I clicked the little link through from Thinkgeek a while ago, saw the picture and thought it looked pretty cool. Then I looked at the other pictures and realized that it had a watchband in addition to the USB cable. Here I was hoping that the USB plug would be the band, wrapping around one's wrist and plugging into a USB receptor on the other side of the watch.
I'd consider buying one like that. The band on the existing one just looks way to unwieldly.
I know I'll probably avoid purchases from CA based companies over the net if I can get the product for cheaper at a different company, or even for cheaper after the CA sales tax is applied.
Given that, I wonder how much more it would cost a company to have a little office in another state which isn't so silly about taxing internet purchases and call that headquarters, giving the CA internet sales tax a miss. Surely for some large company that may be a possibility.
I really, really hope that this extra tax comes to bite CA in the butt. I don't want to wish the ill of companies closing up or moving and jobs disappearing in CA, but I really don't want this to be a success and have more states follow suit. If enough harm came to CA taxes or enough businesses move (or headquarter) elsewhere, maybe other states won't be so quick to adopt a similar plan.
I think if all states were to do this within a year or so that we, the consumer, would be screwed. If it doesn't happen so quick there's at least a chance that other states will heed the warning of reduced revenue, should revenue actually decrease happen. Or hey, maybe revenue will go up despite this reducing the number of sales I'll be looking for from CA over the net.
Of course, knowing the people running the government, companies fleeing the state and overall tax revenue going down will be countered by statements along the lines of "Well, good thing we enacted this tax that brought in $X, otherwise we'd be in even bigger trouble!" which will only ensure they keep their jobs as well as cover up how poor a decision it was in the first place. Meh.
Damn, I must be getting old or something... maybe it had dropped to that by the time I got one.
For memory's sake does anybody remember how long the thing cost $200?
*sigh* I remember when the systems started off near $99. Good old NES. Consoles starting off at $300 is nuts. I mean the graphics are prettier, but has the experience and gameplay really gotten so much better?
And so I'm a hypocrite and have a PS2... at least I bought it when it was $200 and not when it was selling for $600 on ebay.
Better question. What is the patent office thinking? Do they even check these things? While it's vile that SBC is going after people for this, these patents never should have been granted. A company just tries to maximize profits. If the patent office (yeah they're overworked, that isn't the fault of the people that are getting screwed by patents like this) did a little better job we wouldn't have to be up in arms about this.
I'm on DSL and I am capped at 1.5Mbps downstream, but I'm capped at 385kbps up, which I routinely get.
If it was raw speed I was strictly concerned about I might switch over to cable. I rarely download huge files, just the occasional CD image that I can wait for overnight. I usually get good speeds when grabbing those, as they tend to come from servers geographically close, and average around 200KB/sec. certainly not your speed, but not bad either. Latency and uptime are also outstanding on my DSL service.
The primary reason that I haven't switched over is that the contract that I agreed to when I got my DSL is that I can run as many machines as I want on the one connection and they can even be servers. They'll provide no support for such, but really, I don't need networking help. They even accepted mail for the short time that I had a mail server up and running. Compared to local cable companies where the best I can get is the unofficial we probably won't shut you down for doing that, I'm much happier on DSL.
Strange recursion algorithms? There's nothing strange about recursion, and further, some recursion is downright beautiful in nature. A lot of the time recursion strikes beginning programmers as odd but it really is a simple way to solve things.
Consider the programming languages LISP and Scheme. The primary method of writing functions is recursion, and quite often you can write large, powerful programs without once having to set a variable to a value. Instead you'll start with some list of constants and then the program will just pass values around. And with the initial values, well maybe you'll set those initial values to a variable name, since they take a few function calls to build up, but that doesn't really count towards using variables in computation. It is just convenience. While there are structures to do loops in these languages, frankly I'm not sure why they're it is necessary to include them. Anything you can do in a loop you can do with a recursive call.
Sure, there are plenty of instances where outright computation will be faster as well as more efficent than recursion. For instance, any number in the Fibonacci sequence can be computed explicitly, or you can go about from the start of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5... and work your way there. In this instance the explicit formula clearly wins out, unless you want to know the whole series up to that point.
If you're still curious, define what you think a practical application of Computer Science is. If you feel that the most practical solution to any CS question, or in general any question, is to define it via your own if/else logic and neglect any patterns or other algorithms that you might exploit then you're going to be in your own personal hell in CS. There are patterns, often times recursive in nature, that occur in coding and if you're unwilling to look for them you will be lost. Personally I can't think of any interesting problems where no pattern is better than using one.
If your idea of practical is to write applications that do something very specific with very flat, conditional sorts of options, well, where's the challenge in that? Sure, everybody needs a little calculator program for their desktop. But that's the sort of code that practically anybody with knowledge of simple math and a coding reference book can do. That's not Computer Science but a simple exercise.
For the Tower of Hanoi problem you probably weren't given too many rings to move. Think how much more work you'd have to do with if/else statements if there was just one more ring. Therein lies recursion's beauty.
Perhaps I really shouldn't be stating this, just in case some console bigwigs are reading this post, but I can't help myself. Backwards compatability means that I will buy a console of a different manufacturer the next time around. While it may be true that I would do so anyway, backwards compatability more or less guarantees it. Last generation I had (well still have I guess) a Dreamcast. Even had Sega followed it up and released a backwards compatable unit, I probably still would have bought a PS2 this generation. Why? Because now I can play all those PS1 games as well. Sure, the PS1 is awful cheap now, but I can instead put that money towards games.
If next generation comes around and the PS3 is backwards compatable with the PS2 and PS1, and the Gamecube 2 plays its own games along with the original Gamecube's, I'll probably get a Gamecube 2. Only because now I can't play Gamecube games except at friends' houses where there are Gamecubes. If the trend continues then I'll be able to buy a PS4 or something and still get the games I missed (at a discount no less) and be able to play a whole different system with two generations of games until then.
So I guess in regards to my opening, backwards compatability could be a double edged sword. If you don't have it, the console isn't going to look as attractive to those who didn't have your last generation console as well. If you do have it, people may give your console a miss this generation if they already have systems that are covered by the backwards compatability, and hope for backwards compatability again next generation, and go buy a different console that covers two generations they don't own.
Unfortunately, it probably won't stop most of the unwashed masses from buying the latest [fill in the name of the flavor du 'jour] CD.
Well, considering how well labeling cigarettes has worked to prevent people from giving themselves cancer, just because it's cool, I'm guessing that labels on crippled anti-piracy will have about as much of an effect.
Of course, if we could get a lawsuit going against companies that cripple their products, win many millions and have some of that money mandated to be used against the companies we just won it from we could be just like the anti-tobacco people. However, I'm not sure the big tobacco companies have done anything to prevent cancerous side-effects of smoking, either. So maybe that isn't the best plan in the world.
Thanks for the vote of confidence Golias. I'm not sure why such sarcasm has welled up from me on this topic today, but it seems like such a silly idea to try to market this thing to the masses.
For the record I think TuxPaper caught the sarcasm given his comment, but I'm not totally certain. I had hoped that the excessive O's in No and all the exclamation points would have helped render it sarcastic though.
It's a stretch, but I can see it in a certain light. Google has a lot of computing power. We've all seen the articles about their massive clusters. The have massive amounts of storage space, and lots of help keeping things working and improving. But they didn't just go out and say, "Lets get a whole ton of computers and make a search engine to revolutionize the internet, hyping it up while we code it, and then hoping people buy into it once we've invested so much." No, they grew at a steady rate, built up their computing centers, and seem to be generally stable.
Now contrast with the Segway. None have been delivered into consumers' hands that I know of, there have only been tests, demos and the like. They've got huge capacities for manufacture, but they sure as heck aren't being used. They've relied on hype to try to sell these things and hoped that they'd just be rolling in orders. And hype is exactly what it seems that they're left with.
Oh come on now, did you know that you actually have to pedal a bicycle yourself? It doesn't just move except when you're on a slope downwards. And lets talk about the balance of a bike. Does it automatically correct your balance for you? I think not. I've seen plenty of kids tip themselves over, run into trees, what have you.
Sure your bike may have a little bit more range than the Segway, or a lot if you're in good shape, but who needs to travel more than 5-15 miles away from their home anyway? Err... half that, you have to make it back too. So who needs to travel more than 2.5 to 7.5 miles away from their home?
What's that, you'd like to make a bunch of trips that size in succession? Well with a bike you'd be winded, you probably couldn't do it. With the segway, well, just run it down and come back and plug it in, you get a nice breather between trips. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 hours if you listen to the creators. Plenty of time to rest between those errands. You certainly wouldn't be exhausted after that rest, even if you had to pedal the Segway, which you don't!
And it's good for self esteem too. You won't have to feel bad when you can pedal no further anymore. Now you can blame the limited life of the batteries for why you can get no farther. Ah, won't it be great when the Segway finally arives and makes all those silly, manual labor bike things obsolete?
Nooooooo! This thing was going to transform our cities, remember? It was the end all be all to our traffic problems! It was to be the revolution for the pedestrian, quick, mobile, and versitile all while being small and able to fit in with pedestrian traffic. We're talking about a new paradigm in efficiency! A new model for transportation!
Oh how I hate these days where people will gladly pay twenty thousand dollars for a vehicle that will hold them, their family or friends and other stuff like luggage or packages, all the while traveling 50 miles per hour down an open road, but refuse to give even a second thought to paying a quarter of that for a machine that will hold a quarter of the people, if you're lucky a quarter of the stuff, and going a quarter of that speed down the same road. I mean really, the price looks to scale nearly perfectly here.
I've actually had spam being forged from my yahoo account a couple times. They didn't do just the reply-to trick either, but instead forged the whole thing so the send from is my email address. Though it's only happened a couple times and I've only ever gotten one irate reply, I know it's happened several times by the mail server bounce back that I get with the original message, along with the huge alphabetical list of addresses it couldn't be delivered to.
But that isn't the most disgusting part about it. All the bounced addresses were coming from one particular domain, which happens to be the domain my parents are on so I really don't want my email address blacklisted from their servers. Nor do I want my account closed by Yahoo, as I've had the account for a long time. Since I don't want this, and I hate spam as much as the next guy, I decided that I should send that domain owner's operators, which happen to be an ISP, an email message explaining what was going on and that if they could retrieve the headers from my message they'd have another relay they should add to their list to block.
On to the disgusting part. I get a message back telling me that I have a virus. A virus of all things, sending spam, to alphabetical lists of people on a single domain. Right. I try again, explaining the situation in detail so they can see what's going on. I include the bounce message, etc. They tell me they'll take care of it in that sort of message you know means they'll delete any correspondence we've had to this point and ignore it. Luckily enough I haven't gotten any more such signs that my email address is being forged, but I'm still put out that the people who should care, because it's their bandwidth and customers, first insulted me and then told me in so many words to bugger off.
Fun reply to your last bit, I've got an Earthlink DSL account, which comes with an email address that I've had for about 2.5 years now. I've never used the thing to send mail ever. I had to log in to it to get something from Earthlink a while back, to find about 8 MB of spam on an account that has never been posted anywhere, never been used to send email, never known by anybody but Earthlink and myself, and my username isn't so common that people should be just guessing to send email there, at least not 8 MB of spam much.
I figure it isn't my space so I'll let Earthlink deal with it. They're probably the ones who sold me out in the first place.
Like the 3 people before me said, it's because of limits imposed by my life outside of the game, not by the game itself.
It is very true that the more you play, the more the cost is driven down. Even at $5 an hour it is less expensive that many things, like going to a movie and getting popcorn even. It's just that if I don't go to a movie for a few months they don't terminate my account, kill my characters, and the like. Well, not that they could anyway.
Perhaps when I have a real, well paying job and am not so deep in coursework I'll reconsider. I'm sure I could find time for one such game, and once one makes enough to have a disposable income $10 per month probably won't look like too much.
Still, I can play on a MUD for free, and compared to from what I've seen of EQ, I think the experience might be more favorable.
Re:From the opposite side of the fence.
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Interesting to know about the patches, though I guess to keep getting subscription money you need to keep players interested.
Looking at my post, perhaps my italicised never was a little bit harsh. I'm guessing that once I'm off and out of this ivory tower of academia I'll at least re-evaluate this statement, though I can't say for certain that it'll change. Years back, before college and social life and all that good stuff, I used to play on a couple MUDs which really were great fun. The interaction between players was always something that made each session interesting and unique. I tried picking one up again in college, about three years ago now, but I can't find the time to play as much as I'd like to keep up the interaction. Having seen some of the MMORPGs being played I almost think that I prefer the interaction through the horrific ANSI colored text to something like Everquest. Same charm in nethack I guess, but I don't dare install that again lest I wish to fail out of grad school.
Right now the only game that I really play online is Utopia which is a rather large completely human player kingdom game. It consumes a little bit more time than I should give it, but it's usually in little 10 minute chunks a couple times a day.
Re:Pay per use game?
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This is why I will never buy a game like The Sims Online, Ultima Online, Everquest, whatever. I refuse to pay a fee monthly to ensure that I'm able to play a game that I already shelled out for, for a couple reasons.
First, I don't have hours and hours to play games in the first place. I've got homework to do, college to pay for, and then afterwards a little time to unwind. Even at say $10 a month for a single online subscription game I might play at most a few hours of it a month. That's about all the more I get to play most games now. The hourly cost isn't that high, but the total cost over a year is obscene, $170 including purchase cost for maybe 36 hours of gameplay. Sorry.
Second, I can find an abundance of quality entertainment, online multiplayer even, other places for free, or included in the purchase cost of the game. Battle.Net seems to be working out alright, though I'm not a huge fan of playing with some of the jerks on there. I'd rather set up a LAN and play that way, or prearrange an Battle.Net room. Otherwise there are tons of MUDs and other free games out there as well. Those have kept me entertained for longer periods of time than some games I've purchased.
Maybe when I'm making more money than I currently am trapped in college I'll feel differently. Right now, however, I don't even toss subscription games a second look. For some reason I don't think I'm going to change my mind lightly either.
Actually, that's only if the publisher decides that they want to let you. This typically is a non-issue, as most Anime DVDs are bilingual, and a ton of DVDs have a second language track. However, I was perusing Best Buy the other day and found a My Neighbor Totoro DVD. The bad news was that it was English language only. I don't know why they couldn't have included the original Japanese, but it wasn't on there. Had it been, I probably would have replaced my region free import as the English subs aren't the greatest (not that they're that bad, but there's the occasional slip).
In short, there may yet be cause to worry if Disney doesn't feel that we need Japanese audio on these DVDs...
The website for this game, www.moo3.com, the official site from Quicksilver, has stated this game has been in final regression testing since before December 4th, 2002. Read the Infogrames discussion boards, linked from the MoO3 site, if you want a better scoop as to what's been going on with the "We're near release" deal. I'm not getting excited until I see the game, they were supposedly going to have it done just after Thanksgiving. I'd take Chantz's statements that they're about ready with a grain of salt.
I think you take my statements wrong, and that's probably my fault. I'm not suggesting that we take away all the funding for improving blind people's lives. I just think that it is a loftier goal to try to give vision rather than merely give people a way to cope without it. By no means am I suggesting we don't accomodate those without vision.
I'm sure there are probably a bunch of kinks that would need to be addressed in order to diagnose anybody as blind or not at birth. I'm certainly no eye doctor, but I'd hope there would be some way to check if a child had no response to visual stimuli. If there's some reaction then I would think that there would be some development in the brain geared towards vision. Again, I could be wrong on that, but it sounds right to me.
But more importantly, who's going to pay for it? In a world where so many people lack even basic medical coverage, I don't think this is a realistic solution. This sounds like it would be a very, very expensive procedure... And whatever the costs and limitations of improving accessibility, at least the benefits can be reaped more or less equally by all (i.e., not just those who are rich).
Well, I think you probably hit it on the head as to who's going to be covering at least the research costs. My guess is that the rich with blind children, or the rich who had some accident will be the first to reap the benefit of said technology. While it certainly isn't the best basis of forming a line, one would hope that the technology could become affordable enough to be a procedure which is routinely done. If the artificial eyes are even close to average vision then I'm sure it could take a large chunk of future costs away as well, not to mention grant some form of sight. As such perhaps benevolent governments, wealthy individuals, or another third party might help subsidize the costs. I don't know how much time, effort, or money goes into teaching the blind to function in society, but I'm guessing it is fairly large. I would imagine that niceties like seeing eye dogs and the like are expensive as well, not to mention require special training. These are areas that would be lessened in cost or eliminated with artificial eyes. Plus people who have lost their vision wouldn't have such shock when being placed in society, and with enough evolution of the technology, could probably keep their normal jobs.
I have no doubt that it will take a long time to get to the point where we can replace people's vision. I have no doubt that at least a couple generations of the blind will come and go before the technology is near perfect. But let me stress again that I don't think we should make these people's lives worse while we're working on it. I do think, however, and it is likely the case with most things, that pouring too much money in one area does nothing. If more money is made available for the advancement of the blind then perhaps it wouldn't hurt to try to take this avenue.
To bring the whole thing back on topic I think it's great that standards are emerging that will allow better access to the disabled online. Just reading the interview I've been thinking of little changes I can make to my own personal site that would be for the better. Like alt tags, those would be easy.
Lastly, maybe some money from artificial eye research should be put into preventative measures. Things like toxoplasmosis seem to be relatively easy to avoid if you're aware they exist, I'm not sure exactly what else causes blindness at birth though. Perhaps it would be best to encourage family doctors to discuss these things if they're preventable. That solution doesn't help people blinded later in life though. I think the more routes that are being worked on the better. I'd rather see poorly than not at all, though for those who can't see I think we should do what we can to help them out.
Well, assuming we can get the people who are blind but once had vision to see again, what would stop us from giving these artificial eyes to the blind at birth? The brain would get visual information from the start (I don't think you build too much vision in the womb, could be wrong) and thus the areas of the brain responsible for vision would not underdeveloped. This, of course, offers no hope to those born blind before we can do this. Still, once the procedure is down for how to interface the things it should be possible. I would guess that inplants on infants would be tricky, since they can't give you meaningful feedback. However, there's no reason that brain activity couldn't be scanned to see that the hookup went well.
As for the idle thought, I fail to see how it matters in the least to those who would be given vision. In the case of those who are getting vision restored I'm sure some form of calibration must take place in order to get the colors right. For those who would be given vision who had never yet seen, they would learn what color is what for the first time, and would be just like anybody else. It is an interesting concept that I think many have pondered though. Luckily we're now advanced enough to state that light of a certain wavelength is a certain color, all that's up to debate is any given person's perception of it, which, I assume, would be slightly harder than trivial to calibrate through artificial eyes.
I agree for the most part, and personally was horrified when I looked at the new XP start menu. Why not just give me all the programs like 2000 and let me go after whatever else I wanted?
Horrified or not I left it on for a little while, just to give it a shot anyway, and I've actually come to appreciate parts of it. First off, the extra level of menu to get to all the programs doesn't happen all that often, as my most common programs have been put in the quick launch. Things like 'My Computer' are then immediately available from the start menu without having to run to the desktop. The list of six programs recently run from the start menu is nice too, just to prevent that extra step to get to the programs. The menu is a tad large, but that hardly matters when you're going to it anyway, and I think that it has some decency to it.
Having one quick access point per important section is a noble goal, but where do you put it? In a menu like the start menu? That's what you get with MS's older versions of windows. In a single menu in the upper left like Apple? They still have the quick launch like thingy too. Most WM's for X or OpenWindows have some form of quick launch as well. It's merely a convenience, not the sign of a bad design. The things that I want to get to quickly aren't necessarily the things you want to get to quickly. By giving the user the power to make quick shortcuts to what they deem important you can create a system that is flexible for the user. I think that all the major OSes have them, as well as having a single access point for important things, though it may be hidden down a menu a couple steps.
XP indeed isn't bad, and MS is making progress as far as what's friendly to use. I don't think you can make your blanket statement about stability and reliability anymore either. Even in the event an application goes down in Windows the system is going to stay up. It's been this way since Windows 2000 for the most part. *nix does very much the same. In my opinion the place that MS is really lacking is in the multiple user scene, though fast user switching in XP is a step in the right direction. It would be nice to be able to login to a graphical session remotely without disturbing the current user, like X is capable of doing. That and going back to the Win2k user permissions and such. This XP admin or user thing is a little bit on the weak side.
You can have it now with XP if you install one of the PowerToys. Specifically the one that's called Virtual Desktop Manager. It's limited (or fixed rather) to four desktops, but it can be useful nonetheless. It doesn't do the neat deal where you can see where windows are on those virtual desktops like practically any WM will do with X though.
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I'd consider buying one like that. The band on the existing one just looks way to unwieldly.
Given that, I wonder how much more it would cost a company to have a little office in another state which isn't so silly about taxing internet purchases and call that headquarters, giving the CA internet sales tax a miss. Surely for some large company that may be a possibility.
I really, really hope that this extra tax comes to bite CA in the butt. I don't want to wish the ill of companies closing up or moving and jobs disappearing in CA, but I really don't want this to be a success and have more states follow suit. If enough harm came to CA taxes or enough businesses move (or headquarter) elsewhere, maybe other states won't be so quick to adopt a similar plan.
I think if all states were to do this within a year or so that we, the consumer, would be screwed. If it doesn't happen so quick there's at least a chance that other states will heed the warning of reduced revenue, should revenue actually decrease happen. Or hey, maybe revenue will go up despite this reducing the number of sales I'll be looking for from CA over the net.
Of course, knowing the people running the government, companies fleeing the state and overall tax revenue going down will be countered by statements along the lines of "Well, good thing we enacted this tax that brought in $X, otherwise we'd be in even bigger trouble!" which will only ensure they keep their jobs as well as cover up how poor a decision it was in the first place. Meh.
Damn, I must be getting old or something... maybe it had dropped to that by the time I got one. For memory's sake does anybody remember how long the thing cost $200?
And so I'm a hypocrite and have a PS2... at least I bought it when it was $200 and not when it was selling for $600 on ebay.
Better question. What is the patent office thinking? Do they even check these things? While it's vile that SBC is going after people for this, these patents never should have been granted. A company just tries to maximize profits. If the patent office (yeah they're overworked, that isn't the fault of the people that are getting screwed by patents like this) did a little better job we wouldn't have to be up in arms about this.
If it was raw speed I was strictly concerned about I might switch over to cable. I rarely download huge files, just the occasional CD image that I can wait for overnight. I usually get good speeds when grabbing those, as they tend to come from servers geographically close, and average around 200KB/sec. certainly not your speed, but not bad either. Latency and uptime are also outstanding on my DSL service.
The primary reason that I haven't switched over is that the contract that I agreed to when I got my DSL is that I can run as many machines as I want on the one connection and they can even be servers. They'll provide no support for such, but really, I don't need networking help. They even accepted mail for the short time that I had a mail server up and running. Compared to local cable companies where the best I can get is the unofficial we probably won't shut you down for doing that, I'm much happier on DSL.
Consider the programming languages LISP and Scheme. The primary method of writing functions is recursion, and quite often you can write large, powerful programs without once having to set a variable to a value. Instead you'll start with some list of constants and then the program will just pass values around. And with the initial values, well maybe you'll set those initial values to a variable name, since they take a few function calls to build up, but that doesn't really count towards using variables in computation. It is just convenience. While there are structures to do loops in these languages, frankly I'm not sure why they're it is necessary to include them. Anything you can do in a loop you can do with a recursive call.
Sure, there are plenty of instances where outright computation will be faster as well as more efficent than recursion. For instance, any number in the Fibonacci sequence can be computed explicitly, or you can go about from the start of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5... and work your way there. In this instance the explicit formula clearly wins out, unless you want to know the whole series up to that point.
If you're still curious, define what you think a practical application of Computer Science is. If you feel that the most practical solution to any CS question, or in general any question, is to define it via your own if/else logic and neglect any patterns or other algorithms that you might exploit then you're going to be in your own personal hell in CS. There are patterns, often times recursive in nature, that occur in coding and if you're unwilling to look for them you will be lost. Personally I can't think of any interesting problems where no pattern is better than using one.
If your idea of practical is to write applications that do something very specific with very flat, conditional sorts of options, well, where's the challenge in that? Sure, everybody needs a little calculator program for their desktop. But that's the sort of code that practically anybody with knowledge of simple math and a coding reference book can do. That's not Computer Science but a simple exercise.
For the Tower of Hanoi problem you probably weren't given too many rings to move. Think how much more work you'd have to do with if/else statements if there was just one more ring. Therein lies recursion's beauty.
If next generation comes around and the PS3 is backwards compatable with the PS2 and PS1, and the Gamecube 2 plays its own games along with the original Gamecube's, I'll probably get a Gamecube 2. Only because now I can't play Gamecube games except at friends' houses where there are Gamecubes. If the trend continues then I'll be able to buy a PS4 or something and still get the games I missed (at a discount no less) and be able to play a whole different system with two generations of games until then.
So I guess in regards to my opening, backwards compatability could be a double edged sword. If you don't have it, the console isn't going to look as attractive to those who didn't have your last generation console as well. If you do have it, people may give your console a miss this generation if they already have systems that are covered by the backwards compatability, and hope for backwards compatability again next generation, and go buy a different console that covers two generations they don't own.
Well, considering how well labeling cigarettes has worked to prevent people from giving themselves cancer, just because it's cool, I'm guessing that labels on crippled anti-piracy will have about as much of an effect.
Of course, if we could get a lawsuit going against companies that cripple their products, win many millions and have some of that money mandated to be used against the companies we just won it from we could be just like the anti-tobacco people. However, I'm not sure the big tobacco companies have done anything to prevent cancerous side-effects of smoking, either. So maybe that isn't the best plan in the world.
For the record I think TuxPaper caught the sarcasm given his comment, but I'm not totally certain. I had hoped that the excessive O's in No and all the exclamation points would have helped render it sarcastic though.
Oh well, thanks for replying though.
Now contrast with the Segway. None have been delivered into consumers' hands that I know of, there have only been tests, demos and the like. They've got huge capacities for manufacture, but they sure as heck aren't being used. They've relied on hype to try to sell these things and hoped that they'd just be rolling in orders. And hype is exactly what it seems that they're left with.
Sure your bike may have a little bit more range than the Segway, or a lot if you're in good shape, but who needs to travel more than 5-15 miles away from their home anyway? Err... half that, you have to make it back too. So who needs to travel more than 2.5 to 7.5 miles away from their home?
What's that, you'd like to make a bunch of trips that size in succession? Well with a bike you'd be winded, you probably couldn't do it. With the segway, well, just run it down and come back and plug it in, you get a nice breather between trips. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 hours if you listen to the creators. Plenty of time to rest between those errands. You certainly wouldn't be exhausted after that rest, even if you had to pedal the Segway, which you don't!
And it's good for self esteem too. You won't have to feel bad when you can pedal no further anymore. Now you can blame the limited life of the batteries for why you can get no farther. Ah, won't it be great when the Segway finally arives and makes all those silly, manual labor bike things obsolete?
Nooooooo! This thing was going to transform our cities, remember? It was the end all be all to our traffic problems! It was to be the revolution for the pedestrian, quick, mobile, and versitile all while being small and able to fit in with pedestrian traffic. We're talking about a new paradigm in efficiency! A new model for transportation!
Oh how I hate these days where people will gladly pay twenty thousand dollars for a vehicle that will hold them, their family or friends and other stuff like luggage or packages, all the while traveling 50 miles per hour down an open road, but refuse to give even a second thought to paying a quarter of that for a machine that will hold a quarter of the people, if you're lucky a quarter of the stuff, and going a quarter of that speed down the same road. I mean really, the price looks to scale nearly perfectly here.
What a world we live in...
But that isn't the most disgusting part about it. All the bounced addresses were coming from one particular domain, which happens to be the domain my parents are on so I really don't want my email address blacklisted from their servers. Nor do I want my account closed by Yahoo, as I've had the account for a long time. Since I don't want this, and I hate spam as much as the next guy, I decided that I should send that domain owner's operators, which happen to be an ISP, an email message explaining what was going on and that if they could retrieve the headers from my message they'd have another relay they should add to their list to block.
On to the disgusting part. I get a message back telling me that I have a virus. A virus of all things, sending spam, to alphabetical lists of people on a single domain. Right. I try again, explaining the situation in detail so they can see what's going on. I include the bounce message, etc. They tell me they'll take care of it in that sort of message you know means they'll delete any correspondence we've had to this point and ignore it. Luckily enough I haven't gotten any more such signs that my email address is being forged, but I'm still put out that the people who should care, because it's their bandwidth and customers, first insulted me and then told me in so many words to bugger off.
Fun reply to your last bit, I've got an Earthlink DSL account, which comes with an email address that I've had for about 2.5 years now. I've never used the thing to send mail ever. I had to log in to it to get something from Earthlink a while back, to find about 8 MB of spam on an account that has never been posted anywhere, never been used to send email, never known by anybody but Earthlink and myself, and my username isn't so common that people should be just guessing to send email there, at least not 8 MB of spam much.
I figure it isn't my space so I'll let Earthlink deal with it. They're probably the ones who sold me out in the first place.
It is very true that the more you play, the more the cost is driven down. Even at $5 an hour it is less expensive that many things, like going to a movie and getting popcorn even. It's just that if I don't go to a movie for a few months they don't terminate my account, kill my characters, and the like. Well, not that they could anyway.
Perhaps when I have a real, well paying job and am not so deep in coursework I'll reconsider. I'm sure I could find time for one such game, and once one makes enough to have a disposable income $10 per month probably won't look like too much.
Still, I can play on a MUD for free, and compared to from what I've seen of EQ, I think the experience might be more favorable.
Looking at my post, perhaps my italicised never was a little bit harsh. I'm guessing that once I'm off and out of this ivory tower of academia I'll at least re-evaluate this statement, though I can't say for certain that it'll change. Years back, before college and social life and all that good stuff, I used to play on a couple MUDs which really were great fun. The interaction between players was always something that made each session interesting and unique. I tried picking one up again in college, about three years ago now, but I can't find the time to play as much as I'd like to keep up the interaction. Having seen some of the MMORPGs being played I almost think that I prefer the interaction through the horrific ANSI colored text to something like Everquest. Same charm in nethack I guess, but I don't dare install that again lest I wish to fail out of grad school.
Right now the only game that I really play online is Utopia which is a rather large completely human player kingdom game. It consumes a little bit more time than I should give it, but it's usually in little 10 minute chunks a couple times a day.
First, I don't have hours and hours to play games in the first place. I've got homework to do, college to pay for, and then afterwards a little time to unwind. Even at say $10 a month for a single online subscription game I might play at most a few hours of it a month. That's about all the more I get to play most games now. The hourly cost isn't that high, but the total cost over a year is obscene, $170 including purchase cost for maybe 36 hours of gameplay. Sorry.
Second, I can find an abundance of quality entertainment, online multiplayer even, other places for free, or included in the purchase cost of the game. Battle.Net seems to be working out alright, though I'm not a huge fan of playing with some of the jerks on there. I'd rather set up a LAN and play that way, or prearrange an Battle.Net room. Otherwise there are tons of MUDs and other free games out there as well. Those have kept me entertained for longer periods of time than some games I've purchased.
Maybe when I'm making more money than I currently am trapped in college I'll feel differently. Right now, however, I don't even toss subscription games a second look. For some reason I don't think I'm going to change my mind lightly either.
In short, there may yet be cause to worry if Disney doesn't feel that we need Japanese audio on these DVDs...
The website for this game, www.moo3.com, the official site from Quicksilver, has stated this game has been in final regression testing since before December 4th, 2002. Read the Infogrames discussion boards, linked from the MoO3 site, if you want a better scoop as to what's been going on with the "We're near release" deal. I'm not getting excited until I see the game, they were supposedly going to have it done just after Thanksgiving. I'd take Chantz's statements that they're about ready with a grain of salt.
I'm sure there are probably a bunch of kinks that would need to be addressed in order to diagnose anybody as blind or not at birth. I'm certainly no eye doctor, but I'd hope there would be some way to check if a child had no response to visual stimuli. If there's some reaction then I would think that there would be some development in the brain geared towards vision. Again, I could be wrong on that, but it sounds right to me.
But more importantly, who's going to pay for it? In a world where so many people lack even basic medical coverage, I don't think this is a realistic solution. This sounds like it would be a very, very expensive procedure... And whatever the costs and limitations of improving accessibility, at least the benefits can be reaped more or less equally by all (i.e., not just those who are rich).
Well, I think you probably hit it on the head as to who's going to be covering at least the research costs. My guess is that the rich with blind children, or the rich who had some accident will be the first to reap the benefit of said technology. While it certainly isn't the best basis of forming a line, one would hope that the technology could become affordable enough to be a procedure which is routinely done. If the artificial eyes are even close to average vision then I'm sure it could take a large chunk of future costs away as well, not to mention grant some form of sight. As such perhaps benevolent governments, wealthy individuals, or another third party might help subsidize the costs. I don't know how much time, effort, or money goes into teaching the blind to function in society, but I'm guessing it is fairly large. I would imagine that niceties like seeing eye dogs and the like are expensive as well, not to mention require special training. These are areas that would be lessened in cost or eliminated with artificial eyes. Plus people who have lost their vision wouldn't have such shock when being placed in society, and with enough evolution of the technology, could probably keep their normal jobs.
I have no doubt that it will take a long time to get to the point where we can replace people's vision. I have no doubt that at least a couple generations of the blind will come and go before the technology is near perfect. But let me stress again that I don't think we should make these people's lives worse while we're working on it. I do think, however, and it is likely the case with most things, that pouring too much money in one area does nothing. If more money is made available for the advancement of the blind then perhaps it wouldn't hurt to try to take this avenue.
To bring the whole thing back on topic I think it's great that standards are emerging that will allow better access to the disabled online. Just reading the interview I've been thinking of little changes I can make to my own personal site that would be for the better. Like alt tags, those would be easy.
Lastly, maybe some money from artificial eye research should be put into preventative measures. Things like toxoplasmosis seem to be relatively easy to avoid if you're aware they exist, I'm not sure exactly what else causes blindness at birth though. Perhaps it would be best to encourage family doctors to discuss these things if they're preventable. That solution doesn't help people blinded later in life though. I think the more routes that are being worked on the better. I'd rather see poorly than not at all, though for those who can't see I think we should do what we can to help them out.
As for the idle thought, I fail to see how it matters in the least to those who would be given vision. In the case of those who are getting vision restored I'm sure some form of calibration must take place in order to get the colors right. For those who would be given vision who had never yet seen, they would learn what color is what for the first time, and would be just like anybody else. It is an interesting concept that I think many have pondered though. Luckily we're now advanced enough to state that light of a certain wavelength is a certain color, all that's up to debate is any given person's perception of it, which, I assume, would be slightly harder than trivial to calibrate through artificial eyes.
Horrified or not I left it on for a little while, just to give it a shot anyway, and I've actually come to appreciate parts of it. First off, the extra level of menu to get to all the programs doesn't happen all that often, as my most common programs have been put in the quick launch. Things like 'My Computer' are then immediately available from the start menu without having to run to the desktop. The list of six programs recently run from the start menu is nice too, just to prevent that extra step to get to the programs. The menu is a tad large, but that hardly matters when you're going to it anyway, and I think that it has some decency to it.
Having one quick access point per important section is a noble goal, but where do you put it? In a menu like the start menu? That's what you get with MS's older versions of windows. In a single menu in the upper left like Apple? They still have the quick launch like thingy too. Most WM's for X or OpenWindows have some form of quick launch as well. It's merely a convenience, not the sign of a bad design. The things that I want to get to quickly aren't necessarily the things you want to get to quickly. By giving the user the power to make quick shortcuts to what they deem important you can create a system that is flexible for the user. I think that all the major OSes have them, as well as having a single access point for important things, though it may be hidden down a menu a couple steps.
XP indeed isn't bad, and MS is making progress as far as what's friendly to use. I don't think you can make your blanket statement about stability and reliability anymore either. Even in the event an application goes down in Windows the system is going to stay up. It's been this way since Windows 2000 for the most part. *nix does very much the same. In my opinion the place that MS is really lacking is in the multiple user scene, though fast user switching in XP is a step in the right direction. It would be nice to be able to login to a graphical session remotely without disturbing the current user, like X is capable of doing. That and going back to the Win2k user permissions and such. This XP admin or user thing is a little bit on the weak side.
You can have it now with XP if you install one of the PowerToys. Specifically the one that's called Virtual Desktop Manager. It's limited (or fixed rather) to four desktops, but it can be useful nonetheless. It doesn't do the neat deal where you can see where windows are on those virtual desktops like practically any WM will do with X though.
Trusted publishers list? That thing's empty. I don't trust anybody to decide what should be on my system besides me.