Gerrymandering - one way or another - should be illegal. It's total crap. Congressional seats should be based on real communities....nice to dream, isn't it?...no, not really. Just depressing.
The major criticism of Wikipedia from Libraryland is that there's no peer review. Someone else had suggested flagging users with credentials. I would suggest flagging entries that have been reviewed by people with credentials. The trick is that the flag would have to disappear if substantial edits to the article are made...it would appear in the history, but that's it. Maybe have a tab to make it easier for people to read the reviewed version (before said changes).
Convince academia to accept peer review of Wikipedia...that would help.
(Wikipedia would also be well-served hiring a whole bunch of librarians. Lots of 'em are available!)
...I've toasted my legs with my laptop. That's why I use a laptop desk (laptopdesk.net). I'm not schilling for them - just stating what I use.
And in my defense, my laptop battery did bloat, which might have had something to do with it. And I've also noticed that my girlfriend's MacBook Pro dissipates heat a lot better than my MacBook.
During my couple of years in hell (telephone CSR for a big online discount travel site) we weren't allowed to put managers on the phone - ever. When someone asked, the answer was: "I'm sorry, but our supervisors are here for administrative purposes only. I can transfer your call to a customer service specialist, but they will advise you in the same way that I have." Apparently if a manager tells a customer something, it's more binding legally - hence why supervisors and managers were not identified as such on the phone.
I feel sorry for you, going your whole life, supposedly without using publicly-funded libraries. (Someone else already made the point about public universities, so I won't retread that.) Going your entire life...I'm guessing at least thirty years...without knowing the exquisite joys of the public library...to be able to obtain knowledge and entertainment without spending a ton of money each time you do so...to be able to read materials that are no longer in print (and not available on the Internet)...to know the pleasure that comes from simply browsing shelves upon shelves (and maybe floors upon floors) of well-kept, useful, well-organized books...I can't imagine how that's a good thing.
And really (full disclosure: I'm a graduate student in Library and Information Science) I would think that an engineer would be kinder, more knowledgeable, and more understanding about libraries (and, by extension, librarians) in general because your profession depends on information that is only available through library resources. And I don't just mean books - I mean expensive subscription-only electronic resources - journals, databases, technical data.... This sort of thing isn't available to just anyone - it's too damned expensive. But that's a big part of what libraries do. Large corporations like PPG have their OWN libraries to serve their employees. Check out the Special Libraries Association for more information....
"We already have examples of employers that demands access to prospective worker's Facebook accounts in real life."
Can you provide URLs or anything? It's not that I don't believe you (I absolutely do) but I want to see these for myself and to share with my library management class. I tried finding articles on my own, but my Google Fu must not be strong today.
If your purpose is preservation, and you are certain that this game is so rare that your efforts are necessary to preserve it, then what you should consider is doing this project in conjunction with a library. The Librarian of Congress has exempted libraries from the DMCA - but for preservation purposes only. If I recall correctly, the rule is that the item in question must be scarce enough that it cannot be replaced by practical means (i.e. purchasing another on the open market, getting a copy from another library). If this applies to you, this might work - and might shield you from legal liability.
If you need a library to work with, you might contact Stanford University or the library at the University of Texas at Austin.
Good luck!
...if any of your students think they've seen an alien spacecraft, *do not dismiss their findings.* Alien invasions are usually discovered by amateur astronomers and schoolchildren, but nobody believes them until it's too late and the aliens are already destroying major landmarks and slaughtering puny humans.
And some of 'em are real winners, too - which rules out the whole "filtering" argument. Por ejemplo:
"Can I quit my job now?? I want the gov't. to take care of me! I just want to sit around and go fishing!!"
"Have you considered outlawing all forms of regulation for health insurance companies in allof the lands that the USA government has under it's jurisdiction?"
"To what extent will alternative medicine be covered?"
There were some other real winners too, but I can't find them now - maybe they were deleted. One really special one went to the effect that we have to stop sodomy and baby-killing before anything else. (Their words, not mine.)
As per TFA, this is nothing new - they had specs for XP and Vista, too. It would be nice to see some genuine competition for MS in this emerging market - i.e. Apple.
The "Titan" books have been pretty good, if too infrequent for my tastes. I wonder if Frakes, Sirtis, Russ, etc, would be willing to reprise their characters?
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Star_Trek:_Titan
One might argue that these previous attempts failed precisely because they required adapters. Traditional wisdom dictates that peripherals are rarely, if ever, supported by third parties, no matter how cool they are.
Agreed. The study captures only a limited amount of differences in English dialects....not sentence structure, idioms, etc. That's why, for example, the study doesn't seem to reflect Pittsburghese very well, for example.
That's why Iwatani-san is right when he says that innovation will return to the industry in a "couple years." In a couple years is when the new batch of consoles is due. Then companies have to innovate to get consumers to switch up.
It was not all that long ago that almost every new videogame offered something that nobody had ever seen before. However, those days are gone. Critics need to accept that videogaming has matured significantly as a medium. Few people want to admit that...there are still those out there waiting for the other shoe to drop (the first shoe fell in 1983 when Atari's empire crumbled) and this "fad" to finally end.
You're not wrong. Sad but true. Same reason there's so many reality shows...the unwashed (non-geek) masses can't tell they're being fed the same thing again and again.
There's no two ways about it: Yamauchi has a point. Too many developers are relying on technology instead of creativity. But does that really mean that the videogame industry is going to crash again? Mr. Wong really doesn't show the connection. All he has managed to truly establish are the following points:
Videogaming relies on technology too much
Online gaming isn't all it's cracked up to be
That's really not establishing much that we don't already know. In fact, those two problems have been a consistent problem for videogaming since the 16-bit days. All this article does tries to do is shut up (or incite) gamers that don't intelligently examine their own hobby.
What his article misses is that videogaming is maturing as an artistic medium. The only problem, as with any medium, is that you have to take the bad with the good. For every innovative, creative game like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, you'll have five NBA Jam titles. Not only that, but some of the best stuff (like Wind Waker) will get ignored by the general populace in favor of crap. Hence why the list of the top-grossing films of all time does not include gems like The Shawshank Redemption (but Titanic is near the top), and why Wind Waker was not as successful as Nintendo would have liked.
Videogaming is not going anywhere because, despite its faults, it offers a form of entertainment that no other medium can: interactivity. In other words, people love Mario because, when you're holding the controller, Mario is you.The Sims offers a better dollhouse experience than any "real" dollhouse ever could. Ridge Racer tops Hot Wheels any day. And few films can provide the same depth, the same experience as Wind Waker or Final Fantasy VII.
Recommended reading:
Wolf, Mark J.P., ed. The Medium of the Video Game. Austin, Texas: University of
Texas Press, 2001.
I have to agree with the poster above. In fourth grade, the Powers That Be threw me into a remedial social-skill-building class; in fifth grade, the PTB threw me into remedial gym class (instead of computer class). Neither effort made much difference.
The problem with many of the suggestions I've read here is that I doubt they'll actually work. True geeks are some of the most stubborn and rebellious people you can ever meet, but not quite in the John-Travolta-in-Grease way.
The child you're mentoring probably already knows that he's differen. He probably also doesn't care, and probably won't until testosterone starts to talk to him. Even then, he'll be a rebel all his life....and more power to him. Do him a favor and make sure he's playing with Transformers toys and he'll be set.
IBM didn't start with Thomas Watson. IBM was originally the Computing-Tabulating-Recording (CTR) Company, founded by Charles Flint in 1911. CTR was made up of three acquisitions:
The Computing Scale Company of America
The Bundy Manufacturing Company
The Tabulating Machine Company
The latter is most important; it was founded and owned by Herman Hollerith, who invented the electric tabulating machine made famous by the 1890 U.S. Census. Thomas J. Watson wasn't hired as CTR's president until 1915, and the name change did not come until 1924.
Book suggestion:
Austrian, Geoffrey D. Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information
Processing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Quote: "Such is the problem with being second-in-line, everyone uses the first."
Windows came after Mac OS.
AOL came after Prodigy and CompuServe.
Super NES came after Sega Genesis
PlayStation came after 3D0 and Philips
PS2 came after Sega Dreamcast
etc, etc, ad nauseum....
...this isn't necessarily a First Amendment issue. Would Gator be able to successfully sue a publication for libel for calling their product "spyware?" An answer to this I do not have, but a good question, it is.
I wonder...Microsoft is attempting to patent a feature that other IM clients (Y!M, AIM) already have (and has existed for years) and nearly simultaneously made changes to its protocol to block out Trillian, et al. (Not that the block lasted for long, but still, they did it.) Plus MS shuts down chat rooms, claiming that they will be concentrating on MSN Messenger. Is this the start of a new IM war?
Slashdot Mirror
Gerrymandering - one way or another - should be illegal. It's total crap. Congressional seats should be based on real communities. ...nice to dream, isn't it? ...no, not really. Just depressing.
The major criticism of Wikipedia from Libraryland is that there's no peer review. Someone else had suggested flagging users with credentials. I would suggest flagging entries that have been reviewed by people with credentials. The trick is that the flag would have to disappear if substantial edits to the article are made...it would appear in the history, but that's it. Maybe have a tab to make it easier for people to read the reviewed version (before said changes). Convince academia to accept peer review of Wikipedia...that would help. (Wikipedia would also be well-served hiring a whole bunch of librarians. Lots of 'em are available!)
...I've toasted my legs with my laptop. That's why I use a laptop desk (laptopdesk.net). I'm not schilling for them - just stating what I use. And in my defense, my laptop battery did bloat, which might have had something to do with it. And I've also noticed that my girlfriend's MacBook Pro dissipates heat a lot better than my MacBook.
...and yes, it makes everything funnier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakety_Sax
During my couple of years in hell (telephone CSR for a big online discount travel site) we weren't allowed to put managers on the phone - ever. When someone asked, the answer was: "I'm sorry, but our supervisors are here for administrative purposes only. I can transfer your call to a customer service specialist, but they will advise you in the same way that I have." Apparently if a manager tells a customer something, it's more binding legally - hence why supervisors and managers were not identified as such on the phone.
I feel sorry for you, going your whole life, supposedly without using publicly-funded libraries. (Someone else already made the point about public universities, so I won't retread that.) Going your entire life...I'm guessing at least thirty years...without knowing the exquisite joys of the public library...to be able to obtain knowledge and entertainment without spending a ton of money each time you do so...to be able to read materials that are no longer in print (and not available on the Internet)...to know the pleasure that comes from simply browsing shelves upon shelves (and maybe floors upon floors) of well-kept, useful, well-organized books...I can't imagine how that's a good thing.
And really (full disclosure: I'm a graduate student in Library and Information Science) I would think that an engineer would be kinder, more knowledgeable, and more understanding about libraries (and, by extension, librarians) in general because your profession depends on information that is only available through library resources. And I don't just mean books - I mean expensive subscription-only electronic resources - journals, databases, technical data.... This sort of thing isn't available to just anyone - it's too damned expensive. But that's a big part of what libraries do. Large corporations like PPG have their OWN libraries to serve their employees. Check out the Special Libraries Association for more information....
Thank you - you said it better than I could have.
"We already have examples of employers that demands access to prospective worker's Facebook accounts in real life." Can you provide URLs or anything? It's not that I don't believe you (I absolutely do) but I want to see these for myself and to share with my library management class. I tried finding articles on my own, but my Google Fu must not be strong today.
If your purpose is preservation, and you are certain that this game is so rare that your efforts are necessary to preserve it, then what you should consider is doing this project in conjunction with a library. The Librarian of Congress has exempted libraries from the DMCA - but for preservation purposes only. If I recall correctly, the rule is that the item in question must be scarce enough that it cannot be replaced by practical means (i.e. purchasing another on the open market, getting a copy from another library). If this applies to you, this might work - and might shield you from legal liability. If you need a library to work with, you might contact Stanford University or the library at the University of Texas at Austin. Good luck!
...if any of your students think they've seen an alien spacecraft, *do not dismiss their findings.* Alien invasions are usually discovered by amateur astronomers and schoolchildren, but nobody believes them until it's too late and the aliens are already destroying major landmarks and slaughtering puny humans.
And some of 'em are real winners, too - which rules out the whole "filtering" argument. Por ejemplo: "Can I quit my job now?? I want the gov't. to take care of me! I just want to sit around and go fishing!!" "Have you considered outlawing all forms of regulation for health insurance companies in allof the lands that the USA government has under it's jurisdiction?" "To what extent will alternative medicine be covered?" There were some other real winners too, but I can't find them now - maybe they were deleted. One really special one went to the effect that we have to stop sodomy and baby-killing before anything else. (Their words, not mine.)
I thought I was going to have to offer this correction. You beat me to it. Someone please mod Curien's comment up!
As per TFA, this is nothing new - they had specs for XP and Vista, too. It would be nice to see some genuine competition for MS in this emerging market - i.e. Apple.
The "Titan" books have been pretty good, if too infrequent for my tastes. I wonder if Frakes, Sirtis, Russ, etc, would be willing to reprise their characters? http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Star_Trek:_Titan
One might argue that these previous attempts failed precisely because they required adapters. Traditional wisdom dictates that peripherals are rarely, if ever, supported by third parties, no matter how cool they are.
Agreed. The study captures only a limited amount of differences in English dialects....not sentence structure, idioms, etc. That's why, for example, the study doesn't seem to reflect Pittsburghese very well, for example.
That's why Iwatani-san is right when he says that innovation will return to the industry in a "couple years." In a couple years is when the new batch of consoles is due. Then companies have to innovate to get consumers to switch up.
It was not all that long ago that almost every new videogame offered something that nobody had ever seen before. However, those days are gone. Critics need to accept that videogaming has matured significantly as a medium. Few people want to admit that...there are still those out there waiting for the other shoe to drop (the first shoe fell in 1983 when Atari's empire crumbled) and this "fad" to finally end.
You're not wrong. Sad but true. Same reason there's so many reality shows...the unwashed (non-geek) masses can't tell they're being fed the same thing again and again.
There's no two ways about it: Yamauchi has a point. Too many developers are relying on technology instead of creativity. But does that really mean that the videogame industry is going to crash again? Mr. Wong really doesn't show the connection. All he has managed to truly establish are the following points:
That's really not establishing much that we don't already know. In fact, those two problems have been a consistent problem for videogaming since the 16-bit days. All this article does tries to do is shut up (or incite) gamers that don't intelligently examine their own hobby.
What his article misses is that videogaming is maturing as an artistic medium. The only problem, as with any medium, is that you have to take the bad with the good. For every innovative, creative game like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, you'll have five NBA Jam titles. Not only that, but some of the best stuff (like Wind Waker) will get ignored by the general populace in favor of crap. Hence why the list of the top-grossing films of all time does not include gems like The Shawshank Redemption (but Titanic is near the top), and why Wind Waker was not as successful as Nintendo would have liked.
Videogaming is not going anywhere because, despite its faults, it offers a form of entertainment that no other medium can: interactivity. In other words, people love Mario because, when you're holding the controller, Mario is you. The Sims offers a better dollhouse experience than any "real" dollhouse ever could. Ridge Racer tops Hot Wheels any day. And few films can provide the same depth, the same experience as Wind Waker or Final Fantasy VII.
Recommended reading: Wolf, Mark J.P., ed. The Medium of the Video Game. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2001.
I have to agree with the poster above. In fourth grade, the Powers That Be threw me into a remedial social-skill-building class; in fifth grade, the PTB threw me into remedial gym class (instead of computer class). Neither effort made much difference. The problem with many of the suggestions I've read here is that I doubt they'll actually work. True geeks are some of the most stubborn and rebellious people you can ever meet, but not quite in the John-Travolta-in-Grease way. The child you're mentoring probably already knows that he's differen. He probably also doesn't care, and probably won't until testosterone starts to talk to him. Even then, he'll be a rebel all his life. ...and more power to him. Do him a favor and make sure he's playing with Transformers toys and he'll be set.
IBM didn't start with Thomas Watson. IBM was originally the Computing-Tabulating-Recording (CTR) Company, founded by Charles Flint in 1911. CTR was made up of three acquisitions:
The latter is most important; it was founded and owned by Herman Hollerith, who invented the electric tabulating machine made famous by the 1890 U.S. Census. Thomas J. Watson wasn't hired as CTR's president until 1915, and the name change did not come until 1924.
Book suggestion: Austrian, Geoffrey D. Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Quote: "Such is the problem with being second-in-line, everyone uses the first." Windows came after Mac OS. AOL came after Prodigy and CompuServe. Super NES came after Sega Genesis PlayStation came after 3D0 and Philips PS2 came after Sega Dreamcast etc, etc, ad nauseum....
...this isn't necessarily a First Amendment issue. Would Gator be able to successfully sue a publication for libel for calling their product "spyware?" An answer to this I do not have, but a good question, it is.
I wonder...Microsoft is attempting to patent a feature that other IM clients (Y!M, AIM) already have (and has existed for years) and nearly simultaneously made changes to its protocol to block out Trillian, et al. (Not that the block lasted for long, but still, they did it.) Plus MS shuts down chat rooms, claiming that they will be concentrating on MSN Messenger. Is this the start of a new IM war?