I'm reminded of a quote that according to a quick Google search is from Carl Sagan:
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Until I've actually gotten a chance to try the Revolution controller, I'm not willing to say it's going to work as a controller. Likewise, I'm not willing to say it isn't going to work. I'm definitely interested in trying it out, but until we see the console and the games, it's way too early to call it as good or not.
Which doesn't mean that Mark Rein wasn't being a clown in the article, but it does mean it's too early to say one way or the other. Only time will tell.
Hell, it's mighty tempting to get the cracked version now anyway, and just read the manual of my 'proper' copy when it turns up, so I don't have to worry about the CD check.
And why not? Which is more valuable, the version that costs $50 (or whatever) and requires a CD to be in the computer, or the version that costs a 6 hour download (or whatever) and has no CD requirements?
Seriously, I'm fed up with the CD requirement. I'm not the freaking enemy, I'm a paying customer. Why the hell do the pirates get a better version of the game than I do? I'm the one paying money!
Who here honestly thinks requiring the CD in the drive actually helps prevent piracy? Anyone? All it takes is one enterprising programmer to start up the game with a debugger active, and NOOP out the part where it checks for the CD. Then, suddenly, EVERYONE has access to the game! (Oh, and go ahead and try and prevent debuggers. Too bad virtual machines pretty handily defeat that. Or the enterprising coder can look for certain methods of disabling debugging, and, guess what, NOOP them out!)
I pay for my computer games. But, well, I don't play too many. Why? Because I'm fed up with requiring the CD, and then the patching required to make the CD-checking software actually work on my PC (when it was released, Black and White took FIVE MINUTES to actually decide my CD was real, some patch eventually fixed that). Not to mention I can't play the Blizzard version of WCIII any more because it thinks I'm a pirate.
Why should I bother paying for these games if the publishers are going to treat me like I'm a criminal? If I'm going to be treated like a criminal anyway, I might as well go the actual criminal route and get the version that doesn't treat me like a criminal.
The PC games I do play, I usually play through once, and then that's it. The CD goes over onto the shelf, and since the game requires the CD, I never play it any more. And because I never replay it, I don't care about it, I don't think about the publisher, and I stop caring about their sequels.
So, please game publishers, please stop treating me like I'm a criminal. I'm just a paying customer. And if you want me to continue being a paying customer, let's see some respect. I'll put up with CD keys. Those I can understand. But the CD-in-the-drive requirement? That has to go.
This would be why my comment started with "assuming his description of IntelliSense is correct." I haven't used Visual Studio since Visual J++[1], as my job has been pure-Sun Java. For the longest time, I just lived without an IntelliSense like feature, since Eclipse's only really became usable with 3.1.
The article was suggesting that IntelliSense makes for bad programming practices, and I disagree. I don't know what the article writer did to his VisualStudio implementation, but if he mis-configured it, that's not a problem with IntelliSense, it's a problem with the way he configured it.
[1] Actually, that's not completely true. I recently had to write a COM object that integrated with Java, and that involved ATL and Visual Studio. But I used it for all of a week, and the majority of the "heavy lifting" was done in Java.
Eclipse does something like IntelliSense, but it does it correctly, assuming his description of IntelliSense is correct.
Basically, Eclipse doesn't do anything while you're typing. If you type out "id" and a space, it stays "id" with a space after it. In fact, Eclipse won't do anything if you just type "id." It will only start offering suggestions after you enter a period to access an object's properties and methods. Even then, if you're typing fast enough, it won't pop up anything. If you pause, it will display a list, but it won't alter your typing unless you press enter. So if you have a new object, and you decide it needs an "id" field, which you haven't defined yet, you can simply do "object.id = foo;" and Eclipse won't replace "id" with anything. (It will, however, flag it as an error, since "id" isn't defined in this example.)
Now there's another feature of Eclipse's implementation: pressing Control-Space anywhere a Java identifier can go will bring up a list of identifiers that can fit there. (This includes things like in doc comments.) So if you don't want to type out "ExcessivelyLongInterfaceNameInterface," you can just type "E" and hit Control-Space, and up will pop a list of everything that starts with "E." However, it will NEVER replace what you're typing, until you press enter. Continuing to type will further refine the list, so if you type "x" after popping on the list above, it'll further refine the list to things that begin with "Ex."
This gives you all the power of Microsoft's IntelliSense (something I missed when going from Visual J++ to Java 1.2 all those years ago), but causes none of the "don't do that for me" problems the author of the article was complaining about.
I don't think his complaint was the concept of code assistance, it was Microsoft's implementation.
There is a faceless bittwiddler from Blizzard out there giving people a hard time for using names they have used everywhere else, and no way to reign him in.
No, no there isn't. The GMs in WoW don't proactively enforce the naming policy, they only do it reactively. If CmdrTaco had his name changed, that means someone reported him to a GM. Which probably means he did something to annoy someone, who decided to take revenge by doing the virtual equivilent of running to tell mommy on you for some minor thing you did.
Plus, "Cmdrtaco" is pretty blatantly against the naming policies you have to agree to when you sign up for the game. I dunno if CmdrTaco actually read them, but I did, they're not exactly secret. His name clearly violates the titles restriction. This isn't new, either, this is the same naming policy they had in open beta.
Someone has to actually report you to get your name changed. Since, for the most part, no one cares about your name on non-RP servers, people with names that violate the naming policy generally get away with it.
But, yeah, their naming policy is ridiculously strict on non-RP servers. I mean, I can see it on RP servers, you're supposed to be RPing. But on normal servers, it's a bit much.
I never really spent any time with my creature. I managed to teach him not to eat villagers, and even taught him how to grow forests (he'd go, grab a tree, stick it some place, and then cast Miracle Water on it until he had a forest).
However, whenever I had my back turned, and he was with my villagers, the party would start. He'd start picking up villagers and putting them back down, flagging them as Breeders. I'd be over some place, dealing with crops or grabbing trees to build buildings, and he'd be over by the town, making breeders.
So when I finally came back to my town, I'd discover that all my villagers were now engaged in a giant orgy of kissing, centered around my creature, who would occasionally dance.
So I tried to teach him to stop making breeders. I slapped him for picking up a villager. In return, he decided to eat them. (Again.) Trying to discourage that behavior, I succeeded in making him afraid to poop.
It was around then I decided I was through with Black and White. And, unfortunately for Lionhead, the primary reason why I'm not getting B&W II.
My thoughts exactly. My brother would actually play the original Black and White up to the point where you could start skirmishes, but BEFORE you chose a creature, just to play the game WITHOUT the thing. The thing I hated the most about that game was micromanaging the stupid creature. The most annoying thing was that slapping the creature would actually effect the surroundings. I've lost track of how many buildings and villagers I crushed by slapping my creature - usually because he had just eaten a villager. Of course, this succeeded in teaching him not to poop. (?!)
When I first heard about Black & White II, the very first thing I said was "does it still include the damned creature?" When I heard it did, I lost interest immediately. I want to play god, not Giant Monkey Babysitter II.
The Rock recently did an interview on the Daily Show. He walked on with what he called the "Big F***ing Gun." (It may be on Comedy Central, but they still go through Standards and Practices before 1AM, I guess.) I've got some great pictures off my TV capture card of Jon Stewart with the BFG.
Only one I've actually uploaded so far is this one which is intended to be used as an avatar on various forums. (So it's 100x100, which is kinda postage-stamp sized.)
But, hey, Jon Stewart with the BFG. What more can you ask for?
Silly consumers, you should know better than to actually pay for the product, since it'll just be broken! You should just go download the song illegally over the Internet, because that gives you a working copy that you can use as you see fit.
So, essentially, with DRM, Sony has succeeded in making the pirated copies of the songs more valuable than the real copies. Brilliant strategy.
DRM always seems to work like that. All it accomplishes is making the "official" versions that much worse. How many people here have wound up downloading the "NOCD" versions of games that you paid for, simply because either the nuisance of having to swap disks was keeping you from playing, or because the copy protection actually crashed? I can't remember which game (C&C Generals?), but I remember I couldn't actually play a game recently because it's copy protection scheme actually would crash.
I can only hope that eventually the media companies will realize that all this DRM stuff is simply taking value away from their product, not adding anything to it. Apparently their solution to piracy is to make the pirated product more attractive than their own. Then they wonder why the strategy isn't working. Hmm...
This is correct - if you look at the original data you'll see several instances where the unemployment rate is below 5% and so simply doesn't show up on that map.
Both your examples of the UK and Norway do in fact come in under 5%; UK has 4.8%, and Norway has 4.4%.
So, for example, they have data on the UK (4.8%) and Japan (4.7%), but not China (except for Tiawan, if you count that as part of China, at 4.6%). But all of those are colored the same - both ones with no data and ones below 5%.
So, yeah, there isn't a lot of data available, but there's more available than the map shows.
It's worth pointing out that Massachusetts was one of the last states (the last?) to drop the anti-trust suit against Microsoft. There's very little love lost between Massachusetts and Microsoft at this point.
I'm sure Microsoft will try and pull something, but I'm not as sure that the state will actually fall for it. They've gone against Microsoft before, and I expect they're willing to do it again.
Besides, they've already transitioned the Massachusetts government website from IIS to Netscape Enterprise Server. Doesn't really have anything to do with this, really, but some part of the state government's done it before. (The site appears to be written using Java servlet and Java Server Page technology, which is arguably an open standard and has an open source solution available, so there's that, too.)
I remember one movie I went to where I smuggled in a soda and a thing of candy from outside the theater. I was doing this because - well, everyone else was. And so who was I to go against the flow?
When the movie was over, I wound up smuggling the unopened candy and soda back OUT because I never actually wanted them throughout the movie. (For some reason, it's much more akward to be carrying a full 20oz soda back out of a theater than into it in the first place.)
So now I don't bother any more on the rare occasion I actually go to the theater. I'm not going to eat or drink anything anyway, I'd rather not run to the bathroom during the film, so what's the point?
Go ahead and draw the finite state machine that only accepts inputs of the form "A+BC*". That one has loops.
. _ . _ . . _ . . _/- A -V . . . . . ./- C -V [ Start ] -- A -> (...... ) -- B -> ((..... ))
That's the best I could do. (Periods/underscores are to prevent Slashdot from mucking with the spacing.) There's no way that was faster than just sketching it on paper. Plus you need to know that single parenthesis are a non-accepting state (single circle) and double parenthesis are an accepting state (double circles).
As the state machines get more complicated (think, Turing machines), there's no way ASCII art remains feasible. And, in my opinion, spending time to get a graphing program to render the equivilent diagram means that you're not spending that time paying attention to the professor. If you have the time to muck with the diagram and make sure you didn't make a mistake, you probably don't really need it as you already have a sufficient grasp of the subject.
There are "technical" solutions to create the graphs and make the diagrams on the computer. But if you're using them, you're playing with the computer, not paying attention in class. It's far easier to continue to pay attention while writing on paper than it is to play with getting the diagram right on your computer. I don't care how well you can type, you need to do a test run to ensure that you didn't mess up the diagram and it matches the diagram your professor wrote.
The real problem isn't that it can't be done, it's that while it can, it provides too much of a distraction from the actual class.
I thought of that, and actually did have some ASCII art diagrams in my notes, but had the problem that Pocket Word on the iPaq uses a by default variable-width font making it more difficult. I think you could switch it to fixed-width, but it had a tendancy to randomly revert. (Pocket Word has some of the same Word-isms as Word.)
Obviously Notepad/emacs/vi/jEdit/whatever lacks that problem.
Although, I type at 120wpm so that helps.
And there's the other problem. It took - for me, at least - longer to create the diagrams than it would have to just draw the things. For the vast majority of people, I highly doubt using ASCII art will be as feasible as just using a notebook and pen.
I was mostly talking about laptops in the class as opposed to simply having them. For a college/university student, it makes sense to have one, just don't expect to use it during class. So to answer the question posed in the article, "buy your kid a laptop as a high school graduation gift."
Quick summary:
1. Bring it to class, but don't take it out of the bag. Just place it beside your seat and take out your notebook and pen.
2. In a very small subset of classes, namely ones where you're just writing out large passages of text, it works if you type faster than your write. In most classes, it doesn't. If you can't touch type, forget it.
3. For middle school or high school students, laptops aren't worth the effort. The subset of classes were it might be useful is offset heavily by the distraction it provides.
So, yes, it's useful for college/university. But don't try and use it for notes during class.
I actually did do that in the mentioned CS course. I'm a visual learner, though, so taking a picture was much less helpful than actually drawing what the teacher was writing.
Anyway, the problem I had with that is that you can't use a flash for obvious reasons and that, unless you bring a tripod, your hand shakes enough that the pictures come out blurry. Other problems were that I wasn't in the front row, so I wound up having to take two pictures to try and avoid people's heads. (To solve the "hand shaking" problem I tried taking a shot off a table, but it it was too low. I wound up up-ending the text book perpendicular to the desk and using that as a make-shift tripod. Even so, the images were fairly blurry. And I still had to take two to cover areas blocked by people's heads.)
Other problems involve making sure the professor isn't obscuring the diagram, making sure things like overhead projectors aren't obscuring the diagram, and ensuring that you have enough notes to know what the diagram is. Trying to take enough pictures to have a useful view of the entire diagram wound up taking longer than just drawing it would have.
So, yeah, you could try using a digital camera to grab the notes. I found it to be - essentially - a large distraction, that ultimately made it so I wasn't paying attention to the professor, I was paying attention to the camera.
I've also noticed that I learn far better if I have to draw the diagram by hand than if it's simply handed out as a picture. Not being a learning expert, I can't say that's the case for everyone, though. But I'd still advice against trying to take pictures of the diagrams your professor draws up on the board. It doesn't really work that well.
I tried using a laptop to take notes at one point. It just doesn't work. A notepad and paper are FAR superior to a laptop for taking notes. The computer is just a distraction. That's it.
Actually, I went through several computer "aids" for taking notes. The first was an iPaq. You just can't enter information fast enough (think, scrolling, botched text recoginition, poor tactile feedback as a "pen") to effectively take notes compared with a notepad. The largest problem, though, was that most classes involved diagrams or notations that you simply can't do on an iPaq as fast as you can on a notepad. There's just not enough room.
So I got a keyboard attachment, since I can touch-type at something like 50WPM or something. (I haven't bothered measuring, it's a wild guess.) This helped with the text parts of notes, but it utterly failed for every class except history. The only reason it worked for my history class was because history involved taking down a LOT of text notes. (And the only diagrams in that class were timelines, which you can "fake" by just writing "Year: Event" on each line.)
I also tried using a full-fledged laptop in a CS course. It's also completely ineffective due to the "diagram" issue. CS courses aren't all code - most of them involve decision trees or logical tables or some other graphical representation of a concept. (Try drawing a finite state machine using only text. It just doesn't get the message across as effectively as pen and paper.)
The laptop was useful on campus - but not in class. In class, it was only a distraction. It was insanely useful between classes where you might get an hour off and sit down somewhere and do some homework without wandering back to the dorm.
Don't get a laptop with the theory it's going to help you in class. It won't. That doesn't mean it can't help you in college at all, but if you try and use it during class, it'll just wind up being a distraction.
You don't even need Photoshop. You can do that with macros. I had to split them into four macros due to the 255 char limit, but try these out:
/script local i,n,b,c; for i=1, 7 do n = "BrowseButton"..i; getglobal(n):Show(); b = getglobal(n.."Name"); b:SetText("Krol Blade"); c = ITEM_QUALITY_COLORS[4]; b:SetVertexColor(c.r, c.g, c.b); getglobal(n.."ClosingTimeText"):SetText("Long"); end
/script local i,n; BrowseNoResultsText:Hide(); for i=1, 7 do n = "BrowseButton"..i; getglobal(n.."ItemIconTexture"):SetTexture("Interf ace\\Icons\\INV_Sword_18"); getglobal(n.."Level"):SetText("51"); getglobal(n.."ClosingTimeText"):SetText("Long"); end
/script local i,n,m; for i=1, 7 do n = "BrowseButton"..i; getglobal(n.."ItemCount"):Hide(); m=n.."MoneyFrame"; getglobal(m):SetPoint("RIGHT",n,"RIGHT",10,10); MoneyFrame_Update(m, 3009500); getglobal(n.."YourBidText"):Hide(); end
/script local i,n,m; for i=1, 7 do n = "BrowseButton"..i; m=getglobal(n.."BuyoutMoneyFrame"); m:Show(); MoneyFrame_Update(m:GetName(), 3200000); getglobal(n.."BuyoutText"):Show(); getglobal(n.."HighBidder"):SetText("CmdrTaco"); end
The end result? CmdrTaco is up to something! (Remember all real account names can't have mixed case - they're always with an initial capital and then all lowercase.)
Ironically enough, because that screenshot wasn't "faked" per se, and is really what the ingame interface would look like, comparing it with the "dupe proof" screen shot shows that the dupe screenshot was faked in Photoshop!
Actually, you can't do that. You can only copy two characters over. I suppose you could mule items from one character to the other to dupe that way, but since almost everything useful is "Soulbound" (untradeable) that wouldn't be that big an issue.
Of course he's ignoring those... If you read the article, it's fairly clearly a thinly-veiled "I'm bored with World of Warcraft's End-game" post.
Which, as someone else who's also bored with WoW's end-game, is a valid complaint, but, uh, I fail to see the connection with "WoW bores me" and "MMORPGs can't be casual."
If you don't play World of Warcraft, just ignore this article. It's just someone complaining about World of Warcraft's endgame, and trying to come up with something that applies to MMOGs in general so he can claim that it's not just a rant. His points are probably valid - but only within the confines of World of Warcraft, certainly not MMOGs in general.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reminded of a quote that according to a quick Google search is from Carl Sagan:
Until I've actually gotten a chance to try the Revolution controller, I'm not willing to say it's going to work as a controller. Likewise, I'm not willing to say it isn't going to work. I'm definitely interested in trying it out, but until we see the console and the games, it's way too early to call it as good or not.
Which doesn't mean that Mark Rein wasn't being a clown in the article, but it does mean it's too early to say one way or the other. Only time will tell.
And why not? Which is more valuable, the version that costs $50 (or whatever) and requires a CD to be in the computer, or the version that costs a 6 hour download (or whatever) and has no CD requirements?
Seriously, I'm fed up with the CD requirement. I'm not the freaking enemy, I'm a paying customer. Why the hell do the pirates get a better version of the game than I do? I'm the one paying money!
Who here honestly thinks requiring the CD in the drive actually helps prevent piracy? Anyone? All it takes is one enterprising programmer to start up the game with a debugger active, and NOOP out the part where it checks for the CD. Then, suddenly, EVERYONE has access to the game! (Oh, and go ahead and try and prevent debuggers. Too bad virtual machines pretty handily defeat that. Or the enterprising coder can look for certain methods of disabling debugging, and, guess what, NOOP them out!)
I pay for my computer games. But, well, I don't play too many. Why? Because I'm fed up with requiring the CD, and then the patching required to make the CD-checking software actually work on my PC (when it was released, Black and White took FIVE MINUTES to actually decide my CD was real, some patch eventually fixed that). Not to mention I can't play the Blizzard version of WCIII any more because it thinks I'm a pirate.
Why should I bother paying for these games if the publishers are going to treat me like I'm a criminal? If I'm going to be treated like a criminal anyway, I might as well go the actual criminal route and get the version that doesn't treat me like a criminal.
The PC games I do play, I usually play through once, and then that's it. The CD goes over onto the shelf, and since the game requires the CD, I never play it any more. And because I never replay it, I don't care about it, I don't think about the publisher, and I stop caring about their sequels.
So, please game publishers, please stop treating me like I'm a criminal. I'm just a paying customer. And if you want me to continue being a paying customer, let's see some respect. I'll put up with CD keys. Those I can understand. But the CD-in-the-drive requirement? That has to go.
This would be why my comment started with "assuming his description of IntelliSense is correct." I haven't used Visual Studio since Visual J++[1], as my job has been pure-Sun Java. For the longest time, I just lived without an IntelliSense like feature, since Eclipse's only really became usable with 3.1.
The article was suggesting that IntelliSense makes for bad programming practices, and I disagree. I don't know what the article writer did to his VisualStudio implementation, but if he mis-configured it, that's not a problem with IntelliSense, it's a problem with the way he configured it.
[1] Actually, that's not completely true. I recently had to write a COM object that integrated with Java, and that involved ATL and Visual Studio. But I used it for all of a week, and the majority of the "heavy lifting" was done in Java.
Eclipse does something like IntelliSense, but it does it correctly, assuming his description of IntelliSense is correct.
Basically, Eclipse doesn't do anything while you're typing. If you type out "id" and a space, it stays "id" with a space after it. In fact, Eclipse won't do anything if you just type "id." It will only start offering suggestions after you enter a period to access an object's properties and methods. Even then, if you're typing fast enough, it won't pop up anything. If you pause, it will display a list, but it won't alter your typing unless you press enter. So if you have a new object, and you decide it needs an "id" field, which you haven't defined yet, you can simply do "object.id = foo;" and Eclipse won't replace "id" with anything. (It will, however, flag it as an error, since "id" isn't defined in this example.)
Now there's another feature of Eclipse's implementation: pressing Control-Space anywhere a Java identifier can go will bring up a list of identifiers that can fit there. (This includes things like in doc comments.) So if you don't want to type out "ExcessivelyLongInterfaceNameInterface," you can just type "E" and hit Control-Space, and up will pop a list of everything that starts with "E." However, it will NEVER replace what you're typing, until you press enter. Continuing to type will further refine the list, so if you type "x" after popping on the list above, it'll further refine the list to things that begin with "Ex."
This gives you all the power of Microsoft's IntelliSense (something I missed when going from Visual J++ to Java 1.2 all those years ago), but causes none of the "don't do that for me" problems the author of the article was complaining about.
I don't think his complaint was the concept of code assistance, it was Microsoft's implementation.
No, no there isn't. The GMs in WoW don't proactively enforce the naming policy, they only do it reactively. If CmdrTaco had his name changed, that means someone reported him to a GM. Which probably means he did something to annoy someone, who decided to take revenge by doing the virtual equivilent of running to tell mommy on you for some minor thing you did.
Plus, "Cmdrtaco" is pretty blatantly against the naming policies you have to agree to when you sign up for the game. I dunno if CmdrTaco actually read them, but I did, they're not exactly secret. His name clearly violates the titles restriction. This isn't new, either, this is the same naming policy they had in open beta.
Someone has to actually report you to get your name changed. Since, for the most part, no one cares about your name on non-RP servers, people with names that violate the naming policy generally get away with it.
(Which means CmdrTaco ticked someone off, I wonder if it's because he was duping Krol Blades? :) For those that don't play the game, that's fake, since your name is forced to initial-caps, he'd be "Cmdrtaco" in WoW. Faking screenshots in WoW is pretty easy.)
But, yeah, their naming policy is ridiculously strict on non-RP servers. I mean, I can see it on RP servers, you're supposed to be RPing. But on normal servers, it's a bit much.
I never really spent any time with my creature. I managed to teach him not to eat villagers, and even taught him how to grow forests (he'd go, grab a tree, stick it some place, and then cast Miracle Water on it until he had a forest).
However, whenever I had my back turned, and he was with my villagers, the party would start. He'd start picking up villagers and putting them back down, flagging them as Breeders. I'd be over some place, dealing with crops or grabbing trees to build buildings, and he'd be over by the town, making breeders.
So when I finally came back to my town, I'd discover that all my villagers were now engaged in a giant orgy of kissing, centered around my creature, who would occasionally dance.
So I tried to teach him to stop making breeders. I slapped him for picking up a villager. In return, he decided to eat them. (Again.) Trying to discourage that behavior, I succeeded in making him afraid to poop.
It was around then I decided I was through with Black and White. And, unfortunately for Lionhead, the primary reason why I'm not getting B&W II.
My thoughts exactly. My brother would actually play the original Black and White up to the point where you could start skirmishes, but BEFORE you chose a creature, just to play the game WITHOUT the thing. The thing I hated the most about that game was micromanaging the stupid creature. The most annoying thing was that slapping the creature would actually effect the surroundings. I've lost track of how many buildings and villagers I crushed by slapping my creature - usually because he had just eaten a villager. Of course, this succeeded in teaching him not to poop. (?!)
When I first heard about Black & White II, the very first thing I said was "does it still include the damned creature?" When I heard it did, I lost interest immediately. I want to play god, not Giant Monkey Babysitter II.
The Rock recently did an interview on the Daily Show. He walked on with what he called the "Big F***ing Gun." (It may be on Comedy Central, but they still go through Standards and Practices before 1AM, I guess.) I've got some great pictures off my TV capture card of Jon Stewart with the BFG.
Only one I've actually uploaded so far is this one which is intended to be used as an avatar on various forums. (So it's 100x100, which is kinda postage-stamp sized.)
But, hey, Jon Stewart with the BFG. What more can you ask for?
Just loaded Battle.net, and got the new Battle.net website design. (Actually, I got a lot of Flashblocked content, but...)
Apparently the announcement is soley that they redesigned their website. (To use tons of Flash, at that.)
It's, uh, Flashy.
Silly consumers, you should know better than to actually pay for the product, since it'll just be broken! You should just go download the song illegally over the Internet, because that gives you a working copy that you can use as you see fit.
So, essentially, with DRM, Sony has succeeded in making the pirated copies of the songs more valuable than the real copies. Brilliant strategy.
DRM always seems to work like that. All it accomplishes is making the "official" versions that much worse. How many people here have wound up downloading the "NOCD" versions of games that you paid for, simply because either the nuisance of having to swap disks was keeping you from playing, or because the copy protection actually crashed? I can't remember which game (C&C Generals?), but I remember I couldn't actually play a game recently because it's copy protection scheme actually would crash.
I can only hope that eventually the media companies will realize that all this DRM stuff is simply taking value away from their product, not adding anything to it. Apparently their solution to piracy is to make the pirated product more attractive than their own. Then they wonder why the strategy isn't working. Hmm...
This is correct - if you look at the original data you'll see several instances where the unemployment rate is below 5% and so simply doesn't show up on that map.
Both your examples of the UK and Norway do in fact come in under 5%; UK has 4.8%, and Norway has 4.4%.
Unfortunately the gray means both "no data" AND "less than 5% unemployment".
According to the original website, the data comes from the IMF, which only has information for 29 countries available.
So, for example, they have data on the UK (4.8%) and Japan (4.7%), but not China (except for Tiawan, if you count that as part of China, at 4.6%). But all of those are colored the same - both ones with no data and ones below 5%.
So, yeah, there isn't a lot of data available, but there's more available than the map shows.
It's worth pointing out that Massachusetts was one of the last states (the last?) to drop the anti-trust suit against Microsoft. There's very little love lost between Massachusetts and Microsoft at this point.
I'm sure Microsoft will try and pull something, but I'm not as sure that the state will actually fall for it. They've gone against Microsoft before, and I expect they're willing to do it again.
Besides, they've already transitioned the Massachusetts government website from IIS to Netscape Enterprise Server. Doesn't really have anything to do with this, really, but some part of the state government's done it before. (The site appears to be written using Java servlet and Java Server Page technology, which is arguably an open standard and has an open source solution available, so there's that, too.)
I remember one movie I went to where I smuggled in a soda and a thing of candy from outside the theater. I was doing this because - well, everyone else was. And so who was I to go against the flow?
When the movie was over, I wound up smuggling the unopened candy and soda back OUT because I never actually wanted them throughout the movie. (For some reason, it's much more akward to be carrying a full 20oz soda back out of a theater than into it in the first place.)
So now I don't bother any more on the rare occasion I actually go to the theater. I'm not going to eat or drink anything anyway, I'd rather not run to the bathroom during the film, so what's the point?
That was my thought too: Silver and black.
Go ahead and draw the finite state machine that only accepts inputs of the form "A+BC*". That one has loops.
. _ . _ . . _ . . _/- A -V . . . . . . /- C -V ...... ) -- B -> (( ..... ))
[ Start ] -- A -> (
That's the best I could do. (Periods/underscores are to prevent Slashdot from mucking with the spacing.) There's no way that was faster than just sketching it on paper. Plus you need to know that single parenthesis are a non-accepting state (single circle) and double parenthesis are an accepting state (double circles).
As the state machines get more complicated (think, Turing machines), there's no way ASCII art remains feasible. And, in my opinion, spending time to get a graphing program to render the equivilent diagram means that you're not spending that time paying attention to the professor. If you have the time to muck with the diagram and make sure you didn't make a mistake, you probably don't really need it as you already have a sufficient grasp of the subject.
There are "technical" solutions to create the graphs and make the diagrams on the computer. But if you're using them, you're playing with the computer, not paying attention in class. It's far easier to continue to pay attention while writing on paper than it is to play with getting the diagram right on your computer. I don't care how well you can type, you need to do a test run to ensure that you didn't mess up the diagram and it matches the diagram your professor wrote.
The real problem isn't that it can't be done, it's that while it can, it provides too much of a distraction from the actual class.
I thought of that, and actually did have some ASCII art diagrams in my notes, but had the problem that Pocket Word on the iPaq uses a by default variable-width font making it more difficult. I think you could switch it to fixed-width, but it had a tendancy to randomly revert. (Pocket Word has some of the same Word-isms as Word.)
Obviously Notepad/emacs/vi/jEdit/whatever lacks that problem.
Although, I type at 120wpm so that helps.
And there's the other problem. It took - for me, at least - longer to create the diagrams than it would have to just draw the things. For the vast majority of people, I highly doubt using ASCII art will be as feasible as just using a notebook and pen.
I was mostly talking about laptops in the class as opposed to simply having them. For a college/university student, it makes sense to have one, just don't expect to use it during class. So to answer the question posed in the article, "buy your kid a laptop as a high school graduation gift."
Quick summary:
1. Bring it to class, but don't take it out of the bag. Just place it beside your seat and take out your notebook and pen.
2. In a very small subset of classes, namely ones where you're just writing out large passages of text, it works if you type faster than your write. In most classes, it doesn't. If you can't touch type, forget it.
3. For middle school or high school students, laptops aren't worth the effort. The subset of classes were it might be useful is offset heavily by the distraction it provides.
So, yes, it's useful for college/university. But don't try and use it for notes during class.
I actually did do that in the mentioned CS course. I'm a visual learner, though, so taking a picture was much less helpful than actually drawing what the teacher was writing.
Anyway, the problem I had with that is that you can't use a flash for obvious reasons and that, unless you bring a tripod, your hand shakes enough that the pictures come out blurry. Other problems were that I wasn't in the front row, so I wound up having to take two pictures to try and avoid people's heads. (To solve the "hand shaking" problem I tried taking a shot off a table, but it it was too low. I wound up up-ending the text book perpendicular to the desk and using that as a make-shift tripod. Even so, the images were fairly blurry. And I still had to take two to cover areas blocked by people's heads.)
Other problems involve making sure the professor isn't obscuring the diagram, making sure things like overhead projectors aren't obscuring the diagram, and ensuring that you have enough notes to know what the diagram is. Trying to take enough pictures to have a useful view of the entire diagram wound up taking longer than just drawing it would have.
So, yeah, you could try using a digital camera to grab the notes. I found it to be - essentially - a large distraction, that ultimately made it so I wasn't paying attention to the professor, I was paying attention to the camera.
I've also noticed that I learn far better if I have to draw the diagram by hand than if it's simply handed out as a picture. Not being a learning expert, I can't say that's the case for everyone, though. But I'd still advice against trying to take pictures of the diagrams your professor draws up on the board. It doesn't really work that well.
My 26th birthday, to the hour? Thanks!
I tried using a laptop to take notes at one point. It just doesn't work. A notepad and paper are FAR superior to a laptop for taking notes. The computer is just a distraction. That's it.
Actually, I went through several computer "aids" for taking notes. The first was an iPaq. You just can't enter information fast enough (think, scrolling, botched text recoginition, poor tactile feedback as a "pen") to effectively take notes compared with a notepad. The largest problem, though, was that most classes involved diagrams or notations that you simply can't do on an iPaq as fast as you can on a notepad. There's just not enough room.
So I got a keyboard attachment, since I can touch-type at something like 50WPM or something. (I haven't bothered measuring, it's a wild guess.) This helped with the text parts of notes, but it utterly failed for every class except history. The only reason it worked for my history class was because history involved taking down a LOT of text notes. (And the only diagrams in that class were timelines, which you can "fake" by just writing "Year: Event" on each line.)
I also tried using a full-fledged laptop in a CS course. It's also completely ineffective due to the "diagram" issue. CS courses aren't all code - most of them involve decision trees or logical tables or some other graphical representation of a concept. (Try drawing a finite state machine using only text. It just doesn't get the message across as effectively as pen and paper.)
The laptop was useful on campus - but not in class. In class, it was only a distraction. It was insanely useful between classes where you might get an hour off and sit down somewhere and do some homework without wandering back to the dorm.
Don't get a laptop with the theory it's going to help you in class. It won't. That doesn't mean it can't help you in college at all, but if you try and use it during class, it'll just wind up being a distraction.
Except in history class. :)
You don't even need Photoshop. You can do that with macros. I had to split them into four macros due to the 255 char limit, but try these out:
The end result? CmdrTaco is up to something! (Remember all real account names can't have mixed case - they're always with an initial capital and then all lowercase.)
Ironically enough, because that screenshot wasn't "faked" per se, and is really what the ingame interface would look like, comparing it with the "dupe proof" screen shot shows that the dupe screenshot was faked in Photoshop!
Actually, you can't do that. You can only copy two characters over. I suppose you could mule items from one character to the other to dupe that way, but since almost everything useful is "Soulbound" (untradeable) that wouldn't be that big an issue.
Of course he's ignoring those... If you read the article, it's fairly clearly a thinly-veiled "I'm bored with World of Warcraft's End-game" post.
Which, as someone else who's also bored with WoW's end-game, is a valid complaint, but, uh, I fail to see the connection with "WoW bores me" and "MMORPGs can't be casual."
If you don't play World of Warcraft, just ignore this article. It's just someone complaining about World of Warcraft's endgame, and trying to come up with something that applies to MMOGs in general so he can claim that it's not just a rant. His points are probably valid - but only within the confines of World of Warcraft, certainly not MMOGs in general.