Exactly. Facebook has worked so well in part because it forces people to be less anonymous. You are prompted to use your real name and put in factual data about yourself, and when you becomes friends with other people it connects you via all of their other tools. So yes, you could become friends with people from high school you don't know, but your pictures will be with your actual friends, which really is showing that, in private, you hang out with certain people.
I don't see how a factual representation of the self is necessarily bad, though. Yes yes, there's the whole "if you're not breaking the law, why are you afraid of the law" argument, but Facebook does let you lock down your profile pretty well nowadays. The latest privacy hubbub is about how Facebook is linking into other sites like CNN.
MySpace was always a bad model for social networking as it was little more than GeoCities templates with a friend feature. Facebook is actually social networking. But like IM protocols, how many do you need? Sure there's going to be some people who really care about anonymity and prefer something like Diaspora (or ICQ). But the idea of "social network" and privacy/anonymity seems kind of at odds, doesn't it?
I agree -- in high school, technical schools were for "losers" and my high school tried to get them into the technical trade schools as fast as possible, often setting up deals so that they'd earn HS credits for their senior year. It was seen more as a "You're too dumb for college so you might as well do this other thing" rather than viable job training.
And yes, "NCLB" should really be named "All Children Trained to the Same Standard," to point out that it just sets a benchmark and makes all children meet that, regardless of individual talent -- let alone available jobs. Let alone jobs that would benefit the economy.
Well, ignoring the cost of the (apparently private) school you went to, since many public universities offer CS programs, should a CS program teach you the details of a language? Or should it teach you overall concepts about computer science? I mean, truly, you went for a Computer Science degree, not a Computer Programming degree (arguably that would be a cert, not a degree, and be cheaper and shorter as well).
I think the best programmers are those who are motivated to self-teach, because it shows that they really love programming. But I also think there is important stuff taught in computer science classes. It might not be for everyone, but I think it can turn people who just write code without thinking about what actually happens with what they write into better programmers.
Yeah, it's not exactly rocket science. We can't really help the original question when he says shit like "I really need to keep my swiss army knife on the keyring." No, you don't -- that can go in a bag or other thing. You need pocket keys for accessing things when you're not at home. Everything else can stay indoors. If you're a nerd, you should know that there's very easy ways to connect things together, keys and keyrings especially.
A really geeky way to do it is to simply create separate sets of keys. House key plus motorbike, or house key plus car plus girlfriend, etc. Take whichever is most applicable -- the only true standard would be the housekey. And if you own a place (or have a friendly landlord), look into getting your home locks keyed the same. I personally just have about 6 keys on a single ring attached to a lightweight carabiner. Not only is it small, but it clips on to my pants so it doesn't bulge around in a pocket (or scratch up my phone).
I believe one of the major differences between the "reboot" franchise and the old franchises is that they're not going to fix anything. They don't need to fix anything, after all -- there's plenty of stories and intrigue leaving the universe as it is. Getting everything back to zero is old sci-fi.
Interactive art doesn't let you "win." There's no boss and often there's no story. And if you bring up non-games, or games that are made to be experienced rather than progress or win, then Ebert argues that you're not making a game anymore, but rather simply making interactive art.
I think Ebert's definition is that art can be video games, but video games are not art.
Re:Officially?
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 4, Insightful
And those personal computers run a modified version of Unix, which is significantly more open than the old Mac OS. Hmm...
Actually the senate bill that the house passed hasn't changed at all since the senate passed it (or else it would go back to the senate). It's still a huge bill that I doubt everyone in the house has read, but I think part of the reason the news reports are coming out quickly with what's in the bill is that they've had a good 8-9 months to actually read the thing.
I have used Dreamhost for a few years now and have also been very pleased with their service. Not only are their prices reasonable but they provide plenty of tools to either help you set stuff up or to let you do it yourself completely. And not only are their prices reasonable, but their overage prices are still reasonable. My wife recently discovered that some big PDFs and images she had were being hotlinked to a forum and was getting perilously close to going over our bandwidth, and she found that it's a dime per GB per month. Given their already generous plans, if you suddenly get slashdotted and get hit with an extra 50GB of transfer, you'd be out all of $5.
So the simple, easy-to-code games have a quick approval process, while the longer, more-complex games that include net code, notifications, and other doodads are delayed due to a longer approval process? I find that difficult to imagine why.
I empathize with you, and have a suggestion. For most venues, the music has to be loud so that everyone can hear it, including the people in the back. This means that those expensive front row seats (or elbowing your way up in a small venue) doesn't get you better sound; it just gets you a better view. And yes, that means that usually the music is way too loud to actually just listen to.
My suggestion is to look into foam earplugs. You can get a pack of Hearos earplugs at Target for very cheap. They're these little foam guys that you roll between your fingers to make them fit in your ear, and they then expand in your ear canal gently to [b]reduce[/b] sound, not block it.
The first time I tried them at a show it was incredible. The wall of bass and noise that I was expecting was replaced with actual music! And when I left, I took them out and my ears were perfectly comfortable. I became a convert with that show, and now always have some with me if I go to see a band.
Alternatively, small bands and local venues tend to have more reasonable volumes. But that's not always the case, and I've definitely noticed shows where the starting band was a reasonable volume and each group got progressively louder.
Yeah, it's one of the reasons I don't buy racing games anymore. There's no incentive to improve because it only matters if you get first, and by improving your skill you make the AI more challenging, making it harder to get first anyway.
I used to like them, but kicking ass on the first couple laps and seeing an AI car (that crashed or got stuck on an obstacle) suddenly zoom way up is bullshit. There's no point in playing a game where there's no reward for improving.
Most everything that does require you to use handwriting requires printing anyway. Forms, mail, applications, they all want plain printing -- because it's far easier to read (and process by a computer, which means it's more consistent too).
The point of communication is to be understood after all. I think far more people realize that it's better to print than write in cursive once they realize that they can only read their own cursive, and no one else's.
Like the iPod, which is definitely an also-ran in the world of portable music. I remember 3 years ago when the iPod was at the top of its game, and once everyone owned one the hype was exposed and now you can't even find them at WalMart.
Agreed, although this is one reason why Firefox will likely still have a life -- it's unaffiliated with a company that makes money through advertising. Why would Google support a browser add-on that allows you to block their main revenue source?
Morons are a problem, of course, but even they can be alleviated with better light planning. If the lights are short, people aren't going to figure "well, I've got 2 minutes to kill, might as well pull out the phone." They know the lights going to change and they won't be able to pull it out of their pocket in time.
In my city, we've got a couple streets where you can hit all greens, saving yourself about 5 minutes for the entire stretch, if you speed about 7-9 mph. You get half yellows and the rest are green. So anyone who tries it thinks "shit, this really is the best way to drive down this stretch," which just leads to a different kind of moron. Yet, if the lights were set up the *other* direction, traffic could be regulated so that there was no advantage to going over the speed limit -- you'd simply be approaching a red light anyway, and someone going exactly 25 or 35 would hit the light right after it changes. The only people slowed would be speeders.
There's a lot that cities can do to alleviate traffic problems, but it's not "popular" or particularly showy, so almost none of them do. Fiddling with traffic lights doesn't win elections.
Agreed. I was in San Francisco over the summer, and noticed that the majority of the lights were very short. I was there as a pedestrian, not a driver, but it seemed that all of the drivers were cool with the short lights. After being there a few days, it made sense -- if you miss a light, it's not a big deal because it'll be green again in about 15 seconds.
As a side effect, all of the pedestrians went to the corners to cross, because it was easier to wait a short time to get a light compared to waiting to jaywalk (since jaywalking only works if there's a gap in traffic).
Then, when I came home, the fact that we have many, many traffic lights that last well over a minute just irritated me to no end. Now I see tons of intersections where traffic is waiting for a green, yet there's no cross traffic because the lights are too long and the entire system cascades.
Most of the trouble I've seen, and most of the frustration I encounter, is from badly-timed traffic lights. And many delays are the result of civil service rather than accidents. For example, intersections that have very long red-lights lead to more people trying to speed through the light, causing accidents in the first place.
This technology may help people avoid problems once they occur, but it won't do squat to affect the root of many problems -- bad traffic planning. Without a good traffic plan, everything made to "fix" it is just a patch on top of a bad base.
(3) I don't consider water under MY ground to be public property. *I* was the one who spent $5000 to drill a well into the ground and tap the reservoir, therefore the well belongs to me.
But there's drainage, you see. Think of it this way. If you have a milkshake...
I think it's more "economy." Blockbuster movies hit the theaters in the summer -- blockbuster DVDs (and Blu Ray) hits the stores in the fall. Summer months typically equal shitty sales for video games and movies -- anything that involves staying inside, mostly.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Facebook has worked so well in part because it forces people to be less anonymous. You are prompted to use your real name and put in factual data about yourself, and when you becomes friends with other people it connects you via all of their other tools. So yes, you could become friends with people from high school you don't know, but your pictures will be with your actual friends, which really is showing that, in private, you hang out with certain people.
I don't see how a factual representation of the self is necessarily bad, though. Yes yes, there's the whole "if you're not breaking the law, why are you afraid of the law" argument, but Facebook does let you lock down your profile pretty well nowadays. The latest privacy hubbub is about how Facebook is linking into other sites like CNN.
MySpace was always a bad model for social networking as it was little more than GeoCities templates with a friend feature. Facebook is actually social networking. But like IM protocols, how many do you need? Sure there's going to be some people who really care about anonymity and prefer something like Diaspora (or ICQ). But the idea of " social network" and privacy/anonymity seems kind of at odds, doesn't it?
I agree -- in high school, technical schools were for "losers" and my high school tried to get them into the technical trade schools as fast as possible, often setting up deals so that they'd earn HS credits for their senior year. It was seen more as a "You're too dumb for college so you might as well do this other thing" rather than viable job training.
And yes, "NCLB" should really be named "All Children Trained to the Same Standard," to point out that it just sets a benchmark and makes all children meet that, regardless of individual talent -- let alone available jobs. Let alone jobs that would benefit the economy.
Well, ignoring the cost of the (apparently private) school you went to, since many public universities offer CS programs, should a CS program teach you the details of a language? Or should it teach you overall concepts about computer science? I mean, truly, you went for a Computer Science degree, not a Computer Programming degree (arguably that would be a cert, not a degree, and be cheaper and shorter as well).
I think the best programmers are those who are motivated to self-teach, because it shows that they really love programming. But I also think there is important stuff taught in computer science classes. It might not be for everyone, but I think it can turn people who just write code without thinking about what actually happens with what they write into better programmers.
A really geeky way to do it is to simply create separate sets of keys. House key plus motorbike, or house key plus car plus girlfriend, etc. Take whichever is most applicable -- the only true standard would be the housekey. And if you own a place (or have a friendly landlord), look into getting your home locks keyed the same. I personally just have about 6 keys on a single ring attached to a lightweight carabiner. Not only is it small, but it clips on to my pants so it doesn't bulge around in a pocket (or scratch up my phone).
I believe one of the major differences between the "reboot" franchise and the old franchises is that they're not going to fix anything. They don't need to fix anything, after all -- there's plenty of stories and intrigue leaving the universe as it is. Getting everything back to zero is old sci-fi.
Interactive art doesn't let you "win." There's no boss and often there's no story. And if you bring up non-games, or games that are made to be experienced rather than progress or win, then Ebert argues that you're not making a game anymore, but rather simply making interactive art. I think Ebert's definition is that art can be video games, but video games are not art.
And those personal computers run a modified version of Unix, which is significantly more open than the old Mac OS. Hmm...
Actually the senate bill that the house passed hasn't changed at all since the senate passed it (or else it would go back to the senate). It's still a huge bill that I doubt everyone in the house has read, but I think part of the reason the news reports are coming out quickly with what's in the bill is that they've had a good 8-9 months to actually read the thing.
I have used Dreamhost for a few years now and have also been very pleased with their service. Not only are their prices reasonable but they provide plenty of tools to either help you set stuff up or to let you do it yourself completely. And not only are their prices reasonable, but their overage prices are still reasonable. My wife recently discovered that some big PDFs and images she had were being hotlinked to a forum and was getting perilously close to going over our bandwidth, and she found that it's a dime per GB per month. Given their already generous plans, if you suddenly get slashdotted and get hit with an extra 50GB of transfer, you'd be out all of $5.
Especially with the whole "Did you mod but not pirate games?" aspect. Good luck finding those.
So the simple, easy-to-code games have a quick approval process, while the longer, more-complex games that include net code, notifications, and other doodads are delayed due to a longer approval process? I find that difficult to imagine why.
I empathize with you, and have a suggestion. For most venues, the music has to be loud so that everyone can hear it, including the people in the back. This means that those expensive front row seats (or elbowing your way up in a small venue) doesn't get you better sound; it just gets you a better view. And yes, that means that usually the music is way too loud to actually just listen to.
My suggestion is to look into foam earplugs. You can get a pack of Hearos earplugs at Target for very cheap. They're these little foam guys that you roll between your fingers to make them fit in your ear, and they then expand in your ear canal gently to [b]reduce[/b] sound, not block it.
The first time I tried them at a show it was incredible. The wall of bass and noise that I was expecting was replaced with actual music! And when I left, I took them out and my ears were perfectly comfortable. I became a convert with that show, and now always have some with me if I go to see a band.
Alternatively, small bands and local venues tend to have more reasonable volumes. But that's not always the case, and I've definitely noticed shows where the starting band was a reasonable volume and each group got progressively louder.
Yeah, it's one of the reasons I don't buy racing games anymore. There's no incentive to improve because it only matters if you get first, and by improving your skill you make the AI more challenging, making it harder to get first anyway.
I used to like them, but kicking ass on the first couple laps and seeing an AI car (that crashed or got stuck on an obstacle) suddenly zoom way up is bullshit. There's no point in playing a game where there's no reward for improving.
Seems like it would be a lot cheaper to simply go 45 days with no internet access.
One tool one job
I'd hate to see what your kitchen looks like.
Most everything that does require you to use handwriting requires printing anyway. Forms, mail, applications, they all want plain printing -- because it's far easier to read (and process by a computer, which means it's more consistent too). The point of communication is to be understood after all. I think far more people realize that it's better to print than write in cursive once they realize that they can only read their own cursive, and no one else's.
Like the iPod, which is definitely an also-ran in the world of portable music. I remember 3 years ago when the iPod was at the top of its game, and once everyone owned one the hype was exposed and now you can't even find them at WalMart.
Agreed, although this is one reason why Firefox will likely still have a life -- it's unaffiliated with a company that makes money through advertising. Why would Google support a browser add-on that allows you to block their main revenue source?
Lead affects cognitive ability, which perfectly explains why our parents have such a hard time with computers.
In my city, we've got a couple streets where you can hit all greens, saving yourself about 5 minutes for the entire stretch, if you speed about 7-9 mph. You get half yellows and the rest are green. So anyone who tries it thinks "shit, this really is the best way to drive down this stretch," which just leads to a different kind of moron. Yet, if the lights were set up the *other* direction, traffic could be regulated so that there was no advantage to going over the speed limit -- you'd simply be approaching a red light anyway, and someone going exactly 25 or 35 would hit the light right after it changes. The only people slowed would be speeders.
There's a lot that cities can do to alleviate traffic problems, but it's not "popular" or particularly showy, so almost none of them do. Fiddling with traffic lights doesn't win elections.
As a side effect, all of the pedestrians went to the corners to cross, because it was easier to wait a short time to get a light compared to waiting to jaywalk (since jaywalking only works if there's a gap in traffic).
Then, when I came home, the fact that we have many, many traffic lights that last well over a minute just irritated me to no end. Now I see tons of intersections where traffic is waiting for a green, yet there's no cross traffic because the lights are too long and the entire system cascades.
This technology may help people avoid problems once they occur, but it won't do squat to affect the root of many problems -- bad traffic planning. Without a good traffic plan, everything made to "fix" it is just a patch on top of a bad base.
But there's drainage, you see. Think of it this way. If you have a milkshake...
If they extend the life, why would they need to be available at launch?
I think it's more "economy." Blockbuster movies hit the theaters in the summer -- blockbuster DVDs (and Blu Ray) hits the stores in the fall. Summer months typically equal shitty sales for video games and movies -- anything that involves staying inside, mostly.