The troll moderations just proves my point. Without insulting linux, I simply implied it is not the ultimate solution to every problem and I got modded down.
Also, am I the only one who's getting the impression that Linux-based PDA's fall behind the curve in terms of time to market and features?
Nope, you're not. PalmOS offers a clean elegant interface for a PDA; it works very well. There's also thousands of apps available. What is the advantage of buying a Linux-based PDA except that this is slashdot, where everything has to be linux and open source, no matter how impractical.
They use elephant weights in the article to make it easier to visualize. A Hurricane is 40 million elephants. That's just so much easier to visualize than 240 million tons (cubic meters) of water.
Exactly my point. If you can write a game that appeals to the masses and sell a million copies, why do extra work to make it have more substance and only sell 100k copies?
At 256 meg, this mp3 player's capacity is about the same as a single minidisc, but it's not expandable. Minidiscs cost under $2 each, and the files can be re-arranged on them like with an mp3 player. The battery life on a minidisc player is better than the yepp player too which doesn't make sense since the yepp doesn't have to power a motor. A CD based mp3 player is much larger than a minidisc player (even if it's designed for the 8cm CDs), and the battery life is terrible.
It's good to see not all countries have turned themselves over to corporate interests, but a victory in France (which doesn't exactly have a history of putting foreign corporate interests ahead of their own citizens) doesn't say much about the tide in the US.
Monopoly leaves very little room for strategy. The strategy simple; buy anything you can. Sure different properties have different payout percentages, but you're not going to turn down a red property because orange has a better payout.
The dice have too much influence in the game, you have no control at all over where you land, but where you land is all-important. As if that wasn't random enough, they throw in cards just to increase the random element.
Ultimately, whoever has the best luck completing monopolies right at the beginning will win even though it can take hours for them to finally win. I guess this is where you're saying the beginning is tedious because all you do is buy everything in sight; there's no thinking, and the end is tedious because all you do is throw the dice over and over until pure random chance picks the winner; once everyone has their properies and hotels there are no decisions to be made.
The other killer is it's an elimination type game. What are the first people eliminated supposed to do for the next couple of hours while the game continues?
I think the main reason Americans don't like board games is Monopoly is the main introduction to the genre. It would be much better to start people off with something like Acquire. It's at about the same level of difficulty and strategic complexity as Monopoly, but it doesn't have a lot of the problems I've just mentioned.
The random elements in Settlers are the starting locations of the tiles which is essential because you don't want to play the same game every time and the production rolls. The production rolls follow a probability distribtion; you know how often in the long run each region will produce and you can hold a hand of resources, so it's not much of a random element. If you want it to be less random, a lot of people play it with a deck of dice instead.
Companies are concentrating on mass-appeal over fun. In the early 90's, a game was a huge hit if it sold 100,000 copies. Today, with numbers like that it would be considered a flop. Because of that, the newer games are dumbed-down to appeal more to the masses. Eye-Candy is considered more important than playability.
It's the same situation in the board game industry. Everyone's played monopoly (which is a lousy game), but who here has even heard of Puerto Rico or Settlers of Catan which are two of the best games on the market now.
If you're doing big downloads, 56k is already painfully slow, so this will only make it worse.
For typical websurfing you spend most of the time reading a page and a small portion loading new pages. It seems like both users downloading a new page at the same time will only happen occasionally, so most of the time, they can share the 56k connection without even noticing.
On the rare occasion where both users do load a page at the same time, it's still working at half speed, so it's not a major problem for how uncommon it is.
You don't see telephone companies selling phones that won't work unless you call someone with another phone made by them, do you?
No, but up until relatively recently you couldn't get your own phone at all, you had to lease them from the phone company. That way they could also make sure you didn't just plug in another phone without paying an extra fee for the other jack because you couldn't buy a phone at all. Today, who would think of paying an extra fee for each phone jack? It's free. There are still a lot of elderly people paying $5-10/month to lease phones they've been paying for for 30 years or more. It's sad that the phones are worth less than 1 month's fee.
IM is still in it's infancy so there will be silly restrictions like this.
The spies in the Iranian government can still see who is connecting to the anonymizing service, so they'll be able to treat them as harshly as if they accessed the "worst" possible sites.
Generating the heat to toast the bread still takes a few CPUs. Intel and AMD are working on their next-generation chips that should be powerful enough to only need a single CPU to toast bread.
First, I was talking about an american uploading it to an off-shore account. They would certainly be held accountable to US laws.
Second, even if a non-American did it, the US would still consider it within their right to arrest them if they visit the US. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
Even if you host it on a website outside the US, you are still legally responsible and well within reach of the US authorities. Sure it might make it harder to link the site to you, but once the link is made, the fact that it's hosted offshore won't provide any legal defense.
Of course I got the joke, it's just not real geek humour if he makes such a fundamental mistake. He couldn't load the 5 billion into a 32 bit unsigned integer to begin with. If he'd said 4 billion + 2 billion it would have been funny.
I find it funny that so many people replied to you to defend TiVo so passionately. Their model seems as bad as anything MS does, but because people like their shiny toy, they not only overlook it but defend it.
I'm pretty sure it was the 68k. I did a lot of work with the 6802 (basically the same thing as a 6800 but it just needs a crystal instead of an external clock). It's a pretty nice CPU, but it's not in the same league as the 8088 and 68000. A quick websearch seems to confirm that it's the 68k.
Slashdot Mirror
If the problem exists between the steering wheel and driver's seat, the manufacturers have a special liability exemption.
Jason
ProfQuotes
If someone's negligence allows their computer to participate in a DoS, why should they have to pay money to a 3rd party regulatory body or government?
Jason
ProrQuotes
The troll moderations just proves my point. Without insulting linux, I simply implied it is not the ultimate solution to every problem and I got modded down.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Also, am I the only one who's getting the impression that Linux-based PDA's fall behind the curve in terms of time to market and features?
Nope, you're not. PalmOS offers a clean elegant interface for a PDA; it works very well. There's also thousands of apps available. What is the advantage of buying a Linux-based PDA except that this is slashdot, where everything has to be linux and open source, no matter how impractical.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Imagination
They use elephant weights in the article to make it easier to visualize. A Hurricane is 40 million elephants. That's just so much easier to visualize than 240 million tons (cubic meters) of water.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Exactly my point. If you can write a game that appeals to the masses and sell a million copies, why do extra work to make it have more substance and only sell 100k copies?
Jason
ProfQuotes
At 256 meg, this mp3 player's capacity is about the same as a single minidisc, but it's not expandable. Minidiscs cost under $2 each, and the files can be re-arranged on them like with an mp3 player. The battery life on a minidisc player is better than the yepp player too which doesn't make sense since the yepp doesn't have to power a motor. A CD based mp3 player is much larger than a minidisc player (even if it's designed for the 8cm CDs), and the battery life is terrible.
Jason
ProfQuotes
It's good to see not all countries have turned themselves over to corporate interests, but a victory in France (which doesn't exactly have a history of putting foreign corporate interests ahead of their own citizens) doesn't say much about the tide in the US.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Monopoly leaves very little room for strategy. The strategy simple; buy anything you can. Sure different properties have different payout percentages, but you're not going to turn down a red property because orange has a better payout.
The dice have too much influence in the game, you have no control at all over where you land, but where you land is all-important. As if that wasn't random enough, they throw in cards just to increase the random element.
Ultimately, whoever has the best luck completing monopolies right at the beginning will win even though it can take hours for them to finally win. I guess this is where you're saying the beginning is tedious because all you do is buy everything in sight; there's no thinking, and the end is tedious because all you do is throw the dice over and over until pure random chance picks the winner; once everyone has their properies and hotels there are no decisions to be made.
The other killer is it's an elimination type game. What are the first people eliminated supposed to do for the next couple of hours while the game continues?
I think the main reason Americans don't like board games is Monopoly is the main introduction to the genre. It would be much better to start people off with something like Acquire. It's at about the same level of difficulty and strategic complexity as Monopoly, but it doesn't have a lot of the problems I've just mentioned.
The random elements in Settlers are the starting locations of the tiles which is essential because you don't want to play the same game every time and the production rolls. The production rolls follow a probability distribtion; you know how often in the long run each region will produce and you can hold a hand of resources, so it's not much of a random element. If you want it to be less random, a lot of people play it with a deck of dice instead.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Companies are concentrating on mass-appeal over fun. In the early 90's, a game was a huge hit if it sold 100,000 copies. Today, with numbers like that it would be considered a flop. Because of that, the newer games are dumbed-down to appeal more to the masses. Eye-Candy is considered more important than playability.
It's the same situation in the board game industry. Everyone's played monopoly (which is a lousy game), but who here has even heard of Puerto Rico or Settlers of Catan which are two of the best games on the market now.
Jason
ProfQuotes
If you're doing big downloads, 56k is already painfully slow, so this will only make it worse.
For typical websurfing you spend most of the time reading a page and a small portion loading new pages. It seems like both users downloading a new page at the same time will only happen occasionally, so most of the time, they can share the 56k connection without even noticing.
On the rare occasion where both users do load a page at the same time, it's still working at half speed, so it's not a major problem for how uncommon it is.
Jason
ProfQuotes
But that would be like a baseball game without crackerjacks ;)
Jason
ProfQuotes
You don't see telephone companies selling phones that won't work unless you call someone with another phone made by them, do you?
No, but up until relatively recently you couldn't get your own phone at all, you had to lease them from the phone company. That way they could also make sure you didn't just plug in another phone without paying an extra fee for the other jack because you couldn't buy a phone at all. Today, who would think of paying an extra fee for each phone jack? It's free. There are still a lot of elderly people paying $5-10/month to lease phones they've been paying for for 30 years or more. It's sad that the phones are worth less than 1 month's fee.
IM is still in it's infancy so there will be silly restrictions like this.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Unfortunately I never saw Beakman's world, but I'm firmly in the Bill Nye is an idiot camp.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I learned about this sort of thing watching Mr. Wizard's World when I was a kid. I gained my interest in science watching this show.
Jason
ProfQuotes
The spies in the Iranian government can still see who is connecting to the anonymizing service, so they'll be able to treat them as harshly as if they accessed the "worst" possible sites.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Generating the heat to toast the bread still takes a few CPUs. Intel and AMD are working on their next-generation chips that should be powerful enough to only need a single CPU to toast bread.
Jason
ProfQuotes
First, I was talking about an american uploading it to an off-shore account. They would certainly be held accountable to US laws.
Second, even if a non-American did it, the US would still consider it within their right to arrest them if they visit the US. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Even if you host it on a website outside the US, you are still legally responsible and well within reach of the US authorities. Sure it might make it harder to link the site to you, but once the link is made, the fact that it's hosted offshore won't provide any legal defense.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Of course I got the joke, it's just not real geek humour if he makes such a fundamental mistake. He couldn't load the 5 billion into a 32 bit unsigned integer to begin with. If he'd said 4 billion + 2 billion it would have been funny.
Five billion is already over 32 bits.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I find it funny that so many people replied to you to defend TiVo so passionately. Their model seems as bad as anything MS does, but because people like their shiny toy, they not only overlook it but defend it.
Jason
ProfQuotes
One of the reasons MS is so big is that early on, windows was one of the most pirated pieces of software ever, so that could be good for Linux.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I'm pretty sure it was the 68k. I did a lot of work with the 6802 (basically the same thing as a 6800 but it just needs a crystal instead of an external clock). It's a pretty nice CPU, but it's not in the same league as the 8088 and 68000. A quick websearch seems to confirm that it's the 68k.
Jason
ProfQuotes