Yes, you could generate detailed demographics using some computer programs, but why bother? None of the players or their characters will have access to census data, nor will they be particularly interested in them.
Really interesting RPG settings, such as
Glorantha
and
Tékumel
shine because of the quality and depth of the ideas, not the complexity of the numbers.
Take
some advice from John Hughes:
Glorantha has a wonderful mix of three elements: an all-pervasive mythic structure, an elaborate and lovingly (co-) created history and culture, and
a wacky sense of fun. Try to keep all three. Though vary the mix.
I've been a CM specialist, using SCCS, ClearCase, RCS and Continuus at various times. I tried CVS once for my hobbyist programming, but was rather unimpreseed: the gain over RCS seemed marginal.
Is it significant that the open source community has not produced a heavy weight configuration management (CM) system?
I've always suspected a 'hacker' mentality in the commuity, in the sense that following processes and procedures is anathema, and instead people 'just edit the code' in a relatively undisciplined manner.
CM is deeply unsexy.
It's hard enough to get commercial programmers
to follow good CM practices,
even with mamangement backing.
The community has no management coercion, of course, so it's understandable that CM would fair badly in the commuity.
Perhaps a distrust or displike of CM by the community has lead to the situation were open source (or specifically GPLed) tools are just not up to the job?
A review of such software needs to be done almost literally within a week or two, or it will be obsolete
Those of us with dialup connections don't have the time to download the 25 Mb of a new browser every week. I don't want to upgrade my browser more than once a year. Business users can be even more conservative, because 'upgrading' can mean installation on hundreds or thousands of computers distributed over several offices or countries. My current employer, an international logistics company, has offices in most countries in the world. We still have Netscape 4.7x on our desktop computers. For people who are not 'heat seekers', reliability can be important.
Unfortuntely, the review did not really address these non functional concerns. It didn't even mention the significance of the Mozilla version number being less than 1.0.
So, how do the browers compare in terms of reliability, performance, etc?
Why are browsers so bloated, anyway? My poor 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM (no sniggerring at he back, we're not that uncommon) is barely able to cope with Netscape 6.
I'm not impressed. The article does not define what he means by decay, or how he measured it, except in the vaguest of terms. The analysis of the data is poor; anyone interested in decay would suspect some kind of exponential decay. They would therefore plot the data logarithmically, and perhaps calcualte a half life. Piss poor.
Why bother transfering your l33t r00tk1t James Bond style on an MP3player, when you could just FTP an encrypted package from the Internet? Or is it really the case that someone clever enough to use their MP3 player to do this would be stupid enough to leave a non anonymous FTP download of r00tk1t.tgz in the logs?
... everything looks like a nail.
Quoth the author:
Staying within the broad definition of resource directory,
resources for computers as well as people can be defined. This
could also be used as a powerful library card file replacement,
where books and other types of information sources could be
defined, and access enabled through the powerful search
functions.
Use LDAP as a library card file?
Perhaps you could, but that sounds like a classic database application to me.
Powerful search functions?
Like SQL?
The proliferation of identity theft crimes has been fueled in some measure by the Internet, where Social Security numbers and other
personal identifying information are widely available for a fee.
The original article seemed very alarmist.
Is it really such a problem?
My skimming of
a US government report from some years ago revealled the following interesting information (emphasis added):
Officials at VISA U.S.A., Inc., and MasterCard International, Inc., indicated
that overall fraud losses from their member banks are in the hundreds of
millions of dollars annually,
but these losses constitute a small part (about
0.1 percent) of the banks' overall billing transactions processed.
Nevertheless, an official from MasterCard told us that dollar losses
relating to identity fraud represented about 96 percent of its member
banks' overall fraud losses of $407 million in 1997.
[I want to see] a standard printed book value of time estimates of projects
[for example,]
you need a gui interface consisting of 15 screens to maintain 20MB of data, it's going to be 10,000
hours for developing, testing and documenting
This already exists. Estimates based on Function Points essentially give you this.
As we're all experts here, I should point out that content management seems to be just a new buzzword for boring old configuration management with bells and whistles on.
You might therefore want to consider a configuration management system (CMS).
Some of the CMS vendors relaunched their tools as content management systems during the dotcom bubble. You might want to look at them.
Continuus (now
Telelogic) did this, for example.
And, of course, you could take the cheap and Open road and use
CVS
If you want to make linux make better use of your cutting-edge-of-technology-hardware, you'll have to use the unstable release
(or at the very least the testing release). I can imagine a company doesn't like to use software that is labeled 'unstable'.
Do large corporations really want to use cutting edge technology? Large corporations move slowly; we were still using HP-UX 10.20 last year. And desktop computers are bread and butter commodity items. I'm writing this on a Pentium I; of course it has a bottom of the range graphics card and network card. Why would it need anything else? I don't think availability on cutting-edge hardware is important for large corporations.
IANAP (I Am Not a Psychologist!), but check
Sociopathy.
'[psychopaths have a personality that]
emasculates the constraining force of social rules: people for whom...
the idea of a common good is merely a puzzling and inconvenient abstraction.'
Canter says
'Seems that back then the Internet was more or less the private playpen of academics and geeks,
and any commercial solicitations were considered off limits.'
That sounds like a bunch of inconvenient soial rules.
Check 1
'Groups high on psychopathy include...
high-pressure salesmen and stock promoters...
unethical lawyers...'
Check 2
'... psychopaths are characterised by an absence of remorse or any conception that their behaviours
ought to be changed.'
In reply to the question
'Do you have any regrets about sending the spam?'
Canter says
'I don't think so. Given the same set of circumstance--the same time, the stage of the
Internet--I'd probably do the same thing.' Check 3
INT, not DEX
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 4, Informative
An advantage that Nethack has over modern video games is that you use your brains, not your hand-eye coordination. It is, in fact, a strategy game. Also, you entirely determine its pace (it is turn based). This is useful if you want to play it while waiting for something else (e.g. a long compile) to finish.
Short documentation can be useful. I'd say it can be the most useful documentation. Reading the code can tell you about the low-level design decisions taken, but it does not give you the big picture. A short, high-level, document can be invaluable for placing the low-level information in context. For example, telling someone that the product has a database holding customer data, and extracts order data from system XXX, and has a YYY user interface, etc. This information is useful for only new team members, but they are the ones who need documentation.
Hah hah only serious. As shogun
says in his comment, this can be valuable for the new hire, but more importantly, it can be good for the team.
The new hire has none of the details of the system in their head. They will have a more objective view of what is gnarly and requires documentation, not being responsible for the abominations in the first place. This works best if you allow the new hire to produce the documentation in whatever form they wish, rather than, say, requiring them to produce a 'High Level Design' document and a 'Detailed Design Document' and a 'Data Model' etc. Specifically tell them that Your task is to create documentation that rapidly allows new team members to learn enough about the product to work on it. Produce documentation that you would have found useful, had it existed. A case can be made that all new team members should be given the job of updating or improving the documentation along those lines.
When I joined my current team, I made doing this one of my personal objectives. Fortunately, I had an existing Technical Guide to start with. Whenever I found it deficient, I made an amendment to my copy of the 'Guide. The result is a fully marked up copy ready to become the next version.
IANAL, but IIRC, the UK has the legal concept of 'unfair contract terms'. Various slavery clauses have been ruled to be unfair. For example, clauses restricting who you can work for after leaving your employer.
What about due process? Does the law require the site to be found guilty in a court of law first? Or is this analogous to the police holding people on remand, awaiting trial? Would they need a court order?
Is the definition of 'child porn' in terms of the age of consent? Another poster alluded to this age being 18 years in Penn. A UK national newspaper (The Sun) famously carries soft porn on page 3. It would not surprise me if some of the pictures there have been of women younger than 18 years. Would The Sun web site be blocked? Or only a 'page 3' web page. If only the URL of today's 'page 3' web page were blocked, would the Penn. police need a new court order every day?
As danheskett says, the practical complexities of this would be unsurmountable.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you could generate detailed demographics using some computer programs, but why bother? None of the players or their characters will have access to census data, nor will they be particularly interested in them.
Really interesting RPG settings, such as Glorantha and Tékumel shine because of the quality and depth of the ideas, not the complexity of the numbers. Take some advice from John Hughes:
This has been in The Jargon Lexicon for ages. Don't all slashdotters know of it?
I've been a CM specialist, using SCCS, ClearCase, RCS and Continuus at various times. I tried CVS once for my hobbyist programming, but was rather unimpreseed: the gain over RCS seemed marginal.
Is it significant that the open source community has not produced a heavy weight configuration management (CM) system? I've always suspected a 'hacker' mentality in the commuity, in the sense that following processes and procedures is anathema, and instead people 'just edit the code' in a relatively undisciplined manner. CM is deeply unsexy. It's hard enough to get commercial programmers to follow good CM practices, even with mamangement backing. The community has no management coercion, of course, so it's understandable that CM would fair badly in the commuity.
Perhaps a distrust or displike of CM by the community has lead to the situation were open source (or specifically GPLed) tools are just not up to the job?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Sayeth the poster:
Those of us with dialup connections don't have the time to download the 25 Mb of a new browser every week. I don't want to upgrade my browser more than once a year. Business users can be even more conservative, because 'upgrading' can mean installation on hundreds or thousands of computers distributed over several offices or countries. My current employer, an international logistics company, has offices in most countries in the world. We still have Netscape 4.7x on our desktop computers. For people who are not 'heat seekers', reliability can be important.
Unfortuntely, the review did not really address these non functional concerns. It didn't even mention the significance of the Mozilla version number being less than 1.0. So, how do the browers compare in terms of reliability, performance, etc?
Why are browsers so bloated, anyway? My poor 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM (no sniggerring at he back, we're not that uncommon) is barely able to cope with Netscape 6.
I'm not impressed. The article does not define what he means by decay, or how he measured it, except in the vaguest of terms. The analysis of the data is poor; anyone interested in decay would suspect some kind of exponential decay. They would therefore plot the data logarithmically, and perhaps calcualte a half life. Piss poor.
Why bother transfering your l33t r00tk1t James Bond style on an MP3player, when you could just FTP an encrypted package from the Internet? Or is it really the case that someone clever enough to use their MP3 player to do this would be stupid enough to leave a non anonymous FTP download of r00tk1t.tgz in the logs?
Use LDAP as a library card file? Perhaps you could, but that sounds like a classic database application to me. Powerful search functions? Like SQL?
That criminals use the internet for 'identifty teheft' is not news Even the US government is on the case:
The original article seemed very alarmist. Is it really such a problem? My skimming of a US government report from some years ago revealled the following interesting information (emphasis added):
And fresh reports say that 'hackers' also use e-mail, telephones and postal services. Shut them all down!
mark_lybarger asks:
This already exists. Estimates based on Function Points essentially give you this.
So what is, or is expected to be, the best Linux PDA?
As we're all experts here, I should point out that content management seems to be just a new buzzword for boring old configuration management with bells and whistles on.
You might therefore want to consider a configuration management system (CMS). Some of the CMS vendors relaunched their tools as content management systems during the dotcom bubble. You might want to look at them. Continuus (now Telelogic) did this, for example. And, of course, you could take the cheap and Open road and use CVSSayeth a poster:
Do large corporations really want to use cutting edge technology? Large corporations move slowly; we were still using HP-UX 10.20 last year. And desktop computers are bread and butter commodity items. I'm writing this on a Pentium I; of course it has a bottom of the range graphics card and network card. Why would it need anything else? I don't think availability on cutting-edge hardware is important for large corporations.
IANAP (I Am Not a Psychologist!), but check Sociopathy.
-
'[psychopaths have a personality that]
emasculates the constraining force of social rules: people for whom...
the idea of a common good is merely a puzzling and inconvenient abstraction.'
Canter says
'Seems that back then the Internet was more or less the private playpen of academics and geeks,
and any commercial solicitations were considered off limits.'
That sounds like a bunch of inconvenient soial rules.
Check 1
-
'Groups high on psychopathy include...
high-pressure salesmen and stock promoters...
unethical lawyers...'
Check 2
-
'... psychopaths are characterised by an absence of remorse or any conception that their behaviours
ought to be changed.'
In reply to the question
'Do you have any regrets about sending the spam?'
Canter says
'I don't think so. Given the same set of circumstance--the same time, the stage of the
Internet--I'd probably do the same thing.' Check 3
Also check out Antisocial Personality Disorder.An advantage that Nethack has over modern video games is that you use your brains, not your hand-eye coordination. It is, in fact, a strategy game. Also, you entirely determine its pace (it is turn based). This is useful if you want to play it while waiting for something else (e.g. a long compile) to finish.
Short documentation can be useful. I'd say it can be the most useful documentation. Reading the code can tell you about the low-level design decisions taken, but it does not give you the big picture. A short, high-level, document can be invaluable for placing the low-level information in context. For example, telling someone that the product has a database holding customer data, and extracts order data from system XXX, and has a YYY user interface, etc. This information is useful for only new team members, but they are the ones who need documentation.
Hah hah only serious. As shogun says in his comment, this can be valuable for the new hire, but more importantly, it can be good for the team.
The new hire has none of the details of the system in their head. They will have a more objective view of what is gnarly and requires documentation, not being responsible for the abominations in the first place. This works best if you allow the new hire to produce the documentation in whatever form they wish, rather than, say, requiring them to produce a 'High Level Design' document and a 'Detailed Design Document' and a 'Data Model' etc. Specifically tell them that Your task is to create documentation that rapidly allows new team members to learn enough about the product to work on it. Produce documentation that you would have found useful, had it existed. A case can be made that all new team members should be given the job of updating or improving the documentation along those lines.
When I joined my current team, I made doing this one of my personal objectives. Fortunately, I had an existing Technical Guide to start with. Whenever I found it deficient, I made an amendment to my copy of the 'Guide. The result is a fully marked up copy ready to become the next version.
IANAL, but IIRC, the UK has the legal concept of 'unfair contract terms'. Various slavery clauses have been ruled to be unfair. For example, clauses restricting who you can work for after leaving your employer.
It is a bad idea to make any of the content of your site only accessible via a plug-in, sure this software increases the number of systems that a plugin can use, but why bother? Why not create and encourage useful websites that don't need them?
What about due process? Does the law require the site to be found guilty in a court of law first? Or is this analogous to the police holding people on remand, awaiting trial? Would they need a court order?
Is the definition of 'child porn' in terms of the age of consent? Another poster alluded to this age being 18 years in Penn. A UK national newspaper (The Sun) famously carries soft porn on page 3. It would not surprise me if some of the pictures there have been of women younger than 18 years. Would The Sun web site be blocked? Or only a 'page 3' web page. If only the URL of today's 'page 3' web page were blocked, would the Penn. police need a new court order every day?
As danheskett says, the practical complexities of this would be unsurmountable.