The solution I think will be to have professors that actually go through the source code of each student.
You've never taught at a University, have you?
Speaking as one who has, forget it. It's simply not possible for the prof to do it alone. Grading 50 students in an advanced chemistry class took several days per assignment. I didn't even attempt it in my general chem courses with anywhere from 180-700 students- everything was graded automatically.
Sure, you can get TAs to do it, but now you open a bigger can of worms since they won't grade equally, and if you give each TA a single assignment it will take them weeks to get it done for a typical intro class of 200.
The idea of hand-grading is wonderful, until you're the hand grader. You can't imagine how mind-numbing it is.
Well, email is the single biggest cause of traffic on the internet, beating web browsing, P2P apps, ftp, etc.
Source please? I'd be really surprised if this were so. I can look at my school's stats here and the % of traffic due to email doesn't even come off the xaxis. P2P apps were basically every byte until we installed a Packeteer: now it's mostly web.
Perhaps if you count attachments, but then the attachment is basically the entire size of the message: adding HTML is just epsilon.
Yep, it fits. Given that the iPaq has a faster processor and more memory than the computer I owned previous to my current one, I'd say we're pretty much there. (Yes, my mug is large. Anyone with a small one isn't addicted to caffeine enough.)
Now, anyone want a slightly damp, previously working iPaq? Going cheap!
When it comes to camcorders, they do things differently too. Everyone else sells DV capable camcorders that use "DV tape". Not Sony.
That's funny, I guess my (Mini-DV) TRV-900 doesn't exist?
Sony has several lines of DV camcorders: the cheaper ones use digital-8, the higher end use Mini-DV, which is standard across most high end, consumer grade camcorders. Simple product differentiation- no great conspiracy.
Careful about the nut allergy thing- peanuts kill more than 100 people/year- more deaths than beestings, shark attacks, snake bites and a lot of other things people worry about. That ain't psychosomatic.
My wife carries an epipen in case she accidentally eats a peanut or peanut product-very small amounts of peanuts cause her throat to swell shut. Accidentally eating peanuts is a whole lot easier than you might suspect- many, many restaurants fry things in peanut oil and don't tell you. If I eat at Chick-fil-A I can't kiss my wife or touch anything around the house until I wash my mouth and hands to get rid of residual oil.
With the invention in the public domain, companies can then compete in a free market to produce and market the product as efficiently as possible.
So, are you allowed patents on production? Good ChemE's don't come cheap, and if you think the production methods aren't covered in a flurry of patents you'd be wrong.
Of course, if you make all that free where's the incentive to improve production by inventing new methods? It costs a bloody fortune to develop a new method: why should any company bother when there's a free, inefficient method out there and any other company can take your new method away? There's no free market here- just a government sponsored research monopoly.
Who pays for clinical trials? The government would have to- no company could shoulder the ~$100M cost per drug under this system.
How about copyright on the informational/marketing materials that go with each drug? Can I take those free as well? I could save a bundle on technical writers/marketing staff. Perhaps the government should just take over those responsibilites too.
Patent works in the drug industry- it's probably the best example, since up front costs for drug development are immense but costs to copy are low.
Are drug companies angels? No, but shutting them down and transferring their entire R&D staffs to academia (where would we put all the chemists?) under government payroll is kind of a drastic solution. (BTW: I seriously doubt your argument that academic research is more cost effective- I've worked in both worlds. The amount of time spent writing grant proposals to get funded is huge. When I needed a new HPLC at Merck, I asked for one. It appeared the next week. In academia it would have taken 6+ months of writing and waiting.)
Several US companies own patents for individual human and animal genes. No, not modified genes. Naturally occuring ones, like the one which causes Cystic Fibrosis.
While I agree this makes me uneasy, what are your alternatives?
Gene research costs serious cash. Highly trained people (in high demand). Very expensive equipment and lab facilities. Lots of chemicals (and disposal) If private companies can't get some return, they simply won't do the work.
Who else will do it? Government or universities? Both supported by your taxes- pay up, assuming you can get a tax hike past Duyba. Or you can cut other services (Meet hordes of angry seniors) or add to the deficit if you prefer (Ask the Argentinians how well this works in the long run.)
I don't like the idea much myself, but privates do useful work that otherwise might not get done. Is it better to have a patented CF gene or not know anything about it at all?
You really want it? Get a copy of the IRS regs (free from the government) and the latest version of GCC. Start coding.
Don't want to? Neither does anyone else, without a ton of incentive in the form of little pieces of paper with dead presidents on them. My mom has worked for H&R block for 20 years- I've seen what she goes through, and I couldn't imagine doing it. The rules are complex, arbitrary, and change every single year. Next, do it 48 more times for each of the states. (48? NH and AK don't have income tax, right?)
I'm amazed Intuit can pay people to code TurboTax.
(And for God's sake, don't get the IRS to make something publically available. The IRS help line is basically useless- they'll give you the wrong answer very close to the majority of the time.)
TV! Bah, the _real_ use for video projectors is playing Doom/Quake/$FPS_OF_CHOICE.
True story. Back in 1996 I was buying a projector for the chemistry department I worked for. For the first demo of prospective equipment (it was a lot rarer then) for my boss I showed a few images. He told me that the projector was fine but that the demo was a bit dull- I should do something exciting.
Next time I had Hexen up on a 25' wide screen. Don't exactly know what he thought of it, but we ended up getting the other projector...
When I use Mac OS X, I can *feel* that somewhere in Cupertino there's an English major who was losing sleep at nights trying to make the text in the dialog boxes as clear and understandable as possible. When was the last time you felt that way about the latest d/l off of sourceforge?
While I agree about SourceForge, OSX is a step down from OS9 in dialog box text (and help in general).
For example, I just love the error "No file services are available at the URL . Try again later or try another URL (server returned error 1)" OSX returns this when it can't connect to an SMB share no matter what the actual reason. Wrong password? Invalid user? No such share? Everything gets the same error.
Worse, the MacOSX Help files are nicely written, but there are so few of them that help is very close to useless. It will tell you how to copy a file, but for anything more complex you're basically SOL.
Still, compared to the average Open Source app, they're amazing.
Imagine the/. response to MS announcing a new, more powerful DOS command line and touting it as the newest, greatest thing. Imagine that bash and ksh were no longer developed and might not be long for the world: how would you like to move to CMD.EXE?
That's how we HP/RPN fans feel about TI calculators- working on a calculator without RPN is simply crippling. Until you really understand RPN, you have no idea how slow other methods are.
Without RPN, it's just a toy. Worse, it's a toy given to college students who never learn how to do anything more complex than 2+3. A complicated chemistry problem involving 3 whole steps is way beyond them. Sadly, I speak from experience...
I mourn for the HP calculator division. My 11C still works great after 20 years- I keep it in my flight bag for weight and balance calcs. My 28S died last year after 14 hard years of use through college, grad school, postdoc and 2 jobs. I suspect I'll still be using my 49G years after the last of these are sitting in landfills.
You can fake the compass (see below) but you need 3 instruments for 3 degrees of freedom.
For a generalized rigid body in 3-space, you have six degrees of freedom (x,y,z as "external" coordinates, rho,theta,phi (roll, pitch, yaw)as "internal"), so you'll need *6* accelerometers.
For your car, you have x,y and theta, so you'll need 3. You've got 3 instruments. X,y are fine since you have accelerometers for them. The speedometer could be used to back compute the current theta- you'll have velocity given by that (v) and you'll have computed v(x) and v(y) using the accelerometers, so again v(x) = v*cos(theta), but this is really clumsy. Better to just have the position described by x,y and theta. Note: if you have to do this inverse trig functions are usually really, really slow unless you have a good math library. (No, the standard math libraries in any language you care to name are *not* good.) Consider using a lookup table if absolute accuracy isn't needed.
Is this a real world problem? You seem to be thinking about this in terms of engineering rather than as a simulation. If it's just in a computer just track 6 position, velocity, acceleration and force variables (1 for each DoF) and be done with it.
If yes, it's just a bit of trig. You can do it two ways: keep the positions/velocities/accelerations of your vehicle in world coordinates or keep them in vehicle coordinates. I'd highly recommend the former: I assume that the forces on your vehicle are a collection of ones generated internally (by an engine, for example) and externally (by collisions with other moving objects, gravity, etc.) Only the former will need to be converted.
If your vehicle is on a plane (such as a car on a flat surface) it's easy. Define an angle theta which is the angle between the world xaxis and the direction your car is pointing. Then the components of your vehicle's acceleration a are just a(x) = a*cos(theta) and a(y) = a*sin(theta). (This assumes no slipping, of course.)
In 3-d, it's a lot easier if you have thrust only on one axis. (I.e., you have a cylindrical rocket with an engine in the tail.) This lets you ignore roll and then you only need 2 angle variables, theta and phi (aka pitch and yaw): phi runs between 0 and 2*pi and theta from 0 to pi. (Convince yourself that this covers the sphere- it does.) The conversions to take an acceleration a and two angles to cartesian (xyz) coordinates are just the usual ones to convert from spherical polar coordinates to cartesian
a(x) = a*sin(theta)*cos(phi)
a(y) = a*sin(theta)*sin(phi)
a(z) = a*cos(theta)
If you want thrust coming from any axis at any time (aka spaceship with side thrusters), you'll need to include roll. I'd have to go look these up- they're hairier.
If your vehicle is not rigid, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of constrained dynamics. I've got lots of references. (Constrained velocity Verlet= RATTLE, another of my advisor's algorithms.) Hint: if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't go this road! It's far more CPU intensive and the code is uglier.
Here's the Velocity Verlet algorithm for this setup. (I have to use the VV algorithm: my PhD advisor invented it:^)
Start with a set of positions r and velocities v at time t, r(t) and v(t) We'll move them in some small timestep of length dt.
Compute the forces F(t) on the particles at position r.
Compute the accelerations a(t) on the particles by F(t)=m*a(t)
Compute new positions at time t+dt by r(t+dt) = r(t) + dt*v(t) +0.5*dt*dt*a(t)
Advance velocities by v(t+1/2dt) = v(t) + 0.5*dt*a(t)
Compute forces at new positions, F(t+dt) and accelerations a(t+dt)
Finish updating velocities by v(t+dt) = v(t+1/2dt) + 0.5*dt*a(t+dt)
Goto step 4 for as long as your CPU doesn't melt.
The VV algorithm has a lot of advantages: it's simple, stable provided dt is small enough, and unlike straight Verlet is self-starting given an initial velocity set.
This solution is unworkable. The average/. reader would happily remove IE from Windows and replace it with Mozilla, but the average user will use what's given to them in the distribution. Net effect on MS? Zero: after all, the/. folks pirated Windows anyway:^)
The whole idea of unbundling stinks IMHO. Where do you draw the line? At various times in the lifecycle of Windows you've been able to buy web browsers, drive compression+defragment utilities, replacement GUIs and even replacement virtual memory systems. Should we force MS to unbundle everything but the kernel?
So the closest you can do is vote with your money by buying DVD players that don't support WM, HDTVs that don't support HDCP, etc.
No, the closest thing you can do is not buy one at all.
I don't own an HDTV. I don't own a DVD player. (Ok, technically I have one in the TiBook work bought for me, but I've never watched a DVD on it and I don't own any DVDs.) I don't own an MP3 player, especially not one that has content restrictions.
Contrary to popular belief, you can live without these things. Saying "Oh, I came close" is just a cop out- kinda like we hear the/. regulars constantly talk about being free of the Evil Empire yet somehow they manage to play Windows-only games.
Yes, you've never heard of it. Available only from the website
But/. folks should love it- it's a hacking simulator. Break into computers, copy or trash data, delete logs, break bank computers to get funds, create fake credentials... Who, me amoral?
Highly idealized, of course, but the basic ideas are sound. There's a short demo available-sold me on the idea.
The Mac OS 10.1 update is given away for free. You walk into any Mac-carrying retail outlet and they will hand you this nicely-packaged CD with instructions and send you on your way.
Actually, they won't. They will look at you with a confused expression and go "I don't think we have that", or perhaps a "Sorry, Apple didn't send us any- all we have is the full version."
At least, that was my experience when I went to upgrade 10.0. The former was 2 separate Circuit City's, the latter a Mac store (Not one of Apple's). I finally asked a guy I knew online to make me an (illegal) copy.
Apple screwed the pooch bigtime on this upgrade. I'm one of the few folks here who will speak of Macs without spitting and they made it close to impossible for a loyal user to upgrade from a slow, buggy, feature incomplete beta version of the OS.
See LAPES: Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System. Put the cargo on a pallet with a bunch of crushable stuff under it, attach parachute, fly at ~50 feet altitude, drop back door, toss out parachute. Works pretty well: I've seen it done with light tanks which weigh ~10 tons. Higher weight should be possible with a bigger plane, and you've got a lot longer time to recover if you're launching a satellite.
Of course, it's not without risk: the day before the demo I saw a C-130 took an excursion into the woods when they did it. Killed everyone on board. Then again, you're doing major CG shifts 50 feet off the ground...
IIRC Civilisation was a board game LONG LONG before it got converted to a computer game.
Civ the board game and Civ the computer game share the name Civilization. That's it: literally every other thing is different. (Well, they both have a tech tree I suppose, although they're handled very differently.) For example, one of the single biggest management tasks in AH-Civ is making sure you don't tax too much since otherwise you won't get any unit tokens. Not exactly the same as SM-Civ.
Both are awesome games: a 7 player game of real-world Civ is one of the true greats of board gaming, but they couldn't be less alike if they tried.
If anything, the problem with camcorders is that they let people take too much film. Who the hell can sit through 8 hours of vacation video footage? Even an hour could be dangerously close to boring you're audience to death.
Why do you think Apple is hyping iMovie?
iMovie is one damn nice product. Dead simple to use: it took me less than 20 minutes to figure out virtually everything. Can do almost anything a non-professional wants- crop the junk, reorder the good stuff, put nice titles and transitions between the pieces, layer a music track over the whole thing and then dump it back out to tape or to Quicktime.
I've got many hours of footage of my new baby: it's going to be cut down to about 15 minutes of the good stuff when I give tapes out to people who haven't been able to see him yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1: Built a *^##% thick wall
Step 2: Place camera behind wall. Attach remote pan+zoom
Step 3: Put a mirror so that the camera can see around the wall
The solution I think will be to have professors that actually go through the source code of each student.
You've never taught at a University, have you?
Speaking as one who has, forget it. It's simply not possible for the prof to do it alone. Grading 50 students in an advanced chemistry class took several days per assignment. I didn't even attempt it in my general chem courses with anywhere from 180-700 students- everything was graded automatically.
Sure, you can get TAs to do it, but now you open a bigger can of worms since they won't grade equally, and if you give each TA a single assignment it will take them weeks to get it done for a typical intro class of 200.
The idea of hand-grading is wonderful, until you're the hand grader. You can't imagine how mind-numbing it is.
Eric
Well, email is the single biggest cause of traffic on the internet, beating web browsing, P2P apps, ftp, etc.
Source please? I'd be really surprised if this were so. I can look at my school's stats here and the % of traffic due to email doesn't even come off the xaxis. P2P apps were basically every byte until we installed a Packeteer: now it's mostly web.
Perhaps if you count attachments, but then the attachment is basically the entire size of the message: adding HTML is just epsilon.
Eric
Now, anyone want a slightly damp, previously working iPaq? Going cheap!
Eric
When it comes to camcorders, they do things differently too. Everyone else sells DV capable camcorders that use "DV tape". Not Sony.
That's funny, I guess my (Mini-DV) TRV-900 doesn't exist?
Sony has several lines of DV camcorders: the cheaper ones use digital-8, the higher end use Mini-DV, which is standard across most high end, consumer grade camcorders. Simple product differentiation- no great conspiracy.
Eric
Careful about the nut allergy thing- peanuts kill more than 100 people/year- more deaths than beestings, shark attacks, snake bites and a lot of other things people worry about. That ain't psychosomatic.
My wife carries an epipen in case she accidentally eats a peanut or peanut product-very small amounts of peanuts cause her throat to swell shut. Accidentally eating peanuts is a whole lot easier than you might suspect- many, many restaurants fry things in peanut oil and don't tell you. If I eat at Chick-fil-A I can't kiss my wife or touch anything around the house until I wash my mouth and hands to get rid of residual oil.
Nut allergies are very, very real
Eric
They should move to another universe, provided they aren't already living in one...
Eric
You can run the software forever- there's no new fees. You just can't call MS and expect support, or any new patches.
With the invention in the public domain, companies can then compete in a free market to produce and market the product as efficiently as possible.
So, are you allowed patents on production? Good ChemE's don't come cheap, and if you think the production methods aren't covered in a flurry of patents you'd be wrong.
Of course, if you make all that free where's the incentive to improve production by inventing new methods? It costs a bloody fortune to develop a new method: why should any company bother when there's a free, inefficient method out there and any other company can take your new method away? There's no free market here- just a government sponsored research monopoly.
Who pays for clinical trials? The government would have to- no company could shoulder the ~$100M cost per drug under this system.
How about copyright on the informational/marketing materials that go with each drug? Can I take those free as well? I could save a bundle on technical writers/marketing staff. Perhaps the government should just take over those responsibilites too.
Patent works in the drug industry- it's probably the best example, since up front costs for drug development are immense but costs to copy are low.
Are drug companies angels? No, but shutting them down and transferring their entire R&D staffs to academia (where would we put all the chemists?) under government payroll is kind of a drastic solution. (BTW: I seriously doubt your argument that academic research is more cost effective- I've worked in both worlds. The amount of time spent writing grant proposals to get funded is huge. When I needed a new HPLC at Merck, I asked for one. It appeared the next week. In academia it would have taken 6+ months of writing and waiting.)
Eric
Several US companies own patents for individual human and animal genes. No, not modified genes. Naturally occuring ones, like the one which causes Cystic Fibrosis.
While I agree this makes me uneasy, what are your alternatives?
Gene research costs serious cash. Highly trained people (in high demand). Very expensive equipment and lab facilities. Lots of chemicals (and disposal) If private companies can't get some return, they simply won't do the work.
Who else will do it? Government or universities? Both supported by your taxes- pay up, assuming you can get a tax hike past Duyba. Or you can cut other services (Meet hordes of angry seniors) or add to the deficit if you prefer (Ask the Argentinians how well this works in the long run.)
I don't like the idea much myself, but privates do useful work that otherwise might not get done. Is it better to have a patented CF gene or not know anything about it at all?
Eric
You really want it? Get a copy of the IRS regs (free from the government) and the latest version of GCC. Start coding.
Don't want to? Neither does anyone else, without a ton of incentive in the form of little pieces of paper with dead presidents on them. My mom has worked for H&R block for 20 years- I've seen what she goes through, and I couldn't imagine doing it. The rules are complex, arbitrary, and change every single year. Next, do it 48 more times for each of the states. (48? NH and AK don't have income tax, right?)
I'm amazed Intuit can pay people to code TurboTax.
(And for God's sake, don't get the IRS to make something publically available. The IRS help line is basically useless- they'll give you the wrong answer very close to the majority of the time.)
Eric
TV! Bah, the _real_ use for video projectors is playing Doom/Quake/$FPS_OF_CHOICE.
True story. Back in 1996 I was buying a projector for the chemistry department I worked for. For the first demo of prospective equipment (it was a lot rarer then) for my boss I showed a few images. He told me that the projector was fine but that the demo was a bit dull- I should do something exciting.
Next time I had Hexen up on a 25' wide screen. Don't exactly know what he thought of it, but we ended up getting the other projector...
Eric
When I use Mac OS X, I can *feel* that somewhere in Cupertino there's an English major who was losing sleep at nights trying to make the text in the dialog boxes as clear and understandable as possible. When was the last time you felt that way about the latest d/l off of sourceforge?
While I agree about SourceForge, OSX is a step down from OS9 in dialog box text (and help in general).
For example, I just love the error "No file services are available at the URL . Try again later or try another URL (server returned error 1)" OSX returns this when it can't connect to an SMB share no matter what the actual reason. Wrong password? Invalid user? No such share? Everything gets the same error.
Worse, the MacOSX Help files are nicely written, but there are so few of them that help is very close to useless. It will tell you how to copy a file, but for anything more complex you're basically SOL.
Still, compared to the average Open Source app, they're amazing.
Eric
That's how we HP/RPN fans feel about TI calculators- working on a calculator without RPN is simply crippling. Until you really understand RPN, you have no idea how slow other methods are.
I mourn for the HP calculator division. My 11C still works great after 20 years- I keep it in my flight bag for weight and balance calcs. My 28S died last year after 14 hard years of use through college, grad school, postdoc and 2 jobs. I suspect I'll still be using my 49G years after the last of these are sitting in landfills.
Eric
You can fake the compass (see below) but you need 3 instruments for 3 degrees of freedom.
For a generalized rigid body in 3-space, you have six degrees of freedom (x,y,z as "external" coordinates, rho,theta,phi (roll, pitch, yaw)as "internal"), so you'll need *6* accelerometers.
For your car, you have x,y and theta, so you'll need 3. You've got 3 instruments. X,y are fine since you have accelerometers for them. The speedometer could be used to back compute the current theta- you'll have velocity given by that (v) and you'll have computed v(x) and v(y) using the accelerometers, so again v(x) = v*cos(theta), but this is really clumsy. Better to just have the position described by x,y and theta. Note: if you have to do this inverse trig functions are usually really, really slow unless you have a good math library. (No, the standard math libraries in any language you care to name are *not* good.) Consider using a lookup table if absolute accuracy isn't needed.
Is this a real world problem? You seem to be thinking about this in terms of engineering rather than as a simulation. If it's just in a computer just track 6 position, velocity, acceleration and force variables (1 for each DoF) and be done with it.
Eric
If yes, it's just a bit of trig. You can do it two ways: keep the positions/velocities/accelerations of your vehicle in world coordinates or keep them in vehicle coordinates. I'd highly recommend the former: I assume that the forces on your vehicle are a collection of ones generated internally (by an engine, for example) and externally (by collisions with other moving objects, gravity, etc.) Only the former will need to be converted.
If your vehicle is on a plane (such as a car on a flat surface) it's easy. Define an angle theta which is the angle between the world xaxis and the direction your car is pointing. Then the components of your vehicle's acceleration a are just a(x) = a*cos(theta) and a(y) = a*sin(theta). (This assumes no slipping, of course.)
In 3-d, it's a lot easier if you have thrust only on one axis. (I.e., you have a cylindrical rocket with an engine in the tail.) This lets you ignore roll and then you only need 2 angle variables, theta and phi (aka pitch and yaw): phi runs between 0 and 2*pi and theta from 0 to pi. (Convince yourself that this covers the sphere- it does.) The conversions to take an acceleration a and two angles to cartesian (xyz) coordinates are just the usual ones to convert from spherical polar coordinates to cartesian
If you want thrust coming from any axis at any time (aka spaceship with side thrusters), you'll need to include roll. I'd have to go look these up- they're hairier.
If your vehicle is not rigid, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of constrained dynamics. I've got lots of references. (Constrained velocity Verlet= RATTLE, another of my advisor's algorithms.) Hint: if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't go this road! It's far more CPU intensive and the code is uglier.
Eric
The VV algorithm has a lot of advantages: it's simple, stable provided dt is small enough, and unlike straight Verlet is self-starting given an initial velocity set.
Eric
The whole idea of unbundling stinks IMHO. Where do you draw the line? At various times in the lifecycle of Windows you've been able to buy web browsers, drive compression+defragment utilities, replacement GUIs and even replacement virtual memory systems. Should we force MS to unbundle everything but the kernel?
Eric
So the closest you can do is vote with your money by buying DVD players that don't support WM, HDTVs that don't support HDCP, etc.
No, the closest thing you can do is not buy one at all.
I don't own an HDTV.
I don't own a DVD player. (Ok, technically I have one in the TiBook work bought for me, but I've never watched a DVD on it and I don't own any DVDs.)
I don't own an MP3 player, especially not one that has content restrictions.
Contrary to popular belief, you can live without these things. Saying "Oh, I came close" is just a cop out- kinda like we hear the /. regulars constantly talk about being free of the Evil Empire yet somehow they manage to play Windows-only games.
Eric
But /. folks should love it- it's a hacking simulator. Break into computers, copy or trash data, delete logs, break bank computers to get funds, create fake credentials... Who, me amoral?
Highly idealized, of course, but the basic ideas are sound. There's a short demo available-sold me on the idea.
Eric
The Mac OS 10.1 update is given away for free. You walk into any Mac-carrying retail outlet and they will hand you this nicely-packaged CD with instructions and send you on your way.
Actually, they won't. They will look at you with a confused expression and go "I don't think we have that", or perhaps a "Sorry, Apple didn't send us any- all we have is the full version."
At least, that was my experience when I went to upgrade 10.0. The former was 2 separate Circuit City's, the latter a Mac store (Not one of Apple's). I finally asked a guy I knew online to make me an (illegal) copy.
Apple screwed the pooch bigtime on this upgrade. I'm one of the few folks here who will speak of Macs without spitting and they made it close to impossible for a loyal user to upgrade from a slow, buggy, feature incomplete beta version of the OS.
Eric
Of course, it's not without risk: the day before the demo I saw a C-130 took an excursion into the woods when they did it. Killed everyone on board. Then again, you're doing major CG shifts 50 feet off the ground...
IIRC Civilisation was a board game LONG LONG before it got converted to a computer game.
Civ the board game and Civ the computer game share the name Civilization. That's it: literally every other thing is different. (Well, they both have a tech tree I suppose, although they're handled very differently.) For example, one of the single biggest management tasks in AH-Civ is making sure you don't tax too much since otherwise you won't get any unit tokens. Not exactly the same as SM-Civ.
Both are awesome games: a 7 player game of real-world Civ is one of the true greats of board gaming, but they couldn't be less alike if they tried.
If anything, the problem with camcorders is that they let people take too much film. Who the hell can sit through 8 hours of vacation video footage? Even an hour could be dangerously close to boring you're audience to death.
Why do you think Apple is hyping iMovie?
iMovie is one damn nice product. Dead simple to use: it took me less than 20 minutes to figure out virtually everything. Can do almost anything a non-professional wants- crop the junk, reorder the good stuff, put nice titles and transitions between the pieces, layer a music track over the whole thing and then dump it back out to tape or to Quicktime.
I've got many hours of footage of my new baby: it's going to be cut down to about 15 minutes of the good stuff when I give tapes out to people who haven't been able to see him yet.
Eric