Because I'm just a dumb animal and given the choice between expending more energy by biking to the store or expending less (of my own) energy by driving to the store, I'll just fall back on my survival instincts and drive. I may need that energy later to fend off a wild rabbit attack or something.
New York is tiny. I drive two miles to get groceries in my little piece of suburbia. That's like going from Union Square to Central Park in New York...which is the cosmic equivalent of Earth to Mars. On my two mile drive, if I cut through all the little side streets, I'll probably pass 1000 people. Between Union Square and Central park in a straight shot up 5th avenue...more like 200,000 people.
The car gave us freedom. If you want efficiency move to the city.
Consider dual wielding two Wii-like controllers, and give them buttons as well. Your swinging becomes the blades of your toon, your left thumb button becomes movement, right thumb button jump. A trigger on one hand becomes the camera and a trigger on the other has special contextual functions.
You become a dual-wielding jedi knight -- just move your mom's vase out of the room.
What appealed to me about Nethack/Rogue was the sheer number of things you can do. The first time I was granted a wish (I don't recall how...a fountain? A ring?), for fun I put in "Mjolnir". And, unbelievably, I was given the Hammer of Thor (I did ask for Excalibur once but I wasn't worthy enough to wield it). And with things like polymorphing your dog into a red dragon to defend you, or deflecting basilisk stares, you just got the sense this little ascii adventure game probably DID have everything because it didn't waste time with graphics.
That being said, my initial time with the original Everquest was similar. I remember being level 4 or 5 and chatting with my friend and his group that was already 6 or 7. They were going to come get me at the city gates. "Oh, you know what, we'll just send the Bard to get you, it'll be faster." And I was genuinely surprised when the Bard came racing up with a speed song, grouped with me, and we took off at 5 times the running rate I was used to. And the coolest thing was that not everyone could do this (until, of course, the potion of the wolf came out). "Balance" did not mean "similarity". You weren't all massively muscled, sword-wielding, wizards. Every class was different.
And then there was the time my 40th level friend was questing (I was level 20 or so). He had to go through a hole in the ice, swim into an underwater cavern, beat up some creature, take its loot, and get back. He dove in, and I could sort of see him swimming under the ice but as he got deeper I lost him. I waited, watching his health bar drop as, somewhere, he was fighting. "Got it!" he told me. And I waited, but then his health started to REALLY drop. "What's up?" "Underwater breathing spell ran out and I can't find the hole in the ice!" So I cast what meagre healing spells I could (I was a paladin) and he made it with about 10 of his 1000+ hit points to spare. But it was stuff like that where EQ shined over Dark Ages of Camelot and other MMOs. Not sure how WoW is in the "That can happen?!" field.
You know, I played Everquest (the original) for two years. I made it to level 20 or so, took a bit of time off, then played to level 38. So many people seem to be able to max out their level so quickly.
I think it's just mindset -- I played the paladin so I always seemed to be the one giving Lay on Hands (complete heal) to a fleeing party member before turning to face the undead hordes alone. So leveling was slow, but the gameplay was satisfying.
Once I reached 30+, I couldn't find anyone who wanted to take risks. Everything was pulling to the edge of the zone, or camping in one room forever. It was fine -- MMOs are nothing if not for their chat -- but it didn't have that adrenaline rush that going into the dungeon of Befallen or the Estate of Unrest gave you.
Leveling was "work" and if you died you "wasted the whole night". It wasn't too long that "playing" became "boring" and I quit. And, oddly, I've never played an MMO aside from trying it for a night again.
Demi Moore -- Age: 46 years (born November 11, 1962) According to: (some source) [more sources]
This is the proper way of answering a question like that. I don't want just the answer. I want to know where the answer came from.
How many french died at the Battle of Agincourt?
I expect a number from Wolfram Alpha, as well as a cited source. There could also be, like Google, the option to choose other sources.
Eventually, this will all boil down to me driving in my car and saying, "Computer. Tell me: At what speed did Marty McFly need to drive to travel in time?"
I disagree. Security is a layered thing, both in implementation and subversion. If I'm running Windows NT with no service packs and no firewall, I'm easily hacked by 90% of people.
If I'm running Windows XP patched and firewalled, I'm easily hacked by 1% of the people. If I'm running OpenBSD fully patched with no open ports aside from SSH, I can be easily hacked by.01% of the people (likely a BSD or SSH developer who slipped in a back door).
Nothing is 100% secure -- HOW secure you are is the important thing. If this super XP lets in 15% of attacks, you need to ask who knows and who would bother to run those attacks, as well as what other layers of security beyond the desktop are available.
If you're running a desktop operating system "in the wild" with no patched firewall software of any kind to block basic traffic, then you should add that layer.
Two F-16s scrambled to intercept a low-flying 747 painted as Air Force One OR Air Force One or its backup was hijacked/stolen. Heading towards the city, the powers-that-be are telling their pilots to coerce the jet to the ground without firing. No dice as the jet is driven by crazy folk. Now it's too close to the city to do anything other than shoot it down and have it crash in the streets or let it fly into the Chrysler building.
Is that how he really sounds? It had the same tempo as if AOL and Microsoft had just warned me about a new virus that will delete all my accounts and clean out the deli drawer in my fridge and even Yahoo agrees.
Obviously censoring the Internet isn't going to help. Firing the two bozos who leaked the photos would be the first step, just to keep it from happening again. As far as the assholes plaguing the family with photos, the family should change their email addresses.
That being said, do not belittle the loss of a child, especially one in their teens. This alone can devastate a parent's life -- unable to work, to laugh, to do anything other than stare at the wall wishing their child was back. That someone would exacerbate those feelings of helplessness is beyond forgiveness.
Vista works. I use it every day. I actually prefer the UAC to the normal way XP works when trying to elevate privileges. Windows 7 is better at it.
I'd like to see Microsoft focus more on centralization of infrastructure and versatility of clients. Walk in with your laptop, dock it to your dual monitor system, then open an RDP session to a terminal server the admins have 100% control over. When you leave, your laptop has your mail synched (it's been synching as you work not all at once at the end of the day), and you can take what documents you may need for your offline time. Otherwise, if you have a broadband connection, it's secure RDP. When you return, you can synch your mail and documents back up and it automatically gets cleaned as you synch.
This offers security, standardization, and mobility. Building a bigger client doesn't get anyone anywhere in corporate.
It's about profit. These days, you can't charge people $40 (or $140) per copy to go from Acrobat 5 to Acrobat 5.01, with security fixes. You need another version with added features, better usability, etc, otherwise people won't see the value in shelling out for the new version, and you won't make any money. It's easier to add then it is to recreate, so you get bloated software.
While the classroom may go away, I hope the campus doesn't. A lot of people will say that some of the best times of their lives and best friends they ever met were from college. While keeping track of your buddy's twitter feed and facebook status is the new "friendship", I don't think it has quite the camaraderie of midnight frisbee golf.
3 Apps at a time. I think that Microsoft should allow this version of the OS to be downloadable for free. It would probably do their PR and marketing some good -- more people to try it out certainly, and would create good will for allowing the product to be free for users who don't really need the power of Windows but still want to buy Microsoft applications.
When I started this post, I was thinking that the overall power usage of building 21 computers that run at 85 W might supersede the power usage of building one 1000 W computer with 32 GB of memory, if you take the whole process from manufacturing to disposal.
But I suppose it's the electric bill of the company we're concerned with so I'll just sit in the corner and re-read Bambi.
I believe this is why Microsoft wanted to move to a subscription model (and probably still does). If Microsoft can convince a company with 10,000 newish XP machines to upgrade -- that's 10,000 times the cost of an upgrade license. And any machines not upgradeable will be replaced with new machines and OEM licenses. And home users aren't a small market either as most will need to upgrade or buy new systems to support the software....
With a subscription model, like the one we use at the university, we pay X amount of dollars per year for OS and Office upgrades/installs, whether we buy new systems or not. Mostly it's to upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro. Anyway, if MS could have everyone move to a $30/computer/year model, they'd have a steady stream of cash and wouldn't need to create a new OS.
Though honestly, XP is ready for a refresh -- I'm not sure Windows 7 has enough useful features (the imaging is one though and UAC is not as annoying in 7) to warrant an upgrade. Perhaps as a platform to enable new features such as touch screens or Minority Report holographic interfaces (I swore that was in Windows 7 RC 4.52).
1) Form for username, password, email. 2) Stored in a DB where registered is NULL 3) Send an email asking user to visit link to complete registration 4) Set registered = yes 5) Weekly purge DB where registered is NULL
Captchas could also be questions like, "Paris is the capital of what country?" "What's the third menu item on this page?" "If you have four apples and one bicycle, how many pieces of fruit do you have?"
Even the perfect anti-auto captcha doesn't get around teams of people creating accounts manually to spam blogs.
It seems fine that Google could sell the books if the existing copyright has expired or can't be upheld. But there should be no problem with someone else downloading the material and reselling it or giving it out or copying it. Once the copyright expires, doesn't the work go into the public domain? Google can charge for access, but they can't charge for the work persay.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was a fine example of iPhone text prediction feature!
That's just col', yo.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
I think you'll find that not too many people disagree with your sentiment. It's the 10 people to a pothole working with $100 hammers that seems to be the issue.
At the university I work at, the number of true programmers compared to the number of project managers is about 1 to 5. There are a plethora of people who can talk all day about a solution needing a problem, the guiding policies, salaries, level of support. But surprisingly few who can churn out the code to make these projects reality. A constant complaint is the long wait for a desperately needed project, because all of the money is being spent on management and not on coding talent.
That being said, I would put forth that except in rare cases, IT doesn't know enough about their company's day-to-day doings to be included at a high level of decision making. It's up to those managers to talk to the non-IT employees in depth about their needs, then pass on the flowcharts and coding principles to the programmers who then make it into music, sweet music.
Slashdot Mirror
This completely explains what happened to my Commodore 64 cluster...
Because I'm just a dumb animal and given the choice between expending more energy by biking to the store or expending less (of my own) energy by driving to the store, I'll just fall back on my survival instincts and drive. I may need that energy later to fend off a wild rabbit attack or something.
New York is tiny. I drive two miles to get groceries in my little piece of suburbia. That's like going from Union Square to Central Park in New York...which is the cosmic equivalent of Earth to Mars. On my two mile drive, if I cut through all the little side streets, I'll probably pass 1000 people. Between Union Square and Central park in a straight shot up 5th avenue...more like 200,000 people.
The car gave us freedom. If you want efficiency move to the city.
Quantum RAID with drive level parity.
Allows you to recover from the complete disappearance of your drive, and any new drive you choose to buy, will have all your data on it.
The catch, you ask? You won't be certain your data is there until you look...
Consider dual wielding two Wii-like controllers, and give them buttons as well. Your swinging becomes the blades of your toon, your left thumb button becomes movement, right thumb button jump. A trigger on one hand becomes the camera and a trigger on the other has special contextual functions.
You become a dual-wielding jedi knight -- just move your mom's vase out of the room.
What appealed to me about Nethack/Rogue was the sheer number of things you can do. The first time I was granted a wish (I don't recall how...a fountain? A ring?), for fun I put in "Mjolnir". And, unbelievably, I was given the Hammer of Thor (I did ask for Excalibur once but I wasn't worthy enough to wield it). And with things like polymorphing your dog into a red dragon to defend you, or deflecting basilisk stares, you just got the sense this little ascii adventure game probably DID have everything because it didn't waste time with graphics.
That being said, my initial time with the original Everquest was similar. I remember being level 4 or 5 and chatting with my friend and his group that was already 6 or 7. They were going to come get me at the city gates. "Oh, you know what, we'll just send the Bard to get you, it'll be faster." And I was genuinely surprised when the Bard came racing up with a speed song, grouped with me, and we took off at 5 times the running rate I was used to. And the coolest thing was that not everyone could do this (until, of course, the potion of the wolf came out). "Balance" did not mean "similarity". You weren't all massively muscled, sword-wielding, wizards. Every class was different.
And then there was the time my 40th level friend was questing (I was level 20 or so). He had to go through a hole in the ice, swim into an underwater cavern, beat up some creature, take its loot, and get back. He dove in, and I could sort of see him swimming under the ice but as he got deeper I lost him. I waited, watching his health bar drop as, somewhere, he was fighting. "Got it!" he told me. And I waited, but then his health started to REALLY drop. "What's up?" "Underwater breathing spell ran out and I can't find the hole in the ice!" So I cast what meagre healing spells I could (I was a paladin) and he made it with about 10 of his 1000+ hit points to spare. But it was stuff like that where EQ shined over Dark Ages of Camelot and other MMOs. Not sure how WoW is in the "That can happen?!" field.
You know, I played Everquest (the original) for two years. I made it to level 20 or so, took a bit of time off, then played to level 38. So many people seem to be able to max out their level so quickly.
I think it's just mindset -- I played the paladin so I always seemed to be the one giving Lay on Hands (complete heal) to a fleeing party member before turning to face the undead hordes alone. So leveling was slow, but the gameplay was satisfying.
Once I reached 30+, I couldn't find anyone who wanted to take risks. Everything was pulling to the edge of the zone, or camping in one room forever. It was fine -- MMOs are nothing if not for their chat -- but it didn't have that adrenaline rush that going into the dungeon of Befallen or the Estate of Unrest gave you.
Leveling was "work" and if you died you "wasted the whole night". It wasn't too long that "playing" became "boring" and I quit. And, oddly, I've never played an MMO aside from trying it for a night again.
I expect something from Wolfram like the answer Google gives to this question:
How old is Demi Moore?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+old+is+demi+moore&btnG=Search
At the top, you'll see text that says:
Demi Moore -- Age: 46 years (born November 11, 1962)
According to: (some source) [more sources]
This is the proper way of answering a question like that. I don't want just the answer. I want to know where the answer came from.
How many french died at the Battle of Agincourt?
I expect a number from Wolfram Alpha, as well as a cited source. There could also be, like Google, the option to choose other sources.
Eventually, this will all boil down to me driving in my car and saying, "Computer. Tell me: At what speed did Marty McFly need to drive to travel in time?"
I disagree. Security is a layered thing, both in implementation and subversion. If I'm running Windows NT with no service packs and no firewall, I'm easily hacked by 90% of people.
If I'm running Windows XP patched and firewalled, I'm easily hacked by 1% of the people. If I'm running OpenBSD fully patched with no open ports aside from SSH, I can be easily hacked by .01% of the people (likely a BSD or SSH developer who slipped in a back door).
Nothing is 100% secure -- HOW secure you are is the important thing. If this super XP lets in 15% of attacks, you need to ask who knows and who would bother to run those attacks, as well as what other layers of security beyond the desktop are available.
If you're running a desktop operating system "in the wild" with no patched firewall software of any kind to block basic traffic, then you should add that layer.
Scenario:
Two F-16s scrambled to intercept a low-flying 747 painted as Air Force One OR Air Force One or its backup was hijacked/stolen. Heading towards the city, the powers-that-be are telling their pilots to coerce the jet to the ground without firing. No dice as the jet is driven by crazy folk. Now it's too close to the city to do anything other than shoot it down and have it crash in the streets or let it fly into the Chrysler building.
Decisions, decisions.
Is that how he really sounds? It had the same tempo as if AOL and Microsoft had just warned me about a new virus that will delete all my accounts and clean out the deli drawer in my fridge and even Yahoo agrees.
Obviously censoring the Internet isn't going to help. Firing the two bozos who leaked the photos would be the first step, just to keep it from happening again. As far as the assholes plaguing the family with photos, the family should change their email addresses.
That being said, do not belittle the loss of a child, especially one in their teens. This alone can devastate a parent's life -- unable to work, to laugh, to do anything other than stare at the wall wishing their child was back. That someone would exacerbate those feelings of helplessness is beyond forgiveness.
Vista works. I use it every day. I actually prefer the UAC to the normal way XP works when trying to elevate privileges. Windows 7 is better at it.
I'd like to see Microsoft focus more on centralization of infrastructure and versatility of clients. Walk in with your laptop, dock it to your dual monitor system, then open an RDP session to a terminal server the admins have 100% control over. When you leave, your laptop has your mail synched (it's been synching as you work not all at once at the end of the day), and you can take what documents you may need for your offline time. Otherwise, if you have a broadband connection, it's secure RDP. When you return, you can synch your mail and documents back up and it automatically gets cleaned as you synch.
This offers security, standardization, and mobility. Building a bigger client doesn't get anyone anywhere in corporate.
It's about profit. These days, you can't charge people $40 (or $140) per copy to go from Acrobat 5 to Acrobat 5.01, with security fixes. You need another version with added features, better usability, etc, otherwise people won't see the value in shelling out for the new version, and you won't make any money. It's easier to add then it is to recreate, so you get bloated software.
While the classroom may go away, I hope the campus doesn't. A lot of people will say that some of the best times of their lives and best friends they ever met were from college. While keeping track of your buddy's twitter feed and facebook status is the new "friendship", I don't think it has quite the camaraderie of midnight frisbee golf.
3 Apps at a time. I think that Microsoft should allow this version of the OS to be downloadable for free. It would probably do their PR and marketing some good -- more people to try it out certainly, and would create good will for allowing the product to be free for users who don't really need the power of Windows but still want to buy Microsoft applications.
When I started this post, I was thinking that the overall power usage of building 21 computers that run at 85 W might supersede the power usage of building one 1000 W computer with 32 GB of memory, if you take the whole process from manufacturing to disposal.
But I suppose it's the electric bill of the company we're concerned with so I'll just sit in the corner and re-read Bambi.
You know, I might put Slashdot above Oklahoma. Slashdot is the biggest tech site on the internet. Oklahoma has a musical named after it.
That gives me an idea...
Gosh, the defendant sounds like...
Okay, one of you needs to 'fess up!
I believe this is why Microsoft wanted to move to a subscription model (and probably still does). If Microsoft can convince a company with 10,000 newish XP machines to upgrade -- that's 10,000 times the cost of an upgrade license. And any machines not upgradeable will be replaced with new machines and OEM licenses. And home users aren't a small market either as most will need to upgrade or buy new systems to support the software....
With a subscription model, like the one we use at the university, we pay X amount of dollars per year for OS and Office upgrades/installs, whether we buy new systems or not. Mostly it's to upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro. Anyway, if MS could have everyone move to a $30/computer/year model, they'd have a steady stream of cash and wouldn't need to create a new OS.
Though honestly, XP is ready for a refresh -- I'm not sure Windows 7 has enough useful features (the imaging is one though and UAC is not as annoying in 7) to warrant an upgrade. Perhaps as a platform to enable new features such as touch screens or Minority Report holographic interfaces (I swore that was in Windows 7 RC 4.52).
Every time I see a link to Fox News, I get a little queasy. It's not news, it's Foxnews.com.
What's the problem with full-on registration?
1) Form for username, password, email.
2) Stored in a DB where registered is NULL
3) Send an email asking user to visit link to complete registration
4) Set registered = yes
5) Weekly purge DB where registered is NULL
Captchas could also be questions like, "Paris is the capital of what country?" "What's the third menu item on this page?" "If you have four apples and one bicycle, how many pieces of fruit do you have?"
Even the perfect anti-auto captcha doesn't get around teams of people creating accounts manually to spam blogs.
It seems fine that Google could sell the books if the existing copyright has expired or can't be upheld. But there should be no problem with someone else downloading the material and reselling it or giving it out or copying it. Once the copyright expires, doesn't the work go into the public domain? Google can charge for access, but they can't charge for the work persay.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was a fine example of iPhone text prediction feature!
That's just col', yo.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
I think you'll find that not too many people disagree with your sentiment. It's the 10 people to a pothole working with $100 hammers that seems to be the issue.
I didn't read the article.
At the university I work at, the number of true programmers compared to the number of project managers is about 1 to 5. There are a plethora of people who can talk all day about a solution needing a problem, the guiding policies, salaries, level of support. But surprisingly few who can churn out the code to make these projects reality. A constant complaint is the long wait for a desperately needed project, because all of the money is being spent on management and not on coding talent.
That being said, I would put forth that except in rare cases, IT doesn't know enough about their company's day-to-day doings to be included at a high level of decision making. It's up to those managers to talk to the non-IT employees in depth about their needs, then pass on the flowcharts and coding principles to the programmers who then make it into music, sweet music.