You didn't say what version of Windows you were running, so it's tough to tell what might be available to you from an accessibility standpoint. On the Mac you can invert colours, use greyscale, and alter the contrast of the screen as well as cursor size (in addition to the typical colour schemes, display brightness, etc). It sounds to me like you may be facing an uphill battle if you are trying to do this outside of what the OS supports directly.
So, I am not a big Eve fanboy (even though I do play), and I have criticized it publicly here on slashdot before (as SimCity in space (which has limited appeal)). And I would love to have good competition in the genre. But (and not to try to be an asshole here), your description of Eve misses the mark of what it is and if the concept you describe has put you off it may be you've misunderstood it from the outset.
You've probably heard it described as a sandbox. That is what it is. I've never seen a 1k x 1k battle, and frankly I've never seen more than a half dozen ships duking it out at a time, and I have never participated in any such battles of any size. What you do and what you see is your choice (that is the point). Elite (the original) had the concept of the sandbox insomuch as there were markets and systems and what you did in the universe was entirely up to you. I hope the games are similar in that way. The point I was making about the OP's remarks was where that sandbox breaks down, and my supposition is that Elite will put limits on the sandbox out of necessity because of the game mechanic the OP was espousing.
You do not ever have to grind in Eve (unlike most MMORPGs which require it to progress). In terms of ability Eve progression is done in real-time (the longer you are a subscriber the more you can progress), but again, in what skills you progress is a decision you can make for yourself. There is no "dps/tank/support" tracks and you should really choose just one or you're going to be lame, etc. There are hundreds if not thousands of skills and they affect how you perform in whichever of the hundreds of ships you choose to pilot, or industries you choose to get into or occupations you try to excel at.
It's not a grind, but it *IS* another job...:)
Is Elite going to excel at gameplay and also at the sandbox? I hope so, but I fear the challenges are huge. I agree with everyone here who has said that it is not enough money (or time). Eve is still working at getting the balance just right and they've been doing it for 10 years.
Eve Online is click and point rolling dice game. In Elite and Elite: Dangerous you have actually to fly ship.
Wow. Two comments about this.
1. If you are saying they are two different games so they will appeal to different audiences I'm afraid you may be mistaken. Eve is very much based on the work that came before it (Elite, and Homeworld) and that particular genre of game is going to (and does) appeal to a very specific audience. Elite is going to be competing with Eve. If it can't, then it will die, and no amount of hoping it's something different will change that.
2. Eve (if the developers are to be believed) has the rolling dice mechanic you sited for practical network bandwidth, latency, and rendering reasons. The idea is that the client knows the parameters of every ship in the game and knows what commands are given to every ship and only transmits those commands to all of the other clients on-grid which subsequently renders them correctly. What Elite wants to do is allow you to fly the ship free-form. Fine, but that is a lot more information to transmit to each and every client on-grid (because you end up transmitting real-time coordinates). Good luck. Once Elite has 1000+ ship space battles with the mechanic you site as superior you may come back here and gloat. I suspect what you are able to do in-game will end up having to be artificially limited out of necessity and probably sold to you as a feature or design element.
I used to play Elite. I used to play Homeworld. I play Eve. And I sincerely hope to play Elite: Dangerous. But Elite will be competing with Eve for my monthly dollars, and they have some serious architectural challenges ahead of them.
"I've known people to not get promotions specifically on the grounds that they used too much of their sick time."
Without the context this phrase is not enough to base a judgement on. If a person is "sickly" meaning that they struggle all the time with illness then it is quite possibly the worst thing you can do to them to promote them into a role where they would either have more responsibility or were required to work harder. It may in fact kill them. For the employer it could mean that they just find it too much and quit and you would have to backfill their position. If your manager is making judgements about your work ethic based on statistical information about your sick days, then they are just a lazy, ineffective manager and should be fired by their manager.
"Some people literally cant afford to be sick, I.E. you don't work you don't get paid."
I pay my contractors when they're sick. In fact, I also give them vacation time that I pay them for if they are a long-term contractor. I want them to be healthy, happy and productive, not overworked and miserable. That just doesn't make sense.
I am a manager. Each year around this time of year I remind all of the people who work for me about the "I'm sick" policy. That policy is: "Don't come to work. I hate being sick, and if you give me the cold or a flu I'm going to be pissed off." I don't tell them they must work while they are at home, or that they shouldn't work while they are at home -- just like I don't tell them to brush their teeth or not. I expect them to use good judgement -- that is part of being a good employee. Being understanding and enabling your employees is being a good manager.
Good managers know their staff. If someone is not pulling their weight, you should know. If someone is putting in the extra effort, you should know. If you are making performance-related decisions about your staff based on statistics about their sick days you're a lazy-ass manager and YOUR manager should fire you. If you're working for someone who manages you like that, you should quietly start looking around.
IMHO, looking for the right job is as much about finding the right manager as it is about working in an occupation that you care about.
Caveat: If you are a manager and can't manage your staff properly because there is just too damn many of them, then YOU'RE manager is not doing his/her job... This is really simple, I have no idea why people find it such a mystery. People need to lead by example -- being a manager is not some kind of reward for a long successful career -- it's more responsibility and you need to step up to it.
Interesting, but until you compare the design costs of each device, you can't make a statement about whether or not the price is a fair one. These things don't just spontaneously arise.
During the ascent the Falcon 9 lost an engine. Apparently a single engine fault is something that the Falcon 9 is designed for and can continue the mission on 8 engines.
What makes me feel old (apart from the ID) is remembering the slashdotting I got in the early days after I submitted a software review. When I think back to it now, the server the site was hosted on was a Dual Pentium 133. Each "CPU" lived on it's own full-length card and had a proprietary bus to bridge them. Slashdot CRUSHED that machine, despite it being quite modern for the time.
I appreciate the current Slashdot owners attempts to keep the site exciting and relevant and yet appeal to my sense of nostalgia by putting a typo in the summary.;)
"It is 2025 and the planet is rapidly approaching environmental death. Dr. Gupta Singh, a Hindu guru with a Jim Jones-like following, has proposed the suicide, by lottery, of one-third of the world's population. His followers have elected a Depopulationist majority in Congress..."
Possibly a little outdated but I recall it being a very good read.
It's interesting the way that we (as a collective civilization) have gone from attempting to block dangerous activity on the Internet for children, to creating safe "playgrounds" for them, to giving up completely on user-based controls and instead just doing semi-autonomous monitoring of country-wide Internet traffic looking for "dangerous" on-line activity.
We so desperately want to make our children's safety a government problem so we don't have to do anything ourselves and have someone to blame/sue if they are ever in danger. Governments desperately want to exercise their control over us because that is what governments all seem to move towards at the end of the day (taking their responsibility to keep us safe a little too much to heart (or just an extension of the power play that people in the business of government seem drawn towards)).
How is a minority of responsible citizens ever to stand in the the way of the majority that want to be controlled and the governments who are willing to control them? I wish I knew the answer. It doesn't appear that a democratic system of government is enough.
You sir are a Gnostic. Thought I should tell you in case you didn't know.:)
Gnostics believe that the creator god was a false god. The "snake" in the Genesis story liberated humanity from the false god who had enslaved us by giving us knowledge of good and evil... Fascinating stuff.
"The United States remains concerned about the availability of rights of appeal in Canada’s administrative process for reviewing the regulatory approval of pharmaceutical products, as well as limitations in Canada’s trademark regime."
The US is concerned about our rights of appeal. That's awesome! American foreign policy at its finest.
I'm sure there are going to be dozens posts about the evil conservative government and how they have all their ministries scared to say anything about anything. However, and despite all the cool stuff that the NRC does (like 3d scanners, heated concrete, etc), they do do a lot of top secret research. I'm not surprised that a request involving a foreign government organization was met with a bureaucratic response.
Here is a quick list of some of their best and most important work. Probably a much more interesting article than the fishing expedition of the Ottawa Citizen.
I opt out every single time. And I pretend to know nothing about the technology. "No way, I don't want to be x-rayed". It's not an x-ray sir, its..." "I don't care what it is damnit. I dont' want cancer from your damn machine..." "Okay, sir, okay. Just step over here..."
There should at least be SOME benefits to getting old. This is one. You can pretend to be insane and people will do whatever you want them to.
I wear track pants and leave my underwear in my luggage. You think *I'm* uncomfortable? Not as uncomfortable as the guy patting down the old man not wearing any underwear I can assure you... Someone needs to counterbalance these young thrill-seekers.
Fourteen years ago I was invited to speak to Canadian MPs about "Internet safety." The only MPs that showed up (sober) were Conservative MPs. Other MPs (Liberals, NDP, and Bloc) were in the same building partying with the Lumber Lobby and the strippers they brought with them. A few Bloc MPs showed up a little later but were so drunk they could hardly walk.
To say I'm disappointed with this current turn of events is an understatement given what I have done to avoid it. That said, anybody who thinks that this is because the Conservatives are in power is, frankly, just an ignorant troll. Governments want control. All governments. You're job as the populace is to vocally encourage them to focus their efforts on methods of "protecting the people" (the initial and still principle role of government) that do so in a way that does not infringe on their rights as citizens.
If you're concerned about it (and you should be), be sure to contact your MP and tell them how you feel, what they should be doing differently, and how this is going to effect your vote in the next election.
It was also said in French. And Quebec French at that. So this would have had to have been translated by someone in the US before it was decided that this was a threat. Possibly poorly translated...
But on top of that TFA is merely speculating about the cause of the arrest. Both the prosecutor and defendant are not talking specifics so we really don't know what the cause was. I doubt very much that the Americans built a terrorist profile from a single text message in a foreign language.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching the Curiosity Launch Video. I don't think the rover has to worry about radiation so much as the landing. I'd like to start a pool on which part of the untested landing sequence will fail and deliver a smoking hole in Mars instead of the rover.
I seriously hope it works - if it does it will be one of humanity's most amazing technological feats. But I fear the worst.
I was 12 years old. I worked for a summer and made enough money to buy the unassembled version. It was essentially a bag of parts that you soldered together yourself. Add an old black and white TV, a cassette tape recorder and you were on your way. That way back when "built your own computer" meant that either you assembled it or actually designed the darn thing. Today it means you connected the major components together and hoped everybody followed spec.
The best part of the ZX81 was the fantastic instruction manual it came with that essentially taught you how to program (in BASIC). Very well written. I eventually left basic behind and started programming in Forth.
I don't have mine anymore, but I wish I did. The membrane keyboard was truly horrible to use, the RAM (1K) insufficient (I eventually purchased the 16K add-on), and the entire thing painfully slow. But it was an affordable, functional computer back when that was a rarity. I owe it and it's designers a great debt.
Some parts of the world have "distracted driving" laws. In retrospect I should have written "I try pairing my car's bluetooth with the phones of those I see nearby who are operating their phones by holding them up to their heads. Where I live operating a cell phone in a non-handsfree manner in a motor vehicle is illegal."
I tend to use parentheses (and frankly, ellipses) too often, and sadly Slashdot still does not have the ability to edit your comments after you post them...
For the record, I cannot and have no interest in identifying illegal immigrants by sight, or by any other means in any country (my own is not the US). I am also not making a statement about the efficacy of distracted driving laws. My car's bluetooth system is integrated into the car and will not allow me to make configuration changes (like pairing with a new device) while moving so this only works in stop and go (for those who thought I had some hardware hack).
Finally a general observation: It is our nature now to try to make the best use of every minute of every day. When people get stopped in traffic the first thing they do is pick up their phone (I see Blackberries the most around here) and check their e-mail or check their voicemail or call someone. One a good day (for me) the second thing they do is see "Connection Request from POLICE" on their phone.
Juvenile I know. But highly entertaining in the right context.
I changed the bluetooth ID of my car's hands-free unit to "POLICE" and whenever I'm stopped in rush-hour traffic I try connecting my "car" to people I see nearby who are (illegally here) holding their cell phones to their ears. Fun times. The reactions I get are priceless.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't say what version of Windows you were running, so it's tough to tell what might be available to you from an accessibility standpoint. On the Mac you can invert colours, use greyscale, and alter the contrast of the screen as well as cursor size (in addition to the typical colour schemes, display brightness, etc). It sounds to me like you may be facing an uphill battle if you are trying to do this outside of what the OS supports directly.
Too bad you can't go anywhere...
One of the benefits of government-run everything is that big infrastructure is easier to mandate and implement. The downsides are, well, freedom...
So, I am not a big Eve fanboy (even though I do play), and I have criticized it publicly here on slashdot before (as SimCity in space (which has limited appeal)). And I would love to have good competition in the genre. But (and not to try to be an asshole here), your description of Eve misses the mark of what it is and if the concept you describe has put you off it may be you've misunderstood it from the outset.
You've probably heard it described as a sandbox. That is what it is. I've never seen a 1k x 1k battle, and frankly I've never seen more than a half dozen ships duking it out at a time, and I have never participated in any such battles of any size. What you do and what you see is your choice (that is the point). Elite (the original) had the concept of the sandbox insomuch as there were markets and systems and what you did in the universe was entirely up to you. I hope the games are similar in that way. The point I was making about the OP's remarks was where that sandbox breaks down, and my supposition is that Elite will put limits on the sandbox out of necessity because of the game mechanic the OP was espousing.
You do not ever have to grind in Eve (unlike most MMORPGs which require it to progress). In terms of ability Eve progression is done in real-time (the longer you are a subscriber the more you can progress), but again, in what skills you progress is a decision you can make for yourself. There is no "dps/tank/support" tracks and you should really choose just one or you're going to be lame, etc. There are hundreds if not thousands of skills and they affect how you perform in whichever of the hundreds of ships you choose to pilot, or industries you choose to get into or occupations you try to excel at.
It's not a grind, but it *IS* another job... :)
Is Elite going to excel at gameplay and also at the sandbox? I hope so, but I fear the challenges are huge. I agree with everyone here who has said that it is not enough money (or time). Eve is still working at getting the balance just right and they've been doing it for 10 years.
Eve Online is click and point rolling dice game. In Elite and Elite: Dangerous you have actually to fly ship.
Wow. Two comments about this.
1. If you are saying they are two different games so they will appeal to different audiences I'm afraid you may be mistaken. Eve is very much based on the work that came before it (Elite, and Homeworld) and that particular genre of game is going to (and does) appeal to a very specific audience. Elite is going to be competing with Eve. If it can't, then it will die, and no amount of hoping it's something different will change that.
2. Eve (if the developers are to be believed) has the rolling dice mechanic you sited for practical network bandwidth, latency, and rendering reasons. The idea is that the client knows the parameters of every ship in the game and knows what commands are given to every ship and only transmits those commands to all of the other clients on-grid which subsequently renders them correctly. What Elite wants to do is allow you to fly the ship free-form. Fine, but that is a lot more information to transmit to each and every client on-grid (because you end up transmitting real-time coordinates). Good luck. Once Elite has 1000+ ship space battles with the mechanic you site as superior you may come back here and gloat. I suspect what you are able to do in-game will end up having to be artificially limited out of necessity and probably sold to you as a feature or design element.
I used to play Elite. I used to play Homeworld. I play Eve. And I sincerely hope to play Elite: Dangerous. But Elite will be competing with Eve for my monthly dollars, and they have some serious architectural challenges ahead of them.
"I've known people to not get promotions specifically on the grounds that they used too much of their sick time."
Without the context this phrase is not enough to base a judgement on. If a person is "sickly" meaning that they struggle all the time with illness then it is quite possibly the worst thing you can do to them to promote them into a role where they would either have more responsibility or were required to work harder. It may in fact kill them. For the employer it could mean that they just find it too much and quit and you would have to backfill their position. If your manager is making judgements about your work ethic based on statistical information about your sick days, then they are just a lazy, ineffective manager and should be fired by their manager.
"Some people literally cant afford to be sick, I.E. you don't work you don't get paid."
I pay my contractors when they're sick. In fact, I also give them vacation time that I pay them for if they are a long-term contractor. I want them to be healthy, happy and productive, not overworked and miserable. That just doesn't make sense.
I am a manager. Each year around this time of year I remind all of the people who work for me about the "I'm sick" policy. That policy is: "Don't come to work. I hate being sick, and if you give me the cold or a flu I'm going to be pissed off." I don't tell them they must work while they are at home, or that they shouldn't work while they are at home -- just like I don't tell them to brush their teeth or not. I expect them to use good judgement -- that is part of being a good employee. Being understanding and enabling your employees is being a good manager.
Good managers know their staff. If someone is not pulling their weight, you should know. If someone is putting in the extra effort, you should know. If you are making performance-related decisions about your staff based on statistics about their sick days you're a lazy-ass manager and YOUR manager should fire you. If you're working for someone who manages you like that, you should quietly start looking around.
IMHO, looking for the right job is as much about finding the right manager as it is about working in an occupation that you care about.
Caveat: If you are a manager and can't manage your staff properly because there is just too damn many of them, then YOU'RE manager is not doing his/her job... This is really simple, I have no idea why people find it such a mystery. People need to lead by example -- being a manager is not some kind of reward for a long successful career -- it's more responsibility and you need to step up to it.
Interesting, but until you compare the design costs of each device, you can't make a statement about whether or not the price is a fair one. These things don't just spontaneously arise.
During the ascent the Falcon 9 lost an engine. Apparently a single engine fault is something that the Falcon 9 is designed for and can continue the mission on 8 engines.
What makes me feel old (apart from the ID) is remembering the slashdotting I got in the early days after I submitted a software review. When I think back to it now, the server the site was hosted on was a Dual Pentium 133. Each "CPU" lived on it's own full-length card and had a proprietary bus to bridge them. Slashdot CRUSHED that machine, despite it being quite modern for the time.
I appreciate the current Slashdot owners attempts to keep the site exciting and relevant and yet appeal to my sense of nostalgia by putting a typo in the summary. ;)
Nature's End
"It is 2025 and the planet is rapidly approaching environmental death. Dr. Gupta Singh, a Hindu guru with a Jim Jones-like following, has proposed the suicide, by lottery, of one-third of the world's population. His followers have elected a Depopulationist majority in Congress..."
Possibly a little outdated but I recall it being a very good read.
Thank you very much for posting the link (you made my morning). I am a big fan of the man and I hadn't seen or read that piece of his before.
It's interesting the way that we (as a collective civilization) have gone from attempting to block dangerous activity on the Internet for children, to creating safe "playgrounds" for them, to giving up completely on user-based controls and instead just doing semi-autonomous monitoring of country-wide Internet traffic looking for "dangerous" on-line activity.
We so desperately want to make our children's safety a government problem so we don't have to do anything ourselves and have someone to blame/sue if they are ever in danger. Governments desperately want to exercise their control over us because that is what governments all seem to move towards at the end of the day (taking their responsibility to keep us safe a little too much to heart (or just an extension of the power play that people in the business of government seem drawn towards)).
How is a minority of responsible citizens ever to stand in the the way of the majority that want to be controlled and the governments who are willing to control them? I wish I knew the answer. It doesn't appear that a democratic system of government is enough.
You sir are a Gnostic. Thought I should tell you in case you didn't know. :)
Gnostics believe that the creator god was a false god. The "snake" in the Genesis story liberated humanity from the false god who had enslaved us by giving us knowledge of good and evil... Fascinating stuff.
Piracy Warning
My favourite part of the referenced document:
"The United States remains concerned about the availability of rights of appeal in Canada’s administrative process for reviewing the regulatory approval of pharmaceutical products, as well as limitations in Canada’s trademark regime."
The US is concerned about our rights of appeal. That's awesome! American foreign policy at its finest.
I'm sure there are going to be dozens posts about the evil conservative government and how they have all their ministries scared to say anything about anything. However, and despite all the cool stuff that the NRC does (like 3d scanners, heated concrete, etc), they do do a lot of top secret research. I'm not surprised that a request involving a foreign government organization was met with a bureaucratic response.
Here is a quick list of some of their best and most important work. Probably a much more interesting article than the fishing expedition of the Ottawa Citizen.
I opt out every single time. And I pretend to know nothing about the technology. "No way, I don't want to be x-rayed". It's not an x-ray sir, its..." "I don't care what it is damnit. I dont' want cancer from your damn machine..." "Okay, sir, okay. Just step over here..."
There should at least be SOME benefits to getting old. This is one. You can pretend to be insane and people will do whatever you want them to.
I wear track pants and leave my underwear in my luggage. You think *I'm* uncomfortable? Not as uncomfortable as the guy patting down the old man not wearing any underwear I can assure you... Someone needs to counterbalance these young thrill-seekers.
Fourteen years ago I was invited to speak to Canadian MPs about "Internet safety." The only MPs that showed up (sober) were Conservative MPs. Other MPs (Liberals, NDP, and Bloc) were in the same building partying with the Lumber Lobby and the strippers they brought with them. A few Bloc MPs showed up a little later but were so drunk they could hardly walk.
To say I'm disappointed with this current turn of events is an understatement given what I have done to avoid it. That said, anybody who thinks that this is because the Conservatives are in power is, frankly, just an ignorant troll. Governments want control. All governments. You're job as the populace is to vocally encourage them to focus their efforts on methods of "protecting the people" (the initial and still principle role of government) that do so in a way that does not infringe on their rights as citizens.
If you're concerned about it (and you should be), be sure to contact your MP and tell them how you feel, what they should be doing differently, and how this is going to effect your vote in the next election.
My preference is to consume the fermented fruit matter prior to the generation of methane.
Let's keep up the momentum and invalidate a host of other stupid patents.
It was also said in French. And Quebec French at that. So this would have had to have been translated by someone in the US before it was decided that this was a threat. Possibly poorly translated...
But on top of that TFA is merely speculating about the cause of the arrest. Both the prosecutor and defendant are not talking specifics so we really don't know what the cause was. I doubt very much that the Americans built a terrorist profile from a single text message in a foreign language.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching the Curiosity Launch Video. I don't think the rover has to worry about radiation so much as the landing. I'd like to start a pool on which part of the untested landing sequence will fail and deliver a smoking hole in Mars instead of the rover.
I seriously hope it works - if it does it will be one of humanity's most amazing technological feats. But I fear the worst.
I was 12 years old. I worked for a summer and made enough money to buy the unassembled version. It was essentially a bag of parts that you soldered together yourself. Add an old black and white TV, a cassette tape recorder and you were on your way. That way back when "built your own computer" meant that either you assembled it or actually designed the darn thing. Today it means you connected the major components together and hoped everybody followed spec.
The best part of the ZX81 was the fantastic instruction manual it came with that essentially taught you how to program (in BASIC). Very well written. I eventually left basic behind and started programming in Forth.
I don't have mine anymore, but I wish I did. The membrane keyboard was truly horrible to use, the RAM (1K) insufficient (I eventually purchased the 16K add-on), and the entire thing painfully slow. But it was an affordable, functional computer back when that was a rarity. I owe it and it's designers a great debt.
Some parts of the world have "distracted driving" laws. In retrospect I should have written "I try pairing my car's bluetooth with the phones of those I see nearby who are operating their phones by holding them up to their heads. Where I live operating a cell phone in a non-handsfree manner in a motor vehicle is illegal."
I tend to use parentheses (and frankly, ellipses) too often, and sadly Slashdot still does not have the ability to edit your comments after you post them...
For the record, I cannot and have no interest in identifying illegal immigrants by sight, or by any other means in any country (my own is not the US). I am also not making a statement about the efficacy of distracted driving laws. My car's bluetooth system is integrated into the car and will not allow me to make configuration changes (like pairing with a new device) while moving so this only works in stop and go (for those who thought I had some hardware hack).
Finally a general observation: It is our nature now to try to make the best use of every minute of every day. When people get stopped in traffic the first thing they do is pick up their phone (I see Blackberries the most around here) and check their e-mail or check their voicemail or call someone. One a good day (for me) the second thing they do is see "Connection Request from POLICE" on their phone.
Juvenile I know. But highly entertaining in the right context.
I changed the bluetooth ID of my car's hands-free unit to "POLICE" and whenever I'm stopped in rush-hour traffic I try connecting my "car" to people I see nearby who are (illegally here) holding their cell phones to their ears. Fun times. The reactions I get are priceless.
Probably I should stop doing that...
"Jemison ... is a professionally trained dancer".
Spider Robinson must be thrilled.