Which problem are you refering to? The 'reformat-root for upgrade?' That's an application problem, not OS or distro. The knoppmyth installer scripts have a couple of gotcha bugs in them. Nothing show-stopper to work around, but it's enough breakage to stop someone who's not comfortable with *nix and troubleshooting from using them.
Example: if your HDD isn't the master on the IDE chain knoppmyth's install scripts won't correctly handle partitioning, even though the code, at first blush, supports this. Didn't take me long to figure it out, but I can't remember the last time a Windows software install made me crack the case to change a component. (although in knoppmyth's defence, my troubleshooting was made much easier by being able to read through the shell scripts that weren't working properly).
The point being that these software installations are nowhere near as simple as a Windows installer. What may seem simple to you and me is manifestly not simple to the majority of computer users.
But what if it's not insurgents? What if it's just hungry locals? Or folks who want to steal stuff for sale on the grey market?
The essential problem is not "Why would you want to stop an autonomous vehicle?" (I can think of plenty of reasons why people *would* want to stop them no matter what they're carrying, and yet not be 'insurgents'). It's "What does the vehicle do if it's stopped, and how does this impact it's mission?".
Not thinking these things through leads to a typical failure of imagination that gets people killed.
CoV is the same codebase and basic system of CoH (it has new features, but it's the same basic engine and gameplay). It is, essentially, a big honkin' upgrade. So they're doing the only sane thing and charging big honkin' upgrade prices but not touching the fee.
This could work - it might encourage me to put down $50 on it.
Ha! That's good to know. Sorry to hear about your pain.:)
I do this kind of thing for a living (systems integration), so to me this is both a Fun Project and a example of Why Linux Isn't Ready Yet. Too much stuff needs individually tweaking or is held together with crazy-glue. I could probably make it work, but I'm not a normal end-user.
And in no sense should an 'upgrade' require a reformatting of the root filesystem. That's just sloppy.
I'd just make sure that you got all the codecs you could think of for mplayer (things like the AAC plugins for Xvid, the.mkv wrapper stuff, maybe.m4a playback compatibility) and Samba. For bonus points you might want to make sure you had a decent CLI bittorrent client, and some nice way to get torrent linkies to all your favorite fansub sites.:)
The most compelling reason, to me, for having a myth box is the ability to play back absolutely *anything* - so I'd seek to maximise that by going nuts on the codecs.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing *wrong* withe Gentoo, but if you're going to use MythTV and your machine isn't some tiny embedded Cyrix chip, why not use Knoppmyth? It's a heck of a lot easier to install than Gentoo/Myth-from-source, and adding stuff post-facto is trivial, what with it being a branch of Debian. And if you want to dive under the hood and tweak stuff, you still can.
What capture card(s) did you settle on? What's your box's spec? Are you doing anything to mitigate heat/noise? Don't be a tease, give us the details!:)
First off, it's a good movie. You might not get that if all you saw was the plot synopsis. But briefly;
A girl called River is kidnapped by Government, experimented on and given psychic powers, along with a healthy dose of 'teh crazy'. Rescued by her older brother, the two of them flee, and are given shelter by Captain Mal Reynolds of the tramp freighter/smuggler Serenity (who has a thing against the Government on account of being on the losing side of a Civil War some years back). That's the backstory. The movie centers around the hilarity that ensues when the Government realizes just how much of a boo-boo they made by letting River escape, so they send an Operative (a kind of philosopher-assassin) after River. Along the way we learn why the Government wants River back, and a Terrible Secret about the Government is uncovered.
Good plot, no huge holes, good dialogue, characters you care about, good special effects, and a subject that makes you think. It's not the Best Movie Ever, but it's head and shoulders above *any* mainstream sci-fi film in recent memory.
Basically, if you like Good Movies, you should see Serenity: both the NYT and Ebert liked it. If you like Sci-Fi, you should *definitely* see it.
So while we have support for partitioning mailboxes across servers (any mailbox lives on only one of these active servers), you can, in addition, replicate each of these mailbox servers to standby servers if you want.
OK, I see. Not quite how I'd like to do it, but hot standby is better than nothing, and it sounds a bit better than Exchange.:)
How about Tomcat session replication? I take it that's not part of the architecture?
If you have a SAN, you will probably want to use a shared-disk failover/takeover?
Just so I'm clear on what you're saying here, does this mean that a user's mailbox can live on multiple servers?
I'm looking for a way to increase uptime by having a user's mail live on redundant hardware. Sure, I see how Zimbra can split a user population across multiple mail servers (and that's cool), but what happens to users when one of those mail servers go down? Do they lose access to their mail until the box comes back up, or can their mail live on two independent servers? Domino does this with database replication, Exchange doesn't (Well, it can do with HBA and stuff, but it's a different, more expensive approach).
And what if a user is browsing their mail via the web, and the Tomcat they're talking to goes down. With session replication and a loadbalancer, they wouldn't notice anything. Does Zimbra support this? Or do you require sticky, non-replicable Tomcat sessions?
I see Zimbra uses Mysql on the backend and a tomcat frontend. What sort of provision is there in your code for load balancing? Can you use Tomcat's loadbalancing/session awareness, possibly with a hardware load balancer? Can you replicate the mysql database?
It'd be really cool if you could have all the Zimbra app servers pointing to a mysql cluster running on other machines, but it doesn't appear as though this setup is supported.
What you're looking for, I think, is a layman's breakdown of Apple's Profit & Loss accounts. The article provides a look at gross margins on a single product - nothing more - which are only one part of the P&L, and is specifically not the 'profit'. It's very hard, for a company the size of Apple, to accurately break down every cost and associate it with a specific product's income.
That said, those are nice healthy gross margins. Not extortionate though, as the cost of fabrication, design, advertising, etc all goes 'below the gross' on the accounts, and so aren't taken into account in this figure. That's not omission - it's just the way accounts are done.
If you're interested, take a look at Apple's financials, which, as with every publicly traded company, are made up of three sheets - the Income Statement, the Balance Sheet and the Cash Flow. These are just the summaries, though - for the detailed accounts you need to get ahold of the full set of statements.
What a shame, and a huge waste of my taxpayer dollars. And this is the best they can do, rehash ancient technology, and put a new sticker on it? Bullshit!
The waste of money was arguably the Shuttle - it was supposed to be a cheap, safe, reusable space plane. It's not. The waste of money was arguably Apollo - we built all this infrastructure, but it was designed to just go to the Moon and back, not set up a permanent presence. And we let the infrastructure go in the mid-70s.
However, this new proposal does two things:
1. It builds on what we've learned, both from Apollo and Shuttle. It may *look* like Apollo, but it's not. Learning from our mistakes is important, too.
2. It uses our existing infrastructure something we didn't do with Shuttle (all new hardware, all new launch facilities). This saves money. Apollo was built from scratch (all new hardware, all new launch facilities). This re-uses known-good components (while Shuttle is pretty dodgy, the SSME and SRBs are reliable and human-rated - and that's what they'll be using for this).
So while this program may be many things, unless you believe we shouldn't be in manned spaceflight at all, this is *not* a waste of money. It's pretty much the most efficient way to go back to the Moon with what we have.
That's only if you want government contracts. There are no restrictions on ethnic ownership of businesses, but it is lucrative to set up as a bumi partnership if you are large enough....ah! That explains a great deal. But still, not all love and puppies, eh?;)
There's nothing quite like a Ramli burger. Anything that good has to be deadly!
I firmly believe the first burger chain in the US SW to market them will make a killing. Assuming, of course, that it's really chicken in there.:-)
What are you talking about? I live in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. The majority of the city's residents are ethnic Chinese, and they own plenty of businesses and land. In fact, most large businesses throughout Malaysia are owned by Chinese.
I probably over-simplified a bit (this *is* Slashdot, after all, and we must take Americans into account). The anti-Chinese laws are mostly in Indonesia (the ones I recall are the no-Chinese name and the no Chinese-owned lands) but Malaysia's not all Love and Puppies either. For example, you can't own a business in Malaysia unless one of the owners is an ethnic Malay. I know this, because I have some Singaporean friends who started a company a few years back and ran into this problem. According to them there are Malays who make income by renting themselves out as 'business owners' to Chinese folks who wish to run a company in Malaysia. They take no part in the actual running of the company, but they're there. It's a not-so-subtle defacto tax on Chinese business ownership.
There are also no state-run schools that teach Chinese, I believe, despite (as you say) it being a major ethnic group.
On weekends, Kuala Lumpur is choked with cars bearing Singapore number plates, driven here by people looking for authenticity, better food, and of course lower prices. Then, by Sunday night, they seem about ready to get back to calm traffic, spotless pavements, and peace and quiet. I think that may stand as a metaphor for the general perception between the two places.
You're right, lots of S'poreans go to Malaysia for recreation. I've done it myself. The best burger I've *ever* had was a ramli (sp?) burger cooked by an old woman in a car park off the motorway. But that doesn't mean they *like* Malaysia and want to live there - just that it's cheaper (and provides better value for money! A very Singaporean thing) than home. There's also an entire set of folks around Orchard Road who've never set foot in Malaysia, so it rubs both ways.
There's also a *significant* generation disconnect. Folks who were around during the 60s and 70s are, I think, more likely to be hostile to Chinese folks in general and Singapore in particular. Younger folks don't care as much.
If a few Chinese moonbats ranting about the Malays' alleged racial inferiority is enough to spark a conflict, the people of Singapore should just go ahead and prepare for war because clearly their neighbors are itching for a fight.
You don't know much about Singapore, then, since that's exactly what's been going on since Singapore gained independence from Malaysia in the 60s.;-) Everyone's trained to make molotov coctails, and the roads can be converted into temporary landing strips.
Seriously, though - Yes. Most Chinese in Singapore *do* believe they're better than their Malaysian neighbors and co-inhabitants. But most of them are also not dumb enough to say so in public, because the Malaysians (esp. under the Good Doctor Mohammed) have Vitriol honed to a fine art.
In Singapore's defence, they've done an excellent job of maintaining racial harmony in a *very* diverse population base (their public housing, which houses aroun 70% of the population, is deliberately multi-racial to prevent ghettoization of any ethnic group). The point being that if Singapore doesn't crack down on the moonbats, that's enough of a gimme for their nutty Malayasian neighbors with a huge inferiority complex to do something dumb, like trying to cut off Singapore's fresh water supply.
And don't forget that both Malaysia and Indonesia have very strict anti-Chinese laws on the books that prevent Chinese folks from owning businesses or land, and (in Indonesia's case) prohibits them from having Chinese names. Singapore has none of that.
Business numbers are specifically excluded from the FCC DNC list, I'm afraid. It applies to residential lines only. Which probably explains why you still get lots of solicitation calls - the pre-screening shows your number to be a business.
Can't use the songs as ring tones? Just to appease the cell phone companies? Do cellphone companies really think they can continue to make money on a gimmick forever? Where's the creativity?
Exactly. One of the few reasons why I got my Moto 600 series is you *can* use any MP3 or WAV as a ringtone. Sure, it's not marketed, and it only has 64MB of memory, but you can upload any music you like via bluetooth. Of course, that was an old AT&T handset - I know Verizon specifically *doesn't* stock phones that can do that, and I expect Cingular to be firmly in the "Bend over, Blackadder! It's Poker time!" Camp, too.
I'm working on an open-source Learning Management System called Sakai that has a tool for online test taking - you set up the test, tell the system what the correct answers are, then students sign in and take the test whenever.
There are obvious limitations to online test taking, but it *does* provide automated grading, and with the right institutional commitment it can have a positive impact on student learning.
This is true, but I was refering to some folks not donating because they've already contributed to the (as of today) $61BN of Federal funds for relief efforts. While I'm sure some of that's going to end up as part of the National Debt, some of it will be coming from tax receipts.
I downloaded the demo, and it seems to be a total policy wonkage. Very pretty, and some good ideas, but apparently flawed. For example, the *absence* of Policy does not appear to have detrimental effects to any group of voters (I just killed the NHS, because the slider told me that would piss the least number of people off!)
It also doesn't have a very good financial component; no granularity for income tax / personal allowances, etc (policies I'd like to tweak would be 'personal allowances' and tax bands, for example - the BBC has a budget simulator that does this). And the sliders are biased : the choices range from 'very fair' to 'scandalous'. Mmm yeah. Well, if you're a Socialist, a really high tax on rich folks wouldn't be considered scandalous.;-)
So, to conlude : Absence of policy should impact voter groups, much, much better handling of the economy, and less bias in the slider descriptions. "very low" to "very high" would probably work fine for most things.
You know, I'm not so sure it does. I've had a CoH account that's laid fallow for the last *six* months (Stupid, I know, but if me, a reasonably smart, intar-web savvy person can do that, I imagine other folks do, to) and I've not logged into WoW for over a month.
People forget. And if you're in their target demo (ie. wage-earning 18-45 yo male) and charge to credit, it's very easy to forget they're hitting you up for $14.95 a month.
We're also their best customers. We pay, but don't play or complain on the boards. Minimal maintenance!:)
I thought the ratio for game subs vs. current logons was 1 to 10? We use 1 to 20 for capacity planning our systems here, but our stuff isn't a game, so folks are less willing to spend time on them.:)
Back in my MUSHing days we'd see around 150 active logons on a weekend night (busiest time), out of a player base of 2500, which is around 1:13.
Slashdot Mirror
...sna?
Which problem are you refering to? The 'reformat-root for upgrade?' That's an application problem, not OS or distro. The knoppmyth installer scripts have a couple of gotcha bugs in them. Nothing show-stopper to work around, but it's enough breakage to stop someone who's not comfortable with *nix and troubleshooting from using them.
Example: if your HDD isn't the master on the IDE chain knoppmyth's install scripts won't correctly handle partitioning, even though the code, at first blush, supports this. Didn't take me long to figure it out, but I can't remember the last time a Windows software install made me crack the case to change a component. (although in knoppmyth's defence, my troubleshooting was made much easier by being able to read through the shell scripts that weren't working properly).
The point being that these software installations are nowhere near as simple as a Windows installer. What may seem simple to you and me is manifestly not simple to the majority of computer users.
But what if it's not insurgents? What if it's just hungry locals? Or folks who want to steal stuff for sale on the grey market?
The essential problem is not "Why would you want to stop an autonomous vehicle?" (I can think of plenty of reasons why people *would* want to stop them no matter what they're carrying, and yet not be 'insurgents'). It's "What does the vehicle do if it's stopped, and how does this impact it's mission?".
Not thinking these things through leads to a typical failure of imagination that gets people killed.
CoV is the same codebase and basic system of CoH (it has new features, but it's the same basic engine and gameplay). It is, essentially, a big honkin' upgrade. So they're doing the only sane thing and charging big honkin' upgrade prices but not touching the fee.
This could work - it might encourage me to put down $50 on it.
Ha! That's good to know. Sorry to hear about your pain. :)
I do this kind of thing for a living (systems integration), so to me this is both a Fun Project and a example of Why Linux Isn't Ready Yet. Too much stuff needs individually tweaking or is held together with crazy-glue. I could probably make it work, but I'm not a normal end-user.
And in no sense should an 'upgrade' require a reformatting of the root filesystem. That's just sloppy.
Shiney!
.mkv wrapper stuff, maybe .m4a playback compatibility) and Samba. For bonus points you might want to make sure you had a decent CLI bittorrent client, and some nice way to get torrent linkies to all your favorite fansub sites. :)
I'd just make sure that you got all the codecs you could think of for mplayer (things like the AAC plugins for Xvid, the
The most compelling reason, to me, for having a myth box is the ability to play back absolutely *anything* - so I'd seek to maximise that by going nuts on the codecs.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing *wrong* withe Gentoo, but if you're going to use MythTV and your machine isn't some tiny embedded Cyrix chip, why not use Knoppmyth? It's a heck of a lot easier to install than Gentoo/Myth-from-source, and adding stuff post-facto is trivial, what with it being a branch of Debian. And if you want to dive under the hood and tweak stuff, you still can.
:)
What capture card(s) did you settle on? What's your box's spec? Are you doing anything to mitigate heat/noise? Don't be a tease, give us the details!
First off, it's a good movie. You might not get that if all you saw was the plot synopsis. But briefly;
A girl called River is kidnapped by Government, experimented on and given psychic powers, along with a healthy dose of 'teh crazy'. Rescued by her older brother, the two of them flee, and are given shelter by Captain Mal Reynolds of the tramp freighter/smuggler Serenity (who has a thing against the Government on account of being on the losing side of a Civil War some years back). That's the backstory. The movie centers around the hilarity that ensues when the Government realizes just how much of a boo-boo they made by letting River escape, so they send an Operative (a kind of philosopher-assassin) after River. Along the way we learn why the Government wants River back, and a Terrible Secret about the Government is uncovered.
Good plot, no huge holes, good dialogue, characters you care about, good special effects, and a subject that makes you think. It's not the Best Movie Ever, but it's head and shoulders above *any* mainstream sci-fi film in recent memory.
Basically, if you like Good Movies, you should see Serenity: both the NYT and Ebert liked it. If you like Sci-Fi, you should *definitely* see it.
So while we have support for partitioning mailboxes across servers (any mailbox lives on only one of these active servers), you can, in addition, replicate each of these mailbox servers to standby servers if you want.
:)
:)
OK, I see. Not quite how I'd like to do it, but hot standby is better than nothing, and it sounds a bit better than Exchange.
How about Tomcat session replication? I take it that's not part of the architecture?
If you have a SAN, you will probably want to use a shared-disk failover/takeover?
Yeah, we have a couple of really big SANs here.
I'm not after scalability, I'm after uptime. :)
Just so I'm clear on what you're saying here, does this mean that a user's mailbox can live on multiple servers?
I'm looking for a way to increase uptime by having a user's mail live on redundant hardware. Sure, I see how Zimbra can split a user population across multiple mail servers (and that's cool), but what happens to users when one of those mail servers go down? Do they lose access to their mail until the box comes back up, or can their mail live on two independent servers? Domino does this with database replication, Exchange doesn't (Well, it can do with HBA and stuff, but it's a different, more expensive approach).
And what if a user is browsing their mail via the web, and the Tomcat they're talking to goes down. With session replication and a loadbalancer, they wouldn't notice anything. Does Zimbra support this? Or do you require sticky, non-replicable Tomcat sessions?
Hey, since you're here ...
I see Zimbra uses Mysql on the backend and a tomcat frontend. What sort of provision is there in your code for load balancing? Can you use Tomcat's loadbalancing/session awareness, possibly with a hardware load balancer? Can you replicate the mysql database?
It'd be really cool if you could have all the Zimbra app servers pointing to a mysql cluster running on other machines, but it doesn't appear as though this setup is supported.
What you're looking for, I think, is a layman's breakdown of Apple's Profit & Loss accounts. The article provides a look at gross margins on a single product - nothing more - which are only one part of the P&L, and is specifically not the 'profit'. It's very hard, for a company the size of Apple, to accurately break down every cost and associate it with a specific product's income.
That said, those are nice healthy gross margins. Not extortionate though, as the cost of fabrication, design, advertising, etc all goes 'below the gross' on the accounts, and so aren't taken into account in this figure. That's not omission - it's just the way accounts are done.
If you're interested, take a look at Apple's financials, which, as with every publicly traded company, are made up of three sheets - the Income Statement, the Balance Sheet and the Cash Flow. These are just the summaries, though - for the detailed accounts you need to get ahold of the full set of statements.
What a shame, and a huge waste of my taxpayer dollars. And this is the best they can do, rehash ancient technology, and put a new sticker on it? Bullshit!
The waste of money was arguably the Shuttle - it was supposed to be a cheap, safe, reusable space plane. It's not. The waste of money was arguably Apollo - we built all this infrastructure, but it was designed to just go to the Moon and back, not set up a permanent presence. And we let the infrastructure go in the mid-70s.
However, this new proposal does two things:
1. It builds on what we've learned, both from Apollo and Shuttle. It may *look* like Apollo, but it's not. Learning from our mistakes is important, too.
2. It uses our existing infrastructure something we didn't do with Shuttle (all new hardware, all new launch facilities). This saves money. Apollo was built from scratch (all new hardware, all new launch facilities). This re-uses known-good components (while Shuttle is pretty dodgy, the SSME and SRBs are reliable and human-rated - and that's what they'll be using for this).
So while this program may be many things, unless you believe we shouldn't be in manned spaceflight at all, this is *not* a waste of money. It's pretty much the most efficient way to go back to the Moon with what we have.
I'm glad ReplayTV's been left to dangle without an update for so long ... it's probably not worth DM's effort to put this in now.
But still, once my ReplayTV finally dies, I'll be building a myth box. Or maybe getting a Mac Mini and an eyeTV unit.
That's only if you want government contracts. There are no restrictions on ethnic ownership of businesses, but it is lucrative to set up as a bumi partnership if you are large enough. ...ah! That explains a great deal. But still, not all love and puppies, eh? ;)
:-)
There's nothing quite like a Ramli burger. Anything that good has to be deadly!
I firmly believe the first burger chain in the US SW to market them will make a killing. Assuming, of course, that it's really chicken in there.
What are you talking about? I live in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. The majority of the city's residents are ethnic Chinese, and they own plenty of businesses and land. In fact, most large businesses throughout Malaysia are owned by Chinese.
I probably over-simplified a bit (this *is* Slashdot, after all, and we must take Americans into account). The anti-Chinese laws are mostly in Indonesia (the ones I recall are the no-Chinese name and the no Chinese-owned lands) but Malaysia's not all Love and Puppies either. For example, you can't own a business in Malaysia unless one of the owners is an ethnic Malay. I know this, because I have some Singaporean friends who started a company a few years back and ran into this problem. According to them there are Malays who make income by renting themselves out as 'business owners' to Chinese folks who wish to run a company in Malaysia. They take no part in the actual running of the company, but they're there. It's a not-so-subtle defacto tax on Chinese business ownership.
There are also no state-run schools that teach Chinese, I believe, despite (as you say) it being a major ethnic group.
On weekends, Kuala Lumpur is choked with cars bearing Singapore number plates, driven here by people looking for authenticity, better food, and of course lower prices. Then, by Sunday night, they seem about ready to get back to calm traffic, spotless pavements, and peace and quiet. I think that may stand as a metaphor for the general perception between the two places.
You're right, lots of S'poreans go to Malaysia for recreation. I've done it myself. The best burger I've *ever* had was a ramli (sp?) burger cooked by an old woman in a car park off the motorway. But that doesn't mean they *like* Malaysia and want to live there - just that it's cheaper (and provides better value for money! A very Singaporean thing) than home. There's also an entire set of folks around Orchard Road who've never set foot in Malaysia, so it rubs both ways.
There's also a *significant* generation disconnect. Folks who were around during the 60s and 70s are, I think, more likely to be hostile to Chinese folks in general and Singapore in particular. Younger folks don't care as much.
If a few Chinese moonbats ranting about the Malays' alleged racial inferiority is enough to spark a conflict, the people of Singapore should just go ahead and prepare for war because clearly their neighbors are itching for a fight.
;-) Everyone's trained to make molotov coctails, and the roads can be converted into temporary landing strips.
You don't know much about Singapore, then, since that's exactly what's been going on since Singapore gained independence from Malaysia in the 60s.
Seriously, though - Yes. Most Chinese in Singapore *do* believe they're better than their Malaysian neighbors and co-inhabitants. But most of them are also not dumb enough to say so in public, because the Malaysians (esp. under the Good Doctor Mohammed) have Vitriol honed to a fine art.
In Singapore's defence, they've done an excellent job of maintaining racial harmony in a *very* diverse population base (their public housing, which houses aroun 70% of the population, is deliberately multi-racial to prevent ghettoization of any ethnic group). The point being that if Singapore doesn't crack down on the moonbats, that's enough of a gimme for their nutty Malayasian neighbors with a huge inferiority complex to do something dumb, like trying to cut off Singapore's fresh water supply.
And don't forget that both Malaysia and Indonesia have very strict anti-Chinese laws on the books that prevent Chinese folks from owning businesses or land, and (in Indonesia's case) prohibits them from having Chinese names. Singapore has none of that.
Business numbers are specifically excluded from the FCC DNC list, I'm afraid. It applies to residential lines only. Which probably explains why you still get lots of solicitation calls - the pre-screening shows your number to be a business.
Can't use the songs as ring tones? Just to appease the cell phone companies? Do cellphone companies really think they can continue to make money on a gimmick forever? Where's the creativity?
Exactly. One of the few reasons why I got my Moto 600 series is you *can* use any MP3 or WAV as a ringtone. Sure, it's not marketed, and it only has 64MB of memory, but you can upload any music you like via bluetooth. Of course, that was an old AT&T handset - I know Verizon specifically *doesn't* stock phones that can do that, and I expect Cingular to be firmly in the "Bend over, Blackadder! It's Poker time!" Camp, too.
I'm working on an open-source Learning Management System called Sakai that has a tool for online test taking - you set up the test, tell the system what the correct answers are, then students sign in and take the test whenever.
There are obvious limitations to online test taking, but it *does* provide automated grading, and with the right institutional commitment it can have a positive impact on student learning.
This is true, but I was refering to some folks not donating because they've already contributed to the (as of today) $61BN of Federal funds for relief efforts. While I'm sure some of that's going to end up as part of the National Debt, some of it will be coming from tax receipts.
Maybe some will. Maybe some are happy with the amount of tax they paid. Most probably won't think of it, either way.
I downloaded the demo, and it seems to be a total policy wonkage. Very pretty, and some good ideas, but apparently flawed. For example, the *absence* of Policy does not appear to have detrimental effects to any group of voters (I just killed the NHS, because the slider told me that would piss the least number of people off!)
It also doesn't have a very good financial component; no granularity for income tax / personal allowances, etc (policies I'd like to tweak would be 'personal allowances' and tax bands, for example - the BBC has a budget simulator that does this). And the sliders are biased : the choices range from 'very fair' to 'scandalous'. Mmm yeah. Well, if you're a Socialist, a really high tax on rich folks wouldn't be considered scandalous.
So, to conlude : Absence of policy should impact voter groups, much, much better handling of the economy, and less bias in the slider descriptions. "very low" to "very high" would probably work fine for most things.
He has - this is Greg Costikyan we're talking about - he's an A-list old-skool game designer.
Nice troll, though.
You know, I'm not so sure it does. I've had a CoH account that's laid fallow for the last *six* months (Stupid, I know, but if me, a reasonably smart, intar-web savvy person can do that, I imagine other folks do, to) and I've not logged into WoW for over a month.
:)
People forget. And if you're in their target demo (ie. wage-earning 18-45 yo male) and charge to credit, it's very easy to forget they're hitting you up for $14.95 a month.
We're also their best customers. We pay, but don't play or complain on the boards. Minimal maintenance!
I thought the ratio for game subs vs. current logons was 1 to 10? We use 1 to 20 for capacity planning our systems here, but our stuff isn't a game, so folks are less willing to spend time on them. :)
Back in my MUSHing days we'd see around 150 active logons on a weekend night (busiest time), out of a player base of 2500, which is around 1:13.