What's so much different between a laser-gun wielding trooper and a lightning-spell chanting wizard?
Real simple : cycle time.
How many games have wizards who can fire 60 rounds per second?
It's difficult to balance out the classes when someone can fire that fast -- you have to either nerf all of the damage, or make sure they're really inacurate (and well, then you've got your basic storm trooper).
Not to mention all of the extra overhead needed in showing all of the combat going on when there's a whole lot of shots being fired. (anyone remember that level in Quake 1 w/ the fire pit in the middle, and balconies around the sides? If were playing against a bunch of people on dialup, all you had to do was whip out the nailgun, and spray wildly)
Of course, MUDs had this problem to a lesser degree, and the common situation for that was to just treat everything as semi-automatic, and when you got your attack, you'd fire a burst, rather than a single shot, and resolve all of the damage at once.
Unfortunately, it seems that Slashdot has a limitation on the minimum number of characters per line. So I can't just create a nice, simple list, but instead need a significant amount of text to pad out the list, so that I can make it past the filters being used. But I'm still not there yet... sooner or later I will (20.4 is still too few). I'm probably going to have to type a whole lot of crap in here just to deal with the 25 names that are only a few characters each. (and I tried removing returns from the message, but it didn't seem to help at all)
So I guess I have to ask again: How much of microformats could have been done using META, given that it's scoped to the page (which is no problem for the most important page semantics), and uses attributes?
Very little. For instance -- if I had a full page calendar display -- because META is scoped to the whole page, I couldn't include an event record for each individual event -- I'd have to have the person go to a 'more information' link, and then give the event information. If I wanted them to do that, I could've just given them an iCal file. This allows the semantic marking to be along side the format to be presented to the user. (as we would assume that the person wouldn't want to pull down all events from the calendar -- think something like registering for classes in college, where you might only want one or a few from the full list of events)
And many times, even when there is a single event mentioned within a document, it would not be semantically correct to say that the event applies to the entire page -- it may only be a section of the page that is relevent to the event. (eg, the front page of a website, with info about a company, and then an upcoming event announcement)
I personally didn't like the examples given in the IBM article. Some of the past examples that I've seen include embedding semantic detail within a paragraph of text (eg, a movie review), so that different review formats could then be processed in an automated way.
It's even less free than the 'voluntary library gift' (the $50 charge that GW puts on your bill each semester, that you have to request be removed).
It may be free in that you don't have to directly pay Napster, but the money has to come from somewhere -- it's probably covered under the 'Student Activities Fee' or one of the other many fees that you get hit with each semester.
(yes, I'm cynical -- I'm both an alum, and an ex-ISS employee. I've seen how much GW wastes on bad IT implementation. Hell, I even reported Nabih Bedewi to the engineering school for misappropriation of equipment almost a decade ago.)
... when someone calls and asks for 'Mister (something not even close to the correct pronunciation)', I can correctly answer 'nope', and hang up.
Of course, it helps that there are only 8 people in the US with my last name, and it has silent character and accents which aren't typically reflected in most American data collection.
Why isn't there any easy way to style a table column in CSS?
If you're serving legitimate, tabular data, and you want to right-align column #3 (normal for numerical data), you either have to apply a class to each cell, use javascript to apply it after the fact, or use hacks like:
#tableid td+td+td { text-align: right }/* right align col 3 */
#tableid td+td+td+td { text-align: inherit }/* stop right align at col 4 */
Which work, but are difficult to maintain when you get 10+ columns, and don't try to automatically re-arrange columns with javascript.
Why can't we just place styles on a <col> or <colgroup>, and have it cascade down?
Go back and watch any of the early episodes of This Old House -- it's clearly apparent that Bob Villa isn't paying attention to the 'experts' that are giving him instructions. The person doing all of the work is Norm Abrahms (who has his own show, The New Yankee Workshop).
And as for tools -- if I had an outbuilding larger than my current house, with a 1/4 mil in power tools (c'mon -- a laser guided chop saw? And he's had it for years -- they only came down to the general consumer market in the last couple of years), I'm guessing I'd do a little bit better on the woodworking projects I do.
And for those times when it does get out, and it's not in a place that you have control of, or shows up in a cache somewhere, I'm thinking about adding a few hundred pages of partially random information, so the real information blends in the background.
(I ran for public office, so unfortunately, my address is now out there... for those who know where to look... which hopefully isn't the person who was stalking me in college)
I notice that in my version of Firefox the search box defaults to Google, and that the pulldown menu of pre-entered options doesn't even include MSN Search, but Google seems to have been oddly quiet on that front for the many years prior to IE7 that Firefox has made this feature available.
I don't use Firefox, but I'll assume what you're saying is correct...
What Firefox does isn't abusing what may be considered a monopoly power. Microsoft, on the other hand, is using their power in one field to force people back to themselves in another field.
This could be better compared to if you called telephone information, and asked for an ISP, and they sent you to the ILEC's ISP, without disclosing that they were routing you to the ISP they owned. (therefore, shutting out other ISPs)
When there are less items available on the market, the value increases if there's still a demand for it. (if there's no demand, then the value's effectively 0)
The conspiracy theorist would assume that Apple's trying to corner the market on MacQuariums, and they need more spare parts, so they're tricking people into giving them the parts under the assumption of 'recycling' (which it is). They might even have a company that's willing to buy lots of thousands of these for the very purpose. (pbfixit comes to mind)
They might also find that it's more cost effective to strip and refurb some machines than to have new parts manufactured for those with extended warranties. (this assumes that the product is on the market long enough for people to recycle out of warranty machines while other people still have them under warranties)
This U.S. Government resource is for authorized use only. If not authorized to access this resource, disconnect now. Unauthorized use of, or access to, this resource may subject you to disciplinary action or criminal prosecution. By accessing and using this resource, you are consenting to monitoring, keystroke recording, or auditing.
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U.S. Government Public Information Exchange Resource You have accessed a U.S. Government Resource. This site is intended to be used by the public for information exchange. Any attempt to modify or exploit this resource or associated information other than for instructed use is strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The Government may monitor and audit the usage of this resource. All persons are hereby notified that use of this resource constitutes consent for monitoring, keystroke recording, or auditing.
This is actually in the banner, rather than the MOTD -- but it's important to state that there is no expectation of privacy, so that you can't be charged under any of the privacy acts, should you log someone on your system and try to prosecute them.
There are plenty of technical reasons why not to do it. See RFC 3675 for details.
The only justification for new TLDs that I've seen is that it makes companies have to buy them to protect their trademark, thereby making profit for the new registrar.
(I don't know what they've done to the PDF, but you can't copy/paste from it cleanly... but searching on the text in it lead me to NASA Strategic Goals, which has the highlights)
I'd still recommend looking that the PDF, as it seems to the only place on the Internet that has the full breakdown of the goals into the sub-goals -- see the Appendix, starting on page 43 (counting by the PDF, not by the document's internal numbering)
Well, if you had read the article, the Nintendo president said he didn't understand how games could sell for more than $50.
Nintendo's been doing what it can to keep costs down -- hell, they were the most profitable of the last round of consoles, even with the much smaller share.
And as for downloading -- unlike MS, they already have a massive collection of console games to distribute -- the article (which I'm guessing you neglected to read), make reference to selling more lower cost items, rather than focus on selling a few higher priced items.
mass market paperbooks like sci fi have larger audiences, and can sit on the shelf for years..
tech books have small audiences, and a short shelf life.
I'm with you on the 'short shelf life' of technical books -- but that should be reasons for the bookstores to try for a higher turnover. Who wants to pick up that book on HTML+, when there's a book about XHTML 2.0 (nevermind that the spec is still in draft, and there's little if any browser support).
But sitting on the shelf you years is the absolutely worst thing that can happen to something in a store -- shelf space costs money. That's how Amazon can undercut prices while still making a profit -- they don't have a store that's 1/2 full of stuff that's not selling... they make profit by turning stuff over, not letting it collect dust.
Yes, there are places out there that are reminiscent of 'Black Books', but it's not nearly as profitable as actually selling things.
Do you want to by a book on windows 95 in 2006? no? but you can still pick up a copy of Asimov robots of dawn...
I personally don't, but if there's someone out there who's forced to support Win95 because his boss refuses to switch, he's going to want the book. I've had to support quite a few outdated OSes because of management decisions (yay, Netscape 3.0g on Solaris 2.5!... in 2003), and found that Amazon Marketplace and eBay to be great places to pick up reference materials after the typical bookstore has stopped carrying them, assuming there isn't a market. And unfortunately, I don't work down the street from Reiter's any more.
What do my fellow Slashdot readers consider to be the best practices for configuration management?
There are way too many to list -- I've been in a number of organizations -- some had a whole 'workflow' process, where all of the managers were informed of any changes to be made a weekly meeting (and because they didn't understand the implications of all of the changes, and didn't let the tech folks under them know, it was basically useless), to ones where it's completely informal.
I'd say the practices depend on the risk involved with each change, and that depends on the business -- where a single bad change might cost you $5mil, you're going to behave differently than a place that doesn't even pull in $100k in a year.
My rule of thumb -- good backups. Make sure they're good before a chance (ie, you can restore from them, not just that they ran), and don't make changes on Friday -- no one wants to spend their weekend cleaning up something that went wrong. (and if management wants me to come in and do a change on the weekend -- I want 2 weeks notice... if I have to give them 2 weeks notice to use leave, I want 2 weeks notice before I lose it).
And management signoff on changes is basically useless -- you get bitched at when something goes wrong, no matter how many many notes you make in change management that it's a bad idea, and it's going to break things.
I never said code for a specific browser -- I said don't use XHTML. I'm a supporter of valid code, and the Any Browser Campaign, but I don't currently support XHTML, because there is better cross platform support for HTML4 than there is for XHTML 1, because XHTML is not directly compatable with HTML
You can write pages that will degrade gracefully under both XHTML and HTML -- but you can't write a valid XHTML page that will parse cleanly in IE, XHTML is not backwards compatable with HTML, due to the need of an XML declaration before the HTML doctype.
To get XHTML to work in browsers that don't directly support XHTML, you'll have to serve it as text/html, which can then cause problems which correctly support XHTML. more details at wikipedia.
You get better overall support in browsers by coding to HTML4.01 -- there are few advantages to the user to using XHTML 1.0 (it's easier on the browser code, that's about it). That's not true with XHTML 2, which offers better alternative text for images and objects, as well as more easily arranged sections and dramatically updated Web Forms, but I have no idea when we'll get browser support for it. (hell, we don't even have good support for CSS2, much less CSS3 in most browsers)
XHTML and CSS have nothing to do with accessibility. HTML specifies that IMG tags must have an ALT tag -- but that doesn't mean that it's an accurate replacement for the ALT tag -- lots of people used to use them for tooltips. There's nothing in the HTML specifications against having your site being a giant blinking image -- there are in 508.
I recommend against using XHTML -- too many problems w/ Internet Explorer (and even Safari will render some things slightly off what you're used to, even when it's complaint XHTML)
The best place for accessibility guidelines is W3C's WAI... specifically for web developers, the WCAG.
I appologize -- I removed a comment about knowing about the sub-classifications, as I didn't want to give an incorrect example, as I don't have a copy of Dewey at work
In fact, there main headings are at the hundreds, with sub classifications at tens / ones / etc... and we get the even smaller classifications of stuff at the tenths / hundredths / etc... and for some items, you might have a 12 digit or greater identifier.
But the problem is that you need to keep a massive book (well, 3) with all of the rules on how the various sub classifications are generated. Some of it's the subtle stuff -- I don't have Dewey in front of me, so here's an example without numbers. (look at the section on 'libraries' for more concrete examples, specifically special libraries)
You have a given section 'aaa', with various sub categories (aaa.bb)... for which you then append numbers for a sub section... so, given 'ccc.cc', it leads us to 'aaa.bbccccc'... but perhaps there's a special note that 'aaa.bbcc' gets filed under 'aaa.dd', and not 'aaa.bb'. But there are some things that might not get that special category -- you don't get to append numbers whenever you feel like it... so you might end up with 5-10% of your books all filed under the same number. (search google for 'computer security', and you'll see how useless it is)
Dewey has its uses, yes, but in my opinion, there are better solutions out there, not only for special libraries but even for general libraries. The only real advantage to Dewey is that more people are familiar with it, because they've seen it in use at their public library -- if you only have a few users (you, a significant others, and maybe your friends), then the cost of dealing with retraining the users is insignificant to the cost of classifying the whole collection.
And for the record -- of the 5 books I sampled from the book in my cubicle, only 2 had a Dewey classification (The Design of Everyday Things, Object Oriented Perl)... Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology, OS X for Unix Geeks, and Oracle 8i: SQL Statement Tuning Workshop all did not. 'every non-fiction' is a bit of a stretch.
If you have a specialty library, it can be completely useless -- imagine going into a library where every book was filed under '005' (computer programming). If you don't have a general library, Dewey isn't going to be as useful for sorting -- you'll want to look into a specialty thesaurus or ontology for your holdings.
As generalized libraries go, if there's a chance of moving it to a database, I personally prefer UDC, due to the way in which is handles sub-topics. (if you had something on the History of British Railroads -- where does it get filed in Dewey? History, European Countries, or Transportation Infrastructure? UDC maintains each of the facets, without needing 3 books of indexing instructions)
I don't know how large it is, but it does exist --
one of my co-workers mentioned a friend w/ pre-teen daughters who requested iPods for christmas -- and their parents got them... but they didn't have a computer, so they didn' have a way of loading music onto them.
So, the problem isn't the typical yuppie, or college student, it's the families out there that don't have a massive income, and don't have a computer at home, but have kids who want iPods.
Of course, this particular situation won't be helped by the device, as there doesn't seem to be a way to way to tag the files created manually (based on the images available), and they wouldn't have internet access for it to get the info, unless it were done from a library and/or school.
As much as I'd love to see it come out, I just know that if it does, it's going to suck days or weeks of my time that could be spent more productively.
Slashdot Mirror
Real simple : cycle time.
How many games have wizards who can fire 60 rounds per second?
It's difficult to balance out the classes when someone can fire that fast -- you have to either nerf all of the damage, or make sure they're really inacurate (and well, then you've got your basic storm trooper).
Not to mention all of the extra overhead needed in showing all of the combat going on when there's a whole lot of shots being fired. (anyone remember that level in Quake 1 w/ the fire pit in the middle, and balconies around the sides? If were playing against a bunch of people on dialup, all you had to do was whip out the nailgun, and spray wildly)
Of course, MUDs had this problem to a lesser degree, and the common situation for that was to just treat everything as semi-automatic, and when you got your attack, you'd fire a burst, rather than a single shot, and resolve all of the damage at once.
Here's what I know of and/or could find for the ones I didn't.
Unfortunately, it seems that Slashdot has a limitation on the minimum number of characters per line. So I can't just create a nice, simple list, but instead need a significant amount of text to pad out the list, so that I can make it past the filters being used. But I'm still not there yet... sooner or later I will (20.4 is still too few). I'm probably going to have to type a whole lot of crap in here just to deal with the 25 names that are only a few characters each. (and I tried removing returns from the message, but it didn't seem to help at all)
Very little. For instance -- if I had a full page calendar display -- because META is scoped to the whole page, I couldn't include an event record for each individual event -- I'd have to have the person go to a 'more information' link, and then give the event information. If I wanted them to do that, I could've just given them an iCal file. This allows the semantic marking to be along side the format to be presented to the user. (as we would assume that the person wouldn't want to pull down all events from the calendar -- think something like registering for classes in college, where you might only want one or a few from the full list of events)
And many times, even when there is a single event mentioned within a document, it would not be semantically correct to say that the event applies to the entire page -- it may only be a section of the page that is relevent to the event. (eg, the front page of a website, with info about a company, and then an upcoming event announcement)
I personally didn't like the examples given in the IBM article. Some of the past examples that I've seen include embedding semantic detail within a paragraph of text (eg, a movie review), so that different review formats could then be processed in an automated way.
It's even less free than the 'voluntary library gift' (the $50 charge that GW puts on your bill each semester, that you have to request be removed).
It may be free in that you don't have to directly pay Napster, but the money has to come from somewhere -- it's probably covered under the 'Student Activities Fee' or one of the other many fees that you get hit with each semester.
(yes, I'm cynical -- I'm both an alum, and an ex-ISS employee. I've seen how much GW wastes on bad IT implementation. Hell, I even reported Nabih Bedewi to the engineering school for misappropriation of equipment almost a decade ago.)
... when someone calls and asks for 'Mister (something not even close to the correct pronunciation)', I can correctly answer 'nope', and hang up.
Of course, it helps that there are only 8 people in the US with my last name, and it has silent character and accents which aren't typically reflected in most American data collection.
Why isn't there any easy way to style a table column in CSS?
If you're serving legitimate, tabular data, and you want to right-align column #3 (normal for numerical data), you either have to apply a class to each cell, use javascript to apply it after the fact, or use hacks like:
Which work, but are difficult to maintain when you get 10+ columns, and don't try to automatically re-arrange columns with javascript.
Why can't we just place styles on a <col> or <colgroup>, and have it cascade down?
Go back and watch any of the early episodes of This Old House -- it's clearly apparent that Bob Villa isn't paying attention to the 'experts' that are giving him instructions. The person doing all of the work is Norm Abrahms (who has his own show, The New Yankee Workshop).
And as for tools -- if I had an outbuilding larger than my current house, with a 1/4 mil in power tools (c'mon -- a laser guided chop saw? And he's had it for years -- they only came down to the general consumer market in the last couple of years), I'm guessing I'd do a little bit better on the woodworking projects I do.
And for those times when it does get out, and it's not in a place that you have control of, or shows up in a cache somewhere, I'm thinking about adding a few hundred pages of partially random information, so the real information blends in the background.
... which hopefully isn't the person who was stalking me in college)
(I ran for public office, so unfortunately, my address is now out there... for those who know where to look
I don't use Firefox, but I'll assume what you're saying is correct ...
What Firefox does isn't abusing what may be considered a monopoly power. Microsoft, on the other hand, is using their power in one field to force people back to themselves in another field.
This could be better compared to if you called telephone information, and asked for an ISP, and they sent you to the ILEC's ISP, without disclosing that they were routing you to the ISP they owned. (therefore, shutting out other ISPs)
No, no... cost more...
When there are less items available on the market, the value increases if there's still a demand for it. (if there's no demand, then the value's effectively 0)
The conspiracy theorist would assume that Apple's trying to corner the market on MacQuariums, and they need more spare parts, so they're tricking people into giving them the parts under the assumption of 'recycling' (which it is). They might even have a company that's willing to buy lots of thousands of these for the very purpose. (pbfixit comes to mind)
They might also find that it's more cost effective to strip and refurb some machines than to have new parts manufactured for those with extended warranties. (this assumes that the product is on the market long enough for people to recycle out of warranty machines while other people still have them under warranties)
orThis is actually in the banner, rather than the MOTD -- but it's important to state that there is no expectation of privacy, so that you can't be charged under any of the privacy acts, should you log someone on your system and try to prosecute them.
There were a couple of comments in this regard back in February when there were rumors of them looking for TV deals.
There are plenty of technical reasons why not to do it. See RFC 3675 for details.
The only justification for new TLDs that I've seen is that it makes companies have to buy them to protect their trademark, thereby making profit for the new registrar.
NASA websites are supposed to have a 'last modified' date -- that one didn't. If you check the link, it goes to planning documents from 2002.
... it'll then redirect you to the 'NASA Portal' w/ FY2007 Budget & Planning Documents, which includes a PDF with the 2006 Strategic Plan.
... but searching on the text in it lead me to NASA Strategic Goals, which has the highlights)
From the link they cite as a source, trim off the url down to 'codez'
(I don't know what they've done to the PDF, but you can't copy/paste from it cleanly
I'd still recommend looking that the PDF, as it seems to the only place on the Internet that has the full breakdown of the goals into the sub-goals -- see the Appendix, starting on page 43 (counting by the PDF, not by the document's internal numbering)
Well, if you had read the article, the Nintendo president said he didn't understand how games could sell for more than $50.
Nintendo's been doing what it can to keep costs down -- hell, they were the most profitable of the last round of consoles, even with the much smaller share.
And as for downloading -- unlike MS, they already have a massive collection of console games to distribute -- the article (which I'm guessing you neglected to read), make reference to selling more lower cost items, rather than focus on selling a few higher priced items.
I'm with you on the 'short shelf life' of technical books -- but that should be reasons for the bookstores to try for a higher turnover. Who wants to pick up that book on HTML+, when there's a book about XHTML 2.0 (nevermind that the spec is still in draft, and there's little if any browser support).
But sitting on the shelf you years is the absolutely worst thing that can happen to something in a store -- shelf space costs money. That's how Amazon can undercut prices while still making a profit -- they don't have a store that's 1/2 full of stuff that's not selling ... they make profit by turning stuff over, not letting it collect dust.
Yes, there are places out there that are reminiscent of 'Black Books', but it's not nearly as profitable as actually selling things.
I personally don't, but if there's someone out there who's forced to support Win95 because his boss refuses to switch, he's going to want the book. I've had to support quite a few outdated OSes because of management decisions (yay, Netscape 3.0g on Solaris 2.5! ... in 2003), and found that Amazon Marketplace and eBay to be great places to pick up reference materials after the typical bookstore has stopped carrying them, assuming there isn't a market. And unfortunately, I don't work down the street from Reiter's any more.
I'd say the practices depend on the risk involved with each change, and that depends on the business -- where a single bad change might cost you $5mil, you're going to behave differently than a place that doesn't even pull in $100k in a year.
My rule of thumb -- good backups. Make sure they're good before a chance (ie, you can restore from them, not just that they ran), and don't make changes on Friday -- no one wants to spend their weekend cleaning up something that went wrong. (and if management wants me to come in and do a change on the weekend -- I want 2 weeks notice
And management signoff on changes is basically useless -- you get bitched at when something goes wrong, no matter how many many notes you make in change management that it's a bad idea, and it's going to break things.
I never said code for a specific browser -- I said don't use XHTML. I'm a supporter of valid code, and the Any Browser Campaign, but I don't currently support XHTML, because there is better cross platform support for HTML4 than there is for XHTML 1, because XHTML is not directly compatable with HTML
You can write pages that will degrade gracefully under both XHTML and HTML -- but you can't write a valid XHTML page that will parse cleanly in IE, XHTML is not backwards compatable with HTML, due to the need of an XML declaration before the HTML doctype.
To get XHTML to work in browsers that don't directly support XHTML, you'll have to serve it as text/html, which can then cause problems which correctly support XHTML. more details at wikipedia.
You get better overall support in browsers by coding to HTML4.01 -- there are few advantages to the user to using XHTML 1.0 (it's easier on the browser code, that's about it). That's not true with XHTML 2, which offers better alternative text for images and objects, as well as more easily arranged sections and dramatically updated Web Forms, but I have no idea when we'll get browser support for it. (hell, we don't even have good support for CSS2, much less CSS3 in most browsers)
XHTML and CSS have nothing to do with accessibility. HTML specifies that IMG tags must have an ALT tag -- but that doesn't mean that it's an accurate replacement for the ALT tag -- lots of people used to use them for tooltips. There's nothing in the HTML specifications against having your site being a giant blinking image -- there are in 508.
... specifically for web developers, the WCAG.
I recommend against using XHTML -- too many problems w/ Internet Explorer (and even Safari will render some things slightly off what you're used to, even when it's complaint XHTML)
The best place for accessibility guidelines is W3C's WAI
I appologize -- I removed a comment about knowing about the sub-classifications, as I didn't want to give an incorrect example, as I don't have a copy of Dewey at work
... and we get the even smaller classifications of stuff at the tenths / hundredths / etc ... and for some items, you might have a 12 digit or greater identifier.
... for which you then append numbers for a sub section ... so, given 'ccc.cc', it leads us to 'aaa.bbccccc' ... but perhaps there's a special note that 'aaa.bbcc' gets filed under 'aaa.dd', and not 'aaa.bb'. But there are some things that might not get that special category -- you don't get to append numbers whenever you feel like it ... so you might end up with 5-10% of your books all filed under the same number. (search google for 'computer security', and you'll see how useless it is)
... Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology, OS X for Unix Geeks, and Oracle 8i: SQL Statement Tuning Workshop all did not. 'every non-fiction' is a bit of a stretch.
In fact, there main headings are at the hundreds, with sub classifications at tens / ones / etc
But the problem is that you need to keep a massive book (well, 3) with all of the rules on how the various sub classifications are generated. Some of it's the subtle stuff -- I don't have Dewey in front of me, so here's an example without numbers. (look at the section on 'libraries' for more concrete examples, specifically special libraries)
You have a given section 'aaa', with various sub categories (aaa.bb)
Dewey has its uses, yes, but in my opinion, there are better solutions out there, not only for special libraries but even for general libraries. The only real advantage to Dewey is that more people are familiar with it, because they've seen it in use at their public library -- if you only have a few users (you, a significant others, and maybe your friends), then the cost of dealing with retraining the users is insignificant to the cost of classifying the whole collection.
And for the record -- of the 5 books I sampled from the book in my cubicle, only 2 had a Dewey classification (The Design of Everyday Things, Object Oriented Perl)
If you have a specialty library, it can be completely useless -- imagine going into a library where every book was filed under '005' (computer programming). If you don't have a general library, Dewey isn't going to be as useful for sorting -- you'll want to look into a specialty thesaurus or ontology for your holdings.
As generalized libraries go, if there's a chance of moving it to a database, I personally prefer UDC, due to the way in which is handles sub-topics. (if you had something on the History of British Railroads -- where does it get filed in Dewey? History, European Countries, or Transportation Infrastructure? UDC maintains each of the facets, without needing 3 books of indexing instructions)
At least, I've only seen scuttlemonkey admit to it, that is ... it's possible the other editors agree, as well.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=160477&cid=135 01472
Google's second result is Wikipedia
I don't know how large it is, but it does exist --
one of my co-workers mentioned a friend w/ pre-teen daughters who requested iPods for christmas -- and their parents got them ... but they didn't have a computer, so they didn' have a way of loading music onto them.
So, the problem isn't the typical yuppie, or college student, it's the families out there that don't have a massive income, and don't have a computer at home, but have kids who want iPods.
Of course, this particular situation won't be helped by the device, as there doesn't seem to be a way to way to tag the files created manually (based on the images available), and they wouldn't have internet access for it to get the info, unless it were done from a library and/or school.
Supposedly, although Bethesda Softworks licensed Fallout almost 2 years ago, it was not exclusive license, with Bioware still retaining MMO rights.
As much as I'd love to see it come out, I just know that if it does, it's going to suck days or weeks of my time that could be spent more productively.