Table top RPGs have the same divide. Take D&D and Gurps for example. The first started out as a purly class and level based system. the Latter started out as a purly skill based system. In practice they have tended towards eachother with D & D adding multiclassing and eventually a skill system to give more flexibility. While GURPS added a system of racial and career templates to give some consistency and make NPC creation easier.
Incidently I believe that class & level based systems came first. and Skill based system came later. Perhapse we will see the same thing with MMORPG's
In terms of rules on paper a class based system is harder as you need a lot of special case rules for different classes. Original D & D had a lot of mechanics. While Skill based system are easier and can get down to we have contested and uncontested skill checks. end of story.
When you move to writing software the class and level system is much simpler to implement. the ruels are fairly clear cut about what each caracter can do. And Individual character profiles are reletivly simple.
Skill based systems are harder as their is a lot more combinations of skills actions to take into account, and the abilities of particular caracters are more variable. At the table top heavy reliance is made on the players and game masters understanding of how skills can be used. Computers do not however possess common sense so every permutation needs to be coded.
Overclocking and installing third party software are not the same thing.
If I make hardware modifications and the thing shorts out then no I don't expect that to be covered by warrenty. But if software I install currupts things then yes I do expect warrenty to cover.
Its reasonable for the manufacture to say ok here you go, as good as new, and when I check I find that they have reset the device and all my data and third party programs are gone.
In general it is illegal to restrict third parties from making compatable products or addons. Looking at Australia I know that Independent machanics have managed to win a ruling thaT Automobile manufactures can't void your warranty for having your car services by someone who is not part of their dealer network.
Just because an international company does x, and claims some right in their contracts does not mean that they can leagally do so. It just means that no one has called their bluff on it yet. As an example a Desktop computer has user servicable parts, and I am allowed to install new expantion cards, drives etc. Doing this does not void my warranty (at least here in Australia) this however does not stop many manufacturers from putting "warranty void if removed" stickers on their desktops.
Some manufactures go as far as claiming that replacing the shipped OS will void your warrenty. Again this a false claim.
That was a random example. Used bacause one of the apps famously rejected by the Apple App store was for accessing project Gutenberg.
So that their is a way to do this after all is somewhat beside the point.
Note that here in Australia we probably have it better with I Phones as
No exclusive deals where allowed so that we have four competing carriers who have the iPhone. You can even move between carriers without changing your phone number. Ironically the same cannot be said fro blackberry, which is only available from Telstra.
Tethering is permitted, though one of the four carriers charges an extra $10AU per month if you enable this. THe other three carriers do not.
No. But I might want software that allows me to download and read from Project Gutenberg. Which was banned because a text only version of the Karma Sutra is available.
Or I might just want a vm for the scripting language of my choice for no reason at all. I've installed python on every phone I've had that supported it. To date I've never done anything useful with it, but I might one of these days.
If you want freedom then you must be doing something illegal sounds like the first step towards tyranny. (Yes I'm aware that its just a Phone, and no I don't plan to get one).
The thing with one way tickets to Mars is that you need to find a very rare combination of attributes. You need people that
a) are willing
b) are psycologically stable and likely to remain so living in a hostile environment for decades or possibly for the rest of their lives
c) have the needed skills.
I strongly suspect that the majority of thouse who possess trais b & c are lacking trait a, as they would see that they can have a much better life if they stay on Earth.
To have a viable colony you need about 50% of said volanteers be female. Every woman I know would react negatively to this proposition.
Even then I suspect most of the men who would be happy enough to volanteed when discussing this over a beer, would probably back out when the chips where down and it was time to get in the launch vehicle.
the latest CPU's don't seem to be any better in practice then the previous model.
Server OEM's are not delivering power efficient servers.
the two points are somewhat independent of each other. The second I suspect is due to their being a lack of any standard for power efficent servers. Google did it by running single voltage power supplies. A standard around something like this would be useful, and not just for servers I suspect.
I have to say I heartily agree with the above. I got my cheep printer working with Ubuntu. Howevever I'm not the average user and I did all of the above that an average user wouldn't do.
Checked that the Linux drivers where available
Found and downloaded the correct versions of the drivers for Ubuntu. Deb as apposed to RPM packages.
Read the install instructions & Installed the drivers.
Then createded some missing directories and installed them again when that failed.
Edited some configuration fiels to get scanning to work.
Repeated from 1, every time a system upgrade causes the print or scan function to disappear. THis happens as the third party drivers don't register ownership of all their files correctly.
I recall reading some rants about how hard stripping a trademark out of a piece of software can be. Though I can't find the link right now.
The thing is that the upstream provider can make removing their trademarked name very very hard by including it in various obscure places. All of which need to be found and updated.
I have to disagree. Asus was not the first on this either. Back in 2000 I brought a loverly little computer with a pentium MMX processor and an 8 inch touch screen running at 800X600 resolution. which gave it over 100 dpi.
The thing which really set it appart was that it came with a touch screen and even had permenent (and configurable) side panel Icons on both sides).
It came with an external CD Rom and floppy drive. And the whole package was still the cheapest laptop in the store at the time. Granted everything else was Pentium II. so it was a little under powered. Still it served me well for a number of years until the battery wore out and the touch screen started loosing calibration.
Yes we could all add to this list.
Lispers are correctly known as "Knights of the Lambda Calculus"
Where are the Pythonistas and their sub groupings such as the followers of the flying pony.
The Webites who hold that the browser is an operating system. The Vimpire Clans and the followers of the one true Emacs, or the XEmacs heresy. All these cults where missing from the list.
And let us not forget the many many tribes of Trolls that inhabit the internet.
Yes and no. The question is how did these patents get into the 802.11 standard. And is this a legitimate patent or a blatantly obvious one?
To say well its OK for a government funded body to base their business model on licensing patents But its not OK for a private company to do so is a double standard. Basically saying the motive justifies the act.
To my mind the motive does not excuse the act. If patent trolling, especially on standards, is wrong then it is wrong on all cases.
The only mitigating factor I could think of is if the patented technology was knowingly included in the standard. And that the relevant commitee did this on the expectation that the CSIRO would not enforce their patent. In which case their would be a clear intent to commit IP theft.
For some reason we as a society have a much higher tolerances for violence in our entertainment then for nudity and sex.
Not that the ratings for sexually explicit are higher then the ratings for graphically violent content.
In Australia the only place you can leggally buy XXX rated videos is the nations capital.
The list was obtained by Wikileaks from internet filtering software that parents can opt to install on their computers. ACMA provides its list of prohibited sites to these software developers for inclusion in their products.
There is the clinching detail. It was obtained from filtering software. As such I suspect that its actually a super set. Containing everything that the official list contains and then some other stuff which isn't on the official list but has been added by the software vendor, perhaps based on reports from their users.
Yes well. At the last election we had a choice between.
John Howard; One of the few leaders of the developed world who refused to ratify the Kyoto agreement. Liked to setup off shore detention centers. And do anything the Bush Administration asked him to.
And Kevin Rudd. A moderate politician. And also somewhat of a moralist and a prude (even if he has been to a strip club once).
We chose Rudd. On balance it seemed the better option, after 13 years of the Liberal Party. The idea of mandatory internet filtering is an unfortunate consequence of that decision.
Actually Britain sent the lowest dregs of their army to Australia. At one point the local guards sent the Queens representative packing. As He was interfering with them running the colony as their own personal empire.
He Had to come back with new troups to reestablish crown law.
Nothing has actually been blocked. And so far all the major ISP's havn't agreed to participate in trials of the mandatory filters.
The issue is that the maintainers of the blacklist are issuing fines for people linking to blacklisted sites.
At the moment though you can't know you are violating the blecklist until they notify you that you are. And the list of sites blocked is already expanding to include sites that talk about blacklisted sites .
Firewalling an entire country is impractical. Everyone knows it won't work but with usual panache some politicians are chanting "ignore reality, full steam ahead" At least they will be seen to be doing something.
"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching."
Cars have had a standard interface for about 100 years now. So a Honda is a drop in replacement for a Toyota. Otherwise I would need a different license to drive each one. As I do need for a truck or a motorbike.
When I get into a new car I don't need to use Google to find the controls for the radio, or the air conditioning.
PS I just spent ten minutes working out how to disable track changes in Open Office. And the thing from the point of view of a user is I don't care bout all the features being their, just the ones I use frequently.
OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office. This switch is easy because not only is OpenOffice.org superior software in every respect, itâ(TM)s also feature-compatible with Microsoft Office
Hm. no Can't agree with Open Office being superior. At the least a significant amount of re-learning is require. I know every time I use it I find it a frustrating experience.
And no if Word is the baseline then OO Writer is not feature complete. Once I learnt to use it the outline view in Word was the killer feature, which made editing large documents doable. Without outline view I could not imagine working on documents of a comparable size.
As for spreadsheets their are two keybindings I need. Insert current data and insert current time. Apparently their are third party macros for this. But tts something that's never available without additional effort when I try to use calc.
So no OpenOffice is not a simple drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. Then Again if it where a drop-in replacement then Microsoft would undoubtedly be suing.
I Hartley agree. To enhance things further my Motorola phone even gets detected by Linux as a standard usb hard drive. No need for any custom synchronization software or windows lockin.
This does not seem to be uniform across models however my Wife bought her phone a little before me and her's is not detected as a removable disk by linux, (has no SD card so this might be related). Also her's does not charge from a standard USB cable while mine does, even though both came with exactly the same power brick.
Because some comments need to be made anonymously if you don't want to end up in jail for I don't know. Reviling that a member of some royal family was involved in questionable activity, could have you facing a long prison term. Or that the government of your nation was abusing human rights, could see your own rights significantly, or even permanently curtailed.
I know these are purely hypothetical scenarios that would NEVER Happen in the real world, but it pays to consider the worst case scenario.
Yes I grant you that some use anonymity for less noble purposes, but that is the price of free speech. And one that on balance I am willing to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Table top RPGs have the same divide. Take D&D and Gurps for example. The first started out as a purly class and level based system. the Latter started out as a purly skill based system. In practice they have tended towards eachother with D & D adding multiclassing and eventually a skill system to give more flexibility. While GURPS added a system of racial and career templates to give some consistency and make NPC creation easier.
Incidently I believe that class & level based systems came first. and Skill based system came later. Perhapse we will see the same thing with MMORPG's
In terms of rules on paper a class based system is harder as you need a lot of special case rules for different classes. Original D & D had a lot of mechanics. While Skill based system are easier and can get down to we have contested and uncontested skill checks. end of story.
When you move to writing software the class and level system is much simpler to implement. the ruels are fairly clear cut about what each caracter can do. And Individual character profiles are reletivly simple.
Skill based systems are harder as their is a lot more combinations of skills actions to take into account, and the abilities of particular caracters are more variable. At the table top heavy reliance is made on the players and game masters understanding of how skills can be used. Computers do not however possess common sense so every permutation needs to be coded.
I was misinformed then. A friend of mine told me his company could only source blackberries via Telstra.
Overclocking and installing third party software are not the same thing.
If I make hardware modifications and the thing shorts out then no I don't expect that to be covered by warrenty. But if software I install currupts things then yes I do expect warrenty to cover.
Its reasonable for the manufacture to say ok here you go, as good as new, and when I check I find that they have reset the device and all my data and third party programs are gone.
In general it is illegal to restrict third parties from making compatable products or addons. Looking at Australia I know that Independent machanics have managed to win a ruling thaT Automobile manufactures can't void your warranty for having your car services by someone who is not part of their dealer network.
Just because an international company does x, and claims some right in their contracts does not mean that they can leagally do so. It just means that no one has called their bluff on it yet. As an example a Desktop computer has user servicable parts, and I am allowed to install new expantion cards, drives etc. Doing this does not void my warranty (at least here in Australia) this however does not stop many manufacturers from putting "warranty void if removed" stickers on their desktops.
Some manufactures go as far as claiming that replacing the shipped OS will void your warrenty. Again this a false claim.
So that their is a way to do this after all is somewhat beside the point.
Note that here in Australia we probably have it better with I Phones as
No. But I might want software that allows me to download and read from Project Gutenberg. Which was banned because a text only version of the Karma Sutra is available. Or I might just want a vm for the scripting language of my choice for no reason at all. I've installed python on every phone I've had that supported it. To date I've never done anything useful with it, but I might one of these days. If you want freedom then you must be doing something illegal sounds like the first step towards tyranny. (Yes I'm aware that its just a Phone, and no I don't plan to get one).
The thing with one way tickets to Mars is that you need to find a very rare combination of attributes. You need people that a) are willing b) are psycologically stable and likely to remain so living in a hostile environment for decades or possibly for the rest of their lives c) have the needed skills. I strongly suspect that the majority of thouse who possess trais b & c are lacking trait a, as they would see that they can have a much better life if they stay on Earth. To have a viable colony you need about 50% of said volanteers be female. Every woman I know would react negatively to this proposition. Even then I suspect most of the men who would be happy enough to volanteed when discussing this over a beer, would probably back out when the chips where down and it was time to get in the launch vehicle.
the two points are somewhat independent of each other. The second I suspect is due to their being a lack of any standard for power efficent servers. Google did it by running single voltage power supplies. A standard around something like this would be useful, and not just for servers I suspect.
Didn't IBM used to sell all of their mainframes that way?
It wasn't in mine anyway. Reason 1 being that I haven't ever seen a Lenovo system that wasn't butt ugly.
I recall reading some rants about how hard stripping a trademark out of a piece of software can be. Though I can't find the link right now.
The thing is that the upstream provider can make removing their trademarked name very very hard by including it in various obscure places. All of which need to be found and updated.
I have to disagree. Asus was not the first on this either. Back in 2000 I brought a loverly little computer with a pentium MMX processor and an 8 inch touch screen running at 800X600 resolution. which gave it over 100 dpi. The thing which really set it appart was that it came with a touch screen and even had permenent (and configurable) side panel Icons on both sides). It came with an external CD Rom and floppy drive. And the whole package was still the cheapest laptop in the store at the time. Granted everything else was Pentium II. so it was a little under powered. Still it served me well for a number of years until the battery wore out and the touch screen started loosing calibration.
Just because it's so awesomely simple yet powerful, flexible and expressive and ...
Or at least it will be once it has Tail Call Optimization.
Yes we could all add to this list. Lispers are correctly known as "Knights of the Lambda Calculus" Where are the Pythonistas and their sub groupings such as the followers of the flying pony. The Webites who hold that the browser is an operating system. The Vimpire Clans and the followers of the one true Emacs, or the XEmacs heresy. All these cults where missing from the list. And let us not forget the many many tribes of Trolls that inhabit the internet.
Yes and no. The question is how did these patents get into the 802.11 standard. And is this a legitimate patent or a blatantly obvious one?
To say well its OK for a government funded body to base their business model on licensing patents But its not OK for a private company to do so is a double standard. Basically saying the motive justifies the act.
To my mind the motive does not excuse the act. If patent trolling, especially on standards, is wrong then it is wrong on all cases.
The only mitigating factor I could think of is if the patented technology was knowingly included in the standard. And that the relevant commitee did this on the expectation that the CSIRO would not enforce their patent. In which case their would be a clear intent to commit IP theft.
For some reason we as a society have a much higher tolerances for violence in our entertainment then for nudity and sex. Not that the ratings for sexually explicit are higher then the ratings for graphically violent content. In Australia the only place you can leggally buy XXX rated videos is the nations capital.
The list was obtained by Wikileaks from internet filtering software that parents can opt to install on their computers. ACMA provides its list of prohibited sites to these software developers for inclusion in their products.
There is the clinching detail. It was obtained from filtering software. As such I suspect that its actually a super set. Containing everything that the official list contains and then some other stuff which isn't on the official list but has been added by the software vendor, perhaps based on reports from their users.
John Howard; One of the few leaders of the developed world who refused to ratify the Kyoto agreement. Liked to setup off shore detention centers. And do anything the Bush Administration asked him to.
And Kevin Rudd. A moderate politician. And also somewhat of a moralist and a prude (even if he has been to a strip club once).
We chose Rudd. On balance it seemed the better option, after 13 years of the Liberal Party. The idea of mandatory internet filtering is an unfortunate consequence of that decision.
Actually Britain sent the lowest dregs of their army to Australia. At one point the local guards sent the Queens representative packing. As He was interfering with them running the colony as their own personal empire. He Had to come back with new troups to reestablish crown law.
The issue is that the maintainers of the blacklist are issuing fines for people linking to blacklisted sites.
At the moment though you can't know you are violating the blecklist until they notify you that you are. And the list of sites blocked is already expanding to include sites that talk about blacklisted sites .
Firewalling an entire country is impractical. Everyone knows it won't work but with usual panache some politicians are chanting "ignore reality, full steam ahead" At least they will be seen to be doing something.
-- Assyrian stone table 2800 BC,
When I get into a new car I don't need to use Google to find the controls for the radio, or the air conditioning.
PS I just spent ten minutes working out how to disable track changes in Open Office. And the thing from the point of view of a user is I don't care bout all the features being their, just the ones I use frequently.
OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office. This switch is easy because not only is OpenOffice.org superior software in every respect, itâ(TM)s also feature-compatible with Microsoft Office
Hm. no Can't agree with Open Office being superior. At the least a significant amount of re-learning is require. I know every time I use it I find it a frustrating experience.
And no if Word is the baseline then OO Writer is not feature complete. Once I learnt to use it the outline view in Word was the killer feature, which made editing large documents doable. Without outline view I could not imagine working on documents of a comparable size.
As for spreadsheets their are two keybindings I need. Insert current data and insert current time. Apparently their are third party macros for this. But tts something that's never available without additional effort when I try to use calc.
So no OpenOffice is not a simple drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. Then Again if it where a drop-in replacement then Microsoft would undoubtedly be suing.
I Hartley agree. To enhance things further my Motorola phone even gets detected by Linux as a standard usb hard drive. No need for any custom synchronization software or windows lockin.
This does not seem to be uniform across models however my Wife bought her phone a little before me and her's is not detected as a removable disk by linux, (has no SD card so this might be related). Also her's does not charge from a standard USB cable while mine does, even though both came with exactly the same power brick.
Because some comments need to be made anonymously if you don't want to end up in jail for I don't know. Reviling that a member of some royal family was involved in questionable activity, could have you facing a long prison term. Or that the government of your nation was abusing human rights, could see your own rights significantly, or even permanently curtailed. I know these are purely hypothetical scenarios that would NEVER Happen in the real world, but it pays to consider the worst case scenario. Yes I grant you that some use anonymity for less noble purposes, but that is the price of free speech. And one that on balance I am willing to pay.