Huh. Last I knew, Taco lived not too far from me (Dexter, MI). I hadn't heard of any persistent power outages around here, though we did have a nasty wind storm over the past couple days. Could be something as localized as the line that feeds his house. Or maybe...
Hey, Cmdr Taco! Go downstairs and check your breakers!
Also, someone should post a list of keyboards without the numpad column. It should be an attachment.
That's exactly what I want. A standard keyboard, including the inverted-T cursor keys and Insert/Home/etc. block above them. BUT NO STEENKIN' KEYPAD! I simply have no use for the keypad (and yes, I know some people live by it; accountants need not flame me). I'd rather have the mouse that much closer to the typing area. Keypad on left would be workable, too.
Maybe the sudden appearance of trash like kayne west and britney spears on the top of last.fm's charts has something to do with it.
Or maybe... just maybe... that sort of music actually is popular. And now that the service is getting to be more mainstream and less the private playground of geeks the charts are starting to reflect more (current) mainstream artists.
A lot of people actually like that crap. Sad but true.
The only thing keeping me on Firefox is AdBlock Plus. The second that's in Chrome (or Chromium), I'm gone.
Or the equivalent of FoxyProxy. It annoys me no end that Chrome uses IE's proxy settings. Change one and it changes in the other. That's great if you have one proxy through which everything must be funneled, but that's simply not the case for me. I use Privoxy as an ad filter. When I'm running Windows Update I don't want to burden my poor little underpowered Privoxy server. I really like FoxyProxy's ability to select a proxy based on the URL. Which reminds me, I ought to set up TOR and enable it for certain URL patterns.
People are lazy. Look at any image database and figure out why it's difficult to find something. Because people don't want to spend 20 minutes filling in tags for a single image they just want to show off to their friends.
And even when they do fill in the tags, they're sloppy about it. Things get misspelled and mislabeled all the time. Most people are very inconsistent about labeling even when they're trying their best to do an honest, thorough job. Okay, let me tag this photo "wife", because has my wife as the subject. And "boat" because she's standing on a boat. And "ocean", because that's where the boat is. Better make that "Atlantic Ocean". Let's add the month, year, and day, too. And the time of day. There. Now I can query for "all pictures of my wife in the Atlantic on a dark and stormy night". Oh, wait, I forgot to tag the weather...
Of course, this doesn't even touch on the problem of people just plain lying about their data to make it more appealing to possible viewers. I want the picture to show in search engines, so I'll tag it "nude", "pr0n", and "teen". Those tags have nothing to do with the picture, of course, but they'll get it noticed.
I don't expect a Semantic Revolution to happen as long as fallible, inconsistent, lying, cheating humans are in the loop.
It's not so bad if you swap once, as the processor can work on other processes while waiting for the data to arrive, but if all your programs keep pushing each other out of physical memory, you get thrashing and consider yourself happy if the mouse pointer is still responsive!
That's why I always put my swap file on a RAM drive. Swapping happens a lot, but it's really fast!
Yeah, they'll break, discolor, and not fit together all that well, but they'll be significantly cheaper than genuine Legos [...]
Yeah, that pretty much describes MegaBlocks, all right. And after a couple bad experiences even my kid knows to avoid them now. I don't think LEGO has a lot to fear.
I'm really looking forward to the whole video-game-as-a-sequel-to-a-movie, and have high hopes since the original team have such an involved role in it.
Tron 2.0 was an excellent video-game-as-a-sequel-to-a-movie. It brilliantly captured the feel of the movie, advanced the storyline, and had some of the original actors reprising their roles. Hopefully Ghostbusters can pull it off just as well.
Amen. Don't give everyone a console, just stick one in a common area. We have a Wii in our office and the lunchtime Mario Kart races are a good way to build camaraderie. If everyone had a private console they'd hardly ever get used. For the most part we're not hardcore gamers; we're doing it for the social aspect. Even the ones who are hardcore gamers get their fix in outside of the office.
Whatever console you get, make sure to get some brain-candy games which are easy for non-gamers to play. In the office no one's going to be able to get into a huge RPG. They're going to have 10 or 20 minutes here and there. You need games that anyone can pick up a controller and have fun, without a major learning curve.
BTW, the idea of monitoring the console usage is awful. If your company routinely does that sort of thing, I think you probably have deeper morale issues than can be addressed by video games.
Agreed I think that we should more or less abandon TLD with the exception of the country codes so people can specify a certain localization.
And, more importantly, the country codes allow each nation to define how their own corner of the Internet is organized, and they define which entity has jurisdiction over disputes. Generic TLDs need to be deprecated, not expanded.
"Senator McCain, your campaign is complaining that it is being unfairly censored by the DMCA. How do you reconcile your complaint when you yourself voted for this exact measure?
Simplicity itself. The key is right there in the question: "unfairly censored". Any politician worth the title will be able to argue that the law is sound and just, but that it's being applied incorrectly. This immediately shifts the blame to the other guy, and makes the politician look like the poor maligned victim of unfairness by the commie-pinko left-wing press.
Really, after the outright lies told every day in the campaign (by both sides, I might point out) this question wouldn't even cause McCain to break a sweat. In fact, he probably even believes something very close to what I just wrote.
The hexagonal clouds are no mystery. You see, Saturn is far away. It was never meant to be looked at up close. The Designers just didn't bother to waste a lot of polygons on it to approximate a sphere. It's just a low-poly model with some texturing tricks to hide the edges.
If we want to see it in higher resolution we have to get our spacecraft new graphics cards, that's all.
Have a physics competition show. Something like a crossover between Brainiac, The Incredible Machine and Jackass. Participants get some raw materials and are asked, for example, to make their contraption hurl a bowling ball as far as possible or to fix and fine-tune a light gas gun for use in trap shooting.
You mean like Scrapheap Challenge? Or Escape From Experiment Island? Both were pretty good, though the US version of Scrapheap Challenge ("Junkyard Wars") ended up being edited to emphasize the inter-personal conflict that reality TV seems to thrive on.
A-yup. That's been the big problem with the whole eco-friendly vehicle movement. So far, all the eco-friendly vehicles have a higher total cost of ownership, or are so badly hobbled as to be worthless (ie., Neighborhood Electric Vehicles with a top speed of 25 mph). I would love to get a hybrid or all-electric for my 20-mile (round-trip) daily commute, but even avoiding freeways I still have some 50 mph roads to drive on. The TCO of a hybrid or electric that can do that kind of speed just can't compare to something like an Aveo or Yaris.
It's all about money. The revolution won't come until it's cheaper to buy and operate an electric than it is to buy and operate an internal-combustion vehicle.
I was really excited about the Chevy Volt, until I heard that MSRP is going to be $40k. Yikes! That completely eliminates it from the "economical" category, even if you never had to pay for a single coulomb of electricity for it.
No kidding. My parents got tricked by this one. "Your computer is infected, click here to fix." Yeah, right. But my mom clicked, and got her computer fubar'd. Worse, it fubar'd her ability to run Remote Desktop or Remote Assistance or whatever it's called on XP Home, so I can't login remotely and help her. Either I need to take a three-hour drive to fix it, or she needs to take it to the <shudder> Geek Squad.
Anyone know a good computer tech near Grand Haven, MI?
Personally, I'm not willing to draw any conclusions until I see the results of the FITF (foot-in-the-face) or even better, BTTH (boot-to-the-head) experiments.
No, it's not. At least, not growing faster than the population of gamers is growing.
People have been getting bitten by copy protection ever since the very early days of computer games. Floppy disks for the Apple ][ and C=64 had copy protection, and it caused as many problems then as it does now. It was just as effective then, too -- you could get cracks of any game you wanted if you asked around a bit. It's been nearly 30 years since then. The number of sales lost due to people being pissed at the copy protection was insignificant then, and it's insignificant now. We have yet to see the masses take up arms and throw off the yoke of DRM tyranny.
There's been a full generation of gamers now who could have done something if they cared. They haven't, because for the most part they don't. It just ain't gonna happen.
Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM? Is this the beginning of the end for DRM-laden games?
You have got to be kidding me. The people who care about DRM to the point of it affecting their buying decisions is such a vanishingly small population that it's lost in the statistical noise. Most people just don't care about DRM. Of the ones who do, most of them will buy the game anyway and apply a crack to remove the DRM. The remainder probably wouldn't buy the game anyway; not just because of the DRM, but because it's not released under the GPL.
If Spore is fun, people will suck it up and buy it despite the DRM. If it's not fun, people wouldn't buy it even if it was completely free of DRM. DRM or lack thereof will have no significant impact on sales.
I'm wondering why the beta is available in german rather than a language with more speakers, such as spanish.
I have no inside knowledge of IE8, but I've worked on other localized products before. It's quite likely that the German translators were done, but the Spanish translators were still working on it. In other words, it may not have really been a conscious choice by MS to include German but not Spanish, just an artifact of the translators' schedules.
For a new father approaching 40, the new range of Lego is abysmal. There's zero creativity in them.
It's obvious that you haven't actually seen a child playing with modern Lego sets. My 11yo is in love with the Bionicle series. Since Bionicle was launched pretty much at the same time as he graduated from Duplo, Bionicle == Lego in his mind.
I'm 42, and I had the same worries you do. But you know what? My son's every bit as creative with his Bionicle as I was with the sets 30 years ago. He builds each new set according to the directions. Once. Then he rips it apart and combines it with pieces from all his other sets to make something new. Lather, rinse repeat. I still have all my old Lego bricks; they're in a big bin next to his Bionicle. He sometimes pulls pieces from there for his creations, but mostly sticks to Bionicle parts.
IMHO, when someone our age says that there's "zero creativity" in modern Lego, I think it's more a sign of how calcified we've become. The kids are doing just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
(O)
Huh. Last I knew, Taco lived not too far from me (Dexter, MI). I hadn't heard of any persistent power outages around here, though we did have a nasty wind storm over the past couple days. Could be something as localized as the line that feeds his house. Or maybe...
Hey, Cmdr Taco! Go downstairs and check your breakers!
That's exactly what I want. A standard keyboard, including the inverted-T cursor keys and Insert/Home/etc. block above them. BUT NO STEENKIN' KEYPAD! I simply have no use for the keypad (and yes, I know some people live by it; accountants need not flame me). I'd rather have the mouse that much closer to the typing area. Keypad on left would be workable, too.
Or maybe... just maybe... that sort of music actually is popular. And now that the service is getting to be more mainstream and less the private playground of geeks the charts are starting to reflect more (current) mainstream artists.
A lot of people actually like that crap. Sad but true.
Or the equivalent of FoxyProxy. It annoys me no end that Chrome uses IE's proxy settings. Change one and it changes in the other. That's great if you have one proxy through which everything must be funneled, but that's simply not the case for me. I use Privoxy as an ad filter. When I'm running Windows Update I don't want to burden my poor little underpowered Privoxy server. I really like FoxyProxy's ability to select a proxy based on the URL. Which reminds me, I ought to set up TOR and enable it for certain URL patterns.
And even when they do fill in the tags, they're sloppy about it. Things get misspelled and mislabeled all the time. Most people are very inconsistent about labeling even when they're trying their best to do an honest, thorough job. Okay, let me tag this photo "wife", because has my wife as the subject. And "boat" because she's standing on a boat. And "ocean", because that's where the boat is. Better make that "Atlantic Ocean". Let's add the month, year, and day, too. And the time of day. There. Now I can query for "all pictures of my wife in the Atlantic on a dark and stormy night". Oh, wait, I forgot to tag the weather...
Of course, this doesn't even touch on the problem of people just plain lying about their data to make it more appealing to possible viewers. I want the picture to show in search engines, so I'll tag it "nude", "pr0n", and "teen". Those tags have nothing to do with the picture, of course, but they'll get it noticed.
I don't expect a Semantic Revolution to happen as long as fallible, inconsistent, lying, cheating humans are in the loop.
That's why I always put my swap file on a RAM drive. Swapping happens a lot, but it's really fast!
Yeah, that pretty much describes MegaBlocks, all right. And after a couple bad experiences even my kid knows to avoid them now. I don't think LEGO has a lot to fear.
Tron 2.0 was an excellent video-game-as-a-sequel-to-a-movie. It brilliantly captured the feel of the movie, advanced the storyline, and had some of the original actors reprising their roles. Hopefully Ghostbusters can pull it off just as well.
Amen. Don't give everyone a console, just stick one in a common area. We have a Wii in our office and the lunchtime Mario Kart races are a good way to build camaraderie. If everyone had a private console they'd hardly ever get used. For the most part we're not hardcore gamers; we're doing it for the social aspect. Even the ones who are hardcore gamers get their fix in outside of the office.
Whatever console you get, make sure to get some brain-candy games which are easy for non-gamers to play. In the office no one's going to be able to get into a huge RPG. They're going to have 10 or 20 minutes here and there. You need games that anyone can pick up a controller and have fun, without a major learning curve.
BTW, the idea of monitoring the console usage is awful. If your company routinely does that sort of thing, I think you probably have deeper morale issues than can be addressed by video games.
And, more importantly, the country codes allow each nation to define how their own corner of the Internet is organized, and they define which entity has jurisdiction over disputes. Generic TLDs need to be deprecated, not expanded.
Fixed that for ya.
Don't forget the cell-to-cell handoff surcharge...
Simplicity itself. The key is right there in the question: "unfairly censored". Any politician worth the title will be able to argue that the law is sound and just, but that it's being applied incorrectly. This immediately shifts the blame to the other guy, and makes the politician look like the poor maligned victim of unfairness by the commie-pinko left-wing press.
Really, after the outright lies told every day in the campaign (by both sides, I might point out) this question wouldn't even cause McCain to break a sweat. In fact, he probably even believes something very close to what I just wrote.
The hexagonal clouds are no mystery. You see, Saturn is far away. It was never meant to be looked at up close. The Designers just didn't bother to waste a lot of polygons on it to approximate a sphere. It's just a low-poly model with some texturing tricks to hide the edges.
If we want to see it in higher resolution we have to get our spacecraft new graphics cards, that's all.
You mean like Scrapheap Challenge? Or Escape From Experiment Island? Both were pretty good, though the US version of Scrapheap Challenge ("Junkyard Wars") ended up being edited to emphasize the inter-personal conflict that reality TV seems to thrive on.
A-yup. That's been the big problem with the whole eco-friendly vehicle movement. So far, all the eco-friendly vehicles have a higher total cost of ownership, or are so badly hobbled as to be worthless (ie., Neighborhood Electric Vehicles with a top speed of 25 mph). I would love to get a hybrid or all-electric for my 20-mile (round-trip) daily commute, but even avoiding freeways I still have some 50 mph roads to drive on. The TCO of a hybrid or electric that can do that kind of speed just can't compare to something like an Aveo or Yaris.
It's all about money. The revolution won't come until it's cheaper to buy and operate an electric than it is to buy and operate an internal-combustion vehicle.
I was really excited about the Chevy Volt, until I heard that MSRP is going to be $40k. Yikes! That completely eliminates it from the "economical" category, even if you never had to pay for a single coulomb of electricity for it.
Of course not. He was the guy in that play. "O Romero, Romero, wherefore art thou Romero?"
No kidding. My parents got tricked by this one. "Your computer is infected, click here to fix." Yeah, right. But my mom clicked, and got her computer fubar'd. Worse, it fubar'd her ability to run Remote Desktop or Remote Assistance or whatever it's called on XP Home, so I can't login remotely and help her. Either I need to take a three-hour drive to fix it, or she needs to take it to the <shudder> Geek Squad.
Anyone know a good computer tech near Grand Haven, MI?
Personally, I'm not willing to draw any conclusions until I see the results of the FITF (foot-in-the-face) or even better, BTTH (boot-to-the-head) experiments.
No, it's not. At least, not growing faster than the population of gamers is growing.
People have been getting bitten by copy protection ever since the very early days of computer games. Floppy disks for the Apple ][ and C=64 had copy protection, and it caused as many problems then as it does now. It was just as effective then, too -- you could get cracks of any game you wanted if you asked around a bit. It's been nearly 30 years since then. The number of sales lost due to people being pissed at the copy protection was insignificant then, and it's insignificant now. We have yet to see the masses take up arms and throw off the yoke of DRM tyranny.
There's been a full generation of gamers now who could have done something if they cared. They haven't, because for the most part they don't. It just ain't gonna happen.
You have got to be kidding me. The people who care about DRM to the point of it affecting their buying decisions is such a vanishingly small population that it's lost in the statistical noise. Most people just don't care about DRM. Of the ones who do, most of them will buy the game anyway and apply a crack to remove the DRM. The remainder probably wouldn't buy the game anyway; not just because of the DRM, but because it's not released under the GPL.
If Spore is fun, people will suck it up and buy it despite the DRM. If it's not fun, people wouldn't buy it even if it was completely free of DRM. DRM or lack thereof will have no significant impact on sales.
I have no inside knowledge of IE8, but I've worked on other localized products before. It's quite likely that the German translators were done, but the Spanish translators were still working on it. In other words, it may not have really been a conscious choice by MS to include German but not Spanish, just an artifact of the translators' schedules.
It's obvious that you haven't actually seen a child playing with modern Lego sets. My 11yo is in love with the Bionicle series. Since Bionicle was launched pretty much at the same time as he graduated from Duplo, Bionicle == Lego in his mind.
I'm 42, and I had the same worries you do. But you know what? My son's every bit as creative with his Bionicle as I was with the sets 30 years ago. He builds each new set according to the directions. Once. Then he rips it apart and combines it with pieces from all his other sets to make something new. Lather, rinse repeat. I still have all my old Lego bricks; they're in a big bin next to his Bionicle. He sometimes pulls pieces from there for his creations, but mostly sticks to Bionicle parts.
IMHO, when someone our age says that there's "zero creativity" in modern Lego, I think it's more a sign of how calcified we've become. The kids are doing just fine.
Really? You mean now there's a goal other than fighting until either you or the bad guys are dead?
To make you go slower so it can kill you easier.
It can kill you by hitting you, by zapping you, by freezing you, by burning you...
Or you'll be killed.
I may be dense, but it sounds to me like it still boils down to, "the challenge is to avoid being killed".