Re:Americas Army is the model for next gen online
on
E3 Wrapup Documented
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· Score: 1
Finding no information on the America's Army Honor System in the linked article, I must ask -- is the Honor System similar to the Slashdot moderation system, only for MMORPGs? How does it work?
I agree in general that Celsius is a simpler system, and makes more sense than Fahrenheit. Besides, who wants to remember what 0 Celsius is in Rankin or Kelvin -- they're even worse than Fahrenheit.
I have noticed that people will use whatever measure they're used to, and don't like to switch between them. For instance, I have friends who will happily talk about the weather in terms of degrees Fahrenheit, but when asked how hot their CPUs run, automatically switch to Celsius.
The one interesting characteristic of Fahrenheit is that one degree is about the smallest temperature change sensible by the human body, so Fahrenheit makes sense from a day-to-day standpoint. This would change, however, if thermostats, etc. allowed you to see or set a half degree Celsius, which is slightly smaller than a degree Fahrenheit, achieving the same effect.
If you're interested in doing this, I suggest you check out Koha, an open-source library cataloging system. The biggest boondoggle at most libraries is going to be the database system the librarians use to check in/out books and search, because in general it's the only piece they have to buy from an outside (proprietary) vendor. Make sure you spend a lot of quality time training the librarians on the new system, because otherwise they'll complain about it not being like the old system, even if it's objectively better. (Believe me, I've seen the kind of holy wars that go on within a library.)
If there was a LUG in town, I'd propose doing this at my own local library, but I'm pretty much the only Linux person in the area. I used to work there, and I got permission to try switching some of the library computers to Mozilla, because the systems were underpowered and the popups were terrible. Unfortunately, one of the patrons complained that their site didn't look right, and the head librarian made me switch it right back. I had just *finally* gotten them to catalog the RedHat ISOs I burned for them when the library (literally) burned down. Argh.
Working as outside help (as opposed to being an employee and trying to change it from within) may alleviate some of these problems; the patience of Job is also helpful. Remember -- it's not about making the library's systems "better" by installing Linux on them, it's making them more *useful* that counts. Good luck!
Not so exotic. I had to take the FireWire card out of my box and put it in my sister's so I could install the update before this one, and though XP handled it fine, the hardware swap was a pain in the butt.
This should make it much nicer whenever I get around to updating again.
Tell you what, *I* would buy a proprietary DVD player program for Linux, "free software" be damned. I've wasted too many hours trying to set up my system to play DVDs, and not getting anywhere. In the long run, we'd be a lot better off if that were available.
(I would also happily accept a step-by-step tutorial on making Fedora Core 1 play DVD's, preferably telling me exactly which of libdvdcss, libtitles, libcssdvd, and so on I need to make it work with Xine. It's a terrible mess, and I would happily pay ten or twenty bucks to be able to install a single package and make it work.)
Of course I do -- in fact, I recall reading a survey of sysadmins in the old Internet World magazine listing the most popular categories of names (Star Trek and Monty Python were close to the top, IIRC).
For what it's worth, my Pentium III machine (used to be bleeding-edge way back in '99) is called obsidian, my rock-solid Alpha-based development server is granite, and my firewall is brimstone.:) The rest of the house has Windoze boxen named after their owners. Ugh.
In fact, I've seen Google ads on my Hotmail account, so Google is *already* scanning my e-mail. Frankly, I'm not worried -- everything Google (search, News, Groups, Froogle) does has the potential for manipulation, but they've been very open about what little they are legally required to do, so I don't see why they should be vilified.
Built in public-key cryptography support would rock, however.:)
In fact, Isaac Asimov was called Dr. Asimov for a reason (hint: it starts with a 'Ph' and ends with a 'D'), and his particular area of specialty was science, so the Good Doctor could certainly be considered a guru on matters of science. In fact, Asimov wrote a staggering quantity of non-fiction as well as fiction.
Actually, I may use this. I'd like to try out iTMS, but I'm pretty much only running Linux right now, and I'm not installing Windows to listen to music. Sure, I can put the music on my iPod, but I can't listen to it in XMMS or anything else.
Until, at least, this PlayFair program came out. Voila! I don't really want to share the music I bought, I just want to use it otherwise. Steve Jobs *knew* the encryption was going to be cracked and told the RIAA so -- it was only a matter of time. This program will let me buy songs on a Windows system, crack the encryption, and listen on Linux -- harly illegal, and not even immoral. In fact, it makes AAC and iTMS *more* attractive for me, not less.
I'm not entirely sure it's just Japanese TV -- I seem to recall Neil Gaiman mentioning on his site that most British series have a certain planned run, and then the most popular get revived periodically. I'm pretty sure TV shows in Latin America are the same way. (No twenty-year runs for spanish soap operas -- one season and they're done.) Our seven-plus-year 26-episodes-a-year shows are really the other end of the spectrum from this, but I suspect it's easier and cheaper to have a certain cast rehash old jokes for seven years than keep coming up with new ideas (or at least new retreads of old ideas). Or maybe not -- the Friends (ugh) cast was making *bank* by the end of their run.
That's in some ways why I'm glad Firefly was cancelled (I know, I know, perish the thought). The series wasn't old yet, and now they can work it into a movie and maybe a miniseries. With the exception of soap operas, I think *most* stories are better told that way, be it as a book, movie, TV show, graphic novel, or whatever.
Umm... Dunno. FC1 probably isn't as stable as, say, Debian Stable, but I've been using it since it came out and haven't had any kind of stability issues -- rock solid, as always. I'm not sure if you would want to use it in a dedicated server environment where you need the utmost reliability, but that's where the knockoffs of RedHat Enterprise Linux come in.
Still, though, if you want to use another distro, for *whatever* reason, you can -- that's the beauty of Linux.:)
Exactly. If I'm going to buy an album, I'd rather buy the physical object (CD) instead of the immaterial objects (MP3s). The CD is an automatic backup medium, provides me the cover art and lyrics, and in general is the better solution for selling multiple songs grouped together. If I just want one or two songs, I'll download them, legally or illegally. The one way I'd be interested in buying albums online is if I could "trade-up" my bought-and-paid-for single song downloads for the full album.
Err... Well, if you read the article, you'll find that more often than not, P2P *helps* albums, especially the most popular ones. On the other hand, it does hurt albums released by niche groups (furry goth Celtic punk rockers, eg.), which may (IMHO) be better off touring than selling CDs anyway. Overall, though, they're finding that P2P doesn't hurt and does in some cases help CD sales. Is that better?
Umm... dude, there's nothing *forcing* you to download Fedora Core 2 Test 2. You can, in fact, wait until Fedora Core 2 "ships" in May -- which is what I'm doing, since I don't need SELinux and I don't want to FUBAR my existing config at the moment. I'm perfectly happily running Fedora Core 1.
Anybody else catch the gripes from one of the developers about the quality of Visual C++ code as compared to the quality of GCC code? He seemed to think that the VC++ code was better optimized, and in general regarded Windows as the better development platform. I'm not a serious programmer (I just play on on Slashdot), and my projects are small and none too complicated. Can anyone else comment on this? Is he talking sense, or blowing smoke?
But note: if the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
For starters, I would stop suing my customers. As a music consumer, I refuse to buy major label music because I know my money will go to suing people for downloading stuff. As a P2P user, I try to avoid downloading major label music, because I am thereby helping to promote it ("yeah, man, downloaded the new Metallica album last night... it rocks!") and upping the illegal-download statistics. I have *no* problem with people downloading copyrighted music for free, but I don't want to feed the monster that is the RIAA -- I want to kill it.
What's missing from this discussion is the fact that the RIAA killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. Napster was the goose -- CD sales were up because of the economy and the exposure from P2P, artists *and* Napster were doing well, but the RIAA wanted a bigger cut, saw all those illegal downloads, and thought, "Oh, hmm, maybe if we shut down Napster and sue our customers, they'll buy even *more* CDs." Of course, the economy tanked, people got skittish about P2P, and iTunes made a big splash, but the point is that before the RIAA started making a big to-do about it, the artists *were* being compensated for the songs distributed with P2P.
I've done it myself -- downloaded a song or three, liked them, and bought the album. I still do it today with independent music -- I would never have discovered Flogging Molly (or bought their album Swagger) if I hadn't downloaded their music first and listened to it. The 30-second previews on iTunes aren't really enough for me, since I have to listen to some songs for a while before I decide whether I like them. Some artists recognize this, and some don't, but I really wish the RIAA had recognized a good thing when it had it.
The writer found that man was actually quite efficient for his newbies, at least for the commands they were using. Newbies aren't using GCC or CVS, so whether those man pages can be as nasty as they have to be. And, for the record, I'm not really a *guru*, and I think both man pages aren't bad.
Amen, man. In my case, it was sweatpants instead of greasy hair, but the point is the same. I must say, for someone who does well in school but sees the world outside of 7th grade math and wants more, elementary and middle school is *killer* boredom.
I would have loved to be doing something meaningful, especially if it was with science or math, even if I was just running errands for somebody doing lab work. We did a thing in 6th grade where we spent several days at a local manufacturing plant with the quality control people, and the first day was fun because they let me read the numbers off the schematics to check against the machined parts, but the rest was just a glorified field trip -- when in fact the whole purpose of the exercise was to have us "working" with people in the community. Especially since, on an intellectual (though not a social) level, I was really ready to be working on that kind of thing.
The other good thing that helped me later on was when in 8th grade they let me and a couple friends take Algebra I instead of 8th grade math (one of the friends is now, as a senior in high school, almost finished with a college math degree). Since the high school and middle school schedules didn't quite match up, we were taken out of our regular classes and became a small class of our own, really. We still took classes with everyone else, but we didn't rotate when they did, so we always had history first and then English and then we went to the high school for math. The other kids would have three weeks of history first, then have English first, and so on. We kind of became a class within a class, becuase we were working together all the time, and once I made friends there I was more confident about working with other people. Then high school was a Godsend because I could take chemistry (Jr./Sr. class) as a sophmore and really go at my own accelerated pace, and I wasn't stuck at the pace of the other students. Yet I've still managed a reasonable set of social skills, and I feel a lot better about the interactions I have.
So, yes, get him working with others on something meaningful and let him connect. He sounds like he could use a challenge.:)
The story in question is Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," which is part of the _Martian Chronicles_. And yes, both it and Chernobyl are extremely, extremely spooky.
Which is, honest to gosh, what they said about e-mail and Usenet spam back in the days of Cantor and Spiegel, the infamous Green Card Lawyers, when a single spam e-mail was an anomaly. And the method worked, too, until the signal-to-noise ratio on global e-mail correspondance started diving toward zero. The Web isn't there yet, but it's heading that way.
I would bet a lot that Google is training a Bayesian algorithm on "canon-print.free-stuff.make-a-deal.biz" and friends right now. If they aren't, they should be.
Well, I have no personal knowledge of how *many* 91 Escorts are in use today, but I do know that mine works quite well. Certainly, it has had issues, but nothing major that would render it undriveable. It has got about 104,000 miles on it, so it's doing quite well, all things considered.
Oh, and I bought her for less than two grand, and change the oil every three months, so TCO doesn't seem to be a problem as long as I take good care of her.
I don't really *worship* Steve Jobs in any sense of the word, for anything he did, past or present. I do admire him for certain things, Apple and Pixar among them.
I'm no Mac zealot -- I prefer PCs for desktop work, and the amount of lockdown in OS X annoys me. At the same time, I own an iPod and am considering getting an iBook because I can't find a well-made sub-$1500 laptop with the features I want. (My next desktop will be an AMD64 box, however.) Even in desktop systems, Apple is reasonably competitive -- still pricier than a $500 white-box PC, but not as bad as you seem to think it is. Witness Sub-$2000 iMacs. For that matter, Apple still does quite well in the high-end graphics markets.
So far as I can tell, Jobs doesn't care about selling computers to *everyone* -- if he did, Apple would be like Dell. He wants to do the "computing experience," and do it well. Myself, I applaud that.
Slashdot Mirror
Finding no information on the America's Army Honor System in the linked article, I must ask -- is the Honor System similar to the Slashdot moderation system, only for MMORPGs? How does it work?
I agree in general that Celsius is a simpler system, and makes more sense than Fahrenheit. Besides, who wants to remember what 0 Celsius is in Rankin or Kelvin -- they're even worse than Fahrenheit.
I have noticed that people will use whatever measure they're used to, and don't like to switch between them. For instance, I have friends who will happily talk about the weather in terms of degrees Fahrenheit, but when asked how hot their CPUs run, automatically switch to Celsius.
The one interesting characteristic of Fahrenheit is that one degree is about the smallest temperature change sensible by the human body, so Fahrenheit makes sense from a day-to-day standpoint. This would change, however, if thermostats, etc. allowed you to see or set a half degree Celsius, which is slightly smaller than a degree Fahrenheit, achieving the same effect.
If you're interested in doing this, I suggest you check out Koha, an open-source library cataloging system. The biggest boondoggle at most libraries is going to be the database system the librarians use to check in/out books and search, because in general it's the only piece they have to buy from an outside (proprietary) vendor. Make sure you spend a lot of quality time training the librarians on the new system, because otherwise they'll complain about it not being like the old system, even if it's objectively better. (Believe me, I've seen the kind of holy wars that go on within a library.)
If there was a LUG in town, I'd propose doing this at my own local library, but I'm pretty much the only Linux person in the area. I used to work there, and I got permission to try switching some of the library computers to Mozilla, because the systems were underpowered and the popups were terrible. Unfortunately, one of the patrons complained that their site didn't look right, and the head librarian made me switch it right back. I had just *finally* gotten them to catalog the RedHat ISOs I burned for them when the library (literally) burned down. Argh.
Working as outside help (as opposed to being an employee and trying to change it from within) may alleviate some of these problems; the patience of Job is also helpful. Remember -- it's not about making the library's systems "better" by installing Linux on them, it's making them more *useful* that counts. Good luck!
Not so exotic. I had to take the FireWire card out of my box and put it in my sister's so I could install the update before this one, and though XP handled it fine, the hardware swap was a pain in the butt.
This should make it much nicer whenever I get around to updating again.
Tell you what, *I* would buy a proprietary DVD player program for Linux, "free software" be damned. I've wasted too many hours trying to set up my system to play DVDs, and not getting anywhere. In the long run, we'd be a lot better off if that were available.
(I would also happily accept a step-by-step tutorial on making Fedora Core 1 play DVD's, preferably telling me exactly which of libdvdcss, libtitles, libcssdvd, and so on I need to make it work with Xine. It's a terrible mess, and I would happily pay ten or twenty bucks to be able to install a single package and make it work.)
Of course I do -- in fact, I recall reading a survey of sysadmins in the old Internet World magazine listing the most popular categories of names (Star Trek and Monty Python were close to the top, IIRC).
:) The rest of the house has Windoze boxen named after their owners. Ugh.
For what it's worth, my Pentium III machine (used to be bleeding-edge way back in '99) is called obsidian, my rock-solid Alpha-based development server is granite, and my firewall is brimstone.
In fact, I've seen Google ads on my Hotmail account, so Google is *already* scanning my e-mail. Frankly, I'm not worried -- everything Google (search, News, Groups, Froogle) does has the potential for manipulation, but they've been very open about what little they are legally required to do, so I don't see why they should be vilified.
:)
Built in public-key cryptography support would rock, however.
In fact, Isaac Asimov was called Dr. Asimov for a reason (hint: it starts with a 'Ph' and ends with a 'D'), and his particular area of specialty was science, so the Good Doctor could certainly be considered a guru on matters of science. In fact, Asimov wrote a staggering quantity of non-fiction as well as fiction.
The average /. reader is an idiot. Half of /. readers are below average. Are you scared yet?
/. readers are below *median*, not average.
As per your sig, not to nitpick or anything (okay, I guess I am) -- half of
C'mere, goosie. Ignore the hatchet. I *know* you've got more of those golden eggs inside you *somewhere*. It'll only hurt a little bit...
Actually, I may use this. I'd like to try out iTMS, but I'm pretty much only running Linux right now, and I'm not installing Windows to listen to music. Sure, I can put the music on my iPod, but I can't listen to it in XMMS or anything else.
Until, at least, this PlayFair program came out. Voila! I don't really want to share the music I bought, I just want to use it otherwise. Steve Jobs *knew* the encryption was going to be cracked and told the RIAA so -- it was only a matter of time. This program will let me buy songs on a Windows system, crack the encryption, and listen on Linux -- harly illegal, and not even immoral. In fact, it makes AAC and iTMS *more* attractive for me, not less.
I'm not entirely sure it's just Japanese TV -- I seem to recall Neil Gaiman mentioning on his site that most British series have a certain planned run, and then the most popular get revived periodically. I'm pretty sure TV shows in Latin America are the same way. (No twenty-year runs for spanish soap operas -- one season and they're done.) Our seven-plus-year 26-episodes-a-year shows are really the other end of the spectrum from this, but I suspect it's easier and cheaper to have a certain cast rehash old jokes for seven years than keep coming up with new ideas (or at least new retreads of old ideas). Or maybe not -- the Friends (ugh) cast was making *bank* by the end of their run.
That's in some ways why I'm glad Firefly was cancelled (I know, I know, perish the thought). The series wasn't old yet, and now they can work it into a movie and maybe a miniseries. With the exception of soap operas, I think *most* stories are better told that way, be it as a book, movie, TV show, graphic novel, or whatever.
From Neil Gaiman's "Murder Mysteries":
"People named Tinkerbell name their daughters Susan."
Umm... Dunno. FC1 probably isn't as stable as, say, Debian Stable, but I've been using it since it came out and haven't had any kind of stability issues -- rock solid, as always. I'm not sure if you would want to use it in a dedicated server environment where you need the utmost reliability, but that's where the knockoffs of RedHat Enterprise Linux come in.
:)
Still, though, if you want to use another distro, for *whatever* reason, you can -- that's the beauty of Linux.
Exactly. If I'm going to buy an album, I'd rather buy the physical object (CD) instead of the immaterial objects (MP3s). The CD is an automatic backup medium, provides me the cover art and lyrics, and in general is the better solution for selling multiple songs grouped together. If I just want one or two songs, I'll download them, legally or illegally. The one way I'd be interested in buying albums online is if I could "trade-up" my bought-and-paid-for single song downloads for the full album.
Err... Well, if you read the article, you'll find that more often than not, P2P *helps* albums, especially the most popular ones. On the other hand, it does hurt albums released by niche groups (furry goth Celtic punk rockers, eg.), which may (IMHO) be better off touring than selling CDs anyway. Overall, though, they're finding that P2P doesn't hurt and does in some cases help CD sales. Is that better?
Umm... dude, there's nothing *forcing* you to download Fedora Core 2 Test 2. You can, in fact, wait until Fedora Core 2 "ships" in May -- which is what I'm doing, since I don't need SELinux and I don't want to FUBAR my existing config at the moment. I'm perfectly happily running Fedora Core 1.
Anybody else catch the gripes from one of the developers about the quality of Visual C++ code as compared to the quality of GCC code? He seemed to think that the VC++ code was better optimized, and in general regarded Windows as the better development platform. I'm not a serious programmer (I just play on on Slashdot), and my projects are small and none too complicated. Can anyone else comment on this? Is he talking sense, or blowing smoke?
But note: if the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
For starters, I would stop suing my customers. As a music consumer, I refuse to buy major label music because I know my money will go to suing people for downloading stuff. As a P2P user, I try to avoid downloading major label music, because I am thereby helping to promote it ("yeah, man, downloaded the new Metallica album last night... it rocks!") and upping the illegal-download statistics. I have *no* problem with people downloading copyrighted music for free, but I don't want to feed the monster that is the RIAA -- I want to kill it.
What's missing from this discussion is the fact that the RIAA killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. Napster was the goose -- CD sales were up because of the economy and the exposure from P2P, artists *and* Napster were doing well, but the RIAA wanted a bigger cut, saw all those illegal downloads, and thought, "Oh, hmm, maybe if we shut down Napster and sue our customers, they'll buy even *more* CDs." Of course, the economy tanked, people got skittish about P2P, and iTunes made a big splash, but the point is that before the RIAA started making a big to-do about it, the artists *were* being compensated for the songs distributed with P2P.
I've done it myself -- downloaded a song or three, liked them, and bought the album. I still do it today with independent music -- I would never have discovered Flogging Molly (or bought their album Swagger) if I hadn't downloaded their music first and listened to it. The 30-second previews on iTunes aren't really enough for me, since I have to listen to some songs for a while before I decide whether I like them. Some artists recognize this, and some don't, but I really wish the RIAA had recognized a good thing when it had it.
Umm... dude, did you read the article?
The writer found that man was actually quite efficient for his newbies, at least for the commands they were using. Newbies aren't using GCC or CVS, so whether those man pages can be as nasty as they have to be. And, for the record, I'm not really a *guru*, and I think both man pages aren't bad.
Amen, man. In my case, it was sweatpants instead of greasy hair, but the point is the same. I must say, for someone who does well in school but sees the world outside of 7th grade math and wants more, elementary and middle school is *killer* boredom.
:)
I would have loved to be doing something meaningful, especially if it was with science or math, even if I was just running errands for somebody doing lab work. We did a thing in 6th grade where we spent several days at a local manufacturing plant with the quality control people, and the first day was fun because they let me read the numbers off the schematics to check against the machined parts, but the rest was just a glorified field trip -- when in fact the whole purpose of the exercise was to have us "working" with people in the community. Especially since, on an intellectual (though not a social) level, I was really ready to be working on that kind of thing.
The other good thing that helped me later on was when in 8th grade they let me and a couple friends take Algebra I instead of 8th grade math (one of the friends is now, as a senior in high school, almost finished with a college math degree). Since the high school and middle school schedules didn't quite match up, we were taken out of our regular classes and became a small class of our own, really. We still took classes with everyone else, but we didn't rotate when they did, so we always had history first and then English and then we went to the high school for math. The other kids would have three weeks of history first, then have English first, and so on. We kind of became a class within a class, becuase we were working together all the time, and once I made friends there I was more confident about working with other people. Then high school was a Godsend because I could take chemistry (Jr./Sr. class) as a sophmore and really go at my own accelerated pace, and I wasn't stuck at the pace of the other students. Yet I've still managed a reasonable set of social skills, and I feel a lot better about the interactions I have.
So, yes, get him working with others on something meaningful and let him connect. He sounds like he could use a challenge.
The story in question is Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," which is part of the _Martian Chronicles_. And yes, both it and Chernobyl are extremely, extremely spooky.
Which is, honest to gosh, what they said about e-mail and Usenet spam back in the days of Cantor and Spiegel, the infamous Green Card Lawyers, when a single spam e-mail was an anomaly. And the method worked, too, until the signal-to-noise ratio on global e-mail correspondance started diving toward zero. The Web isn't there yet, but it's heading that way.
I would bet a lot that Google is training a Bayesian algorithm on "canon-print.free-stuff.make-a-deal.biz" and friends right now. If they aren't, they should be.
Well, I have no personal knowledge of how *many* 91 Escorts are in use today, but I do know that mine works quite well. Certainly, it has had issues, but nothing major that would render it undriveable. It has got about 104,000 miles on it, so it's doing quite well, all things considered.
Oh, and I bought her for less than two grand, and change the oil every three months, so TCO doesn't seem to be a problem as long as I take good care of her.
I don't really *worship* Steve Jobs in any sense of the word, for anything he did, past or present. I do admire him for certain things, Apple and Pixar among them.
I'm no Mac zealot -- I prefer PCs for desktop work, and the amount of lockdown in OS X annoys me. At the same time, I own an iPod and am considering getting an iBook because I can't find a well-made sub-$1500 laptop with the features I want. (My next desktop will be an AMD64 box, however.) Even in desktop systems, Apple is reasonably competitive -- still pricier than a $500 white-box PC, but not as bad as you seem to think it is. Witness Sub-$2000 iMacs. For that matter, Apple still does quite well in the high-end graphics markets.
So far as I can tell, Jobs doesn't care about selling computers to *everyone* -- if he did, Apple would be like Dell. He wants to do the "computing experience," and do it well. Myself, I applaud that.