Yeah, somewhere on the Minecraft website Notch even admits he'd like to add more Terraria-like elements to Minecraft. I haven't played with Terraria yet, but the demo movie makes it look kinda boring, but I also admit I was never into Castlevania.
I have enough fun with Minecraft, and it's the first thing I've managed to get my wife addicted to since the Sims.
The way I've heard it put the best is: "Owe the bank a million dollars, and the bank owns you. Owe the bank a billion dollars, and you own the bank."
Add a few more orders of magnitude to the latter and that's pretty much our relationship with China at the moment.
A lot of the US finance "whizzes" in power at the moment actually want the value of the dollar to fall, because then we won't owe China as much "real value". But China has been stubbornly pegging their Yuan to the USD for some reason (awfully nice of them to help inflate our currency with their production). As the US market loses its importance relative to other emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, etc.) it might become possible for them to consider taking a loss on their US investments and allow the USD to go into freefall at their option.
Word. As a parent of 2, I wouldn't even really trust Nickelodeon or X Kids's Channel and especially not Disney to be in charge of programming for my children. I really like Google, but I'd still rather decide what content was important to expose my kids to, and be available to talk through events with them. So it's just as well that they haven't taken it on.
That said, you might have more luck with sites like Yahoo!, which does more hand-created search/directory content. Other than maybe the doodles, Google seems to only provide technical tools rather than actual content, and I respect that decision.
For younger kids, there's Starfall which has a bunch of interactive early education stuff.
If you really need to stick your kids on something so you can have some adult time to do taxes or have adult conversations or get drunk off your asses (:-P ) , just stick them on the children's section of Neflix or something, so at least you can choose and control the content. Have them do Magic Schoolbus or Liberty's Kids or something else, but the idea is that you do the programming. Your children's upbringing while they're young is one of the few things you do have control of in this life, so exercise that control while you have it.
I know that's not really anything like "the internet" that you want to expose your kids to safely, but I think "your safety is not guaranteed" is one of the basic fundamental rules that makes the internet what it is, and it's not really worthwhile trying to make it so. Maybe a better analogy is leaving your kid alone in a city, even if you drop them off in the toy section of the mall. You really want to keep them in your sight... you don't necessarily have to stand over their shoulders, but at least be aware of where they're wandering around to.
Finally, I wouldn't let them near any "kid-friendly MMO" or any kind of kid social site. I'm actually not even afraid of pedo poseurs, just other people's children. There are probably not much worse influences on your children than other people's children. If you know the other kids and their parents IRL and you can follow up on stuff that happens online then sure... but something about the anonymity of the internet just brings out the dicks in people and in kids doubly so.
Yeah, what a circus. Not even sure which ones are the clowns anymore. I kinda read/. so I can avoid this kind of story. Now I'm ashamed for having posted in one.
Search around for your prospective university's Linux User Group. They would have all the information about how easy it is to run Linux in their environment, whether it is officially supported or not.
http://www.beyondtheredline.net/demo.html is supposed to be a pretty good Battlestar Galactica -themed game based on the Freespace2 engine... it's even available in the Debian/Ubuntu repos so it's pretty easy to try.
I also liked Vendetta-Online back in the day, before they became more EVE-like and added crappy licensing requirements for the bigger ships. I'll have my space combat without pointless grinding, thank you. But it's worth a look.
Sadly, haven't seen anything with true 6DoF physics and gravity, except for some of the more hardcore simulations like Orbiter. Quite a bit of a learning curve, and there are a lot of addons (many of them incompatible with each other) that you have to fuss with to make it look pretty and have sound effects, but it's quite rewarding (and unfortunately Win32 only). There's a space combat addon somewhere, but I haven't played with it yet.
Hmm, I don't know, I just remember reading about merging being problematic when I was trying to do that some time ago. Of course I'm just using CentOS for work most of the time, so it'll be even longer before I see it.
What doesn't work with LVM, unfortunately, is using snapshots that allow you to "roll forward" if the system updates work out all right and you want to accept the updates into your main volume:-/
Meh, roughly half the people think the poor people are the problem, and rich people are the solution. So they build walls and closed communities and security and defense systems to keep the poor people out, and hopefully they'll go off and die or something.
The other half also think the poor people are the problem, and work to try to make them less poor through improving public education and social services or something.
But obviously neither side is really ever going to win since their approach counters the other side's goal, and when they succeed they tend to bolster the other side's population. Such is the balance of democracy.
... Because Mrs. Manners will probably give him stupid advice, and even Lifehacker would probably give stupid and marginally dangerous advice.
I think he's writing to Slashdot because he wants a technical solution that still lets him maintain some modicum of good karma (Slashdot being one of the few sites that has a concept of karma).
Heh, strange, I'm really surprised no one's suggested that you're morally obligated to turn yourself in to the FBI for illegally invading other people's privacy... you're not allowed to open other people's mail even if it is addressed to you:-P
So legally, the safest thing to do is just filter/delete the thing as soon as you realize it's not for you.
That said, I suspect this could become a new SPAM technique, if it isn't already.
But of course, the legal or even the safe thing to do isn't always the right thing to do, and you want to be a good samaritan and help people out, even if they aren't your neighbors. That's good! The world could use more people like you, even if some people take advantage of it. If it's straightforward, then go ahead and keep on spending your time solving other people's problems, as long as you can stay out of trouble. Karma++ . Just remember to CYA and be ready to accept the worst if something bad comes of it.
My university uses the silly initials+serial number scheme to create email addresses, so I sometimes get email for university people that I will attempt to forward properly, just as some kind of alumni courtesy.
But beyond that, yeah, filters. If you can configure your filters to bounce/reject incoming mail in such a way that doesn't acknowledge that there's a human reading it, then sure, use that to try to alert the company that there's a problem (but beware of SPAM e-mail address harvesters that are using social engineering to verify if an email address has an actual human reading it - that's why you should never respond to any kind of SPAM, but just filter & delete it silently).
Yeah, surprised Google didn't manage to get anything with "8008" in it. Maybe in IPv4space they already spent too much money buying 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 from L3 that they didn't want to spring extra for 8.0.0.8 as well.
Heh, the only way I've ever been able to tolerate having to use any version of Sharepoint is to open a document library in IE, and then click on some dropdown to change it to explorer view, and then create and right click on a folder and select explore in a new window. Then it opens up in File Explorer, where I bookmark/favorite it so I don't have to deal with the atrocious "information blackhole" Sharepoint web interface, and I can easily drag / drop / delete entire folders using the File Explorer interface, and the URLs I send to coworkers are a lot more sane-looking and consistent. (At least in older versions, Sharepoint URLs would seldom get the user to where they wanted to go (way to break the internet there!), leading to long entertaining prose as people attempted to describe how to "navigate" to some random place in Sharepoint.)
And maybe the search works better now, but I often couldn't find files amidst all the junk that shows up, even if I knew and specified their filenames.
Makes it much easier to use a local revision control thing too, I've lost work a few times trying to use Sharepoint's revision tracker doodad.
There was actually an article somewhere saying that politically it's better for a county to spend money on prisons rather than schools, because prisons provide better jobs for prison contractors, and brings in more state funding. So it's actually financially advantageous for a county to let schools flounder so the deadbeat students become inmates and drive up the high-paying prison jobs.
... heh, ever since I took the plunge and bought an ATi Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder, purely on the strength of their promise to work with open source driver team. While that card did get decent support from the GATOS team at the time, my card was kinda the cutoff point for their future closed and open source driver efforts.
Anyway, nowadays I mostly just pine for that alternate universe where Intel bought ATi instead, in which we'd be rid of crappy Intel IGP hardware, but finally have had good open source drivers for ATi hardware written by Intel... and maybe have had AMD and nVidia collaborating on some sort of ION-like platform that didn't have the graphics bus castrated like Intel did to ION2. Things could have been sweet:-P
I believe the climate change deniers logic goes something like this:
5) ?????
5) Blame the climate scientists for not making a big enough deal about it... actually, obscuring the truth by lying about it and causing a whole lot of angsty doubt about the reliability of various measurements and how they have unequivocally supported the environment all along.
Yeah, pretty much... you pay them some money so they're not so desperate as to rob you of your livelihood. If we give them enough resources, they should be able to afford to live comfortably and quietly innovate to themselves in Redmond without getting in anyone's way. At least that's how the theory goes:-P
I have one relatively cheap Android smartphone (HTC Slide), which I pretty much install a minimum of useful apps upon.
My second device is a Viewsonic G-Tablet (running TnT-Lite v4), which is a cheap (~$320 these days) but high-spec device. I use it for "playing" with apps and flash sites (some of them shady). Its main purpose is to let me to play with high-end apps and games while keeping me from doing anything too dangerous with my phone:-P
Custom OS updates come out for the latter quite often, so I'm usually flattening it and reinstalling it relatively often anyway. So as long as the malware isn't breaking into my gmail account, I'm mostly OK:-P
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it /is/ a refreshing break from Sarah Palin coverage :-P
So... are there any good programs Facebook users can use to spider their own accounts to make plots of degrees of separation from famous people?
I'm also kinda interested in seeing some stuff like what ircstats used to generate: http://humdi.net/~vergo/a-radio/ (example)
Still waiting for all this "new tech" to catch up to where we where a decade or so ago...
Yeah, somewhere on the Minecraft website Notch even admits he'd like to add more Terraria-like elements to Minecraft. I haven't played with Terraria yet, but the demo movie makes it look kinda boring, but I also admit I was never into Castlevania.
I have enough fun with Minecraft, and it's the first thing I've managed to get my wife addicted to since the Sims.
Anyway, I shall now troll you with obligatory giant golden wang: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2680-Minecraft
The way I've heard it put the best is: "Owe the bank a million dollars, and the bank owns you. Owe the bank a billion dollars, and you own the bank."
Add a few more orders of magnitude to the latter and that's pretty much our relationship with China at the moment.
A lot of the US finance "whizzes" in power at the moment actually want the value of the dollar to fall, because then we won't owe China as much "real value". But China has been stubbornly pegging their Yuan to the USD for some reason (awfully nice of them to help inflate our currency with their production). As the US market loses its importance relative to other emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, etc.) it might become possible for them to consider taking a loss on their US investments and allow the USD to go into freefall at their option.
Word. As a parent of 2, I wouldn't even really trust Nickelodeon or X Kids's Channel and especially not Disney to be in charge of programming for my children. I really like Google, but I'd still rather decide what content was important to expose my kids to, and be available to talk through events with them. So it's just as well that they haven't taken it on.
That said, you might have more luck with sites like Yahoo!, which does more hand-created search/directory content. Other than maybe the doodles, Google seems to only provide technical tools rather than actual content, and I respect that decision.
For younger kids, there's Starfall which has a bunch of interactive early education stuff.
If you really need to stick your kids on something so you can have some adult time to do taxes or have adult conversations or get drunk off your asses ( :-P ) , just stick them on the children's section of Neflix or something, so at least you can choose and control the content. Have them do Magic Schoolbus or Liberty's Kids or something else, but the idea is that you do the programming. Your children's upbringing while they're young is one of the few things you do have control of in this life, so exercise that control while you have it.
I know that's not really anything like "the internet" that you want to expose your kids to safely, but I think "your safety is not guaranteed" is one of the basic fundamental rules that makes the internet what it is, and it's not really worthwhile trying to make it so. Maybe a better analogy is leaving your kid alone in a city, even if you drop them off in the toy section of the mall. You really want to keep them in your sight... you don't necessarily have to stand over their shoulders, but at least be aware of where they're wandering around to.
Finally, I wouldn't let them near any "kid-friendly MMO" or any kind of kid social site. I'm actually not even afraid of pedo poseurs, just other people's children. There are probably not much worse influences on your children than other people's children. If you know the other kids and their parents IRL and you can follow up on stuff that happens online then sure... but something about the anonymity of the internet just brings out the dicks in people and in kids doubly so.
Yeah, what a circus. Not even sure which ones are the clowns anymore. I kinda read /. so I can avoid this kind of story. Now I'm ashamed for having posted in one.
Just go watch / friend http://nixiepixel.com/ while you're waiting. And maybe also http://watchtheguild.com/ while you're at it, though Felicia Day is not *quite* as nerdcore.
Search around for your prospective university's Linux User Group. They would have all the information about how easy it is to run Linux in their environment, whether it is officially supported or not.
http://www.beyondtheredline.net/demo.html is supposed to be a pretty good Battlestar Galactica -themed game based on the Freespace2 engine... it's even available in the Debian/Ubuntu repos so it's pretty easy to try.
I also liked Vendetta-Online back in the day, before they became more EVE-like and added crappy licensing requirements for the bigger ships. I'll have my space combat without pointless grinding, thank you. But it's worth a look.
Sadly, haven't seen anything with true 6DoF physics and gravity, except for some of the more hardcore simulations like Orbiter. Quite a bit of a learning curve, and there are a lot of addons (many of them incompatible with each other) that you have to fuss with to make it look pretty and have sound effects, but it's quite rewarding (and unfortunately Win32 only). There's a space combat addon somewhere, but I haven't played with it yet.
Hmm, I don't know, I just remember reading about merging being problematic when I was trying to do that some time ago. Of course I'm just using CentOS for work most of the time, so it'll be even longer before I see it.
http://www.jonnor.com/2010/02/lvm-snapshot-merging-avaliable/
Sure, you can sort of do that with LVM now.
What doesn't work with LVM, unfortunately, is using snapshots that allow you to "roll forward" if the system updates work out all right and you want to accept the updates into your main volume :-/
Meh, roughly half the people think the poor people are the problem, and rich people are the solution. So they build walls and closed communities and security and defense systems to keep the poor people out, and hopefully they'll go off and die or something.
The other half also think the poor people are the problem, and work to try to make them less poor through improving public education and social services or something.
But obviously neither side is really ever going to win since their approach counters the other side's goal, and when they succeed they tend to bolster the other side's population. Such is the balance of democracy.
... Because Mrs. Manners will probably give him stupid advice, and even Lifehacker would probably give stupid and marginally dangerous advice.
I think he's writing to Slashdot because he wants a technical solution that still lets him maintain some modicum of good karma (Slashdot being one of the few sites that has a concept of karma).
Heh, strange, I'm really surprised no one's suggested that you're morally obligated to turn yourself in to the FBI for illegally invading other people's privacy... you're not allowed to open other people's mail even if it is addressed to you :-P
So legally, the safest thing to do is just filter/delete the thing as soon as you realize it's not for you.
That said, I suspect this could become a new SPAM technique, if it isn't already.
But of course, the legal or even the safe thing to do isn't always the right thing to do, and you want to be a good samaritan and help people out, even if they aren't your neighbors. That's good! The world could use more people like you, even if some people take advantage of it. If it's straightforward, then go ahead and keep on spending your time solving other people's problems, as long as you can stay out of trouble. Karma++ . Just remember to CYA and be ready to accept the worst if something bad comes of it.
My university uses the silly initials+serial number scheme to create email addresses, so I sometimes get email for university people that I will attempt to forward properly, just as some kind of alumni courtesy.
But beyond that, yeah, filters. If you can configure your filters to bounce/reject incoming mail in such a way that doesn't acknowledge that there's a human reading it, then sure, use that to try to alert the company that there's a problem (but beware of SPAM e-mail address harvesters that are using social engineering to verify if an email address has an actual human reading it - that's why you should never respond to any kind of SPAM, but just filter & delete it silently).
Yeah, surprised Google didn't manage to get anything with "8008" in it. Maybe in IPv4space they already spent too much money buying 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 from L3 that they didn't want to spring extra for 8.0.0.8 as well.
Heh, the only way I've ever been able to tolerate having to use any version of Sharepoint is to open a document library in IE, and then click on some dropdown to change it to explorer view, and then create and right click on a folder and select explore in a new window. Then it opens up in File Explorer, where I bookmark/favorite it so I don't have to deal with the atrocious "information blackhole" Sharepoint web interface, and I can easily drag / drop / delete entire folders using the File Explorer interface, and the URLs I send to coworkers are a lot more sane-looking and consistent. (At least in older versions, Sharepoint URLs would seldom get the user to where they wanted to go (way to break the internet there!), leading to long entertaining prose as people attempted to describe how to "navigate" to some random place in Sharepoint.)
And maybe the search works better now, but I often couldn't find files amidst all the junk that shows up, even if I knew and specified their filenames.
Makes it much easier to use a local revision control thing too, I've lost work a few times trying to use Sharepoint's revision tracker doodad.
It's hardly a one way proposition...
"I love my fucking job and my job loves fucking me."
There was actually an article somewhere saying that politically it's better for a county to spend money on prisons rather than schools, because prisons provide better jobs for prison contractors, and brings in more state funding. So it's actually financially advantageous for a county to let schools flounder so the deadbeat students become inmates and drive up the high-paying prison jobs.
Just sayin.
... heh, ever since I took the plunge and bought an ATi Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder, purely on the strength of their promise to work with open source driver team. While that card did get decent support from the GATOS team at the time, my card was kinda the cutoff point for their future closed and open source driver efforts.
Anyway, nowadays I mostly just pine for that alternate universe where Intel bought ATi instead, in which we'd be rid of crappy Intel IGP hardware, but finally have had good open source drivers for ATi hardware written by Intel... and maybe have had AMD and nVidia collaborating on some sort of ION-like platform that didn't have the graphics bus castrated like Intel did to ION2. Things could have been sweet :-P
I believe the climate change deniers logic goes something like this:
5) Blame the climate scientists for not making a big enough deal about it... actually, obscuring the truth by lying about it and causing a whole lot of angsty doubt about the reliability of various measurements and how they have unequivocally supported the environment all along.
Yeah, pretty much... you pay them some money so they're not so desperate as to rob you of your livelihood. If we give them enough resources, they should be able to afford to live comfortably and quietly innovate to themselves in Redmond without getting in anyone's way. At least that's how the theory goes :-P
Hmm, now I'm left wondering what UID scheme Fuduntu uses.
Sorry, even 256-bit is passé
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe
... but if Google's founders can't fly to Tahiti to watch an astronomical event, then who can?
I have one relatively cheap Android smartphone (HTC Slide), which I pretty much install a minimum of useful apps upon.
My second device is a Viewsonic G-Tablet (running TnT-Lite v4), which is a cheap (~$320 these days) but high-spec device. I use it for "playing" with apps and flash sites (some of them shady). Its main purpose is to let me to play with high-end apps and games while keeping me from doing anything too dangerous with my phone :-P
Custom OS updates come out for the latter quite often, so I'm usually flattening it and reinstalling it relatively often anyway. So as long as the malware isn't breaking into my gmail account, I'm mostly OK :-P
Explain to me how you swat a fly or, in an emergency situation, rip out a page to start a fire with an E-reader?
1: turn off the lights, flies will be attracted to the warm E-reader glow (apparently the editor doesn't use an e-ink-based device). BAM!
2: Overdrive the LED flash on your smartphone, or simply short the lithium battery. FOOSH!