That's not the impression I get from the articles. All the articles seem to be targetted at specific bad implementations of e-voting, not at the concept itself.
I guess the good e-voting systems don't really warrant much coverage? After all, 'press a button to increment a variable' isn't really groundbreaking tech to do properly.
mydeath.net is a free site (set up by writer, artist and ex pop star Bill Drummond of the KLF) where you can leave full instructions for what you want done in the event of your death, write your own obituary, and so on.
Halfway between a service and a conceptual work of modern art, it's got more entertainment value than giving 9.99 a quarter to some venture capitalists, plus you can browse other people's (anonymous) speficications for their demise while you are waiting to die.
Where the hell did you get that idea? It's PC emulation software for the Mac, how many Macs do you know that run windows? I use VPC to run the same version of some arcane DOS based accounting software that my accountant uses, no Windows involved.
The real thing to be worried about is if they stop selling the standalone Vrtual PC, and only sell it bundled with Windows, then they get their Microsoft Tax even if you throw out Windows and install Linux
The problem is that this is a cynical anti-competitive law, designed to make it difficult for other countries to sell products into Quebec.
There clearly is a market for English-only products, or they wouldn't be on the shelves. The removal of these games harms the consumer who can't buy them and the games company who is losing a sale.
The only beneficiary of this restriction on free trade is the Quebec economy.
What's actually wrong here is that advertisers are WRONGLY assuming that shoving intrusive ads at people who don't want them is going to be good for them.
If I block your advert without ever seeing it, your company hasn't annoyed me.
If I don't, you have annoyed me.
If you annoy me, I don't buy from you.
Blindingly obvious, I know, but advertisers seem to think that any sort of recognition is good. That online casino spent a fortune indellibly associating the word "scum" with the number 888 in my mind, whereas I've never seen a single advert for the online betting agency I used once. Who has the better business model?
When E-bay turned userfriendly.org into an animated mess with a cartoon hidden in it, my response was to delete my E-bay bookmark. They paid to lose a customer!
Compare this to whoever is paying for the blank rectangle I'm seeing on this page. They didn't annoy me so I'm not avoiding them. This is a BETTER outcome for them.
While I'm ranting, how would this E-bay advert EVER have worked? It could only get them a new customer if the reader was someone was geeky enough to enjoy a cartoon with unix in-jokes, but not net-savvy enough to have heard of E-bay AND wasn't offended by having 50% of the screen garishly dancing around while they tried to concentrate on the small black and white cartoon in the middle.
Spam is the senseless waste of millions upon millions of tiny fractions of a human life.
There comes a point where the few seconds that each of us without spam filters spend deleting this crap adds up to the average lifespan of a human being.
If someone has sent that much spam, why should they not be treated in the same way as a murderer?
That's why I mentioned Spinner's recent departure as a reason people might want to come back, although there have been no major 'tweaks' recently, unless you count fixing an exploit that gave a guy with 3 roids the #1 spot in the game.
oh, and you really should have created a dummy account named "Nodrog" to post that rather than posting as AC:-)
Yes 'blocking' of alliances has been a problem in Planetarion, but I guess if you have a war game there are going to be casualties. I was top 20 individually in round 8 when I got bashed back to the stone age like you are describing. Nowadays, alliances are fiercely proud of not being block members (despite ofc forming bloocks anyway and lying about it on the forums!) for exactly this reason. The trick is to pick the winning side, not the losing one.
Having said that, the new round (10) has some degree of protection built in against people being wiped out, with a limit on structural damage, score based partly on past successes rather than purely on ships and roids, and new features that are effective for small players to use on big ones (called covert operations).
As I said, there is no need to pay before you try it, your first 2 weeks are free, and as an old player you might be enticed back by the fact that 5th Season sold the game to Jolt, Spinner has quit, and there is a new management team in place.
It's probably my fault you missed this, because I decided to link to the sign-up page rather than the manual, partly because I hate the design of the manual (it's nothing like the design of the game pages, which are skinnable), and I think it's probably more overwhelming for a beginner to go there or to the 'portal' main page than to just dive in and play.
Planetarion, the one I'm addicted to, is entirely browser based, with no fancy graphics. There is no "levelling-up", the combat is entirely player vs. player, and all you have to do to get new skills is choose which one you want to research next. The gameplay is all in the co-operation of players, forming alliances, trying to get into better alliances, defending your friends, ganging up on your enemies, outthinking dumb people and general larking about with likeminded people in irc. It's even inspired several clones (myphppa, starsphere, dawn of myth, planetia etc.).
Sadly it's dying a slow death because people always go for a $50 + $30 a month glitzy graphics game over a $0 + $15 every 3-4 months one that has no graphics. Before Evercrack, Planetarion had 180,000 accounts, now it's down to about 6,000, despite many improvements being made each round.
If you want to give Planetarion a try, I suggest you sign up for a free 2 week trial. If enough of you do, the game might get profitable again.
Considering that hybrids have to carry around 2 engines, a fuel tank and batteries, probably not for a long time.
Smart sell 100s of thousands in Europe, but haven't even bothered bringing their amazing 2-seaters to the States, where the bigger, heavier and unaerodynamic a vehicle is the more successful it seems to be.
Smart used to just make the sub-sub-mini coupe, (which I'll admit is a bit odd even though I drive one) but now there is the sporty roadster, a very pretty car indeed which gets better economy than the Prius from it's turbocharged Mercedes engine, and costs less than a mid-range Ford. Pop over to www.smart.com and see what you are missing.
It's really sad to see great browser based games like Planetarion getting ignored in favour of dozens of eye-candy-rich gameplay-poor levelling-up rpgs that cost a fortune.
Thousands of people devoted huge portions of their lives to playing Planetarion, with 180,000 accounts at it's peak, and the on-line community spirit there was simply amazing.
It's just had an complete re-write for round 10 with many improvements, but it's future is in doubt because people won't pay $15 for a 3 to 4 month round, or even bother with the free 2 week trial
If you ever find an infestation of audiophiles, try this little trick...
Get them to start gushing about any recording with an electric guitar on it, and then turn the discussion towards how an electric guitar is actually recorded.
Linger on the usage of the distortion pedal and what it does to audio, and the effects of micing up a marshal amp (with accuracy specs if possible), and the use of equalisation in the studio, preferably getting them to repeat after you what a distortion pedal does, how much one costs, and then to confirm that the audio they are talking about was deliberatley put through one, by the artist, in order to distort the audio.
Actually, it's CD-mastering and d/a converters that have made improvements over the years.
I've done a/b tests of my very early expensive CD player with a dirt cheap modern one, and the modern one is much better. When CD players first came out, accurately converting a 16-bit 44.1kHz signal to an analogue waveform was a non-trivial task, and early players didn't do a very good job of it.
Couple this with bad mastering from analoge master tapes, and early CDs did quite often sound terrible. They were often shrill, and individual tracks were often horribly gated* in the search for a totally hiss-less result.
I have a few tracks on early compilation CDs that I later re-purchased on remastered CDs, and the differences are more audible to me than the difference betwwen 192k and 256k mp3s.
* the kind of gate I'm referring to here is a piece of recording studio equipment that (amongst other things) can be used totally cut off an audio signal that falls below a given volume. I'm simplifying a lot here, but these were often used to be used to clean up 'hissy' reel to reel master tapes, especially on drum sounds. The problem is that drum sounds ought to smoothly decay to silence, not suddenly cut off when they drop below a certain level, and this is especially true of sounds recorded in any room that has a noticeable natural reverb. When making a digital master from an anlogue source was required, early CDs were often created with the philosophy that no hiss must EVER be audible, even if they were turned up to deafening volumes, and an irritating chopping off of decays and reverbs with gates was an acceptable trade off for this result. Because most audiphiles have no idea what goes on in a recording or mastering studio, they just complained of 'clinicality and sterility', and a 'lack of warmth' that was often due to the mastering engineer turning up the highest frequencies that vinyl had a problem reproducing just to show off the CD's high-end accuracy. Nowadays,studio engineers hve got a lot better at mastering for CD
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That's not the impression I get from the articles. All the articles seem to be targetted at specific bad implementations of e-voting, not at the concept itself.
I guess the good e-voting systems don't really warrant much coverage? After all, 'press a button to increment a variable' isn't really groundbreaking tech to do properly.
mydeath.net is a free site (set up by writer, artist and ex pop star Bill Drummond of the KLF) where you can leave full instructions for what you want done in the event of your death, write your own obituary, and so on.
Halfway between a service and a conceptual work of modern art, it's got more entertainment value than giving 9.99 a quarter to some venture capitalists, plus you can browse other people's (anonymous) speficications for their demise while you are waiting to die.
a very poor user experience
sounds about right to me
I have over 5 years part-time experience of Windows 2000.
I've used it 20 hours a week from 2000 to 2003, and 20 other hours a week from 2000 to 2003.
Virtual Boy 2?
Where the hell did you get that idea? It's PC emulation software for the Mac, how many Macs do you know that run windows? I use VPC to run the same version of some arcane DOS based accounting software that my accountant uses, no Windows involved.
The real thing to be worried about is if they stop selling the standalone Vrtual PC, and only sell it bundled with Windows, then they get their Microsoft Tax even if you throw out Windows and install Linux
PLEASE explain that to Disney, who seem intent on torturing parents everywhere with a straight-to-video sequel to every cartoon they ever made.
The problem is that this is a cynical anti-competitive law, designed to make it difficult for other countries to sell products into Quebec.
There clearly is a market for English-only products, or they wouldn't be on the shelves. The removal of these games harms the consumer who can't buy them and the games company who is losing a sale.
The only beneficiary of this restriction on free trade is the Quebec economy.
What's actually wrong here is that advertisers are WRONGLY assuming that shoving intrusive ads at people who don't want them is going to be good for them.
If I block your advert without ever seeing it, your company hasn't annoyed me.
If I don't, you have annoyed me.
If you annoy me, I don't buy from you.
Blindingly obvious, I know, but advertisers seem to think that any sort of recognition is good. That online casino spent a fortune indellibly associating the word "scum" with the number 888 in my mind, whereas I've never seen a single advert for the online betting agency I used once. Who has the better business model?
When E-bay turned userfriendly.org into an animated mess with a cartoon hidden in it, my response was to delete my E-bay bookmark. They paid to lose a customer!
Compare this to whoever is paying for the blank rectangle I'm seeing on this page. They didn't annoy me so I'm not avoiding them. This is a BETTER outcome for them.
While I'm ranting, how would this E-bay advert EVER have worked? It could only get them a new customer if the reader was someone was geeky enough to enjoy a cartoon with unix in-jokes, but not net-savvy enough to have heard of E-bay AND wasn't offended by having 50% of the screen garishly dancing around while they tried to concentrate on the small black and white cartoon in the middle.
If they gave Windows ME 4 and a half stars, then this is the minimum they could give to Panther.
If they gave Windows 2000 Professional 1 star, then 5 for Panther is a an absurdly high rating.
If their ratings are based on this being $129 for an upgrade from 10.$lastversion it's a quite high rating.
If their ratings are based on this being $129 for an upgrade from 9.2.2 it's reasonable.
On it's own, it's fairly meaningless.
Murder is the senseless waste of a human life.
Spam is the senseless waste of millions upon millions of tiny fractions of a human life.
There comes a point where the few seconds that each of us without spam filters spend deleting this crap adds up to the average lifespan of a human being.
If someone has sent that much spam, why should they not be treated in the same way as a murderer?
They didn't find Saddam either, does that mean he never existed too?
...it's Physics, Jim"
from the lyrics of "Star Trekkin'" by The Firm.
That's why I mentioned Spinner's recent departure as a reason people might want to come back, although there have been no major 'tweaks' recently, unless you count fixing an exploit that gave a guy with 3 roids the #1 spot in the game.
:-)
oh, and you really should have created a dummy account named "Nodrog" to post that rather than posting as AC
Yes 'blocking' of alliances has been a problem in Planetarion, but I guess if you have a war game there are going to be casualties. I was top 20 individually in round 8 when I got bashed back to the stone age like you are describing. Nowadays, alliances are fiercely proud of not being block members (despite ofc forming bloocks anyway and lying about it on the forums!) for exactly this reason. The trick is to pick the winning side, not the losing one.
Having said that, the new round (10) has some degree of protection built in against people being wiped out, with a limit on structural damage, score based partly on past successes rather than purely on ships and roids, and new features that are effective for small players to use on big ones (called covert operations).
As I said, there is no need to pay before you try it, your first 2 weeks are free, and as an old player you might be enticed back by the fact that 5th Season sold the game to Jolt, Spinner has quit, and there is a new management team in place.
There are no screenshots because there are no graphics!
It's all HTML, and you play it in your browser. The game itself (even the free trial) has no adverts, but there is 1 per page on the support pages.
Descriptions of what's going on are in the introduction to the manual.
It's probably my fault you missed this, because I decided to link to the sign-up page rather than the manual, partly because I hate the design of the manual (it's nothing like the design of the game pages, which are skinnable), and I think it's probably more overwhelming for a beginner to go there or to the 'portal' main page than to just dive in and play.
Planetarion, the one I'm addicted to, is entirely browser based, with no fancy graphics. There is no "levelling-up", the combat is entirely player vs. player, and all you have to do to get new skills is choose which one you want to research next. The gameplay is all in the co-operation of players, forming alliances, trying to get into better alliances, defending your friends, ganging up on your enemies, outthinking dumb people and general larking about with likeminded people in irc. It's even inspired several clones (myphppa, starsphere, dawn of myth, planetia etc.).
Sadly it's dying a slow death because people always go for a $50 + $30 a month glitzy graphics game over a $0 + $15 every 3-4 months one that has no graphics. Before Evercrack, Planetarion had 180,000 accounts, now it's down to about 6,000, despite many improvements being made each round.
If you want to give Planetarion a try, I suggest you sign up for a free 2 week trial. If enough of you do, the game might get profitable again.
...you'll see that they are quite clearly claiming that their software spys on you.
I think we could have a lot of fun with a class action lawsuit for false advertising here.
Considering that hybrids have to carry around 2 engines, a fuel tank and batteries, probably not for a long time.
Smart sell 100s of thousands in Europe, but haven't even bothered bringing their amazing 2-seaters to the States, where the bigger, heavier and unaerodynamic a vehicle is the more successful it seems to be.
Smart used to just make the sub-sub-mini coupe, (which I'll admit is a bit odd even though I drive one) but now there is the sporty roadster, a very pretty car indeed which gets better economy than the Prius from it's turbocharged Mercedes engine, and costs less than a mid-range Ford. Pop over to www.smart.com and see what you are missing.
That's complete rubbish, you can drive either at 17.
Diesels are popular here because diesel is cheaper than petrol, and diesel cars generally get a better mpg.
It's really sad to see great browser based games like Planetarion getting ignored in favour of dozens of eye-candy-rich gameplay-poor levelling-up rpgs that cost a fortune.
Thousands of people devoted huge portions of their lives to playing Planetarion, with 180,000 accounts at it's peak, and the on-line community spirit there was simply amazing.
It's just had an complete re-write for round 10 with many improvements, but it's future is in doubt because people won't pay $15 for a 3 to 4 month round, or even bother with the free 2 week trial
yes, given sufficiently healthy values of "dead" :-)
I'm actually very pleased that people haven't wasted their money on a product that (by all accounts) sucks.
It's very reassuring that word of mouth has given consumers the power to whack stupid companies like Nokia with a hefty cluestick.
If you ever find an infestation of audiophiles, try this little trick...
Get them to start gushing about any recording with an electric guitar on it, and then turn the discussion towards how an electric guitar is actually recorded.
Linger on the usage of the distortion pedal and what it does to audio, and the effects of micing up a marshal amp (with accuracy specs if possible), and the use of equalisation in the studio, preferably getting them to repeat after you what a distortion pedal does, how much one costs, and then to confirm that the audio they are talking about was deliberatley put through one, by the artist, in order to distort the audio.
Sometimes their heads will actually explode.
Actually, it's CD-mastering and d/a converters that have made improvements over the years.
I've done a/b tests of my very early expensive CD player with a dirt cheap modern one, and the modern one is much better. When CD players first came out, accurately converting a 16-bit 44.1kHz signal to an analogue waveform was a non-trivial task, and early players didn't do a very good job of it.
Couple this with bad mastering from analoge master tapes, and early CDs did quite often sound terrible. They were often shrill, and individual tracks were often horribly gated* in the search for a totally hiss-less result.
I have a few tracks on early compilation CDs that I later re-purchased on remastered CDs, and the differences are more audible to me than the difference betwwen 192k and 256k mp3s.
* the kind of gate I'm referring to here is a piece of recording studio equipment that (amongst other things) can be used totally cut off an audio signal that falls below a given volume. I'm simplifying a lot here, but these were often used to be used to clean up 'hissy' reel to reel master tapes, especially on drum sounds. The problem is that drum sounds ought to smoothly decay to silence, not suddenly cut off when they drop below a certain level, and this is especially true of sounds recorded in any room that has a noticeable natural reverb. When making a digital master from an anlogue source was required, early CDs were often created with the philosophy that no hiss must EVER be audible, even if they were turned up to deafening volumes, and an irritating chopping off of decays and reverbs with gates was an acceptable trade off for this result. Because most audiphiles have no idea what goes on in a recording or mastering studio, they just complained of 'clinicality and sterility', and a 'lack of warmth' that was often due to the mastering engineer turning up the highest frequencies that vinyl had a problem reproducing just to show off the CD's high-end accuracy. Nowadays,studio engineers hve got a lot better at mastering for CD