I remember reading about some guy who was stealing using bar codes. He would go to a store, and put a fake price sticker complete with a fake barcode on some expensive item; then he would take the item to the cash register, where the sales person would scan the bar code, the item would ring up as something less expensive, and he would pay the amount on the cash register. Sell the item at a large profit, then repeat.
He made up the fake stickers at home. I believe he would buy one of the less-expensive item, and at home he would duplicate its sticker. He didn't even need to generate the bar code, he was just copying the one that was on there.
Eventually he did the same trick too many times and they caught up with him.
If anyone remembers details of this story and can post a link to it, please do.
I read a story about a couple who loved bicycling (and loved their titanium bicycle frames). They decided to have rings made from titanium.
One day the guy had some kind of accident, and his ring finger was mashed; it swelled up badly. They took him to the emergency room. In the ER, someone got out the cutters to cut the ring off the swollen finger. Whoops, titanium. The cutters (probably simple diagonal cutters) had no problem with the usual soft gold rings, but titanium was too hard! They wound up getting a Dremel tool or the equivalent and cutting the titanium ring off (very carefully, I imagine).
The moral of the story: if you get a titanium ring made, maybe you should wear it like a necklace.
Traditionally, it has taken more energy to make a panel than that panel will return
However, that is no longer the case. I quote Wikipedia:
In the 1990s, when silicon cells were twice as thick, efficiencies 30% lower than today and lifetimes shorter, it may well have cost more energy to make a cell than it could generate in a lifetime. The energy payback time of a modern photovoltaic module is anywhere from 1 to 20 years (usually under five)[12] depending on the type and where it is used (see net energy gain). This means solar cells can be net energy producers, meaning they generate more energy over their lifetime than the energy expended in producing them.[13][12][14]
So, if you take a solar cell and stick it into an underground cave, it probably won't be producing more energy than it took to manufacture. But for typical uses a solar cell will be a net energy producer.
I have been reading ebooks for years using whatever PDA I have been carrying around (currently: a Palm TX). I have a large library of non-DRM ebooks: a bunch of stuff that's so old it is out of copyright (for example, the Sherlock Holmes stories), and a bunch of Baen ebooks.
I plug Baen every chance I get: they give away some ebooks for free, they sell the others at good prices, they offer multiple formats, and they don't wrap the books in DRM.
Most of my reading is ebooks on my PDA now. Any time I have a few minutes to spend (sitting in a waiting room, for example) I can pull out my PDA and read a few more pages. I always have my book with me and it's always at the last page I was reading.
For long airplane trips (like flying to Japan) I still use my old Handspring Visor. The Palm TX is good for maybe four hours on a charge; the Visor is good for dozens of hours with a pair of good AAA cells.
I'm planning to buy an XO mini-laptop, and that should make an excellent ebook reader. Like the Visor, it will be readable in direct sunlight, and will have long battery life. It should be excellent for long airplane flights. It's a lot bigger than a Palm PDA, but it is smaller and lighter than most hard-cover novels.
I know that languages like Erlang and Haskell are better for concurrent programming than more traditional languages. However, so far they have not been as popular as more traditional languages.
Will the new world of concurrency cause a shift in language popularity? Or will traditional languages remain more popular, perhaps with some enhancements? C++ is gaining concurrency enhancements; C++, Python, and many other languages work well with map/reduce systems like Google MapReduce; and even with no enhancements to the language, you can decompose larger systems into multiple threads or multiple processes to better harness concurrency.
If you know Haskell and Erlang, please comment: do those languages bring enough power or convenience for concurrency that they will rise in popularity? People grow very attached to their familiar languages and tools; to displace the entrenched languages, alternative languages need to not just be better, they need to be a lot better.
I'm rather surprised that the GNOME Foundation's decision. They could at least have kept their mouths shut instead of praising OOXML, which severely damages their credibility in the GNU world.
Who is "they"? Who is "them"?
Has an official representative of the GNOME Foundation publicly stated that it is GNOME Foundation policy to praise OOXML? Has the GNOME Foundation, as a group, taken any kind of official position on OOXML (other than "we want the specs for it so we can interoperate with OOXML users")?
Miguel de Icaza, who is not the GNOME Foundation, did call it "a superb standard". The GNOME Foundation did not endorse his comments, but it did release this statment:
Here's my favorite quote from the above statement:
While Microsoft should be applauded for releasing information about the Office document formats, their manoeuvres around the standards process demonstrate that they are not pursuing standardisation as a platform for innovation for the entire industry. Indeed, Microsoft continues to behave in the abusive manner of an unreformed, convicted monopolist with no passion for true industry collaboration in the interests of users.
If you have some examples of the GNOME Foundation praising OOXML, be sure to post them here. But at the moment I do not believe your complaints are supported by the facts.
P.S. As for Richard Stallman, he won't be completely satisfied with any desktop environment until he can get one where the whole environment is GPLv3 and there is no proprietary software available. Both GNOME and KDE have proprietary software available.
As I understand it, this method looks at a message and analyzes it based on the users to whom it has been sent. What is not clear to me is how the system would cope with individually customized spams.
Spammers already have systems in place to randomly mutate the spam messages, to defeat systems that block spam based on identity. For example, consider Vipul's Razor, where people cooperate to flag messages as spam. Suppose a spammer sends a message with the subject "Panda Obligate Greenspan" to Joe, and Joe dutifully flags it as spam. But that same spammer sent another spam to Mary with the subject "Goldfish Dutiful Jones".
This new spam trap uses a clever technique, and I believe that if the same message is spammed out to many people, this trap could detect it. But I think that with enough randomness in the spam messages, this won't be able to stop the spam.
Imagine that a spammer has a botnet at his disposal, and the botnet has thousands of servers. He could send a single random spam from each of his servers to each of the users on an email server; each message thus has different gibberish in it, and a different sender.
You could block a bunch of spam by blocking pure gibberish, if you had a reliable gibberish detector. But then the spammers start pulling complete sentences out of any available source texts (Mark Twain novels, news stories, etc.). So I think any content-based spam filtering is also ultimately doomed.
I think the only possible solution to spam will be to create a whitelist system that doesn't suck. Any attempt to guess whether a message can guess wrong. (As the article notes, even humans make errors when classifying messages.) I want digital signatures; then, if I get an email that is correctly signed with my wife's signature, I'm pretty sure that's not spam. But a whitelist system is doomed unless there is an escape mechanism; if my old friend from college suddenly sends me an email message, I want to get it, even if he's not in my whitelist. It's not a trivial problem.
So it's back to Utah they go. I'm sure SCO's lawyers can't wait to see Judge Kimball again, after all the horrible things SCO's CEO Darl McBride said about Judge Kimball to the press.
I'm interested to read just what Darl McBride said. I just Google searched for it and didn't find anything.
Could someone please post links to some of the "horrible things"?
The cops who tasered Mr. Gaubert while he was incapacitated by a diabetic coma, would be in jail if they had just shot him. Ditto for the officer who tasered the 87 year old woman in a wheelchair who yelled at her.
I don't know about these incidents, but if they were as you describe I agree these are completely unacceptable.
You assume the alternative to tasering someone is to pull a gun on them. In truth, the alternative is often just to stand back and talk to them, or simply walk away from them.
WTF? Police have a duty to apprehend people who are committing serious offenses; they don't have the option to simply walk away from them... and the taser should only be used when they have to take someone in and that someone is dangerous. Police should never ever be tasering someone who can be dealt with simply by talking to them. So, I disagree that talking to someone or walking away would ever be an alternative to tasering them.
There is a whole scale of police response. The ultimate extreme of force is to shoot someone; this is reserved for stopping an immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent. Below that you have spraying with pepper spray, beating with batons, overbearing by force (several strong officers piling on), and come-along holds. Somewhere in there is tasering.
(By the way, I saw a chart of the levels of force for law enforcement. The lowest level was "officer presence". In other words, simply showing up wearing a uniform is a very low level application of force. It makes sense to me; people become much more self-conscious around a police officer, and certain conversations will die down to silence, cars start driving more slowly, etc.)
I have heard the stories of punishing some "punk kid" or "nigger" or "hippy" and shutting their smart mouth up with a taser.
I agree this is wrong. I don't think the answer would be to take away the taser; it sounds like you don't think so either.
And I think I'd rather be tasered than beaten up with clubs. But I'd prefer neither, thank you.
Police departments have "the book", and officers are supposed to "go by the book" (follow the rules). I agree that the guidelines in the book should forbid tasering punks to shut their smart mouths. However, I suspect that "the book" already forbids this.
Perhaps the best policy would be to issue tasers that have tamper-proof counters that increment each time they are used, and require officers to file a report each time they use the taser. Sure, more paperwork, as if they don't have enough... but at least it might make them think twice before tasering a punk, because they will be asked to justify doing so.
Here is a model of how the human body works with respect to fat gain and fat loss. This is my summary of my understanding of the material in a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by a pro bodybuilder named Tom Venuto.
Your body is designed to keep you alive, even in hard times when it's difficult to get enough food. Thus, if you simply cut your calories back (say, to 1200 kCal per day) your body will store fat at every chance it gets. If you are really only eating 1200 kCal per day, yet burning more than that, you must burn fat (and perhaps some good stuff like muscle) so you will lose weight. However, your body will store fat any chance it can, so if you eat extra you can gain fat, and once you stop the 1200 kCal per day regimen you are almost certain to gain fat. Worse, it is likely you lost muscle during the 1200 kCal per day regimen.
So, the goal is for you to lose fat, without your keep-you-alive tricks kicking in and making your body stubbornly try to store fat. BFFM recommends multiple, smaller meals each day, rather than a few big ones. If you are eating every 3 hours, how can you be starving to death? Everything must be okay, so your body will let go of the fat. Also you need to get enough sleep, and try to avoid stress in general; stress is a signal that you are in hard times.
Muscle is your friend for fat loss. Muscle burns calories 24/7, so having more muscle means your daily base calorie burn goes up. This paragraph is important, so feel free to read it again.
The primary way to lose fat is through "cardio" exercise, aka aerobic exercise: running, bicycling, swimming, various gym machines like the elliptical or the stair climber, etc.
Another good thing is to eat a diet that fires up your metabolism. Imagine for a second that you had an entire mouthful of glucose, and you swallowed it all. That will pass straight out of your stomach and go straight into your blood as blood sugar, so it's just about 100% efficient as a food. For fat loss, this is a bad thing. How about a mouth full of vegetable oil? Pretty darn easy to digest, and it will be easily stored as fat since it's fat to start out. Imagine instead you have a mouthful of lean protein (skinless chicken breast, if you eat meat; non-fat cottage cheese if you are vegetarian, say). First of all you will expend some effort chewing, and then your digestive system has to work very hard to tear apart the proteins and turn them into something that can pass into the blood stream. If I recall correctly, you can burn about 30% of the calories in a serving of lean protein, just in the effort it takes to digest it. So the bottom line rule here is: complex carbs, high fiber, and lean protein are much better than simple carbs, low fiber, and high fat foods. Corollary: if you want seconds of anything, let it be lean protein.
So, BFFM tells you how to calculate a good portion size, so you don't eat too much. (If my instincts were good and I naturally took a good portion size, I'd probably not need a book like BFFM.) BFFM encourages multiple, smaller meals, with a high proportion of lean protein, and as much natural whole foods as possible (eat apples, not apple pie). BFFM encourages working out to increase lean muscle mass, plus cardio exercise to actively burn fat. If you do everything in the book, you will lose fat, unless you are one of the fraction-of-a-percent people who have a medical condition that keeps them fat all the time. (And if you are, you have probably figured that out by now.)
Tom Venuto has nothing good to say about BMI. He points out that bodybuilders with less than six percent body fat might still have a high BMI, because muscle is heavy. Body fat percentage is the best indicator, and it's not that hard to get a useful measurement.
He also has nothing good to say about Atkins. Carbs aren't your enemy; you need some. And the idea that you can eat as much fat as you want is just insane. You don't need to go into ketosis to lose fat, and it's not all t
I'm glad it works so well for you, but I am seeing the problems.
I routinely keep a couple dozen web pages open, sometimes more. On top of that, I read web comics each day, and I open a couple dozen web comics at once, then close the windows as I read each one.
top(1) routinely shows Firefox growing over 500 MB of RAM. Once it grows above a certain size, I kill the firefox-bin process, and then run Firefox again and let the session restore. Firefox re-loads the same pages and has well under 200 MB for the same page set.
It's not routine, but I have seen Firefox grow to over 1 GB of RAM, no exaggeration. Killing and re-running the process brought it back down under 200 MB.
On top of the large memory usage, I am seeing the CPU getting hammered at 100% just to load another page. It really does seem like there is some code that gets slower and slower when you use too many pages.
So far I have been living with it, killing the process to reclaim memory. But I'm eagerly looking forward to Firefox 3.
If you live within a reasonable drive of FreeGeek, you could always drop off your old computer junk. If your computer is working and at least a Pentium II or a PowerPC Mac, they will install free software on it and give it to someone who can use it; otherwise they will responsibly recycle it. The headquarters is in Portland, OR but there are branches elsewhere.
If you enjoy understated, dry humor, go read the article. It's wonderful.
"While it is an attractive idea, no serious archaeologist would hang their fedora on it without further evidence." Sure; every serious archaeologist wears an Indiana Jones hat, goes without saying.
"Overall, those with cut marks represent less than 4% of the cemetery's population. Thus, one might suggest that the threat of zombification was relatively low, and those manifesting the disease were dealt with swiftly (though in some cemeteries evidence for cannibalism has also been found suggesting that one or two got a good meal first)." It goes on to suggest that the need for swift anti-zombie action may have led to the early invention of government by kings.
If zombies re-emerge as a threat in modern times: "Almost certainly the first sign of infection will come from the Hierakonpolis team. [...] The unfortunate side effect of the infection starting within this specialized group of researchers is that they are generally the least squeamish about decapitation duty. I know for a fact that Sean Dougherty, a physical anthropologist with extensive experience at the site, wouldn't hesitate to lop off the head of any member of the team at any time, and for any reason."
in no uncertain terms on the product page it said that the C3 performed similarly to 800MHz Intel/AMD CPUs [...] the 750MHz Athlon it it was meant to replace absolutely RAN CIRCLES AROUND IT
Not really surprising.
An 800 MHz C3 runs its floating point unit at half the clock rate. This especially sucks for 3D games; the frame rate would be terrible.
Newer Via chips such as the C7 run the floating point at full clock rate, so there's a huge performance hit that you were seeing, which does not apply.
That said, clock-for-clock any Athlon will be faster than any Via.
Still, my guess is that the 1.5 GHz C7 ought to perform well enough to run a Linux desktop. And with a good heatsink you would be able to run it fanless, which is an attractive idea to me.
In my opinion, Linux distros must provide a means of doing away with text configuration files, but still retain the ability to access them for those who wish.
Well, GNOME did exactly that. Try Ubuntu and take a look.
The GUI exposes the most common preferences (look at System / Preferences or System / Administration). For the more obscure preferences, there is something remarkably similar to Registry Editor; it's called gconf-editor. (It's a measure of the success of Ubuntu that I haven't really needed to use gconf-editor for anything in years. The standard preferences are doing it for me.)
The GNOME guys were heavily flamed on Slashdot for making something that looks like the Windows Registry but I think it's a good idea. If two processes both try to write a text file, there is a possible race condition where the first process updates the file and the second process clobbers the update from the first one. The GConf system manages the updates, so that doesn't happen. Yet the back-end storage of data is still plain text files, so if you have to boot in single-user mode to recover after a disaster, you can still just use your favorite text editor to tweak the settings.
I am just amazed by how many people are complaining here on Slashdot about his use of the word "nerds".
Come on, folks, why do you have to search for a bitter insult where none was intended?
He mentioned that he wrote an article called "The Revenge of the Nerds". This title is a clear pop culture reference. (And by the way, he said that he was poking fun at them back then, and now he realizes they were right all along; this is what we call an "apology", one of several in that short piece.)
So then, having referenced "The Revenge of the Nerds" by name, he refers back to it by saying: "I got it wrong. The nerds got it right." And that is the entire extent of his use of the 'n' word. Two times!
I saw someone else complaining about the phrase "amateur sleuths". I really don't see how you can make an insult out of that. They might have been professional computer experts, but that doesn't make them professional sleuths.
Here, check this out. I just did a Google search and found a link to his original article "Revenge of the Nerds". Some of the amateur sleuths really do sound kind of crazy or disingenuous. (The pious "I don't associate 'Dildio' with anything bad" is the kind of disingenuous spin I'd expect from a corporate PR hack. Oh sure, calling Laura Didio "Dildio" was never meant as an insult.)
So, while I enjoyed his article, finding his writing lively and entertaining, many people here apparently found insult piled upon insult. Folks, don't make it into something worse than it is. Would you have been happier if he had written a painfully straightforward text? Something like:
SCO said they would win. They fooled me. I should have known better. I apologize. Many Linux fans said SCO would lose. They were right. I was wrong. The end.
I know it's pretty common to skip reading the fine article, but in this case, don't miss it.
He explains why he was fooled by SCO; for example, how Caldera won a settlement against Microsoft, which led him to believe that the SCO Group (successor of Caldera) might actually win. But he doesn't try to dodge the blame; he takes on the blame due him and apologizes.
With only about seven posts up so far on Slashdot I've already seen a couple that snipe at him for IMHO unfair reasons. He's a reporter, not a computer expert, and he was fooled by some slick con artists. Don't hold him to an unreasonable standard, unless you have never ever been wrong about anything yourself.
He apologizes very nicely and pokes fun at himself (the article is very entertaingly written). So, read it and enjoy. And please, reserve your vitriol for the actual villains of the piece, the SCO Group itself.
Here is one reason why BSD guys would rather see BSD code taken completely proprietary than see it go GPL: when the code goes completely proprietary there is still a chance that patches will be contributed back to the original BSD project.
Consider the "stupid tax". This is the "tax" you must pay if you take BSD code, change it, and keep the changes to yourself: every time the BSD project releases a new update, you will need to sync up your custom changes to the official project. The time and effort this requires is the "stupid tax" you are paying for being "stupid" (i.e. not contributing your changes back to the project).
The hope is that after a while, companies that have been paying the stupid tax will say "this is stupid" and contribute their changes to the main project. But with a GPL fork this just won't happen.
Any time the BSD project releases an update, someone will merge the changes in to the GPL fork. And if you contribute changes to the GPL fork, of course they are in every release and you don't need to do anything. So there is no real pressure on features added to the GPL project.
With no GPL fork, you must choose between sharing with the BSD project, or "paying the stupid tax". With a GPL fork, you have a way to avoid the stupid tax and share with others, yet deny the changes to the BSD project. (If you are doing proprietary things with the BSD project, you will not of course have this option.)
And of course, it must be maddening for the BSD project guys to see the patches going in to the GPL project and know that they can't use them. If the GPL project gets a new feature that's a good idea, they must re-code the feature, just because of an incompatible license. (That's why I licensed my lf utility under BSD; I'm hoping it will become a standard part of the userland in all *NIX someday, and the thought of the BSD guys having to re-do all my work just made me sad.)
I'd love it if I could go back to ebooks, but I will not until they fix (or eliminate) their horrible DRM scheme.
I am a very satisfied customer of Baen ebooks. Baen does it right.
You can download in any or all of five different formats: HTML, RTF, Palm ebook, Rocket ebook, or Microsoft ebook. The book is not under any sort of DRM. They have all their new releases, not just some weird out of print titles. And they have a deal where you can buy 5 or 6 books at a time for $15!
That latter deal they call "Webscriptions". If you buy a really new book, the webscription might include only part of the book. Over time, more of the book is revealed, and finally the whole book is available. But as long as you are buying a Webscription monthly selection that is old enough (which is most of them) you get all the books at once.
And, I believe they are still doing the deal where you buy a monthly Webscription selection and you can give a Webscription selection to a friend. You do this by providing them with the friend's email address, so check with the friend to make sure he or she is cool with giving out the email address. (I made a test email account on my server, and gifted it with a monthly selection; it has never received any spam, so I believe Baen when they say they do not give out your email address to spammers.)
I have spent over $300 at Baen, and my collection of Baen ebooks is up to 200 books! That includes titles from the "free library". Yes, Baen also just plain gives away some ebooks.
I read the book The Making of Star Trek in the 70's and I remember reading about that. Nimoy wanted to invent something to make the Vulcans different, and he started working on hand gestures. The "live long and prosper" gesture came from this, as did the Vulcan habit of "kissing" by tapping fingers together (Spock's parents did this). And some script (I don't remember which one) called for Spock to knock someone out, and he came up with the neck pinch.
I should re-read that book; I haven't read it in decades.
Star Trek failed for the same reasons many TV shows fail. Some of them air in the wrong time slot, some of them fail to find sponsors, some of them are gutted by shortsighted producers... Star Trek arguably experienced all of the above.
I read Shatner's book about his years with the Star Trek TV show. He said that the reason the show was canceled was ratings... more specifically, the way they used to do ratings at the time.
In the days of the original series, ratings were simple: what show has the most people watching it? That's the winning show.
These days, they slice the ratings much finer. They break ratings down by "demographics". And if they had done that with the original Star Trek it would have run for many more than three seasons, because it had a total lock on several very desirable demographics (people with lots of money they could spend).
If I recall correctly, Shatner said that the change to how ratings are calculated came just a couple of years after the original series was canceled. Just another way in which Star Trek was ahead of its time.
The original Enterprise didn't need no damn social worker... one drunken country doctor was good enough for them, 'nuff said.
What I liked was that they got scripts from all over, including scripts by noted science fiction writers. Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and more... there were some weird and really different scripts, and it was great. The modern Trek series were much more constrained.
At a Trek convention, I had a chance to ask one of the executives of TNG a question. My question was "Some of the original series episodes were just plain silly, just funny; for example, 'I, Mudd'. Will there every be any episodes of TNG like that?" The answer was something like "Episode Foo was pretty funny." I no longer remember which episode was the "Episode Foo" but I had seen it and a) it wasn't that funny and b) it certainly wasn't completely goofy. And, I never saw any new Trek episode (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) that was.
P.S. IMHO the genius of "The Trouble with Tribbles" was that it was almost completely goofy yet there was a shred of plot that hung together and was satisfying. You got to laugh a whole bunch, and they actually foiled a nefarious plot!
The funny thing a lot of people miss here..... and many places not just/.
This is a GROUP/TEAM game.
Actually, no, I didn't miss that. Now granted, my experience with D&D is limited to the original books, the "Basic Set", and AD&D First Edition and Second Edition; the newer editions may have already done something to improve these issues.
The mage may not have a large repetoire of spells at low level
"may not"? A mage started out with one, single, solitary spell per day. It sounds like in recent editions that was expanded a bit. Also, a mage couldn't have any better weapon than a quarterstaff. Not only did a mage have 1d4 per level of hit points, but the mage was forbidden to have armor or a shield. (We used to play that, instead of rolling the die for your first level, you would get the max. So a mage would at least start with 4 hit points.)
It just wasn't fun to hear the GM announce a combat, to cast one spell, and then to cower at the back of the combat for however many rounds. The older versions of D&D didn't even have "feats" so a 1st-level mage who had cast his/her one spell really had very little to do. I used to buy ground black pepper and carry it in a special pocket, to throw in attackers' eyes, and I would buy throwing darts and burning oil when I could to have some kind of ranged attack.
In town, just doing standard role-playing, the mage was as good as anyone else; but our games tended to be rather combat-heavy, and it was boring sitting there while others fought a combat.
By the way, one of the GMs changed the "psionics" rules a bit. He reasoned that psionic combat must happen "at the speed of thought" so once a psionic combat started, only the psionic characters did anything until the combat was over (that is, one side of the psionic combat completely defeated). It sure was boring for everyone else with absolutely nothing to do until the psionic combat was resolved. This taught me that in a game like D&D, it's really only fun if everyone has something they can be doing.
(Don't judge that GM too harshly. We were all young, and IIRC he's also the one who had the brilliant idea to make spells cost their square in points.)
Then at high levels the Mage was great for helping the fighter out
A 20th-level Mage can cast two 9th-level spells just as a warmup, and then can start casting 8th-level, 7th-level and on down. A 20th-level mage has a truly staggering array of spells. (Granted they will take a while to re-memorize later.)
9th-level spells include Meteor Swarm! 20th-level mages can do a lot more than "helping the fighter out"; they can fry legions of the enemy before the fighters get a chance to do anything at all.
So, something that reduces the traditional power of high-level mages while increasing the power of very-low-level mages sounds like a good thing to me.
First, I'm just barely old enough to remember a lot of this, so no doubt a lot of the/. crowd isn't either, but IIRC, the Space Shuttle was preceded by a lot of hardware developed to test ideas and concepts that were milestones to the Space Shuttle as we know it today. Remember the X-15 rocket plane? Or how about the lifting body airplanes of the late '60s (?) and '70s
Sorry, but no. I only wish the Shuttle had been designed with an evolutionary approach.
Yes, there was a lot of evolutionary work in the early days. Iterative experiments are what got humans on the moon and back again alive. But the Shuttle threw all that out the window.
The Shuttle was very much designed on paper from scratch. There were no X projects to test new Shuttle stuff. For example, the Space Shuttle Main Engine, while a nifty engine, never flew before the Shuttle flew; test bench firings only.
Second, the Shuttle *was* tested and redesigned during it's lifetime.
Only in small ways.
steveha
"Gone are the days of the four hit point Wizard."
on
Gen Con 2007 In A Nutshell
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm wondering about the changes WotC made to character levels for D&D 4e, specifically with respect to the balancing of the various classes.
The old D&D "balanced" mages vs. fighters by having the mages be pathetic at very low levels, and awesome at high levels, and that was just broken. (That's "balanced" in the same way that putting your head in the oven and your feet in the freezer is "comfortable".) There was a quote saying "Gone are the days of the four hit point Wizard" but no details. Does anyone know more about this?
I'm sure they won't do it this way, but the groups I used to play with had a system that I thought worked very well to balance mages vs. everyone else: a "spell points" system, where a mage had to power spells (and didn't forget them when casting them).
The mage needed to memorize the spells, and we used the standard table from the Player's Handbook for how many and what level spells the mage could memorize. The power cost of a spell was the square of the level of the spell, and "mana points" came at about 8 per level of the mage. (We had a formula to calculate it but the answer was always 8.) We also had a rule that a mage could cast a spell "out of his books" without memorizing it, but it was really, really slow. And in dire emergencies, a mage could use points from Constitution as mana points (only the very low level mages ever did).
Thus your first-level mage would know one spell he or she could snap off quickly (probably Magic Missile) but could very slowly cast Detect Magic or whatever out of the books, and could cast 8 spells per day; and your 20th-level mage would have two 9th level spells memorized, but would seldom cast them (as they would burn 81 out of a daily pool of only 160 mana points!). Medium-to-high level mages tended to use the Fireball spell (level 3 and therefore costing 9 mana points) as a pretty good spell that wasn't too expensive.
I felt this was a much, much better way to balance out the classes.
While in high school, I wrote up an article describing the above and submitted it to Dragon magazine. Editor Kim Mohan sent me a rejection letter, saying this proposed change was "too radical" to publish.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading about some guy who was stealing using bar codes. He would go to a store, and put a fake price sticker complete with a fake barcode on some expensive item; then he would take the item to the cash register, where the sales person would scan the bar code, the item would ring up as something less expensive, and he would pay the amount on the cash register. Sell the item at a large profit, then repeat.
He made up the fake stickers at home. I believe he would buy one of the less-expensive item, and at home he would duplicate its sticker. He didn't even need to generate the bar code, he was just copying the one that was on there.
Eventually he did the same trick too many times and they caught up with him.
If anyone remembers details of this story and can post a link to it, please do.
steveha
I read a story about a couple who loved bicycling (and loved their titanium bicycle frames). They decided to have rings made from titanium.
One day the guy had some kind of accident, and his ring finger was mashed; it swelled up badly. They took him to the emergency room. In the ER, someone got out the cutters to cut the ring off the swollen finger. Whoops, titanium. The cutters (probably simple diagonal cutters) had no problem with the usual soft gold rings, but titanium was too hard! They wound up getting a Dremel tool or the equivalent and cutting the titanium ring off (very carefully, I imagine).
The moral of the story: if you get a titanium ring made, maybe you should wear it like a necklace.
P.S. Merry Christmas everyone.
steveha
However, that is no longer the case. I quote Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Solar_cells_and_energy_payback
So, if you take a solar cell and stick it into an underground cave, it probably won't be producing more energy than it took to manufacture. But for typical uses a solar cell will be a net energy producer.
steveha
I have been reading ebooks for years using whatever PDA I have been carrying around (currently: a Palm TX). I have a large library of non-DRM ebooks: a bunch of stuff that's so old it is out of copyright (for example, the Sherlock Holmes stories), and a bunch of Baen ebooks.
I plug Baen every chance I get: they give away some ebooks for free, they sell the others at good prices, they offer multiple formats, and they don't wrap the books in DRM.
Baen Free Library (free ebooks)
Baen books for sale
Most of my reading is ebooks on my PDA now. Any time I have a few minutes to spend (sitting in a waiting room, for example) I can pull out my PDA and read a few more pages. I always have my book with me and it's always at the last page I was reading.
For long airplane trips (like flying to Japan) I still use my old Handspring Visor. The Palm TX is good for maybe four hours on a charge; the Visor is good for dozens of hours with a pair of good AAA cells.
I'm planning to buy an XO mini-laptop, and that should make an excellent ebook reader. Like the Visor, it will be readable in direct sunlight, and will have long battery life. It should be excellent for long airplane flights. It's a lot bigger than a Palm PDA, but it is smaller and lighter than most hard-cover novels.
http://laptopgiving.org/en/index.php
steveha
I know that languages like Erlang and Haskell are better for concurrent programming than more traditional languages. However, so far they have not been as popular as more traditional languages.
Will the new world of concurrency cause a shift in language popularity? Or will traditional languages remain more popular, perhaps with some enhancements? C++ is gaining concurrency enhancements; C++, Python, and many other languages work well with map/reduce systems like Google MapReduce; and even with no enhancements to the language, you can decompose larger systems into multiple threads or multiple processes to better harness concurrency.
If you know Haskell and Erlang, please comment: do those languages bring enough power or convenience for concurrency that they will rise in popularity? People grow very attached to their familiar languages and tools; to displace the entrenched languages, alternative languages need to not just be better, they need to be a lot better.
steveha
Who is "they"? Who is "them"?
Has an official representative of the GNOME Foundation publicly stated that it is GNOME Foundation policy to praise OOXML? Has the GNOME Foundation, as a group, taken any kind of official position on OOXML (other than "we want the specs for it so we can interoperate with OOXML users")?
Miguel de Icaza, who is not the GNOME Foundation, did call it "a superb standard". The GNOME Foundation did not endorse his comments, but it did release this statment:
http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/ecma-tc45-statement.html
Here's my favorite quote from the above statement:
If you have some examples of the GNOME Foundation praising OOXML, be sure to post them here. But at the moment I do not believe your complaints are supported by the facts.
P.S. As for Richard Stallman, he won't be completely satisfied with any desktop environment until he can get one where the whole environment is GPLv3 and there is no proprietary software available. Both GNOME and KDE have proprietary software available.
steveha
As I understand it, this method looks at a message and analyzes it based on the users to whom it has been sent. What is not clear to me is how the system would cope with individually customized spams.
Spammers already have systems in place to randomly mutate the spam messages, to defeat systems that block spam based on identity. For example, consider Vipul's Razor, where people cooperate to flag messages as spam. Suppose a spammer sends a message with the subject "Panda Obligate Greenspan" to Joe, and Joe dutifully flags it as spam. But that same spammer sent another spam to Mary with the subject "Goldfish Dutiful Jones".
This new spam trap uses a clever technique, and I believe that if the same message is spammed out to many people, this trap could detect it. But I think that with enough randomness in the spam messages, this won't be able to stop the spam.
Imagine that a spammer has a botnet at his disposal, and the botnet has thousands of servers. He could send a single random spam from each of his servers to each of the users on an email server; each message thus has different gibberish in it, and a different sender.
You could block a bunch of spam by blocking pure gibberish, if you had a reliable gibberish detector. But then the spammers start pulling complete sentences out of any available source texts (Mark Twain novels, news stories, etc.). So I think any content-based spam filtering is also ultimately doomed.
I think the only possible solution to spam will be to create a whitelist system that doesn't suck. Any attempt to guess whether a message can guess wrong. (As the article notes, even humans make errors when classifying messages.) I want digital signatures; then, if I get an email that is correctly signed with my wife's signature, I'm pretty sure that's not spam. But a whitelist system is doomed unless there is an escape mechanism; if my old friend from college suddenly sends me an email message, I want to get it, even if he's not in my whitelist. It's not a trivial problem.
steveha
I'm interested to read just what Darl McBride said. I just Google searched for it and didn't find anything.
Could someone please post links to some of the "horrible things"?
The cops who tasered Mr. Gaubert while he was incapacitated by a diabetic coma, would be in jail if they had just shot him. Ditto for the officer who tasered the 87 year old woman in a wheelchair who yelled at her.
I don't know about these incidents, but if they were as you describe I agree these are completely unacceptable.
You assume the alternative to tasering someone is to pull a gun on them. In truth, the alternative is often just to stand back and talk to them, or simply walk away from them.
WTF? Police have a duty to apprehend people who are committing serious offenses; they don't have the option to simply walk away from them... and the taser should only be used when they have to take someone in and that someone is dangerous. Police should never ever be tasering someone who can be dealt with simply by talking to them. So, I disagree that talking to someone or walking away would ever be an alternative to tasering them.
There is a whole scale of police response. The ultimate extreme of force is to shoot someone; this is reserved for stopping an immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent. Below that you have spraying with pepper spray, beating with batons, overbearing by force (several strong officers piling on), and come-along holds. Somewhere in there is tasering.
(By the way, I saw a chart of the levels of force for law enforcement. The lowest level was "officer presence". In other words, simply showing up wearing a uniform is a very low level application of force. It makes sense to me; people become much more self-conscious around a police officer, and certain conversations will die down to silence, cars start driving more slowly, etc.)
I have heard the stories of punishing some "punk kid" or "nigger" or "hippy" and shutting their smart mouth up with a taser.
I agree this is wrong. I don't think the answer would be to take away the taser; it sounds like you don't think so either.
And I think I'd rather be tasered than beaten up with clubs. But I'd prefer neither, thank you.
Police departments have "the book", and officers are supposed to "go by the book" (follow the rules). I agree that the guidelines in the book should forbid tasering punks to shut their smart mouths. However, I suspect that "the book" already forbids this.
Perhaps the best policy would be to issue tasers that have tamper-proof counters that increment each time they are used, and require officers to file a report each time they use the taser. Sure, more paperwork, as if they don't have enough... but at least it might make them think twice before tasering a punk, because they will be asked to justify doing so.
steveha
Here is a model of how the human body works with respect to fat gain and fat loss. This is my summary of my understanding of the material in a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by a pro bodybuilder named Tom Venuto.
Your body is designed to keep you alive, even in hard times when it's difficult to get enough food. Thus, if you simply cut your calories back (say, to 1200 kCal per day) your body will store fat at every chance it gets. If you are really only eating 1200 kCal per day, yet burning more than that, you must burn fat (and perhaps some good stuff like muscle) so you will lose weight. However, your body will store fat any chance it can, so if you eat extra you can gain fat, and once you stop the 1200 kCal per day regimen you are almost certain to gain fat. Worse, it is likely you lost muscle during the 1200 kCal per day regimen.
So, the goal is for you to lose fat, without your keep-you-alive tricks kicking in and making your body stubbornly try to store fat. BFFM recommends multiple, smaller meals each day, rather than a few big ones. If you are eating every 3 hours, how can you be starving to death? Everything must be okay, so your body will let go of the fat. Also you need to get enough sleep, and try to avoid stress in general; stress is a signal that you are in hard times.
Muscle is your friend for fat loss. Muscle burns calories 24/7, so having more muscle means your daily base calorie burn goes up. This paragraph is important, so feel free to read it again.
The primary way to lose fat is through "cardio" exercise, aka aerobic exercise: running, bicycling, swimming, various gym machines like the elliptical or the stair climber, etc.
Another good thing is to eat a diet that fires up your metabolism. Imagine for a second that you had an entire mouthful of glucose, and you swallowed it all. That will pass straight out of your stomach and go straight into your blood as blood sugar, so it's just about 100% efficient as a food. For fat loss, this is a bad thing. How about a mouth full of vegetable oil? Pretty darn easy to digest, and it will be easily stored as fat since it's fat to start out. Imagine instead you have a mouthful of lean protein (skinless chicken breast, if you eat meat; non-fat cottage cheese if you are vegetarian, say). First of all you will expend some effort chewing, and then your digestive system has to work very hard to tear apart the proteins and turn them into something that can pass into the blood stream. If I recall correctly, you can burn about 30% of the calories in a serving of lean protein, just in the effort it takes to digest it. So the bottom line rule here is: complex carbs, high fiber, and lean protein are much better than simple carbs, low fiber, and high fat foods. Corollary: if you want seconds of anything, let it be lean protein.
So, BFFM tells you how to calculate a good portion size, so you don't eat too much. (If my instincts were good and I naturally took a good portion size, I'd probably not need a book like BFFM.) BFFM encourages multiple, smaller meals, with a high proportion of lean protein, and as much natural whole foods as possible (eat apples, not apple pie). BFFM encourages working out to increase lean muscle mass, plus cardio exercise to actively burn fat. If you do everything in the book, you will lose fat, unless you are one of the fraction-of-a-percent people who have a medical condition that keeps them fat all the time. (And if you are, you have probably figured that out by now.)
Tom Venuto has nothing good to say about BMI. He points out that bodybuilders with less than six percent body fat might still have a high BMI, because muscle is heavy. Body fat percentage is the best indicator, and it's not that hard to get a useful measurement.
He also has nothing good to say about Atkins. Carbs aren't your enemy; you need some. And the idea that you can eat as much fat as you want is just insane. You don't need to go into ketosis to lose fat, and it's not all t
I'm glad it works so well for you, but I am seeing the problems.
I routinely keep a couple dozen web pages open, sometimes more. On top of that, I read web comics each day, and I open a couple dozen web comics at once, then close the windows as I read each one.
top(1) routinely shows Firefox growing over 500 MB of RAM. Once it grows above a certain size, I kill the firefox-bin process, and then run Firefox again and let the session restore. Firefox re-loads the same pages and has well under 200 MB for the same page set.
It's not routine, but I have seen Firefox grow to over 1 GB of RAM, no exaggeration. Killing and re-running the process brought it back down under 200 MB.
On top of the large memory usage, I am seeing the CPU getting hammered at 100% just to load another page. It really does seem like there is some code that gets slower and slower when you use too many pages.
So far I have been living with it, killing the process to reclaim memory. But I'm eagerly looking forward to Firefox 3.
steveha
If you live within a reasonable drive of FreeGeek, you could always drop off your old computer junk. If your computer is working and at least a Pentium II or a PowerPC Mac, they will install free software on it and give it to someone who can use it; otherwise they will responsibly recycle it. The headquarters is in Portland, OR but there are branches elsewhere.
http://freegeek.org/
Is there a FreeGeek branch near you?
Guidelines for what they will take
What they do with the stuff you give them
steveha
What happens when the primary, secondary, and tertiary air conditioners all shut down.
http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Im-Sure-You-Can-Deal.aspx
steveha
If you enjoy understated, dry humor, go read the article. It's wonderful.
"While it is an attractive idea, no serious archaeologist would hang their fedora on it without further evidence." Sure; every serious archaeologist wears an Indiana Jones hat, goes without saying.
"Overall, those with cut marks represent less than 4% of the cemetery's population. Thus, one might suggest that the threat of zombification was relatively low, and those manifesting the disease were dealt with swiftly (though in some cemeteries evidence for cannibalism has also been found suggesting that one or two got a good meal first)." It goes on to suggest that the need for swift anti-zombie action may have led to the early invention of government by kings.
If zombies re-emerge as a threat in modern times: "Almost certainly the first sign of infection will come from the Hierakonpolis team. [...] The unfortunate side effect of the infection starting within this specialized group of researchers is that they are generally the least squeamish about decapitation duty. I know for a fact that Sean Dougherty, a physical anthropologist with extensive experience at the site, wouldn't hesitate to lop off the head of any member of the team at any time, and for any reason."
Go read it!
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/hierakonpolis/zombies.html
steveha
in no uncertain terms on the product page it said that the C3 performed similarly to 800MHz Intel/AMD CPUs
[...]
the 750MHz Athlon it it was meant to replace absolutely RAN CIRCLES AROUND IT
Not really surprising.
An 800 MHz C3 runs its floating point unit at half the clock rate. This especially sucks for 3D games; the frame rate would be terrible.
Newer Via chips such as the C7 run the floating point at full clock rate, so there's a huge performance hit that you were seeing, which does not apply.
That said, clock-for-clock any Athlon will be faster than any Via.
Still, my guess is that the 1.5 GHz C7 ought to perform well enough to run a Linux desktop. And with a good heatsink you would be able to run it fanless, which is an attractive idea to me.
steveha
In my opinion, Linux distros must provide a means of doing away with text configuration files, but still retain the ability to access them for those who wish.
Well, GNOME did exactly that. Try Ubuntu and take a look.
The GUI exposes the most common preferences (look at System / Preferences or System / Administration). For the more obscure preferences, there is something remarkably similar to Registry Editor; it's called gconf-editor. (It's a measure of the success of Ubuntu that I haven't really needed to use gconf-editor for anything in years. The standard preferences are doing it for me.)
The GNOME guys were heavily flamed on Slashdot for making something that looks like the Windows Registry but I think it's a good idea. If two processes both try to write a text file, there is a possible race condition where the first process updates the file and the second process clobbers the update from the first one. The GConf system manages the updates, so that doesn't happen. Yet the back-end storage of data is still plain text files, so if you have to boot in single-user mode to recover after a disaster, you can still just use your favorite text editor to tweak the settings.
steveha
Come on, folks, why do you have to search for a bitter insult where none was intended?
He mentioned that he wrote an article called "The Revenge of the Nerds". This title is a clear pop culture reference. (And by the way, he said that he was poking fun at them back then, and now he realizes they were right all along; this is what we call an "apology", one of several in that short piece.)
So then, having referenced "The Revenge of the Nerds" by name, he refers back to it by saying: "I got it wrong. The nerds got it right." And that is the entire extent of his use of the 'n' word. Two times!
I saw someone else complaining about the phrase "amateur sleuths". I really don't see how you can make an insult out of that. They might have been professional computer experts, but that doesn't make them professional sleuths.
Here, check this out. I just did a Google search and found a link to his original article "Revenge of the Nerds". Some of the amateur sleuths really do sound kind of crazy or disingenuous. (The pious "I don't associate 'Dildio' with anything bad" is the kind of disingenuous spin I'd expect from a corporate PR hack. Oh sure, calling Laura Didio "Dildio" was never meant as an insult.)
So, while I enjoyed his article, finding his writing lively and entertaining, many people here apparently found insult piled upon insult. Folks, don't make it into something worse than it is. Would you have been happier if he had written a painfully straightforward text? Something like:
steveha
I know it's pretty common to skip reading the fine article, but in this case, don't miss it.
He explains why he was fooled by SCO; for example, how Caldera won a settlement against Microsoft, which led him to believe that the SCO Group (successor of Caldera) might actually win. But he doesn't try to dodge the blame; he takes on the blame due him and apologizes.
With only about seven posts up so far on Slashdot I've already seen a couple that snipe at him for IMHO unfair reasons. He's a reporter, not a computer expert, and he was fooled by some slick con artists. Don't hold him to an unreasonable standard, unless you have never ever been wrong about anything yourself.
He apologizes very nicely and pokes fun at himself (the article is very entertaingly written). So, read it and enjoy. And please, reserve your vitriol for the actual villains of the piece, the SCO Group itself.
steveha
Here is one reason why BSD guys would rather see BSD code taken completely proprietary than see it go GPL: when the code goes completely proprietary there is still a chance that patches will be contributed back to the original BSD project.
Consider the "stupid tax". This is the "tax" you must pay if you take BSD code, change it, and keep the changes to yourself: every time the BSD project releases a new update, you will need to sync up your custom changes to the official project. The time and effort this requires is the "stupid tax" you are paying for being "stupid" (i.e. not contributing your changes back to the project).
The hope is that after a while, companies that have been paying the stupid tax will say "this is stupid" and contribute their changes to the main project. But with a GPL fork this just won't happen.
Any time the BSD project releases an update, someone will merge the changes in to the GPL fork. And if you contribute changes to the GPL fork, of course they are in every release and you don't need to do anything. So there is no real pressure on features added to the GPL project.
With no GPL fork, you must choose between sharing with the BSD project, or "paying the stupid tax". With a GPL fork, you have a way to avoid the stupid tax and share with others, yet deny the changes to the BSD project. (If you are doing proprietary things with the BSD project, you will not of course have this option.)
And of course, it must be maddening for the BSD project guys to see the patches going in to the GPL project and know that they can't use them. If the GPL project gets a new feature that's a good idea, they must re-code the feature, just because of an incompatible license. (That's why I licensed my lf utility under BSD; I'm hoping it will become a standard part of the userland in all *NIX someday, and the thought of the BSD guys having to re-do all my work just made me sad.)
steveha
I'd love it if I could go back to ebooks, but I will not until they fix (or eliminate) their horrible DRM scheme.
p x
m ons.aspx
s tation.aspx
I am a very satisfied customer of Baen ebooks. Baen does it right.
You can download in any or all of five different formats: HTML, RTF, Palm ebook, Rocket ebook, or Microsoft ebook. The book is not under any sort of DRM. They have all their new releases, not just some weird out of print titles. And they have a deal where you can buy 5 or 6 books at a time for $15!
That latter deal they call "Webscriptions". If you buy a really new book, the webscription might include only part of the book. Over time, more of the book is revealed, and finally the whole book is available. But as long as you are buying a Webscription monthly selection that is old enough (which is most of them) you get all the books at once.
And, I believe they are still doing the deal where you buy a monthly Webscription selection and you can give a Webscription selection to a friend. You do this by providing them with the friend's email address, so check with the friend to make sure he or she is cool with giving out the email address. (I made a test email account on my server, and gifted it with a monthly selection; it has never received any spam, so I believe Baen when they say they do not give out your email address to spammers.)
I have spent over $300 at Baen, and my collection of Baen ebooks is up to 200 books! That includes titles from the "free library". Yes, Baen also just plain gives away some ebooks.
Baen free library:
http://www.baen.com/library/
ebooks, and monthly Webscription selections:
http://www.webscription.net/
Here are a few free ebooks to get you going. These are some of my favorites; perhaps you might like them too.
The best of Keith Laumer's classic "Retief" stories!
http://www.webscription.net/pc-347-1-retief.aspx
A book in the style of the old "pulp" novels, with magic and mad science thrown in.
http://www.webscription.net/pc-110-1-doc-sidhe.as
Humans stranded on a planet with large intelligent large molluscs. The humans need help just to digest the local food, but they can do some things the locals cannot, also.
http://www.webscription.net/pc-287-1-mother-of-de
The first of the "Honor Harrington" series, and my favorite of them.
http://www.webscription.net/pc-304-1-on-basilisk-
I hope you will enjoy reading some of these ebooks!
steveha
I read the book The Making of Star Trek in the 70's and I remember reading about that. Nimoy wanted to invent something to make the Vulcans different, and he started working on hand gestures. The "live long and prosper" gesture came from this, as did the Vulcan habit of "kissing" by tapping fingers together (Spock's parents did this). And some script (I don't remember which one) called for Spock to knock someone out, and he came up with the neck pinch.
I should re-read that book; I haven't read it in decades.
steveha
Star Trek failed for the same reasons many TV shows fail. Some of them air in the wrong time slot, some of them fail to find sponsors, some of them are gutted by shortsighted producers ... Star Trek arguably experienced all of the above.
... one drunken country doctor was good enough for them, 'nuff said.
I read Shatner's book about his years with the Star Trek TV show. He said that the reason the show was canceled was ratings... more specifically, the way they used to do ratings at the time.
In the days of the original series, ratings were simple: what show has the most people watching it? That's the winning show.
These days, they slice the ratings much finer. They break ratings down by "demographics". And if they had done that with the original Star Trek it would have run for many more than three seasons, because it had a total lock on several very desirable demographics (people with lots of money they could spend).
If I recall correctly, Shatner said that the change to how ratings are calculated came just a couple of years after the original series was canceled. Just another way in which Star Trek was ahead of its time.
The original Enterprise didn't need no damn social worker
What I liked was that they got scripts from all over, including scripts by noted science fiction writers. Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and more... there were some weird and really different scripts, and it was great. The modern Trek series were much more constrained.
At a Trek convention, I had a chance to ask one of the executives of TNG a question. My question was "Some of the original series episodes were just plain silly, just funny; for example, 'I, Mudd'. Will there every be any episodes of TNG like that?" The answer was something like "Episode Foo was pretty funny." I no longer remember which episode was the "Episode Foo" but I had seen it and a) it wasn't that funny and b) it certainly wasn't completely goofy. And, I never saw any new Trek episode (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) that was.
P.S. IMHO the genius of "The Trouble with Tribbles" was that it was almost completely goofy yet there was a shred of plot that hung together and was satisfying. You got to laugh a whole bunch, and they actually foiled a nefarious plot!
steveha
The funny thing a lot of people miss here..... and many places not just /.
This is a GROUP/TEAM game.
Actually, no, I didn't miss that. Now granted, my experience with D&D is limited to the original books, the "Basic Set", and AD&D First Edition and Second Edition; the newer editions may have already done something to improve these issues.
The mage may not have a large repetoire of spells at low level
"may not"? A mage started out with one, single, solitary spell per day. It sounds like in recent editions that was expanded a bit. Also, a mage couldn't have any better weapon than a quarterstaff. Not only did a mage have 1d4 per level of hit points, but the mage was forbidden to have armor or a shield. (We used to play that, instead of rolling the die for your first level, you would get the max. So a mage would at least start with 4 hit points.)
It just wasn't fun to hear the GM announce a combat, to cast one spell, and then to cower at the back of the combat for however many rounds. The older versions of D&D didn't even have "feats" so a 1st-level mage who had cast his/her one spell really had very little to do. I used to buy ground black pepper and carry it in a special pocket, to throw in attackers' eyes, and I would buy throwing darts and burning oil when I could to have some kind of ranged attack.
In town, just doing standard role-playing, the mage was as good as anyone else; but our games tended to be rather combat-heavy, and it was boring sitting there while others fought a combat.
By the way, one of the GMs changed the "psionics" rules a bit. He reasoned that psionic combat must happen "at the speed of thought" so once a psionic combat started, only the psionic characters did anything until the combat was over (that is, one side of the psionic combat completely defeated). It sure was boring for everyone else with absolutely nothing to do until the psionic combat was resolved. This taught me that in a game like D&D, it's really only fun if everyone has something they can be doing.
(Don't judge that GM too harshly. We were all young, and IIRC he's also the one who had the brilliant idea to make spells cost their square in points.)
Then at high levels the Mage was great for helping the fighter out
A 20th-level Mage can cast two 9th-level spells just as a warmup, and then can start casting 8th-level, 7th-level and on down. A 20th-level mage has a truly staggering array of spells. (Granted they will take a while to re-memorize later.)
9th-level spells include Meteor Swarm! 20th-level mages can do a lot more than "helping the fighter out"; they can fry legions of the enemy before the fighters get a chance to do anything at all.
So, something that reduces the traditional power of high-level mages while increasing the power of very-low-level mages sounds like a good thing to me.
steveha
First, I'm just barely old enough to remember a lot of this, so no doubt a lot of the /. crowd isn't either, but IIRC, the Space Shuttle was preceded by a lot of hardware developed to test ideas and concepts that were milestones to the Space Shuttle as we know it today. Remember the X-15 rocket plane? Or how about the lifting body airplanes of the late '60s (?) and '70s
Sorry, but no. I only wish the Shuttle had been designed with an evolutionary approach.
Yes, there was a lot of evolutionary work in the early days. Iterative experiments are what got humans on the moon and back again alive. But the Shuttle threw all that out the window.
The Shuttle was very much designed on paper from scratch. There were no X projects to test new Shuttle stuff. For example, the Space Shuttle Main Engine, while a nifty engine, never flew before the Shuttle flew; test bench firings only.
Second, the Shuttle *was* tested and redesigned during it's lifetime.
Only in small ways.
steveha
I'm wondering about the changes WotC made to character levels for D&D 4e, specifically with respect to the balancing of the various classes.
The old D&D "balanced" mages vs. fighters by having the mages be pathetic at very low levels, and awesome at high levels, and that was just broken. (That's "balanced" in the same way that putting your head in the oven and your feet in the freezer is "comfortable".) There was a quote saying "Gone are the days of the four hit point Wizard" but no details. Does anyone know more about this?
I'm sure they won't do it this way, but the groups I used to play with had a system that I thought worked very well to balance mages vs. everyone else: a "spell points" system, where a mage had to power spells (and didn't forget them when casting them).
The mage needed to memorize the spells, and we used the standard table from the Player's Handbook for how many and what level spells the mage could memorize. The power cost of a spell was the square of the level of the spell, and "mana points" came at about 8 per level of the mage. (We had a formula to calculate it but the answer was always 8.) We also had a rule that a mage could cast a spell "out of his books" without memorizing it, but it was really, really slow. And in dire emergencies, a mage could use points from Constitution as mana points (only the very low level mages ever did).
Thus your first-level mage would know one spell he or she could snap off quickly (probably Magic Missile) but could very slowly cast Detect Magic or whatever out of the books, and could cast 8 spells per day; and your 20th-level mage would have two 9th level spells memorized, but would seldom cast them (as they would burn 81 out of a daily pool of only 160 mana points!). Medium-to-high level mages tended to use the Fireball spell (level 3 and therefore costing 9 mana points) as a pretty good spell that wasn't too expensive.
I felt this was a much, much better way to balance out the classes.
While in high school, I wrote up an article describing the above and submitted it to Dragon magazine. Editor Kim Mohan sent me a rejection letter, saying this proposed change was "too radical" to publish.
steveha