if you keep your old computer, when you have to buy a new one (because the old one doesn't work anymore), the new computer will be cheaper and use less energy than if you buy a computer now, your formula doesn't take this into account..
While I'm hardly going to pretend that that formula is some sort of magic formula that completely encapsulates the reasoning behind whether you should buy a new computer, even if only for energy reasons, you're actually wrong that I don't cover that case. That's part of what the word "expected" means.
If you plan on using the computer for two years, after which there is a 100% chance you'll discard it, but there's a 50% chance it'll break after exactly one year, that's an expected use of a year and a half.
This example uses discrete numbers for concreteness. In reality calculated expected use times would involve intergrating under continuous curves, but I don't care to try to explain that all in a Slashdot post.
Now, that said, you're right that it's not necessarily easy to do an evaluation of "expected use time", but that's because life is complicated and there's not much you can do about that. Fortunately, I find such computations for old computers is actually not that hard; since component failure tends to follow a Poisson distribution, generally if your computer has made it to "old" it's more likely to continue on longer, so the random probabilities can be considered smaller than for a new machine, and after three or four years, you can pretty much estimate the probability of failure of the old machine at zero, unless it's giving you signs it's flaky or going to fail. It's wrong, but it's close enough.
The energy used to make a computer is necessarily factored into its price; the manufacturers can't afford otherwise or they'd go out of business.
Therefore, you don't need to do very much fancy analysis to determine if it's worth buying a new computer or using an old one. If (cost of energy * expected use time for new computer + price of new computer) < (cost of energy * expected use time for old computer), then you're saving energy by buying a new one.
There are some externalities with the new computer, but if they added up to much they'd end up getting factored into the price again, most likely. (Most of the low-hanging fruit for internalizing externalities is gone.) You can minimize the externalities of trashing the old computer by recycling it. And thus the topic turns full circle...
I meant the "if". Thanks for being calm about it.:)
Interestingly, our Democracy(-inspired government) is not currently voting itself bread and circuses. Our Congresspeople are voting themselves bread and circuses, for the purposes of buying votes from certain narrow interests. While perhaps more vile, this turns out to be much easier to stop when light is shined on it. When money stops buying votes and starts buying anti-votes, they'll have to stop.
Typically these expenditures are popular (war here is the exception).
If you're trying to imply that the war in Iraq is the reason for our deficits, you need to add some facts to your thinking.
The cost of the Iraq war will be about 315 billion as of September 2006, which is in the future.
The current national deficit is on the order of 8.3 trillion.
Even if we had spent nothing on the Iraq war, that only gets you down to 8 trillion.
For all the coverage in the media, we are fighting this war with our pinky finger*. The bitching about the monetary costs of the war has its origin more in politics than reality. The real problems lie elsewhere, and are left as an exercise for the interested reader.
(*: Something the true enemies of America may wish to consider, lest they do something stupid that precipitates a popular and obviously necessary war.)
An awful lot of people define "my vote mattering" as "my vote determines the outcome", and that's just not how it works. Your vote matters, assuming a reasonably fair voting system (i.e., no secret "negative" weighting, and appropriate weighting, which in the case of politics is equal for all), but it does not matter more than anybody else's.
Even in the case where an election comes up 1,000,000 vs 1,000,001, it wasn't your vote that "made the difference"... it was equally all 1,000,001 of them. Even then, your vote wasn't any more "special" than anybody elses, and that's most people's very definition of "their vote mattering".
I think the big key to participating in "mass minds" is to realize that the "mass mind" is not going to be your mind, writ large, neither in theory nor in practice.
Your vote matters, but it matters as much as everybody else's. It's not supremely important.
Your comment matters, but it matters as much as everybody else's. It's not supremely important.
And this is what the mass mind will look like; a whole lot of people arguing and coming to very rough consensus. It's never going to converge on a set of opinions that exactly match your own.
This may sound obvious when I say it that way, but I'm quite certain a lot of people's disenchantment with participating in these sorts of mass minds (as prototyped by the "body politic" and now popping up everywhere thanks to the Internet) is because they go into it with the idea that they only "win" if the mass mind thinks exactly like them, which rather misses the point entirely. If everybody's not losing a little bit, the system isn't working right. "A good compromise is when all parties are equally unhappy."
One of the things that made me laugh about blogging is that there were a lot of people that were firmly convinced that it was finally going to sweep the world and basically make it hold the "smart" opinions, which by an incredible coincidence just happened to be the opinions these people already held. Here's one of the most egregious examples of that. (My personal opinion is that it tends to drag the system away from the parochial opinions of the relatively few gatekeepers in the existing communications media, and drag it back towards the true ideological average of the participants. I leave as an exercise for the reader exactly what that translates to in ideological terms.)
You can buy a $600 graphics card and not think graphics is the only issue.
I once bought a new graphics card... admittedly still a $60 budget special... because I had graphical latency issues in Quake 2 with my Riva128, which made online play that much harder.
since they're apparently unable to port the 360/PS3 version over without making it "inferior".
That's one interpretation.
The other interpretation is that a port would automatically be inferior to other games on the Revolution. In which case, this is one logic step away from out-and-out admitting that the Revolution is the superior next-gen system, if a straight port of a top-selling XBox360 or PS3 game would be considered "inferior" on the Rev.
(Unless graphics is your absolute and only concern, in which case you can simply interpret that as "not looking as good", automatically call that "inferior", and consider the case closed. How many of us really truly believe that graphics is the only concern, though?)
A lot of the people I know only go to trusted sites,...
A sibling to this post points out it only takes a split second of carelessness. This is literally true.
The combination of
Internet Explorer and several silent install vulnerabilities (are you sure they're all gone? Is everybody's IE up to date?)
The user, and thus IE, running as Administrator (OR any priv. escalation exploit), and
bots that register typo-domains en masse
adds up to a situation where a single innocuous typo in your Location bar could trigger a rootkit install.
For this reason, I consider IE mortally dangerous, and until we go for some period of years without seeing a silent install vulnerability, I won't lift this assessment. This has nothing to do with hating Microsoft, and shouldn't be dismissed as such; I think it's a perfectly rational assessment of the situation. I think the only thing stopping more people from seeing it this way is the fact that most people are dependent on Microsoft and simply don't want to see something that means they are going to have to do a lot of work to switch.
I don't think Firefox has had a "silent install" vulnerability yet. Corrections welcome. It's just too darned easy to get infected, and all the anti-virus software, software firewalls, and spyware detection software is just closing the barn door after the animals escaped, especially as the rootkits are passing the point where you can even pretend to remove them without a full re-load of the OS from the bottom. (And it's only a matter of time before the rootkits go back to the old trick of infecting all executables like the viruses of the olden days, so you have to completely rebuild the machine from scratch...)
(I remember there was some changes made to the extension download process to make it harder to mindlessly click through, but I'm not counting that. I would consider a silent extension install to be a silent install vulnerability, because extensions get full access to the machine. The same for an install process that isn't "silent", but isn't able to be stopped short of cutting power to the machine; ISTR an ActiveX vuln that had the behavior of installing even if you said "no" to the trust dialog.)
Re:I can't wait for Spore!
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EA's E3 Lineup
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In the equation A = B, A does not cause B, nor does B cause A. There's no causation claim, just a relationship claim. I'd never claim 'hype causes a bad game'. You didn't disagree with my point, you elaborated on it. Fairly well, I think. (Your "games standing on their own two feet" correspond to my clause about "exceptions", because such games are definitely exceptions.)
As for Spore, I've seen the videos. But it's only slightly easier to determine how fun a game is to play from a video than to learn a language just from hearing people speak, with no chance to interact. I remember how awesome the Black & White videos were, and how un-awesome the game is. I remember the zoom in from the sky to the worm in the apple. What the demo-er didn't tell you is that the worm in the apply is the only thing in the world that has detail that fine. Any number of such things could be going on in the Spore videos. We can't know.
I'm not convinced the game is crap or anything; in fact I'm not convinced of much of anything, because we have almost no data. Been here, done this. I hope it succeeds. I'm just skeptical, and have good reason to expect failure.
Your story has some holes about 1 mile wide in it, but I'll let that rest.
Probably just because it's a summary. I'd say every two months I see a similar story on the local news, and I don't watch much local news at all. (Just happen to be in the same room with it when my wife is channel surfing.)
I doubt they're all fake, and I doubt they all make it to the news, either. This stuff happens. It's not just a CSI story.
Re:I can't wait for Spore!
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EA's E3 Lineup
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Take the hype, divide it by 100, and that is what you really get in the end.
Naw, that's a crappy formula. That says the less hype the game gets, the worse it will be.
I'd go for something more like "the upper bound of quality is inversely proportional to the hype". Even this has counterexamples, but it's much closer to true.
(In the case of Spore, I am very skeptical because while I believe that a fun game of that description can be produced, I am not convinced that one iteration can jump that far. The more crazy things you try in one iteration, the more likely it is that at least one of them will wreck the game. I think this is what happened to Black and White; the "pet" alone wrecked the game for me, and there were a couple of other deal-breakers that bothered other people. The technology, on the other hand, was pretty impressive, and there was a fun game there if somebody had just taken a knife to several aspects of the game. What they needed to do was sneak up on the pet aspect, starting out simple and relatively unimportant, and developing it over several iterations until they eventually reached what they thought they had in the first Black and White, only this would have actually worked.)
If they don't agree, they'll find they won't be recieving a laptop, or the $250 consolation prize.
So, of course people under 18 are free to "enter" the contest. They can create CSS files. You didn't need this contest's permission to do that, in fact. They just can't win if they aren't over 18.
No contradiction, because not signing does not cause any new restrictions.
Parents can theoretically sign on their behalf, but handling that on a large scale is hard, and there are a lot of other laws protecting minors, such as child labor laws in this case, that while you may not be in violation of, it's easier just to skip the problem entirely.
Please be sure you understand that last sentence before replying. I'm not saying this contest would violate child labor laws. I'm saying that verifying that in all relevant jurisdictions, plus any other relevant law, isn't economically worthwhile.
Since a minor can't sign a contract, the minor can't transfer IP rights as necessary to Slashdot. Obviously, this would be another layer of hassle for Slashdot if they picked a minor as the winner, getting the parent to sign instead. (This is where a creative lawyer could bring in "child labor" laws, by construing the prize as payment. Creative and unlikely to win, certainly, but Slashdot has "already lost" just by being sued.) And I'm not certain, but there may be issues with trying to directly give the prize to the minor, as well.
That shouldn't be necessary. All modern browsers can save an entire webpage, with all external components (images, CSS, etc.) in a separate subdirectory. (That is, don't take the option to save it all in one file, which the very modern browers support, take the older directory-based one as it is easier for development.)
Save one of each of the pages mentioned (Index, Story, Comment, User), and it's the work of a couple of minutes to edit each resulting file to point at one CSS file.
Add each of the four files to the location bar in your browser, and off you go; edit the single local CSS file you created for the contest, and all four pages are one click away. (Or put them in four tabs and "reload all tabs" for tabbed browsers. Unfortunately that won't work in IE 6, of course.)
No Slashcode installation needed, in fact I daresay it'd be a complete waste of time.
Oh, it's obvious if you just put the pieces together:
Maintain a tenuous balance on the edge of total collapse, firmly on the bottom of the market.
Invert reality. Now you're on the edge of complete success, firmly on the top of the market.
Profit!
As you might imagine, such an audacious business plan takes some time to perfect and pull off. We're in around year 2 or 3 of step 2.
Re:Yes, I do remember that. It was different.
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Viiv Falls Flat
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· Score: 1
GP post: MMX makes the internet go faster.
Parent: MMX was an actual hardware improvement that did make media "go faster".
Who can spot the disconnect here?
I'll back up the grandparent post. I distinctly recall claims being made about how the faster Intel processors made downloading faster. Not media playing, which they never actually advertised that I recall, nor game playing, but faster downloading.
I've always considered that one of the most deceptive and stupid ad campaigns ever run; deceptive for claiming an untruth about faster downloading, and stupid because as you say, MMX was a legitimate improvement in media playing and 3D gaming. (Or at least MMX2 was.) Seems to me those would have been even easier to concretely advertise for.
Even so I constantly got complaints from the new [Computer Engineering] students about how they were constantly confused because I kept skipping arround in the text (which, from their perspective, I was).
I would suggest that you tell them to suck it up. If anybody is going to need to learn how to handle out-of-order execution, it's Computer Engineers, no?
For those of you who think that there hasn't been much technological progress since, say, 1980 (except perhaps computers which are special*), this is how it happens. Take this sort of incremental improvement by one company in one very small facet of our lives, and multiply it across any number of thousands of products, carefully trimmed and optimized and made more efficient. You only notice the things that the process isn't very good at; UI, for instance.
(*: And computers only seem special for two reasons: One, most fields don't get to experience exponential growth for decades at a time, and two, you know more about them. There's a lot going on under the hood of any number of other products, too. Familiarity breeds contempt; so does ignorance.)
Some people have commented negatively about a change in specs in the middle of the production run. There's prior art for this, though: apparently the Playstation 2 has two processor speeds, 294MHz and 299MHz.
The fact that this has had so little impact that nobody realizes it has already happened speaks to the fact that it can be done without a whole lot of problems.
The days of being able to count cycles and depend on the timing that way are long gone anyhow. Console games need to use timers and handle the fact that sometimes the game will bog down anyhow. Tweaking the clock speed a little is something that everything ought to be able to handle in stride, or they're going to have big problems as soon as there's one too many polygons on the screen.
On the topic of changing specs mid-stream, it has occurred to me to wonder if Nintendo's HD solution for the Revolution will be to release an HD-capable Revolution about two years after the initial release. 3D games up-sample pretty well, even if the first-gen games won't look quite as good as dedicated HD games, but on that note, even XBox 360 games need to work at SD, as well. They'll be able to still release that console at most likely the original price-point, and they'll be selling into a market where more people have HD displays than today. It'll be tricky, but since they could design the graphics card with the explicit purpose of having the same capabilities as the old one, just with the ability to do all the old stuff in HD in the same amount of time, it should be doable.
If this is their plan, they may be right; jamming all that expensive hardware into the PS3 and the XBox 360 may not be cost effective if you lock out a lot of people who would otherwise have purchased one.
A series or movie set in Starfleet Academy must be character based. It can't be adventure based, because if I know my Star Trek writers and management, by the time they're done "amping up" the drama and adventure, the dominant question in your head at the end of Season One or the movie is why they don't just make Kirk a captain right now. (Especially for a series, where he'll have done it several times.)
It's just not an adventure if the Fate Of Humanity isn't on the line, no?
But Star Trek hasn't had good character writing for a long time now. One must conclude, given the number of writers that have passed through, that this is a management problem, and not just a writing problem. Remember, even if you dislike B&B, which I think is reasonable, there's another layer above them that thinks they're just peachy, and even if they replaced B&B, you'd likely end up with The Sons of B&B.
I think that because of these structural failings in the franchise, that the ability of Paramount to pull of a Star Trek Academy movie or series is just not there.
This kind of debate is what I call a "definition debate". If you define your term, it is almost certain that your questions will be answered.
Are videogames "art"? To answer that, define "art". Once you do, you are almost certainly done.
We're getting this second hand, but Ebert offers up a definition to the effect of "art is something that deeply explores what it means to be human". By that definiton, I completely agree that truly artistic video games are rare. Even the examples I can think of that meet that definition are pretty thin on that front.
The reason I think it's important to remember we're in a definition debate is because there is an overwhelming temptation that most people experience to detach from the definition and start fighting as if the definition is obvious to everyone and the real question is whether the definition applies. Resist that, because it's backwards. If you clearly state a definition, it will be (relatively speaking) quite clear whether video games are art, are not art, or whether perhaps some are art.
At this point, you tend to realize that while it's interesting to compare and contrast the value of various definitions, you're not going to find The Definition Of Art. Therefore, you're not going to find The Answer. You should know going into the debate that you're not going to settle anything. You can't.
I enjoy this sort of thing in moderation if done with people who understand what's going on, but the people furiously arguing backwards tend to drown out the conversation pretty quickly, in my experience.
Slashdot Mirror
if you keep your old computer, when you have to buy a new one (because the old one doesn't work anymore), the new computer will be cheaper and use less energy than if you buy a computer now, your formula doesn't take this into account..
While I'm hardly going to pretend that that formula is some sort of magic formula that completely encapsulates the reasoning behind whether you should buy a new computer, even if only for energy reasons, you're actually wrong that I don't cover that case. That's part of what the word "expected" means.
If you plan on using the computer for two years, after which there is a 100% chance you'll discard it, but there's a 50% chance it'll break after exactly one year, that's an expected use of a year and a half.
This example uses discrete numbers for concreteness. In reality calculated expected use times would involve intergrating under continuous curves, but I don't care to try to explain that all in a Slashdot post.
Now, that said, you're right that it's not necessarily easy to do an evaluation of "expected use time", but that's because life is complicated and there's not much you can do about that. Fortunately, I find such computations for old computers is actually not that hard; since component failure tends to follow a Poisson distribution, generally if your computer has made it to "old" it's more likely to continue on longer, so the random probabilities can be considered smaller than for a new machine, and after three or four years, you can pretty much estimate the probability of failure of the old machine at zero, unless it's giving you signs it's flaky or going to fail. It's wrong, but it's close enough.
The energy used to make a computer is necessarily factored into its price; the manufacturers can't afford otherwise or they'd go out of business.
Therefore, you don't need to do very much fancy analysis to determine if it's worth buying a new computer or using an old one. If (cost of energy * expected use time for new computer + price of new computer) < (cost of energy * expected use time for old computer), then you're saving energy by buying a new one.
There are some externalities with the new computer, but if they added up to much they'd end up getting factored into the price again, most likely. (Most of the low-hanging fruit for internalizing externalities is gone.) You can minimize the externalities of trashing the old computer by recycling it. And thus the topic turns full circle...
I meant the "if". Thanks for being calm about it. :)
Interestingly, our Democracy(-inspired government) is not currently voting itself bread and circuses. Our Congresspeople are voting themselves bread and circuses, for the purposes of buying votes from certain narrow interests. While perhaps more vile, this turns out to be much easier to stop when light is shined on it. When money stops buying votes and starts buying anti-votes, they'll have to stop.
Typically these expenditures are popular (war here is the exception).
If you're trying to imply that the war in Iraq is the reason for our deficits, you need to add some facts to your thinking.
The cost of the Iraq war will be about 315 billion as of September 2006, which is in the future.
The current national deficit is on the order of 8.3 trillion.
Even if we had spent nothing on the Iraq war, that only gets you down to 8 trillion.
For all the coverage in the media, we are fighting this war with our pinky finger*. The bitching about the monetary costs of the war has its origin more in politics than reality. The real problems lie elsewhere, and are left as an exercise for the interested reader.
(*: Something the true enemies of America may wish to consider, lest they do something stupid that precipitates a popular and obviously necessary war.)
Do not meddle in the affairs of the Elder Gods, for you are crunchy, and good with ketchup.
Arrow doesn't disprove that your vote matters, which would be a very silly result.
What he proves is that there is no universal definition of fair .
An awful lot of people define "my vote mattering" as "my vote determines the outcome", and that's just not how it works. Your vote matters, assuming a reasonably fair voting system (i.e., no secret "negative" weighting, and appropriate weighting, which in the case of politics is equal for all), but it does not matter more than anybody else's.
Even in the case where an election comes up 1,000,000 vs 1,000,001, it wasn't your vote that "made the difference"... it was equally all 1,000,001 of them. Even then, your vote wasn't any more "special" than anybody elses, and that's most people's very definition of "their vote mattering".
(This is just my same point, re-expressed.)
I think the big key to participating in "mass minds" is to realize that the "mass mind" is not going to be your mind, writ large, neither in theory nor in practice.
Your vote matters, but it matters as much as everybody else's. It's not supremely important.
Your comment matters, but it matters as much as everybody else's. It's not supremely important.
And this is what the mass mind will look like; a whole lot of people arguing and coming to very rough consensus. It's never going to converge on a set of opinions that exactly match your own.
This may sound obvious when I say it that way, but I'm quite certain a lot of people's disenchantment with participating in these sorts of mass minds (as prototyped by the "body politic" and now popping up everywhere thanks to the Internet) is because they go into it with the idea that they only "win" if the mass mind thinks exactly like them, which rather misses the point entirely. If everybody's not losing a little bit, the system isn't working right. "A good compromise is when all parties are equally unhappy."
One of the things that made me laugh about blogging is that there were a lot of people that were firmly convinced that it was finally going to sweep the world and basically make it hold the "smart" opinions, which by an incredible coincidence just happened to be the opinions these people already held. Here's one of the most egregious examples of that. (My personal opinion is that it tends to drag the system away from the parochial opinions of the relatively few gatekeepers in the existing communications media, and drag it back towards the true ideological average of the participants. I leave as an exercise for the reader exactly what that translates to in ideological terms.)
You can buy a $600 graphics card and not think graphics is the only issue.
I once bought a new graphics card... admittedly still a $60 budget special... because I had graphical latency issues in Quake 2 with my Riva128, which made online play that much harder.
since they're apparently unable to port the 360/PS3 version over without making it "inferior".
That's one interpretation.
The other interpretation is that a port would automatically be inferior to other games on the Revolution. In which case, this is one logic step away from out-and-out admitting that the Revolution is the superior next-gen system, if a straight port of a top-selling XBox360 or PS3 game would be considered "inferior" on the Rev.
(Unless graphics is your absolute and only concern, in which case you can simply interpret that as "not looking as good", automatically call that "inferior", and consider the case closed. How many of us really truly believe that graphics is the only concern, though?)
A sibling to this post points out it only takes a split second of carelessness. This is literally true.
The combination of
- Internet Explorer and several silent install vulnerabilities (are you sure they're all gone? Is everybody's IE up to date?)
- The user, and thus IE, running as Administrator (OR any priv. escalation exploit), and
- bots that register typo-domains en masse
adds up to a situation where a single innocuous typo in your Location bar could trigger a rootkit install.For this reason, I consider IE mortally dangerous, and until we go for some period of years without seeing a silent install vulnerability, I won't lift this assessment. This has nothing to do with hating Microsoft, and shouldn't be dismissed as such; I think it's a perfectly rational assessment of the situation. I think the only thing stopping more people from seeing it this way is the fact that most people are dependent on Microsoft and simply don't want to see something that means they are going to have to do a lot of work to switch.
I don't think Firefox has had a "silent install" vulnerability yet. Corrections welcome. It's just too darned easy to get infected, and all the anti-virus software, software firewalls, and spyware detection software is just closing the barn door after the animals escaped, especially as the rootkits are passing the point where you can even pretend to remove them without a full re-load of the OS from the bottom. (And it's only a matter of time before the rootkits go back to the old trick of infecting all executables like the viruses of the olden days, so you have to completely rebuild the machine from scratch...)
(I remember there was some changes made to the extension download process to make it harder to mindlessly click through, but I'm not counting that. I would consider a silent extension install to be a silent install vulnerability, because extensions get full access to the machine. The same for an install process that isn't "silent", but isn't able to be stopped short of cutting power to the machine; ISTR an ActiveX vuln that had the behavior of installing even if you said "no" to the trust dialog.)
In the equation A = B, A does not cause B, nor does B cause A. There's no causation claim, just a relationship claim. I'd never claim 'hype causes a bad game'. You didn't disagree with my point, you elaborated on it. Fairly well, I think. (Your "games standing on their own two feet" correspond to my clause about "exceptions", because such games are definitely exceptions.)
As for Spore, I've seen the videos. But it's only slightly easier to determine how fun a game is to play from a video than to learn a language just from hearing people speak, with no chance to interact. I remember how awesome the Black & White videos were, and how un-awesome the game is. I remember the zoom in from the sky to the worm in the apple. What the demo-er didn't tell you is that the worm in the apply is the only thing in the world that has detail that fine. Any number of such things could be going on in the Spore videos. We can't know.
I'm not convinced the game is crap or anything; in fact I'm not convinced of much of anything, because we have almost no data. Been here, done this. I hope it succeeds. I'm just skeptical, and have good reason to expect failure.
Your story has some holes about 1 mile wide in it, but I'll let that rest.
Probably just because it's a summary. I'd say every two months I see a similar story on the local news, and I don't watch much local news at all. (Just happen to be in the same room with it when my wife is channel surfing.)
I doubt they're all fake, and I doubt they all make it to the news, either. This stuff happens. It's not just a CSI story.
Take the hype, divide it by 100, and that is what you really get in the end.
Naw, that's a crappy formula. That says the less hype the game gets, the worse it will be.
I'd go for something more like "the upper bound of quality is inversely proportional to the hype". Even this has counterexamples, but it's much closer to true.
(In the case of Spore, I am very skeptical because while I believe that a fun game of that description can be produced, I am not convinced that one iteration can jump that far. The more crazy things you try in one iteration, the more likely it is that at least one of them will wreck the game. I think this is what happened to Black and White; the "pet" alone wrecked the game for me, and there were a couple of other deal-breakers that bothered other people. The technology, on the other hand, was pretty impressive, and there was a fun game there if somebody had just taken a knife to several aspects of the game. What they needed to do was sneak up on the pet aspect, starting out simple and relatively unimportant, and developing it over several iterations until they eventually reached what they thought they had in the first Black and White, only this would have actually worked.)
If they don't agree, they'll find they won't be recieving a laptop, or the $250 consolation prize.
So, of course people under 18 are free to "enter" the contest. They can create CSS files. You didn't need this contest's permission to do that, in fact. They just can't win if they aren't over 18.
No contradiction, because not signing does not cause any new restrictions.
AC says:
Minors in the USA can sign contracts.
(And provides supporting links.)
Point, but I believe your links also provide evidence for my assertion that in this case it's just not worth it, as it can get much more complicated.
But thanks for the correction.
Minors can't sign contracts.
Parents can theoretically sign on their behalf, but handling that on a large scale is hard, and there are a lot of other laws protecting minors, such as child labor laws in this case, that while you may not be in violation of, it's easier just to skip the problem entirely.
Please be sure you understand that last sentence before replying. I'm not saying this contest would violate child labor laws. I'm saying that verifying that in all relevant jurisdictions, plus any other relevant law, isn't economically worthwhile.
Since a minor can't sign a contract, the minor can't transfer IP rights as necessary to Slashdot. Obviously, this would be another layer of hassle for Slashdot if they picked a minor as the winner, getting the parent to sign instead. (This is where a creative lawyer could bring in "child labor" laws, by construing the prize as payment. Creative and unlikely to win, certainly, but Slashdot has "already lost" just by being sued.) And I'm not certain, but there may be issues with trying to directly give the prize to the minor, as well.
It's just not worth it.
Woohoo! PILE-ON!
:)
Sorry, eldavojohn. When I started writing my reply there were no others
That shouldn't be necessary. All modern browsers can save an entire webpage, with all external components (images, CSS, etc.) in a separate subdirectory. (That is, don't take the option to save it all in one file, which the very modern browers support, take the older directory-based one as it is easier for development.)
Save one of each of the pages mentioned (Index, Story, Comment, User), and it's the work of a couple of minutes to edit each resulting file to point at one CSS file.
Add each of the four files to the location bar in your browser, and off you go; edit the single local CSS file you created for the contest, and all four pages are one click away. (Or put them in four tabs and "reload all tabs" for tabbed browsers. Unfortunately that won't work in IE 6, of course.)
No Slashcode installation needed, in fact I daresay it'd be a complete waste of time.
- Maintain a tenuous balance on the edge of total collapse, firmly on the bottom of the market.
- Invert reality. Now you're on the edge of complete success, firmly on the top of the market.
- Profit!
As you might imagine, such an audacious business plan takes some time to perfect and pull off. We're in around year 2 or 3 of step 2.GP post: MMX makes the internet go faster.
Parent: MMX was an actual hardware improvement that did make media "go faster".
Who can spot the disconnect here?
I'll back up the grandparent post. I distinctly recall claims being made about how the faster Intel processors made downloading faster. Not media playing, which they never actually advertised that I recall, nor game playing, but faster downloading.
I've always considered that one of the most deceptive and stupid ad campaigns ever run; deceptive for claiming an untruth about faster downloading, and stupid because as you say, MMX was a legitimate improvement in media playing and 3D gaming. (Or at least MMX2 was.) Seems to me those would have been even easier to concretely advertise for.
Even so I constantly got complaints from the new [Computer Engineering] students about how they were constantly confused because I kept skipping arround in the text (which, from their perspective, I was).
I would suggest that you tell them to suck it up. If anybody is going to need to learn how to handle out-of-order execution, it's Computer Engineers, no?
For those of you who think that there hasn't been much technological progress since, say, 1980 (except perhaps computers which are special*), this is how it happens. Take this sort of incremental improvement by one company in one very small facet of our lives, and multiply it across any number of thousands of products, carefully trimmed and optimized and made more efficient. You only notice the things that the process isn't very good at; UI, for instance.
(*: And computers only seem special for two reasons: One, most fields don't get to experience exponential growth for decades at a time, and two, you know more about them. There's a lot going on under the hood of any number of other products, too. Familiarity breeds contempt; so does ignorance.)
Some people have commented negatively about a change in specs in the middle of the production run. There's prior art for this, though: apparently the Playstation 2 has two processor speeds, 294MHz and 299MHz.
The fact that this has had so little impact that nobody realizes it has already happened speaks to the fact that it can be done without a whole lot of problems.
The days of being able to count cycles and depend on the timing that way are long gone anyhow. Console games need to use timers and handle the fact that sometimes the game will bog down anyhow. Tweaking the clock speed a little is something that everything ought to be able to handle in stride, or they're going to have big problems as soon as there's one too many polygons on the screen.
On the topic of changing specs mid-stream, it has occurred to me to wonder if Nintendo's HD solution for the Revolution will be to release an HD-capable Revolution about two years after the initial release. 3D games up-sample pretty well, even if the first-gen games won't look quite as good as dedicated HD games, but on that note, even XBox 360 games need to work at SD, as well. They'll be able to still release that console at most likely the original price-point, and they'll be selling into a market where more people have HD displays than today. It'll be tricky, but since they could design the graphics card with the explicit purpose of having the same capabilities as the old one, just with the ability to do all the old stuff in HD in the same amount of time, it should be doable.
If this is their plan, they may be right; jamming all that expensive hardware into the PS3 and the XBox 360 may not be cost effective if you lock out a lot of people who would otherwise have purchased one.
A series or movie set in Starfleet Academy must be character based. It can't be adventure based, because if I know my Star Trek writers and management, by the time they're done "amping up" the drama and adventure, the dominant question in your head at the end of Season One or the movie is why they don't just make Kirk a captain right now. (Especially for a series, where he'll have done it several times.)
It's just not an adventure if the Fate Of Humanity isn't on the line, no?
But Star Trek hasn't had good character writing for a long time now. One must conclude, given the number of writers that have passed through, that this is a management problem, and not just a writing problem. Remember, even if you dislike B&B, which I think is reasonable, there's another layer above them that thinks they're just peachy, and even if they replaced B&B, you'd likely end up with The Sons of B&B.
I think that because of these structural failings in the franchise, that the ability of Paramount to pull of a Star Trek Academy movie or series is just not there.
This kind of debate is what I call a "definition debate". If you define your term, it is almost certain that your questions will be answered.
Are videogames "art"? To answer that, define "art". Once you do, you are almost certainly done.
We're getting this second hand, but Ebert offers up a definition to the effect of "art is something that deeply explores what it means to be human". By that definiton, I completely agree that truly artistic video games are rare. Even the examples I can think of that meet that definition are pretty thin on that front.
The reason I think it's important to remember we're in a definition debate is because there is an overwhelming temptation that most people experience to detach from the definition and start fighting as if the definition is obvious to everyone and the real question is whether the definition applies. Resist that, because it's backwards. If you clearly state a definition, it will be (relatively speaking) quite clear whether video games are art, are not art, or whether perhaps some are art.
At this point, you tend to realize that while it's interesting to compare and contrast the value of various definitions, you're not going to find The Definition Of Art. Therefore, you're not going to find The Answer. You should know going into the debate that you're not going to settle anything. You can't.
I enjoy this sort of thing in moderation if done with people who understand what's going on, but the people furiously arguing backwards tend to drown out the conversation pretty quickly, in my experience.