It shouldn't really be that hard to do more than fantasy, but you do make a good point about keeping it person to person. I can imagine at least a few genres possible, though, that would/could still revolve around 'man-to-man' fighting and similar interactions:
post-apocalyptic/dark future sci-fi (Road Warrior or Gammaworld)
superheroes (isn't there something like this coming?)
adventure a la Indiana Jones/Alan Quartermain
swashbuckling/pirate style adventures
I'm not sure how many people would want to immerse themselves in these settings compared to fantasy, but the potential is there to restrict interactions to a pretty interpersonal level.
Why only computer books?
on
Online! The Book
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Junk, all in one books like this have always been quite common. It seems that computers have been around long enough that even the completely uninitiated know that computing is reasonably complicated. Do they try to sell "the only book you'll ever need" style books for business? Construction? Medicine? Maybe they don't feel there are quite enough fearful dupes to be had in those topics.
I'm finding lots of little applications that were using a database or text-file scheme with relatively little data and I've been converting them to xml files for storage and lookup. It's been a performance improvement everytime, often a huge one. There is presumably some size/schema complexity point where this gain turns around the other way (the cost of loading and parsing a doc vs. creating a db connection to parse data), but it's been a big win for me so far.
People kill with knives. People kill with vehicles. People kill with guns. People kill with clubs. Did you find the common denominator in this one?
This sounds logical, but then you'll change your mind when you follow the logic further rather than stop at the place you like. People kill with bombs, people kill with nuclear weapons, people kill with manufactured diseases, people kill with satellite ray gus, etc., etc. See the common denominator? Ignoring the enabling technology stops making sense, doesn't it?
P2P can be enabling technology for illegal purposes, like many other technologies. What our legal system should be weighing, is what is the cost/benefit to society (especially vis a vis the rights in our constitution) to trying to criminalize the technology vs. allowing it. Copyright infringement is a bit lower on the scale of Bad Things than people getting killed, so the arguments against it are going to have less gravity automatically. I'm one of those that think the whole notion of copyright has become stronger than it should be, so copyright infringement ranks somewhere around speeding in the list of things we should be worrying about. Unfortunately my campaign donations buy me no consideration, but that's another matter.
Along those lines, I see that Adobe has also started requiring product activation (web or phone) as well. Can forced upgrades via short-term licenses be in the near future as well?
Looking at the new features list, I have to agree with there be little reason to upgrade. While this may mean the products are mature in their scope, it doesn't necessarily mean OSS is going to catch up and pass them soon. It just means that if they keep the tools limited to their current scope, they have little room to grow. A few years ago Adobe tried to sell ImageReady as a separate product, a Photoshop for the web, and fairly quickly realized their customers wouldn't go for it. They folded it into Photoshop. They may be forced to integrate some of their products in the future, too, (Golive and Indesign?) though not until competition forces them to. Their current products may also undergo some drastic change from new technology (semantic markup or copyright enforcement beyond watermarking or whatever), like the web before.
I used to go to cnet all the time around then, the time of launching news.com. It makes me feel a little old thinking that that's been 7 years already. The site hasn't aged well, though. I come here or various other aggregators for news first, and rarely check cnet at all anymore. If not for the very occasional download from there, I'd probably have forgotten about it by now. I guess I want more either more news at a glance than they're willing to show, or more in depth commentary than they're willing to allow. The columnists weighing in, followed by no reader input or argumentation, feels cheap now, even when the columnists are sharp people.
And the new design looks worse at a glance: same stuff, basically same layout and colors, but now featuring retro "folded corner" tabs. Nothing like trying to get your attention on news with conspicuous nostalgia.
I'm interested in seeing what O'reilly can do with running Sun (and others!?) developer community sites. Imagine an MSDN or TechNet that's organized enough to find what you need on! Of course, MS would never swallow its pride and let O'reilly do that.
I was also hoping to hear that there would be more in the... Cookbook series. I'm a big fan of learning from well-developed samples. O hwell, maybe he can make Flash scripting something more fun and worth playing with.
Most Chinese don't speak "Chinese" either. They can read a common language, but there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible dialects in China (at least as distinct as, say, Norwegian and Swedish, and often more so; Croatian and Serbian are just the opposite - mutually intelligible spoken language, different writing systems). The definition of what counts as a language is often politically motivated, so lumping all of China into "Chinese" and assuming all India fits into Hindi makes for some skewed numbers.
With that in mind, English ranks higher in number of native speakers than you might think, and is way, way ahead in number of non-native speakers. This is especially true for written language (where machine translation can somewhat work).
I have no idea why you think Spanish is going to be the predominant language in the USA. My guess is that either you have birth rates and # of language speakers conflated or just feel that even the slightest trend toward bilingualism requires a winner and loser.
Translating from well-known languages such as Hindi or Arabic are all well and good, but they're already pretty easy to translate (the rules are well-known, translations are easy to check). This may still be a good way to do such translations faster, but it won't help you with: new or obscure languages (not enough translated data to feed into it), quality translation (no mention of the results, so I assume no one's going to be relying on this for publishing or journalism), or very pragmatically dissimilar languages (the rules of conversation rather than grammar). It's a good use of number-crunching, but would you want, say, your wedding vows, free lance article, or software specs done this way?
The video, in particular, screams marketing schmo with theatrical aspirations. This kinf of viral marketing (hate the term, sounds vomit inducing) isn't a bad thing at all, though. It forces the marketers to be interesting enough to keep your attention, rather than try to give you their spiel when you can't walk away.
But it would also carve out a broad exemption in the law for mail sent by companies the recipient has done business with, and completely exempt Internet service providers -- including Microsoft.
Yeah, that's not a hole. How hard would it be for a spammer to start a side business of being an isp to get around this? And since Microsoft only "done business" with practically everyone who's ever bought or used a computer (I'm sure someone out there is weaning their kids on *nix, but the rest of us...), that means free spam all day every day from our "partner".
The fallacy in the article is not that smart kids can choose their degree of popularity, but that they're even smart. The fact that he thinks, even now, that geeks are smarter sort of goes a long way to explaining his adolescent cluelessness.
Apparently Paul Graham hasn't heard of the theory of multiple intelligences, either. Just because you're good at math or science, doesn't actually make you "smart" or that you necessarily have greater control of your fate than everyone else. A geek isn't someone who's socially 'different' or nonconformist or anything like that, it's simply someone who's socially unsmart.
Oddly, this kind of report is one of the few things you won't find on KaZaa or Gnutella. Though something that made the industrial sheen bar graphs is.
Maybe when the prices of music, downloaded or retail, come down to new market levels I'll go back to blowing a day's wages on a handful of iffy albums.
For really cool monorail tech, check out the Urbanaut. Its inventor is the designer of Seattle's original monorail. Why we in Seattle aren't going with his ideas for this new one, I don't know.
Can't read the article since it appears to be already slashdotted, but...
Most games that manage to finally get published are rehashes of already popular games, and often just a quick game version of something already popular in another medium already (tv, movies, books, etc.). For one of those to succeed, it has to *really* be well put together, with great art and marketing (like, say, Spiderman). It's surprising when a game like that doesn't fail. Hopefully the article spends more time discussing the whys and wherefores of games that aren't going to have an obviously high chance of failing (Black and White, say).
Throw in costs for babysitting vs. watching a movie with the kids (obviously does not apply to, um, all kinds of movies), and the price points get a quite a bit bigger.
...but theaters. The movie studios will keep making movies, and if they can't make as much on dvd sales then they reduce the cost of making movies (lower pay, increase productivity, the usual etc.). The worst that can happen is that theaters go out of business, and I see no reason why that would really cause movie studios to go down. Heck, with the focus off of getting people into theaters, maybe the number and quality of films released each year could rise. Maybe not to the level of the book industry (production costs too different), but along those lines.
There's something twisted about folks who can say "Appropriating and parroting the creation of others..." with a straight face (or keyboard). Unless you've invented your own language, every utterance and recording of your thoughts is an appropriation and parroting of others, and not in a trivial way. This notion that only "original thought" is worthy enough for social/legal protection is scary, since it implies that the proponent believes it is possible to neatly divide all thoughts up into original and unoriginal categories (and why do I cynically suspect the author of this memo would put her own thoughts a bit high on the originality scale...).
I'm also failing to see how being the grandchild or someone who works at the company an "original thinker" used to work for would make you the appropriate person to decide who gets to sell or "protect from mutilation" the original thought. If the gGreat Thought is so good, why does it need generational proxies be anointed keepers of the flame?
And why am I still here reading about FF IX? I haven't played it in years! But maybe if they're actually going back to a style that emphasizes fantasy instead realism, I'll look again. I'm not a big fan of all the games now that try to use photorealistic 3d humanoids. What's the point of animation if it's trying to look like film?
Slashdot Mirror
- post-apocalyptic/dark future sci-fi (Road Warrior or Gammaworld)
- superheroes (isn't there something like this coming?)
- adventure a la Indiana Jones/Alan Quartermain
- swashbuckling/pirate style adventures
I'm not sure how many people would want to immerse themselves in these settings compared to fantasy, but the potential is there to restrict interactions to a pretty interpersonal level.Junk, all in one books like this have always been quite common. It seems that computers have been around long enough that even the completely uninitiated know that computing is reasonably complicated. Do they try to sell "the only book you'll ever need" style books for business? Construction? Medicine? Maybe they don't feel there are quite enough fearful dupes to be had in those topics.
I'm finding lots of little applications that were using a database or text-file scheme with relatively little data and I've been converting them to xml files for storage and lookup. It's been a performance improvement everytime, often a huge one. There is presumably some size/schema complexity point where this gain turns around the other way (the cost of loading and parsing a doc vs. creating a db connection to parse data), but it's been a big win for me so far.
This sounds logical, but then you'll change your mind when you follow the logic further rather than stop at the place you like. People kill with bombs, people kill with nuclear weapons, people kill with manufactured diseases, people kill with satellite ray gus, etc., etc. See the common denominator? Ignoring the enabling technology stops making sense, doesn't it?
P2P can be enabling technology for illegal purposes, like many other technologies. What our legal system should be weighing, is what is the cost/benefit to society (especially vis a vis the rights in our constitution) to trying to criminalize the technology vs. allowing it. Copyright infringement is a bit lower on the scale of Bad Things than people getting killed, so the arguments against it are going to have less gravity automatically. I'm one of those that think the whole notion of copyright has become stronger than it should be, so copyright infringement ranks somewhere around speeding in the list of things we should be worrying about. Unfortunately my campaign donations buy me no consideration, but that's another matter.
we had just gone ahead with the whole Earth ruled by a council of scientists thing.
Remember that you're unique, just like everybody else.
Along those lines, I see that Adobe has also started requiring product activation (web or phone) as well. Can forced upgrades via short-term licenses be in the near future as well?
Looking at the new features list, I have to agree with there be little reason to upgrade. While this may mean the products are mature in their scope, it doesn't necessarily mean OSS is going to catch up and pass them soon. It just means that if they keep the tools limited to their current scope, they have little room to grow. A few years ago Adobe tried to sell ImageReady as a separate product, a Photoshop for the web, and fairly quickly realized their customers wouldn't go for it. They folded it into Photoshop. They may be forced to integrate some of their products in the future, too, (Golive and Indesign?) though not until competition forces them to. Their current products may also undergo some drastic change from new technology (semantic markup or copyright enforcement beyond watermarking or whatever), like the web before.
I used to go to cnet all the time around then, the time of launching news.com. It makes me feel a little old thinking that that's been 7 years already. The site hasn't aged well, though. I come here or various other aggregators for news first, and rarely check cnet at all anymore. If not for the very occasional download from there, I'd probably have forgotten about it by now. I guess I want more either more news at a glance than they're willing to show, or more in depth commentary than they're willing to allow. The columnists weighing in, followed by no reader input or argumentation, feels cheap now, even when the columnists are sharp people.
And the new design looks worse at a glance: same stuff, basically same layout and colors, but now featuring retro "folded corner" tabs. Nothing like trying to get your attention on news with conspicuous nostalgia.
I'm interested in seeing what O'reilly can do with running Sun (and others!?) developer community sites. Imagine an MSDN or TechNet that's organized enough to find what you need on! Of course, MS would never swallow its pride and let O'reilly do that.
... Cookbook series. I'm a big fan of learning from well-developed samples. O hwell, maybe he can make Flash scripting something more fun and worth playing with.
I was also hoping to hear that there would be more in the
Most Chinese don't speak "Chinese" either. They can read a common language, but there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible dialects in China (at least as distinct as, say, Norwegian and Swedish, and often more so; Croatian and Serbian are just the opposite - mutually intelligible spoken language, different writing systems). The definition of what counts as a language is often politically motivated, so lumping all of China into "Chinese" and assuming all India fits into Hindi makes for some skewed numbers.
With that in mind, English ranks higher in number of native speakers than you might think, and is way, way ahead in number of non-native speakers. This is especially true for written language (where machine translation can somewhat work).
I have no idea why you think Spanish is going to be the predominant language in the USA. My guess is that either you have birth rates and # of language speakers conflated or just feel that even the slightest trend toward bilingualism requires a winner and loser.
Translating from well-known languages such as Hindi or Arabic are all well and good, but they're already pretty easy to translate (the rules are well-known, translations are easy to check). This may still be a good way to do such translations faster, but it won't help you with: new or obscure languages (not enough translated data to feed into it), quality translation (no mention of the results, so I assume no one's going to be relying on this for publishing or journalism), or very pragmatically dissimilar languages (the rules of conversation rather than grammar). It's a good use of number-crunching, but would you want, say, your wedding vows, free lance article, or software specs done this way?
The video, in particular, screams marketing schmo with theatrical aspirations. This kinf of viral marketing (hate the term, sounds vomit inducing) isn't a bad thing at all, though. It forces the marketers to be interesting enough to keep your attention, rather than try to give you their spiel when you can't walk away.
But it would also carve out a broad exemption in the law for mail sent by companies the recipient has done business with, and completely exempt Internet service providers -- including Microsoft. Yeah, that's not a hole. How hard would it be for a spammer to start a side business of being an isp to get around this? And since Microsoft only "done business" with practically everyone who's ever bought or used a computer (I'm sure someone out there is weaning their kids on *nix, but the rest of us...), that means free spam all day every day from our "partner".
The fallacy in the article is not that smart kids can choose their degree of popularity, but that they're even smart. The fact that he thinks, even now, that geeks are smarter sort of goes a long way to explaining his adolescent cluelessness.
Apparently Paul Graham hasn't heard of the theory of multiple intelligences, either. Just because you're good at math or science, doesn't actually make you "smart" or that you necessarily have greater control of your fate than everyone else. A geek isn't someone who's socially 'different' or nonconformist or anything like that, it's simply someone who's socially unsmart.
Oddly, this kind of report is one of the few things you won't find on KaZaa or Gnutella. Though something that made the industrial sheen bar graphs is.
Maybe when the prices of music, downloaded or retail, come down to new market levels I'll go back to blowing a day's wages on a handful of iffy albums.
For really cool monorail tech, check out the Urbanaut. Its inventor is the designer of Seattle's original monorail. Why we in Seattle aren't going with his ideas for this new one, I don't know.
Can't read the article since it appears to be already slashdotted, but...
Most games that manage to finally get published are rehashes of already popular games, and often just a quick game version of something already popular in another medium already (tv, movies, books, etc.). For one of those to succeed, it has to *really* be well put together, with great art and marketing (like, say, Spiderman). It's surprising when a game like that doesn't fail. Hopefully the article spends more time discussing the whys and wherefores of games that aren't going to have an obviously high chance of failing (Black and White, say).
Throw in costs for babysitting vs. watching a movie with the kids (obviously does not apply to, um, all kinds of movies), and the price points get a quite a bit bigger.
...but theaters. The movie studios will keep making movies, and if they can't make as much on dvd sales then they reduce the cost of making movies (lower pay, increase productivity, the usual etc.). The worst that can happen is that theaters go out of business, and I see no reason why that would really cause movie studios to go down. Heck, with the focus off of getting people into theaters, maybe the number and quality of films released each year could rise. Maybe not to the level of the book industry (production costs too different), but along those lines.
There's something twisted about folks who can say "Appropriating and parroting the creation of others..." with a straight face (or keyboard). Unless you've invented your own language, every utterance and recording of your thoughts is an appropriation and parroting of others, and not in a trivial way. This notion that only "original thought" is worthy enough for social/legal protection is scary, since it implies that the proponent believes it is possible to neatly divide all thoughts up into original and unoriginal categories (and why do I cynically suspect the author of this memo would put her own thoughts a bit high on the originality scale...).
I'm also failing to see how being the grandchild or someone who works at the company an "original thinker" used to work for would make you the appropriate person to decide who gets to sell or "protect from mutilation" the original thought. If the gGreat Thought is so good, why does it need generational proxies be anointed keepers of the flame?
And why am I still here reading about FF IX? I haven't played it in years! But maybe if they're actually going back to a style that emphasizes fantasy instead realism, I'll look again. I'm not a big fan of all the games now that try to use photorealistic 3d humanoids. What's the point of animation if it's trying to look like film?