I honestly think that there should exist FOSS alternatives to almost anything or everything in the computer world.
Video Professor deserves to have some FOSS competition and FOSS alternatives. It really isn't that hard to do just take a video camera and record someone using the software and then edit the video for highlights and using graphics to circle the controls, etc to make it easier to find. It isn't even limited to just Windows or Windows software, but Linux, Mac OSX, *BSD Unix, etc. It could start a whole new trend of tutorial videos for the web.
The FOSS community could do Linux, Mac OSX, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.Org, etc as well. No limits.
I did think it through, it offers FOSS alternatives to Video Professor(TM) the same way OpenOffice.Org offers a FOSS alternative to MS-Office and Wordperfect Office, etc.
Many in the FOSS community use Windows anyway as FOSS developers who target Windows have to use Windows to test things out. Those who write content also cover Windows like Wikibooks and WikiHow and eHow seem to have Windows Software articles written by the FOSS Community.
Just that one has to have an open mind to do this, and not the usual closed minded "Commercial software is teh evil, hur hur hur!" mentality.
First of all it is a violation of the Slashdot TOS, not to mention a logical fallacy aka personal attack, and only adds noise to the discussion.
Second of all since it is the written word it can be subject to a libel suit. Yes you can express something, but when you defame someone or a group, they have the right to file a libel civil suit against you, such as this case of the Video Professor filing one against the defendant. Thus you show your ignorance of basic law and libel and slander suits. Now if Video Professor is considered to be public enough, their libel suit will be harder to prove, but Joe Sixpack reading the offending comment "This makes as much sense as a christian" and he is a christian, will get offended and have the right to file a civil libel suit against the person who posted that statement. But the plaintiff has to prove that damage was done, and that it was intentional. Just that these libel suits can be expensive and often settle out of court.
I reserve the right not to be a bigot. I support even Atheists in free speech and choice of religion or non-religion. But I call one a bigot when they are being a bigot, which is my right as well.
Making bigoted comments about Christians or Atheists is a violation of the civil rights of the USA, and the human rights of the UN, and International Rights as well.
That is just more religious bigotry from you. Like calling an African-American the N-word. Sure you can do it, but you have to face the consequences of doing such a thing in civil court and society.
type business. Now Video Professor sells a series of Tutorial Movies on CDs that show how to use a Windows software product or Windows itself or some Web Site like eBay. Like the "X of the Month Club"s the first one is free for X days and if not sent back and order is canceled new Video CDs are sent and the person's credit card is charged.
Calling it a "scam" is very strong words, and they have sued people who say that. It is a business and the terms on the TV commercials are in small print, and the EULA the user clicks on explains it is a membership in a club to purchase Video CDs for various software products.
The Average Slashdot member doesn't need Video Professor because we usually just use search engines like Google to figure out how software or web sites work. These Video Professor CDs are marketed towards the luddites and people with little to no computer skills and open up a video in Microsoft Media Player. The type of people who don't bother to read the EULA or know that it is a membership or trial offer. So you could say that Video Professor preys on the unskilled and the weak, but legally they have a legal contract with them via the EULA they click agree on via their web site or via the Phone Orders. If it is a legal agreement and legitimate business it is not necessarily a scam, it might be unethical or immoral or appear to be wrong in some way but it is still legal. It is as legal as those "Book of the Month" or "CD of the Month" businesses.
You'll actually find the Internet full of such offers and such companies. But Video Professor airs TV commercials targeted at people who don't seem to understand how a computer works much less how a trial membership works.
I hereby challenge the free and open source community to make a serials of software tutorials for various Windows operating systems, Windows software, web sites, etc and provide those videos free via downloads or web site streaming to engage and or challenge the Video Professor company, and provide free alternatives that people on Slashdot and other technical web sites can refer to our friends and relatives who might get taken in via Video Professor, and instead we can redirect them to the FOSS web site of software tutorial videos or download them and burn our own FOSS Software Professor CD-R disks and give them to them for free.
Yes it is, but there are other Video CDs sent to the person who tries the product including charges made to the credit card.
His business is like a "Book of the Month" or "CD of the Month" type club where the first one is free (for a limited time and if you don't send it back you get charged for it, hence the "try" part of "try my product") and if you don't like it you can call and cancel it and send the CD back to avoid being charged for it.
Truth is we should have researched and investigated into green energy and green technology 30 years ago. But we didn't, and both skeptics and believes refused to show any leadership to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. Neither did the government.
Now we have a cap 'n trade system but no green energy nor green technology to switch over to yet, because we should have developed it 30 years prior to cap n' trade. Now we'll be carbon taxed to death before we can make a majority of things green technology and green energy.
Both the Republicans and Democrats have voted down solar and wind projects to replace our coal burning electricity plants. Both are dumbasses for doing that. Both take lobbyist money from oil and coal and other fossil fuel companies to vote down such bills.
Well not to say skepticism doesn't have its uses, but sometimes skepticism can caused a closed mind and impede progress. In this case skepticism against global warming has caused a slow down in research for green energy and green technology as a big part of the population doesn't believe in global warming, and thus doesn't provide funding for more research to combat it.
Skepticism against religion and God and things that science cannot easily prove has also caused a closed minded way of thinking in science that if one cannot see or hear it, it must not exist. So those warp drives we want invented or some other faster than light or at least faster than booster rockets technology isn't going to happen when people don't believe we can go space travel faster, or cut through another dimension, and reject Einstein and Hawking's works because they talk about more than just the 3D universe we can see and hear, and don't believe in time/space that it is the fourth or perhaps as found out recently due to high energy the fourth and fifth dimensions. It is also what holds back the Large Hadron Collider research because skepticism on the Higgs Boson and skepticism that the LHC cannot control the Mini-Black Holes and that eventually one of them will swallow up the Earth and form a large black hole because they rejected Einstein and Hawking's works and don't believe how Hawking Radiation works at the small level in evaporating the Mini-Black Hole into gamma rays before it can swallow anything to get larger. Thus the old "HUR HUR HUR THE LHC IS GOING TO DESTROY THE EARTH!" mentality of the LHC skeptics. Einstein and Hawking's works are rejected because they show evidence of a higher intelligence to design the universe and talk about God existing and stuff, so skeptics reject it, even if the Math is worked out, and the theories are peer reviewed and in use and workable. But people who believe in it, help fund it, because they know it might lead to a new energy source that can be green energy and lead to green technology and maybe even faster than light space travel.
We now know that is yet another excuse to censor something. Saying it can spread malware. If Google really wanted to hit web sites where it hurt, just list microsoft.com and other Windows web sites as saying visiting them can spread malware.
Yeah but Conservatives don't control Google or most of the media. Just Fox News, Conservapedia, and a few stock web sites. Liberals control most other things, so they set the double standard.
Slashdot isn't conservative either, or they would have had two articles on Condoleezaa Rice and Michael Steele images being racist.
Actually most schools and colleges reject Wikipedia citations and references because of stuff like that. Anyone can edit the page. Wikipedia tried to change that to make it so that Admins have to approve edits before they go through, but it only made Wikipedia worse as people considered it a dictatorship and started to leave the site because of policies like that.
Wikipedia almost became a bathroom stall wall, as anyone could scribble on it, and it used to be the enecyclopedia that anyone can edit. Now it is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, but very few edits are approved by the Administrators.
Wikitruth documented the corruption and scams and scandals that happened in Wikipedia. But it happened so much, and hardly anyone cared about it that Wikitruth had to quit. There was no point in continuing as people didn't care that Editors and Admins who claimed to have PHDs didn't actually have them, or that oversight abuse happened to remove evidence of corruption, etc.
Conservapedia, no I won't link to them, but they claimed Wikipedia was not a neutral POV but a liberal one, and created their own Conservative Wiki Encyclopedia.
Uncyclopedia was started after Wikipedia refused to host deleted facts and other nonsense section of their Wiki site, so many of us went to Uncyclopedia, and others went to Illogicpedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica or both or all three, etc. Even the humor sites seemed to be more accurate than Wikipedia and not as prone to politics, corruption, etc.
Wikipedia is good for WWE/TNA Wrestling facts, and Comic book and Sci Fi and Movie facts. That they do right, there is no bias, and a neutral point of view mostly. I find myself checking Wikipedia for comic books, movies, sci fi shows and movies, wrestling, and other things a real Encyclopedia won't cover but Wikipedia will.
I am not notable enough for a Wikipedia entry, nor are most people. I don't want a Wikipedia entry on me as I want to be a private citizen. I do a lot of open source writing on Uncyclopedia, Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Wikia sub-Wikis, etc. I might later on publish a few books when I get good enough to write them without community help, or I may release them to creative commons license on LegalTorrents instead and give them away for free. That might make me notable, but I don't think it would be notable enough for a Wikipedia entry. I am just one in 9 billion people trying to survive. I also do open source programming and help people fix their computers via home tech support for friends and relatives, like most Slashdot readers.
Well before it became popular and widely used anyway.
Do you think if Perot used Powerpoint or Harvard Graphics with a projection system it would have been more effective than giant cardboard signs and won him the 1992 election?
and other presentation software we had H. Ross Perot and his charts and graphs. Oh how people laughed at his charts and graphs, and today they have their own charts and graphs in Powerpoint and other presentation software.
"That giant sucking sound you are going to hear is jobs going out of this nation due to the foreign trade bills passing." -H. Ross Perot
"This is the real reason why nothing ever gets done and the economy never gets fixed. Gridlock in Congress and the White House. Gridlock, gridlock, period period exclamation point!" -Vice Admiral James Stockdale
Ironically people dismissed them as wrong, but they turned out to be right in the future.
Before WoW we got foam plastic swords and other foam weapons and wrapped them up with Duct Tape to look like metal and dressed up in suits of armor and hit each other with them at a Medieval War reenactment or LARP D&D event. Before WoW we had D&D from TSR before Hasbro or Garfield Games or whomever bought them out and made D20. The Classic D&D and LARP D&D were better in the old days. I shot you your dead! Am not!" arguments were resolved by the Dungeon Master and dice rolling and hit points.
Before we had the first person shooters we had today we had Wolfenstein 3D for MS-DOS, and the original Castle Wolfenstein for Apple II, C64, and other 8 bit systems.
Before we had Need for Speed we had "Night Driver" with the driving controller for the Atari 2600.
Before Facebook we had dial-up BBSes and FidoNet, WWIVNet, and other dial-up networks for single line BBS boards to network with each other before the Internet became popular and it was just the Arpanet back then. Thanks to the Waffle software BBSes could interface with Arpanet Newsgroups and Email. FidoBBS, WWIVBBS, and other BBSes were our social networking sites, but local so people could meet the faces behind the BBS screen names and handles. Now it isn't local it is International, and people don't meet in person anymore except in rare cases, but prefer to chat via the Internet and text messaging.
Before the iPod, we had the Sony Walkman and portable AM/FM radios, Boom Boxes, portable 8-Track players, and the knockoff Walkman type devices made by Sears, K-mart, Wallgreens, etc that had a cassette player and AM and FM radio. But now some cell phones have FM radio built in and can play media files and the iPod became the iPhone, and the Smart Phone and Blackberries do the same things as well.
The best we had was those 8 Bit systems like the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Matell Intellivision, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, and then the Nintendo NES and SNES, Sega Master System and Sega Genesis and we started to get into 16 bit systems. The Sega CD32, Dreamcast, Saturn, were CD based systems but the Sony Playstation out marketed and out licensed them by licensing as many games for the PS1 as possible. It drove Sega out of the game console market but they made video games for other systems. he Atari Jaguar was a good system but it lack popularity and the games and Atari had poor marketing like Commodore and the C64GS game console. But now those retro games are available for the XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Playstation 3 via paying a small fee via the Gaming Networks and downloading the emulators with the retro game ROMs in them to play the classics in modern times.
For the same reason why we don't use SubSeven and other remote control programs. They either were developed by hackers or are written as trojans or hack tools that Anti-Virus software detects and then removes before we can use them to log into Uncle J's Windows computer and fix his problems. Uncle J claims he didn't mean to click on the "Rate this Hottie" pop-up ad and did so by accident and then it changed his IE home page, added a few tool bars, added Bonzi Buddy, and made his system run really really slow, etc.
unless you use solar or wind power for the electricity you will be using mostly coal burned electrical power. But nobody talks bad about hybrids. Actually my economy car costs less and uses less gas than a hybrid and is more friendly to the environment than a plug-in hybrid unless they are using renewable green electricity to power the plug-in hybrid.
I think the car that ran on used french fry oil was the best idea yet, but once that catches on fast food places will charge a lot for used french fry oil.
Look at the Sci-Fi role playing games like Traveller out there.
I wanted to write a book about my Traveller character Orion Blastar since 1985, but I haven't gotten permission from GDW/FarFuture etc to use their tech and ideas and background in my books. So I might have to invent my own tech, ideas, and a different background.
There is a lot of Sci Fi stuff that hasn't been touched yet. Rush "2112" has a story about a Red Star of the Solar Federation and the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx that own all of the music and take away freedoms and rights in a Communist type future government, until a man finds a guitar and creates his own music. But the Priests smash his guitar and eventually he commits suicide. But near the end of the song the Elder Race of Man come back to assume control of the planets and free the people from the oppressive Communist government of the Temples of Syrinx. Or that is at least one take on the story. But I am sure it would make a great SyFy series or TV movie, or Hollywood Movie or series of Sci Fi books.
But Sci Fi does not need new and different technology, it just needs better characters, better plots, better stories, better dialog without stealing or borrowing from other Sci Fi elements, unless it is done in the way I wanted to do it in that it is different enough to be interesting. All Traveller Sci Fi books did was choose your own adventures and stuff that was boring. The RPG version is a lot more interesting than the fiction novels.
That is because I am a proactive personality instead of a reactive personality. I think with the end in mind before I start programming. I put first things first, and then think win/win. I seek first to understand and then to be understood. I then synergize with others and promote creative cooperation. Then I recycle and start the cycle all over again.
When you are reactive, you blame other people and circumstances for obstacles or problems. Being proactive means taking responsibility for every aspect of your life. Initiative and taking action will then follow. Most people having problems in the world and the workplace are reactive, like the people who troll me here on Slashdot and make fun of me, and blame others for their problems.
Every work team I was in via college or work, we got great results and did some of the best work ever seen by professors or managers.
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly think that there should exist FOSS alternatives to almost anything or everything in the computer world.
Video Professor deserves to have some FOSS competition and FOSS alternatives. It really isn't that hard to do just take a video camera and record someone using the software and then edit the video for highlights and using graphics to circle the controls, etc to make it easier to find. It isn't even limited to just Windows or Windows software, but Linux, Mac OSX, *BSD Unix, etc. It could start a whole new trend of tutorial videos for the web.
The FOSS community could do Linux, Mac OSX, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.Org, etc as well. No limits.
I did think it through, it offers FOSS alternatives to Video Professor(TM) the same way OpenOffice.Org offers a FOSS alternative to MS-Office and Wordperfect Office, etc.
Many in the FOSS community use Windows anyway as FOSS developers who target Windows have to use Windows to test things out. Those who write content also cover Windows like Wikibooks and WikiHow and eHow seem to have Windows Software articles written by the FOSS Community.
Just that one has to have an open mind to do this, and not the usual closed minded "Commercial software is teh evil, hur hur hur!" mentality.
Sorry but that is just more personal attacks and bigotry towards religious people.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 grants protection to people via race, color, creed, religion, national origin, gender, etc.
The UN has human rights that cover religion as well.
You are arguing against known civil rights and human rights laws showing your ignorance of them.
First of all it is a violation of the Slashdot TOS, not to mention a logical fallacy aka personal attack, and only adds noise to the discussion.
Second of all since it is the written word it can be subject to a libel suit. Yes you can express something, but when you defame someone or a group, they have the right to file a libel civil suit against you, such as this case of the Video Professor filing one against the defendant. Thus you show your ignorance of basic law and libel and slander suits. Now if Video Professor is considered to be public enough, their libel suit will be harder to prove, but Joe Sixpack reading the offending comment "This makes as much sense as a christian" and he is a christian, will get offended and have the right to file a civil libel suit against the person who posted that statement. But the plaintiff has to prove that damage was done, and that it was intentional. Just that these libel suits can be expensive and often settle out of court.
Good law, but it hasn't caught on in the USA where Video Professor operates out of. My guess is he doesn't sell to Canada, then?
I reserve the right not to be a bigot. I support even Atheists in free speech and choice of religion or non-religion. But I call one a bigot when they are being a bigot, which is my right as well.
Making bigoted comments about Christians or Atheists is a violation of the civil rights of the USA, and the human rights of the UN, and International Rights as well.
That is just more religious bigotry from you. Like calling an African-American the N-word. Sure you can do it, but you have to face the consequences of doing such a thing in civil court and society.
type business. Now Video Professor sells a series of Tutorial Movies on CDs that show how to use a Windows software product or Windows itself or some Web Site like eBay. Like the "X of the Month Club"s the first one is free for X days and if not sent back and order is canceled new Video CDs are sent and the person's credit card is charged.
Calling it a "scam" is very strong words, and they have sued people who say that. It is a business and the terms on the TV commercials are in small print, and the EULA the user clicks on explains it is a membership in a club to purchase Video CDs for various software products.
The Average Slashdot member doesn't need Video Professor because we usually just use search engines like Google to figure out how software or web sites work. These Video Professor CDs are marketed towards the luddites and people with little to no computer skills and open up a video in Microsoft Media Player. The type of people who don't bother to read the EULA or know that it is a membership or trial offer. So you could say that Video Professor preys on the unskilled and the weak, but legally they have a legal contract with them via the EULA they click agree on via their web site or via the Phone Orders. If it is a legal agreement and legitimate business it is not necessarily a scam, it might be unethical or immoral or appear to be wrong in some way but it is still legal. It is as legal as those "Book of the Month" or "CD of the Month" businesses.
You'll actually find the Internet full of such offers and such companies. But Video Professor airs TV commercials targeted at people who don't seem to understand how a computer works much less how a trial membership works.
I hereby challenge the free and open source community to make a serials of software tutorials for various Windows operating systems, Windows software, web sites, etc and provide those videos free via downloads or web site streaming to engage and or challenge the Video Professor company, and provide free alternatives that people on Slashdot and other technical web sites can refer to our friends and relatives who might get taken in via Video Professor, and instead we can redirect them to the FOSS web site of software tutorial videos or download them and burn our own FOSS Software Professor CD-R disks and give them to them for free.
Yes it is, but there are other Video CDs sent to the person who tries the product including charges made to the credit card.
His business is like a "Book of the Month" or "CD of the Month" type club where the first one is free (for a limited time and if you don't send it back you get charged for it, hence the "try" part of "try my product") and if you don't like it you can call and cancel it and send the CD back to avoid being charged for it.
Watch that Anti-Religious Bigotry. Religious people have civil rights too, you know.
Truth is we should have researched and investigated into green energy and green technology 30 years ago. But we didn't, and both skeptics and believes refused to show any leadership to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. Neither did the government.
Now we have a cap 'n trade system but no green energy nor green technology to switch over to yet, because we should have developed it 30 years prior to cap n' trade. Now we'll be carbon taxed to death before we can make a majority of things green technology and green energy.
Both the Republicans and Democrats have voted down solar and wind projects to replace our coal burning electricity plants. Both are dumbasses for doing that. Both take lobbyist money from oil and coal and other fossil fuel companies to vote down such bills.
Mars apparently like the rest of us.
Well not to say skepticism doesn't have its uses, but sometimes skepticism can caused a closed mind and impede progress. In this case skepticism against global warming has caused a slow down in research for green energy and green technology as a big part of the population doesn't believe in global warming, and thus doesn't provide funding for more research to combat it.
Skepticism against religion and God and things that science cannot easily prove has also caused a closed minded way of thinking in science that if one cannot see or hear it, it must not exist. So those warp drives we want invented or some other faster than light or at least faster than booster rockets technology isn't going to happen when people don't believe we can go space travel faster, or cut through another dimension, and reject Einstein and Hawking's works because they talk about more than just the 3D universe we can see and hear, and don't believe in time/space that it is the fourth or perhaps as found out recently due to high energy the fourth and fifth dimensions. It is also what holds back the Large Hadron Collider research because skepticism on the Higgs Boson and skepticism that the LHC cannot control the Mini-Black Holes and that eventually one of them will swallow up the Earth and form a large black hole because they rejected Einstein and Hawking's works and don't believe how Hawking Radiation works at the small level in evaporating the Mini-Black Hole into gamma rays before it can swallow anything to get larger. Thus the old "HUR HUR HUR THE LHC IS GOING TO DESTROY THE EARTH!" mentality of the LHC skeptics. Einstein and Hawking's works are rejected because they show evidence of a higher intelligence to design the universe and talk about God existing and stuff, so skeptics reject it, even if the Math is worked out, and the theories are peer reviewed and in use and workable. But people who believe in it, help fund it, because they know it might lead to a new energy source that can be green energy and lead to green technology and maybe even faster than light space travel.
We now know that is yet another excuse to censor something. Saying it can spread malware. If Google really wanted to hit web sites where it hurt, just list microsoft.com and other Windows web sites as saying visiting them can spread malware.
This is what the Microsoft Knowledge Base might look like if you had malware infecting your Windows system. From Uncyclopedia because sometimes "the truth"(TM) is funnier than fiction.
Yeah but Conservatives don't control Google or most of the media. Just Fox News, Conservapedia, and a few stock web sites. Liberals control most other things, so they set the double standard.
Slashdot isn't conservative either, or they would have had two articles on Condoleezaa Rice and Michael Steele images being racist.
Actually most schools and colleges reject Wikipedia citations and references because of stuff like that. Anyone can edit the page. Wikipedia tried to change that to make it so that Admins have to approve edits before they go through, but it only made Wikipedia worse as people considered it a dictatorship and started to leave the site because of policies like that.
Wikipedia almost became a bathroom stall wall, as anyone could scribble on it, and it used to be the enecyclopedia that anyone can edit. Now it is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, but very few edits are approved by the Administrators.
But in the past:
Wikitruth documented the corruption and scams and scandals that happened in Wikipedia. But it happened so much, and hardly anyone cared about it that Wikitruth had to quit. There was no point in continuing as people didn't care that Editors and Admins who claimed to have PHDs didn't actually have them, or that oversight abuse happened to remove evidence of corruption, etc.
Conservapedia, no I won't link to them, but they claimed Wikipedia was not a neutral POV but a liberal one, and created their own Conservative Wiki Encyclopedia.
Uncyclopedia was started after Wikipedia refused to host deleted facts and other nonsense section of their Wiki site, so many of us went to Uncyclopedia, and others went to Illogicpedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica or both or all three, etc. Even the humor sites seemed to be more accurate than Wikipedia and not as prone to politics, corruption, etc.
Wikipedia is good for WWE/TNA Wrestling facts, and Comic book and Sci Fi and Movie facts. That they do right, there is no bias, and a neutral point of view mostly. I find myself checking Wikipedia for comic books, movies, sci fi shows and movies, wrestling, and other things a real Encyclopedia won't cover but Wikipedia will.
I am not notable enough for a Wikipedia entry, nor are most people. I don't want a Wikipedia entry on me as I want to be a private citizen. I do a lot of open source writing on Uncyclopedia, Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Wikia sub-Wikis, etc. I might later on publish a few books when I get good enough to write them without community help, or I may release them to creative commons license on LegalTorrents instead and give them away for free. That might make me notable, but I don't think it would be notable enough for a Wikipedia entry. I am just one in 9 billion people trying to survive. I also do open source programming and help people fix their computers via home tech support for friends and relatives, like most Slashdot readers.
Well before it became popular and widely used anyway.
Do you think if Perot used Powerpoint or Harvard Graphics with a projection system it would have been more effective than giant cardboard signs and won him the 1992 election?
like this example of Hungarian to English translation.
and other presentation software we had H. Ross Perot and his charts and graphs. Oh how people laughed at his charts and graphs, and today they have their own charts and graphs in Powerpoint and other presentation software.
"That giant sucking sound you are going to hear is jobs going out of this nation due to the foreign trade bills passing." -H. Ross Perot
"This is the real reason why nothing ever gets done and the economy never gets fixed. Gridlock in Congress and the White House. Gridlock, gridlock, period period exclamation point!" -Vice Admiral James Stockdale
Ironically people dismissed them as wrong, but they turned out to be right in the future.
Before WoW we got foam plastic swords and other foam weapons and wrapped them up with Duct Tape to look like metal and dressed up in suits of armor and hit each other with them at a Medieval War reenactment or LARP D&D event. Before WoW we had D&D from TSR before Hasbro or Garfield Games or whomever bought them out and made D20. The Classic D&D and LARP D&D were better in the old days.
I shot you your dead! Am not!" arguments were resolved by the Dungeon Master and dice rolling and hit points.
Before we had the first person shooters we had today we had Wolfenstein 3D for MS-DOS, and the original Castle Wolfenstein for Apple II, C64, and other 8 bit systems.
Before we had Need for Speed we had "Night Driver" with the driving controller for the Atari 2600.
Before Facebook we had dial-up BBSes and FidoNet, WWIVNet, and other dial-up networks for single line BBS boards to network with each other before the Internet became popular and it was just the Arpanet back then. Thanks to the Waffle software BBSes could interface with Arpanet Newsgroups and Email. FidoBBS, WWIVBBS, and other BBSes were our social networking sites, but local so people could meet the faces behind the BBS screen names and handles. Now it isn't local it is International, and people don't meet in person anymore except in rare cases, but prefer to chat via the Internet and text messaging.
Before the iPod, we had the Sony Walkman and portable AM/FM radios, Boom Boxes, portable 8-Track players, and the knockoff Walkman type devices made by Sears, K-mart, Wallgreens, etc that had a cassette player and AM and FM radio. But now some cell phones have FM radio built in and can play media files and the iPod became the iPhone, and the Smart Phone and Blackberries do the same things as well.
The best we had was those 8 Bit systems like the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Matell Intellivision, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, and then the Nintendo NES and SNES, Sega Master System and Sega Genesis and we started to get into 16 bit systems. The Sega CD32, Dreamcast, Saturn, were CD based systems but the Sony Playstation out marketed and out licensed them by licensing as many games for the PS1 as possible. It drove Sega out of the game console market but they made video games for other systems. he Atari Jaguar was a good system but it lack popularity and the games and Atari had poor marketing like Commodore and the C64GS game console. But now those retro games are available for the XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Playstation 3 via paying a small fee via the Gaming Networks and downloading the emulators with the retro game ROMs in them to play the classics in modern times.
For the same reason why we don't use SubSeven and other remote control programs. They either were developed by hackers or are written as trojans or hack tools that Anti-Virus software detects and then removes before we can use them to log into Uncle J's Windows computer and fix his problems. Uncle J claims he didn't mean to click on the "Rate this Hottie" pop-up ad and did so by accident and then it changed his IE home page, added a few tool bars, added Bonzi Buddy, and made his system run really really slow, etc.
unless you use solar or wind power for the electricity you will be using mostly coal burned electrical power. But nobody talks bad about hybrids. Actually my economy car costs less and uses less gas than a hybrid and is more friendly to the environment than a plug-in hybrid unless they are using renewable green electricity to power the plug-in hybrid.
I think the car that ran on used french fry oil was the best idea yet, but once that catches on fast food places will charge a lot for used french fry oil.
Look at the Sci-Fi role playing games like Traveller out there.
I wanted to write a book about my Traveller character Orion Blastar since 1985, but I haven't gotten permission from GDW/FarFuture etc to use their tech and ideas and background in my books. So I might have to invent my own tech, ideas, and a different background.
There is a lot of Sci Fi stuff that hasn't been touched yet. Rush "2112" has a story about a Red Star of the Solar Federation and the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx that own all of the music and take away freedoms and rights in a Communist type future government, until a man finds a guitar and creates his own music. But the Priests smash his guitar and eventually he commits suicide. But near the end of the song the Elder Race of Man come back to assume control of the planets and free the people from the oppressive Communist government of the Temples of Syrinx. Or that is at least one take on the story. But I am sure it would make a great SyFy series or TV movie, or Hollywood Movie or series of Sci Fi books.
But Sci Fi does not need new and different technology, it just needs better characters, better plots, better stories, better dialog without stealing or borrowing from other Sci Fi elements, unless it is done in the way I wanted to do it in that it is different enough to be interesting. All Traveller Sci Fi books did was choose your own adventures and stuff that was boring. The RPG version is a lot more interesting than the fiction novels.
That is because I am a proactive personality instead of a reactive personality. I think with the end in mind before I start programming. I put first things first, and then think win/win. I seek first to understand and then to be understood. I then synergize with others and promote creative cooperation. Then I recycle and start the cycle all over again.
When you are reactive, you blame other people and circumstances for obstacles or problems. Being proactive means taking responsibility for every aspect of your life. Initiative and taking action will then follow. Most people having problems in the world and the workplace are reactive, like the people who troll me here on Slashdot and make fun of me, and blame others for their problems.
Every work team I was in via college or work, we got great results and did some of the best work ever seen by professors or managers.