Good point. When I think of the successful and profitable products we've seen in BeOS, NeXTstep, OS/2, Solaris, and DRDOS, I honestly cannot figure out why Apple doesn't want to get into the OS sales market.
When you run it, an admin password prompt is displayed by OS X, and you have to enter it to continue.
...Unless you are running an admin account. Then it just runs.
Uh, no. Really no.
The effect of an admin account is one level more strict than this. Any user, when attempting to install a package or modify system directories, will be prompted for authentication, and only an admin account's name and password can be used to approve the request. Both types of accounts will be asked, the difference is that a non-admin account can't say yes.
Have you actually read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "Based on" is a pretty generous description of the relationship between it and Blade Runner.
In fact, the pair make my very short list of movies that are better than the book. The book was trying to do about seven different things at once, and thus did a pretty mediocre job of all of them. The movie took one relatively small thread from the book, and fleshed it out into a good little story.
But more importantly, the movie was really about lighting, blocking, and music. The feel of the movie, the visual tone, is the thing about which everyone (rightly) raves. And that feel was absent from the book, but did show up quite prominently in Neuromancer.
Unless I'm forgetting something, Apple has never used this "shared video memory" hackery in any of their systems. Can't rule it out as totally impossible that they might in the future, but I'd find it quite surprising.
I wish the article was more legible. It seems to wrap the actual body text to about nine characters wide. And the "print" link, which is sometimes helps to get readable versions of content from sites of this ilk, is... javascript.
The content might be wonderful, but I just can't be bothered to work around such broken site design to get to it.
Bleh. I've clearly had too little caffeine today, if I can't remember to include a subject in the first sentence, or spell spatial correctly in the third. (Hooray for unintentional irony quotes!)
However, kudos to the AC to did the research and provided a link to an article on the study. (Just repeating that above the default threshold.)
So have this vague memory of a study done a few years ago. (Far too vague to be able to cite, sorry.) It was examining the "spacial" navigation skills of people in a rendered 3D environment, ala FPS games.
One of the surprising results was that women tested had much more difficulty learning the layout of complex spaces, and avoiding getting lost--when using a 4:3 display. But when a wider aspect ratio display was used (giving more gestalt context, one assumes), not only did testees of both genders do better, but this disparity disappeared.
Previous studies have shown that men and women tend to handle navigation differently, so this is not totally implausible. (And no, I'm not referring to men-asking-for-directions jokes. It seems that men tend to rely more on distance and direction, and women tend to rely more on landmarks.)
So this seems to suggest that not only is a three-across setup a great win for all gamers, but that it might be an interesting tool for narrowing the gender gap.
The only things you need to do to cause your site to be accessible by mobile devices are things that you should be doing anyway.
Don't assume anything about the client's display resolution, font size, inclination to display images, or willingness to use plugins, java, or javascript. Just write clean, correct html, and it will deal with diversity of client traits; that's one of the primary things that the language was designed to do.
If you choose to layer other froofraw on your site (eg, javascript, flash, images), that's fine, but make sure that it degrades gracefully and automatically when those are absent from the client.
The absolute worst thing you can do is write one narrowly-targetting monstrosity in flash, and then add a second narrowly-targetted monstrosity in wap. Just write one site correctly, and it will serve both these purposes--and next year's as well.
If this seems like a cool idea, and something that you're glad someone did, give 'em a few bucks through that donation link on the right. Encouraging and facilitating nifty things helps produce future nifty things.
(And no, I'm not affiliated with the creators or ISP here. Just sayin'.)
If you're going to trade in kiddie porn or rape children at all, it doesn't matter what the penalty is. You're a sicko, and sickos don't sit there and thing "Well, I'll do it as long as I won't get more than 10 years."
There is no surer way to fail to solve a problem than to declare the other people involved to be evil, or subhuman, or completely irrational.
No matter how disgusted you are by their actions, the people that you're trying to discourage fro this behaviour are, in fact, human beings. They are capable of rational thought. And if you want to stand any chance of effectively altering their behaviour, you have to accept this and choose methods that will actually apply to them.
Our sexuality is generally something that's handed to us without any choice on our part. These people whom you're demonizing have been handed a very problematic sexuality, but in all other ways they're very much what you'd consider normal people leading normal lives. Sure, some of them might be murderous crack-fiends; about the same percentage of them as of people as a whole. Some others of them will be brilliant neurosurgeons who spend their careers saving others' lives; again, about the same percentage as of anyone else.
This assertion that anyone with any interest in child porn is doomed to commit "a more serious crime" later is certainly bunk. This is the worst kind of justification for irrational punishment: "even if he hadn't done anything bad yet, he would have at some point, I'm sure."
(Another great recent example of this type of failure was President Bush labelling anyone who acts against the US as "evil". "That's right folks, they're not human beings who are making choices that we'd like to change because of societal and economic factors! They're just pure unadulterated evil, which handily gets us out of having to do the hard work of actually understanding those societal and economic factors and addressing them directly!")
That seems like a kind of irrelevant distinction between the two situations. But okay, I'm perfectly happy to discuss other analogies where that's not a factor.
How about people of a given religious faith? Left-handed people? People with diabetes? People whose parents weren't married?
Any of those people could, with some effort, "blend in". How does that change the situation? Would that make it okay to force them to keep these things secret, and to mock, ostracize, or even assault them if they were to ever disclose them?
Guilds on non-rp servers are essentially just teams of players who have chosen to pool resources and work together.
In the case of WoW, they're mostly necessitated by the fact that most end-game contents requires groups of 20-40 players. So guilds exist to arrange which 40 players, of which mix of classes, with what equipment, supported by what crafting professions, will tackle given challenges. In larger cases, they sometimes have rigid organizational structures, ranks and rules for promotions, guild banks that lend money, and complex systems for determining in what order players get the equipment that these runs generate.
(If that sounds like a whole lot of no fun to you, we're agreed. I can't stand giant raids or giant raiding guilds. I play with a handful of real-world friends, and we only created a guild to stem the flood of people inviting us to join theirs.)
So they certainly exist in the absence of roleplaying, and they're just some combination of functional allies and friends.
Usually when people talk about wanting a gay-friendly guild, they simply want the ability to say racy things like "Sorry I can't play on Thursday, it's my boyfriend's birthday" without having to deal with 14-year-old-homophobia from their own guildmates.
It's hard to think of a rationale that more clearly exemplifies the phrase "blaming the victim".
Everyone who has been part of an openly gay-friendly guild is very aware of how bigoted and homophobic some other players are. They don't need Blizzard's patronizing "concern" to warn them off; they know what they're getting into.
In fact, the awfulness of many other players is very likely exactly why these people have chosen to form or join a gay-friendly guild. They want a place where they can say things like "Sorry, can't play tomorrow, it's my boyfriend's birthday" in guild chat without getting that harrassment from their guildmates as well.
A guild is a group of like minded
characters, not a group of like minded players.
I completely agree with you... for RP servers.
But on non-RP servers, I've yet to see anyone make any pretense of acting as their character, rather than as a player. People regularly discuss real-world news and sports in open channels, talk about their ages and jobs, and their timezones and local weather. When people talk about where they're from, the answer is much more likely to be "Cleveland" than "Shadowglen".
In light of that, talking about whether or not you're straight would be assumed to refer to you-the-player, just as if you had said something about whether or not you're left-handed. I don't see any good reason to ban one and not the other.
And a thought just struck me... in the World of Warcraft, I'm
fairly certain that Blizzard has not written sex into the actual
game, so therefore it doesn't officially exist. You can't have a
gay or straight character -- you can't have sex at all.
This is an amazingly contrived excuse. I am truly impressed by the degree to which you're willing to attempt to distort the situation to excuse this behaviour.
And, it turns out, that degree is apparently still insufficient. While the game never refers directly to sex, many npcs refer to romantic love, or to their spouses, or their children. Among the items that tailors can create is a wedding gown.
There's absolutely no indication that relationships and sex work any differently in their fictional world than in our actual one.
So because an offensive act is accepted within a given subculture, we should always just sit back and accept it?
My understanding is that slaveholding was pretty universally accepted in the antebellum South. Does that mean that everyone should've just gotten over that and waited for the fad to change on its own?
(No, I'm not claiming that calling someone a fag is the same scale of badness as holding them in lifelong servitude. But I'm pointing out that societal acceptance is a crappy sole standard for the condoning of oppressive discrimination.)
Actually they are really acting within the best interest of most of the
people involved. If you go out of your way to create a 'GLBT' guild and
advertise it for all to see, then you, and your guild members are
certain to become prime target for the rest of the server that are not
quite as ok with the alternate sexuality as the guild members.
How kind of them to have our best interests in mind. I wonder if they extend the same courtesy toward black players, banning them for disclosing their race in order to protect them from racists?
Yep, this is exactly what came to my mind. Nearly fifteen years ago, I spent some time working at Kinko's as well, and I actually found it to be a huge step up from the average cheesy retail job. Employees were relatively well-paid, expected to be fairly competent and intelligent and were given the discretion that accompanies that, and it did require at least some feel for technology.
It certainly wasn't Xanadu, but it was a pretty good bridge between mindless retail jobs and a genuinely skilled technical career. I went from it to doing telephone support for an ISP, then to desktop support for a web development company, and eventually into being a sysadmin.
I suspect that if the game's author was trying to focus on the true soul-sucking boredom of retail jobs, something like fast food would probably have been a better target.
This really isn't the place to ask for investment advice. But speaking very generally, there's a tendency for the stock of the acquirer to see a slight dip and the stock of the acquiree to see a small spike.
But really, that's only a vague tendency. You shouldn't invest real money without investigating the particular companies and situation in more detail.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention Magnatune, which we should all take every possible opportunity to plug.
Good point. When I think of the successful and profitable products we've seen in BeOS, NeXTstep, OS/2, Solaris, and DRDOS, I honestly cannot figure out why Apple doesn't want to get into the OS sales market.
Oh, it was necessary.
I just can't believe you passed up the opportunity to end with "..and in the darkness, BIND them."
Jon Katz... well, the man sure did write a lot of words.
The effect of an admin account is one level more strict than this. Any user, when attempting to install a package or modify system directories, will be prompted for authentication, and only an admin account's name and password can be used to approve the request. Both types of accounts will be asked, the difference is that a non-admin account can't say yes.
And... what exactly would be so problematic about that if it were?
In fact, the pair make my very short list of movies that are better than the book. The book was trying to do about seven different things at once, and thus did a pretty mediocre job of all of them. The movie took one relatively small thread from the book, and fleshed it out into a good little story.
But more importantly, the movie was really about lighting, blocking, and music. The feel of the movie, the visual tone, is the thing about which everyone (rightly) raves. And that feel was absent from the book, but did show up quite prominently in Neuromancer.
I wish the article was more legible. It seems to wrap the actual body text to about nine characters wide. And the "print" link, which is sometimes helps to get readable versions of content from sites of this ilk, is... javascript.
The content might be wonderful, but I just can't be bothered to work around such broken site design to get to it.
However, kudos to the AC to did the research and provided a link to an article on the study. (Just repeating that above the default threshold.)
So have this vague memory of a study done a few years ago. (Far too vague to be able to cite, sorry.) It was examining the "spacial" navigation skills of people in a rendered 3D environment, ala FPS games.
One of the surprising results was that women tested had much more difficulty learning the layout of complex spaces, and avoiding getting lost--when using a 4:3 display. But when a wider aspect ratio display was used (giving more gestalt context, one assumes), not only did testees of both genders do better, but this disparity disappeared.
Previous studies have shown that men and women tend to handle navigation differently, so this is not totally implausible. (And no, I'm not referring to men-asking-for-directions jokes. It seems that men tend to rely more on distance and direction, and women tend to rely more on landmarks.)
So this seems to suggest that not only is a three-across setup a great win for all gamers, but that it might be an interesting tool for narrowing the gender gap.
The only things you need to do to cause your site to be accessible by mobile devices are things that you should be doing anyway.
Don't assume anything about the client's display resolution, font size, inclination to display images, or willingness to use plugins, java, or javascript. Just write clean, correct html, and it will deal with diversity of client traits; that's one of the primary things that the language was designed to do.
If you choose to layer other froofraw on your site (eg, javascript, flash, images), that's fine, but make sure that it degrades gracefully and automatically when those are absent from the client.
The absolute worst thing you can do is write one narrowly-targetting monstrosity in flash, and then add a second narrowly-targetted monstrosity in wap. Just write one site correctly, and it will serve both these purposes--and next year's as well.
If this seems like a cool idea, and something that you're glad someone did, give 'em a few bucks through that donation link on the right. Encouraging and facilitating nifty things helps produce future nifty things.
(And no, I'm not affiliated with the creators or ISP here. Just sayin'.)
No matter how disgusted you are by their actions, the people that you're trying to discourage fro this behaviour are, in fact, human beings. They are capable of rational thought. And if you want to stand any chance of effectively altering their behaviour, you have to accept this and choose methods that will actually apply to them.
Our sexuality is generally something that's handed to us without any choice on our part. These people whom you're demonizing have been handed a very problematic sexuality, but in all other ways they're very much what you'd consider normal people leading normal lives. Sure, some of them might be murderous crack-fiends; about the same percentage of them as of people as a whole. Some others of them will be brilliant neurosurgeons who spend their careers saving others' lives; again, about the same percentage as of anyone else.
This assertion that anyone with any interest in child porn is doomed to commit "a more serious crime" later is certainly bunk. This is the worst kind of justification for irrational punishment: "even if he hadn't done anything bad yet, he would have at some point, I'm sure."
(Another great recent example of this type of failure was President Bush labelling anyone who acts against the US as "evil". "That's right folks, they're not human beings who are making choices that we'd like to change because of societal and economic factors! They're just pure unadulterated evil, which handily gets us out of having to do the hard work of actually understanding those societal and economic factors and addressing them directly!")
That seems like a kind of irrelevant distinction between the two situations. But okay, I'm perfectly happy to discuss other analogies where that's not a factor.
How about people of a given religious faith? Left-handed people? People with diabetes? People whose parents weren't married?
Any of those people could, with some effort, "blend in". How does that change the situation? Would that make it okay to force them to keep these things secret, and to mock, ostracize, or even assault them if they were to ever disclose them?
Guilds on non-rp servers are essentially just teams of players who have chosen to pool resources and work together.
In the case of WoW, they're mostly necessitated by the fact that most end-game contents requires groups of 20-40 players. So guilds exist to arrange which 40 players, of which mix of classes, with what equipment, supported by what crafting professions, will tackle given challenges. In larger cases, they sometimes have rigid organizational structures, ranks and rules for promotions, guild banks that lend money, and complex systems for determining in what order players get the equipment that these runs generate.
(If that sounds like a whole lot of no fun to you, we're agreed. I can't stand giant raids or giant raiding guilds. I play with a handful of real-world friends, and we only created a guild to stem the flood of people inviting us to join theirs.)
So they certainly exist in the absence of roleplaying, and they're just some combination of functional allies and friends.
Usually when people talk about wanting a gay-friendly guild, they simply want the ability to say racy things like "Sorry I can't play on Thursday, it's my boyfriend's birthday" without having to deal with 14-year-old-homophobia from their own guildmates.
Everyone who has been part of an openly gay-friendly guild is very aware of how bigoted and homophobic some other players are. They don't need Blizzard's patronizing "concern" to warn them off; they know what they're getting into.
In fact, the awfulness of many other players is very likely exactly why these people have chosen to form or join a gay-friendly guild. They want a place where they can say things like "Sorry, can't play tomorrow, it's my boyfriend's birthday" in guild chat without getting that harrassment from their guildmates as well.
N, T, blah?
(Out of curiosity, what had you been thinking of the N as standing for?)
But on non-RP servers, I've yet to see anyone make any pretense of acting as their character, rather than as a player. People regularly discuss real-world news and sports in open channels, talk about their ages and jobs, and their timezones and local weather. When people talk about where they're from, the answer is much more likely to be "Cleveland" than "Shadowglen".
In light of that, talking about whether or not you're straight would be assumed to refer to you-the-player, just as if you had said something about whether or not you're left-handed. I don't see any good reason to ban one and not the other.
And, it turns out, that degree is apparently still insufficient. While the game never refers directly to sex, many npcs refer to romantic love, or to their spouses, or their children. Among the items that tailors can create is a wedding gown.
There's absolutely no indication that relationships and sex work any differently in their fictional world than in our actual one.
So because an offensive act is accepted within a given subculture, we should always just sit back and accept it?
My understanding is that slaveholding was pretty universally accepted in the antebellum South. Does that mean that everyone should've just gotten over that and waited for the fad to change on its own?
(No, I'm not claiming that calling someone a fag is the same scale of badness as holding them in lifelong servitude. But I'm pointing out that societal acceptance is a crappy sole standard for the condoning of oppressive discrimination.)
Yep, this is exactly what came to my mind. Nearly fifteen years ago, I spent some time working at Kinko's as well, and I actually found it to be a huge step up from the average cheesy retail job. Employees were relatively well-paid, expected to be fairly competent and intelligent and were given the discretion that accompanies that, and it did require at least some feel for technology.
It certainly wasn't Xanadu, but it was a pretty good bridge between mindless retail jobs and a genuinely skilled technical career. I went from it to doing telephone support for an ISP, then to desktop support for a web development company, and eventually into being a sysadmin.
I suspect that if the game's author was trying to focus on the true soul-sucking boredom of retail jobs, something like fast food would probably have been a better target.
This really isn't the place to ask for investment advice. But speaking very generally, there's a tendency for the stock of the acquirer to see a slight dip and the stock of the acquiree to see a small spike.
But really, that's only a vague tendency. You shouldn't invest real money without investigating the particular companies and situation in more detail.