I was never very good at parallel parking, until I lived in New Jersey for a few years...If you block a road for more than 5 or 6 seconds in Jersey, while parallel parking, you're taking your life into your hands.
These days I can park in an area within 12 inches of the size of my car, in a few seconds. Tire squealing has been known to occur.
So it seems to me that the Japanese wouldn't have needed to invent this car, if only they were more culturally inclined to road rage.
The problem crops up when you don't have specific machine builds. Ideally you have like 5 or 6 different software loadouts, all files are stored on a fileserver, all email is kept through a nice IMAP system. Then, if a few dozen (or a few hundred) machines get compromised, you can wipe and rebuild them remotely, and you don't have to worry about it. Even better, you could just be doing thin client stuff in the first place, and there wouldn't be any issues, unless your servers got infected.
Of course you hardly ever see this in the real world. Every pc is different, every pc has different software, every pc has a couple gigs of personal data and stored email, so you can't just wipe the machine, you have to struggle to get all the data off it, then you can wipe it, and then you have to rebuild it special, because it needs different stuff from all the hundreds of other machines you are also rebuilding...So yea, in that situation, it seriously sucks.
Don't forget, even if you're starting from scratch, you won't make a profit selling an email system. Even a fancy Exchange setup costs so much in licensing that you're not going to be turning over a good profit.
On the other hand, selling someone a video confrencing suite, or a huge fancy intranet application with built in messaging and project management, will make you a very handy profit.
It's pretty ridiculous anyway...Major government websites fail security audits every year, and they don't spend any time working on them, they don't come up with intelligent standards...I've got my quarterly corporate audit sitting on the desk right in front of me.
The right way to do it would be to harden your local security, rather than trying any kind of offense. A good offense is only the best defense if you have a freaking target. If you don't have a target, either you have to invent one *cough*Iraq*cough* or you flail about like an idiot and look foolish.
That's because when a cell reproduces into another identical cell, it's doing the right thing. Anyway, a cell is too evolved for what came out of the primordial soup.
On the other hand, two animals reproducing, followed by their children reproducing, followed by their children reproducing, etc, would result in a genetic nightmare with increased genetic defects, reduced fertility, etc, etc.
Both of these things are readily observable in the modern day.
Everyone thinks that progress is going to come to an end, because they can't imagine what the next big thing could be, but that's their failing, not progresses.
Meh. Communism != Marxism. The way Communism played out would have horrified Marx. It was basically just inefficient Fascism.
Not saying Marxian communism would have worked better, mind. I don't think we're wired for it to work in the real world. But it's never been given a real test on a big society...Though there are some scandinavian countries whose economies are 80% Socialism and 20% Capitalism that do okay. Not exactly world dominating powerhouses, but nice places to live with a good standard of living.
I think the dividing line between all political ideologies and psychological disorders is pretty thin.
The biggest problem with Marxism is that it's too idealistic. It depends on the goodwill of others, and that is pretty much laughable.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is much more intelligent...It depends on the gullibility of others. No matter that 90% of people are always going to be screwed, if you can keep that 90% believing that they can make it to the top if they just work hard enough, you'll have a stable, productive, society.
Everybody thinks they can win the lottery, but really, it's just a tax on people who are bad at math.
_I_ compile from source and compare the binaries. I can't imagine there is no one in the whole British airforce who isn't equally paranoid.
By the way military equipment usually works (which is to say it is factory configured for about 20 seconds, then continually tweaked for about 40 years), I can't see any way in which an educated consumer (e.g. the Brits, who are capable of doing upgrades, etc, rather than some tinpot dictator out of S.America who is lucky if he has pilots who can fly them) could get by without having the source code. That's like selling them without an owners manual, and technical documentation.
Yea, I ran afoul of that bug as well, the first time I played through. You get 4/5ths of the way through and then stuff stops progressing. Thanks for the emulator link...Running DOS in VMware is kinda overkill.
Can I get a ticket to whatever world you're living in? I work in a shop where 100% of the PCs are Dell, and 100% of the PCs ordered by the fricking parent corporation are Dell, and I routinely have problems with them solving even trivial hardware problems without wasting hours of my freaking life.
The people they send for onsite are generally substandard, and it takes a near eternity to get through online, compared to other corporate hardware support. If I've got a problem on the HP mainframe, I can have a guy here with the part in under three hours. We spend twice as much on dell, and they can't get us a new drive for an extremely critical server in 3 DAYS.
I had to set up a bigass VMware system to mimic the correct environment to play 3,4, and 5, because they got so damn buggy on anything faster or more modern than the EXACT system they were designed for. 1 and 2, of course, play fine.
The ideal is not to have a simple or a complex game...The ideal is having a game that is simple to play and enjoy, but with depth and complexity to keep it from getting stale.
Not to jump on the current "World of Warcraft rulez" bandwagon, but WoW did that very well. It's an MMORPG that is very simple, without the kind of ridiculous learning curve associated with EQ or AO, or any number of older MMO's, but has enough depth and complexity to keep people playing. I think a lot of people would prefer more depth and complexity (myself included), but I think that their model is clearly working out great for them, so I understand why they're not rushing to screw things up.
In early medival europe, one method of siegecraft was to send a guy with a lit keg of black powder running up to a fortified wall or gate. The goal was for him to set the keg against the wall and run like hell...But it was a lit keg, so this was a chancy proposition, and the runner often got blown to bits.
This actually passed into proverb. The keg was called a "petard", and the phrase "hoist by your own petard" (which means screwing yourself with something with which you were trying to screw others) still lingers in the modern lexicon.
I was going with "Fundamentalism is the Enemy of Scientific Progress". Some early islamic science was actually driven by religion (i.e advances in navigation arose from needing to be able to accurately locate Mecca while at sea), but that stuff never lasts, because science is based on curisoity and fundamentalist religion teaches that to be heresy.
It's a lesson we need to learn, unless we want a few centuries of cultural dark age.
Single source story, with some quotes from other studies. Terrible.
What's the other side? Is there another side? What do other psychologists say? What does anyone from any of the states that passed the laws say? What do kids say? What do adults who play games say? Is there anyone who disagrees with you? Is there anyone who disagrees with them.
Also, Jesus, could you ask more leading questions? You asked the question about video games relieving stress twice and you never should have asked it once. You never ask questions that specific, because they're too likely to give you a biased answer. A more general question (Have any behavioral studies been conducted about positive effect of gaming? What positive effects are reported by gamers?) would give you a better response.
At 17 or 18 they're already making their own descisions about a lot of things...At 18 that's their legal right, so you've got no say over it whatsoever.
If you don't trust them to make good decisions by the time they're 18, you've either done something wrong, or you're having a real hard time letting go.
Lot of news organizations really really don't like Rupert Murdoch, so they may be out to get him in a semi-subtle way.
But it is tailormade to be a "Cause of the Week"...It's just like all the hype over IM and IRC before it, so it just may be the usual crap, and the aquisition just brought it to media attention.
Slashdot Mirror
I was never very good at parallel parking, until I lived in New Jersey for a few years...If you block a road for more than 5 or 6 seconds in Jersey, while parallel parking, you're taking your life into your hands.
These days I can park in an area within 12 inches of the size of my car, in a few seconds. Tire squealing has been known to occur.
So it seems to me that the Japanese wouldn't have needed to invent this car, if only they were more culturally inclined to road rage.
The problem crops up when you don't have specific machine builds. Ideally you have like 5 or 6 different software loadouts, all files are stored on a fileserver, all email is kept through a nice IMAP system. Then, if a few dozen (or a few hundred) machines get compromised, you can wipe and rebuild them remotely, and you don't have to worry about it. Even better, you could just be doing thin client stuff in the first place, and there wouldn't be any issues, unless your servers got infected.
Of course you hardly ever see this in the real world. Every pc is different, every pc has different software, every pc has a couple gigs of personal data and stored email, so you can't just wipe the machine, you have to struggle to get all the data off it, then you can wipe it, and then you have to rebuild it special, because it needs different stuff from all the hundreds of other machines you are also rebuilding...So yea, in that situation, it seriously sucks.
Don't forget, even if you're starting from scratch, you won't make a profit selling an email system. Even a fancy Exchange setup costs so much in licensing that you're not going to be turning over a good profit.
On the other hand, selling someone a video confrencing suite, or a huge fancy intranet application with built in messaging and project management, will make you a very handy profit.
It's pretty ridiculous anyway...Major government websites fail security audits every year, and they don't spend any time working on them, they don't come up with intelligent standards...I've got my quarterly corporate audit sitting on the desk right in front of me.
The right way to do it would be to harden your local security, rather than trying any kind of offense. A good offense is only the best defense if you have a freaking target. If you don't have a target, either you have to invent one *cough*Iraq*cough* or you flail about like an idiot and look foolish.
That's because when a cell reproduces into another identical cell, it's doing the right thing. Anyway, a cell is too evolved for what came out of the primordial soup.
On the other hand, two animals reproducing, followed by their children reproducing, followed by their children reproducing, etc, would result in a genetic nightmare with increased genetic defects, reduced fertility, etc, etc.
Both of these things are readily observable in the modern day.
Everyone thinks that progress is going to come to an end, because they can't imagine what the next big thing could be, but that's their failing, not progresses.
Rhetoric. Do you have numbers?
Got any numbers to put behind that?
Meh. Communism != Marxism. The way Communism played out would have horrified Marx. It was basically just inefficient Fascism.
Not saying Marxian communism would have worked better, mind. I don't think we're wired for it to work in the real world. But it's never been given a real test on a big society...Though there are some scandinavian countries whose economies are 80% Socialism and 20% Capitalism that do okay. Not exactly world dominating powerhouses, but nice places to live with a good standard of living.
I think the dividing line between all political ideologies and psychological disorders is pretty thin.
The biggest problem with Marxism is that it's too idealistic. It depends on the goodwill of others, and that is pretty much laughable.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is much more intelligent...It depends on the gullibility of others. No matter that 90% of people are always going to be screwed, if you can keep that 90% believing that they can make it to the top if they just work hard enough, you'll have a stable, productive, society.
Everybody thinks they can win the lottery, but really, it's just a tax on people who are bad at math.
_I_ compile from source and compare the binaries. I can't imagine there is no one in the whole British airforce who isn't equally paranoid.
By the way military equipment usually works (which is to say it is factory configured for about 20 seconds, then continually tweaked for about 40 years), I can't see any way in which an educated consumer (e.g. the Brits, who are capable of doing upgrades, etc, rather than some tinpot dictator out of S.America who is lucky if he has pilots who can fly them) could get by without having the source code. That's like selling them without an owners manual, and technical documentation.
Yea, I ran afoul of that bug as well, the first time I played through. You get 4/5ths of the way through and then stuff stops progressing. Thanks for the emulator link...Running DOS in VMware is kinda overkill.
Can I get a ticket to whatever world you're living in? I work in a shop where 100% of the PCs are Dell, and 100% of the PCs ordered by the fricking parent corporation are Dell, and I routinely have problems with them solving even trivial hardware problems without wasting hours of my freaking life.
The people they send for onsite are generally substandard, and it takes a near eternity to get through online, compared to other corporate hardware support. If I've got a problem on the HP mainframe, I can have a guy here with the part in under three hours. We spend twice as much on dell, and they can't get us a new drive for an extremely critical server in 3 DAYS.
SMAC was pretty much the best Civ ever. Just a damn good game.
I had to set up a bigass VMware system to mimic the correct environment to play 3,4, and 5, because they got so damn buggy on anything faster or more modern than the EXACT system they were designed for. 1 and 2, of course, play fine.
The ideal is not to have a simple or a complex game...The ideal is having a game that is simple to play and enjoy, but with depth and complexity to keep it from getting stale.
Not to jump on the current "World of Warcraft rulez" bandwagon, but WoW did that very well. It's an MMORPG that is very simple, without the kind of ridiculous learning curve associated with EQ or AO, or any number of older MMO's, but has enough depth and complexity to keep people playing. I think a lot of people would prefer more depth and complexity (myself included), but I think that their model is clearly working out great for them, so I understand why they're not rushing to screw things up.
Typical slashdot. Mods on crack as usual.
Wikipedia: A petard was a medieval term for a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications.
How about Wordnet?: petard: a(n) explosive device used to break down a gate or wall
It was also a name for a type of animal trap, a WWII artillery piece, and the word itself comes from the latin for "fart".
Uh, yea. That's what I meant by we. Fundamentalist Christians were living in mud huts when the Muslim civilization was in it's golden age.
In early medival europe, one method of siegecraft was to send a guy with a lit keg of black powder running up to a fortified wall or gate. The goal was for him to set the keg against the wall and run like hell...But it was a lit keg, so this was a chancy proposition, and the runner often got blown to bits.
This actually passed into proverb. The keg was called a "petard", and the phrase "hoist by your own petard" (which means screwing yourself with something with which you were trying to screw others) still lingers in the modern lexicon.
I was going with "Fundamentalism is the Enemy of Scientific Progress". Some early islamic science was actually driven by religion (i.e advances in navigation arose from needing to be able to accurately locate Mecca while at sea), but that stuff never lasts, because science is based on curisoity and fundamentalist religion teaches that to be heresy.
It's a lesson we need to learn, unless we want a few centuries of cultural dark age.
Single source story, with some quotes from other studies. Terrible.
What's the other side? Is there another side? What do other psychologists say? What does anyone from any of the states that passed the laws say? What do kids say? What do adults who play games say? Is there anyone who disagrees with you? Is there anyone who disagrees with them.
Also, Jesus, could you ask more leading questions? You asked the question about video games relieving stress twice and you never should have asked it once. You never ask questions that specific, because they're too likely to give you a biased answer. A more general question (Have any behavioral studies been conducted about positive effect of gaming? What positive effects are reported by gamers?) would give you a better response.
What a fricking joke.
Dell doesn't support operating system problems, last I heard. You've got to call microsoft anyway, and sell your soul.
At 17 or 18 they're already making their own descisions about a lot of things...At 18 that's their legal right, so you've got no say over it whatsoever.
If you don't trust them to make good decisions by the time they're 18, you've either done something wrong, or you're having a real hard time letting go.
Lot of news organizations really really don't like Rupert Murdoch, so they may be out to get him in a semi-subtle way.
But it is tailormade to be a "Cause of the Week"...It's just like all the hype over IM and IRC before it, so it just may be the usual crap, and the aquisition just brought it to media attention.
I'd no more load unsigned code on my servers than I'd jab random needles into my arm at a heroin party.
At the very least, you should be testing whatever it is on a test server or a virtual machine before you ever put it into production.