"...games will get more violent, he says. 'Why? Because they can.'"
I'm actually glad that first-person-shooter video games are getting more violent. It makes them more realistic. At the same time, I would be glad if the simulation games became more realistic too (I'd logged more hours in a Learjet 45 in FS98 than I've spent in class).
The goal of the computer gaming industry is to make games more realistic. Not necessarily real compared to the "real-world", but real compared to the game. Games are trying to be as true to the world it portrays as possible. And as long as they continue to improve, it'll be a good thing. I for one, do not want to go back to playing Pong. I would prefer playing Rainbow Six (or Rogue Spear), where one bullet will take you down.
I cannot comprehend a person so obsessively self-centered as to believe that children have no "point" or are merely a status symbol.
You misunderstand me. I was attempting to find a reason from an outsider's point of view. I was attempting to observe the system, rather than manipulate the system (Man, I've been reading too much Godel Escher Bach). From a purely logical point of view, there is no reason for people in richer countries to have children. But since people are still having children, this leads you to determine that having children is not a logical act in richer countries. Rather, it is an emotional act. Aha!
IANA Reproductive Specialist. Although it seems to me that to understand global population trends, you need to look at why people have kids.
In poor countries, the people are.. Well... poor. They don't have any money. Let's try and figure out why they have children. At first they're expensive, they consume food and water, and give little in return. But eventually they can help out in the fields farming and such.
Now, if someone has a child at the age of 25, 15 years later, they'd be 40. This might not seem to be a debilitating age to most of us, but imagine the conditions in poorer countries. In a third world, a person at the age of 40 is at retirement age! But guess what? They have no money to "retire". Hmmm, who's going to look after them in their old age? Why their offspring, of course! Children are a means of retirement! No wonder the birthrate is so high in poorer countries. They need children to be able to survive later in life.
Now, let's look at richer countries. We obviously do not need children to look after us when we grow old. That's what an RRSP is for. Besides, children are expensive to have. There's almost no point in having children. Maybe most of the children born today are accidents?! Maybe they're a status symbol, a way of saying: "We're well off enough to have a few kids of our own". Well, whatever the reasons, they certainly aren't as compelling as the poorer countries. Hence the lower birth rate.
I don't like the idea of nanobots for several reasons:
1. Military potential of nanotechnology. Anything that *can* be used as a weapon will be/has been. It started with sticks and rocks, and now has progressed to H-bombs and chemicals. Soon we will have biological weapons in wide use. Having viruses engineered to caused maximal damage to humans is scary enough, imagine machines doing the same!
2. Human population. One use that nanobots will have is probably to increase the amount of time that people are sexually reproductive. What I mean is that people will be able to have kids at later ages. Instead of having two or three children in their twenties, couples may be able to have multiple "sets" of children. After one set of children hast grown up and moved out of the house, they may opt to have more kids. This coupled with the possibility of longer life will cause a population explosion in the western world. The more people there are in a confined space, the more tensions rise. When tensions rise, war will eventually break out.
3. Loss of identity. If these machines will be able to give out nosejobs at a whim, then what will stop them from making every man look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar and every woman look like Cindy Crawford (forgive me if I'm using bad celebrity examples, I'm a little out of the celibrity-watching circles). You might argue that outside appearance don't matter, it's what's inside a person's mind that counts. Sure, but wouldn't these nanobots be able to muck around with our brain cells too? Sooner or later, we'd end up with a society of people who all are mechanically altered to be the same. What does this mean? EVOLUTION WILL GRIND TO A STOP!!!
No way, I do not like this idea one bit. But at least I'll be long dead before anything of the sort is invented, or at least useful. It's the next generations that will have the problems.
Basically, you break the CISC style instructions down into simpler instructions that each have a very specific task
That's what I always thought.
What I learned from my last computer design course, was that RISC implemented all instructions in hardware. While CISC implemented all instructions in microcode.
When people look at a Pentium, they're not looking at the actual chip. They're just looking at the protective casing. The actual chip is inside and is about the size of of your pinky fingernail.
They need to make the casing that big to accomodate all of the pins. That, and so it can dissipate heat.
The question here is why isn't there an opensource solution for e-commerce (hate to use the word "solution", but nothing else fits the situation). One explanation would be lack of demand. Nothing ever gets made before there is a demand for it, with the notable exception of New Coke and WordPerfect for Java.
Now that there is demand, will there be supply? I doubt it. Primarily due to the nature of opensource. Most opensource developpers are ordinary folks in their basements living off of cold pizza and jolt cola (or mountain dew for those of you with sophisticated tastes). The individual usually doesn't care much about corporate needs. Whereas corporations hear the pleas of other corporations to create e-commerce programs.
Now, I'm not sure if there *is* an opensource e-commerce suite out there, I certainly do doubt it. However, there is nothing preventing one from being made. Only the time taken out of a lonely programmer pounding out code for naught-but self-fulfillment.
Most big clients need a 1-800 number to settle their frazzled nerves
Just a comment about this quote: I think it's not the company that needs the 1-800, it's the customer. They want to be able to get in contact with a real person at the touch of a button, rather than getting canned email responses for general inquiries.
When I first bought my copy of CodeWarrior two years ago, I was severely unimpressed. The installer crashed on me twice, I reinstalled everything, then it worked fine. Then when I had everything up and running, the toolbar hints only gave me a ''. And it crashed, and it crashed and it crashed. And my greatest peeve was its Pascal compiler which didn't support REALs ( redirect all flames to/dev/null ).
Now, I understand that CodeWarrior was ported from Mac to Intel, so I was expecting a few caveats. But the total lack of usability was astonishing!
I hope CodeWarrior does not go through the same growing pains in Linux as it did for Win32.
Nobody's trying to introduce backdoors into code while fixing Y2K issues. What they're really doing is making sure they still have jobs in 20 years by allowing dates to only go as high as 2019.
I noticed the author mentioned that the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) was used for security purposes.
I remember reading all sorts of wonderful things about NT 3.51 (remember those days) and its abilility to be installed to Alpha and PowerPC systems thanks to the HAL. And that the purpose of the HAL was for cross-platform installs.
Am I wrong? Or are they just claiming it's for security now that they don't support any platforms other than Intel (instead of removing it and possibly stirring up bugs)?
{SATIRE}Why don't we all just ban all domain names that have combinations of letters that have any meaning in english? Hey, why not take it a step further and also ban numbers that have "bad" meaning (e.g. http://69.69.69.69).
Heck, let's just remove all domain names and switch to random letters and numbers to prevent anybody from being offended! If we all can't understand what we're typing, then we can't be offended, right?{/SATIRE}
What I'm trying to get at is that *somebody* will be offended by something. And if you try to please everybody, you will only end up pleasing nobody.
The only reason I can imagine that a student is able to retrieve a pre-made essay is because teachers are inherently lazy themselves.
Take Shakespeare for example. Everybody from my home province had to read one play a year from grade 9 on until graduation. In each Shakespeare play, there are countless topics that essays can be written on.
What happens is that the teachers get lazy. They keep using the same old "standard" topics year after year to make their job easier by marking the same thing over and over again. How many of you remember writing about "Fate vs. Free Will" in Romeo and Juliet? Or how about Ambition being MacBeth's downfall, or similarly Hamlet's procrastination?
And let's not even start by looking at the obvious clues that a student is cheating. The dumb jock who can barely talk, managed to pound out an in-depth 15000 word essay on Othello's relationship with his dog Fluffy. When student grades fluctuate and are strangely not in character, teachers should investigate. But then they would actually be earning their 30k/year, wouldn't they?
Sounds a bit like Prisoner's Dilemma. The classic backstabbing game.
They mention that there are poisonous coral snakes... I hope they have adequate medical facilities nearby to treat somewhen *WHEN* they get bitten by one (not if).
One last comment: What happens if there is a tie in the vote? Re-vote? A votes for B, B votes for C and C votes for A.
It was still kind of a one-sided match. I mean, the way the World chose moves might have been the best way to get alot of people involved, but it did not produce the best moves.
I would warrant a guess that the majority of people who play chess are average players. And almost everybody is a worse player than Kasparov (there might be some undiscovered talent out there). So, the grand majority get to choose moves that will ultimately lose, while the few genius moves will be out-voted.
This didn't happen as much as it would have since there were advisors on the World's team. And people never voted for a move that was against the advisors. So this wasn't really a match against the world, but against a few selected chess players. The voting mechanism was just to formalize everything and make people think their ideas counted.
So do you have to have one of these boxes for every computer you want to hook up? So basically, the light gets dispersed into a million directions. Does a receptor only need to capture a fragment of the Ir beam?
From what I understand, any info that goes through the states could be intercepted by the FBI. What about communication by Canadians, whose TCP/IP packets just happen to get routed through the US? Wouldn't this behaviour be considered as international spying?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually glad that first-person-shooter video games are getting more violent. It makes them more realistic. At the same time, I would be glad if the simulation games became more realistic too (I'd logged more hours in a Learjet 45 in FS98 than I've spent in class).
The goal of the computer gaming industry is to make games more realistic. Not necessarily real compared to the "real-world", but real compared to the game. Games are trying to be as true to the world it portrays as possible. And as long as they continue to improve, it'll be a good thing. I for one, do not want to go back to playing Pong. I would prefer playing Rainbow Six (or Rogue Spear), where one bullet will take you down.
You misunderstand me. I was attempting to find a reason from an outsider's point of view. I was attempting to observe the system, rather than manipulate the system (Man, I've been reading too much Godel Escher Bach). From a purely logical point of view, there is no reason for people in richer countries to have children. But since people are still having children, this leads you to determine that having children is not a logical act in richer countries. Rather, it is an emotional act. Aha!
But "patent" doesn't have rofi in it...
In poor countries, the people are.. Well... poor. They don't have any money. Let's try and figure out why they have children. At first they're expensive, they consume food and water, and give little in return. But eventually they can help out in the fields farming and such.
Now, if someone has a child at the age of 25, 15 years later, they'd be 40. This might not seem to be a debilitating age to most of us, but imagine the conditions in poorer countries. In a third world, a person at the age of 40 is at retirement age! But guess what? They have no money to "retire". Hmmm, who's going to look after them in their old age? Why their offspring, of course! Children are a means of retirement! No wonder the birthrate is so high in poorer countries. They need children to be able to survive later in life.
Now, let's look at richer countries. We obviously do not need children to look after us when we grow old. That's what an RRSP is for. Besides, children are expensive to have. There's almost no point in having children. Maybe most of the children born today are accidents?! Maybe they're a status symbol, a way of saying: "We're well off enough to have a few kids of our own". Well, whatever the reasons, they certainly aren't as compelling as the poorer countries. Hence the lower birth rate.
e-moose
e-beer
e-hockey
Well, you might see the e-hockey, because it just became marketable down south.
1. Military potential of nanotechnology. Anything that *can* be used as a weapon will be/has been. It started with sticks and rocks, and now has progressed to H-bombs and chemicals. Soon we will have biological weapons in wide use. Having viruses engineered to caused maximal damage to humans is scary enough, imagine machines doing the same!
2. Human population. One use that nanobots will have is probably to increase the amount of time that people are sexually reproductive. What I mean is that people will be able to have kids at later ages. Instead of having two or three children in their twenties, couples may be able to have multiple "sets" of children. After one set of children hast grown up and moved out of the house, they may opt to have more kids. This coupled with the possibility of longer life will cause a population explosion in the western world. The more people there are in a confined space, the more tensions rise. When tensions rise, war will eventually break out.
3. Loss of identity. If these machines will be able to give out nosejobs at a whim, then what will stop them from making every man look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar and every woman look like Cindy Crawford (forgive me if I'm using bad celebrity examples, I'm a little out of the celibrity-watching circles). You might argue that outside appearance don't matter, it's what's inside a person's mind that counts. Sure, but wouldn't these nanobots be able to muck around with our brain cells too? Sooner or later, we'd end up with a society of people who all are mechanically altered to be the same. What does this mean? EVOLUTION WILL GRIND TO A STOP!!!
No way, I do not like this idea one bit. But at least I'll be long dead before anything of the sort is invented, or at least useful. It's the next generations that will have the problems.
That's what I always thought.
What I learned from my last computer design course, was that RISC implemented all instructions in hardware. While CISC implemented all instructions in microcode.
They need to make the casing that big to accomodate all of the pins. That, and so it can dissipate heat.
Silly question, but what is a beowulf cluster?
Now that there is demand, will there be supply? I doubt it. Primarily due to the nature of opensource. Most opensource developpers are ordinary folks in their basements living off of cold pizza and jolt cola (or mountain dew for those of you with sophisticated tastes). The individual usually doesn't care much about corporate needs. Whereas corporations hear the pleas of other corporations to create e-commerce programs.
Now, I'm not sure if there *is* an opensource e-commerce suite out there, I certainly do doubt it. However, there is nothing preventing one from being made. Only the time taken out of a lonely programmer pounding out code for naught-but self-fulfillment.
Most big clients need a 1-800 number to settle their frazzled nerves
Just a comment about this quote: I think it's not the company that needs the 1-800, it's the customer. They want to be able to get in contact with a real person at the touch of a button, rather than getting canned email responses for general inquiries.
My $0.01 ($0.02 Cdn)
Now, I understand that CodeWarrior was ported from Mac to Intel, so I was expecting a few caveats. But the total lack of usability was astonishing!
I hope CodeWarrior does not go through the same growing pains in Linux as it did for Win32.
I would have thought the peripherals would outsell consoles. I can just see it now: "Yay! i've got 5 modems and one box!"
It's not like it's an earth-shattering concept: Increasing your profits by entering new markets.
Nobody's trying to introduce backdoors into code while fixing Y2K issues. What they're really doing is making sure they still have jobs in 20 years by allowing dates to only go as high as 2019.
And we can credit Xerox by having most of those products ripped off by Steve. :)
I remember reading all sorts of wonderful things about NT 3.51 (remember those days) and its abilility to be installed to Alpha and PowerPC systems thanks to the HAL. And that the purpose of the HAL was for cross-platform installs.
Am I wrong? Or are they just claiming it's for security now that they don't support any platforms other than Intel (instead of removing it and possibly stirring up bugs)?
Heck, let's just remove all domain names and switch to random letters and numbers to prevent anybody from being offended! If we all can't understand what we're typing, then we can't be offended, right?{/SATIRE}
What I'm trying to get at is that *somebody* will be offended by something. And if you try to please everybody, you will only end up pleasing nobody.
Take Shakespeare for example. Everybody from my home province had to read one play a year from grade 9 on until graduation. In each Shakespeare play, there are countless topics that essays can be written on.
What happens is that the teachers get lazy. They keep using the same old "standard" topics year after year to make their job easier by marking the same thing over and over again. How many of you remember writing about "Fate vs. Free Will" in Romeo and Juliet? Or how about Ambition being MacBeth's downfall, or similarly Hamlet's procrastination?
And let's not even start by looking at the obvious clues that a student is cheating. The dumb jock who can barely talk, managed to pound out an in-depth 15000 word essay on Othello's relationship with his dog Fluffy. When student grades fluctuate and are strangely not in character, teachers should investigate. But then they would actually be earning their 30k/year, wouldn't they?
They mention that there are poisonous coral snakes... I hope they have adequate medical facilities nearby to treat somewhen *WHEN* they get bitten by one (not if).
One last comment: What happens if there is a tie in the vote? Re-vote? A votes for B, B votes for C and C votes for A.
I would warrant a guess that the majority of people who play chess are average players. And almost everybody is a worse player than Kasparov (there might be some undiscovered talent out there). So, the grand majority get to choose moves that will ultimately lose, while the few genius moves will be out-voted.
This didn't happen as much as it would have since there were advisors on the World's team. And people never voted for a move that was against the advisors. So this wasn't really a match against the world, but against a few selected chess players. The voting mechanism was just to formalize everything and make people think their ideas counted.
So do you have to have one of these boxes for every computer you want to hook up? So basically, the light gets dispersed into a million directions. Does a receptor only need to capture a fragment of the Ir beam?
From what I understand, any info that goes through the states could be intercepted by the FBI. What about communication by Canadians, whose TCP/IP packets just happen to get routed through the US? Wouldn't this behaviour be considered as international spying?