I don't buy movies anymore - I rent them. I know it's a (slightly) different comparison to what you were complaining about, but renting HD movies from PSN makes a ton of sense. I hate going to the rental store to pick up a movie, only to have to drive back a day or two later to return it. My wife & I prefer to pick a movie on Thursday evening (when new stuff gets posted to PSN) and if anything looks interesting, we rent a movie to watch on the weekend. It's like $4 to rent an HD movie from PSN, about the same (or less) as going to the store.
A whole chip? Really? That sounds hard.
Just Ebay an old 20MB Seagate ST-225 MFM drive, and write whatever bits you want.
It doesn't know any better.
Or, the submitter could contact Seagate or another drive manufacturer and ask what it would take to get a drive with special firmware that let him write 1's and 0's directly to the drive wherever he wanted. Basically, remove the intelligence on the drive.
It's not that impossible for drive manufacturers to do things like this for you, if you have the $$ to pay for it. I don't know what the cost would be, especially since he's really only [probably] looking for a few drives for this project. If it's grant-funded research, the grant would pay for it. If it's an independent project of some kind, he's in for a surprise.
I took a behind-doors tour of a major drive manufacturer a few years ago. During our visit, we were able to visit with engineers - one of whom was head of the firmware engineering team. He told us lots of stories about the firmware requests they've fulfilled. One example was a customer who supported lots of old PBX systems. These PBX systems ran software from a hard drive, but due to the age the system only supported drives up to (around) 200MB. Nobody made drives that small anymore, so this drive manufacturer re-wrote the firmware for them ($$) so a 120GB drive (the smallest they made at the time) would only recognize & address the first 200MB.
So yeah, I'm sure a drive manufacturer like Seagate could write custom firmware for him that would meet his project needs.
You were walking the user through the process, and you never asked them what's on the screen?
I can relate. I used to manage a group for a web development team (at a previous job.) Part of that included managing the helpdesk, and I worked closely with that team during rollouts. I got some first-hand experience that when you ask users to tell you what's on the screen, often they will "filter" the information for you, because they figure some stuff just "isn't important".
You can tell them all you like that it's important to know exactly what they see, but they'll still "filter" little details like this. It's very frustrating. On the web, pop-up messages tend to get ignored for example (late 1990's) even though you put an error message there. You might be 15 minutes into a call before they mention that little pop-up window that they read but dismissed.
Managing that helpdesk is where I picked up the maxim, "Nobody reads anymore."
Mozilla Labs has started out on some great projects but they don't seem able to make it out into wider use. What happened to Weave, it's been kicking around for years? Ubiquity, a great start with developer/hacker interest, but the ball dropped.
Sometimes the idea of a "Labs" is to generate new ideas, but not all those ideas are really something that can be productized.
In the case of Ubiquity, it was a great idea at the time (2008) but not well-defined. As a result, I think it wasn't something that (as defined) could be easily integrated into Mozilla.
Google took a much simpler approach ("Let's present context-sensitive links for a user's email, for things we can recognize") and integrated it into the GMail web experience. Interestingly, GMail's web interface does some of this for you already, for example by recognizing phrases in an email that indicate an appointment, and giving you a link in the right-hand side to add it to your calendar. It does the same with addresses.
I often use the links that GMail shows me when I buy something online, and the vendor emails me a shipping notification. GMail recognizes a UPS (or FedEx, or USPS) tracking code, and gives you a link - right there - to go check on the shipping status of your order.
So in a way, the functionality of Ubiquity has made it into a product, just not by Mozilla.
Speaking for myself, I prefer Fedora Linux. I find the look and feel is set up to be pretty close to Windows, enough so that sometimes people who look over my shoulder and see me using it assume I'm running Windows. If your family is moving from Windows, this might be a good choice.
Actually, my wife really likes Fedora, and she's a definite non-geek. It's easy enough for her to use, which (for her) is mostly email, web, text processor, and a few other minor apps.
I used to run Linux at work for several years, and ran Fedora. It's got the tools that replicate the functionality of Windows. (Unfortunately, I've been asked to move to Windows, at least for work. Ironically, I find Windows very confusing to use - Linux just seems so much easier to use.)
Well, 10Base-2 uses coax. I think I have an old hub that still has a coax connector.:)
I was going to write my own "10base2" comment, but instead I'll just reply to this one. Yes, your coax cables are essentially 10base2 cables - but may have a different connector. Sounds like you're willing to do a little work - so, get a cable conversion tool and add some correct connectors.
Once you have that, you'll need to have some 10base2-to-10baseT converters. You can probably get them cheaper elsewhere, but here's one at Amazon.
My first workplace was wired entirely with 10base2, even in our server room. Some of our servers didn't support 10base2, so they had the media converters to go with them.
Departments with sensitive information should be using mail clients with GPG, and running their own PKI, but at least by running your own email servers you have more control (eg limit logins to campus IP addresses and provide VPN for remote login).
Actually, the rule is that departments that need to send/share things like PHI data need to de-identify the data before sharing. If a researcher at one university wants to share PHI data with a researcher at another university, you are supposed to de-identify that data first.
If you're working on the same grant together that requires both researchers have full access to the PHI data, then there are other rules about access, transport, etc. Using GPG or other encryption over email doesn't really make the grade here. Email + attachments is not a file transfer protocol, anyway. You should use other, more secure methods to share that data with the grant partner researcher.
By the way, I liked your suggestion that departments should be "running their own PKI." That made me laugh, thanks.
God, I wish my university would do this. We have 40MB account limits and professors routinely send out 10MB worth of attachments. Sure, you can forward it all to gmail (and who doesn't) [...]
I thought I'd point out something that most students are unaware of: When you sign up for your own @gmail.com account, you give up ownership of your email. It's in the use agreement.
This is an important point, because when the university makes an agreement with Google, there's a whole legal process behind it. The university retains the ownership over the email; Google is just the provider. That's how we did it at our university.
Here's the distinction: Did Google (or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or any other webmail provider) mess up and accidentally let someone else view your @gmail.com account? Oops, too bad - but that was really Google's data, not yours. You can get angry at them, but you don't really have any legal recourse. But if Google makes that error for a contractual hosted customer (like University GMail) it's Google's problem, and there's a legal process to go with it. With the legal contractual stuff in there, the university has some protection.
I work in central IT for a large university. [Disclaimer: I'm not on the GMail team.] We knew that many students (and a bunch of faculty, staff) were forwarding their university email to their own @gmail.com account, because GMail was easier for them to use. But these same people just weren't aware that they were giving up their email. Not usually a problem for students, but it's a bigger deal for the university when staff and faculty do it. So it was very important when the university made arrangements with Google for our University GMail system. It's still GMail, you can still use the GMail web interface (or POP/IMAP), but we've taken care of the legal stuff on the back-end so the university retains ownership and is protected.
Maybe someone better informed than I could say whether or not if using Gmail corporate services would also expose you to randomly-applied 'great ideas' such as the screwup that is Buzz?
In a word, No.
When my university moved to GMail, the central IT folks get to administer the university GMail system. [Disclaimer: I work in our central IT, but am not part of the GMail team, although I am in the same overall unit.] That means the university central IT gets to choose what new add-ons our users get access to. So, central IT gets to be the gatekeeper for new stuff that appears in Labs, or new bolt-ons like Buzz. In our university, I believe we use a pretty vanilla GMail. This is (mainly) to help with support issues, but privacy concerns like Buzz probably play into this too.
Incidentally, it's the same with corporations that use GMail, IIRC. Except in that case, the corporation is paying $$$ to Google to be hosted on GMail. But the corporate IT staff still manage the featureset for things like Labs and Buzz.
I work for a higher-ed institution that's in the Big Ten. We recently provided GMail on campus, to all faculty, students, and staff. It was a remarkably easy transition for us to make. Here's how we did it:
Opt-in.
Really, that was it. We said, "Here's the GMail system that we arranged through Google and the University. If you want to move to GMail, please do - here's a link to make that happen. If you prefer to remain on the existing University email system, that's fine, we aren't taking that away and we're still committed in supporting the University system."
It's worked out well. As of last week, our overall adoption rate is 26% across faculty and staff (I don't have the student numbers) with several colleges and departments already at 100%. Overall, students opted in very quickly. Our outliers have been staff and faculty - this is likely because moving to GMail is a change, and change can be scary. (Note you can use the web interface, or access GMail using POP/IMAP.)
It's not entirely opt-in, though. Incoming students are not given an option - they'll be issued a University GMail account by default. The goal is that over the next 4 years, we'll gradually have all student accounts move to GMail automatically. (But as I said, students tended to opt-in very quickly.)
I work for a higher-ed institution, and we recently provided a university-sponsored GMail option. We heard this issue about sending private data via GMail, from some folks in our health departments.
Our response was: why are you emailing anything with private data in it!?
Email of any kind, whether run locally at the department level, institution-wide at the central IT level, or outsourced to someplace like Google... Email is an inherently insecure transport method. You don't send private data over the Internet. Period.
So, let me amend your statement:
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using email, because it involves sending privileged information over the Internet.
Several users posted solutions, but the one laid out by 'maxyimus' was marked by a Microsoft support engineer as the way out of the perpetual blue screens.
I don't think this is the solution you were thinking of. The linked solution has these notes:
# Proposed As Answer byFred_H 21 hours 11 minutes ago
# Marked As Answer by Cody - Support Engineer Microsoft Support, Moderator 20 hours 13 minutes ago
# Unmarked As Answer by Cody - Support Engineer Microsoft Support, Moderator 20 hours 12 minutes ago
So it seems "Cody - Support Engineer Microsoft Support, Moderator" had second thoughts about a minute after marking this as the solution.
[Disclaimer: I run Linux, not XP, so I don't really care either way.]
Look, I was a huge Star Wars nerd back in the day. I saw the original 'Star Wars', like, 1000 times in the theatre, and about a hojillion times on VHS. I had all the toys - it was easier to count the things I didn't have in the little Star Wars catalog/pamphlet that came with the toys, than count the things I did have. Loved 'Empire', and tried my best to love 'Jedi' even though it had dancing Ewoks in it. Honestly, though, you lost me with Episode 1, and totally killed that Star Wars geek in me with Episodes 2-3.
You won me back (somewhat) with 'The Clone Wars' animated series. I think it's that I don't really mind cheesy dialog when spoken by CGI-animated puppets in a CGI-animated show. (Note the difference between that and Jar Jar.) I really dig this show, and I watch it every week.
But I'm really worried about your plans to do a show about the "Dark Times" between Episodes 3-4. We know how that ends; you end up with Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Ben, Darth, and the gang. I don't want to see Luke Skywalker grow up, I don't want to know what it was like when he got his first pimple or kissed his first girl (or Jawa, whatever they do on Tatooine for entertainment.) I don't want to see how they built the first Imperial Star Destroyer, or installed the freaking air conditioning system in the Death Star.
If you must do something in the Star Wars universe, please pleaseplease give us a new story. What happens after the Empire crumbles, who takes charge then, how does the new Jedi order come about? There's a whole Expanded Universe Storyline you can play with there. And we don't know how any of it ends.
I really enjoyed the first game. It had a lot of new elements thrown into it. Far from being a straight-up shooter, there was quite a bit of exploration required. Some areas reminded me of Thief for the PC. I liked the options to "level up" your character, and the moral choice to harvest / not to harvest the Little Sisters. (Although I didn't realize that it was all-or-nothing with that, so while I only harvested 1 Little Sister [the first one] I got the "bad" ending.)
Graphically, the first game felt a little dated, even at launch. But it was a great example of what a great story and plot arc can do to overcome graphics.
That said, I'm not looking forward to the sequel at all. I'm going to skip this one. Meer reflects the same thoughts I had when I first learned of a Bioshock 2: "Part of Rapture's great wonder was that it was just believable enough, if you squinted your brain a bit (or a lot), but this lathers on so much wild sci-fi that it's much harder to connect to it."
I don't think the follow-up will hold up. Part of that is that too many gamers (like me) would keep comparing a sequel to an original game that was (in many ways) groundbreaking. And it's awfully hard to live up to that.
I'd prefer that PSN remain free, since this is a huge plus in the PS3's favor. However, the realist in me recognizes there is significant cost in Sony operating the servers and network infrastructure to support PSN on an ongoing basis. If they had to charge for it, I'm with you on these points:
PlayStation Home - charge for it. It's already an MMO of sorts, just a social MMO, and people generally accept that you pay a subscription fee to play MMOs. (Disclaimer: I use Home, and I would probably pay a subscription fee for it.)
PlayStation Store - needs to stay free. I already buy all my PSP games from PlayStation Store, as well as rent movies from it. I'm paying $$ to Sony each time I buy a game or rent a movie, so I'd stop using this if they charged me just to access the Store service.
However, I'm not sure I'm with you on this:
Multiplayer
It needs to be one or the other - either charge a monthly fee for this, or leave it free. If Sony tried to come up with a mixed model for what online games require an online subscription, and which don't, it would really confuse and frustrate gamers. They don't want to do that.
Personally, I'd pay a (small) subscription fee to play online on two conditions: (1) I shouldn't have to play with 12 year olds who like to call everyone a Mexican Jew lizard; (2) I don't play online games all the time, so it would be nice to be able to buy into a month-to-month plan, or an annual plan, and I should be able to pay for both through PlayStation Store.
Do we really need another attempt to re-make 'Dune'? Yes, David Lynch's 1984 film version was really, really bad. Unwatchable, even. But I thought the healing process was complete with SciFi's Dune (2000) miniseries.
I watched the miniseries (but not the followup, Children of Dune (2003)) and thought it was great. They did an amazing job with the story. With a 3-part miniseries, you can take your time with the story, so it doesn't feel so rushed. Sure, it had William Hurt in it (I find him boring) but was good nonetheless!:-)
I'm not convinced we need another re-make of this.
It was probably one of the most epic examples of human idiocy I have ever encountered. The worst part is that I understand these people are given little flow charts, or on screen wizards, so he must've managed to click past the first box that checked whether the system even turned on or not and then been incapable of handling the idea that my response didn't fit his next question.
Years ago, a falling tree branch took out the phone line to our house. I didn't have a cell phone at the time, so I walked down the block to the convenience store, and called the phone company.
The person on the other end of the line was clearly reading from a script, and tried to ask a littany of questions about the quality of the sound over the line, ignoring my repeated attempts to say that the phone line was now lying - disconnected - in my back yard. Eventually figured out my phone line wasn't hooked up, then got suspicious, asking how it was possible that my phone line was disconnected if I was calling them about it. "Because I'm calling from a payphone down the street."
For me, I'm not so much bothered by people speaking loudly on their phones (although I see it happen all the time.) It's the availability to tweet from fucking everywhere. I have friends that are on Twitter, it's really annoying. Go out with some friends for the evening, dinner and hang out. A few times during the evening, someone pulls out their phone, does something, puts it away. I first thought they were checking some page from work. Then I discovered that they'd been tweeting the whole freaking night.
You know, I can see what you are doing there.
To me, tweeting what I'm saying to the whole world is rude. Apparently not everyone sees it that way. I've mentioned it, asked "hey, can you not tweet this tonight?" but it never really sinks in.
Twitter is like crack for ADD. Smartphones are an enabler for it.
By "TR5" I assume you mean 'Tomb Raider Chronicles'. Yes, that one was a letdown. Again, I think it was due to moving away from what made the games great - exploring tombs, solving puzzles. TRC had a lot of running around shooting things - and while it had some typical Tomb Raider puzzle solving, there wasn't much of it.
It may not be a surprise, then, that 'Angel of Darkness' was similarly bad. After TRC came out, Eidos announced that the "next-gen" Tomb Raider game would have a lot of similar gameplay to TRC - which unfortunately meant less puzzles, more running/shooting.
This is one of those instances where moving away from what made the games great is not a good idea. It basically killed the franchise.
But looking back, I'm thinking it might have been a good idea for Eidos to have said "Tomb Raider was great on the PS1, but it's really a PS1 game. We're going to focus on a different IP for the PS2, and come back to Tomb Raider later." (Hindsight is great, isn't it?) I noticed a lot of developers for cool PS2 series did that when the PS3 came out, and it worked out great for them. Insomniac Games put 'Ratchet & Clank' on hold to do 'Resistance' (and eventually did 'Ratchet & Clank Future'.) Naughty Dog stopped doing 'Jak & Daxter' to do 'Uncharted'.
So while I was very happy that 'Legend' and 'Underworld' were good, and 'Anniversary' was great - I think it would have been best to have put the series on hold, do something new on the PS2, come back to it later if you needed to. But as the original article said, putting out (heck, even announcing) another Tomb Raider game was like printing money to Eidos/Core. They probably assumed it would be the same on the PS2.
TFA mentions Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness as the game that tipped Eidos/Core over.
I first discovered the series with Tomb Raider 2. Since then, huge fan! I bought all the games for PS1, and a few for the Mac as well (I'd re-play the game on my in-laws' computer sometimes.)
When Eidos announced Angel of Darkness for PS2, I was obviously caught up in the hype. More memory and higher res meant more intricate puzzles and larger levels - this would be an amazing game. Or so I thought. Aside from buggy gameplay (and there was a lot of that) they changed the game mechanic to the point that it was like playing an entirely different game, but with Lara Croft in it. No tombs, no puzzles, just a lot of running around shooting things.
I quit the game before I got very far in it, the same sucked that bad. I recall making it just past the cemetary - which I understand is still pretty early in the game.
Still, good things came out of this fiasco: Tomb Raider: Legend was actually very good! Amazing what a new developer can do to breathe fresh life into a project. (That said, Uncharted is a better series.)
When I started in computers (1993?) we did our programming at the console. And I remember being very thrilled the day I found that Linux had a "setfont" command, to set the console font.
"r.psf" was a great font. It set the console to a kind of "Times"-like font. Except it was still monospace, 80x25. The serifs made text really easy to read. Numbers looked distinctly different from letters, and certain digits (3, etc.) were "dropped" a little. You never could mistake 1 for l or |, or O for 0, and so on.
Combined with setting the foreground "grey" and the background "blue", it made reading/writing code a snap, and the console experience very pleasant. For that first year, I preferred doing everything at the command line, and would start X11 only if I needed to do something that required graphics (like, gnuplot.)
"[...] a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Don't worry - I'm sure Russia will have an ill-defined plan to divert this somehow. By then.
Actually, the original plan was to use a simplified version of assembly (based on 6502 assembly) to construct your robot. But I quickly realized two things:
I was spending way too much time writing and debugging my interpreter
It was becoming much too complex to write a simple robot program
I think you'd have the same problem with C or C++.
So I looked around for another way to do it, and found the Scheme interpreter (GNU Guile). Since my Robots program was already being written under the GNU GPL, GNU Guile seemed a perfect fit. It had all the hooks to make writing the rest of the Robots game easy, and users would be able to write programs in a language that already existed. From there, RMS accepted my Robots game as "GNU Robots".
The down-side was that I know nothing about writing LISP or Scheme programs, so when I was done writing GNU Robots, I couldn't create any robot programs with sophisticated algorithms. Bummer. That's why my demo robot programs in GNU Robots 1.0 were so simple.
I envisioned that someone would help me create a tile-based programming concept, where "actions" were represented by "tiles" (for example: "move forward", "turn right/left", "pick up object", "fire gun",...). The programming GUI (basically an "IDE" for a GNU Robots program) would let you connect tiles to each other using "wires" (in the resulting Scheme program, it would be tail-recursion, similar to a "GOTO".) There'd be certain "if" tiles that would let you branch to other tiles (probably a combo tile like "look ahead, if enemy less than _ squares away..").
Alas, I wasn't able to pull that together. It's still not there, AFAIK, so if anyone wants to write such a thing, I'm sure the current maintainer would thank you.
I've found that the games with accurate, lethal weapons result in very different game play. People jump around like rabbits less, stick to cover more, crouch, avoid open spaces, etc... Basically, they play just like you see soldiers or SWAT behave in real life. It's also gives me a much bigger adrenaline rush. Periods of quiet stalking interspersed with real terror, ending with either sudden death or a panicked getaway make for great tension. Jumping around like idiots in glowing neon green armor is just boring after a few hours.
I completely agree! A certain degree of realism does help to minimize the stupid bunny-hopping behavior. Actually, I'd like to see a team shooter that was more accurate with how weapons could be fired "on the run". Ever try to shoot a target with a real weapon while moving? If you're more than a few feet from the target, you're not going to hit it. Yet all the team shooters out there let you "shoot from the hip" at a bad guy across an empty street, while you're running, and you can still kill him. That's not realistic.
I'd prefer that "shooting from the hip" be ineffective [at range] if you're moving, and barely effective if you're standing still.
The only way to effectively hit a target in real life is to stop, and aim. You can still do a good job if you move around when aiming but of course you can't move very fast.
Players would respond very differently to games that did this. "Rambo" behavior wouldn't get you very far, so I think you'd end up with players sticking to cover more, avoiding open spaces, etc. Just like the OP said.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy movies anymore - I rent them. I know it's a (slightly) different comparison to what you were complaining about, but renting HD movies from PSN makes a ton of sense. I hate going to the rental store to pick up a movie, only to have to drive back a day or two later to return it. My wife & I prefer to pick a movie on Thursday evening (when new stuff gets posted to PSN) and if anything looks interesting, we rent a movie to watch on the weekend. It's like $4 to rent an HD movie from PSN, about the same (or less) as going to the store.
A whole chip? Really? That sounds hard. Just Ebay an old 20MB Seagate ST-225 MFM drive, and write whatever bits you want. It doesn't know any better.
Or, the submitter could contact Seagate or another drive manufacturer and ask what it would take to get a drive with special firmware that let him write 1's and 0's directly to the drive wherever he wanted. Basically, remove the intelligence on the drive.
It's not that impossible for drive manufacturers to do things like this for you, if you have the $$ to pay for it. I don't know what the cost would be, especially since he's really only [probably] looking for a few drives for this project. If it's grant-funded research, the grant would pay for it. If it's an independent project of some kind, he's in for a surprise.
I took a behind-doors tour of a major drive manufacturer a few years ago. During our visit, we were able to visit with engineers - one of whom was head of the firmware engineering team. He told us lots of stories about the firmware requests they've fulfilled. One example was a customer who supported lots of old PBX systems. These PBX systems ran software from a hard drive, but due to the age the system only supported drives up to (around) 200MB. Nobody made drives that small anymore, so this drive manufacturer re-wrote the firmware for them ($$) so a 120GB drive (the smallest they made at the time) would only recognize & address the first 200MB.
So yeah, I'm sure a drive manufacturer like Seagate could write custom firmware for him that would meet his project needs.
You were walking the user through the process, and you never asked them what's on the screen?
I can relate. I used to manage a group for a web development team (at a previous job.) Part of that included managing the helpdesk, and I worked closely with that team during rollouts. I got some first-hand experience that when you ask users to tell you what's on the screen, often they will "filter" the information for you, because they figure some stuff just "isn't important".
You can tell them all you like that it's important to know exactly what they see, but they'll still "filter" little details like this. It's very frustrating. On the web, pop-up messages tend to get ignored for example (late 1990's) even though you put an error message there. You might be 15 minutes into a call before they mention that little pop-up window that they read but dismissed.
Managing that helpdesk is where I picked up the maxim, "Nobody reads anymore."
Mozilla Labs has started out on some great projects but they don't seem able to make it out into wider use. What happened to Weave, it's been kicking around for years? Ubiquity, a great start with developer/hacker interest, but the ball dropped.
Sometimes the idea of a "Labs" is to generate new ideas, but not all those ideas are really something that can be productized.
In the case of Ubiquity, it was a great idea at the time (2008) but not well-defined. As a result, I think it wasn't something that (as defined) could be easily integrated into Mozilla.
Google took a much simpler approach ("Let's present context-sensitive links for a user's email, for things we can recognize") and integrated it into the GMail web experience. Interestingly, GMail's web interface does some of this for you already, for example by recognizing phrases in an email that indicate an appointment, and giving you a link in the right-hand side to add it to your calendar. It does the same with addresses.
I often use the links that GMail shows me when I buy something online, and the vendor emails me a shipping notification. GMail recognizes a UPS (or FedEx, or USPS) tracking code, and gives you a link - right there - to go check on the shipping status of your order.
So in a way, the functionality of Ubiquity has made it into a product, just not by Mozilla.
Speaking for myself, I prefer Fedora Linux. I find the look and feel is set up to be pretty close to Windows, enough so that sometimes people who look over my shoulder and see me using it assume I'm running Windows. If your family is moving from Windows, this might be a good choice.
Actually, my wife really likes Fedora, and she's a definite non-geek. It's easy enough for her to use, which (for her) is mostly email, web, text processor, and a few other minor apps.
I used to run Linux at work for several years, and ran Fedora. It's got the tools that replicate the functionality of Windows. (Unfortunately, I've been asked to move to Windows, at least for work. Ironically, I find Windows very confusing to use - Linux just seems so much easier to use.)
Well, 10Base-2 uses coax. I think I have an old hub that still has a coax connector. :)
I was going to write my own "10base2" comment, but instead I'll just reply to this one. Yes, your coax cables are essentially 10base2 cables - but may have a different connector. Sounds like you're willing to do a little work - so, get a cable conversion tool and add some correct connectors.
Once you have that, you'll need to have some 10base2-to-10baseT converters. You can probably get them cheaper elsewhere, but here's one at Amazon.
My first workplace was wired entirely with 10base2, even in our server room. Some of our servers didn't support 10base2, so they had the media converters to go with them.
That's just simply not true. Set up a LOCAL mail server, then the data never even goes on the Internet, you fool!
Wow, your users and researchers must never have to work with others outside the institution. That's amazing.
Departments with sensitive information should be using mail clients with GPG, and running their own PKI, but at least by running your own email servers you have more control (eg limit logins to campus IP addresses and provide VPN for remote login).
Actually, the rule is that departments that need to send/share things like PHI data need to de-identify the data before sharing. If a researcher at one university wants to share PHI data with a researcher at another university, you are supposed to de-identify that data first.
If you're working on the same grant together that requires both researchers have full access to the PHI data, then there are other rules about access, transport, etc. Using GPG or other encryption over email doesn't really make the grade here. Email + attachments is not a file transfer protocol, anyway. You should use other, more secure methods to share that data with the grant partner researcher.
By the way, I liked your suggestion that departments should be "running their own PKI." That made me laugh, thanks.
God, I wish my university would do this. We have 40MB account limits and professors routinely send out 10MB worth of attachments. Sure, you can forward it all to gmail (and who doesn't) [...]
I thought I'd point out something that most students are unaware of: When you sign up for your own @gmail.com account, you give up ownership of your email. It's in the use agreement.
This is an important point, because when the university makes an agreement with Google, there's a whole legal process behind it. The university retains the ownership over the email; Google is just the provider. That's how we did it at our university.
Here's the distinction: Did Google (or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or any other webmail provider) mess up and accidentally let someone else view your @gmail.com account? Oops, too bad - but that was really Google's data, not yours. You can get angry at them, but you don't really have any legal recourse. But if Google makes that error for a contractual hosted customer (like University GMail) it's Google's problem, and there's a legal process to go with it. With the legal contractual stuff in there, the university has some protection.
I work in central IT for a large university. [Disclaimer: I'm not on the GMail team.] We knew that many students (and a bunch of faculty, staff) were forwarding their university email to their own @gmail.com account, because GMail was easier for them to use. But these same people just weren't aware that they were giving up their email. Not usually a problem for students, but it's a bigger deal for the university when staff and faculty do it. So it was very important when the university made arrangements with Google for our University GMail system. It's still GMail, you can still use the GMail web interface (or POP/IMAP), but we've taken care of the legal stuff on the back-end so the university retains ownership and is protected.
Maybe someone better informed than I could say whether or not if using Gmail corporate services would also expose you to randomly-applied 'great ideas' such as the screwup that is Buzz?
In a word, No.
When my university moved to GMail, the central IT folks get to administer the university GMail system. [Disclaimer: I work in our central IT, but am not part of the GMail team, although I am in the same overall unit.] That means the university central IT gets to choose what new add-ons our users get access to. So, central IT gets to be the gatekeeper for new stuff that appears in Labs, or new bolt-ons like Buzz. In our university, I believe we use a pretty vanilla GMail. This is (mainly) to help with support issues, but privacy concerns like Buzz probably play into this too.
Incidentally, it's the same with corporations that use GMail, IIRC. Except in that case, the corporation is paying $$$ to Google to be hosted on GMail. But the corporate IT staff still manage the featureset for things like Labs and Buzz.
I work for a higher-ed institution that's in the Big Ten. We recently provided GMail on campus, to all faculty, students, and staff. It was a remarkably easy transition for us to make. Here's how we did it:
Opt-in.
Really, that was it. We said, "Here's the GMail system that we arranged through Google and the University. If you want to move to GMail, please do - here's a link to make that happen. If you prefer to remain on the existing University email system, that's fine, we aren't taking that away and we're still committed in supporting the University system."
It's worked out well. As of last week, our overall adoption rate is 26% across faculty and staff (I don't have the student numbers) with several colleges and departments already at 100%. Overall, students opted in very quickly. Our outliers have been staff and faculty - this is likely because moving to GMail is a change, and change can be scary. (Note you can use the web interface, or access GMail using POP/IMAP.)
It's not entirely opt-in, though. Incoming students are not given an option - they'll be issued a University GMail account by default. The goal is that over the next 4 years, we'll gradually have all student accounts move to GMail automatically. (But as I said, students tended to opt-in very quickly.)
I work for a higher-ed institution, and we recently provided a university-sponsored GMail option. We heard this issue about sending private data via GMail, from some folks in our health departments.
Our response was: why are you emailing anything with private data in it!?
Email of any kind, whether run locally at the department level, institution-wide at the central IT level, or outsourced to someplace like Google ... Email is an inherently insecure transport method. You don't send private data over the Internet. Period.
So, let me amend your statement:
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using email, because it involves sending privileged information over the Internet.
Several users posted solutions, but the one laid out by 'maxyimus' was marked by a Microsoft support engineer as the way out of the perpetual blue screens.
I don't think this is the solution you were thinking of. The linked solution has these notes:
So it seems "Cody - Support Engineer Microsoft Support, Moderator" had second thoughts about a minute after marking this as the solution.
[Disclaimer: I run Linux, not XP, so I don't really care either way.]
Dear George,
Look, I was a huge Star Wars nerd back in the day. I saw the original 'Star Wars', like, 1000 times in the theatre, and about a hojillion times on VHS. I had all the toys - it was easier to count the things I didn't have in the little Star Wars catalog/pamphlet that came with the toys, than count the things I did have. Loved 'Empire', and tried my best to love 'Jedi' even though it had dancing Ewoks in it. Honestly, though, you lost me with Episode 1, and totally killed that Star Wars geek in me with Episodes 2-3.
You won me back (somewhat) with 'The Clone Wars' animated series. I think it's that I don't really mind cheesy dialog when spoken by CGI-animated puppets in a CGI-animated show. (Note the difference between that and Jar Jar.) I really dig this show, and I watch it every week.
But I'm really worried about your plans to do a show about the "Dark Times" between Episodes 3-4. We know how that ends; you end up with Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Ben, Darth, and the gang. I don't want to see Luke Skywalker grow up, I don't want to know what it was like when he got his first pimple or kissed his first girl (or Jawa, whatever they do on Tatooine for entertainment.) I don't want to see how they built the first Imperial Star Destroyer, or installed the freaking air conditioning system in the Death Star.
If you must do something in the Star Wars universe, please please please give us a new story. What happens after the Empire crumbles, who takes charge then, how does the new Jedi order come about? There's a whole Expanded Universe Storyline you can play with there. And we don't know how any of it ends.
Sincerely,
a worried fan (reformed)
I really enjoyed the first game. It had a lot of new elements thrown into it. Far from being a straight-up shooter, there was quite a bit of exploration required. Some areas reminded me of Thief for the PC. I liked the options to "level up" your character, and the moral choice to harvest / not to harvest the Little Sisters. (Although I didn't realize that it was all-or-nothing with that, so while I only harvested 1 Little Sister [the first one] I got the "bad" ending.)
Graphically, the first game felt a little dated, even at launch. But it was a great example of what a great story and plot arc can do to overcome graphics.
That said, I'm not looking forward to the sequel at all. I'm going to skip this one. Meer reflects the same thoughts I had when I first learned of a Bioshock 2: "Part of Rapture's great wonder was that it was just believable enough, if you squinted your brain a bit (or a lot), but this lathers on so much wild sci-fi that it's much harder to connect to it."
I don't think the follow-up will hold up. Part of that is that too many gamers (like me) would keep comparing a sequel to an original game that was (in many ways) groundbreaking. And it's awfully hard to live up to that.
I'd prefer that PSN remain free, since this is a huge plus in the PS3's favor. However, the realist in me recognizes there is significant cost in Sony operating the servers and network infrastructure to support PSN on an ongoing basis. If they had to charge for it, I'm with you on these points:
However, I'm not sure I'm with you on this:
It needs to be one or the other - either charge a monthly fee for this, or leave it free. If Sony tried to come up with a mixed model for what online games require an online subscription, and which don't, it would really confuse and frustrate gamers. They don't want to do that.
Personally, I'd pay a (small) subscription fee to play online on two conditions: (1) I shouldn't have to play with 12 year olds who like to call everyone a Mexican Jew lizard; (2) I don't play online games all the time, so it would be nice to be able to buy into a month-to-month plan, or an annual plan, and I should be able to pay for both through PlayStation Store.
Do we really need another attempt to re-make 'Dune'? Yes, David Lynch's 1984 film version was really, really bad. Unwatchable, even. But I thought the healing process was complete with SciFi's Dune (2000) miniseries.
I watched the miniseries (but not the followup, Children of Dune (2003)) and thought it was great. They did an amazing job with the story. With a 3-part miniseries, you can take your time with the story, so it doesn't feel so rushed. Sure, it had William Hurt in it (I find him boring) but was good nonetheless! :-)
I'm not convinced we need another re-make of this.
It was probably one of the most epic examples of human idiocy I have ever encountered. The worst part is that I understand these people are given little flow charts, or on screen wizards, so he must've managed to click past the first box that checked whether the system even turned on or not and then been incapable of handling the idea that my response didn't fit his next question.
Years ago, a falling tree branch took out the phone line to our house. I didn't have a cell phone at the time, so I walked down the block to the convenience store, and called the phone company.
The person on the other end of the line was clearly reading from a script, and tried to ask a littany of questions about the quality of the sound over the line, ignoring my repeated attempts to say that the phone line was now lying - disconnected - in my back yard. Eventually figured out my phone line wasn't hooked up, then got suspicious, asking how it was possible that my phone line was disconnected if I was calling them about it. "Because I'm calling from a payphone down the street."
Still took about a day to repair.
For me, I'm not so much bothered by people speaking loudly on their phones (although I see it happen all the time.) It's the availability to tweet from fucking everywhere. I have friends that are on Twitter, it's really annoying. Go out with some friends for the evening, dinner and hang out. A few times during the evening, someone pulls out their phone, does something, puts it away. I first thought they were checking some page from work. Then I discovered that they'd been tweeting the whole freaking night.
You know, I can see what you are doing there.
To me, tweeting what I'm saying to the whole world is rude. Apparently not everyone sees it that way. I've mentioned it, asked "hey, can you not tweet this tonight?" but it never really sinks in.
Twitter is like crack for ADD. Smartphones are an enabler for it.
By "TR5" I assume you mean 'Tomb Raider Chronicles'. Yes, that one was a letdown. Again, I think it was due to moving away from what made the games great - exploring tombs, solving puzzles. TRC had a lot of running around shooting things - and while it had some typical Tomb Raider puzzle solving, there wasn't much of it.
It may not be a surprise, then, that 'Angel of Darkness' was similarly bad. After TRC came out, Eidos announced that the "next-gen" Tomb Raider game would have a lot of similar gameplay to TRC - which unfortunately meant less puzzles, more running/shooting.
This is one of those instances where moving away from what made the games great is not a good idea. It basically killed the franchise.
But looking back, I'm thinking it might have been a good idea for Eidos to have said "Tomb Raider was great on the PS1, but it's really a PS1 game. We're going to focus on a different IP for the PS2, and come back to Tomb Raider later." (Hindsight is great, isn't it?) I noticed a lot of developers for cool PS2 series did that when the PS3 came out, and it worked out great for them. Insomniac Games put 'Ratchet & Clank' on hold to do 'Resistance' (and eventually did 'Ratchet & Clank Future'.) Naughty Dog stopped doing 'Jak & Daxter' to do 'Uncharted'.
So while I was very happy that 'Legend' and 'Underworld' were good, and 'Anniversary' was great - I think it would have been best to have put the series on hold, do something new on the PS2, come back to it later if you needed to. But as the original article said, putting out (heck, even announcing) another Tomb Raider game was like printing money to Eidos/Core. They probably assumed it would be the same on the PS2.
TFA mentions Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness as the game that tipped Eidos/Core over.
I first discovered the series with Tomb Raider 2. Since then, huge fan! I bought all the games for PS1, and a few for the Mac as well (I'd re-play the game on my in-laws' computer sometimes.)
When Eidos announced Angel of Darkness for PS2, I was obviously caught up in the hype. More memory and higher res meant more intricate puzzles and larger levels - this would be an amazing game. Or so I thought. Aside from buggy gameplay (and there was a lot of that) they changed the game mechanic to the point that it was like playing an entirely different game, but with Lara Croft in it. No tombs, no puzzles, just a lot of running around shooting things.
I quit the game before I got very far in it, the same sucked that bad. I recall making it just past the cemetary - which I understand is still pretty early in the game.
Still, good things came out of this fiasco: Tomb Raider: Legend was actually very good! Amazing what a new developer can do to breathe fresh life into a project. (That said, Uncharted is a better series.)
When I started in computers (1993?) we did our programming at the console. And I remember being very thrilled the day I found that Linux had a "setfont" command, to set the console font.
"r.psf" was a great font. It set the console to a kind of "Times"-like font. Except it was still monospace, 80x25. The serifs made text really easy to read. Numbers looked distinctly different from letters, and certain digits (3, etc.) were "dropped" a little. You never could mistake 1 for l or |, or O for 0, and so on.
Combined with setting the foreground "grey" and the background "blue", it made reading/writing code a snap, and the console experience very pleasant. For that first year, I preferred doing everything at the command line, and would start X11 only if I needed to do something that required graphics (like, gnuplot.)
"[...] a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Don't worry - I'm sure Russia will have an ill-defined plan to divert this somehow. By then.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Thanks!
Actually, the original plan was to use a simplified version of assembly (based on 6502 assembly) to construct your robot. But I quickly realized two things:
I think you'd have the same problem with C or C++.
So I looked around for another way to do it, and found the Scheme interpreter (GNU Guile). Since my Robots program was already being written under the GNU GPL, GNU Guile seemed a perfect fit. It had all the hooks to make writing the rest of the Robots game easy, and users would be able to write programs in a language that already existed. From there, RMS accepted my Robots game as "GNU Robots".
The down-side was that I know nothing about writing LISP or Scheme programs, so when I was done writing GNU Robots, I couldn't create any robot programs with sophisticated algorithms. Bummer. That's why my demo robot programs in GNU Robots 1.0 were so simple.
I envisioned that someone would help me create a tile-based programming concept, where "actions" were represented by "tiles" (for example: "move forward", "turn right/left", "pick up object", "fire gun", ...). The programming GUI (basically an "IDE" for a GNU Robots program) would let you connect tiles to each other using "wires" (in the resulting Scheme program, it would be tail-recursion, similar to a "GOTO".) There'd be certain "if" tiles that would let you branch to other tiles (probably a combo tile like "look ahead, if enemy less than _ squares away..").
Alas, I wasn't able to pull that together. It's still not there, AFAIK, so if anyone wants to write such a thing, I'm sure the current maintainer would thank you.
I've found that the games with accurate, lethal weapons result in very different game play. People jump around like rabbits less, stick to cover more, crouch, avoid open spaces, etc... Basically, they play just like you see soldiers or SWAT behave in real life. It's also gives me a much bigger adrenaline rush. Periods of quiet stalking interspersed with real terror, ending with either sudden death or a panicked getaway make for great tension. Jumping around like idiots in glowing neon green armor is just boring after a few hours.
I completely agree! A certain degree of realism does help to minimize the stupid bunny-hopping behavior. Actually, I'd like to see a team shooter that was more accurate with how weapons could be fired "on the run". Ever try to shoot a target with a real weapon while moving? If you're more than a few feet from the target, you're not going to hit it. Yet all the team shooters out there let you "shoot from the hip" at a bad guy across an empty street, while you're running, and you can still kill him. That's not realistic.
I'd prefer that "shooting from the hip" be ineffective [at range] if you're moving, and barely effective if you're standing still.
The only way to effectively hit a target in real life is to stop, and aim. You can still do a good job if you move around when aiming but of course you can't move very fast.
Players would respond very differently to games that did this. "Rambo" behavior wouldn't get you very far, so I think you'd end up with players sticking to cover more, avoiding open spaces, etc. Just like the OP said.