It seems that it redirects with links referred from other websites. After putting in the URL manually, I was able to view the pages. Pretty cool stuff.
It would make a heck of a lot more sense for the US to switch to such a system. Or, alternatively, to use one similar to Japan and some parts of Asia, with the yyyy/mm/dd system. The latter is usually how I append the filenames of recurring text I'm working on for archival purposes.
A fascinating prospect to be sure, but entirely dependent upon the nature and composition of the crashed/impacted material; high Venusian surface temperatures combining with the highly noxious and corrosive atmosphere pretty much eat or melt away simple ores and many other types of materials. Russia's Venera and Vega spacecraft and NASA's Pioneer are probably little more than slag now, maybe even mostly evaporated into the thick atmosphere as trace elements.
It seems to me that moderate use of video games is only part of the solution. Ultimately, it comes down to parental involvement and interaction. When I was growing up, my mom and I often played the Atari 2600, NES and SNES together. She made it a point to just sit back and watch sometimes, too. This actually served two purposes:
She had supervision over the game console use and game content. She knew what kinds of games I played, how long I played them for, etc. This made it remarkably easy for her to anticipate which games to buy for me as gifts or rewards... Not to mention the fact that she played the hell out of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Metroid and Tetris whenever I wasn't playing.
She also gave me encouragement as I played — sometimes offering other possible avenues of action when I was stumped, soothing words when I was frustrated, or positive reinforcement upon completing a major game objective. If I was acting too rashly in response to a game's difficulty, she would make me quit until I calmed down and approached it again with a fresh perspective and a cooler head.
Ironically, her method of coaching helped to sharpen my natural tendency for analytical thinking, further reinforcing it with the (sometimes negative) quality of persistence (some would also say stubbornness) in coming to an understanding with a thing or concept, or completing a goal. Parental involvement is A Good Thing(tm) for all involved, and a lot of parents nowadays have become disappointingly lax in that department.
One of the best things to do to encourage that such involvement or observation actually takes place? Put the console in the living room. If a kid is going to have his or her game machine and/or computer in their room, that's likely where they'll spend most of their time, thusly putting them outside the sphere of parental influence. Putting the console in a common, non-private area will give the parent(s) the opportunity to regulate usage and observe their child in action; it also affords the parent(s) an opportunity to see how their child reacts to and interacts with the game.
And believe me, if the infamous Chocolate Milk video is any indication, a lot of these kids seriously need parental intervention. I can say, thankfully, that I've never acted like such an out-of-control heathen — I knew the fear of MOM, not God.
Some of the younger generation may look at such a suggestion with great disdain, but take it from someone who actually had a parent take the time to get involved — it may seem lame or embarassing, but is A Good Thing(tm). It's also a necessary thing. Take the time, parents; it does make a difference.
Mike: Yeah. You know, if I had been flying that baby and had a low-altitude flameout like that, I'd just reduce my elevators, dip the nose, and fire up the engine.
Servo: You don't know how to fly.
Mike: Sure I do! I'm fully instrument-rated for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
It's hard to have good PR in Japan when your console's name is written as × (×-hako — for some reason, Japanese unicode isn't showing up), which essentially means no-good box in Japanese.
Lost Odyssey & Blue Dragon both look very good; if MS wants to achieve some measure of success in Japan, why don't they direct a part of its massive marketing machine into generating a little noise about its best titles? Are they relying on the underground/guerilla/grass-roots type of hype-generation?
I couldn't agree more; Sakaguchi-san has an excellent track record as a creator-writer-director for the Final Fantasy series, and his and close compadre Nobuo Uematsu's work at Mistwalker don't look to disappoint. Having such a powerhouse developing software is sure to garner some attention by word of mouth at the very least, but if Microsoft hopes to be successful on the Japanese front, they should probably look into some market research with the otaku crowd and hire a died-in-the-wool—and very Japanese—advertising team to market their product.
Pick something you want to learn. Download it, RTFM, and play with it.
You'll have better luck if you have a concrete objective in mind, i.e. learn about databases by setting up a simple database to track your comic book collection, run queries against it, make a PHP front end to search it etc.
I went to high school in a very small town (less than 2,500 registered) in a relatively poor Bible Belt county. Athletics and religion were the primary focuses of the education they offered. In fact, one of my teachers in particular, a world history/economics/law and government/civil studies teacher, had this strange notion of relating every facet of history, science or government to the bible or biblical scripture, often when it would have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter at hand. Now, I'm not one against people's varying religious or spiritual practices, but such a blatant and patented disregard for objectivity in lieu of personal belief was simply unacceptable in a teacher.
Basically, if it didn't have anything to do with God or the football team, there was a good chance it wasn't going to receive much attention from the upper-echelon, let alone the school board.
That was only one of many differences I had with the local establishment and, as misfortune would have it, the method you've recommended was something I had to apply to my general education, not just my education in technology. In the sphere of technology education, I mean, we at least had effing LOGO classes when I was in second grade (in the next county over), and we got time every week to program in BASIC on the Apple IIe. In my high school, we didn't even have a computer lab until my last year, and even then it was used only for the computer club, which met twice every nine weeks.
The state of general education in the US is pitiable at best and my high school's abilities to meet my learning requirements directly reflect that. While I'd like to say that it was only a singular representation, it's far more widespread than that and to greater degrees both above and below the thin bracket of average educational competency.
The system couldn't meet my needs as an adolescent of above-average intelligence, and in the end it was up to me and my parents to request that I—an underage student at the time—use a county-based program normally allocated for dropouts to get their high school diplomas without having to resort to a GED. Though I graduated and got a diploma from my high school, I was lucky that such a loophole existed.
A lot of kids, both of above-average and below-average intelligence have special learning needs, none of which are met by the system currently in place. And with the increasing proliferation of technology into all areas of our lives, education in this field is becoming especially important.
So you or your parents taking your education into your own hands is probably the best advice to be given at the moment. Well, that and contacting county, state, and federal government representatives in regards to education reform because local bureaucrats and school board officials aren't liable to do much of anything.
My mistake. In my sleep-deprived consciousness, I somehow read your comment as a concern about the negatively-charged ions wreaking havoc with the computer's internal components and sought to clarify that. My apologies.
However, your concern about the amount of gunk that forms on the collection grid of these devices is very well-founded. I own one of the IB knock-offs and it requires a great deal of cleaning on a very regular basis, at least once a week--made all the more difficult by living in an apartment in which three of the other tennants are heavy smokers (which was why I bought it). That stuff is a right bitch to get off those collection plates, I tell you what, and it does impact both air flow rates and the device's ability to remove contaminants from the air.
In the article, he stated his concern about the generation of negatively-charged ions moving across the surface of delicate electronic components, so he took a cue from the neutral ionic HVAC filtration systems used by companies with dedicated server rooms and removed one of the diodes from the driver circuit; this (supposedly) greatly reduced the number of negatively-charged ions passing through the system.
This is quite an interesting idea, the use of such a device as a means of moving air inside a computer case. If a properly developed system were created by engineers with the intent of such an application, I'm sure it would be as neutral charge-wise as those systems already in use in server HVAC setups. I'd love to see such a system hit the market.
I think 99.95% is about as close to dead-on-balls-accurate as it gets with our current knowledge of the universe; I mean, there's always a margin for error in absolutely everything, it's just one of the facts of the chaotic universe in which we live. Still, it just goes to show how far ahead of the game (and of the times) Einstein was.
Einstein's still my hero. He's the Samuel L. Jackson of science.
Just a minor correction on your assumptions so far:
I have to buy a wireless adapter -- No; 802.11b/g wireless ethernet is standard out-of-the-box for the Wii. A USB ethernet adapter is sold separately.
You don't get Opera for free -- Yes, you do; Opera for the Wii is free to download until June 2007. Download cost after June has not yet been released to the public (to my knowledge).
You really ought to read rather than skim over the information released yesterday, or at the very least look it up on Wikipedia.
$249.99 for the Wii, one remote, one nunchaku attachment, a Wii Sports game, and Opera -- all ready to go out-of-the-box. Yeah, a Wii-mote costs $39.95, but one has to consider the technology going into that thing. Given what's in the box for the price, it actually isn't too bad a deal. Just a DualShock2 controller for the PS2 was $29.95 for several years, and it was just buttons, two analogue sticks and rumble.
Somehow, this brings to mind that episode of TNG, Booby Trap; I keep seeing the bridge crew of the Promellian vessel in my head, only they're DNF programmers still at their Pentium III workstations.
"Commendable. They died at their posts."
Even as a not-so-scrawny-nerd, I have to say that it does get quite tiresome lugging my 19in. CRT beast from the 90s around everywhere. LAN parties, trips to friends' houses (all of whom are 300+ miles)--you get kind of fed up after a while. Still, the picture quality, color quality and resolution of a CRT are tough to beat. I've yet to see a plasma, LCD, DLP, or LCOS monitor match a CRT's vibrance.
I've seen a few of the new Samsung SED panels coming out of trade shows in Korea and Japan, as well as a few reports from CES, and they certainly seem like a great contender to actually replace the multi-purpose CRT. Unfortuantely, there's no word on release dates or prices for purchasing on this side of the pond, but I'll keep waiting.
Animal Crossing is currently in development for Wii. Series creator Katsuya Eguchi confirmed this in several interviews around the time of E3 this year. Most of the interviews have centered around the use of the WiiConnect24 feature to allow friends (I'm assuming it'll use something akin to a FriendCode system or, if some of the console-based instant messaging patents Nintendo has filed is implimented for WiiConnect24, an IM-like friends list) to visit the town (presumably by loading the save file data from your console) and leave messages, gifts, or make changes similar to what is done on the N64, GameCube and DS versions.
I'm quite eager to play a Wii version of Animal Crossing, actually, mostly because of the online element (and the fact that I don't have a DS.. yet). I started with Doubutsu no Mori (Animal Forest) for the Nintendo 64 several years ago before my ex-girlfriend got me AC for the GCN and, in both cases, I marveled at the possibilities the game had for online play. If Eguchi-san's team also implements a visual standard comparable to the box art, which is well within Wii's graphical capabilities, then so much the better.
If I've read it correctly, Warren Ellis is providing hosting services for webcomic writer/artists for free and allowing them to post their own Google AdSense links so they can collect on ad revenue. That's something a lot of 'free' hosts don't allow, as they're the ones that collect on the ad revenue to support your hosting fees. While I don't think the host itself is precluded from its own ad revenue, this should be a boon to potential digital indie comic creators; free hosting, your own ad revenue, and increased visibility within the community.
Considering the fact that my best friend and I are about to bring our own sci-fi action drama comic (not all webcomics are comedic in nature) to fruition, the idea behind this seems like something I ought to look into. We don't have the money for hosting at the moment; though I do run a FreeBSD-based web server off my cable line, 20KiB upstream isn't much to write home about and isn't very practical for a large viewership when one takes into account the bandwidth required for just the comic page (8.5x11@72dpi).
While I'm hopeful, I think it would be best to watch with vested interest, see what happens.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that it redirects with links referred from other websites. After putting in the URL manually, I was able to view the pages. Pretty cool stuff.
Apparently Nintendo has caught wind of this and has already set up redirects to the Wii root website from these links.
It would make a heck of a lot more sense for the US to switch to such a system. Or, alternatively, to use one similar to Japan and some parts of Asia, with the yyyy/mm/dd system. The latter is usually how I append the filenames of recurring text I'm working on for archival purposes.
Europeans use a dd/mm/yy format for date. :) So the resulting article would have been posted today, November 2nd, 2006.
A fascinating prospect to be sure, but entirely dependent upon the nature and composition of the crashed/impacted material; high Venusian surface temperatures combining with the highly noxious and corrosive atmosphere pretty much eat or melt away simple ores and many other types of materials. Russia's Venera and Vega spacecraft and NASA's Pioneer are probably little more than slag now, maybe even mostly evaporated into the thick atmosphere as trace elements.
Heh. Kinda reminds me of that scene from Liar, Liar:
That would be insanely cool, but I don't think I'd want to wear my pants inside-out; even if it will be the in thing.
I think the term you're looking for is gimping it. :)
It seems to me that moderate use of video games is only part of the solution. Ultimately, it comes down to parental involvement and interaction. When I was growing up, my mom and I often played the Atari 2600, NES and SNES together. She made it a point to just sit back and watch sometimes, too. This actually served two purposes:
She had supervision over the game console use and game content. She knew what kinds of games I played, how long I played them for, etc. This made it remarkably easy for her to anticipate which games to buy for me as gifts or rewards... Not to mention the fact that she played the hell out of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Metroid and Tetris whenever I wasn't playing.
She also gave me encouragement as I played — sometimes offering other possible avenues of action when I was stumped, soothing words when I was frustrated, or positive reinforcement upon completing a major game objective. If I was acting too rashly in response to a game's difficulty, she would make me quit until I calmed down and approached it again with a fresh perspective and a cooler head.
Ironically, her method of coaching helped to sharpen my natural tendency for analytical thinking, further reinforcing it with the (sometimes negative) quality of persistence (some would also say stubbornness) in coming to an understanding with a thing or concept, or completing a goal. Parental involvement is A Good Thing(tm) for all involved, and a lot of parents nowadays have become disappointingly lax in that department.
One of the best things to do to encourage that such involvement or observation actually takes place? Put the console in the living room. If a kid is going to have his or her game machine and/or computer in their room, that's likely where they'll spend most of their time, thusly putting them outside the sphere of parental influence. Putting the console in a common, non-private area will give the parent(s) the opportunity to regulate usage and observe their child in action; it also affords the parent(s) an opportunity to see how their child reacts to and interacts with the game.
And believe me, if the infamous Chocolate Milk video is any indication, a lot of these kids seriously need parental intervention. I can say, thankfully, that I've never acted like such an out-of-control heathen — I knew the fear of MOM, not God.
Some of the younger generation may look at such a suggestion with great disdain, but take it from someone who actually had a parent take the time to get involved — it may seem lame or embarassing, but is A Good Thing(tm). It's also a necessary thing. Take the time, parents; it does make a difference.
When using a portable particle accelerator, always remember this important safety tip:
Mike: Yeah. You know, if I had been flying that baby and had a low-altitude flameout like that, I'd just reduce my elevators, dip the nose, and fire up the engine.
Servo: You don't know how to fly.
Mike: Sure I do! I'm fully instrument-rated for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
It's hard to have good PR in Japan when your console's name is written as × (×-hako — for some reason, Japanese unicode isn't showing up), which essentially means no-good box in Japanese.
I couldn't agree more; Sakaguchi-san has an excellent track record as a creator-writer-director for the Final Fantasy series, and his and close compadre Nobuo Uematsu's work at Mistwalker don't look to disappoint. Having such a powerhouse developing software is sure to garner some attention by word of mouth at the very least, but if Microsoft hopes to be successful on the Japanese front, they should probably look into some market research with the otaku crowd and hire a died-in-the-wool—and very Japanese—advertising team to market their product.
I went to high school in a very small town (less than 2,500 registered) in a relatively poor Bible Belt county. Athletics and religion were the primary focuses of the education they offered. In fact, one of my teachers in particular, a world history/economics/law and government/civil studies teacher, had this strange notion of relating every facet of history, science or government to the bible or biblical scripture, often when it would have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter at hand. Now, I'm not one against people's varying religious or spiritual practices, but such a blatant and patented disregard for objectivity in lieu of personal belief was simply unacceptable in a teacher.
Basically, if it didn't have anything to do with God or the football team, there was a good chance it wasn't going to receive much attention from the upper-echelon, let alone the school board.
That was only one of many differences I had with the local establishment and, as misfortune would have it, the method you've recommended was something I had to apply to my general education, not just my education in technology. In the sphere of technology education, I mean, we at least had effing LOGO classes when I was in second grade (in the next county over), and we got time every week to program in BASIC on the Apple IIe. In my high school, we didn't even have a computer lab until my last year, and even then it was used only for the computer club, which met twice every nine weeks.
The state of general education in the US is pitiable at best and my high school's abilities to meet my learning requirements directly reflect that. While I'd like to say that it was only a singular representation, it's far more widespread than that and to greater degrees both above and below the thin bracket of average educational competency.
The system couldn't meet my needs as an adolescent of above-average intelligence, and in the end it was up to me and my parents to request that I—an underage student at the time—use a county-based program normally allocated for dropouts to get their high school diplomas without having to resort to a GED. Though I graduated and got a diploma from my high school, I was lucky that such a loophole existed.
A lot of kids, both of above-average and below-average intelligence have special learning needs, none of which are met by the system currently in place. And with the increasing proliferation of technology into all areas of our lives, education in this field is becoming especially important.
So you or your parents taking your education into your own hands is probably the best advice to be given at the moment. Well, that and contacting county, state, and federal government representatives in regards to education reform because local bureaucrats and school board officials aren't liable to do much of anything.
My mistake. In my sleep-deprived consciousness, I somehow read your comment as a concern about the negatively-charged ions wreaking havoc with the computer's internal components and sought to clarify that. My apologies.
However, your concern about the amount of gunk that forms on the collection grid of these devices is very well-founded. I own one of the IB knock-offs and it requires a great deal of cleaning on a very regular basis, at least once a week--made all the more difficult by living in an apartment in which three of the other tennants are heavy smokers (which was why I bought it). That stuff is a right bitch to get off those collection plates, I tell you what, and it does impact both air flow rates and the device's ability to remove contaminants from the air.
In the article, he stated his concern about the generation of negatively-charged ions moving across the surface of delicate electronic components, so he took a cue from the neutral ionic HVAC filtration systems used by companies with dedicated server rooms and removed one of the diodes from the driver circuit; this (supposedly) greatly reduced the number of negatively-charged ions passing through the system.
This is quite an interesting idea, the use of such a device as a means of moving air inside a computer case. If a properly developed system were created by engineers with the intent of such an application, I'm sure it would be as neutral charge-wise as those systems already in use in server HVAC setups. I'd love to see such a system hit the market.
I think 99.95% is about as close to dead-on-balls-accurate as it gets with our current knowledge of the universe; I mean, there's always a margin for error in absolutely everything, it's just one of the facts of the chaotic universe in which we live. Still, it just goes to show how far ahead of the game (and of the times) Einstein was.
Einstein's still my hero. He's the Samuel L. Jackson of science.
Just a minor correction on your assumptions so far:
You really ought to read rather than skim over the information released yesterday, or at the very least look it up on Wikipedia.
$249.99 for the Wii, one remote, one nunchaku attachment, a Wii Sports game, and Opera -- all ready to go out-of-the-box. Yeah, a Wii-mote costs $39.95, but one has to consider the technology going into that thing. Given what's in the box for the price, it actually isn't too bad a deal. Just a DualShock2 controller for the PS2 was $29.95 for several years, and it was just buttons, two analogue sticks and rumble.
You could use the "K" shaped heatsink as a Shuriken and kill someone with it.
Or use it to stop zombie Tupac from releasing another album from beyond the grave.
Somehow, this brings to mind that episode of TNG, Booby Trap; I keep seeing the bridge crew of the Promellian vessel in my head, only they're DNF programmers still at their Pentium III workstations. "Commendable. They died at their posts."
"Pit," a.k.a. Kid Icarus, is already in the game. The announcement trailer at E3 clearly displayed this, as well as Snake from Metal Gear.
Even as a not-so-scrawny-nerd, I have to say that it does get quite tiresome lugging my 19in. CRT beast from the 90s around everywhere. LAN parties, trips to friends' houses (all of whom are 300+ miles)--you get kind of fed up after a while. Still, the picture quality, color quality and resolution of a CRT are tough to beat. I've yet to see a plasma, LCD, DLP, or LCOS monitor match a CRT's vibrance.
I've seen a few of the new Samsung SED panels coming out of trade shows in Korea and Japan, as well as a few reports from CES, and they certainly seem like a great contender to actually replace the multi-purpose CRT. Unfortuantely, there's no word on release dates or prices for purchasing on this side of the pond, but I'll keep waiting.
Animal Crossing is currently in development for Wii. Series creator Katsuya Eguchi confirmed this in several interviews around the time of E3 this year. Most of the interviews have centered around the use of the WiiConnect24 feature to allow friends (I'm assuming it'll use something akin to a FriendCode system or, if some of the console-based instant messaging patents Nintendo has filed is implimented for WiiConnect24, an IM-like friends list) to visit the town (presumably by loading the save file data from your console) and leave messages, gifts, or make changes similar to what is done on the N64, GameCube and DS versions.
I'm quite eager to play a Wii version of Animal Crossing, actually, mostly because of the online element (and the fact that I don't have a DS.. yet). I started with Doubutsu no Mori (Animal Forest) for the Nintendo 64 several years ago before my ex-girlfriend got me AC for the GCN and, in both cases, I marveled at the possibilities the game had for online play. If Eguchi-san's team also implements a visual standard comparable to the box art, which is well within Wii's graphical capabilities, then so much the better.
The Geek is strong with this one...
In all seriousness, I, too, am awaiting a lightsaber game for the Wii. Better put me in the boobie hatch, too. :)
If I've read it correctly, Warren Ellis is providing hosting services for webcomic writer/artists for free and allowing them to post their own Google AdSense links so they can collect on ad revenue. That's something a lot of 'free' hosts don't allow, as they're the ones that collect on the ad revenue to support your hosting fees. While I don't think the host itself is precluded from its own ad revenue, this should be a boon to potential digital indie comic creators; free hosting, your own ad revenue, and increased visibility within the community.
Considering the fact that my best friend and I are about to bring our own sci-fi action drama comic (not all webcomics are comedic in nature) to fruition, the idea behind this seems like something I ought to look into. We don't have the money for hosting at the moment; though I do run a FreeBSD-based web server off my cable line, 20KiB upstream isn't much to write home about and isn't very practical for a large viewership when one takes into account the bandwidth required for just the comic page (8.5x11@72dpi).
While I'm hopeful, I think it would be best to watch with vested interest, see what happens.
Now filled with even MORE dark-matter goodness!(tm)