The reasoning is that if a customer can get a product for much less off the internet than in a store, they will waste the stores time getting information on the product (demonstrations and comparisons) and then buy the product online.
That logic applies to optics, too: elite Zeisses and Swarovskis have pricing arrangements that won't let you advertize anything lower than a certain level, partly so physical stores won't get abused like that. Doesn't prevent the problem there, either.
The thing is, if they really want the physical stores to be worth their prices, they need to be providing something that doesn't vanish, pfoof, once the product's sold. With optics and stereos, the warranty means an awful lot to some people. (Do I want to ship my $1000 binoculars back to some New York camera shop, or do I want to let the local place handle it, no-questions-asked, for my lifetime?)
How can these stores offer me something that'll last past the sale? Something to do with tounraments at the stores? That partly explains the requirement in Tourney rules that you've got to use their miniatures ONLY -- but that's a sort of value through contrived scarcity, and the consumer sees the company as forcing stuff down his throat.
Either way this is wrongheaded. They should find some way to give the stores an edge by offering something more. They're subtracting instead of adding, in more ways than one.
Mozilla's Firebird browser is not going to be confused with a relational database. Without customer confusion, there isn't a trademark problem.
The parent to your post didn't suggest it was a legal problem -- just that it showed a lack of inspiration, right? "Poetic variations on Phoenix" was the suggestion.
(The cars thing kind of bores me, personally. Blimps, or early airplane models, or anything else would have more cachet...)
Re:Opera's for a different set of tastes
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Safari Beta 2 Available
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Don't get me wrong, I'm not especially down on Opera, and nobody's sainting Stevie J.
But in general, Opera is cluttered by comparison with IE, leave alone Safari. It has a modest measure of feature creep -- mail client, a "Contacts" list as part of my browser? Between the two Opera versions I can see without standing up, here, it seems not to particularly respect the API of the OS. (One version is treating non-modal "Transfers" dialogs so that I can't drag them outside the program's overall frame. Dang it, get outta the way! The other, new one includes some pretty whacky, sometimes ambiguous stuff like check boxes and radio buttons together in the same right-click contextual dialog. I just tried to close the sidebar deal -- I hate that -- but along the way I accidentally removed a few of the buttons from it. Also seem to have dragged a tab down into the list area, and it showed up there but I don't know what that actually means. Oops. Well, it's gone now.)
We all like tweakability in principle, but why are there three different basic preferences items on two different menus in version 7.10? Why do I have my Google search box in a completely different spot from the three other search boxes in the default layout, again? Why are there 16 different icons in the basic Nav toolbar? You'd really use maybe three of those, unless you honestly buy "Magic Wand" and "Fast Forward" as basic Web approaches(?). The "mystery meat" ones you have to mouse over to figure out are just cholesterol. Seems like a bit of work to get to a clean Web browser.
Sort of the difference between a gaudy leatherman tool and a solid pair of pliers. Just my take, and no offense intended. Some people carry their leatherman everywhere, but I just want a pair of pliers handy when I need 'em.
There are rules for commercials -- you have to use the real turkey if you're selling Jennie-Oh turkeys, but you can shoe polish the thing as much as you want -- so maybe they did this with real, physical parts because they had to use the pieces of a real Accord?
Otherwise I'm thinking Computer graphics would have been the more efficient way of accomplishing what they wanted. Efficiency is something we like in a car maker, isn't it?
(And did they want me to find out it took them 600-plus takes to get the parts of their car to work right together? Jeez, doesn't a car pretty much need to use all those parts together every time?)
Sort of, but not a carbon copy exactly. Rube Goldberg is seen by some people as a sort of "American version" of Robinson -- news programs here might say "Our tax system is a Rube Golbergian mess" where those in the U.K. would invoke Robinson. They were contemporaries, but Goldberg lived longer.
I'd say Robinson was more about social commentary than Goldberg. His typical drawing would be an overall look at a machine, sure, but there was usually something dilapidated about the workings of it, and there was something sort of comic-tragic about the people in the figure -- they're seriously working to maintain the thing despite its ludicrously overcomplex design, and it's running down despite them.
Goldberg is more of an engineer's taste -- he was an engineer to start with, wasn't he? -- and the idea is really to play with the idea of the machine to make it as ridiculous as possible. His machines aren't attended by a bunch of sadly intent factory workers, they're what my Great Uncle would call "flights of fancy." You hear about contests in the U.S., for fun, to build elaborate "Rube Goldberg contraptions" to perform simple actions.
Heath Robinson would have appreciated Metropolis more when it came out.
Excuse me, doesn't it seem like the author of this "study," by playing the game himself, calls his findings (which read pretty much like simple opinions here) into question? If they'd done a story about a Zoloft study, do you think they might have asked some serious questions about the fact that the head scientist was taking Zoloft himself? Okay, so this is just a fluff story, but still, it's weird -- what stereotype is this debunking, anyway?
Let's see, what did the study find?
"today's player is just as likely to be a well-paid professional - male or female - aged in their 40s"
"some players are spending a great deal of time on the pastime" (a quarter said more than 41 hours a week)
"if you are married with three children, it probably will not go down so well and could cause immense problems... But it is okay for someone who is not in a relationship and does not have other responsibilities"
85% of players were male
A significant minority (15%) adopt a character gender opposite to their own.
Is the big "shattered" stereotype that this person is supposed to be a "pimply teenager"? If you met a 40-something man without a significant other who spent 42 hours a week playing a female character online -- he's a Gnome illusionist who wears fetching custom chain mail ensembles -- what would you think? Would you think he wasn't a "geek" or a "nerd" because of his age and income?
(The BBC science staff seems to reprint press releases and call them reporting pretty often. I once told them a story about the anniversary of Prozac was uninformed, and they said "thanks" and promptly reworded the story -- as if they'd never heard of any other antidepressants until I mentioned it. On the one hand, they're responsive, but it makes you wonder about their editors...)
It's not that much better, it's just handy
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Safari Beta 2 Available
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What is it that makes this browser so much better then the others?
Safari is not the greatest thing since penicillin. It won't save the world. It's not even a full release version.
What it is: a relatively svelte, quick-feeling (and yes that's partly just render speed), nicely spare browser that feels fine to use. Look at a page in Safari next to, say, Opera. The leanness of Safari stands out in several senses: render speed, clean layout, just the speed with which the program loads.
It's like a tool that feels good in your hand. Apple has a way of producing stuff like that. That's what your friends mean.
(And when your friends start claiming iCal as one of Apple's triumphs, then you can suspect them. There's a program in serious need of practical work, and much more of a beta than Safari. Slow as molasses, too.)
Maybe the costs for this wouldn't be more than a separate monitor and scanner? Those two items are basically commodity priced right now, for most people's uses anyway. The combo screen would need to be pretty cheap to compete.
We have maybe, maybe 15 copies for several hundred people right now, and a few flatbed scanners around the office here. There's no shortage. I can see some new applications, and all -- potentially conferencing, and people would scan to OCR stuff more (if affordable OCR would work for the things they want to use it on) -- but would these really cost out, if those are the selling points?
Easier to see this at public kiosk sort of things -- "hold up your coupon, please" and other cooler variations on touch-screen I/O applications. There the cost difference doesn't seem like a lot next to the convenience of the combined screen/reader. Seems like that'd be the first place to run into it...
I've used iCab in this way, to test sites under development. The face that shows you errors with a click is simple and effective. Heck, DreamWeaver doesn't show you errors so easily, maybe because its own scripting "behaviors" would cause so many.
A comparable plug-in would be cool, and would underscore Mozilla's standards-compliant MO. (That's its M.O.zilla, citizen.)
The iCab face is dang particular, though, and it seems like your page's rating has to do with the number of standards violations. You don't find one site in 50 that get a real smile out of the thing. (Cranky bugger.) I'd rather the rating had to do with the seriousness of errors -- you have an onLoad to an undefined function, BIG FROWN for you. The difference between one and ten missing Alt tags isn't that big a deal by comparison.
Not sure how to practically have the browser make judgment calls about seriousness, though...
You are giving up a hell of a lot for something that you don't even know will work (in fact, something that history strongly suggests will not work).
Oh, yeah, we did mention the war somewhere in there, didn't we?...
Sad to say, Bush and a whole lot of well-intentioned Americans just don't see how what they're trying to accomplish might not be what actually happens. This "privacy vs. safety" tradeoff ain't necessarily so, good example. The effect might not even be neutral; you could give up a share of your privacy only to make yourself even more vulnerable as a result. Maybe before someone tries to talk us into the sacrifice, they should demonstrate that it'll have the desired effect. You think?
You'd be amazed how many US citizens just do not understand that the current coalition of the reluctant looks the way it does because most of the world was asking just this sort of question about the war. Nope -- suddenly Germany, France, Russia, and the entire Islamic world was just obstructionist... 'cause, you know, they're all jealous of us... or something. Seriously, that's definitely what lots of people think about France. How petulant is that?
If you want to see what US History textbooks do say, there's a decent little book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by Jonathan Loewen. History gets neutered for US schoolkids: all ponderous narrative, hardly any primary sources. They can describe the Lincoln-Douglas debates without mentioning slavery, 'cause they seldom use any of the actual words from the debates.
Kind of like your not being able to get over 2000.
Which is almost as amusing as staging a fabulously expensive, eight-year, openly partisan, trumped-up "investigation" into a long-over land deal that lost the supposed wrongdoers money.
Or didn't you remember that one?
Your memory seems a little shorter than most people's, friend. Weird thing is, you seem to think that's a strength of yours... When someone uses a Supreme Court divided on partisan lines to stop votes from being counted, "funny" that ain't.
Given conflicting instructions, an intelligent, goal-seeking machine may respond in an unpredictable way that obeys neither instruction, but settles instead for a course of action that seems to minimize the apparent conflict.
How much improved would AI be in strategy games if this "neurosis" were to show up there? Those are just the circumstances described in the Darwin article: the computer has limited resources and potentially conflicting goals -- develop and attack, protect resources but aggressively pursue new ones, and so on. We could all use a little unpredictability, right?
I'm all for it.
Seriously, though -- wouldn't games like that be the perfect test bed for more "intelligent," problem-solving approaches? When you got into your car, you could rest easy knowing its resource management routines were honed during many hours of multiplayer FPS. It's the wind tunnel of the future, man.
You have something other than your own eyes to rely on in making this assertion, right? 'Cause you're accusing TIME of some pretty weird behavior, and I'm just hoping against hope that this isn't some sort of hypersensitive "projection" on your part.
"Sickening" is a strong word for a hunch based on posture in an old photograph. Maybe you should confine yourself to the cover of the "Abbey Road" album for now?
If you think of it as an invasion, I suggest you experience some WWII history.
It's a little late for first-person "experience" of World War II. (Closest you can get is something like "The War 1939-1945," edited by Desmond Flower. Amazing book, mainly because it's almost all first-person accounts and it includes any perspective you can imagine.)
If WWII is your model, doing a Google by "D Day" and "invasion of France" has just got me around 5,000 hits.
For a party that makes a big deal out of not being "politically correct," our R'pubs do seem to have a problem saying this word all of a sudden. Iraq's another sovereign state. We may have all sorts of legitimate reasons for doing it, or not, but sending troops into another state to depose that state's government is being called an "invasion" by sympathetic sources like The Japan Times and unsymathetic ones like This Singapore newspaper.
Lord, how Orwellian we're becoming. "Liberate" is okay, but "invasion" isn't? Can I say "war" or do I need to say "police action" -- because we're supposedly enforcing the resolutions of the body that was so divided over whether we should do this? C'mon, give me some guidance here -- I'm not sure how to adhere to the party line. Re-educate us, comrade.
Look up a "socially conscious" investment index. You can get more than four companies on your list. (Ben and Jerry come to mind, though I don't know that they're doing so well any more.)
Or did you mean "kind toward potential copyright infringment by 19-year-old kids"? That's different.;)
You are missing the point. Classic had all these things that the author is talking about -consistency, spatiality, concreteness- from the very beginning.
I've used the Mac OS off and on since it could boot on a single 800k floppy -- my 512ke's -- and "from the very beginning" is a little much there. It's been a great OS, still is very usable, but along the way any snowball's going to pick up some dog stuff from the yard.
"Consistency"? In any Mac OS pre-X, drag a folder containing both files and folders to the trash. What happens to it? Now drag a mounted disk there -- again, one with files and folders "inside." What happens to that? Not the same thing. Pretty unsettling lack of consistency for many users. 'Nother example: to manipulate files and folders on my hard drive, I use the finder... to open a folder over a network, though, I "choose" the network resource as I would a printer... Bad attempt to double-up features within the Chooser, if you ask me.
I basically agree with the parent that the new OS is young yet. Classic prior to this had a lot of history and refinement behind it -- and no, OS X isn't there yet. It's sometimes pretty amusing seeing 'Nix people say how smooth X is, because it just isn't where the old OS was in terms of UI in my book. But neither one was or is perfect -- and neither one seems especially wrongheaded, to me.
Re:I'll take terrorism over totalitarianism
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Snooping on VOIP
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· Score: 1
If not, then that is what our military is for, to defend the country against our enemies...which are OUT THERE, not HERE.
Eric Harris
Dylan Klebold
Timothy McVeigh
Bufford Furrow
Randall Terry
Any of those names ring a bell? They're all white guys who've committed terrorist acts on US soil. (Well, Terry excepted -- he's more like the local Imam, the guy who talks others into it on religious grounds.) McVeigh was part of our worst terrorist act prior to 9/11.
Scary thing is, the same people passing laws to snoop on all the nasty terrorist networks are not so far from the list up there in terms of ideology. U.S. domestic terrorism right now has a lot to do with our right wing fringe. (Anyone remember the private plane the guy flew into the White House during Clinton's term? Sound at all familiar?)
Personally, I think the best form of protection would be to give everyone a firearm, and ensure they would use it only in self-defense, but like you said, this isn't an ideal world.
Um, how exactly were you intending to "ensure" that all these firearms are only used in self-defense? If you can really "ensure" that, then you wouldn't need the firearms to begin with, would you? There'd be nothing to use them in self-defense against, right?
You'd have a database bigger'n'badder than this FBI one in ten minutes, in your "ideal world." Or did you intend that "ideal" to mean "I don't want to deal with the unintended consequences of this idea"?
Yeah, it's not like the universe pulls you over when you break those light-speed laws.
The emphasis on the "flatness" of the lenses, at least on/., is misguided too. These are special materials, and the lenses are flat because they have to be owing to the properties of the materials, not the other way around.
Heck, there are all different shapes of lens. Nikon's been out front with consumer "aspherical" lenses for a few years now, selling them in camera lenses and relatively low-end consumer binoculars. They let you simplify things like the number of elements in a camera lens, or help with distortions on the edge of the field in binoculars. Those are all curved, still, just not spherical on the edges -- but a new shape of lens isn't really much news. It's the whacky materials that make this story.
I guess it's science reporting, so let's take what we can get.
My sister who works at one of the Apple stores recommends this title to people who need any manual at all. An awful lot of the people who buy it do so more for reassurance than anything else -- your nervous parents who want it around just in case, basically.
She doesn't see tech-minded people buying how-to books for the OS proper, or at least not when they first buy the computers. Personally I've never felt a need, and my 9-year-old kids were comfortable immediately in OS X, tweaked every setting they had access to without a blink.
(But "intensely thorough"? Is intensity really the quality you're looking for in a reference? I imagine cracking the binding in my haste to pore, hot-eyed, over some crucial command line syntax...)
The word "preferred" in the url appears to be the entire basis for this/. story.
Why, if one may ask, would Adobe miff a huge established user base by "choosing" one platform over the other, especially when they keep the Mac and PC versions more-or-less concurrent anyway? What possible motive would they have for declaring one platform "preferred"?
On the other hand, I can think of a trolling motive for someone to see if they could get this thing posted. This "news" appears to date to 11 november of last year, to boot.
...only about 5 or 6 genres total... If ten genres are dying, then in five years we won't be playing anything.
Hrm. My elementary school math skills are a little rusty:
Five existing genres
-minus-
Ten genres
---------- Negative five genres!
In five years, we will be playing solitaire. With physical cards. And there'll be some missing from the deck. (And it'll still be more fun than watching "cut scenes" in most FPShooters.)
Someone explain to me, please, whom this attack is directed at? If, as all reports indicate, the Iraqi command structure is already isolated from local units, then what will it accomplish to "Shock and Awe" them into more confusion? They're already ineffectual.
This is meant to awe the world, not just Iraq, and it won't have the effect Rumsfeld et al want. As a demonstration of American Military Might (all in caps of course), it's going to fail if one, ONE member of the Iraqi high command survives in a bunker somewhere. You think that won't happen? It doesn't even matter if it's NOT intended to kill everyone in a bunker, either. The Arab world will see that America's thrown everything it has at Iraq, but that all America had wasn't enough to kill Saddam Hussein or whoever.
It'll backfire, like this entire arrogant foreign policy approach. True strength is more often demonstrated in restraint than in action.
Wallace and Gromit is all about the claymation look, the pacing, and the cinematic feel of the whole thing. Judging by these screen shots, I'm not seeing any of that.
Think of Feathers McGraw, the penguin, in the animated short -- he had no facial expression at all, but they made him sinister just by letting the camera linger an extra split second on that blank face, you know? How do you catch that feeling in a game? Cut scenes before you go to the standard-platform-jumper play? What-ever.
Kind of sad. They'd make a better game by having Wallace build his whacked-out inventions to overcome various obstacles, wouldn't they?
Slashdot Mirror
That logic applies to optics, too: elite Zeisses and Swarovskis have pricing arrangements that won't let you advertize anything lower than a certain level, partly so physical stores won't get abused like that. Doesn't prevent the problem there, either.
The thing is, if they really want the physical stores to be worth their prices, they need to be providing something that doesn't vanish, pfoof, once the product's sold. With optics and stereos, the warranty means an awful lot to some people. (Do I want to ship my $1000 binoculars back to some New York camera shop, or do I want to let the local place handle it, no-questions-asked, for my lifetime?)
How can these stores offer me something that'll last past the sale? Something to do with tounraments at the stores? That partly explains the requirement in Tourney rules that you've got to use their miniatures ONLY -- but that's a sort of value through contrived scarcity, and the consumer sees the company as forcing stuff down his throat.
Either way this is wrongheaded. They should find some way to give the stores an edge by offering something more. They're subtracting instead of adding, in more ways than one.
The parent to your post didn't suggest it was a legal problem -- just that it showed a lack of inspiration, right? "Poetic variations on Phoenix" was the suggestion.
(The cars thing kind of bores me, personally. Blimps, or early airplane models, or anything else would have more cachet...)
But in general, Opera is cluttered by comparison with IE, leave alone Safari. It has a modest measure of feature creep -- mail client, a "Contacts" list as part of my browser? Between the two Opera versions I can see without standing up, here, it seems not to particularly respect the API of the OS. (One version is treating non-modal "Transfers" dialogs so that I can't drag them outside the program's overall frame. Dang it, get outta the way! The other, new one includes some pretty whacky, sometimes ambiguous stuff like check boxes and radio buttons together in the same right-click contextual dialog. I just tried to close the sidebar deal -- I hate that -- but along the way I accidentally removed a few of the buttons from it. Also seem to have dragged a tab down into the list area, and it showed up there but I don't know what that actually means. Oops. Well, it's gone now.)
We all like tweakability in principle, but why are there three different basic preferences items on two different menus in version 7.10? Why do I have my Google search box in a completely different spot from the three other search boxes in the default layout, again? Why are there 16 different icons in the basic Nav toolbar? You'd really use maybe three of those, unless you honestly buy "Magic Wand" and "Fast Forward" as basic Web approaches(?). The "mystery meat" ones you have to mouse over to figure out are just cholesterol. Seems like a bit of work to get to a clean Web browser.
Sort of the difference between a gaudy leatherman tool and a solid pair of pliers. Just my take, and no offense intended. Some people carry their leatherman everywhere, but I just want a pair of pliers handy when I need 'em.
Otherwise I'm thinking Computer graphics would have been the more efficient way of accomplishing what they wanted. Efficiency is something we like in a car maker, isn't it?
(And did they want me to find out it took them 600-plus takes to get the parts of their car to work right together? Jeez, doesn't a car pretty much need to use all those parts together every time?)
I'd say Robinson was more about social commentary than Goldberg. His typical drawing would be an overall look at a machine, sure, but there was usually something dilapidated about the workings of it, and there was something sort of comic-tragic about the people in the figure -- they're seriously working to maintain the thing despite its ludicrously overcomplex design, and it's running down despite them.
Goldberg is more of an engineer's taste -- he was an engineer to start with, wasn't he? -- and the idea is really to play with the idea of the machine to make it as ridiculous as possible. His machines aren't attended by a bunch of sadly intent factory workers, they're what my Great Uncle would call "flights of fancy." You hear about contests in the U.S., for fun, to build elaborate "Rube Goldberg contraptions" to perform simple actions.
Heath Robinson would have appreciated Metropolis more when it came out.
Excuse me, doesn't it seem like the author of this "study," by playing the game himself, calls his findings (which read pretty much like simple opinions here) into question? If they'd done a story about a Zoloft study, do you think they might have asked some serious questions about the fact that the head scientist was taking Zoloft himself? Okay, so this is just a fluff story, but still, it's weird -- what stereotype is this debunking, anyway?
Let's see, what did the study find?
Is the big "shattered" stereotype that this person is supposed to be a "pimply teenager"? If you met a 40-something man without a significant other who spent 42 hours a week playing a female character online -- he's a Gnome illusionist who wears fetching custom chain mail ensembles -- what would you think? Would you think he wasn't a "geek" or a "nerd" because of his age and income?
(The BBC science staff seems to reprint press releases and call them reporting pretty often. I once told them a story about the anniversary of Prozac was uninformed, and they said "thanks" and promptly reworded the story -- as if they'd never heard of any other antidepressants until I mentioned it. On the one hand, they're responsive, but it makes you wonder about their editors...)
Safari is not the greatest thing since penicillin. It won't save the world. It's not even a full release version.
What it is: a relatively svelte, quick-feeling (and yes that's partly just render speed), nicely spare browser that feels fine to use. Look at a page in Safari next to, say, Opera. The leanness of Safari stands out in several senses: render speed, clean layout, just the speed with which the program loads.
It's like a tool that feels good in your hand. Apple has a way of producing stuff like that. That's what your friends mean.
(And when your friends start claiming iCal as one of Apple's triumphs, then you can suspect them. There's a program in serious need of practical work, and much more of a beta than Safari. Slow as molasses, too.)
We have maybe, maybe 15 copies for several hundred people right now, and a few flatbed scanners around the office here. There's no shortage. I can see some new applications, and all -- potentially conferencing, and people would scan to OCR stuff more (if affordable OCR would work for the things they want to use it on) -- but would these really cost out, if those are the selling points?
Easier to see this at public kiosk sort of things -- "hold up your coupon, please" and other cooler variations on touch-screen I/O applications. There the cost difference doesn't seem like a lot next to the convenience of the combined screen/reader. Seems like that'd be the first place to run into it...
A comparable plug-in would be cool, and would underscore Mozilla's standards-compliant MO. (That's its M.O.zilla, citizen.)
The iCab face is dang particular, though, and it seems like your page's rating has to do with the number of standards violations. You don't find one site in 50 that get a real smile out of the thing. (Cranky bugger.) I'd rather the rating had to do with the seriousness of errors -- you have an onLoad to an undefined function, BIG FROWN for you. The difference between one and ten missing Alt tags isn't that big a deal by comparison.
Not sure how to practically have the browser make judgment calls about seriousness, though...
Oh, yeah, we did mention the war somewhere in there, didn't we?...
Sad to say, Bush and a whole lot of well-intentioned Americans just don't see how what they're trying to accomplish might not be what actually happens. This "privacy vs. safety" tradeoff ain't necessarily so, good example. The effect might not even be neutral; you could give up a share of your privacy only to make yourself even more vulnerable as a result. Maybe before someone tries to talk us into the sacrifice, they should demonstrate that it'll have the desired effect. You think?
You'd be amazed how many US citizens just do not understand that the current coalition of the reluctant looks the way it does because most of the world was asking just this sort of question about the war. Nope -- suddenly Germany, France, Russia, and the entire Islamic world was just obstructionist... 'cause, you know, they're all jealous of us... or something. Seriously, that's definitely what lots of people think about France. How petulant is that?
If you want to see what US History textbooks do say, there's a decent little book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by Jonathan Loewen. History gets neutered for US schoolkids: all ponderous narrative, hardly any primary sources. They can describe the Lincoln-Douglas debates without mentioning slavery, 'cause they seldom use any of the actual words from the debates.
Which is almost as amusing as staging a fabulously expensive, eight-year, openly partisan, trumped-up "investigation" into a long-over land deal that lost the supposed wrongdoers money.
Or didn't you remember that one?
Your memory seems a little shorter than most people's, friend. Weird thing is, you seem to think that's a strength of yours... When someone uses a Supreme Court divided on partisan lines to stop votes from being counted, "funny" that ain't.
How much improved would AI be in strategy games if this "neurosis" were to show up there? Those are just the circumstances described in the Darwin article: the computer has limited resources and potentially conflicting goals -- develop and attack, protect resources but aggressively pursue new ones, and so on. We could all use a little unpredictability, right?
I'm all for it.
Seriously, though -- wouldn't games like that be the perfect test bed for more "intelligent," problem-solving approaches? When you got into your car, you could rest easy knowing its resource management routines were honed during many hours of multiplayer FPS. It's the wind tunnel of the future, man.
"Sickening" is a strong word for a hunch based on posture in an old photograph. Maybe you should confine yourself to the cover of the "Abbey Road" album for now?
It's a little late for first-person "experience" of World War II. (Closest you can get is something like "The War 1939-1945," edited by Desmond Flower. Amazing book, mainly because it's almost all first-person accounts and it includes any perspective you can imagine.)
If WWII is your model, doing a Google by "D Day" and "invasion of France" has just got me around 5,000 hits.
For a party that makes a big deal out of not being "politically correct," our R'pubs do seem to have a problem saying this word all of a sudden. Iraq's another sovereign state. We may have all sorts of legitimate reasons for doing it, or not, but sending troops into another state to depose that state's government is being called an "invasion" by sympathetic sources like The Japan Times and unsymathetic ones like This Singapore newspaper.
Lord, how Orwellian we're becoming. "Liberate" is okay, but "invasion" isn't? Can I say "war" or do I need to say "police action" -- because we're supposedly enforcing the resolutions of the body that was so divided over whether we should do this? C'mon, give me some guidance here -- I'm not sure how to adhere to the party line. Re-educate us, comrade.
Each Party is controlled by one or more Corporations Blatantly obvious libertarian advertisement goes here.
Jeez, here I was thinking you were a Green, what with the wasting-your-vote thing. Who'd have thunk?
Or did you mean "kind toward potential copyright infringment by 19-year-old kids"? That's different. ;)
I've used the Mac OS off and on since it could boot on a single 800k floppy -- my 512ke's -- and "from the very beginning" is a little much there. It's been a great OS, still is very usable, but along the way any snowball's going to pick up some dog stuff from the yard.
"Consistency"? In any Mac OS pre-X, drag a folder containing both files and folders to the trash. What happens to it? Now drag a mounted disk there -- again, one with files and folders "inside." What happens to that? Not the same thing. Pretty unsettling lack of consistency for many users. 'Nother example: to manipulate files and folders on my hard drive, I use the finder... to open a folder over a network, though, I "choose" the network resource as I would a printer... Bad attempt to double-up features within the Chooser, if you ask me.
I basically agree with the parent that the new OS is young yet. Classic prior to this had a lot of history and refinement behind it -- and no, OS X isn't there yet. It's sometimes pretty amusing seeing 'Nix people say how smooth X is, because it just isn't where the old OS was in terms of UI in my book. But neither one was or is perfect -- and neither one seems especially wrongheaded, to me.
Eric Harris
Dylan Klebold
Timothy McVeigh
Bufford Furrow
Randall Terry
Any of those names ring a bell? They're all white guys who've committed terrorist acts on US soil. (Well, Terry excepted -- he's more like the local Imam, the guy who talks others into it on religious grounds.) McVeigh was part of our worst terrorist act prior to 9/11.
Scary thing is, the same people passing laws to snoop on all the nasty terrorist networks are not so far from the list up there in terms of ideology. U.S. domestic terrorism right now has a lot to do with our right wing fringe. (Anyone remember the private plane the guy flew into the White House during Clinton's term? Sound at all familiar?)
Um, how exactly were you intending to "ensure" that all these firearms are only used in self-defense? If you can really "ensure" that, then you wouldn't need the firearms to begin with, would you? There'd be nothing to use them in self-defense against, right?
You'd have a database bigger'n'badder than this FBI one in ten minutes, in your "ideal world." Or did you intend that "ideal" to mean "I don't want to deal with the unintended consequences of this idea"?
The emphasis on the "flatness" of the lenses, at least on /., is misguided too. These are special materials, and the lenses are flat because they have to be owing to the properties of the materials, not the other way around.
Heck, there are all different shapes of lens. Nikon's been out front with consumer "aspherical" lenses for a few years now, selling them in camera lenses and relatively low-end consumer binoculars. They let you simplify things like the number of elements in a camera lens, or help with distortions on the edge of the field in binoculars. Those are all curved, still, just not spherical on the edges -- but a new shape of lens isn't really much news. It's the whacky materials that make this story.
I guess it's science reporting, so let's take what we can get.
/shrug
She doesn't see tech-minded people buying how-to books for the OS proper, or at least not when they first buy the computers. Personally I've never felt a need, and my 9-year-old kids were comfortable immediately in OS X, tweaked every setting they had access to without a blink.
(But "intensely thorough"? Is intensity really the quality you're looking for in a reference? I imagine cracking the binding in my haste to pore, hot-eyed, over some crucial command line syntax...)
Why, if one may ask, would Adobe miff a huge established user base by "choosing" one platform over the other, especially when they keep the Mac and PC versions more-or-less concurrent anyway? What possible motive would they have for declaring one platform "preferred"?
On the other hand, I can think of a trolling motive for someone to see if they could get this thing posted. This "news" appears to date to 11 november of last year, to boot.
Hrm. My elementary school math skills are a little rusty:
In five years, we will be playing solitaire. With physical cards. And there'll be some missing from the deck. (And it'll still be more fun than watching "cut scenes" in most FPShooters.)
Someone explain to me, please, whom this attack is directed at? If, as all reports indicate, the Iraqi command structure is already isolated from local units, then what will it accomplish to "Shock and Awe" them into more confusion? They're already ineffectual.
This is meant to awe the world, not just Iraq, and it won't have the effect Rumsfeld et al want. As a demonstration of American Military Might (all in caps of course), it's going to fail if one, ONE member of the Iraqi high command survives in a bunker somewhere. You think that won't happen? It doesn't even matter if it's NOT intended to kill everyone in a bunker, either. The Arab world will see that America's thrown everything it has at Iraq, but that all America had wasn't enough to kill Saddam Hussein or whoever.
It'll backfire, like this entire arrogant foreign policy approach. True strength is more often demonstrated in restraint than in action.
Think of Feathers McGraw, the penguin, in the animated short -- he had no facial expression at all, but they made him sinister just by letting the camera linger an extra split second on that blank face, you know? How do you catch that feeling in a game? Cut scenes before you go to the standard-platform-jumper play? What-ever.
Kind of sad. They'd make a better game by having Wallace build his whacked-out inventions to overcome various obstacles, wouldn't they?