Posts by Matt Semper 14 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2008
with design heading towards more and more cores, this is surely going to lead to the development of complex nural networks, and with it a whole new world of programming with the ability to behave and respond much more like a human would. We got the physics card, how long till we get an add on AI card with 4 of these babies on board.
Duke is a great character, and he makes a game just being in it. Especially in the current climate of ultra serious WW2 recreations etc. Duke would be a breath of fresh air. and it really doesn't matter if it's not on the latest engine, the HL2 engine was already outdated when portal and then TF2 were released and both were amazing. Portal has been considered pretty much the greatest game ever.
What's insane is that after starting the DNF project a different dev team started, finished and released Duke Nukem Manhatten Project, and that was years ago!
I'm getting older now but still I'd like to play DNF if it's ever finished. The best strategy at this point I think, would be to build the engine as quickly as possible (if it's not done) and then get a couple of levels done and start releasing it episodically on XBL.
If anyone is interested there is a High Res mod pack for the original Duke 3D, which updates the graphics to something close to modern, you can find it here http://hrp.duke4.net/
And of course I also have to link to the de-rez video on the subject. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/de-rez/46-The-Truth-About-3D-Realms
Though I'm sure they'll find a way to wiggle out of it. If they don't I'd be concerned that the police might start pushing to convict anyone who's arrested of the tiniest thing, just so they can bulk up their database. (I was arrested for swearing!) Is a formal caution enough for them to be able to keep your DNA?
Their solution if they could be bothered to implement it, is the same as I've suggested to friends before regarding the US but it would work just as well here. Open a voluntary database and pay people £100 for giving DNA and fingerprint samples.
Loads of people would do it, for a few easy notes, it amazing how quickly people will sell their privacy. and with the ability to get partial matches for family members, the police would have all they could possibly need.
It does seem like an outrageously and unjustifiably high number. Obviously they fudge the estimate as much as they can so it sounds like a bigger bust. I think they justify their valuation (though it still wouldn't get them quite to a million) by assuming that the pirate copies would be old as forgeries, passed off as the real thing, thus at almost retail price.
of course we know that that simply isn't the case, you know dodgy discs when you see them, even when they put them in nice dvd cases (tho in my experience they use slimline cases) with labels printed on shiny paper and discs printed on. The stall at the carboot sale with thousands of copies of popular titles, and offers like3 for £10 are usually a dead giveaway.
But they love their disinformation, like how they make out that all pirate copies are bad quality, yes if you buy a movie the day it comes out in the cinema it's likely to be a CAM and pretty damn awful, but by the time the retail DVD is out, there will be dvd copies or dvd rips available which look just as good, you can get HD rips which mean you don't need a Blu-ray drive to play them, and often months before the DVD release you can get Telecines, R5s, Screeners etc. And of course copies of music and games will be bit for bit identical.
I'm not advocating piracy but I don't think their lies are any better, and shame on el reg for printing their propaganda.
I wouldn't call him a hacker or a cracker, he's not even really a script kiddy (although that's closer). That said the term hacking can apply, since hacker doesn't simply mean using advanced technological skills or equipment to break into something, but also includes skills such as social engineering and research. There is a great skill in guessing someone's password beyond just typing in random words.
One thing I don't understand though, wasn't this her hotmail account? That being the case, how did he "break into a protected computer" the emails will have been stored on an MS hotmail sever, a sever to which Microsoft allow the public free access. So surely the indictment is incorrect and should be quashed for that reason.
The shift from a TV 3 foot deep to one 6 inches deep, served a practical purpose. This is hardly a revolution. I really don't see the point unless you've got more money than sense.
The market will eventually shift this way anyway and then all TVs will progressively get thinner, so don't waste your money paying a premium for this. (unless you so some reason need to stand a TV on your mantle piece.
Independence Day was an awesome movie, yes it was ridiculous to suggest that he could just plug and play network interface his mac with the alien space ship (back then you needed a phd to make one talk to a pc). And then there is the fact that if all they were using the satellites for was a countdown then surely it was entirely unnecessary, they could have just synchronised their clocks once before they arrived. And if they needed to remain in communication, the fact that they had a ship positioned over every major city on the planet, would mean they'd easily be able to manage near line of sight communication between themselves without the need for satellites.
But if you can suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy, energy weapons, apparent anti-gravity flight, force fields, and inter-stella flight then surely you can ignore the IT goofs too. it was great fun, and we got to see them blow up the whitehouse :)
I still enjoy Spooks but I do think it's gone downhill somewhat, and I wish they wouldn't cycle the cast so damn quickly, I still keep hoping that one day they'll bring Tom back in. (Some case where he was undercover, and needs to go back, or only he knew the identity of an informant who has key intelligence)
And I thought bugs was great back in the day, but was very disappointed when I got the Series 1 DVD, I guess the standard of TV acting has gotten higher.
Anyone remember a series the BBC ran for a very short while around the same time, called Crimetraveller?
A domain name is nothing more than a short cut to instruct your browser to connect with a certain IP address. So by the same logic, if a casino in vegas will accept a bet made over the phone, they should have their phone number taken away? And what about if the casino didn't even use a domain name, what if they decide to spend several million in advertising just in kentucky, for the new great casino http:// 145.227.96.15 ? is that legal?
And the domain isn't even the property of the casino anyway, all they have is a limited period lease to use said domain.
I don't think this is a case of the judge being an idiot, but rather, just being a tw*t, he knows this, but believes gambling is bad and is attempting to use this opportunity to inflict his own moral beliefs on those that don't want it. After all, killing the domain name stops the company trading everywhere, not just kentucky.
I think there needs to be a federal law put in place, stating that if any state or local government wishes to impose specific sanctions or restrictions on the internet, they should have to be done so, at the state level, (or only within the scope of the local government's jurisdiction) by means of some kind of filtering agreement with the major backbone ISPs
I think the reason for the convergence is that a couple of years ago we finally invented computers that were powerful enough to do 99% of everything the average person wants. Unless you're into the latest FPS games, there hasn't been a good reason to upgrade your PC past around 1.6 - 2 GhZ. Laptops now happily do everything our desktops do other than gaming, and gaming is nor pretty firmly in the living room attached to our HDTVs.
The next revolution for laptops though, especially to capture a little of the gaming market, would be to design and externally accessible peripheral port, fast enough for mobile graphics cards. so that One could simply buy a faster card, and slot it in place of the old one, no opening up of laptop required.
Also a few more standardisations wouldn't hurt, laptops are still just a pain in the ass to upgrade even these days.
The way for Google to compete with this bid would be to essentially buy out the heart of Yahoo!
Offer like $20bn just for Yahoo! Search (And possibly pick up Flickr since that's the cash cow, then merge it with YouTube) together with a name usage license.
Share holders would probably like this deal since that's a big payout for just one or two components of the Yahoo! portfolio (and Yahoo! search will never compete will Google again anyway), but they don't have to dump everything with Microsoft and in the process risk killing it all.
Since they weren't buying the whole company Google would probably get away with it without suffering at the hands of anti-competition laws.
Back in the days when I used to use Yahoo! ( < 2000) it was "Yahoo! Search powered by Google" then Yahoo! switched to the Alta Vista engine, and I (along with everyone else) dumped them like a sack of rocks. Google could bring Yahoo! Search back to it's former glory, bolster it's own product with the Yahoo! Directory, and solidify for all time it's leadership in the sector by owning both major brands.
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