I used to get crushed by level 1 on most chest programs for years... until sometime a couple years ago I actually (more for general/novelty interest) picked up a "beginner"-style book on chess openings. You can't believe how much it helps to know how to properly open the first four or five moves in a game. You can bet the chess programs probably do, and if you don't know the most proper responses, then it seems to me that you've basically thrown away most any chance you have at the whole game, since the program is way ahead with a strong board position. (Turns out, there are reasons why there are so many thick tomes on openings.;-)
Except don't some locks you buy in DIY/home stores come in systems? They'd probably have a master key in the series for the lot of them. Now then, assuming something like that is the case, people who live in cookie-cutter neighborhoods (and/or apartment buildings) where the contractors all probably installed locks from the same supplier might (?) be at similar risk. Just a random thought.
Trip to the ballpark with teenage son: $25. Trip to computer store for card reader: $100. Trip to radio shack for odds-n-ends: $30. Look on son's face when he cracks into the secret pr0n cache on your new credit card: Priceless.
Connecticut, third smallest state, has 11-digit dialing if you're calling more than your or an adjacent "town". But here, what infuriates me every time (and is no doubt a conspiracy;) is that, not only can I not figure out when I need more than seven digits, but the automated voice (that comes on after the three "beep" tones) says "I'm sorry, but you must dial the area code first, and then the number." So I do that, and what do I get? "[beep beep beep!] I'm sorry, you must first dial a '1', and then the area code and the number." WTF? Why couldn't the first message tell me that? So then once I decided to get ahead of the game and dial all 11 digits, knowing the call was more than 100ft from my apartment, and I then got (I'm not making this up) "[beep beep beep!] Please do not dial a '1', or the area code, to make this call." I've about given up trying to understand, what with the few shreds of sanity I have left and all.;-)
...you don't have the localness that you do with DJ Bob and the morning show talking about something that happened 1 town over the previous evening.
...which is exactly why I personally gave up on radio in my area. Between 7:00 and 8:00 am (going-to-work hour) the "DJ"s do some morning show which seems to involve a lot of flatulence jokes. Funny when I was five. Less funny now. Between 5:00 and 6:00 (going-home hour) it is even worse since the "DJ"s drone on ad nauseum about some inane bit of minutiae of their life that isn't interesting, informative, or funny. These two "hours" play maybe 15-20 minutes of music a-piece, and there really isn't another station in the area that plays similar stuff to my liking.
Same. Myself and several colleagues from work were following the initial news about NWN in hopes we could all "game" from home rather than worrying about whose house/apt to go to (etc. etc.). Basically, we were split 50/50 between windows and linux users, and as a consequence of the Linux client not being in the initial release (and the subsequent continual delays), not one of us (half dozen?) have bought a copy, and no one brings the subject up either. We all had hope for it, but the realities of release fell far short of the promises. Ah well...
I just grabbed my Visor and wrote "x". Two strokes.
... which is/was always odd to me, since I write "x" in just a single stroke by not lifting the stylus (similar to a reverse-k) and thereby increasing the overall accuracy of me getting an "x".
At my advanced age of 29, I find myself gravitating over to what you described. I used to be all bent on doing anything and everything on a computer, but I also think (?) that there were not nearly so many technical hurdles ten years ago either so that a person could keep up. (Not that I don't advocate progress or anything.) Now-a-days, I can't keep up with a lot of the hardware acronyms, much less keep a system "respectable" enough to game and/or watch movies on. At any rate, about the only thing I'm doing on my box is web/e-mail anyway, so I don't need to upgrade my hardware (except that the HD is dying, and good luck finding a new one my aged mobo can actually use. *sigh*). Plus, as I recently got a PS2 for Christmas, I think I'm largely converted from needing a PC game platform. (No fussing with installations, registration nags, directX, monitor drivers, sound drivers, etc.... and/or wine configs. Just drop it in and turn it on and play.)
What I am noticing more and more (not that it wasn't ever the case, just that *I* am noticing) is that all friends and family (mine and my wife's) pretty much only use the computer for web/e-mail themselves. (One particularly "techie" uncle occasionally tries moving pictures off his new-fangled camera to it, but that's about the only other thing.) They themselves don't need a computer for any more than as a tool for web/e-mail, and whatever OS came on it (Win'98, XP, whatever) is just fine for them... they don't know about updates, patches, or anything, and don't really want to know. If "it breaks" for any reason, they take the box down the street and pay someone $40 to look at it, plus time and parts for repairs. (I use to help as I could, but I just couldn't stay current on everything, and now don't have interest to.)
Going slightly OT: Many of us here take pride knowing that we run systems free of "Microsoft". But the thing is, friends and family, more often than not, have no idea what I mean when I tell them "I don't run (Microsoft | Windows)". They aren't impressed, shocked, mystified... I might as well be speaking a foreign tongue. Now, this all being the case, it is no longer any wonder to me why MS is so remarkably dominant. Heck, even I myself am quickly losing interest in "computers" as a hobby; I'll most likely keep a current RH distro in my box as a matter of principle, but had I never been introduced to Linux and then OS in general (plus the concept of "choice", etc.) I'd probably be just like the rest of my friends and family: content to use an old, crufty box for web and e-mail since it is good enough for that, and other home electronics per their function. What occurs to me is that this is somewhat the very philosophy of UNIX itself: smaller, discrete programs that can be connected together rather than a single, monolithic "thing".
Your hypotheticals 1,2,3 are enough to worry someone that dual-boots. (i.e., myself on one of my home systems). However, I'm not sure that point 4 would happen quite so suddenly. A new "MSOY/BO" protocol wouldn't be understood magically by non-MS systems (i.e., Unix running Apache servers, etc.). Now, it might cause the final schism between those that use MS and those that do not, but I wonder, what with all the complete b*llsh*t we put up with since the 'net turned commercial and branded, would that be a bad thing? At any rate, your points got me thinking. Thanks for that. =)
Re:These will NOT replace coasters
on
Robocoaster
·
· Score: 1
Finally, riding coasters is a bit of a psychological ordeal. You are conquering your fears/challenging yourself/trying to push yourself in some way. Sims don't really offer this aspect.
Hear, hear! (?) The only real fear I've ever had growing up was that of rollercoasters. I had been on a couple good and a couple cheesy sims of coasters, and it is/was completely different. The aspect of my mind saying "yeah, but we're 2 feet of the ground and have no net displacement" overrode all the visual/audio cues in the sim. (Whether that was my mind defending/rationalizing against real coaster fear... I dunno). I did finally conquer the general fear and anxiety (and in fact remember then when/where/who associated with said moment), and am a minor enthusiast now. So, while sims are entertaining enough in their way, they aren't the same and for me can't stand in as replacement.
In addition to the finger stretches (see parent), here's a nice wrist stretch: put your hands (palms) together in front of you, fingers pointed away and hands touching chest. Keeping your hands together and arms in the same general position, rotate them so the fingers point upward to the ceiling for a couple seconds, then rotate them so that the fingers point downward to the floor for a couple seconds. Repeat. (I could also recommend a number of wrist exercises we do in Aikido, but they're too tricky to explain in flat text.)
And I was hoping to join up and inform them that John Ashcroft wears women's underwear.
Studies show that about half the population of earth wear women's underwear. Sheesh, talking about making a big thing out of... [checks statistics]. Err... right. nevermind.;-)
Regarding Yahoo, my local telco dialup service recently went over to "SBC Yahoo! Dial" service, where my dialup phone number, DNS, POP/SMTP, etc. all needed to be changed. Why's this interesting? Because doing this (i.e., staying on the same service, which has been pretty solid, actually, for a renter that can't get broadband) required getting a Yahoo account setup... since my dialup and e-mail send/retrieval passwords are now connected to my new Yahoo account. Joy...
I can say this with personal experience: starting a new player (or really, a new account, as you're meaning) on an existing, been-around-a-while server can be pretty hard. The thing that chapped my hide (and is why I stopped playing EQ... personal opinion follows) is that the people who have been around long enough to have a moderately high level (40+ - ish) character can "buy" their new character completely out of the newbie stage. The most annoying thing was playing honest, not having enough game-cash to self-twink a new character, and seeing similar characters at my level running around with rare, powerful items that drop in very high level zones/encounters. That my character's gear was honestly level-appropriate put me at a disadvantage as a player. Not that I'm whining about it... the game's design lets that happen to some extent, so it will happen. With a mid-level character that I worked hard for, I finally got frustrated enough that I just left the game and have spent my time elsewhere. For this consideration, it might be arguable that it would only be fair to a huge influx of new characters(accounts) to all start on their own servers where, for at least a little while, startup issues are balanced.
Now, I haven't been or around EQ in a while, but the biggest thing that would counteract the above problem is for uber-strong items to not be useable *at all* (except in the most mundane way) by any character whose level is lower than X. (Somewhat the way Diablo seemed to handle things.) As I was leaving, they were addressing whether a monster would drop an item to a overly high leveled character to keep people/guilds from "camping out" on the monsters, collecting the items, and selling them for straight cash: only thing this accomplished in the long term was devaluation of said item and one less place for appropriately levelled people to hunt. The fix for this seems a positive step, but it still doesn't address the possibility of someone starting a new character and buying common items to effectively max-out their primary attributes with an immediate effect.
I wasn't around for the dawn of the internet, but I wonder when it started to suck, the first real indication it was going to become some commercialized, overused, underutilized resource for the masses.
For me, the first real [related] indications happened when the tv and web became aware of each other: car commercials started including their URL (for me, seeing toyota was the first one), food/drink commercials with URLs (such as M&M's and Sprite), and search engines (the great horde of them of the time) advertising on TV rather than just the trade mags where we were used to seeing them. This all seemed to happen in the same few months. This was the point when I think the snowball started rolling down the mountain.
Not only DOES wine run starcraft, but for the box(en) I have available, windows does NOT run starcraft where I can actually play it. Linux/wine had no problems. I found that rather funny.
Recall emails. Can you recall an email after you sent it? I see people doing that all the time, i normally turn it off so they cant recall and hide the evidence.
"Recall" is an Outlook hack (in my opinion and understanding). It sends a second message that tells the client "hey, if you got this other message, and it is still on the server, and the user hasn't read it yet, and they haven't turned this feature off, and its Tuesday and raining, then silently delete that message before the user sees it."
Given at work I have all my mail configured to re-route into a PST, "recalls" don't work, so I get two messages from some dork. (Worked out great once to figure out who the hell was anonymously spamming the entire company every day and redirect some geek hell on his a$$, but that's another story... when the first message had his full sig accidentally appended.)
I don't know if Evo. supports a way of doing this (i.e., sending a message that causes another message to disappear) but I'd wager it would rely on the server and/or client to know what/how to do this, and given you can't control your mom or grandmother's AOL client (generic "your"), I can't imagine it'd serve much purpose.
MS Outlook innovation? Depends on your point of view, I guess.
So for years we have all bought CD-ROM players for our computers to play audio CDs. How many millions of them are floating around now-a-days? And now the music industry seems to be taking an attitude of thumbing its nose at us. You know, my wife and I don't have a stereo/CD/home entertainment center. (We've been saving up to one day buy a nice one.) On top of that, I haven't really bought a CD in a long time (aside maybe from a couple soundtracks). The way things are going, I might as well save the cash on buying a CD player component all together: I won't have CD's to play on it since in the meantime they won't play on my PC. Gee... start calling me Blue Beard, I guess. I never thought *I* would come to this. (sigh)
And make it very clear in writing ( polite, paper mail ) why its being done.
[CUT] If we dont stop it, then the others will follow suit shortly afterwards.
Wonder if we shouldn't be sending letters to all the others who are watching and might follow along later. BMG is probably too committed to the action now, so let the others know before hand that you (we) no longer support BMG as a customer. Giving the others data in time to make decisions might serve more good. Just a thought.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose bringing the subtleties of noun-noun hyphenation into the discussion, then, would be a Bad Thing? (j/k ;)
I used to get crushed by level 1 on most chest programs for years... until sometime a couple years ago I actually (more for general/novelty interest) picked up a "beginner"-style book on chess openings. You can't believe how much it helps to know how to properly open the first four or five moves in a game. You can bet the chess programs probably do, and if you don't know the most proper responses, then it seems to me that you've basically thrown away most any chance you have at the whole game, since the program is way ahead with a strong board position. (Turns out, there are reasons why there are so many thick tomes on openings. ;-)
Except don't some locks you buy in DIY/home stores come in systems? They'd probably have a master key in the series for the lot of them. Now then, assuming something like that is the case, people who live in cookie-cutter neighborhoods (and/or apartment buildings) where the contractors all probably installed locks from the same supplier might (?) be at similar risk. Just a random thought.
Trip to the ballpark with teenage son: $25.
Trip to computer store for card reader: $100.
Trip to radio shack for odds-n-ends: $30.
Look on son's face when he cracks into the secret pr0n cache on your new credit card: Priceless.
Connecticut, third smallest state, has 11-digit dialing if you're calling more than your or an adjacent "town". But here, what infuriates me every time (and is no doubt a conspiracy ;) is that, not only can I not figure out when I need more than seven digits, but the automated voice (that comes on after the three "beep" tones) says "I'm sorry, but you must dial the area code first, and then the number." So I do that, and what do I get? "[beep beep beep!] I'm sorry, you must first dial a '1', and then the area code and the number." WTF? Why couldn't the first message tell me that? So then once I decided to get ahead of the game and dial all 11 digits, knowing the call was more than 100ft from my apartment, and I then got (I'm not making this up) "[beep beep beep!] Please do not dial a '1', or the area code, to make this call." I've about given up trying to understand, what with the few shreds of sanity I have left and all. ;-)
...you don't have the localness that you do with DJ Bob and the morning show talking about something that happened 1 town over the previous evening.
...which is exactly why I personally gave up on radio in my area. Between 7:00 and 8:00 am (going-to-work hour) the "DJ"s do some morning show which seems to involve a lot of flatulence jokes. Funny when I was five. Less funny now. Between 5:00 and 6:00 (going-home hour) it is even worse since the "DJ"s drone on ad nauseum about some inane bit of minutiae of their life that isn't interesting, informative, or funny. These two "hours" play maybe 15-20 minutes of music a-piece, and there really isn't another station in the area that plays similar stuff to my liking.
Same. Myself and several colleagues from work were following the initial news about NWN in hopes we could all "game" from home rather than worrying about whose house/apt to go to (etc. etc.). Basically, we were split 50/50 between windows and linux users, and as a consequence of the Linux client not being in the initial release (and the subsequent continual delays), not one of us (half dozen?) have bought a copy, and no one brings the subject up either. We all had hope for it, but the realities of release fell far short of the promises. Ah well...
I just grabbed my Visor and wrote "x". Two strokes.
... which is/was always odd to me, since I write "x" in just a single stroke by not lifting the stylus (similar to a reverse-k) and thereby increasing the overall accuracy of me getting an "x".
At my advanced age of 29, I find myself gravitating over to what you described. I used to be all bent on doing anything and everything on a computer, but I also think (?) that there were not nearly so many technical hurdles ten years ago either so that a person could keep up. (Not that I don't advocate progress or anything.) Now-a-days, I can't keep up with a lot of the hardware acronyms, much less keep a system "respectable" enough to game and/or watch movies on. At any rate, about the only thing I'm doing on my box is web/e-mail anyway, so I don't need to upgrade my hardware (except that the HD is dying, and good luck finding a new one my aged mobo can actually use. *sigh*). Plus, as I recently got a PS2 for Christmas, I think I'm largely converted from needing a PC game platform. (No fussing with installations, registration nags, directX, monitor drivers, sound drivers, etc.... and/or wine configs. Just drop it in and turn it on and play.)
What I am noticing more and more (not that it wasn't ever the case, just that *I* am noticing) is that all friends and family (mine and my wife's) pretty much only use the computer for web/e-mail themselves. (One particularly "techie" uncle occasionally tries moving pictures off his new-fangled camera to it, but that's about the only other thing.) They themselves don't need a computer for any more than as a tool for web/e-mail, and whatever OS came on it (Win'98, XP, whatever) is just fine for them... they don't know about updates, patches, or anything, and don't really want to know. If "it breaks" for any reason, they take the box down the street and pay someone $40 to look at it, plus time and parts for repairs. (I use to help as I could, but I just couldn't stay current on everything, and now don't have interest to.)
Going slightly OT: Many of us here take pride knowing that we run systems free of "Microsoft". But the thing is, friends and family, more often than not, have no idea what I mean when I tell them "I don't run (Microsoft | Windows)". They aren't impressed, shocked, mystified... I might as well be speaking a foreign tongue. Now, this all being the case, it is no longer any wonder to me why MS is so remarkably dominant. Heck, even I myself am quickly losing interest in "computers" as a hobby; I'll most likely keep a current RH distro in my box as a matter of principle, but had I never been introduced to Linux and then OS in general (plus the concept of "choice", etc.) I'd probably be just like the rest of my friends and family: content to use an old, crufty box for web and e-mail since it is good enough for that, and other home electronics per their function. What occurs to me is that this is somewhat the very philosophy of UNIX itself: smaller, discrete programs that can be connected together rather than a single, monolithic "thing".
Your hypotheticals 1,2,3 are enough to worry someone that dual-boots. (i.e., myself on one of my home systems). However, I'm not sure that point 4 would happen quite so suddenly. A new "MSOY/BO" protocol wouldn't be understood magically by non-MS systems (i.e., Unix running Apache servers, etc.). Now, it might cause the final schism between those that use MS and those that do not, but I wonder, what with all the complete b*llsh*t we put up with since the 'net turned commercial and branded, would that be a bad thing? At any rate, your points got me thinking. Thanks for that. =)
Finally, riding coasters is a bit of a psychological ordeal. You are conquering your fears/challenging yourself/trying to push yourself in some way. Sims don't really offer this aspect.
Hear, hear! (?) The only real fear I've ever had growing up was that of rollercoasters. I had been on a couple good and a couple cheesy sims of coasters, and it is/was completely different. The aspect of my mind saying "yeah, but we're 2 feet of the ground and have no net displacement" overrode all the visual/audio cues in the sim. (Whether that was my mind defending/rationalizing against real coaster fear... I dunno). I did finally conquer the general fear and anxiety (and in fact remember then when/where/who associated with said moment), and am a minor enthusiast now. So, while sims are entertaining enough in their way, they aren't the same and for me can't stand in as replacement.
What about the real geek gifts? World domination? A Beowulf cluster? Or what all geeks are in need of. A girlfriend.
All possible with the appropriate application of money, but dude, you got any idea how much that last item takes?
In addition to the finger stretches (see parent), here's a nice wrist stretch: put your hands (palms) together in front of you, fingers pointed away and hands touching chest. Keeping your hands together and arms in the same general position, rotate them so the fingers point upward to the ceiling for a couple seconds, then rotate them so that the fingers point downward to the floor for a couple seconds. Repeat. (I could also recommend a number of wrist exercises we do in Aikido, but they're too tricky to explain in flat text.)
Relatedly, the first thing that came to my mind was...
Person A: qwd43f1dvzs21sdfa1sdv....
Person B: So you're a southpaw, eh?
I know everyone was saying how better and more secure BSD is, but didn't we hear how RC5 was cracked? Why the heck would I want RC1, then? ;-)
And I was hoping to join up and inform them that John Ashcroft wears women's underwear.
... [checks statistics]. Err... right. nevermind. ;-)
Studies show that about half the population of earth wear women's underwear. Sheesh, talking about making a big thing out of
Regarding Yahoo, my local telco dialup service recently went over to "SBC Yahoo! Dial" service, where my dialup phone number, DNS, POP/SMTP, etc. all needed to be changed. Why's this interesting? Because doing this (i.e., staying on the same service, which has been pretty solid, actually, for a renter that can't get broadband) required getting a Yahoo account setup... since my dialup and e-mail send/retrieval passwords are now connected to my new Yahoo account. Joy...
I can say this with personal experience: starting a new player (or really, a new account, as you're meaning) on an existing, been-around-a-while server can be pretty hard. The thing that chapped my hide (and is why I stopped playing EQ ... personal opinion follows) is that the people who have been around long enough to have a moderately high level (40+ - ish) character can "buy" their new character completely out of the newbie stage. The most annoying thing was playing honest, not having enough game-cash to self-twink a new character, and seeing similar characters at my level running around with rare, powerful items that drop in very high level zones/encounters. That my character's gear was honestly level-appropriate put me at a disadvantage as a player. Not that I'm whining about it... the game's design lets that happen to some extent, so it will happen. With a mid-level character that I worked hard for, I finally got frustrated enough that I just left the game and have spent my time elsewhere. For this consideration, it might be arguable that it would only be fair to a huge influx of new characters(accounts) to all start on their own servers where, for at least a little while, startup issues are balanced.
Now, I haven't been or around EQ in a while, but the biggest thing that would counteract the above problem is for uber-strong items to not be useable *at all* (except in the most mundane way) by any character whose level is lower than X. (Somewhat the way Diablo seemed to handle things.) As I was leaving, they were addressing whether a monster would drop an item to a overly high leveled character to keep people/guilds from "camping out" on the monsters, collecting the items, and selling them for straight cash: only thing this accomplished in the long term was devaluation of said item and one less place for appropriately levelled people to hunt. The fix for this seems a positive step, but it still doesn't address the possibility of someone starting a new character and buying common items to effectively max-out their primary attributes with an immediate effect.
I wasn't around for the dawn of the internet, but I wonder when it started to suck, the first real indication it was going to become some commercialized, overused, underutilized resource for the masses.
For me, the first real [related] indications happened when the tv and web became aware of each other: car commercials started including their URL (for me, seeing toyota was the first one), food/drink commercials with URLs (such as M&M's and Sprite), and search engines (the great horde of them of the time) advertising on TV rather than just the trade mags where we were used to seeing them. This all seemed to happen in the same few months. This was the point when I think the snowball started rolling down the mountain.
Wine in fact does run Starcraft.
Not only DOES wine run starcraft, but for the box(en) I have available, windows does NOT run starcraft where I can actually play it. Linux/wine had no problems. I found that rather funny.
The name is Axim, as in "Axe him"
;)
Maybe its regional, but couldn't it also be "Axim" as in "Ask him" ? (Sorry... I just can't stand people mangling a monosyllabic word like that.
A 0.002% response rate for 3 million emails is 6 thousand responses.
:-/ )
0.002% = 0.00002. Forgot to move your percent-to-decimal over. That's 60 replies. (Still, thought...
Recall emails.
... when the first message had his full sig accidentally appended.)
Can you recall an email after you sent it? I see people doing that all the time, i normally turn it off so they cant recall and hide the evidence.
"Recall" is an Outlook hack (in my opinion and understanding). It sends a second message that tells the client "hey, if you got this other message, and it is still on the server, and the user hasn't read it yet, and they haven't turned this feature off, and its Tuesday and raining, then silently delete that message before the user sees it."
Given at work I have all my mail configured to re-route into a PST, "recalls" don't work, so I get two messages from some dork. (Worked out great once to figure out who the hell was anonymously spamming the entire company every day and redirect some geek hell on his a$$, but that's another story
I don't know if Evo. supports a way of doing this (i.e., sending a message that causes another message to disappear) but I'd wager it would rely on the server and/or client to know what/how to do this, and given you can't control your mom or grandmother's AOL client (generic "your"), I can't imagine it'd serve much purpose.
MS Outlook innovation? Depends on your point of view, I guess.
So for years we have all bought CD-ROM players for our computers to play audio CDs. How many millions of them are floating around now-a-days? And now the music industry seems to be taking an attitude of thumbing its nose at us. You know, my wife and I don't have a stereo/CD/home entertainment center. (We've been saving up to one day buy a nice one.) On top of that, I haven't really bought a CD in a long time (aside maybe from a couple soundtracks). The way things are going, I might as well save the cash on buying a CD player component all together: I won't have CD's to play on it since in the meantime they won't play on my PC. Gee... start calling me Blue Beard, I guess. I never thought *I* would come to this. (sigh)
Wonder if we shouldn't be sending letters to all the others who are watching and might follow along later. BMG is probably too committed to the action now, so let the others know before hand that you (we) no longer support BMG as a customer. Giving the others data in time to make decisions might serve more good. Just a thought.