The reason for the Millennium Tie-In was to provide some closure for the Millennium viewers, since the show was canceled between seasons, with a cliffhanger season finale. Carter decided to attempt to wrap up the show in an episode of the X-Files, and hey, he can do it, they were both his shows. ---
I can hear CRT's quite well. There's nothing in the world that bothers me so much as an old Apple II monitor that's left on, with the computer turned off.
I can hear the TV in my living room from my bedroom, even if it's muted or receiving no signal, and the same goes for my computer monitor, you could blindfold me, march me into the same room, and I could tell you if it was on or off. My dad, and several of my instructors, on the other hand, always look at me strange when I say that I can hear the CRT's, but it's quite easy, just there on the bare edge of your perception....
No, actually Apple said last winter that there'd be a public beta at MacWorld New York, and would ship in January 2001. Before that, they said it'd ship in July 2000 at MacWorld. Today, they pushed the schedule back even further, with the Public Beta slated for September, and shipping now in "Early" 2001, not January.
At this rate, I'd expect it to ship next June. ---
Actually, you high-school government class is either oversimplifying or just wrong. The courts have ruled that they are the Consitutionally-mandated interpreters of the law, but that's an inherently circular argument. The Constitution never defines the "judicial Power" granted in the Constitution; multiple interpretations can be given to that grant, and only in some of them do the courts have the right to determine the scope of that grant. For example, it can be argued that the "judicial Power" only means the powers granted the courts under English law in the 18th Century; this is much more limited than the role that U.S. courts claim for themselves.
While it's true the Constitution never defined "Judicial Power", it did mandate that the Judicial Branch have the power to interpret the Constitution and judge whether or not a law is in violation of the Constitution. The power of Judicial Review, the ability to strike down and unconstitutional law or act, was assumed by the Court in the case of Marbury v. Madison. It was really the only choice the court had, what would be the point of having them interpret the constitution if their interpretation carried no weight? ---
I personally, would just like to advocate giving up on the hacker/cracker debate. My initial reaction when seeing the headline was wondering how Saltine's could have gotten into the equipment.
Once a word, such as hackers, has made it's way into the lexicon so deeply, you can't reverse it.
Take politically correct words, which have social stigma attached to the incorrect words. How many of us take the time to say Native American instead of Indian? Or African-American instead of black? Why should John Q. Public or Jane P. Media take the time to care about hacker vs. cracker? Especially when everyone knows what a hacker is, right?
And cracker already has two definitions, does it need more? It's already a slang term for a white redneck, as well as a tasty high-carb treat. ---
That seems pretty stupid, considering they already have the unique CD-Keys for copy-protection.
Any retailer dumb enough to not want to sell a TON of Diablo II copies because of a lack of Copy Protection is only short-changing themselves.
In the tiny town of Cedar Falls, Iowa, Software, Etc. had 175 copies pre-ordered. I can't imagine the volumes sold in many bigger markets. Of course, this pales in comparison with the pre-orders of some consoles and their titles. ---
If you look on the little yellow troubleshooting note that came with the game. It says "Some Kenwood drives may have problems, check out http://www.blizzard.com/support/ for the solution"
Guess who has one of those Kenwood drives? Guess who can't install the game? There's no info there pertaining to the problem, and an e-mail to their tech support 4 hours ago hasn't produced a response yet.
Meanwhile, I'm now installing the game from my CD-RW drive. It only writes at 2X, I'm hoping it reads faster than that, or that the full install doesn't use the CD much.
If all else fails, I'm going to have to yank my Kenwood 52X and put in a DVD-ROM drive I brought home from work. I was a closed beta tester for this game, and I had the same problem then. Why didn't Blizzard fix this? No other CD has problems with my drive. ---
The Software, Etc. where I picked my game up today (Cedar Falls, Iowa) opened my box in front of me, as they did everyone else's. Apparently they received several copies that only had two of the three CD's inside. They were missing the Cinematics disc. Thankfully, my copy had all three CD's. Did anyone else experience this, or are the guys at my store smoking crack? ---
Why deal with the FAA at all? They don't own space. Take it to Mexico or some other country with lax Aerospace laws. If you're gonna spend a quarter of a million to build your rocket, you can drop another 50,000 to move it to a country you can blast off from legally.
Otherwise, just launch it regardless of FAA permission. If you fail and it blows up, who cares, you're dead. If you succeed, you'll be a hero in the court of public opinion, and the FAA would have a PR nightmare on it's hands if it attmpted to arrest/fine you upon your return.
Has anyone ever read or watched Destination Moon? It was a story written by Robert A. Heinlein, and made into a movie in the 50's. Pretty entertaining stuff, and actually scientifically plausible (for the most part). It's available on DVD. The launch of the rocket in that book/movie is much the same, in that they just take off despite being denied official permission. ---
Iowa State didn't have a proxy, or, more accurately a caching server when I was there. I graduated in 1999. UNI, however, does have several of Cobalt's raq caching servers in place to cache, the ICN or Iowa Communication Network added caching servers this spring also. It's kind of a pain when you are authoring web pages on an off-campus server. Even with those caching servers in place, it's still slow. ---
The University of Northern Iowa, where I work, has only 5 T1 lines for it's 13,000 students. I think our net connection is slow as hell. The network admin guys blame the Iowa Communication Network, and their connection to PSINet. Iowa State University, where I got my degree, goes through the same connection, and it was never this slow.
Ahh, so they know that X protein is produced by a gene at Y location. But what effect X has on the human body, if any, is completely unknown at this time.
So next, do they create mice with that gene knocked out and see what's wrong with them?
I guess my own analogy for this would be that now they know where all the light switches are in a vast room of indicator lights. They know that switch A1 turns on and off light 2X, but they don't know what 2X indicates or affects. ---
I have a question, pardon me if this is somewhat stupid, but in everything I've read about the HGP, I've never seen it mentioned.
Whose DNA have they sequenced? Isn't everyone's somewhat unique? How do they take an "average" person's DNA, considering all of us have something unique, and/or some type of mutation in our genome. Don't get me wrong, I'm in total support of the HGP, I think it'll revolutionize medicine. I'm just curious as to what sampling methods they employ.
NPR is also great because you get more than a 30 second sound-bite of news. They're not afraid to dedicate 7 minutes of airtime to a story about something that will never even be reported in the national media.
Morning Edition accompanies me to work, and All Things Considered takes me home. And for all of us geeks out there, there's always Science Friday. It's all much more interesting to listen to in the car than the Backstreet Boys.
Now if they just had a better time for the computer show, it's on at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings here....yuck...
Our local affiliate, KUNI, broadcasts from two floors above my office, and they stream the broadcasts too! ---
When I lived in the dorms at Iowa State University, I used to pick up people on my 900mhz phone all the time. One night my friends and I listend to a girl who lived 3 floors below me talk to her boyfriend at Purdue for 2 hours. We could hear both of them, but they couldn't hear us for some reason. It was rather funny, he kept asking her if she was masturbating because she missed him, because he was, "because he missed her so much".
It made me wary of ever saying anything too personal over my cordless phone! Are there any encrypted consumer phones available? ---
Re:Amusing standards compliance related crash...
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Mozilla M16 Released
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· Score: 2
It seems to crash pretty well on my webcam page too, but perhaps it's just the Windows version that doesn't like it. The URL is http://www.sethb.com/webcam.html if anyone else wants to try it.:)
Mozilla has come a long ways, I'm hoping that it'll get ported to the BeOS soon. The last milestone I've seen ported was 8.
The three things I consider missing from the BeOS at this point are a good web browser (NetPositive is lacking in many areas), a decent IMAP client (all they have right now are some that will retrieve the mail via IMAP and dump it into your local mailbox), and multiple user support. Having Mozilla ported would solve two of those three. ---
I submitted this story, with the link to the less-sensational Crimson story, several days ago. It got rejected, I guess I should have looked around for something written with more editorial content.
2000-06-09 14:45:45 Intel makes Harvard hide iMacs during Intel-sponsored event (articles,intel) (rejected)
Normally I bypass all these posts too, but I used to get my news from Slashdot, now I just see old news here. Can we get some submission guidelines written up, so we don't waste our time submitting things over and over again?
To keep this relatively on topic, I don't think that Intel did it necessarily to hide their competitors products, but they could have made an effort to accomodate the students a little more, that's for sure. ---
Re:Stress testers (many of them) are misjudging
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Diablo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 3
Absolutely, I was one of the closed testers also (look for Seth Bokelman in the game credits:) ) and it was a much more enjoyable experience than the stress test. I've been telling all of my friends that the game is easily worth buying the day it comes out, I wasted numerous hours just playing as the Paladin character class, I never even had time to get into the other four!
There's much more that varies between the character classes than there were in the first game. The skill trees have some really unique stuff to them, I can't wait to see the really high-powered spells that the sorceress and necromancer classes have.
This is a sequel, much like Microsoft's Age of Kings, which is truly much better than it's forebearer, it's not simply a glorified expansion pack, or a couple new features, but a completely new experience, using all of the elements that made the first game a giant success, yet improving every aspect of the gameplay in a logical and much-appreciated manner.
Go Blizzard, I've gotta order my copy now, it's too bad we closed beta folks didn't get a free copy, but TANSTAAFL...
I do wish they hadn't made the closed list public, I got e-mail from people I didn't know asking me if they could get my CD Key, etc. ---
A lot of people tend to forget the temperature of Mars when talking about colonizing/terraforming it. A balmy day on Mars is equivalent to a cold day in Antartica or therabouts, so Johnny Appleseed isn't going to be planting trees all over Mars anytime soon. Some sort of greenhouse effect will be needed to warm the planet before you plant a rain forest there, not to mention you've got to water all those plants as well!
We're gonna need machinery here, not plants folks. ---
The problem is, no one follows the "standards" the same way. Take HTML for example, not every page is compatible between Netscape and IE. Wait, hold on, those two are guilty of extending the markup language on their own, but what about the other browsers? Opera, Mozilla, iCab, Lynx, etc. They each have their own glitches and they each will render pages differently. Now, throw in the differences between operating systems on top of that, and you know why it's so hard to make web pages that work well and look good across every platform and browser.
I personally just want to use whatever works well, and I want it to be the same. I support PC's for a living, and it's bad enough have millions of combinations of hardware and drivers to contend with, I'd at least like to keep the OS possibilities in the single digits.
That said, I don't support everything Microsoft has done. Their tactics with the OEM vendors are despicable, but at the same time, the libertarian inside of me points out that those OEM vendors signed the contracts, no one forced them to do so, thus my sorrow for them is greatly mitigated.
There is a great advantage to having a somewhat standardized Operating System. One of my greatest frustrations with Linux is the amount of variance in the systems and the versions of the libraries they include. That doesn't mean I don't like Linux, it just means I'm not going to use it as my primary desktop OS anytime soon, the BeOS has a much better chance with me. ---
I will never feel sorry for a record company as long as CD's cost more than cassette tapes do. IIRC, casettes cost at least 50% more to produce than CD's do, yet cost 40% less. Can someone explain that logic to me? My best guess is that since the CD's are higher quality, then the consumer will pay for it anyhow, but I'd like to hear the question put to the RIAA, and find out what their official response is.
Along the same lines, I suspect that DVD's don't cost much more to produce than VHS tapes do, other than the cost of creating the extra content and getting someone to "program" the menus, etc. on the disc, but I could be wrong...
That said, at least 75% of the MP3's on my computer are ripped from my own CD's. I would never have bought the CD's for most of the ones that aren't, as I tend to buy CD's that contain 50+ minutes of GOOD music, as opposed to 2 good songs and a whole lotta crap. MP3 doesn't really work for me if I want to listen to my Glory Soundtrack or to my Simon and Garfunkel CD, as those CD's are meant really to be played all the way through. I defy anyone to say the same thing about Mariah Carey's latest CD.
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What about the Mayflower Trilogy?
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New Ender Sequel
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· Score: 2
I like most of Card's work, I eagerly anticipated each volume in the Homecoming series. While I enjoy the Ender series a great deal, I'd MUCH rather see a sequel to Lovelock (The Mayflower Trilogy, Part I) than YAEB (Yet Another Ender Book).
Lovelock was a truly original Sci-Fi book that Card cowrote with Kathryn H. Kidd. I enjoyed it immensely, but it was published in 1995 and there is still no sequel out. Does anyone know when and if "Rasputin" will be available?
That said, no one has toppled Heinlein as my favorite Sci-Fi author yet, but out of all of the current writers in the field, Card probably has the best chance. ---
The ACT/SAT requirements seem rather big to me as well. I didn't really try on the SAT, only got an 1180 (I slept 2 hours the night before and fell asleep during the test) because I'd already gotten a 30 on my ACT the first time I took it as a junior in high school, and that was good enough to go anywhere I was going to afford. But wow, a 32, my 30 was the highest score from my high school in SEVEN YEARS, the next closest people in my class got 24's.
Say what you want about our school system, I won't defend it, but to me, this seems to be cutting the percentage of people who can attend down to about 1% of the population, and frankly, most people that smart or motivated probably have the money to pay to go back to school if they'd like to, or have found something they enjoy doing already.
Of course, if I could take the ACT now, I could probably score a 32, I didn't even get Trig until my senior year in high school, and my math score killed me:
Taken spring of '93: Overall: 30 Math: 24 English: 28 Science Reasoning: 33 Reading Comprehension: 36
So what's my point? My degree is in Psych, I could see myself wanting to do something like this someday, but if _I_ don't qualify, I feel a lot of people who would benefit from this program won't either... ---
Nvidia will have to go a long long ways to sell me on their cards again. My first 3D card was the Intergraph Intense 3D Voodoo, a Voodoo Rush card. In case you don't know, they were a 2D/3D card that came out shortly after the original Voodoo cards (Voodoo 1 and 2 were only 3D cards, requiring a separate graphics card for 2D). It opened my eyes to the wonders of 3D Hardware assisted gaming. Now, the Voodoo Rush was certainly a flawed card, it was actually slower than the original Voodoo card, and many games had problems with it, requiring some patching. I used the card for about a year and a half, then bought myself a shiny new STB Velocity 4400, based on Nvidia's TNT chipset, I got the first one that came to Ames, Iowa. My experience with the TNT was very negative. I am a user with a clue, and I still had considerable troubles, and the problems were with getting the thing to work in games, without waiting six months for them to be patched to a playable state. Two games which I never got completely playable to my satisfaction were Final Fantasy 7 and Unreal. Unreal was just plain slow via Direct3D, it ran much faster on my Voodoo Rush card than it ever did on my TNT, although it was like a new game every week as Tim Sweeney and crew gradually patched it from an unplayable slideshow into a marginally playable game. Final Fantasy 7 required over ten calls and e-mails back and forth with Eidos/Squaresoft to finally get the game patched and working correctly. Just when you'd finally get it working, the newest drivers for the TNT would come out, and it'd break again. I finally ditched my TNT last May for a Voodoo 3 3000. This is by far the best video card experience I've had to date. 3dfx has enourmous market share, and EVERYTHING is tested on their hardware before it ships, not afterwards. I, for one, also enjoy dusting off some of my older games from time to time, and watching them scream on new computers, Glide compatibility is great. Some new games, like Diablo II (I'm one of the lucky 1,000 beta testers) still use Glide for some of their rendering. I have not had one instance of "I can't play that because I have an X brand video card, and they haven't patched it yet" which is something I experienced too many times on the other boards. That said, these benchmarks only reinforce my decision to get a Voodoo 5 5500. I play my games at 1024x768, which is precisely where the Voodoo5 scores are beating the GeForce, and the drivers still have plenty of room to mature, I'm sure. I'm generally not one to blindly follow a certain company, regardless of how their products actually are, but I'll have to see a bigger margin in performance before I think of ditching 3dfx. No, I don't work for them, no I don't own any of their stock, but I do suggest their products to anyone who will listen to me, and who wants to buy the latest game on the shelves, and not have to wait two months for driver/patch issues to be resolved. ---
Re:I speak for myself when I say...
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Athlons Sold Out
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· Score: 2
Are any of the BIG system vendors (Gateway, Dell, Micron, etc.) selling corporate Athlon systems? I'd love to implement some, but so far all I've seen are systems aimed at consumers. Gateway has their "Select" line, but I want my systems to come with Windows 2000 on them, as well as having the management features of the Dell Optiplex line or the Gateway E-XXXX lines. The other thing preventing me from using Athlons, at this point, is the numerous gripes I've heard about getting X video card to work, or the right RAM, etc. I don't mind doing a lot of research and fiddling with my own machine, but things like that can become a nightmare when you have to support 250 of them! ---
Slashdot Mirror
The reason for the Millennium Tie-In was to provide some closure for the Millennium viewers, since the show was canceled between seasons, with a cliffhanger season finale. Carter decided to attempt to wrap up the show in an episode of the X-Files, and hey, he can do it, they were both his shows.
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I can hear CRT's quite well. There's nothing in the world that bothers me so much as an old Apple II monitor that's left on, with the computer turned off.
I can hear the TV in my living room from my bedroom, even if it's muted or receiving no signal, and the same goes for my computer monitor, you could blindfold me, march me into the same room, and I could tell you if it was on or off. My dad, and several of my instructors, on the other hand, always look at me strange when I say that I can hear the CRT's, but it's quite easy, just there on the bare edge of your perception....
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No, actually Apple said last winter that there'd be a public beta at MacWorld New York, and would ship in January 2001. Before that, they said it'd ship in July 2000 at MacWorld. Today, they pushed the schedule back even further, with the Public Beta slated for September, and shipping now in "Early" 2001, not January.
At this rate, I'd expect it to ship next June.
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Actually, you high-school government class is either oversimplifying or just wrong. The courts have ruled that they are the Consitutionally-mandated interpreters of the law, but that's an inherently circular argument. The Constitution never defines the "judicial Power" granted in the Constitution; multiple interpretations can be given to that grant, and only in some of them do the courts have the right to determine the scope of that grant. For example, it can be argued that the "judicial Power" only means the powers granted the courts under English law in the 18th Century; this is much more limited than the role that U.S. courts claim for themselves.
While it's true the Constitution never defined "Judicial Power", it did mandate that the Judicial Branch have the power to interpret the Constitution and judge whether or not a law is in violation of the Constitution. The power of Judicial Review, the ability to strike down and unconstitutional law or act, was assumed by the Court in the case of Marbury v. Madison. It was really the only choice the court had, what would be the point of having them interpret the constitution if their interpretation carried no weight?
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I personally, would just like to advocate giving up on the hacker/cracker debate. My initial reaction when seeing the headline was wondering how Saltine's could have gotten into the equipment.
Once a word, such as hackers, has made it's way into the lexicon so deeply, you can't reverse it.
Take politically correct words, which have social stigma attached to the incorrect words. How many of us take the time to say Native American instead of Indian? Or African-American instead of black? Why should John Q. Public or Jane P. Media take the time to care about hacker vs. cracker? Especially when everyone knows what a hacker is, right?
And cracker already has two definitions, does it need more? It's already a slang term for a white redneck, as well as a tasty high-carb treat.
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That seems pretty stupid, considering they already have the unique CD-Keys for copy-protection.
Any retailer dumb enough to not want to sell a TON of Diablo II copies because of a lack of Copy Protection is only short-changing themselves.
In the tiny town of Cedar Falls, Iowa, Software, Etc. had 175 copies pre-ordered. I can't imagine the volumes sold in many bigger markets. Of course, this pales in comparison with the pre-orders of some consoles and their titles.
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If you look on the little yellow troubleshooting note that came with the game. It says "Some Kenwood drives may have problems, check out http://www.blizzard.com/support/ for the solution"
Guess who has one of those Kenwood drives? Guess who can't install the game? There's no info there pertaining to the problem, and an e-mail to their tech support 4 hours ago hasn't produced a response yet.
Meanwhile, I'm now installing the game from my CD-RW drive. It only writes at 2X, I'm hoping it reads faster than that, or that the full install doesn't use the CD much.
If all else fails, I'm going to have to yank my Kenwood 52X and put in a DVD-ROM drive I brought home from work. I was a closed beta tester for this game, and I had the same problem then. Why didn't Blizzard fix this? No other CD has problems with my drive.
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The Software, Etc. where I picked my game up today (Cedar Falls, Iowa) opened my box in front of me, as they did everyone else's. Apparently they received several copies that only had two of the three CD's inside. They were missing the Cinematics disc. Thankfully, my copy had all three CD's. Did anyone else experience this, or are the guys at my store smoking crack?
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Why deal with the FAA at all? They don't own space. Take it to Mexico or some other country with lax Aerospace laws. If you're gonna spend a quarter of a million to build your rocket, you can drop another 50,000 to move it to a country you can blast off from legally.
Otherwise, just launch it regardless of FAA permission. If you fail and it blows up, who cares, you're dead. If you succeed, you'll be a hero in the court of public opinion, and the FAA would have a PR nightmare on it's hands if it attmpted to arrest/fine you upon your return.
Has anyone ever read or watched Destination Moon? It was a story written by Robert A. Heinlein, and made into a movie in the 50's. Pretty entertaining stuff, and actually scientifically plausible (for the most part). It's available on DVD. The launch of the rocket in that book/movie is much the same, in that they just take off despite being denied official permission.
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Iowa State didn't have a proxy, or, more accurately a caching server when I was there. I graduated in 1999. UNI, however, does have several of Cobalt's raq caching servers in place to cache, the ICN or Iowa Communication Network added caching servers this spring also. It's kind of a pain when you are authoring web pages on an off-campus server. Even with those caching servers in place, it's still slow.
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The University of Northern Iowa, where I work, has only 5 T1 lines for it's 13,000 students. I think our net connection is slow as hell. The network admin guys blame the Iowa Communication Network, and their connection to PSINet. Iowa State University, where I got my degree, goes through the same connection, and it was never this slow.
Interested parties can see connection information here: http://netview.cc.iastate.edu/cgi- bin/selectline
As I am not really experienced in large network design, how many users per T1 should a person expect typically?
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Ahh, so they know that X protein is produced by a gene at Y location. But what effect X has on the human body, if any, is completely unknown at this time.
So next, do they create mice with that gene knocked out and see what's wrong with them?
I guess my own analogy for this would be that now they know where all the light switches are in a vast room of indicator lights. They know that switch A1 turns on and off light 2X, but they don't know what 2X indicates or affects.
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Whose DNA have they sequenced? Isn't everyone's somewhat unique? How do they take an "average" person's DNA, considering all of us have something unique, and/or some type of mutation in our genome. Don't get me wrong, I'm in total support of the HGP, I think it'll revolutionize medicine. I'm just curious as to what sampling methods they employ.
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Morning Edition accompanies me to work, and All Things Considered takes me home. And for all of us geeks out there, there's always Science Friday. It's all much more interesting to listen to in the car than the Backstreet Boys.
Now if they just had a better time for the computer show, it's on at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings here....yuck...
Our local affiliate, KUNI, broadcasts from two floors above my office, and they stream the broadcasts too!
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When I lived in the dorms at Iowa State University, I used to pick up people on my 900mhz phone all the time. One night my friends and I listend to a girl who lived 3 floors below me talk to her boyfriend at Purdue for 2 hours. We could hear both of them, but they couldn't hear us for some reason. It was rather funny, he kept asking her if she was masturbating because she missed him, because he was, "because he missed her so much".
It made me wary of ever saying anything too personal over my cordless phone! Are there any encrypted consumer phones available?
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It seems to crash pretty well on my webcam page too, but perhaps it's just the Windows version that doesn't like it. The URL is http://www.sethb.com/webcam.html if anyone else wants to try it. :)
Mozilla has come a long ways, I'm hoping that it'll get ported to the BeOS soon. The last milestone I've seen ported was 8.
The three things I consider missing from the BeOS at this point are a good web browser (NetPositive is lacking in many areas), a decent IMAP client (all they have right now are some that will retrieve the mail via IMAP and dump it into your local mailbox), and multiple user support. Having Mozilla ported would solve two of those three.
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I submitted this story, with the link to the less-sensational Crimson story, several days ago. It got rejected, I guess I should have looked around for something written with more editorial content.
2000-06-09 14:45:45 Intel makes Harvard hide iMacs during Intel-sponsored event (articles,intel) (rejected)
Normally I bypass all these posts too, but I used to get my news from Slashdot, now I just see old news here. Can we get some submission guidelines written up, so we don't waste our time submitting things over and over again?
To keep this relatively on topic, I don't think that Intel did it necessarily to hide their competitors products, but they could have made an effort to accomodate the students a little more, that's for sure.
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Absolutely, I was one of the closed testers also (look for Seth Bokelman in the game credits :) ) and it was a much more enjoyable experience than the stress test. I've been telling all of my friends that the game is easily worth buying the day it comes out, I wasted numerous hours just playing as the Paladin character class, I never even had time to get into the other four!
There's much more that varies between the character classes than there were in the first game. The skill trees have some really unique stuff to them, I can't wait to see the really high-powered spells that the sorceress and necromancer classes have.
This is a sequel, much like Microsoft's Age of Kings, which is truly much better than it's forebearer, it's not simply a glorified expansion pack, or a couple new features, but a completely new experience, using all of the elements that made the first game a giant success, yet improving every aspect of the gameplay in a logical and much-appreciated manner.
Go Blizzard, I've gotta order my copy now, it's too bad we closed beta folks didn't get a free copy, but TANSTAAFL...
I do wish they hadn't made the closed list public, I got e-mail from people I didn't know asking me if they could get my CD Key, etc.
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A lot of people tend to forget the temperature of Mars when talking about colonizing/terraforming it. A balmy day on Mars is equivalent to a cold day in Antartica or therabouts, so Johnny Appleseed isn't going to be planting trees all over Mars anytime soon. Some sort of greenhouse effect will be needed to warm the planet before you plant a rain forest there, not to mention you've got to water all those plants as well!
We're gonna need machinery here, not plants folks.
---
The problem is, no one follows the "standards" the same way. Take HTML for example, not every page is compatible between Netscape and IE. Wait, hold on, those two are guilty of extending the markup language on their own, but what about the other browsers? Opera, Mozilla, iCab, Lynx, etc. They each have their own glitches and they each will render pages differently. Now, throw in the differences between operating systems on top of that, and you know why it's so hard to make web pages that work well and look good across every platform and browser.
I personally just want to use whatever works well, and I want it to be the same. I support PC's for a living, and it's bad enough have millions of combinations of hardware and drivers to contend with, I'd at least like to keep the OS possibilities in the single digits.
That said, I don't support everything Microsoft has done. Their tactics with the OEM vendors are despicable, but at the same time, the libertarian inside of me points out that those OEM vendors signed the contracts, no one forced them to do so, thus my sorrow for them is greatly mitigated.
There is a great advantage to having a somewhat standardized Operating System. One of my greatest frustrations with Linux is the amount of variance in the systems and the versions of the libraries they include. That doesn't mean I don't like Linux, it just means I'm not going to use it as my primary desktop OS anytime soon, the BeOS has a much better chance with me.
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Along the same lines, I suspect that DVD's don't cost much more to produce than VHS tapes do, other than the cost of creating the extra content and getting someone to "program" the menus, etc. on the disc, but I could be wrong...
That said, at least 75% of the MP3's on my computer are ripped from my own CD's. I would never have bought the CD's for most of the ones that aren't, as I tend to buy CD's that contain 50+ minutes of GOOD music, as opposed to 2 good songs and a whole lotta crap. MP3 doesn't really work for me if I want to listen to my Glory Soundtrack or to my Simon and Garfunkel CD, as those CD's are meant really to be played all the way through. I defy anyone to say the same thing about Mariah Carey's latest CD.
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Lovelock was a truly original Sci-Fi book that Card cowrote with Kathryn H. Kidd. I enjoyed it immensely, but it was published in 1995 and there is still no sequel out. Does anyone know when and if "Rasputin" will be available?
That said, no one has toppled Heinlein as my favorite Sci-Fi author yet, but out of all of the current writers in the field, Card probably has the best chance.
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The ACT/SAT requirements seem rather big to me as well. I didn't really try on the SAT, only got an 1180 (I slept 2 hours the night before and fell asleep during the test) because I'd already gotten a 30 on my ACT the first time I took it as a junior in high school, and that was good enough to go anywhere I was going to afford. But wow, a 32, my 30 was the highest score from my high school in SEVEN YEARS, the next closest people in my class got 24's.
Say what you want about our school system, I won't defend it, but to me, this seems to be cutting the percentage of people who can attend down to about 1% of the population, and frankly, most people that smart or motivated probably have the money to pay to go back to school if they'd like to, or have found something they enjoy doing already.
Of course, if I could take the ACT now, I could probably score a 32, I didn't even get Trig until my senior year in high school, and my math score killed me:
Taken spring of '93:
Overall: 30
Math: 24
English: 28
Science Reasoning: 33
Reading Comprehension: 36
So what's my point? My degree is in Psych, I could see myself wanting to do something like this someday, but if _I_ don't qualify, I feel a lot of people who would benefit from this program won't either...
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Nvidia will have to go a long long ways to sell me on their cards again. My first 3D card was the Intergraph Intense 3D Voodoo, a Voodoo Rush card. In case you don't know, they were a 2D/3D card that came out shortly after the original Voodoo cards (Voodoo 1 and 2 were only 3D cards, requiring a separate graphics card for 2D). It opened my eyes to the wonders of 3D Hardware assisted gaming.
Now, the Voodoo Rush was certainly a flawed card, it was actually slower than the original Voodoo card, and many games had problems with it, requiring some patching. I used the card for about a year and a half, then bought myself a shiny new STB Velocity 4400, based on Nvidia's TNT chipset, I got the first one that came to Ames, Iowa.
My experience with the TNT was very negative. I am a user with a clue, and I still had considerable troubles, and the problems were with getting the thing to work in games, without waiting six months for them to be patched to a playable state. Two games which I never got completely playable to my satisfaction were Final Fantasy 7 and Unreal.
Unreal was just plain slow via Direct3D, it ran much faster on my Voodoo Rush card than it ever did on my TNT, although it was like a new game every week as Tim Sweeney and crew gradually patched it from an unplayable slideshow into a marginally playable game.
Final Fantasy 7 required over ten calls and e-mails back and forth with Eidos/Squaresoft to finally get the game patched and working correctly. Just when you'd finally get it working, the newest drivers for the TNT would come out, and it'd break again.
I finally ditched my TNT last May for a Voodoo 3 3000. This is by far the best video card experience I've had to date. 3dfx has enourmous market share, and EVERYTHING is tested on their hardware before it ships, not afterwards. I, for one, also enjoy dusting off some of my older games from time to time, and watching them scream on new computers, Glide compatibility is great. Some new games, like Diablo II (I'm one of the lucky 1,000 beta testers) still use Glide for some of their rendering. I have not had one instance of "I can't play that because I have an X brand video card, and they haven't patched it yet" which is something I experienced too many times on the other boards.
That said, these benchmarks only reinforce my decision to get a Voodoo 5 5500. I play my games at 1024x768, which is precisely where the Voodoo5 scores are beating the GeForce, and the drivers still have plenty of room to mature, I'm sure. I'm generally not one to blindly follow a certain company, regardless of how their products actually are, but I'll have to see a bigger margin in performance before I think of ditching 3dfx.
No, I don't work for them, no I don't own any of their stock, but I do suggest their products to anyone who will listen to me, and who wants to buy the latest game on the shelves, and not have to wait two months for driver/patch issues to be resolved.
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Are any of the BIG system vendors (Gateway, Dell, Micron, etc.) selling corporate Athlon systems? I'd love to implement some, but so far all I've seen are systems aimed at consumers. Gateway has their "Select" line, but I want my systems to come with Windows 2000 on them, as well as having the management features of the Dell Optiplex line or the Gateway E-XXXX lines. The other thing preventing me from using Athlons, at this point, is the numerous gripes I've heard about getting X video card to work, or the right RAM, etc. I don't mind doing a lot of research and fiddling with my own machine, but things like that can become a nightmare when you have to support 250 of them!
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