It's amazing how many players start hitting on my gf's female blood elf character within 2 minutes of meeting her (she's always helping lowbies find the flight master or set their hearthstones or whatever) - surely her typing can't be that feminine? You know, I think it's more in the reception than in the delivery, and I'll tell you why. Either I'm rather well in touch with my feminine side (which could be useful, but I'm decidedly not), or there's a heavy stereotypic conception of how females act.
I play a definitely gender-less game (BZFlag), and I like to chat a bit, instigating a happy friendly atmosphere. Saying "nice shot" when I get whacked out of the blue. Helping newbies. You know, to keep the game fun and things. (I do the same in most other games I'm skilled at and that have a chat system.)
Here's the rub, though: every now and again, I find myself in a perhaps-a-little-above-average chatty mood on a server with few players and consequently a leisurely pace. And in *all* of those cases people take it for granted that I'm a chick -- which seems to make them more inclined to chat with me. Being a fan of OOTS and its comical "V gender issue", I never admit to my gender but prefer to keep them guessing.
On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid [...] on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. That's where online games, and indeed the internet in general, are great - they let you meet the person without prejudice [...]. I couldn't have said it better. Using an alias or avatar provides anonymity which evens the playing field and enables meritocracy. To me this seems common on online forums, but strangely different in online gaming.
Your post reminds me of the film "All Gone Pete Tong (The Legend of Frankie Wild)". Odd title, but a light-yet-deep story about an Ibiza DJ who deals with the effects of a deafening work environment.
> My data center is COLDER than the summit of Everest.
A hilltop like that will both be cold and have thin air, but there's a difference between the two.
When laptops were fairly new (early 90's), Toshiba made some headlines by having a laptop used by an arctic team. Low temperatures on an arctic scale do strange things to components (besides mild natural overclocking?), and keeping the LCD liquid was by itself a feat.
However, as stated by others, temperatures are not the only, or greatest, problem. Low pressures cause negligible difference in coolant airflow (esp. as the air is cool), but hard drives DO require air pressure bocause the read/write heads hover above the platters on a tiny cushion of air caused by the rotation speed (not totally unlike dolphins surfing on the bow wave of a vessel). Run a hard drive in vacuum, and you're as good as certain to have a disk head crash.
Re:Played my LAST arcade game in 1972
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Videogames Turn 40
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I must confess the majority of my gaming has been after 72 (seeing as how I'm born in 74...), but I agree wholeheartedly about wanting to *make* games.
Back in the very early 80's my dad worked for Borroughs, and actually I wrote a school paper or two in <ctrl><italic>WordStar>ctrl><italic>. Looking back, I can't believe I had the patience for it! But also on that Burroughs machine, he programmed a banal ascii-art "Ufo" game -- my first ever contact with computer games. The game was so-so, but it was kinda neat that my dad wrote it for me.
Then in the mid-80s, my dad worked for Apple, and we had a Mac. I was convinced that thing was only a boring business machine -- until one night when I cought him playing BreakOut in Macintosh ANSI Pascal v1.0! The very next morning I started my programming career, with nothing but that Pascal program and its two language reference manuals.
Before I made programming my living (yay), I worked in television. During and after that time, I regard television as I do games: it's something you make, not something you use.:)
Being able to access search engines or things like maps at will is going to be too irritableness for most people. Think about the difference the Internet has made to the learning process for those who have it - no more heading to libraries for books which are loaned out. Similarly I'd imagine being able to access a news update like a normal memory would be a similar jump.
The big downside to this is it will further increase the divide between people who are plugged in and those who aren't. It will have other consequences, too. There will always be people, perhaps even whole professions, that choose to not "plug in" because possible outages would deprive them of more than it ever offers them in the first place.
Since the advent of the 'net, "just Google(tm) it" has become a common phrase, displacing "good ole actually knowing stuff" in a manner that is surely less than intellectually wholesome. I don't need to know the postal code for the city my father lives in, or my doctor's phone number, because (should I need it) I could always find it online. So far so good (hopefully).
If people had the ability to "access a news update like a normal memory", I suppose the same goes for your family blog, to-do-list, phone book, et cetera. What, then, happens when the 'net is down for a while? Will you even know your home phone number, or your schedule for tomorrow?
Hehe, one of the best stuntmen in my country has a slogan on his car that reads, "It's not the fall that kills, it's the sudden landing". He should know!:)
I have had my eye on the RFID Digital Door Lock from ThinkGeek for quite a while now.
It's easily reprogrammed, you can issue access cards to persons as opposed to giving out a single PIN. Plus, it's supposed to be hack-proof, but probably not to the level of Sargent & Greenleaf.
I am considering it as a replacement for the lock in my flat's front door (which is arguably both less and more critical than an ISP gear shed). It's indoors, so weatherproofing is not an issue, but the flat is just rented so I can't really put any big holes in it...
Does anyone have experience with, or otherwise comments about, a lock of this type?
Ahh, I think I misread your point. So with the hardware keyboards, you'd keep the pc set up to use qwerty, and it gets it right in the Bios etc? I would like that.
I agree. However, regarding "I don't assume anyone seriously proposes switching to Dvorak when about to write code" there is such a thing as a coder's dvorak. Furthermore, some very frequent keys are awkward using any country's dvorak or qwerty layout -- for instance, to get "@${[]}" I need to type "AltGr-247890", and the coder's layout makes that kind of characters seriously more accessible -- although, to be truly useful (and keep the Dvorak spirit), I guess you'd have to have a whole layout *per programming language*, which is probably more than anyone wants to deal with.
In truth, I have yet to try the coder's layout, and it might well be some time: almost all of my coding happens at work, on Windows, and that's the one OS where you can't easily drop in your customized layout. (Trust me, I've had to resort to all sorts of hacks to get Norwegian dvorak installed so I could have my øæå.)
You don't need to buy a keyboard especially for dvorak. I buy a keyboard where all the keys are the exact same shape (watch the surface angle). They take a little bit more hunting down (like going to 2 or 3 local stores instead of 1). Then just rearrange the keys and you're done. I've never met a keyboard where you couldn't pop the keys out. $15 bucks and you're done. And we're talking Canadian money here. On the contrary, I find that a 'bumpy' keyboard is as good as no hassle at all. I get 'snagged' far less than I do on the one I put key cap stickers on. I suppose it depends on the shape of the edges and sides of the caps...
I'm a coder and I will NEVER use qwerty again if I have a choice. Plus, no one will mess with my computer. It's better than a password. I could not agree more -- dvorak breeds privacy. Except, I use the Norwegian variant, and Windows at work -- I had to hack-replace a DLL to fake the Norwegian dvorak, and change a registry value from "1" to something like "000419" (really!) in order to switch the layout on the login screen, too -- because yes, remembering your secure password in two layouts is dang tough.
Typing is SOOOO much easier on Dvorak. I'd been using qwerty for over 10 years and I could not type worth sh*t. I still can't type fast [...] Well, yes. Dvorak for me is all about comfort. I've been using it for over two years and I don't think I'm up to my pre-Dvorak speed yet, but I don't really care -- I pause every now and then for other reasons (like thinking) anyway. (As a side note, typing "...n't" and "...sn't" is surprisingly goofy in Dvorak and gets me every time. Weird.)
Yeah, I've wanted one of those black keyboards, for the sheer look of course. But, when you're writing prose in three languages and code in four, the locations of all those pesky |\'`{&]^ (heh, half the symbols won't even make it as far as the preview screen) become rather hard to keep track of. I must confess I do some hunt-and-pecking in between my touch typing...:-/
Err, they're not hard to come by. Google for "Fentek" (or just USB dvorak keyboard"...) and you'll end up in an online shop. Ta-dah.
Or, do what I did: on one keyboard, I've put custom-made key cap stickers to make it look like a dvorak, and on two other keyboards I've swapped around the actual key caps. One of them even was curved, but now it's more, um, bumpy, and it doesn't affect typing like I thought it would.
Only things you need to look out for are those tedious keyboards where the sockets for U and H (oops, F and J) are different than for the rest; and keyboards with a "clit" in the middle, for which you'll have to hack up the caps for I, D and X.
And the purported benefit of dvorak is that it's more ergonomic. This results in it being a little faster, but it's not the point. That's why if you do want to buy a dvorak keyboard, you'll find that almost none of them have the standard physical arrangement. But I do certainly notice the benefits of dvorak with my regular-format keyboards. Here's a fun comparison: Enter some text (using any layout), and have stats shown for Dvorak and qwerty. I have a page about Dvorak, and the distribution of characters on that page come out thusly:
Home row -- Dvorak: 66%, Qwerty: 32%
Top row -- Dvorak: 24%, Qwernty: 49%
Finger movement (arguably less scientifically 'hard' piece of data) -- Dvorak: 367m, Qwerty: 602m
In other words, Dvorak gets you the same result with 39% less effort.
On top of that, I've -never- seen a Dvorak keyboard. Fancy that, neither have I. You (i.e. I) touchtype dvorak. The only value you'll ever get out of looking at the keyboard is because it's fun to look at yourself typing on a keyboard with the keys marked wrong, and you can't do that with a dvorak keyboard. Oh well, I've made a Calc sheet with the caps, printed, cut, and stuck to my keyboard. I find it too confusing otherwise.
There's still just too many reasons not to switch, and only 1 to switch: It's supposedly quicker. Most reasons against switching are false; about the only one worth listening to is that lots of people use your computer and/or you use lots of computers. A very good reason, certainly, but still only one. Actually, it's a neat privacy feature. Not security, because it's only a matter of trying, but privacy because most people would rather just go away and use somebody else's computer, leaving mine to me.:) The keycaps help scaring them away without even trying.
"It annoys me so much that in a little flat country such as Denmark we can't figure out how to sort our waste..."
You lost me here.....sort waste (trash)? You don't just throw it in the garbage can, and once or twice a week, the garbagemen drive by the front of your house and empty your can and haul it all away?
Perhaps I should have written garbage, yes.
Here, everything goes into the same (under-the-sink) trash can, then into a single-compartment garbage truck, to one garbage heap. It pains me everytime I have to throw away perfectly good alumim(i)um foil. As it is, trying to roll a ton of it into a big ball for recycling would only serve to make me (a) $.02 richer, and (b) a laughing-stock.
OTOH, in Austria (or at least several parts of it) you are supposed to sort your garbage into separate trash cans for organic, plastic and metal parts. Therefore, if you buy sliced ham at the butcher's, the coated paper that it comes wrapped in can easily be taken apart for separate disposal. Very nice.
Last time I went to the recycling centre with some cases of floppies and cds, the went directly into the "small combustibles" dumpster... so not exactly recycled.
The folks down there throw tantrums if you're caught dumpster diving, which is sad because I think direct re-use is better than eventual recycling, no? I did manage to salvage a couple of Nixies from some weird old scientific instrument, though.
It annoys me so much that in a little flat country such as Denmark we can't figure out how to sort our waste, especially when the tiniest mountain villages in Austria do it. >_< Ok, rant over.
For the most part, I agree with you. Having said that, I want to also say that I read the entire Mars trilogy (or were that four books?) by Borroughs on my Psion Revo while on the bus. An actual ebook reader might have been just as well, but I didn't (a) have one, and (b) want two devices in my pocket.
Now that I'm on a Palm (T3), I'm looking far and wide for ebook reader software that is comparable.
True, I run BSD because quite frankly I'm fed up with putting my choices in the hands of that kind of corporation (yadda yadda yadda, rant skipped). Also true, that choice does limit my gaming choices, but the bottom line is that I don't want to have another box to maintain just for games.
I only play ancient games anyway (BZflag and DoD are the newest of the bunch, otherwise it's Ports of Call and things from that era). And it's really just DoD that I would really need a Windows box for (oh, that and also Neverhood of course, but that only runs on W9x, so that's nigh on hopeless these days anyway, but I digress...).
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I play a definitely gender-less game (BZFlag), and I like to chat a bit, instigating a happy friendly atmosphere. Saying "nice shot" when I get whacked out of the blue. Helping newbies. You know, to keep the game fun and things. (I do the same in most other games I'm skilled at and that have a chat system.)
Here's the rub, though: every now and again, I find myself in a perhaps-a-little-above-average chatty mood on a server with few players and consequently a leisurely pace. And in *all* of those cases people take it for granted that I'm a chick -- which seems to make them more inclined to chat with me. Being a fan of OOTS and its comical "V gender issue", I never admit to my gender but prefer to keep them guessing. On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid [...] on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. That's where online games, and indeed the internet in general, are great - they let you meet the person without prejudice [...]. I couldn't have said it better. Using an alias or avatar provides anonymity which evens the playing field and enables meritocracy. To me this seems common on online forums, but strangely different in online gaming.
Your post reminds me of the film "All Gone Pete Tong (The Legend of Frankie Wild)". Odd title, but a light-yet-deep story about an Ibiza DJ who deals with the effects of a deafening work environment.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0388139
Watch it if you like.
> My data center is COLDER than the summit of Everest.
A hilltop like that will both be cold and have thin air, but there's a difference between the two.
When laptops were fairly new (early 90's), Toshiba made some headlines by having a laptop used by an arctic team. Low temperatures on an arctic scale do strange things to components (besides mild natural overclocking?), and keeping the LCD liquid was by itself a feat.
However, as stated by others, temperatures are not the only, or greatest, problem. Low pressures cause negligible difference in coolant airflow (esp. as the air is cool), but hard drives DO require air pressure bocause the read/write heads hover above the platters on a tiny cushion of air caused by the rotation speed (not totally unlike dolphins surfing on the bow wave of a vessel). Run a hard drive in vacuum, and you're as good as certain to have a disk head crash.
I must confess the majority of my gaming has been after 72 (seeing as how I'm born in 74...), but I agree wholeheartedly about wanting to *make* games.
:)
Back in the very early 80's my dad worked for Borroughs, and actually I wrote a school paper or two in <ctrl><italic>WordStar>ctrl><italic>. Looking back, I can't believe I had the patience for it! But also on that Burroughs machine, he programmed a banal ascii-art "Ufo" game -- my first ever contact with computer games. The game was so-so, but it was kinda neat that my dad wrote it for me.
Then in the mid-80s, my dad worked for Apple, and we had a Mac. I was convinced that thing was only a boring business machine -- until one night when I cought him playing BreakOut in Macintosh ANSI Pascal v1.0! The very next morning I started my programming career, with nothing but that Pascal program and its two language reference manuals.
Before I made programming my living (yay), I worked in television. During and after that time, I regard television as I do games: it's something you make, not something you use.
The big downside to this is it will further increase the divide between people who are plugged in and those who aren't. It will have other consequences, too. There will always be people, perhaps even whole professions, that choose to not "plug in" because possible outages would deprive them of more than it ever offers them in the first place.
Since the advent of the 'net, "just Google(tm) it" has become a common phrase, displacing "good ole actually knowing stuff" in a manner that is surely less than intellectually wholesome. I don't need to know the postal code for the city my father lives in, or my doctor's phone number, because (should I need it) I could always find it online. So far so good (hopefully).
If people had the ability to "access a news update like a normal memory", I suppose the same goes for your family blog, to-do-list, phone book, et cetera. What, then, happens when the 'net is down for a while? Will you even know your home phone number, or your schedule for tomorrow?
Hehe, one of the best stuntmen in my country has a slogan on his car that reads, "It's not the fall that kills, it's the sudden landing". He should know! :)
I have had my eye on the RFID Digital Door Lock from ThinkGeek for quite a while now.
It's easily reprogrammed, you can issue access cards to persons as opposed to giving out a single PIN. Plus, it's supposed to be hack-proof, but probably not to the level of Sargent & Greenleaf.
I am considering it as a replacement for the lock in my flat's front door (which is arguably both less and more critical than an ISP gear shed). It's indoors, so weatherproofing is not an issue, but the flat is just rented so I can't really put any big holes in it...
Does anyone have experience with, or otherwise comments about, a lock of this type?
I don't suppose you can find me a copy of Herb Alpert's 1971 "Summertime" album on cd, too, then?
p hy
As far as I've found, it was only ever released on vinyl, and ripping it to pc is hard because of the much varying levels on that album.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_Alpert#Discogra
Ahh, I think I misread your point. So with the hardware keyboards, you'd keep the pc set up to use qwerty, and it gets it right in the Bios etc? I would like that.
True, using Dvorak_NO is just fine for Danish as well.
:-p)
(But you seem to be writing nynorsk, which is unintelligible anyway!
I agree. However, regarding "I don't assume anyone seriously proposes switching to Dvorak when about to write code" there is such a thing as a coder's dvorak.
Furthermore, some very frequent keys are awkward using any country's dvorak or qwerty layout -- for instance, to get "@${[]}" I need to type "AltGr-247890", and the coder's layout makes that kind of characters seriously more accessible -- although, to be truly useful (and keep the Dvorak spirit), I guess you'd have to have a whole layout *per programming language*, which is probably more than anyone wants to deal with.
In truth, I have yet to try the coder's layout, and it might well be some time: almost all of my coding happens at work, on Windows, and that's the one OS where you can't easily drop in your customized layout. (Trust me, I've had to resort to all sorts of hacks to get Norwegian dvorak installed so I could have my øæå.)
Yeah, I've wanted one of those black keyboards, for the sheer look of course. But, when you're writing prose in three languages and code in four, the locations of all those pesky |\'`{&]^ (heh, half the symbols won't even make it as far as the preview screen) become rather hard to keep track of. I must confess I do some hunt-and-pecking in between my touch typing... :-/
Err, they're not hard to come by. Google for "Fentek" (or just USB dvorak keyboard"...) and you'll end up in an online shop. Ta-dah.
Or, do what I did: on one keyboard, I've put custom-made key cap stickers to make it look like a dvorak, and on two other keyboards I've swapped around the actual key caps. One of them even was curved, but now it's more, um, bumpy, and it doesn't affect typing like I thought it would.
Only things you need to look out for are those tedious keyboards where the sockets for U and H (oops, F and J) are different than for the rest; and keyboards with a "clit" in the middle, for which you'll have to hack up the caps for I, D and X.
Heh, got me there. It's not like they're all in a row, you know. :-p
However, "a thousand nude deadheads sustained hideous headstands as studious atheists dissented and seethed", is. Wow.
Funny response. :)
But yes, that actually does happen frequently. And I like it. And, they think I'm all weird because of that [as well, heh].
Right you are. :p
In other words, Dvorak gets you the same result with 39% less effort.
Fancy that, neither have I. You (i.e. I) touchtype dvorak. The only value you'll ever get out of looking at the keyboard is because it's fun to look at yourself typing on a keyboard with the keys marked wrong, and you can't do that with a dvorak keyboard. Oh well, I've made a Calc sheet with the caps, printed, cut, and stuck to my keyboard. I find it too confusing otherwise. There's still just too many reasons not to switch, and only 1 to switch: It's supposedly quicker.
Most reasons against switching are false; about the only one worth listening to is that lots of people use your computer and/or you use lots of computers. A very good reason, certainly, but still only one. Actually, it's a neat privacy feature. Not security, because it's only a matter of trying, but privacy because most people would rather just go away and use somebody else's computer, leaving mine to me.
Perhaps I should have written garbage, yes.You lost me here.....sort waste (trash)? You don't just throw it in the garbage can, and once or twice a week, the garbagemen drive by the front of your house and empty your can and haul it all away?
Here, everything goes into the same (under-the-sink) trash can, then into a single-compartment garbage truck, to one garbage heap. It pains me everytime I have to throw away perfectly good alumim(i)um foil. As it is, trying to roll a ton of it into a big ball for recycling would only serve to make me (a) $.02 richer, and (b) a laughing-stock.
OTOH, in Austria (or at least several parts of it) you are supposed to sort your garbage into separate trash cans for organic, plastic and metal parts. Therefore, if you buy sliced ham at the butcher's, the coated paper that it comes wrapped in can easily be taken apart for separate disposal. Very nice.
Oh well
Last time I went to the recycling centre with some cases of floppies and cds, the went directly into the "small combustibles" dumpster ... so not exactly recycled.
The folks down there throw tantrums if you're caught dumpster diving, which is sad because I think direct re-use is better than eventual recycling, no? I did manage to salvage a couple of Nixies from some weird old scientific instrument, though.
Here in Denmark, they're not.
It annoys me so much that in a little flat country such as Denmark we can't figure out how to sort our waste, especially when the tiniest mountain villages in Austria do it. >_< Ok, rant over.
For the most part, I agree with you. Having said that, I want to also say that I read the entire Mars trilogy (or were that four books?) by Borroughs on my Psion Revo while on the bus. An actual ebook reader might have been just as well, but I didn't (a) have one, and (b) want two devices in my pocket.
Now that I'm on a Palm (T3), I'm looking far and wide for ebook reader software that is comparable.
Very interesting! I'll definitely have a good long look at it. Thanks!
No trouble stirred, I'm not easily offended. :)
True, I run BSD because quite frankly I'm fed up with putting my choices in the hands of that kind of corporation (yadda yadda yadda, rant skipped). Also true, that choice does limit my gaming choices, but the bottom line is that I don't want to have another box to maintain just for games.
I only play ancient games anyway (BZflag and DoD are the newest of the bunch, otherwise it's Ports of Call and things from that era). And it's really just DoD that I would really need a Windows box for (oh, that and also Neverhood of course, but that only runs on W9x, so that's nigh on hopeless these days anyway, but I digress...).