Firefox seems to break half the time Quicktime runs. Because Firefox also breaks occasionally without Quicktime, and Quicktime on its own works quite well, I blame Firefox, as the product that appears to be less well-engineered.
"All comics must go through articles for deletion, where the community must decide."
Don't worry, the webcomics community thought of that too, and broke the rule about not making your point by actually proving it makes not a whit of difference. One author put his comic up for deletion, making ten sock puppets in order to argue with each other, and no-one battered an eyelid. Someone else did the same thing in the same VfD but argued 'keep' and got caught. There's plenty more cases where the community has decided to delete notable comics just because the Wikipedia entry doesn't make a proper case (I believe the appropriate response there is 'improve article'). When the most prominent webcomics award is deleted from Wikipedia for being 'not notable', you know you have a problem, as you do when one of the early driving forces behind the Wikipedia Webcomics projectbackflips a year later and decides that Wikipedia will never come around and that the webcomics community would be better served by making their own wiki.
It's almost common knowledge in the webcomics community that Wikipedia is a waste of time, but it's great for looking up comic book minutiae.
"The problem with citizendium is the basic premise that the masses aren't "qualified" to contribute."
I'm sorry, but this is wrong. It's even in TFA.
I'm honestly getting a big FUD vibe from/. here - oh noes, real names! Citizendium will be a failure just like that other site that uses real names, Facebook! Oh noes, Wikipedia is already too big, it'll never be a credible source of information like Wikipedia is - or Encyclopedia Britannica is, or Encarta is, or mass media was, or, or, or...
It's an ambitious idea, and I'd like to see it succeed because honestly competition will improve both, and Wikipedia and Citizendium are unlikely to share weaknesses, especially organisational weaknesses. It'll make both stronger.
"Everything in between is subjective and, as such, should be left to states and local communities to prevent 218 Representatives + 51 Senators + 1 President from imposing burdensome ideologies on the tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of people who don't support those ideologies."
So I guess you don't live in a democracy then, because in a democracy the idea is that the government should represent as many points of view as possible, and where your view differs from the government you should suck up and deal because, ideally, that means that most of society also disagrees.
Of course, this doesn't work in America any more because American politics these days is six kinds of stupid, which is my way of saying that I'm sick of talking about exactly how messed up it is.
I'm a little bothered by the assertion of mono-culture, to be honest - correct me if I'm wrong, but New Hampshire seems to have a very different culture to Missouri, and that's in the same country. The amount of times I've had to explain words that turned out to not be as culturally widespread as I thought they were suggests that even in a Western 'mono-culture' there's a lot of variation, despite a similar set of influences - probably as much as in the African tribes, who on a superficial level are pretty much all the same as well.
Interestingly, the dude says on the centre's blog that the DTSC have seen the error of their ways, independently of the Internet's efforts, and dialed back. For instance, they're no longer demanding that some of the old computers they're keeping around for preservation purposes need to be disposed of.
The one I've heard about that interested me the most was a belt with motors all around it - the northmost motor vibrated, giving the wearer an innate sense of direction.
So now that there's better money in cybercrime than in drug trafficking, does that mean that now everyone involved in drugs is a loser instead of everyone except the higher-ups in the trafficking organisation?
ODF isn't backwards compatible with previous versions of Office, though. It's a huge technical challenge, and so it's probably easier for them to take the de facto standard and make it de rigeur than it is to reverse-engineer decades worth of design decisions.
I have only read the first book of the series and found it quite great. Does it get worse later on? Why are you saying this?
Yeeeeeep. The first three are pretty good, they probably could have stood on their own as a quite decent, though incomplete, trilogy. The fourth one is usually when people feel it starts to dip in quality, and the nadir is about the ninth book. I understand that the eleventh book is something of an improvement, but then you've got to get through the increasing amounts of filler from four through ten.
We gotta vote for someone. (Because voting is compulsory, y'see.)
It does have its upsides: attack ads tend to be less frequent; as everyone already knows that politicians are scumbags, running an attack ad merely confirms whoever paid for the spot as a scumbag.
While the New Zealand law doesn't extend to Australia, Australian media pretty much extends to New Zealand. It'd be nice to see some New Zealand content on the Australian shows, don't you think?
The split between 'casual' and 'hardcore' has never really sat right with me. I don't see why there is a split, to be honest, and I'm having some trouble working out exactly where the line between casual and hardcore is supposed to be. Is it time spent? People spend hours, hours, playing Bejeweled. Is it complexity? Because World of Warcraft is not particularly complex. (Oh sure, there are interlocking crafting systems and whatnot, but you don't need to spend any time with them.)
I suspect that what makes a game 'hardcore' is how much it expects the players can already do. Development budgets are stretched thin as it is, so you don't see many developers put concepts for advanced players to grasp once they've got the basics under control. Wii Sports doesn't have a mode where you make the tennis player run around by itself. And many games skip those formalities and expect you to be able to master concepts pretty quickly, and don't spend much time making gameplay out of running and shooting at the same time, or something similarly trivial for the hardcore player.
The solutions seem obvious: either flatten the curve of triviality by forging a path to a new genre (no-one accuses the Katamari games of being casual, but they're pretty shallow) or find ways to increase the complexity of the game just for the hardcore (this can backfire, as the hardcore as fairly likely to hem themselves in and then complain that the game is too easy, as with Final Fantasy XII).
We have a very similar setup at Caravel Games. Our product, the DROD series, started as an open source remake of a closed-source game, but as we eventually gathered enough fans clamouring for a sequel we found that we couldn't sell what we'd worked on without breaking the license, as it was built on the top of the open source engine.
What we ended up doing is something rather unique: we sell the content we create, levels, voice acting, so on and so forth, and the game engine (including the editor we used to make the game) is free. Because DROD is a niche game that doesn't appeal to everybody, this works out well: players can play and create user-made levels to their heart's content, and most will enjoy the game enough to want to see 'everything', and to support the creators, so they'll pay for the stuff we create. It also helps build a community around the game. (We also let people get full versions of the game for other operating systems for free for the same reason - they've paid for the content, not the code they play it on.)
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Firefox seems to break half the time Quicktime runs. Because Firefox also breaks occasionally without Quicktime, and Quicktime on its own works quite well, I blame Firefox, as the product that appears to be less well-engineered.
"All comics must go through articles for deletion, where the community must decide."
Don't worry, the webcomics community thought of that too, and broke the rule about not making your point by actually proving it makes not a whit of difference. One author put his comic up for deletion, making ten sock puppets in order to argue with each other, and no-one battered an eyelid. Someone else did the same thing in the same VfD but argued 'keep' and got caught. There's plenty more cases where the community has decided to delete notable comics just because the Wikipedia entry doesn't make a proper case (I believe the appropriate response there is 'improve article'). When the most prominent webcomics award is deleted from Wikipedia for being 'not notable', you know you have a problem, as you do when one of the early driving forces behind the Wikipedia Webcomics project backflips a year later and decides that Wikipedia will never come around and that the webcomics community would be better served by making their own wiki.
It's almost common knowledge in the webcomics community that Wikipedia is a waste of time, but it's great for looking up comic book minutiae.
"The problem with citizendium is the basic premise that the masses aren't "qualified" to contribute."
/. here - oh noes, real names! Citizendium will be a failure just like that other site that uses real names, Facebook! Oh noes, Wikipedia is already too big, it'll never be a credible source of information like Wikipedia is - or Encyclopedia Britannica is, or Encarta is, or mass media was, or, or, or...
I'm sorry, but this is wrong. It's even in TFA.
I'm honestly getting a big FUD vibe from
It's an ambitious idea, and I'd like to see it succeed because honestly competition will improve both, and Wikipedia and Citizendium are unlikely to share weaknesses, especially organisational weaknesses. It'll make both stronger.
Something with lots of options is also something with too many options.
Buy it directly through Steam. This requires a credit card, but I live 'internationally' and it went off without a hitch.
In fact, this is the way that Valve would prefer you to do it - that way, the useless retail types don't get a cut of one of the best games this year.
Can it predict this response?
Okay, I guess it is a predictable response, but can it predict this banana pants?
"Everything in between is subjective and, as such, should be left to states and local communities to prevent 218 Representatives + 51 Senators + 1 President from imposing burdensome ideologies on the tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of people who don't support those ideologies."
So I guess you don't live in a democracy then, because in a democracy the idea is that the government should represent as many points of view as possible, and where your view differs from the government you should suck up and deal because, ideally, that means that most of society also disagrees.
Of course, this doesn't work in America any more because American politics these days is six kinds of stupid, which is my way of saying that I'm sick of talking about exactly how messed up it is.
"Ha! Vista is a buggy bloated piece of poo which it took them *7 years* to come up with.
I got booted from a MS friendly site for saying so."
I can kind of guess why, if that's the way you presented it.
I'm a little bothered by the assertion of mono-culture, to be honest - correct me if I'm wrong, but New Hampshire seems to have a very different culture to Missouri, and that's in the same country. The amount of times I've had to explain words that turned out to not be as culturally widespread as I thought they were suggests that even in a Western 'mono-culture' there's a lot of variation, despite a similar set of influences - probably as much as in the African tribes, who on a superficial level are pretty much all the same as well.
Try the actual actual site, http://abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/ - the poll is classic. Video podcasts are here: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/vodcast/
Interestingly, the dude says on the centre's blog that the DTSC have seen the error of their ways, independently of the Internet's efforts, and dialed back. For instance, they're no longer demanding that some of the old computers they're keeping around for preservation purposes need to be disposed of.
The one I've heard about that interested me the most was a belt with motors all around it - the northmost motor vibrated, giving the wearer an innate sense of direction.
So now that there's better money in cybercrime than in drug trafficking, does that mean that now everyone involved in drugs is a loser instead of everyone except the higher-ups in the trafficking organisation?
ODF isn't backwards compatible with previous versions of Office, though. It's a huge technical challenge, and so it's probably easier for them to take the de facto standard and make it de rigeur than it is to reverse-engineer decades worth of design decisions.
I have only read the first book of the series and found it quite great. Does it get worse later on? Why are you saying this?
Yeeeeeep. The first three are pretty good, they probably could have stood on their own as a quite decent, though incomplete, trilogy. The fourth one is usually when people feel it starts to dip in quality, and the nadir is about the ninth book. I understand that the eleventh book is something of an improvement, but then you've got to get through the increasing amounts of filler from four through ten.
The entire parent post somehow reminds me of the manatees that write Family Guy.
But how can you make the computer work without Windows? That's just impossible. You can't do it.
We gotta vote for someone. (Because voting is compulsory, y'see.) It does have its upsides: attack ads tend to be less frequent; as everyone already knows that politicians are scumbags, running an attack ad merely confirms whoever paid for the spot as a scumbag.
What, you're expecting Cory Doctorow talking about copyright to be logical?
While the New Zealand law doesn't extend to Australia, Australian media pretty much extends to New Zealand. It'd be nice to see some New Zealand content on the Australian shows, don't you think?
Hopefully Citizendium will be able to transcend these problems.
There are more contributors than those that worked on the commercial versions, which is why things have to stay open.
I don't think Sourceforge has the latest version of the source any more - it lives here, on the company's official site: http://www.caravelgames.com/sourcecode.html
The split between 'casual' and 'hardcore' has never really sat right with me. I don't see why there is a split, to be honest, and I'm having some trouble working out exactly where the line between casual and hardcore is supposed to be. Is it time spent? People spend hours, hours, playing Bejeweled. Is it complexity? Because World of Warcraft is not particularly complex. (Oh sure, there are interlocking crafting systems and whatnot, but you don't need to spend any time with them.)
I suspect that what makes a game 'hardcore' is how much it expects the players can already do. Development budgets are stretched thin as it is, so you don't see many developers put concepts for advanced players to grasp once they've got the basics under control. Wii Sports doesn't have a mode where you make the tennis player run around by itself. And many games skip those formalities and expect you to be able to master concepts pretty quickly, and don't spend much time making gameplay out of running and shooting at the same time, or something similarly trivial for the hardcore player.
The solutions seem obvious: either flatten the curve of triviality by forging a path to a new genre (no-one accuses the Katamari games of being casual, but they're pretty shallow) or find ways to increase the complexity of the game just for the hardcore (this can backfire, as the hardcore as fairly likely to hem themselves in and then complain that the game is too easy, as with Final Fantasy XII).
We have a very similar setup at Caravel Games. Our product, the DROD series, started as an open source remake of a closed-source game, but as we eventually gathered enough fans clamouring for a sequel we found that we couldn't sell what we'd worked on without breaking the license, as it was built on the top of the open source engine.
What we ended up doing is something rather unique: we sell the content we create, levels, voice acting, so on and so forth, and the game engine (including the editor we used to make the game) is free. Because DROD is a niche game that doesn't appeal to everybody, this works out well: players can play and create user-made levels to their heart's content, and most will enjoy the game enough to want to see 'everything', and to support the creators, so they'll pay for the stuff we create. It also helps build a community around the game. (We also let people get full versions of the game for other operating systems for free for the same reason - they've paid for the content, not the code they play it on.)
I tried compressing This haiku, and the result Was 'cherry blossom'.