-traffic route. A ticket from A to B cost the same on ANY carrier. Because they couldn't compete on price, they had to compete on service, and the service was damn good. Decent food, bigger seats than now, toys for the kids, free decks of cards, pens, and notepaper for the adults. A single thunderstorm in Chicago didn't screw up the whole nation. Flight attendants weren't horribly overworked on jam-packed flights.
Yeah, it cost a lot more in real dollars. Yeah, not so many people flew in those days (they took the train or the bus, duh). But look what would happen if we implemented it now. The higher prices would drive people back to ground transportation, reducing their carbon footprint. The airlines would have to clean up their acts and start competing on service again. With fewer flights the skies would be safer.
Deregulation brought down prices for anybody flying between major hubs, but drove them through the roof for anything out of the way, and shot the quality of service to hell. Typical short-sighted profit-motive thinking.
OK, so there's a certain amount of variation in the hardware configuration.
Personally I think consoles mostly suck for playing games on. The controller is a crappy input device and the television is a crappy output device. The reason they're such a hit with the public is that they're 0.5 to 0.1 times the price of a PC, and the reason for THAT is -- aha -- they're not open-standard.
Outside the USA, few institutions have ever heard of it. The US Congress doesn't use it; each house has its own rules of order.
Good point about the distinction between impartiality and fairness.
If the definition of the chairman's job is to be impartial and to make sure that all sides get a fair hearing (which it may or may not be), then by speaking up as a "private person" with strong views in the middle of a hearing, the chair has just questioned his own qualifications for the job. Consider the effect on the possible outcome -- the committee votes against OOXML, and Microsoft is going to cry foul -- the chair, who runs the show, was biased against them from the start. It discredits the committee.
Suppose a judge in a trial stood up in the middle and said, "I'd like to speak as a private person for a moment, and I think the defendant is GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY! Thank you. Now on with the trial."
I don't know if impartiality is required of the chair in this organization. It certainly isn't on US congressional committees, but a standards organization isn't supposed (in principle, obviously) to be about politics.
Didn't use it all that much, though. I bought it 'cos it rocked.
Also, 2.6 billion dollars is only 1.84 billion Euro, and dropping daily. :)
Your question is like asking what's the point in hybrid cars because they cost more than a comparable traditional car. The up-front cost is recouped in later savings and it's better for the environment generally, while actually offering a higher standard of service. It's simply a better railway.