Not to mention that having so many restrictions on passwords can significantly reduce the pool of possible passwords, making brute force password cracking even easier. But maybe no one does brute force anymore...
The problem with multi-player is that it depends on an online server today which will shut down in time. Consider Super Mario Bros. a game made what? Nearly 30 years ago? It is still as playable today as is was in the 80s. Now consider Halo 2 made in 2004 which is now crippled in 2010 because Xbox live for the Xbox has been discontinued.
Perhaps for online games like Halo 2 or World of Warcraft, once the game becomes so outdated that the company decides not to continue hosting it, they should allow fans to host smaller local servers, private servers, themselves. They could even charge a one-time fee to buy the software. Then fans of the game can still play the game with a small group of friends even if the company essentially gave up on the game servers.
But please, do not put this on your resume as one of your skills, or as leadership experience. Some people do this, and it generally just gets them laughed at.
Perhaps the people laughing are just doing so because they are brought up thinking gaming is a waste of time, or just a fun activity that has no other meaning in life besides entertainment. There is probably not much to learn about real world activities in a corporate environment by spending 16 hours a day playing Super Mario Bros. 3, but MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars are entirely different. You're not just playing a game where you have complete control over the situation (if you jump on the Goomba, the Goomba gets squished). You're interacting with perhaps hundreds of people, with different levels of skills and abilities, who all may or may not be working toward the same goal - a goal that one single individual may not be able to complete on his own.
In a game like WoW, you can track the stats and abilities of your guild members, decide who is good at what and where they should position themselves or what each person should be doing in a raid to get the best possible outcome. In a software development company, you can track the skills and abilities of your team members, decide who is good at what and which types of tasks (hardware interface code, design documentation, GUI design, networking code) each member should be assigned so you can produce the best possible piece of software. It's not about just running out there and swinging a sword at the bad guys for hours on end.
The same skills in WoW could be brought to sports. Lead a football team to victory by positioning each player where they best fit and tracking metrics from this. Should leadership in sports not be used in a resume?
Maybe you're hanging around the wrong crowd of gamers? I've played several MMORPGs and met plenty of people in the game who have a husband or wife, maybe some kids, full time job, etc. Not all MMORPG players play the games in their parents' basements 16 hours a day while eating twinkies and nachos. You can have a full time job, family to support, etc., and just spend a few hours a week casually playing a game like that.
I don't like the charging door either. It feels rather fragile, like I'll end up tearing it off just by tapping it. The charging port door usually doesn't fit all the way in to the port, and if it does, it's a tight fit and hard to get back out.
I'll have to look into the advanced gestures. I didn't see an option for those yet, just the back and up gestures so far.
I sure hope so. I just received two Palm Pre Plus smartphones in the mail today. So far they seem pretty good, but I've never had a smartphone to compare.
VirtualBox or VMware have always worked pretty well in my experience. VirtualBox is free, and VMware Server is free as well. I know there are Linux and Windows ports for VMWare Server (for the host OS), not sure about VirtualBox. The one problem with virtual machines is the students' computers will have to have enough resources to run the software plus the guest Linux OS that they install. Some students' home systems might not be quite up to par.
Perhaps another route, although a bit more expensive, could be to go with a computer-on-chip type system like Gumstix. They have entire kits that can be purchased for about the price of a netbook. The students would just need access to a keyboard, mouse, USB hub, and monitor. It doesn't run Ubuntu by default, but there are instructions on how to install it. That could be an interesting project as part of the class, even as a final project after the students learn how to install to the desktop. They can take that experience and apply it toward installing Linux onto an embedded device like the Gumstix. Just a thought:)
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
It's not good for homes as theres no multiple user accounts.
Who is iPad aimed at then?
How many average home users actually use multiple user accounts? Any home computer I've ever been on (aside from my own), the owner just runs a single account that everyone shares. Maybe things are different in the Apple home user world. Most average users I know have Windows XP boxes with a single standard administrator account (e.g., Compaq_Owner). I've run into one single computer where there were separate accounts, but all were admins, and none had passwords.
If nothing else, THAT is the key to what makes BASIC so good as an intro language. With only a few simple lines of code, you can have a full program up and running getting input from the user and displaying things on the screen. I first got interested in programming as a kid because I thought it was awesome that I could write some text on the screen to make the computer do what I wanted it to do.
You get to learn about core programming concepts like loops, if/else statements, and the like without worrying about classes, structs, event handling, threads, and other similar things that although are helpful, are not necessary to create a program. Some languages (besides BASIC) don't even have some of those more advanced components.
Why shouldn't you be doing it? That's not what I was taught when racing cars in my younger years... Because it's a dangerous technique that is used by racing drivers to get some extra speed out of their car. When you are on the road you should not be trying to get that extra speed, you should be trying to get the extra safety. Now grow up.
Well I was going to write up a response about the reaction time of switching your right foot from accelerator to brake vs left foot braking, but that would only apply on automatic transmission vehicles. On manual transmission, your left foot belongs on the clutch. Downshift while moving your right foot to the brake to save that reaction time.
Cell phones cause car accidents all the time. Even if you think you're skillful enough to operate a cell phone and drive, doing so can be a role model for someone else who can't do the feat. My friend was even in a bad car accident last week where he says the other driver was on a cell phone. He had some broken ribs, a collar bone, and was pulled out by jaws of life.
If you get a ring, down answer it. Then find a pull off and call the person back.
Of course it can be quite a distraction for many drivers to try and hold a phone to their ear or type out a text while driving, What about hands free, e.g., bluetooth headsets? A quick poke of a button on your ear to answer a call shouldn't be any different than pushing a button to change the channel on your radio. If the phone is set to auto answer, it's not much different than having a conversation with a passenger in the vehicle.
There's also another device: Nettalk TK6000, which looks quite a bit like MagicJack, but without the USB connector. It doesn't require a PC at all.
As for MagicJack, I have been using one at home for several months now. I have it running on a headless XP desktop, so the ad-laden call manager doesn't bother me since I never see it. Sometimes the call quality isn't that great, especially when I first got it, but after some tweaks, it's working rather well.
I wouldn't say MagicJack tech support is non-existent. It's just in the form of a live chat with a tech via their website. I've used them a few times before. Sometimes they are more helpful than others, depending on who actually answers your chat I suppose. One time I was forwarded to a Level II support person, and they were even more helpful.
Yes we love your little additional notes like "The block is costing us money". Also using the word "fix", as if something is broken scores you bonus points. If I got a request like that I'd jump right on it.
(jk bottom of the queue)
But the block most likely is costing them money. If I'm spending part of my day performing additional searches in Google to try to find some obscure website that is actually not blocked, so I can finally find the information that would have been provided in the top 3 (blocked) search results that I found an hour ago, that is costing money. That search time could have been better spent actually implementing the information contained in the blocked page.
The communications themselves are not necessarily harmful if performed by consenting parties on both sides. The interception and exploitation of that communication is harmful.
Re:It would be Captain Sir Jean-Luc
on
Sir Patrick Stewart
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I hate to break it to you, but Captain Jean-Luc Picard is not real. He is a fictional character on a TV show played by Patrick Stewart.
Re:Then Obama should knight William Shatner
on
Sir Patrick Stewart
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I'd have to disagree. I think Picard was a great captain. Kirk had this annoying... habit of... pausing... for... effectiveness repeatedly,... but his... pauses were... not... very effective... IMHO. Other than that, Kirk was ok I guess:)
MD5 hashes are all well and good to verify that what you downloaded is indeed the file that exists on the repository's server. However, does the package manager check this against other repositories? What's to stop an owner of a particular mirror from replacing a certain popular package with a malicious program of the same name and regenerating the MD5? I guess the mirror would fix itself the next time it updates from the main repository, but people may still grab the malicious version in the meantime.
The creation of those bits required the harming of a child, there's nothing crazy about wanting to outlaw those bits.
The creation of those crime scene photographs, or war photographs, required the harming of human beings. There's nothing crazy about wanting to outlaw those photographs.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that having so many restrictions on passwords can significantly reduce the pool of possible passwords, making brute force password cracking even easier. But maybe no one does brute force anymore...
I believe the flight sim was in Excel 2000. Excel 95 had an FPS game similar to DOOM in it. It was just one small map, but it was there.
Plenty of Easter Eggs in various applications, operating systems, hardware devices, movies, etc. :)
I guess the term 'friend' is being used somewhat lightly.
The problem with multi-player is that it depends on an online server today which will shut down in time. Consider Super Mario Bros. a game made what? Nearly 30 years ago? It is still as playable today as is was in the 80s. Now consider Halo 2 made in 2004 which is now crippled in 2010 because Xbox live for the Xbox has been discontinued.
Perhaps for online games like Halo 2 or World of Warcraft, once the game becomes so outdated that the company decides not to continue hosting it, they should allow fans to host smaller local servers, private servers, themselves. They could even charge a one-time fee to buy the software. Then fans of the game can still play the game with a small group of friends even if the company essentially gave up on the game servers.
But please, do not put this on your resume as one of your skills, or as leadership experience. Some people do this, and it generally just gets them laughed at.
Perhaps the people laughing are just doing so because they are brought up thinking gaming is a waste of time, or just a fun activity that has no other meaning in life besides entertainment. There is probably not much to learn about real world activities in a corporate environment by spending 16 hours a day playing Super Mario Bros. 3, but MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars are entirely different. You're not just playing a game where you have complete control over the situation (if you jump on the Goomba, the Goomba gets squished). You're interacting with perhaps hundreds of people, with different levels of skills and abilities, who all may or may not be working toward the same goal - a goal that one single individual may not be able to complete on his own.
In a game like WoW, you can track the stats and abilities of your guild members, decide who is good at what and where they should position themselves or what each person should be doing in a raid to get the best possible outcome. In a software development company, you can track the skills and abilities of your team members, decide who is good at what and which types of tasks (hardware interface code, design documentation, GUI design, networking code) each member should be assigned so you can produce the best possible piece of software. It's not about just running out there and swinging a sword at the bad guys for hours on end.
The same skills in WoW could be brought to sports. Lead a football team to victory by positioning each player where they best fit and tracking metrics from this. Should leadership in sports not be used in a resume?
Maybe you're hanging around the wrong crowd of gamers? I've played several MMORPGs and met plenty of people in the game who have a husband or wife, maybe some kids, full time job, etc. Not all MMORPG players play the games in their parents' basements 16 hours a day while eating twinkies and nachos. You can have a full time job, family to support, etc., and just spend a few hours a week casually playing a game like that.
Didn't know you could sync over wifi. I'll have to check that out. I'm still a bit new with smartphones.
I don't like the charging door either. It feels rather fragile, like I'll end up tearing it off just by tapping it. The charging port door usually doesn't fit all the way in to the port, and if it does, it's a tight fit and hard to get back out.
I'll have to look into the advanced gestures. I didn't see an option for those yet, just the back and up gestures so far.
I sure hope so. I just received two Palm Pre Plus smartphones in the mail today. So far they seem pretty good, but I've never had a smartphone to compare.
VirtualBox or VMware have always worked pretty well in my experience. VirtualBox is free, and VMware Server is free as well. I know there are Linux and Windows ports for VMWare Server (for the host OS), not sure about VirtualBox. The one problem with virtual machines is the students' computers will have to have enough resources to run the software plus the guest Linux OS that they install. Some students' home systems might not be quite up to par.
Perhaps another route, although a bit more expensive, could be to go with a computer-on-chip type system like Gumstix. They have entire kits that can be purchased for about the price of a netbook. The students would just need access to a keyboard, mouse, USB hub, and monitor. It doesn't run Ubuntu by default, but there are instructions on how to install it. That could be an interesting project as part of the class, even as a final project after the students learn how to install to the desktop. They can take that experience and apply it toward installing Linux onto an embedded device like the Gumstix. Just a thought :)
It's not good for homes as theres no multiple user accounts.
Who is iPad aimed at then?
How many average home users actually use multiple user accounts? Any home computer I've ever been on (aside from my own), the owner just runs a single account that everyone shares. Maybe things are different in the Apple home user world. Most average users I know have Windows XP boxes with a single standard administrator account (e.g., Compaq_Owner). I've run into one single computer where there were separate accounts, but all were admins, and none had passwords.
If nothing else, THAT is the key to what makes BASIC so good as an intro language. With only a few simple lines of code, you can have a full program up and running getting input from the user and displaying things on the screen. I first got interested in programming as a kid because I thought it was awesome that I could write some text on the screen to make the computer do what I wanted it to do.
You get to learn about core programming concepts like loops, if/else statements, and the like without worrying about classes, structs, event handling, threads, and other similar things that although are helpful, are not necessary to create a program. Some languages (besides BASIC) don't even have some of those more advanced components.
It's nice that they promise up to 50%, but a 0% increase in efficiency meets that promise. So they can do nothing and still succeed. :)
Why shouldn't you be doing it? That's not what I was taught when racing cars in my younger years...
Because it's a dangerous technique that is used by racing drivers to get some extra speed out of their car. When you are on the road you should not be trying to get that extra speed, you should be trying to get the extra safety. Now grow up.
Well I was going to write up a response about the reaction time of switching your right foot from accelerator to brake vs left foot braking, but that would only apply on automatic transmission vehicles. On manual transmission, your left foot belongs on the clutch. Downshift while moving your right foot to the brake to save that reaction time.
I never understood the need to block things like porn for the military.
It's not so much the porn that needs to be blocked. It's the malware and the like that comes with many porn sites that needs to be blocked.
Would someone smarter than me please explain what is so evil about rebooting now and then?
Downtime just KILLS a system's availability requirement.
"Do not use your cell phone while driving"
Cell phones cause car accidents all the time. Even if you think you're skillful enough to operate a cell phone and drive, doing so can be a role model for someone else who can't do the feat. My friend was even in a bad car accident last week where he says the other driver was on a cell phone. He had some broken ribs, a collar bone, and was pulled out by jaws of life.
If you get a ring, down answer it. Then find a pull off and call the person back.
Of course it can be quite a distraction for many drivers to try and hold a phone to their ear or type out a text while driving, What about hands free, e.g., bluetooth headsets? A quick poke of a button on your ear to answer a call shouldn't be any different than pushing a button to change the channel on your radio. If the phone is set to auto answer, it's not much different than having a conversation with a passenger in the vehicle.
I'm not familiar with ATA devices. I've heard of them, but that's about it.
There's also another device: Nettalk TK6000, which looks quite a bit like MagicJack, but without the USB connector. It doesn't require a PC at all.
As for MagicJack, I have been using one at home for several months now. I have it running on a headless XP desktop, so the ad-laden call manager doesn't bother me since I never see it. Sometimes the call quality isn't that great, especially when I first got it, but after some tweaks, it's working rather well.
I wouldn't say MagicJack tech support is non-existent. It's just in the form of a live chat with a tech via their website. I've used them a few times before. Sometimes they are more helpful than others, depending on who actually answers your chat I suppose. One time I was forwarded to a Level II support person, and they were even more helpful.
Yes we love your little additional notes like "The block is costing us money". Also using the word "fix", as if something is broken scores you bonus points. If I got a request like that I'd jump right on it.
(jk bottom of the queue)
But the block most likely is costing them money. If I'm spending part of my day performing additional searches in Google to try to find some obscure website that is actually not blocked, so I can finally find the information that would have been provided in the top 3 (blocked) search results that I found an hour ago, that is costing money. That search time could have been better spent actually implementing the information contained in the blocked page.
The communications themselves are not necessarily harmful if performed by consenting parties on both sides. The interception and exploitation of that communication is harmful.
I hate to break it to you, but Captain Jean-Luc Picard is not real. He is a fictional character on a TV show played by Patrick Stewart.
I'd have to disagree. I think Picard was a great captain. Kirk had this annoying... habit of... pausing... for... effectiveness repeatedly,... but his... pauses were... not... very effective... IMHO. Other than that, Kirk was ok I guess :)
MD5 hashes are all well and good to verify that what you downloaded is indeed the file that exists on the repository's server. However, does the package manager check this against other repositories? What's to stop an owner of a particular mirror from replacing a certain popular package with a malicious program of the same name and regenerating the MD5? I guess the mirror would fix itself the next time it updates from the main repository, but people may still grab the malicious version in the meantime.
Unless mirrors don't work that way.
The creation of those bits required the harming of a child, there's nothing crazy about wanting to outlaw those bits.
The creation of those crime scene photographs, or war photographs, required the harming of human beings. There's nothing crazy about wanting to outlaw those photographs.