Why I like Wired
on
The Long Tail
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Okay, I'm probably surrendering a couple of my geek points by saying it, but I like my Wired.
Reasons:
I work on and around computer technology all day long. Sometimes its nice to read something that doesn't tax my brain anymore than I want it to.
I like Bruce Sterling.
Japanese Schoolgirl Watch -- nuf said
I can skip the ads if I want to. Ads, fwiw, can also be found in my daily newspaper. I am able to look past ads.
the subscription cost is dirt cheap.
nice paper texture, layout, color and page design. It's just pleasing to look at.
If I find the subject of an article interesting, I can look to other sources for more information. Wired never pretends to be an authoritative publication.
I really enjoy the fetish section, even if I'm not looking for the products they list there. The very first time I ever saw a roomba was in Wired, years ago.
The Schwartzenegger article was really good.
They don't take themselves too seriously.
I don't agree with every editorial I find there.
Wired articles often get mentioned on slashdot, where I can watch people bang the topics aruond a ittle.
Is there some stuff that I'd like to see? Sure. I wish the articles were longer, and that there were more of them. I wish that the number of graphics-intensive, full-page 2-paragrpah articles was a little smaller. Apart from that, I wouldn't change anything.
As far as the tail goes, we have more choices because our larger retailers (online and otherwise) are able to make so many more diverse choices in terms of what they want to (and can) sell. The supermarket is a good example. As years went by and people learned more about regional cuisine, and fresh/organic vegetables, retailers became pressured to supply these items because they were losing business to these little niche shops and mom&pop veggie-fruit stands. When organic veggies first showed up in my town (15 years ago), you just didn't have enough of them being grown to allow a major grocery to buy the stuff. As production of organics rose in volume, they became part of the ordinary offering. In dense urban areas (London, Paris, NYC), the range of choices was always wide and varied because of the diversity of the population was similarly wide and varied. I see the diversity of today's channels of information (cable, the net, books, papers, magazines) as spreading demand out along the tail. The choices were always there, it's just that people are more likely to know about them, and getting exactly what one wants is easier in the age of fedex.
I'd echo the desire to keep the headcount low and therefore lower the cost of operation. There's also an increased level of agility, in terms of being able to adjust business processs and act on new information, that makes a small organization more desirable. Up until a month ago, I was working at just such a software company, and I can vouch for the positive attributes of low headcount (we were about a dozen people total).
The drawback that people often forget is that when your company is ten people, if you lose just one of those people (whether temporarily due to illness or maternity, or permanently due to death or newer more appealing job offers elsewhere), you lose ten percent of your workforce. If two people in your organization are unavailable for work, you've lost twenty percent of your capability. When a customer looks at your product, they evaluate it based on a set of requirements they have and how they feel about the direction the product will go, but they also look at the company behind the product with an eye on how well that company will be able to weather changes in the business climate and general economic conditions.
My last company had many chances to sell its product (a very good product, I might add, with the licensed IP attribute you mentioned) to large enterprises, but few would bite because a 5000-employee company looks at a 10-employee company and KNOWS that if five people get the flu, that everything would come to a screeching halt for a week. Also, the number of employees (whether you like the fact or not) is still a measure of how profitable a company is, and how able they are to attract and retain large customer accounts and intelligent, productive employees.
Just as an outside guess, I'd say my last employer lost out on millions (at least, perhaps tens of millions) of dollars of potential revenue by resisting growth in headcount, being unable to attract sufficient additional investment capital outside of constrictive VC relationships, and a resolute no-debt approach to liquidity.
At some point, you've 1) maximized on the potential of the 10-person shop, 2) you're unable to attract new customer accounts of a size that will allow the company to steadily grow, and 3) you have no money for investments in equipment/software tools that help meet the changing needs of the company over time. It was terribly frustrating (at times) to work in that environment, even if it was also very exciting.
Long story short, I left for my current post at a 20K+ employee company in the health care sector of the economy. There are things I miss about the small shop, but I get a lot of comfort out of knowing that I can plan on my company being around for at least five years, and my paycheck is fatter. At my old post, the time horizon was six months, and my paycheck was small. Did I give up a lot, sure, but I recognize that a larger company offers a more secure income, and the customers who buy our software products have the reputation and stability of a large company behind the product.
Yunno, looking for such a device may be a tough task, this time. The camera angles are very tightly controlled. These devices do exist, but my guess is that they will be concealed, if used.
I haven't read all of the rules for this time around, but I wonder if such a stipulation (that none of these devices be used) would even be possible.
Maybe we'll just have to look out for ear-tugging or something like that.
... thanx to NetFlix, and I have my own opinions on a few of the points they're probably raising in their tome:
IV - The Jabba/Solo meeting at MosEisley pad 94 - the film stock for Solo's appearance wasn't that great, or at least he seems a bit too grainy. He also looks kind of two-dimensional. Jabba is walking, er, sliming around and he moves with such ease that I find it unbelieveable, even when I suspend disbelief for the duration of the film. Jabba would send someone to do the pressing of Solo anyway, so it's twice unbelieveable. The scene doesn't add anything to the story, so I figure it was just an attempt to have CG allow old filmstock to be used.
IV - All the CG creature shots - great addition. Adds to the eye candy.
V - Didn't really notice anything apart from the addition of the Hoth ice creature in full view. He used to be played by a severed arm, but he looks much more fearsome in the flesh, and it makes the first twenty minutes of the film a little more zingy.
VI - I have two gripes here: 1) The addition of the CG-generated performers in Jabba's palace was a waste. Yeah, the old puppetish singer with the really-long trunk looked a little cheesy, but I thought the CG and the addition of the punky backup singers was even worse. 2) The changing of Anakin's apparition to match the visage of the pre-dark-side anakin in III, just bugged me. I liked the continuity of an Anakin apparition that resembled the unhelmeted Vader. After all, the Obi-wan apparition doesn't look like Ewan, it looks like Alec. It was a dumb move.
Okay, so there are my beefs. Nope, it's not 11,000 words, but at least it's here to read.
You are correct, sir! This is exactly the point I was hoping would be made.
I recall this as well. I remember it popping up well in advance of the debates. The tech bubble had already lost most of its air by then, but the economy was generally stable until recession language made it into the campaign verbiage.
The only thing I would add is that this ability candidates/presidents have (to say something so often as to make it real) has been used many times by our sitting president WRT the war in Iraq.
So, before this topic got hijacked by Bush-related stuff, it was about how salaries have increased slightly for tech workers. I have the following experience to relate, FWIW:
Four years ago I was working for a year at a contracting job at USWest/Qwest. By the start of 2001 I had been laid off in Joe Nacho's big RIF. I got a gig with a VOIP company right away (paid pretty well, too), and the company started hemmoraging cash like crazy due to mismanagement. RIFs happened every quarter. I got RIFd in the fourth round. I spent five months unemployed until I bagged a job at a friend's startup, with a 20% pay cut. I worked for him for more than two years, with modest raises that didn't bring me back up to my wage at the VOIP company. A couple weeks ago I left for my current post, where I'm making 10% more than I was making at the VOIP shop.
The point I'm trying to make is that yes, my salary situation has improved, taken as a single figure. However, in the totality of my wages over time, and the loss of some 15K of savings while I was unemployed, I'm actually earning almost exactly the same amount of money as I was three years ago, and much more cash-poor. While I like hearing that techies are maybe worth more, I think it's going to take a while longer to convince me that the career I've chosen has some salary stability, let alone any kind of significant growth potential.
This kind of echoes one of the previous posts about powering with anything but the internal combustion engine: Some years back, there was a company called Rosen Motors that developed a powertrain that was all-electric, with the juice coming from a jet turbine under the hood. To start the thing, there was a flywheel that stored a significant enough electrical charge to start the turbine in the morning. The flywheel would spin, unattended for a couple days before needing to be spun back up again. The idea was cool but never took off. I have a feeling that it was because when you reduce a powertrain to four moving parts, you pretty much put mechanics and dealer service shops out of business. Nevermind that the system got something like 120 MPG.
I happened to overhear a guy trying to use his OnStar system when his nice custom diesel truck wouldn't start. It sucked. The voice recognition system they've got is a real stinker. This could be improved a lot.
I saw something on television (like SciAmFrontiers or something like that) about a capsule car idea. The gist of it was that you had a little cube-ish looking car with a steering wheel and a seat and kind of a lounge area in back. You'd drive to a local "station" where your capsule would be taken over by wireless command to fit into a pod of similar capsules and then the whole pod would leave at the same time, keeping about 2-3 feet between capsules, kind of like a convoy. The pod would end up at the destination station where you'd take over driving from there. The idea was to free the driver from the long, middle, highway portion of a lengthy commute and allow the person to do other stuff for that time. It's a little like the cars in Minority Report.
I read Bob Zubrin's book about the case for mars, and I've seen him on SciAmFrontiers with a machine that can make propellant (and water, I guess, too) just sitting around in the martian atmosphere.
I thought it was a neat idea at the time, but I probably need to pick the book back up again.
I've had the impression that Bob's considered kind of "far out", but I do like all these neat ideas. Myself, rather than drive from the back seat, I enjoy just watching.
"According to Hunter, the Efficeon architecture allows Orion to reach a performance of one flop per Watt - more than would be possible with any competing processor."
I'm familiar with megaflops and gigaflops and teraflops and petaflops, but what is so magical about "one floating point operation per watt"? Is this just a misquote, or does it mean something?
Soybeans, while very common in agriculture worldwide, don't actually yield much oil (about 15% of seed mass is oil). Mustard seed contains almost three times as much oil as soybeans (somewhere around 40% of seed mass is oil). The cracked mustard seed (after the oil has been extracted) is protein rich and can also be used as a feed supplement for livestock.
There's a company called Blue Sky Biodiesel that's working with investor farmers to offer them a guaranteed minimum price for mustard. With a large number of individual farmers contributing to overall yields in oil-crop categories, the threat of a monsanto/con agra/ADM domination situation seems unlikely.
Having larger amounts of farm output going to make fuels for vehicles would also improve the quality of biodiesel fuel from 10% (ten percent from crops, 90% from petroleum) to 98% (almost all from crops).
As much as I agree that there's a place for fission-derived nuclear energy, I just don't like the smell of it, for all the reasons that people have listed here.
There was this guy, awhile back, named R. Buckminster Fuller. He was somewhat of a crackpot. He pioneered geodesic domes, the Fuller projection for global cartography, the tetrahedral lattice, among other things. Not bad ideas, really. All of these are used today.
He also tried to get the world to start driving cars with single rear-wheel steering (the Dymaxion Car), or live in round all-aluminum houses that leaked air by design, or install one-piece stainless-steel bathrooms that could be automatically cleaned. None of these things caught on.
He did have a lesser-trumpeted idea, though, that related to the global electrical grid. The idea (and it requires a VERY high degree of cooperation between nations) was to interconnect every nation's power grid to that of its neighbors. In such a way, power would become more fault-tolerant and production would become cheaper.
The idea is that there are about six hours of every day that people are just not using much electricity. Humans tend to sleep every day. While we sleep, we're not watching TV or running the vacuum or opening/closing the fridge door a lot, so there's more electricity available. A hydroelectric plant doesn't shut down for the night -- it keeps generating power as we sleep. Same goes for a nuclear plant.
Electricty has no shelf-life. You put as much on the grid as you need from it, and when demand fades, you put less on the grid -- but you don't stop producing. Balancing the demand and the production on a global scale, while a tall order, would certainly help lesser-developed nations aquire cheap power and would ease the environmental impacts of individual plants in areas where they may not be needed.
clearly, there's a lot to work out in the global grid scenario, but it has certain advantages and elegant attributes.
I echo much of what's already been said about "required" upgrades. I would only add the following:
I'm a software engineer, so I tend to want pretty beefy parts in my machine, especially on the processor and RAM side. However, I played for a long time (a couple years) with a GForce2 card, with the res dropped as low as I could go and the details all but shut off. I have about a half-dozen PCs that are all in one state of upgrade or another, but my main gaming box is a pretty cheap Celeron 2.7, with 512 MB and an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro. It does everything I need, but I always thirst for the next best thing, and I inevitably end up building a new box every year or so. I'm due for a new one next spring, fwiw. I freely admit to having a hardware addiction, but I'm taking it one day at time.
I don't play consoles because I don't like the controllers, I don't think the graphics are all that great, you can't upgrade them and I don't like most of the the titles. Things like Super Mario XXVII or Street-fighter-game-of-the-week just don't float my boat. Almost all console games just lack the complexity to get me interested. Where I've seen PC ports of console games, they just don't hold a candle to games written for the PC. Halo feels that way to me, but I'm sure that others might disagree. To flip that around, if you tried to port PC-native RTS titles like Rise of Nations, Empire Earth, or Age of Empires to a console, they'd stink. The PC is the premier platform for a rich, fast, complex, attractive gaming experience... and yeah, you have to pay for that, but you can nurse old hardware along for quite awhile.
I think the main beef I have with PC games lately isn't about the hardware that I inevitably buy, but the really stangnant quality of the stories and the less-than-immersive quality of the gameplay. I am almost completely tired of the fantasy RPG, not because I haven't had fun with them in the past, but because they're pretty much all the same, these days -- the character classes are all the same, the races are all the same, the gameplay follows this same old kill-stuff-gain-skill-get-treasure-get-items-solve -puzzle-kill-boss-monster-do-it-again line. Neverwinter Nights, for example, looks great with fine hardware, but I just can't stand playing it, no matter how good it looks.
Oddly enough, titles like Call of Duty, which has got this great, detailed, immersive world to play in, gives me tons of replay value. I play a sesh at work on my lunch hour, where my machine is a pokey Celeron 2.0 with a $75 GeForceMX440 card, and it looks and plays just fine.
Anyhow, to sum up, as someone who likes hardware, likes the PC as a gaming platform, and as someone who just can't stand consoles, I take the hardware upgrade question as just another part of owning PCs. I think Carmack said awhile back that we're reaching the point where there will be fewer and fewer new graphics engines being created, and since new hardware specs are often updated when a new engine comes out, I'd expect a $300 graphics card you buy today to have a much longer useful lifespan than a similarly-priced card would have had five years ago.
My Two Cents
I'd echo the point about getting a real degree, but I differ with the antarctican on where to get it and what to get. FWIW, We DO have actual universities here in the U.S., and many of the best are public institutions.
My B.A. is in English with a Journalism minor. I went for almost two years after graduation looking for writing jobs in print and broadcast with no luck. Then I found my way to law, where I thought I might stay. After a few years at one of the larger firms here in Denver, I realized that I didn't much care for law, so I needed a change.
I'd always enjoyed coding and working with computers in general, but I didn't have anything that amounted to marketable skills. By the mid 90s, knowing how to operate a teletype, run a BBS, or hack about in Z80 assembler were not hot skills. I needed C/C++, some systems analysis training and a fistful of OOA/OOD, but getting a CS degree as man of letters meant basically going back for another 4-year degree. I called the advising office at my state University's School of Engineering and they pretty much told me that I'd have to start from the beginning.
Somewhat disappointed, I went next to the School of Business at my University and was pleased to find out that the most technical of their MIS programs was in software development, and involved classwork in several popular languages (C/C++, LISP, Smalltalk and Java), along with good theoretical coursework in systems analysis and design. I had to take accounting and finance and economics and statistics, too, but those topics are valued by all businesses, so I went back to school in this program, full time for the first two years, and one course at a time afterwards. All total, it took me seven years to complete my Master's.
After the first 2 years I got an internship with a major telecom company in operations support, then a job writing IDL interface documentation and developer training materials, then a job as an SCM, and a job as a UNIX system admin. I got laid off when the telecom business died, but found a new job doing Dev/SA/SCM/QA/DBA stuff at the all-Java startup where I've been working for two years, now. I get a decent salary, and I'm pretty sure I could find another job if I felt like looking around.
Am I a "real" computer scientist or software engineer? Nope, but I have a job as one. Do I have a CS degree? Nope, but I've got all the formal coursework I wanted and lots more experience than many of the younger engineers that would love to have my job.
The antarctican would have you believe that an MIS is fluff, but an MIS at one institution can be remarkably different from one offered by another. Mine (a Master of Information Systems) was the most technically rigorous graduate degree (definetly NOT a "flush certificate") I could find in my area, the price was right, and I didn't have to take Calc 4 or Diff Eq. Once I had the technical basics, it was easy to find interships and temp work that used my new skills.
I have seen resumes, I should point out, from people with CS degrees that look great, but they can't write even the most simple code, or exploit the most rudimentary logical constructs when asked at interview time. I interviewed one guy, a fresh grad, that could not define a simple C data structure, so just having a CS degree doesn't automatically make you an engineer worth hiring.
The bottom line is if you like the techy work, learn what you need to get started in your first couple semesters and just keep going. Take the small jobs, the internships, the short-term contracts, whatever, as you complete the degree program. Just being in school goes a long way on the resume, too, because it demonstrates that you're taking the initiative to learn new things, and it proves that you can learn new things and manage your time effectively without much supervision.
The ability to learn and adapt is a very powerful skill that often gets underrated, but the best people on my team are the ones that not only know a lot, but can learn new things, too.
My game group (we're all engineers of one stripe or another) often runs into the situation where three-out-of-five like a game enough to buy it and play it on the days when we don't meet. The other two might play if everyone's playing together, but won't consider it important enough to go out and buy.
What ends up happening is either 1) we pass a cd around to bootstrap those people who don't have a copy (only works if the game doesn't cd-check during play), 2) find a hacked.exe that doesn't do the CD check and hand that off to the guys that don't have a legit copy, or 3) share the second cd with a partner that doesn't have their own copy (this only applies to those games that have multiple install CDs and any of them will work when the check takes place).
Add to this the fact that the copy protection that's on many of the newer titles we play often prevents us from duping the play disc. If you can dupe it, it sometimes requires a pricey CD copying tool that will render a good copy. (Seems to me anyhow that if I bought and paid for a game, I should have the right to make a playable copy as a backup. CDs don't last forever, after all.)
Now, even though our group collectively spends nearly a thousand dollars on legitimately-acquired and licensed game software annually, we still get caught performing these types of pirate-ish workarounds to get everyone playing. As someone that works in a software shop, I feel pretty strongly that you oughta buy what you play, but it has happened that I've been the guy who didn't want to fork over the bux for a title I just knew I would not play outside of game night. It sticks in my craw, you might say.
I'd like to float the following suggestions:
1. What if (apart from the standard single-user license) you had the chance to buy a club license for three times the cost of a single user license, and would get five legitimate registrations out of it. If you bought a club license, you should have the ability to turn off the CD-check.
2. Assuming that you could have such a thing as club-licensing, how about having a way for a single user registrant to convert their single user copy into a club-licensed version online. You could have a seperate registration for each additional registrant on the copy, and ask for immediate payment by cred card for each additional individual applicant to the club license (at, say, %50 of the retail price).
3. Let people copy the CDs, install, and register themselves just as they would if they had bought it retail, only knock off %50 because the'res no additional cost to the game co. to produce another copy, another manual, or another pretty box.
Now, I know that this doesn't cover all the different ways and reasons people have for pirating, but it might bring more than a few pirates in from the cold, and make up for at least some of the lost revenue.
I see what you're saying, but the problem with your assertion is that the US does not set the value of its currency. That dollar value reflects the costs of producing a good or service in the world. Setting the value of a unit of currency (by pegging it to another) is something done by governments seeking less volatility in their infant economies. China does this (they peg against the value of the US dollar), which keeps the relative cost of their goods and services artificially low in developed western economies, and artificially stable.
A dollar is worth as much as anyone thinks it's worth. It has no set value in and of itself. At one time, every dollar was backed by precious metals in the US Federal Reserve. Some dollars were actually issued as silver certificates. You could go to the Federal Reserve Bank and demand to have the paper dollar converted to the equivalent amount of silver. This became too restrictive to economic growth and inhibited the use of debt financing in US budgets. What's more, as more and more of the precious metal is mined, the value of the metal decreases, and therefore the value of the currency backed by the metal also decreases. Today, most developed economies are no longer backed by precious metals for all of these reasons.
A dollar's worth of rice in India is a much much greater quantity than a dollar's worth of rice in the States, and the same dollar buys an even smaller quantity of rice in Japan. This is mostly because (as you point out) the cost of labor (the principal input in agricultural production) in India is cheap. It's getting more expensive for Indian labor, though, as more people move to cities (where the cost of living and therefore labor is greater) from rural areas, as the middle class grows (which increases the expected standard of living), and as more Indians travel and live abroad (where the value of goods and services in a worldwide context can be more tangibly demonstrated). What I'm saying here is that it is India that will become less competitive against nations and regions that are less than developed than she is. Someday, many Indian jobs will be outsourced to Bangladesh, and some already are going there.
The notion that the US should or is going to devalue its own currency is ridiculous. It's actually quite impossible for America to do this, anyway. What's more, everybody loves American money. I've travelled to more than thirty nations, and you can always find someone who has American dollars -- they're the one with a big crowd around them. Saddam hoarded the dollar for its stability and convertibility. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Indians flock to America every day, looking for education, entertainment, relaxation, work or opportunity. In any nation with an American embassy, you don't need to ask where the consulate is, you only need look -- it's the one with the line that stretches around the block. The only people storming the Indian embassy are the ones who made their cash in the developed world and want to bring it home where they can stretch it for all it's worth. Every time they do that, the cost of labor in India goes up. More power to 'em, and more power to India, I say. If it keeps up, maybe you will get the same wages, and you'll get the same costs, too. Good on ye!
Our gaming group has moved from starcraft to warcraft 3 to empire earth (unmentioned thus far) to rise of nations and now we're going back to warcraft 3. One guy has been playing homeworld 2 and finds it to be quite enjoyable, but I don't get it.
Our main beefs with EE and RoN were that while EE had a much longer timeline (you get to play in the future, with future weapons) and this was fun, both it and RoN required micromanaging the individual units quite a lot. The AIs used by both, once you set the difficulty high enough to be challenging, end up cheating so as to make the gameplay more frustrating than challenging.
I enjoyed AoE quite a lot, and ditto for AoE2, but I think that these games seem to have a hard time striking a good balance between unit richness, a lengthy historical timeline for the gameplay, and the quality of the AI. RoN (to me anyway) tried to add a more structured environment with city building limits and all kinds of hierarchies, but I found these things more obstacles than anything else. You still end up micromanaging, but you end up micromanaging other things than the units.
I DO PLAY SWG. (I think that I'm the second or third REAL PLAYER to post on this topic, fwiw.) Snowmit's point is well taken, and having had experience with both open and member forums, I think he's right. One thing about SWG is that there is an in-game trouble-ticketing system that gives a player a first place to go for problem resolution. The forums can be a great place for advice or ordinary gameplay questions. It's come in handy for me, and I've had my issues dealt with -- not quickly, but dealt with.
SWG is like any MMORG: it's a work in-progress. It gets fine-tuned as you go. Sure, there are bugs that take a while to fix, but some are quickly dealt with. The time to start the game has been cut in half since I started three months ago, and this appears to be due to the way terrain is generated and objects are populated.
One note about the Jedi thing. It would suck if everyone could macro themselves into a jedi. I quit playing UO because there were just too many ways to macro up a super char that could kill all. Even in the SW storyline, there was a time when Jedi were all over the place, but their numbers dwindled by E4. If everyone could be a jedi, then everyone WOULD be a jedi, and boy would that be no fun.
Right now, there are lots of people who aspire to high rank in the Imperial chain of command, and more power to em. There are rebels of the same stripe, and plenty of other factions to fight for.
As for the no spaceships thing, I can wait while I develop my char on cheesy hunting quests. I'll have enough money saved up to buy one (or at least to buy some kind of creature/moped to ride around on).
... how while the price of Lindows is pretty low, if you added on all the extras (like the virus & spam protection, the "click-and-install" service), you start peeking into the near-$300 range for cost?
I guess it's expected that one would have to pay more for all the extras, and that $300 is still less than a barebones winOS purchase, but how often does someone have to sign back up for all these extras? In a five year lifetime, wouldn't you be paying double or triple that $300 up-front cost for a fully-featured virus-protected OS?
I don't see that Lindows offers a cheaper cost model than winOS in the long run. I'm pretty confident that Mom would use it, but how long would Mom continue to pay for these extras. Did I miss something?
Our LAN gaming group is about 7-8 people, all guys (most over 30), and about half of the group plays female chars. Admittedly, we have yet to play any massively multiplayer games in the group, but if you go on what happens in DungeonSiege and UT2K3 (our faves), half the group will be playing with chick skins or chick chars.
I played UO for a good long time, and found that while I got more assistance and lenient plunder-sharing privs with my chick char, I got hassled by the dO0Dz (a.k.a. adolescent boys) for "favors" any time I was in town. I could unleash a six-pack of whoop-ass when I had to, but after awhile it seemed more trouble than it was worth. I went back to my male-gendered chars and never went back.
Some of the other posts from guys with female chars ring really true. It's pretty cool to see a chick (maybe your chick) kick ass in a game. It's unexpected, or perhaps less expected than the conquest of a buff male char named "GorkonTheDestroyer". I get the sense that this kind of expectation will become less significant as we get more strong women roles in film and game entertainment products, but it's definetly there.
I plan on signing up for StarWarsGalaxies at the end of the month (assuming timely release), and I will probably start a female char. I wonder how it will go, and what the dO0Dz of the future will think of it.
Well, I suppose that it's not very surprising that "kids these days" don't know how (or don't want) to write in cursive. It's also not surprising that most of the posts to this topic are poorly-written. I found more grammatical errors than posts in my brief survey. As engineering-oriented people, we're famous for reducing the number of keystrokes required to issue a command, and we love brevity and compact code. Most engineers cannot write a complete sentence, or even spell the words correctly, let alone write in cursive script. The same is true for most doctors and scientists, so at least the company is good, right? Having worked in law for awhile, I found that nearly every lawyer I worked with (male or female) had great penmanship, if they lowered themselves to going without the dictaphone for a day. It's odd, but the right-brain/left-brain thing may account for this.
I do find the decline of cursive a bit troubling. I learned it like everyone else: over a few years in primary school. My writing has decended into a mish-mash of printing and cursive, but it is much more legible than anyone I work with, or anyone I'm related to. My dad, whose handwriting is totally inscrutable... so totally undecipherable that he often can't read it, himself... forced me to put in ten pages of handwriting practice every week -- all through grade school. While my hand has become timeworn and ragged, I can still pen off a REAL LIVE LETTER to anyone I want and have it be legible. I hated handwriting practice, but it did make me a much faster writer than a typist, and I think more while I write than I do while I type.
Pleased to be in the minority on this one, but handwriting is a valuable skill, and it really should be taught. How else can someone attempt to decipher the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution?
Packet-switched telephony is old hat. It hasn't had the kind of broad-based consumer support that it probably could have, but businesses have been using enterprise-scale packet-switched telephony for more than a decade. Businesses like Clarent, Sonus and Siemens have already carved out the space for current VOIP and packet-switched technologies. Some countries with developing communications infrastructures are skipping circuit-switched telephone systems entirely and moving straight to packet-switched backbones.
They tried to offer consumer VOIP over CATV a couple years ago here in the Denver area, but this was also back when Qwest was "riding the light". Consumers liked the idea of one bill, but didn't like having to depend on a single incoming cable, and a single company (AT&T) for everything. There also wasn't much savings. (It all smacked a little of the time before the Bell breakup.) Given that the local cable company has changed hands about every five years, consistency in service may have also been a concern.
Has anyone around here got/tried VOIP over cable? I'd be interested in knowing what the experience was.
Time Warner telecom made a handy bundle (and probably still does) on installing SONET rings for businesses to use for putting their phone calls on packet-switched networks -- all to cut the cost of long distance down to a fraction. As someone mentioned in another post, you can get the same 99.99 quality from packet-switched telephone systems as you get from circuits, and two stage dialing (not to mention billing metrics) is much easier to manage.
Clarent, the early leader in VOIP gateways (now under new ownership, btw), has got some great softswitch technologies (Class IV and V call managers) that do SS7, H323, and a bunch of other protocols. Having spent more than my share of time prodding 5ESS and Datakit, it's comforting to see softswitches taking more of the burden, and circuits being freed for other uses.
I like reading/. just as much as anyone, but this post wasn't terribly exciting and didn't say anything new. There's so much that really is exciting in telecom that I'm led to believe that this one must have snuck past the front line. Hopefully we won't see forthcoming stories about how "Graphite powder reportedly makes Abacus calculations faster" or "Fifty ways to soup up your slide rule".
-- ninjagin
"640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates
I'm just curious as who the insured really is. The police report at the smoking gun site shows the same as Robert Ballantine, while the article names him as Gary Valentine. Okay, so maybe cops don't have the best handwriting, but if you're a city beat reporter, you're supposed to be able to read and faithfully reproduce the facts in a police report. Either Valentine/Ballantine, the cops, the reporter, or any combination of the three are being less than truthful. Something stinks here, alot more than a $5500 machine that the average kid can outrun.
I've seen the machines at WalMartDotCom and I'm curious about how Lindows has approached the task of accumulating, testing, supplying and updating device drivers for users. Windows makes this comparatively easy for the novice user. What is the Lindows perspective on native driver support for the endless array of hardware (& peripheral) configurations upon which it could be run?
Thank you,
-- ninjagin
This movie started the "points" system for rewarding car-on-person collisions. There are also a number of great cameos. B-movie all the way. Saw it at the drive-in as a kid, rented it years later, and still liked it.
Slashdot Mirror
Reasons:
Is there some stuff that I'd like to see? Sure. I wish the articles were longer, and that there were more of them. I wish that the number of graphics-intensive, full-page 2-paragrpah articles was a little smaller. Apart from that, I wouldn't change anything.
As far as the tail goes, we have more choices because our larger retailers (online and otherwise) are able to make so many more diverse choices in terms of what they want to (and can) sell. The supermarket is a good example. As years went by and people learned more about regional cuisine, and fresh/organic vegetables, retailers became pressured to supply these items because they were losing business to these little niche shops and mom&pop veggie-fruit stands. When organic veggies first showed up in my town (15 years ago), you just didn't have enough of them being grown to allow a major grocery to buy the stuff. As production of organics rose in volume, they became part of the ordinary offering. In dense urban areas (London, Paris, NYC), the range of choices was always wide and varied because of the diversity of the population was similarly wide and varied. I see the diversity of today's channels of information (cable, the net, books, papers, magazines) as spreading demand out along the tail. The choices were always there, it's just that people are more likely to know about them, and getting exactly what one wants is easier in the age of fedex.
The drawback that people often forget is that when your company is ten people, if you lose just one of those people (whether temporarily due to illness or maternity, or permanently due to death or newer more appealing job offers elsewhere), you lose ten percent of your workforce. If two people in your organization are unavailable for work, you've lost twenty percent of your capability. When a customer looks at your product, they evaluate it based on a set of requirements they have and how they feel about the direction the product will go, but they also look at the company behind the product with an eye on how well that company will be able to weather changes in the business climate and general economic conditions.
My last company had many chances to sell its product (a very good product, I might add, with the licensed IP attribute you mentioned) to large enterprises, but few would bite because a 5000-employee company looks at a 10-employee company and KNOWS that if five people get the flu, that everything would come to a screeching halt for a week. Also, the number of employees (whether you like the fact or not) is still a measure of how profitable a company is, and how able they are to attract and retain large customer accounts and intelligent, productive employees.
Just as an outside guess, I'd say my last employer lost out on millions (at least, perhaps tens of millions) of dollars of potential revenue by resisting growth in headcount, being unable to attract sufficient additional investment capital outside of constrictive VC relationships, and a resolute no-debt approach to liquidity.
At some point, you've 1) maximized on the potential of the 10-person shop, 2) you're unable to attract new customer accounts of a size that will allow the company to steadily grow, and 3) you have no money for investments in equipment/software tools that help meet the changing needs of the company over time. It was terribly frustrating (at times) to work in that environment, even if it was also very exciting.
Long story short, I left for my current post at a 20K+ employee company in the health care sector of the economy. There are things I miss about the small shop, but I get a lot of comfort out of knowing that I can plan on my company being around for at least five years, and my paycheck is fatter. At my old post, the time horizon was six months, and my paycheck was small. Did I give up a lot, sure, but I recognize that a larger company offers a more secure income, and the customers who buy our software products have the reputation and stability of a large company behind the product.
just my 2 bits
I haven't read all of the rules for this time around, but I wonder if such a stipulation (that none of these devices be used) would even be possible.
Maybe we'll just have to look out for ear-tugging or something like that.
IV - The Jabba/Solo meeting at MosEisley pad 94 - the film stock for Solo's appearance wasn't that great, or at least he seems a bit too grainy. He also looks kind of two-dimensional. Jabba is walking, er, sliming around and he moves with such ease that I find it unbelieveable, even when I suspend disbelief for the duration of the film. Jabba would send someone to do the pressing of Solo anyway, so it's twice unbelieveable. The scene doesn't add anything to the story, so I figure it was just an attempt to have CG allow old filmstock to be used. IV - All the CG creature shots - great addition. Adds to the eye candy.
V - Didn't really notice anything apart from the addition of the Hoth ice creature in full view. He used to be played by a severed arm, but he looks much more fearsome in the flesh, and it makes the first twenty minutes of the film a little more zingy.
VI - I have two gripes here: 1) The addition of the CG-generated performers in Jabba's palace was a waste. Yeah, the old puppetish singer with the really-long trunk looked a little cheesy, but I thought the CG and the addition of the punky backup singers was even worse. 2) The changing of Anakin's apparition to match the visage of the pre-dark-side anakin in III, just bugged me. I liked the continuity of an Anakin apparition that resembled the unhelmeted Vader. After all, the Obi-wan apparition doesn't look like Ewan, it looks like Alec. It was a dumb move.
Okay, so there are my beefs. Nope, it's not 11,000 words, but at least it's here to read.
I recall this as well. I remember it popping up well in advance of the debates. The tech bubble had already lost most of its air by then, but the economy was generally stable until recession language made it into the campaign verbiage.
The only thing I would add is that this ability candidates/presidents have (to say something so often as to make it real) has been used many times by our sitting president WRT the war in Iraq.
So, before this topic got hijacked by Bush-related stuff, it was about how salaries have increased slightly for tech workers. I have the following experience to relate, FWIW:
Four years ago I was working for a year at a contracting job at USWest/Qwest. By the start of 2001 I had been laid off in Joe Nacho's big RIF. I got a gig with a VOIP company right away (paid pretty well, too), and the company started hemmoraging cash like crazy due to mismanagement. RIFs happened every quarter. I got RIFd in the fourth round. I spent five months unemployed until I bagged a job at a friend's startup, with a 20% pay cut. I worked for him for more than two years, with modest raises that didn't bring me back up to my wage at the VOIP company. A couple weeks ago I left for my current post, where I'm making 10% more than I was making at the VOIP shop.
The point I'm trying to make is that yes, my salary situation has improved, taken as a single figure. However, in the totality of my wages over time, and the loss of some 15K of savings while I was unemployed, I'm actually earning almost exactly the same amount of money as I was three years ago, and much more cash-poor. While I like hearing that techies are maybe worth more, I think it's going to take a while longer to convince me that the career I've chosen has some salary stability, let alone any kind of significant growth potential.
This kind of echoes one of the previous posts about powering with anything but the internal combustion engine: Some years back, there was a company called Rosen Motors that developed a powertrain that was all-electric, with the juice coming from a jet turbine under the hood. To start the thing, there was a flywheel that stored a significant enough electrical charge to start the turbine in the morning. The flywheel would spin, unattended for a couple days before needing to be spun back up again. The idea was cool but never took off. I have a feeling that it was because when you reduce a powertrain to four moving parts, you pretty much put mechanics and dealer service shops out of business. Nevermind that the system got something like 120 MPG.
I happened to overhear a guy trying to use his OnStar system when his nice custom diesel truck wouldn't start. It sucked. The voice recognition system they've got is a real stinker. This could be improved a lot.
I saw something on television (like SciAmFrontiers or something like that) about a capsule car idea. The gist of it was that you had a little cube-ish looking car with a steering wheel and a seat and kind of a lounge area in back. You'd drive to a local "station" where your capsule would be taken over by wireless command to fit into a pod of similar capsules and then the whole pod would leave at the same time, keeping about 2-3 feet between capsules, kind of like a convoy. The pod would end up at the destination station where you'd take over driving from there. The idea was to free the driver from the long, middle, highway portion of a lengthy commute and allow the person to do other stuff for that time. It's a little like the cars in Minority Report.
Have cars like the ones in Minority Report!
I thought it was a neat idea at the time, but I probably need to pick the book back up again.
I've had the impression that Bob's considered kind of "far out", but I do like all these neat ideas. Myself, rather than drive from the back seat, I enjoy just watching.
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20040830_0920 16.html
It says:
"According to Hunter, the Efficeon architecture allows Orion to reach a performance of one flop per Watt - more than would be possible with any competing processor."
I'm familiar with megaflops and gigaflops and teraflops and petaflops, but what is so magical about "one floating point operation per watt"? Is this just a misquote, or does it mean something?
I seem to recall that this was mentioned in The Original Series, and there is a satellite/probe using it to propel itself away from Earth to the moon.
I thought it was this one, but I could swear there was another probe, too, bound for some outer planet:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3136004. stm
Hopefully I wasn't hallucianting that other one. I'm sure someone around here will gently correct me if I'm wrong... this is slashdot, after all.
I'm not a scientist, but I think the idea was that you have ionized xenon gas that's accelerated with an electron gun to produce the thrust.
NASA has this description, but it's still kinda confusing to me:
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sionrock.ht m
Anyhooo, just figured I'd tack another one onto the list. Will it stick? I dunno.
Cheers!
I can already think of improvements:
1. Scale up the 4-tile model for walking, and have a 12-tile model for running.
2. Force-feedback tiles for seismic or moving-walkway effectts.
3. cushiony lifting-tiles to simulate low-g walks/runs/jumps.
Of course, can you imagine the liability issues for a manufacturer of such a product?
Very neat. I can't wait to have one. When they have it work with Unreal Tournament, I'll be sold.
There's a company called Blue Sky Biodiesel that's working with investor farmers to offer them a guaranteed minimum price for mustard. With a large number of individual farmers contributing to overall yields in oil-crop categories, the threat of a monsanto/con agra/ADM domination situation seems unlikely.
Having larger amounts of farm output going to make fuels for vehicles would also improve the quality of biodiesel fuel from 10% (ten percent from crops, 90% from petroleum) to 98% (almost all from crops).
Itsa neat idea, this biodiesel thing.
There was this guy, awhile back, named R. Buckminster Fuller. He was somewhat of a crackpot. He pioneered geodesic domes, the Fuller projection for global cartography, the tetrahedral lattice, among other things. Not bad ideas, really. All of these are used today.
He also tried to get the world to start driving cars with single rear-wheel steering (the Dymaxion Car), or live in round all-aluminum houses that leaked air by design, or install one-piece stainless-steel bathrooms that could be automatically cleaned. None of these things caught on.
He did have a lesser-trumpeted idea, though, that related to the global electrical grid. The idea (and it requires a VERY high degree of cooperation between nations) was to interconnect every nation's power grid to that of its neighbors. In such a way, power would become more fault-tolerant and production would become cheaper.
The idea is that there are about six hours of every day that people are just not using much electricity. Humans tend to sleep every day. While we sleep, we're not watching TV or running the vacuum or opening/closing the fridge door a lot, so there's more electricity available. A hydroelectric plant doesn't shut down for the night -- it keeps generating power as we sleep. Same goes for a nuclear plant.
Electricty has no shelf-life. You put as much on the grid as you need from it, and when demand fades, you put less on the grid -- but you don't stop producing. Balancing the demand and the production on a global scale, while a tall order, would certainly help lesser-developed nations aquire cheap power and would ease the environmental impacts of individual plants in areas where they may not be needed.
clearly, there's a lot to work out in the global grid scenario, but it has certain advantages and elegant attributes.
I'm a software engineer, so I tend to want pretty beefy parts in my machine, especially on the processor and RAM side. However, I played for a long time (a couple years) with a GForce2 card, with the res dropped as low as I could go and the details all but shut off. I have about a half-dozen PCs that are all in one state of upgrade or another, but my main gaming box is a pretty cheap Celeron 2.7, with 512 MB and an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro. It does everything I need, but I always thirst for the next best thing, and I inevitably end up building a new box every year or so. I'm due for a new one next spring, fwiw. I freely admit to having a hardware addiction, but I'm taking it one day at time.
I don't play consoles because I don't like the controllers, I don't think the graphics are all that great, you can't upgrade them and I don't like most of the the titles. Things like Super Mario XXVII or Street-fighter-game-of-the-week just don't float my boat. Almost all console games just lack the complexity to get me interested. Where I've seen PC ports of console games, they just don't hold a candle to games written for the PC. Halo feels that way to me, but I'm sure that others might disagree. To flip that around, if you tried to port PC-native RTS titles like Rise of Nations, Empire Earth, or Age of Empires to a console, they'd stink. The PC is the premier platform for a rich, fast, complex, attractive gaming experience... and yeah, you have to pay for that, but you can nurse old hardware along for quite awhile.
I think the main beef I have with PC games lately isn't about the hardware that I inevitably buy, but the really stangnant quality of the stories and the less-than-immersive quality of the gameplay. I am almost completely tired of the fantasy RPG, not because I haven't had fun with them in the past, but because they're pretty much all the same, these days -- the character classes are all the same, the races are all the same, the gameplay follows this same old kill-stuff-gain-skill-get-treasure-get-items-solve -puzzle-kill-boss-monster-do-it-again line. Neverwinter Nights, for example, looks great with fine hardware, but I just can't stand playing it, no matter how good it looks.
Oddly enough, titles like Call of Duty, which has got this great, detailed, immersive world to play in, gives me tons of replay value. I play a sesh at work on my lunch hour, where my machine is a pokey Celeron 2.0 with a $75 GeForceMX440 card, and it looks and plays just fine.
Anyhow, to sum up, as someone who likes hardware, likes the PC as a gaming platform, and as someone who just can't stand consoles, I take the hardware upgrade question as just another part of owning PCs. I think Carmack said awhile back that we're reaching the point where there will be fewer and fewer new graphics engines being created, and since new hardware specs are often updated when a new engine comes out, I'd expect a $300 graphics card you buy today to have a much longer useful lifespan than a similarly-priced card would have had five years ago. My Two Cents
My B.A. is in English with a Journalism minor. I went for almost two years after graduation looking for writing jobs in print and broadcast with no luck. Then I found my way to law, where I thought I might stay. After a few years at one of the larger firms here in Denver, I realized that I didn't much care for law, so I needed a change.
I'd always enjoyed coding and working with computers in general, but I didn't have anything that amounted to marketable skills. By the mid 90s, knowing how to operate a teletype, run a BBS, or hack about in Z80 assembler were not hot skills. I needed C/C++, some systems analysis training and a fistful of OOA/OOD, but getting a CS degree as man of letters meant basically going back for another 4-year degree. I called the advising office at my state University's School of Engineering and they pretty much told me that I'd have to start from the beginning.
Somewhat disappointed, I went next to the School of Business at my University and was pleased to find out that the most technical of their MIS programs was in software development, and involved classwork in several popular languages (C/C++, LISP, Smalltalk and Java), along with good theoretical coursework in systems analysis and design. I had to take accounting and finance and economics and statistics, too, but those topics are valued by all businesses, so I went back to school in this program, full time for the first two years, and one course at a time afterwards. All total, it took me seven years to complete my Master's.
After the first 2 years I got an internship with a major telecom company in operations support, then a job writing IDL interface documentation and developer training materials, then a job as an SCM, and a job as a UNIX system admin. I got laid off when the telecom business died, but found a new job doing Dev/SA/SCM/QA/DBA stuff at the all-Java startup where I've been working for two years, now. I get a decent salary, and I'm pretty sure I could find another job if I felt like looking around.
Am I a "real" computer scientist or software engineer? Nope, but I have a job as one. Do I have a CS degree? Nope, but I've got all the formal coursework I wanted and lots more experience than many of the younger engineers that would love to have my job.
The antarctican would have you believe that an MIS is fluff, but an MIS at one institution can be remarkably different from one offered by another. Mine (a Master of Information Systems) was the most technically rigorous graduate degree (definetly NOT a "flush certificate") I could find in my area, the price was right, and I didn't have to take Calc 4 or Diff Eq. Once I had the technical basics, it was easy to find interships and temp work that used my new skills.
I have seen resumes, I should point out, from people with CS degrees that look great, but they can't write even the most simple code, or exploit the most rudimentary logical constructs when asked at interview time. I interviewed one guy, a fresh grad, that could not define a simple C data structure, so just having a CS degree doesn't automatically make you an engineer worth hiring.
The bottom line is if you like the techy work, learn what you need to get started in your first couple semesters and just keep going. Take the small jobs, the internships, the short-term contracts, whatever, as you complete the degree program. Just being in school goes a long way on the resume, too, because it demonstrates that you're taking the initiative to learn new things, and it proves that you can learn new things and manage your time effectively without much supervision.
The ability to learn and adapt is a very powerful skill that often gets underrated, but the best people on my team are the ones that not only know a lot, but can learn new things, too.
My Two Cents
What ends up happening is either 1) we pass a cd around to bootstrap those people who don't have a copy (only works if the game doesn't cd-check during play), 2) find a hacked .exe that doesn't do the CD check and hand that off to the guys that don't have a legit copy, or 3) share the second cd with a partner that doesn't have their own copy (this only applies to those games that have multiple install CDs and any of them will work when the check takes place).
Add to this the fact that the copy protection that's on many of the newer titles we play often prevents us from duping the play disc. If you can dupe it, it sometimes requires a pricey CD copying tool that will render a good copy. (Seems to me anyhow that if I bought and paid for a game, I should have the right to make a playable copy as a backup. CDs don't last forever, after all.)
Now, even though our group collectively spends nearly a thousand dollars on legitimately-acquired and licensed game software annually, we still get caught performing these types of pirate-ish workarounds to get everyone playing. As someone that works in a software shop, I feel pretty strongly that you oughta buy what you play, but it has happened that I've been the guy who didn't want to fork over the bux for a title I just knew I would not play outside of game night. It sticks in my craw, you might say.
I'd like to float the following suggestions:
1. What if (apart from the standard single-user license) you had the chance to buy a club license for three times the cost of a single user license, and would get five legitimate registrations out of it. If you bought a club license, you should have the ability to turn off the CD-check.
2. Assuming that you could have such a thing as club-licensing, how about having a way for a single user registrant to convert their single user copy into a club-licensed version online. You could have a seperate registration for each additional registrant on the copy, and ask for immediate payment by cred card for each additional individual applicant to the club license (at, say, %50 of the retail price).
3. Let people copy the CDs, install, and register themselves just as they would if they had bought it retail, only knock off %50 because the'res no additional cost to the game co. to produce another copy, another manual, or another pretty box.
Now, I know that this doesn't cover all the different ways and reasons people have for pirating, but it might bring more than a few pirates in from the cold, and make up for at least some of the lost revenue.
Just a thought, anyhow.
A dollar is worth as much as anyone thinks it's worth. It has no set value in and of itself. At one time, every dollar was backed by precious metals in the US Federal Reserve. Some dollars were actually issued as silver certificates. You could go to the Federal Reserve Bank and demand to have the paper dollar converted to the equivalent amount of silver. This became too restrictive to economic growth and inhibited the use of debt financing in US budgets. What's more, as more and more of the precious metal is mined, the value of the metal decreases, and therefore the value of the currency backed by the metal also decreases. Today, most developed economies are no longer backed by precious metals for all of these reasons.
A dollar's worth of rice in India is a much much greater quantity than a dollar's worth of rice in the States, and the same dollar buys an even smaller quantity of rice in Japan. This is mostly because (as you point out) the cost of labor (the principal input in agricultural production) in India is cheap. It's getting more expensive for Indian labor, though, as more people move to cities (where the cost of living and therefore labor is greater) from rural areas, as the middle class grows (which increases the expected standard of living), and as more Indians travel and live abroad (where the value of goods and services in a worldwide context can be more tangibly demonstrated). What I'm saying here is that it is India that will become less competitive against nations and regions that are less than developed than she is. Someday, many Indian jobs will be outsourced to Bangladesh, and some already are going there.
The notion that the US should or is going to devalue its own currency is ridiculous. It's actually quite impossible for America to do this, anyway. What's more, everybody loves American money. I've travelled to more than thirty nations, and you can always find someone who has American dollars -- they're the one with a big crowd around them. Saddam hoarded the dollar for its stability and convertibility. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Indians flock to America every day, looking for education, entertainment, relaxation, work or opportunity. In any nation with an American embassy, you don't need to ask where the consulate is, you only need look -- it's the one with the line that stretches around the block. The only people storming the Indian embassy are the ones who made their cash in the developed world and want to bring it home where they can stretch it for all it's worth. Every time they do that, the cost of labor in India goes up. More power to 'em, and more power to India, I say. If it keeps up, maybe you will get the same wages, and you'll get the same costs, too. Good on ye!
Our main beefs with EE and RoN were that while EE had a much longer timeline (you get to play in the future, with future weapons) and this was fun, both it and RoN required micromanaging the individual units quite a lot. The AIs used by both, once you set the difficulty high enough to be challenging, end up cheating so as to make the gameplay more frustrating than challenging.
I enjoyed AoE quite a lot, and ditto for AoE2, but I think that these games seem to have a hard time striking a good balance between unit richness, a lengthy historical timeline for the gameplay, and the quality of the AI. RoN (to me anyway) tried to add a more structured environment with city building limits and all kinds of hierarchies, but I found these things more obstacles than anything else. You still end up micromanaging, but you end up micromanaging other things than the units.
I wish EE would be improved, truthfully.
My .02, fwiw.
-- R
SWG is like any MMORG: it's a work in-progress. It gets fine-tuned as you go. Sure, there are bugs that take a while to fix, but some are quickly dealt with. The time to start the game has been cut in half since I started three months ago, and this appears to be due to the way terrain is generated and objects are populated.
One note about the Jedi thing. It would suck if everyone could macro themselves into a jedi. I quit playing UO because there were just too many ways to macro up a super char that could kill all. Even in the SW storyline, there was a time when Jedi were all over the place, but their numbers dwindled by E4. If everyone could be a jedi, then everyone WOULD be a jedi, and boy would that be no fun.
Right now, there are lots of people who aspire to high rank in the Imperial chain of command, and more power to em. There are rebels of the same stripe, and plenty of other factions to fight for.
As for the no spaceships thing, I can wait while I develop my char on cheesy hunting quests. I'll have enough money saved up to buy one (or at least to buy some kind of creature/moped to ride around on).
I guess it's expected that one would have to pay more for all the extras, and that $300 is still less than a barebones winOS purchase, but how often does someone have to sign back up for all these extras? In a five year lifetime, wouldn't you be paying double or triple that $300 up-front cost for a fully-featured virus-protected OS?
I don't see that Lindows offers a cheaper cost model than winOS in the long run. I'm pretty confident that Mom would use it, but how long would Mom continue to pay for these extras. Did I miss something?
Our LAN gaming group is about 7-8 people, all guys (most over 30), and about half of the group plays female chars. Admittedly, we have yet to play any massively multiplayer games in the group, but if you go on what happens in DungeonSiege and UT2K3 (our faves), half the group will be playing with chick skins or chick chars.
I played UO for a good long time, and found that while I got more assistance and lenient plunder-sharing privs with my chick char, I got hassled by the dO0Dz (a.k.a. adolescent boys) for "favors" any time I was in town. I could unleash a six-pack of whoop-ass when I had to, but after awhile it seemed more trouble than it was worth. I went back to my male-gendered chars and never went back.
Some of the other posts from guys with female chars ring really true. It's pretty cool to see a chick (maybe your chick) kick ass in a game. It's unexpected, or perhaps less expected than the conquest of a buff male char named "GorkonTheDestroyer". I get the sense that this kind of expectation will become less significant as we get more strong women roles in film and game entertainment products, but it's definetly there.
I plan on signing up for StarWarsGalaxies at the end of the month (assuming timely release), and I will probably start a female char. I wonder how it will go, and what the dO0Dz of the future will think of it.
Well, I suppose that it's not very surprising that "kids these days" don't know how (or don't want) to write in cursive. It's also not surprising that most of the posts to this topic are poorly-written. I found more grammatical errors than posts in my brief survey. As engineering-oriented people, we're famous for reducing the number of keystrokes required to issue a command, and we love brevity and compact code. Most engineers cannot write a complete sentence, or even spell the words correctly, let alone write in cursive script. The same is true for most doctors and scientists, so at least the company is good, right? Having worked in law for awhile, I found that nearly every lawyer I worked with (male or female) had great penmanship, if they lowered themselves to going without the dictaphone for a day. It's odd, but the right-brain/left-brain thing may account for this.
... so totally undecipherable that he often can't read it, himself ... forced me to put in ten pages of handwriting practice every week -- all through grade school. While my hand has become timeworn and ragged, I can still pen off a REAL LIVE LETTER to anyone I want and have it be legible. I hated handwriting practice, but it did make me a much faster writer than a typist, and I think more while I write than I do while I type.
I do find the decline of cursive a bit troubling. I learned it like everyone else: over a few years in primary school. My writing has decended into a mish-mash of printing and cursive, but it is much more legible than anyone I work with, or anyone I'm related to. My dad, whose handwriting is totally inscrutable
Pleased to be in the minority on this one, but handwriting is a valuable skill, and it really should be taught. How else can someone attempt to decipher the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution?
-- R
Packet-switched telephony is old hat. It hasn't had the kind of broad-based consumer support that it probably could have, but businesses have been using enterprise-scale packet-switched telephony for more than a decade. Businesses like Clarent, Sonus and Siemens have already carved out the space for current VOIP and packet-switched technologies. Some countries with developing communications infrastructures are skipping circuit-switched telephone systems entirely and moving straight to packet-switched backbones.
They tried to offer consumer VOIP over CATV a couple years ago here in the Denver area, but this was also back when Qwest was "riding the light". Consumers liked the idea of one bill, but didn't like having to depend on a single incoming cable, and a single company (AT&T) for everything. There also wasn't much savings. (It all smacked a little of the time before the Bell breakup.) Given that the local cable company has changed hands about every five years, consistency in service may have also been a concern.
Has anyone around here got/tried VOIP over cable? I'd be interested in knowing what the experience was.
Time Warner telecom made a handy bundle (and probably still does) on installing SONET rings for businesses to use for putting their phone calls on packet-switched networks -- all to cut the cost of long distance down to a fraction. As someone mentioned in another post, you can get the same 99.99 quality from packet-switched telephone systems as you get from circuits, and two stage dialing (not to mention billing metrics) is much easier to manage.
Clarent, the early leader in VOIP gateways (now under new ownership, btw), has got some great softswitch technologies (Class IV and V call managers) that do SS7, H323, and a bunch of other protocols. Having spent more than my share of time prodding 5ESS and Datakit, it's comforting to see softswitches taking more of the burden, and circuits being freed for other uses.
I like reading /. just as much as anyone, but this post wasn't terribly exciting and didn't say anything new. There's so much that really is exciting in telecom that I'm led to believe that this one must have snuck past the front line. Hopefully we won't see forthcoming stories about how "Graphite powder reportedly makes Abacus calculations faster" or "Fifty ways to soup up your slide rule".
-- ninjagin"640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates
I'm just curious as who the insured really is. The police report at the smoking gun site shows the same as Robert Ballantine, while the article names him as Gary Valentine. Okay, so maybe cops don't have the best handwriting, but if you're a city beat reporter, you're supposed to be able to read and faithfully reproduce the facts in a police report. Either Valentine/Ballantine, the cops, the reporter, or any combination of the three are being less than truthful. Something stinks here, alot more than a $5500 machine that the average kid can outrun.
I've seen the machines at WalMartDotCom and I'm curious about how Lindows has approached the task of accumulating, testing, supplying and updating device drivers for users. Windows makes this comparatively easy for the novice user. What is the Lindows perspective on native driver support for the endless array of hardware (& peripheral) configurations upon which it could be run? Thank you, -- ninjagin
This movie started the "points" system for rewarding car-on-person collisions. There are also a number of great cameos. B-movie all the way. Saw it at the drive-in as a kid, rented it years later, and still liked it.