sorry, I disagree. In your world utopia, only the rich would have access to personal transportation. That's not the world I want to live in. Personal transportation waiting for you on your driveway is personal freedom. Focusing on efficiency and compact storage of carbon free electrical power will make that all sustainable and a lot of people happy.
yeeeeeeh, I see what you're saying, but I don't know about that. At the risk of sounding like a non-US person casting aspersions on Americans, I feel like this might be a particular aspect of America, where having and owning your own car is not only basically a necessity to survive but also intertwined with this sense of "freedom".
I remember hearing GWB do a speech at one point early on in the recent wars and he said something that I thought made it clear that he felt cars were a requirement for Americans to live freely. I remember being flabbergasted; wish I could find the quote.
I have a bunch of friends that live in Europe; I visit them once a year. Every time I am there, I am reminded of the fact that many of them don't have cars - those that drive tend to have motorbikes/scooters - and they rely almost exclusively on their rail network and metro systems to get around.
I was amazed the first time I was there about how easy it was to get around. I know I could happily live in many parts of Europe where they have this awesome public transport network and not feel like my "personal freedoms" were being infringed because I didn't have a car.
I know that's not exactly what your saying - I live in Australia and own a car, like most other people here. I like having the freedom to decide one morning I'm going to jump in it and drive somewhere without the hassle of having to check public transport timetables etc. But I do think that a lot of people - both here and in the US - are just really accustomed to the way of life that comes with having a car, and not seeing the other side of it skews the perspective a little bit.
1) Developers release games with dedicated servers that can be run by anyone
2) Multiplayer games get popular, running servers is free and easy and anyone can do it. Years of value comes out of a single game thanks to mod tools and extensibility and the fact that anyone can run a server for their favourite mod.
3) Developers slowly cut back on dedicated servers as they want to control the game experience once they realise they can sell you less DLC when mods exist.
4) Multiplayer games get less fun and more irritating because they only last a few months before the sequel is announced or you have to buy DLC to extend it and keep playing with everyone else that bought the DLC.
5) Game developers notice that private servers are really popular for some weird reason and start thinking that maybe they'd be a good idea for their next game!
We've been using Zimbra for about that long as well. I like it but agree that it has wayyyy too many niggling little problems for most people. Lucky we are all techies so (generally) don't mind working around them, but if we were doing it again I think management would go Exchange just for simplicity.
On the reply-to note - can't you set up an Identity (mail->preferences->accounts)? In those you can override the Reply-To and From fields.
(I submitted this article) I fired off a request for more information from the developers about this and they got back to me indicating they're willing to answer some more questions, so I've summarised some of the main ones that I've seen around the place.
We're based in the same city as this company (Brisbane, Australia) so I'm hoping that I might be able to actually go out there and eyeball this stuff myself to get a feel for it (and possibly drag along a graphics programmer to do some grilling).
I'm not even Joe Randomuser; I work at a software development company and work my Windows XP PC hard every day. Then I go home and play games on my Windows XP system at home. When I'm out and about, my Windows XP laptop does the trick.
I've never had a virus, trojan, or anything. I've followed basic rules - run Windows update, run a virus scanner, don't install foreign objects.
My PCs are rock solid. I don't want the downtime of upgrading and the hassle of moving to a new environment. They're tools that do exactly what I want and need.
I'm not clinging to it because out of some sense of nostalgia or anything - it all Just Works and I won't get any benefits from upgrading.
The only thing that I wish I had that I would get from upgrading to Windows 7 is the ability to do some GPU-accelerated stuff that is not natively supported in Windows XP.
What about Thunderbird (and groupware!)?!
on
The Next Firefox UI
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· Score: 1
Firefox is done. Finished. The only thing Mozilla should be doing with it is making it faster. Fucking with the interface just confuses and enrages all the regular users. Ramping up version numbers annoys plugin makers and users who have to deal with everything breaking, as well as everyone else who sees it as a vain attempt to just keep up with the Joneses.
What I would like to see Mozilla doing is spending all this time working on Thunderbird and Lightning. The browser wars are over - Microsoft lost, we've moved on.
But the groupware wars are still in the skirmish stages - there's still nothing as good as Outlook/Exchange for enterprise comms. They need to NAIL the functionality in Tbird and more importantly Lightning so the calendaring stuff is rock solid. Get it talking reliably to third party groupware packages like Zimbra - we've been using Zimbra for a couple years, and it's good if you're like us (a bunch of nerds prepared to put up with problems and work around them), but it simply doesn't compare with Outlook.
Oh... right. The lawyers are taking all the money.
Why does every story about US politics....
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: -1, Troll
...sound like it is a battle between common sense or good ideas, and Republicans?
Genuine question; I don't live in the US so have only a limited window to watch the circus, but I can't see how the country is so polarised when one party seems to be just hellbent on holding your country back.
That's sort of funny (in a depressing way), because the rest of the world that has awesome Internet is behind because of the third-world class of content licensing that everyone outside of the US seems to get.
I have enough Internet to stream good quality video with no problems, but the people that own the content won't let it be streamed in my country. So I can't access Hulu, or Netflix, or any of those cool services you guys get - even though I'd be able to happily stream it from servers a billion kilometres away.
You are talking about a single sentence in an entire article of things Carmack said. The submitted decided it was the most interesting thing, and the Slashdot editor decided it was also interesting, and as a result... here we are.
I can't imagine anyone seriously thinking Carmack saying "computers are going to get faster" is particularly insightful. However, we live in an age of soundbites; this one appears to only be on Slashdot because it's just an utterance of someone that is held - for excellent reasons, in my opinion - in extremely high esteem. I agree this statement is not very interesting or noteworthy, but to berate Carmack for it like he was getting up and making a bold Kurzweil-esque prediction when it was merely a sentence in a stream of consciousness-dumping about the topic of mobile gaming seems somewhat unfair.
I think a better question is why they were asking such banal, boring questions. "Mr Carmack, do you think mobile gaming will be a big deal one day?!@"
Maybe they don't realise Carmack thought it was such a big deal back in 2005 that he made DoomRPG and has writtenextensively about his experiences working on other mobile games - including their next generation title Rage. Carmack and id have invested pretty heavily in mobile gaming, which is pretty obvious with even cursory research.
What is the difference between an instate resident and, well, whatever the alternative is?
From context it sounds like you might get free education if you stay in your home state to go to college, but that flies in the face of everything I know about American higher education. I have two American cousins both in college (although I think one just finished); one who stayed in their home state (California) and one who went out, but from conversations with them and their parents I seem to recall them both being reasonably expensive.
Yeh, more like an official IBM public liaison got up in front of a lecture hall full of media, software partners, and retailers, and made the claim at a big launch of a new revision of a major software product they'd spent a wee bit of time and effort on. This wasn't some guy in a pub.
I didn't have a lot of reason to doubt it and still don't - it just made me start paying attention to that little three letter logo and noticing in how many places it was actually visible once you started looking.
I remember when I was a retail software sales goon, going to an IBM presentation for their voice recognition software back in 1995. At the time there was a lot of big Windows 95 stuff going on and the IBM guy was really keen to make sure that people knew IBM was a "real" computer company, and one thing that has always stuck with me was him saying that IBM was the biggest company in that market, and if was so big that if you took the next three companies and added their value together - IBM was still worth more.
Never found out of that was exactly true, but at the time I remember it put IBM in a new perspective for me - I just knew them as a company that made a bunch of weeny boring unpopular PC software packages and did some stuff in the hardware space. The reality seems to be that they're this big, massively entrenched company that has hooks freakin' everywhere.
I'd love to have the sort of bug where it actually was one price for everyone, but Gabe might need a reality check on that one - Australians (and presumably some other countries) are still getting skinned alive on video game prices - even on Steam.
We've started putting together a pricing comparison page for users and have a preview online, but in Australia we get to pay almost $50 more in some cases for games.
In Valve's defence, it isn't their fault - regionalised pricing is set by the jerk publishers. But lots of Aussie gamers are sick of it and we're spending more and more time and effort buying overseas where we can - but then we run the risk of falling afoul of the various mechanisms in place to specifically stop us doing that. (I've heard of at least one Aussie who bought a game after VPNing to the US to get the good price, then Valve took it away from him - not sure how true that story is.)
I was in the snow recently (a generally rare event for an Australian) and discovered that I couldn't use my phone when I had gloves on. Obvious in retrospect but not something I'd thought about ever, and it was a total PITA to have to take my gloves off to swipe to unlock my phone to see if I'd missed calls, SMSes, etc.
I ended up using my nose to swipe the unlock, much to the hilarity of everyone else. It looked pretty silly (so I was told) but it meant I could unlock the phone without having to take my gloves off, which was handy when skiing and doing other tasks where it was inconvenient to remove them.
That is not a failing of "online". That is a failing of the online model that Sony have chosen to employ. These sorts of problems don't plague "the old style" of online games, like your Counter-Strikes and your Quakes, which use a decentralised model that is resistant to failure. If servers go down, you just go to another server. If the master server list goes down, you just connect directly using an external game client. The only thing that might stop you playing is if the auth server is offline; I remember that happening about once in the 6-7 years of Quake 3 that I played (for some reason they try really really really hard to keep the auth servers running all the time!!)
A game that saves locally and requires you to be online to load it is just stupidly implemented. It's that sort of thing that has made me avoid online console games; I'm not interested in having the experience locked away. The Sony failure is just a great example why people should be more aware of what they're buying into when network services are offered as part of the experience.
Slashdot Mirror
sorry, I disagree. In your world utopia, only the rich would have access to personal transportation. That's not the world I want to live in. Personal transportation waiting for you on your driveway is personal freedom. Focusing on efficiency and compact storage of carbon free electrical power will make that all sustainable and a lot of people happy.
yeeeeeeh, I see what you're saying, but I don't know about that. At the risk of sounding like a non-US person casting aspersions on Americans, I feel like this might be a particular aspect of America, where having and owning your own car is not only basically a necessity to survive but also intertwined with this sense of "freedom".
I remember hearing GWB do a speech at one point early on in the recent wars and he said something that I thought made it clear that he felt cars were a requirement for Americans to live freely. I remember being flabbergasted; wish I could find the quote.
I have a bunch of friends that live in Europe; I visit them once a year. Every time I am there, I am reminded of the fact that many of them don't have cars - those that drive tend to have motorbikes/scooters - and they rely almost exclusively on their rail network and metro systems to get around.
I was amazed the first time I was there about how easy it was to get around. I know I could happily live in many parts of Europe where they have this awesome public transport network and not feel like my "personal freedoms" were being infringed because I didn't have a car.
I know that's not exactly what your saying - I live in Australia and own a car, like most other people here. I like having the freedom to decide one morning I'm going to jump in it and drive somewhere without the hassle of having to check public transport timetables etc. But I do think that a lot of people - both here and in the US - are just really accustomed to the way of life that comes with having a car, and not seeing the other side of it skews the perspective a little bit.
1) Developers release games with dedicated servers that can be run by anyone
2) Multiplayer games get popular, running servers is free and easy and anyone can do it. Years of value comes out of a single game thanks to mod tools and extensibility and the fact that anyone can run a server for their favourite mod.
3) Developers slowly cut back on dedicated servers as they want to control the game experience once they realise they can sell you less DLC when mods exist.
4) Multiplayer games get less fun and more irritating because they only last a few months before the sequel is announced or you have to buy DLC to extend it and keep playing with everyone else that bought the DLC.
5) Game developers notice that private servers are really popular for some weird reason and start thinking that maybe they'd be a good idea for their next game!
We've been using Zimbra for about that long as well. I like it but agree that it has wayyyy too many niggling little problems for most people. Lucky we are all techies so (generally) don't mind working around them, but if we were doing it again I think management would go Exchange just for simplicity.
On the reply-to note - can't you set up an Identity (mail->preferences->accounts)? In those you can override the Reply-To and From fields.
Here's the response I got to my follow-up questions: http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3094648
Here's the response I got to my follow-up questions: http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3094648
...and I can't use any of them to downmod this stupid story.
I would really like to hear the results. I've been writing a 3d engine for the past year and a half - wouldn't want to learn I'd wasted my time! ;)
Heh, given the investment of the industry and users in 3d hardware I think you're probably on the safe side :)
(I submitted this article) I fired off a request for more information from the developers about this and they got back to me indicating they're willing to answer some more questions, so I've summarised some of the main ones that I've seen around the place.
We're based in the same city as this company (Brisbane, Australia) so I'm hoping that I might be able to actually go out there and eyeball this stuff myself to get a feel for it (and possibly drag along a graphics programmer to do some grilling).
I'm not even Joe Randomuser; I work at a software development company and work my Windows XP PC hard every day. Then I go home and play games on my Windows XP system at home. When I'm out and about, my Windows XP laptop does the trick.
I've never had a virus, trojan, or anything. I've followed basic rules - run Windows update, run a virus scanner, don't install foreign objects.
My PCs are rock solid. I don't want the downtime of upgrading and the hassle of moving to a new environment. They're tools that do exactly what I want and need.
I'm not clinging to it because out of some sense of nostalgia or anything - it all Just Works and I won't get any benefits from upgrading.
The only thing that I wish I had that I would get from upgrading to Windows 7 is the ability to do some GPU-accelerated stuff that is not natively supported in Windows XP.
Firefox is done. Finished. The only thing Mozilla should be doing with it is making it faster. Fucking with the interface just confuses and enrages all the regular users. Ramping up version numbers annoys plugin makers and users who have to deal with everything breaking, as well as everyone else who sees it as a vain attempt to just keep up with the Joneses.
What I would like to see Mozilla doing is spending all this time working on Thunderbird and Lightning. The browser wars are over - Microsoft lost, we've moved on.
But the groupware wars are still in the skirmish stages - there's still nothing as good as Outlook/Exchange for enterprise comms. They need to NAIL the functionality in Tbird and more importantly Lightning so the calendaring stuff is rock solid. Get it talking reliably to third party groupware packages like Zimbra - we've been using Zimbra for a couple years, and it's good if you're like us (a bunch of nerds prepared to put up with problems and work around them), but it simply doesn't compare with Outlook.
Oh... right. The lawyers are taking all the money.
...sound like it is a battle between common sense or good ideas, and Republicans?
Genuine question; I don't live in the US so have only a limited window to watch the circus, but I can't see how the country is so polarised when one party seems to be just hellbent on holding your country back.
That's sort of funny (in a depressing way), because the rest of the world that has awesome Internet is behind because of the third-world class of content licensing that everyone outside of the US seems to get.
I have enough Internet to stream good quality video with no problems, but the people that own the content won't let it be streamed in my country. So I can't access Hulu, or Netflix, or any of those cool services you guys get - even though I'd be able to happily stream it from servers a billion kilometres away.
Without thinking about it too much - is there any reason you couldn't get some Android tablets and rig them up to do what you want?
You are talking about a single sentence in an entire article of things Carmack said. The submitted decided it was the most interesting thing, and the Slashdot editor decided it was also interesting, and as a result... here we are.
I can't imagine anyone seriously thinking Carmack saying "computers are going to get faster" is particularly insightful. However, we live in an age of soundbites; this one appears to only be on Slashdot because it's just an utterance of someone that is held - for excellent reasons, in my opinion - in extremely high esteem. I agree this statement is not very interesting or noteworthy, but to berate Carmack for it like he was getting up and making a bold Kurzweil-esque prediction when it was merely a sentence in a stream of consciousness-dumping about the topic of mobile gaming seems somewhat unfair.
I think a better question is why they were asking such banal, boring questions. "Mr Carmack, do you think mobile gaming will be a big deal one day?!@"
Maybe they don't realise Carmack thought it was such a big deal back in 2005 that he made DoomRPG and has written extensively about his experiences working on other mobile games - including their next generation title Rage. Carmack and id have invested pretty heavily in mobile gaming, which is pretty obvious with even cursory research.
What is the difference between an instate resident and, well, whatever the alternative is?
From context it sounds like you might get free education if you stay in your home state to go to college, but that flies in the face of everything I know about American higher education. I have two American cousins both in college (although I think one just finished); one who stayed in their home state (California) and one who went out, but from conversations with them and their parents I seem to recall them both being reasonably expensive.
Yeh, more like an official IBM public liaison got up in front of a lecture hall full of media, software partners, and retailers, and made the claim at a big launch of a new revision of a major software product they'd spent a wee bit of time and effort on. This wasn't some guy in a pub.
I didn't have a lot of reason to doubt it and still don't - it just made me start paying attention to that little three letter logo and noticing in how many places it was actually visible once you started looking.
I remember when I was a retail software sales goon, going to an IBM presentation for their voice recognition software back in 1995. At the time there was a lot of big Windows 95 stuff going on and the IBM guy was really keen to make sure that people knew IBM was a "real" computer company, and one thing that has always stuck with me was him saying that IBM was the biggest company in that market, and if was so big that if you took the next three companies and added their value together - IBM was still worth more.
Never found out of that was exactly true, but at the time I remember it put IBM in a new perspective for me - I just knew them as a company that made a bunch of weeny boring unpopular PC software packages and did some stuff in the hardware space. The reality seems to be that they're this big, massively entrenched company that has hooks freakin' everywhere.
Nice one, ta!
I'd love to have the sort of bug where it actually was one price for everyone, but Gabe might need a reality check on that one - Australians (and presumably some other countries) are still getting skinned alive on video game prices - even on Steam.
We've started putting together a pricing comparison page for users and have a preview online, but in Australia we get to pay almost $50 more in some cases for games.
In Valve's defence, it isn't their fault - regionalised pricing is set by the jerk publishers. But lots of Aussie gamers are sick of it and we're spending more and more time and effort buying overseas where we can - but then we run the risk of falling afoul of the various mechanisms in place to specifically stop us doing that. (I've heard of at least one Aussie who bought a game after VPNing to the US to get the good price, then Valve took it away from him - not sure how true that story is.)
I've written it off as more or less completely irrelevant
I was in the snow recently (a generally rare event for an Australian) and discovered that I couldn't use my phone when I had gloves on. Obvious in retrospect but not something I'd thought about ever, and it was a total PITA to have to take my gloves off to swipe to unlock my phone to see if I'd missed calls, SMSes, etc.
I ended up using my nose to swipe the unlock, much to the hilarity of everyone else. It looked pretty silly (so I was told) but it meant I could unlock the phone without having to take my gloves off, which was handy when skiing and doing other tasks where it was inconvenient to remove them.
They have also refunded everyone their PSN fees :)
The stipend averages out to $5376 per student, which will surely go a long way to paying for rent between semesters and then some.
Not to mention the incalculable benefit of all that new open source code they're contributing to.
The Summer of Code is probably my favourite thing about Google. Such a great example of corporate marketing!
That is not a failing of "online". That is a failing of the online model that Sony have chosen to employ. These sorts of problems don't plague "the old style" of online games, like your Counter-Strikes and your Quakes, which use a decentralised model that is resistant to failure. If servers go down, you just go to another server. If the master server list goes down, you just connect directly using an external game client. The only thing that might stop you playing is if the auth server is offline; I remember that happening about once in the 6-7 years of Quake 3 that I played (for some reason they try really really really hard to keep the auth servers running all the time!!)
A game that saves locally and requires you to be online to load it is just stupidly implemented. It's that sort of thing that has made me avoid online console games; I'm not interested in having the experience locked away. The Sony failure is just a great example why people should be more aware of what they're buying into when network services are offered as part of the experience.