It doesn't take much extra effort for the automakers to put out a new model each year. They mostly change cosmetic things: bumpers, headlights, grills, fenders, dashboards. The guts of the car are the same until they change the platform, every five years or so. The yearly model thing is pretty much entirely for the psychological effect on buyers. It makes you feel like you're getting something special that nobody else has yet, or it makes you feel that your mechanically-fine vehicle is out of date and you should get a new one.
I actually dislike a lot of the cosmetic changes that they make. When a totally new car is designed it has an overall motif. A couple years later, just to be different, they slap on fenders and spoilers that don't really go with the underlying design.
The big thing I like in the new Nintendo DSi is the built-in web browser. I so often wish I could look something up on my DS while watching TV rather than getting up and going over to my desktop. To continue the car analogy, adding the web browser is like adding HD radio to a car. It doesn't make the old model less useful and it's not worth much expense to add myself, but it'd be a nice feature to have.
Apparently one of the complainants thinks too literally: "My entire room smells bad and I have had to resort to a few air fresheners just to be able to work on it." So he doesn't care about the toxic fume in the air, he just doesn't want to smell it. Or he thinks that an air freshener magically deactivates bad chemicals.
Maybe some of the people yelling about how Excel is the wrong tool can give some advice for my scientific data analysis and visualization needs.
I have simulations (written in C++ and Python) that spit out tab delimited data files. I then need to analyze that data, doing things like linear regression on subsets of the data and calculations to transform the raw data into something else for plotting.
I have a Mac (with Windows XP in Parallels), I am not a student, and I don't have much budget ($500) for software. Currently I use a Mac program called Plot which is a little buggy and incomplete but has some nice plotting abilities. When I need a spreadsheet I use Apple's Numbers, but that seems sorely limited in abilities. What's a better tool for this job?
A big difference between games and common examples of art is that games strongly interact with the viewer/player. A painting is static -- it might change the viewer but the viewer doesn't change the painting. A symphony is written -- it may be interpreted differently by different orchestras, but the audience listens passively and does not influence its future.
A game in contrast is all about interaction. It may have some beautiful graphics and music, but if all you do is watch and listen then it's just a movie. To be a game you must impose your own will on the game and the game must respond. This makes games more akin to machines. They are designed by a creator, both mechanically and aesthetically. Then the player/operator sees and holds and uses the machine.
Can an automobile be art? Can an MP3 player be art? Can a computer be art? If yes, then the definition of art does not require it to have a plot. A great game could qualify through a combination of appearance, mechanism, and relevance.
I'm doubtful of this device too, but come on -- MythBusters is not a reliable scientific laboratory. Their pseudoscientific method seems to be:
"We heard that doing A can cause B. We tried doing something like A a couple times and didn't get B. Therefore nothing like A can cause B."
You can prove something is possible by doing it, but you can't prove something is impossible by not doing it. I can't run 100 meters in under 10 seconds, but that doesn't prove that another human with better knowledge and ability can't.
The fact that so many elections are so close seems to indicate that 'the people' don't have a strong preference for one candidate over another. Why? Because their policies are often nearly indistinguishable.
I don't think their actual policies are indistinguishable, but their campaign promises are. Both of the candidates know what's on Americans' minds: economy, war, corruption, whatever. Once the leading candidates get their parties' nominations, they set out to convince the voters that they will fix all of those problems. But they don't want to scare anybody away with big changes, so they make the safest, vaguest, most uncontroversial promises possible. There's only the thinnest sliver of difference left between them, just enough so that voters on the far left and the far right know which candidate belongs to them.
But candidates never keep their promises, whether intentionally or due to ideology being slapped in the face with reality. Once elected, when they don't have to worry so much about offending nobody, they show their true colors through real differences of action.
As a budding 10-year-old computer nerd, I did not know that "syntax" was a real word. I always thought it said "syznax" and meant something along the lines of "I don't understand what you're trying to say".
The lesson I learned by spending an hour typing an example program into a C-64 at Sears one evening? Don't type the words that look like English next to the words that look like banging on the keyboard with caps lock on.
So if this is a browser window, then what harm can you do by pressing 'OK' that you couldn't do by visiting the offending site in the first place? It's not a system popup. So even if it fools the user into clicking 'OK', how's it going to fool the system in escalating privileges?
Would it be better if the test subjects clicked No? If the popups were malicious then couldn't they label "OK" as "NO" and "Cancel" as "YES"? If your browser is spawning a fake popup, aren't you already screwed anyway? Or if that's not bad itself, would clicking Yes make it any worse?
That's funny. Your objection makes me realize how arbitrary the label "nano" is. Our base units (meter, second, kilogram) are all entirely manmade and chosen for historical reasons that could just as easily have led to different base units. It's an accident of history that we're now working at length scales one-billionth of the base chosen 130 years ago. And it's entirely coincidence if we happen to be also working at one-billionth of our time and mass units.
Maybe we should just arbitrarily agree that "nano" means "based on meter, second, kilogram base units" and nothing magical happens in the nano range that doesn't happen in the micro and pico ranges.
You might have noticed that a lot of network television shows have gone to widescreen format. Same thing for lots of movies on DVD. On your 27" 4:3 clunker you have black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, leaving the people 6" tall. On my 32" 16:9 HDTV that show fills the properly shaped screen, covering about four times the area.
Like I said, 32" isn't big. I specifically chose that size to match the 16" screen height of my old 27" standard definition CRT. Anything bigger would overwhelm my modest apartment. What I gained was a few inches of horizontal space (making the whole screen useable for widescreen sources) and six times the pixels.
You need a $1500-$4000 television? My 32" Sharp 1080p HDTV is $800. Not big, but nice for a moderate size apartment where the screen is 6-10 feet from the couch. However, when compared to an $800 TV that $400 player seems outrageous. Let me know when there's a solid, future-proof player under $200.
Most bills don't enact one binary action. It's more often a matter of degrees: "Allocate $50 million for preschool programs" or "Raise defense spending by $450 million". So even if you favor preschool programs, you have to decide whether $50 million is too much, too little, or just right.
Having done some game development myself, I appreciate how much of the balance and flow of a game isn't apparent until very late in development. In fact, you don't really know how the game will play until it's in the hands of hundreds of players. That's far too late to make fundamental changes to the design. But if there really is a good game underneath the tedious parts, then a bit more polish can make it shine.
Remember that even a great classic like Starcraft wasn't great in version 1.0. It took a dozen patches and an expansion to produce the gem we play today.
I think the thing that keeps Slashdot Slashdot and Digg Digg is the comment moderation systems.
Here, comment scores are limited to the range [-1:5], so you can filter to your level of interest. There are plenty of stupid comments, but they're easy to mute so that the more sophisticated readers can still hear each other.
On Digg the comment scores are in the range [-N:N], where N is the number of people seeing the article summary. If you filter through [0:N] then the best comments will still be swimming in a sea of just-barely-not-terrible comments. If you filter through some arbitrary cutoff [M:N] then you might see nothing or another sea of garbage, depending on how N for that story compares to your M. Since N varies wildly, you have no reliable way of skimming the cream of the crop.
Since good comments are hard to find, there's not much incentive to write them. The best you can do is write a popular comment and get recognition that way. So Slashdot appeals to people who value recognition as insightful, informative, or interesting. Digg appeals to people who value recognition as popular.
If they wanted to make commercials in the vein of Seinfeld, they should have hired Larry David. He seems to have been the real genius behind that series.
Candid88 from 1990 called. He doesn't have any "internet" and can't really say his life suffers much.
He gets his news from newspapers. He watches video on TV or drives over to the video store to rent a tape. At work he sends intercompany courier mail and faxes. He can hear a weather report every 30 minutes on the local talk radio station. The travel agent books his flights and rooms. There's a library less then 10 miles away if he needs to look something up in an encyclopedia or old magazine.
So why would he want to do any of that on a computer?
Maybe the cows base their orientation on sunlight rather than magnetic field. I mean, what about the magnetic field would make cows want to align with it? Nothing I can think of, but facing north might protect their heads from excess sunlight (or help rid pests from the other end).
The researchers say that they ruled out sunlight orientation based on variations in direction, but maybe the cows are smart enough to average out the direction of the sun to find north. Since cows tend to stay in the same place day-to-day, it wouldn't take long to figure out which direction in the landscape is north. And a whole herd of cows each estimating north itself should settle on true north pretty easily.
I understand that towers need to be visible for aviation. But somehow we survived for decades with slow-pulsing red lights that I find much less distracting. These ultrabright white strobes seem to be a newer development. My guess is that they are more energy efficient than the old lights.
The thing that doesn't make sense is using a strobe on an object that you're trying to see. Yes, the intermittent brightness will alert you that there is something there. But with only a few milliseconds of visibility every few seconds, it's hard to actually fix onto it's position. A slow pulse would be much better for actually seeing where the tower is without annoying everyone around.
My biggest complaint is against cell towers with blinding strobe lights on top. So bright that you can see them from ten miles away on a sunny day. Two or three of those can kind of ruin an otherwise scenic vista. (I'm looking at you, Michigan.)
The best solution I've seen is to disguise the towers as pine trees. It just takes a few branches, and the technology has been perfected since the 1950's.
Please, if anybody is going to add noise to quiet cars be sure to use something sensible and non-distracting like white noise. Keep the volume around the level of a 2,000 RPM gas engine. And disengage the noise generator about 25 MPH (by which time tire and wind noise is sufficient).
I have little hope that the world will be so reasonable. I've been blinded by enough strobe lights on school buses, super bright LED police flashers, and high intensity SUV headlights to know that the people who design and buy these things aren't thinking of preserving the visual and audible environment.
Ironically, if 2008 does in fact turn out to be the coldest year of the 21st century, then that would be pretty strong evidence in favor of global warming.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't take much extra effort for the automakers to put out a new model each year. They mostly change cosmetic things: bumpers, headlights, grills, fenders, dashboards. The guts of the car are the same until they change the platform, every five years or so. The yearly model thing is pretty much entirely for the psychological effect on buyers. It makes you feel like you're getting something special that nobody else has yet, or it makes you feel that your mechanically-fine vehicle is out of date and you should get a new one.
I actually dislike a lot of the cosmetic changes that they make. When a totally new car is designed it has an overall motif. A couple years later, just to be different, they slap on fenders and spoilers that don't really go with the underlying design.
The big thing I like in the new Nintendo DSi is the built-in web browser. I so often wish I could look something up on my DS while watching TV rather than getting up and going over to my desktop. To continue the car analogy, adding the web browser is like adding HD radio to a car. It doesn't make the old model less useful and it's not worth much expense to add myself, but it'd be a nice feature to have.
Apparently one of the complainants thinks too literally: "My entire room smells bad and I have had to resort to a few air fresheners just to be able to work on it." So he doesn't care about the toxic fume in the air, he just doesn't want to smell it. Or he thinks that an air freshener magically deactivates bad chemicals.
Maybe some of the people yelling about how Excel is the wrong tool can give some advice for my scientific data analysis and visualization needs.
I have simulations (written in C++ and Python) that spit out tab delimited data files. I then need to analyze that data, doing things like linear regression on subsets of the data and calculations to transform the raw data into something else for plotting.
I have a Mac (with Windows XP in Parallels), I am not a student, and I don't have much budget ($500) for software. Currently I use a Mac program called Plot which is a little buggy and incomplete but has some nice plotting abilities. When I need a spreadsheet I use Apple's Numbers, but that seems sorely limited in abilities. What's a better tool for this job?
A big difference between games and common examples of art is that games strongly interact with the viewer/player. A painting is static -- it might change the viewer but the viewer doesn't change the painting. A symphony is written -- it may be interpreted differently by different orchestras, but the audience listens passively and does not influence its future.
A game in contrast is all about interaction. It may have some beautiful graphics and music, but if all you do is watch and listen then it's just a movie. To be a game you must impose your own will on the game and the game must respond. This makes games more akin to machines. They are designed by a creator, both mechanically and aesthetically. Then the player/operator sees and holds and uses the machine.
Can an automobile be art? Can an MP3 player be art? Can a computer be art? If yes, then the definition of art does not require it to have a plot. A great game could qualify through a combination of appearance, mechanism, and relevance.
I'm doubtful of this device too, but come on -- MythBusters is not a reliable scientific laboratory. Their pseudoscientific method seems to be:
"We heard that doing A can cause B. We tried doing something like A a couple times and didn't get B. Therefore nothing like A can cause B."
You can prove something is possible by doing it, but you can't prove something is impossible by not doing it. I can't run 100 meters in under 10 seconds, but that doesn't prove that another human with better knowledge and ability can't.
I don't think their actual policies are indistinguishable, but their campaign promises are. Both of the candidates know what's on Americans' minds: economy, war, corruption, whatever. Once the leading candidates get their parties' nominations, they set out to convince the voters that they will fix all of those problems. But they don't want to scare anybody away with big changes, so they make the safest, vaguest, most uncontroversial promises possible. There's only the thinnest sliver of difference left between them, just enough so that voters on the far left and the far right know which candidate belongs to them.
But candidates never keep their promises, whether intentionally or due to ideology being slapped in the face with reality. Once elected, when they don't have to worry so much about offending nobody, they show their true colors through real differences of action.
As a budding 10-year-old computer nerd, I did not know that "syntax" was a real word. I always thought it said "syznax" and meant something along the lines of "I don't understand what you're trying to say".
The lesson I learned by spending an hour typing an example program into a C-64 at Sears one evening? Don't type the words that look like English next to the words that look like banging on the keyboard with caps lock on.
So if this is a browser window, then what harm can you do by pressing 'OK' that you couldn't do by visiting the offending site in the first place? It's not a system popup. So even if it fools the user into clicking 'OK', how's it going to fool the system in escalating privileges?
Would it be better if the test subjects clicked No? If the popups were malicious then couldn't they label "OK" as "NO" and "Cancel" as "YES"? If your browser is spawning a fake popup, aren't you already screwed anyway? Or if that's not bad itself, would clicking Yes make it any worse?
That's funny. Your objection makes me realize how arbitrary the label "nano" is. Our base units (meter, second, kilogram) are all entirely manmade and chosen for historical reasons that could just as easily have led to different base units. It's an accident of history that we're now working at length scales one-billionth of the base chosen 130 years ago. And it's entirely coincidence if we happen to be also working at one-billionth of our time and mass units.
Maybe we should just arbitrarily agree that "nano" means "based on meter, second, kilogram base units" and nothing magical happens in the nano range that doesn't happen in the micro and pico ranges.
You might have noticed that a lot of network television shows have gone to widescreen format. Same thing for lots of movies on DVD. On your 27" 4:3 clunker you have black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, leaving the people 6" tall. On my 32" 16:9 HDTV that show fills the properly shaped screen, covering about four times the area.
Like I said, 32" isn't big. I specifically chose that size to match the 16" screen height of my old 27" standard definition CRT. Anything bigger would overwhelm my modest apartment. What I gained was a few inches of horizontal space (making the whole screen useable for widescreen sources) and six times the pixels.
You need a $1500-$4000 television? My 32" Sharp 1080p HDTV is $800. Not big, but nice for a moderate size apartment where the screen is 6-10 feet from the couch. However, when compared to an $800 TV that $400 player seems outrageous. Let me know when there's a solid, future-proof player under $200.
Most bills don't enact one binary action. It's more often a matter of degrees: "Allocate $50 million for preschool programs" or "Raise defense spending by $450 million". So even if you favor preschool programs, you have to decide whether $50 million is too much, too little, or just right.
Having done some game development myself, I appreciate how much of the balance and flow of a game isn't apparent until very late in development. In fact, you don't really know how the game will play until it's in the hands of hundreds of players. That's far too late to make fundamental changes to the design. But if there really is a good game underneath the tedious parts, then a bit more polish can make it shine.
Remember that even a great classic like Starcraft wasn't great in version 1.0. It took a dozen patches and an expansion to produce the gem we play today.
I think the thing that keeps Slashdot Slashdot and Digg Digg is the comment moderation systems.
Here, comment scores are limited to the range [-1:5], so you can filter to your level of interest. There are plenty of stupid comments, but they're easy to mute so that the more sophisticated readers can still hear each other.
On Digg the comment scores are in the range [-N:N], where N is the number of people seeing the article summary. If you filter through [0:N] then the best comments will still be swimming in a sea of just-barely-not-terrible comments. If you filter through some arbitrary cutoff [M:N] then you might see nothing or another sea of garbage, depending on how N for that story compares to your M. Since N varies wildly, you have no reliable way of skimming the cream of the crop.
Since good comments are hard to find, there's not much incentive to write them. The best you can do is write a popular comment and get recognition that way. So Slashdot appeals to people who value recognition as insightful, informative, or interesting. Digg appeals to people who value recognition as popular.
"FIRST POST" is soooo 1998. The new Slashdot meme is to post a "Kill it" comment on an Idle story.
If they wanted to make commercials in the vein of Seinfeld, they should have hired Larry David. He seems to have been the real genius behind that series.
Candid88 from 1990 called. He doesn't have any "internet" and can't really say his life suffers much.
He gets his news from newspapers. He watches video on TV or drives over to the video store to rent a tape. At work he sends intercompany courier mail and faxes. He can hear a weather report every 30 minutes on the local talk radio station. The travel agent books his flights and rooms. There's a library less then 10 miles away if he needs to look something up in an encyclopedia or old magazine.
So why would he want to do any of that on a computer?
With assistants like that, who needs enemies?
Man, this is the least funny Bottom of the Barrel book review yet.
Maybe the cows base their orientation on sunlight rather than magnetic field. I mean, what about the magnetic field would make cows want to align with it? Nothing I can think of, but facing north might protect their heads from excess sunlight (or help rid pests from the other end).
The researchers say that they ruled out sunlight orientation based on variations in direction, but maybe the cows are smart enough to average out the direction of the sun to find north. Since cows tend to stay in the same place day-to-day, it wouldn't take long to figure out which direction in the landscape is north. And a whole herd of cows each estimating north itself should settle on true north pretty easily.
I understand that towers need to be visible for aviation. But somehow we survived for decades with slow-pulsing red lights that I find much less distracting. These ultrabright white strobes seem to be a newer development. My guess is that they are more energy efficient than the old lights.
The thing that doesn't make sense is using a strobe on an object that you're trying to see. Yes, the intermittent brightness will alert you that there is something there. But with only a few milliseconds of visibility every few seconds, it's hard to actually fix onto it's position. A slow pulse would be much better for actually seeing where the tower is without annoying everyone around.
My biggest complaint is against cell towers with blinding strobe lights on top. So bright that you can see them from ten miles away on a sunny day. Two or three of those can kind of ruin an otherwise scenic vista. (I'm looking at you, Michigan.)
The best solution I've seen is to disguise the towers as pine trees. It just takes a few branches, and the technology has been perfected since the 1950's.
Please, if anybody is going to add noise to quiet cars be sure to use something sensible and non-distracting like white noise. Keep the volume around the level of a 2,000 RPM gas engine. And disengage the noise generator about 25 MPH (by which time tire and wind noise is sufficient).
I have little hope that the world will be so reasonable. I've been blinded by enough strobe lights on school buses, super bright LED police flashers, and high intensity SUV headlights to know that the people who design and buy these things aren't thinking of preserving the visual and audible environment.
Ironically, if 2008 does in fact turn out to be the coldest year of the 21st century, then that would be pretty strong evidence in favor of global warming.