I don't see the problem. You admit that there's a need for.NET user groups. Who cares that they're run by for-profit groups or by Microsoft partners ? I don't even care if they charge people to use them, since nothing is preventing anyone from starting a "free", more traditional user's group. If there's a need, it's GREAT to see it being served - however it happens. Do you have a problem with Open-source companies charging for their consulting time ?
This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.
First, the article *I* read never said that Northwest was behind this plan, only that a proposal was *made* to Northwest. Sheesh.
But on a side note, if there were studies out there that could indicated that this work really could potentially catch people who posed threats, I'd be the first to get on a Northwest plane. I don't, after all, have a problem with people passing my body through various screening methods, and I don't have a problem with people looking at the contents of my luggage.
the price drop should tell u something. if they thought it was worth $600 more before why do they suddenly change their minds? Did they find a huge flaw in it that no one else has realized yet and they want to get rid of as many of them as possible?
It doesn't necessarily tell us anything more than the price drops that accompany almost any technology out there.
I've often thought a cool business plan would be to set up a "LAN Party" hall, with monitors and speakers, all the kiddies have to bring are their CPUs, keyboards and meece.
Dude, there are *plenty* of cyber-cafe-style places that cater more to the gaming crowd then the email/web crowd, and they don't require the players to drag CPUs/keyboards/mice, or even software licenses.
It's trying your damndest to get that Windows 98 computer to see your frined's 2000 computer and finding that network cable that you thought you left under your bed for emergencies when the guy with XP is complaining that he needs your DSL connection to get drivers for his new video
Yes, this aspect of LAN parties sucks. But of course any discussion about LAN parties on machines running Linux would be pretty boring, given as there are precious few games running on Linux and those that do are outdated for the most part.
Just *why* would anyone want to spend time reading Taco's diary ? I imagine it would read something like this....I always thought the stories in Forum were phony. Then last night, at an anime festival, 2 buxom Japanese girls with the widest blue eyes you've ever seen, sat next to me...
I have a sneaking suspicion that he HAS at least two computers, one running Windows, just like at least one of the other members of the/. editorial staff who claims to never run Windows but then makes references to Windows games. I conjecture they are claiming they don't run Windows because it makes for better Linux-PR to put on a happy face that says "I don't (really) run Windows".
I'm just not sure whether 5 million a month is a lot... it doesn't seem like it would be a lot for a company the size of Sony. And if the Star Wars game gets popular, you have to expect that a lot of it will come at the expense of cannibalizing the Everquest ranks. MMORPGs, like MUDs, after all, require a very particular type of person to pay to play.
Well, reading the article about Arneson it sounds like *he* was the one who invented *everything*. To my eyes, it was just a lot of "me, me, me". I would have been much more interested to hear about the interactions between Gygax and Arneson and how the game evolved from those interactions and the probably uncountable numerous game-playing sessions, because surely D&D was NOT D&D without Gygax's work. As it is, it sounds like he created the game and then showed the rules to Gygax who "liked it".
The Deities and Demigos manual was one of the coolest books they put out, for sheer enjoyment's sake. I remember being a kid and browsing that book and the Monster Manual OVER AND OVER again, even though I had read every entry probably hundreds of time. It was also great because it probably had the largest number of Jeff Dee illustrations, who was by far my favorite D & D illustrator. I sthink I might have even had a crush on some of the goddesses he drew in that book...
Huh? Because Apple customers like Apple products they should be excluded of a customer satisfaction survey?
The original point is well-taken, in that Mac users are more often than not die-hard Apple users and as such are more likely to view Apple favorably, independent of the service they receive. Such users have also likely made an active choice to buy Apple because of the company and not (say) because of the software available.
In contrast, PC users aren't usually Dell- or HP- or IBM-zealots - such users usually view PCs as clones which are interchangeable,and a far smaller percentage of PC-users are Wintel-zealots as compared to Mac-users being Apple-zealots...so if a PC-user gets lousy service or whatever from Dell, they're probably not jeopardizing their world view by saying so.
The active - and idiosyncratic - decision to buy Apple likely brings with it a cognitive dissonance that Compaq/Dell/IBM users aren't going to face.
I think it is a very similar issue to the zealotry that users of more esoteric operating systems tend to show (think BeOS, Amiga, Linux, OS/2). These users have made an active commitment to something that is not the norm, and it is this active commitment that will force them to psychologically jump through hoops to rationalize nearly every aspect of their OS, even if their OS of choice is imperfect in someway. Contrast this to Windows users, who rarely view themselves as having chosen Windows in any substantial way.
There are tons of social psychology experiments that demonstrate the cognitive dissonance effect. When zealotry comes into play, objectivity has to suffer.
How can a switch box improve video quality ???
on
USB KVMs Compared
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· Score: 2
The IOView, with a Hitachi Elite 751 19 inch monitor and a Matrox G-450 video card at 1600 x 1200 and 75 Hz, actually gives slightly better quality.
OK, I know you qualified this as an 'odd' result, but can someone explain how this could possibly be true ? If you're plugging the computer into the switchbox, the signal the SWITCHBOX is getting is the same signal the monitor would be getting if you didn't use the switchbox. But you're running more cable between the switchbox and the monitor and you have a device in between, to boot.
So how is the switchbox able to increase the video quality without introducing its own noise ?
When I first heard about Neverwinter Nights, I thought "Great, I can go and code all those modules I had when I was a kid"...then I started flashbacking to all my favorite modules' codes...D3, S2, Q1, etc.
But I realized it probably wouldn't work very well. The best modules always had a problem-solving aspect to it that just would never translate well to a the game frameworks that we have now. Neverwinter Nights is just not going to allow you the flexibility to really solve puzzles without cueing you so obviously as to what the solution might be.
The only game framework I could imagine that could really capture the essence of the best modules and campaigns is an Infocom-style framework - where the textual descriptions are so rich and your range of actions so potentially large that the solutions to the problems - and even the problems themselves - aren't painfully obvious. A puzzle isn't very satisfying when you only have to select one of 3 solutions from a menu, or when you just have to show up with an item and walk close to some target character, etc.
But sadly, this framework is almost completely incompatible - almost by definition - with Baldur's Gate-style graphics.
A: Everyone who isn't a Linux chauvinist, OR who doesn't believe that before Linux can be dead on the desktop, it has to first be "alive" on the desktop first. I don't think that Linux even registers as being on the desktop in the orthodox sense.
N.B. I believe this even though I am writing this from Linux.
The more that I read about file sharing, the more that I realize that most "freedom of information" types on the Internet are not concerned about distributing information. They're notconcerned about preserving information for future use. They're only concerned about getting copyrighted material for free. Copyright owners be damned, I want my free
music/movies/ROMs/software.
Thank goodness, a reasoned voice in the cacophony of hypocrisy. I often wonder what kind of reception would be had if someone setup a P2P service with all sorts of GPL'ed software, with all the GPL licenses/comments/etc. stripped, out allowing users to escape encumbrances which really aren't different in spirit than the encumbrances attached to the properties most commonly traded on these networks.
Yes, companies DO rent videos out, but as I understand they also pay FAR more for their copies that you do if you buy the video new.
And as for the presumed legitimacy of these sorts of enterprises, I once belonged to a software "club" in Toronto which, for the price of a membership and a small rental fee, let users borrow software for "trial and evaluation" purposes only. This was in the days of floppy disks, and I bet almost EVERYBODY who belonged to that club ran straight home to run Locksmith or whatever was the prevailing copy program at the time. If anyone really believes that software libraries aren't going to facilitate pirating they're crazy.
It does seem like that, doesn't it. I mean, you HAVE to believe someone as savvy as Perens would have thought to bounce this off HP legal first, before making a big, splashy statement ?
I'll never buy this particular book, because the second edition of the book was the first - of an increasingly larger number - of O'Reilly books that really weren't up to the O'Reilly snuff-of-old.
I miss the old days where I would buy O'Reilly books - no matter the topic - almost without cracking open the cover because I knew I could count on an authoritative, well-written-and-edited book that almost certainly was one of the best books on its topic. Now, it seems like O'Reilly is milking their goodwill and pumping out bushels of substandard quality books. I know, because I've bought a bunch of them.
Now, there doubtless were substantial revisions and additions to bring this particular book up to the 4th edition, but I just can't bring myself to buy an updated copy of what was at the time perhaps the worst O'Reilly book that WASN'T "CGI Programming on the World Wide Web" by Shishir Gundavaram.
Fool me once, shame on you Fool me twice, shame on me
I seriously doubt that we are ever going to have a completely "economic" explanation of open-source. I can't see an integrated explanation of the phenomenon without significant reference and fallback to psychological/ego factors.
Of course, many open-source advocates are wont to believe that this proposition is false, because to believe so is a tacit admission that some (but not necessarily all) part of their motivations involves the (some might say shallow) gratifications that comes for leading something, or from having their name "known" and praised, or even, from following someone else - it's an admission that we crave peer-approval/recognition. Now, you can assign economic utilities to this sort of peer-gratification, but that means the economic theory MUST fall back on a psychological theory.
Just look at the case of Slashdot, which is discussed at some length in the paper. There's NO way to explain why people contribute lengthy posts from a purely "economic" viewpoint and without reference to very subjective terms. You can't get a job or contracts because of your insightful Slashdot posts. You can't make business contacts through Slashdot posts.
What would happen if Slashdot were anonymized, or if changes were made so that people couldn't receive gratification from moderation ?
Imagine that Slashdot started running threads, sorted and nested as they are now, but with NO moderation totals and NO comments ("Funny/redundant/Interesting/etc"). I bet that posting would become much less popular...but I can't see how you could explain that without psychological reference. It is clear that many if not most posters derive significant psychological gratification from getting the "pat-on-the-back" of an up-moderation and "Interesting" tag...But is there an economic explanation ?
Similarly with the notion of karma. I've gone on too long already, but suffice to say I can't see how you can explain how carefullly many users tender to and monitor their karma without capitulating to the notion that they derive significant gratification from peer-approval.
We may seem shallow for it, and hence we might not want to believe it, but I think it's true.
The article does NOT claim that "Spam doesn't work". The experimenters sent out LEGITIMATE questions by email to people. Some of these recipients saw (from, presumably, the To: header) only their name as a recipient. Others saw that 4 others had also received the same query. The result was that people who knew that others had been asked the same question were less likely to respond than people who were listed as the sole recipient. The result that people are less likely to act if they know others are also in a position to act is a well known result in social psychology called "diffusion of responsibility".
They did NOT find what was previously implied, i.e. that sending an email to more recipients reduces response rate.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the problem. You admit that there's a need for .NET user groups. Who cares that they're run by for-profit groups or by Microsoft partners ? I don't even care if they charge people to use them, since nothing is preventing anyone from starting a "free", more traditional user's group. If there's a need, it's GREAT to see it being served - however it happens. Do you have a problem with Open-source companies charging for their consulting time ?
This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.
First, the article *I* read never said that Northwest was behind this plan, only that a proposal was *made* to Northwest. Sheesh.
But on a side note, if there were studies out there that could indicated that this work really could potentially catch people who posed threats, I'd be the first to get on a Northwest plane. I don't, after all, have a problem with people passing my body through various screening methods, and I don't have a problem with people looking at the contents of my luggage.
the price drop should tell u something. if they thought it was worth $600 more before why do they suddenly change their minds? Did they find a huge flaw in it that no one else has realized yet and they want to get rid of as many of them as possible?
It doesn't necessarily tell us anything more than the price drops that accompany almost any technology out there.
I've often thought a cool business plan would be to set up a "LAN Party" hall, with monitors and speakers, all the kiddies have to bring are their CPUs, keyboards and meece.
Dude, there are *plenty* of cyber-cafe-style places that cater more to the gaming crowd then the email/web crowd, and they don't require the players to drag CPUs/keyboards/mice, or even software licenses.
It's trying your damndest to get that Windows 98 computer to see your frined's 2000 computer and finding that network cable that you thought you left under your bed for emergencies when the guy with XP is complaining that he needs your DSL connection to get drivers for his new video
Yes, this aspect of LAN parties sucks. But of course any discussion about LAN parties on machines running Linux would be pretty boring, given as there are precious few games running on Linux and those that do are outdated for the most part.
Somewhere on Wheaton's website he referes to an "accident" at Waffle House which he referred to as the "pigs-in-a-blanket-fiasco".
But I couldn't find out what this was...can anyone enlighten as to 1) what this guy did at Waffle House, and 2) What was the supposed fiasco ?
Just *why* would anyone want to spend time reading Taco's diary ? I imagine it would read something like this....I always thought the stories in Forum were phony. Then last night, at an anime festival, 2 buxom Japanese girls with the widest blue eyes you've ever seen, sat next to me...
I have a sneaking suspicion that he HAS at least two computers, one running Windows, just like at least one of the other members of the /. editorial staff who claims to never run Windows but then makes references to Windows games. I conjecture they are claiming they don't run Windows because it makes for better Linux-PR to put on a happy face that says "I don't (really) run Windows".
I'm just not sure whether 5 million a month is a lot ... it doesn't seem like it would be a lot for a company the size of Sony. And if the Star Wars game gets popular, you have to expect that a lot of it will come at the expense of cannibalizing the Everquest ranks. MMORPGs, like MUDs, after all, require a very particular type of person to pay to play.
it's all the way up there with Wolf Blitzer and Rocco Siegfredi
Not sure if I may be about to reveal my ignorance, or something more embarassnig, but are you referring to Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi ?
Well, reading the article about Arneson it sounds like *he* was the one who invented *everything*. To my eyes, it was just a lot of "me, me, me". I would have been much more interested to hear about the interactions between Gygax and Arneson and how the game evolved from those interactions and the probably uncountable numerous game-playing sessions, because surely D&D was NOT D&D without Gygax's work. As it is, it sounds like he created the game and then showed the rules to Gygax who "liked it".
The Deities and Demigos manual was one of the coolest books they put out, for sheer enjoyment's sake. I remember being a kid and browsing that book and the Monster Manual OVER AND OVER again, even though I had read every entry probably hundreds of time. It was also great because it probably had the largest number of Jeff Dee illustrations, who was by far my favorite D & D illustrator. I sthink I might have even had a crush on some of the goddesses he drew in that book...
Huh? Because Apple customers like Apple products they should be excluded of a customer satisfaction survey?
The original point is well-taken, in that Mac users are more often than not die-hard Apple users and as such are more likely to view Apple favorably, independent of the service they receive. Such users have also likely made an active choice to buy Apple because of the company and not (say) because of the software available.
In contrast, PC users aren't usually Dell- or HP- or IBM-zealots - such users usually view PCs as clones which are interchangeable,and a far smaller percentage of PC-users are Wintel-zealots as compared to Mac-users being Apple-zealots...so if a PC-user gets lousy service or whatever from Dell, they're probably not jeopardizing their world view by saying so.
The active - and idiosyncratic - decision to buy Apple likely brings with it a cognitive dissonance that Compaq/Dell/IBM users aren't going to face.
I think it is a very similar issue to the zealotry that users of more esoteric operating systems tend to show (think BeOS, Amiga, Linux, OS/2). These users have made an active commitment to something that is not the norm, and it is this active commitment that will force them to psychologically jump through hoops to rationalize nearly every aspect of their OS, even if their OS of choice is imperfect in someway. Contrast this to Windows users, who rarely view themselves as having chosen Windows in any substantial way.
There are tons of social psychology experiments that demonstrate the cognitive dissonance effect. When zealotry comes into play, objectivity has to suffer.
The IOView, with a Hitachi Elite 751 19 inch monitor and a Matrox G-450 video card at 1600 x 1200 and 75 Hz, actually gives slightly better quality.
OK, I know you qualified this as an 'odd' result, but can someone explain how this could possibly be true ? If you're plugging the computer into the switchbox, the signal the SWITCHBOX is getting is the same signal the monitor would be getting if you didn't use the switchbox. But you're running more cable between the switchbox and the monitor and you have a device in between, to boot.
So how is the switchbox able to increase the video quality without introducing its own noise ?
When I first heard about Neverwinter Nights, I thought "Great, I can go and code all those modules I had when I was a kid"...then I started flashbacking to all my favorite modules' codes...D3, S2, Q1, etc.
But I realized it probably wouldn't work very well. The best modules always had a problem-solving aspect to it that just would never translate well to a the game frameworks that we have now. Neverwinter Nights is just not going to allow you the flexibility to really solve puzzles without cueing you so obviously as to what the solution might be.
The only game framework I could imagine that could really capture the essence of the best modules and campaigns is an Infocom-style framework - where the textual descriptions are so rich and your range of actions so potentially large that the solutions to the problems - and even the problems themselves - aren't painfully obvious. A puzzle isn't very satisfying when you only have to select one of 3 solutions from a menu, or when you just have to show up with an item and walk close to some target character, etc.
But sadly, this framework is almost completely incompatible - almost by definition - with Baldur's Gate-style graphics.
CowboyNeal can repel all known lifeforms just by playing his massive collection of boy band MP3s.
.
And of course, since file-sharing doesn't mean piracy, CowboyNeal owns the CDs, doesn't he..
Just imagine the hullabaloo to be had here when the Feds require all TVs to ship with WinCE and/or MSN ...
Q: Who says Linux is dead on the desktop? ;-)"
A: Everyone who isn't a Linux chauvinist, OR who doesn't believe that before Linux can be dead on the desktop, it has to first be "alive" on the desktop first. I don't think that Linux even registers as being on the desktop in the orthodox sense.
N.B. I believe this even though I am writing this from Linux.
The more that I read about file sharing, the more that I realize that most "freedom of information" types on the Internet are not concerned about distributing information. They're notconcerned about preserving information for future use. They're only concerned about getting copyrighted material for free. Copyright owners be damned, I want my free
music/movies/ROMs/software.
Thank goodness, a reasoned voice in the cacophony of hypocrisy. I often wonder what kind of reception would be had if someone setup a P2P service with all sorts of GPL'ed software, with all the GPL licenses/comments/etc. stripped, out allowing users to escape encumbrances which really aren't different in spirit than the encumbrances attached to the properties most commonly traded on these networks.
Think there'd be hell raised ?
Oh wait. Isn't that what Blockbuster does?
Yes, companies DO rent videos out, but as I understand they also pay FAR more for their copies that you do if you buy the video new.
And as for the presumed legitimacy of these sorts of enterprises, I once belonged to a software "club" in Toronto which, for the price of a membership and a small rental fee, let users borrow software for "trial and evaluation" purposes only. This was in the days of floppy disks, and I bet almost EVERYBODY who belonged to that club ran straight home to run Locksmith or whatever was the prevailing copy program at the time. If anyone really believes that software libraries aren't going to facilitate pirating they're crazy.
just wanted to grab some headlines, i guess..
It does seem like that, doesn't it. I mean, you HAVE to believe someone as savvy as Perens would have thought to bounce this off HP legal first, before making a big, splashy statement ?
If you can do is with bsd you can do it with linux as well.. (well.. for this particular case that is).
Theoretically you are correct. I think a much more interesting question is, "If you can do it with BSD why hasn't it been done with Linux".
To me, OSX may just be evidence that "Linux on Joe Average's desktop is impossible".
I'll never buy this particular book, because the second edition of the book was the first - of an increasingly larger number - of O'Reilly books that really weren't up to the O'Reilly snuff-of-old.
I miss the old days where I would buy O'Reilly books - no matter the topic - almost without cracking open the cover because I knew I could count on an authoritative, well-written-and-edited book that almost certainly was one of the best books on its topic. Now, it seems like O'Reilly is milking their goodwill and pumping out bushels of substandard quality books. I know, because I've bought a bunch of them.
Now, there doubtless were substantial revisions and additions to bring this particular book up to the 4th edition, but I just can't bring myself to buy an updated copy of what was at the time perhaps the worst O'Reilly book that WASN'T "CGI Programming on the World Wide Web" by Shishir Gundavaram.
Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me
I seriously doubt that we are ever going to have a completely "economic" explanation of open-source. I can't see an integrated explanation of the phenomenon without significant reference and fallback to psychological/ego factors.
Of course, many open-source advocates are wont to believe that this proposition is false, because to believe so is a tacit admission that some (but not necessarily all) part of their motivations involves the (some might say shallow) gratifications that comes for leading something, or from having their name "known" and praised, or even, from following someone else - it's an admission that we crave peer-approval/recognition. Now, you can assign economic utilities to this sort of peer-gratification, but that means the economic theory MUST fall back on a psychological theory.
Just look at the case of Slashdot, which is discussed at some length in the paper. There's NO way to explain why people contribute lengthy posts from a purely "economic" viewpoint and without reference to very subjective terms. You can't get a job or contracts because of your insightful Slashdot posts. You can't make business contacts through Slashdot posts.
What would happen if Slashdot were anonymized, or if changes were made so that people couldn't receive gratification from moderation ?
Imagine that Slashdot started running threads, sorted and nested as they are now, but with NO moderation totals and NO comments ("Funny/redundant/Interesting/etc"). I bet that posting would become much less popular...but I can't see how you could explain that without psychological reference. It is clear that many if not most posters derive significant psychological gratification from getting the "pat-on-the-back" of an up-moderation and "Interesting" tag...But is there an economic explanation ?
Similarly with the notion of karma. I've gone on too long already, but suffice to say I can't see how you can explain how carefullly many users tender to and monitor their karma without capitulating to the notion that they derive significant gratification from peer-approval.
We may seem shallow for it, and hence we might not want to believe it, but I think it's true.
Please, people, READ THE ARTICLE !
The article does NOT claim that "Spam doesn't work". The experimenters sent out LEGITIMATE questions by email to people. Some of these recipients saw (from, presumably, the To: header) only their name as a recipient. Others saw that 4 others had also received the same query. The result was that people who knew that others had been asked the same question were less likely to respond than people who were listed as the sole recipient. The result that people are less likely to act if they know others are also in a position to act is a well known result in social psychology called "diffusion of responsibility".
They did NOT find what was previously implied, i.e. that sending an email to more recipients reduces response rate.
THEY DID NOT FIND THAT "Spam doesn't work".