He (and you) doesn't even have the power to modify his own.profile,.bashrc and other environment files? If he's logging in as a "generic" userid, that should be addressed as a significant security hole first.
Well, I can't tell much from the screenshots, but it sure does look like a clone of Visio... from about eight years ago. The product has come a long way since then, becoming a decent quality, really fast to learn 2D CAD tool that happens to do flowcharts and network diagrams.
Agreed. And how long is it going to take for "the open source community" to come up with a reasonable alternative to Visio? Oh, sure, there are drawing tools out there (i.e. Inkscape) and the infant Dia project, but, in these days of OpenOffice being able to read and write Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without a hiccup, where's the app that can open Visio drawings and templates?
Of course, the Mac development community doesn't have anything, either.:-\
Something that offered little more to the user than a good gas powered or electric scooter, yet cost ten times as much.
Really? Ever price out a Vespa? Sure, the $3,000 price tag on a Segway is way more than it needs to cost for it to be wildly popular (anything under $1000 would make it sell, I think), but it's not a ridiculous price.
Well, the SRBs burn rubber, which is definitely noxious. But the SMEs burn hydrogen and oxygen, the product of which is heat and water. Both of those are fairly environmentally friendly. All I'm saying is that just because you can't see the environmental impact when you're watching something climb to orbit, doesn't mean that it's not there or not significant.
Not sure about the "environmental" part, unless the power for the elevator is derived from a solar array on the orbital end of the cable. Right now, we generate a significant amount of our electricity by burning coal, which puts a lot of pollutant into the atmosphere. People who drive electric cars that they charge at home are just moving the pollution to the site of the generating plant rather that actually reducing pollutant output completely. The same can be said for electric elevators.
I'm not sure I agree with that. The mass and length of the thing would preclude any quick movements. Hang a rope from something, then shake the bottom end of it. See how long it takes for the wave to propogate up the length of the rope? Now try it with a steel cable. It takes longer. Now scale that cable to a length of 62,000 miles and some 20 or more feet in diameter. You're not going to move that out of the way of something moving 17,000 mph relative to the fixed end.
For cyberpunk-ish novels, I vote for Daniel Keys Moran's Emerald Eyes, The Long Run and The Last Dancer trilogy. The battle scenes with the PKF Elite would be worth it. Dunno how they'd work out The Ring as a character, but they could probably do up some Matrix-esque streaming green letter outline of an amorphous blob type thing that would get the point across.
Excellent suggestion! I read Titan, Wizard and Demon back in high-school (over 20 years ago) as my first truly sci-fi books written for an adult market. Of course, they're as much fantasy as hard science fiction, but the visual impact would be stunning.
I just finished reading Ender's Game --> Children of the Mind. While I really enjoy Card's writing style, something that bothers me is his lack of imagination for how humanity's society would have progressed in 3000 years. Or, for that matter, waxed and waned. It was like culture came to a screeching halt and simply spread itself throughout the stars. Unfortunately, this exposes a significant hole in Card's imagination. Too bad, too, as his writing seems to be top notch otherwise.
Re:Beats my education on Africa
on
Africa, The MMOG
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· Score: 1
I think the term you were looking for is satirist.
Re:What's the... point?
on
Africa, The MMOG
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This may be something of a troll, but since Africa is a continent, as you point out, you should compare it in size to North America, which is also a continent, rather than America, which makes up some fraction of North America.
I have to say that my elementary school education regarding Africa was spotty, and completely non-existent in high school, except for the "cradle of civilization" part. As a teen (many years ago), I could have told you that Egypt was a part of Africa, and that the Congo was, but had little or no idea what relationship they had to one another, either socially or geographically. South Africa is obviously in the southern part, and there was plenty of news about Apartheid at the time, but I had no clue what any of it meant.
In my adult life, I'm happy to say that I've had (still have, in some cases) several friends from different parts of Africa. I know how to find The Gambia on a map (not so easy), and quite a bit about the culture of Ghana (fascinating place). Unlike most Americans, I know that Ethiopia is not primarily a desert full of starving poor people.
There's so much about the world that doesn't fit into eight second sound bites, and much of it is only interesting after you've spent time learning about it, which is to say that it takes time to get enough of a picture to understand what's going on. If half of America knew as much about the cultures of this world as they do about what Paris Hilton does in her bedroom, we'd all be better off.
You forgot the possibility of it being slow as Hell* because it's doing just what it's designed to do, but doesn't have enough horsepower behind it to deal with the load.
* No, I don't know what the relatavistic speed of Hell is, I'm just using an American idiom.
Speaking of which, how about integration with other version control repositories? Is an interface to Serena Dimensions (the VCS formerly known as PVCS) available?
(I apologize for bringing up a commercial app in this forum, but people were bandying about names like intelliJ and I just forgot myself for a moment.)
I suppose you could also use it to create a system log miner to figure out what happened and what it's related to. Possibly, enough intelligence could be put into it so that the thing only paged you when something was ACTUALLY wrong rather than whenever something SEEMS to be wrong.
I agree that RPGs aren't going to catch on again; us old codgers are going to die out eventually, leaving you youngsters to boil in your own broth. Unless there's some sort of social backlash or radical technology shift, the next twenty years of gaming look to be about better graphics and sound, and better integrating an individual with the gaming environment. You've seen those Battletech pods that are a completely integrated environment for one person? What happens when those hit the home market, but with a closer, more custom fit? Add photo-realistic game systems and a good AI, people start spending more time there than with families. Network them together, and people start preferring social interaction over the wire to that in person.
It's an old saw, but it's happening despite all the warning signs that have become cliche. Right now, teens can't write because all their typing is in online chat rooms and IM clients. Take "r u on? wut u doing?" and extrapolate that to more human-integrated interfaces. What happens to someone's ability to use language when their speech patterns have gone down the same road?
I suppose that depends on which "us" either of you are a member of. Us old codgers prefer table top games, I suspect. Personally, I enjoy the social aspect of getting around a table and playing a game with my friends. Lately we're more into board games than RPGs, but we spent several years on a couple of long-term campaigns.
Regarding your estimation of income for Blizzard versus WotC, it comes down to how much product gets sold for the average gamer. How much do you spend annually on WoW? If it's $50 to get started and $10 per month, that's $170 per gamer for the first year, $120 for each following year. Over three years, that's over $400. A group of six players spends about $2500. The same group of tabletop RPG players might buy one complete set of manuals at $35 a pop (six or so sourcebooks for $210), plus a Player's book for each non-GM ($175 total) plus an assortment of interesting, yet random other source material at around $20 each, say another $200. For under $600, the team of six is outfitted for an eternity of play. And that makes everyone pretty well outfitted, let alone the savings by sharing materials and whatnot (one Players book is usually good for about three people to share). Over five years of playing tabletop RPGs as a non-GM player, I spent under $100 on materials.
Also, from the pure profit angle, software and online services have much higher profit margins than book publishing.
Speaking of ratings, do you feel like you have to "dumb down" your experiments because the majority of your audience probably couldn't (or wouldn't want to) follow more rigorous scientific methods?
I suspect that CableCARD will be included in any stationary media appliance from Apple, though a FireWire interface would allow for lots of nifty accessories, including a CableCARD adapter, extra storage space, etc. They'll want to stick as close to the "you don't really need cable" line, probably leaving tuner accessories to third parties. Their preferred customer will have an antenna for local news and get all their entertainment content from the iVideo store.
Could you elaborate somewhat on what sort of bugs you've encountered? I'm thinking about purchasing a LifeDrive (my last Palm-type thing was a Handspring Deluxe w/ 2 MB of RAM) as a portable web/e-mail platform, photo storage device, backup device for my laptop (only the important stuff, which is under a gig), and music player (low priority). I was thinking about getting an iPod, which would do several of those things, but then stumbled on the LifeDrive. It's not quite as much storage as I'd like (10 gigs would be plenty, but 4 sounds a little cramped), but I figure for the functionality, I'll take it. You're the first I've found to mention "bugs," but also the first "civilian" (non-professional reviewer) owner. So, what say you?
But they've put video capability out there to test the waters and see if the legal video download market turns out like the legal music download market has. If downloading Lost and Desperate Housewives turns out to be a winner, you can bet that other content providers will come running.
Yes, and after Apple's video portfolio is as well-rounded as their music list (say, three core networks plus PBS, the FOX empire and the Discovery Networks have their full backlog on Apple's servers), with the new hipsters ditching cable and satellite services because they can download whatever they want to watch for less per month than a digital cable bill costs, look for Apple to come out with a sleek little set top box that's essentially a Video iPod on steroids. It'll be pizza box thin, look sexy in your stereo cabinet, have an interface that makes TiVo look complicated, and cost a mere $499. People will marvel at it's capabilities and storage capacity, decrying any attempts to compare it to anything similar as the units fly off the shelves.
You heard it here first, unless you heard it somewhere else. I didn't, though, and that makes it at least marginally original. The cult of personality that is Steve Jobs will change the face of television, you just wait.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, a simple knock sequence kept Hogan's Heroes safe for years.
He (and you) doesn't even have the power to modify his own .profile, .bashrc and other environment files? If he's logging in as a "generic" userid, that should be addressed as a significant security hole first.
Well, I can't tell much from the screenshots, but it sure does look like a clone of Visio... from about eight years ago. The product has come a long way since then, becoming a decent quality, really fast to learn 2D CAD tool that happens to do flowcharts and network diagrams.
Agreed. And how long is it going to take for "the open source community" to come up with a reasonable alternative to Visio? Oh, sure, there are drawing tools out there (i.e. Inkscape) and the infant Dia project, but, in these days of OpenOffice being able to read and write Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without a hiccup, where's the app that can open Visio drawings and templates?
:-\
Of course, the Mac development community doesn't have anything, either.
Really? Ever price out a Vespa? Sure, the $3,000 price tag on a Segway is way more than it needs to cost for it to be wildly popular (anything under $1000 would make it sell, I think), but it's not a ridiculous price.
Well, the SRBs burn rubber, which is definitely noxious. But the SMEs burn hydrogen and oxygen, the product of which is heat and water. Both of those are fairly environmentally friendly. All I'm saying is that just because you can't see the environmental impact when you're watching something climb to orbit, doesn't mean that it's not there or not significant.
Not sure about the "environmental" part, unless the power for the elevator is derived from a solar array on the orbital end of the cable. Right now, we generate a significant amount of our electricity by burning coal, which puts a lot of pollutant into the atmosphere. People who drive electric cars that they charge at home are just moving the pollution to the site of the generating plant rather that actually reducing pollutant output completely. The same can be said for electric elevators.
I'm not sure I agree with that. The mass and length of the thing would preclude any quick movements. Hang a rope from something, then shake the bottom end of it. See how long it takes for the wave to propogate up the length of the rope? Now try it with a steel cable. It takes longer. Now scale that cable to a length of 62,000 miles and some 20 or more feet in diameter. You're not going to move that out of the way of something moving 17,000 mph relative to the fixed end.
For cyberpunk-ish novels, I vote for Daniel Keys Moran's Emerald Eyes, The Long Run and The Last Dancer trilogy. The battle scenes with the PKF Elite would be worth it. Dunno how they'd work out The Ring as a character, but they could probably do up some Matrix-esque streaming green letter outline of an amorphous blob type thing that would get the point across.
Excellent suggestion! I read Titan, Wizard and Demon back in high-school (over 20 years ago) as my first truly sci-fi books written for an adult market. Of course, they're as much fantasy as hard science fiction, but the visual impact would be stunning.
I just finished reading Ender's Game --> Children of the Mind. While I really enjoy Card's writing style, something that bothers me is his lack of imagination for how humanity's society would have progressed in 3000 years. Or, for that matter, waxed and waned. It was like culture came to a screeching halt and simply spread itself throughout the stars. Unfortunately, this exposes a significant hole in Card's imagination. Too bad, too, as his writing seems to be top notch otherwise.
I think the term you were looking for is satirist.
This may be something of a troll, but since Africa is a continent, as you point out, you should compare it in size to North America, which is also a continent, rather than America, which makes up some fraction of North America.
I have to say that my elementary school education regarding Africa was spotty, and completely non-existent in high school, except for the "cradle of civilization" part. As a teen (many years ago), I could have told you that Egypt was a part of Africa, and that the Congo was, but had little or no idea what relationship they had to one another, either socially or geographically. South Africa is obviously in the southern part, and there was plenty of news about Apartheid at the time, but I had no clue what any of it meant.
In my adult life, I'm happy to say that I've had (still have, in some cases) several friends from different parts of Africa. I know how to find The Gambia on a map (not so easy), and quite a bit about the culture of Ghana (fascinating place). Unlike most Americans, I know that Ethiopia is not primarily a desert full of starving poor people.
There's so much about the world that doesn't fit into eight second sound bites, and much of it is only interesting after you've spent time learning about it, which is to say that it takes time to get enough of a picture to understand what's going on. If half of America knew as much about the cultures of this world as they do about what Paris Hilton does in her bedroom, we'd all be better off.
You forgot the possibility of it being slow as Hell* because it's doing just what it's designed to do, but doesn't have enough horsepower behind it to deal with the load.
* No, I don't know what the relatavistic speed of Hell is, I'm just using an American idiom.
Um, thanks, but you didn't answer my question. How about Dimensions?
Speaking of which, how about integration with other version control repositories? Is an interface to Serena Dimensions (the VCS formerly known as PVCS) available?
(I apologize for bringing up a commercial app in this forum, but people were bandying about names like intelliJ and I just forgot myself for a moment.)
Right, but "C-sharp killer" just doesn't have that ring to it...
Alternatively, it could have been a typo. The 6 and 7 keys are suspiciously close to one another on the keyboard, you know.
:^)
Just a thought from a generally optomistic, think the best of people kind of guy...
I suppose you could also use it to create a system log miner to figure out what happened and what it's related to. Possibly, enough intelligence could be put into it so that the thing only paged you when something was ACTUALLY wrong rather than whenever something SEEMS to be wrong.
It's an old saw, but it's happening despite all the warning signs that have become cliche. Right now, teens can't write because all their typing is in online chat rooms and IM clients. Take "r u on? wut u doing?" and extrapolate that to more human-integrated interfaces. What happens to someone's ability to use language when their speech patterns have gone down the same road?
No way? Way.
I suppose that depends on which "us" either of you are a member of. Us old codgers prefer table top games, I suspect. Personally, I enjoy the social aspect of getting around a table and playing a game with my friends. Lately we're more into board games than RPGs, but we spent several years on a couple of long-term campaigns.
Regarding your estimation of income for Blizzard versus WotC, it comes down to how much product gets sold for the average gamer. How much do you spend annually on WoW? If it's $50 to get started and $10 per month, that's $170 per gamer for the first year, $120 for each following year. Over three years, that's over $400. A group of six players spends about $2500. The same group of tabletop RPG players might buy one complete set of manuals at $35 a pop (six or so sourcebooks for $210), plus a Player's book for each non-GM ($175 total) plus an assortment of interesting, yet random other source material at around $20 each, say another $200. For under $600, the team of six is outfitted for an eternity of play. And that makes everyone pretty well outfitted, let alone the savings by sharing materials and whatnot (one Players book is usually good for about three people to share). Over five years of playing tabletop RPGs as a non-GM player, I spent under $100 on materials.
Also, from the pure profit angle, software and online services have much higher profit margins than book publishing.
As usual, it all depends on your perspective.
Speaking of ratings, do you feel like you have to "dumb down" your experiments because the majority of your audience probably couldn't (or wouldn't want to) follow more rigorous scientific methods?
I suspect that CableCARD will be included in any stationary media appliance from Apple, though a FireWire interface would allow for lots of nifty accessories, including a CableCARD adapter, extra storage space, etc. They'll want to stick as close to the "you don't really need cable" line, probably leaving tuner accessories to third parties. Their preferred customer will have an antenna for local news and get all their entertainment content from the iVideo store.
Could you elaborate somewhat on what sort of bugs you've encountered? I'm thinking about purchasing a LifeDrive (my last Palm-type thing was a Handspring Deluxe w/ 2 MB of RAM) as a portable web/e-mail platform, photo storage device, backup device for my laptop (only the important stuff, which is under a gig), and music player (low priority). I was thinking about getting an iPod, which would do several of those things, but then stumbled on the LifeDrive. It's not quite as much storage as I'd like (10 gigs would be plenty, but 4 sounds a little cramped), but I figure for the functionality, I'll take it. You're the first I've found to mention "bugs," but also the first "civilian" (non-professional reviewer) owner. So, what say you?
Yes, and after Apple's video portfolio is as well-rounded as their music list (say, three core networks plus PBS, the FOX empire and the Discovery Networks have their full backlog on Apple's servers), with the new hipsters ditching cable and satellite services because they can download whatever they want to watch for less per month than a digital cable bill costs, look for Apple to come out with a sleek little set top box that's essentially a Video iPod on steroids. It'll be pizza box thin, look sexy in your stereo cabinet, have an interface that makes TiVo look complicated, and cost a mere $499. People will marvel at it's capabilities and storage capacity, decrying any attempts to compare it to anything similar as the units fly off the shelves.
You heard it here first, unless you heard it somewhere else. I didn't, though, and that makes it at least marginally original. The cult of personality that is Steve Jobs will change the face of television, you just wait.