No, really, how many engineers does it take to get the job done? Not too many. Undergrads need to remember that a piece of paper that declares you an engineer isn't going to get you a job. If you like to program, then program. If you want an excuse to screw around for 4 years without having to pay your bills, then go to school. But the only thing that's going to earn you a job (and keep you from getting outsourced) is good networking.
Take a look at what you're offering for $3 a month and ask yourself if you'd pay that money for it. With web games, the answer is usually no. I haven't seen many web games that a) couldn't be replaced by a chat program b) couldn't be replaced by a better offline game c) aren't already available in some form for free on a million different online game websites.
It's NYS. If you can fill out the reams of paperwork it takes to get the money, you deserve it. You'll probably be spending more on ink and fax charges than the $200 you get back. That's right. Fax.
If it's nearly as easy to publish a book as it is to create a website, won't we have as much trouble getting useful content from Google's collection of books as we do from its collection of websites?
We may end up with a different set of hits being popularized than those that chain bookstores want us to see, but I bet there are still going to be a lot of great books that don't make the first page of hits that are going to get ignored. And there will be plenty of books that are absolutely worthless and just make it harder to find gems - something that bookstores help prevent by not stocking crap like that in the first place.
In theory, this is great. Make all books accessible to everyone. Create new interest in reading. Create a credible e-publishing standard. Maybe even spur interest in e-book devices. I just hope this doesn't backfire by somehow falling into the hands of a company like Microsoft, Adobe, or Amazon or it'll have the exact opposite effect.
The only morsel of intelligence you need as an elected official is the ability to answer a series of yes/no questions during your time in office in such a way that you can get re-elected.
The system is not broken. It is perfectly designed to achieve the results it yields.
I'd consider buying something like this if it wasn't through Amazon. They've screwed up orders, screwed up shipping, screwed up the Amazon Marketplace transactions, screwed up just about everything imaginable in the past. In one particularly difficult case the only way I managed to get Amazon to even tell me where my package was located was to threaten a lawsuit. I don't care how good this new technology is, I'll happily remain a luddite as long as I don't have to do any business with Amazon again.
Linux is 100% compatible with all devices as long as you're willing to program the drivers yourself or spend an equal amount of time getting already written drivers to work with it.
First off, I've never had XP not run well out of the box on any computer I've installed it on. That would include everything from pre-built Dell junkboxes to my own homebuilt machine a few years ago.
Second, I've got to agree with the soapbox commentary. Linux is not easy and Linux is not ready for mass consumption. And there's another reason why Linux isn't ready besides its difficulty of use: there is no such thing as the Linux OS, there are only hundreds of flavors of Linux of various popularity. There are currently 3 versions of Windows that 99% of people will be dealing with: XP, 2000, and Vista. If you want one for desktop use, that would be XP. See? Easy. If you ask 100 different people what distro of Linux you should get you'll get at least 120 answers. So even if there happens to exist a perfect distro for me out there I'll probably never find it because I actually like spending my time on the computer doing stuff other than trying out new distros and I'm sure many other Windows users would agree.
In my own limited experience I have not found a single Linux distro that works well out of the box. Stick to Windows or plan to make this a weekend project.
Fine with the rest, but goodluckwiththat. Online and offline news services still have the upper hand because you can go to one place and get all your news. Oh and amateur anythings suck at organizing themselves so I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Why would hackers be targeting those sites now instead of hitting them 24/7/365? It's not like these organizations were good and then all of a sudden became evil when they brought TPB to court.
Besides, who really cares about their websites? If the hackers really wanted to get the job done then every employee of every one of those organizations would have nothing but goatse in their inbox from now until the day they resign.
You obviously don't work in academia.:) Without any meaningful conflict people create it themselves. Even getting another department in one's own institution to return a call is a Herculean labor.
There are plenty of things that nobody's done yet that don't require a lot of physics knowledge to accomplish and aren't cookbook science. They'll be doing enough of that crap in the years to come so now's the time to get them excited about physics.
You could just ask the students what they're interested in and base a project off of that. They may even come up with their own ideas that you can then steer in the right direction - either toward something more simple or something more complicated.
What's the purpose of the game? If the developer is making it to amuse themselves then player input can be zero. If the developer is making it for a target audience, assuming they have a target audience in mind, then player input should supercede all other considerations. There's plenty of room to compromise somewhere in the middle.
Most failed games that aren't the fault of pushy investors seem to be the case of developers missing or not defining a target audience or else not catering to that audience. I don't have hard facts to back this up, just observations of recent failures - SC:S (didn't cater to audience), Spore (poorly defined audience), HGL (didn't cater to audience), TR (didn't cater to audience).
It can and probably will work. ISPs have a virtual monopoly in most areas in which they operate. Once the other few American ISPs hop on board (and they probably will) there will be no alternative... unless you consider laying your own cable and starting your own Internet an alternative.
This would be a good time for the government to step in, but I don't expect that to happen.
MP3 has clearly won this battle and if it weren't for a few enthusiasts struggling to keep Ogg alive we would all have forgotten about it by now. If Mozilla wants to throw money at something they'd do better investing in FLAC. At least audiophiles are all over that format and if it could be brought down to a more manageable size portable players might pick it up too.
We've all seen the legal system (in the US and elsewhere) make honest mistakes, but to see a group of people wielding it like a club so consistently is sad.
You can't even compare it to something like the Inquisition because at least in that case the people in whose interest it was to see injustice done were doing their own dirty work. The public went along with it too, but set that aside for now.
Who is benefitting here? Groups like the RIAA. Who is being used as a weapon? The US court system. Are the courts really so collectively stupid that they can't see that? I would think more court officials would have enough self respect to say, "enough is enough, we're tired of being degraded like this."
$199 according to Nvidia's website. Can't find them for sale anywhere else. I'd be willing to try them for half that, but I'll have to hold off for now.
It may seem like fun to you, but it seems like work to me. I've played EVE long enough to see what it's about. I haven't seen any 10-way conflicts, but a 2-way conflict is enough.
It means every time you log on your first stop is a Vent server to see what the corp is doing. It means staying docked until your squad leader says to go and then gogogogogoing until you get blown out of the sky 30 seconds later in a lagarific slideshow of chaos. It means repeating this every day until the attacking corp gets bored and goes away or until something changes the tide.
Like I said, some are drawn to this type of game and I'm happy EVE exists to cater to their needs. Many, many, many others will happily climb the slow treadmill of PvE content provided by games like WoW.
Slashdot Mirror
No, really, how many engineers does it take to get the job done? Not too many. Undergrads need to remember that a piece of paper that declares you an engineer isn't going to get you a job. If you like to program, then program. If you want an excuse to screw around for 4 years without having to pay your bills, then go to school. But the only thing that's going to earn you a job (and keep you from getting outsourced) is good networking.
Take a look at what you're offering for $3 a month and ask yourself if you'd pay that money for it. With web games, the answer is usually no. I haven't seen many web games that a) couldn't be replaced by a chat program b) couldn't be replaced by a better offline game c) aren't already available in some form for free on a million different online game websites.
It's NYS. If you can fill out the reams of paperwork it takes to get the money, you deserve it. You'll probably be spending more on ink and fax charges than the $200 you get back. That's right. Fax.
If it's nearly as easy to publish a book as it is to create a website, won't we have as much trouble getting useful content from Google's collection of books as we do from its collection of websites?
We may end up with a different set of hits being popularized than those that chain bookstores want us to see, but I bet there are still going to be a lot of great books that don't make the first page of hits that are going to get ignored. And there will be plenty of books that are absolutely worthless and just make it harder to find gems - something that bookstores help prevent by not stocking crap like that in the first place.
In theory, this is great. Make all books accessible to everyone. Create new interest in reading. Create a credible e-publishing standard. Maybe even spur interest in e-book devices. I just hope this doesn't backfire by somehow falling into the hands of a company like Microsoft, Adobe, or Amazon or it'll have the exact opposite effect.
The only morsel of intelligence you need as an elected official is the ability to answer a series of yes/no questions during your time in office in such a way that you can get re-elected. The system is not broken. It is perfectly designed to achieve the results it yields.
Somehow these new space MMOs never materialize...
I'd consider buying something like this if it wasn't through Amazon. They've screwed up orders, screwed up shipping, screwed up the Amazon Marketplace transactions, screwed up just about everything imaginable in the past. In one particularly difficult case the only way I managed to get Amazon to even tell me where my package was located was to threaten a lawsuit. I don't care how good this new technology is, I'll happily remain a luddite as long as I don't have to do any business with Amazon again.
Linux is 100% compatible with all devices as long as you're willing to program the drivers yourself or spend an equal amount of time getting already written drivers to work with it.
First off, I've never had XP not run well out of the box on any computer I've installed it on. That would include everything from pre-built Dell junkboxes to my own homebuilt machine a few years ago.
Second, I've got to agree with the soapbox commentary. Linux is not easy and Linux is not ready for mass consumption. And there's another reason why Linux isn't ready besides its difficulty of use: there is no such thing as the Linux OS, there are only hundreds of flavors of Linux of various popularity. There are currently 3 versions of Windows that 99% of people will be dealing with: XP, 2000, and Vista. If you want one for desktop use, that would be XP. See? Easy. If you ask 100 different people what distro of Linux you should get you'll get at least 120 answers. So even if there happens to exist a perfect distro for me out there I'll probably never find it because I actually like spending my time on the computer doing stuff other than trying out new distros and I'm sure many other Windows users would agree.
In my own limited experience I have not found a single Linux distro that works well out of the box. Stick to Windows or plan to make this a weekend project.
and a good aggregation service
Fine with the rest, but goodluckwiththat. Online and offline news services still have the upper hand because you can go to one place and get all your news. Oh and amateur anythings suck at organizing themselves so I don't see this changing anytime soon.
I'm sure that lawsuit kept a number of lawyers, judges and other legal plankton fed for a while. Society thanks you for your contribution.
Why would hackers be targeting those sites now instead of hitting them 24/7/365? It's not like these organizations were good and then all of a sudden became evil when they brought TPB to court.
Besides, who really cares about their websites? If the hackers really wanted to get the job done then every employee of every one of those organizations would have nothing but goatse in their inbox from now until the day they resign.
You obviously don't work in academia. :) Without any meaningful conflict people create it themselves. Even getting another department in one's own institution to return a call is a Herculean labor.
There are plenty of things that nobody's done yet that don't require a lot of physics knowledge to accomplish and aren't cookbook science. They'll be doing enough of that crap in the years to come so now's the time to get them excited about physics. You could just ask the students what they're interested in and base a project off of that. They may even come up with their own ideas that you can then steer in the right direction - either toward something more simple or something more complicated.
What's the purpose of the game? If the developer is making it to amuse themselves then player input can be zero. If the developer is making it for a target audience, assuming they have a target audience in mind, then player input should supercede all other considerations. There's plenty of room to compromise somewhere in the middle.
Most failed games that aren't the fault of pushy investors seem to be the case of developers missing or not defining a target audience or else not catering to that audience. I don't have hard facts to back this up, just observations of recent failures - SC:S (didn't cater to audience), Spore (poorly defined audience), HGL (didn't cater to audience), TR (didn't cater to audience).
It can and probably will work. ISPs have a virtual monopoly in most areas in which they operate. Once the other few American ISPs hop on board (and they probably will) there will be no alternative... unless you consider laying your own cable and starting your own Internet an alternative. This would be a good time for the government to step in, but I don't expect that to happen.
MP3 has clearly won this battle and if it weren't for a few enthusiasts struggling to keep Ogg alive we would all have forgotten about it by now. If Mozilla wants to throw money at something they'd do better investing in FLAC. At least audiophiles are all over that format and if it could be brought down to a more manageable size portable players might pick it up too.
We've all seen the legal system (in the US and elsewhere) make honest mistakes, but to see a group of people wielding it like a club so consistently is sad. You can't even compare it to something like the Inquisition because at least in that case the people in whose interest it was to see injustice done were doing their own dirty work. The public went along with it too, but set that aside for now. Who is benefitting here? Groups like the RIAA. Who is being used as a weapon? The US court system. Are the courts really so collectively stupid that they can't see that? I would think more court officials would have enough self respect to say, "enough is enough, we're tired of being degraded like this."
The system only works for those who can pay to play.
$199 according to Nvidia's website. Can't find them for sale anywhere else. I'd be willing to try them for half that, but I'll have to hold off for now.
4 teh hoard!
Maybe computer games will actually show some game design again instead of being graphics/physics engine demos.
It may seem like fun to you, but it seems like work to me. I've played EVE long enough to see what it's about. I haven't seen any 10-way conflicts, but a 2-way conflict is enough.
It means every time you log on your first stop is a Vent server to see what the corp is doing. It means staying docked until your squad leader says to go and then gogogogogoing until you get blown out of the sky 30 seconds later in a lagarific slideshow of chaos. It means repeating this every day until the attacking corp gets bored and goes away or until something changes the tide.
Like I said, some are drawn to this type of game and I'm happy EVE exists to cater to their needs. Many, many, many others will happily climb the slow treadmill of PvE content provided by games like WoW.