Think about it. You've got a pilot. It wasn't picked up for whatever reason. Maybe the show was bad, maybe it didn't fit what the network wanted. You're left with one episode of a show for which about the only use left is taking a minute and a half out and using it in a Best TV Shows That Never Were special. So as there isn't any money left in it, why not give away the pilot? Worst case scenario is there's just more crap on the Internet. On the other hand, if it's something the network didn't really understand, you have the potential to generate a fanbase for the show and get it picked up or at the very least it's something the people involved with can point to as something they've done.
I suppose newer homes could be built with appropriate speaker cable run through the walls right along with video, network, and whatever else (wouldn't work with my 100+ y.o. home), but I think the limiting factor keeping things like this out of the typical household is room geometry. Looking at my living room, it would be difficult to have speakers and furniture in the right places for something like this to work and still have a usable space. Maybe if you can spill things out into the larger space afforded by a great room it might work, but the typical home theater just doesn't have the space to do it right.
That list is incomplete. I'm thinking more along the line of including things such as killed by an x while hallucinating. Choking is presented as one item, but there are many different things available to choke on. I guess what I'd want is a list or number of unique cause of death messages, which would of course be many many times larger.
Lately they've been pretty reliable here, but about a year ago there were problems with "area outages" about once a week at work. Whenever somebody complained that the Internet was broken, I took a look at things, figured out that the problem wasn't on my end and said we just had to wait until SBC fixed things on their end. One day, somebody decided to call support. What could be the harm? Well, I warned him not to, but he wouldn't listen. He called and got someone calling himself Richard with a thick Indian accent who told my coworker to do a variety of things, some that I had already done and others that made absolutely no sense. About a half hour into this, he asked Richard if the problem could be on the SBC side of things. He said all his monitors showed green, whatever that means. After another two hours of trying things as stupid as pinging yahoo when there isn't an Internet connection (which of course didn't work, but he must've done it dozens of times), the call was escalated to the next tier of support. This person could be understood, she gave some basic instructions that had already been tried, but after a couple minutes said she had run some tests and thinks it's an SBC problem. The call was sent to maintenance which said immediately that it's an area outage and gave an estimate as to when the problem would be fixed and a number we could call to get back to maintenance. A couple hours later, the problem was indeed fixed, but Richard's instructions resulted in the network settings on the computer being completely screwed up (about 45 minutes wasted figuring out what had been changed and putting things right) and on top of that, Richard had changed the account password and not told us what the new one is so I had to call maintenance back and get the password reset.
More recently, they've started to block access to port 25 on servers not on a small whitelist that they won't add the mail server I use to. (I don't have access to it, so I can't just use another port. I understand the reasoning behind blocking port 25, but it's still evil.)
Reps were continually calling trying to upsell, sometimes to what I already had (yes, I already have that service. Shouldn't you know what I'm already buying from you before you call me?).
Two things are keeping the score above minimum. The price continues to go down (or rather, the speed keeps going up with no increase in price), but I'm keeping an eye on the bill just in case they try to jack up the rates without warning (or provide warning in tiny print) and lately the service has remained uninterrupted for quite some time.
Hallucinogens weren't the only thing to make Nethack great. It's nice how you can die from eating too much:
This lembas wafer is delicious! You're having a hard time getting all of it down. Stop eating? [yn] (y) You choke over your food. You die... Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq]
I love the attention to detail on little things like that. BTW, has there ever been a count of how many distinct ways to die in Nethack there are?
At the time it was a donated copy of NT, meaning it was on hand and free of cost. Were it not, NT was still pretty easy to find (XP was still a long way off). Configuration was a bit of a pain for no other reason than supporting the one ultra-beefy (for the time) Mac the school already had (we added a network card to it), but it's still running and about the only thing that's been changed from the initial installation is that the school has upgraded the network connection to something faster than the donated dial up account.
Would I do the same thing today? Probably not. Linux is much better now than it was at the time this was being set up. Dial on demand and IP masquerading could be done, but it was awful to configure and the management software was much harder to use than what was available with NT. From a security standpoint, keeping up with issues under NT was much easier than it would have been with Linux if for no other reason than people with NT experience were more available than people with Linux experience. You could make a case for using a BSD, but the chances would still be pretty non-existant that the staff could make changes to the configuration as needed (this is, remember, an elementary school that had been using Apple//e computers almost exclusively).
There haven't been any complaints (which could be because the setup is working well (my guess as they did upgrade the Internet connection) or it could be because everything was done by volunteers at no cost). I believe this really was the best solution for this particular situation available at the time.
Sorry, no Google links. Google was not an option at the time.
I once helped upgrade a school computer lab from Apple//e machines to a network of donated Windows machines (this was well before it was even close to reasonable to put Linux in an elementary school). The clients were all 386 based machines running Windows for Workgroups and the server/router to the Internet was a 486 box running NT 4.something. It was slow, but it did what it had to do and it did it well. So, while it might not survive a slashdotting, you certainly can run a Windows server on even worse than a 75MHz Pentium.
The math doesn't have to add up to 1. Values less than 1 and greater than 1 are perfectly acceptable in this sort of thing. Think about it. You have people who listen to music. Some of these people will get music through legal downloads, some will pirate music, some will go with legal downloads and pirate music (meaning the same person counts in both categories) and some will neither legally download nor pirate music (meaning they don't count in either of these categories). So what this means is that there might be somewhere around 25% of music listeners (depending on how many listeners fall into both listed categories) who only buy music on CDs or listen to the radio.
Safety features on command line tools might be nice, but it would be hard to incorporate that sort of thing in a UNIX environment where the tools are often being called from shell scripts and such. If simple command line utilities are going to try to keep me from shooting myself in the foot, I want a flag for releasing the safety.
P.S. If '$ rm -fr/' will erase the whole tree, your permissions are seriously messed up.
Ah (all in good fun here), but speculation about bad things (or humans dying) happening when going past the moon is NOT grounded in present day science. Your new line of argument is really a worse misrepresentation of science than FTL drives, time travel, and sinking ships with sausage fired from rail guns.
(If someone wants to classify a book as mundane SF or not, I don't really care so long as I enjoy reading the book.)
Quite a bit of science fiction has been written using accepted science without a present day earth setting. Possible settings include very large spacecraft that travel slower than light, future post-alien conquered earth, and non-earth planets. I refer you to Gene Wolfe and Octavia Butler as examples of authors who, while not shy to move away from accepted science (let's ignore the works with telepaths in them for these purposes, though) present works which can stand very well apart from improbable science/technology while still avoiding present day earth settings.
I'd agree with this, but 2-3 days is not enough time for that to be the adventure of a lifetime. As a child I was on a few such trips and the best ones lasted in the 1-2 week range for time. That way the kid gets to learn about which insects make good makeshift souchers, natural bug repellants, &c.
Real time action done right is fun. Granted, it isn't my idea of what Final Fantasy is, but the games have gone from rigid turn based combat through to less structured delay based combat so why not realtime action? We've seen the begining of the end for the series before (VII, VIII, IX, X, X-2, and XI have all been called that by people who didn't like abandoning squatty sprites, changes in the magic system, nostalgia-fests, voice acting, same world sequels, or online play respectively and I think it's safe to say that if V had come out in the US between IV and VI, fans would have complained about that as well) and while there are certainly people who prefer the older games (I'm replaying FFV at present and I've probably played FFVI through more times than any RPG other than Chrono Trigger (if you don't count Nethack)), but I doubt we're at the end of Final Fantasy. At least, if we are, we aren't at the begining of the end.
You're right up until the last line. At least on/. up though the time I hit reply, the response has been entirely negative. Some people, it seems, are shouting them down even though they aren't Microsoft.
What's the benefit of being able to edit someone else's opinion?
Personally, I would love to be able to edit the opinions of others so long as others don't get to edit mine. Especially useful would be if those changes propagated back to the brain of the original opinion author.
How so? It's just a matter of running make when you make a change and put -r * to upload the changes. I guess I don't see the need to introduce extra places for something to break.
You're having php evaluate that prior to uploading, right? Otherwise, this just slows down your server without need (why dynamically generate static pages?).
I like to hand code XHTML/CSS, but there is the big problem for any site that gets beyond a few pages: if you decide at some point to transition XHTML 3.0 or if there is some common content on all or a significant subset of pages (say, a navigation menu or contact information) that needs to change, it's a huge PITA to go back and hand tweak that (not to mention that it's highly error prone). I take care of some sites that range from about a dozen static pages up through several dozen (and growing) and what works great for me is m4. Anytime you have blocks that are repeated (possibly with content variations within those tags) several times on the same page or across several pages, define a macro to cover it. Then you just m4 macros.m4 source.m4 | uniq > destination.html (uniq is optional and requires a bit of care. It's just there for stripping out most of the extra blank lines and while there are better ways to handle that, uniq has worked well for me). This, of course, should be put into a makefile that takes care of preparing a directory with all of your pages, images, CSS, and the like ready to be uploaded. That gets you the advantages in hand written code (smaller files than GUI editors produce, markup that is still human readable and editable) and once you have the initial design of your site finished, adding new pages is much faster and less error prone. Rather than typing in or copy-pasting (both error prone) the stuff that is at the beginning of all of your files, it's just a __start_page called with an argument or two to set the document title and navigation menu status. The only potential pitfall is that apostrophes conflict with the default quoting mechanism of m4, so if you need an apostrophe inside a macro or inside an argument to a macro, you need lots of extra ugly marks ('`''`), but the impact is less than you might think from this. The method also plays nicely with PHP.
The above isn't really for everybody. I hear that programs designed for developing Web sites can address a lot of the same issues, but I've never had the patience to work with them as they don't work in the same way that I think about these sorts of things. I suppose it would appeal most to the sorts of people who use a text editor and command line tools to write application programs as opposed to those who use an IDE.
Yes, that's the way to go. Also on the list of places to post your flyer: coffee shop windows and university bulletin boards.
Most local newspapers will have a community calendar section or equivalent. When you have good speakers signed up, write a press release and send it there. If the newspaper thinks it's interesting enough, they may even send someone to cover it.
Other ISPs can easily do the same, but these days there's really no excuse for an ISP to need a setup CD so unless the ISP is big enough that it can sell advertising on those setup CDs (oh, yes, you really do need to use this disc. It will fill your browser bookmarks with links to great sites, set up your home page to a site that can sell you lots of things, and add 15 new desktop items! Who wouldn't want that?), there's no real incentive to provide a Useful Software disc. Some might even reasonably fear that doing such a thing would increase service calls. (I'm trying to use this program you gave me called Gopher, but I can't seem to figure it out.) Of course, my story was from before you could count on computers having a CD-ROM drive (some did, lots didn't) so a Useful Software disc would have been something like a floppy with Mosaic on it and maybe an FTP client and an email program. I think it was safe to assume that anybody who was interested in Internet access would be purchasing a book that would come with such a disk.
To finish my story from before, they did eventually fax the software settings to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it. You've got a pilot. It wasn't picked up for whatever reason. Maybe the show was bad, maybe it didn't fit what the network wanted. You're left with one episode of a show for which about the only use left is taking a minute and a half out and using it in a Best TV Shows That Never Were special. So as there isn't any money left in it, why not give away the pilot? Worst case scenario is there's just more crap on the Internet. On the other hand, if it's something the network didn't really understand, you have the potential to generate a fanbase for the show and get it picked up or at the very least it's something the people involved with can point to as something they've done.
I suppose newer homes could be built with appropriate speaker cable run through the walls right along with video, network, and whatever else (wouldn't work with my 100+ y.o. home), but I think the limiting factor keeping things like this out of the typical household is room geometry. Looking at my living room, it would be difficult to have speakers and furniture in the right places for something like this to work and still have a usable space. Maybe if you can spill things out into the larger space afforded by a great room it might work, but the typical home theater just doesn't have the space to do it right.
Much better.
Can you provide a link to this opt out form page or is it something I'll be able to find myself by looking a little harder?
That list is incomplete. I'm thinking more along the line of including things such as killed by an x while hallucinating. Choking is presented as one item, but there are many different things available to choke on. I guess what I'd want is a list or number of unique cause of death messages, which would of course be many many times larger.
SBC -- 3
Lately they've been pretty reliable here, but about a year ago there were problems with "area outages" about once a week at work. Whenever somebody complained that the Internet was broken, I took a look at things, figured out that the problem wasn't on my end and said we just had to wait until SBC fixed things on their end. One day, somebody decided to call support. What could be the harm? Well, I warned him not to, but he wouldn't listen. He called and got someone calling himself Richard with a thick Indian accent who told my coworker to do a variety of things, some that I had already done and others that made absolutely no sense. About a half hour into this, he asked Richard if the problem could be on the SBC side of things. He said all his monitors showed green, whatever that means. After another two hours of trying things as stupid as pinging yahoo when there isn't an Internet connection (which of course didn't work, but he must've done it dozens of times), the call was escalated to the next tier of support. This person could be understood, she gave some basic instructions that had already been tried, but after a couple minutes said she had run some tests and thinks it's an SBC problem. The call was sent to maintenance which said immediately that it's an area outage and gave an estimate as to when the problem would be fixed and a number we could call to get back to maintenance. A couple hours later, the problem was indeed fixed, but Richard's instructions resulted in the network settings on the computer being completely screwed up (about 45 minutes wasted figuring out what had been changed and putting things right) and on top of that, Richard had changed the account password and not told us what the new one is so I had to call maintenance back and get the password reset.
More recently, they've started to block access to port 25 on servers not on a small whitelist that they won't add the mail server I use to. (I don't have access to it, so I can't just use another port. I understand the reasoning behind blocking port 25, but it's still evil.)
Reps were continually calling trying to upsell, sometimes to what I already had (yes, I already have that service. Shouldn't you know what I'm already buying from you before you call me?).
Two things are keeping the score above minimum. The price continues to go down (or rather, the speed keeps going up with no increase in price), but I'm keeping an eye on the bill just in case they try to jack up the rates without warning (or provide warning in tiny print) and lately the service has remained uninterrupted for quite some time.
Hallucinogens weren't the only thing to make Nethack great. It's nice how you can die from eating too much:
This lembas wafer is delicious!
You're having a hard time getting all of it down.
Stop eating? [yn] (y)
You choke over your food.
You die...
Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq]
I love the attention to detail on little things like that. BTW, has there ever been a count of how many distinct ways to die in Nethack there are?
I'm reminded of the PataPi from Akihabara Denno Gumi. When will the Aibo be combat ready?
At the time it was a donated copy of NT, meaning it was on hand and free of cost. Were it not, NT was still pretty easy to find (XP was still a long way off). Configuration was a bit of a pain for no other reason than supporting the one ultra-beefy (for the time) Mac the school already had (we added a network card to it), but it's still running and about the only thing that's been changed from the initial installation is that the school has upgraded the network connection to something faster than the donated dial up account.
//e computers almost exclusively).
Would I do the same thing today? Probably not. Linux is much better now than it was at the time this was being set up. Dial on demand and IP masquerading could be done, but it was awful to configure and the management software was much harder to use than what was available with NT. From a security standpoint, keeping up with issues under NT was much easier than it would have been with Linux if for no other reason than people with NT experience were more available than people with Linux experience. You could make a case for using a BSD, but the chances would still be pretty non-existant that the staff could make changes to the configuration as needed (this is, remember, an elementary school that had been using Apple
There haven't been any complaints (which could be because the setup is working well (my guess as they did upgrade the Internet connection) or it could be because everything was done by volunteers at no cost). I believe this really was the best solution for this particular situation available at the time.
Sorry, no Google links. Google was not an option at the time.
I once helped upgrade a school computer lab from Apple //e machines to a network of donated Windows machines (this was well before it was even close to reasonable to put Linux in an elementary school). The clients were all 386 based machines running Windows for Workgroups and the server/router to the Internet was a 486 box running NT 4.something. It was slow, but it did what it had to do and it did it well. So, while it might not survive a slashdotting, you certainly can run a Windows server on even worse than a 75MHz Pentium.
The math doesn't have to add up to 1. Values less than 1 and greater than 1 are perfectly acceptable in this sort of thing. Think about it. You have people who listen to music. Some of these people will get music through legal downloads, some will pirate music, some will go with legal downloads and pirate music (meaning the same person counts in both categories) and some will neither legally download nor pirate music (meaning they don't count in either of these categories). So what this means is that there might be somewhere around 25% of music listeners (depending on how many listeners fall into both listed categories) who only buy music on CDs or listen to the radio.
The numbers add up, they just shouldn't be added.
Safety features on command line tools might be nice, but it would be hard to incorporate that sort of thing in a UNIX environment where the tools are often being called from shell scripts and such. If simple command line utilities are going to try to keep me from shooting myself in the foot, I want a flag for releasing the safety.
/' will erase the whole tree, your permissions are seriously messed up.
P.S. If '$ rm -fr
Ah (all in good fun here), but speculation about bad things (or humans dying) happening when going past the moon is NOT grounded in present day science. Your new line of argument is really a worse misrepresentation of science than FTL drives, time travel, and sinking ships with sausage fired from rail guns.
(If someone wants to classify a book as mundane SF or not, I don't really care so long as I enjoy reading the book.)
Quite a bit of science fiction has been written using accepted science without a present day earth setting. Possible settings include very large spacecraft that travel slower than light, future post-alien conquered earth, and non-earth planets. I refer you to Gene Wolfe and Octavia Butler as examples of authors who, while not shy to move away from accepted science (let's ignore the works with telepaths in them for these purposes, though) present works which can stand very well apart from improbable science/technology while still avoiding present day earth settings.
I'd agree with this, but 2-3 days is not enough time for that to be the adventure of a lifetime. As a child I was on a few such trips and the best ones lasted in the 1-2 week range for time. That way the kid gets to learn about which insects make good makeshift souchers, natural bug repellants, &c.
Real time action done right is fun. Granted, it isn't my idea of what Final Fantasy is, but the games have gone from rigid turn based combat through to less structured delay based combat so why not realtime action? We've seen the begining of the end for the series before (VII, VIII, IX, X, X-2, and XI have all been called that by people who didn't like abandoning squatty sprites, changes in the magic system, nostalgia-fests, voice acting, same world sequels, or online play respectively and I think it's safe to say that if V had come out in the US between IV and VI, fans would have complained about that as well) and while there are certainly people who prefer the older games (I'm replaying FFV at present and I've probably played FFVI through more times than any RPG other than Chrono Trigger (if you don't count Nethack)), but I doubt we're at the end of Final Fantasy. At least, if we are, we aren't at the begining of the end.
Now, then... almost at world 3.
You're right up until the last line. At least on /. up though the time I hit reply, the response has been entirely negative. Some people, it seems, are shouting them down even though they aren't Microsoft.
How so? It's just a matter of running make when you make a change and put -r * to upload the changes. I guess I don't see the need to introduce extra places for something to break.
You're having php evaluate that prior to uploading, right? Otherwise, this just slows down your server without need (why dynamically generate static pages?).
I like to hand code XHTML/CSS, but there is the big problem for any site that gets beyond a few pages: if you decide at some point to transition XHTML 3.0 or if there is some common content on all or a significant subset of pages (say, a navigation menu or contact information) that needs to change, it's a huge PITA to go back and hand tweak that (not to mention that it's highly error prone). I take care of some sites that range from about a dozen static pages up through several dozen (and growing) and what works great for me is m4. Anytime you have blocks that are repeated (possibly with content variations within those tags) several times on the same page or across several pages, define a macro to cover it. Then you just m4 macros.m4 source.m4 | uniq > destination.html (uniq is optional and requires a bit of care. It's just there for stripping out most of the extra blank lines and while there are better ways to handle that, uniq has worked well for me). This, of course, should be put into a makefile that takes care of preparing a directory with all of your pages, images, CSS, and the like ready to be uploaded. That gets you the advantages in hand written code (smaller files than GUI editors produce, markup that is still human readable and editable) and once you have the initial design of your site finished, adding new pages is much faster and less error prone. Rather than typing in or copy-pasting (both error prone) the stuff that is at the beginning of all of your files, it's just a __start_page called with an argument or two to set the document title and navigation menu status. The only potential pitfall is that apostrophes conflict with the default quoting mechanism of m4, so if you need an apostrophe inside a macro or inside an argument to a macro, you need lots of extra ugly marks ('`''`), but the impact is less than you might think from this. The method also plays nicely with PHP.
The above isn't really for everybody. I hear that programs designed for developing Web sites can address a lot of the same issues, but I've never had the patience to work with them as they don't work in the same way that I think about these sorts of things. I suppose it would appeal most to the sorts of people who use a text editor and command line tools to write application programs as opposed to those who use an IDE.
Yes, that's the way to go. Also on the list of places to post your flyer: coffee shop windows and university bulletin boards.
Most local newspapers will have a community calendar section or equivalent. When you have good speakers signed up, write a press release and send it there. If the newspaper thinks it's interesting enough, they may even send someone to cover it.
Other ISPs can easily do the same, but these days there's really no excuse for an ISP to need a setup CD so unless the ISP is big enough that it can sell advertising on those setup CDs (oh, yes, you really do need to use this disc. It will fill your browser bookmarks with links to great sites, set up your home page to a site that can sell you lots of things, and add 15 new desktop items! Who wouldn't want that?), there's no real incentive to provide a Useful Software disc. Some might even reasonably fear that doing such a thing would increase service calls. (I'm trying to use this program you gave me called Gopher, but I can't seem to figure it out.) Of course, my story was from before you could count on computers having a CD-ROM drive (some did, lots didn't) so a Useful Software disc would have been something like a floppy with Mosaic on it and maybe an FTP client and an email program. I think it was safe to assume that anybody who was interested in Internet access would be purchasing a book that would come with such a disk.
To finish my story from before, they did eventually fax the software settings to me.