I've never had the power lead fall out of my LaCie drive, but my example is probably just as anecdotal as yours.
The whole thing was covered with foam padding, and they didn't leave enough clearance around the power plug for the thing to seat properly. Undoubtedly, this was a mistake they only made once. I wouldn't be so thoroughly pissed at them if I could have gotten some support or the item replaced.
I once bought a LaCie USB drive. You had to format it before first use. And the power socket was badly designed — so the power lead fell out halfway through the formatting. There's no way to fix that on a USB drive without taking the whole thing apart. Between that and LaCie's lame support and warantees, I will never go near any of their products again!
I've only seen one ep of Cowboy Bebop (not my cup of tea), but it struck me as being more film noirish than western. Though there were certainly western elements — or should I say clichés?
Anyway, Whedon denies that Firefly is a "western". It's a standard SF subgenre, about a future where technology has regressed. In this case, the cause of regression is economic: a few rich people have Star Trek technology, but most people live on backward planets with no industry. The only technology they can afford is what they build themselves. Which mostly means reconstructed 19th century stuff. Which makes the story look like a western, but there's a lot more to it than that.
(For comparison, check out S. M. Stirling's Island series, where a small 20th century community is thrown back into the bronze age. They have the knowledge to recreate the 20th century, but before they can do so, they have to work their way up the complicated network of dependent technologies. Which takes more than a single lifetime. Meanwhile, the locals are also interested in this "new learning"...)
In any case, who cares? Did Watanabe take out a patent on the sub-genre? It's just a way of telling a story, and the stories in Bebop and Firefly are about as different as you can imagine.
And yet you have time and energy to troll and whine on Slashdot.
Plenty of people in your circumstances manage to get an education and/or raise kids. I live in a pretty poor neighborhood (my own financial circumstances suck), and I'm surrounded by blue-collar hispanics who mostly have large families. None are bursting with prosperty, and have to do without a lot of stuff. (Inadequate health care is a big issue.) But they mostly seem to lead decent lives. When they herd their kids around the neighborhood on those weekend promenades that hispanics are so fond of, they do so with self-respect and dignity. Many put a lot of effort into improving their lives — local community colleges and adult schools are all overenrolled. Few of them will become "rich programmers", but most will do better eventually, or see their kids doing better.
You probably have issues I know nothing about, and I can't give you advice on that. But whatever your circumstances, wallowing in your grievances and misfortune is not a productive strategy. If you took some of the energy you expend on telling us how much life sucks, and put it into making your life better, maybe you could be more the a laborer. You don't have to be a "genius" to do that -- you just need to motivated.
Every time we get a story about computer technology for the developing world, somebody trots out this argument. Computers aren't a "basic need". Wrong.
Let's start with the assumption that everybody needs an education. Yes they need food and clean water, and a lot of other stuff too. But you can't just feed people and hope they'll be OK. You have to give them a future, and control over their own life. Otherwise, all your charity does is create dependency and destroy the local economy.
Now, if you educate people, they have to have books. Which are not cheap. I've heard stories of people learning to read from paperback thrillers abandoned at local airports, because those are the only books they have access to! Not a viable substitute for primers, math books, history, etc.
A $100 computer is a cost effective way to deliver books. That much money wouldn't buy you a lot of hard copy books. But there's a huge amount of stuff available for free, because its public domain, or because authors are willing to forgo royalties from people who couldn't pay them anyway.
Bottom line: technology delivers information cheaper. That's why you and I are even having this conversation.
You're assuming that this item will be viewed as a luxury. If a family is so poor that selling the item would make a big dent in their budget (and note that they'd only get a fraction of its original cost), then either they can't afford to send their kids to school in the first place, or they're already making considerable sacrifices to get their kids an education.
Then why is it called "evidence"? Rhetorical question. Anecdotes are certainly evidence — they're just not as compelling as some other types of evidence. As with any evidence, you have to take into account how it was gathered. If the gathering method is biased and non-random (as anecdotes almost always are), then you certainly must view the data sceptically. But that's still a long way from "useless". Especially when anecdotes are all you have.
Heard an amusing story: two medical interns are working one of those notorious 72-hour shifts together. One is coughing and sneezing, and obviously needs some bed rest. The other intern suggests this, with this response: "Show me non-anecdotal evidence that bed rest is an effective treatment for viral conditions!"
Rigorous science is important, but common sense does have a role to play.
The right time to ask this question would have been a couple years ago. Right now, a lot of us would be very happy to have the pay vs. happiness dilemma!
I suspect that part of the reason why you believe Miyazaki to be more creative than Tarantino is that you are more familiar with the source material that the former draws his inspiration from than the source material that the latter draws his inspiration from.
Exactly wrong. Miyazaki draws heavily on Asian mythology and Japanese culture, and I'm pretty ignorant about both. I often feel I'm only understanding maybe 20% of what he's trying to do. Fortunately, 20% of a Miyazaki movie is still a better time than almost anything I've seen lately.
By contrast, Tarentino constantly draws on pop culture standards that I'm all too familiar with -- old TV shows, cheap kung fu movies, and other stuff. And that's a big reason I so thoroughly dislike his work. Because he doesn't do anything interesting or original, he just quotes it endlessly, like a trekkie. The one that really bothered me was the way he kept using Quincy Jones's theme from Ironside (great musician, stupid TV show) in Kill Bill. No point to it that I could see — there were no parallels between the movie and the series, and music was painfully out of place where he used it. I guess he had some subtle point to make that went past me. Whatever it was, I find it hard to care!
I think Schwartz is talking about business computers. Which is what most PCs are used for. So games are a non-issue. But you're right about the rest of it.
I'm don't see why this pdonouncement rates a story — it's been the Sun party line for as long as I can remember. In fact, it's the reason Jonathan Schartz works for Sun. He used to be the CEO of a NextStep development company called LightHouse Design. Sun took them over and turned them into the Java Application Group, which was supposed to create a Java-based alternative for Microsoft Office that would run on a Network Computer. I hate to think how much money Sun spent on this effort, not just buying Lighthouse Design, but hiring lots more people (I was almost one of them) and buying other Java app development companies to fold into JAG. Then they suddenly realized that nobody wanted to buy Network Computers and shut the whole thing down.
You'd think they'd learn from an expensive mistake like this, but they've repeated it a couple times since, with so-called "thin clients" and other nonsense. Despite repeated failures, they keep pushing the idea. It's ironic that a guy who came to Sun through one of these boondoggles is now the COO, and thus in charge of repeating this nonsense.
You're right, of course. But that leads us to our next Ask Slashdot: "I have hundreds of data DVDs witch all kinds of shit on them. I can never find the one I want. How do I keep track?"
I don't see how changing the way a controller is held or the way the buttons are arranged (I assume that's what you mean by "the way the controller is used") is "radical". Not in the same sense that the Evolution controller is "radical".
I want an Evolution system just to try out that controller! If you watch the trailer, you can see that the whole way people are interacting is different. There's been some interesting innovations in controller design, but it's always been just a kind of joystick.
...the "traditional controller type" was itself basically invented by Nintendo, as a radical departure from the then-traditional joystick.
Why is it a "radical departure"? The first Nintendo controller was really just a simplified joystick, with 4 simple switches instead of a lot of complicated wires and stuff. An obvious design choice, because "real" joysticks are either too expensive or too fragile for mass market products.
Messing with me or not, you make a good point. Still it seems strange that a Sim will refuse to do all kinds of stuff like look for work or play chess if they're in a bad mood -- but they'll kiss anything that moves if you catch them in a good mood!
You make some interesting points, but please don't drop the term XML like it were some massively cool feature. XML is just a standardized way to store data. Using it to handle GUI configuration makes sense, but it doesn't add any real functionality to anything. Its main benefit is just to save work, since you don't have to write a parser every time you have a new kind of data to save.
Sims now have romantic preferences, which result from turn-ons (dark hair, formal ware), turn-offs (stench, workout uniforms), astrological signs and life goals. Sims that have chemistry with each other have little lightning bolts near their names.
Sounds like they still haven't addressed the biggest reality gap in the original game — sexual preference. Rather than deal with that issue at all, they just made all Sims bisexual — any Sim can get it on with any other. I guess there's no place for sexual hangups in this kind of game!
Your analysis is correct, except where you say "misleading". It would be misleading if it said something the submitter didn't mean to say. But it appears to me that the submitter didn't read the article very carefully, jumped to the conclusion that the government had confiscated the patent, and thinks that "eminent domain" is the correct term for such confiscation.
That's not misleading — that's completely, thoroughly, stupidly wrong.
I don't own a machine powerful enough to play S2. So could somebody tell me: is it any better than the first game at dealing with contention? I mean the silly problems that happen because the designers didn't anticipate the deadlock that can occur when two Sims are competing to use something. Like one wants to go one way through a door at the same time another wants to go the other way — they just stand and stare at each other until one or both of them "forgets" why he or she wanted to go through the door in the first place. Or when one Sim is sitting on a toilet, and another Sim walks right up expecting to use the same toilet. The first Sim can't yield the toilet because the second Sim is standing in his way; the second Sim is only thinking of his own need to relieve himself...
Slashdot Mirror
I once bought a LaCie USB drive. You had to format it before first use. And the power socket was badly designed — so the power lead fell out halfway through the formatting. There's no way to fix that on a USB drive without taking the whole thing apart. Between that and LaCie's lame support and warantees, I will never go near any of their products again!
Anyway, Whedon denies that Firefly is a "western". It's a standard SF subgenre, about a future where technology has regressed. In this case, the cause of regression is economic: a few rich people have Star Trek technology, but most people live on backward planets with no industry. The only technology they can afford is what they build themselves. Which mostly means reconstructed 19th century stuff. Which makes the story look like a western, but there's a lot more to it than that.
(For comparison, check out S. M. Stirling's Island series, where a small 20th century community is thrown back into the bronze age. They have the knowledge to recreate the 20th century, but before they can do so, they have to work their way up the complicated network of dependent technologies. Which takes more than a single lifetime. Meanwhile, the locals are also interested in this "new learning"...)
In any case, who cares? Did Watanabe take out a patent on the sub-genre? It's just a way of telling a story, and the stories in Bebop and Firefly are about as different as you can imagine.
Plenty of people in your circumstances manage to get an education and/or raise kids. I live in a pretty poor neighborhood (my own financial circumstances suck), and I'm surrounded by blue-collar hispanics who mostly have large families. None are bursting with prosperty, and have to do without a lot of stuff. (Inadequate health care is a big issue.) But they mostly seem to lead decent lives. When they herd their kids around the neighborhood on those weekend promenades that hispanics are so fond of, they do so with self-respect and dignity. Many put a lot of effort into improving their lives — local community colleges and adult schools are all overenrolled. Few of them will become "rich programmers", but most will do better eventually, or see their kids doing better.
You probably have issues I know nothing about, and I can't give you advice on that. But whatever your circumstances, wallowing in your grievances and misfortune is not a productive strategy. If you took some of the energy you expend on telling us how much life sucks, and put it into making your life better, maybe you could be more the a laborer. You don't have to be a "genius" to do that -- you just need to motivated.
Let's start with the assumption that everybody needs an education. Yes they need food and clean water, and a lot of other stuff too. But you can't just feed people and hope they'll be OK. You have to give them a future, and control over their own life. Otherwise, all your charity does is create dependency and destroy the local economy.
Now, if you educate people, they have to have books. Which are not cheap. I've heard stories of people learning to read from paperback thrillers abandoned at local airports, because those are the only books they have access to! Not a viable substitute for primers, math books, history, etc.
A $100 computer is a cost effective way to deliver books. That much money wouldn't buy you a lot of hard copy books. But there's a huge amount of stuff available for free, because its public domain, or because authors are willing to forgo royalties from people who couldn't pay them anyway.
Bottom line: technology delivers information cheaper. That's why you and I are even having this conversation.
You're assuming that this item will be viewed as a luxury. If a family is so poor that selling the item would make a big dent in their budget (and note that they'd only get a fraction of its original cost), then either they can't afford to send their kids to school in the first place, or they're already making considerable sacrifices to get their kids an education.
Heard an amusing story: two medical interns are working one of those notorious 72-hour shifts together. One is coughing and sneezing, and obviously needs some bed rest. The other intern suggests this, with this response: "Show me non-anecdotal evidence that bed rest is an effective treatment for viral conditions!"
Rigorous science is important, but common sense does have a role to play.
Some slashdotters are totally deaf to sarcasm.
The right time to ask this question would have been a couple years ago. Right now, a lot of us would be very happy to have the pay vs. happiness dilemma!
By contrast, Tarentino constantly draws on pop culture standards that I'm all too familiar with -- old TV shows, cheap kung fu movies, and other stuff. And that's a big reason I so thoroughly dislike his work. Because he doesn't do anything interesting or original, he just quotes it endlessly, like a trekkie. The one that really bothered me was the way he kept using Quincy Jones's theme from Ironside (great musician, stupid TV show) in Kill Bill. No point to it that I could see — there were no parallels between the movie and the series, and music was painfully out of place where he used it. I guess he had some subtle point to make that went past me. Whatever it was, I find it hard to care!
I'm don't see why this pdonouncement rates a story — it's been the Sun party line for as long as I can remember. In fact, it's the reason Jonathan Schartz works for Sun. He used to be the CEO of a NextStep development company called LightHouse Design. Sun took them over and turned them into the Java Application Group, which was supposed to create a Java-based alternative for Microsoft Office that would run on a Network Computer. I hate to think how much money Sun spent on this effort, not just buying Lighthouse Design, but hiring lots more people (I was almost one of them) and buying other Java app development companies to fold into JAG. Then they suddenly realized that nobody wanted to buy Network Computers and shut the whole thing down.
You'd think they'd learn from an expensive mistake like this, but they've repeated it a couple times since, with so-called "thin clients" and other nonsense. Despite repeated failures, they keep pushing the idea. It's ironic that a guy who came to Sun through one of these boondoggles is now the COO, and thus in charge of repeating this nonsense.
You're right, of course. But that leads us to our next Ask Slashdot: "I have hundreds of data DVDs witch all kinds of shit on them. I can never find the one I want. How do I keep track?"
Definitely Salt Lake City!
I want an Evolution system just to try out that controller! If you watch the trailer, you can see that the whole way people are interacting is different. There's been some interesting innovations in controller design, but it's always been just a kind of joystick.
Which IDEs have you looked at? Delphi? Eclipse?
I'll concede that Nintendo has designed a lot of really good controllers that have been widely imitated. But until now, each new design has been a simple refinement of previous designs.
Messing with me or not, you make a good point. Still it seems strange that a Sim will refuse to do all kinds of stuff like look for work or play chess if they're in a bad mood -- but they'll kiss anything that moves if you catch them in a good mood!
You make some interesting points, but please don't drop the term XML like it were some massively cool feature. XML is just a standardized way to store data. Using it to handle GUI configuration makes sense, but it doesn't add any real functionality to anything. Its main benefit is just to save work, since you don't have to write a parser every time you have a new kind of data to save.
We're getting a lot of stupid stories today. I guess that's what happens when everybody else takes a long weekend and leaves Zonk in charge.
That's not misleading — that's completely, thoroughly, stupidly wrong.
You'd think that somebody sitting down to write a simulation would deal with contention issues first off.
Where did I say there was anything wrong with acquistions?