I've played EQ for about 4 years before stopping this spring. I can assure you that it's not 1% of folks who are there to PL and not socialize. I'd estimate (roughly) that the breakdown is something like this for EQ:
1/3 -- Socializing with RL friends (as stated) 1/3 -- Gamers first who have made friendships in-game and continue to play for that 1/6 -- Obsessive gamers who seek to level/skill up/etc for the pure sake of it. 1/6 -- misc. Includes people playing after friends quit, new people just exploring the game, plat-farmers, and scammers of all sorts.
You just have to love the Slashdot crowd. Anything new comes along and all you get is "oh, it's been done before... it wasn't quite as fully developed, and was only part of a larger whole, but it was done."
When are we going to stop and think about the fact that all innovation in human history involved taking things that already existed, and combining them in ways that no one else had?
No one had ever fillmed a feature-length movie with live-action actors as the primary stars in which there was only one set and 90% of the film was CG. If hollywood had nixed the idea of doing this, Slashdot junkies would be the first to rant that Hollywood never does anything innovative like this, but when they do, it's all just, "been there, done that."
Tron was an innovative and well-made film. So was Sky Capt. Why can we not celebrate the innovation of both (while lamenting that Hollywood DOES limit such innovation such that it took us 30 years to get from the one to the other)?
Well, that was kind of my point. It's far easier if you HAVEN'T been exposed to a lot of number theory, because you're not thinking in terms of all of the classic sorts of progressions. In a way they're screening for people who aren't as knowlegable.
Ok, let me answer this as a programmer who has only been told how the process works. Someone who is actually in the business, feel free to correct me.
"As it was originally realeased" is not a meaningful term in this conext. The editing of different versions of a film isn't as linear as most fans envision, and there's no real way to "just release that version over there". There is no "that version over there", there's just the original pre-edit masters which need to be massaged into a feature film and various "prints" that are unsuitable for mastering from.
We viewers very often want to assume that there's some atomic state-transition between un-edited and edited, and that once you cross that barrier, everything else is "messing with the original". Not so; every "version" of a film is essentially a different editing process, and while various editing processes can build on each other (the guy who edits the DVD master most likely doesn't re-select camera angles, for example), they're not truly linear either, and scenes might be included or dropped for example, that were not included or dropped in the version you saw in the theater.
You don't master DVDs from theater-house film stock.
That said, I think Lucas would have been stunned, 5 or 10 years ago, at the reception that a new edit, similar to the original theatrical release, but on DVD, would have faired.
All of THAT aside, I'd like to point out that these days much of this is moot. Hollywood is moving to digital, and "edits" are just an abstraction. Star Wars III will likely never be edited in the traditional sense, someone will just create and edit track that guides software in the process of creating a feature-length film out of the original master data. Once THAT is common-place (if it isn't already), then the assumptions about editing that fans have been making for decades will start to be truer.
BTW: ITA Software has some really good programming puzzles if you're looking for something that's a real challenge. If you're an admin, and you submit a resume for that job we send you a different, more ops-oriented puzzle that you might enjoy.
Which, if you solved the problem AND submitted that answer (to prove that you could solve it, but consider it silly), might just land you the interview.
What I didn't realize going in is that this is not a contest, it's an ad. I thought I was solving a puzzle that Google considered hard, and that's why it took me so long: I was looking for hard answers. It turns out that this is just a device for getting smart people to look at Google's Web site.
And in that case, the "FROM" in the envelope (not what the user sees) should reflect the forwarder, not the original sender. It's simple SMTP, and every mailing list and forwarding system in the world that does this right has no problem. If, on the other hand, you use the sender's FROM, as if you were an MX handler, you're going to be called out for lying.
Nothing wrong with that, other than the fact that MTAs are going to have to start handling simple aliases correctly.
I spent two days on the second puzzle (the number from e just leads you to a site with the real puzzle), only to realize that the answer was far, far simpler than I had been looking for. I think buildings two blocks down heard the "Doh!";-)
A hint for those who want it...
If you're searching through all of your number theory memories and reference texts for a solution, you've left the solution far behind.
Yep, none of this is new tech. In fact, it's pretty old tech at this point. Emulators/translators and everything in between have been the subject of experimentation for decades.
Actually, I expect to see someone sit down and write this for Parrot sometime soon. Especially of interest would be an S/390 emulator written in Parrot.
Parrot, for those who don't know, is a VM that targets very high level languages, but it's flexible enough and has a sufficiently strong JIT compiler that a hardware emulator extension to Parrot could easily produce code that would perform as well as the described product.
The cool part about writing such an emulator for Parrot is that you get access to the resulting emulated code from a number of high-level languages, so you could port over your S/390 airline application written in TPF and call its routines from a Java, Perl, Scheme or Ruby program, jumping into and out of hardware emulation as you go. While high-level languages would only have gross access to data as opaque objects, the hardware emulator could provide the ported code with everything that it expects.
"Emulation" is a sophisticated art at this point, and it's going to get very interesting over the next few years.
The kind of forwarding you are refering to is broken, and should not be done anyway. SPF works at the SMTP-envelope level. There's no reason that your server should forward mail to me, claiming that the mail is "from" some third party unless you're my MX. If none of this makes sense to you, then you should not be posting to Slashdot about why SPF doesn't make sense;-)
The problem with your contest is that a developer who writes the code for $5800 is probably going to need at least two, if not all three months. That's between $440-$660/week before taxes for what would undoutably be many late nights, and even then it's just a CHANCE to be the winner... too risky for the reward. You're better off writing some open source software that WILL get used and will end up being a better resume item than "I wrote a contest entry that lost."
I don't disagree that he's a great character, and wonderfully human, I just think that he's not believable in the line-to-line reading. His lines tend more toward the parody of a brute than a brute, where everyone else's comedy comes from the situation, and their natural reactions to it. Mind you, this is a minor complaint, but it's one that stuck with me through the series. I did like the character concept, and I did like the fact that in the end, he was exactly as trustworthy as you expect, i.e. not.
And about that cloud... "The weather overall at the time was cloudy but there was a peculiar cloud, a cloud that was different from any other," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "We cannot confirm whether it had the characteristics of a mushroom cloud." -Yahoo News
A crown fire bad enough to make a mushroom-like cloud of the size reported would leave devestation visible from space that (at least from a satellite) would look exactly like a crater. Such fires create all sorts of amazing (and deadly) displays from mushroom clouds to tornados of flame.
You have to understand that crown fires (so named because they are hot enough and violent enough to burn the whole tree at once, not just the litter on the ground and the bark/limbs at the base) are one of the most violent natural disasters, outhshown only by the big 3: Typhoon, Earthquake and Volcano, and are FAR more powerful than the largest nukes we've deployed to date.
Actually, a large crown fire could EASILY produce a mushroom cloud that would make the casual observer think "nuke". I hope that's not what happened because a) such a large fire would be devestating to the locals and b) fires that burn that hot are doing so by burning the trees dead, and that will hurt their forests and release tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. If the Koreans have the same fire prevention strategy that the US had in the early and mid parts of the 20th century though, then that's not unlikely.
Why do there have to be specific influences. In the case of Buffy, Joss has said that he started with the idea of wanting to turn around the "scared girl in the alleyway, attacked by monster" so that the girl kicks the monster's ass. Being a fan, and drawing on anime for the mechanic of that seems reasonable, but if you watch the first 2 seasons of Buffy, the slayer and the monsters (vampires) aren't the focus of the series except in a few episodes. MOST of the show early on is about the contrast between high school and monster-hunting and how high school really is the more frightening element.
In Firefly, obviously there are Star Wars elements. There's also a whole lot of the old TV western series feel (Joss has mentioned that this is deliberate).
For my taste, the concept was a poor one. Telling a frontier story in space makes perfect sense, but you don't have to drive that home with American western metaphor. However, the execution (barring a few jarring elements that Fox demanded) was brilliant, and the show grew on me. I especially liked the development of the culture in large (throwing in Chinese language) and small (the scarcity of fresh vegetables) ways. The show FELT like it was taking place in a frontier setting, and I think that's the highest compliment I can pay to Joss and the crew of the series. The acting was superb. The only character I never "believed" was Jane. Joss has a hard time writing thugs because I don't think he knows enough of them;-) but the actor did a fine job.
Some of the things that RPM can do in terms of source-packaging and re-packaging are quite useful and not quite mapped fully into dpkg. That said, they're both great tools, and I'm glad they exist.
Did you see it, or are you just calling it godawful because you don't like love stories (which Titanic is... sort of).
One of the things that I loved about that film was that it was about 6 films. It was the story of Rose and Jack's fling on the surface (a smart hook for the teenage girls). It's about the reason that the Titanic existed... that sense that art alone was too limited to contain the imagination of the day (a feeling I think Cameron shares). It was also about why these people were there. Each of them has their own reasons, and while we only get a handful of their stories we get to experience that sense that no two people are on the boat for the same reasons. Then it's about what happened to the Titanic. Rose makes it clear in the beginning that we all know what happened, but not what happened TO THEM. It wasn't really about the BOAT sinking it was about the passengers and crew dealing with the boat sinking and the ways in which they faced, first life, and then death.
The littany of ways that people face death was breath-taking, and for that 20-minute sequence alone, I felt it deserved the Oscar. People remember the 3-piece band that kept playing as the ship went down, but I remember the preacher giving a sermon as the boat broke in two. People screamed and cried and ran and froze; they drowned and boiled and were electrocuted. What he managed to do was get across to the viewer (at least the ones paying attention) that this was not a simple sinking... the boat was too large for that... this was a natural disaster striking a small city.
If you thought the movie was a throw-away you missed out on a truly amazing experience, I'm sorry.
Watching Winslet & DeCaprio cavorting around is entertaining and all (and the fact that both characters die by the end of the film is an extra bonus)
Does Rose actually die? I remember the diamond scene and then I recall seeing her photographs from the life that Jack encouraged her to go live... but did she die?
Man, I'm going to feel silly if I've forgotten that;-)
Three distros, with three different installation methods.
Correct. And this is a problem, why?
Distributions are effectively OSes unto themselves. They cross-pollenate to some extent, but their independence is powerful.
Take a look at RPM. Red Hat did a great job coming up with a low-level packaging format that allowed them to encapsulate community projects as raw, unchanged source, add in distribution-specific patches and fixes in a controled, reproducable way and then build and install binary packages.
Debian, while having a slightly less functional package format (dpkg), built an amazingly powerful distribution and dependency management system called apt.
Different distributions, different goals, different solutions.
In the end, Red Hat's Fedora has ended up moving toward apt+rpm because both solution have strong merits that solve important problems, and now a new level of abstraction and functionality is being build on top of that base.
There's only one "mv" across Linux distributions because it's something that we've pretty much agreed upon. As things like desktops, installation systems, etc grow and mature, they too will sort themselves out, but prematurely selecting one solution and killing the others (ignoring the political and social impossibility of such a feat) would stunt the growth that we all claim to want.
Given that I don't see a relationship between your statements that could be resolved in a reading of an HCI book, why don't you explain exactly what your concerns with Synaptic are, and what you think would be a reasonable soltion.
Slashdot Mirror
I've played EQ for about 4 years before stopping this spring. I can assure you that it's not 1% of folks who are there to PL and not socialize. I'd estimate (roughly) that the breakdown is something like this for EQ:
1/3 -- Socializing with RL friends (as stated)
1/3 -- Gamers first who have made friendships in-game and continue to play for that
1/6 -- Obsessive gamers who seek to level/skill up/etc for the pure sake of it.
1/6 -- misc. Includes people playing after friends quit, new people just exploring the game, plat-farmers, and scammers of all sorts.
You just have to love the Slashdot crowd. Anything new comes along and all you get is "oh, it's been done before... it wasn't quite as fully developed, and was only part of a larger whole, but it was done."
When are we going to stop and think about the fact that all innovation in human history involved taking things that already existed, and combining them in ways that no one else had?
No one had ever fillmed a feature-length movie with live-action actors as the primary stars in which there was only one set and 90% of the film was CG. If hollywood had nixed the idea of doing this, Slashdot junkies would be the first to rant that Hollywood never does anything innovative like this, but when they do, it's all just, "been there, done that."
Tron was an innovative and well-made film. So was Sky Capt. Why can we not celebrate the innovation of both (while lamenting that Hollywood DOES limit such innovation such that it took us 30 years to get from the one to the other)?
Well, that was kind of my point. It's far easier if you HAVEN'T been exposed to a lot of number theory, because you're not thinking in terms of all of the classic sorts of progressions. In a way they're screening for people who aren't as knowlegable.
Ok, let me answer this as a programmer who has only been told how the process works. Someone who is actually in the business, feel free to correct me.
"As it was originally realeased" is not a meaningful term in this conext. The editing of different versions of a film isn't as linear as most fans envision, and there's no real way to "just release that version over there". There is no "that version over there", there's just the original pre-edit masters which need to be massaged into a feature film and various "prints" that are unsuitable for mastering from.
We viewers very often want to assume that there's some atomic state-transition between un-edited and edited, and that once you cross that barrier, everything else is "messing with the original". Not so; every "version" of a film is essentially a different editing process, and while various editing processes can build on each other (the guy who edits the DVD master most likely doesn't re-select camera angles, for example), they're not truly linear either, and scenes might be included or dropped for example, that were not included or dropped in the version you saw in the theater.
You don't master DVDs from theater-house film stock.
That said, I think Lucas would have been stunned, 5 or 10 years ago, at the reception that a new edit, similar to the original theatrical release, but on DVD, would have faired.
All of THAT aside, I'd like to point out that these days much of this is moot. Hollywood is moving to digital, and "edits" are just an abstraction. Star Wars III will likely never be edited in the traditional sense, someone will just create and edit track that guides software in the process of creating a feature-length film out of the original master data. Once THAT is common-place (if it isn't already), then the assumptions about editing that fans have been making for decades will start to be truer.
BTW: ITA Software has some really good programming puzzles if you're looking for something that's a real challenge. If you're an admin, and you submit a resume for that job we send you a different, more ops-oriented puzzle that you might enjoy.
Which, if you solved the problem AND submitted that answer (to prove that you could solve it, but consider it silly), might just land you the interview.
What I didn't realize going in is that this is not a contest, it's an ad. I thought I was solving a puzzle that Google considered hard, and that's why it took me so long: I was looking for hard answers. It turns out that this is just a device for getting smart people to look at Google's Web site.
And in that case, the "FROM" in the envelope (not what the user sees) should reflect the forwarder, not the original sender. It's simple SMTP, and every mailing list and forwarding system in the world that does this right has no problem. If, on the other hand, you use the sender's FROM, as if you were an MX handler, you're going to be called out for lying.
Nothing wrong with that, other than the fact that MTAs are going to have to start handling simple aliases correctly.
I spent two days on the second puzzle (the number from e just leads you to a site with the real puzzle), only to realize that the answer was far, far simpler than I had been looking for. I think buildings two blocks down heard the "Doh!" ;-)
A hint for those who want it...
If you're searching through all of your number theory memories and reference texts for a solution, you've left the solution far behind.
Yep, none of this is new tech. In fact, it's pretty old tech at this point. Emulators/translators and everything in between have been the subject of experimentation for decades.
Actually, I expect to see someone sit down and write this for Parrot sometime soon. Especially of interest would be an S/390 emulator written in Parrot.
Parrot, for those who don't know, is a VM that targets very high level languages, but it's flexible enough and has a sufficiently strong JIT compiler that a hardware emulator extension to Parrot could easily produce code that would perform as well as the described product.
The cool part about writing such an emulator for Parrot is that you get access to the resulting emulated code from a number of high-level languages, so you could port over your S/390 airline application written in TPF and call its routines from a Java, Perl, Scheme or Ruby program, jumping into and out of hardware emulation as you go. While high-level languages would only have gross access to data as opaque objects, the hardware emulator could provide the ported code with everything that it expects.
"Emulation" is a sophisticated art at this point, and it's going to get very interesting over the next few years.
The kind of forwarding you are refering to is broken, and should not be done anyway. SPF works at the SMTP-envelope level. There's no reason that your server should forward mail to me, claiming that the mail is "from" some third party unless you're my MX. If none of this makes sense to you, then you should not be posting to Slashdot about why SPF doesn't make sense ;-)
Yep. I was stunned by the lack of research that went into this article. Strike two for Forbes.com recently. I think I'm going to start ignoring them.
The problem with your contest is that a developer who writes the code for $5800 is probably going to need at least two, if not all three months. That's between $440-$660/week before taxes for what would undoutably be many late nights, and even then it's just a CHANCE to be the winner... too risky for the reward. You're better off writing some open source software that WILL get used and will end up being a better resume item than "I wrote a contest entry that lost."
I don't disagree that he's a great character, and wonderfully human, I just think that he's not believable in the line-to-line reading. His lines tend more toward the parody of a brute than a brute, where everyone else's comedy comes from the situation, and their natural reactions to it. Mind you, this is a minor complaint, but it's one that stuck with me through the series. I did like the character concept, and I did like the fact that in the end, he was exactly as trustworthy as you expect, i.e. not.
And about that cloud... "The weather overall at the time was cloudy but there was a peculiar cloud, a cloud that was different from any other," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "We cannot confirm whether it had the characteristics of a mushroom cloud." -Yahoo News
What crater? From space, a region of utter devestation (e.g. from fire) is not distinguishable from a crater.
A crown fire bad enough to make a mushroom-like cloud of the size reported would leave devestation visible from space that (at least from a satellite) would look exactly like a crater. Such fires create all sorts of amazing (and deadly) displays from mushroom clouds to tornados of flame.
You have to understand that crown fires (so named because they are hot enough and violent enough to burn the whole tree at once, not just the litter on the ground and the bark/limbs at the base) are one of the most violent natural disasters, outhshown only by the big 3: Typhoon, Earthquake and Volcano, and are FAR more powerful than the largest nukes we've deployed to date.
Ya, let's provoke a nation that is under the leadership of a crazy guy
;-)
Took me a beat to realize you were not refering to the US...
Actually, a large crown fire could EASILY produce a mushroom cloud that would make the casual observer think "nuke". I hope that's not what happened because a) such a large fire would be devestating to the locals and b) fires that burn that hot are doing so by burning the trees dead, and that will hurt their forests and release tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. If the Koreans have the same fire prevention strategy that the US had in the early and mid parts of the 20th century though, then that's not unlikely.
Why do there have to be specific influences. In the case of Buffy, Joss has said that he started with the idea of wanting to turn around the "scared girl in the alleyway, attacked by monster" so that the girl kicks the monster's ass. Being a fan, and drawing on anime for the mechanic of that seems reasonable, but if you watch the first 2 seasons of Buffy, the slayer and the monsters (vampires) aren't the focus of the series except in a few episodes. MOST of the show early on is about the contrast between high school and monster-hunting and how high school really is the more frightening element.
;-) but the actor did a fine job.
In Firefly, obviously there are Star Wars elements. There's also a whole lot of the old TV western series feel (Joss has mentioned that this is deliberate).
For my taste, the concept was a poor one. Telling a frontier story in space makes perfect sense, but you don't have to drive that home with American western metaphor. However, the execution (barring a few jarring elements that Fox demanded) was brilliant, and the show grew on me. I especially liked the development of the culture in large (throwing in Chinese language) and small (the scarcity of fresh vegetables) ways. The show FELT like it was taking place in a frontier setting, and I think that's the highest compliment I can pay to Joss and the crew of the series. The acting was superb. The only character I never "believed" was Jane. Joss has a hard time writing thugs because I don't think he knows enough of them
I just started aamail.
Some of the things that RPM can do in terms of source-packaging and re-packaging are quite useful and not quite mapped fully into dpkg. That said, they're both great tools, and I'm glad they exist.
Did you see it, or are you just calling it godawful because you don't like love stories (which Titanic is... sort of).
One of the things that I loved about that film was that it was about 6 films. It was the story of Rose and Jack's fling on the surface (a smart hook for the teenage girls). It's about the reason that the Titanic existed... that sense that art alone was too limited to contain the imagination of the day (a feeling I think Cameron shares). It was also about why these people were there. Each of them has their own reasons, and while we only get a handful of their stories we get to experience that sense that no two people are on the boat for the same reasons. Then it's about what happened to the Titanic. Rose makes it clear in the beginning that we all know what happened, but not what happened TO THEM. It wasn't really about the BOAT sinking it was about the passengers and crew dealing with the boat sinking and the ways in which they faced, first life, and then death.
The littany of ways that people face death was breath-taking, and for that 20-minute sequence alone, I felt it deserved the Oscar. People remember the 3-piece band that kept playing as the ship went down, but I remember the preacher giving a sermon as the boat broke in two. People screamed and cried and ran and froze; they drowned and boiled and were electrocuted. What he managed to do was get across to the viewer (at least the ones paying attention) that this was not a simple sinking... the boat was too large for that... this was a natural disaster striking a small city.
If you thought the movie was a throw-away you missed out on a truly amazing experience, I'm sorry.
Watching Winslet & DeCaprio cavorting around is entertaining and all (and the fact that both characters die by the end of the film is an extra bonus)
;-)
Does Rose actually die? I remember the diamond scene and then I recall seeing her photographs from the life that Jack encouraged her to go live... but did she die?
Man, I'm going to feel silly if I've forgotten that
Three distros, with three different installation methods.
Correct. And this is a problem, why?
Distributions are effectively OSes unto themselves. They cross-pollenate to some extent, but their independence is powerful.
Take a look at RPM. Red Hat did a great job coming up with a low-level packaging format that allowed them to encapsulate community projects as raw, unchanged source, add in distribution-specific patches and fixes in a controled, reproducable way and then build and install binary packages.
Debian, while having a slightly less functional package format (dpkg), built an amazingly powerful distribution and dependency management system called apt.
Different distributions, different goals, different solutions.
In the end, Red Hat's Fedora has ended up moving toward apt+rpm because both solution have strong merits that solve important problems, and now a new level of abstraction and functionality is being build on top of that base.
There's only one "mv" across Linux distributions because it's something that we've pretty much agreed upon. As things like desktops, installation systems, etc grow and mature, they too will sort themselves out, but prematurely selecting one solution and killing the others (ignoring the political and social impossibility of such a feat) would stunt the growth that we all claim to want.
Given that I don't see a relationship between your statements that could be resolved in a reading of an HCI book, why don't you explain exactly what your concerns with Synaptic are, and what you think would be a reasonable soltion.