Diversity as a quality taken by itself is definitely useful. However, in this case it diversity is bringing up cross-compatibility issues. If software works on one fork of diversity, but fails to work on another, each fork has been locked into that road, resulting in less diversity everytime a fork is made.
Windows definitely has limitations that Linux OSes can offer(I definitely prefer this alternative to the Windows Startmenu and startbar/systray), but in terms of software, Windows has more compatibility with more programs. When a program that's important to the user doesn't work on one platform that's a valid reason to stop using that platform, even if it's not the platform fault that the program isn't compatible.
My EEE PC is a small offshoot of Xandros 4, an offshoot of Debian. I want to run Ventrilo which has been made to work for Ubuntu with Wine and a hacked together script, works spotty on mine, but hopefully that script/might/ fix it. Thank goodness somebody in a forum went and made that script for people like me. I want to add the plugin "Extended Preferences" in Pidgin. I just drag+dropped the.dll into the plugins folder for Pidgin on my Windows desktop and laptop. But as for my linux laptop, I can't do it since it's made to work on Ubuntu, or Redhat, and some other OSes, I don't know the differences between them, but I do know that I don't have them, and they don't work with the EEE PC without creating issues with built-in hardware functions
So I try to compile it using./configure, finds that I don't have a compatible C compiler? I don't know what compiler I've got, what it wants, where to find it, how to find the answers I want. Every one of these additional steps and requirements for installation is more complication and another lock-out point. I'll have to live without this plugin that worked on my Windows machine.
I tried installing Mumble instead of Ventrilo, a program made multi-platform off the bat via QT dev tools. Instructions are there for windows and 4 other major linux distros...but not mine. Installed it on my Windows machines with the installer program. Great program, much better than Ventrilo. As for instructions for other open-source OSes: I need to compile it with QTmake a command that I need to implement by installing QT dev tools via synaptic. After doing so, QTmake still doesn't work. Troubleshooting takes me from mumble, to synaptic, to QT, to EEE PC forums, but the answers elude me, if they're even out there.
I honestly don't know a lot about Linux, but I do know that the commercial OSes work for me, while Linux is far more complicated and do not work. I would love to use a free solution, but when things don't work, I'm going to continue to pay for those commercial OSes and so will others at my level of technical expertise and all those below. Compatibility and simplicity is a very real problem for Linux adoption and would have to be addressed for Linux to surpass Windows and OSX.
It's not that these problems don't exist for commercial OSes, it's that they're not nearly as common, involved, or significant.
But are they actually suggesting that they reduce an artist's ownership to just 5 years?
I'm no fan of the RIAA, but there are plenty of other ways to nail them to the wall with less collateral damage. It's the method of enforcing copyright that's been so despicable, not the duration of the copyright(for music that is).
An Asus EEE PC (7-inch screen laptop) will be my first linux computer. I believe it uses linux because windows would be too costly and too inefficient to run well on these specs.
It's fairly popular, popular enough that it was heavily pre-ordered and is selling out of stock(mine was backordered for a month or so). High on the top-viewed items lists on Amazon.
Reason I'm bringing it up is that it runs Linux for PC use(as opposed to small gadgets)and is already setup for ease of use by those who have not had any encounters with Linux(i.e me). I don't know what distro of Linux it uses, or if it's a proprietary configuration, like I said, I don't know anything about Linux. But the point is that it's a commerical Linux product for the mass-market in a desktop form. If it works well enough, I might look into formatting the laptop to Linux. If that works well enough, I might dual-boot on the main computer.
It's certainly not a revolution, but it's commercial Linux sold as a mainstay feature, unlike Dell Linux-installed PCs which are really just an alternative made available for those who already knew about and wanted Linux. Seems like a potential missing-link step between Linux on gadgets and Linux for the mainstream. The tiny thing is small enough to stow in glove compartments and handbags, cheap enough for gift-giving, taking along for wi-fi use without having to drag a laptop bag around with you.
He recorded his song and posted it on the web, got popular with people, published independently, and was only picked up by a major label after he'd already established himself on his own.
I concur, I hate the song too, but it's not a viable example of how the music industry pops out bad music, it's an example people liking music that I hate.
Actually, if you map it to an x/y grid of acceleration speeds like analog sticks on the other 2 consoles(Obviously a deadzone in the center will be necessary), you now have a means for Wii-FPS games to seperate the perspective shifting from the aiming. It's something they lack and it severely hampers the control the player has.
A major advantage the Wii has over the other consoles is the discrete aiming of the wii-mote that matches with the discrete aiming of the mouse. Analog sticks work on acceleration which are slower to get up to speed and more difficult to stop on time. The Wiimote's critical flaw is the inability to re-center. To recenter a mouse, put it in the middle of the mousepad. To recenter analog sticks, just release pressure. To recenter a Wiimote, fumble around until you get the crosshair back in the middle of the screen, and also, you'll need to recenter after a turn to shoot which is even worse.
With analog for movement and perspective, the wii-mote finecontrol aiming would be great for FPS play on a console, and a great deal of fun.
Interesting, but I don't like the idea of constant surveillance on every government employee.
Aside from the cost and ease of circumvention(just type your illicit dealings on a blackberry under the table or on the toilet), it's just not something I would want imposed on myself, someone I know, or anyone who hasn't alread proven themselves a criminal.
But just for the sake of "what-if?" musings:
Perhaps an opt-in program? The longer you leave your camera on, you're graded with a higher "trust" percentage. Then use that trust rating provide incentives to the employee like possibility of promotion(since the more important your decisions are, the more trust-worthy you'll need to be) ass-covering when investigations roll in, that sort of thing. Then they can choose how much privacy they want vs how much trust they want. Some may even like the ability to prove they were working their asses off while co-workers slacked off and ruined the project. Same thing with elected officials.
With an article assigned to a person for revenue-sharing, what about people throwing in their small corrections and elaborations? They're locked out of these small changes that are important to the end-result.
Wikipedia works around a whole mess of people throwing information at it with the expectation that correct information will sift up to the top over time as evidence appears to back up the information against unconfirmed noise. And when contested versions of information in close competition, the uninformed ought to have a reasonable opportunity to examine both and decide for themselves rather than a single viewpoint presenting a single side. The multiple sources of contributions are what distinguish wikipedia from all other encyclopedias. Knol is not really lining up against wikipedia's model, but with the classic encyclopedia model, but just situated online and ad-driven rather than printed and purchase-driven.
If they wanted to compete with wikipedia it seems like they'd get better results by just doing the same thing with a cleaner interface and google's hosting resources. The ad-word hits over time would still be plenty assuming they manage to build up a large enough "network effect"(wiki it;) ).
I don't know, I don't like the idea of not offering redemption. A second chance perhaps. I believe that it can happen in some cases. Especially crimes of passion or mitigating circumstances.
But a repeat offender...don't know why we bother to keep someone who's already been convicted, penalized, and then chose to do it again. Especially for deliberate crimes where they are close at hand to mull over their actions in detail.
"You non-gun nuts don't care about any of the amendments and don't try to uphold anything".
I can say that because it's easy to anonymously poke out at a faceless group and assign any attribute you like to them, whether or not it's true. Because it's not directed at a specific person you don't get an outright denial, just because you could say you were talking about the/other/ faceless member, no need to even prove that you're referring to a majority or even a significant portion of that group to back up your claims.
It's making bold statements at everybody and nobody at the same time. "Americans support the War in Iraq". See how easy it is? So what if it's false for the majority of Americans? I can keep going: "Soldiers rape and kill". "Frat people are self-absorbed narcissists with no compassion for non-members". "Slashdotters think overlord jokes are funny, original, and not at all repetitive." "The French are cowards"
It's much easier than realizing that even though you may be able to group people by a characteristic, it's only valid for that one characteristic and actual people are far more complex and heterogenous than simple blanket statements. Stereotyping by groups is nothing new, it's been done by skin, by sex, by religion, by country, pretty much anyway you like. It's not useful unless it's actually true, and that truth would need to be proven/beforehand/ for such blanket statements to have any value.
Heh, among my study group friends we had a saying, "Remember the Indians". Racist overtones aside, we were alluding to the immigrant students in our classes who seemed to always be asking incredibly stupid questions in great volume.
Everybody else just kept rolling their eyes since they already knew(or at least thought they knew) the answers to what was being asked. Then when test time comes around, the grades were what mattered, and while some of those people rolling their eyes actually did know the answers already, the majority didn't know them as well as they thought, or at least not as well as the students who were constantly hounding the teacher with questions and studying for hours to make up for any lacking areas of comprehension.
So we'd repeat that phrase to remind ourselves to never forget that lesson in hubris, and if we ever doubted our potential to get a good grade, we always had the opportunity to ameliorate our shortcoming with time and effort in the same way that those students kicked our asses.
My sister had accomplished the second. She was 10 years my senior, I was in 4th or 5th. I still remember that moment seeing my sister(sitting on the sofa and reading the third book from the Belgariad series from David Eddings. My attention was captured when she laughed and I looked up to find a huge grin running across her face. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued and I just had to know what was so entertaining, but she said there was no way I could understand without reading the book. Sure enough, I ended up reading my way through her shelves, starting with that series. This probably contributed to my growing up into a nerd given her particular areas of interest.
Thanks to their influences there was a stark distinction between my reading comprehension and vocabulary compared to my K-12 peers who had never discovered the joys of extracurricular reading. They instead found reading to be an annoying and stressful exercise since every association they had with reading stemmed from either a boring textbook or assigned reading forced upon them. Furthermore, both forms of reading involved deadlines, followed by tests. They couldn't understand why I found reading to be enjoyable, but given their only encounters with reading, I could hardly blame them.
I do work in shipping. Bunker (Ship fuel) is a major component of costs, in fact the industry is going through some shake-up from the fluctuating fuel costs. Shippers are now trying to negotiate quarterly reviews of fuel prices while customers want fixed 1-year prices so that all the risk stays on the shipper.
10% change in bunker costs is already cause for renegotiation of the pricing. So shaving off 25% of fuel costs would be a pretty dramatic impact.
Doesn't need a 1-to-1 match to reality to fulfill this silly need to see other people at work. MMO tech today could probably get it done. Load up the office map, have workers log in with their avatars (face capture and paste it onto the avatar), walk to their cubicles and sit down and work. Webcam streams on request by clicking on a worker in your office. Work in online meeting interfaces. Remote desktop for managers peering over your shoulder. It's still just as silly as having a holodeck office, but at least this one is executable.
I lift weights 3 times a week for an hour and a half, and try to squeeze in a half-hour of cardio after lifting. It's not easy to break out huge amounts of time to dedicate exclusively to exercise and nothing else. There's a great deal of things I'd rather be doing with my time outside of work but I don't have the option of not going to the gym, and I'm still barely getting enough to keep fat at a "normal" level.
Light cardio can be done for a long long time and burns off large amounts of calories with relatively little duress. There is definitely a place for in the lives of certain people out there. Certainly not everyone, perhaps even just a niche, but it's there. I would love to be able to get light exercise for long periods of time rather than pounding it all into a short timespan and still running out of time.
That's exactly the problem that came to me as soon as I heard about this "Android".
Open-source but no provisions that improvements on the open-source software be reintroduced to the open-source community.
It can only get loaded up on existing phones which are already running proprietary software from the existing companies. So this allows them to take Android, make proprietary software, and pretty much do...exactly what they're doing now.
I'm not seeing where the incentives are for anyone to use this. And if they can't get these companies to allow users to put this on their phones, there's nowhere to actually use it. Few competitors, and high barriers to entry make me pessimistic that anyone would jump on this and cause everyone involved to have to start competing.
Indeed, my Dell laptop has a button specifically for booting into a mini-OS to directly access files in this manner. Unfortunately, there isn't enough difference between this limited boot and a regular boot to justify its use.
Perhaps their proposal can do a better job, but it doesn't appear to be new ground.
Thing is, web-surfing and e-mail are pretty basic offerings for internet service, they're so minimal that they're fundamental to making any sort of internet service offering at all(obligatory car analogy: A car doesn't advertise on having steering, driving, and braking, but how that car goes beyond the bare minimum on these and other features). The high-bandwidth services are their main basis of competition with other ISPs.
If they throttle everything down just so that you can only use the basic offerings, they shouldn't offer them or include a premium for a service they plan to deny when invoked. If it really is a burden that destroys their business model, they should have a transparent rate structure where people who want more can pay more, and compare rates with other businesses.
Seems to me that it's more like having traffic lights on the major highway, rather than on the local roads leading onto it.
There shouldn't be a problem if unlimited internet ceases to be a viable model for ISPs.
Consumers don't get truly unlimited rates anywhere, just hidden limits on a flat rate. If they want more, they upgrade to a higher flat rate with another hidden limit. Verizon finally got sued for advertising "unlimited" rates recently as reported on Slashdot.
If commercial use of bittorrent causes ISPs to revamp their pricing structure into transparent pay-for-what-you-use structures then that should be a good thing. The underlying problem is that these hidden margins are protected through obfuscation, and the overriding problem is the natural monopoly of internet providers resulting in minimal competitive incentive. In the transition to transparent rates they may screw people by increasing their margins and blaming the shift to discrete rates, but that would really be due to the natural monopoly problem which was already there anyway. They'd just be seizing it as an opportunity to indulge, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the dissolution of the "unlimited" rate model.
So there shouldn't be a problem if we get transparent rates. Unfortunately, we don't live in "should-land":(
It's advertising for games and gaming hardware. They're getting sponsored, that's how they're getting paid. Evidently somebody thinks that paying them is better than not paying them.
Entertainment and advertising have value to someone, not necessarily you or I, but much of the money moving through these sectors is coming from someone who does.
Also, not everyone can do something mentally or spiritually rewarding. Not everyone can be special. Shit, if anyone could make a living doing what they really wanted to do, our economy would consist of just one massive porn industry. But there's only so much room to be filled. Somebody has to lose, not all those kids will grow up to be a doctor, some of them will have to push the brooms, pump the gas, and flip the burgers for the doctor. They can all try to be a doctor, but there isn't room for all of them.
Usefulness and Art are subjective measures from disputable value systems. A poor artist may have a real fulfilling job, but he could end up fucking his family over by wasting his lucrative job as a stock broker/movie star/CPA. Heck, sometimes a job is just a job, and is just the stepping stone to a happy home life filled with whatever that person wants to fill it with. It'd be neat if everyone could have a job they loved, just like it'd be neat if everyone was rich and well-fed, but unfortunately that's not the case.
Actually there is a new physics engine debuting in Force Unleashed (Emotion engine perhaps?) that will try to animate on the fly to realistically simulate a response to falling. Stormtroopers would try to cling to a beam when force-pushed to avoid tumbling to their doom, another sent that way would try to cling to the ankle of the stormtrooper on the beam, that sort of thing. That engine should be able to prescribe behavior such as protecting themselves from a fall instead of limp ragdoll implemented by Havok and PhysX(the most popular middleware for physics right now).
The trickier part is getting up, since a rough landing can leave limbs in a wide array of orientations and a believable process in righting oneself is non-trivial. Games thus far have left this unsolved by just magic-gliding the ragdoll landing into a pre-described falling position and then standing up from there in a prefabricated animation. People don't spin on the floor just to get their legs and arms underneath them to stand, there are intermediate steps(Examples: Jedi Outcast/Academy). Other games handle it by skipping a large animation frame and blinking from splayed out to a pre-made standing up animation, it's better than seeing them magically spin into position. There hasn't been a demonstration of whether or not this new physics/animation engine can handle standing up realistically, but I've yet to see a game implement a superior solution to those listed above.
Obviously those other games were able to implement falling and standing in these fashions, whereas other games chose not to. It's just one factor among the many in whether portal guns are worth including in the game's design.
I would hope that as you age, you will learn some perspective. However, it appears that thus far, it has yet to happen. I could leave it at that and be labeled a troll, but I'll go on to clarify.
Generalizations and oversimplifications are convenient and are handy for supporting a position. However, there is a point of diminishing returns in broad summation where enough detail is lost so that the summary fails as a useful description of the whole. There are always people in any generation who succeed or fail based on a number of factors. People are diverse and even amongst a handful of people selected from even a non-random batch are likely to have significant differences.
Racism, sexism, even nationalism, and in this case age-ism, they handily discard the individual traits that a person is valued by. It's not wrong to resent a black person for being a criminal when it's proven, but it's unfair to judge someone by a stereotype that does not apply. For each of the examples above, it won't be hard to find someone who defies that standard, because humanity is complex, and to classify them properly would require a similarly complex classification to be useful.
If you play through the developer commentary in Portal, they briefly comment on the troubles they may face in bringing the portal gun to HL:EP3. Mostly revolving around how enemies behave with regards to the portal, and how to keep an immersive gameplay experience in spite of the player portaling his way through/past what the developers are trying to have you take part in(Player attention grabbing methods are a big part of the design and is noted throughout developer commentaries in EP1, EP2, and Portal).
Examples of AI issues, how does an AI stay on its feet when passing through a portal like Chell(The protagonist of Portal, who is unlikely to ever see herself do the 360-twist flip as she exits an upside down portal on a wall. Animation issue. Strider leg passing through portal and getting stuck, another issue. Special physics case handling was needed for objects in Portal, this will carryover to some in HL2. AI pathing issues, line of sight issues.
The amount of restriction and added work from adding the Portal gun makes it a tough decision. I expect that if they do add it, they will likely add it in a similar fashion as the dark gravity gun at the end of HL2, where you only hold onto this uber-gamebreaking tool for a short period of time in an area that presumes it's use(they stop worrying about player ammo supply once they give it to you).
There are many places where games cross over into other genres of art and can make something of themselves under that category. Via sound, art, cinematics, story, they can become art just like music, paintings, movies, books...but how about art as a game?
Portals defy reality and show us in real-time an impossible world with impossible gameplay. A big part of the wonder in Portal was that your brain now was now wrestling with a wholly unfamiliar phenomenon and this gameplay, most importantly, is interactive. It's a game.
So this distinction of the portals is where I would point to when using Portal as an example of games as art. Because without the idiosyncratic traits of games being art, then it's just looking at already recognized facets of art in the game and then pointing them out as art, which is only showing that games contain that kind of art, not that gaming itself can be a form of art.
Slashdot Mirror
Diversity as a quality taken by itself is definitely useful. However, in this case it diversity is bringing up cross-compatibility issues. If software works on one fork of diversity, but fails to work on another, each fork has been locked into that road, resulting in less diversity everytime a fork is made.
/might/ fix it. Thank goodness somebody in a forum went and made that script for people like me. I want to add the plugin "Extended Preferences" in Pidgin. I just drag+dropped the .dll into the plugins folder for Pidgin on my Windows desktop and laptop. But as for my linux laptop, I can't do it since it's made to work on Ubuntu, or Redhat, and some other OSes, I don't know the differences between them, but I do know that I don't have them, and they don't work with the EEE PC without creating issues with built-in hardware functions
./configure, finds that I don't have a compatible C compiler? I don't know what compiler I've got, what it wants, where to find it, how to find the answers I want. Every one of these additional steps and requirements for installation is more complication and another lock-out point. I'll have to live without this plugin that worked on my Windows machine.
Windows definitely has limitations that Linux OSes can offer(I definitely prefer this alternative to the Windows Startmenu and startbar/systray), but in terms of software, Windows has more compatibility with more programs. When a program that's important to the user doesn't work on one platform that's a valid reason to stop using that platform, even if it's not the platform fault that the program isn't compatible.
My EEE PC is a small offshoot of Xandros 4, an offshoot of Debian. I want to run Ventrilo which has been made to work for Ubuntu with Wine and a hacked together script, works spotty on mine, but hopefully that script
So I try to compile it using
I tried installing Mumble instead of Ventrilo, a program made multi-platform off the bat via QT dev tools. Instructions are there for windows and 4 other major linux distros...but not mine. Installed it on my Windows machines with the installer program. Great program, much better than Ventrilo. As for instructions for other open-source OSes: I need to compile it with QTmake a command that I need to implement by installing QT dev tools via synaptic. After doing so, QTmake still doesn't work. Troubleshooting takes me from mumble, to synaptic, to QT, to EEE PC forums, but the answers elude me, if they're even out there.
I honestly don't know a lot about Linux, but I do know that the commercial OSes work for me, while Linux is far more complicated and do not work. I would love to use a free solution, but when things don't work, I'm going to continue to pay for those commercial OSes and so will others at my level of technical expertise and all those below. Compatibility and simplicity is a very real problem for Linux adoption and would have to be addressed for Linux to surpass Windows and OSX.
It's not that these problems don't exist for commercial OSes, it's that they're not nearly as common, involved, or significant.
But are they actually suggesting that they reduce an artist's ownership to just 5 years?
I'm no fan of the RIAA, but there are plenty of other ways to nail them to the wall with less collateral damage. It's the method of enforcing copyright that's been so despicable, not the duration of the copyright(for music that is).
An Asus EEE PC (7-inch screen laptop) will be my first linux computer. I believe it uses linux because windows would be too costly and too inefficient to run well on these specs.
It's fairly popular, popular enough that it was heavily pre-ordered and is selling out of stock(mine was backordered for a month or so). High on the top-viewed items lists on Amazon.
Reason I'm bringing it up is that it runs Linux for PC use(as opposed to small gadgets)and is already setup for ease of use by those who have not had any encounters with Linux(i.e me). I don't know what distro of Linux it uses, or if it's a proprietary configuration, like I said, I don't know anything about Linux. But the point is that it's a commerical Linux product for the mass-market in a desktop form. If it works well enough, I might look into formatting the laptop to Linux. If that works well enough, I might dual-boot on the main computer.
It's certainly not a revolution, but it's commercial Linux sold as a mainstay feature, unlike Dell Linux-installed PCs which are really just an alternative made available for those who already knew about and wanted Linux. Seems like a potential missing-link step between Linux on gadgets and Linux for the mainstream. The tiny thing is small enough to stow in glove compartments and handbags, cheap enough for gift-giving, taking along for wi-fi use without having to drag a laptop bag around with you.
Heh, actually "Soulja Boy" is exactly the product that most of the people here on slashdot are advocating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soulja_Boy
He recorded his song and posted it on the web, got popular with people, published independently, and was only picked up by a major label after he'd already established himself on his own.
I concur, I hate the song too, but it's not a viable example of how the music industry pops out bad music, it's an example people liking music that I hate.
Actually, if you map it to an x/y grid of acceleration speeds like analog sticks on the other 2 consoles(Obviously a deadzone in the center will be necessary), you now have a means for Wii-FPS games to seperate the perspective shifting from the aiming. It's something they lack and it severely hampers the control the player has.
A major advantage the Wii has over the other consoles is the discrete aiming of the wii-mote that matches with the discrete aiming of the mouse. Analog sticks work on acceleration which are slower to get up to speed and more difficult to stop on time. The Wiimote's critical flaw is the inability to re-center. To recenter a mouse, put it in the middle of the mousepad. To recenter analog sticks, just release pressure. To recenter a Wiimote, fumble around until you get the crosshair back in the middle of the screen, and also, you'll need to recenter after a turn to shoot which is even worse.
With analog for movement and perspective, the wii-mote finecontrol aiming would be great for FPS play on a console, and a great deal of fun.
Interesting, but I don't like the idea of constant surveillance on every government employee.
Aside from the cost and ease of circumvention(just type your illicit dealings on a blackberry under the table or on the toilet), it's just not something I would want imposed on myself, someone I know, or anyone who hasn't alread proven themselves a criminal.
But just for the sake of "what-if?" musings:
Perhaps an opt-in program? The longer you leave your camera on, you're graded with a higher "trust" percentage. Then use that trust rating provide incentives to the employee like possibility of promotion(since the more important your decisions are, the more trust-worthy you'll need to be) ass-covering when investigations roll in, that sort of thing. Then they can choose how much privacy they want vs how much trust they want. Some may even like the ability to prove they were working their asses off while co-workers slacked off and ruined the project. Same thing with elected officials.
Super-small laptop, with a 7-inch screen.
The thing is hardly bigger than a DS. It can fit in women's handbags. Glove compartments.
And yes it runs linux, it comes runs linux out of the box.
Mine will double as a casual laptop and as a remote for my TV which will be using my computer as a source(via logmein).
I can see both women and men loving this thing. $400 bucks or so.
It doesn't sound very much like Wikipedia.
With an article assigned to a person for revenue-sharing, what about people throwing in their small corrections and elaborations? They're locked out of these small changes that are important to the end-result.
Wikipedia works around a whole mess of people throwing information at it with the expectation that correct information will sift up to the top over time as evidence appears to back up the information against unconfirmed noise. And when contested versions of information in close competition, the uninformed ought to have a reasonable opportunity to examine both and decide for themselves rather than a single viewpoint presenting a single side. The multiple sources of contributions are what distinguish wikipedia from all other encyclopedias. Knol is not really lining up against wikipedia's model, but with the classic encyclopedia model, but just situated online and ad-driven rather than printed and purchase-driven.
If they wanted to compete with wikipedia it seems like they'd get better results by just doing the same thing with a cleaner interface and google's hosting resources. The ad-word hits over time would still be plenty assuming they manage to build up a large enough "network effect"(wiki it;) ).
I don't know, I don't like the idea of not offering redemption. A second chance perhaps. I believe that it can happen in some cases. Especially crimes of passion or mitigating circumstances.
But a repeat offender...don't know why we bother to keep someone who's already been convicted, penalized, and then chose to do it again. Especially for deliberate crimes where they are close at hand to mull over their actions in detail.
"You non-gun nuts don't care about any of the amendments and don't try to uphold anything".
/other/ faceless member, no need to even prove that you're referring to a majority or even a significant portion of that group to back up your claims.
/beforehand/ for such blanket statements to have any value.
I can say that because it's easy to anonymously poke out at a faceless group and assign any attribute you like to them, whether or not it's true. Because it's not directed at a specific person you don't get an outright denial, just because you could say you were talking about the
It's making bold statements at everybody and nobody at the same time. "Americans support the War in Iraq". See how easy it is? So what if it's false for the majority of Americans? I can keep going: "Soldiers rape and kill". "Frat people are self-absorbed narcissists with no compassion for non-members". "Slashdotters think overlord jokes are funny, original, and not at all repetitive." "The French are cowards"
It's much easier than realizing that even though you may be able to group people by a characteristic, it's only valid for that one characteristic and actual people are far more complex and heterogenous than simple blanket statements. Stereotyping by groups is nothing new, it's been done by skin, by sex, by religion, by country, pretty much anyway you like. It's not useful unless it's actually true, and that truth would need to be proven
"Anonymous coward"...how fitting.
Heh, among my study group friends we had a saying, "Remember the Indians". Racist overtones aside, we were alluding to the immigrant students in our classes who seemed to always be asking incredibly stupid questions in great volume.
Everybody else just kept rolling their eyes since they already knew(or at least thought they knew) the answers to what was being asked. Then when test time comes around, the grades were what mattered, and while some of those people rolling their eyes actually did know the answers already, the majority didn't know them as well as they thought, or at least not as well as the students who were constantly hounding the teacher with questions and studying for hours to make up for any lacking areas of comprehension.
So we'd repeat that phrase to remind ourselves to never forget that lesson in hubris, and if we ever doubted our potential to get a good grade, we always had the opportunity to ameliorate our shortcoming with time and effort in the same way that those students kicked our asses.
My parents did the first for me.
My sister had accomplished the second. She was 10 years my senior, I was in 4th or 5th. I still remember that moment seeing my sister(sitting on the sofa and reading the third book from the Belgariad series from David Eddings. My attention was captured when she laughed and I looked up to find a huge grin running across her face. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued and I just had to know what was so entertaining, but she said there was no way I could understand without reading the book. Sure enough, I ended up reading my way through her shelves, starting with that series. This probably contributed to my growing up into a nerd given her particular areas of interest.
Thanks to their influences there was a stark distinction between my reading comprehension and vocabulary compared to my K-12 peers who had never discovered the joys of extracurricular reading. They instead found reading to be an annoying and stressful exercise since every association they had with reading stemmed from either a boring textbook or assigned reading forced upon them. Furthermore, both forms of reading involved deadlines, followed by tests. They couldn't understand why I found reading to be enjoyable, but given their only encounters with reading, I could hardly blame them.
I do work in shipping. Bunker (Ship fuel) is a major component of costs, in fact the industry is going through some shake-up from the fluctuating fuel costs. Shippers are now trying to negotiate quarterly reviews of fuel prices while customers want fixed 1-year prices so that all the risk stays on the shipper.
10% change in bunker costs is already cause for renegotiation of the pricing. So shaving off 25% of fuel costs would be a pretty dramatic impact.
What is the point? Visibility?
Doesn't need a 1-to-1 match to reality to fulfill this silly need to see other people at work. MMO tech today could probably get it done. Load up the office map, have workers log in with their avatars (face capture and paste it onto the avatar), walk to their cubicles and sit down and work. Webcam streams on request by clicking on a worker in your office. Work in online meeting interfaces. Remote desktop for managers peering over your shoulder. It's still just as silly as having a holodeck office, but at least this one is executable.
I lift weights 3 times a week for an hour and a half, and try to squeeze in a half-hour of cardio after lifting. It's not easy to break out huge amounts of time to dedicate exclusively to exercise and nothing else. There's a great deal of things I'd rather be doing with my time outside of work but I don't have the option of not going to the gym, and I'm still barely getting enough to keep fat at a "normal" level.
Light cardio can be done for a long long time and burns off large amounts of calories with relatively little duress. There is definitely a place for in the lives of certain people out there. Certainly not everyone, perhaps even just a niche, but it's there. I would love to be able to get light exercise for long periods of time rather than pounding it all into a short timespan and still running out of time.
That's exactly the problem that came to me as soon as I heard about this "Android".
Open-source but no provisions that improvements on the open-source software be reintroduced to the open-source community.
It can only get loaded up on existing phones which are already running proprietary software from the existing companies. So this allows them to take Android, make proprietary software, and pretty much do...exactly what they're doing now.
I'm not seeing where the incentives are for anyone to use this. And if they can't get these companies to allow users to put this on their phones, there's nowhere to actually use it. Few competitors, and high barriers to entry make me pessimistic that anyone would jump on this and cause everyone involved to have to start competing.
Indeed, my Dell laptop has a button specifically for booting into a mini-OS to directly access files in this manner. Unfortunately, there isn't enough difference between this limited boot and a regular boot to justify its use.
Perhaps their proposal can do a better job, but it doesn't appear to be new ground.
Thing is, web-surfing and e-mail are pretty basic offerings for internet service, they're so minimal that they're fundamental to making any sort of internet service offering at all(obligatory car analogy: A car doesn't advertise on having steering, driving, and braking, but how that car goes beyond the bare minimum on these and other features). The high-bandwidth services are their main basis of competition with other ISPs.
If they throttle everything down just so that you can only use the basic offerings, they shouldn't offer them or include a premium for a service they plan to deny when invoked. If it really is a burden that destroys their business model, they should have a transparent rate structure where people who want more can pay more, and compare rates with other businesses.
Seems to me that it's more like having traffic lights on the major highway, rather than on the local roads leading onto it.
There shouldn't be a problem if unlimited internet ceases to be a viable model for ISPs.
Consumers don't get truly unlimited rates anywhere, just hidden limits on a flat rate. If they want more, they upgrade to a higher flat rate with another hidden limit. Verizon finally got sued for advertising "unlimited" rates recently as reported on Slashdot.
If commercial use of bittorrent causes ISPs to revamp their pricing structure into transparent pay-for-what-you-use structures then that should be a good thing. The underlying problem is that these hidden margins are protected through obfuscation, and the overriding problem is the natural monopoly of internet providers resulting in minimal competitive incentive. In the transition to transparent rates they may screw people by increasing their margins and blaming the shift to discrete rates, but that would really be due to the natural monopoly problem which was already there anyway. They'd just be seizing it as an opportunity to indulge, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the dissolution of the "unlimited" rate model.
So there shouldn't be a problem if we get transparent rates. Unfortunately, we don't live in "should-land":(
It's advertising for games and gaming hardware. They're getting sponsored, that's how they're getting paid. Evidently somebody thinks that paying them is better than not paying them.
Entertainment and advertising have value to someone, not necessarily you or I, but much of the money moving through these sectors is coming from someone who does.
Also, not everyone can do something mentally or spiritually rewarding. Not everyone can be special. Shit, if anyone could make a living doing what they really wanted to do, our economy would consist of just one massive porn industry. But there's only so much room to be filled. Somebody has to lose, not all those kids will grow up to be a doctor, some of them will have to push the brooms, pump the gas, and flip the burgers for the doctor. They can all try to be a doctor, but there isn't room for all of them.
Usefulness and Art are subjective measures from disputable value systems. A poor artist may have a real fulfilling job, but he could end up fucking his family over by wasting his lucrative job as a stock broker/movie star/CPA. Heck, sometimes a job is just a job, and is just the stepping stone to a happy home life filled with whatever that person wants to fill it with. It'd be neat if everyone could have a job they loved, just like it'd be neat if everyone was rich and well-fed, but unfortunately that's not the case.
12.3106061 miles to the tank.
i.e 65,000ft.
Actually there is a new physics engine debuting in Force Unleashed (Emotion engine perhaps?) that will try to animate on the fly to realistically simulate a response to falling. Stormtroopers would try to cling to a beam when force-pushed to avoid tumbling to their doom, another sent that way would try to cling to the ankle of the stormtrooper on the beam, that sort of thing. That engine should be able to prescribe behavior such as protecting themselves from a fall instead of limp ragdoll implemented by Havok and PhysX(the most popular middleware for physics right now).
The trickier part is getting up, since a rough landing can leave limbs in a wide array of orientations and a believable process in righting oneself is non-trivial. Games thus far have left this unsolved by just magic-gliding the ragdoll landing into a pre-described falling position and then standing up from there in a prefabricated animation. People don't spin on the floor just to get their legs and arms underneath them to stand, there are intermediate steps(Examples: Jedi Outcast/Academy). Other games handle it by skipping a large animation frame and blinking from splayed out to a pre-made standing up animation, it's better than seeing them magically spin into position. There hasn't been a demonstration of whether or not this new physics/animation engine can handle standing up realistically, but I've yet to see a game implement a superior solution to those listed above.
Obviously those other games were able to implement falling and standing in these fashions, whereas other games chose not to. It's just one factor among the many in whether portal guns are worth including in the game's design.
I would hope that as you age, you will learn some perspective. However, it appears that thus far, it has yet to happen. I could leave it at that and be labeled a troll, but I'll go on to clarify.
Generalizations and oversimplifications are convenient and are handy for supporting a position. However, there is a point of diminishing returns in broad summation where enough detail is lost so that the summary fails as a useful description of the whole. There are always people in any generation who succeed or fail based on a number of factors. People are diverse and even amongst a handful of people selected from even a non-random batch are likely to have significant differences.
Racism, sexism, even nationalism, and in this case age-ism, they handily discard the individual traits that a person is valued by. It's not wrong to resent a black person for being a criminal when it's proven, but it's unfair to judge someone by a stereotype that does not apply. For each of the examples above, it won't be hard to find someone who defies that standard, because humanity is complex, and to classify them properly would require a similarly complex classification to be useful.
If you play through the developer commentary in Portal, they briefly comment on the troubles they may face in bringing the portal gun to HL:EP3. Mostly revolving around how enemies behave with regards to the portal, and how to keep an immersive gameplay experience in spite of the player portaling his way through/past what the developers are trying to have you take part in(Player attention grabbing methods are a big part of the design and is noted throughout developer commentaries in EP1, EP2, and Portal).
Examples of AI issues, how does an AI stay on its feet when passing through a portal like Chell(The protagonist of Portal, who is unlikely to ever see herself do the 360-twist flip as she exits an upside down portal on a wall. Animation issue. Strider leg passing through portal and getting stuck, another issue. Special physics case handling was needed for objects in Portal, this will carryover to some in HL2. AI pathing issues, line of sight issues.
The amount of restriction and added work from adding the Portal gun makes it a tough decision. I expect that if they do add it, they will likely add it in a similar fashion as the dark gravity gun at the end of HL2, where you only hold onto this uber-gamebreaking tool for a short period of time in an area that presumes it's use(they stop worrying about player ammo supply once they give it to you).
I would have also pointed to portals.
There are many places where games cross over into other genres of art and can make something of themselves under that category. Via sound, art, cinematics, story, they can become art just like music, paintings, movies, books...but how about art as a game?
Portals defy reality and show us in real-time an impossible world with impossible gameplay. A big part of the wonder in Portal was that your brain now was now wrestling with a wholly unfamiliar phenomenon and this gameplay, most importantly, is interactive. It's a game.
So this distinction of the portals is where I would point to when using Portal as an example of games as art. Because without the idiosyncratic traits of games being art, then it's just looking at already recognized facets of art in the game and then pointing them out as art, which is only showing that games contain that kind of art, not that gaming itself can be a form of art.