- Want to thether for free even though your carrier wants you to pay extra? There's a WinMo app for that.
- Want to thether for free via your phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot so that everyone in your carpool can access the interenet at once? There's a WinMo app for that, too.
- Hell, I can even run two programs at once and mount my phone as a disk drive and fill it up with whatever I damn well please.
Seems like pretty basic/essential functionality to me.
Though they built the system, the researchers don’t quite understand how it works.
and...
Intriguingly, the algorithm doesn’t work nearly as well if any one operation is omitted. The sum is greater than the whole, and O’Carroll and Brinkworth don’t know why.
Wow, some interesting "science" that's going on here.
Great result, but, really, way to go guys! You can't understand a non-linear system's behavior; join the club. I still can't understand why z_n+1 = z_n^2 + c looks so pretty either.
To that effect, one of the most frustrating game elements that I see time and again is the age old "die, fight, repeat" formula.
This is, quite frankly, annoying and has been done before.
Don't get me wrong, some risk is required to have fun (coincidentally, it is also another principle of flow), but a game which forces the user to repeat themselves is a game that's run out of new ideas.
I've seen some variation on this formula in the past with decent success, like bullet time effect, which allows the user to "cheat" and slow down the game when the going gets tough. However, it's still a very constrained way of tackling the problem.
Thinking a little outside of the box, I'd like to see adaptive story lines, where based on a player's proficency and style, the story line changes in sensical ways. Also, tiered reward systems based on proficency, not on difficulty, and new ways to handle character death through story telling elements like ghosts, time warping (maybe the ability to go back or forwards in time?), etc.
it possible that peer-to-peer networks could reemerge in the future as a viable, albeit protected, source of content."
By viable, I think he means, "viable buisness strategy for the legal content owners and therefore no longer illegal, i.e., viable for the mainstream public, too".
I'll bet that a P2P researcher is already well aware of the points you made above.
Parent modded "informative"!?
And I guess we should also all watch out those little fuzzy creatures that turn into goblins when you feed them after midnight...
Try "funny".
Assuming all the above premises hold, it seems likely this is just MS being lazy and incompetent and not wanting to expend effort to write an upgrader for Europe that won't install IE.
Do you honestly believe that Microsoft is doing this out of lethargy?
Mod me down for defending Microsoft here, but they are not stupid. This decision could make or lose billions of dollars. Yes, billions. I'm sure somebody in Microsoft has done the math, argued it from all angles, and there's a damn good reason why it is they way it is.
Your high horse clouds your judgement.
It's not their fault
It wasn't the Gestapo's fault either....
Being a mathematician myself, I too find this theory quite refreshing. It seems to tie the scattering of complex ideas that I know as quantum physics into one nice little, intuitive package.
For instance, I've always wondered about the seemingly-coincidental, repetitious nature of the universe. Why is it that an electron is to a nucleus, like a planet is to a star, like a solar system is to a galaxy, like a galaxy is to a super cluster? This cyclic nature is well described and documented in fractals, http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/fractals/mandelbrot.html, and so, the universe having fractal roots makes sense.
Another example: the uncertainty of quantum measurements. Why must everything be measured in statistical values? The continuous nature of the fractal again gives nice intuition into this quandary as well. However, this point leads me to wonder just how reconcilable this mathematical simplification actually is. I'm not a physicist, but I do know that much of quantum physics deals with the concept of discrete: discrete time, energy quanta, etc. Fractals, are, by definition, continuous.
Are these two at all acquiescent?
"I'm growing older, but not up." -- Jimmy Buffett