And, devil of a feminist that she was, quite aptly named I assure you.
I find it quite amusing that the reason the original was expelled from heaven was that she refused to lie below adam, literally. So he had God make him a more appropriately submissive wife.
As sexist as some parts of the Bible can be, nothing compares to the parts that were left out;-)
Atomic Rocket has some interesting reading. It's a nice mix of (as far as I can tell) good physics and some science fiction theory.
Basically, the whole site was designed to help new sci-fi authors make their stories closer to scientific reality. So there's a lot of info not only on the various requirement for a mars trip with different types of engines (everything from chemical thrusters to ion drives to nuclear rockets to the sci-fi only torch ships) to what the requirements would be for a crew living on such a ship and what sort of person defense would actually be reasonable.
It's a fun read, and quite educational as well, if not as hard-core science-y as some of the replies.
I have to agree that this is an issue for any MMORPG, but in WoW Blizzard has EXPLICITY worked to fix that problem more than ANY other MMORPG I've seen.
While you're logged out, your character accumulated "rest" which, for a short time, doubles the experience you get from a kill. So when you play less, you play more effectively. How quickly you rest increases if you log out at an in (great little detail for all those RPer's out there). So if you're logged out a lot between play, you'll gain experience faster than the 15-year-olds playing every night for a bit, and be able to stay at least close to your friends.
Also, with the importance of questing, there's always something to do at every level, even if you only log on once a week. it'll just take you longer to get to the end game of raiding and such.
Finally, the soulbound items and level requirements keep all newbies from wearing nothing but higher-level's castaways. There's actually a market for low-level crafted items. You won't be as rich as a master-craftsman, but I've still made more gold from that than I've looted off of creeps.
In short, they've done a bunch to help the issue you pose, and while I think there's definitely more that could be done, it's an improvement over every other MMORPG I've ever played.
This is, of course, speaking as a twenty-something who bought the game a few weeks ago and has been playing it less than every other night, in between work and fiancee time, so I can understand your situation;-)
But that's what's so useful about Wikipedia. I can pull up a reasonable summary of almost any random crap likely to come up in conversation and have a general knowledge of it and related subjects, as well as links to find more information.
It gives a basic coverage of subjects that you'd normally have to look in very specific types of literature for, assuming you could even figure out what category of encyclopedia you'd need.
If I need to know what an M1 is? easy, as well as other weapons of the era. What about who Lilith was? No need to know that I have to look under religious studies (or, more specifically, the apocryphal book of Enoch, in the extra-biblical Jewish mythology). Heck, as the parent demonstrated, the term bukkake, which almost no one who doesn't live on the internet has ever heard of, is quite reasonably explained.
All these terms are from diverse areas and decently obscure, but you'll find them quite easily in wikipedia alongside "All your base are belong to us," the Tree of Sephiroth, and every pokemon character ever caught.
So, I say, the more entries the better! I hope all those star wars characters are on there, because they aren't going to be anywhere else someone's likely to look for them.
Of course, it's also the people who overwork themselves who tend to start the new companies, make something of them, and end up with a nice private business that they can retire off of.
It's isn't the overworking that's the mistake, it's not properly judging how much the extra work will be rewarded.
It's like how in the gaming industry it seems like everyone works massive 90+ hour weeks. The difference between employers is that the end of burnout EA fires you and hires a new intern, whereas a good company pays you extra for it and gives you a month off after the release.
I've seen in a lot of sci-fi the idea of a radiation bunker. Basically, a smaller part of the living quarters in the middle of the ship that HAS thicker shielding. The crew would retreat there during flares and times of intense radiation, and then come back into the normal ship when things have calmed down again.
That would probably significantly reduce the cancer number, since I get the impression that space radiation is pretty variable.
Or we could do the easy thing and not be terrified of nuclear rockets, and get the astronauts there in and back in a month or two.
Agreed. For any article like this to be useful, one has to really examine what he wants changed and actually prove that it's a better/worse interface and not a personal preference.
There's a tradeoff to all of his points: Control key - consistent with windows, but inconsistent with Unix and less ergonomic. Multi-button mouse - better for power users, harder for newbies (and I've worked enough tech support to know that it is, to some degree at least, harder). Full maximize - better when you need to take the full screen, wasteful of screen real estate when you don't.
Unfortunately, this article doesn't prove to me at all that these beefs are actual inferiorities and not personal preference.
I'd sure *love* to have a car with a V8 (you know, aside from the horribly wasteful gas mileage on them these days), but in the cheap 10-year-old econocar I can actually afford, turning on the AC makes a HUGE difference.
It never feels underpowered under normal circumstances (not overpowered either, but very tolerable acceleration), but it's gotten to the point where I switch off the AC any time I'm merging onto the freeway. Cuts my acceleration almost as much as moving my entire dorm room in the backseat did.
I'd definitely be happy if they made the AC a little less noticeable in a small car;-)
Yeah, except for that isn't how anything else works - there aren't really any other tri-state controls in either OS. They're all on/off toggles.
I dunno, most of my windows have no need to be full screen - I can see both of them at once just fine, and click back and forth (or more often, look at one and type in the other, and expose if I need to switch). Somehow windows that aren't maximized in windows never seem to actually fit all their content somehow, or I have to manually resize every one, so I just end up maximized all teh time and never use drag and drop. Which sucks, because my mac training causes me to always think in terms of drag and drop first.
The dock not being recognized is poor design on the app developer's part. It's a decently easy check to implement.
As for full screen maximize, PLEASE GOD NO! Why waste all your screen when the window shows everything at half of it. Working between windows is SO much easier because of the resize-to-fit behavior. I miss it all the time in windows.
Now, having both (with opt+maximize for full screen) could be useful, but that default behavior is exactly what I want 99% of the time.
It has also been my experience that EE students tend to write ugly code;-)
Not all of them, of course, but at our school the EE programming courses and experience tends to be geared at getting stuff done only, whereas the CS stuff is about making code maintainable.
I won't start arguing whether EE or CS courses are harder (I've had cake classes in both sections) but any time I've had an EE in my lab group his code was a nightmare to read.
Agreed. It took a long time for me to really start thinking in Object-Oriented terms after learning C to start. None of the OO stuff we did felt like actual *programming* compared to the C stuff I learned. I mean, if I'm just using objects that somebody *else* made, what's the point?;-)
Start with something good and object-oriented, like Java or Objective-C (if you're on a mac). C++'s object-orientism, while very useful, *feels* like more of a hack and doesn't seem at all as good for teaching the fundamental principals of the object oriented programming. I had three different courses on C++ and still didn't really understand polymorphism. Five minutes into my Objective-C book it all made perfect sense.
Except for the sad fact that they would have had to rewrite all of the low-level system to be able to make it work well.
The memory management in OS 9 was a hack to allow an OS designed for one program to handle several at a time. No pre-emptive multitasking, no protected memory. An mp3 player had to have system-level access to keep your music from skipping the moment you clicked a menu.
I'm sure they could have rewritten everything (despite the fact that they tried and failed) but it probably would have just ended up a lot similar to unix or linux because those systems work.
The weird thing is, though, that customer support will often help you out with a scratched disc, but not anything else.
My friend had his games discs get scratched pretty badly, and his hard drive that he kept his cd-keys on crash. He called support, and they sent him new cd's - but not his cd-key. So he is perfectly able to play the games cracked, with legitimate cd's...
I'm sure it's great sometimes, but my situation hasn't been so reliable.
It ends up being 3x as fast to turn my xp box off and start it up again the next day as it is to hibernate and wait five minutes for the thing to become responsive next time I turn it on.
Think of all the charismatic leaders that have inspired violence: hundreds, thousands. Now how many can you think of that have inspired people towards true peace? Can probably count them on your fingers; Ghandi, MLK Jr., Jesus Christ, Laozi, Buddha, etc.
And how much violence those visionaries have unintentionally caused through their efforts.
Painter isn't really for photos at all. It's more for painting.
Lots of fancy brush and canvas settings. You can make it draw like watercolors or inks or markers or pencil, but it isn't really designed for photo-editing.
There are several quite good photography programs that aren't Photoshop or gimp, and cost less than $600.
PaintShop Pro is under $150 and is quite high quality. Not to mention the lite version of photoshop, which, while not as nice as its big brother, can still do some good stuff in the hands of a pro.
And those two are owned by big name companies with marketing budgets.
So there's two - I'm sure there's a bunch more. But everyone just buys or pirates Photoshop CS because they don't know any better.
I can sympathize so much for everyone here who was ostracized and picked on in high school. That was me as well - I went to a small school, so I could play sports, but sitting on the end of the bench doesn't make you popular with the girls.
But in the end, it all came down to realizing two things.
1) I didn't need to give a fuck about what they thought about me.
2) Just because I didn't care, didn't mean I needed to be an ass.
Growing up is about learning how to keep true to yourself, find what you enjoy doing and people who enjoy it, and going with it; while at the same time learning how to deal with the people who value entirely different things. It's all about picking what actually matters to you and fuck the rest.
Let things slide. Learn how to socialize, because all those asshole jocks (and the nice ones who just happened to like the right sports) are still going to be around once you get out of high school, as your boss or your coworker or your fiance's dad. Just because we were ostracized doesn't mean we need to stay on fringes of society - socializing is an acquired skill. Play it like a game, realize that it has no inherent value, but that it is nonetheless important.
Stay cool, play the game, and stay true to yourself underneathe. In the end you'll find you have a lot more time to do what you want to do, and a lot less tension with the world around you.
It's all about realizing that specifically avoiding name brands is shallow and pointless as caring about them. Everything else follows from that.
There are definitely a LOT of things that require a real word processor. Some of them even need the auto-indexing and other fancy feature of Word.
But really, for 99% of what I and I bet most people in my situation (a student) ever need one for (papers for school, occasional documentation at work) would be COMPLETELY covered by a basic RTF editor like Text Edit.
And yet every year they tell us we need to buy office:(
Indeed. Anyone who thinks powered armor is a silly battle-mech style idea needs to read Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The ability to give every individual soldier such increased mobility, comm, and firepower pretty much makes our current military obsolete.
I add, however, that the only people I have seen who have had problems with the no-window application were coming from windows, and expecting it to work like windows. Anyone who started on the mac wasn't really puzzled by it, because they didn't identify a window as an open program, but as something owned by the open program.
Sure, it's annoying when you're USED TO THE OPPOSITE, but I don't know that that's a good argument either way.
Notice that a lot of apps on windows keep that same application-centric behavior, but waste a lot more screen real-estate doing so because they are trying to keep both metaphors at once.
It's like moving files - if you're used to mac, the fact that the fastest way to move files in windows is really to use cut and paste feels really backwards, whereas dragging and dropping feels odd to a windows user (yes, you *can* drag and drop, but the one-window explorer view makes it much slower and less useful, as you practically have to start over at the root in the your target window.)
Some things are better, some are just different, and unfortunately when your entire audience has extensive experience in one and not the other, it becomes very hard to tell which is which.
Also, while I agree that the default dock is disgusting, reduce its size and put it on the left, and suddenly it takes up less space than the task bar and can hold more. It's especially nice on the wide screens apple puts on everything these days. How I wish that apple did that as the default.
Slashdot Mirror
And, devil of a feminist that she was, quite aptly named I assure you.
;-)
I find it quite amusing that the reason the original was expelled from heaven was that she refused to lie below adam, literally. So he had God make him a more appropriately submissive wife.
As sexist as some parts of the Bible can be, nothing compares to the parts that were left out
Atomic Rocket has some interesting reading. It's a nice mix of (as far as I can tell) good physics and some science fiction theory.
Basically, the whole site was designed to help new sci-fi authors make their stories closer to scientific reality. So there's a lot of info not only on the various requirement for a mars trip with different types of engines (everything from chemical thrusters to ion drives to nuclear rockets to the sci-fi only torch ships) to what the requirements would be for a crew living on such a ship and what sort of person defense would actually be reasonable.
It's a fun read, and quite educational as well, if not as hard-core science-y as some of the replies.
I have to agree that this is an issue for any MMORPG, but in WoW Blizzard has EXPLICITY worked to fix that problem more than ANY other MMORPG I've seen.
;-)
While you're logged out, your character accumulated "rest" which, for a short time, doubles the experience you get from a kill. So when you play less, you play more effectively. How quickly you rest increases if you log out at an in (great little detail for all those RPer's out there). So if you're logged out a lot between play, you'll gain experience faster than the 15-year-olds playing every night for a bit, and be able to stay at least close to your friends.
Also, with the importance of questing, there's always something to do at every level, even if you only log on once a week. it'll just take you longer to get to the end game of raiding and such.
Finally, the soulbound items and level requirements keep all newbies from wearing nothing but higher-level's castaways. There's actually a market for low-level crafted items. You won't be as rich as a master-craftsman, but I've still made more gold from that than I've looted off of creeps.
In short, they've done a bunch to help the issue you pose, and while I think there's definitely more that could be done, it's an improvement over every other MMORPG I've ever played.
This is, of course, speaking as a twenty-something who bought the game a few weeks ago and has been playing it less than every other night, in between work and fiancee time, so I can understand your situation
But that's what's so useful about Wikipedia. I can pull up a reasonable summary of almost any random crap likely to come up in conversation and have a general knowledge of it and related subjects, as well as links to find more information.
It gives a basic coverage of subjects that you'd normally have to look in very specific types of literature for, assuming you could even figure out what category of encyclopedia you'd need.
If I need to know what an M1 is? easy, as well as other weapons of the era. What about who Lilith was? No need to know that I have to look under religious studies (or, more specifically, the apocryphal book of Enoch, in the extra-biblical Jewish mythology). Heck, as the parent demonstrated, the term bukkake, which almost no one who doesn't live on the internet has ever heard of, is quite reasonably explained.
All these terms are from diverse areas and decently obscure, but you'll find them quite easily in wikipedia alongside "All your base are belong to us," the Tree of Sephiroth, and every pokemon character ever caught.
So, I say, the more entries the better! I hope all those star wars characters are on there, because they aren't going to be anywhere else someone's likely to look for them.
That's all well and good, except for the fact that there are plenty of ways to sell songs that work on an iPod without breaking Fairplay.
Like, oh, that old thing called mp3?
They may have had good reasons to break harmony, but it's not like AAC is the only thing that the little boxes can play.
Of course, it's also the people who overwork themselves who tend to start the new companies, make something of them, and end up with a nice private business that they can retire off of.
It's isn't the overworking that's the mistake, it's not properly judging how much the extra work will be rewarded.
It's like how in the gaming industry it seems like everyone works massive 90+ hour weeks. The difference between employers is that the end of burnout EA fires you and hires a new intern, whereas a good company pays you extra for it and gives you a month off after the release.
I've seen in a lot of sci-fi the idea of a radiation bunker. Basically, a smaller part of the living quarters in the middle of the ship that HAS thicker shielding. The crew would retreat there during flares and times of intense radiation, and then come back into the normal ship when things have calmed down again.
That would probably significantly reduce the cancer number, since I get the impression that space radiation is pretty variable.
Or we could do the easy thing and not be terrified of nuclear rockets, and get the astronauts there in and back in a month or two.
This doesn't bother me at all, as long as they are using to prevent OS X from running on other systems, not preventing linux from running on macs.
Which, from the sound of the guys who claim to have gotten Windows and linux working on the developer machines, is the case.
I don't know why everyone's freaking out about this. I have plenty of OEM discs that won't install a system other than the model they were made for.
It's just a way to check for a system's "Mac-ness" since the hardware is otherwise standard.
Agreed. For any article like this to be useful, one has to really examine what he wants changed and actually prove that it's a better/worse interface and not a personal preference.
There's a tradeoff to all of his points:
Control key - consistent with windows, but inconsistent with Unix and less ergonomic.
Multi-button mouse - better for power users, harder for newbies (and I've worked enough tech support to know that it is, to some degree at least, harder).
Full maximize - better when you need to take the full screen, wasteful of screen real estate when you don't.
Unfortunately, this article doesn't prove to me at all that these beefs are actual inferiorities and not personal preference.
I'd sure *love* to have a car with a V8 (you know, aside from the horribly wasteful gas mileage on them these days), but in the cheap 10-year-old econocar I can actually afford, turning on the AC makes a HUGE difference.
;-)
It never feels underpowered under normal circumstances (not overpowered either, but very tolerable acceleration), but it's gotten to the point where I switch off the AC any time I'm merging onto the freeway. Cuts my acceleration almost as much as moving my entire dorm room in the backseat did.
I'd definitely be happy if they made the AC a little less noticeable in a small car
Yeah, except for that isn't how anything else works - there aren't really any other tri-state controls in either OS. They're all on/off toggles.
I dunno, most of my windows have no need to be full screen - I can see both of them at once just fine, and click back and forth (or more often, look at one and type in the other, and expose if I need to switch). Somehow windows that aren't maximized in windows never seem to actually fit all their content somehow, or I have to manually resize every one, so I just end up maximized all teh time and never use drag and drop. Which sucks, because my mac training causes me to always think in terms of drag and drop first.
The dock not being recognized is poor design on the app developer's part. It's a decently easy check to implement.
As for full screen maximize, PLEASE GOD NO! Why waste all your screen when the window shows everything at half of it. Working between windows is SO much easier because of the resize-to-fit behavior. I miss it all the time in windows.
Now, having both (with opt+maximize for full screen) could be useful, but that default behavior is exactly what I want 99% of the time.
It has also been my experience that EE students tend to write ugly code ;-)
Not all of them, of course, but at our school the EE programming courses and experience tends to be geared at getting stuff done only, whereas the CS stuff is about making code maintainable.
I won't start arguing whether EE or CS courses are harder (I've had cake classes in both sections) but any time I've had an EE in my lab group his code was a nightmare to read.
Agreed. It took a long time for me to really start thinking in Object-Oriented terms after learning C to start. None of the OO stuff we did felt like actual *programming* compared to the C stuff I learned. I mean, if I'm just using objects that somebody *else* made, what's the point? ;-)
Start with something good and object-oriented, like Java or Objective-C (if you're on a mac). C++'s object-orientism, while very useful, *feels* like more of a hack and doesn't seem at all as good for teaching the fundamental principals of the object oriented programming. I had three different courses on C++ and still didn't really understand polymorphism. Five minutes into my Objective-C book it all made perfect sense.
Except for the sad fact that they would have had to rewrite all of the low-level system to be able to make it work well.
The memory management in OS 9 was a hack to allow an OS designed for one program to handle several at a time. No pre-emptive multitasking, no protected memory. An mp3 player had to have system-level access to keep your music from skipping the moment you clicked a menu.
I'm sure they could have rewritten everything (despite the fact that they tried and failed) but it probably would have just ended up a lot similar to unix or linux because those systems work.
The weird thing is, though, that customer support will often help you out with a scratched disc, but not anything else.
My friend had his games discs get scratched pretty badly, and his hard drive that he kept his cd-keys on crash. He called support, and they sent him new cd's - but not his cd-key. So he is perfectly able to play the games cracked, with legitimate cd's...
I'm sure it's great sometimes, but my situation hasn't been so reliable.
It ends up being 3x as fast to turn my xp box off and start it up again the next day as it is to hibernate and wait five minutes for the thing to become responsive next time I turn it on.
I dunno, maybe newer hardware supports it better?
And how much violence those visionaries have unintentionally caused through their efforts.
Painter isn't really for photos at all. It's more for painting.
Lots of fancy brush and canvas settings. You can make it draw like watercolors or inks or markers or pencil, but it isn't really designed for photo-editing.
I think you proved his point.
There are several quite good photography programs that aren't Photoshop or gimp, and cost less than $600.
PaintShop Pro is under $150 and is quite high quality. Not to mention the lite version of photoshop, which, while not as nice as its big brother, can still do some good stuff in the hands of a pro.
And those two are owned by big name companies with marketing budgets.
So there's two - I'm sure there's a bunch more. But everyone just buys or pirates Photoshop CS because they don't know any better.
Yeah, I'm about the only home user I know who still prefers a real email client.
I can sympathize so much for everyone here who was ostracized and picked on in high school. That was me as well - I went to a small school, so I could play sports, but sitting on the end of the bench doesn't make you popular with the girls.
But in the end, it all came down to realizing two things.
1) I didn't need to give a fuck about what they thought about me.
2) Just because I didn't care, didn't mean I needed to be an ass.
Growing up is about learning how to keep true to yourself, find what you enjoy doing and people who enjoy it, and going with it; while at the same time learning how to deal with the people who value entirely different things. It's all about picking what actually matters to you and fuck the rest.
Let things slide. Learn how to socialize, because all those asshole jocks (and the nice ones who just happened to like the right sports) are still going to be around once you get out of high school, as your boss or your coworker or your fiance's dad. Just because we were ostracized doesn't mean we need to stay on fringes of society - socializing is an acquired skill. Play it like a game, realize that it has no inherent value, but that it is nonetheless important.
Stay cool, play the game, and stay true to yourself underneathe. In the end you'll find you have a lot more time to do what you want to do, and a lot less tension with the world around you.
It's all about realizing that specifically avoiding name brands is shallow and pointless as caring about them. Everything else follows from that.
There are definitely a LOT of things that require a real word processor. Some of them even need the auto-indexing and other fancy feature of Word.
:(
But really, for 99% of what I and I bet most people in my situation (a student) ever need one for (papers for school, occasional documentation at work) would be COMPLETELY covered by a basic RTF editor like Text Edit.
And yet every year they tell us we need to buy office
Indeed. Anyone who thinks powered armor is a silly battle-mech style idea needs to read Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The ability to give every individual soldier such increased mobility, comm, and firepower pretty much makes our current military obsolete.
I add, however, that the only people I have seen who have had problems with the no-window application were coming from windows, and expecting it to work like windows. Anyone who started on the mac wasn't really puzzled by it, because they didn't identify a window as an open program, but as something owned by the open program.
Sure, it's annoying when you're USED TO THE OPPOSITE, but I don't know that that's a good argument either way.
Notice that a lot of apps on windows keep that same application-centric behavior, but waste a lot more screen real-estate doing so because they are trying to keep both metaphors at once.
It's like moving files - if you're used to mac, the fact that the fastest way to move files in windows is really to use cut and paste feels really backwards, whereas dragging and dropping feels odd to a windows user (yes, you *can* drag and drop, but the one-window explorer view makes it much slower and less useful, as you practically have to start over at the root in the your target window.)
Some things are better, some are just different, and unfortunately when your entire audience has extensive experience in one and not the other, it becomes very hard to tell which is which.
Also, while I agree that the default dock is disgusting, reduce its size and put it on the left, and suddenly it takes up less space than the task bar and can hold more. It's especially nice on the wide screens apple puts on everything these days. How I wish that apple did that as the default.