Those darn socialist hippies at Microsoft are at it again, taking bread out of the mouths of hard-working capitalists by GIVING stuff away for free. Don't those anarchist bastards realize there's no value in something if people don't have to pay for it? Presumably the quality of VOIP will now deteriorate, because lack of profit motive will kill innovation, etc, etc, and all the other things Ballmer is always ranting about.
Man I hate cane toads. They are ug-a-leee little mofos. They hide in the daytime and come out at night, so you go walking around in the grass and something moves nearby, and Yikes, it's one of those little buggers. They're big and squashy and creepy looking, like atom bomb mutants from a 50s sci-fi movie. And fearless. Stomp your feet at them and they hop toward you, not away, and I've heard that they bite. The up side is that they really aren't poisonous unless you try to eat one (which is why the predators don't fare too well), or possibly if you manage to touch one without getting bit and then you ate something without washing your hands.
Thanks to the guys at Lik Sang for taking the time to do this review. It was very thorough and well written, with nice screenshots and good information about the gun. So much for the review.
Having said that, I think it's a waste to use a gun-type pointing device with any kind of display screen, unless the game is about shooting through a window from the middle of a room. To physically get into the spirit of a gunfight takes more than a pistol grip and a trigger. You really have to be in a larger play environment where threats can come from all over, such as VR goggles provide. I don't see how moving your arm side to side a few degrees to pick targets off a screen is any more exciting than using a mouse or a joystick.
I think people are being way too hard on the movie. Sure it was nothing like as good as the book, but that's almost universally true of movie adaptations. The HitchHiker's Guide is probably an extreme case because almost every line of the book is great. There are no expendable parts. My wife and I had read the books many years before seeing the movie -- long enough ago not to remember all the stuff that was left out, but recently enough to be familiar with what was left in. There were some good things, for example I thought the way they handled Zaphod's second head was inventive. I thought it was so-so but not terrible.
Glad to know somebody else remembers magnetic bubble technology. When I first read about it in the 1980s it was supposed to revolutionize storage (like everything else). All the music ever recorded would fit in a unit the size of a cigar box. At least that part has probably been achieved by now, but what happened to the bubbles, and how is this new approach different?
I was sad to see that a search for CPM in this thread came up empty. Oh well.
My first computer was a CPM system called a "Big Board" -- a single-board Z80 computer with a whopping 64k RAM and TWO 8-inch floppies. I got the parts from a more advanced enthusiast who was putting them together in kits with semi-complete instructions. I hand soldered the whole thing in a few evenings. It worked the first time I turned it on, after a moment of panic before realizing that the brightness control on the monitor was turned all the way down. The massive, cube-shaped case is an artless combination of 3/4" particle board with imitation woodgrain vinyl finish and sheet aluminum.
I still have the computer and a box of 8" floppies, and have been thinking about firing the thing up again, but it hasn't run in more than 20 years since the old monochrome monitor burned out. And if I recall correctly the floppies have rubber drive belts, which are probably rotten by now.
A government that plans to put a GPS in every car and build a nationwide monitoring system, just to collect road taxes, is balking at the cost of handing out ID cards?
Wow, take a look at Peter Moore's photo in the article. Obviously a free-wheeling, devil-may-care kind of guy who knows how to put the FUN back in Accounts Receivable! With him behind the joystick I bet we can expect an average 23.6% net gain in player satisfaction over the next fiscal biennium (inflation adjusted).
I currently inhabit one third of a standard 8x8 cubicle. I would settle for either cash compensation to me or paying the other two guys to shower and brush their teeth more often.
[dials wife] Honey, I just read on Slashdot something about Home Depot going out of business. We need 2x4s and sheetrock for the new rec room! Meet me at Home Depot in the mini-van! Bring the tape measure! Wait. First I gotta go post this on Fark. Holy Crap!
My experience with company-wide standardization of technical details is that there are all kinds of reasons why it seems like a great idea for a while, but then it turns into obsolescence and stagnation. One problem is that users inevitably want to buy packages that IT will have to customize, and the IT dept refuses because of standards. The users hate the 2nd or 3rd best choice that does fit the standard, and the IT people who work on it get blamed for all its shortcomings.
Another problem is personnel rot. You standardize on ColdFusion or ASP/VBScript or whatever, but then the rest of the world keeps moving. The talented creative people who want to learn C# or Ruby or whatever move on. Management replaces them with people who know their standard stuff and nothing else, who do everything one way whether it fits or not. Headhunters start describing your company as "a COBOL shop" or whatever, and you only attract one-dimensional job candidates. The people who stay behind will feel increasingly stuck there by their lack of experience with the cooler newer stuff.
I could go on and on... anyway, if they insist on doing this it might be a good way to get some solid experience, but plan on moving on in a couple years.
Why should a private enterprise be forced to take on a losing proposition?
Why shouldn't insurance companies take the same risks they have always taken? This new technology does nothing to increase the incidence of any disease, which would cost the insurance companies money. Predictive tools give people the chance to do preventative things, which actually lowers the insurance companies' risk without leaving anybody out in the cold. Everybody gains from it.
Using this information to blacklist people lowers the insurance company's risk even more, but at the expense of dooming some people to medical bankruptcy. That's not a responsible way to run a society. Capitalism isn't a reason to jettison everybody who has a problem. It's often used as an excuse, but it's not a reason. Fine with me if some people don't want to pay for anyone else's problems. They can go live in a bunker somewhere with barbed wire around it, but that's not why society exists.
This reminds me of a time back in 90s when I circulated a fake Wall St. Journal article that said Toshiba was going to buy the company where I worked. It was April Fools Day and the Toshiba spokesman's name in the article was Igata Takashawa (say it fast). I really didn't think anyone would buy it, but they sure did. It spread through the building like wildfire, and various depts had emergency meetings to squash the rumor. We were herded into a noisy, overcrowded conference room where my article was projected on the wall. Our manager was standing on a chair trying to get control. He was a short, bulldog-like, easily antagonized Englishman who looked and sounded a lot like Bob Hoskins. The company had designated April 1st as "Funny Hat Day," and for some reason he had decided to go all the way and dress up like a pirate -- bandanna on his head, gold earring, big white shirt, black pants. He also tended to talk fast when he got excited, making him difficult to understand. Some of the people didn't seem to get that we already knew the article was fake. They were babbling away about what-if, what-if, pointing out various parts of the article and arguing about it, with this sweaty Bob Hoskins pirate on a chair sputtering away over the crowd noise, waving his arms to get everybody to shut up. For years after I left the company, I kept hearing from friends there that the story still came up every April. Classic corporate comedy gold.
Back when Powell introduced the bogus intelligence information in front of the U.N. and it turned out to be cribbed from 10-year-old studies available on the Internet, it should have been a big red light for Americans. Now even the people who were on the fence then and are having second thoughts now are mostly doing it because they're looking at maybe a $1 trillion cost eventually. They still ignore the depth of corruption in our government. Our legislators routinely take bribes to write laws, in many cases just parroting the legislation as handed to them by corporate lawyers, complete with spelling errors. But we continue to call it campaign financing or the reality of politics, or dismissing the critics as cynical or self-promoting or simply calling them "liberals" as if the term itself invalidates anything they say. The country is screwed up. In my opinion it's beyond saving. All we can do is watch it go down the drain and hope the disintegration process isn't too painful.
Slashdot Mirror
Those darn socialist hippies at Microsoft are at it again, taking bread out of the mouths of hard-working capitalists by GIVING stuff away for free. Don't those anarchist bastards realize there's no value in something if people don't have to pay for it? Presumably the quality of VOIP will now deteriorate, because lack of profit motive will kill innovation, etc, etc, and all the other things Ballmer is always ranting about.
Our literacy is eroding? WTF? OMG! ROFL!
BRB
Man I hate cane toads. They are ug-a-leee little mofos. They hide in the daytime and come out at night, so you go walking around in the grass and something moves nearby, and Yikes, it's one of those little buggers. They're big and squashy and creepy looking, like atom bomb mutants from a 50s sci-fi movie. And fearless. Stomp your feet at them and they hop toward you, not away, and I've heard that they bite. The up side is that they really aren't poisonous unless you try to eat one (which is why the predators don't fare too well), or possibly if you manage to touch one without getting bit and then you ate something without washing your hands.
Now that Adaptive Path guy is going be even more insufferably smug.
Thanks to the guys at Lik Sang for taking the time to do this review. It was very thorough and well written, with nice screenshots and good information about the gun. So much for the review.
Having said that, I think it's a waste to use a gun-type pointing device with any kind of display screen, unless the game is about shooting through a window from the middle of a room. To physically get into the spirit of a gunfight takes more than a pistol grip and a trigger. You really have to be in a larger play environment where threats can come from all over, such as VR goggles provide. I don't see how moving your arm side to side a few degrees to pick targets off a screen is any more exciting than using a mouse or a joystick.
I think people are being way too hard on the movie. Sure it was nothing like as good as the book, but that's almost universally true of movie adaptations. The HitchHiker's Guide is probably an extreme case because almost every line of the book is great. There are no expendable parts. My wife and I had read the books many years before seeing the movie -- long enough ago not to remember all the stuff that was left out, but recently enough to be familiar with what was left in. There were some good things, for example I thought the way they handled Zaphod's second head was inventive. I thought it was so-so but not terrible.
Glad to know somebody else remembers magnetic bubble technology. When I first read about it in the 1980s it was supposed to revolutionize storage (like everything else). All the music ever recorded would fit in a unit the size of a cigar box. At least that part has probably been achieved by now, but what happened to the bubbles, and how is this new approach different?
Our netadmin radiates his own individual magnetic field. Sort of.
I was sad to see that a search for CPM in this thread came up empty. Oh well.
My first computer was a CPM system called a "Big Board" -- a single-board Z80 computer with a whopping 64k RAM and TWO 8-inch floppies. I got the parts from a more advanced enthusiast who was putting them together in kits with semi-complete instructions. I hand soldered the whole thing in a few evenings. It worked the first time I turned it on, after a moment of panic before realizing that the brightness control on the monitor was turned all the way down. The massive, cube-shaped case is an artless combination of 3/4" particle board with imitation woodgrain vinyl finish and sheet aluminum.
I still have the computer and a box of 8" floppies, and have been thinking about firing the thing up again, but it hasn't run in more than 20 years since the old monochrome monitor burned out. And if I recall correctly the floppies have rubber drive belts, which are probably rotten by now.
A government that plans to put a GPS in every car and build a nationwide monitoring system, just to collect road taxes, is balking at the cost of handing out ID cards?
It hides from the light but gravitates toward Sarah Connor.
Okay, how about Suicidal Grasshoppers?
Wow, take a look at Peter Moore's photo in the article. Obviously a free-wheeling, devil-may-care kind of guy who knows how to put the FUN back in Accounts Receivable! With him behind the joystick I bet we can expect an average 23.6% net gain in player satisfaction over the next fiscal biennium (inflation adjusted).
I currently inhabit one third of a standard 8x8 cubicle. I would settle for either cash compensation to me or paying the other two guys to shower and brush their teeth more often.
[dials wife] Honey, I just read on Slashdot something about Home Depot going out of business. We need 2x4s and sheetrock for the new rec room! Meet me at Home Depot in the mini-van! Bring the tape measure! Wait. First I gotta go post this on Fark. Holy Crap!
IT Mgr: "How's everything running?"
Sysop: "Laaaaaa, li-li-li-laahh, LEEEEE, loooooo!"
It doesn't get me any closer to finding Sarah Connor.
My experience with company-wide standardization of technical details is that there are all kinds of reasons why it seems like a great idea for a while, but then it turns into obsolescence and stagnation. One problem is that users inevitably want to buy packages that IT will have to customize, and the IT dept refuses because of standards. The users hate the 2nd or 3rd best choice that does fit the standard, and the IT people who work on it get blamed for all its shortcomings.
Another problem is personnel rot. You standardize on ColdFusion or ASP/VBScript or whatever, but then the rest of the world keeps moving. The talented creative people who want to learn C# or Ruby or whatever move on. Management replaces them with people who know their standard stuff and nothing else, who do everything one way whether it fits or not. Headhunters start describing your company as "a COBOL shop" or whatever, and you only attract one-dimensional job candidates. The people who stay behind will feel increasingly stuck there by their lack of experience with the cooler newer stuff.
I could go on and on... anyway, if they insist on doing this it might be a good way to get some solid experience, but plan on moving on in a couple years.
Why should a private enterprise be forced to take on a losing proposition?
Why shouldn't insurance companies take the same risks they have always taken? This new technology does nothing to increase the incidence of any disease, which would cost the insurance companies money. Predictive tools give people the chance to do preventative things, which actually lowers the insurance companies' risk without leaving anybody out in the cold. Everybody gains from it.
Using this information to blacklist people lowers the insurance company's risk even more, but at the expense of dooming some people to medical bankruptcy. That's not a responsible way to run a society. Capitalism isn't a reason to jettison everybody who has a problem. It's often used as an excuse, but it's not a reason. Fine with me if some people don't want to pay for anyone else's problems. They can go live in a bunker somewhere with barbed wire around it, but that's not why society exists.
They failed to mention that teenagers who reach puberty early are less likely to know Javascript or how to use two cellphones to cook an egg.
those with a higher proportion of female friends appeared to be less likely to experience subsequent victimization.
In other words, teenage girls shoot, stab and beat you up less often than boys do.
/slaps forehead
prohibited... within 12 miles of food preparation areas
Crap. My living room is way less than 12 miles from my kitchen.
This reminds me of a time back in 90s when I circulated a fake Wall St. Journal article that said Toshiba was going to buy the company where I worked. It was April Fools Day and the Toshiba spokesman's name in the article was Igata Takashawa (say it fast). I really didn't think anyone would buy it, but they sure did. It spread through the building like wildfire, and various depts had emergency meetings to squash the rumor. We were herded into a noisy, overcrowded conference room where my article was projected on the wall. Our manager was standing on a chair trying to get control. He was a short, bulldog-like, easily antagonized Englishman who looked and sounded a lot like Bob Hoskins. The company had designated April 1st as "Funny Hat Day," and for some reason he had decided to go all the way and dress up like a pirate -- bandanna on his head, gold earring, big white shirt, black pants. He also tended to talk fast when he got excited, making him difficult to understand. Some of the people didn't seem to get that we already knew the article was fake. They were babbling away about what-if, what-if, pointing out various parts of the article and arguing about it, with this sweaty Bob Hoskins pirate on a chair sputtering away over the crowd noise, waving his arms to get everybody to shut up. For years after I left the company, I kept hearing from friends there that the story still came up every April.
Classic corporate comedy gold.
Keith Richards in a high-def 3D close-up is just too frightening to think about.
Back when Powell introduced the bogus intelligence information in front of the U.N. and it turned out to be cribbed from 10-year-old studies available on the Internet, it should have been a big red light for Americans. Now even the people who were on the fence then and are having second thoughts now are mostly doing it because they're looking at maybe a $1 trillion cost eventually. They still ignore the depth of corruption in our government. Our legislators routinely take bribes to write laws, in many cases just parroting the legislation as handed to them by corporate lawyers, complete with spelling errors. But we continue to call it campaign financing or the reality of politics, or dismissing the critics as cynical or self-promoting or simply calling them "liberals" as if the term itself invalidates anything they say. The country is screwed up. In my opinion it's beyond saving. All we can do is watch it go down the drain and hope the disintegration process isn't too painful.