In all seriousness, who the hell cares? You have women talking to you- why should you care if it's cute? Mr Testosterone over there can go hang out with all his manly friends, you've got someone nicer to be with.
Still loves my first-gen Asus. I never undock my laptop anymore. Wife would kill me if I used it as a pickup tool though, so I'll go slink away and do the dishes now honey....
Ahh Pr1mos. My college roommate crashed the main student Pr1mos mainframe back in ~1985 with a fork bomb. He had no idea what it would do, he just ran it for fun. He ended up interning for a year after college as a sysadmin, so I guess they weren't too upset in the long run.
I have fond memories of VMS from my days as a student sysadmin for our department VAX cluster in grad school. Walked in one morning to a couple of phone calls asking why the system couldn't find their files. The system disk's heads had crashed into the platter and the entire, enormous 300MB disk was garbage. VMS *didn't care*. It was happily running along, sending an occasional message about missing files, but otherwise fine. Try that on your puny modern OS. We had someone (accidentally) run a denial of service attack on the system and it just queued up the jobs and kept on ticking. It was as close to bulletproof as anything I've ever seen.
How about obscure bad old Unices? Ultrics was a fun one, for values of fun approaching zero.
Googling "virtual advertising in games patent" seems to come up with more than a few hits, so methinks your dreams of riches might be a bit late.
In all seriousness, this will work but only for some things. TF, Counterstrike or something like that? Sure, Coke machines on every corner. EVE? Well, maybe you could have ships towing "Eat at Joe's" banners or something.
Lord of the Rings Online? Umm, ya. Not quite sure what you're going to be able to advertise there. I don't think "Uncle Gandalf's Gold Ring Polish" is going to sell in the real world, and the players are going to revolt if they see Legolas downing a Coke(TM). I think I can assume that LOTRO and most every other fantasy game is going to be ad-free.
This is a solved problem, and in fact an utterly trivial one- there are multiple games out there that have workable interfaces. See LittleBigStar or Guitar Rising.
Guitar tab notation is six lines, one for each string with the fret position indicated by number. Simply have six lines on your game, one for each string, and put numbers on each "button" to indicate the fretting. LBS even has a multiple view- you get guitar tab along the top and the usual GH interface on the bottom.
The hard part is chord recognition. LittleBigStar works fine with my Strat clone->amp->headphone out-> crappy onboard sound card on my computer, so long as I'm playing single notes. Chord recognition sort of works, but not on any fast chord change.
Went out to see it on a perfectly clear (if rather freezing) night last night. It's very easy to find if you know where to look (hint to self next time- make sure to check if your finder chart is EST or UTC:^), but it's not really naked eye visible.
Even in my 8-inch scope it was pretty underwhelming. This was nowhere near a Comet Holmes type event, where it was obviously naked eye visible and glorious in any kind of optics. Flipped the scope around and went cluster hunting, so the night wasn't a wash:^).
You can still see it tonight (and for the next week) if you want: bring binoculars at the minimum. A finder chart is at Sky and Telescope. Note that the chart on that page is for 9PM EST but that the detailed charts are UTC.
It doesn't matter how much illegal content there is, the fact that you even found one "legal download" (remember, nothing is stored on TPB, they do not perform any infringement) shows that it's not meant for breaking the law
"It doesn't matter how many items in this pawn shop are stolen, the fact that we have one item that wasn't means we're legit!"
"It doesn't matter how much money we launder through this pizza shop, the fact that we sold a pizza means that we're not meant for breaking the law!"
I invite you to try this next time in court. TPB has some legal defenses here, but the idea that they aren't all about the pirating of copyrighted content is just absurd.
First, WebCT is owned by Blackboard, so that's *not* your choice.
If you want commercial, look at Angel. They're doing quite well these days- we use them here and have had very few complaints. The software is solid, the tech support is very good, the price is decent and the feature set is there for all but the most absurd BB-only stuff.
If you want OSS, try Moodle. In a recent survey of our peer schools, it's now by far the #1 choice- BB is a distant second followed by Angel, and I know some of my counterparts at those peers are looking for ways to ditch BB in favor of either Angel or Moodle.
BB is actually dying out at small liberal arts colleges like where I work- the costs are absurd and the tech support is beyond miserable. They've been arrogant beyond belief with the market since they think *exactly* like the parent poster mentions. They thought we'd suck up the massive price increase three years ago since we had no options. Instead, we went Angel, cut our costs and drastically increased usage. I know lots of other schools more comfortable with OSS that have done the same with Moodle in the last few years.
If you read some of the stuff written about early Gates, I don't think he was ever a *bad* person per se, but he was horribly immature. Most 16-year-old boys are jackasses, and I think he was stuck at that level for quite a while: hypercompetitive, narssisstic and obsessed with whatever he was doing at the moment. He never really needed to grow up. He could live in his own little world and never worry about other people.
There's a story in one of Cringley's books about Gates holding up a line in a grocery store because he couldn't find a coupon. Someone finally tosses a quarter to the cashier- and Gates accepts it. He was worth a couple of billion at that point, but he simply couldn't escape out of his shell long enough to realize what was going on around him. There are other stories of him hotwiring bulldozers, driving 100+mph to the airport and so on.
I think getting married and having kids finally forced him to grow up a bit. He's still hypercompetitive, but able to channel it in a socially acceptable way.
It's called the Macbook Air. Most people don't want it.
Fixed that for you. They aren't in the same market segment- they aren't even in the same market. The eee is a cheap, durable, ultraportable minimal machine that does simple tasks. The Air is a large, fragile, very expensive machine that wants people to ooh and ahh. I have access to both at work- a first gen eee701 and a high end Macbook Air. I carry the 701- it's far smaller, less obtrusive and if I drop it I don't feel bad since it will probably survive. Even if it didn't I could buy 4-5 more for the price of that Air. (Plus I've gotten far more "Wow, that's really neat" responses from people looking at the eee as opposed to the Air.)
Oh, and the 701 is more expandable. The single USB port on the Air is a crippling flaw, and the lack of wired Ethernet is a major problem. I don't want to have to carry a stock of dongles around just to get my $2k executive toy to actually do work- the eee has multiple USB ports, wired Ethernet and a real VGA port. (Ok, the resolution sucks, but it does work)
Apple needs to get on the freaking bandwagon here- with the economy going the way that it is netbooks are about the only growth segment left. They've done amazing things with small devices in the past (iPod, iPhone)- I'd *love* to see an Apple netbook.
I have a first-gen eee701 and installed XP Pro onto it since our college doesn't support XP home. We have a volume licensing agreement so this wasn't an issue. It works fine with the exception that sleep-on-close is a bit squirrely and I don't have enough room left on the 4GB HD for XP3 to install happily. I can visit all the normal fileshares through AD, use our secure wireless, etc.
You want my take? Light pollution. 100+ years ago you could look up at the sky at night and actually see the stars. Today? Bah- you're lucky if you live in an area that you can see magnitude 3-4 stars where a decent dark adapted eye can see down to 6 easily, and the difference is stunning. City dwellers have it even worse.
Go camping in Yosemite or the high western desert some day and backpack away from other people. Let your eyes adapt at night for a while and then look up. Compare that to what you see in your neighborhood- you can't care about what you can't see.
Check out United Nuclear for insanely powerful magnets. Some of them are rather over the top in that they can break bones if you're not careful about moving them, but they also have lots of the small ones.
So I'm standing in line today at the polling place and I watch the voting machine crash in front of me. The poll worker was busy trying to call the election HQ to figure out if he needed to reboot it and so forth, but it didn't look good. (Something along the line of SYSTEM ERROR: INVALID MEMORY ACCESS)
Did it matter? Not really. My district was smart enough to use paper ballots with an optical reader. Reader not working? Just drop the paper ballot in the box. It still wasn't back up when I left, but it didn't slow down the long line of folks who followed me. Even if the reader just corrupted its entire database, it's no big worry- they'll pull out the ballots and count them by hand.
I managed to get a call on the air on the local NPR station to point out how critical this issue is- don't trust *anything* you can't backup and verify by hand.
that managed to build a huge telescope in orbit around the earth...
Umm, yeah, about that.
Hubble was horribly mismanaged. Perkin-Elmer was given no oversight whatsoever on the mirror and proceeded to grind it incorrectly. The error was not small- any amateur telescope maker with a razor blade and a pen laser would have found it in five minutes. The solar panels were an awful design that flapped when the scope crossed the day/night terminator and required replacement with a better set. The gyroscopes used were ancient and near the end of their life.
Worse, many of these problems were already known- the Hubble is basically a KH-11 spy satellite that points the other way- same mirror, same size, even the same shipping container. According to the guy who ran the Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubble managers had a couple of meetings with various black agencies *after* all the problems came to light that indicated all of these had been seen in the spy satellite program before.
While the last round clearly gave some neeeded exemptions, given the impending start of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN there's very little chance that the restrictions will be lifted this time. Without serious restrictions on the ability to transfer Dho-Na geometry information between devices the Feds are screwed since we don't have the infrastructure to handle something like the Brit's SCORPION STARE conversion of their traffic cams.
Sorry folks, we're going to have to suck it up for a few years until we can make sure the Great Old Ones don't eat our brains.
I am a systems administrator, primarily Unix/Linux and enterprise NAS/SAN storage, working for an aerospace company
Translation: "I am a garbageman. I spend most of my time with a lot of expensive and neat looking hardware cleaning up the messes of people who think they are better than me. You know the neighbor across the street who tosses a bunch of leaky, smelly trash bags on the ground every week and doesn't bother using a can? That's Bob, the engineer over in building 4 who manages to run processes that ABEND every single time because he's an idiot, but he blames the network anyway. The guy down the street who always piles up dead branches and lawn clippings until it stops anyone from walking on the sidewalk? Meet Sue in building 3, who seems to find a way to generate 900GB of crap data that then crashes the network file share. Or perhaps the family down the street with the can so smelly nobody will get near it? That's Ralph, who corrupts his files on the network store at least once a month and needs a total restore from tape.
The only really big difference is that a garbageman has more job security and is probably paid better. Stick with that or plumbing- you'll go far since people will pay anything not to have to deal with it."
I guess I'll start strongly discouraging Endnote usage by all my faculty. The library already makes Refworks available and I've been using Zotero for my class this fall and love it. Endnote is expensive and since we have a pile of individual copies of varying vintage purchased through the years it's annoying to deal with anyway.
Time to talk to the reference librarians again about scheduling some more faculty training with them...
This basically happens in PvP games. Consider WoW, where battlegrounds are broken up every 10 levels and there's a booming business in "twinking" level 29 or 39 characters for PvP only at those levels. Or in Age of Conan, where you can hang out in the Tortage newbie area up until about level 25 when the mobs don't give any more experience. You can however, PvP all the folks trying to level out on White Sands and the like.
Laugh while you can, but I weep for the future of textbooks. They're approved by committees that know little to nothing about the topic and are happy to grind an axe for their point of view. See Dover v. Kitzmiller for a detailed example- the leading "Intelligent Design" textbook they wanted to use is quite literally an older creationism textbook with a search and replace s/creationism/intelligent design/
Having lived in Lynchburg for a number of years, there are plenty of folks there who would demand removal of all sorts of things such as the true age of the universe if they had any input at all into the process. If instead it was written by experts, they'd be complaining to their representative about the state spending money on teaching atheism.
We've seen this at least twice in the last year, with Age of Conan and Lord of the Rings Online. AoC pretty much fails after the first few levels due to lack of meat to the story, but LOTRO actually does pretty well by this. LOTRO has the both the advantage and disadvantage of being heavily tied to an existing storyline that can be recited by heart by millions, so the framework exists but you can't change what actually happens. Instead, Turbine has done a really nice job of writing an epic sequence of quests that follow the fellowship as they move across the land but doesn't change the core story. You're not going to carry the ring, but you are going to unite the peoples of North Downs to stop an orc raid that might capture the fellowship, for example. The voice acting is absurdly chesesy and some of the tales push the limits of suspension of belief but there's a nice sense that you're moving along with the epic storyline and that you are going to make a difference in the end. Turbine keeps pushing out small expansions that take the fellowship farther and thus unlock new areas.
Of course, with the deed and trait system LOTRO falls back to the worst possible grind- yes, you really do have to kill 200 trolls in Sarnur to get your +1 valour bonus. Now go kill 300 worms in Angmar for the next +1.
LSST isn't interesting because of the mirror diameter, it's interesting because of its incredibly wide field of view and amazingly fast optics. This thing has a field of view of almost 10 square degrees and can image down to ~24th magnitude every 15 seconds. Nothing else built or planned even comes close. PAN-STARRS4 will be the nearest thing to LSST and it has an etendue* that's something like 1/6th of LSST, although the PAN-STARRS people like to point out it's also something like a 5th of the cost of the LSST. (* a measure of mirror diameter*field of view. Bigger is better for survey telescopes)
The UT system isn't even the same idea- the main mirror can't even be moved in elevation and doesn't cover the entire sky- it only sees 70% of it. Hobby-Eberly is a spectroscope, designed to look at specific targets for a long time to get the spectrum of the target. LSST is a survey telescope- it's going to scan the visible sky every 3 days in multiple wavelengths, so you have to have an entirely different grade of mount, support structure and drive system. As any amateur astronomer will tell you, cheaping out on the mount will save you quite a few bucks.:^) (Although looking over the Hobby-Eberly, they did some really neat stuff with the mount to get it to track.)
Entirely different missions, different optics, different mounts, etc etc.
Actually, Turbine's done a really nice job of handling this. Gandalf (and Gimli, and Bilbo, and Aragorn, and...) *do* acknowledge your character- you're playing a parallel series of quests to the Fellowship, and you cross paths quite often. Yes, we know at the end of the books the ring gets destroyed, but who cares? In LOTRO currently the fellowship is just leaving Rivendell: the coming expansion will cover the Mines of Moria. I think the actual end of the game is scheduled somewhere around 2014.
And an ending to an MMO isn't a bad thing either- a Tale in the Desert does pretty well with a global EOG+reset every now and then
Any halfway competent jeweler can braze in a new segment of ring, even one with a complex pattern, if it's made of a precious metal commonly found in jewelry. Most large jewelry stores or store chains will also offer free size adjustment of the band for life as part of the deal, or for a small fee at the time of purchase.
This isn't necessarily the case. My wedding ring is has both white and yellow gold parts, and the jewelers I've taken it to for resizing have all said they don't think it's possible- they'll break the welding. Since I'm about 40 pounds heavier than when I got married 15 years ago, it sits in a drawer. The wife can still wear hers though:^)
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In all seriousness, who the hell cares? You have women talking to you- why should you care if it's cute? Mr Testosterone over there can go hang out with all his manly friends, you've got someone nicer to be with.
Still loves my first-gen Asus. I never undock my laptop anymore. Wife would kill me if I used it as a pickup tool though, so I'll go slink away and do the dishes now honey....
I have fond memories of VMS from my days as a student sysadmin for our department VAX cluster in grad school. Walked in one morning to a couple of phone calls asking why the system couldn't find their files. The system disk's heads had crashed into the platter and the entire, enormous 300MB disk was garbage. VMS *didn't care*. It was happily running along, sending an occasional message about missing files, but otherwise fine. Try that on your puny modern OS. We had someone (accidentally) run a denial of service attack on the system and it just queued up the jobs and kept on ticking. It was as close to bulletproof as anything I've ever seen.
How about obscure bad old Unices? Ultrics was a fun one, for values of fun approaching zero.
No, cooters are turtles. Either than or an ex-member of the House of Representative
In all seriousness, this will work but only for some things. TF, Counterstrike or something like that? Sure, Coke machines on every corner. EVE? Well, maybe you could have ships towing "Eat at Joe's" banners or something.
Lord of the Rings Online? Umm, ya. Not quite sure what you're going to be able to advertise there. I don't think "Uncle Gandalf's Gold Ring Polish" is going to sell in the real world, and the players are going to revolt if they see Legolas downing a Coke(TM). I think I can assume that LOTRO and most every other fantasy game is going to be ad-free.
Guitar tab notation is six lines, one for each string with the fret position indicated by number. Simply have six lines on your game, one for each string, and put numbers on each "button" to indicate the fretting. LBS even has a multiple view- you get guitar tab along the top and the usual GH interface on the bottom.
The hard part is chord recognition. LittleBigStar works fine with my Strat clone->amp->headphone out-> crappy onboard sound card on my computer, so long as I'm playing single notes. Chord recognition sort of works, but not on any fast chord change.
Even in my 8-inch scope it was pretty underwhelming. This was nowhere near a Comet Holmes type event, where it was obviously naked eye visible and glorious in any kind of optics. Flipped the scope around and went cluster hunting, so the night wasn't a wash :^).
You can still see it tonight (and for the next week) if you want: bring binoculars at the minimum. A finder chart is at Sky and Telescope. Note that the chart on that page is for 9PM EST but that the detailed charts are UTC.
It doesn't matter how much illegal content there is, the fact that you even found one "legal download" (remember, nothing is stored on TPB, they do not perform any infringement) shows that it's not meant for breaking the law
"It doesn't matter how many items in this pawn shop are stolen, the fact that we have one item that wasn't means we're legit!"
"It doesn't matter how much money we launder through this pizza shop, the fact that we sold a pizza means that we're not meant for breaking the law!"
I invite you to try this next time in court. TPB has some legal defenses here, but the idea that they aren't all about the pirating of copyrighted content is just absurd.
First, WebCT is owned by Blackboard, so that's *not* your choice.
If you want commercial, look at Angel. They're doing quite well these days- we use them here and have had very few complaints. The software is solid, the tech support is very good, the price is decent and the feature set is there for all but the most absurd BB-only stuff.
If you want OSS, try Moodle. In a recent survey of our peer schools, it's now by far the #1 choice- BB is a distant second followed by Angel, and I know some of my counterparts at those peers are looking for ways to ditch BB in favor of either Angel or Moodle.
BB is actually dying out at small liberal arts colleges like where I work- the costs are absurd and the tech support is beyond miserable. They've been arrogant beyond belief with the market since they think *exactly* like the parent poster mentions. They thought we'd suck up the massive price increase three years ago since we had no options. Instead, we went Angel, cut our costs and drastically increased usage. I know lots of other schools more comfortable with OSS that have done the same with Moodle in the last few years.
There's a story in one of Cringley's books about Gates holding up a line in a grocery store because he couldn't find a coupon. Someone finally tosses a quarter to the cashier- and Gates accepts it. He was worth a couple of billion at that point, but he simply couldn't escape out of his shell long enough to realize what was going on around him. There are other stories of him hotwiring bulldozers, driving 100+mph to the airport and so on.
I think getting married and having kids finally forced him to grow up a bit. He's still hypercompetitive, but able to channel it in a socially acceptable way.
Fixed that for you. They aren't in the same market segment- they aren't even in the same market. The eee is a cheap, durable, ultraportable minimal machine that does simple tasks. The Air is a large, fragile, very expensive machine that wants people to ooh and ahh. I have access to both at work- a first gen eee701 and a high end Macbook Air. I carry the 701- it's far smaller, less obtrusive and if I drop it I don't feel bad since it will probably survive. Even if it didn't I could buy 4-5 more for the price of that Air. (Plus I've gotten far more "Wow, that's really neat" responses from people looking at the eee as opposed to the Air.)
Oh, and the 701 is more expandable. The single USB port on the Air is a crippling flaw, and the lack of wired Ethernet is a major problem. I don't want to have to carry a stock of dongles around just to get my $2k executive toy to actually do work- the eee has multiple USB ports, wired Ethernet and a real VGA port. (Ok, the resolution sucks, but it does work)
Apple needs to get on the freaking bandwagon here- with the economy going the way that it is netbooks are about the only growth segment left. They've done amazing things with small devices in the past (iPod, iPhone)- I'd *love* to see an Apple netbook.
Check to see if you can do this.
Go camping in Yosemite or the high western desert some day and backpack away from other people. Let your eyes adapt at night for a while and then look up. Compare that to what you see in your neighborhood- you can't care about what you can't see.
Check out United Nuclear for insanely powerful magnets. Some of them are rather over the top in that they can break bones if you're not careful about moving them, but they also have lots of the small ones.
Did it matter? Not really. My district was smart enough to use paper ballots with an optical reader. Reader not working? Just drop the paper ballot in the box. It still wasn't back up when I left, but it didn't slow down the long line of folks who followed me. Even if the reader just corrupted its entire database, it's no big worry- they'll pull out the ballots and count them by hand.
I managed to get a call on the air on the local NPR station to point out how critical this issue is- don't trust *anything* you can't backup and verify by hand.
Umm, yeah, about that.
Hubble was horribly mismanaged. Perkin-Elmer was given no oversight whatsoever on the mirror and proceeded to grind it incorrectly. The error was not small- any amateur telescope maker with a razor blade and a pen laser would have found it in five minutes. The solar panels were an awful design that flapped when the scope crossed the day/night terminator and required replacement with a better set. The gyroscopes used were ancient and near the end of their life.
Worse, many of these problems were already known- the Hubble is basically a KH-11 spy satellite that points the other way- same mirror, same size, even the same shipping container. According to the guy who ran the Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubble managers had a couple of meetings with various black agencies *after* all the problems came to light that indicated all of these had been seen in the spy satellite program before.
Sorry folks, we're going to have to suck it up for a few years until we can make sure the Great Old Ones don't eat our brains.
Translation: "I am a garbageman. I spend most of my time with a lot of expensive and neat looking hardware cleaning up the messes of people who think they are better than me. You know the neighbor across the street who tosses a bunch of leaky, smelly trash bags on the ground every week and doesn't bother using a can? That's Bob, the engineer over in building 4 who manages to run processes that ABEND every single time because he's an idiot, but he blames the network anyway. The guy down the street who always piles up dead branches and lawn clippings until it stops anyone from walking on the sidewalk? Meet Sue in building 3, who seems to find a way to generate 900GB of crap data that then crashes the network file share. Or perhaps the family down the street with the can so smelly nobody will get near it? That's Ralph, who corrupts his files on the network store at least once a month and needs a total restore from tape.
The only really big difference is that a garbageman has more job security and is probably paid better. Stick with that or plumbing- you'll go far since people will pay anything not to have to deal with it."
Time to talk to the reference librarians again about scheduling some more faculty training with them...
This basically happens in PvP games. Consider WoW, where battlegrounds are broken up every 10 levels and there's a booming business in "twinking" level 29 or 39 characters for PvP only at those levels. Or in Age of Conan, where you can hang out in the Tortage newbie area up until about level 25 when the mobs don't give any more experience. You can however, PvP all the folks trying to level out on White Sands and the like.
The rest of the MMO market in total doesn't add up to WoW's subscriber numbers. Guild Wars is a distant also-ran to WoW.
The MMO makers don't care about you.
[1]; Yes, yes, I know you can run it under Wine. Any guesses as to how many people actually do this?
Having lived in Lynchburg for a number of years, there are plenty of folks there who would demand removal of all sorts of things such as the true age of the universe if they had any input at all into the process. If instead it was written by experts, they'd be complaining to their representative about the state spending money on teaching atheism.
Of course, with the deed and trait system LOTRO falls back to the worst possible grind- yes, you really do have to kill 200 trolls in Sarnur to get your +1 valour bonus. Now go kill 300 worms in Angmar for the next +1.
But it is doable
The UT system isn't even the same idea- the main mirror can't even be moved in elevation and doesn't cover the entire sky- it only sees 70% of it. Hobby-Eberly is a spectroscope, designed to look at specific targets for a long time to get the spectrum of the target. LSST is a survey telescope- it's going to scan the visible sky every 3 days in multiple wavelengths, so you have to have an entirely different grade of mount, support structure and drive system. As any amateur astronomer will tell you, cheaping out on the mount will save you quite a few bucks. :^) (Although looking over the Hobby-Eberly, they did some really neat stuff with the mount to get it to track.)
Entirely different missions, different optics, different mounts, etc etc.
And an ending to an MMO isn't a bad thing either- a Tale in the Desert does pretty well with a global EOG+reset every now and then
This isn't necessarily the case. My wedding ring is has both white and yellow gold parts, and the jewelers I've taken it to for resizing have all said they don't think it's possible- they'll break the welding. Since I'm about 40 pounds heavier than when I got married 15 years ago, it sits in a drawer. The wife can still wear hers though :^)