I don't know how serious you are since you consider yourself to be ranting...
However "responsibility" is a huge problem in the current day and age. Lack of Responsibility. If it is a good outcome then it is because of the President/CEO/leader's abilities, if it is a failure then no one is to blame (eg. any company), if it is a failing then someone/thing else is to blame (eg. drugs), and even if the supposed facts point directly to one or more persons they still have a stable of scapegoats (eg. GWB). It is amazing to me how wrt 9/11 all the government officials can decry proof and their own mistakes and expect the world to carry on as if nothing had happened - and the American people oblige!
From what I know it is the government's fault (and possibly some other organizations) for making drugs into a hobgoblin instead of controlling them as they do (or don't) alcohol. The most recent info I have was a PBS (Frontline?) special on Ecstacy where Reagan's (single) scientist who "proved" and reported on all the bad side effects later turned out to be purely lying. That was so Federal Drug Enforcement officers could start attacking the drugs users since it was so new that it wasn't on any of their illegal lists. And that was the basis of Reagan's "Tough on Drugs" policy which has never been overturned.
Who is responsible for that? The now-dead president who could get his name on a new US currency? Even if it is (not *was* - he is still, currently responsible!) him at the highest level, even if everyone else followed his lead to prosecute citizens, I still don't see any mechanisms in place - government, military, society, capitalist, anywhere, at any level - which do what should be done:
1. proportionately reprimand those in charge - no slap on the wrist for starting an open military conflict 2. proportionately compensate those unjustly persecuted - time, money, public apology... 3. proportionately change most people's attitudes about those responsible - put out the correcting propaganda instead of obliviously letting Reagan remain "that charismatic old codger" 4. takes actions to help prevent similar mistakes from happening again in the future in the same or other areas.
It truly is a mad, mad, mad, mad world. If you find an alternate universe I can join, I'd be happy to hear about it.
You're wrong - that really cute engineer Kaylee is not married! But there are blooming possibilities with Simon:)
As for the actress... And if you don't think there's a difference, take a gander at the DVD boxed set and watch the extras/listen to the extra commentary.
I have an older 3Ware 6410 controller which was the most I needed at the time - even got their utilitarian bay adapter (3x 3.5's in 2x5.25 bays) with hot-swap. I'm happy it still works with 250GiB drives - when I started with 60GiBs. I got the card partly because several sites had very positive reviews both of reliability and of performance - I do RAID 1 both because tests showed it performed better than all the others at the time and because I wanted the ability to remove a drive at anytime and use it elsewhere.
HOWEVER the second part hasn't worked out. I recently upgraded to Fedore Core ? CR 3 and it installed with no fuss. When I went to upgrade the HDs (160->250) though things didn't go so well - for some reason I trusted things and didn't make a complete backup before the op. I'd already scavenged 2 of the 160s for other uses and I can't retreive data off the remaining one!
3ware hasn't yet responded to my e-mail support requests, and I haven't gotten a good Google to give me useful results. The only response from usenet was try Knoppix (which I hadn't considered or ever used before), which I'll try this weekend. I'm a little hopeful.
While the controller states that you can use differently sized drives in the same array, you only get the RAID 1 or 5 size of the smallest drive in the array. There seems to be no way to upgrade this but I haven't tried a gradual progression (160+250 -> 250+250) to see if at the end all drives are upgraded (or can be repartitioned) to use the difference.
ANYWAYS, I also wanted to say that I keep a hot spare around (3rd bay), but someone else mentioned doing an rsync to an extra drive for periodic snapshots - and I'm highly considering it. Still haven't really figured out what is "best", so I'll keep looking.
Maybe using the software RAID would have prevented the above problems, maybe not.
I loved the pair they had at the Blue Man Group show (played after the openers and before BMG started their show when I saw them 1 year ago). After a minute of them scrolling related signs, they started quipping and soon it was an open revolt - the left sign was the upstart, the right was the 'tool of the man' (according to the left). They each also asked the crowd to shout about the other sign (and had the obligitory "I can't hear you!" comments:), but it got going too fast to read everything - what with the short-ish signs, fast text, and simultaneous "talking".
Fun stuff:)
Hmm, it might sound like a tame version of a 2-person chat room, but it was much funnier!
Okay, I haven't done a ton of research on this (hard to know what to google for), but while I was upgrading a TiVO's HD the forums I saw said no one had deciphered TiVO's recording scheme/file formats which meant direct file manipulations weren't possible.
Of course too many of those forums have most-recent messages a year or older... But maybe I wasn't hitting the popular sites. Also at least one forum specifically listed that you can't talk about archiving files or you'll be booted, so they must have thought TiVO would get peeved.
And yeah, it's so hard now to believe I've spent X weeks of my life just watching commercials, though I still like seeing some of them now and again (but not every 10 minutes!).
I'm using Eclipse 2.1.3 for Java programming, and while I think all Eclipse/WSAD let you place a breakpoint on an exception type caught or uncaught - which are the obvious things shown in the logs (eg. a NullPointerException, ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, etc.), you also have the interpreter available from way back in VAJ so you can run an arbitrary expression to determine values in objects, arrays, etc. (add the Display View) And you need it for interpretting things like the blasted GregorianCalendar!
Documentation is time consuming and not very rewarding for coders. As with UI designers, we need a large group of people who get kicks out of writing documentation and there are just too few of those special people. We need more of these people too. Trusting these tasks to the coders isn't enough.
I'm one of those "special people" - at work I enjoy touching up Wiki's so their step-by-step directions are correct and complete, and I like being able to share How-To knowledge with others. Of course I also like making test cases and generally making things easier for users and developers:)
I haven't tried getting involved in OSS projects yet partially because nothing has caught my eye out of the millions of not-quite-the-same projects. Partly because the tools I've tried to use I've had to fight to get working even though they have tons of existing documentation (eg. SAMBA) or gave up because of intricate dependencies (I do not aspire to be a C library manager, dammit!).
And partly because I want to get my own projects working too:)
It is also preserved in the Doctor Demento 20th(?) anniversary collection:) The second half isn't in that particular collection though.
The Dead Alewives were very funny, but I can believe their page is defunct - after half the guys went to Hollywood to work on the Scud movie it sounded like the DA didn't have the same power anymore. Scud's site (http://www.scud.com/) seems to still be going.
Are you looking for 1st person, strategy, or a real RPG or Adventure game? MUD-ish, text or graphics? Team-based, individual adventures, quest-laden, craft-embellished, player-built worlds, player-ruled worlds? Setting matter to you?
Which boards are your favorites?
I have similar feelings - no one has really approached MMO's in a way that *really* interests me, though I have tried the treadmills for a while. I like so many parts, but no wholes.
I've wondered if making a more detailed naming/game-description classification system would help clarify which games I want to play vs. what is available - MMO and not - and if there's a way to use that list along with survey participants to influence game companies wrt making a game people actually want. Of course that could make Marketing Departments obsolete... Hey, that sounds even better!
The . config files were actually a huge reason for me liking emacs - manually editing those files got me where I needed to be, short cuts, color coding, fonts, etc, just how it worked best for me. Well, starting with some help of course. I never ended up doing much with LISP within Emacs, except for actually programming LISP.
I also understand being under duress. If I absolutely had to use vi nowadays - say emacs doesn't exist or on a tiny-sized environment - I'd buckle down and do it. But right now that sounds a hella lot more painful than setting up SAMBA, and that is a chore to learn too:)
And if what you're saying is true, then everyone would have already flocked to emacs since users can always do a search on command name to find and execute it. Simple 2-step flat interface, no?
Personally I haven't done vi because of it's reliance on symbols and arcane single-letter commands. Which really means because I never had a decent learning environment for it and I've accidentally deleted lines and files when I *did* try using it, that I may never bother trying again.
Emacs always met my expectations that when I typed keys on the keyboard, that they always produced their text on the screen. If I needed a command I used the Alt/Ctrl/whatever keys and maybe typed regular characters on (which also appear on screen in the bar at the bottom). Emacs has always been more consistent in my expectations, even when learning. Ctrl-Z still gets me, though.
Summary: A single bad user experience at the start of learning an app scars them for life - unless there is necessity or another imperitive for learning it. Like your computer's installed OS doesn't have another editor and the only common knowledge you know is that "Word does everything you need"...
Ugh. The grandparents views are more in line with my own, that some planned exposure of functions to the user could facilitate a better learning curve (ie. don't have 15 menus with 20 options and strings of sub-sub-sub-sub-menus). However the parent is correct that when a user is trying to do something they really want to do that thing. So in the middle of this elaborately planned training environment which slowly exposed the user to particular functionality, they decide they need to add a footnote or a title page. Now what? Is Clippy's innane questioning actually useful here, or do those options appear in their normal places in, say, a menu structure but have a font denoting that the user hasn't been exposed to them yet?
More importantly, do the menu options appear in a menu which makes sense to the user and does the phrase and/or symbol the program presents for the action make sense? Are there indications anywhere for what else needs to happen to be able to use the option? Eg. you need to highlight a word to manipulate it's font, or what to do to change the document's default font?
And I write "say, in a menu" because nothing has convinced me that the hierarchical menus at the top (or side or bottom) of the window (or screen) are the best. The pop-up radial menus appeal to me, but I've only seen them in games so far, and not always to positive effect because of the purely symbol options. Perhaps there's another concept which could work even better. I'm hoping to see it soon, even if it is an OS I don't currently use like Mac.
Many options, many people, many solutions. Can we each have our own solution?
I'm having trouble finding them, but a couple previous Slashdot stories addressed some of these things:
1) All coherent thoughts are mouthed, even imperceptibly. If you "hear" the thought as words, then you've mouthed it. Of course I may not be finding that because that's what I've boiled it down to and remembered. I'm not recalling any specific sentences from that article or people's comments.
2) The brain thinks after the body acts. The gist of the article was that the people saw it as the brain justifying the body's actions. The experiment I remember was after a stimulus the test subject (human) was to press a play button (or something), and after they clicked the button the scientists detected the neurons firing which were understood to *cause/initiate* the action.
I didn't especially believe the first one, though the scientists, poster, and many comments did. If true then the subvocalizer would require skills similar to blocking telepathy (eg. surface-mind-distractions).
The second article seems to indicate that running thought-interference could be a hard problem.
Guess I need more practice with the search engine!
How about the griefers get the same punishment as those they "kill"? Eg. % loss of XP/HP/items/whatever, temporary or permanent?
Then again I've always been on the receiving end, not the giving end of griefers - and it has caused me to give up on some MMOGs. Or find their non-PVP servers.
Slashdot Mirror
I was trying to do my first search of the day and I get:
Server Error
The service you requested is not available at this time.
Service error -27.
I came back to Slashdot to see if anyone had broken the story that searching is down, but instead there's this IPO announcement.
Hmm....
I don't know how serious you are since you consider yourself to be ranting...
However "responsibility" is a huge problem in the current day and age. Lack of Responsibility. If it is a good outcome then it is because of the President/CEO/leader's abilities, if it is a failure then no one is to blame (eg. any company), if it is a failing then someone/thing else is to blame (eg. drugs), and even if the supposed facts point directly to one or more persons they still have a stable of scapegoats (eg. GWB). It is amazing to me how wrt 9/11 all the government officials can decry proof and their own mistakes and expect the world to carry on as if nothing had happened - and the American people oblige!
From what I know it is the government's fault (and possibly some other organizations) for making drugs into a hobgoblin instead of controlling them as they do (or don't) alcohol. The most recent info I have was a PBS (Frontline?) special on Ecstacy where Reagan's (single) scientist who "proved" and reported on all the bad side effects later turned out to be purely lying. That was so Federal Drug Enforcement officers could start attacking the drugs users since it was so new that it wasn't on any of their illegal lists. And that was the basis of Reagan's "Tough on Drugs" policy which has never been overturned.
Who is responsible for that? The now-dead president who could get his name on a new US currency? Even if it is (not *was* - he is still, currently responsible!) him at the highest level, even if everyone else followed his lead to prosecute citizens, I still don't see any mechanisms in place - government, military, society, capitalist, anywhere, at any level - which do what should be done:
1. proportionately reprimand those in charge - no slap on the wrist for starting an open military conflict
2. proportionately compensate those unjustly persecuted - time, money, public apology...
3. proportionately change most people's attitudes about those responsible - put out the correcting propaganda instead of obliviously letting Reagan remain "that charismatic old codger"
4. takes actions to help prevent similar mistakes from happening again in the future in the same or other areas.
It truly is a mad, mad, mad, mad world. If you find an alternate universe I can join, I'd be happy to hear about it.
8-PP
Your link is coming up with a 404. I tried the base DNS (http://www.mosentha.com/) too and it has some wierd cPanel message.
I haven't started SWG but am looking for reasons to - please repost a working link!
8-PP
Must not feed trolls....
I'm just glad they don't want to impress you!
8-PP
You're wrong - that really cute engineer Kaylee is not married! But there are blooming possibilities with Simon :)
As for the actress... And if you don't think there's a difference, take a gander at the DVD boxed set and watch the extras/listen to the extra commentary.
8-PP
I have an older 3Ware 6410 controller which was the most I needed at the time - even got their utilitarian bay adapter (3x 3.5's in 2x5.25 bays) with hot-swap. I'm happy it still works with 250GiB drives - when I started with 60GiBs. I got the card partly because several sites had very positive reviews both of reliability and of performance - I do RAID 1 both because tests showed it performed better than all the others at the time and because I wanted the ability to remove a drive at anytime and use it elsewhere.
HOWEVER the second part hasn't worked out. I recently upgraded to Fedore Core ? CR 3 and it installed with no fuss. When I went to upgrade the HDs (160->250) though things didn't go so well - for some reason I trusted things and didn't make a complete backup before the op. I'd already scavenged 2 of the 160s for other uses and I can't retreive data off the remaining one!
3ware hasn't yet responded to my e-mail support requests, and I haven't gotten a good Google to give me useful results. The only response from usenet was try Knoppix (which I hadn't considered or ever used before), which I'll try this weekend. I'm a little hopeful.
While the controller states that you can use differently sized drives in the same array, you only get the RAID 1 or 5 size of the smallest drive in the array. There seems to be no way to upgrade this but I haven't tried a gradual progression (160+250 -> 250+250) to see if at the end all drives are upgraded (or can be repartitioned) to use the difference.
ANYWAYS, I also wanted to say that I keep a hot spare around (3rd bay), but someone else mentioned doing an rsync to an extra drive for periodic snapshots - and I'm highly considering it. Still haven't really figured out what is "best", so I'll keep looking.
Maybe using the software RAID would have prevented the above problems, maybe not.
8-PP
I thought the idea was that it wouldn't show up in photos - or did you mean it very pretty equipment? :)
Another comment said that the demo was all for show anyways - no existing tech at all. Typical: marketing selling vapor, er, ware...
8-PP
I loved the pair they had at the Blue Man Group show (played after the openers and before BMG started their show when I saw them 1 year ago). After a minute of them scrolling related signs, they started quipping and soon it was an open revolt - the left sign was the upstart, the right was the 'tool of the man' (according to the left). They each also asked the crowd to shout about the other sign (and had the obligitory "I can't hear you!" comments :), but it got going too fast to read everything - what with the short-ish signs, fast text, and simultaneous "talking".
:)
Fun stuff
Hmm, it might sound like a tame version of a 2-person chat room, but it was much funnier!
YMMV,
8-PP
You misspelled "marketed as" twice.
8-PP
Okay, I haven't done a ton of research on this (hard to know what to google for), but while I was upgrading a TiVO's HD the forums I saw said no one had deciphered TiVO's recording scheme/file formats which meant direct file manipulations weren't possible.
Of course too many of those forums have most-recent messages a year or older... But maybe I wasn't hitting the popular sites. Also at least one forum specifically listed that you can't talk about archiving files or you'll be booted, so they must have thought TiVO would get peeved.
And yeah, it's so hard now to believe I've spent X weeks of my life just watching commercials, though I still like seeing some of them now and again (but not every 10 minutes!).
8-PP
That's only about 50,000 Simoleans, right? And with the current exchange rate (through e-Bay), that would be about US$2.43 :)
8-PP
Not that you're an expert (though you give the best sources!), but my question is: does this show up on or otherwise effect a person's credit report?
8-PP
I'm using Eclipse 2.1.3 for Java programming, and while I think all Eclipse/WSAD let you place a breakpoint on an exception type caught or uncaught - which are the obvious things shown in the logs (eg. a NullPointerException, ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, etc.), you also have the interpreter available from way back in VAJ so you can run an arbitrary expression to determine values in objects, arrays, etc. (add the Display View) And you need it for interpretting things like the blasted GregorianCalendar!
8-PP
and quiet operation
If 173 dB is quiet for you, I'd hate to be around when you throw a rock concert! Liquified bones are not my idea of a good time!
And did anyone read that as
the Penn State researchers who died in the development
? I must need a couple more hours sleep...
8-PP
Your left or my left?
8-PP
I'm one of those "special people" - at work I enjoy touching up Wiki's so their step-by-step directions are correct and complete, and I like being able to share How-To knowledge with others. Of course I also like making test cases and generally making things easier for users and developers
I haven't tried getting involved in OSS projects yet partially because nothing has caught my eye out of the millions of not-quite-the-same projects. Partly because the tools I've tried to use I've had to fight to get working even though they have tons of existing documentation (eg. SAMBA) or gave up because of intricate dependencies (I do not aspire to be a C library manager, dammit!).
And partly because I want to get my own projects working too
8-PP
It is also preserved in the Doctor Demento 20th(?) anniversary collection :) The second half isn't in that particular collection though.
The Dead Alewives were very funny, but I can believe their page is defunct - after half the guys went to Hollywood to work on the Scud movie it sounded like the DA didn't have the same power anymore. Scud's site (http://www.scud.com/) seems to still be going.
8-PP
Keep you interested... how?
Are you looking for 1st person, strategy, or a real RPG or Adventure game? MUD-ish, text or graphics? Team-based, individual adventures, quest-laden, craft-embellished, player-built worlds, player-ruled worlds? Setting matter to you?
Which boards are your favorites?
I have similar feelings - no one has really approached MMO's in a way that *really* interests me, though I have tried the treadmills for a while. I like so many parts, but no wholes.
I've wondered if making a more detailed naming/game-description classification system would help clarify which games I want to play vs. what is available - MMO and not - and if there's a way to use that list along with survey participants to influence game companies wrt making a game people actually want. Of course that could make Marketing Departments obsolete... Hey, that sounds even better!
Curious,
8-PP
:)
:)
The . config files were actually a huge reason for me liking emacs - manually editing those files got me where I needed to be, short cuts, color coding, fonts, etc, just how it worked best for me. Well, starting with some help of course. I never ended up doing much with LISP within Emacs, except for actually programming LISP.
I also understand being under duress. If I absolutely had to use vi nowadays - say emacs doesn't exist or on a tiny-sized environment - I'd buckle down and do it. But right now that sounds a hella lot more painful than setting up SAMBA, and that is a chore to learn too
8-PP
And if what you're saying is true, then everyone would have already flocked to emacs since users can always do a search on command name to find and execute it. Simple 2-step flat interface, no?
Personally I haven't done vi because of it's reliance on symbols and arcane single-letter commands. Which really means because I never had a decent learning environment for it and I've accidentally deleted lines and files when I *did* try using it, that I may never bother trying again.
Emacs always met my expectations that when I typed keys on the keyboard, that they always produced their text on the screen. If I needed a command I used the Alt/Ctrl/whatever keys and maybe typed regular characters on (which also appear on screen in the bar at the bottom). Emacs has always been more consistent in my expectations, even when learning. Ctrl-Z still gets me, though.
Summary: A single bad user experience at the start of learning an app scars them for life - unless there is necessity or another imperitive for learning it. Like your computer's installed OS doesn't have another editor and the only common knowledge you know is that "Word does everything you need"...
Ugh. The grandparents views are more in line with my own, that some planned exposure of functions to the user could facilitate a better learning curve (ie. don't have 15 menus with 20 options and strings of sub-sub-sub-sub-menus). However the parent is correct that when a user is trying to do something they really want to do that thing. So in the middle of this elaborately planned training environment which slowly exposed the user to particular functionality, they decide they need to add a footnote or a title page. Now what? Is Clippy's innane questioning actually useful here, or do those options appear in their normal places in, say, a menu structure but have a font denoting that the user hasn't been exposed to them yet?
More importantly, do the menu options appear in a menu which makes sense to the user and does the phrase and/or symbol the program presents for the action make sense? Are there indications anywhere for what else needs to happen to be able to use the option? Eg. you need to highlight a word to manipulate it's font, or what to do to change the document's default font?
And I write "say, in a menu" because nothing has convinced me that the hierarchical menus at the top (or side or bottom) of the window (or screen) are the best. The pop-up radial menus appeal to me, but I've only seen them in games so far, and not always to positive effect because of the purely symbol options. Perhaps there's another concept which could work even better. I'm hoping to see it soon, even if it is an OS I don't currently use like Mac.
Many options, many people, many solutions. Can we each have our own solution?
8-PP
Sorry, didn't read the other replies to you, but I wanted to say I think you've got it slightly mixed up:
You did the moral thing, not the legal thing.
8-PP
sounds like chicken.
Or was it one hand clapping?
8-PP
I'm having trouble finding them, but a couple previous Slashdot stories addressed some of these things:
1) All coherent thoughts are mouthed, even imperceptibly. If you "hear" the thought as words, then you've mouthed it. Of course I may not be finding that because that's what I've boiled it down to and remembered. I'm not recalling any specific sentences from that article or people's comments.
2) The brain thinks after the body acts. The gist of the article was that the people saw it as the brain justifying the body's actions. The experiment I remember was after a stimulus the test subject (human) was to press a play button (or something), and after they clicked the button the scientists detected the neurons firing which were understood to *cause/initiate* the action.
I didn't especially believe the first one, though the scientists, poster, and many comments did. If true then the subvocalizer would require skills similar to blocking telepathy (eg. surface-mind-distractions).
The second article seems to indicate that running thought-interference could be a hard problem.
Guess I need more practice with the search engine!
8-PP
Isn't is also true, though, that whenever you go to prison you lose your rights to vote as well as others?
So going to prison is even *less* of a choice, if you want to ever be patriotic in the future. Depending on your definitions.
8-PP
How about the griefers get the same punishment as those they "kill"? Eg. % loss of XP/HP/items/whatever, temporary or permanent?
Then again I've always been on the receiving end, not the giving end of griefers - and it has caused me to give up on some MMOGs. Or find their non-PVP servers.
8-PP