It is probably my favorite RTS game ever, but it remains obscure.
Had Cavedog not pissed off Chris Taylor, making him quit, then they might have been able to secure TA's place as a leader in the RTS field. I don't know how they pissed him off, but his departure was sudden, and seemed to be linked to difficulties getting TA2 off the ground. One minute he was talking about it, the next he was gone, and we got the abortion that was TA-kingdoms instead.
Also, and Chris was equally responsible for this, they said that it would be 'too hard' for people to make their own units, and discouraged it. I remember reading his comments about Amatour unit creation at the time, they were somewhat condescending.
Therefore when the TA community sprang up, it did so around the game alone, not around the game and company, although cavedog did try to engage the modders later, without much success. This seperation also contributed to its faliure.
Without a common ground between company and fan base, there was no way to ferment a dialogue between players/modders and developers. This can be critical to a products survival these days, as FPS companies found early on.
CyberKewls Units Independancy Pack was the best unnoficial addon for TA, and brought together the community in the way that Cavedog should have tried to do. Then someone (don't know who) back ported TA-Kingdoms features into TA, making it a very impressive game indeed. All this wasn't enough to make it appeal to new players though, even though it was still better technically then any other RTS available for many years. I still think it's better then CnC Generals.
It won't be long until Supreme Commander arrives though. Personally I can't wait. This time round I really doubt that Chris will be discouraging the community which is bound to appear around the game. As an Aside, I can't help but notice in the presentation from E3 that he constantly refers to TA, albeit not by name, as in saying what's better this time round.
I rather hope the Unit creators of yore resurface for TA2. I want the Abrams back.
"I dunno. Maybe you should ask Apple what sort of protection scheme they're using? Oh, that's right, none. I wonder why they haven't gone out of business..."
This is a rather pointless argument. Apple are computer manufacturers as well, and until now their OS only ran on their hardware. They simply have no need for something like WGA.
"Maybe a company like Red Hat would know, then. Surely their products are locked down so tightly that they can't be copied!"
I have no choice, otherwise I would use windows at all.
When teaching courses that require windows applications and use of windows, I *have* to have exactly the same software as is in the lab.
Sure I could use other software, but when you're teaching programming and using windows (one of the courses I've taught), not having exactly the same stuff as the students are using is asking for trouble.
I didn't say I like WGA at all. In fact it pisses me off. What I don't have is an alternative to it.
They will never just say 'oh well, we give up, after all, whats a few billion in lost sales between friends'.
One is one too many perhaps, but could you do better? IIRC it was the IT depts fault anyway. I don't recall all the details though. Since I don't use windows in my lab it doesn't effect me.
the only way around the restore cd thing is to purchase a machine without windows on it and buy your own copy of windows.
Besides, soney and other companies have software on these restore cd's that is often required for certain hardware to work. You may know what to do, but if joe nubjie screws his machine he'd be fecked unless there was a nice 'stick this cd in and all will be well' solution.
A drawer full of driver discs and windows installer such as you and I would like would be a nightmare for some, resulting in expensive and unneccesary callouts for engineers.
There is a tendancy (of which I have been guilty myself) to assume that WGA is bad just because microsoft are doing it. I'm not a great microsoft fan, but I am a software developer, and I see their point in a way.
If your product is software, how else but via software are you going to enforce legality? Go on, answer that one? Postcards? Hey man, shareware days are long gone, and they failed because of piracy, postal registration doesn't work. Nowadays it's electronic product monitoring or nothing, sorry. And for that matter, what's wrong with wanting people to pay for it if it's non free software?
These are reasonable points if you remove references to microsoft. It wouldn't be fair to say I was trolling just because I think it's reasonable to expect to be paid. I don't like a lot of what microsoft are doing, but you must point out when things they are doing are fair or reasonable, or you're just as bad.
There are also no ways to 'phone home' with any peice of software without sending some kind of identifying material, even if its just the originating IP. That's a lose lose situation, they can't do it at all without being accused of invading privacy, and yet if they don't then piracy of windows products will spiral even further out of control.
Everyone I know who's complained about WGA has a dodgy copy of windows, almost everyone with legal copies either hasn't even noticed unless I've pointed it out, or doesn't care.
I've only known one person with a legal windows copy who got screwed by WGA, and that was a corporate install in a university lab, so probably a mistake by the IT dept giving the wrong key.
If people know anything about the Unix wars then it would become very clear that Unix vendors were fighting amongst each other to 'lock in' customers by deliberatelly making their unix versions incompatible in the eighties. It was a real mess, because if you bought one unix licence, you had to have your apps written for it, and you couldn't move without massive expense.
This wasn't the unix philosophy, it was the 'make loads of money' philosophy, and it wrecked unix as a serious platform for most businesses at the time (not meaning huge businesses here).
Meanwhile this tiny little company called microsoft offered a cheap and easy way out of the mess, called DOS. Ok, it was a bit shit, and ripped off CP/M something rotten, but it did what business wanted, and meant they could get away from the ravages of the Unix wars. Plus it was offered by IBM, which sounded very good indeed at the time, and was available on other hardware to if the IBM stuff was too costly.
I tried DOS back in the day, and it was ok. Not great, but ok. I prefer Linux now, but back then Unix was what the cool guys down at the local powerstation used when I was a kid.
Nowadays I prefer Linux for coding. I never use normal Unix, except for the odd dabble in BSD to produce ports of software. Until Linix though I never would have considered Unix as a serious platform to develop for. When I encountered it at Uni they still had four different Unix versions, and I had to re-code for each one, which meant I used the Solaris boxes, and nothing else until the first Linux boxes appeared, as duel boots with windows, and I was hooked.
So yes, there was a time when microsoft were the good guys, just as there was a time when IBM were the bad guys.
elderly people's skin can become more frail if they don't receive enough fluid, or their vitamin intake is too small, or, as is more often the case, their diet changes and their body can't cope.
We used to prescribe fried breakfasts, no really, I'm not kidding, we did, it worked really well. Our chef had lists from me of what I felt individual people could do with, and their fry up was adjusted accordingly. Or some people would have those nasty vitimins and minerals hidden in ice cream so they'd eat it.
You'd be amazed what difference diet makes to the quality of skin in the elderly, and yes, incidents of skin damage decreases as skin pliability increases.
Back when I was a nurse, in the days before programming sucked me in, I was a manager in a private elderly care home for people with dimentia.
We kept excruciatingly detailed records of every scratch, cut and injury, serious or otherwise, that happened to our clients. So much so that on paper our accident record look awful compared to other homes, who tended not to be so open. We actually had fewer such incidents then other homes in our region, but we documented *everything*.
However, come official inspection day, the health authority inspectors were always very pleased with our records, and always passed us with a very high grade.
The reason? Instead of hunting around for hidden evidence that had been concealed, they just had to consult our records. We were open about problems, and always sought solutions. We were also, because of our policy on recording everything, able more easily to identify problems with patients who were more likely to get cut, and work to alter their environment or diet to try and help.
The result was that we ended up being the top specialist care home in our region.
When I moved into computer science, the only software model that I would work with was open source. Again there is nothing gained from hiding problems with code, and it's much easier to identify issues. I discovered remarkable similarities with my old nursing practices and the Open Source method.
I realise the comparison may seem odd, but my point is that being open about problems is a far better way to reach solutions, whatever field it is applied to.
while I usually consider my linux boxes to be the place to go for long term program runs (experiments and the like), and programming, I prefer windows xp for web browsing (firefox) and gaming.
Before SP2 my windows box was a bit unstable, but since then I have to say it doesn't crash very often at all, and when it has it's usually overheating in the summer, which is probably a ventilation issue.
Not that I trust anything non trivial to windows, god no. And I won't be buying Vista, I have no need. If games become Vista only, then I may consider it for very very good games, but those are rare occurences indeed.
"taking care of mother earth is very important and we should do everything in our power to preserve it."
Too true.
I've heard a lot of people talking about colonising Mars and mentioning the 'because earth will be ruined soon' argument.
The BIG problem with this is that if we as a species are so stupid that we wreck this planet, moving to another one won't help in the slightest, we'll be just as dead, it'll just take a little longer.
Also, though many seem to forget this, we are the evolved product of a complex ecosystem. You can't just send humans to a new planet and expect everything to be just fine. Mars has lower gravity, so our current shape isn't so apropriate, we'd revolve to a shape better suited, making Earth inhospitable to our new form (possibly taller and frailer, certainly lower muscle mass and bone density)
Plus we need a whole bunch of bacteria to keep ourselves healthy. Those are constantly replenished from our environment. That wouldn't happen on Mars, so guess what, we've evolve further to cope with this or die off. That means our entire digestive system, exposed mucosa (mouth and stuff), and skin would undergo fundamental changes.
Or we keep Earth going by sorting it out, and give Mars time to be properly terraformed (taking around a thousand years I beleive, from estimates I've heard), so there is a comparable and stable ecosystem there. We cope with the lower gravity by accepting that we will end up with two, possibly distinct species of human. They may even not be able to interbreed after a few thousand years.
I do beleive that we need to expand out to mars, but not to escape Earth. Instead I think we should do it so that if one planet gets properly spanked by an asteroid or comet, humanity, and hopefully a fair bit of earths current flora and fauna would survive.
Re:Honestly, this was a long time comingthey're no
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 1
"No offence but it's a pity your dad thought you were too stupid to understand a less violent means of communication."
Very much so, since I haven't seen him since I was 7, because of the very same temper. However he had a point I suppose. I was, um, swinging it around my head.....
"The first fish I caught as a child in Oz was a "toadie", I wanted to take it home and cook it until I was told it was poisionous. "
My mum always said she was amazed how kids in australia ever managed to grow up, since almost everything we played with was poisonous. She's a brit who moved there as an adult, we moved back to england not long after I was 7.
Ever play Jellyfish tennis?
Re:Honestly, this was a long time comingthey're no
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 2
when I was a kid in australiaa I was smacked black and blue by my dad when he caught me playing with a stingray. His logic was that he'd rather I not do it because he hit me then not do it because I was dead. I get his point now, as an adult, but as a kid it just worked, I didn't know why.
agreed, I have a neighbor who is so obsessed by this that, rain or shine, she will put out the bins of everyone in our street, and put them away again *the very second* the binmen are done with them.
Unless she's taken offence at you for some imagined reason (usually something which has no foundation in reality), in which case she won't put them back for a while, a couple of weeks at least.
you would be amazed how many scientists are obsessed with how things look. I'm one myself, and I despair sometimes at the scrabble to be associated with things that make people seem more important.
Beleive me, if it were only possible to hold off re-classification until the pluto mission were over, they'd dig their heels in, even if the result was a foregone conclusion, just to ensure that their papers were published with the 'sexier' title.
I had someone sneak his name onto a paper I published once, because he wanted to be associated with the research (without doing shit all towards it), because it was in a new area. I was furious, but it was too late to change it, as it'd already been peer reviewed and accepted.
Scientists can be as vain as any other group of people.
Lovell (he of canals on Mars fame) decided that there must be a huge Gas Giant out beyond Neptune, but could never find one.
In order to find this planet, and ensure that Lovell wasn't primarily remembered for his fanciful and incorrect thesis regarding life/civilisation on Mars, a junior astronomer was set to work searching for this suposed super giant Gas Planet.
Note that I say Junior, no-one else wanted the job, no-one....
Instead of a Huge Gas Giant, he found a tiny rock. As it turns out this was the first sighting of a Kuiper Belt Object, a noteworthy acheivement in itself which was sullied and robbed of its true importance as a milestone in astronomy due to the politics of the day within the astronomy movement.
So, this tiny rock was hailed as Lovells planet, in spite of the ludicrous nature of this claim, given the obvious disparity between the predicted object, and the one found. It could never have caused the gravitational perturbance by which the presence of the gas giant was inferred by Lovell. It's status as a planet, whilst debated by some then, and many since, has been assured due to this fear of blackening Lovells name.
Interestingly, none of the astronomers who wanted Pluto to be a planet would consider calling our moon, or Ceres planets, even though admitting Pluto into the list of planets meant these, among others, would now qualify.
It is this bizarre situation that the decision regarding Pluto is seeking to resolve. That not many astronomers were there to vote is beside the point. The vote was known to be taking place a long time in advance (many months), it wasn't a rushed secret ballot or anything.
The people who want to discredit the vote don't actually have an alternative classification, they just want the ambiguity to remain.
In effect, what we have here is an old fashioned cat fight among supposedly mature people of science (predominantly men).
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
you said it brother.
After four years of teaching undergrads how to program I am continuously frustrated by the apparent attempts of other lecturers to over simplify things.
I know finalists who don't even understand how memory allocation works, and couldn't taalk for more then a few seconds about pointers. Most of that would be 'I don't know what a pointer is'. N
There seems to be an effort to dumb down the entire field. In recent years the amount of graduates who could program without a hand holding high level language (or, god help us, visual basic) has dropped distressingly, at least so far as I've seen it has.
I made my third year students use C, just to give them a taste of a language that expects you to be good at programming. It's embaressing just how many got completelly stuck simply because they were required to think.
These are Java using students too, the syntax is related, or so I think, I don't actually use Java myself.
Quite how these 'programming without programing' systems are going to appear from if no-one knows how to use low level languages is beyond me. Even if they know, but don't like the low level stuff, you still won't get innovation. It takes a deep seated fascination with coding, and a desire to express yourself through low level languages to acheive true innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
It is probably my favorite RTS game ever, but it remains obscure.
Had Cavedog not pissed off Chris Taylor, making him quit, then they might have been able to secure TA's place as a leader in the RTS field. I don't know how they pissed him off, but his departure was sudden, and seemed to be linked to difficulties getting TA2 off the ground.
One minute he was talking about it, the next he was gone, and we got the abortion that was TA-kingdoms instead.
Also, and Chris was equally responsible for this, they said that it would be 'too hard' for people to make their own units, and discouraged it. I remember reading his comments about Amatour unit creation at the time, they were somewhat condescending.
Therefore when the TA community sprang up, it did so around the game alone, not around the game and company, although cavedog did try to engage the modders later, without much success. This seperation also contributed to its faliure.
Without a common ground between company and fan base, there was no way to ferment a dialogue between players/modders and developers. This can be critical to a products survival these days, as FPS companies found early on.
CyberKewls Units Independancy Pack was the best unnoficial addon for TA, and brought together the community in the way that Cavedog should have tried to do. Then someone (don't know who) back ported TA-Kingdoms features into TA, making it a very impressive game indeed.
All this wasn't enough to make it appeal to new players though, even though it was still better technically then any other RTS available for many years. I still think it's better then CnC Generals.
It won't be long until Supreme Commander arrives though. Personally I can't wait. This time round I really doubt that Chris will be discouraging the community which is bound to appear around the game. As an Aside, I can't help but notice in the presentation from E3 that he constantly refers to TA, albeit not by name, as in saying what's better this time round.
I rather hope the Unit creators of yore resurface for TA2. I want the Abrams back.
"I dunno. Maybe you should ask Apple what sort of protection scheme they're using? Oh, that's right, none. I wonder why they haven't gone out of business..."
This is a rather pointless argument. Apple are computer manufacturers as well, and until now their OS only ran on their hardware. They simply have no need for something like WGA.
"Maybe a company like Red Hat would know, then. Surely their products are locked down so tightly that they can't be copied!"
Red Hat use Linux, Um, you've lost me there...
I have no choice, otherwise I would use windows at all.
When teaching courses that require windows applications and use of windows, I *have* to have exactly the same software as is in the lab.
Sure I could use other software, but when you're teaching programming and using windows (one of the courses I've taught), not having exactly the same stuff as the students are using is asking for trouble.
For my own work I use Linux Linux, and um, Linux.
I didn't say I like WGA at all. In fact it pisses me off. What I don't have is an alternative to it.
They will never just say 'oh well, we give up, after all, whats a few billion in lost sales between friends'.
One is one too many perhaps, but could you do better? IIRC it was the IT depts fault anyway. I don't recall all the details though. Since I don't use windows in my lab it doesn't effect me.
the only way around the restore cd thing is to purchase a machine without windows on it and buy your own copy of windows.
Besides, soney and other companies have software on these restore cd's that is often required for certain hardware to work. You may know what to do, but if joe nubjie screws his machine he'd be fecked unless there was a nice 'stick this cd in and all will be well' solution.
A drawer full of driver discs and windows installer such as you and I would like would be a nightmare for some, resulting in expensive and unneccesary callouts for engineers.
There is a tendancy (of which I have been guilty myself) to assume that WGA is bad just because microsoft are doing it. I'm not a great microsoft fan, but I am a software developer, and I see their point in a way.
If your product is software, how else but via software are you going to enforce legality? Go on, answer that one? Postcards? Hey man, shareware days are long gone, and they failed because of piracy, postal registration doesn't work. Nowadays it's electronic product monitoring or nothing, sorry.
And for that matter, what's wrong with wanting people to pay for it if it's non free software?
These are reasonable points if you remove references to microsoft. It wouldn't be fair to say I was trolling just because I think it's reasonable to expect to be paid.
I don't like a lot of what microsoft are doing, but you must point out when things they are doing are fair or reasonable, or you're just as bad.
There are also no ways to 'phone home' with any peice of software without sending some kind of identifying material, even if its just the originating IP. That's a lose lose situation, they can't do it at all without being accused of invading privacy, and yet if they don't then piracy of windows products will spiral even further out of control.
Everyone I know who's complained about WGA has a dodgy copy of windows, almost everyone with legal copies either hasn't even noticed unless I've pointed it out, or doesn't care.
I've only known one person with a legal windows copy who got screwed by WGA, and that was a corporate install in a university lab, so probably a mistake by the IT dept giving the wrong key.
Nice detail, well worth a read, thanks
agreed
If people know anything about the Unix wars then it would become very clear that Unix vendors were fighting amongst each other to 'lock in' customers by deliberatelly making their unix versions incompatible in the eighties. It was a real mess, because if you bought one unix licence, you had to have your apps written for it, and you couldn't move without massive expense.
This wasn't the unix philosophy, it was the 'make loads of money' philosophy, and it wrecked unix as a serious platform for most businesses at the time (not meaning huge businesses here).
Meanwhile this tiny little company called microsoft offered a cheap and easy way out of the mess, called DOS. Ok, it was a bit shit, and ripped off CP/M something rotten, but it did what business wanted, and meant they could get away from the ravages of the Unix wars. Plus it was offered by IBM, which sounded very good indeed at the time, and was available on other hardware to if the IBM stuff was too costly.
I tried DOS back in the day, and it was ok. Not great, but ok. I prefer Linux now, but back then Unix was what the cool guys down at the local powerstation used when I was a kid.
Nowadays I prefer Linux for coding. I never use normal Unix, except for the odd dabble in BSD to produce ports of software. Until Linix though I never would have considered Unix as a serious platform to develop for. When I encountered it at Uni they still had four different Unix versions, and I had to re-code for each one, which meant I used the Solaris boxes, and nothing else until the first Linux boxes appeared, as duel boots with windows, and I was hooked.
So yes, there was a time when microsoft were the good guys, just as there was a time when IBM were the bad guys.
elderly people's skin can become more frail if they don't receive enough fluid, or their vitamin intake is too small, or, as is more often the case, their diet changes and their body can't cope.
We used to prescribe fried breakfasts, no really, I'm not kidding, we did, it worked really well. Our chef had lists from me of what I felt individual people could do with, and their fry up was adjusted accordingly.
Or some people would have those nasty vitimins and minerals hidden in ice cream so they'd eat it.
You'd be amazed what difference diet makes to the quality of skin in the elderly, and yes, incidents of skin damage decreases as skin pliability increases.
It's all about attention to detail.
slightly OT I know, but relevent:
Back when I was a nurse, in the days before programming sucked me in, I was a manager in a private elderly care home for people with dimentia.
We kept excruciatingly detailed records of every scratch, cut and injury, serious or otherwise, that happened to our clients. So much so that on paper our accident record look awful compared to other homes, who tended not to be so open. We actually had fewer such incidents then other homes in our region, but we documented *everything*.
However, come official inspection day, the health authority inspectors were always very pleased with our records, and always passed us with a very high grade.
The reason? Instead of hunting around for hidden evidence that had been concealed, they just had to consult our records.
We were open about problems, and always sought solutions. We were also, because of our policy on recording everything, able more easily to identify problems with patients who were more likely to get cut, and work to alter their environment or diet to try and help.
The result was that we ended up being the top specialist care home in our region.
When I moved into computer science, the only software model that I would work with was open source. Again there is nothing gained from hiding problems with code, and it's much easier to identify issues. I discovered remarkable similarities with my old nursing practices and the Open Source method.
I realise the comparison may seem odd, but my point is that being open about problems is a far better way to reach solutions, whatever field it is applied to.
"Furthermore, there's not enough money to be lost in privacy breaches for companies to care"
Todays irrelevent concern is tomorrows big earner. I roughly quote that foolish HP guy...
"what on earth would ordinary people want with computers", and extrapolate to
"what on earth would ordinary people wanty with privacy, we're 'protecting' them"
So yeah, keep it up guys, sooner or later some idealist bods will suddenly be the next crop of billionaires thanks to current short sightedness..
while I usually consider my linux boxes to be the place to go for long term program runs (experiments and the like), and programming, I prefer windows xp for web browsing (firefox) and gaming.
Before SP2 my windows box was a bit unstable, but since then I have to say it doesn't crash very often at all, and when it has it's usually overheating in the summer, which is probably a ventilation issue.
Not that I trust anything non trivial to windows, god no. And I won't be buying Vista, I have no need. If games become Vista only, then I may consider it for very very good games, but those are rare occurences indeed.
actually I'm an evolutionary biologist, working in the computational research field.
That's the easiest way I can think of describing it, I work on the human genome...
I'm entirely clear on evolution, and how it works. Whether this translates to my being able to put my idea's across well I'm not sure.
"taking care of mother earth is very important and we should do everything in our power to preserve it."
Too true.
I've heard a lot of people talking about colonising Mars and mentioning the 'because earth will be ruined soon' argument.
The BIG problem with this is that if we as a species are so stupid that we wreck this planet, moving to another one won't help in the slightest, we'll be just as dead, it'll just take a little longer.
Also, though many seem to forget this, we are the evolved product of a complex ecosystem. You can't just send humans to a new planet and expect everything to be just fine. Mars has lower gravity, so our current shape isn't so apropriate, we'd revolve to a shape better suited, making Earth inhospitable to our new form (possibly taller and frailer, certainly lower muscle mass and bone density)
Plus we need a whole bunch of bacteria to keep ourselves healthy. Those are constantly replenished from our environment. That wouldn't happen on Mars, so guess what, we've evolve further to cope with this or die off. That means our entire digestive system, exposed mucosa (mouth and stuff), and skin would undergo fundamental changes.
Or we keep Earth going by sorting it out, and give Mars time to be properly terraformed (taking around a thousand years I beleive, from estimates I've heard), so there is a comparable and stable ecosystem there. We cope with the lower gravity by accepting that we will end up with two, possibly distinct species of human. They may even not be able to interbreed after a few thousand years.
I do beleive that we need to expand out to mars, but not to escape Earth. Instead I think we should do it so that if one planet gets properly spanked by an asteroid or comet, humanity, and hopefully a fair bit of earths current flora and fauna would survive.
Staying one one place is just asking for it....
In Soviet Russia, Cities...oh never mind....
"No offence but it's a pity your dad thought you were too stupid to understand a less violent means of communication."
Very much so, since I haven't seen him since I was 7, because of the very same temper. However he had a point I suppose. I was, um, swinging it around my head.....
"The first fish I caught as a child in Oz was a "toadie", I wanted to take it home and cook it until I was told it was poisionous. "
My mum always said she was amazed how kids in australia ever managed to grow up, since almost everything we played with was poisonous. She's a brit who moved there as an adult, we moved back to england not long after I was 7.
Ever play Jellyfish tennis?
when I was a kid in australiaa I was smacked black and blue by my dad when he caught me playing with a stingray.
His logic was that he'd rather I not do it because he hit me then not do it because I was dead. I get his point now, as an adult, but as a kid it just worked, I didn't know why.
aarrgh!
Now crap scenes from that godawful film are reverberating round my head...
agreed, I have a neighbor who is so obsessed by this that, rain or shine, she will put out the bins of everyone in our street, and put them away again *the very second* the binmen are done with them.
Unless she's taken offence at you for some imagined reason (usually something which has no foundation in reality), in which case she won't put them back for a while, a couple of weeks at least.
It's sad really.
redundant reply that man.
:-)
Yes I spelled it wrong, so sue me
you would be amazed how many scientists are obsessed with how things look. I'm one myself, and I despair sometimes at the scrabble to be associated with things that make people seem more important.
Beleive me, if it were only possible to hold off re-classification until the pluto mission were over, they'd dig their heels in, even if the result was a foregone conclusion, just to ensure that their papers were published with the 'sexier' title.
I had someone sneak his name onto a paper I published once, because he wanted to be associated with the research (without doing shit all towards it), because it was in a new area. I was furious, but it was too late to change it, as it'd already been peer reviewed and accepted.
Scientists can be as vain as any other group of people.
whoops, typo :-)
planet used to mean 'anything that moved in the night sky', the literal translation being 'wandering star'.
Originally even the Sun was classed as a planet, as was the moon, any comets that were seen, jupiter, the lot.
As a definition it's changed a lot.
Lovell (he of canals on Mars fame) decided that there must be a huge Gas Giant out beyond Neptune, but could never find one.
In order to find this planet, and ensure that Lovell wasn't primarily remembered for his fanciful and incorrect thesis regarding life/civilisation on Mars, a junior astronomer was set to work searching for this suposed super giant Gas Planet.
Note that I say Junior, no-one else wanted the job, no-one....
Instead of a Huge Gas Giant, he found a tiny rock. As it turns out this was the first sighting of a Kuiper Belt Object, a noteworthy acheivement in itself which was sullied and robbed of its true importance as a milestone in astronomy due to the politics of the day within the astronomy movement.
So, this tiny rock was hailed as Lovells planet, in spite of the ludicrous nature of this claim, given the obvious disparity between the predicted object, and the one found. It could never have caused the gravitational perturbance by which the presence of the gas giant was inferred by Lovell.
It's status as a planet, whilst debated by some then, and many since, has been assured due to this fear of blackening Lovells name.
Interestingly, none of the astronomers who wanted Pluto to be a planet would consider calling our moon, or Ceres planets, even though admitting Pluto into the list of planets meant these, among others, would now qualify.
It is this bizarre situation that the decision regarding Pluto is seeking to resolve. That not many astronomers were there to vote is beside the point. The vote was known to be taking place a long time in advance (many months), it wasn't a rushed secret ballot or anything.
The people who want to discredit the vote don't actually have an alternative classification, they just want the ambiguity to remain.
In effect, what we have here is an old fashioned cat fight among supposedly mature people of science (predominantly men).
you said it brother.
After four years of teaching undergrads how to program I am continuously frustrated by the apparent attempts of other lecturers to over simplify things.
I know finalists who don't even understand how memory allocation works, and couldn't taalk for more then a few seconds about pointers. Most of that would be 'I don't know what a pointer is'. N
There seems to be an effort to dumb down the entire field. In recent years the amount of graduates who could program without a hand holding high level language (or, god help us, visual basic) has dropped distressingly, at least so far as I've seen it has.
I made my third year students use C, just to give them a taste of a language that expects you to be good at programming. It's embaressing just how many got completelly stuck simply because they were required to think.
These are Java using students too, the syntax is related, or so I think, I don't actually use Java myself.
Quite how these 'programming without programing' systems are going to appear from if no-one knows how to use low level languages is beyond me. Even if they know, but don't like the low level stuff, you still won't get innovation. It takes a deep seated fascination with coding, and a desire to express yourself through low level languages to acheive true innovation.