Coming from some work in PHP, I've been burying my head in Ruby lately, to much joy, and have also discovered Ruby on Rails, which was also featured in a recent Slashdot article. What I've seen is amazing so far (not to mention that Ruby code is so much more readable than PHP that it's not even funny). Just an FYI...
This whole thing reminds me of that disturbing scene in one of the Alien movies where Ripley entered a room with "failed hybrids" that were being kept alive (and suffering) for some reason.
This area of research just opens up a million more questions than it answers...
You will save that extra hundred bucks the first time there's a new Windows spyware or virus that you don't have to kill precious hours of your life trying to eradicate that you could have spent instead making money, sleeping, playing with your kids or doing something enjoyable.
I have owned both types of machines for a loooong time. Mac upkeep time/energy is literally an order of magnitude less than Windows upkeep time/energy.
Why are people consistently completely unfathomably incredibly blind to the hidden costs?
1) Create an encrypted disk image (os x) or zip file 2) Rename the file to the SHA hash of the file 3) Upload the file via this method 4) Distribute the file-hash table and secret password to your trusted downloaders via other secure means of comm
This web app framework uses the same "model-view-controller" paradigm that the Cocoa dev environment on OS X uses (and which has also been lauded). FYI
I agree with a couple of posts here in that the direction that non-EA sports game producers should take now is more of a fantasy tack. Forget using real stars and real names. Maybe don't even use ALL the real rules. How about getting back to *fun*, folks? Get creative, maybe? Here's one- Invent a networkable baseball game that uses all the modern 3D technology but has invented, larger-than-life characters with a certain amount of personality. (Remember the movie "Major League"?) Hire a good writer to create the characters and scripts maybe, and some B-movie actors to do voiceovers. Perhaps even have players that reflect sports in-jokes, something to grab the baseball fan gamer. (What pulls you in better than a joke about something that you know not everyone knows?) Caricatured players, caricatured game play. Maybe have a guy who can jump 6 feet in the air, or other such "slightly enhanced" human abilities. Let EA handle the "realistic simulation" market.
I would buy this kind of game in a second.
(On a related note, I wish that media producers would stop trying to pander to EVERYONE and would focus on a certain demographic that would then become rabid (and ever-purchasing) fans... I'm thinking, when is the last time a really good, and I mean really creatively good, hard sci-fi movie came out? Make a movie based on a Vernor Vinge novel or something, for God's sakes! But that's just my own lament...)
These were two of the most compelling computer-based learning software examples I've ever seen. They date from the early 90's on Macs and only ran in black and white, later published by Broderbund... But they demonstrated all the concepts graphically and that's where I feel the strengths lie in computer-based learning. (Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any real links to it, it predates the Web by a few years...)
Anyway, the main draw in a game seems to be the competitive aspect (between you and someone else, you and the game, or you and yourself) and control. So... What if you had a mortar fight and you had to calculate the angle to fire the mortar using physics equations? If the game contrived a reason to have to know something in order to accomplish some goal (it's amazing how compelling the reward of lights and sounds, i.e. seeing your opponent blown up, can be), I think that learning would certainly occur.
That's amazing (re: distilling truly random bits from a biased bitstream). I had no idea that was possible, or even that simple, but of course it makes sense in 20/20 hindsight. Do you know if all methodologies to generate computed randomness via something like environmental sampling (e.g.,/dev/random) take advantage of this to purify the random bitstream?
Market value is the only true value. Why isn't someone screaming this in the courts?
When you buy a CD or piece of software, you get the support... the nice packaging... the printed manuals... the fancy CD... the liner notes... The legal serial number.
When you download media, you only get the media itself, and usually a much crappier version of it (if it's video) or a mildly crappier version of it (if it's sound) or a version you are forced to read on a screen (if it's a PDF of a book).
Not to mention that there is no proof that every download is a lost purchase... I'm telling you, most of these people are merely into collecting and hardly have time to "consume" the media or software.
I have a new Comcast Motorola HDTV/DVR and although the specs look nice, the TV Guide interface that it uses is the worst piece of sh** I have ever seen. Awful use of screen real estate, bad look and feel, terrible responsiveness, yuck all around.
The TiVo interface, meanwhile, is astonishingly great... When I didn't find a TiVo option anywhere that took advantage of HDTV and worked with Comcast (i.e., "the consumer has lost"), I knew that TiVo had fucked up something on the business side. (Whenever the consumer loses, it seems like it's always some headstrong engineer's fault who doesn't want to negotiate away his precious technology.)
I can't believe all the/.'ers here who are bagging on TiVo. What the hell is wrong with you people. Don't you SEE? Are you interface-blind, the same way some are color-blind? Figures that you CL jockeys are not really UI types or appreciators, except for the occasional Apple whoring (which would never have even started until Apple included a command line and X11 compatibility in its new OS). Bah...
This takes just a little bit of effort but is well worth it in man-hours you'll save not managing spam down the line.
1) Compile a list of every human you've corresponded with in the past 6 months, or 1 year, or whatever. This may not be 100% necessary if you can do the second part of step (6) below. 2) Compile a list of mailing lists you subscribe to. 3) Get a new email address with a long prefix (i.e. not easily brute-force-guessable) 4) Let everyone on your list know your new email address. 5) Subscribe your new email address to your mailing lists and unsubscribe your old. 6) Abandon your old email address. If you can, set it to autoreply with an obfuscated version of your new email address that a human could figure out. 7) NEVER enter your new email address online unless you MUST. Use a service like mailinator.com instead, to receive "registration confirmation" emails and whatnot. 8) If you must list your email address on a website as contact info, obfuscate it with javascript (see below*). This will prevent spambots from harvesting your email address from the html source of the page.
I have done this successfully and get NO spam. As in, ZERO. Perhaps it helped that I switched to a gmail account, but damn, it works.
*javascript email obfuscation: replace "yourname@yourdomain.com" in HTML with:
1) Compile a list of every human you've corresponded with in the past 6 months, or 1 year, or whatever. 2) Compile a list of mailing lists you subscribe to. 3) Get a new email address with a long prefix (i.e. not easily brute-force-guessable) 4) Let everyone on your list know your new email address. 5) Subscribe your new email address to your mailing lists. 6) Abandon your old email address. If you can, set it to autoreply with an obfuscated version of your new email address that a human could figure out. 7) NEVER enter your new email address online unless you MUST. Use a service like mailinator.com instead, to receive "registration confirmation" emails and whatnot.
I have done this successfully and get NO spam. As in, ZERO. Perhaps it helped that I switched to a gmail account, but it works.
Think: No spyware to speak of. No virii to speak of. Hardly ever a security patch reboot parade. Plays nice with others. Does most things you'd want to do on a computer, except for a few modern games that only exist on PC's.
I hope they sell a sh**load of these, and I hope that all of you get one for auntie, and granny, and your brother-in-law, and Mom, and basically anyone that you and I know will be asking *US* for free tech support. And lots of it, if it's Windows. You know it, I know it... Hell, I do it.
Your time is as valuable as mine. Even if you can get a stripped-down Dell for a hundred or so less... Even if you can build your own for almost 200 less... Time is money. "Time is hydraulic". It's the only permanently finite resource you have. Don't forget. Don't waste another second running AdAware. Take a walk on the wild side. Try a Mini on for size.
My time is worth 20-120 dollars an hour, depending on the client and what I'm working on.
The time I save in ONE HOUR of not having to remove spyware, virii and other crap from various members of my family's computers (I, being the family geek, am the default repair guy, and of course I have to do it for free, taking time away from playing with my niece and nephew and interacting with my family) is well worth the paltry few bucks I'll save by getting them a POS Windows machine. What are you smoking, dude? You are totally missing the point of this thing.
uh, didja even *bother* to read the specs on it before you knee-jerk posted? it has a sequential mode. They only emphasize the random playlist bit because it maximizes the relatively small amount of space on it. Justifiably so, I think.
The pandas are limited edition too? I thought it was only the zergling and something else, but not a panda. it's just ornamental, in any event. I bought an owl, what a waste of money- Takes up a precious bag slot and does nothing.
But wait... you are a gal... who likes Macs... and plays WoW.
Please email me =) prefix@webmail.com where "prefix" equals Peters' boss' last name in the movie Office Space, and "webmail" = a famous webmail service run by Google. =)
... elves and humans got a Gnome or Dwarf-tossing ability at lvl30... so many times I saw a cute gnome and wanted to select it and do a/toss or maybe even a/pat on the head... alas
I keed, I keed (lectrick, lvl29 elven hunter in zul'jin)
You have to try WoW. It's the MMORPG for people with offline lives. Grinding is kept to a minimum, the experience focus is on quests, and there are thousands of quests. You'll have so much fun doing quests that you'll hardly notice your leveling. The content itself is really interesting too (creatively designed environments/npc's/quests/enemies/sound/graphics)
What if they're already here and observing.
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
And what if they're just waiting for us to be able to deal with it.
Thus, I think the better question is not "Are we alone?" but rather "Do you REALLY think we'd be able to deal with it, right this minute, if we (on a mass scale) realized we weren't?" and the related but important "If 'they' were 'further along' than us, and not just microbes in wet sand, could we deal with that too?"
A while back I emailed some of the SETI founders about this and got back a "We have procedures in place for proper dissemination of the information if it is discovered", which says NOTHING about how we are prepared to handle the emotional/psychic impact, which cannot of course be ignored. Thus, I no longer support SETI, choosing to spend my CPU cycles on something more practical like Folding@home. Discovery that we are not alone is not "usual" news, and due to its uniqueness has a high unpredictability of mass emotional/psychic impact, and I don't believe it will be something that will be treated by publishing the results in Physical Review Letters, so to speak.
Two other quick things- For a distantly plausible workaround to the speed-of-light problem/argument against intelligent life already being here, google Miguel Alcubierre. One last tidbit. I read somewhere (take with a huge grain of salt of course) that "they" like our music and actually owe us a lot in royalties, and are holding onto this for now (and some other things) as a good-faith gift in the event of public contact. Wouldn't it be ironic, the RIAA being a major supporter of a public First Contact?
I don't think they were selling the 128k in '86 anymore. Our family got ours in December 1984 (20 years ago!), a seminal life-changing month for me (nerdy as that is... well, this is/., right?) This was our family's first computer, and prior to this I had only dealt with various Commodore machines. Well we walked into a computer store thinking Commodore, I got a demo of menus/windows/desk accessories/macpaint and was promptly blown away, and we walked out with various Apple Mac/Lisa marketing material ("Macintosh Test Drive", "The Lisa Office System", etc... I think my mom threw em out, bet they'd fetch money on eBay too!) and dreaming of possessing the little beige box. Well I'd have to say that was probably the most exciting Xmas ever- spent all evening playing with macwrite, macpaint, the Guided Tour (with audiotape!), the Finder (what is a "Finder"?), and a few early Mac games. Spent the entire following summer programming in Microsoft BASIC for the Mac, and am now a web/database coder.
That machine was since upgraded to a 512 and then a Mac Plus and now currently sits in my parents' closet... next to the ImageWriter I and a bunch of floppies. Still works! Dark Castle forever...
The truth hurts, don't it, Mr. Anonymous Cowardly Insulter? Take it from someone who wasted a lot of time in the "warez" collecting game... I speak the truth. And I'm in the tech sector (a developer, actually), and not only have a job but have to beat off people asking me to do work for them. Must just be Boston, I guess.
Where is a study showing how many sales are ACTUALLY lost to piracy instead of stupid figures counting every distributed copy as a lost sale??
Do you really think these folks had time to actually use all those apps? These are merely the mega-collector types, and they trade mostly with OTHER mega-collector types. Sure, there is a bit of lost revenue on the fringe of the network, when some freelance consultant who really needs a copy of Visio to get a small project done but doesn't make the effort to afford it, hops on his local P2P and grabs it, or when a kid who can't afford squat doesn't want to nag his parents to death to buy some game and just downloads it. Most SERIOUS software users, however, DO INDEED purchase, because they want the support plan, they want the upgrade path, they want the paper documentation, they don't have the time to keep looking for new illegal license keys, etc.
The rest are just packrats trading with packrats to see who can make the biggest pile. Which makes them more like "freelance software archivists/librarians" than "thieving anti-capitalist contraband distributors".
Slashdot Mirror
Coming from some work in PHP, I've been burying my head in Ruby lately, to much joy, and have also discovered Ruby on Rails, which was also featured in a recent Slashdot article. What I've seen is amazing so far (not to mention that Ruby code is so much more readable than PHP that it's not even funny). Just an FYI...
This whole thing reminds me of that disturbing scene in one of the Alien movies where Ripley entered a room with "failed hybrids" that were being kept alive (and suffering) for some reason.
This area of research just opens up a million more questions than it answers...
You will save that extra hundred bucks the first time there's a new Windows spyware or virus that you don't have to kill precious hours of your life trying to eradicate that you could have spent instead making money, sleeping, playing with your kids or doing something enjoyable.
I have owned both types of machines for a loooong time. Mac upkeep time/energy is literally an order of magnitude less than Windows upkeep time/energy.
Why are people consistently completely unfathomably incredibly blind to the hidden costs?
1) Create an encrypted disk image (os x) or zip file
2) Rename the file to the SHA hash of the file
3) Upload the file via this method
4) Distribute the file-hash table and secret password to your trusted downloaders via other secure means of comm
=)
There are ways around doing that. See other sibling replies to yours...
This web app framework uses the same "model-view-controller" paradigm that the Cocoa dev environment on OS X uses (and which has also been lauded). FYI
I agree with a couple of posts here in that the direction that non-EA sports game producers should take now is more of a fantasy tack. Forget using real stars and real names. Maybe don't even use ALL the real rules. How about getting back to *fun*, folks? Get creative, maybe? Here's one- Invent a networkable baseball game that uses all the modern 3D technology but has invented, larger-than-life characters with a certain amount of personality. (Remember the movie "Major League"?) Hire a good writer to create the characters and scripts maybe, and some B-movie actors to do voiceovers. Perhaps even have players that reflect sports in-jokes, something to grab the baseball fan gamer. (What pulls you in better than a joke about something that you know not everyone knows?) Caricatured players, caricatured game play. Maybe have a guy who can jump 6 feet in the air, or other such "slightly enhanced" human abilities. Let EA handle the "realistic simulation" market.
I would buy this kind of game in a second.
(On a related note, I wish that media producers would stop trying to pander to EVERYONE and would focus on a certain demographic that would then become rabid (and ever-purchasing) fans... I'm thinking, when is the last time a really good, and I mean really creatively good, hard sci-fi movie came out? Make a movie based on a Vernor Vinge novel or something, for God's sakes! But that's just my own lament...)
These were two of the most compelling computer-based learning software examples I've ever seen. They date from the early 90's on Macs and only ran in black and white, later published by Broderbund... But they demonstrated all the concepts graphically and that's where I feel the strengths lie in computer-based learning. (Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any real links to it, it predates the Web by a few years...)
Anyway, the main draw in a game seems to be the competitive aspect (between you and someone else, you and the game, or you and yourself) and control. So... What if you had a mortar fight and you had to calculate the angle to fire the mortar using physics equations? If the game contrived a reason to have to know something in order to accomplish some goal (it's amazing how compelling the reward of lights and sounds, i.e. seeing your opponent blown up, can be), I think that learning would certainly occur.
That's amazing (re: distilling truly random bits from a biased bitstream). I had no idea that was possible, or even that simple, but of course it makes sense in 20/20 hindsight. Do you know if all methodologies to generate computed randomness via something like environmental sampling (e.g., /dev/random) take advantage of this to purify the random bitstream?
Market value is the only true value. Why isn't someone screaming this in the courts?
When you buy a CD or piece of software, you get the support... the nice packaging... the printed manuals... the fancy CD... the liner notes... The legal serial number.
When you download media, you only get the media itself, and usually a much crappier version of it (if it's video) or a mildly crappier version of it (if it's sound) or a version you are forced to read on a screen (if it's a PDF of a book).
Not to mention that there is no proof that every download is a lost purchase... I'm telling you, most of these people are merely into collecting and hardly have time to "consume" the media or software.
Mod parent up!
I have a new Comcast Motorola HDTV/DVR and although the specs look nice, the TV Guide interface that it uses is the worst piece of sh** I have ever seen. Awful use of screen real estate, bad look and feel, terrible responsiveness, yuck all around.
/.'ers here who are bagging on TiVo. What the hell is wrong with you people. Don't you SEE? Are you interface-blind, the same way some are color-blind? Figures that you CL jockeys are not really UI types or appreciators, except for the occasional Apple whoring (which would never have even started until Apple included a command line and X11 compatibility in its new OS). Bah...
The TiVo interface, meanwhile, is astonishingly great... When I didn't find a TiVo option anywhere that took advantage of HDTV and worked with Comcast (i.e., "the consumer has lost"), I knew that TiVo had fucked up something on the business side. (Whenever the consumer loses, it seems like it's always some headstrong engineer's fault who doesn't want to negotiate away his precious technology.)
I can't believe all the
This takes just a little bit of effort but is well worth it in man-hours you'll save not managing spam down the line.
+ 'yourdomain.c'+'om')</script>
1) Compile a list of every human you've corresponded with in the past 6 months, or 1 year, or whatever. This may not be 100% necessary if you can do the second part of step (6) below.
2) Compile a list of mailing lists you subscribe to.
3) Get a new email address with a long prefix (i.e. not easily brute-force-guessable)
4) Let everyone on your list know your new email address.
5) Subscribe your new email address to your mailing lists and unsubscribe your old.
6) Abandon your old email address. If you can, set it to autoreply with an obfuscated version of your new email address that a human could figure out.
7) NEVER enter your new email address online unless you MUST. Use a service like mailinator.com instead, to receive "registration confirmation" emails and whatnot.
8) If you must list your email address on a website as contact info, obfuscate it with javascript (see below*). This will prevent spambots from harvesting your email address from the html source of the page.
I have done this successfully and get NO spam. As in, ZERO. Perhaps it helped that I switched to a gmail account, but damn, it works.
*javascript email obfuscation: replace "yourname@yourdomain.com" in HTML with:
<script language='javascript'> document.write('yourname'+String.fromCharCode(64)
Voila!
1) Compile a list of every human you've corresponded with in the past 6 months, or 1 year, or whatever.
2) Compile a list of mailing lists you subscribe to.
3) Get a new email address with a long prefix (i.e. not easily brute-force-guessable)
4) Let everyone on your list know your new email address.
5) Subscribe your new email address to your mailing lists.
6) Abandon your old email address. If you can, set it to autoreply with an obfuscated version of your new email address that a human could figure out.
7) NEVER enter your new email address online unless you MUST. Use a service like mailinator.com instead, to receive "registration confirmation" emails and whatnot.
I have done this successfully and get NO spam. As in, ZERO. Perhaps it helped that I switched to a gmail account, but it works.
Any reference to Red Dwarf is priceless. Smeghead!
Time is worth much more than money.
Think:
No spyware to speak of.
No virii to speak of.
Hardly ever a security patch reboot parade.
Plays nice with others.
Does most things you'd want to do on a computer, except for a few modern games that only exist on PC's.
I hope they sell a sh**load of these, and I hope that all of you get one for auntie, and granny, and your brother-in-law, and Mom, and basically anyone that you and I know will be asking *US* for free tech support. And lots of it, if it's Windows. You know it, I know it... Hell, I do it.
Your time is as valuable as mine. Even if you can get a stripped-down Dell for a hundred or so less... Even if you can build your own for almost 200 less... Time is money. "Time is hydraulic". It's the only permanently finite resource you have. Don't forget. Don't waste another second running AdAware. Take a walk on the wild side. Try a Mini on for size.
My time is worth 20-120 dollars an hour, depending on the client and what I'm working on.
The time I save in ONE HOUR of not having to remove spyware, virii and other crap from various members of my family's computers (I, being the family geek, am the default repair guy, and of course I have to do it for free, taking time away from playing with my niece and nephew and interacting with my family) is well worth the paltry few bucks I'll save by getting them a POS Windows machine. What are you smoking, dude? You are totally missing the point of this thing.
uh, didja even *bother* to read the specs on it before you knee-jerk posted? it has a sequential mode. They only emphasize the random playlist bit because it maximizes the relatively small amount of space on it. Justifiably so, I think.
mod parent down as poo.
"goaway"
"iliketrafficlights"
"monkeypoo"
and someone's open wifi in my building is now called
"penisforbreakfast"
Definitely opportunities for some creativity here...
The pandas are limited edition too? I thought it was only the zergling and something else, but not a panda. it's just ornamental, in any event. I bought an owl, what a waste of money- Takes up a precious bag slot and does nothing.
But wait... you are a gal... who likes Macs... and plays WoW.
Please email me =) prefix@webmail.com
where "prefix" equals Peters' boss' last name in the movie Office Space, and "webmail" = a famous webmail service run by Google. =)
... elves and humans got a Gnome or Dwarf-tossing ability at lvl30... so many times I saw a cute gnome and wanted to select it and do a /toss or maybe even a /pat on the head... alas
I keed, I keed (lectrick, lvl29 elven hunter in zul'jin)
You have to try WoW. It's the MMORPG for people with offline lives. Grinding is kept to a minimum, the experience focus is on quests, and there are thousands of quests. You'll have so much fun doing quests that you'll hardly notice your leveling. The content itself is really interesting too (creatively designed environments/npc's/quests/enemies/sound/graphics)
And what if they're just waiting for us to be able to deal with it.
Thus, I think the better question is not "Are we alone?" but rather "Do you REALLY think we'd be able to deal with it, right this minute, if we (on a mass scale) realized we weren't?" and the related but important "If 'they' were 'further along' than us, and not just microbes in wet sand, could we deal with that too?"
A while back I emailed some of the SETI founders about this and got back a "We have procedures in place for proper dissemination of the information if it is discovered", which says NOTHING about how we are prepared to handle the emotional/psychic impact, which cannot of course be ignored. Thus, I no longer support SETI, choosing to spend my CPU cycles on something more practical like Folding@home. Discovery that we are not alone is not "usual" news, and due to its uniqueness has a high unpredictability of mass emotional/psychic impact, and I don't believe it will be something that will be treated by publishing the results in Physical Review Letters, so to speak.
Two other quick things-
For a distantly plausible workaround to the speed-of-light problem/argument against intelligent life already being here, google Miguel Alcubierre.
One last tidbit. I read somewhere (take with a huge grain of salt of course) that "they" like our music and actually owe us a lot in royalties, and are holding onto this for now (and some other things) as a good-faith gift in the event of public contact. Wouldn't it be ironic, the RIAA being a major supporter of a public First Contact?
I don't think they were selling the 128k in '86 anymore. Our family got ours in December 1984 (20 years ago!), a seminal life-changing month for me (nerdy as that is... well, this is /., right?) This was our family's first computer, and prior to this I had only dealt with various Commodore machines. Well we walked into a computer store thinking Commodore, I got a demo of menus/windows/desk accessories/macpaint and was promptly blown away, and we walked out with various Apple Mac/Lisa marketing material ("Macintosh Test Drive", "The Lisa Office System", etc... I think my mom threw em out, bet they'd fetch money on eBay too!) and dreaming of possessing the little beige box. Well I'd have to say that was probably the most exciting Xmas ever- spent all evening playing with macwrite, macpaint, the Guided Tour (with audiotape!), the Finder (what is a "Finder"?), and a few early Mac games. Spent the entire following summer programming in Microsoft BASIC for the Mac, and am now a web/database coder.
That machine was since upgraded to a 512 and then a Mac Plus and now currently sits in my parents' closet... next to the ImageWriter I and a bunch of floppies. Still works! Dark Castle forever...
The truth hurts, don't it, Mr. Anonymous Cowardly Insulter? Take it from someone who wasted a lot of time in the "warez" collecting game... I speak the truth. And I'm in the tech sector (a developer, actually), and not only have a job but have to beat off people asking me to do work for them. Must just be Boston, I guess.
Where is a study showing how many sales are ACTUALLY lost to piracy instead of stupid figures counting every distributed copy as a lost sale??
Do you really think these folks had time to actually use all those apps? These are merely the mega-collector types, and they trade mostly with OTHER mega-collector types. Sure, there is a bit of lost revenue on the fringe of the network, when some freelance consultant who really needs a copy of Visio to get a small project done but doesn't make the effort to afford it, hops on his local P2P and grabs it, or when a kid who can't afford squat doesn't want to nag his parents to death to buy some game and just downloads it. Most SERIOUS software users, however, DO INDEED purchase, because they want the support plan, they want the upgrade path, they want the paper documentation, they don't have the time to keep looking for new illegal license keys, etc.
The rest are just packrats trading with packrats to see who can make the biggest pile. Which makes them more like "freelance software archivists/librarians" than "thieving anti-capitalist contraband distributors".