... you can make life for your future self easier doing the following:
1) Only store information in formats that are ridiculously ubiquitous right now. Use (in that order): TXT, JPEG, PDF, AAC (or MP3, if you must), MPEG-4/AVC (h.264). The sheer amount of information available in (an on) these formats makes it more likely that you will be ably to recover them in the future.
2) Keep REPLICATING it ALL THE FUCKING TIME, especially when there is a big shift in storage media (like floppies -> CDs or, right now, magnetic hard-drives -> solid state drives) and keep at least two copies in two different places.
3) In addition, move it into the cloud if you can, as redundancy for your two physical locations.
Your post rings a weird bell in my head that hasn't been rung before. Some completely new kind of... lameness, maybe? Virgin territory to man, in any case.
This is just awesome. The "Dumbest Fuck Ever"-Award clearly goes to the lawyer who filed this laughably thin suit against a company that never has done anything funky to display HTML on its handhelds. The iPhone runs OS X, slightly scaled down for memory and power consumption gains.
What the fuck? You can run GNU/Linux, Windows and OS X on one machine, for one thing.
OS X has the entire GNU toolchain, Darwin Ports, Cocoa (garbage collected, if you want to, and with Ruby, Python and Objective-C as first class citizens. You can mix and match them in your applications without having to think too much about it.), even stuff like tkInter and wxPython and RoR and God knows what out of the box. Most Windows developers shit their pants when they see what kind of work the frameworks do on their own in 10.5. There's XCode with all it's bells and whistles... You can use Mono, Java, X Windows, etc. It has UNIX 03 certification. It's the only platform that lets you develop for the iPhone. There are some emerging technologies (Cocotron) that let you cross-compile your apps into.exe binaries right from XCode, and these are almost sure to mature because of their sheer usefulness. Interface scriptability is great thanks to AppleScript, however ugly that language is.... And I'm just scratching the surface here. No other platform comes close.
First of all, the number of articles is a bullshit metric. Who deserves more reporting: the 25-year veteran, well known to the public at large? Or the relative new-comer, who is the first ever serious black contender for the White House?
Second, if you believe there has ever been even a single example of bias-free reporting, you are seriously deluded. It comes with the territory, the territory being human communication.
5 out of the top 10 best-selling laptops on Amazon are Macs. Add to that the fact that many hardcore Apple fans buy mostly through Apple.com, and it gets pretty hard to make the case that the picture isn't exactly the same in online sales.
The reason for that is that you'd be dead within a few hours in high temperatures. The head is a very efficient radiator that dissipates all the waste heat produced by your most energy-hungry organ - the brain. Having that thing in your mid-section would make it more difficult and expensive to do that while still protecting it with a very hard and durable shell. It's very unlikely that a species would evolve that way... It would also make the mid-section less flexible, and put your sensory organs nearer to the ground (due to the necessity of having very low latency connection to the eyes and ears (at least in every eco-system that has predators and/or hard to catch prey). Both not exactly evolutionary advantages in most environments one can imagine.
Your powers of deduction are truly awe-inspiring. Never mind the fact that I subscribe to some of HardOCP's feeds. I also read above 800 wpm in easy texts like that review, so I'm not exactly slow reader, either.
There is not a single bit of actual information in that article. It's pure, unsubstantiated opinion, and in many cases it's simply wrong. Why do you post crap like that?
You are affirming my conviction that rhetoric needs to be taught in schools again.
My argument, broken down, is this: I like StarCraft as it is, and think SC2 does not have to add much to be a great game. That's a personal preference on an issue without significant ethical or moral consequences, and as such is neither right nor wrong.
A: I personally prefer red wine to white wine. B: You're wrong! A good red has been shown to be better for you health, it ages much more elegantly and besides red wine just totally rules, you tool! A: !?!
I'm not saying that there are no revolutionary things to do in RTS. My point is that Starcraft never was an RTS in the first place. StarCraft played at it's top level is all about motor skill and tactical experience and has very little to do with "S"trategy.
Repeat after me: A GAME IS NOT A SIMULATION. A SIMULATION IS NOT A GAME. Simulations strive for a level of complexity equivalent to the real thing. Games have zero base in reality, but are based on arbitrary but consistent and simple rules. The most enduring games are those with almost idiotically straightforward rules, out of which often arise extraordinarily complex behaviors and strategies.
Good games (chess, go, poker,...) have the capacity make something in the human brain go "click" in a very peculiar way. Our reactions to simulations can be equally strong, but are of a different nature.
SC is a great GAME. Blizzard knows that and will keep it that way.
Blah, blah, *expletive*, blah, blah, *assigning absolute truth value to opinions*, blah...
Try to read what other people write. Of course it's easily possible to do all those things. My point is that it wouldn't necessarily be a good idea, IN MY OPINION. There is a difference between a game and a simulation that you don't seem to grasp. I'm not terribly interested in simulations, but have a strong interest in well-balanced games of skill and/or strategy. Nobody is advocating giving chess players swords and horses so they can have at each other "more realistically" or to make the game "cooler".
The main difference is this: I'm interested in StarCraft as a game of skill and experience, you are interested in the storyline and other stuff that comes with the franchise. Both points of view are valid, and saying that I'm wrong makes no sense at all.
I'm entering "long, pseudo-philosophical rant"-mode here, so caveat lector:
Improving StarCraft is like improving chess - arguably possible, but hardly without upsetting a lot of people. StarCraft is still being played today because as a game, it's one of the most polished and consistent experiences available. It's not truly "real-time", it has little to do with "strategy", it is certainly not trying to be realistic and the graphics suck by today's standard - but that's also true for poker and darts. I feel most of the comments calling for Blizzard to "look to Title X" for new ideas for StarCraft 2 are a little misguided. StarCraft's gameplay is in a class of it's own, people will buy it because it's StarCraft. And they will buy it because StarCraft -even in its current form- is just a damn good game in it's own right. It's just imaginable that, a hundred years from now, people will still enjoy slightly enhanced versions of exactly the same formula, just like we enjoy back gammon thousands of years after its original form was created.
... but I just threw my fist in the air, almost dropped my laptop and grunted like a caveman -- all in an upscale hotel-lobby in Hong Kong. StarCraft 2! Fuck, YEAH! I'm almost 24 now and haven't played anything but a few hours of WoW since I got out of high-school, but this really gets me going in ways I'd rather not elaborate.
If you expect to get a "good handle" on a topic like music theory in less than a few hours of study, you are clearly delusional. Science won't get any easier just because our attention spans are getting shorter.
... you have a very short memory. The original, 5 gigabyte iPod came out in 2001 with an introductory price of $399. That's $456.04 in 2007 dollars. The original iPod had miserable battery life, low storage, a B/W screen and it wasn't -in addition- a smart-phone with EDGE, WiFi, a 3.5-inch color screen and a friggin' camera!
Slashdot editors, here is a newsflash: "Industry analysts" are analysts because the are to frigging stupid to actually make it in the industry they are analyzing. Don't post crap like this.
Apple has been selling more Macs in the last several quarters than ever before in its entire history, and been making insane profits. They also continue to develop all of their desktop and server software at an utterly bewildering pace. I don't know exactly what you're talking out of, but I have a suspicion.
... or shut up! Wikipedia could make upwards of $ 100 million a year if they ran ads on their website, whith which they could do some really useful work. Heck, they could hire 100 full-time editors and fork off a real encyclopedia that would blow everything else out of the water within 5 years, while still continuing to run the open project. They could digitize tens of thousands of books a year. Buy collections of media and other artifacts and release them into the public domain. Fund research into non-transient storage media that will keep our information alive for longer than the average 7 years an HD or CD lasts...
The people who are opposed to running ads because they "can't stand ads" or have utterly ridiculous "moral concerns" have their heads so far up their own asses, it's not even funny. Wikipedia has the chance to make a real difference. As it stands, we (I have 3000+ edits there, so I can't really exclude myself) are not fulfilling our potential in the least -- and that hurts.
People in these discussions keep moaning about how various changes "are only really any good for the developers"... That's kind of dumb. Developers, duh, develop the applications end-users rely on. The under-the-hood changes in Leopard are bound to benefit everyone. Garbage-collection, better debugging, 64 bit, a crazy animation toolkit, etc. (if you don't know how that impacts the user, try this for example: http://www.discoapp.com/ . It's a new disc-burning application with one of the most interesting work-flows I've ever seen).
Probably not, though it's hard to say without having seen the current builds of Leopard. So far, every new incarnation of OS X has been faster and more usable on the same hardware than its predecessor. 10.4 for example, is just as fast as 10.3, while having stuff like Spotlight and Dashboard going on in the background all the time. I know people who happily run 10.4 on G3 iBooks(!). They don't get all the 3D-accelerated eye-candy, but all the rest works.
Keep in mind though: Even if there is no performance increase (or a slight decrease), 10.5 will be a different beast altogether from 10.4 usability and feature-wise: Time machine. Resolution-independent user interface. Cocoa will be fully garbage-collected(!). 32 bit and 64 bit and applications on the same machine, running right next to each other. Insane screen-sharing technology via iChat. All that in addition to the stuff that's already there in OS X and all the power of most UNIX applications ever written...
He is going to market a way for COMPANIES OTHER THAN APPLE to create copy-protected content that is playable on the iPod. None of the crap you just wrote is in any way relevant to what he is up to.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? I don't chose which formats are are most ubiquitous and/or easy to implement.
... you can make life for your future self easier doing the following:
1) Only store information in formats that are ridiculously ubiquitous right now. Use (in that order): TXT, JPEG, PDF, AAC (or MP3, if you must), MPEG-4/AVC (h.264). The sheer amount of information available in (an on) these formats makes it more likely that you will be ably to recover them in the future.
2) Keep REPLICATING it ALL THE FUCKING TIME, especially when there is a big shift in storage media (like floppies -> CDs or, right now, magnetic hard-drives -> solid state drives) and keep at least two copies in two different places.
3) In addition, move it into the cloud if you can, as redundancy for your two physical locations.
Huh?
Your post rings a weird bell in my head that hasn't been rung before. Some completely new kind of ... lameness, maybe? Virgin territory to man, in any case.
This is just awesome. The "Dumbest Fuck Ever"-Award clearly goes to the lawyer who filed this laughably thin suit against a company that never has done anything funky to display HTML on its handhelds. The iPhone runs OS X, slightly scaled down for memory and power consumption gains.
What the fuck? You can run GNU/Linux, Windows and OS X on one machine, for one thing.
OS X has the entire GNU toolchain, Darwin Ports, Cocoa (garbage collected, if you want to, and with Ruby, Python and Objective-C as first class citizens. You can mix and match them in your applications without having to think too much about it.), even stuff like tkInter and wxPython and RoR and God knows what out of the box. Most Windows developers shit their pants when they see what kind of work the frameworks do on their own in 10.5. There's XCode with all it's bells and whistles... You can use Mono, Java, X Windows, etc. It has UNIX 03 certification. It's the only platform that lets you develop for the iPhone. There are some emerging technologies (Cocotron) that let you cross-compile your apps into .exe binaries right from XCode, and these are almost sure to mature because of their sheer usefulness. Interface scriptability is great thanks to AppleScript, however ugly that language is.... And I'm just scratching the surface here. No other platform comes close.
First of all, the number of articles is a bullshit metric. Who deserves more reporting: the 25-year veteran, well known to the public at large? Or the relative new-comer, who is the first ever serious black contender for the White House?
Second, if you believe there has ever been even a single example of bias-free reporting, you are seriously deluded. It comes with the territory, the territory being human communication.
Uhhhm: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/565108/ref =pd_ts_pc_nav/103-8042767-7247807 ?
5 out of the top 10 best-selling laptops on Amazon are Macs. Add to that the fact that many hardcore Apple fans buy mostly through Apple.com, and it gets pretty hard to make the case that the picture isn't exactly the same in online sales.
The reason for that is that you'd be dead within a few hours in high temperatures. The head is a very efficient radiator that dissipates all the waste heat produced by your most energy-hungry organ - the brain. Having that thing in your mid-section would make it more difficult and expensive to do that while still protecting it with a very hard and durable shell. It's very unlikely that a species would evolve that way... It would also make the mid-section less flexible, and put your sensory organs nearer to the ground (due to the necessity of having very low latency connection to the eyes and ears (at least in every eco-system that has predators and/or hard to catch prey). Both not exactly evolutionary advantages in most environments one can imagine.
Your powers of deduction are truly awe-inspiring. Never mind the fact that I subscribe to some of HardOCP's feeds. I also read above 800 wpm in easy texts like that review, so I'm not exactly slow reader, either.
There is not a single bit of actual information in that article. It's pure, unsubstantiated opinion, and in many cases it's simply wrong. Why do you post crap like that?
Eh, you need to switch around the red and the white in A's first statement, of course ;-)
You are affirming my conviction that rhetoric needs to be taught in schools again.
My argument, broken down, is this: I like StarCraft as it is, and think SC2 does not have to add much to be a great game. That's a personal preference on an issue without significant ethical or moral consequences, and as such is neither right nor wrong.
A: I personally prefer red wine to white wine.
B: You're wrong! A good red has been shown to be better for you health, it ages much more elegantly and besides red wine just totally rules, you tool!
A: !?!
I'm not saying that there are no revolutionary things to do in RTS. My point is that Starcraft never was an RTS in the first place. StarCraft played at it's top level is all about motor skill and tactical experience and has very little to do with "S"trategy.
...) have the capacity make something in the human brain go "click" in a very peculiar way. Our reactions to simulations can be equally strong, but are of a different nature.
Repeat after me: A GAME IS NOT A SIMULATION. A SIMULATION IS NOT A GAME. Simulations strive for a level of complexity equivalent to the real thing. Games have zero base in reality, but are based on arbitrary but consistent and simple rules. The most enduring games are those with almost idiotically straightforward rules, out of which often arise extraordinarily complex behaviors and strategies.
Good games (chess, go, poker,
SC is a great GAME. Blizzard knows that and will keep it that way.
Blah, blah, *expletive*, blah, blah, *assigning absolute truth value to opinions*, blah...
Try to read what other people write. Of course it's easily possible to do all those things. My point is that it wouldn't necessarily be a good idea, IN MY OPINION. There is a difference between a game and a simulation that you don't seem to grasp. I'm not terribly interested in simulations, but have a strong interest in well-balanced games of skill and/or strategy. Nobody is advocating giving chess players swords and horses so they can have at each other "more realistically" or to make the game "cooler".
The main difference is this: I'm interested in StarCraft as a game of skill and experience, you are interested in the storyline and other stuff that comes with the franchise. Both points of view are valid, and saying that I'm wrong makes no sense at all.
I'm entering "long, pseudo-philosophical rant"-mode here, so caveat lector:
Improving StarCraft is like improving chess - arguably possible, but hardly without upsetting a lot of people. StarCraft is still being played today because as a game, it's one of the most polished and consistent experiences available. It's not truly "real-time", it has little to do with "strategy", it is certainly not trying to be realistic and the graphics suck by today's standard - but that's also true for poker and darts. I feel most of the comments calling for Blizzard to "look to Title X" for new ideas for StarCraft 2 are a little misguided. StarCraft's gameplay is in a class of it's own, people will buy it because it's StarCraft. And they will buy it because StarCraft -even in its current form- is just a damn good game in it's own right. It's just imaginable that, a hundred years from now, people will still enjoy slightly enhanced versions of exactly the same formula, just like we enjoy back gammon thousands of years after its original form was created.
... but I just threw my fist in the air, almost dropped my laptop and grunted like a caveman -- all in an upscale hotel-lobby in Hong Kong. StarCraft 2! Fuck, YEAH! I'm almost 24 now and haven't played anything but a few hours of WoW since I got out of high-school, but this really gets me going in ways I'd rather not elaborate.
If you expect to get a "good handle" on a topic like music theory in less than a few hours of study, you are clearly delusional. Science won't get any easier just because our attention spans are getting shorter.
... you have a very short memory. The original, 5 gigabyte iPod came out in 2001 with an introductory price of $399. That's $456.04 in 2007 dollars. The original iPod had miserable battery life, low storage, a B/W screen and it wasn't -in addition- a smart-phone with EDGE, WiFi, a 3.5-inch color screen and a friggin' camera!
Slashdot editors, here is a newsflash: "Industry analysts" are analysts because the are to frigging stupid to actually make it in the industry they are analyzing. Don't post crap like this.
I didn't know they have the DMCA in Poland? Seriously, the rest of the world doesn't give a fuck about fascist US copyright legislation.
Apple has been selling more Macs in the last several quarters than ever before in its entire history, and been making insane profits. They also continue to develop all of their desktop and server software at an utterly bewildering pace. I don't know exactly what you're talking out of, but I have a suspicion.
... or shut up! Wikipedia could make upwards of $ 100 million a year if they ran ads on their website, whith which they could do some really useful work. Heck, they could hire 100 full-time editors and fork off a real encyclopedia that would blow everything else out of the water within 5 years, while still continuing to run the open project. They could digitize tens of thousands of books a year. Buy collections of media and other artifacts and release them into the public domain. Fund research into non-transient storage media that will keep our information alive for longer than the average 7 years an HD or CD lasts...
The people who are opposed to running ads because they "can't stand ads" or have utterly ridiculous "moral concerns" have their heads so far up their own asses, it's not even funny. Wikipedia has the chance to make a real difference. As it stands, we (I have 3000+ edits there, so I can't really exclude myself) are not fulfilling our potential in the least -- and that hurts.
People in these discussions keep moaning about how various changes "are only really any good for the developers"... That's kind of dumb. Developers, duh, develop the applications end-users rely on. The under-the-hood changes in Leopard are bound to benefit everyone. Garbage-collection, better debugging, 64 bit, a crazy animation toolkit, etc. (if you don't know how that impacts the user, try this for example: http://www.discoapp.com/ . It's a new disc-burning application with one of the most interesting work-flows I've ever seen).
Probably not, though it's hard to say without having seen the current builds of Leopard. So far, every new incarnation of OS X has been faster and more usable on the same hardware than its predecessor. 10.4 for example, is just as fast as 10.3, while having stuff like Spotlight and Dashboard going on in the background all the time. I know people who happily run 10.4 on G3 iBooks(!). They don't get all the 3D-accelerated eye-candy, but all the rest works.
Keep in mind though: Even if there is no performance increase (or a slight decrease), 10.5 will be a different beast altogether from 10.4 usability and feature-wise: Time machine. Resolution-independent user interface. Cocoa will be fully garbage-collected(!). 32 bit and 64 bit and applications on the same machine, running right next to each other. Insane screen-sharing technology via iChat. All that in addition to the stuff that's already there in OS X and all the power of most UNIX applications ever written...
He is going to market a way for COMPANIES OTHER THAN APPLE to create copy-protected content that is playable on the iPod. None of the crap you just wrote is in any way relevant to what he is up to.
... living in the perpetual darkness of Finlands arctic winter for a few months a year sure can make you lonely, but that lonely?