Actual serious answer: they don't. Too many chances to lose them. You lock up a tank by locking all the hatches internally but one, then putting a exterior padlock on that.
GIF and JPEG are a lot smaller than H.264/Theora/On8. Size matters here folks- we're in the process of putting in a video-on-demand server here on campus. Decent quality streams run anywhere from 1-4 Mbps- we've got tons of bandwidth on campus but ask a few hundred students to hit that all at once and watch the network start to crawl. The answer of "just up the bitrate" isn't a good option when you're slinging that kind of data already.
Actually, the PvP issue is a lot more fundamental than you think.
Why does ganking exist? Because the penalties for losing are so *low*. Unrestricted PvP works in Eve (and I'd argue, pretty much only in EvE) because there are serious penalties. Lose a major ship, lose training time- it can take a while for things to get back to where you were. Even the gankers realize this, and avoid combat unless they know they are going to win, and they realize the guy may well be back with friends to stomp them into the ground.
Compare this to something like WoW. What's the penalty for dying? Running back to your corpse. Even in something like Darkfall with full looting you just have people run around naked, since there's no real penalty for dying otherwise.
Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself
This is more or less what Lord of the Rings Online is. They've bolted on an entire series of side stories that occur during the time of the trilogy (and often interweave with it) but have distinct characters. The Saul Zentz group is the guardian of the IP, and Turbine has to vet the stuff with them, but honestly that's not really necessary- folks who like LOTR simply aren't going to play the game if it takes too many licenses with the story.
Consider the various "Vampire/werewolf/sea monster" versions of Jane Austin's stuff- my wife won't even look at them, even though she'll read the followons that are actually true to the story
Could be worse- one of my first tasks at a previous job was to help a faculty member with a bunch of images for a presentation. His area of research? Body images in magazines like Playboy. Not only did my job involve lots of internet use, but I had to look at porn too.
It was at a woman's college to boot. I swear I thought I'd be fired in the first week- "Really, honest, this is my job!"
Umm, sexual desire isn't a one time thing, with either porn or a real person. After I've had "personal time" with the wife, I don't lay back and think "Well, that's it for this lifetime"- I expect we'll probably do it again sometime, hopefully soon.
Well, assuming the basement doesn't flood again, the kids don't get sick, we don't have to work late.... Hmm, perhaps once a lifetime is accurate. Damn, now I'm depressed
No, it's a question of allocation of resources. If we had infinite resources, sure, build a missile defense shield.
But we don't. Those dollars could go to something that actually might make us safer, like better detection of people trying to ship a nuke (or bio warhead) into a US port on a container ship. Or to better fighting the Taliban in Afganistan. Or to better satellite surveillance of hostile nations. Or improved HUMINT in countries where we have very few assets.
Or perhaps just to reducing our immense budget deficit, a far greater threat to this country.
In all seriousness the Sun is gradually getting brighter, and the increased heat will kill off Earth's biosphere long before it gets to the red giant phase. We only have 1-2 billion years tops, not 5.
Good SF has never been exclusively about the technology- it's about people, same as any other story since the dawn of storytelling. (And don't bother commenting about aliens- they're people too.) It's about how people react to that technology, how society deals with the changes and all the rest. SF doesn't need to be thinking up new technologies all the time- pretty much anything imaginable has already been done, usually by multiple authors- the interesting story is "What comes next?"
Lots of authors have dealt with societies where changing sex is easy, for example, something that we've barely begun to make possible. But does this lead to a truly egalitarian society where men and women stand at exactly the same level, or a strictly segregated one where women stay home with the kids and make dinner? If we develop interstellar travel but the speed of light is still the limit, can you have an actual society where travel time between worlds is measured in centuries? Imagine that robots get to the point where they can fulfill your every need as soon as you ask for it- is there a point in living without struggle?
This is also why SF tends to age less well than other genres of fiction- once the technology actually shows up, we get to see how people react, and then it's just part of everyday life. To quote my 8-year-old, "Boooring"
You'd be surprised what will survive insane accelerations. G-hardening electronics is a solved problem- witness the Army's Copperhead artillery shell. Looking at the speed and barrel length, Copperhead undergoes *much* higher acceleration- 6km/sec over 1100 meters vs. ~1km/sec in about 4 meters. Back when I was in Armor, the DOD was looking at active electronics on tank rounds, and those hit 1.5km/sec in about 3 meters.
You won't ride to orbit on this, but there's lots of stuff that doesn't have to worry about being pulped on launch.
Hate to tell you this, but *all* investors are irrational at some point. It's human nature. We're in this mess in large part because a bunch of economists convinced themselves that the market is always perfectly rational and prices things correctly. They continued to think this despite the endless strings of bubbles and panics in the markets for centuries. Huge events like the bankruptcy of LTCM and the NASDAQ tech crash didn't seem to bother them in the least. They needed no regulation at all- after all, the market was perfect, never made mistakes and they understood risk perfectly.
How much more irrational can you get?
I must admit I'm a bit confused why you think the government is at fault here- the folks running all those sophisticated models were private investors. If someone in the government had had the balls to actually restrain them we wouldn't be here.
"And while you're waiting folks, why not check out Funcom's other AAA MMO, Age of Conan? Come view the beautiful land of Hyboria, where studly barbarians are slaughtered by healing classes, the women are all dressed in drab brown leather and...."
At this, Ragnar was pelted with beautifully designed Collector's edition sturdy metal tins before being smothered by hordes of fans carrying little leatherette maps of Hyboria.
One thing I don't get- you need a fair amount of power for the systems during the winter. You run gas (?) powered generators to do this- this generates tons of waste heat. My guess is that even in Antarctica piping this volume of heat into the ice will eventually cause problems, and if you vent it to the air you're going to mess up the observing.
Or you can try the LOTRO "lifetime subscription" option. Pay your $199/$299 (depending on sale) up front, -you still have to buy the game and any expansion packs like Moria, but you don't have any more subscription fees. Most of the serious players I know are lifers.
News is better when it's controlled by tens of thousands of independent individuals, each providing a different viewpoint, than when it's controlled centrally.
This is high debatable. The problem is that some of the viewpoints that people are passionate about (and create tons of web pages/blogs/feeds about) are simply *wrong*. Not everything has two sides, and having to try and figure out the bullshit from the sanity is beyond the capabilities (and time) of most people. Sorry folks, but
Obama was born in Hawaii
9/11 was caused by Islamic terrorists, not a government plot
Vaccines do not cause autism
The US landed astronauts on the moon
The Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and we are the result of a long process of evolution.
You'll find thousands of independent individuals with blogs that say otherwise. Without some relatively neutral individual calling them out (or beating the crap out of them, ala Buzz Aldrin) they'll take in a lot of people who are simply too gullible or uninformed to know better.
RJ45 is essential- the college where I work is going for netbooks in a big way, in part because a desktop+netbook combo is actually a lot cheaper than a laptop, as well as more flexible. But we also require a wired login to register the machine on the network before you can use the wireless, and that's pretty common at other schools I know of as well.
VGA port is a *eh* I've never used mine on my first gen eee, but there was at least once when it would have been useful. (The 701's wierd screen res causes problems for older projectors though)
I want to see us go back to flash HDs and long battery life- my 701 is actually fairly peppy given the crappy hardware, and I suspect most of that is the SSHD. 8GB is a bare minimum though- I have to have a 8GB CF card in the 701 since the OS and a few apps fills the 4GB drive.
We've been trying to do this for ages: most colleges I've worked at have some sort of pay-for-print scheme. It's usually something like 250 pages/semester free, after than $0.05/page- it lets people print the important stuff and hits the heavy users.
It's derailed here by politics- people don't want to charge "Yet another fee" to students since we're an already expensive private school. Of course, all those charges get moved right back into the stream- it's not free when they click to print out that 900 page article: my department eats the cost and either needs a budget increase or doesn't do something else that might benefit the students more. (And it's not free when they click print again on that 900 page article since it didn't print instantly the first time- the printer was digesting it. I really wish I was joking about that.)
I've tried the Kindle on my eReserve stuff- since it's all scanned as PDF images, the Kindle can't easily resize/reflow the pages and for a lot of the stuff it's simply too small to read. (Our eReserve program doesn't OCR the documents since it's just waaay too time consuming.)
The DX version is slightly better here, but still not as good as a normal screen.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much
Somebody's not living in reality here. I *wish* people were printing things out less. I could use the ~$10K I spend out of my budget every year just to feed two printers in a lot better ways, but the print count continues to climb, every single year.
That's just for single sheet- our poster printers are seeing 2x to 3x growth in use every single year.
I don't have a textbook for my course- I use one $18 trade paperback and electronic reserves for the rest of the content- book chapters, magazine articles, etc. All digital. And most everyone in the class just prints the damn things out instead of reading them online.
There are actually quite a few hidden bits that do make it harder.
Here's an obvious one- how's your web application's Arabic support? You do have a full UI translation in Arabic, right? Also Russian, Chinese and Japanese? Professors teaching those courses want their sites in those languages. Moodle has language packs for 81 different languages
SCORM/IMS support is another one- the specs are detailed and exacting, but without it you can't access a lot of prepackaged stuff.
I recently read a brief code analysis of Moodle and Sakai, which I can no longer find. In short, they have a lot of coding put into them- I think Moodle has something like 180 man-years of effort on the code and Sakai 130.
Slashdot Mirror
Actual serious answer: they don't. Too many chances to lose them. You lock up a tank by locking all the hatches internally but one, then putting a exterior padlock on that.
GIF and JPEG are a lot smaller than H.264/Theora/On8. Size matters here folks- we're in the process of putting in a video-on-demand server here on campus. Decent quality streams run anywhere from 1-4 Mbps- we've got tons of bandwidth on campus but ask a few hundred students to hit that all at once and watch the network start to crawl. The answer of "just up the bitrate" isn't a good option when you're slinging that kind of data already.
Of course, expecting Steve "Apple is Open, everyone else is proprietary" to be consistent is a bit much
then I'll start to believe that Flash might die.
Why does ganking exist? Because the penalties for losing are so *low*. Unrestricted PvP works in Eve (and I'd argue, pretty much only in EvE) because there are serious penalties. Lose a major ship, lose training time- it can take a while for things to get back to where you were. Even the gankers realize this, and avoid combat unless they know they are going to win, and they realize the guy may well be back with friends to stomp them into the ground.
Compare this to something like WoW. What's the penalty for dying? Running back to your corpse. Even in something like Darkfall with full looting you just have people run around naked, since there's no real penalty for dying otherwise.
Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself
This is more or less what Lord of the Rings Online is. They've bolted on an entire series of side stories that occur during the time of the trilogy (and often interweave with it) but have distinct characters. The Saul Zentz group is the guardian of the IP, and Turbine has to vet the stuff with them, but honestly that's not really necessary- folks who like LOTR simply aren't going to play the game if it takes too many licenses with the story. Consider the various "Vampire/werewolf/sea monster" versions of Jane Austin's stuff- my wife won't even look at them, even though she'll read the followons that are actually true to the story
The iPad doesn't have Flash.
Quickly followed by
"[Sales of CDs] which [are] down 15.4% so far this year. Album sales were down 18.2% last year, and 19.7% in 2008, "
I swear, Thick as a Brick should be a Jethro Tull song, not a description of record company executives....
It was at a woman's college to boot. I swear I thought I'd be fired in the first week- "Really, honest, this is my job!"
Well, assuming the basement doesn't flood again, the kids don't get sick, we don't have to work late.... Hmm, perhaps once a lifetime is accurate. Damn, now I'm depressed
But we don't. Those dollars could go to something that actually might make us safer, like better detection of people trying to ship a nuke (or bio warhead) into a US port on a container ship. Or to better fighting the Taliban in Afganistan. Or to better satellite surveillance of hostile nations. Or improved HUMINT in countries where we have very few assets.
Or perhaps just to reducing our immense budget deficit, a far greater threat to this country.
You may now panic
Lots of authors have dealt with societies where changing sex is easy, for example, something that we've barely begun to make possible. But does this lead to a truly egalitarian society where men and women stand at exactly the same level, or a strictly segregated one where women stay home with the kids and make dinner? If we develop interstellar travel but the speed of light is still the limit, can you have an actual society where travel time between worlds is measured in centuries? Imagine that robots get to the point where they can fulfill your every need as soon as you ask for it- is there a point in living without struggle?
This is also why SF tends to age less well than other genres of fiction- once the technology actually shows up, we get to see how people react, and then it's just part of everyday life. To quote my 8-year-old, "Boooring"
You won't ride to orbit on this, but there's lots of stuff that doesn't have to worry about being pulped on launch.
How much more irrational can you get?
I must admit I'm a bit confused why you think the government is at fault here- the folks running all those sophisticated models were private investors. If someone in the government had had the balls to actually restrain them we wouldn't be here.
At this, Ragnar was pelted with beautifully designed Collector's edition sturdy metal tins before being smothered by hordes of fans carrying little leatherette maps of Hyboria.
I assume there's a plan for this- anyone know?
Must be some new definition of the word "life" I'm not familiar with.
Or you can try the LOTRO "lifetime subscription" option. Pay your $199/$299 (depending on sale) up front, -you still have to buy the game and any expansion packs like Moria, but you don't have any more subscription fees. Most of the serious players I know are lifers.
News is better when it's controlled by tens of thousands of independent individuals, each providing a different viewpoint, than when it's controlled centrally.
This is high debatable. The problem is that some of the viewpoints that people are passionate about (and create tons of web pages/blogs/feeds about) are simply *wrong*. Not everything has two sides, and having to try and figure out the bullshit from the sanity is beyond the capabilities (and time) of most people. Sorry folks, but
You'll find thousands of independent individuals with blogs that say otherwise. Without some relatively neutral individual calling them out (or beating the crap out of them, ala Buzz Aldrin) they'll take in a lot of people who are simply too gullible or uninformed to know better.
VGA port is a *eh* I've never used mine on my first gen eee, but there was at least once when it would have been useful. (The 701's wierd screen res causes problems for older projectors though)
I want to see us go back to flash HDs and long battery life- my 701 is actually fairly peppy given the crappy hardware, and I suspect most of that is the SSHD. 8GB is a bare minimum though- I have to have a 8GB CF card in the 701 since the OS and a few apps fills the 4GB drive.
It's derailed here by politics- people don't want to charge "Yet another fee" to students since we're an already expensive private school. Of course, all those charges get moved right back into the stream- it's not free when they click to print out that 900 page article: my department eats the cost and either needs a budget increase or doesn't do something else that might benefit the students more. (And it's not free when they click print again on that 900 page article since it didn't print instantly the first time- the printer was digesting it. I really wish I was joking about that.)
The DX version is slightly better here, but still not as good as a normal screen.
Somebody's not living in reality here. I *wish* people were printing things out less. I could use the ~$10K I spend out of my budget every year just to feed two printers in a lot better ways, but the print count continues to climb, every single year.
That's just for single sheet- our poster printers are seeing 2x to 3x growth in use every single year.
I don't have a textbook for my course- I use one $18 trade paperback and electronic reserves for the rest of the content- book chapters, magazine articles, etc. All digital. And most everyone in the class just prints the damn things out instead of reading them online.
Here's an obvious one- how's your web application's Arabic support? You do have a full UI translation in Arabic, right? Also Russian, Chinese and Japanese? Professors teaching those courses want their sites in those languages. Moodle has language packs for 81 different languages
SCORM/IMS support is another one- the specs are detailed and exacting, but without it you can't access a lot of prepackaged stuff.
I recently read a brief code analysis of Moodle and Sakai, which I can no longer find. In short, they have a lot of coding put into them- I think Moodle has something like 180 man-years of effort on the code and Sakai 130.