It boils down to this. If procedural generation is the solution to all our problems why haven't we used it in everything? Why wasn't it discovered earlier? It's not because of the power of computers, it's because it's not going to save the world.
Think of it that trees were the first "easy" low hanging fruit to go after. From my reading on/., it sounds like the level planners and artists don't like this tech because it doesn't give them as much control over the output compared to doing it the other way. When I first started reading this, I thought of the comparing this tech with vector graphics verse bitmapped graphics. Ideally, you'd have tons of these things and you could feed it an input that would output the general shape/volume of the item/landscape feature you were wanting. What will be "difficult" for this tech is say you want a climbable tree with a hidden treasure in the brances. How would you handle that? Or if you want a branch to creak and fall down if a player walks underneath the tree. You what if you have a switch in/on the tree that activates another event? Those are things gamers expect now, but doing them by this method now may not be as easy. Of course the short term answer is just do the "extras" or "filler" details with this tech and everything actually game play related do the other way. I just had a vision of a game with ultrareal graphics and the player is looking for the least detailed items because that's the only thing that's important.
So every time you see someone do something that vaguely smacks of racism, you have to squash it, and squash it so hard so that the people who still believe in that crap are reminded that the rest of the world doesn't agree with them. When Congress doesn't want to renew the Civil Rights Voting act because they feel that the areas it targets aren't racist anymore, you get right in those people's faces and tell them "Oh yes it is", and then you show where voters are intimidated or have their names removed from voting lists by using criminal lists from other states.
But you are wrong. Almost everyone in the world except a very small percentage believes that foreginism/differentism is "Right and Proper." What people dislike are being targeted by "others" especially foreginers/differenters. You are "targetting" people who don't believe in the same prinicples that you do, which is normal. All humans are different and natively dislike anything unfamiliar to them. The more different you are or the more different types of thoughts that you provoke the more you will be disliked. It's a fact of human existance. We need to learn to live with it a bit better than pretending it doesn't exist.
No, see... That's called "decorating", and it's a normal behavior for human females. Those plants, wall hangings, and curios are supposed to serve the purpose of making your house look like somebody other than a Spartan warrior is living there.
If you think that's bad, try kids! I don't mind stuff on the walls, but random toys on the floor, hurt! You almost have to wear steel-tiped boots in order to safely get a midnight snack. Do yourself a favor and don't get your kids toys such as lincon logs, wooden blocks, legos, hard back books, and action figures. I know those are neat eductaion toys, but take your shoes off, scatter them across the floor, and now walk across the floor without looking down. I bet you get ouches by the time that you are finished.
I would love to be able to spend $33K on that. I'd be lucky to get something in the $3-$4K range approved though. Do you have anything in that price range that I might actually get past my boss?
Regardless, this is cleanup of the wild west 90s, when everyone was handing out options like candy. It says nothing about Take Two that it doesn't likewise say about every dot com.
I just had this mental image of the frontier town becoming "civilized" and having the new terrors of bankers, lawyers, and "the government" to fear instead of just frontier life. I'd guess that 70%-80% of all businesses started end in failure reguardless of time period. I'm going to say that it takes a good 5 years of both profit, success, hiring alot of labors before the government in any form starts to notice. Less than 5 years and your business could go bankrupt, and it wouldn't be worth the effort for going after you.;)
No, we cannot use an aeronautics engineer from Boeing to cure cancer. Open Source programmers cannot write drinkable water for third world countries.
It would actually be very ironic if that actually happens. The only way I could see using an aeronautics engineer for cancer research is studying fluid dynmanics. The only way Open Source programmers could write drinkable water that I can think of is that we come up with that advanced nano-tech assembler that we are always dreaming about and then the OS crowd could design anything for use for 3rd world countries. Given enough time or effort anything is possible. If you want an Oracle to give you answers though, you'll usually get a long winded mystical speech that boils down to "figure it out yourself."
The Olympics should be about being the best athlete - not who can squeeze out a few fractions of a second because they have better/more expensive swimware. I don't mind using technology for training and conditioning, but in the field (or in this case, the pool) the equipment one has shouldn't be the deciding factor.
I'm actually of a different opinion. I think there should be 2-3 additional sections. There should be one for drug enhanced athletes, another for cyberborg athletes, and another for genetically engineered athletes. Ok. I guess if we are going to have those then we need to have sponsor enhanced equipment and also "standard" equipment provided to all athletes. To be perfectly honest, I could care less if an athlete chooses to drug up there body for sporting events. I would just like them to be seperated out from the "clean" "natural" athletes. I'd also love to see final matches cross categories just to see if a plain un-enhanced atlete could beat the best science/money can do.
Maybe the question should rightly be interpreted as "How can the small fraction of humanity which is today thriving continue to thrive through the next 100 years and never mind the people who are already scrabbling for survival today." Because that's really the only question anyone has ever truly asked.
Ok. I believe that the Earth can support 50-60 billion humans easy. Most of the apparent problems actually have solutions today. You want a really nasty Neo Nazi approach? Let's have our "free" state of citizens that are on top of the world number about a 1 million they are in charge of those other let's make it 60 billion. Is that fair? Nope. We are going to make this bad for most people. The average human lives their live in a small box doing just above sweat shop labor and never, ever lives the box. They get their food from the food box, have a single toilet, and small cot. We'll be slightly kind and give them all OverLord Net to ask for instruction from their very real Gods. Oh, most of Earth is a beautiful paradise without a hint of humanity. All those 60 billion live under ground in several large arcologies. The Neo-Nazi Gods have nano tech and live near forever above ground and get the produce made by all the rest.
I feel we need to raise the price of items to make it more economical to fix it than to trash it, or simply tax the item to make it cheaper to fix then to trash.
Um, no. That's not a great idea. You'd just fleeced and still have to buy a new item. Almost every item that I've ever had broken was replaced rather than fixed. The only two exceptions to that is 1. The lawn mower string coming off and 2. I fixed a $15 part on my washing machine rather than replace it. I was almost willing to replace it at $400 though than spend $75 for a tech just to look at it. I'm of mixed opinions about this. Part of me thinks things should be designed to last about a human lifetime. Another part of me thinks that most things should be designed to be built and torn down within an hour or less. The problem is that our complicated devices are unfixable. Can you fix a cellphone, CPU processor, LCD monitor if it breaks? Nope, you get a new one.
"I want to live in a Utopia of plentiful abundance, and there is no intrinsic reason why we can't have it."
The intrinsic reason we can't is that the universe as far as we can tell is finite. However, I think we agree more than we disagree. Our biggest problem is that it's cheaper to be wastefull than to handle it properly.
Um, yes and no. It's all relative. Earth and our Sun can provide near infinite resources for a given population and a given tech level. I'm not going to worry about Earth over populating until we reach somewhere in the 30-40 billion range. Actually, I think that we could easily handle 50-60 billion on Earth with no space resources. Think just dig/build an arcology designed for a billion people. I'd want those 50-60 billion to have a lifestyle orders better than the US.
Not to label religious zealots as fools, but we can't move to another place until the zealots decide, one way or another, to not be zealots anymore.
Not likely to happen on this planet or this plane of existance. Religion is a great concept. I think some university professors should run up a model of what's made the most successful past religions and what most humans will accept and let's go from there. Most people need religion in one form or another. I'd bet a modeled religion would have at the top of the list that all citizens need to be followers of the religion. Maybe instead "religion" label it "moral code." God and the afterlife were never the big thing about religion. Religion was always about getting most people to behave. Why is there such an outrage against homosexual relationships of anykind? Because it's in religious moral code not to do it. If it comes down to it, we could have the new future religion as you better be good to your neighbor because big brother is watching you.
Also, use a router, firewall software, Antivirus, and Firefox. Haven't any issues ever.
Um, I'm at work behind a firewall. We have office scan antivirus and adaware. I and another person run FireFox. He had something like this happen to him just today. He didn't click on anything that it popped up and didn't fully install the thing and was able to remove it. I wonder how many out there click on those damn things.
O.K. From what I read in the article, the kid had this on his home computer and didn't send it out to anyone. There was another so called "friend" that "freaked out" mentioned to said disliked teacher, whom seriously over-reacted and now this kid is going through the wringer. It took me a while trying to understand the objectionable comment in the article. I find it odd that the stated icon wasn't reported. I have downloaded tons of smiley icons with them killing each other. It seems like the kid made something like that and stuck "Kill Teacher's name" under there. I think there was an over reaction on the friend's part and the teacher's part. If anything the student should be able to sue the friend, teacher and school for taking away his right to see representations of his teachers die. The article states like the kid was trying to direct others to think about killing said teacher, which isn't the case that the article presents earlier. The article stated the kid had it on his home computer and wasn't emailing it or spreading it around. That right there to me says the kid is fine. Heck, how many of you have pasted your boss's, and old teacher's or some one that you really don't like picture onto the enemies of a FPS? It sounds like this was something a kin to that, but the friend freaked out about it. Just because of that damn'ed Columbine kid doesn't mean every other kid should loose their right to hate and bitch about their teachers/parents/ or whom ever behind the authority figure's back. It's crap like this that will make this nation into a police state. I've thought about similiar things all through school. I never labeled any icons or what not though. What's the point? I had a whole list of teachers that I didn't like.
Right now, the public concept of anonymous development is left to virus developers and other black-hat-types - it would be interesting if your child's educational software, or in this case model railroad software had to be developed behind the veil of secrecy.
It would only work for open source and software the writers didn't want to take any credit for writing.
Not that anyone else cares, but I'm planning on returning to buying a Nintendo. I bought a PS2 for several reasons, most of them were FF PS1 games and then the FF & KH PS2 games. I've seriously thought about buying a game cube so that I could play the 4-6 fun games that I know Nintendo has and each of the games could be found in classics sections ranging from $15-$25 depending on store. The other reason I've been thinking of returning to Nintendo is kids/family games. My kids have been happily playing my old N64 and love the 2 Zelda games for it. Heck what's the price of a game cube & acc & 5-6 games? Is it $200-$300? I think that might be the family christmas present this year.
Yes, of course some people are still playing Counterstrike, or Quake...my answer to that is, "geez dude, aren't you sick of that game yet?"
Why the heck do you need a "new" shinier game to have fun? Come on people play mine sweeper and solitaire and have fun. What makes you think some one would ever get bored with Quake or Counterstrike. With new maps and other user mods, they can play the same game forever. It's not like any one mods out a chess or checker board so you'd have a different map, but people still play chess and checkers and have fun.
I really haven't looked at any of the Office 2007 features. When I first heard about the whole ribbon thing, I disliked the concept. That was before I read your link to the presentation at BayCHI though. I'm somewhat excited about it now. I think my users will be able to adapt to this. I'm mixed on the removal of a classic mode though. A part of me would like for MS Vista to include a UI tracking function option. I'm not really excited about Vista, but if MS actually had hard numbers on what users actually do in WinXP or Vista then the next version of windows could atleast be this simplified in theory. I don't want my home usage tracked, but my work usage go ahead use that to make the product better.
Not only have they locked in the vast majority of enterprise customers, they now have no pressure to deliver a product when they said they would.
This is classic Microsoft and their best.
Um, I wouldn't be too quick on that point. We might see "alittle" backlash against MS in the corporate sector if they don't deliver. CIOs that pushed for Licensing 6.0 might find themselves unemployeed and their replacements might just decide to use something else. Could you see MS panic if all those corporate businesses decide on not buying MS? I'm not a big pusher for Linux or OpenOffice. If companies that bought into Licensing 6.0 decide to smite MS buy switching to OpenOffice or something else MS will be out alot of money. If MS looses the corporate market for Office, then the OS market might be next.
"PayPal is doing banking and should be regulated as such."
I'm ignorant. So bear with me:
Can you give clear reasons why you state this? Actually, PayPal is operating in loop hole verse like check cashing services do to avoid usry charges. Banks can't charge excessive interest that check cashing services do. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the loop hole that allows PayPal to operate without being regulated without being a bank. Why should they be though? My first response to that is all those complaints against PayPal for freezing accounts and not doing business as most people expect well if they were properly regulated they'd beat up by the FDIC and other federal orgs after enough compliants. Oh, what am I thinking this is the US. Our banking system charges more fees than than our phone companies do. If the US Banks ran the ISPs, they'd charge you by bandwidth, time usage, and per hyperlinks clicked. I don't know why I want PayPal "regulated" other than "it should" help consumers with complaints against PayPal. I don't know if that'd actually happen even if they were "regulated" though.
2. For a group of companies that makes their money by essentially making idiots look cool, why are they so incapable of making non-piracy cool?
Let's be honest, piracy is always going to be cool because we all wanted to be pirates on the open seas at some point. This version of piracy is much safer to the pirates and doesn't cost those that got pirated lifes or solid goods. If the RIAA can make non-piracy look cool, then they could found a new modern religion based around preserving their copyrights. What it'll boil down to anyway is for most individuals to choose not to do it.
Since ebay has taken over paypal, they have abused stores as well as users. Their attitude may start to change back to what it was.
I'm confused why people ever really use PayPal in the first place. Oh yes because it's "easy." I wouldn't mind Google, MS, or heck even SGI to go into this. My thing is that they should start off as declaring themselves as doing banking and being properly regulated. I want PayPal to die a swift death just because of that. PayPal is doing banking and should be regulated as such. I honestly think that MS, Google, or some other IT company should produce a set of software that makes it as easy as using PayPal for your existing bank to do business over the internet. The big PayPal killer will be when my 4+ local city banks can do business with each other and your local banks as easily as PayPal transactions happen.
OTOH, people that believe in invisible fairies devoted to protecting them from all material harm as long as they clap hard enough--a kind of immature religious faith that is sadly common in the US--are prone to ignore the facts and just ask everyone else to just clap harder.
Hey, I'll have you that when I was growing up in the 80s the US was safe from the USSR all because of perfect balance between our unwillness to use our city destroying invisible fairies and the USSR unwillness to take the entire world out just to get US with their city destroying invisible fairies. But today is a different place. The USSR has fallen and those that were supposed to keep the city destroying invisible fairies chained and under their control have let the knowledge of the fairies out into the world and now North Korea, India, Middle East countries and maybe even terrorists have knowledge of those city destroying invisible fairies. I don't think anyone really believes that we've got any fairies out actually protecting US from the evil THEM. Maybe if we are lucky DHS (Department of Human Services) will ask some fairies very nicely and we'll be protected. Maybe it'll involve planting trees. Those tree fairies are powerful in large groups. Trees and tree fairies do help make more clouds so that the sky fairies can't watch you though.
This is one thing that the concept of God used to be used for - the all seeing eye that made some people act (somewhat) honestly. Now that religion is on the wane in parts of the world, a replacement all seeing eye will be needed to keep the same class of people in line.
This was the one thing that I learned in anthropology! Actually, I don't think that it was what god was for though. It was the whole purpose of religion though. It reduced policing costs. You don't have to have as many police running around if every citizen believes that any large crime will have them burning in hell and revolution isn't thought of if the entire populance thought that their King/Emporer had a mandate from Heaven to rule. Causal theft or B&E was most likely much greater in areas where everyone just lives in tents or yurts. When you knew God, the spirit of the home, AI laser home security system is watching your neighbors goods, then you aren't likely to take anything from them. The problem with religion is that everyone has to believe that they'll get punished before it alone will work. I actually wouldn't mind a future AI controlled world where the AIs just set back and have fun with the humans trying to train us to be fair and good to each other. No, I take that back, I'd rather have a god that wasn't active and we'd all go to a nice safe enjoyable place if we happened to die.
I suppose pretty soon the RIAA will demand that all blank CD's come pre-printed with a pair of teary puppy-dog eyes.
And then sales of blank CDRs will sky rocket and consumers will respond to surveys by saying that they just loved the puppy dog eyes on their CDs that they buy packs of 100 just because they are so cute!
From the comments so far, it seems that people feel that Microsoft is somehow failing in a sacred duty by not making DirectX 10 available for Windows XP.
Why should Microsoft make DirectX 10 available for old versions of Windows? We are not talking about making DirectX 10 availble for Win3.11, Win95, Win98, WinME or WinNT. I believe that it should be runnable on Vista, WinXP, and Win2000 though. Why? Ok. DirectX is mainly thought of for games and gaming, but there could be some business apps that decided to use DirectX for some reason. DirectX is an API. If DirectX 10, 11, or 12 requires new drivers from hardware vendors that's one thing, but to say that the API won't work at all? That is just managment BS. Honestly, I've not been as pleased with MS with WinXP and making sure all the "third" party drivers were checked out. I'm not talking about no name generic drivers, I'm talking about nVidia, Ati, HP or Creative drivers getting warnings that the driver hasn't been signed off by MS. I'm sorry, but if MS can't get nVidia, Ati, HP, or Creative to have all their drivers for XP signed off by MS, then what makes them think that they'll be able to do it for Vista? Good idea yes, but will the other "third" party vendors go for it? Not likely.
If anything MS needs to release the DirectX10 API and have a blurb stating for new features your video card/sound card drivers will need to be updated with your vendor's getting their drivers "MS certified" for DirectX 10 or even for WinXP or Vista.
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It boils down to this. If procedural generation is the solution to all our problems why haven't we used it in everything? Why wasn't it discovered earlier? It's not because of the power of computers, it's because it's not going to save the world.
/., it sounds like the level planners and artists don't like this tech because it doesn't give them as much control over the output compared to doing it the other way. When I first started reading this, I thought of the comparing this tech with vector graphics verse bitmapped graphics. Ideally, you'd have tons of these things and you could feed it an input that would output the general shape/volume of the item/landscape feature you were wanting. What will be "difficult" for this tech is say you want a climbable tree with a hidden treasure in the brances. How would you handle that? Or if you want a branch to creak and fall down if a player walks underneath the tree. You what if you have a switch in/on the tree that activates another event? Those are things gamers expect now, but doing them by this method now may not be as easy. Of course the short term answer is just do the "extras" or "filler" details with this tech and everything actually game play related do the other way. I just had a vision of a game with ultrareal graphics and the player is looking for the least detailed items because that's the only thing that's important.
Think of it that trees were the first "easy" low hanging fruit to go after. From my reading on
So every time you see someone do something that vaguely smacks of racism, you have to squash it, and squash it so hard so that the people who still believe in that crap are reminded that the rest of the world doesn't agree with them. When Congress doesn't want to renew the Civil Rights Voting act because they feel that the areas it targets aren't racist anymore, you get right in those people's faces and tell them "Oh yes it is", and then you show where voters are intimidated or have their names removed from voting lists by using criminal lists from other states.
But you are wrong. Almost everyone in the world except a very small percentage believes that foreginism/differentism is "Right and Proper." What people dislike are being targeted by "others" especially foreginers/differenters. You are "targetting" people who don't believe in the same prinicples that you do, which is normal. All humans are different and natively dislike anything unfamiliar to them. The more different you are or the more different types of thoughts that you provoke the more you will be disliked. It's a fact of human existance. We need to learn to live with it a bit better than pretending it doesn't exist.
No, see... That's called "decorating", and it's a normal behavior for human females. Those plants, wall hangings, and curios are supposed to serve the purpose of making your house look like somebody other than a Spartan warrior is living there.
If you think that's bad, try kids! I don't mind stuff on the walls, but random toys on the floor, hurt! You almost have to wear steel-tiped boots in order to safely get a midnight snack. Do yourself a favor and don't get your kids toys such as lincon logs, wooden blocks, legos, hard back books, and action figures. I know those are neat eductaion toys, but take your shoes off, scatter them across the floor, and now walk across the floor without looking down. I bet you get ouches by the time that you are finished.
I would love to be able to spend $33K on that. I'd be lucky to get something in the $3-$4K range approved though. Do you have anything in that price range that I might actually get past my boss?
Regardless, this is cleanup of the wild west 90s, when everyone was handing out options like candy. It says nothing about Take Two that it doesn't likewise say about every dot com.
;)
I just had this mental image of the frontier town becoming "civilized" and having the new terrors of bankers, lawyers, and "the government" to fear instead of just frontier life. I'd guess that 70%-80% of all businesses started end in failure reguardless of time period. I'm going to say that it takes a good 5 years of both profit, success, hiring alot of labors before the government in any form starts to notice. Less than 5 years and your business could go bankrupt, and it wouldn't be worth the effort for going after you.
No, we cannot use an aeronautics engineer from Boeing to cure cancer. Open Source programmers cannot write drinkable water for third world countries.
It would actually be very ironic if that actually happens. The only way I could see using an aeronautics engineer for cancer research is studying fluid dynmanics. The only way Open Source programmers could write drinkable water that I can think of is that we come up with that advanced nano-tech assembler that we are always dreaming about and then the OS crowd could design anything for use for 3rd world countries. Given enough time or effort anything is possible. If you want an Oracle to give you answers though, you'll usually get a long winded mystical speech that boils down to "figure it out yourself."
The Olympics should be about being the best athlete - not who can squeeze out a few fractions of a second because they have better/more expensive swimware. I don't mind using technology for training and conditioning, but in the field (or in this case, the pool) the equipment one has shouldn't be the deciding factor.
I'm actually of a different opinion. I think there should be 2-3 additional sections. There should be one for drug enhanced athletes, another for cyberborg athletes, and another for genetically engineered athletes. Ok. I guess if we are going to have those then we need to have sponsor enhanced equipment and also "standard" equipment provided to all athletes. To be perfectly honest, I could care less if an athlete chooses to drug up there body for sporting events. I would just like them to be seperated out from the "clean" "natural" athletes. I'd also love to see final matches cross categories just to see if a plain un-enhanced atlete could beat the best science/money can do.
Maybe the question should rightly be interpreted as "How can the small fraction of humanity which is today thriving continue to thrive through the next 100 years and never mind the people who are already scrabbling for survival today." Because that's really the only question anyone has ever truly asked.
Ok. I believe that the Earth can support 50-60 billion humans easy. Most of the apparent problems actually have solutions today. You want a really nasty Neo Nazi approach? Let's have our "free" state of citizens that are on top of the world number about a 1 million they are in charge of those other let's make it 60 billion. Is that fair? Nope. We are going to make this bad for most people. The average human lives their live in a small box doing just above sweat shop labor and never, ever lives the box. They get their food from the food box, have a single toilet, and small cot. We'll be slightly kind and give them all OverLord Net to ask for instruction from their very real Gods. Oh, most of Earth is a beautiful paradise without a hint of humanity. All those 60 billion live under ground in several large arcologies. The Neo-Nazi Gods have nano tech and live near forever above ground and get the produce made by all the rest.
I feel we need to raise the price of items to make it more economical to fix it than to trash it, or simply tax the item to make it cheaper to fix then to trash.
Um, no. That's not a great idea. You'd just fleeced and still have to buy a new item. Almost every item that I've ever had broken was replaced rather than fixed. The only two exceptions to that is 1. The lawn mower string coming off and 2. I fixed a $15 part on my washing machine rather than replace it. I was almost willing to replace it at $400 though than spend $75 for a tech just to look at it. I'm of mixed opinions about this. Part of me thinks things should be designed to last about a human lifetime. Another part of me thinks that most things should be designed to be built and torn down within an hour or less. The problem is that our complicated devices are unfixable. Can you fix a cellphone, CPU processor, LCD monitor if it breaks? Nope, you get a new one.
"I want to live in a Utopia of plentiful abundance, and there is no intrinsic reason why we can't have it."
The intrinsic reason we can't is that the universe as far as we can tell is finite. However, I think we agree more than we disagree. Our biggest problem is that it's cheaper to be wastefull than to handle it properly.
Um, yes and no. It's all relative. Earth and our Sun can provide near infinite resources for a given population and a given tech level. I'm not going to worry about Earth over populating until we reach somewhere in the 30-40 billion range. Actually, I think that we could easily handle 50-60 billion on Earth with no space resources. Think just dig/build an arcology designed for a billion people. I'd want those 50-60 billion to have a lifestyle orders better than the US.
Not to label religious zealots as fools, but we can't move to another place until the zealots decide, one way or another, to not be zealots anymore.
Not likely to happen on this planet or this plane of existance. Religion is a great concept. I think some university professors should run up a model of what's made the most successful past religions and what most humans will accept and let's go from there. Most people need religion in one form or another. I'd bet a modeled religion would have at the top of the list that all citizens need to be followers of the religion. Maybe instead "religion" label it "moral code." God and the afterlife were never the big thing about religion. Religion was always about getting most people to behave. Why is there such an outrage against homosexual relationships of anykind? Because it's in religious moral code not to do it. If it comes down to it, we could have the new future religion as you better be good to your neighbor because big brother is watching you.
Also, use a router, firewall software, Antivirus, and Firefox. Haven't any issues ever.
Um, I'm at work behind a firewall. We have office scan antivirus and adaware. I and another person run FireFox. He had something like this happen to him just today. He didn't click on anything that it popped up and didn't fully install the thing and was able to remove it. I wonder how many out there click on those damn things.
O.K. From what I read in the article, the kid had this on his home computer and didn't send it out to anyone. There was another so called "friend" that "freaked out" mentioned to said disliked teacher, whom seriously over-reacted and now this kid is going through the wringer. It took me a while trying to understand the objectionable comment in the article. I find it odd that the stated icon wasn't reported. I have downloaded tons of smiley icons with them killing each other. It seems like the kid made something like that and stuck "Kill Teacher's name" under there. I think there was an over reaction on the friend's part and the teacher's part. If anything the student should be able to sue the friend, teacher and school for taking away his right to see representations of his teachers die. The article states like the kid was trying to direct others to think about killing said teacher, which isn't the case that the article presents earlier. The article stated the kid had it on his home computer and wasn't emailing it or spreading it around. That right there to me says the kid is fine. Heck, how many of you have pasted your boss's, and old teacher's or some one that you really don't like picture onto the enemies of a FPS? It sounds like this was something a kin to that, but the friend freaked out about it. Just because of that damn'ed Columbine kid doesn't mean every other kid should loose their right to hate and bitch about their teachers/parents/ or whom ever behind the authority figure's back. It's crap like this that will make this nation into a police state. I've thought about similiar things all through school. I never labeled any icons or what not though. What's the point? I had a whole list of teachers that I didn't like.
Right now, the public concept of anonymous development is left to virus developers and other black-hat-types - it would be interesting if your child's educational software, or in this case model railroad software had to be developed behind the veil of secrecy.
It would only work for open source and software the writers didn't want to take any credit for writing.
Not that anyone else cares, but I'm planning on returning to buying a Nintendo. I bought a PS2 for several reasons, most of them were FF PS1 games and then the FF & KH PS2 games. I've seriously thought about buying a game cube so that I could play the 4-6 fun games that I know Nintendo has and each of the games could be found in classics sections ranging from $15-$25 depending on store. The other reason I've been thinking of returning to Nintendo is kids/family games. My kids have been happily playing my old N64 and love the 2 Zelda games for it. Heck what's the price of a game cube & acc & 5-6 games? Is it $200-$300? I think that might be the family christmas present this year.
Yes, of course some people are still playing Counterstrike, or Quake...my answer to that is, "geez dude, aren't you sick of that game yet?"
Why the heck do you need a "new" shinier game to have fun? Come on people play mine sweeper and solitaire and have fun. What makes you think some one would ever get bored with Quake or Counterstrike. With new maps and other user mods, they can play the same game forever. It's not like any one mods out a chess or checker board so you'd have a different map, but people still play chess and checkers and have fun.
I really haven't looked at any of the Office 2007 features. When I first heard about the whole ribbon thing, I disliked the concept. That was before I read your link to the presentation at BayCHI though. I'm somewhat excited about it now. I think my users will be able to adapt to this. I'm mixed on the removal of a classic mode though. A part of me would like for MS Vista to include a UI tracking function option. I'm not really excited about Vista, but if MS actually had hard numbers on what users actually do in WinXP or Vista then the next version of windows could atleast be this simplified in theory. I don't want my home usage tracked, but my work usage go ahead use that to make the product better.
Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank.
Not only have they locked in the vast majority of enterprise customers, they now have no pressure to deliver a product when they said they would.
This is classic Microsoft and their best.
Um, I wouldn't be too quick on that point. We might see "alittle" backlash against MS in the corporate sector if they don't deliver. CIOs that pushed for Licensing 6.0 might find themselves unemployeed and their replacements might just decide to use something else. Could you see MS panic if all those corporate businesses decide on not buying MS? I'm not a big pusher for Linux or OpenOffice. If companies that bought into Licensing 6.0 decide to smite MS buy switching to OpenOffice or something else MS will be out alot of money. If MS looses the corporate market for Office, then the OS market might be next.
"PayPal is doing banking and should be regulated as such."
I'm ignorant. So bear with me:
Can you give clear reasons why you state this?
Actually, PayPal is operating in loop hole verse like check cashing services do to avoid usry charges. Banks can't charge excessive interest that check cashing services do. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the loop hole that allows PayPal to operate without being regulated without being a bank. Why should they be though? My first response to that is all those complaints against PayPal for freezing accounts and not doing business as most people expect well if they were properly regulated they'd beat up by the FDIC and other federal orgs after enough compliants. Oh, what am I thinking this is the US. Our banking system charges more fees than than our phone companies do. If the US Banks ran the ISPs, they'd charge you by bandwidth, time usage, and per hyperlinks clicked. I don't know why I want PayPal "regulated" other than "it should" help consumers with complaints against PayPal. I don't know if that'd actually happen even if they were "regulated" though.
2. For a group of companies that makes their money by essentially making idiots look cool, why are they so incapable of making non-piracy cool?
Let's be honest, piracy is always going to be cool because we all wanted to be pirates on the open seas at some point. This version of piracy is much safer to the pirates and doesn't cost those that got pirated lifes or solid goods. If the RIAA can make non-piracy look cool, then they could found a new modern religion based around preserving their copyrights. What it'll boil down to anyway is for most individuals to choose not to do it.
Since ebay has taken over paypal, they have abused stores as well as users. Their attitude may start to change back to what it was.
I'm confused why people ever really use PayPal in the first place. Oh yes because it's "easy." I wouldn't mind Google, MS, or heck even SGI to go into this. My thing is that they should start off as declaring themselves as doing banking and being properly regulated. I want PayPal to die a swift death just because of that. PayPal is doing banking and should be regulated as such. I honestly think that MS, Google, or some other IT company should produce a set of software that makes it as easy as using PayPal for your existing bank to do business over the internet. The big PayPal killer will be when my 4+ local city banks can do business with each other and your local banks as easily as PayPal transactions happen.
OTOH, people that believe in invisible fairies devoted to protecting them from all material harm as long as they clap hard enough--a kind of immature religious faith that is sadly common in the US--are prone to ignore the facts and just ask everyone else to just clap harder.
Hey, I'll have you that when I was growing up in the 80s the US was safe from the USSR all because of perfect balance between our unwillness to use our city destroying invisible fairies and the USSR unwillness to take the entire world out just to get US with their city destroying invisible fairies. But today is a different place. The USSR has fallen and those that were supposed to keep the city destroying invisible fairies chained and under their control have let the knowledge of the fairies out into the world and now North Korea, India, Middle East countries and maybe even terrorists have knowledge of those city destroying invisible fairies. I don't think anyone really believes that we've got any fairies out actually protecting US from the evil THEM. Maybe if we are lucky DHS (Department of Human Services) will ask some fairies very nicely and we'll be protected. Maybe it'll involve planting trees. Those tree fairies are powerful in large groups. Trees and tree fairies do help make more clouds so that the sky fairies can't watch you though.
This is one thing that the concept of God used to be used for - the all seeing eye that made some people act (somewhat) honestly. Now that religion is on the wane in parts of the world, a replacement all seeing eye will be needed to keep the same class of people in line.
This was the one thing that I learned in anthropology! Actually, I don't think that it was what god was for though. It was the whole purpose of religion though. It reduced policing costs. You don't have to have as many police running around if every citizen believes that any large crime will have them burning in hell and revolution isn't thought of if the entire populance thought that their King/Emporer had a mandate from Heaven to rule. Causal theft or B&E was most likely much greater in areas where everyone just lives in tents or yurts. When you knew God, the spirit of the home, AI laser home security system is watching your neighbors goods, then you aren't likely to take anything from them. The problem with religion is that everyone has to believe that they'll get punished before it alone will work. I actually wouldn't mind a future AI controlled world where the AIs just set back and have fun with the humans trying to train us to be fair and good to each other. No, I take that back, I'd rather have a god that wasn't active and we'd all go to a nice safe enjoyable place if we happened to die.
I suppose pretty soon the RIAA will demand that all blank CD's come pre-printed with a pair of teary puppy-dog eyes.
And then sales of blank CDRs will sky rocket and consumers will respond to surveys by saying that they just loved the puppy dog eyes on their CDs that they buy packs of 100 just because they are so cute!
From the comments so far, it seems that people feel that Microsoft is somehow failing in a sacred duty by not making DirectX 10 available for Windows XP.
Why should Microsoft make DirectX 10 available for old versions of Windows?
We are not talking about making DirectX 10 availble for Win3.11, Win95, Win98, WinME or WinNT. I believe that it should be runnable on Vista, WinXP, and Win2000 though. Why? Ok. DirectX is mainly thought of for games and gaming, but there could be some business apps that decided to use DirectX for some reason. DirectX is an API. If DirectX 10, 11, or 12 requires new drivers from hardware vendors that's one thing, but to say that the API won't work at all? That is just managment BS. Honestly, I've not been as pleased with MS with WinXP and making sure all the "third" party drivers were checked out. I'm not talking about no name generic drivers, I'm talking about nVidia, Ati, HP or Creative drivers getting warnings that the driver hasn't been signed off by MS. I'm sorry, but if MS can't get nVidia, Ati, HP, or Creative to have all their drivers for XP signed off by MS, then what makes them think that they'll be able to do it for Vista? Good idea yes, but will the other "third" party vendors go for it? Not likely.
If anything MS needs to release the DirectX10 API and have a blurb stating for new features your video card/sound card drivers will need to be updated with your vendor's getting their drivers "MS certified" for DirectX 10 or even for WinXP or Vista.