It'll also serve as a bellwether to see if the big gamer complaint about the new Sony and Microsoft consoles — that they're only partly about games — is honest. 'At a time when the goal of its competitors is to own the living room, the extent of Nintendo's ambition is simply to be in it — a dedicated games console, and no more.'"
This implies (or assumes?) that people who want a gaming-specific system will outright reject anything that does have extra things they don't need, instead buying whatever the latest gaming-focused system is, regardless of quality... And that if they don't, their complaints were false.
That doesn't fit at all. People don't just decide on a choice based on one factor, they find the best fit between several... And, imo, will probably be more inclined to budge on "isn't weighed down with useless functionality" than "doesn't have a cripplingly limited range of mostly gimmicky games". That doesn't make a complaint about the lack of gaming focus valid, it just means its the best of a bad situation. Personally, I've already decided not to bother with any of the next gen systems.
I think the parent knew that, they was just trying to explain things in terms that would make sense to someone who thinks an old phone would make a wonderful hobbyist computing platform.
I was really interested in Google Wave. Got in the Beta, posted in some random thread... and that was it. No-one I knew signed up. Because no-one they knew was signing up. So I couldn't actually make use of it, at all. It was also really tricky explaining to people what exactly it was; I just couldn't come up with a nice, understandable metaphor to describe it, and I'm not sure Google could either.
Back in the day, my friends and I were really in to Battlefield 2. As time went on though, I found I just couldn't play; we'd spend 20 minutes trying to find a server with enough slots, and after I joined I'd only be there a few minutes before Punkbuster crashes and I get booted from the game. And I'm being precise there; Punkbuster wasn't identifying me as doing anything wrong (because I wasn't), it would just constantly crash out. We tried a few servers not using punkbuster, and everything was fine. I tried looking for solutions online, uninstalling and reinstalling etc, no go.
It got to the point where we'd meet up time and again to try and play, spend a few hours "playing" BF2, and I'd get maybe half an hour of actual gameplay. We moved onto BF2142; even worse. Updates and patches exacerbated things. Everyone else preferred BF2 and moved back to it. It was now essentially unplayable. When everyone else moved to BF3, I didn't follow.
Umm, that's not a Playstation controller, or at least not an official first-party one. Give how many PC controllers have used that style, it's more likely just some generic PC controller.
What a brilliant idea; I completely agree! But... how to make it happen? I mean, this is just two people on Slashdot, we can't do much.
Maybe, and bear with me here, maybe we could get other people to join in. We could all push together for these rights. Not just people we know or are in contact with though, that wouldn't be enough. We'd need a whole organisation, country (or even world) wide. People could join to have a say in our policies and how we apply pressure to get our aims! (For a small cost, of course... I don't know about you, but I certainly don't have the resources to run something like this for free.)
With enough people on board, all demanding the same thing, we could truly be heard! Some employers may not wish people to join, but we could offer our resources to protect people, ensure that they are free to be represented, protected from mistreatment, and that when we are able to get these laws changed, that the new systems we fought for are actually followed.
If only there was some kind of system for uniting people in this way... Alas, it's just a pipedream.
The two tasks aren't mutually exclusive. There is a logical fallacy in thinking that scientists can be taken as one entire group who should all focus research on a handful of "important things". The people with the expertise of how we could theoretically travel to other planets and make that habital environments in a millenium (30 generations?) are not, for the most part, the same people with the expertise of how best to steer society on a global scale to make best use of this planet over the next century (3 generations), and I daresay if each group focuses on their area of expertise, they'll both make advances that aid the other along the way.
But recording at "better than human hearing" isn't enough, because as those sounds are altered, processed, mixed, overlaid and resampled over and over and over again, you lose fidelity. You don't need your original recordings to be good enough for human ears, you need them to be good enough for mixing boards and DSPs and all kinds of hardware, after dozens (hundreds?) of changes. You need the end product to be good enough for ears.
(And to nip the obvious counter-argument in the bud; obviously the genre of music and recording method are important here, and if there're not many steps between what's being recorded and what's being sold then, sure, it's not such a big issue.)
She also has a youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/clairelom) with some videos of in in motion. One of these says it's blocked by a TV channel that own the copyright, hmm....
The Snowman was very clearly referring to ingredients which are generally considered inert enough for used in placebos, but in a small majority of cases can have a direct, unintended physical effect. In a world where a small number of people are allergic to water, I challenge you to find any substance you could introduce to absolutely any human that's guaranteed to be truly "inert".
Umm, does the summary really need to say "$80/unit" rather than just "$80", seeing as it already states at the start of the sentence that this is the cost of "each tablet"? Unless each single tablet can be a variable number of units...
Soooo, any idea what they mean by "50% more colours"? Do these allow the screen to display a wider set of the visible spectrum than LCD screens? Do they allow the same set but at a higher bitrate? Do they simply display the desired colour more precisely? Is this "extra" in the range that consumer GPUs and OSes can display?
Though MM may in fact use *nix solutions as stated, I find the opening line of that post is disingenuous as worded, so I've edited it here to make it more obvious what is being said:
No open source software that I've seen handles the Microsoft proprietary format docx halfway as well as the Microsoft native applications for the format, Word 2007 and Word 2010.
Bolding mine, to point out the obvious deficiencies of that argument.
I agree that your alteration makes his point clearer (although I'm unsure it was really necessary), but I'm not sure it's as much to the argument's detriment as you think. I'm probably going to come off as a Microsoft fanboy here, but so be it.
The reminder must be made that companies both create a legacy of existing files, and must use files by other companies. If you were to flick a magic switch, today, and have all your users understand a new suite of office applications and religiously save into an open format, you would in no way have solved your problems. Their blissful glee at being able to do what they were already doing but in a slightly different way would last until the moment they tried to open an existing file, or one from an external source, that "doesn't look right". And yes, I know I'm going over the same old points that get made, but I'd argue that 1) they're unfortunately still relevant, and 2) with respect, your own points aren't new either.
One additional aspect that usually gets skipped over is Microsoft Access. Yes yes, toy database, shouldn't be used in business etc etc, but we all know it does. I don't believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't checked in a year or two, that any of the open source suites can attempt to open.mdb files. There are now open source Access-like systems to create databases, but again, what do you do about the legacy information? With databases, it's even more likely that these may be currently used, critical files.
As you've said, the starting point is probably to begin using the open document formats in Microsoft products, until all the documents made with older formats are simply not relevant anymore; for my part, our company has only migrated a few users to a version of Office new enough to *have* those formats, so I'm stuck with.doc whether I like it or not. In the end though, it's rather amusing to consider that if, one day, we find ourselves in a situation where the majority of files are created in an open format and switching to an open office suite is easy, it's likely because Microsoft bridged the gap this way.
Hey now, this is Slashdot, surely you can't expect me to RTFA?;)
See, that just raises further questions; so the tool exists, but rather than just run it on the whole project they're asking individuals to run it on their own code as they're going forward? Makes sense from this point on, but why spend the last 6 months... You know what, screw it, I'm sure it makes sense in context!
Wait; so they've had half their people working for half a year to remove code which isn't used anymore?
(Disclaimer here; I'm an occasional, hobbyist programmer at best. It's entirely possible that I'm missing something here, and if I am do please enlighten me.)
I wonder why this couldn't be automated. You make a program that runs through and makes a big list of every function in the source, deletes functions that aren't called anywhere, repeat a few times to deal with chains of unused functions, and you're done. It seems like exactly the kind of task a computer is designed to do. Have a few flags to tell it whether to treat commented-out functions calls as valid so you don't wind up removing the alternate version of routines while trying out experimental new versions, and whether to actively delete the functions or just feed them back to the programmers to examine themselves, and you're finished. If you really want to be clever, have it look for calls that technically exist, but due to the logic involved would never get invoked in any circumstances.
I'm not even sure it'd be fair to say it would take too long to develop such a tool. After all, once it's made for a particular language, then it's done; everyone can take advantage of it, and in a few years time when you decide you need to do another grand cleanup, no need to take up six months and half your team for the task.
Now don't get me wrong here; code optimisation is a different beast, and there's far more to maintaining a tidy code base than this. But we're explicitly talking about a project to just remove unused code here. Do we really need to get those many eyes all focused on this?
I had a look on pathfinder, nothing nearby I'm afraid. I might check the forums, we'll see!
As for running a game... tried that a few years back, kinda worked for a few weeks, and then for reasons I don't even remember now we just stopped playing. Ultimately at this point, I just don't feel like I've had enough time just playing the game to enjoy it if I was the one running it, or enough time to prepare any adventures worth playing.
I already did; we had a group of 4 of us a few years back and, despite only having four sessions under my belt I GMed. I think I did a pretty good job too. Ultimately though, it just didn't stick for the rest, and I left it really wanting to play the game a bit more before I started running it. So while I know that's a possibility I really don't feel like I know anyone who'd be interested or have the free time at this point, so picking up the books would give me very low odds that they'd ever get used. If I knew I had a nigh-guaranteed way to start playing I'd jump on them, but I'm not going to sink money into it when chances are I won't get a game.
That's why I really don't get why the services I mentioned don't already exist. Why force the players to be DnD evangelists too? Do I really have to be selling everyone I know on the game before I've really had chance to play it? There are surely other people out there already ready to play, why not give them ways to get together? If I saw the 5th ed books, and on the inside cover it said "Looking for group? Visit wotc.com/lfg" or something, I'd probably jump at it... I could even go and search there first, try and arrange the group, and buy the books ready for the first session if it works out. OK, sure, I can try and convince everyone else to go along with my new hobby or go to one of the many unofficial websites out there and hope the people in my area are using the same unofficial site, but surely it makes sense to have a central, official, one-stop location for all your "who can I play with" needs?
A bit of search on the site shows they're moving in that direction. You can search for official "Encounters" sessions dotted around (although there're none near me), and they're working on something called a "virtual table" which might be for online play, but this is still all to link WotC to the players,= rather than the players to each other, and that seems like a pretty big deal to me.
I won't be buying any of the 5th edition stuff, for the same reason I didn't buy 4th or 3rd or... well, I do have some 2nd edition, but anyway.
I've wanted to play D&D since I first heard about it over 20 years ago, but the core problem has always been simple: I don't know anyone who plays D&D. I don't know how to find anyone who does. I've tried all the methods I can think of, found a few online group-finding sites and the like, but no go. I DID stumble across a 2nd Edition group not long after I left school who I played with for a handful of sessions, but then I moved away and lost touch. There aren't even any tabletop gaming shops here anymore; the last that stocked anything like D&D closed a couple of years ago, and just sold the books, no starter sessions or noticeboards or anything of the sort.
What I want from D&D right now is twofold; firstly, a decent, official, centralised, and above all *global* (I'm not in the US) grouping system to find people to play with. Maybe even go a little on the social networking side and let players say a little about themselves, their playstyles, and maybe even their characters if they have any they like to stick with. Secondly, a decent, official method of playing the games online; at the very least a chatroom with a map screen with tools for the DM to build it up quickly and easily, along with a LFG system and a friends list to help forming regular groups, preferably support for microphones/webcams, characters/enemy abilities/stat tracking, session saving, and while we're at it an easy way to print off the state of play for if you ever wind up with a great group, and decide you want to take it off the screen and get round a table, as Gygax intended. You don't have to expose all the rules of play if you still want people to buy the books, or heck, have each book contain an authorisation key to lets you use the features/skills/whatever that that book contains.
If either of those features already exist, then what I need is for them to be more public, because I've looked and haven't found them.
They're aiming to release them in November, and given the foundation only started up in mid-2009 that's hardly a long enough dev cycle to be accusing them of "vapourware" IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll also serve as a bellwether to see if the big gamer complaint about the new Sony and Microsoft consoles — that they're only partly about games — is honest. 'At a time when the goal of its competitors is to own the living room, the extent of Nintendo's ambition is simply to be in it — a dedicated games console, and no more.'"
This implies (or assumes?) that people who want a gaming-specific system will outright reject anything that does have extra things they don't need, instead buying whatever the latest gaming-focused system is, regardless of quality... And that if they don't, their complaints were false.
That doesn't fit at all. People don't just decide on a choice based on one factor, they find the best fit between several... And, imo, will probably be more inclined to budge on "isn't weighed down with useless functionality" than "doesn't have a cripplingly limited range of mostly gimmicky games". That doesn't make a complaint about the lack of gaming focus valid, it just means its the best of a bad situation. Personally, I've already decided not to bother with any of the next gen systems.
"The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us."
Or alternatively, it might. What was the point again?
I think the parent knew that, they was just trying to explain things in terms that would make sense to someone who thinks an old phone would make a wonderful hobbyist computing platform.
Hold on, let me go grab my box of expired Slashdot memes, I think there's one in here for... ahh, here we go. Ahem.
Whoooosh!
I was really interested in Google Wave. Got in the Beta, posted in some random thread... and that was it. No-one I knew signed up. Because no-one they knew was signing up. So I couldn't actually make use of it, at all. It was also really tricky explaining to people what exactly it was; I just couldn't come up with a nice, understandable metaphor to describe it, and I'm not sure Google could either.
You can play on servers that don't have PB in the rulset, or run your own.
Umm, as I said above...
We tried a few servers not using punkbuster, and everything was fine.
So, yeah, I know.
Back in the day, my friends and I were really in to Battlefield 2. As time went on though, I found I just couldn't play; we'd spend 20 minutes trying to find a server with enough slots, and after I joined I'd only be there a few minutes before Punkbuster crashes and I get booted from the game. And I'm being precise there; Punkbuster wasn't identifying me as doing anything wrong (because I wasn't), it would just constantly crash out. We tried a few servers not using punkbuster, and everything was fine. I tried looking for solutions online, uninstalling and reinstalling etc, no go.
It got to the point where we'd meet up time and again to try and play, spend a few hours "playing" BF2, and I'd get maybe half an hour of actual gameplay. We moved onto BF2142; even worse. Updates and patches exacerbated things. Everyone else preferred BF2 and moved back to it. It was now essentially unplayable. When everyone else moved to BF3, I didn't follow.
Just my experience I know, but a damn bad one.
Says you.
Ummm... yes. Yes, I did. Glad you're keeping up.
And yes, I AM equating breaking userspace with shooting someone. It IS that serious.
No, it's really, really, really not. You can't revert a death.
Umm, that's not a Playstation controller, or at least not an official first-party one. Give how many PC controllers have used that style, it's more likely just some generic PC controller.
What a brilliant idea; I completely agree! But... how to make it happen? I mean, this is just two people on Slashdot, we can't do much.
Maybe, and bear with me here, maybe we could get other people to join in. We could all push together for these rights. Not just people we know or are in contact with though, that wouldn't be enough. We'd need a whole organisation, country (or even world) wide. People could join to have a say in our policies and how we apply pressure to get our aims! (For a small cost, of course... I don't know about you, but I certainly don't have the resources to run something like this for free.)
With enough people on board, all demanding the same thing, we could truly be heard! Some employers may not wish people to join, but we could offer our resources to protect people, ensure that they are free to be represented, protected from mistreatment, and that when we are able to get these laws changed, that the new systems we fought for are actually followed.
If only there was some kind of system for uniting people in this way... Alas, it's just a pipedream.
The two tasks aren't mutually exclusive. There is a logical fallacy in thinking that scientists can be taken as one entire group who should all focus research on a handful of "important things". The people with the expertise of how we could theoretically travel to other planets and make that habital environments in a millenium (30 generations?) are not, for the most part, the same people with the expertise of how best to steer society on a global scale to make best use of this planet over the next century (3 generations), and I daresay if each group focuses on their area of expertise, they'll both make advances that aid the other along the way.
But recording at "better than human hearing" isn't enough, because as those sounds are altered, processed, mixed, overlaid and resampled over and over and over again, you lose fidelity. You don't need your original recordings to be good enough for human ears, you need them to be good enough for mixing boards and DSPs and all kinds of hardware, after dozens (hundreds?) of changes. You need the end product to be good enough for ears.
(And to nip the obvious counter-argument in the bud; obviously the genre of music and recording method are important here, and if there're not many steps between what's being recorded and what's being sold then, sure, it's not such a big issue.)
She also has a youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/clairelom) with some videos of in in motion. One of these says it's blocked by a TV channel that own the copyright, hmm....
The Snowman was very clearly referring to ingredients which are generally considered inert enough for used in placebos, but in a small majority of cases can have a direct, unintended physical effect. In a world where a small number of people are allergic to water, I challenge you to find any substance you could introduce to absolutely any human that's guaranteed to be truly "inert".
my car can do 270 kph, and yours can do 315... well yay. But which one is more fuel efficient at 60fps?
I'm not sure whether you're talking about cars or computers now, but the answer's the same either way; it's depends on the driver.
"Each tablet costs only $80/unit"
Umm, does the summary really need to say "$80/unit" rather than just "$80", seeing as it already states at the start of the sentence that this is the cost of "each tablet"? Unless each single tablet can be a variable number of units...
Soooo, any idea what they mean by "50% more colours"? Do these allow the screen to display a wider set of the visible spectrum than LCD screens? Do they allow the same set but at a higher bitrate? Do they simply display the desired colour more precisely? Is this "extra" in the range that consumer GPUs and OSes can display?
Though MM may in fact use *nix solutions as stated, I find the opening line of that post is disingenuous as worded, so I've edited it here to make it more obvious what is being said:
No open source software that I've seen handles the Microsoft proprietary format docx halfway as well as the Microsoft native applications for the format, Word 2007 and Word 2010.
Bolding mine, to point out the obvious deficiencies of that argument.
I agree that your alteration makes his point clearer (although I'm unsure it was really necessary), but I'm not sure it's as much to the argument's detriment as you think. I'm probably going to come off as a Microsoft fanboy here, but so be it.
The reminder must be made that companies both create a legacy of existing files, and must use files by other companies. If you were to flick a magic switch, today, and have all your users understand a new suite of office applications and religiously save into an open format, you would in no way have solved your problems. Their blissful glee at being able to do what they were already doing but in a slightly different way would last until the moment they tried to open an existing file, or one from an external source, that "doesn't look right". And yes, I know I'm going over the same old points that get made, but I'd argue that 1) they're unfortunately still relevant, and 2) with respect, your own points aren't new either.
One additional aspect that usually gets skipped over is Microsoft Access. Yes yes, toy database, shouldn't be used in business etc etc, but we all know it does. I don't believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't checked in a year or two, that any of the open source suites can attempt to open .mdb files. There are now open source Access-like systems to create databases, but again, what do you do about the legacy information? With databases, it's even more likely that these may be currently used, critical files.
As you've said, the starting point is probably to begin using the open document formats in Microsoft products, until all the documents made with older formats are simply not relevant anymore; for my part, our company has only migrated a few users to a version of Office new enough to *have* those formats, so I'm stuck with .doc whether I like it or not. In the end though, it's rather amusing to consider that if, one day, we find ourselves in a situation where the majority of files are created in an open format and switching to an open office suite is easy, it's likely because Microsoft bridged the gap this way.
Hey now, this is Slashdot, surely you can't expect me to RTFA? ;)
See, that just raises further questions; so the tool exists, but rather than just run it on the whole project they're asking individuals to run it on their own code as they're going forward? Makes sense from this point on, but why spend the last 6 months... You know what, screw it, I'm sure it makes sense in context!
Wait; so they've had half their people working for half a year to remove code which isn't used anymore?
(Disclaimer here; I'm an occasional, hobbyist programmer at best. It's entirely possible that I'm missing something here, and if I am do please enlighten me.)
I wonder why this couldn't be automated. You make a program that runs through and makes a big list of every function in the source, deletes functions that aren't called anywhere, repeat a few times to deal with chains of unused functions, and you're done. It seems like exactly the kind of task a computer is designed to do. Have a few flags to tell it whether to treat commented-out functions calls as valid so you don't wind up removing the alternate version of routines while trying out experimental new versions, and whether to actively delete the functions or just feed them back to the programmers to examine themselves, and you're finished. If you really want to be clever, have it look for calls that technically exist, but due to the logic involved would never get invoked in any circumstances.
I'm not even sure it'd be fair to say it would take too long to develop such a tool. After all, once it's made for a particular language, then it's done; everyone can take advantage of it, and in a few years time when you decide you need to do another grand cleanup, no need to take up six months and half your team for the task.
Now don't get me wrong here; code optimisation is a different beast, and there's far more to maintaining a tidy code base than this. But we're explicitly talking about a project to just remove unused code here. Do we really need to get those many eyes all focused on this?
I had a look on pathfinder, nothing nearby I'm afraid. I might check the forums, we'll see!
As for running a game... tried that a few years back, kinda worked for a few weeks, and then for reasons I don't even remember now we just stopped playing. Ultimately at this point, I just don't feel like I've had enough time just playing the game to enjoy it if I was the one running it, or enough time to prepare any adventures worth playing.
I already did; we had a group of 4 of us a few years back and, despite only having four sessions under my belt I GMed. I think I did a pretty good job too. Ultimately though, it just didn't stick for the rest, and I left it really wanting to play the game a bit more before I started running it. So while I know that's a possibility I really don't feel like I know anyone who'd be interested or have the free time at this point, so picking up the books would give me very low odds that they'd ever get used. If I knew I had a nigh-guaranteed way to start playing I'd jump on them, but I'm not going to sink money into it when chances are I won't get a game.
That's why I really don't get why the services I mentioned don't already exist. Why force the players to be DnD evangelists too? Do I really have to be selling everyone I know on the game before I've really had chance to play it? There are surely other people out there already ready to play, why not give them ways to get together? If I saw the 5th ed books, and on the inside cover it said "Looking for group? Visit wotc.com/lfg" or something, I'd probably jump at it... I could even go and search there first, try and arrange the group, and buy the books ready for the first session if it works out. OK, sure, I can try and convince everyone else to go along with my new hobby or go to one of the many unofficial websites out there and hope the people in my area are using the same unofficial site, but surely it makes sense to have a central, official, one-stop location for all your "who can I play with" needs?
A bit of search on the site shows they're moving in that direction. You can search for official "Encounters" sessions dotted around (although there're none near me), and they're working on something called a "virtual table" which might be for online play, but this is still all to link WotC to the players,= rather than the players to each other, and that seems like a pretty big deal to me.
I won't be buying any of the 5th edition stuff, for the same reason I didn't buy 4th or 3rd or... well, I do have some 2nd edition, but anyway.
I've wanted to play D&D since I first heard about it over 20 years ago, but the core problem has always been simple: I don't know anyone who plays D&D. I don't know how to find anyone who does. I've tried all the methods I can think of, found a few online group-finding sites and the like, but no go. I DID stumble across a 2nd Edition group not long after I left school who I played with for a handful of sessions, but then I moved away and lost touch. There aren't even any tabletop gaming shops here anymore; the last that stocked anything like D&D closed a couple of years ago, and just sold the books, no starter sessions or noticeboards or anything of the sort.
What I want from D&D right now is twofold; firstly, a decent, official, centralised, and above all *global* (I'm not in the US) grouping system to find people to play with. Maybe even go a little on the social networking side and let players say a little about themselves, their playstyles, and maybe even their characters if they have any they like to stick with. Secondly, a decent, official method of playing the games online; at the very least a chatroom with a map screen with tools for the DM to build it up quickly and easily, along with a LFG system and a friends list to help forming regular groups, preferably support for microphones/webcams, characters/enemy abilities/stat tracking, session saving, and while we're at it an easy way to print off the state of play for if you ever wind up with a great group, and decide you want to take it off the screen and get round a table, as Gygax intended. You don't have to expose all the rules of play if you still want people to buy the books, or heck, have each book contain an authorisation key to lets you use the features/skills/whatever that that book contains.
If either of those features already exist, then what I need is for them to be more public, because I've looked and haven't found them.
They're aiming to release them in November, and given the foundation only started up in mid-2009 that's hardly a long enough dev cycle to be accusing them of "vapourware" IMO.