I just got Virtual PC 6.2 for my Mac OS X box (1GHz G4 PowerMac, MDD, 512MB RAM) last week, and I'm disappointed. The business justification is that I need to be able to test development websites for clients in Windows, but my personal reason is that I want to run all of my old Sierra games.:) I can run Firefox and IE in Windows XP -- they're sluggish, with slow screen redraws and irritatingly long pauses for page refreshes, but it works.
My shock is in how badly that Sierra games run in DOS 6.22. I'm about a quarter of the way through KQ4 (I just got the damned golden bridle and delivered the unicorn, only to be sent off to get the golden goose from the ogre), and it's tough to even walk around. Rosella tiptoes along at one step every few seconds and then hauls ass across half the screen before slowing down again. I'm going to downgrade to DOS 5 and see if that makes any difference. Still, the fact that Virtual PC cannot properly emulate a decade-old DOS box is pretty pathetic.
I'm going to get another 256 or 512MB of RAM and see if that makes a difference.
Get it. $3,500 is a bargain for a business of your size. One virus, one black-hat, one ill-timed tape loss and your business could be dead in the water for hours, days, or weeks -- business interruption coverage for technical problems is essential for any business that substantially depends on their computers. It's important to do all you can to reduce your risk -- backups, best practices, etc., as others have named -- but we all know that these things fail sometimes, usually do to human error, and there's no sense in saying "you should have backed up!" as your business washes down the tubes.
I know virtually nothing about Aon, to say nothing of their Tech E&O coverage, so I can't say if they're any good. But the coverage on the whole is important to have. Do yourself a favor and recommend it to your boss, but also recommend that your boss talk not to Aon (they're not going to tell you what the flaws in the coverage are, or recommend competitors), and, for the love of god, not rely on Slashdot for business advice, but find yourself an independent insurance agent and talk to them, ideally one who knows Tech E&O. They're not married to one particular carrier, they'll be able to give you examples of how this can be useful, and they'll be able to get you the best deal. Who knows -- maybe they'll recommend against it?
I happen to be a licensed property and casualty insurance agent in the state of Virginia, though I don't work in the business anymore, but I've sold a lot of this coverage over the years, and even bought it for my own business. I recommend it strongly.
Some Flash is created such that one can right-click (or whatever) to bring up a little menu, where one can click on "Play" to stop the horrible blinking or flashing or whatever. Increasingly, that option is disabled at the time that the hideous Flash animation is created.
I don't know if this is a Flash thing or what, but I know I'd love it if Firefox made it possible to stop any Flash animation.
"Im glad I got a second chanse to be smart becaus I lerned a lot of things that I never even new were in this world and Im grateful that I saw it all for a little bit. I dont know why Im dumb agen or what I did wrong maybe its becaus I dint try hard enuff. But if I try and practis very hard maybe Ill get a little smarter and know what all the words are. I remember I did somthing but I dont remember what. So I guess its like I did it for all the dumb pepul like me.
"P.P.S. Please if you get a chase put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard..."
"I think I'm really smart, but I haven't done that well academically. Therefore, school must have been bullshit."
I've got a couple of semesters left in college. I'm a straight-A student, having delayed college for 5 years while I did the.com thing in the late '90s and early '00s. I feel that I'm well grounded enough to say that, indeed, college is 90% bullshit. I can't say for certain about high school -- I dropped out after two years, because it, too, was bullshit.
* Waldo * The wizard * A scroll * Two mermaids pleasuring each other * Poseidon's driving license * Plato's lost map * Sebastian the crab * Cowboy Neal's bathing suit
I used to be a subscriber to the Sue Spammers mailing list, for folks interested in taking legal action against spammers. I unsubscribed after a month or so, when I found the list archives were public, with exposed e-mail addresses, including my own. Red flag, bull, etc.
I couldn't agree more. I've had my e-mail address (waldo at waldo dot net) for many years, and last night, I snapped. I'm getting my ducks in a row to change my e-mail address, using a new domain (waldo at jaquith dot org), and to simply inactivate my current domain. I'll phase out this address over the next few months, and jealously guard my new address.
It ain't as good as the real thing. Just yesterday -- after ordering my T610 but before getting it (I'm anxiously awaiting its Monday delivery) -- I saw a T610 in person for the first time. I was surprised at how tiny that it was. But there were no surprises -- it functioned just as the demonstration showed that it would.
I can't find out on the Debian site how the votes will be tallied, but I certainly hope that they've got the good sense to use instant runoff voting. Mathematically speaking, it's the best method of tallying votes. Practically speaking, it's the best method of ensuring that the person elected is the most widely-desired candidate.
A newly discovered planetoid 2004 DW in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, where some think objects larger than Pluto exist, may be larger than Quaoar - making it the second largest known trans-Neptunian object and 18th largest object in the solar system.
When I hear "D.W.," I can only think of Darkwing Duck.
I am the terror that flaps in the night, Waldo Jaquith
I read Gina Kolata's Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic] a couple of years ago, so I'm quite interested to find out from where the sample was acquired. Kolata describes a couple of efforts to extract samples, one from the body of a woman buried in a lead-lined coffin, another from the body of a miner buried deep under once-frozen tundra near the Arctic Circle, in North America. Neither panned out.
I ran strings on the binary. I grepped everything that wasn't obviously garbage.
-Waldo Jaquith.rsrc 1.24 (sync.c,v 0.1 2004 : andy) notepad %s Message [afs W|.dll immyerr3 Sack_i smith [C &joe?neo/ gold-Pxc 5vmb/xH*.* USERPROFI -T RG / UGGC/V ASCII m+Mmg? QUIT DATAEPCGo Mapp wEnv Qu W+owsD tory GSizeZClos Curr Libra pViewOf adeC isdigi upps spaKO U/BuffA Lowwv9r O.5 t+v #~'@ KERNEL32.DLL ADVAPI32.dll MSVCRT.dll USER32.dll WS2_32.dll LoadLibraryA GetProcAddr ess ExitProcess RegCloseKey memset wsprintfA I have to add this really long line to get past the Slashdot filter, since I have too few characters per line (8.6), so if I write a really long line then it will skew the average way up, which is why it probably shouldn't be based on the average (mean), but instead the mode (the most frequently-occurring length), thus avoiding the outliers workaround, like I'm using.
Apparently it infected our financial aid listserv, which caters to 51,000 email addresses, most of them in the vt.edu domain.
It's not so apparent: On Tuesday, between 5:43pm and 9:40pm, I got sent it 10 times by flashmail@vt.edu over the FINAID-INFO listserv. You'd think that they've have a web-based verification system to authorize all messages being sent out to major mailing lists. This is common sense these days.
The bastards won't give me a penny of financial aid, but they will give me a freaking virus. It's like asking somebody for a warm bowl of soup and, instead, they piss in your face.
If I'm incorporated as an S corp, and somebody sues me, they can only take the assets of the business - they can't take my house, my car, etc. Does a DBA filing do the same?
Definitely not. That's why it's important to do the math: what's cheaper, professional liability insurance, or incorporating (and doing all of the accounting and paperwork that goes with that)?
For most of us, insurance will be more expensive, particularly for anybody that does any sort of critical (ie, people could die, important data could be lost, things could break physically) programming. Although I no longer have professional liability (I'm an S Corp for this reason), when I did, it cost me about $1,500 per annum. That's pretty much the baseline for decent PLI (professional liability insurance) for any coverage for programmers that's worth having.
Remember, though, that even if you incorporate and don't have insurance, you can still easily lose your company if you get sued. Your personal assets, however, will be protected. Remember, too, that you don't have to do anything wrong to be sued. But you still have to have enough money to defend yourself against that suit, and that's what PLI is for.
Disclosure: Not only am I a veteran programmer, but I'm a licensed property and casualty surplus lines insurance agent in the state of Virginia.:)
As for to do and contact info from a Bluetooth phone or Palm always being overwritten, is that really the actual behavior? I could have sworn (at least when I tried.Mac) that iSync was more intelligent than that, allowing for actual synchronization of information updated from multiple devices.
I just synched my phone, and you are right -- it does show me the differences between the two, and has me correct them. I must admit that I found it rather confusing -- Is that class at 2:30, or 2:40? Is my phone right, or is my computer right? -- as a consequence of the changes not being timestamped. There's no way to say "go with whichever system has been modified most recently -- if my desktop was given that event's time a year ago, and my phone last week, go with last week's." That would certainly be helpful.
But, yes, iSync does make it possible to reconcile those things. I wish that there was some way to insert iSync into the transaction between calendars (whether on laptop or WebDAV serveR), and not just between devices and my desktop.
I've been playing with iCal and WEB-DAV servers recently for work, and I really like iCal. But one thing I discovered today is that the synchronization doesn't run both ways -- a subscribed can't updated a calendar that someone else has published.
This is a real problem for me, and I'm glad to hear somebody else mention it.
I spend 90% of my computing time on my PowerMac desktop. About 8% (I'm plainly talking out of my ass here) is spent on my iBook, and 2% on other people's computers (friends, computer labs on my college campus, etc.) I use iCal on my PowerMac as the master calendar, and I publish that calendar to my server via WebDAV. I subscribe to that calendar in iCal on my iBook, and I use WebCalendar to reproduce my calendar on my website. I also sync my Palm and my phone with my desktop regularly, such that I can maintain my calendar on those. This system is really helpful, because I have such a scheduled, busy life that I really couldn't function without a decent calendar system.
The problem, of course, is that I can only make changes when I'm sitting at my desktop. Changes on my Palm or phone are overwritten next time that I sync. (iSync's valiant efforts notwithstanding.) Changes made via the website and are lost, and iCal on my iBook will not permit me to make changes to the calendar, because it's a subscription.
I want to make changes on my iBook the same way that I can read and reply to e-mail in Mail.app when I'm not on a WiFi network -- it should synch next time that I get a connection. Likewise, I should be able to do so with the website version, my phone, etc.
The problem here, as best as I can tell, is that the calendar isn't really stored on the WebDAV server -- it's mirrored on the WebDAV server. My PowerMac doesn't get its data from the WebDAV server, it simply publishes it to that server. I want iCal to use the WebDAV server just like Mail.app uses IMAP -- the server is master, and all else synchs to it.
I'd sure appreciate suggestions or tips from anybody that can suggest a solution to this, or some sort of a hack that's available for iCal to make it work in this manner.
We vBulletin for nancies.org's discussion boardS, as we have for the past three years, and we're really happy with it. It's against my grain to pay for software (as opposed to writing it myself or using free software), particularly one with as many good free options as web-based discussion boards, but each annual reevaluation of the market has led me to conclude that vBulletin is the best choice out there. It has good support, a nice feature set, it uses MySQL and PHP (a major bonus, as far as I'm concerned), and product updates are frequent and worthwhile.
To be fair, I haven't looked at phpBB in the past ten months, so perhaps it has improved vastly in the meantime.
Clear Channel's relationship with their affiliates is sort of like that between the Mafia and the businesses that they're "protecting." Clear Channel would neverdemand that certain songs not be played, they would simply make suggestions that the affiliates can follow or, alternately, choose not to follow. Of course, those station managers that choose not to follow the advice of their superiors may find that those promotions don't come like they used to, or perhaps they may find themselves cut out due to a budget crunch.
So, yeah, sure CCE "NEVER dictates what songs [affiliates] play," but you and I both know what's really going on.
The information regarding menu placement is very interesting. As a developer, I've long been torn over the side on which the menu should go. UI testing on some of my client's sites has shown that people are more likely to look on the left-hand side,but I've also seen credible studies that keeping the menu on the right-hand side (near the scroll bar) is preferable, because it puts the menu near where the mouse will already be.
Now that a proper study has been done on the topic, I imagine that I should start moving menus over to the left-hand side of the page. It might be less efficient, but even crappy standards are still standards.
Sim City includes a lot of political aspects. It's not electoral politics, but players do have to deal with keeping their constituents happy. That, in fact, is the primary guiding factor of the success of a city (at least it was in the original, which is the only version that I've used).
I have been heavily involved in electoral politics for several years, and I'm really not sure of how it would be turned into a game. It basically involves working horrible hours, being paid terribly, and murkily navigating the waters of popularity. Political science is a science in name only -- there aren't the rules and standards that would permit it to be translated to gaming very effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
I visited this afternoon and wrote it up, along with a half dozen photos, on my blog. As of 3:30pm, it had only just started to bloom. I plan to return tomorrow, by which time it ought to be in its full...er...glory, and take some more photos. You know where to find them.
-Waldo Jaquith
I just got Virtual PC 6.2 for my Mac OS X box (1GHz G4 PowerMac, MDD, 512MB RAM) last week, and I'm disappointed. The business justification is that I need to be able to test development websites for clients in Windows, but my personal reason is that I want to run all of my old Sierra games. :) I can run Firefox and IE in Windows XP -- they're sluggish, with slow screen redraws and irritatingly long pauses for page refreshes, but it works.
My shock is in how badly that Sierra games run in DOS 6.22. I'm about a quarter of the way through KQ4 (I just got the damned golden bridle and delivered the unicorn, only to be sent off to get the golden goose from the ogre), and it's tough to even walk around. Rosella tiptoes along at one step every few seconds and then hauls ass across half the screen before slowing down again. I'm going to downgrade to DOS 5 and see if that makes any difference. Still, the fact that Virtual PC cannot properly emulate a decade-old DOS box is pretty pathetic.
I'm going to get another 256 or 512MB of RAM and see if that makes a difference.
-Waldo Jaquith
Get it. $3,500 is a bargain for a business of your size. One virus, one black-hat, one ill-timed tape loss and your business could be dead in the water for hours, days, or weeks -- business interruption coverage for technical problems is essential for any business that substantially depends on their computers. It's important to do all you can to reduce your risk -- backups, best practices, etc., as others have named -- but we all know that these things fail sometimes, usually do to human error, and there's no sense in saying "you should have backed up!" as your business washes down the tubes.
I know virtually nothing about Aon, to say nothing of their Tech E&O coverage, so I can't say if they're any good. But the coverage on the whole is important to have. Do yourself a favor and recommend it to your boss, but also recommend that your boss talk not to Aon (they're not going to tell you what the flaws in the coverage are, or recommend competitors), and, for the love of god, not rely on Slashdot for business advice, but find yourself an independent insurance agent and talk to them, ideally one who knows Tech E&O. They're not married to one particular carrier, they'll be able to give you examples of how this can be useful, and they'll be able to get you the best deal. Who knows -- maybe they'll recommend against it?
I happen to be a licensed property and casualty insurance agent in the state of Virginia, though I don't work in the business anymore, but I've sold a lot of this coverage over the years, and even bought it for my own business. I recommend it strongly.
-Waldo Jaquith
Some Flash is created such that one can right-click (or whatever) to bring up a little menu, where one can click on "Play" to stop the horrible blinking or flashing or whatever. Increasingly, that option is disabled at the time that the hideous Flash animation is created.
I don't know if this is a Flash thing or what, but I know I'd love it if Firefox made it possible to stop any Flash animation.
-Waldo Jaquith
I am an ex-Genius
"Im glad I got a second chanse to be smart becaus I lerned a lot of things that I never even new were in this world and Im grateful that I saw it all for a little bit. I dont know why Im dumb agen or what I did wrong maybe its becaus I dint try hard enuff. But if I try and practis very hard maybe Ill get a little smarter and know what all the words are. I remember I did somthing but I dont remember what. So I guess its like I did it for all the dumb pepul like me.
"P.P.S. Please if you get a chase put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard..."
>> Like highschool its 90% bullshit.
.com thing in the late '90s and early '00s. I feel that I'm well grounded enough to say that, indeed, college is 90% bullshit. I can't say for certain about high school -- I dropped out after two years, because it, too, was bullshit.
That's code for:
"I think I'm really smart, but I haven't done that well academically. Therefore, school must have been bullshit."
I've got a couple of semesters left in college. I'm a straight-A student, having delayed college for 5 years while I did the
-Waldo Jaquith
* Waldo
* The wizard
* A scroll
* Two mermaids pleasuring each other
* Poseidon's driving license
* Plato's lost map
* Sebastian the crab
* Cowboy Neal's bathing suit
Well, you can cross one off that list.
-Waldo Jaquith
I proposed this 3.5 years ago on Advogato.
:)
Just calling it up, 'cuz I never get credit for nothin'.
-Waldo Jaquith
I used to be a subscriber to the Sue Spammers mailing list, for folks interested in taking legal action against spammers. I unsubscribed after a month or so, when I found the list archives were public, with exposed e-mail addresses, including my own. Red flag, bull, etc.
WTF?
-Waldo Jaquith
How much marketing do the record companies do for Elvis, The Eagles, Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles these days?
Um. A lot.
-Waldo Jaquith
I couldn't agree more. I've had my e-mail address (waldo at waldo dot net) for many years, and last night, I snapped. I'm getting my ducks in a row to change my e-mail address, using a new domain (waldo at jaquith dot org), and to simply inactivate my current domain. I'll phase out this address over the next few months, and jealously guard my new address.
What a pain in the ass.
-Waldo Jaquith
A number of manufacturers provide website demos of their phones. For example, I bought a phone this week, for the first time doing so on-line rather than in a store. I was comfortable doing so because Sony provides a demo of the phone (the T610) on their website. In addition, the provider to which I have switched, T-Mobile, provides demos of the phones on their site.
It ain't as good as the real thing. Just yesterday -- after ordering my T610 but before getting it (I'm anxiously awaiting its Monday delivery) -- I saw a T610 in person for the first time. I was surprised at how tiny that it was. But there were no surprises -- it functioned just as the demonstration showed that it would.
-Waldo Jaquith
Well that's interesting but does Instant Runoff Voting work when there are only two candidates?
It works just fine with two candidates, but no better and no worse than a "traditional" election.
-Waldo Jaquith
I can't find out on the Debian site how the votes will be tallied, but I certainly hope that they've got the good sense to use instant runoff voting. Mathematically speaking, it's the best method of tallying votes. Practically speaking, it's the best method of ensuring that the person elected is the most widely-desired candidate.
-Waldo Jaquith
A newly discovered planetoid 2004 DW in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, where some think objects larger than Pluto exist, may be larger than Quaoar - making it the second largest known trans-Neptunian object and 18th largest object in the solar system.
When I hear "D.W.," I can only think of Darkwing Duck.
I am the terror that flaps in the night,
Waldo Jaquith
I read Gina Kolata's Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic] a couple of years ago, so I'm quite interested to find out from where the sample was acquired. Kolata describes a couple of efforts to extract samples, one from the body of a woman buried in a lead-lined coffin, another from the body of a miner buried deep under once-frozen tundra near the Arctic Circle, in North America. Neither panned out.
So, where'd they finally get the sample from?
-Waldo Jaquith
I ran strings on the binary. I grepped everything that wasn't obviously garbage.
.rsrch [CT RG / UGGC/Vv Quf 5 t+v r ess
-Waldo Jaquith
1.24
(sync.c,v 0.1 2004
: andy)
notepad %s
Message
[afs
W|.dll
immyerr3
Sack_i
smit
&joe?neo/
gold-Pxc
5vmb/xH*.*
USERPROFI
-
ASCII
m+Mmg?
QUIT
DATAEPCGo
Mapp
wEn
W+owsD
tory
GSizeZClos
Curr
Libra
pViewO
adeC
isdigi
upps
spaKO
U/BuffA
Lowwv9r
O.
#~'@
KERNEL32.DLL
ADVAPI32.dll
MSVCRT.dll
USER32.dll
WS2_32.dll
LoadLibraryA
GetProcAdd
ExitProcess
RegCloseKey
memset
wsprintfA
I have to add this really long line to get past the Slashdot filter, since I have too few characters per line (8.6), so if I write a really long line then it will skew the average way up, which is why it probably shouldn't be based on the average (mean), but instead the mode (the most frequently-occurring length), thus avoiding the outliers workaround, like I'm using.
Apparently it infected our financial aid listserv, which caters to 51,000 email addresses, most of them in the vt.edu domain.
It's not so apparent: On Tuesday, between 5:43pm and 9:40pm, I got sent it 10 times by flashmail@vt.edu over the FINAID-INFO listserv. You'd think that they've have a web-based verification system to authorize all messages being sent out to major mailing lists. This is common sense these days.
The bastards won't give me a penny of financial aid, but they will give me a freaking virus. It's like asking somebody for a warm bowl of soup and, instead, they piss in your face.
-Waldo Jaquith
If I'm incorporated as an S corp, and somebody sues me, they can only take the assets of the business - they can't take my house, my car, etc. Does a DBA filing do the same?
:)
Definitely not. That's why it's important to do the math: what's cheaper, professional liability insurance, or incorporating (and doing all of the accounting and paperwork that goes with that)?
For most of us, insurance will be more expensive, particularly for anybody that does any sort of critical (ie, people could die, important data could be lost, things could break physically) programming. Although I no longer have professional liability (I'm an S Corp for this reason), when I did, it cost me about $1,500 per annum. That's pretty much the baseline for decent PLI (professional liability insurance) for any coverage for programmers that's worth having.
Remember, though, that even if you incorporate and don't have insurance, you can still easily lose your company if you get sued. Your personal assets, however, will be protected. Remember, too, that you don't have to do anything wrong to be sued. But you still have to have enough money to defend yourself against that suit, and that's what PLI is for.
Disclosure: Not only am I a veteran programmer, but I'm a licensed property and casualty surplus lines insurance agent in the state of Virginia.
-Waldo Jaquith
As for to do and contact info from a Bluetooth phone or Palm always being overwritten, is that really the actual behavior? I could have sworn (at least when I tried .Mac) that iSync was more intelligent than that, allowing for actual synchronization of information updated from multiple devices.
I just synched my phone, and you are right -- it does show me the differences between the two, and has me correct them. I must admit that I found it rather confusing -- Is that class at 2:30, or 2:40? Is my phone right, or is my computer right? -- as a consequence of the changes not being timestamped. There's no way to say "go with whichever system has been modified most recently -- if my desktop was given that event's time a year ago, and my phone last week, go with last week's." That would certainly be helpful.
But, yes, iSync does make it possible to reconcile those things. I wish that there was some way to insert iSync into the transaction between calendars (whether on laptop or WebDAV serveR), and not just between devices and my desktop.
-Waldo Jaquith
I've been playing with iCal and WEB-DAV servers recently for work, and I really like iCal. But one thing I discovered today is that the synchronization doesn't run both ways -- a subscribed can't updated a calendar that someone else has published.
This is a real problem for me, and I'm glad to hear somebody else mention it.
I spend 90% of my computing time on my PowerMac desktop. About 8% (I'm plainly talking out of my ass here) is spent on my iBook, and 2% on other people's computers (friends, computer labs on my college campus, etc.) I use iCal on my PowerMac as the master calendar, and I publish that calendar to my server via WebDAV. I subscribe to that calendar in iCal on my iBook, and I use WebCalendar to reproduce my calendar on my website. I also sync my Palm and my phone with my desktop regularly, such that I can maintain my calendar on those. This system is really helpful, because I have such a scheduled, busy life that I really couldn't function without a decent calendar system.
The problem, of course, is that I can only make changes when I'm sitting at my desktop. Changes on my Palm or phone are overwritten next time that I sync. (iSync's valiant efforts notwithstanding.) Changes made via the website and are lost, and iCal on my iBook will not permit me to make changes to the calendar, because it's a subscription.
I want to make changes on my iBook the same way that I can read and reply to e-mail in Mail.app when I'm not on a WiFi network -- it should synch next time that I get a connection. Likewise, I should be able to do so with the website version, my phone, etc.
The problem here, as best as I can tell, is that the calendar isn't really stored on the WebDAV server -- it's mirrored on the WebDAV server. My PowerMac doesn't get its data from the WebDAV server, it simply publishes it to that server. I want iCal to use the WebDAV server just like Mail.app uses IMAP -- the server is master, and all else synchs to it.
I'd sure appreciate suggestions or tips from anybody that can suggest a solution to this, or some sort of a hack that's available for iCal to make it work in this manner.
-Waldo Jaquith
We vBulletin for nancies.org's discussion boardS, as we have for the past three years, and we're really happy with it. It's against my grain to pay for software (as opposed to writing it myself or using free software), particularly one with as many good free options as web-based discussion boards, but each annual reevaluation of the market has led me to conclude that vBulletin is the best choice out there. It has good support, a nice feature set, it uses MySQL and PHP (a major bonus, as far as I'm concerned), and product updates are frequent and worthwhile.
To be fair, I haven't looked at phpBB in the past ten months, so perhaps it has improved vastly in the meantime.
-Waldo Jaquith
Clear Channel's relationship with their affiliates is sort of like that between the Mafia and the businesses that they're "protecting." Clear Channel would never demand that certain songs not be played, they would simply make suggestions that the affiliates can follow or, alternately, choose not to follow. Of course, those station managers that choose not to follow the advice of their superiors may find that those promotions don't come like they used to, or perhaps they may find themselves cut out due to a budget crunch.
So, yeah, sure CCE "NEVER dictates what songs [affiliates] play," but you and I both know what's really going on.
-Waldo Jaquith
The information regarding menu placement is very interesting. As a developer, I've long been torn over the side on which the menu should go. UI testing on some of my client's sites has shown that people are more likely to look on the left-hand side,but I've also seen credible studies that keeping the menu on the right-hand side (near the scroll bar) is preferable, because it puts the menu near where the mouse will already be.
Now that a proper study has been done on the topic, I imagine that I should start moving menus over to the left-hand side of the page. It might be less efficient, but even crappy standards are still standards.
-Waldo Jaquith
Sim City includes a lot of political aspects. It's not electoral politics, but players do have to deal with keeping their constituents happy. That, in fact, is the primary guiding factor of the success of a city (at least it was in the original, which is the only version that I've used).
I have been heavily involved in electoral politics for several years, and I'm really not sure of how it would be turned into a game. It basically involves working horrible hours, being paid terribly, and murkily navigating the waters of popularity. Political science is a science in name only -- there aren't the rules and standards that would permit it to be translated to gaming very effectively.
-Waldo Jaquith