"Everyone, and I mean everyone, who uses Linux will be impacted by the license."
I have to agree on this point. Everyone who uses Linux WILL be impacted by the license. Even Linus. Even me, and I choose to never use the GPL, as well. In fact, it's probably fair to say that they already HAVE been impacted by it. I have seen rants on Slashdot about it for quite some time now, and even participated in the discussions. Linus has had entire discussions devoted solely to the GPL V3 and how he refuses to use it. If you don't count lost time as an impact, you're insane.
On the other hand, it's probably the only on-track thing in TFA.
"If you think a Microsoft product sucks you can say that to great detail without having to be afraid of your job..."
This is also a beaut, mainly because he didn't say what he thinks he said. I say MS products suck all the time and I'm not afraid of my job. Not even afraid FOR my job. The company I work for doesn't care for MS products, either. And as a programmer, what part of my job should I be afraid of? Tux? Is he rabid or something?
And see, you'd be wrong about that. Final Fantasy Adventure (I believe) for the GB was my first FF. I played the SNES one when it came out. I loved all of them that I played up to that point. FF7 was disappointing for me as the intro was very boring, but it got better later. Enough better than I now count the game as a good one. FF8, 9, 10 were all great games. FF11 is amazingly lame. FF12 is boring.
The plot in FF12 would have to change pace dramatically, and actually have some content, to save it past the 20 hr mark. After 20 HOURS I care not a whit about any character. Any movie that lasted more than a hour and had me feeling like that would have had me walking out.
And before anyone says 'if you made it 20 hours, it must not have been that bad'... It's Final Fantasy. I kept telling myself it HAD to get better. I had friends telling me they like it. I had GameFAQs fanboys exclaiming how wonderful it is. And I had Fran's amazingly sexy voice. I basically lived for Fran cutscenes, just to hear that awesome accent. "The Mysthst comesths." Seriously. Awesome accent. Apparently it's the actress' native accent, too. Somehow that makes it even better.
That's a good point. I had a few minutes here, so I looked it up. The answer is: Both.
The United States owns the cameras used in floor debates, but C-Span uses their own cameras for hearings. C-Span even started to revoke their statement against Pelosi, but then found that some of their video was indeed among the stuff 'taken'.
One idea concerns me now, though... C-Span has initial access to all the video before anyone else, as far as I can tell. Doesn't that leave them open to corruption?
Their 70% art business plan shows. And by art, I mean graphics, not plot, storyline, etc. This has got to be the most boring FF yet. After about 20 hours of the game, I finally gave up. It had only once even slightly interested me in the plot, and not at all in the characters. (Except Fran, but not because of who she was as a character, but because she's a bunny-girl that doesn't wear much and has an amazing accent.)
The combat was okay at the beginning. Then you get a few gambits, and it's more fun. Then you get a lot of gambits and you realize the game really does just play itself. (If you're not a complete moron, I mean.) Except for boss fights, there's very little interaction necessary... Or even helpful. And boss fights only need interaction so you can pull off the mega-moves. -yawn-
Combine the lack of interest in combat with the lack of interest in the plot (of which there is NONE in the battlefield) and most of the game is totally boring.
Exactly. If you want it for 'free', get up off your lazy butts and go tape it yourself. If you want it for the low, low price of telling where it came from, you can now use C-Span's media.
Usually? I've never heard that before. 'Usually in your circles', you mean. The term didn't come into wide use until we hit the year 2000, and now it is a common abbreviation for years beginning with 2001. If you read '2k' as 'two thousand' you get two thousand seven from 2k7.
It is, but it doesn't come close to the best selling console games of all time, sadly. (16mil vs 30mil and 40mil)
Having said that, The Sims -is- a great game, but aimed at a different audience than their old games. I'm amazed at how many expansions they've managed to sell. Seasons? Pets? WTF?
Wright has said that all his Sim games are different, but in the same vein. The Sims was just a natural progression of it. Spore takes all this Sims games, plus some games like Civilization, and wraps them all into one. I find this amazingly hard to believe (even after seeing the videos) and I'm very much looking forward to finding out exactly how well it was all put together. If I tried it, I think it'd be amazingly disjointed and it would be like 8 seperate games, 1 after the other, instead of smoothly moving from stage to stage.
We'll see how it comes out.
As for the Wii... Wright has already said he plans to have it on ALL consoles, the PC, and even phones, I believe. There's not much change he'll ignore the Wii.
As others have already said, it comes down to the specifics. The clause is there to prevent you from bringing their trade secrets to a competitor.
The contract I signed is a little overly broad, but it doesn't stop me from working in IT altogether. Just a very small subsection. When I read that portion of the contract, I thought, 'Would I consider working for someone this might affect?' The answer was 'No.' Besides the legal obligation, I would not feel right taking their methods and practices to a competitor, and I wouldn't want to work for anyone else that was forbidden by the contract.
The short answer is: If you think it will actually prevent you from finding any work after you quit, then you should not accept that contract. If it only takes a small chunk of the market away from you, it is probably an okay contract.
Of course, if you're the type to only stay at a job for 6 months, then you'll definitely want to keep all your options open.
As a developer, I can say that Virtual Environments are great for quick checks if the program still runs properly. Once you get to where you want to be -sure- the program runs, and tune its performance, you need the actual machine.
It's like saying, 'I've got this great product. I've never actually tried it, but I know it's great because I used my imagination.'
As noted in other posts, you can't criticize the Turkish government unless you want to be arrested. How do you tell a government that it's done something stupid if you can't do so, even a little bit, without being arrested?
The answer is simple: You leak the information to the world and let them do it for you.
Are they driving the industry that makes computer products better and better? Yes.
Does having better products every year help you? Yes.
Seriously, just let them have their fun. Most of us can't afford to spend the mega-bucks on things that don't matter, but these people can, and they enjoy it. Let them have their fun while they inadvertently make the world a better place.
Besides, I'm sure you have some hobby that most people think it pointless, too.
No, I mean Lego brand building blocks. As this is a Lego brand game, I mean to talk about how they make games.
Someone pointed out that one of the Lego Racer games does allow you to actually make the cars from pieces. I haven't played that one. I've played almost all the other games at some point or another and none of the games I've played allow you to build the items from pieces. There's no reason to think this MMO will be any different.
The most interesting information in here is in an odd place. The 'Indie MMO' discussion. It actually has more to do with general indie games than MMOs in particularly. Paraphrased, they say 'Worry about quality, not being the biggest.' They talk about Puzzle Pirates (Which I never considered an MMO, but I guess it really is) and how they started with 6 guys willing to work themselves into an early grave trying to make the game take off. It STILL cost them $250,000 to make. Ouch! They make the money now to more than justify the initial expense, but I'm amazed at how much it costs to get off the ground.
I never felt the immersion in the old Testdrive games. Part of it was that the controls and feel weren't real enough, but mostly it was looking at the 'flatshade polygons'. I liked games back then, and they were great fun. They just didn't have the immersion. I never felt like I was driving the car or walking where the character was walking. It was always me telling an on-screen object what to do.
Today's 360 and PC games look realistic enough that I often feel like I'm really there. Like watching a movie. Try to get an average adult to watch a movie with 'flatshade polygons' used instead of live actors and scenes. You'd probably have to pay them a fair amount to sit through it.
The Wii gets around the graphics issue by presenting a different kind of immersion. Instead of telling an on-screen character what to do, you simply do it yourself, and the on-screen character mimicks you.
They both create immersion in different ways.
As for the 'scale' issue... You've now said it twice. So I ask, What scale should the Wii be on? If you honestly think the Wii scale should be out of 20 instead of out of 10 or some such, you are simply a fanboy. There is no sense in that, other than to say 'our scale is bigger, nyeh!' If you are saying the scale should not be based on how good/bad the game is, but some other quality... Why? Basing it on anything else is worthless, as the consumer only cares how good the game is. (Good/bad covers a LOT of ground, and you'd have to get pretty far off-base to find a quality that isn't covered by it.)
I'd rather have fun. Wii Tennis is not fun solo, and it is fun multi-player. Wii Bowling is fun solo, and it is not fun multiplayer. I've played both ways on all the Wii Sports games. I'd still rather play Samurai Warriors 2 Empires. It's more fun for me. If they made a version that had the graphics of the 360 and the WiiMote of the Wii, they -might- make it a little more fun. (I'm not convinced the Wii can handle the graphics well enough yet.)
As for 'realistic'... Did you just see that word in my response and ignore everything else I said? My topic was immersion, not realism. Realism is not fun. If I wanted realism, I'd go outside. The only time I said 'realistic' was in 'realistic graphics', which has absolutely nothing to do with medkits and player health.
'I'd much rather play Wii Sports [for example] then "Ghost Recon: Make Things Go Boom 2037 II Gold silver platnium edition."' [sic]
I would, too. However, I'm already pretty much sick of Wii Sports. If Wii Sports 2 had the same games with better graphics, it wouldn't interest me at all. The people who play GRMTGB2k372SPE and its sequels -are- interested in better, more realistic graphics each year. Why? Because immersion in that world means better graphics. Immersion for a Wii game means using the WiiMote as a object. They're just plain different, and meant for different people.
"Putting Wii games on the same scale as 360 games is just lame."
So you're thinking maybe Wii games should get letter grades or something, instead? Maybe you mean their scale should go to 11?
Wii games are not inherently more fun. I've had a lot more fun playing Samurai Warriors 2 Empires and Crackdown this last week than I had with Wario Ware Smooth Moves and Elebits. Both 360 games have got me wishing I could call in sick to work, where those 2 Wii games have me bored and regretting my purchase, respectively. Don't even get me started on Wii Play.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Wii. WiiSports Excite Truck, and Trauma Center: SO are excellent games. But the 360, PS2, DS, PC, etc, etc, all have good games as well.
"Ofcourse demo'ing the game is always better than reading a review."
That's not true at all. There's been plenty of games that I've played the demo and it did not interest me. Then I read a review, or talked to a friend about it (another form of review) and found out there was more to the game than what I saw in the demo. Quite a few games did hold my interest after all.
"The most useless part of a review is the grade, it says absolutely nothing, except what number the reviewer assigned."
While I agree with the fact that it is nothing but a number assigned by the reviewer, this is FAR from useless. I can look at the number and know immediately what the overall impression of the game was on the reviewer. 3.4/10? Oh, he didn't like it much. 9.8/10? Oh, he thought it was almost perfect. Purple? Oh, that's at the low end of the color spectrum, so he didn't think much of the article.
Don't assume that just because it's useless to you that everyone feels that way.
By your comments, I'm guessing that you've never played any of the Lego video games. None of them let you actually build anything. It's all pre-fab and just looks like Lego. (I believe there's program that lets you build with virtual Lego, but it's not a 'game' it's more of a modeling environment.)
Having said that, Second Life has 2 sections: Teen and regular. The Teen section is not filled with sex shops. What makes you think Lego won't monitor the content of their MMO and actively fight stupidity and vulgarity on a kiddie game?
I can't resist taking a shot at all the Lego nazis: Legos.
Actually, quite the opposite, as I remember. All the 'patrons' exclaimed how wonderful the coffee was.
Is this the first known attempt at an astroturf campaign? I say 'attempt' because it was very poorly done and failed miserably. Nobody in their right mind truly believed those people acted like that, and they aired it on national TV, as there was no other medium available.
"Is this a misuse of copyright law in order to stifle dissent?"
If it is, it totally failed! I'd have -never- heard of this if they hadn't done this. Now it's got more publicity than the little website could have handled, had it been up. (Does this count as a pre-slashdotting? ie: Site goes down before it's on slashdot.)
Before, should I happen to see something about this in passing, I'd have said 'Pfft. Activists.' and carried on. Now I -know- the mining industry wants this hushed. Suddenly, it seems a little more interesting and probable.
I find the idea of multiple Processing Unit slots on the motherboard that can each take different type of chips to be very interesting. I'm not sure how well it will work, though. The article mentions 5 types that already exist: CPU, GPU, APU, PPU and AIPU. (Okay, the last doesn't exist yet, but company is working on it.) There's only 4 slots on that motherboard that's shown. I definitely do NOT want to see a situation where the common user is considering ripping out his AIPU for a while and using a PPU, then switching back later. I can only imagine the tech support nightmares that will cause.
So the options are to have more slots, or make something I like to call an 'interface card'. See, there'll be these slots on the motherboard that cards fit into... wait, don't we have this already?
And more slots isn't really an option because the computer would end up being massive with all the cooling fans and memory slots. (Which are apparently seperate for each PU.)
I kind of hope I get proven wrong on this one, but I don't think this is such a great idea. Just very interesting. Having 16 slots and being able to say you want 4 AIPUs, an APU, 4 GPUs, 3 PPUs, and 4 CPUs on my gaming rig and 1 GPU, 1 APU, and 14 CPUs on my work rig would be awesome.
By busy-work, I mean work that was given JUST to have given homework, not given for a specific reason. Maybe you've never had a teacher like that. If so, you're very blessed. Your kinds would all fall under the good homework in my categories.
As for the writing essays not being learning re-inforcement... Have you written many essays? Were you good at it? I'm betting you don't like them because you never figured out the technique. (Most people don't.)
I become good at essays once I realized that there was a simple pattern. The teachers even tell you about it! 5-3-5. 5 paragraphs, 3 points, 5 sentences each. If you practice this pattern enough, you can write an essay about anything and get an A on the paper. It's amazingly stupid. By the time I got to college, it was nothing. So that writing class in college that everyone hates, I didn't care. I did most of my essays in-class. This was a trick that was usually reserved for those 'test' essays where the teacher sets aside the entire class just for that test. Most people don't finish on time. I have never failed to finish one of those. I usually have enough time to re-write the entire thing again and iron it out.
I agree that all bets are off for bad teachers. That's a given. But a disagree about not sending a kid home to do it for another hour, after he/she understands it. Understand is the first step, not the last. Practice needs to be applied to have it fully sink in. Some kids can get that amount of practice in-class from the examples and be done. Most cannot, and have to go home and work at it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Everyone, and I mean everyone, who uses Linux will be impacted by the license."
I have to agree on this point. Everyone who uses Linux WILL be impacted by the license. Even Linus. Even me, and I choose to never use the GPL, as well. In fact, it's probably fair to say that they already HAVE been impacted by it. I have seen rants on Slashdot about it for quite some time now, and even participated in the discussions. Linus has had entire discussions devoted solely to the GPL V3 and how he refuses to use it. If you don't count lost time as an impact, you're insane.
On the other hand, it's probably the only on-track thing in TFA.
"If you think a Microsoft product sucks you can say that to great detail without having to be afraid of your job..."
This is also a beaut, mainly because he didn't say what he thinks he said. I say MS products suck all the time and I'm not afraid of my job. Not even afraid FOR my job. The company I work for doesn't care for MS products, either. And as a programmer, what part of my job should I be afraid of? Tux? Is he rabid or something?
And see, you'd be wrong about that. Final Fantasy Adventure (I believe) for the GB was my first FF. I played the SNES one when it came out. I loved all of them that I played up to that point. FF7 was disappointing for me as the intro was very boring, but it got better later. Enough better than I now count the game as a good one. FF8, 9, 10 were all great games. FF11 is amazingly lame. FF12 is boring.
... It's Final Fantasy. I kept telling myself it HAD to get better. I had friends telling me they like it. I had GameFAQs fanboys exclaiming how wonderful it is. And I had Fran's amazingly sexy voice. I basically lived for Fran cutscenes, just to hear that awesome accent. "The Mysthst comesths." Seriously. Awesome accent. Apparently it's the actress' native accent, too. Somehow that makes it even better.
The plot in FF12 would have to change pace dramatically, and actually have some content, to save it past the 20 hr mark. After 20 HOURS I care not a whit about any character. Any movie that lasted more than a hour and had me feeling like that would have had me walking out.
And before anyone says 'if you made it 20 hours, it must not have been that bad'
That's a good point. I had a few minutes here, so I looked it up. The answer is: Both.
/ my.blog/22607-who-owns-video-of-congress-a-crack-i n-the-c-span-business-model.html
The United States owns the cameras used in floor debates, but C-Span uses their own cameras for hearings. C-Span even started to revoke their statement against Pelosi, but then found that some of their video was indeed among the stuff 'taken'.
One idea concerns me now, though... C-Span has initial access to all the video before anyone else, as far as I can tell. Doesn't that leave them open to corruption?
http://www.themoneyblogs.com/siliconvalleywatcher
Their 70% art business plan shows. And by art, I mean graphics, not plot, storyline, etc. This has got to be the most boring FF yet. After about 20 hours of the game, I finally gave up. It had only once even slightly interested me in the plot, and not at all in the characters. (Except Fran, but not because of who she was as a character, but because she's a bunny-girl that doesn't wear much and has an amazing accent.)
The combat was okay at the beginning. Then you get a few gambits, and it's more fun. Then you get a lot of gambits and you realize the game really does just play itself. (If you're not a complete moron, I mean.) Except for boss fights, there's very little interaction necessary... Or even helpful. And boss fights only need interaction so you can pull off the mega-moves. -yawn-
Combine the lack of interest in combat with the lack of interest in the plot (of which there is NONE in the battlefield) and most of the game is totally boring.
Looked nice, though, for a PS2 game.
Exactly. If you want it for 'free', get up off your lazy butts and go tape it yourself. If you want it for the low, low price of telling where it came from, you can now use C-Span's media.
And I've seen more X brand drives. (No, I'm not even going to bother naming them, but it's not Samsung.)
As they say, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Usually? I've never heard that before. 'Usually in your circles', you mean. The term didn't come into wide use until we hit the year 2000, and now it is a common abbreviation for years beginning with 2001. If you read '2k' as 'two thousand' you get two thousand seven from 2k7.
http://www.wordspy.com/words/2K1.asp
How did you make it to 2007 without knowing this, anyhow?
2700 would be 2.7k in any other field, btw. 2k7 is an odd way to say it.
The other response said The Sims was the best selling PC game of all time, but didn't bother to cite it.
_ computer_and_video_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling
It is, but it doesn't come close to the best selling console games of all time, sadly. (16mil vs 30mil and 40mil)
Having said that, The Sims -is- a great game, but aimed at a different audience than their old games. I'm amazed at how many expansions they've managed to sell. Seasons? Pets? WTF?
Wright has said that all his Sim games are different, but in the same vein. The Sims was just a natural progression of it. Spore takes all this Sims games, plus some games like Civilization, and wraps them all into one. I find this amazingly hard to believe (even after seeing the videos) and I'm very much looking forward to finding out exactly how well it was all put together. If I tried it, I think it'd be amazingly disjointed and it would be like 8 seperate games, 1 after the other, instead of smoothly moving from stage to stage.
We'll see how it comes out.
As for the Wii... Wright has already said he plans to have it on ALL consoles, the PC, and even phones, I believe. There's not much change he'll ignore the Wii.
As others have already said, it comes down to the specifics. The clause is there to prevent you from bringing their trade secrets to a competitor.
The contract I signed is a little overly broad, but it doesn't stop me from working in IT altogether. Just a very small subsection. When I read that portion of the contract, I thought, 'Would I consider working for someone this might affect?' The answer was 'No.' Besides the legal obligation, I would not feel right taking their methods and practices to a competitor, and I wouldn't want to work for anyone else that was forbidden by the contract.
The short answer is: If you think it will actually prevent you from finding any work after you quit, then you should not accept that contract. If it only takes a small chunk of the market away from you, it is probably an okay contract.
Of course, if you're the type to only stay at a job for 6 months, then you'll definitely want to keep all your options open.
As a developer, I can say that Virtual Environments are great for quick checks if the program still runs properly. Once you get to where you want to be -sure- the program runs, and tune its performance, you need the actual machine.
It's like saying, 'I've got this great product. I've never actually tried it, but I know it's great because I used my imagination.'
As noted in other posts, you can't criticize the Turkish government unless you want to be arrested. How do you tell a government that it's done something stupid if you can't do so, even a little bit, without being arrested?
The answer is simple: You leak the information to the world and let them do it for you.
Sounds like someone's a little jealous.
Are they hurting you in any way? No.
Are they driving the industry that makes computer products better and better? Yes.
Does having better products every year help you? Yes.
Seriously, just let them have their fun. Most of us can't afford to spend the mega-bucks on things that don't matter, but these people can, and they enjoy it. Let them have their fun while they inadvertently make the world a better place.
Besides, I'm sure you have some hobby that most people think it pointless, too.
No, I mean Lego brand building blocks. As this is a Lego brand game, I mean to talk about how they make games.
Someone pointed out that one of the Lego Racer games does allow you to actually make the cars from pieces. I haven't played that one. I've played almost all the other games at some point or another and none of the games I've played allow you to build the items from pieces. There's no reason to think this MMO will be any different.
Seems like an odd name for it. Is that English or Russian?
The most interesting information in here is in an odd place. The 'Indie MMO' discussion. It actually has more to do with general indie games than MMOs in particularly. Paraphrased, they say 'Worry about quality, not being the biggest.' They talk about Puzzle Pirates (Which I never considered an MMO, but I guess it really is) and how they started with 6 guys willing to work themselves into an early grave trying to make the game take off. It STILL cost them $250,000 to make. Ouch! They make the money now to more than justify the initial expense, but I'm amazed at how much it costs to get off the ground.
I never felt the immersion in the old Testdrive games. Part of it was that the controls and feel weren't real enough, but mostly it was looking at the 'flatshade polygons'. I liked games back then, and they were great fun. They just didn't have the immersion. I never felt like I was driving the car or walking where the character was walking. It was always me telling an on-screen object what to do.
Today's 360 and PC games look realistic enough that I often feel like I'm really there. Like watching a movie. Try to get an average adult to watch a movie with 'flatshade polygons' used instead of live actors and scenes. You'd probably have to pay them a fair amount to sit through it.
The Wii gets around the graphics issue by presenting a different kind of immersion. Instead of telling an on-screen character what to do, you simply do it yourself, and the on-screen character mimicks you.
They both create immersion in different ways.
As for the 'scale' issue... You've now said it twice. So I ask, What scale should the Wii be on? If you honestly think the Wii scale should be out of 20 instead of out of 10 or some such, you are simply a fanboy. There is no sense in that, other than to say 'our scale is bigger, nyeh!' If you are saying the scale should not be based on how good/bad the game is, but some other quality... Why? Basing it on anything else is worthless, as the consumer only cares how good the game is. (Good/bad covers a LOT of ground, and you'd have to get pretty far off-base to find a quality that isn't covered by it.)
I'd rather have fun. Wii Tennis is not fun solo, and it is fun multi-player. Wii Bowling is fun solo, and it is not fun multiplayer. I've played both ways on all the Wii Sports games. I'd still rather play Samurai Warriors 2 Empires. It's more fun for me. If they made a version that had the graphics of the 360 and the WiiMote of the Wii, they -might- make it a little more fun. (I'm not convinced the Wii can handle the graphics well enough yet.)
As for 'realistic'... Did you just see that word in my response and ignore everything else I said? My topic was immersion, not realism. Realism is not fun. If I wanted realism, I'd go outside. The only time I said 'realistic' was in 'realistic graphics', which has absolutely nothing to do with medkits and player health.
'I'd much rather play Wii Sports [for example] then "Ghost Recon: Make Things Go Boom 2037 II Gold silver platnium edition."' [sic]
I would, too. However, I'm already pretty much sick of Wii Sports. If Wii Sports 2 had the same games with better graphics, it wouldn't interest me at all. The people who play GRMTGB2k372SPE and its sequels -are- interested in better, more realistic graphics each year. Why? Because immersion in that world means better graphics. Immersion for a Wii game means using the WiiMote as a object. They're just plain different, and meant for different people.
"Putting Wii games on the same scale as 360 games is just lame."
So you're thinking maybe Wii games should get letter grades or something, instead? Maybe you mean their scale should go to 11?
Wii games are not inherently more fun. I've had a lot more fun playing Samurai Warriors 2 Empires and Crackdown this last week than I had with Wario Ware Smooth Moves and Elebits. Both 360 games have got me wishing I could call in sick to work, where those 2 Wii games have me bored and regretting my purchase, respectively. Don't even get me started on Wii Play.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Wii. WiiSports Excite Truck, and Trauma Center: SO are excellent games. But the 360, PS2, DS, PC, etc, etc, all have good games as well.
"Ofcourse demo'ing the game is always better than reading a review."
That's not true at all. There's been plenty of games that I've played the demo and it did not interest me. Then I read a review, or talked to a friend about it (another form of review) and found out there was more to the game than what I saw in the demo. Quite a few games did hold my interest after all.
"The most useless part of a review is the grade, it says absolutely nothing, except what number the reviewer assigned."
While I agree with the fact that it is nothing but a number assigned by the reviewer, this is FAR from useless. I can look at the number and know immediately what the overall impression of the game was on the reviewer. 3.4/10? Oh, he didn't like it much. 9.8/10? Oh, he thought it was almost perfect. Purple? Oh, that's at the low end of the color spectrum, so he didn't think much of the article.
Don't assume that just because it's useless to you that everyone feels that way.
By your comments, I'm guessing that you've never played any of the Lego video games. None of them let you actually build anything. It's all pre-fab and just looks like Lego. (I believe there's program that lets you build with virtual Lego, but it's not a 'game' it's more of a modeling environment.)
Having said that, Second Life has 2 sections: Teen and regular. The Teen section is not filled with sex shops. What makes you think Lego won't monitor the content of their MMO and actively fight stupidity and vulgarity on a kiddie game?
I can't resist taking a shot at all the Lego nazis: Legos.
Open Source giveth, and Open Source taketh away.
BTW, how's that the 'war against spammers'? Sounds like this weapon is FOR spammers.
(Showing my age here...)
"Of course, no one ever did."
Actually, quite the opposite, as I remember. All the 'patrons' exclaimed how wonderful the coffee was.
Is this the first known attempt at an astroturf campaign? I say 'attempt' because it was very poorly done and failed miserably. Nobody in their right mind truly believed those people acted like that, and they aired it on national TV, as there was no other medium available.
"Is this a misuse of copyright law in order to stifle dissent?"
If it is, it totally failed! I'd have -never- heard of this if they hadn't done this. Now it's got more publicity than the little website could have handled, had it been up. (Does this count as a pre-slashdotting? ie: Site goes down before it's on slashdot.)
Before, should I happen to see something about this in passing, I'd have said 'Pfft. Activists.' and carried on. Now I -know- the mining industry wants this hushed. Suddenly, it seems a little more interesting and probable.
I find the idea of multiple Processing Unit slots on the motherboard that can each take different type of chips to be very interesting. I'm not sure how well it will work, though. The article mentions 5 types that already exist: CPU, GPU, APU, PPU and AIPU. (Okay, the last doesn't exist yet, but company is working on it.) There's only 4 slots on that motherboard that's shown. I definitely do NOT want to see a situation where the common user is considering ripping out his AIPU for a while and using a PPU, then switching back later. I can only imagine the tech support nightmares that will cause.
So the options are to have more slots, or make something I like to call an 'interface card'. See, there'll be these slots on the motherboard that cards fit into... wait, don't we have this already?
And more slots isn't really an option because the computer would end up being massive with all the cooling fans and memory slots. (Which are apparently seperate for each PU.)
I kind of hope I get proven wrong on this one, but I don't think this is such a great idea. Just very interesting. Having 16 slots and being able to say you want 4 AIPUs, an APU, 4 GPUs, 3 PPUs, and 4 CPUs on my gaming rig and 1 GPU, 1 APU, and 14 CPUs on my work rig would be awesome.
By busy-work, I mean work that was given JUST to have given homework, not given for a specific reason. Maybe you've never had a teacher like that. If so, you're very blessed. Your kinds would all fall under the good homework in my categories.
As for the writing essays not being learning re-inforcement... Have you written many essays? Were you good at it? I'm betting you don't like them because you never figured out the technique. (Most people don't.)
I become good at essays once I realized that there was a simple pattern. The teachers even tell you about it! 5-3-5. 5 paragraphs, 3 points, 5 sentences each. If you practice this pattern enough, you can write an essay about anything and get an A on the paper. It's amazingly stupid. By the time I got to college, it was nothing. So that writing class in college that everyone hates, I didn't care. I did most of my essays in-class. This was a trick that was usually reserved for those 'test' essays where the teacher sets aside the entire class just for that test. Most people don't finish on time. I have never failed to finish one of those. I usually have enough time to re-write the entire thing again and iron it out.
That's learned.
Links in case anyone wonders about it:
http://essayinfo.com/essays/5-paragraph_essay.php
http://www.englishdiscourse.org/5.paragraph.essay. format.html
I agree that all bets are off for bad teachers. That's a given. But a disagree about not sending a kid home to do it for another hour, after he/she understands it. Understand is the first step, not the last. Practice needs to be applied to have it fully sink in. Some kids can get that amount of practice in-class from the examples and be done. Most cannot, and have to go home and work at it.