Maybe so. But if a company is already operating a helicopter in the course of business, then an opportunity to get a little extra income by hanging a camera pod off the helicopter for Google is a nice bit of gravy with no extra cost. It's like selling Google ad space on the side of the helicopter, only instead of a sign, there's a camera.
The key point is: cities already have people flying overhead. Why not take advantage of that, rather than chartering flights?
The cheapest thing would be to contact companies with helicopters, and offer to pay them if they let Google hang an automatic, GPS-equipped camera off them.
News and traffic helicopters, corporate helicopters, charters, and air ambulances do a lot of flying anyway. Get as much coverage as possible from them going about their business, and then hire someone to fill in any gaps.
Oddly enough, a fossil fuel-based power generation system can be a lot more efficient when the parts are allowed to be as big and expensive as they need to be for maximum efficiency. When the main design criteria are 1) small enough to fit in a car and 2) not too expensive, efficiency naturally suffers.
Inform implements a lot of rules for the behavior of things in the world that you'd have to implement and debug from scratch. That's not trivial, especially since many of these things are expected by players.
Inform lets you focus on the story, and making sure that players can interact with the world in ways they expect. For instance, it makes it quick and easy to specify multiple ways of referring to an item. When it comes to game play, not having to play 'guess the noun/verb/adjective' is worth a lot more than the implementation language.
You're a grad student working on your dissertation, but have been stuck for months. You have only 1000 words left to write. Your Ausralian girlfriend Violet, who provide the narrative voice, has threatened to leave you if you don't finish today.
It's a one-room game. The only 'evil wizard' you need to defeat is your own tendency to procrastinate.
I'm not sure that'd turn out well. Stephen King or Follet would probably have a hard time adjusting to the very different medium, and would probably turn out something that is insufficiently game-like and too much of a railroad.
It's a different medium, and a different approach is needed.
The science fiction author Thomas Disch created a game for EA in 1986, "Amnesia". It suffered shortcomings as noted above.
I do wonder what a younger, early-career writer might do. One who grew up with computers and games. A John Scalzi, or Charlie Stross, or Cory Doctorow.
If nothing else, try the IDE. It's really quite well done. When you click 'Go' it turns the source code into a game, starts the game in one pane of the IDE, generates a map of locations you've defined, etc. There is extensive documentation and examples, including a recipe book of code snippets.
It's available free (as in beer) for Mac, Windows, and (I think) Gnome.
I requested access to the Kindle software development program, saying I was interested in doing an IF interpreter, and months later I still don't have access.
"i am not familiar with christian suicide bombers regularly killing hundreds (of mostly other christians)"
What comes to mind that is closest to a 'suicide mission' would probably be John Brown's anti-slavery raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry. Didn't kill 'hundreds', but they didn't really have modern weapons. 10 of Brown's people died, 6 civilians died and like one or two of the militia holding the armory died.
But suicide bombing as such pretty much requires modern explosives to be effective, and in the period since the advent of modern explosives, Christians haven't really been in the position of feeling the need to resort to suicide missions. Suicide tactics are what you use against a much stronger opponent when you believe you have little chance of attaining your goals through peaceful means.
Well, they're not supposed to be, but there have been a lot of problems with coercive proselytization, troops strongly pressured to attend "voluntary" religious events and punished (given unpleasant tasks, etc) if they don't.
Oh, absolutely. But I just refuse to join in with the pants-wetting xenophobes.
I frankly don't care if some country is imposing the horrific barbarity of Victorian standards of modesty for pictures, in a minor way, via control of their domain.
I'll save my outrage for things that actually merit it, and which are actually specific to Islam. Not a minor, harmless anachronism.
Uh, no. The accepted conception of 'scantily clad' in the US has changed dramatically in the last 100 years in the US, without as dramatic a change in religion. (The delta between ankle-length bathing costumes for women and Lady GaGa's outfits is a lot wider than the difference in US religious beliefs from 1910 to 2010.)
If US states had top-level domains under their control, I can imagine quite a few that would try to do the same thing.
It's just conservative cultural mores, which come in all religious flavors. Libya doesn't want its domain used for sexual matters, Texas won't let you buy or sell vibrators, and I think some places still enforce the sabbath so that few businesses are open on Sunday. Connecticut doesn't allow take-out sales of alcohol on Sundays. Various localities in the US ban alcohol sales altogether. John Ashcroft covered up a public statue's boob with a curtain when he was AG.
Talking about sharia just puts it into "oooh, scary muslims! They're so alien and different!" territory.
Or put a reporter in jail for contempt of court for not divulging information about a source. In the US, that can potentially go on for years, though it's quite rare.
Re:Why isn't Siemens being taken to task here?
on
Stuxnet Worms On
·
· Score: 1
Iran knows how to buy things through complicated webs of shell companies in order to hide the final destination.
Slashdot Mirror
"Old Crowd"?
Ozzie only joined Microsoft in 2005.
Maybe so. But if a company is already operating a helicopter in the course of business, then an opportunity to get a little extra income by hanging a camera pod off the helicopter for Google is a nice bit of gravy with no extra cost. It's like selling Google ad space on the side of the helicopter, only instead of a sign, there's a camera.
The key point is: cities already have people flying overhead. Why not take advantage of that, rather than chartering flights?
The cheapest thing would be to contact companies with helicopters, and offer to pay them if they let Google hang an automatic, GPS-equipped camera off them.
News and traffic helicopters, corporate helicopters, charters, and air ambulances do a lot of flying anyway. Get as much coverage as possible from them going about their business, and then hire someone to fill in any gaps.
ie, giraffe.
Exactly.
Oddly enough, a fossil fuel-based power generation system can be a lot more efficient when the parts are allowed to be as big and expensive as they need to be for maximum efficiency. When the main design criteria are 1) small enough to fit in a car and 2) not too expensive, efficiency naturally suffers.
Inform implements a lot of rules for the behavior of things in the world that you'd have to implement and debug from scratch. That's not trivial, especially since many of these things are expected by players.
Inform lets you focus on the story, and making sure that players can interact with the world in ways they expect. For instance, it makes it quick and easy to specify multiple ways of referring to an item. When it comes to game play, not having to play 'guess the noun/verb/adjective' is worth a lot more than the implementation language.
Actually, there is an outfit trying to do this. They're calling themselves TextFyre, probably in a knowing reference to what you describe.
http://www.textfyre.com/
I think they use their own system for IF, not a Z-Machine-compatible format, or TADS.
Where "Whispernet" = "Wifi or 3G"
It'll probably work better via Wifi.
"I mean, the concept is so great, but all we get are "You are the hero fighting the evil wizard" style books."
Try 'Violet' by Jeremy Freese.
You're a grad student working on your dissertation, but have been stuck for months. You have only 1000 words left to write. Your Ausralian girlfriend Violet, who provide the narrative voice, has threatened to leave you if you don't finish today.
It's a one-room game. The only 'evil wizard' you need to defeat is your own tendency to procrastinate.
I'm not sure that'd turn out well. Stephen King or Follet would probably have a hard time adjusting to the very different medium, and would probably turn out something that is insufficiently game-like and too much of a railroad.
It's a different medium, and a different approach is needed.
The science fiction author Thomas Disch created a game for EA in 1986, "Amnesia". It suffered shortcomings as noted above.
I do wonder what a younger, early-career writer might do. One who grew up with computers and games. A John Scalzi, or Charlie Stross, or Cory Doctorow.
"The past two decades have been spent retconning it into something grander than it actually was."
I suppose so, but IMHO there's just something about the authorial voice and tone of Infocom's games.
If nothing else, try the IDE. It's really quite well done. When you click 'Go' it turns the source code into a game, starts the game in one pane of the IDE, generates a map of locations you've defined, etc. There is extensive documentation and examples, including a recipe book of code snippets.
It's available free (as in beer) for Mac, Windows, and (I think) Gnome.
Also, there's a recently-published book about writing games with Inform 7, "Creating Interactive Fiction With Inform 7"
I requested access to the Kindle software development program, saying I was interested in doing an IF interpreter, and months later I still don't have access.
"the problems are the same KIND, but completely different MAGNITUDE. namely, that the muslim world has a much, much larger problem"
Yeah, okay, but what the hell does that have to do with a freaking url-shortener?
"i am not familiar with christian suicide bombers regularly killing hundreds (of mostly other christians)"
What comes to mind that is closest to a 'suicide mission' would probably be John Brown's anti-slavery raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry. Didn't kill 'hundreds', but they didn't really have modern weapons. 10 of Brown's people died, 6 civilians died and like one or two of the militia holding the armory died.
But suicide bombing as such pretty much requires modern explosives to be effective, and in the period since the advent of modern explosives, Christians haven't really been in the position of feeling the need to resort to suicide missions. Suicide tactics are what you use against a much stronger opponent when you believe you have little chance of attaining your goals through peaceful means.
Well, they're not supposed to be, but there have been a lot of problems with coercive proselytization, troops strongly pressured to attend "voluntary" religious events and punished (given unpleasant tasks, etc) if they don't.
"but it does no good to say "well, they jaywalk in the usa, so murder is ok in the muslim world""
You think blocking a URL-shortener on a TLD you control is the same as murder?
FAIL.
Oh, absolutely. But I just refuse to join in with the pants-wetting xenophobes.
I frankly don't care if some country is imposing the horrific barbarity of Victorian standards of modesty for pictures, in a minor way, via control of their domain.
I'll save my outrage for things that actually merit it, and which are actually specific to Islam. Not a minor, harmless anachronism.
"An Islam-apologist, you are doing it great."
Australia's government wants to impose mandatory internet filtering. Is it because their government is rife with Muslims?
"I can imagine winning the lottery, that doesn't mean it's going to happen."
Try buying a sex toy in Texas. Must be all that sharia law, keeping people from buying vibrators.
Uh, no. The accepted conception of 'scantily clad' in the US has changed dramatically in the last 100 years in the US, without as dramatic a change in religion. (The delta between ankle-length bathing costumes for women and Lady GaGa's outfits is a lot wider than the difference in US religious beliefs from 1910 to 2010.)
If US states had top-level domains under their control, I can imagine quite a few that would try to do the same thing.
It's just conservative cultural mores, which come in all religious flavors. Libya doesn't want its domain used for sexual matters, Texas won't let you buy or sell vibrators, and I think some places still enforce the sabbath so that few businesses are open on Sunday. Connecticut doesn't allow take-out sales of alcohol on Sundays. Various localities in the US ban alcohol sales altogether. John Ashcroft covered up a public statue's boob with a curtain when he was AG.
Talking about sharia just puts it into "oooh, scary muslims! They're so alien and different!" territory.
I really hate those code names. They convey less information than the simple numeric pixel sizes.
Or put a reporter in jail for contempt of court for not divulging information about a source. In the US, that can potentially go on for years, though it's quite rare.
Iran knows how to buy things through complicated webs of shell companies in order to hide the final destination.