I mean I've looked at them, like the sony TRV-120, they seem reletivly inexpensive, they can record to 8mm tape that's cheeper and more available (possibly even more durable). They can play hi8 and such. They have composite video in and out such that they can digitize a signal for you, and they're still pretty small.
I have the Sony camera of which you speak. Quality is just fine for home video. In addition to composite video, they also have Firewire (bidirectional) so it means I never have to use a VHS tape again. I can just make MPEG-2 versions of my video through the Firewire card.
b) Solar is very cost effective if you allow the companies to charge more for it *and* require people to pay for it when the company provides it.
So you want to undermine the free market economy and force people to buy something that is more expensive when there's a cheaper alternative? I thought you'd just said solar was cost effective?
In addition to this, solar energy is still a bit of a fallacy. It takes more energy to actually make a photovoltaic cell than it will ever generate in its lifetime. Just another reason why you don't see solar power farms all over the desert southwest.
Who among the people with clean credit histories and driving records and clean rap sheets is whining about this??
I have a clean credit history, a clean driving record and a clean rap sheet, but I still see a problem here. For example, the law will eventually stop holding a grudge: get a speeding ticket for example, and after a few years, it gets expunged from your record.
I just think that denying someone a good job years after making a kind of misjudgement most people could make is a bit over the top.
So if your kid's babysitter had a DWI 25 years ago you'd not give them a chance...but what about the babysitter that has driven under the influence dozens of times but has just never been caught? What if your kid's babysitter got a DWI 25 years ago and as a result, gave up alcohol altogether 25 years ago? You'd still hold that against them despite they recognised they had a problem, took responsibility for it and fixed the problem?
After all, we can have a president that commits a crime in office and remains president...
But the punishment should fit the crime! Is it just that you should be turned down for a certain type of job (possibly for life) because of a misdemeanour you made when you were 18?
Sure - people SHOULD be responsible for their actions (and it seems more and more people feel they shouldn't - witness silly lawsuits after accidents because people always feel "it's never my fault, it's someone elses fault") but there has to be limits. Being denied for a job ten or fifteen years after a minor misdemeanour you made as a teenager is hardly just. Most teenagers exhibit horrible judgement - it's the nature of being one. I'd wager that most people out of their teenage years who don't have a record for some kind of minor misdemeanour or offense do so only because they weren't caught.
I had the same problem (UK to US though). Even worse, since I'm not an immigrant, I didn't have a SSN (I discovered I could get one later, after getting erroneous information from the place that issues the SSN!) However, I found a letter from my employer explaining that I was on international assignment etc. worked for the bank. Fortunately, my employer also has a credit union...which is the only place I can get credit. Everyone else says "Well, your credit's good but we're not going to lend you money anyway because you're a filthy stinking rotten foreigner" The worst one was MBNA who phoned up saying I had been "pre-approved". That turned out to be utter Bravo-Sierra. After three or four snail-mail exchanges sending them bits of information so they could approve me, they turned me down using the filthy stinking rotten foreigner excuse, despite having good credit from paying back credit union loans and a good income.
Hmmm. I've never been keen on those little Bose speakers: they've never sounded particularly good to my ear (in fact I'd go as far to say as a relatively inexpensive set of Wharfedales of JBLs sound nicer). But beauty is in the ear of the beholder I suppose!
Bose do however make awesome active noise reduction headsets for aviation. But sadly, their price is so high that it's not worth it.
OOP (IMHO -- I'm crazy for the acronyms today), is just a fad. Like structured programming was before it.. Unfortunately a lot of these companies today fall into "trendy" programming methodologies.
Structured programming a fad? OOP a fad? A rather long-lived fad then! Software developers have been using structured programming techniques and OO design for years, and will continue to do so.
Personally, I believe you should program using the style you're most comfortable and familiar with. If you're trying to fit a mold it will slow you down.
That's fine if you're working on a small project with maybe one developer. But if you had 30+ developers using their own techniques and styles on a large project (like the >1MLOC project I've been working on for the last 5 years) you'll end up with an unmaintainable mess. If everyone conforms to a standard methodology and style then at least you can maintain each other's code.
This is one of the differences between software ENGINEERING and code that's been congealed instead of designed. Software engineering should result in a robust and maintainable system. Letting every programmer go off and do their own thing as you advocate leads to the truth in the phrase "If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization!" It sounds nice to let the programmer go off and just write in their own style using their own unique design techniques. But it's terribly naive and unrealistic in the real world.
I am *not* a OOP programmer. To be honest, I've never been able to understand it.
snip
And you know what? I've never understood OOP. I just don't "get it." Sure, I understand the theory, but when it comes to real work, I've never understood it.
It's like if everyone started calling the TV a "forbick". Doesn't make any sense does it? I mean, it's a TV. Why call it a forbick?
To use a language (any language) you have to grok it, and think in that language or - in the case of OO - in that kind of style. Your example of calling a TV a "forbick" is kind of right on - the French, for example, call cheese "fromage".
You'll never be a good Francophone if you have to think in English, then translate to French, and say it. You have to actually think in French. Same with computer languages. When I first learned C, I was thinking in BASIC and translating. It didn't really work very well. (BBC BASIC doesn't have pointers for one). It was not until I grokked C and started thinking in C that I got any good at the language. Although it seems natural to think in C then code in C++ because the languages are so similar, unfortunately it won't work out very well. You have to think "object oriented" instead of thinking in non-OO and translating. Once you get to that stage, you'll truly grok OO and its usefulness.
I'm currently learning Perl. I'm trying to start off thinking in Perl rather than thinking in C++ and translating. So far, it's working OK, but I'm still doing things the C way that would be better done the Perl way, so I guess I'm not truly thinking in Perl yet!
There's a lot of anti-ritalin sentiment. I think that's very misdirected. If you want to complain about anything, complain about all the doctors who prescribed it when they shouldn't have.
Don't take my comment as anti-Ritalin, or anti-any kind of drug. My complaint is very much about misdiagnosis. Misdiagnosis is a potentially serious error, whether in engineering or medicine. That and using drugs merely "because something must be done and this is something" instead of proper diagnosis and proper prescription of the correct drug for the condition in question.
I'm not trying to decide for other people that drugs are not good for anyone. I am not anti-drug. The correct drug used for a correctly-diagnosed condition is great. If the right drug is being used for the right condition, great benefits can be reaped. For example, using antibiotics for a bacterial infection - great benefits. But using antibiotics for a viral infection is not only wrong, it doesn't do any good. It just seems to me that the balance is being struck wrong when 75% of the cases are misdiagnosed (and so 75% of the people on the drugs - ie the vast majority - shouldn't be on drugs at all or are suffering from something else and should be on a totally different drug altogether).
Can't concentrate in a class that's so stultifyingly boring that even the morons are losing the plot? He's got ADD, put him on Ritalin.
Have a common cold? Put him on antibiotics (never mind that antibiotics do nothing for viral infections).
It just appears from where I'm sitting that over-prescription - using drugs as the silver bullet - runs a bit rampant, that's all.
I don't remember what this scenario is called, but it goes something like this:
1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore we will do this.
which is like saying:
1. My dog has four legs.
2. A cat has four legs
3. Therefore my dog is a cat.
It seems a lot of time, teachers see a kid who's bored, maybe a bit of a smart-ass who talks a lot, and Something Must Be Done. They tell the parents, "Oh he's got ADD" as the Something in question. And the chain of misdiagnosis begins.
Well, I think I became anti-social first. They said I had ADD, and they put me on ritalin. I promptly stopped interacting with other people (after I got off of it, I started returning to normalcy).
That really irks me badly. Idiot lusers who want kids to conform to their definition of "normal" so use the magic bullet - put 'em on drugs.
I missed that horrible fate myself by a hair's breadth. When I was 14, my school forced my parents to take me to the doctor for evaluation (or I'd get expelled). Fortunately, our local doctor had a clue and told my mother, "Mrs. Smith, your son is a perfectly normal geek, and his school is all fscked up" but in more flowery language of course. The fact the sheeple did this to you, frankly, annoys the heck out of me. It annoyed the heck out of me when they tried to do it to me, too.
It's a good thing my doctor did have a clue. A misdiagnosis of ADD and the treatment it would involve would have barred me from my other great passion in life - flying - because the FAA would have a hell of a time issuing my medical if that was the case.
Many frame the linked content in and essentially build their sites from other people's hard work
That's easy to defend from. Just add a Javascript frame-buster which automatically pops you out of the other person's frames.
Re:If you can't hack CS, don't be a programmer
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 2
Remember also that you're going to be competing for jobs with others who will have CS degrees. Who would YOU pick for a programming job - resume A with the CIS degree, or resume B with the CS degree?
It's a good job not EVERYONE thinks like that. One of the best software guys I know has an English degree. I personally did Systems Analysis (a BA - not a BSc), yet I applied for and got a good software development job. If that's the criterion for hiring (CS vs CIS) rather than what the person can really offer, then you're doing me a favour by not hiring me anyway! I don't really want to work for an employer who is that narrow-minded. And on one job interview, where it became clear that the job was just yet another programming job with no human contact, I said as much! (I did end up working for that company, but I interviewed with a different department for a job I liked better)
It's a good job my employer IS broad-minded, too. Surprisingly to my friends, the last thing I wanted to do was a straight CS degree. I detest calculus. I can't think of anything more stultifying. I wanted something broader. In my systems analysis degree, all the non technical stuff we did was actually very interesting. We had a broad range of subjects - from the hard-science end (yes, we had maths in our course) to other things like understanding system failures (by system, not meaning necessarily computer system, but any system - one of our case studies was TMI-2), all the way to industrial sociology. It was a very interesting degree, and I don't regret choosing it over a straight CS degree for one picosecond.
I don't find 2001 way too long and boring. Beauty, is after all, in the eye of the beholder! 2001, IMHO is a masterpiece. It really DOES make you feel the loneliness and remoteness of space. I've not seen any other space movie that has managed to capture that feeling.
While some of the effects are dated - I find the ship scenes look a lot more realistic than today's computer generated special effects. For some reason, modern special effects look...well, a lot more contrived than the old models did.
When I was 15, my father said, "how can you listen to this? It's noise! There's no melody, it's just boom boom boom!". He was talking about the Beatles.
It's funny - last year, my father asked me, "Why do you like this stuff?"
He was also talking about the Beatles. It sounds like my father is probably a similar age to you. The Beatles had broken up before I was born, and my father was interested why I was listening to this "old stuff".
I explained to him that good music is good music, no matter when it was made. My CD rack contains music from the 1940s (Duke Ellington) to the year 2000. If it's good, I'll buy it.
Lots of people say that music today is terrible etc. - and this is probably a constant. They wistfully remember how good music was in the '60s etc.
However, most '60s music can have the same accusations levelled against it that people level against the likes of Britney Spears and N'Sync today. Most oldies are "samey" and manufactured-sounding. But there are a few bands who really did something good - like the Beatles, and the Who. Or in the 1970s, Pink Floyd and Queen, and so on. Today's good ones (IMHO) are bands like Radiohead, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Ben Folds' Five (incidentally, Ben Folds' Three would be a bit more accurate!)
I recently went to a Roger Waters concert (he was Pink Floyd's lead singer). The friends who I went with were betting we'd be the youngest there, but a large proportion of the audience was younger than me (I'm 28). There were a lot of teenagers there. Pink Floyd music is genuinely good music. I also saw the Who, and although the audience was predominantly older than me, there were a lot of people in my g-g-g-g-generation;-) I guess the Who isn't going to f-f-f-fade away either
A good friend of mine (Hi Bryce! - who now, incidentally works for RedHat) was challenged by one of the sysadmins at my university to get root on their Sun server. This was in early 1992, when we just had Linux 0.14 too;-)
I was there. I know the sysadmin made the challenge. This was also when the encrypted passwords were visible in/etc/passwd on Sun boxes, too. I watched him do the usual tricks (dictionary crack), then write a program, distributed on all the Solbourne workstations, that brute-forced it using the then new fast version of crypt().
When it became clear to the sysadmin (hi troot!) that the crack was about to succeed, he got his account locked and he was sent to see Big Boss in charge of the computing resources.
He did get his account back, but he was quite badly reprimanded for this - and it was very unfair too, since one of the sysadmins made the challenge.
The lesson is: if someone challenges you to hack their system, get it signed and in writing, and witnessed as well. If they do it word of mouth, you'll probably get shafted as soon as the admin realises his security is crap, and you're just about to defeat it...
MUD: Well, I played Shades in the 1980s. In fact, I've started playing Shades again. It used to run on Micronet 800.
But now...telnet to games.world.co.uk (yes, it runs on port 23) and you can get back into Shades again! Quite a few people play it. And it's still lots of fun!
Elite - I think the follow-ons are better, particularly Frontier: First Encounters. However, the learning curve is a little steeper (it uses Newtownian physics, not 'airplane in space' physics). And it inspires people: see all the FEU-fanfiction that's around. You might be interested to know that (hopefully) the Elite Club will be forming soon.
Doom - I agree with your comments entirely. The atmosphere was amazing. It actually made you feel kind of anxious as you could hear all the monsters shuffling around. I played it with the lights off and the headphones on. One day, a friend of mine scared the tar out of me by throwing a little bean-bag frog at my back whilst I was playing the game. I think I jumped about five feet! We still play Doom at lan parties today.
Some people crack me up. Really. The encrypted GPS signal (the P-code) was only useful when selective availability was present. Since it was turned off, the difference isn't alot. The accuracy you can get know is about 20m with a $1000 Australian dollars (around $500 based on the current exchange rates;).
Actually, it's better than that now that Selective Availability has been turned off. My handheld GPS reports an EPE of 20 feet (about 6 meters). It's a Garmin GPSMAP 195.
The trouble with most binaries on Linux is that they always seem to require the latest libraries (of course). I find that most precompiled binaries will not run on my installation of Linux, since it's an older one.
It's often quicker and easier just to download the source and build the thing than upgrade all the libraries on my system - which already works satisfactorily (so I don't really want to upgrade). It seems to me that you always need a distro less than 3 months old on your system to run precompiled binaries of most things.
Having said that, I'd like to see both binaries and source out there. When I *do* have a new distro, I prefer to download binaries!
The article is inaccurate: slide rules are still manufactured. I have one I bought a couple of years ago.
It's called an E6-B. It's a circular slide rule used to solve navigation problems and wind triangles for aviation use. It's actually faster to use than the electronic versions (that's why I've stuck with a mechanical E6-B rather than buying an electronic one). The other good thing about it as there are no batteries to fail, and you can still read it wearing polarized sunglasses.
As far as the Hindenburg, even if it were helium-filled it could have caught fire, but not quite as spectacularly. The doped fabric covering of the airship was itself highly flammable.
But why? You ask. Well, I'll tell you. For one, movies don't come out at the same time all over the world.
The right way is to start releasing movies all over the world at the same time. But of course, they won't do that.
Did you know movie theatres outside the US usually end up using second-hand film that's already been shown in the US - yet customers don't get to pay a lower price for second-hand goods?
I agree. It's not the French people but the French bureaucracy that comes up with this bravo-sierra. The French people are like people everywhere else: most of them are friendly and welcoming.
One thing I admire in the French as a people, they reject silly laws by simply ignoring them. I don't see French videophiles paying much attention to this new one. The French have a very commendable anti-authrority streak in their national psyche, and it's something we could all learn from.
But I have to think: what could I do if I was threatened in this way? In reality, not a lot, and sites like fandom.com know this - and use it to their advantage. They know they can steamroller the 'little guys' and they do.
My father told me one thing when I was a kid - concerning company mergers. "Son, in business, there is never a marriage. Only a rape".
When fandom.com picks up a new site - marriage or rape? I would HOPE it would be the former. But it looks like my Dad was right all along...
Slashdot Mirror
I have the Sony camera of which you speak. Quality is just fine for home video. In addition to composite video, they also have Firewire (bidirectional) so it means I never have to use a VHS tape again. I can just make MPEG-2 versions of my video through the Firewire card.
In addition to this, solar energy is still a bit of a fallacy. It takes more energy to actually make a photovoltaic cell than it will ever generate in its lifetime. Just another reason why you don't see solar power farms all over the desert southwest.
I have a clean credit history, a clean driving record and a clean rap sheet, but I still see a problem here. For example, the law will eventually stop holding a grudge: get a speeding ticket for example, and after a few years, it gets expunged from your record.
I just think that denying someone a good job years after making a kind of misjudgement most people could make is a bit over the top.
So if your kid's babysitter had a DWI 25 years ago you'd not give them a chance...but what about the babysitter that has driven under the influence dozens of times but has just never been caught? What if your kid's babysitter got a DWI 25 years ago and as a result, gave up alcohol altogether 25 years ago? You'd still hold that against them despite they recognised they had a problem, took responsibility for it and fixed the problem?
After all, we can have a president that commits a crime in office and remains president...
Sure - people SHOULD be responsible for their actions (and it seems more and more people feel they shouldn't - witness silly lawsuits after accidents because people always feel "it's never my fault, it's someone elses fault") but there has to be limits. Being denied for a job ten or fifteen years after a minor misdemeanour you made as a teenager is hardly just. Most teenagers exhibit horrible judgement - it's the nature of being one. I'd wager that most people out of their teenage years who don't have a record for some kind of minor misdemeanour or offense do so only because they weren't caught.
Sigh....
Bose do however make awesome active noise reduction headsets for aviation. But sadly, their price is so high that it's not worth it.
Structured programming a fad? OOP a fad? A rather long-lived fad then! Software developers have been using structured programming techniques and OO design for years, and will continue to do so.
Personally, I believe you should program using the style you're most comfortable and familiar with. If you're trying to fit a mold it will slow you down.
That's fine if you're working on a small project with maybe one developer. But if you had 30+ developers using their own techniques and styles on a large project (like the >1MLOC project I've been working on for the last 5 years) you'll end up with an unmaintainable mess. If everyone conforms to a standard methodology and style then at least you can maintain each other's code.
This is one of the differences between software ENGINEERING and code that's been congealed instead of designed. Software engineering should result in a robust and maintainable system. Letting every programmer go off and do their own thing as you advocate leads to the truth in the phrase "If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization!" It sounds nice to let the programmer go off and just write in their own style using their own unique design techniques. But it's terribly naive and unrealistic in the real world.
snip
And you know what? I've never understood OOP. I just don't "get it." Sure, I understand the theory, but when it comes to real work, I've never understood it.
It's like if everyone started calling the TV a "forbick". Doesn't make any sense does it? I mean, it's a TV. Why call it a forbick?
To use a language (any language) you have to grok it, and think in that language or - in the case of OO - in that kind of style. Your example of calling a TV a "forbick" is kind of right on - the French, for example, call cheese "fromage".
You'll never be a good Francophone if you have to think in English, then translate to French, and say it. You have to actually think in French. Same with computer languages. When I first learned C, I was thinking in BASIC and translating. It didn't really work very well. (BBC BASIC doesn't have pointers for one). It was not until I grokked C and started thinking in C that I got any good at the language. Although it seems natural to think in C then code in C++ because the languages are so similar, unfortunately it won't work out very well. You have to think "object oriented" instead of thinking in non-OO and translating. Once you get to that stage, you'll truly grok OO and its usefulness.
I'm currently learning Perl. I'm trying to start off thinking in Perl rather than thinking in C++ and translating. So far, it's working OK, but I'm still doing things the C way that would be better done the Perl way, so I guess I'm not truly thinking in Perl yet!
I keep telling myself it can't be the act of merely displaying a thumbnail...there must be something more to it...
Don't take my comment as anti-Ritalin, or anti-any kind of drug. My complaint is very much about misdiagnosis. Misdiagnosis is a potentially serious error, whether in engineering or medicine. That and using drugs merely "because something must be done and this is something" instead of proper diagnosis and proper prescription of the correct drug for the condition in question.
Can't concentrate in a class that's so stultifyingly boring that even the morons are losing the plot? He's got ADD, put him on Ritalin.
Have a common cold? Put him on antibiotics (never mind that antibiotics do nothing for viral infections).
It just appears from where I'm sitting that over-prescription - using drugs as the silver bullet - runs a bit rampant, that's all.
I don't remember what this scenario is called, but it goes something like this:
1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore we will do this.
which is like saying:
1. My dog has four legs.
2. A cat has four legs 3. Therefore my dog is a cat.
It seems a lot of time, teachers see a kid who's bored, maybe a bit of a smart-ass who talks a lot, and Something Must Be Done. They tell the parents, "Oh he's got ADD" as the Something in question. And the chain of misdiagnosis begins.
That really irks me badly. Idiot lusers who want kids to conform to their definition of "normal" so use the magic bullet - put 'em on drugs.
I missed that horrible fate myself by a hair's breadth. When I was 14, my school forced my parents to take me to the doctor for evaluation (or I'd get expelled). Fortunately, our local doctor had a clue and told my mother, "Mrs. Smith, your son is a perfectly normal geek, and his school is all fscked up" but in more flowery language of course. The fact the sheeple did this to you, frankly, annoys the heck out of me. It annoyed the heck out of me when they tried to do it to me, too.
It's a good thing my doctor did have a clue. A misdiagnosis of ADD and the treatment it would involve would have barred me from my other great passion in life - flying - because the FAA would have a hell of a time issuing my medical if that was the case.
That's easy to defend from. Just add a Javascript frame-buster which automatically pops you out of the other person's frames.
It's a good job not EVERYONE thinks like that. One of the best software guys I know has an English degree. I personally did Systems Analysis (a BA - not a BSc), yet I applied for and got a good software development job. If that's the criterion for hiring (CS vs CIS) rather than what the person can really offer, then you're doing me a favour by not hiring me anyway! I don't really want to work for an employer who is that narrow-minded. And on one job interview, where it became clear that the job was just yet another programming job with no human contact, I said as much! (I did end up working for that company, but I interviewed with a different department for a job I liked better)
It's a good job my employer IS broad-minded, too. Surprisingly to my friends, the last thing I wanted to do was a straight CS degree. I detest calculus. I can't think of anything more stultifying. I wanted something broader. In my systems analysis degree, all the non technical stuff we did was actually very interesting. We had a broad range of subjects - from the hard-science end (yes, we had maths in our course) to other things like understanding system failures (by system, not meaning necessarily computer system, but any system - one of our case studies was TMI-2), all the way to industrial sociology. It was a very interesting degree, and I don't regret choosing it over a straight CS degree for one picosecond.
While some of the effects are dated - I find the ship scenes look a lot more realistic than today's computer generated special effects. For some reason, modern special effects look...well, a lot more contrived than the old models did.
It's funny - last year, my father asked me, "Why do you like this stuff?"
He was also talking about the Beatles. It sounds like my father is probably a similar age to you. The Beatles had broken up before I was born, and my father was interested why I was listening to this "old stuff".
I explained to him that good music is good music, no matter when it was made. My CD rack contains music from the 1940s (Duke Ellington) to the year 2000. If it's good, I'll buy it.
Lots of people say that music today is terrible etc. - and this is probably a constant. They wistfully remember how good music was in the '60s etc.
However, most '60s music can have the same accusations levelled against it that people level against the likes of Britney Spears and N'Sync today. Most oldies are "samey" and manufactured-sounding. But there are a few bands who really did something good - like the Beatles, and the Who. Or in the 1970s, Pink Floyd and Queen, and so on. Today's good ones (IMHO) are bands like Radiohead, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Ben Folds' Five (incidentally, Ben Folds' Three would be a bit more accurate!)
I recently went to a Roger Waters concert (he was Pink Floyd's lead singer). The friends who I went with were betting we'd be the youngest there, but a large proportion of the audience was younger than me (I'm 28). There were a lot of teenagers there. Pink Floyd music is genuinely good music. I also saw the Who, and although the audience was predominantly older than me, there were a lot of people in my g-g-g-g-generation ;-) I guess the Who isn't going to f-f-f-fade away either
A good friend of mine (Hi Bryce! - who now, incidentally works for RedHat) was challenged by one of the sysadmins at my university to get root on their Sun server. This was in early 1992, when we just had Linux 0.14 too ;-)
I was there. I know the sysadmin made the challenge. This was also when the encrypted passwords were visible in /etc/passwd on Sun boxes, too. I watched him do the usual tricks (dictionary crack), then write a program, distributed on all the Solbourne workstations, that brute-forced it using the then new fast version of crypt().
When it became clear to the sysadmin (hi troot!) that the crack was about to succeed, he got his account locked and he was sent to see Big Boss in charge of the computing resources.
He did get his account back, but he was quite badly reprimanded for this - and it was very unfair too, since one of the sysadmins made the challenge.
The lesson is: if someone challenges you to hack their system, get it signed and in writing, and witnessed as well. If they do it word of mouth, you'll probably get shafted as soon as the admin realises his security is crap, and you're just about to defeat it...
But now...telnet to games.world.co.uk (yes, it runs on port 23) and you can get back into Shades again! Quite a few people play it. And it's still lots of fun!
Elite - I think the follow-ons are better, particularly Frontier: First Encounters. However, the learning curve is a little steeper (it uses Newtownian physics, not 'airplane in space' physics). And it inspires people: see all the FEU-fanfiction that's around. You might be interested to know that (hopefully) the Elite Club will be forming soon.
Doom - I agree with your comments entirely. The atmosphere was amazing. It actually made you feel kind of anxious as you could hear all the monsters shuffling around. I played it with the lights off and the headphones on. One day, a friend of mine scared the tar out of me by throwing a little bean-bag frog at my back whilst I was playing the game. I think I jumped about five feet! We still play Doom at lan parties today.
Actually, it's better than that now that Selective Availability has been turned off. My handheld GPS reports an EPE of 20 feet (about 6 meters). It's a Garmin GPSMAP 195.
It's often quicker and easier just to download the source and build the thing than upgrade all the libraries on my system - which already works satisfactorily (so I don't really want to upgrade). It seems to me that you always need a distro less than 3 months old on your system to run precompiled binaries of most things.
Having said that, I'd like to see both binaries and source out there. When I *do* have a new distro, I prefer to download binaries!
It's called an E6-B. It's a circular slide rule used to solve navigation problems and wind triangles for aviation use. It's actually faster to use than the electronic versions (that's why I've stuck with a mechanical E6-B rather than buying an electronic one). The other good thing about it as there are no batteries to fail, and you can still read it wearing polarized sunglasses.
As far as the Hindenburg, even if it were helium-filled it could have caught fire, but not quite as spectacularly. The doped fabric covering of the airship was itself highly flammable.
The right way is to start releasing movies all over the world at the same time. But of course, they won't do that.
Did you know movie theatres outside the US usually end up using second-hand film that's already been shown in the US - yet customers don't get to pay a lower price for second-hand goods?
One thing I admire in the French as a people, they reject silly laws by simply ignoring them. I don't see French videophiles paying much attention to this new one. The French have a very commendable anti-authrority streak in their national psyche, and it's something we could all learn from.
I run a fan-site myself (although I doubt I'd ever be a target of anything: fandom of Elite and Frontier First Encounters is rather a niche kind of thing to start off with).
But I have to think: what could I do if I was threatened in this way? In reality, not a lot, and sites like fandom.com know this - and use it to their advantage. They know they can steamroller the 'little guys' and they do.
My father told me one thing when I was a kid - concerning company mergers. "Son, in business, there is never a marriage. Only a rape".
When fandom.com picks up a new site - marriage or rape? I would HOPE it would be the former. But it looks like my Dad was right all along...