Need I point out that William Shatner is Canadian? Besides, a lot of U.S. TV shows are produced there. Including an unlikely number of SF shows: Stargate SG-1, X Files, Outer Limits, to name a few. Production costs are lower north of the 49th, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on.
Of course, this is all more Trekkie lameness. Even if they can raise the money to produce the show, Viacom is not going to hand over one of its biggest properties to outsiders, even one that has not been making them money. When a property turns unprofitable they usually sit on it for years, hoping it becomes profitable if they hold it off the market long enough.
They might agree to sell the Trek franchise. But not cheaply. If anybody can raise that kind of money, they should start their own SF franchise, not fritter it away trying to revive one that wore out years ago.
The only insight you're going to get from Civilization is, "some inventions depend on other inventions". A useful insight, but not worthy of the emphasis Card places on it.
Civipedia does a good job of explaining history -- but it's not really part of game. It's basically a separate history text you get with the game. What we're talking about here is how the game itself distorts history in the name of better gameplay. Which, as I said before, is not a bad thing, provided the player is aware of it.
We've had this discussion on Slashdot any number of times, but it never seems to register. I'll try once more.
Yes, most people in India can't afford to buy gadgets. That doesn't mean they can't use them. This is happening already in India and elsewhere in South Asia. The gadget -- a cell phone, a internet-capable computer, whatever -- is purchased by a entrepreneur who resells its use. Or by a group of locals who pool their resources. The gadget pays for itself because these people are desperately poor. They use it to sidestep middlemen so as to get better prices for their crops. Or to obtain weather reports off off the web, so they know the best and safest time to send their fishing boats out. Somebody has a sick cow, goes online for help, and a volunteer vet hundreds of miles away gives them advice.
It's called the Leapfrog Effect. Developing countries don't have all the fancy resources we take for granted, and can't afford to reproduce every step we've taken. So they skip steps. They don't have landline telephones, but they do have cell towers and satellite uplinks. They don't have a decent mail system, but they do have internet access. They don't have newspapers (or the ability to read them), but they do have TV.
That said, they're probably better served by off-the-shelf tech then by specially developed stuff like the Simputer. In theory, the Simputer is easier to use and maintain than a PC -- a major consideration when you're hundreds of miles from the nearest computer store. But that doesn't make up for the extra cost of developing and manufacturing that special gadget.
If you follow the links far enough, you find this story from 2003 that makes it clear that the Simputer has been in trouble for a long time now. (Even before we first took notice of it on Slashdot!) The reason is simple: it costs almost as much as a low-end PC.
This should be a familiar problem. You try to sell a cheaper system by stripping out features. But to get rid of those features, you have to tool up from scratch, and your system ends up costing more money than you save. That's what killed the legacy-free PC, and a lot of other stuff.
It'd be easier to just send us to the Archy Introduction instead of copying the entire page onto Slashdot.
And that link should have been in the story itself, instead of a link to the download page. You want to read something about a program before you go to all the hassle of downloading and installing it.
Screw that...in the future, everyone will have their own public-access TV show.
Seriously though...
What's not serious? Everybody already has their own radio show. And according to NPR, one of the most popular podcasts is The Dawn and Drew Show, which is nothing but an ordinary couple discussing their day before going to bed. Not something I'd bother with, but I have to admit that it's better programming than, say, Extreme Makeover.
My own opinion is that the technology isn't there yet for anybody to kill "mainstream" TV. But given the sorry state of TV, I'd love to be wrong!
You're right, the obligation of game designers is to good play, not historical accuracy. But game players have an obligation to understand that it's just a game, and they shouldn't rely on it for historical education. Unfortunately, lots of gamers are less critical than that. Such as Orson Scott Card, who claims to have achieved great historical insight from playing Civilization, the game that invented the discovery-cascade model used in Age of Empires and Rise of Nations. Which is one reason I no longer bother with his books.
My favorite "discovery" is the Existentialism upgrade in Rise of Nations, which rather than changing anybody sense of self, just causes a nation's economic and military efficiency to go up slightly. One wonders what Sartre would make of that!
If all stats are bogus, then why report any of them? But they're not.
You're basically saying, "All the stats I see are bogus, therefore all stats are bogus." That itself is a bogus stat. It's an indication of your own subjective experience, nothing more.
There are stats that mean something. Bogus stats predominate, because people are always inventing them to justify their own opinions. But some stats have an objective validity. If Google Zeitgest still included browser share, and Firefox's share showed a small but steady gain over a period of months, then that would be a stat worth reporting. It would be a stat from a heavily used web site with a broad range of users, and a solid trend. What I'm complaining about is stats from sites that don't have a small, unrepresentative user base and/or don't show any serious trend.
Any time you're looking for a really obscure item, the first thing you should do is enter the part number of in Google. Not Froogle, because the supplier might not be there, and you can always click over. Assuming that Google doesn't go, "Hey, that looks like a part number, he probably wants me to submit it to Froogle as well."
The more obscure your search string, the more helpful Google is.
Your Sun machines aren't slower than your Dell machines because they're Sun machines. They're slower because they're old.
Presumably your purchasing people are smarter than you and compared these new Dell machines with current Sun machines. Now, Sun's SPARC-based systems are still basically more powerful than Dell's Pentium-based systems. But Pentium-based systems cost a lot less to make, so your company finds its more cost effective to buy more Dell machines to make up the difference in raw processing power.
Sun hasn't forgotten how to make powerful machines. They just don't have the economies of scale to make them cheaply.
We need a supersafe ship for humans and cargo. It may be relatively non-tragic when an unmanned rocket blows up. But we can't get serious about space travel until you can ship stuff to and from space with some confidence that it will get where it's going.
The point of your weird example seems to be that programmers can't anticipate every contingency. Well, they certainly can't anticipate iron spikes (or do anything about them in any case). They can anticipate the possibility that an application will make a perfectly ordinary set of system calls.
It is impressive that these uber-hackers could figure out why the kernel was panicking. It is not impressive that NextStep and Apple have known about this panic bug for 10 years but haven't been able to fix it!
Slashdot Mirror
Or you can just edit the registry to remove the restriction. As usual, people are taking some Microsoft tweak and turning it into a grand conspiracy.
Of course, this is all more Trekkie lameness. Even if they can raise the money to produce the show, Viacom is not going to hand over one of its biggest properties to outsiders, even one that has not been making them money. When a property turns unprofitable they usually sit on it for years, hoping it becomes profitable if they hold it off the market long enough.
They might agree to sell the Trek franchise. But not cheaply. If anybody can raise that kind of money, they should start their own SF franchise, not fritter it away trying to revive one that wore out years ago.
Dude, the thread is about language issue that you raised. If you think the issue is stupid, why did you raise it?
You mean all the Slashdot editors are somebody's mom? That explains a lot....
You started a stupid thread in order to complain about stupid threads?
You mean they have a choice? If their product can't play the movies the industry is publishing, its about as sellable as a betamax VCR.
Civipedia does a good job of explaining history -- but it's not really part of game. It's basically a separate history text you get with the game. What we're talking about here is how the game itself distorts history in the name of better gameplay. Which, as I said before, is not a bad thing, provided the player is aware of it.
Being a Nazi about grammar and spelling is lame. Being a Nazi about style is just plain stupid.
Second of all, language Nazis are assholes.
Yes, most people in India can't afford to buy gadgets. That doesn't mean they can't use them. This is happening already in India and elsewhere in South Asia. The gadget -- a cell phone, a internet-capable computer, whatever -- is purchased by a entrepreneur who resells its use. Or by a group of locals who pool their resources. The gadget pays for itself because these people are desperately poor. They use it to sidestep middlemen so as to get better prices for their crops. Or to obtain weather reports off off the web, so they know the best and safest time to send their fishing boats out. Somebody has a sick cow, goes online for help, and a volunteer vet hundreds of miles away gives them advice.
It's called the Leapfrog Effect. Developing countries don't have all the fancy resources we take for granted, and can't afford to reproduce every step we've taken. So they skip steps. They don't have landline telephones, but they do have cell towers and satellite uplinks. They don't have a decent mail system, but they do have internet access. They don't have newspapers (or the ability to read them), but they do have TV.
That said, they're probably better served by off-the-shelf tech then by specially developed stuff like the Simputer. In theory, the Simputer is easier to use and maintain than a PC -- a major consideration when you're hundreds of miles from the nearest computer store. But that doesn't make up for the extra cost of developing and manufacturing that special gadget.
Actually, he is a history writer. He just not any good at it.
This should be a familiar problem. You try to sell a cheaper system by stripping out features. But to get rid of those features, you have to tool up from scratch, and your system ends up costing more money than you save. That's what killed the legacy-free PC, and a lot of other stuff.
I'm glad to see that Mad Penguin finally has Slashdot-effect-resistant servers. But they still need to do better HTML -- and a lot less Javascript!
And that link should have been in the story itself, instead of a link to the download page. You want to read something about a program before you go to all the hassle of downloading and installing it.
My own opinion is that the technology isn't there yet for anybody to kill "mainstream" TV. But given the sorry state of TV, I'd love to be wrong!
My favorite "discovery" is the Existentialism upgrade in Rise of Nations, which rather than changing anybody sense of self, just causes a nation's economic and military efficiency to go up slightly. One wonders what Sartre would make of that!
You're basically saying, "All the stats I see are bogus, therefore all stats are bogus." That itself is a bogus stat. It's an indication of your own subjective experience, nothing more.
There are stats that mean something. Bogus stats predominate, because people are always inventing them to justify their own opinions. But some stats have an objective validity. If Google Zeitgest still included browser share, and Firefox's share showed a small but steady gain over a period of months, then that would be a stat worth reporting. It would be a stat from a heavily used web site with a broad range of users, and a solid trend. What I'm complaining about is stats from sites that don't have a small, unrepresentative user base and/or don't show any serious trend.
Please, please, please. No more "Firefox is gaining ground" stories until we have some solid numbers, not some contorted gee-whiz stats.
The more obscure your search string, the more helpful Google is.
Presumably your purchasing people are smarter than you and compared these new Dell machines with current Sun machines. Now, Sun's SPARC-based systems are still basically more powerful than Dell's Pentium-based systems. But Pentium-based systems cost a lot less to make, so your company finds its more cost effective to buy more Dell machines to make up the difference in raw processing power.
Sun hasn't forgotten how to make powerful machines. They just don't have the economies of scale to make them cheaply.
We need a supersafe ship for humans and cargo. It may be relatively non-tragic when an unmanned rocket blows up. But we can't get serious about space travel until you can ship stuff to and from space with some confidence that it will get where it's going.
The point of your weird example seems to be that programmers can't anticipate every contingency. Well, they certainly can't anticipate iron spikes (or do anything about them in any case). They can anticipate the possibility that an application will make a perfectly ordinary set of system calls.
How is a kernel panic not serious? Except on Windows, of course, where you want to force regular reboots.
It is impressive that these uber-hackers could figure out why the kernel was panicking. It is not impressive that NextStep and Apple have known about this panic bug for 10 years but haven't been able to fix it!