Yes, lets look at WC3's features and see how they're exactly like myth.. 3d terrain. Yep, both apparently have it, but then so do warzone2100, TA, enemy nations.. the list goes on.. and they arent at all like myth.
Unit building. Myth doest have it, WC3 has some form of unit-addition. It said you could recruit new units and have structures in the CNET review
Resource management. Myth doesnt have it, WC3 does. Again, the CNET review said rather specifically that there would be some form of resouce management in the game. Given that you're recruiting people i'd imagine it'd at least have money of some type.
Environment. Myth you had an army, the badguys had an army, you kill each other. WC3 apparently will have you, the badguys, and townsful of innocent bystanders
Yup, exactly the same in every way, obviously blizzard must have stolen the whole game. We've had so many 3d shooter clones and lookalike 'rpg' console games i guess people now assume games are alike at a glance.
I hate seeing fanaticism labelled "proper parenting" by certain mind controllers:) Dreamweaver
Re:That's a very poorly constructed argument.
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Who said anything about morals? I dont think there's anything 'morally' wrong with being drunk or high.. the law would not be to preserve anybody's morals (that should be Your job, not mine or the government's) it would be to protect the wellbeing of the people on the street, includng yourself. You arent going to get grabbed by a cop for public intoxication if you're walking down the street looking normal.. only if you're so blasted you obviously cant even walk straight. You're a danger to yourself (stumbling into a busy street for instance), a danger to others (you could trip people up by staggering into them, knock somebody over into that proverbial busy street etc), and a public annoyance.. i know if i were walking down the street i wouldnt want some guy stoned out of his mind walking up and harassing me. What you do in your home is your business and i think laws against it are rather stupid.. but i also think what you do in your home is Not my business and if i'm not In your home, i dont expect to see it. Dreamweaver
Re:That's a very poorly constructed argument.
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New Cyberlaws
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What's stupid about that? i'm reasonably sure he was kidding about the homeless thing.. and public intoxication is already illegal.. come up with a way to test for being high and there ya go. Dreamweaver
But it wasnt.. it was a witch. It wasnt about a serial killer.. it was about a witch. You could say that nightmare on elm street could have been about a serial killer who went around killing chronic insomniacs with paranoid delusional tendencies.. but it wasnt.. it was about a guy who went around through people's dreams. Dreamweaver
Well, let me qualify that. Suspense is good, yes.. but suspense alone does not make a movie scary. The only movie i've ever been scared by was Psycho 2. Why 2 you ask? I'm not exactly sure why.. i think it's just because i saw the first one in black and white and no matter how good it may be, i've never liked a black and white move (well, except the stooges.. but everybody loves the stooges) much less been scared by one.
So why did Psycho2 and not this scare me? Easy. For those of us who arent gullible, a movie about witches, monsters, ghosts, or any other supernatural creature just isnt going to be scary. It may frighten you, but only in the same way that your friend yelling BOO after sneaking up behind you is frightening. Had you seen them walking up it wouldnt have been scary, and really you're just shocked, not frightened. Psycho was scary not because of what happened in the movie itself, but because it was completely possible. I have no trouble believing that out there somewhere an insane man who keeps his dead mother's corpse around may be running a hotel. The world's full of sickos and psycho reinforced that fact. Blair Witch was about some extraordinarily gullible people in a hideously unlikely situation. No group of amateur filmmakers would go wandering out in the woods that badly prepared and personally, even if lost out in the woods if i ran into the same things i'd suspect some jerk from the town was playing tricks on me long before deciding it was some evil witch. Dreamweaver
No, this would be the same as those things if ford salesmen went out and sabotaged people's crysler's so that they Did break down more often and get worse mileage.. or if your neighbors snuck in while you werent home and switched out your ram for smaller chips so that your computer Did run slower than the one they wanted you to get. The whole point here is that the companies get to control what you're allowed to see. It's not that if you go to their website they extoll their product (which is expected), it's that if you try to go to any Other site it stops you. Dreamweaver
The protagonist should start out an everyday guy, yes.. but the whole idea behind character development is that the character gets ahead of their problems.. when they 'some how manage' to come out ahead in the end, they didnt develop.. they just got by with providence. A good story is one where the everyday joe gets thrust into unusual circumstances and changes to take control of his fate In that situation. The other replyer mentioned Brin's The Postman. The protagonist was a normal guy, possibly less honest than most, and for most of the book he tried to shirk responsability until he finally realizes that he doesnt want to live in a fallen world and takes control of the influence he's managed to put himself in.. that's a good story. If he'd have just kept plodding along and someone else had stepped up to fight the survivalists it wouldnt have been the same. Dreamweaver
Stephenson had about as little technical detail to go on as gibson did.. gibson just used the old 'it's sf.. it doesnt have to make any sense' clause. As for neuromancer being more mature.. i dont know quite how to describe it.. but neuromancer just didnt draw me in. The world was there, i'm sure it was interesting and all, but i didnt really care about the characters. Also, neuromancer's story was just so flat.. i read the book and didnt really have to think about anything. admittedly when i read it i'd already read a great number of books with AI and cyberspace-like elements, but while i'd read books that involved some of the same elements as snow crash, it made them seem fresh and while the whole information virus was a bit far-fetched it was at least thought provoking and i learned a few things about sumerian culture i hadnt been aware of beforehand. Dreamweaver
Unfortunitall, those things are reality. Violence and 'excessive sex' are part of daily life. People die all the time and the fact is on the news constnatly. As for colourful language not being part of the english language like 'apple'.. why not? Words like fuck and shit have been around since the dawn of the language. If the government decided tomorrow kids started using the words 'clerk', 'apple', and 'building' as 'curse words' would that make them unacceptable? People dont say 'shit' thinking solid-waste-product-produced-by-animals.. they say it to mean anything that's unacceptable. It doesnt mean what it used to and people need to get over it and move on. Everybody curses at some point in their life and there's nothing Wrong with the words themselves. I cant think of any possible reason why it should be wrong for children to say them. If an adult were in a car accident and came home saying 'god damnit! that fucking asshole ran a red light and totalled my fucking car!' we would realize he's very angry over the event and that there's really no other way to show the more intense end of the emotional spectrum than 'curse words'.. yet if a child were almost hit by a car while riding his bycicle and said, 'oh shit that was close!' he'd be punished. People will say, 'oh, but you dont need to curse. just say something else.' That's all well and good but doesnt always work. If a flying saucer landed in front of my car tomorrow i'd probably say 'holy shit!'.. somehow 'golly gee!' just wouldnt do it. As for violence and sex.. children 's impressionability isnt a problem here. Explain to the child about injury and death and sex before they see the movie, read the book, look at the magazine, whatever.. Use the impressionability to tell them what's good or bad about the things they're about to see rather than just forbidding them and making them want to see it even More to find out why their parents think it's so bad. Every guy i know snuck a look at a porn mag when he was somewhere around 10 or 12 but we arent all totally warped from the experience.
People need to dump the idiotic inhibitions imposed on them hundreds of years ago by confused men. Sure, some kids really cant handle some movies or other media.. that's for the parent to decide. But to decide fairly. Dont just say no because your parents said no. Dont say no because the preist/rabbi/misc-religious-leader say it's what's proper. Decide whether or not your child can understand what he's seeing and teach them the truth of the matter.. the responsabilities of sex, the reality of death, when to use curse words.. Seeing violence on tv or a movie wont make them go out and kill people.. it takes a mentally disturbed individual to commit crimes like murder and rape, not a normal person who's seen a movie.
Sometimes I wonder if we geeks dont have some unbalanced brain chemistry that makes us find ways to hate any establishment.. I mean, we all love space travel, right? But it seems alot of us hate NASA.. America's only space program and the world's most effective one.
Now I'll be first to admit that NASA does indeed have its problems. However, a great deal of those problems are forced on them. No, nobody is making NASA continue using Shuttle. No, there's no Real need to send humans up there with the satellites. However, NASA has very little choice but do both of those. As for the first one, if they dont use Shuttle, what Will they use? There are hundreds, even thousands, of ideas out there for new propulsion and earth-to-orbit devices.. but how many of them have an possability of actually working? And of those, how man do we have the technology for right now? Most of the good ones I've seen have the little "And we have alot of this technology already!" in there. All the reall great new systems rely on pre-installation setup.. special satellites in orbit, new launch facilities, retooling the whole mission control bay.. None of that is unexpected in a new system, but it all costs money. Sure you might be able to build a new ship that runs on solar energy and can get to orbit in 5 minutes for.1 cents a kilo.. but it requires, say, a 3 billion dollar satellite in orbit to provide that energy. When NASA's budget gets ripped back another 10% every year, in couple decades they'll have to save up a couple of years in a row just to send up that one satellite without doing Any other missions.
I'm pretty sure that origionally 'hacker' and 'hack' related solely to programming, but as with many words it got spread about and applied to all sorts of things both computer related and otherwise.
Personally I've always thought of the nouns 'hack' and 'hacker' not necessarily being related.. a 'hack' is, to me anyway, anything done to take care a problem that isnt the accepted solution. In programming this usually tends to be a kludge that works for now and will eventually need to be fixed.. but i've also seen cases that would defenitly qualify as a hack that were Better than the accepted solution. In other things it varies as well.. as another poster mentioned, tying the muffler back onto your car is a hack in the 'kuldge that works for now' sense.. but then were you to throw together something that replaced the muffler and did as good or better a job, i'd probably call it a righteous hack. The word 'hacker' however, i view as not being applicable to any specific type of person. One may be a programmer.. most likely they'll know a programming language or two no matter what, but it may not necessarily be their main occupation. A 'hacker' to me is anybody with a thirst for knowedge above and beyond that which is considered normal. Computers tend to draw them because there's so Much knoweldge to be had.. that's why I said they would likely know a language, because they couldnt resist knowing how the thing works. Anyone who calls themself a hacker shouldnt Just know computers though.. i've never found a person that's generally known as a hacker (in the good sense) who didnt know a reasonable amount of philosophy, theology, literature, and a smattering of all the sciences. A hack isnt necessarily clever or simple.. but a hacker is defenitly clever, quick-thinking, and has a desperate thirst for knowledge.
So my idea of the conclusive defenition? Hacker: ha-kur n. One who desires to know the inner workings of everything he surveys and has the ability to apply that knowledge.
What are you talking about? Motion capture doesnt reduce the need for animators, it just changes how they do their jobs. Motion capture is great for humans and human-like models, but you cant very well motion capture something with 5 arms and wings, or the waving of a plant in a breeze, or a car etc. All motion capture does for animators is make their job a bit easier, not replace them. And as for not making money on animated films.. tarzan was up there around #1 for cash intake its first weekend if i remember (i didnt pay much attention as i must admit i dont intend to see it.. but that's me) and neither bug's life nor antz (as the most recent fully-computer-animated movies) did very badly either. People dont really care what format a movie is in so long as it's a good watch. South Park was funny as hell, defenitly worth watching, and made out of cardboard cutouts. Alot teens/20ish people might not want to go see a cartoon because they're viewed as 'childish'.. but I dont think computer animated movies suffer the same stigma thanks to cg movies in games and such. Dreamweaver
Re:Compared to space shuttle?
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The big thing here is the reusable rockets. Our current rocket technology is decades old and it's been too expensive so far to make it better. Shuttle was designed as a military vehicle. Enormous redundency, low angle-of-attack on reentry to serve as a fighting vessel, and a big transport bay for modular loads. Usable for science, yes. Usable for military purposes, yes. Good for science? Not really. It's hideously inefficient for what it's used for. We're not ready to move past rocketry yet, but we really do need a boost as to what rockets we use. Dreamweaver
The problem isnt NASA. It's what the government does To NASA. NASA comes up with a good idea, they find a contractor to build it, the contractor agrees to a reasonable sum, they start construction.. in comes the USAF wanting them to test something they already know is crap, but which they want to know the exact crapiness of. The final straw in the x-33 project was when the USAF had them slap some shoddy russian-design aluminum fuel tanks on it to see what the working parameters were so they'ed know what the russians could do. Or NASA is forced to comply with stupid government regulations, like the prices they're forced to pay. Shuttles could be built for probably a 10th what they are now if it werent for them having to go by government parts procurement procedures requiring them to buy from government suppliers, makers of the $500 hammer. If NASA werent given such a raw deal they could have done well.. but almost since the beginning the USAF has been against NASA on principle and trying to drive it into the ground. Make NASA a government funded independent organization and we'll see some progress.. giving it all to the private sector and we'll get shuttles just barely capable of spaceflight that exist for the sole purpose of taking rich businessmen on a thrill ride. Dreamweaver
A while back i read an article (here, on a couple other websites, and in scientific american) about a new type of surface-to-orbit vehicle that worked by creating an air cone on top of it using some kind of dish and microwaves. The only thing stopping it from going into use right now is that there was no satellite microwave transmitter. They already proved that the thing works by using a transmitter on a tower above the device. Dunno if this beam would be powerful or tight enough to do it, but the possability exists and this was probably the coolest of the weird new ideas for single stage to orbit devices. Dreamweaver
Yes, but unfortunitally, those 7 died not only after nasa had faded from the spotlight, but in a way that didnt inspire. It was a mistake that nasa made.. a screw up in the system, rather than a noble way to die. i'm not saying they were any less than the other astronauts, but it wasnt an event that inspired the public. Dreamweaver
This could have saved the space program.. not killed it. Think about it. Just reading nixon's prepared speech even gave me a little patriotic twinge. Sure, there'd be alot of furor about it at first, but those 3 men would have become symbols of human bravery.. giving their lives for the country and their race to the spirit of exploration. It's a morbid thought, but had it happened we'd probably have landed on mars by now. Dreamweaver
Driving down the road, slamming my fist in frustration against the dashboard as the 'windows noise' plays over and over and over.. a sadistic little animated character with a typical name like 'sticky, the gearshift assistant' dancing maniacally across my display with helpful advice like 'Your lights are currently on, would you like to turn them on?' 'You just passed a truck, would you like information on buying a truck like that?' or 'You Too Can Make $10,000 in Two Days!!!'. But seriously, this could be useful if the 'net connection were restricted to certain info.. no adds etc. Of course, that'll never happen. Dreamweaver
I've never seen the animated movies, but if it wasnt funny, it wasnt done right. Discworld's increadibly funny and, odd for a comedy-type light-fantasy book, also very well written (okay, after the first few when he discovered what a plot was). But yes, defenitly try reading one.. some are better than others, but i've yet to find one that wasnt good. Dreamweaver
We have most of the technology... various mechanical processes for stimulating the various organs (or just faking it like with that blood-cycling machine).
We have the technology.. we Can make it the 6.3 billion dollar non-living-proto-human-test-subject! Dreamweaver
There may eventually be computer-driven nanomachines, but it wont start out that way. We already have simple nano-scale machinery.. gears, motors, etc and they arent computer driven, they're self-controlled because a gear can only do 1 thing.. turn. If we needed nanomachines with internal logic processors they would probably not use ram or transistor-type devices based on the flow of electrons, it'd be closer to the old 'Analytical Engine' designes.. a computer based on actual mechanical processes rather than the flow of electricty through electronic components, since nanomachine scales are simply too small. A brownian-motion driven propeller developed as a possible power source for nanomachines was the size of a medium-sized molecule. Perhaps by making a nanomachine, say, the size of a blood cell we could have it accept simple external commands, but it would have to be from extreamly short range since it coulnt have an antenna more than a few nanometers long (or across what with the new fractal ones). Dreamweaver
I'm not saying to use it for linux. The reason i dont have any problems with having it for the caldera install process is that it's just an install process. You dont have to open windows or use new applications or browse your harddrive when you're installing a program. Usually it's just a matter of 'pick place to put it', 'pick options', 'hit continue alot'.. that's why i dont see what the enormous problem is. If they completely copied windows for the entire linux gui, then yeah i'd have a problem with it.. just because if i'm gonna use linux i dont want to be using windows. but for an install program, i dont really care. Look at current linux install programs.. if the entire linux gui looked like the RedHat install screens, would you want to use it? I'd rather just have a command line.. Dreamweaver
You know.. i read that entire article and i think i agreed with it for about 5 words. The whole thing was written by someone who obviously hates windows an loves macs to death. Now you could just say that i say that because i'm biased toward windows over macs.. but you'd be wrong. This guy complains about Everything windows related. Even when something works The Same on a non-mac os, he bashes it. He goes on and on about the Mac menu because of how wonderful it is for being at the top of the screen.. personally i like having to waggle my mouse around as little as possible, having the scroll all the way up there and having it be okay for me to over scroll doesnt sound like such a great idea to me..
Not only is the whole thing amazingly mac-biased, it also points out over and over how macs are wonderful because you can use them even if your iq is 5, you cant see, you have the hand-eye-coordination of a jellyfish, and are confused by the difference between orange and dog. You know, maybe i'm prejudiced and horrible for saying this.. but if you're too stupid to do something, you shouldnt do it. Computers may eventually be so user-frienly anybody can use them, but at present they're not and trying to make them so screws it up for everybody else. This guy went on for PAGES about how confusing things like the start menu are... yet he was apparently confused about any number of windows functions.. he complained for a page or so about how the start menu and taskbar were at the bottom of the screen, but apparently didnt grasp the concept of click-and-drag.. since you can put the danged thing anywhere you want.. or continual campaign against multi-button mice. If i were so easily confused that having 2 buttons on my mouse threw me for a loop i think i'd have to shoot myself.. similarly i think i can think of 2 times in my career or computer-with-graphical-interface using that i missed what i was aiming to click at. Having the down button move you down and the up button move you up is confusing? What world does he live on? Last time i checked, up was up.. oh, wait, that's right.. he meant for Mac users. Yeah, windows sucks because mac users cant use it without learning a couple of things. But oh, wait, windows sucks because it has things in common with the mac. Hrm.. i havent heard that much hipocrisy since this morning's episode of the 700 club.
Color in non-mac systems is evil because it's customizable.. yeeeeahhh.. right. I rather like being able to change things like my colorscheme. I dont Like high-contrast. I'm not colorblind, so if i want something that looks nifty, i'd like to be able to have it. If I WAS colorblind, i could easily click on the high-contrast option, or if i ha poor eyesight the Large option. But of course these things are evil because they're customizable. We must remember, freedom=bad, conformity=good.. now comrade, get your rubles, we must go stand in bread line at market.. Non-mac systems are evil because they used things macs had.. gee, remind me to go take the wheels off my car until someone comes up with a new way to make things roll. If something works, why reinvent it? is it stealing, or using a concept that's already proven rather than confusing all the 'huh? 2 buttons?' people out there with more different things. Context menus are bad because they change depending where you click.. well Duh, that's the whole point mr. infinitely-tall-menubar.. and lets not forget that combo-boxes are also evil because rather than taking up extra screen-space constantly and having us simply scroll over there with our mouse (since we love scrolling so much that the menu-bar-at-the-top-of-the-screen-is-good anyway) and see what the heck this list of numbers is supposed to be.. rather than just having one little one-line box with its purpose clearly labeled that takes up a lot of screen-space for the second it takes to click on an option.. oh, i'm sorry, 5 seconds while you decide which mouse button to use.
This article was a joke. Windows is far from perfect, but even if i'd never used either i'd go with windows over the mac just from reading this drivel. Dreamweaver
Horrid compared to macOS an os/2? the only difference between win9x/nt ui and macOS is the images used.. and personally i think macOS is the uglier of the two.. but that's opinion. And as for os/2.. well, i had to use os/2 at work and that was possibly the Least enjoyable computer experience i've ever had (okay, except for the old VAXs on campus.. but that's not a graphical ui).
In any case, even os/2 isnt That different from windows. Lets see, things that windows has: windows, clickable buttons, options for resizing, moving, and closing windows in basically 1 click, easy-to-identify multi-tasking icons, relatively nice program menu (sure it'd be better if it was available at a right-click, but nobody's perfect). Things that os/2 and macOS have: windows, clickable buttons, options for resizing, moving, and closing windows in basically 1 click, easy-to-identify multi-tasking icons. relatively nice program menu. soo... what were the differences again? people like the bash windows just because it's windows.. but really, the UI itself isnt that bad. it's basically the same as all the others out there, and there really arent that many things you CAN change without either making it too simplified or too complicated. heck, linux wm's are only different because they're so customizable.. and i'd rather use a windows-style ui than a couple of linux wm's. Now i'm not saying i'd rather use Windows, windows has more problems than you can shake a stick at.. but when you're just looking at the UI itself you have to ignore that it crashes all the danged time and look at the concept behind it.
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Yes, lets look at WC3's features and see how they're exactly like myth.. 3d terrain. Yep, both apparently have it, but then so do warzone2100, TA, enemy nations.. the list goes on.. and they arent at all like myth.
Unit building. Myth doest have it, WC3 has some form of unit-addition. It said you could recruit new units and have structures in the CNET review
Resource management. Myth doesnt have it, WC3 does. Again, the CNET review said rather specifically that there would be some form of resouce management in the game. Given that you're recruiting people i'd imagine it'd at least have money of some type.
Environment. Myth you had an army, the badguys had an army, you kill each other. WC3 apparently will have you, the badguys, and townsful of innocent bystanders
Yup, exactly the same in every way, obviously blizzard must have stolen the whole game. We've had so many 3d shooter clones and lookalike 'rpg' console games i guess people now assume games are alike at a glance.
Dreamweaver
I hate seeing fanaticism labelled "proper parenting" by certain mind controllers :)
Dreamweaver
Who said anything about morals? I dont think there's anything 'morally' wrong with being drunk or high.. the law would not be to preserve anybody's morals (that should be Your job, not mine or the government's) it would be to protect the wellbeing of the people on the street, includng yourself. You arent going to get grabbed by a cop for public intoxication if you're walking down the street looking normal.. only if you're so blasted you obviously cant even walk straight. You're a danger to yourself (stumbling into a busy street for instance), a danger to others (you could trip people up by staggering into them, knock somebody over into that proverbial busy street etc), and a public annoyance.. i know if i were walking down the street i wouldnt want some guy stoned out of his mind walking up and harassing me. What you do in your home is your business and i think laws against it are rather stupid.. but i also think what you do in your home is Not my business and if i'm not In your home, i dont expect to see it.
Dreamweaver
What's stupid about that? i'm reasonably sure he was kidding about the homeless thing.. and public intoxication is already illegal.. come up with a way to test for being high and there ya go.
Dreamweaver
But it wasnt.. it was a witch. It wasnt about a serial killer.. it was about a witch. You could say that nightmare on elm street could have been about a serial killer who went around killing chronic insomniacs with paranoid delusional tendencies.. but it wasnt.. it was about a guy who went around through people's dreams.
Dreamweaver
Well, let me qualify that. Suspense is good, yes.. but suspense alone does not make a movie scary. The only movie i've ever been scared by was Psycho 2. Why 2 you ask? I'm not exactly sure why.. i think it's just because i saw the first one in black and white and no matter how good it may be, i've never liked a black and white move (well, except the stooges.. but everybody loves the stooges) much less been scared by one.
So why did Psycho2 and not this scare me? Easy. For those of us who arent gullible, a movie about witches, monsters, ghosts, or any other supernatural creature just isnt going to be scary. It may frighten you, but only in the same way that your friend yelling BOO after sneaking up behind you is frightening. Had you seen them walking up it wouldnt have been scary, and really you're just shocked, not frightened. Psycho was scary not because of what happened in the movie itself, but because it was completely possible. I have no trouble believing that out there somewhere an insane man who keeps his dead mother's corpse around may be running a hotel. The world's full of sickos and psycho reinforced that fact. Blair Witch was about some extraordinarily gullible people in a hideously unlikely situation. No group of amateur filmmakers would go wandering out in the woods that badly prepared and personally, even if lost out in the woods if i ran into the same things i'd suspect some jerk from the town was playing tricks on me long before deciding it was some evil witch.
Dreamweaver
No, this would be the same as those things if ford salesmen went out and sabotaged people's crysler's so that they Did break down more often and get worse mileage.. or if your neighbors snuck in while you werent home and switched out your ram for smaller chips so that your computer Did run slower than the one they wanted you to get. The whole point here is that the companies get to control what you're allowed to see. It's not that if you go to their website they extoll their product (which is expected), it's that if you try to go to any Other site it stops you.
Dreamweaver
The protagonist should start out an everyday guy, yes.. but the whole idea behind character development is that the character gets ahead of their problems.. when they 'some how manage' to come out ahead in the end, they didnt develop.. they just got by with providence. A good story is one where the everyday joe gets thrust into unusual circumstances and changes to take control of his fate In that situation. The other replyer mentioned Brin's The Postman. The protagonist was a normal guy, possibly less honest than most, and for most of the book he tried to shirk responsability until he finally realizes that he doesnt want to live in a fallen world and takes control of the influence he's managed to put himself in.. that's a good story. If he'd have just kept plodding along and someone else had stepped up to fight the survivalists it wouldnt have been the same.
Dreamweaver
Stephenson had about as little technical detail to go on as gibson did.. gibson just used the old 'it's sf.. it doesnt have to make any sense' clause. As for neuromancer being more mature.. i dont know quite how to describe it.. but neuromancer just didnt draw me in. The world was there, i'm sure it was interesting and all, but i didnt really care about the characters. Also, neuromancer's story was just so flat.. i read the book and didnt really have to think about anything. admittedly when i read it i'd already read a great number of books with AI and cyberspace-like elements, but while i'd read books that involved some of the same elements as snow crash, it made them seem fresh and while the whole information virus was a bit far-fetched it was at least thought provoking and i learned a few things about sumerian culture i hadnt been aware of beforehand.
Dreamweaver
Unfortunitall, those things are reality. Violence and 'excessive sex' are part of daily life. People die all the time and the fact is on the news constnatly. As for colourful language not being part of the english language like 'apple'.. why not? Words like fuck and shit have been around since the dawn of the language. If the government decided tomorrow kids started using the words 'clerk', 'apple', and 'building' as 'curse words' would that make them unacceptable? People dont say 'shit' thinking solid-waste-product-produced-by-animals.. they say it to mean anything that's unacceptable. It doesnt mean what it used to and people need to get over it and move on. Everybody curses at some point in their life and there's nothing Wrong with the words themselves. I cant think of any possible reason why it should be wrong for children to say them. If an adult were in a car accident and came home saying 'god damnit! that fucking asshole ran a red light and totalled my fucking car!' we would realize he's very angry over the event and that there's really no other way to show the more intense end of the emotional spectrum than 'curse words'.. yet if a child were almost hit by a car while riding his bycicle and said, 'oh shit that was close!' he'd be punished. People will say, 'oh, but you dont need to curse. just say something else.' That's all well and good but doesnt always work. If a flying saucer landed in front of my car tomorrow i'd probably say 'holy shit!'.. somehow 'golly gee!' just wouldnt do it. As for violence and sex.. children 's impressionability isnt a problem here. Explain to the child about injury and death and sex before they see the movie, read the book, look at the magazine, whatever.. Use the impressionability to tell them what's good or bad about the things they're about to see rather than just forbidding them and making them want to see it even More to find out why their parents think it's so bad. Every guy i know snuck a look at a porn mag when he was somewhere around 10 or 12 but we arent all totally warped from the experience.
People need to dump the idiotic inhibitions imposed on them hundreds of years ago by confused men. Sure, some kids really cant handle some movies or other media.. that's for the parent to decide. But to decide fairly. Dont just say no because your parents said no. Dont say no because the preist/rabbi/misc-religious-leader say it's what's proper. Decide whether or not your child can understand what he's seeing and teach them the truth of the matter.. the responsabilities of sex, the reality of death, when to use curse words.. Seeing violence on tv or a movie wont make them go out and kill people.. it takes a mentally disturbed individual to commit crimes like murder and rape, not a normal person who's seen a movie.
Dreamweaver
Sometimes I wonder if we geeks dont have some unbalanced brain chemistry that makes us find ways to hate any establishment.. I mean, we all love space travel, right? But it seems alot of us hate NASA.. America's only space program and the world's most effective one.
.1 cents a kilo.. but it requires, say, a 3 billion dollar satellite in orbit to provide that energy. When NASA's budget gets ripped back another 10% every year, in couple decades they'll have to save up a couple of years in a row just to send up that one satellite without doing Any other missions.
Now I'll be first to admit that NASA does indeed have its problems. However, a great deal of those problems are forced on them. No, nobody is making NASA continue using Shuttle. No, there's no Real need to send humans up there with the satellites. However, NASA has very little choice but do both of those. As for the first one, if they dont use Shuttle, what Will they use? There are hundreds, even thousands, of ideas out there for new propulsion and earth-to-orbit devices.. but how many of them have an possability of actually working? And of those, how man do we have the technology for right now? Most of the good ones I've seen have the little "And we have alot of this technology already!" in there. All the reall great new systems rely on pre-installation setup.. special satellites in orbit, new launch facilities, retooling the whole mission control bay.. None of that is unexpected in a new system, but it all costs money. Sure you might be able to build a new ship that runs on solar energy and can get to orbit in 5 minutes for
I'm pretty sure that origionally 'hacker' and 'hack' related solely to programming, but as with many words it got spread about and applied to all sorts of things both computer related and otherwise.
Personally I've always thought of the nouns 'hack' and 'hacker' not necessarily being related.. a 'hack' is, to me anyway, anything done to take care a problem that isnt the accepted solution. In programming this usually tends to be a kludge that works for now and will eventually need to be fixed.. but i've also seen cases that would defenitly qualify as a hack that were Better than the accepted solution. In other things it varies as well.. as another poster mentioned, tying the muffler back onto your car is a hack in the 'kuldge that works for now' sense.. but then were you to throw together something that replaced the muffler and did as good or better a job, i'd probably call it a righteous hack.
The word 'hacker' however, i view as not being applicable to any specific type of person. One may be a programmer.. most likely they'll know a programming language or two no matter what, but it may not necessarily be their main occupation. A 'hacker' to me is anybody with a thirst for knowedge above and beyond that which is considered normal. Computers tend to draw them because there's so Much knoweldge to be had.. that's why I said they would likely know a language, because they couldnt resist knowing how the thing works. Anyone who calls themself a hacker shouldnt Just know computers though.. i've never found a person that's generally known as a hacker (in the good sense) who didnt know a reasonable amount of philosophy, theology, literature, and a smattering of all the sciences. A hack isnt necessarily clever or simple.. but a hacker is defenitly clever, quick-thinking, and has a desperate thirst for knowledge.
So my idea of the conclusive defenition?
Hacker: ha-kur n. One who desires to know the inner workings of everything he surveys and has the ability to apply that knowledge.
Dreamweaver
What are you talking about? Motion capture doesnt reduce the need for animators, it just changes how they do their jobs. Motion capture is great for humans and human-like models, but you cant very well motion capture something with 5 arms and wings, or the waving of a plant in a breeze, or a car etc. All motion capture does for animators is make their job a bit easier, not replace them. And as for not making money on animated films.. tarzan was up there around #1 for cash intake its first weekend if i remember (i didnt pay much attention as i must admit i dont intend to see it.. but that's me) and neither bug's life nor antz (as the most recent fully-computer-animated movies) did very badly either. People dont really care what format a movie is in so long as it's a good watch. South Park was funny as hell, defenitly worth watching, and made out of cardboard cutouts. Alot teens/20ish people might not want to go see a cartoon because they're viewed as 'childish'.. but I dont think computer animated movies suffer the same stigma thanks to cg movies in games and such.
Dreamweaver
The big thing here is the reusable rockets. Our current rocket technology is decades old and it's been too expensive so far to make it better. Shuttle was designed as a military vehicle. Enormous redundency, low angle-of-attack on reentry to serve as a fighting vessel, and a big transport bay for modular loads. Usable for science, yes. Usable for military purposes, yes. Good for science? Not really. It's hideously inefficient for what it's used for. We're not ready to move past rocketry yet, but we really do need a boost as to what rockets we use.
Dreamweaver
The problem isnt NASA. It's what the government does To NASA. NASA comes up with a good idea, they find a contractor to build it, the contractor agrees to a reasonable sum, they start construction.. in comes the USAF wanting them to test something they already know is crap, but which they want to know the exact crapiness of. The final straw in the x-33 project was when the USAF had them slap some shoddy russian-design aluminum fuel tanks on it to see what the working parameters were so they'ed know what the russians could do. Or NASA is forced to comply with stupid government regulations, like the prices they're forced to pay. Shuttles could be built for probably a 10th what they are now if it werent for them having to go by government parts procurement procedures requiring them to buy from government suppliers, makers of the $500 hammer. If NASA werent given such a raw deal they could have done well.. but almost since the beginning the USAF has been against NASA on principle and trying to drive it into the ground. Make NASA a government funded independent organization and we'll see some progress.. giving it all to the private sector and we'll get shuttles just barely capable of spaceflight that exist for the sole purpose of taking rich businessmen on a thrill ride.
Dreamweaver
A while back i read an article (here, on a couple other websites, and in scientific american) about a new type of surface-to-orbit vehicle that worked by creating an air cone on top of it using some kind of dish and microwaves. The only thing stopping it from going into use right now is that there was no satellite microwave transmitter. They already proved that the thing works by using a transmitter on a tower above the device. Dunno if this beam would be powerful or tight enough to do it, but the possability exists and this was probably the coolest of the weird new ideas for single stage to orbit devices.
Dreamweaver
Yes, but unfortunitally, those 7 died not only after nasa had faded from the spotlight, but in a way that didnt inspire. It was a mistake that nasa made.. a screw up in the system, rather than a noble way to die. i'm not saying they were any less than the other astronauts, but it wasnt an event that inspired the public.
Dreamweaver
This could have saved the space program.. not killed it. Think about it. Just reading nixon's prepared speech even gave me a little patriotic twinge. Sure, there'd be alot of furor about it at first, but those 3 men would have become symbols of human bravery.. giving their lives for the country and their race to the spirit of exploration. It's a morbid thought, but had it happened we'd probably have landed on mars by now.
Dreamweaver
I can just see it after MS gets ahold of this..
Driving down the road, slamming my fist in frustration against the dashboard as the 'windows noise' plays over and over and over.. a sadistic little animated character with a typical name like 'sticky, the gearshift assistant' dancing maniacally across my display with helpful advice like 'Your lights are currently on, would you like to turn them on?' 'You just passed a truck, would you like information on buying a truck like that?' or 'You Too Can Make $10,000 in Two Days!!!'.
But seriously, this could be useful if the 'net connection were restricted to certain info.. no adds etc. Of course, that'll never happen.
Dreamweaver
I've never seen the animated movies, but if it wasnt funny, it wasnt done right. Discworld's increadibly funny and, odd for a comedy-type light-fantasy book, also very well written (okay, after the first few when he discovered what a plot was). But yes, defenitly try reading one.. some are better than others, but i've yet to find one that wasnt good.
Dreamweaver
We have most of the technology... various mechanical processes for stimulating the various organs (or just faking it like with that blood-cycling machine).
We have the technology.. we Can make it the 6.3 billion dollar non-living-proto-human-test-subject!
Dreamweaver
There may eventually be computer-driven nanomachines, but it wont start out that way. We already have simple nano-scale machinery.. gears, motors, etc and they arent computer driven, they're self-controlled because a gear can only do 1 thing.. turn. If we needed nanomachines with internal logic processors they would probably not use ram or transistor-type devices based on the flow of electrons, it'd be closer to the old 'Analytical Engine' designes.. a computer based on actual mechanical processes rather than the flow of electricty through electronic components, since nanomachine scales are simply too small. A brownian-motion driven propeller developed as a possible power source for nanomachines was the size of a medium-sized molecule. Perhaps by making a nanomachine, say, the size of a blood cell we could have it accept simple external commands, but it would have to be from extreamly short range since it coulnt have an antenna more than a few nanometers long (or across what with the new fractal ones).
Dreamweaver
I'm not saying to use it for linux. The reason i dont have any problems with having it for the caldera install process is that it's just an install process. You dont have to open windows or use new applications or browse your harddrive when you're installing a program. Usually it's just a matter of 'pick place to put it', 'pick options', 'hit continue alot'.. that's why i dont see what the enormous problem is. If they completely copied windows for the entire linux gui, then yeah i'd have a problem with it.. just because if i'm gonna use linux i dont want to be using windows. but for an install program, i dont really care. Look at current linux install programs.. if the entire linux gui looked like the RedHat install screens, would you want to use it? I'd rather just have a command line..
Dreamweaver
You know.. i read that entire article and i think i agreed with it for about 5 words. The whole thing was written by someone who obviously hates windows an loves macs to death. Now you could just say that i say that because i'm biased toward windows over macs.. but you'd be wrong. This guy complains about Everything windows related. Even when something works The Same on a non-mac os, he bashes it. He goes on and on about the Mac menu because of how wonderful it is for being at the top of the screen.. personally i like having to waggle my mouse around as little as possible, having the scroll all the way up there and having it be okay for me to over scroll doesnt sound like such a great idea to me..
Not only is the whole thing amazingly mac-biased, it also points out over and over how macs are wonderful because you can use them even if your iq is 5, you cant see, you have the hand-eye-coordination of a jellyfish, and are confused by the difference between orange and dog. You know, maybe i'm prejudiced and horrible for saying this.. but if you're too stupid to do something, you shouldnt do it. Computers may eventually be so user-frienly anybody can use them, but at present they're not and trying to make them so screws it up for everybody else. This guy went on for PAGES about how confusing things like the start menu are... yet he was apparently confused about any number of windows functions.. he complained for a page or so about how the start menu and taskbar were at the bottom of the screen, but apparently didnt grasp the concept of click-and-drag.. since you can put the danged thing anywhere you want.. or continual campaign against multi-button mice. If i were so easily confused that having 2 buttons on my mouse threw me for a loop i think i'd have to shoot myself.. similarly i think i can think of 2 times in my career or computer-with-graphical-interface using that i missed what i was aiming to click at. Having the down button move you down and the up button move you up is confusing? What world does he live on? Last time i checked, up was up.. oh, wait, that's right.. he meant for Mac users. Yeah, windows sucks because mac users cant use it without learning a couple of things. But oh, wait, windows sucks because it has things in common with the mac. Hrm.. i havent heard that much hipocrisy since this morning's episode of the 700 club.
Color in non-mac systems is evil because it's customizable.. yeeeeahhh.. right. I rather like being able to change things like my colorscheme. I dont Like high-contrast. I'm not colorblind, so if i want something that looks nifty, i'd like to be able to have it. If I WAS colorblind, i could easily click on the high-contrast option, or if i ha poor eyesight the Large option. But of course these things are evil because they're customizable. We must remember, freedom=bad, conformity=good.. now comrade, get your rubles, we must go stand in bread line at market.. Non-mac systems are evil because they used things macs had.. gee, remind me to go take the wheels off my car until someone comes up with a new way to make things roll. If something works, why reinvent it? is it stealing, or using a concept that's already proven rather than confusing all the 'huh? 2 buttons?' people out there with more different things.
Context menus are bad because they change depending where you click.. well Duh, that's the whole point mr. infinitely-tall-menubar.. and lets not forget that combo-boxes are also evil because rather than taking up extra screen-space constantly and having us simply scroll over there with our mouse (since we love scrolling so much that the menu-bar-at-the-top-of-the-screen-is-good anyway) and see what the heck this list of numbers is supposed to be.. rather than just having one little one-line box with its purpose clearly labeled that takes up a lot of screen-space for the second it takes to click on an option.. oh, i'm sorry, 5 seconds while you decide which mouse button to use.
This article was a joke. Windows is far from perfect, but even if i'd never used either i'd go with windows over the mac just from reading this drivel.
Dreamweaver
Horrid compared to macOS an os/2? the only difference between win9x/nt ui and macOS is the images used.. and personally i think macOS is the uglier of the two.. but that's opinion. And as for os/2.. well, i had to use os/2 at work and that was possibly the Least enjoyable computer experience i've ever had (okay, except for the old VAXs on campus.. but that's not a graphical ui).
In any case, even os/2 isnt That different from windows. Lets see, things that windows has:
windows, clickable buttons, options for resizing, moving, and closing windows in basically 1 click, easy-to-identify multi-tasking icons, relatively nice program menu (sure it'd be better if it was available at a right-click, but nobody's perfect).
Things that os/2 and macOS have:
windows, clickable buttons, options for resizing, moving, and closing windows in basically 1 click, easy-to-identify multi-tasking icons. relatively nice program menu. soo... what were the differences again? people like the bash windows just because it's windows.. but really, the UI itself isnt that bad. it's basically the same as all the others out there, and there really arent that many things you CAN change without either making it too simplified or too complicated. heck, linux wm's are only different because they're so customizable.. and i'd rather use a windows-style ui than a couple of linux wm's. Now i'm not saying i'd rather use Windows, windows has more problems than you can shake a stick at.. but when you're just looking at the UI itself you have to ignore that it crashes all the danged time and look at the concept behind it.
Dreamweaver