I'm curious to know what his criteria for "good" are. The professional societies that declare the citation formats have wrestled with the same issues for much longer than he has. Either they've hit on a solution he's not buying, or whatever quality he's trying to capture in his citations isn't important enough for the pros to bother with.
Pick one and go, I say. At least he can show a good faith effort that way.
I like the bill paying metaphor, by the way. I think I'll use that, depending on how this incident shakes out...
I've only used MLA and APA formats myself, but when citing a web source, the citation format explicitly provides for a retrieved-on date. It's a concession to the fluid nature of the web. I expect any other contemporary citation format worth its salt will do the same.
Some web sources are primary, by the way. There's no paper copy of my own web works, so if anyone thought I'd written something worth citing, they'd have to use a URL to cite it.
I envision a world of Sims, where every thought that flits across people's minds is picked up by a meshcap, translated into a simple icon, and broadcast for all to augmentedly see. A world where people wander around, looking rapturously at nothing at all, twisting their hands around visions in the air, reacting in the real world to events that are only accessible through a shared hallucination.
A world of meandering, pseudo-telepathic lunatics.
And me, laughing with riches, picking all their pockets.
Anderson responded, "All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources... "
Zotero, brother: a plugin for Firefox. Makes citing online sources a breeze in any format you care to mention.
There were a few games that required C128 mode -- A Mind Forever Voyaging comes to mind -- and as a C64 owner, I greatly envied the C128 crowd when those came out. But aside from that and CNET-128, which was a BBS that capitalized on the greater memory, there just wasn't *enough* difference between the C64 and C128 for developers to really latch onto.
The Amiga was a massive new beast, and it captured a lot of Commodore-lovers hearts.
Nokia (or whoever) may be in an excusable position, because with any network equipment you have the intrinsic need to monitor, shape, and restrict certain traffic. Anybody with manual or a HOWTO file can learn how to do that. It's the definition of a network admin.
However, IBM was in a different position in the 30's and 40's, and its behavior should be remembered for what it was.
IBM didn't just sell the tabulating machines for the Nazis to work their Nefarious Evil on. In those days, you didn't buy them -- you *leased* them. And when you leased them, you were really leasing services by IBM specialists who came over to the boxes and configured them for what you wanted to do. Nobody else could touch the machines other than to load them with materials and hit the GO button.
Which means, at some point, someone from IBM was asked to configure the machines to tabulate census data based on racial and ethnic lines. Further, they were tasked with configuring IBM's leased machines to innovatively streamline mechanisms to separate out those populations, deliver them efficiently to collection hubs, and monitor the populations of those hubs -- which went precipitously downward because we're talking about Dachau.
This is more than a case of OMG WE JUST SOLD THE BOXES WE DIDN'T KNOW HOW COULD WE. IBM knew exactly what was going on with its machines in Germany.
The Nazis had the Big Idea, sure. They hit the GO button. But IBM was involved up to its economic, administrative, and technical eyeballs with engineering the GO button to do exactly what their client wanted it to do.
Similarly, the Nokia folks will have some 'splainin' to do if it turns out they've been sending network specialists to Iran with the specific goal of helping maintain a repressive infrastructure. "I was only following orders" just doesn't wash if you know what the orders are calling for you to do.
As far as the Hayes Code era and great movie production, I think that's more a case of 'in spite of," not "because of."
Though I agree with you to some extent: boobies and bullets offer an easy way to simulate Great Art without having to think too hard about it. The same way free prose tends to spoodge all over the page in the name of free expression while the more structured iambic pentameter actually takes advantage of the form to overcome the restrictions and crystallize into something profound.
On the other hand, not every creative work needs to aspire to fulfill some kind of self-absorbed High Culture milieu. Sometimes it's nice to play with boobies and bullets.
Adventure games have broken fresh ground with intriguing and sophisticated new ways of storytelling, both in genre and mechanics. I've never seen an FPS or RTS with the kind of eye-popping cultural creativity of, say, Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey. Those games had excellent writing.
The Bladerunner game used recombinations of footage to create new instances of basically the same mystery: "Who's the replicant this time." It helped add replay value to what would otherwise be a straightforward game.
If you're looking for a remake of Star Control, look no further than Ur-Quan Masters. I did a review of the new version a few months ago: see the link on my sig.
I've blogged mostly about gaming -- tabletop D&D a few years back, and old-but-awesome PC games this year. It's a lot of hard work to do it, and I only put out a new show once a month. If that.
If I were depending on the blog for money, I'd he hanging by my necktie off the balcony rails of my cheap-ass apartment right now. I probably have, like, twelve people in the world I can count as an audience. I don't have any swag to sell and I'm not on the speaking tour circuit.
I keep coming back to it because I love what I'm blogging about. Those twelve people give me the little doses of feedback that my ego craves, too, so I feel lots of loyalty to doing them right. (Wanna be lucky #13? Follow the link in my sig.)
That being said, I was floored when I got an affiliate's notice that I had earned $3.50 last month on sales from click-throughs. It's honestly more than I ever expected.
The two can work very well hand in hand in an instructional sense.
I like video for the fast "Here's where the thing is you're looking for" overview: an understanding of what the process looks like and how the bits are related in a show-don't-tell mode. From a well-produced vid, that's usually enough for me to get start.
Flush with that success of making *something* work right, the details of instruction become a lot more approachable to me.
Text is more for reference later, once I understand the broad sweep of what I need to do. Niggling details, explanations of all options involved, etc all fit very well into the specificity and searchability of text.
I recently purchased "Using Drupal" when it became apparent to me that my company's intranet needed to be reworked from the ground up.
The book is fine for what it is, but once I got past the hyp & theory and proceeded into the step-by-step, I began to realize how horribly limiting linear text is for this kind of instruction. When many steps are involved, and there is a lot of explanation involved as to why each step is important, it becomes difficult to keep one's place. The strange loop epistemological dance between "I have to tell you why for you to understand" and "you have to understand for me to tell you why" never really resolves. I think that's true for any "How To" manual.
Finding video tutorials online made a world of difference, especially when it came to figuring out the logic behind constructing views. Sometimes I just wanted to *see* how to do a thing. I knew enough to know I'd get it when I saw it happen.
Static text and explanations can't always bridge the gap. Books tell, videos show, and that's a key point to having a breakthrough.
Santa Feans -- at least the imported ones -- are flipping crazy, and will pay top dollar prices for anything that looks broken, old, and rusted out. (It's can't actually *be* broken, old, and rusted out. It just has to *look* it.)
This drives up the taxes for properties which actually *are* broken, old, and rusted out. That's where people who were actually born in Santa Fe tend to live, and that's how they get shuffled out of town. Nobody who was born there can afford to live there any more.
The New Mexico state capital has more Californians, Texans, and East Coast turquoise fetishists living there than actual New Mexicans. The community's "character" is valued far more than the community is. It's sad.
Dwarf Fortress reads like super amazing fun. I just have no idea where to start or how to interpret what I'm looking at. Which is weird, because I played Nethack until the cows came home.
The XBox and PS *can* be marketed toward casual gamers... but the Wii already has a lot of them already. I suspect that if a family were interested in spending their time together casually gaming, they'd have a Wii by now. Nintendo did a great job marketing the Wii that way.
XBox and PS have a lot of work to do if they want to supplement their SUPER-AWESOME-XTREME image and attract the casual gamer. I have yet to see them try. Then again, I'm a Slashdot hermit, so I'm not really in a position to know.
The fact that I'm not interested in next-gen gaming but that I do really enjoy the Wii, despite my hermitage, is a sign in favor of Nintendo's approach, though.
It helps too that every Wii game *has* to take that motion controller into account somehow. I suspect it inspires more ideas than not.
Other consoles are tacking motion controllers on way too far down the road. I doubt many developers will take advantage of it, meaning there won't be much reason to pick one up, meaning it'll become a paperweight.
For motion control games, you go the Wii. Nintendo broke that ground wide open from the start.
The next versions of the XBox and PS will have to have motion control from the start in order to gain any traction on that ground. They might be better off innovating a new control system themselves and building it in on Day 1.
Good Old Games does brisk business in the "older but funner" game market. They're selling very, very well indeed.
They sell games that have endured because of awesome gameplay and a dedicated audience. Iron-melting graphics and questionably "next-gen experiences" are never a concern. And because the games are older, they're also cheaper.
It's a plus that the older games run fantastically well on contemporary hardware -- the best of both worlds for folks who like to stay on the cutting edge as well.
It's tempting to use numbers to compare systems like that, but it's also completely misleading. Doom3 and UT2004 played on general purpose computers that were not optimized for gaming, no matter what the specs are. Those games needed a lot of brute force computing to overcome the limitations of the generalist PC design.
The Wii is built for gaming and practically nothing else. It's more efficient at doing game stuff, so it doesn't require the same kind of oomph as a PC.
Single Tweeter: AbrahamLincon
on
One-Tweet Wonders
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I created the AbrahamLincon user in response to a back-and-forth discussion on political rhetoric a friend and I were engaged in. (Yeah, in my haste I dropped the 'l' in the last name. Oops.) He was using the Lincoln/Douglas debates as an example of the high quality of political debate that our country once valued, and from which we had fallen into sound bites. He asked what possible message of political worth could be tweeted in 140 chars.
As an experiment, I created AbrahamLincon, reviewed the text of the Gettysburg address, and distilled it to 140 characters. I won't say it succeeded or failed, but it was a fun experiment in high-density verbiage.
I might do the same with other speeches. Or it might stay a one-tweet wonder. It was fun, though, and I hope Mr. Lincoln wouldn't mind.
Re:One Reason for the Hate: Marketing Bozos
on
One-Tweet Wonders
·
· Score: 1
Can we confine the hatred toward the marketing trendoids, then?
I mean, credit where it's due, they're worthy of *lots* of scorn. But that's no reason to take out the genuinely interesting and useful things they congregate around.
Slashdot Mirror
Can I man the tranquilizer rifle we use to stun them in the wild? Or the pincers that hook the ID tags into their ears?
Why are you looking at me like that?
I'm curious to know what his criteria for "good" are. The professional societies that declare the citation formats have wrestled with the same issues for much longer than he has. Either they've hit on a solution he's not buying, or whatever quality he's trying to capture in his citations isn't important enough for the pros to bother with.
Pick one and go, I say. At least he can show a good faith effort that way.
I like the bill paying metaphor, by the way. I think I'll use that, depending on how this incident shakes out...
I've only used MLA and APA formats myself, but when citing a web source, the citation format explicitly provides for a retrieved-on date. It's a concession to the fluid nature of the web. I expect any other contemporary citation format worth its salt will do the same.
Some web sources are primary, by the way. There's no paper copy of my own web works, so if anyone thought I'd written something worth citing, they'd have to use a URL to cite it.
I envision a world of Sims, where every thought that flits across people's minds is picked up by a meshcap, translated into a simple icon, and broadcast for all to augmentedly see. A world where people wander around, looking rapturously at nothing at all, twisting their hands around visions in the air, reacting in the real world to events that are only accessible through a shared hallucination.
A world of meandering, pseudo-telepathic lunatics.
And me, laughing with riches, picking all their pockets.
Anderson responded, "All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources... "
Zotero, brother: a plugin for Firefox. Makes citing online sources a breeze in any format you care to mention.
There were a few games that required C128 mode -- A Mind Forever Voyaging comes to mind -- and as a C64 owner, I greatly envied the C128 crowd when those came out. But aside from that and CNET-128, which was a BBS that capitalized on the greater memory, there just wasn't *enough* difference between the C64 and C128 for developers to really latch onto.
The Amiga was a massive new beast, and it captured a lot of Commodore-lovers hearts.
Nokia (or whoever) may be in an excusable position, because with any network equipment you have the intrinsic need to monitor, shape, and restrict certain traffic. Anybody with manual or a HOWTO file can learn how to do that. It's the definition of a network admin.
However, IBM was in a different position in the 30's and 40's, and its behavior should be remembered for what it was.
IBM didn't just sell the tabulating machines for the Nazis to work their Nefarious Evil on. In those days, you didn't buy them -- you *leased* them. And when you leased them, you were really leasing services by IBM specialists who came over to the boxes and configured them for what you wanted to do. Nobody else could touch the machines other than to load them with materials and hit the GO button.
Which means, at some point, someone from IBM was asked to configure the machines to tabulate census data based on racial and ethnic lines. Further, they were tasked with configuring IBM's leased machines to innovatively streamline mechanisms to separate out those populations, deliver them efficiently to collection hubs, and monitor the populations of those hubs -- which went precipitously downward because we're talking about Dachau.
This is more than a case of OMG WE JUST SOLD THE BOXES WE DIDN'T KNOW HOW COULD WE. IBM knew exactly what was going on with its machines in Germany.
The Nazis had the Big Idea, sure. They hit the GO button. But IBM was involved up to its economic, administrative, and technical eyeballs with engineering the GO button to do exactly what their client wanted it to do.
Similarly, the Nokia folks will have some 'splainin' to do if it turns out they've been sending network specialists to Iran with the specific goal of helping maintain a repressive infrastructure. "I was only following orders" just doesn't wash if you know what the orders are calling for you to do.
As far as the Hayes Code era and great movie production, I think that's more a case of 'in spite of," not "because of."
Though I agree with you to some extent: boobies and bullets offer an easy way to simulate Great Art without having to think too hard about it. The same way free prose tends to spoodge all over the page in the name of free expression while the more structured iambic pentameter actually takes advantage of the form to overcome the restrictions and crystallize into something profound.
On the other hand, not every creative work needs to aspire to fulfill some kind of self-absorbed High Culture milieu. Sometimes it's nice to play with boobies and bullets.
Adventure games have broken fresh ground with intriguing and sophisticated new ways of storytelling, both in genre and mechanics. I've never seen an FPS or RTS with the kind of eye-popping cultural creativity of, say, Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey. Those games had excellent writing.
The Bladerunner game used recombinations of footage to create new instances of basically the same mystery: "Who's the replicant this time." It helped add replay value to what would otherwise be a straightforward game.
If you're looking for a remake of Star Control, look no further than Ur-Quan Masters. I did a review of the new version a few months ago: see the link on my sig.
Absolutely seconded.
I've blogged mostly about gaming -- tabletop D&D a few years back, and old-but-awesome PC games this year. It's a lot of hard work to do it, and I only put out a new show once a month. If that.
If I were depending on the blog for money, I'd he hanging by my necktie off the balcony rails of my cheap-ass apartment right now. I probably have, like, twelve people in the world I can count as an audience. I don't have any swag to sell and I'm not on the speaking tour circuit.
I keep coming back to it because I love what I'm blogging about. Those twelve people give me the little doses of feedback that my ego craves, too, so I feel lots of loyalty to doing them right. (Wanna be lucky #13? Follow the link in my sig.)
That being said, I was floored when I got an affiliate's notice that I had earned $3.50 last month on sales from click-throughs. It's honestly more than I ever expected.
The two can work very well hand in hand in an instructional sense.
I like video for the fast "Here's where the thing is you're looking for" overview: an understanding of what the process looks like and how the bits are related in a show-don't-tell mode. From a well-produced vid, that's usually enough for me to get start.
Flush with that success of making *something* work right, the details of instruction become a lot more approachable to me.
Text is more for reference later, once I understand the broad sweep of what I need to do. Niggling details, explanations of all options involved, etc all fit very well into the specificity and searchability of text.
You can have ours. Please.
Green Orion slave women. Got it in one.
+1 username FTW.
I recently purchased "Using Drupal" when it became apparent to me that my company's intranet needed to be reworked from the ground up.
The book is fine for what it is, but once I got past the hyp & theory and proceeded into the step-by-step, I began to realize how horribly limiting linear text is for this kind of instruction. When many steps are involved, and there is a lot of explanation involved as to why each step is important, it becomes difficult to keep one's place. The strange loop epistemological dance between "I have to tell you why for you to understand" and "you have to understand for me to tell you why" never really resolves. I think that's true for any "How To" manual.
Finding video tutorials online made a world of difference, especially when it came to figuring out the logic behind constructing views. Sometimes I just wanted to *see* how to do a thing. I knew enough to know I'd get it when I saw it happen.
Static text and explanations can't always bridge the gap. Books tell, videos show, and that's a key point to having a breakthrough.
"Santa Feans have unique tastes"
Santa Feans -- at least the imported ones -- are flipping crazy, and will pay top dollar prices for anything that looks broken, old, and rusted out. (It's can't actually *be* broken, old, and rusted out. It just has to *look* it.)
This drives up the taxes for properties which actually *are* broken, old, and rusted out. That's where people who were actually born in Santa Fe tend to live, and that's how they get shuffled out of town. Nobody who was born there can afford to live there any more.
The New Mexico state capital has more Californians, Texans, and East Coast turquoise fetishists living there than actual New Mexicans. The community's "character" is valued far more than the community is. It's sad.
If only I could figure out how to play it...
Dwarf Fortress reads like super amazing fun. I just have no idea where to start or how to interpret what I'm looking at. Which is weird, because I played Nethack until the cows came home.
There should be, however, a +1 Stop Being Such an Asshole.
Seriously, man. Dial back on the defensive hostility. Put those claws away.
The XBox and PS *can* be marketed toward casual gamers ... but the Wii already has a lot of them already. I suspect that if a family were interested in spending their time together casually gaming, they'd have a Wii by now. Nintendo did a great job marketing the Wii that way.
XBox and PS have a lot of work to do if they want to supplement their SUPER-AWESOME-XTREME image and attract the casual gamer. I have yet to see them try. Then again, I'm a Slashdot hermit, so I'm not really in a position to know.
The fact that I'm not interested in next-gen gaming but that I do really enjoy the Wii, despite my hermitage, is a sign in favor of Nintendo's approach, though.
It helps too that every Wii game *has* to take that motion controller into account somehow. I suspect it inspires more ideas than not.
Other consoles are tacking motion controllers on way too far down the road. I doubt many developers will take advantage of it, meaning there won't be much reason to pick one up, meaning it'll become a paperweight.
For motion control games, you go the Wii. Nintendo broke that ground wide open from the start.
The next versions of the XBox and PS will have to have motion control from the start in order to gain any traction on that ground. They might be better off innovating a new control system themselves and building it in on Day 1.
Good Old Games does brisk business in the "older but funner" game market. They're selling very, very well indeed.
They sell games that have endured because of awesome gameplay and a dedicated audience. Iron-melting graphics and questionably "next-gen experiences" are never a concern. And because the games are older, they're also cheaper.
It's a plus that the older games run fantastically well on contemporary hardware -- the best of both worlds for folks who like to stay on the cutting edge as well.
Disclaimer: I'm an affiliate.
It's tempting to use numbers to compare systems like that, but it's also completely misleading. Doom3 and UT2004 played on general purpose computers that were not optimized for gaming, no matter what the specs are. Those games needed a lot of brute force computing to overcome the limitations of the generalist PC design.
The Wii is built for gaming and practically nothing else. It's more efficient at doing game stuff, so it doesn't require the same kind of oomph as a PC.
I created the AbrahamLincon user in response to a back-and-forth discussion on political rhetoric a friend and I were engaged in. (Yeah, in my haste I dropped the 'l' in the last name. Oops.) He was using the Lincoln/Douglas debates as an example of the high quality of political debate that our country once valued, and from which we had fallen into sound bites. He asked what possible message of political worth could be tweeted in 140 chars.
As an experiment, I created AbrahamLincon, reviewed the text of the Gettysburg address, and distilled it to 140 characters. I won't say it succeeded or failed, but it was a fun experiment in high-density verbiage.
I might do the same with other speeches. Or it might stay a one-tweet wonder. It was fun, though, and I hope Mr. Lincoln wouldn't mind.
Can we confine the hatred toward the marketing trendoids, then?
I mean, credit where it's due, they're worthy of *lots* of scorn. But that's no reason to take out the genuinely interesting and useful things they congregate around.
Surgical strikes. That's what's needed.
Why not just write about it in the margin, like that other smart math guy?