Elsevier (RELX) costs around $30B total, so perhaps not. Better would be to very publicly and repeatedly proclaim that the era of closed scientific publications is over, then over a decade or so push down the value until controlling stake can be had for peanuts (relative). After that they can put it all public unless someone else has taken the step in the mean time.
Many older games are still extremely good, despite dated graphics and more difficult game play compared to modern creations. I suggest checking out adventuregamers.com if you like Grim Fandango, Syberia, etc:
http://www.adventuregamers.com/reviews.php
reviews -> all -> sort by ratings
Most of the highly rated games are very nice indeed. Some can be difficult to find. Ebay/amaazon/etc may have some, gog.com or such may have others, or your friendly neighbourhood p2p archive probably have most of the rest. Telltale games and some other companies do create good modern adventure games as well.
Playing together with others also makes it more fun. My wife and I usually play together, and old adventure games are our staple fare. Coop games can be good, but much more difficult to find. Some old RPG games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights are good coop, as well as some more modern arcade games like shadowgrounds and alien swarm.
Then there are the MMOs and regular multiplayer, but we have not found any that we both like yet.
The good immersive games are few and far between, but looking through forums and fan sites can help find the true gems, whether it is an adventure game that carries you to another world for days, a simulator or fps that is good for a couple of hours, or an arcade that leeches 15min of focus every now and then. List the stuff you really liked then start searching using some of them as search terms.
Genes mainly contain information on how the initial stage of protein construction should go. Protein design, engineering, improvement is not new. We have improved upon quite a few proteins, shooting for better functionality in one area or other, and that is done by "improving" the genetic code in one way or other.
The immune system is only partially responsible for weeding out those nasty malfunctioning cells. Many other systems kick in. Mainly in the cell itself, programmed cell death - apoptosis - is triggered from a multitude malfunctioning cell states, as well as from various well functioning states internal and external to the cell itself.
Malfunctioning cells generally have to be seriously malfunctioning, and express a "non-self" surface biochemistry before the immune system kicks in and starts attacking it.
I spent quite a few hours on I-War, Defiance, and Edge of Chaos, and they certianly take some training to get good at. Before those there was only the old amiga game "Warhead". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhead_(computer_game)
Of course I also enjoy Descent, Freespace, Tie Fighter, etc. But more for the general feeling or dogfighting, not very "realistic", just fun game systems. Even EVE is a lot of fun to play, but it has nothing to do with space battle. It is just EVE battle, i.e. coordination, logistics, social management, etc.
The greater LA region is still minor compared to the greater Tokyo region, population, economy, etc.
The cultural choice is what makes LA difficult without a car. The Tokyo mass transit system is in my experience the best in the world, and it really works amazingly well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles_Areahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo
I have worked on both industry and academic projects. If they really want to own and "close source" the code I write, then they have to pay a hell of a lot more than if they just want to open source it. Academia never pays that much, so I always: 1) negotiate for personal ownership or charte blanche open source. Usually the contract negotiator has no clue and agrees. If that is not possible then 2) make very liberal use of gpl code in my project after clearing with group leader. The latter approach is usually very appealing to lower management, i.e. group leaders, since it brings higher productivity and faster results that will be easier to maintain in the future.
Sigh, they really should have gotten this better. Come on. This gameplay style might have been fun a long time ago, for about 5-10 minutes. Today, MMO, hours... Nope.
The I-War people got it right several years ago. Damn good game(s).
In the early days even the Warhead (old amiga) got this right.
Today, I would expect something a lot better.
Gartner audience, as in people listening to what Gartner has to say... Well, why don't do that now? You have already said that wondows has lower TCO than Linux, all supported by Gartner.
I have deployed several clusters throughout the years, mainly for research in academic environments and small companies, and I can say that clustering makes a lot of things soo much easier.
Diskless SSI clustering makes maintainance a breeze, and ensures that all systems are always in sync and up to date. All nodes can run the same system image, whether they are servers, dedicated compute nodes, or regular desktop machines. Of course you can still have local hard disks if you want, and for some apps it is recommended, but the system boots from the servers nontheless.
OpenMosix dynamic distribution makes it possible to use heterogenous hardware, and handles highly dynamic computational load quite well. The applications just wander off to whatever physical machine will run them the fastest. This also makes simple parallel implementations of code a lot simpler, just fork and forget, and you will pay a small overhead for the benefit of having good load-balancing automagically.
Dymanic distribution also makes it possible to use regular desktops as cluster nodes along with the dedicated compute nodes. Need windows dualboot on some nodes? no problem, when you shut them down do boot windows, the processes that used to run on those machines just migrate to another node. When you go back to linux, processes come back.
Need explicit parallelism? no probs, MPI / PVM etc works fine together with the dynamic distribution and complements it for applications that are already well parallelized.
Scaling? This has never been an issue as long as the network infrastructure is up to speed. A decent 100mb or gigabit system has proven to be good enough for just about everything I've seen.
High availability? How about having several servers that can run hot or cold spare for each other, and which can function as compute nodes as well... Nice when a server MB catches fire (yes, I've had that, and lost as much as a few minutes of work time, (the time for someone to walk to the server room, unplug the smoking machine and restart a running (cold spare) backup server). Most of the people at the lab didn't even notice the hickup.)
Batch/job queues? no probs, use sun grid engine, write your own, or whatever. simple as cake.
I have mainly used gentoo linux for the flexibility and ease of maintainance and I can highly recommend it. It is all fairly simple to implement on gentoo. Just read up on gentoo system administration, pxelinux, tftp, openmosix, and whatever you feel you need to use it for.
The main problem right now is the lack of good openmosix support for 2.6 series of kernels. But I'm sure that some or all of this can be built with any or all of the other dynamic distribution systems out there.
If you have off-list questions please contact me at my nick at gmail.com.
I would like to chime in on parent's song. I've authored and played lots of RPG "scenarios", adventures and camapigns, as well as written ordinary fiction and to some extent also computer games. Writing a fixed story takes _far_ less work than authoring an interactive scenario. When allowing for player/reader to make real choises you have to have a much more solid story, you have fewer tricks to use and you have to cover a lot more ground "just in case".
I don't agree with you. Regardless of your views and ideas there will always be those that think differently, and think that their way is the right way, and right/important enough to validate force/violence.
Could the west have behaved better towards the rest of the world. Most certainly. But it could also have been worse. Personally I think that some western coutries' foreign policies in the past decades has been horrible, but horrible enough to validate random violence against civilians? No! Not in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Elsevier (RELX) costs around $30B total, so perhaps not. Better would be to very publicly and repeatedly proclaim that the era of closed scientific publications is over, then over a decade or so push down the value until controlling stake can be had for peanuts (relative). After that they can put it all public unless someone else has taken the step in the mean time.
Many older games are still extremely good, despite dated graphics and more difficult game play compared to modern creations. I suggest checking out adventuregamers.com if you like Grim Fandango, Syberia, etc: http://www.adventuregamers.com/reviews.php reviews -> all -> sort by ratings Most of the highly rated games are very nice indeed. Some can be difficult to find. Ebay/amaazon/etc may have some, gog.com or such may have others, or your friendly neighbourhood p2p archive probably have most of the rest. Telltale games and some other companies do create good modern adventure games as well. Playing together with others also makes it more fun. My wife and I usually play together, and old adventure games are our staple fare. Coop games can be good, but much more difficult to find. Some old RPG games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights are good coop, as well as some more modern arcade games like shadowgrounds and alien swarm. Then there are the MMOs and regular multiplayer, but we have not found any that we both like yet. The good immersive games are few and far between, but looking through forums and fan sites can help find the true gems, whether it is an adventure game that carries you to another world for days, a simulator or fps that is good for a couple of hours, or an arcade that leeches 15min of focus every now and then. List the stuff you really liked then start searching using some of them as search terms.
Genes mainly contain information on how the initial stage of protein construction should go. Protein design, engineering, improvement is not new. We have improved upon quite a few proteins, shooting for better functionality in one area or other, and that is done by "improving" the genetic code in one way or other.
The immune system is only partially responsible for weeding out those nasty malfunctioning cells. Many other systems kick in. Mainly in the cell itself, programmed cell death - apoptosis - is triggered from a multitude malfunctioning cell states, as well as from various well functioning states internal and external to the cell itself. Malfunctioning cells generally have to be seriously malfunctioning, and express a "non-self" surface biochemistry before the immune system kicks in and starts attacking it.
The independence war series is very interesting for more "reality" in the space battles. And a lot of fun to play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-War_(Independence_War)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Chaos
I spent quite a few hours on I-War, Defiance, and Edge of Chaos, and they certianly take some training to get good at. Before those there was only the old amiga game "Warhead".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhead_(computer_game)
Of course I also enjoy Descent, Freespace, Tie Fighter, etc. But more for the general feeling or dogfighting, not very "realistic", just fun game systems. Even EVE is a lot of fun to play, but it has nothing to do with space battle. It is just EVE battle, i.e. coordination, logistics, social management, etc.
The greater LA region is still minor compared to the greater Tokyo region, population, economy, etc. The cultural choice is what makes LA difficult without a car. The Tokyo mass transit system is in my experience the best in the world, and it really works amazingly well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo
Is this something like what you are looking for?
http://www.adesso.us/product_details.asp?dept_id=106&pf_id=KA33PCK-308UB
I have worked on both industry and academic projects. If they really want to own and "close source" the code I write, then they have to pay a hell of a lot more than if they just want to open source it. Academia never pays that much, so I always:
1) negotiate for personal ownership or charte blanche open source.
Usually the contract negotiator has no clue and agrees.
If that is not possible then
2) make very liberal use of gpl code in my project after clearing with group leader.
The latter approach is usually very appealing to lower management, i.e. group leaders, since it brings higher productivity and faster results that will be easier to maintain in the future.
Sigh, they really should have gotten this better. Come on. This gameplay style might have been fun a long time ago, for about 5-10 minutes. Today, MMO, hours... Nope. The I-War people got it right several years ago. Damn good game(s). In the early days even the Warhead (old amiga) got this right. Today, I would expect something a lot better.
Gartner audience, as in people listening to what Gartner has to say...
Well, why don't do that now? You have already said that wondows has lower TCO than Linux, all supported by Gartner.
Gartner, the reliable source
[lol]
I have deployed several clusters throughout the years, mainly for research in academic environments and small companies, and I can say that clustering makes a lot of things soo much easier.
Diskless SSI clustering makes maintainance a breeze, and ensures that all systems are always in sync and up to date. All nodes can run the same system image, whether they are servers, dedicated compute nodes, or regular desktop machines.
Of course you can still have local hard disks if you want, and for some apps it is recommended, but the system boots from the servers nontheless.
OpenMosix dynamic distribution makes it possible to use heterogenous hardware, and handles highly dynamic computational load quite well. The applications just wander off to whatever physical machine will run them the fastest.
This also makes simple parallel implementations of code a lot simpler, just fork and forget, and you will pay a small overhead for the benefit of having good load-balancing automagically.
Dymanic distribution also makes it possible to use regular desktops as cluster nodes along with the dedicated compute nodes.
Need windows dualboot on some nodes? no problem, when you shut them down do boot windows, the processes that used to run on those machines just migrate to another node. When you go back to linux, processes come back.
Need explicit parallelism? no probs, MPI / PVM etc works fine together with the dynamic distribution and complements it for applications that are already well parallelized.
Scaling? This has never been an issue as long as the network infrastructure is up to speed. A decent 100mb or gigabit system has proven to be good enough for just about everything I've seen.
High availability? How about having several servers that can run hot or cold spare for each other, and which can function as compute nodes as well... Nice when a server MB catches fire (yes, I've had that, and lost as much as a few minutes of work time, (the time for someone to walk to the server room, unplug the smoking machine and restart a running (cold spare) backup server). Most of the people at the lab didn't even notice the hickup.)
Batch/job queues? no probs, use sun grid engine, write your own, or whatever. simple as cake.
I have mainly used gentoo linux for the flexibility and ease of maintainance and I can highly recommend it. It is all fairly simple to implement on gentoo. Just read up on gentoo system administration, pxelinux, tftp, openmosix, and whatever you feel you need to use it for.
The main problem right now is the lack of good openmosix support for 2.6 series of kernels. But I'm sure that some or all of this can be built with any or all of the other dynamic distribution systems out there.
If you have off-list questions please contact me at my nick at gmail.com.
I would like to chime in on parent's song.
I've authored and played lots of RPG "scenarios", adventures and camapigns, as well as written ordinary fiction and to some extent also computer games.
Writing a fixed story takes _far_ less work than authoring an interactive scenario.
When allowing for player/reader to make real choises you have to have a much more solid story, you have fewer tricks to use and you have to cover a lot more ground "just in case".
I don't agree with you.
Regardless of your views and ideas there will always be those that think differently, and think that their way is the right way, and right/important enough to validate force/violence.
Could the west have behaved better towards the rest of the world. Most certainly. But it could also have been worse. Personally I think that some western coutries' foreign policies in the past decades has been horrible, but horrible enough to validate random violence against civilians? No! Not in my opinion.