Nostalgia, indeed. I would, however, like to suggest that by lacking in the graphics department, old games were more immersive because you had to use your own imagination more and not rely on the developers' extended imagination. It's basically one of the main points that Scott Mccloud emphasizes in Understanding Comics and I think the idea translated well to computer games. On the other hand, modern games usually have superior audio and graphics design, and more sophisticated storytelling, all key elements of great games.
("The developers trendsourced the project by integrating crowdsourcing with Agile methodologies automated with a SOAP communication layer.")
Sounds very interesting! But can't we get XML-RPC?! SOAP is such a bloated piece of crap.
Comcast is helping their customers, yes? They are crawling/indexing/filtering blogs that are completely public, yes? So what's the problem? What am I supposed to be outraged about this time?
"It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog," he told the New York Times.
"Nobody has left a comment in months."
Oh, that's the problem. Seriously, this is a lousy post.
Whenever I read about a new MySQL version, I think about all of the hosting out there that are still running 4.x. I understand that you can't simply upgrade to the latest version as it would mess up customers' applications, but how about offering customers different versions of MySQL? Is it really that hard to do? A growing collection of well designed web applications require MySQL 5.x and it sucks to miss out om them simply because your hosting provider isn't database flexible enough.
I hope that you are right, but if the world hasn't been able to do anything about Russia's horrible crimes against the people of Chechnya, how big are the chances that Kasparov can make a difference? Also, don't forget that Putin's approval ratings are pretty high even if you disbelieve the official statistics from the Kremlin, i.e. the Russians themselves might not even care about this and that is what's really required here. You can't force changes like this from the outside (are you going to sanction Russia? Use military force? Hardly), it has to come from the people of Russia.
The list is so general that it is bound to be accurate to a certain degree. Also, I seriously doubt that even the brightest and knowledgeable people can predict the really revolutionary stuff that's going to happen. I mean, back in 1989, how many (few?) people could envision the Internet in its current form? Certain societal advances are so revolutionary and disruptive that we cannot even begin to imagine them.
Not that any of this means that the predicted future isn't amazing and great for mankind, of course. What's really encouraging is the focus on health and the environment. Advances in (bio) medicine, improved water purification, carbon management and engineered agriculture will arguably save and improve the lives of millions of human beings lessen mankind's impact on the environment. And it's all thanks to technology, and not/Modern society is evil!/We must go back to nature!/ thinking.
Fantastic! Google has had its head up its search engine for more than 7 years! I'm glad to see the change of heart, and I'll use Google more often I still have major gripes with Google, but at least this is a small step in the right direction Looks like someone reminded people at Google they live in the U.S. and enjoy freedoms soldiers have shed blood fighting for 1 lonely logo for veterans since 1999? Whoopidy-freakin-doo! Google's logos are irrelevant Google only did it to get WND off its back Must have been the new guy who did the design. He's not hip to the anti-American company rules yet Google is still evil, and must be shunned at all costs Other
That pretty much sounds like/. on any given day...;)
Who knows, when the contract with Google expires in 2008, maybe even MS will try to make a deal with The Firefox Foundation.
Only thing preventing this deal would be if, say, Microsoft developed its own BROWSER CALLED INTERNET EXPLORER! /me is getting senile
... why don't you grow your own monies like everyone else!!
Seriously, people: capital is good, that's how you pay for stuff and people, and fund projects. And it's not like Google is bribing the Firefox Foundation, the money comes from search engine integration in Firefox. Also, I can't recall Firefox being involved in any shady business where they have sided with Google against Microsoft. Furthermore, The Firefox Foundation did negotiate with Yahoo before sealing the deal with Google, so they clearly have other options than just Google. Who knows, when the contract with Google expires in 2008, maybe even MS will try to make a deal with The Firefox Foundation.
From the summary:
but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash.
Nowhere is this fear expresses besides in the summary. Less editorializing, please.
As a new Facebook user, I'm surprised by the mess and disorganization that applications on Facebook cause. Reading other peoples' profiles is like participating in psychological experiments with lots of graphics and widgets competing for your attention. And don't get me started on regurgitated content such as "Only great minds can read this This is weird, but interesting!", vampire fights, yes or no apps, etc.
Here's hoping that Google application implementation won't suck.
I have a similar story about MS Office (in)compatibility.
A couple of weeks ago, I opened a PowerPoint 2003 file in PowerPoint 2007 (this loads PPT's compatibility mode), did some changes to the presentation and saved. Well, I tried to save when PPT complained that the changes that I've made to slides 1-12 weren't compatible with PPT 2003. Did I mention that the presentation only had 12 slides? Yeah, so no save for me. And what were those difficult to save changes? I changed the damn slides' design to one of the new fancy ones. That's all. I find it a bit ridiculous that not even MS can't make PTT 2007 compatible with previous versions.
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) needs to realize that there's so much more to a language than the syntax. There needs to be a major effort in making it easier to install, get started with, and deploy Python, and much more advocating and marketing needs to be done. For example, PSF should start campaigning so that web hosting providers support Python out of the box. Why do you think PHP, despite it's obvious drawbacks, is so popular? Because it's ubiquitously supported and requires nil efforts to get started!
It's great that Python is constantly evolving into a cleaner and more competent language, but I fear that the Python 3000 efforts could result in a pyrrhic victory in the war between programming languages because it simply fails to attract enough new people. There's so much that the PSF could do, but there seems to be too much "But that's not our job!"-thinking.
So it's Apples's fault that people prefer singles instead of albums? It can't be that Apple is just responding to consumer demand, could it? Actually, I'm one of the those who prefer buying singles because it's been a damn long time since I actually found a entire album to be good enough to buy it.
As for the alleged deterioration in music quality - what utter nonsense. As a music lover, you have access to more and better music than ever before, largely thanks to the Internet. No one is forcing you to listen to that mainstream crap, you know.
Actually, I think that there's a connection to be made here: as more and better music becomes available, people become more captious about the audio they listen to, because their time and money is obviously too limited. Instead of buying a couple of pretty good albums from a few artists, people buy a couple of great tracks from many more artists.
Actually, this has significantly worsened Microsofts's reputation in Sweden. IT people here are outraged and, actually, quite embarrassed that something like this could have happened in Sweden. Voices are being raised that the voting process at SIS must be changed so that charlatan companies such as MS can't pull stunts like this - i.e. "encouraging" partners to become SIS members in the last moment to be able to vote - in the future.
There's already tons of research on the concept of energy efficient houses. One popular approach is called Passive house and it's pretty amazing how much energy you can conserve.
Slashdot Mirror
Nostalgia, indeed. I would, however, like to suggest that by lacking in the graphics department, old games were more immersive because you had to use your own imagination more and not rely on the developers' extended imagination. It's basically one of the main points that Scott Mccloud emphasizes in Understanding Comics and I think the idea translated well to computer games. On the other hand, modern games usually have superior audio and graphics design, and more sophisticated storytelling, all key elements of great games.
("The developers trendsourced the project by integrating crowdsourcing with Agile methodologies automated with a SOAP communication layer.") Sounds very interesting! But can't we get XML-RPC?! SOAP is such a bloated piece of crap.
You're wrong. MANY recruiters google people they are about to hire because it's a cheap and easy way to weed out obviously unsuitable people.
Yeah, all the Windows ME fanboism is getting really old.
As I predicted one minute ago, you will be modded funny and me too!
I have Helvetica on my computer but, obviously, it renders very differently than on a Mac.
Please Mac web designers, stop using Helvetica on the web. It looks absolutely dreadful on Windows, hundred times worse than Arial.
Comcast is helping their customers, yes? They are crawling/indexing/filtering blogs that are completely public, yes? So what's the problem? What am I supposed to be outraged about this time?
"It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog," he told the New York Times.
"Nobody has left a comment in months."
Oh, that's the problem. Seriously, this is a lousy post.
Whenever I read about a new MySQL version, I think about all of the hosting out there that are still running 4.x. I understand that you can't simply upgrade to the latest version as it would mess up customers' applications, but how about offering customers different versions of MySQL? Is it really that hard to do? A growing collection of well designed web applications require MySQL 5.x and it sucks to miss out om them simply because your hosting provider isn't database flexible enough.
Why did/does Firefox have so many memory leaks? Is it sloppy coding? A framework issue? Third party addons?
I hope that you are right, but if the world hasn't been able to do anything about Russia's horrible crimes against the people of Chechnya, how big are the chances that Kasparov can make a difference? Also, don't forget that Putin's approval ratings are pretty high even if you disbelieve the official statistics from the Kremlin, i.e. the Russians themselves might not even care about this and that is what's really required here. You can't force changes like this from the outside (are you going to sanction Russia? Use military force? Hardly), it has to come from the people of Russia.
The list is so general that it is bound to be accurate to a certain degree. Also, I seriously doubt that even the brightest and knowledgeable people can predict the really revolutionary stuff that's going to happen. I mean, back in 1989, how many (few?) people could envision the Internet in its current form? Certain societal advances are so revolutionary and disruptive that we cannot even begin to imagine them.
/Modern society is evil!/We must go back to nature!/ thinking.
Not that any of this means that the predicted future isn't amazing and great for mankind, of course. What's really encouraging is the focus on health and the environment. Advances in (bio) medicine, improved water purification, carbon management and engineered agriculture will arguably save and improve the lives of millions of human beings lessen mankind's impact on the environment. And it's all thanks to technology, and not
Who knows, when the contract with Google expires in 2008, maybe even MS will try to make a deal with The Firefox Foundation.
/me is getting senile
Only thing preventing this deal would be if, say, Microsoft developed its own BROWSER CALLED INTERNET EXPLORER!
Seriously, people: capital is good, that's how you pay for stuff and people, and fund projects. And it's not like Google is bribing the Firefox Foundation, the money comes from search engine integration in Firefox. Also, I can't recall Firefox being involved in any shady business where they have sided with Google against Microsoft. Furthermore, The Firefox Foundation did negotiate with Yahoo before sealing the deal with Google, so they clearly have other options than just Google. Who knows, when the contract with Google expires in 2008, maybe even MS will try to make a deal with The Firefox Foundation.
From the summary: Nowhere is this fear expresses besides in the summary. Less editorializing, please.
[rant]
As a new Facebook user, I'm surprised by the mess and disorganization that applications on Facebook cause. Reading other peoples' profiles is like participating in psychological experiments with lots of graphics and widgets competing for your attention. And don't get me started on regurgitated content such as "Only great minds can read this This is weird, but interesting!", vampire fights, yes or no apps, etc.
Here's hoping that Google application implementation won't suck.
[/rant]
So which full disk encryption software does Slashdot recommend? Preferably FOSS and available for *Nix and Windows.
I have a similar story about MS Office (in)compatibility.
A couple of weeks ago, I opened a PowerPoint 2003 file in PowerPoint 2007 (this loads PPT's compatibility mode), did some changes to the presentation and saved. Well, I tried to save when PPT complained that the changes that I've made to slides 1-12 weren't compatible with PPT 2003. Did I mention that the presentation only had 12 slides? Yeah, so no save for me. And what were those difficult to save changes? I changed the damn slides' design to one of the new fancy ones. That's all. I find it a bit ridiculous that not even MS can't make PTT 2007 compatible with previous versions.
"langauge"? I spell checked everything besides the subject, so obviously it got misspelled.
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) needs to realize that there's so much more to a language than the syntax. There needs to be a major effort in making it easier to install, get started with, and deploy Python, and much more advocating and marketing needs to be done. For example, PSF should start campaigning so that web hosting providers support Python out of the box. Why do you think PHP, despite it's obvious drawbacks, is so popular? Because it's ubiquitously supported and requires nil efforts to get started!
It's great that Python is constantly evolving into a cleaner and more competent language, but I fear that the Python 3000 efforts could result in a pyrrhic victory in the war between programming languages because it simply fails to attract enough new people. There's so much that the PSF could do, but there seems to be too much "But that's not our job!"-thinking.
Wanna bet that the TouchTable is infringing on at least a dozen patens?
So it's Apples's fault that people prefer singles instead of albums? It can't be that Apple is just responding to consumer demand, could it? Actually, I'm one of the those who prefer buying singles because it's been a damn long time since I actually found a entire album to be good enough to buy it.
As for the alleged deterioration in music quality - what utter nonsense. As a music lover, you have access to more and better music than ever before, largely thanks to the Internet. No one is forcing you to listen to that mainstream crap, you know.
Actually, I think that there's a connection to be made here: as more and better music becomes available, people become more captious about the audio they listen to, because their time and money is obviously too limited. Instead of buying a couple of pretty good albums from a few artists, people buy a couple of great tracks from many more artists.
Actually, this has significantly worsened Microsofts's reputation in Sweden. IT people here are outraged and, actually, quite embarrassed that something like this could have happened in Sweden. Voices are being raised that the voting process at SIS must be changed so that charlatan companies such as MS can't pull stunts like this - i.e. "encouraging" partners to become SIS members in the last moment to be able to vote - in the future.
For those who speak Swedish, here's the press release by SIS (PDF).
There's already tons of research on the concept of energy efficient houses. One popular approach is called Passive house and it's pretty amazing how much energy you can conserve.
... sales of penises, adult diapers and bondage toys sky-rocket in Second Life.