This was certainly a problem with older CD burners, but if you have an ATA100 or 133 controller, plenty of ram and a newer CD burner, this is a non-issue.
The book's philosophy is that Linux is a viable alternative OS that is also fun
When people ask me about Linux I tell them it's a great default OS for most of their work. It can be very easy.
"Well, I can play games on it like windows, right?"
"Yes, there are a few games available for it," I reply. "You can also play some Windows games under Wine, which is software that emulates parts of Windows."
Disney is in the unenviable position of submarining their own works here. In one corner, you have 'Lilo and Stitch', the film, depending on who you beleive, Disney was lobbying to win 'Best Animated Picture' vs. 'Spirited Away'.
Disney has typically treated its Miyazaki/Ghibli licenses just like every other kind non-in-house animation they acquire (Many DIC titles. First season Sailor Moon is a notable example). They'll sell it, but they will not spend adequate resources on it or promote it in any way that will compete with their own films.
They spent considerable effort creating excellent dubbs on Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, but simply will not promote those films in any way like they will their own releases. (I have yet to get a Kiki action figure at Burger King.)
'Spirited Away/Sen to Chihiro' is a true work of art. Disney knows it. Miyazaki knows it. The people who've seen it know it. It *deserved* to win BAP. By winning, however, it takes away from 'Lilo and Stitch'. By rereleasing 'Spirited Away', Disney is effectively submarining a possible 'Lilo and Stitch' rerelease. They're also forced to tacitly admit that Miyazaki and Studio Ghibi produces better stuff than they do.
By not re-releasing 'Spirited Away', Disney is in the even more awkward position of trying to explain why they're submarining a film that's won BAP simply because it's not their own work.
Congratulations Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli! I will be taking everyone I know and can get to go to the rerelease.
Many educators I know (Elementary school teachers, so take that into account) honestly beleive they are completely immune from copyright law because they are educators.
I routinely hear of a teacher buying or borrowing a book and then copying that book in its entirety on a xerox machine, and then distributing copies to students or other teachers. When asked about it, the response is invariably the same. "Oh, it's okay. I'm a teacher."
Personally, I think this is the way it *should* be, even if this practice falls well outside fair use. As a matter of fact, this same mentality will help this situation come about. After all, if enough people believe it's okay, general consensus will eventually trump legislation.
You can always replant a vegetable. Let's see you replant oil reservers.
Even if there's a bio-engineered virus that targets your specific species of corn, you can always switch to a different variety or even a different vegetable. Having a diverse plant population would not only make diseases or natural disasters less effective, it would also limit the effectiveness of terrorism.
Man, it would be really great if you could walk into a grocerie store and buy 'Ethanol Packets' next to the Duracells, Energizers, and Ray-o-Vacs.
No, not to drink, you lushes. It would mean that there would be a new demand for vegetable crops, Corn in particular. While the DoA is one of the most corrupt branches of our government, one can't help but think that a new demand for corn in the form of a non-perishable liquid would cut the amount of money currently being used for subsidies.
An ethanol economy is not quite as desirable as a hyrdrogen economy, but it can still be very good.
Unfortuneately, the reason the information was leaked is because CERT charges people to get early access to security problems like this... So it could be *anyone* at any of the organizations that have legitimately (*cough*) gained access to this resource. Hell, it could be any one of those people's bored teenaged kid who snagged their dad's laptop when he brought it home for the weekend.
Sorry, but once you sell something there is no way to protect it as secret.
CERT has bought and paid for this. They've earned this security breach and every breach like this.
or any Stephen King for that matter. I really loved the scene in the movie were the techies were using computer imaging to digitally change faces on the combatants and remove 'undesirable' images of blood and gore from the combat... Techniques that are now in common use throughout Hollywood despite being science fiction in the movie.
In the short term, this will probably be quite good for both Cisco and Linksys, but after a while both entities, if they still exist as separate entities, will start to regret this move.
First of all, Cisco now has a lot more to worry about, and they've have lot to worry about lately what with their stock prices fluctuating and a slowly decreasing demand for networking hardware as more and more IT firms belly up and more of the ones who stay in business consolodating their IT servies through hosting firms and the like.
The consumer hardware market is *very* low margin. There's a reason that they call this stuff 'Commodity' hardware... including networking hardware. If Cisco has to play the commodity hardware game for long, they're going to start feeling like having a company come buy them out as well.
Second, the number of players in the networking field keeps getting fewer and fewer. This seems like a good thing for the companies-- they don't have to compete as hard or do as much R&D to stay at the top. What this means for them in the long run, however, is that they become less able to deal with business crises and the advent of new tech. Just look at the way wireless is taking off right now. If you think this technology is done by a long shot or that there aren't new companies sprining up to exploit it, you should study it a little more. Sooner or later there will be a 'powerhouse' company spring up for an aspect of networking that's troublesome for Cisco, and then they'll have problems keeping up and staying competitive if they cut back right now at all.
Re:Tech support for your family??
on
Family Tech Support
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I will build PC's for my family members.
I will install hardware for my family members.
I will install software for my family members.
I will, under no circumstances, later support any of that for the same reasons. When something goes wrong, it's *always* your fault.
Heaven help you if they actually watch you doing the install, too. My father-in-law, god bless him, is pretty handy with a Vic 20 or a Commodore 64's BASIC interperator. He can type in games straight from the 'Big Book of BASIC games' and then save them to cassette tape so he can play them again later.
When he got a Windows computer a little while back, he was fairly dissapointed that he could not program the machine. I copied over a copy of QBasic for him, thinking that all his old BASIC stuff would still work in it, even if he had to re-type all of it. Later, I even gave him an old MS Visual Basic 4 CD that came with a book I had to buy for a college course.
Unfortuneately, when he tried to install a new modem in his computer, I got called to clean up the mess. (This was the last time I ever did support for him.) At one point, he saw me fiddle with the COM ports in the PC's BIOS.
"Is this where you program the computer?" he asked me, quite seriously.
I should have known right then what I had inadvertantly done. A few days after I got the modem installed and working correctly, he called me again, quite upset that his computer would no longer work. It must have been the crappy modem driver software I installed.
When I arrived, not only had EVERY single BIOS setting been changed, but the defaults had been wiped out. His BIOS had a 'Save', 'Save Defaults', and a 'Revert to Defaults', but not a 'Factory Defaults' switch.
I couldn't even boot a DOS floppy to try to flash it. It took a long, long time to make that computer work right again.
Free is good. CIOs who don't come to terms with this revolution in 2003 will be paying too much for IT in 2004.
Just like the music industry is in the middle of crumbling, the pay-for software industry is also about to start the long downward slide into irrelevance. IBM and a few other big corps know it's coming and are preparing. They're already well into the conversion to selling their services in association with the software rather than the software itself.
This means that the last hurdle, the hurdle that both Microsoft and OSS developers need to look at most closely, is desktop productivity apps.
Does OpenOffice compare to OfficeXP or Office2003? How about Outlook? Can OSS build a mail client/PIM that plays well with Exchange servers? Can OSS build a layer to confuse Outlook into beleiving that an LDAP server is really an Exchange server?
It's going to be an interesting few years as the software markets begin to shift.
Mod parent up. This is the gaping, Mack Truck-sized hole in the argument.
The only rational way to argue that piracy funds terrorism is that organized pirates sell pirated copies and transfer the funds to terrorist organizations in order to buy weapons, supplies, Swiss-Army Knives, Freedom Fries and other terroristy things like that.
If all piracy takes place on P2P networks, there's no cash, and thus no profit for Al-Qaida or Iraq.
There are real activities that fund terrorism, such as the illegal sale of oil from sanctioned countries and diamond and gold mining. Trading the latest Britney Spears track, the latest Hollywood movie DVD rip, or the latest Microsoft OS ISO rip is so far removed from terrorism that it's laughable to try to associate them. This is an ad hominem attack of the most blatant kind.
Bayesian filter is very, very good. I use popfile with Eudora on windows. After a hundred mails or so, it let five spam through for every 100 I'd get. After a thousand, it lets three in per hundred. I'll reset my stats in a little bit, but it never, ever, gives a false positive.
Despite being a perl script, Popfile is easy to set up and run. It's also very easy to administer.
You can tell a lot from the footprints, such as the shape of pelvis bones, relative age and weight of the print maker, frequently the gender of the print-maker... all from the angle of the foot prints. If the prints are the correct proportions for 'human' and have the correct angles for a human walker, then scientists can probably narrow it down to being human prints with great accuracy.
I have to agree here. Neither I nor anyone I know has any interest in watching pro baseball. This is despite being an amateur team photographer for an intramural baseball team and many other sports teams.
MLB has so sullied its reputation and so alienated its marketbase with repeated strikes, criminal players, drug scandals, and other misdeeds that most everyone I know, even those who are strongly interested in sports, are simply no longer interested in baseball.
Football, golf, NASCAR (Boo!), and even soccer are simply much more popular sports than baseball.
Really, who wants to watch a bunch of steroid-ridden uber-jocks stand around and scratch themselves in a game with zero strategy and zero excitement?
In both methods you mention, it's the pattern of thought and memory that's perceived as important, since Kurzweil discards brain tissue so easily in favor of nano-machines and machine processing. Personally, I agree with this assessment on both logical and religous grounds, as well as ethical grounds.
If that's true, that means that both the 'you' inside your brain and the 'you' inside the computer in the 'copy and kill' method would both really be you. Both have memories, emotions, and preferences of the original. It would be unethical and immoral at that point to destroy either one.
Uhm, yeah, but $3 a GB overrun isn't exactly a lot.
Think about it. If you have a gigabyte of traffic *every* day, every month, you're out about $100-$120 including the regular fee every month... not that bad for the kind of service these guys are offering.
Frankly, I'd be a lot more concerned about the 'no servers' rule than the cost.
Commercial indeed. Why trust reports from people who are given the hardware. We all know that they would not be getting all the lovely free hardware if they didn't shill, at least a little.
Slashdot is hardly unbiased, but at least it doesn't shill for hardware companies... yet.
Certainly. I'm certain if someone walked up today and told the Microsoft board of directors that he could 'eliminate' Linux for 1 Billion dollars and could prove it, then they wouldn't blink twice before signing a check.
Well, I'm certainly happy to see that B&W 2 will be produced, despite the rumors. Hopefully, there will more thought put into the creation and maintenance of that game than was put into B&W 1.
For example, there are many problems still existant with the original game, despite the released patch. There are still crash and locking issues, as well as graphical corruption issues with some video cards. Gameplay was also affected-- the rules of the game were changed enough so that the game is not as enjoyable to some players as it is to others. In particular, as mentioned above, the multiplayer rules affect the single player game. There is no option to turn these rule changes off for the single player game without uninstalling the patch. Again, without installing the patch you are locked out of any of the optional downloads or expansions. You're also locked into going through a long, 30-minute tutorial at the beginning of each new game you start if you refuse to install the patch.
At least four (Maybe five, it's hard to tell) of the titans/creatures in game are not available. They can only be unlocked with the aid of third party utilties that are apparently not sanctioned by Lionhead games and are certainly not available for download from the official game website. On top of all that, it's still ridiculously hard to backup the creatures you do have in case of system reformat of moving them to a different computer.
You state that you have a detailed post-mortem document, but this must be a confidential, internal-use only reference document, because I cannot find it on your (flash-based) website or message boards.
While you state that many of the issues wil be addressed in the sequel, why should I buy a sequel to have issues fixed in the game I've already bought? If you completely disregard that line of thought, what's to make me beleive that B&W 2 won't ship with just as many game breaking bugs as its predecessor? Even if it does not, why should I buy a game from a company when I suspect that company will change the rules and then make future updates dependant upon dealing with those rule changes?
Bottom line, Lionhead really dropped the ball on B&W 1. My experience was so bad that I will probably never buy another Lionhead game again and will encourage others I know to do the same.
The hell of it is that I would love to be proven wrong. I would love to see that Lionhead was still supporting people who bought the original game and *not* the expansions. I would love to see the lingering problems fixed with both game system issues and in-game mechanics. I would love to see this 'post-mortem document' be made available to the public for inspection. Black and White was an incredible game, technology and concept wise, and I'd love to *want* to play it again.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen any of those things. I don't want to play the game. I don't want to buy the expansions or the sequel. I'd rather spend my money on stuff I know is worth it. I've lost trust for Lionhead, just like I'd lose trust in a store that always sold broken itmes or a restaurant that always messed up my order.
Perhaps Mr. Molyneaux's perspective is tinted by the relative success of 'Black and White' and its expansions in the face of a hostile American market.
For those not familiar with the game, Black and White is an innovative 'God' sim in which you literally play a god. You have your peasants worship you and command a anthropomorphic animal titan to do your bidding. It's quite interesting and it's quite intriguing. Not only is the 3d game engine great, the AI in the game is astounding. The animal titan really seems to 'learn' from you and from his own actions.
There was a significant problem with 'Black and White', however. Lionhead and EA shipped the game well behind schedule and with a truly horrible number of bugs still in the game. It crashed frequently and the animal AI had some very serious problems... Your animal learned to become more evil by harvesting fish, for example. In-game quests were broken and hidden features were put in the game that could only be unlocked with 3rd party tools. There were long freezes due to the game's auto-save feature and many, many actions you could take that would crash the game or would somehow 'lock' you. Many features promised during development simply weren't in the game. It was really quite miserable. The game was fun to play, but so punishing that it quit being fun well before you had come close to exhausting even a fraction of the content there.
Since Molyneaux is a huge name and people were eagerly expecting the game, the backlash was dramatic. Players demanded a patch to fix the problems, but at the same time. It was almost four months in develoment from release. Interest in the game waned. Just when the patch was released, a number of rule-changes were added into the patch to address multi-player concerns. Unfortuneately, these changes made the single-player game vastly more difficult. The patch was required if you wanted to download any of the extras or install any of the expansions. This put players in the position of You could choose to play without the patch and subject yourself to frequent problems and lock yourself out of all other upgrades, or you could install the patch and play a game that wasn't fun any more, even with the upgrades and expansions.
Accordingly, the expansions didn't do half as well as the original game release. I've heard rumors that the sequel is being scrapped because of poor expansion sales.
The problem here is not with Lionhead studio's small size, but with their game quality. Molyneaux and crew developed what should have been a revolutionary game, but crippled their own work by bowing to release deadlines, unrealistic expectations, and the angry, but loud demands of a very small minority section of their target audience.
Asimov lovers will flame me for this, but I agree. I think that his characters are very flat and stale in comparison to Niven's characters.
(Spoiler)
Louis Wu spends all of 'Ringworld Engineers' recovering from addiction to electrical pleasure-center stimulation, for example. It affects his every action and every motivation in the book. He grows around it and is a fuller character because of it.
Janet Asimov, on the other hand, can do decent characters, but even then they're still pretty flat when compared to Niven.
IMHO, Niven and Heinlen are about on equal grounds when character-crafting.
A lot of Niven's science fiction is set in 'Known Space' (or in the same continuity). It's not just populated by the Humans who are the main characters in a lot of his books, but also by the Kzinti, Pierson's Puppeteers, and the mysterious Pak Protectors, amoung others. There are myriad worlds in Niven's books, including the aforementioned Ringworld, and many non-worlds, such as the 'Smoke Ring' in 'The Integral Trees'
Is there an intriguing universe to be unfolded there? Absolutely. For me, that universe is more real by an order or magnitude than the worlds set forth in Star Trek or Star Wars.
Niven's background very nearly approaches Asimov's.
While I don't mean to sound elitist, to a science fiction fan, saying 'Larry Who? Niven? Never heard of him' would be like a physicist saying 'Niels Who? Bohr? Never heard of him."
Niven is both a *very* talented writer and an incredible world builder. While he had outside influences, he just about invented the concept of a Solar Ring World (Derived from a Dyson Sphere obviously), which has been re-used repeatedly by authors, movie-makers and comic-book artists since 'Ringworld' was originally published.
If you *really* don't know who Niven is, go do yourself a favor and get a copy of both 'Ringworld' and 'The Integral Trees' from your local library. Read them. Sit back and wait for your mind to cool down. Then go read everything else he's ever published.
Jupiter would probably need about 10x the mass it currently has to start fusing. It would probably be a red dwarf if this was the case -- relatively cool compared to Sol, but super-long lived.
Bodies like Jupiter and Saturn are sometimes referred to as 'Brown Dwarves'.
Slashdot Mirror
This was certainly a problem with older CD burners, but if you have an ATA100 or 133 controller, plenty of ram and a newer CD burner, this is a non-issue.
The book's philosophy is that Linux is a viable alternative OS that is also fun
When people ask me about Linux I tell them it's a great default OS for most of their work. It can be very easy.
"Well, I can play games on it like windows, right?"
"Yes, there are a few games available for it," I reply. "You can also play some Windows games under Wine, which is software that emulates parts of Windows."
"Is that easy?"
Uhm...
Disney is in the unenviable position of submarining their own works here. In one corner, you have 'Lilo and Stitch', the film, depending on who you beleive, Disney was lobbying to win 'Best Animated Picture' vs. 'Spirited Away'.
Disney has typically treated its Miyazaki/Ghibli licenses just like every other kind non-in-house animation they acquire (Many DIC titles. First season Sailor Moon is a notable example). They'll sell it, but they will not spend adequate resources on it or promote it in any way that will compete with their own films.
They spent considerable effort creating excellent dubbs on Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, but simply will not promote those films in any way like they will their own releases. (I have yet to get a Kiki action figure at Burger King.)
'Spirited Away/Sen to Chihiro' is a true work of art. Disney knows it. Miyazaki knows it. The people who've seen it know it. It *deserved* to win BAP. By winning, however, it takes away from 'Lilo and Stitch'. By rereleasing 'Spirited Away', Disney is effectively submarining a possible 'Lilo and Stitch' rerelease. They're also forced to tacitly admit that Miyazaki and Studio Ghibi produces better stuff than they do.
By not re-releasing 'Spirited Away', Disney is in the even more awkward position of trying to explain why they're submarining a film that's won BAP simply because it's not their own work.
Congratulations Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli! I will be taking everyone I know and can get to go to the rerelease.
Many educators I know (Elementary school teachers, so take that into account) honestly beleive they are completely immune from copyright law because they are educators.
I routinely hear of a teacher buying or borrowing a book and then copying that book in its entirety on a xerox machine, and then distributing copies to students or other teachers. When asked about it, the response is invariably the same. "Oh, it's okay. I'm a teacher."
Personally, I think this is the way it *should* be, even if this practice falls well outside fair use. As a matter of fact, this same mentality will help this situation come about. After all, if enough people believe it's okay, general consensus will eventually trump legislation.
You can always replant a vegetable. Let's see you replant oil reservers.
Even if there's a bio-engineered virus that targets your specific species of corn, you can always switch to a different variety or even a different vegetable. Having a diverse plant population would not only make diseases or natural disasters less effective, it would also limit the effectiveness of terrorism.
Man, it would be really great if you could walk into a grocerie store and buy 'Ethanol Packets' next to the Duracells, Energizers, and Ray-o-Vacs.
No, not to drink, you lushes. It would mean that there would be a new demand for vegetable crops, Corn in particular. While the DoA is one of the most corrupt branches of our government, one can't help but think that a new demand for corn in the form of a non-perishable liquid would cut the amount of money currently being used for subsidies.
An ethanol economy is not quite as desirable as a hyrdrogen economy, but it can still be very good.
Unfortuneately, the reason the information was leaked is because CERT charges people to get early access to security problems like this... So it could be *anyone* at any of the organizations that have legitimately (*cough*) gained access to this resource. Hell, it could be any one of those people's bored teenaged kid who snagged their dad's laptop when he brought it home for the weekend.
Sorry, but once you sell something there is no way to protect it as secret.
CERT has bought and paid for this. They've earned this security breach and every breach like this.
or any Stephen King for that matter. I really loved the scene in the movie were the techies were using computer imaging to digitally change faces on the combatants and remove 'undesirable' images of blood and gore from the combat... Techniques that are now in common use throughout Hollywood despite being science fiction in the movie.
In the short term, this will probably be quite good for both Cisco and Linksys, but after a while both entities, if they still exist as separate entities, will start to regret this move.
First of all, Cisco now has a lot more to worry about, and they've have lot to worry about lately what with their stock prices fluctuating and a slowly decreasing demand for networking hardware as more and more IT firms belly up and more of the ones who stay in business consolodating their IT servies through hosting firms and the like.
The consumer hardware market is *very* low margin. There's a reason that they call this stuff 'Commodity' hardware... including networking hardware. If Cisco has to play the commodity hardware game for long, they're going to start feeling like having a company come buy them out as well.
Second, the number of players in the networking field keeps getting fewer and fewer. This seems like a good thing for the companies-- they don't have to compete as hard or do as much R&D to stay at the top. What this means for them in the long run, however, is that they become less able to deal with business crises and the advent of new tech. Just look at the way wireless is taking off right now. If you think this technology is done by a long shot or that there aren't new companies sprining up to exploit it, you should study it a little more. Sooner or later there will be a 'powerhouse' company spring up for an aspect of networking that's troublesome for Cisco, and then they'll have problems keeping up and staying competitive if they cut back right now at all.
I will build PC's for my family members.
I will install hardware for my family members.
I will install software for my family members.
I will, under no circumstances, later support any of that for the same reasons. When something goes wrong, it's *always* your fault.
Heaven help you if they actually watch you doing the install, too. My father-in-law, god bless him, is pretty handy with a Vic 20 or a Commodore 64's BASIC interperator. He can type in games straight from the 'Big Book of BASIC games' and then save them to cassette tape so he can play them again later.
When he got a Windows computer a little while back, he was fairly dissapointed that he could not program the machine. I copied over a copy of QBasic for him, thinking that all his old BASIC stuff would still work in it, even if he had to re-type all of it. Later, I even gave him an old MS Visual Basic 4 CD that came with a book I had to buy for a college course.
Unfortuneately, when he tried to install a new modem in his computer, I got called to clean up the mess. (This was the last time I ever did support for him.) At one point, he saw me fiddle with the COM ports in the PC's BIOS.
"Is this where you program the computer?" he asked me, quite seriously.
I should have known right then what I had inadvertantly done. A few days after I got the modem installed and working correctly, he called me again, quite upset that his computer would no longer work. It must have been the crappy modem driver software I installed.
When I arrived, not only had EVERY single BIOS setting been changed, but the defaults had been wiped out. His BIOS had a 'Save', 'Save Defaults', and a 'Revert to Defaults', but not a 'Factory Defaults' switch.
I couldn't even boot a DOS floppy to try to flash it. It took a long, long time to make that computer work right again.
Sayeth the Article:
Free is good. CIOs who don't come to terms with this revolution in 2003 will be paying too much for IT in 2004.
Just like the music industry is in the middle of crumbling, the pay-for software industry is also about to start the long downward slide into irrelevance. IBM and a few other big corps know it's coming and are preparing. They're already well into the conversion to selling their services in association with the software rather than the software itself.
This means that the last hurdle, the hurdle that both Microsoft and OSS developers need to look at most closely, is desktop productivity apps.
Does OpenOffice compare to OfficeXP or Office2003? How about Outlook? Can OSS build a mail client/PIM that plays well with Exchange servers? Can OSS build a layer to confuse Outlook into beleiving that an LDAP server is really an Exchange server?
It's going to be an interesting few years as the software markets begin to shift.
Mod parent up. This is the gaping, Mack Truck-sized hole in the argument.
The only rational way to argue that piracy funds terrorism is that organized pirates sell pirated copies and transfer the funds to terrorist organizations in order to buy weapons, supplies, Swiss-Army Knives, Freedom Fries and other terroristy things like that.
If all piracy takes place on P2P networks, there's no cash, and thus no profit for Al-Qaida or Iraq.
There are real activities that fund terrorism, such as the illegal sale of oil from sanctioned countries and diamond and gold mining. Trading the latest Britney Spears track, the latest Hollywood movie DVD rip, or the latest Microsoft OS ISO rip is so far removed from terrorism that it's laughable to try to associate them. This is an ad hominem attack of the most blatant kind.
Bayesian filter is very, very good. I use popfile with Eudora on windows. After a hundred mails or so, it let five spam through for every 100 I'd get. After a thousand, it lets three in per hundred. I'll reset my stats in a little bit, but it never, ever, gives a false positive.
Despite being a perl script, Popfile is easy to set up and run. It's also very easy to administer.
You can tell a lot from the footprints, such as the shape of pelvis bones, relative age and weight of the print maker, frequently the gender of the print-maker... all from the angle of the foot prints. If the prints are the correct proportions for 'human' and have the correct angles for a human walker, then scientists can probably narrow it down to being human prints with great accuracy.
I have to agree here. Neither I nor anyone I know has any interest in watching pro baseball. This is despite being an amateur team photographer for an intramural baseball team and many other sports teams.
MLB has so sullied its reputation and so alienated its marketbase with repeated strikes, criminal players, drug scandals, and other misdeeds that most everyone I know, even those who are strongly interested in sports, are simply no longer interested in baseball.
Football, golf, NASCAR (Boo!), and even soccer are simply much more popular sports than baseball.
Really, who wants to watch a bunch of steroid-ridden uber-jocks stand around and scratch themselves in a game with zero strategy and zero excitement?
In both methods you mention, it's the pattern of thought and memory that's perceived as important, since Kurzweil discards brain tissue so easily in favor of nano-machines and machine processing. Personally, I agree with this assessment on both logical and religous grounds, as well as ethical grounds.
If that's true, that means that both the 'you' inside your brain and the 'you' inside the computer in the 'copy and kill' method would both really be you. Both have memories, emotions, and preferences of the original. It would be unethical and immoral at that point to destroy either one.
Uhm, yeah, but $3 a GB overrun isn't exactly a lot.
Think about it. If you have a gigabyte of traffic *every* day, every month, you're out about $100-$120 including the regular fee every month... not that bad for the kind of service these guys are offering.
Frankly, I'd be a lot more concerned about the 'no servers' rule than the cost.
Commercial indeed. Why trust reports from people who are given the hardware. We all know that they would not be getting all the lovely free hardware if they didn't shill, at least a little.
Slashdot is hardly unbiased, but at least it doesn't shill for hardware companies... yet.
Certainly. I'm certain if someone walked up today and told the Microsoft board of directors that he could 'eliminate' Linux for 1 Billion dollars and could prove it, then they wouldn't blink twice before signing a check.
Well, I'm certainly happy to see that B&W 2 will be produced, despite the rumors. Hopefully, there will more thought put into the creation and maintenance of that game than was put into B&W 1.
For example, there are many problems still existant with the original game, despite the released patch. There are still crash and locking issues, as well as graphical corruption issues with some video cards. Gameplay was also affected-- the rules of the game were changed enough so that the game is not as enjoyable to some players as it is to others. In particular, as mentioned above, the multiplayer rules affect the single player game. There is no option to turn these rule changes off for the single player game without uninstalling the patch. Again, without installing the patch you are locked out of any of the optional downloads or expansions. You're also locked into going through a long, 30-minute tutorial at the beginning of each new game you start if you refuse to install the patch.
At least four (Maybe five, it's hard to tell) of the titans/creatures in game are not available. They can only be unlocked with the aid of third party utilties that are apparently not sanctioned by Lionhead games and are certainly not available for download from the official game website. On top of all that, it's still ridiculously hard to backup the creatures you do have in case of system reformat of moving them to a different computer.
You state that you have a detailed post-mortem document, but this must be a confidential, internal-use only reference document, because I cannot find it on your (flash-based) website or message boards.
While you state that many of the issues wil be addressed in the sequel, why should I buy a sequel to have issues fixed in the game I've already bought? If you completely disregard that line of thought, what's to make me beleive that B&W 2 won't ship with just as many game breaking bugs as its predecessor? Even if it does not, why should I buy a game from a company when I suspect that company will change the rules and then make future updates dependant upon dealing with those rule changes?
Bottom line, Lionhead really dropped the ball on B&W 1. My experience was so bad that I will probably never buy another Lionhead game again and will encourage others I know to do the same.
The hell of it is that I would love to be proven wrong. I would love to see that Lionhead was still supporting people who bought the original game and *not* the expansions. I would love to see the lingering problems fixed with both game system issues and in-game mechanics. I would love to see this 'post-mortem document' be made available to the public for inspection. Black and White was an incredible game, technology and concept wise, and I'd love to *want* to play it again.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen any of those things. I don't want to play the game. I don't want to buy the expansions or the sequel. I'd rather spend my money on stuff I know is worth it. I've lost trust for Lionhead, just like I'd lose trust in a store that always sold broken itmes or a restaurant that always messed up my order.
Perhaps Mr. Molyneaux's perspective is tinted by the relative success of 'Black and White' and its expansions in the face of a hostile American market.
For those not familiar with the game, Black and White is an innovative 'God' sim in which you literally play a god. You have your peasants worship you and command a anthropomorphic animal titan to do your bidding. It's quite interesting and it's quite intriguing. Not only is the 3d game engine great, the AI in the game is astounding. The animal titan really seems to 'learn' from you and from his own actions.
There was a significant problem with 'Black and White', however. Lionhead and EA shipped the game well behind schedule and with a truly horrible number of bugs still in the game. It crashed frequently and the animal AI had some very serious problems... Your animal learned to become more evil by harvesting fish, for example. In-game quests were broken and hidden features were put in the game that could only be unlocked with 3rd party tools. There were long freezes due to the game's auto-save feature and many, many actions you could take that would crash the game or would somehow 'lock' you. Many features promised during development simply weren't in the game. It was really quite miserable. The game was fun to play, but so punishing that it quit being fun well before you had come close to exhausting even a fraction of the content there.
Since Molyneaux is a huge name and people were eagerly expecting the game, the backlash was dramatic. Players demanded a patch to fix the problems, but at the same time. It was almost four months in develoment from release. Interest in the game waned. Just when the patch was released, a number of rule-changes were added into the patch to address multi-player concerns. Unfortuneately, these changes made the single-player game vastly more difficult. The patch was required if you wanted to download any of the extras or install any of the expansions. This put players in the position of You could choose to play without the patch and subject yourself to frequent problems and lock yourself out of all other upgrades, or you could install the patch and play a game that wasn't fun any more, even with the upgrades and expansions.
Accordingly, the expansions didn't do half as well as the original game release. I've heard rumors that the sequel is being scrapped because of poor expansion sales.
The problem here is not with Lionhead studio's small size, but with their game quality. Molyneaux and crew developed what should have been a revolutionary game, but crippled their own work by bowing to release deadlines, unrealistic expectations, and the angry, but loud demands of a very small minority section of their target audience.
Asimov lovers will flame me for this, but I agree. I think that his characters are very flat and stale in comparison to Niven's characters.
(Spoiler)
Louis Wu spends all of 'Ringworld Engineers' recovering from addiction to electrical pleasure-center stimulation, for example. It affects his every action and every motivation in the book. He grows around it and is a fuller character because of it.
Janet Asimov, on the other hand, can do decent characters, but even then they're still pretty flat when compared to Niven.
IMHO, Niven and Heinlen are about on equal grounds when character-crafting.
A lot of Niven's science fiction is set in 'Known Space' (or in the same continuity). It's not just populated by the Humans who are the main characters in a lot of his books, but also by the Kzinti, Pierson's Puppeteers, and the mysterious Pak Protectors, amoung others. There are myriad worlds in Niven's books, including the aforementioned Ringworld, and many non-worlds, such as the 'Smoke Ring' in 'The Integral Trees'
Is there an intriguing universe to be unfolded there? Absolutely. For me, that universe is more real by an order or magnitude than the worlds set forth in Star Trek or Star Wars.
Niven's background very nearly approaches Asimov's.
While I don't mean to sound elitist, to a science fiction fan, saying 'Larry Who? Niven? Never heard of him' would be like a physicist saying 'Niels Who? Bohr? Never heard of him."
Niven is both a *very* talented writer and an incredible world builder. While he had outside influences, he just about invented the concept of a Solar Ring World (Derived from a Dyson Sphere obviously), which has been re-used repeatedly by authors, movie-makers and comic-book artists since 'Ringworld' was originally published.
If you *really* don't know who Niven is, go do yourself a favor and get a copy of both 'Ringworld' and 'The Integral Trees' from your local library. Read them. Sit back and wait for your mind to cool down. Then go read everything else he's ever published.
Jupiter would probably need about 10x the mass it currently has to start fusing. It would probably be a red dwarf if this was the case -- relatively cool compared to Sol, but super-long lived.
Bodies like Jupiter and Saturn are sometimes referred to as 'Brown Dwarves'.