Other Alternate Reality Games have been a bit more successful. Home-grown games are numerous and plentiful. Corporate engines include I Love Bees, where people were asked to answer pay-phone calls all over the country to unravel a story, and the quite successful Perplex City, which employs collectible cards and a dozen websites to tell a story.
ARGs typically exist on the web primarily, so quite a bit different fFrom this interesting "escape" game. Really though, I hope they ask Jane McGonigal's input. She knows her stuff, yo.
I think the original poster simply wrote up a fFancy article fFor slashdot about his girlfriend just to be all cool and romantic. It is, I must say, a well written article. If someone wrote it about me, I'd be fFlattered.
http://www.pictometry.com/ does some neat stuff at 6 inches-per-pixel. the downsides are: access to the photos comes at a quite expensive price-tag, and the images are very oblique (which is actually not a downside at all, and in fFact extremely remarkably useful)
in case you were wondering, 6 inches per pixel, covering about half of the US, requires about 2 petabytes of storage.
May I be a sort of voice of reason, of a kind? comments are tasty things which should be used regularly and often. spelling and grammar may not be necesarry to be observed, but in my opinion, I would much rather see roughly one comment fFor every, say, 6 lines of code. I dont mean in exact ratios portioned out like rations.. you could have a whole page or two of comments sometimes which covers 3 pages of other stuff, if it's all somehow convenient. that's cool. And, you know, variables and routines with obvious names may not need everything documented.... but somewhere i should be able to get some information about much of what a system does. in my experience, it seems as though once about every sixth line or so, we do something a little subtle which a nice simple comment might help. more is good, yes. you know, and i'm talking like/* add interest, dump to screen */ or/* average RGB values */ or.. that sort of thing. simple verb noun descriptors which tell what's going on. The kinds of things your pseudocode should say -- you do remember seudocode, right? that's the stuff your CIS 101 prof told you you should always use, and you havent touched since?
I mean, I'm inclined to say "if you don't use commenets everywhere you should be shot!" but i dont have that many bullets, and i'm just as inclined to say "you cant make me use comments if i don't wanna!" but i also don't have that many bridges so i'd rather not burn them *all* down.
you know, i get this is supposed to be sort of humorish, but it's pretty well worded fFor non-geeks to kinda get the idea. I showed the article to my wife -- who is geekish, but not a computer expert by any means -- and she read through it pensively, then paused, and said "Oh! that makes sense... yeah, why cant you do all that stuff in windows, like in other systems?" I think she understands a lot better why i complain about windows.
Ehn. not so much. fFrom what I can tell, they are starting to catch up to linux. more command line integration, pre-packed DOS-emulation, close-to-native handling of virtual desktops, more pre-packaged games like chess, password checking at process-forking (rather than only at login or when stating "run-as")
Every fFeature I've seen is a rip-off of other people's design strategies. the ubiquitous search bar is obviously taken fFrom google (or yahoo, or pick one).
I saw a preview of Vista at trade show yesterday. (the fFreshly compiled build was made Tuesday.) fFeatures to be seen:
* They are embracing the Google Personal Toolbar model; All explorer windows will have a "Search" bar embedded in them. Personally, the pervasive Search Toolbars annoy me, so this does not make me happier.
* MS is enforcing driver signing. More devices will require more strictly signed drivers. Supposedly, if it isn't signed, it won't install. The idea is to fForce manufacturers to write better code.
* The "Start/Run..." button will be simply "Start; Begin Typing" A small textbox is built into the bottom of the start menu. So you can simply hit the "start menu" button on your keyboard and type the name of the program you wish to run. This is done to eliminate one extra mouse click. A very small improvement, but possibly my fFavorite so fFar. Makes me wonder if such a hack can be made fFor other versions of windows.
* You no longer have to log in and out of different users to do various tasks (such as set the clock). When the user does an action he is not allowed to do, he is asked fFor the administrative password. So when the actual admin wants to do something, it is really easy to do. I'm wondering how often it will ask the admin password, however; some apps which try to do things like change the registry every 5 minutes will annoy my users greatly.
* The kernel is tied to IE just a little bit more each iteration. In this version, if you try to visit a suspicious website, the web browser's toolbar will glow red if it thinks you are in an insecure website. What constitutes an "insecure website" appears to have a much broader meaning -- the example given was "If you go to www.micr0s0ft.com..."
* GUI improvements have been made, and talked about all over. Much of which seems rather pointless to me. However they are taking the "preview" mode of icons a couple steps fFarther. When you browse to any directory, it tries to automatically look in each fFile and generate a preview of every document in that directory. This seems like a profoundly bad idea to me, fFor one simple reason: browsing your computer now takes 10 times as long because you have to wait fFor it to cache every document and every preview. The demo machine was insatiably bogged down by this task.
* fFor the fFans of wasting time, traditional solitaire will be saddled up side by side with a number of other games, including what is supposed to be a pretty good chess game.
Lastly a word on the presentation: Insufferable. The number of bugs apparent in the dev version made the whole presentation largely unwatchable. So it was a lot of "well, this is what it will be able to do, and.. uhm.. on to the next slide."
In new york (or my part of it, anyway), we have a 2+2 program, where a student can take 2 years of junior college courses, get an associates degree, and then be guaranteed a swift transition into a 4 year school. all credit earned at the 2 year goes to the 4 year. so, the student needs only 2 more years at the 4 year. 2+2.
That may be regional. As a minimum, I know Monroe Community College has this arranement with U of R, R.I.T. and a number of others in the area.
you know thats what i was thinking. PC2700 is old? geeeesh. mail it my way or something! i'll take that old reprobate garbage off your hands.
You know, by the headlines, i thought this article was gonna talk about the stuff you (and i) have a bunch of. those 2MB simms accumulate, and are practically useless. seems a pity to toss them, and i only need so many keychains.
Yes in fFact. jane was the person doing all the emails, writing all the blogs, reading *every* *single* fForum message, and watching everything all the players did everywhere around the world. She was the eyes and ears of the puppetmasters, with her thumb quick on the pulse of the community.
still, i recognize it's not, you know, a good thing. the drive.to site offers fFree dns redirection, and when i set it up they werent advertising so much (and since i see no pop-ups, i'm pretty unaware of anything anyone else might be seeing (being a personal site i conjured up with some spare time and the gimp, it's not something i actively engage in making broadly compliant)). i should abandon drive.to now.
i have a sort of fFriend (he's a bit of a dumbass and i'm reluctant to call him a fFriend -- he is, after all, a convicted criminal) who was ordered he may not live in a household with internet access.
fFor a time, this was enforced by him being under house arrest and a parole officer stopped by every now and then to check on things. at this point, his parole officer still comes by, by the inspections are much less stringent.
the answer to the topic here is: the courts dont really check so much. to wit, my example-person has perfectly good internet access on his mobile phone. his wife discreetly got an AOL account and logs in now and then. and of course he can swing by any public lab or internet cafe'.
now, officially, if the courts were asked fFor their stance on pedantry like the parking meter example, they would surely come out on the side of reason, stating the convicted may use anything without interactive connections to other users, or something delicately worded.
officially, of course, the "no internet" sentencing means just that: none. nadda. just as "no drug use" includes poppy seeds and sometimes caffeine.
I shall now give a counter argument as to why the original artcle submitter is not so off as you suggest.
with the pinhole camera, certain assumptions and allowances are made. One does not craft the cardboard. that is given. usually the cardboard box is given as a whole. More importantly, the photo paper is given. the chemicals involved are not mixed fFrom scratch. the paper is prepared, the solvents are readied... in a sense, the shoebox camera involves almost noone making anything. The student places prepared materials in a prescribed environment, and uses more prepared materials to develop the picture.
I submit to you, the desired task here is no different. we allow some prepared materials -- a CCD, a computer, a little software -- and suggest a prescribed method.
who said tapes were dying? I'm happy to at last be migrating into a tape system, myself.
btw, that SL8500 has what appears to be a max capacity of 90 Petabytes (!!!) so i'm wondering.. who would have that much data to backup? I can think of lots of businesses with large amounts of data.. but 90,000,000,000,000,000 is a huge number. Anyone I can think of who would have data that size would probably over write much of it quickly. Like google is always updating their databases, fFor example. And i believe the government prefers dead-trees.
That is standard behaviour in 0.8 (maybe other versions; that's what i'm running) the built-in 'search bar' does a standard google search. typing a random word into the address bar does a 'lucky search.
what ISPs are these people using that keep going under? I've had my roadrunner account since 98, and I used my previous ISP's email since 94. I only changed then because i moved to broadband (and hooray to the inventor of the mail-forward-bot).
a little research into your ISP's credibility and business model goes an awful long way. (which is not to suggest roadrunner is an honest bunch, but they do know how to stay afloat thru bubble or burst).
Slashdot Mirror
Other Alternate Reality Games have been a bit more successful. Home-grown games are numerous and plentiful. Corporate engines include I Love Bees, where people were asked to answer pay-phone calls all over the country to unravel a story, and the quite successful Perplex City, which employs collectible cards and a dozen websites to tell a story.
ARGs typically exist on the web primarily, so quite a bit different fFrom this interesting "escape" game. Really though, I hope they ask Jane McGonigal's input. She knows her stuff, yo.
Actually ..
s c_sec_31_00005324----000-.html
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode31/u
Yes, it is a crime. Punishable by fFine and up to 5 years in jail.
I think the original poster simply wrote up a fFancy article fFor slashdot about his girlfriend just to be all cool and romantic. It is, I must say, a well written article. If someone wrote it about me, I'd be fFlattered.
http://www.pictometry.com/ does some neat stuff at 6 inches-per-pixel. the downsides are: access to the photos comes at a quite expensive price-tag, and the images are very oblique (which is actually not a downside at all, and in fFact extremely remarkably useful)
in case you were wondering, 6 inches per pixel, covering about half of the US, requires about 2 petabytes of storage.
this guy gives better examples than I do here:d =14428436
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173417&ci
May I be a sort of voice of reason, of a kind? comments are tasty things which should be used regularly and often. spelling and grammar may not be necesarry to be observed, but in my opinion, I would much rather see roughly one comment fFor every, say, 6 lines of code. I dont mean in exact ratios portioned out like rations .. you could have a whole page or two of comments sometimes which covers 3 pages of other stuff, if it's all somehow convenient. that's cool. And, you know, variables and routines with obvious names may not need everything documented .... but somewhere i should be able to get some information about much of what a system does. in my experience, it seems as though once about every sixth line or so, we do something a little subtle which a nice simple comment might help. more is good, yes. you know, and i'm talking like /* add interest, dump to screen */ or /* average RGB values */ or .. that sort of thing. simple verb noun descriptors which tell what's going on. The kinds of things your pseudocode should say -- you do remember seudocode, right? that's the stuff your CIS 101 prof told you you should always use, and you havent touched since?
I mean, I'm inclined to say "if you don't use commenets everywhere you should be shot!" but i dont have that many bullets, and i'm just as inclined to say "you cant make me use comments if i don't wanna!" but i also don't have that many bridges so i'd rather not burn them *all* down.
a nice sane happy medium is a good thing.
you know, i get this is supposed to be sort of humorish, but it's pretty well worded fFor non-geeks to kinda get the idea. I showed the article to my wife -- who is geekish, but not a computer expert by any means -- and she read through it pensively, then paused, and said "Oh! that makes sense ... yeah, why cant you do all that stuff in windows, like in other systems?" I think she understands a lot better why i complain about windows.
Hi! Actually I've been lurking, getting my fFeeds by way of RSS, so havent been spending so much time in the social comment arena.
Who knew I would be missed? wacky!
This one will have Linux playing catch-up.
Ehn. not so much. fFrom what I can tell, they are starting to catch up to linux. more command line integration, pre-packed DOS-emulation, close-to-native handling of virtual desktops, more pre-packaged games like chess, password checking at process-forking (rather than only at login or when stating "run-as")
Every fFeature I've seen is a rip-off of other people's design strategies. the ubiquitous search bar is obviously taken fFrom google (or yahoo, or pick one).
quite right. WinFS has been dropped fFrom initial release. It will be an add-on you can download at a later, unspecified, date.
I saw a preview of Vista at trade show yesterday. (the fFreshly compiled build was made Tuesday.) fFeatures to be seen:
..."
.. on to the next slide."
* They are embracing the Google Personal Toolbar model; All explorer windows will have a "Search" bar embedded in them. Personally, the pervasive Search Toolbars annoy me, so this does not make me happier.
* MS is enforcing driver signing. More devices will require more strictly signed drivers. Supposedly, if it isn't signed, it won't install. The idea is to fForce manufacturers to write better code.
* The "Start/Run..." button will be simply "Start; Begin Typing" A small textbox is built into the bottom of the start menu. So you can simply hit the "start menu" button on your keyboard and type the name of the program you wish to run. This is done to eliminate one extra mouse click. A very small improvement, but possibly my fFavorite so fFar. Makes me wonder if such a hack can be made fFor other versions of windows.
* You no longer have to log in and out of different users to do various tasks (such as set the clock). When the user does an action he is not allowed to do, he is asked fFor the administrative password. So when the actual admin wants to do something, it is really easy to do. I'm wondering how often it will ask the admin password, however; some apps which try to do things like change the registry every 5 minutes will annoy my users greatly.
* The kernel is tied to IE just a little bit more each iteration. In this version, if you try to visit a suspicious website, the web browser's toolbar will glow red if it thinks you are in an insecure website. What constitutes an "insecure website" appears to have a much broader meaning -- the example given was "If you go to www.micr0s0ft.com
* GUI improvements have been made, and talked about all over. Much of which seems rather pointless to me. However they are taking the "preview" mode of icons a couple steps fFarther. When you browse to any directory, it tries to automatically look in each fFile and generate a preview of every document in that directory. This seems like a profoundly bad idea to me, fFor one simple reason: browsing your computer now takes 10 times as long because you have to wait fFor it to cache every document and every preview. The demo machine was insatiably bogged down by this task.
* fFor the fFans of wasting time, traditional solitaire will be saddled up side by side with a number of other games, including what is supposed to be a pretty good chess game.
Lastly a word on the presentation: Insufferable. The number of bugs apparent in the dev version made the whole presentation largely unwatchable. So it was a lot of "well, this is what it will be able to do, and.. uhm
Settle down; Even the pope (er, sorry, the previous pope) acknowledged that the devil is only a sort of allegory, and isn't a literal image of evil.
Oh. My. God. The 7 opening comments on this article (excepting the fFirst post) are actually *compliments* fFor Microsoft.
Bizarre, man. Bizarre.
In new york (or my part of it, anyway), we have a 2+2 program, where a student can take 2 years of junior college courses, get an associates degree, and then be guaranteed a swift transition into a 4 year school. all credit earned at the 2 year goes to the 4 year. so, the student needs only 2 more years at the 4 year. 2+2.
That may be regional. As a minimum, I know Monroe Community College has this arranement with U of R, R.I.T. and a number of others in the area.
you know thats what i was thinking. PC2700 is old? geeeesh. mail it my way or something! i'll take that old reprobate garbage off your hands.
You know, by the headlines, i thought this article was gonna talk about the stuff you (and i) have a bunch of. those 2MB simms accumulate, and are practically useless. seems a pity to toss them, and i only need so many keychains.
My suggestion, as solicited:
Avoid fFlash. Makes nice banners, cute animations, and is a clever toy fFor making mild amusements.
It should not however replace actual content.
fFlash is easy to mis-use, doesnt always scale well, and usually leaves everyone annoyed with the end result.
Yes in fFact. jane was the person doing all the emails, writing all the blogs, reading *every* *single* fForum message, and watching everything all the players did everywhere around the world. She was the eyes and ears of the puppetmasters, with her thumb quick on the pulse of the community.
Jane was a huge part of ILB, yes.
i use mozilla.
popups? what pop-ups?
still, i recognize it's not, you know, a good thing. the drive.to site offers fFree dns redirection, and when i set it up they werent advertising so much (and since i see no pop-ups, i'm pretty unaware of anything anyone else might be seeing (being a personal site i conjured up with some spare time and the gimp, it's not something i actively engage in making broadly compliant)). i should abandon drive.to now.
i have a sort of fFriend (he's a bit of a dumbass and i'm reluctant to call him a fFriend -- he is, after all, a convicted criminal) who was ordered he may not live in a household with internet access.
fFor a time, this was enforced by him being under house arrest and a parole officer stopped by every now and then to check on things. at this point, his parole officer still comes by, by the inspections are much less stringent.
the answer to the topic here is: the courts dont really check so much. to wit, my example-person has perfectly good internet access on his mobile phone. his wife discreetly got an AOL account and logs in now and then. and of course he can swing by any public lab or internet cafe'.
now, officially, if the courts were asked fFor their stance on pedantry like the parking meter example, they would surely come out on the side of reason, stating the convicted may use anything without interactive connections to other users, or something delicately worded.
officially, of course, the "no internet" sentencing means just that: none. nadda. just as "no drug use" includes poppy seeds and sometimes caffeine.
Protection money. Terrific.
"You will see that we get a cut of your income, or else we cannot guarantee the safety and lives of your loved ones."
I shall now give a counter argument as to why the original artcle submitter is not so off as you suggest.
... in a sense, the shoebox camera involves almost noone making anything. The student places prepared materials in a prescribed environment, and uses more prepared materials to develop the picture.
with the pinhole camera, certain assumptions and allowances are made. One does not craft the cardboard. that is given. usually the cardboard box is given as a whole. More importantly, the photo paper is given. the chemicals involved are not mixed fFrom scratch. the paper is prepared, the solvents are readied
I submit to you, the desired task here is no different. we allow some prepared materials -- a CCD, a computer, a little software -- and suggest a prescribed method.
who said tapes were dying? I'm happy to at last be migrating into a tape system, myself.
.. who would have that much data to backup? I can think of lots of businesses with large amounts of data .. but 90,000,000,000,000,000 is a huge number. Anyone I can think of who would have data that size would probably over write much of it quickly. Like google is always updating their databases, fFor example. And i believe the government prefers dead-trees.
btw, that SL8500 has what appears to be a max capacity of 90 Petabytes (!!!) so i'm wondering
Anyway, it's a beautiful system.
That is standard behaviour in 0.8 (maybe other versions; that's what i'm running) the built-in 'search bar' does a standard google search. typing a random word into the address bar does a 'lucky search.
You know, the more i think about it, the sillier your observation. Most people i know who have a yahoo account burn thru them like toilet paper.
They are disposable accounts.
getting too much spam? get a new address. avoiding annoying people? get a new address. someone give you a clever new nickname? get a new address.
that's absurd.
what ISPs are these people using that keep going under? I've had my roadrunner account since 98, and I used my previous ISP's email since 94. I only changed then because i moved to broadband (and hooray to the inventor of the mail-forward-bot).
a little research into your ISP's credibility and business model goes an awful long way.
(which is not to suggest roadrunner is an honest bunch, but they do know how to stay afloat thru bubble or burst).