Because I don't have the resources to gather together a large group of non net-saavy people together in one place. Most of the things I use Yahoo groups for are local or hobbies. The hobbies are things that attract a lot of middle-aged people who use Yahoo and Hotmail as pretty much the end-all and be-all of the internet. Very knowledgeable in some areas but not computers. Yahoo, hated though it may be, has exposure that I couldn't dream of. Start a Yahoo group tomorrow, and if it's not a completely obscure topic you'll have a hundred people in it by next month. Weed out the spammers, and you'll have fifty.:)
"only" a USENET archive? Yeah, those are a dime-a-dozen.
Okay, I'm of mixed emotions here. On the one hand, I agree that a USENET archive is an important thing in and of itself, but on the other hand, I've been desperately waiting for someone to come up with an alternative to Yahoo Groups ever since they bought out Egroups and screwed everything up. I hate Yahoo Groups, but am forced to use it a lot of the time to keep up with various hobbies and organizations that I'm involved with. Every third message is redirected to a full page ad, they blocked all the adult groups, the interface is inconsistent, and the whole thing (to me) just smacks of "we're the phone company, ma'am, we don't have to care". They're the only site of the kind that I know of besides the excreble MSN Groups, which is so badly done as to be next to impossible to use. It's sad, but I just don't find the same functionality in good 'ol USENET anymore. I see a lot of spam on the USENET in many of the newsgroups that I would usually turn to, and not much else. Well, not since about 95, anyway. USENET just doesn't work as well unless it's moderated these days, and a lot of groups that were really cool back in the golden age are all but dead now.
Wow, I didn't mean this to sound like a rant, sorry. I'm just frustrated with the ways things have gone with both services, and I really hope that Google does a better job than Yahoo.
I have a blogger site, mostly for convenience's sake. It's easy, and it scored me a Gmail beta. (Neat!) You're right, it's sort of a scrapbook of what I'm interested in or doing.
Eventually, I'd like to build a better site that has a better organized format and keeps all of my interests conveniently linked and categorized, eventually, but for now the blog stays. Even then, I'll probably still have the blog. It helps me pinpoint what I was feeling on Sept. 11th, for example, or when my last girlfriend broke up with me, or when I discovered stone sculpture. It's neat for that, and for all I know my children may give a damn about it one day, although I doubt it. I understand the backlash against blogs to a certain degree, but they're slightly better than the old vanity sites they replaced. ("And here are some *more* pictures of my cats!")
I don't know, I've never thought blogs were all that bad, except for when they clog up my search results. THEN I hate them. With a passion.
Outside of posting one for family and friends, I don't see the point.
I think that is the point. I have a blog, and it's a no-holds-barred crapfest to anyone who doesn't know me. (In fact, it's a no-holds-barred crapfest to most people who do...) I have a few friends who read it just to see what I'm up to, and I just use it as a semi-public journal/collection of links I'm afraid I'll never find again. I don't ask anyone to read it, I don't think anyone does. (I've had 3800 hits since 2001, most of them myself.) Still, more than one friend has re-found me through it, so I keep it up. That, and I'd miss the links to stuff that I've thrown up haphazardly. Yeah, it sucks, go to some other page.
I don't know, even though science has a track record of proving (at the time) absurd claims, dark matter just seems.....silly. (I typed darl matter here as a typo, that would have led to yet another SCO thread I'm sure) What are the other theories about the missing mass? I'd like to shop around and see if I can find one a little more reasonable-sounding.:)
While it's not for everyone, there is a certain school of thought on 'frugal living' that shows in sites like the Dollar Stretcher. I've been reading them for a while. It doesn't really fit what I think the person who posted the story was asking for, but it's a good reference for basic lifestyle money-saving tips, some of which are more extreme than others. I always check it at the beginning of each week, even though most of the articles are things I pretty much already know.
I don't know about that. I completely agree, from that linguistic standpoint your argument is valid, and in this particular instance I don't think there was any confusion, but up and down the comment page I'm seeing a lot of arguments over the semantics of the word "art", because people are not defining it properly. I just felt the need to jump in and be pedantic for a little while. Your comment got used as a jumping-off place, sorry.:)
I think that the point people are missing here is that most video games are art. Bad art. The arguments being made in most of the posts I see is that the artistic process in video games is sideswiped by corporate interests and the purposes of entertainment. The same can be said for many genres that still have the occasional piece held up as an example of art. "Art" as an abstract concept crosses boundaries. It can be found in architecture, pop music, acting strangely to confound strangers, telling a story about what happened to you when you were a kid, even tv sitcoms. It usually isn't, but it can be. Something's utilitarian and functional purposes are not at odds with its aesthetic value, its elevation into the realm of beauty. Of course there can be art in video games. That doesn't mean that there always is, or necessarily even often, but saying there is no art in them is like saying there is no art in the coliseum - after all, it's just a building. There's no artistry in my apartment complex, after all.:)
So, the ladies will want us (geeks) around, but we still won't be getting laid (because they don't need us for that anymore)
OBSLASHDOT JOKE: Of course, that won't be a new experience for most of the people on here, anyway.
It's funny, though, how many guys are insecure about them getting rid of us or something. I know most of the people on here are joking, but you don't see women joking about similar situations happening to them. I wonder how deeply ingrained this has become, and why. None of the women that I talk to have ever had a desire to get rid of men, more than a single individual or so anyway. Well, except the lesbians, and they've already removed men from their society as much as possible.
I never said it was my place to tell anyone what they should do with their time, jackass. I pointed out, in reply to the comment about whether or not it was better to watch television or read slashdot, that FOR ME, subjectively, it is a far more enriching to read/. than to watch television. I could care less whether someone else watches television, that's their problem, not mine. Try reading a little more closely instead of just getting the nouns and verbs out of a sentence.
Maybe not for you. Whenever I read slashdot, I almost always learn something new or find something interesting from the links in the comments that people make. I find this to be a valuable use of my time. Now, I'm not saying that I don't learn things from TV occsionally, too, but it doesn't happen as often. Even when there are links that flash up on the screen on TV, I have to go into the other room to research them more fully. With the ol' electric Babbage Engine, I'm much more inclined to stop the flow of what I'm doing and investigate a tangent that I feel uninformed about. But this is only my experience. I cannot speak for other people's quality of experience.
I feel like I go both ways on that one. On the one hand, I hate most TV now that I don't have it myself, because it very quickly becomes inane and a timewaster, but at the same time, it's really difficult for me to ignore one when they're on. I think I'm pretty susceptible to a flickering screen designed to make me pay attention. That's why I almost never turn them on - it bothers me that I have such a hard time blocking them out. I like my life without television. With television, I don't even notice my life for hours at a time. Bleah.
That was the impression I got, too, from reading the article. Everyone else seems to have jumped on that comment completely out of context. From what I could read of the article, he's saying that he developed a very efficient motor, not one that achieves over-unity. That said, I think the thing needs to be looked over by some bona-fide scientists and checked out. Since he has 47 international patents, this should not be a problem. In fact, does anyone feel like looking up his US patent online and posting the link on here so some of those bona-fide scientists that read Slashdot can pick it apart? (Or confirm it, as the case may be?)
Yeah, I didn't catch that. Like you said, a few kb one way or another aren't going to make a whole lot of difference. I was thinking they had somehow managed to get all of it into that space, and the thought of doing that and preserving portability caused my two-volt brain to blow a fuse. But like I said, I should have RTFA.:)
Yeah, that one got me too. I suppose they meant in the classroom, or sarcastically. I mean, when exams are over, the first thing I did was unwind a little by smoking. I couldn't do so the week before exams because it would interfere with studying, after all.:)
Physics is just applied math anyway, as my friend the physicist says. Seriously though, that has an eerie ring of prescience about it, at least to me - you may be on to something there. Or I may have bad instincts for the future, as evidenced by my bad luck with gambling.
I liked the buffalo wing potato chips. Then again, I like things that are really spicy. A friend of mine who also tried them called them Potato Harbingers of Painful Death. I don't think he cared for the spice. My favorite weird little chips are the Steak & Onion flavored chips, I think they're made by Tom's.
To a certain degree I agree with you. The only thing I will say as devil's advocate here is that confidence rates more highly on the list of qualities that women find desirable. There are different value systems at play, here. Don't get me wrong, I still think your post makes an excellent point, and I don't disagree, but I think that whining is something that matters an extra percentage point or two to women.
I have also heard it suggested that doing so would probably create many jobs in the US as the building and operations infrastructure was being put into place, not to mention the increased commerce between disparate parts of the US. I don't know the validity of these claims, but they seem reasonable enough. A good kick in the pants for us USicans economy if true, no? I don't see it being very easy to get widespread support with the current power structure, though.
You know, the thing that scares me is that even though I'm *almost certain* that this sort of thing is (-1, Tinfoil Hat), it is believable enough and I trust the leverages of power right now in my own country little enough that I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. That my trust has eroded that far is a horrifying sign of things wrong, true or not.
Thank you. To follow up the above poster, the Chronicles of Narnia are widely considered classics of children's literature, and the series is an allegory to the religious themes that Lewis explored much more fully in his adult writing. They teach graduate level courses over CS Lewis, spending the first two months on the heavy symbolism and messages inherent in the Narnia books. My mother just finished one such course as a part of her Masters program. Aslan as a Christ figure, et al. If you think there are no themes being explored through them, I submit that maybe you haven't read them since you were a kid?
Not trying to flame or anything, seriously, but I think that if this is the case, there's a whole 'nother level to those books that you may not have been able to catch when you were young. I know I didn't. Now bear in mind, I think Lewis' heavy-handed Christianity as displayed in his other works kind of makes me leery of actually taking on the undertaking of reading them all again, and they are children's literature, after all, but having to listen to endless analysis after analysis of C S Lewis' books over the last semester or two from my mother has given me a different viewpoint on them than the you seem to have.
Another thing that I think a lot of people don't think about with the Narnia series is that they were written in the 50's. They predate pretty much all of the modern fantasy genre. Even if they don't seem that fresh or thought provoking to you, (though they do to me), they were astoundingly original at the time, and helped shape a generation of authors. Don't get me wrong, I loved the Dragonlance series, but I don't think that a hundred years from now they will be considered classics. I imagine the Narnia series still will.
I know, I thought they had banned this stuff years ago.:) A friend circulated petitions in college to that effect. Not only is it dangerous, but terribly addictive - everyone who has ever consumed it develops an insaitable craving for more.
How does that even make sense? This is about sensors that can be woven into fabric so you can monitor performance and determine how someone can improve, not about making things that stretch the human body. There's nothing illegally "performance enhancing" about observing someone's technique and commenting on how they could improve it, and this is just a better method of doing that. Sheesh.
That's true. But the more advanced the technology gets, the harder it is. And Counterstrike, while an amazing technical achievement in and of itself, was built on the bare bones of another game. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that we're quickly reaching the point where it's easier for the one or two man group to produce a movie than a game, unless they're a wunderkind or something. I don't doubt that there will always be those who will forge ahead and make it happen anyway, maybe even show the rest of us how to do it, but it's getting complicated. Of course, this could be another technical bottleneck, and new tools could very easily arise that make this argument a moot point. I look forward to it if so - I don't think that games made by committee are going to be very good.
Slashdot Mirror
Because I don't have the resources to gather together a large group of non net-saavy people together in one place. Most of the things I use Yahoo groups for are local or hobbies. The hobbies are things that attract a lot of middle-aged people who use Yahoo and Hotmail as pretty much the end-all and be-all of the internet. Very knowledgeable in some areas but not computers. Yahoo, hated though it may be, has exposure that I couldn't dream of. Start a Yahoo group tomorrow, and if it's not a completely obscure topic you'll have a hundred people in it by next month. Weed out the spammers, and you'll have fifty. :)
"only" a USENET archive? Yeah, those are a dime-a-dozen.
Okay, I'm of mixed emotions here. On the one hand, I agree that a USENET archive is an important thing in and of itself, but on the other hand, I've been desperately waiting for someone to come up with an alternative to Yahoo Groups ever since they bought out Egroups and screwed everything up. I hate Yahoo Groups, but am forced to use it a lot of the time to keep up with various hobbies and organizations that I'm involved with. Every third message is redirected to a full page ad, they blocked all the adult groups, the interface is inconsistent, and the whole thing (to me) just smacks of "we're the phone company, ma'am, we don't have to care". They're the only site of the kind that I know of besides the excreble MSN Groups, which is so badly done as to be next to impossible to use. It's sad, but I just don't find the same functionality in good 'ol USENET anymore. I see a lot of spam on the USENET in many of the newsgroups that I would usually turn to, and not much else. Well, not since about 95, anyway. USENET just doesn't work as well unless it's moderated these days, and a lot of groups that were really cool back in the golden age are all but dead now.
Wow, I didn't mean this to sound like a rant, sorry. I'm just frustrated with the ways things have gone with both services, and I really hope that Google does a better job than Yahoo.
I have a blogger site, mostly for convenience's sake. It's easy, and it scored me a Gmail beta. (Neat!) You're right, it's sort of a scrapbook of what I'm interested in or doing.
Eventually, I'd like to build a better site that has a better organized format and keeps all of my interests conveniently linked and categorized, eventually, but for now the blog stays. Even then, I'll probably still have the blog. It helps me pinpoint what I was feeling on Sept. 11th, for example, or when my last girlfriend broke up with me, or when I discovered stone sculpture. It's neat for that, and for all I know my children may give a damn about it one day, although I doubt it. I understand the backlash against blogs to a certain degree, but they're slightly better than the old vanity sites they replaced. ("And here are some *more* pictures of my cats!")
I don't know, I've never thought blogs were all that bad, except for when they clog up my search results. THEN I hate them. With a passion.
Outside of posting one for family and friends, I don't see the point.
I think that is the point. I have a blog, and it's a no-holds-barred crapfest to anyone who doesn't know me. (In fact, it's a no-holds-barred crapfest to most people who do...) I have a few friends who read it just to see what I'm up to, and I just use it as a semi-public journal/collection of links I'm afraid I'll never find again. I don't ask anyone to read it, I don't think anyone does. (I've had 3800 hits since 2001, most of them myself.) Still, more than one friend has re-found me through it, so I keep it up. That, and I'd miss the links to stuff that I've thrown up haphazardly. Yeah, it sucks, go to some other page.
I don't know, even though science has a track record of proving (at the time) absurd claims, dark matter just seems.....silly. (I typed darl matter here as a typo, that would have led to yet another SCO thread I'm sure) What are the other theories about the missing mass? I'd like to shop around and see if I can find one a little more reasonable-sounding. :)
While it's not for everyone, there is a certain school of thought on 'frugal living' that shows in sites like the Dollar Stretcher. I've been reading them for a while. It doesn't really fit what I think the person who posted the story was asking for, but it's a good reference for basic lifestyle money-saving tips, some of which are more extreme than others. I always check it at the beginning of each week, even though most of the articles are things I pretty much already know.
I don't know about that. I completely agree, from that linguistic standpoint your argument is valid, and in this particular instance I don't think there was any confusion, but up and down the comment page I'm seeing a lot of arguments over the semantics of the word "art", because people are not defining it properly. I just felt the need to jump in and be pedantic for a little while. Your comment got used as a jumping-off place, sorry. :)
I think that the point people are missing here is that most video games are art. Bad art. The arguments being made in most of the posts I see is that the artistic process in video games is sideswiped by corporate interests and the purposes of entertainment. The same can be said for many genres that still have the occasional piece held up as an example of art. "Art" as an abstract concept crosses boundaries. It can be found in architecture, pop music, acting strangely to confound strangers, telling a story about what happened to you when you were a kid, even tv sitcoms. It usually isn't, but it can be. Something's utilitarian and functional purposes are not at odds with its aesthetic value, its elevation into the realm of beauty. Of course there can be art in video games. That doesn't mean that there always is, or necessarily even often, but saying there is no art in them is like saying there is no art in the coliseum - after all, it's just a building. There's no artistry in my apartment complex, after all. :)
So, the ladies will want us (geeks) around, but we still won't be getting laid (because they don't need us for that anymore)
OBSLASHDOT JOKE: Of course, that won't be a new experience for most of the people on here, anyway.
It's funny, though, how many guys are insecure about them getting rid of us or something. I know most of the people on here are joking, but you don't see women joking about similar situations happening to them. I wonder how deeply ingrained this has become, and why. None of the women that I talk to have ever had a desire to get rid of men, more than a single individual or so anyway. Well, except the lesbians, and they've already removed men from their society as much as possible.
I never said it was my place to tell anyone what they should do with their time, jackass. I pointed out, in reply to the comment about whether or not it was better to watch television or read slashdot, that FOR ME, subjectively, it is a far more enriching to read /. than to watch television. I could care less whether someone else watches television, that's their problem, not mine. Try reading a little more closely instead of just getting the nouns and verbs out of a sentence.
Maybe not for you. Whenever I read slashdot, I almost always learn something new or find something interesting from the links in the comments that people make. I find this to be a valuable use of my time. Now, I'm not saying that I don't learn things from TV occsionally, too, but it doesn't happen as often. Even when there are links that flash up on the screen on TV, I have to go into the other room to research them more fully. With the ol' electric Babbage Engine, I'm much more inclined to stop the flow of what I'm doing and investigate a tangent that I feel uninformed about. But this is only my experience. I cannot speak for other people's quality of experience.
I feel like I go both ways on that one. On the one hand, I hate most TV now that I don't have it myself, because it very quickly becomes inane and a timewaster, but at the same time, it's really difficult for me to ignore one when they're on. I think I'm pretty susceptible to a flickering screen designed to make me pay attention. That's why I almost never turn them on - it bothers me that I have such a hard time blocking them out. I like my life without television. With television, I don't even notice my life for hours at a time. Bleah.
That was the impression I got, too, from reading the article. Everyone else seems to have jumped on that comment completely out of context. From what I could read of the article, he's saying that he developed a very efficient motor, not one that achieves over-unity. That said, I think the thing needs to be looked over by some bona-fide scientists and checked out. Since he has 47 international patents, this should not be a problem. In fact, does anyone feel like looking up his US patent online and posting the link on here so some of those bona-fide scientists that read Slashdot can pick it apart? (Or confirm it, as the case may be?)
Yeah, I didn't catch that. Like you said, a few kb one way or another aren't going to make a whole lot of difference. I was thinking they had somehow managed to get all of it into that space, and the thought of doing that and preserving portability caused my two-volt brain to blow a fuse. But like I said, I should have RTFA. :)
Yeah, that one got me too. I suppose they meant in the classroom, or sarcastically. I mean, when exams are over, the first thing I did was unwind a little by smoking. I couldn't do so the week before exams because it would interfere with studying, after all. :)
awesome... now only if they'd do this for linux
I would think that it might be kind of difficult to move this code across platforms if it's optimized that much, wouldn't it? ------didn't RTFA
Physics is just applied math anyway, as my friend the physicist says. Seriously though, that has an eerie ring of prescience about it, at least to me - you may be on to something there. Or I may have bad instincts for the future, as evidenced by my bad luck with gambling.
I liked the buffalo wing potato chips. Then again, I like things that are really spicy. A friend of mine who also tried them called them Potato Harbingers of Painful Death. I don't think he cared for the spice. My favorite weird little chips are the Steak & Onion flavored chips, I think they're made by Tom's.
To a certain degree I agree with you. The only thing I will say as devil's advocate here is that confidence rates more highly on the list of qualities that women find desirable. There are different value systems at play, here. Don't get me wrong, I still think your post makes an excellent point, and I don't disagree, but I think that whining is something that matters an extra percentage point or two to women.
I have also heard it suggested that doing so would probably create many jobs in the US as the building and operations infrastructure was being put into place, not to mention the increased commerce between disparate parts of the US. I don't know the validity of these claims, but they seem reasonable enough. A good kick in the pants for us USicans economy if true, no? I don't see it being very easy to get widespread support with the current power structure, though.
You know, the thing that scares me is that even though I'm *almost certain* that this sort of thing is (-1, Tinfoil Hat), it is believable enough and I trust the leverages of power right now in my own country little enough that I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. That my trust has eroded that far is a horrifying sign of things wrong, true or not.
Thank you. To follow up the above poster, the Chronicles of Narnia are widely considered classics of children's literature, and the series is an allegory to the religious themes that Lewis explored much more fully in his adult writing. They teach graduate level courses over CS Lewis, spending the first two months on the heavy symbolism and messages inherent in the Narnia books. My mother just finished one such course as a part of her Masters program. Aslan as a Christ figure, et al. If you think there are no themes being explored through them, I submit that maybe you haven't read them since you were a kid?
Not trying to flame or anything, seriously, but I think that if this is the case, there's a whole 'nother level to those books that you may not have been able to catch when you were young. I know I didn't. Now bear in mind, I think Lewis' heavy-handed Christianity as displayed in his other works kind of makes me leery of actually taking on the undertaking of reading them all again, and they are children's literature, after all, but having to listen to endless analysis after analysis of C S Lewis' books over the last semester or two from my mother has given me a different viewpoint on them than the you seem to have.
Another thing that I think a lot of people don't think about with the Narnia series is that they were written in the 50's. They predate pretty much all of the modern fantasy genre. Even if they don't seem that fresh or thought provoking to you, (though they do to me), they were astoundingly original at the time, and helped shape a generation of authors. Don't get me wrong, I loved the Dragonlance series, but I don't think that a hundred years from now they will be considered classics. I imagine the Narnia series still will.
I know, I thought they had banned this stuff years ago. :) A friend circulated petitions in college to that effect. Not only is it dangerous, but terribly addictive - everyone who has ever consumed it develops an insaitable craving for more.
How does that even make sense? This is about sensors that can be woven into fabric so you can monitor performance and determine how someone can improve, not about making things that stretch the human body. There's nothing illegally "performance enhancing" about observing someone's technique and commenting on how they could improve it, and this is just a better method of doing that. Sheesh.
That's true. But the more advanced the technology gets, the harder it is. And Counterstrike, while an amazing technical achievement in and of itself, was built on the bare bones of another game. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that we're quickly reaching the point where it's easier for the one or two man group to produce a movie than a game, unless they're a wunderkind or something. I don't doubt that there will always be those who will forge ahead and make it happen anyway, maybe even show the rest of us how to do it, but it's getting complicated. Of course, this could be another technical bottleneck, and new tools could very easily arise that make this argument a moot point. I look forward to it if so - I don't think that games made by committee are going to be very good.