Perhaps because everybody who is interested has already bought it? I hit my favorite box store once a week to see if a music pack I'm interested in is out. Until the Beatles one is released, I'm not going to have anything to buy to produce the sales blip they are looking for.
I'm not saying this is the reason, but couldn't the article have considered this possibility, rather than assuming they knew the answer and writing a bunch of postulation based on that guess?
Shouldn't that be "Google Moon" instead? Go ahead and try it: http://moon.google.com/ . It works.
Re:I go on geek vacations
on
The Geek Atlas
·
· Score: 1
The problem with shuttle tourisim is that the launches get scrubbed so often, your odds of actually getting to see it aren't good if you don't live in the area.
Some advice if you do go:
Go to a night launch. Day launches are cool too, but night launches just cannot be adaquately described. The amount light they put off is unreal. Think artificial sunrise.
Don't bother gettting "tickets". Just drive down 50 until you hit the beach, find a place a few blocks back to park, and walk down to A1A.
Half of the experience is seeing all the other people (from every country imaginable) also there to see it. It really drives home what the manned space program means to the human race.
Its the best (and most inspiring) free show on earth.
Re:Kids and Real Science don't mix
on
The Geek Atlas
·
· Score: 1
You could similarly make being an NFL quarterback sound dull, if you just related all the hard work they spend most of their time doing to prepare for the relatively short games.
Except, as soon as word got out of them flipping the first bit on the drive during the copy operation, the MPAA/RIAA/ABC/CBS/NBC/etc would be down their necks
That would suck. Think about leaving the spacecraft, all exicted about being the first human to set foot on Mars, only to find a media company lawyer there tapping his foot waiting for you with a subpeona.
You'd still be the first human to set foot on Mars, but what a letdown.
People have written oodles of books on this subject, because there are oodles of different ways to screw up a project.
The best insight on this subject comes from Tolstoy, not Brooks. He was talking about families being functional, not software, but the principle is the same.
All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
A far better method of approaching this issue is to study projects that don't fail, not ones that do.
Perhaps LAN Parties are a thing of the past, but lunchtime office LAN play is alive and well. There are probably 30 people where I work who went out and bought everything in the Battlefield series due to the lunchtime office games. That is only one group that I work near. There are others in the facility.
However, most corporate firewalls block gaming sites. So this move will prevent us (and other companies like us) from doing the same with those two games. This will impact sales.
I just did a cross-country trip using Google Latitude. It worked great, but there were some problems that make it less suitable for this use.
First off, whenever we were out of range of a tower, the whole program stopped until you dimiss a popup dialog informing you of this fact (with a tiny "OK" button).
Secondly, it chewed through my battery power like it was going out of style. I could get perhaps 4 hours max out of it before having to put it on the charger. If your movers have your stuff for less than four hours, I'm really impressed.
I'm now living in fear of the contents of next month's phone bill...
I just noticed this a couple of days ago, but Steven Colbert does an amazing amount of science reporting on his show. I stumbled across a science reporter's blog that showed guest shots from his show, and the number of them he has had on is just incredible. He's done multiple reports on Eagle conservation and multiple interviews of astronauts in orbit. The guest with the most visits of anyone else isn't a politician, pundit, or reporter. It is Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He's probably singlehandedly responsible for more than half the hits on Wikipedia's elephant page.
Oh, and let's not forget his continuing coverage of the great Bear menace.
A mouse is still quite useful for direct random access to any spot on the screen, like when you need to move the cursor to a specific spot quickly, or select and oddly-shaped bunch of text.
When that does happen, its important that it be a quality mouse you can trust. Having to fumble over a spot quickly frustrates you, which will blow you whole flow.
Heh. I see we made the same comment. However, we do have the difference that I don't like wireless mice.
I use the copperhead at home too.
It is probably less than 10% of us that mouse lefty though. I think the majority of lefties just go ahead an mouse with their right hand. I used to, but I quit when I started doing realtime gaming and realised the tremendous advantage you get by having one hand on the mouse and the other on the arrow keys/numeric keyapd. It also helps a bit to have the better mouse control with the dominant hand, but the keyboard control is the big deal. I'm surprised more righties don't switch to doing it that way too. Sales for gaming keypads would dry up overnight.
Plus its hilarious when righties sit down at my rig. Most actually cross their body with their right arm so they can use that hand on the mouse. Sometimes they'll cross the other arm under to use on the keyboard, like they are playing computer twister or something.
...unless you mouse left-handed, in which case it's an awkward monstrosity.
I generally have to stay away from high-end mice. The only things I really need in a mouse is that it not be hand-biased, and that it be a corded laser mouse. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to select one specific spot, only to repeatedly fail because of a flaw in the ball or mousepad, or grit on the mouseball rollers, or some kind of interference/battery problem with the transmitter.
Laser mice still can get issues with small objects like hairs stuck in front of the sensor. Keeping a pair of tweezers handy takes care of that fairly quickly and thouroughly though.
At 42, I've gone through a lot of the same thoughts. For me, I couldn't do it. I'm the kind of person who has to program. If I don't get to do it for a while at work, I end up finding some excuse to do it in my own time at home.
However, if I wasn't the kind of person who has to program, then I'd make the switch. Scheduling people, tasks, and resources is just as challenging a puzzle as most programming tasks. I really like helping people (which should be a manager's primary job), and the advancement possibilities for managers are nearly limitless.
Hey, i think we can all agree that WoW seems to have the best of all the worlds. 12 million can't be wrong
No, we can't. I could use your same logic to claim that all games must have ambulatory cows in them.
You would make a great film executive through. "Hey, that movie with Will Smith and explosions that came out on July 4th weekend sold great. Let's do that every year!"
The entrance to every zone in COH/COV is an area protected by police robots. The robots have rays that instantly kill anything in the game. The purpose of this is to prevent anyone from greifing people who are in the process of entering the area and don't have control of their characters yet.
If it weren't for these robots, then greifers could drag powerful mobs into the entrance area, or in the PvP area just stand in the enemy entrance area with a buddy or two, and prevent anyone from being able to enter without getting killed before having a chance to fight back at all.
There's also a "teleport foe" skill you can take, which is very handy for pulling, or for when an enemy gets stuck in a wall.
What this guy appeared to be doing was going into the PvP area and using teleport foe to teleport players on the other side into his own insta-death protected entrance area.
It is a very clever way to use the dev's griefer protection tools to grief people. What is most certianly is not is "playing the game by the designer's rules".
If you've ever had a conversation with a game griefer where they dumped their rationalizations for their prickish behavior on you, this article will look very familiar to you.
The US needs ANYONE to run against the two established parties ON ANY PLATFORM, and to WIN offices around the country.
That has happened before quite a few times in our history. There are always one of two results. Either the new party never gets enough support to become viable in the way you describe, or one of the other two parties withers and dies.
The fact of the matter is that our system is designed to have two major parties as its steady state. Changing that would require making large changes to the Constitution.
As someone who used to work in Orlando, I'd like to second this defense of it. I've worked in 6 different cities now, and Orlando was far and away my favorite.
The articles main complaint seemed to be that you have to share the city with aligators. Yeah, it can be kind of a bummer that you can't just heedlessly jump in any old lake you like. But on the other hand, gators are just way damn cool. If anything I had more trouble with the other local fanua (fire ants, feral pigs, etc). Honestly, you did a better job of talking it down than the article did.
Hurricanes are really no big deal there. You are far enough inland that they are just really big storms by the time they get to you. We get ones nearly as bad in Oklahoma, and way more of them. The locals freak out way more over mild freezes. Its funny to see everyone's shrubbery suddenly sprout bedclothes when the forecast night lows hit the lower 30's.
Cool things you didn't mention: Nighttime shuttle launches. Sadly, I don't think there will be any more of these, but anyone who has seen one knows what I am talking about. You just can't imagine the light those things put out unless you've been there. Think dawn in the middle of the night. Best free show on earth.
Year round outdoor activities. I spent one Christmas with a mild sunburn because I'd been playing beach volleyball two days before. Along with this, there are bike lanes on every road.
Ugh. I can't believe that anyone would consider that area "liveable". I've been there. There's no road system at all, just the same old country roads built for when the area had 1/100th of its current population. The result is 20 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic snaking through cornfields and chicken ranches (and housing developements that were conrfields and chicken ranches yesterday) just to get to the nearest convienence store.
On top of that there's pretty much no public transit, nothing is walkable, and the area has no culture at all outside of Wal-Mart culture.
On the plus side, AQ Chicken has got to be the best fried chicken place in the world. If you think you've found better, I don't believe you.
likewise, the invasion of Poland started World War II in Europe.
Wow, that was started by the U.N. too? I guess the books I read were all wet!
Well there was the precursor organization, the League of Nations. It was sort of like the UN, except it didn't even have the USA backing it up.
So how did this organization do in stopping German aggression, as the GP implies? Let's go through the list (as retold by Churchill (this should be required reading in every Western country):
They started off with Germany banned by treaty from having a large Army, conscription, and any Air Force or submarines at all, and no border fortifications. They were even prohibited by treaty from putting any troops in their western territories (bordering France and the low countries).
They started cheating on their army numbers. Nobody did anything to them.
They started rebuilding an Air Force and subs (in violation of the treaty). Nobody did anything
They started rebuilding their Navy. Instead of decalring war, the UK actually signed a new treaty with them allowing them more new tonnage than they could possibly build
They reoccupied the Ruhr (in direct violation of treaty). Nobody marched on them.
They started fortifying the border. Nobody stopped them.
They reintroduced conscription. Nobody declared war. Now all the countries around them start to get really scared. France is still big enough to roll them though.
They march into Austria (supposedly allied with France and Italy). Nobody declares war.
They take over the eastern part (with all its well developed border Fortresses) of French ally Czechoslovakia by threat without firing a shot.
Now even France isn't big enough to stop them. They proceed to march into the rest of Czechoslovakia (still allied with France). Nobody declares war.
They invade Poland. Now that they will be lucky to survive, the UK and France declare war.
Notice me mention the League in here? No? There's a reason for that. The League (who all those German treaties were signed with) was a total non-player.
This "Fashion Advisor" sounds to me like they are trying yet again to find a use for Clippy, the reviled and ultimately fired MS Office assistant.
"I see that you are putting on white shoes after labor day. Would you like help?".
There is no problem with letting anyone who wants be a Jedi/Sith in SW:TOR because the lore for that era of the Star Wars Universe has lots of both running around.
I can see where they will have trouble with relatively few people wanting to play the other classes though. Being a Storm...er..Clonetrooper, even a supposedly badass one, just doesn't have the same panache.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps because everybody who is interested has already bought it? I hit my favorite box store once a week to see if a music pack I'm interested in is out. Until the Beatles one is released, I'm not going to have anything to buy to produce the sales blip they are looking for. I'm not saying this is the reason, but couldn't the article have considered this possibility, rather than assuming they knew the answer and writing a bunch of postulation based on that guess?
Shouldn't that be "Google Moon" instead? Go ahead and try it: http://moon.google.com/ . It works.
The problem with shuttle tourisim is that the launches get scrubbed so often, your odds of actually getting to see it aren't good if you don't live in the area.
Some advice if you do go:
Its the best (and most inspiring) free show on earth.
You could similarly make being an NFL quarterback sound dull, if you just related all the hard work they spend most of their time doing to prepare for the relatively short games.
Except, as soon as word got out of them flipping the first bit on the drive during the copy operation, the MPAA/RIAA/ABC/CBS/NBC/etc would be down their necks
That would suck. Think about leaving the spacecraft, all exicted about being the first human to set foot on Mars, only to find a media company lawyer there tapping his foot waiting for you with a subpeona.
You'd still be the first human to set foot on Mars, but what a letdown.
Note, by the way, that some of the crews of Mir spent six months on Mir, which is smaller than a Mars craft is likely to be.
Yeah, but those were Russians. The Mir was probably a lot nicer and roomier than their apartments back home.
People have written oodles of books on this subject, because there are oodles of different ways to screw up a project.
The best insight on this subject comes from Tolstoy, not Brooks. He was talking about families being functional, not software, but the principle is the same.
All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
A far better method of approaching this issue is to study projects that don't fail, not ones that do.
Perhaps LAN Parties are a thing of the past, but lunchtime office LAN play is alive and well. There are probably 30 people where I work who went out and bought everything in the Battlefield series due to the lunchtime office games. That is only one group that I work near. There are others in the facility.
However, most corporate firewalls block gaming sites. So this move will prevent us (and other companies like us) from doing the same with those two games. This will impact sales.
I just did a cross-country trip using Google Latitude. It worked great, but there were some problems that make it less suitable for this use.
First off, whenever we were out of range of a tower, the whole program stopped until you dimiss a popup dialog informing you of this fact (with a tiny "OK" button).
Secondly, it chewed through my battery power like it was going out of style. I could get perhaps 4 hours max out of it before having to put it on the charger. If your movers have your stuff for less than four hours, I'm really impressed.
I'm now living in fear of the contents of next month's phone bill...
I just noticed this a couple of days ago, but Steven Colbert does an amazing amount of science reporting on his show. I stumbled across a science reporter's blog that showed guest shots from his show, and the number of them he has had on is just incredible. He's done multiple reports on Eagle conservation and multiple interviews of astronauts in orbit. The guest with the most visits of anyone else isn't a politician, pundit, or reporter. It is Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He's probably singlehandedly responsible for more than half the hits on Wikipedia's elephant page.
Oh, and let's not forget his continuing coverage of the great Bear menace.
Well, I do what I can...
A mouse is still quite useful for direct random access to any spot on the screen, like when you need to move the cursor to a specific spot quickly, or select and oddly-shaped bunch of text.
When that does happen, its important that it be a quality mouse you can trust. Having to fumble over a spot quickly frustrates you, which will blow you whole flow.
Heh. I see we made the same comment. However, we do have the difference that I don't like wireless mice.
I use the copperhead at home too.
It is probably less than 10% of us that mouse lefty though. I think the majority of lefties just go ahead an mouse with their right hand. I used to, but I quit when I started doing realtime gaming and realised the tremendous advantage you get by having one hand on the mouse and the other on the arrow keys/numeric keyapd. It also helps a bit to have the better mouse control with the dominant hand, but the keyboard control is the big deal. I'm surprised more righties don't switch to doing it that way too. Sales for gaming keypads would dry up overnight.
Plus its hilarious when righties sit down at my rig. Most actually cross their body with their right arm so they can use that hand on the mouse. Sometimes they'll cross the other arm under to use on the keyboard, like they are playing computer twister or something.
...unless you mouse left-handed, in which case it's an awkward monstrosity.
I generally have to stay away from high-end mice. The only things I really need in a mouse is that it not be hand-biased, and that it be a corded laser mouse. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to select one specific spot, only to repeatedly fail because of a flaw in the ball or mousepad, or grit on the mouseball rollers, or some kind of interference/battery problem with the transmitter.
Laser mice still can get issues with small objects like hairs stuck in front of the sensor. Keeping a pair of tweezers handy takes care of that fairly quickly and thouroughly though.
At 42, I've gone through a lot of the same thoughts. For me, I couldn't do it. I'm the kind of person who has to program. If I don't get to do it for a while at work, I end up finding some excuse to do it in my own time at home.
However, if I wasn't the kind of person who has to program, then I'd make the switch. Scheduling people, tasks, and resources is just as challenging a puzzle as most programming tasks. I really like helping people (which should be a manager's primary job), and the advancement possibilities for managers are nearly limitless.
Hey, i think we can all agree that WoW seems to have the best of all the worlds. 12 million can't be wrong
No, we can't. I could use your same logic to claim that all games must have ambulatory cows in them.
You would make a great film executive through. "Hey, that movie with Will Smith and explosions that came out on July 4th weekend sold great. Let's do that every year!"
The entrance to every zone in COH/COV is an area protected by police robots. The robots have rays that instantly kill anything in the game. The purpose of this is to prevent anyone from greifing people who are in the process of entering the area and don't have control of their characters yet.
If it weren't for these robots, then greifers could drag powerful mobs into the entrance area, or in the PvP area just stand in the enemy entrance area with a buddy or two, and prevent anyone from being able to enter without getting killed before having a chance to fight back at all.
There's also a "teleport foe" skill you can take, which is very handy for pulling, or for when an enemy gets stuck in a wall.
What this guy appeared to be doing was going into the PvP area and using teleport foe to teleport players on the other side into his own insta-death protected entrance area.
It is a very clever way to use the dev's griefer protection tools to grief people. What is most certianly is not is "playing the game by the designer's rules".
If you've ever had a conversation with a game griefer where they dumped their rationalizations for their prickish behavior on you, this article will look very familiar to you.
The US needs ANYONE to run against the two established parties ON ANY PLATFORM, and to WIN offices around the country.
That has happened before quite a few times in our history. There are always one of two results. Either the new party never gets enough support to become viable in the way you describe, or one of the other two parties withers and dies.
The fact of the matter is that our system is designed to have two major parties as its steady state. Changing that would require making large changes to the Constitution.
As someone who used to work in Orlando, I'd like to second this defense of it. I've worked in 6 different cities now, and Orlando was far and away my favorite.
The articles main complaint seemed to be that you have to share the city with aligators. Yeah, it can be kind of a bummer that you can't just heedlessly jump in any old lake you like. But on the other hand, gators are just way damn cool. If anything I had more trouble with the other local fanua (fire ants, feral pigs, etc). Honestly, you did a better job of talking it down than the article did.
Hurricanes are really no big deal there. You are far enough inland that they are just really big storms by the time they get to you. We get ones nearly as bad in Oklahoma, and way more of them. The locals freak out way more over mild freezes. Its funny to see everyone's shrubbery suddenly sprout bedclothes when the forecast night lows hit the lower 30's.
Cool things you didn't mention: Nighttime shuttle launches. Sadly, I don't think there will be any more of these, but anyone who has seen one knows what I am talking about. You just can't imagine the light those things put out unless you've been there. Think dawn in the middle of the night. Best free show on earth.
Year round outdoor activities. I spent one Christmas with a mild sunburn because I'd been playing beach volleyball two days before. Along with this, there are bike lanes on every road.
Ugh. I can't believe that anyone would consider that area "liveable". I've been there. There's no road system at all, just the same old country roads built for when the area had 1/100th of its current population. The result is 20 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic snaking through cornfields and chicken ranches (and housing developements that were conrfields and chicken ranches yesterday) just to get to the nearest convienence store.
On top of that there's pretty much no public transit, nothing is walkable, and the area has no culture at all outside of Wal-Mart culture.
On the plus side, AQ Chicken has got to be the best fried chicken place in the world. If you think you've found better, I don't believe you.
Why is the site you link to [dloh.org] in your piece show as 100% black in Firefox 3.0.11?
Hah! My Internet Explorer 7 is far superior. It shows the page 100% white.
likewise, the invasion of Poland started World War II in Europe.
Wow, that was started by the U.N. too? I guess the books I read were all wet!
Well there was the precursor organization, the League of Nations. It was sort of like the UN, except it didn't even have the USA backing it up.
So how did this organization do in stopping German aggression, as the GP implies? Let's go through the list (as retold by Churchill (this should be required reading in every Western country):
They started off with Germany banned by treaty from having a large Army, conscription, and any Air Force or submarines at all, and no border fortifications. They were even prohibited by treaty from putting any troops in their western territories (bordering France and the low countries).
Notice me mention the League in here? No? There's a reason for that. The League (who all those German treaties were signed with) was a total non-player.
This "Fashion Advisor" sounds to me like they are trying yet again to find a use for Clippy, the reviled and ultimately fired MS Office assistant. "I see that you are putting on white shoes after labor day. Would you like help?".
*sigh*. Yet another level 1 Twileck Jedi dancing nekkid on the mailbox in Coriscant...
There is no problem with letting anyone who wants be a Jedi/Sith in SW:TOR because the lore for that era of the Star Wars Universe has lots of both running around.
I can see where they will have trouble with relatively few people wanting to play the other classes though. Being a Storm...er..Clonetrooper, even a supposedly badass one, just doesn't have the same panache.