Considering it only takes a star a few times the mass of our sun to make a black hole, your description could be applied to a single binary system, or a handful of stars that are gravitationally linked. There are a LOT of black holes within the Milky Way.
I've got an entire game laid out using primarily HTML I learned back in the mid-90's: tables, b tags, i tags. Heck, I even use frames (ick, I know). I've got quite a few visually impaired players who have thanked me on a frequent basis for having such a playable game. The funny thing is I've done almost nothing to go out of my way to make it playable (other than adding alt tags to images) but screen readers work just fine with it.
What you say is true, but your cynicism may be a bit heavy handed. I mean, I think timecards, expense reports, and all-hands meetings are annoying and time-consuming distractions, but when accounting emails me and says they need an expense report I still do it, even though I'm a computer guy and not a money guy. Despite the fact that every single time I mess up at least one of their obscure accounting codes (5xxx72 is for travel, but 5xxx74 is for food, except if it's food when you're traveling, then it's 5xxx14, but not if you're in-state, then it's the regular food line item of 5xxxx05, and so on....) they still send back my form with corrections and hope I can figure it out next time. And I work at a fairly friendly, competent company, but I'm still put through hoops.
There's sometimes a lopsided impression in companies that IT is an inconvenience if they "interrupt" other people's daily schedules, but when other departments have interruptive demands it's just "part of doing business." The truth, of course, is somewhere in between.
I think you're right. The GP assuming that acting impulsively is a sign of intelligence. It's only one counter-example, but my own story opposes his. I was a bright kid. I was bored constantly in school. I didn't disrupt things, I just sat there being bored. Sometimes teachers would let me read a book in class, and I wasn't so bored. Others didn't like me reading, so I had to pretend to pay attention and do slightly less fun things like doodle or whatever. It's definitely not necessary to be disruptive just because you're bored.
Wise words. I've never "checked in" to anywhere. Not even sure I know how, but the whole "tell the robbers you're not at home" paranoia is reason enough not to use that tool. I've occasionally "liked" a post from friends in a sign of support without anything to add, but I'm not sure I've ever liked a commercial entity, nor do I feel much inclination to do so. I don't really like most companies all that much, so I guess that's part of it.
I signed up with Earthlink for a hosting package back in the day (98?). They had a special package which was modest but came with a nice price of $10/month "for life." Two years later, they started billing me $25/month. I called to ask why, they said that I was on a discontinued package, so they dumped me into their mid-range one. They had no recollection of the "for life" terms of the deal, insisted I needed to show them documentation (from an internet ad, from two years ago? yeah, like I have that!), and then offered me basically the same plan for $15/month. I said no thanks, signed up with a new host, found a new ISP, and canceled both services with Earthlink. Never done business with them since.
On the other hand, I've been burned by nearly every other web host (tried 6 or 7 since then) that I've done business with, in one way or another, so maybe they're simply nearly all crummy in that business.
Seconded. I set up an account when having an extended stay with my Grandmother, about 5 years ago. Used it for a month, then called to cancel after the trip. I don't even think it took 5 minutes, and I wasn't even once pressured to keep the account.
Oh, and if the Skids twins (or whatever they were called) wasn't just putting two Jar-Jars into Transformers 2, I don't know how else you'd describe it. Also, my apologies for forgetting Slashdot doesn't save line breaks. That turned into a bit of a wall of text.
For the Matrix, my expectations were set by the description of the original as "They wanted to tell a superhero story, and the first movie was setting the stage to explain his powers." And also by the line at the end of the first movie, where Keanu says over the phone something along the lines of "I'm going to show the people what we can do."
I went into the second and third expecting more of Keanu being a hero for the people, maybe teaching others how to be elightened and powerful, or fighting more directly with agents. There was far too much action out of the matrix, too much runaround squabbling with other artifacts, and except for the very end where it's agreed the people would be given a choice to leave the matrix, they're basically invisible and unaware of the hero's existence. Maybe I've also lost my tolerance for the "this is all happened before and will happen again" stories (for one thing, if they have several previous recordings of Neo's exact likeness, how come they didn't just eliminate him as a child or young man and get it over with) and the "the only way to end is for good to merge with evil and destroy them both" conclusions. I don't have a strong loathing of the sequels, but I walked away feeling they hadn't tapped the potential given by the first, and threw in a bunch of cliches that dampened the later ones.
As for Transformers, since you mentioned that one, I'm about as big a fan as you'll see, and while the second one was acceptable, I honestly think the whole thing would have been more fun if they'd just had robots fighting, and dropped 90% of the lousy plot. The Fallen was unnecessary, the "only a prime can defeat me" prophecy was ridiculous, and robots finding Earth was unlikely enough in the first movie -- having a second instance of the same thing in the second movie (and, apparently, a third instance in the third movie) really seems to be pushing it. I'd have been perfectly content with "robots find Earth once and keep fighting for three movies" as enough of a plot.
On the SSI games (Pools of Radiance, etc.) I had an easier answer. I looked at the underside of the wheel once, noticed that the letter "e" was disproportionately represented, and then just relaunched the game and guessed "e" until it let me in. It was faster to do this by guessing than to use the wheel, and it worked even better in later years when I lost the darn thing.
What does this strawman about Twitter outrage have to do with my wanting to read an eBook during takeoff and landing? Sitting and staring at the chair in front of me is boring, my book is interesting. My Nook even has an airplane mode. Why should I spend 20 minutes of the flight doing nothing instead of reading quietly?
Except they'll let me keep reading my book, and if I'm reading a book I might as well not be there, because I'm so tuned out. Is the cell phone more distracting than a good story? For me it definitely isn't.
Longer than 10 years. Last Mac virus I saw in the wild was a Microsoft Word macro virus circa 1993. I'm not even sure that one DID anything, just triggered alerts. Haven't bothered with any antivirus since then, with no problems.
Not that I'm particularly virus prone. I'm pretty cautious with my Windows boxes, too. Haven't gotten any viruses there, but I DO use AV tools that catch risks which have gotten near my computer (landing on a bad page after a Google search, getting hit with email that I'd probably never open, but AV is catching it right away, etc.)
Not quite that bad, but I got a call from the secretary of the Dean of Engineering one day, desperate to open a file. She emailed me a copy and the extension looked weird, so I asked her what it was. She said she didn't know, but the Dean had gotten it and needed it open badly. Who was it from? She didn't know that, couldn't ask the dean because he was away, but she and four other people had been tasked with repeatedly trying to open the file before they finally sent it to me.
A virus, naturally, and I had to spend the rest of the day cleaning up the entire Dean's Office.
Crazy stuff like this really happens. When I moved into a recently remodeled rental house a few years ago, we noticed a mysterious wire that came down from a pole in the back yard, looped around in piles by the fence, coiled up into a pine tree, with the open tips of the wire resting in its branches. At a very quick glance it looked a bit like a power line. We called the landlord first, who blamed "the stupid electric company" and assured us it was normal and safe. I accepted the possibility of "safe" but couldn't believe it was normal, but nobody wanted to do anything about it, so we ignored it for a few days. Until they activated the cable at our house, and we weren't getting any signal. At which point a cable tech came out, discovered the wire in the back yard, and attached it back to the house to fix our cable. Apparently the remodelers had removed it when they redid the house siding, and just dumped it in the tree as a convenient storage place.
That same house gave us a few other surprises, including phone jacks that had been installed in the walls, but not actually connected to the phone wires which were sitting uselessly in the wall next to the boxes, a kitchen sink U-trap which, instead of being the normal U shape did a complete loop, and an electrical outlet for the fridge which was set up with one of the circuit-breaker buttons (forget the technical term) which got triggered every few days by the fridge compressor, killing power to half the kitchen.
While mysteray's tone is grating, the point may be partially valid. I can't remember the last time we had any story about an event older than 6000 years that didn't have a knee-jerk "but the earth is only 6000 years old!" snark in the first two posts, and which invariably constitutes 50% of the discussion with a worthless rehashing of the same old junk.
That said, astrology gets far too much gentle overlooking and not enough skeptical scoffing for my tastes. Not here on Slashdot, but anywhere else it's glossed over like a harmless white lie.
And don't forget northern/southern hemisphere differences, where the seasons (and amount of daylight) are reversed, versus the tropics where daylight is basically constant.
I'm aware that what he does is for business purposes, but I find it reprehensible anyway. So I bash both his political tripe AND his business practices. That's fair, right?
Working in the games industry doesn't have to be awful. You just have to run your own indie company. Probably as a low-paying hobby on the side, after hours. You're still working hard, the hours may be terrible, but at least you're at home for some of it, and the owner's likely to be nice to you.
Why do people always complain about other people asking slashdot for things? It's an interesting discussion, even if the answer is trivially obvious. There are good stories here and examples of good negotiating tactics.
I think most of the books you quote came out before eBooks existed, so naturally you can't find eBook copies of them. I suspect books that come out this year will still be available in digital format in 10 or 20 or 40 years. For one, with no storage and printing costs, there's little incentive to discontinue selling the digital copy, so it should be listed for sale long after the printed versions go out of print. (Not like King's going out of print any time soon, but today's niche sci-fi or fantasy authors might.)
It's true that my Nook won't function in 2050, but I think there's a very good chance the ePub files I have backed up on my computer will still exist. Possibly not in their current format, but certainly if there's a big shift in formats we'll have the option to convert and keep them updated.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering it only takes a star a few times the mass of our sun to make a black hole, your description could be applied to a single binary system, or a handful of stars that are gravitationally linked. There are a LOT of black holes within the Milky Way.
Psh, wrong! It's a little gem on Orion's belt. I thought everybody knew that by this point.
That's a great letter from Asimov. Thanks for linking to it. Quite insightful.
I've got an entire game laid out using primarily HTML I learned back in the mid-90's: tables, b tags, i tags. Heck, I even use frames (ick, I know). I've got quite a few visually impaired players who have thanked me on a frequent basis for having such a playable game. The funny thing is I've done almost nothing to go out of my way to make it playable (other than adding alt tags to images) but screen readers work just fine with it.
There's sometimes a lopsided impression in companies that IT is an inconvenience if they "interrupt" other people's daily schedules, but when other departments have interruptive demands it's just "part of doing business." The truth, of course, is somewhere in between.
I think you're right. The GP assuming that acting impulsively is a sign of intelligence. It's only one counter-example, but my own story opposes his. I was a bright kid. I was bored constantly in school. I didn't disrupt things, I just sat there being bored. Sometimes teachers would let me read a book in class, and I wasn't so bored. Others didn't like me reading, so I had to pretend to pay attention and do slightly less fun things like doodle or whatever. It's definitely not necessary to be disruptive just because you're bored.
I would have said :-/ was pretty close. And that doesn't appear to be on that keyboard.
Wise words. I've never "checked in" to anywhere. Not even sure I know how, but the whole "tell the robbers you're not at home" paranoia is reason enough not to use that tool. I've occasionally "liked" a post from friends in a sign of support without anything to add, but I'm not sure I've ever liked a commercial entity, nor do I feel much inclination to do so. I don't really like most companies all that much, so I guess that's part of it.
Don't you mean "*is* there editors?" :P
On the other hand, I've been burned by nearly every other web host (tried 6 or 7 since then) that I've done business with, in one way or another, so maybe they're simply nearly all crummy in that business.
Seconded. I set up an account when having an extended stay with my Grandmother, about 5 years ago. Used it for a month, then called to cancel after the trip. I don't even think it took 5 minutes, and I wasn't even once pressured to keep the account.
Oh, and if the Skids twins (or whatever they were called) wasn't just putting two Jar-Jars into Transformers 2, I don't know how else you'd describe it. Also, my apologies for forgetting Slashdot doesn't save line breaks. That turned into a bit of a wall of text.
For the Matrix, my expectations were set by the description of the original as "They wanted to tell a superhero story, and the first movie was setting the stage to explain his powers." And also by the line at the end of the first movie, where Keanu says over the phone something along the lines of "I'm going to show the people what we can do." I went into the second and third expecting more of Keanu being a hero for the people, maybe teaching others how to be elightened and powerful, or fighting more directly with agents. There was far too much action out of the matrix, too much runaround squabbling with other artifacts, and except for the very end where it's agreed the people would be given a choice to leave the matrix, they're basically invisible and unaware of the hero's existence. Maybe I've also lost my tolerance for the "this is all happened before and will happen again" stories (for one thing, if they have several previous recordings of Neo's exact likeness, how come they didn't just eliminate him as a child or young man and get it over with) and the "the only way to end is for good to merge with evil and destroy them both" conclusions. I don't have a strong loathing of the sequels, but I walked away feeling they hadn't tapped the potential given by the first, and threw in a bunch of cliches that dampened the later ones. As for Transformers, since you mentioned that one, I'm about as big a fan as you'll see, and while the second one was acceptable, I honestly think the whole thing would have been more fun if they'd just had robots fighting, and dropped 90% of the lousy plot. The Fallen was unnecessary, the "only a prime can defeat me" prophecy was ridiculous, and robots finding Earth was unlikely enough in the first movie -- having a second instance of the same thing in the second movie (and, apparently, a third instance in the third movie) really seems to be pushing it. I'd have been perfectly content with "robots find Earth once and keep fighting for three movies" as enough of a plot.
On the SSI games (Pools of Radiance, etc.) I had an easier answer. I looked at the underside of the wheel once, noticed that the letter "e" was disproportionately represented, and then just relaunched the game and guessed "e" until it let me in. It was faster to do this by guessing than to use the wheel, and it worked even better in later years when I lost the darn thing.
What does this strawman about Twitter outrage have to do with my wanting to read an eBook during takeoff and landing? Sitting and staring at the chair in front of me is boring, my book is interesting. My Nook even has an airplane mode. Why should I spend 20 minutes of the flight doing nothing instead of reading quietly?
Except they'll let me keep reading my book, and if I'm reading a book I might as well not be there, because I'm so tuned out. Is the cell phone more distracting than a good story? For me it definitely isn't.
Longer than 10 years. Last Mac virus I saw in the wild was a Microsoft Word macro virus circa 1993. I'm not even sure that one DID anything, just triggered alerts. Haven't bothered with any antivirus since then, with no problems.
Not that I'm particularly virus prone. I'm pretty cautious with my Windows boxes, too. Haven't gotten any viruses there, but I DO use AV tools that catch risks which have gotten near my computer (landing on a bad page after a Google search, getting hit with email that I'd probably never open, but AV is catching it right away, etc.)
Not quite that bad, but I got a call from the secretary of the Dean of Engineering one day, desperate to open a file. She emailed me a copy and the extension looked weird, so I asked her what it was. She said she didn't know, but the Dean had gotten it and needed it open badly. Who was it from? She didn't know that, couldn't ask the dean because he was away, but she and four other people had been tasked with repeatedly trying to open the file before they finally sent it to me.
A virus, naturally, and I had to spend the rest of the day cleaning up the entire Dean's Office.
Crazy stuff like this really happens. When I moved into a recently remodeled rental house a few years ago, we noticed a mysterious wire that came down from a pole in the back yard, looped around in piles by the fence, coiled up into a pine tree, with the open tips of the wire resting in its branches. At a very quick glance it looked a bit like a power line. We called the landlord first, who blamed "the stupid electric company" and assured us it was normal and safe. I accepted the possibility of "safe" but couldn't believe it was normal, but nobody wanted to do anything about it, so we ignored it for a few days. Until they activated the cable at our house, and we weren't getting any signal. At which point a cable tech came out, discovered the wire in the back yard, and attached it back to the house to fix our cable. Apparently the remodelers had removed it when they redid the house siding, and just dumped it in the tree as a convenient storage place.
That same house gave us a few other surprises, including phone jacks that had been installed in the walls, but not actually connected to the phone wires which were sitting uselessly in the wall next to the boxes, a kitchen sink U-trap which, instead of being the normal U shape did a complete loop, and an electrical outlet for the fridge which was set up with one of the circuit-breaker buttons (forget the technical term) which got triggered every few days by the fridge compressor, killing power to half the kitchen.
While mysteray's tone is grating, the point may be partially valid. I can't remember the last time we had any story about an event older than 6000 years that didn't have a knee-jerk "but the earth is only 6000 years old!" snark in the first two posts, and which invariably constitutes 50% of the discussion with a worthless rehashing of the same old junk. That said, astrology gets far too much gentle overlooking and not enough skeptical scoffing for my tastes. Not here on Slashdot, but anywhere else it's glossed over like a harmless white lie.
And don't forget northern/southern hemisphere differences, where the seasons (and amount of daylight) are reversed, versus the tropics where daylight is basically constant.
I'm aware that what he does is for business purposes, but I find it reprehensible anyway. So I bash both his political tripe AND his business practices. That's fair, right?
Working in the games industry doesn't have to be awful. You just have to run your own indie company. Probably as a low-paying hobby on the side, after hours. You're still working hard, the hours may be terrible, but at least you're at home for some of it, and the owner's likely to be nice to you.
Why do people always complain about other people asking slashdot for things? It's an interesting discussion, even if the answer is trivially obvious. There are good stories here and examples of good negotiating tactics.
It's true that my Nook won't function in 2050, but I think there's a very good chance the ePub files I have backed up on my computer will still exist. Possibly not in their current format, but certainly if there's a big shift in formats we'll have the option to convert and keep them updated.