I can't say I have an addiction to the 'Net, but I'll admit a kind of strange addiction to Lumines(PSP). Once I get a game going, if you don't have anything to do with colored blocks falling to a musical rhythm, then I won't pay attention to you. My wife claims to have flashed her boobs at me while I was playing, and I didn't notice.:-)
The French are calling us fat, lazy, and now stupid. Great, well at least we aren't a bunch cheese eating surrender monkeys. Time to eat some more pork rinds and watch American Idol. I hope I don't have to get out of my chair to find my remote. Found it. It was under a fold of fat. I also found my car keys.
I agree. But it also might be that the iPod is a pretty solid piece of hardware. Even though hard drive capacities increase over time (you can get a bigger iPod next year) the iPod device itself will last a long time with moderate care. I replaced my 2-year-old 3rd gen iPod when the battery failed to hold a charge longer than an hour, not because it was otherwise broken. (And had the battery been easily user-replaceable, I probably would have done that instead.)
You could try GNU Robots, if you're willing to accept Scheme. It's still a work in progress, but the concept is you write a program (in Scheme) for a little robot, then set him loose to explore a maze. The maze is populated with prizes, food, and baddies (you can shoot them, or choose to avoid them.)
The nice thing about this is that kids can learn programming with an immediate payoff - they get to watch their robot in action on the screen. GNU Robots is the same concept as ChipWits, which has been "coming soon" for PC since 1999 (it originally was available on Apple and Mac).
Disclaimer: I am the originator of GNU Robots, but I left the project in 2000 after handing it over to another maintainer.
I've actually been holding out for a professionally-produced game based on the cardboard-tube Samurai. I emailed Tycho about it one day: Cardboard Tube Samurai Wii! For me, it's the killer game that would convince me to buy the Wii. Imagine: using the wiimote to deliver smackdowns against enemy samurai and ninjas. And pig sidekick mini-missions.:-)
Sure, Gabe & Tycho would have to sell out to make this game. But only a tiny bit. And I hear that part of your soul grows back after a while.
Whereas I can buy a game, play it on my current system, and if I find I really am cutting down too much on the quality, I can buy a new video card. That new video card will make all my games improve, unless they are so ridiculously old (Quake 3) that I can already play them at 1600x1200 with every scrap of quality turned all the way up.
Interesting you say that... and how exactly would you know you've cut down too much on quality? Sure, with some games you know how much you've lost on resolution, because you can see the other options. Or because a particular slider setting is at 5, but it can go up to 11. But here's an example where you don't know:
When it was new, I played the first HalfLife all the way through on my PC and thought it rocked. Sure, things were a little dark (that's with the brightness slider set to max) but hey, almost the whole game is underground. Sound was great, better than I had experienced in recent games. Yes, HalfLife was great.
Then I brought my game CD to a friend's house, and watched him play it there.
It was a totally different experience. Brightness levels were different, so there was way more detail visible on the models. And heck, there was much richer sound and music. On my PC, the game only played music at the end of major boss battles... pretty much when things have settled down. Turns out, the game can play more of the music and effects on a better PC... imagine that, a better sound card can handle more music channels. And his video card was better than mine, so everything just looked better.
Lesson learned: on PC games, you don't always know if the game quality has been cranked down for you. Yes, on consoles I don't know the decisions that were made for me during development, but at least you get the same game experience on my PS2 versus someone else's PS2.
Atlantis, on the other hand, lacks plot direction. It amounts to "flail blindly against the ravages of the Wraith", without any sort of clue as to what the team's plan is or where they're going. I think this is partly due to the Wraith being a faceless horde of nobodies, while the enemies with real personality never seem to pose more than a transient threat. The acting is good (David Hewlett shows the most potential, in my opinion, but any growth his character shows always seems to disappear by the next episode), the directing is good, and the design and effects are top-notch. The writers just need to figure out where this boat is going and clue us in the tiniest bit.
I agree that they lack plot direction on Atlantis. However, I suspect it's too late for them to do anything about it. They kind of blew their wad from the start. You need to build up to it. Imagine how cool it would have been to occupy Season 1 with visiting all these new worlds, helping the local population with whatever problem of the week, and hearing tales/legends/etc about "The Sleepers" or "The Hordes" or "The Wraith"... everyone has a different word for it, and it becomes apparent to SG:Atlantis that there really might be something behind the Atlantians fleeing their Galaxy for Earth. We make alliances with other worlds under the presumption that if there is something out there, it's better to stick together. The Genii trade ammo for technology, etc. Around mid-season break, the team makes an encounter with some Wraith, some get away, and after that there's the realization that we might have woken something up. Keep going, and by season end, the team has a major encounter in an action-filled 2-part episode, but after their victory they realize this was only a "small" group of unsuspecting Wraith. And now the Wraith know about us.. maybe they don't know about Atlantis, but they know we're somewhere, and they are coming.
That would have been a killer season 1, and would have set up following seasons with new characters as you grow the alliances. But no, the writers didn't take us anywhere near there. Instead, we met the Wraith in episode 1, season 1. And by the end of season 1, the Wraith knew aobut Atlantis and were trying to invade.
And hey, would it have killed them to (a) show us more of the cool Atlantis city, and (b) had something of a more believeable Gateroom.. in a time of 'war', why did the Ancients leave their Gate in the middle of their command center?
I had something similar happen to me when I was flying to Birmingham, England for a business meeting just before Christmas. Didn't think I'd ever have a problem leaving the country. When I tried to do Express Checkin at the NorthWest counter, the computer told me to see an agent in person. The guy taps my passport number into his terminal, says "Oh!" (never a good sign) and makes a phone call. I can only hear his side of the conversation, but I'm not really paying attention until ten minutes later when I hear the phrase "... he's attempting to use an American passport." Not something you want to hear in an airport. That's when I moved the poinsettia out of the way so I could see and hear him better. (I'm thinking, "Hey, maybe I'll spend Christmas in a 6'x6' chain link cell in Guantanamo... at least it's warm!") Five minutes after that, he says I've been cleared (?) and gives me my passport and ticket. Never found out why the delay. Weird.
I've always felt that the shuttle crew (the astronauts that are about to go up in the thing) should have at least 50% say in go/no-go decisions based on findings like this. If engineers find a 5" crack, it's the crew that suffer the consequences of a bad go/no-go decision. One assumes the crew are already part of the data-gathering process. If the shuttle crew say "Low risk - okay to fix on the pad and launch", then that should carry a lot of weight in the final decision. If they instead say "Too risky - I'd rather not bet my life on this particular problem" then that should carry just as much weight.
Of course, NASA may already have such a decision structure in place. But this is Slashdot.. I can posit without the facts very easily here.:-)
Be careful where you point that joke. My.sig at work over the last few years has been:
This email message has been encrypted using the ROT-26 cipher.
..and I still get email from people to tell me that their computer was able to read my email, so Outlook must support this "ROT-26" encryption thing. And they aren't joking.
I know it's bad form to reply to your own comment, but I had to share. It's amazing what you can find on Google video. I was looking for a copy of the 'Toxic' music video, but instead I found Yoda. Um, that's just... wrong?
(Oh, and Britney Spears -- does the youth audience still care about her, or is she already passe?)
Not to be mean to her or anything, but I don't know that Britney will remain popular for much longer. I understand she's pregnant, but the photo of her on the BBC leaves me pretty unimpressed. It's been a while since Toxic.
DNF will ship. Who knows how good it will be, or what condition it will be in. They can make money after the fact with expansions.
But will you have the system to handle DNF? I have a pre-market copy of the DNF box right here... let's see.... MS-DOS 6.22 (Windows 3.11 users will need to exit to DOS), 32MB XMS memory (HIMEM), 100MB free space on hard drive.
It may not have gone exactly like that, but it probably was similar. The day the announcement hit, I emailed my Lenovo rep to confirm the news. I also emailed my IBM rep separately, saying something along the lines of "at our work, we view Lenovo and IBM as being pretty much tied together - there's an IBM logo on the Lenovo ThinkPads we just bought, for example." And then asking IBM to confirm their continued support of Linux, as my part of the business runs a lot of IBM servers to run Linux.
IBM responded with a statement to the effect of "IBM and Lenovo are definitely not tied together; Lenovo does their own thing, and IBM still supports Linux."
Lenovo responded with a "hold on, I'm verifying this upstream." The next email I got was a pre-announcement that Lenovo was reversing course and will support Linux.
I did wonder at the time if IBM put any pressure on Lenovo. I'm sure my one email didn't have much impact, but I'm positive that other IBM reps received similar email correspondence from their customers.:-)
Re:Gotta wonder how IBM feels about this...
on
Lenovo To Shun Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There are a multitude of other places where one can see IBM's support, endorsement, and development of Linux. The big question is where is IBM getting its hardware for its own employees these days? If there's an agreement with Lenovo to purchase PCs from them, I would imagine that this decision will create some serious support problems.
I don't work for Lenovo or IBM, but I do talk to my sales reps on a regular basis and get to ask some pretty pointed questions. Yes, IBM does have a relationship with Lenovo to provide laptops... probably desktops, as well. IIRC, the deal is over the next 3 years to provide Lenovo laptops.
The deal is also when you buy a laptop from Lenovo, it comes with the "IBM" logo on it, and the blue "Access IBM" button. And that's also why www.lenovo.com/thinkpad redirects you to an ibm.com web site.
Personally, I'm curious how IBM will react to this. The IBM/Lenovo deal has IBM receiving all its laptops from Lenovo for the next 3 years, so what will the IBM Linux support techs say? Will they not care much, since the hardware isn't likely to change all that much in the (near) future?
As a customer, I am concerned if this will have any impact on IBM's support commitment for Linux on their servers and blades. We're a big user of IBM servers and blades, exclusively to run Linux. (Yes, I've already emailed my IBM rep to ask.)
Re:Sightly offtopic but still...
on
Lenovo To Shun Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Am I the only one who thinks that newer IBM / Lenovo laptops are just pieces of crap?
Yes, you are. At least, I would disagree with you.
I've installed and run Linux on lots of IBM ThinkPads: T60, T43,... R40, R30,... A31, A30, A21e,... 770z, 770, 765D,... 384ED. I've always considered the ThinkPad to be a solid machine, very Linux friendly. I love the R40 that I'm on, but now that it's 3 years old it's time to replace it with one of the dual-core laptops... I'm considering the X60, since the T60 definitely supported Linux. When the ThinkPad was an IBM product, for example, IBM opened the code to the DSP on the ThinkPad 770 series.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't say I have an addiction to the 'Net, but I'll admit a kind of strange addiction to Lumines(PSP). Once I get a game going, if you don't have anything to do with colored blocks falling to a musical rhythm, then I won't pay attention to you. My wife claims to have flashed her boobs at me while I was playing, and I didn't notice. :-)
Dude, that one was debunked by the writers. Like, ages ago. :-)
(Great to see a 'Lost' reference here..)
For those who are interested (and missed it on TV) the "bathroom" bit starts at 0:30 in that last section.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Uu7spdSKQ&mode=re lated&search=
Eww....
The French are calling us fat, lazy, and now stupid. Great, well at least we aren't a bunch cheese eating surrender monkeys. Time to eat some more pork rinds and watch American Idol. I hope I don't have to get out of my chair to find my remote. Found it. It was under a fold of fat. I also found my car keys.
... and an Oreo cookie.
For example: Duke Nukem Forever
Sorry ... too obvious, had to do it. :-)
I agree. But it also might be that the iPod is a pretty solid piece of hardware. Even though hard drive capacities increase over time (you can get a bigger iPod next year) the iPod device itself will last a long time with moderate care. I replaced my 2-year-old 3rd gen iPod when the battery failed to hold a charge longer than an hour, not because it was otherwise broken. (And had the battery been easily user-replaceable, I probably would have done that instead.)
And a cute one too
I'm sure I will go to that special hell for reducing a PhD to a sexist remark. :-)
You could try GNU Robots, if you're willing to accept Scheme. It's still a work in progress, but the concept is you write a program (in Scheme) for a little robot, then set him loose to explore a maze. The maze is populated with prizes, food, and baddies (you can shoot them, or choose to avoid them.)
The nice thing about this is that kids can learn programming with an immediate payoff - they get to watch their robot in action on the screen. GNU Robots is the same concept as ChipWits, which has been "coming soon" for PC since 1999 (it originally was available on Apple and Mac).
Disclaimer: I am the originator of GNU Robots, but I left the project in 2000 after handing it over to another maintainer.
I've actually been holding out for a professionally-produced game based on the cardboard-tube Samurai. I emailed Tycho about it one day: Cardboard Tube Samurai Wii! For me, it's the killer game that would convince me to buy the Wii. Imagine: using the wiimote to deliver smackdowns against enemy samurai and ninjas. And pig sidekick mini-missions. :-)
Sure, Gabe & Tycho would have to sell out to make this game. But only a tiny bit. And I hear that part of your soul grows back after a while.
-jh
Interesting you say that ... and how exactly would you know you've cut down too much on quality? Sure, with some games you know how much you've lost on resolution, because you can see the other options. Or because a particular slider setting is at 5, but it can go up to 11. But here's an example where you don't know:
When it was new, I played the first HalfLife all the way through on my PC and thought it rocked. Sure, things were a little dark (that's with the brightness slider set to max) but hey, almost the whole game is underground. Sound was great, better than I had experienced in recent games. Yes, HalfLife was great.
Then I brought my game CD to a friend's house, and watched him play it there.
It was a totally different experience. Brightness levels were different, so there was way more detail visible on the models. And heck, there was much richer sound and music. On my PC, the game only played music at the end of major boss battles ... pretty much when things have settled down. Turns out, the game can play more of the music and effects on a better PC ... imagine that, a better sound card can handle more music channels. And his video card was better than mine, so everything just looked better.
Lesson learned: on PC games, you don't always know if the game quality has been cranked down for you. Yes, on consoles I don't know the decisions that were made for me during development, but at least you get the same game experience on my PS2 versus someone else's PS2.
Absolutely! That's why I double-rot13 all my emails before sending them! :-)
I think he means "rated G, for 'Garbage'." :-)
I agree that they lack plot direction on Atlantis. However, I suspect it's too late for them to do anything about it. They kind of blew their wad from the start. You need to build up to it. Imagine how cool it would have been to occupy Season 1 with visiting all these new worlds, helping the local population with whatever problem of the week, and hearing tales/legends/etc about "The Sleepers" or "The Hordes" or "The Wraith" ... everyone has a different word for it, and it becomes apparent to SG:Atlantis that there really might be something behind the Atlantians fleeing their Galaxy for Earth. We make alliances with other worlds under the presumption that if there is something out there, it's better to stick together. The Genii trade ammo for technology, etc. Around mid-season break, the team makes an encounter with some Wraith, some get away, and after that there's the realization that we might have woken something up. Keep going, and by season end, the team has a major encounter in an action-filled 2-part episode, but after their victory they realize this was only a "small" group of unsuspecting Wraith. And now the Wraith know about us .. maybe they don't know about Atlantis, but they know we're somewhere, and they are coming.
That would have been a killer season 1, and would have set up following seasons with new characters as you grow the alliances. But no, the writers didn't take us anywhere near there. Instead, we met the Wraith in episode 1, season 1. And by the end of season 1, the Wraith knew aobut Atlantis and were trying to invade.
And hey, would it have killed them to (a) show us more of the cool Atlantis city, and (b) had something of a more believeable Gateroom .. in a time of 'war', why did the Ancients leave their Gate in the middle of their command center?
I had something similar happen to me when I was flying to Birmingham, England for a business meeting just before Christmas. Didn't think I'd ever have a problem leaving the country. When I tried to do Express Checkin at the NorthWest counter, the computer told me to see an agent in person. The guy taps my passport number into his terminal, says "Oh!" (never a good sign) and makes a phone call. I can only hear his side of the conversation, but I'm not really paying attention until ten minutes later when I hear the phrase "... he's attempting to use an American passport." Not something you want to hear in an airport. That's when I moved the poinsettia out of the way so I could see and hear him better. (I'm thinking, "Hey, maybe I'll spend Christmas in a 6'x6' chain link cell in Guantanamo ... at least it's warm!") Five minutes after that, he says I've been cleared (?) and gives me my passport and ticket. Never found out why the delay. Weird.
I've always felt that the shuttle crew (the astronauts that are about to go up in the thing) should have at least 50% say in go/no-go decisions based on findings like this. If engineers find a 5" crack, it's the crew that suffer the consequences of a bad go/no-go decision. One assumes the crew are already part of the data-gathering process. If the shuttle crew say "Low risk - okay to fix on the pad and launch", then that should carry a lot of weight in the final decision. If they instead say "Too risky - I'd rather not bet my life on this particular problem" then that should carry just as much weight.
Of course, NASA may already have such a decision structure in place. But this is Slashdot .. I can posit without the facts very easily here. :-)
While talking about the foundation: Anyone else notice that Warren Buffet is so rich that he hired Bill Gates to spend his money?
Yes, Jon Stewart of the 'Daily Show' noticed that last week, and made exactly the same comment on his show. I'm guessing you saw it too. :-)
Be careful where you point that joke. My .sig at work over the last few years has been:
..and I still get email from people to tell me that their computer was able to read my email, so Outlook must support this "ROT-26" encryption thing. And they aren't joking.
I know it's bad form to reply to your own comment, but I had to share. It's amazing what you can find on Google video. I was looking for a copy of the 'Toxic' music video, but instead I found Yoda. Um, that's just ... wrong?
(Oh, and Britney Spears -- does the youth audience still care about her, or is she already passe?)
Not to be mean to her or anything, but I don't know that Britney will remain popular for much longer. I understand she's pregnant, but the photo of her on the BBC leaves me pretty unimpressed. It's been a while since Toxic.
Gosh, if Creative wins, I hope they don't make me give back my iPod.
Fear the Roomba!
Roomba: Godless killing machine. With automatic carpet pile height adjustment.
DNF will ship. Who knows how good it will be, or what condition it will be in. They can make money after the fact with expansions.
But will you have the system to handle DNF? I have a pre-market copy of the DNF box right here ... let's see .... MS-DOS 6.22 (Windows 3.11 users will need to exit to DOS), 32MB XMS memory (HIMEM), 100MB free space on hard drive.
It may not have gone exactly like that, but it probably was similar. The day the announcement hit, I emailed my Lenovo rep to confirm the news. I also emailed my IBM rep separately, saying something along the lines of "at our work, we view Lenovo and IBM as being pretty much tied together - there's an IBM logo on the Lenovo ThinkPads we just bought, for example." And then asking IBM to confirm their continued support of Linux, as my part of the business runs a lot of IBM servers to run Linux.
IBM responded with a statement to the effect of "IBM and Lenovo are definitely not tied together; Lenovo does their own thing, and IBM still supports Linux."
Lenovo responded with a "hold on, I'm verifying this upstream." The next email I got was a pre-announcement that Lenovo was reversing course and will support Linux.
I did wonder at the time if IBM put any pressure on Lenovo. I'm sure my one email didn't have much impact, but I'm positive that other IBM reps received similar email correspondence from their customers. :-)
There are a multitude of other places where one can see IBM's support, endorsement, and development of Linux. The big question is where is IBM getting its hardware for its own employees these days? If there's an agreement with Lenovo to purchase PCs from them, I would imagine that this decision will create some serious support problems.
I don't work for Lenovo or IBM, but I do talk to my sales reps on a regular basis and get to ask some pretty pointed questions. Yes, IBM does have a relationship with Lenovo to provide laptops ... probably desktops, as well. IIRC, the deal is over the next 3 years to provide Lenovo laptops.
The deal is also when you buy a laptop from Lenovo, it comes with the "IBM" logo on it, and the blue "Access IBM" button. And that's also why www.lenovo.com/thinkpad redirects you to an ibm.com web site.
Personally, I'm curious how IBM will react to this. The IBM/Lenovo deal has IBM receiving all its laptops from Lenovo for the next 3 years, so what will the IBM Linux support techs say? Will they not care much, since the hardware isn't likely to change all that much in the (near) future?
As a customer, I am concerned if this will have any impact on IBM's support commitment for Linux on their servers and blades. We're a big user of IBM servers and blades, exclusively to run Linux. (Yes, I've already emailed my IBM rep to ask.)
Am I the only one who thinks that newer IBM / Lenovo laptops are just pieces of crap?
Yes, you are. At least, I would disagree with you.
I've installed and run Linux on lots of IBM ThinkPads: T60, T43, ... R40, R30, ... A31, A30, A21e, ... 770z, 770, 765D, ... 384ED. I've always considered the ThinkPad to be a solid machine, very Linux friendly. I love the R40 that I'm on, but now that it's 3 years old it's time to replace it with one of the dual-core laptops ... I'm considering the X60, since the T60 definitely supported Linux. When the ThinkPad was an IBM product, for example, IBM opened the code to the DSP on the ThinkPad 770 series.