Well, when playing Twister, sometimes that's exactly what you have to do. Better get that game taken off the shelf, because it isn't ergonomical.
Oh, and sometimes when playing board games, I move my token with my left hand. But, I'm right handed, and move my mouse with my right hand. Maybe I should make an effort to only ever move game tokens with my natural right hand.
Seriously, though, my hands rest on the keyboard wherever I put them, because keyboards aren't anything natural in the first place. When I'm playing a FPS, my left hand goes for WASD, with my middle finger resting on the W. When I'm typing, my hand rests on ASDF. Is it bad to be versitile?
When I was a kid, I lost a grand total of one minifig hand. (Subsequently, I melted the end the poor guy's arm so that there wasn't a gaping hole, but rather a stump. But anyway.)
Fast forward 15 years. My 4-year-old likes to re-enact that infamous scene, but just pulls one hand out of the arm of whomever he decides is Luke. And then promptly loses the hand. So next time he uses another minifig, removing its hand and losing it as well. Then he uses another minifig...
Nearly all of the dozens upon dozens of minifigs from my youth have become completely hand-less in the past year...
And to me, the way most MMORPGs are built makes it feel like a single-player game with 3-D chat. You can't make that kind of world be unique and persistant for everyone playing without a huge amount of content creation going on.
I personally much prefer games like BattleMaster, a web-based game that is entirely player-driven. The only content created by the game's author is the physical map, and some very rare interventions (one continent gets yearly NPC monster invasions as a sort of "reset", the rest remain nearly untouched). Players create and destroy just about everything, except for cities themselves. Nations are born and die on a regular basis, some people get into leadership positions and others are content to be "ordinary" characters who spend much of their time following orders. And they come back to play, turn after turn, day after day, year after year.
Someone needs to write this one down. Next time we need an excuse for war, hand out passports to friendly people in country nearby, and get some restless locals to terrorize target country. Then when country responds, complain of atrocities against American citizens, and throw some bombs at target capital.
Why didn't we think of this before? Sounds more effective than making up stories about WMDs.
Note: I do not own any Confederate flags, do not have any particular "southern pride", and groups like the KKK disgust me. Now that that's out of the way...
Yes, and they were.
What makes any place a sovreign nation? If the Confederate States didn't qualify as one, I don't know what does. Our own sacred Declaration of Independence asserts the moral right of self governance, to dissolve the ties of government that does not represent and protect the interests of the people, whether that government is England or our own federal government.
Works even better if you carbonate it, seal it in an aluminum can, and leave it in the center console of a car parked in the sun on a 105 degree day in Arizona.
Think little gooey specks of Pepsi residue covering the entire car from the windshield to the back window. Not that I'd know from personal experience, or anything.
By walking down to the store and buying it? Our local supermarket had it, in the town I grew up in. (Can't say I've looked for it in the city I live in now.)
Agreed. I have one 36" high-def LCD in my house, and four old SDTVs (excluding computer monitors). Automatically, Blu-ray does me nothing for those SDTVs.
The LCD was pretty cheap, you can see banding in some color gradients and it's only 1080i. HDTV through the cable box using component looks pretty, and the regular programming is... tolerable. Our cheapo DVD player, when hooked up by any method to the LCD, provides an experience that is less than exciting. However, I also have a Vista desktop hooked up through HDMI, running 1366x768, and when you play a DVD through it I can barely tell the difference from HDTV programming straight from Comcast.
I was completely surprised. I'd watched DVDs on laptops and been unimpressed. I didn't think a standard DVD could look this good.
VHS to DVD was a no-brainer, once the cost came down. Even on my old TVs, the quality was better, it didn't degrade with repetitive playback (unless you count kids stepping on the discs), you didn't have to rewind/search the tape... For Blu-ray, I'd have to sink a bunch of money not just on a new player but on a whole entertainment setup in order to get any substantial value out of it. Someday, I'll be replacing my old CRTs with HDTVs anyway, with better quality than the one I already have. And then it might be worth picking up Blu-ray.
In the days before CDs and MP3s, "ripping" tunes was the process where people far more inventive than I would find the song data in an executable or data file of a game with cool music and convert it to a MOD format so you could listen to it with any old music player.
Folks using "rip" to mean encoding CDs to MP3 just seems lame by comparison.
Why will one referee in (insert sport here) give a team a foul for (insert rule violation here) when another referee does not?
Humanity introduces subjectivity into objective analysis all the time. Is that okay in popular masculine team sports and not okay in gymnastics?
For the record, my daughter is in gymastics and I don't consider it a sport. But I don't think it has anything to do with scoring or judging, my own criteria is that "sports" involve actively competing against an opposing player/team at the same time. I'm sure someone will come up with a way to say that's a stupid line to draw, too... Oh well.
Even local gymastics above a certain level (maybe 7?) has been using the new scoring system. Threw me for a loop the first time when, at one of my daughter's meets, some of the older kids were getting scores >10.
(stuff that is) missing with today's desktop computers
I used to think I was just sentimental about my old computers. I grew up on Amigas, and since college have been collecting all sorts of vintage systems. My kids, on the other hand, have only had PCs with Win95 or newer for their whole life. My oldest two have their own Vista laptops, the other three share a couple XP desktops.
Recently, I rebuilt a couple of neglected Amigas and my 11-year-old asked if he could buy one off e-bay with his birthday money, so I gave him one of my A500s. He will set aside his $1300 laptop to come play on the Amiga for hours at a time, booting up games off of my old floppies. His younger brothers stop playing on the Nintendo to gather around and watch. I doubt they are awed by the low-res 32-color graphics, even their DSes are far superior. Any I haven't even brought up the subject of BASIC, yet...
I considered building an FPGA module that contained all the necessary C64 or Apple hardware
FPGAs are certainly up to that task, since folks have managed to recreate an Amiga on an FPGA, complete with interfaces to more modern peripherals like flash storage and PS/2 keyboards and mice. Running them in such small quantities, it does cost a bit. On the flip side, how much longer will you be able to pick up a (working) C64 with a pile of (working) floppies for dirt cheap? I found mine for free, but I had to disassemble three systems to get one working pair of C64 and 1541, and the one box of disks I got were almost all worthless.
You don't agree that it's a lot simpler to save newsgroup messages than comments on a web-based forum?
I really wasn't trying to say that everyone knew Usenet was being archived from the start, or that it was designed that way. The design did, however, make it trivial to do (given the space) - a benefit that is not so easy to replicate with today's transient, independent, often proprietary "communities."
I know what you mean about space. Our family went all-out on our first HD (1990?) and got a spacious 210MB Quantum. For a time, we were on Fidonet (through a long distance BBS, on a 2400 baud modem - man, how did we survive?) and did save messages just like I do with emails today. Again, it was a standardized, universal system. We didn't archive all of Fidonet, we archived the interesting and relevant posts on our subscribed groups as they came through.
At least, right up until my dad got fed up with the idiots on the civil liberties board, deleted everything, and cancelled our node account.
If it weren't for my non-existant backup practices in college, I'd still have all my own stuff from ~1993-today, but because I was using the old Quantum as my storage drive when it crashed in 1998, I only have everything from then on. (Minus the conversations on the few web forums I frequent, some already gone, and my LJ.)
You could always hang on to messages locally, if they mattered to you. All Deja News/Google Groups did was make that available to everyone.
It's actually worse that we expect web forums to be persistent now, because it's an absurd expectation. I'd have to go through hoops to preserve replies and comments on my LiveJournal postings, for example.
Regardless, the statement is true. We have a profit-centric web-based internet today, and USENET was most popular in the days before that was so.
The TFA makes the argument that USENET still is the only truly internet-wide forum, because it is stored on servers across the world and owned by none. With USENET, even if one server somewhere stops serving a newsgroup, it will carry on through other NNTP servers. If a web forum goes down, all the information on that site goes with it, likely forever. (Do you think Google will index and preserve LiveJournal or MySpace when they eventually go offline?)
Another reply mentions the functionality of USENET clients, which points out another way that you put yourself at the mercy of the individual website owner. You only get what they want to give you.
Now, I never really used newsgroups, because I found mailing lists for my interests instead. Like web forums today, these were also centralized and prone to disappear, although you still had control over your interface, filters, and archiving of old messages.
For me, if I look at my phone and it has two bars, I know the call won't even connect. In fact, if you dial a number, it will act like it's trying, suddenly show only one bar, then no bars, then tell me I have no service.
A few seconds later, it will find service again, and show me two bars.
I know someone who has been through several careers, from programming in the '60s to nursing today. He recently was approached to be promoted to manager over a 20-room OR, has the skills and experience required (both clinical and supervisory), passed management and staff interviews... and then HR realized he's never received a bachelors degree, and won't offer him the position now.
Although they still want him to continue performing the duties as interim manager until they can hire someone else. Since he's so capable, and all.
> I find it hard to credit them with technological innovation > when these ideas were being casually thrown around by a bunch > of random geeks on a mailing list.
And there wasn't any technological innovation involved with the Apollo program, either. I mean, Kennedy talked about us going to the moon ten years before we got there. And he was just a politician!
Sorry, I know it's a bad analogy, but the argument was bad to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, when playing Twister, sometimes that's exactly what you have to do. Better get that game taken off the shelf, because it isn't ergonomical.
Oh, and sometimes when playing board games, I move my token with my left hand. But, I'm right handed, and move my mouse with my right hand. Maybe I should make an effort to only ever move game tokens with my natural right hand.
Seriously, though, my hands rest on the keyboard wherever I put them, because keyboards aren't anything natural in the first place. When I'm playing a FPS, my left hand goes for WASD, with my middle finger resting on the W. When I'm typing, my hand rests on ASDF. Is it bad to be versitile?
Damn... One more rotten bill to pay. You'll have to send me your address for the check.
I mean, that post was okay, but not nearly worth the price. But since you said I have to, I guess I'll pay up...
When I was a kid, I lost a grand total of one minifig hand. (Subsequently, I melted the end the poor guy's arm so that there wasn't a gaping hole, but rather a stump. But anyway.)
Fast forward 15 years. My 4-year-old likes to re-enact that infamous scene, but just pulls one hand out of the arm of whomever he decides is Luke. And then promptly loses the hand. So next time he uses another minifig, removing its hand and losing it as well. Then he uses another minifig...
Nearly all of the dozens upon dozens of minifigs from my youth have become completely hand-less in the past year...
And to me, the way most MMORPGs are built makes it feel like a single-player game with 3-D chat. You can't make that kind of world be unique and persistant for everyone playing without a huge amount of content creation going on.
I personally much prefer games like BattleMaster, a web-based game that is entirely player-driven. The only content created by the game's author is the physical map, and some very rare interventions (one continent gets yearly NPC monster invasions as a sort of "reset", the rest remain nearly untouched). Players create and destroy just about everything, except for cities themselves. Nations are born and die on a regular basis, some people get into leadership positions and others are content to be "ordinary" characters who spend much of their time following orders. And they come back to play, turn after turn, day after day, year after year.
Don't blame me, I voted for Shwartshinagar!
Someone needs to write this one down. Next time we need an excuse for war, hand out passports to friendly people in country nearby, and get some restless locals to terrorize target country. Then when country responds, complain of atrocities against American citizens, and throw some bombs at target capital.
Why didn't we think of this before? Sounds more effective than making up stories about WMDs.
Note: I do not own any Confederate flags, do not have any particular "southern pride", and groups like the KKK disgust me. Now that that's out of the way...
Yes, and they were.
What makes any place a sovreign nation? If the Confederate States didn't qualify as one, I don't know what does. Our own sacred Declaration of Independence asserts the moral right of self governance, to dissolve the ties of government that does not represent and protect the interests of the people, whether that government is England or our own federal government.
Works even better if you carbonate it, seal it in an aluminum can, and leave it in the center console of a car parked in the sun on a 105 degree day in Arizona.
Think little gooey specks of Pepsi residue covering the entire car from the windshield to the back window. Not that I'd know from personal experience, or anything.
By walking down to the store and buying it? Our local supermarket had it, in the town I grew up in. (Can't say I've looked for it in the city I live in now.)
Agreed. I have one 36" high-def LCD in my house, and four old SDTVs (excluding computer monitors). Automatically, Blu-ray does me nothing for those SDTVs.
The LCD was pretty cheap, you can see banding in some color gradients and it's only 1080i. HDTV through the cable box using component looks pretty, and the regular programming is... tolerable. Our cheapo DVD player, when hooked up by any method to the LCD, provides an experience that is less than exciting. However, I also have a Vista desktop hooked up through HDMI, running 1366x768, and when you play a DVD through it I can barely tell the difference from HDTV programming straight from Comcast.
I was completely surprised. I'd watched DVDs on laptops and been unimpressed. I didn't think a standard DVD could look this good.
VHS to DVD was a no-brainer, once the cost came down. Even on my old TVs, the quality was better, it didn't degrade with repetitive playback (unless you count kids stepping on the discs), you didn't have to rewind/search the tape... For Blu-ray, I'd have to sink a bunch of money not just on a new player but on a whole entertainment setup in order to get any substantial value out of it. Someday, I'll be replacing my old CRTs with HDTVs anyway, with better quality than the one I already have. And then it might be worth picking up Blu-ray.
In the days before CDs and MP3s, "ripping" tunes was the process where people far more inventive than I would find the song data in an executable or data file of a game with cool music and convert it to a MOD format so you could listen to it with any old music player.
Folks using "rip" to mean encoding CDs to MP3 just seems lame by comparison.
Why will one referee in (insert sport here) give a team a foul for (insert rule violation here) when another referee does not?
Humanity introduces subjectivity into objective analysis all the time. Is that okay in popular masculine team sports and not okay in gymnastics?
For the record, my daughter is in gymastics and I don't consider it a sport. But I don't think it has anything to do with scoring or judging, my own criteria is that "sports" involve actively competing against an opposing player/team at the same time. I'm sure someone will come up with a way to say that's a stupid line to draw, too... Oh well.
Even local gymastics above a certain level (maybe 7?) has been using the new scoring system. Threw me for a loop the first time when, at one of my daughter's meets, some of the older kids were getting scores >10.
Or just set the disk on top of the #$!%^&?* desktop speakers I used to own, and let it do the job all by itself.
(stuff that is) missing with today's desktop computers
I used to think I was just sentimental about my old computers. I grew up on Amigas, and since college have been collecting all sorts of vintage systems. My kids, on the other hand, have only had PCs with Win95 or newer for their whole life. My oldest two have their own Vista laptops, the other three share a couple XP desktops.
Recently, I rebuilt a couple of neglected Amigas and my 11-year-old asked if he could buy one off e-bay with his birthday money, so I gave him one of my A500s. He will set aside his $1300 laptop to come play on the Amiga for hours at a time, booting up games off of my old floppies. His younger brothers stop playing on the Nintendo to gather around and watch. I doubt they are awed by the low-res 32-color graphics, even their DSes are far superior. Any I haven't even brought up the subject of BASIC, yet...
I considered building an FPGA module that contained all the necessary C64 or Apple hardware
FPGAs are certainly up to that task, since folks have managed to recreate an Amiga on an FPGA, complete with interfaces to more modern peripherals like flash storage and PS/2 keyboards and mice. Running them in such small quantities, it does cost a bit. On the flip side, how much longer will you be able to pick up a (working) C64 with a pile of (working) floppies for dirt cheap? I found mine for free, but I had to disassemble three systems to get one working pair of C64 and 1541, and the one box of disks I got were almost all worthless.
You don't agree that it's a lot simpler to save newsgroup messages than comments on a web-based forum?
I really wasn't trying to say that everyone knew Usenet was being archived from the start, or that it was designed that way. The design did, however, make it trivial to do (given the space) - a benefit that is not so easy to replicate with today's transient, independent, often proprietary "communities."
I know what you mean about space. Our family went all-out on our first HD (1990?) and got a spacious 210MB Quantum. For a time, we were on Fidonet (through a long distance BBS, on a 2400 baud modem - man, how did we survive?) and did save messages just like I do with emails today. Again, it was a standardized, universal system. We didn't archive all of Fidonet, we archived the interesting and relevant posts on our subscribed groups as they came through.
At least, right up until my dad got fed up with the idiots on the civil liberties board, deleted everything, and cancelled our node account.
If it weren't for my non-existant backup practices in college, I'd still have all my own stuff from ~1993-today, but because I was using the old Quantum as my storage drive when it crashed in 1998, I only have everything from then on. (Minus the conversations on the few web forums I frequent, some already gone, and my LJ.)
You could always hang on to messages locally, if they mattered to you. All Deja News/Google Groups did was make that available to everyone.
It's actually worse that we expect web forums to be persistent now, because it's an absurd expectation. I'd have to go through hoops to preserve replies and comments on my LiveJournal postings, for example.
but anyone can still buy usenet access [...]
Which just validates the view that USENET as it was - a free, decentralized, unowned group of universal forums - is dying out.
Regardless, the statement is true. We have a profit-centric web-based internet today, and USENET was most popular in the days before that was so.
The TFA makes the argument that USENET still is the only truly internet-wide forum, because it is stored on servers across the world and owned by none. With USENET, even if one server somewhere stops serving a newsgroup, it will carry on through other NNTP servers. If a web forum goes down, all the information on that site goes with it, likely forever. (Do you think Google will index and preserve LiveJournal or MySpace when they eventually go offline?)
Another reply mentions the functionality of USENET clients, which points out another way that you put yourself at the mercy of the individual website owner. You only get what they want to give you.
Now, I never really used newsgroups, because I found mailing lists for my interests instead. Like web forums today, these were also centralized and prone to disappear, although you still had control over your interface, filters, and archiving of old messages.
Probably a troll, but I'll bite.
For me, if I look at my phone and it has two bars, I know the call won't even connect. In fact, if you dial a number, it will act like it's trying, suddenly show only one bar, then no bars, then tell me I have no service.
A few seconds later, it will find service again, and show me two bars.
I know someone who has been through several careers, from programming in the '60s to nursing today. He recently was approached to be promoted to manager over a 20-room OR, has the skills and experience required (both clinical and supervisory), passed management and staff interviews... and then HR realized he's never received a bachelors degree, and won't offer him the position now.
Although they still want him to continue performing the duties as interim manager until they can hire someone else. Since he's so capable, and all.
No, that would be AT&T.
That's a syringe to draw blood from an existing vascular access line, which would have to be put in place using a needle.
> I find it hard to credit them with technological innovation
> when these ideas were being casually thrown around by a bunch
> of random geeks on a mailing list.
And there wasn't any technological innovation involved with the Apollo program, either. I mean, Kennedy talked about us going to the moon ten years before we got there. And he was just a politician!
Sorry, I know it's a bad analogy, but the argument was bad to begin with.
Through the roof?
Out of this world?