Heh, I'm going to have to agree there. Haven't upgraded my PC since 1999 (still using a Voodoo2) because, aside from some games that don't take too much juice (like Civ), there really haven't been any PC games out there that have attracted me as much as a console game. And I wouldn't mind adding two more to your list, so I will -
4. You can play the game while decked out on the recliner or spread out on the sofa.
5. Playing with friends involves having friends over, rather than playing over the 'net in isolation or having everyone drag their computers to a common location.
The Concorde, having come into existence decades before the explosion of the Internet and stuff like videoconferencing, was rolled out at a time when business and government folks (the only ones for whom it could ever be anything but a luxury) had a much greater need for a supersonic jetliner, and yet only sixteen were ever built. The entire project would almost certainly have been a complete and dismal failure had there not been massive subsidies from the French and British governments keeping the thing in the air.
There in the end, the Concorde was having a hard time filling seats - yes, the crash in 2000 and Sep. 11 played into this, but my guess is that the demand was already dropping, and these events just exacerbated the situation.
This Japanese supersonic jetliner is about as necessary as the Bugati Veyron or a jet turbine powered motorcycle.
When I said 'crying shame', I didn't necessarily mean hosed data, although a lot can happen when everything comes crashing to a halt in the middle of a write - we've lost an entire 1.5TB RAID that way at work. It's mostly just that in most situations I've experienced where you're likely to see four RAID arrays in one place, downtime is a pretty big deal.
And if you have enough money to collect an MP3/XViD collection large enough to require that much storage, methinks you'd probably be the type to throw it on some real hardware, not some huge mess of disks duct taped into an old Dell case and powered by wannabe electrical relay station. That, or you have some explaining to do to the four-letter acronym people.
Personally, I'd rather have my four RAIDs split among two or four boxen than a single box. It'd be a crying shame if you spent all that money on four RAID controllers and sixteen hard disks, and then had the whole thing fall apart when your single testosterone-addict power supply takes a dump.
Much of the reason why I did better with Graffiti in class is that Graffiti is very easy to write without looking, because it's all in one place. With paper and pen, I couldn't watch the professor and chalkboard as much, because without looking at what I was writing I'd end up with a jumble of letters overlapping or the text wandering up and over other text and stuff like that. So the advantage isn't Graffiti itself, it's just the idea of one letter at a time, all in the same spot.
On one hand, I agree completely. I used my PDA to take notes for about a year while I was in college. My stated reason was because my handwriting had gotten so bad that I couldn't necessarily read my notes after class, while on Graffiti I can write almost as quickly as I can with a pen and paper, and my accuracy is damn near 100%.
However, I gave up after that year because it was impossible to draw little diagrams and such. I just improved my penmanship. Tablet PC's never excited me for a few reasons - most notably, they struck me as a device that costs a few thousand times as much as a notebook without providing much added functionality, while also weighing more and being much more fragile. That, and there's a reason why my good ol' quadrille grid notebooks didn't run Windows or Linux.
On the other hand, I'm actually writing note-taking software as we speak. (Sorry, Cliff, it's OS-X only, though if I ever release it, a GNUStep port might not be too hard.) But the focus is decidedly not to take notes in class. It's meant to be a tool for organizing massive amounts of more research-type notes, keeping PDFs of journal articles organized, keeping everything indexed and cross-referenced, blah blah blah. It's really more of a personal wiki. So I think there is room for note-taking software, just not in the classroom.
(Heck, if I were a professor, I would probably ban laptops from my classes simply because I remember what a distraction they were to the entire room from when I was a student.)
Ah, but it's the suffering in cramped conditions and masses and masses of antibiotics as a countermeasure against the livestock practically swimming in its own filth that is what makes modern hoof-grown meat so wonderful!
I think you misread me. I'm not saying that online games with no story are better. I'm saying they're what seems to be making money right now, and they seem to be the direction in which the industry has been headed for quite a while.
Personally, online gaming isn't for me, either. I think that adventure games are where it's at, hands down. But the genre still died, because the industry moved on.
Similarly, I don't think 3D makes a magically great game. Really, I like sprites - they have style. But 2D games are all but long gone, because 3D is what someone has decided is cool.
He's predicting something that's pretty much already happened. Nobody gives a damn about an FPS that isn't multiplayer anymore, to the point where, for most new major FPS, the single-player is an afterthought. The RPG world has turned into the MMORPG world.
What's he trying to say, that the logical next step on this is games that are distributed exclusively through online channels? I'm sure that's going to happen sometime in the future, but still, saying, "Steam was a good idea, I think more people are going to be doing that in the future," in a roudnabout way hardly seems like much of a prediction.
I grew up with my mommy telling me that an operating system and a kernel are two different things.
If Microsoft thinks that they need to alter the Windows kernel every time they add a feature to the OS, I think I see why they have so many quality control problems.
Heh, I got sick of the lies from page one, but the fact of the matter is, the government doesn't even have to lie, people are pretty good at taking care of that themselves.
If they weren't, then we would have somehow amassed the amazing nexus of concentration necessary to come to the realization that it would take an attack on the scale of 9/11 every few months for terrorists to be anywhere near as much of a threat as, say, drunk drivers or tobacco marketing executives. But we haven't, even though it's a painfully obvious observation.
If you wanted to share a country with intelligent (or semi-intelligent, or even vaguely lucid) entities, you shouldn't have decided to be born on this planet.
OHMYGOD I just heard that GOOGLE is about to come out with a new CPU ARCHITECTURE and it's going to run their own OS and it's so ungodly fast it's like a quad Xeon box but the basic model's only going to be like $500 or you can lease it for a year for the cost of having it shipped to you and it's so damn amazing and after they're done with that they're going to come out with their own distribution of Linux that will be a lot like Google's OS but faster and open source. Oh, and they're going to be giving away free cars in Central Park on September 4, so totally be there, and they're going to use the proceeds from all of this to bring back the dinosaurs - I swear to God! - and it's so cool because they're giving all this shit away for absolutely nothing but they're still making money hand over fist from it. Honestly, this is all true. They're like the coolest company in the world or something.
Finally, a voice of reason in this debate. And it only took, what - eight or so years for the P2P side of the debate, and a few decades for the recordable media side?
Getting the little stuff right between browsers takes time. Most of our customers think we are nuts when we suggest spending more time (their money) so we can get those 2-5% chunks of the browser market, each of which behaves a bit differently. Like it or not ie is the "standard-defying standard."
That's all well and good, but there is a mind-bogglingly important distinction to make between your example and the situation at hand: You work for a private company. We're talking about a government agency here. The government agency has a responsibility to make its services available to everyone, and it shouldn't make arbitrary distinctions about what web browser (ergo, computer platform) people use.
That said, as long as the agency is providing all the services you can get from this website through other channels that are available to everyone (like a 24-hour call center), I'm fine and happy. I just seriously doubt they're doing that, either.
That said, there's gotta be limits, too. I think that all the govt's interactive websites would just curl up and die if we had to support everyone, including people who can only run Lynx.
When you are an employee, during work hours, you are a representative of your employer. Your public actions will have some impact on the public image of your employer. It is the burden of the employer to hire employees whose actions will not damage the public image of the employer.
That's all well and good, and I agree with you about it, but it does not mean that a BBC employee's actions are automatically the BBC's actions as well.
If it turns out that this employee was doing this for fun rather than for work, the BBC's screw-up wasn't abusing Wikipedia, the BBC's screw-up was not keeping a tight enough leash on this person. Is different, it is.
Let's have him charge his batteries overnight using a gasoline generator that's rigged to automatically shut off when the batteries are fully charged. Then we can measure how much gasoline he's using to keep the thing running and get a _real_ number.
Like I said, complain as you might, Slashdot has been doing this for years, and they were quite open about saying that they were going to start posting what amounts to advertisments that are disguised look exactly like every other Slashdot headline.
And calling R.P. a leech who doesn't add to the stories is just crazy coming from a Slashdot poster. Roland Piquepaille goes out and finds his own stories, strings them together with copy he writes himself, and adds other content such as images.
Slashdot waits for YOU to go through the effort of finding the articles and writing a blurb on them, and then posts them verbatim on the front page. Hell, they can't even be relied upon to read the linked articles to make sure the headline synopsis is accurate.
Seriously, who is the worse offender on the "socore a few bucks off the offorts of others" scale?
Well, Slashdot pretty much told us straight up that they were going to start selling front-page space for money as a form of advertising a couple years back.
Apparently it wasn't visible enough for you to complain when the Slashdot editors said, "HEY GUYS, I THINK WE'RE GOING TO DO THIS NOW, OKAY?" but it's visible now that there's a guy who has a consistent greenlight, which gives you cause to think that he's paying?
You had your chance to speak up about this back when they started doing it a couple years ago.
Yeah, who wants a website that simply posts small excerpts of and links to other people's news, usually with a little smidgeon of side commentary from the editor, provides space for readers to comment on it? Especially when said site makes its money from selling ad space.
Oh wait, did I just describe Slashdot? I guess I did. Tee-hee.
Fuck, people, what's your problem with Roland? At least he reads the articles he's linking, finds his own content to index, puts some effort into citing his sources (which the/. eds themseles neverdo), and checks his grammar and spelling.
It's really heard to listen to the complaints you folks are raising about him, knowing that they are coming from Slashdot readers.
Heh, but as the review points out, the mouse also makes chording impossible, and I've heard that you have to take your index finger off of the mouse to right-click.
Seriously, what positive direction in interface design does this mouse take other than that Apple has finally figured out how to get middle and right clicks out of a device without sacrificing the all-important illusion of it being the world's largest aspirin?
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I'm going to have to agree there. Haven't upgraded my PC since 1999 (still using a Voodoo2) because, aside from some games that don't take too much juice (like Civ), there really haven't been any PC games out there that have attracted me as much as a console game. And I wouldn't mind adding two more to your list, so I will -
4. You can play the game while decked out on the recliner or spread out on the sofa.
5. Playing with friends involves having friends over, rather than playing over the 'net in isolation or having everyone drag their computers to a common location.
Well, what do you want for a lousy $200?
I dont understand your comment about the 787 or A350 being 'faster', as they are both subsonic.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
(Yes, I'm being facetious.)
I'm curious why you use the term 'necessary.'
The Concorde, having come into existence decades before the explosion of the Internet and stuff like videoconferencing, was rolled out at a time when business and government folks (the only ones for whom it could ever be anything but a luxury) had a much greater need for a supersonic jetliner, and yet only sixteen were ever built. The entire project would almost certainly have been a complete and dismal failure had there not been massive subsidies from the French and British governments keeping the thing in the air.
There in the end, the Concorde was having a hard time filling seats - yes, the crash in 2000 and Sep. 11 played into this, but my guess is that the demand was already dropping, and these events just exacerbated the situation.
This Japanese supersonic jetliner is about as necessary as the Bugati Veyron or a jet turbine powered motorcycle.
When I said 'crying shame', I didn't necessarily mean hosed data, although a lot can happen when everything comes crashing to a halt in the middle of a write - we've lost an entire 1.5TB RAID that way at work. It's mostly just that in most situations I've experienced where you're likely to see four RAID arrays in one place, downtime is a pretty big deal.
And if you have enough money to collect an MP3/XViD collection large enough to require that much storage, methinks you'd probably be the type to throw it on some real hardware, not some huge mess of disks duct taped into an old Dell case and powered by wannabe electrical relay station. That, or you have some explaining to do to the four-letter acronym people.
Personally, I'd rather have my four RAIDs split among two or four boxen than a single box. It'd be a crying shame if you spent all that money on four RAID controllers and sixteen hard disks, and then had the whole thing fall apart when your single testosterone-addict power supply takes a dump.
Much of the reason why I did better with Graffiti in class is that Graffiti is very easy to write without looking, because it's all in one place. With paper and pen, I couldn't watch the professor and chalkboard as much, because without looking at what I was writing I'd end up with a jumble of letters overlapping or the text wandering up and over other text and stuff like that. So the advantage isn't Graffiti itself, it's just the idea of one letter at a time, all in the same spot.
On one hand, I agree completely. I used my PDA to take notes for about a year while I was in college. My stated reason was because my handwriting had gotten so bad that I couldn't necessarily read my notes after class, while on Graffiti I can write almost as quickly as I can with a pen and paper, and my accuracy is damn near 100%.
However, I gave up after that year because it was impossible to draw little diagrams and such. I just improved my penmanship. Tablet PC's never excited me for a few reasons - most notably, they struck me as a device that costs a few thousand times as much as a notebook without providing much added functionality, while also weighing more and being much more fragile. That, and there's a reason why my good ol' quadrille grid notebooks didn't run Windows or Linux.
On the other hand, I'm actually writing note-taking software as we speak. (Sorry, Cliff, it's OS-X only, though if I ever release it, a GNUStep port might not be too hard.) But the focus is decidedly not to take notes in class. It's meant to be a tool for organizing massive amounts of more research-type notes, keeping PDFs of journal articles organized, keeping everything indexed and cross-referenced, blah blah blah. It's really more of a personal wiki. So I think there is room for note-taking software, just not in the classroom.
(Heck, if I were a professor, I would probably ban laptops from my classes simply because I remember what a distraction they were to the entire room from when I was a student.)
Ah, but it's the suffering in cramped conditions and masses and masses of antibiotics as a countermeasure against the livestock practically swimming in its own filth that is what makes modern hoof-grown meat so wonderful!
I think you misread me. I'm not saying that online games with no story are better. I'm saying they're what seems to be making money right now, and they seem to be the direction in which the industry has been headed for quite a while.
Personally, online gaming isn't for me, either. I think that adventure games are where it's at, hands down. But the genre still died, because the industry moved on.
Similarly, I don't think 3D makes a magically great game. Really, I like sprites - they have style. But 2D games are all but long gone, because 3D is what someone has decided is cool.
He's predicting something that's pretty much already happened. Nobody gives a damn about an FPS that isn't multiplayer anymore, to the point where, for most new major FPS, the single-player is an afterthought. The RPG world has turned into the MMORPG world.
What's he trying to say, that the logical next step on this is games that are distributed exclusively through online channels? I'm sure that's going to happen sometime in the future, but still, saying, "Steam was a good idea, I think more people are going to be doing that in the future," in a roudnabout way hardly seems like much of a prediction.
I fail to see the connection.
I grew up with my mommy telling me that an operating system and a kernel are two different things.
If Microsoft thinks that they need to alter the Windows kernel every time they add a feature to the OS, I think I see why they have so many quality control problems.
Heh, I got sick of the lies from page one, but the fact of the matter is, the government doesn't even have to lie, people are pretty good at taking care of that themselves.
If they weren't, then we would have somehow amassed the amazing nexus of concentration necessary to come to the realization that it would take an attack on the scale of 9/11 every few months for terrorists to be anywhere near as much of a threat as, say, drunk drivers or tobacco marketing executives. But we haven't, even though it's a painfully obvious observation.
If you wanted to share a country with intelligent (or semi-intelligent, or even vaguely lucid) entities, you shouldn't have decided to be born on this planet.
OHMYGOD I just heard that GOOGLE is about to come out with a new CPU ARCHITECTURE and it's going to run their own OS and it's so ungodly fast it's like a quad Xeon box but the basic model's only going to be like $500 or you can lease it for a year for the cost of having it shipped to you and it's so damn amazing and after they're done with that they're going to come out with their own distribution of Linux that will be a lot like Google's OS but faster and open source. Oh, and they're going to be giving away free cars in Central Park on September 4, so totally be there, and they're going to use the proceeds from all of this to bring back the dinosaurs - I swear to God! - and it's so cool because they're giving all this shit away for absolutely nothing but they're still making money hand over fist from it. Honestly, this is all true. They're like the coolest company in the world or something.
Finally, a voice of reason in this debate. And it only took, what - eight or so years for the P2P side of the debate, and a few decades for the recordable media side?
Getting the little stuff right between browsers takes time. Most of our customers think we are nuts when we suggest spending more time (their money) so we can get those 2-5% chunks of the browser market, each of which behaves a bit differently. Like it or not ie is the "standard-defying standard."
That's all well and good, but there is a mind-bogglingly important distinction to make between your example and the situation at hand: You work for a private company. We're talking about a government agency here. The government agency has a responsibility to make its services available to everyone, and it shouldn't make arbitrary distinctions about what web browser (ergo, computer platform) people use.
That said, as long as the agency is providing all the services you can get from this website through other channels that are available to everyone (like a 24-hour call center), I'm fine and happy. I just seriously doubt they're doing that, either.
That said, there's gotta be limits, too. I think that all the govt's interactive websites would just curl up and die if we had to support everyone, including people who can only run Lynx.
When you are an employee, during work hours, you are a representative of your employer. Your public actions will have some impact on the public image of your employer. It is the burden of the employer to hire employees whose actions will not damage the public image of the employer.
That's all well and good, and I agree with you about it, but it does not mean that a BBC employee's actions are automatically the BBC's actions as well.
If it turns out that this employee was doing this for fun rather than for work, the BBC's screw-up wasn't abusing Wikipedia, the BBC's screw-up was not keeping a tight enough leash on this person. Is different, it is.
First they brought you poor spelling. . .
Then they brought you poor grammar. . .
And no, prepare yourselves for -
*drumroll*
A POOR GRASP OF BASIC THERMODYNAMICS!
Let's have him charge his batteries overnight using a gasoline generator that's rigged to automatically shut off when the batteries are fully charged. Then we can measure how much gasoline he's using to keep the thing running and get a _real_ number.
. . .most of the children who play this will be the ones getting bullied.
Like I said, complain as you might, Slashdot has been doing this for years, and they were quite open about saying that they were going to start posting what amounts to advertisments that are disguised look exactly like every other Slashdot headline.
And calling R.P. a leech who doesn't add to the stories is just crazy coming from a Slashdot poster. Roland Piquepaille goes out and finds his own stories, strings them together with copy he writes himself, and adds other content such as images.
Slashdot waits for YOU to go through the effort of finding the articles and writing a blurb on them, and then posts them verbatim on the front page. Hell, they can't even be relied upon to read the linked articles to make sure the headline synopsis is accurate.
Seriously, who is the worse offender on the "socore a few bucks off the offorts of others" scale?
Eh, give him a break. He's French. That particular grammar quip is perfectly reasonable coming from a French speaker now and again.
Well, Slashdot pretty much told us straight up that they were going to start selling front-page space for money as a form of advertising a couple years back.
Apparently it wasn't visible enough for you to complain when the Slashdot editors said, "HEY GUYS, I THINK WE'RE GOING TO DO THIS NOW, OKAY?" but it's visible now that there's a guy who has a consistent greenlight, which gives you cause to think that he's paying?
You had your chance to speak up about this back when they started doing it a couple years ago.
Yeah, who wants a website that simply posts small excerpts of and links to other people's news, usually with a little smidgeon of side commentary from the editor, provides space for readers to comment on it? Especially when said site makes its money from selling ad space.
/. eds themseles neverdo), and checks his grammar and spelling.
Oh wait, did I just describe Slashdot? I guess I did. Tee-hee.
Fuck, people, what's your problem with Roland? At least he reads the articles he's linking, finds his own content to index, puts some effort into citing his sources (which the
It's really heard to listen to the complaints you folks are raising about him, knowing that they are coming from Slashdot readers.
Heh, but as the review points out, the mouse also makes chording impossible, and I've heard that you have to take your index finger off of the mouse to right-click.
Seriously, what positive direction in interface design does this mouse take other than that Apple has finally figured out how to get middle and right clicks out of a device without sacrificing the all-important illusion of it being the world's largest aspirin?