No space age technologies that never took off; just tried and true but old as dirt rail technology.
Yes - there's a host of funding issues (pensions? big-dig debt?) - and management of the commuter rail has transitioned to a private firm (cause that'll make it work better). But what I find so utterly fascinating is the shape that even recently renovated portions of the system are in.
South Station commuter rail platforms were rebuilt not all that long ago and already they are crumbling. Concrete chipping and crumbling and pitting. Metal plates peeling up, corroding and rusted. WTF?
Seems to be the same all over the USA when it comes to public transit. Travels abroad paint a very different picture.
It really depends on what you're trying help the students get out of the reading. While some aspects of Sci-Fi (Gibson, et. al.) would be interesting - and many things explored in some of those novels became in some ways, science fact... their primary purpose is one of imagination. Possibly selected a few chapters as excepts for that sort of content? In the realm of non fiction - you could do a lot worse than some of Rushkoff's titles, or "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson. It's a bit dated at this point - but still interesting. A possibly better source of inspirational writing might be "The Diamond Age" by the same author.
since a mixture of diesel fuel and fertilizer is way the hell more dangerous than a gun could ever be.
Note that post Oklahoma City - large purchases of fertilizer and other unsophisticated bomb ingredients are, in fact tracked much more effectively than gun purchases.
We're currently entering a phase wherein the development of "big databases in the sky" (BDBS) are easier than ever. We've also entered a phase where contributing to the BDBS via portable hand-held electronics (smartphones) or wearables (Google Glass) is getting even easier. The crux of the problem here in the states revolves around issues of privacy (and the right thereto), bearing arms (and the right thereto), and free speech (...). Where does one right end and the other begin?
If it's private citizens participating in a BDBS - can your right to privacy said to have been violated? What about their right to free speech? And they have definitely not infringed on your right to bear arms (in the aforementioned case). If this were a government backed initiative - there would be problems galore, but it's not. Since you trotted out the straw man of the sex offenders - lets remember that's a government initiative, so that makes it different in means, if not the ends. One could certainly argue that such registries constitute cruel and unusual punishment (I'm not, but for the sake of argument). If we're afeared of sex offenders, why not have people convicted of DUI have a "scarlet letter" on their license plates?
I think we all see where this ends. If the government is engaged in this - it's automatically "bad". If private citizens build and offer such a service, is it automatically "bad"? In either case the ends are the same - there's now a publicly available database of information on you - which you don't have control over. How do you deal with misreported or erroneous data?
What about a Slashdot like system of moderation? Upmods and Downmods. Karma, etc.? Build a HUD into new cars, and you can autotag the dangerous drivers - and boom, up to the BDBS! Get cut-off, notice a speeder, or an erratic driver - and you could report it to the BDBS. That info would be available to your HUD, and automatically overlay onto the other drivers on the road in your field of view. You could steer clear, literally of bad drivers. But what to do about those who report everyone but themselves as bad drivers? Karma. The downside of this is we become our own surveillance state. The upside is that police could concentrate on real crime - you'd just get your tickets and auto insurance hikes in the mail.... enough of them and your drivers license gets auto-suspended.
The same sort of thing could be said about guns, and any number of other activities we engage in. I'm not sure that's a world I want to live in. But I'd also say a few reads of David Brin on privacy and how some aspects of how it's evolving might be food for thought regarding the privacy and/or transparency of things.
3rd edition is crap. Most of the soul of the game is gone. The books look nice but it's not D&D. It's a bad imitation with D&D on the cover. Come on, magic using dwarves, evil rangers, and wizards carrying swords. That goes against the very core of the game.
My question is this then. How many "house rules" did you play with in order to accommodate characters that didn't quite fit within the rules? One of the issues that seemed to crop up over and over in pickup games, and long running campaigns and the occasional CON - was that people always seemed to end up having a plethora of house rules to play the game the way they wanted to. As a consequence those rules tended to "break" certain aspects of the game - as the original rules were pretty brittle.
While the 3rd edition allows for magic using dwarfs, etc. There is nothing that says your campaign must allow it. Separating the setting from the rules was not a bad thing - as some people would like to play in settings that don't necessarily follow the preconceived stereotypes.
Some of the better changes in 3rd edition were the increases in consistency. Chiefest amongst those changes was that higher is always better. A higher AC, a higher attack roll, a higher skill check, etc. Recall earlier editions where a negative AC was desirable, and you wanted to roll low for skill checks; yet for almost everything else you wanted to roll high - saving throws, attacks, damage, etc. Another big win was standardizing on the D20 for all checks. No more D100 for thieves skills and (if you used em) psionics.
However the bane of 3rd edition was knowing what and how many modifiers applied when. With each new supplement you entered into a complex realm - with players stacking modifiers and hoping the GM wouldn't notice. A complex game of cat-and-mouse ensued with players and GMs countering modifiers such that in high level play up to 10 or more could apply to a single attack roll.
In any case - yes 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 3.5 aren't the same. Some of my best memories are playing 1st edition - inconsistencies and all. And then 2nd edition seemed to ratify all the usual house rules people had been using; most of which came from Dragon magazine. And it was good. Upgrading to 3rd edition was good - although it was painful to lose a lot of setting information that had been acquired over the years for 2nd edition. I appreciate each edition for what it is.
Considering that at last estimate the USA was hemorrhaging about $50 billion every 2 weeks in Iraq - I'd say that's a bargain. Assuming the damn things even work. There is a real threat - there are enough Stinger and other shoulder mounted air-to-ground missile systems that have been sold and are no longer accounted for that the chances someone might decide to shoot down an airliner in a crowded metro area are non-zero.
I'd rather we spend money defensively - even if it is against an admittedly movie theater plot threat - instead of on boondoggles that really haven't improved security in the world. The money will be spent - make no mistake; might as well spend it on something other than fruitless aggression.
This reminds me of when telecom was deregulated... Here in Boston with the transient student population - telephone, and DSL services are installed and uninstalled rather frequently. I heard so many stories of various telecoms just nipping and ripping cabling from competitors. As soon as you got DSL, your downstairs neighbor was out of luck - and when their repair person showed up - bam he'd just rip your cables and hook his customer back up. Covad, Concentric, Verizon, all of them constantly shooting each other in the feet. Right now we have RCN and Comcast for cable choices - and they do the same thing to each other.
I can't wait for it to start between them and the telco providers. It will be so much "better". Competition is good. Competition without oversight and some rules to limit bad behaviour sucks. And this is all about getting rid of the oversight - let the market regulate itself my ass.
...I found it to be clunky, awkward, irritating, non-intuitive, completely incompatible with previous Microsoft music standards, and has none of the features that make the iPod so completely useful (ability to hold various media and data, even allowing you to boot from Firewire iPods). And forcing users to rely on the Zune application to move data onto or off the device is infuriating (kind of like the Creative devices. Is it possible to "open" a Creative media player and put data onto it without having to use the Creative application?).
OK - so the iPod doesn't require iTunes to put music on it? Strange. Last I recall Apple _forces_ you to use the iPod with iTunes, and the iTunes Music Store (at least for drmed, purchased tracks). And that protected AAC format is so compatible across such a wide range of devices. Every portable music player can handle it, right? Oh yeah, I forgot, it isn't. But I'm sure I'll hear all about how it plays MP3s, and so forth - so you don't have to fall into the "Apple Trap". Keep drinking the kool-aid, and think "different". I also forgot how much the iPod is like everything Apple has ever done - they just copied their OS UI, right? Excuse me if you don't clue into my sarcasm.
... As anybody who has ever taken Marketing101 knows, you should always facilitate the process of getting people to spend money on your products and anything that steps in-between or slows this process down had better have a damn good reason for existing. Why do I have to buy "Zune Points" to then make music purchases? It's just stupid.
Seems to be working pretty damn well on the X-Box Live! marketplace. And lo and behold if the two aren't compatible! For everyone who complains about the DRM on this device - ask yourself - why aren't you complaining about it on the iPod. And don't give me all sorts of BS about how you use some Sandisk player, or whatever... iPod is sitting pretty with a majority marketshare in the portable digital music player market. Some of you clearly have to be using it in preference to devices that do not have DRM. And consider for a moment - if MS had opened up the wireless... The RIAA would be all over them - and say what you will about "sharing" music it's a weak argument at best. Consider the old technology adage: Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I hate these weak reviews that just complain that it's "not Apple". Oooh change is scary. It's different, waaah! The Zune has problems, yes, but show me how I can share music on an iPod w/o hacking it, circumventing it's DRM, or any other "feature".
I've followed the development of the Warhammer MMO pretty closely over the years... I'm just curious about how faithful the online version will be to the paper and pencil (pnp) version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. One of the best features of the pnp version was that it was likely to be "nasty, brutish, and short" for the players if they approached it the way they would many other role playing games. That style of play might not square well with an MMO. It wasn't that the players in a typical WFRP campaign couldn't become heroic - but that the heroism was often balanced by knowledge of how lucky they had been to succeed - and that such victories were at best temporary.
I've had it up to here with people calling this a rootkit. Does it actually have any code that I can run to gain root on a system of my choosing? Can I run it's scripts against a network of computers in an attempt to find vulnerable systems, root them, and then hide my tracks?
NO.
What it uses is a stupid trick - similar to those used by rootkits to hide their tracks. Oooh looky looky, it puts in a little nugget so that files whose names start with $sys$ become invisible. Yeah that sucks. People used to get all bent outta shape when someone used the "hidden" flag on DOS and Windows to hide important files for their software installation. And yet somehow that wasn't called a "rootkit".
It's unable to spread itself via a network (so it's not a worm, or virus). It's at worst, bundled spyware on CD-ROMs; spyware which puts in place a mechanism that can easily be misused by clever worm, rootkit, and virus writers. It itself is not a rootkit.
Here at/. everyone should be capable of distinguishing between a rootkit and a "rootkit" - further references to the Sony fiasco should use the quoted version as in Sony's "rootkit".
I don't disagree that Sony's done something wrong - but this is no rootkit.
I was at the conference and was in the audience...
on
Open Source Not That Open?
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· Score: 5, Informative
OK -
first off, the argument went like this:
Say you're running SAP or some other large enterprise system. Say it's running on Linux. The fact that it's Open Source doesn't gain you much. You're extremely unlikely to be able to change things as companies like SAP, Oracle, etc. all specify exactly which versions of some of the various fiddly bits of Linux they support running their application on. If you deviate from those supported configurations - they don't support it.
And guess what - it's true.
Oracle isn't into supporting you bump-reving your kernel, and your upgrading to the latest c lib. They'll test a working stack - identify known issues (and work-arounds) - and that becomes a "known good" configuration. So - while you can do whatever you want with the source, that doesn't mean that other people are obligated to support it.
In any case - it's sort of a straw man argument. The fact of the matter is (and he even pointed this out) for the most part most people just use software. They aren't interested in actually modifying it in any way (substantively speaking). They aren't going to look at the source code, change it and re-compile it. Only 1% or 2% of software users are in that class. So realistically the fact that you can modify the source isn't such a huge advantage in practice. Other people have cited here what the real benefits are: Freedom of choice - you can still choose to make the change and support it yourself, and security - if the company supplying your software goes away, you still have the source...
And I see a lot of people reiterating the following OoC (Out of Context):
"But if a customer modifies the source code, [Red Hat] can't help you [without charging you extra]. They have to lock things down to provide value," Matusow said. "As open source becomes commercialized, it becomes less open."
What he meant by that - and clarified - was that Red Hat has supported configurations, and other software vendors upstream (Oracle, SAP) have supported configurations. They "lock things down" (not in the literal sense, damn us programmers are always soooo literal - I'm suprised more of us aren't fundies) to provide value - is simply saying they limit the scope of what they support... Deviations from those known configurations are not generally well supported. I'm very curious about how well Red Hat supports the following on the current set of it's "Enterprise" edition:
1> Downgrade a core component such as the C Lib, or similar library or set of system utilities that a lot of the system relies on.
2> Upgrade a core component as above.
3> Crossgrade a component like the file system to a different one.
Once that's been done, I'm also wondering what kind of support you'd get out of a company like Oracle or SAP...
I guess it's true, pop will eat itself. Remember when "push" internet was all the rage? Well, we all knew it wasn't really "push" at all, more like a periodic polling of "channels" of information. For a while there, Internet Explorer had a "channel subscription" feature. And there were all sorts of silly little news-ticker applets you could download and install, and then configure to pull various topics to you.
Hey wow look! It's a brand new wheel! It's round like the old one, and goes round and round like the old one.
I think that the author "knocks" current CPU architecture entirely too much (both PPC and x86) with the comment that the vector units on these chips aren't dedicated enough. While somewhat true - it's also misleading. Typical application code isn't terribly suited to vector processing. Pushing pixels, and decompressing and compressing video and audio - sure. Word processing code, not so much so.
Of more possible interest than pushing the complexity to the compiler might be looking into the code-morphing technology of Transmeta to allow the Cell Processors to dynamically reallocate APUs as needed to "optimize" on the fly.
It also occurs to me that some aspects of this are already in play as far as how current x86 chips work - decoding the macro ops info micro ops - the APU of the Cell architecture seems more like the uop processor being exposed at a higher level, doing away with the abstraction that is the x86 instruction set.
I disagree. While Java makes some hard things much easier, it doesn't make things which should be simple, simple.
The autobox/unbox and arbitrary parameter lists are just two examples. It's not so much that these things are hard - they're just verbose, and they distract you from solving your real problem with having to deal with dozens of little work-arounds. In short a lot of the early Java language choices result in a less than elegant, less than expressive chunk of source code to do simple things.
This coupled with the ever increasing download size of the SDK leads me to believe it's not just "claptrap" when people complain about Java. Once you open the J2EE and EJB can-o-worms well you can virtually kiss simplicity goodbye. Hence a recent spate of books on simpler Java.
Your argument is circular. The corporations benefit from an educated workforce and strong defense, yet that education and that military is paid for by corporate activity.
And yet corporations pay _only_ 7.4% of the total tax revenue collected by the federal government... The rest of that burden is borne by the citizenry. You might argue that this is the way it should be and that because those citizens are benefitting from good employment due to corporate activity - that's why we're prosperous.
Hmmm - but what happens when those companies are no longer a source of good employment? Should they still continue to receive tax breaks? No US company outsourcing to countries where the playing field is not level should continue to receive "good employer" tax breaks.
They aren't betrying, or betraying for that matter, their country. What obligations do they have to their country? They pay their taxes, provide products and services, and the US economy would be worse off if the company didn't exist at all.
OK let's examine this for a second.
Berkshire Hathaway - the company that Warren Buffet heads up has a 1% market capitalization of the entire US economy... And they pay roughly 5% of all corporate taxes collected by the federal government. That's because they're relatively honest. Intel, in the scheme of things, is more honest than some, less than others. The vast majority of US corporations are essentially shirking their civic duty and using tax dodges - all in the name of profitability to the stock-holder.
But, let's examine who holds the majority of those stocks, shall we? Gee, could it be the same fat-cats who sit on the board and run the company? Sure a bunch of their stock may be floated, and involved in joe-sixpacks 401K programs, but don't kid yourself that they are trying to make sure the "shareholders" benefit - they are the shareholders.
Essentially it's a fun little shell game for these guys. They benefit mightly from the stability and quality of life here in the USA. They benefit from a strong, educated (relatively) citizen population. They benefit from the power of our military. They benefit from the fact that we have largest number of good higher education facilities.
I think it makes the most sense for them to reinvest in that community instead of outsourcing. Afterall, once they've canabalized the workforce here - who's going to buy their expensive goods and products? Trust me they're not interested in selling this stuff for a thousand rupees! So the engineers they're paying abroad - while well paid by local standards - can't afford these products; and neither will their home market!
Take a look at other countries where wealth is funneled out - Saudi Arabia, Venezuela... The found wealth of oil is controlled by a few - and do they reinvest it in their own country? Nope - they dump it out - keeping their countries down, in the dumps and forever dependent. We're on that path here in the USA - by outsourcing too much, too quickly, we'll loose our competitive edge, and transform to some wierd dystopic combination of being a third world superpower...
My solution is simple - let them outsource! However, if they want to insist that intellectual property is property let them pay an import tax on those digital goods they bring back into the country. If it's property, it should be taxed as such - just like car parts, and other material things. They screw the government and by extension you and I by dodging taxes and their civic responsibilities, this might help level the field a bit.
Actually they have those - developed during the end of the Vietnam war. Basically the problem was that you might mine an area that you'd have to travel thru in the next couple of days... So they put a little digital watch timer into the mines and you can set when to disarm the mine. They're pretty effective too.
Unfortunately they're also more expensive, making it likely that the only people using them will be the US Military, or other militaries from advanced, wealthy nations. Most 3rd world nations want mines as a permanent defense along the border, not as a deployable, temporary control of a battle front.
Is your dad red-green color blind? Or some other permutation? True, total color-blindness in humans is about a trillion to one odds, so he'll probably be able to tell the difference between yellow and blue - or whatever colors they've engineered it to use. One might assume that you'd be a little more interested in exactly what color-blindness means since your dad is color-blind, and it's a heritable condition.
just a guess, but as the JVM is generally a 64 bit VM (a lot of the numerical types are 64 bits in length) - I would imagine running on a native 64 bit platform will result in better performance. Instead of using 2 32 bit nuggets to store 64 bit values (not to mention the overhead needed to track which two 32 bit registers or memory blocks are storing it), the underlying physical CPU implementation more closely matches the registers and address space used inside the JVM.
this sounds like the old Racing Destruction Set from Electronic Arts... Back in the day, on my C=64 setting the gravity to the same as the moon of Io. Sure, maybe it didn't look as nice, but the concept seems similar.
Essentially this all comes down to the appearance of subjective scoring in RPGs. All RPGs are basically objective games - you want to accomplish certain objectives. Initially, and for the more simple-minded among us, this consists of a Diablo style hack-fest - earning experience for each kill. In the paper and pencil world this is usually known as a hack-n-slash dungeon crawl.
Sometimes that can be fun.
However, IIRC at some point late in high-school most of us managed to grow up. Suddenly it just didn't make sense to kill all the orcs just cause they were orcs. Usually the orcs were raiding some village for some reason - the goal was to stop them from raiding the village. If you killed all the orcs, that certainly stopped the raids. Maybe you only needed to kill the chieftan though - or perhaps you could even convince the orcs that it was less of a hassle to try and kill the vllagers (not likely).
A lot of this simply speaks to the change in perspective away from absolutes of good versus evil; traditionally RPGs represent good as being absolutely good - what they are, and what they do is _good_ simply by virtue of their alignment. Evil is the opposite - they and all their works are evil simply because that is their alignment. Eventually a lot of people find it's not enough to simply say "I am good therefore I must kill that Orc, because he is evil".
Ultimately this all translates into a game which is still objective (in terms of accomplishing objectives) - but not necessarilly absolute. The Orcs might be defeated, and experience gained by creating a damn to seperate the two settlements, and making it very difficult for the orcs to raid the village. I think they were trying to do this a bit with D&D 3rd edition - by introducing a Challenge Rating to monster descriptions. Monsters don't literally have to be destroyed to be defeated.
I think the trouble is balancing the gain of experience in RPGs with the accomplishment of goals and the excercise of skills. Eveyone has different tastes in that regard. Some people prefer level and class based systems, while others want skill based systems. I think ultimately that type of judgement is best handled by people and a skilled GM - perhaps rewarding players based on judicious use of skills to accomplish goals. A bunch of human fighters storming the Orc caves and killing them all, or a lone elf ranger sneaking in and killing the Orc chief, or a dwarvern engineer building a damn - all defeat the orcs, and gain the same experience - maybe the fighters recover more treasure, but they're more likely to need it to replenish the resources they used. This gives the appearance of subjective play, allowing multiple paths depending on the player's skills and approach - but is ultimately still an objective, goal based game.
First, RTFA. It talks about _developing_ applications. It wouldn't really suprise me if it were cheaper to develop applications on Windows.
Visual Studio.NET is a kick-ass development environment. Even the older non-.NET edition is a lot better than most dev tools out there. Sure, it's pretty expensive - but say you're paying programmers $40/hour (ignore benefits, etc) - the fact you just spent $1200 on a development environment is no big deal: less than a 40 hour week of paying said programmer. And, I'm willing to bet he'll save a lot more than a week of effort by using a better tool.
Say what you will about the quality of MS, and how buggy/bloated their software is. It seems to work well enough for a bunch of people out there. Their developer programs are excelent (maybe they need to be to cover up their crappy underpinnings).
In the open source area you might be able to download some open source code, and cobble a system together to do what you want... But I think I remember reading a statistic that said something like 85% of all software written is custom, internal, business software. So you might have a tough time finding something that solves your problem exactly... But since it's open source you can modify it to fit - sometimes; sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth.
With things like Eclipse for Java development in the open source arena the gap should close up in that area too (dev tools) - but don't kid yourself; we've still got a long ways to go.
In my household we've got every major console from the Sega Genesis onward (Saturn, N64, PS1, Dreamcast, PS2, X-Box and, Gamecube). We have network adaptors for the PS2 and (obviously) the X-Box. My roommate is participating in the FF Online Beta as well. So, I'd say we're reasonably familiar with the offerings on hand.
In general, for novices, the Live! service is superior. You pay a fixed rate, and any live enabled game just works. There are networkable X-Box games w/o Live (Halo being one of them), but by and large Live! defines the current online experience for X-Box owners. It's essentially a peer-to-peer game matching service, there are currently _no_ MMO games for the X-Box. It also handles game updates and expansions (several new levels for Unreal Championship, and Mech Assault, etc). It also features voice communications with _all_ Live enabled games.
No matter how many Live enabled games you have, you can play all of them for the low yearly subscription rate of $45.
Sony's PS2 has left network implementation up to the individual game vendor. There is no "standard" user experience, and features are only available on a per-game basis. SOCOM has voice communications, but I can't think of any other PS2 game that does. I count this as a "ding" against Sony. Yes, it's conveinient for the developer in that they can pick and choose which features to implement, but each of them is responsible for implementing them; each of them re-invents the wheel.
On the other hand, this has left the door open for implementing MMO games for the PS2 (Everquest - which was horrid, and FF-Online, which is awesome, although it will require you to get a hard-disk expansion). Many games for the PS2 have their own subscription plan, which could be confusing, and can certainly be an accounting nightmare.
Overall, the PS2 online approach is pretty good for the nearterm - but with MS preparing to launch a couple of MMO offerings late this year or early next, along with "channel" based Live! services (Sports network, RPG network, etc), their online play may have more legs into 2005 and 2006 (when both Sony and MS are scheduled to release new consoles). I'm pretty sure most MMOs will have an additional supscription fee over and above the Live! service fee. But this won't really differ from Squares "portal" fee, and "game subscription" fees.
hmm, wonder what kind of bandwidth one needs to do the whole 640x480 thing at a decent frame-rate? I also noted the "firewire" requirment - but then again since the cam Apple is selling is fire-wire, and $149 vrs. $49 for an el-cheapo USB cam... One could expect it would look better.
But - as I said - bandwidth; at anything less than cable-modem speeds, it's probably likely to be just as craptacular as any other web-cam.
Oh yeah, and Yahoo IM has had a full-res mode for a while now called supercam...
Cost centers are not "measured upon eliminating cost".
Cost centers are an accounting term, typically based on the charter of accounts. As an example from the SAP definition:
Organizational unit within a controlling area that represents a defined location of cost incurrence. The definition can be based on:
Functional requirements Allocation criteria Physical location Responsibility for costs
EVERY organization that does any accounting does this. Whether it's submitting a reciept for a rented car for a sales trip, ordering up chinese food for a late night at the office, or even sometimes photocopying costs... They all get charged to a "cost center". In modern accounting (you know double-entry AR/AP) - a cost center is an AP for a particular chunk of the organization. EVERY chunk of the org has one - sometimes all the way down to a individual level.
It just so happens that most IT depts bill a lot of purchases (those servers, that software, etc) to their cost center. So it appears in most organizations that they spend a lot of money w/o necessarilly saving any - it's just the "cost of doing business in the modern day". When in reality if the IT dept could get a matching A/P entry for the time they save, and services provided, the ledger wouldn't look quite so unbalanced.
Actually in metered organizations, things get charged to "cost centers". For instance some places have implemented card-swipe or code-entry on their copy machines. By swiping or entering the code, you're supplying your "cost center". This allows the organization to know how many photocopies you made, and thus what percentage of the photocopy supply bill you're responsible for.
Anything from ordering up pizza for a late night at the office to renting a car for a business trip gets charged to a "cost center" in most organizations.
Slashdot Mirror
No space age technologies that never took off; just tried and true but old as dirt rail technology.
Yes - there's a host of funding issues (pensions? big-dig debt?) - and management of the commuter rail has transitioned to a private firm (cause that'll make it work better). But what I find so utterly fascinating is the shape that even recently renovated portions of the system are in.
South Station commuter rail platforms were rebuilt not all that long ago and already they are crumbling. Concrete chipping and crumbling and pitting. Metal plates peeling up, corroding and rusted. WTF?
Seems to be the same all over the USA when it comes to public transit. Travels abroad paint a very different picture.
"Program or be Programmed". "Present Shock".
It really depends on what you're trying help the students get out of the reading. While some aspects of Sci-Fi (Gibson, et. al.) would be interesting - and many things explored in some of those novels became in some ways, science fact... their primary purpose is one of imagination. Possibly selected a few chapters as excepts for that sort of content? In the realm of non fiction - you could do a lot worse than some of Rushkoff's titles, or "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson. It's a bit dated at this point - but still interesting. A possibly better source of inspirational writing might be "The Diamond Age" by the same author.
since a mixture of diesel fuel and fertilizer is way the hell more dangerous than a gun could ever be.
Note that post Oklahoma City - large purchases of fertilizer and other unsophisticated bomb ingredients are, in fact tracked much more effectively than gun purchases.
We're currently entering a phase wherein the development of "big databases in the sky" (BDBS) are easier than ever. We've also entered a phase where contributing to the BDBS via portable hand-held electronics (smartphones) or wearables (Google Glass) is getting even easier. The crux of the problem here in the states revolves around issues of privacy (and the right thereto), bearing arms (and the right thereto), and free speech (...). Where does one right end and the other begin?
If it's private citizens participating in a BDBS - can your right to privacy said to have been violated? What about their right to free speech? And they have definitely not infringed on your right to bear arms (in the aforementioned case). If this were a government backed initiative - there would be problems galore, but it's not. Since you trotted out the straw man of the sex offenders - lets remember that's a government initiative, so that makes it different in means, if not the ends. One could certainly argue that such registries constitute cruel and unusual punishment (I'm not, but for the sake of argument). If we're afeared of sex offenders, why not have people convicted of DUI have a "scarlet letter" on their license plates?
I think we all see where this ends. If the government is engaged in this - it's automatically "bad". If private citizens build and offer such a service, is it automatically "bad"? In either case the ends are the same - there's now a publicly available database of information on you - which you don't have control over. How do you deal with misreported or erroneous data?
What about a Slashdot like system of moderation? Upmods and Downmods. Karma, etc.? Build a HUD into new cars, and you can autotag the dangerous drivers - and boom, up to the BDBS! Get cut-off, notice a speeder, or an erratic driver - and you could report it to the BDBS. That info would be available to your HUD, and automatically overlay onto the other drivers on the road in your field of view. You could steer clear, literally of bad drivers. But what to do about those who report everyone but themselves as bad drivers? Karma. The downside of this is we become our own surveillance state. The upside is that police could concentrate on real crime - you'd just get your tickets and auto insurance hikes in the mail.... enough of them and your drivers license gets auto-suspended.
The same sort of thing could be said about guns, and any number of other activities we engage in. I'm not sure that's a world I want to live in. But I'd also say a few reads of David Brin on privacy and how some aspects of how it's evolving might be food for thought regarding the privacy and/or transparency of things.
My question is this then. How many "house rules" did you play with in order to accommodate characters that didn't quite fit within the rules? One of the issues that seemed to crop up over and over in pickup games, and long running campaigns and the occasional CON - was that people always seemed to end up having a plethora of house rules to play the game the way they wanted to. As a consequence those rules tended to "break" certain aspects of the game - as the original rules were pretty brittle.
While the 3rd edition allows for magic using dwarfs, etc. There is nothing that says your campaign must allow it. Separating the setting from the rules was not a bad thing - as some people would like to play in settings that don't necessarily follow the preconceived stereotypes.
Some of the better changes in 3rd edition were the increases in consistency. Chiefest amongst those changes was that higher is always better. A higher AC, a higher attack roll, a higher skill check, etc. Recall earlier editions where a negative AC was desirable, and you wanted to roll low for skill checks; yet for almost everything else you wanted to roll high - saving throws, attacks, damage, etc. Another big win was standardizing on the D20 for all checks. No more D100 for thieves skills and (if you used em) psionics.
However the bane of 3rd edition was knowing what and how many modifiers applied when. With each new supplement you entered into a complex realm - with players stacking modifiers and hoping the GM wouldn't notice. A complex game of cat-and-mouse ensued with players and GMs countering modifiers such that in high level play up to 10 or more could apply to a single attack roll.
In any case - yes 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 3.5 aren't the same. Some of my best memories are playing 1st edition - inconsistencies and all. And then 2nd edition seemed to ratify all the usual house rules people had been using; most of which came from Dragon magazine. And it was good. Upgrading to 3rd edition was good - although it was painful to lose a lot of setting information that had been acquired over the years for 2nd edition. I appreciate each edition for what it is.
Considering that at last estimate the USA was hemorrhaging about $50 billion every 2 weeks in Iraq - I'd say that's a bargain. Assuming the damn things even work. There is a real threat - there are enough Stinger and other shoulder mounted air-to-ground missile systems that have been sold and are no longer accounted for that the chances someone might decide to shoot down an airliner in a crowded metro area are non-zero.
I'd rather we spend money defensively - even if it is against an admittedly movie theater plot threat - instead of on boondoggles that really haven't improved security in the world. The money will be spent - make no mistake; might as well spend it on something other than fruitless aggression.
This reminds me of when telecom was deregulated... Here in Boston with the transient student population - telephone, and DSL services are installed and uninstalled rather frequently. I heard so many stories of various telecoms just nipping and ripping cabling from competitors. As soon as you got DSL, your downstairs neighbor was out of luck - and when their repair person showed up - bam he'd just rip your cables and hook his customer back up. Covad, Concentric, Verizon, all of them constantly shooting each other in the feet. Right now we have RCN and Comcast for cable choices - and they do the same thing to each other.
I can't wait for it to start between them and the telco providers. It will be so much "better". Competition is good. Competition without oversight and some rules to limit bad behaviour sucks. And this is all about getting rid of the oversight - let the market regulate itself my ass.
OK - so the iPod doesn't require iTunes to put music on it? Strange. Last I recall Apple _forces_ you to use the iPod with iTunes, and the iTunes Music Store (at least for drmed, purchased tracks). And that protected AAC format is so compatible across such a wide range of devices. Every portable music player can handle it, right? Oh yeah, I forgot, it isn't. But I'm sure I'll hear all about how it plays MP3s, and so forth - so you don't have to fall into the "Apple Trap". Keep drinking the kool-aid, and think "different". I also forgot how much the iPod is like everything Apple has ever done - they just copied their OS UI, right? Excuse me if you don't clue into my sarcasm.
Seems to be working pretty damn well on the X-Box Live! marketplace. And lo and behold if the two aren't compatible! For everyone who complains about the DRM on this device - ask yourself - why aren't you complaining about it on the iPod. And don't give me all sorts of BS about how you use some Sandisk player, or whatever... iPod is sitting pretty with a majority marketshare in the portable digital music player market. Some of you clearly have to be using it in preference to devices that do not have DRM. And consider for a moment - if MS had opened up the wireless... The RIAA would be all over them - and say what you will about "sharing" music it's a weak argument at best. Consider the old technology adage: Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I hate these weak reviews that just complain that it's "not Apple". Oooh change is scary. It's different, waaah! The Zune has problems, yes, but show me how I can share music on an iPod w/o hacking it, circumventing it's DRM, or any other "feature".
I've followed the development of the Warhammer MMO pretty closely over the years... I'm just curious about how faithful the online version will be to the paper and pencil (pnp) version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. One of the best features of the pnp version was that it was likely to be "nasty, brutish, and short" for the players if they approached it the way they would many other role playing games. That style of play might not square well with an MMO. It wasn't that the players in a typical WFRP campaign couldn't become heroic - but that the heroism was often balanced by knowledge of how lucky they had been to succeed - and that such victories were at best temporary.
OK -
/. everyone should be capable of distinguishing between a rootkit and a "rootkit" - further references to the Sony fiasco should use the quoted version as in Sony's "rootkit".
I've had it up to here with people calling this a rootkit. Does it actually have any code that I can run to gain root on a system of my choosing? Can I run it's scripts against a network of computers in an attempt to find vulnerable systems, root them, and then hide my tracks?
NO.
What it uses is a stupid trick - similar to those used by rootkits to hide their tracks. Oooh looky looky, it puts in a little nugget so that files whose names start with $sys$ become invisible. Yeah that sucks. People used to get all bent outta shape when someone used the "hidden" flag on DOS and Windows to hide important files for their software installation. And yet somehow that wasn't called a "rootkit".
It's unable to spread itself via a network (so it's not a worm, or virus). It's at worst, bundled spyware on CD-ROMs; spyware which puts in place a mechanism that can easily be misused by clever worm, rootkit, and virus writers. It itself is not a rootkit.
Here at
I don't disagree that Sony's done something wrong - but this is no rootkit.
OK -
first off, the argument went like this:
Say you're running SAP or some other large enterprise system. Say it's running on Linux. The fact that it's Open Source doesn't gain you much. You're extremely unlikely to be able to change things as companies like SAP, Oracle, etc. all specify exactly which versions of some of the various fiddly bits of Linux they support running their application on. If you deviate from those supported configurations - they don't support it.
And guess what - it's true.
Oracle isn't into supporting you bump-reving your kernel, and your upgrading to the latest c lib. They'll test a working stack - identify known issues (and work-arounds) - and that becomes a "known good" configuration. So - while you can do whatever you want with the source, that doesn't mean that other people are obligated to support it.
In any case - it's sort of a straw man argument. The fact of the matter is (and he even pointed this out) for the most part most people just use software. They aren't interested in actually modifying it in any way (substantively speaking). They aren't going to look at the source code, change it and re-compile it. Only 1% or 2% of software users are in that class. So realistically the fact that you can modify the source isn't such a huge advantage in practice. Other people have cited here what the real benefits are: Freedom of choice - you can still choose to make the change and support it yourself, and security - if the company supplying your software goes away, you still have the source...
And I see a lot of people reiterating the following OoC (Out of Context):
"But if a customer modifies the source code, [Red Hat] can't help you [without charging you extra]. They have to lock things down to provide value," Matusow said. "As open source becomes commercialized, it becomes less open."
What he meant by that - and clarified - was that Red Hat has supported configurations, and other software vendors upstream (Oracle, SAP) have supported configurations. They "lock things down" (not in the literal sense, damn us programmers are always soooo literal - I'm suprised more of us aren't fundies) to provide value - is simply saying they limit the scope of what they support... Deviations from those known configurations are not generally well supported. I'm very curious about how well Red Hat supports the following on the current set of it's "Enterprise" edition:
1> Downgrade a core component such as the C Lib, or similar library or set of system utilities that a lot of the system relies on.
2> Upgrade a core component as above.
3> Crossgrade a component like the file system to a different one.
Once that's been done, I'm also wondering what kind of support you'd get out of a company like Oracle or SAP...
Wow -
I guess it's true, pop will eat itself. Remember when "push" internet was all the rage? Well, we all knew it wasn't really "push" at all, more like a periodic polling of "channels" of information. For a while there, Internet Explorer had a "channel subscription" feature. And there were all sorts of silly little news-ticker applets you could download and install, and then configure to pull various topics to you.
Hey wow look! It's a brand new wheel! It's round like the old one, and goes round and round like the old one.
Overly enthusiastic is putting it mildly.
I think that the author "knocks" current CPU architecture entirely too much (both PPC and x86) with the comment that the vector units on these chips aren't dedicated enough. While somewhat true - it's also misleading. Typical application code isn't terribly suited to vector processing. Pushing pixels, and decompressing and compressing video and audio - sure. Word processing code, not so much so.
Of more possible interest than pushing the complexity to the compiler might be looking into the code-morphing technology of Transmeta to allow the Cell Processors to dynamically reallocate APUs as needed to "optimize" on the fly.
It also occurs to me that some aspects of this are already in play as far as how current x86 chips work - decoding the macro ops info micro ops - the APU of the Cell architecture seems more like the uop processor being exposed at a higher level, doing away with the abstraction that is the x86 instruction set.
I disagree. While Java makes some hard things much easier, it doesn't make things which should be simple, simple.
The autobox/unbox and arbitrary parameter lists are just two examples. It's not so much that these things are hard - they're just verbose, and they distract you from solving your real problem with having to deal with dozens of little work-arounds. In short a lot of the early Java language choices result in a less than elegant, less than expressive chunk of source code to do simple things.
This coupled with the ever increasing download size of the SDK leads me to believe it's not just "claptrap" when people complain about Java. Once you open the J2EE and EJB can-o-worms well you can virtually kiss simplicity goodbye. Hence a recent spate of books on simpler Java.
Your argument is circular. The corporations benefit from an educated workforce and strong defense, yet that education and that military is paid for by corporate activity.
And yet corporations pay _only_ 7.4% of the total tax revenue collected by the federal government... The rest of that burden is borne by the citizenry. You might argue that this is the way it should be and that because those citizens are benefitting from good employment due to corporate activity - that's why we're prosperous.
Hmmm - but what happens when those companies are no longer a source of good employment? Should they still continue to receive tax breaks? No US company outsourcing to countries where the playing field is not level should continue to receive "good employer" tax breaks.
They aren't betrying, or betraying for that matter, their country. What obligations do they have to their country? They pay their taxes, provide products and services, and the US economy would be worse off if the company didn't exist at all.
OK let's examine this for a second.
Berkshire Hathaway - the company that Warren Buffet heads up has a 1% market capitalization of the entire US economy... And they pay roughly 5% of all corporate taxes collected by the federal government. That's because they're relatively honest. Intel, in the scheme of things, is more honest than some, less than others. The vast majority of US corporations are essentially shirking their civic duty and using tax dodges - all in the name of profitability to the stock-holder.
But, let's examine who holds the majority of those stocks, shall we? Gee, could it be the same fat-cats who sit on the board and run the company? Sure a bunch of their stock may be floated, and involved in joe-sixpacks 401K programs, but don't kid yourself that they are trying to make sure the "shareholders" benefit - they are the shareholders.
Essentially it's a fun little shell game for these guys. They benefit mightly from the stability and quality of life here in the USA. They benefit from a strong, educated (relatively) citizen population. They benefit from the power of our military. They benefit from the fact that we have largest number of good higher education facilities.
I think it makes the most sense for them to reinvest in that community instead of outsourcing. Afterall, once they've canabalized the workforce here - who's going to buy their expensive goods and products? Trust me they're not interested in selling this stuff for a thousand rupees! So the engineers they're paying abroad - while well paid by local standards - can't afford these products; and neither will their home market!
Take a look at other countries where wealth is funneled out - Saudi Arabia, Venezuela... The found wealth of oil is controlled by a few - and do they reinvest it in their own country? Nope - they dump it out - keeping their countries down, in the dumps and forever dependent. We're on that path here in the USA - by outsourcing too much, too quickly, we'll loose our competitive edge, and transform to some wierd dystopic combination of being a third world superpower...
My solution is simple - let them outsource! However, if they want to insist that intellectual property is property let them pay an import tax on those digital goods they bring back into the country. If it's property, it should be taxed as such - just like car parts, and other material things. They screw the government and by extension you and I by dodging taxes and their civic responsibilities, this might help level the field a bit.
Actually they have those - developed during the end of the Vietnam war. Basically the problem was that you might mine an area that you'd have to travel thru in the next couple of days... So they put a little digital watch timer into the mines and you can set when to disarm the mine. They're pretty effective too.
Unfortunately they're also more expensive, making it likely that the only people using them will be the US Military, or other militaries from advanced, wealthy nations. Most 3rd world nations want mines as a permanent defense along the border, not as a deployable, temporary control of a battle front.
90 nations signed on, what about the other 140!
Uhh - the seeds are air-dropped.
Is your dad red-green color blind? Or some other permutation? True, total color-blindness in humans is about a trillion to one odds, so he'll probably be able to tell the difference between yellow and blue - or whatever colors they've engineered it to use. One might assume that you'd be a little more interested in exactly what color-blindness means since your dad is color-blind, and it's a heritable condition.
Hey -
just a guess, but as the JVM is generally a 64 bit VM (a lot of the numerical types are 64 bits in length) - I would imagine running on a native 64 bit platform will result in better performance. Instead of using 2 32 bit nuggets to store 64 bit values (not to mention the overhead needed to track which two 32 bit registers or memory blocks are storing it), the underlying physical CPU implementation more closely matches the registers and address space used inside the JVM.
Just a guess.
Hey -
this sounds like the old Racing Destruction Set from Electronic Arts... Back in the day, on my C=64 setting the gravity to the same as the moon of Io. Sure, maybe it didn't look as nice, but the concept seems similar.
Essentially this all comes down to the appearance of subjective scoring in RPGs. All RPGs are basically objective games - you want to accomplish certain objectives. Initially, and for the more simple-minded among us, this consists of a Diablo style hack-fest - earning experience for each kill. In the paper and pencil world this is usually known as a hack-n-slash dungeon crawl.
Sometimes that can be fun.
However, IIRC at some point late in high-school most of us managed to grow up. Suddenly it just didn't make sense to kill all the orcs just cause they were orcs. Usually the orcs were raiding some village for some reason - the goal was to stop them from raiding the village. If you killed all the orcs, that certainly stopped the raids. Maybe you only needed to kill the chieftan though - or perhaps you could even convince the orcs that it was less of a hassle to try and kill the vllagers (not likely).
A lot of this simply speaks to the change in perspective away from absolutes of good versus evil; traditionally RPGs represent good as being absolutely good - what they are, and what they do is _good_ simply by virtue of their alignment. Evil is the opposite - they and all their works are evil simply because that is their alignment. Eventually a lot of people find it's not enough to simply say "I am good therefore I must kill that Orc, because he is evil".
Ultimately this all translates into a game which is still objective (in terms of accomplishing objectives) - but not necessarilly absolute. The Orcs might be defeated, and experience gained by creating a damn to seperate the two settlements, and making it very difficult for the orcs to raid the village. I think they were trying to do this a bit with D&D 3rd edition - by introducing a Challenge Rating to monster descriptions. Monsters don't literally have to be destroyed to be defeated.
I think the trouble is balancing the gain of experience in RPGs with the accomplishment of goals and the excercise of skills. Eveyone has different tastes in that regard. Some people prefer level and class based systems, while others want skill based systems. I think ultimately that type of judgement is best handled by people and a skilled GM - perhaps rewarding players based on judicious use of skills to accomplish goals. A bunch of human fighters storming the Orc caves and killing them all, or a lone elf ranger sneaking in and killing the Orc chief, or a dwarvern engineer building a damn - all defeat the orcs, and gain the same experience - maybe the fighters recover more treasure, but they're more likely to need it to replenish the resources they used. This gives the appearance of subjective play, allowing multiple paths depending on the player's skills and approach - but is ultimately still an objective, goal based game.
OK -
.NET is a kick-ass development environment. Even the older non-.NET edition is a lot better than most dev tools out there. Sure, it's pretty expensive - but say you're paying programmers $40/hour (ignore benefits, etc) - the fact you just spent $1200 on a development environment is no big deal: less than a 40 hour week of paying said programmer. And, I'm willing to bet he'll save a lot more than a week of effort by using a better tool.
First, RTFA. It talks about _developing_ applications. It wouldn't really suprise me if it were cheaper to develop applications on Windows.
Visual Studio
Say what you will about the quality of MS, and how buggy/bloated their software is. It seems to work well enough for a bunch of people out there. Their developer programs are excelent (maybe they need to be to cover up their crappy underpinnings).
In the open source area you might be able to download some open source code, and cobble a system together to do what you want... But I think I remember reading a statistic that said something like 85% of all software written is custom, internal, business software. So you might have a tough time finding something that solves your problem exactly... But since it's open source you can modify it to fit - sometimes; sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth.
With things like Eclipse for Java development in the open source arena the gap should close up in that area too (dev tools) - but don't kid yourself; we've still got a long ways to go.
OK -
In my household we've got every major console from the Sega Genesis onward (Saturn, N64, PS1, Dreamcast, PS2, X-Box and, Gamecube). We have network adaptors for the PS2 and (obviously) the X-Box. My roommate is participating in the FF Online Beta as well. So, I'd say we're reasonably familiar with the offerings on hand.
In general, for novices, the Live! service is superior. You pay a fixed rate, and any live enabled game just works. There are networkable X-Box games w/o Live (Halo being one of them), but by and large Live! defines the current online experience for X-Box owners. It's essentially a peer-to-peer game matching service, there are currently _no_ MMO games for the X-Box. It also handles game updates and expansions (several new levels for Unreal Championship, and Mech Assault, etc). It also features voice communications with _all_ Live enabled games.
No matter how many Live enabled games you have, you can play all of them for the low yearly subscription rate of $45.
Sony's PS2 has left network implementation up to the individual game vendor. There is no "standard" user experience, and features are only available on a per-game basis. SOCOM has voice communications, but I can't think of any other PS2 game that does. I count this as a "ding" against Sony. Yes, it's conveinient for the developer in that they can pick and choose which features to implement, but each of them is responsible for implementing them; each of them re-invents the wheel.
On the other hand, this has left the door open for implementing MMO games for the PS2 (Everquest - which was horrid, and FF-Online, which is awesome, although it will require you to get a hard-disk expansion). Many games for the PS2 have their own subscription plan, which could be confusing, and can certainly be an accounting nightmare.
Overall, the PS2 online approach is pretty good for the nearterm - but with MS preparing to launch a couple of MMO offerings late this year or early next, along with "channel" based Live! services (Sports network, RPG network, etc), their online play may have more legs into 2005 and 2006 (when both Sony and MS are scheduled to release new consoles). I'm pretty sure most MMOs will have an additional supscription fee over and above the Live! service fee. But this won't really differ from Squares "portal" fee, and "game subscription" fees.
Uhhh -
hmm, wonder what kind of bandwidth one needs to do the whole 640x480 thing at a decent frame-rate? I also noted the "firewire" requirment - but then again since the cam Apple is selling is fire-wire, and $149 vrs. $49 for an el-cheapo USB cam... One could expect it would look better.
But - as I said - bandwidth; at anything less than cable-modem speeds, it's probably likely to be just as craptacular as any other web-cam.
Oh yeah, and Yahoo IM has had a full-res mode for a while now called supercam...
Cost centers are not "measured upon eliminating cost".
Cost centers are an accounting term, typically based on the charter of accounts. As an example from the SAP definition:
Organizational unit within a controlling area that represents a defined location of cost incurrence. The definition can be based on:
Functional requirements
Allocation criteria
Physical location
Responsibility for costs
EVERY organization that does any accounting does this. Whether it's submitting a reciept for a rented car for a sales trip, ordering up chinese food for a late night at the office, or even sometimes photocopying costs... They all get charged to a "cost center". In modern accounting (you know double-entry AR/AP) - a cost center is an AP for a particular chunk of the organization. EVERY chunk of the org has one - sometimes all the way down to a individual level.
It just so happens that most IT depts bill a lot of purchases (those servers, that software, etc) to their cost center. So it appears in most organizations that they spend a lot of money w/o necessarilly saving any - it's just the "cost of doing business in the modern day". When in reality if the IT dept could get a matching A/P entry for the time they save, and services provided, the ledger wouldn't look quite so unbalanced.
Actually in metered organizations, things get charged to "cost centers". For instance some places have implemented card-swipe or code-entry on their copy machines. By swiping or entering the code, you're supplying your "cost center". This allows the organization to know how many photocopies you made, and thus what percentage of the photocopy supply bill you're responsible for.
Anything from ordering up pizza for a late night at the office to renting a car for a business trip gets charged to a "cost center" in most organizations.