As a practicing homosexual
Where did this non sequitur come from?
Anyway, it's pretty common knowledge that some of the Viaos are built cheaply, especially the little half sized ones. If you are really breaking them left and right, perhaps you should look into a more sturdy laptop (perhaps even a ruggedized one).
Also, when you close the screen, push from the bottom of the LCD near the joints instead of near the top, where the stress of closing the laptop is spread across the whole screen.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
The article states that these displays will be self luminious, but it never mentions how much power they will draw. They aren't going to be very useful for laptops if they draw even more power than todays color LCD displays, which are already power hogs. Sometimes I wish I could buy a monocrome passive matrix laptop (they'd be *cheap* in comparision) that let you turn off the backlite (remember when this was possible) and could be used in bright(er) lighting conditions than todays laptops. Who needs 24bit color to read email, compose a letter or a book, read a book, or even surf the web (if you can surf in Lynx, missing color support in Galeon is a small problem). The biggest feature of all would be the increased battery life. Imagine a Transmeta laptop with a low power LCD (passive matrix monochrome backlit optional) laptop with the same batteries as todays power hogs? It'd run for hours on end.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Um, since you don't have a link, I can only assume you are talking about the "WinBoard" that showed up on Slashdot last April 1. I don't think we'll be seeing Winboards anytime soon, simply because of the chicken-and-egg problem. How do you load stuff from disk into memory (your OS) when the disk and memory controllers are part of your OS?
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You live in a school dorm and use a school network. You expect to have some degree of privacy, but it appears if that is not the case.
Why would you expect that? Every school TOS I've ever seen explicitly states that they will monitor your network traffic for anything illegal, immoral, or indecent, and will expell you if you do anything suspicious. Heck, half the time they schools are using hubs for each floor of a dorm room, so even your next door neighbor can snoop on your activity.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Zip was poised to overtake floppies with nearly every OEM providing it for default in many models and a large groundswell of support when IOmega got greedy and basically killed them off. First, the media costs were never reduced down to the levels that people could consider "disposable" like floppies, in fact I think IOmega still charges ~$10 for a single 100MB disk, although I havn't priced them in a while since the media is basically dead. Second, the rapid expansion of the internet and local area networks greatly reduced the need for "sneakernet". Lastly, IOmega seemed to be working as hard as possible at times to garner as much ill will as possible from their users by handling the exceptionally fatal "click of death" problem so poorly.
Of all of these points, I think I should point out that #2 (the internet) is probabaly the most potent. People just don't need to shuffle files around by hand anymore for the most part, so the demand for removable storage has really dropped considerably. In fact, only compact flash type devices and large optical media seem to be going anywhere anymore in the removable storage category.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Depends where you are. Up in northern Virginia, every theatre I've gone to has a cop (most likly a rent-a-cop in full uniform) standing behind the counter to be sure no under-17 types get into R movies. No doubt someone sued some theatres in the area after their darling sweet angel (don't look at the police report) snuck into an R movie and was tarnished for life.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Couldn't you use a catapult mechanism to overcome this? It seems that the extra 8 engines are probabaly going to add a lot of otherwise unnecessary mass to the aircraft. Of course it still doesn't overcome the oceanic storm problem (waves can be a problem if you're trying to use ground effect to stay airborne).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Twister==How to interact with people of the other sex
Wow, I doubt Milton Bradley (or whoever makes Twister, I don't rightfully know) ever considered this. I can just imagine the marketing campaign now: Twister: The contortionist orgy game!Fun for the whole family!
Then again, maybe I just have a dirty mind.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Maybe zero sum isn't the right term then. From the original post, it sounds to me like the poster was worried that kids are going to get the message than whenever two groups of people work towards the same goal one of the groups must lose for the goal to be accomplished.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I think the original poster was trying to avoid getting into a zero-sum mindset, and games only promote this, even if you don't conciously think about it.
One more point, you mentioned something about non-zero life being unfair? Sure it is, everybody (well at least more than 1/2 of the people) "win". That's hardly depressing in my book, in fact that's something to be happy about. It's a peace and love world where I can trade something of mine for something of yours and we both come out ahead.
Oh, and books aren't always happy, and card games are almost invariably zero-sum. That said, I do agree with you on one point, if you make a game boring (Everybody wins all the time! Don't even bother trying kids!) then you've lost the point of playing a game in the first place.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
How about just about any of the Sim* games? For instance, SimCity where you goal is to build a bustling metropolis, but if you want, you can "win" just the same by building a tight knit little community. I think I should mention Roller Coaster Tycoon as well, although it has zero-sum elements in it...(your patrons do run out of money after a while).
As for regular games, it depends partially on what you consider a "game." Most athletic games are zero sum affairs by nature, because it just isn't fun for everybody to get out on the football field and help the other team get the football to the end of the field... Unfortunatly, if an activity doesn't involve competition in some way, many people consider it a hobby or a pasttime instead of a game. Maybe you should look into some new hobbies.
I personally like model building for example, but I'd hardly call it a "game".
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Huh? What's so hard about clicking on the K or the Foot? I'll grant you they don't have the great big arrow pointing towards them that says "Click here stupid!", but I still fail to see what is so difficult about it.
Of course, what do I know, I still prefer the old click anywhere on the desktop instead of actually dragging your cursor all the way over to the bottom left, and then only if it isn't obscured...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
At the same time this is bad news. With no competition, there is little incentive to actually innovate, and the prices for the consoles will go sky high as your monopoly spends more and more money muscleing out any possible competition from the field.
Some people say that Sony is already shifting into this mentality with the rather incremental upgrade that the PS2 is instead of the groundbreaking new machine. Nintendo fell victim to this with the SNES (although they got away with it for the longest time) and now it's killing them.
In summary: Console Monopolies aren't good, and they don't last anyway.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Wine is very simple, it simply re-implements the Windows API calls (including DirectX calls now) by mapping them onto the equivelent Unix calls and writing code to fill in the gaps. This lets you run Windows applictions on x86 machines at nearly full speed, although it is a HUGE undertaking. The Windows API is absolutly enormous, and constantly changing, and the Wine people have to implement it the same way that Windows does (as opposed to what the documentation says it does). As a result, Wine has various minor problems running almost all Windows applictions, and still won't run a fair number of applications at all.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I think you forgot to read the message. The poster wants a mailbox format that he can download on a laptop/PDA or some other device not connected to the net, read and respond to email, and the synchronized the system back up when he gets back online (IE, copy over the mbox or maildir).
Exchange doesn't like that last time I used it, in fact it acts more or less like mbox in that respect, although it depends on how your mail is localy stored. Plus Exchange is pretty expensive for people who don't have large expense accounts and have to support a large base of people.
Finally, how does supporting POP and IMAP make you a "lot more cross platform than UNIX mail"? Especially since UNIX based mail systems can do the same thing (and can share mailboxes between other non-Exchange servers if need be). My biggest beef with Exchange is the binary message format. Just try to resurrect a slightly damaged file, or search/modify something without having to fire up your mail client or web browser.
If the poster was looking for a nice cross platform easily synchronized mailbox format. I don't think Exchange is going to be right for him, especially since he apparently runs (gasp) Linux.
The problem is that Nuclear weapons lose a lot of effectiveness when detonated on the ground. If you want a truely devistating explosion, you need to get the nuke up in the air (in a small plane perhaps).
Right now I think the big thing that is saving us is that it is rather hard and dangerous to manufacture a WMD. For instance:
1. Nuclear weapons: Require refined radioactive elements. Hard to acquire and dangerous to handle. The actual device has to be reasonably precisely machined, and is most likely suspicious looking on an X-Ray machine, making it harder to get in the country.
2. Chemical Weapons: Very dangerous to manufacture the really good ones, and the safer ones don't have quite the same effectiveness. Also, delivery turns out to be difficult, as you have to both spread the gas over a large area, and optimally not kill yourself. The attack on a Japanese Subway a few years back is a good example of this, not all that many people died in that attack (only a handful, and most of them were the people trying to pop open the simple plastic bags with umbrellas IIRC).
3. Biological: Heiniously dangerous to manufacture, since you have to grow and harvest a deadly bacteria or virus without getting infected yourself. Spreading isn't quite as much of a problem as it is for chemical weapons, as people will tend to pass it on to other people (if the infection is contagious).
Many of these problem can be overcome with good funding and facilites (Chemcial and Parmecutical plants for instance), but this generally requires government intervention, which makes the attack a possible liability for the government in question. If the Secret Service tracks down the source of a nerve gas attack to government sponsered terrorism, then you had better belive that the goverment will be in hot water, not just with the US, but with the entire UN and many other groups that are opposed to the use of WMD on civilian targets. Worse, if the US decides to attack your country, you can bet there will be public support for the action (historically one of the weakest links in the US military has been public opinion).
The problem is pure theory classes are frequently a little too abstract for people to really grasp, and people quickly forget the lesson. When you back up your theory with a bit of practice, IE writing some C code in an unsecure fashion then breaking it to show how easy it is; then you have something that the students will remember.
The biggest problem with security problems is that they don't show up during ANY part of the standard software development cycle (your testers generally don't have the source code to try and exploit the code with, and certainly don't have the expertise to do so anyway), so they go unnoticed for years until someone on the outside finds the hole and exploits it.
Re:FASA better then Mechwarrior
on
FASA Dies
·
· Score: 2
Er, FASA used art from the Macross (and Dougram and Southern Cross), but it was certainly not "Macross in America." Battletech has a distinctly different flavor from Macross. In addition, there was apparently some confusion over who owned licenses to what a couple of years ago and FASA lost the rights to the artwork entirely. Nowadays you see people ripping off FASA instead (remember that "exo-armor" in Exo Squad that was a Battletech Madcat?).
Mommie! They are trying to make me think! Make them stop!
You know there are other reasons to go to movies than non-stop chase scenes and explosions...
Still Bicentennial Man did drag in spots, but it wasn't neccessarily the lack of action scenes as much as unfortunatly unstimulating dialog in many of the scenes.
The problem isn't necessarily how directed the air is, it is the amount of surface area you have available to spread the heat dissipation across. You aren't going to be able to slap a big honking heatsink on this thing (but with the PPC you probabally don't have to) so you aren't going to have as much surface area to work with.
Actually, the big reason (besides the fact that you are sitting in a big metal tube) is that cell phone antennas are pointed down towards the earth. Remember that most people on cell phones are on the ground level, and to improve the signal strength cell towers actually have three different antennas, each one directional and covering 120 degress of the sky (actually more, there is some overlap) horizontally and only a few degrees vertically.
On a plane, your cell phone would be constantly out of range anyway.
Plus the 802.11b standard can be tested on the planes first to be sure it doesn't interfere with the controls.
Slashdot Mirror
As a practicing homosexual
Where did this non sequitur come from?
Anyway, it's pretty common knowledge that some of the Viaos are built cheaply, especially the little half sized ones. If you are really breaking them left and right, perhaps you should look into a more sturdy laptop (perhaps even a ruggedized one).
Also, when you close the screen, push from the bottom of the LCD near the joints instead of near the top, where the stress of closing the laptop is spread across the whole screen.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
The article states that these displays will be self luminious, but it never mentions how much power they will draw. They aren't going to be very useful for laptops if they draw even more power than todays color LCD displays, which are already power hogs. Sometimes I wish I could buy a monocrome passive matrix laptop (they'd be *cheap* in comparision) that let you turn off the backlite (remember when this was possible) and could be used in bright(er) lighting conditions than todays laptops. Who needs 24bit color to read email, compose a letter or a book, read a book, or even surf the web (if you can surf in Lynx, missing color support in Galeon is a small problem). The biggest feature of all would be the increased battery life. Imagine a Transmeta laptop with a low power LCD (passive matrix monochrome backlit optional) laptop with the same batteries as todays power hogs? It'd run for hours on end.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Oh I don't know, that could be good for ones self esteem.
Hold it right there, is that a weapon of mass destruction in your pants? You're going to need a license to carry that across the border bud!
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Um, since you don't have a link, I can only assume you are talking about the "WinBoard" that showed up on Slashdot last April 1. I don't think we'll be seeing Winboards anytime soon, simply because of the chicken-and-egg problem. How do you load stuff from disk into memory (your OS) when the disk and memory controllers are part of your OS?
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You live in a school dorm and use a school network. You expect to have some degree of privacy, but it appears if that is not the case.
Why would you expect that? Every school TOS I've ever seen explicitly states that they will monitor your network traffic for anything illegal, immoral, or indecent, and will expell you if you do anything suspicious. Heck, half the time they schools are using hubs for each floor of a dorm room, so even your next door neighbor can snoop on your activity.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Zip was poised to overtake floppies with nearly every OEM providing it for default in many models and a large groundswell of support when IOmega got greedy and basically killed them off. First, the media costs were never reduced down to the levels that people could consider "disposable" like floppies, in fact I think IOmega still charges ~$10 for a single 100MB disk, although I havn't priced them in a while since the media is basically dead. Second, the rapid expansion of the internet and local area networks greatly reduced the need for "sneakernet". Lastly, IOmega seemed to be working as hard as possible at times to garner as much ill will as possible from their users by handling the exceptionally fatal "click of death" problem so poorly.
Of all of these points, I think I should point out that #2 (the internet) is probabaly the most potent. People just don't need to shuffle files around by hand anymore for the most part, so the demand for removable storage has really dropped considerably. In fact, only compact flash type devices and large optical media seem to be going anywhere anymore in the removable storage category.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Depends where you are. Up in northern Virginia, every theatre I've gone to has a cop (most likly a rent-a-cop in full uniform) standing behind the counter to be sure no under-17 types get into R movies. No doubt someone sued some theatres in the area after their darling sweet angel (don't look at the police report) snuck into an R movie and was tarnished for life.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Couldn't you use a catapult mechanism to overcome this? It seems that the extra 8 engines are probabaly going to add a lot of otherwise unnecessary mass to the aircraft. Of course it still doesn't overcome the oceanic storm problem (waves can be a problem if you're trying to use ground effect to stay airborne).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Twister==How to interact with people of the other sex
Wow, I doubt Milton Bradley (or whoever makes Twister, I don't rightfully know) ever considered this. I can just imagine the marketing campaign now: Twister: The contortionist orgy game! Fun for the whole family!
Then again, maybe I just have a dirty mind.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Maybe zero sum isn't the right term then. From the original post, it sounds to me like the poster was worried that kids are going to get the message than whenever two groups of people work towards the same goal one of the groups must lose for the goal to be accomplished.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I think the original poster was trying to avoid getting into a zero-sum mindset, and games only promote this, even if you don't conciously think about it.
One more point, you mentioned something about non-zero life being unfair? Sure it is, everybody (well at least more than 1/2 of the people) "win". That's hardly depressing in my book, in fact that's something to be happy about. It's a peace and love world where I can trade something of mine for something of yours and we both come out ahead.
Oh, and books aren't always happy, and card games are almost invariably zero-sum. That said, I do agree with you on one point, if you make a game boring (Everybody wins all the time! Don't even bother trying kids!) then you've lost the point of playing a game in the first place.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
How about just about any of the Sim* games? For instance, SimCity where you goal is to build a bustling metropolis, but if you want, you can "win" just the same by building a tight knit little community. I think I should mention Roller Coaster Tycoon as well, although it has zero-sum elements in it...(your patrons do run out of money after a while).
As for regular games, it depends partially on what you consider a "game." Most athletic games are zero sum affairs by nature, because it just isn't fun for everybody to get out on the football field and help the other team get the football to the end of the field... Unfortunatly, if an activity doesn't involve competition in some way, many people consider it a hobby or a pasttime instead of a game. Maybe you should look into some new hobbies.
I personally like model building for example, but I'd hardly call it a "game".
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Huh? What's so hard about clicking on the K or the Foot? I'll grant you they don't have the great big arrow pointing towards them that says "Click here stupid!", but I still fail to see what is so difficult about it.
Of course, what do I know, I still prefer the old click anywhere on the desktop instead of actually dragging your cursor all the way over to the bottom left, and then only if it isn't obscured...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
At the same time this is bad news. With no competition, there is little incentive to actually innovate, and the prices for the consoles will go sky high as your monopoly spends more and more money muscleing out any possible competition from the field.
Some people say that Sony is already shifting into this mentality with the rather incremental upgrade that the PS2 is instead of the groundbreaking new machine. Nintendo fell victim to this with the SNES (although they got away with it for the longest time) and now it's killing them.
In summary: Console Monopolies aren't good, and they don't last anyway.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Wine is very simple, it simply re-implements the Windows API calls (including DirectX calls now) by mapping them onto the equivelent Unix calls and writing code to fill in the gaps. This lets you run Windows applictions on x86 machines at nearly full speed, although it is a HUGE undertaking. The Windows API is absolutly enormous, and constantly changing, and the Wine people have to implement it the same way that Windows does (as opposed to what the documentation says it does). As a result, Wine has various minor problems running almost all Windows applictions, and still won't run a fair number of applications at all.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I think you forgot to read the message. The poster wants a mailbox format that he can download on a laptop/PDA or some other device not connected to the net, read and respond to email, and the synchronized the system back up when he gets back online (IE, copy over the mbox or maildir).
Exchange doesn't like that last time I used it, in fact it acts more or less like mbox in that respect, although it depends on how your mail is localy stored. Plus Exchange is pretty expensive for people who don't have large expense accounts and have to support a large base of people.
Finally, how does supporting POP and IMAP make you a "lot more cross platform than UNIX mail"? Especially since UNIX based mail systems can do the same thing (and can share mailboxes between other non-Exchange servers if need be). My biggest beef with Exchange is the binary message format. Just try to resurrect a slightly damaged file, or search/modify something without having to fire up your mail client or web browser.
If the poster was looking for a nice cross platform easily synchronized mailbox format. I don't think Exchange is going to be right for him, especially since he apparently runs (gasp) Linux.
The problem is that Nuclear weapons lose a lot of effectiveness when detonated on the ground. If you want a truely devistating explosion, you need to get the nuke up in the air (in a small plane perhaps).
Right now I think the big thing that is saving us is that it is rather hard and dangerous to manufacture a WMD. For instance:
1. Nuclear weapons: Require refined radioactive elements. Hard to acquire and dangerous to handle. The actual device has to be reasonably precisely machined, and is most likely suspicious looking on an X-Ray machine, making it harder to get in the country.
2. Chemical Weapons: Very dangerous to manufacture the really good ones, and the safer ones don't have quite the same effectiveness. Also, delivery turns out to be difficult, as you have to both spread the gas over a large area, and optimally not kill yourself. The attack on a Japanese Subway a few years back is a good example of this, not all that many people died in that attack (only a handful, and most of them were the people trying to pop open the simple plastic bags with umbrellas IIRC).
3. Biological: Heiniously dangerous to manufacture, since you have to grow and harvest a deadly bacteria or virus without getting infected yourself. Spreading isn't quite as much of a problem as it is for chemical weapons, as people will tend to pass it on to other people (if the infection is contagious).
Many of these problem can be overcome with good funding and facilites (Chemcial and Parmecutical plants for instance), but this generally requires government intervention, which makes the attack a possible liability for the government in question. If the Secret Service tracks down the source of a nerve gas attack to government sponsered terrorism, then you had better belive that the goverment will be in hot water, not just with the US, but with the entire UN and many other groups that are opposed to the use of WMD on civilian targets. Worse, if the US decides to attack your country, you can bet there will be public support for the action (historically one of the weakest links in the US military has been public opinion).
Not if you get everything from the same provider, which is certainly possible with several of the services available today.
The problem is pure theory classes are frequently a little too abstract for people to really grasp, and people quickly forget the lesson. When you back up your theory with a bit of practice, IE writing some C code in an unsecure fashion then breaking it to show how easy it is; then you have something that the students will remember.
The biggest problem with security problems is that they don't show up during ANY part of the standard software development cycle (your testers generally don't have the source code to try and exploit the code with, and certainly don't have the expertise to do so anyway), so they go unnoticed for years until someone on the outside finds the hole and exploits it.
Er, FASA used art from the Macross (and Dougram and Southern Cross), but it was certainly not "Macross in America." Battletech has a distinctly different flavor from Macross. In addition, there was apparently some confusion over who owned licenses to what a couple of years ago and FASA lost the rights to the artwork entirely. Nowadays you see people ripping off FASA instead (remember that "exo-armor" in Exo Squad that was a Battletech Madcat?).
Mommie! They are trying to make me think! Make them stop!
You know there are other reasons to go to movies than non-stop chase scenes and explosions...
Still Bicentennial Man did drag in spots, but it wasn't neccessarily the lack of action scenes as much as unfortunatly unstimulating dialog in many of the scenes.
The problem isn't necessarily how directed the air is, it is the amount of surface area you have available to spread the heat dissipation across. You aren't going to be able to slap a big honking heatsink on this thing (but with the PPC you probabally don't have to) so you aren't going to have as much surface area to work with.
Actually, the big reason (besides the fact that you are sitting in a big metal tube) is that cell phone antennas are pointed down towards the earth. Remember that most people on cell phones are on the ground level, and to improve the signal strength cell towers actually have three different antennas, each one directional and covering 120 degress of the sky (actually more, there is some overlap) horizontally and only a few degrees vertically.
On a plane, your cell phone would be constantly out of range anyway.
Plus the 802.11b standard can be tested on the planes first to be sure it doesn't interfere with the controls.
It is a wise man who knows what he does not know.