Sounds like it ~26% off, so the OS is still hundreds of dollars. Also, they're going sell the bits of Office separately, not Windows. You can already get Office in pieces here if I recall.
I'm a graduate student in biophysics (protein folding, assembly, thermodynamics, mostly expereimental).
I've got to second your point regarding Mathematica's notebook interface. My first experiences with mathematica as an undergrad were all from the command line and they were not pleasant. However, my lab has more or less standardized on Mathematica these days. this is largely because of the notebook interface in Mathematica. We do a lot of procedures fairly often and using a notebook as a template is a great way to start. Also, most people in the lab have zero computer programming experience so the notebook interface reduces a bit of the fear involved with learning Mathematica. That said, it still usually takes a while for people to pick it up.
Generally, I'd say our experiences with Mathematica have been good but a few problems have come up... First, the registration procedure is a pain, especially given the cite license gymnastics we go through here. Second, there are some operations that seem very optimized and others which are astoundingly slow. For example, most reading of data is typically really, really slow, for some inexplicable reason. Binary read operations are particularily bad, but text reading isn't much better. Finally, mathematica has been a great example of 'it takes a computer to really screw things up.' Simple mistakes like inadvertantly printing a large amount of text to the screen (say a list of 40,000 data points or something) can take many minutes to execute. Also, the simplicity of the interface means that people can make silly programming mistakes because they don't know some programming basics.
As far as serious number crunching, we only do a little and people are typically happy to use a combination of fast computers and great patience. In practice, some of what we do would benefit greatly from working in an optimized, compiled environment. On the other hand, even in the case of slow calculations, we usually spend a lot more time figuring out how to perform an operation than actually performing it, which means that a nice interface (and one that makes it easy to change a little and re-run a calculation) is VERY important.
Or for entertainment value itemize the reason the spam got filtered out before it even reached them. -------------- You haven't got (this) mail: 1200 emails for penis enlargers 400 emails for herbal viagra 280 email harvesters 100 Nigerian money scams and a partrige in a pear tree
Replying to your sig... I'm trying to imagine what would happen if one of the monkeys actually started typing Shakespeare, given how much the language has changed, I bet a good deal of it would be auto-corrected to something irrelevant!
That may have worked for a while, but it sounds like most spammers these days negotiate to get a significant cut of any products sold. My guess this is something the people buying spam like as it give insurance against exactly what you speak, selling spamming as effective when it's not. Of course the response rate with spam is so low, it is really changing the definition of effective.
Replying to my own with the follow-up questions I'd like to ask (but am limiting my self to one per post, and one actual sumission total). Given that it seems unlikely that all these questions will get sent on, what's everyone else think?
Tech solution followup: Do you think that recasting the email system would help? A micro-payment tariff per-email sent is suggested every now and then here. Could that work given that if it isn't uniformly adopted around the world it may not help that much?
How about law based solutions? Are the efforts of (West coast state - CA I think) to combat spam as unsolicited email destined to failure, or might that be the right approach? Can local (eg statewide) efforts work when dealing with the international operation which is mass-emailing?
Finally, how about the community based approaches? By this I mean efforts that emphasis the stigma of spamming or facilitating spamming, for example the black-listing groups who publish ISP's that allow mailing relays or direct spamming through them. It sounds like your ISP uses blacklists, is blacklisting an effective solution, or does it entail too high a false-positive rate?
More interestingly perhaps, does it knock out enough spam to be considered effective? Does simple blacklisting stop more than 50% of incoming spam? Are there really a small hand full of channels through which most of the spam is routed? I find the approach appealing because it allows a relatively fast punishment to those who propagate the problem. In a sense it's a bit like focusing on the drug-dealer not the drug-user. On the other hand it is a fast response system, which is highly open to abuse, in a sense it's a form of vigilante-ism. It also raises the question of what a service would have to do to get themselves removed from the black-lists. Speaking as someone who runs an ISP, what do you think of the black-list approach?
Do you think that there will ever be a long-lasting technological solution (e.g. Bayesian filtering systems) to spam or do you feel that any technological counter measure will be circumvented fairly rapidly?
NO, No... her breast size doubles every 18 months is seems... the height of her breasts halves every 18 years. With all that dancin' and silicone, 18 years from now her tits will be at her waist (and in another 18, her knees). That is unless the advances in plastic sugurey can keep up.
8lbs, heck for that price, it's probably a straight up desktop replacement running straight up desktop parts (read P$ not P4-M). Must have a 45min battery life and could well weight more than 10lbs.
Not sure what they're using off hand, but looking at motherboards that use the 933MHz C3, they usually have some sort of hardware acceleration such that you can watch DVD's on them. As far as 3D abilities, they're typically pretty crappy. Given that this is probably aimed at people who want to write a paper and surf the web, maybe listen to MP3's or a CD this is probably sufficient.
Actually, for a subnotebook, light weight computer this may be a good deal. I'm still using a pentium (one!) notebook as it is small enough and light enough to do what I need it to do. I'm mostly curious about battery life. I know the C3's also came in a low power/low heat flavor (passive cooling is fine), I've got to wonder if that was just too crappy to use or something. Light with a long battery and enough power to write a paper/work on a talk while listening to music would be enough to get me to shell out less than $1k, no problemo.
Having trouble wrapping my brain around this one. Could someone explain it a bit? Yes I read the article, didn't help at all.
What does Plex86 run on top of? If it's a VM would it run on top of say Windows or something, allowing you to run your OS of choice within that? Or is it a way of allowing programs compiled for this quasi-x86 architecture to run on other different architectures (ie it vituralizes the hardware directly)? Or something else entirely?
An interesting twist. With everyone complaining that the receiver pays for every email sent and thus spamming is cost effective, this almost turns it around to be that the sender pays. Clever.
My only real big problem is that, as described, the receiver does not have a permanent record automatically generated. This could be fixed by adding in a 'keep' option. In essence you default to deleting emails instead of keeping them. Cool idea.
Of course it doesn't directly fix spam, but it does add a layer of accountability to it (you have to know where it came from), which may be enough to indirectly deal with it. Also, server blacklisting would probably make a bit more sense. Maybe
How many modern software programs allow concurrent editing of a document by multiple people? (where the applications cooperate in modifications to the data structures of the document and don't clibber each other) Excel? Word?
Granted I didn't work at it for that long, but I did attempt to get Word2000 to do this for a few medium sized documents a while ago. My experience was that there was no way to dynamically decide what part you wanted to work on, you had to declare the divisions ahead of time and then could use their master document approach (or whatever they called it). Basically, you declare a bunch of document sections, which are then stitched back into one document. A little clunky and made keeping a version archive pretty nasty, links got fouled up all overthe place.
Given that it was a small group of people working on the documents, and the master document approach seemed to foul a few things up, we found it easier to have someone in control who could manually split out the necessary portions and reintegrate later. Bloody waste of time.
The whole thing about 90% people using only 10% of the capability of Office is right on, the useful features are often missing or very hard to figure out. Not that I have a clue what takes up most of the space in office... clipart maybe?
Re:Other implications of Moore's law
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm about to rant a little here.
IIRC, there an article a while back (discussed here) that reviewed Moore's law, as Moore used it over a number of years and found that Moore himself seemed to redefine it every couple years. It's a marketing term which describes the general phenomenon of faster computers getting cheaper in a regular way.
You're right though, Moore never really talked about doubling of 'processor power,' he discussed things in terms of devices such as transistors. Trouble is sometimes RAM was included in the 'device' total sometimes not... it's easy to fudge a bit during the slow downs and speed ups if you change how the thing is defined.
Top it off with the fact that the whole thing was eventually cast in terms of the cost optimal solution. Given the degree to which the size of the market for computers has changed I'd say that this is a very difficult thing to define. As everyone is likely to point out, commodity desktop PC's have a very different optimum from massive single-system image computers. Of course, if you consider that a calculator is a computer, be they $1 cheapo's or the latest graphing programable whoopdeedoo they are all computers. There are so many markets for computers now, each with their own optimum that it's pretty artificial to talk about Moore's law at all. I've never seen anyone plot out Moore's law with a bunch of branches. Further, cost optimal becomes pretty subjective in all the markets when there are so many variables. Finally, there are points where Moore's law breaks down... the number of devices in cheapo calculators probably hasn't changed much in the last few years, but the price changes. Moore's law doesn't really allow for this sort of behavior, that there is a maximum necessary power for a certain kind of device, if it doesn't have to do anything else, then the complexity levels off and the price goes down. This may well happen at some point in the commodity sector. It is possible that the number of features in a conventional desktop will level off at some point. Hell with a $200 WalMart cheapo PC, maybe we're there now...
Intuitively, everyone applies Moore's law to desktops but there's no particular reason to do so. Considering the history of it the massive mainframe style computer is probably the best application of it, but this is seldom done. Mainframes these days can be a complex as you're willing to pay for, which pretty much means that there is a cost optimal solution for an given problem, not just for fabrication, which is what Moore was talking about. Seems like we have turned a corner, it's time to redefine Moore's law yet again.
Well that's just weird. Intuitively, the 15,000-20,000 makes a bit of sense, that's somewhat close to the warranty period these days. And close to the conventional wisdom I've been hearing of the lifetimes for cheap IDE harddrives. However, the drive you mention does quote a 500,000 hr MTBF (although it's qualified with the word 'field') and a Seagate Barracuda I looked up quoted a 600,000 hour MTBF. Anyone know why they would quote a MTBF of >50 years but give a service life of 5 years? It is Mean Time Before Failure right? If they typically fail after >50 years (ignoring the fact that that hasn't been tested exactly), then why suggest that they will only last 5 years or less. I'm guessing here but are they referring to the loss of readable magnetic signal, not the mechanicals in the MTBF?
From the article it sounds like the Python community was having a hard time keeping up with how fast things were changing (just getting started with Python so I'm just going by the article). As a result it sounds like the next year will see more optimization than major changes. My guess is that this may mean that a Python 3 is a while off.
Say what you will about Quake 3 and its tendency to provoke violence in children, but at least people who obsess over it are communicating with other people, albeit over the Internet.
Yes I realize you're joking but I'm going to respond to the socialness of puzzle games comment seriously.
Okay that's certainly true for Solitare but I think one of the weird things that makes Snood successful is the social aspect. Really. I picked it up from an old roommate who got hooked on it in college. At the time people would casually and not-so casually organize Snood tournaments. Pay for it and that's one of the added perks, tournament mode. Not quite the head-to-head action that bust-a-move had (which Snood is a blatant rip-off of), but actual tournaments, with actual people, playing at the same computer in the same room. I think there's now some elaborate web system for online tournaments but clearly Snood can be a social as anything else. Hell, now that I think about it, I remember people in my dorm years ago getting competitive on their solitaire score. Gladly didn't get caught up in that.
Perhaps smart game designers are those that realize that not everyone wants an hours-long-caffeine-fueled-adrenaline-pumping-frag -fest. Sometimes people play games to simply distract themselves and relax. Some of my favorite games are those which are absurdly easy to learn and which somehow translate into reasonable turn based social gaming sessions. I've spent as much time playing these easy to pick-up non-dazzle games as I have the fancy looking ones. Sure I like flashy 3D graphics, but if it feels like I'm playing a movie (ie. game play feels prerecorded) then I'm not going to play it much. Heck, one of my favorite games of all time was Jump Man (on the PC now BTW). Same concept, simple to learn, puzzles, slowly increasing difficulty, and a ridiculous number of levels. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard people expound on how much they like(d) Tecmo Bowl, even well after it was horribly outdated. Many people I've known would play (beer-in-hand) marathon sessions of it, even well into the late '90s.
He quite plainly accuses of making him sick for days. I figured some geek would be defending their favorite snack food by now.
I guess you can't just dive into two cans. Without a digestive system attuned to American junk food, you have to work your way in slowly.
Either that or those pringles could easily have been off. He looked for them for days, who knows how long they'd been around and what summer in the desert does to them.
And I second the observation - clean text no advertisements, what is this the web circa 1996.
While I'm pretty sure you're kidding there are a few reasons to do this onthe HyWire car specifically.
First, the controls are really different, twist = acceleration, squeeze = brake. Not terribly different from motorcycle controls when you think about it.
Second, this is probably not going ot turn into a production vehicle. It is sort of a meta-concept car. The fuel cell stuff is all squished into an eleven inch slab centered roughly at the wheel axes. Basically, less the controls, the everything useful but the passengers fits into this tiny space. Next they bolt a bunch of random stuff onto the top. It allows them to design a bunch of body plans without having to remake or remount the engine every time they come up with a new body concept.
The weird controls probably evolved out of this in a way, they wanted a interface module that could be removed easily. Pedals, because of their location relative to the slab thingy would require a commitment on their part as to where a lot of stuff would go. This way they can play around with configuration to their hearts content.
Not entirely unlike a 'skinnable' car when you think about it. I think it would be kinda neat to see in a production car, modular form like this. You go in, choose a chasis power rating or something, then choose a bunch of options (two, three, four, or six seats, truck bed, trunk, seats that recline all the way back, sporty aerodynamics, maximum cargo space, driver seat with a high field of view etc). Then you leave for a few hours while they bolt the thing together. Okay, maybe not, but, it's an interesting concept. Imagine, instead of renting a truck for the weekend to move, you go down to the dealership and rent a truck bed, they hold onto your rear seats until you come back.
As far as the completely transparent front design, I imagine that takes some getting used to, what with the road being that much more obvious as it streams past you.
Hmmph... When I got a Nino years ago it came with a piece of handwriting recognition software that I've never heard mentioned again... Caligrapher. It was a plain old handwriting recognition program, worked on cursive, block letters, weird combinations, both etc. With the exception of when you wrote somewhat diagonally across the screen it was pretty good at recognizing my handwriting, eventually. Thing was it initially sucked at handwriting recognition. I almost gave up when I noticed that it was getting better. What it seemed to be doing was recognizing my writing as reasonable combinations of letters. It was slow but it improved as it came up with a table of words that I often wrote. This resulted in a lot on interesting guesses when I wrote something new and marginally legible though.
Is there any truth to the origin of the term 'bug' in computing? Story I heard was that one of the programmers (who happened to be female, hence the tangent) for some huge computer with lots of large components spent a huge amount of time tracking down a glitch, only to find that it oringinated in an actual moth being fried somewhere.
I'm sure I munged that up somewhere, but that's my general recollection of it. Urban legend?
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article (which is really short)
Sounds like it ~26% off, so the OS is still hundreds of dollars. Also, they're going sell the bits of Office separately, not Windows. You can already get Office in pieces here if I recall.
Kinda pointless really.
Shae
I'm a graduate student in biophysics (protein folding, assembly, thermodynamics, mostly expereimental).
I've got to second your point regarding Mathematica's notebook interface. My first experiences with mathematica as an undergrad were all from the command line and they were not pleasant. However, my lab has more or less standardized on Mathematica these days. this is largely because of the notebook interface in Mathematica. We do a lot of procedures fairly often and using a notebook as a template is a great way to start. Also, most people in the lab have zero computer programming experience so the notebook interface reduces a bit of the fear involved with learning Mathematica. That said, it still usually takes a while for people to pick it up.
Generally, I'd say our experiences with Mathematica have been good but a few problems have come up...
First, the registration procedure is a pain, especially given the cite license gymnastics we go through here. Second, there are some operations that seem very optimized and others which are astoundingly slow. For example, most reading of data is typically really, really slow, for some inexplicable reason. Binary read operations are particularily bad, but text reading isn't much better. Finally, mathematica has been a great example of 'it takes a computer to really screw things up.' Simple mistakes like inadvertantly printing a large amount of text to the screen (say a list of 40,000 data points or something) can take many minutes to execute. Also, the simplicity of the interface means that people can make silly programming mistakes because they don't know some programming basics.
As far as serious number crunching, we only do a little and people are typically happy to use a combination of fast computers and great patience. In practice, some of what we do would benefit greatly from working in an optimized, compiled environment. On the other hand, even in the case of slow calculations, we usually spend a lot more time figuring out how to perform an operation than actually performing it, which means that a nice interface (and one that makes it easy to change a little and re-run a calculation) is VERY important.
Actually, I think MS does want to be the primary service provider for everybody that wants to work from home.
But is there such a thing as federal small claims court?
Or for entertainment value itemize the reason the spam got filtered out before it even reached them.
--------------
You haven't got (this) mail:
1200 emails for penis enlargers
400 emails for herbal viagra
280 email harvesters
100 Nigerian money scams
and a partrige in a pear tree
Replying to your sig...
I'm trying to imagine what would happen if one of the monkeys actually started typing Shakespeare, given how much the language has changed, I bet a good deal of it would be auto-corrected to something irrelevant!
That may have worked for a while, but it sounds like most spammers these days negotiate to get a significant cut of any products sold. My guess this is something the people buying spam like as it give insurance against exactly what you speak, selling spamming as effective when it's not. Of course the response rate with spam is so low, it is really changing the definition of effective.
Replying to my own with the follow-up questions I'd like to ask (but am limiting my self to one per post, and one actual sumission total). Given that it seems unlikely that all these questions will get sent on, what's everyone else think?
Tech solution followup: Do you think that recasting the email system would help? A micro-payment tariff per-email sent is suggested every now and then here. Could that work given that if it isn't uniformly adopted around the world it may not help that much?
How about law based solutions? Are the efforts of (West coast state - CA I think) to combat spam as unsolicited email destined to failure, or might that be the right approach? Can local (eg statewide) efforts work when dealing with the international operation which is mass-emailing?
Finally, how about the community based approaches? By this I mean efforts that emphasis the stigma of spamming or facilitating spamming, for example the black-listing groups who publish ISP's that allow mailing relays or direct spamming through them. It sounds like your ISP uses blacklists, is blacklisting an effective solution, or does it entail too high a false-positive rate?
More interestingly perhaps, does it knock out enough spam to be considered effective? Does simple blacklisting stop more than 50% of incoming spam? Are there really a small hand full of channels through which most of the spam is routed? I find the approach appealing because it allows a relatively fast punishment to those who propagate the problem. In a sense it's a bit like focusing on the drug-dealer not the drug-user. On the other hand it is a fast response system, which is highly open to abuse, in a sense it's a form of vigilante-ism. It also raises the question of what a service would have to do to get themselves removed from the black-lists. Speaking as someone who runs an ISP, what do you think of the black-list approach?
Do you think that there will ever be a long-lasting technological solution (e.g. Bayesian filtering systems) to spam or do you feel that any technological counter measure will be circumvented fairly rapidly?
NO, No... her breast size doubles every 18 months is seems... the height of her breasts halves every 18 years. With all that dancin' and silicone, 18 years from now her tits will be at her waist (and in another 18, her knees). That is unless the advances in plastic sugurey can keep up.
Moore's Epidemiology?
8lbs, heck for that price, it's probably a straight up desktop replacement running straight up desktop parts (read P$ not P4-M). Must have a 45min battery life and could well weight more than 10lbs.
Not sure what they're using off hand, but looking at motherboards that use the 933MHz C3, they usually have some sort of hardware acceleration such that you can watch DVD's on them. As far as 3D abilities, they're typically pretty crappy. Given that this is probably aimed at people who want to write a paper and surf the web, maybe listen to MP3's or a CD this is probably sufficient.
Actually, for a subnotebook, light weight computer this may be a good deal. I'm still using a pentium (one!) notebook as it is small enough and light enough to do what I need it to do. I'm mostly curious about battery life. I know the C3's also came in a low power/low heat flavor (passive cooling is fine), I've got to wonder if that was just too crappy to use or something. Light with a long battery and enough power to write a paper/work on a talk while listening to music would be enough to get me to shell out less than $1k, no problemo.
Having trouble wrapping my brain around this one. Could someone explain it a bit? Yes I read the article, didn't help at all.
What does Plex86 run on top of? If it's a VM would it run on top of say Windows or something, allowing you to run your OS of choice within that? Or is it a way of allowing programs compiled for this quasi-x86 architecture to run on other different architectures (ie it vituralizes the hardware directly)? Or something else entirely?
An interesting twist. With everyone complaining that the receiver pays for every email sent and thus spamming is cost effective, this almost turns it around to be that the sender pays. Clever. My only real big problem is that, as described, the receiver does not have a permanent record automatically generated. This could be fixed by adding in a 'keep' option. In essence you default to deleting emails instead of keeping them. Cool idea. Of course it doesn't directly fix spam, but it does add a layer of accountability to it (you have to know where it came from), which may be enough to indirectly deal with it. Also, server blacklisting would probably make a bit more sense. Maybe
Worse still it seems that a good 50% or so only do RAID 1 OR RAID 0, not combinations. Blech.
How many modern software programs allow concurrent editing of a document by multiple people? (where the applications cooperate in modifications to the data structures of the document and don't clibber each other) Excel? Word?
Granted I didn't work at it for that long, but I did attempt to get Word2000 to do this for a few medium sized documents a while ago. My experience was that there was no way to dynamically decide what part you wanted to work on, you had to declare the divisions ahead of time and then could use their master document approach (or whatever they called it). Basically, you declare a bunch of document sections, which are then stitched back into one document. A little clunky and made keeping a version archive pretty nasty, links got fouled up all overthe place.
Given that it was a small group of people working on the documents, and the master document approach seemed to foul a few things up, we found it easier to have someone in control who could manually split out the necessary portions and reintegrate later. Bloody waste of time.
The whole thing about 90% people using only 10% of the capability of Office is right on, the useful features are often missing or very hard to figure out. Not that I have a clue what takes up most of the space in office... clipart maybe?
I'm about to rant a little here.
IIRC, there an article a while back (discussed here) that reviewed Moore's law, as Moore used it over a number of years and found that Moore himself seemed to redefine it every couple years. It's a marketing term which describes the general phenomenon of faster computers getting cheaper in a regular way.
You're right though, Moore never really talked about doubling of 'processor power,' he discussed things in terms of devices such as transistors. Trouble is sometimes RAM was included in the 'device' total sometimes not... it's easy to fudge a bit during the slow downs and speed ups if you change how the thing is defined.
Top it off with the fact that the whole thing was eventually cast in terms of the cost optimal solution. Given the degree to which the size of the market for computers has changed I'd say that this is a very difficult thing to define. As everyone is likely to point out, commodity desktop PC's have a very different optimum from massive single-system image computers. Of course, if you consider that a calculator is a computer, be they $1 cheapo's or the latest graphing programable whoopdeedoo they are all computers. There are so many markets for computers now, each with their own optimum that it's pretty artificial to talk about Moore's law at all. I've never seen anyone plot out Moore's law with a bunch of branches. Further, cost optimal becomes pretty subjective in all the markets when there are so many variables. Finally, there are points where Moore's law breaks down... the number of devices in cheapo calculators probably hasn't changed much in the last few years, but the price changes. Moore's law doesn't really allow for this sort of behavior, that there is a maximum necessary power for a certain kind of device, if it doesn't have to do anything else, then the complexity levels off and the price goes down. This may well happen at some point in the commodity sector. It is possible that the number of features in a conventional desktop will level off at some point. Hell with a $200 WalMart cheapo PC, maybe we're there now...
Intuitively, everyone applies Moore's law to desktops but there's no particular reason to do so. Considering the history of it the massive mainframe style computer is probably the best application of it, but this is seldom done. Mainframes these days can be a complex as you're willing to pay for, which pretty much means that there is a cost optimal solution for an given problem, not just for fabrication, which is what Moore was talking about. Seems like we have turned a corner, it's time to redefine Moore's law yet again.
Well that's just weird. Intuitively, the 15,000-20,000 makes a bit of sense, that's somewhat close to the warranty period these days. And close to the conventional wisdom I've been hearing of the lifetimes for cheap IDE harddrives. However, the drive you mention does quote a 500,000 hr MTBF (although it's qualified with the word 'field') and a Seagate Barracuda I looked up quoted a 600,000 hour MTBF. Anyone know why they would quote a MTBF of >50 years but give a service life of 5 years? It is Mean Time Before Failure right? If they typically fail after >50 years (ignoring the fact that that hasn't been tested exactly), then why suggest that they will only last 5 years or less. I'm guessing here but are they referring to the loss of readable magnetic signal, not the mechanicals in the MTBF?
From the article it sounds like the Python community was having a hard time keeping up with how fast things were changing (just getting started with Python so I'm just going by the article). As a result it sounds like the next year will see more optimization than major changes. My guess is that this may mean that a Python 3 is a while off.
Say what you will about Quake 3 and its tendency to provoke violence in children, but at least people who obsess over it are communicating with other people, albeit over the Internet.
g -fest. Sometimes people play games to simply distract themselves and relax. Some of my favorite games are those which are absurdly easy to learn and which somehow translate into reasonable turn based social gaming sessions. I've spent as much time playing these easy to pick-up non-dazzle games as I have the fancy looking ones. Sure I like flashy 3D graphics, but if it feels like I'm playing a movie (ie. game play feels prerecorded) then I'm not going to play it much. Heck, one of my favorite games of all time was Jump Man (on the PC now BTW). Same concept, simple to learn, puzzles, slowly increasing difficulty, and a ridiculous number of levels. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard people expound on how much they like(d) Tecmo Bowl, even well after it was horribly outdated. Many people I've known would play (beer-in-hand) marathon sessions of it, even well into the late '90s.
Yes I realize you're joking but I'm going to respond to the socialness of puzzle games comment seriously. Okay that's certainly true for Solitare but I think one of the weird things that makes Snood successful is the social aspect. Really. I picked it up from an old roommate who got hooked on it in college. At the time people would casually and not-so casually organize Snood tournaments. Pay for it and that's one of the added perks, tournament mode. Not quite the head-to-head action that bust-a-move had (which Snood is a blatant rip-off of), but actual tournaments, with actual people, playing at the same computer in the same room. I think there's now some elaborate web system for online tournaments but clearly Snood can be a social as anything else. Hell, now that I think about it, I remember people in my dorm years ago getting competitive on their solitaire score. Gladly didn't get caught up in that.
Perhaps smart game designers are those that realize that not everyone wants an hours-long-caffeine-fueled-adrenaline-pumping-fra
No one has come to the defense of Pringles yet!
He quite plainly accuses of making him sick for days. I figured some geek would be defending their favorite snack food by now.
I guess you can't just dive into two cans. Without a digestive system attuned to American junk food, you have to work your way in slowly.
Either that or those pringles could easily have been off. He looked for them for days, who knows how long they'd been around and what summer in the desert does to them.
And I second the observation - clean text no advertisements, what is this the web circa 1996.
Ick
While I'm pretty sure you're kidding there are a few reasons to do this onthe HyWire car specifically.
First, the controls are really different, twist = acceleration, squeeze = brake. Not terribly different from motorcycle controls when you think about it.
Second, this is probably not going ot turn into a production vehicle. It is sort of a meta-concept car. The fuel cell stuff is all squished into an eleven inch slab centered roughly at the wheel axes. Basically, less the controls, the everything useful but the passengers fits into this tiny space. Next they bolt a bunch of random stuff onto the top. It allows them to design a bunch of body plans without having to remake or remount the engine every time they come up with a new body concept.
The weird controls probably evolved out of this in a way, they wanted a interface module that could be removed easily. Pedals, because of their location relative to the slab thingy would require a commitment on their part as to where a lot of stuff would go. This way they can play around with configuration to their hearts content.
Not entirely unlike a 'skinnable' car when you think about it. I think it would be kinda neat to see in a production car, modular form like this. You go in, choose a chasis power rating or something, then choose a bunch of options (two, three, four, or six seats, truck bed, trunk, seats that recline all the way back, sporty aerodynamics, maximum cargo space, driver seat with a high field of view etc). Then you leave for a few hours while they bolt the thing together. Okay, maybe not, but, it's an interesting concept. Imagine, instead of renting a truck for the weekend to move, you go down to the dealership and rent a truck bed, they hold onto your rear seats until you come back.
As far as the completely transparent front design, I imagine that takes some getting used to, what with the road being that much more obvious as it streams past you.
Hmmph... When I got a Nino years ago it came with a piece of handwriting recognition software that I've never heard mentioned again... Caligrapher. It was a plain old handwriting recognition program, worked on cursive, block letters, weird combinations, both etc. With the exception of when you wrote somewhat diagonally across the screen it was pretty good at recognizing my handwriting, eventually. Thing was it initially sucked at handwriting recognition. I almost gave up when I noticed that it was getting better. What it seemed to be doing was recognizing my writing as reasonable combinations of letters. It was slow but it improved as it came up with a table of words that I often wrote. This resulted in a lot on interesting guesses when I wrote something new and marginally legible though.
Is there any truth to the origin of the term 'bug' in computing? Story I heard was that one of the programmers (who happened to be female, hence the tangent) for some huge computer with lots of large components spent a huge amount of time tracking down a glitch, only to find that it oringinated in an actual moth being fried somewhere.
I'm sure I munged that up somewhere, but that's my general recollection of it. Urban legend?