Once, I'm happily playing the game (or trying to with limited success) when suddenly my Sim drops to his knees, clutches his forehead in his hands, and warbles this plaintive cry. I shuddered and shut it down.
I disappoint enough people in real life without having to shatter the mind of some poor virtual bastard too.
He lives his life, and I live mine. We both like it that way. Although that disturbing wail sometimes echoes in my sleep.
1. A simple adventure design engine. If the DM has to learn some horrific and cumbersome system to run a simple game, he or she is going to go back to pen and paper.
You've got to get a community going like you have with the FPS games--large numbers of people cranking out maps (some good, many bad) with software that (while not trivial to use) isn't a huge pain in the ass.
2. Some facility to improvise. Any DM can tell you that the players NEVER follow the plan, and some ability for the DM to make modifications in the game on the fly ("Damn. They're going over there. Better generate some NPCs.") will make a better experience. Anything else locks the players into what seems as static as any ordinary so-called RPG.
I suspect, however, that employees might have other priorities than the illusion of night life and culture. I mean, let's face it: how many of techies go to the opera? Or do all of the other things supposedly offered by a large city? Do you go to Starbucks to hang with your fellow developers, or use e-mail or chat?
I'm relocating from Northern Virginia to Florida because I can live like a king on my salary and because, frankly, every time I have to fight a throng of people to do something up here, I feel heart muscle degenerating.
That's all part of my changing priorities, and I've observed similar changes in other technical folk.
I've discovered a smaller place with better traffic that has all of the things I need (or a broadband connection to order them), but few of the things that frustrate me. To dismiss smaller cities as enclaves of NASCAR-watching idiots forgets a fundamental truth: the people in other cities are just as idiotic but in different ways.
Yeah, Broadway and Wall Street and Silicon Valley are centers of their industries, but there's a reason the real players eventually move away from them, too.
I unfortunately discovered all too late a clause in my contract that no dispute between my employer and I could be handled by anything other than arbitration. I had to learn this just as I tried to sue them over the month of back pay they owed me...
I find that most of the problems I see when people aren't sufficiently tech savvy is that they're too afraid to click around and try things. How many of us learned computing completely formally, with books and classrooms? How many more just clicked/typed around, tinkered, and learned from what happened?
The illusion of system fragility is what keeps people from learning software most effectively: by actually using it, screwing up, and then fixing it.
I suspect years of shoddy software and hardware have frightened people into thinking that if they make a mistake, the entire system melts down. How many newbie users assume the blue screen of death is their own fault? More than you think. "I don't click that application anymore...that shuts down my computer."
I can't decide if software is getting more or less reliable, so I guess the next question is whether new generations of users will have better luck with their systems and more confidence.
Interesting commentary in the rant about the concept of people not wanting to suddenly pay for something historically free. I wonder what will happen once the current generation of users accustomed to free content is replaced by a newer one more accustomed to fees? Will there be a more lucrative dot-com explosion then?
People will balk initially at paying for content, but I think they'll gradually get used to it. I remember being pissed that I'm paying for cable AND for the commercials they're sending me, but now I've just come to accept it.
Mind you, I think this is a lousy thing to happen, but I can't think of a way to thwart it. Our only hope are the sites spewing out free content to contrast with the ones providing it for cost. As long as these places go on, it will be hard to corner people into paying.
I seem to remember the sales pitch for the original cable television markets being something like, "Pay us up front so you don't have to see ads!"
That worked for awhile, but now we have commercials even on channels I'm already paying for.
My guess is that we'll pay for premium commercial-free content, and then discover that the ads will slowly creep in again. Fortunately, like the annoying ubiquitous music you hear in every store and restaurant, it is getting easier to tune out. Sad, but true.
Amen to that. I LOVED that 160 in One project set. I ordered one off of eBay and it didn't work, and I was profoundly disappointed. Radio Shack does sell an updated version, but I don't think it is as flexible as the one we had as kids.
Might have to buy a plain breadboard and experiment with that instead.
Go to the Smithsonian. At the Museum of Natural History, they've got a mock-up (and a fossilized segment) of one of these bad boys the size of a largish coffee table. "Scorpion" is something of a misnomer, of course--the thing doesn't have a long curled tail.
Still, it scares the hell out of me every time I go there, imagining that thing coming clicking out of the ocean at me.
Okay, someone has to say it: the Internet is packed solid with degenerate demihumans who use the vast powers of a global network to find recipes for cheese toast and pictures of Jennifer Lopez. It is CB radio, crackling with posers with idiot callsigns trying to feel cool and find anyone to listen. We all know that, and there may or may not be anything wrong with that, per se.
It just annoys me that all of this intelligence (of various degrees) has been put into a system for idiots. Yeah, yeah: that's the way it goes. Whatever. I'm still waiting for the Internet's John Galt moment when the technically inclined abandon their monkey users.
The heart of the Internet probably is AOL, and that is a harbinger of the inexorable slide of the human intellect into entropy if there ever was one.
Sigh. I guess I just miss the days when I signed at the university computer lab and could find meaningful content on the larval Internet.
What fascinated me the most about the article (I'm long past the evolution vs. creation argument, having endured a creationist biology/chemistry teacher in high school) was that it was funded by a group dedicated to finding out about limb deformities in children.
It makes me wonder if at some point we'll be able to grow new limbs for people who lose them or don't have them at birth. I remember some research long ago into the mechanisms by which frogs(?) grow new limbs after losing them, but I guess this discovery takes that research much further.
I seem to remember that the frontier was perfect for society's ne'er-do-wells and undesirables to go make something of themselves. Of course, most of them just failed to fit the current society's definition of desirable.
We might not want them to be tourists, but I'll have a rocketful of criminals for my space colony any day. Sometimes you need someone who can think outside the arbitrary limits of the law.
Seems to have worked pretty well for Australia, anyway.
That assumes two things:
1. That only one person knows.
2. That one person also happens to know what all of the others know.
How can you spend my money in a democracy if I'm the only one who knows how I want it spent?
In that case, then, those who know should pony up the money. Don't take my money assuring me I don't know how to properly spend it. If you're all-knowing, raise it yourself.
Apparently there is some passive Zen thing to getting jobs, at least for me: every time someone successfully hired me it was because they were looking for me, not the other way around. By posting to various services like Monster and NOT doing the one-click resume sending thing, I've gotten more calls than I ever did by sending resumes to them actively, even in response to their own ads.
My best success has been from just informing them I'm available, either by website or by listing on job sites. Apparently there's something to be said for the confidence of passivity and not seeming to want it too much.
I'm sure there was a time long ago when aggressive tactics like resume spamming and showing up at offices was appealing (especially in the glad-handling sales world), but now it just seems creepy. It is no longer a benefit to seem desperate.
I think it more disturbing that our culture currently encourages people to speak more than they listen, and the estrangement people feel is because we are designing more and more expression technologies but no one is listening.
How many websites are about one person's pathetic yawp into the soul-crushing silence of the void?
I think more people are avoiding direct interpersonal communication because it requires listening instead of skimming, because conversation is still a place where it is considered uncouth to dominate a conversation.
This is a cultural trend toward shouting at the top of one's voice to be heard over the din. Why are there karma whores? Those people have a better chance of being read than the other posters. We're doing anything we can to be heard, but never listening ourselves.
Cite it as part of a drive to cut costs in the government.
Ask why most of the software used by the government of a democracy is created by a single corporation.
Include it as a point of reference to demonstrate ways you won't be doing business as usual (not the centerpiece, but one of many contributing factors).
Mention that it may help create a more secure government web strategy (instead of Microsoft).
Find out if there are open source companies/developers in your area and promote it as a way to fuel the local tech economy.
Those are just off the top of my head. I agree with other posters that not too many people are concerned with open source directly, but as a symbol of democracy, free market capitalism, and innovation, it might help you make some points.
There was a great article in Analog a year or two ago in which the author debated how exactly one would label a place that will be highly toxic for tens of thousands of years. You can't use the same symbols or words we take for granted to mean danger; who knows what people will use to denote that in the distant future?
Ideas bandied about included making the surface from dark stone tiles so it would be too hot to approach or making some huge symbol on the ground to warn people away.
The main problem, though, was whether anything you do to warn people off would actually end up attracting them. Imagine making a huge warning that future generations or visiting aliens think is just something cool like the lines at Nazca.
This may or may not be entirely useful, but I've found that AuthorIT works well for generating multiple documents from the same source text. It stores the information in a database and generates other formats on command (HTML, HTML Help, Java Help, WinHelp, Word docs). As far as I know, it doesn't natively create PDF files, but the Word files are print-ready, and you can always convert them.
The product is designed for user documentation, but the features can work well with anything you want to create once and generate many times. You can reuse text, graphics, links, etc. A pretty elegant solution.
He wrote, "Star Trek is the McDonalds of science fiction." Sometimes filling, sometimes good in a pinch, sometimes what you're looking for, but never quite good.My guess is that this new Star Trek will suck, not because of the director or the tired old franchise, but because even the best Star Trek tends to be marginal.I think it is interesting that we now live in a world where the original themes of Star Trek are considered so obvious that they are cliches: we should all get along, maybe we shouldn't screw around with other cultures, 'stun' is better than 'kill,' etc. Back during the original run, these were revolutionary concepts. Now, they're commonplace. Star Trek lost any sort of social relevance decades ago and now solely exists to validate pathetic fan fantasies. It's about hardware and in-jokes.Q says in the final episode of the Next Generation: "That's the exploration that awaits you. ..not mapping stars and studying nebulae. ..but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence." Good mission statement for a real science fiction series. Too bad Star Trek rarely lives up to it. Too busy selling toys, I guess.Star Trek to me is like giving a child a toy and watching as he plays with the box.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally the Old Ones have returned to cleanse the Earth from those pesky nests of human beings.
I was beginning to lose hope.
Once, I'm happily playing the game (or trying to with limited success) when suddenly my Sim drops to his knees, clutches his forehead in his hands, and warbles this plaintive cry. I shuddered and shut it down.
I disappoint enough people in real life without having to shatter the mind of some poor virtual bastard too.
He lives his life, and I live mine. We both like it that way. Although that disturbing wail sometimes echoes in my sleep.
1. A simple adventure design engine. If the DM has to learn some horrific and cumbersome system to run a simple game, he or she is going to go back to pen and paper.
You've got to get a community going like you have with the FPS games--large numbers of people cranking out maps (some good, many bad) with software that (while not trivial to use) isn't a huge pain in the ass.
2. Some facility to improvise. Any DM can tell you that the players NEVER follow the plan, and some ability for the DM to make modifications in the game on the fly ("Damn. They're going over there. Better generate some NPCs.") will make a better experience. Anything else locks the players into what seems as static as any ordinary so-called RPG.
I suspect, however, that employees might have other priorities than the illusion of night life and culture. I mean, let's face it: how many of techies go to the opera? Or do all of the other things supposedly offered by a large city? Do you go to Starbucks to hang with your fellow developers, or use e-mail or chat?
I'm relocating from Northern Virginia to Florida because I can live like a king on my salary and because, frankly, every time I have to fight a throng of people to do something up here, I feel heart muscle degenerating.
That's all part of my changing priorities, and I've observed similar changes in other technical folk.
I've discovered a smaller place with better traffic that has all of the things I need (or a broadband connection to order them), but few of the things that frustrate me. To dismiss smaller cities as enclaves of NASCAR-watching idiots forgets a fundamental truth: the people in other cities are just as idiotic but in different ways.
Yeah, Broadway and Wall Street and Silicon Valley are centers of their industries, but there's a reason the real players eventually move away from them, too.
I unfortunately discovered all too late a clause in my contract that no dispute between my employer and I could be handled by anything other than arbitration. I had to learn this just as I tried to sue them over the month of back pay they owed me...
Lesson learned, I guess. Heads up.
I find that most of the problems I see when people aren't sufficiently tech savvy is that they're too afraid to click around and try things. How many of us learned computing completely formally, with books and classrooms? How many more just clicked/typed around, tinkered, and learned from what happened?
The illusion of system fragility is what keeps people from learning software most effectively: by actually using it, screwing up, and then fixing it.
I suspect years of shoddy software and hardware have frightened people into thinking that if they make a mistake, the entire system melts down. How many newbie users assume the blue screen of death is their own fault? More than you think. "I don't click that application anymore...that shuts down my computer."
I can't decide if software is getting more or less reliable, so I guess the next question is whether new generations of users will have better luck with their systems and more confidence.
Interesting commentary in the rant about the concept of people not wanting to suddenly pay for something historically free. I wonder what will happen once the current generation of users accustomed to free content is replaced by a newer one more accustomed to fees? Will there be a more lucrative dot-com explosion then?
People will balk initially at paying for content, but I think they'll gradually get used to it. I remember being pissed that I'm paying for cable AND for the commercials they're sending me, but now I've just come to accept it.
Mind you, I think this is a lousy thing to happen, but I can't think of a way to thwart it. Our only hope are the sites spewing out free content to contrast with the ones providing it for cost. As long as these places go on, it will be hard to corner people into paying.
I seem to remember the sales pitch for the original cable television markets being something like, "Pay us up front so you don't have to see ads!"
That worked for awhile, but now we have commercials even on channels I'm already paying for.
My guess is that we'll pay for premium commercial-free content, and then discover that the ads will slowly creep in again. Fortunately, like the annoying ubiquitous music you hear in every store and restaurant, it is getting easier to tune out. Sad, but true.
Amen to that. I LOVED that 160 in One project set. I ordered one off of eBay and it didn't work, and I was profoundly disappointed. Radio Shack does sell an updated version, but I don't think it is as flexible as the one we had as kids.
Might have to buy a plain breadboard and experiment with that instead.
They're supposed to do the same thing other people do when they can't get something: get over it.
They don't have a right to television content.
If you're that desperate, go to a friend's house.
Go to the Smithsonian. At the Museum of Natural History, they've got a mock-up (and a fossilized segment) of one of these bad boys the size of a largish coffee table. "Scorpion" is something of a misnomer, of course--the thing doesn't have a long curled tail.
Still, it scares the hell out of me every time I go there, imagining that thing coming clicking out of the ocean at me.
Okay, someone has to say it: the Internet is packed solid with degenerate demihumans who use the vast powers of a global network to find recipes for cheese toast and pictures of Jennifer Lopez. It is CB radio, crackling with posers with idiot callsigns trying to feel cool and find anyone to listen. We all know that, and there may or may not be anything wrong with that, per se.
It just annoys me that all of this intelligence (of various degrees) has been put into a system for idiots. Yeah, yeah: that's the way it goes. Whatever. I'm still waiting for the Internet's John Galt moment when the technically inclined abandon their monkey users.
The heart of the Internet probably is AOL, and that is a harbinger of the inexorable slide of the human intellect into entropy if there ever was one.
Sigh. I guess I just miss the days when I signed at the university computer lab and could find meaningful content on the larval Internet.
What fascinated me the most about the article (I'm long past the evolution vs. creation argument, having endured a creationist biology/chemistry teacher in high school) was that it was funded by a group dedicated to finding out about limb deformities in children.
It makes me wonder if at some point we'll be able to grow new limbs for people who lose them or don't have them at birth. I remember some research long ago into the mechanisms by which frogs(?) grow new limbs after losing them, but I guess this discovery takes that research much further.
I seem to remember that the frontier was perfect for society's ne'er-do-wells and undesirables to go make something of themselves. Of course, most of them just failed to fit the current society's definition of desirable.
We might not want them to be tourists, but I'll have a rocketful of criminals for my space colony any day. Sometimes you need someone who can think outside the arbitrary limits of the law.
Seems to have worked pretty well for Australia, anyway.
That assumes two things: 1. That only one person knows. 2. That one person also happens to know what all of the others know. How can you spend my money in a democracy if I'm the only one who knows how I want it spent?
In that case, then, those who know should pony up the money. Don't take my money assuring me I don't know how to properly spend it. If you're all-knowing, raise it yourself.
Apparently there is some passive Zen thing to getting jobs, at least for me: every time someone successfully hired me it was because they were looking for me, not the other way around. By posting to various services like Monster and NOT doing the one-click resume sending thing, I've gotten more calls than I ever did by sending resumes to them actively, even in response to their own ads.
My best success has been from just informing them I'm available, either by website or by listing on job sites. Apparently there's something to be said for the confidence of passivity and not seeming to want it too much.
I'm sure there was a time long ago when aggressive tactics like resume spamming and showing up at offices was appealing (especially in the glad-handling sales world), but now it just seems creepy. It is no longer a benefit to seem desperate.
I think it more disturbing that our culture currently encourages people to speak more than they listen, and the estrangement people feel is because we are designing more and more expression technologies but no one is listening.
How many websites are about one person's pathetic yawp into the soul-crushing silence of the void?
I think more people are avoiding direct interpersonal communication because it requires listening instead of skimming, because conversation is still a place where it is considered uncouth to dominate a conversation.
This is a cultural trend toward shouting at the top of one's voice to be heard over the din. Why are there karma whores? Those people have a better chance of being read than the other posters. We're doing anything we can to be heard, but never listening ourselves.
Some general directions to try:
Those are just off the top of my head. I agree with other posters that not too many people are concerned with open source directly, but as a symbol of democracy, free market capitalism, and innovation, it might help you make some points.
There was a great article in Analog a year or two ago in which the author debated how exactly one would label a place that will be highly toxic for tens of thousands of years. You can't use the same symbols or words we take for granted to mean danger; who knows what people will use to denote that in the distant future?
Ideas bandied about included making the surface from dark stone tiles so it would be too hot to approach or making some huge symbol on the ground to warn people away.
The main problem, though, was whether anything you do to warn people off would actually end up attracting them. Imagine making a huge warning that future generations or visiting aliens think is just something cool like the lines at Nazca.
Yes, indeed. I don't use them as much anymore, but the handy libraries of HTML and other text tags and commands are really nice.
The full version is only $19.95 and has all sorts of other text finagling goodies.
This may or may not be entirely useful, but I've found that AuthorIT works well for generating multiple documents from the same source text. It stores the information in a database and generates other formats on command (HTML, HTML Help, Java Help, WinHelp, Word docs). As far as I know, it doesn't natively create PDF files, but the Word files are print-ready, and you can always convert them.
The product is designed for user documentation, but the features can work well with anything you want to create once and generate many times. You can reuse text, graphics, links, etc. A pretty elegant solution.
I wonder how bad the Trek franchise would have to get before the fans mounted a grassroots write-in campaign to STOP it.
They wrote all those letters to save it years ago--I wonder when they'll figure out that stopping it now is saving it.
He wrote, "Star Trek is the McDonalds of science fiction." Sometimes filling, sometimes good in a pinch, sometimes what you're looking for, but never quite good.My guess is that this new Star Trek will suck, not because of the director or the tired old franchise, but because even the best Star Trek tends to be marginal.I think it is interesting that we now live in a world where the original themes of Star Trek are considered so obvious that they are cliches: we should all get along, maybe we shouldn't screw around with other cultures, 'stun' is better than 'kill,' etc. Back during the original run, these were revolutionary concepts. Now, they're commonplace. Star Trek lost any sort of social relevance decades ago and now solely exists to validate pathetic fan fantasies. It's about hardware and in-jokes.Q says in the final episode of the Next Generation: "That's the exploration that awaits you. . .not mapping stars and studying nebulae. . .but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence." Good mission statement for a real science fiction series. Too bad Star Trek rarely lives up to it. Too busy selling toys, I guess.Star Trek to me is like giving a child a toy and watching as he plays with the box.
A better link for info about more telescopes.