Messages

201

General Chat / Re: FireFox and its Awesome Add-Ons

« on: June 18, 2010, 05:19:48 PM »

Toolbar Buttons has most of the menus, as well as a ton of other buttons.  If it has too many buttons, you can also use Custom Toolbar Buttons, which allows you to install an extension that only has the toolbar buttons you want (I don't know if it properly handles updates, though). 

The only button this lacks currently, as best as I can tell, is a button for the History menu (strangely).  If you want that you can use Personal Menu, which provides a single button for all menus as well as a history button and bookmarks button. 

202

General Chat / Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread

« on: June 07, 2010, 01:16:55 AM »

Oh, I somehow missed the part where you wrote it.

203

NWR Forums Discord / Re: the Locked thread comment box

« on: June 07, 2010, 12:56:38 AM »

Your avatar disturbs me TheBlackCat. I wish it was something more pleasant.

Are you kidding?!  But it's so cute!  It's furry and it has those cute ears and that little nose.  How can anyone find that disturbing?

204

General Chat / Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread

« on: June 06, 2010, 09:47:26 PM »

It has been proven that Aborigines of Australia had reached that country at about 60,000 years ago, well enough time for them to spread across the country and eventually sea fare their way to South America and establish a significant presence on the continent long before the supposed Clovis culture had dawned in North America.

Travelling the fairly short distance from island to island from southeast Asia to Australia is trivial matter compared to colonizing the much wider-scattered islands of the South Pacific, which didn't happen until fairly recently, and that is nothing compared to covering over half the pacific in one shot.  It would require ship-building technology that far exceeds even that of Rome, Greece, or the Polynesians, not to mention people living 15,000 years ago, and then have that technology completely forgotten with no trace of evidence left for about 10,000 years.  Also, if this was true you would expect islands in the Eastern pacific like the Galapagos to have similar artifacts, which I don't think is the case.

However, the inhabitants of the land bridge called Beringia in the Bering Strait may have traveled down the pacific coast via boats to North America during the last ice age, but there is still little evidence for this point of view to be accepted because the sea levels have raised enough since the last ice age to cover up any evidence of coastal to make any credible guess as how they settled in the Americas.

This is by far the most plausible.  It requires only very simple ships traveling very short distances following prey.  I find it amusing though that the author considers this hypothesis to be the only one that has "little evidence", despite the fact that it doesn't require any technology beyond what we know people at the time possessed and there is no less evidence for this than anything else.  It would seem this author is trying to push these fairly extraordinary hypotheses and for that reason is downplaying the much more likely but mundane explanation for the evidence seen.  This explanation can explain everything the other explantions can but doesn't require any unsupported assumptions, so by definition this is the parsimonious explanation if overland route was indeed blocked.

So, some of the European migrated to the Americas and must have passed on their stone working techniques to the Clovis people.

"Must"?!  I think there are other explanations that fit just as well.

“The ultimate test of this hypothesis may be found in the genetic research on ancient human remains. Michael Brown colleagues reported in 1998 that mitochondrial DNA haplogroup X(a genetic marker of population groups) is found in low frequencies in both Europeans and Native American populations, but not among Asians. This indicated to them that some of the American founders may have come from Europe between 36,000 and 12,000 years ago.” (Stanford and Bradley 55)

Other people studying the genome disagree with this, and think it is clear that modern native Americans share a common genetic heritage with Asians.  For instance there are a number of haplogroups that are found only in the Americas and East Asia, such as Haplogroups A and B (which are much older than haplogroup X).  What is more, Haplogroup X is not found at all in South America, it only appears in North America, which is pretty much impossible to explain if you say that Europeans are the original ancestors of all Native Americans.  X is also much more common in eastern Europe and the Near East than it is in western Europe where the Solutrean hypothesis said it originated.  Further, the Native American version of the that halpogroup is most similar to those in southern siberia and central, in fact that version is more similar to the american version than the european version.  It appears this version split off from the others very early on, and considering version of X are found in Africa still it is not implausible that the version now found in the Americas originated there or shortly after a group migrated out, meaning the population that is responsible for that haplogroup is probably not from Europe.

However, the fact that skeletal remains much older than the Clovis must shine light on the possibility that the Clovis defenders defensive stance on the topic may be in vain. But, we must also include the linguistic, or language, of the peoples of the region. “Linguist cannot account for the great diversity found among Native American languages in the limited time afforded by the Clovis model.”(Collins 51) Apparently the Clovis people did not have enough time in the Americas to establish a language that would be carried down by their descendants, so, in a sense; some people must have existed before Clovis arrived   and their language must have diversified long before the dawn of Clovis culture.

Even if that is true, island-hoping along the bearing straight can explain this.

205

NWR Forums Discord / Re: the Locked thread comment box

« on: June 06, 2010, 01:13:29 AM »

If the thread veered off into actually discussing Obama policies or politics, then certainly it should be closed, but a thread pointing out an Obama look-alike is not any more inherently political than, say, talking about a movie Reagan was in..

206

NWR Forums Discord / Re: Halbred's Hunting Dinosaurs Thread

« on: June 06, 2010, 01:07:19 AM »

Sorry, Vudu. BlackNMild posted Dino-Riders, including an awesome gif. How am I supposed to NOT give it to him? BLACKNMILD WINS.

BLASPHEMY!  Zoids >> Dino Riders in every way.  Dino-riders are just dinos with guns, Zoids are robot dinos with guns.  IMHO.

Next up, someting a little tougher. Diabloceratops. GO!

This may be a bit too hard, I can only find a half-dozen or so pics at all (excluding skulls). 

207

General Chat / Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread

« on: June 05, 2010, 01:15:36 AM »

It is not impossible, but I would call it far from parsimonious.  For one thing, we know similar technologies have appeared independently.  Secondly, we have no other instances of advanced ocean-going in the west until around 3,000 B.C.E.   at the earliest when we see trade between Crete and Near East, and even those handling the relatively tiny distances and much calmer weather of the Eastern Mediterranean was difficult.  There was more advanced ocean-going ships in the far East, but even there widespread ocean travel did not happen until around that time.

So in order to accept that hypothesis would require ship-building technology that was somehow lost and not seen again for about 10,000 years. 

Add to that the question of why they only ended up in North America.  That makes a lot of sense if we assume a southward migration over land, but if we assume there was a culture that had advanced enough ships to cross the entire Atlantic Ocean it makes far less sense.  The first to make the trip that we know of were Norse, but that was not until 1,000 AD and even with the technology of the day they still island-hopped from Iceland to Greenland to the Islands of Newfoundland in what is now Canada.  That trip would have been practically impossible because all of those areas were covered with ice.  The very pressures that the article claim would have prompted them to move would also have posed a practically impassible barrier to such movements. 

You could claim they went south, but that leads to its own problems.  For instance if they went south you would expect signs of the Clovis culture to appear in South America prior to North America, and Appear in Western Africa and particularly the Canary Islands before that.  They also would have easily colonized more remote Mediterranean Islands that were not inhabited until much later.  It doesn't really make much sense that they would skip over unpopulated, resource-rich, war, relatively safe and sheltered islands just to travel across the ocean with no sign of there being anywhere they could end up.  This isn't like the south Pacific where there are lots of islands and thus a reasonable expectation of finding more.

So although I think all in all they need a lot more than some similarities in arrowhead styles to prove a link.

208

Nintendo Gaming / Re: The OFFICIAL Wii rumor thread *bring your own salt*

« on: June 02, 2010, 02:33:30 PM »

Game saves saved online. Log on and access your last save, your VC, WiiWare, messages & friend list from any machine.

Of course the OS would need to be reworked to support consoles that never make it online(as I'm sure it already saves locally too), but I'm sure Nintendo would have some sort of free WiiApp Download to entice you get online.

The problem with this is how, exactly, do you log onto such a service?  Username and password?  That would take forever with a wii remote.  The only real option is to store it on the wii remote.  The problem is that I sincerely doubt that wii remote was designed for this, and there doesn't seem to be a way to upgrade wii remote firmware.  That would mean this would have to wait for Wii 2 or whatever.  However, if history is any indication the wii 2 will have an updated controller, and based on how the price of flash memory has dropped it will probably have about as much memory as the wii does now, so if you want to carry your stats around with you then it would be easier to just put it in the wii remotes instead.  So I just don't see this happening unless the wii remote has some secret, unused capabilities.  And if they did, why haven't they used them up until now, for instance for carrying your friend codes around with you? So far I have not heard of people being able to load arbitrary data into a wii remote's memory (which is what this would require), although I have not followed the wii remote hacking scene too closely. Edit: it looks like you can read and write arbitrary data from the wii remote's memory, and there are some sections that may be unused and/or hold unknown data not obviosuyl associated with Miis.

209

General Chat / Theme songs (your own choices)

« on: June 01, 2010, 01:21:32 AM »

Post any songs, albums, or artists you think are appropriate in any way for any movies, tv shows, games, novels, genres, characters or anything else but where this connections was not obviously intentional (so for instance you can't say the Bond Theme is appropriate for a Bond movie, or that Skullcrusher Mountain is appropriate for a Bond movie).  The exact reason you associate the two and in what way you associate them is entirely up to you. 

Perhaps you think the lyrics describe a character or situation, the beat matches the flow of action, the emotional tone of the two somehow meshes well, that a song from one movie or game would work well for another, or you find yourself listening to a particular song when reading a particular book.  It could even be the music video, concert, cover, or some other thing related to the music rather than the music itself.  Also feel free to look through your music to figure on new similarities if you want, it isn't limited only to stuff you haven't noticed before. 

If you can, it would help to explain as best as possible why you link the two (although I know this might be hard).  If the lyrics are important post them here (if that is allowed, mods will have to weigh in on that, we may have to link to them).  Posting links to the music (no illegal downloads, of course) can also help but is not mandatory.


For some examples (I'll leave the ones with lyrics until a ruling on the above issue):

A classic example is the Dark Side of the Moon album by Pink Floyd and the Wizard of Oz

It may be subconscious due to the nature of the movie, but I always sort of picture a Metroid intro sequence when I listen to the Terminator theme song, sort of like the SM intro.  It has brief heavy beats for  Samus's first appearance and important events that just feel they should belong to something powerful, with longer, calmer, but somewhat sad-feeling sections between them for the rest of the story.

I also thought think that Heaven by DJ Sammy would make great boss battle music for a high-speed sort of battle in something like Metroid or Zelda, especially one that goes through several stages, if it wasn't for the lyrics.  It just has the sort of high-intensity beat that I think works well for a boss battle and some good transitions.

The theme from Remember the Titans (Titan's Spirit, at least the initial part) seems like good ending music for a game, particular something like a mario game where they are showing all the areas you have visited in the game.

210

General Chat / Re: Program to Block Interenet Access based on time of day...

« on: May 27, 2010, 02:18:22 AM »

What is your OS?

211

General Chat / Re: Halbred's Paleo-News Thread

« on: May 26, 2010, 11:05:07 PM »

An animal from early Cambrian may represent the earliest known cephalopod (squid, octoupus, etc) by 30 million years.  The animal, Nectocaris pteryx, had previously been problematic because the one fossil found was small, poorly-preserved, and had a strange combination of features (which is not uncommon for pre-cambrian and cambrian fossils, unfortunately). This made it impossible to reconstruct, not to mention definitively place relative to modern creatures.  However a huge group of samples, 91, have been recently found in the Burgess Shale, painting a much clearer picture of the creature and, the authors conclude, making it most likely an early cephalod. 

It had a pair of tentacles, a pair of fins, a siphon, and camera eyes (like the eyes found in modern cephalodos and chordates like us, but not like the compound eyes typically found in arthropods).  It also, interestingly, had no hard shell, which (according to the article) people assumed the earliest cephalopods possessed (due to the earliest cephalopods up to this point being similar to the modern shelled nautilus, and the fact that most other molluscs have shells).  It also had other internal similarities to modern cephalopods.  In short it looked very much like a two-tentacled squid or, strangely, superficially like an Anomalocaridid (although it differs significantly in many details).  However, it is fairly small, only 4cm long.  It is unclear whether the two-tentacle or shell-less nature of creature is the ancestral state of all cephalopods are are specializations in this early sub-group, but other traits of the creature are found in other cephalopods.  Unfortunately the mouthparts were not preserved, which are critical because there are mouth features found in all molluscs but only in molluscs that would definitively identify it as one.

 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7297/full/nature09068.html
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/05/26/nectocaris-mystery-fossil-was-actually-a-500-million-year-old-squid-relative/

You can find a description of it prior to this discovery, and an earlier reconstruction based on the one poor sample, here:
http://www.burgess-shale.bc.ca/discover/ancient-creatures/nectocaris
The armored headpiece is actually the funnel, which was crushed and flattened against the head in the original fossil.

212

General Chat / Re: 2 TVs and 3 video game systems

« on: May 26, 2010, 10:44:58 PM »

How many jacks do the TV's have?  The easiest solution would be to use a y-splitter to connect all systems to both TV's at the same time.  So each cable coming out of each system goes into a y-splitter, and each arm of the y-splitter goes to a different tv.  Then you just use the TV's internal input selector to pick the system.  If you don't have enough jacks on the tvs, you would need to get a manual input switcher, which is about $20 at radio shack.  In short, both TVs are getting the signal from all 3 systems, you just set the TVs themselves to display the signal from different systems depending on what you want. 

Analog y-splitters are cheap, $4-5 for the overpriced ones they seem to be selling nowadays.  I am not sure about HDMI ones though, but you can get HDMI stuff cheap online (the stuff in stores is once again really overpriced, but you have a better shot at radioshack).

213

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Official Virtual Console Mondays Thread

« on: May 26, 2010, 04:42:36 PM »

Did anyone else notice the similarities between Kirby Super Star and Smash Brothers?  The hand boss has many attacks similar to master hand, it's boss rush mode is very similar to that of Smash Brothers, even  the winged boss final final boss has similar attacks to its smash bros counterpart.

214

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Official Virtual Console Mondays Thread

« on: May 24, 2010, 09:06:35 PM »

Torrent!  OMG Nintendo is supporting PIRACY!!!! Call the RIAA!

215

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Official Virtual Console Mondays Thread

« on: May 22, 2010, 11:52:49 PM »

Great, I wait for 8 months for Kirby Super Star (since the Japanese release), and they finally release it when I am out of town for a week.  Figures.

216

NWR Forums Discord / Re: What would you do with 3.6 Billion Dollars?

« on: May 14, 2010, 05:13:11 PM »

If you assume 0.1% annual interest (which for that amount of money is probably small), that is still 3.6 million dollars a year.  That is probably plenty.

Although it doesn't take into account inflation.

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NWR Forums Discord / Re: A Torus is a donut!

« on: May 14, 2010, 05:09:44 PM »

Here, see this:

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NWR Forums Discord / Re: A Torus is a donut!

« on: May 14, 2010, 05:07:15 PM »

The ones with a handle, usually.

219

NWR Forums Discord / Re: What would you do with 3.6 Billion Dollars?

« on: May 14, 2010, 04:16:01 PM »

Create a self-sustaining foundation that provides grants for research projects under-funded areas of biomedical science (i.e. NOT molecular biology, systems biology, cancer research, heart disease research, Alziehemer's research, or other popular areas).  It would also only include legitimate areas of research, not alternative medicine.

220

NWR Forums Discord / Re: If I could have any one of Superman's Powers...

« on: May 14, 2010, 04:11:37 PM »

For me, I would have to say super-landscaping.

221

NWR Forums Discord / Re: A Torus is a donut!

« on: May 14, 2010, 03:52:47 PM »

Technically it is the other way around, a donut is a torus.  Topologically so is a coffee cup, or anything else with exactly one hole going all the way through.  Another good example is your mom.

222

General Gaming / Re: Gluon game creation software

« on: May 13, 2010, 11:22:31 PM »

Gluon is isn't just a game creation program, that is just part of it.  It is also a game engine and an online game distribution system with discussion boards, leaderboards, etc.  Gluon is also cross-platform, games created for it run not only on windows, but also mac, linux and even some smartphones.  It also uses a set of libraries that are shared by games, so individual games are very small and very secure (since they are not given access to anything they shouldn't).  Thanks to this, it also means you can embed the game in literally anything.  The view of the game you see in the game creator is not a simulation, it is the game's display embedded in the window.  There is also a KDE deskto applet that allows you to embed the game in your desktop (works on Linux, but it will work on windows for people using plasma as a desktop).  A web browser plugin could also be created to let you play the games in a web browser (although it might take a while to load).  Anyone who wanted to could put a game in any other program or form factor they wanted.  This is very different than the first link you provided, which as best as I can tell creates stand-alone games for windows only that run only in their own window.

Compared to the second link it is much more flexible, since that is a specialized program for RPGs.  Compared to the first link it also seems more flexible.  The first link is event-based, which means everything is based around changes in objects, and events are the basic building block you work with.  For gluon events are simply one special type of property, of which there can be many others.  Furthers, properties belong to specific objects, and objects can have different combinations of properties. 

So for instance for construct you have a block object, which other objects can interact with (the objects are all pre-defined, and the only way to change them with programming them as far as I can tell is to add additional interactions).  On the other hand gluon would have just a generic object, which would have a block property and other properties that define how other game objects will interact with it.  So really objects, interactions, and graphical effects, which are treated separately by construct, are all treated the same in gluon. 

So for instance you could create a rocket object, which increases speed and adds some graphics and graphical effects like motion blur, and include it in a car object to give the car a rocket and all the properties associated with it.  The rocket would itself by made up of other components like a sprite object and a shader object that gives the motion blur.  So each object gives additional properties to any object it is part of.  You could also give the rocket to a boat object, or a dog object, and it would give its properties to those objects as well (although the details of how it affects those objects can be tweaked).  Things like menus would be created in a similar way to enemies, they would just use a different set of objects.  As best as I can tell construct can't do this sort of thing, objects are fixed, they have a specific set of properties and only those properties.  You can't mix-and-match properties to create your own object without programming a new objects from scratch.

It is a different, and in my opinion more flexible, design philosophy mirroring.  At the most basic level construct is a procedural programming language while gluon is an object-oriented programming language (while also offering support for procedures, of course).  This is also a major difference, I believe, with visual basic, which is also procedural if it follows the conventions of other versions of the basic language.

The gluon creator program is also a collaborative program, meaning lots of people around the world can work together on a project, easily communicate which each other, and keep all of their version up-to-date with the changes made by other members of the team without much effort.  It also means people can make new objects they create available to the general public and people can easily find and download new objects and games made available by others, rate the objects, comment on them, get connected with people making similar games or games you are interested in, and so on right from within the program.

Also, gluon uses interpreted languages like java for programming done by the game developers, meaning additional functionality does not need to be compiled in, so it can be extended more quickly and more easily (the core libraries are C++, though).

It doesn't look like construct has any capabilities gluon will lack, while gluon looks like it will have many more capabilities and be considerably more flexible in both creating games and in playing and distributing games than construct.

Gluon also has the backing of some major companies, like Nokia, which want to make it easier to distribute content.  It is still an open-source project based entirely on open-source libraries, though.  I should also add that the libraries are not tied to gluon, they can be and are already being used in other game projects (the audio library, specifically, is already being used in a non-gluon game).

223

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Official Virtual Console Mondays Thread

« on: May 13, 2010, 08:29:48 PM »

That was just my understanding from what I've heard, I don't really know much about it. My point is still the same though; games with peripherals would require extra effort and I don't see Nintendo doing that for most games. There may be exceptions for popular titles like Zelda Majora's Mask, and we might see Star Fox and Yoshi's Island at some point in the future, but I wouldn't count on obscure games like Duck Hunt.

But they would only have to do it once.  Once the software is written it can be re-used on any game that uses the peripheral.  So if they wrote the software to support the rumble pack, any game with the rumble pack would be able to use it.  If the wrote the software to support the light gun or super scope six, then any game that used either of these peripherals would be able to use it.  It is not like they would have to re-write it from scratch for every game.

224

General Gaming / Re: Gluon game creation software

« on: May 13, 2010, 03:09:59 PM »

I'm not familiar with visual basic, and the UI is still in a fairly early stage I believe.  I think programming is done in javascript, although it may support other scripting languages like python and ruby, either now or down the road.  Qt and KDE both have very good support for scripting languages. 

As for windows, it may compile on windows already, I am not sure.  But if it doesn't that is certainly in the works (I know at least part of it compiles on windows, or at least used to before the refactoring).  I am not aware of any specific timelines for anything, though.  Remember that even if it compiles, this is the first alpha release, it is missing a lot of functionality.

225

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Official Virtual Console Mondays Thread

« on: May 13, 2010, 02:59:31 PM »

Face it, Nintendo's not gonna spend time making emulators that do more than spit the game onto the TV screen.

I don't disagree, I am just saying it wouldn't be hard to do.  And that only applies to the Wii, unless Nintendo plans on making people but the games all over again for their next console (which I doubt), I could easily see Nintendo selling "add-on packs" for the VC games to include stuff like rumble pack support, save state support, better graphics (or interpolation), and so on.