What i do like about the cartridge is the fact that they will stand the test of time much better than our slowly corroding DVD and CD media. I think all my old Atari 2600 carts will still boot. Something i can't say about some of my older Sierra cd-rom games on my PC.
Careful about that. I'm sure that we all have "fond" memories of hard to load carts from the 2600, and most notably, from the NES. I recently ressurected my old ColecoVision with VCS adapter, and though carts seem to be fairly durable, oxidation does happen on the contacts, and some games won't load at all. Carts are durable, sure, but don't believe for a minute they are indestructible.
Also, I think a lot of people have forgotten how genuninely bad load times used to be. I can remember playing the same game for hours on end on the C-64 not because I loved it, but because to boot up a new game would simply take too long. I remember having a fast load cartridge to help with the loading times was viewed as a nessesscity. I think the damn EA cube, pyramid, sphere logo is forever burned into my brain. Even on cart based systems (ColecoVision), you still often had to wait 10-15 seconds just to play the game.
No, of course, a major manufacturer is just going to eat $10 in production costs per game. Sorry, but you are out of your mind.
Keep in mind that a DVD will hold up to 9GB of data, think about how much a cart with 9GB of ROM would cost. I can promise you the price differential is a lot more than $10.
Yes, you are [allowed some degree in how you experience your media], but that doesn't mean that some right-wing zealot in Utah has a legal right to auto-edit it for you, creating a derivative work in the process.
And how, exactly, is that any different than me choosing how I'd like to watch the movie that I legally purchased? Let's follow the steps logically.
You agree that I have the right to watch the movie anyway I choose, even if that's with the whole thing on mute and the chapters on random play. Now, lets say a friend comes over, and I say, "I really like watching the movie this way", and we watch the movie that way. Again, this is media I paid for, and I should be able to watch it any way I choose in my house. If my friend doesn't enjoy it, he can pack up and watch it at his house. Now, let's say that my friend really enjoys watching the movie this way as well. So, he comes over to my house and watches a bunch of movies this way, and becomes confident that I know how to edit a movie in such a way that he enjoys. There seems to be no logical problem in this. I enjoy my movies a certain way, and since he too enjoys them this way, he comes to my house to watch them. Now, today, my friend decides that he would really rather watch his movies at his house, and he's just purchased a new movie that he'd really like to watch there. Instead of watching the movie at my place, he calls me up and asks me to come and program his DVD player so that he can watch the movie at his place the way we always enjoy it. How is this fundamentally different and not allowed? How is it fundamentally different from this new DVD player? He's placed his trust in an outside agency (me) to edit a movie that he purchased so that it is more enjoyable to him. It's just the same as if he'd placed his trust in the DVD player. And, if he suspects that either of us is violating his trust and editing his movie in a way that he wouldn't like, he still has the option of watching it the other way.
Perhaps I'd feel different if my friend was forcing others to only watch movies this way.
By the way, about your picture of my mother analogy, as long as you don't try to display the photo as the original artist's intent, then I care fuck all what you do with it after I sell it to you. If you and your sicko friends get your jollys off by photoshopping her having sex with farm animals, printing it out, drawing on it with a marker, burning her eyes out, and poking a hole in her crotch and using it to whack off, then more power to you.
Most people who are offended by the content they see on television today, or offended enough to be interested in this feature, are also probably the same kind of people who would rather someone else view the material and decide what's appropriate for their "filter level" than view it themselves.
I think you miss the fact that people who buy this player are the same kinds of people who are genuinely offended at seeing a bare breast on television or hearing the word "fuck". Really, it's no different than these same people saying, "I don't like the content that is allowed in R-rated movies, so I will no longer voluntarily watch R-rated films." In this case, the MPAA has done their judging for them, but I don't see the huge outcry against rating systems. The current one is admittedly flawed, but I don't see a rallying cry to get rid of ratings in movies and video games -- quite the opposite, in fact.
To use another example, I'm sure there are certain links on the internet that you just don't follow. If I told you that a link takes you to lemonparty or goatse or tubgirl or child pornography or scat porn or whatever else makes your stomach go all queasy, are you going to take my word for it, or are you going to click the link just to make sure.
Or maybe you use movie reviews to judge what movie you'll go see tomorrow. Are you going to let rottentomatoes tell you which movies you shouldn't see, or will you go check them out anyway, just in case they are wrong? Every time?
Allowing someone else to pick or influence what content you watch or do not watch does not automatically equal censorship. If you find that much of what you want to watch contains things offensive to you (what if the mainstream enjoyed watching scat porn in most of their entertainment), it might be better for you to have someone prescreen and edit any movies that you choose to watch.
I have the iFeel version of this optical mouse. Though I've turned off the iFeel feedback (interesting, but really, just a novelty), I find I greatly prefer it to the Razor Boomslang sitting right next to it.
It did take some getting used to though, because it doesn't feel like any other mouse out there.
And this is the primary reason I ditched Linux and went back to Windows.
Did you hear that Slashdot crowd? Yes, I switched back to Windows and haven't looked back.
Look, I'm a technical guy. I like technical things. I was the kid in high school who spent his spare money buying a HP graphing calculator when everyone else had simple Casios. I read the entire manual front to back so there wasn't a button I didn't know how to use. I used to love reading technical documentation and figuring things out and making things work through a force of will.
Then I grew up. Quite frankly, between the job, my wife, my cars, my house, my other hobbies, and all the other assorted shit that comes with being a middle-aged adult, I simply don't have the time. I remember roasting people because they couldn't use a command line (how can you expect to use an OS if you don't fundamentally understand what's holding it up?), but today I fully realize that they don't have to, and learning to do so is a huge, frustrating learning curve.
Also, you can cite how much online documention there is on Linux, but the fact of the matter is, it's not very good. Neither is the help you'll find in IRC. If you get "help" in IRC, it typically is either someone looking to root your box out for fun and profit ("give me your root password and IP") or someone who wants to ridcule you for your lack of knowledge and apparent inability to read man pages ("RTFM, n00b"). Neither is very helpful. Certainly, I could RTFM, but which RTFM, exactly? Typically, I get pointed to a good dozen manuals, one of which is the one I need, half of which are filled with outdated, misleading, or completely erroneous information, and all of them execeptionally long.
Don't get me wrong. I still hack. I still enjoy hacking. Even my wife asks if we can have anything in the house that isn't hacked. But here's the kicker. If my XBox or PS2 goes down for a few days while I'm hacking on it, there's no real inconvience. Even if my damn Tivo goes down, it's not the end of the world, and it's not like I can't do without it. However, I need my computer to work. Reliably. I don't need to come upstairs to do work and find that I need to spend hours tinkering with shit just to make it work.
Linux is fine for a server, where you pretty much set it up and let it run forever without any real attention. But it sucks for a desktop, where you have to install new shit all the time (hardware and software) and actually get real work done.
No, I feel the same way, and I've been scanning to see if anyone else felt this.
To me, the previous incarnation of Google was nearly perfect. It was easily usable, the colors didn't distract, only aided the functionality, and it was overall, a good, clean, easy to use design.
Now, it's so minimalist as to be barren. It's not pleasing to my eye, and it makes the site harder to use because everything looks the same. I understand why many people, particularly programmers, like it, but from a graphics, design, and useability standpoint, I think it fails when compared to the previous version.
I once got to watch a small nuclear reactor fire up, and got to watch the Cerenkov radiation at the bottom of the reactor pool.
That picture does not do it justice. While I was somewhat disappointed that the whole nuclear reaction was fairly anticlimatic -- no rumbling, no vibration, no nothing discernable except the blue light -- that blue light at the bottom of the pool was probably the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. There's just no way to describe the color. It's so vivid and so intense.
Probably not. The way I always dealt with cheaters like you is to give an absurdly high target number, when someone else would have gotten something modest.
For instance, we always played Shadowrun, which uses a unique D6 system. Basically, you roll D6, and if you roll a six, you re-roll the dice and add the result to the original six. For instance, you could roll 1D6, and get a six. Then you reroll that dice and get another six. You reroll again, and get a 3. Your number is 15 (6 + 6 + 3). So, for someone I knew would cheat rolls, or just roll exceptionally well, I would set a target number of 10 when anyone else at the table would have recieved a five. This 'fudge factor' would change depending on how well they'd been rolling and how much I needed or wanted them to succeed or fail at the task at hand.
After a while, we just put the dice away altogether. Granted, I always kept a few as GM (not all our GMs did) just for times when I didn't care or needed some randomness. But, essentially, you're looking at a diceless game. It made for good times.
The last group I played with, once we got comfortable with each other (took playing together over a year or so) we finally started having gaming sessions with no dice.
We all knew about how hard certain tasks should be to accomplish, and how much damage certain creatures would do, and approximately what everyone's dice rolls would be over time, and we just went from there. The various GMs had been fudging rolls and target numbers for quite some time anyway, to get that magical mix of challenge and satisfaction.
Ah, the forgotten Ma Bell. I too remember. I remember using those long distance access lines to dial BBS's all over the country.
What today's hackers don't realize is how expensive phone service used to be. You either got your phone service from Southwestern Bell, or you didn't get it at all. Your phone? You bought that at the Southwestern Bell store. No, you couldn't just go to Wal-Mart and pick up a $10 phone. Not much choice either, I think there were maybe ten or fifteen available choices. Did I mention how expensive that phone was? Try over $100. For just a regular, standard telephone. Oh, and if you wanted an extra phone (not line!) in your house? That was an extra charge. Just for the working outlet, even IF you didn't plug a phone into it.
I didn't get the phone bill in those days, so I have no idea what a monthly bill used to look like, but I did know that it was prohibitively expensive to call anywhere long distance. Just to call my father in the next town over cost $0.22 a minute.
I thought the main reason they limited the field is because tracking 200 autonomous vehicles over a 200 mile course and ensuring they don't hurt anyone during their travels is a logistical nightmare.
But now that it looks like the vast majority of the field won't make 200 feet, it's a whole new ballgame. When you only have to watch a football field size of land, it almost becomes pointless how many vehicles are wandering around inside it. So, why not let everyone race? It appears that most won't make it very far at all, and those that manage to do so will be easy to track. The defense department also gets a added bonus in that they get to evaluate a lot of different robotic equipment and a lot of different methods of robotic navigation. Perhaps there will be something in there that no one who was invited to the qualifying rounds thought of and is quite successful.
Just like in evolution, you never know which mutation will be the one that proves successful over time. The best way to ensure survivability or success is to have an extremely broad gene pool. If everyone shares a homogenous gene pool, then whatever environmental process destroys one stands a good chance of destroying the whole bunch. Having everyone race is a good thing.
Plus, after today, everyone knows that Sandstorm is the best vehicle, and having a race with one vehicle isn't very much fun to watch or very useful.
I have an IQ that tests in the genius range, but I have trouble at times expressing myself. Not so much in the written word, but when speaking. My internal dialog runs at a much faster pace than my mouth can speak, and it's easy for my internal dialog to get so far ahead of my mouth that suddenly I find myself with nothing to say -- because my mind is on a totally different topic. I also have problems selecting exactly the right word that I need. I know it's there, and sometimes the internal thesaurus returns "wordy" and "loquacious" but not "talkative". Unfortunately, I'm aware the word I need exists, and I can't seem to just ignore that and pick a word that isn't quite as good.
Makes me feel like an idiot.
Re:Three mouseclicks... QED
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Real's Reality
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· Score: 1
Try to find it on the UK website. They are still using the old format over there. If you can find the first link inside of 30 seconds, I'll be surprised.
My 1988 Toyota Celica did the same thing. It had several neat tricks like this.
First, if you had the headlights on and turned off the car, they would stay on until you opened the door. Opening the door with the lights on and ignition switched off caused them to go off. But, this could be overridden by simply switching the lights back on. Then they wouldn't go back off until you turned them off.
Second, if you had the keys in the ignition and the door open, you couldn't lock the power door locks. Well, you could, but they would spring open a half second later, no matter if you locked it manually or with the button. Better yet, you couldn't trick this one. I once had the door open, took the keys out, locked the car, then deliberately put the key back in the ignition. Then I shut the locked door. The Celica detected the locked door, the fact that it was shutting, and the fact that my keys were in the car, and unlocked the door! The only way to lock the keys in the car was somehow lock the door while it was already shut (meaning you were in the car or had an extra set) or by leaving them on the seat instead of the ignition (as I accidently did one wintery night).
I've often wondered why this wasn't implimented in more cars. It was unobtrusive, never interfered with how I wanted to use the car and kept me from hurting myself. That's the epitome of good design.
This is a good point. The original Contra (on the NES) gave me hours and hours of game play. Lots of fun. Fantastically difficult too. However, there came a day when I could play from the first level to the end in one sitting and without using continues or the cheat codes. It would take all of about an hour.
By contrast, I just finished the most recent Prince of Persia. I clocked in at 15 hours, and I really don't think that I could get under 10 hours if I replayed the game start to finish. That's considered an abysmally short game in today's world. So short, in fact, that it's mentioned in nearly every review. Can you imagine a game company releasing a game with just one hour of gameplay today?
Couldn't be done. Couldn't even really be done back then, but a few hours of gameplay was typically all you had room for on the cart. To make the game last longer than that, the difficulty was artificially high.
Also, as an adult, I don't have time to play games for hours on end and weekends at a stretch like I did when I was 13. I like the games being a bit on the short side, and I don't have time to fight through the latest Contra: Shattered Soldier. I'd love to play it, but there are other games that I want to play as well, and they don't punish me the way C:SS does. I can play for an hour and feel like I accomplished something. I can actually use the game to relax, as opposed to feeling more stressed and irritable at the end of it all.
But, if you really want difficulty, it is there if you look for it. I loved GTA3 (and Vice City) so much that I played until I had 100% in both games. Do you know how hard it is to get to 100%? To make matters worse, I added an extra challenge to GTA3, and I have all the bulletproof cars in my various garages, along with the car with a dead body in the trunk.
As the above author said, harder != more fun. I'm sure we all had the experience in the early days where we didn't know how to get past Boss #4 and none of our friends did either, or what we were supposed to do next in Metal Gear, and since there wasn't an internet or gamefaqs, we never finished the game.
Indeed, you need to learn, and learn fast. Believe me, they are just waiting to replace you, like they replaced all the UNIX machines.
I don't agree with their decision, but I am pretty good at interfacing with managers. I can tell you how they are thinking (if they are so big as to be able to buy out other competitiors). Their first thought is that all branches of the company should use the same technology. This allows for a centralized support staff, and it allows for easy transitions from one branch to another. It's also easier to order equipment and hire personnel when everything is standard across the board.
Please understand, this doesn't mean it's the best solution for all branches, but it is the best solution from the viewpoint of upper management, and they are the ones calling the shots. It can be good to have each division handling their own affairs and deciding which technology is best, but in my experience, this requires an amazing amount of competence and integrity out of your lower level managers, which is quite difficult to find.
Now that they have switched your company over to Windows, you are now a liability. You are paid for your technical expertise, which is no longer needed. If you drag your feet and show that you are not proficient in Windows as well, you become an even bigger liability. At some point, they will ask themselves if it's worth paying to train a UNIX sysadmin to work with the Windows system, especially when they apparently don't want to. It would be cheaper and easier for them to hire Windows sysadmins, and you would probably be happier continuing your work with UNIX elsewhere. At least, that's how they'll justify your firing.
If they've already switched another shop over and experienced these problems, then you may already have a target on your head. Just be thankful that it's fairly hard to fire employees and hire new ones in their place. So, they may just be waiting for you to trip up and show your incompetence and unwillingness to change as a reason for your dismissal.
If you like, after you've adapted to the transition, you can write a document that shows the impact cost of switching over, and possibly this may sway their decisions the next time they take over a UNIX shop. If you want your desktop switched back to UNIX, you're also going to have to show that the switch back over to UNIX isn't going to cost them any money now (new hardware and software) or the future (do your own tech support) AND how it will directly benefit the company as a whole -- this means "how will it make us money" in business talk. Remember that everything in business ultimately boils down to cost and profit.
Best of luck.
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot
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Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Knowing that many Slashdotters aren't familiar with the rules of American football, and non-Americans possibly more so, I'd just like to add the following.
Punting usually happens on fourth down. You have four downs to move the ball ten yards. If you cannot, the opposing team gets the ball where it lies. Also, typically the same players do not play offense and defense. So, by punting, you are essentially saying, "I've done all I can with it, this is no longer my problem." You are deliberately getting rid of the ball (problem) and handing it off to someone else.
Also, punting often puts you in a better situation, as it gives the other team a much less favorible field position than almost any other kind of turnover. If you simply must turn the ball over, or are seriously concerned that you will, this is the best way to do it.
Last, being American, I've never heard it used in the sense of "doing something completely random". It's almost always referred to in the sense of "getting rid of the problem by giving it to someone else", usually someone you don't like or don't know well or is in a different division (hence, not on "your team"). If you were giving it to a peer or co-worker, you'd probably use the term "hand off", which is how the quarterback (the player who initally takes possesion of the ball and controls the play) transfers the ball to the running back (usually a fast runner, used to move the ball forward by running it) on his team.
Don't worry, by the time we take enough rights from you to get you sufficiently pissed off, we'll have gotten rid of all the guns.
Shit, didn't you know the first amendment was all about hunting? And in our society, why do you need to hunt? You can buy everything you need at the local grocery store, and if you are so poor that you can't afford that, there's always food stamps.
Slashdot Mirror
Careful about that. I'm sure that we all have "fond" memories of hard to load carts from the 2600, and most notably, from the NES. I recently ressurected my old ColecoVision with VCS adapter, and though carts seem to be fairly durable, oxidation does happen on the contacts, and some games won't load at all. Carts are durable, sure, but don't believe for a minute they are indestructible.
Also, I think a lot of people have forgotten how genuninely bad load times used to be. I can remember playing the same game for hours on end on the C-64 not because I loved it, but because to boot up a new game would simply take too long. I remember having a fast load cartridge to help with the loading times was viewed as a nessesscity. I think the damn EA cube, pyramid, sphere logo is forever burned into my brain. Even on cart based systems (ColecoVision), you still often had to wait 10-15 seconds just to play the game.
Keep in mind that a DVD will hold up to 9GB of data, think about how much a cart with 9GB of ROM would cost. I can promise you the price differential is a lot more than $10.
I think someone's right to life is greater than many other rights that another individual would have, but again, we're still talking rights here.
Wow. I can't think of anything more important than an individual's rights.
You agree that I have the right to watch the movie anyway I choose, even if that's with the whole thing on mute and the chapters on random play. Now, lets say a friend comes over, and I say, "I really like watching the movie this way", and we watch the movie that way. Again, this is media I paid for, and I should be able to watch it any way I choose in my house. If my friend doesn't enjoy it, he can pack up and watch it at his house. Now, let's say that my friend really enjoys watching the movie this way as well. So, he comes over to my house and watches a bunch of movies this way, and becomes confident that I know how to edit a movie in such a way that he enjoys. There seems to be no logical problem in this. I enjoy my movies a certain way, and since he too enjoys them this way, he comes to my house to watch them. Now, today, my friend decides that he would really rather watch his movies at his house, and he's just purchased a new movie that he'd really like to watch there. Instead of watching the movie at my place, he calls me up and asks me to come and program his DVD player so that he can watch the movie at his place the way we always enjoy it. How is this fundamentally different and not allowed? How is it fundamentally different from this new DVD player? He's placed his trust in an outside agency (me) to edit a movie that he purchased so that it is more enjoyable to him. It's just the same as if he'd placed his trust in the DVD player. And, if he suspects that either of us is violating his trust and editing his movie in a way that he wouldn't like, he still has the option of watching it the other way.
Perhaps I'd feel different if my friend was forcing others to only watch movies this way.
By the way, about your picture of my mother analogy, as long as you don't try to display the photo as the original artist's intent, then I care fuck all what you do with it after I sell it to you. If you and your sicko friends get your jollys off by photoshopping her having sex with farm animals, printing it out, drawing on it with a marker, burning her eyes out, and poking a hole in her crotch and using it to whack off, then more power to you.
I think you miss the fact that people who buy this player are the same kinds of people who are genuinely offended at seeing a bare breast on television or hearing the word "fuck". Really, it's no different than these same people saying, "I don't like the content that is allowed in R-rated movies, so I will no longer voluntarily watch R-rated films." In this case, the MPAA has done their judging for them, but I don't see the huge outcry against rating systems. The current one is admittedly flawed, but I don't see a rallying cry to get rid of ratings in movies and video games -- quite the opposite, in fact.
To use another example, I'm sure there are certain links on the internet that you just don't follow. If I told you that a link takes you to lemonparty or goatse or tubgirl or child pornography or scat porn or whatever else makes your stomach go all queasy, are you going to take my word for it, or are you going to click the link just to make sure.
Or maybe you use movie reviews to judge what movie you'll go see tomorrow. Are you going to let rottentomatoes tell you which movies you shouldn't see, or will you go check them out anyway, just in case they are wrong? Every time?
Allowing someone else to pick or influence what content you watch or do not watch does not automatically equal censorship. If you find that much of what you want to watch contains things offensive to you (what if the mainstream enjoyed watching scat porn in most of their entertainment), it might be better for you to have someone prescreen and edit any movies that you choose to watch.
It did take some getting used to though, because it doesn't feel like any other mouse out there.
Did you hear that Slashdot crowd? Yes, I switched back to Windows and haven't looked back.
Look, I'm a technical guy. I like technical things. I was the kid in high school who spent his spare money buying a HP graphing calculator when everyone else had simple Casios. I read the entire manual front to back so there wasn't a button I didn't know how to use. I used to love reading technical documentation and figuring things out and making things work through a force of will.
Then I grew up. Quite frankly, between the job, my wife, my cars, my house, my other hobbies, and all the other assorted shit that comes with being a middle-aged adult, I simply don't have the time. I remember roasting people because they couldn't use a command line (how can you expect to use an OS if you don't fundamentally understand what's holding it up?), but today I fully realize that they don't have to, and learning to do so is a huge, frustrating learning curve.
Also, you can cite how much online documention there is on Linux, but the fact of the matter is, it's not very good. Neither is the help you'll find in IRC. If you get "help" in IRC, it typically is either someone looking to root your box out for fun and profit ("give me your root password and IP") or someone who wants to ridcule you for your lack of knowledge and apparent inability to read man pages ("RTFM, n00b"). Neither is very helpful. Certainly, I could RTFM, but which RTFM, exactly? Typically, I get pointed to a good dozen manuals, one of which is the one I need, half of which are filled with outdated, misleading, or completely erroneous information, and all of them execeptionally long.
Don't get me wrong. I still hack. I still enjoy hacking. Even my wife asks if we can have anything in the house that isn't hacked. But here's the kicker. If my XBox or PS2 goes down for a few days while I'm hacking on it, there's no real inconvience. Even if my damn Tivo goes down, it's not the end of the world, and it's not like I can't do without it. However, I need my computer to work. Reliably. I don't need to come upstairs to do work and find that I need to spend hours tinkering with shit just to make it work.
Linux is fine for a server, where you pretty much set it up and let it run forever without any real attention. But it sucks for a desktop, where you have to install new shit all the time (hardware and software) and actually get real work done.
No, Br4d's the asshole. J4n37's the slut.
Nice.
To me, the previous incarnation of Google was nearly perfect. It was easily usable, the colors didn't distract, only aided the functionality, and it was overall, a good, clean, easy to use design.
Now, it's so minimalist as to be barren. It's not pleasing to my eye, and it makes the site harder to use because everything looks the same. I understand why many people, particularly programmers, like it, but from a graphics, design, and useability standpoint, I think it fails when compared to the previous version.
That picture does not do it justice. While I was somewhat disappointed that the whole nuclear reaction was fairly anticlimatic -- no rumbling, no vibration, no nothing discernable except the blue light -- that blue light at the bottom of the pool was probably the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. There's just no way to describe the color. It's so vivid and so intense.
For instance, we always played Shadowrun, which uses a unique D6 system. Basically, you roll D6, and if you roll a six, you re-roll the dice and add the result to the original six. For instance, you could roll 1D6, and get a six. Then you reroll that dice and get another six. You reroll again, and get a 3. Your number is 15 (6 + 6 + 3). So, for someone I knew would cheat rolls, or just roll exceptionally well, I would set a target number of 10 when anyone else at the table would have recieved a five. This 'fudge factor' would change depending on how well they'd been rolling and how much I needed or wanted them to succeed or fail at the task at hand.
After a while, we just put the dice away altogether. Granted, I always kept a few as GM (not all our GMs did) just for times when I didn't care or needed some randomness. But, essentially, you're looking at a diceless game. It made for good times.
We all knew about how hard certain tasks should be to accomplish, and how much damage certain creatures would do, and approximately what everyone's dice rolls would be over time, and we just went from there. The various GMs had been fudging rolls and target numbers for quite some time anyway, to get that magical mix of challenge and satisfaction.
What today's hackers don't realize is how expensive phone service used to be. You either got your phone service from Southwestern Bell, or you didn't get it at all. Your phone? You bought that at the Southwestern Bell store. No, you couldn't just go to Wal-Mart and pick up a $10 phone. Not much choice either, I think there were maybe ten or fifteen available choices. Did I mention how expensive that phone was? Try over $100. For just a regular, standard telephone. Oh, and if you wanted an extra phone (not line!) in your house? That was an extra charge. Just for the working outlet, even IF you didn't plug a phone into it.
I didn't get the phone bill in those days, so I have no idea what a monthly bill used to look like, but I did know that it was prohibitively expensive to call anywhere long distance. Just to call my father in the next town over cost $0.22 a minute.
But now that it looks like the vast majority of the field won't make 200 feet, it's a whole new ballgame. When you only have to watch a football field size of land, it almost becomes pointless how many vehicles are wandering around inside it. So, why not let everyone race? It appears that most won't make it very far at all, and those that manage to do so will be easy to track. The defense department also gets a added bonus in that they get to evaluate a lot of different robotic equipment and a lot of different methods of robotic navigation. Perhaps there will be something in there that no one who was invited to the qualifying rounds thought of and is quite successful.
Just like in evolution, you never know which mutation will be the one that proves successful over time. The best way to ensure survivability or success is to have an extremely broad gene pool. If everyone shares a homogenous gene pool, then whatever environmental process destroys one stands a good chance of destroying the whole bunch. Having everyone race is a good thing.
Plus, after today, everyone knows that Sandstorm is the best vehicle, and having a race with one vehicle isn't very much fun to watch or very useful.
Mr. Hawking?
Makes me feel like an idiot.
Try to find it on the UK website. They are still using the old format over there. If you can find the first link inside of 30 seconds, I'll be surprised.
First, if you had the headlights on and turned off the car, they would stay on until you opened the door. Opening the door with the lights on and ignition switched off caused them to go off. But, this could be overridden by simply switching the lights back on. Then they wouldn't go back off until you turned them off.
Second, if you had the keys in the ignition and the door open, you couldn't lock the power door locks. Well, you could, but they would spring open a half second later, no matter if you locked it manually or with the button. Better yet, you couldn't trick this one. I once had the door open, took the keys out, locked the car, then deliberately put the key back in the ignition. Then I shut the locked door. The Celica detected the locked door, the fact that it was shutting, and the fact that my keys were in the car, and unlocked the door! The only way to lock the keys in the car was somehow lock the door while it was already shut (meaning you were in the car or had an extra set) or by leaving them on the seat instead of the ignition (as I accidently did one wintery night).
I've often wondered why this wasn't implimented in more cars. It was unobtrusive, never interfered with how I wanted to use the car and kept me from hurting myself. That's the epitome of good design.
By contrast, I just finished the most recent Prince of Persia. I clocked in at 15 hours, and I really don't think that I could get under 10 hours if I replayed the game start to finish. That's considered an abysmally short game in today's world. So short, in fact, that it's mentioned in nearly every review. Can you imagine a game company releasing a game with just one hour of gameplay today?
Couldn't be done. Couldn't even really be done back then, but a few hours of gameplay was typically all you had room for on the cart. To make the game last longer than that, the difficulty was artificially high.
Also, as an adult, I don't have time to play games for hours on end and weekends at a stretch like I did when I was 13. I like the games being a bit on the short side, and I don't have time to fight through the latest Contra: Shattered Soldier. I'd love to play it, but there are other games that I want to play as well, and they don't punish me the way C:SS does. I can play for an hour and feel like I accomplished something. I can actually use the game to relax, as opposed to feeling more stressed and irritable at the end of it all.
But, if you really want difficulty, it is there if you look for it. I loved GTA3 (and Vice City) so much that I played until I had 100% in both games. Do you know how hard it is to get to 100%? To make matters worse, I added an extra challenge to GTA3, and I have all the bulletproof cars in my various garages, along with the car with a dead body in the trunk.
As the above author said, harder != more fun. I'm sure we all had the experience in the early days where we didn't know how to get past Boss #4 and none of our friends did either, or what we were supposed to do next in Metal Gear, and since there wasn't an internet or gamefaqs, we never finished the game.
I actually did finish it on the basic level. It is my secret shame that I actually enjoyed playing E.T.
I don't agree with their decision, but I am pretty good at interfacing with managers. I can tell you how they are thinking (if they are so big as to be able to buy out other competitiors). Their first thought is that all branches of the company should use the same technology. This allows for a centralized support staff, and it allows for easy transitions from one branch to another. It's also easier to order equipment and hire personnel when everything is standard across the board.
Please understand, this doesn't mean it's the best solution for all branches, but it is the best solution from the viewpoint of upper management, and they are the ones calling the shots. It can be good to have each division handling their own affairs and deciding which technology is best, but in my experience, this requires an amazing amount of competence and integrity out of your lower level managers, which is quite difficult to find.
Now that they have switched your company over to Windows, you are now a liability. You are paid for your technical expertise, which is no longer needed. If you drag your feet and show that you are not proficient in Windows as well, you become an even bigger liability. At some point, they will ask themselves if it's worth paying to train a UNIX sysadmin to work with the Windows system, especially when they apparently don't want to. It would be cheaper and easier for them to hire Windows sysadmins, and you would probably be happier continuing your work with UNIX elsewhere. At least, that's how they'll justify your firing.
If they've already switched another shop over and experienced these problems, then you may already have a target on your head. Just be thankful that it's fairly hard to fire employees and hire new ones in their place. So, they may just be waiting for you to trip up and show your incompetence and unwillingness to change as a reason for your dismissal.
If you like, after you've adapted to the transition, you can write a document that shows the impact cost of switching over, and possibly this may sway their decisions the next time they take over a UNIX shop. If you want your desktop switched back to UNIX, you're also going to have to show that the switch back over to UNIX isn't going to cost them any money now (new hardware and software) or the future (do your own tech support) AND how it will directly benefit the company as a whole -- this means "how will it make us money" in business talk. Remember that everything in business ultimately boils down to cost and profit.
Best of luck.
Punting usually happens on fourth down. You have four downs to move the ball ten yards. If you cannot, the opposing team gets the ball where it lies. Also, typically the same players do not play offense and defense. So, by punting, you are essentially saying, "I've done all I can with it, this is no longer my problem." You are deliberately getting rid of the ball (problem) and handing it off to someone else.
Also, punting often puts you in a better situation, as it gives the other team a much less favorible field position than almost any other kind of turnover. If you simply must turn the ball over, or are seriously concerned that you will, this is the best way to do it.
Last, being American, I've never heard it used in the sense of "doing something completely random". It's almost always referred to in the sense of "getting rid of the problem by giving it to someone else", usually someone you don't like or don't know well or is in a different division (hence, not on "your team"). If you were giving it to a peer or co-worker, you'd probably use the term "hand off", which is how the quarterback (the player who initally takes possesion of the ball and controls the play) transfers the ball to the running back (usually a fast runner, used to move the ball forward by running it) on his team.
Shit, didn't you know the first amendment was all about hunting? And in our society, why do you need to hunt? You can buy everything you need at the local grocery store, and if you are so poor that you can't afford that, there's always food stamps.