Another lame mod...
on
Project Plex-Box
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Is it just me or are all case mods the same these days? Add plexiglass, lights, leds, maybe vaguely interesting feature (X2 logo).
Does anyone else remember when case modding used to be cool? Where are the stylish custom stickers? (some nice ones on penny-arcade a while ago) The lego man stuck in cryo in the optical mouse? (too lazy to go find this link too)
Why isn't anyone pulling apart their CD/DVD tray and making that out of plexiglass?
In summary, novel and innovative=cool, gratuitous use of plexiglass and lights=lame. (Soz for all the whining).
SVG (now a W3 standard for 3 years) was itself billed as a Flash-killer some years ago
It's funny how some things turn out. Two years ago I was doing some research for a software company (they made CAD software adapted for ship design with lots of extra features) who wanted to put their product tutorials online and create a feedback system. The idea was that they wouldn't have to spend so much time teaching users how to use their software.
Anyway, I was looking at designing interactive websites and had to investigate a whole lot of new technologies, SVG among them. I found a few really cool examples, but nothing really useful. I also concluded at that time that it would be too hard to get SVG working in the users' browsers (Netscape 6.0 had just come out - it supposedly supported SVG, but damned if I could get it to work properly). Also, no one else was really using SVG at the time.
So in the end we went with Flash - not for the site design, but for interactive physics examples that helped the user to understand why different design decisions gave their ships different properties. Now that SVG (or the MS version) is being incorporated in IE, I could see it being useful for these type of things. Of course, there is the little matter of Flash being well understood by developers who've got lots of experience, and the large installed userbase... Will be interesting to see what is being used in another few years.
probably don't run around talking to people about their illegal activities, especially people trying to get in contact with them.
If you've been hacked by the best, you probably don't even know it because they leave no trace and don't brag about what they do. Of course this opens the door to such questions as, do people like this actually exist?
Might be better to assume that there are. *dons tinfoil hat*
will we be seeing subpoenas for people who stop searching for content? Will this be "stealing a valuable source of information" from the RIAA? (much like you steal everytime you timeshift ads or block popups)?
And in unrelated news, the RIAA announces new product lines featuring Barney, based upon p2p information showing everyone is searching for Barney products. They are baffled when two weeks later not a single item has sold...
Something that I've been wondering lately - how much time does it take to set up an online music store? You've got to sort out the code, the content, the licensing etc.
The reason I ask is because we've just had a number of stores launch within 6 months of each other. Did these people "get it" a year ago and start work on their stores then? Or does it only take a month to set up, and everyone has been jumping on the "me too" bandwagon.
Of course, what interests me is not who will be opening online music stores in the next 2 years, but who will still be around after 2 years and have consumers buying their products.
Look what happened in America. DOJ rules that MS illegally abused their monopoly, and MS gets a slap on the wrist. And they're still using similiar "business strategies" today.
I'm all for these types of proceedings in the EU, and even more so for those countries whose governments are installing Linux. I can't help but wonder though if MS is going to get another slap on the wrist or if the EU will actually apply some meaningful rulings and ENFORCE THEM.
Then again, if everyone goes the way of the German government, it might not matter:)
Sorry, that was my bad. The name of the page at spacedaily.com was x-prize03c.html. I recognised the name XCOR (although obviously just from the general suborbital field, not the X-Prize teams) and assumed. I should have checked more closely. Goes to show how much attention the eds are paying.
In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as KNOPPIX, at least within Europe, because the holders of the over 30,000 already granted "software patents" (currently without a legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for trivial things like "progress bars", "mouseclicks on online order forms", "scrolling within a window" and similar. That way, software developers will have to pay the "software-patentholders" for using these features, even in their own, completely self-developed applications, which can completely stall the development of innovative software for small and medium companies. Apart from this, the expense for patent inquiries and legal assistence is high, for even trying to find out if the self-developed software is possibly violating "software-patents", if you want to continue to market your software. Contrary to real patents, "software-patents" are, in the current draft, monopolization of business ideas and methods, even without any tangible technical implementation. More about the current major problem at http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html
Martian Invasion Probing lively puzzles on the Red Planet
Ron Cowen
Just 2 months ago, Mars loomed high in the sky, its ruddy countenance so close that anyone with a backyard telescope could make out the planet's white south-polar cap and a central smudge known as Syrtis Major. Not in 60,000 years had Mars and Earth been so close, and they won't be again for another 2 centuries. But even as the two planets now drift slowly apart, three envoys from Earth are racing to the Red Planet.
If all goes according to plan, the European Space Agency's Mars Express will begin orbiting Mars next month, using radar to search for hidden reservoirs of water. The craft will also jettison a suitcase-size stationary lander, Beagle-2, that will look for signs of life by examining soil at and just below the surface of a region called Isidis Planitia.
Then, in January, two NASA craft bearing identical rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity, will touch down in regions of the planet that may once have had water coursing through them and so could have hosted primitive life.
"Successful landings of all three spacecraft will more than double our experience with the . . . environments of Mars," says James B. Garvin, NASA's Mars-program scientist in Washington, D.C. "I am anticipating major breakthroughs in our understanding."
Planetary scientists studying Mars could use a breakthrough. Recent evidence has shaken what has been one of the most tantalizing core beliefs about the Red Planet--that ancient Mars was much wetter and warmer than the planet is today and even harbored a planetwide ocean.
On the one hand, the planet's now bone-dry surface is scarred by sinuous channels, apparent lake beds, deep canyons, and thousands of gullies. These all bear the marks of having been carved by liquid water. On the other hand, there's a troubling scarcity of minerals such as limestone and other carbonates, which commonly form in the presence of liquid water.
There is a "direct conflict" between the geological and mineralogical evidence for water on Mars, says Bruce M. Jakosky of the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Determining whether parts of Mars ever carried a substantial amount of liquid water and, if so, for how long would help answer the ultimate question about the Red Planet: Is it now or has it ever been a living world?
Missing minerals
The water conundrum intensified late last summer, when Philip R. Christensen of the Arizona State University in Tempe and his colleagues reported the results of a 6-year study with an infrared spectrometer aboard the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor observatory. The instrument scrutinized large swaths of the Martian surface and atmosphere for carbonates, minerals that are associated with water. On Earth, carbonates such as limestone form when carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves in water, making carbonic acid. The acid eats away at rocks, and their remains precipitate out as carbonate deposits. A notable example is the White Cliffs of Dover.
Researchers had been looking for carbonates on Mars for more than a decade, and in the Aug. 22 Science, Christensen's team announced that it had finally found some. But there was little reason to rejoice. Carbonates were detected in only small amounts--up to 5 percent--in the planet's surface dust.
"We believe that the relatively small amounts that we see probably did not come from oceans, but from trace amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere interacting directly with dust," Christensen says.
This study, as well as other new evidence (see "Bone-dry Mars?" in this week's issue: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/20031108/note12.asp), "really points to a cold, frozen, icy Mars that has probably always been that way, as opposed to a warm, humid, oceanic Mars some time in the past," Christensen adds. The extensive carbonate layers that would have formed early in Martian history if the climate had been warm and oceans plentiful "are simply not ther
Re:Bad for users of alternative browsers?
on
IE To Block Pop-Ups
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· Score: 1
If pop-up blocking is integrated into the browser that 90% of the web-surfing population is using, you can bet that they'll start figuring out how to get around it- or worse, figure out some more annoying method of advertising.
They're called banner ads. I'm waiting for someone to work out a way of blocking them without blocking all of the graphics on a page.
Interestingly enough, I remember seeing one of my friends using an early version of netscape (3 or earlier) back in about '95. He had every image blocked by default, simply due to bandwidth concerns and how long it would take a page to load. Try doing that with a site today though, and it's virtually unusable.
Find some good reviewers (that say _why_ they liked it in clear terms), and decide if you tend to like those elements, and you end up seeing a lot fewer movies you don't enjoy.
This is very true. A reviewer in my local paper does this most of the time. I have almost the opposite taste in movies, so if this reviewer loves it, I'll most likely pass.
The same thing goes for game reviews too, although that tends to work more on a per site basis than individual reviewers (at least, that's what I've found).
Seeing how you can run Linux on the PS2, and with enough units you can create a beowulf cluster with a medium amount of computing power, are we sure that China is full of people wanting to play games?
Remember that the PS2 was banned from being exported to Iraq for exactly this reason. Maybe China needs some more computing power for their space program?
Once upon a time we built microcomputers and minicomputers. We finally realised that this sounded dumb, and just called them computers.
Today, if we build something that we measure in nanometers, it is nanotechnology, and it is cool and interesting.
Twenty years from now, when we are building things on the scale of picometers, what will we think of calling things "nano"?
Interestingly though, a hydrogen atom is 10E-10m across (one Angstrom), which is a tenth of a nanometer, or 100 picometers. I have a feeling that we won't be able to go any smaller without stripping off the electrons and playing with charged nuclei. Now that could be some interesting tech...
IIRC, a patent used to be awarded for a device that it would take a master craftsman more than two to three full days to design and make.
Extending that to software patents today, exactly how many lines of C would you say a master programmer can output in two to three days? I have a feeling that it may be a lot more than what this technology is built on.
Thankfully I live in Australia, where we don't have anywhere near as many stupid software patents, but I can still foresee the day that I will have to get a patent judged invalid before I can write a program more than 100 LOC. I wonder if we will have an analogous situation to music piracy today, where everyone will write outlawed code because the big companies hold the patents on basic programming constructs and refuse to play ball.
Whoops, didn't read the comment mentioning that Apple is only allowed to sell music in the US. Guess that explains why its US only. Any guess as to why they aren't expanding?
I wonder what the reasoning is behind restricting sales to the US. There are a few reasons I can think of, but the most likely one is probably the ability to enforce the DMCA.
However, given that Apple allows you to copy the tracks to portable devices and burn them to CD, I'm not so sure why you might need to restrict copying or some such.
If anyone can come up with a probable theory, I for one would like to hear it.
I'm not saying that it will happen anytime soon, but I honestly can't see guys like this stopping spammers as a whole any time soon.
I don't get a lot of spam, mainly because I don't post my email address all over the internet, but I would love to use a secure (PGP or other) email client. Sure, I could set one up now, but how many of my friends/colleagues will also be using it? Not many at all.
Computers are supposed to be tools used to enhance our productivity. Sadly they quite often do the opposite, mainly due to things like spam. I doubt that any progress will be made in fighting spam until Microsoft/Apple include authentication options in their default mail applications.
DDR is Dance Dance Revolution - a game you play by placing your feet on a mat with sensors according to what's on the screen ("dancing"). The longer you play, the harder it gets. It's in arcades and on the PS2. Sorry, thought it was common knowledge.
I'm just going on what my sister and my girlfriend will play, but most of the time it is not what I like to play.
Any given day of the week, I'm quite happy to sit down and play an RTS, RPG, FPS or puzzle adventure. My sister loves Mario Kart and the Monkey Island series. She likes the cute characters and the humour, but also likes to sit down and solve puzzles. My girlfriend is quite unwilling to invest any time in a game unless she gets an instant payoff - she gets frustrated quite easily if she isn't instantly good at something, and will turn off the PC/console and go listen to music or watch DVDs. She is quite happy to play something like DDR.
I think that while there is some (small) overlap between male/female game tastes, in general they are quite different. The reason we don't see more games for women is that the male market is a proven one, and easy to develop for based upon game type. If developers knew how to design games for women (and rake in big money), we would probably see a lot more games for girls out there.
Maybe the industry needs to find out what games girls want to play and then make them. If its more games like Rez, I wouldn't mind playing them with my girlfriend:)
While most people would agree that Jedi are cooler than other character classes, Jedi are not everyone's cup of tea. Sure, you're going to get the hardcore players running around as Jedi and Dark Jedi, but will the average players want to play as these classes?
Keep in mind that apparently force sensitive characters can only learn Jedi skills (yes, I RTA). This means that they are fairly easy to identify (well, at least anytime they aren't hiding - but you won't see them changing people's hair), and this coupled with the bounties on them will make them hunted. Sure they're cool Jedi, but now them are characters who have groups out hunting them, and they suffer permanent death.
I don't think that the average gamer will feel too jaded when you start seeing Jedi being taken down all the time, while everyone wants their character to heal them, change their appearance etc. There is a place for everyone, and Jedi aren't going to be running all over the place. Besides, you can be sure that the Dark Jedi will also be thinning the numbers;)
What is more likely to change the balance in-game will be the refinement of the process of unlocking the force-sensitive slot. I'm fairly sure that this still won't be something that you can do in 2 days, but will still be doable in the long term even if you only play a few hours a week (keep in mind that you are paying a subscription fee here).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that yes the Jedi are cool, but they have their own problems, and a lot of people are happy to just stick to their dancing etc and not have all of these additional problems (a lot of people play games to relax, you know). Seeing as it has taken months for the first force-sensitive slot to be unlocked (and there are still no Jedi), I am fairly confident that there will not be hundreds of Jedi running around any time soon.
For anyone out there who might like to add some of these movies to their collection, I suggest that you check out http://www.animecollector.com/. My girlfriend just bought the 12 movie set, and was extremely pleased with the service.
Flint Ink, which has 5,000 employees, has set up a unit to develop methods of cheaply printing antennas for radio-frequency identification tags, the tiny chips that retailers are hoping will replace bar codes.
So in the future, as my newspaper is sending my bio-information back to the publisher to be re-sold in a database to a third pary - bio-information that it has "read" by me handling the conductive print and interrupting the magnetic field (thus being able to track my pulse etc), will I be able to hack it by tearing the paper to destroy the RFID antenna?
I'm sure that there will be plenty of useful and entertaining uses for this technology, but The Diamond Age is coming.
With MS, there's one choice. With linux, there's multiple choices for software to use.
> Actually, I have found multiple choices of software to use on MS as well.
I think that the problem is that on Linux, there are no clear leaders for common applications. For example, if I want a text editor, I have vi and emacs. Desktop - Gnome and KDE. The list goes on.
Diversity is one of OSSs great achievements, but this does not make the job of the PHB any easier. Exactly when did the PHB learn about Linux during his/her education? Most likely everything the PHB learnt about computers has been to do with Microsoft.
Until we can educate the PHBs about what's available for Linux, I'm not so sure that they will see diversity as a good rather than a frightening thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me or are all case mods the same these days? Add plexiglass, lights, leds, maybe vaguely interesting feature (X2 logo).
Does anyone else remember when case modding used to be cool? Where are the stylish custom stickers? (some nice ones on penny-arcade a while ago) The lego man stuck in cryo in the optical mouse? (too lazy to go find this link too)
Why isn't anyone pulling apart their CD/DVD tray and making that out of plexiglass?
In summary, novel and innovative=cool, gratuitous use of plexiglass and lights=lame. (Soz for all the whining).
It's funny how some things turn out. Two years ago I was doing some research for a software company (they made CAD software adapted for ship design with lots of extra features) who wanted to put their product tutorials online and create a feedback system. The idea was that they wouldn't have to spend so much time teaching users how to use their software.
Anyway, I was looking at designing interactive websites and had to investigate a whole lot of new technologies, SVG among them. I found a few really cool examples, but nothing really useful. I also concluded at that time that it would be too hard to get SVG working in the users' browsers (Netscape 6.0 had just come out - it supposedly supported SVG, but damned if I could get it to work properly). Also, no one else was really using SVG at the time.
So in the end we went with Flash - not for the site design, but for interactive physics examples that helped the user to understand why different design decisions gave their ships different properties. Now that SVG (or the MS version) is being incorporated in IE, I could see it being useful for these type of things. Of course, there is the little matter of Flash being well understood by developers who've got lots of experience, and the large installed userbase... Will be interesting to see what is being used in another few years.
probably don't run around talking to people about their illegal activities, especially people trying to get in contact with them.
If you've been hacked by the best, you probably don't even know it because they leave no trace and don't brag about what they do. Of course this opens the door to such questions as, do people like this actually exist?
Might be better to assume that there are. *dons tinfoil hat*
will we be seeing subpoenas for people who stop searching for content? Will this be "stealing a valuable source of information" from the RIAA? (much like you steal everytime you timeshift ads or block popups)?
And in unrelated news, the RIAA announces new product lines featuring Barney, based upon p2p information showing everyone is searching for Barney products. They are baffled when two weeks later not a single item has sold...
Something that I've been wondering lately - how much time does it take to set up an online music store? You've got to sort out the code, the content, the licensing etc.
The reason I ask is because we've just had a number of stores launch within 6 months of each other. Did these people "get it" a year ago and start work on their stores then? Or does it only take a month to set up, and everyone has been jumping on the "me too" bandwagon.
Of course, what interests me is not who will be opening online music stores in the next 2 years, but who will still be around after 2 years and have consumers buying their products.
Look what happened in America. DOJ rules that MS illegally abused their monopoly, and MS gets a slap on the wrist. And they're still using similiar "business strategies" today.
:)
I'm all for these types of proceedings in the EU, and even more so for those countries whose governments are installing Linux. I can't help but wonder though if MS is going to get another slap on the wrist or if the EU will actually apply some meaningful rulings and ENFORCE THEM.
Then again, if everyone goes the way of the German government, it might not matter
Sorry, that was my bad. The name of the page at spacedaily.com was x-prize03c.html. I recognised the name XCOR (although obviously just from the general suborbital field, not the X-Prize teams) and assumed. I should have checked more closely. Goes to show how much attention the eds are paying.
:)
Timothy, wake up
From the site:
Closed because of "Software-Patents"
In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as KNOPPIX, at least within Europe, because the holders of the over 30,000 already granted "software patents" (currently without a legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for trivial things like "progress bars", "mouseclicks on online order forms", "scrolling within a window" and similar. That way, software developers will have to pay the "software-patentholders" for using these features, even in their own, completely self-developed applications, which can completely stall the development of innovative software for small and medium companies. Apart from this, the expense for patent inquiries and legal assistence is high, for even trying to find out if the self-developed software is possibly violating "software-patents", if you want to continue to market your software. Contrary to real patents, "software-patents" are, in the current draft, monopolization of business ideas and methods, even without any tangible technical implementation.
More about the current major problem at http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html
Martian Invasion
Probing lively puzzles on the Red Planet
Ron Cowen
Just 2 months ago, Mars loomed high in the sky, its ruddy countenance so close that anyone with a backyard telescope could make out the planet's white south-polar cap and a central smudge known as Syrtis Major. Not in 60,000 years had Mars and Earth been so close, and they won't be again for another 2 centuries. But even as the two planets now drift slowly apart, three envoys from Earth are racing to the Red Planet.
If all goes according to plan, the European Space Agency's Mars Express will begin orbiting Mars next month, using radar to search for hidden reservoirs of water. The craft will also jettison a suitcase-size stationary lander, Beagle-2, that will look for signs of life by examining soil at and just below the surface of a region called Isidis Planitia.
Then, in January, two NASA craft bearing identical rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity, will touch down in regions of the planet that may once have had water coursing through them and so could have hosted primitive life.
"Successful landings of all three spacecraft will more than double our experience with the . . . environments of Mars," says James B. Garvin, NASA's Mars-program scientist in Washington, D.C. "I am anticipating major breakthroughs in our understanding."
Planetary scientists studying Mars could use a breakthrough. Recent evidence has shaken what has been one of the most tantalizing core beliefs about the Red Planet--that ancient Mars was much wetter and warmer than the planet is today and even harbored a planetwide ocean.
On the one hand, the planet's now bone-dry surface is scarred by sinuous channels, apparent lake beds, deep canyons, and thousands of gullies. These all bear the marks of having been carved by liquid water. On the other hand, there's a troubling scarcity of minerals such as limestone and other carbonates, which commonly form in the presence of liquid water.
There is a "direct conflict" between the geological and mineralogical evidence for water on Mars, says Bruce M. Jakosky of the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Determining whether parts of Mars ever carried a substantial amount of liquid water and, if so, for how long would help answer the ultimate question about the Red Planet: Is it now or has it ever been a living world?
Missing minerals
The water conundrum intensified late last summer, when Philip R. Christensen of the Arizona State University in Tempe and his colleagues reported the results of a 6-year study with an infrared spectrometer aboard the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor observatory. The instrument scrutinized large swaths of the Martian surface and atmosphere for carbonates, minerals that are associated with water. On Earth, carbonates such as limestone form when carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves in water, making carbonic acid. The acid eats away at rocks, and their remains precipitate out as carbonate deposits. A notable example is the White Cliffs of Dover.
Researchers had been looking for carbonates on Mars for more than a decade, and in the Aug. 22 Science, Christensen's team announced that it had finally found some. But there was little reason to rejoice. Carbonates were detected in only small amounts--up to 5 percent--in the planet's surface dust.
"We believe that the relatively small amounts that we see probably did not come from oceans, but from trace amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere interacting directly with dust," Christensen says.
This study, as well as other new evidence (see "Bone-dry Mars?" in this week's issue: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/20031108/note12.asp), "really points to a cold, frozen, icy Mars that has probably always been that way, as opposed to a warm, humid, oceanic Mars some time in the past," Christensen adds. The extensive carbonate layers that would have formed early in Martian history if the climate had been warm and oceans plentiful "are simply not ther
Space.com, Spacedaily.com, and some more from Google.
If pop-up blocking is integrated into the browser that 90% of the web-surfing population is using, you can bet that they'll start figuring out how to get around it- or worse, figure out some more annoying method of advertising.
They're called banner ads. I'm waiting for someone to work out a way of blocking them without blocking all of the graphics on a page.
Interestingly enough, I remember seeing one of my friends using an early version of netscape (3 or earlier) back in about '95. He had every image blocked by default, simply due to bandwidth concerns and how long it would take a page to load. Try doing that with a site today though, and it's virtually unusable.
Find some good reviewers (that say _why_ they liked it in clear terms), and decide if you tend to like those elements, and you end up seeing a lot fewer movies you don't enjoy.
This is very true. A reviewer in my local paper does this most of the time. I have almost the opposite taste in movies, so if this reviewer loves it, I'll most likely pass.
The same thing goes for game reviews too, although that tends to work more on a per site basis than individual reviewers (at least, that's what I've found).
Seeing how you can run Linux on the PS2, and with enough units you can create a beowulf cluster with a medium amount of computing power, are we sure that China is full of people wanting to play games?
Remember that the PS2 was banned from being exported to Iraq for exactly this reason. Maybe China needs some more computing power for their space program?
...sigh...
Once upon a time we built microcomputers and minicomputers. We finally realised that this sounded dumb, and just called them computers.
Today, if we build something that we measure in nanometers, it is nanotechnology, and it is cool and interesting.
Twenty years from now, when we are building things on the scale of picometers, what will we think of calling things "nano"?
Interestingly though, a hydrogen atom is 10E-10m across (one Angstrom), which is a tenth of a nanometer, or 100 picometers. I have a feeling that we won't be able to go any smaller without stripping off the electrons and playing with charged nuclei. Now that could be some interesting tech...
IIRC, a patent used to be awarded for a device that it would take a master craftsman more than two to three full days to design and make.
Extending that to software patents today, exactly how many lines of C would you say a master programmer can output in two to three days? I have a feeling that it may be a lot more than what this technology is built on.
Thankfully I live in Australia, where we don't have anywhere near as many stupid software patents, but I can still foresee the day that I will have to get a patent judged invalid before I can write a program more than 100 LOC. I wonder if we will have an analogous situation to music piracy today, where everyone will write outlawed code because the big companies hold the patents on basic programming constructs and refuse to play ball.
Whoops, didn't read the comment mentioning that Apple is only allowed to sell music in the US. Guess that explains why its US only. Any guess as to why they aren't expanding?
I wonder what the reasoning is behind restricting sales to the US. There are a few reasons I can think of, but the most likely one is probably the ability to enforce the DMCA.
However, given that Apple allows you to copy the tracks to portable devices and burn them to CD, I'm not so sure why you might need to restrict copying or some such.
If anyone can come up with a probable theory, I for one would like to hear it.
I'm not saying that it will happen anytime soon, but I honestly can't see guys like this stopping spammers as a whole any time soon.
I don't get a lot of spam, mainly because I don't post my email address all over the internet, but I would love to use a secure (PGP or other) email client. Sure, I could set one up now, but how many of my friends/colleagues will also be using it? Not many at all.
Computers are supposed to be tools used to enhance our productivity. Sadly they quite often do the opposite, mainly due to things like spam. I doubt that any progress will be made in fighting spam until Microsoft/Apple include authentication options in their default mail applications.
DDR is Dance Dance Revolution - a game you play by placing your feet on a mat with sensors according to what's on the screen ("dancing"). The longer you play, the harder it gets. It's in arcades and on the PS2. Sorry, thought it was common knowledge.
I'm just going on what my sister and my girlfriend will play, but most of the time it is not what I like to play.
:)
Any given day of the week, I'm quite happy to sit down and play an RTS, RPG, FPS or puzzle adventure. My sister loves Mario Kart and the Monkey Island series. She likes the cute characters and the humour, but also likes to sit down and solve puzzles. My girlfriend is quite unwilling to invest any time in a game unless she gets an instant payoff - she gets frustrated quite easily if she isn't instantly good at something, and will turn off the PC/console and go listen to music or watch DVDs. She is quite happy to play something like DDR.
I think that while there is some (small) overlap between male/female game tastes, in general they are quite different. The reason we don't see more games for women is that the male market is a proven one, and easy to develop for based upon game type. If developers knew how to design games for women (and rake in big money), we would probably see a lot more games for girls out there.
Maybe the industry needs to find out what games girls want to play and then make them. If its more games like Rez, I wouldn't mind playing them with my girlfriend
While most people would agree that Jedi are cooler than other character classes, Jedi are not everyone's cup of tea. Sure, you're going to get the hardcore players running around as Jedi and Dark Jedi, but will the average players want to play as these classes?
;)
Keep in mind that apparently force sensitive characters can only learn Jedi skills (yes, I RTA). This means that they are fairly easy to identify (well, at least anytime they aren't hiding - but you won't see them changing people's hair), and this coupled with the bounties on them will make them hunted. Sure they're cool Jedi, but now them are characters who have groups out hunting them, and they suffer permanent death.
I don't think that the average gamer will feel too jaded when you start seeing Jedi being taken down all the time, while everyone wants their character to heal them, change their appearance etc. There is a place for everyone, and Jedi aren't going to be running all over the place. Besides, you can be sure that the Dark Jedi will also be thinning the numbers
What is more likely to change the balance in-game will be the refinement of the process of unlocking the force-sensitive slot. I'm fairly sure that this still won't be something that you can do in 2 days, but will still be doable in the long term even if you only play a few hours a week (keep in mind that you are paying a subscription fee here).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that yes the Jedi are cool, but they have their own problems, and a lot of people are happy to just stick to their dancing etc and not have all of these additional problems (a lot of people play games to relax, you know). Seeing as it has taken months for the first force-sensitive slot to be unlocked (and there are still no Jedi), I am fairly confident that there will not be hundreds of Jedi running around any time soon.
For anyone out there who might like to add some of these movies to their collection, I suggest that you check out http://www.animecollector.com/. My girlfriend just bought the 12 movie set, and was extremely pleased with the service.
So it seems that Valve was right - shallow pools of water in dirty (let's say alien) environments can heal you!
Let's hope that they weren't also right in predicting what happens when you bring the anti-mass spectrometer up to 105%...
Flint Ink, which has 5,000 employees, has set up a unit to develop methods of cheaply printing antennas for radio-frequency identification tags, the tiny chips that retailers are hoping will replace bar codes.
So in the future, as my newspaper is sending my bio-information back to the publisher to be re-sold in a database to a third pary - bio-information that it has "read" by me handling the conductive print and interrupting the magnetic field (thus being able to track my pulse etc), will I be able to hack it by tearing the paper to destroy the RFID antenna?
I'm sure that there will be plenty of useful and entertaining uses for this technology, but The Diamond Age is coming.
With MS, there's one choice. With linux, there's multiple choices for software to use.
> Actually, I have found multiple choices of software to use on MS as well.
I think that the problem is that on Linux, there are no clear leaders for common applications. For example, if I want a text editor, I have vi and emacs. Desktop - Gnome and KDE. The list goes on.
Diversity is one of OSSs great achievements, but this does not make the job of the PHB any easier. Exactly when did the PHB learn about Linux during his/her education? Most likely everything the PHB learnt about computers has been to do with Microsoft.
Until we can educate the PHBs about what's available for Linux, I'm not so sure that they will see diversity as a good rather than a frightening thing.