When my wife and I made travel arrangements for our honeymoon, we went to a travel agent. The advice and experience they could provide was more than worth any extra expense (which was minimal in our case). Neither of us had ever been to our destination, so we didn't know anything about what areas to stay in (or avoid), what the good (and bad) hotels were, etc.
When we're traveling for business or to a place we're familiar with, we almost always book online, but for a pleasure trip to an unfamiliar place, real live travel agents are invaluable!
I wholeheartedly agree! Right up until Dooku met Palpatine at the end, I was hoping he really was fighting against the Sith.
In fact, I was really hoping/expecting that he'd be killed at the end, and his dying words would be, "You've just destroyed the only force in the galaxy that could have stopped the Sith...."
I love the idea of Palpatine manipulating his enemies into destroying eachother so that he could seize control. Kind of nihilistic, I know, but it lays a far richer foundation for Episode 3.
Ah! That explains why I haven't seen it. On weekends I'm usually out in the yard adding blowers to my 4x4 huntin' truck to get it ready for the mud races on Saturday night.;-)
Well, not Farscape's cancellation in a specific, John Edwards kind of way [sic], but Sci-Fi's decline in a general, Hari Seldon kind of way.
My theory for the past 10 years has been that there is an inevitable tendency for any given TV network or channel to become exactly like all the others. New, focused channels may pop up, or old ones may refocus, but those are momentary spikes, and the general direction will remain unchanged.
Remember when MTV actually had music? Or when VH1 did? Now they both mostly have crappy reality shows and cheesy documentaries.
Remember when TNN was The Nashville Network? Even if you weren't a country fan, you had to respect the attention they gave to their target demographic, with "Dukes of Hazzard" and "Dallas" marathons, NASCAR, outdoor shows, and the Grand Ol' Opry. The first bad sign was when they started showing Star Trek. Nashville? Huh? Now they're the "National Network," and last time I checked there were no fishing shows or overalls in sight.
CNN used to be all news; now it's mostly talk shows that are vaguely news-related. Fox and WB used to be hip and edgy, and now they could give CBS a strong challenge for the snooze market most nights. Heck, even the Weather Channel has shows now!
And soon we'll all pine for the days when Sci-Fi actually had science fiction. I'll go out on a limb and predict that they'll soon change their name to "SF," then shortly thereafter start pretending that it stands for something completely different, like -- I don't know -- "Serious Favorites: The Best Shows Everybody Likes!"
When we were told we'd have 500 channels of programming, nobody ever bothered to mention that they'd all be showing reruns of Law & Order and Friends.
According to a friend's chemistry professor, diamonds are a rip-off anyway. The crystaline structure of the carbon atoms in diamonds isn't the most stable form of carbon. Apparently, diamonds aren't really "forever," they're only for a few billion years. Now graphite, on the other hand, now that's forever! (Or at least a lot closer!)
So buy her some pencil lead, and maybe one of those cool, high-dollar mechanical pencils to go with it!
(Disclaimer: I assume no responsibility for any bodily harm that may result from following this advice. I, myself, am happily married, and if you tell my wife I said this, I'll deny it.)
Suppose I'm on a cable modem, and although I'd never do anything illegal or immoral with my connection, my neighbor down the street has multiple Napster clones running 24/7.
If the MPAA or RIAA decides they want to DDoS him for sharing their material, it's darn sure going to impact my EverQuest and Warcraft III connections (as well as whatever more "legitimate" uses I may be putting my bandwidth to).
Will non-infringers who suffer such collateral damage have any recourse against the companies or trade groups who are "protecting their rights"?
Hmm...no cancelled checks in my account made out to any Congressmen, so I somehow doubt it.
The biggest danger isn't that he'll get grounded by the FAA before his launch and then whine about it.
The biggest danger in that regard is that he'll crash and burn in a big, dramatic fireball. Following that, there'll be the inevitable lawsuits and Congressional hearings, followed by a bevy of completely unnecessary regulations and legislation aimed at "protecting amateur rocketeers" by basically making it illegal to do private space launches.
They'd essentially make the non-technical stuff so difficult that private space exploration would die on the launchpad.
Of course, that would also have the effect of protecting the government's own near-monopoly on the lucrative satellite launch business, but that's a different issue.
All of the modeling/render/animation programs have different strengths, so aside from personal preference, it depends a great deal on exactly what you want to do.
Also several of the big name products have started offering free trial editions, which would be a great way to get a feel for them. Maya has one, and I know there have been others, although I don't know which are still available.
The program that I use at home is trueSpace. It's very robust for the price ($595 for the latest), which might make it a good solution for a project on a budget, especially considering the low-end pricing on the older versions. For instance, tS3 is only $99, and it was pretty good.
I have a great deal of respect for the military, but if using games as a recruiting tool doesn't qualify them as political speech, then what would?
If a candidate released a game that revolved around disrupting protests by groups campaigning again him, would that do it? Might be kind of a fun game. Like GTA3, except with special interest groups....
So the government can use games for recruiting, but apparently some Luddites still think they can't be used for communicating an opiniong?
One example that comes to mind is healing classes. I started a cleric last week, and from a role-playing perspective, I wanted him to be a pacifist. No can-do, there. You've gotta kill countless small animals to get your first heal spell.
Wouldn't it make sense for classes like clerics to get some kind of experience for what they really do, like healing people?
Heh heh. "A whole lot bigger" being defined as "approximately 75% larger" in this case.;-)
The particular file I was thinking of is a 250 page instruction manual with lots of tables and screenshots, and to be honest I think it usually tops out at around 30 MB. Hardly typical of what most users would have in Word, not to mention send as email attachments, but probably not too terribly unusual for Word power users. (Of which I am not one, I just help proofread the thing once or twice a year.)
I'm planning on using Open Office on my home computer. I need a suite that will talk to MS Office at work, but I can't afford (or, more precisely, am unwilling) to spend $150+ on something that I'll use only occassionally for basic stuff.
Yet another option would be to attach the installer, too, and suggest that they use Open Office instead of MS Office. I love the irony of spreading Open Office like it was an Outlook worm!
Heck, a 50 MB installer isn't a whole lot bigger than some Word documents I've seen!
Alternatively, just put a link with download instructions in the body of the email message.
(I'll admit up front that I'm not a parent, nor do I play one on TV, so let's just get that out of the way.)
I think if you zoom out a little, the big picture is even more disturbing. As a society, we've progressed from the "War on Drugs" with all the abuses of power and degradation of rights that came with it [Disclaimer: I do not intend to present a moral verdict pro or con drugs in this post. It's just an example to illustrate by point.] to what you might call the "War for Children."
In the name of this war, as in the Drug War (and, I suppose, nearly every other war of any kind in history), we as a people have been willing to accept all sorts of infringements on our rights, in lots of areas that only tangentially touch on children or their well-being.
Think about how many times you've heard a politician, talking head, special interest rep, or other pundit say we have to do something "for the children" or "to protect our children." How many times have we been told that we "owe it to our children"?
Now, naturally, people do this because it works. Their children are the most precious things in the world to most people, and most parents would sacrifice anything for their childrens welfare. That is good and noble. What is disturbing is that our society has progressed (regressed?) to the point that it is willing to sacrifice rights that belong to all of us (including our children) in the interest of protecting "our" children collectively.
This is the result of decades of public figures engaging in demagoguery using children the same way welfare, Social Security, the Second Amendment, and religion have been used. I believe that doing so trivializes children, engenders an excessive feeling of entitlement in them, and exposes them to the insidious dangers of being abused as symbols.
And isn't abuse in all its various forms what we really want to prevent?
Perhaps the major problem with Asimov's Psychohistory as presented in the original Foundation Trilogy is that the field of chaos theory hadn't been well-developed yet, although I think he dealt with this in the later books of the series, if I recall.
The real problem with almost any complex simulation like this is extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. It's usually enough to say that 78.4% of the population hold one opinion, but if the real number is 78.43141592...% and you use 78.4 instead, after running years and years of calculation the simulation will likely have diverged significantly from reality. The effect will be even more pronounced with rounding and estimation errors in multiple places.
Chaos theory (and math/statistics in general) is very good at predicting what types of general behavior a system will exhibit, but can almost never predict exactly what the behavior will be.
No, what they're really saying is that they don't think one PS3 will be enough. Imagine the money if all 12 million users bought three or four of them!
"Sure, kid, you can play Final Fantasy 17 on our system...but ya gotta have five PS3's all clustered to do it! Mwah ha ha ha!"
What a great motto: Playstation 3 -- Because one console just isn't enough!
No, the influence of money over politics really is not the cause at all. It's really just another symptom.
The real cause is the influence of the government over our lives. In a situation where a single entity has massive and sometimes fine-grained influence over nearly every aspect of the way you run your life or business, it is in your best interest to do whatever it takes to get that entity on your side. If money is all it takes, then that's a comparatively small price to pay.
Ask business owners in some places whether the "insurance" dues they pay to certain organizations are worth it. It's a similar situation with governments. Pre-anti-trust-trial, Microsoft was politically agnostic. They didn't donate much to candidates, groups, or parties at all, and they hardly spent anything on lobbying efforts. And they were getting pounded. Since they started sending money to Washington, and gotten a few politicians on their side, their treatment has improved tremendously. Coincidence?
Is there some kind of incredible controller for the Xbox that is only available in Japan?
In fact, there is...maybe. The standard Japanese controller is considerably smaller (and therefore more comfortable-looking) than the US controller, and it features a different (arguably better) button layout.
Personally, I don't think the standard American controller is all that bad, and I'm not convinced the Japanese controller is much of an improvement anyway. The grass is always greener....
I really don't see eBooks replacing real books anytime soon. The reason? Books are simply Good Enough. I think this is a concept that lots of technologists (myself included) tend to forget. It's not always about being able to do more, in fact it seldom really is. In most cases, it's about being able to do the job at hand Good Enough, and sometimes little more.
Take the toaster, since it's the perennial example of futuristic wired appliances. Sure, you could hook your toaster up to the home network so that your alarm clock starts it, then it goes out to the Internet to check the relative humidity so it knows the precise settings to use for your personal toast preferences.
Would that be cool? Heck yeah!!! Will we ever see them in large numbers of kitchens? Almost certainly not. Why? Because toasters, as they are now, are Good Enough at what they do for most people.
Books are the same way. Granted, for information stores like dictionaries or encyclopedias, searchable electronic versions are the only way to go, but for normal use and basic recreation, plain old paper books are Good Enough for 99.9% of the people in the world. Sure, there's some room for improvement in the format, but it is Good Enough at its basic function that most improvements would only be ancillary at best.
By and large, one square beige box is as good as another to average users. As far as the hardware goes, most users will experience little difference between Dells or Gateways or Compaqs or Mom-and-Pops, so the only difference to them is price, which tends to qualify computers as commodity items. As long as it'll do what they want, they don't care who makes it or what's in it.
In fact, the whole concept of a "computer user" is a little misleading here. A far more appropriate term would be "computer consumer." These are people who are never going to push their hardware to the limits, and who use all the same apps as all the other consumers (email, web, office suite, solitaire, etc.) just like TV viewers watch all the same shows as everyone else.
I'm a computer user. I program, assemble my own systems, play high-end games, tweak settings, and much more. My wife, mother, father, and in-laws are computer consumers. They use email, the web, WordPerfect, and would faint if they had to set jumpers on their motherboard.
In a commodity-like market such as this, the only way to achieve any kind of differentiation is with design. Witness the advent of multi-colored Dells, Gateways, and Compaqs. LCDs are shipping with lots of home systems not because they're better for the price or because people really need them, but because they're different.
All the systems in Apple's main product line have always been aimed at computer consumers, which is why design has been so important for them. We tend to tease and talk down to them, but they are 80% of the computer market, and if I were in that group, I'd find all of the Macs pretty tempting.
And it's even more plausible that they would approach a disaffected, unhappy person regardless of faith -- who'd been working there for several years, feeling unappreciated the whole time -- and say, "Hey, here's a few ten thousand dollars tax free...we'll pay you and you get to screw your company!"
And it's even more plausible that somebody just made this crap up, and the Washington Post bit on it like a hungry trout....
"I saw it on the Internet, it must be true. Right, dad?"
"Not necessarily, son, but I saw it printed on pieces of a dead tree, so that makes it true for sure!"
How would it work in practice? Just take a look at the internet. Next to zero regulation, backbones that in many areas are fixed resources, heavy commercialization, yet there are unlimited opportunities for individuals, non-profits, and other noncommercial organizations.
The difference here is that the Internet can grow. Anybody with enough capital can lay down another backbone. The simple act of dialing up with a modem essentially expands the network. Somebody with a CB talking to his buddy doesn't add an additional frequency, and now matter how much money a company has, they can't expand the electromagnetic spectrum.
The real estate analogy is more apt, but it should be pointed out that the federal government owns massive amounts of land, especially in western states.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently hard enough that you still only got the second post....
When we're traveling for business or to a place we're familiar with, we almost always book online, but for a pleasure trip to an unfamiliar place, real live travel agents are invaluable!
In fact, I was really hoping/expecting that he'd be killed at the end, and his dying words would be, "You've just destroyed the only force in the galaxy that could have stopped the Sith...."
I love the idea of Palpatine manipulating his enemies into destroying eachother so that he could seize control. Kind of nihilistic, I know, but it lays a far richer foundation for Episode 3.
Ah! That explains why I haven't seen it. On weekends I'm usually out in the yard adding blowers to my 4x4 huntin' truck to get it ready for the mud races on Saturday night. ;-)
My theory for the past 10 years has been that there is an inevitable tendency for any given TV network or channel to become exactly like all the others. New, focused channels may pop up, or old ones may refocus, but those are momentary spikes, and the general direction will remain unchanged.
Remember when MTV actually had music? Or when VH1 did? Now they both mostly have crappy reality shows and cheesy documentaries.
Remember when TNN was The Nashville Network? Even if you weren't a country fan, you had to respect the attention they gave to their target demographic, with "Dukes of Hazzard" and "Dallas" marathons, NASCAR, outdoor shows, and the Grand Ol' Opry. The first bad sign was when they started showing Star Trek. Nashville? Huh? Now they're the "National Network," and last time I checked there were no fishing shows or overalls in sight.
CNN used to be all news; now it's mostly talk shows that are vaguely news-related. Fox and WB used to be hip and edgy, and now they could give CBS a strong challenge for the snooze market most nights. Heck, even the Weather Channel has shows now!
And soon we'll all pine for the days when Sci-Fi actually had science fiction. I'll go out on a limb and predict that they'll soon change their name to "SF," then shortly thereafter start pretending that it stands for something completely different, like -- I don't know -- "Serious Favorites: The Best Shows Everybody Likes!"
When we were told we'd have 500 channels of programming, nobody ever bothered to mention that they'd all be showing reruns of Law & Order and Friends.
According to a friend's chemistry professor, diamonds are a rip-off anyway. The crystaline structure of the carbon atoms in diamonds isn't the most stable form of carbon. Apparently, diamonds aren't really "forever," they're only for a few billion years. Now graphite, on the other hand, now that's forever! (Or at least a lot closer!)
So buy her some pencil lead, and maybe one of those cool, high-dollar mechanical pencils to go with it!
(Disclaimer: I assume no responsibility for any bodily harm that may result from following this advice. I, myself, am happily married, and if you tell my wife I said this, I'll deny it.)
If the MPAA or RIAA decides they want to DDoS him for sharing their material, it's darn sure going to impact my EverQuest and Warcraft III connections (as well as whatever more "legitimate" uses I may be putting my bandwidth to).
Will non-infringers who suffer such collateral damage have any recourse against the companies or trade groups who are "protecting their rights"?
Hmm...no cancelled checks in my account made out to any Congressmen, so I somehow doubt it.
After the attacks on NYC and Washington, it seems a lot of companies started questioning the wisdom of having large offices in high-profile locations.
Plus you get the added benefits of living in a less crowded area (for now, anyway).
The biggest danger in that regard is that he'll crash and burn in a big, dramatic fireball. Following that, there'll be the inevitable lawsuits and Congressional hearings, followed by a bevy of completely unnecessary regulations and legislation aimed at "protecting amateur rocketeers" by basically making it illegal to do private space launches.
They'd essentially make the non-technical stuff so difficult that private space exploration would die on the launchpad.
Of course, that would also have the effect of protecting the government's own near-monopoly on the lucrative satellite launch business, but that's a different issue.
Also several of the big name products have started offering free trial editions, which would be a great way to get a feel for them. Maya has one, and I know there have been others, although I don't know which are still available.
The program that I use at home is trueSpace. It's very robust for the price ($595 for the latest), which might make it a good solution for a project on a budget, especially considering the low-end pricing on the older versions. For instance, tS3 is only $99, and it was pretty good.
I have a great deal of respect for the military, but if using games as a recruiting tool doesn't qualify them as political speech, then what would?
If a candidate released a game that revolved around disrupting protests by groups campaigning again him, would that do it? Might be kind of a fun game. Like GTA3, except with special interest groups....
So the government can use games for recruiting, but apparently some Luddites still think they can't be used for communicating an opiniong?
Yeah, that makes sense....
One example that comes to mind is healing classes. I started a cleric last week, and from a role-playing perspective, I wanted him to be a pacifist. No can-do, there. You've gotta kill countless small animals to get your first heal spell.
Wouldn't it make sense for classes like clerics to get some kind of experience for what they really do, like healing people?
Heh heh. "A whole lot bigger" being defined as "approximately 75% larger" in this case. ;-)
The particular file I was thinking of is a 250 page instruction manual with lots of tables and screenshots, and to be honest I think it usually tops out at around 30 MB. Hardly typical of what most users would have in Word, not to mention send as email attachments, but probably not too terribly unusual for Word power users. (Of which I am not one, I just help proofread the thing once or twice a year.)
I'm planning on using Open Office on my home computer. I need a suite that will talk to MS Office at work, but I can't afford (or, more precisely, am unwilling) to spend $150+ on something that I'll use only occassionally for basic stuff.
Yet another option would be to attach the installer, too, and suggest that they use Open Office instead of MS Office. I love the irony of spreading Open Office like it was an Outlook worm!
Heck, a 50 MB installer isn't a whole lot bigger than some Word documents I've seen!
Alternatively, just put a link with download instructions in the body of the email message.
I think if you zoom out a little, the big picture is even more disturbing. As a society, we've progressed from the "War on Drugs" with all the abuses of power and degradation of rights that came with it [Disclaimer: I do not intend to present a moral verdict pro or con drugs in this post. It's just an example to illustrate by point.] to what you might call the "War for Children."
In the name of this war, as in the Drug War (and, I suppose, nearly every other war of any kind in history), we as a people have been willing to accept all sorts of infringements on our rights, in lots of areas that only tangentially touch on children or their well-being.
Think about how many times you've heard a politician, talking head, special interest rep, or other pundit say we have to do something "for the children" or "to protect our children." How many times have we been told that we "owe it to our children"?
Now, naturally, people do this because it works. Their children are the most precious things in the world to most people, and most parents would sacrifice anything for their childrens welfare. That is good and noble. What is disturbing is that our society has progressed (regressed?) to the point that it is willing to sacrifice rights that belong to all of us (including our children) in the interest of protecting "our" children collectively.
This is the result of decades of public figures engaging in demagoguery using children the same way welfare, Social Security, the Second Amendment, and religion have been used. I believe that doing so trivializes children, engenders an excessive feeling of entitlement in them, and exposes them to the insidious dangers of being abused as symbols.
And isn't abuse in all its various forms what we really want to prevent?
Perhaps the major problem with Asimov's Psychohistory as presented in the original Foundation Trilogy is that the field of chaos theory hadn't been well-developed yet, although I think he dealt with this in the later books of the series, if I recall. The real problem with almost any complex simulation like this is extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. It's usually enough to say that 78.4% of the population hold one opinion, but if the real number is 78.43141592...% and you use 78.4 instead, after running years and years of calculation the simulation will likely have diverged significantly from reality. The effect will be even more pronounced with rounding and estimation errors in multiple places. Chaos theory (and math/statistics in general) is very good at predicting what types of general behavior a system will exhibit, but can almost never predict exactly what the behavior will be.
Obviously what we need are lots of blind shoppers who can't see the sticker!
Of course, why a blind person (presumably with more sensitive hearing) would choose to listen to Celine Dion is beyond me.
"Sure, kid, you can play Final Fantasy 17 on our system...but ya gotta have five PS3's all clustered to do it! Mwah ha ha ha!"
What a great motto: Playstation 3 -- Because one console just isn't enough!
The real cause is the influence of the government over our lives. In a situation where a single entity has massive and sometimes fine-grained influence over nearly every aspect of the way you run your life or business, it is in your best interest to do whatever it takes to get that entity on your side. If money is all it takes, then that's a comparatively small price to pay.
Ask business owners in some places whether the "insurance" dues they pay to certain organizations are worth it. It's a similar situation with governments. Pre-anti-trust-trial, Microsoft was politically agnostic. They didn't donate much to candidates, groups, or parties at all, and they hardly spent anything on lobbying efforts. And they were getting pounded. Since they started sending money to Washington, and gotten a few politicians on their side, their treatment has improved tremendously. Coincidence?
In fact, there is...maybe. The standard Japanese controller is considerably smaller (and therefore more comfortable-looking) than the US controller, and it features a different (arguably better) button layout.
Compare the Japanese controller to the American controller for yourself.
Personally, I don't think the standard American controller is all that bad, and I'm not convinced the Japanese controller is much of an improvement anyway. The grass is always greener....
Take the toaster, since it's the perennial example of futuristic wired appliances. Sure, you could hook your toaster up to the home network so that your alarm clock starts it, then it goes out to the Internet to check the relative humidity so it knows the precise settings to use for your personal toast preferences.
Would that be cool? Heck yeah!!! Will we ever see them in large numbers of kitchens? Almost certainly not. Why? Because toasters, as they are now, are Good Enough at what they do for most people.
Books are the same way. Granted, for information stores like dictionaries or encyclopedias, searchable electronic versions are the only way to go, but for normal use and basic recreation, plain old paper books are Good Enough for 99.9% of the people in the world. Sure, there's some room for improvement in the format, but it is Good Enough at its basic function that most improvements would only be ancillary at best.
Mmmmm...pie....
In fact, the whole concept of a "computer user" is a little misleading here. A far more appropriate term would be "computer consumer." These are people who are never going to push their hardware to the limits, and who use all the same apps as all the other consumers (email, web, office suite, solitaire, etc.) just like TV viewers watch all the same shows as everyone else.
I'm a computer user. I program, assemble my own systems, play high-end games, tweak settings, and much more. My wife, mother, father, and in-laws are computer consumers. They use email, the web, WordPerfect, and would faint if they had to set jumpers on their motherboard.
In a commodity-like market such as this, the only way to achieve any kind of differentiation is with design. Witness the advent of multi-colored Dells, Gateways, and Compaqs. LCDs are shipping with lots of home systems not because they're better for the price or because people really need them, but because they're different.
All the systems in Apple's main product line have always been aimed at computer consumers, which is why design has been so important for them. We tend to tease and talk down to them, but they are 80% of the computer market, and if I were in that group, I'd find all of the Macs pretty tempting.
And it's even more plausible that somebody just made this crap up, and the Washington Post bit on it like a hungry trout....
"I saw it on the Internet, it must be true. Right, dad?"
"Not necessarily, son, but I saw it printed on pieces of a dead tree, so that makes it true for sure!"
The difference here is that the Internet can grow. Anybody with enough capital can lay down another backbone. The simple act of dialing up with a modem essentially expands the network. Somebody with a CB talking to his buddy doesn't add an additional frequency, and now matter how much money a company has, they can't expand the electromagnetic spectrum.
The real estate analogy is more apt, but it should be pointed out that the federal government owns massive amounts of land, especially in western states.