This kind of collaborative building effort was done in ATITD. (A Tale in the Desert.) It was really great, but an interesting thing happened...
Guild houses and other structures require LOTS of raw materials. Gathering these were very labor intensive. The 'less dominant' personalities were relegated to these tasks while the Type-A guys did fun things like detail-work and planning. There were players who literally logged in and spent hours making bricks or gathering straw. They'd hand these off the the guild leaders when they were done and start over.
The only reason this wasn't slave labor is that there was no coercion, it was just a class system based on your personality, your 'need to be accepted' and your willingness to do the grunt-work. The social dynamic of the whole thing was one of the most interesting parts of that game.
Windmills convert wind into electricity. The result...less wind on the far side. That changes climate I'm guessing. Not sure how wind affects things. Hotter animals because of less breeze? Smaller area of seed dispersal? Other things.
Solar panels take the heat energy out of the sunlight and convert it to electricity. I'd think that would cause the ground to heat up less, but that's probably insignificant compared to the direct change of 'being in the shade' for all the flora and fauna under the solar panels.
What do the hot/cold water exchange generators do? I would expect that pumping cold water from the ocean warms up the ocean...but that would be putting energy INTO the water instead of extracting it. So I'm a little confused. Lets just say it 'changes the ocean temperature'. That's enough to disrupt the ecosystem.
With this salty water thing. Whose energy are we stealing? If there's some sort of exothermic reaction going on in all river mouths, there's definitely something that's evolved to take advantage of that. Energy on the planet doesn't just SIT there doing nothing. (cept Oil...nobody uses Oil but us.:) ) What's the result of the environmental impact study? (I don't just mean habitat loss...I want to know who specifically was harvesting that energy.)
I'm a VNC user, but I realize some of the benefits of NX. (Sound...performance...etc.)
However...I couldn't get past the start-up times. With VNC, I'd 'click' and poof, my applications would be right were I left them, continuing on as if I'd never left. If I closed the window, the applications didn't even know I was gone.
With NX, I'd connect, I'd go through a big start-up process, I'd log in, and wait for my windows to open.... If I wanted to leave, I'd click on the 'I'm leaving now' and it would put everything into a state to where I could come back to it, etc etc. (granted my remote machine was no speed demon.)
So, finally I went back to VNC. I tend to have the window go up and down quite frequently, and the startup/shutdown times of NX were just a deal breaker.
If I was going to use it as more of a truly 'remote terminal' when I'd have it up for hours at a time, then perhaps the heavily loaded ends wouldn't bother me.
The concerns I noticed were more technical than the ones he looked at.
Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
Bandwidth. Every change, send character by character to whoever happens to have it open. That's a lot of 'real-time' bandwidth for this central location. Both of these would work great in a corporate level with a WAVE server running on the LAN, but when it goes global, those servers will be smokin'
Especially with the concept of wave enabled blogs. If you blog hits DIGG, then the wave server will be sending out your edits to thousands of people simultaneously. I wonder what the datapath is. I'm sure Google/Blogspot has a lot of bandwidth, but when you combine all IM, EMAIL, BLOG traffic along the same pipes to a central location....
I just wonder about the scalability of the hosting solution.
They did say that organizations can start their own WAVE server. Sounds like it works much the same way the Jabber (XMPP?) protocol works. But still, if this catches on, I see a future of new congestion problems.
On the flip side...I was very impressed by the demo...and if this catches on in a big way (and works) it could be a serious redefining of communication on the web.
The other story I saw on this said that the monthly bill was capped at $75. They assumed that meant subscription + overages. So the 'unlimited' plan would be only $75. (Still high for an ISP only charge.)
Is there a 'horse's mouth' release anywhere that doesn't have that ambiguity?
This was that I was going to post. It's what I thought everytime this Google/EU/Antitrust story has been mentioned.
Maybe that's why Google is going the other way around. If they billed a browser and then put an OS underneath it...maybe the fire that's different enough to not be the same as making an OS and bundling a browser.
I wonder why it's so pronounced in that tight little square. Makes me think they were looking for something. Somebody was using their sonar in a grid there, either maping out a (flat, boring) piece of the ocean, or more likely looking for something. Maybe traces of a shipwreck, or lost nuclear sub or something.
Then, they gave their data to Google when they were done.
We have an empty 'suggestion box' at work because it's a black hole. Nothing ever happens with the things you put in there.
However, in another department, the employees are constantly coming up with new things, and these things often become highlighted parts of the department.
If someone has an idea, let them work on the idea. They'll come up with more ideas.
In my area (SLC Utah) There are a handful of wireless Internet providers. These guys put an antenna on your house and deliver your internet that way.
They don't offer all of those extra services, just internet.
Of course, then you get to deal with the problems of a wireless solution, but I imagine those problems have been getting less and less over the years.
Re:Controls Correction
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
WASD is a de-facto industry standard created for Quake in the 90's by non-touch-typists. (I think it might have been something about proximity to tab/shift/ctrl as well, but I'm not sure.)
I agree that ESDF would have been (and is) a better choice. I have to do that particular 'rebind' with every FPS I buy.
I was paying between 75-80 dollars a month on my phone bill. (DSL is included in that.) I talked with the Qwest guy and they looked at my long-distance spending. It was a 'per minute' thing and ranged from 17-22 dollars. He said that I could get an unlimited plan for $15, and have a fixed rate.
So we talked about it, he had to sign me up for a 'packager' to get that plan, but he said the total would come to $75.
I talked to the salesman, while holding the bill said, I'm paying $75 a month now, can you assure me that's what this new one is? He ran the numbers again. "YUP."
So, he had to call the guy at the computer to set it all up. Before they finalized it, the guy at the computer totalled everything up and once again said "$75".
So, when I got my next bill and it was 85$ I was a little confused, but figured it was transfer fees. (I attempted to read it several times, but couldn't) Next month's bill came and it was $92.
So, I called, and the technician ran the phone and said that my features come to $75...PLUS fee's and taxes, and so I should expect the bill to be between $80 and $90 a month.
I had been lied to by both of the salesman (surprise!!) in concert. So I asked about going back to what I had before, and of course, that was impossible, because those features weren't offered anymore.
Now I'm stuck with a bill that's about $5/month more than it was before, and just waiting for an oppurtunity to get service some other way (lovely monopolies these.)
"actually launching" something and all those other 'lab' activities didn't teach you anything. That's not how the knowledge was conveyed.
The structure of the lab assignments was always too rigid. It was just an exercise in following instructions. (Which, in it's own way, is a good lesson; however,it doesn't teach you anything about physics.)
The biggest result of the lab exercises wasn't knowledge, but interest. It made what the instructor said become real instead of abstract. It sparked something in some of the kids that made them think "This is the field for me."
You don't learn from the typical lab assignment. They simply make it so some of the students feel the desire to learn more.
I imagine a crafted ad would be quite effective (although misleading). We've all gotten the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes where they call us by name and say we won. Remember back to the first time, and you can know what it would be like to have that happen online.
One time on the news site forum I frequent they did that. The news posting/headline used a little trick to display who you were logged in as. Everyone assumed that the story was actually about them. The forums were chaos until everyone figured it out, and through-out the day new people would hurriedly make a comment and then get modded 'redundant' by everyone else.
Even though it was a simple echo of your login-name and not some great technical trick, it was effective enough to give everyone a bit of a startle.
I have a Linux box that I use everyday. It's a P2-400 with a 16mb graphics card.
I have a Windows PC that's a glorified Xbox. It's a Core2Duo with 2Gig of RAM and a video card that makes up almost half of the total price of the PC.
There's a HUGE chicken/egg problem with Linux Gaming. You can do most everything you want without a monster PC on Linux. So if they did make a game for Linux, nobody would have the machine to actually play it.
With Windows, MS serendipitously coded their OS so bad that you were required to buy a new machine just surf the web. This put most the machine in a state where they weren't 'that' far off for gaming.
In the article just this morning about Tim Sweeney, he complained about that very issue. "Intel Extreme Graphics" can help you surf just fine, but it can't play games worth crap. That means those people are no longer even capable of playing the new games and it makes the PC market (even Windows) less attractive.
Sure there's the platform dependant API (DirectX) in place of what should be a generic type thing (OpenGL), but that's only half the problem.
(The interesting thing about my theory is that it applies to Apple as well. They were left out of the gaming market because for the longest thing their 'hardware' was just pathetic in that regard.)
They just released IronClad's Sins of a Solar Empire. www.sinsofasolarempire.com If you don't know what this game is, I can't tell you without referencing 3 or 4 other games. It's more than a cross-over, and it's very well done. (As worthy to be on the list as Portal.)
However, if you look at Stardock as a publisher they deserve the spot even more. If you remember the big stink between StarForce and Stardock back when Galactic Civilizations was released. They continue their style of "don't screw the people who actually pay you."
Also, while there are only a few triple-A titles on Stardock Central, their scheme of 'digital download' + 'mail you a box for shipping costs' is much more palatable to me than Valve's Steam service where you are forced to make your own hardcopies from their backup files. It also get nicely out of the way once you've installed the game vs Valve's ubiquitous TSR style.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of collaborative building effort was done in ATITD. (A Tale in the Desert.) It was really great, but an interesting thing happened...
Guild houses and other structures require LOTS of raw materials. Gathering these were very labor intensive. The 'less dominant' personalities were relegated to these tasks while the Type-A guys did fun things like detail-work and planning. There were players who literally logged in and spent hours making bricks or gathering straw. They'd hand these off the the guild leaders when they were done and start over.
The only reason this wasn't slave labor is that there was no coercion, it was just a class system based on your personality, your 'need to be accepted' and your willingness to do the grunt-work. The social dynamic of the whole thing was one of the most interesting parts of that game.
Windmills convert wind into electricity. The result...less wind on the far side. That changes climate I'm guessing. Not sure how wind affects things. Hotter animals because of less breeze? Smaller area of seed dispersal? Other things.
Solar panels take the heat energy out of the sunlight and convert it to electricity. I'd think that would cause the ground to heat up less, but that's probably insignificant compared to the direct change of 'being in the shade' for all the flora and fauna under the solar panels.
What do the hot/cold water exchange generators do? I would expect that pumping cold water from the ocean warms up the ocean...but that would be putting energy INTO the water instead of extracting it. So I'm a little confused. Lets just say it 'changes the ocean temperature'. That's enough to disrupt the ecosystem.
With this salty water thing. Whose energy are we stealing? If there's some sort of exothermic reaction going on in all river mouths, there's definitely something that's evolved to take advantage of that. Energy on the planet doesn't just SIT there doing nothing. (cept Oil...nobody uses Oil but us. :) ) What's the result of the environmental impact study? (I don't just mean habitat loss...I want to know who specifically was harvesting that energy.)
Takes longer to fill up plus needing to fill up more often. What could go wrong?
The 'good' news is that some people will be filling up at home...something you can't do now.
I'm a VNC user, but I realize some of the benefits of NX. (Sound...performance...etc.)
However...I couldn't get past the start-up times. With VNC, I'd 'click' and poof, my applications would be right were I left them, continuing on as if I'd never left. If I closed the window, the applications didn't even know I was gone.
With NX, I'd connect, I'd go through a big start-up process, I'd log in, and wait for my windows to open.... If I wanted to leave, I'd click on the 'I'm leaving now' and it would put everything into a state to where I could come back to it, etc etc. (granted my remote machine was no speed demon.)
So, finally I went back to VNC. I tend to have the window go up and down quite frequently, and the startup/shutdown times of NX were just a deal breaker.
If I was going to use it as more of a truly 'remote terminal' when I'd have it up for hours at a time, then perhaps the heavily loaded ends wouldn't bother me.
The concerns I noticed were more technical than the ones he looked at.
Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
Bandwidth. Every change, send character by character to whoever happens to have it open. That's a lot of 'real-time' bandwidth for this central location. Both of these would work great in a corporate level with a WAVE server running on the LAN, but when it goes global, those servers will be smokin'
Especially with the concept of wave enabled blogs. If you blog hits DIGG, then the wave server will be sending out your edits to thousands of people simultaneously. I wonder what the datapath is. I'm sure Google/Blogspot has a lot of bandwidth, but when you combine all IM, EMAIL, BLOG traffic along the same pipes to a central location....
I just wonder about the scalability of the hosting solution.
They did say that organizations can start their own WAVE server. Sounds like it works much the same way the Jabber (XMPP?) protocol works. But still, if this catches on, I see a future of new congestion problems.
On the flip side...I was very impressed by the demo...and if this catches on in a big way (and works) it could be a serious redefining of communication on the web.
The other story I saw on this said that the monthly bill was capped at $75. They assumed that meant subscription + overages. So the 'unlimited' plan would be only $75. (Still high for an ISP only charge.)
Is there a 'horse's mouth' release anywhere that doesn't have that ambiguity?
Not tied to a computer, just a Steam Account. You can log in from any computer.
However, as was stated before, doing that too often will appear like a compromised account.
This was that I was going to post. It's what I thought everytime this Google/EU/Antitrust story has been mentioned.
Maybe that's why Google is going the other way around. If they billed a browser and then put an OS underneath it...maybe the fire that's different enough to not be the same as making an OS and bundling a browser.
What a waste of time. They are presenting papers about what their research goals are. They haven't actually done it yet.
There are other people with research goals to find a cure for cancer....but that's not news.
I wonder why it's so pronounced in that tight little square. Makes me think they were looking for something. Somebody was using their sonar in a grid there, either maping out a (flat, boring) piece of the ocean, or more likely looking for something. Maybe traces of a shipwreck, or lost nuclear sub or something.
Then, they gave their data to Google when they were done.
This is what I was going to post.
We have an empty 'suggestion box' at work because it's a black hole. Nothing ever happens with the things you put in there.
However, in another department, the employees are constantly coming up with new things, and these things often become highlighted parts of the department.
If someone has an idea, let them work on the idea. They'll come up with more ideas.
I always wondered why people thought they were so cool...but if you can equate bugs to 'lines of code' I have a feeling they are pretty efficient. ;)
Jiggy Waltz?
In my area (SLC Utah) There are a handful of wireless Internet providers. These guys put an antenna on your house and deliver your internet that way.
They don't offer all of those extra services, just internet.
Of course, then you get to deal with the problems of a wireless solution, but I imagine those problems have been getting less and less over the years.
WASD is a de-facto industry standard created for Quake in the 90's by non-touch-typists. (I think it might have been something about proximity to tab/shift/ctrl as well, but I'm not sure.)
I agree that ESDF would have been (and is) a better choice. I have to do that particular 'rebind' with every FPS I buy.
It was Comic-Con, the crowd would have cheered at just about anything.
Unless they have another convention to go to, I'm not really sure they care that this was leaked...they got their 'release' already.
Infact I'm surprised it's not up already...unless they are just letting the 'grass-roots' hype spread for a while.
Qwest did this to me:
I was paying between 75-80 dollars a month on my phone bill. (DSL is included in that.) I talked with the Qwest guy and they looked at my long-distance spending. It was a 'per minute' thing and ranged from 17-22 dollars. He said that I could get an unlimited plan for $15, and have a fixed rate.
So we talked about it, he had to sign me up for a 'packager' to get that plan, but he said the total would come to $75.
I talked to the salesman, while holding the bill said, I'm paying $75 a month now, can you assure me that's what this new one is? He ran the numbers again. "YUP."
So, he had to call the guy at the computer to set it all up. Before they finalized it, the guy at the computer totalled everything up and once again said "$75".
So, when I got my next bill and it was 85$ I was a little confused, but figured it was transfer fees. (I attempted to read it several times, but couldn't) Next month's bill came and it was $92.
So, I called, and the technician ran the phone and said that my features come to $75...PLUS fee's and taxes, and so I should expect the bill to be between $80 and $90 a month.
I had been lied to by both of the salesman (surprise!!) in concert. So I asked about going back to what I had before, and of course, that was impossible, because those features weren't offered anymore.
Now I'm stuck with a bill that's about $5/month more than it was before, and just waiting for an oppurtunity to get service some other way (lovely monopolies these.)
"actually launching" something and all those other 'lab' activities didn't teach you anything. That's not how the knowledge was conveyed.
The structure of the lab assignments was always too rigid. It was just an exercise in following instructions. (Which, in it's own way, is a good lesson; however,it doesn't teach you anything about physics.)
The biggest result of the lab exercises wasn't knowledge, but interest. It made what the instructor said become real instead of abstract. It sparked something in some of the kids that made them think "This is the field for me."
You don't learn from the typical lab assignment. They simply make it so some of the students feel the desire to learn more.
ICQ still has the best 'concept' of instant messaging.
AIM copied the IRC style of 'send on enter.' And it was lame. In addition, AIM can't send to offline users (STILL.)
MSN copied AIM. (Although they recently added the 'offline users' option.
Multi-line messages, and 'send to offline users' are the two features of ICQ that SHOULD have been copied by MSN, but wasn't.
Jabber is a worth replacement, and that's where I'm slowly migrating my friends/co-horts too.
Redbox only carries hit films (well, they carry some crap too, but the point is, it's a very limited library.)
Of course, Redbox is banking on their convenience and not their selection.
I imagine a crafted ad would be quite effective (although misleading). We've all gotten the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes where they call us by name and say we won. Remember back to the first time, and you can know what it would be like to have that happen online.
One time on the news site forum I frequent they did that. The news posting/headline used a little trick to display who you were logged in as. Everyone assumed that the story was actually about them. The forums were chaos until everyone figured it out, and through-out the day new people would hurriedly make a comment and then get modded 'redundant' by everyone else.
Even though it was a simple echo of your login-name and not some great technical trick, it was effective enough to give everyone a bit of a startle.
I wonder what he uses those arms for (one at a time.)
I have a Linux box that I use everyday. It's a P2-400 with a 16mb graphics card.
I have a Windows PC that's a glorified Xbox. It's a Core2Duo with 2Gig of RAM and a video card that makes up almost half of the total price of the PC.
There's a HUGE chicken/egg problem with Linux Gaming. You can do most everything you want without a monster PC on Linux. So if they did make a game for Linux, nobody would have the machine to actually play it.
With Windows, MS serendipitously coded their OS so bad that you were required to buy a new machine just surf the web. This put most the machine in a state where they weren't 'that' far off for gaming.
In the article just this morning about Tim Sweeney, he complained about that very issue. "Intel Extreme Graphics" can help you surf just fine, but it can't play games worth crap. That means those people are no longer even capable of playing the new games and it makes the PC market (even Windows) less attractive.
Sure there's the platform dependant API (DirectX) in place of what should be a generic type thing (OpenGL), but that's only half the problem.
(The interesting thing about my theory is that it applies to Apple as well. They were left out of the gaming market because for the longest thing their 'hardware' was just pathetic in that regard.)
Aren't the hydrocarbons on earth (oil, coal, etc) the remains of LIFE? They've always been called 'fossil fuels.' We're burning dinosaurs.
So...where did these big extra-terrestrial reserves come from?
(Simple answer would be, "That's not the only way hydro-carbons form" but I've never heard that mentioned before.)
They just released IronClad's Sins of a Solar Empire. www.sinsofasolarempire.com If you don't know what this game is, I can't tell you without referencing 3 or 4 other games. It's more than a cross-over, and it's very well done. (As worthy to be on the list as Portal.)
However, if you look at Stardock as a publisher they deserve the spot even more. If you remember the big stink between StarForce and Stardock back when Galactic Civilizations was released. They continue their style of "don't screw the people who actually pay you."
Also, while there are only a few triple-A titles on Stardock Central, their scheme of 'digital download' + 'mail you a box for shipping costs' is much more palatable to me than Valve's Steam service where you are forced to make your own hardcopies from their backup files. It also get nicely out of the way once you've installed the game vs Valve's ubiquitous TSR style.
http://www.stardock.com/
(they mainly do desktop customization and other utilities, but they have an extensive selection of budget games and a few large titles.)