This was my concept - about 5 years ago I thought of it. I saw people watching MTV while they rode an exercise bike or did the threadmill, and I thought "what if you could explore a detailed replica of world famous cities each time you take a run or ride?" My concept would be to replicate the cities street by street in high detail so you could see each building and newpaper box, etc. just as if you were in the city you choice to jog or ride in. This would make the exercise less dull, and give a person an incentive to go further and see more of the city. I'm thinking places like Paris, not Baltimore.
In practical terms, it gives you decent print drivers if you don't have a Postscript printer.
The previous printing available for something like a HP 6L was crappy for something like a typical web page. I used it only as text. With CUPS, I can use the HP4 driver package and click print from Netscape and see the page nicely.
In a typical knee-jerk fashion, people think this is about turf war. This is really about lowering the cost of the Sony computer.
Do you really think people are going to use StarOffice just because it comes on the machine?
Do you think people are saying
Oh yeah, StarOffice, I know that. Let's buy this machine.
Dream on.
This is about selling cheap computers, in a time that it is hard to sell them. Once the machine is home, they get their cousin Arnie to drop off his Word 2000 CDs he took home from the office for the weekend.
Sure, M$ takes a revenue hit, but the user is still in love with what they know, whether that is Wordperfect, M$ Office or HoTMetaL Pro.
Some day, if copying Arnie's CDs doesn't work, they might just be forced to send their dough to M$, and we know that is happening with XP.
I wrote to the LDP and the maintainer of the software RAID HOWTO to volunteer a group of people I rounded up for a rewrite. No responses.
I could write yet another guide for this, but then it becomes lost in the sea of half efforts and misses the peer review a LDP effort would have.
I think the LDP needs a shake up. Look at how many projects are in the status of "can't locate author". What a mess.
There is something real about this thread on OSS. There are fundamental differences between how a corporaton cranks out products and how open source handles the equivalent. Discussing this can lead to improvements if enough of us realize something needs to be done.
Useability is like a wide mouthed fish that captures everything and means nothing. I think what many people mean by it, is to ask whether a piece of software was intuitive to use for a new user. That depends highly on what that user is used to doing. My Dad has flown many aircraft and repaired planes and helicopters all of his life. He is a fairly technical fellow, but after spending 4 evenings training to use Windows 98, he is still frustrated with trying to get anything to work. Many people would say Windows is intuitive, but it is only the case once you've been using it for ages. Likewise, for Unix variants.
I am a fairly adaptive user, as I've been with Windows, Mac and Unix for over 10 years. However, I am often pissed with open source projects purely due to poor documentation. This can be true even with mega projects like samba and software raid.
I sweated enough getting through a software raid conversion project that I decided it was time to do something about it. I roused the interest of my local Linux Users Group and found people who were willing to help write better documentation. I enlisted the support of a friend who is a pro tech writer for over 10 years. I contacted the LDP and the current maintainer of the Software RAID HOWTO and suggested we take some action. No response has been heard. This particular HOWTO is missing steps and is now 3 years old.
My pet peeve is finding software that has only a README with one config example and then the sentence "this should work". When I see that I don't even bother anymore.
Even locating information on serious bugs is harder than before. Samba had a bug with files larger than 4GB on a Linux share. It isn't listed in the release notes of the build that addresses this problem.
Take a look at iptables. Very few people understand how to configure it for practical purposes. The documentation by the coder is specific on granular details, but completely misses the question of how do you put together a set of options that meet a particular threat. As a result, iptables is being configured by a bunch of downloaded scripts on the net which most of us don't understand.
Things are becoming increasingly complex, due to higher security needs, increased features, more choice in packages, etc. Documentation that addresses the questions of the purpose of the tools and how to make practical use of them is very much needed.
The question is, how can you get the official party responsible to even notice the need and the person volunteering to help with documentation?
As for the guy who says he writes software for himself and he doesn't care about anyone else's needs... Don't even bother sharing your code if this is your attitude. You should keep it to yourself and forget about messing up the sourceforge landscape. There are already enough projects there that have lots of good intentions but no time available from the busy coder to come back and update things. If you don't even have the good intentions to offer us, then don't bother sharing one line of code.
OK, I'll learn a new language. But first, where is the meat? I've never seen a job ad for Occum or Intercal, but quite a number of.NET and Java positions. Can you provide one link to a job for one of these languages?
Please don't tell me it is just "the future". I see that claimed all the time - python, etc.
I've been in IT for 12 years and like the original person posting the question, I started with Pascal and mainframes in school.
I did mostly Tech Support for a software vendor which entered the web wave with an early HTML editor in 1994. I had opportunity to see scheme in use, and I didn't get it. OO languages are event driven, and I can't wrap my mind around how to develop code in OO design after years of top down modular style development. I've managed to tackle some javascript that uses it, but that is my limit.
I've done some QA work, but it is tough to find work in that area right now. Both web and software development are in low cycles. Everything in the IT industry was being falsely fired up by estimates from Worldcom about the size of the internet traffic. People are very skeptical about computer industry claims now. They have been stung by Nortel stock falling, and stores selling them PC upgrades so they can run word recognition software that doesn't work usefully. They are not about to believe the next big market hype.
I've been through 2 boom/bust cycles in the Internet now, and I've decided to switch over to an area that isn't as full of marketing hot air: IT infrastructures such as net admin and sysadmin. In the post Sept 11th world, security is also a prime concern. This should lead to a growth in positions related to system security. But one has to build up some experience first in sysadmin duties.
I have a bunch of machines at home and I spend time taking on little projects to increase the scope of experience I have. Lately: IPSEC VPN, software RAID conversion on Linux, iptables, WAP configuration, Linux webcam. I just bought a used Sun Ultra on eBay ($150 USD) so that I can be sysadmin over a Solaris machine with true Sun hardware.
I expect my first job as a helpdesk/net admin/sysadmin is going to pay less than my previous web developer/software QA job, but that is a temporary effect of a minor career change.
As for faking it at the interview, forget it unless your employer is a joke. Modern day interviews are looking for certification, and in lieu of that they are asking for a verbal description of how you previously did a task. Sometimes there are also verbal or written test questions. They are laying traps for the posers, so you can forget what worked in the 1990's. A footnote to that, is that if you are still working in IT and have not been looking for work for awhile, take all opportunities to boost your knowledge and exposure to technology while you are at work. Telling them you read about it in O'Reilly textbooks only raises half an eyebrow.
I don't know why a person would sit there twiddling their thumbs waiting for a fix from Redhat. The way I see their errata, they are often the last to know about a problem.
Here is my method:
1. Discover problem. 2. Check for update at Redhat 3. If RH update not available or doesn't help,
look for update at source project. 4. If newer release from source project doesn't
help, check their bugs information to see if
the problem is known. 5. Check their FAQs and support information to
see if anyone else knows of the problem and
a solution. 6. Pursue their preferred method of discussing
potential bugs - mailing list, whatever. 7. Consider workarounds and other packages that
can do the same thing.
In my view, Redhat is simply a delivery mechanism. They are the taxi driver that brings me linux. I don't even think about the taxi driver making fixes to linux. Perhaps that is sometimes not 100% correct, but that is what I assume.
The above would be different if I paid money to Redhat for the package or support. I would engage this while at the same time checking the source of the package if possible.
As I remember it, it started with Pong on the TV set. It was cheap enough, and it was hours of fun and not complex to learn.
I bought the TRS-80 model I and played FS1 (flight sim), which loaded from the cassette recorder. You couldn't even see the plane - just a crude instrument panel and the outside 10 x 10 grid world with paper thin mountains on the north.
Don't forget that not all games are of the type you are typically thinking of in the best sellers list. There are thousands of people interested in flight simulators and many of them don't buy the latest and greatest release everytime. My Dad, over 65, flies MS Flight Sim 2002 as a substitute for being able to fly real planes as he used to. If I had not bought him that, he would have stuck to flying with Flight Sim 98.
That is, playing games does not equate with buying games, as one can continue to play something they enjoy for many years. I think this would account for the oddity that many people feel is present in this report of over 35 age and game playing. I can see Tetris, Starcraft and some others contining to be played for many years after they peak on the best sellers list.
If anything, I'd think game playing would be associated with free time. Anyone who has free time and has a computer will likely play a game they enjoy.
There are also many more single people over 30 than there were years ago. I know of a few unmarried. Marriage and having kids will kill your free time. I am in this situation. I have to wait for 8 or 9 years and then I can play Starcraft with my oldest son.
As for the box stuffers, Microsoft had a contest for a real Cessna aircraft with its latest flight sim.
For me the question of sexism is quite simple to determine. If someone can assume that my interest in an object is directed by a shallow interest in seeing girls as opposed to something else, then the perception will be that I'm drawn to the object by the sexual appeal rather than by other interests. If the object is plastered with images of suggestive poses or clothing, other people will think that is why I bought the article. I don't want that. I don't want to have to explain that the object has other merits because no one will believe it. It is like the cliche of reading Playboy for the articles. What I mean by suggestive is that they imply the woman would be interested in quick and easy sex.
I have the same problem with something like Maximum PC magazine. It doesn't matter whether there are breasts visible, etc. It is the context of looking or acting in a suggestive manner, like a playboy bunny, that is the issue. In the case of Lara Croft, she isn't Ms Buttercup from Arkansas but she is more capable, something akin to the women surrounding James Bond. A Sex Object with an active lifestyle is still a Sex Object.
I won't read Maximum PC with covers of poster type girls in public, or around people who don't know me well. I don't want to have to explain that there really is technical content in the magazine and it isn't a men's magazine ala GQ and many other new ones.
I've played Quake as the eyeball with two leg/wheels. I don't care what my character looks like. I suppose it wouldn't be as credible if I were a paper bag or a pig, but getting psyched up by the character has a rather low place in the order of importance for me.
This is the first intelligent post I've read here on the topic of end users selecting their own rating version of a movie. The DVD edit is no different than what A&E or any other "family" type TV channel would do to a movie to air it. They still pay a fee to show it on the air, and that seems to be the only important aspect to the movie makers. This has gone on for decades without court cases.
Another example of film editing is for the movies they play on airlines. They edit out references to airplane travel and accidents. E.g. the scene in Rainman.
However, I somehow doubt that having the ability to select DVD rating levels is the central issue to the court case.
My pet peeve in watching Star Trek (TNG is the last one I followed much), is the slow speed in which battle and other urgent situations play out.
For example, If a ship uncloaks nearby and it poses a threat, it takes several status reports and several commands from the captain to raise shields, power up weapon systems and return fire. The details and commands are spoken slowly enough for ESL students to follow, and by the time things are prepared, the Enterprise has already taken significant hits.
It reminds me of the Thunderbirds. Those string puppets of the sixties would run at the same speed they walked, to avoid swinging on the string when slowing down.
Battle scenes in Star Trek seemed to be modelled on cannon ball battle of sail ships in the 1800's and previous. Given what we have today in electronic jamming, stealth, unmanned fighters, remote sensing, chemical and biological warfare devices, etc., you would expect there to be a much wider variety of battles, and for certain reaction time would be a critical factor. Heck, even the game Starcraft has more interesting conflicts than Star Trek.
The type of plot I enjoy is the one containing some unpredictable content. I enjoyed the episode where a part of the Enterprise becomes a life form that takes over the ship and dreams through the holodeck program of The Orient Express. Stuff like that mysterious brick that goes in the wall, and interacting with characters on the holodeck train was fun.
I also liked the move where Picard was being followed by Borg and he entered the holodeck, called up a 1930's mafia storyline with a crowded room, and used a machine gun with the holodeck safety off to pop off a few Borg as they were busy trying to assimilate holodeck characters.
The news item was repeated once, but the number of reader comments saying it was a repost were in the dozens. There is a suggestion in the "Important Stuff" of our Post Comment screen that suggests you read other messages before posting? Is it that crucial for your voice to be part of the scene?
Fuel cells are going to be a revolution in how we use energy, simply by the transfer of energy. If you compare how much energy of a gasoline engine actually makes the car go, compared to that of fuel cell vehicle, it is a massive difference. I don't know where the comparisons could be with fuel cell batteries verses our current lithium, etc.
Sure, they don't solve all of the problems, but they don't add any new ones to the environment, and that is at least half of a solution to the total energy picture.
If a person was very dedicated to green power themselves, they could hook up a few small $1000 windmill generators to make their own electricity and power their own personal fuel appliance from Stewart Energy Systems
It's a little tougher than that. The jobs you list won't pay the rent if you are supporting someone else and/or kids. It is also hard to get someone to hire you if they are convinced you wouldn't stick around long for a joe job.
Like the original question poser, I have moved to a smaller city where there isn't much software development, and it is difficult to find work in one of my previous roles (QA, Tech Support).
I'm trying to switch to a more sysadmin or network admin role, and no one is calling me. Certifications are underway, but tough to pull off on my budget. Tech Support for various places like ISPs is also a possibility, but they generally pay peanuts.
You can get hydrogen by a reverse process to the fuel cell - water and electricity go in and hydrogen comes out - electrolysis. Here is a link to a company that is aiming to make the equivalent to a "gas pump" for hydrogen: Stewart Energy
Electric vehicles have never made sense to me, from a Canadian perspective. Even in many parts of the U.S., the power available in winter from any battery system will be useless in severe cold temperatures.
The automakers are really more interested in hydrogen powered fuel cells.
There are many subtopics off of this news item.
One concept being discussed is that non-petroleum energy sources are not currently available which are environmentally friendly. If I hook up a hydrogen electrolysis machine (available from Stewart Energy Systems to my 220 volt household, it is probably getting juice from nuclear power today. But the future might be different. If I really wanted to, I could have a small windmill or two set up to generate the electricity needed to convert the water to hydrogen.
There are two problems we are solving, and we don't need to do them at the exact same time. One problem is that we need alternate fuel vehicles as gas and oil will eventually be unfound. Another problem is that we want a clean and renewable energy source. Hydrogen power in cars will be part of the solution, and finding sources of electricity that are cleaner will be another solution.
Another topic coming up is that people don't want to give up today's current horsepower and styling. Well, you can probably credit the early efforts of the petroleum industry for making the electric car concept appear in the front pages and then fail. I think this has changed now. They realize the petroleum reserves are down, and if they want to live on in any way they have to adapt to the next wave. You should not assume the production vehicles are going to come with puny horsepower, etc., of the early generation concept cars. There is no reason why we won't see hydrogen powered 18 wheelers, heavy equipment, etc. All you have to do is build the same with more power. Right now this technology is in the R&D phase, with many advancements coming each year. I've heard the big automakers have 2010 as the rollout date for fuel cell vehicles appearing in showrooms.
A major player in this is Ballard Power Systems, who have been working with many of the automakers. GM have decided to develop their own fuel cell technology.
The travel time into space and back is a chunk of the lag. In our case in Canada I've heard the satellite for DirecPC is 35,000 miles away, so that makes a round trip of 70,000 miles. That adds a lag of nearly 400 ms. The encoding and decoding on the hardware takes another 100 ms or more, and so you add that to the rest of the typical routing lag and you'll see about 700ms lag at best. I used DirecPC for about 2 years and it was never better than 700ms. Impossible for gaming. Not very good for web browsing and tasks like telnet are cut off very often due to signal errors or something like it. I think that basically if a bird flies by, telnet loses a grip on the connection.
There is one thing that DirecPC does well in my experience: large FTP downloads. All connections have the quirk that they start as slow modem speeds and then gradually speed up. DirecPC will try to tell you that is normal, but it never happens with other high bandwidth services I've seen.
Surfing the web, doing email and so on are not much different than dial up modem, except in the case of high bandwidth things like quicktime movies.
Read the alt newsgroup on DirecPC or run dejanews searches on this and you'll find a legacy of commentary on Hughes, DirecPC and so on. This will speak volumes on the U.S. side of the experience I don't have.
In our case in Canada, the DirecPC service is encrypted so that only the card with hardware serial number on it can decrypt the digital signal. I don't think they invented this just for little 'ol us.
The cost of these media has fallen so steeply in the last 3 years that the price of a few cents per CD is not significant. A couple of years ago I often paid over $23 for a box of 10 brand name CDs with jewel cases. Now that same brand box is about $12, even with the tax increase. Just how many CDs is anyone producing for their own use? If you are producing volumes of them then that is a business you are running, and this is a small cost compared to everything else involved.
There are more significant things to be concerned about than this. It is just a hot issue for the right wing types who are always sensitive over any perceived tax grab. (This is only a minority of people in Canada. We have to be socialist due to climate, just like everyone else at this latitude. We'd rather pay a little more to the government so we don't have to step over frozen bodies on the way to work.)
Why just Americans? I was going to point out the same fact on the location and also the length of time this labratory has been open. It certainly isn't "recently" opened - it is over a year in operation - perhaps two - I forget. Stephen Hawking visited it shortly after it was complete and he was impressed.
We'd assume Americans might not know this because anyone reading this site is a certified nerd, and all nerds in Canada have read/heard about this labratory - it was headline news several times in the last year. It is located in an old nickel mine, and a famous one at that - not much nickel in Kingston, but everyone in Canada knows the big nickel in Sudbury.
We also have empirical evidence from a TV show run up here called This Hour has 22 Minutes, in which the same dude that proposed the referendum to change Stockwell Day's name to Doris Day (by law) has visited such places as Harvard Univ., and asked professors and learned students there about obviously false stories occuring in Canada, such as the sad news of the closing of Eaton's University, "the last University in Canada". Of course there are dozens of Universities in Canada, and you might expect a Harvard professor to see through that, or even get a little suspicious when reading the mic label in front of his nose that says "22 minutes". In case you didn't know, Eaton's is actually a department store. Rick Mercer had no problem locating dozens of students at Harvard that fell for this question.
The basic fact is, Americans generally have poor knowledge of North American geography. For some reason, Canadians know more about the U.K. and U.S. than the other does about here. I blame elementary school.
Slashdot Mirror
This was my concept - about 5 years ago I thought of it. I saw people watching MTV while they rode an exercise bike or did the threadmill, and I thought "what if you could explore a detailed replica of world famous cities each time you take a run or ride?" My concept would be to replicate the cities street by street in high detail so you could see each building and newpaper box, etc. just as if you were in the city you choice to jog or ride in. This would make the exercise less dull, and give a person an incentive to go further and see more of the city. I'm thinking places like Paris, not Baltimore.
In practical terms, it gives you decent print drivers if you don't have a Postscript printer.
The previous printing available for something like a HP 6L was crappy for something like a typical web page. I used it only as text. With CUPS, I can use the HP4 driver package and click print from Netscape and see the page nicely.
This is about selling cheap computers, in a time that it is hard to sell them. Once the machine is home, they get their cousin Arnie to drop off his Word 2000 CDs he took home from the office for the weekend.
Sure, M$ takes a revenue hit, but the user is still in love with what they know, whether that is Wordperfect, M$ Office or HoTMetaL Pro.
Some day, if copying Arnie's CDs doesn't work, they might just be forced to send their dough to M$, and we know that is happening with XP.
I already made some attempt at this.
I wrote to the LDP and the maintainer of the software RAID HOWTO to volunteer a group of people I rounded up for a rewrite. No responses.
I could write yet another guide for this, but then it becomes lost in the sea of half efforts and misses the peer review a LDP effort would have.
I think the LDP needs a shake up. Look at how many projects are in the status of "can't locate author". What a mess.
There is something real about this thread on OSS. There are fundamental differences between how a corporaton cranks out products and how open source handles the equivalent. Discussing this can lead to improvements if enough of us realize something needs to be done.
Useability is like a wide mouthed fish that captures everything and means nothing. I think what many people mean by it, is to ask whether a piece of software was intuitive to use for a new user. That depends highly on what that user is used to doing. My Dad has flown many aircraft and repaired planes and helicopters all of his life. He is a fairly technical fellow, but after spending 4 evenings training to use Windows 98, he is still frustrated with trying to get anything to work. Many people would say Windows is intuitive, but it is only the case once you've been using it for ages. Likewise, for Unix variants.
I am a fairly adaptive user, as I've been with Windows, Mac and Unix for over 10 years. However, I am often pissed with open source projects purely due to poor documentation. This can be true even with mega projects like samba and software raid.
I sweated enough getting through a software raid conversion project that I decided it was time to do something about it. I roused the interest of my local Linux Users Group and found people who were willing to help write better documentation. I enlisted the support of a friend who is a pro tech writer for over 10 years. I contacted the LDP and the current maintainer of the Software RAID HOWTO and suggested we take some action. No response has been heard. This particular HOWTO is missing steps and is now 3 years old.
My pet peeve is finding software that has only a README with one config example and then the sentence "this should work". When I see that I don't even bother anymore.
Even locating information on serious bugs is harder than before. Samba had a bug with files larger than 4GB on a Linux share. It isn't listed in the release notes of the build that addresses this problem.
Take a look at iptables. Very few people understand how to configure it for practical purposes. The documentation by the coder is specific on granular details, but completely misses the question of how do you put together a set of options that meet a particular threat. As a result, iptables is being configured by a bunch of downloaded scripts on the net which most of us don't understand.
Things are becoming increasingly complex, due to higher security needs, increased features, more choice in packages, etc. Documentation that addresses the questions of the purpose of the tools and how to make practical use of them is very much needed.
The question is, how can you get the official party responsible to even notice the need and the person volunteering to help with documentation?
As for the guy who says he writes software for himself and he doesn't care about anyone else's needs... Don't even bother sharing your code if this is your attitude. You should keep it to yourself and forget about messing up the sourceforge landscape. There are already enough projects there that have lots of good intentions but no time available from the busy coder to come back and update things. If you don't even have the good intentions to offer us, then don't bother sharing one line of code.
OK, I'll learn a new language. But first, where is the meat? I've never seen a job ad for Occum or Intercal, but quite a number of .NET and Java positions. Can you provide one link to a job for one of these languages?
Please don't tell me it is just "the future". I see that claimed all the time - python, etc.
OK, you find a customer willing to pay that and I'll give you 50%!
I've been in IT for 12 years and like the original person posting the question, I started with Pascal and mainframes in school.
I did mostly Tech Support for a software vendor which entered the web wave with an early HTML editor in 1994. I had opportunity to see scheme in use, and I didn't get it. OO languages are event driven, and I can't wrap my mind around how to develop code in OO design after years of top down modular style development. I've managed to tackle some javascript that uses it, but that is my limit.
I've done some QA work, but it is tough to find work in that area right now. Both web and software development are in low cycles. Everything in the IT industry was being falsely fired up by estimates from Worldcom about the size of the internet traffic. People are very skeptical about computer industry claims now. They have been stung by Nortel stock falling, and stores selling them PC upgrades so they can run word recognition software that doesn't work usefully. They are not about to believe the next big market hype.
I've been through 2 boom/bust cycles in the Internet now, and I've decided to switch over to an area that isn't as full of marketing hot air: IT infrastructures such as net admin and sysadmin. In the post Sept 11th world, security is also a prime concern. This should lead to a growth in positions related to system security. But one has to build up some experience first in sysadmin duties.
I have a bunch of machines at home and I spend time taking on little projects to increase the scope of experience I have. Lately: IPSEC VPN, software RAID conversion on Linux, iptables, WAP configuration, Linux webcam. I just bought a used Sun Ultra on eBay ($150 USD) so that I can be sysadmin over a Solaris machine with true Sun hardware.
I expect my first job as a helpdesk/net admin/sysadmin is going to pay less than my previous web developer/software QA job, but that is a temporary effect of a minor career change.
As for faking it at the interview, forget it unless your employer is a joke. Modern day interviews are looking for certification, and in lieu of that they are asking for a verbal description of how you previously did a task. Sometimes there are also verbal or written test questions. They are laying traps for the posers, so you can forget what worked in the 1990's. A footnote to that, is that if you are still working in IT and have not been looking for work for awhile, take all opportunities to boost your knowledge and exposure to technology while you are at work. Telling them you read about it in O'Reilly textbooks only raises half an eyebrow.
I don't know why a person would sit there twiddling their thumbs waiting for a fix from Redhat. The way I see their errata, they are often the last to know about a problem.
Here is my method:
1. Discover problem.
2. Check for update at Redhat
3. If RH update not available or doesn't help,
look for update at source project.
4. If newer release from source project doesn't
help, check their bugs information to see if
the problem is known.
5. Check their FAQs and support information to
see if anyone else knows of the problem and
a solution.
6. Pursue their preferred method of discussing
potential bugs - mailing list, whatever.
7. Consider workarounds and other packages that
can do the same thing.
In my view, Redhat is simply a delivery mechanism. They are the taxi driver that brings me linux. I don't even think about the taxi driver making fixes to linux. Perhaps that is sometimes not 100% correct, but that is what I assume.
The above would be different if I paid money to Redhat for the package or support. I would engage this while at the same time checking the source of the package if possible.
As I remember it, it started with Pong on the TV set. It was cheap enough, and it was hours of fun and not complex to learn.
I bought the TRS-80 model I and played FS1 (flight sim), which loaded from the cassette recorder. You couldn't even see the plane - just a crude instrument panel and the outside 10 x 10 grid world with paper thin mountains on the north.
Don't forget that not all games are of the type you are typically thinking of in the best sellers list. There are thousands of people interested in flight simulators and many of them don't buy the latest and greatest release everytime. My Dad, over 65, flies MS Flight Sim 2002 as a substitute for being able to fly real planes as he used to. If I had not bought him that, he would have stuck to flying with Flight Sim 98.
That is, playing games does not equate with buying games, as one can continue to play something they enjoy for many years. I think this would account for the oddity that many people feel is present in this report of over 35 age and game playing. I can see Tetris, Starcraft and some others contining to be played for many years after they peak on the best sellers list.
If anything, I'd think game playing would be associated with free time. Anyone who has free time and has a computer will likely play a game they enjoy.
There are also many more single people over 30 than there were years ago. I know of a few unmarried. Marriage and having kids will kill your free time. I am in this situation. I have to wait for 8 or 9 years and then I can play Starcraft with my oldest son.
As for the box stuffers, Microsoft had a contest for a real Cessna aircraft with its latest flight sim.
For me the question of sexism is quite simple to determine. If someone can assume that my interest in an object is directed by a shallow interest in seeing girls as opposed to something else, then the perception will be that I'm drawn to the object by the sexual appeal rather than by other interests. If the object is plastered with images of suggestive poses or clothing, other people will think that is why I bought the article. I don't want that. I don't want to have to explain that the object has other merits because no one will believe it. It is like the cliche of reading Playboy for the articles. What I mean by suggestive is that they imply the woman would be interested in quick and easy sex.
I have the same problem with something like Maximum PC magazine. It doesn't matter whether there are breasts visible, etc. It is the context of looking or acting in a suggestive manner, like a playboy bunny, that is the issue. In the case of Lara Croft, she isn't Ms Buttercup from Arkansas but she is more capable, something akin to the women surrounding James Bond. A Sex Object with an active lifestyle is still a Sex Object.
I won't read Maximum PC with covers of poster type girls in public, or around people who don't know me well. I don't want to have to explain that there really is technical content in the magazine and it isn't a men's magazine ala GQ and many other new ones.
I've played Quake as the eyeball with two leg/wheels. I don't care what my character looks like. I suppose it wouldn't be as credible if I were a paper bag or a pig, but getting psyched up by the character has a rather low place in the order of importance for me.
This is the first intelligent post I've read here on the topic of end users selecting their own rating version of a movie. The DVD edit is no different than what A&E or any other "family" type TV channel would do to a movie to air it. They still pay a fee to show it on the air, and that seems to be the only important aspect to the movie makers. This has gone on for decades without court cases.
Another example of film editing is for the movies they play on airlines. They edit out references to airplane travel and accidents. E.g. the scene in Rainman.
However, I somehow doubt that having the ability to select DVD rating levels is the central issue to the court case.
My pet peeve in watching Star Trek (TNG is the last one I followed much), is the slow speed in which battle and other urgent situations play out.
For example, If a ship uncloaks nearby and it poses a threat, it takes several status reports and several commands from the captain to raise shields, power up weapon systems and return fire. The details and commands are spoken slowly enough for ESL students to follow, and by the time things are prepared, the Enterprise has already taken significant hits.
It reminds me of the Thunderbirds. Those string puppets of the sixties would run at the same speed they walked, to avoid swinging on the string when slowing down.
Battle scenes in Star Trek seemed to be modelled on cannon ball battle of sail ships in the 1800's and previous. Given what we have today in electronic jamming, stealth, unmanned fighters, remote sensing, chemical and biological warfare devices, etc., you would expect there to be a much wider variety of battles, and for certain reaction time would be a critical factor. Heck, even the game Starcraft has more interesting conflicts than Star Trek.
The type of plot I enjoy is the one containing some unpredictable content. I enjoyed the episode where a part of the Enterprise becomes a life form that takes over the ship and dreams through the holodeck program of The Orient Express. Stuff like that mysterious brick that goes in the wall, and interacting with characters on the holodeck train was fun.
I also liked the move where Picard was being followed by Borg and he entered the holodeck, called up a 1930's mafia storyline with a crowded room, and used a machine gun with the holodeck safety off to pop off a few Borg as they were busy trying to assimilate holodeck characters.
The news item was repeated once, but the number of reader comments saying it was a repost were in the dozens. There is a suggestion in the "Important Stuff" of our Post Comment screen that suggests you read other messages before posting? Is it that crucial for your voice to be part of the scene?
Fuel cells are going to be a revolution in how we use energy, simply by the transfer of energy. If you compare how much energy of a gasoline engine actually makes the car go, compared to that of fuel cell vehicle, it is a massive difference. I don't know where the comparisons could be with fuel cell batteries verses our current lithium, etc.
Sure, they don't solve all of the problems, but they don't add any new ones to the environment, and that is at least half of a solution to the total energy picture.
If a person was very dedicated to green power themselves, they could hook up a few small $1000 windmill generators to make their own electricity and power their own personal fuel appliance from Stewart Energy Systems
It's a little tougher than that. The jobs you list won't pay the rent if you are supporting someone else and/or kids. It is also hard to get someone to hire you if they are convinced you wouldn't stick around long for a joe job.
Like the original question poser, I have moved to a smaller city where there isn't much software development, and it is difficult to find work in one of my previous roles (QA, Tech Support).
I'm trying to switch to a more sysadmin or network admin role, and no one is calling me. Certifications are underway, but tough to pull off on my budget. Tech Support for various places like ISPs is also a possibility, but they generally pay peanuts.
You can get hydrogen by a reverse process to the fuel cell - water and electricity go in and hydrogen comes out - electrolysis. Here is a link to a company that is aiming to make the equivalent to a "gas pump" for hydrogen: Stewart Energy
Electric vehicles have never made sense to me, from a Canadian perspective. Even in many parts of the U.S., the power available in winter from any battery system will be useless in severe cold temperatures.
The automakers are really more interested in hydrogen powered fuel cells.
There are many subtopics off of this news item.
One concept being discussed is that non-petroleum energy sources are not currently available which are environmentally friendly. If I hook up a hydrogen electrolysis machine (available from Stewart Energy Systems to my 220 volt household, it is probably getting juice from nuclear power today. But the future might be different. If I really wanted to, I could have a small windmill or two set up to generate the electricity needed to convert the water to hydrogen.
There are two problems we are solving, and we don't need to do them at the exact same time. One problem is that we need alternate fuel vehicles as gas and oil will eventually be unfound. Another problem is that we want a clean and renewable energy source. Hydrogen power in cars will be part of the solution, and finding sources of electricity that are cleaner will be another solution.
Another topic coming up is that people don't want to give up today's current horsepower and styling. Well, you can probably credit the early efforts of the petroleum industry for making the electric car concept appear in the front pages and then fail. I think this has changed now. They realize the petroleum reserves are down, and if they want to live on in any way they have to adapt to the next wave. You should not assume the production vehicles are going to come with puny horsepower, etc., of the early generation concept cars. There is no reason why we won't see hydrogen powered 18 wheelers, heavy equipment, etc. All you have to do is build the same with more power. Right now this technology is in the R&D phase, with many advancements coming each year. I've heard the big automakers have 2010 as the rollout date for fuel cell vehicles appearing in showrooms.
A major player in this is Ballard Power Systems, who have been working with many of the automakers. GM have decided to develop their own fuel cell technology.
The travel time into space and back is a chunk of the lag. In our case in Canada I've heard the satellite for DirecPC is 35,000 miles away, so that makes a round trip of 70,000 miles. That adds a lag of nearly 400 ms. The encoding and decoding on the hardware takes another 100 ms or more, and so you add that to the rest of the typical routing lag and you'll see about 700ms lag at best. I used DirecPC for about 2 years and it was never better than 700ms. Impossible for gaming. Not very good for web browsing and tasks like telnet are cut off very often due to signal errors or something like it. I think that basically if a bird flies by, telnet loses a grip on the connection.
There is one thing that DirecPC does well in my experience: large FTP downloads. All connections have the quirk that they start as slow modem speeds and then gradually speed up. DirecPC will try to tell you that is normal, but it never happens with other high bandwidth services I've seen.
Surfing the web, doing email and so on are not much different than dial up modem, except in the case of high bandwidth things like quicktime movies.
Read the alt newsgroup on DirecPC or run dejanews searches on this and you'll find a legacy of commentary on Hughes, DirecPC and so on. This will speak volumes on the U.S. side of the experience I don't have.
Do you know what you are talking about?
In our case in Canada, the DirecPC service is encrypted so that only the card with hardware serial number on it can decrypt the digital signal. I don't think they invented this just for little 'ol us.
The cost of these media has fallen so steeply in the last 3 years that the price of a few cents per CD is not significant. A couple of years ago I often paid over $23 for a box of 10 brand name CDs with jewel cases. Now that same brand box is about $12, even with the tax increase. Just how many CDs is anyone producing for their own use? If you are producing volumes of them then that is a business you are running, and this is a small cost compared to everything else involved.
There are more significant things to be concerned about than this. It is just a hot issue for the right wing types who are always sensitive over any perceived tax grab. (This is only a minority of people in Canada. We have to be socialist due to climate, just like everyone else at this latitude. We'd rather pay a little more to the government so we don't have to step over frozen bodies on the way to work.)
Why just Americans? I was going to point out the same fact on the location and also the length of time this labratory has been open. It certainly isn't "recently" opened - it is over a year in operation - perhaps two - I forget. Stephen Hawking visited it shortly after it was complete and he was impressed.
We'd assume Americans might not know this because anyone reading this site is a certified nerd, and all nerds in Canada have read/heard about this labratory - it was headline news several times in the last year. It is located in an old nickel mine, and a famous one at that - not much nickel in Kingston, but everyone in Canada knows the big nickel in Sudbury.
We also have empirical evidence from a TV show run up here called This Hour has 22 Minutes, in which the same dude that proposed the referendum to change Stockwell Day's name to Doris Day (by law) has visited such places as Harvard Univ., and asked professors and learned students there about obviously false stories occuring in Canada, such as the sad news of the closing of Eaton's University, "the last University in Canada". Of course there are dozens of Universities in Canada, and you might expect a Harvard professor to see through that, or even get a little suspicious when reading the mic label in front of his nose that says "22 minutes". In case you didn't know, Eaton's is actually a department store. Rick Mercer had no problem locating dozens of students at Harvard that fell for this question.
The basic fact is, Americans generally have poor knowledge of North American geography. For some reason, Canadians know more about the U.K. and U.S. than the other does about here. I blame elementary school.