Deus Ex 1 had a lot of backstory you could read in terminals, newspapers, books, etc.
Deus Ex 2, however, repeated the same five pieces repeated over and over again, until I quit bothering to read them. Yet another place where Deus Ex 1 was great and Deus Ex 2 flopped.
As I said above, I wouldn't use the device, because it's not my place to force everyone to bend to my wishes. I deal with my problems by avoiding noisy places and using noise cancelling headsets when I am forced to deal with the airport.
While the TV bothers me, it may be some bored person's only form of entertainment, especially if their plane has been delayed several hours, etc... I accept that when I leave the comfort of my own home, I am going to hear other people's noise.
This device only adds to the general rudeness problem we have already, as it means you could have two people fighting with this device - one trying to turn the TV off, one trying to turn the TV on... neither of them speaking to each other, which could turn ugly.
I frequently suffer from sensory overload. Basically, the noise, the lights, the smells, some touches overwhelm my ability to process them and I end up with a terrible migrane, unable to handle any light or any noise. It's very painful.
I can't walk into a Best Buy or a Costco. I can't distinguish between my husband talking next to me or the jabbering of a tv or a person echoing across the store, my mind tries to process both signals and give them equal priority. It's painful.
I avoid those places. I try not to be placed near a TV at a restaurant - or just not go to restaurants with TVs. Some of my favourite hamburger joints do have TV's (red robin), but you can ask for a booth that's not facing it, and they don't play the sound. I don't do sports bars.
Oddly enough, I can't handle the feeling of velvet. It just overloads my touch sense. I have been given velvet gifts that I promptly give to goodwill... I can't bear to put them on.
There are nights when I beg my husband not to turn the TV on... or the radio... I can't stand the mindless jabber jabber.
My ability to handle multiple signals depends on how tired I am. The more rest I've had, the more able I am to handle tvs, radios, random talking, noises... but if I am overtired, my world spirals into a mass of flashing pain, has my head tries to explode and I can't bear to stand up anymore.
I'm not alone, many people suffer from this, or so my therapist tells me.;) Anyway, I would not use such a device, because although the TV gives me pain, it could be some poor bored person's only form of entertainment. I just try to move myself into a quiet corner, if I'm travelling, I have noise cancelling headsets and I listen to the sound of the rain on cd sometimes, the white noise cancels out a lot of noise and calms me.
I do that all the time on 104th ave. It's a road that is 25 mph, with several 20 mph school zones along it (four to be exact). Police love to do speed traps on it.
The second I turn onto 104th, I drop to 22 mph, hit cruise control, and drive that way all the way to my street.
The really funny thing is, I don't think there's a big pressing need to install this patch. Waiting a while is the best move to make.
What does this patch do for you? Well, I've been using RC2 for awhile, and here's what it's done for me:
1) Broken Thief III such that when I load levels, my computer crashes.
2) Screams bloody murder when an app opens a port - except for loopback - but even when I explicitly wanted that port opened it still raises a dialog.
3) Messed up MSN Instant Messenger's hotmail addin so it now links to Outlook and Outlook Express even though I don't even USE Outlook.
4) Messed up my MSN Instant Messenger buddy list by trying to group them into random categories I didn't even want
5) Installed more gooblygook into Windows Media Player that asks for copyright protections etc that I don't want and makes me go through the configuration screen all over again
6) Added a popup blocker I didn't want - that I can't easily turn off - into IE - that conflicts with Google Toolbar - instead of one easy click to get a popup on a site that you were expecting to pop up (such as a separate chat window for customer support), you now need to go into the options to turn popup blocking off, then click the google toolbar... twice the hassle.
And other nice oddities.
I say, wait until this beast has been patched...there's nothing worth running out for.
Bah, all apps run on the web? Good grief. I'd hate to run a visual C++ compiler located on a website. We've already had that solution - it was called VAX, but instead of using websites, it used dumb terminals.
Besides, the problems with SP2 involve webbed and internet apps. Anything that opens up a port causes the new SP2 firewall to throw up all sorts of alarms, unless it's local loopback only.
When Service Pack 1 was released there were so many errors that Service Pack 1 A was shortly released to fix the worst of them. And the hotfixes still keep on coming.
I think I'd rather trust our own internal Q&A department over Microsoft's. Remember, they shipped Windows XP with thousands of unfixed bugs, and considered that good!
And i think making people pay for it is even worse... It's just a pain sometimes to have to register to see news and stuff.
Registering is a pain.
Paying, is not a pain. I'd gladly pay for unhassled access to my few favourite papers. I'm a firm believer in supporting what you enjoy. I pay for Red Vs Blue, for example. But at the BBC, or at the Washington Post, paying for online content is not an option.
Instead, every 60 days, they harass me about telling them my age, gender, sexual preferences, virginity score, geek score, pet's geek score.... UGH.
If you want the NY Times content without having to give up any information, then hustle down to the newsstand and actually buy a copy.
That's not always possible. I am a big fan of the Washington Post. I live in Seattle... I can't just walk down and buy a copy, no matter how much I'd love to. (Yay, something to read on the bus...)
And buying a copy of the BBC News? Not possible in the United States. And they have the best world coverage, IMHO.
You still have to spend the time filling out the registration form, remembering the user id and password for that site, filling in the user id and password periodically when the cookies expire... what a hassle.
Everyone I know already uses a junk email address for these sites. That's what my hotmail account is for, anyway. But even Google Toolbar doesn't know that I'm 26 years old, female, interested in underwater basketweaving, etc...
Of course, they're also giving you the news without asking for 50 cents, either... Registration is the "price" you pay for full access to the online newspaper. Is that too much? Fine, then don't read it... but don't adopt some holier-than-thou attitude just because the newspaper (gasp) asks for something back before it hands over its content.
It's different than that. I'd gladly pay 25 cents a day for the Washington Post. But, I'm in Seattle. They don't distribute there. Or rather they only distribute the Sunday Paper - a week late. Bah!
I'd gladly PAY to get the regular version of the Washington Post. Unfortunately that's not an option. But I know I'm not the only one who's moved away and wants to read their local paper.
It exists, and is called Passport. There was a hue and cry over it because people were worried about a centralized source of information in control of Microsoft about who they are and where they're going.
Passport failed due to the high licensing fees. There is still room in the password market for a reasonable (non Microsoft) solution.
I too and tired of having to enter the same damn data at every single site... This is why I love the Google Toolbar. At least with most properly configured sites it's an easy one click to get all that stuff filled out.
I'm tired of registering at every news site I visit. With the populatiry of sites like Fark and Slashdot, I no longer go to only one news site - I visit articles in newspapers in Arizona, Australia, Germany, Maine, in addition to my usual 3 - The Washington Post, the Seattle P-I, and the BBC World News.
I don't mind registering for my usual 3. I do mind registering when I want to read a single article in the Boston Piccayune. This makes me give up, and go somewhere else.
An accepatable compromise is to make registration necessary after reading 5 or so articles, instead of for all articles at that site. After all, do their local advertisers really care about someone who is miles away?
Have any of you "I'm not showing my items just for the hell of it" ever tried just being nice?
I go to Fry's, Best Buy, Comp USA, Circuit City... and they never search my bags.
Maybe it's cause I smile at the poor sod at the cash register (I know his job must SUCK), even while I'm turning down all his offers. I exchange smalltalk if he's interested in something I'm buying. Then, when I walk towards the poor guy sitting on that stool, I have the receipt in one hand and the bag open in the other, and I go towards him.... and smile... and he waves me right through. Doesn't even look in the bag.
It's all about being nice to the poor blighted folks who have to work there. If there's no reason for them to suspect I've got anything I shouldn't in my bag, they don't even bother to check. The very fact I'm holding it open and ready for them means they don't even want to bother looking in - I must have nothing to hide!
What's the point of denying them to look in your bag? They'll only summon the police anyway. A big hassle all because you wanted to show how you know your "rights" even though all stores have the right to search all bags in the store anyway...
I often use ILL (Interlibrary loan) to get rare books that cost hundreds of dollars for my research. I scan in what's relevant, sometimes using OCR, take notes, return it. I don't pay a dime and I read about 3-5 books a week.
Use your library people! You pay for it in your taxes, might as well use it.
Downside: Libraries don't buy all the latest computer books because they are obsoleted so quick. Plus you cannot ILL a book that is published within the past year - the ILL goes instead to the purchasing department which may or may not buy the book. Most likely, won't.
So for the latest computer books, my library is not very useful.
That's when I walk into the Microsoft Library and read.... even though I'm not an employee... they have an EXCELLENT linux section. Ahh, the pleasures of being close to the Microsoft campus.
One of the more upsetting things in the article was the assumption that someone who posts a great deal is a spammer.
I'm on several yahoo e-mail lists where that's exactly the opposite - the people who post the most are the ones who are actively doing research into the field, reporting their findings, discussing it with other enthusiasts... the spammers are the ones who post a single "Russian Girls Waiting For You" message which is ignored.
By the definition of this article, I'm a 12th century women's clothing spammer... because I send about 4-5 messages per day on the subject.
Maybe that's because, Singer Sewing Machines are crap?
I had my grandmother's Singer, which spat needles at random intervals, refused to go, ruined the thread, knotted, tore up fabric... I gave the damn thing away to the salvation army.
I checked out the new Singers - they are too light, tip over, break easily, have no power to get through denim or leather...
On the other hand, making felled seams on my three year old Pfaff 2040 is a snap, especially with my felling foot (optional accessory, but necessary if you're making tailored men's shirts).
Getting back on topic, sewing machines are extremely complex these days. Most sewing machine places offer classes, which I've attended, before I could do more than the basics with my own machine. With a repair costing 80$ or more - per incident! not including parts! - I'd rather learn how to do something from the pros than have my machine in the shop. Again.
One of the odd things was, they tried to do a more "3d" graphics area, rather than just a static square. So you could pan around and move around a circular room for instance. Not quite 3d, but interesting.
Although seriously, "graphic adventure" isn't dead. It's just changed. It went from King's Quest static square style, to Myst - static square with different views of the same thing - and then a massive LEAP - into a fps shooter engine (Unreal, Doom) or another 3d engine. I personally believe that Deus Ex is an extention of this category, along with Thief I & II, because they are all stories that involve graphical puzzles while playing through an epic adventure.
The fact that you kill and snipe your enemies doesn't exclude them from this category - Quest for Glory had you killing enemies from game 1, and there are plenty of fps games where you don't kill things... that annoying "Shrek" game for the Xbox for instance, or "Oddworld: Munchie's Oddesey" are more riddle than combat based.
Most certainly, YES, we should record and document the inner workings of a soon-to-be-extinct language.
So much of our past is recorded in these languages - so much will be lost if we allow these languages to become indecipherable.
For example, Yiddish, a mixture of hebrew russian and german spoken by the Jews in the Northeastern part of Europe (of which my grandparents were part of), is soon to be extinct.
And yet, Yiddish was used to record legal documents (Jews were often the only bankers in the middle ages, as Christianity forbade loans), medicine, and stories about life, humor, love. The story, 'Fiddler on the Roof' is an adaptation of a story entitled "Tevye and His Daughters" by Sholom Aleichem, written entirely in Yiddish. I have an entire book of Sholom Aleichem's stories, which, unfortunatley since I am horrible at understanding Yiddish, I cannot read.
Documenting the inner workings of "extinct" languages is useful - not to promote these languages into common use - but to allow us to read all the wealth of information which others have put down on paper/stone/beads to be read, before it is too late.
"Let's all go register for online lotteries with our new Hotmail accounts. Then we'll give our e-mail address to the airport on that little frequent flyer card because I know they're going to send me only useful info. Oh yeah, let's not forget Kazaa registration, seedy computer retailers, and mail-in rebates."
Sometimes you have to submit an email address to someone you know is going to spam. For instance, Victoria's Secret. When you purchase a nightgown from there, they email you with the fedex number and a confirmation that it shipped. I want to have that information, if there's an issue, but I don't want to see all their spam...
My solution is to use a hotmail account that I don't read for these purposes. If, for instance, my nightgown doesn't arrive in the 2 weeks they said it would, I go wading in that account for the emails and use that when finding out what happened.
My fiance was an H1-B worker, so we've had to deal with the INS for awhile now.
Contrary to popular belief, an H1-B visa does not guarantee a green card. These are two different things... H1-B allows you to work in a special field for up to 3 years (with extentions if you're getting your green card), after which you get sent home. A green card can be aquired either through your company, or through marriage. A green card allows you to be hired and fired like any american worker. It's permanent.
I've looked at both methods for getting his green card. We were lucky his second company sponsored him, and we were able to continue it when he was later laid off because he was in the third stage. Had he been in an earlier stage, he would've been sent back.
Getting your green card is a very tough process. It took us three and a half years to get his green card through his company. If you do it through marriage, it's supposedly shorter - but then they question your marriage, your relationship, pull out your wedding photos and ask him to identify a guy in the back row, etc. I'm glad we didn't have to go that route.
Now the REAL problem for Sun here is, if they bring in a significant number of H1-B visa people to replace their tenured staff, then they're going to get a brain drain when in 3 years, all those people have to return to India. There's a population cap for green card applicants based on your country - it's very hard to get a green card if you come from India. So every 3 years they'll have a massive turn-over when all those immigrants go home for the mandated one year, during which they'll bring in new h1-b visas.... costing them lots of lawyer bills and a general loss of accumulated knowledge.
Not a smart move for Sun. Save a buck today, loose important knowledge and spend money on lawyer fees tomorrow...
To have the company spend hours ensuring that their servers will not crash after X hours, x years, x load...
I love Linux. But I know what it's like to be on the bleeding edge of Linux, having to upgrade every other day, every day, sometimes even an hour later, because the release you just got is unstable. Or finding out months later that after two weeks, three weeks, your system corrupts its memory.
Now that's due to the difference in the development cycle of Linux vs Unix. Linux doesn't have a dedicated QA cycle, one that has the money, the equipment, the people, and the DESIRE to verify that kernel xxx will run for 1 year without any issues.
You may think, oh, it's not a big deal to reboot your machine every week or two weeks or a month. But in some cases where unix is used, that downtime is deadly.
Two people I know work for the NRC - Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They write saftey software for nuclear reactors. It runs on various flavors of unix... and probably could easily be ported to Linux. But I doubt it ever would. If you're going to trust the saftey of YOUR nuclear reactor, you want that vendor rep standing behind his product, guaranteeing that server won't crash in the middle of the night. You WANT 24/7 dedicated support for your box, you NEED every single patch to be stress tested for a month or more before you install it.
And that's where Linux will never be able to replace Solaris, etc. Linux will never have the dedicated money, equipment, people, and QA testing certification in place to guarantee that kernel x.x.xx will run for a year.
It's not a bad thing. But there will always be a place for commercial unix distros in mission critical applications.
What ARE you guys complaining about? Windows XP Professional only cost me 30$! Office XP only cost me 60$...... at the microsoft employee store....
*yay friends who are ex-employees of microsoft*:)
Now while I am a spoiled brat who happily takes advantage of people who Microsoft has unfairly fired (long story), I know I do choose to buy legit copies of the software when the prices are "reasonable".
I do seriously believe, that if they could offer JUST Word for under 50$, students would buy it. Why do you think so many students used Microsoft Works? Because it has/had a student discount at the university store and was cheap. I just did a pricecheck - Microsoft Works 2003 costs 68$ at Cnet. Add in the student rebate (I am assuming there still is one, I am no longer a student), and a student can start to justify a 40-50$ software purchase of Word.
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Deus Ex 1 had a lot of backstory you could read in terminals, newspapers, books, etc.
Deus Ex 2, however, repeated the same five pieces repeated over and over again, until I quit bothering to read them. Yet another place where Deus Ex 1 was great and Deus Ex 2 flopped.
As I said above, I wouldn't use the device, because it's not my place to force everyone to bend to my wishes. I deal with my problems by avoiding noisy places and using noise cancelling headsets when I am forced to deal with the airport.
While the TV bothers me, it may be some bored person's only form of entertainment, especially if their plane has been delayed several hours, etc... I accept that when I leave the comfort of my own home, I am going to hear other people's noise.
This device only adds to the general rudeness problem we have already, as it means you could have two people fighting with this device - one trying to turn the TV off, one trying to turn the TV on... neither of them speaking to each other, which could turn ugly.
I frequently suffer from sensory overload. Basically, the noise, the lights, the smells, some touches overwhelm my ability to process them and I end up with a terrible migrane, unable to handle any light or any noise. It's very painful.
;) Anyway, I would not use such a device, because although the TV gives me pain, it could be some poor bored person's only form of entertainment. I just try to move myself into a quiet corner, if I'm travelling, I have noise cancelling headsets and I listen to the sound of the rain on cd sometimes, the white noise cancels out a lot of noise and calms me.
I can't walk into a Best Buy or a Costco. I can't distinguish between my husband talking next to me or the jabbering of a tv or a person echoing across the store, my mind tries to process both signals and give them equal priority. It's painful.
I avoid those places. I try not to be placed near a TV at a restaurant - or just not go to restaurants with TVs. Some of my favourite hamburger joints do have TV's (red robin), but you can ask for a booth that's not facing it, and they don't play the sound. I don't do sports bars.
Oddly enough, I can't handle the feeling of velvet. It just overloads my touch sense. I have been given velvet gifts that I promptly give to goodwill... I can't bear to put them on.
There are nights when I beg my husband not to turn the TV on... or the radio... I can't stand the mindless jabber jabber.
My ability to handle multiple signals depends on how tired I am. The more rest I've had, the more able I am to handle tvs, radios, random talking, noises... but if I am overtired, my world spirals into a mass of flashing pain, has my head tries to explode and I can't bear to stand up anymore.
I'm not alone, many people suffer from this, or so my therapist tells me.
I do that all the time on 104th ave. It's a road that is 25 mph, with several 20 mph school zones along it (four to be exact). Police love to do speed traps on it.
The second I turn onto 104th, I drop to 22 mph, hit cruise control, and drive that way all the way to my street.
The really funny thing is, I don't think there's a big pressing need to install this patch. Waiting a while is the best move to make.
What does this patch do for you? Well, I've been using RC2 for awhile, and here's what it's done for me:
1) Broken Thief III such that when I load levels, my computer crashes.
2) Screams bloody murder when an app opens a port - except for loopback - but even when I explicitly wanted that port opened it still raises a dialog.
3) Messed up MSN Instant Messenger's hotmail addin so it now links to Outlook and Outlook Express even though I don't even USE Outlook.
4) Messed up my MSN Instant Messenger buddy list by trying to group them into random categories I didn't even want
5) Installed more gooblygook into Windows Media Player that asks for copyright protections etc that I don't want and makes me go through the configuration screen all over again
6) Added a popup blocker I didn't want - that I can't easily turn off - into IE - that conflicts with Google Toolbar - instead of one easy click to get a popup on a site that you were expecting to pop up (such as a separate chat window for customer support), you now need to go into the options to turn popup blocking off, then click the google toolbar... twice the hassle.
And other nice oddities.
I say, wait until this beast has been patched...there's nothing worth running out for.
Bah, all apps run on the web? Good grief. I'd hate to run a visual C++ compiler located on a website. We've already had that solution - it was called VAX, but instead of using websites, it used dumb terminals.
Besides, the problems with SP2 involve webbed and internet apps. Anything that opens up a port causes the new SP2 firewall to throw up all sorts of alarms, unless it's local loopback only.
This isn't news.
When Service Pack 1 was released there were so many errors that Service Pack 1 A was shortly released to fix the worst of them. And the hotfixes still keep on coming.
I think I'd rather trust our own internal Q&A department over Microsoft's. Remember, they shipped Windows XP with thousands of unfixed bugs, and considered that good!
And i think making people pay for it is even worse... It's just a pain sometimes to have to register to see news and stuff.
Registering is a pain.
Paying, is not a pain. I'd gladly pay for unhassled access to my few favourite papers. I'm a firm believer in supporting what you enjoy. I pay for Red Vs Blue, for example. But at the BBC, or at the Washington Post, paying for online content is not an option.
Instead, every 60 days, they harass me about telling them my age, gender, sexual preferences, virginity score, geek score, pet's geek score.... UGH.
If you want the NY Times content without having to give up any information, then hustle down to the newsstand and actually buy a copy.
That's not always possible. I am a big fan of the Washington Post. I live in Seattle... I can't just walk down and buy a copy, no matter how much I'd love to. (Yay, something to read on the bus...)
And buying a copy of the BBC News? Not possible in the United States. And they have the best world coverage, IMHO.
You still have to spend the time filling out the registration form, remembering the user id and password for that site, filling in the user id and password periodically when the cookies expire... what a hassle.
Everyone I know already uses a junk email address for these sites. That's what my hotmail account is for, anyway. But even Google Toolbar doesn't know that I'm 26 years old, female, interested in underwater basketweaving, etc...
Of course, they're also giving you the news without asking for 50 cents, either... Registration is the "price" you pay for full access to the online newspaper. Is that too much? Fine, then don't read it... but don't adopt some holier-than-thou attitude just because the newspaper (gasp) asks for something back before it hands over its content.
It's different than that. I'd gladly pay 25 cents a day for the Washington Post. But, I'm in Seattle. They don't distribute there. Or rather they only distribute the Sunday Paper - a week late. Bah!
I'd gladly PAY to get the regular version of the Washington Post. Unfortunately that's not an option. But I know I'm not the only one who's moved away and wants to read their local paper.
It exists, and is called Passport. There was a hue and cry over it because people were worried about a centralized source of information in control of Microsoft about who they are and where they're going.
Passport failed due to the high licensing fees. There is still room in the password market for a reasonable (non Microsoft) solution.
I too and tired of having to enter the same damn data at every single site... This is why I love the Google Toolbar. At least with most properly configured sites it's an easy one click to get all that stuff filled out.
It needs to change, and soon.
I'm tired of registering at every news site I visit. With the populatiry of sites like Fark and Slashdot, I no longer go to only one news site - I visit articles in newspapers in Arizona, Australia, Germany, Maine, in addition to my usual 3 - The Washington Post, the Seattle P-I, and the BBC World News.
I don't mind registering for my usual 3. I do mind registering when I want to read a single article in the Boston Piccayune. This makes me give up, and go somewhere else.
An accepatable compromise is to make registration necessary after reading 5 or so articles, instead of for all articles at that site. After all, do their local advertisers really care about someone who is miles away?
Have any of you "I'm not showing my items just for the hell of it" ever tried just being nice?
I go to Fry's, Best Buy, Comp USA, Circuit City... and they never search my bags.
Maybe it's cause I smile at the poor sod at the cash register (I know his job must SUCK), even while I'm turning down all his offers. I exchange smalltalk if he's interested in something I'm buying. Then, when I walk towards the poor guy sitting on that stool, I have the receipt in one hand and the bag open in the other, and I go towards him.... and smile... and he waves me right through. Doesn't even look in the bag.
It's all about being nice to the poor blighted folks who have to work there. If there's no reason for them to suspect I've got anything I shouldn't in my bag, they don't even bother to check. The very fact I'm holding it open and ready for them means they don't even want to bother looking in - I must have nothing to hide!
What's the point of denying them to look in your bag? They'll only summon the police anyway. A big hassle all because you wanted to show how you know your "rights" even though all stores have the right to search all bags in the store anyway...
I often use ILL (Interlibrary loan) to get rare books that cost hundreds of dollars for my research. I scan in what's relevant, sometimes using OCR, take notes, return it. I don't pay a dime and I read about 3-5 books a week.
Use your library people! You pay for it in your taxes, might as well use it.
Downside: Libraries don't buy all the latest computer books because they are obsoleted so quick. Plus you cannot ILL a book that is published within the past year - the ILL goes instead to the purchasing department which may or may not buy the book. Most likely, won't.
So for the latest computer books, my library is not very useful.
That's when I walk into the Microsoft Library and read.... even though I'm not an employee... they have an EXCELLENT linux section. Ahh, the pleasures of being close to the Microsoft campus.
I print all of mine out on printer mailing labels. You know, the ones from Avery.
Then I stick it on the cd.
The cd goes in my cd book, the rest of the game manuscripts etc go in the trash.
I'm a game collector freak. If I kept all the boxes and the garbage and the crappy plastic cases they come with, I'd be up to my eyeballs in crap.
Anyhoo, I recommend this method. That way you only have to find just the cd to re-install your game.
One of the more upsetting things in the article was the assumption that someone who posts a great deal is a spammer.
I'm on several yahoo e-mail lists where that's exactly the opposite - the people who post the most are the ones who are actively doing research into the field, reporting their findings, discussing it with other enthusiasts... the spammers are the ones who post a single "Russian Girls Waiting For You" message which is ignored.
By the definition of this article, I'm a 12th century women's clothing spammer... because I send about 4-5 messages per day on the subject.
"Learning to make felled seams on a Singer."
Maybe that's because, Singer Sewing Machines are crap?
I had my grandmother's Singer, which spat needles at random intervals, refused to go, ruined the thread, knotted, tore up fabric... I gave the damn thing away to the salvation army.
I checked out the new Singers - they are too light, tip over, break easily, have no power to get through denim or leather...
On the other hand, making felled seams on my three year old Pfaff 2040 is a snap, especially with my felling foot (optional accessory, but necessary if you're making tailored men's shirts).
Getting back on topic, sewing machines are extremely complex these days. Most sewing machine places offer classes, which I've attended, before I could do more than the basics with my own machine. With a repair costing 80$ or more - per incident! not including parts! - I'd rather learn how to do something from the pros than have my machine in the shop. Again.
Quest for Glory V was my favourite.
One of the odd things was, they tried to do a more "3d" graphics area, rather than just a static square. So you could pan around and move around a circular room for instance. Not quite 3d, but interesting.
Although seriously, "graphic adventure" isn't dead. It's just changed. It went from King's Quest static square style, to Myst - static square with different views of the same thing - and then a massive LEAP - into a fps shooter engine (Unreal, Doom) or another 3d engine. I personally believe that Deus Ex is an extention of this category, along with Thief I & II, because they are all stories that involve graphical puzzles while playing through an epic adventure.
The fact that you kill and snipe your enemies doesn't exclude them from this category - Quest for Glory had you killing enemies from game 1, and there are plenty of fps games where you don't kill things... that annoying "Shrek" game for the Xbox for instance, or "Oddworld: Munchie's Oddesey" are more riddle than combat based.
Most certainly, YES, we should record and document the inner workings of a soon-to-be-extinct language.
So much of our past is recorded in these languages - so much will be lost if we allow these languages to become indecipherable.
For example, Yiddish, a mixture of hebrew russian and german spoken by the Jews in the Northeastern part of Europe (of which my grandparents were part of), is soon to be extinct.
And yet, Yiddish was used to record legal documents (Jews were often the only bankers in the middle ages, as Christianity forbade loans), medicine, and stories about life, humor, love. The story, 'Fiddler on the Roof' is an adaptation of a story entitled "Tevye and His Daughters" by Sholom Aleichem, written entirely in Yiddish. I have an entire book of Sholom Aleichem's stories, which, unfortunatley since I am horrible at understanding Yiddish, I cannot read.
Documenting the inner workings of "extinct" languages is useful - not to promote these languages into common use - but to allow us to read all the wealth of information which others have put down on paper/stone/beads to be read, before it is too late.
"Let's all go register for online lotteries with our new Hotmail accounts. Then we'll give our e-mail address to the airport on that little frequent flyer card because I know they're going to send me only useful info. Oh yeah, let's not forget Kazaa registration, seedy computer retailers, and mail-in rebates."
Sometimes you have to submit an email address to someone you know is going to spam. For instance, Victoria's Secret. When you purchase a nightgown from there, they email you with the fedex number and a confirmation that it shipped. I want to have that information, if there's an issue, but I don't want to see all their spam...
My solution is to use a hotmail account that I don't read for these purposes. If, for instance, my nightgown doesn't arrive in the 2 weeks they said it would, I go wading in that account for the emails and use that when finding out what happened.
My fiance was an H1-B worker, so we've had to deal with the INS for awhile now.
Contrary to popular belief, an H1-B visa does not guarantee a green card. These are two different things... H1-B allows you to work in a special field for up to 3 years (with extentions if you're getting your green card), after which you get sent home. A green card can be aquired either through your company, or through marriage. A green card allows you to be hired and fired like any american worker. It's permanent.
I've looked at both methods for getting his green card. We were lucky his second company sponsored him, and we were able to continue it when he was later laid off because he was in the third stage. Had he been in an earlier stage, he would've been sent back.
Getting your green card is a very tough process. It took us three and a half years to get his green card through his company. If you do it through marriage, it's supposedly shorter - but then they question your marriage, your relationship, pull out your wedding photos and ask him to identify a guy in the back row, etc. I'm glad we didn't have to go that route.
Now the REAL problem for Sun here is, if they bring in a significant number of H1-B visa people to replace their tenured staff, then they're going to get a brain drain when in 3 years, all those people have to return to India. There's a population cap for green card applicants based on your country - it's very hard to get a green card if you come from India. So every 3 years they'll have a massive turn-over when all those immigrants go home for the mandated one year, during which they'll bring in new h1-b visas.... costing them lots of lawyer bills and a general loss of accumulated knowledge.
Not a smart move for Sun. Save a buck today, loose important knowledge and spend money on lawyer fees tomorrow...
Guaranteed Stability.
To have the company spend hours ensuring that their servers will not crash after X hours, x years, x load...
I love Linux. But I know what it's like to be on the bleeding edge of Linux, having to upgrade every other day, every day, sometimes even an hour later, because the release you just got is unstable. Or finding out months later that after two weeks, three weeks, your system corrupts its memory.
Now that's due to the difference in the development cycle of Linux vs Unix. Linux doesn't have a dedicated QA cycle, one that has the money, the equipment, the people, and the DESIRE to verify that kernel xxx will run for 1 year without any issues.
You may think, oh, it's not a big deal to reboot your machine every week or two weeks or a month. But in some cases where unix is used, that downtime is deadly.
Two people I know work for the NRC - Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They write saftey software for nuclear reactors. It runs on various flavors of unix... and probably could easily be ported to Linux. But I doubt it ever would. If you're going to trust the saftey of YOUR nuclear reactor, you want that vendor rep standing behind his product, guaranteeing that server won't crash in the middle of the night. You WANT 24/7 dedicated support for your box, you NEED every single patch to be stress tested for a month or more before you install it.
And that's where Linux will never be able to replace Solaris, etc. Linux will never have the dedicated money, equipment, people, and QA testing certification in place to guarantee that kernel x.x.xx will run for a year.
It's not a bad thing. But there will always be a place for commercial unix distros in mission critical applications.
... or they could just use a LightBright for the LED display.
:)
*signs ad jingle*
LightBright! LightBright! Put out the candles and... LightBright!
Damn, I miss those things...
What ARE you guys complaining about? Windows XP Professional only cost me 30$! Office XP only cost me 60$... ... at the microsoft employee store....
:)
*yay friends who are ex-employees of microsoft*
Now while I am a spoiled brat who happily takes advantage of people who Microsoft has unfairly fired (long story), I know I do choose to buy legit copies of the software when the prices are "reasonable".
I do seriously believe, that if they could offer JUST Word for under 50$, students would buy it. Why do you think so many students used Microsoft Works? Because it has/had a student discount at the university store and was cheap. I just did a pricecheck - Microsoft Works 2003 costs 68$ at Cnet. Add in the student rebate (I am assuming there still is one, I am no longer a student), and a student can start to justify a 40-50$ software purchase of Word.
Cnet's review of Microsoft Works 2003 here
It's Word 2003, with a few unnecessary "helper" apps.