http://www.fastmail.fm/ is still around, for a reasonnable 40$/year, and is a very good option which provides pretty much any feature you might want...
Actually, even the $20/year option is quite rich.
Other than just hopping on the pro-fastmail bandwagon, I would add that it does a few things I really like: - Aliases that work well - Good reply-to functionality - BEST keyboard-only message navigation since... Pine
I signed up years ago for the IMAP and the reply-to (so I can hand out my university alumn email), but I don't really use the IMAP, the web interface is so good.
Lastly, if you've got fastmail, I recommend (fastcheck), a freeware mail notifier.
Funny, a bit over a year ago I learned this as a game by way of some teens in Arlington MA.
The game: 1. Pick any subject likely to be a wikipedia entry 2. Each person clicks the "random" button on the left frame 3. Using only the center, article frame, get to the topic.
While some would write code to do this for them, doing it yourself makes for good competitive sport, and it's surprising a) how mentally resourceful you have to be, and b) how few clicks even a human algorithm solves the problem in.
Oh, and it's surprisingly fun. Two friends, two laptops, give it a shot!
Speaking as a writer in the video games industry, I'm all behind negotiating different terms for video game voice acting. There are some serious differences between film/tv acting and video game acting.
Ironically (as it were) one of the big problems that games (that are not Rockstar/GTA) face is the high price of voice acting! Specifically, union rates skyrocket when you ask an actor to perform more than I think 3 characters. But there are video games that are composed of a hundred bit parts. I've heard of games companies pulling tricks like claiming that five characters that belong to the same race/faction are the same, or that several different voices are "different forms" of the same character.
I could see an argument for Mr. Hollick maybe getting royalties for a lead role in a game. I can also see an argument for reducing that initial $100K salary he got.
But I'd warn voice actors -- not every game is GTA IV. More often than not, you'll do better to take the lump sum than bet the house on royalties for the next big flop.
At any rate, games are coming up. They need better voice acting. It's painfully clear to those of us who have to deal with it that hollywood regulations don't translate well into the games industry.
It's interesting how publishers and developers have their own unique love/hate relationships with game reviewers. Both publishers and independent dev studios (like the one I work for) spend a lot of time mad at reviewers. We developers don't just want good reviews, many of us want *fair* reviews. Whereas the publisher is just doing what any corporation would do, i.e. whatever it takes to maximize profit. Generally speaking I think that reviewers need to be the ones upholding the journalistic standards here.
But on the developer side, our frustrations come mainly from the *lack* of standards in game reviewing: inattentive playthroughs, fanboyism, hype-influence. There's nothing more painful, especially to a startup, as seeing a miserable sequel score higher than your proud, polished debut on the market.
I think that comparing the games industry to the movie industry is pretty informative here. Hollywood has its ways of promoting blockbuster duds (usually avertise heavily and quote bad reviews out of context), but movie reviewers are generally much much much more professional. That said, there's a marked difference: many of us depend on game magazines and websites (or review aggregators) to choose what games to buy. I think that most of us will see a movie on a lark, or a trailer.
An iPhone is *not* the form factor I want when I read a book. Never mind all the (cogent) battery and functionality issues brought up here. Who wants to sit down with an iPhone and read Bleak House? (And yes, I read Dickens:-) )
IMO, Amazon has the right idea -- a book-shaped object that doesn't require tech-savvy, computer syncs, etc. to use. My only issues with it are that a) it's ugly and b) it still feels like you're holding a technology. But the ability to keep bookmarks, search, sync periodicals, etc. are awesome. It's not an eBook, it's a portable *library*.
What I'd like to see: Kindle v2, which looks like a lovely leather-bound book. The controls are on the edge, inset by the cover, and the text shows up on both faces of the book. Only it holds up to 1000 books and all major periodicals.
If I had more free time, I would spend a lot of it posting after every article that correlates IQ to anything whatsoever. Or talk about. Or do anything but laugh at.
First, IQ != Intelligence.
Second, IQ doesn't mean much of anything else at all.
As detailed here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ -- to test scholastic aptitude. The test has been criticized many many many times for being racist, classist, not anchored (average scores can drift away from "average"), and possibly entirely without any real value whatsoever. A bunch of those criticisms are also in the Wikipedia article.
As one other poster pointed out, even if IQ did mean something, correlation ain't causation. If this study means anything, it's probably indicating a gentle, general socioceconomic class difference w.r.t. teen sex. Which is not nearly such new or interesting news.
Libertarians/anarchists always amuse me. You think you are against government -- but are you clear about the fact that roads, trash disposal, sewage, regulation of monopolies and corrupt or abusive corporations, protection for quacks & lawyers, not to mention your neighbor are just the beginning of what government does for you?
If you're a real libertarians or anarchists, you'd better be prepared to give up MONEY as you know it, not to mention property, and this internet thing, and other basic socio-technological structures that you've forgotten are under your recumbent arse.
Go read some Hobbes, Rousseau, Lock, Mill... you're currently subscribed to a social contract that's about way more than taxes, speeding laws and social security, my droogs.
Before rpg/adventure games reach "the next level" in storytelling, we'll need to make some really major advances in in-game language and social interaction.
Dialog trees and the simpler (a la Diablo) mechanisms of social interaction that we have in today's games are fine for today's stories, but if you want anything more, they get really limited really quickly.
Since the days of text adventures and the old-style Sierra games, we abandoned user-input speech for simpler forms because computers were too limited, and actually dialoging with player-driven characters was unweildy and unrealistic. But in the year 2001 our computers, which can render 3 physical dimensions and intensely realistic video and audio ought to be able to handle more convincing linguistic social interaction.
In today's games, stories are vehicles for killing things or for solving puzzles. I don't think that you're going to see these things disappear any time soon (most of us like killing things and solving puzzles) -- but there's a lot of room for story to become gameplay, and not garnish-for-gameplay, that has not been tapped yet.
For example: really multiple storylines / outcomes. (You could do these with dialog trees but the amount of work/writing would be too much). Situations with moral consequences, situations where interpersonal problems change the game and how the story unfolds, that the player actuates. We have hints of this in Planescape, The Longest Journey, etc., but only hints, really.
Kudos to the Piaget-poster. I'm a big fan of Piaget, and it's a good point that storytelling in video games is about cognitive mechanisms. In terms of solutions to these problems though, looking to Chomsky & other linguists, and to book-writers might be most productive.
Ben Schneider
Scenario Designer
Stainless Steel Studios, Inc.
It wasn't clear to me whether this independent study is in the realm of psych, sociology, anthro (ack) or otherwhat --
But if you're trying to get really specific data on the correlation of academic aptitude to gameplaying aptitude, you'll be running into the intelligence / performance / motivation problem, which could really obfuscate your data.
That is, namely, the some people are good at things either because they're intelligent or they're motivated (or both). There are competitive people who will try to win everything the walk into, whether they're smart or not, and other people who are not motivated, at leats in every competitive environment, smart or not. Let's not even start on the definition of intelligence!
I think you might run into the problem that the people who are motivated to win at starcraft or freeciv may not be the people who are motivated to do well in school. Or rather, that this correlation may not match up at all with aptitude.
I apologize for the pessimistic-ness of my message. I guess that if this is in psychology, I'd try to set it up so that you can weed motivation from aptitude somewhat, like asking the testees to perform both academic and vidgame excercises for similar rewards. If you're in more of the anthro/soc rut, you might want to consider just interviewing people: equal numbers of B-school (wait -- oh, btw, B-school students aren't actually paradigms of academic excellence. I'd go law or med school, pre-med... somesuch)... um, equal numbers of students who play games and don't (get hours they spend on games, schoolwork, etc, and grade-averages) and just compare them. That's also much simpler.
For anyone who's interested -- this is just one of the reasons why IQ scores don't mean feces. I wish I had the bibliography in front of me -- you'd be astounded at how exactly utterly nil the value of IQ scores are. (Sorry MENSA.)
~B
I buy the basic premise for this essay, but there are some key points that need to be qualified.
First, as others have saliently pointed out, the information is not accessible to all, it is rather overwhelming and redundant, and the data:info ratio is unnervingly high.
Second, we have to make a distinction between filtering news, "sense-making", and a sort of editorial overlay process. I'm surprised that portals weren't really mentioned anywhere in the essay: the portal (and anything that functions more or less as such, like/.) is the true grassroots, organic solution to filtering information on the internet. The thousands who read slashdot can gather out the interesting (pertinent) stuff from a sea that no one or one hundred persons ever could. Filtering works best on some sort of public model like this. Now *sensemaking* is better done on a smaller scale. Whoever runs a portal takes the links s/he likes from all those submitted, and you get a consistent viewpoint of information. Sure it's bias. Unless you're God, in this relativistic universe, you're biased. Maybe, as Katz suggests, there is a way to automate and then personally tune this).
But then there's a necessary editorial side to news, too. What good does it do me to have news that Galileo was officially forgiven, or that Mitnick was allowed to write tech advice columns, if I have no idea who either of these guys are? There *is* room for online journalism like salon.com, because we're not all bright, informed, and perceptive enough to draw out these conclusions for ourselves. And, as other posters have pointed out, there *are* quality advantages to having this editorial interpretation process carried out on a professional level, instead of having to wade through online discussion forums, moderated or no. But it may be that in the future journals will be almost entirely editorial commentary, simply pointing to history as documented by "Open Media".
While the news-accumulating-and-filtering process is may be revolutionized by the internet, sensemaking and editorial processing are only improved, strengthened, and democritized -- which I would call evolution.
Lastly, I never miss a chance to point out that we should always be careful about predicting the future. We can try to understand the problems we will face, but as we can't be too sure of those, their solutions are really way beyond what we can imagine.
Re:Reason to be civil
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 1
Heh - or ppl could threaten to send twice as much flames if the deposition is sealed.
But seriously, you're right. Gandhi's way is always best.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how Francis Ford Coppola feels about this?
http://www.zoetrope.com/about.cgi
http://www.all-story.com/
I know this is my (Mr. Hyde) lit-geek side talking, but I thought he nearly owned that word.
http://www.fastmail.fm/ is still around, for a reasonnable 40$/year, and is a very good option which provides pretty much any feature you might want...
Actually, even the $20/year option is quite rich.
Other than just hopping on the pro-fastmail bandwagon, I would add that it does a few things I really like:
- Aliases that work well
- Good reply-to functionality
- BEST keyboard-only message navigation since... Pine
I signed up years ago for the IMAP and the reply-to (so I can hand out my university alumn email), but I don't really use the IMAP, the web interface is so good.
Lastly, if you've got fastmail, I recommend (fastcheck), a freeware mail notifier.
Funny, a bit over a year ago I learned this as a game by way of some teens in Arlington MA.
The game:
1. Pick any subject likely to be a wikipedia entry
2. Each person clicks the "random" button on the left frame
3. Using only the center, article frame, get to the topic.
While some would write code to do this for them, doing it yourself makes for good competitive sport, and it's surprising a) how mentally resourceful you have to be, and b) how few clicks even a human algorithm solves the problem in.
Oh, and it's surprisingly fun. Two friends, two laptops, give it a shot!
Speaking as a writer in the video games industry, I'm all behind negotiating different terms for video game voice acting. There are some serious differences between film/tv acting and video game acting.
Ironically (as it were) one of the big problems that games (that are not Rockstar/GTA) face is the high price of voice acting! Specifically, union rates skyrocket when you ask an actor to perform more than I think 3 characters. But there are video games that are composed of a hundred bit parts. I've heard of games companies pulling tricks like claiming that five characters that belong to the same race/faction are the same, or that several different voices are "different forms" of the same character.
I could see an argument for Mr. Hollick maybe getting royalties for a lead role in a game. I can also see an argument for reducing that initial $100K salary he got.
But I'd warn voice actors -- not every game is GTA IV. More often than not, you'll do better to take the lump sum than bet the house on royalties for the next big flop.
At any rate, games are coming up. They need better voice acting. It's painfully clear to those of us who have to deal with it that hollywood regulations don't translate well into the games industry.
It's interesting how publishers and developers have their own unique love/hate relationships with game reviewers. Both publishers and independent dev studios (like the one I work for) spend a lot of time mad at reviewers. We developers don't just want good reviews, many of us want *fair* reviews. Whereas the publisher is just doing what any corporation would do, i.e. whatever it takes to maximize profit. Generally speaking I think that reviewers need to be the ones upholding the journalistic standards here.
But on the developer side, our frustrations come mainly from the *lack* of standards in game reviewing: inattentive playthroughs, fanboyism, hype-influence. There's nothing more painful, especially to a startup, as seeing a miserable sequel score higher than your proud, polished debut on the market.
I think that comparing the games industry to the movie industry is pretty informative here. Hollywood has its ways of promoting blockbuster duds (usually avertise heavily and quote bad reviews out of context), but movie reviewers are generally much much much more professional. That said, there's a marked difference: many of us depend on game magazines and websites (or review aggregators) to choose what games to buy. I think that most of us will see a movie on a lark, or a trailer.
An iPhone is *not* the form factor I want when I read a book. Never mind all the (cogent) battery and functionality issues brought up here. Who wants to sit down with an iPhone and read Bleak House? (And yes, I read Dickens :-) )
IMO, Amazon has the right idea -- a book-shaped object that doesn't require tech-savvy, computer syncs, etc. to use. My only issues with it are that a) it's ugly and b) it still feels like you're holding a technology. But the ability to keep bookmarks, search, sync periodicals, etc. are awesome. It's not an eBook, it's a portable *library*.
What I'd like to see: Kindle v2, which looks like a lovely leather-bound book. The controls are on the edge, inset by the cover, and the text shows up on both faces of the book. Only it holds up to 1000 books and all major periodicals.
If I had more free time, I would spend a lot of it posting after every article that correlates IQ to anything whatsoever. Or talk about. Or do anything but laugh at.
First, IQ != Intelligence.
Second, IQ doesn't mean much of anything else at all.
As detailed here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ -- to test scholastic aptitude. The test has been criticized many many many times for being racist, classist, not anchored (average scores can drift away from "average"), and possibly entirely without any real value whatsoever. A bunch of those criticisms are also in the Wikipedia article.
As one other poster pointed out, even if IQ did mean something, correlation ain't causation. If this study means anything, it's probably indicating a gentle, general socioceconomic class difference w.r.t. teen sex. Which is not nearly such new or interesting news.
Sigh. End rant.
Libertarians/anarchists always amuse me. You think you are against government -- but are you clear about the fact that roads, trash disposal, sewage, regulation of monopolies and corrupt or abusive corporations, protection for quacks & lawyers, not to mention your neighbor are just the beginning of what government does for you?
If you're a real libertarians or anarchists, you'd better be prepared to give up MONEY as you know it, not to mention property, and this internet thing, and other basic socio-technological structures that you've forgotten are under your recumbent arse.
Go read some Hobbes, Rousseau, Lock, Mill... you're currently subscribed to a social contract that's about way more than taxes, speeding laws and social security, my droogs.
Before rpg/adventure games reach "the next level" in storytelling, we'll need to make some really major advances in in-game language and social interaction.
Dialog trees and the simpler (a la Diablo) mechanisms of social interaction that we have in today's games are fine for today's stories, but if you want anything more, they get really limited really quickly.
Since the days of text adventures and the old-style Sierra games, we abandoned user-input speech for simpler forms because computers were too limited, and actually dialoging with player-driven characters was unweildy and unrealistic. But in the year 2001 our computers, which can render 3 physical dimensions and intensely realistic video and audio ought to be able to handle more convincing linguistic social interaction.
In today's games, stories are vehicles for killing things or for solving puzzles. I don't think that you're going to see these things disappear any time soon (most of us like killing things and solving puzzles) -- but there's a lot of room for story to become gameplay, and not garnish-for-gameplay, that has not been tapped yet.
For example: really multiple storylines / outcomes. (You could do these with dialog trees but the amount of work/writing would be too much). Situations with moral consequences, situations where interpersonal problems change the game and how the story unfolds, that the player actuates. We have hints of this in Planescape, The Longest Journey, etc., but only hints, really.
Kudos to the Piaget-poster. I'm a big fan of Piaget, and it's a good point that storytelling in video games is about cognitive mechanisms. In terms of solutions to these problems though, looking to Chomsky & other linguists, and to book-writers might be most productive.
Ben Schneider
Scenario Designer
Stainless Steel Studios, Inc.
It wasn't clear to me whether this independent study is in the realm of psych, sociology, anthro (ack) or otherwhat -- But if you're trying to get really specific data on the correlation of academic aptitude to gameplaying aptitude, you'll be running into the intelligence / performance / motivation problem, which could really obfuscate your data. That is, namely, the some people are good at things either because they're intelligent or they're motivated (or both). There are competitive people who will try to win everything the walk into, whether they're smart or not, and other people who are not motivated, at leats in every competitive environment, smart or not. Let's not even start on the definition of intelligence! I think you might run into the problem that the people who are motivated to win at starcraft or freeciv may not be the people who are motivated to do well in school. Or rather, that this correlation may not match up at all with aptitude. I apologize for the pessimistic-ness of my message. I guess that if this is in psychology, I'd try to set it up so that you can weed motivation from aptitude somewhat, like asking the testees to perform both academic and vidgame excercises for similar rewards. If you're in more of the anthro/soc rut, you might want to consider just interviewing people: equal numbers of B-school (wait -- oh, btw, B-school students aren't actually paradigms of academic excellence. I'd go law or med school, pre-med... somesuch)... um, equal numbers of students who play games and don't (get hours they spend on games, schoolwork, etc, and grade-averages) and just compare them. That's also much simpler. For anyone who's interested -- this is just one of the reasons why IQ scores don't mean feces. I wish I had the bibliography in front of me -- you'd be astounded at how exactly utterly nil the value of IQ scores are. (Sorry MENSA.) ~B
I buy the basic premise for this essay, but there are some key points that need to be qualified.
/.) is the true grassroots, organic solution to filtering information on the internet. The thousands who read slashdot can gather out the interesting (pertinent) stuff from a sea that no one or one hundred persons ever could. Filtering works best on some sort of public model like this. Now *sensemaking* is better done on a smaller scale. Whoever runs a portal takes the links s/he likes from all those submitted, and you get a consistent viewpoint of information. Sure it's bias. Unless you're God, in this relativistic universe, you're biased. Maybe, as Katz suggests, there is a way to automate and then personally tune this).
First, as others have saliently pointed out, the information is not accessible to all, it is rather overwhelming and redundant, and the data:info ratio is unnervingly high.
Second, we have to make a distinction between filtering news, "sense-making", and a sort of editorial overlay process. I'm surprised that portals weren't really mentioned anywhere in the essay: the portal (and anything that functions more or less as such, like
But then there's a necessary editorial side to news, too. What good does it do me to have news that Galileo was officially forgiven, or that Mitnick was allowed to write tech advice columns, if I have no idea who either of these guys are? There *is* room for online journalism like salon.com, because we're not all bright, informed, and perceptive enough to draw out these conclusions for ourselves. And, as other posters have pointed out, there *are* quality advantages to having this editorial interpretation process carried out on a professional level, instead of having to wade through online discussion forums, moderated or no. But it may be that in the future journals will be almost entirely editorial commentary, simply pointing to history as documented by "Open Media".
While the news-accumulating-and-filtering process is may be revolutionized by the internet, sensemaking and editorial processing are only improved, strengthened, and democritized -- which I would call evolution.
Lastly, I never miss a chance to point out that we should always be careful about predicting the future. We can try to understand the problems we will face, but as we can't be too sure of those, their solutions are really way beyond what we can imagine.
But seriously, you're right. Gandhi's way is always best.