Specialized tech books don't get bought by individuals who may also be cheap asses and willing to pirate them. They get bought by _employees_ who need them in their works. And an employee doesn't care how much they cost and they are certainly not willing to get fired for a torrent download in order to save the company 50$ !
A lot of books suck. When it comes to tech books, I'll download them to see if they're any good. If they are, I'll make a special effort to make sure we officially purchase them through the IT budget. It's not the most efficient way to show some love but it's the best we can do for now.
We buy all of our software. While I personally begrudge every penny that goes out the door to the bloatware companies like Microsoft and Adobe, I'm pleased as punch when I get to write a PO for a smaller company that does good things. Case in point, I made damn sure the last two places I worked got licensed copies of this beauty -- http://www.foldersizes.com/ It's a great way to track down where your disk use is going.
The economy sucks, though, and our budgets aren't getting any better. We've had one round of layoffs and another might be coming. We certainly don't have any budget for learning materials at this point. Welcome to the suck of the real.
Think about how small that is, and how large a cubic meter is. I'm not impressed. You can find a few molecules of almost anything almost everywhere, if you have sensitive enough equipment.
So they're going 17,200mph relative to the surface of the Earth? How fast are they going relative to some arbitrarily fixed point in the universe? Relative to another galaxy, we're hurtling towards it at some million mph, so maybe count that in as well.
So why don't you go up there and show 'em how it's done?
It must be really worth it for these big companies to risk millions in fines to making competition suffer.
I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...
It's amazing how many of these huge corporate decisions boil down into dick-stroking contests. You think that the major criteria in the decision-making process would be the welfare of the company, the shareholders, market conditions, a sober and rational look towards the future but no, not really. Often times the decisions are as addle-brained as some teenager crowing "Wow, this car will totally get me laid!"
Ya know, it really shocks me when I read this backwards drivel and see otherwise intelligent people gobble it up. If the facts in that article had appeared in a science fiction magazine in the 60s people would have said: wow, I wish I could live in that world where science even makes food taste better! But that was an era when the atom was your friend and we were going to conquer space
Your sarcasm is noted. The problem is that we tend to muck with stuff that's been working fine and introduce problems that are worse than the original ones we tried to solve. Look at the prevalence of HFC. That stuff isn't used because it's good for us, it's used because it's cheaper than sugar. The hormones injected into cows are to stimulate milk production. The antibiotics are used because of the crowded conditions on feed lots. Is there any concern for how these substances will affect downstream consumers? No. It's all about short-term profit maximization.
The reason why people disturst big business is because they've seen how big business operates. Dismissing every person concerned about factory food as an alarmist conspiracy hippie only makes you look like an industry apologist and moron.
I also have to admit the reality of trying to fight with low-IQ idiots with guns. In a situation like this, no matter how right you are, you're wrong. I've had many disappointing experiences with cops and hold them in contempt. But I also realize that letting my feelings slip will do nothing more than give them an opportunity to act like pigs.
I'm guessing that Microsoft has about 4 dozen guys that know so much about finance, they would literally make you slit your wrists should you ever be matched up against them in a test of financial knowledge. Maybe, just maybe, they know what they're doing more than some random dude Slashdotting from work.
You could have said the same thing about Enron ten years ago.:)
A dedicated cult fanbase does not automatically mean that it's a marketable audience. It does not take many fans to make a fan game, especially if they aren't shooting for commercial polish.
The logical solution is to graduate to a shared fanworld supported by the community, all properly held in creative commons license or some manner of copyleft or gnu license that says "Anyone who uses these materials in a for-profit effort grants us the right to use their unique contributions in turn." And fans could self-fund the developer for publishing the game, work for hire.
Everything I said above would have been pie in the sky years ago. It just wouldn't have been possible. It's rapidly becoming more and more possible now. People did it years ago with pencil and paper RPG's and MUD's but I'm talking about the kind of creation that requires serious infusions of capital like game development.
The biggest impediment would be community drama. When a company makes a game, there's a more top-down command structure and what gets produced is what gets produced. There's usually not a big committee arguing over everything. Volunteer and non-profits can be torn apart by the sniping over this stuff, it's human nature.
But I think we're at the point where we can build a new development model here. Right now the games are ultimately fan-supported but it's a rather indirect process. Games have to be pitched to management and they're the ones holding the purse-strings. Anything that gets produced has to satisfy their tastes. Only after the funding is secured and the game developed and published comes the point where the wallets of the fans can have a say. While they can shout and cry, the decision-making process is still behind closed doors and the public is told what they're going to eat and like it.
What I wonder is how likely the prospect is of providing the initial funding from fans, in effect pre-ordering the game before work has even started. There's already fundraising sites in place where people can use credit cards to make contributions and the processor takes a nominal fee off of each transaction. And then we get back to the question of whether a fanbase could hire a developer to create a game according to their specifications, or hire the designer and say "we trust your decisions, make us an RPG with these characters." Wargammers tend to be both obsessive and have money. It would seem like a community-requested and designed game would be a logical step. Hire the developers to make the engine, artists could be commissioned for units, community members design the scenarios. Every five years the engine gets a tune-up to account for improved computers. There's probably more difficulties than I'm allowing for here but it does not seem impossible.
I think losing your job would be punishment enough in this case.
Absolutely. What he did would not have been illegal from home. You can stand in front of a mirror and make your junk move in circles all day long. Do it on your front porch and you get busted for public indecency.
If he's surfing porn from his cube, he can be fired. If he's sexually assaults a coworker, that's worth firing and prosecuting.
It's like drinking. Drinking at home is legal. Getting so hammered I black out and lose days is legal so long as I do it on my own time. Showing up to work hung-over can get me fired but won't put me in jail. Drinking on the job if I just sit at a desk can get me fired, no jail time. Drinking when driving my own car can get me jail time and so drinking while driving a company car can get me fired and jail time, that's fair. If I worked on the factory floor and people could be maimed or killed due to my negligence, jail time would be proper.
Pretty much anything that would put me in jail if I were doing it on my own time is fair game for putting me in jail on company time. But if it's not something that's prosecutable, don't prosecute, just fire the guy. But that also brings up the question of assholes trying to selectively get rid of someone. There's really not much you can do when management has it in for you. I've worked in happy companies and paranoid companies. The happy ones were great but in the paranoid ones once someone has decided they have it in for you, you're toast.
I had a friend in grad school whose credit card company screwed up his billing to the tune of 56 cents. He turned on the TV, poured himself a drink, and sat on the phone talking (wasting the time of) various people for hours over days until they just gave him the 56 cents (they never admitted wrong doing).
I remember this because I visited his apartment on the second day of his quest and thought to myself: "He's still at this?". While he was on the phone, the TV cut to breaking news of OJ Simpson leading police on a chase in a white Bronco. The CC company gave up about the same time as OJ.
So you mean to say the credit card company is still out there looking for the real overbiller?
I hated Office 2007's "ribbon" interface when I first saw it. However, after the first few days of using it, I found myself at least twice as productive when using it. Yeah, I know... it's a Microsoft idea, and therefore it's automatically bad. Except, it isn't. Everything I need is easier to get at with fewer clicks, and working properly with styles is finally a snap.
I hated the ribbon on sight and waited for it to grow on me. It still hasn't. I agree that the menus interface wasn't the greatest idea in the world but it's the best we've had so far. I'm sure there's better control interfaces than keyboard and mouse but we haven't discovered them yet. Keyboard and mouse works pretty good so far.
I'm still banging my head against the wall with the changes in Excel. The ribbons are as counter-intuitive now as they were before. I keep having to google features I know are there but can't find in that fucking interface. They still strike me as not just an epic-fail but an epoch-fail.
IIRC, the original NCC-1701 is a heavy cruiser; not a ship of the line, as you say, but still something that packs a hefty wallop and delivers a big punch. Whilst a frigate is a fairly nebulous term, and has been used for larger ships, it normally covers something of destroyer size or smaller.
All of those terms are nebulous. We have frigates bigger than destroyers and destroyers bigger than frigates depending on the navy.:) Cruiser used to be a mission, not a class. The whole term "line of battle" came from sailing tactics, sailing the ships in a line and trying to cross the enemy's T. A ship that could sail in that line was a ship of the line. Ships were first rate, second rate, third rate. Anything too small for the line would be a frigate. But again, this is all relative and according to the strategic doctrines of various navies.
The very word destroyer comes to us from the torpedo-boat destroyer. They were ships meant to screen the battleships from torpedo boats. Cruisers were meant to be major surface combatants, fast enough to escape from battleships but armed sufficiently to destroy anything it could catch. But then you had the Brits thinking you could arm a cruiser sufficiently to take on a battleship, hence the battle-cruiser. But the lesson learned there is if you put big guns on a ship like that, you're going to try and take on an enemy you can't take hits from.
Ship designs all depend on weapons and tactics. In the age of sail, God was always on he side of the bigger ship with bigger guns. Damage models were linear and straight grinding attrition. Torpedoes changed the equation because a piddly little boat carried sufficient firepower to knock out a battleship for very little risk. Submarines only made things worse. After WWII, big ships were pretty much abandoned with the exception of the aircraft carrier. The Iowa-class battleships were operated for a while but that was more about flag-waving than anything else. Everyone was concerned about surviving nuclear attack. The USN decided to go with a doctrine of active defense, knocking out the nukes rather than trying to armor to withstand them. Surface ships remain extremely vulnerable to cruise missiles, nuclear or otherwise. Since we haven't seen a large surface action since WWII this hasn't been put to the test but I think surface ships are pretty much relics that should be in a museum. Aircraft carriers are viking funerals waiting to happen. If we ever put matters to the test, I think we'll prove that there's only two kinds of ships out there, subs and targets. We might keep some beefed up cutters for peacetime service, pirate-chasing and the like but for fighting it's going to be subs and long-distance drones. There might be a use for amphibious landing ships and drone carriers but the age of the surface combatant is over.*
*We can argue this back and forth but it'd take a war to settle the matter. In that case, I'd be just as happy not to know.
Romulus' sun goes supernova... what, the Romulans, who have starship technology, didn't know in advance?
The Romulans don't evacuate?
The Federation sends ONE BLOKE (Spock) to save their sun?
It gets better than that. Ok, so you collapse the sun into a singularity. That's nice. Romulus will still orbit that point, won't go flying out into space, the singularity will weigh as much as the original sun since it just collapsed instead of 'splodin'. But what are they going to do for light? That planet would have been a snowball inside a month.
I know they wanted to do a big origin tale thing with this movie but they should have been more mindful of logic. Leave the Enterprise as an unexceptional ship exploring the wild and woolly borders of the Federation. Kirk has just been assigned his first command. He has a reputation for being bold, cocky, and getting the job done. He has a mix of patrons and enemies in the Admiralty. He carries a reputation for taking huge risks but has been lucky so far. Maybe have the immediate backstory that he was XO on his last ship and his captain made some tactical mistakes that got them in trouble. Captain is wounded, Kirk assumes command but does not take the ship out of the fight but remains with his squadron and concludes the engagement. The Admiralty Board is deeply divided and this is a cloud that is hanging over his head.
So this would set the stage for him arriving on the Enterprise. It's a ship fresh out of spacedock and we get to see him running the crew through training, getting them working as a team. The crew gets to know him and learns there's more to him than rashness and luck. If you need to spice this up with some space battles, you can fill in flashbacks to the previous fight Kirk was in as XO.
That right there would give you the emotional investment in the characters, the necessary development. And then a crisis could come about where the Enterprise is rushed to an early deployment, some crisis near the Neutral Zone. It doesn't really matter what the crisis is, there doesn't need to be a personal villain involved. It just needs to be a danger for the crew to face and emerge from intact and alive.
the real wet-navy Farragut was given command of a prize ship at age 12, and attained a command of his own at age 22)
Err, these things do not happen sanity-based fleets. No Ensign jumps to Captain in 24 hours, bypassing all the senior officers with many more years of experience. As to the level of sanity in the war of 1812, just the fact that you could become a mid-shipman at the age of 12 (or younger) speaks volumes. This sort of thing happens today only in such centres of civilization as Darfur, Somalia and Afghanistan....
And even in such an insane fleet it took Farragut 10 years to make it to Captain.
There's a few other factors. For the argument of Alexander becoming King when young, we've seen infants named king. This does not mean they're up to the task. Alexander was a man of extraordinary ability given the position to fully employ them. But he is an exception, not the rule.
With regards to Farragut, trying to draw comparisons between wartime and peacetime militaries is problematic to begin with but there's also the matter of advancing technology. We would tend to make an equivalency between a fighter pilot from WWI flying canvas and wood biplanes and a modern fighter pilot strapped into an F-22. There is no equivalency. The planes cost a thousand times more, they take more training to fly, and are very damned complex. They have to be for the abilities they possess. So to say that it's reasonable to have someone wash out of the armored cavalry and then finagle a position flying F-22's and point out it happened in WWI, it's just not a reasonable comparison.
Now someone will bring up that war can cause selection pressures not present in peacetime. Someone like a Patton would not have been able to rise to high rank in a peacetime army but was able to get away with his behavior because he won battles. Likewise with Grant; he was a disheveled alcoholic and a failure at most things in life but he won battles; Lincoln said he'd send a case of whiskey each to his other generals if they could fight like Grant. But when peacetime comes, the pressures are removed and things get back to normal. A winning general might be forgiven eccentricities by dint of his service but a drunk without a record isn't going to be cut any slack. In WWII, the Wehrmacht was forced to use boys and old men as infantry. Rest assured, they're not doing so now.
Now I'm sure someone will say that this is all because we mollycoddle kids in this country and don't give them responsibility. Ok, please point out any other navy in the world that would give command of a national flagship to a kid. I'm not talking about a PT boat from WWII. I'm not even talking about a WWII sub. I mean something like a modern diesel-electric, a modern nuke boat, a destroyer. It's just not happening.
I'll say right from the start that this is going to prove a very successful movie. The theater was packed, people roared with laughter at the parts that were supposed to be funny, cheered the parts that were supposed to be cheered, and clapped at the end. So by all marketing standards, this is a success.
But it isn't a very good movie, if we're actually talking about craft and workmanship.
Michael Bay camerawork is something you're either going to enjoy or hate. Did you think the camera was shaky in Galactica? Did you need dramamine to watch any of the Bourne movies? Then hold onto your butts. In this movie it was like two elephants were having sex on top of the camera. Absolutely atrocious cinematography. I'll be so happy when this fad is over. But this might not bother some people.
Where the movie fell apart is the writing. Even the positive reviews say the villain is forgettable and the plot doesn't make sense. They'll say that's not the point. Really? I thought it was the point. Our Romulan villain has a nonsensical motivation. We bring time travel into the story again and in a highly clunky fashion. Logical shortcuts are made to get our heroes into the academy, establish Kirk as an outsider who then goes on to become bestest dude ever in Starfleet, and have his little battle with the Romulans. The events we see on-screen don't flow from any sense of internal consistency but are visibly imposed by the writers. Consider the skydiving sequence. They cut one from Generations and the idea is really frickin' cool so they decided they must shoehorn it into the movie. Therefore the mining ship must have a laser it dangles off a 1000km cable in order to drill into the heart of a planet. Why a mining ship would do this we do not know. Why the beam had to be lowered into the atmosphere instead of fired from space is not explained. But this does setup a nice option of having a dangerous platform thousands of feet in the air upon which a fight might be had.
There's other instances of anti-logic throughout the film. Kirk goes from being a cadet on probation to being given command of the Enterprise. Not just assuming a brevet command during an emergency but given the post and, one can only assume rank, of captain. Of the flagship of the Federation. A very young and cocky captain made sense in the original series because the Enterprise was not meant to be an exceptional ship. It was not the HMS Victory of the Star Trek universe, it was not a ship of the line. It was pretty much a frigate -- it could range far, defeat anything it could catch, run from anything it couldn't, and get involved with all the adventures big, expensive ships of the line wouldn't. The Enterprise of TNG was the flagship, pretty much a floating embassy and symbol of the Federation. It made much more sense to have someone like Picard in charge, someone who thinks first and shoots second. But to give a kid fresh out of the academy command of his own ship, the flagship? That's almost as illogical as grabbing an engineer from an obscure outpost on a Vulcan moon, throwing him into the engine room and giving him carte blache.
There are visual things that will ruin your suspension of disbelief. The engine rooms for the two Federation ships we saw were filmed in a boiler works and a brewery. The launch pad for the Enterprise looked like a Texas refinery. These kinds of expedients can be forgiven in low-budget scifi. "Hey, we can't afford to build a good set so let's just film inside a decommissioned destroyer and pretend it's our ship." For a $150 million movie, this sort of thing is jarring. It's the kind of nit that would be glossed over if everything else was great but it stands out when the rest of the movie is exhibiting a similar slapdash construction.
Now some people really don't care about this sort of thing. I'm going to make an analogy that doesn't involve cars so bear with me. It's like porno. "Who cares why the hot chick with the tits wants to fuck the guy? She wants to fuck and I wanna see it!" Few people complain about the writing in pornos. But there are people who care about why two people want to fuck. That's called erotica. We don't really have equivalent terms for movies but that's what it pretty much boils down to.
Genuine windows was something dreamt up in the marketing department, but the theory is that "counterfeit" copies are virus ridden.
Actually, they would be because Microsoft will block hacked ones from getting updates to fix glaring security holes. So when you look at the viral load of the interweb, just remember that you're looking at a lot of unlicensed copies of Windows that have been turned into botnet zombies. Microsoft's anti-"piracy" efforts make the world a less secure place.
Well, at least I hope that's the case. Won't know until I see it tonight.
When the movie was first announced I groaned and said "Why? For the love of Christ, why?" Trek is dead to me and Berman and his crew spent a long time killing it. But then I started hearing more and more positive buzz, not from the marketing droids but fan reviews, people who would be just as happy to complain an weep bitterly if it sucked.
This is the same pattern that held true for Watchmen. I anticipated failure from the moment it was announced and planned on not seeing it. Then the fanboys got to see early cuts and holy shit, surprise, it's actually good. I went and was very entertained.
Not every movie needs to be high art, some can succeed admirably just by being really frickin' funny and entertaining. Something like a Galaxy Quest ain't a Schindler's List but it is a warm-hearted comedy wrapped up inside a giant geek in-joke.
I wonder if Hollywood will ever accept the idea that it's not just enough to throw crap on the screen, you need a good script and good actors to make it work. Dark Knight, Iron Man, Watchmen, good movies. Hulk, Wolverine, anything with Nicholas Cage, bad movies.
Seven has to solve the problem of legacy apps that don't run. If it doesn't, the Mexican standoff will continue with Seven in Vista's place, and one or two Fortune 100 shops throwing their hands in the air and switching FOSS could start a stampede. The unlikeliness of that, while high, decreases just a bit for every day the current situation persists.
There's also another matter to consider. IT trends are cyclic and I think we're at the end of the PC-centric phase, everyone is going to want to go put the power back on the server again. That's not to say that we're all going thin-client, just that we're going to see more citrix-type or web-based apps. This allows management to be relatively platform-agnostic. My 7 year old computer can run a remote desktop session just fine. So long as the web apps are developed intelligently, mac and PC can play in the same garden. The upshot of all this is that we could see the end of the era of Complete Microsoft Dominance. Office used to the king gorilla and if you couldn't run that, businesses wouldn't switch. Open Office is a very nice alternative these days.
To take hypothetical company ABC, Inc, let's say they ditch a Microsoft-only solution. They manufacture widgets and have manufacturing, sales, and accounting all in one building. They use commodity PC's on the factory floor running Linux and the management system is all web-based. In accounting, most everyone is running the same Linux PC setup and use the accounting module of the management system. A couple guys who do finance stuff insist they love Excel and won't part with it. No problem. They run PC's with Windows and Excel and still use the same accounting module screens as everyone else since it's through a web browser. Sales guys are running Macs because they're trendy weenies. (yes, I kid, but only a little.) Still, no problem. They can access the management system through a web browser, plus have all their little mac toys running.
Ten years ago this sort of thing wouldn't have been possible. ABC, Inc. may have been running their system on, say, AS/400 and used dumb terminals on the factory floor but everyone else in the company would have standardized on Windows and Office. They'd use terminal emulators to access the management system. Linux would have been too clunky and inconvenient in comparison.
TFA makes it sound like nobody thought storylines were important initially; but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?
Maybe the more creative out there could enlighten me. Can you make a good storyline for Donkey Kong?
(Oh no! Kong found more barrels! Again!)
You really have to make a distinction between simplistic arcade games and what we're able to do now. But as I recall, they did do a Donkey Kong Jr. game with a storyline and there's all the Mario incarnations.
If we compare it to cinema, Donkey Kong would be the early nickelodeons playing silent, extremely short shorts. NES games would be the equivalent of the silent film era and then we move right in to today. Just as story became more and more important in making a good movie, same goes with games. But we also see movies and games where that is completely ignored. With certain movies, it doesn't seem to hurt. Transformers is probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and when factoring in the massive budget involved in making such a shitburger, it's even less excusable. It was an insult to thinking men and women everywhere. But thinking people weren't the intended audience. That sucker did business like crazy. There's a sequel coming out promising to be even worse than the first. It'll do well, I'm sure. Still, it would have been better with a script.
Why do we stay up way too late reading a gripping book? Because the author is dropping little tidbits we really want to know. We keep reading because we just know the answer is no the next page.
The worst games I've played dole out the storyline like it cost a million bucks and most of it is filler or, a real sin in RPG's, stupid goblin nose quests. They could have just as easily had the quest tied into a major part of the plot but they didn't.
The best games tie that story in there tight and everything keeps fresh. You're not just blowing away generic baddies, you feel like there's something involved in the story. You can really relate this to action movies. Lucas said and then forgot "A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." Bad action movies don't setup the action, don't invest you in the characters, the motives, it all just comes across like a sloppy mess. But a good action movie, ah! You have a feel for the character, you know what's going on, and when the action scene kicks in, you feel engaged.
Remember when that other site got taken down, supernova I think? Yeah, it got taken down and nobody could find torrents anywhere else on the interweb after that.
In other news, traffic suddenly spikes at a new site, moninova. Hrmmm.
"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Who said that? Well, that would be that well-known dumbass liberal socialist fascist wacko, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The sound you hear is conservative heads a'splodin'. Next up, quotes from the bible that show Jesus was more of a socialist than a capitalist.
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Who couldhave imagined that an organization with a name like ASCAP could be acting like an an ASS HAT.
Specialized tech books don't get bought by individuals who may also be cheap asses and willing to pirate them. They get bought by _employees_ who need them in their works. And an employee doesn't care how much they cost and they are certainly not willing to get fired for a torrent download in order to save the company 50$ !
A lot of books suck. When it comes to tech books, I'll download them to see if they're any good. If they are, I'll make a special effort to make sure we officially purchase them through the IT budget. It's not the most efficient way to show some love but it's the best we can do for now.
We buy all of our software. While I personally begrudge every penny that goes out the door to the bloatware companies like Microsoft and Adobe, I'm pleased as punch when I get to write a PO for a smaller company that does good things. Case in point, I made damn sure the last two places I worked got licensed copies of this beauty -- http://www.foldersizes.com/ It's a great way to track down where your disk use is going.
The economy sucks, though, and our budgets aren't getting any better. We've had one round of layoffs and another might be coming. We certainly don't have any budget for learning materials at this point. Welcome to the suck of the real.
Think about how small that is, and how large a cubic meter is. I'm not impressed. You can find a few molecules of almost anything almost everywhere, if you have sensitive enough equipment.
Did she believe you?
When are the Russians going to get around to linking all these zombies into a botnet? Or would that be a bugnet?
So they're going 17,200mph relative to the surface of the Earth? How fast are they going relative to some arbitrarily fixed point in the universe? Relative to another galaxy, we're hurtling towards it at some million mph, so maybe count that in as well.
So why don't you go up there and show 'em how it's done?
It must be really worth it for these big companies to risk millions in fines to making competition suffer.
I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...
It's amazing how many of these huge corporate decisions boil down into dick-stroking contests. You think that the major criteria in the decision-making process would be the welfare of the company, the shareholders, market conditions, a sober and rational look towards the future but no, not really. Often times the decisions are as addle-brained as some teenager crowing "Wow, this car will totally get me laid!"
Ya know, it really shocks me when I read this backwards drivel and see otherwise intelligent people gobble it up. If the facts in that article had appeared in a science fiction magazine in the 60s people would have said: wow, I wish I could live in that world where science even makes food taste better! But that was an era when the atom was your friend and we were going to conquer space
Your sarcasm is noted. The problem is that we tend to muck with stuff that's been working fine and introduce problems that are worse than the original ones we tried to solve. Look at the prevalence of HFC. That stuff isn't used because it's good for us, it's used because it's cheaper than sugar. The hormones injected into cows are to stimulate milk production. The antibiotics are used because of the crowded conditions on feed lots. Is there any concern for how these substances will affect downstream consumers? No. It's all about short-term profit maximization.
The reason why people disturst big business is because they've seen how big business operates. Dismissing every person concerned about factory food as an alarmist conspiracy hippie only makes you look like an industry apologist and moron.
I also have to admit the reality of trying to fight with low-IQ idiots with guns. In a situation like this, no matter how right you are, you're wrong. I've had many disappointing experiences with cops and hold them in contempt. But I also realize that letting my feelings slip will do nothing more than give them an opportunity to act like pigs.
I'm guessing that Microsoft has about 4 dozen guys that know so much about finance, they would literally make you slit your wrists should you ever be matched up against them in a test of financial knowledge. Maybe, just maybe, they know what they're doing more than some random dude Slashdotting from work.
You could have said the same thing about Enron ten years ago. :)
A dedicated cult fanbase does not automatically mean that it's a marketable audience. It does not take many fans to make a fan game, especially if they aren't shooting for commercial polish.
The logical solution is to graduate to a shared fanworld supported by the community, all properly held in creative commons license or some manner of copyleft or gnu license that says "Anyone who uses these materials in a for-profit effort grants us the right to use their unique contributions in turn." And fans could self-fund the developer for publishing the game, work for hire.
Everything I said above would have been pie in the sky years ago. It just wouldn't have been possible. It's rapidly becoming more and more possible now. People did it years ago with pencil and paper RPG's and MUD's but I'm talking about the kind of creation that requires serious infusions of capital like game development.
The biggest impediment would be community drama. When a company makes a game, there's a more top-down command structure and what gets produced is what gets produced. There's usually not a big committee arguing over everything. Volunteer and non-profits can be torn apart by the sniping over this stuff, it's human nature.
But I think we're at the point where we can build a new development model here. Right now the games are ultimately fan-supported but it's a rather indirect process. Games have to be pitched to management and they're the ones holding the purse-strings. Anything that gets produced has to satisfy their tastes. Only after the funding is secured and the game developed and published comes the point where the wallets of the fans can have a say. While they can shout and cry, the decision-making process is still behind closed doors and the public is told what they're going to eat and like it.
What I wonder is how likely the prospect is of providing the initial funding from fans, in effect pre-ordering the game before work has even started. There's already fundraising sites in place where people can use credit cards to make contributions and the processor takes a nominal fee off of each transaction. And then we get back to the question of whether a fanbase could hire a developer to create a game according to their specifications, or hire the designer and say "we trust your decisions, make us an RPG with these characters." Wargammers tend to be both obsessive and have money. It would seem like a community-requested and designed game would be a logical step. Hire the developers to make the engine, artists could be commissioned for units, community members design the scenarios. Every five years the engine gets a tune-up to account for improved computers. There's probably more difficulties than I'm allowing for here but it does not seem impossible.
I think losing your job would be punishment enough in this case.
Absolutely. What he did would not have been illegal from home. You can stand in front of a mirror and make your junk move in circles all day long. Do it on your front porch and you get busted for public indecency.
If he's surfing porn from his cube, he can be fired. If he's sexually assaults a coworker, that's worth firing and prosecuting.
It's like drinking. Drinking at home is legal. Getting so hammered I black out and lose days is legal so long as I do it on my own time. Showing up to work hung-over can get me fired but won't put me in jail. Drinking on the job if I just sit at a desk can get me fired, no jail time. Drinking when driving my own car can get me jail time and so drinking while driving a company car can get me fired and jail time, that's fair. If I worked on the factory floor and people could be maimed or killed due to my negligence, jail time would be proper.
Pretty much anything that would put me in jail if I were doing it on my own time is fair game for putting me in jail on company time. But if it's not something that's prosecutable, don't prosecute, just fire the guy. But that also brings up the question of assholes trying to selectively get rid of someone. There's really not much you can do when management has it in for you. I've worked in happy companies and paranoid companies. The happy ones were great but in the paranoid ones once someone has decided they have it in for you, you're toast.
Coworkers thought I was coughing up a lung. Damn cold.
I had a friend in grad school whose credit card company screwed up his billing to the tune of 56 cents. He turned on the TV, poured himself a drink, and sat on the phone talking (wasting the time of) various people for hours over days until they just gave him the 56 cents (they never admitted wrong doing).
I remember this because I visited his apartment on the second day of his quest and thought to myself: "He's still at this?". While he was on the phone, the TV cut to breaking news of OJ Simpson leading police on a chase in a white Bronco. The CC company gave up about the same time as OJ.
So you mean to say the credit card company is still out there looking for the real overbiller?
I hated Office 2007's "ribbon" interface when I first saw it. However, after the first few days of using it, I found myself at least twice as productive when using it. Yeah, I know... it's a Microsoft idea, and therefore it's automatically bad. Except, it isn't. Everything I need is easier to get at with fewer clicks, and working properly with styles is finally a snap.
I hated the ribbon on sight and waited for it to grow on me. It still hasn't. I agree that the menus interface wasn't the greatest idea in the world but it's the best we've had so far. I'm sure there's better control interfaces than keyboard and mouse but we haven't discovered them yet. Keyboard and mouse works pretty good so far.
I'm still banging my head against the wall with the changes in Excel. The ribbons are as counter-intuitive now as they were before. I keep having to google features I know are there but can't find in that fucking interface. They still strike me as not just an epic-fail but an epoch-fail.
IIRC, the original NCC-1701 is a heavy cruiser; not a ship of the line, as you say, but still something that packs a hefty wallop and delivers a big punch. Whilst a frigate is a fairly nebulous term, and has been used for larger ships, it normally covers something of destroyer size or smaller.
All of those terms are nebulous. We have frigates bigger than destroyers and destroyers bigger than frigates depending on the navy. :) Cruiser used to be a mission, not a class. The whole term "line of battle" came from sailing tactics, sailing the ships in a line and trying to cross the enemy's T. A ship that could sail in that line was a ship of the line. Ships were first rate, second rate, third rate. Anything too small for the line would be a frigate. But again, this is all relative and according to the strategic doctrines of various navies.
The very word destroyer comes to us from the torpedo-boat destroyer. They were ships meant to screen the battleships from torpedo boats. Cruisers were meant to be major surface combatants, fast enough to escape from battleships but armed sufficiently to destroy anything it could catch. But then you had the Brits thinking you could arm a cruiser sufficiently to take on a battleship, hence the battle-cruiser. But the lesson learned there is if you put big guns on a ship like that, you're going to try and take on an enemy you can't take hits from.
Ship designs all depend on weapons and tactics. In the age of sail, God was always on he side of the bigger ship with bigger guns. Damage models were linear and straight grinding attrition. Torpedoes changed the equation because a piddly little boat carried sufficient firepower to knock out a battleship for very little risk. Submarines only made things worse. After WWII, big ships were pretty much abandoned with the exception of the aircraft carrier. The Iowa-class battleships were operated for a while but that was more about flag-waving than anything else. Everyone was concerned about surviving nuclear attack. The USN decided to go with a doctrine of active defense, knocking out the nukes rather than trying to armor to withstand them. Surface ships remain extremely vulnerable to cruise missiles, nuclear or otherwise. Since we haven't seen a large surface action since WWII this hasn't been put to the test but I think surface ships are pretty much relics that should be in a museum. Aircraft carriers are viking funerals waiting to happen. If we ever put matters to the test, I think we'll prove that there's only two kinds of ships out there, subs and targets. We might keep some beefed up cutters for peacetime service, pirate-chasing and the like but for fighting it's going to be subs and long-distance drones. There might be a use for amphibious landing ships and drone carriers but the age of the surface combatant is over.*
*We can argue this back and forth but it'd take a war to settle the matter. In that case, I'd be just as happy not to know.
I agree that the movie is often just STUPID.
Romulus' sun goes supernova... what, the Romulans, who have starship technology, didn't know in advance?
The Romulans don't evacuate?
The Federation sends ONE BLOKE (Spock) to save their sun?
It gets better than that. Ok, so you collapse the sun into a singularity. That's nice. Romulus will still orbit that point, won't go flying out into space, the singularity will weigh as much as the original sun since it just collapsed instead of 'splodin'. But what are they going to do for light? That planet would have been a snowball inside a month.
I know they wanted to do a big origin tale thing with this movie but they should have been more mindful of logic. Leave the Enterprise as an unexceptional ship exploring the wild and woolly borders of the Federation. Kirk has just been assigned his first command. He has a reputation for being bold, cocky, and getting the job done. He has a mix of patrons and enemies in the Admiralty. He carries a reputation for taking huge risks but has been lucky so far. Maybe have the immediate backstory that he was XO on his last ship and his captain made some tactical mistakes that got them in trouble. Captain is wounded, Kirk assumes command but does not take the ship out of the fight but remains with his squadron and concludes the engagement. The Admiralty Board is deeply divided and this is a cloud that is hanging over his head.
So this would set the stage for him arriving on the Enterprise. It's a ship fresh out of spacedock and we get to see him running the crew through training, getting them working as a team. The crew gets to know him and learns there's more to him than rashness and luck. If you need to spice this up with some space battles, you can fill in flashbacks to the previous fight Kirk was in as XO.
That right there would give you the emotional investment in the characters, the necessary development. And then a crisis could come about where the Enterprise is rushed to an early deployment, some crisis near the Neutral Zone. It doesn't really matter what the crisis is, there doesn't need to be a personal villain involved. It just needs to be a danger for the crew to face and emerge from intact and alive.
the real wet-navy Farragut was given command of a prize ship at age 12, and attained a command of his own at age 22)
Err, these things do not happen sanity-based fleets. No Ensign jumps to Captain in 24 hours, bypassing all the senior officers with many more years of experience. As to the level of sanity in the war of 1812, just the fact that you could become a mid-shipman at the age of 12 (or younger) speaks volumes. This sort of thing happens today only in such centres of civilization as Darfur, Somalia and Afghanistan....
And even in such an insane fleet it took Farragut 10 years to make it to Captain.
There's a few other factors. For the argument of Alexander becoming King when young, we've seen infants named king. This does not mean they're up to the task. Alexander was a man of extraordinary ability given the position to fully employ them. But he is an exception, not the rule.
With regards to Farragut, trying to draw comparisons between wartime and peacetime militaries is problematic to begin with but there's also the matter of advancing technology. We would tend to make an equivalency between a fighter pilot from WWI flying canvas and wood biplanes and a modern fighter pilot strapped into an F-22. There is no equivalency. The planes cost a thousand times more, they take more training to fly, and are very damned complex. They have to be for the abilities they possess. So to say that it's reasonable to have someone wash out of the armored cavalry and then finagle a position flying F-22's and point out it happened in WWI, it's just not a reasonable comparison.
Now someone will bring up that war can cause selection pressures not present in peacetime. Someone like a Patton would not have been able to rise to high rank in a peacetime army but was able to get away with his behavior because he won battles. Likewise with Grant; he was a disheveled alcoholic and a failure at most things in life but he won battles; Lincoln said he'd send a case of whiskey each to his other generals if they could fight like Grant. But when peacetime comes, the pressures are removed and things get back to normal. A winning general might be forgiven eccentricities by dint of his service but a drunk without a record isn't going to be cut any slack. In WWII, the Wehrmacht was forced to use boys and old men as infantry. Rest assured, they're not doing so now.
Now I'm sure someone will say that this is all because we mollycoddle kids in this country and don't give them responsibility. Ok, please point out any other navy in the world that would give command of a national flagship to a kid. I'm not talking about a PT boat from WWII. I'm not even talking about a WWII sub. I mean something like a modern diesel-electric, a modern nuke boat, a destroyer. It's just not happening.
I'll say right from the start that this is going to prove a very successful movie. The theater was packed, people roared with laughter at the parts that were supposed to be funny, cheered the parts that were supposed to be cheered, and clapped at the end. So by all marketing standards, this is a success.
But it isn't a very good movie, if we're actually talking about craft and workmanship.
Michael Bay camerawork is something you're either going to enjoy or hate. Did you think the camera was shaky in Galactica? Did you need dramamine to watch any of the Bourne movies? Then hold onto your butts. In this movie it was like two elephants were having sex on top of the camera. Absolutely atrocious cinematography. I'll be so happy when this fad is over. But this might not bother some people.
Where the movie fell apart is the writing. Even the positive reviews say the villain is forgettable and the plot doesn't make sense. They'll say that's not the point. Really? I thought it was the point. Our Romulan villain has a nonsensical motivation. We bring time travel into the story again and in a highly clunky fashion. Logical shortcuts are made to get our heroes into the academy, establish Kirk as an outsider who then goes on to become bestest dude ever in Starfleet, and have his little battle with the Romulans. The events we see on-screen don't flow from any sense of internal consistency but are visibly imposed by the writers. Consider the skydiving sequence. They cut one from Generations and the idea is really frickin' cool so they decided they must shoehorn it into the movie. Therefore the mining ship must have a laser it dangles off a 1000km cable in order to drill into the heart of a planet. Why a mining ship would do this we do not know. Why the beam had to be lowered into the atmosphere instead of fired from space is not explained. But this does setup a nice option of having a dangerous platform thousands of feet in the air upon which a fight might be had.
There's other instances of anti-logic throughout the film. Kirk goes from being a cadet on probation to being given command of the Enterprise. Not just assuming a brevet command during an emergency but given the post and, one can only assume rank, of captain. Of the flagship of the Federation. A very young and cocky captain made sense in the original series because the Enterprise was not meant to be an exceptional ship. It was not the HMS Victory of the Star Trek universe, it was not a ship of the line. It was pretty much a frigate -- it could range far, defeat anything it could catch, run from anything it couldn't, and get involved with all the adventures big, expensive ships of the line wouldn't. The Enterprise of TNG was the flagship, pretty much a floating embassy and symbol of the Federation. It made much more sense to have someone like Picard in charge, someone who thinks first and shoots second. But to give a kid fresh out of the academy command of his own ship, the flagship? That's almost as illogical as grabbing an engineer from an obscure outpost on a Vulcan moon, throwing him into the engine room and giving him carte blache.
There are visual things that will ruin your suspension of disbelief. The engine rooms for the two Federation ships we saw were filmed in a boiler works and a brewery. The launch pad for the Enterprise looked like a Texas refinery. These kinds of expedients can be forgiven in low-budget scifi. "Hey, we can't afford to build a good set so let's just film inside a decommissioned destroyer and pretend it's our ship." For a $150 million movie, this sort of thing is jarring. It's the kind of nit that would be glossed over if everything else was great but it stands out when the rest of the movie is exhibiting a similar slapdash construction.
Now some people really don't care about this sort of thing. I'm going to make an analogy that doesn't involve cars so bear with me. It's like porno. "Who cares why the hot chick with the tits wants to fuck the guy? She wants to fuck and I wanna see it!" Few people complain about the writing in pornos. But there are people who care about why two people want to fuck. That's called erotica. We don't really have equivalent terms for movies but that's what it pretty much boils down to.
Genuine windows was something dreamt up in the marketing department, but the theory is that "counterfeit" copies are virus ridden.
Actually, they would be because Microsoft will block hacked ones from getting updates to fix glaring security holes. So when you look at the viral load of the interweb, just remember that you're looking at a lot of unlicensed copies of Windows that have been turned into botnet zombies. Microsoft's anti-"piracy" efforts make the world a less secure place.
Well, at least I hope that's the case. Won't know until I see it tonight.
When the movie was first announced I groaned and said "Why? For the love of Christ, why?" Trek is dead to me and Berman and his crew spent a long time killing it. But then I started hearing more and more positive buzz, not from the marketing droids but fan reviews, people who would be just as happy to complain an weep bitterly if it sucked.
This is the same pattern that held true for Watchmen. I anticipated failure from the moment it was announced and planned on not seeing it. Then the fanboys got to see early cuts and holy shit, surprise, it's actually good. I went and was very entertained.
Not every movie needs to be high art, some can succeed admirably just by being really frickin' funny and entertaining. Something like a Galaxy Quest ain't a Schindler's List but it is a warm-hearted comedy wrapped up inside a giant geek in-joke.
I wonder if Hollywood will ever accept the idea that it's not just enough to throw crap on the screen, you need a good script and good actors to make it work. Dark Knight, Iron Man, Watchmen, good movies. Hulk, Wolverine, anything with Nicholas Cage, bad movies.
Seven has to solve the problem of legacy apps that don't run. If it doesn't, the Mexican standoff will continue with Seven in Vista's place, and one or two Fortune 100 shops throwing their hands in the air and switching FOSS could start a stampede. The unlikeliness of that, while high, decreases just a bit for every day the current situation persists.
There's also another matter to consider. IT trends are cyclic and I think we're at the end of the PC-centric phase, everyone is going to want to go put the power back on the server again. That's not to say that we're all going thin-client, just that we're going to see more citrix-type or web-based apps. This allows management to be relatively platform-agnostic. My 7 year old computer can run a remote desktop session just fine. So long as the web apps are developed intelligently, mac and PC can play in the same garden. The upshot of all this is that we could see the end of the era of Complete Microsoft Dominance. Office used to the king gorilla and if you couldn't run that, businesses wouldn't switch. Open Office is a very nice alternative these days.
To take hypothetical company ABC, Inc, let's say they ditch a Microsoft-only solution. They manufacture widgets and have manufacturing, sales, and accounting all in one building. They use commodity PC's on the factory floor running Linux and the management system is all web-based. In accounting, most everyone is running the same Linux PC setup and use the accounting module of the management system. A couple guys who do finance stuff insist they love Excel and won't part with it. No problem. They run PC's with Windows and Excel and still use the same accounting module screens as everyone else since it's through a web browser. Sales guys are running Macs because they're trendy weenies. (yes, I kid, but only a little.) Still, no problem. They can access the management system through a web browser, plus have all their little mac toys running.
Ten years ago this sort of thing wouldn't have been possible. ABC, Inc. may have been running their system on, say, AS/400 and used dumb terminals on the factory floor but everyone else in the company would have standardized on Windows and Office. They'd use terminal emulators to access the management system. Linux would have been too clunky and inconvenient in comparison.
TFA makes it sound like nobody thought storylines were important initially; but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?
Maybe the more creative out there could enlighten me. Can you make a good storyline for Donkey Kong?
(Oh no! Kong found more barrels! Again!)
You really have to make a distinction between simplistic arcade games and what we're able to do now. But as I recall, they did do a Donkey Kong Jr. game with a storyline and there's all the Mario incarnations.
If we compare it to cinema, Donkey Kong would be the early nickelodeons playing silent, extremely short shorts. NES games would be the equivalent of the silent film era and then we move right in to today. Just as story became more and more important in making a good movie, same goes with games. But we also see movies and games where that is completely ignored. With certain movies, it doesn't seem to hurt. Transformers is probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and when factoring in the massive budget involved in making such a shitburger, it's even less excusable. It was an insult to thinking men and women everywhere. But thinking people weren't the intended audience. That sucker did business like crazy. There's a sequel coming out promising to be even worse than the first. It'll do well, I'm sure. Still, it would have been better with a script.
Why do we stay up way too late reading a gripping book? Because the author is dropping little tidbits we really want to know. We keep reading because we just know the answer is no the next page.
The worst games I've played dole out the storyline like it cost a million bucks and most of it is filler or, a real sin in RPG's, stupid goblin nose quests. They could have just as easily had the quest tied into a major part of the plot but they didn't.
The best games tie that story in there tight and everything keeps fresh. You're not just blowing away generic baddies, you feel like there's something involved in the story. You can really relate this to action movies. Lucas said and then forgot "A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." Bad action movies don't setup the action, don't invest you in the characters, the motives, it all just comes across like a sloppy mess. But a good action movie, ah! You have a feel for the character, you know what's going on, and when the action scene kicks in, you feel engaged.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxtBG6FfSSw&NR=1
Remember when that other site got taken down, supernova I think? Yeah, it got taken down and nobody could find torrents anywhere else on the interweb after that.
In other news, traffic suddenly spikes at a new site, moninova. Hrmmm.
"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Who said that? Well, that would be that well-known dumbass liberal socialist fascist wacko, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The sound you hear is conservative heads a'splodin'. Next up, quotes from the bible that show Jesus was more of a socialist than a capitalist.