To me, even the pre-installation of Windows (or Mac, or Linux) for a flat charge on the laptop doesn't really make much sense. It isn't as though a Dell Inspiron Model X with Windows has inheritly different hardware then Dell Inspiron Model X with *nix. I consider purchasing a computer as purchasing the hardware itself + some assembly cost, much like buying a car. The only difference is that a computer isn't "usable" without an OS, that choice should be much like selecting custom paint for the car. If you want Windows version Y, then you pay some extra charge like "premium paint". If you want Linux, then you pay some smaller cost for some Dell monkey somewhere to create/install a Dell configured Ubuntu/RHEL/*BSD/whatever. The catch is they leave the choice to the consumer, and many computer manufacturers already do this. Why should an OS choice be any different than selecting a HD size or amount of RAM? Isn't that akin to a premium stereo or custom rims?
Then you have a base-price for just the hardware, and you can do whatever you want with it. If you have another Windows license lying around, then you can use that. If you want to install your own custom Linux, you're free to do that too.
Glider - Sailplane, RV-10. Assuming gliders get pulled behind a smaller aircraft, we're looking at cruise height around 8,000 ft.
Looks to me like the biggest concern is really about cruise height in open spaces, and about regulation of the different aircraft in populated areas. Given that all commercial aircraft have flight paths, the problem gets to be a little less intense since we know where the big aircraft are. Also, using a predator as an example of a UAV may not be the greatest example for what they are trying to get at here, though I doubt seriously they are looking to replace commercial airline pilots within the next few years.
They use the Linux platform to the absolute max, leveraging all the blood and sweat Linux developers poured into its development over the past 15 years, and yet, not contributing back any of their most significant enhancements.
I won't call it evil, as they're under no obligation to release GoogleFS or their map reduce implementations, it's just unkind.
If these are both true (for the sake of argument) and GoogleFS is based on an existing *nix FS, or requires special kernel drivers, aren't they required to release the source based on BSD, GPL, or Apache licenses?
... in Populous, for example, it was the modeling of behaviour of relatively large populations, and giving the player seemingly great powers to drive those. (SimCity did something similar in that sense at around the same time, but I don't know of many other mainstream games that did.)
Another game that comes to mind is Ascendancy. That game had a lot of ideas combined into one. It wasn't as battle-driven as Warcraft/Starcraft, but it did follow a similar notion of "build my species up" and conquest of solar systems. In that regard it was similar to Populous and SimCity, allowing for very diverse arrangement of factories, starports, farms, etc... and every decision you made impacted everything you did. You would put resources into research instead of colonization, for example. For those that haven't tried it, see if you can get a copy, it's worth it.
This hints at a poor business model. I pay Amazon to get content on a device run by them, but I'm a subscriber to a foreign company (TWSJ). It's almost like having iPods only work with the iTunes store to add content (no other downloads, CD ripping, etc...), then Apple sending all your user information to the RIAA, just so when you pick up the Zune (HA!), the RIAA already has your info, so you switch to MS as the middle man. A more "fair" way would be to use that distributer to get a device-agnostic format (pdf, mp3, whatever) that could be used on many devices, then the source (RIAA, WSJ) would still remain out of the loop and only provide content. That's effectively what we do now with all retailers. Best Buy may care about how much money I spend with them, but it's none of Sony's damned business when I pick up a ps3 game.
As one of my professors once said: "How do we go from billions of neural synapses to midget wrestling?" While amusing, it points out one of our great unknowns. Biologists and neuroscientists (some psychologists) understand things at the synapse level, and how the chained firing happens in neurons. Then psychologists understand normal behavior by examining abnormal behavior, but that's at a much higher level. We simply don't know how to map out what's in between.
There are a number of things to consider when designing any game:
Define your target audience. Even kids ages 8-12 vary quite a bit. Are you targeting girls? boys? What do you percieve to be their interests? Get some kids in your target age range to tell you about games they like and see if you can borrow some concepts. Keep them involved in testing too. The reason shows like "Dora the explorer" are so popular is because the kid feels as though they are joining in the adventure.
Define your story. Every good game as some sort of objective, even puzzle games. Educational games are no different. Is there some Antagonist involved? "Beating level 7" is not as interesting as "taking down the evil emperor". With a younger audience, keep it simple and reasonable. Maybe becoming the star player of some game (soccer, baseball, etc..) or the best race car driver would work.
Define your approach. Using your story, how are some ways you can progress through it? If the objective is to conquer territory, then you'd have some way to win the game neighborhood-by-neighborhood. Almost Zelda-like in that you take down dungeon by dungeon before facing Ganon. Also consider the attention span of your audience. If you have one level that takes them 20 minutes of repetitive playing, you may lose a lot of players. If you're doing some sort of platform game, you may consider having some way to save progress. If you're doing simple web app games, then you'll want to keep them short and sweet.
We used this book in a game design class I took. While certainly not an end-all-be-all book on game design, it certainly got the class thinking about some of the subtleties in games. How to approach accomplishment in the game, how to encourage the player to keep going (important for younger ones so they don't get frustrated), etc...
What is truly remarkable about this particular story is they say their son started this training Saturday, and was declared dead on Sunday (3 am was it?). Even worse, the mission statement said their methods were "harsh, but no harm will be done", yet the body was bloody and showed signs of restraint and struggle (handcuff bruising on his wrists).
The poor kid didn't even make it one day, yet the camp took a stand much like the Chinese government, denying that anything happened and that the kid had a fever. Apparently in China fevers involve a bruised/bloodied face and handcuffs. China has had attention called to it's human rights violations before, now that we are seeing the murder of a child that didn't do anything wrong in worldwide news, maybe we'll start seeing global pressure on China to change their ways a bit.
On a related note, one thing that I have seen in almost every long-term marriage (15+ year) was making time for "us". For my wife and I, that generally means one "date night" a week, we either go to a nice dinner and chat, or go have fun somewhere. It could even be a quiet night at home, but we drop everything else we are doing (household projects, chores, etc...) to do something togethor. With both of us working full time and going to school, we needed to make sure we had time to break away from stresses and have "us time".
My wife and I have lived together for over six years now and as far as I know, we never truly argued.
That's because you and your wife have learned another key aspect of being in a relationship. There's a world of value in knowing which battles to pick and how to approach them, and knowing when to just shut up and let something slide.
When Farrah Fawcett arrived at heaven, God granted her one wish. She wished for all the children in the world to be safe. So God killed Michael Jackson
Yet the Jonas Brothers were spared? Where's the justice in that?
They can build an island just offshore from WA in international waters, set up their own nation, declare financial independence from the U.S. and every other nation. They can then set up commuter ferries to make the trek to/from the "mainland" take an extra couple hours a day. Then a couple things can happen, either 1) We set up trade embargos and they still get the rear admiral from the Gov, or 2) the employees get sick of the shenanigans and move to another company (say, Apple? RedHat?).
OK: I have be benefit of not knowing exactly what the tender was for, but it appears to include ''support and maintenance''. Assuming that MS s/ware is provided could not this support be provided by a local Swiss company rather than directly with MS ?
''Applications'' is horribly vague.
Likewise they *could* go with RHEL and get support from Redhat directly, among various other "commercial" Linux distros. They *could* have also hired a small team of college students with their Ubuntu CD's. Hell, for $15, I'd drive around installing a free OS.
"Devout believers are safe-guarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of building a personal one." - Sigmund Freud
The saddest part of your story is that it's true. I know a guy whose only "management" experience was being a raid leader for a couple years. He interviewed for a management job, and got it, solely because he was able to organize and keep track of ~40 people on a regular basis.
It's been suggested before, in Albuquerque, (build a green roof). Their references? Here and Here. Albuquerque isn't that large of city (~half million people, can go from edge to edge in 20 minutes, with traffic... 12 without), so I'm not sure it would do too much on the grand scheme of things for the entire city to "go green" with their roofing.
On the downside, whitewashed walls look butt ugly.
You obviously missed the previous "mooning" thread. It's not the whitewash that makes it look butt ugly, it's asses hanging out of every window that makes it butt ugly.
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To me, even the pre-installation of Windows (or Mac, or Linux) for a flat charge on the laptop doesn't really make much sense. It isn't as though a Dell Inspiron Model X with Windows has inheritly different hardware then Dell Inspiron Model X with *nix. I consider purchasing a computer as purchasing the hardware itself + some assembly cost, much like buying a car. The only difference is that a computer isn't "usable" without an OS, that choice should be much like selecting custom paint for the car. If you want Windows version Y, then you pay some extra charge like "premium paint". If you want Linux, then you pay some smaller cost for some Dell monkey somewhere to create/install a Dell configured Ubuntu/RHEL/*BSD/whatever. The catch is they leave the choice to the consumer, and many computer manufacturers already do this. Why should an OS choice be any different than selecting a HD size or amount of RAM? Isn't that akin to a premium stereo or custom rims?
Then you have a base-price for just the hardware, and you can do whatever you want with it. If you have another Windows license lying around, then you can use that. If you want to install your own custom Linux, you're free to do that too.
Just a point of reference--
Looks to me like the biggest concern is really about cruise height in open spaces, and about regulation of the different aircraft in populated areas. Given that all commercial aircraft have flight paths, the problem gets to be a little less intense since we know where the big aircraft are. Also, using a predator as an example of a UAV may not be the greatest example for what they are trying to get at here, though I doubt seriously they are looking to replace commercial airline pilots within the next few years.
They use the Linux platform to the absolute max, leveraging all the blood and sweat Linux developers poured into its development over the past 15 years, and yet, not contributing back any of their most significant enhancements.
I won't call it evil, as they're under no obligation to release GoogleFS or their map reduce implementations, it's just unkind.
If these are both true (for the sake of argument) and GoogleFS is based on an existing *nix FS, or requires special kernel drivers, aren't they required to release the source based on BSD, GPL, or Apache licenses?
+5 funny... watch me be informative!
I'm not smarter than a 5th grader! U.S.A! U.S.A!
... in Populous, for example, it was the modeling of behaviour of relatively large populations, and giving the player seemingly great powers to drive those. (SimCity did something similar in that sense at around the same time, but I don't know of many other mainstream games that did.)
Another game that comes to mind is Ascendancy. That game had a lot of ideas combined into one. It wasn't as battle-driven as Warcraft/Starcraft, but it did follow a similar notion of "build my species up" and conquest of solar systems. In that regard it was similar to Populous and SimCity, allowing for very diverse arrangement of factories, starports, farms, etc... and every decision you made impacted everything you did. You would put resources into research instead of colonization, for example. For those that haven't tried it, see if you can get a copy, it's worth it.
Here's a couple about twitter: here and here.
light pressure for lower case 'a', harder pressure for upper case 'A', and abrupt spikes in pressure for expletives "#$@^%^!".
This hints at a poor business model. I pay Amazon to get content on a device run by them, but I'm a subscriber to a foreign company (TWSJ). It's almost like having iPods only work with the iTunes store to add content (no other downloads, CD ripping, etc...), then Apple sending all your user information to the RIAA, just so when you pick up the Zune (HA!), the RIAA already has your info, so you switch to MS as the middle man. A more "fair" way would be to use that distributer to get a device-agnostic format (pdf, mp3, whatever) that could be used on many devices, then the source (RIAA, WSJ) would still remain out of the loop and only provide content. That's effectively what we do now with all retailers. Best Buy may care about how much money I spend with them, but it's none of Sony's damned business when I pick up a ps3 game.
As one of my professors once said: "How do we go from billions of neural synapses to midget wrestling?" While amusing, it points out one of our great unknowns. Biologists and neuroscientists (some psychologists) understand things at the synapse level, and how the chained firing happens in neurons. Then psychologists understand normal behavior by examining abnormal behavior, but that's at a much higher level. We simply don't know how to map out what's in between.
Even worse that half the team died of disentery (or whatever the most common disease was).
We used this book in a game design class I took. While certainly not an end-all-be-all book on game design, it certainly got the class thinking about some of the subtleties in games. How to approach accomplishment in the game, how to encourage the player to keep going (important for younger ones so they don't get frustrated), etc...
What is truly remarkable about this particular story is they say their son started this training Saturday, and was declared dead on Sunday (3 am was it?). Even worse, the mission statement said their methods were "harsh, but no harm will be done", yet the body was bloody and showed signs of restraint and struggle (handcuff bruising on his wrists).
The poor kid didn't even make it one day, yet the camp took a stand much like the Chinese government, denying that anything happened and that the kid had a fever. Apparently in China fevers involve a bruised/bloodied face and handcuffs. China has had attention called to it's human rights violations before, now that we are seeing the murder of a child that didn't do anything wrong in worldwide news, maybe we'll start seeing global pressure on China to change their ways a bit.
On a related note, one thing that I have seen in almost every long-term marriage (15+ year) was making time for "us". For my wife and I, that generally means one "date night" a week, we either go to a nice dinner and chat, or go have fun somewhere. It could even be a quiet night at home, but we drop everything else we are doing (household projects, chores, etc...) to do something togethor. With both of us working full time and going to school, we needed to make sure we had time to break away from stresses and have "us time".
My wife and I have lived together for over six years now and as far as I know, we never truly argued.
That's because you and your wife have learned another key aspect of being in a relationship. There's a world of value in knowing which battles to pick and how to approach them, and knowing when to just shut up and let something slide.
When Farrah Fawcett arrived at heaven, God granted her one wish. She wished for all the children in the world to be safe. So God killed Michael Jackson
Yet the Jonas Brothers were spared? Where's the justice in that?
They can build an island just offshore from WA in international waters, set up their own nation, declare financial independence from the U.S. and every other nation. They can then set up commuter ferries to make the trek to/from the "mainland" take an extra couple hours a day. Then a couple things can happen, either 1) We set up trade embargos and they still get the rear admiral from the Gov, or 2) the employees get sick of the shenanigans and move to another company (say, Apple? RedHat?).
I meant $15 million :-/, though given the US economy, $15 might not be half bad...
OK: I have be benefit of not knowing exactly what the tender was for, but it appears to include ''support and maintenance''. Assuming that MS s/ware is provided could not this support be provided by a local Swiss company rather than directly with MS ?
''Applications'' is horribly vague.
Likewise they *could* go with RHEL and get support from Redhat directly, among various other "commercial" Linux distros. They *could* have also hired a small team of college students with their Ubuntu CD's. Hell, for $15, I'd drive around installing a free OS.
And give MS more publicity? NEVER!
"Devout believers are safe-guarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of building a personal one." - Sigmund Freud
The saddest part of your story is that it's true. I know a guy whose only "management" experience was being a raid leader for a couple years. He interviewed for a management job, and got it, solely because he was able to organize and keep track of ~40 people on a regular basis.
It's been suggested before, in Albuquerque, (build a green roof). Their references? Here and Here. Albuquerque isn't that large of city (~half million people, can go from edge to edge in 20 minutes, with traffic... 12 without), so I'm not sure it would do too much on the grand scheme of things for the entire city to "go green" with their roofing.
On the downside, whitewashed walls look butt ugly.
You obviously missed the previous "mooning" thread. It's not the whitewash that makes it look butt ugly, it's asses hanging out of every window that makes it butt ugly.
How the hell did they get DVD's up there to begin with? Aren't there some checks for 'contraband' before they even get on the shuttle?
And please tell me one of the DVD's was Apollo 13. That would be hilarious.