No... instead of building a computer chip the size of a pinhead, you build a standard sized chip. Only that ship now *is* the computer - memory, 8 CPUs, ASICs, everything. It plops down into a motherboard who's sole purpose in life is to provide the wiring for the physical connections you need.
End result: a state-of-the-art, general purpose, multiprocessor computer with gigs of memory is about the size of a credit card, and cheaper than a CD. Couple it with a solid-state storage device or a microdrive, and you have a complete computer half the size of a pack of cigarettes. The only thing you're missing is IO... provided by whatever keyboard/mouse/monitor/ethernet combo device happens to be nearby.
Heck... forget about making the thing 8-way SMP. Give me 4 dual processor "machines" on one chip... - one x86, one SPARC, one 680x0 and one PPC. Who needs emulators? I'll be able to run any software I want, natively.
Another poster further down made a good point - you either hang on to every document, forever, or you discard some of them. As soon as you discard or destroy anything, there's a question of why you did so. Was it because you had no further use for the document in question, or because you had something to hide?
Document retention policies help answer that question. If your company policy is to destroy electronic copies of anything more than 12 months old, then when you end up in court and someone asks you "Why don't you have these documents any longer? Perhaps they were destroyed because they were incriminating evidence, hmm?!?" you can honestly tell them "I have no idea. Company policy is that anything older than 12 months gets erased, so we shredded the backup tapes 3 years ago."
Even for the most prestigious government sector work (as yours is) still doesn't match the pay or opportunity of the commercial world.
I suggest you do some research and, say, take a look at how much a garbage man makes. Generally, it's a pretty good chunk of change.
That's because garbage collection is a nasty job.
If you want people to take that job, you have to pay fairly good money. Collection garbage is generally not a fun, exciting, rewarding career. Rule of thumb: more time-intensive, more demanding, less satisfying jobs pay better than less time-intensive, less demanding, more satisfying jobs.
So... you have my sympathies. Any position where an annual 44% raise is required to keep you from leaving must suck big time.
Hmm. Interesting - I never would have looked at it that way. In my view, the GPL is an agreement between the copyright holder and someone else, stating the conditions under which they are allowed to create a copy of the work... under this interpretation, the original copyright holder, of course, isn't bound by those conditions, and can make the initial transfer in whatever manner they wish.
In short - I don't think the original copyright holder is ever under the limitations of the GPL, unless they place themselves under those limitations voluntarily. Of course, once you do that, there's no practical way to stuff the genie back in the bottle... even if you were, as original copyright holder, to release version 1.1 on paper tape, having 1.0 in the wild and in machine-readable form would just mean that the code would be forked.
...please take the time to examine my other comment. Putting something under the GPL does not negate any of the original copyright holder's rights. That is why, for example, a copyright holder can place a work under the GPL, and then sell that work to a commerical company under a closed-source license.
If I am the original copyright holder I'm even allowed to obfuscate the code by removing comments, using nonsense variable names, and other tricks.
The GPL governs the use of the software after it leaves the hands of the original copyright holder. The original copyright owner has complete control - they can do whatever they damn well please. If they want to take their code, remove all the comments, obfuscate it, enode it on paper tape using Morse code, and then place the resulting mess under the GPL, they're free to do so, and there isn't a whole lot you can do about it.
Sorry - didn't specify: we own a Jeep Cherokee, which generally gets lumped into the SUV category, like it or not, just because it's bigger and has a hard top. Stadard Jeeps are nice, but yah, they're definitely not SUVs.
Yah, I agree that they're done right - ours is a '98. The altest models look silly. Still - if you lowered it a bit and turned the enclosed cargo area in to a trunk, it would pretty much be a car. With most SUVs, even if you made those changes, you'd still have something that looks like a luxury whale boat on wheels.
Interesting. I consider the risk minimal, though. Someone would first have to gain access to the box, then either guess or crack a password to gain access to the box via ssh. They can't transfer files off the box, and they can't get software onto the box, which makes getting that password much more difficult. Overall, I think the worst case scenario is someone gaining access, seeing that there's no easy way to do anything, and doing an rm -Rf. Even with that, I'd loose nothing of any real importance - my personal site is small, and well indexed:-) I've actually managed to entirely rebuild it (except for images) from Google's cache once.
I'll agree, and go a step further: nobody needs an SUV.
What bugs me is that the definition of SUV seems to be "anything that isn't a truck or a car".
I live on a farm; my wife and I have two 4x4 vehicles - we need them just to get up our 1/4 mile long driveway in the winter. We're generally off-road at least 2-3 times a week, for whatever reason. When I left for work this morning, there was a dead deer at the bottom of our driveway; my wife will probably end up draging it out past our upper field to let the coyotes have a treat. The last couple of weeks have been an extended doe season here in southwestern PA, and we've had both cars out on our property a couple of times in 1-2 feet of snow, looking for jerks who are fundamentally incapable of understanding that a "Posted - No Hunting" sign applies to them.
In short - even we don't need an SUV. What we really need is a truck; but it's a pain to find an affordable truck that will take two infant seats:-/ So we ended up with a couple of vehicles (RAV4 and a Jeep) that people assume are SUVs, because - well, becuase they're not cars, and they're not trucks. Never mind that the Jeep is essentially a truck with a hard top and a back seat, the RAV4 is essentially a 4x4 station wagon with better clearance, and both of them manage to get around 25 miles/gallon. We're eeeeevil SUV drivers.
It gets even worse when you realize that we're pretty much hit a plateau. If you're not a power gamer or running a server, and you don't need the absolute latest version of some Windows product, then Linux on last year's machine is pretty snappy.
It gets much worse when you realize that I didn't use "last year's machine" as a relative term. I mean that Linux isn't just tolerable, it's perfectly usable and runs A Windows-like GUI (KDE or Gnome) just fine on a circa 1998 computer (P700, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB disk and 8MB video card). On top of that, modulo needs for more memory, it will probably continue to be perfectly usable on that hardware for the next 5 years, if not longer.
Sooner or later, someone's going to realize this - that we've more or less hit a commodity point for computer hardware. As time passes, they'll be able to offer an (almost) disposable PC - cheap processor, cheap drive, cheap ethernet, cheap video. The whole thing will be a third the size of a notebook, and cost around $100 just for the hardware. Long before you reach that point, though, putting a Microsoft OS on the machine becomes ludicrous; the only company that could possibly afford to do so in that environment would be Microsoft themselves.
In my experience people who say that are confusing intuitive with learned.
I suggest giving staroffice a try.
Sorry, but people won't do that. You're asking them to take their time to learn a new new way to do the same things that they can already do in a familair environemnt.
I'm know there's a techincal term for this that I can't recall at the moment... the general idea is that until there is an obvious advantage to learning the new way of doing things, the cost of learning the new way of doing things is too great for most users to accept. Likewise, if there are many small advantages, they don't see the collective value - instead, they only see the relative magnitude ("learn how to use WordPerfect" vs. "better page layout").
As a final example: this language you're reading? That's learned. I've talked to linguists who comment that a tonal langauge like Mandarin is a much better medium for communication. So what's keeping you, me, and everyone else from learning a "better" langauge and using that exclusively? Perhaps the time we've invested in learning and mastering this one? (I'll just mention the network effect, and leave it to you to examine how that affects one's langauge choice, and how if affects people's choice of the.doc "language" in particular.)
When I went to secure my home web server, I removed the various compiler(s) that had been installed by default. And make. And the various editors. Every shell except bash. All client software - ftp, ssh, telnet, finger.
In short, I removed everything except what was absolutely needed on the box. I have SSH set up so I can connect to the box remotely, but anything else - including file transfers - happens via floppy or CD.
I know there must be a way for a determined attacker to get wahtever software they want onto the system if it's ever compromised. I'm betting that:
(a) the majority of attackers will be l33t script kiddies who lack the skill to compromise the system in the first place, and
(b) anyone who has the time, skill, and energy to do so will probably be off rumaging through an interesting system somewhere else, not my dinky little P133 webserver.
Would you say that polaroid's patent on self-developing film is a "common idea"...
No, because they didn't patent the idea - they patented a method (probably multiple methods) of producing self-developing film.
The patent gave them a temporary monopoly on producing self-developing film using those methods. If someone came up with another way to produce self-developing film, then hey! - they could patent that method and tell Polaroid to go take a flying leap, because the patent was for how something was done, not the idea of doing it.
With software patents, the exact opposite happens - ideas are patented, methods are not. The actual method by which an idea is implemented is essentially irrelevant in a software patent. If you allowed these types of patents in other fields, you'd see things like Merck patenting "a method of utilising chemical compounds to increase serotonin levels in brain tissue" and filing a patent infringement lawsuit against every other pharmaceutical company that makes antidepressants.
Gotta agree with what the other folks here have said. Then again, half our "home network" (the two MS machines) belong to my wife - she needs them for work. I've got a Linux workstation, and a P133 set up as our webserver, mail relay, etc. Overall, I'd say that in the past year, we've put in less than 2-3 hours a month into maintenance, administration, etc. (aside from number of times I've hosed my workstation playing around with RPM).
I guess what I'm wondering about is this: is making Linux (or insert your favorite open-source OS here:) more "internally consistent" something that we, as its users, really want to do?
Yes. Most emphatically yes.
This does not neccesarily mean that my desktop will look (or behave) anything like yours. To me, it means that when I configure my system so that "shift-rightclick" means "copy the current selection to the clipboard", all my applications pay attention to my configured preferences.
This is a real basic issue of *nix user-friendliness (primarily for X apps - GNU tools have gne along way towards helping "standardize" command line interfaces.) I expect my computer to do what I tell it to do, and what I have configured it to do, not what some l33t hax0r d00d thinks it should be doing.
I'm lacking mod points, so instead, I'll just repost the AC comment from below:
From his own letters:
"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," he wrote, "unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the Imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." (Letter 142).
Hmm. Would it be possible to set things up so that SpamCop is your legal representative on issues like this? While I lack the time and energy to pursue spam-related lawsuits, if it meant an eventual end to spam, I'd be happy to sign over rights to pursue the case (or whatever) to SpamCop, and let them use the proceeds to fund their service (and the next round of lawsuits against spammers.)
Secondly, gaming just doesn't have much potential as a mainstream spectator sport.
If all you do is hook up a video feed from a random Q3 deathmatch, well, yah, you're absolutely right.
When something like this becomes popular (and I think it will, eventually), it will be because someone realizes that these type of competitions aren't "games" - they're an opportunity for some really interesting, interactive, ongoing entertainment that's less like a football game and more like a series of made-for-tv fantasy movies.
Just thinking in terms of CTF: you could have level designers cranking out all-new CTF levels (huge ones, too!) each week. Use different themes - say, ancient-Aztec-jungle motif week1, hard-boiled-detective genre week2, etc. Put NPCs in the game, and make them real NPCs - hire bush-league gamer/actors to play the role of the mad scientist who betrays the team, the lone good cop who assists them, etc. Give the players goals other than "frag the most poeple" - for example, there might be a scenario where there are a slew of NPCs attending an event in a museum, and the players are secret agents trying to find an assassin out to kill one of the NPCs.
Now that you're got the elements of great stories, record every player's (and NPC's) display, and a few key non-player viewpoints... that's what the director is for. When you're done, edit and package - heck; you can do whatever you want to the "footage" - maybe part of what you "capture" is just wireframe, and the finished product looks 10x better than what they players saw when they were "there", because you throw some really expensive hardware at rendering to make it look "real" in that otherworldly, unreal way... Hey, you could even have guest appearances (imagine a STNG based game where Picard was played, of course, by Patrick Stewart...).
Voila, you have Star Trek meets Big Brother meets WWF. Hard to see how that could avoid becomming a hit.
Someone who is really good at maths, knows to break down the solution to the smallest pieces and explain the pieces
I'm guessing that you've never had children, nor ever tried to teach a young child something like math. (By "young", I mean under the age of 7.)
Exactly what do you do to "break down the solution" when you're trying to explain why 1 + 1 = 2? You're dealing with someone who is on the power curve if they can even write that, let alone understand it. What, you're going to explain the concept of whole numbers, the meaning of zero, decimal arithmetic...
No. You're trying to get a bunch of ideas across, as simply as possible, so they can have an "a-ha!" type of learning experience. And that does take someone special - someone who is very well-trained, very experienced, very creative, and very patient.
Being able to break the problem down into smaller pieces does nothing to help if you decompose it as far as you can, and they still look up at you and say, "But why?" and the best you can say is "That's just the way it works."
I'm a personal fan of minimal Hungarian (single character prefixes for some variables). I'll agree that "full" Hungarian as practiced by MS is downright infuriating. Still... I like to be able to tell simple things about a variable without having to dig back through the code to see where it was declared.
For example:
char[] aMessage;// a for array
char* pMessage;// p for pointer
IMessage piMessage;// pi for pointer to COM interface
CMessage;// class name
eMessage;// enumeration value
auto_ptr spMessage;// "smart" pointer
These warts are there to give hints and raise questions - like when you've got an integer variable named bFoo, which you know is intended to hold a boolean value[1]... so why is this code trying to stuff a literal '3' into bFoo? Which variables need to be free()'d before the function can return? Is this function call going across a COM boundary (and possibly out-of-process), or is it a call on a local instance of a class? And so on, and so forth...
Hugarian does have it's uses, though it's in much the same way that punctuation has it's uses - it's something used to help communicate meaning. On top of that, not everyone uses a syntax-highlighting, error-checking, code-parsing, whiz-bang GUI editor, and some folks still like to look over their code and see if it scans well before they crank it through the compiler.
If the non-free
archive is not part of Debian, should a port built on a non-free kernel
be called 'Debian'?
Call it WIND (because, of
course, WIND Is Not Debian...)
Re:Personal mobile battle armor, anyone?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Ugh... shoulda read more closely when I previewed; I intended to mention that it would really only be viable for urban scenarios.
Personal mobile battle armor, anyone?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
Throw a real engine into it, add some armor and weaponry, and you've pretty much got a mini-tank. Heck - slave a bunch of 'em together with an encrypted local IR/radio network, and you could have one man leading a "squad" of heavy weaponry units.
This could be the first glimpse at what heavy infantry might look like in the years to come.
Slashdot Mirror
No... instead of building a computer chip the size of a pinhead, you build a standard sized chip. Only that ship now *is* the computer - memory, 8 CPUs, ASICs, everything. It plops down into a motherboard who's sole purpose in life is to provide the wiring for the physical connections you need.
End result: a state-of-the-art, general purpose, multiprocessor computer with gigs of memory is about the size of a credit card, and cheaper than a CD. Couple it with a solid-state storage device or a microdrive, and you have a complete computer half the size of a pack of cigarettes. The only thing you're missing is IO... provided by whatever keyboard/mouse/monitor/ethernet combo device happens to be nearby.
Heck... forget about making the thing 8-way SMP. Give me 4 dual processor "machines" on one chip... - one x86, one SPARC, one 680x0 and one PPC. Who needs emulators? I'll be able to run any software I want, natively.
Another poster further down made a good point - you either hang on to every document, forever, or you discard some of them. As soon as you discard or destroy anything, there's a question of why you did so. Was it because you had no further use for the document in question, or because you had something to hide?
Document retention policies help answer that question. If your company policy is to destroy electronic copies of anything more than 12 months old, then when you end up in court and someone asks you "Why don't you have these documents any longer? Perhaps they were destroyed because they were incriminating evidence, hmm?!?" you can honestly tell them "I have no idea. Company policy is that anything older than 12 months gets erased, so we shredded the backup tapes 3 years ago."
Anyone else notice this banner ad at the bottom of the IMASS page the article links to?
Either someone at the company submitted the story, or they have one of the most responsive marketing teams I've ever seen...
I suggest you do some research and, say, take a look at how much a garbage man makes. Generally, it's a pretty good chunk of change.
That's because garbage collection is a nasty job.
If you want people to take that job, you have to pay fairly good money. Collection garbage is generally not a fun, exciting, rewarding career. Rule of thumb: more time-intensive, more demanding, less satisfying jobs pay better than less time-intensive, less demanding, more satisfying jobs.
So... you have my sympathies. Any position where an annual 44% raise is required to keep you from leaving must suck big time.
Hmm. Interesting - I never would have looked at it that way. In my view, the GPL is an agreement between the copyright holder and someone else, stating the conditions under which they are allowed to create a copy of the work... under this interpretation, the original copyright holder, of course, isn't bound by those conditions, and can make the initial transfer in whatever manner they wish.
In short - I don't think the original copyright holder is ever under the limitations of the GPL, unless they place themselves under those limitations voluntarily. Of course, once you do that, there's no practical way to stuff the genie back in the bottle... even if you were, as original copyright holder, to release version 1.1 on paper tape, having 1.0 in the wild and in machine-readable form would just mean that the code would be forked.
...please take the time to examine my other comment. Putting something under the GPL does not negate any of the original copyright holder's rights. That is why, for example, a copyright holder can place a work under the GPL, and then sell that work to a commerical company under a closed-source license.
The GPL governs the use of the software after it leaves the hands of the original copyright holder. The original copyright owner has complete control - they can do whatever they damn well please. If they want to take their code, remove all the comments, obfuscate it, enode it on paper tape using Morse code, and then place the resulting mess under the GPL, they're free to do so, and there isn't a whole lot you can do about it.
Sorry - didn't specify: we own a Jeep Cherokee, which generally gets lumped into the SUV category, like it or not, just because it's bigger and has a hard top. Stadard Jeeps are nice, but yah, they're definitely not SUVs.
Yah, I agree that they're done right - ours is a '98. The altest models look silly. Still - if you lowered it a bit and turned the enclosed cargo area in to a trunk, it would pretty much be a car. With most SUVs, even if you made those changes, you'd still have something that looks like a luxury whale boat on wheels.
Interesting. I consider the risk minimal, though. Someone would first have to gain access to the box, then either guess or crack a password to gain access to the box via ssh. They can't transfer files off the box, and they can't get software onto the box, which makes getting that password much more difficult. Overall, I think the worst case scenario is someone gaining access, seeing that there's no easy way to do anything, and doing an rm -Rf. Even with that, I'd loose nothing of any real importance - my personal site is small, and well indexed :-) I've actually managed to entirely rebuild it (except for images) from Google's cache once.
I'll agree, and go a step further: nobody needs an SUV.
What bugs me is that the definition of SUV seems to be "anything that isn't a truck or a car".
I live on a farm; my wife and I have two 4x4 vehicles - we need them just to get up our 1/4 mile long driveway in the winter. We're generally off-road at least 2-3 times a week, for whatever reason. When I left for work this morning, there was a dead deer at the bottom of our driveway; my wife will probably end up draging it out past our upper field to let the coyotes have a treat. The last couple of weeks have been an extended doe season here in southwestern PA, and we've had both cars out on our property a couple of times in 1-2 feet of snow, looking for jerks who are fundamentally incapable of understanding that a "Posted - No Hunting" sign applies to them.
In short - even we don't need an SUV. What we really need is a truck; but it's a pain to find an affordable truck that will take two infant seats :-/ So we ended up with a couple of vehicles (RAV4 and a Jeep) that people assume are SUVs, because - well, becuase they're not cars, and they're not trucks. Never mind that the Jeep is essentially a truck with a hard top and a back seat, the RAV4 is essentially a 4x4 station wagon with better clearance, and both of them manage to get around 25 miles/gallon. We're eeeeevil SUV drivers.
It gets even worse when you realize that we're pretty much hit a plateau. If you're not a power gamer or running a server, and you don't need the absolute latest version of some Windows product, then Linux on last year's machine is pretty snappy.
It gets much worse when you realize that I didn't use "last year's machine" as a relative term. I mean that Linux isn't just tolerable, it's perfectly usable and runs A Windows-like GUI (KDE or Gnome) just fine on a circa 1998 computer (P700, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB disk and 8MB video card). On top of that, modulo needs for more memory, it will probably continue to be perfectly usable on that hardware for the next 5 years, if not longer.
Sooner or later, someone's going to realize this - that we've more or less hit a commodity point for computer hardware. As time passes, they'll be able to offer an (almost) disposable PC - cheap processor, cheap drive, cheap ethernet, cheap video. The whole thing will be a third the size of a notebook, and cost around $100 just for the hardware. Long before you reach that point, though, putting a Microsoft OS on the machine becomes ludicrous; the only company that could possibly afford to do so in that environment would be Microsoft themselves.
Sorry, but people won't do that. You're asking them to take their time to learn a new new way to do the same things that they can already do in a familair environemnt.
I'm know there's a techincal term for this that I can't recall at the moment... the general idea is that until there is an obvious advantage to learning the new way of doing things, the cost of learning the new way of doing things is too great for most users to accept. Likewise, if there are many small advantages, they don't see the collective value - instead, they only see the relative magnitude ("learn how to use WordPerfect" vs. "better page layout").
As a final example: this language you're reading? That's learned. I've talked to linguists who comment that a tonal langauge like Mandarin is a much better medium for communication. So what's keeping you, me, and everyone else from learning a "better" langauge and using that exclusively? Perhaps the time we've invested in learning and mastering this one? (I'll just mention the network effect, and leave it to you to examine how that affects one's langauge choice, and how if affects people's choice of the .doc "language" in particular.)
When I went to secure my home web server, I removed the various compiler(s) that had been installed by default. And make. And the various editors. Every shell except bash. All client software - ftp, ssh, telnet, finger.
In short, I removed everything except what was absolutely needed on the box. I have SSH set up so I can connect to the box remotely, but anything else - including file transfers - happens via floppy or CD.
I know there must be a way for a determined attacker to get wahtever software they want onto the system if it's ever compromised. I'm betting that:
(a) the majority of attackers will be l33t script kiddies who lack the skill to compromise the system in the first place, and
(b) anyone who has the time, skill, and energy to do so will probably be off rumaging through an interesting system somewhere else, not my dinky little P133 webserver.
No, because they didn't patent the idea - they patented a method (probably multiple methods) of producing self-developing film.
The patent gave them a temporary monopoly on producing self-developing film using those methods. If someone came up with another way to produce self-developing film, then hey! - they could patent that method and tell Polaroid to go take a flying leap, because the patent was for how something was done, not the idea of doing it.
With software patents, the exact opposite happens - ideas are patented, methods are not. The actual method by which an idea is implemented is essentially irrelevant in a software patent. If you allowed these types of patents in other fields, you'd see things like Merck patenting "a method of utilising chemical compounds to increase serotonin levels in brain tissue" and filing a patent infringement lawsuit against every other pharmaceutical company that makes antidepressants.
Gotta agree with what the other folks here have said. Then again, half our "home network" (the two MS machines) belong to my wife - she needs them for work. I've got a Linux workstation, and a P133 set up as our webserver, mail relay, etc. Overall, I'd say that in the past year, we've put in less than 2-3 hours a month into maintenance, administration, etc. (aside from number of times I've hosed my workstation playing around with RPM).
Yes. Most emphatically yes.
This does not neccesarily mean that my desktop will look (or behave) anything like yours. To me, it means that when I configure my system so that "shift-rightclick" means "copy the current selection to the clipboard", all my applications pay attention to my configured preferences.
This is a real basic issue of *nix user-friendliness (primarily for X apps - GNU tools have gne along way towards helping "standardize" command line interfaces.) I expect my computer to do what I tell it to do, and what I have configured it to do, not what some l33t hax0r d00d thinks it should be doing.
I'm lacking mod points, so instead, I'll just repost the AC comment from below:
Hmm. Would it be possible to set things up so that SpamCop is your legal representative on issues like this? While I lack the time and energy to pursue spam-related lawsuits, if it meant an eventual end to spam, I'd be happy to sign over rights to pursue the case (or whatever) to SpamCop, and let them use the proceeds to fund their service (and the next round of lawsuits against spammers.)
If all you do is hook up a video feed from a random Q3 deathmatch, well, yah, you're absolutely right.
When something like this becomes popular (and I think it will, eventually), it will be because someone realizes that these type of competitions aren't "games" - they're an opportunity for some really interesting, interactive, ongoing entertainment that's less like a football game and more like a series of made-for-tv fantasy movies.
Just thinking in terms of CTF: you could have level designers cranking out all-new CTF levels (huge ones, too!) each week. Use different themes - say, ancient-Aztec-jungle motif week1, hard-boiled-detective genre week2, etc. Put NPCs in the game, and make them real NPCs - hire bush-league gamer/actors to play the role of the mad scientist who betrays the team, the lone good cop who assists them, etc. Give the players goals other than "frag the most poeple" - for example, there might be a scenario where there are a slew of NPCs attending an event in a museum, and the players are secret agents trying to find an assassin out to kill one of the NPCs.
Now that you're got the elements of great stories, record every player's (and NPC's) display, and a few key non-player viewpoints... that's what the director is for. When you're done, edit and package - heck; you can do whatever you want to the "footage" - maybe part of what you "capture" is just wireframe, and the finished product looks 10x better than what they players saw when they were "there", because you throw some really expensive hardware at rendering to make it look "real" in that otherworldly, unreal way... Hey, you could even have guest appearances (imagine a STNG based game where Picard was played, of course, by Patrick Stewart...).
Voila, you have Star Trek meets Big Brother meets WWF. Hard to see how that could avoid becomming a hit.
I'm guessing that you've never had children, nor ever tried to teach a young child something like math. (By "young", I mean under the age of 7.)
Exactly what do you do to "break down the solution" when you're trying to explain why 1 + 1 = 2? You're dealing with someone who is on the power curve if they can even write that, let alone understand it. What, you're going to explain the concept of whole numbers, the meaning of zero, decimal arithmetic...
No. You're trying to get a bunch of ideas across, as simply as possible, so they can have an "a-ha!" type of learning experience. And that does take someone special - someone who is very well-trained, very experienced, very creative, and very patient.
Being able to break the problem down into smaller pieces does nothing to help if you decompose it as far as you can, and they still look up at you and say, "But why?" and the best you can say is "That's just the way it works."
I'm a personal fan of minimal Hungarian (single character prefixes for some variables). I'll agree that "full" Hungarian as practiced by MS is downright infuriating. Still... I like to be able to tell simple things about a variable without having to dig back through the code to see where it was declared.
For example:
char[] aMessage;char* pMessage;
IMessage piMessage;
CMessage;
eMessage;
auto_ptr spMessage;
These warts are there to give hints and raise questions - like when you've got an integer variable named bFoo, which you know is intended to hold a boolean value[1]... so why is this code trying to stuff a literal '3' into bFoo? Which variables need to be free()'d before the function can return? Is this function call going across a COM boundary (and possibly out-of-process), or is it a call on a local instance of a class? And so on, and so forth...
Hugarian does have it's uses, though it's in much the same way that punctuation has it's uses - it's something used to help communicate meaning. On top of that, not everyone uses a syntax-highlighting, error-checking, code-parsing, whiz-bang GUI editor, and some folks still like to look over their code and see if it scans well before they crank it through the compiler.
Call it WIND (because, of course, WIND Is Not Debian...)
Ugh... shoulda read more closely when I previewed; I intended to mention that it would really only be viable for urban scenarios.
Throw a real engine into it, add some armor and weaponry, and you've pretty much got a mini-tank. Heck - slave a bunch of 'em together with an encrypted local IR/radio network, and you could have one man leading a "squad" of heavy weaponry units.
This could be the first glimpse at what heavy infantry might look like in the years to come.