These are also the people who are supposed to keep track of such important documents as the U.S. Constitution. Can someone please photocopy it just in case it gets misfiled? kthxbye
This is also an advantage Wikipedia: unlike most encyclopedias, where you have to go find the sources, Wikipedia is point and click.
From one point of view, this heavy reliance on online sources might be seen as a disadvantage. Most of the best information is in books, and not yet online.
Or did you mean just following the footnotes? In that case this is not only a UI advantage, but a qualitative advantage over other encyclopedias. A year or two ago the requirement for references was updated to also require extensive footnotes, something you will not find in any other encyclopedia I know of. Before that the standard was just to list a bibliography at the end, which is the more usual encyclopedic practice. No article achieves "Featured" status witout footnotes. This makes it much harder to slip nonsense in.
I got it yesterday myself. The area code was 503, which is Northern California (Chico, Redding, Truckee, etc.) I assume all these numbers are forwarded to a central location though. It's unlikely that many people had this idea simultaneously.
Investors don't throw their money away to produce something that will only yield them marginal returns that don't reflect the risk. In the case in point, the Thief series had a track record. It had already shown itself to be hugely innovative in terms of gameplay (and sound modeling, but not graphics or physics) and capable of attracting a small devoted following. See thief-thecircle.com to see just how devoted -- the fan-made mission community for Thief 1 and 2 is still going strong after all these years. But to an investor -- you know, the guy without whose money development won't happen at all -- the main point of interest would be the "small" part. It tells him that he's not going to get much back for his trouble. Therefore, the game had to change if it was to be made at all. It became more mainstream-oriented, and it was modified to be playable on a console to significantly expand the potential market. Both changed had an unavoidable effect on gameplay.
Would I have preferred a Thief 3 more in the vein of the first two? Absolutely. Do I prefer having the Thief 3 we got rather than no more Thief at all? On balance, yes.
That's not complacency. That's living in the real world.
Integrity, vision, and not making games for the lowest common denominator are what push gaming (and any industry) forward.
And ignoring commercial success is a recipe for going out of business. You don't get mch innovation or forward movement that way either.
Look, I'd prefer it if the real world could work in this naive, idealistic way myself. I much prefer something like Thief (or whatever would follow it) to the latest finely-rendered twicthy gorefest. Unfortunately, it doesn't and it doesn't do much good to tell everyone to behave as if it did./P
Game programmers deserve to get paid, and game companies deserve to make a profit. It's very easy to sit back from a distance and preach to others about integrity. It's not so easy to be the guy running a game company that's barely breaking even because artistic vision is more important than commercial success.
I very much wish that Thief as originally conceived had sold better. We'd all be seeing more games like it now if it did. LGS managed to put two games out according to their original vision -- before going out of business because, for all their integrity, their games just didn't sell enough copies to carry them through.
Tell me, are you glad that happened? Is it something you'd like to see happen often? Your advice here is almost certain to lead to it.
I'd often wondered if the prominence of the Almagest wasn't due to an accident of history, it simply being a work that happened to survive in multiple copies where others did not.
Actually, a moment's investigation or familiarity with Greek philosphers might convince us that Aristarchus actually suggested a heliocentric model, contemporary with Aristotle's model.
I didn't. The mechanism was most likely intended to model planetary motion. Whether it was used as a navigational device is unknown. (It was found in a shipwreck, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was used on shipboard since it may have been part of the cargo, a possession of one of the passengers, etc.)
Besides, you meant "astronomy". The mechanism has nothing to do with cosmology.
If the Antikythera Mechanism is indeed what the investigators believe it is, then there are further suggestions that it may be based on a heliocentric view of the solar system - highly unusual at a time when most Greeks accepted Aristotle's view that the universe revolved around the Earth.
And what makes us think that most Greeks believed in a geocentric universe? We know precious little about what they knew back then, since we have only a handful of their writings. To insinuate that we have anything like a complete map of the intellectual landscape of the time is sheerest puffery.
A minute's thought might convince us that a heliocentric model was available to them: They knew the earth was a sphere; they knew its size; they knew the sun was far enough away that its rays arrived parallel for all intents and purposes. Add to that that as soon as someone tried to build something like the Antikythera Mechanism they must perforce have noticed (as did Kepler a millennium and a half later) that it's far easier to model the heavens if you place the sun in the center rather than the earth.
Even this mechanism itself cannot be unique, as some articles about it have hinted. An automaton/clockwork/astronomical model this complex cannot have leapt full-formed from the mind of a single inventor. There must be an entire lineage of similar devices. That we have only a single example is simply a hint that there was much more to their technology than we're currently aware of. It's also an indication of how easy it is for a cultural calamity to erase collective memories of high tech; a warning for our times if nothing is. Not to mention that the correct ideas are not necessarily those which survive such a calamity. After all, when the Roman Empire fell, Medieval Europe inherited the Ptolemaic model. Of course, by then Ptolemy was writing (ca. 150) he probably had to work without the benefit of the bulk of the Royal Library at Alexandria so he may have been left to his own devices when considering a model of planetary motion.
The closest physical manifestation of this situation is for a man to walk into a private meeting room such as a boardroom, then use the information he heard for personal gain.
Actually, the closest physical analogue to this is a bunch of people having a conversation in a crowded restaurant becoming offended that they can be overheard at the adjacent table by the people they're talking about. You need a bit more than a promise that you're not the sort of person the site is trying to keep out to make a behind-closed-doors analogue valid.
What planet did you grow up on? The world you describe never existed. Back when it was okay to coast and graduate in the middle of the pack, it was also okay to not go to college at all, but directly into a trade. The college-bound types always had pressure to perform academically, never simply "took the same classes as everyone else", and participated in extracirricular activities. That has always been the formula for getting into a good school.
Actually, it's easier than ever now to get into college. It's expected. The market has expanded to accomodate the additional students. It's also dumbed down considerably, so that students who are unsuited to higher education don't flunk out in the first semester as a matter of course. We're at the point now where we're basically offering high-school level courses in college and calling them "remedial".
Pressure? What pressure? There has rarely been less genuine academic pressure on American students than there is now.
That's not surprising. He was carrying the most weight, and landed square on his tailbone. It must have hurt like hell. He'd be lucky to escape serious spinal injury after that. Maybe he didn't.
The cameraman was no brain trust either. He actually has to ask, "Are you guys OK?" while they're writhing on the ground screaming in pain, and then goes in for a closeup instead of calling 911.
What's so awful about the CueCat? Sure, the purpose for which it was intended was poorly thought out, but it turned out to be a perfectly usable and inexpensive barcode reader once it was appropriately repurposed. Who says a device has to be used solely for the purpose for which it was intended?
See yesterday's story about the same thing being done in Plainfield where they actually expelled a student over a blog post. (Obviously Plainfield IL, not Plainfield, NJ as the story claimed.)
So is there some prodding from the state department of education for school districts to be doing this, or is Illinois just more of a nanny state than most?
Patrick says that once in a while he puts on a crash helmet (mainly as a sound muffler), takes the car out on nearby Highway 237 in the wee hours of the morning and fires it up for a brief and hopefully cop-free run.
I frequently travel home from work on Hwy. 237 in Sunnyvale in the wee hours of the morning. I think I'd better watch out for this guy. I doubt my unmodfied Hyundai Accent could keep up, or even get out of the way for that matter.
tags, so this was virtually unreadable. The lack of proper punctuation didn't help.
I'd be surprised if the Vista kernel was significantly innovative over NT's. XP's wasn't, and I don't see that they have any strong reason to totally rewrite their OS. It's still a broken version of VMS at heart. I'm talking about what makes the OS "go" so to speak, not the pretty pictures and bells and whistles you're talking about.
I know this is hard for you young people to understand, but businesses really are here to make money. Google's "marketing services" are their business, period. Of course Google needs to create a venue where its ads will show. But if it's to exist at all, they must cater to the people who are actually paying them. You sound like someone who's never used any of Google's ad services. There's a lot to them. That's where they innovate. They never claimed that the services they offer to the users were particularly innovative with the exception of their search methodology. But superior searching is only that which keeps the audience for their real customers coming in.
As far as the indexing goes, now that I research the issue I see this is even less innovative than I thought. I had thought I remembered something about how they were doing their metadata and full-text searches based on an RDBMS, but it seems they're just tweaking their existing indexing service. Oh well.
I think very few businesses will have a use for temporary slow RAM. Businesses use their computers for a set of well-defined applications, and size their requirements accordingly. I'm acually having some trouble imagining who might find this useful.
How many of you are actually in anyway involved in the tech field and not casual home users.
I am. I've been a professional software engineer for over 20 years now. The AC right above your post only touched on the more obvious of MS's "borrowings". I'd say that Windows NT could not have been written in today's intellecutal property environment. It was almost entirely based on another operating system -- ironically one of the most stable and secure around. (Building in a GUI is partly what broke it, among other things. Hint: subtract 1 from WNT.) A co-worker of mine who has written device drivers for both OSes says that WinNT internals were "deja vu all over again."
You want to know one inovative thing in that operating system the fact that it lets you use flash as either storage or ram that's huge.
We must use vastly different definitions of "huge". What you're telling me is that it allows you to put a paging file on a removable device. A slow removable device at that. Woot, as they say.
And please don't burble about indexing. That's not innovative by any stretch. The software I work on has been using an RDBMS to catalogue files with metadata for over a decade now.
Google hits the consumer hard and the business very little
Good Lord, you're ignorant. Google is very profitable, but it makes not one thin dime off the consumer. Look to their profit centers to see who they're really targeting.
And if MS isn't portal or search engine, then what the hell are they doing trying to compete in that business?
What comedy? I live near Santa Cruz, California, and I'll have you know that all these things can be found in the middle of the night within a 10 mile radius of my house.
Slashdot Mirror
These are also the people who are supposed to keep track of such important documents as the U.S. Constitution. Can someone please photocopy it just in case it gets misfiled? kthxbye
This is also an advantage Wikipedia: unlike most encyclopedias, where you have to go find the sources, Wikipedia is point and click.
From one point of view, this heavy reliance on online sources might be seen as a disadvantage. Most of the best information is in books, and not yet online.
Or did you mean just following the footnotes? In that case this is not only a UI advantage, but a qualitative advantage over other encyclopedias. A year or two ago the requirement for references was updated to also require extensive footnotes, something you will not find in any other encyclopedia I know of. Before that the standard was just to list a bibliography at the end, which is the more usual encyclopedic practice. No article achieves "Featured" status witout footnotes. This makes it much harder to slip nonsense in.
Grr. Missed the Preview button. That's 530, not 503.
I got it yesterday myself. The area code was 503, which is Northern California (Chico, Redding, Truckee, etc.) I assume all these numbers are forwarded to a central location though. It's unlikely that many people had this idea simultaneously.
but it's not nearly as delicious as a congressman with $90,000 in his freezer.
What better place to keep some cold, hard cash just in case of emergencies?
No, realism.
Investors don't throw their money away to produce something that will only yield them marginal returns that don't reflect the risk. In the case in point, the Thief series had a track record. It had already shown itself to be hugely innovative in terms of gameplay (and sound modeling, but not graphics or physics) and capable of attracting a small devoted following. See thief-thecircle.com to see just how devoted -- the fan-made mission community for Thief 1 and 2 is still going strong after all these years. But to an investor -- you know, the guy without whose money development won't happen at all -- the main point of interest would be the "small" part. It tells him that he's not going to get much back for his trouble. Therefore, the game had to change if it was to be made at all. It became more mainstream-oriented, and it was modified to be playable on a console to significantly expand the potential market. Both changed had an unavoidable effect on gameplay.
Would I have preferred a Thief 3 more in the vein of the first two? Absolutely. Do I prefer having the Thief 3 we got rather than no more Thief at all? On balance, yes.
That's not complacency. That's living in the real world.
Integrity, vision, and not making games for the lowest common denominator are what push gaming (and any industry) forward.
And ignoring commercial success is a recipe for going out of business. You don't get mch innovation or forward movement that way either.
Look, I'd prefer it if the real world could work in this naive, idealistic way myself. I much prefer something like Thief (or whatever would follow it) to the latest finely-rendered twicthy gorefest. Unfortunately, it doesn't and it doesn't do much good to tell everyone to behave as if it did./P
Game programmers deserve to get paid, and game companies deserve to make a profit. It's very easy to sit back from a distance and preach to others about integrity. It's not so easy to be the guy running a game company that's barely breaking even because artistic vision is more important than commercial success.
I very much wish that Thief as originally conceived had sold better. We'd all be seeing more games like it now if it did. LGS managed to put two games out according to their original vision -- before going out of business because, for all their integrity, their games just didn't sell enough copies to carry them through.
Tell me, are you glad that happened? Is it something you'd like to see happen often? Your advice here is almost certain to lead to it.
I'd often wondered if the prominence of the Almagest wasn't due to an accident of history, it simply being a work that happened to survive in multiple copies where others did not.
Actually, a moment's investigation or familiarity with Greek philosphers might convince us that Aristarchus actually suggested a heliocentric model, contemporary with Aristotle's model.
Well, there ya go.
I didn't. The mechanism was most likely intended to model planetary motion. Whether it was used as a navigational device is unknown. (It was found in a shipwreck, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was used on shipboard since it may have been part of the cargo, a possession of one of the passengers, etc.)
Besides, you meant "astronomy". The mechanism has nothing to do with cosmology.
And what makes us think that most Greeks believed in a geocentric universe? We know precious little about what they knew back then, since we have only a handful of their writings. To insinuate that we have anything like a complete map of the intellectual landscape of the time is sheerest puffery.
A minute's thought might convince us that a heliocentric model was available to them: They knew the earth was a sphere; they knew its size; they knew the sun was far enough away that its rays arrived parallel for all intents and purposes. Add to that that as soon as someone tried to build something like the Antikythera Mechanism they must perforce have noticed (as did Kepler a millennium and a half later) that it's far easier to model the heavens if you place the sun in the center rather than the earth.
Even this mechanism itself cannot be unique, as some articles about it have hinted. An automaton/clockwork/astronomical model this complex cannot have leapt full-formed from the mind of a single inventor. There must be an entire lineage of similar devices. That we have only a single example is simply a hint that there was much more to their technology than we're currently aware of. It's also an indication of how easy it is for a cultural calamity to erase collective memories of high tech; a warning for our times if nothing is. Not to mention that the correct ideas are not necessarily those which survive such a calamity. After all, when the Roman Empire fell, Medieval Europe inherited the Ptolemaic model. Of course, by then Ptolemy was writing (ca. 150) he probably had to work without the benefit of the bulk of the Royal Library at Alexandria so he may have been left to his own devices when considering a model of planetary motion.
Oh yeah?
Actually, the closest physical analogue to this is a bunch of people having a conversation in a crowded restaurant becoming offended that they can be overheard at the adjacent table by the people they're talking about. You need a bit more than a promise that you're not the sort of person the site is trying to keep out to make a behind-closed-doors analogue valid.
But I could be wrong. I'm not a native speaker of 1337 or any other h4x0r-related dialect.
Actually, it's easier than ever now to get into college. It's expected. The market has expanded to accomodate the additional students. It's also dumbed down considerably, so that students who are unsuited to higher education don't flunk out in the first semester as a matter of course. We're at the point now where we're basically offering high-school level courses in college and calling them "remedial".
Pressure? What pressure? There has rarely been less genuine academic pressure on American students than there is now.
The cameraman was no brain trust either. He actually has to ask, "Are you guys OK?" while they're writhing on the ground screaming in pain, and then goes in for a closeup instead of calling 911.
Geez, Spiderweb Software deserves a link at least, doesn't it?
What's so awful about the CueCat? Sure, the purpose for which it was intended was poorly thought out, but it turned out to be a perfectly usable and inexpensive barcode reader once it was appropriately repurposed. Who says a device has to be used solely for the purpose for which it was intended?
So is there some prodding from the state department of education for school districts to be doing this, or is Illinois just more of a nanny state than most?
Patrick says that once in a while he puts on a crash helmet (mainly as a sound muffler), takes the car out on nearby Highway 237 in the wee hours of the morning and fires it up for a brief and hopefully cop-free run.
I frequently travel home from work on Hwy. 237 in Sunnyvale in the wee hours of the morning. I think I'd better watch out for this guy. I doubt my unmodfied Hyundai Accent could keep up, or even get out of the way for that matter.
tags, so this was virtually unreadable. The lack of proper punctuation didn't help.
I'd be surprised if the Vista kernel was significantly innovative over NT's. XP's wasn't, and I don't see that they have any strong reason to totally rewrite their OS. It's still a broken version of VMS at heart. I'm talking about what makes the OS "go" so to speak, not the pretty pictures and bells and whistles you're talking about.
I know this is hard for you young people to understand, but businesses really are here to make money. Google's "marketing services" are their business, period. Of course Google needs to create a venue where its ads will show. But if it's to exist at all, they must cater to the people who are actually paying them. You sound like someone who's never used any of Google's ad services. There's a lot to them. That's where they innovate. They never claimed that the services they offer to the users were particularly innovative with the exception of their search methodology. But superior searching is only that which keeps the audience for their real customers coming in.
As far as the indexing goes, now that I research the issue I see this is even less innovative than I thought. I had thought I remembered something about how they were doing their metadata and full-text searches based on an RDBMS, but it seems they're just tweaking their existing indexing service. Oh well.
I think very few businesses will have a use for temporary slow RAM. Businesses use their computers for a set of well-defined applications, and size their requirements accordingly. I'm acually having some trouble imagining who might find this useful.
I am. I've been a professional software engineer for over 20 years now. The AC right above your post only touched on the more obvious of MS's "borrowings". I'd say that Windows NT could not have been written in today's intellecutal property environment. It was almost entirely based on another operating system -- ironically one of the most stable and secure around. (Building in a GUI is partly what broke it, among other things. Hint: subtract 1 from WNT.) A co-worker of mine who has written device drivers for both OSes says that WinNT internals were "deja vu all over again."
You want to know one inovative thing in that operating system the fact that it lets you use flash as either storage or ram that's huge.
We must use vastly different definitions of "huge". What you're telling me is that it allows you to put a paging file on a removable device. A slow removable device at that. Woot, as they say.
And please don't burble about indexing. That's not innovative by any stretch. The software I work on has been using an RDBMS to catalogue files with metadata for over a decade now.
Google hits the consumer hard and the business very little
Good Lord, you're ignorant. Google is very profitable, but it makes not one thin dime off the consumer. Look to their profit centers to see who they're really targeting.
And if MS isn't portal or search engine, then what the hell are they doing trying to compete in that business?
What comedy? I live near Santa Cruz, California, and I'll have you know that all these things can be found in the middle of the night within a 10 mile radius of my house.
No, someone did patent it a couple of years ago, hopefully as a demonstration of how the system was broken. That's why I mentioned it.