No offense intended, but I hope you've got a better comparison than that. Some of us realized that you might need four digits for the year before 1998 rolled along. And?
"Y2K" was being talked about before I was in high school. I think I even read a foreward-reaching mention of it. Heck, the programmer at the time knew that it would be an issue.
Installed it all properly, too, because nothing stopped working. Actually, there were more than a few local computer networks rendered inoperable on Jan 1 2000. No planes fell from the sky or anything, but to say "nothing stopped working" is just plain wrong.
You say this, and yet WoW is possibly the most successful game of all time I don't know. I think that little things like, oh, football or chess kind of beat WoW for "success."
I'm not even convinced that WoW has a larger share of the market than Doom or Wolfenstein did back in the day. More sales, certainly, but you can't play WoW if you pirate it.
Recognize that you, your interests, and your arguments simply represent a minor fringe group and that, while your opinion is valid on a personal level, your comments hold no value in the wider world of gamers. This is slashdot. Does anybody's comments hold value here?
FYI, World of Warcraft HAS "stateful shared quests" which remain active until completed by any character, which then triggers a different quest. They've had several world events... If it's a major event, then it's an event, not a quest. City of Heroes has the same halfway attempt with invasions -- and they simply aren't up to snuff.
Funny how you seem to know all the secrets... 1: "Design a fun game" and "Program a fun game" are two very different skill-sets, but the industry doesn't let you do the former until you've done the latter -- because they don't value the former as highly.
2: Who said it was a secret? City of Heroes was designed to be an amusement park. World of Warcraft was designed to be "warcrack." These were choices made by those companies, for justifiable fiscal reasons. The only possible thing that could keep either Blizzard or NCSoft or CCP from doing an immersive, player-driven PvE game is the likelihood of failure in trying something new.
Maybe he is asking for the old MS Access style graphical "form" interface for inputting data and generating reports or perhaps he is talking about a GUI administrative interface like phpmyadmin. Yes, both of those qualify as a "front-end."
phpmyadmin fails as it's an unnecessary layer of abstraction -- I shouldn't have to run a webserver on my db engine, or local machine, just to admin my database outside a command shell.
I'm wondering, thought, how many people still use MS access? I mean you can make a simple web-based app and people can access it from anywhere. Why bother with a full blown app? MS Access is the archtypical "toy" database -- useful for very-small projects that don't need to go beyond one computer, or that would otherwise be done by hand using some badly written spreadsheets.
I've used Access to parse some very large data sets, and I've seen it used as the primary database for limited-run data-sets. Sure, most of these COULD be done via a single server hosting it somewhere... but that's unneeded complexity for the lower end of tasks.
(was the postal service initiated at the start of the US?) A little bit earlier, actually. The first postal system in the American Colonies was, IIRC, setup by Ben Franklin. The British Crown had a similar system, and the old feudal Heralds served a similar purpose.
At any rate, when the Constitution was ratified, it contained within it Express Powers for a postal servce, right in Article II Section 8.
"The Congress shall have power... To establish post offices and post roads; "
As science becomes debased in popular culture, by everything from homeopathy to astrology to religion, tragedies like this one will be the consequence. I don't know if I should respond in rhetorical over your poor understanding of science or of religion first. I'll go alphabetically.
religion: While the news probably didn't reach your mom's basement, the antagonism between "science" and "religion" only started in earnest in the last two hundred years. For the thousand years before that, science and its precursors were thoroughly entwined with religion, both supported by and supporting in exchange the dominant religion of their land. Any stores you have to the contrary are, sadly, more properly called "Atheist Mythology" than anything else.
Science: Science is the bonna fide measure of truth today not because smart people went out and converted, but because the scientific method gets results. We know what we know because "Make a claim, then try and prove it false" works a hell of a lot better than "make a claim and see if it makes sense" or "make a claim and shout until the other side agrees with you" when you want to know how something works.
Oh, and btw -- the actually smart geeks are out of the basement. We've been so for a long, long time.
DDT was completely awful and evil for saving millions of peoples lives in Africa. DDT is still perfectly legal to use for disease control, which is how it's used in Africa.
It's not legal to use it how we WERE using it -- to get a slightly higher yield from wholly un-diseased agriculture.
Not to mention that "Silent Spring" was shown to be a crock. Nope. DDT thins bird shells in trace amounts, and has a measurable effect on humans. Notice how it's not sprayed everywhere anymore?
"Silent Spring" is no more a crock than "Y2K" was. The disaster was averted because America acted.
(And yes, it is 'bated breath, not baited breath. I have abated my breathing, not eaten nightcrawlers.) ARRRGH!
1: No apostrophe is necessary if you use the old spelling. "Bated" is a perfectly cromulent word.
2: English does not now nor ever truly had one singular guide to spelling. As with word definition, spelling is fluid and will change with time.
3: Go ahead and use thine old spelling, for verily it must make ye quite gay, else thee wouldn't use such. But, prithee, take no insult when another uses such new spelling in textual intercourse with you.
4: Go ahead and say cromulent isn't a word. I dare you.
Unless you change the core mechanics and introduce a random story generation algorithm, Permadeath would be the single most mind-numbingly annoying thing you could introduce into a modern game. You say that like it's impossible.
Nothing aside from lowest-common-sucker planning keeps a real PvE MMO from doing just this. A very smart system would respond to player action -- a heavily hero-populated land would attract more and stronger villians, who spawn minion-quests and whatnot. You could even have stateful shared quests, where a quest remains active until completed by any character, which then triggers a different quest.
The real problem with MMOs like WoW is that the meat of the game isn't all that fun. Some, like City of Heroes, try and avoid it by purposefully making low-level re-play the focus of the game. Others, like Eve Online, say to heck with PvE and focus on the PvP side.
World of Warcraft is "warcrack" by design. They could make it fun and interesting and genuinely massive, but that'd require real work and wouldn't have the same profit margin.
There were 3 - my odds of success were 1 out 3. Monty shows me that one of them is bad, so now my odds are 1 out of 2. No. Monty gives you another chance, by telling you which of the other two boxes are wrong. The only way switching isn't good is if you passed the 1/3 chance in the first trial.
Put another way, the Monty Haul problem is "Pick two of three boxes, and I'll tell you which of your choices is wrong. What are your odds that you picked the right box?"
Marilyn vos Savant explained the problem in Parade magazine, and a whole bunch of math professors wrote in to tell her that she was wrong... turns out it's kind of a bad idea to play "gotcha" with someone who has an IQ of 228. Actually, it turns out that an IQ Of 228 doesn't mean your very good in communicating at all.
The "Monty Haul" problem is where you place the choice, and Marilyn's problem was failing to state it plainly.
For anyone not familiar with it, the "Monty Haul" problem is simple: in a game you get to pick from one of three boxes, inside one of which is the prize. After you pick your box, but before it's opened, the game reveals which one of the boxes you didn't pick is empty. You are then offered the choice to switch to the other box. Mathematically, is it better to go with your first choice or to switch?
The answer: You get a 66% chance of success if you switch, because the only way you lose is if you hit the 33% chance of grabbing the prize box first.
Or, shorter: Switch, because you probably didn't pick the right box to begin with.
Considering approximately 5% of Physicists in the Unites States are religious Every physicist I've ever met adheres to the cosmology of one religion or another, if only by way of personal suspicion about what science cannot answer.
And those friends of mine who have worked with far more physicists report that they often find fundamental reason for what is essentially religious belief in their work. You know, kind of like Einstein, who was "religious" in the sense that he believed in a fundamental and purposeful (deterministic) order, rather than the stark random chance esposed by the "non-religious"
It is only an affirmative defense for a specific case Actually, four specific cases. In the original law, only three -- journalism, review, and education. The fourth, pardoy, was added by way of judicial interpretation of the unexplict statutes and underlying principles.
It is not about whether all lecture notes will suddenly be found to be fair use. That is impossible by definition. Well, only in the sense that a lecture is usually not set in a fixed form, and so isn't covered by copyright in the form usually presented to students.
hPosession is 9/10 of the law. A "lawsuit or two" can be dragged out for years until the market is manipulated to the point where paying the damages for the past instances of non-compliance will become irrelevant -- a monopoly will have been established. And you know what happens to companies that do that? That really, truly violate a government order allowing private citizens to access something created with private funds?
they get their corporate charter revoked, all shareholders lose everything, and their assests are auctioned off to their competition in a firesale.
This isn't Microsoft selling a new type of phone. It's Enron trying to sell a new type of power line.
Intel will be in a world of trouble soon, because a P4 2GHz and 512-1GB of RAM is all most users require to run most of their apps and you can grab computer with those specs or better for less than a few hundreds dollars. Except that it doesn't take a lot to justify a constant IT expenditure.
A faster PC lets you do more. More data on your spreadsheet. More complexity to your calculations. More responsiveness to your intranet.
When you can calculate a hundred year's worth of individual transactions for the stock market on your desk in less than ten seconds, then you'll have a fast enough computer.
(OTOH, if you don't beneit from a FASTER computer, then you don't really need one.)
OK, but "exponential" pretty much always means "exponential" FWIW, "exponential" doesn't always mean "rises according to an exponent of the past value." It also means "rising with a rate of growth that increases rapidly over time."
Welcome to the English language, where words mean what they are defined by the user to mean. This may or not may not reveal the speaker to be an asshat, but trying to say that it's an incorrect usage is a sure way to reveal yourself as one.
Disclaimer: I don't read fiction. That's kind of like saying "I don't like music." But anyway.
Maybe I'm a little too future-happy, but why is paper still relevant today ? If you have the document in electronic form, read it electronically! I'd rather walk around with an ebook reader device than pay some old-world scrooge just to print stuff. The replacement cost of a lost paperback is $20, tops. Assuming you need to special-order it from a scrounger on ebay. The replacement cost of even the cheapest ebook reading device available (The low-end Palm) is close to $100. The additional cost to read a printed book is $0. The additional cost to read an ebook is the electricity to power your reader -- not $0, even if not significantly so. If you drop a paperback book, the worst thing that happens is it gets a little wet or a little dirty. If you drop an ebook reader, you might be out an ebook reader.
The proven lifespan of a paperback book is measured in decades. Ebook readers haven't even been around that long.
If you find the electronic form hard to read, then demand a better reading device! Kindle ain't your thing ? Then don't buy it! We have the tools, we have the engineering know-how, but people are stuck in their backward ways. Well, that's just it. There isn't anything commercially available that can replace even most of the benefits of a printed book. An "epaper" device like the Sony Reader or Amazon's Kindle has a jarring flash with each refresh. A classic LCD device like a PDA or cell phone has a lower resolution and poor reflectivity. And both, as mentioned before, have a prohibitive cost.
I can buy books and give them away to complete strangers after I read them. I've never met a man who can give away Kindles or PDAs to complete strangers so they can read.
This whole world has basically gone to shit. All we get are news story after news story about how this person or that corporation did something for pure greed. Odd, all I've seen lately are news stories about gossip, sex, and self-promotion of one sort or another. Where are you getting your news?
(Oh, btw -- for every greedy SOB you find, assume the existance of two generious SOBs, two greedy nice guys, and one bonna fide nice person. The rest of us just kinda live beneath the radar.)
If that's the case, isn't there some law to prevent you from squeezing your only competition by placing unjustifiable limitations on the market? Not saying they're a monopoly... Until Amazon.com is a monopoly, they can do whatever the hell they want.
They are the Wal-Mart of online bookstores, but they do have competition. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/, target.com, half.com... and, oddly enough, wal-mart.com.
why do you need a publisher to select for quality?
can't a reviewer, friend, or recommendation algorithm select for YOUR particular needs better? You DO realize that a publisher is, abstracted, someone you hire to recommend a book you like? That the whole "marketing" apparatus includes every book review, word-of-mouth recommendation, and "if you like X, you'll like Y" wannabe in existence?
What you're looking for is a marketing department that specializes in book promotion and who's willing to take the risk for a cut of the profit. The "publishing" part of it is not where the value is. Publishing is the act of fronting money to get a book printed, usually for a cut of the gross revenue. Didn't Family Guy have an episode about this?
I wish all POD books would just go away for the most part. They are often of poor quality both in content and presentation.
I wrote a sci-fi novel last year and we published it hardback with our own press. ...
Have you, I mean, actually LOOKED at your website?
Good writing is good writing, if it's printed in a collector's edition hardback or a dot-matrix ebook. Unfortunately, sometimes bad writing in a collector's edition hardback LOOKS like good writing, and enough of the folks who poney up the $30 for a copy delude themselves that the genre gets another hack on the shelf.
Mass-market books are returnable because the publisher expects enough of the ten-thousand or so of the first run to sell to make a profit. POD books aren't, in the same way that the entire run of ten-thousand aren't returnable if the author is rendered unpublishable before they can be shipped. (Most plausible example: plagiarism.)
If you managed to make a profit on your inventory, congratulations. If you haven't... well, then you would understand why POD makes sense.
(And on a completely unrelated note, if you want to get into the book publishing business, why don't you just do that? An author writes, and a publisher publishes, because the ability to create a work of art and the ability to decide which works of art are sellable are usually mutually exclusive within any individual.)
As a side-note to this off-topic post, interesting that you mention books written 50+ years ago as the most worthwhile. In my experience this is largely true and my mind floods with cynical reasons why this may be so. Obvious one: there's been 50 years to weed out the bad ones.
Books of a like quality written today must complete with the slew of blogs, mindless novels, and other "pulp media" that, well, doesn't last 50 years.
Well, that and elitism is a self-fulfilling perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
"Y2K" was being talked about before I was in high school. I think I even read a foreward-reaching mention of it. Heck, the programmer at the time knew that it would be an issue. Installed it all properly, too, because nothing stopped working. Actually, there were more than a few local computer networks rendered inoperable on Jan 1 2000. No planes fell from the sky or anything, but to say "nothing stopped working" is just plain wrong.
I'm not even convinced that WoW has a larger share of the market than Doom or Wolfenstein did back in the day. More sales, certainly, but you can't play WoW if you pirate it. Recognize that you, your interests, and your arguments simply represent a minor fringe group and that, while your opinion is valid on a personal level, your comments hold no value in the wider world of gamers. This is slashdot. Does anybody's comments hold value here?
2: Who said it was a secret? City of Heroes was designed to be an amusement park. World of Warcraft was designed to be "warcrack." These were choices made by those companies, for justifiable fiscal reasons. The only possible thing that could keep either Blizzard or NCSoft or CCP from doing an immersive, player-driven PvE game is the likelihood of failure in trying something new.
phpmyadmin fails as it's an unnecessary layer of abstraction -- I shouldn't have to run a webserver on my db engine, or local machine, just to admin my database outside a command shell.
I've used Access to parse some very large data sets, and I've seen it used as the primary database for limited-run data-sets. Sure, most of these COULD be done via a single server hosting it somewhere... but that's unneeded complexity for the lower end of tasks.
At any rate, when the Constitution was ratified, it contained within it Express Powers for a postal servce, right in Article II Section 8.
"The Congress shall have power
religion: While the news probably didn't reach your mom's basement, the antagonism between "science" and "religion" only started in earnest in the last two hundred years. For the thousand years before that, science and its precursors were thoroughly entwined with religion, both supported by and supporting in exchange the dominant religion of their land. Any stores you have to the contrary are, sadly, more properly called "Atheist Mythology" than anything else.
Science: Science is the bonna fide measure of truth today not because smart people went out and converted, but because the scientific method gets results. We know what we know because "Make a claim, then try and prove it false" works a hell of a lot better than "make a claim and see if it makes sense" or "make a claim and shout until the other side agrees with you" when you want to know how something works.
Oh, and btw -- the actually smart geeks are out of the basement. We've been so for a long, long time.
It's not legal to use it how we WERE using it -- to get a slightly higher yield from wholly un-diseased agriculture.
"Silent Spring" is no more a crock than "Y2K" was. The disaster was averted because America acted.
1: No apostrophe is necessary if you use the old spelling. "Bated" is a perfectly cromulent word.
2: English does not now nor ever truly had one singular guide to spelling. As with word definition, spelling is fluid and will change with time.
3: Go ahead and use thine old spelling, for verily it must make ye quite gay, else thee wouldn't use such. But, prithee, take no insult when another uses such new spelling in textual intercourse with you.
4: Go ahead and say cromulent isn't a word. I dare you.
Nothing aside from lowest-common-sucker planning keeps a real PvE MMO from doing just this. A very smart system would respond to player action -- a heavily hero-populated land would attract more and stronger villians, who spawn minion-quests and whatnot. You could even have stateful shared quests, where a quest remains active until completed by any character, which then triggers a different quest.
The real problem with MMOs like WoW is that the meat of the game isn't all that fun. Some, like City of Heroes, try and avoid it by purposefully making low-level re-play the focus of the game. Others, like Eve Online, say to heck with PvE and focus on the PvP side.
World of Warcraft is "warcrack" by design. They could make it fun and interesting and genuinely massive, but that'd require real work and wouldn't have the same profit margin.
Easier: "Pick 2 out of 3 doors. What are the chances one of the doors you picked contains the car?"
Put another way, the Monty Haul problem is "Pick two of three boxes, and I'll tell you which of your choices is wrong. What are your odds that you picked the right box?"
The "Monty Haul" problem is where you place the choice, and Marilyn's problem was failing to state it plainly.
For anyone not familiar with it, the "Monty Haul" problem is simple: in a game you get to pick from one of three boxes, inside one of which is the prize. After you pick your box, but before it's opened, the game reveals which one of the boxes you didn't pick is empty. You are then offered the choice to switch to the other box. Mathematically, is it better to go with your first choice or to switch?
The answer: You get a 66% chance of success if you switch, because the only way you lose is if you hit the 33% chance of grabbing the prize box first.
Or, shorter: Switch, because you probably didn't pick the right box to begin with.
And those friends of mine who have worked with far more physicists report that they often find fundamental reason for what is essentially religious belief in their work. You know, kind of like Einstein, who was "religious" in the sense that he believed in a fundamental and purposeful (deterministic) order, rather than the stark random chance esposed by the "non-religious"
they get their corporate charter revoked, all shareholders lose everything, and their assests are auctioned off to their competition in a firesale.
This isn't Microsoft selling a new type of phone. It's Enron trying to sell a new type of power line.
A faster PC lets you do more. More data on your spreadsheet. More complexity to your calculations. More responsiveness to your intranet.
When you can calculate a hundred year's worth of individual transactions for the stock market on your desk in less than ten seconds, then you'll have a fast enough computer.
(OTOH, if you don't beneit from a FASTER computer, then you don't really need one.)
Welcome to the English language, where words mean what they are defined by the user to mean. This may or not may not reveal the speaker to be an asshat, but trying to say that it's an incorrect usage is a sure way to reveal yourself as one.
The proven lifespan of a paperback book is measured in decades. Ebook readers haven't even been around that long. If you find the electronic form hard to read, then demand a better reading device! Kindle ain't your thing ? Then don't buy it! We have the tools, we have the engineering know-how, but people are stuck in their backward ways. Well, that's just it. There isn't anything commercially available that can replace even most of the benefits of a printed book. An "epaper" device like the Sony Reader or Amazon's Kindle has a jarring flash with each refresh. A classic LCD device like a PDA or cell phone has a lower resolution and poor reflectivity. And both, as mentioned before, have a prohibitive cost.
I can buy books and give them away to complete strangers after I read them. I've never met a man who can give away Kindles or PDAs to complete strangers so they can read.
(Oh, btw -- for every greedy SOB you find, assume the existance of two generious SOBs, two greedy nice guys, and one bonna fide nice person. The rest of us just kinda live beneath the radar.)
They are the Wal-Mart of online bookstores, but they do have competition. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/, target.com, half.com... and, oddly enough, wal-mart.com.
can't a reviewer, friend, or recommendation algorithm select for YOUR particular needs better? You DO realize that a publisher is, abstracted, someone you hire to recommend a book you like? That the whole "marketing" apparatus includes every book review, word-of-mouth recommendation, and "if you like X, you'll like Y" wannabe in existence? What you're looking for is a marketing department that specializes in book promotion and who's willing to take the risk for a cut of the profit. The "publishing" part of it is not where the value is. Publishing is the act of fronting money to get a book printed, usually for a cut of the gross revenue. Didn't Family Guy have an episode about this?
I wrote a sci-fi novel last year and we published it hardback with our own press. ...
Have you, I mean, actually LOOKED at your website?
Good writing is good writing, if it's printed in a collector's edition hardback or a dot-matrix ebook. Unfortunately, sometimes bad writing in a collector's edition hardback LOOKS like good writing, and enough of the folks who poney up the $30 for a copy delude themselves that the genre gets another hack on the shelf.
Mass-market books are returnable because the publisher expects enough of the ten-thousand or so of the first run to sell to make a profit. POD books aren't, in the same way that the entire run of ten-thousand aren't returnable if the author is rendered unpublishable before they can be shipped. (Most plausible example: plagiarism.)
If you managed to make a profit on your inventory, congratulations. If you haven't... well, then you would understand why POD makes sense.
(And on a completely unrelated note, if you want to get into the book publishing business, why don't you just do that? An author writes, and a publisher publishes, because the ability to create a work of art and the ability to decide which works of art are sellable are usually mutually exclusive within any individual.)
Books of a like quality written today must complete with the slew of blogs, mindless novels, and other "pulp media" that, well, doesn't last 50 years.
Well, that and elitism is a self-fulfilling perspective.